Listening to the Body
In this episode I take a deep dive into what it means to "listen to the body" both from a personal standpoint and as a professional working with another body.
I share my thoughts on how important it is to regain and improve awareness of the sensations in the body and how to identify how we feel when we feel safe and feel how truth feels.
During the episode I also discuss the difference between listening with our ears to what stories the patient or client is sharing vs. listening with your hand, and why we cannot get distracted by the story or our belief system creating bias and searching for evidence to further support our beliefs.
I encourage the listener to practically apply some of these concepts with contemplation, body scans, and to change the order of operation of a typical assessment and treatment session.
Some resources I mention:
MovementREV Regen Sessions: https://www.movementrev.com/regen
Byron Katie: https://www.instagram.com/byron.katie/
Amy Young Coaching: https://www.instagram.com/amyyoungco/
Ron Marriotti (Barral Institute Teacher- Listening Techniques 1): https://www.iahp.com/ronmariotti/ and https://shop.iahe.com/Workshops/Listening-Techniques1-An-Integrative-Approach-to-Evaluation-LT1 and https://www.barralinstitute.com/ (mention Anna Hartman if you register)
Start the MovementREV LLC journey of listening to the body at the in-person LTAP Level 1 course: https://www.movementrev.com/ltap-level-1-in-person
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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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. Welcome to another episode of the Unreal Results podcast. Uh, the mic I use here is broken. So I'm on my old, uh, AirPod. They're not AirPods. The old school plug in Apple earphones. It has, you know, I was a speaker down the thing and I feel like the original, like, TikTok videos when they brought it across there.
Face hair there. I mean, and they didn't even have it in the air, right? They're just like pulling up in their mouth like a microphone and it looks silly. It seems silly So I'm gonna put it back in my ear, even though I'm not listening through it. Just as a placeholder by my mouth Oh, actually it reminds me too of this breathing app.
I use once upon a time I don't even remember the name of it, but it was kind of a cool one. It measured things, but you brought it across your face like this, and it was almost like an oxygen canister. And it could listen to your nasal breathing, which was kind of cool. And it measured your,
I wish I could remember the name of it. It was actually a really cool company. The company might've just been called Breath Research. Anyways. Fun fact, the, the, the thing I learned the most from them is, um, this is also, this has nothing to do with today's concept, kind of, I mean, I can always sort of bullshit it and like connected it, but this is just memories from my microphone.
But, um, when this breath research company came to Exos Athlete Performance, talked to us about the product and using it and just breathing in general. Um, I mean, this was a long time ago, but anyways, um, the person who designed it, she lived in the Bay Area and of California, if you're I guess if you're not on the west side, you've not might not actually know what the Bay Area is, but like San Francisco area and My mom was in Sacramento at the time doing lung cancer treatment and so, you know, I was trying to do all the things I could for her to support her healing and Everything and that's before I knew a ton about the nervous system and Anyways, she invited us to her house slash studio for a session.
She was a Pilates and gyrotonic teacher as well as the, one of the people behind this company. And um, this product and she was doing a session with my mom and me and there was a moment when she said on our exhale, on our breathing, to emphasize the exhale, draw it out as long as possible. And just wait for the inhale breath to rise up and to notice how you feel in that moment between the exhalation and the inhalation.
And it was the first time really I had noticed that in that moment waiting for my breath, I had so much anxiety. And, at the time, I did have a lot of anxiety, um, because of going through dealing with knowing my mom had a terminal illness and was going to probably not make it, and also going through Just watching her struggle with her Mortality, it makes you struggle with your own mortality.
It makes you worry about everything and I definitely during that time. I probably Leading up to her illness. I probably had some sort of underlying general anxiety disorder. My family, you know, we, we think it's just part of our family. We think we're like a family of war rewards and, um, you know, our family, like ancestral is Jewish and that tends to be sort of like a Jewish personality trait, which if you look at the generational trauma that is passed down through.
Jewish families. It's like, no wonder they, a lot of people have general anxiety disorder. Anyways, so, but of course, during that time, it was, I was going to see a therapist. It was like, actual diagno diagnosed general anxiety disorder, and I remember talking to one of my patients about it, too, and she like, Point that was the first time I heard of the phrase of like catastrophization, which is basically like you worry so much that you like literally start thinking about like all the catastrophes that could happen.
So, um, but it was in this moment with this breathing exercise with this woman lying on the gyrotonic equipment that I noticed, I first noticed that feeling. But then I also not only noticed this like it was almost like it was the first moment that there was like quiet in my body enough to notice how I felt and It was a really powerful moment So a couple things I took from that because because the other thing I noticed in that in that sense in that moment was not only was there this moment of anxiety and But if I just sat with it for a second and let the breath rise up on its own, it instantly started to change it.
And, um, That, actually that experience totally changed the way I queued breath from then on out. And then from there I even learned more about the nervous system and why that is important and you know, put background information to all those things. But I knew there was value in a couple of things, one, noticing how I felt in that one moment of like silence in your body.
And then also noticing what a difference it made for the inhalation to change the way you cue things to change in your breath. So you know, actually I just like laughed and said this had nothing to do with today's conversation, but actually it has a lot to do with today's conversation because it was around that time in my life that I was.
Like, things were shifting and I had to do a lot of work on dealing with my feelings and dealing with, not only dealing with my feelings, like, from an emotional standpoint, but learning how what I feel could be such a powerful teacher. And actually understanding how, what you're feeling, and what you're, Ignoring, the feelings that you're ignoring because of the emotional component of it is actually blocking you from this fundamental intelligence that is built in to our human organism.
That innately we are feeling beings. Right? That we organize ourselves in the world based on our sensory experience, and part of our sensory experience, our sensations, our sensations in our own body, our interoception, what's going on in the inside, and what's going, what's happening with our emotions, because they are always linked together.
It is impossible to separate body and brain. Your body is part of your brain. Your brain, obviously, is part of your body. And then even, too, to separate mind and body. Because... Our mind can trick us into either one. I don't want to say trick us. Our mind can convince us to completely ignore what we're feeling in our body and to sort of go rogue in a sense and like just rely on what we, our knowledge is and what our thinking is and, and forget this.
It's like huge components of knowledge that is inside of our body based on our sensations. So that's actually what I want to talk about today is, um, what listening to the body really means because if you are new here or if you've been here a while, more of, if you've been here a while, you've heard me talk about the importance of listening to the body, the value of listening to the body.
And you've probably heard me say that the body is the wisest person in the room. The body is full of wisdom. And when we can learn to follow that wisdom, we can figure out how to help our patients better. We can tap into our body's innate ability to heal itself and all the things. And so, but I also realized that there's a lot of mixed messages in the world of what listening to the body really means.
And then also it's semantics a little bit too, because. It can mean many things for different people in different scenarios. And I want to make sure that you know what I mean when I say listen to the body. And I actually on Instagram today in my stories, I'm asking this question to all of you because I, I'm curious.
And obviously, by the time the podcast comes out, you won't be able to interact with the, like, the poll and my stories, but send me a DM on Instagram, send me an email, um, and let me know what it means to you, maybe even in this moment, before you even listen to the rest of the podcast. You know, what does...
Listening to the body mean for you? And I'm, I'm actually pulling up my Instagram because I want to ask, like say word for word what I said. So I said, I need a favor. When you hear the term listening to the body, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? What does it mean to you? And... Then I asked, like I had a poll.
I said listening to the body means dot dot dot and I gave four options because that's all I could give on Instagram and I said does it mean paying attention to the symptoms you're having in your body, paying attention to the feelings, trusting what you feel over what you think, or trusting your gut or intuition.
And then I asked one more and I said what does the word feeling, just the word feeling, mean to you? Does it mean emotions? Does it mean senses or sensations? Does it mean both emotions and sensations? Or does it mean intuition? So those are the questions I asked. If you have time, I would love to hear from you.
Um, send me an email, like I said, send me a DM. Um, I'm curious and like I said from a semantics standpoint It can mean many things. This is why words are funny sometimes. Words are funny. And this is why if you've ever taken a course with me, I also usually start out the course with like straight up definitions of words and concepts and things that I mean, because I want us to be on the same page.
And whenever I talk about this, I talk about a story, an experience I had in, in undergrad and, um, with an organic chemistry. So in organic chemistry, learn about the moiety, the mo mo moiety of different cellular structures. And oftentimes, you have a cellular structure that is like a mirror image of each other.
And it's called the right or the left moiety. And you need, you need that nomenclature. You need the R or the L in the nomenclature to know what you're talking about. Because It's virtually made up of the same things, but it's completely different, right? And so we, we have that terminology in organic chemistry.
And when he was talking about the importance of having the right words, the right nomenclature to describe what we're talking about, he would always say, we gotta get our cows and chickens straight. And that was like, then his cue the rest of the semester of like, are we talking cows or chickens? Are we talking right or left?
Because, um, If I'm talking chickens and you're think I'm talking cows, we're never going to be on the same page. And so that's actually two why I wanted to do this podcast. Cause I realized in a lot of the other episodes I talk about listening to the body and I probably loosely define it when I talk about it because I know it is a, is, can be confusing.
There's a lot of cows and chickens in the room, right? And so I want to make sure that, um, we're all At least understanding what I mean when I say listen to your body and then also today I want to talk about like how I go about teaching someone how to listen to the body and both as the practitioner The clinician as well as the human, the athlete, the client, the patient who, you know, the person you're working with, because I always want that for both of us.
It's not just being able to listen. The body is not just in your own body. And it's not just. For the clinician and it's important that they, they both happen together. In fact, I'm gonna talk about how the only way you can listen to someone else's body is if you've done the work of listening to your own body.
And so I have a feeling since we're only 14 minutes in and I've barely started talking about it, this is gonna be a longer podcast, so apologize ahead of time. But, um, it's not a easy. I don't want to say easy. It's not a small topic to have a conversation around. In fact, it's like one of the fundamental concepts that I talk about in every single course that I teach.
Um, especially throughout the results cheat code, the locator test assessment protocol level one course. And in the mentorship and that is actually the goal of the mentorship to get people to understand this concept of listening to the body more. It's also what I teach within every single regen session.
So if you have the movement rev regen library, it's. It's baked into that. If you've worked with me as a client or an athlete, you know I lean into this all the time and I try to get you to then also trust what you feel because it has, this also comes down a lot to trust and trusting what you feel and not believing a lot of the nonsense that's out there in the world.
So, let's dive in. I, this is a big, no wonder I've avoided this podcast because it's a big concept. So, and why, the other reason why I want to talk about it is this came up in one of my teaching sessions the other day with somebody. I was teaching them the LTAP and we got to the central nervous system tension test and um The coach was like, Oh, this is, I'm sure you'll find central nervous tension test or central nervous system tension on me because I had a car accident.
I had a whiplash injury. I've got a lot of neck pain, you know, and it went on from there. And I was like, you know. Like, total college game day here, like, uh, not so fast, not so fast. You can't make that assumption. And, and this is why it's important to do an assessment on someone before you get their story.
And the story in the world of clinician dom, I know that's not a word, but you know what I mean, um, is the subjective history. And the subjective history we're taught is what we're supposed to start with. And, you know, the patient comes in, the client comes in, and we sit down, and part of building the rapport with them is listening to their story.
But the problem is, most of the time, when we're listening to someone's story, we are looking for evidence to support our beliefs. And it's really hard to be non biased about their story and about their body and their assessment if you're doing that. And that also means that we're truly actually not listening.
And we've all been in that, and in this sense I'm talking about listening as auditory listening. Our listening skills are that, and this is a normal conversation with people, you're looking for evidence. You're looking for evidence, you're looking for keywords that you can provide your expertise on, you're, you know, it's, it's rare that someone truly just holds space and listening, and it is a big skill to actually listen to someone's story and not chime in and not react to it, and that is, I don't think it's actually taught well enough in school when we, when we talk about the subjective history, um, um, um, um, Though also, I'm going to tell you that I don't put a lot of weight in people's subjective histories anymore because of, because of understanding this.
And because now I have a tool using the Locator Test Assessment Pro, Protocol and using the Osteopathic General Listening, which I'll talk about what that is, that I don't have to rely on their subjective story now to direct me. Where to go in their body. I actually rely on the story, the memory, the information that their body is giving me.
And so that is why when someone comes in to see me, I don't talk to them about why first. There is time for that because it's also so ingrained in telling a healthcare provider what's going on. It's so ingrained of telling your friends, like, the story of what's going on. Our story, we like to share our story, we like to share our thoughts, we want to be heard.
And that is actually an important concept to understand, that people still want to be heard. You just, as a clinician, need to understand that, um, you can't actually pay attention to what they're saying all the time. Because it's always laced in story, and when it's laced in story, it's based on their experiences, it's based on their beliefs, it's based on other people's experiences and beliefs, it's jaded by their belief system.
It's jaded by your belief system. And, um, so when we... When we can evaluate someone, assess somebody first, what we're then looking at is the tissue memory, and this is the cool thing about the human nervous system and the biology, is every single experience that we have ever had in our body, from the time we started as one cell, to this present moment, has been, has been recorded In our tissues.
Literally recorded. We have a memory of everything that has ever happened to us. And like I started before, we probably even have a memory of everything that has happened to everyone in our ancestral chain. If that's hard for you to understand the concept of, because that's like a big reach, um, I want you to at least appreciate that we are the same.
It's like the being we are when we were being created in the womb. Those cells are like the intelligence, the information that within each of those cells has been replicated and stored in every cell that has been made since then, right? That's how the biology works. And so this, this is the body's wisdom I'm talking about.
And then, and then it's cool because you get to see this played out mechanically in the tissues. The information is stored in the tissues, the, the movements when somebody's injured in an accident. The movements, the forces that were through the tissues are restored. It's very common that when you're working on someone's tissues, you go back through a range of motion that they got hurt in.
When I'm working on my football players, like, especially in their lower extremities sometimes, like, The ranges of motion their leg takes me through in order to like go like discharge the energy that was stored Um, it's really interesting. And then if I am able to see film on them when they actually got hurt it like Exactly mimics the movement that happened and it that that's wild to me But that's what I mean, and that's and I obviously I didn't make this up.
This is like an osteopathic thing the Many osteopaths along the years have always said, like, only the tissues know. Um, I forget the man's name that the Baral Institute always shares. I want to say, like, Roland Baker or Roland something rather like that. But that's what he would always say. Always, only the tissues know.
And so you actually, the cool thing is, is you can assess someone and when you don't have their story, Layered in on it, you actually have a more pure assessment of what the tissues are telling you, a more pure assessment of their history through their tissues. And so you get the, the least biased opinion on what's going on and where the body is directing you.
Now, now with that said. It is a skill, a learned skill, to be able to feel this information in the tissues, to feel these tension, tensions, to feel these different energies being stored. And when I say energy being stored, I mean like physics. Energy is neither stored or, you know, created or destroyed, right?
It's stored, or lost as heat. And so, um, when you apply stress to a tissue, the tissue then stores it, and responds to it. It either builds more tissue around it, or it takes away tissue around it, right? Like, this is Wolf's Law. This is, this is... the stress adaptation, right? So you can feel this in your hand too.
I don't mean like woo woo energy though, that's part of it. It, it, it is like actual like physics, okay? Um, so the limitation of being able to listen to someone's body without Their story means that the listening is actually what you're feeling. So when I say, talk to a client about what my listening, what their listening is, what I feel with their listening, I'm talking about what my hand is feeling.
And this is a trained skill. And this is probably the hardest. skill for a, for a person that works with their hands to learn. And it takes many years and it takes, it is actually a constant practice and ignoring your thinking mind. And, um, But, with that said, there is things that you can do, and this is how I teach, that learn, that is like, teaches you how to do that, um, both by repetitions of assessment and reassessment, and treatment, being curious, as well as, It's practicing feeling in other parts of your body.
So sometimes if you have a hard time feeling what's in your hand or feeling the information your hand's giving you in a test, it's just means that you need some work in feeling in your body in general. And so this is kind of why it goes back to this concept of feeling as like, Sensations and emotions because I would say the majority of my life.
I spent a lot of time stuffing my emotions and trying to ignore them just like an athlete or someone in Sometimes chronic pain can disassociate from their body because they don't want to feel The pain anymore. They don't want to feel how bad they feel so their brain just starts to ignore Everything they feel below the neck.
They ignore the messages, the symptoms, the messages, the sensations that their body is giving them as a survival strategy. And the, that's the other thing too is like not to be like frustrated that your body does this because your body is always working for you, not against you. But understanding that sometimes when it's working for us So we need to then step in and realize when it's not serving us anymore, the patterns that we're doing.
And so oftentimes with my athletes and with the clinicians I teach, it's a, we need to give your. We need to make some space for spending time regaining your body ownership and body agency, because that's what happens when you start to ignore all the things that you're, all the sensations that you're feeling, whether the sensation is coming from no c septive information, or the sensation is coming from an emotional thing, or the sensation is coming from digestion or like whatever the sensation is coming from, or movement.
injury, whatever it might be. If, if you've been ignoring all those sensations, then we need to actually spend some time in a container where we start allowing those sensations to come through again. Because when you ignore them, you start to take away your body ownership. And when you take away your body ownership, your body agency goes away, your body resonance goes away.
And what those things are, your body agency is like the understanding that you have control over movements in your body, you control over sensations in your body. Um, body ownership is the ultimate, like, combination of agency and, like, awareness. Right? Understanding that this is yours to sense from and move from and operate from, right?
But the habitual ignoring of sensations, we start to lose that body ownership. And body resonance means the ability to allow our body to feel, to feel, other people's body. So understanding how to interpret body language and understanding how to interpret what you're feeling in your hands and someone else's body, or just the general nervous system state of someone else is our body's resonance.
And without good body agency and body ownership, we don't have good body resonance. And, and this is actually, this is the clinic clinicians journey that, um, I try to take people through. Throughout the mentor throughout the revitalized mentorship, but also within the LTAP course and the results sheet code I start to introduce it because This is a tangible way to understand You have to pay attention to what you feel in you and how you are as a clinician The the state you are in the nervous system state you're in How it might be getting in the way of being confident and trusting what you're feeling in your hands
This is a lot, right? It's like, probably deeper than you thought it would be. Um, and this is, so, often times, When we start realizing this connection, there is a frustration because people are like, I don't know how to sort of get over the hump of trusting what I feel. So trusting what you feel comes with the body agency and body ownership and cultivating awareness through the other parts of your body.
And so this is too, why I always tell the clinicians that I'm teaching, like why you got to do the work in your own body. We can't expect to be able to help someone in their healing process if we haven't started it on our own body. So, um, how I do that, and actually, how I do that for clinicians, myself, and for athletes is the same way.
It starts with just spotlighting your attention on your body, and on your feels, taking a moment to see how you feel. And, like, do a body scan, see how your dynamic alignment feels, do a range of motion check, pay attention to what your hip mobility is like, your ankle mobility is like, your neck mobility, your arm mobility, whatever it may be.
And then don't pass judgment on those things. And that's the hardest thing, too, as a clinician, because you're like, oh, my dynamic alignment, like I have a lateral shift, that must mean this is wrong, and this is wrong, and this is wrong. You start applying these stories based on your beliefs. Whereas the only, the only job you were supposed to do is like spotlight your attention there and be curious about like, oh, interesting.
I seem to be shifted to the right and make no judgment on that. There's nothing wrong with being, this is just where we're starting. There's nothing wrong with being shifted to the right. It's just a, that's where we're at and understanding that we can't change things if we don't know where we're starting.
And so doing this check in is so important. And then you, we do something. And then we check in again. And it's in that moment that there is a change from our original check in to our next check in. This is what teaches us things, this change, this moment of change, because we noticed then how we feel and how we feel, we then put a, like, um, weight on it of whether we like it or not, or whether it feels better or worse than where we started.
And this is how we start to, one, relearn sensations in our body and start to see how the body changes sometimes with interventions that We're not necessarily going to support the belief that we thought something was wrong. For example, if you do have that lateral shift and you were instantly thinking that it was like coming from your back and then the intervention you did was like something at the opposite foot or it was some eye exercise or a hair pull or a change in your breath or rolling on the ground, something seemingly unrelated and you check back in and your lateral shifts gone.
That informs you and starts to, that informs you. It starts to change your belief system, but it also shows you how cool the body is in that the symptoms, you start to understand that the symptoms that you feel are just sensations as opposed to related to something.
And they're not something to necessarily be ignored, right? So, I know that's like, kind of hard to understand. It's hard, it's hard, honestly, it's hard to explain. But that's like, how we start to gather trust in our body again. Um,
yeah. Man, this is so, like, big of a topic. But anyways. Um, the other thing, you know, so, so, this is what I mean too, like, so symptoms, this goes back to the question I was asking on Instagram. So symptoms that you're having in your body are nothing but sensations. And sensations, though, that we're interpreting under a certain lens of view or belief system.
And, um, depending on what that lens of view or belief system, it might distract you to the real issues at hand. Right? So, from, uh, what I teach, right, we talk about visceral referral patterns into the musculoskeletal. System. So it might make us feel like a certain symptom is like musculoskeletal related.
It is back pain or it is shoulder pain, but it was actually like a symptom from the viscera, right? But if we don't have that lens of view, we don't appreciate how that could be coming from somewhere else and giving us a different message. Um, there is a big importance on, like I said, this restoration of awareness.
So going back to how this relates as a clinician to my hand. It's really hard to trust what I feel in my hand if I can't trust what I feel in the rest of my body. I will better trust what I feel in my hand when I can better trust what I feel. And the rest of my body and learn how to move my body because that's how, you know, sensations are felt in our body through movement.
And so, um, this is how, why movement is such a wonderful teacher to us. It creates shift and change in our body and then allows us to have a plethora of sensations to pick from. Okay, and um, how you also build trust in your body and trust in your hand is that you do something, you decide what you felt, right, and you are okay with it being wrong.
There's nothing wrong with being wrong. You do some sort of innervation and then you retest it and it's sort of like, is it, has it changed and does that support then what you're feeling and the more bodies you feel, the more times you do this, the more you. assess and reassess, check in, and then check in again after a, um, intervention.
This is training your hand in what you feel, and it's also helping you to trust it more. It's giving you evidence, it's giving you proof. And with that too, so I talk about trust a lot, and part of this too is picking up on the sensations in your body. When we are in trust, or we are, in fact, believing the truth, so it's important to understand what the truth feels like in your body.
And this is actually a question that I asked in the beginning of the Revitalize Mentorship to People, is what does it feel like in your body? To know that something is true, and I also ask what does it feel like in your body to feel safe? Because usually those things go hand in hand even when we might not like the truth The truth has a component of safety to it, right?
When we're believing reality, when we're believing the truth, it is safe because it is. And this is, I've shared a little bit, I can't remember what podcast it was, but I know I've shared a little about it, a little bit about it, because I've talked about Byron Katie before, and her, um, self inquiry process that I learned during the Asha Yoga teacher training.
This is... A really important work, but it ties into this concept of trusting what you feel in your body and trusting what you feel in your hand as a clinician. And as I'm giving shout outs. You know, I always like to, like, where did this come from? Because, like with everything, I, it comes from a bunch of places and I blend it all together because I see these connections to it.
And the, the places that it, it's sort of been blended together from are Byron Katie's work and the, um, yoga concept of Avidya. And then also, um, from Eric Franklin, so Eric Franklin work, which I've talked about a lot too, he was the first to like introduce me to a body scan and the importance of knowing where we're starting before we provide an intervention because there is so much richness in Okay.
Bye. the change that happens. And then also, um, from Ron Mariotti, Dr. Ron, one of the teachers at the Burrell Institute, he was the teacher who taught the listening techniques course that I took the first at one. And he basically was the one who to say, when I have my hand on someone, that is permission only to pay attention to what I feel.
That I should not be thinking when my hand is on them I should not be thinking about all the anatomical knowledge in my hand head All the pathomechanics all the I shouldn't be thinking of their story be distracted by it My only thing I should be paying attention to when my hand is on someone is what I feel and as soon as I catch myself Thinking I should take my hand off of them because that's I'm not, I'm no longer even with them anymore.
I'm in my head. So that was a huge concept for me. And then, um, and I, and this is what I teach all the clinicians in my courses, is when you're hands on someone, you shouldn't be thinking about what you should feel. You should just be paying attention to what you feel. Or you shouldn't be thinking about being right or being wrong.
You should just be paying attention to what you feel. And describe that. And then, um, it doesn't mean that you never think. Of course we think. But it allows all the knowledge that's stored in your brain. And all the knowledge that's stored in all your cells. To actually get pulled from. As opposed to just your ego.
And just the belief system that you're believing and the belief system, not concept, but the understanding that our belief system colors our lens of view and can be distracting to us is from Amy Young. She is a life coach, um, that I found on Instagram and I worked with, um, in the relationships. sector, but it's Her teaching of that like is so much made sense and this is what I talked about with the subjective history We're searching for evidence within that subjective history To prove our belief system.
So if we have a belief system that movement dysfunction is what leads to pain, is what leads to injury, then we're looking at someone's assessment and their story to corroborate that and If we want to, if we want to, well, not if we want to, like, we just have to understand that we are, no matter where we're at, we're operating from a belief system, so that's like part of the reason too, like, the Baral Institute taught me to not be distracted by the patient's story and to not get a subjective history until you've already done your assessment, so it's not biased, but understanding it from a belief system standpoint with Amy, like, yeah, that makes sense.
Because it, because even the lens of view of the visceral, the visceral organs are the most important. You know, thing to the body. If I listen to someone's story with that lens of view, now I'm gathering evidence to support that lens of view too. So this is again, why it's important to rely on what you're feeling in your hands because it takes away our belief systems.
Um, and there's, you know, there's nothing wrong with having a belief system, you have to, that's how we operate in the world, but you have to understand that it changes your goggles that you're seeing the world through, and, and that's a concept I got from Amy, because, you know, from a relationship standpoint, she would say, like, if you have this belief that all guys are shitheads, That there's no good guys left in the world, then when you walk out the door, you're just gathering evidence to prove that belief.
And so, if we want to believe it not to be true, we need to operate under a different belief system and put new goggles on. So when we go out the door, instead of seeing all the crappy guys in the world, we can start seeing all the good guys in the world. So, this same concept can be applied through everything.
But it's also why it's... so important when you're working someone to not get distracted by their story and have a tool like the locator test assessment protocol or like osteopathic general listening to pay it to then be able to pay attention to what you feel and trust that. more than the story in your belief system.
And, um, I think at the beginning I said I would explain what osteopathic feeling is, and it's, or listening is, is basically just paying attention to what I feel with my hand. A general listening is we start with evaluation with a hand on top of someone's head, and then we Locally, wherever the general listening direct us to, front of the body, back of the body, right side or left side, below the diaphragm or above the diaphragm, we go to that area and do local listening, place our hand on the body, and see where we're feeling tensions.
Is it to the, this side, is it, how deep is it, what's the quality of the feeling, does the quality feel like a tube, or does it feel hard, or does it have pressure on it, or does it vibrate, right, all of those qualities we can pick up in the receptors of our hands. And so that informs me what tissue it is.
Okay, so that concept of osteopathic listening is what the locator test assessment protocol is trying to do because It's hard to trust what you feel at first, and I felt like that was the hardest concept for people to get, to learn, to accept, to operate from. And so I know that our clinician minds needed some concrete evidence to prove it.
The concrete evidence, then, is more of these orthopedic based tests that the Locator Test Assessment Protocol provides. Evidence for this belief system, but evidence, also, to corroborate what we're feeling. And this, kind of, too, how it ties back into the Byron Katie work, is knowing what it feels like to be safe in my body.
Knowing what it feels like to be in truth. I also, then, know when I'm feeling that, when I'm assessing someone. If I feel like their SI joint is moving, or doesn't, is not moving and changes with the breath hold, I can trust that because I know what trust feels like. I know what truth feels like. Same thing, that's actually why I believe my general listening and local listening, what I'm feeling in my hand, more than anything else, especially When it feels like the truth to me in my body, or when it feels safe to me in my body.
Um, and each day is different. Some days I am more depth of paying attention to what I feel than others. And it's nice to have some other tools that can arrive at the same spot for me as a clinician. But then I have the tools as just in my own body to arrive at that safer place too. Understanding how I can manipulate.
My movement, my breath, my sensations in my body to regain body ownership and agency and then feel safe again in my body. So it sort of all comes full circle in that sense. Um, and the other thing, you know, that comes up when we talk about listening to the body is intuition. Intuition is also often called the gut feeling.
Interesting enough, when we talk about gut feeling from our gut. Um, the feelings we get from our gut is interoception and interoception is inherently an awareness of the sensations in our body, right? So again, like I think intuition is just a combination of paying attention to the emotions and the sensations and how they're showing up through your dynamic alignment, through your range of motions, through your sensations.
And understanding when that changes based on different situations, and that actually circles back to this concept, too, of neuroception from Stephen Porges, which is, um, a, another ception that he refers to in the fundamental ability for us to move about the world and know if we are safe or not, or being threatened.
And this neuroception is like an instant thing that happens, but I think it's very tied to this same concept of intuition. and sensations and it can be trained. You can be trained to be able to sense better and trust what you sense more. Okay. So in a sense, the questions I asked at the beginning of this podcast, the questions I asked on Instagram on, on Sunday, um, are sort of all integrated within each other.
And I was just curious as to what people resonated with more. Um, but when I speak about listening to the body, I'm talking about specifically what you're feeling and the value placed on understanding that we are feeling beings. And the more we can lean into that and own it, And know that that is more true than any belief system that we will ever have.
That, I think, is the importance. And even for the patient. This is, I tell my athletes, I want you to believe yourself more than you believe me. I want you to believe your own body and what you feel more than you believe me. Which means that if I tell you a certain way to move, or a certain posture to be in, if it doesn't feel good in your body, then it's not true.
It's not, like, this is why you have to throw out movement rules out the window. Because... These movement rules are nothing but someone trying to bully you into their belief system and put you in a box about how things should be instead of how things are. So, it's not, it's not living within reality or your truth.
To bring it back to Byron Keating. Um,
which is... Again, why I weigh so much on people doing the work in their own body, to feel the anatomy in your own body. This is a concept too, I just said, I just did this quote the other day from Bonnie Brainbridge Cohen. If you don't know who that is, you need to know who that is. Um, she's a little bit more common in like the movement, the dance world than anything else.
She was talking about embryology and anatomy, and she said, you know, uh, when you're learning science about the body, there's this feeling that people have to like memorize it and like learn all this new information, but actually, fundamentally, it's not new information. It is a lived experience in your body, and if you can like sit with that for a second and then just like let it soak in when you're learning it.
And feel it through movement, then you're tapping into that intelligence that's within the cells that I'm talking about. So the quote she said is, This is about memory, not learning something new. This is about memory, not learning something new. So same thing, listening to the body and improving your feeling is about memory.
Not learning something new. It is about coming home to your body. It is about taking your power back. Realizing that all of this information is stored within the cells of your body. That your body is always in a quest for survival. And safety, and self healing, and regulating. And when we can get out of our own way, we can sort of tap into those, quote unquote, magical abilities, as opposed to be in competition with them.
So, that's a lot. 52 minutes of me sort of running around in circles, maybe, is what that felt like. But, um, if all you get out of this is maybe switching your next patient you evaluate, you switching when you take their subjective history. Start with the evaluation first. Even if you don't have a skill like general listening or the locator test assessment protocol, even if you don't have that skill, Do your normal clinical exam.
And you might be like, Anna, where would I do the normal clinical exam if I don't know what they're coming in for? Shoulder pain, or ankle pain, or whatever. Just take a look at their whole body. Their whole body posture. Their dynamic alignment. Because posture and dynamic alignment, newsflash. So they're related or different things.
Pay attention to their affect in their face, their facial expressions. Pay attention to how they're holding their body, that's their posture. Pay attention to, um, how they walk, their gait. And then decide if there's some joints that you want to look at. In general, I look at ankle dorsiflexion, hip flexion.
Hip extension, hip internal rotation, trunk rotation, and shoulder flexion. And maybe you can look at neck rotation too, whatever you want. Or maybe it's just simply like a forward bend. What does it look like when you try to touch your toes? Start with gait and go from there. And then, once you have like some unbiased assessment of their body, then ask them, Hey, what brings you in today?
What's hurting? How can I help you? And just take a moment, too, to see how does that change? How does that change? And, you know, maybe at the end of the day, look at your notes from their session, their, their objective measurements, and then their subjective information, and think back, and think, if I would have had the subjective information first, where would I have gone?
And, Based on the objective information, what would I have missed? Because I was trying to, to collect evidence on a belief system. Because chances are you might not even realize your belief system is doing that for you, is doing that to you. Like you're trying to prove, collect all this evidence to prove what you believe, okay?
So, that's sort of the practical application of this, is like, to honor that we are feeling beings and that we probably need to spend more time feeling, both from an exteroceptive standpoint and an interoceptive standpoint, and then also we need to stop collecting evidence on our belief system with their story, or the story we give them, and just see what the body is presenting us with, and then have a conversation.
And let me know if you get a better outcome. So this was, um, an hour podcast today. A long one, but hopefully food for thought. And, uh, let me know if you enjoyed it, if you hated it, whatever. Um, I'm probably not going to change what I do over here. But, um, I'm just curious if you've ever thought about this.
So, have a great day, week. Evening, whatever, wherever you're tuning in from, I am grateful for you. Thank you for being here and we'll see what next week's topic brings us.
