The self-care practice of dry brushing
An ancient Ayurvedic practice that is so helpful for people with Lymphedema or any kind of chronic condition where there is lymphatic stagnation.
Dry brushing can help:
To support you as we shift seasons, or
To wake up your lymphatic and blood circulation any time you need. When you first wake up is my favourite time, or before bed to slough off the day physically and energetically.
Encourage your body to detoxify & renew naturally.
There are many reasons to add dry brushing to your weekly routine.
It has lasting benefits for our overall lymphatic circulation and helping keep our skin healthy with Lymphedema.
So what's all the hype about Dry Brushing anyway?
If you google the term "dry brushing", you get 1,340,000 results!!
You can find it referenced all over the internet in popular media as well as scientific sources. It's even in Forbes?!
It's a thousands of years old practice from Ayurveda called Garshana, that has really caught on in the West, mainly for its promise to reduce cellulite and give your body a fresh glow afterward!
But it's more than just a beauty practice. It's a lymph-loving practice, that even helps our body make ozone! Say what?! More about that below! 👇
I love introducing people to dry brushing!
Why? It's an:
easy,
inexpensive,
gentle, and
safe ritual that takes as little as 5-10 min/day to help your body clear as well as prevent lymphatic stagnation!
So what are some signs and symptoms of lymphatic stagnation in the body beyond our Lymphedema?
Skin breakouts/blemishes
Puffy eyes
Bloating
Brain fog
Bronchitis
Constipation
Dehydration
Fatigue
Headaches
Muscle stiffness
Swollen joints
Inflammation
That's like all of us humans right now, right? Our modern sedentary, out-of-sync with natural rhythms, lifestyles are contributing factors as well as stress, lack of sleep, etc.
Let’s take a look at dry brushing to see how we can combat some of the lymphatic stagnation that can build up in our bodies through our lifestyles.
Garshana
Pronounced gar-shun-uh in Sanskrit, translates to 'bringing friction to the skin'.
In Ayurveda, it's encouraged to vigorously dry brush the skin every morning as part of your morning routine.
It's seen as essential to help the body slough off dead skin, further detoxify the body, help bring Ama out of the body, and encourage the body’s natural regenerative healing processes to kick in. Our bodies naturally detoxify when we are sleeping between the hours of 10pm and 2-3 am is when crucial detoxification takes place.
This magical window of time that happens every night, is when our bodies process our foods, emotions, and experiences of our day, making memories, and gathering the waste, to get it ready for elimination when we wake up. Morning comes and it’s time to pee and poop! 💩
Our skin, our bigger organ of our body, accumulates toxins as well. Dry brushing our skin, helps our body remove these wastes.
In Ayurveda, gloves are preferred over bristle brushes, as it's considered a dry skin massage experience, to feel the skin through your sense of touch, more than a rough exfoliation process.
Traditionally raw silk gloves are used. (See the image below for an example)
I found an interesting article on this by Dr. John Douillard about the history as well as the science behind the silk gloves.
He states that when silk is rubbed against the skin vigorously, it creates static electricity on the surface of our skin. This helps the body alkalize the blood, activate the lymphatic system, as well as the parasympathetic nervous system. Plus, it causes our body to produce its own ozone! Fascinating right?! Our bodies are capable of making so many healing mechanisms when we give it the right tools, environment, or nutrients.
Benefits of Ozone for the body include:
Regulates vascular tone, blood viscosity, and flow
Delivers oxygen to mitochondria for energy production
Supports healthy arterial lining, preventing cardiovascular disease
Supports healthy blood sugar and
Improves insulin sensitivity
Lowers BMI (body mass index)
Regulates neural plasticity
Supports cellular immunity
Fights viruses, bacteria, and fungus on the skin.
Using raw silk gloves like those shown below from Paavani Ayurveda in the USA or Jute Mitts I have in my shop are gentle enough to exfoliate without damaging the skin like bristle brushes can. It’s important to keep our skin intact and free of skin breaks to help prevent infections. Whether or not the jute mitts help create static electricity like the silk ones, I’m not sure.
Garshana Jute Dry Brush Mitts. Tried and tested by yours truly.
How to maintain the Jute Mitts:
Wash them. It’s so crucial to keep our skin clean to prevent infection, I love that these are washable! Just place them in the washer with your regular load or put them in a wash bag, so they don’t pick up other cloth fibres in the wash. You can use them in the bath for a wet brush experience, or keep them dry. I have a set for each. I like to have one on the shower/bath as a scrubby mitt and have a pair in my little basket by my bed that I can access first thing in the morning after I take off my night compression. With a regular bristle brush, you will want to wash it from time to time to get rid of the dry skin flakes that build up in the bristles.
They are long-lasting. I find each pair has lasted me 1 year or more with daily use!
How to Dry Brush
Here are some little demonstration from me of how I dry brush with my Jute Mitt in a couple reels I made on Instagram @lymphwell.life Look for these image to see how the jute mitt looks and works. I’ve tagged the image with a url link to take you right to it, so you should be able to click on the images below, but if not, click on my IG name in this paragraph in the text and it will take you to my full IG profile and you can browse from there.
Tips from the experts:
Here is a short 10 min video on a Lymph-loving dry brushing, from my friend Lisa Gainsley, who is a CLT (Certified Lymphatic Therapist), and Author of: The Book of Lymph. Which is a fabulous book for learning about how to self massage at home!
Her company and her IG handle is called The Lymphatic Message. Here is a dry brushing diagram from her book that illustrate the brush stroke directions.
Here is my sequence that that works best for me and my lymphedema.
It’s lymph loving, combining insights from Lisa’s techniques and wisdom from Ayurveda. I do this technique with my Jute Brush Mitt, so I can massage at the same time I’m dry brushing.
1. Start with opening up your neck to get your main lymph drains open and ready.
2. Open the armpits, and chest.
3. 70% of our lymph tissue resides in our abdomen. So, working in a clockwise direction (looking down at your belly button), rub the abdomen vigorously, feeling for any areas that are sluggish, hard, or squishy. Moving in a circular pattern towards your belly button. Notice, how do you feel? P.s. You will likely burp. This is good and totally normal!
4. Ayurveda tells us to then vigorously rub the soles of our feet for 30 seconds on each sole to wake up our never pathways.
5. Now we are going to work on draining our legs. Spend a few moment pumping your groin area on both legs with your hands, to flush the lymph nodes. Then we are going to work our way up from our feet towards our groin. We want everything to flow up towards the groin and our pelvic bowl.
6. Where you have long bones, you want to do long sweeping strokes from distral to proximal (i.e. stroking towards your heart and your core rather than stroking outwards towards your feet or fingertips)
7. For joint regions like your knees, elbows, take 30 seconds or more here and pump these areas with your hands to gently flush the lymph nodes, then do circular motions with your dry brush.
8. For the upper region of your body (above the belly button), you are draining towards the heart and towards your arm pits. For skin below the belly button drain towards the belly button.
9. For your arm, vigorously rub the palms with your dry brush for 30 seconds each to awaken the nerves.
10. Work from hand towards the armpit, stroking towards the heart.
11. Circular strokes at the wrist and again at the elbows, and shoulder joints.
12. Long strokes on the forearms and biceps.
11. Finish with a return to the neck and chest region.
12. If you have time, follow with an oil massage. So good for moisturizing, boosting immunity, and promoting collagen growth and cellular repair.
Hope that helps you get started, and feel inspired to try dry brushing!
Amy
