Everything Moves

How biotensegrity informs human movement

Susan Lowell de Solórzano

• Publisher: Handspring Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781909141971
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Sport & Exercise Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

'What a multi-sensory pleasure in learning! I will be a better teacher and better clinician using what I am learning from this book.' Carol M Davis DPT, EdD, MS, FAPTA

The emerging science of biotensegrity provides a fresh context for re-thinking our understanding of human movement, but its complexities can be formidable. Bodywork and movement professionals looking for an accessible and relevant guide to the concept and application of biotensegrity need look no further than Everything Moves: How biotensegrity informs human movement.

In order to work with our own bodies and the bodies of our students, clients and teams most effectively, we need to understand the nature of our human structure. Everything Moves offers the enquiring bodyworker or movement professional, who wants to take their understanding of how to apply biotensegrity in their work to the next level, a practical and relatable guide to the biotensegral nature of our bodies, in which all of the parts are one, yet all are constantly changing.

Throughout Everything Moves, concepts and ideas are presented with activities and exercises to make them tangible, accessible and applicable. The material presented is suitable for coaches and movement teachers new to biotensegrity, as well as those with more advanced levels of understanding.

Whether your focus is performance, sports, Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais, yoga, Pilates, martial arts, or dance, any arena in which bodies move can be informed by Everything Moves!

1 A Charming State of Confusion

Tho’ at this moment I am in a charming state of confusion; but it is that sort of confusion which is of a very bubble nature.

Ada Lovelace (1843)

When I first saw Steve Levin present on biotensegrity, he told our group that you have to hear this information a few times before you can get used to what is going on with it, and advised those of us who were new to biotensegrity to just let it go by, catch whatever you can, give it time to sink in, and don’t worry too much about it.

For a room full of professionals, this was a very big “ask.” We are quite used to our expert status, and knowing I had prepared myself by building models and reading lots from Fuller and everything on Levin’s biotensegrity.com website, I felt certain that this advice could not apply to me.

Of course he was right, and I was wrong. I was, as Ada Lovelace once was, in a “charming state of confusion.” In July of 1843, Ada Lovelace, feeling dismayed, realized it was time to step away from the “quagmire and botheration” of what may have been the first computer program, and she went for a horseback ride, trusting that, given time, space and movement, clarity would come. It did.

As a teacher, I see confusion and consternation all the time, but as a learner, I had somehow lost sight of it. When people are learning T’ai Chi they often worry about their inability to memorize the sequence of the postures, and as a teacher I try to get people to just relax and let their bodies go through the movements so that the movements themselves can do the teaching. Later on, their minds can catch up and they can start asking questions and putting things together. The practice is not linear, and especially in the beginning, it is very hard to learn by using a checklist.

Not unlike T’ai Chi, the nature of biotensegrity seems to be that we need it to go around in circles a few times before it can start to settle within. For most of us this is a new paradigm which requires an adjustment in the way we think. This takes time. For many of us, it has been a while since we learned something new for the first time.

This chapter is an overview of what lies ahead, an outline for the general progression of this book. Let it serve as a roadmap, but also as a reference for the future, something you can come back to if you begin to feel untethered or impatient in the naturally spiraling process of learning biotensegrity (Fig. 1.1).

A sense of our biotensegral being

Everything Moves is a guide for developing a working understanding of tensegrity structures, their relevance to biology in general, and to human movement in particular. Thinking of ourselves as biotensegral beings (dynamically living, breathing, locomoting tensegrities), gives us a completely new perspective on our bodies. Biotensegrity both reveals and demystifies critical aspects of our physical, structural, and biological heritage.

Because biotensegrity is such a radical departure from the customary body-as-machine view, it comes with a whole batch of new concepts and terms, many of which may be unfamiliar. A trickier aspect is that some terms (such as tension) may be familiar, but have a framing here that may be unfamiliar. We need these new terms in order to organize and apply new ideas; however, the learning process can be quite digestible when it proceeds gradually and steadily, and is grounded in our own experience.

As trainers, coaches, and teachers of movement and bodywork disciplines, we may wonder how we can apply biotensegrity directly to our work, and what advantages this may give to our clients and students. Experiential exercises (experientials) are included here so that each reader can feel into their own biotensegral nature and move through biotensegrity’s many aspects along the way. Stopping at each step to feel movements in our hands with our models, visualize ideas, make observations, and move our bodies from a new point of awareness, we can develop our own internal nexus of understanding, grounded in the science and our own experience. What we know viscerally, we can teach.

Figure 1.1

Naturally spiraling process of learning.

Working with models, then, is essential. Materials held in the hand can impart information about physical structure directly. Specific observable and palpable behaviors demonstrate how our bodies can manage the world of forces we are living in. Engaging with concrete items thoughtfully and with open curiosity, we can sense the fundamental qualities of our materials. Our sensations may inspire new metaphors, and these new metaphors can inform the way we think about our bodies and perceive our physical abilities, including potential for healing and repair. Developing a biotensegral sense of ourselves opens new windows of understanding and has a direct impact on how we might move and change.

In learning about biotensegrity, our models and nature are invaluable teachers, and we apply scientific inquiry principles to explore how and where the two might connect. These are the two touchstones we can turn to when we get stuck on a question. It cannot be emphasized enough: you will need at least one tensegrity model that you can hold and manipulate in order for biotensegrity to make any sense. There is no substitute for experience! The models needed to study biotensegrity, and how to acquire them, are discussed in Chapter 2, Models and Other Metaphors.

Forces

Writing about biotensegrity means facing the challenge of deciding what to present first, as everything relates to everything else. Since tensegrity is a particular arrangement of components which push and pull, both of which are present in our bodies at all times, we will start by looking at the behaviors of push and pull independently.

Danièle-Claude Martin points out that the term tensegrity “can be misleading in that it emphasizes the tensional aspect and apparently ignores the compression” (2016, p. 52). In the history of human-made structures, compression comes first, and without compression, tension cannot arise. To ensure it is not ignored, compression is explored first, in Chapter 3, Push. It is followed by Pull (Chapter 4), for it is the pull of tension that makes it possible for our bones to be held apart inside our multidimensional tensional webbing, seeming to float in the interstices of our flesh like almonds suspended in soft meringue or olive slices caught in aspic.

What, then, is holding up this web? Here is the crux of tensegrity’s paradigm shift: it holds itself up.

Working with tensegrity, we can begin to feel the “Harmonious Concatenation” (Chapter 5) that results from this revolutionary structural arrangement. We can begin to sense how we are inherently tenso-compressional beings, constellations of balanced and balancing dualities of push and pull, and how, despite having these opposing elements of push and pull within us, our bodies have the quality of a unified whole. Like our tensegrity models, our biotensegral bodies are fully integrated, connected and interconnected. Unlike stone columns which rely upon gravity to maintain their structural integrity, we can somersault or lie down, jump in the air or swim, and even go up into space for a while without being in danger of falling apart, making us relatively gravity independent.

Structure

Part of our bodies’ structural independence and energy efficiency is due to a shape that can be found inside our tensegrity models, and which gives us a very accessible starting point for beginning to understand the advantages to living beings that are inherent in tensegrity structures.

“Triangles” (Chapter 6) emerge naturally when nature builds, and the study of simple triangles offers a trove of structural principles foundational to biotensegrity.

Triangles are flat, but we are not. Living organisms are multidimensional, occupy space and have volume. Our bodies have shapes within shapes, and from the macro, whole-body scale level down and into the nano, our many shapes undergo transformations all the time. By tuning in to our models and to the feeling of our own shapes, spaces and volumetric aspects, we can begin to sense the way nature creates shapes. How these shapes can and do establish volumes, arrange themselves, and form other shapes, all while maintaining structural integrity and efficiency, is the focus of Chapter 7, Shape, Space, and Volume.

As larger and more complex structures arise organically out of nature’s basic shapes, very often winding spontaneously results. As we begin to grasp the many ways that our bodies are natively helical, we can make the connection between spiraling at the unseeable micro-scale levels of our tissues and the macro-level whole-body curving movements we see in sports, performance, and everyday life. Moving with this awareness gives us the opportunity to influence and inform the twists and turns of our physical experience (in Chapter 8, Spirals).

Spirals are not the only configurations that emerge when shapes come together, and “Patterns” (Chapter 9) of many kinds can be found in our tensegrities and in our own physical structure. Indeed, we can each be regarded as a unique pattern that has come forth into the world (even identical twins have differences between them, and they express individual variations in their patterns). We study patterns in biotensegrity, in part, to get “…a deeper understanding of the mechanics and structural energetics of living organisms hiding in the geometry” (Scarr 2014, p. 118), and to learn how patterns can give insight to how all living organisms connect with each other. What does moving as patterned beings entail? Which of our patterns can we deliberately make use of as we move?

These shapes, spirals and patterns collaborate to generate movement behaviors which are governed by the structures themselves, including a particular movement pattern ubiquitous in biology which involves spirals, oscillations and omnidirectional expansion and compression, all happening simultaneously.

Having looked at spirals, we turn our investigation to “Oscillations,” in Chapter 10, as living organisms are constantly oscillating at many levels all the time. We can envision our bodies as living oscillators which, both as whole systems and in all our various areas, are oscillating and vibrating. This vibrating and oscillating means that we are tuned, tuning, and attuning, and we do all of these all the time. And this, in turn, means that we are continuously communicating: signaling as well as conducting, transferring, and receiving signals. As omni-oscillating beings we are simultaneously and interchangeably initiators, conduits, and receptors of signals. How sensitive can we become to the oscillations that are a natural part of our being?

Is it possible for something to get bigger, or smaller, in every direction at once? Tensegrities do, as do a number of interesting and unusual materials of the category called “soft matter.” The multi-tensegral configuration of our bodies gives us this structural possibility as well, and in manipulating a tensegrity, we can concretely experience the material possibility of condensing and expanding omnidirectionally. This omnidirectional movement is called “Auxeticity” and is considered in Chapter 11, followed in Chapter 12 by a broader review of “Soft Matters” in general.

What exactly is soft matter? Scientists are still working this out, making soft matter one of the fastest growing fields in physics (APS News n.d.), but generally speaking, soft matter refers to materials which are complex and flexible, and which often respond in ways that are contrary to what we might expect, including drastic or sudden changes in mechanical properties and behaviors. The family of soft matter materials includes foams, gels, emulsions, liquid crystals, colloids, and common materials such as Silly Putty, honey, paint, milk, mud, wet sand, and even water. It also includes most, if not all, biological materials, making us soft matter beings. Our various internal expanses can and do move and transform in unexpected ways, suddenly becoming rigid or tight, and then soft and loose again, according to what is needed. Focusing on the behavior of soft matter materials, we can move more consciously as soft matter beings, expanding our possibilities for intentional transformation.

When simple materials behave unexpectedly (cornstarch mixed with water, for example), the combinations of materials may be regarded as complex “Systems” (Chapter 13), and our bodies can be understood as systems as well. We also have systems within our systems, just as we are part of the larger systems around us (from family, friends and workplaces to neighborhoods, ecosystems, counties, countries, and our home planet). It is within this context that we develop, live, and move. In a complex system, just as with our tensegrity models, movement in any one part of a system affects the whole, and can result in surprising changes in areas far removed from the impetus.

Biology

All of the above structural arrangements, along with their behaviors, responses, and movements, are found in naturally existing non-living substances and phenomena as well as in living organisms. Adding the component of biological life brings ever more complexity to the mix, and for the concept of biotensegrity to be of value to us it must fit within “The Constraints of Biology” (Chapter 14). As living beings we are functional: we work. This pattern of our bodies, and our speci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Author
• Contributors
• Foreword
• List of illustration sources
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: A Charming State of Confusion
• Chapter 2: Models and Other Metaphors
• Chapter 3: Push
• Chapter 4: Pull
• Chapter 5: Harmonious Concatenation
• Chapter 6: Triangles
• Chapter 7: Shape, Space, and Volume
• Chapter 8: Spirals
• Chapter 9: Patterns
• Chapter 10: Oscillations
• Chapter 11: Auxeticity
• Chapter 12: Soft Matters
• Chapter 13: Systems
• Chapter 14: The Constraints of Biology
• Chapter 15: Reconfiguring
• Conclusion: In Closing, an Opening
• Postscript
• References
• Links and QR Codes
• Glossary
• The Living Temple by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
• Artwork featured in the book
• Index