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