8. Fable (part I)

I created the word “somanaut” to describe those who explore the inner space of the body, and discover there the rich terrain of themselves. 

—Gil Hedley, PhD 

I once allowed seven years to pass between labs. During that time I continued to investigate my inner emotional terrain and longed to become healthy enough to venture into a successful relationship where I could snuggle in and start a family. By the time I was in my mid-thirties, all of my friends were married, most with kids. I felt left behind and knew partially, that I still had a lot of healing to do in order to have a normal life. I began to feel I was wasting my young years in the waiting. So I packed up my things and traveled to Costa Rica for six months. I had been teaching annual yoga retreats in the country, and each year I fell a little more in love with the vibrancy of the land and the people. I decided to take a few months on either side of the upcoming retreat to dig deeper into the richness of the tropical landscape. Dividing my travel into segments, I volunteered at a wildlife sanctuary, learned to speak Spanish while enjoying a homestay with a local family, and even lived off the grid in a remote aboriginal community. 

The experience pushed me to my emotional, mental, and spiritual edge. I was so far out of my comfort zone, loneliness forced me to reach out to the people around me, and I found that Cristina—my Latina identity—was much more outgoing than the highly introverted Christine. I observed from being away that in Canada people are more reserved and engage in small talk mostly around the weather. In Costa Rica, light conversation is almost always centered on family. The first question is usually an inquiry about marital status and whether or not I have children. Since I’m single and childless, the next question—rarely asked in Canada—is “How old are you?” This leads to deeper probing about parents, siblings, and eventually work. I found myself often telling perfect strangers about my dad’s death and the details of my childhood. It dawned on me one day that many of the people I crossed paths with in Costa Rica knew more about my family than some of my close friends at home. 

Historically I had displayed a disconnection between the narrative of my trauma and the emotion the subject evoked, meaning that I smiled when I spoke about the sad parts of my history. The emotion of it was too much, and as a young person I was not given permission to openly feel sad. As a result, I habitually hid my emotion and felt ashamed that it even existed. Embarrassed by my paradoxical smile, I avoided the topic of my father’s death at all costs. But in Costa Rica I found that when I spoke Spanish, I could share my deeper personal story without the words triggering a pain response. The new language had a way of sidestepping the emotion center of my brain, allowing me to separate myself from those childhood wounds just long enough to peek inside. 

On my return to Canada, I mourned the simplicity of life in Costa Rica and the friction of boredom that forced me inward (and outward). The unrelenting discomfort of solo travel while speaking a foreign language had been invigorating. It liberated me from the superficial hang-ups that kept me in my comfort zone at home. In Canada, I struggled to reunite with my comfortable routine. Within six months of being back, I sold all my possessions and moved indefinitely to Costa Rica. I was running away—but I was also running toward. 

My hope for a family was reawakened when I met a man in Costa Rica. The vulnerability I experienced with him showed me I was not damaged or unlovable after all. I had not previously realized that the circumstance of my adolescence had caused me to build a barrier between my heart and the possibility of love. This man wrapped himself around me in a way that made me feel whole and supported, possibly for the first time since my dad had died. There were troubles there too, and as I began to recognize the dysfunction of the relationship, I made the difficult decision to come home. I was heartbroken to leave him but knew on a deeper level that what I was feeling was the pain of healing, not breaking. The most difficult parts of our relationship mirrored my deepest pains surrounding abandonment and self-worth. He scratched at my old scars and made them feel fresh again. The wound belonged not to him but to the heartbreak of my youth. It was going to take more work for me to feel less susceptible to the threat of abandonment. 

I had been in Costa Rica for two years and didn’t know where to go, so I settled back into Ottawa, where I had not lived in close to seventeen years. The memories and emotions that the once familiar streets stirred made it very difficult for me not to turn on my heels and run again, to anywhere but here. The network of bike trails expanded in my absence and getting back to them brought a freedom that truly felt like a homecoming for my body. Everything about me, apart from my love of running away on a bike, had changed. Ottawa felt lonely and repressed in comparison to the places I had been. I had changed in so many ways, but everything here felt the same. In the time I was gone, yoga had erupted onto the scene. There was a yoga studio in every neighborhood (sometimes many), and instructors were a dime a dozen. The average wage for teaching a class had plummeted by half since I had begun teaching a decade earlier.  

I had been moving around for too long dipping my toes into different yoga communities, and it felt as if I was constantly building my teaching and thai massage business. As soon as I began to get a hold of my new environment, I was on the move again. With each new location, the yoga scene felt a little further behind than where I had come from, and the competition was greater. I didn’t realize it wasn’t just the location, but also the passage of time. Everything was changing. Traditions were being watered down as businesses attempted to make ends meet. Yoga was being rapidly altered by fitness and fashion, which was of no interest to me. 

The old studio with the peeling paint had been, to me, a model of perfection. Payment was by the honor system, with a box for cash at the door and a calendar on the wall where you wrote your name on the date your monthly yoga membership was set to expire. Curtains made up the walls of the change rooms, so the square footage could expand when required by pulling the drapery back. Studio software and yoga pants did not exist. Our community quickly outgrew that space, but the simplicity was maintained as long as possible before all the studios had to evolve with yoga’s new popularity. It was a unique time when sharing the practice that had given me so much meant more than running a business. Now it was becoming harder to find a community with mature practitioners whose interest in the benefits of yoga went beyond physical fitness. It was a full-time job to keep myself from running off in search of more distraction. I needed to focus on building a life that could ground me in one place. 

Despite having nearly a decade of experience with Thai massage, I still lacked a lot of critical education. Anyone could take a week of training (I took two) and call themselves a bodyworker. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I ignorantly felt that my interest in anatomy made me more knowledgeable than I really was. I would soon come to learn how inappropriate it was for me to be working as deeply with bodies as I had been. I mean, I wasn’t doing anything dangerous, but my confidence in the therapeutic aspects of yoga and Thai massage was almost completely blind. Really, the only choice I had was to return to school and get properly educated. 

I enrolled in the massage therapy program at the local college. In Ontario, massage is a regulated profession that falls under the Canada Health Act, which legislates professionals eligible to provide services covered under public and private health insurance. This means health care professionals must adhere to the minimum standards of their profession as outlined by the governing body. A minimum of 2,200 hours of study is mandated before one can even qualify for the testing to be certified as a registered massage therapist, or RMT. These three little letters meant I would officially become a member of the health care system. With my prior experience working with the body, I was granted acceptance into an abbreviated full-time two-year program, saving me a full year of study. 

Those two years filled so many gaps in my learning around the body. I thought my anatomy knowledge had been adequate, and it was for what I was doing, but adding the physiology and pathology pieces were game changers for me and my work. Anatomy alone misses a huge percentage of the body and how it works. A whole new world opened up through the next level of study. My yoga practice and teaching deepened because I gained a clearer understanding of how movement and breath could affect the different systems of the body. 

After I graduated from massage school (with honors), completed the rigorous provincial exams, and claimed those three important letters for my business card, I headed back to the lab with a colleague. 

The lab felt new to me again, and I was expecting to be in a group full of beginners. Self-conscious about being viewed as the only morbid participant who kept coming back for more, I was humbled to see that in the seven years since I had been in the lab last, a community had developed and many dissectors were returning again and again. I was propelled further by my curiosity and was initiated into the community of Somanauts who continue to meet year after year over a dead body. 

In the small break between clients, meant for changing sheets and prepping the room for the next, I often peek at my email. On the day the email describing the three-week lab arrived, while I unfolded sheets and washed my hands I was tortured by my desire to spend that much time dissecting, although I likely couldn’t afford an extended unpaid stretch away from work. As my hands worked through my client’s knots, my mind was beneath the skin, exploring the source of the tension and marveling at the complexity of structure. This scenario played on repeat through the next client and the one following that, until my day was complete and my inner dialogue changed from “I wish I could make it a reality” to “Why would I even consider missing this opportunity?” These became the exact phrases I used in my application to the course that day. I didn’t even wait twenty-four hours to think it through. 

The intent of the three-week lab was to celebrate Gil's twentieth year of lab teaching with an extended format that would enable the group to go on a much deeper journey than his six-day format could afford. There would be two such labs to choose from, in two different cities, with a dozen donors in each room and four dissectors committed to each donor. There was an additional layer added to the course: we would be required to record objective findings throughout the duration of the three weeks. The application was full of statements intended to ensure participants were aware that there would be additional responsibilities beyond the usual exploratory, self-interest method of dissection. Following my acceptance, I would have to wait another eight months before the course began. 

By this time, I had already been teaching the five-hundred-hour yoga teacher training I had written while attending massage school. The program was heavy on anatomy and physiology, bridging the esoteric practices of yoga with the concrete evidence of how mindful movement had the potential to transform a person. Dissection provided a mysterious link to these things. I was searching for how the physical and emotional are tied to one another, hoping I might find some clear definition or diagram somewhere along the way. It was no secret among my yoga students that I looked to the body for spiritual answers, and some of them were, in turn, looking to me for the same. My inquiry was fast becoming the inquiry of my community, compelling me toward further exploration. 

I passed the time before the course’s start date easily, preoccupied by the details of being away for so long. The course itself was expensive, but I also had to factor in the exchange rate between the US and Canadian dollars, my expenses at home, the loss of income from both teaching and massage. This course was to take place in one of North America’s most expensive cities, San Francisco, and I also had to consider the cost of living there for nearly four weeks. During this time I began to tell everyone who would listen about dissection. Previously, I had been nervous to share the details of the lab, or even let on that my “anatomy” courses involved real bodies and sharp instruments that cut flesh. I suppose I was afraid of making people uncomfortable or leaving space for them to conjure up gruesome stories about me and my interests. Leading up to the three-week, I held special classes to raise funds for my adventure and, as I explained the project to students and clients, found that their interest and enthusiasm fueled mine. 

Spending three weeks in a body could only be life-altering, and I suspected the experience, like Costa Rica, would transform me in subtle but permanent ways. As my departure date drew closer, the fear of what might be revealed of myself and the lab, began to show up in my body. I developed back pain that was very different from my usual. It was higher and more like an ache that would not loosen its grip. It woke me at night, and no position would relieve it. I tried massaging, stretching, strengthening, but nothing made a dent in the pain. I wondered how long I could endure it. I became emotional and beyond frustrated. Then I realized the pain was emotional. The fear of going into the lab and spending that much time looking inward terrified me. I didn’t know who or what I was going to uncover there. With this realization, the pain slowly began to let up, and I could move the fear out of my body and into my intellect, where it could be managed cognitively. 

Years of yoga practice had gently coaxed me inward, and this would be an extended gross examination of not just one human being, but a roomful of human beings, living and dead. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to look that deeply into my own metaphorical viscera: the place that exists so deep inside, functioning quietly behind the scenes, affecting everything in indistinct and profound ways. It’s an interesting phenomenon in the lab: participants are not typically repulsed or scared off by pathologies we see—these are the most interesting details of dissection. It’s the layers and the reaction to how they accept or resist being dissected. It’s the shifting dynamic among the living as we navigate the work. It’s having to deal with our own reaction to the person at the table who is carelessly cutting too deep, speaking too loud, or knowing too much.