How Images Move: A review of Lynda Barry's Syllabus

This book is never far from reach and, often in my mind. The concepts I encountered in this strange little book have altered the way I understand the inter-relationship between content and medium. Meaning, there is a content we are endeavoring to explore and understand – the body. And then there is the medium, or way, by which we do that. Syllabus changed my understanding of the medium.

I first encountered Syllabus shortly after finishing my first term teaching at NUNM.  I remember that my initial experience of teaching felt frustrating to me in a way that I couldn’t quite identify.  There was something inside me that I wanted to share that wasn’t coming through and it had to do with the method of instruction: the medium we were using to engage with the material at hand. I felt lost: focusing on learning objectives and outcomes was uninspiring. I wanted my teaching and the learning process itself to reflect the nature of hands-on bodywork.

I was realizing how complex and unique it is to develop and offer alternative medicine curricula.  The study of medicine involves both the mastery of academic knowledge and the honing of the art and craft of medicine. In alternative medicine, especially hands-on work, we are dedicating ourselves to a craft that requires distinct skills and a complex knowledge base, implementing this skill based on knowledge, is the art of it all. So, how do we teach that? Lecture? Nope. Memorizing? Not really, or at least not in the way we typically approach memorizing, usually by cramming for a test. As learners, we must adapt and flexibly respond to a living and organically changing human system. No two cases are the same; theories, frameworks and techniques must bend and transform to meet our patients. 

The learning process should in real ways reflect the content and ultimate objective of our study – treating patients. For example Moving Mountain Institute’s cranialsacral curriculum endeavors to reflect cranial work itself, we attempt to “teach in the direction of ease” as one student said after a seminar. I learned when developing the courses that the work itself was guiding the way we would approach it in class. For example, in developing our cranialsacral curriculum we used the metaphor of the Polynesian Wayfinders as a context for our inquiry. Using metaphor as a bridge between difficult concepts or techniques and actual treatment opens up terrain for dialogue and inquiry (research shows that metaphor is effective in helping people make meaning from and remember complex concepts). Through using potent metaphors students can go deeper into their own personal inquiry with the work at hand. A collective language is generated that allows us, as a community of learners, to not only go more fully into our personal understanding but also to evolve our collective understanding.

In my quest to break free from the conventional classroom, I talked to people at NUNM, made friends with the Dean of Faculty Development and Curriculum Design, but I found no real answers. It wasn’t until one day with some unstructured down time (research is now showing how important open and unstructured time is to support the creative process), I wandered into Powell’s Books. I was looking at books on writing. And I saw a spine that looked like the spine of a composition notebook. The title, Syllabus appeared handwritten in marker. I was plagued by having to write syllabi because of how rigid and confining they felt. So, I pulled this book off the shelf and saw these wild drawings on the cover, I opened to the first pages and they were a collage-like blend of drawings and handwritten notes, amazing questions with no answers offered, random clippings from old magazines and newspapers, bits of poetry, Rumi and Dickinson. I was hooked.

I still turn to Syllabus when I am need of inspiration, when I have a question about teaching or my process, or when I want to remember what’s possible in a classroom… But recently, I have been turning to it in gratitude. In its first pages Lynda Barry shares why she first got interested in teaching. Barry is interested in “images”. To her images are alive and are at the root of her work. She realized that she had gone as far as she could in her exploration of the “image” by herself and said, “I need students to help me figure out how images move.”

Take some time to look into the page below, it is an open field that is packed with questions and ideas that engage the viewer in a way that a strictly textual page could not. If you consider Barry’s desire for students to understand how images move and then read the little blue box beneath the smoking monkey you get the idea that this image she is talking about might be relevant to our work with patients. What is moving between us when we make contact with them? Could it have some resemblance to Barry’s concept of an “image?” I think so.

We are working, in so many ways, with an image of the body. As practitioners, we use images of the body to guide our work. Pictures from anatomy books give us insight into the nature of the tissues we are working with. We study images of people performing the techniques we are learning and refining. And then there is the image of the work itself, our belief and sense of what it is that we are doing, of the potency of hands-on medicine. What is our internal image of the body? How well does it reflect how the body experiences itself? Are we in harmony with the complex nature of the body and how it carries the fullness of human experience? And, most important, how do we blend our perceptions with the patient’s image of their own body? How is that image transforming as they do their work on the table in our presence? When we think about our work like this it seems like we, as hands-on practitioners, might also be interested in how images move between people.

There are (at least) two things that I love about Lynda Barry’s realization that she needed students to go further in exploring her question.

First, I love the humility and communal impulse. I resonate with the idea that we will learn more when we pursue our inquiries together rather than on our own. Our work often occurs in isolated settings, us one-on-one in a treatment room with a patient. But we share in that encounter together by participating actively in a community of learners. That is my goal for the institute, for myself. It might sound funny, but often I think of you all when I am working. I notice something happening in a treatment and because I want to be able to share it later, I explore the phenomenon more deeply and continue to question my own approaches.

This leads to my second point. I love that Lynda Barry has questions that are so alive to her, questions that have become her companions, questions that shape her journey and her process and keep unfolding themselves to her. I find that to be true about our work. I still find myself pondering the same questions I started my career puzzling over. How does the body experience itself? What does it mean that the body has an innate healing capacity? How do I work with that in treatment? The presence of our community holds me in intimate engagement with those questions. For all of this I am grateful.

We are a few years in now. Moving Mountain Institute is teaching two full curricula and we have more courses in development. We have grown into a baby company of three people plus all of you. And, I have learned how much I need students to continue my own journey with this wonderful world of the body that we all share.

There is so much more that I love about Syllabus but I’ll leave it here for now and just say thank you to all of you for inspiring me to delve ever deeper into both the work and how to teach it to others, I have been changed by the process.

Onward…