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Power Napping & Sleep Strategies

So I know that for so many I mean so many of us sleep is an is an issue as it is and there's a lot of studies out recently that talk about the lack of sleep and their relationship to disease we're talking about alzheimer's we're talking about all sorts of other physiological changes that happened in your body over time when you don't get enough sleep it spikes your quarters all levels it makes it more difficult to have natural relaxation when you're not accumulating enough sleep enough shut eye now I understand I'm not yet apparent although during the days while I was here my husband bought a puppy so it provides direct so I do have an infant waiting for me at home but the infant remark rhymes with upi as a puppy and at that puppy has kept him up of course the last couple of nights and I being deeply empathic we connected to my husband have actually had disturbed sleep these last couple of nights imagining the well thing. So so I did my best my best last night to implement my own some ...

of my own sleep strategies to help me to at a minimum if I couldn't tank back to sleep at least I was able to maintain a relaxed state and not get frustrated or mad that I couldn't fall back asleep so what I mean what I want to help you all do is you may not necessarily fall asleep every time you do the sleep set up and do the breath work but at a minimum it's going to help induce deep tranquil ization and sedation and so you wantto at a minimum try to accumulate relax the relaxation in your body so that you do have more alertness when you need to be called at command the sleep cycle of the baby the sleep cycle of you may also be deeply at odds as I know from sir so any of my young mothers are older mothers you're not going to sleep for the first how many years seventeen something like that so it's just it's into the massive issue I think what are the best ways to set yourself up for sleep period is that your day is actually full of meaningful activity and that meaningful activity is that esther's has talked about it katie has talked about it kelly has talked about it that when we're moving we're moving with awareness and consciousness we use our bodies fully and well so really by the time we need tio sleep sleep sets in because we've actually we have exercised even if you haven't exercised in a gym on a mad or in some type of of space you haven't been sedentary all day because actually that sedentary nous also leads to deep anxiety and stress in the body and that's really hard to shake when you're trying to fall asleep you think being a couch potato all day or being sedentary all day leads to fastly, but night, just try being on bed rest, you'll know how unrest ful it is right those of you who have had to deal with that. So the first thing that we're going to do is what I feel is like a legal shot of I don't know what I don't know what's an illegal downer, but like this is like this wolf there's like the vulcan fall asleep set up and we're going to use the opportunity balls to do a little neck and jaw work. Let me say that again neck and jaw work, so I'm going to show you on the skeleton where the yoga tuna ball's going to go and I'd like you all tio palpate touch yourself at these locations they're so easy to find. So really three major points, or maybe we can say for one first place that will go is the base of your occipet really the base of your skull. So where your skull meets your neck tryto see if you can just nuzzle your fingers right up against the base of the head if you've ever had cranial sacral massage, if you've ever had anybody do a little bit of cervical traction, this is exactly where they'll hook their fingers in and, in a sense in a kind way decapitate you I know that sounds horrible but really it feels like oh let's just take the lid off of me and you're gonna be doing that literally with the balls the balls air going nuzzle up against these sub occipital muscles and helped to create a little bit of local traction there which feels amazing then we will move the yoga to not balls onto a lateral muscle of the neck which actually is a lateral to frontal muscle it's called the sternal clyde a master and the way we can find it is there's this little boney overhang that almost resembles a bony ear lobe so if you find your own ear lobe and then you just track into your skull and slightly back back about a quarter of an end to half an inch depending you'll feel like a it's like an incisor tooth hanging off your skull he all feel that if you push in and try to surround or move your finger around that you're gonna be nuzzling against attendant it's the tendon of a very famous neck muscle that connects the skull to the collarbone and to the sternum it's called the sternal clyde amassed oid and if I pivot my head in one direction you'll actually see it pop up on me you can see the meat of that muscle yeah so you can do that right now you could turn your head and you can feel the meat of the muscle contract down and you can feel, oh, look at that that muscle dangles its way and it attach is into the sternum and the edge of the collar bone and then when it creeps up north it's hooking and really into your skull, so does a lot of different things now really deep pressure right here against the side of that is also you're corroded artery, so you never want to just, like, take the ball in just mangle a deeply into there because you literally can pass out and we're not going to do that don't worry don't fret we're actually just going toe massage right around that area, then we'll take the opportunity ball and where did it go? And we're going to do some points on the face that are incredibly relaxing, so if you find this bone here this is the zygomatic arch is that archie is part of your face if you're a makeup artist, this is a very important landmark for you allies of the makeup artist is amazing she's doing a great job with all of us, my hair like four different ways it's so much fun so thick zygomatic arches here you want to go just below the zygomatic arch in than track your fingers backwards, the grace jones thing to go down the track it backwards when you clap for tea together and you'll feel the massacre muscle pop up right that's your sure muscle um it's also your talker muscle I never used to get neck pain but then when I started teaching eight hours a day and you might notice that I talk a lot I talked a lot when I teach but I was starting to get these neck aches and I think a lot of it had to do with talking and also you hanging my head over and no adjusting people and so it's something that I try to massage this quite often so the ball is going to go there and then the ball's going to just hop scotch above the zygomatic arch and roam around into the temporal alice which is a a big fan shaped muscle that also relates to that temporomandibular joint in fact, if you quantities he'll also feel those muscle fibers hello was muscle fibers popping up on you so those are really the four basic points that we're gonna be going teo and we just play around and that's going to feel really good so here's our set up actually let's do a little check in first um well just a couple of you come up and stand up here we just do a little check and recheck so that we can test and then re test what happens before and after so you don't find your stand position and remove that skull over the heart as we've heard from every single presenter but there's something we're doing with our rib cage there's something that we're doing and life is just we must not for us our chest out right? So I like this analogy of that periscope the soft tissue of the dia fram trying to reflects itself reflect like a reflecting pond with pelvic floor and so those ribs still going you can drop your hands I'm holding the sky yes uh ribs in and a little bit of tone in the tush a little bit of action of external rotation just tow create that little pelvic floor attention and all I want to dio all I want you to do is you'll rotate your neck to the right and you just see how far over the shoulder it goes without spilling and the other parts of body and then rotate in the other direction when you rotate you might also feel some of you might feel stretch on the opposite side some of you may feel like a bind up or compression on the side toe which you're rotating all right and so these are the and some of your like I just I'm rotating my head I don't feel anything that's fine too secondly will do a lateral flexion of the neck so just let your right here dropped down toward your right shoulder and of course we're mirroring for the tv audience and so you'll probably feel something over here unless there is some other cervical issue in which case you might feel a jam up or conjunction over here and then go to the other side again, you don't have a mirror right now but this is fun to do in front of me you can see the distance between this year and the shoulder versus the other side and offer quite often there's a difference because of the soft which is in the heart issues and you come up and we can also what the chin dropped the chest so these are all just different range of motion tests isolating that and then I become and then open and close the job and also notice when you open and close the job if you hear clicks are sounds or if there's pain or uh some of you if you have any type of build up uh in one side of the job, the other any arthritic condition there there may be a we're tracking when the job when that uh mandible lowers it made you could do a little skipping a side thing these are just little little mini test this is adding to the relaxation because I don't want you guys to totally fall asleep I do want you to remain alert so you have to remember these for after okay kids, wake up, retest all these so let's set this up and I've got some ways that we can modify for third trimester because you are going to be on your back for this so what I'd like to dio may actually megan, why don't you come up here in your massage therapist and I'm going to set it up for you a little third trimester set it for you and you will just have a normal set up so you get him block you could have a stack of books and the block is going to be a pillow now what I'd like you to do is lay on your back with your knees bent soles of the feet on the floor and your head is going to rest on the boss so what I want you to do right now you have to pull your hair off your head and stick the ball's in your occipet while I'm setting this up for lauren until actually lauren this is totally going to be up to you how long you feel like you can sustain great how long you feel you can sustain being on your back and your option basically is going to be sort of the same thing but you'll be able to tilt so you could just let the baby's weight fall towards the bolster does that make sense so it may be a little bit awkward just give me lying here almost like road not road kill but road living how that all right, down you go. I have megan how you feeling? You ready for your nap? I have anyone started. Well, you know, the thing is is that reclining ended of itself as soon as you recline it's relaxing because why there's? Just less pressure from your postural muscles yanking on your heart, your diaphragm there's just less work that has to be done now, mind you, the yoga tuna balls do love hair, ladies. So this is that's why I'm wearing the point you wouldn't see if you can hold your hair away from the boss that really we want to expose the grip of the balls even though they're in the total would expose the grip of the balls to the neck. She was start here being in the bottom of a nod in the bottom of a nod if pretty much everybody knows how to say yes, she wouldn't be in the bottom of a nod with your chin slightly angled towards your sternum and the balls are acting as that pry device pulling the skull away from the neck. Recall the abdominal thor asic breath were you inhaled belly swells and then the ribs and the lung swell soto already induce a deep conscious breath into your body while you're doing this now that abdominal thor asic breath the lid of it is the top of the ribs so hopefully you're in a position right now where if your neck muscles and your collar bone muscle start to want to yank your shoulders up uh it's sort of this is a little bit turning that desire off now by the way, you could do this on the floor without a block with the plus size balls they fit in there really? Well also I like the smaller balls for my neck for this particular for this particular routine, but you can also use the larger balls without the brick because the larger balls actually take up this gap space now start to say yes just like you're doing now, which is start to say a very small yes, a very small, almost like, oh, like I'm snooty and I'm just going to stick my nose in the air and then bring it back down, right? But without the attitude snooty without the attitude. So you're saying yes, because what I want to do is I want to actually use those little tiny sub occipital muscles a little tiny director's appearance the neck little tiny nod could watch too fatigued them are you they starting to fatigue yet again properly fatiguing okay, so basically once they fatigue then stop doing that and you're still breathing abdominal drastic breath so jealous hall of you I have to stay a beat and up here y'all can just I'm gonna pass the sleep dust around so but actually you're doing the sleep dust yourself that's what's so nice about this you're not taking dust right? You're not popping a pill to get this state in your body so next we're going to a passive yes now a passive yes is also what one of our white teachers in canada lisa high field called the missionary action and the missionary action what you'll do is a push pull with your feet when you create that push pull with your feet your body will literally slide inside of that superficial fascia fluffy layer of your body and you'll end up having this little bobblehead thing where you end up saying yes yes yeah yes may I so I'm going to actually make the missionary thing happened for you I'm just gonna bond your knees together and you just relax completely and all I'm doing is giving you feel that so you're just trying to induce is that I'm sure the baby loves that actually to salo bouncy action one of the hardest things for us to let go of is our head and megan being a massage therapist go out let me take over for you megan being a massage therapist you know that when you start cradling somebody's head this is awesome they have a really hard time getting it over but it's great if you could start to train yourself to consciously let go of parts of your body that you didn't know you were holding on to. We don't know that we're holding onto our pelvic floor. We don't know that we're clenching our job. We don't know that where so tonic they were unable to actually let our head move in all the ways that it was designed to dio all right, that's, enough of that missionary action. Isn't that what got us here in the first place? I had to say that again. I'm sorry. That's all you lisa. All right. And now start to say no. So you'll rotate your head from side to side and the balls will ultimately nuzzle themselves into those sub occipital xcx. But by the way, I'm having you do it in the tote because it keeps them together. I personally tend not to do this in the tote. I I'll actually have an outside of the tote and just anchor them with my fingers because I love teo. I love to really use the grip property of the ball. No, meghan is like I want this deep I can see that on so you can actually start toe role even further. Yeah, if you're ready to pop in, yeah, I figured it was going to a time limit for you. On this but you can still keep your head in the same position right exactly there we go very nice and then you can we can also flip your needs to the other side let me grab another bolster in case you get tired of being on that side yes so we're rotating from side to side and saying no and then actually let's unwto to one ball and you can just actually on totem both cause we'll get we'll end up using them both to untold the one ball and remember where that stern oh clyde ome asteroid muscle ended at the bottom of that sort of snaggle tooth a portion of the skull so what I wanted to do now is you stay on your back unless you're uncomfortable you're okay okay you stand you back and you simply rotate your head and let that bony prominence that mastered process be a balanced point for the ball so the ball becomes a new pillow exactly then you take your hand away you shouldn't you won't need your hand you know the ball stays there get your hair out of the way. Meghan exactly. So you're just you're in that rotated position that makes sense and and so if you're able you actually don't need to rotate your whole body unless you're uncomfortable with a partial back is whatever's whatever feels good for you here in this position say yes and say no and the ambivalent yes and no and maybe so make it circle make a square dance that ball around that tenderness attachment and you're still breathing now those of you who are of the shaved head variety or have less hair down at this area another thing that you can do here is little penance spence you twist the ball into this junction listen to take a little bit maneuvering you're tryingto spin the ball into the soft tissues, gathering as many of those fashion layers as possible and then making little movements as well. Such is the struggle clouded mastered you're getting here you're also approximating some of this kaylene attachments as well. We're little high up to be connecting with the locator scapula which is a shoulder neck muscle but nonetheless these things that they're all sharing their own their neighborly so helping one often does help another all right go to the other side so you put the that ball in the master process the other side and new leaders are so good with your landmarking yes exactly and you crave it also it's like oh it's just there's kind of a perfect fit there's a perfect perch there yes and you say yes you say no maybe so you are still breathing one of the things that I start to see and I know that the relaxation is starting to happen uh both katie and tia their bottom lips has pulled away on their upper lip and you start to see this kind of drool face you're not on camera don't worry about it but that's a good sign as as in the instructor seeing this facial expression of just like mad a napkin please is ah is good so yes no and experimenting with how far of pivoting that had also even trying toe cradle the cell phone not that you have won in a cradle of cell phone and then spinning the ball by the way, this is one of the this is one of the muscles that I will quite often grab and massage while I'm driving although I recently heard study that any any time your hands or not on ten into its distracted driving so massage driving is just as distracted distracting as cell phone driving, which we don't do but I do use my balls in the car used the opportunity balls in the car all the time I had to bind my back it's interesting talking tio esther and her talking about the grip does the stick of the grip of the little nubs on the seats that she has I use the opportunity falls in the same way to create traction in the car or in different chairs in my house and what not okay good now roll over on to your right side ladies and remember that zygomatic arch descend down and stick the ball right on that massacre muscle where your jaw articulates and so you're literally rolling on your side that shouldn't be a problem for anybody at any at any stage at this point and at first just be docile rest let your body hanging over you don't even need your hand there megan yeah good now you do have your salivary glands or in this neighborhood so if you feel like all of a sudden there's a lot of fluid coming out of your mouth you're probably milking that gland and so you just wanna right you want to move the ball a little hi you're a little lower a little towards the side so that you're not I'm starting salivate just thinking about salivating is anybody else okay? So from here we can make a lot of different movements we can open and close the job, which is gonna look like a fish like a relaxed fish you can also clinched the job. You can also open and say no or close and say no or say yes or circle and those of you that are really keen on your anatomy and knowing where the massacre ten denies itself you can also find the border of that muscle and I'm not I'm not doing the ball in my face a lot because I do have a lot of um what's called pancake makeup on I have a lot of base on don't just swipe it off but you're going to find the corner the front edge of that massacre muscle and let your face hang from that as a pivot point the biologist traction its way in you're literally trying to find its tenderness edge yeah and sports spill your face off all right then take the ball above that zygomatic arch go right into the temporal isthe I ok? So for the temporal you're pretty much to do the same thing that you did for the the jaw you could say yes, you could say no you can say maybe so you could open and close the jaw I find that this is a great pre sleep routine, especially for those of you who are clinchers at night you grind your jaw, you've got the bite plate maybe you've done all the different orthotic ce for your mouth, but have you actually tried to work structurally on those tissues and when you're working structurally you're also working neurologically your helping to quell some of the desire for that clinching to happen at a minimum, try this see if you can do a little you know, five minute dose of this before you go to bed that is going to help you sleep and maybe it will offset the timing of that clenching and who knows maybe that will change over time, but the last thing that you can do here is take the other yoga to nutball that you have and do a little pin and spin so you'll put it on the other temporal iss and literally like you're gonna make a frankenstein bore hole into your temple so you keep this one on the thing and you're just going to may I yes, you'll just hit it the tissue with the ball so this is why it's good tio have less hair so we can all shave our heads and b and b yogis kirigoe the yogis who do a lot of facial massage and skull massage all right let's flip to the other side of course you can use other balls for this, but the ideal is that you have something that's compliant it's not really fun to poke your jaw with something wooden or extra hard and in fact those of you who have yoga tuneup balls or you know well loved balls the gush here they get because they get softer and softer with use, the better it is for some of these finer uh, finder junctions so we say yes, we say no, we open and close, we're still trying to breathe oddly enough and you can open and also laterally deviate the jaw and my favorite is just finding that the partition you could even find just by clinching you could feel the outline of the master he could find its anterior border you stick the ball there and then just hang your face off of that I feel I just feel so good it's like somebody just got their fingers and hooking you and then go uptown I know we spent a little bit longer on the other side that when you're doing this on your own you just hit pause and stay as long as you like and up you go to the temporal iss you say yes you say no anybody drooling you know uh um and then a little screwy little screwy with that other ball so you keep they keep the one underneath you, megan so you have a stand we have, like, a brain sandwich which how's it feel now your massage therapist? How does how does this I know you're worried about getting put out of business, but I know you're not gonna get put out of business. How is that feeling to you? Feels effective. It feels like I'm releasing a lot attention. My face that I honestly didn't know was in certain areas and this is just a small pattern. There are so many other uh tendons and facial muscles to go to what's called about the facial muscles is they are their nerves are so close to your brain and we know that right are the wear mind thinks shows up on her face right? And our mask has a lot to do with how we think there was. A study done years ago was fascinating by a psychiatrist who recognize that all of his depressed patients had deep rural marks and had deep, you know, frown lines in their face that the mask of depression and grief was sort of solid on there, so he wanted to to conduct an experiment instead of giving them ssr eyes anti depressant medication he gave them though talks now before you reacted that way, doctor the injecting their faces with bo talks the idea was to prevent frowning from happening to prevent the mask of depression from showing up all of them snapped out of their depression, and you can't say the same for some of these anti depressant medications. I just thought it was very interesting and so maybe we can do a ball talks instead to turn it around the turn that frown upside down. I'm so I had to do that, but you understand what I'm talking about? We can we can also mechanically induce a change in our demeanor through the soft tissue manipulation, your structure, your physiology, response to your structure and verse of fisa and vice versa, right? So we may as well sit up, do a little recheck and then we'll go right into our sleep set up we're in a natural position for it actually born is already so come up to sitting and remember who was up here before I'm so sleepy and wonky I can remember is hopefully we'll get some feedback from you so you're in a sit position and see if you can remember that same thing angling the ribs down towards the pelvis and rotate your head to the right and I didn't even do the thing and I'm feeling my stretch in a different place any change to the right folks like it's a softening there's more there's, more motion, less restriction and then go to the other side is there a difference on that left side? How much rotation you have where you're feeling compression of where you're feeling stretch come back to center and then tip your head to the right tip your head to one side or the other any change? Megan yeah, I had a little fuzziness before damning hand tonight not there the nerve pain isn't there and did we just do a him such? No, no, we did the head and the neck interesting those nerves are they're all interconnected plus you were deeply relaxed go to the other side and then write your head and then opening closure chalk how's that no, no clicking well done, great thanks, mate, and so I'm going to send you off and I'm keep lauren on because actually lauren is already priesthood for our for our sleep set up so the sleep set up is really simple and it's obviously we've talked about lying on your back as you get larger and larger it's it's one of those things that is super contra indicated because the weight of the baby the mass of the baby puts a lot of pressure on the vasculature and that could make you feel really nauseous and queasy and it's not healthy for your own circulation and so side sleeping if you're not used to side sleeping, you're gonna have to get used to size sleeping, and I've always been a side said, well, no, I haven't always been aside sleeper I used to be a stomach sleeper, which is really not great they're especially during pregnancy is not a great idea, and so when your stomach sleeper, you have two choices of what to do with your head, you either turn it this way right through that because you can't sleep face down on the pillow so I wake up in a pool of drool every night and I just had to consciously trained myself to sleep on my side, which is typically might buy preferred are you okay? Oh yeah, your fall asleep while setting up all right, so here's the way that I like to organize my dead and I actually included an article in the bonus materials that you can see this in in those materials and and you have a nice photo of it so come off of this mat for a second my husband and I are both very petite so we can get away with having lots of hugs pillows in our bed which is really cool. Can I have that bolster also? Ok. Did you mind? Okay, cool. It does require a lot of pillow talk and a lot of pillow arranging and the other people people out there that make body cushions and body pillows but I just used different size pillows and different sized blankets depending on where I am. I'm in a hotel right now and I don't have my my blanky oh, how my blanky. So I always just take towels from the the bathroom and pile them up in between my legs so here's the setup you want to have a pillow on either side of you because you're going to flip during the middle of the night and you wanna have obviously a pillow for your head? Um let me have one more blanket and then you also want tohave some type of towel or blanket or you can get a one of these circular book wheat filled cervical tello's which I I love the most it's what I absolutely love the most to fill in the gaps space between your head and your shoulder you'll see what I mean by that in a moment if I just lay down on my side my neck shears it slides to towards the shoulder and the shoulder hikes up and compresses in could you guys see how I'm basically listening to my cell phone you know, for for for eight hours right? So compresses up to that I want I need something to create a spacer so that my neck actually retains its cervical shape over overnight and so what I'll do is if I don't have a cervical pellet like I haven't home when I'm traveling all roll up a towel from the bathroom I'll take a cover off of one of the pillow cases at the hotel and that way the terry cloth because I've experiment with this and not to know that I wake up with terry cloth marks all over my face takes up that gap space so that when you lay down on your side and you may have to experiment with healthy do I need it so then the head itself goes on the pillow and the neck of their this it's it's awesome the neck is supported and so I have that distance all right? Secondly, I want to maintain congruence ian my pelvic bones so if my knees it's altogether then I have this one is overstretched right? And often it just gets hiked up so if you have a blanket here, this tax is a really nice spacer so that I'm convey ain't ain the congruence see of those two s I joints and so this helps to reduce that ah constant pressure on the psychotic nerve overnight this pillow isn't isn't high enough from my rib cage is not going behind a few years but you want to have a thick enough pillow here a hug hello so that your shoulders also maintain the width of your rib cage instead of all collapsed up and in that makes sense so even this is a little bit too low so I want to have something a little bit thicker and then literally you'll just flip from side to side I mean, I just trained myself to flip I stay asleep, the blanket stays in between and lo and behold over here I have this so why don't you give that a try? And actually what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna stack this one over here we'll just do it on one side and give it a try and I may need to read blanket this just that just like esther was having tio tool around with each of you it's your body configuring to work with the towels, the blankets, the bolsters does this need to be higher yeah, it could go a little bit higher but it looks pretty good and we want to have this so that it's just an easy reach how does that feel? Yes the height of your pillow I feel like sometimes my pillow is too squishy than my head is still exactly so you want you really I mean in a perfect world you want to find a pillow that actually supports your head so that there is no tilting or lateral sharing going on and so what I do I have a down pillow but I screen she it up so that it chubs up and it's able to come to the crown of my head without my head having to meet it like that or my shoulder having to do some weird, uplifting thing so you're gonna have to experiment we have a closet full of pillows my husband is like a pillow cemetery I have never met a man when I first met my husband I open this one clause and I was like what? It's like every reject hello because he is the princess and the pea and I mean he loves the sleep set up and you know but he'll heal all the subject like the pell doesn't work anymore and we'll go and shop and they'll be many, many, many pillows and come to my house there's free pellens many, many fellows but you've got your really your your body does change over time as well, you know it's like, why does he need a new problem now? Will you know he was having chronic shoulder problem? And we have fellows now and he's doing the right exercise now that it's really not not an issue anymore, but you just gotta pay attention, your body's going through so many changes, the fluid change that you're going through right now, so invest to get comfortable and then there are these other things that you can do tio moderate to modulate your sleep set up so I think this is for makes for a peaceful sleep, whether you're pregnant or not. Now lastly, if your baby weight feels like it's really taxing your lumbar spine um and I'm not at the stage yet, but you might be is to then put another blanket underneath the side of the valley so that the belly then is centered and not constantly pulling and talking on that top so is that I could put, like, a little thing there you just got to kick your husband out of bed, you know, it's all about, you know, the queen's gotta sleep there we go, great, so before you fall asleep way, have another guest, we're going to talk to the doctor see what the doctor says. So when I'm sorry, you gotta get on stage, like like, well, I could make us even better. Please make yourself comfortable, so thank you.