Therapeutic Healing by Cindy Rowland Wilson

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Yin Yoga & Affirmations for HEALING - Full Body NO PROPS Yin Promote physical, mental and emotional healing with this full body ...

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Why can gentle touch feel comforting to one person, neutral to another and uncomfortable to someone else?

Could persistent pain change not only how pain is experienced, but also how pleasant touch is interpreted?

Palamoutsi and Liberati bring together brain imaging and behavioural research to explore the relationship between persistent pain, affective touch and the insula.

The insula is involved in bringing together information about the body, emotion, attention, salience and pain. It also contributes to how we experience the pleasant and emotional qualities of touch. This makes it an important meeting point between what is happening to the body and what that experience means to the person.

Gentle moving touch can activate C tactile afferents, a group of sensory fibres associated with the affective qualities of touch. In many people this type of touch is experienced as pleasant, comforting or socially meaningful, although the response is never determined by the fibres alone.

The paper suggests that persistent pain may change how this information is processed. In some chronic pain populations, gentle touch is rated as less pleasant or rewarding. Brain activity during touch may also become more closely associated with pain, sensitivity and threat than with pleasure.

The authors describe this as a ‘hijacked insula’. Rather than touch automatically entering a pleasant sensory pathway, ongoing pain may influence how the brain interprets and gives meaning to that input.

Importantly, this does not appear to happen in the same way for everyone. Some people retain their ability to recognise and enjoy pleasant touch. The authors therefore propose two broad possibilities: touch may need to compete with pain related processing in some people, while in others it may be able to strengthen pleasant pathways that remain available.

This supports a more individual approach to hands on therapy. Pressure, speed, movement, location, predictability, consent and the relationship with the therapist may all influence how touch is received. The same input may feel reassuring on one day and unwelcome on another, particularly when pain, fatigue, stress or sensitivity has changed.

For therapists, the message is positive. Thoughtful touch can be explored collaboratively rather than applied according to a fixed assumption about what should feel good. We can listen, adjust and help each person discover the type of touch that feels comfortable and useful to them.

This remains a proposed model rather than proof that touch can directly ‘normalise’ the insula, and its personalised interventions still need clinical testing. Even so, it offers a valuable direction: understanding touch as adaptable sensory and emotional input, shaped by the person rather than guaranteed by the technique. 👐🧠

Palamoutsi, E.M. and Liberati, G. (2026) ‘The hijacked insula: A stratified model of affective touch modulation in chronic pain’, Journal of Neuropsychology, 20(3), pp. 659–694.
https://doi.org/10.1111/jnp.70062

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Fascial glide, hyaluronan and what can we actually claim? 🔬

I think we need to get much better at separating fascinating fascia research from evidence about what we actually do to people in treatment rooms and movement classes.

Take fascial glide and hyaluronan.

Hyaluronan, or HA, is present within the loose connective tissue between fascial layers and is relevant to how those layers move relative to one another. There is interesting research into its viscosity, molecular behaviour, water interactions and wider biological functions. 💧

All worth knowing.

But knowing how HA behaves does not automatically mean that massage, stretching, rolling or particular movement sequences are changing HA in the way we sometimes hear claimed.

HA really does show shear dependent behaviour under experimental conditions. Mathematical modelling has also suggested that different mechanical movements could influence HA fluid pressure around fascial layers. But that is a very different thing from demonstrating that rotational or multiplanar exercise makes human fascia ‘slipperier’, improves lubrication or clears HA produced during training.

There is some interesting human research here too. A very small study involving five people with elbow pain found changes in an MRI measure sensitive to water bound glycosaminoglycans after Fascial Manipulation. HA was proposed as part of the explanation, but HA itself was not directly measured.

Then there is fascial ‘glide’. ↔️

In 2011, Langevin and colleagues found reduced thoracolumbar fascia shear strain in people with chronic low back pain. It was tempting to construct a fairly straightforward story from that: pain is associated with reduced sliding, therefore perhaps restoring sliding would be beneficial.

Except the research has not remained that straightforward.

In 2025, Tomita and colleagues found greater, rather than reduced, thoracolumbar shear strain in people with non specific low back pain. A brief massage in that study did not significantly alter it.

We also have an observational study in which foam rolling increased measured thoracolumbar fascial sliding, particularly when vibration was added.

And then a 2026 mechanistic trial found something almost opposite again. Three weeks of massage reduced thoracolumbar fascia shear strain by around 32%. No corresponding microstructural change was detected, and the change in shear strain was not clearly associated with improvement in disability.

So which is better: more glide or less glide? 🤔

At the moment, I do not think the evidence allows us to answer that confidently. A 2026 systematic review reached much the same conclusion: findings for thoracolumbar fascial mobility vary according to population and measurement method, intervention evidence remains preliminary, and the clinical meaning of these measures is not yet established.

And that is exactly the problem with turning emerging fascia research into explanations for treatment.

Showing that fascial layers move is not evidence that more movement between those layers is always desirable.

Showing that HA contributes to the interface between fascial layers is not evidence that our hands are ‘releasing’, ‘rehydrating’ or changing its viscosity.

Showing that HA is shear thinning does not demonstrate that a particular movement sequence is required to ‘clear’ it.

And showing that an intervention changes an ultrasound measurement does not establish that this tissue change caused somebody to feel or move better.

None of that makes fascia irrelevant. Quite the opposite. The research is becoming far more interesting as our ability to investigate living tissue improves.

But basic biology, an observed tissue characteristic, a proposed mechanism and a demonstrated treatment mechanism are four different things.

Movement can help people. 🚶

Massage can help people. 🤲

We do not need to make the mechanism more certain than the research allows.

Sometimes ‘we don’t know yet’ is the most scientifically accurate answer.

When we talk about ‘unwinding’ in manual therapy, we nearly always start with the idea that there is something wrong or dysfunctional that needs to be released.

If you’ve worked as a fascia oriented therapist, you’ve probably seen unwinding. Someone is lying on the treatment table and, without deliberately deciding to move, their arm starts to rotate, their head turns, their body stretches or curls. Sometimes the response becomes much stronger and they shake, cry, vocalise or suddenly describe a memory from their past.

Traditionally, we have attached a problem to this. Fascia was restricted, an old movement pattern needed releasing or trauma was stuck in the body and the client had been encouraged to release it.

But what if much of what we are seeing is actually something a healthy human nervous system is perfectly capable of doing?

We don’t consciously plan every movement we make. The brain is continually predicting, preparing and adjusting movement in response to sensory information. Our ‘sense of agency’ is the feeling that ‘I decided to do that’, but our own motor system can generate movement without us having a strong conscious sense of initiating it. This may help explain why someone can genuinely feel that their body ‘just wants to move’.

The treatment table also provides an interesting environment. Someone is relatively still, there are fewer distractions and a therapist is providing sustained, predictable touch. Attention may naturally shift towards breathing, pressure, position and other bodily sensations.

Once movement begins, it creates new sensory information, which influences the next movement and creates more information again. Rather than something physically ‘unwinding’, this could potentially be a form of sensorimotor exploration, with movement and sensation continually influencing each other as the brain updates its predictions about the body.

Emotion can be part of this same process. Emotion involves changes in breathing, autonomic activity, muscle activity, facial expression, vocalisation and readiness to move, so crying, shaking, sighing or making a sound can all be perfectly normal parts of a strong emotional response.

Memory can also appear without us deliberately searching for it. Involuntary autobiographical memories happen in healthy people all the time, when a smell, sound, sensation, place or even body position unexpectedly reminds us of something. A movement might therefore change sensation, that sensation might cue a memory or association, and the memory may influence emotion and further movement.

This could also help explain why someone occasionally moves in a way that reminds them of something from their past. It doesn't necessarily mean the body was storing that movement waiting to complete it.

The movement may have helped cue the memory, the memory may have influenced the movement, or both may have interacted.

We regulate ourselves through movement and emotion every day. We stretch, fidget, sigh, walk, laugh and cry without considering these behaviours unusual. During treatment, however, someone may feel safe and supported enough to pay much more attention to what they are experiencing and allow movement or emotion to emerge without consciously directing it.

Similar spontaneous movements and emotional responses occur during meditation, hypnosis and religious practices. One context may describe them as spiritual, another as energy moving, while manual therapy may call them fascial unwinding or trauma release.

Perhaps the context and explanation change more than the underlying human processes do.

So rather than seeing ‘unwinding’ as evidence that someone arrived with fascial dysfunction, negative energy or trauma that needed releasing, perhaps we should consider another possibility.

Maybe ‘unwinding’ isn't really about unwinding anything at all. It may be a normal interaction between sensation, movement, prediction, memory and emotion that becomes particularly noticeable in the context of therapeutic touch.

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Comments here from the wonderful past Chair of the CSTA, John Wilks - https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/dec/02/understanding-the-role-of-fascia-in-keeping-the-body-healthy

Fascia research is still in its infancy, but the implications for healthcare are considerable. As early as 2015, a conference at Harvard Medical School examined links between fascia, acupuncture and oncology; the lectures remain available online and underline how much more we need to understand about fascia’s role in medicine.

Manual therapists have long recognised the importance of working with fascia. Andrew Taylor Still, the founder of osteopathy, stressed its significance, and newer approaches such as the Bowen technique aim to improve hydration, proprioception and flexibility by engaging fascia gently but directly. One of the least appreciated aspects of fascia is its extraordinary sensitivity: it provides a constant feedback loop to the central and autonomic nervous systems, responding continuously to internal and external stimuli.

Often it is the gentler therapeutic methods such as the Bowen technique, the Feldenkrais method or slower forms of yoga that have the greatest influence on this remarkable network, which underpins the healthy functioning of the whole body.

John Wilks
Compton Dundon, Somerset

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Everyone is starting to realize how important fascia is when it comes to training the body, but most people still underestimate how deeply it influences movement.

Hydrated fascia behaves very differently, down to the cellular level. Not only does it participate in bioelectric signaling, it also plays a major role in how much range of motion your body can access during exercise. When this tissue is loaded correctly, it becomes elastic and responsive. Your muscles coordinate better, your posture improves, and energy becomes more stable because your body isn’t fighting itself to move.

When this tissue loses its elasticity and structural organization, your body begins moving in ways that increase tension, stiffness, and joint stress in the wrong areas. This is when people start experiencing the movement degradation that eventually leads to pain. Hydration in the body isn’t just about drinking more water. It depends on restoring the mechanical conditions that allow fluid to move through your tissue with minimal friction.

The visual on the left is exactly what we help you overcome through our training. This is what you see in the transformations we help people achieve, where their bodies begin to look more viscoelastic and full.

If you want to improve your movement, you not only need to strengthen the muscles that are weak, you also need to build the mechanics that distribute tension efficiently throughout your fascial system. The quality of your movement determines the quality of your tissue.

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Meditation for an Open Heart | Sarah Blondin As we give ourselves permission to be led by our heart, we move into our highest human power. We wield a new strength. And with practice, we begin to see gli...

My clients often ask me, how did you know? This explains the knowing. 😂