Fascia and the Truth of the Body
By Cintain Quintana
Fascia is a buzzword in the alternative health world. Everybody seems to talk about it. It would seem that fascia is the answer to everything, but, is it? What exactly are all these people talking about? Let’s try to make sense of the confusion.
In its broadest sense, the word ‘fascia’ refers to the connective tissue that links, envelops, protects, and organises the other tissues of the body. It isn’t made up of cells, but made by cells to serve as an interactive structural framework for everything else in the body. If we took out the fascia from a body and placed it next to it, on one side we would have a perfect ghostly outline of every structure in the body: each nerve, blood vessel, organ, muscle, bone, represented accurately, down to its smallest detail. On the other side, we would have a puddle of seawater and fat.
Fascia isn’t inert. Nerves and blood vessels run through it; cells move and live within it. Perhaps most importantly, it is sensitive to, and transmits, mechanical forces moving through the body. It is constanly being built, re-built, and torn down along lines the lines of tension and vectors of force that are put through the body, responding to every single action and posture in the person’s life.
Sounds pretty important, no? Perhaps most profoundly, its shape and consistency affects the life of the cells in it. Cells are embedded in fascia — they rely on it, on the forces that pull and push through it, to know who they are and how they behave. The functioning of entire tissues changes as the fascia that surrounds and invests them changes. Therefore, therapists and movement practitioners the world over are becoming aware of the potential of fascia as an avenue for treating illness and reducing and improving problems of mobility and pain.
Any therapy that influences the body mechanically in any way, whether subtle or forceful, affects the fascia. It makes sense, given that it is everywhere. What gives, then? Isn’t all therapy fascia therapy?
Yes and no. You see, inasmuch as the preceding paragraphs hold true for fascia anywhere in the body, the stuff is also quite versatile, and what it does in different parts of the body requires a certain degree of variation, whence different approaches and qualities of touch will be better suited to different layers of levels of the body.
For example, in the field of movement and action — the world of muscles — fascia is tough and plastic more than it is elastic. It takes time for it to respond to change, because its job is to maintain the structure in a functional state that can withstand (ab)use. Structural integration and other kinds of so-called “deep tissue” bodywork, can encourage the fascia to change in a profound way, correcting postural patterns and a better relationship with the mother of all forces: gravity.
Conversely, in the visceral cavity, organs move and vibrate in delicate patterns and frequency that are intended to preserve function more than form. Intestines expand and roll, stomachs churn and contract, gallbladders and pancreases blood vessels withstand changes in chemical composition that would otherwise melt them. Here, the gentle, subtle techniques of visceral manipulation dissolve restrictions and adhesions caused by trauma and the daily abuses of food and poor posture to restore ease, sometimes resolving issues that are localised at great distances from the place where the therapist works.
Finally, in the primeval, oceanic world of the brain and spinal cord, fascia toughens and solidifies to create an almost anti-gravitational medium for the brain and nervous system. Only the most delicate, subtle, and slow of touches can influence this system that is part membrane, part liquid crystal, and all electricity and light.
One tissue with many variations, one body with many internal shapes, functions, and forms. To truly be able to influence fascia in an integrative, holistic way, one would have to be able to access all of these systems and understand the interactions between them. Only then could one be said to truly be doing “fascia therapy.”
The truth is, there is no catchy name for the combination of visceral manipulation, craniosacral therapy and structural bodywork. Most of the people who work at this level know one of them; a select few know two. But to work with and move freely between all three, responding to the needs of each individual body at any given point in time is a rare and special thing. Yet this is exactly what we do.
One of my teachers once called it “spatial medicine”, because it deals with the position and movement of the structures of the body in space. Yet this fails to grasp the holistic nature of the process that it facilitates. We like to call it “true fascia therapy,” not because it goes a step beyond what any one of these therapies, by itself, can accomplish, but because it is ‘true’ to, it responds to the truth of, the embodied reality of each individual patient at the point in time when they seek help.
Our therapy evolves and responds; encourages and nudges the body, and elicits change in the direction that the body needs to go. It is a dance, an exchange between two intelligent systems. It enables the body to meet its reality in the present moment, with as much awareness and resourcefulness as it can muster.
It doesn’t get much more true than that.
