A Discussion with author, Marisa Ferrera on "Magnify your Magnificence" (Part 1)

Basically, it's him in a cadaver lab showing what happens when fascia hardens and that it gets the stickiness between the tissues and that when we are keeping that fascia more fluid, just like other substances that we might all think of, they can go from more hardened or sticky substance, the fascia can become more like a liquid. And so that's what we're wanting to create is more literal flow in your body. And so this can be reversed.

Yes, it can be reversed. Yes. But for anyone listening that suffers from chronic inflammation patterns or fibromyalgia, right?

headaches, migraines, all of this, this is, you know, you're, you already know the, know this experience because you've experienced what inflammation does to your body. You experience how the how tension can build in particular places in your chest or shoulders or neck. I welcome to another episode of the healing podcast.

This is the place where you learn and get inspired to heal in to achieve higher levels of satisfaction in every area of your life. I am Karen, milling your host. And I believe that what we resist, her sister, and that we cannot change what we don't face.

And it was finally when I accepted this reality and invested time, energies and money into myself, in professional support that my life was completely transformed. And now I'm on a mission to demystify this process for you to inspire you to do this work yourself. Hi, today I'm excited to be talking about the healing power of therapeutic yoga with Dr.

Ariel Schwartz. Dr Schwartz is a psychologist and international sawdout speaker and teacher, a yoga instructor and a leading voice for healing of PTSD and complex drama. She is the author of six books, including EMDR therapy and somatic psychology, the post traumatic growth guidebook and the therapeutic yoga for drama recovery that I just finished reading and loved.

On this episode, she shared her journey into the amazing work that she's doing today. How being a child of divorce and two households impact her psychologically and physiologically, she explained how we store trauma in our connective tissues, our fascia, inner bodies and how this leads to headaches, mind grains and chronic pain. And we got into detail of why and how therapeutic yoga, its flow, the poses, the breathing truly helps in the healing of our bodies from whatever we experience in the past.

We talked about what EMDR and I movement works, which I was super excited to learn about and how Vegas nerve exercises should be part of our daily self care routine. People I learned and I also shared so much during this episode, including finding for the first time in six years that yoga that I was looking for. You can find and learn more about Dr Schwartz on her website at drarialchwards.

com on Facebook and on YouTube under her name, where she has all her yoga recordings that you can follow. And please look into her upcoming Vegas, nor of course this August 2023. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did.

And if you did, please share it, rated to help me and my guest inspire as many people as possible to do this work. Welcome to the healing podcast, Dr Schwartz. I mean, I'm so excited that you're here.

Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here with you. So I shared with you a bit and I shared with a lot of my audience on previous episodes that I had an extremely therapeutic excuse to have the yoga experience about 10 years ago for about two years, where it was the most stressful and uncertain time in my life.

I was getting separated. The wars didn't know what I was going to do where I was going to live. So I was doing yoga at the time and he was so therapeutic.

I mean, I was also doing EMDR sessions. And I remember telling my therapist like, this is kind of replacing EMDR kind of thing. Like I feel like a million bucks after one of this yoga sessions.

And I'm a bit of a rational geek where I would love to know the why and the how it works and what about it work and what about it was so powerful. And it was during listening to your book, which is amazing, by the way, congratulations that I had a lot of a ha moment. I'm like, aha, that's why this is so powerful.

That's why that worked. And as well, I have six episodes on EMDR and they get very deep on why they work and how they work, but listening to some of your explanations on the importance of I movement and what happens to our brain when we experience trauma. And a bit more of how it works.

It was like, oh my God, this is so cool. I'm so excited to have you here and to have this conversation. Lovely.

I just think we're going to have a great time diving in. It's obviously a great passion for mine, both the kind of the why and the how and what are we doing and also kind of really speaking about exactly what you just said that that felt experience after a class during a class where you know that you've dropped in. That you're experiencing a deeper connection, a deeper integration of something and that's such a beautiful gift.

It was it is. So we before we get started, would you mind sharing with us a bit about your journey into becoming a psychologist and EMDR trained therapist, so my experience practitioner and therapeutic yoga. Yeah, it's a lot there isn't it.

I'll start with a very kind of short short integrative tale about all of this. I was initially introduced to yoga as a child starting at the age of seven. So I grew up in in a family where where we had yoga and I also grew up in a family where there was a lot of unrest and trauma and and divorce and two households and the impact that that had on me, both psychologically and physiologically.

So I carried a lot of the impact of that in my body and even though I had yoga as a child, it was something that I kind of dropped off of when I became a teenager. It wasn't cool, you know, and then I came back to it in my undergraduate studies in college because I was experiencing a tremendous amount of anxiety. And similar to what you just described, I also was in therapy and when I went to yoga, I felt whole, complete, like I belonged to myself, to the world, to the class.

It was such an extraordinary contrast to how I felt in my day to day. And all I kept saying was I just want more of this. I want more of this.

And so it brought me to doing my own teacher training to become a yoga instructor at the age of 23. So I was drawn to this very early. And also in my undergraduate studies, I had my first introduction to what we would call embodiment or a somatic experience.

And that was through body mind centering. There was a workshop that came up from Northampton. I was in school at Oberlin, which already had a pretty good grounding in dance and and somatics.

And I went to this workshop and had an experience once again. And what strikes me now reflecting back on what happened in that workshop, it was a lot of rocking movements and reflex integration and and gentle holding and gentle slow movements, very similar to what we do in yoga. And I came out of that workshop, re-awakened inside of myself of I get to have needs.

I get to have a self. And that when we're orienting from self and a felt experience, it's a very different orientation to the world. So once again, just like the experience I had in yoga, this somatic thing that I did, I was like, what is that?

And how do I get more of that? And so, you know, together, both in 1996, I did the yoga training and then I began my studies of somatic psychology, which was at a master's program here in Boulder, Colorado at Naropa University at the time in the mid 1990s. It was one of three programs in the country that offered a master's degree in body centered psychotherapy.

And at the time, nobody really knew what that was. It was rather cutting edge and and felt rather fringe and risky to, yeah, my life to that so young and so early. And I'm so grateful that I listened to an early adopter.

How we call it in this. Right. Right.

And then, you know, and then after completing that master's, I went back and got my doctorate and my doctoral studies was actually looking. My dissertation dissertation research was looking at the integration of mind body therapies into clinical practice and studying why they work. So that really shaped to the rest of my career.

Amazing. If you don't mind going back to something you said that I remember from your book that was really I took really important and some of my audience are divorced. I wrote a book about my amazing divorce being through the wars.

We know it's one of the biggest trauma one of the eight a traumas. Can you share with us a bit about What you shared in the book of how difficult it was to even though you had such a loving and empathetic mother going from house to house to another very different type of family worries more about type a list. Do it.

How that affected you and how that causes dissociation and some of the things you talk about in terms of when we say a trauma. Why is it a trauma. Yeah.

Yeah. Great question. It's subtle and it's in its accumulative but by the most important thing in this will tie into a little bit of the polyvagal theory is that the way that our nervous systems process threat happens very quickly and and at a nervous system level.

So it's not even that we're consciously recognizing the threat sometimes. But if we do not feel safe and accepted and understood for who we are. If we're not allowed to have our voice to express ourselves and and obviously that requires a ground of safety.

Then we're having to manage we're having to in some way or another suppress what it is that's my authentic self in order to fit in with my environment. You can go back to really early you know attachment literature that speaks about the way that even in infant will adjust what they express for the sake of the primary caretaker. Based on what the caretaker is capable of responding to and and witnessing or attuning to.

And so all of that you know kind of is an accumulative response to a household where I myself didn't feel safe accepted understood welcome to as I was I didn't have that ground of belonging. So you know going back and forth we have different you know parenting schedules that we all know how about you know that occur out there in divorce but I went every week back and forth between these two households and a five to schedule. And the experience of the anticipatory anticipatory anxiety that would build up in me in preparation for going to the household where I didn't feel safe.

The experience of managing myself there and then the decompression that would occur going back to the quote unquote safe home right and so you know as we we often know occurs my mom got everything like she got all of the fallout of what didn't get to be expressed in the other house. Hold and the the experience within me is that in order to suppress or manage what I wasn't expressing in the household that was well meaning provided everything on the exterior right like you wouldn't one wouldn't necessarily look in from the outside and say that was trauma. But the internal experience was one of lack of safety lack of emotional safety lack of you being able to really tell them what you're thinking of what you want to do without them saying no you're not doing that no that's not the way works know it.

It's. And so it. Cost a bit of dissociation or kind of more than a bit of a connection right the two primary symptoms for me one is that I found for I felt shut down disconnected robotic.

Disconnected from my body and the other primary symptoms is that I would get sick and so my body had this other story to tell about what it was like for me to be there and I developed chronic respiratory illnesses and kind of strange illnesses especially at summers when I would go for a month at a time. And so you know to to basically have built up all of this accumulative attention and then at some point there was this tipping point where it was more than I could process. I couldn't metabolize it even coming home to my mother's house it didn't wasn't enough to let that integrate all the way through in my sense that occurred later in therapy.

This rings very close to home as my two daughters went through all that very closely and my my second born develop asthma as a baby when when I started fighting and yelling and all that unhappiness. And I was as it was actually with Dr Amy who shared the you know what happens and it was the first time I heard of it. You know what happens with our biggest nerve that affects our diaphragm and that we injure our lungs and I always said oh no she's just was born like that she's got asthma and it all tied up in so many times that she had to spend a lot of time on her that's where I was traveling.

Oh she got asthma so it's like hard breaking she had been tears when I just came up to the like oh my god you know and here's someone who wrote a book and amazing divorce because I did the best I could. But the impact is so profound and yeah deep in the nervous system that's right it's well thank you for sharing and I think and it will tie into everything we're going to speak about because it's the reason why we can't think or talk ourselves out of these states it's held in our physiology both in the nervous system but but in some of the most primitive ways that we don't always think about. For example in the vestibular system in the inner ear in the way that that connects into the the kind of very central regulation mechanisms in our brain stem and so we need things like rhythmic movement and somatic integration and conscious breathing in order to restore the body into states of safety.

So let's stay in there I was going to get to that a bit later but what happens to our you were talking about our fascia and our brain and our muscles and ears and hearts can you keep going on that like what when you're experiencing that. That overwhelm of unsafety or something happens. How does it get stuck in our tissues yeah.

So when you if you imagine you are you know you who are listening if you imagine any time of stress. How do you know that you're stressed we know that we're stressed because we begin to hold our breath or we are gripping our fists or we're clenching our jaw. We brace across the chest or the abdomen the diaphragm the belly and so we start to create these what we call holding patterns in the body and those holding patterns are our held in place by our fascia we're restricting movement.

The fascia of your body or connective tissue runs through every single system of your body it's a it's connecting tissue because it's uniting all of the systems it wraps around every endocrine system gland wraps around all of your digestive system organs wraps around every single muscle and and it's intervates into all of the muscles the diaphragm is considered primarily connective tissue that connective tissue of the diaphragm wraps around the heart becomes the paracardium or the heart protector and extends down into our so as muscles which we often think of as our fight flight muscles because they prepare us to flee or they protect us in some way. So when we're bracing when our nervous system via the vagus and herve is detecting threats and sending that up to our brain we are going to prioritize self protection over. You know relaxation rest and digest and that self protection goes into this guarding in all of our systems in the body and so we tend to then see that that that holding there builds up chronic tension it builds up a kind of fibrous tissue all throughout the fascia in the body.

And the fascia requires hydration in order for us to feel like we're in flow right to it requires movement it requires literal hydration drinking enough water fascia requires breath and attention and safety in order to allow us to come out of that braced defense stance. Is any of this doctor shorts ever been seen it can you see fascia being tense and you know when someone's experienced a lot of trauma has this ever been evidence based or yes absolutely so there's there's both scans that you can do of the tissue but a lot of this also gets. Can recognize if you look for example at autopsy or the ability to work with a cadaver so if you have a particular article that i've written on this on my blog and it links to very popular speech done by Gilhead headly which is called the fuzz speech.

And basically it's him in a cadaver lab showing what happens when fascia hardens and that it gets the stickiness between the tissues and that when we are. Keeping that fascia more fluid just like other substances that we might all think of they can go for more hardened or sticky substance the fascia can become more like a liquid. And so that's what we're wanting to create is more literal flow in your body and so this can be reversed yes it can be reversed yes but for anyone listening that suffers from chronic inflammation patterns or fibromyalgia right headaches migraines all of this.

This is you know you're you already know the know this experience because you've experienced what inflammation does to your body you experience how. The how tension can build in particular places in your chest or shoulders or neck or or upper back. It amazing go on and on.

No yeah it's amazing it's so exciting and shocking and as I ask all these questions I get all this memories of friends of mine or clients of mine who suffer from mine grains and experience a lot of trauma and have very stressful lives and it's kind of sad that there isn't a better linkage between. Medicare and and the health system and all this work that we're doing right because a lot of doctors don't even know what to do with mine greens and they give them pills and. And it also reminded me of someone I know who.

Experience a lot of trauma in her life and died young at 40 and when they did enough topsy they said that her body was a body of an 82 year old. Like the fascia the way the brain worked and it's you know I haven't you know when I asked you about the evidence I'm like oh yeah the minute you said that it was like wow this is just. Chalking so why is before we get into the specific therapeutic yoga how do you define therapeutic yoga and where do we find it and i'm going to ask you this because.

I lived in Toronto and I had this amazing half a yoga practitioner who Donna Warren who just amazing she was also very spiritual and the whole practice was talking through when it was a lot of the fashion like a bit therapeutic it it was undescribable and when I moved to New York I needed. To do some yoga and I need I wanted to go to a class or assume and I assisted about five different yoga studios and it was not one of them was power yoga it was woman was yelling at me i'm like yeah time out I don't need to. Or or he was like the quick flow and it was a great workout but it was nothing like I had experienced before so if.

What is therapeutic yoga and if there's someone out there like me who wants to join a class or assume. How do I go about finding what you do yes yes well to start with this question of what is therapeutic yoga the first is that it starts with connection it starts with. Moving slowly enough to notice what is the experience that you are having here and now within your nervous system and how do we know what the state of our nervous system is because our body communicates it.

So we need to be moving slow enough to be in tune with what are what is our body experiencing right now can I be in here can I feel. The again maybe that tension or that emotional weight that i'm carrying in my chest or the what's happening in my belly what's happening in my throat so we want to start with awareness. And when we moved towards the movement side of it the asana that we want that to come with a ground of choice and enough safety in the room.

And so if I if i'm just moving to create an outer shape then i it's like gymnastics which is fine there's nothing wrong with that but. What we're wanting to do is actually create a secure base that the movement process then becomes authentic to you and an exploratory journey what is happening in here. And how does what i'm sensing and feeling inside of me want to guide my movement from the inside out rather than from the outside in a sense.

We can think of this is that we're using the the shape or the asana as an opportunity to feel yourself rather than trying to fit your body into an asana. Okay so that's why your book is all about teaching us how to do it ourselves in our own place in our own you know we talk about having a place of practice isn't in our home making it our own. And you are teaching us how to do it so that we can follow our own instincts of what we need and where we need it and how we needed.

That's right and that's that's a beautiful base that's the foundation for the practice from there we can add on because once you have that connection to self. We can then explore very specific structure or technique or or asanas or krias if we call it that in yoga we can explore really specific practices for a purpose, for example, in yoga we have all these opportunities to cross the midline of the body. And you know whether it's in something like eagle pose whether that is in a cross crawl movement from a tabletop we have all these opportunities and we we know that that is so good for our brains that we have these opportunities to facilitate brain integration.

Or another example is we have all of these opportunities to practice balance in yoga balancing shapes there's beautiful research out there about that building more. You know, kind of cortical thickness within the parts of the brain such as the cerebellum that are involved with balance and so if you think about preparation for healthy aging. And that that so many of the injuries that happen as we age have to do with falling injuries and that we can prevent that by building a daily practice of balancing movements that help strengthen that ability within us so there's so many structures within yoga that help build foundations for healing or for strengthening.

And we can even take what we call kind of power poses right what you call it a five pointed star or a warrior pose that we can embrace these energizing and empowering us and us because they give you a felt sense of self within that stance that you carry with you off the mat. And that's one of the biggest aha moments I had of why you feel so good is that when you because obviously we've heard about meditation for 40 years and I was someone who wasn't able to meditate so yoga for me was my meditation so being able to just stay with a pose and be okay being on my own like I was someone who was never able to go on to dinner on my own or sit at a coffee shop on my own I always had to have people around me. And so yoga was so transformational in being like just listening to your body listening to connecting with yourself.

And then the power poses were like my god I'm strong I am able I'm capable I'm which is something that when we've gone through a lot of trauma we don't feel like we're capable and strong and you know we might be capable capable professionally and we've done really good at work because that was part of our dissociation to work. Work work work and it felt good so let's keep going but at home which is a lot of the clients that I work with we don't feel empowered we don't have a voice we don't because we never had one at home so we carry that with us and the whole yoga so let's break down yoga a bit about what are the components of yoga and how can they be very therapeutic so the poses. Anything to add to the importance of the poses and yeah you know one of the things that we practice and and I want to I want to look back to an earlier question for just a second and then I'll come back to this you asked how do you find the right class for you how do you find a therapeutic class that's not how are yoga or just a vinyasa that feels like this gym.

To extend to our own practice like if I want to make it a routine and find something what's right closest to this yeah so you know one is that I do think there is great value to attending a class or finding a teacher that you feel really comfortable with going back to you know that that quality and again this is driven by our nervous system but we love co regulating spaces and people and what that means is that we're going to do that. So I think that's what I think is that when somebody else is able to hold the space for us and offer that Susan boys tone and guide us and direct us it actually does help us set our our own mind aside for a little bit and be deeply trusting that someone else has me for this hour someone else is going to actually wisely guide me they've already created a structure for me and I can just allow myself to go into that. I love about the honor of being a yoga teacher is that I create those structures for my students and you know for those of you that haven't taken a class with me come find the classes they're all recorded in there on YouTube at Dr.

Rial Schwartz and and you can find through the range of classes some are shorter and some are very very gentle and some are more challenging because we can build up our capacity for of readiness and excitement for that challenger those empowering shape. There's a there's a whole range within that coming back to the question you just ask me which is about what is it about the postures themselves why do they work or what what's you know what is it that we might think about in terms of of how this is creating change one of the areas of interest for me is what we call positive neuroplasticity and within that when you know what we know about neuroplasticity is that our brain is going to be able to do that. So what we do is that our brains are changing throughout our lifespan and that they're their experience based so whatever we repeatedly do will wire itself into our our nervous system brain and body and that yoga for example if it's a repeated practice maybe even a daily practice you are wiring an experience that has usually two core elements one is what we call safe mobilization.

The ability to move my body safely to enhance the amount of energy that I can hold within my system to feel that charge not as something scary but as something exciting right and that we can embrace that so fully and we can challenge our physiology to handle more challenge which helps us off the mat be able to handle stress and come back into recovery. So in yoga what we do is we go into active or chosen movement with phases of active recovery a very mindful letting the heart rate increase and then coming back down to that regulated parasympathetic state so that we can restore our capacity to handle some challenge and feel that we can come back to home the estasis or regulation. And that the you know the other part of this is that yoga gives us these opportunities to embrace safe immobilization or stillness without feeling stuck.

So I could go into a guided yoga need your practice or a guided yoga sleep practice and have someone guide my awareness to my body rest and stillness and feel safe within stillness which for individuals with trauma. Myself included sometimes stillness itself didn't feel safe and that's why it can be hard to meditate my mind is racing even though my body is still so yoga is meant to be yoga as and as meant to be a precursor to meditation it helps prepare us by basically getting the body into an optimal state so that then by the time we sit still we feel blissful. It's so enjoyable.

Oh my gosh. I wanted to now I can sit for hours right. It transformed my life from being super extroverted and who's who's out there and trying to get together with people to be like I get to be on my own and my husband's like what do you want to do to say nothing I want to say to any joy of you and be with myself and that's because of the power of yoga that it taught me.

How to do that and when you were talking it. I had an episode with Dr Andrew Russell whose a physician turned anxiety doctor and he's a psychic too so we were on the podcast and we were talking about how we store you know trauma in our bodies but it was very early on and he's like you know when your brother used to hold you up and and and hold you down. And I'm like how did you know that and it's funny because I have a I was chairing with you that I don't love living in New York and the subways and I just like to stay in my safe nature bound neighborhood and I kind of asked myself to like let's get over this fear I'm not living life I mean an amazing city I should be taking the subway so I did some hypnosis with one of my guests and it was very traumatic because he came back to I never felt safe in my own home because I had a brother who pestered me and hit me out of nowhere and and that state of activation that I'm always scared and I'm always looking around and I never felt safe even when I lived in Canada who's the safest country in the world with like a hundred homicides a year I still was in constant state of alert.

And so now that you're talking about trying to feel safe and he said you know you should be doing a lot of exercises because I I got stuck in that response of not ever I was too little he was five years older to like you know said free and and I need to do a lot of work so I'm so excited about your YouTube channel I'm not going to follow you and do all your exercises I think you like them that's great and kind of heal that and get that out of my system. Because I don't want to live in fear. You know you don't want to live in fear and and what you just shared is such a profound example of what gets patterned in the patterned in the body when you have a repeated experience of I don't know when this shocking event is going to happen again when I'm going to get pinned down and feel helpless and immobilized in a state of threat.

Right that is a lot to live with the end that in some way you're you're still walking through the world with that living in your body so in as you know in the book we we talk about somatic repatterning the process in which in yoga because we have those opportunities to press through the hands right and down we're going to feel that strength moving from your palms all the way to the center of your chest and to feel that empowerment right there. You have the ability to reach through your arms and to feel like it's safe to open yourself up to the world again right we have that capacity to move the legs recognizing that we're no longer stuck in a situation that we don't want to be in. And so all of that is repatterning your body to know what's possible now and that now is different from then.

And another thing I loved that you talked about is the importance of bottom up approaches and top down approaches how important it is that I have this awareness I've done this work that I understand the cause of my fears and my anxiety you know with being out and about with the bottom up approach. Right because when you if I was your patient or your client and I come to you as I've come to many with like I am very afraid of subways I don't walk along. I'm a five die on my own I feel like someone's going to jump me and attack me and rape me and that's the anxiety I feel how do you start like do you do you and the body or both or depends or I love meeting someone who does it all right right.

Either have a EMDR or a somatic or a yoga you do it all how do you recommend or I have lines of mind that need to do this work and they're like Karen do I work with EMDR first or somatic or this what do we recommend for them. Well it's right it's why I wrote the books and that is a call gene EMDR therapy you are I love it this way I'm so excited you're here you're. You can get it all together and actually we we can do what we call somatic EMDR therapy which is that we are working simultaneously with the felt experience in the body.

For example going to your fear of subways right to notice as you imagine getting on the subway what begins to happen with how you breathe right are you holding your breath are you breathing shallowly how does how you're breathing reinforce the fear story. There's a phrase that deb Dana uses within the poly day goal of my poly day goal theory world which is that story follows state and that the story that our minds are telling is directly related to the physiological state that we're in. And so if we start by attending to the physiological state and you can change it by noticing oh when as soon as I start thinking about going on the subway i'm holding my breath or i'm breathing shallowly you're like yeah how do you know I start sweating I start I have full on anxiety I then I call an over and i'm spending thousands of hours I don't want to take a lot of it.

And so you know so you can start with changing how you breathe you can but you can reorient your attention sure there are some cues of threat that live in New York City they're they're all around but or and there are also cues that let you know that you're safe enough now. Right and that our nervous systems are primed to find the cues of threat and react to them within a fraction of a second. We need to actually reach rain our nervous system to reorient to cues of safety and of course this requires that you are safe enough now.

And that of course there are you know hundreds of thousands of people that take the subway every day and have fine experiences nothing bad happens. And so but we will hone in on the what ifs and the worst case scenarios because that's what our brains have been trained to do for survival. If I know there's a tiger in that woods I'm prepared for the tiger in the woods however there are plenty of times when we walk through the woods to get to that clearing on the other side and it's a beautiful field of wildflowers.

And that even when we're walking through the woods we see the moss growing on the trees and we see all of these beautiful sites and we hear the birds sing. And and we forget to listen or to see all of that beauty because we're focused on that is there tiger. Absolutely.

I that's where I want to get I actually went to Arizona once and my husband and I started hiking in the in a bit of a desert and I couldn't enjoy it because I was worried about the cool girls or the or the anxiety ball. So this is definitely work I want to do. So you're saying that we would work with someone like you who can do both EMDR Somatic and have the the yoga Somatic know about to and read your book I mean you have four anxiety do this type of breathing which get that leads me to the breathing and all the parts of yoga we talked about the poses.

How all the flow allows us to improve our fashion and let it go and improve mobility and the breathing wise breathing so important and you went into very detailed types of breathing for specific. Society depression and breathing through one knows and vice breathing so important. Good.

So we we can think of breathing is the most direct way to change the state of your nervous system. And what we're cultivating is what we call heart rate variability with unconscious breathing when we are breathing in the most basic and most beneficial breath practice to start with is not going to be something. Like what we call resonant or coherent breathing pattern which is in yoga it's called the summer free tea pattern and it's the same length of an inhale and a same length of an exhale generally recommended about a four count or five count inhale and a four or five count exhale.

And when you breathe rhythmically with the same length of inhale and exhale you are creating a balanced nervous system state because every inhalation is activating just a little bit of your sympathetic nervous system every exhalation a little bit of your parasympathetic nervous system. And so we're creating this rhythmic alternation between sympathetic and parasympathetic and it does so because of that connection between your heart and your lungs and the fascia and the diaphragm movement and so forth and that on the inhale your heart rate will increase a little bit on the exhale your heart rate will decrease a little bit. But if you're someone like yourself who experiences anxiety a lot of the time you might what we wanted you might want to do what we call a calming breathing pattern which is to overemphasize the exhalation in this case you might inhale for a count of four and exhale for a count of six or eight.

When you breathe out longer than you breathe in when your exhale is longer than your inhale we call that a parasympathetic breath because you're emphasizing that parasympathetic system and if you look at animals in the wild for example those animals are not going to have an exhale that's longer than their inhale unless they're safe. So it's a way that you can change your breathing to communicate to your brain i'm safe enough now. And I remember you were talking about the straw and like and I practiced that actually as I was walking through battery park woods and sometimes there's homeless people and I'm like okay i'm safe there's cameras everywhere.

And the straw breathing is beautiful for two reasons and as is alternate nostril breathing i'll speak about both in the same text because what they're doing is they're creating just a little bit of resistance to the breath when you're breathing through a single nostril versus in and out of your mouth right with you breathing in and out of your mouth. A lot of air can pass in and out through the mouth without much resistance when you breathe through a single nostril or through your first lips like you're breathing through a straw you're creating resistance to the breath and that allows us to lengthen the breath to be very mindful about that length of the breath to bring your consciousness to the breath. And to create change but the straw breath is a particular a particular technique that I love for panic anxiety and this one you are finding that very long exhalation in this case just a short inhale natural inhale you're exhaling for a count of 10 right and that eight of those counts is that resistance breathing sending it out through your lips like they're shaped like a straw.

Right and you count to eight and then the last two counts come out of your nose together you know for for the last two and that very long exhale is again a beautiful bottom up from your body to your brain signal you're safe enough now you're safe now and then where would we add the mdr because I never can never really answer that question yes I was going to. Ask you about how you talked about how trauma affects our brain as well right and how the importance of I've movement yeah and it was the first time because there has been everything space since the 90s and Dr Shapiro was talking about walking in the woods and how this came about but it was really not like so why does it work wise that. That movement of the ice so helpful in our healing so that's right share with us I loved hearing what I heard good good you know what what is the mdr first of all it's an eight phase model that integrates cognitive behavioral therapy and semantics in neuroscience and it puts all of these together for an arc of trauma recovery and the first part of that arc is what we call resource development or the preparation stage so what we're speaking about for the first time in the world.

What we're speaking about for example of finding a felt sense of safety in the body or finding a felt sense of empowerment in the body. EMDR invites you to find that positive state pause there linger extended and let it wire into your nervous system so we add the bilateral into a positive state to strengthen it so that's part one of EMDR or you know it's phase two but it's part you know it's it's it's the preparatory phase and I think that sometimes we we always want to do. We always want to jump to that that trauma reprocessing part which is great but if we don't have that rewiring of safety in the nervous system first we don't really have the the what are we going to rewire in if we want to rewire in a resource state or a positive outcome we need to to build that within your nervous system to know that we have a safe space that we have cheerleaders that we have people who love us that we are strong that we've done this before yeah.

Exactly all of the above so that's the first part and then is we get into the science of what you're asking about here we like wow there's all this science of I movements why does that work why did this idea of Francine Shapiro walking through the park her eyes scanning left to right right to left and looking around why did that created change in how she was thinking about a difficult event. Aha now that gets really interesting and you know here here we are in a podcast I would certainly recommend also listening to Andrew Huberman's podcast on this particular topic because he is a Stanford researcher that also looks at a lot of his research has been looking at eyes I movements pupil dilation and so forth and so one of the things that he speaks about is how I movements activate the number of people that are in the world. Activate the neurochemistry of courage because I movements themselves begin to release dopamine which is a kind of pleasure and reward chemical in the brain and so we can feel this experience here and now of a positive neuro chemistry and that we're now linking when we think about a hard event it's going to change how we then have the capacity to think differently about that hard event and that's brilliant.

Right that's really cool on itself there's also some very interesting physiology about the movement of the eyes and how it connects to the muscles at the base of your skull the occipital muscles can often tense up and I think many of us know that again again going back to headache survivors right like you know that experience of all of the tension that can happen around the neck and around your eyes and so when we go into what we call I yoga and I yoga goes back thousands of years the recognition that we want to stretch our eyes that that has great benefits for your nervous system and part of what it's doing is that it's also there's a direct connection between the muscles of the eyes and the muscles at the base of the skull. And so we're beginning to open up more blood flow around the vertebral artery in your neck which is going to send more oxygenated blood to the vagus nerve to the brain stem itself it's going to create some physiological changes that are helping to can real line your your whole body mine health system. Brilliant that was so that and that was one of the missing the missing pieces like the whole oxytocin of the eyes because a lot of people are into psychedelics because you're entering into that safe happy drug that then you can process such a hard event that people may might have gone through.

And the whole explanation of the time to the back of the head it's a brilliant have practices in the book which which you will find yeah guiding you for example through self applied touch to areas of the face where the vagus nerve comes close to the surface of your skin and then we are activating what we call natural vagus nerve stimulation which is this beautiful. The release that of tension that accumulates around the eyes around the ears around your jaw and it's it's a very quick relief that one will feel it's like a vagus nerve massage is that something we should do all the time or. Or when we are having a panic attack that was about to go into the end but wake up and do it every day right it can do this within five minutes of your day and if you think of it like it's like you're brushing and flossing your teeth like this is a way to keep all of that care.

Connective tissue of the face clear so that the energy of your life force your precious life force gets to flow through your face doesn't have to be bound in all of that tension beautiful and i'm sure we can find this massage on your YouTube channel and doctor are you else shorts yes. Doctor shorts thank you so much for coming I love this episode I think I was learning more than anybody even though I read your book and I was still learning and applying things to my own life and my own healing journey so I thank you so much I ask all my guests what is healing for you. How do you define healing for you it is the sweet spot of profound safety and ease that lets the innermost wisdom of your own soul to come to the surface of your awareness.

Wow beautiful definition and why in your opinion people should do this work. I believe that it makes us better people I think that we not only feel more comfortable and calm within ourselves but that that radiates outward into every place that you touch in the world whether you're a parent it will impact how you're with your kids or your partner or your own parents or. People you work with and I believe that healing ourselves is world work.

I could not agree more thank you so much for coming and to my audience if you enjoy this episode please subscribe please share and please find doctor aerial shorts on her website at doctor aerial shorts dot com on Instagram aerial shorts bolder and on YouTube and Facebook under her same name thank you so much. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you.