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“Be prepared to unlearn everything you thought you knew”

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From the moment I signed up to take Jules Mitchell’s anatomy lab, help from the initiated began to pour in.

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A common love language of teachers is sharing experience and advice, most of which can be summarized in the above quote when it comes to dissecting a human body.

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Massage therapists describe how different things look vs. how they “feel”. Anatomists are rapt about the difference between two dimensional renderings of our separate muscles, and the three dimensional, connected ropes that make up our human macrame system. Movement enthusiasts wax poetic about the struggle to separate one muscle from another as it’s name and location change ,but the structure remains unbroken…

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Here’s what I unlearned:

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I have lived by the quote “Nothing separates anything in the human body except a scalpel” for years. It’s been a guiding force of all my movement practices and trainings.

And I couldn’t have been more wrong.

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Everything IS separate within the human body, and it is separated by the body’s own intelligence. Fascia, tendons, muscles, ligaments, bones… The body takes the same ingredients and mixes them up a little differently to form the various structures that make up our dynamic selves. And every element the body creates has a purpose.

Feeling the dense resilience of the Sciatic nerve between my double gloved fingers, running it’s length down from the Glutes to where it split and disappeared back into the knee into a forest of fat cells, and understanding that ALL that fat was put there for a reason. Learning that fat and nerves are “best friends” they don’t exist without each other. The mind boggling effort to divide the muscles and tendons of the forearm - so clearly defined, and easily articulated separately by that being’s nervous system. Only difficult to separate out by some random alien human who decided to get in there with a scalpel and make sense of the organism by deconstructing it.

We had two bodies - teachers, as they are called at The Institute for Anatomical Research ( where I did this training) and they were definitely in different conditions at the point of their death. One of them had muscles that didn’t want to stay together - they would almost shred beneath your fingers. And when I was working on her, I found myself thinking about how the knowledge to create an entire human body is contained within every one of our cells. They all have the potential to become any type of cell needed. It’s the part where they choose to “ define” themselves and show just a certain part of their pattern that allows us to build a liver, and bone, and skin, and nerves, and have them all behave differently from each other in the appropriate manner.

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A current theory on diseases related to aging is that our cells lose the ability to differentiate their function, so the liver cells begin to behave like skin cells for example, and then problems arise. On the body that had forgotten how to hold herself together, I began to tell myself a story about how the muscle and the fat lost their separate definitions, and began to hang out as one… effectively destroying the support system they had once created.

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But really, everything we tell ourselves about our bodies is a story.

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It’s us trying to make sense of a magnificent, sacred creation that was built with an intelligence far greater than our own.

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No different than space, or the ocean, we are still discovering this bioorganism. The more information we have , the more we are unclear, and hopefully our reverence for it all grows in the process.

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Speaking of processing, I’m still doing exactly that. So more details in future newsletters.

( Or buy me a cocktail and I’ll talk your ear off about it as soon as you ask)

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I’ll leave you with two resources this Sunday

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The Institute of Human Anatomy is a fabulous Youtube Channel with tons of free videos about anatomy and dissections.

And if you want to take the course I took, check out Jules Mitchell’s schedule here. She’s.been rocking my world with her classes and courses since 2016 and anything you learn from her will make you a better teacher.

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Have a Happy Hallowe’en.

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Go forth and adapt the appearance of your living bodies with joy.

It’s a pleasure to inhabit them, even when we’re pretending to be dead for the night.

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Domini Anne

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