In 2013, I did something super weird. I spent $2000 to spend a week with a brilliant teacher in a room full of cadavers.
At the time, this was the most expensive training (outside of college) I had taken. And unlike college or yoga training, there was absolutely no guarantee of job opportunities at the end.
I headed to San Francisco to spend a week with a bunch of people I didn’t know and attempt to learn something I thought I already knew: human anatomy.
My first exposure to anatomy wasn’t until my 3rd year at UC Davis – I spent the entire winter quarter in the same stinky clothes (formaldehyde soaks into everything) and staring at a textbook, hoping the names and locations of every single part would stick just long enough to get me through the next test.
And even after all that, the 6 days in SF changed my life forever.
For the first time, the human form I thought I knew so well was completely unknown. The textbook images burned into my memory were nothing like the real thing. I was getting lost as we peeled back layer by layer and exposed more and more.
The human body is complicated beyond your wildest dreams. There are simple things, like the structure of a shoulder, knee or hip. But standing there, with someone else’s brain literally in my hands, was an experience unlike anything else.
We give so much power to our physical body. We give it names like “the good knee” or the “bad shoulder”. But there’s so much more that illuminates your experience on this earth. That brain, which actually isn’t all that large when you’re holding it, is infinite in its ability to imagine the impossible.
I took a risk and it paid off 1000 fold. Even though I spent lots of time and money and missed a week of work, this will forever be an investment I will never regret.
I learned to appreciate the human body and its infinite capacity to heal and grow around whatever comes its way. I also realized that no matter how much I think I know, there’s always so much more to learn.
Which is why, even to this day, I never doubt anyone’s story about their body. No matter how far fetched someone else may have told them it was – the truth is, we don’t really know.
Every body is unique. Your experience is yours alone.
And while I suggest what the next best step is based on you, your history, and what I know to be true about the human body, there’s always a chance something else will happen.
And I’m ok with that. Because I’ve seen how forcing a fix hardly ever works. And how the simple things that you may have already overlooked, may be just what your body (and mind) are craving to heal.
