What Studying a Human Cadaver Changed About How I Teach Yoga
- Joy Zazzera
- Nov 13, 2025
- 6 min read
Updated: Dec 26, 2025
Why This Experience Matters
A yoga teacher does not participate in a human cadaver dissection lab as an isolated training or a spontaneous decision.
This was the culminating learning experience cap-stoning years of complex, layered study through Yoga Medicine®, alongside concurrent training in massage therapy school — together demanding a level of anatomical understanding and therapeutic application far beyond what is typical in the wellness industry.
As a movement teacher — a Yoga Medicine® Therapeutic Specialist — and Licensed Massage Therapist, my work centers on interconnected yet uniquely separate therapeutic modalities: helping people move, heal, and restore trust in bodies that have been injured, altered, or changed by time, surgery, and stress. That responsibility carries weight. And it requires more than memorizing structures from books or listening to lectures about the human form.
It was also amplified by my own lived experience not congruent with the average middle-aged woman.
By the time I entered the cadaver lab, I was no stranger to the inside of the medical system. I had already undergone multiple surgeries to resolve anatomical injuries — including ACL reconstruction, and two knee replacements — followed by extensive physical therapy, rehabilitation, and retraining. I understood what it means to relearn movement, to work with scar tissue, to navigate pain, compensation, and recovery over time. Not to mention the psychological reckoning with a drastically different athletic ability that once had no limits.
These experiences shaped how I approached anatomy and physiology from a yoga context long before I ever picked up a scalpel.
They taught me that bodies are not theoretical. They are personal, adaptive, and deeply intelligent stories. As a wellbeing professional committed to a therapeutic approach, I knew my learning had to extend beyond textbooks, diagrams, plastic models and classrooms. To truly serve my clients — many of whom live in bodies similarly shaped by surgery, injury, limitations or chronic stress — I needed to understand anatomy and physiology as it exists in real human bodies, not idealized ones.
The cadaver lab offered that opportunity.
Preparing for What No Textbook Can Teach
I arrived in Colorado with a suitcase full of clothes I wasn’t attached to keeping pristine, goggles, surgical gloves, masks, essential oil to soften unfamiliar scents, my lab coat, and a well-worn lab manual and journal.
After landing in Denver, I picked up my rental car and drove through snowcapped mountain terrain into Boulder, arriving a full day early — not to sightsee as suggested, but to settle nerves and prepare for what I knew would be an experience far outside the scope of most yoga and massage trainings: a direct, hands-on exploration of the human body that few yoga teachers or massage therapists and even some medical professionals, ever witness.
This wasn’t about curiosity or novelty. It was about understanding the body as it actually lives — adapts, compensates, scars, heals, and survives.
Inside the Lab: Presence, Precision, Reverence
The Lab of Anatomical Enlightenment, led by world-renowned master dissector Todd Garcia and Yoga Medicine founder and lead teacher Tiffany Cruikshank, and fascial researcher Dr. Katja Bartsch, was held with exceptional care and intentionality.
Each day began in the classroom — grounding us in theory, outlining a clear plan, and allowing time to set the mental and emotional tone required before stepping through the doors of the lab. This preparation mattered. What awaited us wasn’t simply anatomy — it was intimacy with the physical record of a human life.
The majority of our days were spent working as a team with a fresh human cadaver. We lifted, lowered, carried, unwrapped and wrapped, positioned, and observed her body supine, prone and side-lying. We dissected and uncovered tissue layers together, and at times worked individually — scalpel in hand — guided by informed curiosity and deep respect. We compared our cadaver findings to the findings of the three other groups paired to distinct bodies with their owned lived stories.
There was excitement. There was vulnerability. There was curiosity. There was reverence.
We had a specific anatomical roadmap, but we were also encouraged to work intuitively, responding to what each layer of tissue revealed rather than forcing discovery according to expectation.
Meeting Her Body — and Her Story
I was paired with a female cadaver in her sunset years — and in many ways, she offered more than I could have hoped for.
She had undergone knee and hip replacements, each enveloped in thick layers of disorganized scar tissue. Surgical pins remained in her shoulder. A device we identified as a spinal cord stimulator lay embedded along her spine. We observed arthritic changes in joints, muscles contracting and stretching under manual manipulation, and lungs inflating as air passed through structures that had once supported breath in daily life.
Balancing the specificity of my own anatomical interests with openness to what her body revealed, I slowly settled into steady presence. It was only then that I made my first careful, hesitant cuts with the scalpel.
With each reflected layer, my focus deepened. Awe remained — but it no longer disrupted clarity. What textbooks often present as tidy, one-dimensional structures, revealed themselves instead as layered, adaptive, interconnected systems shaped by time, stress, injury, surgery, and resilience.
Pictures teach recognition. Hands-on anatomy teaches relationship.
Anatomy as Lived Experience
No plastic model or textbook illustration can convey what it means to:
Carefully remove skin and adipose tissue to expose superficial fascia
Identify, feel and manipulate fascial sheaths, ligaments, tendons, bones, and muscles
Dissect blood vessels, nerves, and lymph nodes
Handle entire muscle groups like the trapezius, and hamstrings
Examine the heart’s chambers from the inside
Hold a section of vertebrae in your hands
Follow the spinal cord to the cauda equina
Trace the vagus nerve from the brain through the abdomen
Track the sciatic nerve down the length of the leg
Examine how artificial joints interface over time
One of the most profound moments for me was the opportunity to work nearly uninterrupted on a total knee replacement. It felt like having x-ray vision into my own knees — an intimate, sobering look at what lies beneath future movement, recovery, and aging — seeing my own movement limitations in translation ahead of time.
These experiences permanently challenged any preconceived ideas I had about the human body.
While the scalpel was our primary tool, we also worked with forceps, probes, dissecting scissors, garden shears to open the rib cage, and — during one of the most emotionally charged moments of the lab — a bone saw to open the skull and access the brain.
Our cadaver was particularly fluid, requiring constant care to manage outpouring fluids and blood so the integrity of the table and the work could be maintained. Everything we removed was carefully preserved, cataloged, and eventually returned to her body during the final wrap — preparing her for cremation and return to her family.
This mattered deeply.
Reverence, Gratitude, and Responsibility
This woman — whose name we did not know — had thoughtfully prepared for this gift of science and discovery long before we ever met her. She placed trust in individuals she would never meet — trusting that her body would be handled and studied with intention, respect, and care.
That sense of responsibility was present every single day. It didn’t leave the table when the lab ended. It still lives in my nervous system.
Layer by layer, we witnessed the story of a life lived. A body that could have been my mother’s — and, one day, could be my own.
Nothing prepares you for that level of intimacy with the human form short of medical school.
How This Changed My Work Forever
I emerged from this experience more prepared than ever to meet bodies without judgment.
To stop drawing conclusions. To stop working from expectation. To stop asking bodies to conform to shapes, poses or ideals.
This experience solidified something I had long believed but now know without question: yoga happens only through felt experience — through awareness, movement, rest, and perception — not through achieving poses or mastering a specific order of performing them.
As a teacher and therapist, this knowledge cannot be unseen.
It has given me advanced skills to help students adapt, sense, and explore what might be felt as frustrating but isn’t visible — and the confidence to guide women through movement patterns informed by their lived experiences rather than imposed standards that emphasize aesthetics. It has even armed me with unusual agency to inform and raise the bar with the therapeutic relationships I have with my own healthcare providers.
When yoga and therapeutic movement are approached this way, real therapeutic change becomes possible — not because bodies are pushed and positioned, but because the stories they might be holding are finally understood.
