☘️☘️☘️Enter the March GIVEAWAY: https://www.christabiegler.com/giveaway

🚨Watch Christa's free training here: christabiegler.com/blueprint

This week, Deanna Hansen joins me to talk about fascia through a root cause lens. Instead of looking only at pain, posture, or mobility in isolation, we explore how fascia affects the body as a whole and why compression, stress, and loss of flow may contribute to much more than people realize.

We discuss how fascia influences circulation, detoxification, lymphatic flow, digestion, alignment, and even emotional health. Deanna explains how trauma, shallow breathing, repetitive stress, and daily movement patterns can all create adhesions in the body that affect how we feel and function over time.

We also talk about why breath is such a critical part of healing, how the diaphragm supports both nervous system regulation and cellular health, and why symptoms like pain, bloating, tension, and chronic stress may all point back to deeper patterns of compression. Learning how to create more space in the body may be one of the most powerful ways to support long term healing.

Bonus Gift: 9 Part Fascia Sampler https://blocktherapy.com/sampler-program-opt-in/. Use just your body weight + a towel to start decompressing fascia, improve oxygenation, and support better alignment.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:
• You can’t out supplement a compressed body
• Shallow breathing keeps you stuck in stress mode
• Fascia affects way more than just pain and mobility
• Your diaphragm is a major player in healing
• “Tight” often means stuck, not strong
• Creating space = better flow, better function 

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ABOUT GUEST:
Deanna Hansen is a pioneer in the field of fascia decompression for physical and emotional transformation. With more than 20 years of hands-on clinical experience, Deanna created Block Therapy™, a unique fascia-release protocol, to relieve chronic pain and dis-ease, encourage healthy detoxification, and reverse cellular aging.

WHERE TO FIND GUEST:
Website: https://blocktherapy.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blocktherapy/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Fluidisometrics

WHERE TO FIND CHRISTA:
Website: https://www.christabiegler.com/
Instagram: @anti.inflammatory.nutritionist
Podcast Instagram: @lessstressedlife
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lessstressedlife
More Links + Quizzes: https://www.christabiegler.com/links

SPONSOR:
Thank you to Jigsaw Health for being such a great sponsor. 😎 Use code LESSSTRESSED10 anytime for 10% off!

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TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] Deanna Hansen: we can't control what's going on outside. This world is weird and it's strange and it's highly stressful all the time.

But we have the ability to handle our internal environment through understanding breath, understanding exhalation, and understanding how to support flow in the body.

[00:00:15] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm your host Christa Biegler, and I'm going to guess we have at least one thing in common that we're both in pursuit of a less stressed life. On the show, I'll be interviewing experts and sharing clinical pearls from my years of practice to support high performing health savvy women in pursuit of abundance and a less stressed life.

One of my beliefs is that we always have options for getting the results we want. So let's see what's out there together. 

 It is March and it is the month of my favorite holiday. So we are going to celebrate here at the Less Stressed Life in partnership with Jigsaw Health. We created the first giveaway I've done in years, and we made it really solid. So there's four winners you can enter throughout the month of March. Just go to christabiegler.com/giveaway.

That will also be in the show notes. We're giving away four prizes, two mega bundles from Jigsaw Health with prizes worth more than $200 of all of our favorite products like Mag soThe Mag, SRT, potassium Cocktail. Other electrolytes from Jigsaw and also a 30 minute one-on-one with me, which you cannot normally get.

And then also a mineral test with review. So if you're interested in any of those one prize per person to try to share the love a little bit throughout the entire month of March, you can enter, just go to christabiegler.com/giveaway. We've got a really cool software that makes it really easy. You just click some button, subscribe to the podcast.

You can end, have more entries. Really simple. And then you'll be set to go. We'll announce the winners after April 1st after the giveaway closes throughout the month of March. And happy month of St. Patrick's Day, my very favorite holiday. So go get entered, christabiegler.com/giveaway.

All right. Today on the Less stressed life I have Deanna Hanson, who's a pioneer in the field of fascia decompression for physical and emotional transformation. With more than 20 years of hands-on clinical experience, Deanna created block therapy, a unique fascia release protocol to relieve chronic pain and disease, encourage healthy detoxification in reverse cellular aging.

Welcome to the show, Deanna. 

[00:02:41] Deanna Hansen: Thank you so much, Christa. It's a pleasure to be here. 

[00:02:44] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah just tell us a little bit about your story. How did you get into fascia work? If it fits, go ahead and just tell us about Fascia because it's this mysterious, not well talked about. If you're in the health space, you've probably heard of it, and I think generally it's like growing in popularity, like lymphatic.

Topics are growing in popularity, but there's a difference here around fascia and lymphatics. So when you're telling us your story, tell us a little bit about your background, how this all started, and a little bit more about fascia. And really you'd have to be a pioneer in this industry to have been doing it for 20 plus years, to tell us a little bit about how we arrived here.

[00:03:21] Deanna Hansen: Yeah, so back in my twenties, I'm 56 now. I was an athletic therapist by profession, which is similar to physiotherapy in the us. I live in Canada, but focused more on working with elite athletes. And so at the time I was doing everything that I was taught. Yet I was really struggling with my own physical body.

I was 50 pounds overweight, struggling with anxiety to. Depression, chronic pain, and so on. And the harder that I was working, the worse my body became. I was compressing more. I was becoming more toxic and ballooned and I was working out, I was doing 400 situps a day, running ty bow aerobics, weights in the gym, like you name it, I was doing it and it was like, why are the rules of weight loss not applying to me?

At the age of 30, I made some big changes in my life and as a result of those changes, I started having really severe anxiety attacks. And it was this one anxiety attack in particular that was actually the seed of my whole understanding of fascia and what I've created in the moment. I actually thought I was gonna die because I was literally frozen in fear.

My breath was strangled. For some reason, I intuitively dove my hand into my abdomen. Now, this was where I carried my. 50 extra pounds. I was ashamed of this area. I never touched it. And now I'm diving my hand deep into this space and the first thing I encountered was pain. But the pain brought me out of my crazy thinking.

I'm back in my body. I'm aware, I'm breathing and I'm alive. And then I started to intuitively explore in that tissue with my hands. Now, as an athletic therapist, we learned a number of different modalities, but I always focused on deep tissue work with my hands, and I had a really. Good practice because I had strong hands and I could find scar tissue and really work through it in people's bodies.

But here I am in this tissue in my own body and it felt like it was marbled with scar tissue, even though I hadn't had any injury or surgery in that area. And then suddenly I had all these aha moments. Like no wonder when I'm coming home from a five mile run, I'm dripping wet with sweat. My belly would still feel cold.

So that first day I spent 30, 45 minutes just working intuitively in my belly. And what was really noteworthy for me was how calm I felt because of my issues with anxiety. I never had that sense of peace, but now I'm feeling calm and centered. So I wake up the next day and I'm a little tender from the work that I did, but that connection to my physical body kept me calm throughout the day.

And after I worked on my patients that day, I went home that night and I continued to explore. And after the second night of doing a similar thing, when I stood up, I felt taller. And I went and I looked at myself in the mirror and my belly was flatter than it had looked in years. So now this became my new approach to working with my own body.

After work all day, I'd come home and I would do this self-care process, and within two months or two weeks, my chronic low back pain was going away. My neck pain was improving, my entire outlook to life. Had changed. And then I also started working in my patients in a similar way, and I started attracting all these other therapists because they were wanting to learn the technique that I had started working on.

And I recognized probably a couple of years in that I'm actually tapping into the. Fascia. It wasn't just like focusing on muscles and ligaments and tendons like we're trained in school to do. I was working in this different system and I was having these incredible results in my own body that continued to add up as well as with my patients.

So what I really learned along the way. Was that fascia is this most beautiful system. It is literally the cell membrane of each cell connecting to every other cell. So it's the communication system in the body. And when in balance, there's two proteins that. Make up this this system as well as other things.

But the two proteins are collagen and elastin. The collagen is the structural component. The elastin allows for mobility, for movement in the body. So when in balance, what ultimately we have is space. In and around every single one of our cells. And as long as there's space, there's ease of flow of nutrients into the cell, as well as the ease of removal of toxins and debris away from the cell.

And if that's the case, we have a system that's working efficiently and with ease of flow. There's really no pain, no aging, no disease. That builds up. However, this is not our reality because we are constantly under the influence of gravity. We're dominant on one side of the body. We have past traumas, whether physical, emotional, mental.

Also, how do we spend our time every day? Are we doing physical labor? Are we in front of a computer multiple hours? Do we play sports or instruments? All of the things that really comprise our life add up to create the patterning that we have in our body. So what ultimately happens with this. It's that collagen protein, that structural piece that starts to migrate to areas of need.

We are designed to be upright, so if we start to tip off balance, the body essentially creates false walls and false floors like scaffolding on a building to support us from tipping over in a moment of time. This is a benefit. But if left to a chronic buildup of this, now we start patterning and we become shorter and wider as we age and our body starts to slow down with flow, and then we start being imbalanced in our alignment, which creates pain, aging, and dis-ease.

So the work that I do is fascia decompression. It takes us in the opposite direction to what time has done so we can put the space back into the body. That time has taken away. 

[00:08:53] Christa Biegler, RD: What's so fun about this opening story is you unpacked quite a lot and you made it quite sexy, right? So in a couple of weeks you started doing this accidental therapy, right?

[00:09:04] Deanna Hansen: Yes. 

[00:09:04] Christa Biegler, RD: You didn't even know I was already, my brain was already thinking, oh, did you dig more into other. Learning, did you learn more about fashion, but it took you two years to even realize that you were accidentally creating something, right? Yes. That was just this beautiful thing that had changed.

And what I love about this is it's very common that we need a minimum of two to three weeks to do a modality, to really see a change, especially daily. And that was exactly your experience, but to have that much change and such. Such a short amount of time. It's so interesting as well, where you said the anxiety really provoked some of those symptoms.

And I often like to think of things from a health triad perspective where there's an emotional, energetic piece, a structural physical piece, and the nutritional chemical piece. Is there anything to say about. Why the anxiety was provoked at that time. But it's really interesting that there was a structural, physical relationship or improvement, which I know we're gonna end up going into 'cause everything is so connected.

So do you have any comments about how anxiety provoked it, but then it was solved through the body? 

[00:10:02] Deanna Hansen: I had been struggling with anxiety. I always said I have anxiety. Now I recognize I don't even, I don't use that terminology anymore. Now, if I feel that similar sensation, I say my cells are anxious because ultimately the cell requires a whole bunch of things.

Just like we as a human require a whole bunch of things. So the cell needs space to function. It needs nutrition, it needs rest. It needs hydration. It needs love and care. So just like we do. If that cell is being squished underneath the unconscious patterning of the fascia, because now we have blockages to that cell.

It's getting starved from nutrients. It's becoming toxic because now the area is becoming acidic because of that lack flow and that stagnation now also because so much of that collapse can come from emotional. Trauma or physical trauma from the past. It can also be patterned with the emotion and then with the memory of that emotion.

So everything gets tied together. And that's the really cool part when we start to understand the fascia. When we support Fascia health, we're supporting health of all aspects of our being. So when I had anxiety, one of the things I recognized was I wasn't breathing. Because when I'm breathing through the muscles of the upper chest, it's keeping us in the sympathetic mode instead of turning on that parasympathetic nervous system, which is what's required for rest and digest.

So I was 24 7 in sympathetic mode and that was what I really recognized when I was diving my hands into my abdomen and it was marbled with scar tissue. I had no breath in that space. That's also why. I learned I was 50 pounds overweight even though I was working out like crazy and dieting like crazy.

The rules of weight loss have very little to do actually with what we've been trained to think it means calories in versus energy expenditure because I was doing the work and yet my body was not succumbing to that because my breath was frozen. I wasn't getting any energy. In the abdominal area for the heart and the lungs, the diaphragm.

I'm gonna dive in here just a little bit to talk about this. Because it's such an important component to all the things we're talking about, and it's actually one of the three pillars of the work I've developed. So the three pillars are creating space, inflating space, and maintaining space. The creating space is all about melting the adhesions that form over time, whether scar tissue from an injury or surgery or.

That patterning of adhesions that occurs from unconscious living. So we melt through that, those adhesions through the process, which I can talk about later. The second pillar is inflating the space, and that's teaching people about proper diaphragmatic breathing and really. All of this work is to teach people how to breathe in this way, because if we are conscious breathers, we're physiologically a very different animal than if we're unconscious breathers.

So your diaphragm muscle, it's a plate of muscle that is at the base of your rib cage when it's working properly. When we inhale, it moves down in the body. When we exhale, it lifts and when this plate of muscle is working optimally, we are giving the organs, the heart and lungs a continual massage. We're putting energy into that space.

The challenge is pain, fear, and stress cause you to reactively hold the breath. So if that becomes the pattern, we're going to be breathing as long as we're alive. In some way or another, and the body's built to survive. So the secondary muscles of respiration take over. We start breathing through the muscles of the upper chest rather than the diaphragm.

But this creates a lot of issues, and this is really what we're seeing in the world today. So because we're not getting that activity of that muscle mechanically moving up and down, first of all, it becomes weak, the muscle. So now everything above the rib cage, the head, the arms, all of that weight. Comes crashing down into the core space.

So as we notice, oftentimes as we start getting a little bit older, we might not be changing anything that we're doing, but suddenly we might be getting a little bit of a spare tire in that space and people think, ah, I'm accumulating fat around my middle. But it's not that. It's the compression and the ballooning because when we take away the space of the core.

Stuff has to go somewhere and it's going to go outward. And then you combine that with that lack of energy. That's not being created from the movement of the diaphragm going up and down. Now the area is becoming colder, and we need the diaphragm to support digestion because that action creates energy to the stomach, organ.

It creates energy to the liver, to the pancreas, to everything. So again, if we're not breathing properly, we're basically displacing the entire upper body. We're crushing the internal organs, displacing them, and now all of our functions aren't. Performing properly. So we end up becoming toxic because we're not eliminating either.

And then we develop feces and accumulation of that, and then we attract parasites and there's inflammation and here's your gut issues that create brain problems. So everything is really connected, but it so much comes down to the breath. And what is most important to understand it? It's at the base of the lungs where the majority of the.

Oxygen absorption occurs. So if we're breathing that shallow upper chest breath, we're not pulling the air deep into the lungs to reach this bed of abundance where this absorption takes place. We can feed the body 600% more oxygen. Breathing, diaphragmatically, every single cell in your body, first and foremost from a nutritional standpoint, needs oxygen to thrive.

So 600% more is a ton more, six times more. Also, they've shown 84% of weight loss. Comes through proper exhalation. And when I learned that like a decade plus after my journey began, I was so excited to hear this because when I was back in my days and I was working out like crazy and literally starving myself at times, and I'm getting bigger now, it made sense right from that scientific perspective as to why I wasn't getting the results that I was looking for, because my breath was literally frozen and I had such a shallow breath.

So that's part of the reason that we have anxiety or we feel anxious is because your cells, they're not getting what's required for them to function, so they're giving you a signal. 

[00:16:29] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. I love this because you started to touch on this as you were talking, I was thinking about how there are modalities that exist in the world for fertility, which are essentially.

Aversion of some abdominal type massage, which would affect the fascia system. Anxiety creating so much. When I used to do more advertising around bloating, you would find refractory bloating, right? So after you make adjustments to nutritional, chemical, et cetera, you would still see bloating as a result of stress.

There was one nurse that I had one time who was able to see that she was only bloated on the day that she worked. So the exact example that you gave in general, and actually I love this because one of my original breath work teachers was a physiotherapist from Australia and one of his modalities was really massaging the belly, which was something you very much intuitively Did what was lovely about your background, was that you could recognize what was normal and abnormal in that tissue area. So you had that big, I will call it advantage. The other thing I would love to highlight is that you talk about how. All these issues with fascia and I just generally appreciate how you have this umbrella to talk about fascia and it really does downstream trickle to so many different symptoms that can be refractory or unresolved for people are definitely big pain points overall.

So yeah, I very much appreciate all of that. But you've mentioned how with fascia, with everything that's going on, you get off balance. And it made me think about how we have practitioners, these doctorate level practitioners that work with people with balance, right? Chiropractic, physiotherapists or in the United States, physical therapists.

But, and there are fascia workers, but it's not as well known. Is there right now in the world, is there much of a. Section of people that work with fascia overall, is there a fascia? Is there a term for someone who works on fascia? 

[00:18:21] Deanna Hansen: I think the awareness is definitely increasing. It was 2007 that we had the World's First Fascia Conference.

Now I find that interesting because Rolfing was developed long before John Barnes Myofascia release was developed before this 2007 conference. But that is when I think the whole world became aware of this tissue and they even shared that, surgeons will go and they'll cut it out and throw the tissue away.

Oh, wow. It's really the most important tissue in the body to consider. I would love to even just give an analogy here, so please. I live in Winni. I live in Winnipeg, and two weeks ago it was minus 47 Celsius with a windchill like. Crazy, right? I 

[00:19:03] Christa Biegler, RD: understand. I'm just right south of you. Barely.

[00:19:05] Deanna Hansen: Okay, fair. So I'm here in my apartment. If you can see out the window, it's white. I can have all of the best of everything in here to keep me healthy and safe. But if my window breaks and it's minus 47 and I can't fix that window or cover it up, it doesn't matter what I have inside here, I'm going to die because the container broke your cell membrane, that fascia, that's the container of the cell.

So I think we've been led for so long to really focus on the what's going on inside the cell as opposed to the container. Because it's the container that matters the most. Think of an egg, inside. We trust that the yolk is intact when the egg is, normal, but you crack it and then things come out.

So if we have containers that are not. Understood for the value that they have, which is what keeping the space in the body is all about. Then we start crushing these containers. We start strangling the life out of whatever tissue, organ, whatever it is that we're crunching down on, and that will create symptoms in that space.

So I don't actually see a body, or I don't actually believe in disease. I like using the word dis-ease because ease of flow is a healthy body. When there's lack of flow, there's dis-ease in the body. Also, dis-ease is an impermanent thing. Disease can get centered in the mind as a permanence. It's oh, I have this, like I used to have anxiety.

Now I don't have anxiety. I have days when I feel more anxious and I understand why and I also know what to do about it. So really it's the languaging too that's so important to understand because when we can. Shift our perspective on how to approach the body. It's not scary anymore, and we get caught in a pain fear spiral.

Yes, and what we really teach people is to find pain on purpose. So when we're doing that first pillar, the creating the space, that's what we do. What we're doing is we're moving into the tissue, we're not, sliding on the surface, we're planted in and our tools are made of wood because bone and wood are similar in density.

And those collagen fibers will grip to bone with a 2000 pound per square inch seal. Holding us out of alignment. So that's what we're dealing with, those incredible forces inside the body, but they're magnetic. So what we have to do is understand how to release the magnetics at the bone, and that's what my work is about.

But when we're in position and we work the entire body, we're lying in position and we're very slowly navigating through the adhesions, using our breath as our guide. And I always teach, as long as you're breathing in a relaxed way, you're feeding and healing the body. If anything hurts so much, it takes that relaxed breath away.

That's your body saying, this is too intense. But we teach people to become pain seekers because pain and adhesion are tied together. Your cell is gonna give you information when it's not getting what it needs. It's simply the baby crying. But we have been led to believe that pain is the bad guy and we need to, do everything we can to.

Minimize pain when in fact it's just a, an information that we need, but we haven't been taught the language of the cell. So this really helps you get in contact with the inner workings of your body and teaches you how to move breath into those spaces previously contracted from trauma from the past, and open up those spaces and rejuvenate your tissue.

And then, as you mentioned in the beginning, fashion lymphatics are tied together. If you have. Adhesions in the body, guaranteed you have a sluggish lymphatic system because that's part of that drainage piece that needs space for us to be able to dump out the toxins. 

[00:22:42] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. I wanna talk to you about how.

To implement some of this with some of the tools. But before we do something, I wanna highlight, so we're getting familiar with this concept of fascia. You gave us an analogy about the window breaking and this being the container that the cell is in. You've also mentioned breathwork as this very important underpinning that can I'll call it make or break, where things can maybe get stuck with fascia because it's part of the entire flow of the body.

But I wanna just. Briefly mention I love to recognize patterns or where things have something in common. And recently I was on a ski trip in your lovely country. I was with family and we were talking about different ways people achieve a similar outcome, right? And so someone was talking about starting a fitness program and it resolving a specific pain he had for a while.

And so the point is I think you mentioned this at the beginning, but there are ways that people sometimes inadvertently support their fascia and flow systems, like breath work, like certain types of movement, different stretching or types of yoga or any kind of movement. I'm guessing in general or bringing sort of movement to any part of the body, or maybe even massage, I'm not sure, but are there things that have maybe helped people improve their fascia unconsciously, that are giving them some of those same results?

Can we show where some of these things are sometimes connected, or maybe someone has almost experienced improvement with fascia because of some other modalities as well. Does that make sense? 

[00:24:09] Deanna Hansen: Yeah, and I mean there's lots of fascia modalities out there, but the reality is because of that powerful grip on the bone, I haven't seen anything that works like what this system does.

And that's the reason we use wood for our tools. So I have three different tools now. I have a block buddy. A block baby and a block paddle. For the people that can see, I'll just show you the block Buddy, is the tool that is the general tool for people typically over five feet tall. The block baby was designed for kids, and we always say if you're under five feet, the two together though, we have classes where we teach both and they work beautifully together.

And then we have a paddle. This one was initially brought in to work the face, but we also have classes in the membership to work the entire body with the paddle. Now the thing with these tools, A, they're specifically shaped because as we are moving in through. The adhesions in the body, in all of these vulnerable spaces, it has to be comfortable.

So it has a very specific size and shape so that we can move deeply in. But the reason again, it's made of wood is because bone and wood are similar in density. So if you have a fascia roller as an example, and you're rolling on the surface and it's made of plastic and it's porous, it will improve circulation to the surface layers.

But you're not going to be able to melt through those adhesions to get to the root of the problem at the bone. We need something similar in density to bone so that when we're lying on this tool, we're getting EQU pressure from the bone and the tool so that we can start to melt throughout that tissue.

And that's the reason it's so important. Plus we don't roll we're not moving on the surface layers. We're sinking in and then we're very. Slowly teaching people how to shear. That's how we release the magnetics. If you had magnets far apart, they don't have any connection to each other, bring them close together and they'll seal with the force.

Now, try to pull them apart. Almost impossible, if not impossible, but you can slide them apart. So through that shearing action. With the breath, we teach you how to move through those deeper layers to get to the root of the issue. And then again, through that instruction of proper diaphragmatic breathing and particularly focusing on the exhale, we support moving that blood and oxygen into those newly created spaces.

So now those cells that have been blocked from flow, they start absorbing that oxygen, they become fuller, they become lighter, and then we can sink and dive deeper to the next layer. Of adhesion, and it's a never ending game really, because at the end of the day, no matter when we're starting, we have an entire lifetime and even past lifetimes of patterning that have created the body that we have, and it's denser than we should be.

We should have, again, if we had that optimal space in and around every single cell, we would age in a completely different way. We would feel different. We would have mobility, we wouldn't have pain, but we were never given instructions really on how to use this container when we were born. So when we tap into things like yoga, which is a fantastic practice, it was a foundational world for me.

I was taking Igar yoga when this whole journey began for me, and I learned so much about alignment, so much about breath, but I did recognize there was a piece missing and it was that decompression component working in the areas that were blocked, blocking me from moving into that deeper expression of the posture.

I would go home and I would. Do the work on myself, and then I would gain that space for the next time around. Yet I would see everybody else continuing to stay stuck in the patterning that they had because they were missing this one element. So that was when I really became aware of how what I have been working on with my hands, which I call fluid isometrics, was making a significant difference.

And then block therapy became the self-care version of fluid isometrics. 

[00:28:01] Christa Biegler, RD: So fun, and really what I was pointing out was where has someone already experienced some of this? Improvement because you mentioned this word multiple times earlier, unconscious. And when things are unconscious, alls we can see is, oh, I'm bloated.

Right? And so how do we start to connect those things, when do you feel better? When are some examples of times that you've enjoyed how you felt or that have brought some improvement to your life? And then how do we. Unlock more of that by going down that same rabbit hole or that same path.

What does this teach us about what else is going on in the body? I wanna talk about some interesting questions that you shared with me about different places that adhesions show up and what are some important places. But before we do that, since we're talking about using these. Wood blocks.

This is the first time I've heard or seen this related to fascist. This is super interesting, so there's a couple parts to this question. One, there's other products out there on the market, right? There's this one that I feel like I've seen ads for over time called a fascia blaster.

And so the other connection point to this question is with lymphatics, there is considered a right and a wrong way to support yourself. Like you should start. With opening up the termini and making sure the drain is open, et cetera. Are there similar rules with fascia? Are there ways to do it incorrectly and cause some issues overall?

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[00:31:23] Deanna Hansen: Absolutely. We always, no matter what area of the body we are making our focus, we always start in our belly position. So we lie on the tool. We teach people where the breath should be coming from, and that's really the key because we can do the work. Like you can sit and you can have your calf resting on the tool looking for pain, but if you're not breathing, you're missing the magic part of it because it comes down to melting.

So when we're in a position. We're creating pressure on the surface, so we stay in each position. A minimum of three minutes. Pressure over time creates heat, but it's through activating proper diaphragmatic breathing that we turn on the body's furnace. Your upper chest muscles are like a space heater. So in this building I live in, if I have a space heater, I can heat one room in my space.

If I turn on the building's furnace, I can heat the entire building. The diaphragm is your body's furnace. And what is really important to know, and this is why oftentimes. Other breath work can be frustrating for people is the collapsing of the ribcage into the core will lock your diaphragm away. Like a frozen shoulder.

You have a frozen diaphragm. With that same powerful 2000 pound per square inch force. So if you're doing breath work from a very contracted diaphragm, you're only accessing a little bit of that muscle to really. Promote the goal, which is more oxygen, better detoxification. So through the work that I teach, we release the ribs, we add more of that muscle to the equation.

So with every breath you're taking now you are supporting lymphatic drainage as well as optimal circulation. So that's the first thing is we always start in the belly position for that reason. Because if we don't turn on the body's furnace, you're missing one of the two major heating aspects. And then.

The work isn't going to be at all the same. And then another piece is there's cause sites to our pain. So because the feet are the furthest from your diaphragm, that is where we get most strongly patterned into our negative alignment. So you could have a frozen shoulder as an example, and you could go for years of treatments, but every time you start walking.

You're gonna get pulled into the patterning that was at least partly responsible for why your shoulders doesn't have optimal mobility. So we really have to look at the whole body and identify where are the anchors and the holding patterns to what's going on. And the limbs dictate the alignment of the core.

So even with scoliosis, it's not an issue of the spine that's the result of the limbs. Pulling our core and rib cage out of alignment, causing the spine to go into whatever curve it has. So we need to bring the limbs back into balance. Think of a tent. If you have those tent poles firmly in the ground, you've got a tent that's nice and taut, and then it rains and there's no problems where you take out.

Pull out and suddenly the tent starts to sag. Now you're gonna have issues, and that's the same. If we don't have conscious awareness of our limbs, then our core is simply responding to what your limbs are doing. 

[00:34:27] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, so interesting. I used to I still am quite obsessed with foot health and anchoring, and so I often think about you're just bringing up how important it is to consider the feet, because that's the starting point of so much imbalance.

So it makes me think that if we're not really taking care of our foot health. If our feet are jammed into shoes that are creating imbalance, even with a slight heel, that may impact some of the results that we get, right? Because there's 

[00:34:54] Deanna Hansen: it a hundred percent will. It's not May. It will. And if I may, I would love to share an exercise that I teach.

So two years ago I had a video that went viral called Death Starts in the Feet, and. One of the things that we teach to everybody, I've gotten multiple videos on YouTube showing this, is we wanna re-pattern the toes. The toes are like the eyes of the feet, the toes they've actually shown now that longevity and toe strength are connected.

So if our toes aren't engaged in how we stand and how we walk and how we balance. Then as we get older, we fall, we break a hip, and then we're on a downward spiral toward death. When we have strong toes, we have that spring in the step. We wanna be driving a car with proper air in the tires. Most people are walking on feet that are flat tires.

Because they haven't kept the structure or the life in the feet. So an exercise we can do really simply is you want to put pressure between the webbing of each of the toes, and you can use a finger. You can use a pencil. You can even get a rope or a cord and wrap it through and hold. And the thing is, you wanna move down so you feel some sensation and you wanna stay there for that three minutes.

And then you can work between the next toe and then the next toe. And what you're doing for people that have toes that curl or twist, or they can't spread their toes nice and wide, or they have bunions or bunionettes, whatever it is, hammer toes. That is the work that you need to do to release the patterning of the toe so that you can start engaging them, strengthen them, and then after you release them, a great exercise is just to simply stand and take 10 slow exhales through the nose.

Think that you're pumping up the tires, you want that spring in your step, and if you have that, then you have a light body. We should have 60% of our body weight on our heels. The average person has more than 80% on the balls of their feet. Wow. So we get locked in this forward alignment, and that essentially is squishing the life out of us.

So to basically pull that body back into more of that. Back bend almost, right? Because we naturally age forward going into like more of almost a back bend as an exercise to become straight consciously is really the goal. And so again, if you can have 60% of your body weight, on your heels, that's the sweet spot of where we should be when we're standing.

[00:37:16] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. Okay. So how would someone know you've mentioned this, touched on this, there's deformity to the feet, there's maybe, having constant mode, areas of pain in the body. So I'm trying to bring awareness to how someone, of course the answer is, we could all work on this, right? But how does someone really know that they might be dealing with adhesions in the feet, in the calves, et cetera.

What would be some of the other sort of symptoms that might be presenting overall, which you probably touched on, but just to help people identify themselves. 

[00:37:49] Deanna Hansen: Yeah, so from the, for the calves, most people, if you go and you squeeze your calf, it won't be much before you feel quite a bit of sensation and they might feel hard.

And it's interesting because there's a lot of people like women as an example, who might have very toned looking legs and then they're more ballooned in their upper body. And when I see these pictures, I'll always say. The cause sites are in your legs, in your calves and feet, and they'll often say, oh, it's my best feature because they're hard because they don't wiggle when we don't have a muscle that's contracted.

It should be soft. We want there to be space and flow so when things feel hard or bumpy or painful. That's an indication that you have adhesions in there and we all do. There's not one person on this planet that is perfectly balanced walking around. So all of us have issues because again, those feet being the furthest from the engine, this is where we're going to get patterned and the most cold if we're struggling with size and shape.

Like me, when I was dealing with all of that anxiety and I had that issue, it was also locked in my feet. I was a Highland dancer when I was a kid and I was told to hold my belly in. So now I'm creating a turnout. I'm jumping on the balls of my feet and I'm not breathing properly. And that was a, definitely a major patterning for me that I had to take time and years to undo.

'cause I did it for a long period of time as I was developing issues with trauma. Stress responses, those kinds of things, they get stuck and stored in the body because what happens is whether it's a physical trauma, an emotional trauma, whatever it is. The response is we hold the breath and if we don't release it, like a deer who survives an attack will shake, we get patterned into that freeze response, and then we start aging from there.

So if we have this trauma when we're two, and then we're developing with this contracted diaphragm, we're really limiting. The oxygen and the life force as we are going through our developmental years compared to if we have a trauma when we're fully grown. It's a different animal. So a lot of those people with autoimmune diseases and situations like that, they had trauma early on and then they aged from that place of lack.

So this helps to come back to that space in your body where you can turn back on this beautiful muscle. That can really do quite miraculous things when we understand how to support it. 

[00:40:10] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, I love this. I think why I love it is because you often have these tools already in and with your body to support yourself.

You always have options right here. So I wanna talk a little bit more about when releasing trauma, when releasing emotions. So as people start to do this work. And start to improve flow making space in fascia. What are some of the things that you might see both physically, both emotionally, that might be related to releasing with emotional health or they may see, I mean you've mentioned several positive physical things, but are there other.

Really common things that start to emerge as people release. What are some of the most common things that show up as people start to release or start to work on their fascia? 

[00:41:00] Deanna Hansen: I think it's a great time to talk about those healing opportunities. Some people call them healing crises. I like to flip it because it's actually an opportunity.

And they might not feel good in the moment because when we start diving into whatever state we are currently in, we are disrupting that pattern so that we can start to create something new. Think of buying a whole new wardrobe. You have to. Take the old out of the closet to put the new wardrobe in.

If you smash it all together, it's chaos. So as we start going through this journey, we are going to be disrupting physical stuff. So you might have a skin rash, you might have a change in pain, you might have mucus production, you might get flu-like symptoms. These are all your body's ways of dealing with the stuff that's coming into the system that was trapped so that you can handle it.

You might have emotional releases that don't seem. Relevant to whatever your situation is. Suddenly you might wake up and you might have a very sad day. You might feel moments of anger. You might have memories come to the surface. You might even have dreams come now. Those are all moments of time that are basically your body's bringing something to the surface so you can clean it out.

Now, on the flip side, you also, this is such a beautiful way to tap into your higher self. Because I've read, I love Greg Braden's book, where he wrote the book, the God Code, sharing that on the surface level of every cell, there's a message that says in Sanskrit or whatever the numerology it is, God lies within.

So this message is on our cells. So if we have a blockage to 70, 80% of our cells because of adhesion, we're only really communicating with maybe 20% of our cells. So we're really missing. Why are we here? And the more you tap in and the more you melt those adhesions and you bring those deeper cells more to your conscious awareness, you start connecting to your higher self, to your deeper intentions, to your creativity, that spark of life.

So that's one of the very positive consequences of this work. Also, just. The ability to handle emotional situations. We can be in a perfectly stress-free environment, but if we're breathing through the muscles of the upper chest, we're stuck in the frequency of the brain that's connected to fear turning on the diaphragm.

We can be in a very stressful situation, but if we know how to use our diaphragm effectively, we can have our internal world being at peace even though there's chaos around us. So we have so much more control. Over our inner world. 'cause we can't control what's going on outside. This world is weird and it's strange and it's highly stressful all the time.

But we have the ability to handle our internal environment through understanding breath, understanding exhalation, and understanding how to support flow in the body. 

[00:43:43] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. I have really enjoyed this. I wanna go back to one thing you said at the beginning before we start to talk about the end and where people can find you.

So you talked about in the beginning. Stimulating collagen and elastin and like all of us, I too am aging. And the pattern or the common denominator that continues to come up is collagen, I will say degradation or loss of collagen, and loss of elasticity in general with aging. So I guess my question is how does supporting and stimulating fascia, you've mentioned it loosely about anti-aging in general, but with stimulating fascia, can we, preserve some of that collagen degradation or if we are already.

Far into aging, we've already lost a lot of collagen. Is there any opportunities that working with the fascia has to help bring back some of that collagen elasticity, et cetera? Because often when we think of collagen, we think of it as like finite and or created by the nutrients we put into our body, et cetera.

So what can you say about improving collagen longevity function, et cetera, or using fascia as an anti-aging tool? 

[00:44:54] Deanna Hansen: So it's not that we lose collagen, it's that it migrates away from balance. So again, when we have this collagen elastin balance, we have, again, both the integrity of the tissue with the mobility.

So a face is really easy to explain. Let's say I'm sitting here and for those that can't see, I'm tilting my head to the right. And if you look at pretty much anybody, nobody's head is perfectly straight. People tend to tilt one direction or other because we're dominant in one eye. So if I'm always tilting this way over time, I'm likely going to develop a bit of a jowl.

More on one side than the other, because now I've got a body that is hanging not properly aligned. So gravity is manipulating my tissue. And again, because we are designed to not tip over, it's the collagen that migrates and grips to bone to create that false wall and false floor. But without that balance of the elastin in there, there's no space left.

So now you have. Blockage. So now let's say it's my jowl. I have a thick jowl that's all like collagen that's gripped to bone, and now I have the tissue that's primarily elastin, that gravity is manipulating and starting to pull it down toward the earth. So then I get signs of aging like that.

So what we do with this work is we work to release. The collagen from the bone. So for those that can't see, I've got my one tool right now, my paddle, I've got it right where that jowl would be. And I spend again, that three minutes or so working in that space. As I focus on that breath, that helps to release the collagen from the bone so that we can start to build that migration of collagen and.

Elastin back into balance, and that's the third part of my system. We create space, we inflate space, and we maintain space. So one of the things we teach people is how should we be aligned to support proper cell alignment as opposed to just being unconscious and allowing our bodies to collapse and fall into whatever system we are currently in.

And one of the things we teach is tongue alignment. The tongue has a specific alignment, and if it's properly aligned, it helps support the alignment of the head. But we also teach, again, the diaphragm is a foundation and the feet are a foundation and how we support and hold our body. Even sitting. I like sitting on a wooden chair because I want to feel both of my sit bones.

I can tell if I'm leaning over to one side because I've got more weight on a sit bone. We want balance. Balance and symmetry is the key. As long as we have balance and symmetry, we have optimal room for the diaphragm to work, and then we're optimally feeding and cleaning all of the cells. 

[00:47:32] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. This has been so much fun.

Aside from talking about where people can find out more, do you think that there's anything that we missed? Before you answer that, I just wanna say that one thing I really appreciate about you coming on and talking about this today is that it's very common for us to go in and have a.

Work done, have body work done, but you're saying we can be empowered to do some of this on our own to help maintain these results. And I just appreciate that. 'cause that's the mentality I've really moved into in my life as well, that it can be quite disempowering to rely on someone else to fix us, even though that's generally where we start.

Quite often when we. End up with some things we don't like. We look for someone to fix us, but we do have the power. We have so much power on our own. We're blessed with so much ability for our body to support and protect us if we just learn some additional skills and tools with it. So is there anything that you think we missed as a part of this?

I think this is an endless conversation, but is there anything that you really think we need to highlight for people to understand related to Fascia? And then Deanna, where can people find you online and learn more about your work with this? 

[00:48:37] Deanna Hansen: So two parts to that one question. I have a free gift for everybody, and what's lovely is you can start immediately using a rolled up towel.

It's a nine part series. You can dive in, you can go through the nine classes. We teach you how to breathe, we teach you proper foundation. We give you a feel for the work throughout the entire body to see if this feels appropriate for you. We also have a YouTube channel with block therapy on YouTube with.

Probably hundreds of free classes, free discussions, free exercises for people to dive and tap into, to support their body and bring alignment. One of them is the tongue decompression technique that's really taking the world by storm right now in my community. And gaining tons of awareness of how to bring symmetry back into the mouth, into the jaw.

Super great at improving lymphatic flow. Glymphatic flow and then getting blood and oxygen flow to the face, the hair, the eyes, the brain, everything. So I would really endeavor if people could tap into that free gift so you can feel it. If nothing else, you're gonna learn how to breathe from there and learn how this.

System works and then if you love it, block therapy.com is my website. And also I have a private Facebook community that everybody is welcome to join. We have over 20,000 members now, and what I love about that community is. I can say all the things in the world that I want, but in this community, if you ask a question specific to what you're going through, you're gonna have other people supporting you, sharing their experience, going through that, whether you have ms, fibromyalgia, Parkinson's, chronic pain all of it.

It's so beautiful, this community because again, you're gonna have the support of people that have gone through it, sharing their wisdom to just to bring a greater depth of understanding to this work. 

[00:50:19] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, I loved this conversation. Anything that is really supporting, essentially cell health and cell membrane health is I think the future of what we ne need to all be focused on.

So thank you so much for coming on today. We'll have that link. For the sampler program, which is block therapy.com/blah, blah blah. So it'll be in the show notes. People can find it there. Deanna, thank you so much for coming on today and for talking about this topic that we get just little tiny bits and pieces of online, but we needed a good overview.

So thank you for the work that you do.