Anatomy does not Equal Reality. Here’s What That Means For You.
Communicating with clients and colleagues is at the heart of every bodyworker’s business. However the scientific anatomy that most of us learned in training isn’t enough to understand and describe our work. You need more and you deserve better!
I’ve been an enthusiastic anatomy teacher for 30 years. This scientific approach to the body is useful and practical – but it also strips down the luminous multidimensionality of your client to the point where the actual person you’re observing can disappear.
That’s because human anatomy tends to treat the human-like IKEA furniture. It breaks everything down into parts. When you want to use it, you have to figure put how to put all the parts together, and the instructions seem like they’re in a foreign language. There are always a couple of parts that you can’t figure out where to put, and then you can’t find the on switch! What’s a bodyworker to do?
Anatomy is important but left to its own devices, it throws the baby out with the bathwater.
“I came to George years ago with a terrible pain in the middle of my back that no one else had been able to alleviate. George addressed some alignment issues, but his holistic approach uncovered much more. My tension and nagging pain stemmed from everything from the shoes I was wearing, to my diet, to childhood trauma. George was able to identify and correct so many limitations — and the pain in my mid-back has never returned. The idea that all sorts of things – mind/body, past/present – can affect your well-being makes perfect sense, but it took George’s compassionate guidance and treatment to help me fully understand it and to use that understanding to feel better.” – Hanna Thomas
A big part of getting and keeping clients is communication. If you can talk about your work in vivid, specific language, you’ll attract a bigger client base – and your clients will heal more effectively. That’s what The Spirit Of Anatomy is all about. Discover more here: https://www.georgerusselldc.com/the-spirit-of-anatomy/
There are seven courses in this series, each of which can be taken separately. The current course, The Spirit of Anatomy, is 10 hours in 5 sessions on Tuesdays from 11-1. It starts May 17 and ends June 14.
This online course concentrates on
- The foundation of the trunk where it meets the legs.
- posture and balance.
- emotional, spiritual, transpersonal, and psychological dimensions of the self.
- Appreciating and expanding the multiple dimensions of your work.
One of the wonderful things about touch or movement therapy is that you start from the whole person who is standing in front of you. From there, you perceive and weave the many details into a new coherence. To talk about that, you’ll need more than science, and that’s what this class is about.
George’s unique teaching style is intellectually challenging and easily digested, blending observation, discussion, and hands-on practice. I’ve learned the fine details of assessment, the intricacies of the human body, and the ways that a patient’s daily life and emotions can impact their health. The relaxed feel of his workshops encourages students to share, query, and test new ideas. His teaching is engaging, challenging, and fun. – Sally Firestein
Getting to The Spirit Of Anatomy
Scientific anatomy is tremendously helpful in all kinds of things, especially in repairing the concrete body structure, but it’s limited, too. For example, everyone knows the difference between a dead body and a living person, but science can’t define or explain what it is.
Another omission is the human spirit itself. “Spirit” is defined differently from culture to culture, but a language of the spirit is found in every culture except our science-based one. Science dismisses the spirit because it can’t measure or define it. That omission is unprecedented. In fact, even Descartes, “the father of modern science”, believed in and talked about the soul.
Scientific anatomy is presented as reality, but it isn’t. Medical/scientific descriptions are not equivalent to reality. Even science acknowledges that its information is hypothetical and subject to change. There are many ways of defining the self – many anatomies. Each of them describes a different human being. You are all of those human beings at once, and you can’t get to the living truth of yourself – or the living truth of your client – unless you can talk about all of your selves.
The Spirit of Anatomy class will help you
- Expand your ways of thinking
- Put the way you’re already working into words
- Make your work more fulfilling
- Help clients understand and integrate your work with them.
- Make your outcomes better.
The Spirit of Anatomy: A Whole-Person, Multicultural, Multidimensional way of knowing the human.
- Explain the complexity of your work to clients in authentic language.
- Connect the many dimensions of your work without putting science first.
For information on upcoming classes, email George directly: george@georgerusselldc.com
“I’ve developed wonderful relationships with each of my classmates; we’ve shared bodywork, job opportunities, copy editing help, and more. George is also amazing at creating a safe and fertile environment for exchange and creativity. Each class is interactive, playful, improvisatory, empathetic and different every time.” – Kelly Lee
After this course, you’ll be able to
- experience the fantastic, deep, multilayered healing that you already do and enter it more fully by putting words to it.
- Develop an understanding of the chakra system and other cross-cultural and traditional ways of knowing.
- Learn new ways to think and work that expand your scope of consciousness and technique.
- Put new manual and movement techniques to work right away that open a universe of possibilities for the client’s healing beyond the mechanical approach of scientific anatomy.
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