There is so much research going into fascia these days. When I began my Rolf Structural Integration training fifteen years ago, fascia was barely mentioned outside a few bodywork modalities. And at the time, those modalities were considered alternative. These days, fascia is very definitely in the mainstream. It is a popular word which most everyone who plays sports or does exercise has heard.
More and more is known about this immense, dynamic, intelligent system. This is good news as it is the fascia rather than the muscle tissue where pain often accumulates. I am not here to give a lecture on fascia. There are far more competent fascial experts out there. I merely work with the fascia with my hands and I teach clients to move paying attention to the fascia. And through this work I have discovered things that seem not to be mentioned within the fascial sphere. Perhaps that is because science will find it difficult to prove what I feel in my own body and what I teach to others.
When we speak of movement, when it is taught or when we don't even think about it but we just move (as in walking) we see it as something "I" am doing. So when I lift a weight, I am lifting a weight. When I am walking, it is me doing the walking. As in, I am in control of my body and my body is performing (according to my patterns) on my behalf or as I command it. Clearly, if I am to perform a new or specific movement, I need to think of the movement. What we generally are not considering is how the environment is entirely part of that movement. Instead of recognising this partnership, we tend to walk ourselves across the ground. There are many theories about how to walk 'correctly'. I have heard many over the years. Heel, toe was popular for many years. Then someone decided that walking involved squeezing the glutei to propel us forward. Others suggest that we should land on the toes first. The list goes on.
None of these theories represent the truth of walking. They rely on the fact that I have to 'walk myself'. And by 'walking myself' I engender certain patterns in my body that become aberrant over time. What these theories leave out is that we are walking across the ground. So the ground is fully involved in the movement. Not in terms of pulling or pushing. I don't need to push off with my toes, neither do I need to pull myself forward with my quads. The body is entirely set up to walk across its environment, in unison with that environment.
I believe it is the fascia that simply connects us to the ground upon which we walk. The fascia is considered to be the largest sensory organ in the body and is likely a conductor of energy. It resides throughout the body in different forms of connective tissue. The sole of the foot is encased in thick fascia through which nerves travel to create a wonderful sensory feedback network. Every step I take, the body speaks to the ground and the ground communicates back. The body, riddled with patterns of doing, no longer hears this feedback so we begin to force the movement.
It is this feedback that the body collects constantly from its environment that we are ignoring. If we constantly decide which muscles to use in a movement, or how to exactly align a heel to touch the ground, clearly we will interrupt that feedback. If we use the hips to walk by squeezing the gluteal muscles, the feet cannot hear well. The health in the system relies on constant feedback. So rather than us training our bodies into control and resistance, allowing it to hear the environment, our direct environment which includes the body and the space within which we move, would allow health into all the tissue: fascia, nerve, muscle, bone, perhaps down to our very blood cells.
It is not easy to discover this quality because we have spent millennia overriding it. We have lost embodiment. Our great analytical brain has taken over and tried to reproduce something entirely natural and intelligent. For the body to maintain health, no pain, exceptional movement, perhaps we have to unlearn everything we thought we knew about movement and give the job back to the body. We need to remind the body of its fascial connection to the environment.
