Inner Balance Wellness

12/03/2025

This long post beautifully describes the dance and flow between fascia and lymph. The body is its own ecosystem, a whole entity and it responds much better when we treat it as such. ❤️🧠🙏

The River and the Riverbed: The Lymphatic Myofascial Relationship.

The body is not made of separate parts, no matter how many textbooks try to divide it. It is one continuous conversation. One river system. One woven landscape of structure, fluid, memory, and sensation. Nowhere is this more beautifully seen than in the relationship between the fascia and the lymphatic system.

Fascia is not simply connective tissue. It is the body’s inner forest floor, the soft earth through which everything grows and travels. It holds more sensory nerve endings than the muscles themselves. It houses the interstitium, a vast fluid reservoir now recognized as one of the largest “organs” by volume. It creates the very terrain through which lymph must move.

Lymph is the traveler, the cleansing tide, the quiet river that removes waste, regulates immunity, transports nutrients, and responds instantly to inflammation or injury. But lymph does not move on its own. It depends on movement, breath, pressure changes, and the softness of the tissues it flows through. Its vessels sit embedded inside the fascial layers, anchored to the very fibers that bodyworkers stretch, melt, warm, and free.

This is why these systems cannot be separated. This is why fascial lymphatic flow works. The Long Method is my favorite technique taught by Katrina Gubler Long.

When fascia becomes dense or dehydrated, the interstitial fluid thickens, pressure gradients collapse, and lymphatic capillaries cannot properly open and close. Imagine trying to push water through a dry, compacted sponge. The lymph has nowhere to go. Post-surgical clients feel this acutely. Trauma, inflammation, surgical scarring, or immobility cause the fascial planes to lose their slide, which in turn traps swelling, slows immune function, and increases pain.

But when we touch fascia with slow, intentional, directional work, something extraordinary happens. Mechanotransduction, the cells' response to mechanical pressure, shifts the behavior of fibroblasts and immune cells. Collagen fibers begin to reorganize. Hyaluronic acid changes viscosity. The interstitial fluid becomes less stagnant. The tissue warms, hydrates, and begins to breathe again. And the lymphatic system, finally uncompressed, begins to move with ease.

You cannot restore lymph flow without changing the landscape it flows through. You cannot free swelling without freeing the structures that hold it. You cannot separate the river from the riverbank.

This is not guesswork. It is anatomy.

The superficial lymphatic system lives in the loose areolar fascia, a layer designed to glide. The deep lymphatic system lies within the deep fascia surrounding muscle compartments. When these gliding surfaces stiffen, every lymph vessel tethered to them loses its ability to pump. This is why many clients feel more relief with fascial lymphatic flow than with lymphatic work alone. We are restoring the architecture that lymph depends on.

In post-surgical care, this becomes especially profound. Scar tissue alters glide. Protective guarding increases fascial tension and non-pitting edema forms when fluid becomes trapped in thickened interstitium. Traditional lymph work is essential, but fascia must also be addressed for complete restoration. A gentle fascial approach honors the lymphatic system's delicacy while creating the space it needs to travel.

This is not breaking tradition. This completes the picture.

Some may challenge this perspective, but the body does not argue. It responds. It softens. It drains. It heals. Thousands of therapists have seen swelling reduce, pain decrease, and mobility return when these systems are treated together. Because fascia and lymph are not separate entities. They are partners; two halves of one healing intelligence.

To work the fascia is to prepare the riverbed. To work the lymph is to free the river. Together, they create a landscape where healing becomes possible again.

For the bodyworkers who feel this truth in your hands, keep listening. The body is always teaching us how interconnected it really is.

12/01/2025

Long read but beautiful summary of the living ecosystem that is our body. It is a sacred honor to touch you and to co-creatively mold your landscape💖

The Hidden Ecosystem Under Your Skin

There is a reason people look at the branching currents of fascia and think of mycelium, the great underground network that carries information through the forest floor. They feel similar long before you know the science. Both look like living constellations. Both listen. Both respond. Both exist not as separate parts, but as unified systems devoted to connection.

Inside the human body, fascia forms a continuous web of collagen and fluid that wraps every muscle fiber, every organ, every vessel, every nerve. It is the only system that touches everything. When you zoom in under a microscope, fascia reveals delicate branching fibers that look astonishingly like fungal hyphae. When you zoom out, it behaves like a communication network, transmitting mechanical, electrical, and chemical signals across the entire body.

Beneath the earth, mycelium creates the “Wood Wide Web,” an underground communication system that allows forests to behave like a single, intelligent organism. Mycelium can transfer nutrients to weaker trees, warn neighbors of pests, regulate moisture, and maintain the health of the entire ecosystem. The network thrives on conductivity, hydration, and collaboration. It is not simply fungal tissue. It is a relationship embodied.

This is where science and metaphor meet.

Fascia conducts electrical signals via mechanotransduction, converting pressure and stretch into cellular signals that ripple outward. Mycelium transmits electrochemical pulses across long distances. Both systems coordinate responses faster than conscious processing. Both store memory. Both change their density and responsiveness in response to stress, environment, and hydration.

Fascia thickens and stiffens under emotional load, exactly the way a forest mycelial network becomes denser under threat. Fascia softens when safety returns, just as fungal networks increase nutrient sharing when a forest is thriving. Fascia maps experience, trauma, and recovery in its matrix. Mycelium maps seasons, storms, and regeneration across its vast web.

Humans are not separate from nature; we are built with its patterns.

When we touch fascia, we are not just altering tissue. We are restoring communication within an internal ecosystem. We are helping a body remember that its parts belong to each other. Through slow pressure, traction, breath, and presence, we help the signals move again. This is why fascial work can shift emotional states, restore fluid movement, and awaken tissues that have gone silent. We are rehydrating the network. We are clearing blocked pathways. We are giving the body back its forest-like clarity.

The deeper science is even more beautiful. Fascia contains more sensory nerve endings than muscles or joints. It senses vibration like a tuning fork. It transmits mechanical forces like an internal tide. It carries subtle electrical currents that influence how cells behave. In many ways, it behaves like biological mycelium, a distributed intelligence that monitors and adjusts the whole.

And just as a forest thrives when every tree is connected, the human body thrives when fascia glides freely, breath moves fully, and the nervous system feels safe enough to soften its grip.

As bodyworkers, we are the caretakers of this inner landscape. We listen for places where the network has gone quiet. We hydrate the dry fascial riverbeds with movement, warmth, and mindful pressure. We help reconnect the body’s communication pathways so the person lying on the table can feel themselves again, not just physically, but emotionally and intuitively.

The body is not a machine. It is a living ecosystem. A forest of sensation. A mycelial web of memory and meaning. A world that speaks through its fascia the way the earth speaks through its roots.

And when we honor it this way, with curiosity, science, artistry, and reverence, the whole system begins to heal.

11/29/2025

Yes! And how do you connect? There’s a great book by Brene Brown called Atlas of the Heart that succinctly outlines this very topic. Her examples helped me be a better communicator and learn the language of true connection.

11/25/2025

Hello friends. I’ve got two openings this week. Today at 3:30 PM and tomorrow, Wednesday at 12:30 PM come see me for a little
pre-Thanksgiving
self-care! 🦃💜

11/15/2025

This post touches on some of the things that can happen when you learn how to navigate and regulate your nervous system. Stay tuned for Somatic services. I’ll be offering beginning January 2026!

No one tells you that peace can feel like breaking.
That after years of running on adrenaline and hypervigilance,
the moment your body stops bracing — it crashes.

You think you’re falling apart.
You’re not.
You’re finally coming down from a lifetime of surviving.

For years, your nervous system lived in emergency mode —
heart racing, muscles clenched, mind scanning for threat.
You called it anxiety, overthinking, perfectionism.
But really, it was a body that never got the memo: the danger is over.

So when healing begins, it doesn’t feel graceful — it feels confusing.
You can’t focus.
You’re exhausted for no reason.
You lose motivation, feel detached, even depressed.
Not because you’re broken — but because your body is finally safe enough to stop pretending it’s fine.

This is what repair looks like.
The crash isn’t failure — it’s recalibration.
It’s your cells exhaling after decades of holding their breath.
It’s your nervous system moving from vigilance to vulnerability.

You’re not lazy.
You’re unlearning emergency.

Let yourself rest without guilt.
The world taught you to glorify resilience,
but recovery has its own quiet strength —
the kind that rebuilds from the inside out.

So if all you can do right now is breathe,
if your body feels heavy, slow, or foreign —
don’t fight it.
That’s your system learning peace,
one surrendered moment at a time.

You’re not falling apart.
You’re finally letting go.

11/11/2025

10/17/2025

BEST POSTURE FOR SLEEPING
In terms of alignment, sleeping on your back is the best posture. However, for those of us that have lived in a body for more than 20 years, that’s not always true. We develop patterns over time of compensation based on our repetitive activities, injuries and socioemotional events that we experience. What this means is that sleeping on your back is not always the best for every body.

So what do you do? TRUST. Trust your body to find a comfortable position that is right for you in the moment, according to what’s going on in your body. For some bodies, a small pillow between the knees if you’re a side sleeper will help keep your hips and Sacroiliac joints happy. Use all the pillows and props you want and just get cozy! 

05/14/2025

Let’s play a game! Name 3 sensations you feel in your body right now.

03/11/2025

I love this reminder of present moment awareness ♥️

03/06/2025

I have done a couple seminars and trainings with the embody lab. They are an incredible resource! I’m also looking forward to starting Peter Levine’s somatic experiencing training in April. It’s going to be epic!

60 HOUR CERTIFICATE PROGRAM   |   LIVE PROGRAM BEGINS MARCH 24TH, 2025 SOMATIC ATTACHMENTTHERAPY CERTIFICATE   “Our basic blueprint as humans is connection and bonding- sometimes we just need the right support at the right time to find our way back home.”— DR. SCOTT LYONS   PROGRAM AT-A-GL...

12/10/2024

Curious about what we'll be doing in The Gathering Women's Circle? Watch this!

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