How can you restructure your body and build a better life for yourself? In this episode of Cosmic Consciousness, host Jewels Arnes is joined by guest Deanna Hansen as they talk about her journey as an athletic therapist who was dealing with addiction, and how she got past that dark phase of her life. Deanna also talks about Block Therapy, a bodywork practice that is medication, exercise, and therapy all in one. Join Jewels and Deanna in today’s episode to know more about restructuring your body through Block Therapy and how it can help improve your life.
Blessings Soul Family, this is Jewels with Cosmic Consciousness: Coding the New Human for the New Earth. And for more shows like this or to start your evolution journey, go to activateevolution.com. I am super excited about our guest today. I have Deanna Hansen, and she has developed a tool called Block Therapy. So Deanna, why don’t you just tell us a little bit about yourself?
Hi, Jewels. First of all, I want to thank you so much for having me here and sharing it with your community. I am very honored to be able to do that. So my journey began about 21 years ago. At the time, I was 30 years old, and I was an athletic therapist through training, but my body, my life was in absolute chaos. So up until that time, I really struggled with addiction. I was an alcoholic. As much as I was, I was still able to get through my schooling and still able to start my practice, but I was struggling. So I was working really, really hard as well. I was working hard at changing my physical appearance, changing my life, trying to get control over my anxiety, my chronic pains, and really applying what I learned in university as an athletic therapist.
And the harder that I worked and the harder that I tried, the bigger my body became, the more stressed I became in general. And I was very depleted in general because I would go to the gym and I’d be working out really, really hard seeing what other people were doing. I also had the profession behind me teaching me what to do, and I felt like this absolute failure because I see what I want my body to be like, and I was doing what I was supposed to be doing, and yet I was going in the opposite direction.
So at the age of 30, I made a big change in my life. I quit drinking. And that in itself was one step toward healing, but in the process of that, now I had to look at my life and what I had become from all of those years of unconscious living. And I was leaving my second marriage. I was in a business partnership with a gentleman who was not on the level that I wanted to be on with my business, and I had to make a lot of significant changes. And now I didn’t have an escape. So I had some significant anxiety attacks. And month after month, they kept ramping up and becoming terrifying.
And this one anxiety attack was the seed of everything that I’ve developed because I thought I was going to die at that moment. My diaphragm was frozen with fear, and I couldn’t catch my breath. So for some reason, I intuitively dove my hand deep inside my belly, and the first thing I encountered was pain. But the pain took me out of my crazy thinking. It brought me back to the ground. I knew I was safe at that moment. And then the next thing that happened was I continued to explore, and I was blown away by the amount of scar tissue I had felt.
So as an athletic therapist, I always focused on deep tissue work, and as much as my personal life was in disarray, I had a really good practice. So I had a lot of experience working in scar tissue in people’s bodies, I had good strong hands, but I never touched my abdomen because that was where I carried my extra 50 pounds of weight. And I truly hated that area. So now I’m putting my hands in here, and I’m exploring, and I was surprised because I didn’t have any injury or surgery in that area specifically, yet it felt marbled with what felt like scar tissue.
And suddenly, I was having all these aha moments. Like no wonder when I’m coming home from a five-mile run, dripping wet with sweat, my belly still felt cold. And then I realized, well if it’s still cold, there’s no blood flow getting to that area. So no wonder no changes are happening. At least not changes for the better. So every day, I would come home from work, and I was excited to continue this exploration. And after two weeks, my chronic low back pain was going away. And I thought, “I have to try this on my patients.” So I started flipping my patients on their back, and I asked them if I could do a little bit of the work that I was doing on my own body to see what would happen, and I was getting excellent results. So this became my new focus. And that was 21 years ago.
So for quite a while, I was teaching other therapists my technique. People would hear about the results I was getting, and then I was attracting therapists to come and learn what I now call Fluid Isometrics. But my real passion was to teach self-care. And that was a challenge in and of itself because teaching people to use their hands on their fascia system. There’s a lot of limiting factors to that. So about ten years into the process, I was having a restorative yoga session, a private session with my teacher, and she was putting me into a sideline twist over a bolster. She cautioned me that that gets really, really deep. Now for ten years, I had been diving my hands in through my fascia system from head to toe, and I was getting very, very deep with my hands. So I just kind of chuckled. And I thought, “I can hardly even feel this.”
And in the past, I had been taking the Iron Barre Yoga teacher training. So I had an iron guard wooden block beside me. And I said, “I don’t want to lie on that block.” And she said, “What are you thinking? You’re crazy. That’s going to go way too deep.” And I said, “Just let me try it.” So I put it on my ribs, and I started intuitively moving into this block, and I thought, “Oh my gosh, I don’t need to use my hands. I can use this piece of wood to get similar results that my hands were getting.” But the challenge was the yoga block itself had sharp edges. It was a rectangle. So there were certain things I could do, but to get deep as my hands did, was too painful.
So one of my therapists was also a woodworker, and I gave him the tool, and I said, “I need you to shape this so that we can go really, really deep because we need to get to the bone, but in a comfortable way.” So that was about a two-year process, and then we finally found the exact size and shape that is now the block buddy that we use today, and we teach people self-care with this process and system. And the goal is to melt through the adhesions in the fascia system to improve blood and oxygen flow to cells.
That is fascinating. I love your story of how you got here and I definitely have all these questions going through my mind. But we’re going to go ahead and go to break so that we can come back and just dive in and stay in the conversation. But before we get a break, Deanna, where can people find you if they want to learn more about your tool and the other things that you do?
My website is blocktherapy.com
And I love that name, blocktherapy.com. Okay, well, just give us one moment and we’ll be right back.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
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