All One

When I stand outside my house and look out at the mountains in the distance I know that the plot of earth I touch is connected to the tops of the varying blue peaks that are set out before me. And when I walk around the corner and look out into the valley, I know that the same earth stretches into neighboring towns, runs beneath the concrete of NYC, and extends under the oceans — connecting my feet to people all the way in India.

This reflection of continuity is why I’ve become so interested in working with fascia. Fascia is a continuous web of connective tissue that both separates and connects every bone, muscle, and ligament in the body.

Anatomists have given names to different regions of fascia, much like we name different regions of land. There is the thoracolumbar fascia. There is the nuchal fascia. There is America. There is Mexico. We name these areas to describe local relationships — to muscles, to bones, to culture, to geography. Yet the earth, like our fascia, remains fundamentally one.

Borders may be drawn, and walls may be built, but the ground beneath them is continuous - without argument. 

It is this principle of continuity that inspires this practice — not only as physical therapy, but as meditative art and spiritual inquiry. To understand the body, and the world, as a unified whole is foundational to healing the pain that it experiences. When a river is dammed upstream, the land downstream feels the effects. In the same way, pain that presents itself in the shoulder may arise from restriction or adhesion elsewhere along the connective web. 

In a world captivated by the myth of separation, it feels essential to return to practices that remind us of our inseparability — practices that help us sense and feel our place within a larger whole.

For this reason, our own fascia is a beautiful place to begin

All One

Nothing stops

and nothing begins

each river

is all one.