Where we start
Your core fascia line, from your feet to your skull.
Fascia is the connective tissue that wraps every muscle, bone and organ you have, and it's also one of your richest sensory systems, constantly telling your brain what's happening in your body and whether you're safe.
The dura mater, the protective covering around your brain and spinal cord, is a specialized form of fascia. Through a chain of real anatomical attachments, it's physically connected all the way down: the dural sleeves around your spinal nerves, the ligaments at your sacrum and tailbone, and the fascial lines that run down the back and sides of your legs into the soles of your feet. I call this line the Dural Fascial Kinetic Chain, or DFKC.
Picture a stocking that runs from the soles of your feet up to the base of your skull. If it's twisted at the pelvis or too tight at the calf, you might only feel it in your neck or your jaw, because the pull travels up the line. It's also why symptoms tend to show up in clusters, like headaches, jaw tension, dizziness or ringing ears, a ribcage that won't let you take a full breath, and a nervous system that won't settle, which are all different expressions of one line under load. That's why we start at the feet and unwind the whole thing from the bottom up, even when your neck is where it hurts. In 2015 I presented outcomes to the Canadian Pain Society showing that releasing tension in the pelvis and legs changed both how often headaches happened and how intense they were.
This line tends to tighten from birth strain, falls, surgeries, years of compensating for an old injury, or a season of life that asked too much of you. When your brain senses danger, it uses fascia as armor, so a tight chain and a braced nervous system keep feeding each other long after the original stress has passed. As the DFKC softens, your brain gets a steady physical signal that it can stand down, and the adjustments, bodywork and breathwork you're already doing finally have a body that can hold onto them.
If you're living with Chiari or CTE, this work is personal for me, since it's the condition I was navigating when I built this method. Inside, you'll find specific adaptations for Chiari and CTE, EDS and hypermobility, and ME/CFS.