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
Why Do We Sleep? For More Reasons Than You May Think
Most of us spend about a third of our lives asleep, despite not really having an answer to the question, ‘why do we sleep?’ Now neuroscientists are realizing that sleep is more important than previously thought. They’re also realizing that the worn-out platitude, “you can sleep when you die,” is terrible advice, as that day will undoubtedly come sooner if you short yourself on a good night’s sleep.
According to most contemporary research, you should be getting around seven to eight hours of sleep every night, and if you think you can get by on fewer than that, there’s a really good chance you’re fooling yourself.
Why is Sleep Important?
While the exact mechanisms of sleep are still being studied, neuroscientists including Matthew Walker have made interesting learnings about what happens when we deprive ourselves of sleep and the impacts sleep (or lack thereof) has on society as a whole.
When we’re awake, Walker says that essentially, we’re causing low-level brain damage. By this, he is referring to the build-up of the sticky, toxic junk in our brain known as beta-amyloid. This accumulation of beta-amyloid has been found to correspond with the onset of Alzheimer’s, among many other adverse health effects correlated with a lack of sleep.
Sleep is beneficial as more than just a healing function; it also replenishes spent resources and regulates hormone levels that dictate our appetite, cognitive function, and motor skills. The two hormones that dictate whether we are hungry or full, ghrelin and leptin, have been observed to flare up and down, respectively, when we’re sleep deprived. This inevitably leads to an increase in hunger, but even worse, it leads our bodies to crave unhealthy and fattening foods — those heavy on carbs and light on greens. In fact, people who run on four to five hours of sleep per night tend to eat 200-300 more calories per day.
For men, sleep is an important regulator of hormones, most notably testosterone. Sleep-deprived males can have the same virility and strength as a man 10 years their senior. For women, a lack of sleep can lead to a significantly increased risk of breast cancer and drops in immune hormones.
According to Walker, just introducing a single night of just four hours of sleep among a normal eight-hour sleep schedule, can bring about a 70 percent drop in natural cancer-killing cells, the immune assassins that target malignant carcinogens. Every day our bodies produce these cells and others to fend off disease and maintain our health, and while a cat nap might make you feel refreshed, it won’t make up for the loss of these cells.
