Origin, God. Insertion, Earth.

How were you taught to understand a muscle? Most likely, you had the "Trailguide to the Body", which is a fine enough book, but it plays to an anatomy perspective that may not be the most relevant to a bodyworker or acupuncturist. Most anatomy books that address the musculature do so by presenting discrete units of muscle as singular entities. This is just one perspective on a muscle. It ought not be the defining perspective.

The other aspect of a muscle that we are forced to memorize is that of “origins” and “insertions”. I have never found this categorization to be particularly meaningful. The “origin” being somehow fixed in the body and the “insertion” being the locus of movement. Movement is far too complex for this to be a reasonable model. It is becoming more common to think of distal and proximal attachments. However, even focusing solely on the idea that muscles attach to bones might be missing the most important aspect of a myofascial structure; its relationship with other connective tissues.

Every surface of every muscle is in relationship with other tissues, connective tissues. There is no surface not in contact with some other tissue, be it another muscle and its fascia, or a different fascia, or the “viscera” of the muscle (its neurovascular connections).

For example, we could identify the Transversus Abdominus by its bony attachments, but we’d be missing most of the story. Look at the weirdness that is this muscle and tell me there is an “origin” and “insertion” in the ways we were taught. If that is what one clings to as the meaning of this structure then one has lost the plot completely.

One of my projects in the lab was to dissect the torso, layer by painstaking layer: superficial fascia, perifascia, anterior rectus sheath, rectus abdominus, posterior rectus sheath, external oblique, internal oblique, transversus abdominus and diaphrgam, in order to reveal to my own eyes, my hands via hemostat and scalpel, the relationship between the T.A. and the diaphragm. It required about 3 days of concentrated looking and meticulous work. It required help at different times from all 5 of the instructors. Each of them said, "you're trying to do what?” And some version of the statement, “huh, that isn’t going to be easy.” But I wanted to see it for myself.

One of the great gifts of going into the lab with Gil and crew is to have my perspective altered. I have come to think of perspective shifting, enhancing, changing as being just the type of learning I am seeking at this stage of life and career. Our perspectives are determinants of what we “see”, as in the lab and experience as in life. One of my all time fav writers, Annie Dillard is a righteous perspective buster. I love her books for their specific way of jamming my channels in just a way that I perceive something differently. In The Pilgrim at Tinker Creek she is going on about what “seeing” requires and what can be revealed when we allow ourselves to “see” in different ways.

The majority of the T.A. “attaches” to other soft tissues. It is woven into the diaphragm, as though God sought to imitate the great basket weavers throughout world history, who could take grasses and make vessels for carrying water. It wraps around to the back and “attaches” to the thoracolumbar fascia. It reaches towards the center and “attaches” to the fascia of the rectus abdominus (technically, it likely is attaching to the posterior rectus sheath, a fascia deep to the rectus abdominus). At its high point it attaches to the inner surfaces of the lower ribs and inferior it attaches to the inner surface of the iliac crest. That’s a lot. But we haven’t even discussed the fact that over its anterior surface lies the internal oblique. Is this not potentially a meaningful relationship? According to our books it is not. According to the bodies on our table, it very much is. Let’s go, literally, deeper. The posterior surface of the T.A. is in contact with the transversalis fascia. This is a fascia that mediates between the myofascia of the torso and the fascia of the internal organs. The transversalis fascia is like a bag around the bag of the peritoneum.
​
Dillard continues:

In terms of the work that we are doing, why would we focus only on the bony relationships and ignore all of these other connections? One of my guiding questions is to ask myself; “How is the body experiencing itself?” I feel confident that the body experiences all of these soft tissue relationships as meaningful and interesting and potentially worthy of our attention. This is just one muscle and the specifics of its relational milieu within the body. Each myofascial structure has its own unique set of tissue relationships that deserve to be taken on their own terms, met with open attention and curiosity, We could imagine our hands honed and whetted as Dillard suggests we do with our spirit, broadise our awareness to the merest puff of the ineffable interrelationships our bodies are. There is more meaning in this attitudinal adjustment than all the memorizing of origins and insertions in the body.

In class, after a few days of dissection and encountering the magnitude of the bodies before us we joked at the absurdity of “origin” and “insertion”. The group created the formulation, origin, God: insertion Earth. We all come from the ether somehow and find ourselves together, here, on Earth in this moment. When Gil encourages us to hold the stories we tell about our work lightly, he is encouraging us to loosen the perspectives that often narrow our lens, that reduce our seeing to that which confirms what we have already learned. Of all of Gil's teaching, this one encouragement from him has been the most meaningful for me.