110: Hands-On the Nerves (with Gil Hedley)
Episode Transcript
Summary: Anatomist extraordinaire Gil Hedley stops by to talk with Til and Whitney about nerves, dissection, bodywork, and what hands-on therapists can learn from his most recent project, the Nerve Tour. 🔍🗣️👥🔊
Watch the video and get the full transcript of their conversation on Til or Whitney’s sites:
- Til Luchau’s Advanced-Trainings.com
- Whitney Lowe’s Academy of Clinical Massage
Resources:
- Gil Hedley’s site
- Gil Hedley’s Youtube channel
Episode 110: Hands-On the Nerves (with Gil Hedley)
Key Points in the Podcast
0:00 – Introduction to The Thinking Practitioner Podcast
0:30 – Introduction of hosts Whitney Lowe and Til Luchau
1:57 – Introduction of guest Gil Hedley and discussion of his nerve tour
7:00 – Gil Hedley’s background and introduction to integral anatomy
12:00 – The importance of understanding the nervous system in manual therapy
16:00 – The unique aspects of dissecting nerve tissues
20:00 – The impact of nerve tissues on texture and pain in the body
24:00 – The importance of the state of the practitioner when working with nerve tissues
28:00 – The personal connection to the donors in Gil Hedley’s projects
34:00 – The future of Gil Hedley’s nerve project and availability of the content
38:00 – Gil Hedley’s upcoming tour schedule and accessibility of his content
43:00 – Conclusion and thanks to sponsors Books of Discovery
45:00 – Closing remarks and contact information for hosts and guest Whitney Lowe:
Til Luchau:
A podcast where we dig into the fascinating issues, conditions, and quandaries in the massage and manual therapy world today.
Whitney Lowe:
I’m Whitney Lowe.
Til Luchau:
And I’m Til Luchau.
Whitney Lowe:
Welcome to The Thinking Practitioner.
Til Luchau:
The Thinking Practitioner Podcast is supported by ABMP, Associated Bodywork and Massage Professionals. ABMP membership gives professional practitioners like you a package including individual liability insurance, free continuing education, and quick reference apps, online scheduling and payments with PocketSuite and much more.
Whitney Lowe:
And ABMP CE Courses, Podcasts and Massage and Bodywork Magazine always feature expert voices and new perspectives in the profession, including from Til and myself. Thinking Practitioner listeners can save on joining ABMP at abmp.com/thinking. Til, how are you today?
Til Luchau:
I am good and I am excited to be here with you and with our guest, Gil Hedley. How are you, Gil?
Gil Hedley:
I’m good. I’m right here.
Til Luchau:
All right, that’s a good place to be. We get to spend a little time with you just catching up, which I always enjoy. And we’re going to ask you about what you’ve been up to, including your nerve tour. How are you doing, Whitney?
Whitney Lowe:
Yes, indeed. That’s what’s on the plan. So Gil is doing, for those people who don’t know, I think horrendously ambitious project here going around to, I believe it was 111 cities. Is that correct, Gil?
Gil Hedley:
That is correct.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. We’ll ask a few questions later on, but there’s one question I want to find out. What in the world got it in your mind about doing this? For those of us who spent a lot of time on the road, that seems like a very ambitious undertaking, I think.
Til Luchau:
I actually understand why you wanted to do more than 11, and 222 was just way too many, so somewhere in there, got to get to that nice round number. I like that.
Gil Hedley:
That’s it.
Til Luchau:
Okay, Gil, we should introduce you a little bit to our practitioners who may not know who you are.
Gil Hedley:
Okay.
Til Luchau:
I don’t even know how to do that honestly, except I know that how you and I met was in the 90s when you came to the Rolf Institute.
Gil Hedley:
1991, a fine year-
Til Luchau:
1991.
Gil Hedley:
A fine year for making friends.
Til Luchau:
That was a good year for making friends. That was my second or third full year at the Rolf Institute teaching there. And you came in and made an impression, a very positive impression on me. And that class you were in was a pretty special class. Tom Myers was the lead teacher-
Gil Hedley:
Yeah.
Til Luchau:
And I’m still in touch with some of those people. How do you introduce yourself? How do you tell people about you and what you do?
Gil Hedley:
Well, I am an anatomy guy, but I’m a whole person guy, so I’m an integral anatomy guy. And I trained in theological ethics as an academic and saw something was missing there, mainly a connection to my body despite the fact that I was talking about it a lot and pontificating with everyone else in the ethics department about the body, and none of us were even in one. And so I had to launch into another phase of my development as an ethicist, and as my development as a body worker. So I went and got trained in Massage at the Rolf Institute with you and Tom there, and then trained as a Rolfer. And then I was like, hey, I got to know more. I don’t know enough anatomy to be doing what I’m doing. So I thought, let go to the lab and see what I can figure out. And that was the beginning of 30 years in the lab. I just did Rolfing for a few years, but I became possessed by the anatomy.
Til Luchau:
And you really took the vision that we were learning and exploring there at the Rolf Institute of wholeness, and at that time a very fascial-based picture of the body, but really as a medium for understanding the wholeness of the body and the interconnectedness of the body and made it into an art form. You’ve really done that.
Gil Hedley:
Oh, well, thank you. And I can say with you that, that was the launch point because I’m very much of a doubting Thomas and we’re all talking about these different layers at the institute, and I’m like, “Well, I’ll bet they’re there, but I got to see them.” I need to look under the skin and that really helped. I invited many Rolfers into the lab to join me there, and then I ran out of Rolfers, so I had to go to massage therapists and then I couldn’t afford to advertise into massage magazines anymore. So I was like, well, let them tell people about it. And now I have folks from every conceivable modality who come, the fitness world and the Pilates and the yoga people, and now I have the naturopaths and the osteopaths and the PTs and the chiropractors, and everybody wants to come and learn this way.
Til Luchau:
When you’ve had me in as a guest for your Live with Gil series, where we get to talk to you, you show us some pictures or expound them, we get the dialogue on that. I was amazed at how diverse your community is. One, it’s pretty large. You got a lot of people that show up live on a Sunday or whatever it is to these events, and then they’re from all over the world and all over the spectrum.
Gil Hedley:
It is a huge and very endearing community. I don’t have a huge tolerance for meanness, and so folks show up pretty friendly to my community. I was the friendliest guy in my high school, I got voted that. So I got to keep it in my community. So yeah, we’re a pretty nice bunch.
Whitney Lowe:
So tell us a little bit, you’re embark, you have embarked on this Nerve Tour now from the people who don’t know what this really is, tell us what is the Nerve Tour and what is it about?
Gil Hedley:
Well, you can look at it at two levels. We’re touring and we’re talking about the nerves. And so I’m touring the people who attend through the human nervous tissues with examples from the laboratory. And then we’re literally touring around the whole country in an RV. The whole content really.
Til Luchau:
Just to be clear, you’re showing pictures of dissections, you’re not diving into people. You are diving into people’s nervous system through your words and pictures, and-
Gil Hedley:
That is my intention.
Til Luchau:
Exactly. That’s right.
Gil Hedley:
To engage the nervous system. When people come up to me at the end and their eyes are watering and they want to give me a big hug, I’m like, “Yay, we got into your autonomics.” Got there. So yeah, the hope is to help people to engage their nervous system or at least have tools in which they might do so after the fact, and then be able to have a meaningful relationship with the nervous tissues nerve tree of their clients as well. But I think it kind of always starts at home. If you can have personal relationship, then you can extend that to facilitate other people and having a personal relationship, it’s all just academic or in your head, it’s not going to come across quite the same way.
So yeah, I do try and engage people at multiple levels in the talk. In five hours I can do a lot really, and it goes by pretty quickly. So folks tell me, I don’t have a lot of thumb twiddlers in the crowd, occasional dozing, but that’s to be expected when you turn the lights down and you don’t know how late someone stayed out. And so…
Whitney Lowe:
I would’ve to say, and again, I got to see this, I was fortunate enough to see you back in November. The crowd was pretty riveted. Even I was talking with people at breaks and things like that, and I was very blown away by how engaging that whole time was. Five hours can be a long time to listen to a lecture. But one of the things that you do so exceptionally well that makes a presentation engaging is the element of story that keeps people following along with what’s really happening throughout here. And that’s just, I have to say, just marvelously done really, really well done.
Gil Hedley:
Thank you. And I do also hope that even for those who might forget the stories, which I hope they remember them, but also the visuals are strong in a way that makes an impression. I like to say, no need to take notes here because we’re going to burn this into your gyri and you’re not going to be able to stop seeing it even when you go home, you’re going to keep watching this presentation for weeks inside your head as you replay certain images that make a powerful impact. And that’s kind of my intention is to create images that are not in a traumatic way of course, but in a exciting way that it’s like I saw the Grand Canyon, I can close my eyes, I can still see the Grand Canyon, and it’s kind like that I’m showing pictures of the Grand Canyon, but it’s inside of us.
Til Luchau:
Yeah, you were kind enough to invite me and Loretta my wife down and we got front row seats because Loretta had fairly recently been through brain surgery and for vision problems, and she was of course fascinated with the subject matter. You were talking about the nerves and you began your lecture with the talking about the cranial nerves, and she didn’t want to leave. It was her first long outing from the house after brain surgery for a few months later. And she was, this is a testament to the riveting nature of what your presence, but also what you’re showing. She was just fascinated, we didn’t realize it was five hours long or we would’ve planned to stay longer, although I don’t think she maybe would’ve made it five hours, but she was not ready to leave after the hour and a half stay. I got to say she really was struck and wanted more. So you did that, you found a way to inspire her and talk to her and her state and keep her engaged.
Gil Hedley:
Oh, that makes me very happy.
Til Luchau:
Great to be there with you. And the images are striking. I mean, I’m holding myself back a little bit just because I’m not usually such a gushing fan of my guests, but I’m gushing a little bit. Because you have some of the best pictures I’ve seen of cranial nerves, and you came and showed Sue Hitzmann and I, some of those as a little preview that again just dropped my jaw. And I piece these things together from various sources and imaginings. But to see that your actual sections of lifting the brain out of the cranial vault and to see the cranial nerves dangling down like spider legs or something was just really, that’s one of the ones that’s burned right into my head.
Gil Hedley:
Oh, good. Yeah. I do find that if you are left to your own devices, the nervous system will likely escape you in your anatomy studies because A, it’s super complicated and it’s hard enough just to engage it at a regional anatomy level in terms of the vocabulary and the different branches that they create and who divides it this way and who divides it that way. So I do feel that showing people visuals that make it super clear and super obvious, that’s always my goal in my presentations. It’s like I don’t want to be telling more descriptive stories in the air, I just want to show it to you. It is like a baseball bat to the consciousness that says, “There.” And then you can have a, I feel it’s so much easier to have a relationship with something you can see the picture.
Whitney Lowe:
I’m curious to hear your take on this too. You kind of alluded to this, and it’s certainly been my experience over the years in working with a lot of professionals in mostly manual therapy practitioners from different fields who all say the same thing which is, “We didn’t really study the nervous system in that greater detail in our training.” Do you have a clue why? I mean, if it’s so relevant and so important and pervasive, why don’t we get into there?
Gil Hedley:
You spent all that time memorizing that crap about the origins and insertions of every muscle for your test. And I think curriculum could be simplified with respect to the musculature a great deal because that which is relevant to most touch practices does not include some fanciful schematizations that people are forced to memorize. And then that would open up all kinds of space in a curriculum and look, five hours, can you open up five hours in your curriculum and watch this thing and it’ll blow your mind and change your practice and transform your life potentially. We could make room for that. It doesn’t have to be forever, it’s not like we’ve got to do a month neuro course in the middle of a massage training. Five hours and cover a shit ton of stuff.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Gil Hedley:
And so I think it’s a question of emphasis in the curriculum, what they think you need to know. And the fact of the matter is everybody who’s touching a body is traipsing all over the nerve tissues that you don’t know it-
Whitney Lowe:
That’s right.
Gil Hedley:
Outside of scope of practice. I remember years ago I made my third DVD in my DVD series, an integral anatomy series, and it was something blah blah, and the word viscera was in there. And people who had been a company who had been purchasing my DVDs, I said, “I got another one for you.” And they’re like, “Oh, viscera? That’s out of our scope of practice.” I’m like, “Are you kidding me? You are confused. You are meddling with viscera from the moment you say hi, and I like your outfit to somebody you’re meddling with their viscera. Their face flushes at the compliment, right? That’s your heart in your face. So don’t think you’re not touching it when you’re touching a human being. And same goes for the nerve tissues.” It’s like, “Oh, that’s for chiropractors or something or medical doctors.” No, you’re traipsing all over the nervous system all day long and you just don’t know it. So I’m just here trying to overcome ignorance a little bit and say, “Wouldn’t you like to know what you’re doing to a persons tissues?”
I was as a practitioner going into the lab early on, still a practitioner trying to facilitate my practice. When I saw, oh my gosh, look at all that stuff there. Well, that gave me a little more respect at the end of my elbow for what I was doing there. And also I found, oh, and this area here, this is interesting too. It’s not quite rigged the same way. So maybe I can actually work in a way and engage that area without fear because also I know that, I know that it’s not so complicated there and I can do these things that I’m doing. And then other places where it’s like “Back off, dude, you have no idea, you’re literally in a minefield and you’re doing a jig.”
Til Luchau:
That’s a great example of how this kind of information could be really practical and useful to a hands-on practitioner. What’s different about nervous tissue? Because you’re working with tissues and dissection-
Gil Hedley:
Yeah.
Til Luchau:
You’re having influences all down the stream as you’re describing it, but there’s something different I imagine about actually dissecting for nerves and maybe for doing body work when you’re thinking about nerves, how would you characterize that for us?
Gil Hedley:
Well, it is very different to dissect for nerves, and that’s why I put it off for 30 years because I was busy doing something else. I was busy dissecting for layers and dissecting for textural biological fabrics and their continuities, which whose integrity comes from the nerve tissues in large measure. And so-
Til Luchau:
What? Wait a minute, say a little more about that. The integrity of the layers comes from the nerve tissues. Did I get you right?
Gil Hedley:
You got me exactly right.
Til Luchau:
I’m ready.
Gil Hedley:
The nerve tree, if you use that image has its central axis, its trunk and then its peripheral branches. So those peripheral branches don’t simply make a beeline from the trunk to the most distal surface. Each time they kind of poke through to a new fabric, they infiltrate it. All the layers are innervated, right? So they infiltrate those layers and that’s the stringy material. I didn’t show you guys a single neuron in the Nerve Tour. I showed you fascial wrapped neurons. I showed you a fascia tree that had neurons in it. That’s all I can do except from a microscopic perspective. But from a gross perspective, we’re looking at a nerve tree that’s wrapped in fibrous connective tissue and that fibrous connective tissue is infiltrating all of those layers. And so it gives a tensile strength. And that’s kind of interesting all on its own.
And also you can be short in your nerve tree, you could have a hypertonic tree and that’s going to change the texture of the tissues that you’re touching. And most of the people I teach are texture people. They might not describe themselves that way, but they put their hands on a person. Some of it feels soft, some of it feels like a ball or a rock or something. And they go to that one. And then a person says, “You’re a genius. How did you find my problem?” And it’s like, “Well, I’m just swimming in an ocean here and ran into a rock. How could I miss it?”
So that’s texture people. So then what about the texture of the nerve tissues in there? Can you get your sinus subtle down, you’re touch enough that while swimming in that ocean, you can feel ropes going up to buoys. You might be able to get it. And I actually in the talk lead people in some palpation, when I’m doing the brachial plexus terminal branches for fun, I have people palpate a couple things and we all joke about it because when you’re funking on your big nerves, you can really, really feel it. But it’s like you ought to know that. Then you ought to know even we don’t have to talk about the finest branches. What about the big chunky ones? Do you know those and can you feel them? Well, it’s super easy, I can teach my mother to do that.
Til Luchau:
I do a little bit of nerve palpation in my hands on trainings. And that is the point I make is that most say massage people or structural integrators instinctually avoid the nerves. We learn to not work on them because they feel different and we think our target is something else. So to do that figure ground switch is also pretty revealing. And there is the surprising chunkiness or largeness or tangibility to some of those nerves-
Gil Hedley:
And some leverage too.
Til Luchau:
Leverage, you can get a hold of it and do something with it, you’re saying or what?
Gil Hedley:
Yeah, I mean either in a specific trunk or a broad palm to the surface, if you bring your attention to the nerve tree and realize, oh wow, I’m actually, I’m putting drag on the cutaneous nerves and they go back to your spinal cord. So you can talk the nerve tree with different techniques. I mean, I’m not a technique guy, I leave that to you and I brag about you at every talk till I have your go up there. And I’m like, this is your technique guy because well, someone’s got to know how to do that and I don’t. But I can see the roads, I can see the pathways to technique, although I don’t teach technique, I’ll leave that to-
Til Luchau:
Well, you inspire technique through, again, the tour you give us of these tissues and the qualities you describe and your embodied excitement about them as well.
Gil Hedley:
That is my hope.
Whitney Lowe:
So I’m curious to know, this is a wonderful experience for those of us in the audience seeing this stuff, but also a little bit from your perspective, what have been some of the most interesting things that you have learned either out of the project that led to the tour or from the tour experience of sharing this stuff as well?
Gil Hedley:
Well, in the project, first thing I had to do was do everything different than what I’ve always done. I had to put my scalpel down, which is really hard for a guy who’s been on demand lecturing and scalping at the same time for 30 years, I had to put that scalpel down and get a paddle because the only way to preserve the branches of that tree is with a little tiny metal spatula and you just paddle along and paddle along is if you cut, you’ve destroyed the nerves, that’s it. You bring out the knife, the nerve is gone, you ruined it. Go get your bottle of glue.
So that was interesting just as a technique shift for a person who’s an artist, but I’m a sculptor and so I had to use a different tool to sculpt with, and that was very challenging. But then also the incredible rigorous study that we had to do to comprehend what was in front of our face. So I had with me the entire project multiplicity of research helpers. I had some dissection help, a little bit of dissection help for which I’m very grateful and a part of my friends who could step up to that and do some dissection help, but it was not something I really risk when it comes to doing the kind of dissections that you saw up on that screen. I’m not going to blame anyone else but me if it doesn’t turn out. And so technique, but research because it turns out that no matter how many books you have out on the table, just the more you have, the more they disagree.
And you’re thinking this is just common knowledge, right? Well, it’s actually kind of all very fluid and the information is varied. And what I realized was that whatever, say you learned nothing about the nervous system at all, that’s probably the case. Say you learned something about it, well, that’s probably wrong. And say you learned a little bit more about it, well now you’re confidently wrong. And so you get some ego for your book knowledge, but when you actually go into the tissues, it’s like, oh, they don’t give a hoot about your schematizations. They’re just going to re-anastomose and join up and take a left turn and they’ll just do whatever they damn well please. Because they don’t care about your books, your academics or your different offices and different departments at your university. They’re just this big old jellyfish in there, growing tentacles anyway damn well pleases and having a good time at it.
So when you go to what I call tracking them in the wild, which is really what you’re doing when you’re doing dissection, and it’s a confrontation with your mind because you show up with a mind state and a mind frame around the nerve tissues, around what you’re looking for, around the vagus nerve, around whatever you have a name for from a book. And then you’re confronted with this stuff in front of you that just doesn’t match so well and doesn’t fit in any boxes and pulls at the reins so much that it breaks free and just does its thing. And then what is your mind to do on the far side of an experience like that? And it really was a juxtaposition of regional anatomy and integral anatomy with regional anatomy having its propensity. Its very left brain strategy of one-to-one mapping of a name to a structure and in a space in a place, and that’s it. That becomes a way of telling the story of anatomy. And integral anatomy is a very right-brained process about relationships and context and individuality.
And so what the whole project was, was this battle between needing to use the tools of regional anatomy because that’s where people have set descriptions down about these tissues and trying to see it for what it is. And that was literally messing with my head the entire project. And I hope that that’s what I do in the tour talk as well, is to help to convey that this way of knowing which we’ve conventionally approached the nervous tissues doesn’t have to be the only way that we take it in. We can take it in as a whole, we can take it in as a relationship, we can take it in, in its context in relationship with other tissues or in a relationship with our behavior, with our personhood.
Til Luchau:
And aesthetically because so much of what you’re doing is just the visual aesthetics of what we’re seeing. So the analytical memorizing of names is a little like the lover of nature who goes and studies botany and goes, wait a minute, this is a lot of categorization and you’re getting right down to the flower in a way.
Whitney Lowe:
And in another way too, it’s telling us we should really be looking at a lot of our reference tools as tendencies to exist instead of factual information. When we see, this is where the path of the ulnar nerve is here, it’s like, well, this is actually where it has a tendency to exist more often than not.
Gil Hedley:
Yeah. It’s a high probability for certain things now very high probability. But when you get down to the minutia, it becomes very unique. And I think that uniqueness is the starting point for integral anatomy. The witnessing of the individual in their uniqueness, which I think is the only way to do body work as well, because if you’re working on an idea, you’re not working on a person in front of you. And it’s not different for surgeons either. I mean, the surgeons I think are more than most people in the medical professions keenly aware of everyone’s uniqueness because they go in just like I do. They’re dissecting human bodies and finding out, “Oh, it didn’t go that way this time.”
Whitney Lowe:
Well, I was going to say, you’ve alluded to this a couple of times, but mainly we’re often really interested here on our podcast of trying to make some direct connections with people’s clinical practice. And I’m curious to hear what you think are some of the most valuable and important takeaways to connect what you’ve learned and what you share there with what happens in treatment rooms individually with people.
Gil Hedley:
Well, I guess in a treatment room, if we add a consciousness of this layer say of being beyond muscles and fascia or to understand that muscles and fascia are infiltrated in the highest degree by these nerve tissues, then we can maybe help that. We can facilitate that. We can realize that this person here, you can have a reset through touch of the nervous system, through touch, through conversation, through relationship. You can have a reset of the nervous system, the impact of which is so profound and transformative that may be your greatest service as opposed to releasing a knot. The knot is the expression of a nervous system. The fascia are sensory return apparatus. They’re not packing material, they’re communicative in their own right, and they’re also a sensory return pathway. Did people think about that? Some people fascia is dead, it’s a nerd, it’s packing into whatever they think fascia is. It’s like, well, if you’re into fascia, you ought to get into nerve tissues and understand that those fascia are sensory nerve pathways. So you maybe understand pain a whole lot better when you realize that.
And then how do you touch when you know that? What kind of sensory information do you want to send down that fascial pathway to the central nervous system to be integrated as an interpretation of the universe, as an interpretation of the world? What kind of information do you want to send? Do you want to send bully on a playground? Do you want to send loving kindness and pleasure? How are you going to talk to those sensory nerve endings in those fascia? Maybe you’ll adjust it once you realize they’re sensory.
Til Luchau:
You’re inspiring a different sense of how we do our work by the paradoxically, by featuring so much of what we work, with the materials. You’re a materials guy, but in a way that really does inspire a different approach. I think this has been the biggest factor in the evolution of our field in the last 10, 20 years is a reexamination of how we do it and the explanations for that. And really in many ways, de-emphasizing the physical specifics of what we’re working with and revaluing and assigning importance to how we do it and what we’re thinking about and the impact, the sensory information that you’re producing as opposed to the thing you’re producing, the experience itself becoming the focus.
Gil Hedley:
Yeah. And what’s your state? What’s your state when you enter into a relationship with someone else’s nervous system? Because if you’re going to merge trees with somebody, are you going to do it crazy? Are you going to do it kind?
Til Luchau:
That’s great. What you just said could be the wrap-up to the episode, and maybe we should just stop here almost. Except, I got to feature a little bit about the specifics of your project because I was fascinated by the models, the people you were working with and the unique circumstances of that. You want to say anything about that?
Gil Hedley:
Sure. So I work at this lab called the Institute for Anatomical Research in Colorado, Springs. And it’s a real personal place. It’s a very heart centered place. It’s a small little nonprofit lab and founded by my friend Bonnie Thompson. It’s continued in its existence by my friend Jim Pulciani, and it’s a wonderful sweet space. And we have our own little donor program and that enables us to know our donors.
Til Luchau:
Donors are the people that you’re dissecting?
Gil Hedley:
Yeah, the donor. So people donate their bodies, they pass away, their families follow-up, we receive those bodies, and then we do our studies. And we are completely the beneficiaries of these donors and their gifts. And usually people think about it before you sign those donor forms. Yeah, well, A, there’s going to come a time when I don’t need this body. And B, wouldn’t it be cool if someone learned something from it. So there’s a certain kind of spirituality that underlies donating your body, I think. A certain letting go took me a hundred cadavers before I signed on our forms, I thought I was attached. I was like, I don’t know if I’m ready to give from my body. But then after about a hundred, that was several hundred bodies ago, after about a hundred, I was like, “Yeah, I can definitely let this go at some point because this ain’t me.” I’m not my body, although I do enjoy my body.
And so the donor for The Nerve Project was a friend and the parent of a friend as well. So my friend Madhav, who spent at least lived with us for, I don’t know, a year, worked for about six months on the A to Z project filming for me. And then so I got to know his family and they come and visit us while Madhav was living with us. And then so his mom and dad would come and visit and they just fell in love with the lab too and the work that we do there and we became bast friends. And then Jim passed away unexpectedly and he was a regular background person on the Live with Gil’s.
He’s always in the background, he and his wife Claudia and they just loved it. And so I asked Claudia, “Well, we can use him for a class for a week, or we can have him be a teacher for the lab for a few months, or I have this idea about The Nerve project.” She was like, “He would love that. Let’s do that.” And so it was very personal. The donor form was my friend and his son was on the camera, and that makes it actually really joyful, believe it or not, rather than weird or morose or something, it was freeing actually to be-
Til Luchau:
I don’t think I got it that his son was on the camera. I knew that you knew the donor, and I don’t know for our listeners just how unique that is in the dissection world. I mean, in my experience previously, the donors were carefully anonymous, you knew nothing about them.
Gil Hedley:
Yeah.
Til Luchau:
In this case, you actually knew these people alive and people that were working with them knew them-
Gil Hedley:
Yeah, we knew their life story, and I didn’t have to wonder whether the family was okay with what I was doing because they were in the room. Grandma coming from Mexico and spent three days in a lab with me. So it was very, very personal that way. And so we knew if something made us laugh, that Captain was laughing with us. And if we were stuck and frustrated, we had his mottoes behind us, we had his picture on the wall, we knew we were backed with it. And that brought actually a tremendous amount of kindness and joy to our project. It was an incredibly intimate, friendly, personal, loving process that gave birth to this story of the nervous system that I’m telling. And that does make it quite special.
Til Luchau:
What a process for the family as well, a process of coming to a different relationship.
Gil Hedley:
They all came a talk too in Denver, whole family showed up and there was mother-in-law, mother, two sons, cousin were all at the talk. And then his sister and nephew came to a more recent event. And it’s really powerful to have, because it’s like how many people A, get to see what folks learned from their family member’s gift and their gifts, right? And also, the responsibility that that place is on my shoulders because believe me, I have always wanted to do good by my donors.
Til Luchau:
Yeah.
Gil Hedley:
I’m a donor family. We donated my uncle’s body, my father’s body, my mom will donate her body, I’ll donate my body. And so, I’m a donor family. I know what it’s like to be a donor family. And I think it’s pretty special to be able to be a part of it in that way. And they’re thrilled. The family is thrilled, so much so that they awarded me one of his medals, which just melted me.
Til Luchau:
Wow, that’s great. The reverence you bring, the respect and the understanding of the context of what you’re actually working with is something you’ve always played really strongly to. You really brought that forward. You had a really unique pair of donors for your project too, that was striking.
Gil Hedley:
For the A to Z Project?
Til Luchau:
Yeah, maybe that was it. I just remember the differences between the two donors you were working with.
Gil Hedley:
Yeah, and again, I was in the A to Z Project, which preceded the nerve project where I compared two bodies. It took 17 months to dissect two bodies on camera bit by bit everything you could possibly compare and compare it on these two forms. And when I saw, well, the one donor was a friend of the lab, again, Jim was his massage therapist, so he was known to us and he chose to go to Gil, “I’m going to go to Gil’s table and you’re going to work on me.” And that made his life meaningful in the end because it’s like you’re dying before you expect to and you’re feeling kind of young and did you do everything you wanted to do? And then you’re like, “Well, I’m going to do one more thing. I’m going to be an anatomy teacher. That’ll be cool.” And so I’ve made the best of that offering.
And yeah, it did make for a very powerful comparison with the other donor who was also a local person, I got to know her daughter and dissected both of her parents’ bodies. And yeah, it keeps you on your toes. You always know what you’re doing. I always have a shrine going, and I do that for everybody else too by the way. It’s not just people I know, it’s for total strangers because I know they’re only total strangers to me, they’re not total strangers to their family. So we do take good care of the dead.
Whitney Lowe:
I would also say from listening to the entire presentation, watching all the way through that, the fact that you knew a lot about his history and was able to show things throughout the presentation relevant to like, “Well, this likely here because of so-and-so that happened at this point long ago.” That was incredibly helpful too, to be able to see that and have that relationship illustrated there.
Gil Hedley:
Yeah, there’ll be even more of that when I edit out the footage. I shot 97 days on that project. And so I have quite an archive that will be very exciting to edit out. I haven’t done that yet, I’m too busy showing off these treats, these highlights.
Whitney Lowe:
Right.
Til Luchau:
That is unique to know something about the donor’s physical or somatic experience too, and to be able to begin to correlate it or speculate about the correlations to what you’re seeing in the lab because again, in the sections I’ve been a part of, we’re guessing we’re finding things and says, “Well, I wonder if this person was experiencing X?” And again, the more we learn about pain for instance, the less clear the relationship is to structural issues. But yet for you to be able to connect some of those dots to get a really unique-
Gil Hedley:
Well, sometimes the dots end up getting disconnected as well because the donor, “Here’s what the doctor did to me.” Or the doctor says, “Here’s what I did to the donor.” And then you look and you’re like, I don’t know what he’s talking about because this looks fine here. So it’s very interesting in both directions actually.
Til Luchau:
Give me an example of that, I’m trying to follow.
Gil Hedley:
Well, Captain had had some bowel surgeries for some problems and had had some descriptions about the pathway of his colon, and they mentioned what was taken out and such and such, and we looked in vain for what they were talking about. I’m kidding. And that was very interesting. It’s like, what did they do? Because I’m not sure that’s what they did, that kind of thing. And I found that to be the case over the years back in another venue that I used to work at, we would get about a handwritten page from each of the donors, and often the donors an old person and the doctor says something, and that’s what you think happened, and you write it down and it’s like a game of telephone. And by the time it gets onto that piece of paper, “He took out my such and such.” And I’m like, “No, they did not take out, they took out your other such and such.”
But you don’t know that until you get in there and you compare. And that’s why frankly the bottom line is what’s in front of your face? No matter what the donor said about themselves, what the doctor said about the donor’s body, what the medical records say, the truth is lying there in front of your face and you got to run with that.
Til Luchau:
But 90 something hours, not something days of filming, five hours of presentation and you’re still going to go back and work on the material. What do you envision for this project in the future? You’re going to do a bunch more cities and we want to hear about that too, but is this going to be something that’s available to people in other forms someday?
Gil Hedley:
Yes. Yes, absolutely. Ultimately, I did this project because having done the A to Z Project, which was an incredibly comprehensive tour of the human body and comparatively and from an integral perspective directed towards body workers and hands-on therapists and fitness professionals, I was like, wait a second. I feel like I’ve shortchanged the allopaths, naturopaths, osteopaths and PTs because they’re really into the nerves. So let me add that to this massive already 300 hour archive on my website. Now I’m going to add another 50 hours or something on the nerve tissue so that, that becomes a lasting resource, not only for those other professions that I mentioned, but a resource with which our professions, the Bodywork professions, can up their game with respect to the nerve tissues.
So in anticipation, and I feel like I’ve helped the Pilates and yoga communities kind of up their anatomy game because when they started coming to me, they’re like, “We didn’t really learn any of that stuff.” So folks have been coming for three decades to my lab, and then those are prominent teachers, so then go out and it’s kind of helped up the anatomy game in general of muscle fascia, bone, right? But now it’s like, okay, now you got that down. Let’s up the game one more time and add a comprehensive relationship with the nerve tissues. And so the idea is to get all that onto my subscriber site, which is whatever, 15 bucks a month. So you can go pretty deep for 15 bucks.
Til Luchau:
Such a deal, 15 bucks a month, people get access to your library, they get access to your live conversations, all kinds of things that come out of that.
Gil Hedley:
And all those CEs too. So what we’ll ultimately, Rachel will coursify all of the content that I edit, and my partner Rachel, and then it will be courses on their tissues. And I’ll also probably be able to get a lymphatic course out of it as well, because as I mentioned in the talk, the nerve project quickly became the carefully dissect away the entire lymphatic tissues project to witness the nerves, and so I got a lot of that on camera too, just giving a better accounting of lymphatics than I’ve been able to in my other work.
Til Luchau:
I want to say you let me speechless there for a minute. As you were dissecting the nerve, you’re saying you realized you had to carefully dissect away lymphatic tissue, and that gave you a different picture of that as well?
Gil Hedley:
Exactly.
Til Luchau:
The material there.
Gil Hedley:
It was just constant, endless paddling through the lymphatics to get to the autonomic especially, which are just buried.
Til Luchau:
And do you picture a lymphatic tour? A lymphatic project?
Gil Hedley:
I would have to do a more specific, I destroyed the lymphatics to witness.
Til Luchau:
To see the nerves?
Gil Hedley:
The issues. And while I was doing that, I made some careful dissections along the way as well as some mistakes and misidentifications that I corrected months later. I was like, “No, this wasn’t that, this was this.” And so I don’t know that I’ll do a lymphatic tour, but I will definitely do presentations maybe online or something on the lymphatics. There’s lots of fans of the lymphatics out there who are asking me about it.
Til Luchau:
Right.
Gil Hedley:
And I’m happy to bring that forward as a kind of a perk of this project. I don’t know, probably if I’m going to do another tour, it might be Sex in the Sacred Heart, that might be where I take that.
Til Luchau:
The Anatomy of Sex in the Sacred Heart?
Gil Hedley:
Sex in the Sacred Heart, yeah.
Til Luchau:
Amazing.
Gil Hedley:
Well, I might have to call it Pelvic Anatomy to get it approved by NCTBM because if it has the word sex or penis in it, they’re going to be like, “No, we don’t do that.” But I’m like, “Yes, you do. Yes, you do. It’s one body, folks, you can only touch the whole person. And you are always engaging a person in their energy, in their being, in their heart.”
Til Luchau:
Well, you’re always willing to think outside of our usual boxes and question the boxes themselves and look for larger connections, especially into that lived experience.
Gil Hedley:
Bust those boxes, baby, bust them. Yeah.
Til Luchau:
Nice.
Whitney Lowe:
And again, I want to put in a plug for anybody who has not seen this yet, take a look at where the Nerve Tour is coming near your city. It is a fantastic presentation and something that will really dramatically impact you, I think.
Gil Hedley:
Thank you.
Til Luchau:
You want to say anything more about where you’re going, how people should find out more, that kind of thing, Gil?
Gil Hedley:
Sure. We’re sort of centrally based in Colorado, and so we’re doing several more loops. So we just did our Pacific Northwest loop and now we’re going to launch in just a week and a half our Southeastern loop. So we’re going to go through Texas and all down through the South, through the deep South, through the Southeast, and come back through the Southern Midwest. And then we’ll do a Northeast loop and we’ll traipse back out over through the Northeast, all through the Dakotas and Canada and come on down through all those states up in the Northeast and find our way back through the Midwest home. And then we’ll finally launch back out to the West, go down the California Coast and come back through Arizona and New Mexico. So we’re really going to cover a lot of towns.
Til Luchau:
You got a lot of ground to cover there.
Gil Hedley:
Our goal was to be, I like to meet the people, like you said, I got a lot of community out there and I don’t get that many chances to see folks unless they maybe come to a lab or something. So every now and then, I like to get out on the road and give a hug and a hello and talk to people in person and be able to enjoy that. So yeah, we’re going to be going all through. I mean, if you live somewhere, we’re going there. We are going there or within two hours of-
Til Luchau:
Some of the meetings are pretty intimate. You mentioned some that were small as a dozen, others that are probably up into well over a hundred or more.
Gil Hedley:
Oh, yeah. We had 220 people in Portland and then we had, I don’t know, 16 in Idaho Falls, and we had a wonderful time at both places, so I’m more than happy to speak to a small group. Basically if you can’t get it up to seven, we start thinking we might want to scratch that one.
Til Luchau:
Hard to make that work but otherwise you’re pretty flexible, it sounds like?
Gil Hedley:
Yeah.
Til Luchau:
Okay. So these recordings last for a while, these podcasts, if it’s the future, we’re talking to the people in the future now and they’ve missed their chance or they just can’t make it to see in person. How do people find out more?
Gil Hedley:
Well, you’d go to my website because in the future it’s all going to end up there eventually, but you might not want to wait. And I say come out for the tour. It’s going to take me a couple of years to edit all that stuff out, but it will eventually all end up on my website. I’ll probably have it up there as a recording for sale for a while that you can put into your library. And then ultimately I’ll probably add it to my membership.
Til Luchau:
What’s your website, Gil?
Gil Hedley:
Gilhedley.com, G-I-L-H-E-D-L-E-Y.co and gilhedley.com. And there is a ton of stuff there. And I have a YouTube channel as well, so there’s free stuff on my site. I have a Easy Rider membership, I call it, and you can join that and you’ll have up to 30 hours I think of video content on the website along with another 35 or so audio content. So if you’re just an easy Rider, you can get 65 hours of kick-ass education there. But if you wanted to go for the deep dive and also get CEs, then folks join as an Explorer, and then you can access all my writings as well as those live presentations that I do, as well as several hundred hours of CE content.
Til Luchau:
You’ve done such an inspiring job of making your material available at all different levels and all different ways to engage to, so thank you for that.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah, absolutely.
Gil Hedley:
Accessibility is so important to me. I’m trying to democratize access to anatomical knowledge, and honestly, if you literally spend whatever, 10 hours a day for 30 days on my website, you can change your perspective of the human body. You can practically do that in five hours on any of my talks, but it is there to be accessible.
Til Luchau:
Wonderful. Make sure those are in the show notes as well.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. Well, it’s been a delight talking with you Gil, and again, it’s such an outstanding presentation. Thank you for all the work that you all put into doing the project and then coming out and sharing the findings with everybody here. I think it’s going to be a great help to enrich people’s practice and some wonderful things you can learn about the nervous system.
Gil Hedley:
Thank you, Whitney, and thank you Til, and it’s my pleasure. I’m kind of compulsive and obsessed with these things, so you can’t stop me whether we’re having fun or not, I’m still going to do it.
Whitney Lowe:
Right. Good.
Gil Hedley:
We are having fun.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Til Luchau:
Glad to be able to have you come by, glad to be able to go to your talk. Looking forward to more. Thank you, Gil.
Whitney Lowe:
And for everyone to remember Books of Discovery also is one of our sponsors. They’ve been a part of the Massage and Bodywork community for over 25 years, and nearly 3000 schools around the globe teach with their textbooks, E-textbooks and digital resources. Books of Discovery likes to say that learning adventures start here, and they find that same spirit here on The Thinking Practitioner Podcast and are proud to support our work knowing we share the mission to bring the Massage and Bodywork Community thought-provoking and live-in content that advances our profession.
Til Luchau:
Instructors of manual therapy education programs can request complimentary copies of books of Discovery’s textbooks to review for youth in their programs. Please reach out at booksofdiscovery.com. Listeners like you, instructor or not, can explore the collection of learning resources for anatomy, pathology, kinesiology, physiology, ethics, and Business Mastery at booksofdiscovery.com, where you the Thinking Practitioner listener can save 15% by entering Thinking at checkout.
Whitney Lowe:
And also, we let say thank you to all of our listeners and to our sponsors. You can stop by our sites for the video, show notes, transcripts, and any extras. You can find that on my site over at the academyofclinicalmassage.com until where can they find That for you.
Til Luchau:
advanced-trainings.com. If you have comments, questions, or things you’d like to hear us talk about, just record a short memo on your phone and email it to us at [email protected] we might even play it on air, or look for us on social media. Where do people find you, Whitney?
Whitney Lowe:
They can find me also on social under my name, Whitney Lowe, and you can, if you will, rate us on Apple Podcasts, it does help people find the show that’s very helpful for everyone. And you can hear us on Spotify, Stitcher, PodBean, or wherever else you happen to listen, and please do share the word, tell a friend, and we will look forward to seeing you in another interesting conversation.
Til Luchau:
This is Til Luchau signing out. Pleasure to be with you, Whitney Lowe and Gil Hedley. Thanks so much.
Whitney Lowe:
Thanks again.
