Welcome to the Joanne Avison Podcast. Thank you, thank you, thank you for your wonderful comments and messages from the last episode about Vanda Scaravelli. It was so great to read them. And this week, we dive into another woman whose work inspired me deeply when it comes to considering the living, moving human body as thinking, as feeling, and as far more than the sum of its parts.
Mabel Elsworth Todd used this quote to open her book, "The Thinking Body": "God guard me from the thoughts men think in the mind alone. He that sings a lasting song thinks in a marrow bone," by William Butler Yeats, "The King of the Great Clock Tower." It's the name of that poem. Now, Mabel Todd writes in "The Thinking Body," Chapter One: Function and Form in Human Dynamics.
And I'm gonna quote a, a small chunk of that first paragraph. She writes, "Behavior is rarely rational. It is habitually emotional. We may speak wise words as the result of reasoning, but the entire being reacts to feeling. For every thought supported by feeling, there is a muscle change. Primary muscle patterns being the biological heritage of man.
Man's whole body records his emotional thinking."
We spoke of Kellerman's references two episodes ago in emotional anatomy to the archetypal patterns of the body. Now, here is Todd's version of the same principle, bringing in actors who, when on stage, depend so deeply on physical positions and gestures of the body to express the archetypes of any role or character they are to play and embody.
And I quote, "The explorer and the pioneer stand up. The prisoner and the slave crouch. The saint leans forward. The overseer and the magnate lean back. The marshal rides. Hamlet walks. Shylock extends the hands. Carmen requires the weight of the foot, hands on hips, eyes over shoulder. The postures of dynamic tradition crystallize the history of actors, and through the body designs, the young study the portrayal of epic qualities in movement."
She continues, "Guilt, craft, vision, meanness, ecstasy, and lure appear in certain arrangements of arms, hands, shoulders, neck, head, and legs. Thus, the stuff of ages goes into man's thinking, is interpreted, and comes out in movement and posture again. Personality goes into structure by denial or affirmation into person again.
It is an aspect of life in evolution, in self-expression of a mental and emotional equipment, temperament, personal experiences and prejudices influencing and controlling the relation of the bodily parts to the whole." I do smile as I go back over these highlighted paragraphs in the books I began with. It was chapters like this that sent me off down rabbit holes of studying archetypes for 20 years and realizing through my knowledge of fascia that we literally shape our fascial matrix through our movements and gestures, and they in turn shape us.
Which takes us back to Jaap van der Wal's brilliant comment to me that it is our morphology that is archetypal, meaning our shape, rather than our anatomy. That in turn takes it deeper into our self-organizing nature as humans being What I've discovered through working directly with literally thousands of people now is that we have more power than we think, thinking being a key word here, to change our morphology, which means our shape.
I don't just mean the shape that we're in, in terms of fitness. I don't mean lose weight or gain muscle. Of course, both of those are available to us.
You have behaviors, gestures, and ways of being you, and they're expressed through the medium, through the music and the movement of the instruments you combine, the, the, the organization of you in complete continuity throughout your whole form. All the inner instruments, if you wanna call them that, are made of fascia in various textures.
You and your architecture are one
Here is an example from Todd: "This equipment," meaning the muscles and bones, "includes the working unit for motion, the nerve muscle action on bones. Muscles act automatically. When acting, they move bones. Man's bones play a large part in his sense of control and position in his world. How he centers them determines his degree of self-possession.
They are continually centered and ex-centered in his rhythms of movement. Mechanically, physiologically, and psychologically, the human body is compelled to struggle for a state of equilibrium This is where I first appreciated the idea that each of us seeks balance. However That is not a prolonged state of dynamic stability.
We are not trees, and you'll hear me say that a lot. We don't, in my not very humble opinion, need to struggle for a state of equilibrium to get to that dynamic stability. It isn't the goal, nor does it need to be a default demise. It can be a joy. We dance into and out of dynamic instability all the time.
We can love the process of balance, poise, and equilibrium coming and going from moment to moment as we walk in our unipedal way, balanced on one foot as we choose where to place the other. It takes a certain amount of presence to keep reestablishing that balance, which takes some care of our breathing and attention through it.
But when we're present, we really can play with that dynamic instability. But I'm jumping ahead here. I've grown out of the idea that we are doomed to seek balance as if it's an elusive composure. You know that from previous episodes. It's part of the game of living life the way it is, the way it seems, the way it is appearing and disappearing as we go along.
Balance is not something we find and store unless we're playing statues, which is one of the hardest games in the world. It is something we play in and out of all the time. That's called the joy of moving. In my world, we're born to dance. Anyway, let's go back and take another clip from Todd's ideas.
They're what sparked so much of my journey. It isn't that I wanna take them down. I love, love, love that I began my learning with her wisdom. When you think about it, she wrote this before the Second World War. It was first published in the United Kingdom in 1937, so it was literally genius at the time, especially for a woman in academia.
In fact, notably, the copyright went to Paul B. Hoeber, who was the publisher, which he transferred to Mabel Elsworth Todd in 1949. The culture of the time did not necessarily encourage her, and her bravery in speaking up for the body as something more than mechanical is outstanding almost a century ago.
It was a time when the military was an obligatory part of service for young men in Europe and many other places. And back then, yoga had not yet come to the West
It was the philosopher Krishnamurti and the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, both family friends of Vanda Scaravelli, who first invited their own teacher, Krishnamacharya, the pioneer of modern yoga, to guide them. Now, Krishnamacharya sent two of his own students to do the teaching in his place: Iyengar to teach the postures, and Desikachar to teach the breath.
Now, Menuhin had already met Iyengar in India in 1952, and in 1954 invited him to Gstaad in Switzerland to stay with him and teach him yoga. And it was through Menuhin's circle of artists and intellectual friends there that Iyengar and Desikachar came to teach Vanda Scaravelli herself. So, do go back and listen to the last episode in this series for how that comes full circle, if you will.
Because Scaravelli rented a chalet in Gstaad each summer, although she lived in Florence, Italy, and it was there in her 50s that she began the practice that would grow into her own unique style, encouraging her students to do the same
Iyengar did not teach in the United Kingdom until years later than that in the '60s, when he was invited to run a London program that went on to establish Britain as the center for his work outside of India
This was a different era, and given Todd's wisdom preceded the 1950s by two decades, in that context alone, it deserves deep respect. I was so inspired by her preface and these words that were in it. "Details of the nervous system involvement are presented but briefly, except to describe the proprioceptive mechanisms as a prime factor in establishing coordinated movements.
Relaxation is the crying need of our age, but what it is and how to attain it are still unanswered questions." Mabel E. Todd, 1937. Those two sentences sent me on my journey with so many different questions. As I was studying yoga, the breath became a key focus for me, and it has changed my work as my work has changed in how I teach it.
For me, it has the first and last word in our ability to relax and our ability to find our optimal posture with ease again and again and again as we sit and as we move. Did you try the methods in the last piece with Vanda Scaravelli? I consider Todd's integration of the spine and breath.
Mabel E. Todd introduced me early on to thinking outside the box. I stand on her shoulders as a, as a giant to see perhaps beyond the thinking that, like Kellermann's after her, was still steeped in the idea that muscles and bones are separate pieces of the form activated by nerves. Her work brought us forward beyond that idea, and you'll see what I mean with the next quote about the diaphragm.
However, even that outstanding realization at the time has been superseded or extended if you have the privilege of being in the anatomy lab. Stay with me and you'll see what I mean. She wrote: "The desirable high chest. The anterior and posterior walls of the chest are symmetrical as well as the sides, and this symmetry should prevail in arrangement of parts in the vertical of the structure.
While avoiding the stiff, faulty posture, we must not favor a slumped chest, but a symmetrical one. The curve of the dorsal aspect of the sternum and the curve of the ventral aspect of the spine are symmetrical in their structural design. We should take this into account in our thinking." Now, let's understand in her era, Todd was a pioneer of somatic education.
During her life, she lived from 1880 to 1956. She lived and taught her programs in New York and eventually moved to California. Here is what she wrote about the diaphragm, which in its day was hugely controversial A surprising number of people think of the diaphragm as a muscle in the wall of the thorax, which contracts and expands horizontally in breathing and which has little or no relation to the other body structures They are all too prone to accept width of chest as the index of deep breathing.
They are astonished, therefore, to learn that the horizontal part of the diaphragm is a floor for the thoracic cage upon which the heart and lungs rest and a ceiling for the abdomen, and that its roots run down the spine as its front aspect almost to the hip bones. In breathing, its action is up and down like a piston in a cylinder, deepening the chest cavity instead of broadening it with every inhalation.
The balanced thorax with freedom of ribs and intercostals will release the diaphragm and deep breathing, which requires not breadth of chest from side to side, but depth from top to bottom and from front to back will result. This increases the vertical rather than the transverse diameter of the chest Now, I've had the huge privilege of seeing these aspects of the human body in dissection, and I would have loved to have Mabel Elsworth Todd standing beside me when I saw it, as the real story within us is much more than she describes.
There are no parts. Everything is in complete continuity in the round, and there's no symmetry. The heart doesn't sit in the chest like a valentine heart right in the middle with the same amount of lung on either side, completely separate from either of them. Nor does the liver sit beneath it to make the slightest suggestion that there is equal organisation or symmetry from one side of the body to the other.
Each lung is a different size, and the liver, which sometimes wraps and fills the upper right side of the abdomen only and sometimes fills a much larger area than you see in the anatomy books, means that such symmetry, while a nice idea, actually doesn't make much sense to the body. The roundness that I think she's reaching towards does But the other piece in this that endorses and expands Todd's ideas is that the diaphragm not only forms the root or the floor of the thoracic cavity, all that sits above it, and the roof of the abdominal cavity, all your guts below it, but it is in fact in complete continuity with them.
The very top of it is twisted and becomes the pericardium that wraps the heart in total continuity with the tongue. The very base of the diaphragm is folded and forms the gut tubes. There is no interruption in that continuity of the fabric the fascia forms. It's quite extraordinary, and I would love to have thought that Mabel Todd could see it.
All that Todd says about the connection between the upper and lower torso is actually even more the case than she suggests, and how she explains it is even more that. The legs of the diaphragm, the so-called diaphragmatic crura, are in fact in complete continuity with the psoas muscles that line the deep front of the spine and reach down over the front-facing rim of the pelvis to the innermost top of the leg bones in the groin.
It is quite stunning to witness if you know what you're looking at, and Todd suspected it, but actually she was more right than she knew. Her explanations are amazing. They point towards how it really is, and it's more than she said. Her movement teaching grew from her instinct, I believe, that this was all somehow deeply related, and I admire her so hugely because she would not have found a lot of agreement in her day, and I doubt she was considered scientifically accurate by many at the time And there's a last quote that I will share with you that's likely where her actual somatic practices grew from.
And I quote, "To balance bodily forces, think down the back and up the front. Let the spine drag, but keep the body, the front of the body up. The vertebrae sit to the full length of the back while the whole front of the body is suspended from the spine and head directly and indirectly through connecting bone, muscle, and other soft tissues.
Thinking up the front of the body without lifting any of its bony parts will maintain proper traction in the connecting muscles to keep the ends of all bones in the front of the body wall at proper levels for a balance of weight at their spinal attachments. Thus, the work of the tensile members at the front balances the work of the compression members at the back.
If the thorax and pelvis are in balance and the throat muscles and abdominal wall are firm, the small muscles and ligaments of the spine will maintain such a degree of curvature in each area as to make the whole spinal axis as long as possible. Thus, all weight is passing downward from top to base, linking posture and speech."
Now this takes us into another world of how the way we speak and express ourselves is profoundly affected by, and has a profound effect on, our posture The missing piece, however, takes us deeper when we add it into the puzzle that Todd is figuring out That missing piece is that the human body is round It does not have a clearly delineated front, back, and sides like a flat-packed kitchen.
Traditional classical biomechanics suggests it does, and planes of movement divide the body in half from front to back, from side to side, and from upper to lower to describe it. However, find me someone with the same body right and left, the same front and back, and the same above and below. It's ridiculous to even think.
Why do we make things so complicated? I mean, think about it. We tend to be handed, y- right-handed or left-handed, not ambidextrous, so we use one side completely differently to the other. Our upper body doesn't vaguely resemble our lower body, and the front and back don't have a seam running down between them.
What is there that can even be considered symmetrical? We're round, and that takes this whole conversation into the next dimension. Yes, of course, posture and speech are inextricably linked. Once you appreciate first how the embryo self-organizes into form, but how the fascia of the neck and throat in complete continuity with the chest and the head, you begin to see something crucial to understanding how we can now view the body
Here's the key. The human body doesn't have tensile forces at the front and compression forces at the back. Every human cell everywhere demonstrates tensile and compressive forces as its volumetric roundness. It's not an exclusive thing to a part of us. Tension and compression work together all the time in the round everywhere.
Everything in the human body is rounded, tubular, folded, and patternedin a lattice arrangement based on triangulation. Not stacks, not separate forces front and back, not a below and an above, but organized as a whole in the round to be upright in nature ideally We could just as easily say the compressive force is at the front and the tensile force is at the back because fasciategrity, the tension compression architecture of the fascia on every scale, it's fractal, means that there is nowhere, nowhere in the human form that it isn't a volume.
A volume that changes shape, reorganizes itself, and reestablishes balance with every breath Integrating that at the micro level changes the macro without effort. You just have to ask better questions. The body itself will give you so much better answers if you're not looking through this lens of separate parts joined together.
Now, I love what Todd writes that organizes us to think about the thinking body. I love that she inspired me to explore fascia and find out that everything I thought was true might not be. I love that she linked posture, gesture, shape, and expression to the archetypal patterns we express and adopt as humans being.
From the soul, the psyche, and the soma express us. Now, in the last episode, we talked about Vanda Scaravelli, who lived a lot later than Mabel Elsworth Todd. I think I prefer the inner sense of peace I get from deeply breathing the spine and finding that subtle place where it seems to lengthen and deepen at the same time, that thing about it moving in two directions.
Check out the exercise in the last episode. Through the whole torso, not just up the front and down the back.
What about the sides and the top and the base of the breath and the body? It all moves together
Thank you, Mabel Elsworth Todd, for the gift of a thinking body. For showing me that a muscle can hold a memory and a posture can hold a life decades before the rest of us caught up with you In the next episode, we're gonna take a look at another outstanding woman who pioneered a different approach to the living body.
Not completely disconnected from the ones that we've looked at so far, but her work was a huge contribution to the body work world at large. That is Dr. Ida P. Rolf. I am as grateful to her as I am to Vanda Scaravelli and Mabel Elsworth Todd. Let me know what you think in the comments here on YouTube, or if you're listening to the podcast, please do email me.
I love to hear from you. And until we explore Dr. Rolf next week, perhaps you may think and feel a little more from the marrow bone and a little less from the mind alone. God bless.
