Fascia Dance : Tobias Gremmler
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Rolfers make a life study of relating bodies and their fields to the earth and its gravity field, and we so organize the body that the gravity field can reinforce the body's energy field. This is our primary concept. Ida P. Rolf, Ph.D.
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Eva Norlyk Smith: When you say the body is more like a plant, what do you mean?
Tom Myers: Like a plant, the body is grown from a seed. The body is grown from a single fertilized ovum. Somebody didn’t take a nervous system and put it together with the vascular system and put it together with the muscles, and so on, to come up with the body. The muscles and the vascular system and the nervous system all grew together from one single cell. So everything has a common origin and everything grew up together. It never grew up separately.Our books have to separate things out so that we can study and understand them. But we’ve forgotten that separating things out was just something that we did for academic convenience. But this approach doesn’t actually represent the truth of the body.
Eva Norlyk Smith: If I understand you correctly, the myofascial meridians, laid out in Anatomy Trains, are also the patterns through which musculo-skeletal strain is communicated?
Tom Myers: Yes. Whatever happens — in the feet, or anywhere in the body — also happens in the neck and the shoulders. And it also goes the other way. What happens in the neck can have ramifications down to the feet as well. Fascial restrictions can cause pain patterns that are quite far removed from the site of the initial fascial compensation.
Eva Norlyk Smith: You have referred to this approach as a “third kind of medicine” or spatial medicine. What do you mean by that?
Tom Myers: Spatial medicine deals with identifying and treating fascial compensations to help realign the body closer to its ideal. Bodyworkers, such as Rolfers, do this through the manipulation of fascia. You do it through yoga as well. Yoga works directly with the plasticity of fascia. One of the great things about yoga is that it works both with the strength and flexibility of the muscles to get things balanced on the muscular side. But it also elongates the fascial fabric. When you are doing Uttanasana, standing forward bend, for example, the whole back line of your body, not just the muscles, is being tugged into a stretch.Spatial medicine is a term for any technique that focuses on altering both the structure and functioning of the body by releasing holding patterns in the soft tissues. Anything that impacts the alignment of all the body’s structures in a holistic way to create space and more mobility is really practicing spatial medicine. [From Seed to Plant: Yoga and the New Anatomy of Interconnectedness Eva Norlyk Smith, Ph.D. Mg. Editor, YogaUOnline.com]
