Let's Unpick Fascia

On the Juicy Path

Ernesto Neto, Esqueleto Glóbulos.

This is an observation and gentle commentary on why fascia has been spreading across wellness spaces, why now, and what for.

Only a few years ago, almost every wellness conversation started and ended with the gut microbiome. So now we know, we’re almost entirely made of microbes. This is no longer a trend. It’s a revolutionary scientific breakthrough that has become integrated into our understanding of health. The microbiome will never get skipped over.

Then entered the nervous system, and more importantly, nervous system regulation. This is something many of us have been talking about for a long time. It’s been well over a decade that I’ve personally been speaking about the importance of parasympathetic states inside my detox supportive protocols and programs. We know, we get it, rest and digest, it’s basic physiology and it’s not new news.

Yet although nervous system regulation has been discussed for years, it now carries a different kind of gravitas. It’s almost as if anything and everything you could ever want is on the other side of your regulated nervous system. You noticing this?

As a person with “all the letters”, this is essential daily work for me. But my god, it’s incredible to see how it’s moved to the forefront across so many disciplines. Beyond health and healing, nervous system regulation lives inside business coaching, relationships, money mindset, the entire human experience. It’s our nervous system after all.

Once the core teachings land, it won’t trend anymore. It will just be integrated. Like the microbiome.

Of course I now need to mention the last decades obsession with trauma, all our traumas. For many many years, the word trauma was mainly reserved for psychology spaces. Now it’s at brunch.

Trauma is actually a whole other knot to untie, but mainly just to say, the trauma-informed movement has been needed, helpful and true. And like many necessary movements, it has also become ..a bit much.

My sense is that it’s going to stay, but soften as we’re leaning towards saturated with the trauma talk.

Now it’s Fascia.

It might just be my algorithm, but I’m seeing lots of movement in the fascia conversation and I find it really exciting and interesting. In online wellness spaces, fascia is showing up as the catalyst for everything from tension and pain in the body, the definition of your jawline, the openness of your chakras, the functionality of your lymph and nutrient delivery, and even as a conduit to heightened states of consciousness, or even the holder of consciousness itself.

Lets get literal with a screen grab image of fascia over muscle fibres.

Fascia is a continuous web of connective tissue that wraps, separates, and connects everything in the body. Every muscle, organ, nerve, and bone lives inside your fascia. It’s the interwebs of your body. A web of constant intake of information, which it sends to the brain. But it’s not just a web. It has its own nerve supply and is considered a sensory organ.

When the fascia is unhealthy, it is compressed, sticky, dehydrated and stiff and gets held in patterns of protection.

Which is where I got more interested.

This is really what happens to us, as a whole human, when we become rigid, compressed, we get stuck in holding patterns of protection.

As I am not a fascia specialist. So for this moment, I’m gathering information.
I reached out to my dear friend Jasmine Takanikos, who was the first person I knew to be actually studying fascia, and who also happens to be a brilliant trend forecaster.

I asked her two questions.
Here is what she said.

On why fascia has moved to the forefront of the wellness conversation:

“I believe we are living in an advice epidemic. People are inundated with external instruction and increasingly hungry for forms of healing that return agency to the self. Fascial work invites people back into direct relationship with their own body, strength, sensation, and intuition. It offers a way to locate pain, trauma, and stagnation through one’s own touch and movement, making healing feel less outsourced and more embodied. That level of self-empowerment is deeply compelling right now.”

On what she believes fascia holds, stores, or connects us to:

“I believe fascia stores the imprint of our lived experience. It is not separate from memory, emotion, or the body’s history. To me, fascia acts as an intelligent connective web, carrying information, fluid, energy, and sensation throughout the body. It links us to our organs, our nervous system, and our earliest experiences of being alive. In many ways, it is the architecture of our inner world made physical.”

Artist, Ana Teresa Barboza

Reading these from her, I felt even more pulled to the study of fascia, especially as it relates to carrying information.

As a breathwork therapist, the lineage I went in through is Rebirthing Breathwork, the original work of Leonard Orr from the 1950s.

Orr believed that unresolved experiences, including birth trauma itself, is stored in the subconscious and held in the body. The connected breath is the tool that reaches it. the practice is to be liberated from them, not so much trace the origin.

But the question remains unanswered. Breathwork or not. Where was it?

Rebirthing Breathwork says it’s in the subconscious mind and body, Bessel van der Kolk says it’s in the nervous system. Candace Pert says it’s biochemical, expressed through neuropeptide receptors throughout the entire body.

So for now, as an observation and gentle commentary of fascia inside the wellness industry - what I see is that fascia is already a really interesting aspect of our body that opens up our understanding of how we move, how we age, how we stay juicy.

But if it is also the web that’s holding our stories and imprints, a communication network and the interwebs of our human life, then we’re just getting started with fascia. And I’m here for it.

Jasmine Takanikos is the founder of formafuture.com

Thank you for reading,
Emily
xo