Hey, beautiful soul, and welcome to Dear Body, I'm Listening, the podcast for women navigating chronic symptoms, invisible illness and that daily dance between hope and exhaustion. If you've ever been told it's all in your head, well, this podcast is for you, because your body is not lying, and neither are you.
Hi, I'm Donna Piper, movement therapist, Pilates instructor and chronic illness navigator. After years of being dismissed and diagnosed, and doing everything, quote, unquote, right, but still getting sicker, I created this space to tell our truth. Here, we talk about swelling, brain fog, nervous system crashes, and the kind of symptoms that don't always show up on lab results. We're going to explore lymph breath, movement, self trust, latest research books, relationships, basically, everything, all from a place of compassion and honesty. This isn't about fixing your body. It's about finally being heard and getting some answers.
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Donna Piper: Welcome back, everyone, to Dear Body, I'm Listening. Today's guest is someone who truly gets the body on every level. Peter Stuart is a Registered Massage Therapist who spent over 30 years helping people move beyond chronic pain through gentle trauma informed myofascial release. What makes Peter's work so special is his shift from those old deep tissue no pain, no gain techniques to a lighter, science backed approach that honors how trauma and tension actually live in the fascia. He's logged more than 30,000 hours in his practice. He's taught healthcare professionals and brings a beautiful mix of anatomy, evidence and empathy to every session. If you ever felt like your body was holding on to pain or emotion that no one else could see, this conversation is going to feel like an exhale. So these are all the topics that I love, trauma, pain, new techniques, no pain, no gain. And so what I really would like to start with is, what got you into doing body work in the first place? And what has kept your passion alive in this area?
Peter Stuart: I started off in, well, I guess I've had a lot of my own injuries and illnesses since I was a child. It was funny, I do a mentorship program for therapists, and one of my patients we were working on the other day had asked me about my background on injury, and the list kept going on, and on, and on, and on. And by the time I was 18, I had accumulated a lot of significant injuries, concussions and things like that. But I think the catalyst was when my knees got bad enough that I was playing a sport at a national level. And then once my knees started to go and no one could figure out I was in pain. Most of the time, if I participated in sport, I would be in pain, and my brain was just so focused on, that's kind of who I am. So it's a real identity shift. And not very talked about is when you lose who you think you are to pain, the amount of depression that sets in later on and I didn't even see it, I just tried to shift. I was starting a new family, recently married and thinking, yeah, this is all just life. It's all good. And then it just hit me one day like a ton of bricks how depressed I was. So what I ended up doing is when I was in Calgary, at this point, I had my own clinic, but I started working for a chronic pain research and treatment facility called Myosymmetries under the guise of Dr. Stuart Donaldson, brilliant man, great mentor to me. His approach to the body was whole. The sum of what was happening to me was the accumulation of years of trauma, and even the mental and emotional aspect of that, the healthcare, I didn't grow up knowing I was ADHD. I really only found out a few years ago through a psychologist friend of mine, and that made a lot of sense.
I had this memory sort of box that my dad had put together, and my kids had asked if they could go through my old school records and look at my old marks and things like that. I'm like, oh, yeah, that's fine. The comment from the time I was in kindergarten right up until I ended High School was, Peter has trouble focusing. Peter doesn't pay attention. Peter needs to try harder. But Peter, when he comes to think about it, had a lot of anxiety and depression around the way his brain worked. Because if I got assigned a novel in English class, like in grade 10, it didn't really click with me. I'd have to read each page three times. It was a daunting task. Then I'd have the shame and guilt thrown at me of, you don't work hard enough, you're not achieving the same marks as other kids. I shelved it all. I just stuck it away. I just tried harder, and I tried the best I could. And my dad, God loved him, he was concluding the fact that, hey, you just don't have that same kind of brain that some of the other kids do. Don't take it to heart. And I'm like, well, I'll try harder, which isn't even a thing. I needed to focus on what I was good at. It turns out, what I became very good at is helping others who are in pain. So when people come and see me, I can really identify with the various mental, emotional and physical aspects of what they're experiencing.
So how did I get into this gig? Well, I went to see a friend of mine who was studying massage therapy, and she was going to work on me as a project while she was home for a couple weeks from school and just going to work on my knees. I got talking with her, and I remembered how much I loved the body in high school. I loved reading about it. I was in a traditional high school, math, geography. I did biology, physics and chemistry, but the body stuff was really fascinating, so I connected to that. I became a massage therapist, a two year program in Ontario at the Canadian college of massage and hydrotherapy. But after that, working at this chronic pain clinic and seeing these people the way they were being reached wasn't through traditional therapy. The nervous system wasn't really responding for people who had chronic situations. Let's just put it this way, that the nervous system had very little response to traditional means. In that, we couldn't manipulate the nervous system by the techniques we were using to make any permanent change. There's always a shift or a change in the short term, but not in the long term. So it was the gentle style of myofascial release which was having a tremendous effect. So how are you able to shift the nervous system with that? I was fascinated. Now, I'm not doing it at this point, but I'm in my own private clinic, and people who started showing up to me are chronic pain people. I'm like, okay. Had this one done off, just remembering this now, she was the breaking point for me. The catalyst that made me shift.
She was a woman who had been mid 30s at this point, and she had seen a lot of therapists already post her motor vehicle about four years, and hadn't gotten better. Hadn't gotten better. Heard about me, came to see me, and I wasn't making too much of a change either. And there's a bit of an ego involved when you get into this. You want to see successes so I just said to myself, you know what? You're going to give her the best massage anyone's ever had. You're just going to go all out. This is going to be the best. You're going to include everything. It's just gonna be amazing. I'm building myself up. And she gets off the table after an hour, and I say, how do you feel? Immediately fishing. She gets up and she's like, I feel really good. Wow, I can move better. I haven't felt this good for a long time. This is great. And then she leaves. And I'm like, yes, finally, breakthrough, had it in me all the time.
Of course, she comes back two days later. This little black rain cloud overhead, and I'm like, oh, okay. She's not talking about how great my massage was and what an effect it had on her life or anything like that. So I'm like, hmm, okay. Can you tell me a little bit more about how you felt after the treatment was done? And she was like, oh yeah, let's see here. I went home, and I felt really good. Actually, I felt really good. And my brain's gone. That's better. Tell me about that. Feed me. And then she goes up until about supper time, and then it all went downhill from there. I was just like, defeated. I was like, I can't keep going on like this. I want to help these people. So that's when I made a change. I was getting the psychological aversion to having oil in my hands on a regular basis too. I had a towel on me all the time. I was constantly wiping my hands going, I can't keep this up either. So I went down to the United States, and I did a lot of courses in gentle style, myofascial release. The same style that was being used up at our clinic, the chronic pain clinic, and immediate shift. It was about combining the philosophy of the genital style of myofascial release with the philosophy of Dr. Stuart Donaldson. Treating the body as a whole person, and then seeing well beyond what is in front of you makes a significant change in people's lives. So that's basically how I got into a long roundabout story.
Donna Piper: But it's beautiful because, yeah, I am that patient that tries everything and likes, okay. Everyone else gets immediate results, and they feel great, and it lasts. And I'm your client that came in and was like, oh, I felt great right after it. It didn't stick, so I totally relate to that. And that you didn't take that as a one off, like this lady is just, she's not my client. She's not for me. But I really want to understand how in someone with chronic pain or having this, that they respond much differently. Searching that out because that's a huge provider, whether you're a massage therapist doctor, which a lot of my audience. A lot of what I do is, I'm 54 so I did not diagnose any of my things that I've had since, mine was like genetics. Hypermobility, EDS, lipedema, MCAS, POTS.. So I have a lot of those things that my fascia has been freaking out. I was trained as a psychotherapist that focused basically just all on trauma, and that PTSD was my thing. So there was like, I thought I was doing all of these techniques and all of these things to process my trauma, and really my fascia got all jacked up because my body is learning to survive, but creating new pathways. So I think it's really fascinating that you spoke about your history with how you felt your brain was different, also how much your ego. Just like you were a sports person, whatever sport you were in was a part of your identity, and how chronic pain slowly does it. It's not like, oh, my god, I have this pain. I'm so depressed. It's very insidious, and it changes you. Don't think that it changes your perception because I know it's changed mine.
I was in mental health. I was a runner, a Pilates instructor. I did all these things that were healthy, I thought, and still my body wasn't. There was a disconnect. I didn't know about all these things, but that was going on with me to help. But there isn't that. There is this kind of gray area that you really illuminate. You work with the fascia, but it also brings out the whole person in that. All of these things are about the whole person. It's not just like, I have pain here. How can you treat me? That pain there, depending on how long it's been, might affect your career or what you do, and there's emotions that go along with that, so it's a very beautiful work that you've done. I'm fascinated even to hear more so can you describe what myofascial release is? How it's a little bit different, or maybe different than getting a massage, and then the process of how you assess someone that comes into your office. And are there different protocols depending on, say I come in with a whole lot of stuff and I would be one of those clients like, oh, gosh, she has a lot of stuff going on. It may take a minute to get her to respond positively to anything. But do you have different protocols based on what your diagnosis is? Or do you just really look at the body and find out what the body needs?
Peter Stuart: I'll start with the fact that myofascial release is sort of an umbrella term, really. Myo is Latin for muscle, and fascial is Latin for band. Basically, people think of it as the band around the muscles, but it interdigitates every structure we have. In fact, it creates structure in the body. It's a liquid system down at its core, and it can have a tremendous effect on how people are operating. It's basically the immediate environment of every cell of your body, so it has a profound effect. The research going on today is just incredible. These are all medical researchers doing, or most of them are physiatrists and medical doctors. I just think we're going to prove that fascia has an influence on every element of our well being, so it's a good question. The general style differs from more aggressive styles. There's a lot of aggressive styles. The thing that we found at Myosymmetries and in our chronic pain treatment facility is that aggressive styles tended to flare the nervous system. And the last thing you want to do is flare the nervous system with somebody who has chronic issues, because it'll take less stimuli for them to flare again. At least that's what our findings were. So we eliminated a lot of different types of therapy because they were too aggressive. The light touch fascial work was the type of work that gently applied to the body. No oils, thankfully.
Donna Piper: Well, yeah, especially if you have MCAS and stuff. Like me, sometimes oil, or smells, or lotions, I can't imagine being a provider, you have to deal with it all the time.
Peter Stuart: We couldn't smell it. I mean, back then, we knew at the chronic pain clinic that scents were bothering people, but it would probably take another 10 years before that was universally accepted. So this is just a general hands on placing in the body, or placing the hands on the body, and you gently sink in. And when you don't feel like you're going to sink any further, you push away until you feel a barrier of tension, could be immediate, and you allow this piezoelectric effect to take over, which has long been held the theory of how fascial work is effective and making change in the nervous system. Beautifully described and proven by two Nobel Prize winners for science on finding new receptor sites on nerve cells, the Piezo1 and Piezo2, and the TRPV. I'm not going to get into all that. But needless to say, supports the idea that a low level pressure will create a change in the nervous system over time. So it's patience. And then when I feel the release, basically, that release is known as a creep because you just feel a movement under your hand and you start to follow it. And when you follow that movement, you're not trying to make that movement go the direction you think it needs to go in. This is all about allowing the body to move in the direction it wants to release. The body's intelligent, we just have to show up. I equate it to a dance where the body leads and I follow. Now, my wife might take some different approach to that. I don't think she thinks I lead very well. But in this, you do. But in this, I think dancing with my wife, I've learned to follow. She's much better than I am.
And to be honest with you, it takes a lot of the guesswork out as to what is needed to open up an area of the body. So in a nutshell, that's the difference between the myofascial that I do and and somewhere where you get into more aggressive knuckles, elbows and things like that to try to create change. Now, you may use an aggressive technique for a matter of 20 to 30 seconds in an area if it's really stuck, but I don't even really do that anymore. I just hang out with the body and wait for it to open up. Just listen for what it wants me to do. So it is a very different style, but it makes a change in the nervous system. And the great thing about this is we have incremental change with every treatment. There's no leap or bound toward, oh, my gosh. They're 100% now. Or 80%, or 50% of better treatment. If somebody has a strange leap like that, I always tell them that it's not going to hold. Your brain can only hold so much information, and that would be a tremendous amount. So what I do tell them is that incremental change over time creates permanency in the brain to make those changes happen. Establishing new neural pathways from repetition of, say for instance, one of the big courses that I created was this Pelvic Re-balancing. I'm sure there's other therapists out there who do a version. What I found is that the pelvis is the foundation of the body. So if you're off in your pelvis, everything above and everything below is going to be off. You could have had this chronic pelvic imbalance for a long time and not known it. But essentially, it makes one leg shorter than the other.
So if you are out running or doing activities, you're increasing your balance imbalance over time. A lot of people believe that they're helping themselves, when in fact, they may just be creating more dense patterns of fascial tissue tension. You combine that then with slip and fall, or motor vehicle accident, your workplace posture, the mental and emotional stresses that you've been through, so that leads me to say, when people come in to see me, I do an hour and a half intake. I ask a lot of questions because I'm treating the whole person. You may come in for a shoulder injury, and you're coming to me because you've already seen a number of good therapists, and you've plateaued in your therapy, or you're getting the resolve that you want from the injury. Hopefully, you've had pictures taken, and you've had the exams, physical exams done to see whether you have tears or anything like that happening that may need a surgical intervention. But if you're coming to me and you have a long standing shoulder situation and you've seen other good therapists, then I have to ask the question, why are you not healing? Because if the body is a self correcting mechanism, what are we missing? So I ask a lot of questions, and a lot of it is based on trauma. I'll ask if people understand any of their past trauma, being from in utero to birth trauma, to their childhood traumas. It's accumulative, and that's what we found all creating tensions and patterns in the body. Then you have your mental and emotional trauma. Maybe your parents got divorced, or maybe your dog died, or your horse died, or whatever it is that you're into, something's affected you because you can't get out of this life without it. Or maybe there's more involvement, maybe there's childhood abuse, or you're dealing with an alcoholic in the family, or narcissistic parent, things like this.
In which case, even narcissism is interesting. I have a patient who had two, both her parents were narcissists, and I asked her to describe how she grew up. She just put her hands over her head like this and just said, I was bombarded with negativity. She turned to sport to try to be the catalyst to get out. But then she was playing soccer at a pretty high level and had ACL, MCL injury, and never could play at the same level again. Didn't realize how depressed that made her, because she lost her identity that helped her get out from underneath the shadow of her parents' narcissism, which she hadn't really faced. So she became a very hypersensitive person to touch, as well as starting to accumulate more and more issues in her body. So yeah, those are the kinds of things that I want to find out from people. I don't have to know all the details, but I do need to know what you've been through because most people have been through stuff, right? It's not uncommon, and I've been trained. It's trauma informed, so I can understand this stuff. There's no reaction to it. It's a matter of, okay, so we list up all the things that have happened to you. It's quite amazing.
And then there will be some people who say, well, nothing is wrong with me. I rolled my ankle once, that's all I can remember. I'm like, hang on to that. Well, we'll come back to that. You'll probably remember some stuff as we go along, or the body remembers. Because sometimes when I get my hands on a body, people will react emotionally. So the emotional trauma is sometimes just right underneath. Sometimes, you just start to see people's throats go red when you're working on an area. There's so much held here about what wasn't said, or to shut you down when you wanted to scream that it wasn't safe, things like that. And so when that comes up, it's a great intervention for me to be able to then refer to colleagues of mine who can help them through those situations. If they haven't done talk therapy, EMDR, or whatever, there's a lot of really good therapies out there. I love psychotherapy because it really cuts into the chase. I love that style. And in the interview, it also gives me the opportunity to refer out when I hear their stories. Are they nutritionally well? Do they need help there? Are they coping with the stressors of their daily job? 9 to 5, five days a week, and you hate going to work. That is probably one of the biggest catalysts to keep you from healing. It's about taking a team approach to help people reclaim the parts of them that are stuck, and how they feel that it's okay to put themselves into situations where they're compromised on a regular basis.
Donna Piper: I love this whole approach because you really are the thread between, literally with the fascia that goes throughout the body. But in between the psychological, the nutrition, all the aspects of life, and when they come to you, it sounds like it's not just to have this pain go away, but really to listen. I know in my world, there's a lot of medical trauma with doctors just not listening. Just kind of writing it off as, oh, maybe eat less, move more. Oh, it's probably that phase of your life, don't worry about the pain. There's so much of that in the US as far as the women that have been under diagnosed or undiagnosed forever. But it sounds that when they come to you, it's not just to do my shoulder, but you really take the time to listen, which is key to make people want to tell their story. Maybe not the person with the ankle. But eventually, those people with the ankle probably really want to sell it, like pushed it down. It's too much to even go there. They're like, no. But that's nice that you also have the trauma informed background, or part of it. When they do have emotion or something comes up, you're able to be a nice, neutral place to have that stuff land as you move through the fascia to start the healing. I do want you to talk a little bit more about the science with the cells and the fascia because I am fascinated with it. It does hold trauma memories, it connects things. You were talking about neural pathways. I think the body is amazing. I now understand that my body's going through that. I'm still breathing and alive, and how it's created all these different pathologies to keep me alive based on everything I've inundated to it. How it's not really functioning and optimal. When you find that, when you unravel that with you, the fascia really does speak to have a safe, I'm assuming, and you could talk to this as well.
But when I've done trauma work, and my view is until your body feels safe enough to even process any of the things that it's like, got cumulative trauma or anything, your body needs to be safe and relaxed. So it really is the opposite of the push harder. Do more, force it down. You really have to go the opposite. Get quiet, find people that you feel safe with, even breathing within yourself, and then you can start to unwind it. So with the fascia in the cells that you talked about, what is it connecting to? Is it connected to the fight flight response? Is it neurotransmitters like cortisol? You can be a little sciency as much as you want to, and if you can make the sciencey part understandable, that would be great too. But if you can't, that's fine. But I'm just really curious about what it is about the fascia that holds on to it, and it protects us. What's that mechanism that I see as a protective thing, but I could be totally wrong.
Peter Stuart: Well, you're probably familiar with the work of Peter Levine and his colleagues. Back 30 years ago when I was first starting to understand and read Peter Levine's work, he had equated that our hindbrain or nervous system would tend to imprint not just physical, but emotional and mental traumas. And then that's where we first heard the term PTSD back in the late 60s, early 70s when he was working on Vietnam vets coming home. Since then, that phenomenon has expanded, and he's got so many amazing colleagues who do a lot of great workshops on this sort of thing. I don't necessarily take a somatic approach. I stick mainly with the fascia, and allow the body to release at a time when it's ready to release what it wants to release. And I never know what area is going to come up with something. I don't expect it from everybody. And not everybody emotionally releases. If I was physically injured by somebody, unfortunately took a fist or a bat and hit me in the shoulder, I would have physical damage there, right? And we would understand why that is traumatic there, but how the nervous system lays down the trauma in other areas of the body that are mental, emotional, I can't really speak to that because it's kind of a mystery still.
Now, there are schools of thought that say that the body doesn't hold this, but you touch an area and it tweaks something in the brain to remember, to me, it doesn't really matter. After 30,000 hours of clinical experience of doing this. you can think what you want, but I can tell you exactly that. I could even give you a story. I had a school bus driver one time come to the chronic pain clinic, and she was in her mid 50s. Icy conditions. She only had a few kids on the bus, maybe about 6 or 8, or something like that, and she slid off into a ditch. Not too many injuries. One child unfortunately broke her arm. But for the most part, they got out of it unscathed, except for the driver. So she had constant chronic low back pain, and we put her through the assessment test tests that we normally do, and she was very positively responding to the myofascial release in her body and changing shape, but she wasn't changing pain. Then it was interesting, because at a certain point, I was like, I don't know if there's anything more I can do for you because your body looks incredible. It is aligned. Your tissue is in good shape, so why do you still have chronic pain? And I remember one of my teachers came to me in my head and just said, if you ignore people's scars, then you're doing them a great disservice. And immediately, I went back to her chart, and I was looking at it. I'm like, your appendix scar. Let's take a look at that today.
Unfortunately, she's in tears. Because at the end of her rope, she's suicidal at this point, or starting to talk about it. I laid her down on the table, and I was examining her scar. And of course, it's quite small and it's old. She got that when she was like 10. She's 55, so it's a 45 year old scar. And when I started to do work on it, I asked her permission if it was fine to proceed. We started doing work and she's like, no, that's fine. And I was doing this release on it, and all of a sudden, the tears came, and they came, and they came. And then I was helping her work through that, breathing through it, and allowing her space, and she knew it was safe. She already trusted me. And then I said, if anything comes up, just let me know. And then she just said, this is all about my husband. She was divorced, but she was narcoleptic, and her husband used to assault her at night. Actually assaulted her while she slept, and she didn't find out about it for years. When she figured it out, she divorced him, and had the authorities arrest him. He actually went to jail, and this all came out in this tiny, little scar.
We had a one hour session, allowing for her to process, to grieve, and allow this to come up. And I talked to her about, have you done any talk therapy around this? She said, yeah, I have. I don't feel right now, once we finished, that I have anything more to say. I'm just really glad this came up. That was a Friday, and I said, okay, so I'm going to see you again on Monday. Of course, just call if there's any issues coming up over the weekend, or if you need support. She didn't call, and she walked down the hallway Monday, just strutting with her cowboy boots which she hadn't worn in years. And I said, well, look at you. You look completely different. She goes, I am. I got my boots on today, and had my boots on Saturday night. It felt so good. I went out country dancing. I haven't done that with my girlfriends in a long time. And then she said, I even got dipped twice. And then backwards the whole time going, look, look, no pain. And I did an examination on her, and I couldn't recreate any pain for her. Then I heard from her once after that, probably about six months later, just a thank you letter to the clinic, and that was her story. So she told me that things don't lay latent in the body. I have too many stories like this.
Donna Piper: What a beautiful, succinct testament to it. Because with everything, you could talk a lot, or you could do a lot of physical work. But at some point, it's all in the same system. Sometimes, it needs to relate. And how it came out, she did a lot of talking, she did a lot of work, and then she just needed that extra connection to happen to put it all together, and then really let it go and release it. Not just like let it go sort of flippant thing, but she was able to integrate and release out. What amazing work. And you say you see that all the time. Maybe not significantly, like dramatic.
Peter Stuart: For the most part, people can connect to their pain. Most people will emote without making a connection to an event. It's just stuff that we've held on to. It's just baggage and feeling like they have a safe place to allow that to happen. Most people are like, oh, my God, I don't know why I'm crying. And that's okay. Your emotions are coming up for whatever reason. Don't have to put a label on it. Just allow them to come up, and that's fine. I do a lot of structural work, which can lead to emotional work. I had one teacher who put a lot of emphasis on the unwind. And unwinding a body can bring up a lot of trauma, but it's not necessarily. I don't know, it may not be a safe space because I don't know that a lot of therapists are really, truly trauma informed. or enough to do that work with people. There's a caveat to that. I just say, when the body is ready, the mind's never ready for this. Well, I'm embarrassed. I don't want to do this right now. And if you trust me, let's just hang out with this and see where this goes. And they always feel so much lighter after we're done with a session. They've let go of things. It's like the right time to have kids. There is no right time to have kids, right?
Donna Piper: It probably comes up whenever it comes up. Yeah, that's right.
Peter Stuart: Life has a way. And as much as your brain is trying to say, your thoughts are trying to control things all the time, your emotions and your feelings need to be expressed as well for health. So if they come out without the brain understanding why it's okay, maybe some will hold your hand through it because I've been through it myself, right? It's a much better pathway walk.
Donna Piper: You mentioned a lot of therapists aren't trauma informed, and I feel the same way. But I'm not a force anywhere in my therapy. When you go to a session a day and force it away, or breathing, I kind of stay away from that stuff because I feel like the body protects you for a reason. It needs to have a more gentle approach in order to actually release it. Sometimes, you can just create, in my view, more boundaries around the thing by forcing, by putting it back in because you don't really feel you didn't process it in the first place. There's probably a good reason why. If now, I'm going to force my body to do it, it's probably not what is needed. I really like that you look and say that out loud because you're going to maybe go do myofascial release somewhere, and you might be looking for a therapist who's ever listening like you, that would take the whole body and really be informed about it. There's different levels of education and views about how informed you are. This is all to say, when you teach other professionals this, do you include the trauma informed part in your courses? Or where does that kind of lead in the training of a professional that is doing the work that you are beautifully doing and bringing out to everyone? Because everyone, no matter if you don't think so, no one goes through childhood unscathed. Everyone has stuff. Life brings stuff with us. It's not bad. It's not like your life was bad or anything, or good if you have it. We process stuff. And sometimes, we don't. That's the stuff I think that you really can get in a physical way.
Peter Stuart: It's interesting that you say that. From a childhood, say I'm doing a neck unwinding with somebody where they're sitting up on my table, and I'm doing this general process of unwinding the neck, there'll be glitches in the movement, right? So people will be moving along. And all of a sudden, it just gets stuck, and it wants to get out of that little glitch where the nervous system is skipping over an area. Traditionally, that's been called the Still Point after Andrew Still, the creator of osteopathy and his beautiful work. So that Still Point, you want to bring somebody back to it, but it's a glitch, and people will be like, why do I have so many glitches in my neck. I must be broken or something. No, you pick this up all the time. If your head was turned in a certain direction that you heard something you didn't like, your nervous system would record that as, oh, I don't like that particular degree of movement because it reminds me of this. Let's skip over that. You could have been crawling in the kitchen with your head moving back and forth, and your mom dropped a pan on the floor and it went bang, and you went in this position, I mean, we come by this stuckness, this tension that develops over time pretty naturally in the nervous system.
Some of us are a little bit more like, I would say that I was a very sensitive kid, and I think most people who get into my profession are very empathetic people, and are on the sensitive scale pretty high. And probably, your profession as well. We tune into things differently, and I think that makes for a really good therapist to be able to understand that some people will have these traumas that they incur and just brush it off like it's nothing. But we could hear that little story, if they want to tell it, and go, hmm. Well, I think that has more significance than you think it does. Just adding everything up. The Body Keeps the Score, that wonderful book, it's an accumulative process of trauma over time, mental, emotional and physical. And there are ways to access your well being depending on all of those aspects. So we have to look at them all. I'm not skilled in all of those things. And I will refer out if I need to, that's absolute. I am not the be all in of anybody's healthcare. I tell people that I am a link in the chain. And if you come and see me for an assessment and I flag you that you need to see somebody else first before you see me, or maybe I'm not even involved, I will go to great lengths to make sure that you can get that appointment.
Donna Piper: A beautiful awareness of you as a practitioner too. What you do and how you help people in different ways, you have resources, because that's also helpful to go to someone and get resources. At least when they talk to you, they get a resource or something. It's not just like, I can't help you. I don't know if we talked about it before, but medical trauma is a real thing down here with all of life, especially with lipedema. I have all these invisible illnesses. I've been in chronic pain since I was seven. I had migraines. I have hypermobility, EDS, which is a whole topic in and of itself, whether it exists or not. MCAS, which is now a little bit more understood. But a lot of dysautonomia comes from that as well. Also the POTS and the MCS, MCAS, and the hypermobility, and I have chronic fatigue syndrome, and I have lipedema. I have all these things that for years affected my gut, my health and my pain level. It took me quite a few doctors, literally 10 functional doctors that missed it. And then I finally found someone that diagnosed one thing that led to some other things. But I'm not the only woman that goes in and like, oh, my gosh, I'm in so much pain. I have bloated, I have all these things. And most of the time, it's assessed as, oh, it's probably hormonal, it's probably stress. Don't worry about it. Women usually get more like, they're just being over dramatic about the pain. Most of the women in my situation were actually under our pain. We're in so much pain, and we underscore it. 10 is supposed to go to the hospital. But I've gone to the hospital before, and they can't really do anything. So really, you function at a 7 to 10, and then really higher. And because people can't see pain, I don't look like I'm in pain, but I am. It's not something like, if I broke my arm, you'd be like, oh, she broke her arm. Or if I had a deformity, oh, she has this deformity. But in this world of invisible illness, you see a lot of women that either have these chronic conditions, have been undiagnosed,, or have any sort of medical trauma--
Peter Stuart: On a regular basis. Three quarters of the people I've treated over the years, I would say, are women. More women than men seem to seek treatment. I was telling you, I think earlier, my friend Erica and I, we've had this discussion more than once, and we just shake our heads. I've had women come to me and I'm talking with them about their situations. I'll say, what has your doctor told you about your incontinence? Or what has your doctor told you about any of the pelvic floor dysfunction, painful sex, all of that stuff? And is your doctor concerned about your relationship right now with your husband who is not understanding anything because you don't get any information from your doctor to talk about what's happening to you? And she goes, well, no. She usually just said, you had a baby. What do you expect? And when Erica and I get into this discussion, it's more of a rant, just getting stuff out. Healthcare professions really need to talk about it because we see so many things that are just glossed over. And women's health directly, I can attest to the fact that it's a man's world in a lot of ways, and it's certainly still in the healthcare field where a lot of the women that I've had sent back to their doctors. I've even talked to doctors on the phone and said, if we can have a conversation, that'd be great. And then when I can have a conversation, they'll say, oh, well, I wasn't sure about her background. Whatever you want to say, as long as you are ready to get behind this, and let's get some tests done. Let's get some referrals, and let's move the ball for this one because it's a pandemic of its own.
Donna Piper: It really is. And I love that you're able to get on in there and on the phone, because there is something if you bring in some sort of evidence or something else like just what you're saying, like her background. They really brush a lot of the symptoms off because the symptoms can be kind of weird. How do you really talk about your level of brain fog, and how do you really talk about your level of pain? You're in pain. I have a very high pain tolerance compared to someone else, and still, that is subjective. I wake up with aching legs or back. They're like, oh, well, that could be anything. There's this weird sort of, oh, you're tired. I can't function. But they don't really understand. Even a lot of people, they don't understand unless you go through it. Or maybe you've been through it, or you see a lot of people with it, it's hard to really understand fatigue. It's not like, oh, I could take a nap and feel better. It's like, I really can't function. How to help with that? I'm just really grateful that you're an advocate and able to get on the phone with providers to help your patients or whoever needs to be in their system, to give them the test or what they need, and also make it validating. Because it does suck when you're out there and you see all these people and they're like, oh, nothing's wrong with you. And you're like, well, I don't feel normal. But maybe it is me. Maybe I am making this up. Maybe I am having some body dysmorphia. I think a lot of people shouldn't use the new fangled term gas lighting because once you go and they say, no, your blood works great. What you're saying and what I'm seeing don't correlate, so you must be making it up. I'm just really expressing my gratitude. I think any of my listeners out there actually recognize that there are interventions. And once you understand them, there's a lot of different things you can do in your life. Get this myofascial release. If you have hypermobility, you change your range of motion. You do different electrolytes. If you have POTS, there's things out there that can support you so you're not in so many flares. So that's just my gratitude to you.
Peter Stuart: Thank you. I'm just trying to spread information and send people to as many informed people in their areas of expertise as I can. With chronic fatigue, we used to treat that a lot at the chronic pain clinic. But after doing brain map and try to figure out where and why it's happening inside the brain, and do the neurofeedback to reset the brain so that eases off the chronic fatigue, which helps tremendously for you to be able to heal in other areas because your nervous system is willing to accept, your brain's willing to accept new information where a lot of times, the brain gets stuck. We see this with concussion or any of the mild traumatic brain injuries where the brain's just shutting off. It's like traditional therapies. If I did traditional massage or whatnot, I know I speak to massage specifically. But somebody's very chronic and you're doing that good work on them, what you know to do to just to ease the tension, well, that will ease the tension in the muscles for a short period of time. Reflexly, it goes to the spinal cord, and then the message gets sent back to relax. But when it goes to the upper motor to say, hey, let's store this. It's going, nope, I'm full. I've got so much chronic pain signal that I am not even remotely interested in accepting anything else you're saying sending from below the neck, so forget it. So in cases like that, the myofascial release can help. It's being able to tweak the brain that neural feedback. There's a lot of wonderful practitioners, from what I understand, in the United States, and there's a few in Canada. But the guru of all this was really Dr. Mary Lieste. And now, she's moved to Denver, but she was in Washington. The work she's done is incredible. There is help. You just got to dig for it. And I think doctors are overwhelmed on a regular basis. Our healthcare system is taxed all the time. I just want to get through my day.
Donna Piper: And if there's not that much research, ICD-10 codes or whatever. So if there's not a code for it, or if there's not something like, oh, she checks this. Maybe see a provider, your PCP is like 15 minutes. So if there's not something like they're used to diagnosing, it is a little bit more challenging to get them to turn around.
Peter Stuart: I don't want to put any blame on the doctors. Every one of them is individual, and they come at it from the direction they come. I'm grateful to work with the medical community on a lot of things. However, some people have been, their symptoms have been just shoe shoot away. I'd rather we dig a little deeper into this and see what we can come up with if there's something better, because some doctors are open to suggestions, which is great. So people used to come into our chronic pain clinic 25, 30 years ago, but they'd be on 15 medications. And after doing assessment, we'd say, can we get them off? And usually, they were very receptive to that. And they'd say, yeah, let's take a look at that. Now, I have to try to get people to go on medication because they're so anti medication. I'm like, painkillers are for the short term, and stop taxing your nervous system trying to handle your pain. And if you're not sleeping and melatonin doesn't work, or CBD doesn't work, you're going to have to take something to shut your body down so it can do the repair work it needs to do. But again, I find that my approach is about educating the patient from my perspective of where they're at. I think that they do well with me because they have an understanding as to what's happened to them and where we're moving.
Donna Piper: I love that it's an education as well so they can take it too. Just like podcasting, getting the word out about this approach and how it is part of the whole, that there is an option to like me that has different chronic pain from different ways. Or if you have chronic pain because you had failed back surgery 10 years ago, or for whatever reason, you could have other things that this is a nice technique that really helps heal your system in a different way, which sounds more gentle, and helps you release things that are stored there that are preventing those more healthy pathways, or neurotrans, or however you want to say it. But basically helps your body function more optimally.
Peter Stuart: Absolutely. I enjoy what I do. I'm passionate about it, and I've been an educator for a long period of time too so I really have a lot of passion. There's only so much passion you can have for anatomy and physiology before it gets a little old. But I'm not that person. Being able to teach people how to do this, and then getting the testimonials back from therapists who have taken the courses saying, I had somebody who was stuck for so long, and I applied that technique, and they've never felt it, in one session. And I'm like, okay. I also want to caveat that and keep looking at everything that you need to that has to have an effect globally on their body. Make sure that you keep applying the techniques, because it's going to take a while before they get more permanent change in the brain to make a shift and no longer be in that stuck position.
Donna Piper: Everyone is a little bit different as far as the timing. Once you kind of get into opening up a pathway that has been stuck for a while, completely everywhere, it could take that one time. That's the question I get asked all the time. All of this is very individual. My work works for me, and doesn't work for someone else. But that's how you have to piece it together of what works and have expectations of, like you said, that incremental change. So incremental for me, might be six weeks, it might be a year, and someone else might be two sessions. We all have different levels. And approaching our healthcare, resources and tools to help us. Our expectations need to be like, I think we all have been marketed to like, there's a magic pill, this new thing. I don't know if it's the same. But in the United States, there's always new super food. You take this one thing you have, like this berry everyday, and you lose 50 pounds and look 20 years younger, right? Which doesn't always work. But I think we are in this world of like, we kind of want this magic. I know certain times, I felt like, if I could find the one thing that is making everything all messed up, I would be happy. But I've learned that it's not just one thing. It's like, there's fat and it's layers too. So there's fascia, there's my emotions, there's my view on things, there's genetics, there's the other. So it's really just you going into this knowing that, okay, there's a way out and less pain. But the process is going to look so different for each of us. It is important to put expectations, and it sounds like that's what you do with your holistic approach. Because if there's certain times where you need to refer out and they stop seeing you, or they continue, you have that available to someone.
Peter Stuart: Absolutely 100% that everybody is so vastly different. Here's a little thing that I remember from my time at the chronic pain clinic, but Dr. Donaldson kept the statistics and everything. He was a true psychologist. So anyway, one of the stats that he kept was on people who had support or didn't have support. So when comparing numbers that if you came in with very similar symptoms to somebody else and the markers are all very similar on your testing, how long did it take you to move through our program to get to the point where you were like an 8 out of 10? That's who we considered kind of the success mark. That's what we would shoot for shift and change. Those with support went through the program three times faster than those who didn't. Another question that I like to ask people is, do you have support in your life? Is there somebody helping you? Do you have somebody you can rely on to talk to? And you'd be amazed at how many people don't. I can then go back and say, okay, so I'm gonna help this person. I'm gonna find a gentle place for this person to fall, because I need to be able to say this road may take a little bit longer than not. What support are you looking for? What would you like in your life that you don't have now? Because most people are just so stuck and in pain. They don't see the rest of their needs that they are just slogging through with the day. And it's tough. That's just one element that can separate one person from another, and how well they do in treatment.
Donna Piper: That's so true. And again, having a provider you, or people that you teach, or your clinics have that listening aspect, because that's supportive too. Seriously, when I got my diagnosis of lipedema, I cried because it was like, oh, god. I thought I wanted the other one that was easier to cure, but I got this one. But at least it was a relief when someone told me like, all these symptoms, it's X, Y and Z because she's been doing it for 20 years. But everyone else I didn't. So there is that thing where you're like, oh, that's support right there. Just not being dismissed is really supportive. But if someone's not listening to you and you don't really know how to, and you can't even tell your spouse or your friends around you, they don't really understand when someone does. I think it's a huge shift just in like, okay, at least I know I'm not making this up. Someone hears me, and there is a path in which I can lean on this person. Or go there, and maybe see what we could do together to get this going.
Peter Stuart: You bring up a great point, because there's a lot of people who are in your situation, and similar situations where it's hard for the spouse to understand. I was visiting friends of mine, and my buddy has a serious back issue. Three surgeries already. But one day I just said to his wife, how are you with all this? And she said, well, good. And I went, but seriously, kind of sucks because he's in pain all the time, and it's hard. I said it was a massive shift in his life, and it was a massive shift in your life. You got to look at it like that, and you don't have to put on a brave face all the time. It's okay to say this does suck, because it sucks for you too. That doesn't mean that there's an abandonment thing happening there. It's just acknowledging it. Acknowledge what you're going through. And spouses of people who have a chronic situation need to hear that. Need to hear that it's okay. I recognize you. I see you too. This can't be easy. You're taking over more of the work load, with the kids, with the cooking, the cleaning, and your spouse is probably sitting there feeling guilty about it, and you're feeling resentful about it. You should probably talk about it.
Donna Piper: The spouses and chronic stress should get the same release, especially with fascia, strange stress. My husband is great, but I know it impacts us. It's not that fun to have a sick wife. There is a grief on both of us, because that change happened. So honoring that you talked the very beginning about depression that you had, that you didn't know there is grief. And to honor grief, whether it's positive or negative, honoring that change and talking about it more, and having places where you can be like, I'm not going to leave you. The world's not over, but there is a shift. We can really embrace this new path. It's not just going to be like, oh, this is fine. You can't do anything anymore. Intimate relationships change. You talked about pelvic work that you're doing with Erica and all that, especially women with chronic pain, depending on what impact your life on all levels really does need to be addressed. So a couple more things. I really love this conversation. For anyone that's listening out there, what would you say if they don't have resources or can't get to myofascial release specialists in their area? I'm going to put all your links below, and I'm sure you're very open so I want them to reach out to you, look through your website and find your courses. Is there anything you can do, self myofascial release? Is that a thing? What would you recommend to someone if they have pain in their back, or is it better to go see a professional?
Peter Stuart: Okay. So for those who can't get out or don't have the resources at this point to be able to move physically or monetarily to get to somebody to help them, yeah, that's a good idea. I was thinking about creating a small online YouTube kind of situation where I can show people various elements of fascial stretching and how that can assist them. I can't stop creating. I have this brain where I'm creating new courses all the time because I'm like, oh, this and this. People need to know this. But yeah, absolutely, they can contact me. Just bear with me as I'm very ADHD, so I'm not always the most, I'll get back to you. It's just hard to do it.
Donna Piper: I gave you another thing to do, especially with women with lipedema. So lipedema is a fat disorder where you have fat. It doesn't behave naturally, and it's disproportionate. Different parts of your body will accumulate fat and bulk. The only thing there is for it now is to remove the disease fat through liposuction. There is conservative measures. But what it does other than the pain, it also affects your mobility. So as you progress, some people don't, some people do. That's all a mystery. Who knows? But part of it is that a lot of times, people get chair bound, so that's also stiffness, neck and things. I'm just giving you some information for your videos that you're going to make eventually on the long list of things to create, but something to help with mobility. When you have a disproportionate amount of weight in your lower body, and your legs are not just heavy because they're large, but it's a dense fibrotic tissue, the fat becomes dense because the foreign object goes there. It's too big. The lymph can't pull it out. So fibrosis material goes to all the more sciency parts, so it goes to help out, and those are bigger molecules, and then they don't leave. And for whatever genetics happen that it's usually a genetic condition they think, and somehow estrogen is a factor. In some people, it's too much. For some people, it's too low. Usually puberty, pregnancy and menopause is where you might have more fat accumulate in these areas and grow. But mobility is a big thing. A lot of people, if you can all get treated, you can't really walk because the fibrotic material impacts your joints and the range, but also all these other symptoms. But if you're sitting a lot, pelvic cooling, all of that stuff. I want to segue in, and one of the last questions is like, is this pelvic workshop that you're going to create or creating, is that for the public? Or is it just patient facing? Or is it really just professional facing?
Peter Stuart: It's going to be for the public. We want women from wherever to be able to access it. I think we'll make part of it online, but we'd love to do a weekend in Nova Scotia for those who can afford to come to a beautiful area of the world. And we will be creating some online courses for therapists. The only thing I can do is, like I said, I'm going to put online material up this winter for therapists. But it's the touch that I'd like people to come to the workshop to figure out how to be able to hear the body, what it's telling you to do and how to move it. You said about liposuction to create some scarring situation in the body. So the myofascial would be very indicated for that. And sedentary is the enemy of the body, right? It's how fascia becomes viscous, and then you create this fascial tension or stiffening. I'm trying to go up the right frame of reference there for that's not coming to me right now. The fascia needs to glide on itself. But with movement, it becomes quite stiff and stuck, and then without movement. So again, sedentarity is the enemy of the body's ability to function properly. We need to move. We're built to move. So if you have something that is creating a situation where you're having a hard time moving, then getting somebody to passively move you would be a great thing to do. But if you can move, whatever you can, maybe there's a way to figure out how to stretch or pull in certain areas of the body that you weren't able to get before. It's vital.
Donna Piper: Well, I can't wait to see those videos. No pressure, whenever you're ready. Just another list. I know you have a lot of training, and they can find all your courses when you're online through your website. Is that correct? I'll leave all those links below. And then another question, do you have any advice or something that you wish you had maybe known earlier along your journey? Or do you tell clients, is there any wisdom that you would like to impart to anyone when they're going through chronic pain, like go see a myofascial therapist sooner than later, or anything like that? But is there anything 30 years ago, if you could tell all these patients years before they come into your door, what advice would you give them?
Peter Stuart: Get on as soon as you can. Once you recognize that you've changed, if there's a shift in pattern or your inability to do activities that you normally did, get on it. Most of the time, I see people in their late 40s, through their 50s, early 60s, we're already behind the 8 ball. We got a lot of work to do. So the sooner you get on with your situation, the more likely you won't have to incur more because trauma is cumulative. And if you're dealing with stuff now and going, ah, well, I can deal with it. And let me caveat that. Because most of the time when I'm teaching therapists, I will talk about chronic pain a little bit here and there. But I'll also say, most of your patients probably have a chronic issue. Maybe they don't think of themselves as falling into a chronic pain situation. But somebody comes in with the neck situation with me and I'm saying, okay, let's do your physical assessment now. I'll do the standing posture and lying down, any orthopedic tests I need to do, and they reach down to start undoing their shoes, and they grunt. I'm like, okay, well, tell me about that.
What's going on there? Do you have a low back issue? Because you didn't mention that. Oh, well, yeah. End up in Canada, this is more typical of this scenario. But oh, yeah, I was playing hockey with the boys, and I got slammed into the slide hard into the boards, lost my footing, and it's just never quite been the same. But did you get something done about that? Ah, nah. And how old is that injury? Oh, well, I don't know. 10, 12 years now. I'm like, okay, so you're setting yourself up for patterns of tension, furthering the patterns that you already have because you sit at a desk all day or etcetera, and you're slowly becoming shrink wrapped. And maybe there's a reason your neck is now in pain. Because there are a lot of people who come to me with insidious neck pain and they're just like, well, I woke up and it was sore. And then it's been three years now, and it's super sore. And I've seen physio, I've seen doctors, I've seen massage. Then when I look at the body and I see that their pelvis is way out of whack, I'm like, did you have a back injury? Oh, not that I remember. Doesn't really matter if you're imbalanced like this, everything above is going to be affected. And eventually, you'll start to feel pain much further from the area of where the real problem is.
Donna Piper: So that is interesting. You don't think that you would go get some treatment for maybe the catalyst to have these pathways where you might then radiate pain in your neck later. I love that. Don't brush it off. Get these things looked at from a professional. I do like that. I do believe we're all humans. There has to be a relationship, that we're all in a relationship. We have to be in a relationship with others, and have someone to help move you through. You talk about trauma, whether or not anything comes up, but definitely being in relationship with others actually is a healing aspect. I know when I went through my therapy program, they're like, what's the most effective psychotherapy? There is Freud, CBT, whatever. And the answer is always, that doesn't really matter. It's the relationship between the therapist and the patient, the transference and counter transference. So that is the magic. It's not really the technique always. So with your technique to actually have someone that knows how to do that, and then it's the relationship where the magic of healing happens through that. It's them coming and the person. So there is a, I do like to say an offer, like self things because some people can't get out, or they don't have it. But maybe with this, both happen so well, especially since you're dealing with trauma in the body, and trauma could be like, you hurt yourself, like your hockey example. So does he really think that that's trauma? No, but the body does. Like, hey, I got rammed up into this thing. Now, I need to protect myself, and I need to move differently because I don't want to have that feeling again. So having this personal connection, I think, is very important. Especially after the pandemic and being separated, and that's my personal view. But after everything you've told me, to have someone to be with you, and then you can communicate in that personal way is highly effective. There's tons of research and science behind it, because we are a research science culture. But also, why does going to Peter help me more than Sam?
Peter Stuart: Well, to me, when you can work with somebody, when you are a therapist, when they come, when someone comes in to see you and you can identify with them, that's huge. That gains their trust more often than not. People will say, how come no one's ever asked me these questions? aAd that is simply because they just didn't know to ask the questions. I'll ask questions that will tweak so many different elements to their situation, and that's what I need to do. I just need to unravel as much of it as I can in order to sort it out for you. So then, we can move forward. And then people start to have hope because they're educated, and they know what's happening to them, and they're not being brushed off. And just even the simplicity of being not inviting as a therapist. But if I could say anything, it is funny that you brought up the pandemic. But in class, numbers tend to be a little lower since the pandemic than this new generation coming up of therapists tend to like to have everything on the screen, and I'm hoping I could shift that idea because I can't teach you this from a screen to be effective.
Donna Piper: How do you like people to contact you more? Do you like email? Are you on any platforms that you like people to reach out to you? Or how do you like to have inquiries?
Peter Stuart: Yeah. I know people can reach me through my website, on Facebook or on LinkedIn. I'm new to LinkedIn. I must be honest, when I first got into LinkedIn years ago, I did not like the energy of LinkedIn. I just thought it was incredibly dry and boring. And I was like, what am I doing here? People would say, oh, three years at the same job, I'm like, I don't care. Not because I don't, I don't want to have to sift through all of this stuff to get to somebody that has a message for you. That is relevant. So please, you can go to LinkedIn and give me relevant messages. That's how people can reach me if they want to reach out. I'd love to be able to talk to therapists and have that conversation, and be able to have more people doing this work because I think it's really great from an approach of trauma informed.
Donna Piper: And I think dysautonomia in general, I want to say that 70 million people have it. So a lot of people are having things. I mean, even if you don't have stuff like to go and to see you would be amazing, because our bodies have something, right? That's the whole reason why I have these conversations. I want to talk about it, because if I would have known, and I was in the fitness industry and therapy, whatever, and I've missed all of my things. If I would have had some different knowledge about what the condition was when I was in my 20s, I probably wouldn't be in the state that I am. With all the chronic pain and earlier interventions, they don't have to be scary, it doesn't have to be hard. I really am also pushing to this. Pushing through isn't always the best, especially if you're susceptible to dysautonomia or chronic illnesses. That's usually the antithesis. A hard one for me to do is to rest and to not push. How can I attack this problem head on? No, I have to go get something very nice and gentle, and it has to feel like not much because my body is already in such a heightened state of wanting to defend itself. I need to learn how to rest and digest, which I'm not, on a cellular level. Younger practitioners, I do think the in person connection is so important. I am all about getting back into person and doing things, and really feeling what this body feels like. It's different than theoretically, because my idea of what it feels like maybe isn't really what it feels like. So having that in real time interaction, I think, is so important.
Peter Stuart: Well, I always tell real sorry, real therapists. I always tell younger therapists, people who are newer in the field, if you want to get good at therapy, get therapy. Know what touches you. Like what you don't like, and you will have a 6th sense as to how you're touching somebody else. It's really important to get the work done.
Donna Piper: Well, thank you so much for all of your time sharing all your knowledge, and having this conversation with me. I'm going to put Peter's links down below. And if you have a therapist that you think would be, well, tell your therapist, your MLD therapists, anyone out there listening to have any sort of therapist, massage therapists about this technique, about Peter, they could go to his website and take his courses. I'll be looking for and probably re sharing your pelvic course, because I think that is such an amazing thing for patients, for women to know. I think a lot of my issues can start to be corrected when I work with my pelvis. I can't wait to take your course. And Nova Scotia, if you have it in person up there, I heard it's beautiful. I'd love to go. The final thing, is there anything that I miss? Anything you just want people to know, or any final words? You don't have to, but if I want to leave anything?
Peter Stuart: Go get treated before it becomes a situation. See your physio, your chiro, your massage, your osteo, whoever it is, go get treatment. Don't hang on to stuff. Or your psychotherapist, psychologist, counselor, don't hang on to stuff.
Donna Piper: I think you need both. Peter, again, thank you so much. And thank you everyone for listening. I will see you next week.
Peter Stuart: All right. Thanks very much.
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If this episode made you feel even a little more seen, brought you a dose of clarity or pointed you toward your next step, please rate, review and share it with someone who's been quietly carrying the same questions. You can find some more resources, blog posts and healing tools over at donnapiper.com. Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Until next time, Dear Body, I'm listening, and I am so glad you're here.
