Fascia & Bones: Unpacking the Mystery

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In Episode 8, I will be discussing ideas around trauma, collective trauma, intergenerational and epigenetics.

I was driving home yesterday, the day after the presidential election in 2024, through the canyon along the Rio Grande Gorge. There was a dusting of snow on the cliffs on the right, with mist and sprinkles of snow. The river looked full of water lined with golden cotton woods with sprinkled with snow. I imagined I was in the Scottish Highlands, the place my ancestors are from, it all feels so familiar to my soma, a deep knowing of belonging. I do believe the place I live found me and I found it. It is a home that deeply resonance with me, living with four seasons in the mountains in the high desert of Taos, New Mexico. There is definitively something similar between here and the Highlands. They are both remote places belonging to indigenous people.

Between the years of 1750 to 1860 is a period of time known as the Scottish Clearances, where the people were forced to move, often with brute force, from the lands they inhabited by generations before them. They left for Canada, USA, and Australia in large numbers. This is a deep part of my own ancestry. As I study the history of my people, I am reminded multiple times of how it resonates in my own bones and fascia as a deep memory of despair and grief. I also appreciated the resilience of the people I come from. Twenty Five percent of the Highlanders died in the potato famine of 1846 to roughly 1856. More were killed, robbed and raped during the clearances to make way for the British landowners and sheep, completely decimating a way of life and raising cattle.

As with other cultures, who have experienced similar forms of occupation and genocide, these memories are carried in our epigenetics as a cultural trauma across multiple generations. I was brought to Highland games as a child in the Northwest of the USA. I saw Scottish folk dancing; log tossing and experienced the bagpipes—my grandfather even wore a kilt. What was not shared is how we ended up so far from the Highlands. It would be later in my adult years that I would return to study the history and gain a broader understanding of my people. One quarter of my lineages descends from enslaved afro-indigenous ancestry, which carries similar stories and are people of the diaspora.

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Part 1
In Episode 4, I will be discussing ideas around Empathy, Rest and Resistance. In July of 2024, Suzanne Picard and I co-taught and create a class in Living in Health, Cultivating Parasympathetic and Rest. I will be interviewing Suzanne, who is a Rolf Movement educator and practitioner of Structural Integration under the trademark known as a “Rolfer”. Some of the inspirations for this course came from the Nap Ministry’s founder Tricia Hersey. Tricia’s book is described as, “rooted in spiritual energy and centered in Black liberation, womanism, somatics, and Afrofuturism. With captivating storytelling and practical advice, all delivered in Hersey’s lyrical voice and informed by her deep experience in theology, activism, and performance art, Rest Is Resistance is a call to action and manifesto for those who are sleep deprived, searching for justice, and longing to be liberated from the oppressive grip of Grind Culture.”
Part 2

Empathy comes from Greek for “affection” or “in suffering”. To be empathic has taken on all kinds of meanings in modern culture. For those of us who work in therapeutic realms it is a necessary skill we have to cultivate and/or organize in our work. I say this because many folks who enter into therapeutic fields are natural empaths. Being a natural empath has its advantages and can lead to burnout in working with people. It becomes incredibly important to practice rest as an act of liberation and selfcare within therapeutic fields. Natural empaths are often neurodivergent and have other complexities they have to regulate.

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Welcome back to Fascia and Bones: Unpacking the Mystery. Some things I love—fascia and bones with a detective mystery. I am practicing manual osteopath and structural integrator and love working with the connective tissue of the body and the holistic systems of the body. I am also a long-time educator in the field of bodywork and movement. My hope is to share some insights in the fields I practice.

Part 1

In Episode 2, I am taking a look at some recent research to helps us unpack how we may support fascia in our manual practices. As I mentioned in the previous podcast, fascia was first found in the literature in the 1700s during the time of Marie Antoinette by French physicians. It is in the last 20 years we have seen more growth in the research and the Fascial Research Society is a great resource for practitioners.

Part 2
In the second half of Episode 2, I am taking look new research in fascia and looping back to research over the last 5 years. I am highlighting a lot of research out of the Stecco Lab in this podcast. Some very interesting results and changes of understanding fascia from how hormones play a role in the viscosity of fascia, opening a new mapping of nerve roots to an idea of fasciatome. The role of endocannaboid receptors in fascia and fascia as a pain modulator. The results of treating with a myofascial approach for sacral iliac dysfunction and the expression of different roles of proprioception and pain in the gluteal and thoracolumbar fasciae.
Part 3
So, what does this mean in the manual application of the work we do?

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Part 1

The nights are drawing in earlier here in the mountains and the moon is shining brighter as we come on to the upcoming Hunter’s Moon. We were sleeping outside over 9,000 feet amongst the spruce, pine and golden orange red aspen trees. There is something about being in the mountains that is in my blood and bones. There was a femur bone in our camp site, maybe an elk. The next day we road our mountain bikes and stumbled on many tibia bones, most likely cow and found a juvenile male cow skull. The women of the Highlanders would spend their Summers in the mountains tending to the cows, caring for children and making cheese while the men went off hunting and raiding.
Part 2
There is something in being mirrored by a friend, teacher or practitioner that can be very powerful in the healing of all types of traumas. I have read all kinds of explanations by psychologists over the years into the biological, neuro, physiological and anatomical mechanisms at play. Maybe these don’t matter as we have a felt sense of when something is in resonance and feels “right” in our body. Our connective tissue or fascia has this knowingness about it. In Episode 2, I spoke of the sensory nerve endings (mechanoreceptors) that innervate the fascia as well as how they transfer information from the outside to the inside of our bodies via ANS. There are the endocannabinoids and hormone receptors in fascia too. This starts to paint a picture of the fascial complexity we have in our systems as well as a potential for plasticity or maybe what we can call “fascial-plasticity”.

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In Episode 6, I will be discussing ideas around yin energy in the field of structural integration, embryology, craniosacral, energy work and how we meet our clients in the field with Carol Agneesens. Carol began her career in education in special education. She had heard of Rolfing in high school and didn’t directly come across until she was working in the North West. After receiving her first 10 series, she enrolled at the “Mystery School of Structural Integration” in Boulder and trained as a Rolfer. She then went on to become a lead instructor and Rolf Movement educator. She works independently in her practice in Aptos, California where she continues to be an elder and innovator in our field.