A Vital Role of Fascia in Health and Wellbeing

Schultz Bands, Body Memories, EFT, and a Recommendation

Background

For background information on what fascia is and why it is so essential to questions (and answers) of health, see my review/synopsis of David Lesondak’s book:

Book Review: "Fascia: What it is and Why it Matters" 2nd Edition

For my own successful journey into addressing fascia health as a primary route back to wellbeing, see:

What Fascia Decompression and "Block Therapy" Did For Me

Schultz Bands

This morning, facebook reminded me of a post from 3 years ago, where I covered the concept of Schultz Bands, which I first came across on the Neurofascial Approach facebook page. I’m not sure where the image above, which illustrates these bands, originates from, as the link where I apparently found it is now broken, but I think the likely source is “The Endless Web: Fascial Anatomy and Physical Reality”, by y R. Louis Schultz and Rosemary Feitis.

These bands denote places on the body where the adipose tissue/subcutaneous fat layer is thin, and where there is little fascia between the skin and bone. They hence represent areas where the fascia tends to easily adhere to bone, so that the skin can become seemingly "superglued" down to it. Hence these areas are prone to cause restrictions to various flows, pressurizations, pulsations, and signals. They may be places where the nerves and arteries which pass through the narrowed spaces could get compressed. They are likely primary “real estate” where body memories of stressful episodes get written, and where heavy metals and toxin get trapped and sequestered.

Since we know that fascia stiffens, contracts and dehydrates when we are stressed, so stress will tend to make these bands tighter (like a drawstring bag) and even more restrictive, thus making any symptoms associated with them being too tight even worse.

Self-Assessment

We can easily assess for ourselves if any or all of these bands are causing problems for our own wellbeing, by seeing if we can easily “pinch an inch” with our fingers and are able to pull the skin away from the bone. We can also test this by placing two fingers on different points on the band and making small spiralling circular motions: does the skin move with the fingers, gliding on the bone, or not? Another way to tell is to lie on a block underneath one of these regions, like we do in Block Therapy (see my article on this above). If there is a lot of pain, the fascia is probably glued down here, especially if it is so painful that you dare not put your full weight on the block.`

I suspect for most of us, most of the bands are well and truly stuck down hard. This is not how our bodies should be, and is an artefact of the modern world. These restrictions and constrictions may, in turn, be restricting and constricting our enjoyment of life in all sorts of ways.

In fact, doing this exercise daily - pinching as much as you can the skin on a stuck down area, and then pressing on the same place with finger tips while making small circling movements, and perhaps also applying some Block Therapy, is a way to release the fascia in these areas. Repeated daily, one can start to see improvement quite soon.

Indeed, synchronously, but before I got the above reminder about Schultz bands, I intuited I needed to do some work around my eyes. Initially, the skin at the bridge of the nose was stuck down hard, for example. By just pinching and rubbing this area a couple of times a day, the skin here is starting to come away and beginning to glide over the bony structure beneath.

Myself as an Example

I have just done such an assessment on myself, here is what I found.

Moving downwards, starting with band (7) in the image above. As I mentioned, I have already been working on the area around the eyes, and also on my scalp and have made progress here.

The band (6) around the top of the neck/jaw feels ok, but this was an area where I have concentrated a lot of fire with my Block Therapy practice over a span years, as my neck was by far the most problematic area in my own symptom sett.

As for the collar bone band (5), before I started using Block Therapy, the skin here was definitely stuck down hard on my collar bones. After a lot of daily Blocking, my skin here now glides across the bone, and I can pull it up and away. However, the band as it moves around the side of the neck appears to be a big part of my residual chronic neck pain issues. I am currently digging deep into the area where the neck meets the shoulders with the Block. This was intensely painful at first, which indicates indeed I have found a problem area.

The chest band (4) is pretty good for me, but again, before I started using Block Therapy, my skin was stuck down to my ribs over my entire rib cage. This has been freed up and now the skin glides over the ribs. The skin was particularly stuck on the flat part of the sternum and took a very long while to start loosening up.

The belly band (3) I am OK round the back and sides, but things start to become more dense and solid as I approach the navel, and the skin here becomes hard to pinch - there is no bone here, so I think it is a case of being stuck down to the underlying organs. So some more work to do here, especially as this is likely to be negatively impacting my diaphragmatic breathing.

The pelvic (2) and and upper leg bands (1) are very tight, as I haven’t done much work on these areas at all yet, but this indicates I need to do so.

Body Memories

As I revisit this concept of Schultz Bands, I am reflecting on my therapy sessions with

Lilian Sjøberg

of

The HOPE shortcut

, in which she helps to clear and release trapped body memories of past, but unprocessed, stressful episodes. The best description of this process I have come across is from a testimonial on the HOPE shortcut website:

“Lilian works with stories, the aggregates of our traumas and emotions, accessed through patterns in the body, through ‘symptoms’. She goes back, with you, to unpick, revisit and rewrite your stories, to settle traumas and soothe emotions. She uses her skills as a storyteller evoking imagery, metaphor and meaning. And your body listens very carefully and hears the new story, and somewhere there is a response and resolution, a light, and room for newer stories.”

I postulated above that the bands are likely to be places where body memories get written, and, looking back now on my therapy sessions, this certainly seems to be the case for me: these bands seem to be prominent in many of the stories.

Indeed, as mentioned above, my most major symptoms has always been the pain and rigidity in my neck and shoulders. So, many times the neck pain has come to the fore in the therapy sessions, and I have often seen it in the visualizations evoked by the therapy as a silver metal ring around my neck, which is very tight - which I now realizes closely follows band (5) in the diagram.

When I was really unwell, just before my hospitalization, due to a combination of extreme stress, and, as I found out later, neurotoxic black mould in the wall next to my bed at the time, this ring was so tight that it felt like I was being strangled and could not breathe. Very frightening. When we first encountered this ring in therapy, in my visualization there was also a man in a guardhouse beside the ring protecting it, symbolizing that my body felt that any attempt to ease it could make the pain worse. We had to make my Nervous System feel safe enough to trust the process.

Another place which has come up a lot in therapy is the belly area around or underneath the navel, precisely the “dense” area I just found in my self-assessment reported above, corresponding to the front of band (3). In one series of therapy sessions, my visualization was of my skin here as being like a brittle roof of building intricately connected by pylons and ropes to other points on my body, which needed careful dismantling and removing. Other times, it is arisen as a heavy dark stone inside my guts just beneath this very place, which Lilian helped to dissolve in the visualization.

The third most common place in therapy is my tired dry eyes, and the area around my eyes, as per band (7). I recall one session where the back of my eyes seemed connected by thick wires to the back of my skull which were overly tight. A tight or clenched jaw has also come up several times, corresponding to band (6).

I therefore feel that one benefit of this type of therapy is that it helps to release the restrictions and constrictions stored in these bands.

EFT

Another modality Lilian is trained in is Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) or “Tapping”, which she has used hands-on on me and demonstrated significant symptom relief when she visited me here in the UK. I find it interesting to note that nearly all the major tapping points correspond quite closely to points on or near these bands, especially around the eyes, on the collar bone, and beneath the armpits.

Recommendations

If you want to learn more about fascia and its vital role in your health and wellbeing, the inventor of Block Therapy, Deanna Hansen, and her nephew and business partner, Quinn Castelane, have relaunched their “Discussions with the Fascia Masters” podcast with a new format. I highly recommend this most engaging and informative series, below is the first episode.

Later, they did an episode based on this article:

Also, Lilian and I have got together and combined Lilian’s knowledge and understanding of Body Memories, with my knowledge and understanding of Fascia, to create a unique pragmatic online course on these topics.