Reliving Chronic Pain with Cannabis, Breath and Movement
What Is Fascia?
Fascia is the largest organ in your body. It is an intricate web of collagen that surrounds every organ, muscle, bone, and nerve. This tissue is both thick and thin, strong, elastic and flexible which allows our bones and muscles to rest while it does all the work. Without it, we would dissolve in a pile of bones.
Have you removed the skin of a chicken breast? That thin, silvery sheath is fascia. It is made up of special cells known as fibroblasts, which continually repair the collagen network in which they reside, similar to how a spider continually repairs its web. Your fascia is adapting to the needs of your body in real time.
This web of interconnected tissue responds to our nervous system, our immune system, and our endocannabinoid system. It relays messages faster than your conscious mind so you can respond to a serious threat in a millisecond. The fight or flight response is hard wired into your fascia, luckily, so is your “rest and digest” system.
Every trauma, every injury, every threat is stored in your fascia. Your body responds by creating a dysfunctional pattern of movement as a result of the trauma. When injured, fascia can exert over 2,000 pounds of pressure and pain per square inch of tissue. This results in limitations in the range of movement of the fascia and you feel pain, tightness, pinching, throbbing, burning, and fatigue.
Thankfully, your body has the means to help balance all this dysfunction. To repair your fascia, it’s necessary to use heat, slow movement, long exhales, and the wisdom of cannabis. Your body wants to heal and it wants to move easily with more freedom and less pain.
Come and explore this amazing web of life beneath your skin.
This video is full of great information about how emotions and trauma are stored in our fascia. Learn how releasing trapped emotions can change the energetic frequency of your tissue which allows it to align with the frequency of LOVE.
This is an amazing video of how our fascia looks under the skin! It is a whopping 28:02 which will satisfy any anatomy geek. (FULL DISCLOSURE! THIS IS A VIDEO OF LIVING HUMAN ANATOMY. NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH.)
If that’s a bit much for you, here are a few of my favorite segments:
5:30-5:50: fascia as it moves under your skin
5:48-6:55: a computer model of how fascia glides and moves in relation to other structures
10:41-17:50: here we see so many beautiful moments of moving fascia
18:04-18:40: how non-linear mathematics, chaos theory and tensegrity explain fascia
18:40-19:52: tensegrity and the architecture of R. Buckminister Fuller
20:00-20:36: sacred geometry in the body and nature
If you prefer to learn about fascia without the real life view of connective tissue, Tom Myers is a leader in understanding fascia. In this video he breaks down the multiple functions using common household items.
