Listen to Your Fascia: Unwinding the Body as a Resonant Wave

by Elizabeth Dare-Andes

There is a wonderful (and long out of print) children’s book about Lake Titicaca called Lakes are Holding Places for Water. I’ve always loved this image of being a holding place and a home for life’s waters. Thought to be over a million years old, Titicaca is an ancient lake. I like to imagine the nested memories she holds swirling in her flows and settling into the fleshy layers of her sediment.

Have you ever noticed how lakes and other bodies of water are unique? They have their own soundscapes that harmonize in a bubble of biophonic bliss with the natural soundscapes of the other organisms who share their ecosystem, including us. After all, we are all bodies of water oscillating in a resonant universe and all of us have our own signature wave.

In a coral reef’s body, this wave emerges from a signature sound to create and maintain a healthy environment of mutuality and symbiosis with all the other signature waves of crustaceans and fish(1.)
In human bodies, our own internal biophony(2) is collectively produced by all of our organs, fluids and myofascial tissues arising from and entrained to our signature heart wave. With the 250 million sensory neurons in our fascial web, you could think of our fascia as a sonic-acoustic sensor hearing us into harmony through waves of sensation.

Welcome to a reality based on vibration. In this reality, we’ve loosened our view of the independent self and embraced the long-story of our souls as part of a much larger, interconnected and evolving story of life.

Sound as a Healing Modality
Spend a few minutes with Dr. Google and you can find a lot of information about the promise of sound as the healing modality of the future. While all sorts of new sonic technologies, ancient singing bowls, gong baths, tuning forks and Solfeggio frequencies open a path for new modalities, let’s not overlook the power of the human voice, or the voice of any other living creature. There is magic in the way living sound makes us more sensorially alive.

Unwinding the Resonant Body
When unwinding as a self-guided movement practice begins with breath and sound, the sound penetrates our locked tissue and becomes a wave that circulates through our tissue. It activates sensation quite effectively (very helpful for moving through layers of body armoring ) and elicits a broader range of sensory participation. Sound activates our sensory awareness and we merge into a stream, being swirled into new territories, releasing held patterns and becoming an open system.

We can look at the human body, the environment and all inhabitants of it, as musical instruments. Spirals of sound and vibrating particles emanate outward like waves from a stone dropped into water, effecting the flow of fluids, the organization of molecules and the tone of the whole organism. This is as true for Lake Titicaca as it is for us. Vibrating electromagnetic fields and molecules self-organize into geometric patterns like those seen in cymatic(3) experiments. They are like packets of ‘living information’ experienced and decoded via our somato-sensory perception.

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References:

(1) Steve Simpson TED talk: How ocean noise destroys marine ecosystems.

(2) Biophony definition courtesy of Wiktionary: (ecology) The cumulative non-human sound produced by living organisms in a given biome.

(3) Cymatic definition source as above:

1. (physics) Of or pertaining to cymatics.
2. Describing any secondary effect of sound or similar vibrations.