Yoga: Fascia, Anatomy and Movement: Fascia, Form and Functional Movement

The invitation is to do less and breathe fully, exploring the pose by feeding back to the centre, rather than reaching from it, to their limits.

It does not have to be a self-absorbed way of being. On the contrary, it is nurturing the centre from which we can teach in a quiet kind of listening, without the commentary of a busy mind.

The three positions encourage fuller breath in the lower ribs, front-to-back body and upper chest. The student is guided to gently expand the breath, from the breathing innersphere – inside out. (As distinct from activating muscles to force breathing action from the outside-in.)

Fascia also occupies the incredibly complex world of the “in-between” and forms a single, body-wide, tensional network in all dimensions.

What this comes down to in general terms for our teaching is that we cannot usefully separate structure from function because they are not separate. You move and create form as you form shapes by moving.

A great divide began to arise between man and nature, his own nature, due in part, ironically, to the way in which the study of human anatomy eventually came to be sanctioned by the church (see Descartes, later in this chapter). Soft tissue was removed from the physical body when human dissection was eventually permitted. Since it was not recognise

Mae-Wan Ho, The Rainbow and the Worm: The Physics of Organisms, 3rd edition, World Scientific Publishing,

“Seen from the perspective of developmental dynamics, muscles cross joints because the muscles develop in segments of various large [connective tissue] slings systems and joint spaces arise within the compass of the same slings. … the tissue at the periphery of the space becomes stretched forming the joint capsule. Those parts of the joint capsule

“when discussing any changes in motor organisation, it is important to realise that the central nervous system does not operate ‘in muscles’, i.e. a muscle is never activated as a whole.”