Introduction by Dorothy Miller: At the time of this interview, Brooke Thomas had just wrapped up the third season of her Liberated Body Podcast. During the first three seasons, Brooke produced sixty-one shows in which she explores the work of researchers, practitioners, and educators from a variety of fields that focus on the amazing entity that is the human body. If you have not had a chance to explore the work she has created, all the shows can be found at www.liberatedbody.com or on iTunes or Stitcher. I had the opportunity to speak with Brooke after she wrapped up her final taping of the season. We talked about some of the people she has interviewed and how her work on the show has informed her work as a Rolfer.
Brooke Thomas
Dorothy Miller
Dorothy Miller: What prompted you to start Liberated Body? Can you talk a little bit about the evolution of the show and how it ended up where it is today?
Brooke Thomas: There were two main motivators to start doing this work. Like many in these fields, I came to Rolfing® Structural Integration (SI) through my own healing crisis. After I got better, I was really motivated to share the work with other people. I have been a Rolfer for sixteen years and after having many one-to-one interactions with clients, I wished there was a way to let more people know not just about Rolfing SI, but the wide variety of manual and movement therapies that exist, and how much they can help. Many clients I worked with would ask, “Why didn’t I know about this sooner?”, so a big motivator in my work on the show has been to find a way to make these fields more visible.
I started Liberated Body as a website with a blog and self-help videos. However, it started to feel too narrow and was too focused on me and my ideas. I was posting things that were important to me and my clients at the time; for example, what might help piriformis syndrome or issues like that. Ultimately I was much more interested in all the really amazing people, practitioners and researchers, who had their own input to share. That’s when the second main driving force, which was to use it for myself as a learning tool, made me want to go down the rabbit hole a little bit.
I had been in practice as a Rolfer and was enjoying it and helping people, but you get to a certain point where things start to feel a little stale and I felt like I was doing the same thing all the time. Instead of having any particular continuing education path calling to me, I turned the podcast into my continuing ed path. I have to do so much prep for each interview that I was reading all of this amazing research. It definitely changed me and changed my viewpoint of the work and of the human body generally, way more than I thought it would.
DM: It’s awesome that it has helped all these other people as well. When you first started the work, it was more to give additional information to mostly clients. At this point, do you have a sense of your audience? Do you feel like you are talking to mostly practitioners in the field or clients?
BT: When I started it, I remember the question I asked myself was, “Why don’t I just put something out there, a blog or something, where the things I say a million times to clients, I just say in a more public place so more people can hear them?” I definitely was thinking of it as helping people as a practitioner, the same way I would in my practice. Very quickly though, once I started the podcast, I realized that that was not at all what this was about. It quickly became a show for other people who are in practice. I would say that the audience is undoubtedly mostly other movement and manual-therapy people of all stripes – bodyworkers, movement educators, yoga teachers, Pilates teachers, fitness people, all different things.
DM: I think it is terrific that you were able to transition it in that way. What do you envision the show looking like a year from now, or five years from now?
BT: I honestly have no idea. I would say that the show has surprised me a lot more than I have planned it. It’s led me around by the nose completely and I continue to let it do that. It is about finding a balance. Since I have developed this platform where I am able to communicate with a large group of manual and movement therapists, I would like to continue shining a spotlight on all those people and their work. On the other hand, it is also about my own learning journey, and I am the kind of person that can only do the stuff that I really care about, so that gets me into different rivers and streams. I don’t know where it will take me. I am just ending season three and it is a natural pause point. I am looking ahead to season four and I can’t quite envision yet what it will become. We’ll see.
DM: I for one am excited to see what it becomes. How has your work on the podcast informed your Rolfing practice? BT: There are a few of categories of things that have changed the way I am working with people. One is understanding the new paradigm of the body. Even though I went to the Rolf Institute® and have been in practice for a long time, there were still things that were very hard for me to grasp; like biotensegrity, that thinking about a muscle as one thing doesn’t really make any sense, it’s more about motor units or, as Robert Schleip says, a school of fish that swims together when it performs a certain action. I got a much better handle on that and started working differently with people because of that. My work became a lot more holistic. I have become less PT-like. Before, people used to come to me with tissue damage because of something that had occurred and I would fix it by being my good Rolfer self. I have come to feel that that is not what I am doing when I help people. People are still getting helped, but I am able to see their lives in a more whole and continuous way. As tempting as it is to use anatomical words when people ask “What are you working on right now?”, I want them to understand that it is never just one thing. I want them to understand that their pain does not necessarily correlate with tissue damage. Their whole life informs what the sensation feels like in their bodies.
The other big change that has also changed the path forward for me in my career, because it is what calls to me personally, is somatic meditation, somatic psychology, and somatic spirituality. This has become a huge part of my life over the last couple of years. I am inviting people into their own sensation more. I am inviting them to trust their bodies more, instead of thinking of them as just broken down. I am not super ‘woo-woo’ about that in practice, as my practice is on Yale’s campus and I work with a lot of head-oriented people, but I would say that people do stop seeing that their body is at war with them and start seeing that it is trying to help them out and communicate with them. It opens things up for people in a way that is very exciting to me, beyond just their knee getting better.
DM: I think of it as a gift that you give to clients that they can take with them into their lives outside your office. It is the power to be in tune with themselves and to be able to affect change in that system and not just feel like, “Oh no, here we go again”. You did a series of interviews focused on children. You spoke with Juliet Starrett, Richard Brennan, Patricia Pyrka, and Kathleen Porter. As a mom of two schoolaged children, I was especially interested in the work they are doing with kids and in schools. My son is starting fifth grade and I am seeing firsthand how his posture and movement has changed as he spends more time in chairs and on devices. I am curious to know if you aware of any follow-up on their projects and how your work with children, including your own, might have been affected through these interviews.
BT: It is that holism thing again. Your body is not separate from the environment that it operates in. I love that. The natural movement piece has become really important to me. We don’t think about it. Our world is just our world, our chair is just our chair, and we get into the habits we get into. I don’t have many young children in my practice but I am having conversations with their parents. My son is going into fourth grade. You really see their bodies start to change in first grade. I try to control what I can, like our environment. We do a few things, like before-school hiking and often after-school hiking. It helps connect him to the natural world and get back into natural human movement. We also do a movement scavenger hunt. For example, today is a climb-over-things day and you find as many things as you can to climb over. Often he will pick two things, like it’s a pick-up-things and a balance day, so we’ll pick up rocks and logs and we’ll find fallen logs or stone walls to balance on. It injects fun and playfulness into things instead of me just telling him to sit on his ischial tuberosities all day. The screens do exist, school does exist . . . but we’ll also have furniture-free days at home. I try to do stuff that feels playful instead of just lecturing. He does seem to get it. At the end of his last school year, they made a crazy no-running-at-recess rule. He came home and told me that he got all the kids at recess to sit around a tree and just stare at the tree so that they could protest the no-running rule. I feel like some of my propaganda got in there [laughs].
DM: I bought Kathleen Porter’s book, Happy Dog, Sad Dog. When I showed my kids the pictures, it was easy for them to pick out all the Sad Dogs with unsupported structure versus the Happy Dog bodies that were supported. It seems like a huge opportunity to get this generation of kids to learn about their bodies and movement.
BT: There is also some follow-up on these practitioners. Kathleen Porter has a new documentary called Born to Move. The organization Stand Up Kids, which is Juliet and Kelly Starrett’s organization to make schools chair-free, has partnered with Let’s Move, which is Michelle Obama’s active schools initiative, so that is exciting. They both have the personality and charisma to move that forward, so I am really excited about that.
DM: Another personal favorite of mine was the interview with Christopher McDougall, the author of Natural Born Heroes. One of the many things that are meaningful to me about Rolfing work is the hope and ownership of one’s body that it instills. In this book, Chris’s telling of the story of the Cretan rebellion during WWII is an amazing tribute to what the human body is really capable of. Can you share with us some highlights of your conversation with him, specifically relating to the research into fascia and movement that he did for the book?
BT: He got interested in fascia in a student/ superficial way. He studied with Tom Myers and Robert Schleip. What was so cool about Chris McDougall having an ‘aha moment’ on fascia is that he is so good at bringing these concepts about what the human body is, and what it is capable of, into mainstream culture. He got really interested in the elastic recoil property. He was also looking at how parkour uses it. It all came back to springiness in the body, which is totally different from the Newtonian idea of a machine of parts connected by pins and hinges. It was exciting to have Chris, who is so great at conveying these concepts to a wide audience, letting people know that the body is not what we think it is.
DM: The research piece of your show is so important to keep people up to date on what questions are being looked at. For example, the research on the role of connective tissue in intracellular communication and inflammation that you spoke about with Dr. Helene Langevin is fascinating. Would you be willing to talk about your conversation with her on this research or any other research that currently has you excited right now?
BT: I am particularly excited about the research coming out about cancer and fascia. This past year there was a joint conference on acupuncture, oncology, and fascia at Harvard University that Dr. Langevin headed up. The reason why I am personally most excited about that research is that it is going to be a huge motivator for mainstream culture to start to get holism and continuity. What they are finding is that understanding that is the key to curing cancer. Cells don’t just go AWOL and crazy on their own. They have to do it within a framework and that framework is fascia. So if you can understand fascia, which means you have to understand continuity, then maybe you can actually disrupt this whole cancer thing. This is exciting for me because it is going to force people to see the body in a different way. You can’t think of it as divide-and-conquer anymore. You can’t think of it as attacking the faulty broken part. One of the reasons that cancer treatments don’t work the way we want them to is because cancer metastasizes. How does it metastasize? It does that along the fascia.
The other thing that I personally have a lot of interest in is all of the interoception research that is going on. I think we can get excited about the complexities of the human body, but the interoception work is really showing the simple, yet profound, basic fact that if you can cultivate a relationship with your body, that involves listening to the sensation of your body, your life actually improves. It sounds weird because we have very little regard for the body in our culture, but here are these researchers showing that if you can have a better internal sensation map, many issues like depression, substance disorders, and eating disorders can resolve. That is pretty amazing. Beyond the fact that stuff gets better, it gives people’s lives an opportunity to unfold. It seems weird to the outside world, but we Rolfers know that when people go through a series with us, they don’t just feel better, they don’t just lessen their pain or improve their mobility, their lives change.
I think our relationships with our bodies are way more powerful than we think they are. In our realm we get that to a certain extent, but it is exciting that there are these researchers gathering to talk about this. Bo Forbes has created the Interoception Tribal Council to gather and share ideas. A lot of them are neuroscientists. I spoke with one, Norm Farb, and most recently I talked with Cynthia Price. Her work really stands out to me. She started the Center for Mindful Body Awareness. She is based out of the University of Washington. Her works is exciting to me because she started out as a clinician, with over a decade as a massage therapist, before she became a researcher. The work that she is doing is in the realm of using touch to help educate people about their bodies so they can start to develop a relationship with their bodies. She is working with people who have very significant chronic pain; people who have been traumatized; people dealing with PTSD, substance abuse, and eating disorders. She’s in the Biobehavioral Nursing Program. She is bringing the importance of touch to the forefront in its ability to heal.
DM: I completely agree with how important touch and interoception are. I talk to my clients about their role in the Rolfing process and the importance of what they feel on the inside and finding new ways to move. It’s not about something happening to them; for there to be lasting change, the change has to come from within them. A challenge for us as practitioners is finding the right way for each client to hear this in a way that makes sense to him. You’ve mentioned other trainings you have taken. Which trainings have had the most impact on your personal life and your Rolfing work?
BT: The somatic mediation work, which I have studied at Dharma Ocean and with Judith Blackstone, has changed the way I approach working with people and has also completely changed the whole orientation of my life. MovNat® has also been a really important part of my life and is how I train. Because people come into our practice with the concept of the body as a machine that has busted parts, and they want to know how they can fix that one part, MovNat has been a really useful and playful tool for me to give to clients to experience the idea of continuity. It also helps them not obsess about the ‘broken-part’ idea. If someone comes in with plantar fasciitis, [he is] often looking for ‘parts-based’ exercises that [he] can do to ‘fix’ [his] foot. I may give some self-care that involves the foot, but I may also give a playful MovNat sequence that involves very easy balancing exercises or walking on uneven terrain when appropriate. It starts to open up a way for [people] to see their environments as connected to their bodies and that their healing may not just be about them sitting alone in their bedroom doing exercises. It can help them cultivate a more playful relationship with their body. It is definitely responsible for me feeling good in my body during all these years in practice as a Rolfer. It has been an important part of my self-care toolbox.
DM: Are there any other trainings that you want to touch on?
BT: The other training I find myself using a lot with clients is Yoga Tune Up®, which is Jill Miller’s work. She uses therapy balls to teach people self-myofascial release. I know that has been contentious in our community: there is a sense that people could harm themselves with therapy balls or that they will continue in their ‘partsbased’ way of thinking. That’s true enough, but with the way that I use them in my practice, I have found that it empowers clients to touch themselves and access themselves and give their tissue little bits of nourishment without having to be on my table. I’ve found that kind of work really does speed people’s healing, as much in the fact that they feel empowered about healing their own bodies as anything else. I think that is a beautiful gift to give people. I have found the therapy balls to be a very straightforward way to give people that gift. Also because of who I am, I am always educating my clients in continuity, so they don’t just find some ‘hot spot’ and ream on that. Sometimes when they do that anyway, they feel worse and then they learn something. People can have very nourishing aha moments with these therapy balls when they work a totally different part of the body from where the pain is and find that they get relief.
DM: Are there any guests who have had a particularly big impact for you?
BT: Joanne Avison and John Sharkey are two separate interviews. [Editor’s note: the John Sharkey interview can be read in the December 2016 issue of this Journal.] Both of them really get the new paradigm about the body. They are also both brilliant teachers of that. Some people get it but it’s hard to convey, but John and Joanne are both really good at communicating concepts like continuity of form, individuality of anatomy, biotensegrity, and bound water and how fascia is responsible for our fluid volume. They have helped me to have many aha moments about understanding the human form that I’ve been trying to get for years.
In terms of shifting the way I feel about pain, Steve Haines, Neil Pearson, and Todd Hargrove helped me to see that pain isn’t about tissue damage. Steve Haines actually has a short pamphlet, more like a graphic novel, which is illustrated really beautifully, called Pain Is Really Strange. I highly recommend it. It is a very straightforward illustrated guide to how there is no division between our mind and our body, and our pain can be as much about how we feel about our pain and our lives – our body is being very effective at trying to get our attention about the fact that we are discontent somehow.
With the natural-movement / natural-world stuff, Katy Bowman and Erwan Le Corre were great interviews. Katy Bowman is the founder of Nutritious Movement and Erwan Le Corre is the founder of MovNat. Frank Forencich also talks about the ‘long body’, the idea that we are not discontinuous from our environments and how our environments shape us. [Editor’s note: the Frank Forencich interview can be read in the November 2015 issue of this Journal.] This has changed how I see the world and how I talk to and educate my clients.
DM: That is all great information. Is there anything else you want to add for our readers about having an extracurricular activity, like your podcast, outside of their Rolfing practice?
BT: I didn’t realize how nourishing and revolutionary it was going to be for me personally, as a human being and a practitioner, to do this project. I would encourage people to take on some kind of learning project, besides just going to a continuing ed workshop; something that requires that you go on a journey in a certain way. Everyone’s journey is going to take [him or her] somewhere different. All I am doing is learning in public on this show. People get to hear the paths that I got interested in, but other people will get interested in different things and discover different ways and have different aha moments. Anything that commits you to doing that is really powerful. There is so much good work going on, and I think that we are culturally at the beginning of a sea change of coming home to our bodies and seeing them for how sacred and amazing they are.
DM: Agreed. It seems like we may have come to a tipping point where all the pills and surgeries that maybe had been ‘fixing’ things before in a more duct-tape solution aren’t working all that well. People I am seeing are more open to coming back to their body and learning things. Any last things you want to share about upcoming projects you are working on?
BT: I am starting another podcast with my friend Vanessa Scotto, called Bliss and Grit, that is more about being on the spiritual, embodied path.
DM: Does this stem out of the somatic meditation work you have been studying?
BT: Yes. Two years ago, I became engaged in a practice in the Dharma Ocean lineage, a Tibetan Buddhism lineage, that is my own personal spiritual practice. This is the direction my personal and professional life is going, so I am creating this to have another podcast in which I can continue learning. The format will mostly be a conversation between me and Vanessa about being students on the path and bringing in teachers sometimes. It will be less about interviewing people about their work and more about having a conversation between two people who are very much in process, as opposed to ‘experts’. It will be of most interest to people [who] are on some sort of spiritual path. [The website] is www.blissandgrit.com.
DM: Thank you so much for your time today and for all the work you put into creating Liberated Body. I am happy to join you in “making the world a more embodied place.”
Brooke Thomas is a Certified Rolfer who has been practicing for over fifteen years. A selfadmitted body nerd, she teaches movement and hosts the Liberated Body Podcast as a continuing-education resource for those in the manual- and movement-therapy fields. Visit www.liberatedbody.com, or visit www.newhavenrolfing.com for more information about Brooke and her practice.
Dorothy Miller is a Certified Rolfer in Bend, Oregon, practicing since 2014. She is passionate about healthy movement and helping people feel better in their bodies. You can find out more about Dorothy and her practice at www.rolfingconnections.com.Liberated Body – Where Body Nerds Unite[:]
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