What is holding you upright? You might think it’s your bones, but what if I told you that the answer is way more interesting and it comes down to what’s called tensegrity?
I’m Savannah Alalia, and welcome to the latest episode of High Functioning Human Podcast, where you get to connect with yourself as a high functioning human.
Okay, so what on earth is tensegrity? This might be a completely new word for you. It’s one I particularly enjoy because it’s a term combining two words, tension and integrity, and I love the dual meaning you can take here. Tensegrity is a way of thinking about the balance of forces that keep your body held upright and in place. Your bones and your organs are less stacked on top of each other and more floating in a network of your soft tissues.
So if your bones are floating, what keeps them in place? What keeps you upright when you’re walking around? Well, no surprises here. It is actually about your fascia that provides that structure for your whole network. And it can do this because of this marvelous ability to both hold and to give, to support and stretch where it’s needed. Your posture emerges from how evenly your fascia shares the load, how evenly it can distribute the push and the pull forces across your body.
So, think about a puppet being held by a string. When all the strings are equal, everything is nice and even, and the puppet can move really easily. But what happens if you pull down on one leg? Or one of the strings gets knotted, or worse, it gets cut? So what happens to the other side of the puppet? Can it still stand? Can it walk around? Well, you’re a bit like a puppet, too, except all of your strings are held inside your body and they’re made up of your fascia. So when your fascia gets stuck or has an adhesion on one side of the body, this can pull the entire fascial sheet into a distorted position where you’re like a puppet with tangled strings and movement gets restricted.
And, yes, things start to look a little bit strange both in your face and in your body.
In the latest podcast, we spoke about braces, and I hinted that there would be a connection between your tongue and your posture. I wonder if you’re starting to see what that might be yet. Let’s go back to my story. So when I first started speaking with experts about getting Invisalign, they told me I needed to sever my tongue tie before starting the process. This process is very normalised, both in babies and in adults. And dentists also occasionally sever the frenulums between the lips and the gums. But because I feel a strong connection between the mouth tongue and that full body tensegrity that we’re talking about today, say I knew that cutting any part of this central line could potentially disrupt balance throughout my entire body. And it was a serious last resort situation.
So let me explain. I’m hypermobile, which means that my fascia requires extra attention to maintain alignment. And as I mentioned in the last episode, my main reason for getting braces went way beyond straight teeth. It was because my hips were constantly going out following my sacrum injury, leading to multiple migraines a week. If I then went and cut my tongue tie, I felt I would be at risk of affecting my sphenoid and my collarbones and my diaphragms, and that could make my hips even worse. So that felt completely counterintuitive to my goal.
So I said no to the procedure. But I did end up getting Invisalign treatment. So what did I do instead of cutting my tongue tie to make that possible? While exercises like tongue caves and tongue strengthening can retrain the tongue to hold its correct position, opening space in the mouth and allowing fascia to release naturally, I also use the Face Stick daily to support the release of the fascia around the mouth, as well as mobilising techniques within the mouth to stimulate nerves to release. Now these are all practices that you can learn in my Your Face Symmetry 2 program, which follows on from Your Face Symmetry 1. If you’re really interested in how your facial fascia affects your entire body, I’d love to see you in the programs.
This is my personal experience and thoughts around braces, but I do think it’s important to think about the bigger picture when it comes to these small parts of your body. Think what purpose do they serve? When you think about the tensegrity in your body, the balance between push and pull, cutting a piece of yourself to release tension, you can start to see where my hesitancy came from and why I made the decision that I did.
This is all a lot to think about, as you may have only ever thought about your teeth and your tongue as simply existing inside of your mouth. And this might be the first time that you’re considering what happens in your mouth has a consequence and impact throughout the rest of your body. If you’re someone who has had a tongue tie cut or a similar procedure that has affected the movement of your fascia, something that has led to a lot of scar tissue, say, understanding this idea of tensegrity can be a big part of thinking about how to strengthen the muscles and open the fascia to support continued mobility and connection. This kind of thinking is called integrative and it’s about understanding the importance of your fascial network.
If everything is connected, it’s a lot easier to understand how an injury at one end of your body can travel through the fascial line to show up in another area. That’s the basic understanding behind my Face Map and my YFS Programs.
This has been a biggie today and well done for listening. I really love that you’re taking the time to think about how supporting your fascia is really one of the most important things that you can do as you age and as you take charge of your own strings.
Remember, trust your instincts, follow your intuition, because the world needs your voice and the magic that it brings to us all.
Jump on my mailing list to stay reminded and connected with your intuition. Plus some special things that I only share in email.
As always, I remain a cheerleader for your inner self-worth,
One Response
Absolutely fascinating!!!