Our muscles and joints are designed explicitly with our fascia network. This incredible continuum of connective fibers shapes us. How we carry ourselves over time, injury, and tension lines become movement patterns. Without notification from our inner body, we can wake up unable to move our arms. What’s going on, and how did we miss the memo?
Muscle is highly adaptive tissue, unlike its co-partner, fascia. We are only doing part of the work when we work to lessen tension through muscular stretching. Fascial networks can be remodeled, and pain can lessen, but this process takes longer due to the high amount of collagen in the fascia. We can reshape and effectively improve nutrient flow by addressing our spidey suit and lengthening this network.
Symptoms of pain come with a long list of signals that we may have taught ourselves to ignore and adapted our lives around that pain. When we are distracted with the business of a full life, it’s not hard to ignore our achy spots. When we find ourselves stuck, this is an underlying pattern of tension where fascial components are essentially frozen. The older we get, the thicker our fascia becomes so it’s even more important to keep movement patterns omnidirectional and fluid. Our bodies are not designed to hold one or two shapes; they have the capacity to be nondirectional, expressive, and responsive.
Movement remodeling restores tissue integrity. Integrating breath with movement, sound with bone tapping, alignment, energy medicine, not only restores our body mind it creates capacity for developing fluid movement within our connective tissue continuum.
“The concert of existence places me in resonance with our biosphere, meaning that at this moment there is no “body,” no separation; I am part of the swirl of bio-morphic unfolding. I am not bound by culture or language. The deepening of sensation allows me to be without category. I transfer the moisture of my cells, join the wet of the grass, the pour of the ocean, the stars that watch over the night. The plants breathe, my skin is wet, we are here. This fundamental umbilical to life without category is for me the first stage of sanity.”
–Emilie Conrad, Life on Land
