Cathy Meehan: Welcome to the Meehan Mission podcast. I’m your host, Cathy Meehan. And on today’s episode, I’m so excited to introduce you to something that I was not very familiar with. It is fascial maneuvers. I hope I said that right. So my special guest is Andrea Reed. She is the founder of the Oklahoma Center for Wellness and her special gift is being a connector of like-minded people who are seeking and practicing natural and holistic health. Andrea has just been the best resource for me because she is always and constantly gathering like-minded people together so that we can share our knowledge and help spread that to help everyone become the scientists of their own health. So in today’s episode, I hope you guys participate and do some of the fascial maneuvers that she had me do. It was fun, it was relaxing, and I think you’re gonna find benefits too. So right now, let’s get started and let’s welcome Andrea.
Cathy Meehan: Hello everyone, and here is my special guest today. Hello, Andrea, how are you?
Andrea Reed: I’m great, Cathy. How are you? Thanks for having me on today.
Cathy Meehan: You are so welcome. So let’s start this off because I have questions for you. First of all, give us a little bit of your background on how you got into the whole holistic movement because I think it’s really, you know, that personal journey really helps people.
Andrea Reed: Yeah, most people that are in this industry for work or on this journey for themselves, you know, have come through something, through a need. And, you know, I’m second generation, holistic, natural health and wellness. My mom had a decade long illness when I was growing up. So the formative years of my life, she was struggling, working full time, building her house, raising a child. And she was seeking ways to heal herself from a misdiagnosis. and didn’t know she was misdiagnosed with an incurable disease at the time. When she found a naturopath in Vancouver, because I’m from Canada originally, that could help her, her symptoms were reversed in three weeks. So I grew up knowing, right, and she doesn’t say she had a decade long illness. She says it took her nine and a half years to find the right answers. And so that has really been informative for me, right? Because it’s like if we shorten the length of time it takes for people to find answers.
Cathy Meehan: Wow.
Cathy Meehan: like that.
Andrea Reed: the quality of their lives and their families and for themselves and their children and for generations to come drastically changes. So that’s how knowing that the body could heal itself. When I had my own health crisis, shortly after becoming a new mother, I got into the emotion side of things. So I learned the nutrition side really early, just through the experience in our family. And I learned how like,
Cathy Meehan: Mm-hmm. I agree.
Andrea Reed: repressed trauma and emotions, physical and emotional stuff stuck in the body, all came to the surface through my first birth experience. And so I had a choice. mean, I’m holding this new baby who’s not a baby anymore. He’s almost as tall as I am. And think he’s lot taller now. He grows every night. But I had this choice and I was like, I need to heal myself for him so I could be there for him. And so that got me searching for ways to somatically remove
Cathy Meehan: Hahaha!
Cathy Meehan: Mm-hmm.
Andrea Reed: move through stress in the body just so that I could feel more free and light and less pain in my body.
Cathy Meehan: Well, know, it’s very often it’s either our own health issue that makes us seek other types of remedies and therapies and healing, or it’s somebody very close to us who’s gone through some sort of a crisis in their medical condition. so often, like you said, your mom was going through probably like this Western medical system. that really wasn’t looking outside of the box. They’re not digging into kind of root cause things or natural holistic ways to heal, which is why I’m so thankful that there are more people really out there learning. And not only are you learning, but you’re sharing that information that you have learned so that you can help other people. And I just want to commend you, Andrea, because what you have done for the state of Oklahoma and our area is just phenomenal because you are really a connector and you help connect people together to ensure that our messages get out. So I just want to thank you for that. So thank you.
Andrea Reed: Well, and thank you. Thank you so much. I had to pop up.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah, it’s been great. So specifically why I wanted to bring you on for our community is what you are doing with the Human Garage and with fascial maneuvers, because that’s really a new concept for me. I’m not that familiar with it. And so I would love for you to kind of take us down that road on maybe a little bit of the history of it and how you are utilizing that now and helping people.
Andrea Reed: Yeah, that would be great. Thank you. And truly, like, I appreciate you saying that, Cathy, and also the work that y’all do nationwide with people and really informing parents what options and choices and freedoms that they have. It’s huge. So I appreciate you very much. I love doing this. Yeah, so, Fascial Maneuvers is a radical self-care movement practice that was started by Human Garage in 2020.
Cathy Meehan: Thank you.
Cathy Meehan: You bet. Thank you.
Andrea Reed: And the Human Garage had been doing clinical practice in like the one-on-one treatment room method for a very long time. They were clinically treating over 10,000 patients and really working on performance. And so in California and in Vancouver, British Columbia, they had just a gathering of the top practitioners all under one roof, all working from different angles to help people. And so they’ve been working with. Well, on their website, humangarage.net, talks about the different sports teams, Olympic athletes, and it was celebrities that they were working with on a performance basis. However, what they noticed was that at a certain point in time in our history, people started showing up with not performance issues. They had to work through things like autoimmune and inflammation and chronic pain in order before they could even get to improving performance, before they could get to
Andrea Reed: maybe shaving off a second or two, which is a huge deal for an Olympic athlete, like cutting down those times on the trons and things like that. So they started to see everyone that was walking through their door coming through with some kind of chronic condition. And that’s how one of the ways that Fascial Maneuvers was born. It was also born through the need of the, you know, the co-founders had their own personal healing journeys that created this. But what this work does is it, and I’ll explain what it is here.
Cathy Meehan: Yes.
Andrea Reed: in more detail in a moment. Because if you’re not familiar with fascia, it might be a brand new word to some of your viewers. Your viewers are pretty sophisticated in the health and wellness world. So many of you already know about this. But what this does is this hands healing tools to people, to every individual, 7 billion, however many people are on our planet right now, who knows, need help. Like there’s nobody that I’ve met that doesn’t have
Andrea Reed: some kind of stress, physical, emotional pain, or nervous system, heightened nervous system, I don’t want to say disorder, but just like our containers are too full. How do we take those layers out? Just, you know, traffic, chemicals in our air, in our water, in our soil, in our food.
Cathy Meehan: Mm-hmm. Yes, they are.
Andrea Reed: unresolved emotions from early in life and from other generations, this can all be stored in the body and how do we release that out? And so if fascia is a brand new concept to somebody, and before I went into the bodywork world, it was completely new to me too, this is, our fascia is so much more than how it’s explained maybe in medical school or in traditional ways of thinking of that thin interconnected layer of tissue that wraps around the muscle, wraps around every bone, every muscle, every organ, around the brain, it’s in the brain. Our fascia is the only thing in our body that cannot be surgically removed. It’s incredible, but it’s so much more than a physical connection. It holds memory, it moves water and hydration for our bodies. And, you know, we also feel like it connects with the field, with consciousness.
Andrea Reed: And so it’s that same way, this is such a random example. I went in my backyard and bare feet and walked through Clover and you we don’t spray. And so I felt good about walking in bare feet. And I literally went to put my foot down and I thought, I’m likely going to get bitten by something. I walk in my backyard all the time, but the field of consciousness connected with that before it happened, I put my foot down and I got bitten by a spider. Huge, huge.
Cathy Meehan: What? Yeah.
Andrea Reed: bite on my foot that was like over a week. It was such an interesting experience because my body knew there was an experience, a threat, a danger, whatever, before that foot even came down. And we believe that that is our fascia connecting with the field of consciousness that is, you know, around six feet around us, interestingly enough. It’s the same reason why when you walk into a room, likely if you’re in tune with your body, you can tell who
Cathy Meehan: Boom.
Andrea Reed: Maybe you don’t want to talk to you at a party, that kind of thing. It’s that visceral feeling. So that’s a little bit more in depth than I usually get into, but here we are.
Cathy Meehan: So Andrea, what I would really love for you to do is help explain to our community exactly what you’re doing with the Human Garage and fascial maneuvers. Because you know, I always like to introduce new things. and new healing modalities for our community. And what you do is rather new to me, and I think it’s so beneficial. So how can that help with other people?
Andrea Reed: So because our fascia is woven in spirals through our body, it’s interconnected. So we believe the body is in three zones. If we’ve got zone one, zone two, and zone three, then when we work with one zone, we’re also affecting the other two. Within each zone of the body, we’ve also got three zones. So one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, and the legs too, right? So somebody who has TMJ,
Cathy Meehan: Okay.
Cathy Meehan: Ugh. Mm-hmm.
Andrea Reed: issues, tension, pain, likely will also have wrist and ankle issues. The root of that can come from the hips. So somebody who has pain in their knee or in their hips, we can work with the elbow and with the shoulder and release that using rotation, counter rotation, and breath and intention to release the stress from the body and from the nervous system.
Cathy Meehan: Interesting. Okay.
Andrea Reed: and then we’re restoring flow to the body. So truly there’s principles to this work. I trained with Human Garage in their online coaching program. So this is available if you go to humangarage.net, you can learn how to become a certified coach. And after that, I actually trained with them in person and was able to assist and do hands-on work in New York and in Mexico last year, which really amplified my body work background. But you can learn this without, having a massage or bodywork background at all. In fact, Garry Lineham, who is one of the co-founders of Human Garage, has shared with me that the more you know coming in, the harder it is to undo the old programming. So people who have no background in bodywork can come in and really learn how to do this, even if it’s just for yourself. You can learn how to do this for free on YouTube. But doing this in community is exponentially more powerful.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah, probably to get all that help and support.
Andrea Reed: I can talk about it a lot, but I can show you a short demonstration if you would like to give it a try. So we basically, we use the principles of rotation, counter rotation and breath to expand the fascia. And when we create space in the body, the body can flow better. So lymph, blood, cerebrospinal fluid, all that can move better through the body.
Cathy Meehan: think that would be great. Yes, I would love that. Yes.
Andrea Reed: And when the body is flowing, when flow is restored and adhesions are released, the body can heal itself. So if it, what it needs, we take out what it doesn’t need and we use rotational movement because when you’re stretching laterally, so if somebody is lifting weights, this is like a lateral stretch in one direction, right? That’s creating stress in the body that adds cortisol. When we do a rotational stretch in the body, it takes cortisol out.
Cathy Meehan: Yes.
Cathy Meehan: Okay, oops, because I work out and so I’m gonna need to, I probably should incorporate this into my routines so that I can balance out the cortisol that I’m increasing. That makes sense, that makes sense, that makes a lot of sense, okay.
Andrea Reed: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, and this is what professional athletes are doing and they have an edge up on their competition when they add this in for recovery or for increased performance. So basically if someone has pain in the body, it’s the body speaking to us, telling us to pay attention. And when we give it attention in a rotational movement with breath, it can unwind and let go like you’re bringing stress out of a washcloth. So you want to try something with me? Nope, you can do this seated.
Cathy Meehan: Yes.
Cathy Meehan: Mm.
Cathy Meehan: Mm-hmm.
Cathy Meehan: Yes, yes, do I need to stand up? Nope, OK. whoops. OK.
Andrea Reed: And if want, you can do this seated because the goal of fascial maneuvers is to really show people that anyone of any mobility, anywhere, anytime can do this without any equipment required. And I think we’re in a time and space where we need all the tools we can get like right away.
Cathy Meehan: Okay.
Cathy Meehan: Yes, yes, and especially convenient if you’ve got everything with you. It’s all there. It’s all there.
Andrea Reed: All the time, yep. We’re gonna do a simple release, which is just taking your right hand out in front of you. And everyone watching can join us if you would like, standing or seated. And then you take your right hand, the palm of your right hand, and just place it on your right shoulder. And now you can do this on skin or you can do this through a shirt. Either way is fine, but we wanna rotate the skin. So twist the skin out and then twist the skin in.
Cathy Meehan: Okay.
Cathy Meehan: I did the opposite. Sorry about that. Okay.
Andrea Reed: and see. That’s okay. You’re just gonna see and check in. Sometimes I close my eyes because that helps me really check in with how I feel inside my body instead of what I’m seeing. Which direction is tighter for you?
Andrea Reed: And then once you see which direction is tighter for you, you’re going to twist the skin in that direction. So for me, it’s tighter if I twist it out.
Cathy Meehan: Mine was in.
Andrea Reed: Okay, so hold that twist. That’s the most important part. If you lose it, that’s okay. You just come back on and you grip the skin and you rotate it again. So now we’re gonna bring that elbow overhead. Just do the best you can. And you’re going to hinge at the waist or if you’re seated, you’re just gonna lean to the left and you’re gonna turn your head to the right. So you’re looking under that armpit. yeah. And we’re gonna breathe in through the mouth and out six times. Breathe in. to.
Andrea Reed: Three.
Andrea Reed: Four. Five. Six. slowly come back up. my shoulder just clicked. That’s great. Unwind, let that go.
Cathy Meehan: Ooh, that felt great. If people haven’t tried that, they need to try that. my gosh, that felt so good. Are we going to do the left side? Okay, let’s do the left side.
Andrea Reed: So now you can just…
Andrea Reed: Yes. just look in and see how does it feel? How does it feel different from right side to left side right now in your body?
Cathy Meehan: It just feels loose and airy. I don’t know if that… Yeah, just feels… Yeah, loose and airy, light. It feels very light on my whole right side. My whole right side.
Andrea Reed: Mm-hmm. That’s what we’re going for.
Andrea Reed: So not bad for 30 seconds and free to do, right?
Cathy Meehan: No, yeah, that was cool. That was really cool.
Andrea Reed: There’s somebody working at a desk all day could stand up and do this. also before we do the other side, because the longer we wait, the more awareness the body is like, this side wants attention now. I’m like, stressing nuts. When we just to give you a visual on what we’re doing here, when we’re doing this, the rotation, if you were sitting watching a show on the couch or at the din, you know, if you’re studying or maybe not driving, if you’re a passenger, if all you did, right.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah, don’t do this while driving people. Don’t do it
Andrea Reed: Don’t do this, you’re supposed to have 10 and two or what are we at? If all you did was rotate the skin around the elbow and just sit or stand for three minutes, the fascia will start to unwind and it’ll go whatever direction the body needs. So when this arm, I was recovering from a broken wrist, I’d sit and hold and it would spiral. After about three minutes, I’d feel releases going up here. Now if I do it.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah.
Andrea Reed: I actually feel it in my hips. Now if I do this, it’ll travel through the shoulder and then it’ll go to the next spot that’s tight. And then I hold that and continue to unwind. So we’re unwinding, we’re undoing. But when we do this and this and have breath, we’re constricting this side and we know, the body knows that breath is life. So all the breath that normally goes to both sides of the body,
Cathy Meehan: Yeah, that’s great.
Cathy Meehan: Thank you.
Andrea Reed: can’t go here as much. It all goes in here. Well, we’ve got small and large intestine connections here. We’ve got liver. We’ve got right kidney, right lungs. We’ve got everything expanding and opening up. So we’re restoring the organs too when we’re working.
Cathy Meehan: Wow, that’s fabulous. That’s how I’ve, I’ve, if people don’t really actually know what the fascia is, it’s like, need to go, maybe I’ll put up a diagram of it, but it’s almost like a whole nother layer of skin, but it’s under your skin and goes over every muscle, every bone, every tendon. It’s like, it’s like a little body suit, right? If that, you know, but it’s under your skin. And so it’s just really fascinating how it actually, just, it, covers your entire body. so, and it’s, I thought that was interesting. You said, it’s the only thing you can’t surgically remove. And I was thinking through that and I was like, no, you probably can’t. Yeah, it’s really fascinating.
Andrea Reed: So there’s a video, I don’t know if you wanted to link to this video, there’s a really great video on YouTube and it’s called fascia 25 times magnified. And it shows during an arm surgery, they lift it up, they’re doing the surgery to repair, I think it’s a break, but they magnified the fascia. So you’re seeing living fascia, you’re not seeing what was fascia was like that chicken skin on the cutting board, that’s dead meat.
Cathy Meehan: Cool. Thanks.
Andrea Reed: This is alive and electrical and fluid and moving through. And as a fascial adhesion breaks up, it’s like they reconnect. It’s almost like watching new neural pathways connect. It’s wonderful.
Cathy Meehan: Cool. Yeah, cool. Yeah. It’s really amazing what are all the things that they’re discovering of our body or that it’s been around forever. They just called it something else. It makes me think of the endocannabinoid system, which is a whole nother thing. But there’s a podcast on the endocannabinoid system. But it’s just really fascinating that people are discovering this, like I said, and then using these to help. you know, with your chronic disease and circulation and so many things. I love it. I love it. Yes, I’m ready to do the other side. Okay, so left.
Andrea Reed: You ready to do the other side? Okay, left hand out in front of you, left palm on left shoulder, right hand, palm of your right hand is gonna grab the skin around the elbow and just check in and see is this side different. Twist the skin out, twist the skin in, we’re just rotating. When I say skin, you could also think fascia. So which way is better for you?
Cathy Meehan: I think my out, my out on this side.
Andrea Reed: Yeah, and most people are out unless there’s another pattern going on in the body, in which case we go in the direction that’s tighter. So twisting in the direction that’s tighter, lock that skin in place, bring the elbow overhead, do the best you can. And we’re gonna hinge at the waist, leaning to the right, turning your head to the left, breathe in through the mouth. too. Three. Feel that expansion even in the hips. Four.
Cathy Meehan: My chair is moving. Sorry. I couldn’t get my chair to stop moving.
Andrea Reed: slowly moving out of the screen and six. Slowly come up.
Cathy Meehan: yeah, I don’t. My I’m on a swivel chair. And when I did that, my chair just was automatically swiveling. I couldn’t get it to stop. So don’t do this while you’re driving and don’t do this while you’re in a swivel chair and you will be perfectly fine. So that was great. OK. My my.
Andrea Reed: That’s perfect.
Cathy Meehan: My practice there was a little interrupted, but it definitely still felt good. But that right one, I just really felt light and airy. Still, now it feels really good, really good.
Andrea Reed: So when we work with the elbow, we’re also releasing the knee. So when later on, when you’re walking around, see what you notice in the hips and knees.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah, so I wonder is this something like if I had a knee injury from overworking out or something I could utilize this.
Andrea Reed: Yes. So now again, everybody’s individual, typically a knee injury will come from above or below unless there’s been a direct impact to the knee. So if someone has pain in the knee, but they haven’t had a direct injury to the knee, I would look at releasing the hips and or the ankles because it’s usually traveling upstream or downstream to the knee. Yes, you can absolutely use this for working out for knees. In fact,
Cathy Meehan: Mm-hmm.
Cathy Meehan: Okay.
Cathy Meehan: Okay.
Andrea Reed: I can show you one that’s done standing. And again, you can modify these if you’re seated too, but it’s so simple. All we’re doing is just rotating the skin and breathing and seeing what happens. So you can use a towel or you can use your hands. You just rotate the skin. If you take the front and behind the thigh and you just take out. And now come into the squat and then breathe six times. And what you might notice,
Cathy Meehan: No. Okay.
Andrea Reed: Now for me, it’s four tailbone falls. So what I noticed even within a few seconds of doing that, I noticed that my sacrum and my tailbone started getting tight, which means that the unwinding was going up there. And so when something’s tight, when I’m doing fascial maneuvers, that’s my invitation to notice how pressure is moving through the body. So if you think of it like we’re squeezing a tube of toothpaste, as one end is releasing, the pressure is building up somewhere else. So then pressure releases, it flows better.
Cathy Meehan: Okay.
Cathy Meehan: So is there any like maintenance type suggestions? Like every day do these particular movements to, you know, just maintain health in your body? And like, what’s that like time period? Is it going to take me 30 minutes a day or, know, something like that? How do I incorporate that into my daily routine?
Andrea Reed: Yep. So you can do the 15 minute stress reset every day or as you feel called to. And within the stress reset, when I first started doing this with Human Garage, I couldn’t do it every day. I did one day and then the next day I felt exhausted or I had emotions coming up. Heaven forbid. I had like, it could have been good emotions. like, I had like, I was very weepy one day and then I felt like irritable.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah.
Andrea Reed: And I was like, OK, I’m noticing that I’m experiencing these changes. I don’t normally feel this way. So I did fascial maneuvers. I did the 15-minute reset once every three days. That’s all I could handle. And that’s what my body needed. I needed more rest. I needed more sleep. I needed more hydration during that time. Then it was once every two days, and now it’s every day. But Human Garage has the 28-day reset, and it’s on humangarage.net. And you can subscribe to the 28-day reset. And you will get one video every day where the founders The co-founders talk to you they’re all over the world filming in Amsterdam and Greece and all over the place. And they’re taking you through the stress reset and educating you on how your body works. And I’m like, well, this is really simple. I don’t know if it’s doing anything. And then I stopped and I was like, why do I hurt? Why am I grumpy? Why am I craving sugar? Because this functional movement can be done. And after 28 days of doing this daily, your body, your nervous system,
Cathy Meehan: No!
Andrea Reed: and your emotions expect to be out of stress.
Cathy Meehan: And then what happens when you stop, right? yeah, and you just keep going. Well, and it sounds like it’s simple enough to incorporate that, you know, it should be just, we always kind of focus on, you know, becoming more healthy. And as we’re becoming more aware, sometimes it’s changing your lifestyle and introducing little bits of things until it becomes routine. And then it just,
Andrea Reed: So then you keep going.
Cathy Meehan: It changes your life. It changes your life. So yeah. So I’m actually looking forward to incorporating some of this. And especially when you talked about the trade-off because of, because I do work out with weights and you know, if that’s increasing my cortisol, which I’m pretty sure we don’t want too much cortisol, then this should help, you know, balance that out too. So I think that’ll be, that’s probably my, my go-to for me, for me. So, um, Tell me about like some of the people that you work with and why do they seek out doing these fascia maneuvers? I mean, do you have any like particular cases that you can think about?
Andrea Reed: Yeah, so this helps everybody with everything. And there’s not many things that I can say that unless we’re working with foundational principles within the body that we need. Good nutrition, good hydration, mineralization. We need minerals in the body. We need silica. Our bodies are depleted of silica because of what’s being sprayed in the air. So consuming diatomaceous earth will allow our bodies to absorb the minerals that we’re taking so that we don’t have a really expensive pee later. So we’re actually absorbing all that good organic
Cathy Meehan: Mm-hmm. Nutrition, yeah.
Andrea Reed: food. Stress in the body can actually, there was an interesting study published a few years ago, stress in the body can actually negate the ability to absorb nutrition. So I could be eating all organic, taking practitioner grade supplements, and my nervous system and my body is so stressed out, I can’t absorb it. And so those are the kind of global picture things that are leading to the different issues that people are coming into my treatment room or for online one-on-one sessions, which I work mostly with women. seems to be that typically women are the ones that are seeking health for their families. There’s more and more men that are becoming aware of this because they want to be able to be free of pain, be the provider and feel strong and healthy in their bodies and look for solutions. Anybody with scar tissue, abdominal scar tissue, I’m seeing a lot of women who have had C-sections, hysterectomies, different operations in here.
Cathy Meehan: Mm-hmm.
Andrea Reed: where the scar tissue creates restriction and tension and then scar tissue will grab its neighbor and pull organs out of place. Somebody could come in for constipation, digestion issues, anxiety. my gosh, so much anxiety. we release the diaphragm, I used to have it every day, every single day. When we release the diaphragm, we can breathe better. And there’s like…
Cathy Meehan: Thank you.
Cathy Meehan: Okay.
Andrea Reed: in the brain and that anxiety loop of the brain saying something’s wrong in the body, I have to go fix it. I can’t fix it because the mind can’t fix the physiology. So it loops back up and then this like kind of panic cycle is created. We get into the respiratory diaphragm into the abdomen, apply the principles of rotation, counter rotation and breath, free it up, people can breathe better. Anxiety is disappearing, depression is starting to go away.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah.
Andrea Reed: what else do I say vertigo? my gosh, babies, babies and kiddos. I know human
Cathy Meehan: Yeah, you want to tell me, talk to me about babies and kiddos and fascial maneuvers.
Andrea Reed: So Human Garage has an incredible parents and children’s program that they’re relaunching. And this is where it’s short videos that show parents, grandparents, caregivers, how to work really, really gently with their kiddos as far as like an evening routine, bedtime routine. Let me just sit and hold your arm a little bit and you’re going to do some breaths together with me and maybe we’ll put the diffuser on or. listen to an audio book while we’re doing this and creates connection, but they’re also helping the body to let go of stress. If you sit and just hold your arm, just take your hand. Let’s try this together. Everyone take your right hand and just grab just under kind of where the armpit is as high as you can and just at the bicep, rotate that skin. We’re working on fascia, not muscle. Twist the skin outward and just sit and hold that for a minute and breathe normally.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah.
Andrea Reed: And I can kind of feel, actually feel a lot of heat releasing out of my body right now.
Andrea Reed: And so if your kiddo is watching TV with you and you hold a finger or a toe or a forearm or where we are right now, and you say, hey, I’d like to just, can I just do this real quick and see? I learned this stretch that helps you relax more in your body. Would you like to relax more in your body? Yeah, I guess please. My kids do this on me and they’ll twist it. Mom, can you have more video game time?
Cathy Meehan: Yeah. Yeah, I feel like, I think that’s great. Yeah. I love that.
Andrea Reed: So it’s just so simple, but I’ll see people that’ll come into the treatment room that will have maybe they, and this is more in my clinical practice where they want more functional work done with the jaw to help loosen things up and create more space for teeth to come in or, and that’s more with my craniosacral training and things like that that I incorporate fascial maneuvers into.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah.
Andrea Reed: We’re seeing pretty much anything that you can think of if you go to Human Garage on Instagram There are jaw releases big time it went viral with Garry working with LeAnn Rimes and People magazine, TMZ like all these you know mainstream channels picked up on it and they were they were all like what is What is happening here and she had a massive emotional release on the treatment table?
Cathy Meehan: Okay.
Andrea Reed: and starting to normalize. Healing happens in community, not hidden behind closed doors.
Cathy Meehan: Wow.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah, it’s so great that it’s now like more acceptable to talk about and share all of these natural holistic, you know, because, you know, few years ago, all of it was woo-woo, right? Yeah, mean, yeah, it’s just it’s amazing that we can all talk about it now, which which actually talking about gathering people. I do want to make sure Andrea that we talk about how successful your annual event that you have in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma has become. I mean, it is the go-to for holistic and natural healing. What made you come up with that concept and then have the determination and the guts to actually do it again and again and again?
Andrea Reed: Good question. Yeah, it’s, can’t not do it. It’s part of my calling and it started with having one very disempowered hospital birth and one very empowered but still challenging home birth and the contrast between the two and people, you I’m in the Facebook mom’s groups and stuff and people were posting things and questions and I would just share my experience. don’t ever.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah.
Andrea Reed: I don’t like to give people advice. If someone asked me directly, what would you do? I’ll tell them, but I like to just share what my experience is and then people can make their own choices, right? Free will.
Cathy Meehan: That’s great. Yep, that’s the way we should do it.
Andrea Reed: And so I just thought at one point, what if I just bring everyone together under one roof? I have an events management background and hotel management. And I was like, let’s just bring everyone together under one roof. Everyone I wish I had known about before I had my first baby. And we had the Holistic Birth and Baby event in 2019 and we had like 25 vendors and we had like 75 people come in and the stories were incredible. You know, people got new birth providers and changed their birth outcomes because they felt empowered by the knowledge of the vendors that came. And so now this year will be our seventh year. We’re expecting attendance around 5,000 in excess of that. It’s a two-day event. We’ve extended categories. I, yes, I created the invitation for it. But the reason these events are successful is because of vendors and sponsors and people like MeehanMD and MINDSETkids.
Cathy Meehan: Wow!
Andrea Reed: that show up, that share this event with your communities as well and bring your people in. And then when we all do that in collaboration, because there is no room for competition anymore, we’re never gonna run out of people. In fact, we’re gonna need more self-care practices as a practitioner, more self-care, because there’s gonna be so many people that are coming to the realization that what is going on out there isn’t working for them. And so…
Cathy Meehan: No, yeah. There is so much out there.
Andrea Reed: free event for people to come to where they can meet people one-on-one and see, okay, if we have half a dozen chiropractors at the event, we’ve got 12, 15,000 square feet, they can walk around and see who resonates with them, who is the specialist in the area that they wanna work with. And we’re collaborating together. So it’s an incredible time.
Cathy Meehan: Mm-hmm.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah, it really is. And you talk about, you know, the growth of this, if you want to call it a natural holistic industry movement, I’m going to call it a movement, the natural and holistic movement. There is still so much information to share and to make people aware and just, know, as they’re getting frustrated with the Western medical system and, you know, actually seeking healing rather than disease management. And you’re right, there is more business for people that are in this industry. And I always tell people, it’s like doing the Meehan, I’m sorry, the MINDSETkids, there’s 72 million kids between the ages of zero and 17. And they need natural holistic things. So I’m like the more people that want to do natural holistic pediatrics, please do it. please do it and just, you go to wellness events and do anything that you can, but we’ve got to really save people from Western medicine. That’s really kind of, I think, our mission, partly there. That’s really great. Yes.
Andrea Reed: Yep. And ask questions and ask questions. We’ll know you can do this because, but why and trust your mama gut. And I say mama gut like, like dads have it, caregivers have it too, but it’s like trust mama gut. You know, if you feel like something’s not right with your child, you’re probably right. And keep looking. That’s, that was the situation that I was in and everyone’s like, he’s fine. He’s fine. He’s fine. I’m like, yeah, but there’s something there’s, and he was fine.
Cathy Meehan: Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah.
Andrea Reed: compared to what’s going on out there. But there was something that he needed and I didn’t know what it was. And when I started asking the question, who can help us, life will answer the questions that we ask. like somebody has got to be able to help us, who can help us with this? And then I overheard somebody talk about somebody and then somebody else talked about that same person. I started hearing it and I was like, okay, this is how I got to where I am now. Following the.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah.
Cathy Meehan: Yes.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah. Yeah. Which I think I said you were a connector, right? It’s just in me. You are such a connector, which is so great. Well, let me ask you, Andrea, if someone is interested in finding out more about you specifically and also the holistic wellness event, where do you direct them to go?
Andrea Reed: Yep, so for all your information for the Holistic Wellness Event, you can go to HolisticOklahoma.com and it’s HolisticH-O-L-I-S-T-I-C-Oklahoma.com. And that’s got all the details on our event. We’ve got videos of past events and we’ll have 2026 vendors and sponsors listed there soon. I work with people in my clinical practice and doing one-on-one fascial maneuvers coaching virtually worldwide. All that information is on my website, AndreaReedWellness.com. and you can read a little bit more about the work that I do and testimonies and specific things. But definitely go to either YouTube or Instagram and follow Human Garage because their content is paradigm shifting and they’re really working with very, very complex cases worldwide and making it very, very simple for people to learn how to heal themselves.
Cathy Meehan: I love it. I love it. You are just a wealth of information. You are fun to have on a podcast and we are gonna do some more of these and I just hope you have a great blessed day, Andrea. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.
Andrea Reed: Thank you.
Andrea Reed: Thank you so much, Cathy, I appreciate you.
Cathy Meehan: Thanks.
