I’m joined by Anna Rahe, founder, CEO and educator of GST Body, who works with the fascia, the “secret organ” that touches every cell and musculoskeletal part of your body. Anna shares the vital role fascia plays in your physical, mental, and emotional health.
In this episode, Anna Rahe describes and solutions for navigating and releasing tension, trauma, and pain within the body’s tissues called fascia to access freedom and possibility. A founder, CEO and educator of GST Body, Anna works with the fascia, the “secret organ” that touches every cell and musculoskeletal part of your body, to help people invest in their health, restore their vitality, and heal themselves.
Anna describes fascia and how it organizes itself into a complete body system that can expand consciousness. By stretching fascia, boundaries of information expand to create more change in mind and perspective. She shares how fascia specifically relates to adrenals in the endocrine system and how accessing fascia allows the body to unload psychological and mechanical forms of stress. Plus, we discuss the concept of elimination within the wellness industry and how to navigate relationship to and interaction with pain for health of the body, wellness of the mind, and spiritual connection.
Listen in to learn more about the proprietary tools Anna has created to liberate and empower our relationship with the secret organ, fascia.
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Dana Frost 00:07
Welcome to Vitally You, a podcast created to introduce you to the tools that will be your roadmap for feeling younger while growing older. I'm your host Dana Frost, a wellness expert, life coach and energy medicine practitioner. Here's what you can expect conversations about vitality from the inside out with guest experts in the field of health, culture and spirituality, and solo episodes along the way from me where I do deep dives into the topics of aging, heart intelligence, energy, medicine, and your innate capacity to heal. If you want to feel younger, while growing older, this is the place for you.
Dana Frost 00:52
Hi, everyone. Welcome to the show. I'm Dana Frost, your host and I am going to be so brave and say that I believe this episode has the power to change your life. I know it's a bold statement, but I feel really confident and I'm excited about this episode. But before we get into it, I want to thank lifewave x 39 stem cell activation patches for sponsoring today's episode, let me share how x 39 supported and is supporting my longevity goals. The first thing I noticed in 2021 When I started patching was the radiance of my skin returned. No joke after two weeks, I noticed that my skin just felt supple and radiant. I also started growing baby hairs for the first time in forever. I sleep better using the X 39 patch my energy. I would say after one month of using the lifewave patches my energy returned to how it felt before my health crisis and adrenal burnout. Now you know that my lifestyle was already in sync with a whole foods diet and movement and a healthy stress response. But the stem cell activation patch pushed me beyond were my lifestyle choices have taken me into an even higher quality of living each and every day. If you would like to learn more, there's a link in the show notes. Okay, get ready.
Dana Frost 02:19
Today's guest will introduce you to an organ in your body you might not be familiar with. And it's an organ that touches and has consequences for every cell organ, the other organs, musculoskeletal part of your body, as well as your emotions and your mind. It's called the fascia. For the past 20 plus years, Anna Ray has delved deep into a liberating and empowering relationship with fascia, so that as many people as possible can invest in their health, restore their vitality and heal themselves with the proprietary tools she has created. As the founder, CEO and educator of GST Body. Anna has spoken about holistic body care through fascia around the world. She's partnered with top athletes, surgeon physicians and celebrities. She's been featured in various publications from shape to L. Net a porter to The Wall Street Journal. And it is such a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you so much for joining us this week.
Anna Rahe 03:28
Thanks Dana. It's so nice to be here. I'm really excited.
Dana Frost 03:32
So we have so much to talk about. And after listening to different podcasts you've been on and looking at your work, experiencing your work. This morning, I am so excited to introduce your work and you to the Vitally You communities. So thank you, again, for being here. And I would love for you to share the origin story of your work.
Anna Rahe 04:00
So funny enough, I was 18 and I was living in a body that just felt like I was at. And this kind of came on me the experience of the physical ailments that were in my body came on me right after a summer of really intense healing, from trauma, childhood sexual abuse, trauma. And I came up and lived in a mountain cabin for three months and was just like, I have to figure this out or I'm not going to you know, live the life that I was supposed to live. And so I really committed to doing all this like kind of healing in the framework of my psyche through therapy that whole kind of three months summer.
Anna Rahe 04:40
And it was really interesting. I landed back in San Francisco and was like, I'm gonna like now I can do my dance and now I can you know show up and really be powerful and be who I'm supposed to be and my body just started having all these symptoms very exaggerated very fast. With this vast onset. It was more like I was discovering it but let me describe sensation so people can kind of understand, I would have simple things like muscular skeletal pain that would just be excruciating. It felt like I was wearing a straitjacket. And on the inside were like blunt and sharp objects poking in me and zingers of nerves. And I wouldn't be able to take a full breath and my lungs would feel tight and restricted. It would feel like I had been doing like huge workouts and the kind where you can like sit down on the toilet or like pull the shirt over your arms. But I wouldn't have done anything severe in my training or in my dance.
Anna Rahe 05:29
And so I'd have to like volatile muscular skeletal things that would then kind of flare up in my digestion. So I'd go in and have like colonoscopies, I'd have like these bubbles of a turnover in my guts, and I couldn't sleep at night. So I became an insomniac. And that obviously doesn't help with the other things. And then the other symptoms were a little bit even more extreme. Like I felt like I would regularly run and I'd go and run through Golden Gate Park on a Monday and I feel like super powerful up the hills no problem. And three days later, I do my second run, same run, and I feel like a 10 pack a day smoker. Like my muscles would burn and I couldn't get full breaths. And I went in and they looked at my lungs, no asthma, they gave me inhalers it kind of helped, but not really. And so all of a sudden, I had been certified in Pilates, I'd studied a lot of yoga, I was a dancer, so I kind of knew bodies.
Anna Rahe 06:20
And I kind of been introduced to fascia from a Rolfing perspective, I that summer of healing, I had had a 10 series in traditional Rolfing. I'd also done stuff with Heller work. So it was in my consciousness that something was going on. And it could be related to my fascia. And so at 18, I had a tiny studio apartment, I had a reformer in my house that my parents had bought me so that I could work and teach private sessions. And I called my Pilates mentor one time, I'm like, why would I do this? Does my body just like flare up? Am I doing something wrong? And I had been certified in three different Pilates programs. And I kept searching for like this answer. And she's like, well, sorry, you live in California. And I can't help you with that. And so I just felt really abandoned. But in the lot in the backside, it was like the most the biggest blessing that I think life could have thrown me. I felt totally abandoned, but I was like, I'm gonna fix this, I'm gonna figure out what's wrong with me. And that's what I did. I spent 25 years figuring out what the hell was wrong with me.
Anna Rahe 07:24
And kind of just testing things like I was a real big rule follower. I did things to precision, and I would execute whatever I was taught. And that's why that blessing came in where it's like, if I had someone guiding me, I would have latched on and just been the best student ever, and mastered whatever they said. And when you're standing alone, and all of a sudden, you're like, What the hell am I going to do? Like, all of a sudden, anything was available? And so it gave me this opportunity in my brain to just be like, could it possibly be that what I've been taught is wrong? Could it possibly be taught that this isn't what's right, because every time I do what I like, what feels good, I get an opening, I get a release, I can breathe, I sleep better the days when I have this, and then I'd go to another Pilates workshop or a yoga, you know, training session, and I would have my flare up, and I couldn't move for a couple of weeks and things would just be awful. And then I'm like, but they told me to put my ribs down.
Anna Rahe 08:19
They told me to like, really lock into my core, or whatever the principle was. And I'm like, I'm just going to have to trust that my true is my true. And then I'm going to pursue what is producing, healing, lightness, openness, more freedom, more like calming of my nervous system. And I had to really learn to trust myself and connect deeper to, you know, block out all of the things I'm told I should I should I should and then be like, No, this isn't right. And it's really hard when you have doctors telling you that you should do this. And you should do that. So it's kind of in the long run, I discovered that I could do something with fascia that was not talked about in medical books, like 25 years ago, fascia was still really not in the science, not in the cutting edge. And so there weren't a lot of books on it. It was mostly a manual therapy technique.
Anna Rahe 09:11
And I found that when I got manual therapy would flare me up. And so I was like, but movement in this way makes me feel better. And so I started just kind of collecting and making a really comprehensive science based body of work by doing my own kind of research into other areas of science and what fascia is and its composition and just following those kind of truths.
Dana Frost 09:34
Yeah, well, I love that because it really speaks to having a curious mind and being open. I wish I could remember the name of the he was a conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and he wrote the book The Art of Possibility. Well, you you described it perfectly, you know, as a young person and questioning maybe what I've been taught or what I think is true. Isn't true and what's possible? What could be possible if I open the window to possibility? And so it's just it's so powerful to look at whatever situation we're going through, not as a door that's locked down, but that we can look at what are the possibilities? What are the options? Okay, this is uncomfortable. So this pain in my body is uncomfortable. Well, let me explore that. What can I do with this pain? What's the message? What, you know, how can I hook up with my body to try to see what it's asking for me?
Anna Rahe 10:33
One, this is so interesting, but with the word I use, which I love as possibility in terms of like future potential, but in the moment, most of our pain is caused because we lack options. And I use this analogy with people and they come in and they like, come in with this lake of pain. And on their pain, they have two lily pads, and they're like, help me cross over this lake, I just have to get over this shoulder problem, or my, you know, MS symptoms, or my, you know, migraines that are rampant in my okay. And it's like you have to lily pads, and I can't the jump is so big to get you from here to here.
Anna Rahe 11:08
And so then people are like, I just want to do it right? What do I need to do. And I'm like, Just practice, because you're adding options, I need you to go home and be able to add some lily pads. And then I will teach you how to jump from this lily pad to this lily pad. And we will cross the leg of pain together. But you have to have options. And I think that people are so wed to certain things in their life that they restrict even unknowingly Not intentionally, options. And when you restrict options, you're innately inversely restricting freedom, right? Freedom of concept, freedom of idea, freedom of potential. And so it's really coming back to being like, I could only do three things in my tissue. I can only do these four things in my body. How can I create anything with three things? I have to add my options. Okay.
Dana Frost 11:57
You were hitting on something that is one of my pet peeves about the wellness industry, particularly. Yeah, through the lens of functional nutrition, which is one of my trainings. And this isn't a concept of functional nutrition, but it's in the wellness industry, it's eliminate, eliminate, eliminate, totally eliminate,
Anna Rahe 12:21
they do it in movement tune and you're in pain, take that movement out. If you're, you know, feeling in any kind of discomfort, eliminate the movement, it's amazing. It's amazing. And so what do you think that's from what, from what causes humans to constantly contract, rather than expand, to limit options to eliminate something rather than to proliferate to, you know, work of it better, you know, typing that
Dana Frost 12:50
fear? Well, I see that every energy, it either stems from love or fear. And so I would say the, the root or the origin of bad is fear. And we don't like pain, right. And so when we hit a pain point, we move away from it. And, and then we keep moving away from it until we lock the body down. Because we won't go near it. And in order to heal it, you have to go near it in a way that this is just my framework, you have to go near it in a way where the nervous system feels safe. And we're not really taught, we're not taught how to do that.
Anna Rahe 13:31
We're also taught that pain is bad, right? And so if you can kind of like start to see that pain is actually neutral pain is inflammation. And inflammation is just things that allow you to have different perception. And so if you can, I mean, that was the point of my healing was like I would actually touch into the pain. And sometimes I would touch in really hard. But if I was in agreement with it, if it wasn't being done to me, if I was choosing to accept it and look at it, then all of a sudden I'm I'm in right relationship to that pain.
Anna Rahe 14:04
And that's what this was like fascia, like metabolizes pain, it literally is a metabolic process where you tap into the pain, you learn how to dilute it, which is metabolite like spreading it out, understanding it, analyzing it, and then putting it into motion. And most people forget that last step of pain metabolism, which is we think about it we psychologically analyze it and we you know, masquerade it, but we never actually put it into full motion. And that leaves septic fear tension in our tissues, from my, you know, line of work, but also in our psyche.
Dana Frost 14:39
Yeah, I really love that connection between what's happening physically has that connection with what's happening emotionally and mentally. Because we really can't separate either any of those. We can't separate them from one another. Not at all.
Anna Rahe 14:54
They're one in the same process.
Dana Frost 14:57
Yeah, this idea I really want to talk about this idea. Yeah, well, first, you know, what I want you to do give us a definition of fascia describe what fascia is.
Anna Rahe 15:06
That's my favorite thing. So fascia is a generic term that describes a type of body tissue. And I say that it's generic, because it's kind of akin to being like, My shirt is cotton. And it's just this type of tissue that exists in your body. If you d skinned your body, you would see like a gooey, spiderweb type material that is wrapped around every structure, organ cell vessel. It's just everywhere. It looks like a kitty went crazy with yarn in your body. But that's not what makes fascist so significant. And so we've been looking at it from a from a, what is it? Versus what does it do? Right, it's almost like, great if you can identify it.
Anna Rahe 15:46
But the most important thing is that fascia organizes itself into a complete body system. And it was really hard for people to see the organization of it because it was so hectic and crazy. And so it creates this connective tissue system. And just like your endocrine system, your nervous system, your vascular system, it comes complete with its own organs, the way that tissue organizes and delineates itself. And they are not masked organs, like a heart, or like a lung, it's spread out like, like sedimentary, almost kind of like the way that veins of stone run in and rock. And so fascia was really highly missed because we couldn't individuate it, we couldn't see that this up here in the brain is actually completely connected to the way that it's showing up in your bladder, or whatever, right.
Anna Rahe 16:32
And so Chinese medicine is tapping into that in a more holistic approach, people are starting to see it, but not actually being able to put it all together. And so fascia is, and we use them interchangeably. But this connective tissue system is really powerful, because it's like a sonic system, it really is like your own personal sound bath, taking it in energetic frequencies, it's an irrigation system. It's the way that all of your cells create, maintain hydration, it's a communication system. It's actually more sophisticated in many ways than your nervous system in terms of collecting information, and being able to relay sensations and all of this kind of important stuff for your consciousness to grow.
Anna Rahe 17:14
But in its greatest capacity, all of those things, what they have in common as a fact is kind of your energetic, smart grid. It's the reason that your heart can pump right next to your lungs, and not have interference. It's why we have high voltage force from our stressful lives outside mechanical load, psychological load that comes into us. And then we have low frequency, the low fi energy of heartbeat, cellular, you know, physiological energy. And fascia is busy, like pulsating and pushing and, and moderating these different energies in the body. And so I think that that's what makes me the most excited is when you see it in the holistic approach of what that actually means to you as a human. It's the by far the most prolific body system with the greatest extensive amount of reach and influence over your health. That's not just health in the body, but wellness of the mind. And that, you know, spiritual connection. That happens.
Dana Frost 18:13
Yeah, so it literally touches everything,
Anna Rahe 18:15
everything. And everything is not a part of your, it's in your eyeballs, it's behind your tongue. It's in the tonsils, it's in your, you know, everywhere. And it's really exciting. Because when you touch into it, then all of a sudden, you have like this influence you did not have it used to be that you what you eat, and how you do your heart workout, and how you do your muscle stretching. And everything was just compartmentalize and fascist, like, I'm totally integrated, dude. I'm just like a big integrated system.
Anna Rahe 18:43
So you can't isolate anymore, right? You have to integrate, if you have to think how my eyes are affecting my digestion, right? It's a weird thing. But all of a sudden, it's by nature, it's called the organ of, you know, fascist, they talked about it being an organ of consciousness. And it really is the fascist the organ of the body, like the brain is to the mind. And so it's it's this complimentary system in terms of how you expand consciousness. So by stretching your fascia, you're literally expanding the boundaries of the information that's able to be accessed to you, in order to create more change in your mind perspectives. It's like opening of the aperture. And so there's so many different fun ways that fashion can really change your life. Really.
Dana Frost 19:31
That's so interesting. So, in my chi yoga training, I was exposed to the idea that the soul as like the importance of the soul, as in terms of consciousness, and the information that it holds in the body. And so that's just, you know, remembering that as I'm hearing you talk about fascia,
Anna Rahe 19:53
so as really deeply connected to emotional response, because it's shares common boundary lines with the diaphragm. It also really works with your QL, Quadratus, lumborum. And those are all. So maybe that's off topic, let's go, just geek out forever. Let's actually go into the emotional body. And now let's talk about representing yo.
Dana Frost 20:16
But I do want to go into the emotional body actually. So let's go into the emotional body, if it's related to fascia, it is related. So yeah, tell us some.
Anna Rahe 20:25
So let's just talk about the idea and the perspective that would be maybe really helpful, especially to women as we're aging and hormones. And so you have this endocrine system, that's pretty much kind of like a bartender, and along with your neurotransmitters, it's shaking up a cocktail of experience, you have a breakup with your lover, and it's like a couple of little, you know, shakes of Vermouth and add a little bit of this a little serotonin of stress, and then it shakes it up, and it sends it through your entire system, your tissue system.
Anna Rahe 20:54
And so when you start looking at the emotional body, it's where are if you think about the body like flow fields on a planet, those hormones will actually get stuck in tissues, the fibrous web of the connective tissue system with contractile action, fascia contracts under mechanical load, but it also contracts under chemical load. And so that chemical experience flies all the way through your tissues. And if you are having areas that pool, like the flow fields are not open, that chemical cocktail like sits in your tissue, and starts to become part of your mechanical patterns, your habits, your configurations of tightness, the expression of you is literally etched in your flesh.
Anna Rahe 21:37
And so when we start going in and looking at the so as in the, you know, QL, those are part of major emotional cocktail, chemical cocktail flow fields. And so they hold a lot of these tensions in the entrance of these experiences that we have, as we grow in our traumas in our stuff. And that's why you know, the issues in your tissues are great adages. But they're also very physically true. And so in order to be able to heal, I remember in my journey of the emotional body was like, and I kind of just talked about it in my origin story, which is, it's a lot of times our traumas are inflicted in the physical body. But then by the time we're ready to address them, we are so in our culture cognitively oriented, that we start to like, do it in analysis.
Anna Rahe 22:28
And we try to fix the problems purely from this, like digital X and o's and you know, kind of like digital, rather than analog experience, I like them the body to more analog life versus digital life. And so when you get in there, you're like, we do all this type of healing, but we never bring it down to where the point of original infliction was. And when you don't complete the cycle, you actually don't really completely heal. And so some of the power of you know, healing through fascia and integrating it into our, the way we're healing our mind, right, we're integrated individuals is you can use the body and not have to constantly re tax the nervous system with the trauma. So it's been years like, what is it? What is it? Why am I crying, and I would cry, and think and think and think and then I'm like, if I just go and release this from my tissues, my mind is dumping at the same time. So that makes sense,
Dana Frost 23:22
it makes so much sense.
Anna Rahe 23:24
That's the metabolic process, right is the healing in different layers, but doing it at the body is so much freeing to your mind, it actually restores more rather than getting stuck in our narrative, in our stories in our you know, the brain is a real tricky place. And using the body is almost like a grace or a space that's like, I can do this for you. And you don't have to re experience the trauma. And you don't have to like just get it out of my system. And we're good to go. Right. And so it's almost like the body becomes this beautiful totem, to be able to complete the healing for us.
Dana Frost 24:02
I love that visual, the body becomes a beautiful Totem. I think that when we you know, everybody has trauma of some, you know of some sort. And in our Western framework, the way that we get rid of it has been for now many years. I don't know how many years but it's been through talk therapy, and or cognitive therapy. And I think we're at this point in time, we're at this pivotal point in history where we now like you've spent studying fascia, so you've got this body of work and somatic therapy, getting us in our body. We have this we have people who are calling us to get into our body to ease our pain and suffering. And so I think that yeah, we're just at this really opportune moment in terms of healing the collective trauma and healing at the individual level and it really is coming. I believe it's coming Home to the body and integrating all these different parts of who we are
Anna Rahe 25:03
seeing the body as me, rather than a part for me. Right. And that's a whole nother discussion. But I love the the anthropological relationship of human to body. It's almost like the first 2 million years, we're all biological evolution. And then we got into the, like, 18th 19th century, and it started becoming more cognitive evolution. And now we're kind of moving into the spiritual realm where it's like, that is the job of humans to create integration and coherence in ourselves. And while extending our concepts of global connection, right of ourselves as being one cell of the trillion human collective body, right, and how we can by working on ourselves, really. I mean, that's where the highest passion for what you and I do is, right? Yeah, it's like, there comes a point where you got to get over yourself and be able to be of service to others, you do your healing, and then you're like, how can I use the suffering of others?
Dana Frost 26:07
Yeah. So I want to get really practical for people. And yes, how would someone know if you know something's happening in there fashion? I mean, I think all of us need attention to the fascia, but how it's, you know, what are some of the signs, I think pain is a sign? So what how could you speak into that? For our listener? Great
Anna Rahe 26:25
question. It's kind of like the same comment you just said is like, everyone has some type of trauma, right? So if you've been living for at least 40 years, you can pretty much guarantee that there's areas of your fashion that are not working. And it ages as we age, and it's regulating stuff. So pain is one autoimmune stuff is another it's deeply layered fascist, deeply layered into the ANS, which is your autonomic nervous system, just simple things like stretching, right? If you are super inflexible, you really probably have some fibrotic conditions. You know, the farther extreme of fibrosis is Austin is ossification where like tissue almost becomes bone, like rigid digestive issues. I mean, this is what my story kind of highlights is an origin of, it's everywhere.
Anna Rahe 27:14
And so pretty much if you are having a body issue, somehow your fashio is involved, and you start addressing the passion, not just on the muscular skeletal level, then all of a sudden, you'll start to see that your symptoms greatly and radically improve. I had this client, let's call her Stacy. And she comes in and she is in her 50s. And she's you know, looking at hormone, you know, support and bioidenticals. And she's been pretty athletic her whole life, but she was a chiropractor and had her own practice. And she's like, my body just hurts, I work out and my body hurts and, and she was doing all of these bioidenticals and nothing was really working, the balance wasn't totally right.
Anna Rahe 27:58
And it would kind of go okay for a while. And so she started doing this just fascist stuff with me. And immediately there was a stabilization in her ability to tolerate and select the hormones that she was being given. Because fascia is related to the metabolic process of your hormone cocktail. So that's one example where it's like it's it's maybe not as obvious it was helping her with her shoulders and her low back pain and our hips that wouldn't open. But it was like this kind of, it's like a malaise. And it's both a benefit. Because we can't get myopically diagnostic with fascia. It actually forces us to be like, well, it could be this, it could be this. So if people are having issues and listening, just assume do a deep dive into fashion. It's fascinating. And it's, you know, something that might produce a complimentary impact for whatever you're also pursuing
Dana Frost 28:51
was something that I heard you talk about, you know, a few things I want to make sure we get to. I heard you talk about the adrenals, and fascia related to the adrenals. And so I would love you to touch on that. And then I also want you to touch on what are a few I've heard you talk about do these few movements. You know, every day just in your everyday life, do these few moments. So could you touch on those things before we come to an end?
Anna Rahe 29:17
Yeah, let's talk about that. So the I kind of already addressed the thing, but now we'll put it into context. Your adrenal glands are an endocrine organ, and they secrete most of your stress hormones. And because of what fascia is, it responds both to mechanical loading, like I am pushing pressure into that area, and chemical loading, which is I call it psychological loading, but it's the chemicals of your experience. So fascia. If we do things like contracting and trying to crunch and get really solid core, you're actually loading into the adrenals and the adrenals go, Oh my gosh, I'm in fight or flight, the position that It is stressful.
Anna Rahe 30:01
Think about like, when you're wanting to run away, you fold your body in, you push your ribs back, it's designed to make everything protect down, man be able to run. So you're so as tightens your diaphragm stops, you know, breathing normally. So this area's really important. So we shorten under stress, psychologically, we go into fetal position is a protective, you know, lace. And that fetal position is the same position we do while we're doing our exercise, by tucking our butts and bringing our ribs down. So unknowingly, we are creating the condition of psychological stress, by the way that we are stressing the mechanical load into the body.
Anna Rahe 30:43
And fascia is that thing. So we want to be able to unload our stresses both psychologically and mechanically. And so for example, one of the greatest ways to do that is less simply, instead of crunching, arching your back, every 20 minutes, just art lay over your couch arm lay over your window of your car, like you're always trying to arch rather than to flex because the mechanics of load into the fascial tissue changes your psychological and your physiological state. So that's how that works. That question? Yeah, it
Dana Frost 31:21
does. It really does. Yeah. And you mentioned I've heard you talk about hanging.
Anna Rahe 31:27
Okay, so then let's go for it. Yes. Yeah, here's an interesting thing about fascia and fascua is 70% Water 30% fiber. That means that when you move, and when you go through life, your body is more like a water balloon being hurled through space than you are a stick being hurled through space. But we do all of our exercises with levers and pulleys in mind, not thinking about the like dimensional movement. So all of a sudden, our mechanics are wrong. They're not solid mechanics, but we're fluid dynamics. And the most simple simple understanding is going to affect how I give you these motions to do. And for the listener, your body is, is created to be kind of like a syringe where if you pull the end of the syringe, water moves in, and if you push the syringe, water moves out. And that's the elemental, very simple mechanics of a pump.
Anna Rahe 32:21
And if you look at all of human motion, it's a combination of flexion and extension, or compression, and traction, okay. And so if you start looking at your movement, like a syringe, the way to keep your tissue hydrated, the way to keep stress moving and metabolizing through the fibers of your fascia is by making sure that you are regularly doing push and pull movements. And so what you're talking about is, I always tell people that you want to make your body kind of like life is a jungle gym, especially as you age, your body doesn't want to do 45 minutes of a workout, it just doesn't. But you get better quality over quantity if you move with fashion in mind, and especially with the techniques that GST has. So you look around life is a jungle gym, and you find surfaces like banisters, railings, sinks, open car windows, while you're filling your car with gas, parking meters. You know, public transport, you know, I used to live in San Francisco. And I'd always hang off of the kind of like hanging things.
Anna Rahe 33:26
So you need a lot of this hanging creates traction, it also creates suspension. And then you want to be able to go into really dynamic like that primal squat of our ancestors around the fire. A good example of the compression of pushing the syringe out dude. And so we're going to traction and we're going to compress and we're going to traction and compress. The only other thing that I tell people that they need a lot of is rotation. We never rotate our torsos and our spines and ever. And so rotation is like the ringing out of a sweater. So think about for the for the listener, washing your fascia every day, you take a sweater and you hand wash it, you dunk it into the water, that's compression, and all the fibers get wet and loose, you pull it up and all the water runs off and that's traction and the fibres are heavy and the dirts are being pulled off.
Anna Rahe 34:15
And then the rotation is wringing it out and getting all the impurities out. So it's a dunk, pull, rinse, and so start looking for that even if it's just layered into your current workout. What does that look like in in understanding that my spine has to compress and then traction and then ring out and those are the three things that we try to do a lot of.
Dana Frost 34:36
Yeah, I really love that. So I would direct people to your YouTube channel specifically because you have what I did this morning as a five minute fascia flow. You have different opportunities for people to experience it and I think when you when you see what you're describing on a video then it makes it really evident. Oh, I could do it here or there. Like I noticed that on our I have a Built in barchart, and I know I was like I can hang from this I can hold on and kind of hang. But I noticed that after doing that fascia flow and yeah, so all of
Anna Rahe 35:10
our lifestyle anthropologically, like old functional movement was really diverse hanging from trees down at the fire hiding and crouching hunting and did a and the body needs this huge range of motion, I think that's what most people will start to experience that's very different than other even yoga and Pilates is that GST is about how big can your motion be. Because if our gravity is pulling us in, we want to traction and pull ourselves out. Right? This is actually an interesting concept that I talk a lot about an aging, which is our minds tend to narrow as we age. So unless you're actively stretching them, you're going to get more fearful, you're going to get more myopic, and you're so we have to stretch our bodies in big ranges of motion to compensate for the natural aging process, which is tends to be closing in. Right?
Dana Frost 35:57
Absolutely. And I think that goes, you know, with the mindset, too, it's the same as you know, body and mind emotions. The more we close down, the tighter everything gets, you can see that if you pay attention to bodies is the ages when you're walking on the street, notice the different bodies, and you're gonna you're gonna be able to put together stories about, you know, maybe not the specifics about somebody, but if they're, if they're closed down, or if they're opened up. So I love our conversation. And I'm so sad. We're there we are at the end of it, but I want to honor your time. And I do have to ask you one question I asked all of my listeners at the end of the show, and that is what does feeling younger, while growing older mean to you?
Anna Rahe 36:45
I'm going to answer it from three perspectives. In the body. It's having boundless energy, from the mind. It's having lightness and spiritual like lightness and effervescence and agility. And in my spirit, it's having joy.
Dana Frost 37:02
Hmm, that's really beautiful. Anna, thank you so much for being on the show this week.
Anna Rahe 37:07
Thank you for hosting and having me I love talking with you. I love your soul and what you're doing. It's so fun.
Dana Frost 37:13
Oh, this sentiment is mutual. It is mutual. Thank you. Thank you everyone for joining us this week on the Vitally Yoy podcast. What I want you to remember from this episode is that fascia is your healing ally. It's also your longevity ally. It's right up there with chi yoga for me in terms of feeling younger while growing older. Why? Because it supports intimacy between your nervous system, your thoughts, your body and motions. And it works effortlessly as you engage with your fascia and move it and allow it to flow like it wants to flow. It works effortlessly to heal traumas and fashion your body to be functional. As it was originally designed our modern world we are behind walls, we're in chairs.
Dana Frost 38:10
We have this limited range of motion and it diminishes the capacity of our human. Please come to the wild site and play with your fascia. Anna has graciously offered a 10% discount, there will be a link in the show notes. I also want you to know that she has free content on YouTube. So I went to her YouTube channel as I was preparing for my episode and I checked out her videos I did her videos I was having so much fun with it. And if you're in Boulder better yet, check out her studio. Okay, if you're enjoying the value podcast, please make my heart sing leave a review, hit subscribe and download. Better yet, share this episode with your friends and family and until next week.
Dana Frost 38:56
I am streaming love from my heart to yours. Ah Wait a second. I forgot I wanted to read a review. Okay, before you go, a refreshing perspective, by Gretchen cosell Dana is a dynamic, knowledgeable host who has a refreshing perspective on aging. She is a skilled interviewer and introduces listeners to a wide range of healing modalities. Dana proves that when you get curious and uncover the root causes of symptoms, it is definitely within reach to feel younger while growing older. Looking forward to many more episodes. Gretchen thank you so much. I'm so glad I remember to read this review. I love getting your reviews everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Bye