The Three Movements of Evolution

I think I mentioned, somewhere, that we were planning to shoot some video of my dog Jake and the problems he was having in his back. The night before the "shoot" I was rehearsing what I wanted to say, with Jake in the family room. Long story, short, I was showing how one could treat with myofascial release the issue Jake had when I realized it was being resolved but not on film. Luckily the work I did has not held up six weeks later and Jake can demonstrate, through his body the concepts I want to present. Which are the subject of this post.

About a year ago I bought a book by Luigi Stecco "Fascial Manipulation", it is a very interesting and complicated text. One piece of information that he presents is the development of the fascial planes throughout evolution and there contribution to movement. I have been "playing" with this information as I look at the movement patterns of both my animal and human clients.

What I have noticed for years is that there are certain movement patterns that I always thought were adaptations to a lack of mobility in the spine. I thought these patterns were "added" to the movement repetoire as an adaptation.

What I think now is that these movements have always been present as more primitive movement patterns on which our more complicated movements are based. Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen (founder of Body Mind Centering) talks about the "alphabet" of movements which are mixed and matched to create more complex motions.

What I want to present is that there are three pelvic/rear limb movements that we have developped through our evolution and that these three movements are each correlated to an evolutionary process. You can replace evolution with development, since these movements also correlate to our personal movement timeline--this is the Bain-Bridge Cohen message as I understand it.

I call these three movements, at least today: the fish, the reptile and the mammal. In the development of the fetus there is another movement, the JellyFish, which I assume happens since the person/animal is born. (This movement is the cranial sacral motion that us CS therapist work with. It is very important but taken as a given for the purposes of my small brain thinking about this.)

There is a heirarchy to these movements in that the fish is built upon to arrive at the reptile and the fish/reptile to arrive at the mammal. These loosely correlate to the three brains, reptilian, mammalian and Neo Cortex (Read Temple Grandin's book "Animals in Translation" for a description of this.)

The theory is simple: When we have a movement issue, a spinal restriction for instance, we will resort to a lower movement in the heirarchy as an adaptive strategy. The lower in the heirarchy the adaptation has to go to resolve the issue the more global the restriction. This could be called structural dis-integration.

I'll be putting much more about this, along with videos and animations to illustrate on the website www.equinesi.com, including some discussion of how to work with these restrictions from a structural integration view.