Lioness Conversations: Brave Stories of Women Leaders & Female Founders | Women leading with confidence, empowerment, entrepreneurship, innovation, impact | The Hidden Fabric: Unlocking Your Body's Fascia for Women's Health

Pain doesn't have to be a life sentence. In this episode of Lioness Conversations, pioneer Sue Hitzmann reveals a powerful, often overlooked key to a woman's vitality and well-being: fascia. 🧬

You've been taught to push through pain, to "no pain, no gain," and to rely on others for answers. But what if the solution to chronic pain, hormonal imbalances, and the effects of aging lies within you? Sue explains how our bodies store stress and how a gentle, consistent practice can rehydrate your system, leading to profound physical and emotional healing.

We discuss:

Why the "blunt force" approach to pain often makes things worse.
How your fascia is intricately connected to your hormones and menopause.
The surprising reason why NASA is using vibration therapy on astronauts.
The life-changing power of listening to your body with kindness and awareness.

Stop letting pain dictate your life. It's time to reclaim your power. 👑

Have you ever questioned the traditional approach to health? Check out this full episode to learn how to empower yourself in your wellbeing and longevity of your life force.

Check out the Melt Method: https://meltmethod.com/

Learn more about the pioneer behind the Melt Method: https://suehitzmann.com/

Join the Lioness Community and connect with Jen Porter here: https://www.jenportercoach.com/

CHAPTERS:
00:00 Introduction to Lioness Conversations
01:55 Understanding Fascia and the Melt Method
09:09 The Role of Fascia in Health and Movement
13:31 Fascia and Women's Health
18:11 The Connection Between Fascia and Hormones
23:09 Pain as a Message from the Body
28:42 The Indirect Approach to Pain Relief
37:19 Self-Assessment and Awareness in Healing
46:38 The Melt Method: A Holistic Approach to Self-Care
52:29 Connecting with the Melt Community
57:41 Empowerment Through Understanding Our Bodies
01:02:24 The Importance of Community and Support
01:07:10 Living in the Present Moment
01:10:40 Advice for Women to Live Better Lives
01:12:36 The Future of the Melt Method and Fascia Research

Creators and Guests

Host

Jen Porter

Corporate leader turned entrepreneur, I created "Lioness Conversations" to amplify the voices of extraordinary women—leaders who have faced fear, overcome challenges, and are now shaping the world with their work. This podcast is a space for courage, truth, and deep inspiration. My mission is to empower women to be brave, leading with confidence and joy, to do the most meaningful work of their lives.

Guest

Sue Hitzmann

Sue Hitzmann—a pioneer, visionary, and true force in the world of health and healing. As a manual therapist, exercise physiologist, and internationally recognized educator, Sue has transformed how we understand the body by shining a spotlight on fascia—the hidden fabric that holds us together.

What is Lioness Conversations: Brave Stories of Women Leaders & Female Founders | Women leading with confidence, empowerment, entrepreneurship, innovation, impact?

Welcome to Lioness Conversations, the podcast dedicated to uncovering and celebrating the extraordinary stories of women who embody fierce strength, tender hearts, and a relentless drive to make a difference in the world. 🦁✨

Jen Porter (00:00)
Hey, Lioness, welcome to the show, Lioness Conversations, where we help women be brave, to lead with confidence and joy, and to find your path to the most meaningful work of your life. I'm your host, Jen Porter, leadership and empowerment coach for ambitious and heart-centered women who are ready to change the world. You can find out more about being a guest on the podcast or being part of the Lioness community at jenportercoach.com.

Today we have a really special guest. I'm excited for you to meet Sue Hitzmann, a pioneer visionary and true force in the world of health and healing. As a manual therapist, exercise physiologist, and internationally recognized educator, Sue has transformed how we understand the body by shining a spotlight on fascia, the hidden fabric that holds us together. She's the founder of the groundbreaking Melt Method.

a fascia-focused self-care practice now used around the world by athletes, practitioners, and everyday movers alike. Her New York Times bestselling books, The Melt Method and Melt Performance, have empowered countless people to restore resilience, stability, and freedom in their bodies. For Sue, fascia isn't just tissue, it's sacred architecture, the blueprint of wholeness.

whether on stage, in classrooms, or through her podcast, Anatomical Gangster, check it out. She makes complex science accessible and inspiring. With over 3,800 trained instructors and a thriving Melt-on-demand community, Sue is building a fascia-first future where science, soul, and self-care come together to heal the world from the inside out. Sue, welcome to the show.

Sue Hitzmann (01:55)
I love that introduction. Thank you so much. It's like, wow, that's so cool. Thank you.

Jen Porter (01:58)
You're welcome. You're welcome. It sounds good to hear it, doesn't it?

It's amazing, it's amazing what you've done. So this

is gonna be new territory for a lot of the listeners because they're, you know, we're sort of steeped in understanding our bodies in certain ways and understanding fascia is gonna be a new concept. So I really wanna break it down so that people understand what that is. I was actually mentioning it to a friend who's a massage therapist and she was like, yeah, we don't really know a whole lot about fascia, you know, and she certainly wasn't trained.

Sue Hitzmann (02:10)
Mm-hmm.

Jen Porter (02:33)
in fascia, she was trained in muscles, right, in skeletal systems. So tell us what is the Melt method, what is fascia, what are you working on?

Sue Hitzmann (02:37)
Me too.

So Melt method is a simple self care technique. It simulates my manual therapy practice, my hands on practice. It spawned out of my private practice with simply with one moment with one client who had said to me, you know, if you could invent a way for me to do to myself, what you do with your magic hands, I could stay out of your office once and for all. And I thought to myself, yeah, but then I would be unemployed, like who would ever have to come see me. But it really, it really was kind of an intriguing idea. So I started developing software

tools that would mimic this very gentle light touch therapeutic technique that I was doing with my own hands. My background is in neuromuscular therapy, in cranial sacral therapy, visceral manipulation and lymph drainage. So I kind of think of it as the subtle body energies of the system and how to address these.

elements of our body, which I really think are a missing link. And much like you said about your massage therapist is I grew up in the fitness industry and I really had this idea that the musculoskeletal system was like the thing that we could work on, that we could stabilize, we could help our bone strength, we could help our muscles and keep our physique looking great.

But come to find I was like 28 years old and all of a sudden I woke up and the bottom of my foot hurt me. I thought I stepped on glass and what started out as this foot pain turned into this body wide ached fatigue. I had no definable source. I did not know why I had pain and it completely derailed me from that traditional model of fitness, which is to say that if you eat right and you exercise, you're going to lead in a healthy act of life. But nowhere in there did they say pain free.

and that's kind of the dirty little secret of fitness is that everybody in fitness, actually the no pain, no gain theory is still widely held as a very important aspect of it. So Melt, I think of as an interruption in the way that we tend to treat the body. It gets us quiet and what we do is we use soft tools. We have soft rollers and soft hand and foot therapy balls. I actually have my hand and foot therapy kit. So we use these very soft tools to gently approach.

the superficial fascia and all of the sensory nerves that live in it to then transmit new information throughout the body to alter the way our mind and our body connect. So people see the roller and they think it's foam rolling and I say we actually don't do much rolling and Melt. We just use it as a tool to simulate what I would be doing with my own hands on a body.

And so you also asked what fascia was. So fascia is a three-dimensional fluid-based architectural matrix within you. It is your inner tissue. It actually formulated with the autonomic nervous system in embryology. They weren't separate systems. It's kind of like a marriage. can't, it's not just that your nervous system developed and it developed things. No, it needed to have something to create stuff in. And fascia is in a sense,

Jen Porter (05:05)
Yeah.

Sue Hitzmann (05:31)
the container, is the biological fabric, it is the collagen matrix that both holds everything together, but also is what provides us our physical shape. From every organ having a shape to our physical body having a shape, fascia is playing a leading role in our development and what we look like in a physical form. So what we understand about fascia and what's been known for years is that fascia really does help our muscles and bones.

It keeps our joints in good alignment. It gives the joint shock absorption. But in more recent times, over the past 25 years, we're using atomic force microscopy and we're looking at the intricate network from people like Dr. J.C. Gumberto, Dr. Robert Schleip, Tom Findley, are these premier researchers who began to look at fascia and really its role in the cellular components of our body. And what we understand now about fascia is on a microscopic level, the extracellular matrix.

is what's supporting, protecting, and stabilizing every cell, vessel, and nerve in the body. So fascia, exactly. And so the extracellular matrix is what fascia is on a microscopic scale, all the way down to quantum. You could look at fascia in a quantum scale and the structures of fascia, which is very intriguing in that in all nature, there's no straight lines. And if you look at like a leaf, if you just stare at a leaf for a minute and you see all those veins that are

Jen Porter (06:31)
fashion

Sue Hitzmann (06:54)
actually holding the shape of the leaf together, we have that same polyhaledric shape in fascia. And it's the only substance in the entire body that possesses that architectural shape that is what keeps nature how it looks. And so we are very similar to nature. We have these polyhedrons, these triangular and quadrangular shaped structures produced by collagen that hold structures together and allow communication to occur.

from our blood vessels to our nerves, to our cells, to muscles. It is the communication highway. And what recent science is understanding is daily living causes an impact in our fascial structures. And even if you don't have pain, mean, pain would be the ultimate resolve of it. But even for people listening who don't have pain, you've experienced what we call connective tissue dehydration.

Like when you sit for long periods of time and when you get up, you kind of feel like you aged 40 years because your joints don't work as well when you get up as they did when you sat down. Or you wake up in the morning and you're stiff like a dried out sponge. Fascia actually under a microscope looks like a sponge. And if you think of a sponge that's hydrated, can move and adapt, you can pull or cause tension or compression on it. And when you let it go, it bounces back to its original shape. But a sponge that's dehydrated, you can press and pull on it and it doesn't yield to pressure very well.

and bounce back to its original shape. And if you think again of a sponge as absorbing water, a moist sponge always absorbs fluid faster than a dried out one. So what do you want in your body? A stiff dried out sponge or a hydrated one? That's why movement is so important to fascia. And again, as we age, we know we just lose space. Nobody gets taller as we get older. We lose the space, we lose our structure.

Jen Porter (08:21)
Okay.

Sue Hitzmann (08:36)
And fascia again is playing a leading role in that breakdown. So if you wanna lead a resilient, vital, vibrant life longer, then fascia is really the missing link to understanding how to do that. Because again, you can eat right and exercise and still have pain, still have joint misalignment, still have body issues. But treating fascia as a substance that is adaptable and malleable, I think really is the marriage of...

Jen Porter (08:53)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Hitzmann (09:02)
True self-care is getting into that subtle body energy and learning how to care for it from day to day. That's what Melt is. That's what Melt does.

Jen Porter (09:09)
So what does fascia look like? And where is it in the body? Like if we were to sort of peel back the layers, like there's the outside skin, right? And I think what we think is underneath that is tissue. What is it? What does it look like?

Sue Hitzmann (09:21)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah. What

is it? So, so fascia is primarily made up of fluids we call like hyaluronin, glyco-amino glycans, proteoglycans, proteins, and collagen and elastin fibers. And the, the way that it, what does it look like in an ideal state under a microscope? When you look at it microscopically, it kind of looks like a spider's web. But for a lot of us, if we were really looking at like, if you had a scar, it would kind of look more like a cobweb.

it kind of loses its inherent nature of connection. It looks clumped down. So again, under a microscope, it looks like, I would think of it like taffy or something of like a cotton candy almost. There's like this fibrous aspect of it, but within it is fluid. So I don't want you to think like it's crunchy, like something like that, like cotton candy.

But just like cotton candy, if you pinch it and you press on it for long periods of time, when you let it go, it leaves a remnant. And fascia has the capability of doing that as well. When tissue gets too bound down, we lose the glide ability of the fibrous elements of fascia and they kind of get tacked down. What was the other question? What does it look like? it's everywhere.

Jen Porter (10:33)
in the body, like there.

Sue Hitzmann (10:36)
Fascia is everywhere. There's no place that it isn't. It's in your nails, it's in your eyes, it's in the orbital conjunctive groove of your eyes. It is absolutely everywhere. There's nowhere that it isn't. And in fact, if we could take, and actually some of my dear colleagues created a project called Freya where they removed everything but the fascia to look at the structure of the body. And if we removed every organ,

If we remove every organ cell, if we removed every bone, every muscle in your body, but left fascia, you would see the entire structure of the human body and all of the compartments of everything inside. So fascia is what is the biological fabric of your body. It is the inner tissue. Again, fascia and your autonomic nervous system are like a power couple in your body. So fascia is shaped.

and it shapes it is shaped by and it shapes the autonomic nervous system and the autonomic nervous system shapes and is shaped by the fascia. So they are really in cahoots with one another when we have agility, stability, power and strength, but it's also in cahoots if we have pain, poor posture and a breakdown of the body. These are the two systems that are having trouble

And because the autonomic nervous system is what regulates our immune system, our lymphatic system, if you have digestive problems, sleep issues, hormonal imbalance, it's still an autonomic dysregulation and fascia is playing a leading role in that dysfunction. So the recent science, and I've been very privileged to be a founding member of the Facial Research Society now since its inception. And the discoveries that we continue to make about fascia, its relationship to

emotional states, depression, it's dysregulation in movement, in aging, and also athleticism. People who are athletes, sometimes we work so hard to get good at something while throwing a ball repeatedly is gonna get you better at throwing a ball. You could also then get Tommy John syndrome where all of a sudden you strain your elbow and now you have tendonitis in your elbow.

It can damage your cervical spine because you're constantly doing a single sided motion, right? So repetition is really a blessing and a curse of the human body. And again, fascia is the primary substance in the body that adapts. And as it adapts, your muscles adapt, your autonomic nervous system adapts, your timing in movement adapts. And so time over tension overload. If we don't restore fascia, we tend to break, we injure something.

Jen Porter (13:19)
So I can see why high performance athletes would need to know about this and be paying attention to their fascia, but why should just an everyday person moving through their world care?

Sue Hitzmann (13:31)
Yeah, if you want to move well, you should know about your fascia. And if you're a female, you should really know about your fascia because fascia is actually playing a huge role in your hormonal balance. So as you get into your forties and into your fifties and you go through menopause, you know, I'm 55. So I've gone through menopause. I'm in my menopausal years and I

have never really had many symptoms. And I think it's because I Melt and I understand how fascia's role is helping my immune and hormonal balance. So that's a big thing. So really, if you're looking to keep your joints feeling good, you know, want to move well, you want to live a vibrant life, understanding the role fascia plays in your resilience, I think is the fundamental flaw

of longevity is everybody's wanting to bio hack us. I absolutely hate that word, by the way, if you're hacking something in your body, it sounds like you're beating something into submission. Like, why don't we just bio understand our systems and actually break the code, crack the code of our bodies and learn how to hold our, our aging process in our hearts and, really do things that keep us feeling youthful and vibrant.

at any age. I think that's important. And I am going to say this for all of the elite athletes that are out there that may be listening to this. As a high performance athlete myself for many years, all of my friends who continue down the road without fascia all have hip replacements in their 50s. All of them. Everybody's got a knee replacement, hip replacement, back surgeries. So being an athlete, anybody who is an endurance athlete, they call it endurance for a reason, because you have to endure a lot for a long time.

And being in that mindset can actually break down the body faster. People who run all of the time, you know, your heart's only going to beat so many times in a lifetime. You take up all of those heartbeats earlier. You may actually die of a heart attack earlier than you think. So I think we sometimes have a belief that the things that we're doing are good for us. Running, running 17 marathons a year doing, you know, training for elite sports. These are all good for us.

It might be good for your mind because you want to be a winner, because you want to be challenged, because you want the award, whatever it is that your ego gets satisfied with. But are they things that are really going to prolong the vitality of your life? And it may or may not be so. Elite athletes, like, is an elite athlete any more healthy than a woman who goes for a one mile walk with her dog every day and...

goes out with her girlfriends and walks in the park? I don't know, is one more healthy than the other? How do you define health is a big question for people to consider and I don't know if they asked that.

Jen Porter (16:24)
So it sounds like athletic performance is secondary to being able to move well.

Sue Hitzmann (16:30)
Yes,

definitely. Yeah, definitely. 100%. Take a look at any athlete and how their gait patterns are. They are not great. They're not great. know, bodybuilders, they make good statues. They stand and pose really well. But when you watch them walk, they look like a monkey. They waddle like a duck. They can't flex or move with freedom. Most of them. I'm not saying all of them, but...

as a general tendency, when you over train muscles, you actually become more stiff. If you are a dancer, like a lot of dancers, once they end their career, that's when their body falls apart because their nervous system is wanting so badly to do that performance, to do those movements. And the second you stop, your joints compress, your nervous system doesn't know what you want to do, and you start getting joint replacements. So,

I would always say to anybody, if you've been an elite athlete in anything, soccer, tennis, softball, whatever it is, never stop doing your sport. Even if it's just 10 minutes of fun movement, throwing a ball against a wall, kicking a ball and giving that agility back to your body, I think your nervous system is looking for those motions at any age. So if you've been an elite athlete, always do your sport. It will help your nervous system over time.

Jen Porter (17:46)
Hmm.

Sue Hitzmann (17:46)
Just one

tip there.

Jen Porter (17:49)
So I wanna talk about how this impacts women's issues. Can you brought up some of it like hormones and menopause because mostly they're mostly women listening to this. So go back to hormones. How does fascia relate to hormonal health and what our hormones are doing in our bodies?

Sue Hitzmann (18:12)
Yeah, so in fascia, you actually have tons of hormones floating around in your fascial matrix. So your lymphatic system, there's something called superficial lymph. And right underneath your skin, superficial fascia is where we have an abundance of unused hormones.

So for women, if you have cellulite on the back of your legs, this is actually a metabolic sign that your metabolism is off. our body needs to absorb nutrients, but our lymphatic system also needs to absorb junk and then get it out of the system. And for a lot of us, fascia becomes dysregulated. kind of loses its stiff to elastic property, which the marriage of those

two words stiff and elastic is the tone of fascia. So when there's just enough stiffness and just enough elasticity there's good tone in the tissue. If you sit for long periods of time like we do because we work and we're sitting at our desk all day and then you decide that you're going to go get up and like do a spin class I kind of say to people is your tissue is the tissue in your body ready to do that because you've been sitting still

all day and now you want to get up, go back into flexion and move your body very fast, boy, you're really going to tighten up your low back and your neck, you got to be mindful of that, right? So the way that hormones operate is when we don't absorb them and we aren't using them because you know, when you're going through

your 20s, your body is really into the production of hormones, right? You know, you got a lot of estrogen coming into your body, a lot of progesterone. And during different parts of your ovulation, there's different levels of hormones that are there. And if you decide this month, okay, I'm not going to have a baby, well, that those hormones that you haven't used to get that next step into pregnancy happening, some of it gets stored in the tissue. And what happens with a lot of people, especially, you again, as we age men and women,

is that this excess storage of unused hormones in the superficial tissue really bogs down the lymph system, the immune regulation, the ability for your body to move, because some hormones can become neurotransmitters and neurotransmitters can also become hormones, right? So there is this tipping point between these substances in the body that help us manage cell proliferation, motility of organs, all these other things. So,

As we age and fascia declines in its supple supportive qualities, this can also cause a backlog and an unused volume of estrogen, estriol, and progesterone. So when you get into your forties, all of a sudden you're agitated more. You get really pissed off at the simplest things. You can't move, your joints start to bother you. All of a sudden you're like, I got this weird pain right here, or my knees are really starting to hurt me.

but you say, haven't done anything out of the ordinary, that's your fascia talking to you. That is most women who are in their 40s who suddenly have joint pain. The leading role is fascial dysregulation and hormone imbalance. And if your body doesn't have enough progesterone, your fascia needs progesterone to keep its elastic properties, needs estriol and estrogen to keep muscle strong.

So as these things decline in our bodies, this is why we suddenly lose our muscle mass, our skin withers and wrinkles, our joints start to hurt us. And then we go to a doctor and we're complaining about the back of our leg hurting us and they decide that they're gonna give you a hip replacement, but really it's just tendinopathy and it's caused by the dysregulation of hormones. So I think the problem for women is that you have to, you have to be...

smart about your own body and get educated because your doctors aren't educated in fascia. They're not educated in hormones either, by the way. Even a lot of OBGYNs don't really specialize in hormones. They're great with pregnancy, but they're not great with HRT. So you really have to, if what you wanna do, you've said to yourself, wanna commit, I do wanna live an abundant life. Like,

How long do you want to live? I always say, I'd like to live until I'm 111 years old, maybe 112, but only if every year is good. But I think that I could keep my body going for that long. Well, how am I going to do that? Like, what am I eating? How much movement do I have a day? Do I meditate? Does my body feel good at 55? If I didn't feel good today, I would be working on that. I wouldn't wait until I'm 60 to be like, you know, maybe I should go see a doctor about that back pain. And that's what people do.

You know, you asked me earlier, like you had said something about like, what is pain? I think pain is simply the brain's way of getting our attention to alert us that something's not right. The problem with the way most people deal with pain is when we have a pain symptom, most of us will go over to the medicine cabinet and we'll get some Advil and we'll pop a couple Advil. And so that's kind of like your toaster is on fire and your fire alarm goes off.

and you hear that fire alarm and you walk over to the fire alarm and you take the batteries out because you don't want to hear the alarm. But the toaster's still on fire. And that's the problem with the way that the medical practice deals with things is they are very symptom driven. They will look at your symptom, you tell me what your symptom is, and I'll give you a pill to decrease that symptom. I don't care what the cause is and I don't care how to fix the cause, I just want to fix the symptom. And that's bullshit.

And that, but that is the way that the medical world is trained. They are trained in medicine. They are not trained in nutrition. They are not trained in fascia. They are not trained in the cellular matrix, hormones, neurotransmitters or otherwise, unless you have a specialist that is, but don't think that your hip surgeon has a clue about hormones, fascia or anything else that I've mentioned in the last half hour chatting with you. Yeah.

Jen Porter (23:57)
Wow.

I think there's a deeper issue that prevents us from really understanding what's happening in our body, and that is the disconnect between our brain and our body. ⁓ Where I think that we're not paying attention is maybe the nicest way to say it. In some ways, we're cruel.

Sue Hitzmann (24:08)
Mm-hmm.

Jen Porter (24:19)
to our bodies when it's not doing what we think it should do, is, you we think it's almost an enemy in some ways.

Sue Hitzmann (24:25)
Yeah, we ignore or we

ignore it. We either beat it up or we ignore it. Right. And I can give you an example of that, Jen is like, I get a lot of clients who they'll talk about, like, my neck is hurting me. And the first thing that they do is they take a blunt object or a ball and they jam it right into their neck and actually inflict pain in their neck and they push on it and press on it. And I'm like,

Jen Porter (24:29)
don't know.

Sue Hitzmann (24:49)
Why would you cause pain to get out of pain? You're literally assaulting the messenger. You're beating up a victim. And so I give you this image. If you had a child that suddenly ran back to the front door, screaming bloody murder, you wouldn't punch it in the face, right? No. If your child came up to you screaming out for help, you would get right down at their level. You would meet them eye to eye. You would hold them. You would ask them what was wrong. Tell them they're okay. They're safe. Just tell me what happened.

And then you take information in and then you would take action. But when our bodies scream out for our help, the very first thing we do is we assault the messenger. We go right after the areas that are hurting us and we try to submit it into quiet. We push on it, we press on it, we physically cause pain to get out of pain and you're shooting the messenger. You're literally doing the opposite of what your body is asking you to do. So why would you have a mind body disconnect is probably because the way that you've dealt.

with the messages your body has been giving you. You keep trying to shut your mind up and you can't. And so this is, I think, a message is that if your body is crying out for your help, if you have pain, your body is trying to get your attention and it's deep, subtle energies of the body that are crying out for your help. So you wanna go in with subtle body energy.

Jen Porter (25:51)
Yeah.

Sue Hitzmann (26:08)
to heal subtle body energy. You don't go into physical body energy to fix a subtle body. You got to go into the subtle body. And so that means getting quiet, attuning yourself to things that you're unaware of and reconnecting the mind body connection, which consciously you can become a conscious agent in a physical body and change the way that your body feels.

Jen Porter (26:27)
That really stood out to me the first time we talked was I was telling you about my, I guess it's plantar fasciitis that hasn't been diagnosed, but I'm assuming that's where the pain is. And it happens after a rigorous exercise. And you talked about that, that what we do when we feel pain is we use blunt force. We're hard on our bodies and I use a lacrosse ball.

and I roll it out and I try to dig in there thinking that my mindset is, it can be whether it's my hips, my back, any muscle that's hurting, I'm getting in there with a lacrosse ball and trying to work it out because I guess my thinking is that there's something that needs to be released and it needs this attention in order to then say,

Sue Hitzmann (27:10)
Mm-hmm.

Jen Porter (27:15)
I've undone whatever was, like, if it was contracted, you know, like that would help it release. And you talked about your method being way gentler.

Sue Hitzmann (27:27)
Very, yes, very. So you're saying, I mean, there's so many things I should write down, because you're saying so many great points here. I'd love like there are bullets. Let's see if I can remember a few of them. So number one, again, when you have pain, in Melt, we take what we call the indirect before direct approach. So if your foot hurt you, I'd probably be looking up at your hips.

and the back line of the body and seeing what's the relationship of your front and back line. So the front thigh, the back leg, like where, how does your hip move when you move your leg? And probably what we're going to find is on your opposite hip, you probably have some weakness that's giving you a short heel strike on the leg that tends to bother you. So when you go to do vigorous exercise, you're just kind of beating up that region that's already taught. And here's another thing is that Jen said, I just think that when I take a ball,

I'm releasing something, right? And it's like, well, what do you think you're releasing? the answer, people will say muscles. And I'm like, see, there's the problem is that first of all, self myofascial release is a term that was used and John Barnes and Viola Harris, was her last name? Harris, Viola Freiman, Viola Freiman and so many of these other people in the 60s started coining these terms with very clear definition.

But then these words get out into the world with no definition or new definitions and it gets confusing. So there is something that releases and it's called energy that it's not a physical thing. It's a subtle body energy. So your fascia has something of a neuro electrochemical semi conducting ability. It literally manages tension compression forces. But if you

pull or compress on fascia for short periods of time, you build up a electromagnetic charge in it. And then when you let it go, it creates a frequency through the body. So I'm not saying that using a low crossfall is bad. Any tool is just a tool. Like I could hammer in a nail into my wall with a spatula, but I probably bend the spatula and ruin my spatula and I can't make eggs lighter. Okay, so I could do it. It's not the right tool.

Jen Porter (29:21)
Okay.

Sue Hitzmann (29:38)
So I think lacrosse balls are excellent tools for playing lacrosse. I think once we start putting lacrosse balls on the body, I think, well, I mean, if you know how to use a lacrosse ball properly, maybe you could use one. But I think that those kind of tools are a bit hard. And our bodies are soft bodies, know, soft tissue like soft tools, right? So again, if we...

think more about blending with what's going on in our bodies and we understand what's there. I think we can really engage in self care and touch much more efficiently. So when you use any tool, whether it's the Melt products or a hard foam roller or lacrosse balls or whatever you want to use, that my first question is, where do you start? Where are you starting? Are you starting on the places that already hurt? You're already in the wrong map.

you're off the path, okay? If what you want to do is get out of pain, stop going right to the areas of pain and think about what connects them. And this is the big punchline for you, Jen. You're talking about you think that things are tight, and then you're going to release them. And dare I say that a lot of times with things that are tendon related, whether it's, or ligament related, or fascial related,

Oftentimes the pain that you feel is because something is taut, not tight. So what's the difference? Okay. Tightness is when things move together, right? So if I've got, if I've got a structure that's coming together and moving inward, it's contracted. That's, that is a shortening of tissue. But for something like the IT band or the Achilles tendon, most of the time those structures are taut. They're under too much tension.

And so when you ask them for their elastic property, they can't release. And if you hold just like a rubber band, if you had a rubber band for your hair, over a month, what happens to that rubber band? Kind of loses its elastic property. Well, if you hold tension, if your fascial structures, if large fascial sheets like IT bands, like Achilles tendons are under tension all of the time, and you never create that supple, supportive contractility,

Now you get into an inflammatory response and that's where you get your pain. So if you have things like plantar fasciitis, Achilles tendonitis, if you've got a IT band syndrome, if you have low back pain or neck pain, it's a fascial problem and it's probably under tension over compression first. And so I would try to figure out where you have too much tension and try to decompress the tension.

And then on the places that are too tight, I would then try to maybe release those, but then I want to activate and stabilize my hips, my shoulders, or wherever I have weakness, because when you're under tension or compression too long, you tend to get motor sensory motor amnesia, you get weakness. And that's what ultimately causes compensation. And that's what ultimately causes pain. So pain is like the end result of many compensatory

stages to get you to pain. You don't just suddenly have chronic pain. Chronic pain is an accumulative problem. Whereas an acute trauma, like if you break a bone, you fall down a flight of stairs and you break your arm, that's an acute trauma. That's the time to go to the doctor, get the x-rays, put a cast on, help the bone heal. That's a good time. If you have a disease like

you have diabetes, you might have neuropathy in your lower leg and have lower leg pain. Well, the diabetes isn't causing the leg pain. The neuropathy that is caused by your diabetes is what's causing you leg pain, right? So there's steps that get you to pain. So when you have a chronic issue, seeing a doctor also can be of benefit, but don't think that they're gonna get rid of your chronic pain. They're only gonna manage your diabetes symptom. They're not going to really treat the...

the actual pain that you have, they could treat your neuropathy, which might then decrease your pain, but they're not gonna fix the diabetes. The only thing that's gonna do that is fix your nutrition and get yourself into a self-care mindset, right? So, right, so I guess my point here is that there are so many stages that lead us there. And in the middle of this acute traumatic event or this chronic disease that people get is this gray area I call sudden chronic pain. It's where you didn't do anything.

Jen Porter (33:50)
Yeah.

Sue Hitzmann (34:06)
You woke up and your foot hurt you like me, or you're suddenly noticing that the back of your heel starts hurting you after you exercise, or you bend over to pick up a pencil and your back blows out. But it's not a traumatic event. You just picked up a pencil. What's traumatic about that? Right? You you did the same down dog you did 50,000 times over the last decade, but this time your hamstring blows. Are you sure it's the down dog that did it? Or you think that might just be time over tension overload. So it's, the accumulation of life.

is most often what's causing us our pain. And where we store stress is in fascia, that's its job. It is a stress storing system that decreases the stress in your mind, your body holds it. Right, but we need to take it away. And the only way we can do that is with our consciousness. We need to be more conscious. Again, if you can think of yourself as a spirit occupying a body and using a mind to have a human experience, then use the mind.

Jen Porter (34:48)
Wow.

Sue Hitzmann (35:01)
to help your body and be a conscious agent in a physical form and do something to help your body. And don't just go to exercise because you don't like what you see in the mirror and you think your ass is fat. Like actually go to the gym because you feel like it's gonna help you. You're gonna breathe. You like the social engagement. You like the people that you see and you feel good when you leave. But if you leave your gym and I say, are you feeling? You go freaking exhausted. I feel like crap. That just sounds bad, right?

Why'd you have to work so hard? Like, what are you doing, right? So think a lot of people go into wanting to transform their body because they either have pain or they don't like what they see in the mirror. In one way or other, that's an emotional and psychological problem. And fascia relates to those two systems too.

Jen Porter (35:46)
So let me continue to use me as an example. So I did go to a chiropractor, really evolved awesome people. It's called neuro-athlete. And so it is that brain-body connection. like the body is trying, you know, the mind believes that the body is in danger. And so it's trying to protect that area. And so that's why it's tightening that sort of thing. And the chiropractor there, he said, you know,

Yes, your foot's hurting, but we're not going to deal with your foot yet. We're going to start with your back because it's happening in your mid back, which is then affecting your hips because there's this SI joint thing happening that's then affecting your strong your hamstrings have to work and then your calves and then your feet. if someone, mean that's so I'm on a path right to understanding more, but I don't

Sue Hitzmann (36:34)
Brilliant.

Jen Porter (36:40)
I still don't understand or what do I do about that? Now he's given me lot of exercises and doing those exercises actually does take, reduce the pain. really does. I have to do those every day, you know, in order to get those results, which is, it's a practice, right? It's a lot of work. It's a discipline. But if someone is experiencing pain, how do we, how does we really know where that's

coming from like our body's trying to communicate to us. We want to honor what our body is telling us. We want to be listening, but how do we understand? What the origin of that is and then what what to do about it?

Sue Hitzmann (37:19)
It's a really great question. Well, first of all, 100 % of the time, your brain is what's producing your sense of pain. Your brain's producing it. There's no other way. The brain is the producer of pain, but it's being told by the body that something's wrong and that those sensory nerves are sending information back to the brain saying, hey, danger, danger, something's wrong. And your brain is then going through a process. Have we seen this before? Do we know what it is? yeah, that's that's Jen not paying attention to her hamstring and her SI joint. And so we're going to send a message down to her foot because we're still having

disconnect here and she's still not hitting the right place. It's still, it's not sticking. That tends to be a big problem and I think that gets frustrating for people when they are working with a physical therapist or chiropractor is that it does take time.

And I get it, everybody wants a quick fix. Everybody wants to find the miracle pill, you know, is it the red one or the blue one? I'm gonna pick this one and I'm, you know, cured for life, right? And there are times that that happens. I mean, I've literally done a single session on somebody who had had severe knee pain calls me the next day and says, I don't even know what you did, but like, I think I'm gonna go for a run today. And I said, hell no, you're not gonna go for a run.

Can't your body feel good for one day without you doing something stupid, like running, when only for one day your knee hasn't bothered you and they're like, God, you talk to me that way and I feel bad about myself. I'm like, well, feel bad for a minute because your body's gonna get really pissed off if you don't listen to Sue. And then they're like, yes, you're right. Like I instantly wanted to do the thing that was hurting my knee because my knee doesn't hurt. I wanna go back to the things I wanna do, okay.

But what I want you to realize is that what we did made a change. So now let's try to maintain the change. Here are the steps to maintain it. And that's really where

self awareness and self assessment, I think is very important. So in Melt, the four hours protocol starts with reconnect. And I think the reconnect is where most of our therapists go wrong is that they they tell you just how you said like, hey, told me it's like my mid back isn't moving. So my SI joint gets a little bit stiff on one side, that's going to channel too much tension into the back of my leg and cause my heel.

Okay, that's just like a whole bunch of information and information makes you smarter, but emotions make you react. And if I said to you, Jen, look at when you walk, you're not moving your torso. You've got some restrictions here. Well, what is in this area, your heart, your lungs, your, your solar plexus. And I might then inquire on what's going on in your life. And maybe there's something that we can actually identify where there's actually an emotion that's holding you.

that's not allowing your pelvis to move. Maybe there was something in your history that happened that's still holding steady because you haven't fully emotionally addressed that story. And these are real happenings in bodies. I can tell you how many times I've worked on people who come in with back pain and there's an emotional story that is so old, it's like from childhood. And as they start to talk about it, as I'm inquiring and just asking the right questions,

that then the story comes out and then a few days later their back feels better for the first time in years. Why is that? Because the body is where we hold memory. The fascia does hold the memory. holds us in, and again, I don't want to like overreach a boundary here because it's really more anecdotal. There is no scientific evidence that really shows like we store our emotions in fascia. Anybody who says this is like, it's anecdotal. But our bodies do.

whole store energy fascia is designed when when we go to jump, we kind of recoil down our fascia is storing energy so that we can explode and jump up into the air, you don't just bounce off the ground. So it is a storage center for energy and emotions, emotion, it is an energy in motion, it's it's an emotion, right? So all of these concepts that we have of where is it coming from? And why do we have these pains?

I would look at it more deeply and ask questions to you, Jen, like in your life right now, do you feel grounded? Do you feel rooted? Does it feel like you're missing something? Are you looking for something? And if the answer is yes, maybe that's why your foot hurts is because electrically there's something going on in the root of your body that you need to ground yourself more. And maybe there's something that you really need to sink your feet into so that you can get to that next place. And in understanding that and going,

I do feel this way and if you can tie that emotion to the pain that you have, oftentimes you can address it through the emotional field and decrease the pain in your foot. And I'm not saying that that's what your problem is, but again, a lot of times like my clients who have knee pain, the knee is a very forward moving joint. They don't feel like they're moving forward in life. They feel like they're being pulled back. It feels like somebody's dragging you back.

That might be why your knees hurt you. And so let's talk about how you can address those things, not get annihilated by speaking your truth and get this energy out of your system. Can we find ways to do this? And I think that's where body work becomes different than when you see a chiropractor or you see a physical therapist is that they are still myopically looking at one of the bodies, the physical one, but there's an emotional body, an ethereal body, spiritual body.

And I think we need to understand that all of these bodies are valid. We are all of these things. We are one. We are all of these things. So I think looking at the body on a more holistic approach, I think can allow us to then go a little bit deeper in why we feel pain, how long it's been there, really identify its source, and then move forward from it and actually heal from it and never go back to it again. And again, for me, when my foot hurt me,

I say that there wasn't anything out of the ordinary that was going on. But a year after my foot hurt me, my father died. And so I wonder even to this day, could it be that my energy field felt this person who was such a dominating force in my life was going to depart from the world. And my foot started to hurt me because the foundation that he laid for me was cracking. And then a year after he died and my foot hurt me for another year and a half worse after he died. And

I look back at it and I just know that a lot of that was about the falseness of myself that I felt because of how he made me feel. Like I hadn't addressed it. And it wasn't until I sat with my father before he died to express what it was and then still unraveling from that story to then heal from it and my feet feel fine, you know? So I guess my message to anybody is when you have pain, I always want to say this too shall pass.

It can pass, it will pass. Pain is impermanent. It always has varying degrees. And with all experiences, they arise, we experience them, and then they subside. If you keep focusing on your pain, you will keep it like a friend, you will keep it close. If you start to veer your mind away from the pain of what you feel, and what might be the cause of it, and start to focus somewhere else,

That's where you unlink the connection of the story that your brain keeps telling you as something's wrong, especially when you've taken the MRIs and the x-rays and they say nothing's wrong with you. And that's what happened to me too. MRIs, x-rays, CT scans, they couldn't find anything wrong with me. And then one doctor decided that I should just take an antidepressant to manage my emotions. And I just thought, I should be really sad.

I'm a fitness professional and I'm in so much pain and I'm lying to people, no pain, no gain. I'm not gaining anything from this pain. So what am I doing? Right? And it changed everything. I mean, my pain was a great motivator for me to veer me out of fitness and into what I do today. And 25 years later, if I could go back and talk to my younger self, I would tell myself to love myself more, to not feel like people aren't going to love me because I don't have this or I don't have that or I'm not pretty or whatever it is.

it doesn't even matter. That's their problem, not my problem. So I think that there's a big story in that that simply says, and again, anybody who's listening to this going, that really made sense to me, that to focus on the cause of pain, and even if you don't know what it is, rather than where you feel pain, that is the first step in getting out of it. So in Melt, we can we call it the reconnect, we teach people how to assess their bodies for accumulative tension and stress.

Jen Porter (45:46)
Okay.

Sue Hitzmann (45:48)
and then feel that it's different. And in the moment of not being that interruption in pain by focusing on some of the causal symptoms of it and addressing those areas of your body that reconnect you and then coming back down on the floor and reassessing, most people will almost instantly in 10 minutes start feeling better. And that's powerful because if you can make a change in your pain response and how you feel in your body, then you can get yourself out of pain. It's that simple.

Jen Porter (46:13)
So say more about that. it sounds like the Melt method is both physical touch, it's addressing the physical body with light pressure, but it's helping somebody understand the root cause. Is it, it's the mind, it's the body, it's spirit too?

Sue Hitzmann (46:38)
Yeah, it's everything. I really think that most of the time when somebody's in pain, they want to tune it out. They have a hard time listening, paying attention, focusing. They don't want to be in their bodies because it hurts. They don't want to close their eyes and be in that dark space. They want to be out of it. They want to ignore it, go drink, go walk, go do something. I don't want to pay attention to it. So if you want to get in your, if you want to get out of pain, you have to get in your body to get out of pain. It's the only way out is in.

So in MELT, what we do is we really do, we focus on intentional breath work, we have mindful meditation, we do tension and compression techniques called rehydrate, we have rebalancing techniques which help the autonomic nervous system down regulate so that parasympathetic rest and repair state can come back up online in a waking state. We activate the neuro core reflexes and mechanisms that involuntarily stabilize us in a conscious way to help them reset.

We cause decompression in the neck and low back. We have different tools like the fascia hydrator is a low frequency vibration tool to stimulate lymphatic flow. We have neuro strength, which is to reinstate stabilization over movers. A lot of us are deep tonic muscle fibers are dysfunctional. And so we use muscle movers as stabilizers.

So a lot of people, if we do a standing assessment, I have people stand up with their feet side by side and close their eyes. And I just have them breathe and focus on their legs. And I'll talk them through ways to find common imbalances. And one of them is I asked them to scan up their legs and notice if they're clenching their thighs and butt cheeks and to relax that. And you'll see people voluntarily relax, but they don't fall over. So why are they tense? It's because their nervous system is under way too much tension. They're

Jen Porter (48:21)
Yeah.

Sue Hitzmann (48:22)
their muscle movers are gripping to hold them upright, but then they let it go and they're still standing upright. So now what's doing it is the true essence of stability. But now you start seeing all the dysfunction of the body, you feel it, you feel compressed, you feel rotated. But again, awareness is half the battle. So if you want to get out of pain, you have to attune yourself to yourself, you need to go into your body and learn to identify what stuck stress feels like in fascia. And that's what

I think I've done for 25 years is to give people knowledge of how to become a good self assessor to what's really going on in their bodies. And when they feel the imbalances, they feel the torques, the tension, the compression, and then they treat it and eliminate it. It's just a matter of time where the treatments actually start to make impact. So it's not a quick fix. And just as you said, it's a practice.

Like anything, it's a practice. We should practice self care and it should be a daily self care treatment. You brush your teeth every day. You don't brush your teeth once a week, right? So those are good habits, right? And you do it not just so that people can stand your stinky breath, but to prevent tooth decay in the future, whether you know it or not. Well, Melt is the same way. You're doing it today so that you move better today, but you're also ensuring a better tomorrow because you're keeping the fluid perfusion of fascia hydrated and supple because without it,

Your joints don't work well, your muscles can't contract appropriately, your nervous system gets fatigued too fast, and your lymphatic system gets bogged down, and it's what causes disorders, diseases, and dysfunctions. So again, fascia is sort of like this missing piece. And when people say we really don't know a lot about fascia, I would dare to say that maybe they don't really know a lot about fascia because they haven't spent an ungodly amount of time.

reading the thousands of research papers that are out there that are actually understanding fascia on a microscopic scale, on a nanoscopic, on a quantum scale, this is where we're headed. So people who say we don't know a lot, actually we do know a lot, we just don't know everything. But we're making new discoveries all of the time. And I think it's just a matter of time where we will really see the importance of fascia and the autonomic nervous system and how it operates so that

the 98 % of what happens to me in a normal day that is out of my voluntary, controller conscious awareness works better, longer. And that's what we want for longevity.

Jen Porter (50:46)
Do you think that we need one another? We need someone else to help us see ourselves?

Sue Hitzmann (50:51)
I think, I think yes, I think we need one another to get through this world. I think that it's like walking down a dark road. It's better to do it with a friend than on your own. So having somebody shine a light so that you know where that path is going, I think is a really good idea. I think a lot of times when we're in suffering or what the Buddhist practice would say samsara is that we really are too alone in the process. We feel very isolated. And when you go to a doctor and you feel helpless there too, it really leaves you feeling

lonely and we don't want to burden our husbands or our wives with our pain stories and be complaining to them all the time because they're not our therapists. So I think that's also the beauty that I feel very privileged with is that we have thousands upon thousands, tens of thousands of people in our community who share this message, who work together, who communicate all the time. We have forums and

you know, we are very connected to everybody and we're accessible. And I think that's also important is to be working with people who are reachable, who you can ask a question to and get an answer. And I feel very honored to have a lifestyle where I find that as part of what I do is to be able to guide people is I never healed anybody. I've only just opened the door to healing where they didn't know that the door was so

I think that yes, we do need one another. We need one another to get through this world. This world was not meant to be lived alone. No, I don't think so.

Jen Porter (52:19)
So how would people get connected to the Melt method and what should they do if they're intrigued by this conversation and want to learn more and maybe even apply it to their own bodies?

Sue Hitzmann (52:29)
I would 100 % say go to the website, meltmethod.com. If you want to find an instructor near you, click find an instructor. Type in your zip code and you might be surprised. There's probably three or four people within a 25 mile radius of where you live and you just didn't know it. And I know that you found Zoe, so we love Zoe Bowick, so big shout out to Zoe. And I think that's probably the first way you can find out about our retreats. We've got a retreat coming up in Costa Rica.

with Hallie Altman for Pilates and Melt in November. I do teacher trainings that are all online that a lot of people do just because of their own curiosity. They're not even sure they're going to teach it, but they really want to like dig deep into the practice. And we're also very active on social media. I do talks and events all the time. I do have my podcast Anatomical Gangster. I talk to really smart people about complicated stuff in simple ways. And

Yeah, I mean, I'm always out there. again, we've got a community of thousands that teach the method and they're very open to helping anybody and everybody that they can.

Jen Porter (53:29)
Yeah,

just to say, after you and I got off our call, I went to your website, found the people that were in my area and had multiple conversations, had a great conversation with Zoe and I'm gonna meet with her next week. Because I wanna see how to apply this to my body because to your, the name of your overarching business is longevity fitness. And that's exactly what I want. I want...

to have fitness for the rest of my life, as long as I possibly can. And this seems like a missing tool in my toolkit to be able to understand fascia. And so I encourage people to reach out, learn. There's a ton of resources that Sue's put out there on YouTube. So you can watch some of her videos, understand more about the Melt method.

and then go from there, maybe even buy some of the tools that you offer so that people can have their own equipment at home. And these are simple, very simple things, but learning how to use those and how to cooperate with our bodies and communicate and listen to our own selves. ⁓ You talk

Sue Hitzmann (54:35)
It's such a meaning

of life, by the way, it is such a meaning of life, right, is to just pay attention to ourselves. What an interesting idea is to really listen. Like, what is that voice in your head that's talking to you anyway? Is it you? I don't even know, you know? I know.

Jen Porter (54:38)
Yeah.

with.

That's a whole other topic

about how we speak to ourselves. Oftentimes, really...

Sue Hitzmann (54:53)
That's right. Yeah.

If we talk to other people the way sometimes we talk to ourselves, you get kicked in the throat. Seriously. So I'm with you on that one. We should be more loving to ourselves. And I think again, that's what the practice of Melt what it is I've learned what it is I try to share with others is how to be

more in love with the process of the human experience. It's not made to be easy. It's going to be hard. You're going to go through grief. You're going to go through loss. You're going to go through struggles. You're going to go through pain. But if you always have the outlook that you are in love with the opportunity to be in skin and to be a human being and to see what it is to be in a human body, I would just think of it as an honor because

here you are and you know that it's impermanent. And when you leave your form, you will not disappear. You will just return to your spirit body and leave the mind body and the physical body here. you do, but, that's important to understand is that if energy is not created or destroyed, then the energy within us is eternal. So find the impermanence of life as being an opportunity to Carpe Diem, to seize the day.

Jen Porter (55:52)
That's right.

Sue Hitzmann (56:06)
to be a good person to others when you're pissed off or you're mad at somebody. Try to really understand that you're angry and that the words that you're about to say could actually hurt another person as much as you're hurt. And if that's what you wanna do, you wanna hurt people because hurt people hurt people, just know that that's what you're doing rather than I'm hurt and I want you to know how much I'm hurt. And I'm not saying it because I want you to hurt. I wanna not hurt. And if I tell you that I'm in pain, maybe I will hurt less. And that's beautiful.

Jen Porter (56:22)
Yeah.

Sue Hitzmann (56:34)
And that's what the meaning of life is about is having compassion, even when you're angry, having compassion for mean people, having compassion for the unconsciously unbehaving people out there, but to still find compassion for them to realize there might be something going on there that you just don't even know about. just, we come in with a softer touch. I really do think that we would be better off and just as simple as this, would you rather be punched or hugged when you feel bad?

Jen Porter (56:52)
Yeah.

Sue Hitzmann (57:02)
I think you'd rather be hugged and embraced. And so do that for yourself if you have pain, embrace it, embrace yourself, embrace what's going on, slow down and can give back to your body what it's asking you for. And you might actually change the dialogue, change the narrative, change your pain, change how you feel and live better in your body. I think that's beautiful.

Jen Porter (57:21)
You know, the lioness energy, part of that really is divine love. And it starts with us. And so it's like, it, we have to be honest with ourselves and we have to be brave in being honest with ourselves and really acknowledging where we are and what's wrong. You know, where are we hurting?

in every facet, right? Not just our body, that's one manifestation of it, but where are our hearts hurting, truly. And being kind to ourselves, I want to give a kind of practical example of how I, you know, I use the word cooperate with our bodies.

I've done some somatic experiencing work which has been really enlightening and helps me connect more with my own body. And one of the things that one of the practices was if my body began to talk to me, so let's say I'm on a run and I feel my knee, you know, it's talking to me, it's like starting to hurt, I actually stopped and spoke to my knee. You know, I touched it.

Sue Hitzmann (58:19)
Touch it. I hear you.

Jen Porter (58:21)
we're not gonna go any further than you're ready to go and we're gonna do this together. And twice I've done that and the pain has subsided. But it was because I responded with kindness instead of beating it into submission or resenting ⁓ my own body.

Sue Hitzmann (58:31)
That's beautiful.

That's right.

Yeah.

Jen Porter (58:38)
And so

that's just a simple way that we can acknowledge, like, I'm sensing something, you know, my foot or my arm or my neck, like, what, you know, what's going on? It's...

Sue Hitzmann (58:50)
Yeah, I hear you.

hear you. And that's it. It's like, touch it and say, I'm hearing you're saying something's wrong here. What is this connected to? Can you tell me why this is hurting me? And just wait for it. Right? Because you can't turn off your thoughts. You can't.

You think you can, even in meditation, meditation is a game where if I ask people to focus on inhaling and exhaling, probably by the third or fourth breath, you're actually thinking about something else. But it's in that moment that you catch yourself thinking about your toaster or your friend or the call you forgot to make, or did I turn the dishwasher on a camera? Or whatever it is, but you go, look at how I'm thinking about that thing again, thank you. And you go back to the breath.

That's how you win over your emotions or your thoughts controlling you and learning that you can control your emotions and your thoughts. And that's powerful because a lot of times our emotions take over. We get so mad and then we just.

dump it on everybody else. We're pissed off and we just take it on and we're frustrated and everybody else is the problem. I cut clients come in, oh, this person, that person, this, that person, that it's like, well, where's your where's your part in all of this? I didn't do anything. I'm like, you sure you didn't do anything. So you were just standing there while this person was saying, well, I mean, I came in with the Okay, wait a minute. So So are you a part of that? I just want to make sure the story right. So we have selective

beliefs and thoughts, and sometimes our beliefs are not what is true. So we shade emotions, we have these stories. And I think you're very right in all of this, that if you come at it from a place of awareness, you're aware of your thoughts, your feelings, the images and sensations that you feel, you are actually in the place of conscious agency. And I'm telling you, the majority of human beings on the planet have no idea

what I just said conscious agent. They're like, do you mean like a person like from a call center? No, like you're a conscious agent, you are you are a being inside of a form. And you are taking care of yourself. This is an idea, right? And it's mind blowing to people. never thought of it that way. I can take care of my body. Whoa, you know, like I don't need a personal to do it. I can do it for myself. Wait a minute, right? You know, so I think it's obvious when someone says it.

It's just we need people around us to say it. And I feel like, again, that's what I've been is somebody who listens very keenly to what people say, and then say it back to them in a way that they go, is that what I just said? I'm like, that's what it sounded like you said. I don't want to do it that way. Okay, well, then tell me a different story. And we can change our stories. Even in pain, we can change the story grief, you can change the story and and you'll overcome the problems. And again, you will learn that this too shall pass, the pain will never be exactly the same.

pain level always and forever. It's just not that way. That's not the way the body works. The body will get your attention. It will let you know. And if you answer in a kind and loving way and you address the cause rather than the symptom, your pain will dissipate. It's that simple.

Jen Porter (1:01:58)
You know, everything that I do in my work is empowering others. It's all about empowerment and that's what I'm hearing you say and it's, I just had a conversation recently about this where it might have been on the podcast last week where I was talking to an end of life doula and we talked about how we give our power away to other people and particularly in the medical field. You know, we expect someone else to tell us what's happening with our body.

when we haven't even assessed it ourselves. And so we're handing over this power to someone else who doesn't live in our body, you know, has a segment of knowledge about what might be happening. And the idea of reclaiming that power is, it's a huge shift. It's like what you talked about with, when we, you know, what a mystery menopause is, right?

And yet, so it's like so few women understand even in the cycle, even in our menstrual cycle, there's so few of us that understand what's happening in every phase of that cycle.

Sue Hitzmann (1:03:04)
I have, I

have women who don't know the difference between their vagina, their clitoris and their labia. They're like, what is that word? I'm like, your labia? They're like, what part of that is it? I think to myself, it's part of you. You should, we should all know more about our bodies. We really, really should. We should know more about what's going on. And you are right. We surrender a lot of our trust and our control and our power to medical doctors. And God forbid you question. Yeah.

Jen Porter (1:03:16)
Yeah, exactly.

And it's abandoning ourselves when we do

that.

Sue Hitzmann (1:03:34)
Yeah, well, the doctors will diminish you, you know, I mean, when my mom had that first break in her leg, and they put a pin in it. And three weeks later, I'm like, something's horribly wrong with my mother. Her leg is shorter, she has drop foot. And every time I draw attention, it kind of makes like kind of a clicking, is it possible a screw is loose? And the doctor looked at me, rolled his eyes and went, my surgery was perfect. If your mom's got drop foot, it's from her back, go see a spine surgeon. And it turned out, no, he

cracked her leg in half with that pin that he put in it and whatever it was that made it go and give was negligence. But as far as we know, know, well, he says, it's your problem, not mine. I'm perfect. You're an idiot for even asking me. And when I came back to him the few weeks later when we finally did get the x-ray and he sees it and he says, well, she must have fell or whatever it was, was his. And I looked him, said, I thought you told me.

your surgery was perfect because it was I was like, well, apparently not so perfect because you broke my mother's leg in half from your surgery. My surgery didn't do it. She did it. She must have felt it was like, gosh, just assume no accountability for the work. But doctors can do no harm and do no wrong because they're doctors. And there's a belief there. But dare I say that people get on medications that they don't really need.

Because again, you're not just seeing the cause how many people are on high blood pressure medication and high cholesterol that actually, know what, if you just ate different and you moved more, you wouldn't have those problems. Shot in the dark. Have you ever even tried that? No. Why? Because actually, we don't want to have responsibility or power. People are more than willing to give it to other people because we don't want to be the one to be say, I did that to myself. I want everybody else to be the problem. If I'm the problem, well, then that makes me a count.

Jen Porter (1:05:21)
and just say,

Sue Hitzmann (1:05:22)
So I think that that's another big

Jen Porter (1:05:23)
you're interesting.

Sue Hitzmann (1:05:24)
thing is that we don't want to be the ones who cause trouble. We want to be perfect, but there's no perfection in life. And we do things that hurt our bodies. do. And I always say even in Melt, people are like, could I hurt myself doing melts? And I was like, I think you could hurt yourself doing anything. But here's the thing, Melt can't hurt you. The balls are inanimate objects. You can hurt you using an inanimate object.

But the ball's not just suddenly gonna jump up and hit you in the head. It's not doing anything. It's just gonna sit on the floor unless you do something with it. Knowing what to do with the tools, knowing the techniques, knowing how to take care of yourself, that takes practice. We do not know how to self care. We do not. Nobody taught you how to do it. You figured it out yourself. Maybe you had a mom or a dad that was like teaching you how to tie your shoe and fold your laundry and be a good student and get up on time and do your homework.

But really on the net of it, nobody taught you to crawl, walk or laugh or find things funny. You just figured it out yourself. And I think that's the thing you got to remember is if you're 100 % accountable for your life, no matter what anything else comes in, you'll always be ahead of the game because the thing you'll always try to do is get your 100 % back.

Jen Porter (1:06:39)
You know, the thing that I'm always helping people, the lessons that I'm bringing into the coaching work that I'm doing is empowerment, trusting yourself, learning to trust yourself. And that's what I hear in this is being willing, why would we give away our power? Why would we surrender that to someone else? I haven't really thought about it from that perspective that you shared. We don't want to be responsible.

Sue Hitzmann (1:06:47)
Yeah.

Jen Porter (1:07:01)
for what happens, but we have to be, we have to take ownership of our life, our health, our impact, our influence.

Sue Hitzmann (1:07:10)
Yeah, no, and also,

mean, depending upon your childhood, like if you grew up in a family where every time you decided to do it one way, if it's like you broke something or anything that I told you not to do that thing, don't do the things that you want to do, you know, like stop standing up. So I mean, and again, I can only speak for myself. had a dad who was like that, you know, it'd be like, I'd be asking questions. He was like, stop asking so many questions. It's so annoying. You ask so many questions. Go look up in a dictionary, like just do it yourself. Nobody wants to hear you. It's like, God, you're so

like noisy all the time. But that shapes you where then when you're an adult, you don't want to ask anybody questions, you know, like, now suddenly you're not getting good grades because you're not asking the question until finally a teacher says, Why are you getting a D in my class? It's like, I don't understand this. Well, why don't you ask a question?

Jen Porter (1:07:54)
because it's too scary.

Sue Hitzmann (1:07:55)
Because it's too freaking scary because my father would scream at me anytime I asked a question and that but that's it is we actually here's a big mention to everybody. And again, Jen, because you're a coach, I know you know this is that most people are not living in the present moment. They're living in the past, and the regurgitating past experiences, and they don't even know that it's happening, right? They're dealing with their

Again, you like I'm in college and I'm not asking the question and I'm failing a class because I'm not asking why am I not asking because I think this This teacher is a man and he's gonna yell at me He's gonna demoralize me and shame me I don't like the way that that feels So I'm just gonna shut up and do my best But in the end I'm hurting myself because of a historical problem. I'm living in the past I'm not presently saying I'm having a problem right in this moment. This is nothing to do with my dad This has to do with me getting good grades. I've got to ask the question and get help, right? So that's me leaving presently a lot of people like my mother

live in a in the future and so they worry all the time they're so worried they're so worried well that might happen

like, okay, I'm out like, you like, you things gonna have like, why are you even talking about that? Well, mean, you really thought about it. I'm like, yeah, you have an appointment at 215. I don't know how we're gonna get there. I'm like, I'm gonna drive you mom, why are you so worried? She's living in a future state. And she's afraid of her future. She's 84. And her future is looking grim. It's come the end of life is right down the street. And she and I think she's afraid to go one more day. But that's it is if fear your future.

where you're always worrying about what happened in the past or you're unaware of how the anchors of the past are manipulating your your present moment. You never live presently you never find joy in your life you don't you're never just enjoying the moment smelling the roses living presently this is the only place where anything happens nothing happens in the future or in the past it all happens right now so

Jen Porter (1:09:46)
Yes.

Sue Hitzmann (1:09:51)
Stay right here. And I get that a lot with my clients. They will come in and just start talking about the past and I'll say, well, what's your problem right now today? And they're like, well, I don't know. I really, really have a problem today. I'm like, oh, how about we stay in the present moment right here where you don't have any problems. You keep going in the past. I can't fix that. But if we stay right here, there's really no problems and we can grow a better future. And don't let that stuff hold you back. Why are you still talking about that? It still bothers me. Well, why? And here it is. So why?

Jen Porter (1:10:08)
Yeah.

Sue Hitzmann (1:10:20)
And when you can get to the why you behave in the present moment, the way that you are, you can suddenly lift from the burden of the past and your future is much better because your future is being based on what's happening right now, not what happened in the past. It's what's happening. That's it. Boom.

Jen Porter (1:10:34)
and we get to create it.

Okay, I'm gonna ask you a couple last questions ⁓ as we wrap up. what advice, given this whole conversation that we've had, what advice would you give women to live more fully, to live better lives?

Sue Hitzmann (1:10:40)
Okay.

Find more women who are under the notion that you are, that there is a way to live more fully. Yeah, be around people who are positive, who support you, who challenge you, who move you forward. If you've got friends that are making you feel bad, say bad things, I think you need to take a diet from those people and you don't need to never chew on that problem anymore, but just for like a week, like just...

leave it over there. And I think that's important that you, if you really want to live abundantly, you need to be around like-minded individuals who want to do the same thing.

Jen Porter (1:11:28)
Yeah, and who are going in the place we want to be.

Sue Hitzmann (1:11:31)
That's it.

Jen Porter (1:11:31)
And then what's your vision for longevity fitness and Melt method? Like if you could, you know, create your future in your business, what do you really hope for?

Sue Hitzmann (1:11:41)
You know, I guess more of what I'm doing now, I hope to be able to influence more people to get out of that pain body and to get more into a present state of awareness and grow. We have new products and new techniques I'm always doing. I always say Melt's not a static system and neither am I. I'm always constantly evolving and trying new things. And I just,

Yeah, I just feel like the opportunities to teach people what I've learned, I just know that that's my purpose in life is to learn, write it down and share it with other people and see if I can help as many people as possible because in that I help myself and I feel better that I'm serving a life's purpose by helping others and helping myself.

Jen Porter (1:12:29)
And in real simple terms for non-medical people to understand, what is the fascial hydrator? This new product?

Sue Hitzmann (1:12:36)
The fascia, I actually don't have one

right in front of me, but the fascia hydrator is a low frequency vibration stick. It has four sides. It's got a textured side, a smooth side and two edges. And we stimulate through low frequency vibration, 40, 70 and 90 Hertz frequency and an oscillating frequency, the subtle body nature of the system. So we deal with the lymphatic system, lymphatic flow, the superficial fascia and fluid exchange in the more superficial tissues. And we also work on breath work with the oscillating frequency.

six second cycle to try to boost the body's own natural repair processes through controlled breathing.

Jen Porter (1:13:11)
So hydration doesn't have anything to do with water in your world.

Sue Hitzmann (1:13:16)
Well, it does but just remember the water that you drink is bulk water It's h2o and when you drink it it turns into h3o2 Which is more of a bound water. It turns into a crystalline matrix. So fascia is a more crystalline matrix with frequency That's why it possesses something so our body through the sosmosis changes it into h3o2 and That is what stabilizes the matrix. So

If you think that you're, you when people say your body's like 80 % water, it's actually more like 90 % bound fluid. It's bound in the body. So, you know, I always say you're probably more like 99 % fluid and 1 % attitude, but you know, if you break it down on a molecular level. But drinking water frequently, eating water-filled foods, moving daily, melting, stimulating the fluid state of fascia, I think is...

a technique that everyone should learn. It's simple to do. It's very powerful. And the beauty of Melt is that it makes an instant change. You could Melt and then 10 minutes later actually feel better. And that I think is remarkable for people when they lie down and they feel one way, they treat their body and then they feel something else. And I'm like, you know, it's actually that moment where you consciously realize you feel different. That's actually switching the autonomic nervous system and baselining it. It actually brings it back to a better baseline.

Jen Porter (1:14:21)
Good.

Sue Hitzmann (1:14:40)
and it works off of that new state, that new awareness. And I think that's powerful. Yeah, it's great. We're right now in a 500 person research study. have 200 people that are not actually going through the techniques as a placebo, but we've got just shy of 300 people who are going through it. we're only in our week six of an eight week study and the results are nothing short of amazing. I literally am astounded by

Jen Porter (1:14:45)
I can't wait to try it. I can't wait.

Sue Hitzmann (1:15:10)
the simplicity of this tool, which was developed by my friend Christopher Gordon, and we've taken it on to bring it to the US market with new techniques and a new mindset and from reducing the cellulite dimpling, showing a metabolic change to skin feeling smoother and more toned. People feeling their muscle strength is a little bit more accurate when they do neuro strength techniques.

sinus congestion draining, have people are improving their sleep. mean, it's, it's, it's nuts. I mean, really, and that's the thing that to me is fascinating, is all we're talking about is low frequency vibration and knowing how to use it. It's just low frequency vibration. And I just think, have we been missing this? But really, if you look at NASA's research, they've been using frequent 90 hertz frequency up in space in the past decade, because they find when people go up into space, they come back osteoporotic.

Jen Porter (1:16:02)
Yeah.

Sue Hitzmann (1:16:02)
They

put them on 90 Hertz frequency vibration devices and they come back with less osteoporosis. Yeah, so I really think that with a little bit more research and a little bit more understanding of protocols and what we're doing, I think people with scars, people with bone issues, people with musculoskeletal problems, I think we're gonna make a real change in bringing vibration.

Jen Porter (1:16:08)
No kidding.

Sue Hitzmann (1:16:27)
concepts and what frequency and vibration therapy do and even in Melt are when we do events we oftentimes have my friend Lloyd Leary who is a sound healer come in and play the didgeridoo and the fascia hydrator and Melt because it's all on frequency but and your fluid matrix is a vibration system water vibrates frequency goes through Water very easily right, you you drop a pebble in water that ripple even when you stop seeing it. It's still rippling

And that's the beauty of understanding fascia is that you are kind of creating a ripple, wave in the system. I know, Jen, you've got to do this. Now we've had two conversations. I hope we can have three with you before you start melting.

Jen Porter (1:17:06)
Well...

I'm so intrigued by all this. I feel like I'm just getting started and understanding all the talking.

Sue Hitzmann (1:17:16)
Yeah, it's gonna be

great. Once you start melting, I'll tell you what, when people have a hard time believing that one soft ball underneath your foot once a day could actually change your gait, your movement and how you feel. But I've worked with over 10,000 people with my hands. I've worked with hundreds of thousands of people around the world in events and classes and series and all sorts of things. And I can just tell you, the human body is designed to heal. The human body is designed to adapt.

And so what we want to do is have it adapt in a positive way by consciously helping it go in that direction. Otherwise, your adaptations will cause compensation and compensation is what causes pain. ⁓ Thank you.

Jen Porter (1:17:55)
Sue, you're such a lioness.

So as we close, I just want people to see that it's through your own journey and your own experience that you have found this passion and that you have done the work to do the research, figure it out.

Sue Hitzmann (1:18:10)
Yeah.

Jen Porter (1:18:16)
you know, connect with other people who were doing similar work to understand more. I you talked about reaching out to all these different, think it was in a podcast episode, you you called all these people to around the world to understand. And so you took that and you, you know, you didn't surrender your power. You actually leaned into your power to find out for yourself, then apply it to others and now apply and now thousands upon thousands of people.

Sue Hitzmann (1:18:27)
I did. I still do.

Jen Porter (1:18:44)
are being impacted by your work. And you said yourself, this is your purpose.

Sue Hitzmann (1:18:49)
Absolutely. It's really

a gift. It's really a gift. think, you know, my grandmother, my great grandmother had said it to me, what I thought was my curse would become my greatest blessing, this ability to feel vibration and frequency on things that sounded weird. You know, she saw it. She said it's a gift. And I think that when you can find your passion and your gift to anybody, think it's wonderful. it is true. Pain is what got me here. And I would just tell anybody, if you're really curious about fascia, go to the Fascia Research Society

Look at the research, come and find the real pioneers, not the people who are out there on social media telling you that they're the gurus, that they're the queens of fascia, that they know all things. the people are right. We only are just scratching the surface on what fascia's role is in longevity, in aging well, in pain. But we are really making headway because of technology. think in the next five to 10 years, we will really be able to

so many more disorders, lipidema, lymphedema, things that doctors are like, don't really know what to do with you. I think that as we uncover the roles of fascia and understand the components of fascia, the molecular components of fascia more efficiently, I think that we'll really make headway with Ehlers-Danlos, mixed connective tissue disorders, and so on. I think we'll heal a lot more people.

Jen Porter (1:20:07)
Amazing, amazing. I'm so thankful you're doing what you're doing. Yeah, and thanks for not keeping it to yourself, but sharing it with the world and helping so many others. So I'm gonna encourage everybody to check out the Melt, so meltmethod.com, Anatomical Gangster is the podcast. You've got two books, The Melt Method and Melt Performance.

Sue Hitzmann (1:20:11)
Thank you.

Always.

And I also

have my own website, SueHitzmann.com You can look at what I do, my speaking English.

Jen Porter (1:20:36)
SueHitsmann.com

and I'll have that in the show notes. But also there's so many YouTube resources that you can look at and watch, like see what this is, see what the Mount Method is. You can watch Sue walking us through it and reach out. There are trained professionals that can help work one-on-one with you, which is what I'm gonna be doing because our bodies are unique. Each situation is unique and the way that we move is unique.

So I encourage everybody to check it out and really lean into what awaits you, which is less pain and more fullness of life and more joy. So thank you so much, Sue. In the meantime, until the next episode, the lioness in me sees the lioness in you.

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