Movement As Medicine: Pilates, Posture & The Pelvic Floor

Jana Danielson

Dr. Tom. Thank you so much for having me here.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Yeah, I’m excited because when we last chatted, we talked about having a conversation about the movement of medicine or I should say movement as medicine trifecta, a thing you talk about a lot where we bring your work with Pilates and posture and the pelvic floor together and really explore how that leads to total healing, not just physically, but also mentally and emotionally. And as a lot of people who are watching know, that’s really where, you know, yoga was the thing that kind of saved my life. And I didn’t know I had chronic Lyme disease and the busy heavy metal toxicity in my body was kind of shutting down, saying, Tom, pay attention. So I’m really excited to kind of start this conversation about your experience of this. And maybe you can just, you know, for everybody, tell us a little bit about your journey where you come for you came from and how does it lead you to the work that you’re doing today?

Jana Danielson

Yeah, no, that’s a great place to start. So I grew up in a small farming community in the prairies of Canada. So my childhood was like lots of open space, acres of garden, you know, grumbling when we had to go wheat or heel potatoes. Yet it was such a simple way of being brought up. I mean, you had to play all the sports or your high school didn’t have enough people for the team. And being the daughter of a farm family, you also knew that you really did live and die by the weather. You know, an early frost, too much rain, not enough rain, certain, you know, bugs that were eating your crop. And so it was a little bit more of a high stress experience growing up. And my dad, I always remembered my dad wherever he was, he had rolls of Tums. So the antacids. Right. And he would pop them kind of like breath mints. And because he had a lot of stomach issues. And so as I was into my high school years, I started experiencing the same thing and everyone just thought, oh, it’s just just like my dad. And when I got to university, the pain started to increase more. It was digestive in nature, right near my bellybutton, almost like a baseball sized. And I used to connect the dots between going to write an exam or going for a job interview with my pain.

But soon I couldn’t actually connect those dots anymore because it was happening all the time. And I began a two year journey going to my doctor, who then, like a button a in a track and field relay race was passed and passed and passed to different specialists. And I drank every drink. I got poked and prodded. I had lots of blood drawn with crossing my fingers, praying to God. Every time I would go to the next appointment, there would be some clarity, a little bit on what was going on with me. I just wanted that thing. What was it? So that I could then heal. And I ended up just 21 years old on 11 different medications and being told by my medical team that they believed that the pain was in my head and that I was seeking attention. And I don’t care how old you are when you trust somebody and you’re looking to them to help you, and that’s the messaging you get. It doesn’t feel very good. And I went into a depression and I believed that at that point that my body was not serving me. 

For some reason. I got dealt a hand, you know, what did I do to deserve this? I was newly engaged. I wanted to own my own business, be a mom. And I thought, how will any of that actually happen? And, you know, in your story, yoga, you just mentioned how yoga saved your life for me was Pilates. And I saw Madonna on the cover of a fitness magazine in 1999, and it had the word slut splashed across it. And I bought the magazine and I went home and I read the article, and it made no sense to me. And so I read it again and again and again because it talked about this arm of exercise. It looked like yoga to me because it was pictures on a mat and it talked about all the different ways that it could heal. It talked about things like diaphragmatic breathing and the five spinal movement and this guy named Joe Pilates and Posture. And I used to teach fitness to pay my tuition through university. And I had this disconnect because it didn’t look like there was a puddle of sweat on the floor. It didn’t look like there was muscles that were in pain the next day, which is how I used to determine if my workout was good or not. Right. And so that’s how it started. And can I tell you, within about six weeks of doing Pilates mat work, I was off all my medication. I didn’t understand why what my healing what did I realize was I was looking outward for my healing and I needed to, first of all, look within. And once I understood that, my body responded in a beautifully positive way.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Jana I mean, that is so amazing because I think this story probably resonates with so many people listening. It certainly does with me. I’m just going, Oh my God, the same exact thing. It’s just like passed from one person to the other, one concoction to the next potion to the next test, to the Hey, it’s all in your head. I mean, my God, how many times have we all heard this? But then it’s like. And then we start to think they might. Maybe they’re right. And it’s like, like you said, almost like our we’ve experience, like my body is betraying me, you know, my body’s letting me down and I’m like my body. What I learned in the long run is my body was screaming out to tell me what I needed to focus on to actually get better. And I would love you to kind of tell us more about like like it’s interesting you provided me this little quote from Joe Politis of Physical Fitness is the first prerequisite to happiness. And I’m just thinking, like, to me, physical fitness was always totally measured. It was like, how sure are you? How much did you lift? How far did you run? But then ultimately in my illness, I went and I was like my physical fitness actually became the thing that led to my mental and emotional wellness. And then my body healing followed my emotional wellness. And then I saw that quote. I was like, Deb, so tell me more about what that means to you and where this goes for us.

Jana Danielson

Yeah. So I mean, obviously when I started healing my body, I was intrigued and I was I mean, I went, I, I did a business degree, I did an undergrad in business and a master’s in business. And yet there was something pulling me to learn more about the body. And so I went and did my body certification and since then have done a lot more with that. And I realized that we frame the body in a really unfortunate way. We frame it as pieces, arms and legs, and we got to get our cardio in. We got it. So we talk about these pieces. Yet the body is a series of systems. You know, we have bones. We’re going to talk about posture later. So we have a skeletal system. We have blood, we have a circulatory system, we have a digestive system. We’ve got a lymphatic system, which is the body’s innate natural garbage disposal system. We have all these systems that impact each other. So what, you know, when I hear that quote with you, it really was because I come back to that all the time. 

We Dr. Joe Dispenza says the thoughts are the language of our mind and feelings. Is the light, are the feel, are the language, is the language of our body. And yet we become so conditioned in this autopilot mode where, you know, we’re in line at the grocery store and the clerk asks us how we are and we say, Good, how are you? Like We have these canned answers all the time, but yet inside, like with me there was so much disconnect because I was saying, good, I’m good, I’m doing good and inside my body. But no, you’re not. No, you’re not. Like there’s all this pain. There’s all this, you know, there’s all this disconnect and there’s a lack of trust in your body. And I figuratively and literally lost my voice. I stopped making hair appointments and stuff like that. And so when you think about happiness, the physicality of moving your bones, which means you’re then moving your muscles, which means and you have to be breathing in fresh air using our diaphragm. You know, our metabolism is impacted by that. How we eliminate waste is impacted by that. And so when it comes right down to it and maybe some of you have heard this analogy of the million dollar racehorse, if you owned $1,000,000 racehorse, how would you treat that horse? 

How would you treat that asset? You would darn well make sure it had the best nutrition. It had the best trainers, it had a great barn that it could, you know, that it could live in. You would not, you know, ride your horse through a fast food line up. That’s exactly the way it is with our body. You know why? This is what we got. We weren’t born with replacement parts yet. We can get replacements if we need during our life. But this was it. And that’s what I learned through my early days of Lottie’s training, was that when we can move with ease, it ensures that the body’s functions are being supported by that. So the physicality plugs into the emotionality and the mental side of the body. And then there’s also that spiritual piece, which I think so many of us are just starting to explore and bring into the realm of our physical wellness.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

It’s just I love it. Like the million dollar racehorse is something is a concept. Like I never really thought of it like heard it put that way, but I totally know what you’re talking about. It’s like because like seriously, we would do, I think even all the time, like if it were your kid on the, you know, on the other, like if there’s this big ravine that you had to jump over and your kid’s on the other side and you had to find a way to go to the cross is itty bitty little like rope bridge to go save them and you could fall 200 feet to your death you know, into a river whatever in the Amazon. If I asked you to do that for yourself, you’d be like, Hmm, that’s kind of dangerous. I know about that. Maybe I’ll just go have another Big Mac or whatever. But if it were your kid, your ass would be across the thing like right away, right?

Jana Danielson

Absolutely.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

So I love the concept of that million dollar racehorse because it’s like, why don’t we treat ourselves as the million dollar racehorse? You said something that I mean, boy, there’s so many pieces like I love Doctor Joe always just reminds you there’s possibility, right? And to think differently if you want a different result than you’re getting today. But one of the things that I really love talking about is when you talk about diaphragmatic breathing, one of the things that I learned in yoga was because a lot of people see I learned Ashtanga yoga and a lot of people like, well, that’s like or power yoga comes from really hard. How could you even do that with I’m like, Wait a second, my teacher said, Yoga is movement on breath. And so if I couldn’t breathe fully, I was actually pushing too hard and I was doing the first thing you said in the beginning about the sort of making it a workout and making it about physical accomplishment. So how do you look at it from your perspective, your background? Because diaphragmatic breathing to me does, oh, so many different things. So I’d love to hear a chat a little bit about the diaphragm for sure.

Jana Danielson

And, you know, I’m I’m going to I’m going to route this in another Joe quote because he said, Breath is the first and the last act of life. And somewhere in the middle we forget how to do it. And it’s so true. You watch a newborn baby breathe, their belly rises and falls with every single breath just to give an idea of like the muscle we’re talking about the diaphragm. It just sits in the crust of the ribs. It’s like a mushroom cap or an open umbrella. It happens right with the physiology of our body. When we don’t tap into that muscle, the body just is like, Oh, we’ll find another group to help out. So we’ve got these secondary breathing muscles in our neck. They’re called the scaling and the start of external plateau master. Right. And they’re like little strips of beef jerky, right? And they already have a job. That job is to hold up the head and now we’re asking these little muscles to also be the main breathers. 

That becomes a problem. And here’s why we end up we breathe about 86,000 times a day. So we’re asking these little muscles that are supposed to be the best supporting actor in the film. Right, to be the lead role. And they’re like, wait, but wait, I can help out. But I’ve also got this job to hold this bowling ball right on the spine. So we actually stop using the diaphragm altogether. And what happens when a muscle is not being utilized is it just goes into like a hibernation and there’s so much we can unpack there and we’ll talk about pelvic floor in a little bit. But when you breathe diaphragmatic and that is in your nose, out of your mouth, your belly is rising and falling like that newborn baby you’re actually taking in about 600% more oxygen. All right. Now, I’m not saying you have to breathe that way. 24 seven, but if you find two or three times in your day to do 8 to 12 breaths, cycles in through your nose and out through your mouth and hands on this bone here is called your sternum. If you put one hand on your sternum in one hand down on your belly button when you inhale, it’s the bottom hand is your target. That’s what should be filling with air. 

And then on the exhale, you think about drawing that belly button away from the bottom here. For those of you who practice this and you feel your top hand doing more breathing, all that simply telling you is you’ve conditioned these muscles to be the main breathers and we just need to show a shift their job description a little bit. And over time that will start to change. We can create a new neural network 100%. It just takes time and patience and the right information to know what you’re doing. That’s all it takes. So what does 600% more oxygen mean? It means, you know, you’re 50 to 70 trillion cells have the vitality they need to do their job. Then you sprinkle in the right amount of hydration and the right nutrition, and you literally start to create a body that can heal in a more effective way, that can, you know, we can prevent injuries in a different way who have, you know, this body has a better sleep at night. This body can metabolize its food better. Like it just it’s these systems that are so interrelated. And when you give the body the basics, which breath is like a basic, I would say it’s phenomenal what will happen with Jana?

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

I mean, breath is free and it’s also required, right? I mean, so like, I’m just thinking like this, it always blows my mind because then I’m automatically going, wow. How many people have headaches and neck pain and shoulder pain? Start with breathing. How many people are like, I have irritable bowel syndrome or I have like a lot of anxiety. I’m like, well, our solar plexus region is right below the diaphragm. And one of the ways that we relax it, especially when we’re all hyped up in that sympathetic state or even that freeze state that a lot of us get into in chronic illness, is the diaphragm manually massaging? You know, the solar plexus? And lo and behold, you said something earlier that love you to dove into to from your perspective, because as you guys may tell already, like I’m like an anatomy physiology nerd, like, like osteopath, love this stuff and eat it all up. 

So, like, this is such a fun conversation, but it’s like when you look at the, you know, we all want to detox or find more. Well, you know, we’ve got Sister and Kylie, which is this sort of almost like Grand Central Station on the lower part of our lymphatic system, draining the entire abdomen and the legs. That’s right. In the same area. And the thing that moves it is pressure gradient change is driven by two main things. One that we’ve talked about the diaphragm that the thoracic breathing diaphragm, the other one is the pelvic floor. So the flat and the pelvic floor, because if you want to heal from all these things that we think are related to chronic Lyme and other things, let’s optimize the body through here because some of it might disappear like happened to you.

Jana Danielson

Yeah, yeah. So what a lot of people don’t understand when it comes to the pelvic floor is or we’ve been told, you know, watching commercials and seeing billboards that as we age, there are just some things we have to expect. So as we age, we might expect our hair to turn gray. We might expect our skin to show our experiences through wrinkles. We’re also told that as we age, we should expect some incontinence, right? Because our pelvic floor starts to become less functional. And here’s where I’m going to get on my soapbox here, Doctor. Tommy, please do well. And this is why I created the couch and boots. Because no one is talking about this part of the body. This way I feel like people need to understand, first of all, that the core. So our core is more than just the six pack abdominals. All right, we’ve got four sets of abdominals. The rectus abs is the six pack. We chase that and chase it and chase it. And just a very small percentage of us ever see those muscle striations. And actually, at the end of the day, who cares? Right. So we have the rectus abs. 

Then beneath that we have the obliques that act like an X, the external obliques kind of interact with the internal obliques on the opposite side of the body. So, you know, you see sometimes construction workers or they’re wearing those safety vests with the big fluorescent x that’s like our obliques deepest to that is our transverse abs. They start in our back and they wrap to our front like a corset or a big weight training belt. We talked about the diaphragm. The diaphragm becomes the root for the core. All right. And then there’s the floor on the floor. Ladies and gentlemen, is your pelvic floor. So the core of the body is literally a cylinder, a 360 degree cylindrical system with a roof and a floor. Here’s the beautiful part of this. The diaphragm and the pelvic floor are like BFFs. They love each other. And when one responds or not, the other responds or not. So when we are not actively breathing with our diaphragm, the pelvic floor gets that message. And the pelvic floor is like, Oh, all right. I guess I’ll also go on a vacation. Right? And so then we live on a planet with gravity. We have babies, we have sports injuries. We walk around with a wallet or a phone in our back pocket. We stand with too much weight forward on our toes. We’ve had motor vehicle accidents. All these things leave their thumbprint on our body. 

So over time we start to cough or sneeze or laugh and maybe a little bit for guys. It can show up as erectile dysfunction, pelvic floor pain, chronic tight hips, low grade, low back pain that just you can’t get a handle on cold tingly feet constipation. And these are all things that I’m connecting to pelvic floor dysfunction. People just think if I had a baby, I got pelvic floor stuff going on. I’m in menopause, I got step pelvic floor stuff going on. I just post prostate cancer surgery, right? Like there’s all these things that we connect these dots. And here is how simple this is. Everyone, when you start to learn how to use your diaphragm in an impactful way, your pelvic floor, it’s like giving CPR to your pelvic floor just by virtue of breathing properly. You are going to bring function back. And here’s the beautiful thing is that the main nerve that goes from our brain to that area of our body is called the donor. It has two jobs. It’s got a sensory job, which means sensation and motor, which means messaging. When we wake up that muscular tissue and the diaphragm starts or sorry, the pelvic, the pelvic floor diaphragm starts to move in conjunction with your diaphragm muscle. They work together. All right? You actually can start to turn back the hands of time in a way. You can bring confidence back. You can bring sensuality back. And when we bring oxygen, nutrient rich blood to that area, we can literally change the function of what’s what you’re experiencing in your body.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Yeah, this is insane, because the some of the cool parts, this is like how the body works. Like I’m just enamored with how amazing the physical human being’s body is. And you highlighted a few symptoms that I think that are obviously like, hey, if you had a baby or prostate cancer and somebody has done something there, but we have a lot of people who have back pain and leg pain. I have a ton of people are like, hey, as soon as you said, hey, cold feet, I’m like, How many people say they have Raynaud’s because they were all about labeling. I want to tell a quick little story. And I saw someone who had three and a half years of ulcerative colitis that was uncontrolled on a bunch of meds, just kind of like your story. So, I mean, this girl was in college, she was on all these meds and we she happened to go to the same undergrad college, right at the University of Vermont. So I really felt it. But she would go to the restroom in another dorm at 2 a.m. because she had blood and mucus and foul smelling stools, losing weight, the whole nine yards and one or two times a year, every single year since it started, she would be hospitalized on steroids and then they would get her stable and she would go home. But she was never fixed. And so then she comes in to see me and she’s like, Hey, Dr. Tom. Like, I was doing a fellowship and manual medicine, osteopathic treatment, and she was seeing her sister get her white coat put on. 

So I had literally this many visits with her and she came in and I checked her and her breathing was atrocious and we released her right pelvic floor and got it balance between that then allowed her thoracic diaphragm to function better and her right so was opened up. Three weeks later she goes, Doctor Tom, I stopped all my meds. I’m like, Wait, wait, wait. What you did what? Literally didn’t even ask your GI guy. He’s like, Ever since you treated me the one time the next morning I woke up, had the biggest breath of my entire life. And then three weeks later, I’ve had no symptoms. Six months after I saw her, she went to Kenya for eight months and had no relapse. And so the story here, guys, is that I think what happened was because, Jana, you talked about two things that were really important is oxygen in, nutrition in. And then the other part of this is the toxins out. 

And that’s really a huge part of this cylinder you’re talking about is getting the toxins out. Everybody wants the latest and greatest drainer for their belly, their whole body, and then also their brain. And I’m like, hey, the greatest drainer is, you know, like you mentioned, breathing, hydration and sleep. So I just wanted to really highlight that. And one of the little piece that comes that I want to pull together for all of us Lyme folks, that vagus nerve that a lot of you thought that Janna was about to say instead of the dental nerve, the beauty of the dental nerve going to the pelvic floor is it gets down to the pelvis through a different route than the vagus nerve. So the vacancies come in from the top to the diaphragm and also below into the colon and everything in your belly. And then the lower part of it is coming up from that Pew Dental. So listen to everything she’s telling you. This is like the key to healing here, Jana.

Jana Danielson

And, you know, can I just I want to just mention one thing and get into a little bit of the the little bit more of that of this spiritual realm. A little. Let’s just depart holdthere.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Go for it.

Jana Danielson

All right. So just dove.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

So just dive in. No toes here. Just go.

Jana Danielson

Dive in.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Headfirst. Let’s go.

Jana Danielson

We’re going to cold plunge it. I love it. Okay, so here’s the thing and I just learned this recently and I was like, jaw drops, seriously. So here’s little did you know the Latin root of Q dental is a shape. Okay like I just and so I’m just going to say it again. So the Latin root word for a few dental is a shame. And if you think about the nerve, the main nerve that runs from our central processing unit down to the physicality of our pelvic floor, our genitals. Right. And we carry so much stress and tension. There can be trauma in that area. You know, there are amazing sensations. Sometimes there’s no sensation, sometimes there’s painful sensations. And it’s rooted in the word ashamed. And so I want to just help everyone understand and somebody might be like, what? I don’t know if that means. Why does that matter? Here’s why it matters, really. We cannot separate the physicality, the emotionality and the spirituality of who we are. As of be. All right. 

And it’s not about religion and subscribing to a certain church or mindset or framework. It’s not at all spirituality really is our connection to an energy center, a source that’s greater than we are. And you may have felt very spiritual in moments where you’re a part of a community where you’re like, oh, my gosh, look at the impact many can make. And I’m a part of this, right? And so when you think about this area being rooted in the energy and the frequency of ashamed, is it no. I mean, it shouldn’t surprise us that for a lot of people, we don’t even we don’t name that area of our body. We talk about down there. We don’t go to a medical practitioner when we when we have pain or we think maybe something’s not right because it can be shameful for a lot of us. And I want to just help everyone understand that when we can take information as simply information. So this summit that Dr. Tom is doing and offering you is information. What you choose to do with the information can completely change your life. So I want to encourage you to think about the information coming in through all these interviews over the length of this event. 

And then as we move from information to starting to process, it then becomes education, right? Education is what we can start to do to take inspired action. Then one step further is if we take that education and we live it and we bring it into our lives and we start to share with others, that’s when it becomes wisdom. And that’s what Dr. Tom and I do, is we want to help you understand that, you know, you do matter. Even if someone’s told you there’s nothing we can do, there is something you can do. And just taking in this information and I know there’s probably an amazing VIP opportunity here in this summit so that you can have this information for the rest of your life. Think of it like when I was a young. When I was young, my very best Christmas gift. You guys can believe this was a set of Encyclopedia Britannica. They were burgundy. They had the gold edging on the pages. I thought I was like the cat’s ass when I got those. I was in grade three and I just I went through these encyclopedia Britannica. That’s what this experience is. And because there’s so much information coming at you, you might miss something. So, again, think of that information becomes education becomes the wisdom that can really impact you from today until your very last breath on this earth.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Wow. You know, it’s so interesting. It’s like one I think that’s like such wisdom because we can get overwhelmed. There’s so much info. And I think a lot of what we’re doing with the summit is really to try to bring together people who look at healing holistically. We use that. We throw that word around so, so freaking much and drive me nuts like that. The reality is your body knows how to heal itself. And I really love this concept that you mentioned a little while ago about if you’re doing this like with your scaling muscles, which so many of us have it mean when you say that people are go, oh my God, you know, and like you feel it and everything, but you didn’t say you’re breathing wrong. I want everyone to be very, very clear. This is, like, so important. Jana did not say, Hey, you’re breathing incorrectly or wrong. It said you conditioned your those muscles to do the breathing. So let’s condition the primary muscle to do the primary breathing and then you bring up this ashamed thing, because so much of it’s like you’re doing this incorrectly or you haven’t taken the right action. I’m like, Wow, that really just sets you up to feel like, ashamed and like a piece of crap. 

And that has no place in healing except in my world, at least as a signpost. It’s like a flashing neon light. Hey, this is a place where you might be able to talk to yourself a little differently, because, as Jana just pointed out, you’ve got this kind of energetic kind of place that starts with your route. And it’s so interesting that you said if you Daniel’s ashamed by and you keep saying the root and it’s like and your root chakra there so what about energy like what when if I’m if my pelvis and when we closed just you mentioned the little tool that can really help open up the pelvis. So I want to make sure we’ll get back to that. But I want to keep going down this energy for just a minute here. So we’ve got the physicality and the breathing and then the words that we’re saying, the operating system that continually says positive or negative things to us throughout the day. But from an energetic perspective, what’s going on with the pelvic floor and how does that relate to the rest of our body?

Jana Danielson

Yeah. So, you know, whether you call them your energy center is your chakras, whatever it is, I visualized them as these beautiful little spinning galaxies in our body. Right. And there are seven of them within the body. And then there is more outside of the body. But and you mentioned Dr. Thomas so as muscle. So I want to pull the so as into this a little bit as well because I feel like you talk about the pelvic floor without the so as and so getting the so as is located at the front of your body. It’s like two pillars in our body. It’s the only muscle group that attaches our legs to our spine. It is the attach on the inside of the long leg bone, just about a fist distance below the pubic bone on either femur, the big long leg bone, and then this muscle that comes up through the pelvis and attaches on either side of the spine at all sides. So the first lumbar vertebrae, the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth. Some say it goes to the thoracic, the 12th thoracic vertebrae and then it attaches to each of the intervertebral discs. So it’s this muscle and this might go some people out. If you are vegetarians or vegans. But in a cow, this is the filet mignon cut of the of this of the animal. Right. And you know that you’re paying more for that filet than you would for a different kind of sick. We are upright beings, all right? 

If we were all four beings, the size would always be really juicy because we’re standing upright. It can become very well the opposite of juicy. Very dry. It can. It can short and it can hold in utero. The and I’m obsessed with the psoas right now, so I’m just doing lots and lots of reading in utero. The psoas literally absorbs energy from your mom. So if your mom was stressed out during her pregnancy with you, you as baby inside of her belly are absorbing that. All right. And so these energy centers and I want to specifically talk about the root chakra, the sacral chakra and that solar plexus. So the first three from the base of the tailbone up to just below it, just above the belly button. When we talk about feeling grounded and feeling confident and secure, that really is what these first we talk about these energy centers. That’s what they make us feel. The solar plexus is like the sun. It’s that it’s this shiny, beautiful energy. And when we have pelvic floor dysfunction or there’s been trauma or we don’t want to talk about it, we become muted. These energy centers, they can either stops, they think of these little galaxies, they can either slow, they can get stuck, or in some cases they can actually start spinning in the opposite way. So if you’re someone who has been and Dr. Amy Apigian, I interviewed her on my summit and she said something beautiful about trauma. She said Trauma is defined as either too much too fast or not enough for too long. And so these energy centers can be impacted. 

And again, in my mind, trauma, before I talk to her, I was like, I’ve never experienced trauma, right? But after I talk to her, I was like, oh, my gosh, of course I have. Right? Of course I have. And so when we understand that these little galaxies are going to like 1,000,000% impact our physicality and that often medications are symptom focused versus root cause focus, if you can understand that, then you can start to shed like a snake sheds a skin, you can start to shed that. We take on the personality, I believe, of what we’ve been diagnosed with or the medications that we feel like we need to serve us. And the more you understand that, the basics of the breathing, the posture, you know, we’ll talk a little bit about the cooch ball, even just where we have our weight and our feet. Did you guys know that most people start with 80% of their weight to the forefoot, the structure of the foot is not conducive to that. We’ve got a big bone at the back, the heel bone called the calcaneus. And you don’t have to be a structural engineer to understand that big, solid bones are meant to bear weight. Small little bones, fingers, toes, spine are meant for movement. So simply, if you get stuck in that forward posture where you got about 80% of the weight in your feet, your root chakra, your sacral chakra, because of all the holding of the muscles. So that you don’t fall forward, they’re going to get stuck. You are then going to feel less safe, less confident, less willing. Or you might sit at a restaurant and have a menu in front of you and think, Why am I so indecisive? I just have to order a meal. But those are the basic things that just start to happen when those energy centers are stuck.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

So powerful because like, I’m just thinking like, you know, nutrition, absorption, pooping or elimination or the lack thereof, just a little bit of wait for it or even weight too far back posture or sideways or whatever. But bringing it back to the safety and the confidence to speaking to yourself and just this, I just want to highlight that part of taking on the personality of what we’ve been diagnosed with. If everyone watching would if you do this, please stop immediately. Stop calling yourself a limey because it’s a vibration signal piece that is energetic and physiologic and it expresses through your physicality, as Jan has been talking. And it’s just like you have a diagnosis of something that’s just a label that helps us understand what may have triggered the symptoms and potentially give us, you know, a guideline of how to get you better. And it’s not to not remember that you have this disease, but it’s to not be defined by it is so critical because then you can open this up and then you can start working on the things. Because I’ve seen so many people like, Oh, I need more antibiotics as I’m a limey and limey is never get better. I’m like, 

Well, maybe all you need to do is sort of work on your posture and your breathing, because if, if you want to move your lymphatics and you want to like poop more and you want to get more oxygen, and I will say just a quickie on the on the top end of this, because we talked a lot about the pelvic floor being the foundation. Right? The other side of the foundation is that heavy bowling ball gender that you’ve been taught you talked about in the beginning. We just want if we can get the posture of the lower part of the body better, then and we can breathe better then. We don’t have to rely on these scaling and then we get a little out of our head forward posture, which then will drain our brain better. So one of the things because I mean, we could talk about this all day and as you can tell, like I’m like super nerding out as well. Like I think I’ve said this at least twice already before because I love the way the body functions, because it gives us the key and a roadmap to very simply unlocking dramatic healing. 

So one of the things that our folks, a lot of the people that I see, people who are diagnosed and experiencing Lyme disease, other co-infections, maybe mold, illness and even mass activation and things of that nature, they’re like whenever I ask them to do movement, they’re like, I can’t do that. I don’t have the stamina. I don’t have this and that. How do we access I mean, obviously, you gave us the simple breathing exercise with the hand over the sternum and then the hand over the belly button. And just over time, the awareness and breathing down into that our belly button will give us more. But what are the next steps? How can we kind of if people are living in chronic pain, how do we bring into adding a little bit of movement and what the hell, what the hell is this beautiful thing?

Jana Danielson

Okay, so the move, first of all, the movement part is really simple. Again, reading back to Joe Pilates, he said the health of the body is dictated by the health of the spine. And so if you think of your spine, it’s there’s hundreds of thousands, millions nerve of nerve endings that plug in like lights on a Christmas tree. Right. And so the recipe for the spine is there’s five different ways you can move your spine. And hey, Dr. Tom, is there an opportunity for me to give a gift?

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Absolutely. Yeah. Well, what will definitely be putting all that in there?

Jana Danielson

So perfect. So you know what I’m going to do? What I’m going to gift is and I don’t usually give this as a summit, but it’s perfect. I’m going to gift. Of course that. I have it’s called Renew Your Body Movement as Medicine. And what I’m going to talk about right now for the next 90 seconds is all in that gift can find five ways. All right. So first, spinal flexion. When we round our spine forward, we get this visceral massage, our organs get interact with each other. And I don’t I’m not talking about, like, schlumpy posture as forward rounded spine. I’m talking about a little tuck of the tailbone. So you can feel like if you had to cinch up a belt one notch tighter. That’s what I’m talking about. Spinal flexion. All right. Spinal extension. If you were zipping up a jacket and you zipped up your jacket and you kept zipping, and if you looked at a plane that was flying overhead, opening the heart, that heart stopper, the throat chakra, that’s what happens on spinal extension. Spinal rotation takes the spine like a face cloth and rings it out. We have all this amazing spinal fluid that needs movement twisting is important. Side bending is the fourth part of the recipe. And then if you can get on the floor or lay on your bed and just put your feet on the bed or on the floor, bend your knees and just very slowly and s Then gravity can work on that spinal fluid at a different weight. 

And those live. That is the five simplest ways to start to bring movement into your life. You don’t need to do high knees. You don’t need to go run to the end of the block. None of that. If you just start to move your spine, the entire body and all of its systems will become better because of that. So that’s going to be in the gift that’s going to be here in Doctor Tom’s Summit. Now, the cooch ball and the Gooch ball were my answer to being very frustrated with my clients who, like I said, we’re not talking about pelvic floor health, would not use the word vagina or perineum or down there. And that’s when you understand that nutrient rich oxygen, rich blood is required for a muscle fiber to thrive if you don’t water a plant for six weeks, it might still be living. The leaves are going to lose their vigor. The soil is going to be impacted by that. That’s what happens when any muscle fibers lacking blood flow. Then we have this amazing facial tissue that’s like a boa constrictor snake that wraps around every fiber. And if we have if we’re dehydrated, if we have a lack of oxygen, if we have poor posture, poor nutrition, that facial tissue sticks to muscles, bones, organs, joints at the force of £2,000, square inch. So we’ve got all this force going on without us even knowing. And because we live on a planet with gravity and we are like the shape of a DNA helix, we get locked down in forward as we age. The cooch ball for girls, the huge ball for guys is what I created simply and yes. And I name this baby. Right I’ve got three boys and then I name this baby in a way that would do it. 

Exactly what you did, Dr. Tom, is you kind of giggle because, you know, it opens the door for me to start to educate that all this is is a simple three minute practice every day where you sit on the ball, you use your diaphragm through the breathing that we talked about earlier, and we create this lift and lower in the pelvic floor. It really is beyond the eagle. I also use my cooch ball for bloating for Mike. There’s a series I’ve done for Gut Health. I do an anti-aging series on the face. I’ve helped so many people with sciatic pain, do some release through the back body. So as there’s just, our body needs oxygen, enriched, nutrient rich blood, and it needs it beyond a lacrosse ball. People, I can go on and on about the lacrosse ball phenomenon. So that’s what I did. I created a solution for what I believe most people. There was a piece of research done by Dr. Bruce Crawford, who is a Euro gynecologist, who said 90% of pelvic floor dysfunction in a man’s body and in a man’s body, it shows as erectile dysfunction, incontinence, pelvic floor, pain, hips back. We talked about that one in a woman’s body similar but it might show itself as, you know, urge incontinence or stress incontinence is that 90% of those cases, it’s not really a medical issue. It’s a fitness slash movement issue. And if we improve our posture, improve our breathing, get our blood flow to a level where the body is flourishing, we can actually heal that in a very simple way.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Jana, that is sick. I love it. It’s so good because like, everyone’s like, we’re looking for the big shiny thing, the next latest, greatest thing to do. And if you unlock your if your pelvic floor is stuck and you unlock it and you open the breathing, it works your way up, you know, the sciatica goes away because you’re loosening up the back, the Soyuz works, the diet, the thoracic breathing diaphragm works. Then we get all of that nice parasympathetic that comes with this. And you mentioned the heart and all this. We open all this up naturally by just it unfolds from the root up physically as well as sort of energetically and spiritually. So I just I’m so grateful to have you here to share this message, because I think that a lot of what we do with health is make it complex. And you boil it down to maybe a little localized exercise and then some breathing, right. As a foundation. Obviously, there’s a lot more. And I just love the message of hope because so of the symptoms you miss, you mentioned are symptoms that are part of being a human being and they don’t always fit into the category. Everybody tries to play them in the bartonella or Lyme disease or mold them like, well, maybe it’s just you’ve got the head forward posture from your phone and then gravity and then over time it all kind of falls apart. But that one little key, so definitely grab a gooch ball or cooch ball, whichever side you like to look. And you know, the thing about the thing that’s so great about the giggle, too, is not only does it open a conversation, but it opens it. There’s a spark in your heart of just a moment of joy in what could otherwise be a shit show of a day most of the time. So I just appreciate that so much. I am so stoked about the Renew Your Body movement is medicine course that you give. That is just so amazing. So thank you. And I’m sure there’s going to be a zillion people who want to and that everyone needs to go check out your stuff. But if someone wants to follow you, learn more. Learn more about what you’re doing. Where should they go?

Jana Danielson

Yeah. So on social, the best place to follow me is on Instagram at Jana L. Danielson. So it’s Jana with one N and a L Danielson. And then just, you know, coochball.com is the best place to connect with me for the cooch ball my online movement community is at the Mettadistrict.com it’s metta with two Ts, which is a Buddhist word that means a place of love, nonjudgmental and benevolent. So you can join me in the movement kind of my movement community at my Mettadistrict.com. More info on the cooch ball at coochball.com or Jana Danielson on Instagram. 

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

So cool. Well, Jana L. Danielson, thank you so very much. This is so like from a personal perspective. It’s always great to have a conversation about anatomy and physiology and opening healing from that perspective. But from a practical perspective, that’s really why I wanted to get together and have this conversation. And I think that’s well above anything I could have imagined, because to me it’s about igniting that spark where we can put in your hands, guys, the healing from Lyme Disease Summit is not just about getting you in front of the latest and greatest research because that’s always coming out. And I’d be willing to bet a lot of you are out there reading that all the time, so we’re going to take some of that confusion out of that. But these kind of conversations are the ones that you might think have overlooked the place where you can bring back control of your healing back into your own body and reignite your own self-healing mechanism. And that’s really my mission in the summit. So send a lot of love to Jana Danielson for this. Go check her out at Outreach Broadcom and Metta District dot com Instagram all that awesome love and until next time I can’t wait to see you in our next episode of The Healing from Lyme Disease Summit. Talk to you then.