Ego-Free Healing: Learning A New Paradigm In Patient Care
In this week’s episode of the Unreal Results podcast, I reflect on the LTAP Level 1 course that I taught in Washington, D.C. this past weekend. If you didn’t know, the LTAP is a paradigm assessment that I created over my 20 years of practice that helps you shift your focus from more of a traditional orthopedic approach to a whole-organism approach. In the episode, I go over the course structure and breakdown, the importance of feeling versus thinking during assessments & treatments, and the paradigm shift you truly need to help you get the best results for your clients. I hope you enjoy this episode and join me in one of the upcoming in-person LTAP courses!
Resources Mentioned In This Episode:
Episode 60: LTAP Core Beliefs
LTAP Level 1 in San Diego, November 2024
LTAP Level 1 in Boston, October 2024
Considering the viscera as a source of musculoskeletal pain and dysfunction is a great way to ensure a more true whole body approach to care, however it can be a bit overwhelming on where to start, which is exactly why I created the Visceral Referral Cheat Sheet. This FREE download will help you to learn the most common visceral referral patterns affecting the musculoskeletal system. Download it at www.unrealresultspod.com
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Anna Hartman: Hey there, and welcome. I'm Anna Hartman, and this is Unreal Results, a podcast where I help you get better outcomes and gain the confidence that you can help anyone, even the most complex cases. Join me as I teach about the influence of the visceral organs and the nervous system on movement, pain, and injuries, all while shifting the paradigm of what whole body assessment and treatment really looks like.
I'm glad you're here. Let's dive in.
Hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of the Unreal Results podcast. I'm coming in hot, uh, filming recording in the morning and, uh, I, this past weekend, I taught, uh, LTAP level one in Washington, DC. So I'm still sort of like recovering from that. It takes me, it takes me a couple of days. Uh, but it was such a great course, great group of physical therapists, athletic trainers.
You had a couple. Movement practitioners there as well, strength coach and Pilates instructors and a couple massage therapists too. So it was a really great, great course. And, um, I just really love seeing people go through the whole like learning curve during the weekend. And, um, I've taught enough of them to new People knew, meaning like the first couple times I taught the LTAP where people, it was like, um, I don't, I don't know what the right word for it, but it was like, I first taught it to a group of the people who've gone through my mentorship.
So they were already really familiar with me. They were somewhat familiar with the LTAP itself. They were somewhat familiar. Are really familiar with the philosophies and principles that it's based on. So this was the fifth time I've taught to newer professionals, newer to me, newer to the LTAP, newer to these concepts.
So, um, it's been really cool to see sort of some patterns emerging and, um, what everyone. goes through during the two days of the course. So, and this too, like, I'll speak to what the patterning is, but this is also why I think it's so important to also do the six week online course. And, um, it's mainly because it's such a huge paradigm shift.
It's so different than traditional orthopedic sports, sports, physical therapy. athletic training. Like it's just so, it's such a different way to see the body, to like truly see and appreciate the whole organism. And then also truly see and appreciate how the body can speak to us and, and what it takes from us to like, listen to it.
So, um, what happens, Well, actually, before I dive in, since we're at the top of the top of the hour, top of the class, class, top of the podcast, um, I also announced this weekend, the next in person location and date for 2024, it's been the classes have sold out so quickly that. I felt like I needed to add one more class for 2024 because it's June and the fall class had basically already sold out.
I have one spot left in the November San Diego course. And, um, so I added another course. It's in October, it's October 5th and 6th, and it's in the Boston area. It's at Hanover. It's in Hanover, Massachusetts, which is just south of Boston, one of the suburbs. And um, it is at the Empowering Athletes Facility.
So um, shout out Jamie. She was in the um, six week course that I just ended and she um, volunteered her, her New 5, 000 square foot space to host a course so super excited about going there And yeah, I opened I announced it this weekend I opened enrollment and actually doing a four day like I mean, it's not really a presale but presale sale Um, and you can get Up to 400 off if you bundle it together, the in person course with the online course in the fall.
And, uh, other than that, it's also a discount for early bird right now. So I expect that to fill up quickly as well, and probably sell out, um, as Every poll I did for people, the demand for Boston was very high. So, okay. All you Northeaster people or people just want to come to Boston in the fall. This is for you.
And if you are a West coaster and you want to get in the course, like I said, there's only one spot left in the San Diego course, and then it will be closed. So super excited for that. All right. So back to the journey and this is, and I call it a journey. And because not only is there a journey through the two days of learning in this new paradigm, but also what gets sort of like very apparent by the end of the two days is that without us really realizing it, without us, Really knowing what we're signing up for and getting into.
It also ends up being perhaps the beginning of a personal development journey as well as professional. And so I want to talk a little bit about that today. That's really what the podcast is about. It's about how important it is to work on. Improving your skills in your body from a feeling standpoint.
And um, so yeah, that's, that's what we're going to talk about today. So the, the, the, the two day journey is that obviously people sign up, they're getting familiar. They've listened to the podcast. They're just like you. They found me on social media or through a friend. They're listening to the podcast.
They're reading my emails or they're reading my social posts and they're in there. You know, you're slightly getting used to this new paradigm, this new lens of view, this lens of view that appreciates the viscera and the nervous system, and truly the whole organism. So looks at movement, looks at pain, looks at injury, more from a whole organism standpoint of what is a whole organism always, Like the purpose of it and really when we look at that the purpose of the whole organism is survival, right?
like survival of ourselves and survival of the species and so in order to survive We rely on Our nervous system, keeping us safe and part of keeping us safe is protecting our vital organs and, and the number 1 thing that does that is the organism itself, right? Like, the, the autonomic nervous system and its response to threats.
To either fight, flight, or, um, freeze, that is a response to protect the organs, to protect the organs and the entire organism. Now, we also have built in protective mechanisms in our body that also protect the organs. And therefore the organism and the primary one is the musculoskeletal system. The musculoskeletal system is designed to protect the organs, right?
We have hard frames that are protecting the brain, the heart, the lungs, the reproductive organs. And then we have layers of tissue that are protecting the other soft organs. Um, and then even to our back side of our body is longer than our front side of the body. Um, as we've evolved, it doesn't look that way, but embryologically still the front of our body is between our nostrils and about halfway between our belly button and our pubic bone and then our back body wraps around the rest.
Our back body is a little bit longer. Taller than our front body. And that's part of the reason why our startle or stress fr reflex, is to close in on that ventral body, close in on that front body. That startle reflex is tucking our tail and sticking our head out. And do you see how that shortens our ventral body, shortens our anterior front of our body even more so.
So the musculoskeletal system in itself. is the main body guard for the organs. And so when our mobility is limited or our muscles are not turning on like we would like, oftentimes it's because they are prioritizing what is most important. And if the body is getting messages to the brain that maybe something is wrong with the organs, and wrong is a loose term, it doesn't, You know, sometimes when I tell people like, Oh my gosh, there's something wrong.
I don't say, Oh my gosh, but if I say like, Oh, your body's directing me to your liver, they hear an organ and they instantly think like cancer. And that's not what it is. When, when an organ can't move, its function diminishes. And any sort of diminished function is going to affect our overall health.
Especially in the long term, and so our muscles, our musculoskeletal system will arrange itself around that to protect it because to when an organ is diminished function, it's going to be more at risk for injuries to is more more vulnerable. So. So this is like the new organism we're getting you the new view of the whole organism.
We're getting used to More than likely as you come into the class, right? It's very rare if somebody comes to the class and has not Listened to me at all The only scenario this happens with is when you host a course, you get two free spots as, you know, like trade for hosting the course. And sometimes the clinicians that get filled in those spots are You know, very new to me.
Usually there's one clinician at the facility who really wants me there, which is why they offered to host a course. But then when they get the free spots for the other clinicians, um, you know, they're kind of like, Hey, trust me, come to this course. It's really interesting information. And so sometimes the people get filled in those free spots.
They're very new to the information and it's all, I'm always actually very interested to see how their experience in the two days are. Because. Um, that is interesting to me to, to, to know what, especially they go through. And so this journey, once you get there, right, you're a little bit exposed to it, but then we spend two days completely hands on.
So you get to see it in real time. My biggest thing is to not believe. The stories I tell you to not believe what I tell you, I want you to see this for yourself, see this for yourself in your patients and see this for yourself in your own body. And so we lay out the core beliefs of the LTAP, which I'll have Joe link that, um, podcast in the show notes because I do have a podcast episode on that, but we lay out those core beliefs first day of class and we.
And, and we go over them and I share the anatomy, like I give all the reasons why they're true, you know, as much evidence as I can provide of why they're true. And then I'm like, but the next two days we're going to be all hands on practically with each other and you're going to see these things for yourself.
So the two days is teaching you these principles, teaching you these core beliefs so you can believe them for yourself because it's only when you truly have evidence. your own evidence of these things to be true that you really start buying into this new lens of view, this new paradigm. So, um, what happens is everybody's pretty excited Saturday morning and, and they're feeling pretty good.
And then we get to lunch and we've gotten a couple of the, um, assessments in and, and we've seen the body change a little bit and we're like, Oh, whoa. And the assessments, we feel like maybe they should be easier than they are because we've been doing some of them before, but then we realize like, Oh, maybe our palpation skills are not as good as we thought.
Maybe, maybe we don't really pay attention as much as we should with the assessment. And so by lunchtime, people are like, a little bit starting to doubt themselves and also. Also, you're starting to see how the body responds to the viscera and to the central nervous system. And so you're starting to see the musculoskeletal system respond in a way that's very different than the biomechanical model.
And so what happens by the end of the Saturday is I've given you enough evidence and not in the eye, if the body's in front of you, the work has given you enough evidence That by the end of Saturday, you have significantly challenged some deeply held beliefs you have about the body and the biomechanical model that we usually operate on in the traditional orthopedic medicine world.
And, um, so by the end of Saturday, you feel a little defeated and you feel a little offended and you might not even know it's offense, offended, and you might not even know that that's why you feel that way is that you've had this day of challenging some deeply held beliefs about the body and also some deeply held beliefs about yourself.
And this is sort of what I talked about in the beginning of like, this is the personal Development journey as well as professional is because what this whole thing, this lens of view and the LTAP, what it really does is it forces us to let go of our ego mind, our ego driving the bus. With our assessments and treatments, with the assumption, with the belief, with the deeply held belief that we are the expert on their body, that we are the expert on the musculoskeletal system, that we are the expert on why they hurt, or we are the expert of Why they're having pain, right?
Like, we tell our patients stories all day long about their situation that we have no business doing because there is actually no way for us to know why someone has knee pain. It is such a complex thing and it has more to do with what's going on in the biomechanics and what's going on in the tissues.
And so, this model forces you to realize that you're doing that. That you are Letting your ego drive the bus and that maybe you're not as much of an expert in the body as you thought you were and Also, the cool thing is no one is The human body is so damn intricate and amazing and interconnected and, like, the systems and the way it communicates within the cells and the development of the body itself is nothing sheer, like, nothing sheer of magical, like, there is literally no way that Probably in our lifetime of our species that we will ever fully understand how the body works, period.
And so it is so silly for us to come at this thinking that we know better than everyone else. And so by the end of Saturday, you start to feel this and also. Is uncomfortable it is that feels it's so freeing the best thing I've ever done for my burnout right for my exhaustion of being a caregiver of being a clinician is Letting go of the ego driving the bus and letting go of the idea that I am the extra And that I need to have the answers and that there is an answer that is very black and white, like right and wrong.
And um, it is so freeing and it is so much more fun when you let go of that. When you let go of that and be curious and let go of that and actually put your science hat on. Because the ego and being the expert actually prevents you from being a good scientist. And being a good scientist is actually being curious and to, yeah, have a theory, have an idea, but then gather as much evidence as you can to just prove it.
That is the scientific method. And we've forgotten that along the way. Because we got so wrapped up in being the expert. So, um, then, that's the end of Saturday, right? Pretty defeated. And then we come back, then they come back on Sunday, and I do this thing. I, you know, we spend all day Saturday learning each of the tests, learning each of the assessment tests.
We don't really do a lot of treatment. We don't even talk about interpretation a lot. The emphasis is just doing the assessment tests, getting comfortable with the assessment tests, but it takes all day. And then you're also like, how the hell am I going to do this in a session when we just took all day to do it?
Right? So Sunday morning, the first thing that we do after we sort of review interpretation, Is, um, we actually go through the assessment with a time constraint and what the time constraint does, because again, we go through the assessment, just like we quickly go through the assessment. So you can trust what you feel and move on.
Don't worry about interpretation. You can interpret it. When you have a second and um, so, so what this does this time trial is To get people out of their thinking heads thinking is slow The worst thing you could ever do for your athletes people that are moving their body is to tell them Cognitive cues that makes them have to think about how their body should move Because by the time they've thought about it, they've missed the time starting gun.
Like the feeling happens in such greater time periods than thinking. Emotions are even faster than thinking. And so, um, this is why I put a time constraint because it doesn't allow the time for thinking. I 100 percent know when somebody voxers me and is like, Anna. I want to, I've been trying to do the LTAP, but it's just like, I don't feel like I have time for treatment.
And I'm like, you're thinking too much because it should take you like less than five minutes. And so first I demonstrate going through all of the assessments and I have them time me. And again, I'm not interpreting. I'm just going through literally all five of the LTAPs, which honestly, when you interpret it as you go, it's not even going to take five minutes because you're not going to do all the assessments because you stop at certain places based on the interpretation.
And so I go through all of the tests and it takes me five minutes. And I, and they're like, what? How does that happen? They're all wide eyed. And then I'm like, okay, so the challenge to you is I'm going to put the timer on for 10 minutes and you're going to go through all the assessments on your partner.
And they panic a little bit because they're like, that's not possible. And I'm like, trust me, it is. And the reason why I do that is because this gets them out of their thinking mind. And so we do it 10 minutes on each person. And then what do we do? Once is not enough. So we do it again with even less time.
So the second time I give them seven minutes to go through it, which is still plenty of time. And what happens is the room is when they still have ten minutes there's a little bit a lot of chatter because they're talking it through, they're, they're wanting Affirmation from their partners or me that they're like doing it right in and when you're worried about if you're doing it Right, you're still in your thinking mind, right?
Because the thinking mind the ego is still very concerned with black and right There is a right way in a wrong way instead of just being curious to what is And so the seven minutes, what happens is again, a little panic at the beginning, but then they get real quiet. And when you get real quiet, that is you going inside, going into your body and trusting what you feel.
And that's the key here. And so what happens is most people. Do it no problem in seven minutes and it proves to them that one they're overthinking things and two that it is possible and then we go in and we actually do a mock session with our partners and like do treatment and we have 45 minutes to do up to three rounds of the LTAP with treatment and That's it and it's really successful and everybody gets good results and we talk about like at the end We all share like what the primary organ or nervous system or neurovascular treatment was and then what we chose to treat it And then after that After we do all of that, the final thing we do is a movement experience.
I lead people through a movement experience of some, really, the, the purpose of the movement experience is twofold. The first part of the first purpose of the movement experience is to give you more options for interventions for things like the central nervous system and the viscera, which you probably don't feel as comfortable with to show you how easy it is that you can affect the organs without.
actually needing visceral manipulation. So that's the real purpose of the regen session. The second purpose of the regen session, and actually probably the, not probably, the second thing is the most important part of the regen session, is it gets them in their body. Practicing what it feels like to feel more in their body because what you find when your hands are on someone, like I talked about what happens on that first day is a realization that maybe you don't trust what your hands are telling you as much as you trust what your brains are telling you.
And I encourage people to flip the script on that and actually start to begin, start to learn what it would be like to trust your hands more than your brain. Because our bodies are communicating with each other before our brain is even involved, in terms of like our cognitive brain, our conscious brain is even involved.
Our brain's involved all the time. Um, but our conscious brain, before we actually talk to the person, the best way I can prove to you this is when you're in a room, you're back towards the door, it's quiet, you know, it's, it can be loud or quiet, it doesn't matter. If the person walks in, quiet as a ninja.
You don't see them, you don't hear them, but yet you know they're there. We've all had that situation, right? You know they're there, even though you haven't seen them and heard them. So it's like, how do you know they are there? You know they are there because our body, our DNA, extends outside of us. And that extension outside of us, as soon as it starts to merge with another person's, it starts communicating.
So as soon as that patient is with me, I'm getting information about the history of their body and their tissues without cognitively knowing it. And especially as soon as I touch them, I get even more information about goings on go what's going on. I start to feel the different lines of tension in their body.
And if I follow those, If I trust what I feel in my hands, then I'll, it leads me to that protection pattern too. I, I theoretically don't need the LTAP, right? I, I created the LTAP in order to get us to the same spot. Once you can trust your hands, you don't even need the LTAP because you can trust your listening of your hand.
Which is through the feels. But, most of us don't have our hands so tuned in like that. And then also, our ego brain is in the way of being like, there's no fucking way you can feel that through your hand. My brain knows better, what everything I've learned I know is better. And so there's two things we need to work on.
One, improving. are feeling in our hands. And then also getting rid of, not rid of, but calming down the ego brain. And so the getting better at feeling in our hands, one just takes more practice with hands on stuff. But also I have found that If you can't feel in your hand very well, more than likely you don't feel in the rest of your body very well either, and then maybe even you don't like to feel very much, and feel from an emotional standpoint I mean.
And so, this is the journey I want to take people on through the regen session. The feeling, the emotional bit, I really truly feel like therapy, or journaling, or a combination of the two is best for that. Or meditation, but like guided meditation tends to do better, breath work with meditation, breath work with journaling, like some sort of.
Journey in, you know, some sort of journey in with journaling helps best for the emotional piece. But the physical part of feeling, we need to improve on that too, and we do this, I do this, I think the best way to do this is through the regen sessions, and not just any movement session, right? A regen session is not just any movement session.
A regen session is a session specific movement session that I've put together that combines some things. One, it combines, um, autonomic nervous system based drills to tap into our parasympathetic nervous system to, to help us downregulate, to help us, um, be more in our feeling body and to, Be in a more self healing body because when we don't feel good in our body It's hard to pay attention to all the messages It's giving us because we tend to want to ignore them because one of the messages That we're receiving is that we don't like how we're feeling and so we just ignore it And so in order to sometimes work on how well we're feeling through our hands We need to Heal our bodies and we need to spend more time feeling in our bodies.
And then the other part of the region session that is important is some sort of visceral work when we can go into the viscera and we can start manipulating the viscera, even with just a breath or a pressure change via the gorgeous ball or, um, trunk, like very specific guided trunk movements or pelvic movements.
Um, we. Again, instantly go into our fields. Our interoception increases. Our interoception is the awareness of what we're feeling, and the gut organs are very, very much connected to our interoception as well as the skin itself. And so self massage is a big part of this regen session to tap into that interoception.
And then the other key component of the regen session, which is gonna, you. Be better and improve how you feel in your body and eventually in your hand is the body scans we start the session and end the session with a guided body scan, which is basically just cultivating your attention, spotlighting your attention at different parts of your body and your standing alignment to see what your dynamic alignment is starting and then to see what it is finishing.
That's when you get to see the power of all those interventions. Because you see how much your body changes in such a short time with such simple exercises, which is also a very powerful thing to feel. But then also, it is, you know, each one of them is probably like 5 minutes, so you, cumulative 10 minutes, actually spending time, acknowledging and paying attention to the sensory messages coming into your body that is happening at all times.
So this is the thing. We are always feeling whether we want to or not. It's just what messages are we paying attention to? The thing that makes our body cool is that we're constantly monitoring what's going on in space through our sensory system, and then our brain is organizing it in a way that allows us to move through space safely, accordingly, and to not get distracted by all that information too.
And so we're not supposed to feel everything. And so Also, improving our feeling is just when we can like take a second to acknowledge that it's there and pay attention to it. That's why it's like the word spotlighting your attention on it is so helpful. So this practice really I have found allows the practitioner to be in one a little bit down regulated state so that they when they do put their hands on somebody when they are interacting with someone they're gonna have a better chance of being calm and And actually being able to tune in to what they're feeling in their hands.
And this is not just for the osteopathic listening, but even for like passive range of motion tests. When I am paying attention to my hands and I'm feeling, I pick up even in passive range of motion tests where the restrictions are coming from or where the range of motion is actually not coming from instead of assuming.
Right. So this is the journey. This is, I told everyone at the end of the course, I was like, you know, thank you. Like, whether you realize this or not, like going down this rabbit hole and seeing this new lens of view is not only going to like totally change things for your patients and you and get great results.
Considering this whole organism approach, but it sort of forces you to go on this personal and professional journey, letting go of the ego, letting go of the need to be the expert and the need to be right, and being curious and trusting your feeling body more than your thinking body. So that's it. That's how our body works, as Jill Miller says.
The body thinks and feels. The body thinks and feels. So we want to lean into that because that is where our wisdom is, both in the body and to interacting with other people's bodies. So I hope you'll join me one day in an LTAP. I hope you're enjoying these. Hopefully this episode was food for thought and we'll see you next week.