Integral Anatomy and Fascia

This section addresses questions about Yin Yoga and other body parts, such as shoulders, feet, wrists, and various conditions such as arthritis, osteoporosis, etc.
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Bernie
Posts: 1254
Joined: Sat Sep 23, 2006 2:25 am
Location: Vancouver

Integral Anatomy and Fascia

Post by Bernie »

Hello fellow Yinsters!

I just wanted to let you know about a guy named Gil Hedley http://www.integralanatomy.com/ghabout.php. I recently spent a week with Gil at one of his Integral Anatomy workshop (along with Paul and Suzee Grilley). It was fascinating!

Gil takes an "integral" view of the body, unlike more traditional regional approaches. In a regional approach we would investigate just one part, one piece of the whole puzzle. A regional approach might be to study the heart, but not the tissues connected to the heart and around it. In an integral approach we look at layers within layers, rather than pieces.

The workshop was a guided dissection of actual cadavers. Gil arranges 6~8 people per cadaver and there were 4 groups, 4 "forms" we got to explore. (This was an amazing gift: the donors were brave and generous enough to leave us their empty forms so that we could further our own knowledge and teaching. We really honoured each and every gift that was granted to us.)

I can not describe the whole 6 days in one post, and do highly recommend Gil's amazing DVDs for those who want to understand this more. But just one example may be instructive. When we looked at the heart, of course we found that the heart is not just floating in a space in the thoracic rib cage. It is bound quite tightly to all the other tissues nearby. You may check any anatomy book and see that the heart is usually depicted as a separate organ. What is not shown is important. The bag in which the heart lives, the pericardium, is not separate from the heart but integral to it. Only by cutting and carving away the bag, can you free the heart. This is akin to a sculptor carving an object out of the stone: it doesn't exist separately until after he creates it. The pericardium is part of the heart. And the pericardium is not separate from its surroundings: it is part of (not just attached to) the diaphragm!

When we breathe, the heart is moved! Because the heart is part of the pericardium, which is part of the diaphragm, when we inhale and the diaphragm descends, it takes the heart with it. When we exhale they both rise. I hadn't realized this! Every breath moves our heart: deep breaths move it deeply.

There are so many examples of how our tissues are all one tissue, and only by the scalpel can we differentiate them. But that makes us think that they are different to begin with; they aren't. Our muscles, which anatomists love to attach names to, are not separate individual muscles but very connected to each other and to the fascia that they exist within and around. Yes, we can cut them into shapes and thus give that shape a common name, but we can also carve them into different shapes very easily too. In fact Gil says there are three possible ways to name each muscle: I think he meant by location, by function or by adjoining connections.

It was fascinating to see just how loose and limp the "raw" muscles were once we differentiated them from their bags of connective tissues. These bags were quite tough. I could see how much work it is to stretch or elongate the bags, even though the muscles were quite malleable. It gave me a new appreciation for what was happening physically in our yoga practice. I can see much more clearly how Yin Yoga helps even the muscles because the long holding works the bags of the muscles so well.

Check out Gil's DVDs! You will be amazed ...especially check out his "fuzz speech" in his second DVD.

Cheers
Bernie
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