188 Fascia, Movement & Body Image with Helen Eadie

Join me and Helen Eadie in our experiential conversation about exploring body consciousness.

Helen Eadie is a somatic practitioner with a rich background in craniosacral therapy and yoga. And in this conversation, we talk about:

🌱 Understanding the Body: Having vs. Being

🌱 The Journey into Somatic Practices

🌱 Craniosacral Therapy: A New Perspective

🌱 Self-Study Through Movement

🌱 Exploring Fascia: The Body's Connective Tissue

🌱 Fascia and Its Implications for Health

🌱 The Importance of Spiral Movements in Fascia Training

🌱 Mind-Body Connection: How Thoughts Affect Fascia

🌱 Understanding the Role of the Insula in Body Awareness

🌱 Trauma and Disconnection: The Impact on the Fascia

🌱 Body Image and Perception: Navigating Changes During Menopause

🌱 Helen's Work: Exploring Movement and Healing

So if you’re ready to be educated and inspired, tune in now.

Helen’s Links:

Website: www.heleneadieyoga.com

Instagram: @heleneadiesomatics

Sally's Links:

[Free Guide] Healing The Trauma Underlying Your Menopause Symptom Severity:  https://www.sallygarozzo.com/healingtraumatheguide

[On Demand Masterclass 2 hours] How To Heal The Trauma Underlying Your Menopause Symptom Severity [£17] https://www.sallygarozzo.com/healingtrauma

[On Demand Workshop] Redefine Your Values at Menopause and Live Life in Alignment With Them [£27] https://www.sallygarozzo.com/redefine 

[Online Practitioners Diploma - Self Paced] Menopause Wellbeing Practitioner [£127] https://www.sallygarozzo.com/meno

[One to One] Transformational 30 Day Rewire (Includes RTT) [£447]: https://www.sallygarozzo.com/rapid-transformational-therapist

Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/sallygarozzomindmentor

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sallygarozzo/

Send me a voice clip via What’s App - https://wa.me/message/FTARBMO7CRLEL1

Transcript

Sally (00:01.432)
So my guest today is the lovely Helen Ede. Helen is a somatic practitioner, originally trained in craniosacral therapy and Scaravelli inspired yoga. Over the years, she's has trained and studied under the mentorship of Joanne Avison, who is a leading educator in the field of fascia and movement. And more recently, Helen has completed a master's in psychology at the University of Sussex.

and has also now applied to do her PhD. She is deeply curious about the relationship between body consciousness and mind, specifically how we can heal psychological wounds through the body's process of becoming conscious of itself. Now, Helen, I already know this conversation is going to be mind blowing, but I just want to say welcome to the podcast, my love. Are you okay?

Helen (00:59.236)
Hi Sally, I'm good and really, really pleased to be here. So thank you for inviting me.

Sally (01:04.91)
Well, I just want to let everyone know how we met because I think it's quite a story actually. I saw a post, I was scrolling on Facebook and I saw a post, my friend Denise Richards, I think, had been to one of your retreats at NEP Estate. And I thought, oh, that looks really good. At the time I was doing cold plunge and there was a natural pond, the yurt, I thought, oh, that looks lovely. So I came in the summer.

and really loved the type of yoga that we were doing. I'd never done this type of yoga before. And it was all kind of curly-whirly yoga. It was like spinning plates. And it felt like, I called it body engineering. It felt like we were sort of, I don't know, I felt that you had an incredible amount of knowledge that I was so curious about.

Then the second time I came, because I think I've been on four of your retreats, we had the most amazing walk, do you remember, in the NEP estate and there were wild ponies, it was snowing, we had the most incredible chat and you were telling me about the power of fascia. And at the time, I was getting into the Eileen McCusick stuff around sound and electromagnetic energy and, what do you call it, ether.

and the toroid shape that you were talking about, how that energy spins itself into existence and all of this stuff. So you and Eileen McCusick's stuff and the Joanne Averson stuff and my own body experience of having a lot of pain at the moment has really kind of opened me up to this whole new way of thinking. So I know this is gonna be amazing. I just wanted to set the scene. So Helen.

What does it mean to have a body?

Helen (03:06.322)
Hmm. It's a really good and interesting question. But I think it's one half of a bigger question because I think that for sure we have a body, but we also are a body as well. So there's having a body.

Sally (03:15.438)
Yeah.

Sally (03:20.59)
Hmm.

Sally (03:31.843)
Right.

Helen (03:35.514)
And there's being a body. And I think they are two distinct experiences. so to have a body, think is to, well, I guess the question implies already that there's a separation of some kind. Having a body is to some degree, like objectifying your body. So your body is.

Sally (03:40.877)
Yeah.

Sally (03:54.2)
Mm-hmm.

Sally (04:02.22)
Right.

Helen (04:04.508)
perceived as an object because not only from yourself, you're perceiving it as an object, but you're aware that others perceive you as an object as you perceive other bodies as objects. Whereas being a body is speaking to a more subjective experience, a more internal

Sally (04:22.306)
Yeah.

Helen (04:34.008)
experience, I would say.

And yeah, think both are right, but I think we can have a tendency to maybe give more weight to one experience over the other. And I think perhaps where kind of ill health or dysfunction can come from is when we give too much

Sally (04:54.327)
I see.

Helen (05:09.574)
like attention to our objective body, to having a body. We start to remove ourselves more and more away from the body that we are.

Sally (05:20.558)
That's so interesting that distinction. Never, never thought of it like that.

Helen (05:24.018)
There's a brilliant, like simple kind of visual metaphor for it was Hercel the philosopher. I can't remember what he described it as, but you know, he said it's like you have your hands and when you have one hand touching the other, you know, in that moment that is you experiencing the

objective body, that's the body that's being touched. And the subjective body, that's the hand that's doing the feeling. So sorry, the hand that's being touched is the objectified body, the body that you have. And the hand that is feeling is the body that you are the body that is being. So we can see it for ourselves, by how we can touch ourselves, we can experience that duality.

Sally (05:58.819)
Yeah.

Sally (06:08.813)
Yep.

Sally (06:15.15)
Ooh.

Sally (06:24.504)
Wow, yeah, I'm trying to get into that now as I'm, as I'm, yeah, yeah, okay. Can tell the psychologist in you is coming out there. Okay, so that's what it means to have a body, that it's a tale of two halves. You have a body, but you also are a body. And I'm sure we're gonna explore this because the our part of it is like more of the beingness and how we function within.

Helen (06:25.434)
Yeah.

Sally (06:54.38)
that and I guess the whole mind body comes into that too as well because the head is in the body you know I think sometimes we forget that the mind and the head is is part of the body you know we try and separate the two but you can't because it's it's right there in it on it yeah it's one how did you get into this work Helen by the way the work of yoga

Helen (07:09.81)
Absolutely.

Helen (07:15.952)
Yeah.

Helen (07:22.404)
So my inroad was craniosacral therapy, and that's a somatic practice, is... there's different... Sorry, that was my apologies, something pinging. So that practice is... There's different schools within craniosacral therapy, but essentially it's kind of...

Sally (07:27.374)
Mm-hmm.

Sally (07:36.59)
That's alright.

Sally (07:47.651)
Mm-hmm.

Helen (07:52.294)
what you're doing as a practitioner is facilitating...

your client's experience of their felt sense. So you're helping them to develop their inter receptive awareness, which is something I'm sure we've come to talk about. But essentially, inter receptive awareness is your felt sense of your internal world of your body and not only like your sensory perception, but also how you

Sally (08:09.154)
Yeah.

Helen (08:27.908)
evaluate and appraise those sensations and feelings that you're experiencing. And that really blew my mind, that whole experience, because biodynamic craniosacral therapy, apart from being a mouthful, is something so kind of radical in terms of therapy, because as a client, a lot of us have expectations that we go to a therapist and they do something to us.

You know, it's transactional in that sense. I'm paying you to fix me. Whereas craniosacral therapy is not that like you as a client participate in that therapeutic relationship. And I think for it to be most effective, you have to be really present to what's going on. You have to stay attentive because you're being asked to go.

kind of deeply inside with your attention and awareness. And that can be extremely confronting for people. It can be really scary. But gradually, slowly, with time, one can develop more safety within their body and develop more.

kind of peace and curiosity within their body. And the more skilled we become at kind of perceiving these really subtle sensations, the more skilled we can become at kind of noticing how they are associated with our emotional states. And we just get better at kind of...

Yeah, I guess kind of giving ourselves the space to respond to what it is we're feeling rather than just reacting, you know, without having that kind of conscious awareness of what's happening. And I also think kind of cultivating your sensory awareness just develops this incredible self-compassion because you start to get really

Sally (10:37.038)
Hmm.

Helen (10:49.87)
attuned to the intelligence of your body. And when it starts to come forward, I always think of it and I always experience it. If I'm giving a cranial session, when you start to feel the body responding to you, it's like a kind of wild animal that's starting to come forward, that kind of knows that it's safe and it starts to approach you and you can

experience that with yourself. It's like, wow, you know, what is this that I am that I'm experiencing? yeah, that was sorry, a long winded explanation of that's how I kind of got into this curiosity around, I guess, mind body practices, which was rooted in my own kind of, like health and difficulties, early trauma stuff.

Sally (11:45.996)
Hmm.

Helen (11:47.21)
but yeah, that led to, training in a, in a yoga, is called Scaravelli inspired yoga. it's not referred to as a style of yoga because the, woman who developed it was very kind of anti method and her whole kind of, philosophy was to create your own yoga. It was.

similar to cranial in the sense that it's about the quality of your attention. What you bring to your body is what helps you to discover these like incredible connections and pathways. You know, you've got to be present to yourself and you have to tolerate not knowing. You have to go there without preconceptions and assumptions of what you're going to...

do what you're gonna find and that's really hard. It's really hard to do.

Sally (12:46.99)
very hard, especially when we have, when we want to know, when we want to control, when we want to, you know, we have 20 questions about what it's going to be like so we can set our expectations and avoid disappointment and all of that. And I would imagine that's quite a high, high barrier to sinking back and allowing this journey of discovery to take place.

Helen (12:52.124)
Yeah.

Helen (13:03.451)
factory.

Helen (13:14.268)
Definitely. I mean, it's so countercultural, isn't it? It goes against the tide of everything that we, you know, experience in the world. Everything's so kind of instant and now, and you know, information is there at the touch of a button. So to, yeah, sit with not knowing. And there's a reason for that because that allows in novelty and new experiences, which is...

Sally (13:31.864)
Yeah.

Helen (13:43.586)
extremely important for challenging, you know, your habits and the predictive nature of your brain. you know, to disrupt that, you need novelty. But for novelty, need, you need the kind of, yeah, the type of attention that allows new experiences to come in.

Sally (13:50.158)
Hmm.

Sally (14:09.87)
Mmm, so much, so much richness to what you're saying. I just want to go back a little bit to craniosacral therapy because my experience of cranio, I haven't, I don't know whether it's because I didn't have enough information about it but I, I was always like laying there thinking what is going on?

Helen (14:30.386)
Yeah.

Sally (14:32.962)
think if I had it with you and if I had it now I would probably be a little bit more open to the the subtle shifts, the subtleties of cranio. How, if we are having cranio, how should we be approaching it as a client? Because as you say you you go to these kind of manual therapies and you expect that the massage therapist or whoever is gonna do something quite obvious to you

Helen (14:49.042)
Hmm.

Sally (15:02.348)
and then you're gonna leave, you know, it's a very passive experience for you. But with cranium, it's so subtle, it's almost like, is anything actually going on here? And I remember having it once and the guy just fell asleep. I mean, I don't, the practitioner just fell asleep, yeah.

Helen (15:18.94)
The best.

Helen (15:24.306)
Okay.

Sally (15:24.99)
literally yeah maybe that maybe that one wasn't quite

Helen (15:29.394)
I mean, I would say that is not good. But I would say in terms of responsibility, you have some as a client, but your responsibility is not to...

do I put this? It's the responsibility of the practitioner to communicate with you. And personally, it's, I think with Cranial, you can go and have a Cranial session and you can just like drop deeply and bliss out. And as experiences go, that is like, it's amazing. It's so great when you can kind of drop into that lucid dreaming state.

However, it's a fine line between kind of falling into deep rest and disassociating. And I think the power of cranial work is when you stay connected to your experience. And that doesn't mean that you can't kind of experience a different state of being and a state of mind because you can.

but you've got to stay tethered to your sensory experience moment to moment. And like I said, that's confronting, it's hard and it takes attention and that's a skill that we're trying to train. And me personally, as a practitioner, know, I, there's a lot of verbal skills involved because I stay connected to my client verbally, checking in how they are.

Sally (17:03.372)
Okay.

Helen (17:19.052)
you know, I might talk about what I'm experiencing and seeing how that relates to their experience. You know, it's really important to make sure that your client feels safe. And I think if you're lying there and you're thinking like, what the hell is going on? Because I can't feel anything because you're probably so like vigilant that you, of course you can't drop into like a kind of deep, receptive, subtle state.

So I would say it's really the responsibility of the practitioner to kind of set things up for you with you from the start and kind of let you know, give like meet your expectations, let you know that, you know, there's not going to be any manipulation or I don't know. And that is a process. Of course you can have a one-off cranial session and feel great, but it is a process. And I think as a client, it's you're developing a skill.

It's educational. You're not going there to get fixed.

Sally (18:22.72)
Yes, it's educational and that's what I remember you saying from our last retreat that I did with you in the winter, December I think, and you were describing the movements that we were doing as self-study and I was like, I have never thought of yoga like that before as a self-study.

Helen (18:37.522)
Hmm.

Helen (18:42.558)
Absolutely, absolutely.

Sally (18:46.808)
Can you flesh that out a little bit what that concept sort of means to you?

Helen (18:51.864)
Yeah, I think it kind of comes like generally from somatics. So I would say, I mean, I don't really refer to my movement practice as yoga anymore. And that's only because I don't really do yoga postures. And I know yoga is more than postures. But I don't kind of explicitly bring in yoga, yogic philosophy and

Sally (19:04.992)
Hmm.

Helen (19:20.642)
My experience of training in yoga was not traditional by any means. You know, I had two years, my training, similar to cranial was learning to feel. It was learning to pay attention. It was learning to find connections and pathways. So it really wasn't this kind of traditional yoga training that I had. And because of the cranial work,

I kind of relate more and resonate more with semantics as a general term for any kind of bodywork or movement that emphasizes this internal inquiry. So I think that, and that internal inquiry is the self-study. It's...

Yeah, it's this need to be interested in yourself. You know, be curious. And it's so interesting. I was at a dance workshop yesterday and the teacher said, you know, like, you've got to want, you've got to be able to entertain yourself. I can't entertain you. And she was talking about, this was in the context of doing more subtle somatic work. And it comes back to this.

Sally (20:23.902)
Aww yeah.

Helen (20:48.378)
the whole cranial thing. It's like, you you've got, you've got to want to not fix yourself, but be part of your own healing process. You can't expect to, you know, farm it out and have someone sort it out for you. Like it's this participation. And I don't think we do it alone. I think it is a relational.

experience, whether that's with a practitioner who's guiding you, or it's with the people around you. They might not necessarily be providing any kind of intervention, but we're relational beings. we, you know, that's how we function. That's how we operate. And yeah, so it's interesting in that, in the retreat context where you're there as an individual, but you're there as part of a group. And

Yeah, so I think there's all levels of relational stuff going on. You're relating to yourself. You're relating parts of you, know, connections and pathways, and then we're relating as a group.

Sally (22:01.39)
mmm yeah it's so powerful you mentioned something called a path a pathway sorry stuttered there what what are you what is a pathway what are we sort of sensing into when we're looking for pathways in the body

Helen (22:07.889)
Yeah.

Helen (22:20.22)
So let's talk about the fascia, because that's going to... That's the pathways. So for anyone who doesn't know, the fascia, most simply put, is the connective tissue of the body.

Sally (22:25.663)
Yes, please. please talk about this Yeah

Sally (22:34.368)
Okay.

Helen (22:48.312)
It's primarily made up of collagen. some people think that fascia, because it's, you know, it's very much in popular culture right now, especially within health and fitness and wellness. But people often think the fascia is just like a sleeve or like it covers the muscles or it's these discrete places in the body, like the lumbar fascia.

plant of fascia and it is all of those, but it's like also so much more. So you have to think of the fascia. It's like the internal scaffolding of the body and it's a like multi-dimensional connective tissue web. And it's not just a

covering it, and it moves through itself. So Joanne Averson, who's a mentor of mine, is like the queen of fascia. So please go check her out for all of her incredible knowledge around the fascial matrix. But, you know, she often talks about the fascia and says how it's

Because we only kind of think in three dimensions, we find it and perceive in three dimensions, we find it really hard to understand the structure of the fescia because it's at least four dimensional in its structure. And she defines a four dimensional structure as something that moves through itself. So as embryos, when we're kind of

becoming, when we're weaving ourselves into existence, there are, you know, we do this incredible dance of kind of folding in and out and through ourselves in what again, Joanne describes as this biological origami that happens. It's an incredible thing. And you have to, with origami, it's one piece of paper. Yeah. That creates.

Sally (25:11.79)
Mmm.

Helen (25:17.81)
you know, the the the swan or whatever it is you're making. It's the same with the human body. It's it's one biological material, which is the fascia. And you know, the fascia is so it's the connective tissue of the body. And

Sally (25:22.828)
Yeah, yeah.

Helen (25:44.814)
If you think about it, that's from the very kind of microscopic, the structure of our cells to the structure of our capillaries, of our nerves. It gives us our shape and form of our organs, of our muscles. It's like a whole body matrix. But some within fascia research would say that, you know, bone is also fascia, blood is fascia, lymph is fascia, fascia, fascia skin.

Sally (26:03.107)
Yeah.

Sally (26:13.374)
Hahaha

Helen (26:14.744)
is fascia. It's everything. It's one material, but it has a variety of densities and a variety of textures and functions. So I remember when Joanne said once about, which really blew my mind. So instead of thinking of like a muscle as like a chicken breast, which has this kind of casing over it, fascial casing, you know, like you get fruits sometimes and they have that kind of white tube.

netting around the fruit, which is

Sally (26:47.116)
Yeah, like, orange pith. no.

Helen (26:51.332)
Yeah, was thinking what but yeah, orange pith is like the fesh of the fruit for sure. I was thinking more of that. It's the outside, it's all unnecessary stuff you might find over a pomegranate or something. I think people often think that's what the fascia is like. It's just like this outer casing. But I remember when Joanne said, you know, the fascia, like the muscle protein,

Sally (26:57.997)
Yeah.

outside stuff when you go into the supermarket yeah

Helen (27:20.312)
emerges within the matrix of the fascia. So, you know, it's fundamental. And like I said, it's this body wide continuous matrix. And when we're talking about pathways, experiencing connections and pathways, we're kind of tuning into and tapping into the fascial

pathways in the body of which there are many, many, many, many, I think, of infinite possibilities of finding connections and pathways. So yeah, have to kind of think of the fascia is like a collagen of fibers, obviously, but we're not talking about stiff fibers. The fascia is a...

Sally (27:53.365)
Okay.

Helen (28:17.72)
liquid crystal matrix, so it's fluid, the fibers are fluid. yeah, they, you know, the texture of the facial matrix can change according to temperature, according to pressure. So it's this incredible structure that

Yeah, that changes according to how we use it, how we train it.

Sally (28:49.326)
interesting so I mean God there's so many different avenues I could go down with this what let me just ask you what can go wrong with fascia I mean there's things like plantar fasciitis is that like inflammation in the fascia and when you get like a stiff shoulder is that more fascia than muscle yeah

Helen (29:14.992)
Yeah, so exactly that. So fascia, so obviously any, we don't want any friction in the body. So the fascia, it's not layered in the body like an onion, but like I was talking about earlier, you know, going back to our embryological roots, when the embryo was developing, when we were developing and going through this.

kind of incredible process of folding in and out and through ourselves. know, those folds within the facial matrix, you know, are there and, you know, what we kind of, what remains with our structure. we want, and those folds, they glide over each other. Okay, so we are always looking for this kind of glide.

Sally (30:04.095)
Okay.

Helen (30:10.192)
within the body. And when we experience inflammation, there's friction there and that glide isn't really happening. And that can lead to pain, can lead to like, yeah, frozen shoulder, stiffness, exactly. Because the fascial matrix is elasticated, collagen is elasticated. And by elasticated, I don't mean like,

Sally (30:11.31)
Yeah.

Sally (30:20.236)
Okay, that makes sense.

Sally (30:25.526)
stiffness.

Helen (30:40.314)
you know, it's really bendy. It's that it has, it's pliable, but it has appropriate stiffness because you want the fascia to be able to kind of, deform and reform because we're always shape shifting in life, whether we're, you know, from sitting down to standing up to moving around, to turning, whatever we're doing, we're constantly deforming and reforming. And we need our structure to

be really responsive. So what happens, obviously, in perimenopause and menopause is that we start to lose estrogen. And estrogen is really important in the development of collagen, especially in its elasticated qualities. So as we drop in estrogen and postmenopause, when

Sally (31:33.656)
Yeah.

Helen (31:38.8)
the estrogen receptors in the fascial matrix also drop. There's potential for more stiffness there, which is thought to perhaps be a reason why some women experience aches, pains, myofascial stiffness postmenopause. it's really important to train the fascia to

Sally (31:58.594)
Yeah.

Wow.

Helen (32:08.826)
you know, we want to keep it as kind of springy as possible as we can.

Sally (32:13.934)
Mmm.

So when you're thinking about training fascia, presumably it's not about bulking it up like a muscle, it's about applying a different type of movement to keep that slip and glide happening, that freedom within. So are we talking mobility? Is that why you do the spirally movements?

Helen (32:39.558)
Yeah, mean, spiral movements are, you know, the most kind of efficient way of moving and causes the least amount of friction within the body. And I would recommend checking out Dr. Karen Kirkness, who basically is a great educator in all things spiral mechanics and movement.

and she's extremely fascia informed in her approach. But yes, spiral movements help with that glide, but also we need diversity and variety. So the fascia, we want it to be able to respond appropriately to...

its environment and whatever's going on at the time. So we don't just want to train in one direction. You know, we want to, if you kind of think of training the fascia along a spectrum of speed, so we can train really slowly. And I would say kind of semantically in that kind of deep listening, curious, subtle kind of moment to moment movement, which helps us kind of really get into the

minutiae and detail of our structure. But also, you know, we can train fast and kind of depends on what you want. So, you know, I run, I really like running and I train my facial matrix to run and to run well, right? So that's kind of like what I want to do.

Sally (34:29.057)
Okay.

Helen (34:34.076)
But if you want to dance, if you want to swim, if you want to, I don't know, parkour, like whatever you do, your body's going to respond to and become, essentially. So, but having that variability, I think really allows for a healthy, responsive facial matrix. So...

Sally (34:59.565)
Yeah.

Helen (35:04.258)
Yeah, so I would say...

Sally (35:05.073)
Okay. I'm just thinking, is there a mindset, does the mind affect the fascia? Like where we, yeah, so I'm thinking thoughts, I'm thinking emotions. I'm also thinking spiritually as well, but first and foremost, like for example, it's like the Alexander technique. So if I think about unraveling my shoulder,

immediately the tension releases and there's a sense of like the energy around it becoming bigger. Is that actually having a physical effect on the muscle, on the fascia, when you send that idea, that imaginary idea into that part of the body?

Helen (35:38.332)
Mm-hmm.

Helen (35:58.066)
Yeah, mean, one thing, a major thing I didn't say was that your fascia is your biggest sensory organ. So it's always listening. And I think it's, I was just writing some notes before this and I think I wrote it down, but it's got, I think they've estimated that the fascia,

Sally (35:58.785)
you

Sally (36:02.635)
Mm-hmm.

Sally (36:06.222)
okay.

Helen (36:27.548)
has, I don't think I've got my notes, has over 250 million free nerve endings. And that's more than the skin, more than the eyes. So although we think of the skin as the biggest sensory organ, it's actually the fascia. there's a couple of things I just want to unpack from your question. So when it comes to...

Sally (36:33.422)
Wow.

Sally (36:53.208)
Yeah.

Helen (36:57.174)
taking your attention, taking your mind like into a specific area of your body, then my experience is that the fashion knows when it's being listened to and when it's being attended to. Yeah, it's like it knows and it responds. And I think when you align your mind with your body in that way, where you're kind of bringing that attention in,

Sally (37:11.576)
thought about.

Helen (37:26.352)
then absolutely the body responds. And it's what I see in cranial work, you know, it's like someone can have a really kind of, what's it called? Like kinesthetic.

Sorry, it's when you don't have any kind of awareness of a certain area. I was going to say...

Sally (37:48.882)
kinis-kinesphobia. Kinesthesia.

Helen (37:55.442)
it. I said it as well. But I mean, yeah, it's it's and it can it's so subjective. So it could be for example, in the pelvis area, somebody could have literally no sensory awareness or for someone else, it could feel completely, I don't know, like heavy or black, or it could feel really, like light and soft. And I think

Sally (37:56.546)
What are we like?

but it's something along those lines.

Helen (38:24.88)
you know, when you train yourself to bring your attention into the pelvis and to kind of be with it, be able to, coming back to what we saying earlier, tolerate not knowing, can I just be with the kind of sensory information as it rises up into my conscious awareness? Then things can change. That's when you might experience, you know, I don't know, you might start to get a whole different

experience of the pelvis arising in that moment. absolutely yes to your question. But also I would say what's really cool about the fascia is that it's mostly made up of these really low threshold free nerve endings, which respond to light touch and really light mechanical tension.

and pressure. And these free nerve endings are constantly kind of feeding information to our brain to let us know kind of how we are and kind of what's going on with us in any given moment. So that's kind of always happening in the background, mostly unconscious to us. so that feeling of

being alive, basically, which is kind of mediated through our facial pathways. It speaks to, that information is projected to our insular cortex, which is a kind of deep structure within the brain. And the insular cortex is kind of also involved, so it's involved in our body perception.

but it's very much kind of activated in any kind of mindfulness, like mindful attention. This is the structure that's lighting up, as it were. And specifically, it's the right side of our insula that mediates our interoception.

Sally (40:36.374)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Helen (40:51.718)
word I mentioned earlier, which is this felt sense, this sense, internal sensory awareness, sense of self. And the reason I'm talking about the right side of the insula is because there's a brilliant man called Dr. Ian McGilchrist, who's a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and he's developed this hypothesis of

the two hemispheres of the brain over years and years of research and his own clinical work. And he's basically come to the conclusion that the right and the left hemisphere perceive the world differently according to a particular attentional style that they have. And the left hemisphere basically attends to the world

in very specific way in which it reduces, it's very reductionist. It sees everything in parts, everything is out of context, it's mechanical, it's linear, but it's...

Sally (42:09.868)
I'm laughing because it sounds like the NHS.

Helen (42:12.902)
Well, yeah. Well, it's so reflective of the scientific paradigm that we've over the last few hundred years.

Sally (42:19.992)
Yeah.

Yeah, sorry, I shouldn't have said the NHS. It's the paradigm that the NHS is built on. Yeah, yeah.

Helen (42:27.942)
That's underneath it. Exactly. But it's necessary. It's still necessary because the right hemisphere is completely opposite. So it sees everything as the continuity that it is. It sees everything as a whole, as a Gestalt, not fragments, not parts. It attends to the world.

Sally (42:33.772)
right like that.

Helen (42:55.632)
and perceives the world as a non-linear reality that is contextualized, that's subtle, that's nuanced. And McGillchrist said it's our closest guide to the nature of reality, much more than the left hemisphere. And to kind of help put it into, I guess, an evolutionary context of why we would have developed these two kinds of attentional styles.

He talks about a bird, if you would see a bird just kind of pecking at grain on the ground. So it would need one side of its brain. And obviously, remember, we're cross-lateral. the right brain is informed through what's coming through the left eye. OK? Not to over-complicate it. Yeah. So the bird would need.

Sally (43:44.014)
Okay, yeah. And then vice versa.

Helen (43:50.738)
one eye to be really able to kind of focus in on that grain of sand. It needs to have that attentional ability to like zone in and extract. Okay, but it can't only do that because if it only did that it would

not be able to have awareness of everything else going on around it to make sure another bird doesn't sweep in and get its grain or it's not kind of eaten by a cat. So it needs this whole kind of field of attention that is taking in the wholeness of the environment, that awareness, whilst being able to zone in at the same time. So therefore we need the attentional style of both

left and right. But coming back to what I saying about the fascia, so it's feeding in all this information is being fed through the fascial pathways in forms of like mechanical tension and chemicals to the brain, to the insula, to the right insula primarily. And I think that when you're

working with the body, interreceptively. So you're working with this deep sense of kind of inner awareness of these subtle kind of motions and sensations. You're cultivating right brain attention because you know, you're feeding it, you're feeding it. And I think also when you

work with the fascia as a it's it's the fascia itself is a metaphor for wholeness and connectedness because that's what it is it was never disconnected it's like as i said it was one piece of material that folded and folded in on itself until it made us who we are today and that process is always kind of happening it's what we're always becoming so when we can sense ourselves as this

Sally (46:07.022)
Mmm.

Helen (46:11.772)
whole body matrix. Where I think we're just really kind of tapping into a deep part of ourselves that's really aligned with the true nature of reality. And it's about interconnectedness, wholeness, subtlety, nuance, context, all the things that are missing from the global politics.

Sally (46:28.514)
Yeah. I... Missing.

Exactly, exact, my god, I knew this was going to be juicy. And this takes me into trauma, because what tends to happen when we've experienced early life trauma is that disconnect, right? So we experience something in our early life, and it's not usually big T actually, I think big T.

Helen (46:50.514)
Hmm.

Sally (47:03.242)
is easier to deal with because it's more obvious. Little t which are those subtle events that happen over a long period of time like being over controlled, not being allowed to think for yourself, emotional suppression, vocal suppression, know parents perhaps being emotionally mature themselves, you've had to grow up very quickly to support them, so many different things go

can influence the nervous system and can influence our need to then disconnect from our authentic self. So from that kind of psychotherapeutic point of view, I would see the fascia as almost like a representation of our authenticity based on what you've said just then in that when we connect with it,

Helen (47:54.29)
Hmm. Hmm.

Sally (48:00.414)
we're moving into the right brain, we're moving into that sense of wholeness and connectedness and essentially who we are, you know, because when we disconnect from it, disconnect, when we disconnect, we disconnect from our body. Essentially that is what disconnection is, right? We disconnecting from the feeling world.

Helen (48:08.572)
Hmm, absolutely.

Helen (48:24.134)
Yeah, exactly, going back to the body that I am, the body that, as opposed to the body that I have. And I think that's, you know, there's a lot of evidence that shows that, you know, people who experience early childhood trauma, you know, there are associations with disembodiment, feelings of disembodiment. Childhood trauma,

Sally (48:27.565)
Yeah.

Sally (48:31.384)
that I have.

Helen (48:52.792)
is associated with interreceptive deficiencies. So people not being able to really detect. Interreception can be the feeling of when you're hungry, the feeling of when you're thirsty, when you're hot, when you're cold. But it's also more subtle than that. think it's this whole sensory gestalt of just how you feel, how you are.

Sally (49:21.474)
Yeah.

Helen (49:22.448)
And that can be really disrupted and dampened down through trauma. And again, the facial matrix is like the kind of, it's the information highway on which all of this kind of information is traveling to the brain. So yeah, it's, I mean, it is really fascinating. It's something actually that in my PhD,

of research proposal, know, this is all stuff that I'm hoping to explore. So yeah, it's really fascinating.

Sally (49:57.038)
Mm.

Sally (50:02.604)
Yeah, it really, really is. I know you're very interested in body image. Can we talk a little bit about that? Because I think that would be really useful for anyone that's listening. You we know that our body shape changes a lot during menopause. It can do. And as a result of that, we might try and force and cajole our body to be the size that it was. Don't worry. Be the size that it was.

when we were in our 20s and 30s and things like that. But also I think if we've had issues with body image from a young age and we go through menopause and the changes that that might bring up, it's more likely to, you know, those body image issues are more likely to arise again at that time. And there's so much disordered eating around midlife.

for sure, with so many different diets being presented online and things to help you lose weight and stuff. But I know that you have quite a unique perspective on body image and that it's not to do necessarily with how we think and feel about ourselves, but it is again down to this disconnect from the sensory perceptions. Can you expand a little bit more on your point of view?

with regard to body image.

Helen (51:31.698)
Sure. body image is made up of different components. And like you mentioned, it's made up of cognition, thoughts, and the feelings, emotions we have about our body, and behavior. And also, there's a perceptual component to body image. And that's the...

That's what you're kind of relating to when you talk about this, yeah, the feeling within the disconnection. it's not that, yeah, a body image is all of those things. But I think the perceptual component of body image is something that's really unknown, especially in just like popular culture, but even within the research.

Sally (52:18.144)
Okay.

Helen (52:24.558)
in body image, it's just really underrepresented, although it's starting to come forward because I think it's largely supported by all of the inter reception research that's coming through as well. So when I say the perceptual component of body image, that is grounded in everything we've been saying, it's how you feel internally, it's how you perceive your internal

kind of sensory experience, but it's also your proprioception. So it's your perception of kind of where you are in space, like the organization of your body in space. It's both things. And, you know, I can speak, I guess my interest in this is really rooted in my personal experience.

having had an eating disorder when I was 14 or so, and then having years and years following that of real dysregulation, like inability to, just to find any kind of balance with regards to, you know, to food, to exercise, it was just all over the place. And what

Helen (53:57.06)
Yeah, what kind of opened me to a different possibility was my first yoga class, actually. was like just this feeling of, it was so kind of small, but it was like, suddenly I had a feeling of space in my shoulder, which sounds to me now being the veteran that I am, it's like, know, they do. But back then it was like,

Sally (54:23.246)
What?

Helen (54:26.63)
wow, how have I never experienced inside my shoulder before? And that was just the very start of a lifelong kind of curiosity and quest to kind of, I guess, yeah, like deepen my experience of my body and kind of explore who I am. And...

You know, I can honestly say in my experience that it was working on the perceptual component of myself that brought me to a place of peace with my disordered eating, with my body image, because it shifts the focus from how do I look to how do I feel, because you're working internally.

And it's so deep. And like I said earlier, I think when you start to really pay attention, you develop a self-compassion that, you you respect your body, you respect its intelligence. And, you know, it's not perfect. My God, I have days when, you know, I really don't feel like that, but I know I have such a grounded practice that I know

the truth. I know to come back to myself. I know to tap into that deep intuition, intelligence to help me just kind of get present to who I am and where I am rather than be in my head. And what's really interesting around especially disordered eating, it's a lot of research within anorexia nervosa, but there's this thing called

Sally (56:10.562)
Yeah.

Helen (56:23.578)
Allocentric lock theory. And the theory is that, let's just keep to individuals with anorexia. But I think it definitely applies to people with all sorts of body image disturbance. But essentially, people, so we have an allocentric self, and it comes back to the body I am and the body I have.

The allocentric self is the objective body. So it's the body that you have. It's the body that you experience through other people's eyes, through other people's judgments. And it's the body that is based on images and beliefs and ideas about yourself. And then you have the egocentric body, which is the subjective.

kind of moment to moment body that is becoming, that is kind of based on this like bottom up sensory information that is kind of coming into our experience at all times, even though we may not be attentive to it. And you can think of the allocentric body, it's a top down process. Like I said, it's based on beliefs and ideas, you know, other people's perceptions of who you are.

Sally (57:52.822)
like the external rather than the internal.

Helen (57:56.562)
Um, yes, yes. Um, but I would say, uh, yeah, and more than that, it's not as simple as external, internal, I don't think, but yes, that kind of falls into those categories. And the theory is that, you know, people with anorexia are kind of stuck in an allocentric self. They're stuck in an idea, in a thought pattern.

Sally (58:13.08)
Yeah, sure.

Sally (58:22.146)
Okay.

Helen (58:26.384)
that's kind of fixing them. And it's dampened down their ability, their inter receptive awareness, their egocentric self. And that's always there, but they can't feel it. They can't experience it. And I know that there's research that has been done that's kind of tested perceptual interventions. So things like

not yoga, because yoga is such a broad kind of term to use, but specific, like working with movement, essentially, and mindful movement to develop these perceptual skills to disrupt the allocentric self so that, you know, we talking earlier about, you need to have a quality of attention that allows space for new things to come in.

If you're stuck in your mind, in your thought pattern, like it's impenetrable, like nothing can come in. So you've got to have this, it's the right hemisphere, attentional style of being vigilant, but broad and vast and, you know, not having preconceptions, just being open to your experience as it arises. So.

Sally (59:32.205)
Yeah.

Sally (59:52.429)
Yeah.

Helen (59:57.118)
I what the was. that's, think, coming back to body image, I think that's a huge part of the puzzle, is that people are stuck. Because my god, we're in a culture where we're bombarded constantly with how we should look, what we should be doing, advice, advice, advice all the time, images. It's so

Sally (59:58.604)
That's all right.

Helen (01:00:26.652)
hard to just find it for yourself and feel. And I think that's where a lot of the problem lies. So coming back again to these practices that cultivate the listening, the ability to tune in, to be subtle, to experience your sensory self. It kind of sounds simple, but actually, we don't really practice that at all.

Sally (01:00:54.122)
No, and almost like too simple, that won't work. That's too, you know, when sometimes I do mention mindfulness to people, some clients that I'm working with and there's almost like a little bit of an underlying scoff. Not everyone does this, but like really you just want me to be mindful. Aren't we past that? You know, it's like, it's so proven. The science, the research comes back time after time.

when we give something our attention, when we slow right down, when we tune in by applying that focus, that curiosity, that right brain, that I call them the higher senses, the imagination, the curiosity, the creativity, that really magic happens and something that

sprung to mind when you were talking before in terms of healing eating disorders. The mindset required for a lot of these things, eating disorders, OCD, some of these kind of obsessive compulsive behaviors do require you to step back, require that for you to sort of zoom out a minute.

widen your perspective, come out of that absolute thinking, that binary right and wrong, that kind of, what was it you called it, the reductive left brain. And of course, it's through trauma usually, we default to those ways of thinking because we're trying to grasp onto certainty. Certainty will give us that sense of, okay, I'm at home, I can cope.

Helen (01:02:25.714)
Hmm.

Sally (01:02:45.068)
It's like a coping strategy, right? We're trying to grow. But the more we do that, the more I think we're developing that left side and disconnecting from the right side, because we wire in what we practice, right? Yeah.

Helen (01:02:56.114)
Hmm.

Helen (01:03:00.252)
Exactly. that's like the left brain, needs to know. And it's kind of like if you think of, you know, scientific research, I mean, it's brilliant, because we specialize and we can go so kind of like narrow into something. But by going like that, suddenly, we're blinkered to everything else that's going on around us. So, yeah, I think that that need to control to know.

Sally (01:03:23.938)
Yeah.

Helen (01:03:29.964)
is a real characteristic of the left brain. And again, it's not that we don't want to have that ability to do that because it's really useful, but we need it. But I think it all comes down to your attention. It's like, you know, the more you can become skilled at...

Sally (01:03:42.508)
Yeah, we need it.

Helen (01:03:56.004)
your attention, the quality of attention, the more you just notice if you're starting to kind of head that way, if you're leaning in, giving a bit more weight to a kind of left brain way of thinking. And I do think your physical practice, like, actually can really affect your attentional quality. Because again, if you're in a physical practice that's just obsessed with metrics and

you know, I don't know, kind of just working on like parts of the body and you know, you're not working in this holistic way. think surely you're just logical that you're kind of, yeah, you're, you're, attentional style has to be more left brain because it's, you know, that's what you're, that's what you're doing. So yeah.

Sally (01:04:49.28)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So interesting, this conversation. I knew it would be good. I knew it would be amazing. Helen, thank you. Thank you so much for sharing. I feel like you've shared really generously. You've shared really deeply. I know this is quite difficult and challenging subject matter. I could see the cogs turning. Yeah, yeah, you've done really well. But...

Helen (01:05:13.34)
Thanks.

Sally (01:05:17.676)
Do you, I'd like to give you an opportunity actually just to describe to our listeners what you do, how you work with people. I know you're kind of on the cusp at the moment and you're kind of going into a very amazing field in psychology, maybe clinical psychology, but you do have some hustles that you're, or some gigs, shall we say, that people can come to and work with you. Do you want to explain what you've got?

Helen (01:05:46.554)
Sure, yeah. So you mentioned at the start, the retreats at the Nepa State, which are day, like day retreats. Although the next available one isn't until September. But they are great opportunities to basically come along for a day and really be able to have the time to

Yeah, get curious with your body, explore movement, explore these connections and pathways that we've been, you know, discussing. And yeah, just to kind of get creative with not only movement, but just the whole day is just really nurturing because we're in a beautiful space. The nature's lovely. We have water.

There's a sauna there now that we use. My husband, he's a great cook. does all of our food. It's just a lovely kind of wholesome experience. And I do think there's something in just having more than an hour to move that just really allows you to deepen into your practice. it's just a caveat. It is grounded. We're not all there kind of

like flopping around and like, you know, kind of losing ourselves in the space. It's, yeah, this structure to the to the practice. But I really encourage you to, yeah, to be curious, to explore for yourself. It's not just like a copy and paste situation. You copy what I'm doing. It's it's a really reciprocal space, actually, between us all. And so there's that. And

I do practice craniosacral therapy, but that's at my home in Brighton in Salteen. So yeah, people can obviously get in touch if they were interested in that. And general public movement classes have stopped for now because I've just been so crazily busy with applications and kind of all the studying that.

Helen (01:08:12.338)
I've been doing. So yeah, like you said, I'm in a slight transitional stage at the moment.

Sally (01:08:18.354)
it I love it get on to get in touch with Helen if you fancy one of her retreats in NEP and warning they do get sold out very quickly so you might have to start putting a few more on I think but again thank you so much really really appreciate you taking the time out to come and talk to us because I know how busy you are you're crazy busy but I was like after the last retreat I was like please come and talk to us so

Yeah, I've gained an incredible amount of knowledge and insight and awareness just from this conversation alone. So hopefully it's going to help so many people. So thank you so much.

Helen (01:08:59.944)
thank you so much, Sally. I really appreciate you. And I think you're doing brilliant work. And it's a privilege to be asked to come on. So thank you so much.

Sally (01:09:10.771)
thank you.