How to Grow a New Story

The Physiological, Emotional and Evolutionary Benefits of Fascial Coherence.

What irony that the Big Brutal Bill was signed into law on July 4th, bookending the birth and death of the national order we thought we could count on! We are in the midst of a change unlike anything we've experienced before, and yet I am optimistic. This is all going to work out in favor of life. However, even if I had had plans for the 4th, I would not have felt much like celebrating.

It begs the question: What do we do when things fall apart? Do we push through, patch it up and try to get back to what used to work? Do we pull ourselves into a frozen shell and do nothing? Or do we allow what needs to die in us die so that we may partake in the full cycle of Nature coming alive again in us? This new earth will arise spontaneously from us as we expand our systems to open to what we do not yet understand, the more coherent we become.

So, what is worth continuing and what must be let go? What stories need to die before I birth a new one?

Can we recognize the destructive patterns we cling to and choose differently as we courageously feel our way through the liminal spaces? Can we sense into what's arising and move forward balanced and able?

I love the word courageous, from the French coeur (heart). It's heart-centric rather than ocular-centric. It speaks to the whole sensory-motor loop of feeling. This is feeling as the flow of present feedback, not as fossils arising from the sediment beds of our past. It's not that we erase the old memories. We dissolve and integrate them while awakening what is newly arising. They become part of the healing story we are telling our grandchildren about the time we were called into action from the heart of heaven and earth to build anew.

Heart Coherence

You've probably heard how heart coherence is a frequency of harmony between the heart and brain that reduces stress, regulates our emotions and promotes well-being, but do you know why?

Your fascia's 250 million sensory neurons report directly to the heart, then travel via the vagus nerve to the brain. Traditional trauma healing has focused only on the vagus, while the whole body sensorium is the one sensing the environment, the present, and who we are being in it.

Where the brain sees differences and separates, the heart listens to the sensing body, sees wholes and unifies. It mediates the new information received via our interoceptive sensing.

However, we have more resources than Heart Coherence, and times like this call for us to use all we've got.

Coherent Waves

Before going there, let's get on the same page about coherence. Coherence is a wave frequency where all the wave peaks and troughs match up. There is no interference, just a steady beam that doesn't lose energy as it slowly radiates out from center. Coherent waves are powerful and know no boundaries.

In living organisms, these waves are generated inside every cell. Inside the cell's cytoplasm, tiny polarized microtubules rotate the plasma inside them (known as lumens) and generate coherent waves packed with biophotonic and biophonic information. These waves travel through all the cells and interconnect a vast cytoplasmic network that reorganizes the living architecture of our cells through information waves of light and sound.

They rearrange the connective tissue, enabling us to conduct strong electromagnetic energy through our bodies and into the space around us.

From the cytoskeleton, resonant waves spread out through the whole fibrous system of fascia in rhythms that oscillate the watery molecules and harmonize the whole body, gut, brain and heart.

A deeper look into how these waves re-arrange our connective tissue then becomes a story about how we expand and condense as part of our evolutionary journey. With a greater charge, we expand and grow. We then condense to digest it and bring forth a new capacity from within. Ideally, the constant pushing out of our highly charged cell membranes and bones (the compression elements) is balanced by the constant pulling in of the tensional forces that hold us together. This pulsation primes us to be more adept at sensing and responding to the constantly changing forces within and around us.

When there is balanced pulsation, as there is in a coherent wave, we are stable emotionally and physically. We self-revive after wilting. We are self-supporting and are no longer slaves to gravity, meaning we stand and move without bracing or collapsing.

Biological Coherence

When we enter into the story that Nature is telling us, we find a world of cycles, seasons and lunar phases, night and day, our breath, and our own circadian rhythms. This lends a stability and predictability to our experience that our bodies and emotions love.

Perhaps it invokes our own biological gift for self-organizing or is our system entrained into coherence by the multiple living systems of Nature? At any one moment, there are multiple creatures and living systems like cacophonies of migrating birds, the diurnal and semidiurnal tides, the rhythms of bacteria, and the pulsating buzzing of bees. They are all working at different rates and to different ends, and yet all become entrained into harmony, order, and stability for a substantial period of time. Nature is the great regulator. To enter into the world of biological coherence is, according to research from The Heartmath Institute, to experience 'a state of co-operative alignment between the heart, mind, emotional and physical systems that spreads out into the community and environment beyond.'

Biotensegral Coherence

When you think about the variety of life and their exotic morphologies, all pushing and pulling themselves into adapting their forms to better function in a sea of constant change, you've got to wonder, “Isn't all this constant motion exhausting?” The answer is no. There is no stillness in Nature nor us, but there is rest.

There is a resting state, a quiet settling into a body-drenched sense of equilibrium, but it's not stasis. It's like just before falling asleep. Is this simple thing we do every night, the sensory experience of a balanced tension and compression web? Is this that zero point where the living liquid crystal matrix is barely oscillating, in perpetual motion in the sweet spot of the center of the center?

It's a gravity-free floating and pulsating that feels like you could keep at it forever. It happens when we stand and move too. Things glide and flow with ease. We feel lighter and grounded, fluid and stable. We are primed to respond. The forces move through us and, like water, we naturally restore ourselves to a sense of balance. Biologically, biotensegrally and quantumly, coherence is always and already existing in us at every scale.

Conclusion

Lots can pull us into incoherence too like fear, anxiety, uncertainty, trauma, injury, illness, diet, and environmental hazards like electro-magnetic radiation, just to name a few. The converging metacrises we're undergoing are sending us into greater and greater incoherence. We are clearly in need of a new story. What needs to die so that we can birth something new, something coherent, that includes and is bigger than us?

What capacities do we need to keep? Which ones should we develop so that we're better equipped to hold the potential of the unknown along with focus? How do we seed our capacity to be coherent during so much upheaval and change?

We can develop our inborn, embodied capacity for coherence as a felt-sense of being. We can strengthen it, anchor it and call upon it so that we can show up, resourced and present, salient and responsive, like a radiant wave that knows no boundaries.

Fascia is the responsive, intelligent, living web of your embodied self. Learning how to work with its form and flow is an art as much as a science. We can consciously participate in what we perceive and how we show up.

We do not need to tolerate the constant barrage of dissonance and incoherence. We can develop our natural capacities that drive evolution forward. The treasures of the living liquid crystalline matrix could be the key to planting our feet on our ground, reframing our stories, and becoming fluent in the intuitive language of our sensory bodies. That is when a Big Beautiful Story will swell up from the depths and carry us through.