Why Bother?

The 18th at St Andrews Golf Course

"Why Bother?"

This was the question that was laid before me, stark and cold, in my treatment room last week. A
couple of clients, (who have given me permission to write about this), simply didn't understand why I needed to learn any more anatomy. After a month away in America studying with Lise Waugh in Washington and Gil Hedley and the team in New Jersey, I can understand where their question was coming from, as in many people's eyes it seems that my going away so often to learn about the body is a bit odd.

"If you've seen so many bodies, haven't you seen everything you need to see yet?" is another question that I get asked on an almost daily basis at the moment.

The reason why I am off to St Andrew's on Sunday for a week in the lab is because I don't see why I should stop exploring, and every time I see something new in the lab, or in my treatment room, I am astounded at how amazing our bodies are and how little I know about them. After 15 years of study I can feel like a trainee on their first ever day at school most days. This isn't because I don't know what I'm doing, it's just that the more I see, the more questions I have about body-work and the way our bodies react to the environment around us.

I find that the work that my clients and I do together ends up being a huge journey about their past and present, looking at how stress factors effect them, finding their own way of calming down and the growing forward. It's a total immersion into body change every time I go to work, so I feel that the more questions I have the better. The reason I go off to hang out with people who are as eager to learn about life as I am is that the questions don't simply become more, they get better!

Gil Hedley said this in May when he was asked what he wanted to achieve out of the work we were doing in New Jersey, he wanted to be able to ask better questions.

Science isn't fact. This is something I learned from my husband, David, as over the years he has shown me that science isn't there to create fact, it's to go further in our understanding of a subject and to ask ever bigger and better questions. It's a changing force, science, with ideas and concepts becoming moveable feasts. Papers are written not to prove a hard and fast theory, they are produced to show a way of thinking and to aid debate, further ideas and progress from the point when they are published.

This is true of Anatomy. The books are great guidelines to base a hypothesis upon and I can refer to them as a bench mark of what an average take is of an average body that has been simplified into pictures. I can know from these books what I can reasonably expect from healthy muscles.

But my anatomy books are not you!

The reason why I bother is that you are personal, unique and perfect in your own anatomy and the more I can see, the more I can fill my mind with questions that may be able to help you find a more comfortable place within your form.

The lab work is fantastic for not only remembering that no body is the same, but it nudges me in the direction of new thinking. For example, I may have seen a client for a year and based my treatment work on the information that my 15 years of experience and the books have been given me. The moment I step back and see something fresh I can see a way that may unlock the problems that we have been having simply by not relying only on my past experiences or looking at the books, but seeing it for real.

My study into the anatomy, skin health, the science of oils and herbs, and the passion I have to read about the environment and it's relationship on the body is a journey that I am in love with. It's the way my mind is able to change daily and I don't want to stop that feeling I have of finding something new everyday!

I bother because I love to see us move with more freedom around our planet.