The next thing that I want to say about chronic pain is that people that suffer with chronic pain are much more likely to suffer with depression. That may seem completely obvious. It may not even need to be said. It’s like, of course, if you’re hurting all the time, you’re going to be depressed. But it actually goes beyond the obvious reasons. So it is not just because you are depressed because you’re hurting all the time. It is not just because you are depressed because you maybe can’t accomplish the things you want to, like I talked about last time or you can’t have fun or enjoyed time with friends and family in the same ways as you want to. It’s not even because of those reasons that chronic pain sufferers also typically suffer with depression or more commonly do.
It is because of your brain and the pain centers in your brain, especially the chronic pain centers, those are related to the centers in your brain that are activated in depression. So it’s like you’re a button in your brain that’s being pushed over and over. And every time there’s pain signals being sent to your brain, it’s also activating that portion of your brain that processes depression. So this goes beyond just I’m hurting, so that depresses me.
You need to realize if you suffer with chronic pain, again, bringing from the last post that I made, give yourself some grace, but also recognize that there’s a reason why you’re feeling this way. There’s a reason that you’re struggling with depression. So, that bringing in that mental health aspect and not just chalking it up too well, I’m in pain all the time so of course, I’m depressed. Get some support in that area as well. As most of you know, I’m a huge advocate for mental health support at all times and especially if you suffer with chronic pain, there may be some deeper things there that you definitely need support for. So please take care of yourself. Get some mental health support.
Hey everyone, it’s Dr. Emily Hurley. Thank you for tuning in. If you caught my video last week, I was talking about the level one of dynamic body balancing. When I first started on this journey of learning and training in make body balancing, I had absolutely no idea what it was. I did not know what I was getting myself into, let me say. And I found this really beautiful and life changing body work that Dr. Carol Phillips has created and teaches all over the world and all over the country. So I, last week shared about that level one of dynamic body balancing was that full body mild fascial release. And I shared about some of my experiences in being able to help patients with that since I first was trained in it a couple of years ago. I did want to share my personal story.
This is something I have not shared with very many people. And I want to share it because I think it really demonstrates the beauty of this work. And also, I think it really illustrates why I feel so strongly called to do this work and why I so passionate about sharing it with others. So my goal in sharing my story is that if any portion of it sounds like something that you are looking for in your life, then this is a way for you to find answers like I was looking for at the time. So when I was in chiropractic school, I got an amazing opportunity to do a pediatric rotation in clinic. So this was a really cool opportunity to train with a very well known and well respected chiropractic mentor in the pediatric community. So she always did this very different kind of cranial work on babies.
So I had learned some cranial adjusting in chiropractic school and I really loved it. I’ve always said you suffered from headaches and migraines and I loved the cranial adjusting that I was learning in school. But when I observed Dr. Periot in our pediatric rotation, when I observed her cranial work, it was completely different from what I had learned. And babies, kids, teenagers, adults, they loved it. Their bodies just melted. We saw really amazing results. And so I started asking her, can you teach me this cranial work? Well, I want to do this. And she told me, no. I’m not going to teach it to you. This is Carol Phillips work, and you need to learn it from her. And so I did. I signed up for Carol’s class and I was excited to go and learn more about cranial work.
I had no idea that dynamic body balancing included this full body myofascial work. I didn’t know the benefits of it during pregnancy, the type of birth work and labor work we can do with this unwinding technique and I had no idea at all about this energy work component that what I would be experiencing at the dynamic body balancing seminars. So I definitely say, I did not know what I was getting myself into. I definitely would not have said that I believed in energy work. I probably would’ve said it was something crazy and I would not have signed up if I had known what it was truly. It wasn’t until I experienced this work that I truly believed in it and saw how powerful it could be. So when I arrived at the seminar, I was in a really hard place in my life.
Many of you know that this beautiful clinic that I have the honor to be a part of is Hurley Chiropractic. It is the clinic that my mom founded 26 years ago. And I grew up in this clinic and I was so excited to come and work with her and learn from her. But just a few months before I graduated, my mom passed away. So I was instead thrown into the chaos of trying to learn how to run a business, learn how to be a doctor and learn how to process and grieve this sudden loss of my mom. And I felt to be in a really dark place. I was not processing my anger and my grief well and I didn’t know how. And I did, I felt dark. That’s the only way that I know how to describe it.
I had this heavy, heavy, dark bitterness inside me. And I really started trying to look for, I’ve got to release this. I’ve got to… It’s okay to be angry. It’s okay to grieve. It’s okay to be sad and scared and traumatized. But this dark bitterness and resentment that I had, was not serving me and I didn’t know how to work through it or release it. Side note. I’m a huge, huge advocate for mental health support. And I had a one therapist at the time. And I do want to say that when I do this energy and emotional work with people, it does not replace seeing a wonderful therapist, getting counseling and getting the mental health support that is needed. So I do want to say start there. And this is a beautiful supplement to add on to. Like I’ve said before, like I mentioned last week, it’s great to supplement chiropractic care for the physical pain. But because there is this energetic release that can happen when we’re unwinding the fascia of the body.
There’s energy stored in that connective tissue. Maybe from a trauma. Maybe we had a physical trauma, injured the tissue, injured the body and the fear of the trauma got locked in. Maybe the opposite is true. Maybe an emotional trauma caused our body to create that tension, to protect, to lockdown. Just like when we get stressed, our shoulders get tense or our stomach hurts. Our feelings, our emotions, our experiences can get locked into our body in a lot of ways. So while this can be a little bit more… I mean, I just straight up, I call it voodoo to my patients. I recognize it’s a little more out there than a lot of what we’re doing with our therapy massage, our chiropractic, and a little bit more of that directly science based therapies that we do. But I think we have to recognize that it exists.
It happens. Every day we’re in interacting with energy in our body and other people’s energies. And so to acknowledge it and to work with it is pretty cool. So I had no idea I was getting myself into this but this weekend, this first weekend with Carol Phillips, I don’t know how she knew. I’m really, really good at putting on a happy face and projecting that I’m wonderful and everything is great. I did not share any of my personal story, only that I was a chiropractor and I was interested in learning more about the cranial work she did. Somehow, Carol knew. She has amazing intuition. And from doing this energy work, she can really tune in and pick up on some pretty crazy personal things with people. And that’s exactly what she did with me. So every time that she was going to demonstrate a new portion of this technique and training throughout the weekend, she chose me to demonstrate on.
And let me tell you if she hadn’t and I’d only been observing some of this were work, I would not have bought into it the way I did. But to experience how unwinding the body can release these really powerful emotions and help to process and release this negative energy that I was holding inside of me is amazing. And she knew you crazy stuff about me that I did not share. So it’s pretty interesting. It’s pretty out there, but if it’s something that you feel like you’ve been looking for. If you feel like you’ve been looking for a way to process trauma, grief, anger, sadness. It’s something that I’m really passionate about. And again, I don’t… I’m not a therapist. I’m not replacing mental health support, but to be able to tune in to what your body needs, to where your energy’s at, and to be able to acknowledge it and hold a space to process and work through it, it’s pretty life changing.
And so that’s the experience that I had. I was able to release so much anger, resentment, bitterness, and that darkness inside of me throughout that weekend, through doing the unwinding, I described to you guys. Through unwinding, as we unwind the fascial system, that energy is stored in there. And so we’re able to create amazing change in our emotions, in our energy and in the physical aspect of what we’re doing too. So if this is something that sounds like what you’re looking for, please, please let me know. And the other part of it is you don’t have to talk about it. You can come and we can work and unwind and release things, and you never have to share with me what you’re feeling or what you’re releasing. It works whether or not we talk it out. Sometimes talking about it is useful in the moment when it bubbles to the surface.
Some people it’s part of their process to just speak about it as we’re letting it go. That was not the case for me. When Dr. Carol Phillips and everyone in my class was working on me and I was at times on the floor crying, I didn’t share what I was feeling or where I’d come from or why I was upset. So if that part seems daunting to you is not a necessary portion of this type of work. So we don’t have to even know what we’re working on. You may not know that it’s from a specific trauma. You may just know that you have a heaviness that you want to try to release and that you want to have some personal growth, and maybe you want to work through some limiting beliefs you have, and you want to get better. So again, please let me know if this is something that calls to you. If it’s something that you feel would benefit you, and I would absolutely love to help in any way. Thanks everyone.
Hey everyone. It’s Dr. Emily Hurley, like I was telling you all last week, I’m so excited that I just received my 100-hour certification in Dynamic Body Balancing. It’s a myofascial unwinding craniosacral therapy and an energy work that I’ve been learning with the Dr. Carol Phillips, so I wanted to share more about what I’ve learned, who I have been able to help through this, and who can benefit from Dynamic Body Balancing and what that looks like. As I told you last week, there is five levels. There were five different weekends that I was going to Dallas. I was training there.
Level one was focusing in on the myofascial release. What is myofascial release? Myofascial is a connective tissue that covers all of our muscles in our whole body. I tell people if you’ve ever skinned a deer, for my hunters out there, or if you remember dissecting in class, when you peel back the skin, you see a cobwebby white, very delicate connective tissue, and that is our fascia, and then when we peel that back, and when I was dissecting in school, in anatomy labs, that’s what we did, right. We tore right through that fascia so that we could get down to seeing the muscle groups, the veins, nerves, and arteries.
Scientists are learning more and more about the fascial network and that fascia, they are learning, is so significant, it’s almost like its own organ system. If you can imagine, covering all of our muscles right under the skin throughout our entire body, we have this connective tissue. That’s called the fascia, and this fascia, it can get dehydrated. It can get matted down, it can get twisted, it can get restricted, just like you can get tight muscle knots and joints in the spine that get restricted, that we work on as chiropractors.
The myofascial system can also have areas that get matted down, that can get twisted, that can get restricted, and so sometimes we are working and working, working in an area on somebody. We’re working and working on this area of their spine that’s always stuck and adjusting and adjusting. It just stays stuck, so we think maybe we need to help get the muscle spasms around to relax, so we’re doing muscle work, our massage therapists here do amazing therapeutic muscle work, and sometimes even that isn’t doing the trick. Well, this is a great opportunity when we can take a step back and say, “Well, what’s even covering the muscles, and is that…” It’s almost like your arm is in a sleeve. It’s almost like a really tight sweater. If that is constricting the muscle and the joint, then it can’t be healthy. It can’t move how it’s supposed to and it can’t respond to the treatments that we’re doing.
There’s lots of different ways to do myofascial release. Our massage therapists are also trained in certain types of myofascial release, but the cool thing about the Dynamic Body Balancing is it’s a very indirect way to do a myofascial release. It’s amazing for people that maybe don’t respond well to a really direct type of body work or really digging in and getting in there. Maybe their body needs a lighter touch.
The cool thing about Dynamic Body Balancing is as we are unwinding the fascia, we’re unwinding the body, we start with the legs, I start with testing the hips, the legs, is everything rotating the way it’s supposed to, are the legs balanced, are your muscles firing the same from side to side? And if no, we can know that there is a issue with that fascia. If the fascia is twisted, then everything else underneath the muscles and the bones are going to have a harder time to stay balanced as well.
We do this… it’s a really gentle unwinding of the legs. It’ll feel like a gentle stretch, but the difference is I’m following this person’s body. When I’m facilitating this myofascial release, I’m not saying, “This is tight and so I’m going to push it and stretch it,” and that’s what we do a lot of times in chiropractic, in massage, in physical therapy. A lot of things we’re doing here in the office, I’m analyzing as a chiropractor and saying, “This joint is stuck and I’m going to push through it and restore motion to the joint, and it’s a very specific angle that I’m going to do this, and I have the intention to restore motion in this way.”
Same thing we find tight hamstrings in physical therapy. All right, well, we’re going to push through that and we’re going to help stretch out those hamstrings. In massage we say, “Man, this muscle’s tight. We’re going to dig in there and get it loosened up,” and all of those therapies are, I think, critical. Every person’s body needs them at some point in time, and they all work really well.
But with the Dynamic Body Balancing, it’s a mindset shift. I am not being a doctor. I am not saying, “I have this intention for your body.” I get rid of my agenda and I tune in with, what does this body want, what does this body need, and I actually follow the body. This is all, I guess, hypothetical or difficult to envision, but if I am actually going to, as I’m unwinding a leg, let’s say, I am going to gently compress all the joints of the leg and then I’m going to follow the body as it starts to unwind. I think of it almost as if we pull the two ends of yarn that might be tangled up just in the right way, it will start to unravel on its own, rather than us trying to pick apart the knot from the inside.
It depends on where that person’s at, but I’ve been noticing that for people, if their adjustments don’t seem to be holding, if their muscles are staying really tight and they’re not necessarily responding to treatments how I think they would, sometimes I take a step back and say, “Maybe some unwinding will really be beneficial.”
I want to share some of the types of cases and some of the people that have really responded well with some of this full-body myofascial unwinding. The protocol begins, and I say the protocol because sometimes I go straight by the protocol and sometimes I use my intuition to really zero in on a certain area. If I was doing the full protocol, I would start with the legs. I’d unwind the legs then I would unwind the diaphragm. Our diaphragm is right here, lining our ribcage. It’s right underneath our lungs, and our diaphragm is what we use to breathe. When we’re taking a nice deep belly breath, our diaphragm is pushing down gently on all of our organs and allowing our lungs and ribcage to expand the way it should. A lot of us, almost everyone probably at some point, can get into a bad habit when we’re anxious, stressed, busy, or maybe we just aren’t even thinking about how we’re breathing. We can get into a bad pattern of really breathing from our chest and our shoulders.
For our lungs to expand, if the diaphragm’s not pressing down, we’re not belly breathing, our lungs have to expand up instead. This can be a huge cause of always tight shoulders and neck, feeling tight in the chest, and this can even cause anxiety. When we’re anxious, we’re more likely to breathe in our chest, but then if our body patterns get used to always chest breathing, it can actually trigger the opposite effect and cause more anxiety, because we’re used to breathing in this shallow chest breathing type of way. So unwinding the diaphragm has been really beautiful for people with anxiety, for people with rib pain, rib cage pain, and even with my… I found with babies, my babies that have acid reflux or if they’re spitting up a lot, that can be from the diaphragm being really tight. It’s restricting the stomach and the digestive system.
Those are the people that really benefit from the diaphragm release. I will unwind the arms and shoulders, and then I unwind the spinal cord. This is a really fun one to do. I actually do it with a… The patient will be sitting, I press down very gently on top of their head and their whole neck, back, and actually their whole body, their spinal cord will start to unwind.
I actually had a patient who told me one day, she was like, “I can’t describe this, but I almost feel like my spinal cord hurts. Not like I need adjusted.” She’d just been adjusted and her back pain was gone, “but my inner spinal cord hurts,” and when she said that, I thought, “Well, the only thing I know to do for the spinal cord would be to unwind the spinal cord,” and we did that. She had really great results.
Another population that I consider the spinal cord being… having tension in the spinal cord is our babies. It’s one of the things that I check in all of my babies when they come in, and it’s something you can do at home too. One of the ways I check does baby have tension in the spinal cord is, I know it sounds crazy, I hold babies upside down, okay. It’s safe and they usually love it, okay. You hold them by their ankles. Please don’t drop your babies. That is the only, only part of this, but I gently… I hold them by the ankles, slowly invert them and let the babies hang by their ankles and feet, okay.
If babies, ideally, if they are balanced, their arms should relax and hang directly over their head. Their head should maybe turn a little bit side to side, but mostly be balanced hanging straight ahead. If there is tension in the body, in the fascia or in the spinal cord, especially if there’s a lot of tension in the spinal cord, babies will arch back. They’ll arch their heads back. They’ll go really tense and they’ll arch backwards with their shoulders, their head and neck. That’s my first sign, “Oh wow, there’s a lot of tension in the spinal cord for this baby.”
Another thing that I see often is as soon as they go upside down, babies will turn their head one way and you’ll think, “Oh, maybe they’re looking at something over there,” so test it. Turn them slowly the other way, and if they keep their head in the same position, we know that this baby needs to be adjusted as well. There’s something stuck in their neck that makes it to where they always are favoring that one side. So those are some indicators that I do. It’s called the inversion test. You can do it at home to see does my baby have any tension or any imbalances that they might need adjusted, or they might need the Dynamic Body Balancing to unwind their system.
That’s the level one. Like I said, what I learned in that level one seminar, it was a lot. A lot of information, and next week I’m actually going to share my experience with receiving this work during that level one seminar. It was really life changing for me, the experiences I had that weekend. It was not what I was prepared for and I really… I felt that I was a different person when I left that weekend. I am going to get personal and vulnerable and share some really intimate things about my experience with that next week, but I wanted to really talk structurally about who benefits from the myofascial unwinding, that level one, beginning of the protocol, is that full body unwinding.
Like I said, if you feel just like head to toe, if you feel tension, if you’re getting adjusted, getting massage and feeling like the results just aren’t lasting as like it should, if you feel like you have difficulty or restriction with belly breathing or calming your breathing down, if you have hip pain, groin pain, SI joint pain that… the low back pain again that’s just not holding, the unwinding of the legs has been really powerful for these patients that are having this chronic hip SI joint low back pain that they’re not seeing improving or holding with the adjustments.
It’s a really cool full body release, like I said, and next week I’m going to share with you all a bit about my experience with receiving this work as well. All right. Thanks everybody.
Hey everyone. It’s Dr. Hurley. I have some exciting news I wanted to share. Over the last two years, I’ve been working on a certification in a type of bodywork that’s called Dynamic Body Balancing. And this work is created and taught by Dr. Carol Phillips, she’s a chiropractor and she’s well known in the birth community for being the creator of the content for Spinning Babies and for being a groundbreaking trendsetter in cranial work in the chiropractic community as well.
So I’ve been doing this certification with her for her Dynamic Body Balancing classes, and this weekend I completed the certification. I went through five levels of the seminars, and I got my 100-hour completion seminar certificate. So, I’m really excited. I’m going to be posting over the next few weeks. I really want to share the things that I’ve been learning in these classes, the things I’ve learned for myself and the ways that this work has healed me, and also the ways that I’m looking forward to being able to help others and serve others with this type of work.
This is bodywork that incorporates craniosacral, myofascial release and an energy balancing component as well. So, I’m really excited to share more about my personal experience with my journey through receiving this work as we learned it. The most valuable part of it was that I was able to receive this work, and I’m excited to share more. So stay tuned on our podcasts and blogs on our website, and I’ll be posting them to social media as well.
