Beyond Parts: A Biotensegrity Lens for Movement Professionals

by Chris Morita Clancy and Bruna Petito

Fascia is the continuous, living tissue that shapes us, transmits forces and organizes our movement. It is essential to our wholeness. We can feel this when we turn our attention inward to what’s going on when we move.

Try picking up a pen that is just out of reach. Leaning forward, we might notice our weight shifting, our body spiralling, our arm elongating. We are loading and winding our own inner springs. Once we grasp the pen, we can release and effortlessly return to our original position. Our body naturally self-adapts as we bridge the distance without conscious thought.

As movement professionals, we know our clients naturally move as an integrated whole. Yet it can be challenging to shift away from the parts-based framework we were taught. Instructing clients to “engage the core,” we neglect to zoom out to the body as a whole. Prompting a client, “tighten your glutes,” we may forget to invite them to notice corresponding movements in their feet, face or elsewhere.

Modern western culture teaches us to see our bodies as buildings or machines. We learn to think of joints as hinges and bones as levers that are moved by muscles. We learn that the spine is a column that must be reinforced by the core in order to stay safe and pain free. These models are contrary to a holistic perspective, and can easily colour our thoughts, words and actions.

We need an updated lens that invites curiosity, a different way of seeing, and new possibilities.

Biotensegrity gives us just that. It is an emerging science that uses tensegrity and other models to create a radically different framework for our bodies and all of biology, from viruses to vertebrates. It helps us understand the human body as an integrated, self-stabilizing, responsive whole that constantly adapts and reconfigures as needed. Biotensegrity helps us understand not just the what of structure, but the how of movement.

We can get a sense of this by holding and playing with a tensegrity icosahedron. The struts and string are connected in a pattern of loops, diamonds and triangles that create volume even though the struts don’t touch. When we push or pull on it, the diamonds open and close like butterfly wings, the triangles spiral around, and the whole assembly condenses or expands in all directions. It has an almost lifelike feel that can change the way we understand movement possibilities.

For example, there was a woman who seemed physically detached as she started a teacher training. But when she held a tensegrity in her hands, she was completely absorbed by its oscillating motion. Gently and rhythmically she began pressing and releasing, pressing and releasing. “Like my heart” she said. “Like my lungs.”

Over the course of the training, she discovered that her whole body resonated with her inhale and exhale, right out to the surface of her skin. She noticed places in her body that were less responsive and found that often, just by watching, things would shift. Areas of holding would release and fall into the rhythm of her breath. By the end of the training, she moved with more confidence and presence. She later said she had stopped trying to “fix” her posture, and instead, she was listening to her body “from inside”. The background tension she had carried for years began to ease. She wasn’t controlling her body anymore, she was experiencing it and trusting it.

Her experience points to a bigger question: what if we approached our work through the lens of biotensegrity? Would we find ourselves focusing on the relationship between parts of the body rather than the parts themselves? Could we find new tools that help our clients naturally move as an integrated system?

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References

Adstrum, S., Hedley, G., Schleip, R., Stecco, C., & Yucesoy, C. A. (2017). Defining the fascial system. Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies, 21(1), 173-177.

Scarr, G., Blyum, L., Levin, S. M., & Lowell de Solórzano, S. (2022). Moving beyond Vesalius: Why anatomy needs a mapping update. Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies, 31, 60-67.

Scarr, G., Blyum, L., Levin, S. M., & Lowell de Solórzano, S. (2025). Biotensegrity is the super-stability hypothesis for biology. Biosystems, 256, 105569. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biosystems.2025.105569

Levin, S. M., & Martin, D. C. (2012). Biotensegrity: The mechanics of fascia. In Fascia: The Tensional Network of the Human Body (pp. 137-142). Churchill Livingstone.