Jodi Cohen: Hello and welcome to Essential Alchemy. Alchemy is defined as the power or process that changes or transforms something in a mysterious or impressive way. My hope is that the information in this podcast can help you transform your mood, energy, physical health, or even some dots to help you shift your mental or emotional state. I’m your host, Jodi Cohen, a bestselling author, award-winning journalist, functional practitioner, lifelong learner, and founder of Vibrant Blue Oils, a company that sells proprietary blends of high-quality, organic, or wildcrafted essential oil remedies designed to help you return to your ideal mental, physical, and emotional state. You can find out more about me and my company at vibrantblueoils.com. And with that, let’s get started with today’s episode.
Hi, I’m Jodi Cohen, your host, and I’m so excited for today’s podcast. I’m joined by my dear friend Deanna Hansen, who is a pioneer in the field of fashion decompression for physical and emotional transformation with more than 20 years of hands-on clinical experience. Deanna created block therapy, a unique fascia release protocol using these fabulous blocks that we’re going to talk about to relieve chronic pain and disease, encourage healthy detoxification and reverse cellular aging. She’s also the author of this amazing book, which really unpacks kind of what we’re going to talk about a little bit further. So thank you and welcome.
Deanna Hansen: Thank you, Jodi. I’m so incredibly honored to be here sharing with your community.
Jodi Cohen: No, this is going to be really fun. I’m really excited to kind of jump in. For people who don’t really know what you do facia and breathing, can you explain that a little bit?
Deanna Hansen: Absolutely. So let’s just have a bit of a discussion on what fascia really is and the functions and purpose of this beautiful system that really is still not very well understood. So we have trillions of cells in our body, and the goal of the fascia in part is to keep cells incorrect alignment, because if they’re in their rightful position, there’s optimal space in and around the cells. Space allows for ease of flow of nutrients in as well as the removal of toxins and waste away from the cell. So that’s one of the functions. It’s also the communication system between every single cell on the body. Fascia is primarily made up of collagen and elastin. It is the balance of these proteins that gives us both our structure as well as that opportunity to move through life with grace and ease. The challenge is though we have to be also conscious of supporting our fascist system.
Deanna Hansen: And one of the issues is we’re under this constant force of gravity. Gravity is always pulling us down toward the earth, and it doesn’t just compress the body linearly because we’re dominant on one side. We literally spiral down in one direction or another. So what happens to the balance of the collagen and elastin is as I start tipping off balance, the collagen component starts to migrate and it creates these false walls and false floors in the body. So if I’m not using my body properly with conscious awareness of posture and proper breathing, the collagen migrates. It creates all of these beaver downs to blood flow, and then cells become compromised as a result of that as well as they become dirty. So they’re essentially starving and dirty. So cells that are hungry and dirty, they’re not doing their best job to keep our bodies healthy so that we can thrive.
Jodi Cohen: Yeah, and I love you really get into detail in the book about how pain, pain, let’s say in the right hip might be the cause of a fascial imbalance elsewhere that we’re always compensating, and so that kind of throws us off and then results in pain almost in a distal region.
Deanna Hansen: It really does, and we’re always teaching people about the cause sites versus the pain sites. So if I can talk just a little bit about the diaphragm because this is such a key component of fascia decompression in this work. So dia, I’m just going to bring my camera down a little bit so we can see here. So the diaphragm is a plate of muscle that supports everything above the rib cage when it’s working properly. With the inhale, it moves down. When we exhale, it lifts, and if we’re breathing consciously, we’re getting this continual mechanical action in through here, creating an internal massage. It also helps through the strengthening of this muscle maintain this proper alignment up the chain. Now the challenge is pain, fear, and stress causes to reactively hold our breath. So if we don’t consciously understand that and stay focused on that breath, this becomes weak.
The rib cage collapses into the core. It creates displacement of the organs inside the core space. And because we don’t have the mechanical action of that muscle working properly, it starts to become colder. So our systems, when they’re colder, they don’t have the ability to function. We need heat, we need energy to ensure that all of these cellular actions happening inside the cell all the time are able to do their job. But as soon as the body starts to become cold as a result of not breathing properly, now we don’t have the energy to send all of that life force to the cells as well as detoxify the body efficiently. And it’s fascinating because when we breathe consciously, we can feed the body up to six times the oxygen that’s 600% more oxygen. I mean, just even consider that it’s amazing and it’s not like we’re pulling six times the air into the lungs.
Deanna Hansen: We are directing the air in the lungs to where the majority of the oxygen receptor sites reside, which is at the base. So the absorption rate increases dramatically as well. They have shown that 85% of weight loss comes through proper exhalation. So if we’re not breathing properly, we’re storing all of this waste in the body. So we basically compress and balloon and become toxic as a result of falling out of balance and the fascia having to allow that collagen to migrate to create these building blocks so that we don’t tip over and land on our face. So that’s why we really need to understand the heating of the body, and that’s why we need to look at the extremities as the major cause sites, because the calves in the feet, they’re the furthest from the engine. So whenever I’m looking at a body and doing an assessment, there’s always going to be one foot that’s going to be acting like a flat tire or the driver of pulling the body away from balance, and then the other side of the body is going to become the anchor.
So the further that driving foot pulls us away, the more tight and rigid the opposite side of the body becomes, and it anchors. So if my right foot is the one pulling me away, now my left shoulder, for example, is getting drawn into that system. So the muscles back through here are under this constant contraction to try to stop me from tipping over, and that’s why we’ll have shoulder issues. It’s also pulling the shoulder out of its joints so we can end up having issues with arthritis. And this is every single cell in the body. I’m just using the shoulder as an example, but that’s why it’s so important to understand the limbs. The limbs are truly the puppet masters of the core. I work with a lot of people with scoliosis and simply addressing the core and the spine is never going to give us lasting results because as soon as we start walking, we’re going to get pulled back into this negative fascia alignment pattern, and we’re going to continue to cycle through those issues lifelong as well. Gravity attracts or is attracted to dense tissue, so the denser the body becomes as a result of it becoming cold and out of alignment the faster we go through the aging process.
Jodi Cohen: You said a couple of things and you detailed this really nicely in your book. You talked about energy and you talked about weight, and that was part of what got you into this. You most of us were like, oh, the more exercise, the skinnier I’ll be, the healthier I’ll be. And it didn’t work out for you. And I mean, look at how gorgeous you are. Can you talk a little bit about your story and your personal experience with changing your breathing, opening your fascia, and the weight loss and the energy boost?
Deanna Hansen: Absolutely. So it was back in my twenties when I was training to be an athletic therapist. So athletic therapy in Canada would be like a physiotherapist, but really trained to work with elite athletes. So I’m doing the work, I’m working out like a fiend. I’m doing 400 situps a day, running ty bow aerobics, weights, I mean, you name it, I’m working it.
Deanna Hansen: I was also dieting in the way that back then I understood dieting, which is basically just limiting calorie intake. I had no concept of what that truly meant from a healthy perspective. So the harder I was working, the bigger I was getting. I was 50 pounds overweight and the majority of my size was stored in my core. So I was really ashamed of it. I felt anything but attractive or sensual. I just felt like this big block of tissue, and I never touched that area, with the exception of if I’d be coming home from a five-mile run dripping wet with sweat, I would observe that my belly would still feel cold.
So this one moment, I made some changes at the age of 30, I’m 54 now. This one moment was the seed of everything to come because I was going through some real struggles and I was having serious anxiety attacks. But this one anxiety attack in particular, I actually thought I was going to die because my breath was just frozen and locked. So for some reason, I intuitively dove my hand into my belly. Now up until that, as an athletic therapist, I always focused on deep tissue work and I had good practice because I had strong hands and I could locate scar tissue and bodies and people and work through it basically in the back and the legs as we were trained to do. But I had never paid any attention to my own belly, and here I was intuitively moving around this tissue and it was marbled with what felt like scar tissue, even though I hadn’t had any injuries or surgeries at that time.
So suddenly I’m having these aha moments. Also, just prior to this moment, I had started the practice of yoga, and I had a wonderful teacher who about every 30 seconds would remind us to breathe. And every time she would remind us, I’m like, wow, I’m not breathing. So I was just in this moment of working in this tissue, I was having these realizations like, no wonder I’m not making any progress with my dieting and my working out because there’s no lifeblood, anything getting into this tissue. So for the first evening, I spent maybe 30, 45 minutes just intuitively exploring, and the next day I woke up and I was a little tender, but I was also calm and that’s not my norm. So I was excited to finish with my patients that day, get back home, and do that work again the next night. And after the second night of doing the same thing, I stood up and I felt taller, I looked at myself in the mirror and I literally began to cry because my belly was flatter than it had looked in years, years of working so hard and failing. And yet in two days literally at my fingertips, I was making positive changes. So this became my new process. Every night I would come home from working on clients, I would start diving into my own body, and within two weeks my chronic low back pain was going away, my neck pain was improving, but most importantly, I was actually hopeful for life for the first time in a very long time. So that was, yeah, 25 years ago almost now. And I’ve never looked back.
Jodi Cohen: We’re the same age. And it’s funny when I started doing yoga, I grew an inch. I was five-six, and suddenly I was five-seven.
Deanna Hansen: Amazing.
Jodi Cohen: No, it really is amazing. And I want to talk a little bit about two things that you brought up, kind of how we kind of protect the heart and what that means both physically and emotionally, and then why we’re all such shallow breathers.
Deanna Hansen: The diaphragm is fascinating because it’s the only muscle that’s under our conscious and unconscious control. Now we’re built to survive. So whether we’re conscious breathers or not, we are going to survive as long as we do and we end up breathing through the muscles of the upper chest because pain, fear, and stress cause us to reactively hold the breath. And then on top of that, when I was a teenager, I was a highland dancer, and I was always told, to hold your belly in. Hold your belly in. Well, if you’re holding your belly in again, you’re going to breathe somehow. And so these muscles of my upper chest, they took over and they became the main breathers because I wanted to have that flat belly. But the challenge with that is now I’m basically making this foundation, the diaphragm weak, causing the entire weight of my rib cage and everything above to crash down into my abdominal space, causing everything to move outward because it’s got to go somewhere, all of that tissue.
And if I take away that space for where it’s supposed to be, now I’m ballooning, I’m getting bigger. That was such a beautiful moment for me to truly understand that because prior to that it was like, why are the rules of weight loss not applying to me? But here I’m making these changes and it was so impactful. But also when we have trauma, heartache, heartbreak, whatever it is, again, that same response of the diaphragm is there. If you see a deer survive an attack, they shake after they release that energy. Where we as humans, tend to move into that freeze mode where we’re going into protection mode and there’s a purpose for it because if we are being attacked by something, it gives us that shot of adrenaline. However, if we continue from that frozen moment and age, from that perspective, now we are truly changing everything in the body from an energetic perspective as well as how we properly feed and clean cells.
Jodi Cohen: I love that. And I mean it’s interesting. I want to kind of get into how you formulated the blocks and how they work. But one of your early exercises, it’s so simple and so powerful. You just have people place this over the belly, which is kind of near the rib cage, and it doesn’t physically hurt, but it must trigger the release of emotions. I just lay on it and wa, and I’m not in physical pain, it’s just like the shaking or all that energy is just coming out of me and it’s really powerful. So can you talk a little bit about what you teach, what the block is, how this works so amazingly well, and how you help people do this at home, which is such a gift?
Deanna Hansen: So there are three pillars to this work. So the science is called fascia decompression Block therapy is the process that we use. People can also use their hands. So either way, the goal here is to decompress the fascia at the belly button. That’s where all of the 72,000 currents of life force come together. That’s where we are attached as we are growing in the womb. So this area is, and I love how Kelly Kennedy comments on this. She said, it’s basically our first scar, and that’s exactly what it is. It’s the scar. So if we keep this abdominal space nice and open and free, we have a very different situation in our body from every aspect to how we look, how we feel, how we function, and how we perceive life. When we start compressing and we start tangling all of the tissue inside this beautiful space, it blocks that life force.
And we also end up storing those negative emotions that have been trapped inside for so long. So at the beginning of every single class, we literally lie on the tool on the belly button. And if it’s too painful to lie on the tool, you can lie on your back, place the tool on your belly button, add a little bit of pressure with your hands, and then we teach you how to train proper diaphragmatic breathing because when we inhale, the belly should become big. I always tell people, to think
pregnant belly with the inhale. And then we want to squeeze the belly small with the exhale. Most people are breathing in the opposite direction when they’re breathing through the muscles of the upper chest. There’s no activity happening in the abdominal space. And then again, the breath isn’t being pulled deeply enough into the lungs to really have optimal absorption or detoxification. So the act of lying on this for a minimum of three minutes, which we always instruct, pressure over time creates heat, it creates blood flow. And then we also instruct on really connecting to the full exhalation. When we do that, now we are training this muscle in the proper way. And also when we slow down the breath and we bring it into a relaxed state, not only does it change our brain frequency to a relaxed state, it turns on the parasympathetic nervous system and all of those wonderful things.
Jodi Cohen: I mean basically that’s amazing what you’re sharing intuitively. I’ve had some interesting traumas and the most interesting, when my son was killed in a car accident, was his dad. That was the driver. His dad was in prison for four and a half years, got released. My daughter’s like, oh, yay, call him. And I’m like, wait a minute, I never processed all this anger. I have all this stuff that I just kind of backburnered because he was out of the picture, said, I need to deal with it. And all of a sudden I’m like, dorsal, vagal freezing because it’s too much for my system and I’m in shutdown and I’m stuck. And I’m like, okay, I’m just going to lie on this. And it’s that one act it just opened. It’s almost like I’m in a room where there is no water. It gave me enough space to just take that one next breath. And I think you were kind of talking about why that placement in that specific area is so, so powerful. So much of what you do is incredibly powerful. That feels like a life raft.
Deanna Hansen: Well, and it’s because of that vagus nerve connection because now we can communicate with the brain in a much more beautiful way. What’s fascinating when we first start this process, we’re basically coming to this work as a cold shell. You know how they say we only use 10% of our brain. I believe we’re actually breathing 10% of our capacity. So when we can actually open up the diaphragm and start feeding ourselves more fully and completely, what’s really exciting is every part of the body starts awakening more. So if we only have 10% of our cells really in use because we are riddled with scar tissue and adhesions, which we all are to some degree, basically we don’t have all of our cells communicating with our brain. So then we get locked into memories of the past and fear of the future. We get pulled into this loop of trauma because we have gaps in the system.
So if 80 to 90% of our cells aren’t communicating with the brain, we’ve got a lot of dead space that we end up reliving memory over and over and over again. So as soon as we start diving in through this process and we melt adhesions, then we start connecting to those cells that are deeper than what we’re consciously aware of. And that’s where we have stored and hidden the negative emotion, the memory around a trauma. And so it has a life inside the body that keeps living as though it’s still here in the moment, even though it could have been decades ago. So when we go through the process, we melt those adhesions, we exhale out the energy, and then suddenly we move past it. And it’s beautiful because there’s no judgment around it. You simply move past it. Now we can have healing crises, we can have memories come to the surface or dreams.
It can also come out through the skin. Your body can suddenly feel like it has a fever or mucus production because the body’s really ingenious at doing what it needs to do. When we start putting positive energy in, the negative energy will come out. Sometimes people just as you mentioned, you’re crying. You have a day where you feel sad because suddenly you’ve opened up this portal of that frequency and now it’s coming out so it can leave and we want to support it leaving you. If you want to be crying all day, that’s a beautiful thing. If you’re feeling angry and there’s no immediate reason for it, it’s because you’ve opened something and you’re letting it out of the body. So these are really healthy things, but we need to understand them because if people don’t understand those healing crises, they can be a little scary. But through the process of connecting to that full exhale, we very efficiently and effectively move that negative energy out to keep the space inside renewed and clean. And I love Greg Braden’s book, the God Code, and he goes into detail, I’m not very good with detail, but he shares that on the surface layer of every single cell. And I believe that the surface layer of every single cell is the fascia connecting every other single cell lies the message God lies within. It’s fascinating.
Jodi Cohen: I totally believe that. And the other thing that’s fascinating that I really appreciate about your block and your teaching, sometimes I feel like we need to titrate the intensity of the release. There’s so much there. And with your therapy, with oils, with so many things, it’s like if you open the soda can, it might explode. So you let out the pressure a little bit easily. I feel like you do a wonderful job kind of helping people to titrate the intensity and really give people a tool to kind of, we have EMDR, we have kind of mental tools to work on the trauma, but I really love what you said that if we don’t really address it in the body, it’s still there.
Deanna Hansen: It is. And the reality is those adhesions in the fascia will grip in adhere to bone with a force of up to 2000 pounds per square inch. I mean, that’s another thing that’s like how is that even possible? How can our body be so strongly held out of alignment? But you can feel it. You can if people have cold feet and you can feel the density in people’s body where we’re dense, we have a lack of flow, and then we also have a whole bunch of adhesions blocking those cells from communicating with our brain, with our whole system. So to be able to understand how to release the extremities while connecting with the breath is such a beautiful simple process. So for all of the listeners here, one of the things that we share for everybody to do every single day, and it’s mind-blowing the changes, is to work between the toes because again, the feet are the furthest from the engine.
So if we take a finger or say a pencil, if you don’t have the strength in your fingers and you press down between each toe for three minutes to the point where you feel that pain as you’re connecting to your exhalation, we start to re-pattern the feet because this is where we’re most strongly gripped and held. So let’s say we had a trauma when we were a child and we ended up in that freeze mode with the breath again, we’re still going to be breathing but differently now. And now that your diaphragm isn’t working, we have all these cells as we’re developing and growing, not being supported through proper breath and detoxification. So then we end up burying all this. As we keep going through time, we get shorter, wider, and denser. So when we start putting some energy, some heat, some love into these spaces, then we connect the breath to the extremities where we’re most strongly held and we start moving the energy in a nicer way. Because yes, there are lots of things that can happen if people just dive into a process and disrupt that trauma too much too fast. You can get overwhelmed, but working the feet and then the extremity, a simple way to do it, three minutes pushing into between each finger just like this, and it’s painful. It’s surprisingly painful.
Jodi Cohen: One at a time, or can you take your own, my yoga instructor always tells us to do all the toes at once with the hands, is that too much?
Deanna Hansen: I do all the toes now, but in the beginning, until you really get an understanding of what it should feel like between each toe, I feel that if people try to do it all at once, they might feel it in only two and they might not be getting the right pressure in all of them. So you’ll still get benefits for sure. But I always tell people, if you’re watching a TV show spend, spend the time just doing it for half an hour, and then when you’re done, stand up, grip the toes into the floor because not only do we want to release the old patterning, we now want to turn these beautiful mechanisms, 26 bones in the feet. We want to turn them into the springy, wonderful foundations of our body that they’re supposed to be instead of becoming a flat tire. So through that gripping the toes, we pump up the tires essentially, and then we can drive our body forward in life without falling into those collapses. And that is also just such a beautiful way to release the energy more effectively and simply throughout the whole body instead of it getting all jarred up and it has nowhere to go.
Jodi Cohen: One of the things before we kind of get into your block and how people can work with you, you mentioned Kelly Kennedy. I’m so intrigued by the intersection of the vagus nerve, the fascia, and the lymph, and I love your take on that, and how they interact with each other.
Deanna Hansen: Well, I mean they’re all married together because again, if we’ve got the adhesions now we have a blockage in our lymphatic system. So adhesions are the roadblocks to whether it’s energy flow or fluids, so lymph being a fluid, if we’re collapsed and twisted over, then we have a blockage for the lymphatic flow as well. And that’s why I love the work that Kelly does as well because it’s such a beautiful compliment. In fact, this is a compliment to everything including your work, because you do the same thing with your beautiful essential oils. You teach people how to move that fluid, and there are so many different ways we can do it, but the adhesions do become that roadblock no matter what. So to understand how to melt those adhesions and get that breath strong, to keep the body warm brings all of these different opportunities that we have for healing into a, not one plus one equals two, but an exponential benefit for our health going forward.
Jodi Cohen: It’s interesting. That’s actually why I created the fascia release formula because I call it like the vagus nerve has co-factors. It’s not just stimulating the vagus nerve. That’s not enough. There are other aspects of the physiology and the emotional state that impact it. And so we have to look at all of them.
Deanna Hansen: And I learned more about the parasympathetic nervous system from your book than I’ve ever read anywhere.
Jodi Cohen: Thank you.
Deanna Hansen: Yeah, it’s fascinating. I mean, everybody needs to read that book.
Jodi Cohen: Oh, you’re so kind. Thank you. But I feel mean, it’s so funny because I’ve been doing this for 12 years and it’s like I’ve wondered if the universe throws obstacles in my way so I can figure out how to get past them. So I want to kind of talk about what you offer people, how they can work with you, how they can use this block to kind of reduce the fascial adhesion. So speak a little bit to what you offer people if they’re like, oh, I need that. All the things I didn’t know I needed.
Deanna Hansen: Now we have what’s called our starter program, and so the block comes with the starter program and we have classes working throughout the body. We always begin working first in the core of the rib cage because most importantly, it’s all about the breath. So again, there are three pillars. The first pillar is creating space that we do through lying on the tool, then inflating the space through the teaching of proper diaphragmatic breathing, and then maintaining that space through teaching people proper postural foundations. So in our program, we have classes that teach you all of these things. We work through the entire body, we work head to toe. And then from there we also have a membership with tons and tons of programs and additional classes. We also teach people how to bring some hand work in. We even have a video on conscious walking because how we use our body is as important as going through the process of releasing the patterning that we have and learning how to breathe properly.
So we make it really simple in our programs to do that. So you simply just order the tool. Block therapy.com is our website, and you start, we also have a sampler program and would love to give to your people listening for free. It’s amazing. It’s nine classes using a rolled-up towel so you can begin right away and the towel, when you roll it up nice and dense, it works pretty darn good because it’s about the teaching. So the difference between this process and some of the other fascia modalities is if we are rolling on a fascia roller or a tennis ball or something like that, the rolling keeps us on the surface. Just like you’re taking a boat on the surface of the ocean, we need to deep-sea dive. So the tool is made of either bamboo or wood because bone and wood, bamboo and wood, similar in density to bone.
Deanna Hansen: And because the fascia will grip and adhere to the bone with that 2000-pound per square inch seal, it’s a magnetic seal. We need something similar in density to be able to reach that depth. So when you’re lying in a position for a minimum of three minutes after you connect with the breath and you understand the process of seeking pain on purpose, which I’d love to talk in a moment about, we teach you how to slowly shear through the layers so we can release that magnetic seal. If I have a magnet far enough away from each other, there’s no attraction, pull it close together and it seals with the force. If I try to pull this away, I won’t have any luck doing that, but I can slide it apart. So the shearing allows us to go through the depths of fascia to get to those adhesions with the tools.
Jodi Cohen: Oh my gosh, I’m having a full body knowing, okay, talk about pain on purpose.
Deanna Hansen: So pain is the baby crying, and whether it’s pain, anxiety, or any other, what we would determine as a negative sensation, that’s your cell letting you know that, Hey, mom or dad, you’re asking me to do a job, but you’re not giving me what I need. If we’re compressed, we’re squishing it and then it’s not going to be properly fed, not clean, it’s going to be dehydrated, exhausted. So it gives us information through pain signals. So we basically, again, if we are, and nobody is a perfectly aligned body, every cell is in the correct position, but because again, we don’t start falling away, but pain takes us away. So let’s say I’m a golfer and I wake up and I’ve got a little bit of a tweak in my neck. I slept funny, but I wanted to go and play that golf game, but I don’t have my normal full range of motion I’m going to play and unconsciously I’m going to adapt my swing so that I can still do the action.
But there’s going to be a slight shift in how I do that. If that doesn’t get switched and changed in the moment, which it normally doesn’t, it adds up. And because now I’m twisted in a different way, the fascia, that migration of collagen is going to constantly be adapting to these new forces, these new negative alignments I’m creating in my body. So pain takes us away from alignment. So we’re going to use pain as our roadmap back to that correct alignment. And what’s lovely about it is the pressure fibers are larger in diameter than the pain fibers. So initially you get into the position and you sense that pain butt, you are in control, and we always teach people your breath is your guide. As long as you’re breathing in a relaxed way, you’re feeding and healing, if anything hurts so much, it takes your relaxed breath away. That’s your body saying too intense. So let’s back off a little bit. We can do the work on the floor, we can do it on a bed. Most of the work is done lying down, which is also lovely.
Jodi Cohen: So you talk about in the book your mom hurt her ankle or hurt her leg, and just this idea of healing and how we think of inflammation as the bad guy that we need to stop, but how you have kind of figured out how to work with inflammation to expedite healing. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Deanna Hansen: Yeah, and it always struck me as odd as I was going through my athletic therapy training. Somebody would have a torn muscle or something would happen, and I was always like, ice makes no sense to me. Why would the body be doing this as a natural response? And we as humans think, oh, we know better. It just never made sense. So everything I’ve ever taught, I’ve first done on myself. So here my mom comes in, she’s a second-degree ankle sprain. She comes right off the golf course to see me. And so I’ve only done stuff on myself for it. And I’m like, okay, well, I’m going to test my mother. I mean, if something goes wrong, she’s not going to sue me or something. So I have her on the table and first of all, I just get her to calm down with her breath, and then I just add a little bit of energy into her quads and her calf just so that there’s some good flow.
And then right where the injury is, I start just applying a little bit of pressure, and at first, she’s just pulling away, but again, I’m just like, keep breathing. You let me know. I give her the control and then before I know it, I’m going deeper, deeper, deeper. And then I had her standing up on it and then I had her walking on it and it was amazing. She walked out almost without a limp, and I explained to her, you’re probably going to be in some pain tonight. I’m going to come back over tomorrow morning and I’m going to work on it again. She did let me know in no uncertain terms that evening, that she felt the pain because what went into the body, we allowed to come out. We didn’t freeze it in that negative state, and the next day she was 80% better.
It was amazing. So it took hardly any time for her to fully heal from this injury. And I always explain with inflammation, it’s like here the body is directing all this blood flow with all of the ingredients to rebuild the tissue. So if you’re baking a cake, you’ve got all the raw ingredients, you mix it up, you have batter, but if you put the batter in the freezer, you have frozen batter, put the batter in the oven, you bake a cake. We need heat and energy to allow those raw ingredients to rebuild whatever was damaged. And we don’t even have to know because the body will take care of itself as long as we support the natural processes of the body. So we can repair so much faster than, well, not only faster, but in a completely different manner than if we allow that scar tissue or that injury to be healed with scar tissue.
Deanna Hansen: Because what that does is now I’ve got a gap. All of the collagen and the surrounding tissue, if it’s not being rebuilt through that inflammation is going to get dumped in. And now we have a scar, and that scar has no last ability. It acts like a beaver down to cells on the other side, and then we get pulled into this chronic inflammation because your brain or your body is still saying, well, wait a second, you’re not really healed over there. Now there’s all these other cells that need more attention. So the body keeps directing blood flow to this area, but if we’ve already frozen it, it becomes backed up and stagnant and creates more damage and then more inflammation, and then the body gets thrown into this crazy response. It’s dysregulated now. So no matter where you’re starting in your body, we can turn on all of those healing proteins by heating the body up and by understanding how to melt the adhesions that were created through this process so that we can actually go backward through time in our tissue, get back to those injuries and truly heal them properly.
And it’s just so lovely and fascinating to see because again, it’s a simple process, not without those shifts because those shifts are real, but we’re in pain anyway. And rather than having gravity direct where our future holds us to give people and empower them to be able to walk through life and awaken their greater potentials and understand how that full exhalation is really the counterforce to gravity. So when we can get back to the basics and the body’s designed to do this, it’s not like we’re forcing the body to do something different than what it’s supposed to do. We’re just treating it so that it can be remembered.
Jodi Cohen: I really love that. I forgot to ask, I love this little one too. I’m slightly obsessed with the neck as kind of the big bottleneck because it lets the good things into the brain, it helps with drainage. Can you just talk about it, I know you have a bigger program for those people who are interested in the fascia release on the neck, what do you cover in that program, like for the vagus nerve, the neck, everything?
Deanna Hansen: Yeah, so I have a ton of those classes actually in the membership where I’m using because we’ve got actually two different size blocks. I’ve got a series called The Baby. You’ve got the Paddle, this is the Baby.
Jodi Cohen: I have all three.
Deanna Hansen: Oh, you’ve got all perfect. I’ve got a series called Double Blocking the Neck and Throat, and it’s three 30 minutes literally focusing through here. And I love that series because it really creates that space. It opens up this area, all of those adhesions. I’ve also got a class in there called the Wrinkle Wrecker because we really want to understand the tongue. The tongue is partly designed to support the weight of the head, but if it’s not understood, it becomes a hindrance to this area and impacts your thyroid, your major lymphatic drainage sites, and the carotid arteries. So in the membership alone, we have that, but I also have a program called the Face Lifter Program using that paddle now, we launched it a little bit ago and our community loved it, and then we’ve had some growth things going on, so it’s not quite available yet. The paddle will be probably by the fall with our whole program around that Rev revamped. So I’m very excited about that. But people are getting tremendous results just from people.
Jodi Cohen: You look amazing. You are the cover model for your own product.
Deanna Hansen: Thank you.
Jodi Cohen: Anything that I haven’t asked you that you’d like to share?
Deanna Hansen: Wow. I mean, there are so many things and what I just get so excited about is it doesn’t matter if you’re a kid. We’ve got people starting in their nineties. It’s wild. If you’re an elite athlete, if you’re struggling to get out of bed every day, you can access this work and you take it to the level just like yoga, if you have a goal of doing the splits, you start where you are and you work toward the goal. So with this process, it doesn’t matter where you are.
Jodi Cohen: Hips, for anyone that like me, likes to cheat in pigeon pose or side-to-side lenses because you can’t bend is great for the hips.
Deanna Hansen: Yes. And simply working between the toes will change the game. I had a client who was at one of my retreats at Sparkling Hill last year. She’s in her seventies, and she was sitting there and when she’s sitting cross-legged, her knees were up about this high and she said, okay, Deanna, I’m determined. What do I need to do in three months to get this to change? And I said, every day work between your toes because the foot is what’s messing up your hip. Just like if I took your arm and I pulled it this way, now this is my range. If I release this now, this is my range. So by releasing the toes she shared in our community group last month, her knees are all the way to the floor.
Jodi Cohen: Wow. Okay. I am on board. I definitely have my knees too. This has been so amazing. We will definitely have to talk more, but please tell people where they can find you and learn more about working with you.
Deanna Hansen: So block therapy.com is my website and there’s so much information on there. My favorite thing is if you happen to be on Facebook, we have a private Facebook group called Block Therapy Community, which anybody can join. This is lovely because there are 15,000 members in there now, and whatever question you ask, you’re going to have the members answering you as well. So if you have fibromyalgia or MS or you want to know, does this work for cellulite or whatever it is, you can ask those questions and you’re going to get real answers from the people doing the work that have seen the changes. And that’s the most exciting part for me because I mean, I can talk all I want about it, but to actually have people experience those changes and to be sharing with you, community is so important and is just such a lovely place to be. I have two of my therapists moderating the group and they’re fantastic.
Jodi Cohen: Amazing. Well, thank you so much for your time, for your brilliance, and for everything you shared. I’m sure everybody got a lot of dots connected and for your very generous software, we’ll put that in the show notes for the nine-class program, nine-day program.
Deanna Hansen: Yeah, it’s called the Sampler Program. So everybody just gets that link, try it, and if you love it, then you can go to the next step.
Jodi Cohen: Amazing. Thank you so much.
Deanna Hansen: Thank you, Jodi.
Jodi Cohen: Thank you so much for listening. I hope this podcast empowered you with some useful information and takeaways. If you liked this episode, please consider sharing a positive review or subscribing. I would also love to offer you my free parasympathetic toolkit as a gift just for listening. It will teach you how to activate the most important nerve in your body to turn on your ability to heal. This free toolkit includes a checklist, a video, and a detailed guide. If this podcast prompted any questions, you can always find answers at my blog at vibrantblueoils.com or my book Essential Oils to Boost the Brain and Heal the Body. Until next time, wishing you Vibrant Health.
