How to locate your “bad” fascia if you have hypothyroidism
Each and every one of us is covered in a thick, complex, tangled web of fascia. Fascia is the connective tissue that sits under your skin and on top of your muscles. On anatomy diagrams, fascia looks like the off-white strings and planes that sit on top of or in lines up and down the muscles. It provides structure and support, helps transport nutrients, helps regulate nervous system as well as hormone and immune function, helps keep you hydrated, helps you maintain a healthy youthful appearance to the skin, and much much more. “Bad” forms of fascia, called fascial adhesions (which most people are covered in) are also known as “scar tissue” because it is considered fibrotic tissue.
If your fascia is “bad”, you will see it or feel it. You’ll feel achy, sore, tight, tired, overweight or unshapely, with limited range of motion. Not only can you feel it under your skin with your fingers, you can also see it with the naked eye — constriction or restriction, bulges, tightness, lumps and bumps, thick skin/”big boned”, cellulite, crepey skin, and asymmetry are all possible fascial distortions. You see, fascia is like a mesh web that gets too thick or tight in certain areas, which affects how the fat cells settle and how the skin appears.
In addition to the physiological roles fascia plays, fascia also keeps your secrets. It collects your memories. It remembers your joys, but largely it stores your traumas. It forces you to live in the pain of the past instead of being able to be present in the moment. Your fascia has kept a record of every time you misused your body, forcing it into bras and cinchers, too-tight jeans, or awkward shoes — and why you did so. It also remembers how often — and to which degree — you’ve smiled, laughed or cried, winced, squinted, questioned, tensed, quieted, forced, sat or walked. It’s the literal, tangible mind-body connection and it is the record keeper of you.
In Body Readings, I highlight the areas you have “bad” fascia and interpret the meaning so you can understand the core wounds and life lessons you have been given. It’s extremely helpful because it decodes who you are, what you have been through, and why you feel or act the way you do now. And it also provides you with solutions so you can actually fix your fascia once and for all.
But did you know there is a connection between your fascia and your seven energy centers, called chakras?
Yes.
Your fascia tells us which chakras are blocked and which need to be opened or activated.
It’s pretty simple, actually — fascial adhesions create a density that does not allow for proper blood flow, nutrient transport, hydration, movement of muscles and joints, and more. It also stores bad energy and blocks good energy from entering the chakras. The chakras are nothing more than centers on the body where intense physiological activity occurs 24/7: the sex organs, the intestines and stomach, the heart, the thyroid, the brain. Imagine if over those centers of activity there was a thick mesh choking out nutrients, blood flow, oxygen, hormone fluids, and more to the areas. Would you be healthy or would you gradually become symptomatic?
Remember, fascia responds to emotional and lifestyle cues so the fascial adhesions you have built up are no mistake. They are the record keeper of what has happened to you or how you have felt about it.
But fascia is tricky. It doesn’t stay put in one area. It sprouts tentacles and “grows”. The original area that was affected (your throat, thyroid, or voice box area in the case of fifth chakra problems/thyroid disease) soon spreads it’s adhesions to nearby areas affecting them as well. It’s no mistake, for example, that myxedema (thickening of the face, limbs, or other areas of the body) is a known hypo/hyperthyroidism symptom.
It goes like this:
Throat / voice box -> neck -> head -> shoulders -> upper back -> chest -> stomach
The picture above outlines the areas I have seen the most fascia for those with forms of hypothyroidism (including Hashimoto’s Disease). This is most usually caused by holding back your true voice (whether literally — altering your voice to sound more likable or “soft”, or choking back words and tears because you don’t think they will be accepted). Again, you may think one would only have fascial adhesions directly over the thyroid gland but as you can see, it spreads.
This is just a general guideline, though, because everyone’s fascial adhesions will vary according to what they have experienced in life. You can easily “test” yourself at home to see if the problematic areas above are affecting you. First, try this in front of a full-length mirror completely naked. Where do you see a thickening of skin? Where do you see bulging? Which areas are asymmetrical? Then tune into how you feel — where do you feel tightness or pain?
Next, you can try the pinch test. Can you “pinch an inch” as they say? Meaning, can you grab a tiny amount of skin at any one area on your body or is there a large mass of tissue that cannot be easily separated from the skin? That’s not just fat — that is dysfunctional fascia. You can do this all over but especially on the front and back areas where the chakras are located (ex: front and back of the neck).
Like the picture above illustrates, you are likely to have thickening of fascia on the throat and neck, face, shoulders, arms, forehead, and then over your heart and stomach organ. They are all connected because they originate at the throat or voice box. It’s no accident that many with hypothyroidism have vocal chord or swallowing disorders — you are feeling pain from your throat down into your shoulders, chest, and stomach — but because it is layered under other pain, you may not be consciously aware of it. It requires a process of identification and then a lengthy foray into myofascial release (where you get rid of bad fascia and restore the healthy fascia) to improve your thyroid health but also eliminate pain and dysfunction in other areas of the body.
Everything is connected.
The “toxic masculine” doesn’t want you to resolve your karma
Each one of us has unique life lessons that dictate what we are here to do, to learn, and to become. Some choose to recognize these and resolve them, and others ignore them to continue a more “blissfully unaware” life. Truthfully, you can only go so many years before the weight of karma finally catches up with you. Unresolved karma will make you stressed and sick, no ifs, ands or buts about it. Your unresolved karma will also 100% be passed down to the people around you, including your friends, family, and especially children. If you love yourself and others, you will interrupt the karmic cycle and break it once and for all. Don’t make others bear the burden of the dysfunctional generational cycle — in essence, it’s passing down a life sentence of pain and illness. And the toxic masculine system is behind it all.
“Toxic masculine” is the designation for the unhealthy ways the masculine is expressed. A healthy masculine seeks to support the feminine, engage, understand, compromise, lead with integrity, and move forward when it works (not when it is forced). The healthy masculine is the person who has gone into battle, recognized his own weaknesses and sought to correct them, and come out the other side able to understand the needs of the people around him and how to move things forward. The toxic masculine is the little boy who has never earned his stripes, only dresses up as king, and makes decisions that serve himself rather than the whole. And when this little boy gets caught making bad decisions, he blames and shames rather than admitting to the truth and changing his behavior.
The toxic masculine does not like to admit to problems because the “there are no problems” or “the feminine is the problem” deflection has worked for so long. It has helped the proverbial little boys remain in power while they otherwise should be guilty as charged. The toxic masculine says, lets’s rush this along, let’s ignore the real issues, let’s gloss over and cover-up the truth, let’s blame the victim, let’s remain amnesic, let’s overlook how this all connects, let’s enforce rules and regulations that work in our favor, let’s engage in extreme group think for our benefit.
If we started admitting to the problems, the toxic masculine would have no more power. The secrets are what uphold the toxic system and keep us stressed, sick, and un-actualized. If we started telling the secrets, the system would dissolve. The secrets are the karma. The toxic masculine would rather view problems as isolated instances rather than interconnected messages that contain a call to action. The sacred feminine says, if there is a problem we must fix it because it is affecting people. The toxic masculine says, there are no problems and you are a fool for ever thinking so.
As I have said before, please do not be fooled into thinking this is a man versus woman issue. It’s not. We each have masculine and feminine aspects to our bodies and personalities. I have seen done-up soccer moms and female holistic health professionals exhibit toxic masculine traits just as much as flower child “peace loving” male hippies. No one is safe from the toxic masculine system because we live in the system and have been indoctrinated into it from birth. Though, within the last year have we seen significant forward momentum towards balancing the scales in honor of the sacred feminine, we first have to be aware of the toxic masculine system and its functions in order to break it down and finally resolve the karma.
Remember, karma is not about you being “bad” and it is not something you necessarily have to possess religious beliefs to understand. It is a reminder of Newton’s third law and it allows us to see that everything is interconnected and will come back around to haunt if not resolved. Even the Bible talks about the “sins of the father”. Your core wounds are the soul vulnerabilities or problems that you inherited from the ego of your caregivers (or beyond) because they never addressed the core wounds that were passed down to them and on and on back in time. Your life lessons are the patterns in your life that are dysfunctional, and are tasks you can do in order to overcome the core wounds. The karma is the overarching cause and effect of how you and everyone around you engages the life lessons — do you resolve them or will they come back around another time? Also, your lessons are not isolated — they are connected to everyone around you and vice versa. When one person overcomes the karma, it makes it easier for others to do the same.
Let me give you an example:
You have been married for 20 years but are now in the middle of a divorce. For nearly two decades, you listened to your mother-in-law complain about her divorce from your spouse’s father. You heard about the terrible backstabbing, lying, court ordeals, drug use, and abuse. He engaged in a total character assassination of her and took her kids away through the court system because his family had enough money to do so and enjoyed this privilege.
You watched your mother-in-law cry and recount the same stories each time you saw her for holidays and gatherings. You felt her pain. But each time you visited with her, she cried the same tears and told the same stories from nearly 40 years prior and never took advice or tried to change. You see that she has never gotten over the pain, understandably, but she has also never done anything to overcome the trauma.
Now that you are going through your own divorce, you think back to the stories she told you and see how the pattern this family engaged in for generations is coming back to haunt you and your ex. The court drama, the money struggles, the tug of war over children, the projection of guilt or innocence — the same exact tactics being used. What his dad did to his mom is what your ex is doing to you. From here, you can crack it up to coincidence or “that’s just what happens in divorce” or you can go back to what you learned from this family and use it to your advantage to break the cycle.
You see, in such an example, although they are now divorced, the divorce itself was never the “end goal” — the way they handled it is. The mother still carries the extreme trauma of the past, and the father did not act in justice or righteousness in this situation. Therefore, neither were able to truly resolve the karma. The father still has energetic strings he holds over the mothers head, and she feels the sadness and weight of this.
Ironically, your mother-in-law supports her son (of course) despite him doing the same thing to you that his father did to her. Because she is unaware of the family cycle, she cannot see how the abuse she endured is the abuse she is now supporting.
To complicate things further, you have your own karma from your family as well. Perhaps, like many with thyroid disease, you inherited a family pattern of running and hiding or getting quiet when things got hard. You can throw your hands up and give up or give in, or you can say to yourself, I don’t want to run from this — I will be seen, be heard, process and resolve it, and then be done.
What no one else has done in the past is what you must do in order to stop the karma.
Again, breaking your karma is not easy but please don’t get discouraged — this doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t try — you absolutely should and it is the true way to peace, health, and self-actualization. However, if you choose to recognize the cycles and stop them, you will come up against systems and people who want to prevent the unraveling of the problems, who want to keep the secrets, who want to poison and subdue the subconscious mind so that you question yourself and reality, and who will harm anything that seeks to expose the truth. You’re not just exposing one person or one situation, you are exposing entire lineages that have never done the right thing. The present is a reflection of past cycles that were never broken, until someone becomes aware of them.
As I said before, the toxic masculine system is at the root of the karma cover-up. It prefers to pretend everything is fine so it can maintain control. If you choose to tell the secrets, admit to the problems, and do what no one before you has done, you resolve your karma. Then you will be free from the energetic strings that are pulling you down and keeping you stressed and sick. Resolving your karma means you don’t have to live in a traumatized state forever. It is a path to happiness. Undergoing this journey is up to you and do not be surprised if you face spiritual warfare while doing so. In the end, it is still worth it.
