There Is No Fascial System

Everyone’s acting like fascia just fell out of the sky yesterday.

It didn’t.

Fascia isn’t some brand-new discovery that’s suddenly rewriting the body. It’s been here all along—felt, understood, and worked with by healers, osteopaths, and bodyworkers for generations. We’re not discovering fascia. We’re finally catching up to it. If your algorithm is anything like mine you’ve probably seen countless revelations over the last few years, along the lines of:

“There is an intelligent web of fascia encasing everything in the body.”

NO.

Fascia doesn’t just encase everything—it is around, inside, interwoven with, and continuous with all other tissues. "Fascia" is simply one definition along the living tissue spectrum. Think of the colour spectrum: there’s no single point where red stops and blue starts; the colours blend seamlessly. Fascia is exactly like that: it blends seamlessly into tendon, muscle, ligament, brain tissue, nerves, kidneys, spleen, fat, skin, blood vessels, and lymphatics. Everything.

And even fascia itself isn't just one thing—it's a spectrum all on its own. There is thick tough fibrous fascia, there is soft delicate spiderweb-like fascia, there is stretchy elastic fascia, there is brittle filament like fascia, and everything in between. And the states and properties of fascia (like everything else in the body) are constantly in states of flux, adapting to their environments as we adapt to our wider environments. And the nutrient and mineral constitution, ionic charges and pressures of the fluids in and around these fascial fibres (again like everything else in the body) are equally, if not more, crucial in determining the health and good function of that fascia than the fascia itself.

“The Fascial System Transmits Messages Faster Than Nerves or Hormones"

NO.

It is not a separate system. At all.

In fact, there are no separate systems. Period.

Time for a quick trip into semantics:
The concept of "systems"—nervous system, endocrine system, fascial system—is simply a lens humans invented to try to understand the mind-bending complexity of living organisms. These systems don't exist on their own. They never have. They are constructs: intellectual tools we use to observe and organise life’s forms and functions (and, notably, death's, since a lot of early medical science was based on cadaver studies).

Systems are heuristics—mental shortcuts, ways to simplify an unimaginably complex reality so we can talk about it, study it, and attempt to heal it. But they only make sense within certain contexts, and underpinned by particular theories.

Take nerves, for example:
We say they transmit electrical impulses around the nervous system to signal different parts of the body and act as an interface, right?
Wrong.

The nervous system can’t do anything on its own. Without blood supply, without fluid movement, without metabolic energy, without interaction with every other aspect of the living body and the environment, it would be nothing.

The circulatory system moves blood, nutrients and oxygen around the body, right?
Wrong.

Blood, nutrients, and oxygen can only move through the body with the help of pumping mechanisms driven by the muscular and skeletal systems, and pressure gradients created by the respiratory system.

The systems only appear to function independently because of the interplay of countless factors—many of which don’t fit neatly into our boxed-up concepts of "systems" at all. The other “systems” don’t just support the nervous or circulatory systems so they can “do their thing”—
ALL the forms and functions in the body work together to perform ALL the forms and functions in the body.

Don’t believe the hype

Lately, fascia has been getting almost magical press.
It's being credited with conducting information faster than nerves, storing trauma, regulating metabolism, maintaining posture, orchestrating healing responses, and even serving as a master communication network for the entire body.

But here’s the thing: fascia isn't performing these feats alone.
None of these remarkable functions can be attributed to fascia acting independently.
They emerge from the sum of all parts—a beautiful, inseparable collaboration of tissues, cells, fluids, forces, and fields, including but not limited to fascia.

For example:

• Posture isn’t maintained just by fascia—it’s the dynamic result of muscle tone, nervous system calibration, gravity’s pull, skeletal architecture, fluid pressures, and emotional state, all interacting through and with fascia.

• Trauma storage doesn’t reside purely in fascial tissues—it’s a full-body phenomenon involving nervous system memory, chemical signatures, fluid dynamics, hormonal cascades, cellular behavior, and yes, the adaptability of fascia within that larger context.

• Communication across the body doesn’t travel solely along fascial planes—it’s an integrated symphony of bioelectric signals, chemical messengers, mechanical tension and fluid flow, with fascia serving as one part of a varied spectrum of vital media among many.

Fascia is not the sole mastermind.
It’s part of the orchestra.

And like any great orchestra, it's the relationships between the players that create the music—not any single instrument alone.

Recognising fascia as critically important doesn’t mean isolating it as a separate, magical system.
It means appreciating it as a central player in the seamless unity of the body.

When we remember that “systems” are just heuristics—not actual separations—it becomes incredibly useful to consider fascia as a system among the others.
Naming it gives us new ways to observe, treat, and understand the body’s deep, living continuity.
It helps us respect the layered intelligence of tissue, motion, and form.

Fascia is essential to life

So yes—it is absolutely worthwhile and useful to recognise fascia as a body system. In fact, alongside the 11 commonly taught body systems in medicine (circulatory, respiratory, digestive, nervous, muscular, skeletal, endocrine, urinary, reproductive, lymphatic, and integumentary) there are many other key forms, functions and associations already described as systems - like the immune system.

Then there’s the body wide ecosystem of microorganisms - the microbiome - which is far more complex and essential than most people realise, and without which we would quickly be unalived (and, no, it’s not just in your gut!).

The systems overlap and drive each other, work through and with each other to the Nth degree. The 11 classically taught systems were never meant to be limiting factors in our understanding of the body: they were convenient classifications of tissues that seemed to more or less perform a distinguishable set of functions. They all depend on and consist of fascia. And muscle fibers. And nerves. And circulating fluids. And energy and materials derived from digestion.

I would speculate that the reason a “fascial system” was never described in such terms by the anatomists who developed the foundational literature is that fascia is too diverse and widespread a tissue type, with too wide a spectrum of roles in the form and function of the body, to be called a system at all. It would be like calling the cellulose in trees a "system"—isolating it as if it acted alone, when in fact, it’s the underlying material that shapes every fibre, branch, and leaf, inseparable from the living whole.

As long as we stay rooted in the reality that nothing in the body ever acts alone, honouring fascia strengthens our understanding of the whole.

Fascia is not the whole story.
But without it, the story could never be told.

Once you really grasp the significance of heuristics—that they're just frameworks, not facts—you start to see the larger picture:
Not only is the idea of discrete body systems a fallacy, the entire notion of the human being as separate from the wider environment is a fallacy.

They are of each other, reliant on each other, indistinguishable from each other.
One, masquerading as many.

This is also why humanity creates seemingly "unnatural" forms and environments—to convince ourselves that we are separate from nature, not expressions of it. But if you look closer, it’s self-evident: every raw material, every idea, every human invention still comes from and through the world around us. The imagination, the vision, the survival instincts that built our "civilizations" were born in a cosmic dance, not apart from it.

The Spectrum of Life

The point isn't to discard the idea of body systems—they're useful.
It’s to realise they are maps, not territories. And to remember that if the territory is always changing and growing, the maps are always out of date.

They are ways of navigating life’s infinite gradations, but the body itself is not a sum of separate parts working together. It’s something far beyond that.

Think of a rainbow.
You can pick out red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. But there are no sharp lines dividing them—it’s an analogue gradient, a living spectrum.
Even with all our scientific understanding, a rainbow in the sky still stirs awe and mystery.

Take the seven colours separately, and they’re just colours.
Mix them haphazardly, and you get a muddy mess.
But in a rainbow, somehow, they become something more—something exquisite.

Our bodies are not mechanical collections of systems that happen to work together.
They are beautiful mysteries—simultaneously nanoscale quantum engines, planetary phenomena, and cosmic dances.

We are rainbows, not spreadsheets.
We are not made of systems.
We are made of stories, stardust, and structure—woven into one continuous breath of life.