227 - Dr Heather Wilde - Listening with Hands: Healing Speeds Up When You Find The Blockage

I talk with Heather Wilde, a doctor of physical therapy, about why Long Covid and ME/CFS symptoms can be downstream of blocked drainage and disrupted nervous system signalling rather than a single “broken” part. We follow her plumber and electrician framework from real client stories into craniosacral therapy, inflammation, and why hope often returns when someone finally finds the true restriction. 

• Heather’s hands-on manual therapy approach and why she keeps expanding her toolkit 
• A personal recovery story after decades of ME/CFS and what changed 
• The plumber mindset for fluid flow and the hidden source of symptoms 
• The electrician mindset for nerves, especially the vagus nerve and gut function 
• A case study where a neck restriction links to GI pain and hyperventilation 
• How covid-related inflammation can lock down the head and thorax 
• Lymphatic drainage, sympathetic regulation and the Perrin theory in plain language 
• Why breathwork and manual therapy are hard to research yet powerful in practice 
• What craniosacral therapy is anatomically and what “dura restrictions” mean 
• Touch, listening and rebuilding a healthy relationship with the body 

Links:

• Connect with Heather: thewildeclinic.com 
• The Perrin Technique: theperrintechnique.com 
• My interview with Dr Perrin: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1835170/episodes/16397354

For more information about Long Covid Breathing courses & workshops, please check out LongCovidBreathing.com

(music credit - Brock Hewitt, Rule of Life)

Transcript

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Welcome And Guest Introduction

Jackie Baxter 0:45

Hello and welcome to this episode of the podcast. I am super excited to be joined today by Heather Wilde, who is a doctor of physical therapy. But we have so much more than that to discuss because Heather also brings in other different modalities. So that's kind of where we're going today. Heather, welcome to the podcast. It is so awesome to have you here.

Heather Wilde 1:09

Thank you, Jackie. I am so thrilled just to chat with you and hopefully share something that has helped me and helped my clients maybe bring something to the table for the people that are your listeners.

Jackie Baxter 1:22

Amazing. And yes, we were just chatting away and then we thought, oh, we should probably hit the record button. So uh we we remembered to do that bit. Um so Heather, do you want to say a little bit about yourself and what you do and maybe what brought you to here?

Heather Wilde 1:39

Yes, I would love to. So, as uh Jackie, you mentioned, I'm a doctor of physical therapy. I've been a physical therapist for over 20 years, and that has led me on its own twists and turns and of its journey. I specialize in manual therapy, which means just about all of my treatment is hands-on, looking for what isn't moving that should be moving, what isn't um, I think that's like the easiest way to describe it, where the restrictions are. And that has led me in many different directions. I'm a certified cranial sacral therapist. I do a lot of visceral mobilization. That's a fancy word for organs. So I want to know how all your organs are moving. I um nerve mobilization, blood vessels, anything that can get restricted in the body. I've gone through training to learn how to how to release that. That

Heather’s Toolkit And Recovery Story

Heather Wilde 2:35

includes osteopathic training. So, you know, that's bones, fascia, ligaments, muscle, as well as I mean, we could just go deeper onto all of these. I have I try and do at least four trainings a year. And so that has led to me having just like a big toolkit when it comes to manual therapy. And I'll get into a little bit of the cranial sacral at another time, exactly what that is, and uh, because that's I think really critical for uh especially long COVID um survivors. But how I ended up in Jackie's space is that I've had MECFS or chronic fatigue for 26 years. And the last year I've had this dramatic recovery. And that's because I went to another continuing education course where I learned the pairing technique, which I've heard that you've had Dr. Perrin on. So shout out to Dr. Perrin. And I implemented all of his um work and receiving the treatment, and I've had just this massive recovery over the last like 15 months that I've been engaging in that. So that's how I kind of lined here. But then it was really great because now I also became a parent certified therapist and I started applying all these techniques to my clients. So I have, you know, the people are coming to me for their back pain or whatever. And then I have also have long COVID patients, I have MECFS patients, and I have people who are just dealing with post-stroke or brain fog or any of these things that are seeing really fabulous results implementing the parent. And I think what's a little bit unique is just how extensive I have the manual therapy portion in addition to what parent does. Because all right, so I think that if we thought more like plumbers and electricians, we'd have a lot better health because we're just a bunch of pipes and a bunch of electricity. And that's kind of what makes us work, right? We got our our nervous system that's huge and critical, and then pretty much everything else is uh is pipes, more or less, like our digestive system, our blood vessels, our lymphatics. And if they get blocked, right? So if they get pinched, we need to think like a plumber, like where is that pinch? We want to be investigating and finding where that is, and then release the restriction that is blocking that fluid flow. And then we can have a return to health in that area. So

The Plumber Mindset For Symptoms

Heather Wilde 5:25

I feel like I'm being really long-winded in answering this. So um, when you've got problems with drainage, it leads to MECFS and you get a lot of long COVID problems because the body can't clear waste. And that's so when you have the parent, you're using that to pump and drive the system, but you also need to be able to investigate and find where they're where the pipes are getting blocked and release the restrictions in that area. That's where the heavy cranial sacral comes into play, as well as other manual techniques that work directly in those drainage sites where people really start to make progress when you have the combination of them.

Jackie Baxter 6:11

It's amazing. And as you were speaking there, I was just kind of thinking, do you know what? Like your plumbing analogy is so cool because you know, I've heard people describe people like plumbers and electricians, how most of their work is kind of diving around underneath floorboards trying to find the problem. And actually, a very small proportion of their work is actually fixing the problem. And, you know, I think it sounds like a lot of what you do is kind of quite similar in that, you know, we have to work out where that blockage is or where that fault or whatever it is, what where is that thing that's gone wrong? And then once you've found where it is, you know what to do, or you can teach people what to do, or you can show them techniques that will help that, but you've got to do that detective work first.

Heather Wilde 7:00

I love that analogy because if you think about it, this is where I think we get lost in our bodies is that we want to treat where the problem is, but that's not the cause, right? So if your bathtub is like backing up and you just treated the bathtub because that's where you see the problem, and that's where then you're never gonna fix it because you got to figure out it's not the bathtub, that's just where you're seeing the problem. It's somewhere under the house, in the basement, maybe you know, somewhere else that you got to track down and you got to get that part working. And then it's amazing the results that that happen that all of a sudden, whoa, how did that bathtub all of a sudden heal when we didn't do anything for the bathtub? Right. And that really is a lot of my emphasis on any of my manual therapy that I'm doing is that once you get to the root, then that correction happens. But if you're just so localized and you're not looking down the whole path, then you're gonna have have those problems and they just don't get better. You know, you could use the plunger on that bathtub all day long and it's not gonna get better, right? Because the problem isn't there.

Jackie Baxter 8:20

Yeah. Yeah, it's it's a really great analogy. And I think you know, analogies are great because you know, our our bodies are, I think for a lot of us, quite a mystery. Um, you know, we we can look at at diagrams or or even you know, you you got your um uh your skeleton and your um little little guy that you take the the heart and the lungs. My organ model. Exactly, organ model, that's the word I was going for. And you can kind of show people where things are, and as you you know very rightly said just before we hit record, people often don't know where things are in their body because you've never seen them. Um so actually having that kind of visual representation can be really helpful, but you know, it it does take that kind of bit of detective work, and you know, having someone like yourself that really understands that, I think can be really, really helpful to help with that detective, um, you know, finding that problem under the under the hood, so to speak. Um yeah.

Heather Wilde 9:19

And I think this is a great time just to talk about the story that you asked me to to share of this client kind of bringing this, wait, so okay, so we have the plumbing problems with the we need the plumber mindset. We also need the electrician mindset. So I had a client come into me, five years of like severe, like to where she's hyper hyperventilating frequently, um, GI pain, gastrointestinal pain, which she would call her stomach pain. And I mean, she just gotten nowhere with any of these doctors. And her very first time in, she's just like, okay, well, I had a friend who says that you work magic. So I've I've tried everything else. So why not come here? And as I was talking with her, I was like, okay, give me your list of your injuries, uh, lifelong injuries, like way. And she

A Neck Injury That Mimicked GI Disease

Heather Wilde 10:14

was like, Well, you know, I'm like car accidents. Did you sprain an ankle? Like, what just start talking about these things that have happened to you because your past is is directly correlated to your present when it comes to the body. I found out that she had this massive injury with her neck. She was dancing and she folded her neck backwards too far and she almost passed out. Uh well, she said she blacked out and she um and she had this massive neck pain. And I said, that is what I need to know. So I go, I go and I check out her neck, and it's a mess. And interestingly enough, if you're an electrician and you understand how the electrical coursing of the body is, you'd understand that the upper cervical is the exit point for the vagus nerve. And your vagus nerve is the parasympathetic, that's the rest and digest manager of your entire organ system all the way down to your colon, right? So it's gonna be all of your GI system, in addition to heart and lungs and everything else, is gonna be navigated by that vagus nerve. Now imagine 10 years of that vagus nerve being compromised and not being able to function correctly. At some point, the camel uh the straw broke the camel's back. That's the analogy I'm going for. Um, and that vagus nerve got problems. I released that neck and she stood up from the table just confused because she didn't have stomach pain for the first time in five years. And so that's where like that detective work and the you know, electricians. So the the GI doctors are just looking at our digest digestive system and they're sending scopes down there and they're looking at it and they say, well, everything looks fine, but the signals weren't fine. But then, you know, finding that, like, okay, we don't touch anybody anymore. That's just a big problem in general. But if you just touch that neck, you could tell that that was not functioning correctly. So our bodies are interconnected and that detective work and finding all these pieces, everybody enters chronic illness with their own individual story. Like you may people with long COVID may have all had that as the straw that broke the camel's back, right? But everybody has a different history of injuries and problems, and everybody's presentation is different. So what your past is really makes a difference to what your ability to recover, and we've got to fix like fix. We need to assist. I'm all about the body being smarter than we are, and we're there to listen and we're there to assist the body. If it's not functioning right, it's because it's reached its own capacity and it needs a little help from a friend, but it does not need us to go in there and tell us, tell it what to do and that we're smarter and it's dumb because that's never ever the truth. That doesn't work out that way. We need to assist the body in its uh um healing pathway. And long COVID did one thing really, really well. Well, maybe sorry, COVID. Let me just not long COVID, COVID did one thing really, really well, and that's inflammation. And and from my standpoint of what I'm treating people. So um massive inflammation of the head, even if people didn't have the severe headaches when they had COVID, um, they still find that there is a lot of inflammatory action happening at the head and a lot of inflammatory action happening in the thoracic spine. Um not just the spine, but the whole thoracic cavity. I took a class and I I wish I had the source on this. Um, it was a continuing education class early on, like maybe 2020, in trying to understand COVID. And they talked about how in their autopsies,

Covid Inflammation And Lymph Drainage

Heather Wilde 14:33

that was the one thing that was fairly consistent among everyone was this lockdown of the thoracic area. So lungs really locked down, the thoracic spine locked down. And then we've also found the severe inflammatory response in the head. And that's gonna lead to some severe consequences that you find um Dr. Perrin talking about. So Dr. Perrin talks about that the thoracic spine is where the heart of the sympathetic nervous system and the sympathetic nervous system regulates the lymphatic system, and the lymphatic system is what um regulates the waste removal. Specifically, yes, our bodies, but if our head can't drain and we don't and the and again, plumbing, the lymphatic system gets backed up, that's gonna go up to our head, and then that causes a dysregulation in the hypothalamus. That's all of Dr. Perrin's theory. So long COVID hit the two most important sites in lymphatic drainage and regulation that then leads to a impossibly endless list of symptoms and something that uh in general medicine hasn't been able to figure out how to reverse or help.

Jackie Baxter 16:42

And that makes a whole load of sense when you talk, you know, about you know, the plumbing analogy and how everything in our bodies is interlinked. And you know, you start backing up in one place and it's gonna have a knock-on effect into other places. And you know, you said how the the nervous system regulates our lymphatics. So again, we're totally intertwined here with with all of these different things in the body, and I suppose what what I've certainly seen with recovery stories is that each individual person has a different story because they bring in to their story different things. As you said, their history is different, their experience is different, and their symptoms are often different as well. And it's it's finding that way in for each individual person, and and that's why no two stories are the same. But it's you know, for some people it is parent, for some people it's other things, for some people it's breathing. It's like it's finding that way in.

Heather Wilde 17:43

Exactly.

Jackie Baxter 17:44

And then that leads you onwards to other things, probably, because I don't think anyone has recovered by doing just one thing. Um, so it's it's you know, it's it's what is your puzzle, and uh, and that's what's so fascinating about well, hearing those stories and also hearing you talk about you know the the work that you do and bringing in all these different modalities and how you can look at a person and or even work with a person and and go, okay, well, what which ones of these are we going to use for you and which ones are going to be the most appropriate? And and you know, we we pull that in. And you know, you and I work in different ways, but that's exactly the same thing that I do. It's like, okay, what do you need? You know, maybe we need breathing today, maybe we need something else, maybe we need this, maybe we need that. Um, and it's it's just it's bringing in all those different threads. And I think that's what's so um, you know, so successful. And as you were saying, you know, modern medicine really struggles with this because it's stuck in silos, whereas people who are working kind of in a slightly more um sort of what's the word, sort of different modalities, um, slightly, you know, sort of stepped back a little bit from the sort of healthcare system, seem to have greater success. And I think that's why it's it's it's that kind of lack of being stuck in that in that one thing um that that seems to have the success.

Heather Wilde 19:11

Well, I also think the the being stuck, I think, I think the medical system is stuck for various reasons, and part of that is their own best intentions. Apparently um, they really want to be sure that what they are doing works, right? And so that's actually led to some problems because uh lot of what really works uh is these manual techniques and these breathing techniques or these other things that you cannot control. Right? You can't control you can't uh make sure that somebody breathes the exact amount every single time so I can study it and prove that this works, right? Because what works for one person's breathing or nervous system stabilization isn't going to be the right thing for somebody else. And so you can't study that and they can't prove it, therefore they can't use it. Same thing with like a manual therapy thing. If you're looking for what I can do versus me telling somebody else and them trying to do it, my 20 years experience is vastly different, right? And so it's never going to research well. And if I try and do, okay, you need for the knee, we're just gonna study people who have anterior knee pain, trying to make it as specific as possible. The problem is that everybody got to that anterior knee pain a different way. So if I treat a manual technique with everybody with that same knee pain, that's never going

Why Medicine Struggles With Individual Care

Heather Wilde 20:59

to research well because that one technique isn't going to be applicable for everybody. So it just doesn't research well. And so then medicine is stuck with uh medicine because it can be titrated exactly and it can be researched, and uh so there they're uh intention of trying to be so sure that they are giving you what works is blocking them from enabling you to receive and get trained in what works. It's it's kind of this catch-22.

Jackie Baxter 21:40

Yeah, it totally is, isn't it? And and the thing that means that your work or my work or you know, other practitioners' work is kind of unable to be researched is the thing that makes your work so powerful, in that you can meet each and every individual patient exactly where they are and titrate it to them, you know, in in a way that that is more likely to be successful. But yeah, that that is what makes the research much, much harder to do, which is, as you say, a bit of a bit of a conundrum, isn't it?

Heather Wilde 22:15

Yeah, exactly. So I always want to give like doctors a lot of credit because they're really doing their best and they're really applying and they know a lot, but they are also stuck within the system that has been created as, and you know, systems are just tough. They're they have they have their their limits. And unfortunately, I think our chronic illnesses are highlighting their limits.

Jackie Baxter 22:49

Yes, I think you're you're very right there. Yeah. Now you mentioned you've talked a bit about Perrin and about the manual therapy, and I would love for you to talk a bit more about craniosacral because people have mentioned it, but I don't think anyone has really talked about what it actually is. And I would love to hear that from you as someone who I think you said you'd experienced it as a patient, but also that you now administer as a practitioner. So, do you want to talk us through that?

Heather Wilde 23:21

Oh, lovely. I'd love to. So I've been practicing cranial for Almost 15 years now. Um cranial sacral is just like anything else. It's not that simple. And it means something different to a lot to different people. So it's a wide spectrum of potential of what you could get within a craniosacral system. So let me just start with the general consensus that anybody practicing within it should hopefully agree upon. And that is that the cranial sacral system is the system of the body that's this houses the central nervous system. So it's your cranial bones, your facial bones, and then down your spine to your sacrum, because that's all one continuous um system of the central nervous system. And within that, you have a covering called the dura. It's this really thick. Um so the dura is a really thick fascia. Okay, so it's this big fascia, and it's one continuous piece that surrounds the top of the head, surrounds the spinal cord,

Craniosacral Therapy Explained Clearly

Heather Wilde 24:40

and all the way down to the to the tip, to the sacrum. And it also has an intersegment that goes through the midline and the horizontal, so a vertical and horizontal segments. We can get in, you could talk to a neurologist and you know, you talk all day about the dura, but that's a really important because that dura is what connects all these pieces and where you're most likely to get restrictions within the system. Okay, so it can get a kink or a pull or tight or have inflammation within it, and then you get you get locked down of that. So the dura is um sorry, I just like trying to find the right words. So the so the dura is what links everything together, but then you have the bones, right? So the bones in the head, the way that the joint lines are is that it's it it allows the head in case of an emergency to open up like a balloon is being pumped up, right? Because you if you have intracranial pressure, so like a head injury that caused the pressure in the head to increase so much that now you're in risk of brain damage because the pressure's too high, because you have this enclosed system that the head actually is designed to be able to open a little bit. And that's what the doctors are measuring, right? Is how much that opening is before they do a craniotomy if somebody has too high of pressure. So the point is that these bones move, like they're designed to move, but everybody's alive. Everybody had to learn to walk and get their head bonked every time they fell down. And you're playing with your friends and you've hit each other and you clonked yourself in the head. Like life is just filled with our head getting like a hit in various ways. Heaven forbid you play sports, you would you have all of this impact. So just like any other joint, it can experience restrictions, compression, and problems that decrease its mobility. So the cranial work is teaching us individual mobilizations of each bone to release the restrictions, making sure that the joints move. And then ultimately they also become handles for the dura because the dura attaches to the bone. And then you can stretch out the container of the central nervous system, right? So it's not being compressed anymore. And what I find in the long COVID, just about every long COVID patient that I treat, is that that dura is so locked down that it doesn't have any flexibility. It has no life to it. It's just like almost like dead wood in there, which then blocks the mobility of the joints of the head. And then it blocks the actual, it decreases the motion of the pumping motion of the sphenoid. This that's the bone in the middle. That's all you need to know. But that one's important because that also helps the health of the pituitary. So then we start seeing the connection between the bone, the dura, the like the nervous system of the brain functioning, whether it's being compressed too tight because things are too tight, and the endocrine system. And then it also gets to the lymphatic system because if it's too tight, then you're going to be pinching those drainage, those drainage sites, which your nose sinuses, 50% of your drainage of waste and clearing goes through your nose and sinuses. So I had a patient who was like, I was trying to get her health history, and I was like, I knew there was something in there. She was, I was like, I she goes, Well, I mean, I broke my nose, but nobody cares about that. And I was like, no, I do, I do, I do, I care about that. That is exactly what's going on. Um so the cranial work in and of itself is the way to release the stress and the restrictions that's blocking the drainage, that's impeding the central nervous system, that's giving you back and neck pain because that's connected from top to bottom. And if that dura is tight at the top, it can be causing you pain anywhere along that whole chain. So that's what I say. The cranial sacral way, I think we can all agree on, is that those are the major tenets of just the cranial and the sacral system. There's a lot of cranial out there that also goes into more energy work and emotional clearing, somatic emotional release, and all those things are a part of it too. But when I'm working with these clients, I'm really wanting to see what is restricted in the head and in the system that is having these, all these kind of downwind effects on people's health and function.

Jackie Baxter 30:28

I feel like you've just blown my mind with the with that. And I'm thinking like you said a wee a wee bit back that what COVID did really well was inflammation. And does that kind of link in with the when you said that you know that that long COVID patients seem to have this really kind of solid durer? And is that is that related to the sort of high levels of inflammation that you were seeing?

Heather Wilde 30:57

Yes, yes. So one of the things that's really interesting, I learned from um one of my mentors, he talked about the chemical byproduct of the inflammatory process relieves a sticky residue. So whenever you have an inflammatory process, you're gonna have two things start to stick to each other. And the worse that inflammatory process is, the more they're gonna stick, and the less you're gonna have flexibility in there. So when we were talking about these long COVID having this massive amount of inflammation affecting their head and completely locking it down and preventing the normal physiological motions that the head relies on for its functioning, just even just circulation and the ability for the nerves and the blood vessels to not be impeded or trapped. I mean, it's just you know, it just kind of goes on and on. We start thinking about the potential implications of that.

Jackie Baxter 32:05

Yeah, which makes a lot of sense. And you know, you you would when when you were describing, you know, the the sort of mechanisms, for want of a better word, of the kind of cranial sacron, you're you know, describing how that and the perin and the inflammation and it links into your nervous system. And you were talking earlier about the person with the neck pain, sorry, the the neck injury hindering the vagus nerve, which obviously is our main nerve for our parasympathetic nervous system. And you know, it's um it's this amazing piece of the puzzle where by you know, sometimes it may be one very small kind of release, or for some people it may be a little bit more complex in lots of different areas, but by sort of mobilizing different things, you can actually free up all sorts of things going on in the body, whether it's the sort of the drainage or the inflammation or the nervous system blockages or indeed all sorts of other things, and um you know what what I'm kind of thinking is that you know, we we often talk about how movement or sort of mobilizing stuff is the

Inflammation Makes Tissues Stick And Tighten

Jackie Baxter 33:22

enemy, and like it's not that at all, it's not that movement is the enemy, it's doing the right sorts of movements in the right way at the right time, and if appropriate, by somebody who actually knows what they're doing, like yourself, rather than you know, me sitting here and being like, Oh, I'll just pull that and that'll definitely help, which is probably not going to be successful because I don't know what I'm doing.

Heather Wilde 33:49

One of the things I love about cranial sacral therapists, um, and you know, it's like any profession, there's good good ones and better ones, and even better ones, right? There's a continuum of them. But the people who choose to work in that cranial system choose to listen to your body at a depth and a level and a sensitivity, unlike anybody else. They it is amazing what their hands start to learn and understand um to be able to feel something like deeper into the head, to be able to feel these small motions. Um and so somebody who's not trained in that and hasn't practiced that isn't, you know, isn't going to be able to like, you know, push on the head and be able to get the same result. Even if I say, okay, push here just like that, it's very, very um targeted listening, um, which is kind of hard to explain if you haven't experienced that under your hands yourself. And I liked your point about you brought back up um you know how the vagus nerve and this client of mine, and I just wanted to make one point of that is that she had no neck pain. So there was nothing to say that this was the problem, right? That was having this broader understanding of where the interconnectedness lies. And you talked about also, you mentioned like small things, and um, whether this was your point or not, it made me remind of one of Burral. He's still alive, he's he's this French physician who created this um whole line of organ manipulation, the visceral courses. And he says dysfunction hides behind corners, and what that means is that you gotta find around the corner, and when you find that small thing, big things happen, right? So um those small things can be really, really powerful in changing whole systems, yeah.

Jackie Baxter 36:10

Yeah, so those little tweaks can have those

Small Releases With Big Downstream Effects

Jackie Baxter 36:13

huge kind of downstream effects, um, which again, you know, I I see in in breathing work as well. Um, and it's amazing.

Heather Wilde 36:23

Oh, I'm sure. Yeah, and people would say, how could breathing possibly heal me? I breathe every day, right? Like it's hard to believe that something so accessible is can be so powerful.

Jackie Baxter 36:38

Yes, until you experience it.

Heather Wilde 36:39

That's exactly.

Jackie Baxter 36:40

And I guess it's exactly the same when you're in your work, you know, we just tweak this and it changes your life. Yeah, right. Um, and and then and then that does happen, and suddenly, you know, you you still can't quite believe it, except that you can because it's happened. And you know, I it's it's amazing the shifts that can happen with something so small or so simple, and it's you know, not necessarily the whole story.

Heather Wilde 37:07

I mean, people with 10 years, 10 years of back pain that they have to watch how they move, and in 45 minutes they stand up and their eyes just about pop out of their head because they can't believe the difference, right? Like it is and that's my favorite thing, Jackie, is watching hope come back into people. If I was to say my number one favorite thing about what I do is that moment when hope reappears, um it's just the most uh sacred space that I could possibly imagine, and I'm just so privileged to be in that. And I love that that's what this podcast is, and that you're doing that for people is you're giving them that piece of there is hope. There is people out there who found their way and are really dedicated. Like I'm really dedicated to trying to help other people find their way out. So thank you for your work.

Jackie Baxter 38:14

Yeah, I I love that. And I think you know, I think this is why a lot of people, you know, do find their way through and then want to help others because you have you you know how it feels to be in that place of of being so unwell um and feeling hopeless and and all of those things. And um you've just made me think of something that I hadn't thought of in the space at all in terms of kind of manual therapy, and and you touched on it earlier. Again, I don't know if it was exactly what you meant, but you said we don't touch anymore. And I'm thinking, you know, with what you're doing with your manual therapy, with your craniosacral, you know, you are physically connecting with people, um, but in a way that feels safe to that person because you're able to judge that and to work with the person that you have in front of them rather than through a formula, right? And you know, that that sense of touch. I mean, a lot of people are so isolated that maybe they don't get much of a sense of touch from other people. And I'm thinking that actually so much of what someone will get from you is is obviously your expertise, but it's also your your empathy in the space that you've created and that kind of hands-on connection that you are able to have with that person, which is powerful, right?

Heather Wilde 39:41

It is exceptionally powerful to be in a place where somebody there's a difference in when somebody touches you and they're listening and they're there to help you, versus being touched like a lab rat, right? Like, you know, well, how does this affect you? And there are very different ways of approaching that, and when you that's one of the things I loved about um becoming a cranial sacral therapist in addition to all the other things that I do, is that I was surrounded by a group of people who were listening with their hands instead of implementing with their hands, and maybe some of it is implementing, but only once you've listened. Uh, I always talk about with I try and tell my patients that what we want is we want to have a relationship with our body, um, and we want a healthy relationship with our body. We don't want an abusive relationship with our with our body. And our society teaches abusive relationships, which is don't listen to your body, push it hard, no pain, no gain, don't rest. Rest is I'll rest when I'm dead. Um, and my body doesn't know, just make it get better. And those are just some ideas that come to the tip of my tongue. But what we want with our bodies is we want to be in healthy relationship. We want to listen to it, we want to respect it, we want to hear that it is it has information to share. We want to hear that um it's with us, it listens to us. Our I mean, you we've all heard the stories of people who were walking and just dropped dead because they, you know, maybe these are extreme circumstances. You know, the guy who first ran the marathon, right? He ran and then he died when he was done. Once he's delivered his message, he's done. Our bodies will deliver and keep going until it kills it, until until what we've asked of it will kill it and it will keep going there. What we that's that's an abusive relationship, if I've ever heard one, right? Instead, we want to come to terms where we start saying, My body says that maybe that's not a good idea to engage in that. My body says I might need some rest, and we start coming into a healthy relationship with our body rather than why won't you do this the way that I'm asking you to do it, even though I've never once stopped to listen to what you need. I've just kept pushing and pushing and pushing.

Jackie Baxter 42:33

Yeah. And I think, I mean, I've heard a lot of other people say the same. And certainly my experience was that I had never listened to my body until it shut me down with long COVID, you know, and and in hindsight, you know, I had not been treating my body well up to that point, you know, and and I I had been the person that thought being really fit meant you were really

Touch Listening And Self Worth

Jackie Baxter 42:54

healthy, and you know, that I'll rest when I'm dead and that sort of thing. And you know, my body had been trying to send me messages for years, but I just hadn't been listening. And, you know, I like to think I have a much healthier relationship with that now. And that was one of the things that I learned through my recovery. And that doesn't mean that I'm perfect because I'm certainly not, uh, but you know, it's it's a much better relationship.

Heather Wilde 43:19

But we're not giving permission. We're not given permission to have a good relationship with our body.

Jackie Baxter 43:27

No, no, we're not.

Heather Wilde 43:29

We're we glorify abusive body relationships, right? In all kinds of ways. There is there is no permission, there's there's no awareness. Um, and I think that's another powerful thing that your podcast is putting out there is that there's a better way to live. Um and you learn to have a good relationship with yourself, it's gonna help you also have a better relationship in life in all aspects.

Jackie Baxter 44:05

Yeah, yeah, that's a really good point. You know, I I talk often about, you know, reconnecting with our bodies um and reconnecting with our breath. And, you know, again, that connection with ourselves is important. And, you know, what what's what's the phrase? If you don't love yourself, no one else will love you, kind of thing. And you know, I I think that's so true. We we have to have to love ourselves, we have to really feel like we are worth it. And I think, you know, like you say, that the problem is that we have often spent years being told and therefore believing that we're not. Um, so it's kind of rebuilding that relationship with ourselves and that trust in ourselves, and you know, to sound sound a bit hippie, you know, that self-love kind of thing that that is is really important, isn't it?

Heather Wilde 44:57

Well, I think that was the gift I was given of my suffering that I don't think I could have gotten to anyway, was when I spent a year on the couch and my husband came home and made dinner and would put the laundry in and then do dishes, and I literally couldn't do anything. How incredible the the depth of feeling inadequate, of feeling that I had nothing to prove my value, right? And I'm sure this is a story that has been shared many times of coming to that point of realizing that you you can't that's a black hole. Like you can put as much into it and you're never gonna get anything out of it because you just have to realize that your productivity has nothing to do with your worth or the worth of anybody else, that we are just divine beings, that every human just is a divine being, and that I can just sit in my own divinity without having to prove anything else, and I can sit and watch somebody else be unable to do anything and completely see that that person is divine, and that person has worth, and that person is adding to the greater good because of their light, that they just exist, and that is powerful, and that that changes your view. It changed my view on how I interact and how I wish and how I see the desire to help as many people for free or whatever I can do as possible.

Jackie Baxter 46:59

Yeah, I think you're so right, and I think this experience does give you a different outlook, and certainly for me, I think it's a better one. So I think uh that's that's a beautiful place to leave it. I wasn't sure where we were gonna end up. I did not see it being here. Um we've gone from plumbing analogies, we've worked our way through manual therapy, through craniosexual therapy, and we have ended up at this place where we everyone in the world has value without even having to do anything. And I think that is that's gotta be the most beautiful evolution of a conversation ever.

Speaker 1 47:39

That's gotta be, that's gotta be the top of the that's the best place to finish. I agree.

Jackie Baxter 47:45

Exactly. Yes. So, Heather, thank you so much. I feel like we've covered so much, and it's been absolutely enlightening for me. So I hope that everyone listening has got just as much from it as well. Thank you so much. And uh, I'll make sure that I drop all your links in the show notes so people can get in touch with you and and uh and follow up if they are interested.

Heather Wilde 48:09

And Jackie, you are delights, absolute delight. I'm so grateful for this opportunity. And if nothing else, like I said, I just bring in hope. Like I hope those of you who are suffering, you have hope. Like, don't give up. There are pathways opening up, there's information that's getting out there to people, and um you can do it every day. You've got this.