← The Nourished Nervous System
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- [00:04]
A
Welcome to the Nourished Nervous System, an exploration of stress, the nervous system and resilience for parents and other humans through the lens of Ayurveda, somatics, herbs, and a whole lot more. I'm your host, Kristin Timchak, an Ayurvedic health counselor, stress and resilience coach, somatic stress release practitioner, and mother of a tiny human. Please join me for information and insights, deep thoughts and small steps to help you nourish your nervous system. Hello, hello, welcome, and welcome back to the Nourished Nervous System. So happy that you are here on this day. I hope you're doing well out there in the world. Hope you're finding some moments to pause, to breathe, to feel your body. And today's episode is with Donna Brooks, who is a somatic movement therapist and educator, a yoga therapist and embodied meditator with 40 years of experience teaching, counseling and coaching in movement and the healing arts. And Donna is awesome. I've known Donna for many years now. We originally met in Western Massachusetts in the somatic dance community there. And I also in that time became very close friends with her son, Michael J. Brooks, who was a political commentator and talk show host and comedian and writer, and just an all around really incredible human. And Michael and I became friends in this time where we were both in these transition periods of our lives and we were really supports for each other in that time and he since has passed away. And so I feel like when I get to have these opportunities to connect with Donna in this way, Michael feels really alive in the space with us. So I just wanted to name that special part of this connection as well. So Donna's been on before. I'm so happy to welcome her back. And I'm going to stop blabbing now and just get into the conversation. Oh, and just a reminder that this podcast is purely for entertainment and educational purposes and should not be considered health or mental health advice. Anything said should not be taken as a replacement for medical, clinical, professional advice, diagnosis, or medical intervention. Okay, now we will get into the conversation. Welcome back, Donna. I'm so happy to have you here again.
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B
I'm glad to be here.
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A
Awesome. So, to begin, for those who maybe have not listened to your first episode that we did together, will you introduce yourself and talk about your path to where you are now?
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B
Oh, yeah. Okay. Well, I'm Donna Brooks and I started out, I guess, my professional path as a yoga teacher in the 1980s, and I had danced in college. And what sent me to yoga, to Iyengar yoga specifically, was A knee injury. I loved Iyengar yoga. That was my constant practice for many years. But I missed moving. And so what happened was I was living in Washington D.C. and I started going to the Feldenkrais center of Washington D.C. and being introduced to this thing called somatic movement. And it was kind of a little bit of a renaissance of somatic movement. At that point in D.C. there was a breakaway Feldenkrais teacher, Thomas Hanna, who people were talking about, that I had an opportunity to do some work with. I used to study with people who were influenced by Corolla spreads and Middendorf breath work. It fulfilled both this part in that needed to move, but also that the movement was more intrinsic. Because as much as I love dianegar yoga, it was you don't put your foot here, move your hips to this degree and there wasn't any like vital life in that. And then fast forward a number of years. I went back to New York for a while and then I ended up in Western Massachusetts. And who was here but Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, that I had multiple opportunities to study with her and senior teachers and still do spend a lot of time with Bonnie Co. And the other person that I spent some time with and who had a number of teachers here was Emily Conrad doing the continuum work. And for years I just kind of integrated all this somatic stuff into yoga. And that's kind of interesting because lately I've been asked to teach somatic based yoga classes, which I guess now lots of people do. But at the time I was kind of like, you know, we're talking about the 90s. Like I was like, what am I doing? I wasn't really sure what I was doing, but I knew that it was really good for my body and for other people's bodies and our minds and feelings. But at a certain point my practice became more just simply somatically based. And I have worked with people with Parkinson's. Really way early on I worked with Karen Steffen Iyengar teacher who worked with HIV AIDS patients. So that that really taught me a lot of compassion and a lot of listening. Yeah, I've worked with people with traumatic brain injury. So it's been some kind of just open ended exploration. But somehow I found myself more in the part of somatic movement that's used therapeutically. And as part of that therapeutic process has been my own pelvic floor issues and therefore that spreading out into the pelvic floor with other people.
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A
Awesome. I really relate to that. I started off in yoga as well. Kripalo Yoga and then found contact, improvisation and more, the somatic, the authentic movement and those type of practices. And it's interesting because just recently I'm starting to step back into teaching yoga again after being kind of away from it for so many years. But from exactly what you were talking about, that kind of rigidity of it, and it's so neat to come back to it with all of the somatic work, where I think about it almost as looking at internal alignment as opposed to the external alignment. And so, yeah, it's this. It's like a whole new exploration to approach yoga from this way. So that's really cool.
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B
Yeah, I love that.
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A
So maybe for folks. I think most people know what their pelvic floor is, but maybe just for people who are listening, who don't know, let's just start with what. What is the pelvic floor?
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B
That's a very good question. So the pelvic floor is a system of support. Let's say that that is based between your tailbone, each of your sit bones, and your pubic bones. So there's a series of muscles. There are classic pelvic floor muscles, which are generally what is worked with when you go to pelvic floor retraining. And then there are. Are layers of other muscles also on your pelvic floor that may or may not really influence the strength or flexibility of your pelvic floor. And also layers of connective tissue and ligaments. I think there are seven layers of connective tissue kind of separating these muscular levels. And they're all underneath your bladder. Well, in women, it's a little different in men. Bladder, uterus, and rectum. Right. So men don't have a uterus, but they have the prostate. And. Yeah, has been in the past really overlooked. But it's becoming more talked about now because many women, and definitely some men, experience pain and. Or laxity or difficulty voiding or too much ease in voiding, peeing when they sneeze. So now it's becoming more of a. Of a known place.
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A
Yeah. Awesome. I'd love to talk about. Because there's actual physical problems that can happen with the pelvic floor, like after birth or just for a myriad of different reasons. But there's also this emotional societal component to the pelvic floor problem. So can you talk a little bit about that aspect of it?
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B
Yes, yes. So the pelvic floor for women is kind of like the root or the seed of our femininity because it is really where our sexuality resides. I mean, in the base of Our sexuality. And so when there are problems with the pelvic floor, there's often a lot of shame. It's also a place that's still kind of forbidden to talk about. Even if there's not intense shame, there's often a lot of embarrassment. So for older women or for women who had difficult childbirths, there's often problems with peeing. You know, you cough, you sneeze, you pee, or maybe just you're walking around and you pee. There's problems with leaking of the rectum or the rectum, rectum or the bladder falling into the vagina. And then with other women, it's kind of the opposite. There's a lot of contraction in the pelvic floor and a lot of pain. So some women I have met who I've worked with have that from sexual trauma, which makes a lot of sense. You know, you're going to react to sexual trauma by getting really tight. And the emotional tightness also creates a physical tightness. But this can also happen from just a loose pelvic floor. You know, there are other things besides childbirth that create laxity in the pelvic floor. Being overweight, being sedentary, and having surgeries. Surgeries really complicate. Abdominal surgeries can complicate the pelvic floor. So sometimes the pelvic floor contracts if there's a prolapse. So what happens potentially during childbirth is there could be too much pressure on the pelvic organs, and they can kind of be pushed and pulled too much and start hanging down. And as women get older, this becomes more prominent because your estrogen and potentially your progesterone help keep everything juicy and lifted, you know, just like your face. And so it's similar. It's like the pelvic floor organs can drop, and it's harder for the muscles to hold them up. So sometimes the muscles just kind of sag, and other times the muscles kind of try to hold things up so much that they're always clenching. Sometimes this is an emotional decision, right? Like, oh, my God, there's something wrong. I better hold it up. Like, even unconsciously. So there's layers of it. There's also perfectionism with women. So I have this little ebook that explains a lot about the pelvic floor and a somatic approach to it. And the image I use for it is a jellyfish. Because. Because our pelvic floor really has to be strong enough to hold everything up in relation to the rest of our posture. It's a network, but it has to be fluid. And Flexible enough to be able to pee, to poop, to have babies, if we're talking about women. And it has to be responsive enough to be able to adjust in any moment to what we're needing. Like if you're running, for instance, your pelvic floor has to have more tensile contraction than you know if you're lying in bed. It also has to have quick response, right? Like if you sneeze or laugh, it has to be able to give support to your bladder. And there's other issues. I mean, this is a more complicated question because there are other issues besides just your pelvic floor muscles that would influence your ability to have healthy bladder function. But the pelvic floor muscles are important. So you need this give. You need it when you're walking. You know, walking is kind of a balance between your strength and your flexibility. You need a certain amount of endurance. So if you're someone who, let's say, like, wants to lift weights, you need endurance to be holding and repetitively lifting those weights. And the thing is, you can have too much. And this is where I think a lot of perfectionism comes in, is the jellyfish is just contracting. You know, the jellyfish is just trying to hold its shape. And I think that's a different kind of shame. So there's a shame in, oh, things aren't working properly. I've met women who, you know, they poop when they have sex after childbirth. Or, you know, older women who don't feel like they can really go out of the house. Cause they never know when they're gonn pee. And it feels awkward to try to control it. That's a certain kind of shame. Like it's not working the way it should. But there's. There's another kind of emotional drive that I have met a number of younger women whose pelvic floors hurt or sex becomes painful, or putting a tampon in becomes painful sometimes because of trauma, but other times just because of the drive. You know, like, I'm lifting that many weights, I'm doing that much Pilates. I'm just always squeezing and lifting that pelvic floor. And it starts to even become a habit to just squeeze and lift the pelvic floor. And it will eventually lead to pain and also misalignments with the tailbone. These pelvic floor muscles are really related to the freedom and support you get from your tailbone.
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A
That makes so much sense. Especially I think about it too, that with the drive of even just how much we're holding in our lives Like, I think about. I've experienced the tight pelvic floor end of the spectrum. And I think about, you know, my life, and it's like, oh, yeah, I'm holding parenting and starting a business and taking care of the house and managing things with my partner. There's so much that we're all holding. And I can imagine that we're holding that in our pelvic floor as well. We're holding our whole body. So our pelvic floor, of course, is going to be affected by that.
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B
Absolutely. And that's one of the things somatic movement can offer, is helping you, for lack of better words, regulate your nervous system. Because for many of us, we're always in drive mode. And in a very simplified way, drive mode encourages us to get our muscles really ready for activity. So there's kind of like a preset tension when you're in drive mode because it's about. I mean, you could look at it as fight or flight. You're in drive mode because there's something that you need to handle that's an emergency. But one of the gifts that I like about Thomas Hana is that he also gave this. It's also just accomplishment. In those days, they still use the term type A personality, you know, so someone who is holding and juggling a lot of things so you could be very successful in life. You know, it's not like you're. You're underwater feeling like, oh, my God, life's too much. You might be killing it, but that intensity of killing it can cause your muscles to tighten. And your pelvic floor muscles are no different than in that sense than other places of chronic tension and pain.
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A
Totally. Yeah. And Ayurveda, when you were just talking, it makes me think of, like, the Pitta personality, the fire personality, and all the things that you've been talking about. The perfectionism, the drive, the self criticism, all of that stuff. I'm curious. I'm like, I wonder if Pitta people have more tight pelvic floors than other people. It'd be a great science. It'd be a great research.
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B
It really would be. I mean, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that, but that is definitely an interesting perspective. I'll start to kind of notice that. And sometimes it's from abdominal surgery. Sometimes the adhesions from abdominal surgeries will pull, you know, on the connective tissue. And the pelvic floor on the connective tissue gets very tense and right. And very adhered and pulls on the muscle. So it's not Just personality or temperament or drive. But that is definitely an aspect of it.
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A
Right. Like, if you have those muscles pulling, having that stress and that drive isn't going to help the situation. So, yeah, no matter where. Where you're at. So how can we use somatic work? How can it be a useful tool in helping to heal the pelvic floor?
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B
Yeah. So what is interesting about somatics in general, somatic movement in general, is there is starting to be research on it, which is, you know, really great. And what the research tells us is that participating in movement somatically can release tension and pain. It also can improve our capacity to do exercises. So when you. You are going to say you have a great pelvic floor therapist near you. And this is a really important distinction because when I first started noticing kind of postmenopausally that I was having prolapse, it took me a while to find a pelvic floor therapist who could help me because my. Well, this is kind of another topic, but I'm going to go there anyway. My pelvic floor muscles tested fine, right. So here I'm having a prolapse, but there's nothing wrong with my pelvic floor muscles. They're performing well with contracting and being strong and with relaxing and having flexibility, and they're testing well with transferring between the two as needed. So the first pelvic floor physical therapist I went to didn't know what to do with me. She just told me to do Kegels, and I did. And what happened was that I did a lot of Kegels and I started getting pelvic floor pain. I was thinking, yeah, this isn't going to be good. So that made me branch out and made me start thinking about what I need to do. And in that, I'm thinking, well, I know in other muscles in my body, there's a conversation, right? There's a kind of active lengthening, maybe we could call it stretching or flexibility. But that's also another conversation and an active kind of contracting or condensing, you know, coming together or shortening of the muscle. Kegels are about, you know, shortening the muscle. So I started being curious more about the language between the shortening and the lengthening. And as I got involved in the conversation of the lengthening and shortening, I started to really feel and experience how this was not separate to my whole body having sometimes more of an expanded phase, sometimes more of a contracted phase, and that being a doorway into my nervous system, really. And postural. Some people consider pelvic floor muscles, postural. Some people don't. But there is a connection between our posture and what pelvic floor muscles are doing. Between our walking, our sitting, our lifting.
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A
Right. So there's like a rhythm, I think, when people hear pelvic floor. I think Kegels is probably the first thing that comes to mind for a lot of people. That's in a lot of the literature. That's what people are told to do, but it's kind of almost like it's ignoring that there's actually this rhythm to the pelvic floor.
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B
Exactly. Yes. So if you're squatting, so typically, like if you were doing a Kegel based exercise that, let's say, also included your quads, your glutes, maybe your ADD muscles, your inner thigh muscles, you go into the squat and it's accepted that there's a relaxation. And then you come up from the squat and you, you know, however you're talk, he goes, pull, lift, you know, squeeze and lift. And with that, perhaps you squeeze your glutes, perhaps you squeeze your inner thighs because those muscles are important to your pelvic floor. And then you relax again. And I think this is the biggest thing I've discovered in my work with myself and with other women is that how do you relax your pelvic floor muscles, especially when you're standing? Like, when you're standing, there's all this weight coming down on your pelvic floor. So it's not really a relaxation. It's an eccentric contraction. It's an active lengthening contraction. And that's super important because a lot of women I've met, they're stumped with pain in their pelvic floors? How do I relax? I mean, have you felt this, like, the difference between being able to expand and then kind of condense or close up as opposed to like, oh, I'm supposed to turn them off and then put them on again, Right?
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A
Yeah. It is a huge difference. I saw a pelvic floor therapist after birth and that one of the images she gave me is as I'm inhaling to imagine, like a flower opening.
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B
Oh, that's good. Yeah, that's good.
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Yeah. Yeah, that was really helpful.
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Really helpful. Absolutely.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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And so with the somatic work with the pelvic floor, are you tuning into your actual pelvic floor? Are you just tuning into your body in general? How does that work?
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What I do when I teach workshops or work with people is I focus mostly on these classic pelvic floor muscles because they are the, you Know, the ones that are closest to the organs that need support and relaxation. And so we embody them. We actually literally find the muscle between the tailbone and the sit bone muscles between your tailbones and coming up on the inner ischial ramus and the underneath the hip, where it attaches to some connective tissue muscles up to the front of your pubic bones. And by embodying them in motion, we actually experience their range of movement. And often people will find funky things like, I can feel this on one side, or I can feel this on another side. I can feel this in this muscle. I can't feel this in another muscle. Often this is related to how people are also working with their hips. It can be really related to. This is a really big thing, is how the pelvis is tilted. You know, for most of us, we have a much bigger pelvic tilt than is good for our lumbar. But also when it's not good for your lumbar, it's not good for your lower back. And again, in somatics, we're not giving directions like, place your pelvis this way. Often that comes with sucking your lower abdomen in, tucking your tail. What I'm doing is having people do movements that help them find the balance for their pelvis and their hips. And another thing that science has said about somatic movement is that it improves the results of exercise. So what I find, I don't want to disparage physical therapy because they're really, really excellent physical therapists. And then there are other places where people go for physical therapy. And it's not very well explained. A lot of people don't have the time they need to understand the exercises. So I'll often have people come who either don't understand their pelvic floor exercises. Or aren't doing them for the full benefit.
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A
Right.
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B
Because if you can really find yourself in alignment, we'll use that word, even though that's not a static thing. But if you can find yourself in alignment, then when you say you are doing Kegels or Kegel variations, they're gonna be more effective. And then if you don't need to do Kegels. And it sounds like you had a good physical therapist because she was like guiding you in a quote, unquote reverse Kegel. You're doing these things from a place of wholeness and integrity through your structure. So they work better.
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A
That makes so much sense. When you were talking, I was just thinking about. I had an herbalist on recently who wouldn't use the Word somatic. But he was talking about how when we meditate with herbs, it increases the potency of them. I'm just thinking about that. What you're talking about with the science, talking about how when we bring awareness to what we're doing in our bodies, whether that's taking herbs or eating food or doing these pelvic floor exercises, it's going to bring more benefit. It's kind of like, duh. But it's also profound because I think so much of the time we're just going through the motions of things and getting things done on our list. But when we can actually take that time to like drop in and really feel what's happening and bring that awareness, just how much more potent it's going to be for us.
- [26:19]
B
Yes. And you're making me think of the difference between. Is a definition of somatic movement, the different definition between having the body as an object and the body as an experience, the objective body versus the experienced body, or the aware of versus the aware as some aware as my muscles are moving versus being aware of my muscles moving. And it seems like, what's the big deal? But it's a different reference in your system. It places you more in your body rather than in the frontal cortex, which that intense frontal cortex is what is keeping our sympathetic nervous system churning anyway.
- [27:06]
A
Right. That makes so much sense. And so when you can actually drop into the body, you're also able to drop into your nervous system in a different way. Yeah, yeah.
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B
So one of the things with the tipped forward pelvis, or lordosis, or you know, whatever people want to call it, is that's a natural response to stress. You know, like that's the sympathetic nervous system kind of pushing you forward, you know, stress, or as I said before, like achievement, like, I gotta get this done. So if that's chronic and you have that, and that's gonna put more pressure on your pelvic floor, your pelvic floor can respond to that laxity, it can respond to that gripping, but it's putting more pressure. So being able to drop in. You know, one of the exercises in my little ebook is very simple. It's just different ways of doing pelvic tilting on different planes. And it's enjoyable, it's regulating, it's breathful, and it sets you up for any kind of pelvic floor exercises your physical therapist might be giving you so that they are more effective. Yeah.
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A
And when we were talking earlier, you were mentioning intra abdominal pressure in the pelvic floor. Can you talk a little bit about that.
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B
Yeah. So here's where I play with myself a little bit differently. So in traditional intra abdominal pressure, say if the audience could imagine holding a softball and it's kind of cut between your two hands, so your hands are making these kind of jellyfish shapes. Right. So in traditional thinking, there is a widening of the top hand. That's your thoracic diaphragm, and that pushes all that volume down, and it pushes down your bottom hand. So that's the traditional thinking of intra abdominal pressure, because this is, you know, this is all your abdominal and pelvic floor region. And then when you exhale and you're strengthening, you want to lift up your pelvic floor as the thoracic diaphragm domes back into its chest. Can be very helpful with strengthening the pelvic floor. The newer research that I'm aware of is that what happens is the chest diaphragm, the thoracic diaphragm that's contracting, it's kind of getting more flat and pushing downward. And the pelvic floor looks like it's going downward. But what's happening is it's getting an eccentric or widening contraction. And then the pelvic floor gets a concentric contraction. And that can feel like a lift. And you can ride a lift. If you need that kind of work, you could lift that. But you're riding on a contraction as you lift. Right. And as you're breathing in, it's like your flower opening. It's an active opening. Nada. A pressing down and kind of drooping.
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A
Right. Okay. That makes sense.
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B
And that's part of intra abdominal pressure. As I said before, the tailbone is really, really significant in all of this. It's just very, very crucial to have an awake and fluid and flexible tailbone.
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A
Cool. That's so interesting.
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B
And from a. I mean, a more esoteric point of view, I mean, the tailbone's part of an important root system. Right. That's. That both grounds us and allows energy to come upward.
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A
Right. That totally makes sense. So it's like doing these things to have all of these systems working together in concert is actually also going to help our energetic systems as well.
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B
I think so.
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A
Yeah, I think so, too. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Is there anything else you want to talk about along these lines?
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B
Well, I guess what I would also want to say is that another place where we get really hung up is that there's a couple of places. One of the places where we get really hung up is we don't really experience the back of Our body. And that's part of experiencing your tailbone. So when we think of intra abdominal pressure, we're very frontal and we disregard the sides of the body. And if you really understand how your abdominal muscles work, especially that transverse abdominis muscle, you couldn't pitch your belly out so far. So part of having a healthy pelvic floor is actually also understanding how your abdominal muscles work and function. And a nice thing about that is when your abdominal muscles are understanding again, they have the same kind of rhythm. You know, it's not like you've got clenched abdominals or they're relaxed when their rhythm is good. You're also alleviating lower back and sacral pain and that often comes with pelvic floor problems.
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A
That makes so much sense.
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B
Yeah, And I have, I lead people through that also in the book, because it's different. It's definitely different because people think, oh, I'm diaphragmatically breathing, I feel my diaphragm going down. But if there's a. This huge belly breath, it's not full diaphragmatic breathing.
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A
Right. So it's more breathing into like all the sides.
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B
Yeah. And the back, there's movements in the back as well, from both horizontal movements and vertical movements and diagonal movements as well.
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A
And it just makes sense in general, I think about just going back to that idea of the energy and the prana that where we put our attention, that's where our prana follows. In so much of our, our pranic attention is forwards, forwards, forwards all the time. And so, yeah, just in general, bringing our attention more into our back bodies is really valuable.
- [33:28]
B
Absolutely. And what I notice in myself is that as I have more of this connection into my back and into my tailbone, so I had two episiotomies and that's always been kind of like a dull area from that. And with this more. I don't know if you want to call people call it back breathing. Some people call it 360 breathing. There's different ways of describing it, but with getting more breath and not just like as a force. And that's another wonderful thing about somatics is we come back to this somatic movement. We come back to this, this place. Well, okay, I want to introduce something to my body, but I want to introduce it in such a way that the body likes it and wants to perform it without me making it perform. So it's like an invitation. And for me, a lot of what I think of as the abdominal container and intra abdominal pressure, I know A lot of people see it as a balloon. You know, if you squeeze a balloon, it changes shape, but I see it more as fluid. Like, it's fluid, and it's not even just fluid. It's fluid with organs in it. And those organs are having different pressure and different shaping. And with that experience comes a lot more smoothness and ease. So it's like, in that wholeness, you could say360. You could say back breathing. Some people call it cylinder breathing. But there's this. This sense of it being alive and not a mechanical kind of thing. There's like a little. There's a wiggle room in it, and there's this embodiment of ease and gentleness. And in that, quite miraculously, if you do need to lift from your perineum, your perineal body, it's much more organic to just feel that ease of lifting. And again, for women who need to Kegel. Right, because if your pelvic floor muscles have a lot of laxity. Yeah, it's like going to the gym. It's good to Kegel, but where do you initiate it from? How do you ride it? So you get the most benefit, and you have this ongoing flavor of ease to keep reinforcing your nervous system.
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A
I love that so much. It just made me think about when I first started dancing. Contact improvisation, my background. I grew up as a competitive gymnast throughout, like, when I was 4 until, like, through high school. And so I had this. Even when I did yoga, I always had this thing in me of, like, do it. Like, just what you're saying. Achieve. Do it. Do the pose perfectly. So coming into these more somatic practices and just really coming up to that part of me that pushes so much and to actually then find those places where, how can I move in a way that's more organic? How can I move in a way where I'm using the momentum and then softening into it and where it feels. Where my body feels soft. And it was just a whole other world opening up and a retraining. So I think that's a piece of this for a lot of people that. That we're so indoctrinated into this culture of achieving and going and perfection, that there is this retraining process that has to happen with all of this and to be soft with ourselves in that process.
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B
Yeah, I think that's why I always say somatic movement. I'll just tell you why I keep going to movement is because so many people assume I'm a somatic experiencing therapist, you know, and so that's not movement, you know, that's a different. So I really go for the movement. So somatic movement is gaining in such popularity because we need that, and we need that in an ongoing way. The softness of our fluid sense. That's one of the big things I learned from Emily Conrad is the movement of wave and vibration through fluid. And in my work and study with Bonnie Cohen, and I wonder how this is in Ayurveda, she really equates the parasympathetic with the organs so just moving. So this is a thing like if I'm getting back breathing, right. But maybe my kidneys are moving. Maybe my small intestine and the mesentery are moving. Not because I'm like pumping my kidneys, which, again, there's nothing wrong with pumping your kidneys. I'm sure there are techniques where you're pumping kidneys. And it's good. It's just I'm different. Because you're doing it to your kidneys, then and again, could be totally appropriate. Wonderful. And when you can just feel those organs being more slippery and glidy and soft, that takes us into this more parasympathetic state.
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A
That makes so much sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Being with settling into self and letting the pushing and the doing kind of fall away. Because the sympathetic state is a doing state. We need that little bit of sympathetic activity to do the things we need to do.
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B
But then it's great.
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A
Yeah, yeah. But you have to balance it.
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B
It. And that sympathetic directs, as far as I know, blood flow into our muscular skeletal system.
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A
Right.
- [39:15]
B
And that's why we're so tense all the time. Because our society. You know, I remember I. I worked with Parkinson's patients for a number of years. And one of the things that was always drilled home with, you know, when you study with people who work with Parkinson's, is the idea of mirror neurons, like in a. In a positive way for Parkinson's students. Like, if you can create this movement, they'll be able to mirror you. And if more people mirror you, more people will get results. But the opposite is true. Like, we walk out into our world and, you know, let's say you just, you know, whatever took a massage or the float spa or, you know, you just came back from camping, you know, and you're all chill. And then you just walk into the co op. It doesn't even have to be that you go into New York City, you know, you walk into the co op and people are getting things done. And again, not bad. Good. But is It a flow.
- [40:11]
A
Right.
- [40:11]
B
Is it a moving flow?
- [40:13]
A
Right.
- [40:13]
B
And it's not in our culture. So then how do we. Where do we carve time to build that in ourselves so that we have. It's almost that the parasympathetic becomes the what? We're. It's like our ocean. You know, we're swimming more in the parasympathetic. And then we say, you're a fish in the ocean. You're chilling out and then you see something, you know, and then of course, you go and you get that meal, but then you eat and you can. It was like when people talk about Aboriginal people, how they had to, you know, get into gear to get an animal. Absolutely. But most of the time it was just this kind of gentle pace, walking around, eating some food, taking rests.
- [41:06]
A
Right.
- [41:07]
B
And that was normal. And then there'd be a crisis or an opportunity, but then it would pass and you'd go back to, you know, your singing and storytelling and foraging.
- [41:19]
A
Right. Because they were in tune with nature. I had a conversation with someone this morning about this, about how our society, it just brings us so out of tune with the natural world and with nature and it creates stress in that process. Yeah.
- [41:33]
B
And our bodies, we forget our bodies are the natural world.
- [41:38]
A
Totally. I love that. So will you talk a little bit about your ebook?
- [41:45]
B
Like a primer?
- [41:46]
A
Yeah.
- [41:47]
B
I think what it has, it has some instructions for getting this whole 360 cylinder back, breathing and why you should have it and how that's connected to the pelvic floor. It offers instruction. It's not just a book. It comes with a video library. Because I'm reaching for demonstrations, but I know it's a podcast, so people aren't going to see it, but I'm reaching for visual images. So the book comes with, I think 12, 13 videos of visual images to help you locate your classic pelvic floor muscles. And again, these are the muscles that are the base of support or tightness in our pelvic floor. And the breathing. There's a little assessment. I mean, it has a caveat that your most accurate assessment is done by someone who actually can touch your muscles in terms of your pelvic floor is too loose or too tight. But I have a kind of rudimentary assessment in the book because I have also met women who. And we come back to the kind of embarrassment and maybe shame thing where they don't want to go to the pelvic floor therapist. They want to do this on their own. So I have just like a basic simple beginning step assessment. And for some people that's enough. They can figure out if they're too tight and too loose. And then there are some exercises in it that are based upon the continuum of somatic movement with orientation towards if you need to have more strength, more concentration, or if you need more flexibility. We also go along with finding the muscles. We find the bones, your sacrum, your tailbone, the joint at your pubic bone. Also very important sits bones, hip joints and balancing them. I spoke to that before. Have a great movement to balance your lower back and hips. And then we go into these deep or classic pelvic floor muscles. So you can embody them with the hope and I think the promise of when you embody them, your exercises are going to be more clear and more effective and you'll also be able to experience them as you're moving in your daily life. If you embody these muscles, it will change your hip and your gait, gait, because you'll see how your gait or how you hold your hip are altered. We call them one muscle. Like we'll say there's one, you know, pubiorectalis muscle or iliococcygeus muscle. But everything's a set. There's like a connective tissue, like, you know, kind of tendony structure in between them. So often people are really different from one side to the other in these pelvic floor muscles. And that makes for a lot of more outer imbalances like how you walk and what's happening in your hips or you have two pelvic bones when they're imbalanced. It's not a great feedback loop. Right. Your pelvic floor muscles are being pulled out of place, but because they're pulled out of place, they're reinforcing what's not happening in your pelvic bones or your hips. I talk about myosin and actin how muscles move, which is nice. A few words on Kegels because you don't want to grip when you do Kegel. So just helping people understand like a useful Kegel versus just tightening your pelvic floor. And again, a good PT will do that. It's a matter of people can find a good PT in some cases and in other cases the PT having time to give you that right rib flare. Why an outward rib flare is difficult on your pelvic floor. Assessing your pelvic floor and yeah, then some, some exercises for helping to bring more balance and well being back to your pelvic floor.
- [46:02]
A
Awesome. That sounds so good. I love it.
- [46:05]
B
Yeah, it's just, it's basic but it's really great. And also if people are teaching, I mean I have had a number of yoga teachers who. They don't necessarily know why there were two pubic bones or what each pelvic bone is and how it relates to the hips. Like training is really varied in all of the kind of exercise arts. I think it's also a useful guide for people who are teaching or working with women with their pelvic floors in other areas. Like you mentioned herbally or. Yeah, it's just good to know what you're actually touching and talking about.
- [46:46]
A
Yes, definitely.
- [46:48]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [46:49]
A
Awesome. Is there anything else that you want to share before we close up?
- [46:55]
B
Well, people can go to my website. I think there's actually also like a free. It's kind of a smattering of videos that are helpful for the pelvic floor. And yeah, there's occasional workshops for pelvic floor well being and I also work with people over zoom and individually one on one and I have a lot of other work. The important thing is that experiencing as our bodies to be these organisms, at some level we're just organisms and I find that when we allow our organisms to be, there's just more sanity and balance in our lives.
- [47:35]
A
Yes, so true. I agree with that.
- [47:38]
B
I appreciate that you have that, that sentiment and experience. Yeah, yeah.
- [47:43]
A
And would you be willing to give listeners a small step, like an action step that they could take into their lives?
- [47:51]
B
Okay. Since we're talking about yoga, this is an objective versus an experience. But it's the first thing that came to my head because we were talking about yoga. So what was the first clue to this more circular breath was what Mr. Iyengar in the 80s? Sandbags on your bottom ribs or pose of the child if you don't have a sandbag because that makes your breath go more towards the side than the back.
- [48:23]
A
Awesome. I love that.
- [48:26]
B
Yeah. Just kind of cave in. So I thought that's.
- [48:29]
A
Yeah, yeah, perfect. Thank you.
- [48:31]
B
You're welcome.
- [48:32]
A
All of Donna's information will be in the show notes so you can check out the ebook and her website and all the different things and yeah. Thank you so much, Donna for coming on and sharing all of that. So, so helpful, so useful.
- [48:46]
B
You're welcome. It's a pleasure to be here and it's really good to see you.
- [48:50]
A
So good to see you too. Hello, it's me again. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Donna Brooks and I will have all of Donna's information in the Show Notes and I will be back next week. Have a great week. Hey there. Thanks again for listening. I want to let you know about a couple of resources that I'm offering if you're interested in going a little deeper. I have a deep breath meditation as well as a Nourished for Resilience workbook. There'll be links in the Show Notes if you're interested in checking them out, and I'm also currently offering one on one coaching around nervous system health, self care, resilience. I like to weave in Ayurveda herbs, somatics if it makes sense, as well as Ayurvedic consultations. So if you're interested in seeing if we're a good fit, I have a schedule for booking an exploratory call in the Show Notes. Hope to connect with you soon. Have a great week.