23/04/2025
Jaap van der Wal states:
SAVE THE FASCIA (positive version|).
Three good arguments to participate in the 7th International Fascia Research Congress in New Orleans from August 10-14, 2025.
(In another FB post a more negative version with four arguments NOT to attend this congress).
1.
A select group of wise anatomists and experts will present a proposal at this congress, as part of the already long-running nomenclature discussion on fascia, to arrive at an anatomical-functional definition of the so-called "fascial system." See the December 20, 2024 Journal of Anatomy (DOI: 10.1111/joa.14212). However, I cannot appreciate this proposal other than yet another attempt to categorize fascia or the possible "fascial system" as an anatomical-functional system and define it within the straitjacket of the reductionist anatomical view. Again, the dissection method, i.e. foundation of the anatomical mindset that I so often question and sometimes detest (hello, I have been a licensed medical anatomist-embryologist for 40 years), is employed to make fascia "something anatomical”. Right in itself, I suppose there could be such a thing as "fascial anatomy (although it still sounds to me as a contradictio in terminis)" but the approach in the aforementioned article produces a definition that, like Vesalius' "muscle (hu)man," cpould be considered an (anatomical) artifact. I have had many opportunities to argue that, and you can read about it in the first chapter of David Lesondak's book entitled Fascia, Function and Medical Aplication. 20221 (and in The Tensional Network of The human Body by Schleip, Findley, Ch 2.2, among others).
I challenge you as a movement therapist, as an osteopath, as a craniosacral therapist, as a MELT trainer,as a Pilates trainer therapist etc etc whatever your professional background is to deal with, to work, to treat fascia, to ask yourself if this substrate corresponds to 'your fascia'. The fascia of the dimension of the first body, of the body that we are (and that, for the record, is not the body of science and anatomy). Ask yourself whether the definition of the fascial system offered here should not be broadened with a definition in a broader sense that encompasses the definition presented here now but also does justice to the holistic and complementary nature of "fascia.
2.
There will be a fascinating film (with discussion afterwards) on the life of and her passage through science of Ms. Ida Rolf, made by Ales Urbanczik. She was a biotensegrity thinker avant la lettre, and her philosophy revolves around the concept of the fascial web as well as gravity or, in other words, man's balancing upright body, physically, psychologically and spiritually. (The latter is also an essential theme of my vision of the human embryo). She would certainly not have found herself in the definition of the facial system as it is now before us
3.
There will be an interesting poster presented by David Wronski about Structural Integration. - Gravity an unexplored factor in a more Human use of Human Beings. Watch it.
There is also no such thing as a "muscular system" or a system of muscles. In every anatomy book there is a chapter on muscles entitled MYOLOGY, which includes not only the so-called skeletal muscles, but also mimic muscles, smooth muscles, cardiac muscles and laryngeal muscles. At most one speaks of a musculo-skeletal system (as substrate for the so-called posture and movement system), also such a poor reduced anatomical definition. But there is no such thing as a muscular (tissue) system. So too with fascia. There are plenty of fasciae in the body, with all kinds of functions (not all shearing mobility and tensional loading) but to rake them together and define fascia as a system as the Christmas tree of fasciae is perhaps anatomically defensible but does not deal with the fascia as web or communication and self recognition (Schleip). Just as the muscle man does not exist in the primary reality of the body namely the reality in which we move, so does fascia, except as the aggregation of a large number of connective tissue structures or so-called fasciae also exist in another way. (Just recently Carla Stecco boasts of a piece of recognition of fascia by having produced a publication in a reputable journal of anesthesiology and announces her article as dealing with the innervation of FASCIAE, as if fasciae, like muscles(?), are unambiguous anatomical elements!.
I think the discussion should rather be about a possible revision and redefinition of the concepts of connective and muscular tissue, but who would dare to question this ancient, widely accepted and still applied sacred four unity of tissues? Similarly, the embryo dramatically challenges the sacred trinity of ectoderm, mesoderm and endoderm and seems to indicate that the mesenchyme may well be the representative of the embryonic "meso. That mesoderm is not a (third) layer at all but a dimension, namely that of the interiority, of the "fabric of the body," of fascia in other words.
Go to New Orleans to "save" the fascia from the anatomists and take the following quotes and definitions and consider which ones may and may not belong in it or in your list:
Stecco et al (zie boven):
A layered body-wide multiscale network of connective tissue that allows tensional loading and shearing mobility along its interfaces;
Stephen Levin:
Fascia is the fabric of the body, the matrix. Not the investment, the coverings of the corpus. All organs are embroidered into the fascial fabric;
J.C. Guimberteau:
“Fascia is the tensional, continuous fibrillar network within the body, extending from the surface of the skin to the nucleus of the cell. This global network is mobile, adaptable, fractal, and irregular; it constitutes the basic structural architecture of the human body.”’;
Findley & Schleip, 2007.
Fascia is ubiquitous, everywhere in the body. It permeates the whole body, forming a continuous three-dimensional matrix of structural support which interpenetrates and surrounds all tissues and organs. (....) Fascia is both a tissue and a system;
Andrew Taylor Still:
The soul of man, with all the streams of pure living water, seems to dwell in the fascia of his body;
Ida Rolf (Structural Integration):
“Fascia is the connecting line between the psyche and the soma”(deze quote wordt door Rolf-biograaf Ales Urbanczik niet herkend maar wel gebillijkt).
Ales Urbanczik about Ida Rolf:
“She became more and more convinced that the fascial web is more than simply a physical phenomenon; it is a manifestation of someone's entire being”.
Christine Wushke:
Fascia is a vibrating liquid crystal matrix that yields to energy and soft pressure;
Neil Theise:
The fascial interstitium is a body-wide network through which water and solutes can flow. It's actually not an organ. It's a system”.
Jaap van der Wal’:
Fascia as integrity ‘system’. It is ‚everywhere‘, it connects, and it creates space. It enables movement and it ‘mediates’, in a mechanical way and in a spatial organization. It is our ‘organ or dimension of innerness’
