My Theory of the Longevity Effects of Regenerative Touch

I’m developing my own bodywork modality, which I’m calling regenerative touch. Why? Many reasons, but one of the clearest is because I was in such a gnarly car crash in second grade that my fascia got developmentally malformed through my whole right-side abdomen, and this is a very edge-case problem, and existing modalities I could find weren’t helping me with it.

One day, in a future blogpost, I will write an intro to what my modality is! But for the meantime, here’s what the experience of receiving it is like, quoted from my website:

Expect to relax so much that you start dreaming, and then wake up feeling more limber. It improves both structural health and nervous system health - like if low-dose MDMA was also good for your body. It draws on my training in Esalen massage, craniosacral, fascia-based techniques, and visceral manipulation (organ bodywork). It also includes my learnings from esoteric bodywork teachers I've sought out, and my study of anatomy. It's approximately 50% mechanical-structural, 50% energetic. It helps people shed layers of stress and baggage - both physical and emotional - so they return to feeling more like themselves.

And, here’s a thread where I start attempting to characterize it more. (Note, none of this is actually “new,” bodywork has been around for thousands of years - but unfortunately the lineages of wisdom transmission have been disrupted enough that it’s easier for me to coalesce my own lens than to simply join an existing one.)

But I have a theory about the longterm effects of regenerative touch: by keeping the body’s fascia continuous and able to transmit long-range kinetic signals, this also allows the body’s ~*~life force energy~*~ to diffuse evenly through the whole body’s structure. (Regarding “life force energy” - call it metabolic processes if you want; call it qi or prana if you want.) What a convenient barometer! That kinetic energy flows through structure with the same ease and fluidity that metabolic-vitality energy flows through structure! Where the kinetic energy is blocked, the metabolic-prana is also blocked! We can detect locations of metabolic issue, by simply looking at the physical structure! And in my practice, it seems like addressing one can also address the other.

So I expect that regenerative touch, which re-establishes continuity through the body’s fascial tensegrity net, will be an excellent support for people’s healthspans. It’ll increase not only the number of years lived, but the quality of those years. Why? Because - here’s my testable prediction - I hypothesize that where there are disconnects or distortions in the body’s fascial tensegrity is where the body tends to accumulate health problems. A clear example of this is that I was hit in the teeth when I was thirteen, and that was giving me headaches now at age 30, which resolved once a colleage of mine essentially pulled that injury out of my face. I’m also tracking something where the right side of my face is aging slightly faster than the left side, and that may have been due to being starved of bloodflow from … that same injury? The constellation of tensegrity-deformations from the car crash? Who knows. Nevertheless, I’m keen to work on it.

Note, these health problems can be both structural - “knee pain” - or even metabolic. Part of the car crash side effects fascia contractures spiderwebbed through my digestive tract, tracing to a lot of lower-right-quadrant inflammation and also making it so I had a harder time absorbing nutrition from food. Now that a lot of that structure and inflammation has been addressed (with a lot of support from Jess at myAyu <3) I’m digesting food better, and feel generally healthier! Yay!

It just so happened one of the issues I had was headaches. But if it had gone on for years or decades unadressed, it probably would have presented as “general faster aging” on that right side of my head - even stronger and more problematic headaches, or maybe some flavor of cognitive decline that I don’t want to think about and am very glad to avoid.

On the other hand, if fascia are continuous and sharing the body’s kinetic energy distribution evenly, there’s no clear location in the body that is obviously more vulnerable to problems than others. So this would lead to increases in healthspan! It’d help elders in their 80s, 90s, still feel “overall fine, but with less energy than they used to have” rather than feeling functional along some domains but cripplingly disabled along others.

And I really care about quality of life through the totality of life. So, I’m happy to be developing my practice.

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A footnote

Note, bodywork is not the only way to keep the body’s structure-metabolism humming along: appropriately comprehensive movement practices can do it to. A friend of mine is into advanced esoteric martial arts and, she talks a lot about similar underlying principle of “the body being smoothly able to transmit force.” She sees 70 year olds in her aikido classes and, she says it’s very obvious which ones have been practicing for decades and which ones just started. The ones with decades of practice are mobile and vital beyond their years.

Hearing her describe this ultimately clicked how I relate to my work. Usually, when people start seeing me, for the first 3 - 8 sessions there are rapid obvious changes, as we work through all the restrictions that are low-hanging fruit for my toolkit. But thereafter, the nervous system benefits of deep parasympathetic continue - and it’s hard to say what, exactly, is happening structurally, but something still is. It’s more like “maintenance” or “unkinking the longer-time-horizon, subtler misalignments.” But now, I consider it a longevity practice! The sort of thing that clients’ bodies will thank me for when they are 80. In the maintenance regime I’d ballpark one hour of my bodywork at roughly 10 hours of gentle high-quality Qigong.