Art for Heart Sake

Chris McHugh and I were planning to teach a Yoga workshop together (I think it was in 2006). We were both sitting on the floor of the Brighton Studio where we work (Unit 4) and we looked at the skeleton, hanging in the corner. I gazed at it, trying to imagine how the bones feel inside. Chris is a doctor (of medicine) and we chatted about how we would include the anatomy appropriately in the workshop.

I suddenly noticed that the pelvis is heart shaped! Then we realised the first rib is also heart shaped...actually, so is the sacrum. We looked down at our feet and found that it was easy to imagine they too are heart shaped. Then we discovered something wonderful that you can only feel.

If you stand up and sense that the heart shape of your first ribs are over the heart shape of your pelvis - firmly over the heart shape of your feet (either together or separate hearts in Tadasana, standing 'mountain pose',) you actually find a wonderful sense of poise and balance. Try it!

adapted from Albinus on anatomy: The First Rib - heart-shaped

The Feet - together or individually - sensing the shape

adapted from Albinus on anatomy: The Pelvis & Sacrum

Back to Art for a Moment

Leonardo and Michelangelo were called Philosophers. They were not just artists. They were thinkers, creative beings with a wide and a profound understanding of many elements; to name but two among many creative authorities during the Renaissance. They were seekers - of a truth or representation - that was true to nature and honoured both the literal and the symbolic and the archetypal in their work. Steeped with traditional and religious symbolism they wove humour and realism (of the day) into their work. In a sense, they animated the inanimate. Working with inert materials to represent it as a living moment, captured in time, a sort of three-dimensional motion capture of the day.

These images are from a recent visit to Ulm, where the magnificent Minster there houses some of the most exquisite architecture and sculpture. Just to note that it is possible to apparently animate the inert!

Here the fabric folds as if draped - yet it is carved from stone

And here we seem to be part way through a conversation, an attitude, a thoughtful moment suspended as if in motion

Tom Myers - Mentor & Poet

I first met Tom in 1998 and was inspired by his teaching of whole body anatomy based on the concept of Anatomy Trains. For the first time the body language I was seeking to interpret had an interpreter who could speak it in joined up writing! Tom is an entertainer, an archetypal magician and mentor with a charismatic ability to literally spell-bind a room. He is also very brilliant at what he does and a wonderful poet, so I was captivated by his rendition of the fascial body-wide matrix. His opening words were:

"there ain't no muscles, connected to no bones, nowhere in no body"

I was hooked! Next stop USA.

The training at Tom's KMI school in Boston (I believe in its second year when I started way back in the 20th century) was a trial by fire for me. However as the alchemist (much as I burned) it was fuel in my laboratory. I read, studied, devoured the unpublished spreads he gave me to proof read of the first edition of Anatomy Trains, before it went to print. They bubbled in my mental testing ground and every class I arrived with new questions of why the anatomy books showed one thing - yet the Anatomy Trains had such a different perspective.... and so I let those pink and white pages reorganise and recreate my understanding of anatomy on every level. Then the real questions started.

I am so glad now that I didn't come to the class room as a doctor or physiotherapist with an investment in the classical view of human anatomical study.  I wished at the time that I had more medical knowledge of it - but now it is a blessing that I wasn't tethered to the traditional path. My education was in the work of Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo - who had used their secret studies of the real human form to revitalise and animate the images they painted on inanimate canvas. With nothing but pigment they could bring a two dimensional image to life so that it seemed to breathe. If the anatomy books were right, we were trying to reduce the real living breathing version to the state of a diagram. It was akin to analysing the non-living example that might be found under canvas in a morgue, covered in labeled parts. There were my renaissance heroes carving life out of stone - and I needed my new clients to stand still like statues and all be identical - if the traditional books were to be believed. People don't stand still very much!

Something wasn't making sense here.

Every person I was touching appeared to have their own version of anatomy. Although they were basically built to a similar pattern - ish, it was clearly not an exact science and, more to the point, everyone moved and felt differently. (Most inconvenient if you are trying to count vertebrae one by one, or find a hidden bony point that they don't appear to have.) A new world was emerging in which the common denominator was definitely not in the anatomically correct schematic diagrams. It was a constantly changing, moving, oscillating, unique-to-each-person, strictly animated version of something that just did not function as a so-called "musculo-skeletal system". Sorry guys - but there wasn't a person alive in that room who moved (or hurt) according to the traditional books!

As Lewis Carroll said in Alice in Wonderland "curiouser and curiouser" - don't you think?

Tom wasn't so much confident as passionate back then, before Fascia Research had escalated and verified so many aspects of what he had dared to put into print. Thank goodness he dared - even if he did promise "Anatomy Trains is only a metaphor" - (and bear in mind that the magic of a metaphor is  soul food to the poet)!

Touching where the client felt pain was one thing....

Knowing where you were was another....

...the moving client was yet another....

...and everyone was different...

...and relating all that to an anatomical diagram was something else entirely....


...until you had Anatomy Trains joining it all together!
 

www.anatomytrains.com
(Check out the Arm Lines to make sense of this)

Below my water-colour sketches that helped me make sense of the moving living continuity that Anatomy Trains articulates so successfully - we are continuous and we don't move mechanically, so a continuous metaphor, map or meridian literally and symbolically makes sense to the breathing human moving their own animated body.

Feet First

I have worked for 17 years now, in the approach to Yoga that Vanda Scaravelli crafted. Often called Restorative Yoga, Vanda always insisted it was owned by the practitioner working with their own practice. In her lifetime, according to her protege and dear friend Diane Long - she would not have the work named after her. It is sometimes called 'Scaravelli Yoga' now, but that is a shorthand way of describing an advanced movement practice that is both intuitive and generous to the body. It takes years to make sense. The rewards for the teacher invariably reside among the students. My Friday Class (as they are known) range from 18 to 81 - and even the older ones have fallen over and bounced!! That works for me - especially watching a 75 year old man begin yoga and be fitter, more supple and agile at 81, than he was at 70!

First and foremost, Vanda's approach to any posture began with the feet. Their profound relationship to gravity is considered paramount; the exquisite depth that allows the body to ground itself through the heels, through the eloquent, articulate footprint - releases the breathing spine to lift naturally upward. Vanda called it an 'anti-gravity reflex' and her wisdom in the use of that phrase preempts the most recent discoveries about the body and its fascial matrix, by decades. Now it can be explained in exquisite detail why the body is actually spring loaded - but back then we had only the inner sense and those of us teaching this 'new movement' jumped in to get the proof in experientia - feet first.

That was Yoga, movement. Now came the manual practice of Structural Integration and a huge shift or expansion was required. My feet were awake - but my head and my hands each had a whole new language to learn that they didn't know they didn't speak. The head had to learn anatomy technology and biomechanical angles and levers -  while the hands had to learn to touch people - and the two worlds were so very different  - apparently galaxies apart. What vehicle could travel between them? Better still - how could they be united so they made sense to me and the client...?

...and no long nails for Structural Work!

From Art to Science

I am an archetypal storyteller, an artist and a poet. Learning the science of Professional Structural Integration (SI) felt, at first, like an alien world. The anatomical parts and the descriptions of bio-mechanical movement had no romance. I had to enter a realm distinguished by its exclusive vocabulary. Years of experience as a restorative Yoga teacher seemed like another domain, as I wrestled with the intellectual detail of anatomical parts, levers, joints and technical information.

That worried me, because essentially I was to work with people. They would come to me because they were in pain, because they feared something they didn't understand and because they had (often) tried everything else they could think of and had ended up with this last resort (SI). It is a tough basis upon which to work - and we were told early in training that it would be so. For that, more than anything else, I had to find an eloquent and accessible language.

The other problem was that learning to work with the human body, at the level of the connective tissue matrix (or the Fascia as it is called) requires a new understanding altogether of the word "language". Every single body has a language of its own – any artist can tell you that. It is entirely unique - indeed, it is like a specialised dialect, spoken only by that body's tissue. I didn't know that then, back in the early days of studying long lists of muscle names, bones, origins and insertions. I just felt seriously awkward applying a standard [anatomical] category to a visibly and oh-so-obviously unique being.

It’s a good problem to wrestle with – it creates friction and friction gives rise to energy; heat – the kind of stuff that cooks all alchemical processes…little did I know that I was being trained as an Alchemist…

Sketching people was heaven to me; if I could capture their essence without words

At First

At first, the experience of learning Anatomy was one of the most difficult things imaginable. There were several reasons for this, one in particular that stays with me in every class I teach and every client I see and every student I have ever worked with since. The labels of bones, of muscles, of joints and of body parts seemed so distant from the experience of the person to whom I was to apply this knowledge - that it left me cold.

I had to learn a language that only my hands could really speak...

Contour Drawing (without looking at the paper)