The Joanne Avison Podcast

What if our emotions are communicating through far more of the body than we ever imagined?
In this episode, Joanne considers things she learned through the groundbreaking work of Dr. Candace Pert. Dr Pert is the neuroscientist whose scientific discoveries helped transform our understanding of the relationship between mind, body and emotion.
Through her research into neuropeptides and their receptors, and her influential book Molecules of Emotion, Pert revealed a remarkable body-wide communication network, challenging the long-held, classical idea that our physical and emotional lives are separate.
Joanne reflects on how Pert’s work influenced her own understanding of fascia, psychosomatic intelligence and the living body, and why it helped give her the confidence to develop the concept of biomotional intelligence.
Along the way, she questions the mechanical language we still use to describe human movement. Joanne explores the essential relevance of soft matter physics and the continuous architecture of fascia. How are our feelings, movement and physical form so intimately connected?
It's a celebration of a remarkable scientist whose work continues to inspire us to reconsider what it means to be a thinking, feeling, living human being.

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Podcast produced and edited by Megan Bay Dorman

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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My website - https://www.joanneavison.com/
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My book:  - https://amzn.to/3zF3SAS
Instagram -  joanneavison

FREE ONLINE WEBINAR:
Free Webinar - https://myofascialmagic.com/webinar-registration

Podcast produced and edited by Megan Bay Dorman