YOGA FASCIA, ANATOMY and MOVEMENT

YOGA FASCIA, ANATOMY and MOVEMENT Foreword Yoga, along with martial arts and dance – all of which stretch back into the mists of pre-history – is certainly among the earliest organized attempts to change a person by means of body movement. Even though modern psychotherapy has largely abandoned a body-centred approach in favour of talk therapy and increasing amounts of pharmaceuticals, the positive effects of exercise on the psyche – Juvenal’s mens sana in corpore sano – have been acknowledged for centuries. Yoga, at least in the developed texts and adepts, goes well be- yond these general benefits that come from engaging the mind in a coordinated pumping of the muscles. It claims (and in my experience, often delivers) to advance our psychophysiology into positive territory, away from self-centred, fear-based chemistry to a more serene, objective and fully present state of bodymind. The modern flowering of yoga owes a great deal to the late B.K.S. Iyengar, a lion of a man who wrestled both the postures and the breathing practices of yoga into an understandable and graduated discipline. Even current forms of yoga that have rejected the particulars of his practice owe him a deep debt – without him there would be no “art of contemporary yoga”. With him, and with the interest that has followed and branched out from his work, yoga has taken many forms, and over the course of my working life has gone from a few hippies contorting themselves in an ashram to the current ubiquity of yoga classes in nearly every gym, village hall, street corner, and even school athletic programmes, corporate retreats, and senior centres. Yoga itself has diversified into hundreds of branches, ranging from the athletic Ashtanga to the flowing Vinyasa to Iyengar’s precise positioning to more meditative approaches. These days, we are spoilt for choice in which yoga to choose for ourselves. Inevitably, then, yoga comes up against science – “Prove it!” say the researchers. Joanne Avison – not a researcher in the laboratory sense, but rather a re-searcher – is uniquely positioned to help us understand the research we have already, as well as provide a framework to understand the studies to come. Joanne’s background includes many years of teaching yoga in a variety of contexts, and with her quick mind and her ability to write clearly, this book provides the contemporary teacher and practitioner of yoga with a frankly as- tounding tour of current thinking that blends the spiritual with the scientific, and the sacred with the intensely practical. Fascia – that long-ignored biological fabric that shapes us – has now become a buzzword, often used with more enthusiasm than understanding. This book takes on the developmental significance of what Dr Robert Schleip calls the “neuromyofascial web” in all its glory, without bogging the reader down in the details of anatomy or biochemistry, which are relevant to “afascianado” or biomechanist, but not necessary to daily practice. The tradition of yoga has a great deal to teach us, but in another way these ancient texts and forms are entirely irrelevant. Industrialized, electronified humanity faces a challenge – a whole series of challenges – never before encountered by any previous era. One of these challenges is the loss of self-sense, a sense of alienation from the body and its whispered but essential messages, dulled in the roar of the planes, trains and automo- biles, the blare of radio, TV and Internet, and the sheer weight of the number of people on this intricate planet. We must face the challenge of how we educate our children to move and feel in the natural world, and create a programme of what I have called “Kinesthetic Literacy” for this hyper, data-rich, information-poor era. Read this book no matter what form of yoga you practice or teach – in fact, read this book if you happen to have a body. You will be pulled along a merrily flowing stream of ancient and contemporary thought, and you will emerge with a fresh explanation of why the many new interpretations of yoga can be so important in the revivification of our body and mind. Thomas Myers 2014 [email protected] vi Preface I began my yoga training aged seven, sitting beside my mother in a church hall in the mid-sixties, wondering why the man at the front was wearing white pyjamas. Scintillate, scintillate global vivific Fain would I fathom thy nature specific Loftily poised in the ether capacious Strongly resembling a gem carbonaceous At sixteen I learned a form of meditation in a centre for the deaf in London and remained fascinated by sign language, by communicating with my hands. Meditation for me was like drinking water; something so much a part of my life that I could not understand why anyone would want to talk about it! After a broad and wonderful education in England and France (languages, sciences, fine art) and a career that included the arti- san craft of the chocolatier and being a resident author for a large publishing house, a back injury in my early thirties re-introduced me to yoga and anatomy. Little did I imagine that understanding the various properties of chocolate (a substance that responds and changes structure with movement, manipulation, temperature and intention) would one day be the foundation for understanding the fascial matrix of the human body. I was originally trained in Vanda Scaravelli’s intelligent, feminine approach to yoga. Among my teachers were men and women who worked directly with her. John Stirk and Peter Blackaby brought anatomy and biomechanics from their osteopathic backgrounds, while Elizabeth Pauncz, Pat Sparrow, Diane Long and others each contributed their own way of bringing out our way of developing a practice. One day I realised that there is no such thing as “the posture” and that each pose is unique to each one of us. I set out alone to make sense of that. My profound desire to understand the difference between the anatomy books and what happens in the classroom was not easily satisfied. For instance, why did everyone do trikonasana differently? If they all had the same organisation as the anatomy books suggested, how did such a various abundance of beings-in-bodies do these wonderful postures, meditations and breath work and get such different things out of them? How did a body work out whether to contract a lateral rotator or bend to balance? Why did everyone I asked have a different answer? I had disparate pieces of a jigsaw that none of the workshops and seminars I attended could fit together. When I met Tom Myers in 1998 I studied Structural Integration, becoming a teacher and adopting Anatomy Trains as a means to translate from body bits to continuities. Many hours spent in the sacred space of the human dissection laboratory raised yet more questions. What could explain the gap between the accepted science of biomechanics and the reality of living people doing yoga? Why did it remove pain and improve performance in some bodies but seem to make it worse in others, unless …? Unless what? What was the elusive common denominator? Could it be the fascia? Working in manual practice changed my hands into finely-tuned sensors that could eventually read “body- Braille” fluently. I realised that every person has their own soft-tissue dialect, and a light began to dawn. Struc- ture, form and function are not so far away from self-expression. It eventually became obvious that we each write our own life story physically in our gestures and demeanour; our own archetypal movement signatures. The being in the body, whether meditating or metabolizing, is there in continuously joined-up “body-writing”. Yoga movements are a way of gaining physical literacy; we can learn to read and write in an elegant hand, each from a uniquely personal human perspective. vii Fascia, the connective tissue tensional matrix holding every miniscule part of us together, from cells to skin, is the very fabric of our architecture. Indeed, it is the context from which we self-assemble as embryos – and carry on developing right through to elderhood. Until relatively recently fascial tissue was cut away in the anatomy laboratories in order to reveal the “important parts” – as if these could move, metabolise and manage us without its assistance. This is like removing the cement holding the bricks of a church together. As a structure in space and time, the building will not stand up very well (or contain anything) without the connecting, binding material between the building blocks. We abide by special geometries of living, biologic (non-linear) structures. However, the stuff in between, the “transanatomical substrate”, is still holding us together as one whole being, moving exactly the way we do. Fascia, for me, describes this “in-between” hidden world of body architecture; the sacred geometry of beings in bodies. It accommodates each of us, regardless of age, ability, politics or origins. I do not see auras or angels or anatomical cogs in a movement machine. I simply recognise the common tissue denominator of our form and love translating it for someone doing yoga in terms of their own animation. Whatever your favoured style of yoga, I hope this book encourages you to become your own guide or guru and understand more about how we sense our way into form (we have been doing it since we were conceived!). It may contribute to making sense of what does not make sense if you exclude the fascia from the anatomical body story. Like the identical poems at the beginning and end of this preface, I truly hope it points some fingers at the stars and asks a bit about the hidden mysteries of the sky in which they shine.

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