Amrita 6: Asana through the ages - Magazine - Page 78
Pull Yourself Together
This complex multi-stability of tension-compression can be modelled
out of struts and string in what we’ve
come to see popularised in body culture as tensegrity, in particular, the socalled tensegrity icosahedron as pictured. This model illustrates the closed
kinematic chain relationships in flux
around an equilibrium.(2) The living human body is a biotensegrity, a living
tensegrity in motion.
Here are 5 ways for yogis to recognise the intrinsic “pulled-togetherness”
of our tissues:
Useful stiffness – There’s no question,
the hot topic of hypermobility is impossible to ignore. For decades, yoga
garnered a pop-culture reputation as
basically just fancy stretching, and
stretch we did, often to the detriment
of long-term health outcomes. Learning to consciously stiffen around lax
joints has become just as important as
the opening practices we learn to gain
mobility in asana. This intentional stiffening is not the result of individual
muscles tightening, but a sense of harnessing and intensifying the cellular
pre-stress, or pre-tension, already at
work within the facial matrix.
Auxetic nature of breathing – This
one is so fundamental to you as a yogi,
you’ll get it right away. When we
breathe in, we don’t just get longer. We
expand. Biologic tissue is said to be auxetic (having a negative Poisson’s ratio), which means when we extend in any
direction there is an associated global expansion. Think of
how when you pull apart your chewing gum, for example; it
gets thinner and stringier the more you pull on it. The body,
in contrast, expands in all directions when we lengthen with
the breath.
Wound gaping – Sorry not sorry for this one! Have you ever
been on the unfortunate receiving end of a scrape or gouge?
Perhaps you have, like me, witnessed one of your kids’ burst
knees or elbows. You’ll notice, with no small amount of horror, how the wound gapes or pulls open from itself under the
tension of the tissue. That gaping effect arises because the
tissues are pre-tensioned!
Biologic coupling – This one is all about how our anatomical systems are interconnected in a nonlinear way, all seated
in the fascial matrix that is self-governed by means of closed
kinematic chains (CKCs). In the fascial locomotor system, we
experience these CKCs in a hierarchy of rotational joint motion or spirals. You’ll feel this inter-system connectedness in
how your mood changes after you’ve practised, the feltsense of heart rate variability associated with pranayama is a
great example. (3)
As we greet the ground – And we spiral back to the first
point, the concept of useful stiffness and spirality are the hallmarks of a pre-tensioned biologic form. We can step quietly
or bound with dynamic jumping back and forth on the mat.
In yoga, we turn the hands into a second set of feet, and we
learn with due care and instruction on how to make a foundation out of the head, neck, and even the elbows! Such an
array of various greetings in all manner of inversion relative to
the ground would never be possible for a continuous compression structure.
“There are many ways to teach connectedness. In this era of deep
division and polarity, our anatomy for yoga conversation now has
the language to teach connection from a structural perspective”.
76 AMRITA Issue 6 / Spring 2021
