Anatomy of the moving body

“The very structure of our language and its cause and effect epistemology, requires that we understand any system by dividing it into its constituent parts in order to define the contribution of each identifiable bit to the whole. A tree has roots, trunk, branches and leaves. each with an essential function. The leaves have stomata, mesophyll and veins. The veins have xylem and phloem bundled in a sheath. And so on, down the line to smaller and smaller building blocks: cells, macromolecules, atoms and quantum forces. This analytical process is fundamental to our Western comprehension of the world. But this way of thinking presents one significant danger when we apply it to living systems such as trees and ourselves. The tree did not glue a root system to a trunk and bolt on branches with leaves wired to them. It sprang from a single seed, and is ever and always a co-evolving unitary set of system interactions from root to leaf. In reality, the parts are never separated, and are always co-dependent.
Humans are never assembled out of parts like a car or a computer. ‘Body as machine’ is a useful metaphor, but like any poetic trope, it does not tell the whole story. In our modern perception of human movement anatomy, however, we are in danger of making the metaphor into the be all and end all. In actual fact, our bodies are conceived as a whole and grow, live and die as a whole - but our mind is a knife...
How do our ‘parts’ arise? The human body stems from a single fertilised human ovum which proliferates wildly. The daughter cells then specialise. Each tissue cell exaggerates some function of the ovum and cells in general. .. Conversely other functions diminish... Yet each cell still partakes of the unique individual whole in its constant communication with its neighbours, near and far, and in the similarities of chemical structure, from glucose as a universal fuel right on down to the tangled helix of DNA...
Thinking in ‘wholes’, attractive as it is to contemporary holistic therapists, simply has yet to lead to useful maps... we know the body is interconnected on many levels, but we need better treatment strategies than ‘press and pray’. What can we learn when we shift from a symptom-oriented’ view of the body to a ‘system-oriented’ one?
The myofascial meridians concept provides such a map of the structural body, a map that provides a practical transition between the individual ‘parts’ and the ‘whole’ of a human being, a gestalt of physics, physiology, stored experience and current awareness which defies mapping. This intermediate map of the body’s locomotor fabric opens up new avenues of treatment consideration, particularly for stubborn chronic conditions and global postural effects...”

This major article looks at ‘anatomy trains’ map as a practical means of treating holistically, and discusses the significance of the three networks which if somehow extracted intact, would show the shape of the body both inside and out: the neural net, the vascular system and the extracellular fibrous web created by the connective tissue cells. Of these, the last “has never been well mapped because it is considered to be ‘dead’ material that needs to be removed to see the ‘interesting’ neural, vascular, muscular and other local systems. Because the connective tissue provides the divisions along which the scalpel runs to parse out other systems, the connective tissue has also been studied as a system less than other more familiar systems”.

Article extracted courtesy of the CONCISE BOOK OF THE MOVING BODY by Chris Jarmy. Lotus Publishing ISBN 1-90536-01-5.

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