A Hypothesis on AXIS as a Movement System

– Toward Posture, the Central Nervous System, and Forms of Intelligence Not Bound to the Center

AXIS is a movement system designed with the hope that bringing balance to the central nervous system through bodily movement may, in turn, bring balance to posture itself—and to the physiological states that arise from posture.
In this sense, AXIS aims to offer a starting point for cultivating a bodily environment that feels sustainable and inhabitable from within.

Here, “balance” does not refer to fixing the body into a single ideal or optimal state.
Rather, it points to restoring a margin of adjustability—the capacity to respond to continually changing internal and external conditions without becoming overly biased toward tension or defensive organization.

An Evolutionary Perspective on the Role of the Central Nervous System

At this point, I would like to briefly turn our attention to the evolutionary process.

Life began in the ocean as single-celled organisms, whose internal and external environments were nearly identical to the surrounding seawater, separated only by a thin cell membrane.
As life became multicellular, organisms grew more complex. Invertebrates emerged, inhabiting a world without a clear sense of front and back. Later, vertebrates appeared as fish without jaws, living in environments that were not yet organized around the stark logic of “eat or be eaten.”

With the later development of jaws and eyes, however, a clear sense of direction—front, back, left, and right—came into being. Along with this directional organization, neural systems supporting predation and avoidance evolved. Amphibians and reptiles followed, and eventually, through profound physiological transformations such as the reorganization of circulation to support lungs, life transitioned onto land. From there, birds and mammals emerged, culminating in humans.

The emergence of eyes was not merely the addition of a sensory organ for visual input. It marked a fundamental shift: the appearance of directionality, and with it, choice in movement and action.
To capture prey.
To avoid being captured.

In order to perform these action selections more efficiently, sensory organs and neural processing became increasingly concentrated toward the front of the body, leading to the development of the central nervous system characteristic of vertebrates.

From this perspective, the central nervous system can be provisionally understood as a system selected through evolution to enable faster and more reliable execution of capture and escape—core survival strategies of vertebrate life.

Whether this system ultimately produces “efficiency” or “better outcomes” in a broader sense is not the focus here. Instead, I would like to move the discussion slightly forward.

What deserves attention is that, in prioritizing the development of the central nervous system, animals also prioritized the accumulation of the past—memory and stored experience—as the basis for neural automation.
For better or worse, patterns of neural connectivity tend to become stabilized and memorized throughout the entire body. These patterns are not confined to neural circuits in the brain alone, but are inscribed in posture, habitual movement tendencies, and the distribution of muscular tension across the body.

Memory, Defense, and the Body

In many mammals, it is observed that after intense fear or life-threatening experiences, the body may shake or tremble, as if releasing the heightened state of the nervous system.

Humans, however, live under cultural and social conditions in which such responses are often suppressed or discouraged. As a result, it can be hypothesized that experiences are more likely to remain held as “memory” rather than being completed through action or movement.

Of course, the prioritization of memory has many positive aspects, including learning, emotional depth, and social complexity. There is no intention here to deny or diminish these human capacities.

However, when we focus specifically on traumatic experiences—understood not only as dramatic events, but also as relatively minor injuries or moments of sudden fright—the picture shifts somewhat.
Such experiences are prone to being retained as defensive neural patterns, characteristic brain responses, and configurations of tension throughout the body. Releasing these patterns and replacing them with new ones often requires time, appropriate knowledge, specific techniques, and in some cases, medical or pharmacological interventions.

Trauma as a Common Bodily Phenomenon

The word “trauma” often sounds heavy or extraordinary, leading many people to feel it has little relevance to their own lives.
Yet, from the perspective of the body as a system that learns and remembers through patterns, trauma can be understood as a highly common phenomenon. Anyone who has lived carries such patterns, differing only in degree.

These patterns influence the condition of tissues throughout the body and eventually manifest as visible tendencies in posture and movement.

Within this context, AXIS is designed as one possible means of re-educating relatively minor trauma-related memories and defensive patterns, and of cultivating posture and physiological states that are more balanced.

At this point, I would like to provisionally define AXIS as
“a movement system that brings balance to the human central nervous system,”
and continue the discussion from there.

When Balance Returns to the Central Nervous System

What, then, might occur when a certain degree of balance is restored to the central nervous system?
What changes might arise in the body, in thinking, or in the functioning of the system as a whole?

In Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake explores fungi—life forms that belong neither to plants nor to animals. He describes algae and fungi as exhibiting behaviors that differ from those of animals, yet demonstrate highly refined forms of problem-solving and learning.

“Because these organisms don’t look like us or outwardly behave like us, or have brains, they have traditionally been located a position somewhere at the bottom of the scale.
Yet many are capable of sophisticated behaviors that prompt us to think in new ways about what it means for organisms to ‘solve problems,’ ‘communicate,’ ‘make decisions,’ ‘learn,’ and ‘remember.’”
(Sheldrake, 2020)

What is suggested here is that functions such as problem-solving, learning, and memory are not exclusively governed by the central nervous system.

Through AXIS and other somatic practices, when excessive defense and tension within the central nervous system subside and its survival-driven automation loosens, it may become possible to glimpse modes of awareness and functioning that are not constrained by the logic of the central nervous system alone.
This is offered here as a hypothesis.

Fascia and Systemic Communication

In relation to this idea, it is also noteworthy that Emilie Conrad, the founder of Continuum, along with Rolfing practitioners and many clinicians, has long focused attention on fascia as a significant tissue.

In her later years, Conrad reported experiences from collaborative work with individuals with cerebral palsy, in which movement below areas previously believed to be permanently impaired re-emerged after severe impacts to the spine had disrupted central nervous system function—through the activation of fascial movement.

This does not mean that fascia can simply be described as possessing an intelligence separate from the central nervous system.
However, it does suggest that fascia may function as a medium rich in mechanoreceptive and interoceptive input, deeply involved in neural regulation and self-organization throughout the body.

Beyond Survival-Based Organization

From this perspective, vertebrates—including humans—may, by easing excessive survival-based strategies of the central nervous system (such as chronic defense and tension), gain partial access to ways of communicating with the environment that resemble those of much earlier ancestors, such as algae and fungi—systems that engage the environment as an integrated whole.

After AXIS exercises, people often report not only changes in posture, but also shifts in visual field, skin sensation, breathing, perception of weight, and their sense of spatial presence.
These experiences may reflect a quieting of excessive central defensive mechanisms and the re-emergence of other modes of perception.

To loosen, even momentarily, one of the constraints carried as humans and as mammals, and to experience the world through a different mode of organization—this possibility has been repeatedly emphasized by Conrad as well.

Closing: A Hypothesis, Not a Conclusion

As stated earlier, what has been described here is not a conclusion, but a set of hypotheses that remain open to ongoing examination.
Still, as a proposal, I would like to suggest that restoring a margin of adaptability within the central nervous system through movement and posture may open human awareness and function toward directions slightly different from those we habitually inhabit.

References and Sources of Inspiration

Sheldrake, M. (2020). Entangled Life. Penguin Random House.

三木成夫『生命とリズム』M. Shigeo. “Life and Rythm”

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“Stability within motion. A body that stands with gravity, not against it.”

— SenseBody: Aligned with Gravity, Alive in Motion

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