Feeling biotensegrity

by Susan Lowell de Solorzano

There’s an old story…

Two young fish are swimming together and an older fish swims by and says, “Good morning kiddos! How’s the water today?”

…and swims on.

The young fish look at each other quizzically and one asks the other, “What’s water?”

For most of us, the cultural context for our experience of our own bodies, the water we don’t even know we are swimming in, is a carpentered environment in which our bodies are regarded as machines made of parts constructed from inert materials with linear behaviors, and in which many assumptions about the movement of our bodies comes from taking apart the dead.

Biotensegrity offers us a radically different framework, but, especially if someone doesn’t have a tensegrity model, how can we learn to feel our biotensegral nature? Steve Levin has a classic activity for this:

Pull on your ear lobe. 

What do you notice?

At least generally speaking, when we first pull it is readily compliant, no matter what direction you take it in. But then, perhaps almost suddenly, it reaches a limit.

This behavior is nonlinear, in that it goes from highly compliant to noncompliant in a manner that isn’t stepwise. 

Pull on your ear lobe again. Then let go suddenly. Notice it doesn’t snap back like a rubber band. Again, the behavior is nonlinear.

Nonlinear behaviors are quite common in biology. This is why organisms are considered to be soft matter. Tensegrities also exhibit nonlinear behaviors.

I got into biotensegrity as a way to better understand T’ai Chi Ch’uan, which has a concept called, “right touch.” This very light touch is used for all of the partner work we do, all of the pushing in push hands. And, in order to learn right touch, you have to  experience it.

Now, it’s easy to find someone who will shove you and push you off balance and call it a T’ai Chi push. Finding someone who can pop you up into the air and send you flying into a wall with a push you can scarcely feel, is rare. 

With biotensegrity, we work with tensegrity models (and others), to learn a kind of right touch. This is because the water we’re swimming in gives us no clue about the behaviors a tensegrity has in store for us.

To echo Mark Twain’s sentiment that there are things one learns when trying to carry a cat by the tail that would be hard to learn any other way, likewise there are things one learns when building a tensegrity, that are much harder to learn any other way. 

Fortunately, biotensegrity is also the water we are swimming in, in our own bodies, and all of us are in touch with living tensegral organisms every day. Some of these are human, but also we have contact with animals, bugs, the plants we have in our homes and gardens, and the vegetables we cook with. We can learn something from all of them.

---

A fuller version of this article appears in the Members’ Area. For more information on membership of The Fascia Hub, click here.