Yoga: Fascia, Anatomy and Movement: Fascia, Form and Functional Movement

The most we can say about the joints in our body is that they are floating fulcrums which forces percolate through. If muscles and tendons are acting like levers, they are not simple levers [see Ch. 7] because the fascial net which wraps everything transmits forces across the joints as well.”

Katie’s body is containing and managing the internal changes of breathing. At the same time it is organising the external balance between gravity (drawing her toward the centre of the earth) and ground reaction force (her body instinctively resists, away from it). Thus her ability to “draw in” to her sense of her centre and at the same time reach a

How this body-wide sensory system works could be likened to a kind of hierarchy in a walled city, where everyday details of the housekeeping do not bother the “head office” of the central nervous system: the brain. In this metaphor there are gatekeepers, regulating at various levels of management, throughout the whole connected sensory architecture

Are there fundamental principles that we should adhere to? Integrity, subtlety and remembering one’s own kinespheric balance, before combining it with the person being adjusted. It is a conversation between two intelligent systems that become one in that moment of adjustment.

“To give an example: in real bodies, muscles hardly ever transmit their full force directly via tendons into the skeleton, as is usually suggested by our textbook drawings. They rather distribute a large portion of their contractile or tensional forces onto fascial sheets. These sheets transmit these forces to synergistic as well as antagonistic mu

The fascia, in this instance, acts something like moss, holding bound water in and to the tissues.

“This phenomenon, in which components join together to form larger, stable structures having new properties that could not have been predicted from the characteristics of the individual parts, is known as self-assembly. It is observed at many scales in nature. In the human body, for example, large molecules self-assemble into cellular components kn

In this restorative approach, the arm is in fact being guided by the facilitator back towards the spine. Her hands are drawing towards each other, not pulling on the arm to stretch to the foot. (It is extremely difficult to show visually such subtleties of adjustment.) The result of this is that Alex can remain relaxed and fold forward incrementall

A spider’s web, for example, is a tensional structure and can be said to have “tensile integrity”. However, it is not a tensegrity structure as such, because it requires an external frame. “Tensegrities are different – their forms are self-stabilized, independent of gravity and need no external support” (Tom Flemons2). Our ability to walk around an