The Integral Body: The Deep Front Line - Our Axis - Our Self
The Deep Front Line: Our Axis - Our Self
By Karin Locher 2011
Connecting to this deep and hidden line of fascia is connecting to the deepest parts of ourself.
'If you bring forth that which is within you, Then that which is within you Will be your salvation. If you do not bring forth that which is within you, Then that which is within you, Will destroy you.' The Gnostic Gospels
The Deep Front Line (DFL) is a continuous ‘line’ of myofascia (connective tissue) that when interconnected forms a deep central axis of inner strength and communication, keeping order and balance throughout the rest of the body. Connecting to the DFL is life changing, it is a meeting and realising of a greater and more powerful you than you’d ever have imagined. It holds the key to our health and becomes our greatest reference from which to live by.
What is The Deep Front Line?
The DFL, introduced to us by Thomas Myers revolutionary Anatomy Trains, link, is a continuous ‘line’ of neuromyofascia that runs right up the deepest centre of our bodies in a voluminous and cylinder fashion. From the foot arches, it runs right up to the pelvis, from the pelvis up to the diaphragm, activated and fuelled by the breathing it spreads out around the rib basket and on up into the throat and temples, enveloping the bones, muscles, joints, nerves and organs on its track. It is the ‘master of the lines’ from which an equilibrium requisite of whole health can be restored. It holds our greatest strengths and some of our most hidden subconscious psyche along its track.
Connecting to this deep and hidden line of fascia is connecting to the buried parts of yourselves; so alien to those hidden parts, the feelings can be deeply uncomfortable, it is a place, it seems, we don’t know how to be in, a place we are unfamiliar with. With an eerie quality of echoing space and stillness, it can feel vacant and uninhabited, but ones entered it becomes your refuge and our salvation.
Vocabulary that connects our DFL
In the original instruction and the vocabulary and ‘design’ of the original Pilates Method Controlgy the restoring and reconnecting of the fascia’s elasticity and health is systematically addressed. The instructions create the neuromuscular interconnection to the whole neuromyofascial web. Starting with the DFL it then interconnects to all the other ‘lines’ of fascia creating an ‘inter communication’ throughout the whole fascial network, so the body can reconnect to its own naturally orchestrated rhythm, in a ‘bio’tensegrity (tensional integrity) free from the impact and distortions of gravitational pull and compression.
Is the DFL our ‘core stability’?
The term ‘core stability’ consistently referred to and often prioritized as a need for strengthened by most physical disciples, is now used across the fitness industry, refers repeatedly to our pelvic floor muscles and the much-overrated transverses abdominus, as the all-important core. Instructions like, pull your abs in and pull your navel to the spine are used to strengthen the ‘core’, but when the ‘core’, your DFL, runs from the arches of your feet all the way to your temples, is this instruction sufficient in meeting it? In fact, fascially this contracted action blocks the very connection we are trying to make. In the Pilates Method, Joseph Pilates never used the word core, never spoke of the pelvic floor, but yet his Method took you right there deep inside your whole self, resulting in the whole-body health and a the uniformly developed body he intended. His insistence to breath well “you breath OUT the air to breath IN the air” connects the deep front line, as the diaphragm is part of the DFL and its full use one of the most effective ways of evoking it. Tom Myers of Anatomy Trains refers to the DFL as our ‘core’ but his image is the apple core, which runs from the bottom through to the top (and beyond) and not just the pips in the middle!
Working with the DFL
When working with a strain pattern, injury or illness, I first passively ‘put’ the client ‘onto’ their DFL while they are standing to renegotiate with it. Once the DFL is evoked and lined up in communication the strain pattern is instantly supported, and the pain is relieved; they are then able to start entering their bodies to start to realise and work with these inner connections. (Often this first renegotiation re-establishes the connection of the DFL and it is enough to fully support the strain pattern, as once back in connection the DFL organises and rebalances the rest of the body.) With the strain or pain pattern adjusted the bodies re-education can begin, to re pattern the bodies memory and change the minds ‘belief’ system. We must now renegotiate with the body to realign to those disassociated often trauma held places and perform the movements that caused it discomfort, without the discomfort, to lose the associated adaptations so that the real healing can begin.
Connecting to this deep and hidden line of fascia is connecting to the deepest parts of your self. So separated from these parts, the feelings can be deeply uncomfortable, it is a place, it seems, that we don’t know how to be in, a place we are unfamiliar with. With an eerie quality of echoing space and stillness, it can feel vacant and uninhabited, but ones entered it becomes your refuge and your salvation.
So why is it uncomfortable to be there?
In my experience of ‘putting people on their DFL, I have realised that it is not only the feelings of meeting with our whole self and stirring the frozen experiences or trapped traumas that are uncomfortable, but it is the intensity and potential enormity of our whole self that we seem somewhat fearful to meet. The fascia envelops our bones, joints muscles nerves and organs but also holds our entire consciousness, reconnecting to it and being in its communication stirs our greatest human potential, the blueprint of our potentiality. As Nelson Mandela said, “our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure, it is our light not our darkness that frightens us”.
Hang out with the DFL and you will find what others may sit 10 years in the hills of Tibet to find – yourself. Not only a full relationship to it but the ability to hear yourself, to notice yourself and live fully from your own inherent knowing and innateness, separate from the distracting and often sabotaging mind that goes on and on like a constant analysis to our day. For it is the mind voice that churns out the doubts, stories and adapted beliefs that run our lives and block our way.
So, what is along this deep line of fascia that can hold the key to our greatest wellbeing and potential?
Let’s look at what is along the tracks and stations that make up this line and what they represent.
A map of emotional stations along the Deep Front Line
From the foundations of our whole architecture, the foot, arch is our springboard into life, heading straight up to meet the calf, our future, (fear of the future is often found buried in the calf’s.) From there we enter into the locked storage cupboards of the thighs, meeting our stored and buried childhood experiences. On up to the pelvis which holds our potential for perfect balance of our ‘whole body’ which ‘thrusts’ us forward, often however thwarted by our fear-based resistance to ‘knowing what to move forward to’ or moving forward into someone else’s desired ‘forward’ which takes that balance potential away and our feeling of ‘out’ of balance resides then in our coccyx. The coccyx represents the blaming of ourselves as we ‘sit’ on the old pain, feeling our loss of power represented often as a financial insecurity, which festers to become the common L5/L4 collapse issue. Then it travels to our deepest most intimate and often confronting sexual emotions sitting in the Pelvic fascia and up the L1/L2/L3, where unresolved sexual issues are held. On up to the T12 and the diaphragm - our breath, our animal instinct, our life source. Here is the potential to ‘take in all of life’ all that we were ‘god’ given and experience Life’s full abundance. However, the voice of ‘I don’t have the right to’ or ‘I am not worthy of’ or ‘who am I to…’ can block this (our breathing) and we never get to taste the richness of life’s true nectar. Not forgetting the solar plexus on route here, the very centre of our emotions, the gut reaction and the often-numbed centre of our intuitive power. Up and around the intercostals, and the rib basket, up the scalenes, the cervicals, our neck, which challenges our ability to see what is really ‘back there’ and the throat, our potential for creative expression, often stifled by the inability through self doubt, trauma or adapted patterns to speak for one-self, with a fear induced but seeming ‘stubbornness’ to change.
Boy it’s a journey all right, why would anyone ‘choose’ to take it. Meeting all those issues is enough to send you right ‘out’ of yourself as far away as possible. In my experience that is exactly what most of us do, live way outside of ourselves, disconnected from our human potential, perhaps it is a far more appealing place than stuffed in the seeming limitations of our physical body with all those issues amongst the tissues!
Disconnection and Re-connection
The disconnection from this central axis of our selves starts from the adapted patterns we make, often at a very early age, to fit in to our environment, from needing to get the reaction we want from those around us and more often from trauma that has not been fully processed and the fight flight reaction to the trauma is quite literally still ‘frozen’ in the body exhausting the nervous system. In my experience it is only life’s ingenious orchestration that leads us back to a reconnection, through incident, through ‘accident’, through illness or through pain, only then do we unknowingly stumble into the opportunity to go back and reconnect with our whole self and find an equilibrium. It may often take several attempts! If we could recognise and ‘listen’ to the first incident, we could often avoid the 2nd, 3rd or 4th coming along to send us back ‘home’, each time usually more devastating than the last until we are ready to surrender.
Through my years of working with people in open crises or in an unconscious state of crises or in fear induced denial, it has become so clear that even a fraction of a connection to this deep connective tissue that holds the ‘all of you’ has the power to change lives, to create the healings and the road to wholeness where your greatness begins. Calling you in from your minds or from that way of place out there, this connection brings you ‘home’, home to yourself, to the opportunity for a re-connection to meet and live the ‘all of you’. After all ‘the kingdom of heaven is within’.
A closer look at the route of the DFL and the emotional issues that can be stored in the relative tissue.
The arches of the feet: the tendons of the deep toe flexors, halluces longus and flexor digitorum longus and the complex attachments of the tibialis posterior.
Here are the deepest foundations to our architecture, the springboard to our forward movement.
The foot represents our understanding of ourselves and of others and taken us out into life
The deep calf: Superior/anterior tibia fibula, tibialis posterior to fascia of popliteus, knee capsule
Our extended springboard to our forward walking/running, to moving on
It represents the future; problems here indicate a fear of the future and not wanting to move on (the knee)
Inner thigh: Medial femoral epicondyle, adductor magnus and minimum (adductor extensors) longes and brevis (adductor flexors)
The whole thigh is an emotional storage cupboard for our childhood experiences, (often rage at our parents). It is often a place of great disconnection and disassociated, numbed out and shut off.
The Pelvis/ Hips: lesser trochanter, ischial ramus, the pelvic floor fascia , obturator internus fascia, the femoral triangle (psoas, iliacus, pectineus)
The pelvis holds the potential to carry the body in perfect balance, giving the major thrust in moving us forward
As a problem area this then holds us ‘out’ of balance suggesting our resistance and fear to major decisions or a feeling of nothing to move forward to or moving forward into someone ‘else’s’ chosen picture - so out of your own truth.
The Coccyx: sacral fascia and anterior longitudinal ligament.
The coccyx representing being in or out of balance with oneself, out of balance coming from a blaming of the self and sitting on old pain.
Sacrum/L5/L4 Sacral fascia.
Represents our loss of power, fear of career and financial insecurity.
The Lumber vertebral bodies L3/L2/L1: The psoas major/minor, quadrates lumborum
The spine is our ‘back bone’ our ‘flexible’ support in Life, to be spineless an expression of weak and uncourageous.
L3/2/1 specifically represent insecurity, self-hatred, guilt, childhood pain and sexual issues
The Diaphragm T12: posterior and crura of diaphragm, pericardium, mediastinum, parietal pleura, fascia endothoracic, transversus thoracis, xyphoid process.
The breath: our ability to take in life fully. Breathing problems can be associated with not feeling the right to take up space or even exist.
The Neck: cervical vertebra, Basilar portion of occiput, cervicals, longus coli and capitalis, the scalene fascia.
Our flexibility. The ability to really ‘see’ what’s back there.
The Throat: hyoid bone, posterior manubrium, mandible, infrahyoid muscle, fascia peritracheal suprahyoid muscle.
Our avenue of expression, our channel of creativity. Problems here represent stifled creativity, the inability to speak up for oneself, refusal to change.
Often resulting in stutters and speech impediments.
Karin Locher 2011
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