I learned anatomy from the dead before I ever taught the living...

Image taken at an archaeological mortuary excavation in Poland, 2006.

There's a strange silence in a morgue. Not eerie like television makes it seem. It's not dramatic. Just... still.

It's a silence that I have always been drawn to.

Long before I taught movement, before I spoke about fascia or nervous system regulation or why your balance system affects your anxiety, I worked in forensic medicine assisting with autopsies.

This intro to the human body (through the tissues, pathologies, and stories of their deaths) changed the way I see living humans forever.

Because when you spend enough time around the human body in its quietest state, you stop seeing bodies as aesthetics to perfect or problems to fix.

You start seeing adaptation everywhere.

You start seeing how fragile we are.

What a miracle it is that we are even here in the first place.

You see how resilient we are.

But most importantly, you realize very quickly that bodies tell stories... not metaphorically but literally.

The body reflects repetition, environment, survival, compensation, load, injury,...

The only thing that is common is variation.

No 2 bodies look exactly alike. No 2 stories are the same.

I think that is why modern movement spaces sometimes feel incomplete to me.

We've become obsessed with ideal shapes, optimal posture, perfect alignment, and "corrective" everything. But humans are adaptive by nature. Your body is constantly responding to the life you live. Even as I write this, and as you read it, adaptation is happening. How are you sitting/standing? How far away is the screen from your eyes? What discomfort are you leaning away from? How is your nervous system responding to the discussion of death? How is your nervous system responding to the discussion of your nervous system? The body is not separate from human experience. It is the human experience. Ironically, it wasn't until I left forensic medicine that I began to truly understand this more personally. After receiving a PTSD diagnosis myself, many of the concepts I now teach stopped being abstract neuroscience and became lived reality. I understood hypervigilence and exhaustion differently. I understood why safetly is no the same thing as stillness.

Movement, for me, became less about performance, and more about internal communication. That shift changed how I teach entirely. I no longer teach isolated muscle contractions. I'm teaching humans. Humans with histories, adaptive strategies, bodies that are trying their absolute best to keep upright, functionaing, protected, and moving.

Sometimes this can look messy. But it is always intelligent. Which is why I no longer see movement as simply exercise. I see it as a conversation between brain and body, environment and nervous system, survival and resilience. Perhaps that is the real reason anatomy still fascinates me after all these years... because each body is its own conversation. The body has always been speaking... most of us were just never taught to listen. Over the next few months, I’ll be sharing more reflections on the nervous system, movement, adaptation, and what the human body has taught me, both through forensic medicine and through teaching people how to reconnect with themselves through movement.