Jodi: Hello, I’m Jodi Cohen, your host. And I’m so excited for this amazing conversation we have in store today with my dear friend Kelly Kennedy, who is a biological investigator and a lymph queen. Like many in the world of biological and energetic healing, Kelly had her own traumatic experiences that motivated her to find another approach to health.
And her training started traditionally at Cornell University with a desire to be an allopathic medical doctor. However, one particular year she was faced with her own health issues and the premature passing of her father. These experiences confirmed what Kelly intuitively knew in her bones – that good health was not restored through prescriptions.
So after 23 years of building a health and wellness practice based on bioregulatory medicine, Kelly is now paving the way for a new wellness system to be born. A bioregulatory system where therapists, doctors, and specialists work collaboratively within a paradigm that focuses on allowing the innate intelligence of the body of each unique individual to truly heal the body.
I’m excited to talk about that, along with regulation and lymph. So, Kelly, for those people who aren’t really familiar with the lymphatic system or the fascia system, can you just give a brief overview of what you see as the key to health?
Kelly: Absolutely. Well, Vibrant Blue. I’m very happy to be here, Jodi. And Jodi is a very dear friend, and she’s a dear friend for two reasons. One, anybody that helps me in the clinical setting to get more effective and efficient with clients, I’m super happy about. But Jodi’s a very heart-centered person, and any of you who have been working with her know that she puts her heart and soul into her work.
And I have so appreciated getting to know Jodi throughout the last couple of years. So I’m very excited about teaching all of you about lymph and fascia. You must know a little bit because if you’re in Vibrant Blue oils, you’ve got fascia and lymph, hopefully, one (Vibrant Blue oil) in each hand.
But to talk about your fascia and lymph, a lot of people think about the human body and they instantly go into the circulatory system, the digestive system, the endocrine system, all these systems. And there’s compartmentalization and there’s, “Oh, I’m gonna go see my ENT for this, and my gastroenterologist for this, and my endocrinologist for this.”
And nobody talks to anybody else. My dentist has nothing to do with my health, right? So I go see them once when I have to and it’s all this compartmentalization. And for me, that’s like looking at a car and going, “Okay, I’m gonna take my transmission to somebody, and then I’m gonna take my engine to somebody else, and my tires to somebody else.”
I never used that analogy before, that’s ’cause of you and I.
But that’s what it’s like. It doesn’t make any sense. You gotta look at the whole car and why is it not running, and a car – like us – compensates. If we’re up against a stressor, it’s gonna help compensate. Adapt is another word for that, and regulate is another word for that.
Those are all synonyms. This means that my body is trying to account for what it’s up against and it’s gonna do the best job it can at any moment in time. It’s never gonna make a mistake. It’s always going to be here for my survival and that’s its job, as the mammal of the 3D that it is. It is here for survival.
The spirit part of me? We could have a whole different conversation about that. But from a fascia-lymphatic perspective, the fascia is actually holding all those systems that we just talked about in one unit together. We start embryologically when we are conceived as a zygote and then churn into an embryo.
We actually start as fascia. We start as a fascia and a tongue, and then as the tensegrity, as the pressure actually, and the tension between the fibers actually creates a form that holds a structure that then allows the organs to grow inside of it. And it’s all housed in the fascia and the fluid that moves in and around the blood in the organs, which we have three times more of this fluid than we do blood, is called the lymphatic fluid. And that lymphatic fluid should be like water.
And as you and I both know, there are many phases to water. It’s more than just a liquid, a solid, and a gas. We know there’s a fourth phase of water and a fifth phase of water now, and that the fourth phase of water is more like plasma.
So it’s not really a solid, it’s not really a liquid. It can kind of bounce between the two. And the plasma part of us is our lymphatics. It’s the spaces between the cells.
And when allopathic medicine compartmentalizes, I mean, if I ever get in a car accident again, please take me directly to the hospital, to the emergency room where they’re gonna compartmentalize, and they’re gonna make sure that all my parts are sealed.
But then let me leave there and go to my acupuncturist, my chiropractor, my body worker, my wellness practitioners, and my spiritual healers to find out why I got in the car accident and how I’m gonna actually help my body get through that trauma, that drama, and this, and whatever else happened from that car accident.
To allow the body to heal.
The lymphatic fluid, I look at it as the fabric that holds us together, which is our electrical fabric because it’s made of collagen. And collagen is what holds the electricity in the body where the minerals really cycle through that system and create the information highway through the fascia, and then the lymph is the plasma inside of it, it kind of magnifies that information, that signaling, because all of life is vibration and information.
We know that from our beautiful Vibrant Blue plant oils. Oils are vibration and they have information. Different plants have different information and that’s why Jodi, when she created her combo, she was like, “Okay, all these plants are good for the lymph. So rather than giving seven oils, why don’t we put seven oils in our lymph, create a combo, and now that’s called lymph.”
Beautiful. That all those plants have different information for the lymph. And so we give it to the body and let the body and its innate wisdom decide what it’s gonna do with that.
But that vibration is magnified in the lymphatics and then that lymphatic fluid. It’s part of our circulatory system and it dumps into the cardiovascular system. Our lymphatics end right above our clavicle. And when I say it’s a circulatory system people think, “Oh yeah, I have lymph nodes in my neck, right?”
Little kids, lymph nodes. That’s what most people know about lymph. I had my tonsils out. I know my lymph. That’s it. If somebody knew somebody had cancer, we might know that word. Lymph and cancer, I don’t know, but they’re somehow connected. But the reality is we have 600 to 1,000 lymph nodes which are tiny little organelles, little organs, think of them that way. But the largest one’s 25 millimeters.
They’re tiny. You have between 600 and 1,000 of ’em though. And in between each of those, you have vessels, much like we have veins and arteries that go to organs, we have vesicles and lymph nodes.
And they literally go from our head to our toe and we have about 20% of our lymph nodes in our neck, about 50% in our gut, that 70% and 30% is heckled throughout the rest of the body, speckled.
And mostly we have the largest concentration of nodes in and around where we bend. So wrists and elbows, and shoulders and neck, and hips and ankles, and knees and toes. So around our joints is where we have the largest concentration and lymph only moves if we move.
Movement can be as simple as breathing, but conscious – not shallow – conscious breathing. Opening up the ribcage and then dumping the ribcage. I wanna give a little anatomy if I can, we talked about the fascia’s made of collagen. Let’s talk about the organs that are related to our lymphatic system.
In our lymphatic system, we have our tonsils and our thymus gland – the thymus gland is where our T-cells mature, if you don’t know much about immunity.
Everybody’s kind of heard of T-cells and B-cells. These are two main types of white blood cells. The thymus gland is where the T-cells mature, and the bone marrow is where the B cells mature, and both the thymus and the bone marrow are part of your lymphatic system.
The tonsils are the gatekeepers to your lymphatic system. The spleen is your largest lymphatic organ, and that’s where the body toxifies not only the red blood cells but helps create white blood cells.
Your peyer’s patches, which are your small intestines, create white blood cells.
That’s part of your lymphatic organ and your appendix, you know that thing that people have taken out all the time, they don’t know what it’s for? The “optional organ”? The gallbladder for some reason is an optional organ, somehow?
Neither one are optional. You didn’t come with spare parts. And the appendix is actually a lymphatic organ. We know now that it stores probiotics.
Jodi: Lymph and immunity, ’cause I don’t think people realize that your lymphatic system is your immune system.
Kelly: Western medicine science hasn’t said those words, Jodi Cohen, but I, Kelly Kennedy, have said these two things. I would also project two things.
The ovaries are part of your lymphatic system. They haven’t been determined to be so yet. But I would like science to prove me right that the ovaries are part of your lymphatic system. And I would agree after I just explained all that.
After you hear all that, how the hell do you not, “Well, isn’t that just my immune system?” Now it could be argued that the entire function of our being is our immune system because immunity is living, lack of immunity is not living. We can’t, again, compartmentalize and go, “Well, if I just had a lymph system but didn’t have a liver, I could still have an immune system.“
No, you need all your organs – no spare parts. But I do know that without a lymph system, you die. And I do know from my research, having had cancer so prevalent in the world that I come from, for my father had Hodgkin’s disease, he had cancer seven times. I didn’t wanna get cancer, I wanted to become a doctor, so I didn’t get cancer. I was very selfish then. But I was willing to teach other people when I figured it out.
And so here I am, 24 or 25 years later. Now realizing that what I didn’t understand then that I now know is that cancer is the body’s answer, as horrible as that sounds, but it’s the truth to bringing energy and flow where there is an energy and flow and that the flow state, which is fascia, lymph, and optimize your wellness, is your fascia is open, which is your antenna to all the information, and then it’s magnified in your lymph which flows well because you’re moving, and then it dumps into the cardiovascular system, and then it circulates and all that’s working well.
Then you breathe out more toxins than you do anything else. You’re gonna poop out a lot of toxins. You’re gonna pee out a lot of toxins. You’re gonna sweat out a lot of toxins. And back to my theory, you’re gonna bleed out a toxin if you are a woman, and whether you’re a man or a woman and you have an ejaculation, I would conjecture that’s also a way your body detoxifies.
Any fluid leaving your body is a way for your body to get rid of toxins. So all of those things are an opportunity for the body to drain out the toxic load.
And that my friend, is the purpose of the body to receive information, whether that’s nutrition, spiritual, mental, emotional, or 3D like nutrition or liquid. Like, I need water, right? And then it’s receiving what I need, moving through, letting go of what I no longer need, and stepping into who I now am as my new present self. Because I’ve let go of what no longer serves me and moved forward into what now does serve me, and this is the flow of life.
Jodi: Amazing. And stagnation and congestion stop the flow. So it’s a little bit like a river flowing water. Things move, a lake or a pond, it gets stagnant. The bugs, everything kind of festers.
Kelly: Sorry, but I just wanna reiterate, both fascia and lymph have one main thing in common: Hydration.
Jodi: And not just drinking fluids.
Kelly: In breath, in being in parasympathetic [state]. We’re gonna talk about how to pump your lymph. We’re gonna talk about ways to enhance your fascia and all that. But when we use the parasympathetic oil, one of the favorites that I often use in clinical settings, when I go to apply this to somebody’s skin or I have them smell it, their body has to mobilize that now and it’s going to take water to transfer that out.
And if we are dehydrated, it’s going to be stuck.
You can do your fascia rolling, you can do your lymph pumping, but if you’re doing it all in a dehydrated body, you’re working against yourself. And we get dehydrated when we’re in the sympathetic; when we’re in anxiety. And we stay in hydration when we’re in parasympathetic, and we breathe in slowly, we actually get a lot of nutrients when we breathe in, and then when we drink water – that we either inform with our words, with our minds, with our hearts, with light, with vibrations of some sort, and we structure that water, that water has a better opportunity to hydrate us and to restructure the body or the water inside of our body, which will then hold the information better.
Because the water is the librarian of the body. It’s holding all the information, and if we don’t have enough water, then it can’t hold even the best information.
So please make sure you hydrate and that the water is bioavailable, meaning it’s electrically charged. It’s not flat, dead water. If you’re distilling your water, you’re filtering your water, you’re drinking purified water. It needs to be reconstituted and made alive by structuring it. If you’re reverse osmosing, you’re restructuring, you’re hydrolyzing it, whatever, just drink structured and hydrolyzed but vary your water as well.
Jodi: Are you a fan of electrolytes and mineral drops? And what do you do to revitalize your water?
Kelly: Oh, that’s cute. The woman who sits next to me at conferences. Do I remineralize my water and use electrolytes? I literally carry in a bag and I put out all this stuff for all my friends and I start passing the bottles around.
I’m like, “Did everybody take their electrolytes and their minerals today and get all your creams and your lotions on?” So that we’re moving our lymph and we’re able to receive all this wonderful information that we’re here to gather at this conference. So yes, Jodi, I’m a huge fan. I love her interview style. It’s so great. I’m much more of a fireside, like we know each other well, let’s be honest. But electrolytes and minerals, absolutely. I’ve run a practice for 18 years and we’ve helped people from all over the world with all sorts of illnesses, and I’m happy to help ’em with their supplementations and all that.
But you and I both know the majority of people that come into my center dealing with chronic illness are honestly, even to this day, most people that are just living a more holistic lifestyle. They’ve been on supplements for years. The same supplements for years. That’s not called a supplement. That’s called a dependent.
When a supplement is a supplement for a little while, and then I let something take over because I just had to supplement it for a little while. But if you have to do it every single day, you’re dependent upon it. It’s a dependent. I feel our job as practitioners is to get the body to take over what it couldn’t do. That it was stuck, that we allowed it to open up and facilitate it and then let it take over.
Jodi: I look at it like training wheels, you know, I don’t know any adults that are still biking with training wheels, or using water wings. Use them until you learn how to swim or learn how to bike.
Kelly: But the one thing that I will say that I don’t find that we can take our training wheels off yet is minerals, because our soils are depleted. And until Dr. Zack Bush and Sadhguru or some others fix our soil problem and get everybody to be regenerative farmers versus industrial farming and genetically modified farming, right?
When we go back to nature and regenerate our soils and allow the minerals to be regenerated, then the food we eat will actually have minerals in it. We’ve all heard the food today doesn’t have the mineral source that our great-grandfather had – eating an apple today, you have to eat 10 apples to get the same level of nutrition compared to things in the 80s.
Jodi: I was alive in the 80s, the food of my childhood is different from the food of today.
Kelly: 100%. So we just have to remineralize pretty much forever now. And where do we get minerals? We take minerals in liquid forms or powdered forms because colloidal minerals are rocks. And if you eat a rock, it’s gonna come out rock.
I only like ionic or powdered minerals. And I like them to be the full gamut, as well as getting people on electrolytes, which are the four main minerals, which are sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium, which are the ones that really run your heart and run your nervous system. You just need more of ’em. That’s why they’re the basic four.
So I do like people to take extra electrolytes, particularly when you’re working your lymph and your fascia, ’cause it gets pumped out because you’re peeing a lot of your toxins out through your urine. And because you know your lymph and your kidneys work together for your lymphatic fluid, all your fluid retention, or your fluid balance rather, in the body is done through the lymphatic. All with the help of your kidneys. Your kidneys filter 250 liters of fluid a day. And there are only five liters of blood in your body. So what do you think it’s filtering? I actually never made that connection before, but that’s really good. Okay, so there are 250 liters of fluid filtered through your kidneys a day, and you only have five liters of blood.
Do you think it’s just going through your kidneys that much or do you think there’s maybe other fluid in your body that it’s working through and that’s your lymphatics? Which we don’t know, but there’s about eight to 12 liters of lymphatic fluid in the body. And it’s obviously cycling all that, but there’s a different ratio is what I’m getting people to understand.
Jodi: Could you talk a little bit about lymph congestion and why things get congested and the main areas of congestion?
Kelly: The main areas of congestion are where there’s tightness and stagnicity from lack of movement. So a lot of women watching this are probably wearing wire bras.
I invite you to take that wire bra off, which is a dam for your lymphatic system, and throw it away, and never, ever, ever, ever, ever again in your life wear a wire. It’s metal, it’s going over your heart. That’s not good. But more importantly, it’s creating a dam over that. So our breast is fatty material, fat is where the body wants to store toxins.
This is typically for a lot of women, it’s the fattest area of our body. It’s a safe, benign area for the body to store toxins. We might disagree with that as women or men or whoever, that I need my breast, but from an organism’s perspective for survival, not needed. So I’m gonna store the toxins there as a body. Now, if I put on a bra, first I’m gonna shave my armpit in the morning. I’m gonna get some micro-nicking from my razor. Then I’m gonna blast it with some chlorinated water, which has over 7,000 chemicals in it. Then I’m gonna put some aluminum deodorant on my armpit. Then I’m gonna take a bra and I’m gonna put a wire right here create a dam.
And 75% of my breast’s lymphatic drains right here. And then that drains up to the armpit. But right now, that’s all clogged because aluminum’s job is to stop the lymphatic flow, and so it literally stops. It stops being sweaty. It’s supposed to stop sweating. Well, that’s stopping the lymphatic flow. Yeah, so sweating is positive, by the way.
That wire bra dams it up and if it’s not a wire, it could just be a tight bra, a bra that leaves lines on you, or socks. I have stockings on, and I have found two brands.
I can’t think of the name of ’em right now, but whatever they are- Their elastic isn’t so tight on the top. It’s softer. The ones I have on today are more not cloth, they’re like actual nylon. I actually cut the elastic off because it cuts me. I don’t know how many women wear pantyhose and then like eight hours later they’re like, “why I haven’t peed all day?” Because it’s all held together. It’s like your fascia is so tight. Pantyhose is a great analogy for that, but it’s the stagnicity that creates that. Sitting creates stagnicity. I’m blocking my lymph right now by sitting and crossing my legs. I’m blocking my lymph. And so to change that I have to stand up. Every once in a while I gotta open up. I gotta move.
There are other things that actually clog our lymph, which is chemicals and metals. They make the lymph thicker instead of like fluid. So water, if it’s got 7,000 chemicals in it, your body’s gotta filter that out before it can use the actual beneficial aspects of it. So buy a filter or be a filter. Your lymph is your filtering system. Air filtration.
We just moved our house. We moved from an old ranch-style, 60-year-old house in Pennsylvania, Bucks County, If anybody knows that area. I’ve lived here for 20 years. I haven’t found a house yet until my brand new construction house that I just moved into that doesn’t have a mold problem.
Like, every one of these houses has basements and mold, and they’re old homes and there are critters, and we live in the woods, and that’s what we do.
There was no choice but to have an air filter because we also live near a stone quarry, and the dust was red and it was like in the air, it was on the cars. You have to have an air filter because we like fresh air windows, but I don’t wanna breathe that in.
So when I would, at the old house, take the top of the air doctor off and take that filter off every two or three months – I’m like, “Oh my God, that’s disgusting. I am so glad I have that filter in so my lungs and my son’s lungs and my pet’s lungs and my husband’s lungs aren’t breathing that.” And I thought it was gonna be so different.
Cause I haven’t lived in anything but an old kind of farmhouse for 20 years. We move into a brand new construction house. I let it outgas for two months because I’m that person. I go in, I put in the filters, I put in the EMF blocking and I’m like, we’re opening the windows and we’re not moving in for two months. We’re letting it outgas. And the first month I pull the filter off and was like, are you kidding me? It was all the construction dust settling thick like hair on the filter. Buy a filter or be a filter. Air and water. Change ’em. And change your filters. And that’s why you have to move your lymph. And then so metals and chemicals sitting still, and then foods.
Foods that our body shouldn’t eat. So I’m not a huge fan of a diet that’s right for everybody. I don’t think there is one. I think throughout our time in life, there are different needs that we have. Men versus women. Cycled all those things. Your daughter was rowing in college.
She and I should not be eating the same things and in the same quantities, even though we’re both women. And I was a rower when I was in college, but I’m not a rower anymore, so I shouldn’t be eating the same way Carly eats now.
That being said, I do think there’s some validity to the blood type diet from the perspective of avoiding the foods that our blood type has difficulty breaking down that would create lecithins that would then create essentially thicker lymphatic fluid because lectins are gonna make that fluid thicker. It’s the acid thing. So avoiding the foods that you should avoid.
I’m an A blood type, sweet potatoes are an avoid. Do I avoid them? 100% no, but do I buy three a week thinking I’m doing well? No. And what I noticed, Jodi, is that when I stopped doing that because I was a superfood woman, I was an orthorexic a little bit. It’s three sweet potatoes a week with black beans and all the things, and I was bloated all the time, but I didn’t know it, because I was bloated all the time. And then I stopped eating the sweet potatoes and I was like, oh, my stomach flattened. I was bloated.
Jodi: Yeah. I’m also A type, and when I don’t eat dairy, um, my life is easier.
Kelly: And that’s the last one, cow dairy. I don’t care what your blood type is, nobody listening to this is a cow. Can I be crass? Get off the cow tit. Stop breastfeeding. I eat goat and sheep cheese. I do, ’cause I tolerate those well. But I did a three-day fast at the beginning of this year – I have yet to go back to cheese.
And I’ve noticed this every time I do some kind of detox diet.
I don’t do it very often. I did a 21-day standard process purification diet. I’ve done that for years. I’ll do it once every, probably two years, over the last 10 years. Every time I finish that, it takes me about two months to get back to cheese.
Now, I love sheep and goat cheese, but this time I’ve noticed it. Since this three- day fast, I did it with three of my friends here and they all are struggling to get back to cheese. I find that very interesting because none of us really need to have cheese in our life… It does thicken your fluid, it thickens your congestion, which I think is so bizarre. Like why do we take tonsils out, number one? And number two, why when we take tonsils out, is it to give them ice cream as the treat?
Jodi: Yes. For a week for the swelling.
Kelly: This is the most insane thing I’ve ever heard. Your lymph is clogged, so we got it so badly. Their only answer is to take out the tonsils that are so swollen because the lymph is so backed up that it’s swelling the tonsils. So don’t manage the lymph system, take out the tonsils, and then give you more of what clogged your lymph system!
That is what I call a good lobbyist for dairy farmers. They’ve done a phenomenal job at lobbying for why cow dairy should be on every shelf. I don’t understand that. I went to Cornell University. I was an agricultural science major. I was a biologist, rather, I was in agricultural science.
Most of my friends and families that I come from are dairy farmers, and I’m telling you, nobody should be in the cow dairy farming business. We should end that as a career, and it should be done because it’s clogging everybody’s lymphatic.
Jodi: And you know, I’m mostly slender, but I had what you call arm puffs. I wore underwire bras for years. I did everything you said, and it’s like this little fat, and I could never figure it out. I’m like, “why am I fat there?” It’s because there’s so much lymph congestion. So can we unpack that a little bit more for anyone who’s listening who might be wearing an underwire bra who might like, have kind of a puffy area. Like, you put on the strapless dress and you’re like, that does not look good.
Kelly: Yeah, absolutely. And I just wanna say it’s the protein of cow, not the fat. So when I say no cow dairy, I mean no protein of cow. You can eat the fat, the butter, and the cream is highly beneficial for us. And one of the great things lymph does is actually mobilize our lipids and our fats. And we need fats to get a lot of our minerals and our vitamins throughout.
And the brain needs fat. So don’t stop eating ghee, butter, and cream. Just make sure it’s organic. So it’s not full of toxins. So to your question, I just wanted to make sure I was clear on that. Pits and puffs are what she’s talking about. So an armpit when you open up your arm – it’s cold in Pennsylvania.
So if I open up my arm, it should look concave.
If it looks flat, it’s what I call a puff. And some of us have literal puffs like it’s soft and gooey and poofy. And Jodi is very svelte. I think we were in a hot tub or something and I looked over and I would go, “We gotta work on your puff, sister.”
Jodi: It’s exactly that. I was completely stopping the flow with the underwire, all of these things. So I’d love to tell people because everyone asked me, they’re like, show me a video. How do I do this? So walk people through, how do we unpack this?
Kelly: So one is we stop giving stuff for our lymph to filter. So the chemicals, the metals, start looking at what you’re putting on your skin. Your skin absorbs everything, and it goes into lymphatics.
If you would not put it on your tongue, do not put it on your skin – with the exception of Jodi’s oils. I will say that I’m not putting any of Jodi’s oils on my tongue. But I was and I still do put them on my skin.
Jodi: You know, honestly, you could. They won’t kill you.
Kelly: You could. They’re just, wow. That’s a lot of flavors. Although I think I just put parasympathetic oil in on my tongue when I did that.
So that’s number one. Stop adding to the problem. Cow dairy, metals, chemicals, water. How can I clean up?
Number two, can I move more? You know, oftentimes we move our legs, but how often do we do this? I think that’s why a lot of people feel so good when they do yoga actually, cuz they’re moving their lymphatics and moving their body in different ways.
Or if they can do a handstand as you can, where they’re draining ’cause they’re going upside down and they’re moving their body in different ways. And then stopping the dams, the tight-fitting clothes even. I mean, when I wear jeans, my husband laughs at me every time I say this.
He’s like, “Really? No tight-fitting clothes, huh? So jump into my jeans.” But you know, at the end of the day, as soon as I walk in that house, those jeans are off. And I’ve got on the flowiest pants you could possibly imagine because any tightness, clothes, sitting still, creates stagnicity.
And stagnation. Like, the river’s flowing, and then you’ve got sticks, and then the water gets caught up behind the sticks and now nothing’s moving. And then that just creates more, more, and more problems. Like a dam, like a beaver created a dam and then all of a sudden the woman goes, “oh look, I’m getting fat.
I got this puff over my bra strap.” And I’m like, “no, you don’t have a puff over your bra strap. You have stagnant lymph. That’s not fat. That is, you have improper lymphatic flow.”
Jodi: We mentioned cancer. What happens when the toxins can’t drain from the breasts to the armpits and then into the body?
Kelly: The majority of women who get breast cancer, they get it right here in this area, in this quadrant, and this is the quadrant that gets tight and gets constricted because you have a lymph drainage point right here that drains about 75% of your lymph right there. And that’s often where a lot of those bras have that bar on the side as well.
It often makes me wonder, to be honest with you, who is designing this? Were they purposely trying to clog our lymph by putting bras on us? Like literally where they’re putting it is like clogging the lymph. Clog the lymph, don’t drain the breasts, keep ’em up and keep ’em here.
That’s keeping all the toxins in women and not letting them drain at all. It’s horrible. And tight underwear, the same thing, as the underwear that leaves the lines in your inguinal, it’s not good. It’s clogging all your inguinal lymphatics. And then women are like, “oh, I have horrible periods, or I have horrible menstruation.”
Well, you don’t have lymphatic flow. You’re wearing tight underwear all month, and so there’s no flowing or you’re sitting in a chair. So getting the body to open and mobilize and not wearing tight clothes, and moving if there is tightness and getting it to mobilize is important.
And then breathing and drinking good quality water, as we said. And I don’t expect everyone to go home and read all your labels and throw everything out, although that would be okay.
Just start to vote, if you will, with your buying dollars and start to demand from companies that you’re not gonna buy products that have horrible ingredients in them, whether you’re eating them or you’re applying them.
So ladies, start looking at your makeup and your skincare and your body care. It’s full of toxins. Hair dyes in colors. Listen, I gave up. I gave in. I’m going gray because I can’t do it anymore. I mean, I’ve done all the natural hair colors since I was 26 when I started coloring my hair 23 years ago. But the reality is, even the greatest one out there isn’t the greatest. They still have a little bit of peroxide in them.
Fingernail polish is another one that I find is abhorred that people are putting formaldehyde on themselves. This is supposed to breathe in oxygen. You know this is collagen. It’s part of your fascia, your nails, and they’re going to breathe in oxygen and breathe in minerals.
And when we put nail polish on them, we’re stopping all that from happening. In addition to whatever that nail polish has in it, it is absorbed into the fascia. So people are out there going, “Oh, I do all the detox and the drainage,” and then I’m like, “But you color your hair and you got nail polish.”
I mean I use polish as well on my toes twice, three times a year. But it’s formaldehyde-free. She uses this crazy, natural remover of the nail polish thing. All the scrubs that she uses on my legs don’t have any PGs in them. It’s all just like salt, sugar, just simple ingredients, three to four ingredients are all you need.
Coconut oil goes a long way on your body. A long way.
Jodi: While we’re landing on this, I want to talk about the intersection of beauty and drainage, because you have said to me like, I’m 53, I’m starting to get that neck. I’m starting to see puffiness, and I realized a lot of this is lymph and fascia.
And so I’ve really been trying to drain properly. On Instagram, all of those natural facelift things pop up. Some of them are actually telling me to go in the wrong direction, you know, that is countered to the lymph. So can you help people? You know someone who’s listening, who’s like, I wanna know how to do this.
Do I start at the clavicle? How do I, if I’m draining my neck, walk us through what we do?
Kelly: Just so you know, I do have a video on my website that goes through this a little bit more on a PDF that they can go to. So I’ll do a quick version. But I wanna make sure that for the purpose of clarity, if they need more details, they can go to the website and find it.
Jodi: We’ll make sure there’s a link in the show notes.
Kelly: Perfect. And so you’re gonna take, ideally, these two fingers. Lymph is not, it’s not a lot of pressure. This isn’t a muscle. You’re squeezing, you’re pumping the lymph. So think of it as a tiny, little blueberry… eh, a tiny little avocado. And you wanna just see if the avocado is ripe.
So if you can’t push your fingers into it, you’re just gonna like pump it. Is it ripe? Does it pump a little bit? So I’m gonna go right above my clavicle on either side. It’s easier if you cross your arms and use these two fingers. So you don’t use a lot of pressure – if you use your index finger you tend to push harder. And you’re not gonna use your tips. Kind of try to use your pads, and you’re just gonna create a pumping motion. It’s not fast and it’s not hard, and you’re kind of just getting right under that clavicle where a lot of them are really laying. And so you’re just gonna go pump, pump. Pump, pump. And I would recommend that it’s probably slower and softer than you think.
Jodi: And you do this because we’re a hydraulic system, so you need to open this up before you start draining from the neck and it’s above the clavicle.
Kelly: These are the exits, so you gotta open up the exits first. You always work from the closest and then the farthest. A lot of times when people teach dry brushing or you see it on YouTube – it’s completely wrong. They go, start here, and move it in. I have 50 cars lined up. Here’s where the car is, I’m trying to get through the exit here at the end. Here’s the exit. Do I move the 50th car or the first car? You move the first car. Here’s the accident. Open up the exits, and now start to move the traffic. So then I’m gonna go to my tonsils because they’re the gatekeepers, and I want my head to drain always because I want my brain to work. So the next place I’m gonna go is my tonsils.
And I’m gonna envision, intend, as I pump my nodes that I’m kind of pumping them down toward what’s called my termini.
And I’m just enhancing the flow through the pumping movement to go, “Look lymph, this is where you’re supposed to go. You’re supposed to go down, drain all the way down the neck, and then when you get it down here, you’re supposed to go into the cardiovascular system.” That’s what you’re supposed to be doing, right?
And then after I pump those two areas, what we teach is then we pump this apical node because of the breast cancer. So it’s right where you would have a bra strap, and again, you’re just gonna pump and you’re gonna pump with the intention that now this is gonna drain up. This is gonna drain up to this clavicle. So this is gonna drain over here. This is gonna drain over here. Now that that’s all open, now I can get my armpit to drain in there. So then I’m gonna take that armpit and I’m just gonna pump that little node maybe five, six times.
Jodi: Yeah, and if it’s tender, that probably means it needs to be.
Kelly: Yep. And it’s not a squeeze, it’s just a little gentle pump and it’s right in the center and it’s kind of just a pump, pump, pump, pump. It’s the one on the PDF. It’s the hardest one to explain because you don’t want your arm up. ‘Cause then it’s all contract. You actually want your arm down, but you can’t really see what I’m doing. Can you do that? I’m like, here you go. Here you go. That’s what you should be doing. You got it. Not what you ‘should,’ but what I suggest. Do whatever you want. There are no ‘shoulds’ in life. So that’s gonna drain to here and then that’s gonna drain to here.
Then I’m gonna go to my cisterna chyli. So the cisterna chyli is not really a node, but it’s a larger empty vessel that lays basically where my necklace lays. It lays kind of above the belly button. If you put your right-hand pinky in your belly bun and then face your hand, kind of where these two fingers land is, where your cisterna is, and then you’re just gonna pump. Because the key to understanding, and those are like the main points, but the key to understand is that on the right side of our head, where this clavicle is about 25% of our entire lymphatics drain here and 75% drains here, right?
So this drains the right side of my head, my right breast, and my right arm drains here. My left side of my head, my left arm, and my left breast drains here. And then my cisterna drains up to my left clavicle. The cisterna lays on the top of the abdomen and it drains all the lymphatics from the lower.
The iliac, the inguinal, and the legs all drain up the cisterna, then the cisterna up to this left clavicle. So I find, and when we teach the manual drainage that the most important points are the termini, the tonsils, the apical nodes, the axillary, the inner elbow, or the armpits, the cisterna, and then the inguinals.
So you have the iliac, which is like above on the hip, and the inguinal is like when you’re sitting, and that’s the other area that we recommend people pump. There are lots of other main nodes, and when you do a clinical setting, it’s different, but for a quick short, I suggest you do this on your children. On your infants. You learn how to do this.
You go gentle and slow and you feel the drainage and often evidenced by I’m pooping more, I’m sweating more, I’m peeing more. In general, I just feel lighter because you’re not carrying around the baggage of all the toxins.
Jodi: Thank you. And can you kind of show how you like to use the oils in combination with lymphatic drainage flow? How do you recommend that your clients use things?
Kelly: So first of all, these are my standard four that are always in my office. It’s heart length, fascia, and parasympathetic. So heart… I feel everybody should have this in their pocket all the time and share it with everybody because we all need to open our hearts more. But my goal with flow, fascia, lymph, optimize wellness, whether it’s flow-preso or it’s the manual flow technique, we all have this modern-day protection posture of fear.
And it’s really about this. And what it does is it clogs our lymph and it’s here to protect our hearts. And I think one of the ways we connected, and our wonderful friend, is because we know that this medicine and this world needs a little more heart opening and we need to connect with our hearts and we need to connect authentically.
And so I recommend that you use this all the time, but I have a lot of clients that have anxieties or whatever. They’re rigid about using the heart to open up their heart to help them start to trust, to start to have that balance, and it’s literally rubbing it all over the emotional heart and smelling it.
I use it in the clinic on almost every single client. When I go to do manual therapy, I first put this on their heart. When I’m doing a sound of soul, when I’m doing tuning forks, when I’m doing light therapy, all of these are vibrations and they’re all information that are gathered into that fascia and lymph. And this is another way for the body on a 3D level to receive that information, to continue to help open that heart. And so I’ll apply it. And then I’ll shine light into it. Or I might massage and vibrate after it. Fascia release. I don’t know where my roller is right now. It’s probably my purse, but my roller ball. I’ll roll that. Like I’ll work fascia with my hands. I work it with my different tools. I have all sorts of tools that work fascia. And then if I’m just like, it’s not releasing. I’ll just put a couple of drops of fascia on and then I’ll hold it and I just feel the fascia start to unwind underneath it.
So I just use the roller ball all the time and I highly recommend for clients, like wherever you feel stuck, roll it. That’s it. It goes wherever. I mean, fascia goes everywhere. It’s everywhere. And it’s holding around every organ, every tissue, every joint. So if you’re stuck, it’s probably fascia.
Jodi: I put heart on the front, and then fascia on the back.
‘Cause I find that I’ve been protecting my heart for so long that I have to unpack the fascia on the back too.
Kelly: That’s a very good point. And I’ll use fascia and heart both on front and back. And parasympathetic on the vagal nerve, but I’ll also put it over the kidneys. Because people are so in sympathetic overload.
So when I’m cupping them on the back to try to get them more balanced and relaxed, I’ll often put a little parasympathetic oil on their kidneys to help ’em just settle down. I do find what’s so interesting with – I don’t find it with any of the other oils – and I almost wanna take a video, but that changes the energy. But almost every person, when I have ’em, smell it, this is what happens. They go, “Huh.” They sigh! Like, that’s the goal for me is get people to sigh and release some of their emotions and yeah, parasympathetic oil just instantly makes people go into that.
Jodi: For anyone who’s listening, if you’re yawning or sighing, you’re releasing energy.
Kelly: Releasing emotions. And then lymph, so I’ve put this one drop on a spleen. I’ve put it over the liver. And it releases a lot of emotions as we’re talking. This is why I’m burping y’all because it’s releasing a lot of emotions.
And honestly, when I said all that about the heart a few minutes ago, I got very nauseous after I said that. I don’t know if you saw that energetically on me, but I was feeling very nauseous for the world to hear that message and the truth of that message. Lymph is probably the one that most people don’t use enough. This is the one that needs to be used five times more than the fascia, than the heart, than the circulation, than any of the parasympathetic, even. Well, parasympathetic and lymph. I don’t know. One half-dozen to the other. But when you’re in the parasympathetic mode, your lymph moves. When you move your lymph, you’re in parasympathetic mode.
We need to drain five to 10 times more than we kill. Everybody wants to kill everything. I wanna kill my parasites, I wanna bind my metals, I wanna do all this. Guess what? Your body wants to do it more than you do, but you’ve not given it the opportunity because you haven’t opened the pathways.
Jodi: Or even they’re doing a green juice cleanse for three days.
And I’m like, that’s great. So you’re mobilizing all the toxins and how are they gonna leave? Where are they going?
Kelly: And I wish it was as simple as, “Hey, have a valve over here.” Open the valve. Then all the lymph drains out like an oil change in your car. I wish it was that simple, but it’s not. You’re gonna breathe them out, you’re gonna poop ’em out. You’re gonna sweat ’em out. But first, you gotta mobilize lymphatics to do that. And so if you have scar tissue, I also put fascia on scar tissue and I put lymph on scar tissue because you find wherever you have a scar that’s a lot of adhesions, that’s a lot of toxicity caught up in there. And there are lymph channels and fascia channels that need to be open.
So we’ll have ’em apply this. At home use I’ll have ’em apply it just once a week on their scars, lymph, and fascia. But in clinic I would do it. At home I would have ’em use it on their lymph points, on maybe a stuck point, but I wouldn’t have them open the scar and get the body to dump all the stuff that’s trapped into there more than I would focus more on the drainage.
The drainage is the deep breathing, the being, and I do find, I like to really smell your oils before I apply them because I find that a lot of people just need to smell ’em sometimes. That might be sufficient enough because a vibration has an intensity to it.
I have five oils all over my hands right now and that’s a lot for me. I’m very aware of energy and I feel a lot moving over here, so I’m like, I don’t normally have all four in my hands at all times, right?
So I go and grab the one I need, apply it, and put it back. At the end of the day, they all get put in the cup, but at home I’m gonna apply lymph on a regular basis, like twice a day or something. Same with fascia, where I’m stuck, but I’m also gonna have an intention and I’m gonna give praise and gratitude to them before I go to use them.
So I’m not just going to unconsciously go, “Oh, it’s time to put my parasynthetic oil.” I’m gonna be like, “Oh, maybe I don’t want that. Oh, I don’t know— I don’t feel that.” Then put it down. Oh, today I need heart and, and I found this the other day. I was working on Sarah who works for me and I was doing advanced slow on her, and I put all my oils off on my table.
I had just used one of ’em 20 minutes prior to that on her – I used heart and they were sitting on the table and I had my hands on her and nobody else was in the building, nobody else was here. And all of a sudden the parasympathetic rolled off onto the floor. And I didn’t know it was parasympathetic because I couldn’t move my hands.
I looked at it and I instinctively knew. I go, “I bet you anything that’s parasympathetic,” because there’s an ongoing joke. She loves your parasympathetic oil, but she doesn’t like lime. But the main ingredient in your parasympathetic oil is lime. And every time I buy the siesta lime chips when we’re hanging out and having guac and chips, she yells at me because I buy the lime chips. And she’s like, “how do you forget? Lime grosses me out,” and I thanked myself because you love Jodi’s parasympathetic oil that’s made of lime, and there’s something there for her. Why doesn’t she like lime? She’s resisting it somehow, but yet the universe is calling it out to her. And that’s the beauty of plant medicine and trusting the flow.
Because there was nobody else in this room. The vibration of the work I was doing, parasympathetic rolled off the table and was like, it’s my time, please. I wanna show her my stuff. It rolled off the table. I picked it up. I got my hands off her. I go, I told this story. I said, yeah, I bet you anything it’s parasympathetic.
I pick it up. I go, yep, and parasympathetic, smell it. Here you go. She goes, “Oh, I love the smell.” I go, “And that’s funny ’cause you don’t like lime.” But you trust the oils and if you grab the wrong one, you trust that that’s the one you were supposed to grab and you apply it and you move on.
But the histamine I carry in my purse, that’s the other one I think everybody should have. ‘Cause I think that’s very successful at helping break a reaction. And there’s not a lot out there anymore on the shelves that can really do what the histamine can do in breaking a reaction.
Jodi: I know, I know. That makes me sad. And I think it does something with the mast cells, too. And I also think like, if you’re traveling a lot, and it seems like a lot of the hotels are moldy. Just kind of having that, I’ll smell it. Or sometimes I’ll get some salt and put a drop or two by the bedside table. I just sleep better.
Kelly: Absolutely. And that’s a really good point ’cause we’ve all been in that scenario. In hotel rooms that you’re getting, you’re like, “What do you mean you don’t have another room for me?” It’s amazing what oils can do and clean that up so it can take the stress off your body and you are able to breathe that air and get that frequency from the oils instead of from the air because you’ve changed the environment.
Jodi: Kelly, this was so amazing. Is there anything we didn’t touch on that you wanted to share?
Kelly: Your words are a vibration and so are your thoughts.
Jodi: Oh, amazing. Yes. And your intention.
Kelly: So the biggest information, your lymph and your fascia, again, are from your mind. And a lot of us, when we listen to ourselves, we don’t have a lot of self-love, which leads me back to why everybody needs to have the heart. Because the first person we need to love is self, so then we can love others.
Me first, and then, and I would like everybody to take a note and to truly sit with yourself authentically, hear what you’re saying, don’t judge it, have curiosity, and have the courage to unpack it and unwind it and do the work.
Do the trauma work, and love yourself with your heart oil, with Jodi’s heart oil, putting that on your heart every day and reminding yourself that you are from the source, you are from God. You are from love. And we are all connected through love. And that’s the biggest lesson in life, is that we are connected. We can’t not be connected. If Coronavirus didn’t teach us that, nothing will. And that we are all here for each other and we are connected through our hearts, and that’s how we’re gonna heal this world. That’s how we’re gonna heal this planet. That’s how we’re gonna heal each other, but first, we must heal self.
So please love yourself.
Jodi: That’s beautiful. I love that. What a wonderful note to end on. Tell people how they can find you and how they can work with you.
Kelly: So the truewellnesscenter.com is our website and you can look on there to become a client and know what this discovery call is and all that is like if you’re interested in that.
But I also have a three-day mini-cure that I think Jodi and I are gonna work on for all of you in giving you some discounts or an opportunity to have access to that three-day mini-cure, which is kind of like the prerequisite of everything I know about fascia, lymph, and breath, and scar therapy in a Three Day Do-It-Yourself program which is available on our website.
And then I have a podcast called The Beats, where every once a month right now, but we have over 112 episodes that I’m publishing, a new podcast where I really wanna teach people for the first a hundred episodes how the body worked and the next hundred episodes, how the universe works and you know, I get to interview great people. Jodi’s been on my podcast and I go deep and try to get people to understand how their body really works and give them the wisdom that they have inside them and to remind them of that. So that’s it. The Beats, the True Wellness Center, and talking loud somewhere about fascia and lymph.
Jodi: Well, this was brilliant. I loved all your analogies. It’s so valuable. Thank you so much for your time and your great energy and frequency.
Kelly: Thank you so much Jodi, and thank you for creating great oils that truly help not only me, but so many of our clients and all the work you’ve done in the world and continue to do. We’re looking forward to all your next books.
Jodi: Oh, yay. Me too. Thank you!
