YOUR ISSUES ARE IN YOUR TISSUES
What is the Fascia?

Written by Akira Yoga
Fascia is a highly organized mesh formulation filled with water; one uninterrupted sheet of connective tissue fiber and its job is to attach, stabilize, and separate our muscles and internal organs.
If you think of a piece of meat like a chicken breast you can often see a white web interweaved through the tissue. This is fascia. It’s exactly the same for us, we are intimately connected throughout the entire body by fascia. We can think of fascia as the most sensitive, highly interconnected system in the entire body.


Physically, fascia is wrapped throughout the body on “lines of pull.” It connects your toes to your hips and to the top of your head; your fingers to the arms, shoulders, chest and neck. It coils around your bones, muscle fibers, organs, arteries, veins and nerves. Each organ is wrapped in a hammock of fascia that’s connected to the spine, ribs, or the pelvis. These fascial connections connect with the muscle fascia that affects your movement and ultimately muscle potential is limited by the quality of the fascia that surrounds it. This is what you feel as a stretch or when you have physical pain. It’s the tension of the fascia that causes feelings of tightness. Tendons and ligaments are layers of fascia that are meant to absorb shock and distribute the impact of this shock throughout the body. Our body mechanics are meant to be spring loaded to protect the joints of the spine, hips, knees, ankles and ribs. If tendons are tight, dehydrated and shortened, they can’t absorb this impact and will fray, causing pain.
In the fascia there is also a connection of the physical with the emotional.

Your Issues are in your Tissues – is a quote highlighting the connectivity factor of our emotions with the physical body.
Within Yin yoga there’s a distinct lack of engagement of the muscles. Yin yoga is creating space from the bones, and working more with the ligaments, joints and connective tissue system and this is why its mostly floor based so you actually can let go of your muscles. In this style of yoga, we want to gently stress the fascia (not stretch), which helps to make it stronger and, over time, longer.


Within Yin yoga there’s a distinct lack of engagement of the muscles. Yin yoga is creating space from the bones, and working more with the ligaments, joints and connective tissue system and this is why its mostly floor based so you actually can let go of your muscles. In this style of yoga, we want to gently stress the fascia (not stretch), which helps to make it stronger and, over time, longer.
In the end it does not matter how flexible we are, what’s more important is that our practice will make us healthier, stronger and happier.
