Ankrum School of Functional Bodywork

I want to tell you how embryology ended up inside my training. Because it was not part of the original plan.

I had been teaching bodywork for years. Good work, high-level techniques. And something kept nagging at me. Something was missing from the foundation.

I was teaching the toolkit without the blueprint that explains what the toolkit is for.

The blueprint is embryology.

The body does not assemble itself randomly. It follows a specific, organized sequence. Structures that share an origin continue to act together their entire lives, even after they have separated into distinct bones or organs or tissues.

The inner ear bones and the jaw bones. Same embryological origin. They always act in concert.

The cells that migrated to the perimeter of the blastocyst in the very early days of development. They eventually became the womb. Part of us became our own protection. That is not a metaphor. That is what happened.

When I really sat with this, it changed how I understand every body I work with. The patterns I see in someone are not random. They are organized. They follow a logic. And the better I understand that logic, the better I can follow what a particular system needs.

So I brought a doctor in to teach this material. It is one of the only days in my whole training where I open the doors to people outside the core program, because this understanding is genuinely useful for anyone working with the body at a deeper level.

Artists. Dancers. Chiropractors. Physical therapists. Anyone curious about where we come from and why we are organized the way we are.

What aspect of embryological development would you most want to understand? Drop it below. I am genuinely curious what this community wants to go deeper on.

I want to tell you about a newborn I worked with years ago. I still think about this baby.

The mom came in within the first week after the birth. She was exhausted and a little frightened. The birth had been hard, and it showed.

The baby's eyes had that startled, glassy quality I have learned to recognize over the years. Not the softness of sleepiness. Something else entirely. Like the system had not yet found anywhere safe to land.

The baby arched consistently. Nothing consoled her. Sleep came in fragments.

I want to be clear about something. This is not a baby with a difficult personality. This is a nervous system that went through something significant and has not yet been helped to integrate it.

We did some gentle work together. Soft, following the system rather than imposing on it, listening for what wanted to happen rather than applying a sequence. Maybe twenty minutes in total.

By the end of the session the baby had curled forward. Not arched. Curled. And she slept. A real sleep, not the fragmented kind from before.

The mom came back two weeks later. She said it was like a different baby. Feeding better. Sleeping longer. Less inconsolable crying.

I am not telling this story to take credit for anything. The baby's system did the work. I just created the conditions and got out of the way.

What I want you to take from this is that early intervention matters enormously. In the first weeks and months the system is still soft, still highly responsive. It has not had years of compensations layered over the original difficulty.

The natural state we are all meant to be in is happy and healthy. When a newborn is not there, the body is asking for something. And it is almost always possible to help.

If you know a family with a newborn who is not settling, not sleeping, consistently arching, inconsolable, please share this. Getting early hands-on help is not overreacting. It may be the most important thing they do in those first weeks.

Here's one I think about a lot, and I'd love to know where you land.

When a client comes in with pain that keeps returning, which do you lean toward first?

A) Address the symptom and work from there
B) Work backwards from the symptom to find what's upstream first

I used to lean A. There's a real case for it, the person came in uncomfortable, and there's something important about honoring that.

But over time I've moved to B. Not because the symptom doesn't matter, but because the body that keeps returning to the same complaint is usually trying to tell you something about what's driving it. The symptom is a chapter, not the whole story.

Drop A or B in the comments, and if you want to say why, even better. I'm genuinely curious.

Here's a question I've been sitting with lately.

When did you stop asking 'which technique should I use here?', and start asking 'what is this body actually trying to do?'

For most practitioners I've worked with, there's a specific moment they can point to. It's usually not a new skill. It's a client who didn't respond to the protocol. A session where the plan had to go out the window and you had to just... listen.

That shift, from executing to reading, is the beginning of integrated practice, in my experience.

When was that moment for you?

Our bodies are miraculous. I come back to this thought more than any other.

Think about what each of us is carrying on an average Tuesday. Most people have some kind of pain or dysfunction quietly running in the background, a stiff neck, a locked hip, a digestive system that's been a little unhappy for a while. And most of us keep going. We adapt. We compensate, adjust, modify, and continue.

That is extraordinary when you really stop and look at it.

I take a history from every person who comes to see me. And the longer they lie on the table, the more they remember. Things they'd written off as old history. A fall from fifteen years ago. A car accident they thought had healed. The surgery from years back they hadn't thought to mention. The body kept all of it, every last entry.

I am always struck by how much each of us carries, and how much we're still capable of despite it.

In my work, this shows up in a particular way. When I'm with a student or a client, I watch the body do its own work. A gentle input to the fascial system, a soft engagement with a visceral restriction, and I get to watch the body take that and run with it. The body was waiting for the right conversation, not a stronger force.

That's not me doing something impressive. That's the body's own intelligence responding.

Today I want to point to the positive: we live in these bodies and we love in these bodies, and despite everything they carry, they keep going. That is worth pausing to acknowledge.

What's something your body has shown you lately about its capacity to adapt or keep going, even when you weren't paying attention?

Something shifted for a practitioner in one of my trainings a few years back, and I think about her often.

She was experienced. Smart. Her technique was genuinely clean. But she kept hitting this wall where things wouldn't integrate, she'd do the work, the person would feel better in the room, and then two weeks later they'd come back in the same place.

We spent time watching how she worked, and what I saw was this: she had built an excellent protocol. A really excellent one. But she was running the protocol instead of reading the person.

There's a difference. Once you see it, you can't unsee it, but from the inside, when you're in it, it's almost invisible.

What changed for her was learning to let the body lead. Not abandoning her training, the anatomy, the technique, all of that is non-negotiable and she knew it deeply. But holding it differently. More like information than instruction.

The treatment plan is in the body. That sounds simple. But actually practicing it, trusting it enough to follow where the tissue leads instead of where your protocol says to go, that takes a particular kind of courage.

She's still practicing. She's one of the best people I know working in this space. And she'll tell you herself: the shift wasn't about learning something new. It was about unlearning the idea that she already knew what the session needed before it started.

Yeah. I love that story. Because that's the truth of this work.

Has there been a moment in your own practice where you realized you needed to work differently, not just more? I'd genuinely love to hear about it.

Pregnant Women 16 weeks and beyond (on May 16th) needed!!
On May 16, 2026, Group 10 is having their Pregnancy Training Day and we need some pregnant women who are at least 16 weeks along for our students to practice with! Pregnant Volunteers need to come at 2pm and plan to stay until at least 4p for a free treatment from a Student. Please text or call the Ankrum Institute school phone at 918-212-4206 to secure your appointment. Thank you!

We are looking for 3 pregnant volunteers from 2p-4p on Saturday, December 6th to help our students learn how to work with pregnant clients. Call 918-212-4206 to secure your spot!

Pregnant Women 16 weeks and beyond (on December 6, 2025) Needed!!
On December 6, 2025, Group 9 is having their Pregnancy Training Day and we need some pregnant women who are at least 16 weeks along for our students to practice with! Pregnant Volunteers need to come at 2pm and plan to stay until at least 4p for a free treatment from a Student. Please text or call the Ankrum Institute school phone at 918-212-4206 to secure your appointment. Thank you!