Tactile Anatomy: How To Feel Your Fascia

A membranous tensegrity-unitard that's often easier to feel than to explain

Hi, I’m Elena! I’m an MIT math/physics/CS grad who pivoted to practicing bodywork in the Bay Area. I teach “tactile anatomy” classes - here’s a lightly-edited transcript of a popular one, about fascia. I hope to record it someday, but in the meantime you can see my website or book a session here.

Why fascia?

Maybe you’ve heard the word “fascia” - it’s trending, but in my opinion it’s also unnecessarily mysterious. That said, it’s also complicated - I find it’s often easier to feel than explain.

I did not learn this material in massage school; the curriculum there focused on muscles. Then when I started working on clients, I found that thinking and feeling in terms of fascia got better results in my practice than thinking and feeling in terms of muscles.

Why were the results better?

For one, it made the work easier for me, as a practitioner - it took less force and effort. It did also take more awareness and attunement, but I enjoy cultivating both of those.

And two, a fascia focus seems more helpful in unwinding structural issues people would come in with. I sort of independently rediscovered fascia! I started out as a straightforward massage therapist, just doing relaxing techniques I was taught that worked with muscles, and noticed - hey wait there’s this other texture I’m feeling when I do all this muscularly-oriented massage. When I tune into that texture, it seems like people’s tension literally melts away…but then that physical action of engaging with fascia texture is not a massage anymore, though it can also be incorporated into massage, and every massage stroke can also become fascially attuned.

Working with fascia often looks like touching a body with five grams of pressure, and shifting the skin a tenth of an inch. That’s not a massage! If I said I was going to massage you and I did that, you might be confused. So that’s why I call myself a bodyworker now. There’s so many ways to touch, that are supportive for health, that aren’t massage. And I do a lot of those non-massage styles of touch too.

Another note before we begin: This class does not contain everything there is to know about fascia. Instead, it is an experiential introduction to my best working models of fascia at this time. It’s what I’ve learned. It will be different in a year as I learn more.

A big chunk of my job is having experiences with my clients on my table, wondering “woah, I wonder what that sensation or body shape was” and then venturing out and tracking down people who have real answers. Which is not most practitioners. I’m searching for, like, the osteopath in his late 70s who has been practicing for 50 years and has an entire living room full of extremely obscure anatomy and embryology books. And it’s not just the book knowledge, it’s his embodied precision of touch too, that he’s directed his attention at for decades. Like, instead of saying "this person's trapezius muscle is tight," this teacher of mine will say "I feel the tension in the vascular tree from the right subclavian artery causing tension in their trap.” And he feels that all with his hands, because he’s trained his sense of touch. There’s a lot of solo practitioners with that level of skill, who nevertheless haven’t shared their knowledge broadly. So I’m learning from people like that. None of this is taught in an average massage school. So by reading the material from this class, now, you’re ahead of where I was as a massage school graduate.

Why tactile anatomy?

So that’s “why fascia.” We’ll get to “what is fascia” later. But quickly, before that - what do I mean by tactile anatomy? And why is it so unique that I’m teaching it?

Well, my college education was in math and physics, but in 2021, I enrolled in massage school. And when it came time to learn anatomy, I was so stoked! I would just memorize everything, that was my plan. All the muscles, all their attachment sites, I was so good at memorizing and I expected that to be a huge boost to my bodywork. But what I found is - that was not nearly the whole story. I need to be able to actually feel the anatomy, on a sensory level, and be experientially literate in the physical realm of it, for it to matter in my sessions at all.

What good is a mental model that the lungs are suspended in a sheath of fascia called the pleura, if I cannot then use my hands to feel and pick the pleura out of the whole body’s tactile soup, and hear if they are moving and gliding ok, or if they want some help coming unstuck? And I have the sensitivity to hear and offer that help? And this is where my main excitement of this class comes in. Human senses are so trainable! Most of us are starting out with them very dulled, but it only takes a little bit of being in tactile space to start noticing new things become obvious that were never available to us before.

I used to think, before I learned bodywork, that what I felt in the world or someone’s body at any given time, was all that there was to feel. Now I know that’s just laughably not true. Now I feel intricate interconnections of fascia, and various bodily pulsing cues, and I can basically echolocate to stuck spots in a person’s body, by gently tugging on that fascial web - but I didn’t start out like that. Two years ago I only had a small slice of that sensory bandwidth.

I want to underscore though, the ceiling’s really high. For example, one of my teachers will put her hand on someone’s head and identify a twist in their right knee that’s propagating up to the pain in their neck.

And also, maybe by now you’ve heard that unprocessed emotions are stored in the body. Well, there’s whole fields of bodywork that take that as a starting point, and then run with it - they find out “...and here’s exactly where those emotions are stored, and how to work with them kinesthetically.” In an experience with another teacher of mine, I walked into their session room for the first time, and they put their hand on my midback. I immediately felt deeply sad, but in a cathartic way and not overwhelmingly so. They tell me "Oh woah, your liver's holding onto a lot. There's almost an 'ick'."

That said, even though the ceiling is high, that doesn’t say anything about what you’ll be able to feel now. What you feel now is your starting point! It’s kind of like weightlifting, where you know it’s possible to lift 100 or 200 pounds, because you see other people do it, but you picking up a weight for the first time will probably not do that. It takes some repetition, some showing up, some feeling whatever you feel even if it’s not what you expect or what I seem to be talking about, for you to train from A to B.

So that’s a whole rabbit hole I could go down, I love talking about it, how growing motor skills and kinesthetic intelligence is a totally different process from reading about it a lot. At a certain point I had to do very real physical training, and show up over and over, and there’s nothing my mind could do to speed it up. It’s a body process that arrives day by day. I’ve been in entire four-day workshops that center around “hey can you feel this particular tactile cue” and I literally could not. A teacher would explain that people’s skulls change width by a 16th of an inch in and out, a few times a minute, as part of the craniosacral rhythm - and, I spent four days not feeling that. It randomly showed up two weeks later.

I could talk about this forever, but let’s not get sidetracked. Let’s go back to talking about having a tactile experience of fascia. I’ll guide you through some exercises that help us with a general dropping into our body’s sensory capacities, and then we’ll go looking for fascia specifically.

Bones

One of the main principles of how I teach tactile anatomy is: your hands can sense more than what they are in direct contact with. They can feel complex layered structures too, and various densities stacked on top of one another.

If you stand up, you’ll be able to notice an easy example of this.

Start patting anywhere on your upper body. With an open, flat palm. As we do this, go ahead and shift to - a space of sensing. Not a space of thinking. It’s important that as we do this patting, we are also experiencing the impact of it on us.

Like, it’s possible for you to read the instructions for this self touch here, and simply follow them, but then check out and not be feeling the reverberating impact of this patting on your skin, on your muscles.

But meanwhile, dropping into my own experience, even while I am explaining this I have one line towards my experience of my body sensations. This is a really simple touch, this impact - but it’s creating ripples and vibrations on my skin, through my bones, through my fascia. It travels at different speeds through the different densities. Like, I’m here patting my ribs, and I feel the different flavors of the impact through my skin, through the bones, and through the organs underneath.

When you drop into the felt experience of it, how do you feel the vibrations of it travel differently, through the different densities under your hands? The patting has quite a different flavor over my abdomen than it does over my hip bones, or over my ribs.

Ok, you can stop patting, or maybe continue patting if you like - but there’s other ways of exploring body densities too. My prompt for you here is: discover where there are bones in your body. Use your sense of touch to do so. You can try patting like the above, but also shaking. Jiggling. Pulling, even poking and prodding. Maybe give yourself a massage, but do keep attunement to signals of bone underlying all that tissue.

What can you tactile-ly learn about the shape of the bones in your body?

None of them are sticking outside of the skin, right?

So what are the tactile cues that let you know they’re there?

How deep are they? You might notice some are clearly closer to the surface, like the frontal bone of our forehead, or our spine.

What can you learn about the shape of the bones, even as your hands are stuck a couple layers away from them?

Try taking thirty seconds to really feel into these exercises.

I really like starting out looking for bones, because they’re pretty obvious even for new feelers. The bones make it so clear that our hands can feel complex layered structures, and mixed densities stacked on top of one another.

Reflection question for you: what’s something you experienced about your bones just now, that you haven’t before?

I hope you’ve found some new information! That’s our intro into what it means to tune into different flavors of tactile signals that make up our body. We’ll take this a step further now, and look at what some of the layered structures in our bodies are. And how we can pull particular signals out of the whole tactile soup.

Layers

If you are still standing you can go ahead and sit down. The next exercise I’d like you to try is putting one hand on your upper thigh, and one hand on your side abdomen below your ribs. It doesn’t matter which hand does which.

We’ll do this simply with the weight of gravity. This is not a massage, this is not pushing, and this is not hover-handing. Whatever gravity is, on your hand and body, that’s what we’re touching with. Let your hand become the shape and density of the body underneath you.

Now, beneath each of your hands, there is a whole symphony of body activity. All sorts of pulsing, all sorts of flowing, all sorts of breathing. Your hand on the abdomen can probably feel your body breathing. That’s really obvious, you can probably see yourself breathing. But there are little microcosms of pulsing all over the body too - the heartbeat, the craniosacral rhythm, each organ.

We’ll play with listening to specific tactile aspects of this symphony. The same way you can choose to listen to a whole orchestra at once, or pull out one instrument and follow along with what it’s doing.

So, go ahead and move both your hands to your thighs. First, you probably feel - their clothing. But again, our hands can feel so much more than just what they’re directly in contact with. And - sense into this next piece as you’re reading along with it.

Right underneath the clothes is the skin. A thin layer, pliable, soft. 1-4 millimeters. And then, right underneath the skin? Depending on the body, there might be some fatty tissue, or we might go right into the quad muscles. The quad muscles are big. They attach up at the hip, and down at the knee, in beautiful interlocking spirals and lacings around the joints. Go ahead and compress your leg a little bit, and maybe jiggle it around, with light or medium pressure on it, to feel - now that our awareness is about one inch deep, under the surface - can you feel that something in there, both gelatinous and strong, is running parallel to the leg?

And maybe, if you run your hands across the quad, keeping that medium pressure on, you can feel striations in the muscle. At this point in my own practice, I can engage the middle of the muscle, and feel its attachments on either end. That probably isn’t you yet, but maybe it is. If you shift the muscle a little bit, can you feel its fixed attachment points?

And now, if you’re jiggling or shifting the muscle, you can stop. Go back to a still hand with the weight of gravity. And now, drop your awareness into the bone.

This is a good spot, here on the leg, because there’s only one bone here. And, it’s straight. It’s the femur, and it’s right in the middle of the thigh. It gets knobbly on either end, but here where your hands are - it’s a pretty straight shot up and down.

Lots of places in our body - like oh my god, the shoulders, and the hands, and the feet - have all sorts of bendy and complicated interlocking bones. Not so here, over the femur. It’s quite simple.

So we’ll bring that previous question back - how do you know there’s a bone under your hands? You aren’t touching the bone directly, of course. Like, if you press down on the muscle - you hit a resistance. It’s not pure gelatin, you don’t go all the way through. What is the shape of that bony resistance, there, about three inches deep into the leg?

How does all of the softer tissue - the skin, the muscle, the fascia - move around the bone, in relation to it? More free, but also definitely adhered and attached to the bone? Go ahead and jiggle your leg a bit. Either with your hands, or initiated by your leg. Can you feel the inertia and weight of the bone, inside the softer tissue that surrounds it?

Fascia!

Okay, now it’s time to move on to fascia specifically. Feel free to keep exploring your layers in as you read this next piece, I’m going to be elaborating for a bit here.

SO. What is fascia? As I mentioned at the beginning - sometimes it’s easier to feel than to explain.

It is the gelatinous, sheetlike, membranous connected saran-wrappy-3d thing that suspends every single thing in our body. My closest analogy is that fascia is like extremely alive and strong and flexible and sensory saran wrap. The whole body is anchored in fascia, as a tensegrity structure. Our fascia are doing the tension bit, and our skeleton is doing the rigid structure bit. Fascia is the reason we are not a stack of bones on the ground surrounded by a pool of liquid. It anchors our skin, it wraps every bone, it suspends every organ, and it also covers every muscle. One of my friends calls fascia a “cosmic unitard,” which I think is beautiful.

Tensegrity: a structural system of rigid compression elements (that don’t touch each other) suspended inside continuous tensional elements (like cables, or in this case fascia).

Fascia starts directly under your skin, as superficial fascia. Depending on where you are on the body, your skin is 1-4mm thick, and right underneath it, you hit - fascia. Then, depending where you are on the body, you might have fat - which, get this, is also suspended in fascia. Fun fact, the fascia that suspends fat is not quite as flat and sheetlike as fascia elsewhere in the body. The fatty tissue fascia is still gelatinous and strong and densely interconnected, but it’s more the fibrous structure of a cotton ball or a fuzzy wool blanket, than it is flat saran wrap. So, curiously, inside of fatty tissue the gelatinous strong texture of fascia is the same, but the shape is different.

So, roughly speaking, superficial fascia is the fascia that suspends the skin and fat.

Then there’s also something called deep investing fascia, which is what wraps all your muscles and organs.

Then even deeper than that, we have - something similar to fascia, but it’s not technically fascia and I’m still learning why. It’s a membrane that wraps bones, called periosteum.

I’ll talk some more about the muscle fascia - muscle and fascia have a very deep relationship.

Here’s an analogy. Imagine an orange. The orange has the main peel around it, and the membrane between each slice. But then when you break open the slices, you find there are little droplets inside the slices too! Each droplet is wrapped in another, smaller, membrane.

So like the orange has layers of wrapping, so our fascia is layers of wrapping! The peel, the membrane between the slices, and the membrane around the little droplets, are all fascia. Fascia wraps our whole body under the skin, and it wraps every muscle, and it also wraps all the little subsections within the muscle.

So, a muscle is like this slice of orange, where - removing fascia from it doesn’t really make sense. Fascia gives the muscle form.

That said, there’s an interesting thing about the difference between muscles and fascia.

Put your hand back on your leg for this. So, whereas muscles end - they attach at specific places on bone, that’s actually the definition of a muscle, that it has a start and an end - fascia is kind of all one thing. The wrapping of one muscle seamlessly flows into the wrapping of the muscle next to it. One view of the body isn’t that fascia wraps muscles, but rather that fascia splits to allow muscles to exist within it. And this is literally embryologically true. When we are tiny embryos, first there is fascia. And then the fascia splits, to allow muscles and organs and bones and all this other stuff to grow inside of it.

I think that’s pretty trippy. When I explain that, I really feel the holisticness of the body. We are not a collection of discrete assembled pieces. We are a cosmic unitard walking around with discretely identifiable stuff inside of it, but the whole continuous thing came first.

So, how do we feel that holistic cosmic unitard? Well, there’s a lazy thing I could say, which is that basically any long-range continuous elastic sensation in your body is fascia.

Arm swings

Stand up again if you feel like it, we’re going to go over how to notice some continuous elastic sensation via arm swings. Whatever arm swings mean to you. The trick is, to feel fascia, you actually can’t be too tense. If you’re very tense, you will not feel any long-range elastic sensation, because - the information in your body’s mechanical structure just won’t go that far. It’ll hit the tension and stop.

Is there a stretchy elastic sensation that spans the length of your entire arm when you swing your arm? (Note that, if you arm-wave, with all your muscles engaged, you likely won’t feel it! There’s a reason these are arm swings. In this looseness, it’s more obvious.)

Explore this quality of swinging and elasticity. Actually, try a thing - spin in circles with your arms out. Have them aloft by the sheer momentum of your spin. This is very fun but I can’t do it for too long, because I get dizzy. So whenever you get dizzy, go ahead and switch to qi-gong waist twists. And keep looking for a sense of elasticity, which is also often obvious in the recoil of the waist twists.

I won’t get into this here, but there is a dance practice that teaches efficient movement patterns that rely on fascia. It says that, the more you use this elastic recoil property of fascia in your day-to-day motions, rather than muscular efforting, the more graceful and easeful you feel. It’s totally cool. It’s called axis syllabus.

So like, in running, instead of muscling your legs everywhere - the more that this natural recoil in the elasticity of your fascia can do for you, the easier. To notice the contrasts, feel free to try this: first swing your leg assisted by gravity and your fascia’s natural rebound tendencies. Then try leg-swinging by using your leg muscles.

That was one movement exercise. I have two more for you to try.

First we noticed finding your fascia through the elastic sense of recoil and swinging.

“Move the sheet around with your hands”

Now, we’ll go over another method that I like to call “move the whole sheet around with your hands.”

When feeling fascia, the tactile cue you’re looking for is the elastic membrane pull that transmits across muscle boundaries. Of course this gets easier if you know where muscles are, but that’s outside the scope of this class, and we can do without that.

In general it’s a safe bet that long-range pulls are fascia. Experienced bodyworkers can feel the transmission of very small forces over very long distances. They can gently rotate your ankle and check if that’s getting stuck somewhere up in your hip.

Basically, with trained tactile sensing, the fascial web of our bodies can transmit any mechanical signal from anywhere to anywhere else, UNLESS it gets stuck in an adhesion or contracture, which are two specific kinds of fascial stuckness that I work on helping people clear.

You can practice tuning into this whole-body elasticity. Go ahead and, with your hands, grab the tissue around your ribcage. I mean, I don’t want to say grab, because that’s kind of too forceful - in my sessions I’m not going around grabbing. I’m more gentle and attuned. But, with your hands around the front and side and back of your rib - engage the entire soft tissue layer above the bone, and - “move the whole sheet around with your hands.” How far up and down does it go? How far sideways does it go?

This is where different bodies can be very different. Depending on someone’s amount of fatty tissue, the depth of the sheet over your ribs can be very different! Either half an inch, or more if they have thick oblique muscles, or more fatty tissue.

But what we’re aiming for is - how much of your soft tissue can you get to move as one coherent sheet, from this spot on your ribs? How far can the lines of pull go? Note, they won’t go indefinitely far from everywhere, because there are also muscular attachment sites, which don’t move as much.

Shaking

One last thing. Try and see if you can shake in such a way that the soft tissue of your body all starts moving as one contiguous wave. This is a fun way to play with resonant frequencies. You’ll notice, depending on tension patterns, that different parts of your body may move as different clumps.

How much of it can you link up and get continguous?

Closing

Okay! That’s what I’ve got for you today. This is the point at which my notes end and I normally take questions in my live class. I’ll provide some additional resources and some *cool fascia facts* below for you instead.

What I want to leave you with here in the written is the anchor feeling for fascia: “move the whole sheet around with your hands.” Any movement that gets coherent blocks of the body moving, is usually being cohered by fascia. Heck, I’d go so far as to say any long-range pull in the body is fascia - but in a year or two I’ll probably learn to feel nerves and blood vessels, and those are also pretty long, but they are anchored on fascia. So it’s more likely the long-range pull would be fascia, and not nerves or blood vessels.

For now, my best sense of things is - if it’s membraneous, sheetlike, and elastic, three-dimensional, and goes long distances - it’s fascia!

Cool fascia facts

• Fascia is thixotropic! like ooblek, the non-Newtonian fluid that’s a mixture of constarch and water! Fascia’s both very strong in resistance to some types of contact, but it melts under precisely attuned amounts of pressure.

• Fascia is piezoelectric - which means, it accumulates electrical charge in response to mechanical input. You can imagine that’s a whole rabbit hole, and honestly I don’t know much about it. Where I’m at is - woah, fascia do electrical things, and also movement influences those electrical things!

  • In Ayurveda there’s something like thousands of energy channels in the body, and the best hypothesis I’ve heard for where those energy channels live in western anatomy is in the fascia.

• There are fascia inside your skull that keep your brain anchored, and these are accessible by pulling on your ears.

• There’s also fascia inside your spine!

• There are sensory receptors in the fascia whose whole job is to detect light touch, and then promote overall well-being about it.” source link, Cat Matlock]

• One of my teachers, Jeffrey Burch is annoyed by practitioners who lump together what to him are very distinct sheetlike membranous textures in the body. He posits that there are three different types of fascia texture.

  • What are the three? I’ll leave that for you as a preview of “fascia 401”

Additional Resources

There’s not much for non-massage-therapists, which is a big part of why I teach this. But the ones I know are:

• Gil Hedley - Integral Anatomy

• Axis Syllabus - a dance practice

• Anatomy Trains - I haven’t learned this but I think they have online material, and I’ve heard good things.

• John Barnes teaches myofascial release classes for bodyworkers, but I have not studied with him. Lots of my knowledge is from colleagues and independent teachers.