Imagine the body
as one big
stringed
instrument
upon which we play
the unique
song
of our life.
Imagine such an instrument
with layer upon layer of strings forming spiral-like patterns of fibres all connected to one spiralling matrix upon which we play our version of the song of life.
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It sounds like a lovely metaphor, doesn’t it, yet it is not a metaphor at all, it is anatomical fact. In a very literal way, you are a 5D map of forces - tension (pulling), compression (pushing) and friction in between - forming in 3 dimensional spirals of tissue grown in the shape of these directional forces over time. The shape of you, the shape of this 3-dimensional spiralling map in tissue of tension-compression-friction over time is a record of your lifestyle, your moods, and your emotions. How so?
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“Spirality”, the quality or state of being a spiral, can be found everywhere in nature. It’s most often found in the minds of nerdy teenagers and stoned hippies who, when first discovering Fibonacci and The Golden Ratio, mistakenly think everything in the universe expresses spirality. For the record, it doesn’t!
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However, even the parts of a nature that don’t express spirality are at least in some sense part of spirals. As we zoom into the micro and zoom out to the macro, we see spirality as a product of different types of growth over time in 3 physical dimensions. Patterns such as the Fibonacci sequence lead to all sorts of spirals in nature, like those found in the proliferation of cells by mitosis. On the macro level, the distribution of density in the universe forms spiralling galaxies of stars, planets, moons etc. On the micro level the helical shape of the most fundamental building blocks of life – from DNA to collagen – are all examples of smaller spirals forming part of larger spirals.
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Now, we could say "Wow! That's cool." and stop there. Many a nerdy teenager has. However, the influence of shapes that wind in a continuous and gradually widening or tightening curve around a central point on a flat plane or around an axis so as to form a cone do continue beyond the limits of our curiosity; the influence of such shapes on your life does not stop here.
Spirals work well to hold tension. One of the best spiral-structures for holding tension in the body is collagen. Collagen is the most abundant structural protein in our body and it forms the structural framework of your cells and tissues. The ‘strings’ of your body as an instrument are collagen-based fibres.
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Collagen has three strands or spokes of amino acid that make a triple-helix structure. This structure makes collagen stronger at holding tension, gram for gram, than steel. Should you wish to work with collagen-based tissues as a physiotherapist, athlete, or anyone living in/as a human body, a nod towards spirality saves you a lot of time and energy both when connecting the body for integrated movement or when releasing outdated or pathological patterns of tension in the body. Building or breaking relationships between parts of the body along the lines of spirals give you greater results faster.
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So DNA and collagen utilize spirals to hold tension on a micro level, what about bigger spirals in the body?
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There are far too many examples of spirality in the human body to list here. Familiar to many readers might be the simple spiral of crossing pathways of afferent and efferent nerves to/from the left hemisphere of the brain to the right side of the body and left side of the body to and from the right hemisphere of the brain. More significant in terms of structure in the body is the ‘spiral line’ (SPL) of myofascia – muscle and the tough white stuff made of collogen connecting it. basicmedicalkey.com describes the function of the spiral line:
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“The SPL functions posturally to wrap the body in a double spiral that helps to maintain balance across all planes. The SPL connects the foot arches with the pelvic angle, and helps to determine efficient knee-tracking in walking. In imbalance, the SPL participates in creating, compensating for, and maintaining twists, rotations, and lateral shifts in the body. Depending on the posture and movement pattern, especially which leg is characteristically more weighted, forces from the legs can travel up the same side or cross to the opposite side of the body at the sacrum, especially in the contralateral motion of walking”1
The spiral line can be invited to fortify itself in order to strengthen body connectivity. Excessive tension held in parts of the spiral line can also lead to pain and dysfunction in other distant parts of the SPL. Inviting the body to release tension held on the spiral line can lead to profound shifts throughout the body.
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The spiralling movement of Tai Chi works out and strengthens connectivity on the spiral line. The spiral line is one example of how spirality is hardwired into our body but any movement laterally or backwards-forwards together with waist rotation will create a spiral. When done repeatedly, that spiral will be hardwired into your body architecture. We become what we do and since what we do is so often rotational along more than one plane, what we do is so often a spiral. Much of life is therefore the act of becoming a series of spirals.
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Your individual lifestyle is made of what you do and don’t do on a regular basis. Your mood determines how you do what you do. How you do what you do – anxiously, calmly, joyfully, hurriedly etc. - will change the quality of the deep-fascia bed. Mood is expressed in the spiralling strings of deep-fascia through tension-compression relationships. It is thus that we play and record the tune of our lives on the stringed instrument of the body.
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The term ‘silk reeling’ is a favourite term to describe the spiralling movement characteristic of how Tai Chi makes new spools of connective tissue. The term ‘silk reeling’, however, could be used in a more general sense to describe how any movement you do makes new spools of connective tissue that wrap and connect our body like clothes woven of silk. From Wikipedia:
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“The name derives from the twisting and spiralling movements of the silkworm larva as it wraps itself in its cocoon, and to the metaphorical principle of "reeling the silk from a silk worm's cocoon". Dozens of cocoons are placed into boiling water. A single strand comes from each cocoon. In order to draw out the silk successfully, the action must be smooth and consistent without jerking or changing direction sharply. Too fast and the silk breaks, too slow and it sticks to itself and becomes tangled. The pot is then stirred and each cocoon spins as the silk unwinds. Each filament twists through a single point to become thread. The thread is usually pulled over a wheel and wound onto a spool. Thus silk reeling movements are rotations within rotations that must be continuous, cyclic, focused, twisting and untwisting actions. Silk reeling is a core method of movement and is trained throughout the curriculum including solo forms, individual solo exercises (chan si gong), as well as in two-person work (push hands).”2
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So how exactly do the spirals we create whilst moving on multiple planes become anatomical spirals found in the body?
Where do the anatomical
spirals come from?
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The simple answer is that they come from mechanical force. They come from a delicate equilibrium of tension (pulling), compression (pressing) and friction over time. To picture what this looks like, let’s travel back in time to that tender first trimester of ‘you’ in your mother’s womb, that very first iteration of ‘you’ was a single cell. That single-celled fertilized egg contained the information, stored in the form of a spiralling DNA helix of all chromosomes necessary for undifferentiated cells to become bone cells, heart cells, and all the other specialised cells of the body. Cells in a human embryo differentiate along the lines of both mechanical and chemical laws. However, it is the mechanical laws that are most evident; it is in those laws that we start to see spirals. Cells in a human embryo differentiate according to intra and extra-cellular pressure, be it tension, compression, or friction. Quoting from The Endless Web: Fascial Anatomy and Physical Reality
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“There is research showing that pressure or tension or friction applied in one area of the embryo results in increased secretion of fibres by the connective tissue cells at the stimulated place. These fibres tend to arrange themselves along the line of the pull or friction or tension. The connective tissue then changes from a lace-like elasticity to something more dense. If a fly gets caught in a spider web, there’s a snag, a tightening of the web in that area. Everything is pulled towards the snag, particularly as the fly moves around. Similarly, if there’s a snag in the myofascial web, it tends to grab connective tissue fibres concentrated there.”3
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The one most evident defining characteristic of the formation of tissue in the body, as an embryo in the womb and after birth, is directional pushes, pulls and friction. These simple mechanical forces initiate a chemical response. The bed of connective tissue (think of a maze-like mattress of crossing fibres) in the embryo contains fibroblast cells that secrete spools of new spiral-shaped connective tissue according to the stimulus of directional force. When tension or compression is exerted on the connective tissue bed, at that site there will be greater fibroblast activity creating new tissue. This is how embryonic tissue like bone, tendon, or organ tissue grows for the first time and takes shape during gestation along lines of directional forces supplied by limitations on space from the environment (compression) and pulling on tissues (tension) from growth.
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We might think that a small version of everything (small bones, small organs etc.) grows first and then just gets bigger and more complex as we grow in the womb. In fact, human and other mammal embryos primarily grow around a line of stem cells called ‘the primitive streak’ that can already be found at around the beginning of the third week of pregnancy (about 17 days). This streak of stem cells is primitive because it is the original line around which left-right and up-down (cranial–caudal) are established in the body. The new cells made from the primitive streak form into the head which, as the rest of the body forms, is pushed away from the streak itself which later forms the anal region. To draw an accurate curve without mathematical design, you first need a centre around with a curve can be made. The primitive streak is the original ‘central channel’ or ‘seam’ in the body, around which the spiralling geometry of tissue formation occurs.
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The streak is also primitive because it is made up of undifferentiated cells. These stem cells aren’t yet cells of specific tissues and it is directional tension-compression-friction that makes them transform from ‘primitive’ cells into specific parts of us like a liver cell, a heart muscle cell etc. This growth is a product of a cell replicating its DNA during mitosis and then dividing. The order of replication of DNA in cells appears to follow the Fibonacci sequence (measuring 34 angstroms long and 21 angstroms wide for each full cycle of the double helix – a Fibonacci/golden spiral). All very interesting but, what does this have to do with actual morphological spirals found in tissue?
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After copying all the DNA, cells divide to form two daughter cells. Those daughter cells then copy all their DNA and then divide further into two more daughter cells but they don’t do this immediately. Whilst not all things in nature grow according to the Fibonacci sequence, this division of cells over time does follow a Fibonacci sequence - 1,1,2,3,5 etc. which, when seen geometrically as the body at any given point in time, is a series of spirals that map cell growth over time.
The major strokes of muscle, tendon and bone architecture develop in the first three months of gestation but it’s a process that doesn’t stop at birth, it continues in every moment of your life. After birth the mechanical forces of tension-compression-friction continue to define the architecture of our bodies. With every movement or body part held still, in every moment of sitting, standing, or lying in a particular way, a unique pattern of tension-compression-friction will occur in the body. Over time we become that pattern (lifestyle) in the form of how (mood) that pattern was established. This is the record of our song of life.
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Gravity constantly pulls on your mass creating bodyweight. That weight must find a pathway through your body’s spiralling web of connective tissue to the ground without putting enough of your bodyweight on any one place to injure it whilst, at the same time, maximizing optimal movement and physiological processes to occur unobstructed. The body achieves this, in every moment of our lives, through a series of spirals made up of lines of tension-compression relationships like spokes. These ‘spokes’ of tension-compression relationships are not anatomical structures per se. They start as merely theoretical, like a stencil for how movement and holding could change the body. Repeated movement and holding creates new connective tissue and changes the density and elasticity of already existing connective tissue along these ‘spokes’, each spoke consisting of the relationship between two points, or a point and an area. These spokes of tension-compression relationships zig-zag our body, intersecting any and all types of tissue, but are regulated by the ‘bed’ of deep fascia.
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One such tension-compression spoke of the body’s dynamic spiral exists between the left hip and the right shoulder. If you stay hunched at a computer screen for hours every day, the body will learn how to maintain that hunch. In doing so, it will recalibrate ‘normal’ tension in chains of myofascia that govern the anterior (front) of the body. Over time, new fibres of myofascia on and connecting the anterior will grow and existing fibres will thicken and become more dense. Other parts of the body will transform along the lines of this new pattern of pressure compressing the front. This might involve binding the spine around this new compression which is optimised for hunching (but probably not optimised for the rest of life).
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Whilst only very few individual fibres of connective tissue link the left hip with the right shoulder, the relationship of tension-compression between those two places is maintained by the bed of deep-fascia that binds together all other anatomical structures between those two points. These tension-compression-friction spokes lead to anatomical spirals in the body, compress the body along the lines of spirals and through which the body can be released following said spirals.
Yet more large functional spirals can be seen in the body by connecting together angles of flexion/extension in joints that optimise the holding of tension in spiralling chains from hand to foot. Tai Chi is the art of hard-wiring the confluence of these optimal structural angles into the body’s architecture by maintaining joint flexion within a specific range of angles with as little muscular activation as possible and then moving along specific planes of motion without breaking the confluence of optimal angles.
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To illustrate how that happens, think of the elbow joint. If the elbow is flexed at more than 90 degrees but not locked at 180, the connective tissue within the joint can maintain more tension-compression force applied to the arm to flex the elbow joint compared with degrees of flexion less than 90 degrees. So, if you keep your arm with more than 90 and less than 180 degrees of flexion at the elbow, the connective tissue in the elbow joint will be able to maintain that angle using less muscular strength than if it were flexed at less than 90 degrees or locked at 180 degrees. In Chinese, the basic pattern of degrees in flexion of a confluence of joints that functionally stretches and links connective tissues from foot to hand is called 掤手 ’Warding off hand’. When a practitioner slowly and carefully puts their body through the spiralling pattern of warding-off hand on regular basis over a long period of time, that spiralling confluence of angles that can maintain structure in optimum degrees of joint flexion becomes hard-wired into the body’s myofascial architecture. This anatomical change is called 掤劲 ‘warding off power’ – it’s now held within the structure of the practitioner’s body, even when they’re not arranging their body in the shape of ‘warding off hand’.
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You might think of bones as giving the body its structure and there’s not much apparent spirality in the arrangement of bones. Bones are part of a physical architecture defined by relationships held by deep-fascia. Bones are themselves held together by other connective tissues that thicken and form new fibres along tension-compression-friction lines. Since spirality can be found in the tension-compression-friction lines, physical spirals comprised of different anatomical structures can be found in the body. For most people it is in affecting change within the spiralling collagen-based fibres of deep-fascia, not in bones, that we can affect the greatest curative and performance enhancing transformations in our physical architecture by inviting the body to re-calibrate tension-compression relationships and thus begin to re-define the spokes of the spiral.
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Many conventional approaches to physiotherapy, bodywork or acupuncture are highly conceptual means of tinkering with individual spokes of a highly complex constantly shifting series of interacting spirals. This spoke-by-spoke approach looks at loosening what is too short and tight and tightening what is too loose and weak. Whilst this approach serves as an excellent entry-level paradigm to work with, the potential for therapists to create more problems than they fix is serious and ever present. The body itself, through the deep-fascia bed, is the world’s best regulator of tension-compression relationships within the body, not the therapist or bodyworker. It is my experience that the best, most long-lasting, most profound healing occurs after stirring movement in the bed of deep-fascia enough to let the body itself rearrange the spokes of tension-compression that spiral through our body. In this paradigm, the job of the therapist or bodyworker is not to reshape the architecture of the body so much as to invite the body to rethink its own architecture. In this paradigm, the therapist or bodyworker is not present for the treatment. The treatment occurs naturally after the therapist/bodyworker has invited the body to rethink its inner spirals. This approach avoids some of the major conceptual pitfalls one tends to fall into as a therapist/bodyworker. This approach I believe starts to shone a light on the Dao of physiotherapy.
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Schultz, R (1996), The Endless Wed: Fascial Anatomy and Physical Reality
