Traditional Yoga and acupuncture texts say there are thousands if not millions of meridians running through the body. One reason why traditional Oriental theories have been rejected by modern science is that anatomists would ask “Where are all these mythical meridians?” It turns out they were looking at them all along but did not recognize them for what they were. Connective tissue is everywhere in the body, it is in the dermis of the skin, it forms and interpenetrates every bone, every joint, every organ, tissue, and cell.
The connective tissue and fascia form a mechanical continuum, extending throughout the animal body, even into the innermost parts of each cell. All the great systems of the body – the circulatory, the nervous system, the musculo-skeletal system, the digestive tract, the various organs – are ensheathed in connective tissue.
This matrix determines the overall shape of the organism as well as the detailed architecture of its parts. All movements, of the body as a whole, or of its smallest parts, are created by tensions carried through the connective tissue fabric.
Each tension, each compression, each movement causes the crystalline lattices of the connective tissues to generate bioelectric signals that are precisely characteristic of those tensions, compressions, and movements. The fabric is a semiconducting communication network that can convey the bioelectric signals between every part of the body and every other part.
This communication network within the fascia is none other than the meridian system of traditional Oriental medicine, with its countless extensions into every part of the body. As these signals flow through the tissues, their biomagnetic counterparts extend the stories they tell into the space around the body. The mechanical, bioelectric, and biomagnetic signals traveling through the connective tissue network, and through the space around the body, tell the various cells how to form and reform the tissue architecture in response to the tensions, compressions, and movements we make