MATRIX Online Course

Introduction to the Matrix Module
by Prue Jeffries

Welcome to the asynchronous portion of the Matrix Module. In this module, we will explore how both nature and the human body create and sustain through matrices—the intricate networks and patterns that support life, balance, and renewal. These matrices supply, transform, and distribute resources while maintaining the delicate homeo-dynamics that allow living systems to flourish.

Through this exploration, we will consider examples ranging from mycorrhizal networks in the soil to the fluid systems of the human body, observing how each reveals a unique intelligence of flow, exchange, and resilience. The aim is to deepen our understanding of how life organizes itself through these dynamic webs, and to reflect on how we, too, are participants within these larger matrices of being.

In this lesson, we explore the Matrix as the relational field through which life is organized across scales. Beginning with the body, students are introduced to nested biological matrices: the intracellular environment, genetic–epigenetic regulation, connective tissue and extracellular networks, bone as living structure, lymphatic and interstitial fluid systems, and whole-body coordination across neural, visceral, endocrine, and metabolic processes. Rather than viewing the body as a collection of parts, this framework presents embodiment as a set of interdependent structural, fluid, and regulatory networks that continually interact. The matrix is understood not as a single tissue, but as the conditions that allow form, function, and adaptation to arise.

We then shift from what matrices are to how they behave. Drawing on principles from nonlinear dynamics, including Edward Lorenz’s work on sensitivity to initial conditions, students examine how living systems maintain coherence through responsive, fluid-mediated processes rather than rigid control. Cardiac regulation, fluid flow, and tissue responsiveness illustrate how stability in the body arises through organized variability. These dynamics become perceptible as waveforms — rhythms and oscillatory patterns moving through the living medium. The lesson concludes by extending the matrix concept outward to ecological and cosmological contexts, helping students situate human embodiment within broader nested fields of relational organization.

The natural world generates and sustains life through foundational networks—matrices that supply, concentrate, transform, and distribute nutrients along dynamic channels of communication and nourishment. In the video, this is expressed in the mycorrhizal fungi: delicate mycelial filaments extend outward in a vast, web-like form. Yet the same image could just as easily describe the body’s fascial or interstitial systems. Both reveal a fluid, ever-shifting architecture of connection—one that shapes, supports, and animates growth through continuous flow and exchange.

What you are witnessing here is complex cytoplasmic streaming and nutrient exchange moving through the mycelial networks. These filaments act as dynamic conduits, concentrating, transforming, and redistributing resources across great distances. The flowing currents within the hyphae strikingly resemble the streaming of fluids within the body’s fascia and interstitium. In both cases, a living web emerges—an intricate matrix that enables communication, nourishment, and resilience through continual movement and exchange. 

The body is an intricate, multi-layered structure composed of several fluid matrices. Among them, the lymphatic systemis closely interwoven with the interstitial system, forming a continuous field of circulation, exchange, and renewal. These videos highlight the subtle yet distinct movements and rhythms within these systems—showing how each layer of fluid dynamics contributes to communication, nourishment, and resilience throughout the body.

The body’s intelligence expresses itself through its fluid matrices, each tuned to cycles of nourishment, protection, and renewal. At ovulation, this intelligence becomes visible in the cervical mucus, which transforms into a clear, receptive medium. Far from being passive, this fluid actively guides and filters—nurturing healthy sperm cells while screening out bacteria and weaker sperm, ensuring that only the strongest have passage.

This shift is marked by an increase in sodium salts, which, as the mucus dries, crystallize into striking fern-like patterns. These delicate structures, appearing only at ovulation, are more than a biological curiosity: they are a signature of the body’s deep patterning, a fluid expression of fertility’s rhythm.

Just as mycelial networks and lymphatic vessels reveal the body’s capacity for communication and selective exchange, the cervical mucus demonstrates another layer of this living matrix—where fluid itself becomes an intelligent gatekeeper, attuned to timing, flow, and the shaping of new life.

A relational matrix of connection can be seen in the development of the nervous system. As neural cells grow, they extend long branching processes that reach outward and attach to those of other cells. Through these countless points of contact, vast networks are formed. Along these fibres, action potentials travel as pulses of energy—sometimes exciting, sometimes inhibiting—depending on the cell’s role. In this way, information is not only transmitted but also selectively channeled, ensuring it reaches the right place at the right time.

The nervous system thus embodies a living matrix: a dynamic web where connection, communication, and differentiation give rise to coordinated intelligence.

A good overview and explanation of bones - showing them as a multi-layered matrix, and fluid system. 

This video shows the movements of bone remodeling by multi-nucleated cells such as osteoclasts and also osteoblasts, revealing how bones are a moving, dynamic and fluid crystalline matrix.

Microscopic film of bone matrix.

This video shows a segmental "rope" or strand of the extracellular matrix, and a fibroblast cell, moving through it. Keep in mind the extracellular matrix is bathed in interstitial fluid. 

This video explains the science of piezo-electricity - looking at quartz crystals and our bones. The bodies fascial system is also responsive and generates piezoelectricity. 

This quick talk by Mae-Wan Ho summarizes and explains her theories and discoveries that she explores in her book The Rainbow and the Worm, which is on the NAIO Practitioner Training Program reading list. 

Mae-Wan Ho lays out her theory at the Institute of Science in Society, London, UK

It is: that Proton currents associated with water in nanospaces are the key to intercommunication in living organisms. They provide a ‘proton-neural network’ that regulates redox reactions in the core energy metabolism throughout the liquid crystalline matrix of the body and into the interior of every single cell and its compartments. This proton-neural network has all the characteristics of the acupuncture meridian system of traditional Chinese Medicine. New evidence shows that water in various nanospaces adopt new quantum states dependent on the precise dimensions; at certain critical dimensions, water confined in nanospaces superconduct proticity and also become superfluid. The quantum electrodynamics theory of Emilio Del Giudice and colleagues provides a unifying framework for the new science of water for life.

This lesson explores how NAIO understands human experience across multiple nested dimensions/layers. Students learn to distinguish between:

• pre-reflective lived experience (what is directly felt and lived)

• phenomenological description (how experience is structured and appears)

• philosophical reflection (how traditions have interpreted the coherence and intelligibility of life)

We examine how symbolic Meta-Themes such as Logos, Chaos, Nous, Eros, Cosmos, and Flow function as philosophical lenses rather than scientific explanations. Students develop the capacity to hold subtle experience with precision, without reducing it to mechanism or turning it into fixed belief.

The focus is not on adopting metaphysical doctrines, but on cultivating ontological humility — the ability to reflect on the depth of lived experience while remaining grounded, relational, and ethically aware.

This lesson introduces students to how NAIO understands subtle experience across distinct yet related domains of inquiry. Beginning from pre-reflective lived presence, students explore how qualities such as coherence, aliveness, relational attunement, and organizing flow are first encountered as directly lived phenomena, prior to interpretation. From there, the lesson develops the phenomenological method, which turns toward experience to describe how it appears and organizes itself — clarifying structures such as wholeness, field coherence, self-organization, and relational participation without reducing them to mechanism or elevating them to metaphysical certainty. This establishes experiential literacy alongside descriptive precision.

The lesson then situates these experiential and phenomenological insights within a broader philosophical orientation, introducing NAIO’s Meta-Themes (e.g., Logos/Open Order) as symbolic–philosophical lenses through which traditions have reflected on the intelligibility and coherence encountered in lived life. Students learn to distinguish lived experience, phenomenological description, scientific models, and philosophical reflection — cultivating ontological humility and avoiding both reductionism and pseudo-scientific claims. Cross-domain structural themes such as non-linearity, complex systems, evolution, wave, and matrix are clarified as patterns that appear both in living systems and in lived organization, but through different modes of access. The result is a grounded, rigorous, and ethically responsible way of working with subtle dimensions of embodiment.