ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Deanna Hansen, the author of ‘Unblock Your Body: How Decompressing Your Fascia Is the Missing Link in Healing.’ Deanna Hansen is a Certified Athletic Therapist and the founder of Fluid Isometrics and Block Therapy. She has spent over 50,000 hours working in the fascia and has seen thousands receive the transformational benefits of her system. She has a global community, along with a university program where she teaches individuals to share Block Therapy with their community. To learn more, go to www.blocktherapy.com.
CONNECT WITH DEANNA HANSEN:
Website: https://blocktherapy.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deannahansenblocktherapy/
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Does your body feel heavy and blocked? Discover how to awaken your cells and become more attuned to your inner spirit.
Are you looking to overcome anxiety and your reactions to negative triggers? Do you want to conquer chronic pain? Struggling to defeat your sleeping problems?
As a Certified Athletic Therapist and the founder of Fluid Isometrics and Block Therapy, Deanna Hansen has helped thousands draw on transformational benefits through her innovative system. Now she’s here to show you why the connective tissue that holds every organ, blood vessel, bone, nerve fiber, and muscle in place shouldn’t be ignored and is essential to your well-being.
Unblock Your Body: How Decompressing Your Fascia is the Missing Link in Healing is a powerful guide to learning how to support your body’s internal systems and enhance your physical health. Unpacking how flourishing cells require space both around and inside them, you’ll know how to reduce restrictions, repair function, and recharge every aspect of your essence. In a world full of chaos and obstructive energy, you’ll soon be powering up the key forces needed to counter the constant drag of Earth’s gravity and boost your strength and vitality.
In Unblock Your Body: How Decompressing Your Fascia is the Missing Link in Healing, you’ll discover:
• How to calm the all-important vagus nerve to ensure your organs work at maximum effectiveness
• Natural ways to decrease panic attacks and other anxiety disorders so you can increase mental wellness
• Reasons why you should keep your adrenal glands refreshed and breath unrestricted to receive necessary levels of oxygen
• Methods for pushing past survival mode to live a life of drive and vigor
• Whole-body strategies to lose weight, be more flexible, stay in touch with yourself, and much, much more!
Unblock Your Body: How Decompressing Your Fascia is the Missing Link in Healing is your gateway to achieving a stress-free existence and maintaining holistic-based health. If you like therapeutic techniques, eye-opening case studies, and advice supported by years of research and clinical experience, then you’ll love Deanna Hansen’s revolutionary book.
• Grab your copy on Amazon! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08MQWW6JD
• Or, buy from Grace Point Publishing bookstore: https://gracepointpublishing.com/bookstore/books-cards/unblock-your-body/
LISTEN HERE:
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Hello, and welcome to grace point publishing podcast. I’m Michelle Vandepas, and today I’m so thrilled. I’ve got Deanna Hansen with unblock your body. How decompressing your fascia is the missing link in healing wanted to get that right. I love this book. I love the cover. I love your work. So what can I say? Welcome to the show.
Thank you so much, Michelle. And I just want to thank you so much also for the journey that we’ve been on together. It, for me, this was all very universal. Like it, it was like you were placed in front of me when I needed you and the relationship continues. So I’m just thrilled for that.
Me too. Thank you. Thank you. All right. So I gotta just for people who don’t know, the first thing you have to do is explain what the heck fascia is.
My pleasure. So fascia is the connective tissue connecting every single one of the cells in our body. And I have a very unique understanding of this tissue because for the last 25 years now, Oh my gosh, the last 25 years I’ve been, I’ve been working deeply in this tissue with my hands, starting on my own body and then transferring what I learned to patients. So it’s, it’s really interesting because the way that I see it, it’s almost as though fascia is the membrane of every single cell interconnecting, every other cell. And it’s the transmission of consciousness of light of everything that travels in and through the body. And the goal from my perspective of the fascia system is to ensure that every single cell in our body is properly aligned and to maintain its internal space, because really it’s where the space is where the magic happens.
So over time, what happens to the body under the constant forces of gravity, unconscious posture, injuries, even surgeries that create scar tissue is we become dense and thick. And this dense, thick tissue blocks, blood and oxygen flow to cells and also blocks the removal of waste from cells. So ultimately I see this as being the real issue with how we are aging, because pain, fear and stress causes to reactively hold the breath. And it is through the breath through proper diaphragmatic breathing that we keep our cells filled with oxygen and light and buoyant, almost like a balloon filled with air. As long as that balloon is filled with air, it almost defies gravity. And we want every cell in the body to be light and buoyant so that we can glide through life where what is actually happening is most people don’t have a really strong connection to their diaphragm and they’re breathing through the muscles of the upper chest.
So the oxygen in our bodies has depleted significantly and our bodies have collapsed and they’ve become very sticky and twisted. So this is what’s really causing aging. As we know it because pain fare and stress causes to reactively hold the breath. We all know that the world is a very stressful place, 24 seven. So people intuitively have really stopped their connection to their breath and therefore the connection to feeding their bodies properly. Every single cell in the body requires oxygen to feed the fuel. So if we only have 20 or 30% of ourselves actually receiving oxygen, it’s, it’s almost as though we are carting around these heavy bodies, as opposed to having these nice light fluid bodies that can move through time with grace.
Yeah. So you’re talking about getting the oxygen into the cell. So in my head it feels like it sort of expands the cell with light so that all the other stuff can detox. So let’s go back to fascia for just a minute. So if I’m like holding my arm, what it’s like under there, it’s under there, right?
Where it, it enervates bone, organ, skin, fat ligament muscle. So I don’t see a differentiation in the body. And that’s again, where I think my perspective is quite unique as an athletic therapist, I was trained to look at muscles and tendons and ligaments and all the things that get injured with activity where the way that I see it, if you sprain your ankle, for example, it’s not just the ligaments that are involved, it’s everything. And there’s blood vessels, fascia, intervates the blood vessels, the nerve fibers, absolutely everything is made up of this fascia. So we need to truly understand this tissue, the system in our body and properly feed it so that we can actually move through time in our life without undergoing the negative effects of gravity and unconscious behavior. Which if we do that, the way that we age is very, very different.
Yeah. And you you’ve been working on this a long time, and I know when you and I first started working together and you introduce this whole concept to me part of what you teach is, is sort of laying on a block. I wish I had my block with me, it’s at my house, but it’s, it’s a, it’s a block, a beautiful bamboo blocks that you, that you lay on and you breathe into it. Right. And it opens yourselves. It’s an amazing, it’s an amazing process. And this book sort of explains how and why that works, I guess. Right.
It does. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, go ahead.
Really. It comes down to understanding scar tissue and adhesion because there’s, there’s three pillars to block therapy and the first one is creating space. So because of gravity and all the things we just mentioned, we actually lose our internal space. We get shorter and wider as we get older. Ultimately, what we to do is we want to keep our height and we want to keep our size and shape the way it is meant to be. But because we collapse into ourselves, what we are taking away is that internal space. So the very first one is through the process of lying on the tool, connecting to the breath and driving through the layers of fascia, by connecting with pain, we melt the adhesions because ultimately pain equals restriction in the body. So when we can wrap our head around pain, as well as a different language, as opposed to something to be afraid of and push away the pain and the body is the cell is the baby crying. You wouldn’t ignore your baby crying. You would embrace your baby. You would figure out what that cry means and you would feed the baby, whatever it is, whether it’s love changing a diaper, sleep comfort ourselves.
The station right, is just information, right? Just a short anecdote years and years and years ago when I had some chronic pain I, I journaled with that pain, right. And talk to the pain. And that’s how I was able to get the information to, to release the pain. And that’s kinda what you’re talking about too, is just information. And there’s a lot of ways to release it. And you’re suggesting through the fascia, through the breath, through connecting with the pain to release it,
Because what happens under that compression is we push away a bunch of ourselves and those cell membranes, they communicate with our brain to give us information in the moment. So if I’m sitting collapsed in front of a computer for 20, 30, 40 years, and I have literally shrunk in my size or in my height, there’s a whole bunch of cells that aren’t responding and responding to what is going on in life. It’s not, they’re not receiving blood and oxygen flow. So they’re also not sending signals to the brain. And that’s where it gets really interesting because then we connect into memory. And in, in this book, I actually share an anecdote where I was in the, in that time. I was at the beginning of my yoga studies and I loved the process I went through because they made us be our own subjects.
And one of the things that we had to do is become very aware and observe how we would feel in any given moment. So one of the things I was doing was walking through a mall and I was in a great mood that day. And I’m walking, just enjoying myself. And I catch a glimpse of this man walking toward me. And he looks at me and he has this look of disappointment in his eyes. And immediately my gut just turned and I felt anxiety. And because I was awake to this, I thought what just happened? So the first thing was like, what did I do wrong? Did this, did I upset this matter? Whatever. And then, you know, I took a moment and I’m like, you know, there could be a whole bunch of reasons we could have just caught each other’s glimpse when he had a pain shot in his knee.
Or maybe that was just his expression. I mean, you know, it’s so funny how we fill in the gaps with our own story. So when we actually have all of our cells communicating with us, it creates a very different opportunity to be present in the moment and to see each moment as a unique experience in and of itself. So through the process of block therapy, it really is all about releasing those adhesions that are blocking the cells from flow so that they can awaken and be part of our story and how we proceed forward into the future.
Yeah. And so the, the takeaway part of the takeaway on that is to kind of slow down and listen to yourself and not just take all the six terminal stuff all the time, right? It’s like slow down and listen to what your own body’s telling you.
And that’s part of that whole process of the second pillar is the inflating that space through that component of proper diaphragmatic breathing. And we really focus on the exhalation phase because we have absorbed so much, our fascia is like a big sponge and it’s absorbing everything from the toxins to the negative emotions to your environment, like whatever you’re around becomes part of your makeup in that moment. So we want to clear that out so that we have clean space to bring in the oxygen, to connect to our creative gifts so that we can actually do what we’re supposed to do here with this life where most people are really flogged down with past memories toxins again, like if, if let’s, let’s say you’re a hairdresser and you’ve spent 10 years working in a salon with chemicals, your fascia has absorbed that if you’re in a toxic relationship, your fascia has absorbed that again.
And then when you add in the injuries and the surgeries and all the other things, the unconscious postures that just slows everything down. So basically our fascia is this very cold, dry, brittle sluggish system. When if it’s working properly, it becomes a very light, fluid, warm system. We w we were really like a river. We want to be that free flowing, fast, clean river, where we’re kind of like a meandering toxic river as we age, but we can, we can. Yeah. But we can change that, which is really exciting. We can undo that and we can bring that flow, that heat and that fluidity back into our body. So that again, we can move through time in a very graceful way with our bodies.
Yeah. And you give S you know, in your website and the book, you’ve got testimony and examples, and people who’ve been cured. I don’t think we’re allowed to say that word, but disease. Right. They, they have experiences that helps them feel better and feel more alive and, and healthy and, you know, in, in their body. And so I’m just wondering if you’re feeling like you’re compressed, you’ve got bad posture, or you’re just feeling sluggish. Is there, like, do you have to like go through this process an hour a day for the rest of your life? Can you it’s like, how do we add one more thing to our life? It’s like telling me to breathe. Okay. I gotta add another and another practice in my life. So talk to me about how we can add this and not have it be more stressed because I, so I’m gonna let you talk here. But I, I got to say that five minutes on my block is like an hour of exercise for me. It is so relaxing. And so I’m going to preface it by saying, I don’t think you need a lot of time to make a little difference, but I want to hear your, your real answer to that.
In fact, I always say to people, if you only have five minutes a day, lie on the tool and connect to that full diaphragmatic breath. And the reason is, is because when we breathe, diaphragmatically we feed the body up to six times the oxygen. So most people are breathing through the muscles of the upper chest because pain, fear, and stress cause us to reactively hold the breath. So we have been pulled away from this muscle that is actually designed to feed every single one of the cells in our body. So when we are lying on the tool and for those out there, you can lie on a hard cover book, or if you even have quite a bit of collapsed and you have a rounded belly, simply lying on your belly, on a floor and breathing into the floor. So it’s a challenge for people initially, because like me, when I was younger, I was a dancer and I was always told, hold your stomach in.
So when you hold your belly in, you’re forced to breathe up here. Yet. What we want to do is we want to have a dynamic belly, so we can make our belly big on purpose, and we can make it small on purpose. And then we’re constantly working the abdomen, the abdominal muscles through the process of proper diaphragmatic breathing. So we can be doing exercise all day long by becoming conscious breathers. And in fact, that’s how our body is designed to breathe. But because we’re so far away from the posture to support that we’ve become these upper chest breathers. So again, we are, I mean, six times the oxygen is a huge amount and it’s not because we’re pulling six times the air into the lungs. It’s because it’s at the base of the lungs where the majority of the oxygen receptor sites reside as well as where the majority, when we’re upright of the blood flow is so that’s where the absorption happens.
So for breathing through the muscles of the upper chest, we’re not even bringing the air deeply enough into the lungs for that absorption. Also in 2014, they did a study in Australia, proving 84% of weight loss comes through proper exhalation. So to me, that was one of the most wonderful studies they could have shared because it’s through the breath that we, the toxins from the body and for somebody like me, who, you know before this journey began for me, I was 50 pounds overweight. I was not eating a lot. I was working out like a fiend and I was getting bigger. So it was almost like I defied like the whole rules of weight loss didn’t apply to me. And why not? I mean, I’m working hard, but then I started to really understand this through this process. And when the study happened, years after this journey began for me, it really shared the science behind the reason because every single exhalation is an opportunity to detoxify the body.
But most people have such a small amount of an exhalation. If you even tell somebody new to breathing, you know, take a full breath, they’ll take a nice deep in breath, but they’ll just kind of push out a little bit. And then we keep pulling, pulling in, but we don’t release properly. So when we make that exhalation, the focus, it’s a game changer in how we oxygenate the body, but also it connects us to the parasympathetic nervous system, which is why people feel calm right away. So that in itself changes, it changes the tension inside the body. And when, when talking about weight loss, because again, that was my journey. I really see the issue is compression from collapse and the resultant ballooning. And then because of that, we become toxic because our flow is stagnant. So if we don’t have a nice high flow in, like for not that clean fluid, fast flowing river, we become the meandering river that has pockets of LG because there’s blockages and it has all these issues.
And that becomes the diseases in the future to us. So it’s, it’s really important to understand what we want for fascia is we want heat. We want flow and we want alignment. And that is the third pillar of block therapy is proper foundations. So we create the space, we inflate the space, and then we maintain the space and then your body becomes really efficient. So even if you do have an injury, or even if you do have a week where you’re on holidays and you might be eating and drinking more than what your body is normally used to, it’s efficient at getting back to its neutral place and healthy place because your, your systems are already turned on. You know, I live here in Winnipeg, in, in Canada, and it’s like, we’re in the middle of winter right now. So if your car has been sitting outside, you’ve got to warm it up for 20 minutes before you’re going to drive. And we don’t want that to be the situation in the body. We want the body to be ready to go all the time. And with the proper breath, that’s how we do it.
Right. Not get up out of bed and shuffle and feel like, Oh, I can create, right. So I want to go back to the breath for a minute, because in yoga often you’re taught all different kinds of breathing, depending on what kind of yoga you take. But one of the things as you breathe in for say five counts and then breathe out for five counts, are you talking about the same sort of same measure in and out? Yeah,
Actually I often have people breathe in for four and out for six. And then after that full exhalation, take a moment in that space of no breath before engaging the inhalation, because the diaphragm is a muscle. It moves up and down in the body. When we inhale, it moves down when we exhale, it moves up. So it becomes this pump that will give the internal organs, the heart, the lungs, this continual massage, if we’re working at properly. And that’s really the key that’s, what’s going to keep our internal area in nice and heated. We want to be massaging these organs for people that have stomach problems. The diaphragm sits right on top of the stomach, Oregon. So first of all, most people don’t chew properly. They swallow food, somewhat whole, and most people aren’t breathing, which that movement of the diaphragm gives the added energy for digestion.
So we’re swallowing whole food, and we’re frozen in the container that it’s going into. And we wonder why we have issues with, with guts, you know, with absorption, absorbing nutrients, with breaking down fats, all of these things, because even for the liver, the gallbladder, I mean, one of the jobs of the liver is to clean the blood, but the fats are getting clogged in the liver, fatty liver diseases on the rise big time. And it’s because this Oregon has become cold. So butter at room temperature is a solid, you heat it up. It becomes liquid. We need to melt the fats inside the body. But at the end of the day, if we’re not breathing from the right place, our organs are cold. So they’re not able to do their job as they’re designed to do.
Yeah. Yeah. That’s such a good, good way of putting it. And I just like having a couple of things that people can take away from this, you know, while they’re waiting for their book to arrive or before they get on the handle to buy it or audio, listen to it. And one of the things that’s really easy to do is that four, six breath count. Right? You can just start with that. So I, I appreciate that. What’s next for you? You’ve written this book. You, you have a whole community of people online. You teach people how to lead classes in this and be therapists in this. Talk to me about your community and what’s next for you in your community?
My community is truly the life breath. I feel of this practice because for years, as I was developing this, I would have people asking for the research and research. Isn’t something that’s really easy to just get, you know, you don’t just get research. So through my attempts that failed years ago, I decided I don’t personally care about the research. I know what this does. I want to make sure that if people are open to this work, they have the work. So in my community now my private Facebook community block therapy community, there’s 4,000 members in there. And what is so lovely is they are sharing what’s happening. So for me, for example, I have my own set of issues in the injuries and all the problems that I personally have as a, as an individual. But I don’t have things that other people have say like fibromyalgia.
So for me to be, I’m not an expert on fibromyalgia. The person that has done block therapy to get rid of their issues with fibromyalgia are the experts. And so it’s lovely because people can ask questions to the community. So people that have had their real experiences get to share and help guide and support, and it is such a beautiful place to be. It is so warm and I’m just, I’m thrilled with the community. We also have a university. So we do teach people how to teach this to their communities, as well as to become therapists in this, where we get photos of people. And we can see cause sites because where people have pain is the pain site, but that’s not what’s causing the pain. There’s going to be cause sites and pain sites in the body. And we can see it visually in the fascia, the way that the fascia will twist and hook.
For example, something like cellulite, the fascia is here literally to support and protect us. And one of the goals of the fascia is to keep us upright and to keep us aligned. So if we’re not supporting that process through understanding proper foundations and proper breathing, and we start collapsing and we’re all dominant on one side. So we basically age in a forward rotational direction, our bodies are twisting away from balance. So the fascia will grip and adhere to bone and other structures to maintain stability and energy moves in waves and spirals. So these grips occur in a spiral fashion. So here’s the dimple of the cellulite. So people don’t like the appearance of it, but more importantly, from my perspective, it’s an indicator that now you have blockage to cells on the other side, and back to your comment about curing disease. I don’t actually believe in disease. I believe there are blocks in the fascia system, stopping certain tissue from being properly fed and clean. So they will arise with a symptom. And if that tissue happens to be an organ or a muscle or whatever it is, symptoms are going to arise based on that tissue, not receiving what it needs to be properly fed and clean. So I, I lost track
The Facebook community. You teach people to become therapists, you’ve got this book and block your body, but you’ve also got other books and other for at least one, two more books out.
My next passion project is block therapy Academy for kids. So I’m yeah, yeah. It’s, this is, this is something I’ve wanted for a very, very long time, but there is a time and a place for everything to get developed and happen. And I see the youth today being in a lot of turmoil because they are growing up in front of screens where you and I adopted screens as adults. Once we were fully grown, when you’re growing up in a compressed forward way, that’s impacting everything. And the amount of scoliosis I’m seeing, the, the issues that the, the mental struggles and challenges kids are having. I really see it all being a function of them, not connecting properly to their breath. So we are in the developmental stages now of getting this block therapy Academy for kids underway. And my goal is that we launch the beginning stages of it in the fall. So there’s, yeah, so there’s a lot of stuff going on and I’m just so thrilled. And I just actually had a wonderful podcast this morning with Dr. L the parent whisperer, who I’ve been on some of his podcasts, and he’s incredible, and he’s going to be an active participant in that as well.
That’s fantastic. So is there a book coming out on block for kids? Maybe we should call out that maybe we should. Excellent. Okay. We’ve got to wrap this up. Tell me what one question I forgot to ask was, Oh,
Question you forgot to ask. I would love to address the immune system that it is such a thing today, right? So I, I really do believe that our body, when given what it needs has the capacity to be stronger than anything out there. And it really does come to that proper exhalation because that is how we keep the body clean and we keep it fed. So with the process of block therapy, one of the reasons why it is so impactful on the breath is because it releases the adhesions blocking that diaphragmatic muscle from moving properly. And within one class, people in our community will share the difference in their ability to take a deep breath and how calm they feel. So from the perspective of health today, connecting into your body and understanding the system and your breath is in my opinion, the most powerful way to combat anything that we have to deal with also to come at it from a very calm, centered place.
So no matter what, it’s time for, self-care like, we really need to let the noise go. We need to start giving ourselves the time and attention that they require and not through force through persuasion. This can be done in a bed. And I do most of my blocking in bed. And it’s lovely because you don’t have to do anything. You just put it underneath you somewhere. I mean, we’ve got so many programs and things to follow, but it doesn’t have to be that either to be effective. It, it really is about melting those adhesions, connecting to your breath and being present. And it, it’s beautiful and it’s fast. And that’s the great thing. And no matter if you’re coming from the perspective of chronic pain, anti aging, if you have a disease, if you want to improve your size and shape, all of it comes down to the fascia system. So just diving in a little bit and understanding this process is impactful on every level for every age.
Wow. I love thank you again. The book is unblock your body, how decompressing your fascia is the missing link in healing. Deanna Hansen my guest. And I want to get your website, right.
Would you share that with block therapy though?
Talk therapy.com. I’m so used to saying unblocking lock therapy.com. You can get the book anywhere books are sold by the time this podcast is released. I hope the audible book will be out Kendall. I’m available on Amazon, but every bookstore around the world. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Michelle.