Functional Synergy Toolkit | #299

In this episode, I introduce the Functional Synergy Toolkit, a set of 16 concepts and tools designed to revolutionize pain management and healing. I emphasize the importance of a relational approach, where trust and understanding between the practitioner and client are paramount. 

Key tools I discuss include the Healing Helix, Client Commitment Blueprint, and Body Signals Mapping. These tools help clients tune into their bodies and foster a compassionate, integrative healing journey. I invite listeners to explore these concepts further and join my Therapeutic Yoga Intensive for a deeper understanding.

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What You'll Learn from this Episode:

  • Introduction of the Functional Synergy Toolkit for pain management and healing.
  • Emphasis on a relational approach to healing rather than a transactional one.
  • Importance of building trust and understanding client needs in the healing process.
  • Overview of key tools in the toolkit, including Healing Helix and Client Commitment Blueprint.
  • Exploration of deeper motivations behind clients’ desire for recovery.
  • Techniques for clients to tune into their body’s signals and enhance self-awareness.
  • Breakdown of movements into smaller components for improved recovery.
  • Understanding the three dimensions of movement to optimize patterns.
  • Integration of emotional and analytical aspects of healing through Whole Brain Healing.

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Intro 00:00:01 You’re listening to From Pain to Possibility with Susi Hately. You will hear Susie’s best ideas on how to reduce or even eradicate your pain, and learn how to listen to your body when it whispers so you don’t have to hear it scream. And now here’s your host, Susi Hately.

Susi Hately 00:00:22 Welcome and welcome back. I’m so glad that you’re here, because today we’re diving into something quite exciting. And it’s the official Functional Synergy Toolkit. And this toolkit consists of 16 concepts and tools that I’ve been using over the years that have been quietly transforming the way people approach pain, both in themselves and with their clients. It’s super fun for me that my team and I have finally formalized these concepts into a clear and comprehensive structure. The toolkit represents a culmination of the methods and insights that have shown incredible results, not just in helping people to reduce or eliminate pain. But in training yoga teachers and health professionals to do the same. And as I’ve mentioned, we’ve documented 16 core tools and concepts, each designed to support an integrative and effective healing.

Susi Hately 00:01:13 The tools provide yoga therapists, yoga teachers, physical therapists, occupational therapists, and massage therapists with practical and relational approaches to helping their clients create real and lasting change. And let’s pause for a moment here. Because this integrative, this relational approach is key. Healing and recovery is not about a single fix it or one size fits all method. It’s relational. It’s about fostering a connection between the individual and their body, and between the individual and the health practitioner. As yoga therapist, we don’t just guide the recovery and healing process. We model it through the relationships we build with our clients. We show them what it looks like to relate to themselves with clarity, kindness, and curiosity. And the Functional Synergy toolkit is here to here to support that process. Here is a peek at some of the tools you will find in the toolkit. The Healing helix. The client commitment blueprint. The compelling reason body signals mapping. Biomechanical granularity principles and planes of movement. Reverse engineering. Whole brain healing. Coaches and qualities.

Susi Hately 00:02:28 Deliberate rest. Each of these tools serves as a guide, a touchpoint, and a framework for working with clients in a way that is both intuitive and grounded in evidence based practices. I’ll be sharing more about these tools and episodes to come, and weaving in stories of how they’ve transformed lives. But for now, I invite you to consider this. What would it feel like to approach recovery and healing with clarity, structure, and compassion? To have tools that meet you and your clients exactly where you’re at and then guide you forward with confidence. That is the foundation. And that is the intention of the Functional Synergy toolkit. So let’s go in and dig into them a little bit more. The healing helix. The healing helix represents the foundation of the Functional Synergy toolkit. The healing relationship. Healing isn’t transactional. It’s deeply relational. The concept emphasizes the dynamic connection between the practitioner and the client. It’s not just about fixing the body, but modeling what it looks like to relate to oneself with compassion, curiosity, and awareness.

Susi Hately 00:03:40 When the practitioner embodies this relationship, it creates a ripple effect empowering clients to develop their own healing relationship with their body. Healing, after all, is not linear. It’s a spiral growing deeper and deeper with each layer. Which leads then to the client commitment blueprint. One of the most common frustrations we hear among practitioners before they become our trainees is dealing with or working with? Or how do you change non-compliance or clients who seem to resist the process? And, well, let me tell you, that is not an issue for me or for my clientele. The Client Commitment Blueprint redefines this narrative. It shifts the focus to building trust and uncovering the why behind the client’s hesitations, and also the why behind why the client actually wants to do this and why. Now, it has the practitioner really listen deeply to what the client is both saying and not saying. It’s not creating or co-creating any sort of agreement, but rather it’s in this relational space of listening and of presence and of sensing. And in that space, some really deep safety occurs.

Susi Hately 00:05:03 There is a nervous system connection because our nervous systems, after all, are all talking with each other. And when our client truly feels safety in that presence of their practitioner, when there’s trust present, That is when some crazy, amazing magic begins to happen. With recovery and with healing. Which then leads, obviously to the compelling reason. After all, why do people choose to recover and heal? Why do they choose to start right now? The compelling reason really allows us to dive deep into the why. It’s not just a surface level goal setting. It’s really tuning in again. We’re listening, perceiving to both what’s being said and not being said. Finding the common thread through the story, through the desire, through what’s working and not working so that this healing process becomes deeply meaningful. And it’s done in a way that’s so interestingly Relational, and it’s so often something that a client has not experienced before. It tunes in so deeply, in a connected way. It continues to build trust in a step by step.

Susi Hately 00:06:19 Layer by layer, rooting sort of way. So when it comes to this next tool, the body signals mapping, it makes a lot of sense that the body signals mapping works really well. This is the tool we use to help people tune in to their whispers, their yellow lights, or whichever metaphor works for them. Our bodies, after all, are constantly and consistently speaking to us through sensations, whether they’re discomfort or pain, freedom, tightness, gripping, tension, ease, softness, strength, steadiness, that inner rhythm, pulse, that melody that is within all of us, each of us. And this Body Signals mapping tool helps practitioners and clients tune in to these whispers. Understand the language of a person’s body, themselves specific to them. By integrating subjective experience, what the client feels with objective observations that which can be seen or measured. We can create this an amazing, integrative, clear, clear, clear picture of what is happening in the body. It’s amazing how this roots even further trust in the relationship and trust in the body’s wisdom, enabling more actionable insights for recovery and healing.

Susi Hately 00:07:38 This also ties together with biomechanical granularity, and this tool really is about zooming in and helping to reduce compensatory strategies. Healing often lies in the smallest, more subtle movements, the ones we typically overlook because they’re quiet. But power is quiet. There’s a subtlety to it, and it can have such magical implications when it comes to recovery and healing. Biomechanical granularity teaches the practitioners to practitioners to break down movements into small component parts. Helping clients uncover become aware of the inefficiency or compensations and these small adjustments. These shifts and changes can lead to profound breakthroughs, creating even more of a solid foundation that creates significant change. This leads to principles and planes of movement. Movement happens in three dimensions sagittal, frontal, and transverse plane. Understanding these planes allows practitioners to truly identify compensatory strategies where something is working or working against a client and their movement patterns. And this way, we can help someone really feel into what’s working and not working, and understand the biomechanical implications of their movement patterns. These are principles that I have used for so many, so many decades, and they go beyond merely the mechanics.

Susi Hately 00:09:03 They integrate breath flow, core stability, moving in a pain free or in a reduced pain range of motion. Guiding both the practitioner and the client to be able to take a step by step approach that honors a central nervous system. Honors the myofascial system honors the way that we think and enables a sequential, step by step process toward recovery and healing. Creating movement loops. Movement isn’t random, it’s a feedback loop. And then create a movement loop. Tools helps practitioners understand how movement begins and flows and completes. By observing and guiding these loops, we can identify where there’s disruptions, where there’s a lack of coordination, and how we can reestablish smoother, more efficient movement patterns. It’s a remarkable tool for helping to down regulate and at the same time retrain the nervous system, building confidence and clarity and movement. Reverse engineering. Clients will often have specific goals Girls picking up their grandchild. Walking without pain. Getting back to skiing on a bike. Quilting. The reverse engineering tool helps break these goals down into biomechanical steps.

Susi Hately 00:10:19 Assessing what a client can and cannot do. And from there, they can begin to rebuild, stabilize, strengthen, and optimize movement patterns. It’s about meeting a client exactly where they are at and guiding them toward what exactly it is that they want. Which then leads to whole brain healing. Inspired by Doctor Jill Bolte Taylor’s work, Whole Brain Healing taps into the four quadrants of the brain the left prefrontal cortex, the right left amygdala, and the right. Each quadrant brings unique strengths to the healing process, from logic and analysis to intuition and emotion. And it really helps practitioners create this integrative approach because ultimately we need to be able to sense and recuperate down, regulate and calm the sometimes overactive left side of the brain and bring the two together, promoting balance and resilience. Coaches and qualities. Now we’re looking at layers of being physical, breath, mental, emotional, spiritual healing that focuses only on one layer. Maybe just the physical is rarely sustainable. And this tool helps practitioners integrate all of the layers and begins to see someone as more than just sets and repetitions, but rather the how of the quality of movement.

Susi Hately 00:11:46 It really helps someone recognize we’re not actually fixing anything, but improving and supporting the qualities of these layers. And it can be profound and lasting. And this leads to deliberate rest. Rest, after all, isn’t passive. For it to be effective and recuperative, for us not to be under recovered, We need to be deliberate in this process. We need to nourish. We need to support. We need to allow for awareness to really have a settle into ourselves. After all, the wisdom of our body is always on. It’s always bringing us back. Our bodies and our minds are tuned towards health and healing, and deliberate rest is a way toward that. It focuses on the art and science of true recovery, helping clients to understand the importance of downregulation. Rest is where integration happens and this tool ensures is prioritized and practiced effectively. This is the start of the Functional Synergy Toolkit. A taste of what is to come. So stay tuned. Over the number of weeks and months, I’ll be sharing more about each of these tools and how they work together, because truly, they work together as a functional synergy.

Susi Hately 00:13:12 It’s not just one tool. It’s all of them working collectively and cohesively. You’ve received a taste of the tools today. I didn’t go through every single one. I gave you a taste of some so it could just get your curiosity brewing, exploring, and even just with the short amount that I’ve offered today. Consider how you can use these ideas in the practice that you have. I’m looking forward to sharing more with you. And if you want to dig into these more, come join me at the Therapeutic Yoga Intensive where you can really explore these in real time with me. I would love for you to join me and you can come and explore more at FunctionalSynergy.com/intensive

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Does POWER come to mind when you think of the armpits?

Discover how working on the pits can impact (and improve) carpal tunnel syndrome, wrist and elbow issues . . . even knee issues!