hello and welcome my name is ruth chiles i've been working very successfully over many years with many many clients to help them resolve completely cure their focal dystonia many of my clients are musicians the majority musicians but i've also worked with athletes and then with with other people in general population so what i wanted to do was just record a series of videos to explain uh from my perspective what the causes of focal dystonia are and how we can work with them because from my perspective it's not so much about the physiology of the body so much as the neurophysiology of the brain and that's the way that i work with it so this video is just an overall introduction and then in future videos i want to go into more detail on each of the aspects that i want to mention today so just to give you a little bit of background i started working with focal dystonia almost by accident actually i had suffered from focal embouchure dystonia at around 17 or 18 years old and actually stopped playing music for many many years it was never diagnosed at that moment that was a long time ago and um my solution was actually just to stop playing which was such a shame because music was was my life it was my soul and then i actually i mean i had also had a number of other performance blocks with my music anyway so um my first aspect to my of my career was actually to work with athletes and with musicians and other performing artists around their performance blocks in general um and i and so for many many years i've been working on almost 30 years now i've been working with neuroplastic techniques around performance blocks and many of those being physical blocks where the body doesn't respond in in the way that it's been trained to respond and then really quite a number of years ago now i started to work with i was asked to work with a basketball player whose foot would go into contractions every time he jumped he went to do a jump shot at that point it wasn't diagnosed as focal dystonia um but you know over the years as i've worked with so many different clients with focal dystonia it obviously was and i really saw very clearly what the cause was you know as he as i took his clinical history for it became very clear as to what the course wasn't and and so i worked in it from from as i say from this neurophysiological perspective and um in actually a fairly short period of time not only was his focal dystonia completely cured but he's actually his percentage on his jump shots were better than they had been beforehand um and then you know the basketball world is a small is a small place so word got around and and i was increasingly worked with other clients with with similar problems with focal dysteria problems in different aspects of their body and all of them work very successfully with them and then a trombone player came across came across me and came across the work that i was doing and it was him that actually put the label of focal dystonia on it and he asked me he had focal embouchure dystonia and asked me if i could work with him as well so i did so again very successfully came back to complete had a complete recovery from uh from the had it for many many years and had tried many different things to resolve it um and he was he that encouraged me to really continue to work with this with this problem and to dedicate my my practice towards focal dystonia more than overall performance blocks which is what i've been doing since then and you know as say i've dedicated the last many years to working exclusively with focal dystonia so where does it come from we need to understand that it's a neurophysiological response that is happening in the brain to do with the activity in the automotive autonomic nervous system and what happens is it's making it forces the brain to be almost like it's moving forwards and backwards at the same time and that counter movement is what then eventually shows up in the body as these counter movement physical movements in the body okay so in order to understand what's going on and in future videos i'm going to explain all of these in in more detail we need to understand how the autonomic nervous system functions and how it has different levels of of functioning one of those levels is well-being but then the other levels are survival modes we've normalized some survival nodes in gen in modes in general in our culture um but particularly in the world of performance um and most of us don't realize that we are in survival we think that we're in well-being so it's important to understand that and so over prolonged periods of time of the autonomic nervous system being survival mode what happens is it creates disconnections in the brain it's almost like they create these these bar these um capsules in the brain that have dissociative barriers around them and focus estonia is a dissociative uh problem in the body meaning that most people who have suffered from focus dystonia will talk about to some degree them not being able to feel that part of the body in in the same way it might feel alien it might feel more numb and it might feel they just don't have the same level of detail of feeling in that part of the body and so we need to understand what's causing that over arousal in the nervous system okay sometimes you know they're very specific for events that have occurred sometimes related to music and for some clients it actually goes way back way back to the early childhood and um events that occurred to them that installed the nervous system into this hyper around state and or the survival state if you want to call it like that and that's also why so often we see these many other traits with people who suffer from vocal dystonia such as perfection hyper perfectionism hyperactivity tremendous focus obsession and all these different all these different personality traits that actually are also a reflection of the nervous system being over stimulated and in survival mode um and we also need to understand which is something i'm going to explain in in another video you know the different aspects of the brain and the different way that they function so we can think top down top downwards that the brain is divided into two main levels so we have the neocortex at the top which is our thinking part of the brain it's where all our conscious thoughts are coming from um anything that we're aware of our opinions our decisions when we set objectives when we tell ourselves to do something or do or something else when we tell ourselves how to move our fingers or how to hold our embouchure or how to move the tongue that's all coming from the neocortex and the neocortex works on about 10 to 60 bits of perceptual information per second which is pretty phenomenal when you think about it but then moving downwards we have the sub cortex which is everything else our limbic system our reptilian brain the brain stem and that part of the brain is actually what really governs all of our movements it governs almost everything that we do so let's bear in mind whereas the neocortex is working on 10 to 60 bits of perceptual information per second the sub cortex is working on 11 million bits of information per second so anything automated that's going on the body is coming out of the subcortex and that's where we need to work to be able to resolve focal dystonia so i use neuroplastic techniques the main one is brain spotting which which gives us direct access to the subcortex in a com completely pinpointed place to where the causes are and as we do that what happens is we release these capsules we break down the dissociative barriers and their nerve system comes into peace and well-being on the other hand i also teach my clients to how to actively and spontaneously under their control go into deep flow states which are the deepest well-being states that we have so that their relationship with mute with their music and with their instrument changes to one of flow and that they can mainta manage and maintain those flow states in all moments and actually throughout the whole of their life as well not just with their instrument and that means that as they're doing that that the whole brain that they're able to use the whole intelligence of their brain this whole 11 million bits of information per second um in an integrated and healthy and flowing way so the body also comes back into flow and its natural movement so as i say those are the key things that we need to understand in order to understand focal dystonia and i'm going to continue to record videos over the next weeks to explain each of one of each one of those in more detail to you what i find is that you know when i'm working with clients and i begin to explain this to them so many things begin to make sense and they begin to go oh that explains this and that explains that and oh yes now i understand so i'm sure that as i go through these talking through these videos there will be many things that will begin to make sense to you um so curing focal dystonia is part of my passion um you know it was so sad for me to i felt like i lost my soul and so much my purpose when i stopped playing music and through learning about it and healing my own focal embouchure dystonia i've been able to come back to playing music again you know without this any symptom whatsoever and so i know what it's like to have been able to bring for myself bring that joy and that purpose back to my life bring my soul back to myself and and that's what makes me so passionate about this work and and and doing offering that same gift to my clients so i really hope that this information is useful for you if you have any questions or want to get in contact in any shape or form please do so i'm going to leave my website and contact details with this um with this video and with each of the following videos and i really hope that at some point that we get to meet and above all i really hope that if you are suffering from focal dystonia that you do find the cure for it that you do find a really successful treatment and that you can come back to your full talent thanks for listening to me