And welcome back to Family Health Matters.

I’m Shelley Irwin.

With me today, Sandy Parker, owner and founder of On the Path Yoga, and Toni Reedy, a Reiki master.

It’s good to be a master in many ways.

All right, ladies, how are we spending our day in this world of pain?

I’ll start with you, Sandy.

so I will say I don’t directly deal with pain as a yoga instructor.

I deal with many people who are coming into the studio.

They’ve been referred by the physicians or their physical therapists because of chronic pain and they’ve heard that yoga can help And they know that yoga is kind of about stretching, but they really don’t understand the science of stretching.

So there’s a lot of layers of what yoga practice can mean to people.

It’s a biopsychosocial type of practice.

So we work on multiple levels.

But I will say that primarily a lot of people come in because their back hurts or they have tight hamstrings and that’s bothering them.

Some kind of physical manifestation Some people come in because of anxiety.

And so, again, that kind of holistic approach to the mind body integration is a way to clarify what’s going on in the body.

Pain is always valid.

Pain is communication, the brain protecting the body but pain is not always accurate because 80% of the information coming from our environment and from our body goes into our brain, and then our brain is filtering out and only receiving about 20% of that to actually process.

So what lights up is what is acted on.

So there are multiple levels of pain and pain research.

We’ll dig into that.

Tell us about you, Toni Reedy.

Well, I have the pleasure of working with people every day that are dealing with either physical pain, emotional pain, mental pain and what I have the ability to do is we work with them to help them release and relax.

Reiki is a Japanese energy form that helps the central nervous system relax, which also uses universal life force And in that turn, it allows people to actually heal themselves in that process.

I also work with people who have emotions that have built up over time, whether they are experienced or inherited and with the practices that I do, I work with them to release them and allow their body to heal, because sometimes it’s not an actual physical trauma that’s happened.

It’s emotional pain that has, in turn, developed into that physical pain that they’re feeling.

You’re someone answering my next question.

I’ll stay with you, Toni.

How important is it to take pain seriously?

It is incredibly serious because unfortunately, if it’s not dealt with, there’s a great book that I always recommend out that’s called The Body Keeps a Score.

And it goes into how traumas that a person experiences, it will end up building up, almost like blocking energy on a highway If it’s not dealt with, it can can then manifest itself into physical pain.

So where someone really doesn’t have to go through a physical trauma, they can have an emotional trauma, and that’s when in turn, they’re trying to find different alternatives to try to release that pain.

And then it’s up to people like us to help those people find the best thing that’s going to work for them.

So it’s 100% serious that pain is dealt with.

Thank you.

Sandy, would you do a little education to us, the acute versus chronic pain definitions?

Right.

So acute pain is a sudden onset with a fairly quick resolution.

You stub your toe, it hurts like heck, and then after a bit, it goes away With chronic pain, it’s a longer period of time, and also different things happen in chronic pain in that it becomes more sensitized, so more things upset you physically, mentally, emotionally You’re tired when you have chronic pain, and so then that tiredness can lead to other manifestations of just being diseased.

And then the other thing is that it can start to travel in your body, so it becomes less accurate over time So chronic pain is more the concerning thing.

And like Toni said, you know, like if you have some type of trauma, whether it’s emotional, physical, mental, that quick resolution means that you’ve processed it kind of out of your body But when it’s chronic, it’s staying in there and it’s becoming more diffuse.

In Ayurvedia, we always say, if we can’t deal with something quite quickly, it becomes more immersed in all of the tissues.

And I’ll stay with that, Ayurvedia.

Tell me about this.

So Ayurveda is a sister science of yoga, and it’s the science of longevity.

And so it goes back a few thousand years.

I mean, there’s not a really start date for yoga and Ayurveda.

They were progressively created throughout just experience, where now we depend on evidence for Western science.

Yoga and ayurveda are more experiential, and just over time, it’s like, well, this seems to work.

What I love and what’s happening more and more is that ancient wisdom of the traditional Eastern practices or South Asian practices are now being manifested and seen as vast valid in our Western medicine, too.

So people are turning to it because it works And even though sometimes the evidence is sketchy because we’re dealing with subtle energies in the body, and so it’s impossible to sometimes trace that.

But the application is the valid, and it works.

And so especially for chronic pain, which is very unsuccessful in Western medicine to deal with.

It’s usually just pharmaceuticals, and that’s not wrong.

If somebody’s in pain, we want to ease that pain, but it’s not getting to the root cause of where that pain’s coming from.

Well, again, everyone work with their own needs.

Yeah.

But the take two aspirin and call me in the morning, hopefully, is not the way to deal with your pain these days.

I’m going to have you Toni define Reiki.

Reiki is a practice that was used back with the Buddhist back in biblical times.

And it was stored away and it ended up coming back into modern day in the 1900s with a gentleman by the name of Miko Uzi.

And through his practices and traditions, he was handed over symbols, so to say, to work with universal life force.

And what that does is that allows Reiki practitioners to work literally as a piece of coax cable, to hook up to universal life source, which it doesn’t go against any religion, anything along that line, but it also allows us to work with the person to become more relaxed.

And when the body is more relaxed and not in a constant fight or flight mode, then at that point, it’s able to allow the energy to go through the body so much easier It also removes blockages that are within the meridians, and there are 12 main meridians that are within the body.

So once we have those blockages neutralized, we can get them moved aside to allow the body to relax and get more centered and more calm and release pain and release anxiety and stress.

It’s a beautiful tool, beautiful tool.

When you have a client that is in pain and is looking for your help, I’ll stay with you, Toni, how do you determine which therapy you’ll use?

I also, in my practice, I also use karuna Reiki, which is a different type of vibration, and that, for me personally, as what I lean towards more, I work with archangels And so I also am a medium, so I’m allowed to hear things on the other side.

So I work with them as well, as well as with my intuition, and I feel where the energy is actually being pulled too.

So I can feel the differences between where there’s blockages of energy and where it flows more clearly.

And then also with being able to work with my team and the person’s team as well, it channels me to where they need the most health.. And have you helped a person be relieved of pain?

Most definitely.

All right, Sandy, can you talk a little bit about maybe a personal dealing with pain that you’ve been on?

Yeah, personally.

I had a laborum tear, so that’s a cartilage tear in your hip in 2019 in the fall.

And I was hoping it would heal.

I’m 63.

So this happened, you know, in my late 50s.

Very young.

And so it was progressively worsening rather than improving.

But we also, in early 2020, we experienced COVID.

So my studio was closed, walking didn’t hurt.

So I just continued to walk, knowing the biomechanics of cartilage that it does remodel with gentle, you know, loads And it just continued to worsen until it was, again, it was spreading all over my body.

My feet were hurting.

I hurt my knee, I could feel my back going out of wax.

So it was, again, becoming more generalized, and then even walking hurt into the point where I couldn’t walk without a cane And so when I finally did go in and get it imaged, you know, the way the body heals is adaptive and it’s always protective, but it’s not always... Restorative.

Right.

And there wasn’t going to be restoration of this hip joint.

It had completely encapsulated, which means it was beyond bone on bone, and it was actually fusing.

And so last, not this year, but last year, I had a total hip replacement.

And I think because the whole time I was working with it, I knew the source, I knew the acute source, and I was able to monitor and really know what the communication was in my body and move in a way that was at least as beneficial as possible.

And so I had high success rate with my with my hip replacement.

And I think a lot of times people have joint replacements and there is probably some type of acute initiative trauma to that joint.

But if they haven’t stayed attuned to what their body is doing and how they’re working with it, then sometimes those replacements aren’t very successful, even though we have great orthopedic practices in this country So oftentimes I will work with people, post surgery, to try to just make sure that their body is becoming realigned, because that new misalignment in the body due to whatever occurred can lead to, again, the brain trying to protect the body against this imbalance And so that’s where pain oftentimes becomes referred.

So I do work with people one on one, if they have specific concerns.

Yoga classes in this country are generally taught in group situations, and so you can’t address everybody’s individual needs in a group but I have a private practice as well.

Let’s dispel some myths.

I’ll start with you, Toni.

As I age, my guaranteed to be in pain, that is a definite no.

The reason is, is because of the fact that it’s also how you perceive everything that’s going on with life.

If you are more proactive and you start listening to your body ahead of time, you can get past and bypass so much of that.

The problem that we see sometimes is where if it seems to be a little nudge, we ignore it, dispass it, and then it will continue to go and go and go I have a handful of clients that have had that happen, and they go in and they speak with their physician and they’re told things like, oh, it’s all in your head or it’s fibromyalgia, and we can’t find an exact thing.

Well, unfortunately, at that point, we have so many things that have linked up together that we now need to start removing the links to find out what the root cause of it.

And so it’s just, it depends on how proactive you are.

Good.

I’ll run an extra mile on that one.

Kids in Pain.

Normal?

Sandy?

Well, yes, I mean, kids fall, they hurt themselves, you know, they tend to not have good sense of boundaries, right?

So they’re going to have painful events in their lives.

I’m kind of concerned with mental pain and with the anxiety that we’re seeing in younger generations and what the source of that is in their life.

And of course, oftentimes, you know, we have to look from the rear view mirror to see what’s happening and why it’s developing But I think that the lack of exposure to a wide variety of experiences, our kids tend to be a little bit more siloed these days, and that might be we don’t know the source, right?

That’s the problem.

And you want to rule out the cancers and the Of course, you know, that’s why I say pain is always valid.

Just like Toni said, we need to validate pain.

And you know, my population I work are primarily adult women who have been gas lit, who have been told that it’s all in your head or given these generalized diagnoses.

And so one of the first things I do is listen listen to what’s going on.

And I think that that’s something maybe we need to do more with our younger generation too, is really give them their capacity to vocalize what they feel and to have that be authenticated.

And then we can maybe begin to work on.

For me, kids in pain is going to be more socially influenced, I think that than physically influenced, unless there’s something, again, an acute injury that we definitely need to deal with.

Yes.

And Toni, stay with this idea of not necessarily kids, but maybe the generation or two above.

Greatest generation probably didn’t have Reiki.

The baby boomers probably know about it, but want to stay traditional.

How are millennials and more, Are we doing, I’ll still say non-traditional work?

Maybe more traditional is it getting?

Yeah, I would say it’s more traditional.

Oh, definitely.

Definitely.

And that’s why it’s so big For example, like just this show is so we can educate people is because the more that they’re able to learn that there are other reasons, other root causes, other things things that can be done.

And where with some of the generations, they were just taught to, you know, be seen, don’t say anything.

And so then they’re pulling that energy back down into them and they don’t understand that it’s like that mental and emotional anxiety and that trauma is built in and it truly does start causing a twist of energies and causing issues.

So the more that we are able to educate others that listen, what you’re feeling, it’s real, and it is valid.

What you remember is real and it’s valid Let us help you.

So that way they can start learning for different methalities and also just unpacking things so they can grow older and be more at peace.

And the great thing is the more that we’re able to do this now it’s just going to snowball and we’re going to be able to help more generations and more generations, which in turn, opens us up to where we can help the generations in the past.

Unless you can live forever.

I’m willing to, you, do a challenges in that time.

Again, the science of longevity.

True.

Yes.

You have some, both of you, the nutritional expertise, too.

Does what I eat matter when it comes to the topic of pain?

Well, of course, you know, the two main things we do as live beings as we eat and we move and we sleep three, weeks, really, right?

And so all of those rings are integrated and how well we function as a whole.

And so while a lot of nutrition is very, I would say, of it’s a trendy and it’s B prescriptive.

In Ayurveda, it would be very individualized.

We would look at, you know, what they are experiencing, we’d look at how their pain is showing up in their bodies and whether or not nutrition would be something that we would work on.

But we try to balance the energies in the body.

So Toni talked about energies and I definitely work with energies, yoga has different terms for the same thing.

So life force, Prana.

So we look for areas where Prana is stuck.

You’re saying Prana?

Prana is the same.

It’s the Sanskrit term for life force.

And so where’s Prana stuck?

And if it’s stuck in the digestion, there’s going to be certain symptoms of that and so then we would work absolutely on getting digestion smoother.

Same thing with sleep, same thing with movement, you know.

I think that sometimes exercise can almost increase pain because we have this no pain, no gain kind of attitude towards exercise And so that’s, again, why I think, especially in this society, we need gentler practices, like yoga, which sometimes there’s a more aggressive form of yoga.

But we’re seeing the trend as people are recognizing.

We need a gentler application of how we move, and that allows that introspection.

So we have something that’s called a stretch reflex.

When you go into a stretch, your brain’s like, oh, you don’t want to be pulled apart, let’s tension up.

And so there’s this fear fear, tension, pain cycle, right?

And so if we can hold that stretch and get past that initial response in the brain, then we can begin to breathe and quiet and calm, and we’ll find that we can begin to listen to the body better, map the body better have a better understanding of what’s going on.

So sometimes digestive pain can actually be pelvic pain, something going on in the bones rather than the digestion, but that tension all the way around that pelvic bowl can lead to digestive problems.

So, nutrition is definitely apart, but we always have to look at all everything that’s integrated there.

Takes work.

Yeah, Toni, and on that and maybe touch on the importance of sleep.

Oh, of course.

I’ve had clients that I work with that with part of my practice.

I use the body code, which in turn with that, that’s by Dr.

Bradley Nelson, phenomenal gentleman who he is a chiropractor as well, and he works with energy healing.

One of the things with his practice is he goes through and works with the subconscious regarding things that are needed in nutrition, because there are so many times that essential oils, nutrients, things are missed and the subconscious will end up pulling that in, which in turn, when I come up with that, and I mentioned it to the clients, I always say, please reach out to someone who is a professional nutritionist, who understands it and can work with you on a one on one level, because it is.

It’s very individualized, and you need to have someone that specifically works with that form the human body So what we take in, whether it’s nutrients, whether it’s energy, whether it is the information that we submerge ourselves in on social networks.

We truly, we’re almost like a piece of tofu.

What we marinate in, that’s what we take in So it’s so important that what we ingest, either internally or externally, is so important and we stay cognizant because that makes a difference regarding how we feel.

And I’ll go back to the statement I made.

I’ll jump back to you, Sandy.

This is hard work.

It’s nice.

take two pills and call me in the morning.

Well, and it’s up to individuals how hard they want to work to resolve what’s going on.

And I meant that as a positive.

Yeah.

Do the work.

Yeah, yeah.

Because, you know, for some people, life is as hard, it’s complex, and maybe what they need is a straightforward analic answer.

Like, just relieve the pain, right?

And I’m very compassionate about that.

But if they’re willing to ask the deeper questions, you, I always say I work on four levels of the progression of health.

And the first one, and I hope people don’t stay here because it sounds really bad, is being doomed.

But many people, especially if they have chronic pain, they feel doomed, right?

They’re Yeah.

Physical pain.

Yeah, right.

Yep.

And it is very overwhelming.

I mean, I have experienced it physically.. So then the second level of that progression is that they ask for help, and that’s where therapists or physicians, people who can offer therapeutics are there for them to take them out of that place of doomed and into a place where they are progressing, I call it the level of dependence.

They need that outside help.

Where I tend to work is in that place more of empowerment, where I call it deliberate.

So this is where we work on lifestyle And the changes don’t need to be dramatic, but they do need to be deliberate and they need to be daily because it’s not what we do most enthusiastically that has the longest effect on our lives.

It’s what we do every day that’s cumulative.

So it’s that butterfly effect.

Little changes have a huge effect over time So that’s where I work is in that deliberate place.

And then my hope is, and I do work in this are as well, is that then they go and they start to change their social environment.

So we start to really implement this, not just in the home, but we maybe become active in our community.

We ask for more bike paths, multi user paths, areas where we can have better walkability so that we are moving in a way that’s evolutionary, to our bodies.

This is what we evolved to do, not sit in cars, 24/7.

We’ sit like this.. computers, I look at cars a little bit more because cars are we’re swimming in cars so long now for the last 100 years or so that we don’t even see cars as an implement, but we didn’t evolve to move at 70 miles per hour.

So that is a stressor that, again, the brain has decided, is it isn’t a threat.

We don’t have to protect ourselves against being in a car.

The car protects us But moving at 70 miles an hour is not safe.

Thank you for that.

Yeah, as we start to wind down too, Toni, add to that, and some other action items when it comes to I’m in pain and I need help.

As mentioned, yes, definitely, our bodies are not built to be going at 70 miles an hour.

What that also does, which a lot of people don’t realize, that puts our adrenaline going.

So we constantly are in this, oh, it’s normal to be in a fight or flight kind of mode.

And as that happens, we can’t shut ourselves down.

We can’t shut ourselves down to sleep.

We can’t quiet our mind.

We can’t take a moment to process and chew slower and eat slower and listen to our body So as we are going forward, it’s not just even pain.

The more people understand how important it is to listen to their bodies on everything so we can slow them down.

It’s going to give them the opportunity to listen so they can make the best choices for themselves So we can eliminate pain, we can eliminate unnecessary anxiety, we can eliminate all of these other things.

And that’s why we depend on each other as therapists and practitioners, because so many times we’ll work with people and we’ll get to a certain point A perfect example, I have a client who had a physical situation where they had a shelf fall on top of them.

And they were bedridden for approximately five years.

I started working with them with Reiki and it got to where now they are able to, they are at the point where their body is able to handle about a month without feeling pain But we’re also now uncovering that there’s also held emotions that are still working with that, that they need to work out so they’re able to listen to their body more.

So as we are going forward, we’re just here to help educate and make things easier for the generations to come.

Yeah, I think education is the key.

How we in language to, how we speak to our clients, how we speak to ourselves, using really a huge part of it.

Yeah.

So language is important, education is important And then providing a choice in practitioners, choices in how we pursue those more difficult changes, right?

And again, you know, when you said two, like, I have told more people, it’s not so much what you eat, it’s how you eat.

And if you can just slow down and really actually chew your food and that has maybe been one of the biggest outcomes, I think, for my clients, is they’ll say, you know, like all my pain and my digestion went away.

And I was like, yeah,, because now you’re actually ready to receive that food, right?

Instead of just gobbling it down.

How do we find out more about you, Sandy Parker?

And that doesn’t mean ice cream all day.

Well, it could, I guess.

I don’t want to go there.

You’re the fix over.

We wouldn’t need to 30 minutes, I think.. On the path yoga, yes?

Yes.

I’m in Spring Lake, so on the Lakeshore.

And I also do have a private practice.

It’s called the Vital Path.

So looking at issues of vitality, so that’s that line force, right?

And so that’s where I see people one-on-one.

Yeah, keywords.

Thank you for you.

Toni, wrap us up on the last minute or so.

Of course.

The more that we all work together and refer each other, because truly, our goals is not to have someone come into us saying that they hurt, that they’re feeling uncomfortable, they don’t know what to do.

Part of our paths is is to help this person understand what they’re going through, to help relieve the pain, to educate them, and to watch them be able to go off on their own.

We are not looking for permanent clients, we are looking to help them go off and help others.

That’s why we do what we do.

Yes.

And you do both hands on and also some counseling as well?

I do.

I have clients worldwide, so I do a lot of work.

virtual work as well.

: Yes, that is kind of the positive, I guess, of a COVID experiences.

We’re online a lot.. Yeah, yeah.

Toni, we find out more about you how then.

Simply go to my website, ToniReedy.com, TONIREEDY dot com.

Good.

Well, I only bring two of the best, and so thank you for that, Sandy Parker and Toni Reedy, that you both practice what you preach, and obviously I’ll help us out when it comes to the topic of pain.

Thank you.

Thank you for having us.

As always, thank you for listening to and watching this edition of Family Health Matters.

Stay painfree.