Edan Harari: [00:04:44] Thank you for having me, Maria.

Edan Harari: [00:04:53] So kinetic release therapy is just a name K.R.T. It’s just the name that I give to my healing system and my name of my practice, I guess, if you will, is kinetic body therapy. I’m a body therapist. And so, yeah, I just came up with a name for my own method, that’s all.

Edan Harari: [00:05:16] So as a manual therapist and body therapist, my particular healing method that I work with my clients, both in-person and online Zoom Sessions is a combination of many different modalities and techniques that work with hands on touch and pressure in the body, as well as breathwork guided somatic based meditations, movement. Many different things, many different things. It just depends. So essentially my training is as an osteopathic based manual therapy practitioner. So first I was a massage therapist and my practice evolved to working with osteopathy and manual osteopathy. Osteopaths or medical doctors or doctors of osteopathy that are trained in hands-on, manipulation of the body to support healing. And so, yeah, it’s it’s it’s just a combination of many different things that I’ve learned through the years in my formal education and also non-formal education and just going through healing experiences in my life. Right. And healing myself and receiving healing from other facilitators.

Edan Harari: [00:06:33] Well, I was always drawn to like touch therapies and massage and things like that, even as a child. I’ve been walking on my dad’s back since like the age of three. And my dad is one of those massage enthusiasts. And so I grew up with a lot of just, you know, therapeutic, I guess you could say touch therapy, influence in my life. And then I just always found myself drawn to the human body and anatomy and just muscles and science. And so eventually I was in the restaurant business. Fast forward to when I was about 18, I think when I first started going through some pretty major anxiety and stress in my life due to working at my dad’s nightclub and restaurant and jazz club in New York City here in Greenwich Village. And I found myself really in need of some relief. And actually, even before that, I was also suffering with some anxiety when I was in high school and I found yoga. So there was you know, there’s many different things that happened in my life that draw me to find holistic healing. Right. Whether it’s your movement and yoga and dance and massage therapy. So, you know, when I was in working for my dad’s club, one of my waitresses that was working for me, I was the manager there at the time. She was like, you seem pretty stressed. Go get go get a massage. Like, I’m going to refer you to a friend of mine is a Thai yoga massage. Try this. It’s amazing. And I’m like, oh, well, I was into yoga by that. I was into it. And I was like, cool, I’m down to try this. And it was life changing for me, this hour and a half session that I had with this with this stranger, just like changed my life.

Edan Harari: [00:08:21] I realized the power of healing, of touch, of pressure into the body of yoga. Right. So Thai yoga massage, just Thai massage. Anybody doesn’t know. It’s sort of like lazy man’s yoga. And I was big on yoga back then. I became a yoga teacher when I was 21. I actually started teaching yoga back then. I’m 40 now. So this is way before yoga was a thing. I had to become a teacher because nobody knew about it and I had to share it with the Western culture where I lived here in Brooklyn. And it was it was an honor to do that back then. But yeah, I just found myself always drawn to holistic healing arts because they’ve always helped me when I found that I didn’t really receive a lot of results that were beneficial to me from my doctors. And at the time, whether it’s physical medicine, doctors or mental health practitioners like psychiatry, which I started getting into, unfortunately, when I was around the age of 19, 20, you know, where I found myself dealing with mental health issues, anxiety, panic attacks, depression and, you know, smoking cannabis. But back then, it didn’t really help. I was doing that daily to cope with the anxiety of being. Sensitive. I find myself to be what I call a sensitive or someone who is intuitive and really sensitive and feeling a lot of energy, you know, which can be many different things. And people call it empath and the New Age World, you know, other people will say, you know, it’s just someone who’s who’s spent a lot of trauma, who is very neurologically sensitive. I mean, I can go on and on.

Edan Harari: [00:10:37] Yes, absolutely. Recently I heard maybe a couple years ago or something like that. Joe Dispenza with saying that our body is our unconscious mind or subconscious mind, one or the other. And so essentially our body is simply a reflection of what’s going on mentally, emotionally, internally. Right. In fact, spiritually as well, if we want to go there even. Right. And so when we understand this deep connection between our body and our mind and if we have mental health related conditions, for instance, such as stress, anxiety, panic attacks, depression, any sort of mental health issues, addictions. Right. Which is also a mental health related condition, if you will. And we can actually work with our body, with the physicality of our body, with our muscles, with our bones, joints, with movement, with breath work, with eye movements, with all these different techniques that access our healing capacity of our mind body spirit complex, if you will, because we are not just the body. We’re not just a mind. And these thoughts and our brain and brain activities and the mind which is essentially is not necessarily in our brain. That’s a whole other topic to unpack. But essentially, we are a mind body spirit, you know, complex. We’re like, you know, multi-dimensional beings and without getting too esoteric.

Edan Harari: [00:12:03] We’re multidimensional. And so our body is simply a reflection of what’s going on in our mind, especially our unconscious mind. Right. So it’s psychosomatic. It’s a psycho being a psyche of the mind. And then somatic is so minor as being the body. And it’s organ, you know, the organism of our body and its processes. So I’m a somatic therapist. I work with the body, with the soma. And essentially working with our body is a really tremendous access point for health of all aspects of health. Right. Not just physical health, mental emotional health, spiritual health. Right. And spiritual fitness, which is what I like to call it. You know, it’s just like this constant inner work and spirit sure. Work that we do or self-mastery for all the high performers out there who I like. I work with some high performers, high performing CEOs who are all about like, how can I biohacking, how can I, you know, enhance my performance? And so even if it’s not even if people are not into the spiritual aspect, there’s a way to enhance our health and optimize our health through of all aspects of our health, through working with our body.

Edan Harari: [00:14:17] Yeah, absolutely. I think a really potent way to access some of the techniques or, you know, wisdom, if you will, with the work that I do with my clients. One on one is using a combination of some breath work and some feeling or somatic based meditation. And so we can actually do that now, which is kind of cool. So. Do this with clients over resume, working with clients around the world for the last several years, both training therapists as well as working with everyday people who are looking to heal. And so there are so many different ways that we can access healing or medicine, if you will. There’s many ways to to receive this medicine. And so I think a really potent tool to use, again, is a combination of breath, work and movement and also some some pressure into different key areas of our body. So why don’t we all just take a deep breath and start with the breath work? And so a really important practice of breathwork that we can use to begin to soothe our nervous system is to slow our breath down. And doing that, we can do like a box breathing technique where we can inhale for a count of let’s do six for today, where we’re inhaling for a count of six. We’re holding our breath for account of sticks. We are exhaling for a count of six and then we’re pausing and creating space for another count of six. So imagining almost like a box. And then I think this is called the box breathing technique. So you can visualize this kind of box and how we’re inhaling along, which is one of the sides of the box. Right, if you can visualize that. And then we’re going through this exercise and I recommend we don’t have the time to go through the full exercise.

Edan Harari: [00:16:26] If you’re listening to this while you’re driving. I’ve been told that my voice is soothing enough that maybe you may start to fall asleep. So you don’t want to do that?

Edan Harari: [00:17:06] So I’m not a specialist, an expert in breathwork. I just use it as one of the many tools in my toolkit. Right. So there’s so many different types of breathwork exercises that people can do. And the breath is free. It’s there. And so once I started practicing, you know, using the breath as a tool, as a way to soothe and calm my nervous system, I realized how potent it was. And I started using that in my sessions with clients like intuitively. And it started to really help. And in fact, my body therapists, who is my mentor right now, he also uses breath of work here and there in combination with different eye movements and different techniques that look like EMDR as well. And so there’s so many different techniques. Right. And so I think breathwork is oftentimes a really potent access point to our body, to our somatic experience, to trauma, to spirit. Some people will say. Right. So I think, you know, using our breath is really a great way to sue their nervous system. And let’s do it. You know, let’s do a little bit of breath work right now. And then what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna combine the breath work right. With some pressure into different key areas of our body.

Edan Harari: [00:18:20] So for this purpose of this podcast, an episode that you can’t see me, what we’re gonna do is we’re going to focus on pressing into our sternum and this chest plate that we have right in the center of our chest. And so there’s a bone right in the center of our chest. And most people can feel into that. So that’s what we’re going to press for today. We’re going to press there. And we’re also going to press one other place in our jaw. We’re gonna press into the master muscle, which is this thick band of muscle that is basically right where our jaw lies. And it’s sort of like the muscle of mastication or chewing. Right. So it’s that you can feel into it if everybody just takes their middle fingers and presses into there’s this side of their jaw on their jaw line. And if you even just kind of squeeze your teeth together. Right. Or just like grind your teeth for a second, you can feel that muscle pop into your hand. Can you feel that, Maria? Yes, I just felt that perfect. So that’s the muscle. And, you know, so the thing is, if you’re not exactly on the muscle or on the sternum, it’s fine. You know, just be in that area and we’re going to press in really hard into those two areas for today. But we’re gonna start with the breath work exercise. So let’s all go ahead.

Edan Harari: [00:19:41] Good question. So you’re going to use your middle fingers for this and you’re going to just use the fingertips of your middle fingers and that’s it and just press and we’re gonna press and quite hard. So for this pressure that we’re doing, we’re doing an energy work technique. This is a technique that is one of the many techniques in my system that is based in a body therapy that releases emotions that is there to trigger us so that we can feel our shit. Hope it’s okay that I curse on your podcast. So, you know, feeling our stuff, OK? Feeling in our body is key to healing to heal. We must feel my friends. Right. And so this is just a way to access some of those feelings. Now, some of us are going to be more connected to those feelings than others. Some of us are going to be like, oh, OK, I can feel some emotions coming up. I can feel some sadness. I can feel some anger. I can feel some anxiety or fear, especially in these uncertain times that we’re in right now. And others are gonna be like so disconnected from their feelings and so used to suppressing their feelings that what happens is they try these exercises and they’re like, you know, I don’t really feel anything cause it’s in their head. Right. And they’re so in their head that essentially they are not aware of how, you know, there’s there’s an emotional process happening now. Emotion is just emotion, just energy in motion.

Edan Harari: [00:21:13] And for those of you don’t even want to use the word energy, you don’t have to. But essentially, it’s just like motion. It’s movement. It’s movement within our body. It’s a physiological natural process that we are really it’s really important that we all go through that natural process. And when we don’t, we get ill. We have disease. We have dysfunction, both physical, mental, emotional dysfunction that happens when we don’t feel our emotions. And the reason why I think children and animals are so liberated in their bodies and they’re so free and limber and supple is because they’re not holding on to that tension from blocking all this energy, from moving through them. This emotion. And so I think the more as adults that we can let that energy flow through our bodies, the more free and liberated we’re gonna be and less tense and more mobile and just free that we’re gonna be in our bodies. And I’m all about life, just liberating our body. Right. When we liberate our body, we liberate our mind.

Edan Harari: [00:23:30] Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, there’s this thing that happens in our body that when we go into this fight flight freeze response of just stress. And I just call stress just saying no to what whatever is arising. Right. And anytime we’re going into that state of saying no in the state of fear, which could be conscious or unconscious, we tense up. And I like to visualize this as like a very visual person. And I like to visualize it as like a tightly clenched fist, you know, and our muscles are like becoming this tightly clenched fist that’s holding onto all this tension and so movement. And also just feeling into that, we’ll start to soften that tightly clenched fist. Right. And so there’s lots of different techniques, essentially. But what we want to realize is that unconsciously, every single day we’re going about our lives. We have no idea if we’re doing this. But when we’re in stressful situations, no stress of not just the mind, but stress of the body. So something could be a physical stressor. And then there’s the mental emotional stressors. Right. Which is just like. General, everyday stress. Right. You’ve been multitasking is stressful to our nervous system.

Edan Harari: [00:24:46] So a lot of people who are at multitasking every day, they don’t realize that that is causing a tremendous amount of stress to their nervous system and to our nervous system. And that causes more of these tightly clenched fists or like muscles that are just holding on to that energy, to that emotion instead of the motion moving through us. It becomes this blockage. It’s just a blockage. Right. And that’s what emotional, energetic blockage is in our body. It’s like these moments of time that are stored in our tissues, in our fascial system, the fascia, the connective tissues in our body and our nervous system and our or auric field or our entire being. Right. We have these blockages of this energy, essentially. And it’s tension. It’s just tension and softening. This tension is key. It’s the key to being healthy, liberated, free, mobile, agile, you know, being able to dance well and move well or be an amazing athlete. I mean, I’m I’m an athlete and I’m a dancer and I love to move. And so I want to be able to move my body with freedom. Right. And so I think most of us want that. Most of us want to be like a supple leopard, if you will. You know, it’s what Kelly Star says, you know. And so I really love that idea of like, how can we be a supple leopard? How can we be like agile and free, like an animal or like or like a child? Right. Like an infant. See how they move? You see how like free they are in their bodies. And so, you know, I mean, we can we can go on and on about this.

Edan Harari: [00:26:21] Let’s dive into the exercise. People are probably like. Come on. What about that exercise? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let’s do it. So let’s feel into this first. OK. So that we can talk about this more understanding once we feel it. I think the key to healing is feeling. And I think that with understanding any of these things I talk about, it’s really about feeling it right. And so let’s feel it in our body right now. Let’s all take a deep breath and close our eyes and settle into our seat. Hopefully we’re sitting down comfortably somewhere. I recommend doing this seated in an upright position, because if you’re laying down, sometimes you can fall or sleep because it is super and deeply relaxing. So we’re sitting upright in upright position and softening our spine a little bit and we’re going to focus on our breath.

Edan Harari: [00:27:09] Now we’re going to breathe only from the nose right now as we inhale from our nose for a count of 6.5.4.3.2 and 1.We’re going to pause for 6.

Edan Harari: [00:27:33] 5.4.3.2 and 1 we’re going to exhale slowly from our nose, for 6.

Edan Harari: [00:27:45] 5.4.3.2.2.1 and then we’re going to pause for six.

Edan Harari: [00:28:01] 5.4 3.3.2.2 and 1. I’m going to do one more round. Inhaling for 6. 5. 4. 3.2.1. Holding 6.5.4.3.2.1. And then exhaling, slowly, resisting that breath from pushing out for 6.5.4.3.2 and 1. With our eyes closed. Softening your jaw feeling into to our body, feeling into our seat. Feeling into the different spaces in our body, noticing the different areas. In regions of our anatomy of our body. And just feeling for a moment. Seeing if we can notice. And he shifts. See if we can feel if we’re perhaps slightly calmer than we were when we started. And just noticing our current state. The way we feel in our body, maybe we’re not able to feel and so our body yet maybe we’re still in our heads. We were still wondering if I’m doing this right. Maybe we’re still noticing these racing thoughts.

Edan Harari: [00:29:58] When we’re in that stress based. State of mind. We have many racing thoughts and it’s very hard to connect with our body. But these breath work exercises that we just went through this exercise is it’s a great access point to sue the nervous system enough so that we can speak again. That process of feeling. So we’re just starting here. And so if you’re very stuck in your head now, we’ll do another exercise to see if we can get a little bit more into our body, more embodied. We’re going to press into those areas we spoke about before with the middle fingers, we’ll start with the jaw. Pressing into our jaw muscles and see if we can activate so our eyes are still closed, we’re still feeling we’re still staying inside, having this internal experience instead of an external experience. like letting go of agendas, letting go of distractions and pressing in.

Edan Harari: [00:31:06] Now for those of us who can press and hard enough to really feel it. Do that. For those of us who have any jaw issues or conditions, we might want to be more gentle. Listen to your body here. Don’t use too much force, but at the same time, if you’re finding yourself really rigid and stiff and very much in your head, you can press and pretty damn hard. And don’t worry so much about it, right? Our body’s quite resilient. So we’re pressing into those muscles, pressing, pressing, pressing. Seeing if you can strum those muscle bands and strings like like guitar players, you’re strumming really, really fast. So we’re thinking about activating that part of our body and bringing awareness and attention to that part of our body. And then we’re going to move to the other location on our sternum, right in our chest, in the center of our chest, that long bone that’s right in between our chest muscles. Right, right. The center of our chest pressing into there. You’re going to feel some discomfort if there’s a blockage there.

Edan Harari: [00:32:08] So wherever there’s blockage in either one of these two locations. That we’re doing today. You’re going to feel tension. You’re going to feel tenderness. You’re gonna feel stuckness. You’re gonna feel. Like, ouch. And so if if there is ouch there there is pain as you’re pressing, especially if you’re pressing hard to start. Then just know that it may be that it’s just blocked. Right. These are key areas where we you hold on to some emotional blockage, if you will. We’re just muscular armor, right. It’s just this unconscious armoring and contraction. So we’re pressing into these areas. I want you to go back and forth from the chests to the jaw and alternate for a total of 10 seconds for the next 10 seconds on your own pressing and as hard as you can handle without harming yourself, of course. But think about strumming the muscles and pressing in to activate yourself. Right with their eyes closed and we’re still feeling ten seconds. OK. Now we’re going to go back to the breath. We’re going to pause.

Edan Harari: [00:33:21] Now we’re just going to be aware of our breath. Our hands are on our laps and we’re just becoming aware of the breath. And then we’re going to do another box breathing technique for a moment we’ve been to inhale for 6.5.4.3.2.1. Pausing for 5.4.3.2 and 1.Exhaling for 6.5.4.3.2 and 1. Pausing for 6.5.4.3.2 and 1. Now just pause. And feel. Just notice. Curiosity. Let go of agendas. Feel into your body. Is there any emotion? Is there any motion? Is there any movement within. Is there any heat? Can you feel some blood moving? Can you feel into your blood vessels? Can you feel into your chest, into your jaw, to your face?

Edan Harari: [00:35:19] Let’s soften our eyes a bit. Softening the space around our brows, our temples, our jaw. And we’ll do one more round of pressing into those two key areas. Dive in. Go ahead and try it, guys, just dive in. Press into your jaw and press into your chest. Maybe go back and forth. Trigger yourself for. Let’s do another 10 seconds, 10 seconds of activation. We’re just bringing awareness there. We’re just strumming those strings like a guitar. And we’re pressing in as hard as we can handle. And even if it is uncomfortable, sometimes we can do it, we can still do it unless we’re super sensitive, then we can do it lightly. We don’t have to press it harder for supersensitive. But again, the more that we’re in our head, the more we have to press hard into our body so that we can come back into our body. Right. We’re just bringing sensation stepping into the felt sense. Most of us are not there, we’re in our heads, right? We’re thinking we’re doing. Even now, just bringing the awareness to my voice and to guidance and instruction is taking us out of our body right into our mind, into more of that mental awareness. I want you to step into the somatic awareness. The physical awareness. And so I recommend doing these exercises on your own without my guidance. Just trying it and doing as many rounds as you need. It’s a great tool.

Edan Harari: [00:37:19] So this is different. This is a different thing. So there’s so many different technologies, if you will, of our body and massage and pressure and manual therapy where there’s reflexology, there’s acupressure, acupuncture, there’s there’s, you know, Meridien work. There’s chakra work with like people who are doing things like Reiki. There’s there’s so many different, I guess you could say maps. Right. And really what I do is I just focus on a very general approach to where we’re holding onto muscular armor. OK. So we want to think of this as a way of just releasing some of the armor. So when we get into a stressful situation, think of like Game of Thrones kind of stuff, where were you put on like this armor? Right. So you were carrying a big, heavy shield. Now, imagine we’re all walking around as warriors, as, you know, humans in our life. Right? We’re warriors, right. We’re stepping out into the war every day of like the stress of life and work and kids and family and everything else. Right. And so we’re going out as warriors were carrying this heavy shield. Yeah. Yeah. We have on our body this super high tech, thin, breathable, lightweight armor that’s just there. It’s called fascia. That’s our connective tissue. And so we have that right.

Edan Harari: [00:38:40] And so imagine we have that. But we’re carrying around this heavy shield. Now, this shield that we’re carrying is putting up this shield and carrying this shield every time ever since every so ever since that we’ve had a traumatic experience. Now, any traumatic experience that we experience in our life causes us to armor up and put up more armor. So it’s almost like we put up this shield. We protect our heart. We protect ourselves from getting hurt again. Right. We we have this unconscious response that happens in our body neurologically, physically, emotionally, that we we end up clenching and tensing up. And we’re always we always end up having that in our body for the rest of our life until we clear it out with someone such as myself working with this armor, with this body. Right. And so we want to visualize that we’re carrying this heavy shield and we can drop that shield because we have this super thin, high tech armor on our body that’s going to protect us and nothing can go through. And so we also want to imagine that we’re also wearing another four or five layers of armor unnecessarily. So my work in this world is to get people to release this armor, to disengage some of this armor.

Edan Harari: [00:39:54] We don’t need to be carrying that much heaviness. We don’t need to be carrying all that past trauma in our tissues, in our body, in our physical body. And so these exercises are designed by pressing into our chest, into our jaw, like we’re doing today. This is a special exercise that is going to begin to disengage the armor. That’s all. It’s very simple. So when we press into these areas, which is like the armor, it sort of tells our body. Oh, I’m armored. And our body unconsciously is going to start to release that tension. It’s no longer going to carry that tension. But in order to make our body aware and even aware that it is holding on the tension, we need to press in hard enough to make our body aware. That’s all it is. We’re just bringing awareness there. So it’s not like a acupressure. It’s not like trigger point work or massage or manual therapy. It’s not like reflexology. There’s so many things. Right. And so this is a totally different technique. This is an emotional release technique. And it’s basically working on releasing and disengaging the armor. Does that make sense?

Edan Harari: [00:41:18] Yeah, your body is so intelligent and wise. And I think. So I work with all the laws of nature and our body naturally can heal itself. And so I work with the laws of homeopathy and like yours, like and letting the body self correct. And so these techniques are there to allow our body to self-correct because it knows how to heal. It just needs a little bit of a reminder. That’s essentially all I’m doing with my clients, just reminding their body that it can heal. Right. And so sort of like when you take. Remedy and it stimulates your body to self-correct in the same way. This is the remedy. This is this is another option. It’s another access point to healing and health. And what is health? It’s and healing is just becoming whole. Right. It’s a mind body spirit like wholeness to ourself. And it’s when we’re disconnected and we’re misaligned energetically, emotionally, spiritually, then that’s we’re gonna have disease. And lack of ease. And we’re going to have dysfunction and mental health related conditions and things like that. And we’re gonna see those mental health related conditions rise right now during this pandemic that we’re facing right now. And so I think it’s really important that we all support each other and that we all do different exercises like this and different manual therapies and body therapies and breath work and movement and meditation. All these different things that are essentially tools for accessing healing.

Edan Harari: [00:43:21] It would be to use movement as medicine. Each and every day, exercise and movement is the number one stress reliever of all time. And if we just move our bodies, in fact, using something like dance or any sort of intense physical exercise either 15 to 30 minutes of that a day, really getting our sweat on is going to release enough endorphins to prevent most mental health issues, including depression, anxiety and the like. So move, guys, if there’s anything I share with you today. Just move your body as much as possible, because if you don’t move, you won’t be able to. First off, and then also you won’t be moving that energy that we talked about today that we’ve worked with today.

Edan Harari: [00:44:21] Thank you, guys. Thank you, Maria, for having me.