759: The Fascia Episode: Everything You Need to Know and How to Support It With Kelly Kennedy

Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.

Hello, and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com. And this episode was so much fun to record, and I learned so much. I’m back with Kelly Kennedy. You guys loved her in her first episode where we talked all about the lymphatic system. And in this episode, we go deep on fascia and everything you need to know and how to support it. We even talk about things like scars and how they can inhibit fascia and lymph flow, how to address them, the emotional component of all of this, and so much more. And Kelly is an absolute wealth of knowledge. She’s referred to online as the Lymph Queen, and she is the brilliant mind behind the Transformative Flowe Formula. She has 19 years of clinical experience doing these exact things, and she gives some really valuable advice for how to address these things at home and also what to do if you do need additional help. Like I said, I’ve learned so much from her. I wish I could just move her next door to me and keep learning from her. But the second best option is to get to have these podcasts and share them with you. So let’s join Kelly Kennedy. Kelly, welcome back.

Kelly: Thank you so much. I had so much fun in our last episode. I’m looking forward to this one talking about fascia.

Katie: I will make sure that our first episode is linked because we got to go deep on lymph health, and it was phenomenal. I learned so much. And in this one, like you said, I’m super excited to learn from you on the topic of fascia because I think this is another area that’s not talked about enough when it comes to health. And I don’t know that much about it other than some initial research I’ve done, but I have noticed even in the professional athletes I work with and in my student athletes, there seems to be a difference. There’s some like very fascia-driven athletes who are super connected and it’s amazing to watch them move. And then there’s muscle-driven athletes. And while they’re all amazing athletes, there does seem to be something special about athletes who are very connected in their fascia. So hopefully people have heard this term, but for anybody who hasn’t, can you define what fascia is and tell us a little bit about what we need to know about it?

Kelly: So yes, fascia is a fascinating, I call it the most fascinating fabric of the body that we have. And I don’t know, I’ve got a rabbit hole. I don’t know when I’m going to end my fascia experience because the more you research it and delve into it, the more interesting and fascinating it gets. So fascia is this connective tissue. A lot of people have heard that term. It’s connective tissue. It’s collagen fibers. A lot of people are taking collagen these days, right? Why? Well, because the majority of your body is made of protein. And it’s the smallest particle in the body. The majority of the body is protein. And the protein is mostly collagen. And that collagen is mostly the fascia. And the fascia is the connective tissue. So embryologically, when a sperm and an egg connect, there’s light. We now know through quantum physics, there’s light. And then there, that light, which is a particle, which is a wave length becomes a particle. And that particle then builds upon itself and comes another particle and another particle, and then you have a piece of fabric, and that fabric is fascia. So we start off as fascia. And that fascia develops enough to create a heart inside of it. And the circulatory system starts and then we create the rest of the body is created. I shouldn’t say we create it. Innate wisdom creates it. I don’t do anything. I just sit back, relax and allow.

But the innate intelligence of the body creates this beautiful 99% of the time works perfectly, right? We come out after that moment of conception with 10 fingers, 10 toes, two eyes, and a nose, two ears, all that works pretty well most of the time. And, you know, if all the things are going well and there you go. And it started as fascia. And that fascia connects. It’s the connection between every organ, every tissue, and every cell, right down to the endothelial layer of the cell. There are connections to the fascia, and the fascia is just under the skin and is really your inside skin that is suspending the organs and the bones.

You know, a lot of people think that the structure comes from our skeletal system, and it doesn’t. It actually comes from the fascia, and the fascia creates the structure, the architecture, and then inside that architecture is the floating, is the fluid rather that is the lymphatics, and floating inside that fluid is the bones. And if there’s no adhesions or scars from the fascia then the bones can move and have full range of motion. And the lymph fluid can flow where it needs to go. And there’s no blockades, there’s flow.

And if there’s not, if there’s a scar or you do repetitive motion, you can create an adhesion. And now that collagen fiber is going to get thicker and it’s not going to be this lever pulley gliding system that looks like cellophane, but also can look like jelly, can be solid, but also almost look like water and change and also absorb shock. So it can get real, real stiff and hard and create like a cast, or it can be real jello-y and fluid-y so that it can absorb shock. It’s literally the shape-shifter part of our body. It’s so fascinating.

And when we twist an ankle, right? I twisted tons of ankles, I was a volleyball player. And when you twist an ankle and you feel that swelling, that’s the lymphatic fluid, but then you feel that tightness around it all, that’s the fascia. And then afterward, when all the swelling’s gone down and all those years later, you know, you’re like moving your, and it’s still a little cranky and it maybe pops or cracks, that’s your fascia and the adhesions. And when you can work that out, you can get full range of motion back. No matter the amount of years, no matter the lack of impact or the majority or the intense impact you can unwind the fascia and the fascia is exactly that it unwinds and as you unwind it you create freedom and flexibility in the body and allow this flow to take over and it is the communication system of the body it’s it through the collagen fibers. The light throughout the body, which is how the cells communicate and sound travels at the speed of light and sound. So much faster than our nervous system and our neurotransmitters and our minerals is the fascia as a network fiber, fiber optic network. Sound familiar? Your fascia is your own fiber optic network system.

And it is connected to every single organ and every system, but it’s also connected to the invisible magnetic field that is life, that we’re all part of this invisible matrix field of energy. Is this maybe too deep? But it’s what connects us all. And that fascia is the antenna that is receiving and sending signals that then the lymph is magnifying or amplifying and then signaling the cells so that the organs can behave how they’re optimally supposed to behave. So it’s the autonomic nervous system fibers that the fascia lymph is made up of to decide, is this body in contraction, tactile, hardening armoring mode or is it in soft movable pliable flexible vulnerable parasympathetic mode? You know like think of a dog right? We have a little dog and she’s like the lack of sympathetic. This dog, she will lay down on the ground for anybody, any dog and just lay in her belly and be like, please, I surrender. She very much feels safe. And yet a lot of dogs, right, what happens when they get tense is their back goes up. They get tense. Their arms are tense. And there’s not a lot of flow. So that’s what your fascia does too internally. It creates that internal instinct dog. Am I flexible or am I tight and rigid?

Katie: Oh, so much I want to go into from here. And I love that you mentioned the pets because I joke often there’s that book, The Body Keeps the Score. And I joke there could be a follow-up book called Cats’ Body Don’t Keep the Score because it does seem like animals are more in tune with their nervous systems and do better at actually intuitively figuring out these things than humans sometimes do because we can just like mentally override our body. But you mentioned scars and adhesions. And certainly I don’t think many of us get through life without some form of scars. I know I had a C-section. I have tattoos, which I know are not optimal for all these things that we’re talking about. But for anybody who has scars or adhesions, is there a way to address them so that they’re not creating these blockages?

Kelly: Absolutely. And in full disclosure, I’d like to say cats probably express their emotions more than dogs. So I might agree with you there. Cats don’t keep it on. That’s why they have nine lives in one life because they just keep going. They’re like going to let you know how they feel all the time. Whereas a dog. i just happy-go-lucky and willing to be the martyr to the victim. Never thought about that before.

Okay, so scars are really important, as you said. And again, in full disclosure, I have a tattoo. And if you walk in my office, you’d think that tattoos are really good for you because the majority of my team is fully tatted up. Tattoos are a scar. They need to be addressed, but how the energy is behind getting the scar is key. So if you get a scar, if you get a tattoo where you’re like, oh, I’m going to put this person that passed that brings all this drama and sadness to me and tattoo them on my arm versus you know, a badge of honor because I passed some special thing and now I’m putting that on my arm. That’s a very different way to experience that scar. Right.

Same with C-section. A planned C-section versus an emergency C-section are going to have two different levels of trauma on the body. And as you know from reading the Body Bears the Burden, that the Body Bears the Burden and that we are more emotional beings than we are physical. Yes, we are very physical. We’re having a physical experience. I do not disagree. Of course, this is physical. But we are emotional beings that think. And we have totally screwed that up. And that emotional body holds all of this information and that information is energy. Energy and information mean the same thing. And that energy and information is stored in the fascia, which is your closets of your body. And in the scars. And in the adhesions.

And you know what it’s like when you clean out your closet. You know, it’s a little messy at times. All this crap that you haven’t wanted to deal with is in there. So we’ve got to be willing to address that when we address scars. So let me just preface. Once we address scars, be ready to breathe and do this. It’s also, scar is an adhesion of sympathetic nervous system fibers. So as we address scars, if we measure the whole body, if we have the type of way to measure the body, measure the hertz, there’s about 25 hertz that are coming out of the body. Where there’s a scar, there’s 250 hertz. I’m sorry, not hertz, megahertz, 25 megahertz and 250 megahertz coming out of the scar. It’s 10 times more energy. So if the whole body’s blue, think of a scar as red. And as you address that scar, as you break up that adhesion, as you allow that energy to dissipate, that frequency to dissipate that’s stuck, then that’s got to go somewhere. So that’s when you go and ground. You literally put your feet on the ground and your hands on the ground or an Epsom salt bath or moving water, and you allow your body to dissipate that excess charge. And when you do that, now the body can reconstitute that magnetic field and not have something that’s out of order in it. That’s a little hotter than everything else. So it allows the body to flow in a cohesive and congruent flow of frequency of energy throughout the whole body in that information field.

So scars, I don’t know if you talk about dentistry at all. I don’t remember to be honest with you, but the dentist, oh yeah, you do. Cause I got your toothpaste. Your toothpaste is great. The dentistry piece, there’s two blockades to the nervous system working scars on the physical body and dental foci, whether those are root canals or, you know, silver fillings or all the things that dentists can do to your teeth. Let’s go to scars. So scars in and on your body, it doesn’t matter their age, doesn’t matter their size, but the midline scars, belly buttons, chins, nose, nose piercings, belly button piercings, C-section, anything that addresses the midline, it’s going to be more impactful because that’s where your conception and governing vessel is. So that’s like shutting down your whole electrical panel rather than just a little circuit breaker. You know, a little scar off to my arm might create a circuit breaker off, but a scar in the middle of my, body’s more like turning off my whole panel.

And so every time a scar is touched, after you’ve gotten a scar until you treat the scar, every time that scar is touched, it’s your whole body going into contraction every time it’s touched. So you have a C-section and you’re taking a 10 mile, a 10 minute walk. And every time your pants touch your C-section, and your body goes energy off/on, energy off/on. That can be a little exhausting, ladies. So by treating the scar, we break up that catharsis. We ground. We allow the energy to flow throughout the body. Now, all of a sudden, we’re sleeping better. We’re pooping better. All the system can work better because there’s not a blockade to the autonomic nervous system being able to shift gears anymore, which is what that scar does. It stops the body from shifting gears and doing what it needs to do. It stops it from working. So allowing it to work can affect literally every single thing in the body.

So in our lymph interview, we talked about the framework should be about the lymph. And really before that, you got to treat scars. And scars should be treated one time a week, whereas lymphs should be treated twice a day to give you a ratio. And the more intensive your scars are, the bigger they are, the more they have to be treated. And for the rest of your life. And all different ways to treat scars. I mean, we treat scars at our clinic with little vibration, medium vibration, strong vibration. We do full body re-put together of the fascia. We’ll do light therapy. We do oils and creams and further topically. Then we have them work with a medical professional, whether that’s a naturopath that can inject in their state a nurse practitioner or a medical doctor to actually lace the scar. So if the scar was this pen, the needle would go in and lace the scar so that it breaks up the adhesion and allows energy to flow. It’s phenomenal if you ever have a chance to get it done.

Katie: Yeah, that’s definitely on my list for this year. And I know you have resources about this too, so I’ll make sure those get linked. But that brought up two other points that I’m so curious about. So one is there does seem to be an emotional aspect of addressing the fascia. So I would love to delve into that. And you mentioned the belly button. Can you explain how your belly button ties in here and what we need to know and do about that?

Kelly: Do you know you just made one of the best puns ever? How does your belly button tie in here? Because we don’t get in or out of life without one scar. It’s our belly button. And, oh, this is very, so the Kelly Kennedy theory ongoing of 26 years is this. We start off as light, source light, love, energy, God. Whatever you choose to call it, I’m calling it, it and love. Okay. It love is how we start light. At the source of our heart, in our emotional heart, in our conception vessel 17 acupuncture point, at the center of every single being is coherence and perfection and beauty and perfect, but coherence, ever evolving coherence. It’s regenerating because it’s love. It’s light. It’s what connects us all is what constantly heals the body. There is no, the body’s broken autoimmune. The body’s perfect and it’s self-healing. That’s crap what they’re telling you, okay? And at the end of that conception, we come out and we have an umbilical cord that attached us to our physical mom and they cut it. And they should because we need to let go of that. And now we all have a belly button. Between the belly button and source is us. That’s the part of me that’s Kelly, unique to me and only me. And my light is my light. And all my filters are in the middle of that. All my illness, all my darkness, all my stuff. And it radiates out. And I bring it in as well because there’s a field around me. The belly button is where we hold on to or potentially could hold on to our mother and father, like our earthly parent wounds, like their lineage, their craft that they’re, that they’re carrying around with you. You know, we all have this energetic bubble that we carry around with us of information. I think of Charlie Brown and you know, the one, Pig Pen that walks around with a bubble of dust around them. And what we want is a bubble of rainbow around us, not a bubble of dust. But a lot of us come into this world with a bubble of dust from our parents and we got to clean it up. And that’s our energetic life, our miasms, our energetic potentials, our genetic potentials that are all turned on by our lifestyle and our thoughts and our actions and our consciousness.

And the belly button represents, if nothing else, that. And from there, as we release that belly button, it also helps release that diaphragm. And as you release the belly button and the diaphragm, you can expand more oxygen into the body. And as you become more oxygen, you become more light. As you become more light and more oxygen, you become even more of a feeling being. And you’re in this coherence and you’re regenerating your light. And I would contend that that’s where we’re all headed is a little bit more light, a little bit less physical and being willing to, or able, willing and ready to let go of the burden of the physical body and realize that we manifest our lives, we manifest our physical burdens from our thought life, from our energetic life. And as we release our traumas, as we release our scars, our traumas and our dramas are gonna come out with that.

So I have a 12 inch scar on my head from a car accident, and I had a gotten out of pain after three years, finding vibrational medicine. I lived on painkillers and drugs for three years, and then I found vibrational medicine. I was pain-free. But I was still getting a symptom of ovarian cysts, which started bursting a month after the car accident. And I had 30 of them burst in 10 years. And I’ve had one child, and I’ve had 30 cyst bursts. I was in labor for four days having my child. I would take childbirth over a cyst bursting again. So it was a problem. And we were treating the scar because we felt like there was a link because of regulation. But when my scar was treated medically with a needle for the first time, I’ve never had a cyst burst since. And what happened was when he released the scar, with a needle, with procaine, a local anesthetic, I couldn’t wait for him to get the needle out. And he was like, okay. I was like, can I go outside? He’s like, sure. I was in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at a retreat with a bunch of medical doctors. I was the non-medical doctor. And I went outside, took all my clothes off except my bra and underwear. And I laid on the ground and I just was like breathing. My husband, he wasn’t my husband at the time, but he comes out and he’s like, are you okay? And I was like, yeah, I just needed to like be outside. I felt very claustrophobic. And it was like for the next three weeks, the car accident happened in slow motion emotionally to me. And physically. I felt, because I was supposed to do all this homeopathic support that I ignored. And I felt rib pain and things that came out of my body that I was not prepared for at the time to deal with.

And every time we’ve done my scar, which has been probably 30 times since, it’s less and less impactful. Like there’s like the second time was like Humpty Dumpty. I looked like he had, you know, took like an hour to put my body back together again. And I’m an extreme case y’all. But now when we do my scar, it’s like, oh, that’s good. I can sit longer in meditation without like much discomfort in my hips at all whatsoever. Like that’s what I’m doing scar therapy for these days. But it’s, it’s impactful in the fact that like, if I notice, oh, I’m not sleeping well, or my digestion’s off or any little tiny thing, I go, oh, it must be time to do my scar because my regulation’s off. As long as I’m pumped my lip, because scars will literally block the nervous system. And the emotions that are trapped in there are what we have to go through to release the nervous system from the burden that it’s holding onto. And that my friends is not easy, but it’s worth it. It gets easier with time. It gets easier. The more you do it, right Katie? The more you face it, the easier it becomes.

And it’s free because the scars, I never looked at it this way before, but you know, those marionette puppets, they’re, those are your scars pulling your strings and keeping you in old patterns of life. And they will hold and keep you there until you can break free of them by treating them and allowing them to really reduce their impact. And you notice that because it’s hard to find them. Like this 12-inch scar on my head had a keloid, like a pretty big keloid. Like it was a bump. It was like when the hairdresser would, she’d be like, oh, wow, you got, you know, now it’s, they’re like, kind of like, oh, what’s that little thing? Oh yeah, that’s, that’s a scar. And I’ve had people like, I can’t see their scars on our abdomens. Can’t see their C-section after it’s been treated five to 10 times. So you know that the body is healing, right, and regenerating and no longer holding on to that trauma that was caused when it was cut. I mean, thank God we have doctors and surgeons that can cut us open and stitch us back up if we get accidentally cut open like I did. Thank God we have that. But we now have to release the trauma because I, the body was not, the babies were not meant to come out through C-section just for that example, right? It was meant to come out through the vagina. So when the body is cut open and had a baby taken out of it, that is out of order for the body. The body goes, that is not the right order. And so now the body’s got to release that trauma of that being out of order.

What’s fascinating to me, because we’re all connected, is that when you treat the mom C-section, often the children change. I mean, that’s a whole nother I don’t know, masterclass or something, but that’s a whole nother thing. I mean, that’s just about the fact that we’re all connected and quantity, we’re quantumly connected. But when the mom changes, the energy of the trauma around that birth is released. And then that child is no longer feeling the guilt, the anger, whatever it is that the child was holding on to unconsciously, unawaringly, the mom was pulling in her frequency because that was an emergency C-section that scared her to death and she almost died. And now the kid has got ADD and eating disorders and nobody knows why. Well, treat mom’s scar and watch the ADD and the eating disorders go away. Watch. Like, it’s crazy. It’s not crazy. It’s actually how it works because we’re all energetically connected. And we connect with the fascia physically in our bodies and in the non-physical, that’s what’s receiving. When you walk in a room and there’s 100 people in the room and you just know, oh, I feel like I want to go in this direction. I want to stay away from that. What’s feeling that? What’s your spidey senses? It’s your fascia picking up the energy of everybody else’s like that antenna and telling you which way to head, looking always for coherence and resonance.

Katie: That’s so fascinating. And it sounds like for people with especially significant midline scars, worth finding a practitioner to help release those. Are there daily habits or things we can do in our own lives that are like fascia supportive that we can sort of integrate as habits to sort of unwind it like you talked about and help it get back to how it’s supposed to be?

Kelly: Yeah, so I was very honored to be able to co-host a fascia summit and I got to interview fascia experts. I thought I knew a lot about fascia until I started interviewing fascia experts after reading all their books. Talking to them is very different. And Gil Hedley I have to give it to when I asked him, what are your three best piece of advice for fascia, I’ve used it every day since, he said, move different frequently. Move differently and frequently. That’s it. Move frequently and differently. Just change it up. Don’t always move the same way. Don’t always do the same thing. Change. Change your habits. It’s just what Joe Dispenza teaches too. Don’t get up in the morning, brush your teeth and poop, and then take a shower. Change it up. Be conscious. Take a shower, then poop, then brush your teeth. Just do everything in different order. And then you cause your body to regulate its own order. And you’re causing it to, you’re not forcing it. You’re not trying to control its order. You’re causing it to compensate and to adapt. Then it gets stronger.

We only get stronger when we adapt and grow. We only get stronger when we expand. That’s how we are expanding now. We expand through our feelings now, through our divinity. So by moving and differently and often, we allow our fascia to move. So, yesterday, I put all the holiday decorations away and we have a lot of steps in our house and there are they were big bins. And I just noticed that every time I was going down the steps, I held it a little differently. Like one I held this way and one I held this way and one I held this way and one I held above my head. And I just noticed because I will otherwise I know the next day I would have been sore. Right. I would have been sore from carrying 15 bins down the steps in this particular way every time. So I just challenge my body to do it differently a little bit every time and be conscious about how I’m doing it, whether that’s climbing up. I’m painting a wall. Well, I’ve got to climb up a ladder and paint a wall and do this. Well, I’m going to use my right hand, then I’m going to use my left hand. And then I’m going to paint backwards, not really. But, you know, I’m going to do different things. Stand on one foot, put weight on another foot. I’m going to be very conscious of my body and move it differently.

Katie: That’s great advice and so interesting because we touched on HRV very briefly, and I know we can do a whole, hopefully another episode on that in the future. But one thing I have noticed is that people who are in the mobility space tend to have extremely high HRV. And I’ve always wondered if there’s a connection there because they are constantly moving in different ways and not just in a forward plane of motion. And they’re moving in ways that the human body wouldn’t just naturally move to the course of a normal sedentary lifestyle, and they’re doing it intentionally. So that’s really fascinating that you brought that up. And it makes me even more excited on my mobility focus this year as well. But like I said, I know there’s like a thousand more directions we could go and hopefully some follow-up episodes in the future. But for today, where can people keep learning about these topics? I know you have so many resources available.

Kelly: So I want to mention quickly about dance before we get there, though. Ballroom dancing has been proven to be one of the best things to improve your heart rate variability because it’s movement and it’s contrast and it’s making you use your right and your left brain in different ways. And I was honored to be able to emcee a couple Argentina tango festivals. And these are the happiest people I have ever met in my life. And I can guarantee their heart rate variabilities were outstanding regardless of the fillings and the scars and everything else because they are improving their heart rate variability all the time by moving the two sides of their brain.

So where you can learn about it is live it. That’s my first suggestion is do movement differently and frequently and see how it makes you feel and notice what you notice in your body. Knowledge is great, but if we don’t implement the knowledge that we have, it’s just knowledge. And so you can learn about this on my podcast, which is Flowe. You can wherever you listen to your podcasts on Instagram, on True Wellness Global. The website is thetruewellnesscenter.com. And I did a fascia summit last year, and I highly recommend to check out that fascia summit. You know, I know everybody’s in the summit game and there’s so much, but truly, fascia is the next frontier. It’s, the thing that there’s not a lot of information out there. There’s not a ton of experts. And so we compiled them all in one place and, for like a hundred bucks, you can own it and you can delve into it because eight hours a day of learning about fascia and you’re just going to start to scratch the surface because we don’t know a lot about fascia. We’ve only been studying it in cadavers up until about eight to 10 years ago. Now we’re finally able to have the cameras and the ability to look at it. Thank God for Jean-Claude Guimberteau, who’s this French hand surgeon, who really started to figure out how to look at fascia in a live in vitro surgery. So we get to see how it moves. Everybody, please go watch the YouTube clip, Strolling Under the Skin by Jean-Claude Guimberteau. It is I mean, if you’re not into anatomy and physiology, I’m going to warn you. It’s a little, you know, I mean, it’s live bodies. But you’re looking at the fascia and the vesicles. And it is so fascinating to watch it because it is like watching an octopus that constantly changes its shape. But knowing that that’s happening in your body every day second of the day, that’s your regulation. And so those people that are moving are doing that. So go learn about fascia, get the fascia summit, go watch Strolling Under the Skin. Deanna Hansen’s a great resource too. If you don’t know her, you would love her. She teaches something called block therapy, which I love. And it’s these simple hard blocks. Again, self-care over health care, these blocks, we can give you my link, Katie, and they, these are, I mean, it’s they’re wood. The most unbelievable tools for your fascia you could possibly imagine. Unwinding your toes, your neck, your hips, all parts of your body so that you have more mobility, flexibility, and space so everything can open and flow. It relieves pain. The greatest pain reliever is fascia.

Katie: I love it. Well, I learned so much. And like I said, I hope I get to have future conversations that we record because I know there’s so many more things I can learn from you. But for today, I so, so much appreciate your time and for all that you’ve shared today and just for all the good that you do in the world. Thank you so much for being here.

Kelly: Thank you so much, Katie. I’m so honored to be on your show and be introduced to your community truly. And I’m so grateful to all you ladies for taking the action that you do in your lives and moving forward this and helping our next generation so that they can live free and truly just be human beings. That’s the beauty of all this life that we’re living. So thank you so much for the opportunity, Katie. Really, I’m honored.

Katie: And thanks as always to all of you for listening and sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama Podcast.

If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.