Amrita 6: Asana through the ages - Magazine - Page 76
Pull
yourself
together
Five ways biotensegrity blooms within us
HAVE YOU EVER wondered what really holds the body together? Some might say it is the ligaments, or perhaps the skin. In
yoga, we might attribute the inward pull to prana vayu.
The question of what actually holds us together in space
as biologic form isn’t just an existential or theoretical one. It’s
the core of the new paradigm in practice! As a movement
teacher, a practitioner of yoga, and a human, having a body is
to experience pre-tension, what protagonists of the paradigm
call biotensegrity.(1) Learning to teach and practise yoga in this
new paradigm is a call to connectedness and one that we can
feel equally in our hearts, bones, behaviour and beyond.
So, what is pre-tension and how does it work? It sounds
more technical than it is! The concept is one that those with
an engineering background might be more familiar with, but
pre-tension is so fundamental to our bodies that it might take
you a minute to step back and see the obvious. ‘Pre’ means
that it has always been the case. And by ‘tension’, in a biological context, we’re dealing with the force that pulls inward.
The new paradigm in biology (called biotensegrity in certain circles), is recognising that this drawing together of tissue
around regions of various densities gives rise to tension-compression structures. The tensional force arises from the balance of interconnected cytoskeletal elements in dynamic arrangement within their secretions: the Extracellular Matrix
(ECM), aka the fascia.
74 AMRITA Issue 6 / Spring 2021
