Your Body Stores Emotion - This Is How Movement Heals It | Jason Van Blerk

29:15And so everything that we're doing to take care of the body is very linear. What we found is if we rotate the body, like we did in the beginning there, and we breathe, that simulates the walking position, it simulates a swinging position, a position where we generate a lot of force, and it simulates being in the womb and that rotated position is what unwinds the restrictions in the fascia so we have a series of over 40 50 movements that you can do on your own daily to unwind the tension in your body but i like to keep it to like 15 minutes if you do 15 minutes a day in a rotated position breathing then it starts to unwind everything so i'm thinking about i mean i love yoga that's like my thing i also like pilates but you don't really do many twists we do some twists and Pilates, but yoga is a big thing.

30:05When I read Body Keeps the Score and, you know, even Gaba Mati as well, they talk a lot about yoga also being really helpful for trauma or PTSD or even just stored emotions to kind of help release your body. And I'm thinking in yoga, there's a lot of like spinal twists and lots of rotations that you do. So can you kind of relate some of the practices to yoga poses or am I just kind of offshooting that? It's similar. I think, you know when i try and describe what fashion maneuvers are to people it's kind of like in in a way the new yoga but it's different because the belief systems and the way we move is slightly different when we rotate it's not about just rotating it's about counter rotating so when you walk your shoulders go to the right and your head goes left like this right fashion maneuvers is the same So whenever you're doing the movement, like when we started off and we did that first movement, your shoulders went one way, your head went the other way.

31:05When you do that counter rotation, you're working with fascia. If you were to just turn your head and your upper body all one way and your hips the other, it doesn't work. You have to have anything above and below needs to go opposite. So if my forearm goes inwards, my upper arm goes backwards. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. So that's how you unwind restrictions in the fascia. It's the counter rotation. And the greatest point of tension is always in the joints. So if you rotate below the joint one way and above the joint the other way, you're working on fascia. I'm interrupting for one moment to ask one small favor.

31:43Please subscribe to the show. This helps it grow more than you know. And I'm so bad at asking this from you. I'm so bad at thinking about this. But you know, my goal is 100 ,000 to get to on YouTube. And I really want to bring you more content and better guests and bigger episodes. And we can only do that with your help together. So please do hit subscribe. Thank you. So I just want to see a couple more pictures of the clients that you've worked with. There's one with a small girl on her back that I find quite interesting, this one. So, I mean, I have been known to slouch a lot. I've got a long body, my shoulders can come forward a bit.

32:23I do always go and see physios and things like that and always try and think about, you know, strengthening exercises in the gym to pull my shoulders back and try and stand upright. But now this interests me, it piques my interest because it's nothing that I would have thought about. So how does the fascia relate to posture here? Yeah, so in this first picture, you can really see how she's crunched and crunched over. She's almost protecting her feelings. Solar plexus is where we store a lot of our, that's our feeling center. And so when people are protecting their feelings, when they're holding on to anger, they tend to pull into their diaphragm area, right into the xiphoid process, starts to curl in.

33:07Also, if they're holding on to anger or sadness, it restricts the front of the body and it starts to curl. So if you see in the second photo, you know, the first photo, she's crunched over. The second photo, she's standing nice and tall. And if you really think about it, you know, when you have grief or sadness, how do you feel? Heavy. You want to curl forward. Your body feels heavy. It feels like you're carrying all this weight. And when you do this practice, one of the first things that people say to us is, I feel lighter. How can you feel lighter from doing a movement practice in like five seconds and you're barely moving?

33:41So how long did this take then? You're not losing weight when you do that. You actually are feeling lighter because you're releasing emotions. And this is one session. This is one session? This is one session. Wow. And if you pull up the scoliosis photo, this is also one session. So for people that are listening, again, we've got scoliosis, which is like a bend in the kind of mid to lower back of their spine. And this one goes out to the left. And then after one session, how? So this, the first photo, the before, is 27 degrees scoliosis. That is when you get a surgery. They go into the spine and they try and align it.

34:25bones, as I said earlier, float inside of the body. They are not structure. If they float inside of the body, when you move your fascia, they can realign naturally. You had a neck adjustment when we did the first movement. It's because we're counter-rotating the neck and the shoulders, breathing, and it resets the bones into the natural position. So this first photo, 27 degree scoliosis, warrants a surgery. In the second photo, it's down to around 13 degrees, if that, which is manageable so by doing this practice what we're doing is we're unwinding the restrictions that are pulling the bones out of place and then the spine realigns if you want to help posture you have to unwind the reason why it's there in the first place and this is literally i mean and i and i want to you know i think some people might be finding this so hard to connect with and others might be fully invested already because there's lots of people with lots of different opinions around this, especially if you're hearing this for the first time.

35:23But the thing I think is really important here to state is this isn't something that's going to harm your body. This is like a natural movement that you're doing that's actually free at home. So I know that there might be a lot of skepticism around hearing this, but a lot of the things that you're describing here are, one, just to kind of work with the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system, getting into rest and digest it sounds like with the breathing first of all like taking that your body down and then a lot of natural rotations which is going to be just good for you anyway so this is why for me it's so interesting because it's not something that you have to go and pay thousands of pounds for these are movements that you can do at home that I guess you can just try so if you are skeptic there's things that actually maybe just try it for a week like we did in our in our pre-interview challenge and get people to see it for themselves but this is like fascinating to me that this can happen after one session.

36:17I mean, we have people who've reversed scoliosis, autoimmune, Crohn's disease, Parkinson's disease, dementia, anxiety, stress. You know, there's so many health issues that people have healed themselves. Literally, they do this at home on themselves and they've healed themselves from. So one paper that I want to talk about was a randomized controlled trial. So it was a very good scientific paper where they found that people with depression had stiffer, less elastic fascia especially in the neck and upper back and in just one session of self myofascial release if I said that correctly reduced their negative memory bias and improved their mood that blew my mind that's one of the papers that you sent me um I think that was I mean it's still a small sample size I think it was around 67 people they had in each set but still you know still an RCT it's still something to definitely not be dismissed I found that really interesting that obviously we're talking about emotion, depression, anxiety is hugely on the rise.

37:21And we can sometimes think about it just as in our minds. It just kind of lodged in this kind of upper part of us, but we forget that it can be so connected to our bodies. And, you know, I am a big fan of Dr. Gabo Matto's work, and he talks a lot about, you know, back pain is connected to emotion. So this is why I find this so fascinating. So if people are suffering with, you know, stress, poor mood, depression, how should they be thinking about daily movement in relation to their fascia? If the body's not able to move, it stagnates. And we're not able to produce the feel-good hormones anymore.

38:00And one of the other things is like, if I squeeze your ribcage really tight, if I squeeze it, you're going to start getting anxious because your body feels threatened. I'm threatening your ability to breathe. Well, what are bras doing? Squeezing the ribcage slightly, which drives a stress response. And so if we can reduce the tension on the body, then the body starts to calm down. If the body calms down, the brain calms down. Because if I'm in stress, my body will take all of its resources, all of its energy to try and solve the problem. but if we can just give the body more space reduce the tension reduce the stress then all of a sudden the thoughts calm down like when people do this practice they say i don't have any thoughts like they go complete it completely empties their mind and it's because if the body's in stress it drives thoughts we're trying to solve depression through the brain it doesn't work that way it's not a chemical issue it's an issue with the body the body's not able to flow we're blocking the body's ability to perform.

39:07And if we can get the body moving, it will start to heal. And then our thoughts calm down, stress calms down, anxiety calms down. Yeah, I think somatic work has been massive for my own kind of self experience. This is obviously completely anecdotal. But for me, when I felt the most disconnected to my body, it's not talking therapy that helps me. It's not journaling my thoughts down. It's actually a connection back to my body and my emotions, I guess, because I think we can all live in a world where we're very disconnected from that. We're kind of drawn away from our body. And also, I do think if we can have a flux of emotions in our body, I mean, we quite like the happiness ones and the excited ones, but they're also very related to fear.

39:50The excitement emotion is also very related to the fear emotion. It's very similar chemicals. Really similar chemicals, but I don't think we're taught to, I guess, feel comfortable with them. Well, look, I was a guy growing up in the world as an athlete. everything I've been taught is to suppress emotions. So for me, it was like anger, maybe a little bit of happiness with my friends. But I didn't really have the different flavors of emotions. It took me a long time to become emotionally aware. And what I realized when it comes to really helping the human body is there's three paths. One is talking, which we just talked about.

40:28The other one is the emotions. And the other one is the body. Or talking or thoughts, Let's put it that way. And when we're helping somebody, you know, I work with a lot of people and they say, you know, I've tried everything. I've done talk therapy. I've whatever. It's because their body's not moving. So we get the body moving. All of a sudden, the emotions and the mind change as a result. So if we want to access and help the body or help somebody transform their life, you have to hit all three. You can't just hit one. When you work on the body, the emotions come up. When the emotions come up, now you can change your narrative, your thoughts, or your story about it.

41:02You have to hit all three levels. Otherwise, you're not completing the loop. So people will do emotion therapy, but they're not changing the way that they see the situation. They're not moving their body. So it's incomplete. You have to hit all three in order to really help somebody. So for people who are like, okay, so it's rotation, it's movement. I mean, I know you gave us one exercise already in the pre-interview, but to give people an understanding of these rotations, can you just give us some examples? You want to do one? Yeah, can I do it? I mean, for anyone who's watching this, I literally have heels and a black long skirt on.

41:37Can I do it like this? Yeah, absolutely. Is this the most interesting dress sense that someone's come to you in? You know, it's funny because you can really do this anywhere at any time, wherever you are. So it's accessible for anyone? Yes. Okay, great. I sometimes do it when I'm in the middle of a meeting, nobody even knows I'm doing it. I can do it right now on this podcast and nobody would even know that I was doing it. and there's different movements based on different scenarios so let's do an easy one so if you take your your right your left hand and place it on your trap and your right hand just grab your elbow and you're going to twist the elbow outwards and normally you would bring it above your head but just keep it here for a moment and twist as much as you can out and lock it in place and just hold it there and we're going to hold this for about a minute what we're doing here is we're taking the bone and we're torquing the bone outwards as you do that it creates almost like a vortex or torsion pattern in the fascia that we saw there and it starts to unwind the tension deep around the bone all the way into the shoulder joint so somebody's dealing with shoulder pain if they do something like this while they're sitting in a meeting while they're sitting in traffic while they're waiting for something you do this for a minute it will unwind the tension and have you seen i mean it's very hard because we saw that youtube video but have you seen the differences of fascia where there's a lot more stored tension and a lot more released tension yeah when and you can relax and you might feel tingling in your fingers you might feel lighter in your shoulder a cold or warm sensation what you feel is totally based on your awareness the more in stress somebody is the more disconnected from the tiny little subtle changes once the body comes out of stress you start to really notice the environment around you like right now if somebody walks into a room and they have an emotion i can feel it if i walk into a room i can smell 30 feet away that there's a chemical that's in the air that's a threat to my body but if i'm in stress i'm so narrowed in my focus i don't even realize the things that are happening around me.

43:43That's what stress does. Stress literally diminishes all of our senses. So if we look at aging as an example, stress accumulated over time, that's what aging is, you lose your sense of smell, you lose your touch, your hearing, your feeling, everything starts to diminish. So if somebody's in a lot of stress and they're doing a movement or a practice to take care of their body or take a supplement or whatever it might be, they might not be aware of the changes yet we could probably scientifically measure it with data but from a sensation perspective they're so disconnected from their body because they're in stress and i was there so doing a movement like this you know if you do this for three or four days just this one movement you'll start to notice a significant shift in the shoulder in the tension that you're holding and it's important to to bring that up because when we're in stress it narrows our focus we can't see other options we can't sense the world around us yeah i talk a lot about it kind of because it bypasses the amygdala and um i talk about a lot about stress being the low road versus the high road you know when it when we are very stressed we have a disconnect in our hpa axes and so we don't have the rational responses um but sadly i think it's become so unique for us all to live in that world that the awareness is even harder to connect to i mean it's very different i think if you're also living in a city or you have a very demanding lifestyle or you have children or you have economics you know socioeconomic stress where you're just trying to get by but it has become quite normalized yes that stress response yeah and i like to look at the body as vibration okay so if you listen to sad music how do you feel melancholy yeah right so when you listen to music it changes the way you feel yeah why how is that possible how come and for more empaths i'm gonna talk to here how come when somebody does walk into the room and they have an emotion you can feel them you maybe you didn't even see them and you felt it come up there's something more happening and I believe it's vibration.

45:50If I take a tuning fork and I hit it and there's another tuning fork in the room, they will synchronize. So the body is a tuning fork. That's how I see the body. So when we listen to music, when we hear a sound, when we use our voice, these are all vibrations that vibrate the body at the cellular level and it changes the structure of our fascia. So if we were to distill the body down into like three really basic parts, water sand if we were to grind up the bones and the minerals and the nutrients and elements and everything let's just say sand and then bacteria or viruses that's the human body if we look at how water interacts with vibration and we look at how sand interacts with vibration we understand the human body okay so this is the water video okay so if we look at watch this they're going to play a sound, boom, water changes the shape.

46:43That looks like our fascia. The video that we looked at earlier looks like these water tubules that are connected to each other creating shapes. Now, if I have an emotion, that's a vibration, that's a frequency, that's been measured. We can measure the frequency of an emotion, the heat emitted from the body as an emotion. And when we vibrate the body in anger, it changes the shape. That's my belief. Okay, so we were water. We're about 70 % water, give or take, depending on your hydration level, and we're also sand. And if you look at sand, when you vibrate sand at specific frequencies, this is 1820 hertz, the higher the frequency we go here, 2041, you're going to see the more complex this shape becomes.

47:32let's go one more even higher 32 40 so just explain for people who are listening so this is creating like almost like the flowers of life or geometrical shapes it's creating uh art when you vibrate sand and water at specific frequencies it creates shapes that you see in nature and is this is a very important component of it because if we're 70 water and we're about 25 percent sand if we were to distill everything down and this is how water and sand interacts with vibration and frequency then how come the human body isn't how come we're not talking about this how come when you listen to sad music and you feel sad that we're not considering frequency and vibration in human health and so i believe that fascia is bioacoustic it responds to sound it responds to frequency and vibration and this also is why we can feel people when they walk into a room because they're a tuning fork.

48:28They're vibrating at a specific frequency that hits my body and it changes the structure of my cells at the cellular level. Okay. So if we're thinking about that, then if we're trying to like understand, cause for some people, this might feel quite vast to get their head around. Sure. Just, I have to like get people to kind of connect to this. So if there are people that are understanding this as maybe listening to music, how do we think about this in our everyday life, like how do we use the vibration that you said? Because there's lots of different ways, I guess, that we can get vibration. I think about vibration, which is something that I've learned through the show.

49:01I talk a lot about the vagus nerve, kind of that central node that goes, you know, from our brain into, well, kind of pass into our GI tract, actually at the very base. That is like our communication network. And when we do the word OM, it vibrates and it helps kind of calm the vagus nerve. That's my way of thinking about vibration. People then kind of connect when doing a yoga practice music was a really really good one i feel very connected to music i actually i actually disconnect before the show by listening to music because it helps change my mood and my energy what other ways people can bring in this vibration method to help work with their fascia the words you speak program your body because every word that i say is a vibration.

49:47So there's this whole movement towards affirmations or programming language is what I like to call it. When I say a statement out loud, it vibrates and it goes down into the cellular level and it changes the vibration of it. So if I'm working with somebody and they come up to me and they say, they tell me their story of their life of why they're in pain. Literally, just based on the story that they're telling them, I know why they're in pain. And the words that people say dictate their reality. Every word that you say is programming language. It's vibrating the body at the cellular level. And there's actually a system in the brain called the reticular activating system that lights up when you speak.

50:32So when you just have a thought, it lights up 50%. When you speak, it lights up 100%. And the reticular activating system, it's a system in the brain that's like a filter. So there's a lot of things in the room. trillions of bits of information why did you notice the painting on the wall because the painting on the wall is important to you you're a fan of art so what the reticular activating system does is it takes what's important to you and it filters out everything else so when you say something with your words that system lights up a hundred percent it says that this is important to you so if you say i am suffering from your system the reticule activating system lights up 100 and it looks to make that true it validates it filters out all of the information in the environment and you will only see suffering it's the glass half full versus the glass half empty it's the way that you see the world is based on the words that you say because that system lights up well i guess i think it's really interesting because it's this is a very generalized statement.

51:37I've tried to find the scientific evidence behind it, but I do think that there is some scientific evidence connected to it, but we have around 70 ,000 to 80 ,000 thoughts a day and up to like 90 % of them are negative. And there's like a lot of connections to that in research. But I do find it interesting that we have a very big negativity bias anyway. So it's actually harder to have more positive thoughts than negative ones, because our brain is trying to actively protect us. That's why it's kind of doing what it's doing. Um, so it's interesting that you're kind of connecting that to vibration.

52:11Um, but what about people that are, that do feel that they're very happy and then get sick? Like what's the kind of outcome on that? Cause some people can have these like very positive lives and still get sick. I think that we should talk about what sick is. Okay. I believe that when we're getting sick, for the most part, it's the body detoxing or healing itself. It's like if you don't clean your room for six months, it's going to be pretty messy. You can have a very positive thought or a very happy life, but you might not be cleaning your house, cleaning your room. And so over time, eventually at some point, your body says, hey, you're on vacation.

52:53This is a great moment for me to start to clean myself. And so it's important that we're moving our body so it can clean itself. Otherwise, at some point, it's going to start to get messy. And it has to come out somewhere. Like when you breathe, when you sweat, when you throw up, when you have diarrhea, these are all cleansing mechanisms of the body. When you have a fever, your body's heating itself up to kill things that no longer belong. So the body, when it's sick, is, I believe, in a healing process, not sick. now that doesn't mean i'm not saying for everything when there's actual diseases or chronic health issues that start to come up that's a whole nother thing but when it comes to being sick specifically in the way that most people talk about it i believe the body is detoxing it's eliminating waste the mucus build up from the food that we're eating the chemicals that we're putting in our environment that are being absorbed in the body so overall kind of through your practice and like where you are today people like listening to this might have heard about this for the first time, what do you think their next step should be to connecting to the fascia and movement and their body?

54:00Like, what's one thing that you really want people to take away from this conversation? If you choose to take back control of your own health and move your body just a little bit, 5, 10, 15 minutes a day, your life will change. When you're out of stress, you see situations differently. Because when I'm in stress, it narrows my focus. I see one option. I do this or I die, or I run or I fight. If I come out of stress, I start to see the world differently. If I see the world differently, then everything changes. For example, if somebody cuts me off in traffic and I'm very stressed, that's going to come out.

54:40Road rage. But if someone cuts me off in traffic and I'm out of stress, they just cut me off in traffic. I'm not driving stress hormones. I'm not getting angry. I'm not destroying the world around me. So when I'm out of stress, I become a different person. I see the world differently. I make different decisions and ultimately my life changes. And so since the photo that I showed you six years ago, my life has changed significantly. Not because I have somebody working on me trying to fix me, because I've taken the time to really work on myself, to decrease the stress, to change the way that I see the world.

55:13And because I've done that, the world has changed. I can't change the people around me. I can't change you. I don't have the power to fix you. I have the power to inspire you to make the change yourself or to change myself. When we work with kids and parents, this is really interesting. We did a lab test on the mom and we did a lab test on the child. When we worked on the mom, guess what happened to the child's lab test? Changed. Changed. Can you give me an example? So it could be cortisol levels. It could be the level of heavy metals in the blood. It could be anything. I mean, we do a session with a mom.

55:59Or fascia. Yeah, a fascia maneuver session with the mom. You will see the lab test of a child change. And if we do the other way, we work on the child, the mother changes. And so what that means is if I change, the world around me changes. Everything comes down to frequency and vibration. And if I change my vibrational blueprint, the world around me will change as a result of that. You can't, Gandhi, was it Gandhi who said this? Be the change that you wish to see in the world. That is the most true statement that I could possibly say on this podcast right now. Be the change that you wish to see in the world.

56:31If you don't like what you see in front of you, change yourself. start to take care of your own body it's really interesting because i asked you the question like what's the one myth um referencing back to the pre-interview and and you were saying actually and to not let someone else heal you i mean you started off by saying you know i don't believe people that like fix your bones like a chiropractor or a physio actually is that helpful because within a few weeks you're going to get your symptoms are coming back so you're helping yourself in the moment to get a release and i feel that a lot i mean when i a hard elbow goes into my left shoulder, it gives me an amazing release in that moment.

57:07But it does come back, you know, the symptoms come back, the pain comes back. And it's interesting that I think many people listening to this, who maybe suffer with different types of pain, whatever pain that is in their bodies, maybe haven't connected to fascia. And before this, you know, when I was looking into fascia research, before we connected last year, I was looking into the fascia release, and there's these like really extreme practices where people are like pushing your skin and your muscles and try and like you know it looks excruciating and it looks more painful and now I'm hearing what you're saying and I mean this is also kind of you know not on the scientific ground it's just something that I was very interested in and going wow okay there's this whole thing that I hadn't looked at and people are now trying to do this emotional release maybe I should give it a go but it just looks so painful and now I'm feeling like that's just maybe going to cause more problems because you're creating more pressure in a wrong vibrational frequency which is basically what i'm hearing from today yes and movement is healing movement is the cure if we move our bodies if you walk every day go to the blue zones our dan beaton has been on here a few times we love go to the blue zones they walk a lot barefoot in nature well i said to you something about walking backward before we came on the show like i mean this might sound bizarre i mean you know i know people can't walk backward everywhere because imagine if we lived in a system and we all started doing that but there is something about we're always in this forward motion and we know brisk walking is so good for our health like we know in i think it's is it sardinia i think where they all walk is that that's where they have very a lot of hills and that's kind of one of the areas of the blue zone where they say it's because when they're looking at this environment they're all walking up steep hills every day we know that i think it's 45 minutes of brisk walking um can help reduce dementia symptoms as well when we spoke to the brain dogs not specific on that but i remember it was brisk walking no brisk walking can reduce your dementia risk by 45 got that the way around but what about walking backwards like how can that help with like i guess it's a different rotation but not forward but it's going backwards i think there's a number of things one when you do something that you're not that you're not used to doing you're building new pathways so you have to use a lot of conscious thought in order to do it until it becomes subconscious The second thing is, I'll give an example.

59:27When we're working with the NBA and we're helping their athletes jump higher, you don't get somebody to jump higher by training jumping higher. You train them how to land. Because if they can land safely, the body feels safe enough to jump high. without like extreme impact i guess because if if i jump so high but i have no landing protocols i'm just gonna get hurt on the way down and so we train the opposite direction to reprogram the body system there's a whole i mean we we do work on the body and i'm not saying that you know helping somebody through pain or emotions is not a good thing what i'm saying is it shouldn't be the primary source that people go to.

1:00:13They should have some sort of self-care practice and then go to a coach or practitioner for extra support. But we do have a modality that is in our practice where we actually move the body at four centimeters per second through every single range of motion. So your thumb through every direction that your thumb would go through, your arm, every direction that it would go through, sideways, up back, and you move it four centimeters per second. and when you do that you're reprogramming the fascia you're reprogramming the body's computer and it reprograms your entire movement system however you don't want to build a program on top of tension because you're just it's like you're saving a program on top of a problem you have to unwind the tension first and then you reprogram it through this system or this modality So walking backwards, I feel like there's something there.

1:01:08I don't know enough about it, but I feel like you're doing this backwards movement, which is like landing. It's the opposite. So there must be something there. And I'm now going to try walking backwards a little bit more. Maybe that's my challenge to you. Okay. We're going to swap. When NBA basketball players, I feel like I have to ask that question, come to see you. You were saying you can't teach them to jump higher without knowing how to land. How do you work with them in this scenario? Yeah, so ultimately, if you reduce global tension in the body, it will flow. So if you have a tension line on part of your body, especially with athletes, because they're usually asymmetrical, usually they're shooting in one direction or swinging in one direction, what you want to do is you can't really make them stronger.

1:01:58It's hard to make them faster. They're already at the peak of the peak. So the thing that you can do, there's two aspects, is you reduce the tension in the areas that are preventing them from moving, and you can reprogram the movement system. So reprogramming it is by moving it four centimeters per second through a joint. But even the simplest thing, I gave you peppermint when we started today. So we've worked with Olympic runners. And one of the runners that we were working with had a severe injury on their left side before they were running a hundred meter race. And what we did is we rubbed peppermint on the opposite side of the body.

1:02:34and when they breathe that peppermint in it expands the lung and when it expands the lung the entire part of the body gets stimulated so it can perform better so it's these micro micro little tricks that we've learned over time that help people perform better another example is your bones float but they're also reference points so if you see an old person walking sometimes one of their hands will be curled and crunched it's because they're falling and then they're crunching on one side to pull their body back up. They're creating tension on that side. So if you're running in like an oval in a race, you want to optimally bend into the curve so you can run around.

1:03:14So you can actually utilize your fingers and you can bend your fingers in certain ways, changing the reference points of the bones and you go around the curve easier. So it's these micro little changes when you're working with professional athletes to help them perform better. but then you're also working with the fascial maneuvers to reduce global tension and stress because that's usually where the injuries come from wow yeah so you got the performance side and then you got the injury side and the prevention side so i'm seeing today i've just noticed as you're talking that you don't have any shoes on yes opposite to me got my like ones that you're probably thinking gonna be awful for my body i've learned a lot from barefoot shoes on the importance of yes wearing good footwear how often do you walk with barefoot like i i find it really fascinating people that are barefoot runners um and the recalibration it does to their bodies and their bones i think we i can't leave this conversation without asking um about this i love that you asked this because so i've worn barefoot shoes for about two years not even shoes sandals okay and the reason why i did that was because when you compress your foot it it literally changes the one the structure of your foot but it doesn't allow your foot to expand if your foot can't expand the rest of your body can't expand and so what we want to do is you want to if your foot can expand fully that you would actually get taller but we're wearing shoes which restrict us we're wearing elastic bands you get taller yes because if your bones can't expand past the environment that you put them in then you're not going to get bigger so if we wear clothing that's very tight or we wear shoes that are very tight it's like putting yourself in a cage and you can't grow past the cage.

1:04:54So what we're doing is if you take off a shoe, your foot is going to splay more. It's going to spread out. It's actually going to change structure. And as a result of that, your entire movement patterns will change. Your entire body will change shape. So about two years ago, I went to barefoot sandals. I didn't even go to shoes. I don't wear socks. I don't like anything that makes my foot feel like it's in a cage. And I noticed a big difference in the shape of my foot and the way that my foot was moving. but I'd always wanted to go fully barefoot and I was a little hesitant because you know there's chemicals on the ground there's dirt there's social constructs um you know people you arrive here without any shoes on yes in London how did you walk here yes where from so I don't know we're like 10 minutes from here did anyone look at you as you're walking oh people look at me very very funny so let me tell you something so we were just in switzerland at an event and we were speaking and i i decided to go full on i'm gonna go fully barefoot so i started to walk barefoot through the city of switzerland which is beautiful and it's super clean and great it's a great place to start fully barefoot and i'm walking and you know people kind of look at me in disgust or confused or like what happened did that guy's shoes get stolen or something when i got to london it's a little bit different because people are very posh or professional here especially in the area that we're staying in and i feel i feel that people are looking at me like i'm a homeless person or like looking down at me i had a guy ask if someone stole my shoes so let me tell you why i went fully okay barefoot shoes and sandals have minimal support which is great because if you have a cushion between you and the ground, what happens is your foot's not getting the sensory information that it needs for you to walk efficiently.

1:06:48You also have all organ pathways go through your feet. So if you walk barefoot, you're massaging literally your organs, which are connected to your emotions. We won't get into that. So when you walk barefoot on the ground, you're grounding, you're moving every joint in your toe and your foot properly because they're actually bending. If you're in a flat surface like this, they don't bend. So your foot becomes like this rigid, straight system. You need... What do you think of this? Yeah, no comment. But if your foot can't rotate, then your knees, your hips, your shoulders, your jaw, and your head will not rotate.

1:07:28Remember what I said earlier, we're a rotational system. So when we walk, we're not meant to walk on flat surfaces. We're meant to walk in nature that it's uneven. And when it's uneven, your foot actually has to force itself into angles that it normally doesn't go into in today's world. And so you get the range of motion back in your foot. Your foot changes shape. Because you're getting the range of motion in your foot, you get more range of motion in your joints. The other element of it that the main reason why I did it is I really didn't want that support, but the grounding effect. I've spoke about this a lot on the show, actually about the, you know, the electrons that can transfer into from the ground and into your body.

1:08:06And I guess you do also have a connect, you know, if I do feel overwhelmed, I do take my shoes and socks off and go and stand on some grass in the park because I only have a small decking in the back of my garden to feel connected to the earth. And it does, it does help you go into that parasympathetic nervous system, the rest and digest really, really quickly. you know i guess we're talking about this from the whole body you know we're looking at the whole person sat in front of us and it was just interesting i hadn't i hadn't even noticed that you weren't there until i guess you were talking about the nba players and i just looked down at your feet and thought wow he hasn't got any shoes on i hadn't noticed it let me talk about something about the electricity and the grounding because i think that that's an important aspect is a healthy cell is around minus 20 to minus 25 millivolts.

1:08:58A new regenerating cell is minus 50. So it needs a lot of electricity to get there. Cancerous cells live around plus 30 millivolts. And this is all Dr. Jerry Tennant's work. It's fantastic if you want to look more into him. But he's basically taken the electrical voltage in the body and it's correlated to pH. So your pH is actually a measurement of voltage. And the measurement of voltage is a measurement of disease. So every cell in your body is electrical system. The earth is an electrical system. It's electromagnetic. And so when we walk barefoot on the ground, you're literally recharging every cell in your body.

1:09:33It's like plugging our iPhone charger into our iPhone. When you walk barefoot in the grass, that's what you're doing with your human body. There are certain things that actually recharge your human battery. And there's certain things that take away that energy. when you are in wind still water when you drink tap water when you drink caffeine when you don't move your body those all drain electricity from your cells and then they start to get to that plus 50 millivolt or plus 30 millivolt cancerous cell when you move when you take a shower that's why you feel so good when you take a shower you feel creative and all these thoughts because you're you're actually recharging your battery when you hug a tree the tree huggers had it right when you hug a tree when you put your feet on the ground you're actually recharging your batteries and this is measurable it's been measured in science um dr jerry tennant has a lot of work on healing is voltage or voltage is connected to the healing process and i think it's you know putting your feet on the ground is a very important component of healing i think what i've loved about this conversation today jason is that although some people might find this quite different to our other episodes.

1:10:43I think the things that you're saying are simplicity. They're like bringing us back to our roots. You know, we're not, I'm not into the biohacking scene. It's not my thing. Um, I think it can cause too many extremes. I think it's too out there. I think it can also cause a lot of disruptions in the body. And I think what's really nice about, about this is that, as you said, it's about just the simplicity of like having a shower, walking barefoot, doing rotations, creating pauses, becoming more connected to yourself. Like these aren't crazy biohacking things that are going to disrupt your stress hormones and your cortisol levels and your autotomic nervous system.

1:11:25These are things that like are so simple and free. And these are things that we can incorporate into our lives. Whether people fully can kind of grasp everything that you've spoken about, the fundamentals of it are the simplicity of connecting back to the body for me. Like, I find it so fascinating to hear about the fascia. And it's so nice to have this conversation where it's not pulling your fascia apart in an extreme movement and in pain. You know, the simplicity about this is like, ironically for me, like reducing stress and allowing your body to go into that rest and digest and doing it in ways that creates this vibration and frequency through our body.

1:12:04And I think, you know, that is something that we can all hopefully universally connect on. That is something that's really important for our health. And so my last question, Jason, which I ask all my guests, which I'll be really interested how you're going to answer this, which is what does live well, be well mean to you? If I take care of myself and I feel good, then I do good things. self-responsibility yeah hurt people hurt people it's true mirrors it's all a mirror i love that well i'm very pleased to have your energy and um looking after yourself inspiring all of our listeners and i and i do think you know it's the beauty of this is the simplicity behind it like we can go into the technical terms which we did and it's been super fascinating but But I do think that things that feel actionable, relatable, and simple are things that we can all do and connect into our lives.

1:13:03Sometimes the most simple things are the hardest. It's sometimes easier to pop a supplement because it feels that that's just going to wash all our things away. But actually connecting to the presence, connecting to the stillness, and connecting to our bodies can actually be one of the hardest things. So thank you for the work and coming onto the show. And I'm fascinated by the fascia. Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me. Thank you.