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Dayna Lopez

How Dayna Lopez Is Using Myofunctional Therapy to Unlock the Connection Between Your Mouth, Your Airway, and Everything Else

A decade as a dental hygienist. A newborn who slept with her mouth open. And a discovery that nobody — not in dental school, not in the delivery room, not in the pediatrician’s office — had thought to mention. Dayna Lopez’s path to founding Inspiration Myo is the kind of story that makes you immediately start thinking about where your own tongue is resting right now.

It Started With a Baby Who Slept With Her Mouth Open

Dayna Lopez always knew she wanted to work in dentistry. As a child with crowded teeth and a parade of cavities, she spent more time in the dental chair than most kids her age — and instead of being put off by it, she fell in love with her hygienist, became fascinated by everything happening in that small, well-lit space, and eventually followed that curiosity into a ten-year career as a dental hygienist.

The next chapter started not in a classroom or a clinic, but in a nursery.

When her oldest daughter was a newborn, Dayna noticed something. Every time the baby slept, her mouth was wide open. Not occasionally — always. “I didn’t learn anything about airway or tongue posture or even tongue ties or anything like that in hygiene school,” she says. But something about it nagged at her. So she did what most parents in that situation do: she started searching. And what she found sent her down a path she hadn’t anticipated.

A pediatric dentist confirmed that her daughter had oral ties — cheek ties, lip ties, tongue ties. Laser frenectomies were performed that same visit. That night, the baby slept with her mouth closed. “For me as a mom, I was like, okay, maybe I did do the right thing.” But as Dayna kept researching in the weeks that followed, she kept finding references to things the dentist had never mentioned — bodywork, craniosacral therapy, chiropractic care, oral motor therapy. Things that, as she learned, ideally happen before a procedure like a frenectomy, not after. “Nobody told me this,” she says. “And I don’t hear it anywhere else.”

That moment — the realization that critical information about oral health and airway function existed in the world, wasn’t being shared, and was directly affecting families like hers — became the foundation of everything that followed. In 2023, on maternity leave with her second daughter, she took her first myofunctional therapy course. She slowly transitioned out of hygiene. And Inspiration Myo was born.

What Myofunctional Therapy Actually Is

Most people have never heard of it. Dayna is used to that, and she has the explanation ready in plain language.

“Myofunctional therapy, really plainly put, is kind of like physical therapy for the muscles of the face and the mouth — the tongue, the cheeks, the lips, and the muscles that support the airway.” It is an exercise-based therapy, and its goal is to tone and strengthen these muscles so that they support three things the body was designed to do but many people have gradually stopped doing correctly: keeping the lips sealed, resting the tongue on the roof of the mouth, and breathing in and out through the nose.

That last one — nasal breathing — is the thread that connects almost everything else. “Our tongue needs to be resting in the roof of our mouth to keep our mouth closed, to then breathe in and out through our nose,” Dayna explains. “When we’re breathing through our nose, our nervous system is regulated. It supports proper sleep. It helps us get into that rest-and-digest phase.” From there, the cascade continues — proper sleep supports gut health, emotional regulation, immune function, jaw growth and development. Pull on any one of these threads and the whole fabric shifts.

“When it comes to tongue posture and nasal breathing,” she says, “it really sets the tone for how you go about living your life.”

It is, she acknowledges with a smile, the kind of information that makes people suddenly very aware of where their tongue is sitting in their mouth. That’s the point.

The Symptoms Most People Don’t Connect to Their Mouth

The signs that someone might benefit from a myofunctional evaluation are wide-ranging — and many of them are things people have been told are just the way they are.

The clearest indicator is chronic mouth breathing. If someone can’t remember the last time they breathed easily through their nose, that’s where the conversation starts — and if a structural obstruction is the cause, Dayna will refer to an ENT to address it first before therapy begins. But beyond that primary signal, the list is longer than most people expect: diagnosed tongue ties, poor sleep, snoring, sleep apnea, morning headaches, migraines, clenching and grinding teeth, children with swollen tonsils and adenoids, and — perhaps most surprisingly — emotional regulation difficulties and behavioral issues in kids.

“Things that are common but not normal,” Dayna says, echoing a phrase that runs through her work like a refrain. Snoring, teeth grinding, mouth breathing — these things are everywhere, and their prevalence has convinced many people they’re inevitable. They’re not. “They’re not going to grow out of it. It’s just going to continue to get worse and show up in different ways.”

She makes an important distinction for parents of children who seem to be doing fine across the board: the absence of dramatic symptoms doesn’t mean everything is okay. She regularly sees children referred for an obvious tongue tie or grinding habit whose parents, when filling out her intake questionnaire, answer no to almost everything else. Sleep is fine. School is great. No behavioral concerns. And then Dayna looks at the child’s jaw development. Narrow arch. Crowded teeth. A palate that is already doing what crowded palates do — limiting the space available for the tongue to rest, restricting the airway, quietly shaping a developmental trajectory that will be harder to redirect the longer it continues.

“Just because it’s not blaringly obvious doesn’t mean that it’s not affecting them as they get older,” she says. “It’s not always about the really detrimental things — it’s also the little things. How is the jaw growing and developing? Is there enough room for the tongue? Are they going to need teeth pulled to make space? Those little things matter.”

The Evaluation That Takes an Hour and a Half (at Minimum)

When a new patient comes to Inspiration Myo — whether a four-year-old or an adult — they begin with a questionnaire that is itself a revelation. Pages of questions about sleep, breathing, digestion, diet, aches and pains, snoring, sleep studies, bedwetting, night terrors, emotional regulation, ADHD indicators, gut issues. The scope of it surprises people, and deliberately so.

“I deep dive into everything,” Dayna says. “Tell me a little bit more about your gut issues. Or if it’s a child, their emotional dysregulation. More about their sleep. Is there bedwetting, nightmares, night terrors?”

The in-person evaluation that follows is equally thorough. Dayna examines the bite — how the teeth come together and what that reveals. She looks at the space at the back of the throat, checks for tonsillar inflammation, assesses the soft palate, and takes specific measurements to identify restrictions like tongue ties, lip ties, or cheek ties. She watches the patient eat and drink: applesauce, crackers, water. Which muscles do they recruit to chew? Do they favor one side? Do they use their cheeks, their lips, their head to help them swallow?

Then she looks at posture. Head. Neck. Shoulders. Back. Hips. Knees. Ankles. Feet. And then she watches them walk.

“That’s not true for all myofunctional evaluations,” she acknowledges. “That’s just what I do personally, the more that I learn.”

The whole evaluation takes about an hour and a half. “Sometimes we go a little over. There’s just so much to look at.” The breadth of what she’s examining isn’t quirky or excessive — it’s a direct reflection of the interconnected reality of the body, where what shows up in the mouth has roots in the neck, the gut, the nervous system, and the developmental history of the person sitting across from her.

Like Salt — Add It to Everything

One of Dayna’s favorite descriptions of myofunctional therapy is this: “It’s like salt. Add it to everything.”

The field intersects with orthodontics, speech therapy, ENT care, pediatric dentistry, and general medicine in ways that make it less a standalone discipline than an amplifier for everything else. In orthodontics, for instance, the muscles of the mouth will always outlast the hardware — “muscle’s gonna win every time” — which means that expansion and braces, however well executed, will drift back if the underlying muscle function hasn’t been addressed. Myofunctional therapy is what makes the ortho results last.

In ENT care, the same principle applies. Tonsil and adenoid surgery is sometimes necessary and genuinely helpful — but the conditions that led to the enlarged tonsils rarely resolve on their own just because the tonsils are gone. “Follow it up with therapy so that the symptoms that led you to the ENT in the first place don’t come back,” Dayna says. “Because they usually do.”

She is equally clear about what myofunctional therapy is not: a replacement for other care. If someone comes to her and she determines they need an ENT evaluation, a sleep study, or bodywork before therapy can be effective, she says so. The referral network she has built — practitioners who understand the connections between airway, nervous system, jaw development, and whole-body health — is as important to her practice as the therapy itself. “Even if the myofunctional therapist can’t help with every single issue, we can guide you to other professionals who understand the connection. We can’t fix it all, but we have the resources to complete the circle.”

What She Wishes She Had Known — And What She Wants Healthcare Professionals to Know

Dayna is candid about the gap she encountered in her own education — and the gap she still sees across the medical and dental fields.

In ten years as a dental hygienist, she learned essentially nothing about airway health, tongue posture, or the developmental significance of oral restrictions. She saw one picture of a tongue tie in a baby during school. “I couldn’t tell you the importance of it, or why it mattered, or how to identify it, or what to do about it.”

She doesn’t say this critically — she understands the time constraints clinicians work under, particularly physicians, whose appointments are even shorter than a hygienist’s cleaning appointment. But that’s exactly why she believes awareness is so important. “Just being able to mention it to the patient — to let them know that there are other options out there — is always going to benefit them. It’s never going to take away from what you’re doing. It’s only going to complement.”

What she would most like to see is simple, practical, and achievable: a pediatric sleep screening questionnaire in every dental practice’s intake forms. Not a diagnosis. Not a referral to a specialist on day one. Just a few questions. Is there snoring? Pauses in breathing? Teeth grinding? Bedwetting? And when the clinician looks at the child — are the teeth flat, the tonsils enlarged, the face long, the circles under the eyes dark? These are not exotic clinical findings. They are visible, assessable, and currently going unasked in the environments most likely to catch them.

“We screen for scoliosis and eyesight and speech and occupational therapy needs at schools,” she says. “But we’re not screening for sleep-disordered breathing, which is so common. And people think it’s normal — or something kids will grow out of. They don’t.”

The Business She Didn’t Expect to Be Running

Building Inspiration Myo has taught Dayna things about herself that a decade in clinical employment never surfaced.

The most significant: how deep her people-pleasing ran, and how unsustainable it was in a private practice setting. In the early days, she said yes to everyone. She took every inquiry, scheduled every patient, and then found herself puzzled when results didn’t match her expectations. The answer, once she looked honestly at it, was that not everyone was ready to do the work — and she hadn’t yet built the discernment to know the difference before committing her time and her name to the outcome.

“Myofunctional therapy is a time commitment and a financial commitment,” she says. “Not everybody is ready to take that leap. Some people think they are, and then get into it, and decide it’s not for them.” That’s hard on schedules, hard on the therapeutic relationship, and ultimately not serving anyone well — least of all the patient.

Now, at the end of every evaluation, she asks directly: “How important is this to you? On a scale of one to ten.” The answer reveals readiness — and readiness, she has learned, is the real prerequisite for results. “If you don’t do the prescribed exercises at the prescribed time, it’s not going to work, and you’re gonna waste your time.” She used to feel she couldn’t say that. Now she knows she has to. “It’s my practice. And my name is on their results.”

The other thing building her own practice revealed: the confidence to let the wrong fit go without taking it personally. “Not everybody is going to be your cup of tea. And you’re not going to be everybody’s.” Coming from a field where the patient was just there — scheduled, seated, already in the chair — to a world where every client relationship begins with a choice on both sides required a significant shift in how she understood her own value. “If people say no, that’s not about you. They just weren’t the right fit.” She says it now with the ease of someone who had to learn it the hard way.

The Six-Year-Old Who Changed in Three Sessions

When asked about the most rewarding transformation she has witnessed, Dayna doesn’t have to think long.

A six-year-old patient came to her still sucking their thumb — a habit with direct implications for jaw development, tongue posture, and airway function. By session three, the thumb sucking had stopped entirely. But that wasn’t the part that stayed with Dayna.

“Their posture changed immensely. Their lower jaw already started to come forward. And mom was saying that they were just overall so much happier — waking up in the morning ready to go. Better attitude. Better mood. Just happier to be around family and friends.”

Three sessions. A child transformed — not just in the measurable clinical ways, but in the texture of daily life. And for the parents, something equally powerful: validation. “A lot of times parents are told one thing by one professional, and it doesn’t sit right with them. And then they come to see me, and they’re like, ‘Yes. This is what I was saying. Nobody listened. Nobody believed me. And now it’s like a completely different child.'”

That moment of being believed — after months or years of having a concern minimized or dismissed — is something Dayna recognizes from her own experience as a parent, and it is, she says, one of the most important things she offers alongside the therapy itself.

The Future She’s Working Toward

Dayna’s vision for myofunctional therapy is ambitious but not abstract. Dayna wants it to become as unremarkable as seeing a chiropractor. She wants a teenager finishing orthodontic treatment to automatically follow up with a myofunctional therapist to make sure the results hold, she wants a parent whose child is struggling with sleep to call a myofunctional therapist before waiting six months for a sleep study. She wants it to be a first line of response — teaching the body to do what it was always supposed to do, rather than managing symptoms with devices or medications indefinitely.

“We’re teaching the body how to do what it’s supposed to do when there was an interference,” she says. “Rather than giving you something you’re going to be dependent on for the rest of your life. Let the body heal itself and reteach it — because we can. At any age. I’ve had patients in their eighties who are tired of snoring and sleeping poorly.”

For anyone wondering whether myofunctional therapy might be relevant to what they’re experiencing — whether it’s a tongue tie they’ve been told about, chronic poor sleep, unexplained headaches, digestive issues, or a child whose development has quietly raised a question nobody has answered — Dayna’s invitation is direct: come in for an evaluation. Because the thing someone comes in presenting is rarely the whole story. And following the thread to where it actually leads — through the airway, the nervous system, the gut, the jaw, the posture, the sleep — is exactly the kind of work she was built for.

Connect with Dayna Lopez and Inspiration Myo

Website: inspiration-myo.com

Instagram: @inspirationmyo

Dayna sees patients both in person and virtually. Fill out the contact form on her website and she’ll be in touch within a day or two. Virtual evaluations and virtual therapy are both available — meaning that wherever you are, if this conversation has made you wonder about your own airway health or your child’s, there’s no barrier to getting a first look.

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