51. Moving Fearlessly with Jeannie DiBon

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00:00
Jeannie Di Bon
You know how it is. Sometimes you can go to the gym or you can go to a class and we kind of do it mindlessly we're just in it and we're going for it and we're not really participating with our brain, I guess, you know, fully engaged, fully present. And you get up and you leave the class and you go on with your day. And have you really noticed or changed anything about how you move and how you hold yourself? So the one thing I want to do for people is just make them more aware, make them more conscious of their patterns because often in those patterns is where the pain is kind of being held, whatever the stress, the trauma, the pain. So if we can become aware of that, we can change it. And that's ultimately what we're trying to do. 

00:58
Jennifer Milner
Welcome back to the Bendy Bodies podcast, where we strive to improve, wellbeing, enhance performance and optimize career longevity for every bendy body. This is co host Jennifer Milner, here with the hypermobility MD linda Bluestein. 

01:13
Dr. Linda Bluestein
We are so glad you are here to learn tips for living your best bendy life. This information is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for medical advice. 

01:24
Jennifer Milner
Our guest today is Jeannie Devon. Jeannie. Hello, and welcome to Bendy Bodies. 

01:30
Jeannie Di Bon
Thank you. Thank you both for inviting me. Really, really excited to be here and I really appreciate it. Thank you. 

01:37
Dr. Linda Bluestein
Of course. 

01:38
Jennifer Milner
Well, we're excited to have you here. I know we have referred to you several times on the podcast, so we're glad to finally have you in the guest chair so we can dig a little bit deeper with you. So for the people who don't know you or aren't really familiar with your work, can you tell us just a little bit about yourself? 

01:55
Jeannie Di Bon
Yes, of course. So, yes, I'm Jeanie Devon and I'm based in London, but I have clients all over the world. So I'm a movement therapist and my background was initially Pilates and I trained with Polestar Pilates, which is a rehabilitation Pilates organization. But I went on and investigated and learned other things to supplement my body and to help my body and ultimately to help my clients. So I don't stick strictly to pilates. Now I kind of look at movement patterns and I'm very interested in tension patterns and how people hold tension in their body and stress and trauma in their body. And of course, if you live with a chronic illness like hypermobility Eds or HSD, chances are you've got some tension and pain and things going on in your body. So I'm particularly interested in helping people with that. So I specialize in hypermobility Eds and of course the chronic pain that tends to go with these conditions. 

02:58
Jennifer Milner
Absolutely. And I know you wrote your book Hypermobility Without Tears, and that is sort of all about moving pain free. With hypermobility and Eds, we see a lot of people with hypermobility, including highlevel artists and athletes who function really well until they kind of hit that Eds wall, at which point they really struggle to incorporate movement back into their daily life without increasing pain. Sort of like you're either the hair or you're the tortoise. There's not a lot of in between. So what concrete steps can a person in this situation take? 

03:37
Jeannie Di Bon
Yeah, that's a really interesting point. We see it obviously in dancers and athletes, but we also see it in lots of our population, our hyper mobile population. Lots of people come to see me because exactly those reasons I used to be able to do this. I used to be a dancer, I used to be an athlete. And now I can't even get out of bed in the mornings. And I think it's really interesting and it kind of brings into what I was just talking about being interested in stress and trauma. Dan Siegel, who's the author of Mind Sight, he talks about people having a wall of tolerance. And I think for a lot of us, we have this tolerance level. And if you're a dancer, of course you're working really hard, you're doing lots of repetitive motions, you're probably pushing yourself very hard to be at the top of your game. 

04:28
Jeannie Di Bon
And it's almost like we get to this window of tolerance and it kind of fills up and then something happens and we can't do that anymore. And that's where we kind of get our stress and our trauma. I was lucky enough to speak to Stephen Porgis, who's the author of The Polyvagal Theory. And again, I'm very interested in that side of things and how it impacts our conditions. And he was saying people hypermobility in media shouldn't cause all these other problems of fatigue and all the disorder Nomias. And he really feels that the disorder Nomia. And these things that stop us doing what we want to do is kind of piggybacking on the back of our Eds. So when somebody gets to that stage where they used to be out be an elite athlete or a dancer, and now they're not because of injuries, stress, whatever's going on, we really, in my opinion, we really need to start looking at the autonomic nervous system. 

05:29
Jeannie Di Bon
And that's where I would start with people, because something's happened in the brain at that point, right? Something's now stopping you, something's causing all these injuries, whatever started that. And we have to now start almost reprogramming and calming down that nervous system. I have an example. I have a client who was a dancer. She stopped dancing, but she wanted to carry on being fit and healthy. She loved movement and she was doing like, kickboxing just at home on her own. She really very fit, very strong lady. And she was doing the kickboxing one day, and she did a kick and she did something. Obviously, we don't know what, but something happened she woke up the next day and literally she could not get out of bed, and she's still in bed, unfortunately. So we do very gentle things to help get her autonomic system regulated again. 

06:24
Jeannie Di Bon
But that kicked off a whole spiral of things. Sensitivities marcels even sensitivities to things like Wi Fi. Where did that come from? Where did all of that come from? What created that? So I think there's a lot going on sometimes with our athletes and our dancers and our general population. How do they get to that point? What happened to the nervous system that sort of got them to that stage? It's not just a physical issue. Yes, we get injuries, yes, we get repetitive strain injuries, of course, but it's not just that, I don't think. I think there's something else going on. And I really think we hit that sort of window of tolerance. Our stress buckets kind of explode and say, that's enough, I can't do this anymore. But yeah, that's just my thoughts on it. And what I see with my clients as well, I think a lot of. 

07:21
Jennifer Milner
People would sort of instinctively lean into that. And as they're listening to this, they're probably going, yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and really resonates with them. So if we're talking about it being an issue that's more with the autonomic nervous system, why is movement so crucial then, for people who have hypermobility? 

07:39
Jeannie Di Bon
Yeah, I mean, it is. You're absolutely right. It's so crucial. I mean, from a physical point of view, obviously, we've got to stop that deconditioning because we know that people with hypermobility Eds, they're going to decondition quicker than somebody who doesn't have our condition. So movement, and I love that you call it movement and not exercise, because exercise has such connotations for some people because they're told to exercise. And actually, movement can be anything you want, anything you enjoy. It doesn't have to be a formal sort of exercise class. So it's really important that we work on that deconditioning, because once you start to decondition, we're going to spiral down and down, and that's when people start to have the issues like, well, I can't walk anymore, I need a walking aid, or I need we need to stop that, hopefully before we get to that stage, before people decondition so much. 

08:35
Jeannie Di Bon
So movement helps with our postural tone, our muscular tone. It helps with our pain management when we don't move. And for myself as well, when I don't move, I feel worse. I feel much worse. And I know my clients feel the same. So movement and it should be a beautiful thing, right? So we've got the physical side. And you are dancers, I'm sure you love. Movement is beautiful, right? It gives such joy to so many people. So we've got the physical side of the deconditioning and the muscular tone. But what about that emotional side of it? Having the confidence to do the things you want to do in life. I don't want to be scared of walking up my stairs or walking up to the shops, or not being able to walk my dog. And so we need to keep that emotional health as well for people because it's a balance, right? 

09:28
Jeannie Di Bon
Emotional, physical. So, yeah, lots and lots of reasons going to why movement is so important. 

09:35
Dr. Linda Bluestein
And I have a line that I like to say, and I get a little careful about it because the way you described it is so perfectly about how the deconditioning happens. Because sometimes when you mention the word deconditioning, people get defensive. And like you said, it can be a result of something else that happened, but we still have to be very just careful to get out of that as quickly as possible. So I say deconditioning is the devil and we just want to get out of that as quickly as possible. In terms of if someone is, you know, in a really rough place or maybe they're doing pretty well, but they have some joint instability and they really need to work on that in order to be able to improve functioning of the whole body. How do you recommend that people work on that? 

10:21
Jeannie Di Bon
Yeah, so joint stability obviously is another really important factor in our whole management of this condition. And a lot of people kind of jump in and think, well, you're unstable, so we need to strengthen that joint. You need to do strengthening exercises, and then you'll be fine. And I kind of take a step back from that and say, well, no, actually, we can't strengthen something if somebody's in the wrong place. One shoulder is here, one shoulders forward, pelvis is rotated, whatever it might be. So I come back to alignment first, and I do a lot of work in helping people understand where their bones should be in place. If I don't understand where my shoulder should be, how am I going to then even attempt to strengthen it? So I do a lot of work sort of pre strengthening, and that takes up quite a lot of time, but that's crucial work. 

11:15
Jeannie Di Bon
And then once you've kind of oh, yeah, I kind of understand my shoulders are here and not here. That's great. Okay, so you've understood that. Now we can start doing some strengthening. Work very slowly, go slow, go low. But it's really important. So alignment first, then add on your strength. And when you start adding on the strength, of course we want to do low loads. We don't suddenly want to start giving people 20 kilos to try and lift. When I started, I was on half a kilo. I couldn't lift anything without pain. And there's nothing wrong with that. You start where you are. Some people can't even have weights initially. That's fine too, wherever you are today. I always say one small physical step is a massive emotional step. Because you've done it. You've done one rep with half a kilo. Absolutely brilliant. And that's going to start working on your joint stability, which is then going to make you feel so much better. 

12:18
Dr. Linda Bluestein
Great. And that also probably ties into improving your posture and neuromuscular patterns. Can you comment on that a little bit as well? 

12:26
Jeannie Di Bon
Yeah, absolutely. I always say that you can't teach someone posture. I mean, obviously, intellectually I could say to you, okay, let's stand up, and you need to do this, and you need to put your pelvis here and your shoulders here, and your head needs to be back and all of those things. We know what a good posture looks like, but it has to be embodied into the nervous system for you to actually be able to utilize it and maintain it. Because I could teach you, right, let's stand up. Let's do this. And you'd go, yeah, I've got that. And the minute this call finished, you'd probably go, oh, that was way too hard. I can't maintain that. Because it comes back to that conditioning. We haven't conditioned you to be able to maintain your postural tone. So the two kind of go together. The movement patterning that I do, what I do with people is I look at how are you moving, what's not moving, what's stuck, where are you moving too much? 

13:26
Jeannie Di Bon
What's causing your nervous system stress? You can see that in various different ways in people, and can we change that? And at the same time, coming back to that nervous system, can we help you feel safe? Okay, so when they start to take all of that and it's a lot of information, right? But when they start to take all of that on board, you kind of see over the weeks that you're working with someone, their posture automatically starts to change. So their chest starts to open, their head gets naturally drawn back, the pelvis starts to take on some density, so it kind of hangs as it should, and they start to fill their feet into the ground. So obviously the feet are super important for that posture. We've got to be really sitting in our feet, and it all kind of comes together in this beautiful way. 

14:14
Jeannie Di Bon
And it's not that I've taught them how to do posture, but their nervous system has understood, well, this is supposed to be here, and this is supposed to be here, and my feet are supposed to be here. And all of a sudden, someone's got a beautiful posture, and that way it lasts. There's nothing worse than someone telling you, pull your shoulders back. It's horrible and it's painful. So I prefer to kind of drip feed it and let it kind of blossom on its own. 

14:45
Jennifer Milner
I love that idea of drip feeding it. And I know all of my clients and everybody listening on the podcast have heard me say so many times, slow and low. Which is just another way of saying the same thing. And talking earlier about joint stability and now talking about postural reeducation and retraining. The theme that you keep coming back to, which I 100% support, is that education is so key that we have to educate people, what we're trying to accomplish, what it should feel like, maybe what is going on, even like this is what is happening to you, this is what's happening with your nervous system, this is what it should feel like. And then let's figure out how to get the strength to maintain that. As you said, just telling someone to pull their shoulders back, they're going to hold it until you stop looking. 

15:36
Jeannie Di Bon
Exactly. 

15:37
Jennifer Milner
And then walk away. 

15:39
Jeannie Di Bon
That's absolutely spot on. I totally agree 100% with that summary. Thank you. 

15:45
Jennifer Milner
Absolutely. Education so important. So speaking of education, you have a lot of different ways that you put information out there in your books, your YouTube videos, and then you've got the Zebra Club program. And throughout all of them you do a lot of work on proprioception, which is another big hobby horse of mine. So who should try to improve their proprioception and what are some ways that we can do this? 

16:11
Jeannie Di Bon
Well, everyone can work on their propioception, but I was thinking about your audience. Obviously, dancers, they probably have the most amazing proprioception because they do these beautiful moves. You have to have proprioception and control to be able to do the things that a lot of your listeners are doing. Just recently I had a phone call from a university in America, actually, who work with elite athletes and a lot of volleyball, a lot of sort of not American football, but a lot of sports that probably we don't have as much over here. But they were concerned because they had these really strong fit guys, these athletes. Some of them were hyper mobile and they were like, these guys keep getting injured, they keep tearing their ACLs and why they're so strong and fit and they can run up and down whatever pitch they're running up and down and what's going on. 

17:07
Jeannie Di Bon
And I actually said to them, well, do you ever step back because they're in the gym, like doing loads of weights and all the big stuff that men want to do. And I'm like, well, do you ever actually step back and work on their appropriate section? Do you actually get them to slow, go slow, go low, which they'll probably hate, but actually is really important? Can we actually teach them to understand where their body is in space and how they're moving and all of these things that go into proprioception make them more aware? And that was really interesting. So they've gone away and they're going to start working on sort of adding this, not taking away, obviously, all the strength stuff they need to do. But they're adding in proprioceptive training to their athletes, which I think maybe is often missed in a lot of these sort of athletic programs. 

17:58
Jeannie Di Bon
So, yeah, anyone, whether you're an athlete or, you know, somebody like me, someone like you, just not a dancer, we can all benefit from proprioception. And why is it so important? Because what I found is that once people start to get proprioception about what they're actually doing, their injuries start to go down, because we're suddenly aware that I shouldn't be standing with my knees locked back and I shouldn't be lifting with my elbows locked and all of these different things. And they start to control their range of movement and all of a sudden those strains and strains start to diminish very significantly. So it's super important. It's one of my principles in my hypermobility method. It comes after breath and relaxation. So it's the third principle because it's so important before you can start again, going on to that strengthening work. We can't give someone a weightlifting program or whatever we want to do. 

19:00
Jeannie Di Bon
If they don't know what they're doing in space, they're just going to injure themselves. So it has to come pretty early on in anybody's training program, in my opinion. 

19:10
Jennifer Milner
So what might that look like? I'm going to beg you for details on what are some ways that people can work on their appropriation, because it's one of those things we talk about a lot and people like, I don't know what that means, I don't know how to do that. 

19:23
Jeannie Di Bon
Yes, no, that's a good point. It is a word that kind of gets thrown around a lot. But the way I do it, and I'm probably quite unique or strange in that I'm quite obsessed with talking about sensation. So the way I get people to improve their proprioception is I spend a lot of time with them lying on their back, so in a safe, supine position, lots of proprioceptive information coming up from the ground and they can feel their body fully supported on the ground. And what I talk to them about is the sensation. And we do really basic things. If somebody's got very unstable shoulders and they don't understand how their arms are supposed to move and they can't control their arms when they lift them up, or pick up a bag, whatever it might be a simple thing, like we lie on our back with our elbows bent, vertical forearms, so very safe, very simple. 

20:18
Jeannie Di Bon
And basically we just start to lift the arm up towards the ceiling. And I said, can you feel the weight of your scapula dropping into the floor? If you watch any of my YouTube videos, people say to me, oh, Jeannie, I know you love those bent arm exercises because they pretty much appear in all of my videos because it's so useful to start to feel well, when my arm goes up, can I feel that heaviness and weightiness of my shoulder dropping down? So they start to get that awareness of where that joint actually is. And we just learn to move our arms very safely, very slowly. And that's the other thing. To improve proprioception, you have to do things really slowly, because in the slowness, and I say to people, do it the slowest thing you've ever done, it's going to feel ridiculously slow. But in that slowness, you're actually paying attention to every single thing rather than just going, yeah, oh, that's easy, I can lift my arm up and down. 

21:17
Jeannie Di Bon
What's the big deal about that? No, it's not that. It's can you feel that? Can you actually pay attention to it? Because then your nervous system is listening. And we come back to the beginning about how we actually have to start to reprogram people and how they move and how they think about movement and making people feel safe in their movements as well. So, yeah, that's a long winded way of answering your questions. Sorry, but yeah, lots of lying on the ground, getting lots of feedback, then I add resistance. So bands, balls, they're great. You don't need a reformer. I know a lot of us have got reformers, which are brilliant proprioceptive tools, but if you don't have one, you get a TheraBand, you get a small Swedish pilates ball, you get a spiky ball. There are so many things you can use to give you that feedback to help improve your proprioception. 

22:10
Jennifer Milner
Yes, I completely agree with you. It seems like such a difficult concept for people to grasp sometimes, that idea of our 6th sense of our appropriation. But it's so important for people with hyper mobility to understand when we have so many different options for where our shoulder joint might sit, how our humor might sit in the socket. It's really important to be able to listen to it and see how it feels and see what it's trying to say to you. So I love that you spend so much time working on that. One of the other things that you do, you talk about your five step integral movement method. Could you describe that and how our listeners could incorporate that into their sort of day to day lives? 

22:52
Jeannie Di Bon
Yeah, so the integral movement method, or the IMM as we shorten it to I guess you can think about it again, it comes back to this, how I first started. You know, it's a way of making people more mindful and more aware of these subtleties in their movement patterns. And as I said at the beginning, I'm very interested in what tension patterns are you holding? What breathing patterns have you got? Where is this muscular tension that's stopping you moving pain free? So the first step, and again, I spend a lot of time here, I call it unwind. So unwinding muscular tension, unwinding emotional tension. So, again, lots of time lying on the back in a comfortable position, looking at breathing patterns, looking at very simple movements. But what's going on here. Do you brace? Are you guarding? Have you stopped breathing? All those things that go on. 

23:49
Jeannie Di Bon
So we spend a lot of time softening and letting the body kind of settle into the floor. And then the next stage is called Explore. So we start to move and I call it Explore because it should be fun. I don't like perfection. I don't want people thinking it's got to be done like this. Just explore. How do your arms move? They don't have to go in a straight line, it doesn't matter. And then we kind of stop and assess and say, okay, when I lifted my arm, did I brace? Did the shoulder come up to my ear? Whatever it might be. And so we start to notice, actually, okay, can I change that? Now I'm aware that my shoulder always comes up to my ear. Can I change that? So we refine it. So step four is refined. So we move again and we're now conscious that when I lift my right shoulder, it always comes up to my ear. 

24:36
Jeannie Di Bon
So can I change that? And then the final stage, which is really important, is sort of reflect. So you stop and you actually go, actually, do I feel different when I get up off the mat? Does that work I've just done? Do I feel different? Do I breathe differently? Do I hold myself differently? And even if someone says to me one thing, often they'll say to me, actually I feel really strange, or I feel weird and I'm like, Brilliant. If you feel weird, that means your nervous system has gone, oh, this is different. That feels different to how we normally do Pilates or movement or whatever yoga, whatever it is we're doing. So it's really great. You just want them to say, wow, I feel different, I feel lighter or my feet feel heavier. Everyone is going to have a different response, but you need some kind of response because we need our nervous system to be engaged in the process. 

25:31
Jeannie Di Bon
You know how sometimes you can go to the gym or you can go to a class and we kind of do it mindlessly we're just in it and we're going for it and we're not really participating with our brain, I guess. Fully engaged, fully present. And you get up and you leave the class and you go on with your day and have you really noticed or changed anything about how you move and how you hold yourself? So the one thing I want to do for people is just make them more aware, make them more conscious of their patterns. Because often in those patterns is where the pain is kind of being held, whatever the stress, the trauma, the pain. So if we can become aware of that, we can change it. And that's ultimately what we're trying to do. 

26:19
Jennifer Milner
It sounds like what you're saying is that movement is really important for every hyper mobile person and that we are looking to understand that it's the movement that's important. It's also the education that's important. It's also the nervous system reeducation that is so important. So this is not a linear process. We're not looking at ten reps today, 20 reps tomorrow, 30 reps the next day. We are looking at listening to the body, gaining confidence in what we feel and then being able to interpret what we feel and being able to move forward in that way. So some days we will be the hair and we'll feel great and we'll be running, and some days it'll be hard to stick our head out of our tortoise shell and keep moving. And that's completely okay, is what you're saying? 

27:05
Jeannie Di Bon
Yes, absolutely. Yeah, it's a really good point. I was talking about this with some of the members of the Zebra Club last night and we drew a little graph. And in talking of progress and how people move forward, like you're saying, and it's not linear. So you might have an axis and, you know, for a I don't want to say normal, but a nones person, it might be a graph that goes straight up like this. And every week they get different, more loads, more reps, everything. For us, you might start off like this, and then it has a little sort of dip and a little circle and you kind of step back and you have to reassess and maybe go back and then go forward, and then you go up a little bit more and then there's a little dip again. And that's okay. We're not going to have a straight vine. 

27:52
Jeannie Di Bon
We might go up and down and that doesn't matter. That doesn't matter as long as we keep working at what's right for us. And like I say, recognizing. Okay, today I'm not going to go and do my usual workout. Today I just need to lie on the floor and do some breath work because I'm feeling a little bit anxious or a little bit I just don't feel right. And that's really so many times I missed that and I would go and do things. And ultimately we can end up hurting ourselves because some days our bodies just don't want to go and do the hard stuff. We want to go and just do breath work, some somatic work, and that's absolutely fine and interestingly, a lot of my members, which is kind of counterintuitive, but what they've said is that in doing the softer work, the unwinding, the slower, what we call in the Zebra Club gentle classes, they're not actually gentle as in, oh, this is easy. 

28:50
Jeannie Di Bon
They're actually the body awareness classes. They're those essential nervous system classes. And what they've actually reported to me is that by spending more time balancing out with those gentle classes and the strengthening classes, they've actually got much stronger than they ever thought they would because it's not just about doing the weights and doing. The band work and whatever, they actually find the value in stepping back and going, actually, I just want to do this today. I'm going to do I've got classes like rest and restore or body scanning or whatever. But these ones that are much more somatic, they found them invaluable. So it shows. I think it's a really important part for our hyper mobile population that really. 

29:39
Dr. Linda Bluestein
Makes a lot of sense. And I think what you're teaching people really is how to help their nervous system feel safe. 

29:46
Jeannie Di Bon
Yeah. 

29:47
Dr. Linda Bluestein
And once their nervous system feels safe, then they can feel like they can add on the movement and actually be able to incorporate more activity of the body. And I try very hard not to use that word exercise, because I feel like so many people about it, they're like, I just keep getting told I need to do physical therapy and exercise. And it's like, no, it's a combination of things. And that's what I really love about the Zebra Club and your YouTube videos, and I recommend those to people all the time. 

30:16
Jeannie Di Bon
Thank you. 

30:17
Dr. Linda Bluestein
Of course. Can you talk a little bit about the Zebra Club, why you started it, and what kind of feedback you've gotten about it? 

30:26
Jeannie Di Bon
Yes. Yeah. Thank you. Well, the Zebra Club is really my heart's work. I love it, and I can't ever envisage not doing the Zebra Club. It kind of came off the back end of I think you guys know my first hypermobility course, which I wrote in 2016, strengthen Your Hypermobility Core, which has now been the subject of the research study and has kind of been used by 100 people now, which is amazing. But when I wrote that back in 2016, there wasn't really anything structured out there for the hyper mobile population. There were a few bits on YouTube, but varying qualities and different things. Like, YouTube is full of all sorts of things, isn't it? So there wasn't really anything structured out there. So the course came out, and it's five lessons of 30 minutes, which is great. It's a good introduction to getting people moving with hypermobility. 

31:26
Jeannie Di Bon
And I think it was the first of its kind, an online program for hypermobility. And so that was successful. And I was having a conversation with Dr. Russet, dr. Leslie Russek, who is a speaker for the Eds Society, a physical therapist. And I said to her, I've got this idea of making more of that, making it more bigger, like a community of people. What do you think? And she was like, well, that sounds brilliant because there isn't really anything, especially in the States, there isn't that kind of support for people. So back in 2018, I started working on it, and ultimately it was to help people, because people can't go to physical therapy forever. People can't afford to keep going to physical therapy. Is there something we can do at home, in the safety of our own home? Some people don't like to travel. Some of us need to stay close to home. 

32:22
Jeannie Di Bon
So what can we do at home with the minimum amount of equipment that's affordable? And so I created we have over 120 classes now in the Zebra Club of, as I said, varying levels. But apart from the classes, which obviously are great, we need to do the movement. We have this inbuilt community, and it's the community, there's nothing worse than going through this Eds journey and feeling on your own and feeling isolated. And nobody understands. A lot of our members come on and they've never even spoken to anyone who has Eds before. So we have these monthly meetings and they can meet other people and go, hey, I've got that too. And that alone is such a massive healing for people to understand they're not alone. People do have the same issues as you and we're all going to get through it together. There's this real sense of people helping each other. 

33:19
Jeannie Di Bon
So we have these events and monthly meetings and we have our own Facebook page within the app so only members can see what's posted. And it's wonderful. I'm very proud of what it's become. So, yeah, it was there to help people, ultimately to help people move better, to feel better. And we became an app in November last year, so we're now on the App Store and we're on a web app. So if people don't like to use their phones, I know a lot of people don't, you can still do it on your desktop. So, yeah, that's why I created it. That's how it came about. 

34:05
Dr. Linda Bluestein
That's really great. And it's so nice to there are more resources than there used to be, but it can be so challenging when people are really just some people do end up that they are spending a fair bit of time in bed and they just don't know what to do, where to start. For people like that, is the Zebra Club still a good place for them to be tapping into? Or should they start someplace else? Or what do you recommend that people, if they've really just gotten into a really bad place and they feel like everything that they do hurts, do you have any suggestions for where they can start? 

34:42
Jeannie Di Bon
Yeah, absolutely. And we do have members like that. So I created a whole set of classes that you could to get people going, right, to get them started that you can actually do on the bed. So lying down, totally supine, no equipment, just to help people, those people who are starting out in that condition. We've got a lot of seated classes as well. And as I was saying earlier, a lot of those somatic awareness classes, body scans, breathing practices, things that you can just do on your bed or in your armchair. And it's all, as I said, it's all about helping them feel safe to move again, starting to build confidence, getting over that fear of movement that a lot of us have, and speaking to other people as well and saying, gosh, I'm going through this. Has anyone else been through this? And people saying, actually, yes. 

35:42
Jeannie Di Bon
And what I did, I found this class really helped and this class really helped. It's very powerful. But yeah, we have classes that start, as I say, from being in bed or being in a chair all the way up to what we call challenging classes, which are a little bit faster, I guess, a little bit. You should be able to we've worked on with appropriation and the stability by then. So people wanted that. They said to me, can we have more sort of even cardio? We've got a whole section of hypermobility safe cardio classes because people are like, I really miss doing cardio, but every time I try and go and do a cardio class which has got jumping and star jumps and they go, I injure myself. So I'm like, okay, let's come up with a set of cardio classes that doesn't involve jumping around and damaging our knees and our ankles. 

36:35
Jeannie Di Bon
So we've got a whole set of classes for cardio and people love them and even chair cardio. So if you're like, well, I can't stand up, I've even got them on the chair. So I try to think of everything, you know, I do. I just I think I dream this stuff. I go to bed and I wake up in the middle of the night and that would be a really good class. It's like my obsession. I'm kind of obsessed with it. 

37:03
Dr. Linda Bluestein
That's amazing. And I love the terminology that you use because our society tends to be, or can be so judgmental and you know, the person who's lifting lots of weight at the gym or the professional athlete who can tolerate lots of pain, and they tend to be viewed very differently than the person who's really struggling. So I like how you have the different you're using names that are much. 

37:28
Jeannie Di Bon
Less judgmental, which I really like, absolutely, really important, right? Because you're not going to start feeling safe and you're not going to start calming things down if you feel that people are judging you, because that all goes into the mix. How I feel about myself is going to show up in my body, right? We can't escape the two. So I want people to feel welcomed, safe, part of community, that there's something for everyone no matter where they are. Today, that's what I wanted to create because I've been there, I've been in pain, I've been unable to do things, and I know how valuable it can be and I just want to give that back to people. 

38:16
Dr. Linda Bluestein
That's amazing. So, final question, where can people learn more about you? And then also if there's anything that we didn't ask that you wanted to add in at the end here. 

38:28
Jeannie Di Bon
Well, thank you. It's been great. I think we've covered everything. So, yes, as you've mentioned, the YouTube channel, so I do regular, I do live classes once a month on YouTube, but there's also a whole host of different classes and education. So I do a lot of education on there. It's not just about exercise. It's like, why is this happening? Why is that? So I try and educate. So that's always going to be updated on my YouTube channel, which is just Jeannie de Bond. I'm on all the social medias, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, if people want to find me. And of course, I have the Zebra Club, which is www. The Zebra Club, it's always a tricky one because the search engine has always got a space in it. So it's the Zebra Club. And I just briefly wanted to mention, in case you have any sort of health professionals listening or therapists or physical therapists, I do also run education for teachers, Pilates teachers, yoga teachers, massage therapists through the Eds Society on their Echo platform. 

39:42
Jeannie Di Bon
And it's the immense so it's learning about my IMM method. And it's all online and it's 2 hours a week for nine weeks. So 18 hours of content. So that's a relatively new thing. We just finished our first program and our next one is starting in September. So, yeah, I just wanted to mention that in case you had anyone interested in professional education, that's great. 

40:07
Jennifer Milner
And I think it's going to be a really valuable resource for a lot of people. There's not that much out there that medical professionals or people on for free, like trainers and a lot of teachers can find on the subject of hypermobility. So I think that's going to be super valuable for a lot of people. So thank you for that. 

40:24
Jeannie Di Bon
Thank you. 

40:25
Jennifer Milner
Well, you have been listening to Bendy Body's Podcast, speaking with Jeannie de Bont. Jeannie, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. 

40:33
Jeannie Di Bon
Thank you. I've really enjoyed it and an absolute pleasure to be with you. Thank you. 

40:38
Jennifer Milner
Well, the feeling is mutual, I promise you. If you love what you learned, please follow the Bendybody's podcast to avoid missing future episodes and screenshot this episode. Tagging us in your story so we. 

40:48
Jeannie Di Bon
Can connect with you. 

40:49
Jennifer Milner
Our website is www.bendybodies.org and you can follow us on Instagram at bendy. Leaving a review following the Bendy Bodies Podcast and sharing the podcast helps spread the word about hypnobabilities and associated conditions. This information is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Information shared is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Thanks so much for listening to us today and we'll catch you next time on the Bendy Bodies Podcast. 

41:22
Dr. Linda Bluestein
Thanks so much, Jeannie. It was great chatting with you. 

41:25
Jeannie Di Bon
Thank you. 

41:26
Dr. Linda Bluestein
If you love what you learned, follow the Bendy Bodies podcast to avoid missing future episodes. Screenshot this episode. Tagging us in your story so we can connect. Our website is www.bendybodies.org and follow us on Instagram at bendy underscore bodies. Leaving a review following the Bendy Bodies Podcast and sharing the podcast helps spread the word about hypermobility and associated conditions. This information is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. The information shared is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. We'll catch you next time on The Bendy Bodies podcast.