Episode 12
12: Exploring the World of Myofascial Release with Yvonne Vander Heiden
Looking for a natural way to relieve chronic pain and improve your quality of life?
Yvonne Vander Heiden, COTA (Certified Occupational Therapy Assistant)
Yvonne owns and operates Body & Soul MFR Therapy since November 2019. She has completed Expert Level in Myofascial Release taught by John F. Barnes, PT, international lecturer and the authority on MFR.
In 2014, she graduated from Fox Valley Technical College, Appleton WI in Occupational Therapy Assistant program. She has worked in home health care, geriatric nursing facilities, and field work at a rehabilitation clinic. Currently, is completing 200-hr Yoga Teacher Training to bring MFR Yoga in the near future.
Yvonne enjoys treating the whole person, taking into account the spiritual, cognitive, physical and emotional components. She believes in the power of touch, and the importance of being fully present while actively listening to each person as they achieve amazing results.
Cherie asks Yvonne Vander Heiden about her journey to becoming a myofascial release practitioner, the experiences of her clients, and the healing potential of myofascial release therapy.
Want to know how you can begin your journey to hope and healing? Visit Elevated Life Academy for classes and free resources for personal development and healing.
Resources
Transcript
[00:01:44] So I'm gonna let Yvonne introduce herself and just say a little bit about her business and then I'm gonna ask you some questions about how you became a myofascial practitioner.
[:[00:02:00] I'm a Body and Soul MFR therapy and I'm located in Green Bay Wisconsin. I wasn't always an MFR therapist and I started, I wanna say, about four years ago. And my credentials is that I'm an occupational therapy assistant. So I have found through my journey as a therapist in a nursing home we're giving exercises and range of motion and activities for people to go home so they can perform life as you know it. So in my journey, I came across some training on myofascial release. I was very interested in it for my CEUs, to decreasing pain, improving range of motion. And I started using a little bit on patience and I have found an incredible, incredible amount of improvements compared to general OT and PT which I was from.
[:[00:03:18] The patient went back to the doctor and the doctor says, oh no, you don't need surgery anymore. So, it is fantastic. So it opened up my eyes and like more people need this in their life. And in the traditional OT and nursing homes and Medicare and insurances, you can't normally do a full hour of MFR.
[:[00:03:43] Cherie Lindberg: Beautiful. So tell me a little bit about your first training. I would love to hear what your experience was like.
[:[00:04:21] But it's when we got to our hands-on experience, it was so much more than treating just pain. And what it brought about is the emotional side of things, the trauma. And it did scare me at first because people were screaming, crying. They were in a different language. It was things that are trapped into your muscles and tissue that were broken open.
[:[00:04:59] But these were deep down. And we can go more into my experience later on, 'cause I finally hit my point this past year. Everybody heals at a different point when they're ready. So that was my experience. And then when I went home, I've always had sacral bone pain, right hip pain .
[:[00:05:35] So it's nice to go home feeling like, oh wow, I can walk better now. So that's the physical aspect of it, as well as the emotional aspect of it.
[:[00:05:48] Yvonne Vander Heiden: Absolutely. Fascia is like the basic explanation is like if you had a chicken breast, lift up the fat and the skin. You see a very thin membrane, it looks like a's saran wrap. I would refer to as like saran wrap in your body, covering your muscles, your bones, your DNA. It goes all the way down the cellular level.
[:[00:06:25] Therefore. Other places in your body has to compensate, causing all the tenderness, angriness in the body. It changes the formation of your skeletal system. So you have to compensate to be able to walk. It's three-dimensional. It can be liquified, it can get really thick and hard, and it also can change shape and form depending on what your body is doing.
[:[00:07:06] That's where all messages are being transferred. Oxygen, nutrients, water and anything. So it keeps your tissue moving and gliding your bones like it was designed to do it.
[:[00:07:21] Yvonne Vander Heiden: It is. When there's trauma, it could produce like 10,000 pounds per square into your body of pressure when that system can't move. And that's why people hurt so much. Just because they hurt, let's say, on their hip does not necessarily mean that is where the problem is.
[:[00:07:59] And that's what I do. I do an evaluation and I find out where that spot is.
[:[00:08:10] Yvonne Vander Heiden: Absolutely.
[:[00:08:21] We all have our own readiness for healing. You were also curious why you weren't having those kind of releases that other people were having. This year you actually got to feel what that was like.
[:[00:08:47] So everything was built by Medicare and everything's by time and minutes, and then they change everything. And you're running ragged in the nursing home just to take care of all these people, rather if they need therapy or not. And I hate to say that, but that's what goes on in the medical fields, in those nursing homes.
[:[00:09:24] In the beginning it was a lot of the physical for me. My hips feel so much better. I'm walking straighter. My hips are not tilted like they used to be. My neck this past year. So before I got to my expert level, which was this past October, and this neck and my shoulders drive me crazy and I know a lot of it's 'cause of the treatments that I'm giving everybody else, but I started going to, one of the requirements is to get weekly treatments.
[:[00:10:00] In an MFR-III, it's more than just physical aspect of things. It's also more about the emotional, like we had a day of no talking and reflect and feel the vibrations. And if you have never been to Sedona, you have to go there just to feel what the energy level is like out there. But that alone with all the treatments opened up a different area in me.
[:[00:10:41] And it's really hard to focus because we are so busy. But once we get to the quiet side, the healing side, you can get to that part of your healing in your own body along with a therapist and no expectations.
[:[00:11:11] I'm gonna get two or three more classes. These are repeat classes. We could take as many classes we want. The second time ,around it was amazing. Whole new experience. And this time we got to the emotional state. And what happens is that a lot of trauma came up.
[:[00:11:47] And the only thing I can think of, it brought me back to being scared. And so your tissue will store all this trauma, even though in my brain I dealt with it as a child. I passed it. I'm trying to help other people. My tissue says Uhuh. We still have this in our tissue. It's like a boiling pot with a cover on it that someday someone's gonna lift up, which is a therapist who opens up all that fascia and then all of a sudden all this steam comes out and everything's coming out with a like crazy.
[:[00:12:32] So mine started from the bottom chakra. And then. over a span of weeks in treatments, it moved up to my chest, and my chest would quiver back and forth, back and forth . When I went to that training in November, it was my upper chest and my throat, and I could feel a scream once to come out so bad, but my scream still has not come out because I was always a good girl, always kept my mouth shut.
[:[00:13:12] Besides the shaking, our body does a thing called unwinding and I don't wanna scare people 'cause this is all affected healing until you actually experience it and feel it. You'll know what it means. But your body will move in different areas. Your whole body just moves like a cat that stretches in all kinds of weird positions.
[:[00:13:44] Cherie Lindberg: Right. It sounds very developmental too. Wherever they're at, some people are more aware, others don't have body awareness. And Peter Levine, who is a somatic experiencing therapist, has a lot of videos out there where it shows the jerking and the shaking and the releasing coming out of the body. So I totally understand what you're talking about and the unwinding that connection. Yes.
[:[00:14:45] We don't openly as a society talk about these things. And that's why I wanted to have you on here is to talk about myofascial release because these healing methods where we're going into the body deeper can help people with fibromyalgia, chronic pain, things that are chronic for people that they can get significant relief instead of going on all these drugs.
[:[00:15:29] Yvonne Vander Heiden: Well, there's all kinds of stories. So I had one person who's kind of does like Shama work. Hers was very interesting. I could put my hands on her body, work on the spots. I look at the body, I see what sticks out by my intuition. That's what I would work on. But then I let that patient tell me what's bothering them. What's hurting? So she would tell me, okay, my shoulders been really been bothering me, and I lay my hands on her and I do my technique.
[:[00:16:14] So I imagined there's a knife right where I was at, and I pulled it out. And actually John Barnes has exactly the same story too. If I didn't see John Barnes talk about this, I would not know what to do. But this person, it actually happened. Wow. Were they relieved afterwards?
[:[00:16:38] Cherie Lindberg: So yeah, this could be past lives, if somebody thinks of it that way. It could be a shamanic journey if other folks think of it that way. It could also be epigenetics, cellular memory from ancestry. It is unusual and it does surprise people, but these things are real.
[:[00:17:06] She was going through this horrific moment, screaming, being held down. But in her lifetime, she was never raped, even as a little girl. Somewhere in her ancestry that had came up. So it was somewhere in the past. This is the type of things that we experienced and I think when us therapists are all together in a room, John keeps us close.
[:[00:17:33] Now, another case. I had a gentleman with a really bad knee replacement, and he's young. He's like in his. early fifties. And he came to me and it looked like he was walking like his leg off to the side. Like he had a kickstand because he could not have that leg underneath his hips to be walking with a good pace. His hips were totally off. He could not flex his knee 90 degrees, nor could he straighten his knee. So I worked with him, I wanna say, for a year and a half, and come to find out, PT had a hard time with him. The surgeon even put him back under again and forcefully bent his knee, which is I think is why we couldn't really get it to where it needed to go.
[:[00:18:38] So there's two different extremes.
[:[00:18:52] Well, Yvonne, we are gonna make sure that we have your website and your contact information on the podcast page so that everyone knows where you're located in case they wanna reach out to you. Is there anything that I haven't asked you that maybe you'd wanna share about being a myofascial practitioner?
[:[00:19:36] There might be one week that's better than the other, but it's like peeling the layers of an onion, that one layer at a time. Every treatment is different on each person. I will feel things underneath my hands, and a lot of times the patient will feel the restrictions being released also in their body.
[:[00:20:14] Cherie Lindberg: Beautiful. Well, thank you so much for being with us today and sharing your story and your experience. I hope that this might get people to reach out to myofascial practitioners and give it a try.
[:[00:20:31] Cherie Lindberg: You are welcome.
