The Paradigm Shift and the Body: Meaningful Change Happens From Within

The Paradigm Shift and the Body: Meaningful Change Happens From Within.

I am in a pretty unusual position. I am a healer, historian and a somatic social theorist with an anatomically specific focus on the role that the body plays in psychology, culture and history. I did my undergraduate work at Columbia and doctoral research at UCLA in East Asian Studies, but concluded that I couldn’t get anywhere with the tools at hand and did not write my dissertation. Basically, as an academic, I was stuck in my own big head and a bunch of obscure texts, where what I needed was to find myself and the truth.

Becoming a healer was a fundamental shift in my perspective. I have been a bodyworker for the last 10 years, a deep tissue massage therapist, and have also been doing a deep theoretical dive into the fascia revolution. To extend the metaphor even further, my focus is on the specific myofascial synergy of the deep core, our axial postural and interoceptive core.

Fascia is our connective tissue matrix and has been excluded from consideration throughout modern history, literally speaking, because these membranes had to be removed in dissections in order to expose the muscles and bones and organs underneath. It has been and still is the practice to discard the connective tissue that makes us who we are. Fascia was not only hidden from sight in this way, it was hidden from our own interoceptive awareness and from theoretical consideration. The connective tissue is what makes an integrated whole out of the sum of the many parts. We have studied the parts but are only just beginning to perceive the highly innervated connective tissue matrix that make us into a functioning, perceiving whole.

The omission of fascia from our anatomical self image is telling both metaphorically and somatically. This is our connective tissue matrix. It is not just metaphorical to say that it is what connects us and makes us into the whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. This self aware whole is who we really are and this insight is the most important philosophical breakthrough, I believe, in the last 600 years. It. Is the culmination of the somatic tradition of natural philosophy. It is reflected in the integrative or synergistic foundations of complexity theory, ecological thinking, and the principles of democratic community building. Our intrinsic biomechanical and neurological inner connectivity is inseparable from all other human connectivities, synergies, and collaborations we hope to achieve.

Fascia is one of the greatest and earliest victims of the reductionism and objectification of the modern analytical methodology. The fascia revolution, or its rediscovery as our connective tissue matrix, is having tremendous impact in a variety of fields; it fundamentally changes how we understand the relationship of the mind and the body. It is for this reason perhaps the single greatest scientific blockbuster and lies at the heart of the current civilization level paradigm shift. Yet few discuss its social, historical and even economic relevance. We cannot understand ourselves without understanding the role that is played by our connective tissue matrix.

I am a manual therapist, but more than that, I am a deeply committed social theorist— a somatic social theorist, and in that occupy an unusual position because of my knowledge of both realms, the body and society. I am interested in how the body informs our behavior, and how bodily processes—and not just mental ones—are crucial for understanding things like cultural evolution and the large social issues like the paradigm shift or Mismatch that we face.

For example, I describe the effects on the body of what Ehrlich has called the Great Mismatch. Maladaptation and stress are physical. We understand that there are deleterious epigenetic changes as a result of major stressors (see Social Safety Theory by George Slavich) but it is their effect on our gross physical structure that we can sense and feel and intervene in and that are the most important to us practically speaking. It is great that scholars and experts like Slavich understand the psychoneuroimmunology and epigenetics of stress. But this is meaningless unless we also understand what it means for our own body, our relationship with our body, and how we can practically intervene for our own health and the health of society.

I describe the effect of Mismatch as a form of postural collapse syndrome. Of course, this involves not just the mechanics of postural collapse, but the associated physiological and psychological effects that occur. Epidemiological research on sedentarism makes this abundantly clear. The role of the body in our maladaptive reaction to our artificial environmental predicament is integral to understanding how we move forward in making a better future. We are the primary agents of change, not just a high theoretical intelligentsia, however valuable their insights and research may be. We have to understand maladaptation not just as complex physiology and neurobiology that only experts perceive, because it affects all of us in a very basic way. The paradigm shift is populist. We all face the same challenges. We all are living in bodies in society and on the earth. We are all agents of change and each one of us holds the supremely practical power in our bodies, and not just in our minds, to affect the course of cultural evolution.

Our predicament affects our ability to stand up straight and to move easily and freely. Movement is not about just joint health or biomechanics. It is about the free flow of energy, feelings and ideas. It is about life itself. Our maladaptive physical response affects every aspect of our lives and shape the world we create and recreate daily. In order to be able to respond positively we have to identify the challenge that we face as meaningful and easily practical. This is where the body becomes a crucial fixture in our analysis.

The body is always involved. Our physical structure and muscular vitality have profound significance for our moods and relationships with others and the world around us. This is why the cultural phenomenon of the global movement movement and my own work on the deep core and postural collapse are important to understanding the paradigm shift.

These are things that we can act on. This is change from within.

I founded a group on Prosocial Commons called Prosocial Embodiment, and we have been moving forward for the last six months or so. We have high hopes, but my own specific concerns as a healer, historian and social theorist focus on the civilization level paradigm shift we are currently experiencing and what the new science of synergistic anatomy has to say about it. We live in our bodies, and we are our bodies, not just our minds or brains. As a somatic social theorist, I believe this realization is absolutely fundamental to building global community going forward. It is common to say that change begins from within, but very few can talk about this in meaningful and practical anatomical detail. The study of fascia is a revolutionary new science but it is very important that we also realize it is also deeply personal, natural, and is as vital as our own bodies. We can all access it as easily as we do our own muscles and bones.

The wisdom of the body is intrinsically related to the wisdom of the earth. When we say that we look within we must do so with scientific specificity but also with an open heart—a very humble awareness of the bod’s own wisdom. By doing so we begin to recognize the many complex and also very intuitive and simple physical mechanisms which we possess and can employ and that make radically positive, democratic, and peaceful change not only possible but easy, natural, and intuitive.

This is my unique contribution to the paradigm shift but there are a vast number of others in body-related fields with a great deal to offer. I hope my work can help to open a giant and ancient door to an abundance of very radical but natural, hopeful, and new possibilities for lasting and meaningful change.