Remember these and you basically have the avenue to helping anything your body has going on.
Your tissues are effectively seeking out two things for healing:
Electricity and hydration.
Dehydrated tissues are stuck together, stiff, and consequently end up affecting the tissues around them by making them take on more of the movement capacity your human form needs to get around in. That need to move around the immobile areas can lead to more stiffness, and as your central nervous system begins to evaluate your decreasing ability to balance as you walk due to fewer movement options it increases the perceived threat level and…stiffens up, further. This can affect someone psychologically as they find getting around to be more and more difficult.
Dehydration may not be what you’re thinking, though. Someone can slug back the water and it still won’t get into their tissues. (Unrelated to this email, if you’re into a deep dive down an esoteric and spiritual lane, this is a potentially life-changing Luke Storey podcast episode about water titled “the secret intelligence of water as the liquid language of god”).
I have a theory that one of the reasons people become healthier on a Whole 30 or other whole-foods-oriented (single ingredient, not necessarily bought from Whole Foods Market) diet is that they are getting bioavailable water from their food.
A simple hydration hack is to add salt to water. I like the supplement LMNT brand from Robb Wolf. I have a subscription to the chocolate flavor. I’ll leave it at that.
So the type of water you drink has an effect on the hydration of your tissues.
But even if you improve your water it still might not be able to get in to every tissue.
When you don’t move an area often, whether via injury or lifestyle, thousands of layers of cells get stuck together. As your tissues get stuck together, they no longer glide over one another. And you begin to move like you’re a pixelated cartoon instead of hi-def. I saw a guy today on YouTube comparing sticky bodies to the old Terminator vs gliding tissues like the new Terminator.
You can unstick stuff, with time and effort. A few of the things that can work to unstick your layers:
Cupping
Breathwork
Pin-and-stretch massage techniques
And regular movement
The way I would frame electrical activity in a given part of the body is the person’s ability to exhibit motor control in the area. Show me a place that someone can’t move well and I’ll show you tissues that need more electricity. Show me a place they move effectively, intentionally, and smoothly, and I’ll see an area that has good communication between their mind and their body. Using the back as an example, areas that hurt usually aren’t moving when the person breathes, they have difficulty breathing into the area to make it move, and they probably either can’t move it at all on purpose or can’t control movement in the pained areas without a lot of accessory compensation from other parts of the body. The area is nearly as likely to feel numb as it is to feel pained. It has poor signaling.
On a more technical note, Dr. Zach Bush talks about things called phase angle measurements to gauge whether electricity is getting between cells, which coincidentally is how he tells whether or not his patients are dehydrated. News flash: all of his patients are when they get to him.
How can you increase electricity across cells? A few options in no particular order:
1. Bodywork with someone using bare hands. You’ll receive electrical inputs from their hands into areas that need a boost
2. Hydration that can get into your tissues – see above.
3. Energy work and healing – meaning conscious, intentional interaction between you and the world around you.
4. Red light therapy
5. Unfiltered sunlight on skin and into your eyes
6. Float tanks
7. Intentionally learning how to engage areas of your body you couldn’t prior. Aka paying attention to an area and trying to increase connection.
8. Heavy weight training that engages the whole body
Working on even one of these things on a regular basis for a few months will change the way somebody moves and feels.
I looked up pubmed studies for someone recently to show them how easy it is to increase neurological signaling through weightlifting so their hand tremors would reduce or stop altogether. It’s just increasing electricity through the tissues, which changes nerve signaling, growing and shifting the neural pathways in literal physical form (your nerves and capillaries and everything else shift all the time).
I’m doing my best to keep this brief. I’m so fucking fascinated with this stuff.