Lisa Gunshore

"My name is Lisa Gunshore and I have been a yoga teacher for about 3 years. In addition to yoga I am an Ayurveda wellness coach and I come from 16 years of spiritual counselling. With that background it led me to Block Therapy and really beginning to integrate the Block Therapy practices into what I am doing with Ayurveda for health and wellness as well as yoga for the body.

What brought me to Block Therapy and the Block Therapy Academy and becoming a certified Block Therapy instructor was really Deanna Hansen the founder. I was able to connect with her on one of my shows for Buddhist Biohacker Podcast, and the more that she talked about what this Block had to offer, the more interested I was in the Block. What was interesting is, in my original yoga teacher training, I had a teacher that really focused on alignment and fascia decompression. And of course we were using tennis balls and yoga blocks and different things. When I went through that process there was something about that that was calling to me. It was about a year later that I found Deanna and I found this Block. The changes in my body were so profound that it became obvious to me that this was what I needed to be able to do the yoga postures I had never been able to do. I needed this Block in order to stand up straight. Because I am already a teacher, that is naturally a part of who I am, I absolutely had to be apart of the teacher program and really be able to start sharing this tool with everyone that I possible can.

My biggest challenge with my body and yoga practice and even just my day-to-day activity is that I am hyper-stable. My flexibility was really non-existent before the Block. I couldn’t touch my toes - I practiced yoga for 15 years, still couldn’t touch my toes! Didn’t matter how much I stretched. I have a natural hunch in my back - this comes from my family, genetics, we all hunch. So I wasn’t able to do a lot of the practices that I wanted to do. I also was frustrated that even though that I have all of this extensive knowledge in health and wellness and extensive knowledge in alignment and yoga, I wasn’t able to perform to what I knew.

When I started working with the Block - the first thing that I can say is that I have gotten 9 inches out of my hamstrings in the last two years working with this Block. I can touch my toes for the first time in my life. Which is a really big deal. I am working now at being able to put my hands flat on the ground and also touch my toes. The other thing that has been really amazing has been my posture. I actually had a part of my spine that stuck out at the base of my neck and it is flat now. And I’m standing up straight. And I have mobility in my shoulders that I didn’t have before.

I had zero hesitations going into Block Therapy Academy and becoming a Block Therapy instructor. I understand and I understood when I started that process how important the Block is, why I wanted to integrate it into my practice, and why it is a tool that really everybody needs I think to maintain strong physical health, working with their immune systems. Yea, I had zero doubts, I was ready to dive in and go for it.

Since I have received my Block Therapy instructors certificate, I have seen such a change in my own practice. As a wellness coach, I have been able to integrate the Block into individual wellness programs for my clients, which has been really beautiful. The Block Therapy membership space is such a supportive space for my clients, and its useful for me as a teacher because all of that content is already available and accessible, so that has been a really nice addition to my business. I also just recently expanded my Block Therapy classes into athletic clubs in town and into our local rec centre. So that has exponentially increased my income in a very short amount of time and allowed me to be able to share this tool with even more people. That’s what my mission is, to share it with as many people as possible. It has been a profound addition to my practice and has really become more of what my practice is than even some of the other modalities that I was working in. 

My favourite part of sharing Block Therapy with other people is seeing their faces after they do a class, and they are in disbelief at how different their body feels in one 60 minute class. Their desire to come back to my classes over and over, my classes have tripled almost every single week that I have been teaching them because people want to do more. They want to work with their body in this way. They are seeing the results, they are experience something that they didn’t think they’d experience. I am also seeing a lot of my students choose to come and do Block Therapy before they do their workout, before they go to that intense yoga class, because they know that this is going to create the space that they need to do those other things well.

My business has increased about 25%-30% just by adding Block Therapy, and that is really just the beginning. That doesn’t include some of the new partnerships that I am building with some of these local clubs and rec centres, and it doesn’t include my own studentship who I feel are very excited about the potential of becoming a Block Therapy instructor themselves. So right out of the gate I am experiencing that 25%-30% increase, I anticipate seeing that increase even more over the next 6 months. 

BTA has made a difference in my practice by bringing me THE embodiment tool. To me, this is the tool to become connected to your human nature and to your body. It is the autophagy tool. A lot of my clients and students have challenges with ventilation and autophagy, my expertise is MTHFR. Because of that, this tool has become one of the most important pieces of my practice. The most important thing that I learned in BTA was really how to work with this tool and more specifically how to teach the connection to the tool to the students. So not just how to teach a class, but how do you hold space for people who have never done this before so that they can do it safely and effectively, and really feel excited about what they are doing and continue to feel motivated and inspired. That has changed my practice because it taught me how to walk into a classroom or studio and teach this tool and have all of my students walk away feeling really excited and excited to come back. 

I can’t imagine not having this Block in my life, in my husband’s life, in my kids’ life, for my clients, for my students, for my patients. I don’t think that I can say enough about Block Therapy, in fact when I start talking about it to somebody I can’t stop. So for me the most profound change is that I am standing up straight. That is my most profound change today. That said, I think there is so much more to come and I am really excited about my own personal results and excited about the results of the people that I am working with and that I am teaching this Block to also.

If you’re on the fence and trying to decide if you’re going to join Block Therapy Academy and become an instructor, whether or not you should dive in and make that commitment and investment - I would say you are going to make that investment and never look back. It is so fulfilling as a teacher, it is more fulfilling to see your students really change - change our body, change who they are. This Block allows you to create the strength and flexibility that yoga does, but safely and without injury. That to me is the most profound thing about this Block and the gift of being a Block Therapy instructor."

~ Lisa Gunshore