86: Body by Breath (with Jill Miller)
Episode Transcript
Summary: Til and Whitney talk with self-care expert Jill Miller about her new book “Body by Breath: The Science and Practice of Physical and Emotional Resilience” and other topics including:
- Jill’s “Five Ps:” levers on our own well-being
- Applying polyvagal theory in self-care
- Body image and body awareness in fitness
- Applications for massage and manual therapy
Check out the video, full transcript, and a special offer from Jill on Til or Whitney’s sites:
- Til Luchau’s Advanced-Trainings.com
- Whitney Lowe’s Academy of Clinical Massage
Til Luchau:
Books of Discovery has been a part of massage therapy education for over 20 years. Thousands of schools around the world teach with their textbooks, e-textbooks and digital resources. Books of Discovery likes to say learning adventures start here. They see that same spirit here on The Thinking Practitioner Podcast, and they’re proud to support our work knowing we share the mission to bring the massage and body work community and livening content that advances our profession.
Whitney Lowe:
And you can check out their collection of e-textbooks and digital learning resources for pathology, kinesiology, anatomy physiology at booksofdiscovery.com, where Thinking Practitioner listeners can save 15% by entering thinking at checkout. Til, we have another lead-off sponsor today in addition to Books of Discovery. And who is that?
Til Luchau:
That’s actually me, you and I-
Whitney Lowe:
Oh, right.
Til Luchau:
We’re going to be sponsoring our own podcast. I’m my own sponsor today, and the thing I want to talk about is our spine, ribs and low back principles training. We’ve been teaching a bunch of these online, hybrid online trainings now ever since, well, for the last three years since the lockdowns began. And they really had a chance to evolve, and I’m so happy with the shape they’ve taken. Myself and five members of my faculty are going to be walking small groups of people through our, what’s typically a two-day in-person course, but we stretched it out over two months, when we meet every two weeks and go through the material together. It gives you the balance of self-paced learning with small group cohorts, with me personally and with my faculty personally, so I hope you can join us. Check that out, that starts April 17th. Check it out at advanced-trainings.com or in the show notes. How’d I do, Whitney?
Whitney Lowe:
That was absolutely awesome. Thank you so much for that, sharing that with us. And we are a guest with us today.
Til Luchau:
Yeah, we do. We have a guest who’s been so patiently waiting as I do my first ever self-sponsorship. Jill Miller, you are here with us, and I am so happy about that. Your bio, let me read that first before I give you a chance to talk. Your bio says, you have 30 years of corrective movement expertise that forges links between the worlds of yoga, massage, athletics, and pain management. Your self-care fitness programs, Yoga Tune Up, and Roll Model, are found in gyms, yoga studios, hospitals, athletic training facilities, and corporations worldwide. You are also the former anatomy columnist for Yoga Journal, really cool.
You’ve been featured in New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Shape, Women’s Health, O, The Today Show, and are a contributing expert on the Oprah Winfrey Network. Your new book, Body by Breath: The Science and Practice of Physical and Emotional Resilience will be published this month, which is currently February 2023. You live in LA with your husband, two kids and a rescue dog, which I also have a rescue dog, so that’s the moment I could relate to your bio. You’ve done so much that I get the dog part. It’s so nice to have you here with us-
Jill Miller:
I hope there’s other relatable things besides my dog. I related when you announced your rib course. I’m like, “That sounds so cool. I want to do it.”
Til Luchau:
Yeah. Well, I’m just so impressed by… I knew you on social media and knew of some of the collaborations, you did say with Tom Myers or Kelly Starrett, things like that. And then Whitney and I met you in the Fascia Research Congress in Montreal in the last year. But is there anything else you want people to know about you before we get into talking about your new book?
Jill Miller:
Oh no, I’m an open book. Let’s just go for it.
Whitney Lowe:
I got to ask you a question, because I’m curious about this, I had seen this in the bio thing, I didn’t know this, when were you doing the anatomy thing for Yoga Journal? What time period was that?
Jill Miller:
Oh my goodness. I did their anatomy column for about a year. It was well before the pandemic. It was after my first book was published. It was probably six years ago. If I’m carbon dating that it was probably about six or seven years ago, I think. Gosh, guys, I can’t remember-
Whitney Lowe:
I went through a long stretch of reading every issue of Yoga Journal, but this was in the late eighties or nineties, so I was wondering if it was back that long ago.
Jill Miller:
No. Well, in the late eighties, I was a avid consumer of Yoga Journal magazine and the Yoga Journal is one of the reasons why I got into yoga as a tween. It was just one of the only publications out there that had consistent information. And actually, the original founder was a physical therapist, so there was really great stuff in there.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. Was that Judith Lasater?
Jill Miller:
Yep. Judith Lasater.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. Well, anyway, interesting.
Til Luchau:
Well, that is interesting. And I relate to more than just your dog. Your book is gorgeous and-
Jill Miller:
Thank you.
Til Luchau:
You were kind enough to send us advanced copies of it. It’s organized, it’s thorough, it is, in my opinion, sound in terms of your scientific references and rationales. You do a good of job as any of us that’s trying to make that comprehensible to our readers, maybe better than most of us. But I got a question for you, the first question really is, what question of yours was writing that book the answer to?
Jill Miller:
God, there’s so many beginnings. There’s so many origins to why I needed to write this book. One really simple answer is my mother. I grew up with an asthmatic mom, and I can remember as a young child, ambulances coming to our house and taking her away because she couldn’t breathe. And so, I learned very early on that without breath, you die. And so that was, I think, a core fear. I also saw my grandmother live on oxygen and die in a terrible way from COPD, but actually perish from a mental health issue, that was compounded by having to live on oxygen. To put it bluntly, she overdosed because she couldn’t handle a life chained to a bed, chained to oxygen and her being a mid 60-year-old woman. Those were very big core to my interest in breathing.
But on a functional level, when I was a young girl, I really wanted to be a singer. That was really the only athletic thing I liked to do. I was not athletic at all, I was quite overweight. And I liked playing with my dogs and playing with dolls, but I loved to sing. And there was a voice teacher in the community we lived in, we lived a solar community outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico. That’s where I spent most of my early years. And this voice teacher, I just remember one lesson, one day, she told me about the diaphragm, and that was probably when I was in fifth or sixth grade. And it stuck with me. And so ever since then, there’s been a deep interest in breathing mechanics. Other origins of this book have to do with my own mental health and my spiral into a number of eating disorders as a tween all the way till my early, I guess late teens or early twenties.
I was first anorexic and then I was bulimic and I discovered self-massage in there, as a way to connect into myself and begin a process of healing. Deep visceral work, self visceral work, before I knew the term. And now I know all the terms guys. But back then, I was just rolling around on a towel, rolled up towel on my abdomen and breathing and trying to connect with emotions that were buried, stuck, and had really left by the wayside in terms of my own emotional development. Those are some of the origins of my own personal story. But on the bigger scale, this book had to be written, because when I wrote my first book, The Roll Model, a Step by Step Guide to… I don’t even know the subtitle, it’s so long. But anyway, it’s a long subtitle that breaks down my approach to self-myofascial release work.
I had put out a call to action to my students, my followers and so on, and I asked for their stories. I asked them to share how the Roll Model work had helped them heal or deal. And every story that I got back, I got dozens and dozens of unbelievably rich stories. And I thought I’d have a rotator cuff story, I’d have a low back pain story, I’d have a knee story, I’d have a foot story, I’d have maybe a cancer story or breathing thing. Every story had a huge emotional component to it. There was a massive amount of data in front of me about how people were using the balls for emotional regulation as well as pain mitigation and self-treatment. And I just thought, “I need to know why everybody is having this response.” It’s not just impacting their range of motion, but it’s impacting their range of emotion. What is that thing? Because I know that’s what it was for me initially. I wasn’t trying to heal my diaphragm, I was trying to feel my feelings while I was rolling around on stuff on my guts. That was the-
Whitney Lowe:
Jill, if I can interrupt you for just a second, for our listeners and people who may not be familiar, can you just give us a brief little synopsis when you talk about balls and they’re so wonderfully illustrated in your book. Just let people know what you’re referring to here with this work.
Jill Miller:
Yeah. I guess we can rewind quite a bit, and I can share that I teach people self-myofascial release strategies using really my tools. But I adapt no matter what you have in your house. And the tools that I use are a set of grippy pliable rubber balls. Some of them are solid rubber, and then one is air-filled, that’s called the Coregeous Ball, which features heavily in Body by Breath. And so these grippy pliable rubber balls, I teach people to map their body and to address aches, pain, mobility issues, and self-regulation through the use of them. That’s a little summary of that.
Whitney Lowe:
Great. Thanks.
Til Luchau:
Thanks too for your personal context and the story there. I think every one of us is in this field, has an origin story that’s really related to our own challenges or our family’s challenges or the things we’ve been working on healing for. Who’s this book for?
Jill Miller:
Well, first, it’s for my mom. I would love for my mother to palpate her diaphragm and her intercostals and address ongoing concerns with her neck and her shoulders and her spine as she ages. And so I wrote it in two ways, I wrote it for a general population to be able to grasp the why and how this is important for health and longevity. But I also wrote it for those people’s clinicians to think creatively about how and why this type of work impacts health and longevity and wellbeing, and ways that they can think about offering, for their own self-care, but also offering alternatives to just chemical medication or only talk therapy. But maybe there’s some other adjuncts that patients or general population with massive amounts of anxiety, depression or the rising trend of long COVID. All of these issues, there can be some very helpful self-management that can work in tandem with their team, as well as miraculously eradicate symptoms and issues that other treatments just aren’t addressing
Til Luchau:
Your book’s really practical. You talk people or illustrate people through specific things they can do with their own body. Those effects you’re talking about are about just feeling more connected or feeling better in all the different dimensions. How present is that in the book? How does that come through?
Jill Miller:
About feeling better in all dimensions?
Til Luchau:
Yeah. About the emotional side of what happens or the personal side as well?
Jill Miller:
Well, there’s definitely, there’s a couple of chapters that address the nervous system. I try to break it down relatively simply in the beginning and then get into, I would say, a big wrestling match with the vagus nerve and addressing polyvagal theory to teach people about different zones of innovation that the vagus spends time in that seem to be in lockstep with different zones of respiration. In the application of the tools, in this book, I tend to focus on three distinct zones in the body. That is the stuff below the ribcage, which I call the sub-diaphragmatic region, also known as zone one. I also attempt to help people learn about their thorax, their ribcage, and both the respiratory stuff in there as well as the nervous system stuff in there, especially as it relates to the vagus and as it relates to sympathetic and parasympathetic. That would be zone two.
And then zone three is the supraclavicular zone. That’s all the stuff above the shoulders, neck, face, expression. And so that would be what I call zone three. And they’re all also vagus interventions, in that same zone. Much of the work is directed towards your mapping of these zones and figuring out which zone you tend to live in, you tend to breathe in or you tend to stiffen or you tend to defend from the world in. I break all of that down in terms of the science and then show you different applications to either shore up that area or in most cases, release different soft tissue regions within that area, different muscles that tend to be a bully to the rest of your body.
Til Luchau:
In your answer, I hear the same voice that I read in the book which is, you’re laying down a fairly clear technical anatomical territory for us, and then you’re inviting us to get in there and explore it and find out what happens. You’re giving us a contextualization for, “This is the part of your body that breathes, this is the part of your nervous system that helps regulate affect and here’s something you can do to experience it and play with it.”
Jill Miller:
Yeah. As a Yoga Therapist, not a mental health professional, I have to be really careful within my own scope of where I’m leading people. And then, I offer what is within my scope to offer different mindset strategies to help people pull out their own questions. And then if stuff comes up, because inevitably when you start on shielding tissues that have been on guard for a long time, for whatever reason, you’ll start to feel, you’ll start to feel your feels. And sometimes those feelings can feel absolutely unmanageable and overwhelming, but this is not an aggressive, just throw you to the ground and jiu-jitsu you, wrestle with an implement. This is so slow and tender and progressive and welcoming and alarmingly, gently disarming in the methodology.
I found, obviously that worked for me. And in the athlete population that I work with, I work with a lot of athletes that have an enormous amount of unknown tension in these different zones. Their training habit is usually a pain for gain type of no nuance within application. And so, I really try to invite what I would call a therapeutic response by exciting the parasympathetic nervous system, bringing the parasympathetic nervous system to the party and helping those folks improve their endurance there, their ability to tolerate being in that slow side of self.
Til Luchau:
Nice. Your slow muscle, you’re building the slow muscle, how can we get stronger there. I didn’t warn you about this at all, so feel free to decline. Do you have an experiential you could offer to Whitney and I and our listeners? Is there something we could do right here?
Jill Miller:
Oh, you know what? We absolutely are not prepared for that. That’s such a great thing. Let me see, I might be able to do a free class on my online for your listeners. That would be amazing, because there are hour long classes there. Let me Slack my husband while I’m here, and then I’m sure he’ll Slack me. I told him I was unavailable, so he’ll be shocked to see a message from me. Can you pause while I do that?
Til Luchau:
Yeah, no, that’s a good consolation prize. Just a chance for people to come in and try your classes. I’m going to go ahead and talk a little bit, just as you’re talking, I’m thinking about breath of course, and I’m thinking about regulation and I’m in the experience of speaking to you on Zoom and hanging out with Whitney, and I’m just remembering that this is going on at every minute. We’re breathing all the time, and our diaphragm is right here with us and our vagus nerve and all that is right here.
Jill Miller:
Doesn’t that feel great to know it’s coming along with you?
Til Luchau:
Yeah. Right.
Jill Miller:
Or you can manage it if things are going in a direction, if things are going sideways and you know you actually need to stay a certain course, then you can alter your breath pattern. You can alter your posture, you can alter your environment by palpating yourself in certain ways, or you can change your relationship to gravity. And suddenly you have a state change.
Til Luchau:
Yeah. And then we’re different, we’re showing up differently, we’re experiencing things differently. The world even looks different by just changing those things as well.
Whitney Lowe:
Jill, I’m curious to hear, and a lot of what you’ve been describing is really effective self-engaged processes for self-awareness and all that kind of thing. Are there other strategies or methods in what you’re presenting here that might be used, let’s say, in a therapeutic encounter between a manual therapist and their client person… would it be more like teaching them about the awareness and breadth and that kind of stuff? Or what would be the best way in which a practitioner might incorporate some of those concepts and ideas?
Jill Miller:
I think that one of the places to start with that question is, have you guys done a podcast on polyvagal theory yet?
Til Luchau:
Nope.
Whitney Lowe:
Nope.
Jill Miller:
You haven’t. Oh, okay. It’s a pretty big topic and takes a good chunk of time to describe all of the different aspects of it. But the summary of polyvagal theory is that we as organisms, and by the way, polyvagal theory is a theory developed by a neuroanatomist, multi-hyphenate PhD, Dr. Stephen Porges, who actually is the first person to ever quantify heart rate variability. And as your listeners probably know, heart rate variability, we have the heart rate variability because we have a vagus nerve that is changing the beat-to-beat ratios of the heart. And so, the health of the vagus nerve and the input of the vagus nerve on the heart is what allows us to slow down. And sometimes it slows us down too much and we pass out. And that can be very problematic, especially if your body suddenly does that spontaneously when it’s under threat.
But in terms of what we can do with… I said, I was going to say what the end thing of polyvagal theory is, which is that we’re designed as organisms to co-regulate one another. We are primates that evolve in clans, we didn’t evolve solo. In fact, when we are isolated or when we are solo beings, our health measures dramatically decline. We can survive with another mammal. A lot of people live alone with their dogs and they do quite well, but we were designed to co-regulate with one another. You know that, that’s just basic, like, “Oh, I want to be a better friend. I want to be a better therapist.” Well, what do I need to do inside myself to be in a state of regulation where I can actually offer some assistance with regulating my client? And so the book creates a cocktail, an inner pharmaceutical cocktail of different ways that you can get yourself out of an anxiety state, or get yourself out of an amplified state that is only going to spin somebody else out, so that you can help entrain one another, entrain the other-
Til Luchau:
Can you give us an example of that inner cocktail? What’s something someone would do? What’s the practical side of that?
Jill Miller:
In the book, I discuss what I call the, five Ps of parasympathetic dominance. And in this case, parasympathetic dominance, if my intent is to get myself into a state where I know that I can be there for someone that I can be in a state of listening, I can be in a state of receptivity for what they’re bringing to the room. The five Ps are, number one is, place. As a practitioner, you probably have a place that is sanctuary like, is safe for your clients, so place is key. The second P is perspective. Perspective has to do with mindset. And so that is a top-down suggestion for your own hosting of your embodied experience. That top-down suggestion could be something as simple as, “I embody my body.” Which would put you in your skin, or, “My breath is welcome here.” If you know that I need to focus on my breathing right now because it’s a little amped, or in the case of working with somebody else, “I am a safe place.” You can actually put that into your body, “I’m a safe place.”
You have a top-down suggestion that invites a deep listening from within, which would be the inter-receptive messages that we’re going to get when we get into these next three Ps. The next P is, position. Position has to do with, “What can I do to amplify my own intrinsic relaxation response?” In general, we’re going to maximize relaxation by getting low, by getting grounded, by going with gravity, so that is a recline. Or what I illustrate in the book again and again, is this gentle slope position, where your pelvis is slightly higher than your heart, slightly higher than your head, so that you induce the baroceptor reflex. Are your listeners familiar with the baroceptor reflex or should I define that?
Whitney Lowe:
Let’s define it.
Jill Miller:
The baroreceptor reflex is a total freebie courtesy of the vagus nerve. What happens with the baroceptor reflex, as I described, this is a position where your brain is below your heart. You can do this just by doing a forward bend in your chair or by doing a forward bend with your tush against the wall leaning over. Or you can do it on the ground with your pelvis higher than your head. I like to put a Coregeous Ball underneath my sacrum to do this. What happens is, your brain can only manage a set amount of blood flowing in it, and when you go upside down, you’re with gravity. And so gravity starts to pull excess blood towards the brain.
And as soon as the carotid arteries, or rather as soon as the sensors in the carotid arteries, which are sprinkled with little loops of vagus nerve, as soon as they sense that there’s a bulging in those arteries, they send a very quick feedback through the vagus to the brainstem that says, “Uh-oh too much blood coming. Narrow, narrow. Slow heart rate, slow breath rate.” All of your arteries constrict so that the blood flow in your brain is regulated. And that will slow down your breathing and it’ll slow down your heart rate. And it happens in my classroom all the time, I tell people, they come in, they’re chit-chatting, or they’re sitting up, they’re talking to each other, the class starts recline, within 15 to 20 seconds, you just start to hear, ah. You just start to hear these sudden exhales coming out of people’s bodies, because number one, their pastoral muscles are no longer holding them. But also just that shift, that gravitational shift starts to induce the relaxation response for them. You can get yourself-
Til Luchau:
I’m picturing my dog lying down, and then that big dog sigh they do, once they settle in,
Jill Miller:
They’re so cute, and then they start to have the little dreams and the lips start to, da, da, da.
Til Luchau:
Does that happen in your classes too, when you do that?
Jill Miller:
When I do, led yoga Nidra or non-sleep deep rest, yes, people go out. There, it’s like a horse tranquilizer. Okay, so we’ve got the place, excuse me, we’ve got place, we’ve got perspective, we’ve got position. The fourth variable in the five piece scenario is pace of breath. Pace of breath is a huge variable that I tackle within the book, and that is, in general, if you exhale longer than you inhale, you’ll induce a relaxation response for you and other people will entrain with it. I do this with my kids all the time. There are other specialized inhalation exercises you can do that also induce a relaxation response. But the basic formula is, your exhales longer than inhales should ultimately make you a lot more chill. Then the fifth is palpation.
Til Luchau:
Let me guess. Oh, palpation. Okay.
Jill Miller:
Oh, you jumped on it.
Til Luchau:
Palpation, okay. I want to hear about that. But you know what, I was going to guess?
Jill Miller:
What?
Til Luchau:
It’s going to totally be a tangent from what you were going to say. I was going to guess presence or purpose.
Jill Miller:
That would come in perspective.
Til Luchau:
Yeah, okay. True.
Jill Miller:
Bring on the Ps though.
Til Luchau:
Yeah. Okay.
Jill Miller:
I do have a subset of additional Ps that all have to do with pain science.
Til Luchau:
Yeah, pain.
Jill Miller:
We’re not going to do that here. A whole other P trickle theory. But play, there are so many different Ps and B.
Til Luchau:
Okay. Palpation is, yours is what? Palpating with your hands or are you talking about-
Jill Miller:
Balls.
Til Luchau:
Okay. With balls. Okay. Using the balls to feel yourself.
Jill Miller:
I teach hands off work.
Til Luchau:
Yeah.
Jill Miller:
Yeah. I teach people to auto-regulate. I did a lot of massage training, but I found I could massage on scale through cues and through tools, and so that’s what I do.
Whitney Lowe:
I am curious, something just made me think about this a moment ago, when we were talking about our previous P, about the thing with going to sleep and resting recumbent positions. We have a lot of people that fall asleep on the massage table, we assume just because it’s so relaxing. But do you think there’s another physiological factor going on with what you had mentioned here too, with that whole issue with the receptors and blood flow and all that kind of thing, potentially being a part of that?
Jill Miller:
Oh my goodness. There’s so many factors that go into it. There are some people who, like my husband, as soon as he lays down on the couch, it’s just, ten, nine, eight, seven. He’s just out.
Whitney Lowe:
That’s me too. Yeah.
Jill Miller:
I think some people, vagus has such, there’s such a strong push-pull that, he just gets knocked out as soon as he lays flat. I think we’re built differently and our nervous system has different tolerances. That being said, I also recall an incident massaging my husband early on in our relationship where he got what I call the zingy. And you’ve probably seen this happen on the table where somebody will get just an unchecked sympathetic rush that is racing through them. All of a sudden their brain goes into fight or flight and down his shoulders and arms and median nerve. He was like, “Oh my God, I can’t get rid of this.”
And he was getting the zingy, just like when your dog runs laps around the backyard 90 times and they can’t stop, that’s when the nervous system… For whatever reason, the safe touch can sometimes trigger a tremendous defense response. And this is one of the reasons why I bring up polyvagal theory in the book, because I think it’s really helpful to look at it as a lens, to understand why things like that can happen, and then what might be the best strategy to migrate to oneself through that experience. And then to be able to reflect on the experience without feeling like you’re crazy or that your body hijacked your will.
Til Luchau:
Okay. You are an expert and have a big following in some fields like fitness, and then you have big social media presence, fields that are very image conscious, if you know what I mean.
Jill Miller:
You think?
Til Luchau:
Yeah. But tell me something about how you see the relationship of body image with body awareness? What’s the inside out or outside in paradox or relationship there?
Jill Miller:
Wow. I love that you’re an outsider to the fitness industry, and ask me that question.
Til Luchau:
How could you tell? You hadn’t seen me stand up.
Jill Miller:
Oh my gosh. I could do the entire podcast about that alone. As somebody who healed from not one, but two eating disorders and works in the fitness industry and sees… Once you’ve gone through addiction, I’ll just speak for myself, having gone through addiction, I feel like I have a scarlet letter that I see attitudes, behaviors, and expressions that once were code for me, cries for help that nobody saw, but I can see it. Anyway, so that’s my opinion, that’s my experience. But it’s all over the place in the fitness industry, and I’ve made a real point in my output to not try to sell aesthetics ever. Because, I think it’s completely demoralizing to all bodies.
And there are people that will help you with that. If you want aesthetics, there are experts that will help you with aesthetics. I know some of the best bodybuilder trainers in the entire planet, and they can help you with your aesthetics. I’m going to help you with your feeling, with your feels and your ability to feel. And guess what? When you do that, there might be a byproduct of shape-shifting, but I’m most interested in your range of motion within your respiratory mechanics. And that the lining of your birthday suit is communicating well from the core to the periphery and back again. That’s my real boring take on all of it. And I am definitely, I also live in LA, I used to do film work. I do put myself out there on social media, but I try to put out a variety of my own faces, so people can see that I’m not addicted to makeup or eyebrow grooming.
Til Luchau:
I know. I love what you do, by the way, because it is you. And you’re younger than me, but you’re of the generation where you go, “Okay, so I’m not looking like I was when I’m 20.” You look fantastic, but you’re showing a woman of our generation doing these things in an awesome way.
Jill Miller:
Yeah. And for your listeners, I’m 51 and I’m super proud to have crossed that half century mark. It’s just incredible
Til Luchau:
Kudos for you. In your social media feed, you’re sharing, again, the algorithms found me, like I told you, you’re sharing your daily life with your family, you got the cutest kids in the world, but you’re just there with them doing your stuff. You’re sharing your own challenges, you’re sharing about your hip replacement story, those kinds of things.
Jill Miller:
Yes. I love talking about my hip replacement story because it opens up so many different pots that I love to dive into. One is that I’m an undiagnosed hypermobile body, I have self-diagnosed myself as a hypermobile person, although my orthopedist also diagnosed me, that, that was the underlying cause of my need for hip replacement. I’ll never forget it. I had avoided getting imaging in my hip for a long time. I had on again, off again pain in my tensor fasciae for probably about seven years, but those were my childbearing years, and I just did not want to have any imaging, because I didn’t want anything to get in the way of me making babies.
I was a late starter, I had my first kid at 42 and my second one at 44. And when I finally did have the imaging, I thought I had a torn labrum. I thought all things pointed to that, I just had a labral tear and I was just working around that. But there was no labrum, there was nothing, it was just decimated bone spurs cam deformation. Oh, what a mess. I have the bone on my desk if you guys ever want to see it.
Til Luchau:
You got your hip bone?
Jill Miller:
Yeah. I have the best surgeon. He’s so cool.
Whitney Lowe:
Oh, wow.
Jill Miller:
He’s so cool. But, there was no conservative option. I was at end stage, hips got to go, other hip is fine. I had no idea I was living with such diseased hip, because what do I teach? I teach self-care and pain mitigation through the techniques that I share with Roll Model and Yoga Tune Up. I walk into the office, lay down on the table, he walks in, his first five words to me are, “When do you want to schedule?” I had never met him before, he just walks in, “When do you want to schedule?” It was absolutely the death knell. And then he did an orthopedic test, he just circumducted my hip and he was like, “Oh, well, there’s your underlying condition right there. Hypermobility.” It was just boom, boom, boom, “Okay, when do you want to schedule?” But he is very cool. I believe, there’s a lot more to his bedside manner, I make him sound gruff, but he is not at all. Yes, I love-
Til Luchau:
It sounds like a confrontation with that reality in a way, or that option, what that meant.
Jill Miller:
Confrontation with that reality?
Til Luchau:
The gruffness you’re describing sounds like, “Hey, this is the deal. You’re hypermobile and the option I have for you is a hip replacement.” And so that it was your process of going, “Okay.” I don’t know what you expect. I don’t know if you expected him to give you options or talk you through some different things like that.
Jill Miller:
No. I guess I didn’t even expect a clinical hunch. That was his clinical hunch. We’ve never done any testing on my joints. I could self bait and score myself, but I studied very closely all of the literature regarding EDS and hypermobility. I have a deep interest in all of that because of my own suspicions about my body and my life. But I go to the Fascia Research Congress, I listen to the researchers, and I try to do my own personal practice to make sure I maintain strength and then also address this rising tide of anxiety that I have succumbed to along with the rest of society over these last few years.
Til Luchau:
You mentioned Porges, and his work is on my wishlist to find a way into here on the podcast. And interestingly, some of his first research when he was developing heart rate variability was with a Rolfer, John Cottingham, who was also a Professor. They were colleagues. And so he did a research project on rolfing subjects, where John was doing different rolfing moves, and he’d measured their heart rate variability. This was back in the early nineties, I believe it was, to see is this a valid measure and what happens in body work? That was some of his first tests, some Stephen Porges’ first test. And their takeaway was that, well, the move that seems to make the biggest difference was the pelvic lift, which is just a hand under the sacrum and a little bit of traction there. And there were lasting effects, they were able to measure effects in the control, I think for a week afterwards.
Jill Miller:
Incredible. You wonder if the, it’s the pelvic lifting, it creates that gentle slope, right?
Til Luchau:
Yeah.
Jill Miller:
We’re seven, eight degrees higher than normal.
Til Luchau:
Interesting.
Jill Miller:
I’m just trying…
Til Luchau:
And back then we thought sacral nerves were parasympathetic. Now there’s a big question about that, but still it had that vagal tone response. Hey, and I thought of another P for you.
Jill Miller:
Sure.
Til Luchau:
I think it’s your playlist, honestly, that helps. I think it’s the context we set for what we do. Maybe it’s part of your place P, it’s part of that whole environment that we help people into. That way that it makes some of these differences you’re talking about. And there is just that inside out piece as well. I’m still with the perspective, I can just think about 15 Ps under that one, how important that is and how refreshing it is to see you representing that in this very image conscious field and say, “Listen, it’s not just about what you’re seeing in the mirror and how you’re sculpting your body. It’s not just Body by Jill, it’s body by your breath. It’s really on the inside out.”
Jill Miller:
Yeah. I’ve been in the fitness space since I was 20. I started teaching yoga at the Park Services. I should not have been hired by the Park Services when I was 20 or 21, going to school in Chicago. And at the same time, I was also teaching water aerobics at the YW, and I would play Peggy Lee on a cassette tape. And all the women in the water aerobics class were well over 60, I was completely unqualified to be teaching either of these groups. But the people that showed up at the Park District for yoga, and the people that showed up in the water for water aerobics, they weren’t interested in a tiny waist and stronger glutes. They probably were interested in stronger glutes. But on the aesthetic level, I just don’t recall people sharing that interest with me.
And maybe it’s just what I brought to the space, that we’re really here to get to know ourselves and to discover something about ourselves. I think maybe the outsiders to the fitness space, they see the madness on social media or the glamour that’s portrayed in magazines, but those of us grinding it out as instructors, we really offer this group space where people can share joy and share the joy of movement and share the joy of discovery. And that in and of itself, gathering people together, increases vagal tone. We sell the ability for the intrinsic rise of hedonic tone in the body. And it’s a celebration in that, change happens every time you gather like that. I’m just not in the space where they’re going after chisel and I guess drizzle and dribble. I don’t know what they’re going after. But believe me, the fitness space is vast and there are a lot of us in here with a very deep, mindful agenda to really help people with their pain and improve movement and not just get after tighter buns.
Til Luchau:
That’s such an important thing. It might be a great place to wrap it up. And I got one more wrap up question. Whitney, anything else you want to ask?
Whitney Lowe:
No. As you were talking about that, Jill, it was striking to me thinking about… That’s what fitness is. Fitness is really about your body’s wellbeing in your life regardless. And it has been, unfortunately, quite co-opted by the visual aesthetics as a more predominant part than really about physical health and wellbeing, I think, for a lot of people. Kudos to you for keeping that, holding that flame going there.
Jill Miller:
Thanks, Whitney.
Til Luchau:
Okay. Your new book is Body by Breath. Could you sum up for us or anything else you want to say in closing about how it can be useful or relevant to our audience who are engaged in hands-on work? What would you say about that in closing?
Jill Miller:
Yes. The massage therapy community has been a very robust part of the ideation and creation of my own methodology. I have adapted massage strokes essentially for self application. And as massage therapists, the amount of body stress that can go into a day-to-day office setting or clinical setting for you, is substantial ankles, feet, low back, hands, wrists, neck, and just even the stress of the interpersonal work that you’re doing with clients. I see the work… I train so many massage therapists to have this adjunct offering within their clinic so that they can take small groups through a hand and foot series or neck and jaw or breath mechanic work. Because sometimes it’s actually better if they do it themselves than you do it on them, in terms of it having a lasting effect. Because it’s their nervous system through your queuing or through your direction remodeling them.
I’m sorry I split into four different directions here, but one, as a massage therapist, or Rolfer, or any manual therapist, it’s very helpful to have a little reset between clients to address your own structure and also getting you back to… getting you back to a state where you can tolerate the next client’s stuff that they bring you. This is like pallet cleansing neurologically, from your own body through your own structure. But it just so happens to give you this incredible lift, literally. You’re using your Body by Breath methodology or Body by Breath practices to give you self a state change and also a structural change.
The tools that are used in the book are breathe, roll, move and non-sleep deep rest. And those four tools really compound to give you, in whatever order, whatever sequence you want, to have that state change addressed so that you can be your best self. One is your own self in between clients or for your own rigor of practice. And then two, to have something else for homework to offer your clients that is less stressful on your body. I read on Facebook this morning, Til, that you had done some work with the Google massage staff.
Til Luchau:
Whitney as well, yeah.
Jill Miller:
Pre-pandemic, right?
Til Luchau:
Yeah.
Jill Miller:
And you put up an article that, more than, almost a half of them were laid off in this last round of layoffs. I worked with this staff multiple times in the pandemic to teach them how to work with their clients, with the employees of Google through the camera. Because I can’t touch, because it’s a pandemic and we don’t know when we can be in the room together again, but I still have to service my teams and the employees who are in deep distress working in their homes where there’s children running around and their productivity is going down the tubes. How do I still give them the massage they need? Well, that is where the Roll Model and Body by Breath work comes in, because you can cue, skillfully cue another body, another being into their own best self-treatment.
My work was made for that moment. And it was just interesting to see your post this morning because I forgot about it. I forgot that we had worked with this team and certified them in Roll Model. It just really bumps me out, all those individuals that… Because when you’re a massage therapist, you are just a giver. You do so much to provide help and care taking for those in your care and how necessary it is for people’s productivity. And so, it just really bums me out for those people and their families, but also for the employees that no longer have that service, at the ready for their own stresses that they’re dealing with.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. I would also just want to say for everybody listening to really think about this, because you said some things here that I think really are important for a lot of people to think about. One of the very high or prominent reasons for people leading our profession is physical burnout. And I think a lot of that has to do with the self-care piece. And there’s a lot of emphasis in self-care about teaching people correct body mechanics and all this stuff for the work that they’re doing. But a lot of what you’re talking about here, I think is really valuable. What you mentioned, just that short time in between clients or the things that you do with taking some of these processes that you can do to really take care of yourself and give yourself the longevity through some of these practices. I think they would be really helpful for a lot of practitioners.
Jill Miller:
Oh, absolutely. And like I said, we have many massage therapists and PTs who trained in our methods, and that’s exactly what they do. I’ve learned from them, how did they apply this work for their own health and longevity. And one of the big add-ons that has been a really big boon to many of them is offering small group classes where they’re not having to bend over people, they’re not having to dig a thumb here and there, and you can, again, massage on scale and empower people.
Til Luchau:
That’s great. Thank you, Jill.
Jill Miller:
Empower people.
Til Luchau:
Empower people,
Jill Miller:
Self-care.
Til Luchau:
How can people find out more about your work?
Jill Miller:
Well, the book is on Amazon. I don’t know when this is going to air, but the book drop-
Til Luchau:
February 22nd.
Jill Miller:
Oh, so February 28th is when the book drops. And actually we are… For all people who pre-order, I will be teaching a free online one hour class to all the pre-orders. And so, you can find out about that by going to our bodybybreath.com website. My company is Tune Up Fitness, so you can find out about it through Tune Up Fitness also. But probably the best shortcut is just to type in the name of the book, bodybybreath.com, and then you can find out how to get in on that, as well as some other giveaways that we’re doing, which one of them includes the training of Body by Breath methodology. I’m doing a three-day online training and one lucky winner will win a seat in that course, which is both interactive as well as recorded. And that’s happening in late March.
People can find out about me through social media. As you mentioned, I have been pretty delinquent in the last week or so. I’m under another deadline, but I’m thejillmiller on Instagram. My company, Tune Up Fitness is also on Instagram, and you can find us at the same handles on Facebook, I think. And we do have about 500 teachers worldwide that teach Yoga Tune Up and Roll Model method. And so you can also find local teachers. It’s always wonderful to work directly with teachers. And then because of the timing of this podcast, you can come and work with me directly. I’m taking the book on tour, I’m going to cities all over the US and Canada, including Los Gatos, Larkspur, Houston, Atlanta, New York, Boston, Washington, DC, Toronto, and a retreat that is sold out in Ontario. But I’m trying to get my roadshow back up after the pandemic, and I’m going to help people breathe. And of course, Los Angeles where I live.
Til Luchau:
We will put all those links in the show notes on the website. I’m going to do our closing sponsor, and then we’ll say goodbye for the day. The Thinking Practitioner Podcast is supported by ABMP, Associated Body Work and Massage Professionals. ABMP membership gives professional practitioners like you a package including individual liability insurance, free continuing education, quick reference apps, online scheduling and payments with PocketSuite, and much more.
Whitney Lowe:
And ABMP CE Courses, Podcast and Massage and Bodywork Magazine always feature expert voices and new perspectives in the profession, including Til and myself. The Thinking Practitioner. Listeners can save on joining ABMP at abmp.com/thinking. We would like to say a thank you to all of our sponsors and to all the listeners who’ve joined us here today. You can stop by our sites for the video show notes, transcripts, and any extras. You can find that from my site at academyofclinicalmassage.com. And Til, on your site, where is that?
Til Luchau:
Advanced-trainings.com
Whitney Lowe:
Questions or things you’d like us talk about, you can email us at [email protected] or look for us on social media. You can find that under my name at Whitney Lowe. And Til yours?
Til Luchau:
I am Til Luchau. And you can rate us on Apple Podcasts as it helps other people find the show. And oh, by the way, when I’m having a bad day, you know what I do? I go to Apple Podcast and I read the reviews people are leaving us Whitney.
Whitney Lowe:
Oh, that’s nice.
Til Luchau:
It’s so sweet.
Whitney Lowe:
They’re actually good reviews to read?
Til Luchau:
There’s some good ones there. If they’re not good, I just scroll to the next one and read it on another day. But it’s helpful. Thanks everybody for those little tidbits. Or you can hear us on Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or wherever else you listen. And please do share the word and tell a friend. Jill Miller, thanks for joining us today.
Jill Miller:
It’s a pleasure. I’m a fan of your podcast, so this has been really a really cool thing to be able to talk with you both.
Whitney Lowe:
Good. Thanks again for being here. It was great to see you again.
