Biotensegrity and Me
/Some Kind of Tea Party
During the Covid quarantine some people interested in the principle of tensegrity as applied to the human body began meeting online. They called these meetings “biotensegri-tea parties”. By now there’s an archive of over a hundred of these 90-minute conversations about how balanced tension and compression in architectural or sculptural design applies to the structure and function of biological creatures. Conversations are wide-ranging, from physical therapy to thermodynamics, from geometry to soft matter physics, from fitness training to the nature of consciousness. It turns out these folks aren’t just interested in a different way of understanding human anatomy but rather are investigating the structure of life.
Like other somatic movement teachers, I’ve been brandishing my 6-strut tensegrity model for several years now, assuming that the wooden sticks represent our bones and that the rubber bands represent the soft tissue or fascia that encompasses, contains and manages the movement of those bones. Looked at that way, the models are memes for a holistic view of the body, and fascia is just another system, like the circulatory system or nervous system, that helps keep the body running. We likely lose interest.
But this turns out to be a naïve first step in understanding what a tensegrity model represents. It’s not about the design of the body. It’s about the forces that organize biology in general — compressive or pushing forces (struts) in relation to the pulling or tensioning forces (the strings). And those forces themselves represent polyhedrons, which in turn represent the rounded shapes that packed closely together become gels, foams and, well,... us.
Back to School
In December I learned about a three-month course beginning in January that would explore biotensegrity in some depth. I dove in headfirst and now with a month to go, I am drifting to the surface, hoping for a flat rock in the sun where I can let the ideas and impressions that I’ve been exposed to bake themselves into my own way of understanding this amazing inquiry.
One day, Susan (Lowell de Solórzano) our instructor (and author of Everything Moves: How Biotensegrity Informs Human Movement) asked the group to spend three minutes writing down words and concepts we’ve been tussling with. Here are a few:
emergent properties, pre-stress or inherent tension, geodesic geometry, systems theory, closed kinematic (not kinetic) chains, helical motion, auxeticity, soft matter physics, fractals, chaos, complexity, turbulence, phase change, degrees of freedom, reversible behavior, self-assembly, non-linear, gravity, far-from-equilibrium,...
Since I don’t have a coherent way to talk about any of this yet, I’ll share some of the questions that glide past as I swim around in an ocean of considerations.
What if:
your muscles are not attached to your skeleton by your tendons but instead your bones, muscles, nerves and tendons are all embroidered within the fabric your fascia — nerve, muscle, and bone cells emerging as needed?
What if your fascial matrix were a two-way conduit passing information between your molecules—maybe even the atoms at the nano-scale of yourself—and the world around you? What if every move you make is pre-ordered by your fascial matrix long before your brain, nerves or muscles know anything about it?
What if always trying to release tension is a bad idea? (See this post for discussion of the word “tension”.)
What if phenomena like the painful knots we call “trigger points” are a necessary phase in a process of self-assembly?
What if your embryonic self didn’t arrive in your mommy’s tummy complete with a blueprint for your size and shape, your various organs and capacities? What if, instead, the pushing and pulling forces of your conception are responsible for everything about you from that moment to this one? What if you pushed and pulled your bones into being, your heart, your liver, your cute little nose. What if you assembled yourself then as you continue to do to this day?
What if your environment is your body as much as are the atoms of your molar teeth?
What if embodiment is a flux of events on a scale that ranges from your atoms to the cars speeding by on the freeway — from molecules to cells to tissues to organs to organism to the thin veil between your “body” and what is going on around you? — and with the time-frame of events on each scale being unique, such that information processing is both instantaneous and never-ending?
In that case, where is your body?
© 2026 Mary Bond
Thanks for reading and for sharing!