Fascial unwinding is an intuitive somatic movement. The body's innate way of healing in motion.
Fascia is your fabric of embodiment. A body-wide tissue of communication. It's the largest sensing organ of your nervous system. Shaped by how you think, feel, move, and breathe in response to your nervous system. It’s how trauma gets stuck in your body when the nervous system is stuck in a trauma loop of fight/flight/freeze/fold. Through no fault of your own!
Chronic pain, inflammation, hormone disruption, frozen shoulder, Fybromalgia or any ailment is a sign of fascia under strain.
When you heal fascia you heal trauma.
When you tune into fascia as a felt sense you connect with your inner wisdom.
When you tone fascia you tone your vagus nerve.
All movement shapes fascia. Intuitive movement heals fascia.
In SomaSensing, fascial “unwinding” is a fascia tuning intuitive motion that emerges when you bring your body calm and quiet. Through the practice of somatic awareness.
Feeling strain and stiffness around your back, neck and shoulders?
It's because your body's fascia, like a musical instrument is out of tune and your nervous system is in disharmony.
According to clinical anatomist and fascia expert John Sharkey. Fascia has site-specific tuning pegs that allow us to move the whole body with ease, grace, freedom and suppleness. The strain of trauma, injury, or repetitive movement changes the density of this fascia. Restricting movement.
The feel-good motion of intuitive fascial unwinding is your body’s way of reaching those tuning pegs in a way that a stretch just can’t get to. Softening dense tissue to release strain and stiffness. Calming the nervous system to restore inner harmony. Like an inner dance expect to experience rocking, pulsing, coaxing, bouncing, rolling, and pandiculation in a fascia tuning session.
Whilst SomaSensing’s version of fascial unwinding originated through movement. John Barnes, Myofascial Unwinding is a similar approach that originated through his expertise as a bodyworker. Using hands-on techniques to bring the body to a resonance that allows what he called “Myofascial Unwinding” to arise. Adding to this knowledge and intuitive wisdom is Fascia educator Dr. Carol M. Davis, a seasoned bodyworker, practitioner, and educator of the John Barnes method.
So why use the term unwinding?
Fascia is like living origami, Shaped to move in a spiral pattern. Babies don't learn to move. They move with ease following the nature of this spiral pattern. As long as their fascia is not stuck in a trauma pattern.
Anxiety, stress, and the lack of movement prevent us from accessing our intuitive movement blueprints. We feel stuck, stiff, or uncoordinated. Somatic practices awaken us from somatic amnesia, by reconnecting us to these original blueprints.
When your mind is busy, lost in thought, you become disconnected from your body. You barely notice how the body is taking the strain. Until the discomfort becomes noticeable. Or even unbearable. You may even describe feeling emotionally “wound up” in response to feeling stressed or anxious. Expressing the need to unwind and relax. Your language reflecting, perhaps, what you intuitively sense in your connective tissue.
Intuitive unwinding is the bod's way of rewiring the trauma brain.
In SomaSensing we guide you to
1. Connect to interoceptive awareness in a way that helps you calm distress.
2. Tune into your fascia to connect with your original design.
3. Find the quiet and allow the urge to move to emerge.
Interoception is the way your body expresses how you feel from within. Butterflies in your tummy for example. Or sensations of hunger, thirst and the urge to pee, when you need to regulate physiology. Fascia has interoceptive sensations that are linked pressure, light touch, strain and stiffness.
Learning how to tune into fascia as in interoceptive sense can help us heal trauma without having to talk about it.
Find the urge to unwind in 3 steps.
Start on the ground. Lying on your back. Knees bent
1. Can you find your place of rest? Find what feels most comfortable?
2. As your body comes to rest, can you let it adjust? You don't have to be still. You may have the urge to move. A little twitch here or there. As your body softens to ease any strain.
3. As you come to quiet, you may notice the pelvis starts rocking. When that happens can you notice whether it happens in isolation or does the whole body respond. If not how can you include your shoulders. So that when the pelvis rocks, the shoulders respond. Once you find that pattern, notice how the breath responds. Follow the unwinding sensation. Like the wringing of a towel. Find what feels good and let your body find it's way.
If you want to explore more, book a private session or join the pandiculation course.