We have been preparing our whole lives to NOT be able to understand the importance of fascia

To truly understand Fascia, you must challenge your entire way of looking at yourself and your body.

You, we, and everyone in Western society have been preparing our whole lives to NOT being able to understand the importance of fascia.

In our society, we have for long time focused on dividing, disassembling and closely studying the smallest components. It has led to great progress in some fields and an advanced understanding of parts – but it has also led to a very limited holistic understanding.

But then you just have to think a little bit differently, right?

Absolutely. But there is a problem that many do not think about. Our whole world is PHYSICALLY built on the idea of dividing and separating.

In school, the world is divided into different subjects such as mathematics, biology, language, geography and history. We learn early on that these subjects have nothing to do with each other.
Society is divided into different functions where specialization is highly valued, both in research and professional practice.
Universities are physically divided into different buildings for different subjects and each subject is divided into smaller subjects – there are even physical buildings for different body parts.
Researchers and experts belong administratively to different faculties, so if a psychologist comes up with something that may be of value to a medic, it is very unlikely that they will come in contact with each other at all. Not because they are far apart and cannot understand each other, but because they are in different houses, have different jobs and focus on different things.

All of this makes it hard to hear new ideas when you already have physically existing organizations that are literally built in a different way of thinking.

To divide and separate, not have a holistic perspective, is not just an idea but a physically manifested institutionalized thought that affects our entire society without us thinking about it.

So, this is deeply rooted in us, this is how we learn to look at the world and it affects our whole way of understanding ourselves and our body. Here are two examples;

#1. We do not believe we ARE our own body

We separate ourselves from our own body automatically. When we talk about the body, it is like we are talking about an instrument, like something that can break and that we need to go to someone to fix. We use phrases that *the body does not do as I want* or *there is something wrong with my body*, we treat the body as something that is outside of us, that is separate from our consciousness, from us.

We see the body as something we HAVE, not as something we ARE, which makes it difficult for us to understand ourselves in a holistic way, where the body and consciousness are part of the same thing.

Try it yourself: Realize that you ARE your body and try to experience it from within, in the same way that you experience your consciousness. See what happens!

#2. We pretend that a dead body and a living body looks the same

For hundreds of years, we have through dissection built up a theoretical understanding of the human body, where muscles, bones, organs, connective tissue, and so on, are close together in different layers.

The dissected bodies have been dead (thank goodness) but is there not a difference between a dead or a living body?

We usually ask this question when we lecture about fascia and the answer is usually that there is a big difference – a living body is alive.

In a living body there is a fluid flow and a constant pulsating motion, while a dead body has no pulsation, it is still.

A living body and a dead body are not the same thing…

… but we pretend it to be like that when we study anatomy and build our image of what the body looks like.

“I’m a pathologist, so I sit and look at human tissue through a microscope all day. It is not the same as looking at living tissue, even though we pretend it is. But now we have a tool that allows us to see living tissue and it does not look like we thought.” – Professor Neil Theise

The traditional image of the body does not consider that the body is alive and that there is a space between all cells where there is a constant flow. It is in this environment, this space, that all communication and integration take place, from cell migration to the immune system, to the nutrition and purification of waste products.

Try it yourself: Your body is alive. There is a constant fluid flow inside your body and everything is constantly changing. Feel! How does it feel?

It is difficult to really understand life if we base our image of the body on the fact that the body is dead.
It is difficult to have a holistic understanding when our whole world is PHYSICALLY built on the idea of dividing and separating.
But we try
Right now, a global revolution is underway, after an explosion of new anatomical research, which brings new life to the idea that the parts must be put together into a whole.
To understand fascia, a holistic view is not only desirable but absolutely necessary – and the recent research question many previous ideas about the body, about health, about pain and about our widespread diseases.
What we know today about fascia, forces us to question our whole way of looking at the body, and ultimately our whole way how we do see science, and how we conduct research.
At Fascia Research Congress 2018, the latest in fascia research was presented – including the discovery of a new cell.

Beställ Fasciaguiden här

*Av Axel Bohlin Grundare & Redaktör, The Fascia Guide*