YOGA
FASCIA, ANATOMY
and MOVEMENT
Joanne Avison
Yoga: E-RYT500, Structural Integration: KMI, CTK, CMED
Director: Art of Contemporary Yoga Ltd
HANDSPRING PUBLISHING LIMITED
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First published 2015 in the United Kingdom by Handspring Publishing
Copyright © Handspring Publishers 2015
Photographs and drawings copyright © Joanne Avison unless otherwise indicated
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with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts 1988.
ISBN 978-1-909141-01-8
eISBN 978-1-909141-40-7
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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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
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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 re-searcher – 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 selfsense, 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 selfassemble 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
Acknowledgements
The list of acknowledgements is longer than this summary; forgive me if you are not mentioned
personally.
First and foremost my parents, Stephani and William, without whom I wouldn’t be here; your
loving guardianship remains so precious to me. Ben, Caroline, Jim and Sasha-dog, I cherish all that
you are for me, every day. A special word to Poupette, with love, and to all my family (you know who
you are). To Malcolm, for all that we created and for the artisan skills of the chocolatier! Little did I
know how much I was learning about the liquid crystal nature of soft matter.
My dear friends and broader family; without your loving listening and encouragement this wouldn’t
have happened. In no particular order Philippa King, Tracie Morrison, Jo Ellis, Jane Priddis, Annie
Waite-Gilmer, Linda d’Antal, Trish McElhone, Gilly (Bean) Smith, Diane Ward, Shane McDermott,
Alex Filmer-Lorch, Martin Gordon, Amanda Baker, Susie Llewelyn, Andy Forsey, Karel Aerssons,
Petra Gommers, Evelyn Bowles, Ruth Vinuela, Jeni Dodson, Tracey Mellor, Nicola Brooks, Stella
O’Shea, Adam Clements, Paul Kaye. To Eileen de Herdman and Doreen Thobigele (Sesi Wami) may
they rest in peace with so much love.
Professionally I thank all my teachers; those from whom I have learned by design and those from
whom I have learned, by default, (what not to do). My profound thanks to each of the graduates at Art
of Contemporary Yoga for teaching me more than you learned and for going out into the world the
way you have; raising your game and mine. It was a privilege to work with Philippa, Alex, Linda,
Diane and Steven to create such a field of Grace for us all. That includes the graduates in Tübingen for
their patience while we translated my metaphors into German. To the lovely participants in my Friday
Class, now in Sarah’s safe and capable hands and to all my loyal clients and colleagues; Thank you
each. (Especially Gerlinde, Gilly B, Stephani and William, Frances and Phil for attending so many
classes/sessions for so many years!).
A special word for Pat Sparrow; may she rest in peace and know that her down-to-earth and spirited
teaching influenced me hugely. Tom and Quan Myers; your advice to “seek my own author-ity” and
here it is. Robert Schleip, without whom this book would not have happened, for your patience and
enthusiasm to ignite the project and join the dots in the network in all aspects of “fascianating” fascia.
To Dr Stephen Levin and Susan Lowell for their devoted assistance at every corner on biotensegrity.
To which end no small thanks go to Tom Flemons, Kenneth Snelson and Graham Scarr for the various
gifts of explanations, corrections, models and consideration. Jaap van der Wal for the generous gift of
time and references in reading the work. Leonid Blyum and Danielle-Claude Martin for endless
encouragement. On which note a very special thank you to Professor Darrell Evans. When this work
began as Associate Dean at Brighton and Sussex Medical School (and Professor of Developmental
Biology) your patience in all things anatomical and embryological was frankly saintly. Now as ViceProvost (Learning and Teaching) at Monash University, Melbourne; you found the time in a
demanding schedule to check Chapter 5 (which nearly drove me mad) and help me bridge some of the
gaps between academia and the movement classroom with access to your lectures, research and
magical margin notes! Thank you for a vertical learning curve. To Dr Wilbour Kelsick for support and
devotion to all things applied and heart-centred in health and human performance.
Since the book went to proofing, the passing away of B K S Iyengar, brings me to an observation
about the matriarchy behind Restorative Yoga. This incredible man taught Vanda Scaravelli one-to-
one and their combination of masculine and feminine perspectives brought forth the realm we enjoy
working in today. My thanks and gratitude to both and the legacy they left behind in their protégés. I
have had the privilege of working with both Elizabeth Pauncz and Diane Long, so my thanks and love
to each of you. John Stirk and Peter Blackaby have also inspired me and encouraged my deep
fascination with anatomy and biomechanics. Actually, it was more frustration – which ignited the
questions contained herein. My deepest appreciation to Caroline Myss for personally and
professionally giving me the confidence to take those questions about the physical body and raise
them to the level of the sacred and mystical in down-to-earth, real ways that I treasure. Thank you for
your Grace and wisdom and to David Smith for taking it out into the world and answering my emails!
To Phil and Patricia to say thank you for Bill Corsa my “special agent”, without all of you I would
have struggled more and giggled less. To Stephanie Pickering for her meticulous care and loving
attention as midwife to every chapter. Vicky Dokas for exquisite design; including the cover on this
book. Samira and Katie, what wonderful models you were for the “fascia tubes” – thanks to you both
and to David Woolley, the photographer and everyone for the pictures. Sarena Wolfaard, my huge
appreciation for your guidance, patience and warmth; Bruce Hogarth for such attention to detail and
everyone at Handspring, including the reviewers that have each been so generous with their time and
comments in reading this work. A very special thank you to Linda d’Antal for being so patient in
modeling postures for me to reference in many of the illustrations. To your clients and Jo Ellis for
more of the same and Martin Gordon for artistic guidance.
Last, but by no means least, one of my oldest friends and dearest companions in life; Steven
Kingsnorth. You ensured that I stuck with it, followed it all through, nurtured and literally fed me
when I was lost in translation or just needing fresh air for inspiration. Without you there would be no
art and no art of contemporary yoga from which to tell this story. My love and profound gratitude
always and in all ways.
In deep gratitude and awe
Joanne Sarah Avison
Brighton, England 2014
Contents
PART ONE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Activating the intellectual mind: behind the new paradigm
The Art of Contemporary Yoga
Ancient Wisdom and New Knowledge
The Science of Body Architecture
Biotensegrity Structures
The Remarkable Human Blueprint
The Breath, the Bones and the Dermatomes
Spines, Lines and Automobility
The Elastic Body
Sense and Sentience
The Fascial Forms
PART TWO
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Animating the instinctive body: applying the new paradigm
Animating the Architecture
Yoga and Anatomy Trains
Yoga and Posture Profiling
Adjustment of the Fascial Form
The Elastic Breath
Yoga for the Fascial Body: A Simple Practice
PART THREE Illuminating intuitive awareness: integrating the new paradigm
Chapter 17
Freeing the Fascia from Within
Chapter 18
The Inner Sense of the Fascia
Chapter 19
Presence and Pre-sense of the Fascia
Chapter 20
Posture Mandalas
Chapter 21
Archetypal Geometries
Index
PART ONE
Activating the intellectual mind: behind the new paradigm
Chapter 1
The Art of Contemporary Yoga
Chapter 2
Ancient Wisdom and New Knowledge
Chapter 3
The Science of Body Architecture
Chapter 4
Biotensegrity Structures
Chapter 5
The Remarkable Human Blueprint
Chapter 6
The Breath, the Bones and the Dermatomes
Chapter 7
Spines, Lines and Automobility
Chapter 8
The Elastic Body
Chapter 9
Sense and Sentience
Chapter 10
The Fascial Forms
CHAPTER
1
The Art of Contemporary Yoga
“Out beyond ideas of right doings and wrong doings, there is a field.
I will meet you there”1
Rumi (1207–1273)
Yoga means different things to different people. It can be as complex and as straightforward as the
individuals who practise it. It relies as much on its inherited wisdom as it retains exceptional
relevance and value in a modern culture.
There are as many different styles of yoga and perspectives on yoga as there are people to interpret
them. There are fast and slow practices, dynamic and static aspects, different cultures and
applications. Some yogic forms embrace only physical postures, while others emphasise a more
meditative approach. Any yoga teacher training includes philosophy and technique, ethics and
practice, anatomy and physiology, as well as work on meditative approaches and the broader quest for
expanding awareness and conscious understanding of what it is to be alive in a body. In truth, yoga can
become as far reaching, profound and multi-faceted as we can. It seeks to account for body, mind and
being as a context for health and vitality on many levels. Whether your interest is therapeutic or
dynamic, for strength or stillness, there is far more to the art of yoga than a series of exercises or
shapes-in-space on a mat.
Yoga has evolved from ancient principles that have never separated body, mind and being from
each other, as we have in the West. We do not leave our minds at the desk, our hearts outside the door,
and take only our functioning anatomical parts to the yoga class. Rather, we engage our many
different aspects and faculties to arrive (and leave) whole and complete. We activate ourselves as one
animated form, unique and essentially self-motivated.
Yoga is about movement and quality of motion as well as the power to be still in that moment of
now. Much of its value resides in the ability to expand awareness and attention beyond the mind and
its intellectual processing, to a state of presence in the body. Once that state accumulates we can begin
to learn stillness through poise and balance, practising the art of relaxing in quiet reflection. This
brings with it the ability to quieten mind chatter (chitta vritti) and begins to show us how yoga goes
beyond thinking and individual movements as postures. It can be fun, acting as a kind of portal to
accumulating vitality.
Movement is not an intellectual process, and nor is meditation. Both are heart-felt practices of a
being in a body. Our intellect, or thinking mind, is just one of our many gifts; yoga gives us access to
all our aspects. These include the thinking body, the moving body, the instinctive body and the
emotional body, with all its sensory and intuitive abilities to experience embodiment.
Anatomy of the Body
When we begin to study how the body is formed, we (particularly in the West) tend to veer away from
whole embodiment, preferring to examine the detail of how the body can be separated or broken down
into its component parts. We turn to various works based on long-held knowledge in the fields of
anatomy, physiology and biomechanics. This approach requires the naming of our parts,
understanding our physical systems and explaining how we move. We learn which parts are where
(topography), we explain the systems in which those parts function (biology and chemistry), and
describe the movement (locomotive) apparatus and how it works under various aspects of
biomechanical and neurological theory. Muscle–bone–joint anatomy is the foundation on which we
base our understanding of any movement modality. Understanding the being inside the moving body
is largely assigned to the separate study of psychology.
To understand how we do the postures, we focus on the musculoskeletal system to remember which
muscles move which bones via their specific attachments. By learning how the nervous system works
and assigning specific nerves to each muscle, we can work out which actions do which movements and
understand the postures accordingly. Or can we?
Musculoskeletal System
Once we have learned the basics of muscles and bones, we name the ligaments that attach the bones of
the skeleton to each other, and the tendons that attach the muscles to those bones, and we find out
how, between them, they activate the various types of leverage at the different types of joint. This is
what is known as the musculoskeletal system. We study its form and its function.
I was in my early thirties, three years into learning yoga on a more formal basis, trying to make sense of anatomy. Having
been trained by osteopaths, I considered anatomy and biomechanics to be a high priority, but could not understand why there
was such a rift between the books and the people actually doing yoga in my classroom. Into this confusion walked Tom
Myers. He stood in front of a large group of yoga teachers and announced to us all that “there ain’t no muscle connected to no
bone, nowhere, in no body”. To give you a context, this was the late 1990s, in Brighton, England. Not only was this man
apparently committing anatomical heresy, he was doing it with a big grin and an American accent. It shifted a few notions and
ignited a curiosity in me that has only grown since.
In this system, each muscle has a name and position, an origin, an insertion (or distal and proximal
attachment) and an action assigned to it, related to which nerve activates its particular designated
behaviour(s). The whole suite of muscle–bone–joint anatomy combines to motivate a system of levers
and pendulums that allows our bodies to move around. We can choose whether to follow up on the
biomechanics of those levers first, or the nervous system that apparently innervates their respective
functions. In either case, it becomes progressively more complex and difficult to divide topics up, or
work out what overlaps what and which functions belong to which system. We require ever more
complicated rules, for more detailed fragments. The ability to make sense of the wholeness that
arrives in the classroom becomes increasingly elusive.
In yoga books on anatomy, these principles are usually presented via poses (asanas), with a related
image showing which muscles are contracted, which stretched, and the point at which they are
individually attached in their so-called “antagonistic pairs”. Similarly, in the anatomy of the breath,
we study the principles of the organs and muscles of breathing: how they attach to and move the rib
cage and diaphragm, which muscles are for accessory breathing, and so on. A great deal has been
learned, taught and written about from this particular perspective. However, it is a persepctive that
largely excludes a key feature, which is the roles the fascia has beyond its capacity to act as a
packaging and connecting tissue.
The importance of fascia has become clearer and more differentiated only comparatively recently.
“Fascia” is the name given to a specific (and variable) kind of connective tissue that is the subject of a
rapidly increasing amount of research with regard to its range, capabilities and characteristics.2 The
fascia is what we might call the “stuff in-between” that in traditional dissection has mostly been
removed. It has been treated more as a kind of inert packaging material that gets scraped away in
order to properly present the more important items, considered to be the muscles, joints, bones and
materials of the musculoskeletal system. We will see in the following chapters how this situation
arose and what it is that is so vitally important about this exceptional fabric of the body.
What is Fascia?
The difficulty in answering that question is twofold. The first concern is that fascia is so many things.
The second is that if fascia really is so many things, with such a tremendous influence on so much of
our body, movements and systems, then how has it been overlooked, in terms of its significance, for
so many centuries? These are good questions to consider, and this first part of the book will attempt to
answer them.
We will discover that the increasing knowledge about the fascia is creating a sea change,
transforming our understanding of anything to do with the body. The scale of this effect is big enough
to be described as a paradigm shift. It revolutionises our view of anatomy since modern technology
reveals that fascia is not only ubiquitous (everywhere), but sensory in nature (see Ch. 9) and crucial to
any part of any muscle connecting to any part of any bone in its locality (not to mention its
neighbouring muscles). We begin to learn how very important the fascia is to understanding anatomy
and movement since it is the universal tissue of relationship between all our parts. What is more
inspiring, however, is that we will find it begins to make perfect sense of the very wholeness that the
ancient principles of yoga endorse and espouse.
Fascia could be described as the fabric of our form. It literally joins every single part of us together,
from the finest level of detail within us, between the cells, to the outermost layer of the skin in which
we are wrapped. In some places it is so fine it cannot be seen by the naked eye, while in others it
forms thick, layered sheets making up a named entity such as the thoracolumbar fascia, which
supports the lower and mid back. In some anatomical representations of the body it is presented in
white against red muscles. What is usually less obvious is that it is invested throughout those muscles
and forms the layers between them. It is continuous with, rather than separate from, the tendinous
attachments, and much more besides.
The fascia is essentially made up of collagen and elastin fibres bound together to form a variety of
tissues. (The fascia also includes reticulin, which is immature collagen.) Together these tissues form a
tensional matrix that contains every part of us. Fascia includes tendinous sheets (aponeuroses) and
chords (tendons), connecting webs (some strong and some gossamer-like) and the boundaries that
distinguish one part from another. It includes various types of tissues with different densities. They
contribute to the form of joints, attachments, relating membranes and continuous connectivity
throughout our bodies. It has been suggested that the entire body is made up of variations on this
tissue theme: that bone is a calcified form of fascia at its thickest, hardest and most compressed, while
cartilage comes next, with high hyaline content, then ligament, then tendon, then myofascia
containing numerous muscle fibres.3 These issues of exactly what is and what is not fascia are now