Mucous the Body's Glue and Glide

Your body expresses every experience you ever had.  Each trauma, laugh, relationship, exercise, labor, nourishment all are captured in your cells to create the unique being that is you.

For centuries, we looked at the body from a perspective of separate parts, the skeleton is a frame surrounded by muscles, attached by tendons, supported by ligaments etc.  We’ve  understood movement muscle by muscle.  We can’t touch our toes, so we focus on stretching our hamstrings or strengthen the core to relieve a sore back. But there are limits to looking at the body that way.   It is the balance of the muscles around the skeleton that determines where the skeleton is in space. Muscles move in relationship to one another, not as individual units. Nerves fire to create contraction, and the muscles respond by yielding, stretching, and bouncing back. 

But the system that allows this body to move in such beautiful tensegrity or floating compression is our fascia.

Fascia is mostly mucosal.  Like egg whites, its gooey, slimy properties help muscles and organs glide easily as we move.   We see this in the fluid movements of youth when the body is hydrated and likely (hopefully) in movement most of the time.

With age, injury, and inflammation, the fascia dries out, becoming brittle, sticky, and clumpy.   It becomes more and more difficult to move moisture into the fascial cells.  The nerves that move around and through the fascia have more difficulty firing and the body loses the memory of movement.  If you can’t feel it, you can’t move it, if you can’t move it you can’t feel it. This is called sensory motor amnesia where the body forgets how to move in an easy, fluid way and maybe can’t move that part of the body at all.

This cellular dehydration and sensory motor amnesia show up as stiffness, pain or lack of agility and becomes increasingly more debilitating without intervention.  Changing the way we move, stretch, and nourish are key to reversing the changes in fascial structure.

Healing begins with awareness.  Nothing changes in our reaction to stressors until we listen deeply.  We see this in every relationship in our lives but often we numb the inner awareness of sensation. 

Sensation is information.  An easy way to begin is by observing  your breath.  Try this:

1.     Close your eyes.

2.    Without moving, notice the shape of your spine, don’t try to change, simply observe.

3.   Notice your breath.

4. Make a small change in how you’re sitting (standing, laying down?)

5. Sense how it feels.

6. Do that three or four times with small shifts in the spine.

Begin the conversation with your body.  The slow exploration, the curious observation, is the key to connecting and recreating vitality and agility.

Keep exploring with slow, mindful movement.  Get to know this wonderous being from the inside out.

Try a somatic yoga class for even more great tools. Check out weekly online classes