Yoga & Fascia Release | Sydney Zwicker

Gina Clingerman (00:00) I was reading on your website, like I just devoured everything on there. And there was one place where you wrote the fascial network is highly intelligent. And, ⁓ you wrote it's a mycelial network of the body. I, a, I just love that phrase because I also in a different, in the different parts of my life, I worked with plants and mycelium is just like the most interesting thing. We wouldn't be here if we didn't have mycelium, like the whole world wouldn't exist. but I loved comparing the fascial network to that mycelial network. And, you continue. on to say like it connects bone to breath, muscle to psyche, blood to memory, emotion to posture, the nervous system to the soul. And I was wondering if you could maybe just give our listeners a little like condensed version of like, what is the fascial network? Why is it like a mycelial network? And like, how do you think it works that, you know, like muscle to psyche? you know, blood to memory. Like those are really big connections and I 100 % agree with that. But I'm just wondering if you could maybe elucidate that for our listeners. Sydney Zwicker (01:11) Yeah, totally. There I think are many different schools of fascia thought, especially in the last decade, I'd say, or two decades where ⁓ in the world of the body, we're starting to give more attention to what is fascia. How does it work instead of just this other thing that surrounds muscles or the white stuff? Anyone who has no idea what fascia is, if you think the metaphor people often use is like when you remove the skin on a chicken drumstick and you see that white stuff. ⁓ That's kind of what fascia is. And the way that I am more in the school of fascia is everything, and then there's other things. ⁓ And that idea that fascia not only encompasses around muscle tissues and creates cells, it is our bones, in fact, that all of our, most of our tissue is some form of fascial connection. And in that, it really holds so much in our nervous system by being our nervous system, the physical structure to it. So myelinated nerves are covered in fascia. And this idea of the really magic of this tissue and this part of our organism is that it's what's called piezoelectric. And so there are electric currents that travel along our fascia. And so in that, similar to if you think of how the messages travel in a mycelium network, right? How do trees talk to each other? Our systems, all of our systems are doing that through fascia because fascia is the key that connects them all, right? Our vasculature has fascial network to it. Our lymph has fascial network to it. Our endocrine system has that to it. And so if we think of that thread that kind of penetrates everything and the visualization of the mycelium network I think is really beautiful because when you look at dirt, we think it's empty and yet it's so full of aliveness. ⁓ And we know very little about fascia and so much about fascia and really getting to be with that energy of what happens there and... One of the powerful things when you do fascial-based body work and start to really look at fascia in more of this ⁓ holistic sense is we notice how when fascial unwinds happen, so when tissue shifts shape, ⁓ that the energy and that electricity that's stuck in there is often the body guarding from an emotional charge. And if we think of emotions as energy and motion, that connection there too. ⁓ how a fascial shift can change our heartbeat. It can change the cranial rhythm. It can change ⁓ our mental state. You know, there are studies going on about different types of depression and mental illness about fascial adhesions actually in the brain. And this idea that the difference between depression and schizophrenia is just where that adhesion is on the brain and the pressure that ⁓ it incites by being stuck there. And so there's... Brendon Orr (04:01) Hmm. Sydney Zwicker (04:02) so much to get to be with in fascia as this really multifaceted ⁓ part of our system, of our aliveness, and to connect with it both as physiology but also as spirituality and in that getting to really see the woven pieces of it's not just mind, body, spirit, but it's all one network, one tapestry, and we're just, to understand the wholeness, we have to take it into pieces versus it being pieces that we put together to find wholeness, if that makes sense? Gina Clingerman (04:27) Hmm. Brendon Orr (04:31) Hmm. Gina Clingerman (04:32) Yeah. Brendon Orr (04:32) Yeah. And it's also a really fun word to say, right? Fascia. Sydney Zwicker (04:35) Yeah. Yeah. Gina Clingerman (04:36) You