One Body, Many Textures

I no longer believe that I'm cast out of a garden, because I've seen that a garden is the finest. So what is the fuzz? What's the fuzz? What is the fuzz? How do we predicate the fuzz?

You can do it a number of ways. This is the rebuke. Okay, number one. Here's the mouthful. Desiccated, right?

That means drawing. Desiccated, filming, slash, parry, fascial, memories. You know what they are, right? Desiccated, filming, parry, fascial, memories. Placed in tension in the dissection process.

In such a way as to demonstrate the felted, multi-directional organization of the collagen fiber distribution. Do you understand that ridiculous nonsense? Yeah. So look, desiccated, parry, fascial, memories. All right, putting tension in the dissection process in a way that reveals the cotton candy like felt, out of which that memory is constituted, there it is.

That's the fuzz. Again, same stuff, right? Desiccated, parry, fascial, memory, placed in tension in the dissection process, revealing the felted, multi-directional distribution of the collagen fibers. Again, same thing. Right?

This type of fuzz, this belongs there. It belongs there, right? This is the essential anatomical basis of differential movement. However, when I first approached it, when I first saw it, right, with my model of silk stockings attached at their ends, right, it confused the heck out of me. No, that was wrong.

It took a long second. Oops. Fascial adhesions. All right, here's another one. What's the fuzz?

How about fascial adhesions formed between the visceral surfaces, which normally have a gliding relationship, right, by a serious fluids. We just saw a bunch of them. All right, this type of fuzz forms like fuzz gone wild in the musculoskeletal system under conditions of inflammation, right, or pathological processes that we just saw, right, injury or tumorous disease, right, or as an accidental result of, or as a non-purpose result of surgery and medical intervention. All this stuff. This kind of, this kind of suspicious that this was like a decision from minimally invasive surgery, right, they go on your belly, they shove in four different tubes of stuff and they do stuff.

This is not minimally invasive. It scratches everything up in there and stuff gets stuck. That stuff. All right. And this type of fuzz, right, contributed to my early belief that the normal relations that I was seeing in the musculoskeletal tissues were not normal.

Can you see how I got confused? It kind of makes sense, right? It makes sense in our wrong kind of way. And on top of that, to make it even more confusing, those processes are happening there. But I just can't make that judgment call in the dissection process.

So the words are true, but the visual support for it that I've offered in the past was half true, possibly true, but speculative, right? Because the good fuzz does get in trouble. It does get gummed over, it agglomerates, it gets brittle. All this stuff happens. I didn't know there were two types of ways the body accomplishes differential movement.

One through, right, one through a fascial membrane system and one through fluids. I didn't have that distinction available to me that I can share with you now. That was a hard one, folks. That was a hard one. I probably should have wrote a book.

So number three, normal fuzz, right, the perifascial membranes, right? That's the means by which nature accomplishes differential movement, right? That's how there can be play within the unity. We started out, right, with total connection in differential movement. Play within the unity, not like the tree.

Same little girl running in the woods. Don't you wish you had that much differential movement in your body? She is going in eight different directions at the same time. That's like a photograph of joy. And joy goes through the whole body.

Another one, wow, the tree. The tree is out there. Can you tell the difference? They're all higgly-piggly, but she's on the moon. So remember that cloud I told you I saw out the window that looked like that big section of fascia that we had rendered?

Oh, we were flying out of that cloud for a long time. It was a big cloud. An amazing thing that happened was it started to shear, right? Wind forces operating in the atmosphere started to cause that big beautiful cloud to shear, to move in two different directions at the same time. The movement induced a transformation, created a membrane in the cloud, right?

The structure of the cloud responded to the movement. These membranes in your body formed, right? Embryologically, as the cells clump together, they bend and fold on each other, creating surfaces in contact with each other that are now places where differential movement will arise, generating different kinds of tissue, different kinds of electrical potentials that cause the cells to differentiate differently. So we have movement creating the anatomy, right? The movement is prior to the anatomy.

That's life. Let's just go large. The fuzz, let's just say the fuzz is a relationship, right? And the texture, the texture, is it dry? The texture of the fuzz reveals the qualities and character of the movement, right?

Whether it's going to be happening or not. Is it glue or gummy? The texture of the fuzz reveals the quality of the movement in a relationship. So here's a fuzzy picture. I'm told I take a lot of fuzzy pictures.

The fuzzy picture, my kids home for Thanksgiving last year. Time flies. My son in the middle there didn't know how to write a longboard, but his brother and sister didn't know how to write a longboard. So he said, would you teach me how to write a longboard? And off they went.

That one's a father's heart. That's a healthy quality fuzzy image. So relationships, right? They can be soft, fluid, easy, playful, moving. They can be.

Soft, fluid, easy, playful, moving. Soft, fluid, easy, playful, moving relationship. Hot. I don't put that slide in there. Soft, fluid, easy, playful, moving relationship.

This image is an image of soft, fluid, easy, playful, moving relationship. There's connection. There's genuine emotion of water in the ice. There's mirth. This is an image of lightness and mirth.

Soft, fluid, easy, playful, moving relationships. And what's easier relationships? What other relationships can change? They can become right, tense, stuck, unyielding, fracture. Tense.

This is about politics. This is an image of a relationship. Tense, stuck, unyielding, fracture. You can see that it went through gooey all the way clear to brittle. This is ready to snap.

The emotions are masked. To see the stiffness in the features as they try and cover the underlying levels of the relationship. That's an example of a relationship that's got fuzzed over, glued up, and gone brittle. It's ready to snap. Here's another relationship.

This is my boy when he was a little ant in a pool and a dog, Luna. Can you see the soft, fluid, easy, playful, fluid relationship between the boy and the dog? Do you see that connection? The eye contact? The joy and the mirth between the boy and the dog?

It's a little more complicated for the dog, though, because she hates the pool. She hates the pool because I was breaking one day when she was a puppy. She jumped backwards and plunged into the deep end of the pool. She didn't even know how to do doggy paddle at the time. So I've got to go running in, through the gate, through the fence.

Oh, we rescued a dog. She was inside, I was outside. So from then on, she was afraid of the pool. She is loving the boy and hating the pool. Can you see the tension in her body?

She's lowered into the boy, soft, easy, fluid, playful, fluid relationship, and she backs away from the pool, tends to step into the other fracture relationship. There are two relationships happening expressed in her little, simple, emotional doggy life. That's us, folks. We're away. We have way more complex nexus of relationships in which we live, and they are playing out in our bodies.

Right now, we have like two operating systems going here, two perceptual systems in which we generate relationship. One is our mind. When our mind perceives difference, and we do perceive difference, that's what our minds do. We perceive difference. Unless you like just sit and press late, gone into zen, some oddy, or whatever.

But basically, the mind perceives difference and imputes separation. We impute separation, look. Skin. My mind sees the two colors and will sell for that. My mind will name them, call one a thing, skin.

We'll call the other a thing, superficial fashion. Show them, wipe them between the two of them, and actually thingify these things. Thingify a skin. The skin doesn't exist until I cut it away from the body. Now there's a skin.

There's no skin. There's a body. I thought the mind will perceive a texture, a color, give it a name, and separate it. But the reality of the union persists. Just because I say I have the skin doesn't change the reality of my body, nor does it dissect my body.

The heart, this is a different perceptual system. It also sees patterns and recognizes differences, right? But it doesn't need to impute separation. It's a connector. It palpates the relationship.

It's okay with the differences. It doesn't need to separate. In its very existence, it's a connecting agent. It goes out and feels, and as it feels, it feels itself reflected back. My mind will do one thing with this image, and my heart another.

I'm always asking folks to drop the words in the lab, to give them an opportunity to dissect the heart. Because if you're just dissecting with your mind and spotting and identifying the structures that are really just a history of anatomy from the book, and have nothing to do actually with what's in front of you, you'll cut it up and it'll look like the book. But what will you have gotten out of it? What kind of relationship will you have established with what you're touching? See, if the heart looks at this, if the mind looks at it, I see superficial fashion.

I see deep fashion. I want to cut them apart. If my heart looks at it, it's just like, what is that? It's like a soft peripheral vision. It takes in the colors without having to say their names.

It's a softer palpation of the world. You see the same shape from one slide to the next. This is that superficial fashion, in the deep fashion, right? In the pond, it's just water. It's a continuity.

The reality of the union persists. I can see the difference, but I don't have to impute separation. I can see this beautiful pattern. I can see the water rushing over the boulder here. I can see the water rushing over the boulder here.

I can see this beautiful interface, the interference pattern, the combination, the relationship. The relationship that's formed here, I can appreciate. If I take that capacity to appreciate that unity, then I can come back to the body and see that iliac crest and the iliac crest and the fascia over the sacrum and find those same patterns and not need to take anything apart, but to feel into what's there. Feel into what's there. Feel into the movements there.

Feel their textures. Build a different kind of relationship with the body and the naming of parts and the parsing of a unity. It's going to mix the differences, right? The heart feels it's like it recognizes itself, mirrored in every form. It doesn't see other.

It just sees itself. Look at the heart. Look at it. Look at it infiltrating, right? Creeping its way in, feeling its way through.

This beautiful grid here, the waves going through the grid. My heart can absorb that and then recognize itself outdoors. See the same pattern. See the grid, the waves on the water. Watch. See this wave coming in from the top.

It lifts the grid just like that wave we saw. Is this my body? Is this not my body? What is my body? What exactly are its borders?

It depends on what I'm... Am I asking the question with my heart or my mind? Is the moment I put my scalpel or my words to the form, to the body, right? I'm telling the story. I'm creating a model.

I'm metaphorizing. I'm reducing reality. That's okay. It's okay. It's okay to use models.

I'm not telling you not to use models. I'm not telling you to turn your mind off. Your mind is the best second lieutenant you could ever hope for. It's not a great general, but it's an incredible support to the heart. The models are meant to be functional, not true.

It's really fun to think, okay, the body is an onion tree. It's built out of layers and penetrating branches. It's just an ideal. It breaks down the second you start dissecting. You find that every layer is 10 layers, and you find that the layers themselves are sort of confusing when you're actually trying to get them apart, because there is no apart, except one that can be produced by my knife, so the model breaks down the moment you employ, whether it's an anatomy training model or a layers model or whatever it is.

You're going to find that the poster you get to what's there, the less the model works. That's okay. We've got to talk to each other. It's okay. Use your models.

Collect them. Collect them. Don't stick to one. Get 10 models going at the same time, and don't believe any of them. They're meant to be functional, not true.

I can employ the model of muscles attached at their ends, the origins and insertions, and I can turn Mr. Agape into Arnold Schwarzenegger with the anatomical charts model, and it's actually kind of fun. I did that. It was awesome. I learned so much by walking a mile in the moccasins of the anatomists who had cut me for me, who were really instructive to get a sense of what they found compelling about their method of dissection, not just sticking around. I'm just arguing for my one way of doing things.

That's why I love teaching my class, because no one ever does what I tell them to. And I learned so much by not repeating the same thing over and over again, but by witnessing in hundreds and hundreds of different ways how you can work with the same thing and come up with something quite different, and each time you see more and more and more, it increases your depth. Here are my words, cutting up the body into four DVDs. Awesome. What a great book.

Right, so my scalpel are my words. They create inferior and superior, anterior and posterior. What happens to the water? Nothing. I say you and me.

I'm not so convinced anyone. I say us. I'm not buying it. I bought the thing about the silk stuff. I bought that.

I went looking for it, and it didn't show up in the body. Reality bumped up against my model. I had to change my model. And once I see what was once subtle to me, those membranes, not so subtle anymore. Now they're in my face.

I can't not see them. It has rendered me incredibly suspicious of this space that we're dwelling in. It's feeling kind of thick, not so subtle, full of feeling and connection, and imagined separation imputed by the mind just because it seems like there are differences around here. I don't believe them. They have a little red blood cell, thinking that's all about me.

I'm just cruising along here and bumping into all these other people, all these other red blood cells, and look over there. That's a little whitey. It's kind of big, too. That's that thick macrophage. They eat too much.

We all agree about that, right? And then one little red blood cell works its way out into a little fenestrated capillary and pokes its head out. Everyone's rushing past its ex, but it's like, hey, just look. Look over here. It's like, whoa.

Am I that? Do I participate in that somehow? What is this? This exploration of this funny thing that fuzzes made me reconsider my most basic questions, the philosophical core of my life. Who am I?

What is my body? I can't answer it the same way anymore. I believe now in orders of unity, right? I recognize the unity here, and then I see it everywhere. I just breathe out, actually breathe in back and forth.

Am I not in connection? What is it? Is there a relationship there? It's not other. It's continuous.

Total connection and differential movement. How many bodies do you see? Is it three? Is it one? Is it one?

Is this one body? How about this one? Can they get off of it like the little red blood cells? Can they get out of the blood? Can they get off of the earth?

Can we get off of it? I snap right back down to it. Me. Can I shift my sense of identity? This is earth rise over the moon.

Where do I put my knife? Where do I put my knife? I can ask this question. Is such and such connected to such and such? It's a funny question after a while.

There are practitioners that send emails. He goes, I was working on someone's knee. They started coughing, and their jaw started to pop. And after the session, they called me up the next day, and they said, this thing that was going on in my jaw for like ten years, and you fixed it. And they asked me, Gil, is there a faction connection between the knee and the TMJ?

And if I took your class, would you dissect it out for me and show me? Yes. Yes, there is a connection. There's not quite the way you think. There's more to consider. One body, many textures, differential movement, and fast separation.

Thank you, Vancouver. Thank you.