Mycofascial Integration™ and Holistic Cognitive Education

Biotensegrity and Embodied Cognition

Over the course of the past 120 or so years, the life and mind sciences have been undergoing a comprehensive paradigm shift. Today, a creative synthesis of the best available evidence yields a radically new (yet also ancient) perspective on human life, health, and cognition. The core of this paradigm shift is the move away from the obsolete "mind-body duality" view that defines mind as a non-physical mental phenomenon and the body as a non-mental physical phenomenon, and recovers a sense of the holistic intelligence of life. The simplistic summary of this new/ancient paradigm is that everything in human experience is a cognitive phenomenon. We are "minding" all the time, regardless of whether or not we are thinking explicitly through concepts, words, and symbols. Cognition manifests through and as the function of the entire body, not just the brain.

In a nutshell, Mycofascial Integration™ is an experience of connecting with, expanding, and practically applying the mind of the body. This "embodied mind" can manifest an intelligence far greater than any computer, and through this dimension of cognition we can come to know aspects of ourselves and our unique experiencing of the world that no expert, no teacher, no guru, and no clinician can ever access or understand.

Our body's mind is most directly accessed through the fascial system, especially when engaged through a lens of biotensegrity. Comparatively neglected in scientific research and medical practice for the past few hundred years, fascia is now getting the attention it deserves: fascia is our primary sensory organ; it provides form, structure, and dynamic stability in all movement; it is in direct contact with literally every cell in our bodies; and it serves as a holistic, organizing system that synthesizes the needs and functions of all other neurophysiological and biological systems in our bodies.

Biotensegrity -- which is a new framework for understanding anatomy, movement, structure, and biological function -- helps us appreciate and make practical use of the non-conceptual intelligence embedded in the fascial system, and our bodies generally. The currently-developing paradigm shift in the life-mind sciences reveals that human cognition is far more than thinking through abstract concepts, words, and symbolic communication. In fact, 99% of cognition is non-conceptual: it is sensory, qualitative, instinctual, and dynamic/non-linear. This non-conceptual cognition is principally generated and mediated through the many intersecting functions of the fascia, and we can intentionally engage and make use of this embodied cognition through various practices that work to cultivate and expand our reflective awareness of fascial function.

Biotensegrity: Living Anatomy for Living Systems

For centuries, medical science (and science generally) has viewed life through a mechanistic, physicalist lens. This has manifested in anatomy and physiology as characterizing human structure, movement, and function through metaphors such as a lever-and-pulley system (e.g., how muscles move bones); a brick building (e.g., the spinal "column" is a "stack" of vertebrae); or other mechanical-computational notions (e.g., the heart is a "pump" and the brain is a "parallel processor/computer"). Over the past few decades, however, improved research techniques and technologies have revealed that this is fundamentally misguided. The body is not structured like a machine or a building, and mind/cognition is not like a computer. As biotensegrity researcher Graham Scarr explains in his book Biotensegrity: The Structural Basis of Life:

If the behavior of living organisms were to follow the laws of classical mechanics, then lifting a heavy weight would cause muscles to tear, discs to rupture, vertebrae to be crushed and blood vessels to burst; fly fishing would become a dangerous sport and simple everyday activities would be fraught with all sorts of problems. In addition, [Stephen] Levin noted that the uterus and bladder would burst when they contracted, the heart would be unable to maintain the systolic pressure and the bones of humans and larger animals would be likely to fracture during movement."

So, a purely physical, mechanistic, linear analysis of human anatomy, physiology, and movement is simply insufficient to accurately describe and understand how we move. Likewise, viewing mental function or cognition generally in terms of computational metaphors (as has dominated much psychological research and theory in the 20th century, and often still today) is also misleading. As summarized by pioneering biologists and neuroscientists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela,

The popular metaphor of calling the brain an 'information-processing device' is not only ambiguous but patently wrong." (The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding)

So, biotensegrity describes the structures of living systems whose structural integrity results from an intricate web of tensional components organizing the rigid components of the system (tension+integrity=tensegrity). This means that, in living systems such as animals, the skeleton does not hold up the soft tissues and organs of the body -- it is the other way around. It is the inherent, holistic tension in the fascia that organizes the bones into what we abstractly call "the skeleton." Nowhere in the body do two bones directly touch, so "the skeleton" isn't an intact structure in and of itself, independently of the connective tissues. Instead, all our bones are held in dynamic position by fascia, which includes the muscles, tendons, and ligaments. To move optimally and functionally, therefore, requires understanding how this structural tension works in our bodies and making intelligent use of it. We cannot completely rid ourselves of tension (as this would mean, technically and literally, the death of an organism), so we must learn to work with it rather than against it (which is tantamount to working against ourselves!).

Features of tensegrity structures

Tensegrity structures manifest unique structural properties that enable a more accurate understanding of the functional organization and dynamic movement of living beings. Some of these key characteristics of tensegrity-based movement are:

Biotensegrity and Embodied Cognition

The "bio" in biotensegrity is very important: while physical models such as the tensegrity icosahedron in the picture above help reveal how we move on the physical level, there is much more to living systems than mere physical parts. There are mental/mindful/psychological dimensions to living phenomena, as well. But here we must be careful to not maintain the classical and false distinction between mind and body. For centuries, researchers, scholars, clinicians, philosophers, and mystics alike have tried in vain to "solve" all the "problems" (theoretical, practical, medical, conceptual, clinical, etc.) that arise when one begins with the assumption that life is divided between two distinct realms of being, or activity: the physical body and mental mind. But this is a false assumption! There is no such duality, except in our language. It is no surprise, then, that nobody in the history of humanity has satisfactorily solved the many problems attendant mind-body dualism, which is sometimes described as the "problem of consciousness" (i.e., how a non-conscious physical substrate, the body, could give rise to a non-physical conscious mind). For details on the history of these ideas, including the very origin of the mind-body, mental-physical dualism, see my dissertation (hint: the duality was in place long before Descartes's infamous "I think, therefore I am" statement).

The life-mind and medical sciences are currently in the midst of a dramatic paradigm shift that's altering many of modern science's most entrenched and longest-held beliefs. Prime among these assumptions is the "mind-body duality," which, roughly stated, asserts that the physical body is just that: a mass of physical matter somehow connected with -- or at least moved around by -- a mental mind which somehow arises from this non-mental physical substrate (the body). This assumption is ultimately rooted in an error of logical reasoning made by the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides ~2,500 years ago, which became the basis of an ontology that guided the vast majority of classical and modern Western science ever since, right down to the present day. Wild, huh!?

Well, the truth is stranger than fiction, as they say. The truth being that, as our best sciences now tell us, there is no such mind-body/mental-physical duality. Rather, everything in human experience is a cognitive phenomenon. In simplest form, the idea is that "the body" is "the mind." Or, said differently, mind/psychology/mentation is not something contained inside the physical boundaries of organisms (e.g., a mental process occurring in the brain), but something that pervades the tangible experience of living systems across multiple physical scales (from cells to ecosystems to planets) and across multiple temporalities (evolutionary processes, or organism lifespans). In short, mind is not inside the head, we are inside mind. We participate in mind. Cognition is something that we do with our entire being, not just neurological processes in the brain and nervous system. Of course, the brain and nervous system play key roles in psychological activity, but so does the entire rest of the body!

Research has shown that the brain is actually not where we "know" things; the brain is primarily concerned with coordinating perception, action, communication, and behavior. Where and how we really know is distributed throughout the entire body in its dynamic sensing of and movement through tangible environments. Cognition is a multidimensional phenomenon that makes use of literally every part of our physical body. And it is the fascial system (in cooperation with all other systems) that synthesizes and integrates stimuli, information, activities, and functions from everywhere else in the body. This holistic sensing of our embodied experience in relation to surrounding conditions is what constitutes the experiences that modern science has variously called mind, cognition, or consciousness.

So, fascia plays a central and defining role not just in our physical structure and function but also in our "mental" structure and function. In fact, the framework of biotensegrity, when connected with the emerging field of embodied cognition, provides a way to begin understanding how "mind" and "body" are really one integrated, multidimensional, dynamic phenomenon -- basically definitional of life. Mycofascial Integration™ is my way of making practical use of all this complex and technical science. What does this all mean for us in our daily lives? Well, I could write multiple books on this, or talk for hours! Book a session with me to tangibly experience the implications of these groundbreaking scientific insights. Your full potential is waiting to be unlocked.