The Joanne Avison Podcast

What happens when everything you’ve been taught tells you to go one way, but the body asks you to go another?

In this episode, Joanne reflects on Dr. Ida P. Rolf, the pioneering biochemist whose work creating Structural Integration profoundly influenced the way we understand fascia, bodywork and the organisation of the living body.

Joanne shares her own journey through Structural Integration, from training and teaching alongside the development of Tom Myers’ Anatomy Trains, to an experience with a client that challenged one of the fundamental rules she had been taught. What followed was an extraordinary dream about Dr. Rolf herself, and a message Joanne has carried with her ever since: “Follow the yoga. Go deep. Follow your intuition.”

Along the way, Joanne explores Rolfing, fascia, alignment and the famous Rolfing line, and considers what it really means to help another person find their own balance, poise and embodied wisdom.

It’s also a reflection on teachers and traditions: how we can honour the people who came before us while continuing to question, explore and allowing their work to evolve.


🎁 Joanne’s free Sacred Geometry guide, including five subtle movement practices to explore for yourself, is available here:
👉 https://www.joanneavison.com/sacred-geometry-gift

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Podcast produced and edited by Megan Bay Dorman

What if the body is doing far more than simply carrying us through the world?

Following last week’s exploration of Vanda Scaravelli and learning to listen to the body, Joanne turns to another woman whose work profoundly shaped her thinking: Mabel Elsworth Todd, author of the pioneering The Thinking Body.

Todd was writing about the relationship between thought, feeling, posture and movement as early as the 1930s. She recognised that our emotional lives are expressed through the whole body, and that gesture, behaviour and physical form are intimately connected.

In this episode, Joanne explores Todd’s remarkable ideas through the lens of what we now understand about fascia, proprioception, embodied movement and movement science. She considers the body’s changing shape, the role of breath and the diaphragm, our relationship with balance, and why Todd’s work opened the door to decades of Joanne’s own exploration into somatic archetypes of the living body and how we are entering a new era of understanding our physical form.

Some of Todd’s anatomical models belong to their time, but the questions she was asking remain strikingly relevant. Nearly 90 years later, The Thinking Body still invites us to become more curious about the relationship between body, mind, feeling and movement…

✨ What does your own posture and movement reveal to you? 

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Podcast produced and edited by Megan Bay Dorman

What happens when we stop telling the body what to do, and start listening to what it already knows?

More than 30 years ago, Vanda Scaravelli’s Awakening the Spine began a journey for Joanne that would profoundly change the way she understood yoga, movement and her own body.

In this episode, Joanne reflects on what Vanda taught her about gravity, the spine, proprioception and the intelligence within our movement — including the unforgettable moment her own body showed her what Vanda called its “anti-gravity reflex.”

A number of you have asked questions about emotional anatomy and the idea that our body is listening. In response to that, Joanne also explores the teachers who helped shape her ability to do that along the way, why learning to trust our own inner guidance matters, and how her later understanding of fascia, biomechanics and biomotional intelligence gave new meaning to ideas she first encountered decades ago.

There’s also a simple practice you can try as Joanne invites you to pause, breathe and experience the subtle two-directional movement of your own spine, to really feel what Vanda’s guidance meant in practice.

Perhaps awakening the spine begins with something remarkably simple: learning how to listen and using our breath to hear.



🌟🌟🌟 Plus, the free guide 'Sacred Geometry In The Living Body', including five subtle movement practices, is still available here! 
https://www.joanneavison.com/sacred-geometry-gift

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Podcast produced and edited by Megan Bay Dorman

What if your emotions aren’t separate from your anatomy, but part of the way you move, breathe and express who you are?

After sharing her deeply personal experience of recovery in 12 Minutes That Changed the Way I Move, Joanne turns to a question many of you have been asking in the comments: what is emotional anatomy, and do our feelings really shape the body?

Drawing on decades of studying anatomy, fascia, movement, spirituality and the work of Emotional Anatomy by Stanley Keleman, Joanne explores the body as something far richer than a collection of mechanical parts.

She reflects on the relationship between our emotions and the shapes we make, why she’s cautious about labelling a person by their posture or body type, and how changing the way we move can sometimes change the way we feel…

Joanne also shares something she has noticed through her own micromovement practice: when she moves differently, she breathes differently. She smiles. She feels different. And her whole body responds.

Perhaps our emotional anatomy is part of an ongoing conversation between body, movement, feeling and soul - one we already have the ability to listen to.

🎁 If you haven’t collected Joanne’s free Sacred Geometry guide yet, you’ll find five subtle practices inside that you can explore for yourself.
 👉 Get your free guide here: https://www.joanneavison.com/sacred-geometry-gift

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Podcast produced and edited by Megan Bay Dorman

What if the way we’ve been taught to stand is getting in the way of how we’re designed to move?

After the extraordinary response to last week’s personal episode, Joanne continues the conversation with something wonderfully practical - beginning with a sentence she used herself for decades:

“Stand with your feet hip-width apart.”

So why doesn’t she say it anymore?

This episode is an invitation to look a little differently at the remarkable body you inhabit: one designed to wobble, recoil, adapt, recover and dance its way through life.

Joanne explores the natural spring and intelligence already within us, and shares a simple micromovement you can try for yourself right away. You might discover something surprising about the way your body prefers to balance, turn and move! Because perhaps moving better for longer begins with listening more closely to the body we already have - and trusting a little more of its innate wisdom...

*** If you haven’t collected Joanne’s free Sacred Geometry guide yet, it brings together both Sacred Geometry series, the geometry of the living body and five subtle practices for you to explore.

 Get your free guide here: https://www.joanneavison.com/sacred-geometry-gift

 And Joanne mentions Myofascial Magic In Action co-founder Paul Thornley in this episode. You can find Paul on Instagram at @paul.s.thornley

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Podcast produced and edited by Megan Bay Dorman

What can 12 minutes of gentle movement really change?

For this final chapter of Sacred Geometry Series 2, Joanne does something a little different. After exploring the remarkable people and ideas that have shaped our understanding of living architecture, she shares a much more personal story.

Following surgery after a diagnosis of breast cancer, Joanne came home unable to move her right arm and shoulder. Drawing on decades of work with fascia, anatomy and movement, she became her own case study, committing to just 12 minutes of micromovement a day. She expected that to fully restore her movement it would take at least 12 months. It took 12 weeks.

This episode follows that experience through recovery, the support and grace that surrounded her, and the unexpected visit from Paul Thornley that led to the creation of Myofascial Magic in Action. It felt essential to them both to share the benefits of this work.

It’s a story about subtle movement, fascia, recovery and restoring the natural spring we’re all designed to have… and what that can mean for you.

🎁 A SPECIAL GIFT FOR YOU
Inspired by everything we’ve explored across these two Sacred Geometry series, Joanne has created a free guide for you, connecting the keys of all the Platonic solids explored in Series 1, a summary of the key protagonists in Series 2 and how all that geometry actually works in the living body, through five subtle practices you can explore for yourself. 

👉 Get your free Sacred Geometry gift here! https://www.joanneavison.com/sacred-geometry-gift

✨ EXPLORE THE 5 R’s
Explore the 5 R’s of micromovement sequencing Joanne mentions in this episode, by watching our special YouTube mini-series - complete with practical demonstrations - starting here: Rebound In Action: The Key to Moving Without Strain

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Podcast produced and edited by Megan Bay Dorman

What if continuity is even more fundamental than tensegrity?

In this special episode of Sacred Geometry, Joanne is joined in person by clinical anatomist and exercise physiologist John Sharkey for a wide-ranging conversation about fascia, tensegrity and the living architecture of the human body.

You might prefer to watch this episode on YouTube as there are a couple of brief references to a visual model (the 'Skwish') held up by Joanne and John.

Together, they revisit the ideas explored throughout Series 2 - from Leonardo da Vinci and Kenneth Snelson to Buckminster Fuller, Tom Flemons and Donald Ingber - and ask where those discoveries take us now…

John explores why fascia may be better understood as something that transcends the body's individual systems, how living geometry continually adapts through movement and time, and how no two bodies ever express that architecture in quite the same way. This fascinating conversation also covers fasciategrity, stochasticity, force transmission, the spiral architecture of the heart (!) and what decades of anatomical dissection continue to reveal about human form.

It’s a conversation about continuity, curiosity and the questions still waiting to be asked, with plenty of stories from Joanne and John's years of working and teaching together.

Subscribe to continue the journey. There’s one final episode of Series 2 still to come, and Joanne has something special waiting for you there.

Links to some of John Sharkey's most recent papers:
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/15/12/1924
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42458875/ 

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Podcast produced and edited by Megan Bay Dorman

What if tensegrity isn't simply a theory, but something already at work inside every living cell?

In this episode of Sacred Geometry, Joanne Avison explores the groundbreaking work of Donald Ingber, the Harvard scientist whose research brought tensegrity into the laboratory and helped establish the field of mechanobiology.

Following the thread from Leonardo da Vinci, Kenneth Snelson, Buckminster Fuller and Tom Flemons, we arrive at the living cell itself, where Ingber demonstrates how tension, structure and force are communicated throughout the whole.

You'll discover:

• How sculpture inspired Ingber's scientific curiosity
• The experiment that demonstrated tensegrity in living cells
• Why cells respond to force as whole structures
• What mechanobiology reveals about movement, fascia and healing
• How geometry connects architecture, biology and the living human body

From geodesic domes to a single cell under a microscope, this episode takes us deeper into the science of tensegrity and the extraordinary living architecture already at work within you…

👉 Read Donald Ingber's paper:
Joanne mentions Donald Ingber's landmark 1998 Scientific American article, “The Architecture of Life,” in this episode. 
If you'd like to explore the research and ideas behind the conversation for yourself, you can find it here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-architecture-of-life/
(Vol. 278, Jan 1998, pp. 48–57).

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Podcast produced and edited by Megan Bay Dorman

What if the model we've used to explain the human body could never stand up on its own?

In this episode of Sacred Geometry, Joanne explores the remarkable work of Tom Flemons, whose human tensegrity models challenged centuries of conventional biomechanics. Inspired by Kenneth Snelson and Buckminster Fuller, Flemons spent decades building physical demonstrations of the body's living architecture, revealing a model based on continuity rather than isolated parts.

You'll discover:

• Why a classroom skeleton cannot stand on its own
• How Tom Flemons built the first human tensegrity models
• Why the body is not simply a system of levers and joints
• What embryology reveals about living architecture
• How fascia creates continuity throughout the body

This episode brings Sacred Geometry directly into the human body and lays the foundation for the next chapter of the series, where Joanne explores Donald Ingber's groundbreaking research into tensegrity at the level of the living cell.

If these ideas resonate with you, Joanne Avison and Paul Thornley teach you about fascia, movement, anatomy and Sacred Geometry in depth through the Myofascial Magic in Action programme. Find out more here.

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Podcast produced and edited by Megan Bay Dorman

What happens when someone gives a name to something that has always existed?

Buckminster Fuller didn't invent tensegrity, but by naming it, he gave the world a new way of seeing. In this episode of the Sacred Geometry series, Joanne explores how Fuller's remarkable work connected architecture, engineering, biology and the living human body through one universal principle…

From geodesic domes and “Spaceship Earth” to carbon molecules, fascia and human movement, this episode reveals why Fuller's ideas continue to reshape our understanding of living architecture today.

You'll discover:

• Why Buckminster Fuller coined the term tensegrity
• How geodesic domes reveal nature's principles of force distribution
• Why the same geometric patterns appear from carbon molecules to the cosmos
• What synergetics and whole-system thinking can teach us about the human body
• How these ideas are transforming our understanding of fascia, movement and anatomy

This episode continues the journey from Leonardo da Vinci and Kenneth Snelson, exploring how a single word - tensegrity - helped reveal one of nature's most profound organising principles. It also lays the foundation for the next episode, where Joanne introduces Tom Flemons and his groundbreaking work applying these ideas directly to the human body.

If this way of understanding the body resonates with you, Joanne Avison and Paul Thornley teach these principles through their online programme, Myofascial Magic in Action. This in-depth course brings together fascia, movement, anatomy, and Sacred Geometry to help practitioners, movers, and curious learners experience the living body in an entirely new way.

FIND OUT MORE HERE:

🌟 https://www.myofascialmagic.com/mmia-programme-info

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Podcast produced and edited by Megan Bay Dorman