Fascia Isn't Connective Tissue: Safety in Yoga Teaching

"We are live." That is how the recording begins, with two teachers settling into a conversation about the body. Christine Wushke, a yoga teacher, says she is about to launch her 200-hour teacher training, with an intake in January or February and a flexible start. She has invited her colleague Joanne Avison, a structural integrator, to open the program by introducing trainees to fascia as a whole-body system. What follows, in the January 2022 video, is less a lecture than a working argument: that fascia is not a material you can scrape out of the way to see the "real" anatomy, that the body is understood better as one continuous fabric than as a set of parts, and that a yoga room only works when the people in it feel safe enough to be themselves. The video is about a 36-minute conversation, and its ideas hold up well beyond that single session.

Why does the way we learn anatomy matter for yoga students?

The conversation starts with a gap that most yoga teachers will recognize. We learn anatomy as a set of facts. We learn the names of muscles and bones, which attach where, which joints they move. We learn asana names, often in Sanskrit, and we have to hold them in the intellectual domain. Then we step onto the mat, and something else happens. Avison draws the contrast sharply at about the two-minute mark: practice is "experience," and "we leave our minds outside and come in and bring our bodies in," along with our hearts, our families, and whatever else we carry.

That distinction is the frame for everything that follows. If the body in a yoga class is experienced rather than memorized, then the teacher's job is partly to shape the conditions for that experience. Avison and Wushke both return to safety as the precondition. The environment a teacher creates, they argue, has to feel safe, whole, and respectful before students can bring their full selves into the room. In the conversation, that feeling is described almost as a kind of grace: a sense of beingness that arrives with the rest of the practice, and that the teacher has to facilitate in advance.

For a teacher, the practical takeaway is that technical knowledge is necessary but not sufficient. Knowing where the psoas attaches does not tell you how a nervous student will respond to a hands-on adjustment on the day she walked in after a hard week. The pair's insistence on safety is a reminder that somatic awareness, the lived sense of one's own body, is part of what a teacher is responsible for.

What is fascia, if it is not just connective tissue?

Around the six-minute mark, Wushke interrupts to name a discomfort she has with a standard answer. When she teaches fascia, students usually ask what it is, and the stock reply is that it is connective tissue. She says she dislikes that phrase because it "immediately paints the picture that I am separate pieces and parts," with a tissue that stitches those parts together. What she would rather describe is "one thing that has multiple folds and turns and spaces," which then individualizes and specializes into the structures we name separately.

This is the heart of the video's argument. The word "connective" implies two things that already exist, muscle and bone, joined by a third. The model Avison and Wushke propose runs the other way. Fascia is the original fabric, and muscle, bone, and other specialized tissues differentiate out of it. Avison grounds this in embryology, describing the body as beginning as a form whose fabric is essentially fascia, and then differentiating into its properties and natures.

To make this concrete, Avison uses a building analogy at around the eight-minute mark. Picture a house made of bricks and cement. If you remove the cement, you assume the house falls apart, and the bricks are the components. But she asks the listener to go one level further down. Sand is one of the original building materials of the house. Treated one way it becomes cement, mixed with clay it becomes brick, treated differently again it becomes glass. The house is an arrangement of materials that all come from earth. Fascia, in her picture, is the earth-level material beneath the bricks, not the mortar between them.

The fascia is the unifying fabric of the form that plays a part in every one of those things.

— Joanne Avison, in the January 2022 conversation with Christine Wushke (approx. 6:00 to 8:00 on the video)

Note the caution in that framing. The analogy is not a claim about every chemical detail. It is a claim about level of description: that you cannot understand how a house holds together by looking only at its bricks, and that the structures we label as separate tissues share a common material history.

Why does dissection make fascia disappear?

One of the sharpest moments in the conversation is an anecdote about a course. Wushke says a participant in her own class came back from an anatomy course in which a professor demonstrated movement by dissecting muscles from bones. When the student asked about fascia, the professor replied that fascia is "what we scrape out of the way in order to see what we need to understand about the locomotor system." The participant had, in effect, been told that the material binding everything together is the thing you remove to get to the real anatomy.

Avison responds that the room is under a kind of spell, and that the spell is collective. The idea that connective tissue can be removed and leave the components of everything else behind is, in her framing, a myth. Dissection is a legitimate method, but it has a built-in blind spot. When you take the tissue out to reveal the parts, you are looking at the parts you already expected to find. The continuity that makes the body move as a whole is precisely what the method discards.

The pair do not treat the professor as a villain. Wushke is explicit that she does not want to make him wrong. The point is that the course's framing is a starting assumption, and the whole effort of their training is to examine that assumption in a way students can feel rather than only memorize.

What happens when the tissue is treated as a whole?

The conversation shifts from definitions to implications around the eleven-minute mark. If fascia is a continuous web rather than a packing material, then a movement in one part of the body is also a movement in the rest. Avison describes an emerging "web of recognition" among practitioners, therapists, researchers, and scientists internationally, one that sees the fascial system of the human body as woven from a common basic material. She also suggests that natural principles, including how plants and humans are organized, are "so closely connected and so economically designed" that the parallels are striking.

Here the conversation reaches the terms that the video description highlights: biotensegrity and trauma awareness. The description says Avison and Wushke discuss both, and the threads of safety and wholeness that run through the early part of the talk are the bridge. A teacher who sees the body as a continuous, responsive fabric is also a teacher who has to think about how that fabric holds memories of stress, injury, and protection. Trauma awareness in this context is not a separate specialty. It is part of asking how people actually experience being touched, moved, and held in a practice.

That is why the safety theme keeps returning. A yoga class that respects the whole body, rather than correcting its parts, is one where students are less likely to be startled into holding on. The conversation's emphasis on sensitivity, on listening, and on the intelligence of the body points toward a teaching style built around invitation rather than instruction alone.

What should a new teacher take from this conversation?

For teachers entering a training program, the conversation offers three practical ideas. The first is to hold anatomy as a living map rather than a list of names, so that when a student describes a sensation, you can ask where it moves rather than only where it is. The second is to notice the framing you use when students ask what fascia is. Calling it connective tissue is a shorthand that quietly reinforces a parts-based model of the body. Describing it as one fabric that differentiates into many forms invites a different kind of attention. The third is to treat safety as the first asana. Avison and Wushke both say that a feeling of safety, wholeness, and respectful relationship has to be established in advance, before the work of posture, breath, or movement can really begin.

None of this requires abandoning the anatomy you learned. The pair are clear that they are not arguing against muscles, bones, or the locomotor system. They are arguing that these are the visible, named surface of a continuous material, and that a teacher who understands the continuity will teach differently.

Where to go from here

The full conversation runs about 35 minutes and is worth watching in its entirety, especially for the parts where the two teachers test their own language against each other. If you are new to fascia, start with the house-and-sand analogy and the dissection anecdote, since they capture the central shift in perspective. If you are a teacher, consider how your own opening explanation of fascia sounds to a student who has never heard the word, and whether "connective tissue" is doing more work than you intend. The deeper question the conversation leaves open is practical: how does a teacher create the sense of safety that Avison calls an act of grace, and how do we notice when a body in the room is telling us it does not yet feel held?