How Fascia Holds Trauma With Ana Rahe | Ep 32

In part 1 of this conversation, fascia expert, Anna Rahe joins the show to discuss its importance in relation to trauma and mental health overall. Fascia being the connective tissue network that also functions like a body-wide communication field. Anna explains how fascia registers load and stress, how it distributes force, and how it carries the analogue “texture” of experience into the brain. we connect the dots between trauma and the nervous system: when the brain predicts danger, it mixes a biochemical cocktail that tightens breath, raises tonus, and builds protective armour in tissue. This lens helps explain why certain yoga postures or somatic practices can bring up emotion, and why trauma release should feel stabilising, not chaotic or forced.

You’ll also hear a powerful story about self-connection and the moment the body finally feels ready to speak. 

Key Topics:

• Pain reframed as communication rather than damage 
• Trauma as struggle filtered through skills, support, and meaning
• Movement as the core tool to metabolise load and stress 
• Fascia as a body-wide communication field with dense sensory input
• Trauma imprinting as patterns of tension, torsion, and protective bracing
• Brain as a “digital” processor creating a hormonal stress response 
• Why releasing trauma can feel stabilising and calm rather than cathartic
• Risks of pushing somatic release too fast and going outside scope 
• A personal turning point through self-connection and compassion 

About Anna: is a leading innovator in the health and wellness industry, with over 25 years of pioneering work in fascia science. As the founder and CEO of GST Body, she has developed a proprietary system that helps people restore vitality, prevent injury, and unlock physical resilience through fascia-focused movement and care. Her method has gained recognition among top athletes, physicians, and wellness experts, and she has been a featured speaker at the 2019 Goop League as well as numerous masterclasses, webinars, and events. Anna is a member of the Fascia Research Society and is building a new category of body care rooted in science, performance, and self-healing.

Special Offer

Anna would love to share the 7-Day Body Revival, a free introductory experience designed to help people begin getting to know their own body in a deeper way. It is not a challenge, but rather a gentle introduction to GST and an invitation into more awareness, connection, and understanding of how their body responds.

Connect: https://www.annarahe.com/
https://gstbody.com/  https://www.instagram.com/gstbody/

https://www.youtube.com/@TheGSTBody

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Transcript

Pain As Communication

SPEAKER_02 0:00

And I learned very early that pain was actually just neither good nor bad. It was just communication. It becomes this really profound way of dealing with life's loads, the struggle of life, and how we're going to engage it and whether it becomes a trauma or whether it becomes our transformation.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

What if pain wasn't the problem? What if it was the body's way of communicating with you? What if your body wasn't broken? Instead, it was adapting to the changing circumstances.

Welcome And Listener Safety

SPEAKER_01 0:36

Hi, I'm Liz Albanis and welcome to season two of Yoga for Trauma, the Inner Fire of Yoga, where we explore how yoga can help release trauma, calm the mind, and reconnect you with your body. Before you start listening, this episode includes a discussion on trauma and may touch on experiences that could be distressing for some listeners, including, but not limited to survivors of sexual abuse, natural disasters, or other distressing events. If you find yourself feeling triggered during this episode, please treat yourself with care and compassion for where you are in this moment. If you're struggling, please see a licensed healthcare professional or if in Australia to call Lifeline on 1314.

SPEAKER_00 1:30

The views and opinions expressed by guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the host Liz Albanis. The content shared in these conversations is intended for informational and educational purposes only, and it's not suitable for listeners under the age of 18. Please use discretion and consult a qualified professional before making changes to your health or wellness routines.

Meet Fascia Innovator Anna Ray

SPEAKER_01 1:51

My guest today is Anna Ray. She is a leading innovator in the health and wellness industry with over 25 years of pioneering work in fascia science. And don't worry if you don't know what that word means, fascia, you're going to hear a lot more about it. She is the founder and CEO of GST Body, and she has developed a proprietary system that helps people restore vitality, prevent injury, and unlock physical resilience through fascia-focused movement and care. Her method has gained recognition among top athletes, physicians, and wellness experts. And she has been a featured speaker at the 2019 GOOP League, as well as numerous masterclasses, webinars, and events. Anna is a member of the FASHA Research Society and is building a new category of body care rooted in science, performance, and self-healing. And today Anna is offering a seven-day body revival, a free introductory experience designed to help people begin getting to know their own body in a deeper way. But because it was such a long conversation, I've separated this into two episodes. And this is the first part.

ADHD, Healing, And Purpose

SPEAKER_02 3:49

Thanks for having me. It's such a pleasure to be with you.

SPEAKER_01 3:53

Thank you. I'm honored. And we we have a fair bit in common. I mean, you've got ADHD like me. You just got diagnosed at a much younger age than I did. I only got diagnosed, oh, after my mother died about because she would have found it would have been a light bulb moment for her about 41 or something. So really? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:17

I wonder if it's just because you're in Australia. I know a lot of people get diagnosed later, and I thought I was late. I got diagnosed at 21. And back then it was I thought, I'm 21. Most people get help when they're in elementary school. So at least we found it, right? At least oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:35

And it's part of our story.

SPEAKER_02 4:37

Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 4:39

Yeah, for sure. And you know, sometimes when things happen to us, like with you, with the pain that you suffered a long time ago, we might think at the time this is terrible, but sometimes we might come out of it saying, This is the best thing that ever happened to me because it shaped our life. That's right. That's right.

SPEAKER_02 5:00

That's exactly well, and that I think is the ideal story for anyone who is looking for healing. That they are that they are liberated by their suffering, right? Like that's the whole point. Is like needless pain, needless wounds, needless trauma is is. So yeah, I guess I always say that my journey took me from victim to victor, where I am now living in a state of just um internal peace, but also you know, pain-free in my body, but an internal state that's really profound. And if I wouldn't have found how to work that process, um I think that's what everybody's trying to do, right? Um, and that's why they come to you. That's why they come to people who are doing the same process. We might just be three lily pads ahead as we're trying to cross that pond, you know. Um, so it's it's uh it's a beautiful place to be, I think.

SPEAKER_01 6:14

Yeah, it makes your life more purposeful. You find your dharma. Yeah, and it can make the what you do becomes is your passion, and it doesn't seem like work because you're doing what you were meant to do, that you that you and work in an industry that you're passionate about.

SPEAKER_02 6:36

Yeah, I think that's true. And I think it also makes you be able to be of service. And I think that's a pretty fulfilling place to live where you are being potent in your purpose and being of service so that it's to have your journey and do nothing with it feels, you know, again, like pointless, right? Um if you're not doing it for your profession. So I work with a lot of people who do their journey of healing and they don't become a teacher or a thought leader or a they just go out and they live a better life, which then touches the people around them. It doesn't have to be in like significant leadership type roles. It's where you get to share the things that have have healed you. And even if it is just that you no longer are critical and you can engage with compassion, even if it is your words are tainted with uplifting things rather than you know depressing things, these in themselves are the simple acts of what internal healing can share with the world, right?

SPEAKER_01 7:44

Making the world a happier, more compassionate place, which we need in this crazy world. Yeah, it's a crazy world we live in. Yeah. But what I also found interesting about your story is, as I've shared a bit about this in the introduction, is you you had PTSD that

When Struggle Becomes Transformation

SPEAKER_01 8:05

you were trying to recover or heal from because of childhood trauma, which we don't have to talk about because not everyone's comfortable with that. I can if it serves uh the higher good. Well, you can briefly if you would like.

SPEAKER_02 8:22

I usually put a trigger warning in, so I didn't know if you wanted it to share with other people who don't want to hear about it, or I can also do it in a very I think that trauma this goes into a whole different concept of where trauma really comes from and how we relate to it. And I think trauma has become a little bit of a catchphrase where everybody has trauma and everybody's trying to get over trauma. And I'm like, I I I would never have the audacity the audacity to qualify trauma for individual people, but there are like physical, violent traumas. There is, you know, um abandonment trauma from parents. And when you start breaking down the human experience, almost all of it could be traumatic unless we had some type of skills and some type of um, you know, spiritual connection that helps us to be able to weather the storms of struggle, right? Whether struggle becomes trauma or not for you, I think depends on how you visit it. That comes back to my story of pain, where I used to think, and most people would be like, pain is bad, it's telling you that something's wrong. And I learned very early that pain was actually just neither good nor bad. It was just communication. And so when I went into it, I was like, struggle or hardship or you know, these things that happen to us may become trauma, but maybe they don't. Maybe it's just this information about this is how we need to be able to strengthen, this is how we need to be able to um grow without struggle, without trauma. There is no agitation in ourselves to help.

SPEAKER_01 10:06

Agitation to change. Yeah, yeah. Exactly right. And so Ashra, sorry, go ahead. So sorry, you've looked at pain in a non-dualistic way of neither good or bad. Yeah, yeah, which we would do it.

SPEAKER_02 10:18

Well, because I also learned that my pain became the kind of breadcrumbs that I would follow towards goodness. So it's like I almost there came a point where I was not avoiding pain. I remember this exact moment in San Francisco where I was laying there, and I'm like, I can either try to like not feel that pain, or I'm like, but what if I go into it and and and feel it? And I'm like, could I move that pain? And that question, that just that question, when I was laying on the balls trying to like breathe through the pain in my back, it was like, if I can move it, it immediately lightened. And all of a sudden it changed the conversation from pain is happening to me to being that pain or trauma is something that I agree to participate in. I agree to engage with. There's a karmic concept in new age um, you know, theology that is you come in with a karmic contract and you've agreed to take on these burdens as life lessons. You've got to accept your yeah, whatever that is. I'm not sure if you even have to believe in past lives. I just like the concept of I'm not being victimized by this. It is hard. I hate it. I'm hurt, I'm wounded by it. But I get to choose what I do with those experiences. I get to can I move this emotional pain? Can I move this piece of trauma inside my life to a place that is better? And this is where the philosophy of fashion movement becomes so beautiful to me is that movement is the bare element that actually metabolizes all of our pain. It's physical, you need more animation in your tissues. If you have emotional pain, you need more movement in your mind and to be open and to spread concept to see bigger perspectives and have, you know, tools for moving those emotions through your body. And if you're, you know, struggling with soul sickness, there is movement, spiritual movement that you can do to create healing. That's the whole point. And so movement then becomes something that's way more profound than just fitness or physical therapy, or it becomes this really profound way of dealing with life's loads, the struggle of life, and how we're going to engage it and whether it becomes a trauma or whether it becomes our transformation.

SPEAKER_01 12:43

Yeah. I'm really grateful there's been so much more research with trauma recovery and fascia because fascia's just fascinating and fascinating. And I mean, I know a bit about it. I'm by no means an expert, but yeah, so you had did you have a formal diagnosis of PTSD

Trauma, PTSD, And Eating Disorders

SPEAKER_01 13:06

of post-traumatic stress disorder?

SPEAKER_02 13:09

Uh you know, that would be really funny to go back and look because I went to a lot of therapy and a lot of in treatment programs with my eating disorders and stuff, and I don't know that that was a thing that long ago. PTSD wasn't really like I think it came about later, right? Um depends where you are. I don't think so.

SPEAKER_01 13:38

I mean most of my stuff was like but it obviously affected you because you had an eating disorder. And so I'm assuming.

SPEAKER_02 13:45

Yeah, I suffered I suffered childhood sexual abuse and a ritualistic.

SPEAKER_01 13:52

That was very yeah. Sorry, that's what happened to me. And I interesting on the I wasn't right anorexic like I did, I was borderline for a few years. Yeah, so I think it can be more common with sexual abuse victims to have eating disorders. From my understanding, I could be wrong here, people could disagree, but I think it's the subconscious of someone saying to you, there's you there's something wrong with your body. This is why someone did this to you. Make yourself thinner or try to make yourself less yeah, controlled. Yeah. But so it obviously had a big impact on you if it's gonna cause such a thing, regardless of whether you had a diagnosis. And it caused other other manifestations like depression or anything.

SPEAKER_02 14:55

Yeah, I did. And I so it was multi-layered, right? So back in the early 90s, I'm quite a bit older. And back in the early 90s, even I was living in Australia actually when all of this came to a head for my parents. Uh no, in the Gold Coast.

SPEAKER_01 15:11

Oh, someone else said Hobart on another podcast. Okay, right.

SPEAKER_02 15:15

I know, well, no, I and I grew up when I was seven and eight, we lived in Hobart.

SPEAKER_01 15:20

Oh, wow. Okay, cool.

SPEAKER_02 15:21

You're not you're not wrong. I have lots of connections, but we came back and forth. So I was 15 when we were living in the Gold Coast. Um, and that's when my eating disorder was kind of revealed to my parents, and they didn't want to come back to America right away, or the US, I should say. And so uh there just wasn't that kind of treatment. Like Australia still, like there was a doctor who said we know what it is, and we have girls here, but we don't have really comprehensive um treatment in Australia. So my parents shipped me home. Um, so it was kind of pieced together because I think a lot of my depression layered in from um the initial trauma, but also ADHD in women tends to have symptoms of anxiety and depression more than like hyperactivity. And I didn't know that at the time. Um, and I think that being ADHD also can lead to it's an it's a neurological way that the brain, ADHD brain connects information. But I there's this thing called, um, I just learned about this in the last four years. I'm like, I totally suffered from that, which is rejection sensitivity. Yes, that's a socialized, like weird thing in ADHD. Yeah, and so that made me oftentimes feel victimized, yeah, and feel like had social traumas in my childhood. So those led to these other like diagnoses. I don't think that um my brain became sick, which is one of the like larger archery, um, larger arching things that sometimes I really like to go into in terms of where in somatic in the somatic experience does your trauma get lodged, right? There are people whose bodies are just fine, but their brains are kind of broken. And there's a different approach to healing when your brain has the sickness versus when your body does. Oh, yeah. And in my case, my body was more the container of the sickness of my soul rather than my brain, which I humbly was so grateful for because it's much harder to fix sickness in the mind than it is in the body. In terms of you need a good mind to unravel the story and to put pieces together about the healing and where things went off. And because we're multi-layered beings, right? It's not just like one event creates the trauma, right? It's almost like there's all these multiple layers because we're we're dynamic creatures, right? And so inside of that, when you start kind of like re-engineering, like where did this part of my my myself come from? Why am I, you know, um having an eating disorder? Where'd that come from? Well, if we always just point to causality, we're not actually coming back to a really um, those don't always uh they don't come back to an almost true source. And sometimes we will like lodge into something. This is when it's like, this is what my trauma is, and it's like, well, that plus this, plus then your personality and the way you translated this. And so it's nice to be able to see somatic influence both from from the brain and from the body. But as you're trying to unravel it, I think that sometimes it's a lot easier, it's more painful to be in a body that is carrying trauma, I think. Um, just because that was me, but you know, everybody has their own story, everybody has their own story. That's true.

SPEAKER_01 18:59

And then you had talk therapy when you back to went back to the USA. And what fascinates me was your body was okay then, except for the eating disorder. You didn't have physical pain, but then you brought it all out. You had the talk therapy, and you suddenly had pain and lung issues. And that's just amazing. It's an interesting thing. Yep. Because I haven't heard of that before. I mean, my physical pain came out a lot earlier. Maybe it came out from the talk therapy, but I'm too young to remember it because I had play therapy and medication at the age of 11 because of trauma, but in those days they didn't deal with the body because they didn't know the connection. Um but yeah, it is fascinating that, and so I'd like you, you get asked this question all the time, to to explain

Why Fascia Matters

SPEAKER_01 19:56

what fascia is, because you do a beautiful job of it being an expert. And how your understanding of fascia, why that would happen, that this physical pain came out. Great.

SPEAKER_02 20:11

So I'm gonna uh you you uh when we first started talking, you said, you know, you get asked the same questions, but what's interesting is that every um place that I continue to grow, my answer slightly changes because I feel things differently or I experience them this differently. So I can explain it from a physiological side. What is fascia? It is the connective tissue of the body and it wraps around all of your organs and it connects. Yeah, and it gives the idea of how people want to see it. But one of the things that I used to always say, which I am now changing my view on, oh yeah, which is um that fascia is a body system. A lot of people like to try to consider it like a type of tissue, like saying it is like a cotton, a type of material, a type of fabric. You can have cotton, you can have linen, you can have um uh silk and sateen. And that is true, that there's all these different types and textures and functions of it from a tissue lens. And then people will expand it and they'll be like, but it organizes an entire system in the body. So they talk start talking about it systemically, like you would the digestive system or the neurological system. But what's really fascinating, this is where it kind of starts to come into play into the trauma and to the um spiritual nature, is that fascia also kind of organizes your whole body's energetic field. It's more of a field than it is a diagnostic type of organization. And that's why people missed it forever because it's not clear and masked like an organ in your in your guts or like a lung or like a right. And so it was like everywhere. And they're like, what does this thing do? And what this comes down to is the physiology is what my experience is is that. Fascia is designed to connect a body-wide communication system that is constantly registering through its high density and population of sensor receptors all of the things that are going on in your body in all systems at all times. It's like your massive grid of information. And inside this field of information, it's like it'll tell you the organ of your stomach is contracting at this rate and it's talking to the lung up over here. And then the esophagus starts to contract because it knows it's taking food and it's constantly monitoring physiological information. And one of its primary sensory informations is mechanical stimulus, which we talk about being load or stress or effort. When a muscle contracts, when I lift up a weight in my hand, fascia, we know, is monitoring how much load and where it's going to go, how to distribute it, how to share the load so that the entire field is um that it's not over-surging. The way that I like to describe it to people is that it's like when you have a wire grid or a smart grid. Do you know what a smart grid is on a planet? That it's like monitoring the energetic usage in an area and how much this person's taking and how much this person and what is taking what. And in that smart grid, fascial field type of a thing, the fascia is taking all this information, like high voltage from external sources, trying to downgrade it so that it doesn't damage the tissue on the inside. And then it's taking the subtler low voltage energy from inside the physiology and trying to constantly negotiate high and low voltage. What it does is it's got a mechanical property that takes the load, contracts it, and then it starts to spread its fibers into this web-like material and moves the actual electrical current of that information through the field. What's interesting is that it's doing it for our physical loads, right? Carrying, lifting, twisting, yoga-ing, GST-ing. Yes. But it also does the same thing for our emotional and mental loads. So when our brain has, well, our body, first, what's interesting is that trauma usually, I'm not even going to say usually, trauma's first point of entry is physical. It's into our tissues from the body, not the brain. That information is sent to the brain for translation. And then the brain tries to compute it and says, Oh, I'm being touched in these ways, but I don't have the neurological understanding of what that's supposed to be yet. I haven't had my period. I don't even know what sensory things are going on below my belt. And then the organism, we're what? I don't know what to do with this. Yeah, it doesn't, it literally doesn't, a five-year-old body does not know what to do with sexualized feelings. And that's one of the reasons it gets stored in tissue because it doesn't get to process, it doesn't get to metabolize. So fascia has this metabolic process that takes input, moves it through the system to dilute it, to compute it, and then it resends it back through the tissues to say, oh, we're safe. Oh, we're not. Yeah. To eliminate it is what I say. So it generates and that it animates and then it eliminates that information, a full metabolic cycle. And we know that when emotions do not resolve in tissue, there is a chronic tension of lower toxicity in the tissues. The tonus goes up, right? It's very primal. It happens within the brain of our kind of our primal brain that says, I'm not safe. This isn't right, right? And we can logic our way out of it. We can say, Oh, yeah, well, Uncle blah, blah, blah. He loves me, and I should probably let him. And we're trying to, but the body says, absolutely not. No way that's right. And so this is where the fascia becomes this intercession between our two bodies of consciousness, or I should say, our two organs of consciousness. The brain is our organ of mind consciousness, and the fascia is the organ of body consciousness. One is analog, right? It is sensory. If you know what analog information is, it's like sound, scratchy, like you know, old records that had scratches in them. It's a wave format of information carrying, how to carry information. That's fascia. It's wave, it's pulse and tone, and it gives a lot of texture to our experiences. That information goes to the digital processor, organ of consciousness, the brain, that says, XO, XO, it looks like this. We're going to produce this kind of experiential hormones, right? It puts together the neurotransmitters and the hormones. It shakes it together in an experience. I like to call it the cocktail of experience, where literally the brain goes, all this data says this. And then the brain goes, that's three shots of adrenaline, two shots of serotonin, one shot of ad noradrenaline, and five ounces of cortisol, go. It seeps back into the body and the fascia goes, Oh my gosh, shut down the diaphragm. I'm in danger. I feel restricted. Oh my God, something's wrong. And then if you don't ever

Trauma And The Importance Of Fascia

SPEAKER_02 27:40

talk about it, feel it through, understand it, then the body carries it in itself. The tissue's low tonus stays rigid and starts to hold it. Now it's not enough always to have one point of trauma. Sometimes it is, but because we're so resilient, it's not like one drop of trauma does this. What happens in the larger scale is that we have that one trauma and it changes our perspective. It changes our sense of safety. We perceive danger where probably there isn't. And all of a sudden, it that experience changes all the cocktails we order from that day forward. So all of a sudden, every time I hear a door open, my body does that thing. Stop it. And then the tissue contracts. And so fascia requires multiple repetitive influence to really capture trauma.

SPEAKER_01 28:34

Right.

SPEAKER_02 28:35

And it's layer by layer, but it's behavioral, if that makes sense. It's not, it's not something that is circumstantial. And this is why it just gets complicated. So you can get releasing in your hips and it can trigger the emotion, but it's not just because the emotion was so big, it's because it's tied to all of the patterning, all of the connections of what that has been layered into us as people, right? Into the story or continuous. Yeah. The body biography. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 29:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:11

So that's kind of a general story of what how the body and the brain work together and why trauma, the pathway of trauma, and then how it how it is expressed and imprinted into the tissues.

SPEAKER_01 29:25

Yeah, that's a really thorough and comprehensive way of explaining it because I've always explained it really simply, but that's because my understanding. And because also there's more and more research out on it. Like there's even a study on liposuction, how that changes the fascia, and how people have come out with depression. Not because the liposuction didn't work, but just because of the changes in the fascia. Yeah. But what about the talk therapy brought it to the the pain? I'm still grasping my head around.

SPEAKER_02 30:06

That's right. I I don't know that I have all the answers to this, but I think this. I don't think that it was the talk therapy, Liz. I think that it was no, because I mean, talk therapy is what actually helped me get to the point I didn't remember my trauma. It was something that was, I it was like kind of a repressed memory. And I had fragmented memories. Like I knew for sure that I had this memory, and I'm like, why do I have a picture of a tree like this? But it never fit in until I did. Oh, it wasn't just talking about how I feel. My amazing therapist at the time would do almost like it wasn't hypnotherapy, it was it was called imagery work, where she would have to close my eyes and bring up images and say, Where are you? Where does that feel? And one time I was like, Well, how do you know I'm not making this up? And she said, I'm I am listening to what you're saying, but I'm actually watching your body. Do you know that your breath shallows when you say this and when you do this? And so she was already looking for the physiological connection because oftentimes when we are trying to process trauma, we our our trauma is not necessarily even as we remember it, right? It's such a complicated process. It's like you could remember one thing and that didn't even happen. It doesn't change the truth of your trauma, it just changes that it's not exactly as you remember it. And so I would go to these sessions, but I think what made the biggest difference was at 18, I'd done, I at 18, I had done four years of deep therapy. And I was, you know, the first parts of therapy was me in denial and me being mad because I was an adolescent girl. And then I kept slipping more and more to depression and more and more out of myself. And I was in a really um interesting relationship with this older woman when I was, she was 37 and I was 18, and it was my first real time being with a woman. And I like it raised all of these other things for me, like self-love, not self-hate, which is so interesting. And just like, if this is what it's like to touch her, then this is what it's like to touch me. And I found precious moments and learning to love myself. But what was really interesting is that my anxiety and my depression kept growing and growing. And it wasn't until, oh shit, yeah. Sorry. No, no, don't worry about it.

SPEAKER_01 32:31

No, no, just a minute.

SPEAKER_02 32:32

Like shit, yeah. So she decided that she was gonna leave, she had a trip to go on for three weeks, and I got absolutely paralyzed in panic that I would have to live in San Francisco by myself for three weeks.

SPEAKER_01 32:48

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 32:49

And I wasn't happy. I was I knew that I wasn't happy, and I'd always go to her to just kind of feel slightly better. But I called my mom. There was a moment on the 101 freeway. I was getting off at the Octavia Street exit. This is a long way to tell you what the the end of the story was. But in that moment, I pulled over on the highway and I just had this vision. I'm like, if I don't do something about this now, I will never be who I was supposed to be. And it was a very strong imprint. I don't want to call it God or a vision or something, but I knew if I don't do something about where I am now, I called my mom. I said, Can you fly me home? I have no money. I was sleeping in my car. I'm like, can you please send me home? And I, and so I went home for what I said, only three weeks, I'll be back. I went home and my mom said, I just kept praying, stay for longer, stay for longer. And so I ended up staying three months. I went to a mountain cabin in the middle of nowhere. And this is what I think changed that. It wasn't the talk therapy, but that is when I truly committed

Self Study and Self CompassionThat Changed Everything

SPEAKER_02 33:55

to, I said, I found a picture of myself at seven. And I it was in a drawer up there, randomly in this in this thing. And I was like, oh, she is so pretty. I what a pretty little girl. And I stopped myself and I'm like, that's weird. I know that's me, but I don't feel like that's me.

SPEAKER_04 34:12

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 34:12

And so all of a sudden, I sat down at my table in the living room. It was terrifying to be in the mountains by yourself. I slept with a knife under my bed because I just I was in the forest like at 18. It felt so scary.

SPEAKER_01 34:26

This was back in America. Your parents were back there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We were all back in this is in my home.

SPEAKER_02 34:33

Yeah, totally. It was in my family's cabin. We went up there all the time, but I was alone for the first time. And I sat down that night and I wrote for two hours a love letter to this child. And it was really, I have it still, it was literally from the time I started writing the letter of you are so precious, I cannot, I don't know who you are, to the end where I said, I cherish you. I started writing in first person. And okay, I closed the book. I'm exhausted. I had been drinking wine. My dad had a wine cellar, and I'd go down and take the wine. Anyway, that night I fell asleep and I had a dream. And in the dream, all of it came clear. And it wasn't because I dreamt about being five and what happened to me. I was 18. And I had the dream that I was in this real time, but just having it be clear. And that was the moment because after that dream, all of a sudden, my body started to speak. And what I think was the connection is that it was true. That what I number one, I finally connected to self. It wasn't brain thought this, body was holding this.

SPEAKER_04 35:47

It was like my self.

SPEAKER_02 35:49

Yeah, I really connected. And I think that that was the magical moment that said, my body said, I trust you. It's safe. You're gonna believe me. You're going to help me. I'm no longer caged. And all of a sudden, then my body said, Okay, now you can have your memory. Now you can start working on it.

SPEAKER_01 36:08

And I think that that's-I think you remember more about what happened to you as well. That's right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:13

But I was having the physical memories, not just the mental memories. Like my body, the pulling, all of my tissue was so torqued because I have memories of being pinned on this altar and trying to twist, right? Like trying to make my body stop the stop the event. And so all of my spiral pattern was deep at my spinal level. I had my spine was straight as an arrow, but my fascia was literally as if I had had like severe scoliosis. And this is what's interesting between skeletal tissue. This is a whole nother thing we can go into, skeletal tissue and how it holds imprint versus animating tissue, fascia. And so you can have two different very um classic profiles inside those two systems, and one can show something and the other one won't. And so fascia shows more of the torsion inside of us than does our skeletal system from a we're talking trauma and somatics. We can go into more of that. But so I started, I would have memories. I would start pushing in the reverse. This is, I can't tell you every moment, but I realized at one point where this pattern came from. And so I started pushing all of my force when I would try to change my tissue in the opposite pattern. And over and over again, I would just collapse into a heap of tears. And slowly that pattern would reveal another pattern, and then it would do another. And so that was the unwinding of the actual way that I was cloaked. Fascia will literally cloak you. It's not just this shoulder represents this.

SPEAKER_01 37:50

It's like it's a protective armor in a way, too. It is, it is. Yeah. And we do go into that protective mode. Like I could feel my solar plexus diaphragm. That's right. And I'd spasm there. And you know, psychosomatically, you can see that when you yoga therapists look at the psychosomatic posturing of someone to help see where the blockages are. So here's what's to come in

Movement, Beginner Mind, And Next Steps

SPEAKER_01 38:25

the next episode. And you've studied yoga and Pilates, and among other things, among the But you also have said that what fascinates me as well is that a lot of the things you were taught in your yoga and Pilates training, because I I'm training Pilates too, yeah, contradicted what you found with your fascia research. There was a study on 9-11 victims, and the ones who were able to flee and run and get away had less chance of a PTSD diagnosis and suffered less after than the ones that were trapped.

SPEAKER_02 39:14

That was back to what I said was movement, movement metabolizes stress, whether it's physical or psychological. Movement is the key. And even like, you know, like longevity medicine is showing now that you can take any kind of biohack you want, any medicine, peptide, blah, blah, blah. And they say it does nothing compared to what movement does for the body. Period. Nothing registers like movement. So I think there's something to that. Like why we go into it and help people from a yoga or you know, movement perspective is because I think there's truth there. And I like something you just said, Liz, which is the beginner's mind should be almost like a state of being for people, where it's like you're always looking for like what can I do next? And and asking questions is an open, like opens the field. And you know, there's always something more. And then and then that led you to the more that we open as people, the more that we can lead or we can show people, right? I love that, you know, people, I think oftentimes teachers think they need to have what they know and what they've learned. And I'm like, you're not teaching what you know or learn. It took me a long time. I've been doing this 28 years. Yeah. It took me a long time to realize that I am not trying to teach people the concept. I am trying to share with them my experience. And that is predicated. The only way I can be potent is if I have done the work first. Because then I actually have something to share.

SPEAKER_01 40:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:58

Right. So, you know, that's why you want to stay open. That's why you want to have that beginner's mind, is because then you're always going, like, my journey is never complete, and therefore I have stuff to offer other people. But if we go in and we start to analyze and diagnose, like this is where trauma is stored. It's a, it's almost like a reverse pathology where we start putting narrative in. And I remember a very clear moment in my own journey where I was in a healing table and I was having a somatic release, and the woman was a true healer, and she said, That's not it. And I kind of was shaken out of it. And she's like, That's not it. Whatever you're thinking, whatever you're relating to, it's not what is it. And I said, Oh, that's interesting. I was milking my own story. I'm like, this is the trauma of my, I know that this is the relationship I had with my, but then all of a sudden it was like, that's not it. True healing doesn't have cathartic, like, or like um such, it's quiet. What I want to say is it's quiet. Fascia unwinds quietly and profoundly. It is a stabilizing source, not a destabilizing. It is not, it is, it's mystical because fascia is so intelligent and so crazy to think about it, but it's kind of like another dimension, right? Fascia introduces you to a different dimension of work that is, I don't know, it's stabilizing, it's it's calming, it's not frenetic, it's not, it's not adrenal, right? So when we try to do trauma work that is too somatic, that's right.

SPEAKER_01 42:41

Yeah, we can have panic attacks or yoga teachers who are going outside their scope or even yoga therapists that have open the doorways, the floodgates, yeah, too much.

SPEAKER_02 42:52

And not being able to hold it. That's not really actually how how trauma is released or dealt with in fascia terms.

SPEAKER_01 43:02

Yeah, because I always heard about the psoas and the lower back.

SPEAKER_02 43:07

Oh, don't even get me started. Fucking

Trauma Fascia,Yoga and Pilates Teaser Part 2

SPEAKER_02 43:10

psoas. Oh my gosh, and the pelvic floor, the psoas and the pelvic floor, and I'm like, yes, but it's an object.

SPEAKER_01 43:20

If you've ever felt like you've done the mindset work, but something isn't shifting. Part two is where things really start to click. I'll see you there. Thanks again for tuning in. If you loved the show, my guests and I would really appreciate a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps grow this incredible community. Until next time, never forget the power of yoga.