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electrochemical signals rapidly around the body and has been marvelously successful at coordinating our hands, feet, limbs, and trunk into a mighty tool for our brains to explore and test the world (and possibly screw it up beyond all recognition). The BARS concept—and what is generally meant when this buzzword fascia is invoked—applies this same logic to the fascial system, which is engaged in the job of protecting our 70 trillion cells and keeping them in the proper relationship with each other. This is our biomechanical system, which works with tension and compression, and with the mechanical environment each cell lives in. Your BARS, your fascial system, is the context in which all your cells work—or not. Each cell is adhered into this fascial network like Velcro, though some cells (e.g., white blood cells) are more free to roam within it, while others (e.g., osteocytes) are much more held in place. This adhesive property of the cell membrane means that each cell is either in its "happy place" biomechanically, or it is too tensed or too compressed. The work of Donald Ingber and his many followers has shown that cells do not do their job properly if they are in a mechanical environment not suited to their appointed task. 18 In other words, there are diseases of "mechanotransduction," and these are being explored. 19 HOW FASCIA RESPONDS TO MANUAL THERAPIES, OR "WHY SHOULD I CARE?" This new understanding—not only do cells need the right neural messages and the appropriate nutrition and peptides, they also need a healthy mechanical environment to work well—gives us a new way to interpret the interesting findings we get in our day-to-day practices. Clients report improvements with constipation, headaches, an irregular heartbeat, or menstruation regulation— things you may not expect to remedy with massage. Of course, they ask you if these improvements are due to your work, and of course you want to say yes. But how do we really know? Maybe someday this will be measurable, but for now it is enough to know that improving biomechanics— through any manual therapy or movement approach—could not only amplify local circulation and bring feeling back through stimulating underused nerves, but also reposition the fascial tissues so that the cells in that area can breathe a sigh of relief and go back to their jobs. Releasing our cells from mechanical tension or pressure is the source of many of the unexplained healings we get in our sessions. Cells act differently when they are mechanically stressed—either overstretched or overcompressed. The overstretched cells tend to abandon their job and put all their energy into reproduction. Overcompressed cells slow down their metabolic activity and, in extreme cases, can activate their apoptotic (suicide) gene and die. 20 But there is a happy place in the middle, and, as we work with our clients to re-establish coherence in their posture and movement, it is not just the muscles that are happier—whole communities of cells can be happier and better nourished, with room to move and function. This idea will fill in with the next 25 years of research, but the principle underlying it is simple: the glues that held neighboring cells together in early organisms like jellyfish extended themselves into more complex tissues (see illustration above) and then extended again into our yet more complex fascial body and skeleton. All these levels—the BARS— work together moment-by-moment. Every time you touch the fascia—in other words, when you touch someone—you affect the entire communicating network of fibers and gels, which communicates across the body, often at great distances from the site of your touch. Fascia is not new; awareness of fascia is. Touch your clients with that awareness and your results will deepen as well. You are working with fascia whether you are aware or not. How much better could we do if we touched fascia consciously? THE FASCIAL NETWORK In equating the fascial network with the neural and circulatory networks, we must emphasize that the fascial network is the context in which all the others live. The nerves are completely surrounded by the connective tissue perineurium—use a Harry Potter spell to make the nervous system disappear and you would still see its shape in the surrounding fiber of the neural sheaths—the perineurium. Likewise, all the tubes—capillaries, bronchioles, spinal canal, and digestive system—have tunics of fascia that encase them like sausages, keeping them attached, intact, and connected to the whole. When the embryo grows (or when a salamander regrows its tail), it is the connective tissues—the BARS—that pioneer the shape, with the neural, vascular, and epithelial tissues coming along behind and filling the spaces shaped by the BARS. 21 70 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 A B Most of our cells are hooked into the fascial network, so pulls in the fascial network affect the functioning of the cells and, in some cases, the pulls in the cells can affect the fascia.