Why I Stopped Teaching Self Fascia Release

In a "self" obsessed world that is experiencing a growing loneliness epidemic, I believe what we need more than anything is to face our social fears and heal our relationship wounds.

Dear friends,

Everything in this world comes at a cost.

Reading this letter will “cost” you about 20 minutes 😜 (but you might learn something valuable).

If you want to heal trauma, for example, that decision may cost you certain relationships as you begin to set and maintain boundaries, or express yourself authentically; it’ll cost you certain beliefs like “I’m the only one I can depend on” or “I must be broken;” it will most definitely cost you all of the survival programs that have kept you “safe” until now.

Remember: your brain (nervous system) would rather you be miserable than dead, and so - neurologically speaking - “safe” often means perpetual physical and/or psychological pain. This is because pain is often familiar, and the familiar is viewed as “safe” while freedom and healing would require stepping into the terrifying unknown (which can feel, at a nervous system level, like facing certain death).

When I decided to start teaching self fascia release on YouTube back in 2015, I was oblivious to the steep costs I would pay, both personally and professionally. I was also ignorant of the costs to many of the people (maybe you?) who showed up to learn with me. (And now that I know better, I’m doing better).

My goal in 2015 was simple: for years I had witnessed what seemed like “miracles” occurring in my private practice where I use a method of partner fascia release and mapping called Kinetix, pictured below; and I wanted to give people all over the world who couldn’t work with me in person the knowledge and tools to resolve their own pain at the root level. So I developed “self help” versions out of the 100+ Kinetix techniques in my toolkit.

A few examples of the “miracles” that occurred in my private practice:

In 2011, a man with crippling knee pain who couldn’t even walk a mile on flat ground was fired by the best physical therapists in Boulder after 2 years of unsuccessful treatment. They told him that he would be in pain every day until he got knee replacement surgery, which he would have to wait at least a decade or more to qualify for since he was only 35 at the time. This man came to see me and was able to walk without knee pain during our very first session. He was back to hiking 10 miles in the mountains without any pain at all that summer.

Meanwhile, a woman in her 40’s with carpal tunnel syndrome, shoulder pain, hip pain and plantar fasciitis - who had tried painkillers, shoe inserts, cortisone injections and years of physical therapy - got completely pain free within weeks.

The woman in the picture above met me in 2011 as well. She had nerve damage in her right neck/shoulder that was caused during her birth when doctors used metal clamps to pull her out of the vaginal canal. As a tiny baby she underwent intensive surgery to remove intact nerves from her calves and put them in her neck in order to enervate her right arm.

She was told throughout childhood that she would never be able to play sports; that she would never be able to reach above her head with her right arm; that she would be in occupational therapy for life. She defied all of these doctors, went to college on a volleyball scholarship and fired her OT’s. With Kinetix, we quickly increased her range of motion and arm function, busting through the upper limits of what she believed would be possible for her and her body this lifetime. She became a student of mine, we climbed many class 3 and 4 mountains together, and her passion is helping other people bust through upper limits like she did.

Another man was struggling with chronic lower back pain. He had the money and means to see the best doctors and therapists in town, and before his first session with me I was handed a folder an inch thick with his MRI and X-ray results, along with detailed reports from a dozen physical therapists, orthopedic surgeons, personal trainers and massage therapists.

I told him I didn’t need to see whatever was in that folder; that I believed his body knew the real reasons he was in pain; and that my process would involve mapping his body to discover those causes.

During that first session he was shocked when he experienced 100% relief. We discovered some major imbalances in his lower body fascia that were causing hip hikes, something I would investigate in depth with many of my clients over the years and later come to describe as “pelvic instability”. This man became one of my most loyal clients and supporters.

My private practice filled entirely by word of mouth referrals, and pretty soon I was seeing clients that were considered incurable or hopeless by the medical community: people with fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, TBI’s, brain tumors and agoraphobia; people who had undergone multiple failed surgeries, and people with “mystery” pain that modern science couldn’t explain or resolve.

What I didn’t realize back then is that most of my in person clients weren’t getting these “miraculous” results because of the fascia release we were doing; they were healing for far more mysterious reasons that I didn’t fully understand until I tried to teach self fascia release online to people with similar stories and diagnoses…only to watch them spin their wheels in frustration.

I’ve learned a lot since 2015 about what it truly takes to resolve chronic pain at a root level, and at this point I’m convinced that self fascia release has very limited benefits. For many people, it can further ingrain the very survival programs that caused their chronic pain in the first place.

At best, self fascia release is a moderately useful tool for nervous system regulation and moving fluids in the body; and it is a very good tool for becoming self aware. But I now believe that it is almost useless at actually changing fascia. Which is the primary reason I cannot in good conscience teach it anymore.

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The importance of “thinking with” reality.

One of my primary goals with The Human Freedom Project is to “free our thinking.”

What does this mean?

It means “thinking with” reality.

For example, if we want to know the truth about how the body functions, then we have to learn how to “think with” the body (vs thinking ABOUT the body).

Likewise, if we want to know the truth about another human being, then we have to learn to “think with” them; yet most of us are far too busy thinking ABOUT other people.

The problem is, human beings are susceptible to repeating, on automation, the subconscious thoughts created in childhood; or the adopted beliefs and thoughts of our family, peer group, religion, educational curriculum or culture. As adults, we unconsciously project these thoughts outward and “see” the world (and other people) through this highly biased lens.

Our perceptions of reality rarely map onto reality itself.

As Anaïs Nin said:

“We do not see things as they are; we see them as we are.”

When I reversed 8 years of debilitating knee pain with the help of my best friend Jess in 2011, I was completely deluded about what happened that summer. Naively, I believed it was fascia release that reversed my knee pain.

When I opened my private practice in Boulder, that belief followed me and I became a fascia release evangelist.

However, I now know - unequivocally - that fascia release had almost nothing to do with my results. (Almost).

How do I know this?

Simple: my fascia is denser and more knotted up today than it was in 2011…yet I have no knee pain. (Now that I’m back in the Boulder area, I have a Kinetix practitioner to trade with 🙌 🥳. While I’m not in pain, I am in need of regeneration).

Pain is a neurological phenomenon.

Modern neuroscience has proven repeatedly that pain is based in subjective perception, while mindsets determine outcomes. We’ve all heard of the placebo effect (when you believe a protocol will heal you, and it does); yet most people aren’t aware of its opposite: nocebo.

Nocebo refers to the phenomenon of believing that something bad is going to happen, and as a result that bad thing happens. For example: believing the doctors who say you are going to be in pain every day until you get knee replacement surgery; which then becomes your reality.

Pain (and therefore, the key to freedom) belongs to the domain of the nervous system, while degeneration (and therefore, the key to regeneration) belongs to world of fascia.

Check out this letter from the archives for some visual graphics and descriptions that illustrate how fascia reflects the objective realm while the nervous system reflects the subjective.

Below is one of those graphics to help us in today’s discussion:

When I asked my best friend Jess in 2011 if she’d learn to step on me and help me run again, I was completely unaware that the real healing magic would happen relationally and neurologically.

As a deeply traumatized person with unhealed boundary violations and abandonment wounds, what I was really looking for (unconsciously) was someone who wasn’t afraid of my pain; someone who wouldn’t try to take the pain away, but would instead help me integrate and alchemize it on the way to freedom; someone who was willing to join me in the trenches and help me dig a path out of the murky darkness.

What I needed was to be drawn out of my body by a force equal to the one that put me in there.

What I needed was the container of a loving relationship in which to explore the totality of my being: thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

Jess offered me all of the above and more; whereas every professional I had ever hired to help me was only “qualified” to address my body; or my mind and emotions; but never both at once (which illuminates modern medicine’s profound inability to “think with” reality).

What really happened the summer of 2011 was a complete rewiring of my nervous system in coincidental tandem with the optimization of my fascia. And the nervous system rewiring was ONLY possible because of the role Jess played in unintentionally helping me heal some deeply ingrained traumas. The article linked above will give you a more complete story of HOW.

Before that summer I had spent 3 years asking a dozen teachers in the fascial stretching and massage world to help me run and hike again, and none of them were able to do so. Logically, this whole fascia release thing “shouldn’t” have worked with Jess; but she was a different person, and therefore my results were different.

We often think that the modality is what creates the result, but that’s because we’re not thinking with reality.

When I opened my private practice, I didn’t understand the profoundly important role that ‘the relationship’ would have on my client’s results. (‘The relationship’ being the one I cultivated with each unique human being who asked me for help).

After two decades of feeling unmet and unseen by most practitioners I went to for physical and emotional pain alike; of having my money (in the tens of thousands) taken without any answers or results to show for it; and of consistently having generic protocols applied to me without any attempts to first understand me and my unique body…I was absolutely committed to doing things differently in my office.

What matters the most is how we show up for each other.

When I take time to get to know you; when I ask you questions and actually listen to you; when you feel heard and seen (but not coddled); when I step on you with fierce but loving tenacity and help you know just how NOT fragile you are; and when I treat you like an intelligent person capable of understanding some basic science that will help you make sense of your body…this is when you start to heal, if you’re my client.

Because the real reasons you’re stuck in chronic pain have (almost) nothing to do with your fascia; you’re stuck in chronic pain because you feel invisible and forgotten; othere’d and neglected - by a family, or by society, by the medical system or all of these; because you’ve tried so many times to share your pain, only to be met with fear or indifference; because you’re sick of being treated as a lesser human than the one with the letters behind their name; and because you’ve been waiting your whole for someone - just ONE person - who will resist the temptation of letting your pain, as real as it is, define how they see you.

These are just a fraction of the ways we heal within the container of a relationship.

To the extent that fascia release (of any kind) resolves pain is 100% dependent on the level of nervous system rewiring that occurs when the fascia release is performed. (And that ◀ ◀ is a mystery that will be explained in detail in my first book!)

As I’ve been saying for over a decade now, the nervous system is “The Gatekeeper” to the world of fascia.

There is no changing someone’s fascia unless that person’s nervous system stands back and allows it. Which means that fascia release is, first and foremost, a useful “diagnostics” tool for assessing the state of a person’s nervous system. However, to do this effectively with self fascia release you have to understand the nervous system; and if you understand your own nervous system at this level, then this practice will be pointless.

People who get results for pain by using self fascia release are, in my opinion, unknowingly interrupting nervous system patterns and/or creating new neural pathways; they aren’t necessarily creating change within their fascial system. In fact, I would argue that it is highly unlikely self fascia release can create meaningful change within the fascial system at all. This is because…

Fascia is almost as strong as steel and capable of sustaining over 2,000lbs of mechanical stress without deforming (aka, without changing - for good or bad). One of fascia’s primary jobs, as I explore in depth in my course Mind Body Breakthrough, is to absorb mechanical stress in order to protect us from damage and injury.

Any force coming into the body could harm us physiologically, and fascia has been granted the unique ability to contract independent of muscle tissue - and outside the influence of the brain, or nervous system - in order to protect us when we can’t protect ourselves.

When we can’t protect ourselves, we go into “freeze” mode: instead of confronting threats and fighting, or fleeing from danger, some people simply freeze; and most people who freeze also dissociate, or “leave” the body. A soft body is easier to hurt, while contracted tissues created a wall of tension.

Millions of people today are stuck in perpetual states of freeze; which means their fascia is locked into a chronically contracted state of self protection, resulting in chronic pain and diagnoses like fibromyalgia and myofascial pain syndrome. Fascia release will offer these people zero benefits in and of itself (and could actually backfire) until they emerge from the freeze response and learn to harness the healing powers of fighting and fleeing - like saying NO, setting boundaries, and voluntarily confronting stress and necessary conflict, to name a few.

However, to the degree the fascia release offers someone the chance to move out of freeze and into healthy fighting and/or fleeing is the degree to which people with these issues can heal with fascia release. The fascia release is merely the trigger, or opportunity; the healing happens at a nervous system level.

On the other hand, it is entirely possible for someone to approach fascia release hoping to resolve something like chronic pain or fibromyalgia, only to more deeply ingrain an unhelpful fight, flight or freeze response.

We are complicated creatures!

To understand all of the moving pieces we must learn to “think with” the whole human organism - made of body, soul and spirit - in the context of its whole environment: society, planet and cosmos.

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Putting things in their rightful place.

Like my past self, many of my clients and students are experiencing chronic pain because of unhealed childhood traumas; because of medical neglect and abuse; because they’re in unhappy marriages or violent relationships; because they hate their job; because they are chronic people pleasers and don’t know how to say ‘NO’, so their body says NO for them; or because they dissociated from their body during childhood, and the pain is a cry for help from the subconscious psyche.

If pain belongs to the realm of the nervous system, then it must be addressed there; and it is best addressed through relationship behaviors.

Over the past 7 years, I have helped hundreds of people resolve their chronic pain by teaching them how to become competent, healthy fighters; how to set boundaries and say NO; the importance of personal integrity and authentic self expression in their relationships.

I have not helped a single person (to my knowledge) resolve their chronic pain with the use of self fascia release alone. (I’m referring to my courses here, not people on YouTube).

If your pain is due to suppressing your authentic voice, then no amount of self fascia release will help you heal.

If your pain is due to staying in a relationship that you know is not the right relationship for you, then no amount of self fascia release is going to free you.

If your pain is due to unhealed childhood trauma, then you are probably longing to be seen and heard by at least one other human being; to believe that you and your pain matter to at least one other human being; to know - and experience - that you are not alone. Self fascia release would likely exacerbate your symptoms.

And if you’re suffering from degenerative conditions like shrinking, brittle fascia, scar tissue, hardening blood vessel walls, arthritic joints, chronic inflammation or cellular dehydration, then self fascia release would not be my #1 recommendation. It would take you months, or years, of daily self fascia release to do what could be accomplished in a few Kinetix sessions (once the skills are learned).

While self fascia release can help you “feel yourself” by putting you in direct contact with the feelings pulsing through your body; and while it has the potential to release suppressed emotions that are trapped there; it causes many people to feel even more traumatized; to further ingrain survival patterns of enduring pain; of feeling defective and broken; of extreme self reliance; of not asking for help; of dealing with their pain alone yet again.

So what exactly are the benefits of self fascia release?

Self fascia release has the potential to:

1. Help you get to know your body parts: fat vs fascia vs muscle vs bone vs nerves vs blood vessels

2. Interrupt and rewire certain nervous system patterns related to self perception and feelings

3. Increase blood flow

Social wounds need to be healed in the context of relationship.

Degeneration must be addressed within the systems of the body responsible for regeneration: fascia and blood. Self fascia release has very limited potential here.

Pain must be addressed neurologically; that is to say, it must be addressed psychologically at the level of individual perceptions, meanings, beliefs and mindset.

Self fascia release has the potential to alter perception - of your body, and of sensations like pain.

The irony here is that if I teach you self fascia release as a way to resolve pain, then you are going to think that the fascia release itself is the important thing; in reality, it’s the ability to feel your feelings and alter what you perceive about yourself while you roll around on balls and rollers. Most people have a hard time wrapping their minds around this, let alone applying it effectively in a room by themselves.

Finally, as we explored recently, blood is the body’s inbuilt healer, so increased blood flow is a definite benefit.

However, compared to something like Kinetix, self fascia release is incredibly limited in its ability to increase blood circulation. Only a handful of techniques will work wonders, like this gut compression technique (which is not really fascia release).

Which brings us to…

The real reasons I stopped teaching self fascia release:

1. Self fascia release isn’t part of my origin story (I didn’t use it to heal myself), and I only feel qualified to teach you what I’ve learned through direct experience in my own body and life. I asked my best friend to step on me, she said yes, and with her help I healed decades of chronic pain and trauma in one summer. That experience changed my life, and I am now on a mission to help friends, family members and professionals alike learn to “think with” reality and apply the Kinetix methodology effectively.

2. I no longer believe in “self healing” - I believe we are becoming sicker and lonelier and more chronically debilitated in our bodies and minds because of our deeply rooted social wounds that have left us terrified of each other.
   
   While it is important to spend time alone with our own thoughts and feelings, I believe what we need most is to stop avoiding each other and get to work healing our relationship wounds. We will heal the root causes of most chronic pain when we learn social skills like curiosity, listening, reflecting, collaboration, negotiation, boundary setting, compassion, conflict resolution, and unconditional positive regard, or love.

3. All of these years spent teaching self fascia release took me away from the social aspect of my work, which was really unhealthy for me. It also took me away from Kinetix, which has cost us all a lot because it means there are very few people offering Kinetix in the world (I can count them on one hand) and I get emails every day asking about Kinetix practitioners.
   
   In order to reverse these trends and align my actions with my beliefs, in 2024 I will begin teaching in person Kinetix workshops and offering small group healing retreats. And this week I am returning to in person client work after moving back to Colorado 🙌 . If you want to come see me in person, hit reply or comment below.

4. Self fascia release is, in my opinion, simply incapable of creating effective change to the fascial system. Need I say more?

There are reasons to use self fascia release, and many people have benefited from the techniques I’ve put online. But for all of the reasons I’ve shared today, I cannot in good conscience be the one to teach it anymore.

Kinetix, on the other hand, is something I believe in - and stand behind - with my whole being.

If you’ve been wanting to learn Kinetix, stay tuned for a special offer later this week.

With love,
Elisha