Anatomy As Symbol Language

During a recent craniosacral weekend, I could tell some of the students were a bit overwhelmed with the anatomy we were working through, so we took a step back and checked in on why and how we are studying  anatomy. 

I absolutely get feeling numbed out by anatomy - it’s real.

I was a terrible anatomy student in both of my formal trainings in  massage therapy and acupuncture. However, when left to study on my own and pursue my own curiosities I actually became excited by it. My anatomy curiosity began when I was first introduced to craniosacral therapy. Forming a relationship with the CS system through the anatomy was pivotal in me being able to develop my felt sense of the system - to listen to the tissues. Looking back, I realize that my initially pretty poor palpation skills are what inspired my interest in anatomy - but I was never and still am not interested in the rote, mechanical approach to anatomy. 

Anatomy is relational not mechanical nor objectivist. Nothing exists in the body’s perception of itself, as separate from anything else. It doesn’t know of itself as our anatomy books have parsed it out. I’m not saying the parsing out of it all hasn’t led to insights that support surgeons and those surgeons often save lives. However, that is only one perspective. It is not the only perspective or the “right” perspective, simply a perspective rooted in a way of knowing. 

Embodiment is a riddle of form and energy in constant interdependence. So, if we are talking about form we are also always involved with what makes the form animate. As Mary Oliver says in her poem title Poem, which we read regularly in class:

The spirit 

likes to dress up like this:

ten fingers,

ten toes,

Shoulders, and all the rest…

It’s an instructive poem for us. The spirit dresses up as body, energy and form. So, anatomy, the form becomes what the body has to express itself, it is a symbol language for the blended energy-form that we are. The body, in its riverine myofascial/meridian pathways and its humming and churning physiological realities is an expression. As Stephen Porges says, our physiology is our emotions. We know the energy that we experience as emotion is stored within our myofascial system as well as expressed through our physiology. 

If we are to take the body on its own terms, best as we can, then what we have to do is understand how the form might understand itself. I have come to believe, through a lot of hands-on time, that if we know the body, know it’s form and properties, it will express itself a bit more fully in response to our touch and our presence.  I believe the body can perceive a knowing touch. 

Anatomy is relational and the body has its form as a symbol language. In class we began using this phrase; the body as a preverbal language. Because the body is an ecology, and exists as constellations of interdependent relationships, learning our anatomy from the perspective of relationships and connection can be a path to participating in its language. 

So, when we study anatomy, are we curious about relationships and pathways and properties and how structures are related to one another? What might that tell us about what they might be experiencing - how does the nervous system interact with the tissues and other physiology? 

The one thing I found that I liked 20+ years ago when I studied anatomy in massage school was encountering the word cuneiform - there it was a bone, but I knew the word also from studying linguistics and poetics - cuneiform, a symbol language etched on tablets in ancient Mesopotamia and Persia. It is one of the oldest forms of writing. Ever since then I have associated cuneiform with a symbol language of the body - each structure, an expression. We are one of the oldest forms of symbolic expression, or as Eduardo Galeano wrote “perhaps we are the words that tell who we are…” 

So, when we approach cranial or myofascial anatomy it is to know how and what that structure might speak and say. It is to be in relationship with it within all of its myriad relationships. I tell students structures matter when we know about the milieu and some of what they might do within that milieu. Our hands become more intelligent listeners and communicators when we can bring that awareness to our work.

This type of anatomy is intentionally imaginal. I had the opportunity to take a fresh cadaver dissection seminar years ago and it changed me. 

Anterior neck-jaw-Sternum gray

Day one I had seen all that I needed to see. We dissected superficial fascia from the front and side of the neck → clavicle → sternum and ribs → we then cut a window through the right side rib basket and removed the right lung. What I could see looked much more like a flowing stream than it did specific tissues. I could see what I knew was the SCM and the scalenes but they were embedded within a flowing contouring there-is-no-other-way-to-say-it river of tissues. Even in a non-living form it looked like it was in motion. 

Mind blown first time. 

Later in the craniosacral class this conversation emerged as we were reading another poem, The First Water is the Body, by Natalie Diaz, (Mojave and enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe), from her book, Postcolonial Love Poem.  The poem is complex and potent. Diaz tells us,

This is not juxtaposition. Body and water are not two unlike things - they are more than close together or side by side. They are same - body, being, energy, prayer, current, motion, medicine. 

…that flowing stream of tissue encountered the clavicle and it did what water does - some went above and some went below…

Back to the dissection; that flowing stream of tissue encountered the clavicle and it did what water does - some went above and some went below - there was no place where it looked as though the tissue differentiated itself into some specifically different tissue at that bony landmark - it just flowed. There were places that it appeared as though some of the tissue did attach to bone (clavicle or sternum) but that was not more apparent than the movement around the tissue nor was the attaching more apparent than the continuity. If anything the ways the tissue attached was less noticeable, less of a gesture. But, we wouldn’t know that from looking at any of the anatomy texts our trainings have presented us. 

Mind blown a second time.

The tissue that stayed on the outside just went and became the musculature and fascia of the chest we are familiar with, and the tissue that went under magically transformed imperceptibly into endothoracic fascia and pleura and mediastinum and created a division between right and left thoracic cavities and became a diaphragm. 

Then being interested in structures I knew from years of doing cranial work I just had to touch the hyoid. It was suspended there as you might imagine, floating in this golden myofascial stream, I touched it in all its delicacy and it moved, and as it moved I could see down through the endothoracic fascia to the diaphragm and the diaphragm moved too. 

the spirit likes to dress up like this…

That moment remains a great teacher for me and that form gifted me a beautiful lesson. We are and are so much more than what our conventional anatomy texts show us. 

Later in The First River is the Body, Diaz involves a quote from John Berger, the writer/philosopher where Berger uses the phrase, “A return to the pre-verbal”. Diaz goes on to equate that with the the body;

Berger called it the pre-verbal. Pre-verbal, as in the body when the body was more than body. Before it could name itself body and be limited, bordered, by the space body indicated. 

Diaz was offering us deep language for something we were trying to discuss earlier that day. And, at that moment, there was nothing more to say. Students were practicing and we were all, in some way, deepening our relationship with the meaning of body.