Over the past year, my fascination with fascia, or connective tissue, has grown tremendously. I had already known for some time that it plays a significant role in our bodies, that the meridians run through it, and how interesting it is to release tension from it using body dearmouring techniques. Flexible fascia plays a crucial role in your movement and overall comfort in life. This year, I discovered that it goes much further than I thought. My osteopath told me last January that your fascia should feel like a comfortable pair of yoga pants but, for most people, feels like a pair of jeans that is several sizes too small. On average, we all tend to live far too tensely.
There is a connection between fascia, your emotions, and your subconscious, which becomes evident when you have your fascia treated. Certain fascia massage techniques can cause a tingling or somewhat painful sensation, which can trigger an emotional release in the moment, or more often, leave you with an undefined emotional feeling afterward. This is what has been worked out of your fascia. If you take the effort to go into the experience and the pain, you are later rewarded with feelings of liberation and possibly even bliss. When your fascia holds pain and tension, and you want to let it go, you have to go into it and thus break the association with pain and fear. If you open yourself up, go into the pain, and take a curious attitude toward it, only then can you release it, and afterward comes the yoga pants feeling: much more space in your body. When it comes to emotions, it’s really not about the story behind them but literally about feeling and letting go.
I decided to learn some additional connective tissue massage techniques and expand my knowledge of fascia. This gave me deeper insights on top of my existing knowledge and experience: the link between connective tissue, the nervous system, and proprioception (the sense related to spatial awareness, which is important for the development of intuition). Fascia is dynamic, found everywhere in, between, and around other tissues (muscles and organs, skin, and bone tissue), and it can contract. There are 250 million nerve endings in your fascia (and that’s not even counting the 200 million nerve endings in your skin, which is technically also fascia), making fascia an important sensory organ. It’s therefore the physical basis of our sixth sense: proprioception. Information from the body itself is taken in and processed by the brain. Thanks to proprioceptive receptors in the fascia, our brains are informed about the posture and movement of our bodies and our position in space (source: "Discover Your Fascia" by Philippe Rogier).
Of course, I had heard about proprioception as a sense in anatomy classes long ago, but it wasn’t immediately linked to fascia then. Practicing Transformative Energetic Bodywork encourages your body to develop this sense. In my own work, I had interpreted it as the development of your awareness/sensing through your own body and that of your receiver. In the book Core Awareness by Liz Koch, a connection is even made to "direct knowing," a kind of clear knowing, and a well-developed proprioception is considered the beginning of clear knowing. In my personal experience, other senses can also lead to the development of direct knowing, and this clear inner knowing sometimes even comes from within when you consciously manage your energy (grounding and centering sufficiently). In my course on psoas massage, I discuss the sensory development that accompanies the practice of this work in more detail. For me, there is also a clear link with Tantric knowledge and concepts such as the light body, but that's a topic for another time.
Now, back to fascia massage – the additional techniques I learned are consciously done without using oil to loosen the different fascia layers (subcutaneous and deeper fascia between the muscles) without your fingers slipping. There are different forms of techniques and sessions that can work on your fascia, ranging from gentle to more intense. These techniques without oil, for example, but also various forms of body dearmouring, fibromyssage, working with meridians and meridian points, and Chi Nei Tsang (focusing on the fascia around organs). This led me to develop a session called "Fascia / Myofascial Massage," or connective tissue massage, where I first apply the techniques without oil and then further treat the area with warm Deep Tissue Oil, also treating some meridian points. This oil was developed to counteract acidity and inflammation and to promote blood circulation. It’s a great oil for muscle pain but also, for example, for fibromyalgia and overly tight connective tissue. It has a strong herbal scent and a mild blood-thinning effect. So, it’s a new, pleasant, and intense session that literally sets you looser and freer in your skin! Feel welcome to come and experience this – more information and booking can be made here.
With warm regards,
Maria De Dauw
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