Celest Pereira ~ Physiotherapist and Yoga Teacher Discusses the Benefits of Functional Neurology

Celest Pereira, a physiotherapist and yoga teacher, discusses the importance of focusing on one main project instead of trying to juggle multiple streams of income. She emphasizes the need to prioritize and avoid spreading oneself too thin. Celest also explains the concept of functional neurology and how it can be used to evaluate and treat various physical issues.  Celest also shares insights on breathing techniques, pain perception, and the power of positive self-talk.

Visit Celest on her website: https://www.celestpereira.com/
On Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/celestpereiraphysio/
On YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/c/CelestPereiraYoga

Key Takeaways:

• Diversifying movement patterns is important for optimal brain mapping and overall physical well-being.
• Pain is an output of the brain and can be influenced by our thoughts and beliefs.
• Functional neurology can help improve movement and reduce pain by addressing the underlying neurological issues.

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Chapters

• 0:03 Introduction and excitement about having Celeste Pereira as a guest
• 0:26 Celeste's background as a physiotherapist and yoga teacher
• 3:08 The myth of having multiple streams of income
• 8:57 The misconception about always having the feet parallel in yoga
• 12:23 Explanation of functional neurology and its importance
• 15:58 The benefits of air hunger and its impact on forward folds
• 17:06 The importance of evaluating the whole body in physiotherapy
• 21:40 The significance of breathing techniques and their impact on pain
• 30:26 The turning point in Celeste's career and her discovery of functional neurology
• 33:18 Celeste's advice for dealing with back pain
• 47:28 The misconception about engaging the core and the importance of movement
• 52:01 The importance of listening to how you talk to yourself
• 57:50 Final thoughts on self-talk and trusting your body

Transcript

0:00:03 | A | I'm so excited to have Celeste Pereira here today. And Celeste, how are you feeling?
0:00:10 | Celeste Pereira | I'm feeling pretty good. I was just telling you off camera that it's been a really intense week, and so I'm very excited about the fact that it's Friday and that I'm going to get to rest this weekend. But outside of that, thank you so much for inviting me, your amazing podcast.
0:00:26 | A | Well, thank you. I love the content that you produce. It's so informative, and I'm excited to speak with you. You're a physiotherapist, is that correct?
0:00:36 | Celeste Pereira | Yeah, I am. I have my own online clinic, and I do see some people in person, but mostly around the world. I have different clients that dial in on Zoom, and then we do different sessions, and we evaluate their nervous system online, and we get some pretty intensely good results even though it's not in person.
0:00:55 | A | That's cool. And you're also a yoga teacher?
0:00:59 | Celeste Pereira | I am, yeah. I'm lucky enough to have my own app, and I teach twice a week in London, and yeah, I just absolutely love teaching yoga. I taught for many years, and then the pandemic hit, and we had to all Pivot online, and now that we're back in person again, wow, what a gift. Hey. What a gift to be back with the real people in the flesh.
0:01:22 | A | Yeah. And were you already up to speed with having an app prior to the pandemic, or is this something that you put all together because of it was.
0:01:31 | Celeste Pereira | Actually something I put together just as it finished, and yeah, gosh, what an experience that has been. It's a lot of work to run an app, but what's actually been so nice about it is that there are different people around the world that I get to connect with who ordinarily I wouldn't have had the chance to. So, yeah, it's been really good for that reason.
0:01:52 | A | That is so cool. I know. It's something that I think looks amazing whenever I see somebody put one together and I think I want to do it. And then I'm taught about how much work it would take, and I go, oh, my goodness. So how do you manage all that? What is your trick, your strategy for doing the marketing that is required as a self employed professional?
0:02:20 | Celeste Pereira | I think one of the biggest things I'd like to share with your audience is there is a myth in the world of being self employed that you want to have multiple streams of income. And so what a lot of us do is sorry, this is a little bit off piece from your question, but just bear with me. A lot of us do is we hear this advice, and so I'm speaking for myself now, but I wrote a book, I teach classes, I ran retreats and events and teacher trainings, and I started an app, and I then started really digging a bit deeper into people that really make it like, really make their business viable. And they often only have one big thing that they're working on, maybe a little side thing, but very, very often.
0:03:08 | Celeste Pereira | And what I'm finding now is that there isn't enough time to market everything effectively and to really nail it. And so one of the big things that this year has been about is actually tying up loose ends and actually trying to say no to more projects and then pivot so that we're taking just one main project and letting that be the main thing that you work on. Because it's a very good question. How do you have time to market everything and to run it well?
0:03:36 | Celeste Pereira | And the real answer is, if I'm very honest, I'm so stretched to an absolute brink. And it shouldn't be like that for us. We should be working extremely hard and we should be able to pause and step away from it and think, okay, now time to get inspiration. So that when I go back to the thing, there is something left in the tank. And I think that that has been the biggest learning for me is this myth of having multiple streams of income is really not sustainable unless you have a massive team, which most of us, we don't have access to. That.
0:04:09 | A | Yeah. Great advice. I appreciate that. Do you find that you've been able to employ that same theory and technique to other parts of, say, like your exercise routines or your exercise approach?
0:04:24 | Celeste Pereira | That's so funny. And actually, now that you're asking that question, I'm realizing it's a theme in my life to dip my big toe into the proverbial ocean and hope that some of its wisdom will come into me. Because I would say I'm similar in the approach to my exercise. Like, I'll compare myself sorry, that was my wake up alarm from my afternoon nap.
0:04:47 | A | No worries.
0:04:48 | Celeste Pereira | Six minutes late. Basically, I love climbing and I'll use the example of a good friend of mine who I climb with. She's just obsessed with climbing and so that's all she does. And she's really good at climbing, but I would get so bored if all I did was climb. And I absolutely love going to Calisthenics. I quite like just the fact that there's other people in the room and I can watch them struggling with pull ups and then some other people getting it.
0:05:16 | Celeste Pereira | I love lifting weights. I don't have a community that I do that with, but I have a gym in my building, so I go and I lift weights. I'm obsessed with kite surfing. Obsessed.
0:05:27 | A | Cool. I kite surf, too.
0:05:28 | Celeste Pereira | Obsessed.
0:05:29 | A | Yeah.
0:05:29 | Celeste Pereira | Do you? Oh, my God. We have to connect over that. And so any chance I get, I'm in the water. But I don't just do one thing. I also love dancing. I love yoga. So I wish I could say there was just the one path for me with that, but really I dipped my big toe in again, as I said.
0:05:46 | A | Yeah, it's a tough one to just I'm only going to do one thing.
0:05:51 | Celeste Pereira | For me for sure. I think, like I mentioned, my friend who's really into rock climbing, she's so determined with that that's her one thing. And I was trying to imagine myself giving up something to get good at one thing and I just genuinely couldn't.
0:06:06 | A | In relation to coaching your clients then, and you find someone that comes to you with an injury and perhaps I'm guessing you might investigate like what are your daily activities, what are you doing? Are you generally coaching people to try to diversify, to be able to heal? Or do you have a standard approach that you use in relation to that?
0:06:32 | Celeste Pereira | It's a difficult one because it really depends on the person. And I would say that if I had someone who is doing the same thing every single day and when I say, for example, I don't know, like a set sequence like ashtanga, all they do is that every single day they don't do anything else. I do tend to encourage them to diversify, but I'll give you a quick example. I just had my physio session that just ended before you.
0:06:59 | Celeste Pereira | She's a dancer and she does a variety of different movements, I mean, so complex, her movement history and she does a lot of different therapeutic movements to complement that. And yet she's really struggling with pain in her body. And with a little bit of evaluation of her history and also watching her move, I realized that she has a vestibular deficit, which means her middle ear is not operating quite as it should. And so we started doing few very basic tests of it and it was very apparent that the system is just not working well.
0:07:33 | Celeste Pereira | So no matter how much she rehabs or diversifies her training schedule, she's not going to get to the root cause of her problem. And what that's going to mean is it's almost I use the metaphor of fighting a forest fire with a pistol gun. You're going to get a few flames that are going to die and then they're just going to come right back up at you. And so that's why sometimes zooming out and looking more holistically at the body is far more effective. And I think physiotherapists and physical therapists, as they are called in America, have also been indoctrinated into this allopathic model of how the body works. When we're looking at the medical world, they put their blinkers on and if someone says, my elbow hurts, they analyze the arm or the neck. Maybe they'll go as far as the neck, but the problem could be as low as the toe or as high as visual issues.
0:08:28 | Celeste Pereira | And these seemingly unrelated problems actually do show up as pain in the body.
0:08:34 | A | Interesting. Good answer. I went through your Instagram page, which is amazing. Everyone listening. Please go follow at Celeste Pereira physio and I noticed that you said it's a myth that the feet should always be parallel. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by that?
0:08:57 | Celeste Pereira | It was just something that I noticed a lot in the yoga community where people were really encouraged to have their feet in parallel, whether that's in a downward facing dog or at the top of the mat in Tadasana. And whilst I do appreciate finding some kind of neutral alignment can be useful for a lot of stuff, I don't want people to think that that's the finish line. Like, let's call it a starting point, but it's so important for us to get good at lunging like a warrior or even in the gym with our weights.
0:09:28 | Celeste Pereira | Just get your feet out of parallel. And sometimes do things with internal rotation and sometimes do things with external rotation because our brain needs to map all of the possibilities and it can only do that through experience. So if we don't use it, we lose it. And what I see a lot in my clinic is that people have, just like you mentioned earlier, people have doing the same thing the same way over and over. And we're missing huge maps in our brain.
0:09:56 | Celeste Pereira | And people will often come to me with problems and it's either trauma related or disuse atrophy. And what those words mean is just that statement don't use it, you lose it. So they're actually getting pain in their body or having issues with focus, clarity. And it's mainly just because their brain is starting to shrink in size and it shrinks more rapidly the older we get. We actually have to increase demand on our brain rapidly as we age and demand on our physical bodies and our cognitive abilities to help keep our neural tissue intact.
0:10:35 | A | Great point. That made me think about I remember at one time someone had said in relation to say, Prasarita padotanasana or wide foot forward folding stretch, that okay, bring your feet parallel. If you want a deeper stretch, do an internal rotation. But if you're experiencing Sciatic pain, turn your toes into an external rotation or out. Do you think there's any validity to that or is that a bit of a myth as well?
0:11:02 | Celeste Pereira | What's happening when you go into internal rotation is you are putting those nerves on a bigger stretch. But to say that someone with Sciatica should just turn their feet out, I think people with Sciatica, depending on its severity, could still be quite compromised in a forward fold. So again, it would really depend. And also, I don't know if it's really appropriate if a yoga teacher would say a blanket statement like that in a yoga class, particularly because really, if someone has Sciatica, yoga can be quite aggravating simply because of all the forward folds. So did they say that for downward dog? Did they say that for every forward fold through the Suriname scar, it's actually less neural tension? Because the legs are abducted, they're spread apart.
0:11:48 | Celeste Pereira | When you're going into a forward fold, the legs are abducted. And that's even more aggravating for sciatica. So I would hope that if they are helping to rehab, that's great. But are you actually applying those same principles intelligently through the poses that are actually even more aggressive for those nerves?
0:12:07 | A | Nice. Good point. That's cool. I noticed that you have a terminology for ways that you teach called functional neurology. Can you give a little bit insight into what does that big word mean?
0:12:23 | Celeste Pereira | Yeah, functional neurology. Well, of course, we have a brain and what many people don't realize, let's use the example of having stronger legs to do your lunges better. That's a simple example. A lot of people think that to get the quad stronger, we have to load the quads. We have to keep doing more and more quad exercises. And they are absolutely correct. But a large percentage of the strength that's available to your body, in fact, even just the ability to move your leg, it all comes from the brain.
0:12:53 | Celeste Pereira | Every single thing that you do think, say, every process in your body, it's all governed from the central nervous system, everything. And people forget this. They really look at the body from the neck down. So when they want to get better at pose, they practice the pose or poses that look similar to the pose. But actually, there's so much we can do in terms of the brain. And I'll use a forward fold as an example if we want to get better at touching our toes.
0:13:22 | Celeste Pereira | This is called flexion in the body, right? It's a flexed spine and we've got flexion of the hips. To get better at that, we can actually, instead of just practicing forward folds, go to a brain region that sets your reflexive flexor tone, and two come to mind. The first one is in the brain stem, one of the oldest part of parts and lowest parts of your brain called the midbrain, and another part of the brain stem, which is called the medulla.
0:13:51 | Celeste Pereira | So you've got these two areas. Both of these have the job of reflexively getting your Flexitone to light up. And I can actually improve someone's forward folds by just lighting up those two parts of the brain. There's an old statement in neurology called neurons that wire together, fire together. So in the midbrain, for example, you've got little receptors that sense if you need to take a breath. And if you haven't breathed in a while, they'll start to contract your breathing muscles.
0:14:21 | Celeste Pereira | And they're also right next to the neurons that give you this ability to flex your body, like touch your toes. So if I get someone to hold their breath, I can actually light up the midbrain. And then when I recheck their forward fold, they can often go deeper. Another process that lives in the midbrain helps us to bring our eyes together you and I are staring at a screen right now looking at each other. So our eyes are in what we call convergence.
0:14:50 | Celeste Pereira | They're together. If we had to look out the window and look far away, our eyes would go into divergence. Now one of the ways I could get someone to be better at their forward folds is I can actually get them to practice convergence by bringing their thumb to the tip of their nose repeatedly. And then I get them to recheck their forward fold and again really frequently. I'm finding people can then do their forward fold so much better.
0:15:15 | A | Interesting.
0:15:15 | Celeste Pereira | So whilst we do want to do reps and repetitions because this helps to increase the brain's mapping and improve the muscles and the joints, of course, all of that's important. We can also shorten the time it takes to achieve things in the body by going to the neural tissue first.
0:15:33 | A | So cool. I did see a post that you did that said this is not real yoga, which I think is intriguing. What she's going to do that's not real? But you kind of demonstrated maybe going like you said, into a warrior pose and then doing that same technique that you just talked about, bringing the thumb close to your eyes and bringing it away and then coordinating that in different positions. I thought that was so interesting. I haven't seen that yet before.
0:15:58 | Celeste Pereira | Well, what's interesting is through the history of yoga, they did actually have different eye movements but it has kind of been lost a little bit in translation. People aren't utilizing some of those tools anymore. And I think it also just depends on like history is always written by whoever is popular at the time and I think that when Patabi Joyce and Ayengar kind of reached mainstream within the yoga world, a lot of the other kind of Tibetan practices that utilized eye movements sort of fell to the know. Thankfully we still have a really rich Pranayama that has infiltrated the practice for some styles though that hasn't really been integrated at its highest level.
0:16:37 | Celeste Pereira | I'm guilty of that as well. I'm definitely not pointing any fingers at anyone for this evolution. It really is the yoga teachers doing their best to serve their community in the way they know how. But yeah, I think that this is the thing about yoga in my humble opinion, is that it's a living art and that it's adapting. And I think it's important that we take time to look at all the different things that kind of formulate yoga and understand that potentially there's a few things that need to change as well as we move forward.
0:17:06 | Celeste Pereira | And we tweak the practice, really to help people to make, I should say this instead, to make yoga sustainable in their bodies.
0:17:14 | A | Very cool. Can you explain a little bit what you meant by the process of holding the breath? How does holding the breath fire the lower brain stem like you made mention of?
0:17:27 | Celeste Pereira | Yeah, the upper brain stem, the midbrain. It's called the midbrain, but it's actually the top portion of the brain stem. So all very confusing. So the brain stem has the ability to sense if you have elevated levels of carbon dioxide in your blood. And I want to use the example of a coffee drinker. So imagine someone's drinking coffee, if the more coffee you drink, the more immune to coffee you become.
0:17:54 | Celeste Pereira | Like, you've got these people who are like, I can drink coffee at eleven at night and I go straight back to sleep, no problem. And the reason they were able to do that is they have formed more receptors on their brain so that they have lot of availability to get that coffee molecule to bind. And if someone like me, who never drinks coffee, drinks a coffee, even if it's 05:00 a.m. In the morning, I will be running like a headless chicken until late at night because I have so few receptors, they bind so quick, they're all full. And I've got all this leftover caffeine which is rushing through my bloodstream, which makes me feel really jacked up.
0:18:35 | Celeste Pereira | So for me, I need to be really mindful of my coffee intake. Well, in your brainstem you've got these receptors which bind with carbon dioxide. And what we find when we look at the general population, because of the introduction of knives and forks and soft food, our palate has shrunk dramatically from our ancestors. In addition to that, our breathing space, for lack of a better term, has also shrunk. So imagine all the airways, I should call them all the airways of your nostrils and down into your lungs.
0:19:10 | Celeste Pereira | These airways have also become smaller. So what's happening is we're utilizing mouth breathing, unconsciously, particularly when we sleep, and actually even as far as when we're doing exercise. And what this is doing is it's blowing all of our carbon dioxide off. We're blowing a lot of it out of our bodies. So what happens is when we hold our breath, we don't have a lot of those carbon dioxide receptors on the brainstem.
0:19:40 | Celeste Pereira | So we hold our breath and all of the carbon dioxide that is in the blood quickly binds to those receptors. Then you've got a lot left over in your blood and your brain goes, it's too much carbon dioxide, I can't cope. So then you start to pant and you'll do a big breath to sigh and let it all out. And what's actually interesting is we can train our brain to develop more receptors for carbon dioxide by holding our breath.
0:20:06 | Celeste Pereira | And this is really important because we actually need to have a balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide for oxygen to be able to get into our tissues. So it's actually a useful thing to be able to learn how to hold your breath, because when you do, you increase your amount of carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide doesn't just let your oxygen float around in your blood. It's like opening the door of the taxi and it says, Please enter the tissues. And then oxygen is able to get into your brain and your muscles and your tissues, like your organs.
0:20:44 | Celeste Pereira | When I measure the oxygen saturation of someone who has a breathing pathology like COPD, we see that they have really great oxygen in their blood, but they have blue lips because they're not able to get the oxygen into their tissues. And when I ask them, can you hold your breath? They can do it for a few seconds and they start to pant. They would pant walking to the toilet, even if it's just a few steps away, and it's because of their CO2 tolerance is very low.
0:21:18 | A | Interesting. I'm guessing you had to have read Breath by James Nester.
0:21:25 | Celeste Pereira | Of course. What a legend. I interviewed him on my podcast.
0:21:28 | A | Did you really? No way. That's awesome.
0:21:31 | Celeste Pereira | He was the first interviewee, actually. I was like, you will come on my podcast and you're the first one. Legend. Yeah.
0:21:40 | A | That's so cool. I did write him to try to get him to be a guest, and he was kind enough to respond, which I thought was so cool, but he was extremely busy. But that's amazing that you got him on. Wasn't that fascinating to hear? The way he researched going down under the tunnels in France and looking at skulls from back prior to what you're talking about with the mushy food that we eat before when we were actually on carrots and celery and stuff.
0:22:05 | Celeste Pereira | He did a really good job of that book.
0:22:07 | A | So interesting. Did you ever read his other one, Deep, where he chronicled you know what.
0:22:11 | Celeste Pereira | I've heard of it, but I must get it. It's on my list.
0:22:14 | A | Just as entertaining. Yeah, he's brilliant. That's fascinating. So then when you're doing assessment of somebody and you're wanting to help them improve their, say, forward flexion ability, like, you're saying, Hold your breath. Are you just waiting for them to hold as long as they can? Are you saying, let's try to hold it for 30 seconds? What's your protocol in relation to that?
0:22:36 | Celeste Pereira | My protocol would be to do something called air hunger. I wanted to keep because what I'm explaining to you guys and those of you who are still with me, thank you. Because it's very complicated, some of the things I'm saying. And so when I first spoke about holding your breath, I tried to keep it as simple as possible, so I just said, Hold your breath. But since you've asked, actually, the way I would do it is something with a tool, which I believe everyone should do every single day. It's called air hunger.
0:23:02 | Celeste Pereira | And what air hunger is, is that you're doing movement whilst holding your breath after you've breathed out. So you'll breathe out all the air, you'll hold your breath and then you'll go walking or you'll do squats or push ups, whatever floats your boat. And what we want to do is we want to get people to do that body weight exercise, just until they feel that's enough and they only take one breath to recover.
0:23:31 | Celeste Pereira | And that's a really important distinction because what we don't want to do is push them so far that they then pant and release all their CO2. We want them to retain the CO2. So ideally, they would hold their breath until it's uncomfortable and then they go just the one breath. And then they would potentially have a period where they take a bit of time to just relax and then they would go again. They could do as many rounds as they feel comfortable doing.
0:24:00 | Celeste Pereira | And we just do see a really great upregulation of their Flexitone that goes for forward folds, push up, shoulder flexion. So if they trying to get into handstand or downward dog oh my gosh, this works incredibly well.
0:24:15 | A | Interesting. So let me try to imagine. I'm going to pick the squats. I take a big breath in, I exhale, I hold my breath with nowhere in my body, do as many squats as I can, but not too crazy, so that when I have to breathe, I take a big breath inhale, I exhale, and then you be calm. And just be calm. So don't go right back to the squats right away and then like, no.
0:24:41 | Celeste Pereira | Have a bit of recovery time. Have a little recovery time. Even if it's a few seconds, some people need longer. I work with people that have had severe brain traumas, and they're rehabbing from that. And because in the time that they've been trying to rehab, they've literally just been laying down. And so for them to try and hold their breath for a long time is really not appropriate. I don't want to spike their threat and push them further into their symptoms.
0:25:08 | Celeste Pereira | So I would get them sometimes to hold it just for 10 seconds and then to take a 1 minute break. Sometimes I would get people to do 15 squats holding their breath, and then they would take a 1 second break. Like, this is how variable it can be depending on the person.
0:25:25 | A | Got it. And you recommend every day and just make it like a five minute exercise. It doesn't have to be like an hour long thing.
0:25:31 | Celeste Pereira | It doesn't even have to be five minutes. When I go for my morning walk, I will just do three rounds of air hunger for as many steps as I can.
0:25:38 | A | That's cool. Air hunger. I like that.
0:25:41 | Celeste Pereira | It sounds weird, but it works so well. And I'll just give you one other reason why it works. Your brain stem is at the it's the oldest part of your brain, it's right at the bottom of your brain. And when we light up the brain stem, it's really powerful because we feed our brain, takes in fuel from the bottom to the top and the back to the front. It's literally like a sponge that you've dipped in water, and it has the mechanism to sort of absorb water from the back portion and slowly keep absorbing it until it reaches the front.
0:26:16 | Celeste Pereira | And so the brain stem, what we see is if people haven't got enough fuel going through their whole brain, that's when they really struggle. So sometimes I'm actually giving them all the right stuff. I'm giving them all these cool drills, and I'm really trying to give them my best physio stuff and nothing's working. And then later I'm like, oh, you don't have enough fuel. And the two forms of fuel that the brain takes in is oxygen and glucose.
0:26:44 | Celeste Pereira | So, like, what have you eaten today and how long ago, and how are you breathing? And potentially, there's something wrong with your brain stem, and so it's absorbing all of your fuel, and it's not getting to the rest of your cortex. And so if you do air hunger, it just helps to get bit more fuel to the rest of the brain. Because we're lighting up not only are we lighting up the midbrain, which is very near the bottom of your brain, but we're also sending additional fuel with the oxygen saturate with the oxygen, the CO2 levels, rather pulling the oxygen into the brain. So just lots of good stuff is happening.
0:27:23 | A | What has been your experience with exploring yogic style pranayama techniques? And then it sounds like obviously from the physio and or exercise science world, there's a certain way to approach breathing practices, like you mentioned. Have you explored, I don't want to say traditional, but like, old school yoga style breathing practices.
0:27:51 | Celeste Pereira | Yeah, I have. And I'll have to be honest with your community and say that not recently, because I've been down this rabbit hole of neuroscience and working quite hard on that and more on the functional rehab perspective. There are people who do trauma rehabilitation through a lot of the different hyperventilating techniques, and I don't know much about that, if I'm really honest. It's definitely on my path to get there.
0:28:16 | Celeste Pereira | There's just been a lot of other information, as you can hear, that's kind of taken the front seat. But what I can say is that one of the things that's really been highlighted to me through my personal journey with researching this content is that with Yogic breathing techniques, we just do need to be careful that we don't assume that these breathing techniques are good for everyone. Because what I would do in my clinical practice is I would test, like, I would give you air hunger, and then I would check, is your forward fold improving?
0:28:50 | Celeste Pereira | And if it doesn't, if it actually gets worse, that's a sign maybe air hunger is not the right breathing drill for you. And that's okay. We're all different. And I do feel that potentially, in the world of exercise, yoga breathing. Techniques. They're not testing their work. They're not testing does this nervous system want cold exposure? Does this nervous system respond well to a hot water bottle? Should we be doing Bastrika with this person? They're just going, oh, this is an ancient form of breathing, so it's definitely good. Let's go.
0:29:21 | A | Yeah, good point.
0:29:23 | Celeste Pereira | No. And the other thing is when we are doing hyperventilating techniques, whether that is for trauma release or it is just because you're in a yoga class, we need to put a bigger emphasis on recovery because of the CO2 that we are losing and because of the fact that in modern life we tend to release so much of our CO2. We don't have adequate blood gas levels and that's not across the board. Guys, I'm sorry if that came across as a blanket statement. It's just obviously I work with a very niche set of population, so take what I say with a massive grain of salt.
0:29:57 | Celeste Pereira | You are extremely resilient. Your body is very adaptable and I just want you to make sure that whatever you're doing, don't force it because you've been told this should be good for you. If it doesn't feel good, you are so welcome to abandon anything any teacher ever gives you. Don't feel forced to do anything just because you're told by someone else, this is good.
0:30:16 | A | Yeah, great point. What got you all fired up about all this? What was a turning point in your life where you realized, this is what I want to do, this is what I'm going to focus on?
0:30:26 | Celeste Pereira | I'm really glad you asked that because I really want to give a big shout out to the people and the teacher who's basically given me so much knowledge. I obviously did a degree in physical therapy and I worked as a physio and it was really frustrating because I just wasn't getting results with people, if I'm honest. I was doing traditional rehab, looking at someone who's not got pain in their knee and we'll strengthen their quads and strengthen their hamstrings and their glutes and their knee pain wouldn't go away.
0:30:55 | Celeste Pereira | And that was very frustrating. And it was around the beginning of the pandemic that I ended up meeting Dr. Eric Cobb, who he's just not given the credit he deserves. He's taught so many people about the brain and he's brilliant, absolutely brilliant. A genius of a man. And he created an education system called Z Health Performance. And in addition to my degree, I've just been slowly chipping away at all of his incredible courses.
0:31:29 | Celeste Pereira | And I feel like at last, utilizing the principles that he has shared, I'm at last able to make some real profound changes in the people that have come to see me for various different things as aggressive as brain trauma all the way through to simple. I had yesterday a lady, bless her, she had a terrible like a crook in her neck, we'll call it. Like, you know, when you wake up and you have a crook in your neck. Well, she's had it for two years, and for two years, this poor lady hasn't been able to really function very well. Terrible migraines off the back of this tension on her one side.
0:32:07 | Celeste Pereira | And actually, she's similar to the lady I saw today. I just gave her a few vestibular drills, and at last she was like, oh, my goodness, I can move. Like, this is life changing. And she was like, it's the first time in two years that I've been able to move my neck and my shoulder without any pain and that we were together for an. Like, it's just, you know, just credit to Dr. Cobb, dr. Eric Cobb, please look him up. Please look up Z health. Everyone in the world, please take his know, some of them are free. Even he's got loads of free YouTube content.
0:32:40 | Celeste Pereira | Just really worth devouring his content and going to the source. I know I share all this great stuff, but really, he's awesome. Very, very smart.
0:32:50 | A | Yeah, I will definitely check him out, and I appreciate you mentioning that. Do you mind if I ask you a personal question then, since you have you here? I have back pain. I have a degenerative disc in between my L five s, one with a spondylothesis where my L five is forward, but I've been dealing with it for a really long time. But then I finally pushed things a little way too far, which caused me to start getting MRIs and then going, oh, well, maybe that's why I have some back pain.
0:33:18 | A | And so I'm finding that extension does not feel good at all. Flexion feels great. What have you come across in relation to helping people rehab either spondylothesis and or degenerative disc down in Lumbar?
0:33:32 | Celeste Pereira | I'm so happy you asked this question. Thank you so much for sharing it. Your personal story.
0:33:37 | A | Oh, man, I can't wait to.
0:33:39 | Celeste Pereira | Honestly, I'm so jazzed that you asked this. Two big things I want to share with you, and then we can maybe talk about some strategies for your unique body. But I'm hoping everyone listens, just hears this next message. Like, they did this incredible study where they took a huge sample size of 3600 people is massive, right? And they analyzed people from the age of 20 to the age of 80 like they did every decade, 20 to 30, 30 to 40, 40, all the way through to they ensured that every single person in their sample size had no pain.
0:34:22 | Celeste Pereira | That was their one criteria.
0:34:24 | A | Wow.
0:34:25 | Celeste Pereira | And then what they did is they analyzed their backs. They started scanning their backs with MRIs to check what's going on in these people's spines. Do they have nothing going on? Do they have something going on? And what was so awesome is they found out that every single age bracket had something going on. It just slowly increased as people got older. But bear in mind, none of these people had pain.
0:34:52 | Celeste Pereira | They found spondylithesis. They found Degenerative, DYS disease, facet joint syndrome. Degenerative changes were across the board from the nobody had pain and the conclusion that they used when pain researchers started, they did some really cool studies to look at pain. But that was one of the big studies that really got researchers thinking that degenerative changes in your spine are very normal, but it doesn't mean you will end up in pain.
0:35:25 | A | Oh, gosh, that's so nice to hear.
0:35:27 | Celeste Pereira | It's so good.
0:35:29 | A | Doesn't that sound like I don't want to interrupt you, but doesn't that Dr. Sarno's work with healing your backs? He kind of know him. Okay, cool. Sorry. All right, I want to hear more. I don't want to interrupt you.
0:35:41 | Celeste Pereira | I just dropped my AirPod. That's why I did a woo. I want you guys to think of, like, this is where the pain research is so fascinating, because when these researchers started looking at all these amazing different experiments, they started realizing that pain has not got anything to do with your body necessarily. Pain is exclusively an output the brain chooses based off of how safe it feels. So potentially, you've got something wrong in your back, as you do, and potentially you'll feel pain because of that.
0:36:19 | Celeste Pereira | But very often, it's in combination with a lot of other factors. And I want you guys to remember this one important thing. There are no pain receptors in your body. But what we do have is something called nociceptors and nociceptors sense when you are under threat. Now, I want you to imagine a bucket. You wake up with the alarm. Wow. Crying out at you, and it shocks you awake. Your threat fills up a little bit.
0:36:49 | Celeste Pereira | First thing you do in the morning is you put the TV on. Guess what? The news is on. And there's a lot of bad stuff happening in the world, and it could affect your world. Threat fills up a little bit. You then get stuck in traffic. Your threat fills up a little bit. You've been sat in a chair all day disuse atrophy. Your threat fills up a little more. You then go to a yoga teacher's class, and she's constantly saying, make sure your knee is 90 degrees to protect your knee.
0:37:17 | Celeste Pereira | Don't do XYZ because you need to protect your back. Squeeze your core tight so that you keep your back safe. So she's instilling this message that you are vulnerable. Your threat fills up, and eventually something happens. Let's say you have a fight with your best friend or your significant other, your partner, and your threat overflows. And your brain is like, I can't keep you safe. My job is to keep you safe, and I cannot.
0:37:46 | Celeste Pereira | So I'm going to give you some pain because when you're in pain, it's going to slow you down. It's going to put you in bed. Now, that's not to say that pain is not real. And it's not to say that you can mind over matter pain if you've got serious things going on in your body. Like, what you've got is serious. But also we'll need to evaluate your eyes, your middle ear, your brain. How well are you processing the information coming into your brain?
0:38:12 | Celeste Pereira | Or did you suffer from a car accident? And your brain can't process the incoming information very well? That's very threatening. So things like dizziness, nausea, pain, stiffness, weakness, these are all signs that the brain is trying to keep you safe. I'll give another example. Imagine you're about to do a backflip, but you've never done a backflip before, ever. So you stand, you bend your knees, and you're like, okay, here I go.
0:38:43 | Celeste Pereira | What do you think the jump into the back bend is going to look like?
0:38:48 | A | Not very enthusiastic.
0:38:49 | Celeste Pereira | Yeah, it's going to be like, whoo. It's not going to be much of anything because your brain is going to make you weaker and smaller, and everything's going to tighten up because it knows that you've never done a backflip before. And the brain is always trying to predict the future. And it's like, I mean, if my past experience is anything to go on, this backflip is not going to go very well. And we are in danger of hitting our most valuable asset, which is our head.
0:39:15 | Celeste Pereira | And so you're not going to be able to go very far. In fact, you might even develop your pain. Your pain in your back might get worse. Oh, suddenly that feels worse for some reason. It's just because your brain is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You need to go back in your box, big man. You're not ready for this backflip, dude. And so the brain is always communicating with us, but unfortunately, it just uses really obscure methods of communication which don't give us a clear indication of what's wrong.
0:39:43 | A | Yeah, that's fascinating.
0:39:47 | Celeste Pereira | It's a good one.
0:39:49 | A | Wow. Well, first of all, it definitely made me think too, in relation to what I'm telling myself. Like, okay, back bending hurts, right? It's like, don't do it, don't do it. Maybe if I don't just put it about me, but just, like, say all of us in general, when we we if we feel like we figured something out, like, okay, this is what I need to stop doing, then one of the ideas. When I mentioned that author Dr. Sarno, he has a very similar theory to what you said in relation to what he's observed in his practice.
0:40:27 | A | And one of his ideas is that you should get right back to doing what you're used to doing because that reservation hesitation of like, oh, boy, if I do that, that's going to be worse. If I keep doing this, it's going to be worse. He's kind of pointing to what you're saying exactly the same. Like, we want to override that hesitation. Maybe the hesitation is what's causing the discomfort. So how do we find that fine line of knowing, I know that hurts me almost like if I hit my head on the wall and I know that hurts me, obviously, I don't want.
0:41:03 | Celeste Pereira | To keep doing don't want to do that. Yeah, I think it's a fine balance, right? It's a fine balance. So he's right. We don't want to get into something. What he's describing is the fear avoidance pattern. This is a really old theory. I mean, I went to university, I graduated in 2009, and we were learning about fear avoidance strategies then, which is a vicious cycle. You hurt, so you stop moving. And because you stop moving, you hurt more.
0:41:29 | Celeste Pereira | Because you're hurting more, you stop moving even more. And then you get, like, into this vicious cycle. So he's right. You want to train the body to move because movement is like motion is lotion, as they said. That cheesy little statement, which actually is so true. You do want to teach your body to tolerate some back bends. Maybe for you going into some wild ass deep dancers pose is not going to be appropriate.
0:41:56 | Celeste Pereira | But we do want to at least get you doing glute bridges, because that's a functional movement where we can get your glutes fired up, and that's like a nice extension to get your posterior chain working. So we do want to gently start to get your body used to some extension.
0:42:10 | A | Great answer.
0:42:11 | Celeste Pereira | However, I don't want you to ever put limits on yourself because maybe we could get you back to that. Dancers I don't want to ever say, oh, you'll never walk again. I don't want to say those words to anyone. What if they could? And then I've put that thought in their mind.
0:42:29 | A | Great point.
0:42:29 | Celeste Pereira | However, I would want to evaluate your whole system. And when I say that I work extraordinarily holistically. First of all, I'll take a very robust history and I'll look at what's happened in your past, like the lady today with your vestibular system. They're like little canals and there's fluid in there. And if someone has kind of hormonal issues, it affects how fluid the motion runs in your canals.
0:42:59 | Celeste Pereira | And a lot of her history was pointing towards hormonal things. So I was like, definitely her vestibular system is not working. I can see that looking at her history, even though she's a dancer. Like, imagine. So I would want to evaluate your eyes, your ears, your brain, how does it function? What's your sleep like? What's your diet like? But the biggest thing I'd want to evaluate is how are you talking to yourself when you're going into movement?
0:43:27 | Celeste Pereira | What are you saying to yourself when your back is sore? And I would really try and tease out the negative loops of my bloody back again, stupid back, honestly. Which really your back is just doing what it's supposed to do and letting you know that it's not safe. That's actually a good thing. So it's like developing a different relationship with pain would be a big step in the rehab process.
0:43:54 | A | Nice. Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for all this information. What are your thoughts on walking.
0:44:03 | Celeste Pereira | In.
0:44:03 | A | Terms of importance of walking, just in general? Do you recommend to your clients that are saying, it's painful for me to walk? Your kind of condition or even neck pain or shoulder, like sometimes when people are on their feet for a long period of time? Oh my God, it's so painful. Do you see just walking as a form of therapy?
0:44:27 | Celeste Pereira | That's a really good question. Tod. I use what we call gait analysis to check people's walking and I can tell a lot about what's going on in their brain looking at the way they walk, because there's certain patterns that come up again and again. Then when you tweak those parts of the brain, we see the patterns go away. It's really wild. So walking is very, very powerful. It's a very healthy thing to do. We've evolved to take many, many steps every day and we don't do enough.
0:44:55 | Celeste Pereira | I would say that movement is so, so crucial. So if you are someone who's going to walk, great. But I'll give the example of my dad. He's struggled with terrible arthritis since the age of 20. Walking is so painful for him and he just really loves to ride a bike. He just loves getting on his bike. So I would always encourage him, like, get on your bike when you take the dog for a walk because I don't want him to be in pain. I want him to have as much pain free time as possible.
0:45:24 | Celeste Pereira | And so it depends on the person.
0:45:28 | A | Good point. This is a totally off topic question, so for those listening, please bear with me. But I just have to ask Celeste this question. What size kite did you fly last time you went kite surfing? Seven meter seven?
0:45:47 | Celeste Pereira | Yeah. I'm just getting my jumps at the moment, so I'm just so I can't tell you the joy. It's just the best thing in the world.
0:45:55 | A | Strapped in or are you riding a surfboard?
0:45:57 | Celeste Pereira | I'm strapped in at the moment, I'm strapped in, but it's definitely a goal of mine to get a surfboard and.
0:46:03 | A | Obviously it's got to be so cold over there. Are you kiting in the winter or only in the summer?
0:46:08 | Celeste Pereira | Yeah, I kite all year round.
0:46:11 | A | Do you? So you do in the winter in England as well?
0:46:13 | Celeste Pereira | 100%. And it was so funny. I'm wearing a big thick wetsuit and I just messaged my brother, like, late last night going, we've got to go to the surf shop because the wetsuit that I've got is either not warm enough I get too cold, or the one that I've got that's thick enough, it drinks water like it's not a very good one. And I end up looking like the Michelin man. Do you guys have the Michelin Man in America?
0:46:37 | A | Well, we do.
0:46:38 | Celeste Pereira | The little chubby guy. That's how I look when I get out the water. Because the ankles are so tight, the water is not leaving, but the water is coming in. Exactly. So I'm powering up my kite, and eventually it's not strong enough to get me up, and I have to leave the water.
0:46:54 | A | Have you had that experience yet where you try to launch an air and you swing the kite really high back up, and you get up in the air, and then you don't coordinate the flow of the kite back forward again? You get completely body slammed?
0:47:07 | Celeste Pereira | Yeah, I love it.
0:47:09 | A | All right. I'm telling you, right?
0:47:11 | Celeste Pereira | You got to surround it.
0:47:13 | A | Yeah, that's cool. It's the best. Well, thank you for indulging me there. So when you offer yoga teacher training, what are questions that you find you get asked the most in relation to, say, anatomy and yoga?
0:47:28 | Celeste Pereira | So you're saying if someone wants to join my teacher training, what question would they ask?
0:47:33 | A | Well, no, when you conduct teacher training.
0:47:36 | Celeste Pereira | I see your point.
0:47:38 | A | What are some of the big questions that you get that you just feel like you get it again and again? Like you keep addressing.
0:47:46 | Celeste Pereira | I have to say I drop a lot of bombshells. And so people are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Did you just say we should not be engaging our core? That's the first thing that popped into mind. So it's less a question and more like, hang on, hang on. Did I understand you correctly? Big one, guys.
0:48:07 | A | Can you explain that?
0:48:08 | Celeste Pereira | Yeah. Oh, man.
0:48:10 | A | Why would I not want to engage my core or what am I getting wrong about this concept of core?
0:48:19 | Celeste Pereira | It's a pandemic of people just over engaging. Just like, let's use the bicep as an example over engaging. Let's just during this chat together, this next few minutes, just keep your bicep tense with me. We'll do it together. Just keep it up there. So really tense. Yeah. Come on, everyone at home, join us with a funny arm and really squeeze your fist and your bicep, like, really go for it. And just how long can you think you can sustain this intense contraction before it cramps up?
0:48:51 | A | I don't know. 60 seconds, maybe.
0:48:53 | Celeste Pereira | Maybe, okay. And how long are we expecting the core and pelvic floor to stay contracted?
0:49:00 | A | The pelvic floor to contract?
0:49:02 | Celeste Pereira | Yeah. Mullah and Udiana Bunda in a yoga class. Like, how long do we want that contraction?
0:49:06 | A | We're told if we're doing it for 90 minutes. For 90 minutes? Like, the whole time? Yeah.
0:49:11 | Celeste Pereira | Go on. Now squeeze your arm a little more for that 90 seconds and then relax. And try and now do dexterity with that hand. Imagine you're going to pick up a crystal glass. We expect so much from these muscles. They haven't evolved to grip into a single rigid hold. They've evolved to adapt to the pressure system. Put your hands on your ribs and feel your ribs are moving because air is filling up your ribs, your lungs rather, and this is making your diaphragm push down. Now move your hands to where your belly is.
0:49:46 | Celeste Pereira | What's happening to the organs? They should be moving and so the core should be loading eccentrically. That means that muscle fibers are lengthening as you inhale and concentrically as you breathe out. And when a muscle moves through range, it's a healthy, strong muscle. You're engaging it into a single rigid hold. That muscle is not strong. You take anybody who keeps their muscle on one single level contracted. It's not a strong muscle.
0:50:18 | Celeste Pereira | It's very weak. It's overactive, but weak cannot do a good bicep curl. If you hold your bicep at a single rigid hold for 90 minutes, you're not going to get your best rep. And so it's the same with a core. We need to load along with respiration. When you look at ultrasounds of the pelvic floor and the core, you can actually see the muscle fibers doing this, which is eccentric concentric. Eccentric concentric.
0:50:47 | Celeste Pereira | As the diaphragm moves, they move together. Imagine the cogs of a machine. Imagine four cogs and how when they turn, the other one turns. Now jam one of them straight. What's going to happen to the others? They're not going to move. So your diaphragm leads the charge, right? The diaphragm is moving. It wants to keep you alive. It's moving up and down. But now your core is rigid. What's going to happen to the diaphragm?
0:51:15 | Celeste Pereira | It's not going to be able to move as well. It's going to be rigid too. And your diaphragm, everyone thinks the core is your trunk stabilizer. It is. But my God, the diaphragm. The diaphragm connects low as L three, and it is your biggest core stabilizer. And it is a powerful muscle and it needs to move to function well. When we get people to grip at 30%, we see a reduction in lumber stability.
0:51:45 | A | That makes me then we're in downward facing dog. Don't try to really squeeze core just in any pose. Just let it in any situation. Don't grip it. That blows your mind.
0:52:05 | Celeste Pereira | Every single class I take, navel to spine, engage your core, squeeze it tight. Your back is vulnerable. And I'm like you're not taking into account the pressure system when your core moves. It's not vulnerable. That's a strong position. You've got a lot packed in. You've got air. Diaphragm is contracted as it's moving down. Yes. Pelvic floor and transverse abdominals are loading eccentrically, but they are not weak. There.
0:52:31 | Celeste Pereira | It's like taking your bicep curl example again and lowering your weight down to the ground. It's not weak, it's just lowering down. Yes, it looks really strong when you curl it up against gravity, but that doesn't mean that it's weak.
0:52:46 | A | Interesting. So then you're implementing during your own practice. Just relax. And then every now and again, when it seems appropriate. If I have to squeeze, go ahead and squeeze it. But then I'm aware of that. Relax again and just keep breathing. Nice.
0:53:01 | Celeste Pereira | If you can squeeze it if it's appropriate. So, for example, a lot of people who've had core and pelvic floor trauma, maybe they've delivered or maybe they've had an operation. They maybe lose connection, that neural connection to those muscles. So sensory feedback would be really important. Like placing your hands on all of those different muscles and feeling the relationship of what a contraction versus a relaxation would feel like.
0:53:22 | Celeste Pereira | That's awesome. If they are doing a movement that's very demanding, tuning into those muscles, feeling it contract and release along with the breath, there should be no rigid holds. And then in addition to that, recognizing that that is the starting point but not the finish line. The finish line is that you reflexively let the brain do its thing. You shouldn't be overriding those unconscious processes with your conscious demands.
0:53:48 | Celeste Pereira | And this is especially a good example. Again, the bicep. Let's imagine I'm about to drink a cup of water. Who thinks about their bicep when they're drinking water?
0:53:59 | A | Nobody.
0:54:00 | Celeste Pereira | And who whacks themselves so hard that they have blood coming out of their face? Or who struggles to lift the cup up because they're not engaging into their bicep enough? It's a very small percentage of the population with those two issues. Most people just drink the water without thinking. They're busy typing, talking on the phone, listening to the radio all at once, and they're drinking their water hot drinks.
0:54:27 | Celeste Pereira | Just the right amount of sensitivity coming to their lips, just the right amount of tilt. And we're not thinking about it.
0:54:35 | A | Yes.
0:54:35 | Celeste Pereira | Why do we have to think about the core so hard? Just trust your body, please. Your body is so smart. Stop messing it up with thinking about everything so intensely. Your body's got this amazing just move and relax. Chill out.
0:54:54 | A | Amazing. You've been trained in the physio world as well as the yoga world. What are your thoughts on loaded flexion? For example, like a pose, standing leg raises or titasta padangustasana. You grab your foot and that's like a heavy item and you're in flexion.
0:55:10 | Celeste Pereira | That's pretty good.
0:55:11 | A | What do you think?
0:55:11 | Celeste Pereira | Pretty good.
0:55:12 | A | You like it?
0:55:12 | Celeste Pereira | Yeah, it's great.
0:55:13 | A | Yeah, I love it. Do you feel like in the physio world is there this idea that you should never do loaded flexion or I.
0:55:20 | Celeste Pereira | Mean, maybe, but I hope not. Your body is resilient and strong. You can do so much as long as you've progressively built up to it. Go for it. Your body. Oh, my God. Guys, just listen to me. Your body is so resilient. It can do so much. The big problem is we've been told we're fragile. Yeah, we are not fragile.
0:55:44 | A | I feel the underlying theme of your message. I like it.
0:55:48 | Celeste Pereira | I mean, if you want to get really good at anything, progressively build up to it. But don't think that it's wrong or bad. Please don't ever let those thoughts enter your brain because they've done all these, again, really cool studies where they analyzed different verbal cues. And it's actually a bigger issue that we're telling people to do something to protect our joints. That's a bigger issue than actually doing the movements, because your brain works on a predictive mechanism.
0:56:21 | Celeste Pereira | It's trying to predict the future. Am I safe? Am I safe if I do this? Am I safe if I do that? Now you're being told do this to protect your knee. Oh, my knee needs protection. Oh, okay. I've got to be careful with my knees. I got to be careful how I move. Now we're in the fear cycle. Remember that vicious cycle I spoke about? Oh, I'm not going to move as much with my knee because my knee is vulnerable. I need to protect my knees. The yoga teacher told me my knees. Be careful with your knees.
0:56:46 | A | Yes.
0:56:48 | Celeste Pereira | Imagine if every yoga teacher was like, your knees are so strong and so resilient. Just today we're going to go knee over ankle. Tomorrow we're going to go knee beyond ankle. The next day, knee behind ankle. You're going to get good of all of them. If it doesn't feel right, ease back to neutral. And then we're going to slowly get you ready to go to all the ranges possible because your body can do it. We just have to get you there.
0:57:12 | A | It yes. Celeste, that's awesome. I'm so excited I got a chance to meet you.
0:57:18 | Celeste Pereira | Thank you.
0:57:19 | A | So mean. I can't believe it's already almost an hour and I still have so many questions. But I think that's probably so much information for anyone listening to digest. Usually I find an hour is just good enough to then take a couple of deep breaths and chill out after. Is there anything? What do we miss? What could I ask you or any final thoughts that you really want to hit home with here to conclude.
0:57:50 | Celeste Pereira | I think the biggest one is really listen to how you talk to yourself. I know you get told this low, everyone's heard it before, but I mean really listen. Like, what exactly are you saying to yourself moment to moment? And if the thoughts are very unconscious and just running away from you, could you just take a moment to pause and tune into this supercomputer utter, most precious gift you've been given, which is your body, and just send some good energy down into it. Say thank you.
0:58:22 | Celeste Pereira | I don't even know if half the things that you do even are in existence in medical literature. That's how complex you are. And you're just doing it for me. Like, you're just doing it and I don't always drink enough water or get enough sleep. I work really hard or I put myself second, and yet here you are waking up for me each and. Every day, just thank you. Thank you for that. Just once a day, if you could just sneak in that little narrative or if there is a movement that you're struggling with, like your back bends when you're slowly grading your body up towards it, just be like, I trust you so much.
0:58:57 | Celeste Pereira | You've got me this far. I can ride the water with a kite, for God's sake. That's so impressive. And it's because of your incredible abilities. Body. Like, thanks. As if you're talking to a kid. You would always want to say nice things to your kids, and you would want to build them. Please, please give yourself that same kindness. It's so important.
0:59:21 | A | Beautiful message. That's amazing, Celeste. Well, what a treat. I'm so thankful, and I appreciate you accepting the invitation and being so kind, and I can't wait to just keep digesting more of your information that you're putting out. It's just so great. So. Thank you, Celeste.
0:59:42 | Celeste Pereira | It's a huge pleasure. And I'd like to also thank you for inviting me to all your listeners and especially for all your well prepared questions. Thank you so much. I know how much time and effort a podcast like this takes, and so, yeah, you're really serving so many people. Doing my message always say is, even if you just reach one person, you've made a difference somehow. And I know for a fact that you're reaching that one person and making a difference to them. So thank you to you, too.
1:00:08 | A | Thanks, Les. I'll see you soon.