That in every movement or gesture that we perform, the Nervous System is listening to the Fascia System and talking to the Musculo-Skeletal system.

Our body of intelligence is always trying to figure out how to respond to the environment. The nervous system is our safety barometer – it perceives both our internal and external environment and everything in between to scan for potential danger. It records every phenomena and labels them as good or bad based on the imprints of historical experiences.

Our connective tissues via the self-organising fascia matrix give us a sense of where and how we’re moving through space and gravity across multiple joints. Every muscle, every bone, every organ and even every cell lives embedded within the sea of a unitary fascial matrix. It gives us a sense of continuity and integration of our whole body. 

All these information is then related back to our brain to control our musculo-skeletal system for both volitional and sub-conscious movement and action.

These trinity of system then form a feedback loop – The Neuromyofascial Web. These processes and the way in which they dialogue with each other define our responsiveness / reactivity to our environment, our defensive mechanisms in which we view the world as safe or dangerous. It shapes our emotions, our posturing and our body language. It creates the container in which we experience life and conjugates our reality.

DM to find out more about how we can tap into these somatic inquiries through our trainings, workshops and private sessions.

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In this fascia community class, we begin in an embodied meditation followed by a recap of movement explorations that we practiced in the earlier classes. These movement explorations span across the body, from head to toe, sensing into the fluid continuity of the myofascial slings. We also harness upon the use of visualisation and sound to create the unwinding of the body-mind, integrating the nervous system to create safety, grounding, and presence.

Click the link in bio to watch the full video on youtube.

Props required:
1 yoga mat
1 blanket
1 pair of socks (or 1 soft, squishy-like ball)
1 yoga strap (or 1 scarf/towel)
1 cushion (optional)
1 yoga block (optional)

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This fascia workshop starts off with a short introduction about fascia, and on embryological development – particularly on the endoderm (front body), ectoderm (back body) and mesoderm (inside body). We then engage in an embodied meditation followed by a series of movement practices – both active and restorative, with greater emphasis on internal sensing and awareness in relation to the theme. The workshop also offers us the embodied sense into the different layers of our body – skin, adipose tissues, muscles and bones.

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This post was previously posted on Yogawithdaphne.com on March 20th 2021.

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This week’s topic on #somawithDaphneandLucy is about what constitutes healthy stretch!

Everyone loves a good stretch. However, do you sometimes feel that the more you stretch, the more you need to stretch?

The yoga world is obsessed with stretching. There’s this misconception that the more one stretches a particular area of the body, the “longer” and “looser” it will be, and “looser” feels better than “tight”. Like most things in life, there’s also the “high” of chasing big sensations in stretching, and the belief that there is no gain unless there is some sort of pain.

Being a person with hypermobility, the physical practice of yoga came about relatively easily for me. It doesn’t take long for my joint spaces to open up and I could quite quickly flop into forward bends or use my arms as leverage to pull myself to extreme range of motion. I’d feel spacious and open after an intense stretching session. However, it wouldn’t take long before my body started to feel tight again and needed another round of “fix”. As this cycle perpetuates, my body would feel achy and sore if I have to sit or stand or walk for extended periods; my mind restless.

To many people, I seemed like a dedicated yogi, spending hours on a yoga mat contorting myself into a pretzel. I realised that something had gone terribly amiss when the more I practice, the less I could bear stillness without discomfort – counter to the tenet that Yoga is state of being both steady and easeful (Sthiram Sukham Asanam)

I finally found the answer to this mystifying conundrum when I discovered somatics and mobility practice. I had been stretching wrong!

I was chasing sensations instead of cultivating awareness.
I wasn’t listening to the subtle nuances of what my body was telling me.

My muscles were either switched off or over-contracted in those deep stretches, further stressing my already hypermobile connective tissues – in particular the tendons and ligaments – as I collapsed into gravity or when I leveraged on an external force to pull myself into the end range of motion (ROM).
Even though this might initially trigger the nervous system into a relaxation response, it also destabilises the connective tissues around my joints. My body then sends a “danger signal” resulting in even more muscle tension, creating the vicious stretching cycle.

My practice now includes resistance stretching which requires active range of motion, i.e keeping muscles in eccentric contraction and maintaining integrated postural tone through myofascial continuity (more on a future post!) to express our 3-dimensional relationship with gravity and space, as well as in creating progressive loading with theraband or weights to strengthen and stabilise joints)
​
Passive stretching is still a valuable practice to down-regulate the nervous system when we use props to support joints without going into the full range of motion such as in restorative poses..

This post was previously posted on Yogawithdaphne.com on June 30th 2020

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The relative distance of our feet from our brain often causes us to disregard the health and care of our feet. We tend to ignore the messages coming from this very distal part of the body. We wear shoes that are too tight, too loose, too flat, too high… For some culture, there’s even a certain element of shame attached to the feet. Some people might go through years of suffering from sore feet before paying any attention to this part of the body.

The health of our feet is instrumental in our overall health.

Our two feet are made up of 52 bones, accounting for about a quarter of all the bones in our body. They contain 60 joints and 200 muscles, tendons and ligaments that hold them together for mobility and stability. Most of the myofascial matrix crosses through the feet as they are fundamental to our evolution into bipeds. Our feet establish the foundation of our vertical relationship to navigate through gravity and 3 dimensional space and create movement continuity through all our body’s systems.
Embryologically, our feet and toes grow out of the limb buds before the legs are fully formed, essentially making our feet an extension of the pelvis, and hence its close association to our pelvic health.

Keeping our feet strong and nimble means stronger grounding and stability, more movement choices and increased neural pathways and plasticity! Training our feet to be able to articulate through different loads and tracking its relationship to different parts of the body will not only alleviate conditions like plantar fasciitis, heel pain, achilles tendinitis, it can also prevent knee injury, relieves lower back pain, soothe neck and shoulder tension and even migraine. Its close relationship with our pelvic diaphragm also means that strong and flexible feet will bring awareness to our core being as we find support through gravity and levity. When we establish better proprioception and interoception we can also help to regulate our nervous system so we are less anxious and stressed!

This post was originally posted on Yogawithdaphne.com on May 28th 2020

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Please check it out and let me know how it goes 🙂

This post was originally posted on Yogawithdaphne.com on April 26th 2020

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A little rolly polly floor time playing with initiating from the soft midline, from navel to limbs. Playing with low falling and reversible spiralling movements, fascia continuity and biotensegrity in finding tension and rebound 🙂

This post was previously posted on Yogawithdaphne.com on March 27th 2019

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I enjoy exploring non-linear movement using a prop to change things up for sensory feedback. This is a short clip where I’m using a weighted ball (about 1kg) to add load and resistance. It helps me to track movement into the scapular, rib cage and spine. The spirals of my bones help to recruit the elasticity of the myofascial chains. Allowing for information from the distal to inform the proximal body in initiating movement.

This post was previously posted on Yogawithdaphne.com on February 20th 2019

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