“Like A Globe in the Classroom”
- marketingc8
- Jun 26
- 4 min read
In September of 1988, the Massage Therapy Journal published an extensive interview with Anatomy in Clay® Learning System founder Jon Zahourek. The interview itself was conducted five months earlier, in Austin.
“Jon and his new wife, Renee, blew into town, towing a trailer filled with video equipment and bones,” wrote David Lauterstein in his introduction. “Jon and Renee immediately and excitedly opened box after box of goat skulls and antlers, their latest acquisitions, distributing them all over my front lawn. Before my neighbors began to suspect a remake of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, we gathered the booty and headed indoors.”
Lauterstein also wrote that the “marathon conversation” with Jon was “delightful, brilliant, and energetic.”
Well, thirty-seven years later, Zahourek’s words still resonate and we thought we’d recapture a few of those insights here:
Knowing Yourself
“We are a series of ideas that the cells have erected among themselves. The human body is the largest experience we have of natural law. It's the only direct experience we have. So a detailed experience of ourselves generates an understanding of how pattern and law run through everything else. Socrates said, ‘Know thyself.’ Polonius said, ‘Be true to thyself, and you can be false to no man.’ Well, the same is true of this body of knowledge. If you know yourself, if you even begin to know yourself, you are introduced to every bit of the world around you—there are no categories, they are all artificial. History and music are separated by a septum—they are not separate systems, they're only the short fibers and long fibers of a man's existence.’
Anatomy is Not the Nouns
“What I want to do is affect a fundamental revolution in human thinking and, to start with, we have to revolutionize human education. I think it's really attainable with anatomy and our basically childlike approach. It's not a ‘technicrafts’ approach; it can be done in Africa just as easily as it can be done in Boston … I push people very hard to learn the language and to use it. Because it is magical. People come into the classes that I do and say, “I'm not going to learn the language.” Within two days, they're dancing with the language, and that's because it has a meaning for them. It's their child that they can give a name. If you study anatomy as if you were to study a language for just the nouns, then all you would have is a memorized series of nouns that have meaning, but they never really take flight. But if you are willing to be rigorous, you begin to see life in its entirety. The MANIKEN® is like a globe in the classroom. It can be used in many ways, individually by many teachers. And once students begin assembling it, their bodies are just crying out, ‘tell me more, tell me more.’”
Seeing the Light
“I didn't set out to hatch such a system of thinking or being—this thing has really changed my life. The MANIKEN® simply jumped in and began to educate me and to break things down. I have this sense that my body sat in this darkened room and started pounding on the table.”
Body Sense
“I think a third of our mind is our body sense, our proprioceptive sense. I see that proprioceptive sense as an autistic child whose opportunity for deeper internal forays gets shut down at age five when they entered the education system. Then it's like they've been told, “don't touch that.” That's for the doctor or the nurse. She's going to take care of your body. Let's go to the body place. And so on. It's tragic.”
Body Workers Picking Up The Torch
“The traditions of anatomy are particularly rigid because our approach to it has depended on death. The prospect of death can be so terrifying to us. And the cadaverous aspect of death, as revealed in anatomy, is so ominous and terrible that it tends to immediately limit the number of people who are willing to undertake the study of it. And the process of dissection is backward, always taking things apart instead of putting them together … I'm proposing that, even though anatomy is still in the hands of a small number of people who have access to cadavers, this tool (the Anatomy in Clay® Learning System) takes us out of that problem. It replaces all the problematic areas with easily accessible solutions. And now the time is really right because, although anatomy has been in the hands of the doctors and surgeons, now a medical student has very little time to study anatomy—most of their work is on the cellular level. In medical school, many times they don't even study gross anatomy—they are expected to have it in pre-med. That's a big step, because that means relinquishing the torch. Once the medical profession has let it go, then who's going to pick it up? Anatomy is being handed to the lay people. Therefore, we now have Rolfers, movement specialists and massage therapists helping people take charge of their own bodies. It's as if body workers were part of an evolution. And the trick is to not let just a few people pick up this torch, but to have us all pick it up.”
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