Yoga: Fascia, Anatomy and Movement

558 Pages·2015·14.58 MB·English

YOGA
FASCIA, ANATOMY
and MOVEMENT
Joanne Avison
Yoga: E-RYT500, Structural Integration: KMI, CTK,
CMED
Director: Art of Contemporary Yoga Ltd
HANDSPRING PUBLISHING
LIMITED
The Old Manse, Fountainhall, Pencaitland, East Lothian
EH34 5EY, Scotland
Tel: [phone]
Website: www.handspringpublishing.com
First published 2015 in the United Kingdom by Handspring Publishing
Copyright © Handspring Publishers 2015
Photographs and drawings copyright © Joanne Avison unless otherwise
indicated All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced or
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The right of Joanne Avison to be identified as the Author of this text has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts 1988.
ISBN 978-1-909141-01-8
eISBN 978-1-909141-40-7
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this
book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in
Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of
Congress Notice
Neither the Publisher nor the Author assumes any responsibility for any loss or
injury and/or damage to persons or property arising out of or relating to any use
of the material contained in this book. It is the responsibility of the treating
practitioner, relying on independent expertise and knowledge of the patient, to
determine the best treatment and method of application for the patient.
Commissioning Editor Sarena Wolfaard Design direction Sarah Russell; Bruce
Hogarth, kinesis-creative Cover design Victoria Dokas, Ariadne Creative
Artwork Joanne Avison (unless otherwise indicated) Index by Dr Laurence
Errington Typeset by DiTech Process Solutions Printed in the Czech Republic
by Finidr Ltd.
The
Publisher’s
policy is to use
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Dedication
To my wonderful parents, Stephani and William; to Caroline in deepest
gratitude; to Ben for the questions about science; and to Steven, without whom
there would be no art.
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 beyond
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 researcher – 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
astounding 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 automobiles, 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]
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 artisan 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. Structure, 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.
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.
Twinkle, twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are
Up above the world so high
Like a diamond in the sky
In awe and wonder at the sacred nature of form, and a simple translation of the
opening poem.
Joanne Sarah Avison