Understand your body with experiential anatomy

[INTERVIEW] My guest today is Leila Stuart, BA, LLB. Leila has practiced and taught yoga and somatics for over 40 years. She specializes in teaching experiential anatomy, movement re-patterning, and the deeper teachings of yoga as pathways to self-healing.

Lately, she has also written several anatomy books about yoga and somatics.

I’m curious about Leila’s journey. And about her new book, Experiential Anatomy 

At the end of the interview, I’m also asking her to share a somatic practice from the book.

Enjoy, Peter

 

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Transcript (slightly edited for clarity)

 

[Peter Appel]

Welcome, Leila, it’s a pleasure to have you here.

 

[Leila Stuart]

Thank you very much for having me, Peter.

 

[Peter Appel]

So, Leila Stewart, just a short presentation! You are doing amazing work in the yoga world and also in the somatic world. You are a long-time practitioner of yoga and somatics. You are also an author and you have written several amazing anatomy books.

Now we are going to talk about your new book, Experiential Anatomy. But before we do that, I’m curious about your journey. How did it start?

How did you get into yoga and somatics? Please tell me!

 

[Leila Stuart]

Okay, so I had a back injury when I was 19 and that was back in the early 70s. And a friend said to me, there’s this thing called yoga, my boyfriend’s mother is doing it, and it’s supposed to be good for your back. So at that time there, where I lived in Calgary, Alberta, there were very few yoga classes.

I didn’t find one. And so I bought myself a book and I learned from a book, and I could get myself out of pain every morning. It was quite a severe injury.

And so every morning I would have the same pain, but I could get myself out of pain by doing a practice in the morning. And then throughout the day, I would do little things that would release the discomfort.

So I’ve always been interested in movement. And so when I was in university, I took some dance classes and one of the teachers taught outside of the university. And I started working with her and she was leading edge in terms of mind-body integration practices. And so from her, I learned about Feldenkrais.

I also learned about Alexander technique and the way that she worked was very integrative. And so from that time on, I’ve always been very lucky because the teachers that have come to me have all been like that. So all in the mind-body indivisibility school.

And so I’ve studied with a lot of different people, mainly a non-yoga person who I studied with for 35 years, who recently just died at the age of 87 and a half. And so working with her really shaped how I was, how I am as a teacher and how I am as a person really.

So yoga was a very early influence and then the mind-body disciplines have been happening and interweaving throughout my life. And even now, I’m just so happy to see how much that is in the world now, body-mind centering and my teacher’s teacher, Charlotte Selver, the sensory awareness work. And so I’m really happy to see that that’s coming more and more into the world because it’s so needed, because people generally are not really in their bodies.

 

[Peter Appel]

Oh, great. You had a really amazing start, really from the beginning. No, not much looking around, just finding the right teachers from the start.

Amazing! Now, we’re going to talk about your new book. You call it experiential anatomy, the therapeutic applications of embodied movement and awareness.

Please, can you open up a little bit? Who is this book for?

 

[Leila Stuart]

Yeah, okay. Well, first I should say, just relating to what I just said about how I got into the whole practice of yoga and movement, is that for me, right from the very beginning, yoga was therapeutic, because I had a back injury, and I wanted to, I wanted to heal it, you know, I mean, I didn’t want to be in that kind of pain. And so same with experiential anatomy, when I first got into it, it was because I have a background as a massage therapist, and I was introduced to experiential anatomy.

At about the same time, I was graduating from massage college. And so I almost immediately I started teaching workshops that I called the body project. And so the workshops would be on various parts of the body, and I would integrate all of this stuff.

And, because I was a massage therapist, I thought, oh, yeah, this will, this will help people’s back pain and neck pain and headaches and digestive issues and all of that. And it did. But I was working on a very physical level.

And what I found, though, from my own experience, and from the experience of my students, is that that work was really just a doorway into the deeper self. And so experiential anatomy for me is that it’s not just well, if you learn something about how your foot works, then it will help you walk better and have a better foundation. It’s about when you know something about your feet, and you have a felt sense of how they work and where the bones are and how the weight is distributed, then that’s going to help you stand in yourself.

So the book comes from the course manual from the yoga therapy training that I taught for almost 15 years. And that ended up being a three-year course.

And so the work has been molded and changed and modified over all of those years from the feedback of students. So I also have this is my yoga therapy studio, where I teach individuals. So it’s a community studio.

And this is also where I taught the teacher training, I don’t teach it anymore. So I’ve always worked with two groups of people, professional health professionals, and then the average yoga person, yoga person who’s in pain, or in some kind of dysfunction and needs help therapeutically. And so the book is written more for the health professionals.

But for people who are interested, it also works for them, I would love to to write a more popularized version of that. So that doesn’t go so, so heavily into the theoretical or what you were saying before our talk the density, the dense part of it. 

But mostly, it’s geared toward health professionals as a way of helping them up their game on anatomy, and on how to improve their effectiveness as health professionals by using some of these tools of experiential anatomy.

 

[Peter Appel]

When you talk about health professionals, do you think about yoga therapists?

 

[Leila Stuart]

Yeah, yoga teachers, yoga therapists, personal trainers, kinesiologists. I’m doing a series of workshops for massage therapists, so that they can help their patients and find practices that can be adjunct to what they’re doing in the clinic. So hands-on.

So I got quite tired of being a massage therapist, and people expecting me to do it for them.

And so what I discovered about experiential anatomy is that because it involves the person, and it gives them a sense of agency, so that they can become an active participant in their own healing process, rather than just laying on a table and having someone do something to you.

 

[Peter Appel]

Yeah, it’s empowering.

 

[Leila Stuart]

It’s empowering, it gives a sense of agency. And it arouses people’s curiosity, because we’re very interesting to ourselves.

 

[Peter Appel]

Well, I don’t completely agree with that. I a normal setting, I feel that we are more interested in our standing in the group. Not so much ourselves, we want to have a social position in the group, and everything revolves around that. But after a certain point, if something happens, like a sore back, as in your case, then we might be become interested in ourselves. So that’s my personal take.

And this is the threshold that makes it so hard to engage people sometimes, because what is there for me? Will I get a better car? Will I get a better position at work?  

[Leila Stuart]

Oh, that’s interesting. I’m just thinking, I’ve had this studio for 26 years now. And then I taught before that. 

And, and I don’t know, I mean, maybe it’s just the approach that, that individual teachers have, because I always invite people to be interested in themselves. And then they say, Well, why don’t we learn this in school, because it makes my life so much better. So I don’t know, maybe it’s because I’m interested in myself, I’m interested in myself in how I work psychologically, I’m interested in how that carries over into the group setting, but I guess it’s like, know thyself, you know, that’s been a, that’s been a piece of advice has been given century after century.

So know thyself, because when you know yourself, then you can participate in the group in maybe a more harmonious way. Yeah, I think it’s, I think it’s kind of like this, like yin and yang.

 

[Peter Appel]

Yes, of course. Both sides are there, the group and maybe selfinsight at some point in life.

 

[Leila Stuart]

Yeah. And then of course, even beyond that is the community.

So the environment, and then the universe. So then we bring the spiritual into that, too. And of course, that’s yoga.

 

[Peter Appel]

Talking about yoga, you are introducing a yogic model in the book, pancha kosha, or the five koshas. This concept is quite central in yoga therapy, but I think there might be one or another somatic person who doesn’t know so much about it.

So maybe you could give a short overview of the koshas and how they work.

 

[Leila Stuart]

So the kosha model is a model that comes from the Taittiriya Upanishad. It’s essentially, you know, centuries and centuries old.

It’s not the only model. There are other kinds of kosha models that are different than the one that I presented. So it’s a way of explaining the individual in relationship to the world, the universe, the all, the divine.

So the model says that we are a soul. We are a piece of that divinity that is covered in different sheaths, kosha means sheath, different sheaths of different densities.

So closest to the soul would be the finest, the lightest covering, which would be the intellect, the Anandamaya. So Anandamaya – Ananda is joy – that sheath is thinner.

And that’s the sheath where we can kind of get a sense of and communicate with the divine. And then it goes denser and denser and denser to the intellectual, to the mental, emotional, sensory, to the energetic, and then to the physical. So the model says that we are all of these different layers, which are interpenetrating.

So they’re not just layers, they interpenetrate, and they interrelate. So that whatever happens on one level, say on a thought level. So for an example, to make it real, say I have a belief that I’m not good enough. So then that level is going to affect us on other levels.

If I feel, if I have that program that I’m not good enough, then maybe it’s going to affect my posture, right? Because I’m not feeling like I really belong in the world, I’m making myself small. When I make myself small, that’s going to have an effect on my energy level. I’m not going to be able to breathe as well, because my chest is collapsed. That may bring a sense of depression, because I’m in that posture, and posture and mood are interrelated.

So the Kosha model is a way of explaining our existence in this place, in this universe. And also giving us a pathway to work with because the task, supposedly, for us as human beings is to clarify and polish and balance all of those Koshas so that the light of the soul can shine through. And we can live in a state of balance – which we of course get out of now and then and have to find again.

But each Kosha gives us the tools that we can use to bring ourselves back into that balance. So if someone believes I’m not good enough, then maybe we work with the physical to give that person a sense of mastery over some movements, and that will change their mind.

And we know that we are neuroplastic beings, and so when we start to change things on one level, then it can change the whole game. Yeah, so it’s a way of working, and it gives us five different avenues to work with ourselves.

 

[Peter Appel]

So if we compare it to Western psychology, it’s not that far away from Maslow’s pyramid, even though the yogic perspective is a little bit more in the body, I’d say.

 

[Leila Stuart]

Yeah, I would say that it was the original model, and others have taken it, and yeah, for sure, for sure. And I mean, we are all those, we do have all those aspects.

Not everyone expresses or lives in all of those aspects, but we have those possibilities.

 

[Peter Appel]

Okay, so if you look at experiential anatomy and compare it to the traditional way of teaching anatomy, what would you say are the benefits or the skills that you can get from experiential anatomy?

 

[Leila Stuart]

Okay, well, I love to talk about this, because being an anatomy person... my massage therapy training was two years, and we did university-level anatomy, neuro anatomy, neurology, all of that. And so I learned anatomy really well. However, most of it to me was quite boring and dry.

And when I finished massage school, I realized, well, I can tell you where a muscle begins and ends, where the insertions are, I can tell you the innervation, I can tell you the action, but so what? Really? So what?

And so what I have come to with experiential anatomy is that you still need to have some intellectual information about a structure or a system. But the most important thing is taking it into the body and having a direct experience of it, so that it becomes useful. I don’t personally think it’s beneficial to teach anyone anatomy unless it’s somehow functional for them, that they can bring it into their everyday life, they can bring it into their practice.

So it has to be useful.

 

[Peter Appel]

Yeah, and you talk about the direct experience here. I mean, if you cannot feel your body, then experiential anatomy is quite meaningless, isn’t it?

 

[Leila Stuart]

Yeah, there’s a whole continuum of the ability of people to have that sensory experience. Because we know now the sensory apparatus can be diminished through injury, through depression, or through just a lack of innate awareness of the body.

So there’s lots of different reasons why that might be diminished. And because I guess, going back to your first question, one of the things that comes from experiential anatomy is an enhanced interoceptive awareness ability. And why that is so important is that the research on interoception over the last 20 years has shown that ability to feel, whether it’s proprioceptive, interoceptive, whatever level we’re working at, has everything to do with many physical and psychological conditions.

It’s been found that a decreased, either a decreased interoceptive awareness or a dysregulated interoceptive awareness has been correlated with anxiety, depression, chronic pain, autism, eating disorders, all kinds of things. So when we take that intellectual information into the body and have a felt sense of it, then it initiates a whole cascade of neural processing that ends up with us making better decisions about ourselves and about our self-regulation. And we know that self-regulation is how we stay safe and healthy.

So that’s the biggest thing.

 

[Peter Appel]

Yeah. Let me make an interruption here. Can you give a short definition of what interoception is?

 

[Leila Stuart]

Yes, I could do short or long. So a short definition of interoception is the perception, the processing and the integration of sensory impulses from inside the body that are processed in the brain. And what the output is, is a motivation to self-regulate.

 

[Peter Appel]

Can you give an example?

 

[Leila Stuart]

Yes, an interoceptive signal would be a feeling of hunger. So for some people, say someone with an eating disorder, that feeling would not be interpreted as hunger. It would be interpreted as a signal to exercise or not to eat.

In a neurotypical person, those sensations, which might be a growling or a hollowness or something that would be processed in our brain. And we would get signals. We would get some signals from our limbic system, some emotional stuff. And some signals from our prefrontal cortex, some higher reasoning. So yes, I’m hungry, but I won’t be able to eat until three o’clock... So it ends up as a self-regulation thing. This is hunger and I need to eat and it’s self-preservation, right? We need to eat to survive. 

On a different level, I might be talking to you and you have a bit of a scowl on your face and I might have some feelings like, oh, this is a bit scary because I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what that scowl means.

And so this is processed from my limbic system. I’ll get some information about, well, I know that my dad used to do that. And that was okay with him. And then there might be something from the prefrontal cortex, I might’ve learned, I might’ve read a book that different facial expressions can mean different things.

And so I’m not consciously doing this, right? It’s just all happening in a nanosecond. I’m interpreting that sensation and how important it is.

Like, do I need to get out of here or do I need to, um, smile?

So, it’s interoception and it is how we survive.

 

[Peter Appel]

Well, I suppose this is a skill you can improve. It can be gross sensations like eating or going to the loo, but it can also be more subtle signals. And you can train yourself to pick up smaller and smaller signals and have a better understanding of the body’s language. 

 

[Leila Stuart]

I was just going to say that that’s one of the values of experiential anatomy that people have, have, um, uh, articulated over the years of teaching this is that when you start with, with training physical awareness, so tracking a movement, tracking, you know, um, initiating movement from different parts, um, uh, from whether it’s bone or myofascia or your, or a developmental movement pattern, um, that that awareness breeds more awareness.

So I often say awareness is awareness is awareness. Even people who started with pretty low sense of interoception over time can become much more aware to the point where some people become overly aware. So it might be, I’m, I can much more easily have the know from sensations that my boundary is being overstepped by someone, but maybe if I hadn’t done all that experiential anatomy or any kind of somatics, really, because all somatics brings that awareness, um, and

You need to have awareness in order to heal.

We need to be aware of and feel what we need to heal.

 

[Peter Appel]

How do you get started if you don't have a well developed interoception? How do you take your first steps? How do you do it?

 

[Leila Stuart]

Well, I have a protocol that I’ve developed. It’s three steps: Learn it, feel it, and heal it or integrate it.

So we learn something intellectually. As an example, we might learn about the bony structure of the neck, and how all the joints work, and how the discs contribute to movement and shock absorption. So we learn something intellectual.

So the brain says, That’s really interesting! And then we take that information, the second step, and feel it into the body.

We use things like touch, self-touch or partner touch. Or sound. So we send a vibration into the neck. And that’s going to change things.

We can do gentle movement.

At this stage, we’re doing more exploration and inquiry. We might feel, how would I normally move my neck?

Where do I initiate movement from? What does that feel like? And then what if I, after I’ve palpated and done some various movements, get a felt sense of my neck... How does that change the experience?

If I move from my transverse processes, the pieces that stick out on the side, or if I think about moving them apart on one side and closing them on the other side.... How does that change my movement? That’s the second stage.

So that’s where we bring in the slow, aware, subtle movements. Because we need to slow the movement down so the brain can register what’s happening.

We need to stay in awareness. So if I fall, if I track that movement in my neck, then I can tell, Oh, that’s where I go into my old pattern! Or that’s where I start to raise my shoulder up instead of just moving my neck.

And we use tools. From my first movement teacher, I learned the use of many different kinds of balls, soft balls, foam balls, and inflated balls. And so we use tools to help get that sensory awareness.

So the second step is building sensory awareness. Actually, the first two steps are of no use unless the third step happens, which is healing or integration.

So how can I take this movement into my practice so that my practice becomes safer and more useful?

How can I take it into my everyday life? So when I do a shoulder turn to look behind me when I’m driving, how does it differ when I do that in my aware way compared to my usual way, and which way is better?

And then you’ve got a choice. Do I want to do it my habitual way, which always causes a bit of pinching in my neck? Or do I choose the spaciousness of moving from my transverse processes.

Then my movement becomes integrated. 

And then life becomes an inquiry. All of life becomes an inquiry.

Like how do I walk?

How do I reach for something in the cupboard?

How do I reach for somebody when I shake their hand?

 

[Peter Appel]

Yeah.

 

[Leila Stuart]

So life becomes exciting. 

 

[Peter Appel]

Yes, life is constantly new and there are new things to explore all the time.

In my teaching, I start with the experience and then I go to the theory.

So I suppose there are different ways you can do it.

 

[Leila Stuart]

Okay.

 

[Peter Appel]

I suppose it’s just because of your personality that you want to have the experience or the theory first. You can do it in different ways.

 

[Leila Stuart]

Well, both definitely work.

 

[Peter Appel]

Now, in a normal anatomy or gymnastics class, the students are imitating the teacher. The teacher is the role model. But how is the teacher supposed to teach experiential anatomy?

 

[Leila Stuart]

As a teacher, I’m giving information and then I invite people to take that into their bodies and to explore. So, I don’t care what people look like. In the integration step, I don’t care if they look like the picture in the book of the yoga pose.

What I care about is how this person can figure out the sensations, the signature sensations of grounding, or of stability, or of balance. Those are the things that I’m interested in.

I’m not interested in how long you can stand on one foot. I mean, you might be interested in that to time yourself by doing it without an awareness of your feet, and see how long you can stand on it.

So as a teacher, I’m a co-creator with my students.

I want them to figure out. And then maybe someone says, Well, this feels good, but maybe Leila, can you help me, you know, cause I’m not quite getting this? And I might come over and ask a question or put a hand on someone or guide them a little bit.

But it’s really a co-creation. I feel more like a guide and so everyone in the class might be doing something different.

I’m not really that happy with Zoom classes, but that’s the way it is these days.

I only have one in-person class and I really miss it because one hand can on someone make such a big difference to their internal experience. And their internal experience is what helps them to develop and transform into the version of themselves that they love.

 

[Peter Appel]

Here we might come to another fundamental concept, proprioception. How do you define proprioception?

 

[Leila Stuart]

Proprioception to me is the perceived sense of the position of the body in space, the relationship of body parts, weight, and velocity. And I should say that in the model of interoception, in the definition of interoception, proprioceptive signals are a part of that. So it’s because we feel those proprioceptive signals inside our body, like that feels heavy...

Or when I close my eyes, I can feel, I can still touch my nose with my finger. So proprioception is more, I think about proprioception as from the skin out and interoception from the skin in.

 

[Peter Appel]

So when people use touch, touching themselves or someone else is touching them, I suppose it’s a mix of proprioception and interoception.

 

[Leila Stuart]

Well, to me, touch is more interoceptive because usually touch has a feeling associated with it. And proprioception may, but yeah, to me, proprioception is more about relationship of body parts, relationship of body in space, relationship of body to a weight. Whereas when I experienced the weight of my arm, to me, that’s more interoceptive.

So even the fact that I have an arm that’s interoceptive, the fact that I can move my arm in space would be proprioception, but how I feel about that would be more interoceptive. So I would say that the distinction is somewhat artificial because there’s always an overlap.

 

[Peter Appel]

Yeah, I agree. So when I teach, I mostly teach on Zoom. Then the feeling of your own hands are really important.

And also the feeling of the body on the floor, pressure against the floor, which gives you a sense of where you are. So it’s more, it’s more than just knowing where the body is.

It’s also a sense of identity.

 

[Leila Stuart]

Well, that goes into interoception because what the research has shown with interoception is that the sum result of that processing and integration, of all of those signals, is a sense of self. And that in those physical and psychological conditions that I was mentioning earlier, the common factor in all of them is this diminished sense of self. And trauma is one of the big examples of that.

The antidote for all of these conditions, including working with people who have undergone trauma, is to build that sense of self and interoception. The therapy that is applied to you is used with these conditions.

So yes, the pressure against the floor would be proprioceptive because that’s a relationship of body and floor, but the feeling that it gives inside of me, that would be interoception.

But like I say, they overlap, it’s like the yin and the yang again.

 

[Peter Appel]

Yeah. It’s a choice, how you word it, a choice of wording.

 

[Leila Stuart]

Yeah, and it’s interesting that you start with the experience first. I always start with movement first in a class, but not necessarily geared toward what the topic of the class is. So that’s really interesting. And I might play with that. Thank you, Peter.

 

[Peter Appel]

Yeah, it’s great to get some feedback loops here, and I’m stimulated also by what you’re saying.

I actually saw a video of people working with children. The challenge for these children was labeled as a lack of proprioception. They were biting their fingers or biting their hair or not being able to recognize too much or too little pressure, being clumsy, touching things, and so on.

That was related to proprioception. So I suppose it could just as well be related to interoception.

 

[Leila Stuart]

Definitely. The therapy can work either way, like Kelly Mahler, for example, she works with interoception, kids with ADHD and learning disabilities and stuff.

And we know that proprioception decreases in the light of pain and in light of other conditions. So, to train or to train both proprioception and interoception can only be good.

 

[Peter Appel]

Absolutely! In your take on anatomy in the book, you start with breathing and then you go to fascia, organs, feet, legs and hips, psoas, pelvis, spine, head and neck, shoulder and arm. So why do you use this order?

 

[Leila Stuart]

Well, I start with breath because I always start with breath in my clinical practice and my classes. That’s because if we can’t breathe, we probably won’t be able to feel very much. So we have to get the nervous system prepared.

I guess the way the book is designed follows the design of my course that I taught… In that training, the piece that’s not in the book would be all the developmental movement patterns. If the book was going to be 2000 pages, then I would have included them too!

So from all of those movement patterns, what I took was the organs because the organ body gives us a sense of inner fullness. And I have found over the years that so many people tend to muscle through life. They’re holding themselves up through their muscular, their myofascial system. And so right off the bat, to get people to feel something that’s more internal, that gives a sense of inner support so the outer body can relax and release into that support, is a very important initial step. Otherwise, people are still just muscling through everything.

And then I actually wasn’t going to have a fascia chapter, but as I started writing all the other chapters, I realized that the fascial system is what integrates everything. So I have to have a chapter on fascia, and the book kept getting longer and longer.

The rest of the book is the body parts. I found that starting from the feet was the most impactful and then working up the body.

I used to start with the pelvis many years ago. I always started with the pelvis because the way the pelvis is, it is going to pattern what’s happening above and what’s happening below. But then I started with the feet because that’s the foundation, and we start building a house from the ground up. And the way we relate to the ground patterns everything else higher up.

It ends up being the whole body. And then using the koshas model in the book means that we don’t just work with the physical part of it. We start to explore how this relates to how I am emotionally in the world, my beliefs about myself, my perception of the world, and how I act based on my inner self.

So that’s what I really wanted to do in the book! It’s not just about anatomy because there are other experiential anatomy books out there that don’t necessarily touch into the deeper layer levels of our being.

And I want to take people from a sense of doing something to a sense of being.

 

[Peter Appel]

So how would you say that this book differs from other books about experiential anatomy?

 

[Leila Stuart]

Well, I think just that the other books I’ve seen are more about learning anatomy so that you can move better or be stronger or be more flexible. In my book, I really wanted to move beyond that and use the body as the doorway to all of these deeper aspects of self. And as a doorway to the transformative process that is yoga, because yoga is transformation.

Well, at least that’s the way it was meant to be, not the way that it necessarily is in the world. But when we look back into the rich tradition of yoga, it’s all about transformation. So, what do we transform to? To being that divine self.

 

[Peter Appel]

And then you have a lot of really wonderful exercises, body explorations in the book. It’s a real goldmine and it’s been a joy to explore them. Do you have a short exploration we could do together?

 

[Leila Stuart]

Well, you mentioned that you might want me to do a practice. So I actually brought my skeleton too, and maybe we could do the little neck thing that I mentioned before.

 

[Peter Appel]

Yes!

 

[Leila Stuart]

Let’s do it!

So part one, step one is we want to understand a little bit about the neck. The neck has seven vertebrae and each vertebra has a transverse process on it. These little pieces that stick out from the side, they have discs between them, except the one at the top.

And then you can see on the back, these little pieces that stick out. These are called spinous processes.

And so if we feel them on ourselves. And if we visualize what happens when we move our neck, we can visualize moving from the transverse processes. If we were to bend our neck sideways, we would think about widening them. 

I’ll do that down here so that you can see that better. Widening them on one side, shortening them on the other side, to twist. We would think about moving the transverse forward on one side and backward on the other side.

So that’s how to learn it.

To feel it, take your fingers to the back of your neck vertically and find the base of your skull right in the middle of your neck. And then really gently with the pads of your fingers, feel the little bumps.

Those are the spinous processes. If you move or nod your head forward a little bit, you can feel that they spread apart. So if you lay your fingers on three or four of the vertebrae, as you move your head down, they spread apart.

And as you move your head back to neutral, they move together. So, in your mind’s eye, think about spreading your fingers apart and that that is initiating the movement. So you’re not doing it.

The bones moving are causing your head to move forward. And then the spinous processes are moving together, you're bringing them together.

So now just sort of erase all of that for a moment, and then do the movement a few times the way you would normally do it.

And then take your fingers on the back of your neck again, and think about the bones spreading. And that’s what causes the head to bow forward.

Then move the finest processes together to bring the head back to neutral. Do that a few times. And notice what’s different about that.

So Peter, what’s different? What’s different for you?

 

[Peter Appel]

Well, the neck becomes an area of interest, an area of awareness. So yes, it’s really amazing. Small things are great.

 

[Leila Stuart]

Yeah. And so, how might you take that into practice?

I think about moving my spinous processes together. And that spreads the movement over the whole area, rather than maybe crunching at the base of my neck. So when I think about moving all of the transverse processes, all of the spinous processes together, then it creates a more global integrated movement.

 

[Peter Appel]

Yeah. You can feel it also in your chest, and it affects the rest of the body.

 

[Leila Stuart]

Yeah, because one part then affects all the other parts.

So that would be just a really simple body exploration.

 

[Peter Appel]

Is there anything else you would like to say about the book before we conclude?

 

[Leila Stuart]

Well, I would say that the book is the kind of book that you have on your shelf for years, that you dip into, and you work with parts of it at a time. It would be really challenging to read it all the way through at once, because of its density. It’s better to maybe read the introduction and then choose a body part, or a chapter, say the organs or the breath chapter, or the fascial chapter, and just really work with that over time. 

And also as a teacher, to really get it in your own body before you teach it.

 

[Peter Appel]

My suggestion would be to do some of the practices, the body explorations, for example, once a week when you have a free day and then gradually work through the book. So you can see I’m starting with the experience.

 

[Leila Stuart]

Exactly. If you’re a teacher who works with themes in your classes, like for example, the spine. Then you can learn learn the experiential anatomy practices for the spine and the theory, and take it into your own teaching.

 

[Peter Appel]

Yeah, that’s great. That’s a very systematic way of doing it, too.

 

[Leila Stuart]

Yeah.

 

[Peter Appel]

Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. Really great time together.

 

[Leila Stuart]

Well, it was really great to spend a little time with you, Peter.

 

[Peter Appel]

Take good care and spread your book.

 

[Leila Stuart]

All right. Okay.

 

[Peter Appel]

See you soon again.

 

[Leila Stuart]

Bye.