How can you regulate your Nervous System? Feel less stressed and get back into your body. That's what we're gonna explore today with Jill Miller on The Wise Effort Show. Welcome back. I am Dr. Diana Hill. I am a clinical psychologist and this whole month we're working on wise effort with the body. I have a chapter about wise effort with the body in the book, and there's body-based practices woven throughout my book. Actually. It's woven into everything I do, how I live, how I lead retreats, how I lead my workshops. I will be in a Hyatt hotel room with 400 therapists that I'm training and I'll be guiding them through some kind of body work exercise because it is so essential. For not only your physical wellbeing, but your emotional and mental wellbeing. We are seeing a skyrocketing interest in somatic therapies. You know that book, the Body Keeps the score has been number one for like years and now, and part of it is that psychology's finally waking up to the fact that emotions, stress, trauma, are not just stored in your thoughts. They're not just in your head. They're also in the nervous system and the physical body. So it is essential to develop body awareness to learn how to release tension and energy in your body. And then also how to take care of our bodies in terms of sleep and eating and movement. So we're gonna be talking about all of that this month on The Wise Effort Show. Today we have the real honor of speaking with Jill Miller, who is the founder of the Tuna Method. if you could see me right now, I'm in my new little office that we built out for podcasting. I have one foot on a yoga tuneup ball, stretching my calf, rolling it around the ball of my foot, and then the center of my foot and the heel of my foot. And I'll be switching it back and forth as I record this. Jill Miller is the reason for that. She's a renowned fascia expert, a movement educator, and she's the co-founder of Tuneup Fitness Worldwide. She's the author of two books, The Role Model, the Step-By-Step Guide to Erase Pain, Improve Mobility, and Live better In Your Body and Body By Breath, which is the science and practice of physical and emotional resilience. So I had a chance for Jill to take me through, some of her exercises, and that is as. Separate episode on YouTube. If you wanna go watch it. It's not gonna be a podcast 'cause you need it to see us doing it, but you can go check that out. And in this episode, we are gonna walk through some key things that you need to know about your body. You need to know about your diaphragm. You need to know about your fascia and you need to know how to regulate your nervous system, how to decrease your stress response from the bottom up. It's not all about the top down folks. She's gonna give you a few simple things that you can do on the city bus or on an airplane, or when you're watching TV with your kids that will support your nervous system because we are stressed out folks. And sometimes talking about our stress only makes us more stressed. We need to figure out how to get back into our bodies, how to develop interceptive awareness and how to work with our bodies. And get out of that stressed out mind that a lot of us are in. All right. Enjoy this conversation with the incredible Jill Miller. I could turn to any page. I'm gonna do what I do with books here, book, which is when I get a book, I just go like this, right? And then here I have a picture of the role of recovery. Regardless whether, you're working with asymmetries, struggling to come down after a game, or trying to cool your nerves if we're giving a speech, the body by breath approach gives you the remote control to dial down physiology that is running in the other direction at the core of all healing are sustainable, parasympathetic stress. You now have the knowledge to make the shifts as needed and as kneaded with a k. So here we go. This book is about the role of recovery, I related so much to your story, and I'm wonder if we can start there of how you found your way to your body as a, as a source of recovery.

When I was a young kid, I was a really chubby, sedentary kid, and I just liked reading books. I had big Thich glasses and I was a, a very heavyset little kid. I was very short. I grew up on, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, off the grid in a solar home. And so we didn't have, tv. We had a, a satellite dish, and then we watched a lot of videos. And my mother, towards the end of the sixth grade, she wanted to get in shape. Jane Fonda workout had just been released. And so she got the Jane Fonda workout and she also got the Raquel Welsh yoga video. And

Did you have the Jane Fonda one where she was in the stripe leotard with the tiny, tiny belt? Because that's the one I had.

the original Jane Fonda workout.

Circle back, circle forward.

And then the

We are living same universe,

change the light bulb exercise single. And then she would be like, she made these like really sexy faces,

Feel the burn.

feel the burn. Yeah, exactly. So she brought home these videos and. I started doing them with her back to back, and they were really hard, of course, but I got obsessed with them. And my mom fell off the wagon within two weeks. Like she was not noncompliant, she was not very disciplined about exercise. I had no idea that I was, I became obsessed with them and I would come home from school, do them back to back every single day. And it became a ritual for me.

Mm-hmm.

And so I spiraled into anorexia. 11, 12, 13. I had dropped down to 65 pounds by the time I was 13 years old. And so instead of growing, I was shrinking. But then that ended up, of course, never being dealt with in, in, any mental health capacity. And I started now to binge and purge. But the thing that got me into the body work is I couldn't feel my abs. My, my apps never got sore in the dance classes or in the Pilates classes. And I knew I should be getting sore 'cause everybody else was, they would be like, oh my God, that workout yesterday. That was never sore. And I knew it was because I was just bypassing my core. I was bypassing my center and I confessed to a yoga teacher that I was seeing outside of school. I was going to yoga classes outside of school that I couldn't feel my abs and that I was bulimic and I knew these things were connected. And she said, why don't you just lay belly down on this thing? And she handed me this little beanbag that looked like a hamburger bun, and this was a prop that they used in the, in the yoga studio, lay belly down and just breathe. And so I did exactly as she told me, and I felt absolutely the worst pain imaginable from my center, which I now know is those visceral pain. But the beauty of that was that I started to feel, and I, I could feel what the binging and purging had been doing to my insides. And suddenly there was a communication from my body to my brain

Mm-hmm.

that I could start to have a dialogue with this pain of what I had been stuffing down, what I had been running from, how much I disliked the insides of myself because talk therapy wasn't working. I had tried at school, I had tried to go see therapists and nothing was stopping the behavior, but once I started to physically feel myself, something switched and I started to treat myself. With a lot more respect and, started a process of healing. I had to go through my body to get that information. I couldn't go through my head to get it. I had to go through my body to start that dialogue and then, then we can leapfrog 20, 30 years later. I've written a book about these processes that don't just help folks with eating disorders, but they help people with knee pain, with arthritis, with, people in the NHL, in the NBA. So it

Yeah. Or just chronic stress. Yeah. Yeah. Two things you said there in that story and, thank you for sharing that story. Thank you for sharing that story in the book upfront. It's like in the first chapter

Mm-hmm.

because, it roots us in something that's really important to get rooted in, which is what happens when we bypass our center.

Mm-hmm.

Why is our center like physiological Center, but soul Center, They're all, they're all mixed up in there. Like what happens when we bypass our center and then maybe some of the ways in which we're trying to regulate our nervous system that can be regulated in other ways. I was just driving my kid back from school and I saw there was a teenager in front of the junior high and he was, vaping, right? So he was like.

Yep. Getting those deep breaths.

to, he, yeah, he's about to walk into school. It's like the second day of school. He's stressed. Of course he's vaping. But, so we're vaping, we're eating, we're throwing up. We're not eating, we're drinking. We're over exercising. We're not moving, like all the ways in which we're trying to regulate our nervous system. And, and there's pathways, there's physiological pathways that we can activate that are not about talking, but actually physiologically reconnecting the brain and the body and are going from the bottom up instead of the top down. I wanna land on the center because one of the things, we'll go back to our, our nineties, eighties and nineties childhoods with Jane Fonda. So our moms had Jane Fonda videos. Our moms also had a diaphragm. Did your mom have a diaphragm? My mom did.

didn't. She did not have the actual, she, that was not her birth control. No. mean, I

But this was a popular form of birth control, and so when people say, can you picture a diaphragm? I'm always picturing my mom's diaphragm finding it in her bathroom. But it's a pretty good visual for what her diaphragm looks like and the importance of the diaphragm and breath. It is called body by breath for a for a reason. I want to unpack the diaphragm because it's all connected here. this is connected to the physiology of why you, when you put that hamburger bun on your belly, it was so good for you, right?

Yes. And why it was so painful.

And why it was so painful.

Yeah. I like to joke. When I'm teaching, oh, the diaphragm, it's really my favorite skeletal muscle. I love it so much. I had to write a 480 page book about it. Are you ready for some facts?

Okay.

I

to us.

So the respiratory diaphragm is this, trampoline shaped muscle that lives inside of your rib cage. And it lines the lower six ribs. It also attaches, you have this thing called your sternum, and at the bottom of your sternum there's a little pointy bit called the xiphoid process. You can even touch that on yourself right now, and it's attaching there. You can even take your fingers and, and swim them underneath the, the rib edge. Did you know that You can, it's legal. You can finger your way around this border and kind of slump down, and if you slump down, your fingers should be able to like really dive up. If you go up further to the sides of your rib cage, it's easier if you're right there under, right underneath your midline. It's harder, but you have better access. You can walk your fingers all the way around there. Your diaphragm is very hidden. And, it also has tendrils that wrap around the back of the rib cage and string down onto your lumbar vertebra. these are called the chora, by the way. And when you and I were doing a little bit of rolling, I mentioned some of the, the sensory elements of the diaphragm. They're located in those Quora, by the way. So your, your diaphragm. We really just don't have a business being able to move the diaphragm. The diaphragm is moving automatically 20 to 22,000 times a day without you even having to think about it. Your breathing is controlled by your brainstem, by this really intricate, chemical process that's sensing the fluctuations of carbon dioxide in your bloodstream. And so that's running on automatic in the background for you all the time. But the cool thing about your respiratory diaphragm is that it can also be controlled. You can decide on the pacing of your own breaths. You can decide on the volume of your breaths, how fast or how slow you breathe. And those different, breathing behaviors that you can consciously engage will actually change your state. They'll change your energy. They'll change, your sense of activation or your sense of plasticity. This muscle is connected to so many different systems of the body. Yes, I talked about breathing, but the diaphragm is also one of your main digestive muscles. Your diaphragm is also moving blood. Did you know that your diaphragm is the mattress upon which your heart sits? Your heart is tethered to the diaphragm, through this, wonderful connective tissue packet called the pericardium. So literally your heart sits inside of this, this little fascial purse that's sitting on top of the diaphragm. And when you're breathing and the diaphragm's going down and up, your heart is getting tugged a little bit, or not the heart, but the pericardium, the connective tissue around the heart. And this changes our heart rate variability. You might have heard of HRV, but when we really get into the anatomy of the diaphragm, we see that the movements of the diaphragm are the fundamental like input that changes HRV.

What I wanna hear also is, okay, so when the, body. Instructor put the hamburger and you on your belly, and you laid down on your belly and it was painful and you were discovering, okay, this is like an important part of my body. How does this connect to regulating your nervous system and, and finding recovery from something like bulimia or vaping or stress? Like how, how can we become, more skillful in the, use of our diaphragm? And, and that, and, and, all of us know about taking deep breaths, but what you teach is so much more nuanced than taking a deep breath. What's going on there?

So dialing back to the, like 15, 16, 7, the 17-year-old me, 18-year-old me who laid on that object. The diaphragm is also sewn to, I have taken to a little bit of anatomy to, to explain the physiology. So the diaphragm below it is sewn into the same tapestry as a muscle called the transverses abdominis, right? So any of you that like to look skinny, when you pull in your belly and you tighten up that abdomen, you are activating the transversus. When you cough, the transversus is active. The transversus abdominis, it's stiffness allows or disallows the diaphragm to descend and ascend. If I have a chronically stiff transversus abdominis because I'm trying to hold it in all the time, or I'm bracing for a punch metaphorically. Or I have scar tissue, maybe I had some kind of abdominal surgery or C-section or a hernia surgery or whatever.

I have all three. I have all three. Check, check, check,

and

it in, stressed out, and two C-sections. Okay?

and I have chronic tension in this area. The diaphragm will not be able to move downward well, and that is gonna keep me in a more aroused state. Let me back up. Let me back up two steps because I think this will really help. In the Body by Breath book, I talk about three zones of breathing. This is gonna make it really easy for your listeners. There's really three zones that we focus our breathing movements in. Zone one is the area below the rib cage. This is what I was just describing with your transverses abdominus. When we're breathing in a way where our gut expands on inhale and then it settles back in on exhale. We're in our most calm state. We're in a parasympathetic style of breathing. Our rest and digest and recovery, this is our baby's breath. If this zone one area with the transversus and these other tissues, are not pliable, they're not allowed to move, they're to use Katy Bowman's word. They're casted, right? We're like, we're like wearing an AB belt all the time. Then we're not gonna be able to have a. Calm state breath. We're gonna be deflected into a more rib centric, a zone two breath. The zone two breath is when your ribs are pump handling to try to get air in. And now this is not an illegal way of breathing. It's how we breathe in athletics. It's how we're breathing. If we're moving, heavy furniture or lifting something heavy off the floor, you wanna actually be braced in your zone. One, you want your TA to be tight and to be able to breathe in your ribs, but it's more sympathetic breath. And if that becomes our, our habit, we're going to be stuck in arousal. We're going to be more quick to react more. Freaked out as it were. And if that really becomes our habit, we're going to have more shallow breaths. And then more often than not, where's the next place to go? If I really get freaked out, I'm gonna flip into what's called zone three breaths, and those are breaths that typically happen through the mouth and our, neck and shoulder type of breaths, like type of a breath, a breath at fright or shock, or high stress, or even high delight. But. Anybody knows if you're always breathing that way, you are going to end up with so many symptoms, stress symptoms related to the eye, the jaw, the neck, shoulder, elbow, hand, fingers, because the, the nerves that come out of the neck, if you are always overusing your neck to breathe, it's gonna clamp down on a bunch of nerves called the brachial plexus that are gonna limit your body's ease of reaching into the world of grasping, of holding, of touching. so we have these three different zones of breath that are related to where we, or, how we process and integrate stress in our lives. And so

And the information goes both. The information goes both ways, right? So there's the, if we are. If we are stressed, we will move into that kind of tightened shoulder, upper chest breathing, right? And which will send, in psychology, we call it embodied cognition. Like those, if you hold up your shoulders and you breathe in your upper chest, you will start to feel anxious whether or not you were anxious to begin with. It can trigger your brain to say, oh, there's something wrong. Your body can tell your brain there's something wrong. And then your brain will make up a story about it. Like our brain will, will notice the posture of our body and make up a story about the posture of our body. And sometimes that posture of our body, I'm holding my shoulders up, that I'm breathing through my chest, is just because I was working on a paper and I was typing, or I was crunched over my phone. And so we can also have. Embodied cognition in if we practice breathing in this lower zone one area and if we can work on loosening up, not sucking it in. and you just did a whole exercise around putting these ous balls under my lower back and just breathing in my, my zone one for a bit. How that can also change my, change my, cognition can change the way I feel, can change the way I think after that exercise of putting these balls under my back and just breathing there for a little bit, you said your voice has dropped and I said, yes. I'm in my sexy voice

Yes.

because Yeah. 'cause it opens

is vaguely regulated too. this is when, when our relaxation response, when our parasympathetic nervous system starts to take over, then we have all these, these additional features of our being get to present themselves. And they're often, they're very, very masked. But along with, that parasympathetic dominant state often will come, all the feelings that we haven't had time to dignify with, their time on stage in our, in our body's life. People can feel very vulnerable when they endure a zone one state. A lot of the book is about building the body's tolerance capacity for enduring a parasympathetic state. Because I think, I certainly know for myself, like I can just go, go, go, go, go, go, go. Like we are very much a zero to 60 culture and not a 60 to zero culture. That's part of what I love about being friends with Katy is she's so, she's so good at I'm just gonna walk for 40 miles and think, you're like, wow. How do you find the time? I gotta go run it here and there and

Jill, try writing a book with Katy because while she's walking that 40 miles, you're like, Katy, where are the edits?

Oh, sweetheart. So I've got two months in, in, in South America now.

Yeah, okay. I'll get done. Uh, so if you were to give us, if you were to give us a practical exercise that we could do to get into zone one and get from 60 to zero. 'cause you're right, we we're so used to living in zone three and two. Physiologically living there, but also psychologically living there. Like literally, I'm in zone three of my life. I'm speeding through my life and I wanna change my physiology so I can change my psychology. That's what this book is also about. So what would be a good one? What would be a good one? And this would be for the kid that's vaping outside of school. He's stressed. And, and the, the, the mom that's, binging on whatever, 'cause she's overwhelmed by too much to do and whatever, that we could do that's here and now give us

What I have found the most fast acting in the most diverse groups is a very, very simple, insertion or a very simple protocol, which is have somebody either with a pillow, obviously, I'm a ball dealer, so I'm gonna tell you get a gorgeous ball,

I will tell you where I got my gorgeous ball. I got my first gorgeous ball from Jill Miller. 'cause she sent it to me 'cause I was gonna interview her. And then I got my second one at my local yoga studio called Yoga Soup. Your yoga studio will have these. And my son blew it up in the car for me this morning while we were driving and, and we read the, we read the little thing and it, it said on the back it mimics the, the texture and pressure of a human hand. And I was like, oh, I want this on my body. I need some more human hands on me and I don't have enough. It's a big ball. It's like the size of a, a kid's soccer ball

Yeah. Or a little smaller than a soccer ball. Yeah. Like the size of your head, or I don't

Like a toddler soccer ball. Yeah.

So it, yeah, it mimics an open hand approach. but if you don't have something like this, you can do this with, a rolled up. Towel or a couch cushion or a bed pillow. But what you would do is lay on your side, on your ribcage. So you would put the, in the, the object on the side of your body and just lay sideline. So you can get down on the floor or on a couch or on your bed. And then I put a little something underneath the, your head also. So you put it on the bulk of your ribs, not even on the low ribs, like right next to your breast, below your armpit. And yeah. And then just lay on your side with your knees bent, with a little extra something underneath your head. And start to enlarge the way you're breathing down, the way you're breathing and enlarge the way you're breathing and whatever object you have, whether it's a couch cushion or not. A couch cushion, a a decorative pillow or your bed pillow, or rolled up blanket or towel, or yoga mat or the cords ball. It's gonna give your ribs something to push against. And that input of feeling the tissues that are connected to the rhythm of breathing, that alone will have a profound effect, on the actions of breathing, both the inhale and the exhale. But there is this surprising shift that happens in the spinal muscles as well. You'll feel a tremendous relief in your upright posture and ease of posture, just like what you felt, you felt like an ease of just resting against the floor. So you would do this for a few minutes. Slow breathing. This is like the simplest thing you can do. And then if you wanna do a bonus, what I would add onto that is reaching the top arm and shoulder forward and then reaching that top arm and shoulder backwards. So you would take this into a really simple rotation, while you're sideline. and that will move the object of the cord ball around the c shape of the ribs. And so we're gonna be getting massage into muscles called the intercostals as well as the diaphragm in this manner, and start to integrate a little bit of, of, of whole body movement. Then you would go to the other side and you would do the same thing. And probably when you go to the other side, you're gonna notice an immediate. rib range difference. Our ribs carry different stresses in them from how we've been holding our spine, how we hold backpacks, whatever arm dominance or even leg dominance we have, so you'd really be surprised that the ribs, they don't always row the same boat. And so using a tool against the ribs can help these oars to synchronize a little bit better. And so we get just a better overall breath rhythm now. So we're doing this with the object, but if I even evaporate all that, I don't have an object. I'm, I'm listening to this. I'm on a city bus. maybe you have a purse and you can just lean that purse against the side of the, if you're lucky enough you have a window seat. I'm just leaning against the window seat here and I'm slowing down my breath. I'm letting my purse or my backpack. Or the my jacket act as, some biofeedback to the action of breathing. Look, just focusing on the actions of breathing is a meditation in and of itself. And like you were talking about, embodied cognition. When we can start to address what we're attending to, it really has this incredible effect on our overall cognition and helps us to start to prioritize what feelings are really important, which ones we can let drift away. And it does lead to better decision making. And also it gives you this ownership of this fundamental behavior of your body, which is breathing.

One of the things when I interviewed Porges a, the first time I interviewed him, Steven Porges is the Polyvagal theory founder of Polyvagal Theory. Talked about, and I know he's a friend of yours and consulted a lot on this book, and, but I asked him about bulimia because of my own history of bulimia and my research in that area for so long, and, and I said, There's gotta be a connection here. when you're talking about the, the diaphragm, you'll give me the physiology of it. 'cause you're gonna be like way too smart around this for me. But the diaphragm is linked to the vagus nerve too, right? Doesn't the vagus nerve go through the diaphragm? So this breathing is also activating our vagus nerve. And when folks are attempting to regulate their nervous system through eating or through throwing up, it's like almost like this false attempt to tell, regulate my stress, regulate my vagus nerve, and this type of breathing you're on. I love the image of you're on the bus on the way home from work and you're doing this type of breathing into the intercostal muscles, slowing your breathing down. You're giving your body what it needs, which is that 60 to zero. And what you'll be able to do then when you do walk in the door. Come into your door from a place of zero. And we all know that when you are in your most relaxed rest and digest, befriend and tend state, you can be more compassionate for your to towards yourself and towards the people around you. So it's the, it is like this ripple effect. Put your purse under your armpit, breathe a little bit on the bus and, but whatever it is, zone one breathing, I'll just put my hands on my belly and, and remind myself to breathe down here and, and, and don't suck it in because that's the other thing that Jane Fonda, Jane Fonda's great. Jane Fonda is like such a feminist in doing such rad things in her later years. And she was a source of a lot of my exercise compulsion as

learned about bulimia from Jane Fonda. She, I didn't know about bulimia until, so Jane Fonda was on the 2020 show. Do you remember that show? 2020 with Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters, and she was talking about this, Issue that she had bulimia where she would venge and purge. And that's where I got the idea. I know this is like a terrible story,

no, it's true. It's actually, there's a contagion effect. It's in psychology. We, we have to be careful about talking about conditions. Same thing with, suicidality. All these things can become contagious because they get glorified or they give us tricks of the trade. So we're, we're offering other tricks of the trade here, which is the, the other ways to, to work with your nervous system through the body.

As a human, we've really appropriated many, many many different nerves into this giant, stalk called the vagus nerves. And it does many paradoxical things in different regions of the body. And, many of the, the hardest chapter to write, of course, was the vagus nerve chapter and incorporating polyvagal theory into it. But the vagus nerve, when it's overactivated, will cause us to actually pass out and to conserve our metabolic needs. So in the case of shock or fright, or being terrorized, you'll, you'll pass out or you'll, disassociate. So that is an overstimulated vagus. but typically when we think of the vagus, we think of it as the, the nerve of relaxation. Stephen also covers the newer aspects of the vagus nerve that share source nucle on the brain with a lot of our muscles of expression and ingestion. And so it's very complex theory, but there are different zones where it does different things. And please read the book so you can really get those details because I, I wanna, I wanna. Bump back over to this conversation about bulimia. 'cause I really haven't talked out loud with anybody about this. Many bulimics will report feeling a sense of euphoria after throwing up. And this is not just, thank God I got rid of the food. This is a physiological, relief that is part of the vagus response. So we get this complete parasympathetic supercharge feeling after going through this really bizarre, autonomic reflex that you're inducing upon yourself.

There's other disorders that are similar, right? So we have cutting people experience euphoria from cutting. people experience euphoria from, breath retention. The sort of Wim Hof breathing, right? There's, there, there's all these different ways in which we're activating the physiology and, and maybe we find our way there, right? And what you have is a pathway there that isn't gonna harm you

harming

and that, and that it's not gonna, you're not gonna get addicted to. And that maybe you need a way there, like maybe, you don't use any substances and you don't have any disorder and you don't cut yourself, but you are just like feeling. So overwhelmed by your life and you need something physiological to, to find your center again. And, to go from that 60 to zero. So when we're, when we're doing that zone one breathing and we've identified that the vagus nerve is the nerve, that helps in some ways. If you don't overstimulate the vaga vagus, but you stimulate it in the right way, that it can help regulate and get you from the 60 to the zero. How does the diaphragm relate to that?

So slow deep breathing is known to stimulate the vagus nerve, so when you, slow down your breathing pace. As well as take longer, deeper breaths. This has been shown in all the breath research to be, a way of exciting parasympathetic features. there's a really great systematic review by a colleague of mine, Tanya Bentley, that looked at all breathing research around anxiety, any type of breathing patterns that helped to reduce anxiety. And they found that the common denominator of, out of hundreds and hundreds of studies, only 73 or 78 were included. But you basically have to breathe slowly for five minutes or more in a disciplined way, at least five times a week to have a lasting effect. fast-paced breathing can be included, but it has to be at least mixed with some slow paced breathing. So just fast breathing alone for five minutes is not going to help with your anxiety. It's the slow breathing, interception in there that is the ticket. And so that leads to a vagal dominant state, meaning it's slowing down the heart rate and helping, to slow, slow down your anxiety processing.

So I will be remiss if we don't talk about fascia. So we've talked about the diaphragm. I'm, I'm, I'm gonna go back. I'm gonna stay in the eighties. So we talked about the diaphragm, which my mother's thing of choice, sorry, mom. And then another thing from the eighties and nineties. I don't know if you did this, but I did it fishnets, fishnet stockings with the short skirt and and that whenever I think about fascia, for whatever reason that is the visual, I imagine like a big fishnet stocking all over my body. I discovered fascia through Bo Forbes of all Bo Forbes is a clinical psychologist and yoga teacher, and she was so revolutionary in my, probably 12 years ago that I went to my first Beau Forbes workshop so Bo Bo Forbes taught me a lot about this network that's over and covers our whole body. You write in the book. It's like the most important sensory organ that we have. And when we're using these little yoga balls or we're getting a massage, or if you're thera gunning or whatever it is that you are getting in, it's not about your muscles, it's about your fascia. So tell us about the fascia, why it's so important. And we just did a whole video where you were showing me some of these yoga ball therapy ball moves, but we were putting 'em right up underneath our trapezius and rolling around getting into some of those tight spots that are, it's our fascia. Yeah.

Yes. So your fascia is your body wide connective tissue network. I see it as our body's seam system. It connects everything from foot to face, cell to skin, and everything in between. It surrounds, it, inter penetrates, it suspends. One of the easiest ways to visualize, fascia is if you've ever butchered meat, like even if you've just ever pulled the skin off a chicken breast, you often will see this sort of white elasticy, almost cellophane material between the Phap and the muscle. This is epi mesial fascia. This is a, a layer of fascial tissue that's between the Phap and the muscle itself. So when we're rolling, like with therapy balls or foam rollers or what have you, we're introducing stretch, micro stretch into these different structures. And, trying to. Improve some of its elasticity and glide, but we have different types of fascia depending on location in the body. For example, you have a layer of fascia embedded within the fat all over your skin called the superficial fascia. And this superficial fascia layer is highly innervated with these nerve endings called rini endings. And, these rini endings are a, a quick dial right up to the autonomic nervous system. And so when we do light, gentle touch, that creates a little bit of sheer, a little bit of, of sort stretch. These rini endings get stimulated and they tell your brain to calm down sympathetic outflow. They help to tamp down sympathetic outflow, and it allows a parasympathetic tone to arise. And at the same time, it helps the, the parts of the brain that are about proprioception, about your body's ability to locate itself. It excites them. So when we do rolling, it improves, through the nerves embedded within the fascia. It improves our body's sense of itself, but it also changes, it recalibrates our stress response. This tissue has not been studied to the extent that it has until the last 30, 35 years. And Not all tribes of clinical medicine or fitness medicine or wellness medicine are up to date on the science. But know that whenever you're getting a massage, whether it says it's deep tissue or whether it's shallow tissue, even a lymphatic massage is a fascial massage because your lymphatics are crossing in and out of this fatty layer where your superficial fascia lives. So it's like you've never left your fascia alone. You just maybe haven't been as aware of its role in pain, in body sensing, in movement, in, emotional state and all that stuff.

Yeah. So back to the fishnet stocking example. So like a fishnet stocking,

I like the fish talking

Sometimes it's more like an opaque, tight, stocking when we were, so what you had me do is you had me take two tuneup balls. People can watch the video of this, it's on YouTube, but you had me lie on my back and you could do it. I do it against the wall sometimes, but put them right underneath my trapezes at the, the top of my shoulder and lie there and move around and find it my own way, which I actually think is very important. People talk about self massage and anytime I, I suggest self massage. I don't know why it's always men, but oftentimes my male clients will say things like, I just go get a massage. I, I don't wanna self massage. I hate that self massage idea. Here's why you self massage. Here's why you do it to yourself. Because when you do that. You're developing interceptive awareness. You're paying attention. You're not just tuning out, you're tuning into your body and you are finding places in your body that are the opaque tights and not the fishnet and that are tight. And I was pointing out I think that this shoulder, my right shoulder was so, painful and tight because I've been driving with my teenage son and it's holding not just the stress of driving with the teenage son, but just the tension and loss and letting go. And I don't wanna let go. My shoulder doesn't wanna let go. Like I psychologically don't wanna let go. My shoulder doesn't wanna let go either. But when I put that ball there and I breathe for a while and a while and a while, my body will start to let go around it. And that. Opaque, tight starts to loosen up more into a fishnet. And back to Bo Forbes. Back to, Norman Farb, who's written a lot on interceptive awareness. There's a lot of research in here from the psychological end on the benefits of being aware of what's happening in your body in terms of your own mental health and healing. We're coming at it from different angles. and that's what I love about body by breath. 'cause you're weaving the psychological into the physiology and it's yes, you have neck pain, but you also have teenager pain. And, put a ball under there and lie on it for a while and you'll, and you'll start to explore some things in that pain.

Absolutely. And we have these parts of our body that will do all the work for the rest of the body. It's you know how, I don't know how you, it is in your family, but it's fine, I'll do it all. And you have body parts that are also like, ah, I'll do it. We weaken these other body parts as a result of it. So it is important to address these areas that are overburdened, that are taking on more roles than they need to. Like your trapezius doesn't need to be your jaw, right? We can trace a fascial relationship easily between the jaw and the trapezius. And this might be interesting to you also regarding, the vagus nerve and polyvagal theory. The trapezius is innervated by the accessory nerve and the accessory nerve. It shares source nuclei with the vagus. So when we massage the trapezius, we actually get, a vagal response. So it really calms us down. My quadricep muscle is not, it's not sharing the same, outpost in the brainstem as the vagus, but your accessory nerve and your trapezius, they are kissing cousins with the, the vagus. And so that's like a double bonus there. and I think it's also one of the reasons why people instinctively, they're like, oh, I just want a back rub. I just want this spot rubbed. 'cause it's really going to calm them down and put them into a place of ease.

So there's two places where I wanna put those balls.

Mm-hmm.

I, I think about this, I can't wait to get my balls under my trapezius against a wall. I just wanna do that. It feels so right. So that's helping with my vagal response. But the other place is,

with their neck rotation.

My neck rotation and I think I, and, and all of the typing and the stress that I carry up there, but the other place is in my hips. Whenever I get a massage and, and the masseuse gets close to my hip, it feels like that game where you used to play with as kids and you're like, you're getting hotter. You're getting hotter. No, you're getting colder. You're getting colder. And I can't communicate to my muse. I, I just, I probably should be more assertive, but I'm not assertive enough to say that's the spot I want pressure there. as my yoga instructor, Luca often says There's nothing better in the world than a butt massage. If we all had bet massages, we'd be better people. So why, why is that the spot and why does that do everything for my lower back and do every, it just sort of like, I wanna put a ball there. I wanna lie

think it's how, I'm gonna use some of Katy's language. I think it's how we wear our body. some, for some people it's the calf. and for some people it's, it's the abdomen. So I can never really predict what, where that, that desperate, need for being met, for being met with deep contact is gonna be on a person. And that's what's so wonderful and liberating about using, soft pliable tools on yourself is you can really go on that discovery, that adventure yourself and satisfy those needs. And I mean it in the K-N-E-A-D-S and the N-E-E-D-S way, you are the one that gets to direct the exploration and to have the fulfillment of knowing that I did that. I took care of my own pain. I solved my own problem. That's incredibly empowering, and medication is a, is a great tool. It's a great bridge, but these are rubber drugs that actually can solve chronic pain long-term with no nasty side effects, and give you that sense of autonomy and give you that sense of, of dignity back. And it's not painful on the pocketbook either.

just having done 20, 25 minutes with you on the ground. just that you described it so well, just lying on the ground with your knees up and your feet on the floor is an intervention in itself. So that's one place you could start, lie on the ground and breathe from zone one. You could do that for five minutes between a client, five minutes we get home from work, even with the TV on, just lie on the ground with your feet on the floor and breathe in zone one. But then we added a few balls behind my shoulders. But you could put these in lots of different places if it's your hip or other places to do that self-exploration. And what starts to happen there is, is beautiful because you will, you will see a pretty quick pre-post.

Oh yes.

shift or physiological shift or stress shift, and then it'll carry out to what happens to you in the day.

So you can create a novel parasympathetic response for yourself in almost any location, in almost any environment. You can stimulate this, this change for yourself. The, the therapy balls, obviously, you might look weird put, like squirming around in your seat. I certainly do on the airplane. I know you are doing it in the airplane also, you don't even have to have the skill of knowing anatomy. You don't have to know what best practices are. You did that on the floor, Diana, with the two gorgeous balls tractioning your back. There's a different, healthy, productive way to make change and to make lasting change.

yeah. What you're talking about here is, transformation. I just came from a, you were at your fascia retreat. I was at a climate research, retreat. And our, our theme was transformation. And, and Cassie, Cassandra Viton, who's at UCSD said, transformation is when you move from, I should do this. To, I cannot not do this.

Mm-hmm.

And when you start to discover ways in which you can produce transformation in your psychology, transformation in your body, it's no longer a should. I should be foam rolling every day. I should be using. It's actually, I cannot. It's, it's why I bring them. I bring those balls with me to conferences and I'll stand at the back of the room rolling out my feet because Katy taught me how to roll my feet along. Katy Bowman taught me how to roll my feet a long time ago. And I will put them on my butt against the wall. And I'm like, and then all of a sudden, here's what you notice. You start doing that, and then a few other randos. pop up and they get back there with you and you're passing it to them. It's like, it's like you're passing a joint at the back of the room and they're like, can I take a drag? And you're like, yeah, I got a drag of something and it's good. So you have to be part of the movement of transformation, but it becomes, I can't not do it. So I was raising that question of I don't have enough time, because I think it's the most ridiculous question that I hear all the time about all the things when I'm giving. But once you experience it, you're like, I want to. I can't not, and it's not, I should and I will make time, or I'll integrate it into the time that I have while I'm doing other things so that I can have this transformation because it's necessary, especially when everything is overstimulating our threat systems right now, especially since, wow. Jill Miller. This is a phenomenal resource, body by breath. This is a heavy lift. If you want a lighter lift. There's ous balls, there's tune-up balls.

The ball is so light compared

It's so light. It's so light. It'll, your dog will grab it and your kids will play with it. So guess you want one for every room. And then, you have so many, you just have lots of resources. Where's the best place to send them for you?

the website, tuneup fitness.com is the best place for access to all the things. I teach coursework to professionals competency courses around body by breath, around role model, and around, my movement paradigm, which is yoga tuneup. I also have a classroom that's an. for all the peoples. It's called Move, breathe, roll. And every week I release a new class around, very narrow and Interesting. themes like, for example, I have a class on, two classes on the jaw. I'm saying that for you. 'cause as a public speaker it's always very helpful. classes on the thumb, the ankle, the knee, whole body movement. so that's move, breathe, roll. All the exercises in body by breath. were also filmed beautifully, and they live in that library too. So that's 114 exercises. If you're not a, you're like, I got the book, but I don't, I don't wanna learn an exercise from a book. So we have them on, on the website. The other place to, find us is there are hundreds of teachers who, have gone through these competencies and they are, available to you for private lessons or group classes or workshops, and you can find 'em on the website. and then I teach both in person and online. So the competency courses are both available through an online, also in person. I don't know when this is airing, but I'm gonna be teaching it the role model in London and a Body by Breath Masterclass in London, September 19th, 20th, and 21st. And then the book Body by Breath just got translated into Polish. So I'm popping over to Poland to teach body by breath, over there for a day also. so there's worldwide footprint of this work and. Then of course Instagram, you can find me at the Jill Miller and Tuneup Fitness also on Instagram.

Fabulous. And if you are not worldwide, but super local to Diana Hill in Santa Barbara, go to Yoga Soup. They helped me out this morning with my need for some of these balls. Your yoga studio. Ask them to supply them and find out which one of your yoga teachers is using these in class. 'cause you will find that there is somebody probably in one of your movement classes that brings in a big bag of balls and will show you, some of these tools and they most likely learn them from. Jill Miller. So it's a, it's a trickle effect and, get yourself some, go explore, develop your interceptive awareness. And thank you so much, Jill, for spending this time. It's been so fun to

Thank you Diana.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Wise Effort podcast. Wise effort is about you taking your energy and putting it in the places that matter most to you. And when you do so you'll get to savor the good of your life along the way. If you would like to become a member of the Wise Effort podcast, go to wise effort.com. And if you liked this episode and it would be helpful to somebody, please leave a review over at Podchaser. I would like to thank my team, my partner, in all things, including the producer of this podcast, Craig. Ashley Hiatt, the podcast manager. And thank you to Ben Gould at Bell and Branch for our music. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. And it's not meant to be a substitute for mental health treatments.