Yoga, Fascia, Anatomy and Movement, Second edition

Joanne Avison

• Publisher: Handspring Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781913426057
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Alternative & Complementary Medicine

"From Anatomy to Architecture, from Biomechanical to Biomotional and from Classical to Connected "– speaks to all bodies, in all modalities; in a world seeking unity and connection more than ever.

Yoga, Fascia, Anatomy and Movement was written partly as an appeal for Yoga Teachers to appreciate the depth and breadth of Yoga as a science, a movement practice and a philosophy that fundamentally espouses "wholeness" as the basis of living anatomy and form. Yoga calls for unifying who and how we are; and as teachers – how we can help our clients (who are all different) move better.

Classical Anatomy (in the West) divides the body down into its component parts and traditionally (unchanged for 400 years) reduces its functionality to those parts; usually described in a 2D iconic forms and founded in lever-based mechanics. In the East, such reductionism was never espoused and Yoga, Fascia, Anatomy and Movement covers two huge bases to bridge the difference and upgrade understanding of Yoga, to 21 st Century anatomy:

• The first is to recognise that the leading edge of Fascia Science changes all those reductionist views (anatomically and biomechanically). It is carefully explained in the first part of the book and shows how the New Science of Body Architecture actually makes perfect sense of yogic philosophy of union and wholeness.
• The second is to take this paradigm shift and apply it in practice, to the subtle understanding of the fascial architecture and how that helps us move better. Yoga, Fascia, Anatomy and Movement attempts to ask questions, find suitable research and make all this practical and applicable to teachers and practitioners of all types. (Indeed, it teaches "posture profiling" and creating Class Mandala's, to support this). It is a contemporary yoga teacher's bible.

A
From Anatomy to Animated Architecture

1 The Art of Contemporary Yoga

2 Ancient Wisdom and New Knowledge

3 From Anatomy to Architecture

4 The Remarkable Human Blueprint

5 Sensory Architecture

6 Living Tensegrity Structures

7 The Fascial Architexture

1

The Art of Contemporary Yoga

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there”¹

Rumi (1207–1273)

Yoga means different things to different people. It can be as variously complex and straightforward as the individuals who practise it. It relies as much on its inherited wisdom as it retains exceptional relevance and value in a modern culture. Fascia is the unifying fabric of the body form and since yoga means “unifying”, in one sense we could say it is the yoga of our forming, since we are a work in progress throughout our lives.

There are as many different styles of yoga and perspectives on yoga as there are people to interpret them. There are fast and slow practices, dynamic and static aspects, different cultures and applications. Some yogic forms embrace only physical postures, while others emphasise a more meditative approach. Any yoga teacher training includes philosophy and technique, ethics and practice, anatomy and physiology, as well as work on meditative approaches and the broader quest for expanding awareness and conscious understanding of what it is to be alive in a body. In truth, yoga can become as far reaching, profound and multi-faceted as we can. It seeks to account for body, mind and being as a context for health and vitality on many levels. Whatever your interest, there is far more to the art of yoga than a series of exercises or shapes-in-space on a mat; the medium in which you do it is that of your fascial body matrix.

Yoga has evolved from ancient principles that have never separated body, mind and being from each other, as we have in the West. We do not leave our minds at the desk, our hearts outside the door, and take only our functioning anatomical parts to the yoga class. Rather, we engage our many different aspects and faculties to arrive (and leave) whole and complete. We activate ourselves as one animated form, unique and essentially self-motivated.

Yoga is about movement and quality of motion as well as the power to be still and present. Much of its value resides in the ability to expand awareness and attention beyond the mind and its intellectual processing, to a state of presence in the body. We can begin to learn stillness through poise and balance, practising the art of experiencing equanimity in quiet reflection; a pathway perhaps, beyond the forms. This practice fosters the ability to quieten mind chatter (chitta vritti), taking our yoga beyond thinking and individual postures. It can invite fun in the physical realm, balance to the emotional and curiosity in the mental pursuit of the philosophy; animated by the form, but not reduced to its components. Once these aspects are woven together, we can become inspired by the breathing practices and beyond to the more esoteric aspects. Yoga can be a kind of portal to vitality and awareness. It takes more than theory, however, to makes sense of the experience, way beyond the exercise technique. It is in action, through the medium of our whole physical form, that we animate what is essentially our own yoga.

Movement is not an intellectual process, and nor is breathing, or meditation, or seeking awareness. They are heart-felt practices of a conscious being, animating a body. Our intellect, or thinking mind, is just one of our many gifts; yoga can bring awareness of all these myriad expressions of our living architecture. These include the thinking body, the moving body, the instinctive body and the emotional body, with all its sensory and intuitive abilities to experience embodiment essentially as a self-motivated being. Fascia, as the original fabric of our form, incorporates and organises all these aspects of us.

Anatomy of the Body

When we begin to study how the body is formed, scientifically, we (particularly in the West) tend to veer away from whole embodiment, preferring to examine the detail, separated or broken down into its component parts. We turn to various works based on long-held theories in the fields of anatomy, physiology and biomechanics. This approach requires the naming of our parts, understanding our physical systems and explaining how we move, deduced from those parts. We learn the locations, which parts are where (topography); we explain the systems in which those parts function (biology and chemistry) and describe the movement (locomotive) apparatus and how it works under various aspects of biomechanical and neurological theory. Muscle–bone–joint anatomy is the foundation on which we base our understanding of any movement modality. Awareness of the being inside the moving body is largely assigned to the study of psychology or more esoteric practices, as if they are separate.

To understand how we do the postures, we focus on the musculoskeletal system to name which muscles move which bones via their specific attachments. By learning how the nervous system works and assigning specific nerves to each muscle, we seek to explain which actions do which movements. This explains the postures accordingly. Or does it?

Musculoskeletal System

Once we have identified the muscles and bones, we name the ligaments attaching the bones of the skeleton to each other, the tendons attaching the muscles to those bones, and how, between them, they activate (via various types of leverage) the different types of joint. This is to study the form and function of the “musculoskeletal system”.

I was in my early thirties, three years into learning yoga on a more formal basis, trying to make sense of anatomy. Having been trained by osteopaths, I considered anatomy and biomechanics to be a high priority but could not understand why there was such a rift between the books and the moving people actually doing yoga in my classroom. Into this confusion walked Tom Myers, presenting to a large group of yoga teachers. He announced to us all that “there ain’t no muscle connected to no bone, nowhere, in no body”. To give you a context, this was the late 1990s, in Brighton, England. Not only was this man apparently committing anatomical heresy, he was doing it with a big grin and an American accent. It shifted a few notions and ignited a curiosity in me that has only grown since.

In this “musculoskeletal” system, each muscle has a name and position, an origin, an insertion (or distal and proximal attachment) and an action assigned to it, via a nerve, responsible for that specific action or type of motion. The whole suite of muscle–bone–joint anatomy combines to motivate a system of levers and pendulums that provides explanations of how our bodies move around. We follow up on the biomechanics of those levers first, or the nervous system that apparently innervates their separate, respective functions. In either case, it becomes progressively more complex and difficult to divide up, or work out, which functions belong to which system. We require ever more complicated rules, for more detailed fragments. The ability to make sense of the wholeness that arrives in the classroom becomes increasingly elusive and confusing. Who looks forward to “learning their anatomy” and finds it easy to make sense of how the body moves from the icons in the books?

In yoga books on anatomy, these classical principles are usually presented via poses (asanas), with a related image showing which muscles are contracted, which stretched, and the point at which they are individually attached in their so-called “antagonistic pairs”. Similarly, in the anatomy of the breath, we study the principles of the organs and muscles of breathing: how they attach to (and move) the rib cage and diaphragm. We learn by rote which muscles are for accessory breathing, shallow breathing and deep breathing, etc. A great deal has been studied and described from this particular perspective. However, although this perspective has been taught for centuries, it largely excludes an essential feature of body architecture. That essential feature is the significance and ubiquity of the fascia, historically assigned to the role of connecting tissue, as if that is merely a kind of “scaffolding” or inert packaging material.

The importance of fascia has become clearer and more differentiated only comparatively recently. “Fascia” is the name given to a specific (and variable) kind of connective tissue that is the subject of a rapidly increasing amount of research with regard to its range, capabilities and characteristics.² From 200 papers per year in the 1970s and 1980s, to almost 1,000 in 2010 on the subject; the following article in 2019 indicates the exponential rise in research and interest:

“While anatomy textbooks are slim on fascia a search on the Internet using the term “Fascia” on PubMed alone resulted in excess of 20,000 articles. Anatomical texts provide detailed images and descriptions of muscles, nerves, lymphatic’s, organs and blood vessels while the very tissue connecting, supporting, nurturing, wrapping and investing them is most often not included. Recent research indicates the role of Fascia in the pathogenesis of a variety of conditions including Lumbago, inguinal hernia and the regulation of posture, muscular biomechanics, peripheral motor coordination and proprioception.”

John Sharkey³

The fascia is what we might call the “stuff in between” all of the parts, that in traditional dissection has mostly been removed. It is scraped away in order to properly present the more important items, considered to be the muscles, joints, bones, vessels and materials of the musculoskeletal system. A similar focus in studying visceral anatomy includes removing fascia to study the “more important organs” that it wraps. What is perhaps ignored, is that everything in the human body is made of fascia. We will see in the following chapters how this has hidden, for so long, in the obvious. What is so vitally important, and growing in rec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• About the Author
• Foreword to First Edition by Thomas W Myers
• Foreword to Second Edition by Jill Miller
• Foreword to Second Edition by Jules Mitchell
• Acknowledgements
• Part A: From Anatomy to Animated Architecture
• Part B: From Biomechanics to Biomotional Beings
• Part C: Classical to Connected
• Appendix A: Discovering The Interstitium – Neil Theise, Physician and Scientist
• Appendix B: Stretching; The Faux Amis of Yoga – John Sharkey, Clinical Anatomist, Exercise Physiologist
• Index