Tensegrity is the name given to the modern version of the magical passes: positions and movements of body and breath that were dreamt and stalked by men and women seers who lived in Mexico in ancient times, and taught to Carlos Castaneda, Florinda Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar and Carol Tiggs by their teacher, don Juan Matus, a Yaqui Indian from Yuma, Arizona, and Sonora, Mexico, and the heir to a lineage of seers that originates in Mexico of ancient times.

      The word Tensegrity is borrowed from an architect, engineer, scientist and dreamer whom Carlos Castaneda admired: R. Buckminster Fuller, who described tensegrity as a combination of tensional integrity, the forces at work in a structure that is formed by a finite network of compression, or rigid elements interconnected through tensile, or elastic elements which give the structure its overall integrity. Due to this elastic property of interconnections, when one element of the tensegrity structure is shifted, this shift is spread throughout the whole structure, and all the other elements shift as well, or adapt for a new configuration, yielding to these shifts without breaking.

      Carlos Castaneda found this process, tensegrity, to be a perfect energetic description of the modern practice of the magical passes and of the way of being that don Juan Matus taught him. In the case of the magical passes, Tensegrity refers to the interplay of tensing and relaxing the tendons and muscles, and their energetic counterparts, in a way that contributes to the overall integrity of the body as a physical and an energetic unit. In the case of daily life, Carlos Castaneda said, Tensegrity is an art: the art of adapting to one's own energy, and to each other's energy in a way that contributes to the integrity of the community that we are.

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