Fascia & Your Sensing Systems

"Your body thinks in feels."

Hi everyone!

I’m so happy to be back with you. I will write a more personal post soon, but I didn’t want to let another day go by without thinking and writing about Chapter 6 in Body by Breath.

I think I said previously — THIS IS MY FAVORITE CHAPTER.

It combines my current favorite obsessions: feelings, embodiment, proprioception, interoception, and neuroception. I grew up as a dancer with big feelings — so emotions and embodiment are concepts I’ve sliced, diced, and processed for decades. But the last three concepts have become part of my lived experience since becoming a mother.

Put simply, Jill nails this chapter and clearly lays out how the work on the balls can improve our proprioception, interoception, and neuroception, which can lead to so many benefits, including helping us feel our feelings in an embodied way rather than only getting stuck in our head.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself here.

In the beginning of the chapter, Jill introduces us to the “maxim that I live by, ‘My body thinks in feels.’”

If you take nothing away from this book except for this singular understanding, it will be worth your while.

So, how exactly does your body “think in feels?”

Jill counts the ways as move through the chapter:

Your fascia “feels” a lot

On p. 131, she cites scientist Martin Grunwald, who has calculated that there may be 250 million nerve endings in the fascial net. (By comparison, your skin has approx. 200 million nerve endings and your eyes have 120 million.)

She goes on to remind us that her self-fascial massage approach “show you what and where your body feels and shine a light on what is numb, confused, or missing.“

Also important: Rolling is “great for stimulating mechanoreceptors and giving them more of an audience with your brain. Flooding your brain with this pressure and positional information helps quiet many pain or stress signals that may also be active.” She explains this in more detail later in the chapter, on p. 135. and I’d like to ask her about it more in our call with her!

Our ability to “feel” our body in space is variable — and trainable

On pages, 133-134, Jill introduces us to proprioception, which is our ability to feel where we are in space.