Body networking with Colleen Jorgensen

Today on the Work IN we are so excited to have our favorite Osteopath and pain care educator, Colleen Jorgensen back with us on The Work IN. As you may remember Colleen is also a Pain Care Aware Trainer, therapeutic pilates, yoga and somatics practitioner and she brings a world of experience to the conversation around connecting the mind and body for real world resilience and results. Our conversation today will center around the body as a network of systems and how we can use that network through small movements to bring the biggest relief. Then next week we’ll take that information and break it down for instructors and discuss how fit pros can apply that knowledge for themselves and their clients.

As a part of my mission to bring a legacy of resilience through movement, each month you can join me for a hike on the bike trail followed by a free trauma informed vinyasa class back at the studio on Main Street. Go to savagegracecoaching.com to see the calendar and join my newsletter, Yoga Life on Main Street, to stay up to date on all the latest studio news, events and gossip. And now… on to this week’s episode.

It’s time to stop working out and start working IN. You found the Work IN podcast for fit-preneurs and their health conscious clients. This podcast is for resilient wellness professionals who want to expand their professional credibility, shake off stress and thrive in a burnout-proof career with conversations on the fitness industry, movement, nutrition, sleep, mindset, nervous system health, yoga, business and so much more.

I’m your host Ericka Thomas. I'm a resilience coach and fit-preneur offering an authentic, actionable realistic approach to personal and professional balance for coaches in any format.

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Transcript

Ep 165 CJ Transcript

Ericka Thomas  0:01  

Hi there everyone and welcome back to the work and today on the podcast. I am so excited because we have our favorite osteopath and pain care educator Colleen Jorgensen back with us on the work in and as you may remember Colleen is also a pain care where trainer a therapeutic Pilates yoga and Cymatics practitioner and she brings a world of experience with her to the conversation around all things wellness movements, and connecting the mind and body for real world resilience and results. Our conversation today was centered around the body as a network of systems and how we can use that network through small movements, small tools to bring big relief. Then next week we'll take that information and break it down for instructors, and discuss how fit pros can apply that knowledge for themselves and their clients. So let's get started. And without further ado, let's go ahead and start our work in with Colleen Jorgensen. Welcome back. Coleen, it's great to see you.

Colleen Jorgensen  1:14  

Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here again. I love our chats. Yes.

Ericka Thomas  1:18  

So let's just dive right in. There's like a million topics that we could cover today. And I know it's difficult to just pick one and and hopefully we will be able to narrow this down as we go. But let's let's start off today with this idea of the body as a network as a network of systems so in wellness and in fitness, I think a lot of people are aware of like the typical body systems that we think of when we're working out in the gym when we're going to class or getting fit all of those things. You know, you've got the cardiovascular system, maybe the respiratory system and of course the muscular skeletal system. Those are the obvious ones that we think about. But we are made up of so many more systems than just those that and so many of them are less well known but much more powerful for us in the body. So let's talk a little bit about that. What what are some of our less well known systems in the body that maybe we should pay a little bit more attention to give a little bit more love to, like when? Yeah,

Colleen Jorgensen  2:39  

so I'll start by saying I don't think there's one system that's more important than another. The whole point is that we have all these systems that none of them could work by themselves. They are all interconnected. They are all dependent on each other and they all affect each other. I think where we could take it today is looking at the fascial system, which is something that's becoming more and more mainstream, that's becoming more day to day language, I think for those of us in the fitness industry, which is wonderful. So with the fascial network, we connect everything literally from head to toe. But you mentioned cardiovascular respiratory systems. And I think sometimes we think that those only live in the heart and in the lungs just in that chest cavity. But we have a network of vessels, arteries and veins that travel through the entire body through that fascial network. So every movement we do is affecting the heart and lungs by the accessory vessels. The same is true for our nervous system, that we have that central brain and spinal cord, but at every level of a spine we have peripheral nerves that leave the spine and that's what feeds our our limbs, our arms and our legs and our hands and our feet and our shoulders and our toes. So there again, every single movement we do every single movement we make every single breath we take has an effect all the way down to those extremities and I think it can be just it may not change necessarily the movements that we teach, but I think it can really change the intention behind why we're introducing a certain movement and for me, why postural alignment are still important. You and I've talked about this before that there's been this shift that now that we have this better understanding that we're a systems system, a system of systems, that all of a sudden some people think, Okay, well, postural alignment don't matter anymore because that's biomechanical. I disagree with that. Because posture and alignment also affect all of those structures that lie underneath the muscles and the bones and the fascia, the the arteries, the nerves, the veins, the lymphatic system, and all of the viscera. So from my perspective, as an osteopath, we work a lot on all those different things and postural alignment do matter because if if a certain posture is going to change the way that blood is flowing to a certain part of the body, well that makes a difference because oxygenated blood is what nourishes and feeds every single part of us. And I'll just share this quote from Dr. Andrew Taylor still, who is the founder of osteopathy. And he says, Show me, show me. Sorry, show me the moment where circulation was compromised, and I will show you the moment that disease began, which is basically another way of saying if we're not getting good blood flow to certain tissues those tissues are not going to stay healthy. So I think as fitness instructors, we can do a lot for people that that teach them how to do things for themselves that keep their body moving in a way that is fully nourishing their whole system through those vessels.

Ericka Thomas  5:56  

Yeah, yeah. And the nourishment part, right. We think of, we think of this nourishment or this communication, this movement of nourishment from the inside out to the periphery. Yeah. But oftentimes, there's a little there's a, I don't know what the word is for it, but that kind of a mythology really, but about the body that it's all from this central area out when actually we have a lot of communication, a lot of connection that is going from the periphery all the way back in, right all the way back in to the heart and lungs all the way from the viscera up to the brain. And a lot of those pathways. I mean, those pathways is what we're taught the fascia is one of those pathways of communication. And so how do we keep those those pathways open for communication, and what we can bring out then yeah, what can happen when they're not?

Colleen Jorgensen  7:09  

So should we take an actual example? Why don't we share? Yes, all the time in all the classes. So we're seeing more and more that forward head posture, we call it sometimes now text neck, where that chin jutting forward, and it creates this exaggerated curve in a cervical spine. So if we look at that, not just from we could talk about it from which muscles are tired and which muscles are weak in which muscles are strong, but I think we've we've done that we've all heard about that. Let's look at it from what's deeper insight. Let's look at that from these vessels we were talking about. So just for the neck in that area that goes from our ear to the collarbones, let's say we have three of our most important structures. We have the jugular vein, a carotid artery, and the vagus nerve. So essentially we have the vessels that are responsible for feeding and draining the brain. The Head, neck face and heart and lungs. And we have the nerve that is the most intimately connected to our nervous system. pretty huge. So if you just think I always think of it like a garden hose analogy, that we want our vessels to be flowing at full capacity. Just like when you turn your garden hose on and you you you press on the gun and you've got a nice slow a nice spray of water. What happens if you put a kink in the house? Either you impede the flow and now okay, maybe there's still water coming out but it's not as strong it's not as powerful or you might impede the flow entirely. So if we take a look at the neck again, if we have that forward head posture where the chin is jutting forward, picture what that's doing to those three important structures. It's putting a little bit of a kink in those structures. We're still going to function we're very lucky our bodies are in credibly intelligent and resilient and it always finds ways to get things done. However, that's a pretty important area. So to me, how much of a service is it for us as teachers to invite our clients to be mindful of that part of their bodies while they're moving? So that they're on kinking? That area, if you will, and look I'm not a I'm not a researcher, but if I was I would be so interested in researching how many people who later on in life end up with dementia, strokes, heart attacks, how many of them have that forward head posture and how much of impeding the flow of those three important structures are a contributing factor to those things. I don't know if that's been done or not, but that's something that I'm very curious about, and whether we can prove it or not. Anatomically, physiologically, it makes sense that it has a big effect on the brain, the heart and the lungs. So why not give ourselves the best shot? Yeah, absolutely.

Ericka Thomas  10:04  

Open it up. Open that up. And the the other piece, I mean, we touched on on posture right? This is part of this postural, it's not just in a class that you want to think about this, right? This posture is all the time. This is how we sit, how we stand, how we walk, how we move, for the 23 other hours of the day, right? How to sleep like what kind of pillow all of those things play a role, because and I'll tie this back to the fascia. That fascia serves as this brilliant scaffolding of connective tissue through the body and it's trying to help us stay and the most efficient or whatever I want to say most it's not always the most efficient, but it's the most common. Yeah, it's trying it's trying to hold the body in certain ways and it maps that energy throughout the body. So, undoing those things can be a little challenging. I'm doing that neuro muscular tension pattern in the body can be really challenging for someone who's not aware of those fascial lines. So what are some of the what are some of the real common let's talk about what what commonly people might feel technic, we've already got you know, we've talked about that. Maybe some some other postural alignment things that maybe we we should be a little bit more aware of day to day.

Colleen Jorgensen  11:41  

I gotta ask the question, I want to just highlight a couple of things that you said because they're really important. Fascia is our richest sensory network. So like you talked about before, fascia is taking information from our environment and from our from our external environment outside of us and our internal environment inside of us, and it's informing our nervous system, so it's informing our choices. So that's a really important thing. Second thing that I wanted to highlight that you said, I don't remember the words you use, but part of part of how we choose our posture, while we're static, or while we're in movement is habit, that we don't want to be thinking about posture all day every day. We want that automaticity to come in. However, if we over and over and over, choose a posture that's perhaps not serving us, that's the posture that becomes easy to go to and that's the one that will default to without thinking about it. So where we can intervene, I think as teachers is in a class, like you say, we only have them for maybe an hour, but for that hour if we can bring people's awareness to the fact that maybe this particular posture isn't the most efficient for them. Then for an hour, however many times a week if they're thinking about it, then over time, it takes a while, but over time, eventually we want that default, that the choices their system chooses for them is the one best serve them in terms of posture and movement. I just thought that was important to highlight. And now let's forget your question. What can people feel if they if they have those restrictions? That was it, right? Yes.

Ericka Thomas  13:20  

And then some other areas in the body where you might see some of that postural maybe misalignment? That is super common, right? So let's just to touch on those things. But let's

Colleen Jorgensen  13:32  

start with the ones that are very common. So we have that forward head posture. That's one another one is rounded through the shoulders, and maybe we'll come back to like some of these postural choices of for very good reason. But we'll just talk right now about what some of the common ones are. So rounded shoulders is one often goes together that we then get that extra rounding through the thoracic spine, the kyphosis, that little bit of a hunchback in the Triassic spine. All of that can affect the position of the ribs. So some people like myself have the flared ribs where the ribs are opening to the front and exaggerating the arch in the mid back and the opening in the front and some happy the opposite where the ribs are stuck more in that down position and then we have the opposite scenario. Pelvic Floor tension is a very common one and pelvic floor tension can contribute to the position of the pelvis the position of the hips, position of the lower back. Knees and knees, ankles and feet can have certain postural habits as well. hard for us to know from the outside as a teacher looking Is it a postural habit that's based on choice and weakness? Tension, that sort of thing, or sometimes it's bony structure and bony structure we need to honor so that's a different conversation but I just wanted to bring that in. And then at the feet you know we're so used to wearing suits. In our culture, we wear shoes and we have since we were very, very young. So oftentimes, now when we're barefoot, and we don't have that external support, we see a lot of people who have those fallen arches for example, which can then ripple up to different things up through the lower extremity pelvis, lower back, etc. So I think those are probably the the ones that we see a lot. And then I think your The question was, how does that manifest or people like, what can they feel? And this is where it gets tricky. Because what we've learned as we, as we've learned more about how pain works in the body is that what we feel is not always an accurate representation of what is actually happening. Having said that, there are some things that people tend to feel that may go along with some things that we just talked about. So some of those postural changes. So let's say they said to have some of those postural changes we talked about, and then they come to a class and in the class, we bring their awareness to stacking their alignment a little bit better. So if they spent a lifetime closed in certain parts of their body, and now they could open it, it might not feel great in their body and that can manifest differently for different people. For some, it might just be a simple stretch. For some it might actually be pain for some it just might not feel right. For some it might change their breath. You know, we would we would think that as soon as we open the chest for example, well, they're going to be able to breathe so much better. Eventually Sure, but if at first those those muscles are in that fascia is really tight in the chest, then at first when we opened up that might actually put more pressure on the lungs sweat first. It might feel like oh, I can't breathe very well. So there's lots of different things that can manifest and the tricky part is that what we feel doesn't necessarily match what's actually happening physically in the body.

Ericka Thomas  16:46  

Yeah, that's such an interesting piece. And hopefully we'll get to touch a little bit more back on that. So but before we leave the posture piece, I'm curious about how some of these posture choices might affect some of that. That nourishment that kind of movements slide and glide peripheral of the body. Over time, maybe through you can maybe maybe suggest like what might that feel like to the to a person or and what might actually be happening at those at those areas when we were talking about, you know, the nerves and then and the veins and the arteries and all of those things as they're running through these areas that might happen do that might be curled in a little bit or dropped out or whatever people are doing.

Colleen Jorgensen  17:50  

Yeah, whatever whatever it is. So exactly what you said it's, it's about slide and why we are full of many, many layers of tissues in our body. And in a perfect world. We would like all the different layers to be able to slide and glide on each other in opposition. So let's say one layer is going to the right, the next layer should go to the left, and that keeps going so that it's not all moving together as a clump. But instead we're getting this freedom, this kind of shearing. And then what's running in between those layers are these little accessory vessels, little tiny arteries, veins and nerves and lymph vessels that are nourishing us. So as soon as we lose sliding by which we all do, because life is challenging, and we all have our habits, we all have the things we do often. Oh, that was the other thing I wanted to come back to remind me to come back. So as soon as we lose, slide and glide, we can change the function of those structures, arteries, nerves, veins, lit. It could be years before that actually manifests into any symptoms in some people. And it could be immediate and others because I think we've talked about it in other chats together. What ends up when the body ends up producing a symptom isn't about only what is physically happening in our tissues. It's about so much more than that. It's it's kind of, I call it the resiliency receptacle that we all have this threshold that we can take a whole bunch of stuff. Whenever we each reach our threshold, it just takes one more thing and that thing could be doing a certain posture in a yoga class. Or it could be picking up a pencil off your desk or reaching up for glass in your kitchen. And now all of a sudden, you feel something pain in your neck, your back doesn't move well your knee gives up. Doesn't matter what the thing is. But it's once you reach your threshold. Now it's like your system is at capacity. And it just takes the smallest of influence and some sort of symptom presents itself. So it's not usually about the symptom. It's about what can we do to create more space in that resiliency receptacle? And that's where I think as teachers, we we can offer people a lot of options, if we if we're helping them to be mindful of their breath and getting a more efficient breath in that one hour. If we are using alignment and posture cues that helped to make their system more efficient, not just muscular, skeletal wise, but all those different systems that were nourishing everything, at least for the hour, and then hopefully we build on that. It's like a layering sort of system if we can keep building and building and building on those things. And we're creating a more we're putting more well being and less disease, right? Yes.

Did I answer your question? Yes.

Ericka Thomas  20:55  

I'm just sitting there with this resilience receptacle actually, because I love that and it makes so much sense and explains a lot of things. I'm sure people listening out there are like, ah, like lightbulb moment. Like, how come I was just fine. I'm just trucking along and then I bend over to get that pencil and boom like everything a million times in my life it was never possible before.

Colleen Jorgensen  21:24  

Exactly. And it is it's probably speaks to a lot of instructors as well who can handle all kinds of high intensity in their in the classes that they're doing and the things that they're doing. But then they just you know, they're just, you know, reaching for a glass at home and back down, right.

Yeah, right example. And it's not just the physical stuff that contributes to our resiliency bucket. It's how well are you sleeping? Yes. Are you eating a well balanced diet? Are you in a healthy happy relationship? Do you like your job? are you grieving like it's, it's everything physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual, cultural, it all contributes to that resiliency receptacle. And once you're at that threshold, then it takes nothing to spill it over. So let's do everything we can, even before we have sent it like some people wait, a lot of us, almost all of us wait until we have symptoms and we usually wait until we have big symptoms, that it stops us in our tracks and then we're finally ready to do something about it. But now at that point, our resiliency bucket is overflowing. Imagine how much healthier we be how much better we feel in these bodies of ours. If we learn to do the things that are nourishing, when our resiliency bucket isn't full, so we keep creating more and more and more space. So that we can do more challenging things life can throw its challenges at us like it's always going to do and we don't spill over because we haven't even reached our threshold yet because we've little by little been creating more space. That to me is like gold.

Ericka Thomas  23:01  

Yeah, and just just a finer point out I do want to offer listeners some grace, like a lot of times we don't know where that the top of that receptacle is. And so you most people don't I would say we nobody does and so you know they're right. That's that's the edge right? That's the edge we don't know our edge. And so no one really no one expects anybody to like, let's just go find it today. No, yeah, that isn't

Colleen Jorgensen  23:37  

what we're saying at all. But I think the point is good here that we don't because we don't know where that is. It's really important to, you know, just to focus a little bit more on those, those rolling resilience kinds of activities that we can give ourselves it's so fascinating to me. How many things that are not physiological or don't seem physiological that affect the body, on that physiologic level. With inflammation, things like your relationships like relationships can affect your inflammation level. how stressed you are, you know, how the body responds and the body responds and inflammation often we know it responds with inflammation with a physical hurt, right? Like if you cut your skin if you bump your knee, whatever, you know, that makes sense. But I think it's less obvious to people how much those those other things that we are exposed to those other stressors in our life, how those can affect us physiological later All right,

it seems like seems like a long thread of how to get there. But it actually is just as clear a path as those typical things you were talking about that when we have any kind of stress, emotional, psychological, cultural, any that it still creates a stress response in our system, it triggers that you have that fight or flight survival response or what we call the dorsal vagal. Disconnect the spare fawn or freeze response. Anytime we stay too long in a survival response. Let's say we needed the survival because there was a stressor. Now the stressor goes away. Perfect scenario is we just come back to a regulated state, but that doesn't always happen. Sometimes we stay in a survival state and when we stay long term in a survival state, it triggers this inflammatory immune response in our bodies. So yes, 100% emotional triggers can result in physical symptoms. And so isn't such a big stretch. It is physiology, it comes down to that physiology, which is fascinating. But the good news to that is that we can use things like just doing things you love like you don't always have to be in a yoga class, working on your posture and doing something like that. Just do something you love, and that's anti inflammatory. So you're counteracting those stressors. Every time you do something that makes you feel good or makes you feel cared for or brings you joy, or every time you bring in compassion or gret I gratitude. All of those things trigger the anti inflammatory response in our physiology. So it doesn't always have to be big, huge things that are physical that we can do for ourselves, we can help create more resiliency in our resiliency receptacle by doing things that we love doing, putting on music that you like watching a rom com like hanging out with your dog. So like those things, all have great value. Well, and

Ericka Thomas  26:52  

that's the the, the that's the pro side. That's the body being such an integrated network, right? So because everything is connected, every every system in our body is dependent on other systems. That is a good thing. That's a good thing. So you don't necessarily have to work on your cardiovascular health. If you've got some issues there for blood pressure, you can maybe just go paint a picture in Apple and lower your blood pressure or watch the fish you know, so all of those things. It really it should be something that people are thinking that's, that sets me free a little bit. You know, it's

Colleen Jorgensen  27:40  

to me, it's very hopeful. It's empowering and it means that we have so much more choice than we used to think we had, you know, used to be had to shoulder pain. Need to treat your shoulder you need to do exercises for your shoulder you need to do interventions for your shoulder. You can still do all those things. Those things are so awful, but you can do all those other things we just talked about as well. And they're going to affect what's going on in that shoulder. So it's like it gives you more options.

Ericka Thomas  28:08  

Yes And isn't that isn't isn't that an interesting thing? I know for myself, like anytime anything any kind of injury comes up usually overused, but sometimes out of the blue, like an out of the blue pain. Like the first thing that my mind goes to is like worst case scenario, and it doesn't help that I go to Dr. Google first because that's not really bad, right? And so that is always a possibility. My gosh, Google,

Ericka Thomas  28:38  

listen, it's either nothing is wrong with you, and you're a hypochondriac, or you're terminal and say goodbye to all your family now. Right but that's all you get there. So but I can't help myself. I'm not alone in that right of course. But, but to to our discussion now like that affects my whole network, right like that information coming into my body. It's not helpful, for sure. And and, and yet, it makes sense

Ericka Thomas  29:11  

that we would do that right. Because you're it's a threat, right? If you're feeling something all of a sudden that maybe wasn't there yesterday, or maybe it's a big pain, right? Like, we've we've, you've mentioned this before, like this big, big pain, all of a sudden it draws all your attention there. Yeah. And then that's the only thing that we're paying attention to. And so what we're talking about today is that maybe, maybe that should not be the only focus when that there's that big pain in that one spot. Right? Exactly. That's

Colleen Jorgensen  30:13  

one strategy is actually to take your attention and you're bringing a tool bring to something far away from where you feel that new big pain, we're not talking to you he just had an accident and you literally injured something. That's a very different scenario. We're talking this pain comes out of nowhere. There's no mechanism that makes sense that you have this pain. That's what we're talking about. And I was about to say something I lost my train of thought, Erica, where are we? Are we one of the thing sorry. One of the things that I like to tell people is work with what's working. So our instinct, let's say you woke up with a big family who has a shoulder again, because it's easy. Let's say you woke up all of a sudden you have a big pain in your shoulder and maybe you even had wrist restricted movement in your shoulder. A lot of people strategies like gotta get that moving again. So they you know, they try to fight against the pain and the and the and the lack of function and they try to push it to get it moving again. Instead sometimes what works really, really well is find a different part of your body. Maybe it's the other arm, maybe it's a different limb entirely, but something that's got nothing wrong with it, and just move that and enjoy moving that and then come back and check your shoulder and nine times out of 10 You're going to have better movement in your shoulder than if you tried to push your shoulder through moving something that didn't feel good moving, for work with what's working, instead of trying to fix what we think is broken. That is fascinating

Ericka Thomas  31:40  

and kind of taps into the theories around Cymatics, somatic movement and different things like that. And it's just it's almost like magic. Some of the things like magic

Colleen Jorgensen  31:57  

sometimes it really does. But it all comes down to exactly what you and I wanted to talk about today that we are this interconnected system of systems. Nothing works by itself. Everything affects everything else. Literally everything in your body affects everything else, right down to your thoughts and your feelings. And so we can use that to our advantage. We really can.

Ericka Thomas  32:22  

Yeah, and so is there anything, Coleen that you would suggest for people in general out there? We've touched a little bit on some of that just now. But you know, that that you know, maybe a tool that people could use right out of the gate if they were in some maybe some restricted space or have some area of their says one of their systems that's really flaring. What would you what would you suggest them to do? Specifically, you know, maybe to kind of cool things down a little bit.

Colleen Jorgensen  33:08  

I'm thinking of three things that are top priority, I guess. First one, is to reassure yourself that pain and damage are not the same thing. But we can be pain, sorry, we can be sore and still be safe, that we can have pain, and it's not an accurate representation of what's happening in our body. So likely, like we've talked about pain can come just because you've reached that threshold. And that could be because you didn't sleep well, for three days this week, you know, and it might have nothing to do with the thing that hurts. So just reassure yourself that pain can feel horrible. It can be really, really big pain, and it can restrict your movement. And sometimes there's nothing wrong with that area of your body. You have to do to deal them to rule out that there isn't something wrong with it, but it's interesting how often there isn't so just reassure yourself pays on the same as damage so try to get that fear to come down a little bit. And one of the things that is two things that are really helpful in reducing fear is curiosity, and sense of play. So instead of when something happens, you wake up and you feel that awful, whatever, instead of immediately jumping into fear, which is normal. Can you replace that fear with Well, isn't that interesting? I did nothing different. I felt perfectly fine yesterday, and here I am. I wake up today and I can barely move my arm. Isn't that interesting? Wonder what my body's trying to tell me. And just that attitude of being a little bit more curious and kind of playful about it takes us out of our stress response compared to if we just stay in that fear. We're 100% in our stress response, triggering all kinds of inflammatory and immune cascades. We do the opposite if we bring curiosity, compassion, and play into it, so pain is on the same damage, bring curiosity, compassion and play into it instead of fear. Second thing is the breath. Everyone thinks it's too simplistic, but the breath is connected to every single cell in your body is connected to every tissue. Every system is connected mechanically is connected hormonally. cellularly chemically like I cannot say enough we should do another talk on just the brand. Because there's so much to say. But I know it seems overly simplistic like let's say you have that scenario where you wake up and you your your back is not moving and you feel like you can't even get out of bed. Because you know we usually say our back is locked or it's stuck. And they don't actually get locked but it feels like that in our body. And you tell someone to breathe and they're like okay, no, you don't understand. I can't get out of bed. Like I know I get it. Breath is the one way that you're going to be able to reach every single one of those systems without having to move the thing that hurts. So turning to breath and it couldn't be as simple as just paying attention to the breath, trying to slow it down a little bit and trying to make it a little softer and a little bit easier. Just that if you like a particular breath, practice, that's your favorite and you want to go to that. No problem. But it doesn't always have to be a technique. Sometimes it's enough to just pay attention to the breath. Notice that you are breathing or maybe in that moment you're not which is very common when we're hurting and just try to make the breath a little softer, a little easier. Extend that exhale a little bit. So pain does not seem to damage bringing that curiosity compassion in play, and breathe. And then the third thing is the vagal system. So we've talked about that in other other chats together. There are a lot of different ways that you can affect your vagal system and one of those is to read but one of the things that I've come to love more and more is a hand on the face. And you could just do that in any old way. But one way that I really like is two fingers behind the ear and two fingers in front of the ear and just let your hand and forearm come to rest. However they do naturally. You can do one side at a time or you can do both sides at the same time. You could do same hand the same side of the face or you can cross all good. And then it's super gentle. We're not looking to massage the muscle and you just want to think of moving your skin. So you just gently slide your hands sort of on a diagonal towards and away from your ear and you're just sliding along the skin up to you to decide what tempo sort of matches your your energetic state in that moment. Whether you want to do it faster or slower is completely up to you. But by doing this, we're connecting with what's called the ventral vagal part of the nervous system. And that's the part that brings us into a place of comfort, connection and safety. So it tends to bring us out of that stress response and bring us back to a regulated resilient place. And you can do that anywhere. You know, like sometimes I'll be in the line at the grocery store with my hand on my face you know and it just makes a difference. I

Ericka Thomas  38:25  

love those things that you can do out in public and nobody knows what they do. Yeah, absolutely. And that's a good one. I felt really good. Really good. Wonderful. It's possible to have mine. 

I really enjoy it. Yeah, wonderful.

Okay, so, um, So Colleen, We're going to wrap this here. And then when we come back, we're going to take some of these same things that we've talked about and apply them for instructors about in in a class situation are working, what are other people? How can we take some of this information, some of this knowledge and awareness with us to help the people in front of us so I'm really looking forward to that part of our chat. So we will be back with you next time. Thanks for listening everyone. Colleen, we'll be back next week to talk specifically to instructors, coaches, trainers and other fitness professionals movement professionals about this very topic and how to apply some of the things that we talked about today. So be sure to like follow and subscribe wherever you listen to the work in and if you liked what you heard today, and you want to know a little bit more head over to savage Grace coaching.com forward slash the work in for all today's show notes. All the links and lots of other fun resources. Thanks everyone. See you next time on the work in

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