Bodies are cool

Going to massage school, I’m getting to understand the body in ways I wish we’d learned in grade school. There is so much depth and nuance that fills me with wonder.

For instance, did you know that at any given time, 20% of your blood is in your kidneys? Each one is a bit smaller than your fist, and there is one tenth of your blood in each! It’s incredible that so much of an important part of your body—blood—is just lounging in such a small space.

And yet, the blood isn’t lounging. It’s traveling though capillaries—the smallest tubes that carry blood—in a winding path around yet other tubes, called nephrons. In these nephrons, urine is formed by gathering excess water and other tiny things from the blood. Before taking this class, I had never thought about where urine was formed. Maybe I thought the bladder just gathered it through osmosis (stuff moving from one place to another) from the tissues and organs immediately around the bladder. Nope.

The digestive system felt more familiar, which I expect is because of that one episode of The Magic School Bus where Ralphie swallows the bus. It’s a classic, and I can vividly recall the excitement I felt watching it.

Something I didn’t know about before are rugae. They’re folds in both your stomach and bladder that let each organ expand. They look a bit like those elastic bodices that were popular on dresses in the 90s.

There are mechanics to let organs to expand! I never really thought about how they expand and contract, and I think it’s because all the diagrams we studied in school were just still, single view diagrams. Organs just felt like they are always one size and shape. In class today, videos are part of our curriculum, and the diagrams often have views of organs in different states.

Here’s something else. There are three tissues in the body that I previously had no idea existed.

Lymph is a fluid that collects waste and white blood cells that were previously in the blood. You’ve heard of lymph nodes before, whether they’re swollen when you’re sick as a kid, or someone’s talking about them in the context of cancer. But what are they really? They’re where the lymph goes to be cleaned.

Another is cerebral spinal fluid. It also comes from the blood, and it circulates between your brain and your spinal column. In the brain, it hangs out in these spaces that add up to looking like one rad hood ornament. This fluid is what carries away waste from your nervous system—not your blood.

And finally, there’s the fascia. I was already amazed by fascia before I attended school, because I went to a physical therapist who specializes in working with it. I went to her after I asked my dentist whether there was an intervention for teeth grinding. For years I had been wearing mouth guards while I slept, and it finally occurred to me that perhaps I could learn to stop grinding.

The fascia surrounds All. Of. Our. Body. It does that in the way the skin does, around the shape that we recognize as a “human,” but it also wraps around each muscle, each organ. It helps them keep their shape, and it holds our organs in place. It wasn’t until I learned that last bit that I realized the anatomy I learned in grade school had no explanation for how things were held in place. It skipped over fascia, and now I imagine all those organs just slumping to our pelvic floor without the support that I now know exists.

When we massage folks, we can work with the fascia. There are many techniques for it. My physical therapist who introduced me to fascia used a technique called “myofascial release,” which holds pressure in places along a muscle for 3-5 minutes, with the goal of having the muscle relax in that place.

Now, I’m practicing another technique, called “structural integration.” It uses a slow, methodical movement along the skin and therefore the fascia. The level I’m learning it at right now is called “connective tissue massage”—I have to learn to work with the first, and most easily accessed layer of fascia before I progress to deeper layers.

And it’s a remarkable process. After receiving my first full connective tissue massage, the knots on my shoulders decreased to a third of their size. A third! I have lived with these adhesions (the fancy, formal word for knots) for 25 years, and now they are finally receding.

It’s only because I have found skilled practitioners who intimately know a tissue that I had no idea existed until 8 years ago.

Our bodies are cool, friends. We so often think of them only in terms of how they’re not serving us, or how we wish for them to be better.

I hope that, in my sharing these concepts that fill me with wonder, you’ll be inspired to see a bit more beauty in your body, too.

Mentioned in this issue: “Inside Ralphie,” an episode of The Magic School Bus; that elastic bodice style from the 90s that I can’t remember what it’s called (reply if you know!); fascia (the link is a really neat illustrated article in the New York Times, and you don’t need a subscription to open it. Note, though, that they talk about the fascia as if it was just discovered, when really, folks have been working with it for a long time); myofascial release; structural integration; and, bonus, a picture book by Tyler Feder called Bodies are Cool that I named this essay after (buy it for every family you know).