In 1899 Dr Andrew Still, founder of Osteopathy, wrote: "The soul of man with all the streams of pure living water seems to dwell in the fascia of his body." Dr Still was fully aware of the importance of fascia and he wrote about it extensively in his book "The Philosophy of Osteopathy."
It took over 100 years for scientists to begin to probe this extraordinary organism which quite literally holds us together, allows us to move, and allows for communication through the body and the brain. Fascia has become quite a subject and we are finding out more and more about this exceptional substance every day.
What has been known for hundreds of years and is now in the realm of modern science is that fascial structures exist everywhere in the body. Muscles, nerves, cells, organs, viscera, brain, spinal cord. It is becoming clearer that fascia is the place where strain shows up in the body.
I have been working with fascia for fifteen years within the modality of Rolf Structural Integration. When Dr Ida Rolf developed this system of bodywork, she was always hopeful that fascia would become an every day word. She encouraged the teachers she taught to go out and study the fascia more deeply so that we could begin to understand why 'Rolfing' seems to work.
Rolf Structural Integration is an interesting practice in that the practitioner learns every single time we put our hands upon a human body. It takes many years to really begin to appreciate the nuances of facia, muscle, nerve, flows, blockages.
For me, my understanding began to truly flourish when I began to teach the Gyrotonic Method of movement. I had to unlearn my Pilates and yoga training to find something deeper within my body. Things began to change enormously in my body. I began to feel things I could not explain. I began to understand something about movement, energy and the body that, frankly, my body was teaching me. I listened to it and went along with the ride, but to verbalise my experience and to place it into my teaching took me years of exploration and finding words to describe something that has no vocabulary.
I began to understand that what I was finding in clients' bodies in Rolf Structural Integration was what I can only describe as a corruption of energy flow. Many pain syndromes seemed to have their roots in disorganisation. This led to me asking many questions for which I had no answers. I did not look to others to find an answer, I merely delved more and more into my work. My passion took over and I began to pay more attention to aspects of the human being I had not considered to be connected.
What I discovered remains difficult to articulate. It has long been discussed how our emotions end up in the body, but the link between the mind and body goes much deeper and at the same time remains close to the surface. How we think affects our fascia. Our opinions affect our fascia. Our fears affect our fascia. Our happiness affects our fascia. The fascia is undoubtedly linked to our hormones too.
I experiment a lot in my own body and I present my experiments to clients. Some are subtle, but most people are able to feel or see what I am showing. One of the elements that has become utterly clear to me is that it is the fascia that connects me to the ground and, through touch, to other people. In fact, I think it is deeper than touch, even. Through touch, I have clients feel how a negative, futuristic thought, affects the way they are feeling me touching them. It changes the energy. Quite literally it turns it around and instead of being connected, I entirely disconnect.
Without us being aware any of this, this phenomenon is happening all the time. What I have also discovered, is that awareness is fascial. We believe that awareness might have something to do with the thinking brain. But thinking awareness is isolating. When the awareness moves into a different part of the brain, the older non-thinking part of the brain, where it connects to the fascia, the awareness itself changes. It begins to merge with the environment.
It seems to me that what people experience as spiritual experiences are connected in the fascia. This is because fascia fully connects us to our environment. It is organic, intelligent, freeing, and whole. While science is uncovering some exceptional qualities in the fascia, there remains a long way to go before we discover all of these connections. But they are there, or rather, they are here. It is the fascial connection that presents the seamless connection between our body, mind and environment. The fascia is body-mind for there is no separation in these things. The separating factor in the human being appears to be our collected knowledge which, through thought, introduces duality.
