Dr. Ida Rolf Institute

Structural Integration – Vol. 43 – NÂș 3

Volume: 43

On Thursday September 17, 2015 the First Biotensegrity Summit gathered in Reston, Virginia. I had the great pleasure to attend this and the preceding Biotensegrity Interest Group, or BIG, which was celebrating its seventh meeting, and out of which the Biotensegrity Summit was born.

Run jointly by John Sharkey (famed clinical anatomist, exercise physiologist, and neuromuscular therapist) and Joanne Avison (structural integrator and author of the fantastic resource Yoga, Fascia, Anatomy, and Movement), the event gathered to pay homage to the Stephen Levin Biotensegrity Archives and showcased wisdom from clinicians and researchers across a wide spectrum of backgrounds.

The day began with a keynote talk from Dr. Levin himself, which gave a wonderful overview of his work in the field for more than forty years. For those unacquainted, Levin was an orthopedic surgeon for many years, and so really got to look into the living human body and see how we are truly constructed – not like machines, but as living biotensegrity organisms. He points out that biological systems are non- linear, global, continuous, omnidirectional, communicative (i.e., they don’t need to rely totally on the central nervous system), and independent. He talks about structure as self-organizing, stable with flexible joints, and held together with snot (or extracellular matrix, depending on  your  preference of term).

I really appreciated his emphasis that we are all soft matter. As in, this idea of hard matter (bones) being somehow different from the fascia, tendons, ligaments, blood, etc. is nonsense. Pulling a quote from one of the many soft-matter labs springing up these days at all of the most esteemed academic institutions, “Biology is soft matter come alive.”1

Levin has always described the icosahedron as the building block of our tensegrity structures and points out its omnidirectional shape – which allows us to be pre-stressed and supported from the inside out. In the earlier BIG event, Jean-Claude Guimberteau questioned this when he presented some of his gorgeous video from Strolling Under the Skin (captured using an endoscopic camera). Guimberteau’s videos showed the highly dynamic, constantly shifting structures that provide our biotensegrity support, and pointed out that he always saw irregular polyhedron shapes, and had never seen an icosahedron. It would be interesting to see Guimberteau and Levin have a conversation about the issue.

Following Levin’s talk, there were two panel discussions. The first was moderated by John Sharkey and the panel was made up of Debora Chasse, Carol Davis, Niall Galloway, Paul Sercu, Ed Stiles, and Mike Turvey. All had presented their work more extensively during the BIG in the days preceding, and to give you a flavor of how diverse a group biotensegrity is drawing these days, I’ll give you a brief peek into their work:

Debora Chasse is a Doctor of Physical Therapy who spoke about her tensegrity manual therapy approach to treating a rare pain condition that originates in the adipose tissue.

Carol Davis is a Doctor of Physical Therapy who spoke about the J.F. Barnes Myofascial Release ApproachÂź and also works with Polestar Pilates Rehabilitation.

Niall Galloway is the Chief of Female Urology  at   Emory  University, and he demonstrated the use of applying tensegrity principles to better understand pelvic support anatomy and vaginal and pelvic organ prolapse. His university’s multidisciplinary team is working to provide minimally invasive pelvic surgeries that reestablish pelvic support by using a biotensegrity approach.

Paul Sercu, a physiotherapist, discussed perceptive psychopedagogy and research into non-specific back complaints and stress-related pain.

E d S t i ls i s t hD i rc t o r o f Neuromusculoskeletal Medicine at Pikeville Medical Center and teaches osteopaths about taking a tensegrity approach.

Mike Turvey, Professor Emeritus of Ecological Psychology, discussed haptic perception, which spoke more directly to how soft matter communicates with itself and the body’s perceptual systems.

The second panel was specific to functional movement and was moderated by Joanne Avison. The panel was made up of Shari Berkowitz, Leonid Blyum, Sergio Fonseca, Wilbour Kelsick, and Bill Morgan, again a diverse group:

Shari Berkowitz is a biomechanist and Pilates teacher of teachers who runs the website The Vertical Workshop and advocates for us to apply our theories of biotensegrity to movement.

Leonid Blyum is the creator of Advanced Biomechanical Rehabilitation, or ABR, which has demonstrated significant help to children with cerebral palsy.

Sergio Fonseca is a professor in the department of Physical Therapy of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil and is the co-author, with Mike Turvey, of “The Medium of Haptic Perception: A Tensegrity Hypothesis,” which was published in the Journal of Motor Behavior.

Wilbour Kelsick is a sport chiropractor who works with the Canadian National and Olympic teams.

Bill Morgan is also a chiropractor and acts as a consultant to the White House, the Veterans Administration, the U.S. Army, and the U.S. Navy. His interest is in understanding the ‘four-bar mechanism’ of the knee (a biotensegrity view) as opposed to the traditional lever model.

At the end of the day there were a number of expo tables filled with a variety of soft matter (substitutes for human biology like Silly Putty, cornstarch in water, and other ‘goos’ that kids play with these days), and a variety of tensegrity sculptures that people could play with to get an idea of their function in a more hands-on way.

Of course, directly following this daylong First Biotensegrity Summit was the Fourth International Fascia Research Congress (FRC). I found it fascinating to go from a biotensegrity event into the fascia research event. The prior  was  entirely  dedicated to understanding how we function as a whole organism, while at the FRC some (but clearly not all) researchers are still approaching it in the ‘old’ parts-based way where they are taking some part of fascia e., not in a living person – and putting it into a highly artificial environment in order to determine some insight into how it functions.

The beauty of the Biotensegrity Summit   is that there is no way around  wholeness, since that’s the whole point, and so the research and clinical work there was always highly relevant. One could argue that that should be the whole point of the FRC as well, but I digress . . .

If I have a wish for the future of the Biotensegrity Summit, it would  be  that  it is approached more like the preceding BIG – which was two days where people were given ample time to present their work, rather than just snippets of insight on a panel without an opportunity for a deeper view.

Considering the exceptional people presenting at the BIG and the wide- ranging applications for biotensegrity, I have no doubt that the summit will grow and flourish.

Endnotes

1 . www. softbio. ox. ac. uk ( retrieved 10/26/2015).

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Biotensegrity Summit Report[:]

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