10/19/2025
What I thought would be an intellectual, cerebral and scientific experience - four days in a dissection lab in Boulder, Colorado, studying under Tom Myers and master dissector Todd Garcia - turned out to become a spiritual experience that I had no way of preparing for: a direct encounter with life itself, and with everything that makes it precious precisely because it ends.
I thought I had seen death; ten years ago I sat by my father’s bedside when he took his last breath, felt the stillness that followed, and washed his body. But seeing the inner architecture of the human form - the way a lifetime of breath, emotion, and adaptation writes itself into tissue - was something else entirely.
We worked with six donors, each a final gift of generosity. Layer by layer - skin, fascia, muscle, viscera, bone - we witnessed that patterns of protection don’t die when the person does. Even after death, the body remembers its shapes of survival.
There were countless moments of anatomical awe: feeling the fragile fabric of fascia, tracing the psoas into the diaphragm, seeing the web of the brachial plexus, holding the heart and cerebellum in my hands. And then there were moments that stopped me cold - the strength of the aorta, the tenderness of the uterus, the elegance of the vagus nerve, and the realization that the “tension” we speak of in living bodies is not theoretical; it is visible, palpable - a record of a life lived.
Somewhere, the line between science and spirit dissolved - the body revealed itself as both map and mystery. Yes, I had the honor of experiencing anatomy in its truest form - but more than anything, I was gifted a deeper understanding of how sacred and intelligent beyond true comprehension the body is: an expression of relationship between matter, movement, memory, and meaning.
I’m profoundly grateful that I get to dedicate my life to studying the soma - the alchemy of being alive inside a body that feels, remembers, protects, and, if we’re lucky, feels at home in its own skin. I’ll be carrying these lessons into my teaching, not as more information, but as a deeper invitation to remember the miracle of being alive in motion.
