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When fascia releases, Barnes says it feels like taffy stretching. "That sense of softening leads to a deeper barrier, and then you wait there for a while." The art, he says, is finding the restrictions and applying the appropriate pressure. "You have to use your feeling intelligence, not just your thinking intelligence," especially since these barriers are unique to each individual. Layer by layer, the tissues are addressed. No oils or lubricants are required, only pressure and intention. Barnes tells students that a key to MFR is to never force the tissue; in fact, it's his mantra: "never force, never force, never force." Approaching the tissue with patience avoids any fight-or-flight response and lets the client's mind be available to help begin the healing process. The nuances required for therapists to address this fascial tissue include having a quiet mind while waiting for the tissue to let you in, using the proper pressure, and then feeling the subtle changes that occur in the ground substance—the fluid part of the fascial system. "It's in the silence and the feel that we heal," Barnes says. Ironically, most fascia research has been done on cadavers, Barnes says, where the fluidity of tissues is obviously no longer viable. He is still baffled at the disregard paid to the tissue's fluid component and its importance to health. "Everything must go through the fluidity of the fascial system to get to the cell. If the ground substance [outside of and within the cell] has solidified because of trauma, surgery, or thwarted inflammatory response, that cell is dying—it's not breathing, it's not getting the fluid or the nutrition it needs." By addressing the fascial system and releasing the restrictions, you can "reverse the solidity of that ground substance and change the frequency of the vibration." By doing that, Barnes explains, the cells can rehydrate, the crushing pressure is removed, and then "our body becomes capable of healing itself." Despite the critical anatomical role of fascia and all of today's research being conducted on its relevance to health (including on living bodies), Barnes says the "health-care community is still not paying attention to the connective tissue," something he considers to be a huge oversight when addressing issues of pain and well-being. PAIN INFORMS THE MFR JOURNEY Like so many in the healing professions, Barnes lived through his own somatic traumas and lets those experiences inform his work today. A back injury suffered at a young age helped Barnes eventually devise his own MFR Approach. Training as a competitive weightlifter, the young Barnes found himself 78 m a s s a g e & b o d y w o r k s e p t e m b e r / o c t o b e r 2 0 1 6