Liberate Your Fascia, Liberate Your Life
Understanding Fascia
I see patients every day with chronic pain. It is as if their whole body keeps reacting in pain. It usually starts in one area of the body and then quickly spreads to other parts. Treatments with massage, acupuncture and physiotherapy help but never seem to sustain pain relief. I can relate to this because I have been there.
In my years of looking for treatment and understanding why this happens, I have stumbled across the answer – the fascia.
Our fascia is an interconnected layer of connective tissue that weaves through our entire body. It encases our muscles, joints, bones and vessels. The fascia can be visualized as one piece of saran wrap that literally coats our whole inner body parts. Because it is something that we cannot see with our eyes, I encourage you to close your eyes and imagine the visual of fascia.
When we start to understand the concept of fascia, we can truly grasp why our body may start to feel pain in our right shoulder and then before know it, our left hip and our left toe! It seems to transcend our understanding. Before we understand it, we can get confused, frustrated and end up feeling like a victim in our own body. Because the fascia is one continuous layer that literally encircles and encases our whole body, we can understand why and how this pain patterns develop.
The next piece of understanding (which was a huge breakthrough for me) is to understand that our fascia actually holds onto emotional memory. This is not studied in Western Medicine, and I went through all of medical school not ever being exposed to this. All of our old sadness, trauma and past history is locked as memory in the fascia. Many times our past fears, angers, sadness and confusions lie here in the fascia. This is why when we feel certain emotions like anxiety, anger and confusion; we will literally feel it in our body almost instantly. Our bodies hold onto the memory even if time has past and we are not directly involved in that situation.
Energy in Motion
Many massage therapists and other body workers see this affect in their offices. Clients who are ready to feel and release those emotions will literally cry on the table. This is not an uncommon occurrence in yoga classes as well. The emotions want to be liberated from the body. They do not want to be stuck in the body creating pain. When we are ready to release them and have no desire to hold onto them, we are allowing our body to release what it does not need.
Emotions literally means e = energy in motion. The emotion is energy that wants to liberate and move out of the body. When we hold onto the old memory, the trauma, the past, the guilt, the anger and all of those feelings, we are holding onto the energy. When we are ready to liberate it from our mind, we are able to release it from the body.
This can truly transform your life. Personally, I used yoga to liberate many of those old traumas and emotions that were stuck in my body. As I did this regularly, those energies left my body and the chronic pain that I was suffering from literally left. There are many techniques that promote this type of release – Yoga, Rolfing, Feldenkrais, deep massage and others.
Are you ready to liberate your body, your fascia and your life? Our bodies are connected in every which way to our minds, emotions and feelings. Have fun in the liberation! As you do, you will feel lighter, freer, and more alive and centered (not to mention out of pain!). Have fun!
About the Author
You Can Rewire Your Brain to Eliminate Chronic Back Pain
A groundbreaking new study shows the remarkable efficacy of a brain-based treatment for chronic back pain. It provides new hope for a debilitating problem.
One in five Americans suffers from chronic pain, most often without receiving many benefits from invasive and costly treatments.
The most common type of chronic pain is chronic back pain- in 85% of cases of which no physical cause can be identified.
Dr. Yoni Ashar is a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist who studies psychological treatments for chronic pain. He recently led a study at the University of Colorado Boulder to determine whether a psychological treatment can eliminate chronic back pain — something no other therapy has ever before been scientifically proven to do.
“Our society predominantly thinks about chronic pain through a biomechanical, medical perspective. The most common treatments are physical; they’re injections or physical therapy, something targeting the body. What we’re learning more and more is that in many cases of chronic pain the problem lies in the mind or the brain. And we now have decades of research, both in neuroscience medicine and psychology, showing that there are a lot of changes that happen in the brain during chronic pain. In many cases, these can cause the pain to persist after an injury has healed.”
An important distinction that should be made when discussing chronic pain is that between the two types — primary and secondary.
“With secondary chronic pain, the pain is secondary to some medical problem or disease. With primary pain the pain is the primary problem, it is not secondary to anything else. What really is driving it are neuroplastic changes in the brain, and fear and avoidance. Fear is at the heart of chronic pain, so pain is a danger signal. The fundamental function of pain is to guide a person or animal away from things that are dangerous and when we perceive things to be dangerous that can amplify or even create this pain in our brains.”
