A couple weeks ago, I participated in a fascial dissection with Anatomy Trains in Boulder, CO. It was my very first time working with cadavers, and a rare opportunity to see and touch real human tissue beneath the skin. This experience has touched me profoundly in ways I’ve not yet processed, and will likely inform my Structural Integration practice for years to come…
Day one, I was anxious. These were untreated cadavers, so no preservation other than freezing. I was so startled the first time they exposed a donor in the lab that I felt my heart drop!
Every morning, our master dissector Todd Garcia gave a demonstration of what we’d do for the day. This man’s skills with a knife were uncanny, and his craft was as much a skill as it was poetry.
My first time touching a body with no consciousness inside was when I touched our cadaver’s arm. Firstly, it’s cold. Having touched people all my life, I’d never been fully cognizant that people are warm. Biologically, temperature is implicit, though not often registered unless we’re checking for a fever or inflammation.
Initially this was my first surprise, until sensing the absence of control. Having touched people professionally now for almost eight years, I have seldom (if ever) felt a deadweight arm. Having years of experience asking people to soften their clench, I can attest to the challenge of letting your arm flop. The absence of a subject in the body was my biggest takeaway that I can’t yet fully comprehend, but now I suspect that the body is only a shell.
We are embodied, yes. We are in our bodies. After this last week, I’ve seen pretty hard evidence that we are not our bodies. Our flesh comes and goes from the earth, but “we” are something else. Maybe the soul belongs to the earth too, or maybe consciousness can only exist here on our planet, but I now have seen these elements separated. Game-changer.
Working in the body with a subject present is how I’ve found my living. Working with the body as an object was purely dumbfounding. In my several dreams that week, dream people were partially dissected, my subconscious archetypes were disassembled, and inanimate objects were turning into ghosts and flying away.
What floored me was, for lack of better term, the “psychic energy” emanating from handling these tissues. I don’t deny my bias, but each organ that I held in my hands released distinct feelings in my soma. When I held the brain, I felt a wiry nervousness. When I held the uterus, I felt a familiar, grounding calm come over me. When I held the heart, I felt an overwhelming sense of love which brought tears to my eyes. I know that my own intelligence has symbols associated with these objects, yet these feelings were very real.
As a bodyworker, I’ve always used these inner feelings as a compass when at work, especially those felt in my gut, heart, and spine. I check in with these spaces to affirm significance in others. These opportunities in the dissection lab have solidified my affirmations even further.
What’s more, I’ve been witness to the beautiful variations in anatomy. Muscles that some have and others don’t, foreign objects either medical or unintentional, even undeveloped anatomy or congenitally defective structures, all were represented.
Even though I expected this going into the lab, I couldn’t quite anticipate how different real anatomy is from our textbooks.
Lumbar discs and vertebral bodies are GIGANTIC! The brachialis muscle is way more obvious than I ever anticipated. The appendix is so inconspicuous, I hardly even noticed it. Much of our GI viscera is brown or grey. The Dura Mater is extremely tough, and the pia mater is so mushy it could be squished by my pinky finger. Neurovascular bundles are mostly just long, red stringy noodles kinda tangled up in everything. Not only that, but most donors we worked with were so marbled with adipose tissue that I almost forgot they were once human. If something like this doesn’t compel me to eat right and move, I’m not sure what else can.
Every piece is held together by none other than- you guessed it- fascia! It really, truly, is everywhere in us. Holding our organs to our other organs, holding our lungs to our lung bags and our lung bags to our ribcage and our ribcage to our intercostals and gluing our intercostals to our Lats and so on! Bags within bags within bags!
Never again can I look at the human in the same way. I have new reverence for the gift of the body. We are truly blessed by this fleshy vehicle.