Undoctrinate Yourself - #40 - Aleena Kanner

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

Aleena Kanner is a postural restoration provider and certified athletic trainer integrating positional breathing with dental and visual integration to help people get out of pain, improve performance, and support nervous system regulation. Find Aleena on Instagram ⁠@aleenakanner⁠ www.instagram.com/aleenakannerAleena's website: ⁠https://www.aleenakanner.com⁠Join Aleena's program Rooted Well: ⁠https://www.aleenakanner.com/rootedwellfoundations⁠Follow Alexis on Instagram: ⁠⁠www.instagram.com/dralexisjazmyn⁠⁠Follow Alexis on X: ⁠⁠https://x.com/dralexisjazmyn⁠⁠Follow the podcast: ⁠⁠www.instagram.com/undoctrinateyourselfpod⁠⁠Support the podcast: ⁠⁠www.patreon.com/undoctrinateyourselfpodcast⁠Join The Incubator book club and think tank:https://dralexisjazmyn.thinkific.com/courses/theincubator

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Undoctrinate Yourself. Today, I'm sitting down with my very good friend, Alina Canner, who's a postural restoration provider and a certified athletic trainer. We've been friends for quite some time, at least two, three years or something like that. I did some poor painting at her mom's house a couple years ago where I met Elise, who was another previous guest on the podcast. I actually think I found Alina's work through Rua Gilna, who's also been on the podcast a couple times.

So we're in good company here, and I'm really excited to share with Alina today. She's really working out like the bleeding edge of integrating vision and dental with postural issues and helping to make people feel better and help them to live more pain-free lives and more success with their physical bodies and how that relates to how we can all act in the world in the best of our ability. So thank you so much, Alina, for coming on. I'm excited to chat today. Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be here. Yeah, it's good. You made the trek down from New York.

It was like, what, two hours? Two hours. Not bad. Pretty painless. Not bad. You mean new friends. spend some time with Wiley. With Wiley. New friends. Great. Yeah. So I mean, maybe you can just give us a little background of how you got into this work to begin with. And then we can start going into some of the

details around the topics that we were thinking about talking today as it relates to dental vision, cataracts, LASIC, getting into all these juicy topics that people like to hear about. Yeah, perfect. So how did I get into this? Honestly, I was in graduate school. I had, I have like a personal journey and then I have like an academic journey that got me here. So the more academic side is that I was in graduate school. I was working with really high level athletes that, you know, top athletes in the country helping them with their injuries. And I just felt like these athletes were treated like dollar signs and not like real humans.

So they'd get hurt. We'd patch them up. They were thrown back out. You know, sometimes even still fractured. And I just couldn't believe that that was sort of the way that it worked at such high level athletics that I didn't want to work in that field. after and I wanted to kind of figure out a way to still work with people, help people with their injuries or help people with their long-term care of what they're struggling with, but without

patching them up and throwing them back. So I found a way for myself. I studied something called Postural Restoration. I've been studying that for the last six to seven years. And I've been mixing that along with other components that I've learned through my own journey, just through in general, looking at things from a holistic perspective. And with my own health journey, along with what I saw in athletics, what I saw with mainstream media that covers things like posture, it kind of just didn't make sense to me what I was seeing on the mainstream markets. And I wanted to make a new route for myself.

So I've been doing this now for a little while, moved to Texas to learn it. And the journey kind of is where it is today, where I have my own business. And I help people with things that they didn't even know could be really. related. So that's probably what we'll talk a lot about today. Yeah. I mean, that's something I learned a ton when I first started seeing Rua, who like really introduced me to PRI. I just had no idea that so many things could be related to imbalances in our posture and biomechanics, like the way that we're feeling our sleep quality, our nervous system regulation, like our vision, how our teeth are touching and how we're able to digest food and detox and like have bowel movements, like all these

things can be so related. And so I really just saw that firsthand like for myself. I was in chronic knee pain for years, and I always assumed it was like degenerative from being obese for so long, but turns out I was just basically stuck in an extension pattern. And within one session with him and doing my techniques every day, like, been out of knee pain now for over four years. Yeah. It never came back. So it's, I saw firsthand, like, how powerful that can be.

And now I send so many people into the PR world because it synergizes really well with the quantum biology stuff and the light biology stuff. And together can be like just a really potent way to facilitate healing. How did you find PRI? So I found PRI in graduate school. One of my classmates who was Japanese said to me one day, he was like, you're not going to work in athletic training. You're going to end up doing this one-on-one thing. And I was like, what are you talking about?

And I know that he was already certified because in Japan, there's like a whole PRI Japan is a thing. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, they have a whole institute in Japan. And he had already taken some of the courses. And he just for some reason said something to me about Postural Restoration. And then I checked it out. And I took a course and I remember being like, this is so much information. And I had to back off of it for a little bit because it was so opposite of what we learned in school.

Yes. Everything that we had learned was completely different than what I had just finished learning in graduate school. So I wanted to dive into this information when it was appropriate for me. So then I took another course and then I've been taking courses and now kind of branching out into learning other things like light biology because I feel like what you just said. before. There's such a synergy behind everything because it all goes back to the breath. And that idea of the breath is the same sort of natural thing that we should know how to do. And a lot of times people are struggling. The same thing with understanding sunlight. That's something that we should just naturally do. We should go outside and be in the sun, but people don't know. So it's just about

getting this information out there. Totally. And I feel like ignorance is a huge driver in general. like if we think also about the connection between let's say our posture and biomechanics and like our environments and our light environments in particular, I think that's something we're going to be doing some research on together coming up pretty soon this year because I think some people would argue that, you know, if your dopaminergic system is really healthy because your light and dark cycles are really dialed in, you're connected with nature, then maybe you wouldn't even begin to develop these postural imbalances to begin with. Or myopia, for example, which highly associated with screen use and like reading things right in front of your face. And we see myopia like,

I think it's on trend for 50% of people being myopic and over the course of the next couple decades. And there's a whole slew of issues that come with that, such as overcorrection and things like that, which you can talk about and how that affects your body, getting in the wrong prescription. But also from a light perspective, most people's glasses are blocking all of UV light. And then we're missing out in that whole cascade of POMC and the endorphin production and appetite regulation, energy expenditure regulation by blocking that light coming into the eye.

And so I think, I don't know if you want to share about like the basic pilot studies you did just wearing blue blocking glasses, like a difference that you saw on people's testing right off the bat. Yeah. Even with my own testing, we tested my own self out with no prescription on, with different prescriptions on, and with my red blue light blocking lenses. And the red lens was winning the battle every single time. It didn't, it would override everything.

We actually tested out with playing different songs and rhythms and music, which is something that one of my colleagues is doing a really good job of looking at this information. and if there are certain rhythms in the beat, it can be very disharmonious to the brain to have certain, like, rap music playing. Right. Where there's kind of like a catastrophe of beats instead of it being like 90s rap music

where you feel the same beat. Totally. I was consistently able to get into what we call a neutral pattern, which I can talk about with the red lenses on. But also what you just mentioned was really interesting. You were saying something about, like bringing it back to nature. If you look at the tribes in Africa, like the hot, I think is Hodson tribe,

if you look at their palettes, if you look, they're not wearing glasses. They're not having any of these modern day societal problems that we are struggling with. And those tribes are outside all the time, all the time getting sunlight. They're in areas where the UVB is strong. They're also eating food that is developing this really perfectly developed jaw where they all have these wide pallets with forward growth, anterior growth of the face. And we're not seeing any myopia problems there. So I think it's something to think about when we think about the modern society and the problems that we're seeing and what might be the reasons for those problems.

And you mentioned it, sunlight, you know, food. Those people that are in that tribe, they're not having breathing or postural problems. We're not seeing that because they don't, that's, that's is a modern day issue. Yeah. And I think West Indy Price's work really hit on that. But unfortunately, I think it was construed as a food only problem when they weren't realizing that these. people who were removed from their tribal settings and put into more modern settings were not only eating different diets, they were in completely different environments. Yeah. You know, no UV light,

no grounding, like just disconnected from nature. And so I think the combination of those things is it's very powerful. But I also think like getting back to those roots and also doing, you know, just exposing yourself to information like this, working with a PRI provider or somebody that can help you get back to a neutral state. It's like so much can change in a positive way over a pretty short period of time. Yeah. I never want people to come in. and feel like helpless because they're struggling because most of the time these are modern day problems and we have modern day solutions. So a lot of my way of interacting with people is to help bring them back to nature and to

help bring them back to their breath and bring them into a place of homeostasis in their body. And I educate on what we're talking about here. And sometimes some people need a dentist. Sometimes some people need an optometrist. That's because their problems are a little more far gone than, you know, the other person. But we use a dentist, we use an optometrist if it's needed. Why he's like talking about? He's like very interested in the conversation.

He's like locked in, man. He's so cute. I'm very happy to have my little guest here. But yeah, some people just need the extra assistance. And that's where, you know, my role comes into play, where I could be that guidance, that middleman piece that allows for that interaction between the dentist or optometrist to actually make sense and actually play out in a way that it should and not you just going to the dentist and then never interacting with the optometrist

because all these cranial bones along with the feet and the rib cage and the pelvis, they all need to work in combination with each other. Totally. I mean, the siloing of medicine in general is just a huge issue. Like you can't treat one organ system as separate from the rest. Everything is in constant communication with each other. And even in my PhD, we did a lot of work to show like how metabolites are exchanged between organs. It's like a way for organs to talk to each other and to think that one specialist can just focus on your mouth and then one on your eyes and then one on the, it's also just weird that like the eyes and the mouth are separate from medicine. Well, they're very separate from medicine, right?

Insurance is separate and it's separate. Completely. It's weird. It's like that part of the body. It's pretty wild. And they don't talk to each other. Like I actually had that experience firsthand with like the specialists that were dealing with my mom when she was in the hospital. It was like none of them were talking to each other. And then the, you know, the family of, let's say the patients have to deal with all the chaos and try to advocate in this space where it's like everybody's saying conflicting things. Yeah.

And it's also, and that, you know, acute scenarios that really happens, like in a hospital, right? And then you're dealing with it and it's chaotic right in the moment. And then it's also chaotic on the other way is that where I see people in chronic pain. So they are like very stressed out that they've dealt with this. They know what it's like to have to advocate for themselves, but they're so burnt out because they've advocated for themselves for the last 10 years and they feel like they've gotten nowhere. Like a gas lift. Yeah.

And that's a huge thing. Yeah. The gas lighting in the industry is just ginormous. It's a massive problem. Yeah. I mean, especially when it comes to the line of work that you're doing, it's like that's really an end-of-one approach. Like you're dealing with an individual person's imbalances, issues, traumas, whatever it is. But like medicine is really focused on the average response across the population and you can't do the work that you do within that paradigm.

It just doesn't work. No. And even if the average response is an okay response to certain surgeries or treatment options, Great. I'm seeing the people that are not in that average. Yeah. So, and then they're really suffering. And so that's, I just want to be able to help get the information out there so more people can know about it. Because if a doctor comes across this, let's say, and they hear, oh, wow, the dental inclusion system can have a real significant effect on my patient's hip. And then now they know this information, then they're more likely to share it and talk about it. But if they never know about it, they're way more likely to guess like their patient.

Totally. So that's where I think it's really powerful to be able to talk and share. Yeah. And also another thing about like modern solutions, I feel like when I've really thought about the concept of progress in science and medicine, on one hand, people may say, okay, like, we've made a ton of progress. We understand so much more. But on the other side of that, I feel like, let's say 90% of our innovations have been made to deal with problems we created unconsciously. Yeah, that's for sure. Is that innovation really? I don't know. I know. I agree. A lot of solutions to man-made problems. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, maybe we can start getting into some of the details. You want to start with, like, vision or dental, whatever makes the most sense. Sure. Or maybe talk about neutrality first and what that even brings within the PR lens and we can go on from there.

Yeah. So the way I like to explain neutrality is that you have a right half of your body and you have a left half of your body and you have an in-between. And that in-between is what happens in a gate cycle. So when I say gate cycle, I'm talking about walking. When you walk, your body has to operate on its right leg. It has to shift to neutral and then operate on its left leg. And when I mean by operate, I mean it has to be able to organize each and every piece properly over each half. So when you stand on your right leg, your right hip has to be ever so slightly back while your left hip has to be forward. You have all these little components happening at different areas. So I just explained the hip, but what about the cranium? So we have these little cranial bones that have to move to organize properly over the right leg.

and then left leg. Okay, so what we see a lot of times is because of the organ placement, in general, where we have a liver that's three pounds on average on the right side, we have three lobes of lung on the right side, two on the left, and we have a diaphragm that is bigger, the hemid diaphragm on the right side, is bigger than it is on the left side. It has a stronger pull, it's attached low into the lumbar spine, and it is a very significant mover in the way that the body is orienting and operating. So we'll typically find that people will end up being more dominant and pulled over onto their right leg, meaning that they organize themselves easier on that right leg than they can organize themselves on the left leg. That doesn't

mean they never get to that left side. That just means that they might have a preference of being over their right leg for majority of the time. And what we want is the ability to go both right side and left side. And we want the person to have a nice homeostasis and a nice rhythm and a flow. And when we're missing that rhythm and flow is when we see issues arise. So essentially, my goal when somebody comes in to see me is first off, test them. Where are they at? What are my objective test saying about that person? Are they really oriented over the right side? What is their cranium telling me? I'm looking at every single bit of the puzzle. I'm not just looking at one thing because you can't get a full picture of somebody if you're only looking at one or two tests. So I do

all my tests. I see where that person is orienting the majority of the time. And then I am giving them specific techniques to help what we call reposition or change their orientation in space. We're changing their center of mass. We're changing how their brain essentially understands their environment. And then we can get to a state of neutrality. And neutrality, Wiley is really in this conversation. You're done. Spanish. Bye, Wiley.

It's fun. I'm dead. That is so funny. It's fine. I don't care. All right. Neutrality. So essentially, getting to that state of neutrality is going to allow that brain to have optimal function.

Because you're never functioning optimally if you're stuck on one side. You're never using your full brain capacity. You need to be able to go right left for a lot of reasons. You want left peripheral vision. You have to get over to your left leg to properly use that left peripheral. vision, your shoulder on the left side has to depress to get over to that left side. So we have all of these pieces of the puzzle that have to move so that the brain and body know how to flow and rhythmically be able to have this, what we call, oscillation. So when I see patients in the clinic,

I'm seeing people that are struggling. So most of the time they don't have that flow. They don't have that rhythm. And my goal is to find out what they need first to get them to get that flow. And sometimes people just need techniques and they're good to go. Like you said within one or two sessions, you said your knee felt better. That's awesome. Not everybody is so easy. Some people have visual issues, dental issues. And sometimes we use the dental occlusion system or we use the visual system,

even if they don't have issues there to get their body into a state of neutrality so that they can get pain free. Because most of the time people are coming to me in pain. This patterning that I'm talking about is not a problem if you don't have pain. We see people all the time that are walking around still more hemispherically dominant using their right side, but they have no pain, they feel good, they have no problem. I'm not concerned about it. It's the people that are struggling that I want to be able to help get this oscillatory flow back in place into their system. And that flow is going to enhance even things like tier production.

We're going to see vocal resonance be greater. There's a lot of different components here. So we can talk more about dental and vision too. but that's essentially the idea of neutrality. So I hope that explains that. Yeah, that makes really good sense. And the thing that's coming to mind with regards to people who are more sticky or in their patterns, there could be issues in getting them into their body in the way that makes them pain-free and better performance.

And I'm thinking about neuroplasticity and also an ability to feel safe in your environment and safe in your body. And how if you're stuck in a fight-or-flight state, it's really hard to learn in general and including motor-lasticity. learning. And so it's just always at the back of my mind in ways to help expedite progress for people and their ability to have these results stick in the short, medium, and long term. And so I think the light environment comes into play again here because if you're in an environment, let's say you're doing your testing or, you know, somebody's coming to you, they work a job, they're under fluorescent lights all day long, maybe even the assessment is happening under fluorescent or LED lights. it's like this blue light toxic environment that's activating your sympathetic nervous system,

which is then preventing you from inhabiting more of a parasympathetic state, which is where motor learning even happens. And so I think even in like in the acute testing phase, but also in like the phase where they're doing their homework at home and like curating an environment that helps them feel safe, relaxed, parasympathetic that will expedite their progress potentially pretty rapidly. I'm really curious to do like testing with. Yeah. And that's why we're going to do some research on it because it's something that I'm really passionate about too, because this is not, Like you said, medicine can't be siloed. Like we have to look at every single little piece of the puzzle.

When I am talking to these patients, I'm trying my best to educate on these topics because exactly, if they're in front of fluorescent lighting all day long and they have a very stressful job and they're going home and they're not eating in a way that is suitable, then I can do all the best work in the world. But if their environment is not going to allow them to heal, then there's nothing that I can really do. I have to, my best job is to give as much education I can and give them techniques and guide them in a way that's going to help them. But I also need them to understand that they are a big part of their own healing. Because I can't heal people. People heal themselves. And yeah, the environment

is huge. And also what's going on in your head is huge. If your nervous system is going haywire, we could talk about also just extension patterning because like you were mentioning before, this sympathetic overdrive that we see a lot in today's society. I mean, I work in New York. All the people I see are on overdrive. They're stressed out. They have stressful jobs. And their ribcages are lifted up towards Mars. And it's because their system, they don't know how to breathe. They don't know how to exhale. And what we'll see on a consistent basis is necks that are overrun by the external clad of mastoids are pulling the ribcage up and forward, the pelvis up and forward. And nobody can breathe well, or these people that are in the sympathetic overdrive, cannot breathe well.

Now, are they in that sympathetic overdrive because of their entire environment, their lifestyle? And I personally think it's not a, we have to look at all these pieces of the puzzle. But that sort of extension locks the body up so then they can't rotate. They can't properly get either to the right or the left side of their body. So now they're in a state of essentially panic without no proper oxygen flow. And so we're seeing these things that we're talking about from like a holistic medicine perspective of getting the brain to calm down into that parasymposite state. you're not going to be able to digest your food. You're not going to be able to learn. You're not going to be able to do anything peacefully and happily if your body is going haywire and we're seeing it posturally.

And that's where we can address it from the light environment, from food, from all these other components, but we can also address it through the breath and through teeth and eyes if necessary. So it's like there's the same goal, but we can look at it from so many lenses, which is cool. Yeah, and there's such like a close relationship and like cross talk between like the mental and the psychological and the physical as well. Like I've shadowed Rua probably for like 50 to 75 clients like shared clients at this point. And it's not uncommon for people to have like cathartic experiences or like aha moments when they're on the table or like doing specific techniques and they're finally able to inhabit their body in a way that they weren't able to do that prior. And it's just I think it speaks to the power of well, not only PRI, but just an ability. to feel into areas that we may have like closed off or numbed off in holding patterns like to avoid feeling pain that pain could be physical it could be related to a trauma from somebody's past i think it's a really interesting area but so much can be accomplished going through the physical and i kind of feel the same way about like modulating the light environment where it's like low-hanging fruit that can give you access to deeper parts of your healing journey yeah 100% it's actually

interesting as you were saying this i was thinking about i see a lot of different types of patients And my tougher patients that, not that they're tough in general, they just, they can't sense. They're yogis and they're financial people. People that work in finance because they are just in a brain of only thinking about numbers all the time. And they're never sensing themselves. Whereas like therapists or somebody else in the health field, it's so easy to work with because they understand their body. They can feel.

And you know, doctors, sometimes physicians have a really hard time sense. their body, which is a very interesting thing because medicine, like conventional doctors I'm talking about, medicine has, I think, torn them in a way apart from that spiritual, sensual self and feeling. They're trapped in the intellect. Exactly. And the people that are trapped in the intellect are really with numbers, actuaries, people that are in the financial district, and that's what they do, finance.

And they, both men and women, like, they struggle with it. So it's, it kind of just made me think about that. Like, what you choose to do with your life is going to dictate a lot about your body. I'm going to see it on your body. That's a great point. I think the yogis is one that maybe would surprise people. I think people tend to think that more flexibility is good, but maybe you can just dispel that myth here now.

Yeah, that's a big one. So more flexibility is not good. I always feel like I can talk about this because I was a gymnast growing up. So I stretched my whole life and it's, I feel like this is something I'm allowed to talk about and I'm allowed to be ruthless because. the more you stretch, the more your brain will shut off the signals to those areas. So, for example, if you can do what we call like a forward fold, if you can easily go down and touch your toes and you can easily palm the floor, your hamstring tissue should signal to your brain, hey, like, stop.

You have an end range here because hamstrings are going to provide integrity to the pelvis. And when that is compromised or overstretched, there's no end range. Your brain is not getting the signal like there's a pull in the back of your leg to stop you from going so far forward. And what we see with yogis is that they've just lost all sense of a lot of areas, most areas of their body. There's a lot of ligament laxity. There's the muscle belly is just overstretched. And it's because they do in modern day yoga.

I'm not talking about yoga from 5,000 years ago. That's a different conversation. Modern day, they're doing a lot of different types of exercises in one class. There's a billion different exercises. and then they're just holding different positions for a long static period of time, you are essentially telling the brain to decrease the connection to that area. So we're not going to have hamstrings that support the pelvis. We're not going to have hamstrings that know when end range is.

And I'm just giving hamstrings as an example. We see it in the shoulders. We see it in the neck big time. And we call that pathology. And that pathology, certain people with a lot of extreme pathology on a body that is patterned in extension. So, for example, their ribcage is very, very lifted up, but they can go down and touch their toes. That doesn't really add up.

It should not add up. And so when I see that in somebody, those are the people that a lot of times do need dental and vision because their body sense is lost. So we have to give them sense from their external environment, essentially. I feel like another dangerous part of that is that a lot of people who, like, let's say, teach yoga or, like, are good in gymnastics. They're, like, self-selecting those sports or those activities because they already have ligamentous laxity. And then normal people come in and they're like, I should be like them. And now they're like basically messing up their connected tissues and they're signaling and their sense because they think that's something that you should be like going towards. That's something you're fired to.

It's like there's a natural selection with athletes too. Like I was a gymnast and then I went into Olympic weightlifting. That's a very common transition because as an Olympic weightlifter, you have to be able to squat all the way down. You have to have that quick twitch and the mobility or flexibility really to get down there. And so a lot of gymnasts become, you know, into that sport. But what you're talking about, too, is you have these yogis that maybe are very good at yoga. Most of them are in a lot of chronic pain. And now they're teaching the general public.

And that is a, it's quite dangerous because you have somebody who's over flexible, teaching somebody who does not have that range. And nor should they push past that. Right. Because not when the body is a bit tight, it's telling you where your stopping point is. I could teach somebody how to breathe to get better range, but forcing the body there. Anything with force, in my opinion, at this point, anything with force is just generally not the best idea. And what we do with most surgical procedures is forcing things.

So forcing yourself through pain to force a stretch is really suboptimal for the rest of your system. Like your brain is telling you, it's signaling that you don't want to be here. You don't want to do this. So you have to listen to that because that's your brain saying sympathetic. Like it's a big red stop sign. So yeah, I think a good point maybe for people who are, let's say, hypermobile or hyper flexible and uses PRI and, like, restores healthy range of motion, it doesn't mean that you're going to lose your flexibility. It just means that your muscle is going to be now signaling to your brain at the appropriate range of motion that, like, hey, we should stop here. If you want to go beyond that, you can still choose to do that. Yeah, you can still, I've worked with contortionists and they can regain the integrity of their, like, essentially their pelvis, their rib cage. they're still going to have that laxity. They're still, you're still, once those ligaments stretch out, they're stretched.

But you can use muscles to support that, the bony structure. And that's what we do with my learning is how do we teach the muscles to really support the entire region and how we teach the brain when the signals are appropriate versus when they're, you know, missing. So contortionists will still be able to be a contortionist. A yogi will be able to be a yogi, but with less pain. And that's the idea there. And also, like, I never tell a patient.

If you love doing yoga three times a week, I'm never going to say, don't do yoga. I'm just going to educate you and say, I think that there are other options for you to do and not necessarily force yourself through these stretching positions. There's some strength training that could be similar style to yoga. A lot of people do yoga because they like the meditative aspect, not necessarily the stretching. Most people do not like holding a static stretch. It's quite painful. I know, I did it in childhood.

Like, it's not the best, but most people are going to these things because they think they're restorative. They think it's, they think it's good for them. But when you educate them and you explain to them what it's actually doing to their body and how there's other solutions, they're happy to try something new. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And I actually, I've heard, I think Rua was talking about this. If you put your child or in, like a young child in ballet or gymnastics, and they're doing a ton of stretching at that age, that can really set up issues for later in life versus if they started, let's say, as a teen, for example. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I wasn't, competitive as other people, but I was, I just was stretching since I was five. And I think that

it really lost sense to my brain about certain areas. And so now as an adult, I've had to go back and really regain that sense using external things. And, but I do, I do really agree with him there because the more complicated patients are the hypermobile people. And some people are straight up hypermobile. Now there's a huge, like, I almost think it's like an epidemic of people getting diagnosed with the EDS. Right. Yeah, it does seem like the diagnosis criteria of like widened or something. I'm not sure. It's wild because a lot of people are coming in.

They're like, oh, I have EDS. And it's like, do you? Because I've really seen, I saw EDS. I went to a rotation with an EDS case in graduate school of a clinic. And there were kids there. And like these kids are really loosey-goosey. Like they don't have any integrity. And it's really hard for them.

And so I don't know if now we're just diagnosing people with a lot of EDS or, you know, they might see a genetic marker. and it's like, oh, for sure, this person has EDS. But I do think EDS is a thing. And I think that the people struggling with EDS also have a lot of lifestyle circumstances. I think that things like UV light are a huge, huge missing link to the puzzle. And I think we can do all the strength work in the world, but it's not going to fix the nervous system that's going haywire. Yeah, I imagine, like, the red infrared light part is probably really important too because it stimulates collagen synthesis and supports the connective tissues and the fascia and allows, light and water communication.

Yeah, it just light. Yeah. And just getting back to nature, water, all the things that you educate about that are really important in bringing that person back closer to their natural self. Because these people that are struggling with EDS, it's a sensory problem, I think. I think it's a brain's inability to fully sense.

And I think you can make significant progress if it's done properly, if the body's signals are rearranged. Mm-hmm. So. Yeah, that's really interesting. I know a couple people who were diagnosed with it. Actually, one, had her back broken by a chiropractor because apparently she had a congenital defect.

Oh, my God. That she didn't know, but like her, like around her tailbone. And then when she got this chiropractic adjustment, it literally broke her back. And she was like in a wheelchair for a period of time. Wow. I mean, I have colleagues that are chiropractors and my take on chiropractic care is that it's so dependent on the chiro. Yeah.

And also your body's in a pattern and you can't force it out of it. So when we go and adjust and we do especially like these rapid force adjustments, I think it can be extremely detrimental. I mean, you could put somebody into a stroke. Yeah. It's scary. Yeah. And I mean, with manual therapies in general, I feel like that was a big aha moment that I had

learning about PRI is that like you should teach the body how to hold its position. Yes. You know, in an effective and efficient way itself, not from the outside because then you don't have the neural patterning that's actually able to keep it there. So you have to keep going back. Right. And that's a big thing. Like I do like some manual therapies, but I do think that people feel so much better after a massage

and then two days later they go back. And same with chiropractic care. And the goal for us as a, you know, postural restoration provider is that you don't feel like that. I don't want my patients to be like, oh, I did techniques and then now it kind of went back. Then I know the body's not holding. I want that body to hold. And that's a big, that's actually a big key for me.

Hey, maybe we need to reroute a little bit, but or look at other higher level signals that coming from up above or down below the feet are a really big component to it too yeah it's really i feel like a way of helping people that's very inherently empowering versus like you don't you're you're hoping they don't need you for very long like they should graduate from your care and go on and live a healthy pain free life if they constantly need to come back and have the same issues that's like a red flag yeah there's something not working here right exactly do you want to talk a little bit about like so we can talk about dental and vision but maybe start with the feet you just mentioned it because i think it's something really interesting a lot of people are in terrible

shoes. What makes a good shoe? Why are a lot of shoes bad? What should our feet be like if we were like living in nature and how does that differ from like a modern foot, let's say. Yeah, yeah, let's start there. So our feet should be like wide and thick and muscular and be able to grip if we are living in nature. But unfortunately, most of us are not. I wish I was. Same. Like out in a tribe in the middle of Africa. That would be great. Yeah, but we are in modern society. And what we have seen is that Shoes definitely have changed the structure of our feet. We're putting little kids in shoes. If you have a little child, just keep them outside.

Shoeless as long as possible. Now, my take on the whole barefoot world is different than these barefoot shoe gurus. And I get a lot of hate whenever I talk about this, but I don't really mind because I know what's correct and what really matters. Now, when it comes to the exchange of frequency from the earth, I think that that is vital for healing. but we are not walking on flat or uneven surfaces all the time. We're not outside grounding from the actual earth. And if we are, great, we should be barefoot. I live by the beach.

You have grass in your backyard. Going outside and grounding is different than what I'm about to talk about. I am a big fan of going outside barefoot and grounding. I am not a big fan of walking around with barefoot shoes or walking around barefoot in your house or just on outside flat surfaces. So if you're working in a city and you're wearing a. a barefoot shoe to work, that's going to potentially create problems up the chain. And that's because, like I mentioned before, with the gate cycle, we have this oscillatory flow of movement.

In the foot, we have that as well. There's all these little bones in the feet that have to articulate with one another in order to get proper full range. And we have the one movement pattern called supination, which is when you're on the outside edge of your foot. We have more of a mid-stand neutral. And then we have pronation, which is when the mid-part of your foot. the arch and is able to feel the ground and push off and move forward into the gate cycle.

If you don't pronate that foot and you never push off properly, you could never get to the other leg. So that pronation piece is really, really important. We need to have this full range in order to propel our body forward and move through space. If we are walking outside on flat surfaces, we are essentially slapping the ground with our foot. We're never getting this full movement range. We're never getting this oscillatory movement, which, yeah, I'm just talking about the feet, but it's going to actually reiterate up into the neck. And we're going to see that the patterns up at the head, neck, and cranium are going to reflect what's going on down below as well.

So the shoes that I recommend are typically Brooks and A6. There's a shoe list. I actually have a free PDF on my website. Oh, great. So I'll send it to you. And it just talks about the components of a shoe. So a heel counter, which is the back portion of the shoe, you can squeeze the heel counter and see how much resistance you're getting from it.

And we want a strong heel counter because of the way that the foot is structured, we have a bone in the foot called a talus, which doesn't have any muscular attachments. And so the only way to really control where that talus lies is by the calcaneus, which is the heel bone. So when that calcaneus is in a nice neutral position, the talus is in a neutral position, and then we can get both pronation, supination from the rest of the foot. But when we have any sort of serious flattening or serious high arches, that's because the talus position is off. And so we have to control that.

We have to kind of push the foot to establish this neutrality, especially in modern day society. So a heel counter is really important and an arch is really important. Today's talk in mainstream media, they talk about the arch as in, we're going to put a really big arch here, right? Orthotics. They put big arches to lift the person's arch up. That's not how I think about an arch. I think about an arch support as a sensory tool for the brain. So that sensory tool for the brain allows for that person to be able to push off,

like I was mentioning before, and get to the other leg. Because when there's an arch underneath the arch of your foot, your brain says, oh, I feel that. I'm going to press into it and move forward. Without an arch there, which is what you see essentially in a barefoot shoe, it's just flat. Your brain doesn't learn supination. I do believe sometimes manual footwork can be very powerful just to help. get that movement going. But honestly, for most people, they could get into a good shoe and be in a

good shoe, and they're going to feel a significant difference. And, you know, it's something that you don't have to be in shoe jail forever. But if you go outside on a walk, throw on a good pair of shoes. I personally, I'm barefoot at home because I have done the work on my body that I don't need to worry about this. I feel good. I don't have a problem. But for my patients that come in, where they have chronic neck pain and they've had that neck pain for 15 years, yeah, I'm telling them to wear a shoe in their house. And we do see significant changes with that. Yeah, I can definitely attest to that before I got into like the Brooks adrenaline 23s. I was wearing like Adidas. What are the ultra boosts I think about? Anyway, every time I would go on a walk, I would get terrible hip pain.

Terrible. And then I got these new shoes, put them on no hip pain. Like it was just gone. It was crazy. And it's funny too because everybody is a little different on the shoes. Like I love recently the Brooks Go 16. They came out earlier this year. That's my shoe. I knew when I put it on. I was like, oh, I love these. And I really like the Brooks addiction. Okay. I've ever tried any other than Brooks. Oh, well, because you like your shoe. Yeah. So you probably stick with the same one. I don't blame you. That's a thing. And that's good. That shoe probably works really well for you. That's a, I recommend that one a lot, the adrenaline's. But everyone is slightly different. And the only way to really know is to try it on, go on a walk, see how you feel. Yeah. And you'll know,

I tell people, you'll know when you put the right shoe on, your body's going to tell you. Unless your sense is very, very skewed, which not skewed off, you know, like I was mentioning before about the people that work in finance, they might have a harder time. So then I'll test. I can test the shoe with the body and, you know, help the person make that decision. But most people that are in tune with their body will know what shoe works for them. Yeah. And when I got the adrenaline, I went to like a running store and they had all the different shoes, like most of the shoes from the shoe list there, so I could try them all on. Yeah. Which is, I mean, sounds like that's what you would recommend as well. If you could just try them and see which feels right. And another important thing, I think, that you

kind of alluded to is that they should feel good right away. You shouldn't have to break them in. Yeah, that's huge. You don't have to break shoes in. Yeah. Um, I don't know why we were taught that growing up. Unless it's like a pair of leubitons or something that you shouldn't really be like heels. Like heels. Oh my God. Yeah. And you know, that's the thing too. Like, it's okay. If I go to a wedding, I'm going to wear heels. Yeah. I'm going to be heels. That's the, the goal is that you can wear that and not have pain. I used to wear heels for like three hours and have back pain. And then I went to a conference a month ago and I wore heels for three days in a row and I was fine. I kept waking up and I was like, is my back and hurt? And I'd move around and I'd be like, oh, I'm fine because my body has recalibrated

itself to be able to handle those stressors. Four or five years ago, my body wasn't able to handle it. So that's where I think people need to understand that this might be a temporary thing that you're in a shoe all the time. And it's also about getting over this hump of like, we need to be barefoot in a barefoot shoe. Like you were joking with me earlier. You asked about my boots. I was where I wear, I wear barefoot boots because a company sent them to me, but also I put an insert in there so that there's a little bit of a heel counter and there's an arch support. And my followers will probably laugh when they hear that I can see that. But I have made those shoes fit me better. They're cute shoes. They have a really nice wide toe box. It's crazy because the barefoot

shoe gurus that have made these companies have done a great job with the toe box. And unfortunately, the shoes that we look at, the Brooks and A6, you have to get wide. You have to like, struggle with it, especially for somebody with a wide foot. Yeah. But they really have not found a shoe on the market that encompasses every single quality that I love. You do it. I know. The shoe market is tough.

A grounding shoe. Like there's nothing like that. It would be great. I know. I've talked to one company about it and it was like, it's so difficult. But I'm sure it's possible. It's totally possible. I think there's a big market for it too, just a matter of educating people and why it's

important. Right. I think it would be a really good, you know, add to the, uh, oh, it would have. help people so much. People living in our society today, not people at a tribe in Africa. They're barefoot and they're fine doing that. They're great. Yeah, exactly.

They don't need it. Right. So, okay, we started at the feet. Do you want to work your way up? Sure. I mean, maybe we can talk about like some common patterns you would see in general and how that relates to the positioning of feet, you know, neck, rib cage, pelvis, things like that. Then we'll get into the nitty-gritty of the vision and dental.

Yes. We do see a lot of, like I mentioned before, about the way that the body orientes, typically more over on that right side because of the orientation of that right diaphragm and also really our brain. Our left hemisphere controls the right side of the body, but we have a lot, the right side of the body is more dominant on the majority of people, functionally cortically more dominant. And even if you're a lefty, lefties can be tricky, but lefties are still more functionally cortically dominant with their right side. That's why lefties can still use their right hand. People that are ambidextrous are the most complicated, to be honest, because they don't

have a dominant side so their brain never chose dominance and we'll see a lot of issues with the visual pathways being skewed with people that are ambidextrous definitely by far my hardest patients most interesting patients very very smart people um but they have a lot of path uh brain pathways that are off so that's interesting because i was actually ambidextrous for a period of my childhood because i broke my right wrist when i was like two years old so you're forced to use your left exactly that's interesting but certain things like if i'm throwing a frisbee or like batting and like baseball, I do the opposite of what you expect a right-handed person to do. It's weird. That's interesting.

Yeah. Very interesting. A lot of times we'll see the ambidextrosity like align itself with a visual problem. So the kid will have some visual problems and they'll like really not be able to choose a dominant. So yours is more of a force thing. Yes. So that's probably actually better because your brain just had to use the other side a little bit. Versus somebody who is truly, truly born ambidextrous, they cannot choose a side. Do we know what causes that? I think it's a missing issue.

Like, it's in the brain from, I think it's, you're supposed to know in utero, really. I think it's like six months in your utero. I don't think they know exactly the cause. But I personally think that there's a mismatch in the brain in the hemispheres as to what the dominance patterns are. So interesting. Yeah, and their primitive reflux testing will be off too. Like, there's a lot of layover with other issues. What primitive reflex?

Primitive reflexes are reflexes that help you essentially survive your first year of life and get out of the birth canal. So like the star reflex. Oh, the mammalian dive reflex? Is that one? Yeah. Which one? The mammalian dive where you like gasp when you go into cold water?

Yeah, probably. Yeah. I don't know it's coming out of the birth canal. But that's, uh, maybe. Yeah, because like if you're being born into water, which we commonly were, I guess, I think it's one of those. And people still are born into water. Totally.

It's really, really bad. Yeah. Totally. So awesome. Um, yeah. No, so there's like moro, which is like startle reflex. Okay. Like if you drop a baby, a little newborn like this or like, basically,

I'm gesturing like just lowering a baby down kind of quickly. They'll do this with their arms. And so that startle reflex, if it's never integrated properly with the brain, it will stick with somebody. And they'll have a startle when you clap near them or something like that. So that's one. There's also ATNR, STNR. There's all these other ones that have to do with the brain being able to see different

things on both hemispheres. And there's, what else? Moro, I said. Spinal galant reflex. Yeah, it's really, really fascinating. But they'll really notice that the people that are ambidextrous, their primitive reflexes, will be retained. And sometimes what we do in modern society with things like swaddling babies can actually be problematic with the primitive reflex. There's a lot of controversy over it.

Oh, interesting. Yeah. Huh. It's fascinating, actually. Are these people typically on the spectrum? The ones that have... like the reflexes. Reflexes that are not retained reflexes, they can be for sure.

They'll be on the spectrum. Or they could just be a kid with like dyslexia or bad handwriting. Oh, yeah. You have the palmer reflex. You know, babies will grasp your finger. That's in case they fall. So to grasp in the first year of life. But if that palmer reflex is not properly integrated, then their ability to write will be,

it might not be as optimal as if they had integrated palmer reflex. but most kids have their parmar and Babinski reflex. Most kids are fine with those. What's Babinski? Babinski is when you stroke the bottom of the foot and it will come in versus out. And you can integrate these reflexes as kids get older. You have to give them a lot of stimulation to these areas. There's a ton of nerves in the hands in the feet.

Yeah, huge. And so if it's not, most of the kids, a lot of them are autistic kids or they do have other issues, social issues, anxiety, OCD, these other things can pop up. I took one course in primitive reflux testing. I'm going to take another one because it's really truly fascinating. And is that useful for testing anybody or only children? No, you can test adults. That's very interesting. Yeah.

I've tested some of my friends. I haven't, like, gone deep into it, but I feel like I should. Yeah, I think that would be an interesting tool in the tool. Yeah. Now you're like, I love these conversations. Because you're really interested. I'm curious. Yeah, no.

Yeah, I could test you. Yeah, that would be cool. We need a paintbrush. Yeah, we'll find. We definitely have one of those. I was just thinking, I remember whenever I would go to the doctor as a kid and they would do like the reflex testing on the knee. Yeah.

I would always feel like it was a challenge to like prevent myself. I don't want to be controlled. Oh my God. That's literally neurotic. That's what you thought. That was like six. I was like, you're not going to control my body. That's hilarious.

But you can't control it. It's a real life. I know. The challenge. Oh my goodness. Yeah, no, you don't have a choice with it. But yeah, there's a bunch. I can pull up my course after I have.

Cool. some information on it. Yeah, so maybe some common patterns that you see. Yeah, so common patterns in PRI, and it will coincide with these reflexes too, but we'll see bodies that are locked up what we call sagittally, which is basically similar on both sides. It's more symmetrical. So we'll see that rib cage on both sides will be flared and pelvis on both sides will be dipped forward.

And what we see by that is the inability to rotate side to side because think of if you're lifting upwards, your chest is up towards the ceiling and now you're trying to rotate, you're not able to. In order to rotate, you actually need your rib cage to come down and in into something called internal rotation to get full range of motion rotation. And what we need to have when we walk is the ability to rotate our thorax, our sternum right to left. So we do see this extension-based pattern very forward on both sides. Body weight is coming forward.

People will have all their weight in their toes. People will be utilizing all their neck muscles to essentially hold their body. body up. Their hip flexors, their calves, and their back will just be tight and working all the time instead of what we call grounded being weight back in the heels, allowing the pelvis to kind of dip under into a post to your pelvic tilt, allowing for the rib cage to come down into internal rotation. And we will see this lack of groundedness with that extension pattern. We kind of call it floating away because their whole body weight is coming forward. Their center of mass is forward almost outside of their system.

They're just falling all the time. They're falling forward. Yeah, that was me, by the way. You and so many people, too. And then we'll also see, so we see that where it's happening on both sides. And underneath that on everybody, pretty much, is that it's always happening more on the left side. So we'll see the left rib cage ever so slightly flared more than the right, left pelvis

coming forward. So more weight coming forward on the left and more weight is back on the right. And that's called more of what we call like the left a I see, or being more over into your right side. And so that pattern... What does AIC stand for? I always wondered that. anterior inferior chain. It's a chain. It's like PRI has coined these terms. But essentially, it's just that the body weight is over on the right side. And yeah, PRI did a good job really coining these terms and creating patterns out of it to understand it. Like, there's nothing really wrong with that AIC pattern being over on the right leg. We just need to switch it off and go to

the other leg. Be stuck there. Right. We can't be stuck. We can never be stagnant in life. Yes. That's like the biggest thing. Like I explain it like their son and moon and there's midday. We need to be midday to get to both. Exactly. So these patterns can really dictate how someone's living their life and why they're in pain. And I see a lot of problems with people coming in when they're in the extension-based pattern. And they also see different problems, but a lot of problems coming in when somebody has one side really turned on. So these are more of the people that are going to be like, oh, yeah, I have all my injuries on my right side. Or I, you know, my right knee hurts versus like both knees are hurting. We might see a more bilateral

problem. It's not always like this, but most of the time. So underlying every pattern where I see a symmetrical pattern, we see this underlying asymmetry. So I'm always treating the asymmetry. And with the cranium, too, we see these patterns occurring at the cervical spine and the cranium. And that's where it gets more into the visual system and into the dental system is really when this pattern can't be retained. Like, I can't get the person out of it. I'm trying my best. The person's consistent. They're in a good shoe. They're doing everything I've asked, but they're coming in every week. Or not every week.

I see people like once a month, usually. But they're coming in every month and they're still stuck. Their pain's not going away. And that's when it's really time to try something different and look outside the box. So it sounds like you're kind of starting at the bottom and then going up to the dental and the visual if you have to. I try. Sometimes it's clear as day if somebody has a dental or vision problem and then I just go right

there. And that's just through experience now at this point that I can tell. And I don't typically do that, but if on a first session, you know, if certain things are checked off, LASIC eye surgery, that's one. If that's checked off, I'm not always running to an optometrist, but I only give it two or three sessions and then I go to an optometrist. That's the way I practice. That's not how other providers practice.

Some other providers will do six months working on something, but I have seen too many cases of LASIC, for example, or crossbytes, dental-wise, that are just very, very difficult. And I don't want to waste the person's time and energy. they've already come to me after seeing four or five other providers. I want to be mindful of their financial situation. And I also know at this point, like, when they need what they need. Right. So.

And it's also you valuing your own time as well. Because if you know you're not going to be able to make progress with them until they get these other boxes checked, then it just makes sense for that to be an earlier move or the later one. Right. So, yeah, so we can get into all that stuff too. Yeah, we should. I just want to circle back briefly the idea of being grounded neurologically or like physically and also electrically because I just think there's a really cool relationship there, like, with

the terminology. And I feel like they're both so important. And, like, you can be grounded electrically, but not grounded in your body, or vice versa. So it's important to be grounded wholly as a whole being. Yeah, I remember when you talked about this before, and I was like, oh, my God, Alexis said this so well. And it was about this specific topic because you understand it. So that introception you have about understanding postural restoration has is really cool because you can talk about the grounding through the electricity, like that electrical current from the earth, and you get the difference between that and the physical groundedness. And I don't think everybody really grasps that. And that's something that I think if it could be more mainstream, would be amazing. Well, yeah,

like, for example, Ru and I have a shared client. We just had a session with her last week, and she had, like, a very cathartic experience before we even started. Like, she's very high performing, like, takes on everybody else's stuff and never has anybody to help support her when she needs to just, like, vent or whatever. So she had this whole like, you know, breakdown basically, which was really good because she was all parasympathetic going into the exercises. And by the end of the session, she described basically feeling like she inhabited her body for the first time she, in like recent memory. Yeah, and that's, that's really what being grounded is. It's like you're fully inhabiting your body, and it feels like you're rooted. You're not lighty. You're not, like, feeling like you're unstable

or like you're just like energetically diffuse, let's say. Yeah. No, it's, you're really on it with that. And that patient, it's interesting. I remember learning this about the term interoception. It's, I know what you're talking about because I've experienced this. And people that don't have not experienced this might not fully grasp it. But you get it because you've experienced, you get what a technique does to your body.

you get what the sensations are. So that person, she experienced her body for the first time because that center of mass changed. And then there was also this like emotional component there too. So that's that's really a key component to healing. Totally. It's huge. And actually, so I had like a, I probably still have a little bit of a tors and you probably notice in my face. So I've been working on that with Rua for a while. I just keep falling off the boat and exercises. But anyway, it's hard. The first time I did those exercises, it literally felt like I was high. in the best way possible. It was amazing. Yeah. It was like just a very minor, minor shift, but it just, I had all this energy suddenly. It was just magnificent. And I feel like, oh, that's actually

probably supposed to be my baseline. I'm just like kind of stuck over here and a small deficit that, you know, it's kind of wearing and tearing over time. And that's the other thing. Like you said, some people are, you know, in these patterns and they're not in pain. Do you think they're really, it's just like a matter of time or some people will never experience that? I think it depends on the person. I think that some people take really good care of themselves. from other levels of health. And if you're eating in a way, I was talking about this yesterday, too, with Sarah. I did the podcast with her.

I know two people in my mind that got their premolar's removed. And usually premolar removal for me is like, oh, we have to go probably see a dentist and get you an appliance. But these two people have taken such good care of their bodies for the last 20 years. And because they've taken such good care of their bodies, they have no problems. And I think that it's person specific. I think the majority of people that are in a pattern that have done other things like dental work, eyes, whatever, they're going to have some problems if they've not taken the best care of their bodies. But like the people I'm thinking about really, they ground themselves in so many other ways that doesn't impact them.

Yeah. But I think there are some things that you have a way harder time like dealing with. Your brain can't handle the loss of sense of all those teeth being removed. it's very hard and as the people get older they really struggle with it. So that's, yeah, I think it's person specific, but. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like maybe just one more thing before we move up to dental and visual

is just that I think a lot of people are used to having such a low baseline of like energy and vitality that you don't even know what you're missing out on by not being able to experience your body to its fullest potential. Yeah, that's true. I mean, I can relate to that because I was living in New York. and I didn't even know my levels of stress. This was years ago. And then I moved to Texas.

And I was like, wow, my levels of stress, my baseline levels of stress were so extremely high that I didn't even know I was stressed. Like that was just my norm. And that was my lifestyle. And I moved and I experienced going outside every single day. I was on walks every single day. And just I didn't even know that I was doing light biology to myself. But I would go outside for two hours every single day. It just felt so good.

Yeah. Looking at the blue sky, just all these stressors of my lifestyle back then, I didn't know until I got myself out of that environment. And I don't, most people don't want to hear that. A lot of people don't want to hear that. Yeah, it's definitely the rub. Yeah, like my toughest patience, it's not about what techniques you're doing. It's about what is your day to day. What is your lifestyle?

What are you doing? What are you thinking? Mm-hmm. I mean, that's why to bring in astrology very briefly, like the House of Health is your ruled by Virgo and that Virgo is really about what your habits are, what you're doing every day, like just habitually and what's part of your routine because there is this acknowledgement by our ancestors that whatever you do most often is what's going to dictate your health. So if you're engaging in patterns and behaviors that are breaking you down over time, you're going to run into

issues versus developing healthy patterns and habits that are actually supportive to your body, then you're setting yourself up for health in the future. So it's not about the thing that you do every once in a while for your health. It's really about what you're doing every single day over and over again. And the breath is one of the main things. We're breathing however many times a day, I'm sure you know roughly. 25,000. Right. So if you're not getting that right at a very fundamental level, things are just starting off at a wrong foot. A hundred percent. It's, it's key. It's not. It's deep. Yeah. I love the astrology component. Yeah, it's great. And also on that, no, you mentioned something about people never really fully exhaling. And I feel like that was a

major takeaway I had from PRI is just that like so many people are breathing shallow. and so frequently. And when you fully exhale, like, I mean, first of all, you can just feel your whole core tighten up. It's turning on all those inner deep inner abdominal muscles. But then you can feel this sense of threat that comes on by holding a held exhale at first, but the more you practice it, the less scary it feels for your brain. And you're actually dramatically improving your athletic performance by practicing that, too,

because now your CO2 tolerance is building, which means that you can tolerate more anaerobic activity. If you're a sprinter or weightlifter or any sort of athlete, really, you can benefit tremendously from that practice. So it's not only about being in pain, it's also a major performance boost for completing these. I mean, look at free divers. Free divers of extremely long lives. What do they do for their entire life? They exhale. Have you read the book, Breath? Yes, I actually interviewed James Nestor recently. Yeah. Oh yeah, I know. I knew that. Yeah, you should do that for the book club. It's an amazing, amazing book. And he's, he looked at free divers and their longevity is unbelievable. And they

literally exhale for a living because and then they pause and they sit in that parasympathetic state and they're able to hold it for an insane brilliant amount of time and it makes sense why their longevity. This is why mouth breathing is so problematic and this is like a huge thing in today's society. Yes.

Huge. For many reasons and that also ties in with the dental piece which we can get you in a moment but I'm just thinking to put a little bit of a bow on that you mentioned like the parasympathetic activity when you're fully exhaled that is like the parasympathetic when you're inhaling that is the sympathetic. So many people are just like inhaling, hyperinflated.

Exactly. Yeah. And so just I mean, just if you do nothing else, maybe just try doing a full exhale and just holding it. See how long you can hold it. And then do it every so often, see how much you can improve it over time. It's like a short little exercise that can actually give you, like pay you back in dividends. Yeah. It's actually

it'll change your life. Yeah. That and breathing through your nose are like the two low hanging fruit in my world. obviously going outside and being in the light and all that too, but breathe through your nose and learn how to fully exhale and just that, half your pain might decrease. And that's the key takeaway from this episode. Yeah, because when your CO2 tolerance is poor and you're hyperinflated also, you can increase

your, well, you decrease your pain tolerance. You can be more sensitive to pain. So that could also, you know, sensitize neurons. So maybe your, you know, like you said, your pain can decrease. Your athletic importance can increase. One thing I noticed, like within six weeks of doing my PRI exercises, is my back squat went from like 185 by 6 to 225 by 8, literally in less than two months.

Because you were able to pressurize your core. Exactly. Like you're able to actually properly pressurize your internal system, and yeah, performance is going to increase. And I went from doing a normal back squat to a Hatfield squat, which is so much better. Yeah. So great.

It's so much better. Like, why would you want to get stuck in an extension position and then try to go down into a squat? It's just a bad idea. It's so funny because I trained as a weightlifter for years, and then now I've created. I cringe thinking about it. I'm proud of my accomplishments with it,

but I'm like, oh my goodness, like I would never do that again. Just because I know positionally how detrimental it is from even a brain perspective. And I look at every weight lifter I ever trained with and almost all of them have like issues with anxiety, eating disorders. Like there's issues in it.

And same with gymnastics, to be honest. It's a positional problem that creates internal stress and strain to the nervous system. And then we see it. We see long-term. issues. Gymnists that are struggling with chronic pain their entire life, but it's not just pain. It's a nervous system regulation problem. That's the big thing that I treat on a daily basis is, yeah, you might have back pain or you might be coming to me. I had a patient called me yesterday

for dysottonomia. These are nervous system dysregulatory issues. Your brain cannot process what is going on because your body is in such a state of fight or flight. Exactly. And also if you're doing like, let's say, weightlifting under heavy weight, there's a ton of like, sensory information coming in. There's a huge amount of threat. Yeah. Under fluorescent lights on top of that. So it's just like a perfect storm for issues and injuries and long-term, you know, nervous system issues. Yeah, it's funny to me that we use gyms to get healthy. Like that... There would be a great way to do it. Like, I'm really dying to open up like a franchise of gyms that are all... Outdoor. Yeah. With wooden blocks. Yeah. There's so much you can do with it.

Could be grounded, natural light, skylights, like you can open up the roof, like, or at least get full spectrum lights when it's night time. If people are going to go in there, you. You can have red light. Like, there's so much that we can do. You can use a barbell, but you need to know what you're doing. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Totally. Totally.

So I think that's definitely in the future something. I've already consulted, like, with quite a few gym owners to help them, like, build out their own facilities in a way that's aligned and work with their professional athletes in a way that's aligned. And so I think there's an immense potential there to help prevent injury recovery. No one's doing this. This is a niche thing. Yeah.

No one's talking about it. Instead, we have people going to Equinox, spending a ton of money in Equinox for what? You've got to towels. Right. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know, like the light environment sucks. It's horrible.

Grounding. Like, it's just. You're shaking because the music is so loud, you can feel the floor vibrate. The, I mean, they're constantly spraying like chlorox and stuff on the windows. The cleaning is, you know, significant. Yeah, there's a lot of, a lot of issues. With most gyms, I'm just picking on equinox because I used to work there. Yeah, I'd never actually set foot in an equinox, but we used to be members at lifetime.

But then I was like, we have most of our equipment here. Like, you don't need it. I don't need to go there. Yeah, exactly. And honestly, less is more when it comes to working out. Totally. If you decrease the weight and increase the time under tension, you're going to feel it. And it's going to be, the workout you're going to get is going to be way more significant for your long-term health than if you're just going to the gym and pounding weights.

Absolutely. Like higher volume training, I think, is really, I mean, literature pans out as well. It's like you just get as good results and now you're stressing your central nervous system less. Your recovery is better and you can actually move more weight per week. Yeah, I don't ever focus now on how much I lift ever. And I just lift when I feel like it. Yeah. And that took me a long time.

I bet. I mean, since you're like pedal to the metal for so long. Yeah. But at least now you have that healthy baseline of muscle. Yeah. That's how I feel. I don't lift. I lift maybe like one or two days a week.

Yeah, that's how I am. Yeah. I'm not like obsessive about it. No. You can't be. Yeah. It's not a healthy lifestyle. Yeah.

And you can get a really like killer workout in with just a few dumbbells and like your body weight. Like you get a great workout in. Yeah. Oh yeah. And you've done Loa. Yeah, yeah. That was great. Lauren's program is really wonderful. She's great. The integration of PRI with fitness is amazing because it's like, it just helps to like anchor things in as well and just a good synergy. Yeah. No, I agree 100%. Yeah. That's so cool. Yeah. So you mentioned mouth breathing earlier. I'm thinking from like a dental health perspective, there's a huge play there because saliva helps to coat the teeth and like an alkaline solution with minerals, helps to remineralize the teeth, prevent cavities, tooth loss, root canals, things.

like that but obviously also is changing the shape of your face when you're doing a ton of mouth breathing which then messes with the jaw and I'm sure there's a whole bunch of knock-on effects but maybe we can start talking about the dental integration piece a little bit yeah and then move up to vision no problem that sounds great so what you just said about mouth breathing is really important like most mouth breathers have a significant amount of cavities and you know they know they do and they know that it could be problematic they just don't know necessarily how to change the pattern so people that tend to mouth breathe are usually

asthmatic kids and they maybe had some issues growing up with breathing and so they just started to breathe through their mouth and then they never stopped and then other kids that maybe have had an allergy attack or they had some sort of sickness when they were a child and then they just started one day breathing through their mouth and they never went back it can happen in adulthood it's less common but it can definitely happen to adults um your mouth is your secondary breathing source. You're not supposed to naturally breathe through your mouth unless you are dying for air, like running, sprinting because you're getting away from something chasing you. That's why we have that pattern, the secondary source. We need it for those sort of sympathetic events. But on a daily basis,

we should always be breathing through our nose. Our tongue should be on the roof of our mouth. And that's essentially how we're built. We're built to filter air through our nose so that we're not getting the particles in the air that are harmful. We're just getting the actual. We're just getting the actual. quality of the air, even though most of our air today, unfortunately, can be harmful. We need to just filter that out and inside with filters. Also, when the air goes past the hairs in the nose, it stimulates the production of nitric oxide, which is phase of dilation, nutrient auction delivery to tissues, and waste removal from tissues, and blood pressure regulation.

Huge. A huge metabolic component there. Yeah, giant. And if you're not stimulating all that, then you're just bypassing the true source, which is getting it through your nose. You're going straight through your mouth. yeah, you're breathing, sure, but very suboptimally. So that's, you know, metabolically what you just said is really powerful.

From a structural standpoint, we're going to find a much longer face. We're not going to see so much forward maxillary growth. And you will only get that maxillary growth in children growing. Once you reach like 12, 13 years old, that forward growth is done. That's just, it's not going to be developing. So we need to make sure that we can get that forward growth and How we're going to get that is tongue position. Tongue needs to rest on the roof of the mouth.

Tongue needs to be there all the time. Mouth breathers tend to have a tongue that's going to just dive to the bottom of their mouth. It's going to be a lower tongue posture. They're not going to be ever getting the proper force distribution on the palate to help the palate grow. So we want the palate to grow out and forward. And when somebody's a mouth breather, we're just, we're not seeing that because of the tongue position. So that long face is going to contribute to a lot of long-term dental issues. I just was thinking this people say like why the long face.

Uh-huh. That's funny. Mouth breathing is like an old insult that you would say mouth breather. Did you remember, hey Arnold? Yeah, of course. We watch it all the time. I always think about that guy like I want to do a meme about him. Do it.

Please do it. I will. I'll do it. I'll do it. But like that guy, they called him mouth breather, didn't they? Yes. It was a huge insult because it was not, you're not as attractive if you're a mouth breather. That's the insult.

Yeah. That's the bottom line of that insult. So there's a reason for it because a long face is not as attractive as a fuller, wider, nice palette, you know, a really wide palette face. You're just, it's a different, it's a different look. It's probably signaling that there's health issues and this person don't mate with that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I truly think that. So, and mouth breathers are going to have more health issues. They're not going to be able to filter the air out. They're going to have health issues from a dental perspective because their palates are going to be more narrow. So they're more likely to have dentists and orthodox. to say, hey, you have a really narrow palate. We want to pull out your premillars. We need to take out your wisdom teeth. And the problem when it comes to taking out teeth is, of course, every tooth is connected to an organ through a meridian.

So there's that, which people are always confused about and don't see how the acupuncture that Chinese medicine really matters. But when you have teeth that are connected to organs, we're going to see if those teeth are pulled, more disruption in those organs. And that's been very true in my practice, seeing people with premolars taken and different their health issues long term. So there's that. And then there's also the component of when you take out teeth,

you are disrupting the sense of the signals that the brain is getting. Because when your teeth touch, which is called your occlusion. So one, your top tooth has to touch your bottom tooth. And if they don't touch, they're going to move to find a way to touch. So when we take out one tooth, let's say we take out one tooth, that bottom tooth is actually going to go down to try and meet whatever tooth is not there. So we're going to have shifting of teeth. If we take out all four premolars, now we have a mouth that just became a lot smaller.

And so we already have a small mouth. Now it became a lot smaller. Now the brain signals of that dental occlusion are off. And then we have different asymmetries in the dental occlusion that can be problematic. But just talking about the premolars, it can be very, very hard to come back from that. And people don't realize it because they get them taking out at 13, 14 years old. They have problems when they're 35 years old. They don't realize that their neck pain that they've had.

you know, herniations in their neck could be very related. I mean, maybe if it's neck pain, they'll think that there's a relationship, but if it's back pain, they're not going to think about it. And then they come into my office and I asked, you know, that's a question on my forearm, premolar removal. So I don't want people to feel hopeless if they've had premolar removal or other issues like implants. But what we end up doing is we end up utilizing the techniques. We see if that works for people. We do very specific cranial cervical techniques. Craneosacral therapy could be helpful. And then if that person is not making any progress, that's when I'll reach out to the dentist. And I work with a few dentists in Manhattan right now that will make a dental appliance that is a

flat plane splint. And the idea of this flat plane is that it's flat and that it's essentially signaling to your brain to erase whatever bite you have. So if you have a bite that's really off, we're going to give you a more even keeled bite. And we're going to, disrupt your current signals and give you a more even signal every single night when you go to sleep. So it's not something that people wear 24-7. It's something that people wear to sleep. And it clips in and it's on the bottom jaw. It's not on the top jaw. And the reason for that is because the periodontal ligament, we need that connection. And when we put the jaw, when we put the dental appliance on the top jaw, it disrupts the connection of how that periodontal ligament senses. So the

brain doesn't get the proper connection. However, most dentists see. make these night guards for the top jaw for the maxilla. So it's really hard to now tell a dentist, hey, we want this for this. We want all these specifications. And then essentially what I do is I go with the patient to the appointment. They get the guard and we adjust it with them standing. And that is a key, key, key factor because you are coming to me for pain. Yeah, we're getting you the appliance for your teeth.

But it's not really for your teeth. It's for your body to get neutral. And so if we want that body to be neutral, I need to. to organize that person standing because how they walk and how they move in space is going to reflect if they're able to get neutral or not. So that dental appliance can be really powerful in someone's healing. And I've worked with a few dentists. I've worked with some biological dentists to try and make guards that are more biocompatible because I really don't want to be using acrylic if I don't have to. But at the same time, some people, they don't care what the guard is.

They just want to feel better. And if I have a dentist that makes an acrylic guard, that does a good job, then I use them. But I'm currently starting to work with some other dentists to, you know, find who works really well with me. Just I have, I've worked with a bunch. So I've worked with dentists in Texas. I had people call me and get me on the phone with their dentist when they live in Colorado. And I will do it, but I'm at the point where I just really want to work with people who

understand what we're doing here because it is a very different approach. It's very different than what people learn in dental school. and it's a hard thing for most dentists to grasp because it's not really dentistry. I have one dentist I work with. I love her. She'll be like, I don't know what this is or this isn't dentistry. She's like a Russian woman. She's so funny when she says that because she's very true.

It's not what they learn in school. We're not changing the teeth, but we're giving the brain a different stimulus. We're changing that, like essentially feedback to the brain and we're changing that neurological response that the person has in their system to help rewire their nervous system. talk about neuroplasticity. That's what we're doing. And that guard can be permanent, or not permanent, like long term. Not permanent. It's always temporary.

Okay. Or it can be short term. So it's dependent. I mean, for me, I wear one to sleep. It's helped me. I still wear it to sleep. I've worn it for three years. Do I need it forever?

Probably not. If I go a couple days without it, I'm fine. But some people, people who have had premolars pulled, people, if they have a crossbite, if they have a major can't. So it can't is when one side of the bite is much higher than the other side of So essentially one molar is hitting first than the other molars. The teeth are just super off. That happens when there's a lot of asymmetry in the cranium.

A crossbite is when the bottom side of the teeth, like the bottom jaw is coming in front of the top jaw, essentially, on one side or on both sides. So you're seeing usually like a canine coming sticking in front of the top canine. And sometimes they're easy to spot. Sometimes they're not. Sometimes they're in the back post-tier cross-bite versus an anterior. and those can be very, very hard because they'll, they, however your teeth are hitting every single day is giving your brain that feedback of where you should be in space.

So that, and then you get the visual system, which is going to be influenced by what your bite is doing. So it can get, this stuff can get very, very complicated and very, very individualized. So. And is it bi-directional as well? Can your vision stuff affect your bite and teeth or only the other direction? It's more that your dental impacts your vision. I almost always see visual.

complaints or visual issues when there's a major dental occlusion problem. I don't always see that the visual system impacts the dental, but we do see crossover. But I will send people directly to vision, and they might not have any dental problems, and they might just get better with that. Got it. Is that basically based off of like a history report where you see what kind of work they've had done, go from there? History, pain complaints, but history, my history is huge.

I have to know every single thing that's happened to that person. Like we were talking about earlier, like you need to know. what that person is doing every minute of their day. And he mentioned that. He's right. Because I need to know. I need to also know what is your history. What happened to you as a kid?

I mean, trauma, of course, I do dive into, but also like, what happened to you dentally? Did you have full mouth restoration five years ago? Because that's going to really impact. Did you have a cavity that was, did you have an amalgam removal taken out and they took it out poorly? These things are going to really impact the entire way of your cranium, essentially. Yeah.

And also with regards to like the mouth breathing piece, there's like a huge impact of the bore effect there where basically you're changing the ratio of oxygen to carbon dioxide in the bloodstream. If you're breathing through your mouth versus your nose, that basically makes oxygen availability go down. Even though you've got plenty of oxygen, the pH is too high to dissociate the oxygen from hemoglobin, which means that you're basically going to feel like you're out of breath and have pseudo hypoxias like Uncle Jack would say in your tissues because the oxygen's not available because the pH is too high. the way that you get the pH lower is to increase the CO2 in the ratio. And that's why people, when they're having panic attacks, they bring to a bag. Exactly. To get more CO2 to lower the pH that then allows the oxygen to get into the tissues. And so just nasal breathing is really, really helpful in that context as well.

Also, PRI, the full exhale is the same thing as breathing into a bag. It's doing the exact same metabolic effect in your body when you learn how to fully exhale. But then the idea is that you learn that and you can transfer into your daily life without consciously thinking about it. now you've worked on that breathing you have that integrity in your core and your pelvis and your rib cage you don't have to think about it you just naturally know how to do it that's the goal exactly so it becomes reflexive your natural naturally breathing into a paper breath that's it yeah exactly and so yeah i think that's kind of the goal is almost with everything anything that you learn at least it's like you're making something into your bringing something into your conscious awareness and then it becomes

you know it's i don't remember the exact line up it's like consciously incompetent consciously competent, unconsciously competent. Like basically, this is motor learning. This is like motor learning. Yeah, exactly. So it goes into the background and now it's just running by itself. And it just naturally occurs. And that's the goal.

And that's the same with the dental stuff. So we wear this appliance at night. I give it to my patient. They'll wear it at night. And then after a few weeks, they'll be like, oh, my pain is gone. Like, I don't feel it during the day. And is it because the appliance is resetting them every night? And then maybe they stop wearing that appliance and they still feel better.

That's the same components there. So that's, um, that's, why it works. That's why it holds long term. It becomes subconscious. Anything that works I've noticed is subconscious work. Like even therapy, and you could talk to Elise about this all day, but the real true work with emotional work with people is when they're able to make changes subconsciously. The same with my work. Because you can do exercises all day long. And most chiropractic and PT care in America is conscious work. But it is not transferring over into the subconscious. And that's why it doesn't work.

Yep. Or maybe it does for six months and then you have another injury pop up. Yep. Well, the brain has to deem the new pattern to be safe and efficient. And has to like use it and rewire towards it. So it's also a very big issue of repetition too. It's not going to happen overnight. You need the repetition in order to actually lay the like the groundwork for it. And then if it's deemed safe and efficient, then it can be chosen. Exactly. Yeah. It's and that's the power of healing.

Mm-hmm. Really. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Totally. So you mentioned about vision related to dental. Let's maybe talk about vision broadly and then talk a little bit about cataracts and LASIC, which are two areas that I get a ton of questions about from like the light biology standpoint. But let's get into it. And I'll time as well. Biology standpoint. We're going to get into it.

I'm excited. So talk about vision in the first place. Your eyes need to work together. You have two eyes. They have to work together. They have to take one picture, one picture, merge them. And your brain has to understand that picture and know what to do with that information. And the problem is a lot of ophthalmologists and optometrists are really not looking at the binocularity of our eyes, which means are the eyes working well together?

They're just looking, hey, let's patch this eye, see how well this eye sees, let's look at the other eye, how well does that eye see? That's acuity. And during that time, they usually have you sitting with your neck, you've got it forward. Yep. Alexis is on it. No, it's true. So they're looking at only acuity, and they're looking at it in a position where your body might be actually all. altering the testing. And what you are doing during that exam is really, really important

because it's going to reflect in that exam. So if you, we were talking earlier about if you have a stressed out day, you're on a computer all day, and then you go get your eyes tested. That's really not a great idea. Because your eye testing is going to reflect what you just did earlier that day if you were on screens all day long. You're going to have, most likely, need a higher power than if you were outside in nature all morning and then you went and got your eyes tested. But a big issue is really that ophthalmologists especially, optomologists who mainly look at eye disease when they do what we call refractions, which is what you just mentioned, where you're sitting in the chair and they put the thing in front of your face, the fropter, and they're saying,

is one better, is two better? Ophthalmologists typically will look at acuity. So they're only looking at how well you see. Optometrists are a bit better. I work with behavioral or developmental optometrists. They have two names for them. There is a website called OVDR. and N-O-R-A, N-O-R-A, N-O-R-A, and O-V-D-R-A, and you can find developmental optometrists through that website that do look at binocularity. They have way more testing. They have way more research behind what they're doing.

They do vision therapy. They try to teach people how to get the eyes to work better together. Now, there is an order of operations to this, because we just talked about the foot, the rib cage, the pelvis, all before we got to the eyes. And that's because it really is on one of the last steps of things, unless I see modern medicine that has disrupted my algorithm type order. But most of the time people need to start at the feet.

They need to start at the pelvis. They need to get their body in a better position so that when they go and do this exam, they're not sitting there very extended. But we do have this problem of only looking at acuity, not looking at how well the eyes merge images together. And then also what we're doing during that exam, if there's, you know, they'll say lean forward, put your head in this thing. and you're sitting.

We're not meant to use our eyes seated. We're meant to use our eyes in an outdoor external environment. We're sitting under fluorescent lighting. They usually shut the lights off for the exam. So now you're pinpointing yourself to look at one small image on a screen. Your peripheral is off too, right? Your peripheral is off because the fropiter is there. So it's really not taking into account how your visual system works on a daily basis.

Your visual system works when you go on a walk and you have things passing by. It's called optic flow. things are passing by your peripheral and you're looking out in space. And another thing here is that we work in a single distance. So we can look up close and we see what's up close and we look far and we see what's far away. But a lot of times right now we're seeing a lot of multifocal corrections. We're seeing a lot. We don't see as much anymore of monovision.

Multifocal is when there's like a progressive. They have more than one correction in a lens. So they'll do it into a contact. They'll do it on cataracts. They'll do it in glasses. So we're not meant. our brain will get very confused with this information because we're not meant to see in three different types of planes.

It seems so wrong. It seems very wrong. What's the justification for doing that? Convenience. What? I feel like it would make me so nauseous to have that. So some people do get really nauseous. And I think that's amazing that the brain signals to that person.

Hey, don't do this. It's not good for you because it's essentially not healthy. Some people do need it like on a computer screen. If they want to look at their phone and their dashboard driving, I'm fine. with a progressive if it's used driving. I'm not fine if you're wearing a progressive and you're walking through space. You're going down steps and you have at the lower part of your lens

a plus prescription and the upper part of your lens a minus prescription. It's extremely confusing to the brain. And we see falls happen, I think it's like 80% more in older individuals. And that's, I truly attribute it to the visual system because think of how many older people are corrected.

Whether they have cataracts or whether they're wearing glasses, they're in a correction. So for convenience we do a lot of things I think in society and so that's that's a big component is the progressives and there's another type of lens called mono vision if you think you get nauseous from progressives you'll get super nauseous from mono vision monovision is when one eye is corrected to see far away yeah one eye corrected to see up close and it is ultra confusing for the brain it was more of an old school thing but it still happens yeah I still have patience

They're usually older in their 60s, but I have a 30-year-old right now with Monovision correction. And it's like they usually have ankle instability problems. They do it. Optomologists do it. Yeah, they do it. Is it because one eye near side and other far side is? So your right eye, I think, is better for distance and your left eye is a little better

up close. But that doesn't mean... It's really funny to say that because whenever I don't have my context in, I'm looking at my phone, I always close my right eye and the middle eye. Me too. That's... I do that too. That's really funny.

That's funny. That's really fun. I do it too right in the morning if I look at my phone and I'm like here. But I also like, yeah, my eyes are opposite of what is technically normal, which is weird. But yeah, I think they do this correction and it's extremely detrimental. I have never seen. That's like on my list of you're immediately going to an eye doctor. Like whether you're just getting out of your prescription, that's the first thing. I'm like, you just need single distance vision.

That's what you need. So it's really problematic because those people are suffering, actually. They have shoulder replacements, hip replacements. They have a lot of problems. I remember I said, actually, a woman on a plane once, and she just started talking to me, and she was telling me how she has to have another surgery. And then I was like, what are you wearing on your eyes? Just curious.

And she was like, oh, this one's for far. And I was like, that's your problem. And she was like, no way. And I was like, this was free. You were probably meant to this. I know. And she was like, I'm going to go get out of these glasses. And she, I remember she, she emailed me.

And she was like, because they gave her my card. And she was like, I got out of them. I feel so much better. But MonoVision is actually very easy because they come in. I know exactly what's wrong with that. Right. That's true. Like it's a very easy situation versus somebody who has nothing in their history.

Yeah. Then I have to figure out what's in their history that they didn't, they're missing. So yeah. So MonoVision is pretty wild and it's not as common, but it's still a thing. And it's good to educate about in case somebody here, you know, know someone or has it themselves. But yeah, the visual. system is wildly important to orient yourself in space. Where you are in space is going to depend on how your teeth touch your eyes, how they understand your spatial awareness, and how all of

these signals come in and work together. Mm-hmm. That makes sense. I mean, the eyes are technically part of the brain. They're literally squished out brain tissue. Absolutely. It's pretty wild. So when you think about all the postural and biomechanical stuff, I mean, it's a brain issue or, you know, it's controlled by the brain. So yeah. It's why the mainstream medium posture drives me crazy like shoulders down and back just do this exercise it's like it's it's a brain problem like you're not in this hunch position for any other reason then you need to breathe and your brain is just trying to get you to breathe better yeah and i mean when you're doing the shoulders back and down stand up straight then you're shutting off all your breathing through your through your back yeah you're

not getting maybe you want to talk about that a little bit on some of the exercises you're looking for expansion through the back yeah show that you're breathing correctly yeah 360 degrees yeah your lungs like actually live up into your chest wall and into your back and And like all this demonization of not breathing into the chest is wild to me because we need expansion up here. And that doesn't mean that we need our neck to pull upwards. We just need like 360 expansion up into our chest, into our upper back, our posterior amygdicidum. Vegas nerve lies right in between your shoulder blades over there. And so when you're getting that breath there, you're actually stimulating the vagus nerve

and you're stimulating your parasympathetic nervous system to pick up some speed and shut down your sympathetics. So that's why breathing is so powerful. Even if you're just in a yoga class doing breathing, it's still very powerful for people. Now add a positional component and, wow, you can make a world of a difference for somebody. Do you want to dispel belly breathing real quick? Yeah, belly breathing. Belly breathing is going to force you forward even more. So when you're only ever, first of all, your lungs don't live in your belly.

That's number one. They literally live up into your chest. They come down into your rib cage. That's why you have the ribs. They're protecting your lungs, essentially. your belly can rise ever so slightly when you breathe. That's fine. That's normal. But when I'm seeing these people that have massive belly shifts and no ability to move air anywhere else,

I know that there's a lot of problems happening here. I know that this person has been taught faulty breathing, has practiced faulty breathing, and their whole center of mass is forward. Because when you breathe only into your belly, your rib cage has to actually elevate into extension. Your pelvis has to dump forward because the air is going forward instead of ever having, some pressurization. So when you learn to breathe into your chest, you can actually pressurize you. Your belly will still expand ever so slightly, but your lung tissue is getting the movement.

They say the upper third part of the lungs is the most limited to get air into, which is literally right up here. Yeah. And that also has the highest density of alveoli, too. So you get better. So it's the most important. Yeah. It's the most important place. Right. Even just teaching somebody one technique can be the world of a difference for them just to get air back there. Yeah. And getting the rib cage into that internally rotated position instead of lifting upwards is going to change your whole center of mass. Mm-hmm. So, and you can't force it. You have to do it through the breath. You have to breathe your way into these positions. Yeah. That's why this posture stuff, you know, on the internet drives me bonkers because it's all forceful exercises and it's not actually making significant change.

Totally. And as it relates to like some issues that maybe people wouldn't even realize or related to like the breath, including. acid reflux and constipation, which are two really common ones, because if you're not getting that pressurization, as you talked about, you're not actually getting to massage your internal organs with every inhale, and that's going to help with peristolsis, pumping lymph, for example. Yeah, lymph huge. Yeah. And if that diaphragm isn't working properly, if it's overly stretched because you've got a flared rib cage and you're stuck in this position, then you're not going to get proper closure

of the esophageal sphincter that travels through the diaphragm into the stomach, which can cause you to be burping up acid and food post meals. So a lot of people, you know, they'll be put on PPI's by a doctor. Meanwhile, they just need to learn how to breathe. I've had some people get off their PPI from just PRI. Multiple people. Yeah, I've seen that multiple times. Breathwork.

Yeah. Positional breathwork, along with the proper modalities, if necessary, if they need in dental appliance, et cetera. Yeah. I always laugh because whenever I mention, I try to not, whenever I'm introducing PRI to people, like clients and they have no idea what it is, I always like describe it in a certain way that doesn't say the word breathwork. because people will be like, oh, breath, I've done that. Didn't work for me.

I'm like, oh, my God. People, you can't, it's like, you say positional breathing. Yes, that's good. Sometimes that's better. That's good. Because it's like different position. But still, people hear breath and they're like, oh, woo-woo. I'm like, just because there's breathing involved doesn't mean it's woo-woo.

Also, a little woo-woo is good for everybody. It is. I feel like everybody thinks breathwork is like either like Wimhoff breathing. I know. Like belly breathing. I know. And I think there's some positives to the other breathwork out there on the market. Like I think for different reasons.

For different. reasons, not for this. Yeah. For what we're doing here is we're re-teaching the brain, complete neural plasticity over new patterns, new awareness, new sensory tools. And in that, we're changing the center of mass of the person, just restructuring their nervous system. Mm-hmm.

And when you shorten those abdominal muscles by learning to breathe right, you also get better abdominal definition. You look more ripped in tone. So it's like, and you get better orgasms. You can hold your pee in. You poop better. It's like, who wouldn't want all this? It's all good stuff.

All good. Circle back to the eyes. LASIC. Let's talk about it because it's two areas that I think a lot of people have questions about. Yeah, this is a great thing to do this with you because, like, you have such information about all these topics. It's so fun to actually talk about this stuff with you. So LASIC, from a PRI perspective, you'll talk about all the light biology stuff, but from a PRI perspective, here's what we see. We typically see people that are overcorrected in the first place.

So many people come into my clinic. They're wearing the wrong prescription because of what we mentioned before, being forward in that head coming forward, loss of periphery, having to focus on this object in their distance 20 feet away. And so they're getting overcorrected for years. You have to have, I think, five years of the prescription being the same before you're able to do LASIC. And so here's what we see. We see people that have actual binocular vision dysfunction that are not tested that get LASIC and they have serious complications. Serious, serious, serious. There was a Fox News anchor. Do you know the story? Yeah, and she killed herself. Yeah, she, she, she killed herself. She committed suicide.

There's a bunch of support. It's a bunch of support. Yes. And this is because most people have like a visual dysfunction that went underlying because the testing for LASIC is not invasive enough. They don't do significant testing. They're not doing the testing that my optometrists do. They just check how well do you see. They dilate your eyes. Okay, let's do LASIC. So there's not really enough precursor activity before we go and do this. Life-altering procedure. Life-altering procedure. Like you're changing the shape of your cornea.

Like, it's wild to me, especially now the education I have on it. It's wild. But it's all done for convenience. So people don't want to wear glasses. They think that LASIC is their only way to do that. Maybe for some people it is. Maybe for some people it isn't. Some people get LASIC and are completely fine.

My best friend had LASIC when we were 19 or 20. She was in medical school. Maybe we were a little older. maybe 22. And she was totally fine. And she even says today it's one of the best things she ever done for herself. You know what? Like I'm grateful that she's fine and I'm so happy that that was not her story. But I see people in the clinic that are really suffering. So there are people that are completely fine. On Google it says 1% of people are suffering. That's nonsense. It's like reporting. It's like theirs. Yeah. It's all exactly. Exactly.

People may have other issues. They don't attribute it to their eyes. That's the other thing. They have no clue. So unless you have actual visual issues, post-Lasic eye surgery, why are you going to report it? Of course. So we see that the visual issues, straight up visual complaints are things like halos, night glares. People will have a lot, a lot of dry eyes. That's the number one complaint.

Chronic dry eyes, because they're cutting, they're severing the corneal nerve. When you sever the corneal nerve, you're decreasing tear production to the eye. Every single LASIC or PRK surgery, PRK is slightly different, but I'm pretty sure they also, it has the same sort of variables

that happen afterwards. So you're automatically signing yourself up for dry eyes. Whether you feel those dry eyes or not, that's a different case. There are things you can do for dry eyes. There's something called a brooder mask. And I don't love that one because you have to microwave it. And so, like, I have it, but I can't use it. I literally don't have a microwave in my house anymore.

So there's another mask online that's like just heat. And you plug it into an electrical outlet and you get automatic heat coming to your eye. And you kind of press it into your eye and it will stimulate to your production. And so that's really a powerful thing for people who are struggling with just in general dry eyes or from post-Lasic. Maybe go cut some onions. Yeah, right? I mean, that's a great idea. Probably work.

It would definitely work. It'll sting, but it'll work. But yeah, so those are like visual complaints. And then, yeah, people that have actual binocular dysfunction that get LASIC, they will have double vision. They will have their entire worldview will be off. And that's why that news anchor killed herself because her. entire world was off. She was not herself post-Lasic and I think she killed herself like a month after and it was attributed directly to the eye surgery and it's very, very sad. I've had two patients come in

that have been suicidal post-Lasic because of the complications they had because they were, they both had visual dysfunction, actual dysfunction that was underlying that was, you know, not looked at. So that's much more rare, but it does happen. There are support groups like you mentioned. From a PRI like body movement asymmetry perspective, what we see is that because we're overcorrected and because when we're getting that eye prescription, we're usually dominant over one side of our body. We were never put into a neutral place first. The prescription is going to most likely be off and that prescription is going to pull us more into our pattern, whether it's a more extension pattern or it's a more asymmetrical pattern. We're going to find that that LASIC eye surgery will keep us locked up. And so what

I'll see with people is I'll do sessions with them three, four, five sessions, and they're not making changes. And that's because that LASIC is really overriding everything I'm doing. So until I get them a new prescription, I'm going to be stuck fighting with their eyes. And then what we'll typically do with a new prescription, they'll have to get glasses, which is literally the reason they got LASIC in the first place. So it's heartbreaking to tell somebody that, hey, you have to get glasses now, but they'll have to get glasses and usually it'll be a different prescription that maybe has some stigmatism correction or plus so if they got corrected for distance they're now going to have a plus correction where it's going to change how they understand space and it's going to lighten up that

distance prescription to go in the other direction of plus fear got it yeah and i mean from a light perspective the cornea has a ton of a couple different photoreceptors Neuroposin and melanopsin, the UVA light detector and the blue light detector. That helps to anchor in the circadian rhythm locally within the tissue, but likely has propagating effects into the brain even. So, I mean, we can think about if we're shaving the cornea, we're reducing the total concentration, like a total amount of these receptors available. So now the light signaling that's getting into your eye and into your brain is

distorted. It's different. And so, I mean, typically what I tell people already had LASIC is like they just need, they they should prioritize getting more light in general just to compensate for the lack of, like, the loss of these receptors. But I think, you know, in combination with the type of work that you're doing, it's a really, really good synergy. And I think we can't really, we kind of need to do both in order to set them up and have health

in the long term. Yeah. And some of these people will come in with chronic pain. And it's like, oh, it's start, like, I'll line it up. And it'll be like, oh, we had LASIC on June, 23. And then, like, September, 2023 is when your pain, your hip pain was excruciating. And you couldn't, because you couldn't get out of it. because before LASIC, if you took your glasses off, then your body could get to neutral.

Yeah. And you take your glasses off for maybe a few hours a day. Even if it was a wrong prescription, you're allowing your body to still have that oscillation. Now that is 24-7 on you. Yes. So it's something to really consider before ever doing, I mean, I'll think most people that do it that have pain regret it, unfortunately. But there are things you can do. So, you know, seeing a provider that has understanding in this field is, is, is,

really something you have to do and people will travel when they've had LASIC because those people are quite desperate if they're in pain. So those are... One thing I was thinking with the glass, is there an issue with wearing glasses and like peripheral vision? Sometimes glasses actually helps with peripheral vision because the box around your eye allows your brain to sense two hemispheres. You have one eye and the other eye.

And so for some people it actually does significantly help. So glasses shape is then important in some people? Shape and color of the frame. So the Institute really recommends a... A dark rim frame. I think that the people, I used to wear clear frames. So it's kind of funny to me because my brain, I just wanted those frames for a reason. I didn't want to know the two hemispheres.

I don't like black rim frames myself. They drive me crazy. I hate seeing the frame. Yeah. So I think it's a person specific. I'm not going to force somebody to do something they hate. I don't like wearing them. I have like a light brown and they're bigger so they don't bother me.

So it is the frame is a piece to it. But you also, when you wear contacts, you are going to have more peripheral because, yeah, it's not blocking you. Right, right. So. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. Like from an optical flow standpoint, it seems like without glasses is probably better. Yeah, I mean, if you don't wear anything, it's always best.

Yeah. But if you wear glasses, it's okay to wear glasses. Like, it's not going to limit your peripheral vision. I do think I tell everybody, especially like you with your prescription, we were talking about it earlier, especially if somebody is just straight. sphere, like they just have a minus power. Like, be out of your glasses when you can. Like, don't wear them in the morning. Start your day, and unless you need to be in them, don't be in them.

But I understand when people have a high prescription, they need to see to get down steps, to do things like that. But I really think that most minus sphere can reverse. A lot of things can reverse. I reverse mine. I don't know. What optometrist will say is that that was never my prescription and I was overcorrected. But I think that that was my prescription.

And I think that at that time, that's what I corrected as because my body was so stressed out. And now that I've been able to more reground myself, now we see my true prescription. So I do think that a lot of people can make significant changes to their eyes. There's a book called something about there's an eye book. About like improving prescription. Yeah. And it gives you eye exercises you can do. There's certain things.

I mean, just looking on the distance. Yeah. throughout your day can help being outside more is going to make a significant difference. So I think people have more ability to change their prescription than they ever realize. I mean, I improved my vision over the past year with just like modulating my light environment by a whole point. Yeah, that's huge. I think I could continue being better with that and like improve it even more. And I feel like with regards to like people not wanting to like go naked eyed or whatever because their prescription,

I feel like this is just pointing back to like the convenience thing again where it's like people just don't want to ever feel even a little bit of discomfort if they can avoid it. And it's like for me, I just, once I normalize just being blind, it doesn't, I'm not even actually that blind, but like, you know, just relatively speaking, it just feels normal at something. So like during the spring through fall, when I go on walks, I typically don't wear glasses either or contact. Yeah, well, and that's the smartest thing to do. Yeah. And it does depend also on the person, like, for you specifically with I saw your script, like that is the best thing for you to do. Yeah. But like for some people who have more of an stigmatism, it's not always the best idea.

So this one book, which I'll find the title and you can link it. I can't remember at the moment. But he's very much so like, everybody should do this. And I do think that some people really do need their glasses to actually get them neutral. And not having their glasses does make it complicated. Yeah, so I was going to ask you, like, is it better to just go without glasses for everybody? Or like, sometimes a test worse. Yeah.

Sometimes, I mean, most people do test better. Majority of people do test better. but sometimes they'll test worse once we get them the glasses that they need. Right. So we can test them without anything. And then if I'm at the optometrist with the person, they'll test better with those glasses. Okay. Yeah.

So then it becomes person specific. Okay. Noted. Cataracts. Cateracts. Caterax. So what I mentioned before about multifocals, it's like a big thing right now that they push the multifocal lens because they make a lot more money off it, I think. And they think it's convenient for people.

But you can't push a multifocal lens on somebody who's never. worn a progressive because now you're altering their life view permanently. So actually my mom had cataracts this summer and I was like in on every single appointment because I was stressed out about it. I was like, you need to make sure you get the right thing, right lens because she was all confused. She wasn't sure what lens to do. Then I did research. So there's different types of lenses, multifocal. So like I mentioned before, very not ideal for any human. Humans should not have multifocal lenses. I don't care what optometrists say about this. we are not meant to have multiple distances in one eyeball when we are walking through space.

And what are we meant to do in life? Walk, breathe, and reproduce, essentially. So multifocal lenses for me are like a no-go. Monofocal, which sounds like mono vision, but it's not, can get a little confusing. Monofocal is just to see in the distance. So what they do is they replace the lens of the eye, which I know you can talk about when it comes to light biology, because it's not optimal at all. lot for health and the actual signals you're getting into your brain.

But when they replace that lens of the eye, they can replace it with just something for distance vision. And then that person will probably have to wear their readers. Because at this point, what happens is that cataract develops and they're not going to be able to see well in the distance due to the cataracts. But most of these people are like 60s, 70s, 80s, they probably have already lost up-close vision. So they're near focus.

So they're wearing reading glasses. So they think that a multifocal is a better idea so that they can see up close well and far away well. But I have seen very sad stories post multifocal specifically lens. And I think that it's something that just needs to be educated about. So the monofocal is what I always recommend. And then you can talk about the components of the light that actually gets through the eye or doesn't. Yeah, yeah. So it's actually really interesting.

If you look at, who is it, Van Gogh. There was somebody else. Oh, I think it was Van Gogh. There was Van Gogh and the haystacks painting. Who did that? I don't know, but I think it's in the MoMA. It's in the MoMA. Yeah, the Hastex. And I saw. Yeah, so.

I think it's Van Gogh. It might be Van Gogh. So it was either Van Gogh or another famous artist from this time period who had cataracts removed. But at the time, they didn't have, like, synthetic lenses to put in. So they just took his cataracts out and left his eyes. And after that period of time, you see his paintings changed dramatically because it turns out that we actually have photo receptors for UV light in our retina. and now he was able to see UV light in the environment. And now he was seeing all this different dimension of color in the environment. So the haystacks painting has all this different color in it that you wouldn't expect.

Did he just take out the lens and not replace it? Oh, that's what I'm going to do if I ever need to do that. Yeah, you can totally do that. And another really interesting thing from the time period, there were some studies done with lens removal from cataracts without putting a new lens in. And they saw people's diabetes completely disappear basically over the course of period. So then why don't we do that in today's system? So there are tradeoffs.

I'm sure. I mean, there are a natural lens blocks UV light to a certain extent, not completely. But it does filter some out. Protective. So, yeah, it's probably protective somewhat to the photoreceptor than UV photons are higher energy. And so maybe, you know, our retina is not expecting to receive all of that at once. It's supposed to receive like a piece of that, but not all of it. And so I guess, you know, there's probably tradeoffs there.

But it was just interesting to see metabolically speaking how much people's metabolic health improved. Same. by letting that UV light into the eye, and especially because in a cataract, a lot of that UV light is being lost even more completely because, you know, the cataract is basically creating opacity. Yeah.

But now when we're using, you know, different cataract lenses that are available, currently we either have the standard lenses, which block essentially all UV light coming into the eye, UVA and UVB, probably some UVA still gets through, but UVB is likely totally blocked just based on the material being used. It's not, it doesn't have to be that way. Like, we could easily engineer lenses that aren't like this,

but this is just the way they're being, you know, developed because UV light has been demonized in optometry and in dermatology. And so, you know, we haven't developed that tech yet, but we easily could do so. So there's the ones that block UV light. And now there's even blue blocking contact or lenses that you can get after, what are we? A cataracts.

Cataracts, yeah. Cataract surgery. And so that's just a giant mess that I can't even begin to describe because blue lights the essential input into the eyes that tells the master clock in the brain what time of day it is. And so that's what's dictating the circadian rhythm, which dictates every function in our body essentially in all of the organs. Yeah. Including, you know, sleep and wakefulness, cognition, digestion, metabolism, muscular activity, fat mobilization. And so there's so many aspects to our health that require that blue light input during the day, ideally from full spectrum sun, and then absence of blue light at night.

And so the blue blocking cataract lenses are just like absolutely like wouldn't wish them on my worst enemy. Like they should not exist. The fact that they exist just proves like how dangerous siloing of medicine is because there's no communication here between. Yeah, exactly. So the cataract lenses that block UV, at least they don't block blue, but I really think we need to just develop a technology that's, you know, it's semi-permeable at least. Like for example, the Daly's Total One contact lenses, they're UV permeable. They don't have UV blocking. They're made of a material that is allowing UV light to come through.

we can easily find a material that can do that for cataract lenses as well. I'm sure. Yeah. It's funny because when I wore contacts, those are the only ones I ever wore that didn't create problems for me. Yeah. They would pop out of my eyes. All the other lenses besides those ones.

I used to like, always be like, oh, I always have to wear the most expensive. I know. They were expensive. Yeah, they were more expensive. I wore them for almost 15 years, those contacts. So now I was like, I'm so happy that that is what I actually wore. Exactly. Yeah.

On the flip side to that, though, so they're the most expensive contacts, but the UV permeable glasses that you can get are actually cheaper than regular classes. So if you go to your eye doctor, I haven't had an issue at America's Best or lens crafters. I heard some other people had issues with their eye doctors being dogmatic about it. But if you request CR 39 lenses without UV blocking coating on them, they're about 55% UV permeable compared to the polycarbonate, the standard lenses. They're more expensive and they block almost all UV light. That's crazy. Yeah.

So it's also really interesting because I've tested patients with and without their glasses. that have blue light blocking in them. So I like the different actual blue light blockers for blue light blocking when it's necessary during the day. But when you are wearing glasses that are blocking blue light all the time, I see it in the clinic. Yeah. Their bodies tighten up. Totally.

Totally. Yeah. We need that blue light stimulus during the day. Ideally, with red and infrared light because midday sign, it's 25% blue light, but 50% redden infrared. So we're really always meant to receive the short wavelength UVM blue light with an abundance of red and infrared. It creates balance in the system.

So if you're under fluorescent lights, LED lights on screens that are unfiltered, that is very much blue light in isolation. No infrared light. That's creating hyper, you know, sympathetic activation can damage the eyes, can damage the skin and mitochondrial dysfunction. It basically directly impairs mitochondrial function. So that's the blue light. That's a problem. Nature's blue light is, you know, perfect because of great ratios. Of course.

Everything goes back to nature and what we're meant to be doing. That's how we heal. Exactly. Yeah. That's really what it comes out. Usually the solutions are pretty simple, actually. when we get down to it. And they're not easily monetized. And that's the crazy part is that the solutions are simple because that's what humans need. Yes. Yes. It's wild. Yeah, I love that. Anything else?

No, I thought this is awesome. This was great. Yeah, I think we could. We covered a lot. We could, yeah, definitely keep going, but I think we did good. It's a good, digestible piece of content for people, and we'll probably have to do it again, though. Hopefully different information. I've listened to a bunch of your episodes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This I think is a really good diversity and we'll, you know, keep people interested and wanting to learn more and then go follow you. And also, you know, hopefully we can record some content later after we start doing our experiments and see what things start to unfold there. I think it should be really exciting. It'll be really interesting.

So where can people find you? So I'm mainly, my main thing is Instagram. My, just my name, Alina Canner. And then my website, I have a platform I put out called Ruted Well. So a lot of these techniques that we talked about here are in there, along with a lot of descriptive videos talking about the components of everything we mentioned here, but in more depth. And yeah, that's mainly where people can find me. Great. I'll include links to her Instagram, her program, and yeah, so you can get involved in her world and keep learning.

And thank you so much, Alina, for coming on. This is so fun. Thank you so much for having me. Long overdue. Thank you guys for listening. Bye.