Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Science of Fascia: How Simple Movements Can Calm Your Mind & Heal Your Body with Jason van Blerk #620

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

When it comes to feeling better, many of us instinctively start with our minds. We think about our thoughts, our beliefs, our stress levels. But what if a huge part of our emotional and psychological experience is actually being held in our bodies – quite literally – in a remarkable tissue called fascia? This week, I’m joined by Jason van Blerk, one of the co-founders of Human Garage - a global self-care movement that aims to inspire 1 billion people to heal themselves, through simple, accessible movement practices, that they call Fascial Manoeuvres. In our conversation, we explore what fascia actually is, why modern science is only just beginning to catch up with what many practitioners have observed for decades, and how emotions and past experiences may be stored in our physical structure. Jason also shares how different areas of the body seem to relate to different emotional patterns, why posture and mood are so tightly linked, and how changing one can often influence the other. We also talk about stress, and why so many of us feel tense, disconnected, and stuck in our own lives and Jason explains how simple rotational movements, combined with specific breathing patterns, can help “unwind” the body, reduce stress, and leave you feeling lighter, calmer, and grounded. The thing I love the most about Human Garage’s philosophy is that they want to empower people to heal themselves. This is not about needing lifelong treatment, or becoming dependent on a therapist or HCP - it’s about learning a set of practical moves that you can use anywhere, anytime AND with no equipment, to start healing your body and calming your mind. Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com.   Thanks to our sponsors: Peloton https://onepeloton.co.uk Heights https://heights.com/livemore   Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/620   DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

I've seen people release extreme trauma, you know, from screaming to people passing out to shaking to just crying or just sitting in silence. And there's something that we're doing here. I don't fully understand it yet. And I hope one day a scientist comes in and starts to really research what's changing in people. But when people do this, they start to balance their emotions. They start to feel more grounded and more centered in themselves. Hey, guys. How you doing?

I hope you having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Ronggan Chatterjee, and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More. When it comes to feeling better, many of us instinctively start with our minds. We think about our thoughts, our beliefs, our stress levels, but what if a huge part of our emotional and psychological experience is actually being held in our bodies, quite literally, in a remarkable tissue called fascia? This week, I'm joined by Jason Van Blerk, one of the co-founders of Human Garage,

a global self-care movement that aims to inspire one billion people to heal themselves through simple, accessible movement practices that they call fascial manoeuvres. In our conversation, we explore what fascia actually is, why modern science is only just beginning to catch up, with what many practitioners have observed for decades, and how emotions and past experiences may be stored in our physical structure. Jason also shares how different areas of the body seem to relate to different emotional patterns,

why posture and mood are so tightly linked, and how changing one can often influence the other. We also talk about stress, and why so many of us feel tense, disconnect. and stuck in our own lives. And Jason explains how simple rotational movements combined with specific breathing patterns can help unwind the body, reduce stress

and leave you feeling lighter, calmer and ground it. The thing I love the most about Human Garage's philosophy is that they want to empower people to heal themselves. This is not about needing lifelong treatment or becoming dependent on a therapist or healthcare professional. It's about learning a set of practical moves that you can use anywhere, anytime and with no equipment to start healing your body and calming your mind.

A lot of people are aware, Jason, that our body can hold emotions. and trauma. But what I get from watching you speak and watching what human garage is doing is this idea that the trauma and the emotions might be stored

in something called our fascia. Is that right? I believe it is. And the reason why I believe that is because fascia is primarily made of water. And there have been researchers who've studied a lot about the properties of water and what water can do.

So Veda Austin's one of them. What she does is she takes water. She puts a coin next to it. She freezes the water and looks at it under a microscope. And what you see is that that water actually takes on the same structure or picture that was on the coin. And water is showing that it can hold memory. So if you talk to water, if you put it next to a plastic water bottle, whatever that water is next to, it actually takes on the information that,

around it. And so if we're 70% water, where is all the memory being stored in the body? I believe it's being stored in our fascia, and our fascia is primarily made of water. Yeah. I think we sort of are getting this collective understanding now that our body holds tension. And look, I've been delving into my fascia release and all forms of bodywork for a long, long time now. I've been to many courses where they train practitioners, and you will see time and time again that when people have a deep release in their body, sometimes they can be shaking, sometimes they can be crying. And I've seen that enough times to know, there's something going on here that we're not taught a medical school. And you see this all the time, don't you, that you're treating people,

you're holding their body, you're pressing on their body, and suddenly they come out in tears. what do you think is going on? You know, it's really interesting because I've worked on 800 people in a day. I've worked on probably about 5,000 people in the last year. And I'm just watching patterns. When I work on somebody's knee, there tends to be certain emotions and certain reactions when I work on their knee. When I work on someone's shoulder or their head, same thing.

And so I believe that different parts of the body hold different emotions or different memories. So, you know, like, what is trauma? Trauma is an event where you could not process the emotions. It could be something when you were eight years old, your mom didn't give you candy at the store, and you were all frustrated. You didn't have the tools to process those emotions. Those emotions go somewhere.

Like when you're angry, what happens to your body? You tighten your fists, you clench your jaw, you almost, you go in, you roll like this. So people who work out and they're angry all the time, they're like this. And so when we have an emotion, it changes our posture. When we have an emotion, it stores somewhere in the body. And I've just seen countless times when I touch people in certain parts of their body, certain emotions release.

Certain patterns are stored there. Yeah. I think something that everyone can resonate with is this idea that if you've had a really busy day at work, you know, you didn't take any breaks. It was loads of demands. You work through lunch. You can come back in the evening and your body can feel tense. and tight. You can feel neck tightness or whatever it might be. I mean, what's going on there?

Of course, you know, your stress, your emotions are being stored. And unless you do something about it, it's going to stay there, right? Mm-hmm. Yes. And if we look at most people's bodies, we talked about this when we were working together. You know, most people have a left shoulder that's higher than the right. And their their one hip is higher than the other. So it looks like they have a leg length discrepancy. It's 99.9% of people do not have leg length discrepancies that are anatomically that way.

It's because there's some sort of torque pattern in their body. So one shoulder's higher, one hip is higher, one part of their face is more forward, the eyes are slightly torqued, and based on the emotions that we're holding, you can actually see patterns in the body when people walk, when people move. If they're holding anger, they're tight in the groin.

They're tight in the jaw. So if you do a jaw release, they're going to have a lot of anger come out, like, er. And if you watch our videos, you see people, they scream in a very angry way when you do the jaw release. So there's something to do with posture and emotions. And there's certain emotions on certain parts of the body and certain emotions on another part of the body. And we've just done this so many times that we've been able to map it. You know, there's a lot of people who do this, the body keeps the score. You've got Louise Hay who's documented this.

you've got metaphysical anatomy. And over time, I've just found that a lot of these practices, they've found something. There's something about the body holding emotions in certain areas, and it affects our posture. Like, if somebody's sad, what do they do? Or they're suppressed or they're not acting as themselves? They start to curl forward and almost become small. Yeah. And if someone's confident, like look at Tony Robbins.

Like, he's really big and confident. You know if you stand in this posture, you feel more confident. you feel larger. And so based on the posture can also influence the emotions. Yeah, I think these things work both ways, right? You know, is it sorting out your emotions that then changes your posture

or is it clearing the fascia and clearing your body that's going to sort out the mood, right? I think it could work from both angles, perhaps. 100%. Yeah. Like everybody can do this right now. You could sit up nice and tall

with your chest up. You feel stronger. You feel more confident. So I can put the body. into certain positions and it can reprogram my emotions. I can also have an emotion that reprograms my physical body into a certain position. So it goes both ways. And, you know, there's mind over matter and people always talk about can you use the mind to influence the physical body. Yes. You can also use the physical body to influence the mind. Yeah. There are two ways. You can't,

it's not just one way, it's both. Yeah. You mentioned the term fascia. Yeah. That is becoming, I hope, a term that people are more familiar with today than they were 10 years ago, for example. But for people who've never heard that term before, can you explain what fascia is? Yeah, fascia is a very interesting thing. You know, there was actually articles 20 years ago that were buried about what fascia really is. And the traditional way of looking at it was it's like this saran wrap connective tissue, kind of looks like a spider web, and it surrounds your mind, muscles and your bones. If we bought a piece of meat from the store and we're sort of pulling it apart, that kind

of fibrous connective tissue, that is fascia, isn't it? That is the traditional way of looking at it. But we're looking at dead bodies. We're looking at the chicken once it's on the counter. We're not looking at it when it's alive. And so what we found, and we found a video on YouTube called Fasha Magnified 25 times. they cut open the forearm and they lifted the skin up. And what you see when you look in there is there's these water tubes. They're tubes of water and when you have a movement or an emotion or a

thought, all of a sudden that tube breaks off and reconnects to another tube and it breaks off and connects to another one. And so when we look at it in the living system, it reacts very differently. What I believe is fascia is these biohydraulic tubes of water and it's in a gel like state. That's why if I cut your body, you don't just squirt water out. You're 70% water. Where is all that water? The water is not in a liquid substance. It's actually in this gel-like state called our fascia. And because it's in this gel-like state, I believe it actually transmits electricity, it sends information, it stores memory and emotions, and there are studies now coming out validating this. They're saying that fascia is biocoustic. That means it responds

to frequency and sound. They're saying that fascia conducts electricity and it has its own brain. And so I believe fascia is the most intelligent organ in our body. And it holds your muscles, your bones, your tendons, your ligaments, and your organs. So if you have a neck out and you go to a chiropractor, you get it adjusted, a week later, your neck's out again. If I go to massage and they massage my muscles, my neck goes into place, it's all good, and then a week later it goes back out. I believe that the fascia is becoming restricted. And if we work on the fascia, because it holds everything, everything unwinds and resets naturally. And because fascia is so sensitive, it changes structure based on the way that we feel. And if you sit for a long time,

it starts to solidify, calcify, and harden. And that is a position where it's now locked and it's tight. So the goal is to get the water in our bodies moving again. And if we're dehydrated, if we have chemicals, if we're not moving, that will just start to harden and calcify. And that calcification is what we see when you're cutting that piece of meat and you're lifting it up. You see those little fibrous strings

of this white fibrous string. That's the calcification of it. A lot of people know that feeling when they're on a foam roller or a ball and they're trying to sort of, you know, rub out some tension. You know, when we're doing that, would you say some of the time

we're finding adhesions in our fashion, that we're trying to rub out and try and roll out? You know, it's very interesting because once we discovered what fascia is, we found a new way to work with the human body. And the traditional way of working with fascia or the muscles is we roll it, we massage it, we push into it and make it submit. And it's so painful at some point the body's like, okay, and it releases. But for some reason it was coming back, so we had to look at the body in a new way.

If we understand that fascia is this water-based system in gel, how does water react versus a dense structure? It's very different. So water goes through tubes and it's flowy and it's almost hydraulic. It responds to pressure. So what we found is if we rotate the body and counter-rotation while we breathe, then the fascia starts to release. but rolling it and submitting it with an elbow

or stretching it in a straight line doesn't work. The body is a rotational system. Like when you walk, every part of your body, including your arms, your legs, your head are constantly counter-rotating when you walk and move, when you swing a bat, when you're in the fetal position, all of these positions are rotational. So if all of these things that we do naturally

when we move are rotational, why are we stretching in a straight line? Yeah. Why are we lifting, you know, a bicep curl in a straight line? The body, you know, when you fix your arms on a bar and you do a bench press, there's no rotation that's allowed to happen there. So we're locking the body in positions that it's not familiar with. Yeah.

And so I believe that these linear-based straight-line movements are causing more dysfunction to the body than if we were to add rotation into it. Yeah. I mean, that's certainly been my experience for many years now. let's take two, you know, core human movements walking and running, something that humans are uniquely adapted to doing compared to lots of other creatures and animals, right? I remember early on with my work with Helen, my movement coach Helen Hall, after she did something when we did some movements to sort of free certain things up, suddenly when I was walking,

I was like, oh, Helen, I'm sort of rotating. And she's like, yeah, you know, you should be rotating when you're walking and running. And I can, I'm really tuned into it now where I feel when I go for a walk, you can feel that this is not just a linear movement. And when you get into that counter rotation, it just feels effortless. You feel like, oh, this is how I'm designed to move. Yes. And if we look at the reason why we stopped rotating, we walk on flat surfaces. We used to walk in nature.

and nothing was flat. So that means your foot had to rotate and adapt around an uneven surface. The moment we brought flat surfaces in, our foot, our toes, our ankle, none of the joints in our foot are actually rotating. They're walking in a straight line and they're very flat.

Well, if your foot's flat, then your ankle, your knee, your hip, your shoulder, your jaw, and everything responds to that. But if you were to walk in nature barefoot for 30 minutes, you would notice that your body would start to rotate,

and swing. Your body should swing and it should feel very efficient. But if we're not doing that, if we're wearing shoes, if we're on flat surfaces, we're not getting the natural rotation that the body needs. Yeah, it's interesting. As you were saying, that reminds me of another way to look at nature, right? We know, for example, that when a human being goes into nature, the levels of the stress hormone cortisol start to come down. One of the reasons that I really like is to do with fractals. So fractals are these geometric shapes that you only get in nature. And when a human eye sees a fractal, something happens with your physiology

and cortisol starts to go down, right? But of course, these things like, where do you see fractals? Trees, leaves, flowers, coastlines. There's no straight lines. These man-made surfaces, which we're surrounded by, are linear. These straight lines are basically not what we have evolved for.

Exactly. And even if we go down to the cellular level, like I like to break the body down in a very simple way. Your 75% water depends on your age and your hydration level. You've got about 20, 25% sand. If we were to grind down the bones, the muscles, the minerals, the nutrients and everything, and it becomes sand. And then bacteria and viruses. So that's a very simple formula for understanding the body. I love that. Can I just say that's how simple we are. I love that. It's such a beautiful. I've never thought about the human body like that. We're just like water sand and some bugs. Exactly. In some sort of combination. Yeah. And if we look at how water and sand react to the world, then we understand the human body in a deeper way. That's my belief. If you Google on YouTube, water frequency experiment, what you'll see is they create. They create a deeper way. That's my belief. If you Google on YouTube, water frequency experiment, what you'll see is they create. sound waves and the water creates cymatics. It creates geometrical shapes. Now go to sand on YouTube, the frequency of sand. When you vibrate sand on a plate, it starts to create geometrical shapes. The higher the vibration, the more complex the geometrical shape that's created. And so you've got water and sand. When we vibrate water and sand, it changes shape. It creates the shapes that you only see in nature. That's inside of our bodies. And so

I always thought about this. Like when I listen to sad music, I feel sad. When I listen to exciting music I'm about to go out, I feel excited. And so how come sound or the music that I'm listening to makes me feel a certain way? I believe it's because that water and that sand is vibrating at the frequency of the sound around us and it changes structure, which changes the way that we feel. Yeah. I want to relay that back to what we said about Fasha earlier on in this conversation. this idea that when you release someone's fascia, in a variety of different ways which we're going to talk about, old memories and often painful memories can come up.

People can cry, they can shake, right? It's really quite profound. But I think most of us know that feeling when we hear a song or a sad song and we can literally, with our entire body, be back at a different part of our life. Right? You can literally be 14 years old.

again. You can feel, you know, where you were, you know, what was going on, what you were wearing, you know, it's quite incredible, isn't it? So what is going on? Do you think that's also fascia? Yeah, I think it has to do with looking at how sand and water vibrate at specific frequencies, they change shape and they create specific shapes. So if I listen to a song that I'm familiar with from 30 years ago when I had a breakup, my entire body is, is vibrate. at that frequency. All my cells are changing shape to that frequency and it creates a familiar pattern, a pattern that I felt 30 years ago when I was going through a breakup. And so that's my guess. I don't know if we'll ever really understand how the human body works. You know, I laugh about this

because, you know, kids at two years old know how to use an iPad, but they have no idea what's on the inside. And I think if we started to look at the human body in a similar way of like, I don't know if we'll really ever understand what's inside of this computer, but if I know which buttons to push to create whatever feeling I want, then I'm empowered. You know, if you hum, you feel lighter and calmer. If you sing or dance, you feel happier and lighter. And so there's certain buttons that we can push on the body that create a certain feeling.

And so my goal is not to understand what's inside the body and how it works. It's how to use it. I'm the new generation using, you know, the two-year-old using the phone. I just want to know what buttons I can push to create what response. And we've become masters of knowing which buttons to push on the body, to release emotions, to help people release tension and feel better. Yeah. That is such a great analogy.

We don't have to know how everything inside works. We just need to know what inputs to give the body to get the response that we want. Now, Jason, a few times in this conversation, you've said, I believe I think this is the explanation. And I love that. And I find that really interesting because you and your colleagues at Human Garage, you've gone through the process of getting results first, right? So you deal with humans who are struggling. People come and something's not working. There's some dysfunction. There's some movement pattern. There's some pain. Whatever it might be. And you guys have figured out in real time how to help people.

And, you know, all people have to do is go online, go on your Instagram, go on your YouTube, and just see what people are saying about how the facial maneuvers that Human Garage have created have had such a huge impact, right? But the modern belief system is that you have to get evidence first, publish it first, get it peer-reviewed, only then can you then talk about it. Which I'm like, that's not how anything has ever worked. Things have always worked by observation first, and then the scientific method is there to try and make sense

of why that thing worked. You know, think about athletic training. A lot of modern science now, whether it would be on Zone 2 training or interval training, is basically just saying what the best running coaches have known for 70, 80 years. Right? It's the same thing. Like, you go to someone like Arthur Lidiard,

and he was like one of the world's best running coaches. Everything he was doing with his athletes decades ago is now what modern science is saying, oh, yeah, yeah, you've got to do a load of low intensity, you've got to do this. And I'm like, human beings have known how to do so for a long period of time. We need to be a bit more humble and go,

you know, let's observe, what works and then let's go and study it. So what I was trying to get to, Jason, is when you say, I believe, it's fascinating to me that your results are so clear to see. I felt them myself twice in the past few weeks, right? But you don't exactly know why it's working. There's a lot to say on this topic. Today's episode is sponsored by Peloton. Now, we all know that moving our bodies more is good for us. But despite that knowledge, many of us find it hard to actually implement. And that's where the new Peloton cross-training bike plus, powered by Peloton IQ, can really help. It's built for fitness

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so that you can move freely and let Peloton handle the rest. Let yourself ride, lift, stretch, move and go. Explore the new Peloton cross-training bite plus at one-peloton.co.uk. That's on-e-pe-el-o-t-t-on-com. and please note, Peloton all access membership is required to access all Peloton content and applicable features on your Peloton hardware. In 2020, after a decade of helping people, you know, we had a clinic in Los Angeles

with 52 practitioners from chiropractors to naturopaths to dieticians to integrative medicine, you name it, we had it. and we were testing the body to find out, you know, if I can put 52 people in the same room from different specialties and look at the same body, I'm going to see something that others don't. And for 10 years, we had this clinic. And when we closed in 2019,

when we hit 2020 and we were sitting there and we were during the pandemic, we had all this time, we thought, what if we just forget everything that we know? and we just play, like kids would. Like, what happens if I try this? So try it, you know, either he would be on the one end

or I would be on the other, and we would do these crazy movements on each other, and we started to feel better. So we committed ourselves to doing this practice every single day, and we started to change. That's n-equals one of science. I'm testing something for myself, and I felt a difference.

Okay, so that was step one. Step two was to go out and start sharing with other, to see if they also got the same result. So we were results-based. We just did it ourselves. We were curious. We forgot everything that we knew, and we tried to come in with a completely fresh lens.

And if we look at three different examples, Bruce Lipton, epigenetics. He was talking about epigenetics for like 20 years. He was scrutinized by the scientific community, and he ended up leaving the universities. We have Wim Hof, who had done all this breathwork and ice therapies, and he was pushing the narrative of where scientists finally came in and said,

okay, this guy's onto something. Let's study this guy. And then you have Joe Dispenza who conducted his own research because he was seeing such amazing results from people doing the meditations and all that. And so epigenetics to cold therapy, breathwork, and meditation, these were all practices that people really pushed back in the scientific community

until enough people were talking about it. And so when we started sharing this with people, we had people who had reversed Parkinson's and dementia and scoliosis and autoimmune and all these complex health issues. That to me is science. We just don't have a lab where we're measuring at the scientific level, at the cellular level, exactly what's changing. My goal was to just get this out to people, create results, and hopefully one day a scientist comes in and says, I'm really interested in what you're doing and I want to learn more about this. and we're starting to get the interest of the scientists.

We have a gentleman who created robotic surgery, who's now really looking into what we're doing. It's changed his life. He had kidney disease and he was going to die and he's reversed a lot of that through our practice. He says, I'm super interested in this. I want to start to study it. So my goal is to get this out to people.

I am not a scientist. I'm not going to sit in a lab and study at the molecular level the changes that people are experiencing. But I have enough people coming up to me saying that this has changed their lives and that's all that I need. Yeah, it's really powerful.

I mean, meditation falls into the same category, right? Something that was poo-poohed by Western science for years. You know, you go to traditional practitioners in India for hundreds of years, they'll tell you the benefits of meditation. They'll tell you what they've seen, right? And, you know, there's many scientists I've had on this show who admitted, you know, all credits them

that they were very skeptical 20 years ago. I thought, what stress, meditation? What the hell is that going to do? And they're like, actually, you know what? I was wrong. There's so much science now on what meditation does, lowering your stress levels, which parts of the brain get affected,

all kinds of things. And again, it goes back to this idea that I feel I'm talking a lot about these days. We just need a bit more humility to go, there are lots of things out there that work. Sometimes we've got an explanation for them. Sometimes we don't. But that's okay.

you said something really big there, belief. I learned something very interesting about belief because we did an event in Austin. We had 800 people in a line and I worked on every single one of them over eight hours. And each person that I worked on, I had to rebuild belief. I had to have the conversation,

understand what was going on. We did the maneuvers with them. They had a release. Boom, next person. Next person, next person. And then the next event, I was like, it's kind of unsustainable if we do it that way. So what I did is I had everybody in the event do a Q&A.

And we were answering the questions and somebody needed help, and we would go and help them. And when I helped that person, everybody witnessed it. They all had a kind of a connection or a release or it built belief for them because they saw it help someone else. The next person that I helped almost instantly when I touched them, they had a release. the next person even faster. And so what I realized was when there was a collective conscious belief that this could really help them,

it was faster and more effective than when I had to build belief with people each time. And so I have run into situations where I'm working with somebody who doesn't believe that emotions are in the body or doesn't believe that there's sometimes something more than just this physical suit that we live in. And when I'm working with them,

if they're skeptical, their brain is looking for why it's not working. And it's very, it uses a lot of my energy to help that person. And what I learned is I'm not here to change the way people believe. I'm here to help people who are ready to transform. And this was a big, big shift because I was using a lot of energy trying to push this movement into people who didn't believe. And when people are ready to release and they come to you, it's almost instant.

Yeah. So belief systems, you know, placebo effect, nocebo effect. You know, if I believe there's a positive outcome for doing this or if I believe there's a negative outcome for doing this, they have proven that in the scientific community that nocebo and placebo are sometimes more effective than the drug itself. Yeah.

And it's a lot of the time that they're proving that. And so belief systems is so important. So the more people that share their stories and testimonials with us online about how this has changed their life, the stronger this movement practice becomes. Yeah. So it's important to hit people at the belief level. And if they don't believe that emotions are in the body, it's kind of a hard conversation.

It's harder to work with. Yeah. I mean, I love that you bringing this up. I used to play that game as well, like try and convince people, talk to the naysayers and talk them around. And I'm like, I'm over that. It's like, I just do my thing. I just try and put out positive, helpful information. If you like it, if it helps you, great.

If you don't like it and you don't like me, that's also great. I'm probably not the right person for you. If you don't believe, you don't believe, that's fine. Let's get into what fashion manoeuvres is, right? Because there's quite a few interesting things so far that I want to make sure we cover. I guess the first thing is when you said that a lot of people, let's say they're in pain, they will go to a practitioner, whether it be a physio or a chiropat, whoever it might be. and you use the example of a chiropractor, I think,

where you might get a manipulation, and then it feels good, and sometimes that feeling good is temporary. And a couple of weeks later, it reverts back, so you need to go back, okay? I'm not saying this to be anti-any-physio or anti-any chiropractor, right? Generally, I've been, you know,

I've been seeing practitioners for years, okay? But I know that feeling. When you have something released, and you're like, oh, great, my bat feels great. They feel would say, oh, damn it's come back. You know, I need to go back again. And I want to draw that. I want to bring back fascia into the conversation

because if fascia is this, as you call it, an intelligent organ, do you think that for many cases, when you've had a manipulation and it doesn't hold and it reverts back, Do you think that sometimes that's because the fascia has remodeled and is almost in a different pattern now? So you can temporarily realline the spine with a manipulation, but the fascia is always going to drive it back to its current type of positioning? Yeah. You know, it's very interesting. So I believe bones actually float inside the body. There's only the rib cage and the ears where they actually touch. But if our bones are floating inside of us, you know, I almost envision like it's in a,

a fish tank or a bowl. And we've created these restrictions. So, for example, if I tighten the front of my shirt and I pin it really tight, all of a sudden I start to feel tension on the back. Yeah. My liver starts to pull up to the center. My organs get pulled into the center. My rib cage gets pulled down.

And so whatever this restriction is, it's moved my organs. It's moved my bones. It's moved my tendons, my ligaments. It's moved everything. And so if I crack the bone, but this is still there, it's just going to go back out into place. And so what I find is if we get to the root cause, which is usually not where we think it is, right now I'm tight in the front, but my pain is being experienced in the back. So a lot of the time people have lower back pain, but it's actually coming from their bladder or the front. There's too much tension there.

So it's about addressing the body in understanding where the tension lines are, how the fasces being. held there. And there's a lot of points on the body that almost everybody has tension in. And you can map it. If they have back pain, it's usually coming from the bladder. If they have frozen shoulder, it's actually coming from underneath in the armpit. So you can map it on the opposite side of the body. That's where the restriction is. Yeah, for people listening on audio, what Jason did then was he crumpled at the middle of his t-shirt. And, you know, if you want to watch it, just jump onto YouTube to actually see the YouTube version, but we can all try it ourselves, just come pull up that middle bit. And it's amazing. So you're basically saying that if your fascia has got

tight for whatever reason in that area, you know, I can feel a pull on my shoulders, I can feel a pull on my back, just from my T-shirt. And I think that helps to explain why sometimes these manipulations don't hold. Now, of course, there's many great therapists out there. There's many great physios, great chiropractors, and sometimes they'll also try and do some facial work as well and give you some new movement patterns to try and actually change your pattern so you don't go back to the old patterns that will just reinforce the way your body currently is, which gave you pain, which is why you ended up with a practitioner. But that's a really, really beautiful analogy of just thinking if there's tightness somewhere, it's going to pull on somewhere else. And I mean,

you and Aisha worked on me this morning before we started this podcast. And, you know, I know the body's connected, right? I intuitively, I know it, I felt it. I've seen it with patience that you change one thing in one area, you automatically change something else. But you were working sometimes on my stomach or like my left hip. And then when I would get up off the couch and walk, I could feel tightness in my right foot. But you haven't touched my right foot. You've touched something much higher up, but I'm now feeling a change in my right foot. And I just love that, that these facial lines go through the entire body, make one change in one area, you can automatically influence another area.

And the way we map it is you've got your head, which is zone one, your torso, zone two, and your legs, zone three. So when you walk and when you move, these zones are constantly counterfeit. counter balancing each other. So you have cheeks on your face, you have your cheeks on your chest, your pecks, and you have your cheeks on your butt, your buttocks. And if I change pressure in your cheek on your face, it changes pressure on the cheek in your chest and the pressure on the cheek on your butt. Should we be able to feel that?

Like if we press it now. Yeah, like there's movements that you can do. You can even just on the right cheek, if you take your right hand, place it on there, and just twist the skin over the bone and hold that there. And you have to be sensitive to be able to experience this. But if you change the pressure here, it's gonna change the pressure here and here when you walk.

So this is what I just did. I just did that. I can feel that on my left pack. So I can feel something there. And I'm not even doing what, I'm just twisting here. Yeah. I can feel it right there. Yeah, so we're a pressurized system.

Like if you look at you've got outside pressure and you've got inside pressure. The outside pressure is atmospheric. When you go higher up in an airplane, what happens to your ears? They want to pop. Yeah. Why?

Because you have inside pressure. The outside pressure is decreasing the higher you go. And now that inside pressure is trying to equalize with the outside pressure. So it's like pop. Now it's balanced. And so if we're a pressurized system and we look at the body like a pressurized system, we interact with it differently. Like most people, if you want, you can look at your feet.

One foot is bigger than the other. Usually the left foot is slightly bigger. Same with your chest. You have one chest that's bigger than the other. I believe that it's bigger than the other because we have a dysregulation of pressure. There's more tension on one side. There's less tension on the other.

And they have different sizes as a result of that. And so if we're a pressurized system, and we have these zones, zone one, zone two, and zone three, these pressure systems work together. For example, when you take a step with your left foot, your right hand swings to go outwards. Your foot and your hand,

I don't know if I could do this on the podcast, but let's see. These map each other. So your foot and your hand map each other with pressure. Your forearm and your shin map each other. Your upper arm and your upper leg match each other. Your shoulder and your opposite leg match each other. So when you walk, your foot and your hand are balancing pressure.

And you see this the most easily when you're working with like elderly. because they've got tension somewhere on their left hip or their left rib cage, which pulls their entire body to the left, and then they cramp their hand on the right to stand straight. And so they're using pressure. They're creating pressure with their right hand to balance themselves. So it's a little bit... You really have to think about the body as a pressurized system

where this balloon was inside and outside pressure. And when we move, these pressure systems are trying to balance each other. So if you have a headache, you just have a dysregulatory. of pressure in your head. And there's ways that you can move this pressure around through movement. Yeah. It's kind of interesting. I'm saying to a lot of runners about how they feel when they run. And a few of them have said to me that if, let's say, they haven't managed to open their bowels before they go for a run, right? So there's, you know, there's not the lightness, let's say, in their being compared to when they have managed to. And people will probably know this. If they go for a run,

when they feel light inside and clear as opposed to bunged up inside, actually their gate is going to be different. There's going to be different pressures within them. That makes sense, doesn't it? Yeah. I mean, if you were to fill up your intestines right now with liquid or food,

think about it when you go to swing your arm, there's so much pressure inside of there. It actually creates a restriction so your arm can't swing as much. And so we've noticed a difference in, you know, getting this area open. You know, women have a lot of infertility these days, a lot of period cramps, people have digestive issues, autoimmune. It's because there's a lack of flow between the diaphragm and the pelvic floor.

And a big reason for that is we were never meant to sit in chairs. Yeah. When you sit in a chair, your upper body weight sits on top of your diaphragm and it compresses everything in here. So nothing moves. And we've got non-organic food and the chemicals in our environment. They're coming in and disrupting the flow here. And if this can't flow, we've got a lot of problems. Because if you look at even on an anatomy chart,

you'll see the brain and you see the intestines. They look the same. And so what I found is when people have a concussion, they start to get digestive issues. And when people have digestive issues, they start to have racing thoughts, foggy in their brain, harder to wake up, they start to have stuff going on in their mind. And so it's really important to get this area flowing.

And this is pretty, When this is constricted, it affects the way we move. It affects the way that we think. Yeah. You guys treat some of the world's best athletes. Okay, so you teach the public, you're teaching people around the world. You're on a mission to, you know, state your mission. One billion people to do what? It's to inspire billion people to heal themselves. Yeah. And the reason we did that was because we had a clinic with a 3,000 person wait list and we closed. Why would you do that? The reason why was because people were coming to us, we were taking away their pain, and then they were going back right to the life

that caused that pain, and they made no changes. Then they would come back to us six months later, now the problem was worse. We fixed them, they go back to that life, and they come back, and now it's a chronic health issue that's life-threatening. And so if we're not giving you the tools to actually change your life,

and we're just another pill, another drug that you take, where we take away your pain and suppress it. We're not really getting to the root of the problem. We're not making a change in the world. The only way to make a change in the world is to give people the tools to help themselves. And if people start to help themselves, their life literally changes.

Yeah. You know, we live in a world right now where, you know, you don't like somebody in your environment and you try to change them. It never works. But when I change, change the way I see them, change the way I feel about them,

change my actions, whatever it might be, I change. They start to ever, interact with me differently. 100%. And so I believe life is a mirror and I believe that the only way to really make an impact in the world is to change myself,

is to focus on myself. Yeah, I love that. I just want to finish off that thought about elite athletes. And it fascinates me. So you and your colleagues have worked with tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people now, right?

So you've laid your hands onto many different people. You just mentioned the elderly and what you notice when you actually lay your hands on some elderly people and how easy it is to see the compensations. Are there any patterns that you see when you're putting your hands on some of the world's best athletes? We won't mention names, okay? But when you put your hands on an elite athlete who is the best in their chosen sports, does their body feel different? It's a great question. Yes, because they have

optimize their body for a specific pattern. So if I'm a baseball player and I'm swinging, I've created tension in certain areas of my body, created pressure and others, so that I can optimally swing. So you have to be very mindful because if they've created this pattern over time and I go and reprogram their computer, their swing is going to be slightly off for the next couple of days until they integrate that pattern. And so you have to be mindful. We are a computer and we are computer programmers. So we understand if I twist here and pull here, it's going to create this effect. So a lot of time, you know, you got one-sided sports where they're playing on one side, well, they're creating tension lines. So what we do is we work on the opposite side of the body

to balance the pressure because they've created this long-term pattern. You don't really want to mess with the patterns too much. Yeah. Yeah. The goal, to be honest, the goal with a professional athlete is how can you get them to get into the zone faster? How can you help them manage their emotions better? And how can you help them change their perceptions so they can see things differently? Those are the three things that you can really fine tune. But their bodies are like well-trained machines. And either you're working with somebody because they have an injury or you're working with someone for performance. Specifically, I'm talking about performance. You know, how do you, if I'm out of stress, I see situations differently.

The peak of stress is I do this or I die. That's suicide. I only see one option. So if we take the body out of stress, you start to see options. So if I'm playing a team sport and I'm out of stress, I'll see that there's a player to my right, there's a player to my left,

and there's a player behind me that I can pass to. But if I'm in stress, that fight or flight reaction mode, I might make silly decisions because I only see that one option to the left, but there was a better one to the right. And so our goal is to bring the body out of stress so that people can see options again.

And this happens in life too. Yeah, it's so interesting. And without going into the whole history, I mean, I think, you know, I had an emergency appendixemy when I was about seven or eight years old. And long story as to how and why that happened, but it was an emergency.

So, you know, I would have just literally had a knife ripping it open to take it out, right? And ever since I started working with it, it's very clear that my whole right side around my groin area, and you probably notice this in me as well, all my movement patterns in life are all about not closing down

my right groin area. I will do anything to avoid doing that. And then if you see the way I play table tennis or snooker or the way I hold my guitar, it's flipping everywhere. I'm like, oh my God, that's my pattern. So it's amazing how many of us probably choose sports based upon our compensations.

You know, the patterns we've got, we're naturally drawn to sports which actually suit our compensations, right? And it works until we get injured. And then you have to find a new program. You have to find a new way to kick the ball to hit the tennis ball. And even for you, when we were working with you,

if you noticed your right glute was tighter than your left. Yeah. massively today. And that's when we crumpled up our shirts, what is a scar? A scar is we're crumpling up our shirt. We're tying the fascia right into that spot. So the opposite side of the body, the glute, is going to tighten as a result of that. There's less room for it to move.

So it's very important if people have scars throughout the body to actually stretch them. And you can just put your fingers on either side of the scar and you pull it apart in every single direction to give it space. You're like unwinding the fascia there. One of the things that we talk about is if you stretch your skin, you're working on your fascia. Because your fascia connects to the skin. The skin is an access point. And there's this misconception that if I stretch my skin, I'm going to get wrinkles. But it's actually the opposite. You get wrinkles because you're dehydrated, because everything's pulled into that area and it's constricted. But if you pull the skin over your scar or over any area of your body, you're creating space in the bag that's holding everything.

Yeah, that's really interesting. You've put some stuff up online before about how your face and skin has changed since you started doing these maneuvers, right? You look way younger and all kinds of things. And you would say that's because you've been doing these maneuvers, right? I would say it's a combination of lifestyle and maneuvers. So I do maneuvers every single day, 15 minutes, in the morning when I wake up. Sometimes I do it before I go to bed because I help me sleep faster and deeper. I do these movements to unwind all the tension and the stress. It helps me get into the flow state, helps me focus better, it helps me have more energy throughout the day. But then there's a lifestyle component. And just like if you look at yoga, you know,

thousands of years, there was a lifestyle and then there was the movements. What happened was it became westernized and they lost the lifestyle aspects of it. So we do teach a lot of how to build a really healthy lifestyle, and I like to do it in the most natural way possible. I'm not a big fan of, you know, having thousands of dollars of equipment. If I can get out into nature, if I can walk, if I can get out in the sun, if I can get in the ocean, touch a tree, move my body, I know that I'm giving my body the optimal conditions to feel good. Yeah. And, you know, I see the body as an electrical system. If you look at every cell in the body, it has a voltage. It literally conducts electricity. So if I rub my feet on a carpet,

we've all done this as kids, and you could zap somebody. So my question is, if I could rub my feet on a carpet and zap somebody, I conduct electricity. Well, that's interesting. So when I dove deeper into this, there's a Dr. Jerry Tenant,

he really breaks down the cellular voltage. And what he was able to do was map pH to a voltage. And based on the voltage, he could map disease processes. So a healthy cell is at around minus, 20 to minus 25 milovolts. A regenerating new cell is at minus 50 milovolts.

Cancer was around plus 30 milovolts. And if we were able to take the cellular voltage of each cell, he was able to map behaviors that changed the voltage. So you're an electrical system, and if you put your bare feet on the ground, you actually change your voltage. He noticed that it put it back to the natural state. But if you're in wind, if you're in still water, like a bath, that's why you get really tired,

it takes electricity from your body. A bath makes you tired. A bath makes you calm and tired because it's still water steals electrons. It's an electron stealer. Moving water gives electrons. So a bath before bed can be useful. 100%. Yes.

But if you stand in the wind, I don't know if you've ever done this, you're in the wind at a beach for like an hour and you feel tired. because the wind is stealing your electrons. When you touch a tree, when you walk barefoot on the ground, you're actually getting electrons from the earth. And so, I mean, I've experimented with this. I walk barefoot everywhere now, and I've noticed more energy throughout the day because I believe the earth is giving us the energy that we need.

And this has been measured at the cellular level. Yeah. These facial maneuvers, you guys give out all your content for free. So it's all out there. It's on YouTube, it's on social media platforms. The manoeuvres themselves, and you just took me and my wife through a sequence, which was lovely, you feel different very quickly.

I think we only did three of those maneuvers and felt really calm and light after doing them. And I can see why it's such a powerful practice to do every morning when you wake up. One of the things I was thinking about as I was doing them, and even over the past, weeks of observing them is, I guess, one of your classic ones is when, you know, you put, let's say, your right leg over your left foot, your right hand goes to your left armpits, and then the left one, the left arm goes onto the right armpit or the right back like that, okay? Yeah. And then you start doing things where your torso goes one way and your head goes another way whilst doing certain breathing patterns. Well,

I'm into why you do it that way in just a moment, but I was thinking, as you're doing it, you're sort of giving yourself a hug, right? So yes, there's what's happening to the fascia, there's what the breath is doing to the sympathetic nervous system and how it's releasing things. Great. But there's also just something really deeply primal about you're getting in touch with yourself. It's like a practice of self-care, dare I say it, self-love where you're hugging yourself as you doing these things. And I really feel these days, Jason, that so many people are so disconnected from their bodies. Like, yes, they live in their heads, and I've certainly been guilty of this in the past, right? But they don't know what their bodies are doing, like what their hips are doing,

what their breath is doing, if their diaphragm's tight, you know. And what I love about these fashion maneuvers that you guys have created. It's that it's helping people get back in touch with their bodies. You're holding yourself, you're touching yourself, your skin. In the early days of this podcast, I'm going to get him back on soon, actually, hopefully. I spoke to a guy called Professor Francis McGlone. He's one of the world's leading touch researchers. And he did some of the early research showing that when you stroke the skin,

I think it's at one to three centimeters per second, you activate certain nerve receptors in your body called C-tactyl aphorants, which basically go all the way to the brain and lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol. But, you know, when we spoke, we said, yeah, of course, no one is measuring the pace at which they stroke someone.

That is naturally the pace at which a mother will stroke their child at one to three centimeters per second, right? This stuff is built into us. So I just love that these maneuvers it's not just you're getting back in touch with your body by actually working on your body and moving your body, you're actually touching your body as well.

So you're really, I don't know, I think that's one of the key powerful parts of it for me is that you're actually putting your hands back on your body again. Yeah, I mean, self-awareness is a really big component of this. And I really think that there's something that happens in the brain and in the body when we cross. Yeah. Like when, why do we all, when we're sitting at a desk working, bring one, not everybody, but a lot of people, they bring one leg up and cross it over.

Yeah. There's something to what happens. There's something neurologically that's happening when we cross sides. And I think that when we're hugging ourselves, you know, when you're in an extreme pain or trauma or sad or a breakup, what do you do? You crawl into a ball in your bed and you cry or you lay there. There's something to getting into that position. and what we found is that position you just described with the right foot over, the right hand under,

and the left arm on top, and we twist, that's a fetal position. But we just do that when we're standing for the fashion maneuvers, but one of the other fashion maneuvers that we use is actually getting into a fetal position. You lie on your side, you crawl into a ball, you cross your arms, you hug yourself, and when you do that, you just feel different.

Yeah. How do fashion maneuvers help us with stress? stress. Today's episode is sponsored by Thrive. Now, as I get older, I realize that staying healthy isn't just about living longer, it's about having the energy to really live those years as myself, to be present for my kids, my work, and for the people who matter most. Recently, I started taking Thrive, a new daily longevity supplement from Heights,

a British company that I really trust who focus on using science to make products that work. Thrive is designed to support healthy aging at a cellular level, helping you feel clearer, more energized and more resilient as the years go by. It contains four clinically studied ingredients for the first time in the UK at research-backed doses, including niogen, a NAD prekust, CO-Q-10, trans-respiratrol and copper, which together help support energy production, cellular defence and long-term resilience, all in one simple daily capsule. It's one of the best products that I've come across in this space,

and not only am I taking it each day, I also have my mother and my brother taking it as well. So if you want to start supporting your future self, Hight is giving my listeners an exclusive 20% off your first order of Thrive. All you have to do is go to Hite.com forward slash live more and use the code live more. That's H-E-I-G-H-T-S dot com forward slash live more and use the codes live more. I believe stress takes a lot of energy from us. And as people age, you know, they get, decreased sight, decreased hearing, decreased taste, smell, all their senses start to diminish.

When people do about 15 minutes of fascial maneuvers, all of a sudden the room looks different. They hear differently, the food that they're eating tastes different. And so I believe it's bringing the body out of stress in just 15 minutes. And why it works, I don't fully know yet. But when we put the body in these rotated positions and we breathe, we're unwinding tension in the entire body. and the body just starts to relax. Yeah. I heard your partner, Gary, say in a podcast recently,

he said, look, we're not saying this is the only thing that works, right? There's probably other things out of that that work as well, but we know that this works or something to that effect, which I also love it. It's like, because there are all kinds of practitioners of doing all kinds of amazing things, you guys have just found a method that is very scalable and very teachable that also works and happens to be very very,

very powerful. Yeah, I think whatever you believe in and whatever you commit to over time has the ability to really help you. Yeah. And from going to a chiropractor to a physio to doing breath work, to doing meditation, if you commit to it and you're really serious about it and you do it right, over time, you're going to see a result. This is just one way. There's tons of ways that people can do it. And if you like moving your body in this way, like what I like about this practice is I don't need a mat, I don't need equipment, I can do it while I'm standing in line at a grocery store. I can do it anywhere. I can do it on a plane to avoid jet leg. It's so simple that anyone can do it. Even kids are doing it. You know, you've got elderly doing it. And so we're just out here to

teach people how to heal themselves and there's so many ways to do it. Yeah. This morning after you took Ved and I through these sequences, maybe three of the maneuvers. So I don't know if you have names for them or not, but what was that first one that we did? What's that called? Totally twisted. Totally twisted. Antigravity. Which was anti-gravity. Oh, I love that one. That was amazing. Yeah. With the neck. Anti-gravity. And then Swinger. And they're all on your YouTube channel. If you want to watch that with you and your colleagues teaching people. But I would totally agree, these are free. You don't need any equipment. You could do it anywhere. You don't need a mats. It's very, very accessible. And you and I,

Asia asked us both at the end, you know, how do we feel? And we both said some version of we feel lighter. I also said that I think I felt way more grounded. I could just feel pressure in my feet against the carpet. You said something really, which really caught my ear. You said, yeah, you said something about people generally feel lighter, even though you haven't lost any weights, right? So why is it, do you think, that people feel lighter after doing these maneuvers?

I believe it's because we're releasing emotions. And emotions are heavy. Yeah, emotions are heavy. Like sadness, you know, if you're holding onto sadness, sometimes you feel like the weight is on your shoulders. You feel like 100 pounds extra. And then all of a sudden people do these movements and they feel super light and flexible and they can move.

And the only thing that I could explain is that I believe that we're moving their emotions. And sometimes people feel it. Like, I'll be teaching a class to 100 people and five people start crying after the fourth movement. Other people like me, I have no idea. I don't even notice the emotion, but I feel lighter. My theory is that emotions are heavy,

and when we do these movements, we're moving the emotions, even if we're not aware of it, and as a result, we feel lighter. Yeah. It's interesting. I really like the spiritual teacher Michael Singer. And he'll talk about,

you know, experiences that we have in life. you have an experience. And if you allow that experience to go through you, there's no problem. And it really makes it think of what you're talking about here with these maneuvers that anyone can do. Why did some people start crying? It's probably because at some point in your life, something got stuck. It didn't go through you. Right? Because ultimately, that's what trauma is, right? Isn't it? A traumatic experience happened in the past. It's not happening in the process. It's not happening in the presence, right? The only reason it's causing you problems in the present is because your sort of, that past experience has been relived in the present moment. That's not to deny the impact

to trauma, right? Just to be really clear. But if you just look at it factually, that experience is no longer happening. So why is it still affecting you? It can only be affecting you because somehow it's still stuck. If it just passed through you, it wouldn't. So maybe, these manoeuvres, maybe one of the deep, powerful components of them is that by moving your body into all these different positions that we don't tend to get into in the modern world, in the state of our natural two-dimensional lives, we sit, we drive, we walk, but we're not walking even with rotation. I wonder if these emotions then get stuck, and actually for many people, these maneuvers are just helping them move through them.

Yes, it's exactly what I feel. I've seen people release extreme trauma, you know, from screaming to people passing out, to shaking, to just crying or just sitting in silence. And there's something that we're doing here. I don't fully understand it yet. And I hope one day a scientist comes in and starts to really research what's changing in people. But when people do this, they start to balance their emotions. They start to feel more grounded and more centered in themselves. Yeah.

I mean, we started this conversation talking about fascia, right? And I spent yesterday looking up a lot of the scientific research on fascia, I thought, okay, let me see what else is out there. There's a lady called Dr. Helene Langavin from Harvard, who's been studying fascia, who a few years ago said, we are still at the very beginning of understanding fascia. In another interview, she called fascia the meta system of the entire body, which is pretty profound. In 2007, there was someone called Carla Stecco, an anatomy professor who found that fascia is alive with nerve endings.

A lady called Jill Miller, who's written this brilliant book called Body By Breath, has written about the 250 million sensory neurons that live in your fascia. And she writes in that book that 40% of your facial sensory endings are sympathetic fibers. So that's part of your stress system under autonomic control. I mean, there's a ton of research out there. Scientists are studying fashion. And what's really fascinating for me is this idea that fascia is not just physical. It's not just holding our entire structure together. A lot of people now are talking about, as you are, about these,

about fascia being a way that we communicate. You know, maybe all kinds of things get communicated throughout our body through fascia. And I'm sort of, you know, a lot of the way you talk, it reminds me a lot of traditional modalities like are you eating medicine or traditional Chinese medicine about flow in the body, about, you know, if there's a blockage somewhere and things can't flow, if the chi can't flow, if the energy can't flow,

that is the precipitating event that can, and some people lead to problems and potentially disease, right? Do you think that the facial lines that you work on are the acupuncture lines or the meridian lines that Chinese practitioners have been working on for years? Very similar.

Yeah, we have mapped the body where we believe certain organs, pathways, and emotions go. And there's actually a sequence called the fascial coffee. If you rub your body with friction in the direction that we've mapped,

what it does is it starts to activate it. So it's a two-meatial. minute routine. It has to be in one. So I'll, if you want to do this with me, so stick your left hand out and rub it down towards your fingers with your right hand. And feel that. Okay, now go the other way. What do you notice, which side, what do you notice for each direction? So when you go down towards your fingers. I think that's smoother. Okay, now go up towards your shoulder. And that feels tighter to do it that way. You got it.

So there's actually a direction that if you swipe your entire body, it feels lighter, tingly, looser, and you walk faster. It's called the fascial coffee. So what I like to do is I'll put a little bit of peppermint on my hands when I wake up. I'll rub it on my hands and I go through this two-minute sequence, rubbing the body in a certain direction. The body has a certain flow and there's certain emotions in different areas. So we have a lot of overlap with the acupuncture systems,

the meridian lines, the Chinese medicine, all that. We have a similar belief system, but we've also found a little bit of differences. Does it invalidate what they've done? Does it validate what we've done? No, not necessarily. We just have a different way of looking at it. Yeah. It's called the faschial coffee. It's on our YouTube. Yeah. I can't get out of my head, whether it be facial maneuvers or something else. this idea that we need to spend more time in our bodies and with our bodies, I think it's really important for people. You know, if you just get up, you're looking at your phone, and you slam down your coffee, and you're on your emails,

you get the kids off to school, and you drive to work, and, you know, arguably, you know, your coating, your skin, your body, in which you're living in this life, you're so out of touch with that body. Yeah, you might go and do yoga at the weekend. Great, that's brilliant. But I really do think there's something about spending a bit of time each day with your body, feeling your body, moving your body. You know, as part of my morning we're seeing, and I have started to bring some of your maneuvers in. And I think I'm probably, you know, it was quite powerful today. I'm pretty sure from tomorrow I'm going to maybe start off with 10 minutes

each day and see how that goes for the next few weeks. But I tend to get up and meditate. And then when I finish meditation before I do anything else, I will do, you saw my living room, I will roll around on the floor, I'll do some breathing, I'll do some hip twist. I'll, I'll just feel my body and loosen things up. And I think it's a beautiful way to start each day. And I think your manoeuvres, and there's all kinds of, there's five in it, there's 10 minute, there's 15-minute sequences on your YouTube channel. I just think for people who do feel disconnected from the cells, I would just say, just give it a go and just see how you feel.

Because that's ultimately the real test, isn't it? You know, we can talk about getting scientists to study it, which I think would be amazing. And you can also go, well, why don't I just ask myself, how do I feel when I do this, compared to how do I feel when I don't do this? And if you feel calmer, less anxious, lighter, more relaxed, you know, that's a pretty powerful motivating factor to keep doing it, isn't it?

Well, you know, when I started doing them, I was a professional soccer player. I had a lot of injuries. I was a guy growing up in a world where you're told to suppress your emotions. So I was very disconnected from my body because as an athlete, you know pain and how to push through it. So that means I ignore every other sensation that my body's sending me. And so when I started doing this practice, I thought, what if I start to build a new relationship with my body. And I would close my eyes.

I would hold my breath. And I would eliminate all the noise and I would try to feel at a very deep level the sensations that I was feeling. And it took me a very long time. Like if you did something on me, I was like, eh,

I kind of noticed that, but I didn't really. But everybody else could notice it. They could see me walking differently, but I couldn't even see it myself because I had built that relationship with myself. I disconnected so far from my body. And so over the last six years,

I have made it my mission to my personal mission to really understand this computer. Because I always wondered, how come my friend over there could feel that that person was angry? How come I couldn't feel that? How come we're sitting here?

That person's angry. I had no idea. I couldn't feel it. But there's somebody here that could feel that. There's a phenomena that was happening. They were feeling it in their body. Just like a tuning fork. If you hit a tuning fork in one room,

it will sink to another one. and we talked about frequency and vibration and how sound waves affect the fascia, the body's a tuning fork. So if somebody walks into the room and they're angry, I feel that, even without even seeing it, there's some sort of physiological shift that happens. And they've measured this.

If someone's stressed around you, they actually measure that your stress levels change. So what I've learned over the last six years is my body has become the most intelligent system that I use to navigate my day-to-day. I no longer use my brain, even when I'm working with you or somebody, You always ask me, what do you see?

What do you notice? No, it's what I feel. When you walk into a room, I can feel my body shift. I have tension in areas that I don't ever have tension. That's interesting. And then I talked to you and it's like, yeah, I had an injury over there and there's tension here. So over time, the people I was working with

were validating what my body was telling me. Yeah. So being self-aware is one of the most empowering tools that we can have. No, I love that. And I've only met you twice. A few weeks ago in London and today. And you have come across to me as someone who is so in touch of themselves,

so in touch with the energies around you, with what's going on with the people around you, that I find it baffling that you at one point was so disconnected. But also inspiring, because if you were that disconnected and now you can feel the stuff, I think that gives a lot of people a lot of hope. Yeah, I mean, look at kids. Kids are so in tune.

And up until seven years old, they're just downloading information about how the world works. And I feel like we don't ask kids, how do you feel? We tell them based on an education that we had from the past. And so I believe we are unlearning as we age with the programming in society today. And that it's important for us to go back to what it was like to be a kid again. back in tune with ourselves. And it took me a long time to get there and I know everybody can.

When we're in stress, there is so much internal noise that we're not able to perceive the difference of the things around us. We're not able to perceive the environment. But if we calm down and everything is really slow and peaceful, the moment there's a slight shift

in the environment, you can feel it. And what I did in order to learn this was when I would work on somebody, I'd work on their ankle, and I would feel my body for the changes that they were experiencing. And all of a sudden, my ankle would get kind of cold or tingly or warm or looser, and I would ask them,

is your ankle tingling right now? And they would say to me, yes. But I was working on them, and this really blew my mind. So here I am working on somebody, and I'm feeling what they were feeling. And I just did this over and over and over again, and everybody that I worked with, I would ask, are you feeling this?

Do you feel this emotion? Do you feel this tension here? Do you feel that? And I was training myself to be in tune, with my body. So it's important to have people around you that you trust, that you can ask, are you feeling frustrated right now? Just so you can learn what these signals are again, we have to retrain our, it's a body language, we have to learn what it is. It takes time and takes practice. Even these facial maneuvers, you know, because most of them that I've seen at least

are, you know, you do one side and then you do the other side, even that awareness that, oh, on my left side, my neck turns freely, but on my right side it doesn't. That's the kind of self-awareness that so many people just don't have. They don't know that their left wrist is tighter than they're right or whatever it might be. And there's such possibility available to people if they can just start to tune into that. Jason, you had quite a stressful upbringing, didn't you? Can you tell us a little bit about that? because it's fascinating to know.

It's fascinating to hear how much fear played a role when you were a child, especially in the context of what you do today. Yeah, I mean, I grew up in South Africa, and it was a very dangerous place where we lived. So we would have, you know, guys jump out of a bush when you stop at a red light with guns to steal your car. Or they would try and break into your house.

And when they break into your house, it's not pretty. You know, they tie you up. Sometimes they do other things. They steal everything inside. And sometimes they kill you. And so my parents, when I was three years old, taught me how to climb into the wine cellar,

how to jump out of a car if somebody came to hijack it. And we actually had a situation where eight guys tried to break into our house. I remember we, well, I don't even remember. My mom was telling me that we were in the car in the garage with one of our other, with one of our small dogs, me and my brother and my mom, and there were eight guys trying to break in,

and my dad and our security guards were going to handle whatever was going on. And so growing up in a world where, you know, you're sleeping and there's gunshots and people are breaking in, and it was hyper stressful for me. And so I grew up in a lot of fear. I grew up, I grew up in that environment, and when I was six years old, my parents said, enough is enough. We need to move, and I moved to Canada. And in Canada, you pursued sport, you pursued what we would call football, what you guys would call soccer,

and my understanding is that you got a lot of injuries. Do you think, now looking back, that the fear state in which you grew up in, so that tightness, that tension within your body, that sort of hypervigilance, because at any point you know there could be a threat, do you think that was a big contributor to how many injuries you got? 100%. My inability to manage my emotions at that age had a massive impact on the way that I felt and the way that I played.

Like if you have fear when you're playing a sport, you know, if your focus is on not making a mistake, you make a mistake. It's so funny. And so, you know, when you get injured, usually I've, now knowing what I know, looking back at it, I was holding a lot. a lot of anger and a lot of fear. And the injuries that I got were exactly in those areas of the body from what I know now today.

If I had the tools to manage my emotions at a younger age, I don't feel like I would have been in this position. I don't feel like I would have gotten injured. And a big reason why I wanted to study the human body, like I became a biomedical physiologist and kinesiologist. I was gonna go down the medicine route. And I realized that there was more than just the physical body. There was more than just chemical reactions.

There was something else that was influencing the way that I felt. And that's why I started to pursue something that I couldn't see with my eyes. I had to start asking questions and explore new ways of working with the body. It's interesting that I know you were saving up to do a physiotherapy course in the UK in 20203.

You know, that was your plan. And I think it was in 2019 or 2020, you thought, you know, actually, you know what, this is not for me, I need to change path. Can you talk to me a little bit about what it means to follow your passion? In my teens, I had a deep inner knowing. And it was an inner knowing that I was going to do something. And I kind of had a vision of what it was.

But at the time, it made no sense to me. And I just followed what the path that was built for me by society. You go to school, get a good education. You know, if you want, you can become an athlete and go to college and pay. for your education and do all that kind of stuff. Study medicine. And I did this path. And when I turned 26 years old,

I had graduated in 2019, were four months after graduation. I was saving up money and I was working every single day. You know, I was making good money. I had a girlfriend. I lived in a nice place. I did everything that society had told me

was right in order to be happy and wealthy and successful and all that kind of stuff. And I just had a moment in December of 2019 where I just realized how miserable and sad and in pain I really wasn't.

And I was just so busy up into that point I never really realized it. And when I realized what was really going on, I just said enough is enough. I'm just going to listen to this inner voice that knows that there's something else out there and I have no idea what it is. At that time,

I ended everything. I quit my job. I broke up with my girlfriend. I said, I'm not gonna go to physio. I have no idea what I'm gonna do next. And I just had a lot of faith in that moment that whatever was meant for me to happen,

whatever path I was meant to take will show itself. And about a month and a half later, boom. I had a friend that introduced me to Gary and he was just closing a chapter of his life. I was closing a chapter of my life. And that's when this movement started. And so when it comes to finding your passion, I really feel like,

We're forcing children at, or teens, you know, to make decisions that are lifelong. And I don't agree with that. I think we need to go and try 10 different things. Go try and go, be with a doctor for a week. Go and work in a law office for a week. Go be a tech engineer for, you know, do it. And when you do it, the things that really light you up that don't actually feel like work, those are the things that you should put more time into.

We're making one decision. I'm going to become a doctor. I'm 18 years old. I have no idea about any other discipline in the world, and I'm going to pursue that for the next 40 years. And when I'm 10 years in, I feel so guilty if I want to change past because I put in so much money and so much time

and so many people are relying on me to do it that it's so hard to change directions. And so for me, I believe at a younger age, we need to try more things. And the things that we like do more of it. and eventually if you can monetize it even better. For me, I don't feel like I work a day in my life. And that is how I feel like we're supposed to live.

Yeah. It doesn't feel like work. I literally work almost 24 hours a day, but I never feel like I'm working. Yeah. And it's sometimes scary. You know, sometimes you go against what everybody else around you believes, and sometimes you have to do that.

If you know deep inside of yourself that this is the path for you, do it. Wow, very powerful. You met Gary and I don't know the technically correct way of describing your relationship, but is it you and him who co-founded Human Garage together? Yeah, so at the time when we got introduced by my friend, it was January 27th, 2020, there was another person, Cynthia and Gary that were there. So I would go to his house every single day, Cynthia would be there, and we would just play with the human body.

We would just try and find ways like, what if you try this and what if you try that? And we would do it on each other. At the time, it was still a therapy that we would do on someone else. And we sat with it and we said, well, is there a way that I could do this myself? And we would say, okay, let's try this. And we would try and do the same things that we were doing on the table to ourselves. Like, for example, remember the day I bent your hands?

I do, yeah. Yeah, because it hurts. So I can do that myself. I can bend my own hand. This is called twisty-risty. You can find it on our YouTube. But doing this movement, I can do it myself. But this used to be a movement that a practitioner would do on me.

And so we just set the intention that can we find a way to do every single one of these things that we do on someone else and do it on ourselves so that we no longer rely on other people to take care of our bodies. And that's what we did for six months. And by August of 2020, we were doing this practice at the beach every single day. day, funny enough, outside of Chip Wilson's house, he's the yoga, you know, big in the yoga movement. And we were doing this practice every single day and we started to feel better. And that's when we knew that we were onto something. And at the time, we saw women's health, the issues in women's health were skyrocketing. We had people who were coming to us in their 20s with the same issues that we used to see in 50 and 60 year olds. And we knew that there was a problem. So we took all of our

savings and we said for the next year we're just going to share this with as many people that we possibly can and whoever we help however many people we help we will just help them and we didn't charge anything for it we used all of our own savings to fund literally the first two years of this mission and it was just to help people because we saw that mental health and suicide and disease and all these things were starting to rise and we needed to give people a way to help themselves I mean, that's the thing I love the most about it. We use the word empowerment a lot. We hear it a lot of these days,

but what you guys are offering the world truly is empowerment. It's like you don't need us. Let us just teach you the moves, then you just play with them and do them. And as you said before, if you believe in them, if you commit to practicing them, there's a pretty good chance

that are going to start changing your life. How does it work, though? in the sense that first two years you didn't charge anything. I know you were down to not much money at all, but there was this real desire to go and help the world and give out this information. But of course, this year you guys are on a mission to spread this around the world.

You're traveling all over the world. You're doing workshops. You know, we've been at events together where you're showing how you can do this to people. Of course, that costs money. So how does it work where you're giving it out to the world and you're able to do all these things? So we started this mission as empower a billion people to heal themselves.

And then I realized that if I'm empowering someone, I'm giving them the authority to help themselves. And it just didn't really sit with me. And I realized that inspire was a much better word because it meant that I had to do it. You know, we live in a world of medicine today where a lot of the doctors, not all, but a lot, are not doing what they're telling their patients to do. This happens in all disciplines. And so we realized that if I inspire people to heal themselves, it means I need to do it and be a role model in that space. I need to live what I'm teaching. And so we change the word to inspire.

And I just wanted to share that because it is a big difference between giving authority to people to heal themselves versus inspiring them to heal themselves. So our mission is now to inspire, which means we have to live and breathe what we preach. Yeah. I love that. And in terms of funding this mission, you know, We had a lot of people help us along the way. We went down to the food in our cupboards, and we had no business model. We had no plan.

We were like, hey, if all else fails, we'll go back to treating people. Like, we had a plan B, but we believed so much in what we were doing. And when we went down to the food in our cupboards, we had a lady actually donate $50,000 to us. And at that time, she just had believed so much in our mission. She had no idea of where we were financially or what our business model was. She just believed in us. And that got us just over the hump.

It gave us a little bit more time to figure out how can we get this to a billion people. And doing it free, the reason why we did it free was because we wanted to be accessible. There's a lot of people in like Africa and certain countries. They just don't have health care and they can't afford it. So free was never really the goal. The goal was accessibility. If you really want to help a billion people, you have to find a way to make it accessible. So what we did in order to scale this to more people, because we do have a big team,

we do have to hire people, we do have to travel and teach, is we made it to pay what feels right. So when people go into our self-care programs, they can contribute whatever amount they want. If it's a dollar because they have nothing or $1,000 because they want to give more, we've given people an opportunity to contribute to this mission so we can continue sharing it with people. I don't take a salary. I haven't taken a salary since we started this. None of the founders do. I mean, we have people on our team who do,

but the founders, at the core of it, we have just said, if we just go out there and we do this, and this mission can fund us going out there and helping more people, then that is enough for us. And so for the last six years, that's what we've been doing.

We've converted our self-care programs into pay what feels right so that people can contribute to the mission if they want to. It's beautiful to hear. I guess living from the heart and just trying to give and share and not trying to say this is the only way. It's like this is our way that you're hoping a billion people are going to get on board with and improve their lives and the lives of the people around them, right?

I mean, we had just set a goal at the time. I'm sure it'll increase. But once you get a billion people doing something to take care of themselves, the world changes. Yeah. Like they've done this with meditation. They have 100,000 people meditate at the same time and it literally creates. a wave. Yeah.

It's, I know if we get a billion people, it's going to impact the world. Because to be honest with you, everything in my world has always mirrored me. Like when we would hire somebody on our team and they were doing something that was out of alignment and we fired them, you bring another person and they do it again. You bring in another person, they do it again. And then I realized that every time I hired somebody, they were bringing the same lesson to me. And when I changed, because I realized I was the problem, I changed, all of a sudden, the next person that I brought on to the team was different. And we live in a world where everybody's pointing fingers and blaming others.

But that doesn't help anybody. Nobody's going to change if we do that. But if I change, then the world around me starts to change. And this has been my experience. I've done this for six years. Every single day I look at myself and I say, what can I do to improve? why is this situation in my life? Why did this person cut me off in traffic and yell at me?

Yeah, exactly. There's something inside of me that created this experience. I don't know what it is, but I need to look inside of myself and ask the question, is there something that I did to bring this situation to me? And if we all did that, even if you don't believe in it. If we all did that, we would live in a better world. Yeah, that's the key.

Whether you believe in it or not, it doesn't matter. If you look at life that way, it's a more free and empowering way to live, actually, you know, when you can't change the situation, you're forced to change yourself, right? And again, I feel I have to say it just so that doesn't get misinterpreted. But of course, there are horrible things going on in the world and there are really traumatic experiences that people are living through, right? So we acknowledge that. But these kind of things that were talked about, they're being cut up on the boat away or, you know, something happening at work. guess those things you really can look at them as learning opportunities. And just to tie it all

together, it's very much this whole idea that if we're stressed and we haven't processed trauma and emotions from the past, we're going to bring that stress into our present day life. It's going affect how we feel about ourselves. It's going to affect our body. And it's going to affect the people around us, our partner, our children, our colleagues, right? The people we interact with on the road, whatever they do, whether they cut us up or not, that stress is going to permeate around us. So if, by spending 10 to 15 minutes a day, maybe five minutes a day, that's all you've got, and you do these beautiful facial maneuvers, these gentle rotational movements where you breathe intentionally and you put your body in different positions,

if that helps you start your day in a better way, dramatically lower your stress, help you process your past and help you feel calmer, it is inconceivable that that is not only going to change your life, it's going to change the lives of every single person around you that you interact with. I don't think that's far-fetched. I love it.

I think that's how you change the world by changing yourself. 100%. Be there change your wish to see in the world. Yeah, I love it. And I felt that since I met you, Jason, a few weeks ago, that we, I felt a deep resonance with you. I thought, I really like this guy. I like the way he looks at things.

I guess my biases is that I think, yeah, quite a lot of things we seem to see the world in similar ways. And, you know, it's been a joy getting to know. It's been a joy learning these moves. I feel very lucky to have had your hands on me twice to help speed up this process for me. At the end of this conversation, Jason, for someone who's been listening.

and does currently feel really disconnected from their body and disconnected from the world, they don't know what they think. They're constantly getting confused, but they don't know where to start. What would you say to them? So a really quick exercise you can do is close your eyes and put your hands on your heart.

Because when you put your hands on your heart and you feel your heartbeat, you're immediately bringing yourself inside. and your heart is a very, very powerful system. And I feel a lot of people, if you ask them to tune into their heart, they can't actually feel it. But if you can feel your heart, your heart will tell you, oh, there's stress. It's going faster. It's going harder. It's going softer. And so tuning into your heart is a very, very, very quick exercise that you can do to become more self-aware, more mindful of yourself and the environment around you.

Yeah, I love that. And for people who want to start practicing these facial maneuvers, maybe they've never heard a few guys before, they want to learn, where should they go? So we have an app, Human Garage app, and they can go in there and we have structured programs from an introduction to fascia maneuvers all the way to a 28-day life reset.

And we show you essentially in 15 minutes every single day what you can do to heal yourself. So it's giving you tools to work on your own fascia, and teaching you why it works and what we believe is it's doing. And what about for healthcare professionals or people who might want to learn about it to teach others?

Because, you know, obviously before we were talking about how maybe you go to a physio or a chiropractor or an osteopath or whatever, and you get something done, but it doesn't hold. I imagine that there will be some healthcare professionals listening who would go, well, actually, you know what, I'd love to still be able to do what I do, but also add this in. So, yeah, let's see you're a chiropractor, you do the manipulation.

And then you can also say, hey, yeah, but I think these four facial maneuvers will really help you to keep that locked in. Are you offering training courses like that as well? Yes, we have a coaching program where we teach you how to cue the maneuvers, guide people through them, how to work with fascia in the body. and the idea as a coach or practitioner is you're there to support someone through their healing journey. Like one of the things that I've realized is if I am responsible for your health because you come to me, then when you go home, I only see you one hour a week. You go home and you're not taking care of yourself.

You come back to me and I'm still responsible one. So the goal with becoming a coach is you're giving your client the tools to heal themselves. and then when they come to you, you're working on the sticky points that they can't do themselves or you're helping them see what they can't see. And so there is a purpose for having coaches and practitioners out there

and they're working extremely hard right now to help a lot of people. And I'm very grateful for the workforce that's been created through this and giving your clients the tools to heal themselves with fashion maneuvers will only enhance your practice.

Yeah. So if you want to become a coach, you can find it on our website. You can apply to become a coach and we teach you how to do that. Yeah. Well, Jason, it's been a real joy chatting to you today. I love what you guys are doing.

I wish you all the best with your mission to get one billion people around the world to heal themselves. I think that's a beautiful mission. I think what you guys are doing are great. And thank you so much for coming back on the show. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life.

and also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember when you teach someone, it not only helps them. It also helps you learn and retain the information. Now before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday 5. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I'd be consuming,

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