The Deep Front Line - an axis of space
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 connects a deep central axis of inner strength and communication, which keeps order and balance throughout the rest of the body. Awareness of the DFL is life changing, it is a meeting and realising of the all of you. It holds a key to our health and the greatest reference from which to live by.
What is The Deep Front Line?
The term Deep Front Line, was introduced by Thomas Myers' pioneering and revolutionary work of Anatomy Trains. It is in reality a continuous ‘line’of myofascia that connects the deepest centre of our bodies in a voluminous and cylinder fashion. From our foot arches, it travels to the pelvis, from the pelvis to the diaphragm, it spreads out around the rib basket and up into the throat and temples, enveloping the bones, muscles, joints, nerves and organs along its tracks. I call it the ‘master of the lines’ from which the equilibrium requisite of whole health can be restored. It holds our greatest strengths and our hidden subconscious psyche within its psyche.
Connecting to this deep and hidden 'line' of fascia is connecting to the buried parts of your selves, so unfamiliar to those hidden parts, the feelings can be deeply uncomfortable; a place, it seems, we don’t know how to be in, a place we are unaccustomed to. With an almost eerie quality of space and stillness it is like a familiar place that has been vacated and uninhabited, ones entered it becomes a refuge and our salvation.
The term 'line'
Please note that the term 'line' is a metaphor of the Anatomy Trains visual concept, where the lines connect from station to station along the tracks (rail roads). It is in fact referring to a 'line of pull', a direction of force, connectivity and communication that travels in any one direction. In reality the fascia is more like sheaths of wet, gluey, string like webbing.
Working with the DFL
When I am working with pain, a strain pattern, injury or illness, I will always first passively move the client ‘onto’ their DFL while they are standing, to observe the body’s response in offering a renegotiation to it. Once the DFL is evoked and back in line, a sensing of it can occur, once back in connectivity and in communication, the strain pattern is immediately supported and the pain usually relieved. We are then able to start re embodying and working to maintain with these inner connections. This first renegotiation re-establishes the self - regulatory connection of the DFL and is often enough to support the strain pattern to loose the symptom, once reconnected the DFL organises and rebalances the rest of the body. With the symptom lost, the strain pattern adjusted the body’s re education can begin: to re pattern the bodies memory and change the ‘belief’ system. We must now renegotiate with the whole body to re-engage with those disassociated places and re-perform the movements that were causing discomfort, without discomfort, in order to loose any associated adaptations, learnt compensations, so that the real healing can begin.
Why is it uncomfortable to go 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 quoted, “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”.
Hanging out with the DFL
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? Lets look at what is along the tracks and stations that make up this line and what they represent.
A map of the emotional and metaphysical stations along the Deep Front Line
From the foundations of our whole architecture, the foot arch, is our springboard into life, from here heading up to the calf, our future, (a blocking of the future is often found buried in the calf.) From there we enter into the locked storage cupboards of the thighs, meeting any stored and buried childhood experiences. On up to the pelvis which holds our potential of perfect balance for the ‘whole body’, ‘thrusting’ us forward, often however thwarted by a fear based resistance to ‘knowing what to move forward to’, or moving forward into someone else’s desired future, taking that balance potential away and our feeling of ‘out’ of balance is left around the 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 compression issue. There it meets our deepest most intimate and often confronting sexual emotions sitting in the Pelvic fascia and up the L1/L2/L3, where unresolved sexual issues can be held; then up to the lumbar/thoracic junction, 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 is 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 inherent 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 so often numbed centre of our intuitive power. Up and around the intercostals, and the rib basket, up around the heart, the lungs to the 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, to speak our truth, with a fear induced but seeming ‘stubbornness’ to change.
Boy it’s a journey all right, why would anyone ‘choose’ to go there. Meeting all those issues is enough to send you right ‘out’ of yourself and move in next door. In my experience that is exactly what most of us do, live way outside of ourselves, disembodied and disconnected from our life and ourselves. Perhaps a far more appealing place than surrounded by the seeming limitations of our physical body with all those issues amongst the tissues!
Disconnection and re-connection
The disconnection from this integral part of our selves starts from the adapted patterns we make at a very early age to fit in to our environment, from needing to get the reaction we want from those around us or react the way we think others want us to; often from trauma that has not been fully played out and the fight flight reaction to the trauma being quite literally still ‘frozen’ in the body. From my experience it is only life’s ingenious orchestration that leads us back to reconnect to ourselves, through incident, through ‘accident’, through illness or through loss or pain. It seems only then do we unknowingly stumble into the opportunity to go back and reconnect with our whole self and find our equilibrium. It may often take several attempts! If we could only 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, 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 life can begin. 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’.
Through Contrology we reconnect the DFL
In the original instruction and the vocabulary and ‘design’ of Contrology 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 re self-regulate to its own naturally orchestrated rhythm. Aligned to gravity where it is fully supported and free from the impact and distortions of gravitational pull and compression.
Is the DFL our ‘core stability’?
The term ‘core stability’s referred to by fitness professionals and physiotherapists and supposedly strengthened by all Pilates disciples, it is widely used across the industry, referring repeatedly to the pelvic floor, deep abdominals muscles and the much overrated transverses abdominals. Joseph Pilates however never used the word core, never spoke of the pelvic floor, but yet his instructions took you right deep inside your whole self, to the very fibres of the DFL, resulting in the whole body movement, whole health and the 'uniformly developed' body that is the legacy of his work. His insistence to breath well “you breath OUT the air to breath IN the air” connecting to the DFL, as the diaphragm lies on the tracks of the DFL and its full use one of the most effective ways of evoking it. I feel a more appropriate image of a core needs then be one of the apple core, which runs from the bottom through the centre to the top (and beyond), as does the DFL.
A closer look at the route of the DFL and the issues that get stored in the relative tissues.
The arches of the feet: the tendons of the deep toe flexors, halucas 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 into life.
The foot represents our understanding of ourselves and of others and takes us out into the world.
The deep calf: Superior/anterior tibia fibula, tibialis posterior to teh fascia of the popleteus, the knee capsule
Our extended spring board to our forward walking/running, to moving onwards.
It represents the future; problems here indicate resistence or fear of the future and not wanting to or feeling able to move on .
The knee represents ego and pride.
Inner thigh: Medial femoral epicondyle, adductor magnus and minimum(adductor extensors) longes and brevis (adductor flexors)
The whole thigh is a storage cupboard of childhood experiences, (often rage at our parents). It seems often to be a place of disassociated with unfinished resolve. Often a difficult place to sense feel.
The Pelvis/ Hips:, ishsial ramus, the pelvic floor fascia , obturator internus fascia, the lesser trochantor,the femoral triangle (psoas, iliacus, pectineus)
The pelvis holds the potential to carry the body in perfect balance, giving the thrust in moving us forward.
As a problem area this can hold us out of balance. A resistance or fear of major decisions or a feeling of nothing to move forward to or moving forward into someone else’s chosen picture - living 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 your self and sitting on old pain.
Sacrum/L5/L4 Sacral fascia ,
Represents power, and loss of power. Fear of career , loss of security, financial insecurity.
The Lumber vertebral bodies L3/L2/L1: The psoas major/minor, quadratus lumborum
The spine is our ‘back bone’ our ‘flexible’ support in Life, to be spineless an expression of weakness and uncourageous.
L3/2/1 specifically represent emotional insecurity, self-hatred, guilt, childhood pain and sexual issues.
The Diaphragm T12 : posterior and crura of diaphragm, pericardium, mediastinum, parietal pleura, fascia endothoracica, 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 vertebre 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, mandable, infrahyoid muscle, fascia pretrachialis suprahyoid muscle
Our avenue of expression; our channel of creativity. Problems here represent stifled creativity, the inability to speak up for one self, refusal to change.
Often resulting in stutters and speech impediments.
Karin Locher 2010
