Touching the Fascia
If you were an early anatomist doing dissections in the name of science (and probably risking your own life, too, if you were in mediæval Europe, since it was illegal and a sin), nobody could blame you for thinking little of the fascia. After all, in a fresh cadaver, it isn’t much to see. Barely there in most places, appearing and disappearing into and out of other, arguably more important structures, enveloping and covering the really ‘important stuff’… fascia has basically just been ‘in the way’ for most of the history of the study of what people look like inside.
However, modern science is now catching up to the idea that these bits of enveloping and filling are actually quite crucial. Let alone the fact that they hold everything in place and shape, against the better judgment of dear ol’ gravity, the layers of fibrous connective tissue that make up the ‘spaces in between’ in our bodies are actually quite busy, so much so that most of the time we like to think of what we do here at Healing Space as ‘fascia medicine’.
I often tell my patients that, if you could lift all the fascial tissue out of their bodies and stand it next to them, on the one side there’d be a ghost-image of themselves, and on the other there’d be a puddle. When we talked about acupuncture last week, I mentioned that everything in the body is liquid, and that we’re basically highly-organised pockets of sea-water. That organisation is mediated by the fascial layers, along with the cocktail of chemicals and electrically-charged water that make up the substance of ourselves.
Fascia is everywhere. From the inside of every cell, through to the scaffolding of liquid-crystal fibres that the cells use to hold themselves in position, to the enveloping sheaths that delimit the organs, blood vessels, nerves, and bones, it is the most pervasive system in our bodies. Only the nervous and circulatory systems have such widespread distribution, and even those are embedded, defined, and invested by fascia.
So, you might say, if this fascia-stuff is everywhere, then it follows that one can’t really not interact with it, if one touches a body. Moreover, if it is as pervasive as we say, then what gives? You’re going to touch it anyway, so it doesn’t really matter. Interesting theory, but it doesn’t really change anything when one receives a massage, or some craniosacral or visceral therapy. Right?
Actually, no, because the function of the fascia isn’t just structural — fascia communicates. Any and all mechanical forces applied to the body — starting with our old friend, gravity, but also including any pressure, tension, torque, and shear we experience. Our bodies talk to ourselves in terms of our position in space, the hardness or softness of forces coming towards us, and our perceived ability to resist or accept such forces as they come.
This is not our nerves making notes on this information, mind you, but a whole ‘nother level of interaction. Think back on the last time you walked down a step you didn’t know was there, or tripped over an incline and managed to catch yourself. It was over in a split-second, and you probably didn’t realise what was happening until afterwards, right? That was your fascial system responding to a change in mechanical forces being applied to it (namely, gravity and the ground reaction force) and adjusting, before your brain had the time to get the message and decide on a response. Pretty cool, no?
The fasciae are an integral part of what makes us, well, us, and in a very real sense mediate and define the shape of our lives. The level of responsiveness of the system and its ability to change in an instant should mean that we can influence the body tremendously by engaging these tissues directly.
All the therapies that we practise here at Healing Space have one thing in common: they interact with the fascia directly. The so-called “meridians” of acupuncture, the Anatomy Trains, the sheaths of the viscera, muscles, tendons, and bones, even the membranes that envelop the brain and spinal cord… they’re all variations on the theme of fascia. Not only do they all come from the same place, they’re all continuous with each other. In the words of one of my teachers, the only separation that exists within the body is the one you create with a knife. Heck, strictly speaking, blood is a form of connective tissue, so when interacting with the circulation directly, we’re treating this level, too.
So what’s the difference? Why so many different versions of doing the same stuff? Wouldn’t it just be enough to do one (hopefully the one that involved the least effort and pain) and have done?
Here is where things get really fun.
Fascia doesn’t only make up our structure and mediate the body’s communication with itself. It remembers.
What?!?
Let me explain.
Do you have scars? Of course you do. Even if it’s just from that time you scraped your knee when you fell off your bicycle, or the paper cut that you got when absent-mindedly thumbing through your mail. Everyone has scars. Scars are the most obvious, but certainly not the only way that the fascia remembers every single insult, abuse, injury, and pain the body has ever experienced. In the world according to fascia, it’s simple: if you get hit and it hurts, you brace for the next time that particular hit comes again. It doesn’t matter if you’ll never get hit again in that exact same way and place. Your structure has learned that particular interaction and will toughen up against it, just in case.
Imagine that the insult (fancy term for being hit) was not the pavement or the edge of a Christmas card, but rather something that you did, or was done to you, over and over, day in and day out, for months or years. Like, doing the same motion of holding the same position. The fascia would also remember this, and toughen up to make it easier going. After all, if you are going to be standing, or sitting, or hunching over your phone all day, you’d need additional support to do it, because your body wasn’t initially designed for it.
This also holds true for repetitive activity. Look at a professional musician or athlete, or a guy who carries heavy loads onto and off trucks all day. You probably can pick them out of a crowd, if you know what to look for. People’s posture is a striking reflection of the activities they do most habitually. More cunningly, in the absence of constant physical insult (i.e., repetitive activity), posture will clearly reflect how people feel about their lives. Sad and despondent? Hunched over. Aggressive and pushy? Chest sticking out, knees hyper-stretched. Avoiding attention? arms turned in, hollowed-out chest, head forward. Angry at life, itching for a fight?… you get the idea. When I was in alternative-doctor school, my teacher would sometimes take us out to the coffee shop when it was warm out and sit in the terrace to do ‘people-watching’. It’s downright uncanny how much people show on the outside what is going on inside, through their posture.
Invariably, this can’t go on forever. After all, fascia was not designed to hold the same posture all the time, nor were our bodies designed to do the same thing over and over. Invariably, this state of affairs always gives. You know what I’m talking about: pain. We’ve been here before.
But the fascial tissue of a person who carries boxes all day isn’t the same as the one from someone who walks around trying to avoid being seen. Or the one from someone who has to pretend all day that they’re in control when they’d rather be hiding under their bed. And so on. Different tissues, different people, different life situations and ideas and, perhaps most importantly, expectations and beliefs about what it is all about and what can be done about it.
Now, this isn’t about the power of positive thinking and me going all ‘kumba-yah’ on you. The layer of belief I am talking about is below the level of discursive thought that you engage with when you read “The Secret”. Your fascia has been reinforcing itself into the shape and toughness it currently holds over years and years of you believing whatever it is you really believe, deep-down below your everyday consciousness, about who you are, what everything that ever happened to you means, and what it’s really all about. This isn’t going to change because you think you can think your way out of it. But it can change. It just needs the right kind of nudge.
Sometimes, only the deepest form of contact will do. Structural Integration is literally about engaging the body in an intense, pay-attention-this-is-important conversation. We are not dropping subtle hints or allowing for things to resolve. We are literally pushing the tissues into a different kind of relationship with themselves, strongly suggesting to the body that there are more options than the combination of compensations that it is currently on. It doesn’t ‘treat’ anything, per se. SI is about encouraging the body to get its act together, just by taking away as much of the noise as possible for it to arrive presently in the field of gravity and stop fighting life so much. It works just as well for couch potatoes as it does for high-performance athletes, and requires only one thing to be successful: a willingness to embrace change at a physical and experiential level, to take on board the suggestions that one can be in the world in more ways than one.
At other times, things get stuck in a bad feedback loop that is a bit more specific. It’s still very much about the way the body talks to itself and moves in space, but the reminder needed is much more local and precise. When something that causes pain happens, the fascia braces, and the tissues around the area of impact ‘splint’ around it to reinforce and protect it. Pain ensues, but then it continues. Usually, the original insult (physical trauma, impact, damage, etc.) is long gone, but the muscles, tendons, ligaments, and periosteal tissue are braced in anticipation of further aggravation. Myofascial Release involves engaging the body carefully and subtly but with clear purpose, to find the places where things are stuck and allow them to release (hence the name). The amount of pressure applied varies, but it is usually very light. MFR relies on the responsiveness of fascia that we discussed earlier to receive, accept, and process mechanical stimuli to induce a ‘state-shift’, breaking out of the loop that causes dysfunction and pain.
Acupuncture is perhaps the most subtle version of this kind of work, because it isn’t limited to the myofascial tissues. Availing itself of the fact that everything is connected to everything, acupuncture employs super-precise stimuli (the needles and cauterisation we talked about before) to send messages not just to the tissues in the vicinity, but throughout the body. Acupuncture is most effective at the systemic level, inviting the body to harmonise and regulate itself.
Visceral manipulation takes this one step further, engaging the fasciae of the viscera directly. The touch is super-light, because the fasciae that envelop and invest the viscera are so delicate. Paradoxically, this means that they’re so much more receptive and quick to adapt and change. VM is one of the most powerful versions of this kind of work because it allows us to see the maxim of our work happening in real-time: the body wants to heal, and it needs only the smallest bit of help to sort itself out.
Craniosacral therapy goes even one step beyond that, and is the lightest kind of touch you will experience with us. The medium of the cerebrospinal fluid and the structures floating in it is almost entirely liquid; its connection to our higher consciousness makes seem at times like it isn’t physical at all. Thoughts, memories, crazy insights, dreams… all come to the fore when the body is touched in this way. Again, we aren’t necessarily ‘treating’ anything, just witnessing and noticing the body as it resolves whatever it has to on its own. It is relaxing and invigorating, and can also powerfully change the state of mind and being of a person, but it does so in ways that we can neither plan nor expect. It’s like turning on a light in a room that you went into in darkness, having never been there before.
Which one of these does each person need varies. Not only from the condition their fasciae are in to begin with, as we saw above, but also depending on how aware they are of what is going on inside themselves, how much work they get done in their bodies, their age, gender, nutrition, energy level, even their mood. It changes all the time, sometimes every day. It might change during a session. This is why we practise them all. It is way more often than not that we shift from one to the other during a session, responding to the changes happening whilst we do the work. The only thing that doesn’t change is our emphasis on the wholeness of your fascia, your person, and the focus on the health of you, our patient, as a whole.