Anatomy Trains

I am looking forward to the Bowen Conference that is coming up in a couple of weeks, and I have chosen to speak on the concept of tensegrity there, covering the many hierarchies though which tensegrity sports itself from the molecular and cellular through to the organismic and societal.

Bowen is an odd approach, if you don’t mind my saying so, to soft-tissue manipulation. You can research the history of Tom Bowen and the various factions and different interpretations of his work, but I latched onto Julian Baker – or rather he latched onto me and we formed an immediate bond. Julian has an insatiable curiosity about how this all works, and the courage to ask the difficult questions of himself and of anatomy in his search to explain Bowen’s results.

The Bowen ‘moves’ usually involve rolling a few times gently over tendinous areas such as the biceps tendon or the origins of the erector spinae, with a long pause in between each move to allow the body to ‘absorb’ and adjust to the changes made. Given my long history of working with the fascia, this seemed ridiculous to me on two counts: that such small, gentle, and non-invasive moves could have much effect on tough fascial planes, or that several minutes were required to adjust to such tiny inputs.

And yet the anecdotal evidence for the effectiveness of Bowen was sufficient to pique my interest. Like Kinesiotaping, the story seemed firmly in left field, but the results were unignorable. In other words, both of these – Bowen and Kinesiotaping – are methods in search of a theory. And I admire and support Julian’s fierce courage (as well as his knockout sense of fun and sharp humor) in searching out skeptics and critics who might advance his quest even as they discounted his explanation.

And I would have been tempted to dismiss the lame theorizing myself until I had 1) seen Guimberteau’s film of living fascia, Strolling Under the Skin and 2) studied the research of Helene Langevin , whose findings about the highly active areolar tissue – same stuff Guimberteau is filming – show how biologically active and responsive this surface, soft, fractally organized, fatty, viscous, everywhere material really is.

It seems quite possible – nay, by this year leaning toward the probable – that the areolar tissue should be considered an organ system of its own, following Gil Hedley and combining him with Guimberteau and Langevin. What if Bowen somehow intuitively tapped into super-responsive areas within this soft and highly responsive system of loose areolar tissue (which lubricates between layers, around tendons, and anywhere things have to move). Langevin has shown how active this layer is to the stimulation of acupuncture. Perhaps Bowen causes responses in this layer also.

If so, the mechanism for carrying this information around the body would be cellular and intercellular tensegrity. It’ll be interesting to hear the questions and responses from this group later this month.