The ‘Normal’ Body Signals That Come From Unprocessed Trauma

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 0:00 A lot of people are aware, Jason, that our body can hold emotions and trauma. But what I get from watching you speak and watching what Human Garage is doing is this idea that the trauma and the emotions might be stored in something called our fascia. Is that right?

Jason van Blerk 0:27 I believe it is. And the reason why I believe that is because fascia is primarily made of water. And there have been researchers who've studied a lot about the properties of water and what water can do. So Veda Austin's one of them. What she does is she takes water, she puts a coin next to it, she freezes the water and looks at it under a microscope. And what you see is that that water actually takes on the same structure or picture that was on the coin. And water is showing that it can hold memory. So if you talk to water, if you put it next to a, a plastic water bottle, whatever that water is next to, it actually takes on the information that's around it. And so if we're 70% water, where is all the memory being stored in the body? I believe it's being stored in our fascia, and our fascia is primarily made of water.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:17 Yeah. I think we, we sort of are getting this collective understanding now that our body holds tension. And look, I've been delving into myofascial release and all forms of body work for a long, long time now. I've been to many courses where they train practitioners, and you will see time and time again that when people have a deep release in their body, sometimes they can be shaking, sometimes they can be crying. And I've seen that enough times to know there's something going on here that we're not taught in medical school. And you see this all the time, don't you? That you're treating people, you're holding their body, you're pressing on their body, and suddenly they come out in tears. What do you think is going on?

Jason van Blerk 2:08 You know, I, it's really interesting because w- I've worked on eight hundred people in a day. W- I've worked on probably about five thousand people in the last year, and I'm just watching patterns. When I work on somebody's knee, there tends to be certain emotions and certain reactions when I work on their knee. When I work on someone's shoulder or their head, same thing. And so I believe that different parts of the body hold different emotions or different memories. So, you know, like, what is trauma? Trauma is an event where you could not process the emotions. It could be something when you were eight years old, your mom didn't give you candy at the store, and you were all frustrated. You didn't have the tools-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 2:46 Mm

Jason van Blerk 2:46 ... to process those emotions. Those emotions go somewhere. Like when you're angry, what happens to your body? You tighten your fists, you clench your jaw. You almost... You go in. You roll like this.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 2:57 Mm-hmm.

Jason van Blerk 2:57 So people who work out and they're angry all the time, they're like this. And so when we have an emotion, it changes our posture. When we have an emotion, it stores somewhere in the body. And I've just seen countless times when I touch people in certain parts of their body, certain emotions release, certain patterns are stored there.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 3:13 Yeah. I think something that everyone can resonate with is this idea that if you've had a really busy day at work, you know, you didn't take any breaks, there was loads of demands, you worked through lunch, you can come back in the evening and your body can feel tense and tight. You can feel neck tightness or whatever it might be. I mean, what's going on there? Of course, you know, your stress, your emotions are being stored, and unless you do something about it, it's gonna stay there, right?

Jason van Blerk 3:48 Mm-hmm. Yes. And if we look at most people's bodies, we talked about this when we were working together, you know, most people have a left shoulder that's higher than the right, and their one hip is higher than the other. So it looks like they have a leg length discrepancy. It's n- ninety-nine point nine percent of people do not have leg length discrepancies that are anatomically that way. It's because the... there's some sort of torque pattern in their body. So one shoulder's higher, one hip is higher, one part of their face is more forward. The eyes are slightly torqued. And based on the emotions that we're holding, you can actually see patterns in the body when people walk, when people move. If they're holding anger, they're tight in the groin, they're tight in the jaw. So if you do a jaw release, they're gonna have a lot of anger come out, like err. And if you watch our videos, you see people, they, they scream in a very angry way when you do the jaw release. So there's something to do with posture and emotions. And there's certain emotions on certain parts of the body and certain p- emotions on another part of the body. And we've just done this so many times that we've been able to map it. You know, there's a lot of people who do this. The Body Keeps the Score. Um, you've got Louise Hay, who's documented this. You've got Metaphysical Anatomy. And over time, I've just found that a lot of these practices, they've found something. There's something about the body holding emotions in certain areas, and it affects our posture. Like, if somebody's sad, what do they do? Or they're, they're suppressed, or they're not acting as themself, they start to curl forward and almost become small.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 5:16 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 5:17 And if someone's confident, like, look at Tony Robbins, like, he's really big and confident, you know if you stand in this posture, you feel more confident, you feel larger. And so based on the posture, it can also influence the emotions.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 5:30 Yeah. I, I think these things work both ways, right? You know, is it sorting out your emotions that then changes your posture, or is it clearing the fascia and clearing your body that's gonna sort out the mood, right? I think it could work from both angles, perhaps.

Jason van Blerk 5:47 Hundred percent.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 5:48 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 5:48 Like everybody can do this right now. You could sit up nice and tall with your chest up. You feel stronger.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 5:53 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 5:53 You feel more confident. So I can put the body into certain positions, and it can reprogram my emotions. I can also have an emotion that reprograms my physical body-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 6:03 Yeah

Jason van Blerk 6:03 ... into a certain position. So it goes both ways. And you know, there's mind over matter, and people always talk about can you use the mind to influence the physical body? Yes. You can also use the physical body to influence the mind.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 6:15 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 6:16 There are two ways. You can't-- It's not just one way, it's both

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 6:19 Yeah. You mentioned the term fascia.

Jason van Blerk 6:22 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 6:23 That is becoming, I, I hope, a term that people are more familiar with today than they were 10 years ago, for example. But for people who've never heard that term before, can you explain what fascia is?

Jason van Blerk 6:38 Yeah. Fascia's a very interesting thing. You know, they, there was actually articles 20 years ago that were buried about what fascia really is, and the traditional way of looking at it was it's like this Saran Wrap connective tissue, kinda looks like a spiderweb, and it surrounds your muscles and your bones.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 6:55 If we, if we bought a piece of meat from the store and we're sort of pulling it apart, that kind of fibrous connective tissue-

Jason van Blerk 7:02 Yes

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 7:02 ... that's, that is fascia, isn't it?

Jason van Blerk 7:04 That is the traditional way of looking at it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 7:06 Okay.

Jason van Blerk 7:08 But we're looking at dead bodies. We're looking at the, the chicken once it's on the counter.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 7:13 Mm.

Jason van Blerk 7:14 We're not looking at it when it's alive. And so what we found, and we found a video on YouTube called, uh, Fascia Magnified 25 Times, and they cut open the forearm, and they lifted the skin up. And what you see when you look in there is there's these water tubes. They're tubes of water, and when you have a movement or an emotion or a thought, all of a sudden that tube breaks off and reconnects to another tube, and it breaks off and connects to another one. And so when we look at it in the living system, it reacts very differently. What I believe is fascia is these bio-hydraulic tubes of water, and it's in a gel-like state. That's why if I cut your body, you don't just squirt water out. You're 70% water. Where is all that water? The water's not in a liquid substance. It's actually in this gel-like state called our fascia.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 8:05 Mm.

Jason van Blerk 8:06 And because it's in this gel-like state, I believe it actually transmits electricity, it sends information, it stores memory and emotions. And there are studies now coming out validating this. They're saying that fascia is bioacoustic. That means it responds to frequency and sound. They're saying that fascia, um, conducts electricity, and it has its own brain. And so I believe fascia's the most intelligent organ in our body, and it holds your muscles, your bones, your tendons, your ligaments, and

Jason van Blerk 8:36 your organs. So if you have a, if you have a neck out and you go to a chiropractor, you get it adjusted, a week later your neck's out again. If I go to a massage and they massage my muscles, my neck goes into place, it's all good, and then a week later it goes back out. I believe that the fascia is becoming restricted, and if we work on the fascia, because it holds everything, everything unwinds and resets naturally. And because fascia's so sensitive, it changes structure based on the way that we feel. And if you sit for a long time, it starts to solidify, calcify, and harden, and that is a position where it's now locked and it's tight. So the goal is to get the water in our bodies moving again, and if we're dehydrated, if we have chemicals, if we're not moving, that will just start to harden and calcify. And that calcification is what we see when you're cutting that piece of meat and you're lifting it up. You see those little fibrous strings of, of this white fibrous string? That's the calcification of it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 9:36 A lot of people know that feeling when they're on a foam roller or a ball and they're trying to sort of, you know, rub out some tension. Are... You know, when we're doing that, would you say some of the time we're, we're finding adhesions in our fascia that we're trying to rub out a- and try and roll out?

Jason van Blerk 9:55 You know, it's very interesting because once we discovered what fascia is, we found a new way to work with the human body. And the traditional way of working with fascia or the muscles is we, we roll it, we massage it, we push into it and make it submit. And it, it's so painful, at some point the body's like, "Okay" and it releases. But for some reason it was coming back, so we had to look at the body in a new way. If we understand that fascia is this water-based system in gel, how does water react versus a dense structure? It's very different.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 10:30 Mm.

Jason van Blerk 10:30 So water goes through tubes, and it's flowy, and it's almost hydraulic. It, it, it re- responds to pressure.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 10:38 Mm.

Jason van Blerk 10:39 So what we found is if we rotate the body in counter-rotation while we breathe, then the fascia starts to release. But rolling it and, and submitting it with an elbow or stretching it in a straight line doesn't work. The body is a rotational system. Like when you walk, every part of your body, including your arms, your legs, your head, are constantly counter-rotating when you walk and move. When you swing a bat, when you're in the fetal position, all of these positions are rotational. So if all of these things that we do naturally when we move are rotational, why are we stretching in a straight line?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 11:16 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 11:17 Why are we lifting, you know, a bicep curl in a straight line? The body... You know, when you fix your arms on a bar and you do a, a bench press, there's no rotation that's allowed to happen there, so we're locking the body in positions that it's not familiar with.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 11:31 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 11:31 And so I believe that these linear-based straight line movements are causing more dysfunction to the body than if we were to add rotation into it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 11:39 Yeah. I mean, that's certainly been my experience for many years now. Let's take two, you know, core human movements, walking and running, something that humans are uniquely adapted to doing compared to lots of other creatures and animals, right? I remember early on with my work with Helen, my, uh, movement coach, Helen Hall. After she did something with me, we did some movements to sort of free certain things up. Suddenly when I was walking, I was like, "Oh, Helen, I'm sort of rotating." And she's like, "Yeah, you know, you should be rotating when you're walking and running." And I can-- I'm really tuned into it now where I feel when I go for a walk, you can feel that this is not just a linear movement, and when you get into that counter-rotation, I-It just feels effortless. You feel, "Oh, this is how I'm designed to move."

Jason van Blerk 12:33 Yes. And if we look at the reason why we stopped rotating, we walk on flat surfaces.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 12:40 Mm-hmm.

Jason van Blerk 12:41 We used to walk in nature and nothing was flat.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 12:44 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 12:44 So that means your foot had to rotate and adapt around an uneven surface. The moment we brought flat surfaces in, our foot, our toes, our ankle, none of the joints in our foot are actually rotating. They're walking in a, in a straight line, and they're, they're very flat. Well, if your foot's flat, then your ankle, your knee, your hip, your shoulder, your jaw, and everything responds to that. But if you were to walk in nature barefoot for 30 minutes, you would notice that your body would start to rotate and swing. Your body should swing and it should feel very efficient. But if we're not doing that, if we're wearing shoes, if we're on flat surfaces, we're not getting the natural rotation that the body needs.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 13:21 Yeah, it's interesting. As you were saying that, reminds me of another way to look at nature, right? We know, for example, that when a human being goes into nature, the levels of the stress hormone cortisol start to come down. One of the reasons that I really like is to do with fractals. So fractals are these geometric shapes that you only get in nature, and when a human eye sees a fractal, something happens with your physiology and cortisol starts to go down, right?

Jason van Blerk 13:51 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 13:51 But of course, these things like where do you see fractals? Trees, uh, leaves-

Jason van Blerk 13:58 Flowers

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 13:58 ... coastlines. There's no straight lines.

Jason van Blerk 14:01 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 14:02 These man-made surfaces which we're surrounded by are linear. These straight lines are basically not what we have evolved for.

Jason van Blerk 14:09 Exactly. And even if we go down to the cellular level, like I like to break the body down in a very simple way. You're 70, 75% water, depends on your age and your hydration level. You've got about 20, 25% sand if we were to grind down the bones, the muscles, the minerals, the nutrients and everything and it becomes sand. And then bacteria and viruses. So that's a very simple formula for understanding the body.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 14:36 I love that. Can I just say, that's... I'll just say that's how simple we are. I, I love that.

Jason van Blerk 14:43 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 14:43 It's such a beautiful... I've never thought about the human body like that, where we're just like water, sand, and some bugs.

Jason van Blerk 14:47 And exactly.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 14:48 [laughs] In some sort of combination.

Jason van Blerk 14:50 Yeah. And if we look at how water and sand react to the world, then we understand the human body in a deeper way. That's my belief. If you Google on YouTube water frequency experiment, what you'll see is they, they create sound waves and the water creates cymatics, it creates geometrical shapes.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 15:11 Mm.

Jason van Blerk 15:12 Now go to sand on YouTube, the frequency of sand. When you vibrate sand on a plate, it starts to create geometrical shapes. The higher the vibration, the more complex the geometrical shape that's created. And so you've got water and sand. When we vibrate water and sand, it changes shape. It creates the shapes that you only see in nature. That's inside of our bodies. And so I always thought about this, like when I listen to sad music, I feel sad.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 15:40 Mm.

Jason van Blerk 15:41 When I listen to exciting music, I'm about to go out, I feel excited. And so how come sound or the music that I'm listening to makes me feel a certain way?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 15:50 Mm.

Jason van Blerk 15:51 I believe it's because that water and that sand is vibrating at the frequency of the sound around us, and it changes structure, which changes the way that we feel.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 16:00 Yeah. I want to relate that back to what we said about fascia earlier on in this conversation. This idea that when you release someone's fascia in a variety of different ways, which we're gonna talk about, old memories and often painful memories can come up. People can cry, they can shake, right? It's really quite profound. But I think most of us know that feeling when we hear a song or a sad song and we can literally, with our entire body, be back at a different part of our life, right? You can literally be 14 years old again.

Jason van Blerk 16:37 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 16:37 You can feel, you know, where you were, you know, what was going on, what you were wearing, you know. It, it's quite incredible, isn't it? So what is going on? Do you think that's also fascia?

Jason van Blerk 16:48 Yeah, I think it has to do with looking at how sand and water vibrate. At specific frequencies, they change shape and they create specific shapes. So if I listen to a song that I'm familiar with from 30 years ago when I had a breakup, my entire body is f- is vibrating at that frequency. All my cells are changing shape-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:10 Mm

Jason van Blerk 17:10 ... to that frequency, and it creates a familiar pattern, a pattern that I felt 30 years ago when I was going through a breakup.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:16 Mm.

Jason van Blerk 17:17 And so that's my guess. Like, I don't know if we'll ever really understand-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:22 Yeah

Jason van Blerk 17:22 ... how the human body works. You know, I laugh about this because, you know, kids at two years old know how to use an iPad. But they have no idea what's on the inside. And I think if we started to look at the human body in a similar way of like, I don't know if we'll really ever understand what's inside of this computer, but if I know which buttons to push to create whatever feeling I want, then I'm empowered. You know, if you hum, you feel lighter and calmer.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:49 Mm.

Jason van Blerk 17:49 If you sing or dance-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:51 Mm

Jason van Blerk 17:51 ... you feel happier and lighter. And so there's certain buttons that we can push on the body that create a certain feeling. And so my goal is not to understand what's inside the body and how it works. It's how to use it. I'm the new generation using, you know, the two-year-old using the phone. I just wanna know h- what buttons I can push to create what response.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 18:13 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 18:13 And we've become masters of knowing which buttons to push on the body to release emotions, to, to help people release tension and feel better.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 18:21 Yeah. That, that is such a great analogy. We don't have to know how everything inside works. We just need to know how to, what inputs to give the body to get the response that we want.Now, Jason, a few times in this conversation you've said, "I believe, um, I think this is the explanation." And I love that, and I find that really interesting because you and your colleagues at Human Garage, you've gone through the process of getting results first, right? So you deal with humans who are struggling. People come and something's not working. There's some dysfunction, there's some movement pattern, there's some pain, whatever it might be. And you guys have figured out in real time how to help people. And, you know, all people have to do is go online, go on your Instagram, go on your YouTube, and just see what people are saying about how the fascial maneuvers that Human Garage have created have had such a huge impact, right? But the modern belief system is that you have to get evidence first, publish it first, get it peer-reviewed. Only then can you then talk about it. Which I'm like, how, how... That's n- that's not how anything has ever worked. Things have always worked by observation first, and then the scientific method is there to try and make sense of why that thing worked. You know, think about, um, athletic training. A lot of modern science now, whether it be on zone two training or interval training, is basically just saying what the best running coaches have known for 70, 80 years, right? It's the same thing. Like, you go to, like, someone like Arthur Lydiard, and he was like a, one of the world's best running coaches. Everything he was doing with his athletes decades ago is now what modern scientists are saying, "Oh, yeah, yeah, you've got to do low to low intensity, you've got to do this." And I'm like, human beings have known how to do stuff for a long period of time. We need to be a bit more humble and go, you know, "Let's observe what works, and then let's go and study it." So what I was trying to get to, Jason, is when you say, "I believe," it's fascinating to me that your results are so clear to see. I felt them myself twice in the past few weeks, right? But you don't exactly know why it's working. Is that fair to say?

Jason van Blerk 20:47 There's a lot to say on this topic because in, in 2020, after a decade of w- helping people. You know, we had a, we had a clinic in Los Angeles with 52 practitioners, from chiropractors to naturopaths to dieticians to, um, integrative medicine. You name it, we had it. And we were testing the body to find out, you know, if I can put 52 people in the same room from different specialties and look at the same body, I'm gonna see something that others don't. And for 10 years, we had this clinic. And when we closed in 2019, when we hit 2020, and we were sitting there and, and we're ... During the pandemic, we had all this time. We thought, "What if we just forget everything that we know and we just play like kids would? Like, what happens if I try this?" So try it. You know, either he would be on the one end or I would be on the other, and we would do these crazy movements on each other, and we started to feel better. So we committed ourselves to doing this practice every single day, and we started to change. That's N equals one of science. I'm testing something for myself, and I felt a difference, okay? So that was step one. Step two was to go out and start sharing with others to see if they also got the same result. So we were results-based. We just did it ourselves. We were curious. We forgot everything that we knew, and we tried to come in with a completely fresh lens. And if we look at three different examples, Bruce Lipton, epigenetics. He was talking about epigenetics for, like, 20 years.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 22:21 Mm.

Jason van Blerk 22:21 He was scrutinized by the scientific community, and he ended up leaving the universities. We have Wim Hof, who had done all this breathwork and ice therapies, and he was pushing the narrative where scientists finally came in and, and said, "Okay, this guy's onto something."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 22:36 Let's study. [laughs]

Jason van Blerk 22:37 Let's study this guy. And then you have Joe Dispenza, who conducted his own research because he was seeing such amazing results from people doing the meditations and all that. And so epigenetics to cold therapy, breathwork, and meditation, these were all practices that people really pushed back in the scientific community until enough people were talking about it. And so when we started sharing this with people, you know, we had people who had reversed Parkinson's and dementia and scoliosis and autoimmune and all these complex health issues. That to me is science. We just don't have a lab where we're measuring at the, at the scientific level, at the cellular level exactly what's changing. My goal was to just get this out to people, create results, and hopefully one day a scientist comes in and says, "I'm really interested in what you're doing, and I wanna learn more about this." And we're starting to get the interest of the scientists. Like, we have, um, a gentleman who created robotic surgery who's now really looking into what we're doing. It's changed his life. He had kidney disease, and he was gonna die, and he's, he's reversed a lot of that through our practice, and he says, "I'm super interested in this. I wanna start to study it." So my goal is to get this out to people. I am not a scientist. I'm not going to sit in a lab and study at the molecular level the changes that people are experiencing. But I have enough people coming up to me saying that this has changed their lives and, and that's all that I need.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 24:02 Yeah, it's really powerful. I mean, meditation falls into the same category, right? Something that was poo-pooed by Western science for years. You know, you go to traditional practitioners in India. For hundreds of years, they'll tell you the benefits of meditation. They'll tell you what they've seen, right? And, you know, there's many, uh, scientists I've had on this show who admitted, you know, good- all credit to them, that they were very skeptical 20 years ago. Thought, "What? Stress? Meditation? What the hell's that gonna do?" And they're like, "Actually, you know what? I was wrong." There's so much science now on what meditation does, lowering your stress levels.Which parts of the brain get affected, all kinds of things. And again, it goes back to this idea that I feel I'm talking a lot about these days. We just need a bit more humility to go there are lots of things out there that work. Sometimes we've got an explanation for them, sometimes we don't, but that's okay.

Jason van Blerk 24:55 Mm-hmm. You said something really big there, belief. I learned something very interesting about belief because we did an event in Austin. We had, you know, 800 people in a line, and I worked on every single one of them over eight hours. And each person that I worked on, I had to rebuild belief. I had to have the conversation, understand what was going on. We did the maneuvers with them. They had a release. Boom, next person, next person, next person. And then the next event, I was like, "It's kind of unsustainable if we do it that way." So what I did is I had everybody in, in the, in the event do a Q&A, and we were answering the questions, and somebody needed help, and we would go and help them. And when I helped that person, everybody witnessed it. They all had a kind of a connection or a release, or it built belief for them because they saw it help someone else. The next person that I helped, almost instantly when I touched them, they had a release, the next person even faster. And so what I realized was when there was a collective conscious belief that this could really help them, it was faster and more effective than when I had to build belief with people-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 26:03 Wow

Jason van Blerk 26:03 ... each time. And so I have run into situations where I'm working with somebody who doesn't believe that emotions are in the body or doesn't believe that there's sometimes something more than just this physical suit that we live in. And when I'm working with them, if they're skeptical, their brain is looking for why it's not working. And it's very d- it uses a lot of my energy to help that person, and what I learned is I'm not here to change the way people believe.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 26:35 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 26:35 I'm here to help people who are ready to transform.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 26:38 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 26:38 And this was a big, big shift because I was using a lot of energy trying to push this movement into people who didn't believe. And when people are ready to release, and they come to you, it's almost instant.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 26:49 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 26:50 So belief systems, you know, placebo effect, nocebo effect. You know, if I believe there's a positive outcome for doing this, or if I believe there's a negative outcome for doing this, they have proven that in the scientific community that nocebo and placebo are sometimes more effective than the drug itself.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 27:05 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 27:05 And it's a lot of the time that they're, that they're proving that. And so belief systems is so important. So the more people that share their stories and testimonials with us online about how this has changed their life, the stronger this movement practice becomes.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 27:19 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 27:20 So it's important to hit people at the belief level. And if they don't believe that emotions are in the body, it's kind of a hard conversation. It's hard to... It's harder to work with.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 27:28 Yeah. B- b- I, I mean, I, I love that you're bringing this up. I used to play that game as well, like try and convince people, talk to the naysayers and talk them around, and now I'm like I'm, I'm over that. It's like I just do my thing. I just try and put out positive, helpful information. If you like it, if it helps you, great. If you don't like it and you don't like me [laughs] , that's also great. I'm probably not the right person for you. You know, if you don't believe, you don't believe. That's fine. Let's get into what Fascial Manoeuvres is, right? Because there, there's quite a few interesting things so far that I wanna make sure we cover. Um, I guess the first thing is when you said that a lot of people, let's say they're in pain. They will go to a practitioner, whether it be a physio or a chiropractor, whoever it might be, okay? And you use the example of a chiropractor, I think, where you might get a manipulation, and then it feels good, and sometimes that feeling good is temporary, and a couple of weeks later, it reverts back. So you need to go back, okay? I'm not saying this to be anti any physio or anti any chiropractor, right? Genuinely not. I've been, you know, I've been seeing practitioners for years, okay? But I, I know that feeling when you have something released, and you go, "Oh, great, my back feels great." But a few days, "Oh, damn, it's come back, you know. I need to go back again."

Jason van Blerk 28:51 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 28:52 And I wanna draw that, um... I wanna bring back fascia into the conversation because if fascia is this, as you call it, an intelligent organ, do you think that for many cases when you've had a manipulation and it doesn't hold and it reverts back, do you think that sometimes that's because the fascia has remodeled and is, and is almost in a different pattern now? So you can temporarily realign the spine with a manipulation, but the fascia is always gonna drive it back to its current type of positioning?

Jason van Blerk 29:29 Yeah. You know, it's very interesting. So I believe bones actually float inside the body. There's only the rib cage and the ears where they actually touch. But if our bones are floating inside of us, you know, I, I almost envision like it's in a, a, a fish tank or a bowl. And we've created these restrictions. So for example, if I tighten the front of my shirt and I pin it really tight, all of a sudden, I start to feel tension on the back.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 29:57 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 29:57 My liver starts to pull up to the center. My organs get pulled into the center. My rib cage gets pulled down. And so whatever this restriction is, it's moved my organs, it's moved my bones, it's moved my tendons, my ligaments. It's moved everything. And so if I crack the bone, but this is still there, it's just gonna go back out into place. And so what I find is if we get to the root cause, which is usually not where we think it is-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 30:25 Mm-hmm

Jason van Blerk 30:26 ... right now I'm tight in the front, but my pain is being experienced in the back. So a lot of the time, people have lower back pain, but it's actually coming from their bladder or the front.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 30:35 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 30:36 There's too much tension there. So it's about addressing the body and understanding where the tension lines are, how the fascia's being held there, and there's a lot of points on the body that almost everybody has tension in, and you can map it. If they have back pain, it's usually coming from-From the bladder. If they have frozen shoulder, it's actually coming from underneath in the armpit. So you can map it on the opposite side of the body. That's where the restriction is.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 31:00 Yeah. For people listening on audio, what Jason did then was he crumpled up the middle of his T-shirt, and, you know, if you wanna watch this, just jump onto YouTube to actually see the YouTube version. But y- we can all try it ourselves, just crumple up that middle bit, and it's amazing. So you're basically saying that if your fascia has got tight for whatever reason in that area... You know, I can feel a pull on my shoulders, I can feel a pull on my back, just from my T-shirt, and I think that helps to explain why sometimes these manipulations don't hold. Now, of course, th- there's many great therapists out there, there's many great physios, great chiropractors, and sometimes they'll also try and do some fascial work as well, and give you some new movement patterns to try and actually change your patterns so you don't go back to the old patterns that will just reinforce the way your body currently is, which gave you pain, which is why you ended up with a practitioner. I'm delighted to announce that AG1, the daily health drink that has been in my own life for over six years now, have updated and improved their formulation based upon the latest science, and to celebrate by giving my audience a very special offer. Some of the upgrades include more magnesium, which supports muscle function and improves the ability of your nervous system to relax, and also five strains of bacteria instead of just two to reflect the latest advances in microbiome science. It also contains key nutrients like vitamin C, biotin, niacin, vitamin B6, riboflavin, thiamine, zinc, and folate in bioavailable forms the body can easily and readily utilize, maximizing their potential benefits. Nutrition can often seem really complicated. What diet should we be following? What supplements should we be taking? And I think that's one of the main reasons I really like AG1. They make it really simple for you to be the best version of you. Over 70 ingredients, one scoop once a day for less than a cup of coffee. So if you wanna support your health seven mornings a week, get started with AG1, and right now we have a very special limited time offer. Get a free AG1 duffle bag and a free AG1 welcome kit with your first subscription. All you have to do is go to drinkag1.com/livemore, and the offer is only available while supplies last. That's a really, really beautiful analogy of just thinking if there's tightness somewhere, it's gonna pull on somewhere else. And I mean, you and Aisha worked on me this morning before we, um, started this podcast and, you know, I know the body's connected, right? I intuitively, I f- I know it, I've felt it, I've seen it with patients, that you change one thing in one area, you automatically change something else. But you were working sometimes on my stomach or, like, my left hip, and then when I would get up off the couch and walk, I could feel tightness in my right foot. But you haven't touched my right foot. You've touched something much higher up, but I'm now feeling a change in my right foot. And I just love that, that these fascial lines go through the entire body. Make one change in one area, you can automatically influence another area.

Jason van Blerk 34:26 Mm-hmm. And the way we map it is you've got your head, which is zone one, your torso, zone two, and your legs, zone three. So when you walk and when you move, these zones are constantly counterbalancing each other. So you have cheeks on your face, you have your, your cheeks on your chest, your, your pecs, and you have your cheeks on your butt, your buttocks. And if I change pressure in your cheek on your face, it changes pressure on the cheek in your chest and the pressure on the cheek on your butt.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 35:00 Should we be able to feel that? Like, if we press it now.

Jason van Blerk 35:03 Yeah, like, there's movements that you can do. You can even just, on the right cheek, if you take your right hand, place it on there, and just twist, twist the skin over the, the bone and hold that there. And you have to be sensitive to be able to experience this, but if you change the pressure here, it's gonna change the pressure here and here when you walk.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 35:22 I... Like, so this is what I just did. I just did that. I can feel that in my left pec. So I can feel something there.

Jason van Blerk 35:29 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 35:30 And I'm not even doing what... I'm just twisting here.

Jason van Blerk 35:32 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 35:33 I can feel it right there.

Jason van Blerk 35:34 Yeah, so we're a pressurized system. Like, if, if you look at, you've got outside pressure and you've got inside pressure. The outside pressure is atmospheric. When you go higher up in an airplane, what happens to your ears? They wanna pop.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 35:47 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 35:47 Why? Because you have inside pressure. The outside pressure's decreasing the higher you go, and now that inside pressure's trying to equalize with the outside pressure, so it's like pop, now it's balanced. And so if we're a pressurized system and we look at the body like a pressurized system, we interact with it differently. Like most people, if you want, you can look at your feet. One foot is bigger than the other. Usually the left foot is slightly bigger.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 36:11 Mm.

Jason van Blerk 36:12 Same with your chest. You have one chest that's bigger than the other. It's be- I believe that it's bigger than the other because we have a dysregulation of pressure. There's more tension on one side, there's less tension on the other, and they have different sizes as a result of that. And so if we're a pressurized system and we have these zones, zone one, zone two, and zone three, these pressure systems work together. For example, when you take a step with your left foot, your right hand swings to go outwards.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 36:40 Mm.

Jason van Blerk 36:40 Your foot and your hand, I don't know if I can do this on the podcast, but let's see. These map each other. So your foot and your hand map each other with pressure. Your forearm and your shin map each other.Your upper arm and your upper leg match each other. Your shoulder and your opposite leg match each other.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 36:58 Mm.

Jason van Blerk 36:58 So when you walk, your foot and your hand are balancing pressure, and you see this the most easily when you're working with, like, elderly because they've got tension somewhere on their left hip or their left ribcage, which pulls their entire body to the left, and then they cramp their hand on the right to stand straight. And so they're using pressure, they're creating pressure with their right hand to balance themselves. So it's a little bit... You really have to think about the body as a pressurized system where there's balloon with inside and outside pressure, and when we move, these pressure systems are trying to balance each other. So if you have a headache-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 37:35 Yeah

Jason van Blerk 37:35 ... you just have a dysregulation of pressure in your head, and there's ways-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 37:38 Mm

Jason van Blerk 37:38 ... that you can move this pressure around through movement.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 37:41 Yeah. It's kind of interesting. I was speaking to a lot of runners, um, about how they feel when they run, and a few of them have said to me that if, if, let's say, they haven't managed to open their bowels before they go for a run, right? So there's, you know, there's not the lightness, let's say, in their being compared to when they have managed to. And people will probably know this, if they go for a run when they feel light inside and clear as opposed to bunged up inside, actually, their gait is gonna be different. There's gonna be different pressures within them. That makes sense, doesn't it?

Jason van Blerk 38:14 Yeah. I mean, if you were to fill up your intestines right now with liquid or food, think about it when you go to swing your arm, there's so much pressure inside of there, it actually creates a restriction so your arm can't swing as much.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 38:29 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 38:29 And so we've noticed a difference in, you know, getting this area open. You know, women have a lot of infertility these days, a lot of period cramps. People have digestive issues, autoimmune. It's because there's a lack of flow between the diaphragm and the, and the pelvic floor, and a big reason for that is we were never meant to sit in chairs.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 38:48 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 38:49 When you sit in a chair, your upper body weight sits on top of your diaphragm, and it compresses everything in here, so nothing moves. Then we've got non-organic food and the, the chemicals in our environment, they're coming in and disrupting the flow here, and if this can't flow, we've got a lot of problems because if you look at even on, um, anatomy chart, you'll see the brain, and you see the intestines.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:12 Mm-hmm.

Jason van Blerk 39:12 They look the same.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:13 Mm.

Jason van Blerk 39:14 And so what I found is when people have a concussion, they start to get digestive issues, and when people have digestive issues, they start to have racing thoughts, foggy in their brain, harder to wake up. They start to have stuff going on in their mind. And so it's really important to get this area flowing, and this is pressure. When this is gr- constricted, it affects the way we move. It affects the way that we think.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:38 Yeah. You guys treat some of the world's best athletes, okay? So you d- you, you, you teach the public, you're, you're teaching people around the world. You're on a mission to, well, you know, state your mission. One billion people to do what?

Jason van Blerk 39:54 It's to inspire a billion people to heal themselves.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:57 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 39:58 And the reason we did that was because we had a clinic with a 3,000-person wait list, and we closed. Why did we? Why would you do that? The reason why was because people were coming to us, we were taking away their pain, and then they were going back r- right to the life that caused that pain, and they made no changes. Then they would come back to us six months later, now the problem was worse. We fixed them, they go back to that life, and they come back, and now it's a chronic health issue that's life-threatening. And so if we're not giving you the tools to actually change your life-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 40:30 Mm-hmm

Jason van Blerk 40:31 ... and we're just another pill, another drug that you take, where we take away your pain and suppress it, we're not really getting to the root of the problem.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 40:37 No.

Jason van Blerk 40:37 We're not making a change in the world. The only way to make a change in the world is to give people the tools to help themself. And if people start to help themself, their life literally changes.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 40:47 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 40:48 You know, we live in a world right now where, you know, you don't like somebody in your environment, and you try to change them. It never works.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 40:55 Uh-huh.

Jason van Blerk 40:56 But when I change, change the way I see them, change the way I feel about them, change my actions, whatever it might be, I change. They start to interact with me differently.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 41:04 100%.

Jason van Blerk 41:05 And so I believe life is a mirror, and I believe that the only way to really make an impact in the world is to change myself, is to focus on myself.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 41:12 Yeah. I love that. I just wanna finish off that thought about elite athletes, and it fascinates me. So you and your colleagues have worked with tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people now, right?

Jason van Blerk 41:23 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 41:24 So you've laid your hands onto many different people. You just mentioned the elderly and what you notice when you actually lay your hands on some elderly people and how easy it is to see the compensations. Are there any patterns that you see when you're putting your hands on some of the world's best athletes? We won't mention names, okay? But when you put your hands on an elite athlete who is the best in their chosen sports, does their body feel different?

Jason van Blerk 41:56 [laughs] That's a great question. Yes, because they have optimized their body for a specific pattern. So if I'm a baseball player, and I'm swinging, I've created tension in certain areas of my body-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 42:11 Mm-hmm

Jason van Blerk 42:11 ... created pressure in others so that I can optimally swing. So you have to be very mindful because if they've created this pattern over time, and I go and reprogram their computer, their swing is gonna be slightly off for the next couple of days until they integrate that pattern.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 42:27 Mm.

Jason van Blerk 42:27 And so you have to be mindful. We are a computer, and we are computer programmers, so we understand if I twist here and pull here, it's gonna create this effect. So a lot of time, you know, you got one-sided sports where they're playing on one side, well, they're creating tension lines. So what we do is we work on the opposite side of the body to balance the pressure because they've created this long-term pattern. You don't really wanna mess with the patterns too much.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 42:52 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 42:53 Yeah. The goal, to, to be honest, the goal with a professional athlete isHow can you get them to get into the zone faster? How can you help them manage their emotions better? And how can you help them change their perception so they can see things differently? Those are the three things that you can really fine-tune, but their bodies are, like, well-trained machines. And either you're working with somebody because they have an injury or you're working with someone for performance. Specifically, I'm talking about performance. You know, how do you ... If I'm out of stress, I see situations differently.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 43:26 Hmm.

Jason van Blerk 43:27 The peak of stress is I do this or I die. That's suicide. I only see one option. So if we take the body out of stress, you start to see options.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 43:37 Hmm.

Jason van Blerk 43:37 So if I'm playing a, a team sport and I'm out of stress, I'll see that there's a player to my right, there's a player to my left, and there's a player behind me that I can pass to. But if I'm in stress, that fight or flight reaction mode, I might make silly decisions because I only see that one option to the left, but there was a better one to the right. And so our goal is to bring the body out of stress so that people can see options again. And this happens in life, too.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 44:01 Yeah. It's so interesting. And without going into the whole history, I mean, I think, you know, I had an emergency appendicectomy when I was about seven or eight years old, and long story as to how and why that happened, but it was an emergency, so, you know, I would've just literally had a knife ripping it open-

Jason van Blerk 44:22 Hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 44:23 ... to take it out, right? And ever since I started working with him, it's very clear that my whole right side around my groin area, and you probably notice this in me as well, all my movement patterns in life are all about not closing down my right groin area. I will do anything to avoid doing that. And then if you see the way I play table tennis or snooker or the way I hold my guitar, it's flipping everywhere. I'm like, oh my God, that's my pattern. So it's amazing how many of us probably choose sports based upon our compensations. You know-

Jason van Blerk 44:59 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 44:59 ... the patterns we've got, we're naturally drawn to sports which actually suit our compensations, right? And it works until we get injured.

Jason van Blerk 45:07 Mm-hmm. And then you have to find a new program.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 45:10 But you-

Jason van Blerk 45:10 You have to find a new way to kick the ball to, to hit the-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 45:14 Yeah

Jason van Blerk 45:14 ... hit the tennis ball. And even for you, when we were working with you, if you noticed, your right glute was tighter than your left.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 45:19 Yeah. Massively today.

Jason van Blerk 45:21 And that's ... When we crumpled up our shirts ... What is a scar? A scar is we're crumpling up our shirt.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 45:27 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 45:27 We're, we're tying the fascia right into that spot, so the opposite side of the body, the glute, is gonna tighten as a result of that. There's less room for it to move. So it's very important if people have scars throughout the body to actually stretch them.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 45:40 Hmm.

Jason van Blerk 45:41 And you can just put your fingers on either side of the scar, and you pull it apart in every single direction to give it space. You're, like, unwinding the fascia there. One of the things that we talk about is if you stretch your skin, you're working on your fascia because your fascia connects to the skin. The skin is an access point. And there's this misconception that if I stretch my skin, I'm gonna get wrinkles, but it's actually the opposite. You get wrinkles because you're dehydrated, because everything's pulled into that area and it's constricted. But if you pull the skin over your scar or over any area of your body, you're creating space in the bag that's holding everything.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:19 Yeah, that's really interesting. You've put some stuff up online before about how your face and skin has changed since you started doing these maneuvers, right?

Jason van Blerk 46:27 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:28 You look way younger and all kinds of things. And you would say that's because you've been doing these maneuvers, right?

Jason van Blerk 46:34 I would say it's a combination of lifestyle and maneuvers.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:37 Mm-hmm.

Jason van Blerk 46:37 So I do maneuvers every single day, 15 minutes in the morning when I wake up. Sometimes I do it before I go to bed because that helps me sleep faster and deeper. I do these movements to unwind all the tension and the stress. It helps me get into the flow state, helps me focus better. It helps me have more energy throughout the day. But then there's a lifestyle component. And just like if you look at yoga, you know, thousands of years, there was a lifestyle, and then there was the movements. What happened was it became Westernized, and they lost the lifestyle aspect of it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 47:09 [laughs]

Jason van Blerk 47:10 So we do teach a lot of how to build a really healthy lifestyle, and I like to do it in the most natural way possible. I'm not a big fan of, you know, having thousands of dollars of equipment. If I can get out into nature, if I can walk, if I can get out in the sun, if I can get in the ocean, touch a tree, uh, move my body, I know that I'm giving my body the optimal conditions-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 47:30 Yeah

Jason van Blerk 47:30 ... to feel good.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 47:31 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 47:32 And, you know, I see the body as an electrical system. If you look at every cell in the body, it has a voltage. It literally conducts electricity. So if I rub my feet on a carpet, we've all done this as kids, and you could zap somebody. So my question is, if I could rub my feet on a carpet and zap somebody, I conduct electricity. Well, that's interesting.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 47:51 Mm-hmm.

Jason van Blerk 47:52 So when I dove deeper into this, there's a, a Dr. Jerry Tennant, he really breaks down the cellular voltage, and what he was able to do was map pH to a voltage, and based on the voltage, he could map disease processes. So a healthy cell is at around -20 to -25 millivolts.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 48:13 Hmm.

Jason van Blerk 48:14 A regenerating new cell is at -50 millivolts. Cancer was around +30 millivolts, and if we were able to take the cellular voltage of, of, of each cell, he was able to map behaviors that changed the voltage. So you're an electrical system, and if you put your bare feet on the ground, you actually change your voltage.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 48:35 Hmm.

Jason van Blerk 48:35 He noticed that it put it back to the natural state. But if you're in wind, if you're in still water, like a bath, that's why you get really tired, it takes electricity from your body.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 48:47 A bath makes you tired?

Jason van Blerk 48:48 A bath makes you calm and tired because it's ... Still water steals electrons. It's an electron stealer. Moving water gives electrons.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 48:58 So a bath before bed can be useful

Jason van Blerk 49:00 100%, yes

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 49:01 Yeah

Jason van Blerk 49:01 But if you s- if you stand in the wind, I don't know if you've ever done this, you're in the wind at a beach for like an hour and you feel tired 'cause the wind is stealing your electrons. When you touch a tree, when you walk barefoot on the ground, you're actually getting electrons from the Earth. And so I, I mean, I've experimented with this. I walk barefoot everywhere now, and, you know, I've noticed more energy throughout the day because I believe the Earth is giving us the energy that we need.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 49:24 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 49:24 And th- it's, this has been measured at the cellular level.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 49:26 Yeah. These Fascial Manoeuvres, um, you g- you guys give out all your content for free, okay? So it's all out there. It's on YouTube. It's on social media platforms. The maneuvers themselves, and you just talked me and my wife through a sequence, which was lovely, you feel different very quickly. I think we only did three of those maneuvers, and felt really calm and light after doing them, and I can see why it's such a powerful practice to do every morning when you wake up. One of the things I was thinking about as I was doing them, and even over the past few weeks of observing them, is I guess one of your classic ones is when, you know, you put, let's say, your right leg over your left foot. Your right, uh, hand goes to your left armpit.

Jason van Blerk 50:22 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 50:22 And then the left one, the left arm goes onto the right armpit or the right, uh, the right back like that, okay?

Jason van Blerk 50:28 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 50:29 And then you start doing things where your torso goes one way and your head goes another way whilst doing certain breathing patterns. We'll dive into why you do it that way in just a moment, but I was thinking, as you're doing it, you're sort of giving yourself a hug.

Jason van Blerk 50:46 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 50:47 Right? So yes, there's what's happening to the fascia. There's what the breath is doing to the sympathetic nervous system and how it's releasing things. Great. But there's also just something really deeply primal about you're getting in touch with yourself. It's like a practice of self-care, dare I say it, self-love, where you're hugging yourself as you're doing these things. And I really feel these days, Jason, that so many people are so disconnected from their bodies. Like, they've... Yes, they live in their heads, and I've certainly been guilty of this in the past, right? But they don't know what their bodies are doing, like what their hips are doing, what their breath is doing, if their diaphragm's tight, you know? And what I love about these Fascia Manoeuvres that you guys have created is that it's helping people get back in touch with their bodies. You're, you know, you're holding yourself. You're, you're touching yourself, your skin. Um, in the early days of this podcast, I'm gonna get him back on soon actually, hopefully, I spoke to a guy called Professor Francis McGlone. He's one of the world's leading touch researchers, and he does some of the early research showing that when you stroke the skin, I think it's at one to three centimeters per second, you activate certain nerve receptors in your body called C tactile afferents, which basically go all the way to the brain and lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol. But, you know, [laughs] when, when, when we spoke, we said, "Yeah, of course no one is measuring the pace at which they stroke someone." That is naturally the pace at which a mother will stroke their child-

Jason van Blerk 52:28 Mm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 52:28 ... at one to three centimeters per second, right? This stuff is built into us. So I just love that these maneuvers, y- y- it's not just you're getting back in touch with your body by actually working on your body and moving your body, you're actually touching your body as well, so you're really... I don't know. I think that's one of the key powerful parts of it for me, is that you're actually putting your hands back on your body again.

Jason van Blerk 52:55 Yeah, I mean, it's... Self-awareness is a really big component of this, and I, I really think that there's something that happens in the brain and in the body when we cross.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 53:04 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 53:05 Like, when, when y- wh- why do we all, when we're sitting at a desk working, bring one... Not everybody, but a lot of people, they bring one leg up and cross it over.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 53:13 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 53:13 There's something to what happens. There's something neurologically that's happening when we cross sides, and I think that when we're hugging ourself, you know, when you're in a, an extreme pain or, or trauma or sad or a breakup, what do you do? You crawl into a ball in, in your bed and you cry, or you, you, you lay there. There's something to getting into that position, and what we found is that position you just described with the right foot over, the right hand under, and the left arm on top, and we twist, that's a fetal position. But we just do that when we're standing for the Fascial Manoeuvres, but one of the other Fascial Manoeuvres that we use is actually getting into a fetal position. You lie on your side. You crawl into a ball. You cross your arms. You hug yourself, and when you do that, you just feel different.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 53:59 Yeah. How do Fascial Manoeuvres help us with stress?

Jason van Blerk 54:07 I believe stress takes a lot of energy from us, and as people age, you know, they get, uh, decreased sight, decreased hearing, decreased taste, smell. All their senses start to diminish. When people do about 15 minutes of Fascial Manoeuvres, all of a sudden the room looks different. They hear differently. The food that they're eating tastes different. And so I believe it's bringing the body out of stress in just 15 minutes, and why it works, I don't fully know yet. But when we put the body in these rotated positions and we breathe, we're unwinding tension in the entire body, and the body just starts to relax.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:47 Yeah. I heard your partner Gary say in a podcast recently, he said, "Look, we're not saying this is the only thing that works, right? There's probably other things out there that work as well, but we know that this works," or something to that effect.

Jason van Blerk 55:01 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 55:01 Which I also love. It's like, because-There are all kinds of practitioners who are doing all kinds of amazing things. You guys have just found a method that is very scalable and very teachable that also works and happens to be very powerful.

Jason van Blerk 55:15 Yeah, I think whatever you believe in and whatever you commit to over time has the ability to really help you.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 55:22 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 55:22 And from going to a chiropractor to a physio to doing breathwork to doing meditation, if you commit to it and you're really serious about it and you do it right, over time-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 55:33 [laughs]

Jason van Blerk 55:33 ... you're gonna see a result. This is just one way. There's tons of ways that people can do it. And if you like moving your body in this way, like what I like about this practice is I don't need a mat. I don't need equipment. I can do it while I'm standing in line at a grocery store.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 55:47 Mm-hmm.

Jason van Blerk 55:48 I can do it anywhere. I can do it on a plane when I-- to avoid jet lag. You know, it's so simple that anyone can do it. Even kids are doing it. You know, you've got elderly doing it. And so we're just out here to teach people how to heal themselves, and there's so many ways to do it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 56:02 Yeah. This morning after you took, uh, Ved and I through these sequences, maybe three of the maneuvers, so I don't know if you have names for them or not-

Jason van Blerk 56:11 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 56:11 ... but what, what was that first one that we did? What's that called?

Jason van Blerk 56:14 Totally Twisted.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 56:15 Totally Twisted.

Jason van Blerk 56:16 Anti-Gravity.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 56:18 Which was Anti-Gravity. Oh, I love that one. That was amazing-

Jason van Blerk 56:20 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 56:21 ... with the neck.

Jason van Blerk 56:21 And-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 56:21 So Anti-Gravity.

Jason van Blerk 56:22 And then Swinger.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 56:24 And then Swinger. And they're all on your YouTube channel if people want to watch that-

Jason van Blerk 56:27 Yes

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 56:27 ... uh, with you and your colleagues teaching people. But, but I, I would totally agree. These are free. You don't need any equipment. You could do it anywhere. You don't need a mat. It, it's very, very accessible. And you and Aisha asked us both at the end, you know, how did we feel? And we both said some version of, "We feel lighter." I also said that I think I felt way more grounded. I could just feel pressure in my feet against the carpet. Um, you said something really, which really caught my ear. You said, yeah, you said something about people generally feel lighter even though you haven't lost any weights, right?

Jason van Blerk 57:04 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 57:04 So why is it, do you think, that people feel lighter after doing these maneuvers?

Jason van Blerk 57:09 I believe it's because we're releasing emotions.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 57:12 And emotions are heavy.

Jason van Blerk 57:13 Yeah. Emotions are heavy, like sadness. You know, if you're holding on to sadness, you f- sometimes you feel like the weight is on the, on your shoulders. You feel like a hundred pounds extra. And then all of a sudden people do these movements, and they feel super light and, and flexible, and they can move. And the only thing that I could explain is that I believe that we're moving their emotions, and sometimes people feel it. Like, I'll be teaching a class to a hundred people, and five people start crying after the fourth movement. Other people, like me [laughs] I have no idea. I don't even notice the emotion, but I feel lighter. My theory is that emotions are heavy, and when we do these movements, we're moving the emotions even if we're not aware of it, and as a result we feel lighter.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 57:54 Yeah. It's interesting. I, I really like the spiritual teacher Michael Singer, and he'll talk about, you know, experiences that we have in life. You have an experience, and if, if you allow that experience to go through you, there's no problem. And it, and it really makes me think of what you're talking about here with these maneuvers that anyone can do. Why do some people start crying? Well, it's probably because at some point in your life something got stuck. It didn't go through you, right? 'Cause ultimately that's what trauma is, right? Isn't it? A tr- a traumatic experience happened in the past. It's not happening in the present, right? The only reason it's causing you problems in the present is because you're sort of y- that past experience is being relived in the present moment. That's not to deny the impact of trauma, right?

Jason van Blerk 58:48 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 58:48 Just to be really clear. But if you just look at it factually, that experience is no longer happening, so why is it still affecting you? It can only be affecting you 'cause it's somehow it's still stuck. If it just passed through you, it wouldn't. So maybe these maneuvers, maybe one of the deep powerful components of them is that by moving your body into all these different positions that we don't tend to get into in the modern world, in the state of our natural two-dimensional lives, we sit, we drive, we walk, but we're not walking even with rotation. I wonder if these emotions then get stuck and actually for many people these maneuvers are just helping them move through them.

Jason van Blerk 59:35 Yes. That's exactly what I feel. I've seen people release extreme trauma, you know, from screaming to people passing out to shaking to just crying or just sitting in silence, and there's something that we're doing here. I don't fully understand it yet, and I hope one day a scientist comes in and starts to really-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 59:57 Mm

Jason van Blerk 59:57 ... research what's changing in people. But when people do this, they start to balance their emotions. They start to feel more grounded and more centered in themself.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:00:05 We all know that moving our bodies more is good for us. But despite that knowledge, many of us find it hard to actually implement. That's where the new Peloton Cross Training Bike+, powered by Peloton IQ, can really help. It's built for fitness breakthroughs with real-time insights and endless ways to move. And you can go from cycling on the Bike+ to strength training off it with one spin of the swivel screen. While you lift, Peloton IQ counts reps, corrects your form, and suggests new weights so you're always making progress towards your goals. And Peloton's movement-tracking camera provides real-time feedback so you can train safer, lift smarter, and make every move count more. With over 15 types of workouts, expert instructors to keep you motivated, and a personalized plan tailored to your goals, the Cross Training Bike+ takes the guesswork out of working out so you can move freely and let Peloton handle the rest.Let yourself ride, lift, stretch, move, and go. Explore the new Peloton Cross Training Bike+ by clicking on the link below or by scanning the QR code on screen. I mean, we started this conversation talking about fascia, right? And I spent yesterday looking up a lot of the scientific research on fascia. I thought, "Okay, let me see what else is out there." There's a lady called Dr. Helene Langevin from Harvard who's been studying fascia, uh, who a few years ago said we are still at the very beginning of understanding fascia. In another interview, she called fascia the meta system of the entire body, which is pretty profound. In 2007, there was someone called Carla Stecco, an anatomy professor, who found that fascia is alive with nerve endings. A lady called Jill Miller, who's written this brilliant book called Body By Breath, has written about the 250 million sensory neurons that live in your fascia, and she writes in that book that 40% of your fascial sensory endings are sympathetic fibers, so that's part of your stress system, under autonomic control. I mean, there's a ton of research out there. Scientists are studying fascia, and what's really fascinating for me is this idea that fascia is not just physical. It's not just holding our entire structure together. A lot of people now are talking about, as you are, about these, about fascia being a way that we communicate. A, a, you know, maybe all kinds of things get communicated throughout our body through fascia.

Jason van Blerk 1:02:45 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:02:46 And I'm sort of... You know, every... A lot of the way you talk, it reminds me a lot of traditional modalities like Ayurvedic medicine or traditional Chinese medicine about flow in the body, about, you know, if there's a blockage somewhere and things can't flow, if the chi can't flow, if the energy can't flow, that is the precipitating event that can, in some people, lead to problems and potentially disease, right? Do you think that the fascial lines that you work on are the acupuncture lines or the meridian lines that Chinese practitioners have been working on for years?

Jason van Blerk 1:03:26 Very similar. Yeah. We, we have mapped the body where we believe certain organs, pathways, and emotions go.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:03:34 Mm-hmm.

Jason van Blerk 1:03:34 And there's actually a sequence called the fascial coffee. If you rub your body with friction in the direction that we've mapped, what it does is it starts to activate it. So it's a two-minute routine. It has to be in one... So I'll... If you wanna do this with me, so stick your left hand out and rub it down towards your fingers with your right hand. And feel that. Okay, now go the other way. What do you notice? Which side? What do you notice for each direction? So when you go down towards your fingers.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:04:13 I think that's smoother.

Jason van Blerk 1:04:15 Okay, now go up towards your shoulder.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:04:20 And that feels tighter to do it that way.

Jason van Blerk 1:04:22 You got it. So there's actually a direction that if you swipe your entire body, it feels lighter, tingly, looser, and you walk faster. It's called the fascial coffee. So what I like to do is I'll put a little bit of peppermint on my hands when I wake up. I'll rub it on my hands, and I go through this two-minute sequence, rubbing the body in a certain direction. The body has a certain flow, and there's certain emotions in different areas.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:04:46 Mm.

Jason van Blerk 1:04:46 So we have a lot of overlap with the acupuncture systems, the meridian lines, the Chinese medicine, all that. We have a similar belief system, but we've also found a little bit of differences. Does it invalidate what they've done? Does it validate what we've done? No, not necessarily. We just have a different way of looking at it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:05:04 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 1:05:05 It's called the fascial coffee. It's on our YouTube.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:05:07 Yeah. I can't, I can't get out of my head whether it be Fascial Maneuvers or something else, this idea that we need to spend more time in our bodies and with our bodies, I think it's really important for people. You know, if you just get up and you're looking at your phone and you slam down your coffee and you're on your emails, you get the kids off to school, and you drive to work and, you know, arguably, you know, your coating, your skin, your body, you know, in which you're living in this life, you're so out of touch with that body, right? Yeah, you might go and do yoga at the weekend. Great. That's brilliant. But I really do think there's something about spending a bit of time each day with your body, feeling your body, moving your body. You know, as part of my morning routine, and I have started to bring some of your maneuvers in, and I think, and probably, you know, it was quite powerful today. I'm pretty sure from tomorrow I'm gonna maybe start off with 10 minutes each day and see how that goes for the next few weeks. But I tend to get up and meditate. And then when I finish meditation, before I do anything else, I will do... I mean, you saw my living room. I will roll around on the floor. I'll do some breathing. I'll do some hip twists. I'll, I'll just sort of feel my body and loosen things up, and I, I think it's a beautiful way to start each day. And I think your maneuvers, and there's all kinds of... There's five-minute, there's 10-minute, there's 15-minute sequences on your YouTube channel. I just think for people who do feel disconnected from themselves, I would just say just give it a go and just see how you feel, 'cause that's ultimately the real test, isn't it? You know, we can talk about getting scientists to study it, which I think would be amazing, and you can also go, "Well, why don't I just ask myself, how do I feel when I do this compared to how do I feel when I don't do this?" And if you feel calmer, less anxious, lighter, more relaxed-You know, that's a pretty powerful motivating factor to keep doing it, isn't it?

Jason van Blerk 1:07:18 Mm-hmm. Well, you know, when I started doing them, I was a professional soccer player. I had a lot of injuries. I was a guy growing up in a world where you're told to suppress your emotions. So I was very disconnected from my body, 'cause as an athlete, you know pain and how to push through it. So that means I ignore every other sensation that my body's sending me. And so when I started doing this practice, I thought, "What if I start to build a new relationship with my body?" And I would close my eyes, I would hold my breath, and I would, I would eliminate all the noise, and I would try to feel at a very deep level the sensations that I was feeling. And it took me a very long time. Like, if you did something on me, I was like, "Meh, I kinda noticed that," but I didn't really. But everybody else could notice it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:08:01 Mm-hmm.

Jason van Blerk 1:08:01 They could see me walking differently, but I couldn't even see it myself because I had built that relationship with myself. I disconnected so far from my body. And so over the last six years, I have made it my mission to, my personal mission to really understand this computer because I always wondered, how come my friend over there could feel that that person was angry? How come I couldn't feel that? How come we're sitting here, that person's angry, I had no idea, I couldn't feel it, but there's somebody here that could feel that? There's a phenomena that was happening. They were feeling it in their body.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:08:36 Mm-hmm.

Jason van Blerk 1:08:36 Just like a tuning fork. If you hit a tuning fork in one room, it will sync to another one. And we talked about frequency and vibration and how sound waves affect the fascia. The body's a tuning fork. So if somebody walks into the room and they're angry, I feel that even without even seeing it. There's some sort of physiological shift that happens, and they've measured this. If someone's stressed around you, they actually measure that your stress levels change. So what I've learned over the last six years is my body has become the most intelligent system that I use to navigate my day-to-day.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:09:07 Mm-hmm.

Jason van Blerk 1:09:07 I no longer use my brain. Even when I'm working with you or somebody, you always ask me, "What do you see? What do you notice?" No, it's what I feel. When you walk into a room, I can feel my body shift. I have tension in areas that I don't ever have tension. That's interesting.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:09:24 Mm-hmm.

Jason van Blerk 1:09:24 And then I talk to you, and it's like, yeah, I had an injury over there, and there's tension here. So over time, the people I was working with were validating what my body was telling me.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:09:33 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 1:09:33 So being self-aware is one of the most empowering tools-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:09:38 Yeah

Jason van Blerk 1:09:38 ... that we can have.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:09:39 No, I love it. And I've only met you twice, a few weeks ago in London and today, and you have come across to me as someone who is so in touch with themselves, so in touch with the energies around you, with what's going on with the people around you, that I find it baffling that you at one point were so disconnected. But also inspiring, because if you were that disconnected and now you can feel the stuff, I think that gives a lot of people a lot of hope.

Jason van Blerk 1:10:10 Yeah. I mean, look at kids. Kids are so in tune, and up until seven years old, they're just downloading information about how the world works. And I feel like we don't ask kids, "How do you feel?" We tell them based on an education that we had from the past. And so I believe we are unlearning as we age with the programming in society today, and that it's important for us to go back to what it was like to be a kid again-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:10:40 Mm-hmm

Jason van Blerk 1:10:40 ... back in tune with ourselves. And it took me a long time to get there, and I know everybody can. When we're in stress, there is so much internal noise that we're not able to perceive the difference of the things around us.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:10:52 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 1:10:52 We're not able to perceive the environment. But if we calm down and everything is really slow and peaceful, the moment there's a slight shift in the environment, you can feel it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:02 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 1:11:03 And what I did in order to learn this was when I would work on somebody, I'd work on their ankle, and I would feel my body for the changes that they were experiencing. And all of a sudden, my f- my ankle would get kinda cold or tingly or warm or looser, and I would ask them, "Is your ankle tingling right now?" And they would say to me, "Yes." But I was working on them, and this really blew my mind. So here I am working on somebody, and I'm feeling what they were feeling. And I just did this over and over and over again, and everybody that I worked with, I would ask, "Are you feeling this? Do you feel this emotion? Do you feel this tension here? Do you feel that?" And I was training myself to be in tune with my body.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:41 Mm-hmm.

Jason van Blerk 1:11:41 So it's important to have people around you that you trust, that you can ask, "Do, are you feeling frustrated right now?" Just so you can learn what these signals are again.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:50 Mm.

Jason van Blerk 1:11:50 We have to retrain our, our... It's a body language. We have to learn what it, what it is.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:54 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 1:11:54 It takes time, and it takes practice.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:57 Even these fascial maneuvers, you know, because most of them, that I've seen at least, are, you know, you do one side and then you do the other side. Even that awareness that, oh, on my left side, my neck turns freely, but on my right side it doesn't, that's the kind of self-awareness that so many people just don't have. They don't know that their left wrist is tighter than their right or whatever it might be.

Jason van Blerk 1:12:22 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:12:22 And there's such, there's such possibility available to people if they can just start to tune into that.

Jason van Blerk 1:12:31 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:12:31 Jason, you had quite a stressful upbringing, didn't you?

Jason van Blerk 1:12:35 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:12:36 Can you tell us a little bit about that? Because it's, it's, it's fascinating to, to know. It's fascinating to hear how much fear played a role when you were a child, especially in the context of what you do today.

Jason van Blerk 1:12:50 Yeah. I mean, I grew up in South Africa, and it was a very dangerous place where we lived. So we would have, you know, guys jump out of a bush when you stop at a red light with guns to steal your car, or they would try and break into your house. And when they break into your house, it's not pretty. You know, they tie you up. Sometimes they do other things. They steal everything inside, and sometimes they kill you.And so my parents, when I was three years old, taught me how to climb into the wine cellar, how to jump out of a car if somebody came to hijack it. And we actually had a situation where eight guys tried to break into our house. I remember we-- Well, I don't even remember. My mom was telling me that, that we were in the car in the garage with one of our other-- with one of our small dogs, me and my brother, and my mom, and there were eight guys trying to break in, and my dad and our security guards were going to handle whatever was going on. And so growing up in a world where, you know, you're, you're sleeping and there's gunshots, and people are breaking in, and it was hyper stressful for me. And so I grew up in a lot of fear. I grew up, I grew up in that environment, and when I was six years old, my parents said, "Enough is enough. We need to move," and I moved to Canada.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:14:06 And in Canada, you pursued sport, you pursued what we would call football, what you guys would call soccer, and my understanding is that you got a lot of injuries.

Jason van Blerk 1:14:18 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:14:19 Do you think now, looking back, that the fear state in which you grew up in, so that tightness, that tension within your body, that sort of hypervigilance because at any point, you know there could be a threat, do you think that was a big contributor to how many injuries you got?

Jason van Blerk 1:14:37 A hundred percent. My inability to manage my emotions at that age had a massive impact on the way that I felt and the way that I played. Like, if you have fear when you're playing a sport, you know, your-- If your focus is on not making a mistake, you make a mistake. It's so funny. And so, you know, when you get injured, um, usually I-- Now knowing what I know, looking back at it, I was holding a lot of anger and a lot of fear, and the injuries that I got were exactly in those areas of the body from what I know now today.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:15:11 Hmm.

Jason van Blerk 1:15:11 If I had the tools to manage my emotions at a younger age, I don't feel like I would've been in this position.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:15:16 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 1:15:16 I don't feel like I would've gotten injured. And a big reason why I wanted to study the human body, like I went into-- I became a biomedical physiologist and kinesiologist. I was gonna go down the medicine route, and I realized that there was more than just the physical body. There was more than just chemical reactions. There was something else that was influencing the way that I felt.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:15:35 Mm-hmm.

Jason van Blerk 1:15:35 And that's why I started to pursue something that I couldn't see with my eyes. I had to start asking questions and explore new ways of, of working with the body.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:15:43 Mm-hmm. It's interesting that I know you were saving up to do a physiotherapy course in the UK in twenty twenty-three.

Jason van Blerk 1:15:51 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:15:51 You know, you were-- That was your plan. And I think it was in twenty nineteen or twenty twenty, you thought, "You know, actually, you know what? This is not for me. I need to change path." Can you talk to me a little bit about what it means to follow your passion?

Jason van Blerk 1:16:10 In my teens, I had a deep inner knowing, and it was an inner knowing that I was gonna do something, and I kinda had a vision of what it was. But it-- at the time, it made no sense to me, and I just followed what the path that was built for me by society. You go to school, you get a good education. You know, if you, if you want, you can become an athlete and go to college and pay for your education and do all that kind of stuff. Study medicine. And I did this path. And when I turned twenty-six years old, um, I had graduated in, in twenty nineteen, where four months after graduation, I was saving up money, and I was working every single day. You know, I was making good money. I had a girlfriend. I lived in a nice place. I did everything that society had told me was right in order to be happy and wealthy and successful and all that kind of stuff. And I just had a moment in December of twenty nineteen where I just realized how miserable and sad and in pain I really was in. And I was just so busy up until that point, I never really realized it. And when I realized what was really going on, I just said, "Enough is enough. I'm just gonna listen to this inner voice that knows that there's something else out there, and I have no idea what it is." At that time, I ended everything. I quit my job. I broke up with my girlfriend. I said, "I'm not gonna go to physio. I have no idea what I'm gonna do next." And I just had a lot of faith in that moment that whatever was meant for me to happen, whatever path I was meant to take will show itself. And about a month and a half later, boom. I had a friend that introduced me to Gary, and he was just closing a chapter of his life. I was closing a chapter of my life, and that's when this movement started.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:18:00 Hmm.

Jason van Blerk 1:18:01 And so when it comes to finding your passion, I, I, I really feel like we're forcing children at or teens, you know, to make decisions that are lifelong.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:18:10 Hmm.

Jason van Blerk 1:18:11 And I don't agree with that. I think we need to go and try ten different things. Go try and-- Go be with a doctor for a week. Go and work in a law office for a week. Go be a tech engineer for... You know, do it. And when you do it, the things that really light you up that don't actually feel like work, those are the things that you should put more time into. We're making one decision. I'm gonna become a, a, a doctor. I'm eighteen years old. I have no idea about any other discipline in the world, and I'm gonna pursue that for the next forty years. And when I'm ten years in, I feel so guilty if I wanna change paths 'cause I put in so much money and so much time-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:18:48 Yeah

Jason van Blerk 1:18:48 ... and so many people are relying on me to do it, that it's so hard to change directions. And so for me, I believe at a younger age, we need to try more things.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:18:58 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 1:18:58 And the things that we like, do more of it, and eventually, if you can monetize it, even better. For me, I don't feel like I work a day in my life, and that is how I feel like we're supposed to live.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:19:12 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 1:19:12 It doesn't feel like work. I don't-- I literally work almost twenty-four hours a day, but I never feel like I'm working.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:19:19 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 1:19:20 And it's sometimes scary. You know, sometimes you do what you're, uh, you go against what everybody else around you believes, and sometimes you have to do that. If you know deep inside of yourself that this is the path for you, do it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:19:33 Wow. Very powerful. You met Gary, and I don't know the, the technically correct way of, of describing your relationship, but he... W- is it you and him who co-founded Human Garage together?

Jason van Blerk 1:19:48 Yeah. So at the time when we, when we got introduced by my friend, it was January 27th, 2020, um, there was another person, Cynthia, and Gary that were there. So I would go to his house every single day. Cynthia would be there, and we would just play with the human body. We would just try and find ways like, "What if you try this, and what if you try that?" And we would do it on each other. At the time, it was still a therapy that we would do on someone else. And we sat with it and we said, "Well, is there a way that I could do this myself?" And we would say, "Okay, let's try this." And we would try and do the same things that we were doing on the table to ourselves. Like, for example, remember the day I bent your hands?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:20:25 I, I do, yeah. [laughs]

Jason van Blerk 1:20:26 Yeah. Yeah, 'cause it hurts. So I can do that myself. I can bend my own hand, uh, doing... This is called Twisty Wristy. You can find it on our YouTube. But doing this movement, I can do it myself, but this used to be a movement that a practitioner would do on me. And so we just set the intention that can we find a way to do every single one of these things that we do on someone else and do it on ourselves so that we no longer rely on other people to take care of our bodies? And that's what we did for six months, and by August of 2020, we were doing this practice at the beach every single day, funny enough, outside of Chip Wilson's house. He's the, the yoga, you know, big in the yoga movement. And, and we were doing these, this practice every single day, and we started to feel better, and that's when we knew that we were onto something. And at the time, we saw women's health, the issues in women's health w- were, were skyrocketing. We had people who were coming to us in their 20s with the same issues that we used to see in 50 and 60-year-olds, and we knew that there was a problem. So we took all of our savings, and we said, "For the next year, we are just gonna share this with as many people that we possibly can, and whoever we help, however many people we help, we will just help them." And we didn't charge anything for it. We used all of our own savings to fund literally the first two years of this mission. And it was just to help people because we saw that mental health and suicide and disease and all these things were starting to rise, and we needed to give people a way to help themself.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:21:52 Wow. I mean, that's the thing I love the most about it. We use the word empowerment a lot. We hear it a lot these days. But what you guys [laughs] are offering the world truly is empowerment. It's like you don't need us. Let us just teach you the moves, then you just play with them and do them. And as you said before, if you believe in them, if you commit to practicing them, there's a pretty good chance they're gonna start changing your life. Um, how does it work though, in the sense that first two years you didn't charge anything. I know you were down to [laughs] not much money at all, but there was this real desire to go and help the world and give out this information. But of course, this year you guys are on a mission to spread this around the world. You're traveling all over the world. You're doing workshops. You know, we've been at events together where you're showing how you can do this to people. Of course, that costs money. So how does it work where you're giving it out to the world and you're able to do all these things?

Jason van Blerk 1:22:55 So we started this mission as empower a billion people to heal themselves. And then I realized that if I'm empowering someone, I'm, I'm giving them the authority to help themself, and it just didn't really sit with me. And I realized that inspire was a much better word because-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:23:10 Mm

Jason van Blerk 1:23:10 ... it meant that I had to do it. You know, we live in a world of medicine today where a lot of the doctors, not all, but a lot, are not doing what they're telling their patients to do. This happens in all disciplines.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:23:22 Mm.

Jason van Blerk 1:23:23 And so we realized that if I inspire people to heal themselves, it means I need to do it and be a role model in that space.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:23:32 Mm.

Jason van Blerk 1:23:32 I need to live what I'm teaching. And so we changed the word to inspire, and I just wanted to share that because it is a big difference between giving authority to people to heal themselves-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:23:41 Mm

Jason van Blerk 1:23:41 ... versus inspiring them to heal themselves. So our mission is now to inspire, which means we have to live and breathe what we preach.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:23:48 Yeah. I love that.

Jason van Blerk 1:23:49 And, and, and in terms of funding this mission, you know, we had a lot of people help us along the way. We went down to the food in our cupboards, and we had no business model. We had no plan. We were like, "Hey, if all else fails, we'll go back to treating people." Like, we had a plan B, but we believed so much in what we were doing. And when we went down to the food in our cupboards, we had a lady actually donate $50,000 to us, and at that time it w- she just had believed so much in our mission. She had no idea of where we were financially or what our business model was. She just believed in us, and that got us just over the hump. It gave us a little bit more time to figure out how can we get this to a billion people? And doing it free, the reason why we did it free was 'cause we want it to be accessible. There's a lot of people in, like, Africa and certain countries, they just don't have healthcare, and they can't afford it. So free was never really the goal. The goal was accessibility. If you really wanna help a billion people, you have to find a way to make it accessible. So what we did in order to scale this to more people, 'cause we do have a big team, we do have to hire people, we do have to travel and teach, is we made it a pay what feels right. So when people go into our self-care programs, they can contribute whatever amount they want. If it's a dollar because they have nothing or a thousand dollars 'cause they wanna give more, we've given people an opportunity to contribute to this mission so we can continue sharing it with people. I don't take a salary. I haven't taken a salary since we started this. None of the founders do. I mean, we have people on our team who do, but the founders at the core of it, we have just said, "If we just go out there and we do this, and this mission can fund-"Us going out there and helping more people, then that is enough for us. And so for the last six years, that's what we've been doing. We've converted our self-care programs into pay what feels right so that people can contribute to the mission if they want to.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:25:44 It's beautiful to hear, I guess living from the heart and just trying to give and share and not trying to say, "This is the only way." It's like, this is our way that you're hoping a billion people are gonna get on board with and improve their lives and the lives of the people around them, right?

Jason van Blerk 1:26:01 I mean, we had just set a goal at the time. I'm sure it'll, it'll increase. But once you get a billion people doing something to take care of themselves, the world changes.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:26:10 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 1:26:11 Like they've done this with meditation. They have 100,000 people meditate at the same time, and it literally creates a wave.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:26:16 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 1:26:18 It's-- I know if we get a billion people, it's gonna impact the world because to be honest with you, everything in my world has always mirrored me. Like when we would hire somebody on our team and they were doing something that was out of alignment and we fired them, you bring another person and they do it again. You bring in another person, they do it again. And then I realized that every time I hired somebody, they were bringing the same lesson to me. And when I changed, 'cause I realized I was the problem, I changed, all of a sudden the next person that I brought onto the team was different. And we live in a world where everybody's pointing fingers and blaming others, but that doesn't help anybody.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:27:00 No.

Jason van Blerk 1:27:01 Nobody's gonna change if we do that. But if I change, then the world around me starts to change. And this, this has been my experience. I've done this for six years. Every single day I look at myself and I say, "What can I do to improve? Why is this situation in my life? Why did this person cut me off in traffic and yell at me?"

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:27:19 Yeah, exactly.

Jason van Blerk 1:27:19 There's something inside of me that created this experience. I don't know what it is, but I need to look inside of myself and ask the question, is there something that I did to bring this situation to me? And if we all did that, even if you don't believe in it, if we all did that, we would live in a better world.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:27:33 Yeah. That's the key. W- whether you believe it or not, doesn't matter. If you look at life that way, it's a just-- it, it's a more free and empowering way to live actually. You know, when you can't change the situation, you're forced to change yourself, right?

Jason van Blerk 1:27:49 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:27:49 And again, I feel I have to say it just so that it doesn't get misinterpreted, but of course, there are h- horrible things going on in the world, and there are really traumatic experiences that people are living through, right? So we acknowledge that. Um, but these kind of things that we're talking about, the being cut up, um-

Jason van Blerk 1:28:10 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:28:10 ... on the motorway or, you know, something happening at work, I guess those things, you really can look at them as learning opportunities. And just to tie it all together, it's very much this whole idea that if we're stressed and we haven't processed trauma and emotions from the past, we're gonna bring that stress into our present day life. It's gonna affect how we feel about ourself, it's gonna affect our body, and it's gonna affect the people around us, our partner, our children, our colleagues, right? The people we interact with on the roads. Whatever they do, whether they cut us up or not, that stress is gonna permeate around us. So if by spending ten to fifteen minutes a day, maybe five minutes a day if that's all you've got, and you do these beautiful fascial maneuvers, these gentle rotational movements where you breathe intentionally and you put your body in different positions, if that helps you start your day in a better way, dramatically lower your stress, help you process your past, and help you feel calmer, it is inconceivable that that is not only gonna change your life, it's gonna change the lives of every single person around you that you interact with. I don't think that's far-fetched.

Jason van Blerk 1:29:26 I love it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:29:27 I think that's how you change the world-

Jason van Blerk 1:29:28 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:29:28 ... by changing yourself.

Jason van Blerk 1:29:29 A hundred percent. Be the change you wish to see in the world.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:29:31 Yeah. I love it.

Jason van Blerk 1:29:32 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:29:33 And I felt that since I met you, Jason, a few weeks ago, that we-- I felt a deep resonance with you. I thought, I love... I really like this guy. I like the way he looks at things. I guess my bias is that I think, yeah, on quite a lot of things we seem to see the world in similar ways. And, uh, you know, it's been a joy getting to know you. It's been a joy learning these moves. I feel very lucky to have had your hands on me twice to help speed up this process for me. Um, at the end of this conversation, Jason, for someone who's been listening and does currently feel really disconnected from their body and disconnected from the world, they, they don't know what they think. They're constantly getting confused, but they don't know where to start. What would you say to them?

Jason van Blerk 1:30:23 [inhaling] So a really quick exercise you can do is close your eyes and put your hands on your heart. 'Cause when you put your hands on your heart and you feel your heartbeat, you're immediately bringing yourself inside, and your heart is a very, very powerful system. And I feel a lot of people, if you ask them to tune into their heart, they can't actually feel it. But if you can feel your heart, your heart will tell you, oh, there's stress. It's going faster. It's going harder, or it's going softer. And so tuning into your heart is a very, very, very quick exercise that you can do to become more self-aware, more mindful of yourself and the environment around you.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:31:06 Yeah. I love that. And for people who want to start practicing these fascial maneuvers, maybe they've never heard of you guys before and they want to learn, where should they go?

Jason van Blerk 1:31:19 So we have an app, Human Garage app, and they can go in there and we have structured programs from a introduction to fascial maneuvers all the way to a twenty-eight day life reset. And we show you essentially in fifteen minutes every single day what you can do to heal yourself. So it's giving you tools to work on your own fascia and teaching you why it works and, and what we believe is it's doing.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:31:42 And what about for-... healthcare professionals or people who might wanna learn about it to teach others.

Jason van Blerk 1:31:50 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:31:50 Because, you know, obviously before we were talking about how maybe you go to a physio or a chiropractor or an osteopath or whatever, and you get something done, but it doesn't hold.

Jason van Blerk 1:32:01 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:32:02 I imagine that there will be some, uh, healthcare professionals listening who, who would go, "Well, actually, you know what? I'd love to still be able to do what I do, but also add this in." So yeah, let's say you're a chiropractor, you do the manipulation, and then you can also say, "Hey, yeah, but you know, I think these four fascial maneuvers will really help you to keep that locked in." Are you offering training courses like that as well?

Jason van Blerk 1:32:26 Yes. We have a coaching program where we teach you how to cue the maneuvers, guide people through them, how to work with fascia in the body. And the idea as a coach or practitioner is you're there to support someone through their healing journey. Like one of the things that I, I've realized is if I am responsible for your health because you come to me, then when you go home, I only see you one hour a week. You go home and you're not taking care of yourself, you come back to me and I'm still respon- I'm still the s- responsible one. So the goal with becoming a coach is you're giving your client the tools to heal themself, and then when they come to you, you're working on the sticky points that they can't do themself.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:33:08 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 1:33:08 Or you're helping them see what they can't see. And so there is a purpose for having coaches and practitioners out there, and they're working extremely hard right now to help a lot of people. And, you know, I'm very grateful for the, the workforce that's been created through this. And giving your clients the tools to heal themselves with fascial maneuvers will only enhance your practice.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:33:25 Yeah.

Jason van Blerk 1:33:25 So if you wanna become a coach, you can find it on our website. You can, you can apply to become a coach, and we teach you how to do that.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:33:31 Yeah. Well, Jason, it's been a real joy chatting to you today. I love what you guys are doing. I wish you all the best with your mission to get one billion people around the world to heal themselves. I think that's a beautiful mission. I think what you guys are doing are great, and thank you so much for coming back on the show.

Jason van Blerk 1:33:48 Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:33:50 If you enjoyed that conversation, then I think you are really going to enjoy this one.

1:33:55 If you're in a situation in your life which is difficult and overwhelming, you need to change your job or change a spouse or change a relationship or set some boundaries or do something in your life, you may be having headaches or stomach pain or chest pain or back pain