Our
Mentors.

Andrew Taylor Still grew up on the American frontier, the son of a Methodist minister and physician who worked closely with Native American communities in Missouri and Kansas. From an early age, Still observed and learned from Indigenous healing practices, traditions that understood the body as a whole, unified system long before Western medicine adopted that framework. The idea that structure and function were inseparable, that the body contained its own healing intelligence, was not something Still invented. It was something he absorbed, formalized, and built a school of medicine around.

When the Civil War took the lives of three of his children to spinal meningitis, a disease that conventional medicine could not treat. Still's disillusionment with the medicine of his era became absolute. He spent years studying anatomy with obsessive intensity, dissecting cadavers, observing patterns of disease and health, and arriving at a conclusion that would change medicine forever: most disease originates not in the organs themselves, but in the structural conditions that prevent the body from functioning and self-healing as designed.

He called this system osteopathy, from the Greek for bone and disease, though his real subject was always the body's connective architecture as a whole. His foundational principle: find the lesion, correct the structure, and the body will do the rest. He described the connective tissue network as the body's river system: the medium through which everything the body needed to function traveled. Restrict that flow, and disease followed. Restore it, and health could return.

Still founded the American School of Osteopathy in Kirksville, Missouri in 1892. The first institution of its kind. He was not a fringe figure. He trained hundreds of physicians who went on to build the osteopathic medical profession that today numbers over 100,000 practitioners in the United States alone. His ideas, once dismissed by the mainstream medical establishment, are now the foundation of an entire branch of medicine.

Ida Rolf studied osteopathy. She knew Still's work deeply. When she began developing Structural Integration, the first systematic manual approach to fascia, she was standing directly on the shoulders of Andrew Taylor Still. The lineage is not metaphorical. It is documented.

Thomas Myers studied directly under Ida Rolf. He is not adjacent to this lineage - he is a direct descendant of it. Trained in Structural Integration, he went on to become one of the most influential bodywork educators in the world, but his greatest contribution was something deceptively simple: he drew the lines.

His landmark book Anatomy Trains, first published in 2001, introduced the concept of myofascial meridians - continuous chains of fascia and muscle that run head to toe through the body, transmitting tension, force, and restriction across vast distances. Where Rolf proved fascia was the organizing matrix, Myers showed you exactly how that matrix was organized. He gave the whole system a map.

This is what made fascial understanding visually attainable. Before Anatomy Trains, you could understand intellectually that the body was connected. After it, you could see it. You could trace a line from the sole of your foot, up the back of your leg, along the spine, over the skull, and down to the brow. You could understand, finally, why your chronic neck pain might have nothing to do with your neck at all - and everything to do with a restriction three feet further down the chain.

For us, reading Anatomy Trains was a before-and-after moment. The myofascial lines gave us a framework for understanding why self-bodywork works the way it does - why releasing one area creates change somewhere seemingly unrelated, why the body responds to sequences rather than isolated work, why the whole really is more than the sum of its parts.

Myers also brought rigorous anatomical scholarship to a field that had been too often dismissed as unscientific. His dissection work, his collaboration with researchers, and his tireless teaching helped bring fascial science into the mainstream. He sits at the intersection of Rolf's hands-on legacy and the modern research era - the bridge between what she felt under her hands and what the labs would later confirm.