BIOTENSEGRITY
This is a Big Article.
Chunked, sliced, diced I’ve taken all the raw ingredients and turned it into a platter for You to feast on, full of Bioavailable nutrients steeped in fats that maximize absorption for the most efficient power-packing, nutritionally-dense, smash hit to ever enter Your Gaping Maw.
This article is thick with knowledge but pieced together in the most stepwise manner that it’s impossible to get lost. That being said You may have to save some for the next day and come back for the Leftovers.
Like any good meal, once it’s finished You can never go back to plain old weiners and ketchup. This is a gamechanger and unless Your Hotdog is made with fermented sourdough bread, a pasture-fed pork belly Bratwurst topped with Roasted Red Pepper Aioli, Chermoula Relish and Sauteed Onions it’s unlikely You’ll be able to experience Life the same way again.
In this Article I’m going to introduce You to Your Fascia’s Feeler’s, show You how Biotensegrity extends further than just holding up the Human Structure, “How You Feel” is Fascial, Why there’s no such thing as Positive or Negative Emotions, How Fascia is Your Blood-Brain Barrier and how through Biotensegrity Your Fascia creates Your thoughts.
Let’s get Started.
YOUR FASCIA’S FEELER’S
Your Fascia is Your largest Sensory Organ. Besides Your Brain, Your Fascia is the most receptor-dense organ in Your Body, the Eye trailing in third. With such a vast area to cover and so much information to convey, it is important that Your Fascia has some way to deliver it.
This comes in the form of Receptors.
Here’s a quick list:
Chemo - : Chemical substances turn into biological signals.
Thermo - : Sensitized to fluctuations in temperature. Detecting hot, cold and changes in internal temperature.
Noci - : Pick up noxious stimuli that threaten the body’s integrity, primarily perceived as pain. They are particularly active when the tissue is inflamed.This is why Inflammation and Pain usually go hand-in-hand, (No-Brainer there).
Photo - : Detects light source and intensity and turns it into a biological signal. Besides the eyes, these receptors are primarily found in the skin as dermal photosensors called opsins. Opsins not only mediate wound healing, skin function, hair growth, immune activity, and Free-Radical Scavenging through melanogenesis, but also contribute to helping maintain circadian rhythm. A 24-hour cycle responsible for Your daily patterns of alertness, sleep-wake times, temperature, activity, hormones and appetite. In mice, photoreceptors in the skin can even go as far as having the potential to impact mood and learning ability, which might be part of the reason why it feels so dang good to get in the sun.
To give You a rough idea of how multiple types of receptors can be clustered into Your Fascia, I’ve attached a photo here, showing You how the receptors connect to the nerve fibers embedded within.
Most of the receptors in the picture are specialized mechanoreceptors but at least it paints a visual of how receptor diversity can be integrated into Your Fascial Web.
When the receptors are excited, simulated or interacted with they transduce the signal to a nerve fiber nested within Your Fascia or to the framework of Your Fascia itself. This allows the signal to carry to where it needs to go and induce the appropriate changes locally or elsewhere.
This is one of the mechanisms by which Fascia plays a role in Global Cell-Signaling, By communicating all the stimuli it picks up to the appropriate places. Your Fascia can even go as far as being a signal itself.
By cleaving pieces of the Extra-Cellular Matrix (ECM) through specialized scissors called MMP’s Your Fascia can snip off pieces off itself to become chemical-signaling molecules called a Matrikine. Matrikines move through the matrix to affect organ development, cancer-modulation, wound repair and immune response. Your Fascia will even go one step further by releasing different types Hyaluronon from its Ground Substance to play a role in cell-cell communication and initiate Anti-inflammatory and Anti-cancer cascades (High Molecular Weight Hyaluronan), the type normally found in Your Fascia or Pro-inflammatory and Pro-cancer cascades (Low- Molecular Weight Hyaluronan) the type found in Densification.
Though out of all the signaling methods found within Your Fascia there is no pathway as obvious as Your Mechanoreceptors, the most abundant receptor You have.
MECHANORECEPTORS AND MECHANOTRANSDUCTION
Your Fascia’s tensegritous structure, that is all the fibers that build and hold the gel of the ECM, are equivalent to the neural pathways of Your Brain, both in structure and function. Containing water Your Fibers are Hydraulic in nature and have the capacity to be part of the information transport that occurs via l’eau, (I like the way the French say “water”. They have a way of making the word feel like water is actually flowing out of Your Mouth).
Unlike Your Neural Tissue the way information is transmitted is different. Instead of pure electricity to facilitate communication the electrical capacity is caught up within the water, altering the dynamics by which the signal is delivered. Understudied, the electrical-water potential combo is still in its infancy, however what is well-studied is the primary mode of action by which Your Fascia communicates.
By touch.
As far as we know, Mechanoreceptors seem to be the number-one communication station used by Your Fascial Network.
Responding to mechanical deformation like pressure, stretch (tension) and vibration, mechanoreceptors take this stimuli and either turn it to an electrical signal by creating a nerve impulse, a biochemical signal by engaging molecular recruitment or cause a structural reorganization of cells or the ECM by triggering a mechanical change through cell adhesion proteins.
Split, Mechanoreceptors can fall under two categories:
Tactile: A receptor that responds to light touch, high and low vibration and changes in pressure.
Proprio:- A receptor responsible for relaying position in space and detecting motion, telling You where pieces or the whole of Your body is at any given time.
From these two categories each receptor can be classified further, becoming more specialized & specific or generalized & widespread. When the right kind of mechanical stimulation comes across a receptors path, it picks it up out of the murmuring undertone of background noise like a magnet pulling paper clips out of a pile of sawdust. Dispatched, the message travels through the fibrous intercom of the ECM by mechanotransduction.
Mechanotransduction is the mechanism by which cells sense and convert a mechanical stimulus into a biochemical stimulus to create change in cellular activity.
A combination of Fibers and Ground Substance Your ECM is the vast majority of what Your Fascia considers Home Base. Specialized Cells called Fibroblasts keep everything in working order. They build the Fascia, embedded within it, Your Fascial Fibers pulling them in every which way. Chugging along, they keep their ears to the phone lines, listening for a Mechanically transduced signal. When one is picked up, Your Fibroblast changes shape reciprocating to the pull of Your Fascia’s Fibers, altering the web. Passing on a new signal and degrading old fibers while churning out new ones, making adjustments as they go.
Here’s a Photo courtesy of MicroscopyU:
When they stumble upon each other's path they communicate with each other via small intermembrane channels called gap junctions. Like a swap of secret messages they can communicate with one another through short electrical impulses, ions and small molecules to share information and make new decisions related to Your Fascial structure.
And it doesn't stop there.
Mechanotransduction gets smaller.
SMALLER
Connected to Your ECM Your Fascial Fibers merge into the Cytoskeleton of Your Cell by passing through small adhesive proteins called Integrins. Acting as corridors in Your Cells Membrane integrins connect the ECM to Your Cytoskeleton, intertwining into Your NuclearEenvelope and embedding itself next to Your DNA. Delicate fingers and surgical-like precision allows Your Cytoskeleton and ECM to turn Your genes On and Off and change the way Your DNA is structured and read. This extensive connection is what allows the Fascial Forces from Outside to influence the workings of Your Cell on the Inside. In turn, it lets Your Cells create forces of its own to transmit messages outside, to the bustle of the ECM, fostering an intimate intuition that started before You were born.
THE INTIMATE CONNECTION
The most abstract concept to wrap Your Head around is there is no official start to a signal. It is a consistent loop of reception and response with external stimuli getting sprinkled in to jazz things up a bit. Without exaggeration Mechanotransduction is a consistent interplay of messages that occurs between every structure in Your Body, all the way down to the molecular level.
Starting with the first cell at Your Blessed Inception Your Fascial system evolved hierarchically from a Single-Cell Embryo all the way to the Multicellular, Complex Organism You are today. A continuum, it is forever expanding, constantly adapting to new sensations and altering Your structural makeup to make sure those sensations are met in the most efficient way possible.
As You grew, Cell by Cell, Your Fascia grew along with You. Its Living Matrix extending into and from the nucleus of each cell. Enveloping all Your Cellular structures as You would divide, becoming the Framework for Your Form and the Connection for Your Communication. Sharing a relationship with Your DNA, it would travel outward enmeshing itself into Your Nuclear Envelope, integrating around Your Organelles and evolving to become the Cytoskeleton of Your Cell.
Continuing it would span the lipid bilayer through transmembrane integrin proteins to link up with Your other Cells, pulling together as one, in a squishy, fibrous jelly-like substance You know as Your ECM. Your Cells, sharing this Space, call it Home, allowing it to culture their conversation and incubate their intimacy. Gradually, different cells emerged forming tissues. Never skipping a beat Your Fascia spread along with them, leading the way and organizing the vibrational chatter to keep Your Cells in Communion.
As You became a full-blown, functional Human nothing changed. Continuously listening, organizing and delivering messages Your Fascia still holds the Space for the language of Feel ensuring You have the information to meet Your Needs & Wants and the ability to invoke the action to achieve them.
This is Powerful.
It’s the power to feel every one of Your Cells.
It’s like You Being gently attached to thousands of tensioned threads and every move You make the whole world can feel and respond to. But instead of the threads only being connected to the outside of Your Body, they connect to the inside as well. Wrapping all of Your tissues, including Your Brain, Gut and Heart. So not only do they feel the way You move but they can feel what's going on internally as well.
If we used Your Heart as an example, the Whole world would feel Your Heart.
EVERY Person would internally FEEL the Beat of Your Heart.
And You would feel everyone else's too.
Not only that but You would be aware of each thread and how to use them, creating a Morse Code that crosses language Barriers and keeps You, and everyone else connected.
This is how Your Cells Work, with Your Fascia’s fibers acting as the threads.
WHAT’S THE SECRET SAUCE?
With its interlaced and widespread distribution, sensory capacity, mechanically transducible communicative capability and tightly knit cellular relationships “Your Fascia may form a bodywide mechanosensitive integrating signaling system analogous to that of Your Nervous System and Brain.” An idea proposed by Robert Schleip and multiple other scientists who have delved deep into the research of the Fascial Field.
An Organ that connects every aspect of Human Physiology, Your Fascia is a Metasystem. A silky soft cloak, Your Fascia ensheathes all of Your other systems connecting them to one another and influencing their activity at the same time. Encapsulating even the hard tissues Your Fiber systems of Your Fascia braid themselves to become substances like bone and cartilage creating a continuous extension between the soft tissues of Your ligaments, tendons, muscle, viscera and skin. Only differing in the degree of firmness and viscosity in the ground substance that surrounds them.
For example in Your Bones the Ground Substance is ossified by crystallizing the Gel of Your ECM through the addition of Calcium Salts. In Your Muscle the Ground Substance remains fluid and flowy so long as proper hydration status is maintained.
Naturally this blossoms a burning question.
If all Your Fascia’s Cells, Gels, and Fibers hold You together and form the Metasystem, then how does this Metasystem act as One?
What picks up all the cellular touches and transduces them into a global signal?
What’s allowing trillions of cells to stand up and walk around as a single organism?
The Answer is in Your ECM.
FREE NERVE ENDINGS
Receptors in Your ECM are called Interstitial Receptors. 80% of Your Interstitial Receptors are free nerve endings with a vast array of functions. Varying from thermoception and chemoreception all the way to exhibiting multimodal function, where they pick up a diverse array of environmental stimuli to whet their appetite.
However, the majority of them function as mechanoreceptors reading the mechanical stimulation around them.
Unmyelinated, interstitial receptors are usually found as Free Nerve Endings. They are slower, sensitive and everywhere, Your Fascia boasting the densest population in Your Body, richest in the areas surrounding Your Bones, Muscles and Organs. Also known as Type III and IV nerves, Your Free Nerve endings have the Power to regulate Your Autonomic Function and induce subconscious and conscious state changes.
Almost all of Your Free Nerve Endings are afferent. Meaning they move from the outside in, towards Your Central Nervous System. If You follow the nerves back like tracing a string-line with Your finger, you’ll find the majority of these nerves terminating in the insular cortex of Your Brain, an area You're about to get very familiar with.
To give You an idea of numbers, in muscular tissue there are 7 Interoreceptors to every 1 proprioceptor.
Approximately half of those interoreceptors are low threshold, detecting light touch.
The sheer number of these receptors and their degree of sensitivity are starting to spell something out.
YOUR FEELINGS ARE FASCIAL
The way You Fascia wraps Your larger tissues, like muscles. blood vessels, bones and organs, can be thought of like the netted meat sleeve that wraps the chuck roast that You picked up from the Butcher. When perfectly balanced around the Roast, the Roast holds, stores and cooks well. If the sleeve is too loose the roast loses support and is prone to falling apart. If the sleeve is too tight or pulled in multiple directions it squeezes the roast, causing it to squish, bruise and tear.
Heck, if it’s fresh enough it might even release signaling molecules that the Meat Sleeve would pick up if it were Alive like Your Fascia.
Of course, if it was actually Your Fascia there would be total continuity between the sleeve and the meat, one would just slowly transform into the other. But for the sake of an analogy this will do.
In this section I’m going to explain How Your Fascia dictates your behavior, How it’s responsible for your emotions, Introduce You to Your Homeostatic Pathway and show You how Your Organs are much more influential than You think.
THE SEVENTH SENSE
In a nutshell Feelings lie within the realm of Interoception and Movement in the Realm of Proprioception.
In a minute You’ll find out they are not mutually exclusive from one another, but for simplification purposes it makes the concept easier to digest.
Proprioception is the sense of where the Body is in Space. Often called The Sixth Sense it’s how You know where You hand is when You close Your eyes. Proprioception is more mathematical in nature. The sense is strictly informative about what Your Body is doing.
If Your Body or limbs are not moving the way You want them to training your Proprioception will lead You towards moving in the way that You desire.
Using a language that is 2-D and spoken in grayscale It communicates things like “Heavy or Light”, “Slow or Fast”, “Twist Left or Twist Right”. It doesn’t tell You how those things make You Feel or what greater implications they may have.
In Contrast, Interoception is a sense of the physiological condition of Your Body as a whole. It is the reading of the gauges, dials and scales that are telling You the current state of Your Homeostatic balance. From anything that’s touching Your skin to the food that’s moving through Your digestive tract all the way to the inner workings of each and every one of Your Cells and Systems, all of it gets accounted for by Interoception.
Interoception is colorful, vibrant and 3-D. It is the scanner that tells You how close everything is to operating in perfect Harmony for the specific situation You are currently experiencing.
The catch is that it’s up to You to figure out what balance and imbalance feel like.
To throw in a few more curveballs Balance and Imbalance take on multiple forms depending on the situation. The more You train Your Interoception the more confident and certain You become about what move would be the best move given Your current circumstance and intentions.
The vast majority and arguably all of these sensations originate from the receptors in your Fascia. With the astronomical amount of stimuli relaying a steady stream of information about the degree of Homeostasis in every cell, system and tissue it would only make sense for the body to leverage and use this valuable insight to influence changes in Your behavior so that balance can be maintained.
This is why Interoception is processed in the Cingulate Cortex, Insula and Parabrachial Nucleus (PBN) of the brain rather than the Somatosensory Cortex like Proprioception.
Fancy words I know, but who doesn’t grow up saying they want to be a brain surgeon?
Don’t worry, we’re going to take Baby Steps and break this Beauty down into manageable chunks. Before You know it you’ll be in a lab coat with a scalpel in hand performing dissections at the UCLA Medical Center.
THE MECHANISM BEHIND FASCIAL INTEROCEPTION
The Insula, Cingulate Cortex and Parabrachial Nucleus are special because they all hang out in the Limbic System. This is the Emotional part of the brain and is the bridge between Thought and Instinct.
So what do each of these do?
Let’s break it down.
Parabrachial Nucleus (PBN or Pons): Takes all the interoceptive information and sends it to the Amygdala and Hypothalamus to compare the information to all Your stored memories as explained in this article. (see The Biological Code) The PBN Is responsible for helping to direct Your Instinctual Behaviors and habits that are created through the Hedonic Pathway. Something we will visit in FASCIA AND THOUGHT.
Insula: Takes all the Interoceptive Information, combines it with Exteroception, Proprioception and a backcheck of all Your Memories and turns it into a Conscious Feeling.
Cingulate Cortex: Takes the Conscious Feeling produced by the Insula and turns it into an Expression using the Motor Components of the Body. It is also the bridge to Cognition from the Cerebral Cortex.
While both the Insula and Cingulate Cortex can be viewed as separate and distinct from one another the Partnership between them is where the Magic happens.
Your Insula is the Ultimate Interoception Integration Center.
It’s like a giant funnel pulling in every sensation that could ever contribute to Your current State of Being and centrifuging it down to a tiny little pellet packing a Powerful Punch of Perception and serving it to You as a Tic tac with the Flavor of Inner World Experience and a taste-bud tingling intensity that would put a 4th of July Fireworks Show to shame.
After receiving all the Homeostatic Feedback, Your Insula communicates with Your Amygdala to integrate any emotional and notable memories, has a chat with Your Hypothalamus to blend in the current state of Your Autonomic Nervous System and Metabolism, takes the baton from Your Somatosensory Cortex to take in all the Tactile feelings of Touch, Temperature, Pressure and Pain that merged in Your Spinal Cord, and then sprinkles in the visual, auditory and vestibular feedback to mix up a batch ready to bake and put in the oven.
Before it’s cooled and ready to serve the Right Anterior Insula adds Subjective Time into the mix. At this point Your Interoception is consciously accessible and You become Aware of it in Your Experience.
All of this input was communicated by Your Fascia in varying degrees at one point or another.
Your Cingulate Cortex is the Mix and Match Master.
Once the Feeling is Conscious Your Cingulate Cortex acts like a World-Class Disc Jockey performing at the Electric Daisy Carnival. Spinning songs with such eloquent synchronicity that it sends You to the next level of Sensation. Listening to the Backbeat from the Insula it adjusts the dials, toggles the faders and adds some spicy drum samplers as it attempts to find a behavior that will tune Homeostasis back to balance.
Like any good DJ Your Cingulate Cortex listens to the crowd. Before sealing the deal on the appropriate Behavioral Expression it reaches out through its multiple connections to receive any pertinent information. It checks in with the Amygdala and Hippocampus to see if anything may have been readjusted thanks to further Fascial Input. It listens for any modifications made to your Autonomic Nervous System through the help of Your Hypothalamus and takes in the Cognitive Input that is being shouted out from your PreFrontal Cortex in the Front Row. After all that is finished, the volume is normalized, the faders recalibrated and the equalizers are overhauled to pump out a behavioral tune that Your Cingulate Cortex feels is the perfect fit to bring Your body back to Synchrony.
This is then sent out to your Body where the Fascia helps to perform the Behavior while simultaneously sending back information regarding the changes made to Homeostasis.
And this is happening every second of the day.
Moment to Moment.
Cyclically processed, nothing is ever missed.
Think of the Insula and the Cingulate Cortex like the Ultimate Power Couple. A Dynamic Duo they form the Emotional Network that pulls everything together and puts into effect the appropriate behavioral changes. The Insula is responsible for receiving all the sensory input, blending it into one sensual feeling and then making it conscious. The Cingulate Cortex cross-analyzes this with thought and creates the Behavioral Expression of the Feeling.
Together they integrate all subjective feelings related to the body into emotional experience and conscious awareness. Of both Your Environment and Your Self.
But here's the kicker.
if Fascia captains Your Feelings and what You sense is an Emotional Experience are Emotions the same as Feelings?
In part.
Walk Yourself to the Starter’s Line, get into Your racing stance and listen for the gun blast because we’re about to Run the Gamut.
FASCIA CREATES YOUR EMOTION,... MOSTLY
An Emotion is defined as:
“A feeling that is accompanied by a mind state that arises spontaneously”
A Feeling is defined as
“A physical sensation other than one experienced by touch”
And if we really want to break it down a Sensation is
“A Perception associated with a specific sense organ or body condition (which in Fascia is one and the same).”
Lastly, we have the Mind which is defined as:
“The element of a person that allows them to be aware of the world and their experiences,.- consciousness”
Stacking them into each other like a Brand New, perfectly-packaged Tupperware Set and it looks like this:
An Emotion is:
A physical perception associated with a Sense Organ accompanied by a conscious awareness that arises spontaneously.”
So to close it all up an EMOTION is a State of Being, a FEELING is How Your Body Physically Feels.
A State of Being is the combination of Feelings that are physically, biochemically and energetically sensational and being aware of them.
We know the Physical Feeling is the cues of pressure, touch, tension, tickle, itch, vibration etc. that describe Your current degree of Balance.
The Biochemical Feeling comes from the chemical reactions that are happening in Your Body when an emotional State arises. These chemical reactions are sensed in a similar way to how different foods have different flavors or how each scent has its own unique smell. Biochemical reactions are strong contributors to how Your Organs feel, Your Brain included.
Like mixing the primary colors to make up the entire color wheel, the ratios of the Biochemicals combined with where they are playing out their effects determines the Biochemical feeling and helps to sum up Your World of Emotion.
The Energetic Feeling is the third key player and rounds out Your Emotion to fill all the remaining cracks and crevices, but for the sake of being succinct we’re going to leave this one for another article. However, it is good to be aware that it plays a role.
If You were to take the whole process and slow it right down You will notice that a Feeling is the qualification required for a Full-Blown Change of Emotional State. This is why when You're going to buy a new book, Celebrate at a Party or go to meet someone You Love, the anticipation of the change of events creates sensations in Your Body first like tingling, expanding or pulsing before You do a complete switch into a State of Excitement or Elation.
It’s like a low potency prerequisite of the Emotion You're about to feel, similar to the water bubbling off the first faint scents of coffee as Your percolator begins to roll into a boil.
What’s responsible for the switch from low-potency prerequisite to an Immersed Experience of Emotional Intensity is the volume of Your Neurotransmitters and Hormones.
These are the Biochemical players of how Your Organs and tissues feel and influence Your Mind state.
Neurotransmitters take the signature of Electrical signals traveling through Your Neural Tissue and turn them into a Chemical Signal in the form of a Molecule.
During nerve impulses one neuron passes information to another neuron by releasing a group of Neurotransmitters to travel across a gap called the Synaptic Cleft. On the other side of the gap are receptor sites that receive the Neurotransmitters like the perfect putt at Your favorite Mini-Golf Course. When the Neurotransmitter docks on the receptor site there's an enzymatic-like reaction that turns the chemical signal back into an electrical signal passing the message on while simultaneously creating a Biochemical Feeling that is closer to touch than it is to taste, smell or any other type of sense.
The speed at which Neurotransmitters work is incredibly fast.
We’re talking milliseconds.
Your own personal Lightning.
Hormones act very similarly except they are released by Endocrine glands like Your Pituitary, Thyroid, Adrenals and Reproductive Organs instead of through Neural Tissue. These travel through the blood to dock on receptor sites that could be anywhere in the body. Because of this they are slower and their effects can be drawn out over a longer period of time. This is why some Feelings can last for days or weeks transitioning into moods.
To get You acquainted I’ve attached a nice summary courtesy of SeekingBalance.com
HOW YOUR NEUROTRANSMITTER ARE RELATED TO YOUR FASCIA
So how do Hormones and Neurotransmitters get activated?
At one point or another they were stimulated by Your Fascia.
There are exceptions to the rule like peptides from the Bacteria in Your Gut or even Thought Processes in unique cases of dominant Left Hemisphere activity have a more direct line of connection to Neurotransmitter and Hormone Transduction rather than stemming from Your Fascia, but these are specialized and specific situations.
Every Emotion You experience has a corresponding Body Response and Fascial Activation. When an Emotion is embodied it instinctively animates particular Fascial Lines. When the receptors within Your Fascial lines are stimulated by different types of sensations (pressure, hot, cold, stretch, vibration, light, dark etc.) they do two things at once.
- They create a conformational shape change in the Fascial Web.
- They trigger appropriately matched nerve impulses. These Nerve Impulses travel up towards Your Brain making pit stops and branching the message to other parts of Your Body along the way.
So now there are 2 signals at once.
This is where it gets tricky, so keep Your eyes on the prize and Your feet steady as You walk along this fishing line of a tightrope.
We’re going to start with the Conformational Shape Change.
EMOTION CHANGES YOUR FASCIAL WEB
Of all Your tissues that contribute to the sensation of embodied emotion Your Organs are the tissues with the most diversified color pallet. Translating the messages into Neurotransmitters each one of Your Organs has nerves embedded into the fabric of Your Fascia connected by Fascial Mechanoreceptors. Your Mechanoreceptors act as tuning forks that allow Your Organs to pick up different sensations and activate neurons through nerve impulses. Listening, Your Organs are able to turn mechanical stimuli quivering through Your Fascia into electrical signals. Your Organs can then read and perceive the sensation You are feeling and contribute in their own original way.
A prime example given by Fascia Extrafonaire Gil Hedley here → Fantastic Podcast by YogaTeacher
Even Your Brain is an organ surrounded by Fascial Membranes. The membranes are called the Dura, Arachnoid and Pia Mater. Your Pia Mater creates Your Blood Brain Barrier and shrink wraps the entirety of Your Brain, it gently molds Your Brain’s fissures and folds, innervated. It acts as the bottom half of the Tuning Fork. The Dura Mater is a layer above your Pia Mater and is enriched with mechano and chemo receptors that pick up Fascial sensations. The Dura Mater is like the top half of Your tuning Fork. Together they’re Your Brain's own private Butler. While the rest of the information comes up from the Spinal Cord as nerve impulses, Your Brain, like the rest of Your Organs, actually gets to feel the pull of the Fascia as it’s picked up by the Dura and transferred over by the Pia.
Once Your Organs have picked up the mechanical touch it transfers into an electrical signal and induces Neurotransmitter release. Stimulated, Your nerves broadcast the signals in 2 ways:
1: Within Your Organ to stimulate a change in activity. The way Your Organ, (be it Your Brain, Liver or otherwise), feels the vibration from the tuning fork will change the way it’s operating. (Something We will touch on in a bit.)
2: The change in Behavior of Your Organ is detected and sent through what’s called the Homeostatic Pathways. Neural Highways that communicate the degree of Homeostasis from all the different areas in Your Body.
Like cars merging onto the freeway they join the nerve impulses from Your Fascia that are also using this pathway, making their way towards Your Brain. We will include this when we cover Nerve Impulses going up to the Brain.
For now we’ll focus on a change in Organ Activity.
One of the ways the change in Your Organ’s activity comes about is through the release of their own personal entourage of Neurotransmitters.
For Example:
During sadness the Deep Front Arm Line is going to get activated, the Lungs are viscerally connected to this line Of all the Peripheral Organs the Lungs express the highest Monoamine Oxidase activity (MAO), an enzyme involved in the degradation process of neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin and epinephrine. MOA’s hyperexpression is commonly seen in depression.
Other examples that link Neurotransmitter release and Organ function are:
Your Heart, whose cells produce Serotonin a Neurotransmitter associated with Patience and Joy.
Your Stomach, known to have the capacity to secrete high levels of histamine a neurotransmitter commonly associated with worry and anxiety.
And of course Your Adrenals, sitting atop Your Kidneys they release adrenaline during feelings of fear, an emotion associated with the Fight or Flight Response.
It’s kind of like each one of Your Organs having their own personality, acting as mini-people that contribute to the way You feel.
You could also see them like the Angel and Devil on Your shoulder. Except instead of voicing thoughts they voice feelings, and instead of 2 characters there’s 5+.
Talk about a Party.
Alongside the sensations generated by Your Fascia, Neurotransmitter modulation by Your Organs influences Your Emotional State.
THE EMOTION - ORGAN CONNECTION
Through this New Level of Understanding the link between Emotions and Organs becomes obvious.
Prime examples of these innate connections are when You feel Courageous and Proud You can feel it in Your Lungs as if they swell, but it also feels good somehow. Likewise when You're sad Your Lungs feel Heavy, but if You're connected to the emotion, it feels good somehow. Another example is when You feel Trusting in someone or something Your Abdomen will open up (usually around the spleen and liver area). If You focus on that Space You’ll notice there is an opening and freeing sensation that also just feels good even though You may not be able to put Your finger on it.
Likewise if You don’t trust someone or something, yet You trust in Yourself because You are embodying Mistrust, (You might have to read that one twice), Your abdomen will usually close and Your arm will fall over Your Spleen as You begin to worry about the situation. But connecting to Yourself and honoring Your feeling by acknowledging that it is Yours and Right to Feel, even though it’s uncomfortable, makes worry still Feel good somehow.
Simple or what?
These “good” feelings come from the adjustments made by the Crosstalk between Your Neurotransmitters, Hormones and Fascia as they work with Your Organs, steadily and systematically syncing everything together towards Perfect Balance.
This Cross-talk is the Second Half, (of the diagram below), where the impulses travel up to Your Brain and then come back down again.
The next space we’re going to slide into.
Buckle up and keep Your hands and arms inside the vehicle. We’re going to be drifting through the busy intersection of Times Square at 100 miles an hour.
NERVE IMPULSES TRAVEL FROM YOUR FASCIA → BRAIN
After Your Fascia has triggered a change in Your Organs activity, the feeling You get from Organ Neurotransmitter release is paired with a neural impulse that joins the rest of Your Interoceptive messages from Your Fascia. Together they arrive at Your Insula.
In the diagram below this is Part 2 of the first half.
When all of Interoceptive Input arrives at Your Insula it releases a wave of Neurotransmitters that influence Brain Activity. Like a Spring Freshet surging forth all at once, this is the Climax, the Peak, the culmination of all Your feelings condensed into the small little space within Your Brain. The packing of a million little photons of light into a tight, hot, luminous glow, thick as Syrup and as weightless as a fledgling’s first feather. Everything in Your Body centralizes down into this singular Space. This is the height of Intensity in Your Emotional Experience.
As quickly as it arrives it’s integrated and shot back out at warp speed with a Brand New Mixture of Neurotransmitters in response. In an Explosive Flurry they spread through the Body with a Domino-like effect (50sec Mark) Docking at their target sites to create changes in tissues that Infuse all the colors of Emotion into one Elevated Experience. Your Fascia then picks up the changes to initiate the Cycle all over again. This Rhythmic Repetition provides You with a continuous supply of information that intertwines the Emotional and Physical into one Sensation and guides You towards Perfected Balance and Harmonized Homeostasis.
In the diagram below this is Part 3 & 4 of the second half.
You might be wondering, how this contributes to Homeostasis?
Let's use Your Organs as an example.
Each of Your Organs is partial to specific emotions. What You know already is that a combination of Fascial Line Activation and Personal Neurotransmitter release defines Your Organs emotional palate. But here's something new, Your Organs are also preferential to favoring distinct Neurotransmitter Ratios from Your Brain. With a unique array of neurotransmitter receptor sites each organ responds favorably to particular Neurotransmitter proportions spurred from the Insula, Cingulate Cortex and other Brain regions that play their part. When a Neurotransmitter binds to Your Organ’s synaptic receptors it signals a change in activity bringing the Organ closer or further from Balance. This then readjusts “the Tuning Forks” in your Fascia allowing everything to come full circle as Your Brain receives the new input.
In real time this is a two-way relationship like cars driving in opposing lanes. With neurotransmitters from Your Organs affecting Your Brain and Neurotransmitters from Your Brain affecting Your Organs and then of course both affecting themselves, with Your Fascia’s Shape Changes acting as the intermediary.
What You are feeling through Your Fascia is simultaneously being relayed to Your Brain so together You can become Consciousness, allowing Your Brain to decipher what Your Fascia is communicating so it can make a Homeostatic adjustment.
This means the stream of Emotional Information is constant and within it is the instructions for what to do to make sure Homeostasis is maintained.
And this happens with all Your tissues, not just Your Organs.
Pretty Neat Hey?
Sensation and Information combined into one little packet of Emotion.
Understanding Emotion through Feel all of a sudden becomes a whole lot cooler than trying to understand it through thought.
For Your Learning Success, here’s a Drawing to give You some direction. Don’t worry if You can’t grasp it right away, it’s much easier to feel instead.
Next we’re going to cover what happens when You get stuck.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GET STUCK IN AN EMOTION
Embodying Your Emotions connects You to your Natural State of Love, Joy and Purpose.
A frictionless coalescence is created as You Unify Your Body in its entirety.The Left and Right Hemispheres of Your Brain synchronize and all of Your Systems integrate themselves into one beautifully harmonized functional unit as they surrender themselves to the working of Your Fascial Fabric. When this happens there is a full sense of clarity of what steps need to be taken in order to maintain Homeostasis as Your Brain, Heart and Gut listen to the language of Your Fascial Web. Simultaneously You are immersed in the enjoyment of Experience. Everything fits like lock and key as the Fascial Lines allow the situation to unfold. Working in Collaboration with Your Tissues, navigating the novelty of New Experience and never missing a step in terms of meeting Your Body’s Needs, Wants and Desires.
When You connect to Yourself through the Vibrant Hum of Emotion Your body falls into flow with the moment and - get ready - allows Your Soul to comfortably sit in the Animation Matrix that makes up Your Human Form. Aligned and in tune bridging the gap and connecting You quantumly across the Energetic Reality and Material Reality of Life. This is a piece of the Biophysical aspect of Emotion and the first steps to fully integrating the 4 Famed Quadrants of the Health Industry, Physical, Mental, Emotional and Spiritual.
Nailing this down and You begin to work Your way towards singularity.
When an Emotion is not embodied You get stuck. It spiderwebs into varying degrees of Expression which are customized to the Individual. Depending on what Emotions a Person represses and what experience and memories they’re connected to dictates how that form of Disconnect is expressed and held in their Fascia. In other words, what their posture is, how they move and how they behave on a daily basis.
To throw in a few extra twists and turns, all the various forms of an Individual's Disconnection from an emotion, and thus their Body, have varying degrees of Intensity. In the absence of embodiment, interpreting Your own expression through logic and reason is like trying to listen for a fart in the chaotic cacophony of car horns in Mumbai's busy streets. Coupled with the concept of trying to wrap Your Head around the reasons for the expression and what You’re experiencing, it becomes an ordeal that’s more convoluted than Albert Einstein’s Wormhole Theory.
When Your Emotion is repressed the Feelings and Neurotransmitters that transmit through the Activation of Your Fascia get stopped short when they reach Your Cingulate Cortex and interact with Your Thought Patterns, both conscious and subconscious. This means all the information that Your Fascia pulled together from every aspect of Your Body, Brain included, doesn’t get processed and therefore doesn’t get lived out. In literal terms the sensations have to get stored somewhere else.
The Information from Your Fascia is communicating the current level of Homeostasis and what next steps are best to maintain or right Homeostasis. When Your Emotions aren’t expressed or allowed to be fully experienced a disconnect from Your Body occurs, You stop listening to Your Fascia, retract to the Left Hemisphere of Your Brain, and allow Imbalance to steadily manifest as Compensation mechanisms kick into high gear and do their best to mop up the mess.
Because the Emotion and Experience generate Imbalance, and the Imbalance is disregarded the Emotion and Experience get categorized as a Threat, filed in Your Amygdala and Hippocampus as a memory for future reference.
As You have learned, the job of Your Amygdala and Hippocampus is to scan Your Inner and Outer World to match Your feelings, perceptions and observations to Your memories. If a memory of experiencing an Emotion like sadness is considered a Threat, everytime that emotion is felt or anything similar to that memory is recognized it’s picked up and transduced by Your Fascia. Simultaneously it cues Your Brain and reinforces the Memory. If the Memory isn’t acknowledged and nurtured into expression the appropriate Fascial Lines and the Systems they are associated with are activated. This triggers another round of compensatory actions and behaviors as Your Fascia contracts against Your Body’s innate desires.
Over time this leads to chronic subconscious Fascial engagement, knitting the Fascial Fabric into adhesions, depleting Your Neurotransmitters and Hormones and driving imbalance further as the repressed Emotion and its associated Memory sew their way into the construct of Your Form, slowly robbing You of the diversity of Experience and the Sensation of Singularity.
This is what causes You to steadily and progressively Loop Down at an Exponential Rate.
WHEN YOU’RE NOT STUCK
In connecting to the pulling and “slacking” of not only Your Organs but every other tissue within Your Fascial Fibers a Fresh Space blossoms forth opening up a new Pathway to Explore. Your Body is then able to move itself into the correct position for physical, physiological and biochemical processing of the emotional experience by naturally finding balance with the new and incoming stimuli. This, in logical terms, is what it means to be connected to Yourself.
So long as You are connected, internally and externally, to the Moment You are experiencing Your Awareness is maintained and this cycle remains balanced. Updates from Your Fascia are Fluid, Consistent and Experientially Informative as they guide You on the best decisions to make.
As each decision is the right one, or guides You with feedback towards the right one, Balance progressively becomes more stable. Greater stability requires no need for compensation mechanisms and inefficient backup plans, physiologically, emotionally, cognitively or otherwise. The Energy You then put in is built into a Foundational Framework that is sound meaning You no longer lose it to putting out the fires that are products of a maladapted equilibrium. Instead it optimizes an Equilibrium that You have culturally and evolutionarily adapted to.
This Process, emotionally, is Looping Up.
FASCIA AND THOUGHT
So what is the Central Switch that dictates whether we Loop Up or Loop Down?
What is the key activator that determines whether we synchronize, coming together and transcending as a whole or we fall into a conglomerate of interrelated working parts distinctly separate but somehow still functional?
This is the difference between Top-Down and Bottom-Up Processing, the difference between using Your Brain as an Operating system or a User Interface.
Before we start here’s a brief overview, You might want to come back to it later:
- Thought Patterns and How You think stems from the current state of Your Body.
- Your Body state isbased on WHAT You Feel in Your current environment.
- WHAT You feel is based on What Your Fascia Extero- and Interocepts.
- How you feel (whether an emotion feels good or bad) comes from the current state of connection to Your Body.
- In other words HOW You feel is based on how connected You are to the “WHAT” of Your Fascia.
In this section We are going to map this whole thing out.
I’m also going to explain to You how Hedonism can override Homeostasis, How both Hedonic and Homeostatic pathways are best used in Harmony and How using them synchronized will lead You to the Best Life You could possibly Live.
Let’s get started.
FEELING 1ST, THOUGHT 2ND
Thought is the birth child of Feeling. The Order of Operations is Feeling First, Thought Second, this is also the motto for Bottom-Up Processing, otherwise known as the User Interface. In Bottom-Up Processing the right Hemisphere of the Brain is deeply immersed in the Interoceptive Processes of the body linking internal perceptions with all of Your external senses. In real time and real Space the right Hemisphere takes everything in to paint a richly, complex, dynamic, 3-D picture that cultivates coherence between our inner and outer worlds. It is curious and exploratory taking everything in as it looks for new and exciting patterns that nourish its relationship to the world. In other words the Right Hemisphere feels the Body, and it does so without judgment. This allows the Right Hemisphere to work together with the Fascia and harmonize the Body as one.
In Top-Down Processing the Left Hemisphere leads and Your Brain is used as an Operating System. The Left Hemisphere of the Brain only knows what it is given. It takes information from the right Hemisphere, deconstructing it and categorizing it into file folders and cabinets for efficient recall and the formulation of accurate predictions. Self-referring, the Left Hemisphere has no concept of time. It lives in the Past and Future, always looking for the meaning in experience and stringing stories together to explain them. It is amazing at imagination and has an immense power to envision and creare realities outside of the Present. But because the Left Hemisphere doesn’t have access to the senses in real time, when we act through Left Hemisphere Operation we end up detaching ourselves from our bodies living in an imaginary world of Ideas and Interpretations.
Metaphorically, the left Hemisphere lives inside the right Hemisphere, it is like the Mother to a Child. Because of it’s self-referring nature the Left Hemisphere can accidentally get lost within itself as it seeks to create connections, unintentionally ignoring the right Hemisphere. In contrast the Right Hemisphere is always taking the Left by the hand and introducing it to new and exciting things that are happening in the now, bringing it to the present so they can experience the World together.
However, just like a child can surprise their Mother the Left Hemisphere can surprise the Right. Through its own creative nature, the Left Hemisphere can eloquently paint a Fresh Canvas with Broad strokes and beautifully textured colors captivating the Right Hemisphere in a completely New World of Sensation. This happens during Imaginative Play and Visualization.
Between these concepts of User Interface and Operating System is where the switch between Looping Up and Looping Down lies.
Between the left and right Hemispheres of the Brain.
And the direction the switch is facing determines the way one of Your most influential neural networks on Behavior is utilized.
This network is called the Hedonic Pathway.
THE HEDONIC PATHWAY
The Hedonic Pathway is the Brains reward System used to promote certain behaviors that benefit survival by increasing the Signal-to-Noise Ratio The Hedonic Pathway’s main currency is Pleasure signals, with the most famed Neurotransmitter involved being dopamine.
While the Homeostatic Pathway is telling You about the current state of Balance in the Body and communicating what the right thing is to do, the Hedonic Pathway simply signals what would feel good right now given the current circumstances.
Depending on the degree of activation it is often described as feelings of bliss, delight and elation.
When contradicting Your Homeostatic Pathway it dawns it’s Red Cape, a fresh set of Horns and a pitchfork to become the Devil on Your Shoulder.
In contrast, the Sensation of feeling Your Body is through the Homeostatic Pathway, it is Right Hemisphere led and the portal to Whole-Body Integration. Even if the right decision isn’t releasing pleasure signals it will still make You feel good in the long run.
Even if the long run is only 30 seconds from now.
Your Hedonic Pathway evolved to motivate You through the Reward-Behavior Cycle. This would ensure Your survival in a world that was more or less unpredictable. For example if eating calorie-dense food didn’t taste good it’s unlikely You would eat it and the potential of starving to death would increase. So to ensure You ate high calorie foods the Hedonic Pathway adapted to reward Your Brain with Pleasure signals when these foods came across Your path.
The Hedonic Pathway can be actuated in two ways, In Synchrony or in Isolation.
Hedonic Override is the Pathway acting in Isolation. Because the Hedonic Pathway offers immediate Gratification it has the potential to override the Homeostatic pathways. Predominantly expressed in the Pre-Frontal Cortex, the Hedonic Pathway also shares stomping grounds with the Homeostatic Pathway through the Anterior Cingulate Cortex, Insula and Parabrachial Nucleus, giving it the power to dull down Homeostatic signals by turning them into “Noise”. When Hedonic Override occurs, Bottom-Up Processing comes second to Top-Down Operation, blurring the lines between what feels good through distraction and what truly feels good.
The True “Feel-Good” being the type of “Feel-good” that reverberates from the tip of Your toes to the top of Your Head.
“Truly feels good” is a combination of feeling good by actively working in the present to shape Your Homeostatic balance while simultaneously releasing pleasure signals from Your Hedonic Pathway in the process. This is the Pathway working in Synchrony. In this state Your Homeostatic Networks work in partnership with Your Hedonic Networks to forge a flourishing collaboration that gently weaves You into Utopic Joy.
HOW HEDONIC OVERRIDE GETS TRIGGERED
The last place sensation arrives prior to Behavioural Expression is the Mix and Match Master You learned about earlier, Your Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC). After receiving all the Interoceptive Input from Your Fascia and Insula Your ACC does a quick audit on the memory files in Your Amygdala and Hippocampus. If You’ve filed an Emotional Memory away as a threat and the experience You're currently having is a close enough Match it will trigger a Threat Response, aka Fight or Flight.
The memories that You previously repressed now have an opportunity to Express themselves. And they will take full opportunity as Your ACC opens up the doorway. Because the circumstance is uncomfortable and it feels like a threat Your Body will want to escape the situation to protect You. But because it’s coming from within You can’t.
This is where the threads that make up Your Fabric of Unity are open to change. Wearing thin enough to allow the fibers to separate as they start to spin and rearrange the design of Your Identity. Exposing small holes, corridors reveal themselves and You can either allow Your Reshaping to begin or slip into a Breach of Your Homeostatic Balance.
You’ve hit a turn point, actively integrated in a Switching Process.
If You let Your Balance get Breached You have committed to Hedonic Override.
In Hedonic Override Your Prefrontal Cortex recognizes You can’t remove Yourself from the Fight or Flight situation. It knows You can’t run and that You don’t feel safe enough to live out the memory so Your thought Processes offer up a compromise, a distraction in the form of Dopamine, a pleasure signal.
This is the scent of the Hedonic Pathway, already making You drool like the smell of Hot Apple Pie fresh out the Oven, cooling off in Crisp Autumn Air.
If You bite into it You create the foundation for coping mechanisms and addictive behavior.
Whatever distractions Your Thoughts offer will become the New Signals to pay attention to as the Fight or Flight Response gets reduced to Background Noise. This disconnects You from the feelings in Your Body as You filter them out from the Foreground. Migrating towards the left Hemisphere of Your Brain, your Right Hemisphere is slowly removed from the picture as Your Left Hemisphere takes over, ever persistent to find a solution for You but ungrounded and lost in it’s own world of Ideas and Interpretations.
Because the Left Hemisphere is self-referring it views Your Body as a working machine that needs to be controlled rather than a vibrant, living organism that is unified with Your Left Hemisphere as One. This desensitizes the data streaming in from Your Fascial Web leaving You numb like being injected with a global anesthetic.
The solutions offered up by Your Left Hemisphere are then delivered to the Body but the feedback that comes in return is never received, because the Right Hemisphere has become “noise”. Gradually, this triggers more Threat responses as Your Left Hemisphere does it’s best to fumble for answers in the dark. This perpetuates a cycle of Coping Mechanisms be it eating, denial, blaming, overthinking, working out, it doesn’t matter what it is, if it distracts You from Your feeling and makes You feel superficially good somehow it’s a coping mechanism and it’s delivered in the absence of Your Right Hemisphere.
This can be dangerous because You are hushing the signals of imbalance in Your Body (too many peroxidized fats, inadequate CO2 supply, a disrupted gut lining, overproliferation of pro-inflammatory cytokines) etc. As the Homeostatic stimuli coming in are unable to be recognized the information loses its value to the Left Hemisphere but not its importance to You as a whole.
Because the Whole of You takes precedence over the parts the Use it or Lose it principle is applied. If the systems generating that information aren’t being listened to then the sensitivity to those systems can be reduced to save energy and conserve the integrity of Your entirety. So Your Biotensegrity network reshapes to create a new Homeostatic equilibrium at the sacrifice of function.
Functional sacrifice can give a false sense of relief because the stimulus is now reduced in power. But the relief isn’t a result of advantageous adaptation, it's a maladaptive lull. Without alignment another system in Your Body is either overworked or undersupported. If their signal remains repressed because of Left Hemisphere Dominance and Hedonic Override the sacrificial cycle continues. Over time this causes the Left Hemisphere to reinforce its own thought patterns through the Hedonic Pathway changing the way You think, shaping You into the Product of Your Repressed Emotions and leading to lower levels of Happiness and Health in the long run.
ISOLATED HEDONISM IS A PRODUCT OF BEING UNCONSCIOUS
When the Left Hemisphere is at the helm Your Body is split into 2 parts, Your Left Hemisphere and the rest. While Your Left Hemisphere is curled over the Map Table deciphering Charts and Graphs for Navigation, the rest of the Body needs to have some sort of autonomous network that keeps the ship at least somewhat on course. Making sure that, at the very least, You don’t crash onto the rocks while the Left Hemisphere temporarily leaves the wheel.
Which may come to no surprise, happens more often than not.
This is unconscious processing and Your Body’s Autonomous Back-Up Program is called Your Default Mode Network.
Created out of Habitual Patterns the Default Mode Network is primarily composed of 3 parts of Your Brain. Your Pre-Frontal Cortex, Your Anterior Cingulate Cortex and Your Angular Gyrus.
During Default Mode:
Your Pre-Frontal Cortex (PFC): creates Decisions based on Past Events and Future Goals while still accounting for Your Safety, it does this in “sans a lå presence” (My French for “without the Present moment”). PFC engagement allows for Hedonic Signaling so Your Left Hemisphere can continue to try and keep You safe in the absence of understanding what You really need because it has inadvertently dumbed down the Right Hemisphere through it’s self-reference.
Your Cingulate Cortex: combines your memories of the past, goals about the future and involuntary stimuli coming in to mold your perception and execute habitual behavior. Your Cingulate Cortex shrinks to becoming a robot that produces routine behaviors from Plug and Play information influenced by Your Amygdala, and the Hedonic signals from your PFN.
Your Angular Gyrus: communicates across multiple areas of Your Brain to draw inferences from past experiences and assess consequential actions based on what worked in the past. It is the organizer pulling together Your Perception, Attention, Cognition and Potential Actions.
Together Your DMN works independently of external stimuli. It’s what allows You to daydream about Your up and Coming Base Jumping Trip at the Grand Canyon and still arrive on time to Your Neighbors Annual Princess Party for her niece at the YMCA.
It’s the Cruise Control that allows Your Left Hemisphere to continue it’s individual pursuits. The Default Mode Network allows just enough sensation to come through at an engageable intensity that lets You survive, an energy-conserving mechanism born out of our Ancestral Hunter-Gatherer Years and carried over into our Industrial Times. The stimulus is strong enough to be recognized, filtered and categorized but too weak to trigger the full experience.
It’s akin to separating all the white flowers you’ve seen from all the blue flowers You’ve seen. From The DMN’s perspective, it’s either white or blue, but in reality they all have different shades of color, petal arrangement, species, smell, bloom times and ecological connections each with their own individual significance and impact.
Because the Default Mode Network has Pre-Programmed Behavior already in place in the form of habits, it makes Left Hemisphere operation efficient because it can just drag and drop a response that is close enough to a good fit. This lets the Left Hemisphere continue to search for Meaning, but as You just learned this method will collapse on itself in the Long Run.
SO WHAT ELSE?
Now this is where it gets good. This is the real human Experience
This is what it actually means to Be Alive and open the Floodgates to continuously building Your Vitality.
This is the Lynch pin of this article.
The final puzzle piece to show You that You are one, sole entity, an integrated whole mediated by the Actions of Your Fascia.
A Singular organism has the power to infinitely interconnect with every other source of Energy on this Planet, dare I say the Universe.
In fact we’ve even get the Gray Matter to prove it, no other species has as much of it as we do and it’s not the Frontal Lobe.
Are You ready?
Here it is.
THE HEDONIC PATHWAY IN HARMONY
Before we get started there are 2 new Networks I need to Introduce.
The Central Executive Network & the Salience Network
As the name implies The Central Executive Network (CEN) controls Executive Function, the conscious self-control of behavior. It's the Stoplight on Your habitual nature. It is fully aware of Your current Goals and direction, Your Emotions, Sensations, Habitual impulses and any notable information You need to recall from the moment.
Like the pot of boiling potatoes You left on the stove before the delivery guy came and knocked on Your door to bring You Your brand New Stack of Supplements.
The Beautiful nature of Executive Function is it is in the Now, fully conscious of the moment, with the power to switch between Red and Green on Your Behavioral expressions. As new sensory stimuli come in, it has the ability to organize at lightning speeds and adjust information on the fly, putting it in the perfect position to pull the trigger on Task Initiation.
Think of it as an Executive on a Board or in a Business. It's the person who has the power to put plans and operations into effect. They know the business so well and what it’s been through, all they need are the new details to get the ball rolling.
Working in direct opposition to Your DMN, Executive Function was commonly thought to be isolated to the PFC. However, it actually stretches beyond the gray matter of Your Frontal Lobe and continues to span across Your Brain to include the same structures as Your Default Mode Network.
Except Your Cingulate Cortex is substituted for Your Corpus Callosum.
The link between both Hemispheres of Your Brain.
Your Corpus Callosum being the Key ingredient between a User Interface and an Operating System.
And there’s only one way it gets activated.
The Ultimate Switch.
And that Switch is Your Salience Network, The second network and the Keystone to Connection.
THE SALIENCE NETWORK SWITCH
As the name suggests Your Salience Network picks up Salient information. When something is salient it is important or noteworthy.
Your Salience Network is so important that You’ve developed a Neuronal Structure shared with only a handful of other Creatures. Cetaceans, Elephants and the Great Apes. With Your Brain having the highest in number of what are called Von Economo Neurons. Found between the Salience Network and the Pre-Frontal Cortex they act as Hyperdrives for enriched learning through Emotional Intelligence and Self-Awareness. This allows You to Fast-Forward Your learning as You engage with others and the outside world, intuitively sculpting Yourself into who we want to Be.
Detecting notable changes in sensory stimuli that stream in from your Fascia and accounting for changes in Your Emotional State, Your Salience Network leads from the right to act as a switch between Your Central Executive Network & Default Mode Network.
Remember the Switching Process from How Hedonic Override gets triggered?
The Turning Point?
This is it.
Your Salience Network is made up of none other than Your Insula and ACC. The Hub of all Your Sensory Information, the Reception Desk of Your Awareness, the Kickstarter to Action and Follow-through and the Observer of Your Embodied Expression.
The Centerpoint of Your Brain’s Pulse, Your Salience Network is ever smiling, perfectly present in the moment and as joyful as a puppy rolling in the Golden Glow of the Soft Spring Sun.
Delivering the goods to whomever cares to see.
LIVING CONSCIOUSLY AND YOUR SALIENT NETWORK.
Because Your Salient Network is intimately connected to Your Fascia it is actively involved in Conscious living. When You are Conscious and sensitized to the Now You are actively engaged with the language of Your Body. As You listen in You will begin to see that every moment is different, that nothing can ever be the same and therefore everything You experience has the potency to customize and refine Your desired behaviors towards Balance and the Soulful Symphony of Your Expression.
The act of listening is what allows Your Salience Network to activate Executive Function and remodel Your Default Mode. Facilitating a constant exchange between the two contrasting operational Organizations. When the Central Executive Network (CEN) has access to the DMN’s Maps it can begin to shuffle the deck and restructure the pieces as it sees best fit under the guidance of Your Fascia. Your Fascia confirms or denies every adjustment, reinforcing Self-Supportive Behavior and Intertwining You as One.
Enlaced, You move away from the Chain of Events where Your Fascia leads Your Right Hemisphere and Your Right Hemisphere leads Your Brain to an Interplay of all the working parts into a dynamic, singular entity, simultaneously working in tandem. Your Salience Network creating the passage between Executive Function and Default Mode, bringing them together as functional operation leads into expression. And Your Fascia, facilitating congruence, allows feedback and execution to become the same signal, knitting Your Inner and Outer Worlds into one smooth, indistinguishable experience.
EVERYTHING FEELS GOOD THROUGH THE SALIENT NETWORK
By bringing New and Unlived Sensations up to the surface Your Salience Network allows You to create New Behaviors in the Default Mode Network. No matter what feeling Your Salience Network presents to You, it is good if You remain connected to the moment.
Every emotion You feel is an expression, an expression of You and therefore it will feel good and right.
Just like fitting on the perfect sized toe-sock.
You know that pure feeling of pleasurable satisfaction when You Heel fits snugly in the heel cup and the rest of the sock wraps the contours of Your arch as each one of Your toes fits flawlessly into their own little cubicle?
That feeling.
Your Emotions, like roller coasters, are all enjoyable because they are all different experiences. Whether it’s a slow ride on the love boat, a Scary Ride through the Haunted House of Horror or the exhilarating triple loop corkscrew where only the bravest hold their hands above their head, each roller coaster has its uniqueness, with happiness coming from the contrast and Joy from the immersion.
In continuity, just like a rollercoaster, Your Emotion is only not enjoyable when it’s not safe. If the ride doesn’t have safety belts or speed control it’s not the best idea to step onto it.
It’s the same for Your Emotions. Emotions are always positive, but they only feel positive if You feel Safe and You only feel Safe if You're connected. Enjoyment and Love can be felt in any emotion so long as You are bound to Your Body. A process that automatically ties in Your Soul. Connection to Your Body is positivity. Disconnection is negativity, and it happens when You live in Your Head, more specifically Your Left Hemisphere. It is what makes emotions feel unsafe because of an experience You felt, for one reason or another, You couldn’t live out. The Problem comes from thinking, thought overriding feeling, Hedonic overriding Homeostatic.
As Your Salience Network (SN) brings Your attention to Your Homeostatic Pathway and You begin to listen in; Your CEN, Fascia and SN orchestrate the notes of Your Behavior into a smooth, sealed and silvery melody. Deeply connecting to Yourself, the Process becomes playful as You uncover buried seeds hidden in the soil. Nurturing them with fresh light and breathing in new life, they will spring forth with pulse and vigor, stretching and expanding as You ride Your own Wave of Growth.
Learning becomes intimate and exponential as You begin to observe the cyclical exchange. Releasing the Expressions of Your Inner World to explore, testing the Waters of Your Outer World. You then rhythmically absorb the Outside World’s Feedback like a sponge, before once again combining it with Your Inner World to make adjustments.
This internal listening act opens up the communication lines and lays out the canvas for experience, working in synchrony with Your Homeostatic and Hedonic Pathways to facilitate true learning and Expression. As Your Homeostatic leads and Your Fascia affirms decisions made by Your CEN, Your Hedonic Pathway becomes activated, sensing what is right and good through it’s communion with Your Fascial Web. This releases pleasure signals that no longer reside in the confines of Your Brain but Echo through the interstitial fabric of Your Body. Expanding in all directions, outwards and inwards, to fill every crack and crevice and sttrrreeeeettch out, tickling the Environment around You.
This is Your Hedonic Pathway in Harmony, feeling safe and at Home. Together, with all Your other Networks, listening and acting in the same motion. Organized, orchestrated and executed by Your Fascia. Cooperatively combining to provide a sound and supportive platform from which Your Soul can begin to Speak.
WHERE BIOTENSEGRITY WILL TAKE YOU
This Platform leads to the Ultimate End Goal, which, in good fashion, is really a process. Forever cycling in whatever direction You Choose.
Eudaimonia.
A state of Being that is Precipitated by the Space of Presence, Grounded by a Stabilized and Balanced Identity and Built by the Creational Expression of Flow.
Eudaimonia is something in motion, a Human Flourishing. Defined as the contented state of being happy, healthy and prosperous, Eudaimonia goes beyond emotion, it does not pass. It is not an experience, it is the experience, a Way of being and a Way of Living. Frictionless and Easy-Flowing it is when the Four-Dimensional puzzle of Life rotates around itself to gently slip into the perfect position with a soft and delicate click, similar to the pieces coming together In Iron Man's Discovery of Vibranium.
Under balanced circumstances we are naturally tuned to experience life through Love, Joy, Purpose, Learning and Service. Living Your Life through Purpose and Loving Yourself, Others and the Process through Your Purpose and You begin to cultivate a Life enriched with deep feelings of fulfillment and joy.
This is the germination of Eudaimonia, and its roots rest in three Foundational Pillars.
THE THREE FOUNDATIONAL PILLARS
Presence:
Eudaimonic happiness comes from conceptually and viscerally Knowing Yourself, Your Environment and the Others around You. An intimate relationship that can only be created by an experiential understanding. An act facilitated by Your Salience Network, Homeostatic Pathway and Executive Function.
A connection built through listening, Mindfulness, or Presence is the first step towards Eudaimonia.
Identity:
Evolving a stabilized Identity comes from the constant interplay between the CEN and DMN as the Salience network facilitates the reshaping of Your Default Mode Network, materializing a supportive sense of identity.
Overlapping a meta-stabilized sense of Self with Pleasure signals from Optimized Hedonic afferent pathways are the Grounds for Eudaimonia’s upbringing, where it can begin to turn, fold and spiral, graciously building upon its nature in kind-hearted fashion as it sculpts itself into form.
Flow:
A Pure and Total immersion in an activity, with complete Emotional, Physical and Cognitive Congruence. Flow is where action becomes spontaneous and You no longer see Yourself as separate from the task You are performing. https://www.amazon.com/Flow-Classic-Achieve-Happiness-Introduction/dp/0712657592
In other words Your Homeostatic and Hedonic Pathways simultaneously being activated through the action of Your Salience Network and CEN. Experiencing learning and expression at the same time, stimulating feelings of Grounded Expansion. The Act of Flow is the Conveyor belt of Materials, a Supply chain of Resources for Your Eudaimonic Grounds.
Are You Noticing a trend?
The three famed Pillars of what it means to feel good all seem to link together, all of them soundly grounded in what it means to be fully connected to Yourself.
All sharing the same Pathways, Processes and Networks.
All of whose perpetual cycling is fostered by Your Fascia.
Mathematically it’ll make more sense.
Fascia = Presence, Flow and Identity = Eudaimonia = Your Ultimate Life
Fascia = Presence, Flow and Identity = Eudaimonia = Your Ultimate Life
Fascia = Your Ultimate Life
Equation Simplified.
SUMMARY
Now I know what You’re thinking. It sounds as if it’s Brain led.
As if the Brain is guiding the process, not the Fascia.
In truth they are running in tandem. Your Fascia is the Experience. It’s what You Feel and Do, It’s full of Color, Sound and Sensation. Your Brain Activity, while incredibly important, is a blip in the picture. It pulls in the information at an incredible rate and shoots out a response as quick as it’s received and Your Fascia reciprocates in return.
However the Process is Fascia led.
It looks like this.
Fascia Feeling → Brain → Behavior change→ Fascia Feeling —> Brain → Behavior change
With everything happening so fast that the Feeling in the Fascia is as close to immediate as it gets, creating a continuous, fluid transition of sense.
It’s Fascia-led because Your Fascia knows what the Perfect balance is.
Eventually it does become One, no Order just Action, everything happening together, at the same time and in the same place.
But before You get there it’s easier to view it as is.
This is what it means to get out of our own way.
When You get out of Your own way You actually step into Yourself.
Your Fascia knows something Your Brain doesn’t. Your Fascia knows the homeostatic balance. Untangling the language is Your brain guessing and listening until Your Fascia says it’s getting it right.
This is the guesswork of figuring out what balance and imbalance is. It’s a language that doesn’t use words, images, visualizations or symbols.
It is sensational only.
It is Fascia Led.
This is what Knowing is. It’s the blending of Thought and Feeling into its own unique category.
If You look at Your insula and Cingulate Cortex they are right in between the 2 hemispheres, dead center of Your Brain, Your Insula connecting all 4 lobes and Your Cingulate Cortex wrapping Your Corpus Callosum.
Listening and strengthening Your Fascia integrates the Brain within itself by enhanced connection and neural activity along these 3 areas, Your Insula, Cingulate Cortex and Corpus Callosum. Inherently connecting Your Brain with Your Body by bringing all the pieces together to create a whole so You can access and utilize Your entire Nervous System.
Embedded in the Fascial Web, Your Nervous and Vascular System communicate with the tension network of Your Fascia. The pull of Biotensegrity detailing to Your Body as a whole, thoughts, feelings and all, whether You are in balance or not.
Your Nervous and Vascular Systems then make adjustments and through Feedback from Your Fascia continue to fine-tune and tweak their way to perfection.
The Whole Process is Fascia Led.
This is why learning to understand Your Fascia and how to use it is so powerful. It inherently knows everything that is best for any situation You are in.
Where most people find the obstacle is that they don’t know how to communicate with it.
Falling into Flow with the language of the Fascia gives You unlimited, VIP access to the infinite potential of Your Body and ingress to the ever-expanding, generative, power of the energy that surrounds You.
It is what lets Your Soul work in partnership with Your Body to facilitate Conscious Expression.
This is where the Mind moves out of the Left Hemisphere and into Your Being.
This is what Gut Feelings are. Or the feeling when You are listening to Your Heart. It is the feeling within the Fascia that guides Your decision making and it can be sensitized to a far greater degree than what is currently available to You.
This is the Real World and the Feelings that come along with it.
And it is all Fascia Led.
