Experiencing Life Through Death
Opening up the human body is typically an experience reserved for people in the world of medicine. Or murderers. Neither of which describes me. Never in my wildest dreams did it occur to me I would have this experience as a yoga teacher. Experiencing the inner landscape I spend so much time trying to bring to life in the mind of my students and self has invariably altered the way I think about the body.
The perfection of the joints. The way the femoral head is perfectly sucked into the capsule of the pelvis. Smoother than any surface I’ve felt to date. Fitting perfectly inside, unwilling to come out with ease. The suction and popping sound it makes when forcibly removed is reminiscent of popping a balloon at a birthday party. The ligament keeps the attachment, even when the femur is pulled away. True depth of connection.
The fascia connects everything. Nothing is separate. This idea floated through the lab over the week- we don’t have separate muscles, rather it’s one muscle with various attachments. This makes sense to me now. My anatomical education previous to this experience would have found this idea laughable. The idea that your latissimus dorsi was in some way the same muscle as your temporalis or tibialos anterior? Please, don’t make me laugh. Now that I’ve been inside, in a way other than inhabiting my own skin, bones, muscles and connections, I understand. Seeing is believing and I believe our bodies are nothing short of miraculous. A living example of interconnectedness.
The way our nervous system is controlled by our brain, the connection of the brain stem to the spinal cord less of a connection and more of a continuation. The cave the pituitary gland sits in, doling out controls to other glands from atop its mountain in the mind. Having waited well over a decade to see inside the human skull, I felt my jaw on the floor. I felt the level of astonishment inside me from my head to my toes. Removing the brain from the skull, experiencing the resilience and durability of the aptly named dura mater brought me to a place of utter disbelief. Not because I was unaware or unfamiliar with the structures and functions in front of me, rather seeing it in the post mortem gooey flesh felt like seeing something not meant for me to ever see. Yet, it also felt like something I had known all my life.
Amidst all the disbelief, shock, awe and utter amazement that came with the dissection of a human body I was also covered in a comforting layer of familiarity. As layers were removed - skin revealing fat, fat revealing fascia, fascia revealing muscle and muscle revealing bone - I felt the familiarity of an old neighbor you run into at the grocery store some ten years later. Same, but different. Experiencing each structure in a full three dimensional multi sensory state (the smells, ohh wow the smells) solidified the understanding of anatomy already in my brain. A brain not unlike the one I delicately removed then dissected from the skull. Marveling at the beauty and slime of one lobe of the cerebellum sitting in the palm of my hand. When I began to study the brain at the age of fifteen I never could have predicted I would one day hold the very organ that perplexed me and so many others in my own hands.
Experiencing the tensile strength of our fascia not only changed the way I think about movement, but the way I think about sensation. Our fascia is not separate from our nervous system. It is our nervous system, and our nervous system is it. One of the largest parts of the nervous system, the fascia is reminiscent of a spider web. Not unlike the arachnoid matter in the brain. The nerves that venture out from our spinal cord, I now imagine, are the precursors to the creation of the fascial network in their direct reach. The strength in the muscle, I am no longer convinced comes from the muscle alone. The muscle belly of the bicep came apart easily and willingly with the swipe of a finger. Yet, while encased in the fascial layer the muscle seemed like an impermeable layer protecting the humerus. I felt utter disbelief when I saw the size of the sciatic nerve, bordering on denial. I questioned whether it was actually the femoral artery, no way could a nerve be that big. It was in fact a nerve, much larger than any others I had seen. I still feel amazed there is a nerve in the body as wide as my pinky finger.
The idea our range of motion is limited not due to muscular inability but by our nervous system has me eager to find new movement patterns and experiences in my own body. Movements I previously wrote off as unattainable for my body, now seem within reach. My clear understanding of the various joint movements creates the belief my joints can and will move in any way I ask them (within reason) and trust them to via my nervous system. It’s not called a nervous system for nothing though, I will feel nervous going into new patterns and new places. A survival instinct kept safely in the brainstem, the place many of our nerves wander out from.
Opening the human body with a blade sent electricity down my spine. The visual of opening the outermost physical layer of a human is alarming at best, nauseating at worst. Once open though the curiosity of what lay deeper - to see, touch and learn more - quickly takes over. The desire to understand outweighed any tendency to stay in discomfort.
When asked if I would do it all again, I can’t say no. I would do it all again, even the parts that made me feel the ick from head to toe (perforated bowel and burst bladder comes to mind…). Do I need to do it again? I do not. I feel immense gratitude to have explored the body in this way even once. Do I have more curiosity now than I did before? Yes, absolutely. I want to touch and see more. More of the spine. More of the muscle fibers turning into tendons connecting firmly to bone. I want to feel the strength of fascia in my hands while simultaneously marveling at how delicate it seems. As if it was made by silk worms, creating a layer strong enough to hold everything in yet still allowing light through.
Perhaps more than anything, I discovered a deeper appreciation for the energetic and subtle quality that is life as a human. I found myself imagining the chakras and the energetic waves carried through the body. Seeing areas where tissue had accumulated in ways indicative of scarring, trauma or blockage instilled in me the importance of not only movement but actual physical connection with the tissues. Whether with a foam roller, a myofascial ball or a manual therapist. The tissue adapts to the life we live, and the life we live is up to us. Whether or not we choose to move, hydrate and nourish. The movement potential in the body, is in my new view, infinite. There are as many patterns available to us as we can think up or seek out and the more of them we use the more our body will flourish.
Seeing what makes our physical us, us, was truly a gift. My depth of understanding has reached levels I simply couldn’t have imagined before this experience. It is with immense gratitude to our donors, their loved ones and my teachers I move forward in the world of movement in new ways. Finding ways to illustrate our innate ability to move and live. Emphasizing our resilience and strength, bearing in mind the areas of tenderness and fragility. Reminding myself and my students when it comes to the body all these terms and more are relative. The beauty of being human is the shared similarities as well as the subtle and at times profound differences among us. As a movement teacher, the dissection lab with Yoga Medicine was invaluable to my anatomy education. Another teacher and I joked all the anatomy education we had given our students up to this point felt like a lie. The way we now see and understand the body is more than anything we thought we knew or understood before. I’m excited to bring this incredible knowledge to my classes, clients and community.
At the end of the day, I come back to the all important knowledge everything is connected. The body is a holistic fully integrated organism responding to the environment it finds itself in. We live more days where it all goes right, than days where it all goes wrong. This is a beautiful gift. I will use movement as the medicine it is for as many days as my body allows.
Moving with gratitude for all the things going right.
