When I watched the documentary Fantastic Fungi, I had an aha moment hearing about mycelium. Mycelium are the roots of fungi and they create a network in the forest. This underground web allows trees to communicate with each other. If one tree hasn’t been able to receive enough nourishment, the other trees send their reserves by way of the mycelium. On top of that, if there’s something detrimental to life, the tree sends signals to its seedlings to move farther away so that they’re able to survive. And this is all by way of mushroom roots!
Mycelium made me think of fascia in the body because it’s also a network. Fascia is pretty much everywhere in your body, surrounding muscles, bones, organs, you name it. So if something’s going on in your body… fascia’s got the intel. The fascial network supports the body just like mycelium supports the forest.
Fascia is able to respond to all kinds of touch from movement to temperature to pressure to muscle engagement. It communicates what’s happening in the body to the brain as it’s the largest sensory organ with over 250 million nerve endings.
Fascia can produce and respond to hormones because of the cells and molecules it contains. Our hormones control our mood, metabolism, how our organs work, along with our growth and development.
Fascia creates stability in the body through tensegrity which is a term for floating compression. It’s the definition of soft power; a fluid and gentle form that allows our body to maintain its structure.
Through my work with fibromyalgia, I’ve seen the most effective treatment to be myofascial release. This leads to the understanding that emotions are held in the fascia. The body has so many ways of supporting us and one of the greatest ways is by storing emotions in our tissues (the fascia mostly) until we’re ready and have capacity to process through them.
My understanding is that when we’ve stored so many emotions that our body has hit its max, fibromyalgia is the response. Fibromyalgia is challenging to diagnose which tends to lead to depression for feeling misunderstood. Also, the widespread pain wears on a person’s mental health from the amount of suffering they consistently experience.
Life is complicated and complex. When we go through hard things, there’s not always the time and space to process through what comes up for us. The fascia holding onto those emotions until things are less stressful is a way of prioritizing our vitality and resilience.
This month’s video has 2 releases for the psoas (pronounced so-az) which is one of the body’s strongest hip flexors. The psoas is also a stress response muscle which means that it’s easy for it to engage when we’re in fight or flight and it may stay engaged without our knowing which offsets our hips and spine. I shared more about stress response muscles back in January.
Our brain hasn’t evolved in terms of threats so instead of fight or flight as a response to a bear, our threats are more like an email or text message that’s triggering our perceived safety or survival. Having tools to release stress from our body after we’ve been activated can allow the fascia to be supple and supportive as opposed to restricted and sending signals of pain to the brain.