Feeding the Imagination of Our Body's Beauty
"These are the waters of beauty and mystery, issuing from a gap in the granite world; they fill the lodes of my cells with a light like petaled water."
Who knows what is really happening in the "granite world" of our blessed domes? I don't. I've been studying and practicing CST for over 25 years and I know all the stories from the different schools. Of late, many CST narratives read more like dogma than the awe and mystery that, to me, feels most apparent. Sometimes, it's nice just to bear witness to mystery and leave the heavily saturated stories out of the picture. The body as it is, in its beauty is enough.
That was my experience re-watching the cranial dissection, preparing for tomorrow's Anatomy Talk. Gil was talking about the membrane layers and peeling them back, revealing the twists and turns of the sulci and gyri, the magic making matter under the dura mater. How does it make this magic? I don't think anyone really knows. That it does is more than enough for us to deal with.
Gil was talking about the 3-layer membrane system, specifically the middle layer, the arachnoid, or spider-like membrane. It webs as it envelopes. As Gil was talking and dissecting, I learned something I hadn't yet understood (mind you, I have watched this video dozens of times, along with other cranial dissections). This middle membrane wraps around the small vessels that dive into the cavernous spaces formed by the brain tissue. That's trippy cuz the middle membrane is also connected to the outer most membrane, which in turn is connected to the bones of your sweet lil head.
Here's the thing about all these membranes we have: they like each other. They interweave with their adjacent structures. They find a way to create connection. Case in point: the web like arachnoid filaments, flimsy as they appear, tunnel through the much tougher dura mater and in doing so create little riverine channels that link the arachnoid space (where cerebrospinal fluid flows) with the outer most membrane layer.
These pathways have been little understood until recently. Newish research postulates that these may be meaningful circulatory channels of physiologically important fluids other than csf. I went back to a blog post I wrote about this research and revisited my awe and the mystery and added a little more compost to the soil of my imagination.
To know that there are mysteries within the body and that touch makes contact with them and that we can learn more about the how of touch and the properties of tissue in service of the mystery that each of us are is enough of a story for me. At this point I turn it over to the person on the table and follow their system into their "waters of beauty."
If you are curious to learn more about this system, check out the upcoming Anatomy Talk, the CST Open House, and our CST Foundations I course.
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