1st Novel: NODding Out Chapter 37

Peeling onions

Onion. iPhone. © 2025 - Samuel Claiborne

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Sometimes my own book blows my own mind. Why? Because I find there’s a lot of wisdom in this thing that I wrote, and yet more often than not, I don’t live into or up to that wisdom!

A lot of Andy’s journey is a journey of letting go of the intermeshed stew of emotions we carry from our trauma. Letting go, or perhaps rather unweaving the triggers of the past from the present situation, can be a very liberating thing. But it can be (is) often so fucking scary — if you’re doing it right!

And so often I’ve utterly failed. I guess the things I wrote in the book are aspirational. Still, they have a clarity that I wonder at; where the fuck did all of that come from?

Truth is, I’ve labored hard, through therapy, multiple types of meditation, time spent at the Hoffman Institute (highly recommended), and even prayer, to become less reactive, less easily triggered and to, as Andy puts it, “stop taking everything so personally”.

And yet…

I remember a therapist of mine read this book, which was written well before I started therapy with him, and he said, essentially, “I don’t get it - I’ve been telling you all of this stuff for several years, but it’s all here!” He was, frankly, pissed off a tiny bit, but also amused. “It’s all here in your book! You clearly see the fundamental issues of what it means to be human, from the fallibility of memory to how triggers are all based in the past. And you see your issues! And yet: you are still so triggerable, and you still often take everything so personally!”

And so I do. Almost all of us do, to one extent or another. I always joke: let the Dalai Lama live for five years in the same house with an intimate partner and we’ll see just how well his equanimity survives…

Still, I am striving for the kind of clarity that Andy’s basically being forced by circumstance to apprehend.

These challenging relationships and circumstances, what we call life, peel off some of the layers, for some people, while they accrete more armor onto others. There’s a choice there, one you have to make in response to every trauma, if you want to stop accreting.

I don’t know about you, but I not only want to stop accumulating layers, I wanna peel ‘em! That’s what all that hard work’s been about, which is why I still feel that the only way to really peel the onion is to do it consciously, and, alas, to be gentler on one’s self than I often am, for failures to grow, failures to clearly perceive, learn from, and finally to let go of patterned behaviors.

Like all of you, I am a work in progress. And, like all of you, the configuration of my triggers is unique: something that might infuriate me might roll off of you like water off a duck’s back, and vice-versa.

I just mentioned the Hoffman Institute, and, if I had the money and health, I might go back and take the quite pricey over week long residential course again.

Hoffman has a model of what it is to be human that, while not revolutionary, is simple and clear, and makes sense to me.

They call it the Quadrinity. Basically, you have four “bodies”, the physical, the emotional, the intellectual, and the soul. The first three bodies are distortable, damageable, and mortal - they stick around for this life only. The last is immortal and cannot be damaged, destroyed, or defiled; it is inviolate.

Moreover, those first three bodies will be damaged and distorted in this life — usually most profoundly by early experiences, but also by severe traumas later on in life.

In my case, as I spoke of on a recent video (which you can watch HERE) on my YouTube channel, beyond all of my childhood trauma, a lot of deaths in my family in short succession, coupled with my multiple spinal and brain injuries in 1992 changed me profoundly.

Because of frontal lobe damage, I became so reactive and lost so much impulse control that I was suddenly punching walls and throwing furniture, things I’d never done before in my life.

It took many, many sessions of Neurofeedback at the Stone Mountain Center in Tillson, NY to, as I call it “bring back my sweetness”.

But let’s not overstate it. When roused, when hurt, when triggered, I can still be incredibly vitriolic in my verbal dismemberment of whomever has “wronged” me. Part of that is more integral - stemming from my parents (especially my father) and from childhood. But part of it is a result of the considerable reactive residue left over from my brain injures. I’ve healed them a lot, but not entirely by any means.

It’s all me, though, and I feel that despite emotional damages from childhood and physiological damages acquired later on, I am still responsible for my failings in these areas.

I often call myself “The stupidest smart person in the world.” Because, among other things, I am absolutely amazed by how long it often takes me to even realize what’s going on inside of me. I feel that I am extraordinarily slow at times to actually consciously recognize what I’m feeling, and why, so that I can get a handle on my response to myself and to others.

Noy long before I left America, a dear friend of many years did something to me that felt like a betrayal. When I told her of my hurt, she, as per her own triggers, which call for defense, denial, and deflection, could not only not apologize, or show a shred of empathy, but she doubled-down, placing all of the blame for her own discrete decisions and actions upon me.

And… I became enraged. I attacked her with all of my venom and skill. I wasn’t lying: I do not believe I said anything untrue. But I was cruel, vindictive, totally scorched earth. It was behavior that did no one any good, and was beneath the picture of me that I like to pretend is me.

It took me two weeks to actually cry over what she’d said and done. Two weeks of self-righteous rage, safely protecting me from any feelings of vulnerability and heartache. Two weeks of emailed attacks against her from the part of my personality that I call “The Lawyer from Hell”.

By my lights, this lawyer is usually pretty correct in his analysis, but he’s inhumanly aggressive and cold in how he uses my reasoning, my intelligence, as a cudgel to beat the shit out of someone who, in the rarified air of my high dudgeon, I feel has wronged me.

But what was I really trying to do? What was really going on under the surface?

In truth, I was trying to get some empathy from that first vulnerable email, and maybe an apology. I was trying to be heard, to have my pain acknowledged. Instead, I was shut down as she deflected, and turned my feelings against me, and utterly invalidated my experience as I was blamed — as I so often had been by both of my parents in childhood — for her/their actions.

It took me so long to realize that although the original offence had felt like a betrayal, what had really made me go stratospheric in my rage was that I’d communicated how hurt I felt to her, and she’d not only failed to empathize with my pain, or even acknowledge it, it felt from my triggered place that she’d refused to even hear me as she proceeded to use her own Lawyer from Hell to construct a rather torturous rationalization that not only put all blame on me, but absolved her of any responsibility — to the point that it almost denied her any agency in the matter at all.

It was this, my reaching out initially from pain, not anger, and being met with denial and blame and zero empathy (ironically from someone who calls herself a “spiritual leader”) that magnified the hurt tenfold, maybe a hundredfold, because I’d come from a place of vulnerability.

And so, an almost instantaneous transformation into highly self-righteous rage erupted, completely protecting me for two weeks from the immense pain of abandonment I felt — a pain that, of course had more to do with my mother, and childhood than it did with her. But hell hath no fury like little Sammy scorned…

The past was conjured from the present by my clever little trigger system, conflated with it, and alchemically transmuted into rage, which is much easier for the heart to stand in the short run, and ironically so much more corrosive to it in the long run.

These triggered behaviors do serve a function: they were designed to protect the heart from things that felt unbearably scary and painful, but they persist in doing their thing even when they now do more harm than good, when they become patterned Pavlovian straitjackets.

I am still in awe that I felt none of this pain and sorrow consciously for two weeks! It was occluded, sheltered inside a ball of rage. And man did it hurt when I it finally broke through (with the help of a therapist). I cried like a baby. Harder than a baby. I cried like a man crying his guts out…

And so, here I am, a smart guy who’s often a fool, incredibly impulsive, and often unconscious about what’s simmering, or boiling, or dying, beneath my own surface. I am often a walking terra incognita to myself, after all of this fucking work!

What da Buddha said…

Buddha said that there are only two real emotions: fear and love. What a genius observation — one of those things that seemed as obvious as hell to me once I heard it, but I’m not sure I ever would have come up with it myself.

All of these triggered behaviors stem from fears: the existential fears of violence, starvation, abandonment, and the other deep fears of being unlovable, unworthy of love, or maybe, as in my case, the deep fear that love itself is an just illusion, something you can never trust or rely upon, because you’re really on your own, navigating a purely transactional sea of interpersonal relationships, simulations of the true connection I so desperately yearn for (I don’t sound paranoid at all, do I?).

To bring it one step closer to Buddha’s analysis, I could say that I am too often a soul clinging precariously atop a rampaging elephant with its own agenda, an agenda that’s doing neither myself nor anyone else any good.

That elephant is ego, powered by emotion, and buttressed by intellect — two of the three distorted, damaged bodies from this lifetime, acting in concert to wreak havoc.

Oh devious fucking intellect; such a clever little reasoning, rationalizing machine that often masquerades as the soul, but isn’t any such thing. It was masquerading as such in my friend’s case, and it was masquerading in my response as well.

Intellect, in service to ego, in its role as soul-impostor, says: “I have the answers! My analysis is truth! And so, I am right!”

And how is that working out for you?

Hasn’t done me a fucking lot of good, I can tell you. And, the smarter you are, the smarter it is, rationalizing, creating hallucinations about others and self that can be so damn convincing.

And then there’s the emotional body. It’s in cahoots. And perhaps it’s even more devious for someone who likes to think they’re on a soul-centered, heart-centered path.

Why? Well, for many reasons in many ways, but here’s an example: What often feels like “True Love” is just brain chemistry based on past patterns (the Imago model of relationship has some good insights on this). You think you’re doing the heart-centered thing, for example, in getting together with this person. But it’s often based on poverty mentality, the fear of eventual rejection, betrayal, abandonment, of never being good enough, so you take anyone who’ll have you, and you take on their damage into your life, because being alone feels worse... for a while.

You’re being led by fear, but you think it’s love. It’s… demonic! And yet, it’s how we’re built - all of us in one way or another, except, possibly, those lucky enough to have formed really secure attachments in childhood.

And even there… well, I have to say that I’ve NEVER personally known anyone totally immune to triggers, rationalizations, all of it. I am not saying these people don’t exist, but I’ve met some pretty heavy-hitters in the spiritual world, and those I’ve gotten to know well enough, well, their shit stinks too.

But, as Captain Kirk says: We must strive! And so, strive we do — or, at least, some of us do.

The banality of evil - it’s inside all of us:

There’s a gordian knot here - because even people of good will, with good hearts, people who genuinely strive to do the right thing, can actively support evil!

There are people whom I think are psychopathic or sociopathic to different degrees, like Putin, Trump, Musk, Bovino, Noem, et. al.

But then there’s my former girlfriend, now a full-on MAGA cult member, who seems to feel no empathy for what the people of Minneapolis are going through, and, honestly, I believe that she believes that all of these demonstrators are not regular folks trying to save democracy and protect their neighbors, but nefarious shadowy ANITIFA operatives bused in by George Soros. I’m serious.

I mean, she’s a good person. She feels empathy — but her own traumas, and her accumulated family traumas as upper-class refugees from Castro’s Cuba, have, in effect, dulled both her heart and her intellect. She’s in full trigger mode, to the point that she’s lost a lot of humanity.

She not only cannot feel for the people murdered in Minneapolis, but she can look at a women turning her car’s wheels away from a man (who’s just run in front of her car), a woman looking the other way from him and down the street, clearly trying to leave, and my ex sees what she’s been told; that this is a radical intentionally “weaponizing her vehicle”.

She can see a nurse pepper sprayed as he tries to help a woman who’s just been brutalized, then this nurse is beaten, disarmed, and then shot 10 times in the back - and she thinks this was a “legitimate response by law enforcement”.

She can see an entire city brutalized and terrorized, the brutality almost universally leveled against completely non-violent citizens exercising their rights to freedom of assembly and freedom of speech - and they’re “the enemy within”.

For exercising these core rights, these peaceable citizens are repeatedly brutalized by fists, arms, legs, and munitions. And she sees all of this as somehow justified.

In her world, the mayhem unleashed against this city is caused not by the invasive, gratuitously violent occupying army that refuses to respect the Constitution, but by the citizens themselves.

She will not believe her own eyes. She will instead regurgitate, verbatim, what’s she’s instead been told to believe.

For her, Trump is correct when he says he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth avenue, and she’d still support him, still believe whatever lies were promulgated to justify his behavior.

I’ve extended this to the grotesque at times to try and make a point: he could kill an 8 year old boy on Fifth Ave, then bugger him, and the MAGA cult would say that he’d killed a highly trained assassin and was just frisking the body for weapons.

I mean - is that really very far from the theater of the absurd (and tragic) disconnect between what we’re seeing and what we’re being told to see?

And, perhaps most ironically for my ex, while Trump’s resemblance to tyrants and strongmen from Castro to Hitler, and, most perfectly to my mind, to Benito Mussolini, has been incredibly obvious to so many of us for so long, she and her entire family still project someone akin to Jefferson or Lincoln onto a damaged, amoral, womanizing, draft-dodging two-bit grifting, sadistic bully who much more closely resembles the object of her family’s intergenerational hatred, Fidel Castro.

This is the banality of evil, and it’s really terrifying, this capacity to rationalize those dark emotions and to dehumanize anyone who dovetails into your concept of “the other” or “the enemy".

It’s terrifying that a good person, with a good heart, like my ex girlfriend, can be so blinded to the inhumanity being committed by those she’s been programmed to blindly support against those she’s been programmed to see as mortal threats, enemies.

She even told me the other day that’s Trump’s more popular in the polls than ever. I mean, it’s an alternative universe she’s inhabiting, as unreachable as the Andromeda galaxy.

But, still, it’s similar to things I’ve felt, to how I’ve reacted, only writ very, very large.

Oh, yes, it has much more dire consequences, life and death consequences, than my attacks on an erstwhile friend, and I pray I wouldn’t fall prey to these pernicious beliefs under any circumstance. But isn’t it really all of a piece? Is it all just a matter of degree? Would most of us, from the Buddha on down, come to rationalize cruelty, even murder, if sufficiently frightened? If the right button were pressed for all of us?

God knows I’ve seen it on the left — just look at China’s Cultural Revolution, or the student mobs so concerned about the “violence” of misusing pronouns and deadnaming, suddenly chasing Jewish students through the halls of Columbia and Cooper Union screaming vitriol and bl;oody murder.

No one is immune. Constant vigilance is required.

And yet, even in the most horrific places, love can conquer fear:

I just saw a YouTube documentary on the plane crash in the Andes of a soccer team and their families in the 1970s that led the survivors to resort to cannibalism in order to survive.

And, in truth, it’s a testimony to love, not Lord of the Flies. It’s amazing, and you can watch it HERE.

There they all are - several have already died. They’re freezing, and they’re starving, in a high Andes valley with no wood, no plants, no wildlife, and towering jagged steep mountains and a massive glacier hemming them in on all sides.

They were going to starve to death, and they all knew it.

So, they called a meeting to discuss what no one wanted to even consider: eating the flesh of their dead friends, team mates, and relatives in order to survive, an almost incomprehensibly horrific thing to try to wrap your mind around.

Almost everyone reflexively said NO! And that was almost that… until one of them quietly looked up at all of them and said “If I die, you have my permission to eat my flesh to survive”.

And, one by one, they found their answer inside: they’d all want their friends to survive if they died, any way they could, including using a body they would no longer need.

And so, that is how this group of people (only men, by the end), most of them deeply Catholic, broke one of human kind’s oldest, strongest taboos - not out of hatred, or greed, but out of love, for each other.

When they were eventually rescued, after a tale of unimaginable courage, grit, and ingenuity, the truth of how they survived came out. The newspapers were aflame with it. People were furious.

So, only a few days after their rescue from almost 3 months of harrowing emotional loss and physical suffering, they gave a news conference. Some of the survivors wanted to sugar coat it, but just as they had with all of their previous decisions, they met as a group and decided to tell the unvarnished truth.

And something happened. Their humanity, their looking out for each other, love for each other, is what shown through!

The news conference ended with a standing ovation. Most of the families of those who’d been consumed subsequently released statements affirming their gratitude that their loved one’s deaths had not been in vain. Even the Pope sent a telegram telling them that their actions were not sinful, given the extremity of their circumstances.

There’s kind of a corollary here for me: if you want your soul to live to its full expression in this life, you must cultivate the ability to look at and take on what you cannot stand to see, to feel what feels unbearable to feel, and to question most of all the beliefs and feelings that resonate most closely within you.

None of us gets out of here alive, after all, right? In the end, it’s all existential…

And turning towards love, even when it’s hard as hell, on a personal level, a national level, an international level, is all we’ve got.

And yet, we, all of us, or virtually all of us, suck at it!

How many intelligent people, people who feel themselves to be spiritually enlightened, have I seen rationalizing their bullshit? As Manny would say: a fuckuva lot.

We gotta do better. I think we can do better.

Perhaps we’re in the act, every day, every moment, even in this dark time in history, where authoritarian strongmen are multiplying like maggots, learning to love better.

The whisperings of the the quiet member of the Quadrinity:

While the physical body blares its pains, longings, and addictions, and the intellectual body schemes to concoct a coherent rationale to yell out in support of the emotional body’s primal chthonic forces, the true heart-center, the soul, merely whispers.

It’s the whispering we must all become more attuned to, first and foremost.

I see this all too clearly, but all too often only in theory, failing to actually hear its plea to me to risk feeling and genuinely loving. I have a big loving heart, but oh man, can it spring shut like a fucking bear trap when I’m deeply hurt or frightened, just like my ex, just like… everyone? Almost everyone?

Certainly like Andy. Here is where we find him - peeling away more layers but damn, it hurts.

Soon, a layer of incredible pain, an ego-destroying layer that he’s unwittingly nurtured within in order to denude himself of all of his power, just to avoid the pain of ever feeling responsible for the fate of anyone else ever again, will be challenged.

All of his defenses will soon be on Defcon 4, wanting to nuke anyone who wants to help him see how he’s crippled himself via the gymnastics of his team of ego-intellect, and emotion.

But. Not. Quite. Yet…

The next few chapters are an inflection point for Andy, or, maybe more precisely, a fulcrum. And if he can just open himself up to the pain, and clear it, if his soul can find its leverage, lift him up clear of the jungle of fear and defense and self recrimination, and into the soul-light, there’s nothing that he, or I, or you, can’t do!

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Chapter 37

We did this for three days. I mean, that’s all we did for something like eight hours a day, with stops for tea. The balance was spent in sitting meditation, which was easier on my body but not my hamster brain.

Sometimes we would do the clearing down meditation; I was to feel all the places in my body that called attention to themselves—places that felt stiff or sore, numb or tingly, or even particularly strong. I was to soften these places, to feel them turning from ice to water to vapor, and finally to nothing, just evaporated space.

I began to feel these spots, especially in my spine and skull, but all over as well, from my eyes to my toes to my shoulder blades, and even in my cock, a place I’d never thought of as holding tension. But then again, I’d never noticed that my perineum was hard and tight and… scared.

I could feel fear there, and as I learned to let go, it came out to play, as did all of the other emotions. Memories flooded me and moods took hold of me out of nowhere. I couldn’t believe that just standing in a specific posture, and doing the clearing down meditation could produce such profound reactions in my mind.

“Remember,” she told me, “your body will want to re-encapsulate the trauma. You have to have the courage to make the conscious effort to release it. This goes against human nature, but you must do it, or you will achieve nothing at all.”

And so I practiced. And sometimes I could feel myself releasing the traumas, and sometimes I could feel them creeping back in, pulled in greedily by my shadow, despite my best efforts. Then I’d peel off another layer and try again. And I finally did relax my perineum, and learned to let it breathe.

But before I could release it, relax it, I had to see what was there and dissolve it. And what I found there was an unreasoning fight-or-flight fear that was awesome in its power and depth. Once I found it, focused on it, I could trace it right up my spine. This fear almost tore me in two. It was pernicious and it didn’t want to let go. Or I didn’t want to let it go.

As I worked on it, layers of anxiety and terror peeled away. It seemed that any fear I’d experienced in my life was there, in accretions, layers of sediment: fossilized terror. It made me ill to see it and feel it and understand what it had done to me, how it had held me back.

But even that was a trap. Thinking about the past, about what that fear might have caused me to do or not do, about missed opportunities, that just took me out of the moment, so my sneaky body and mind could try to hold on to the fear by distracting me from dissolving it. I couldn’t dissolve these terrors in my past, only here, in the moment, so I strove mightily to stay present.

Eventually, the fear seemed to go all the way back to birth, to non-verbal sensations that I could get on a body level, but for which there were no words.

Perhaps they even went all the way back to my time spent in my mom’s belly: her fears and anxieties about having me, wondering if her frail marriage could stand the strain of another child. I don’t know if these were the actual fears, I only know that I must have felt some sort of fear then, in her belly, and it must have been hers, transmitted umbilically to me in a manner as old as mothers and their young.

After three days, we moved outside, to a tiny strip of sandy clay at the water’s edge. It was a reedy, sad place, strewn with pieces of driftwood and lapped by brackish water. I was nervous about it at first, about being aboveground, under the sky. I mean, even Bestic seemed to stay underground most of the time. But Lucia told me it was absolutely necessary, that I needed to be in contact with night and day and sun and moon and stars to reach the proper state of concentration. And anyway, had I really thought that a wooden barn would protect me?

Truth is, I loved it. There was sun during the day and stars and moonlight at night. I got to see the moon and the sun rising and setting on the lagoon’s syrupy tidal flats and shoals. Over and over again, little spits of clayey land surfaced and submerged like lazy whales throughout the cycling tides. I became hypnotized, sometimes staring at the moon, staring into it until I was blind to anything else, and finally to it as well.

She began to teach me yin seeing, or inward seeing.

“In the West, we peer out, trying to push ourselves into the environment with our sharply-focused eyes, all of our ocular muscles tensed. It’s a very yang and masculine way of seeing that expends a lot of energy, and misses much. It has its place, such as the observer in the crow’s nest of a ship, or the day watchman keeping a lookout for Mongols on the Great Wall, but it is only one way of seeing.

Those in the East developed a softer way of seeing as well. They invited the world inside, in a soft, unfocused gaze rather than a sharp glance. You see more, you see less. You see energetic structures more acutely, physical structures less acutely. You see motion, especially peripheral motion, much more acutely, which is why that same watchman might have employed yin vision on the night shift. It is neither better nor worse, it merely performs a different function.”

Day after day, night after night, for about two weeks, the sun and the moon and the waves blurred. And when I looked at her with that soft gaze, I thought I saw a slight shimmering around her. We had slowly worked up to about 20 hours a day. I was eating in posture, though I was mostly living on tea. I only took bathroom breaks and I spent perhaps ten minutes of each hour lying on the beach with my sore feet resting in the cool water.

From sleep-deprivation and fatigue and the magic of yin-gazing at the moon, I finally entered a fugue-state of strange clarity. And after about three more days, I started hallucinating. The waters rose and formed into animals and waterspouts and mountains and sailing ships. I learned later that they’d given me my first dose of ergot that night.

Lucia started speaking to me without speaking. I had entire conversations with her without a word being spoken. I couldn’t believe it, yet I was sure of it. During the cool nights I’d see steam coming from her nose holes, but none from her mouth. But we were talking! Or were we? Was it all a hallucination when she pointed out a part of my skull, a fissure-site on my right temple where I still held the rage and grief of that last day with Nina? And I released it and cried all night, struggling to let it go, to stop from re-embracing that bitter memory.

Though bitter, it was a memory of love nonetheless, with its concomitant emotional charge, that charge we humans so zealously hold close to our hearts, though it kills us as surely as life-giving salt will kill a tree. Memory, the thing I was fighting to save, what was it? Wasn’t it the root of pain? The enemy? What was I doing this for? Wouldn’t it just be better to… forget?

No. The next morning I could remember that last day with Nina, even remember how peaceful she looked in her best nightgown, without falling to pieces or gritting my teeth in rage as I had so often before. It was a loving memory, uncluttered by past associations of loss, a wound debrided of the human context of infantile grief, all that Freudian striving for mama, etc. Instead, the memories of Nina stood on their own, in the context of themselves only, not conflated with childhood traumas and drives.

Was my affect flattening? Was I somehow becoming… unfeeling? No. Great feelings of tenderness and love and sadness were there, but they were true feelings, feelings derived from those distinct experiences alone rather than the smudgy mélange of memory and experience we naturally conjure up when we feel emotions. It was a new way of feeling, far removed from that messy stew of totally unrelated stimuli strung together by our busy, mischievous intellects, blown out of proportion by our emotionally over-reactive limbic brains.

There was a purity to the remembrance, a lack of weight and baggage to it. I could still feel, could still even cry, but I was finally crying for those moments alone, not for a thousand other jumbled-together events.

“You will have to practice this for the rest of your life, Andrew, to stay vigilant, for it is not the normal way of being. From time to time, you will find you have fallen into the old groove, you will feel the rage, the terror, the grief, whatever, blown out of proportion. Then you will know it is time to do some more work. Peeling off the layers is an endless process, and it takes courage and commitment. But it brings peace and strength.”

One day Lucia began a raft of other qigong exercises. She taught me Cloud Hands and Bend the Bow, Shoot the Arrow and my favorite, the Marriage of Heaven and Earth. These started to teach me to have delicate control of skeletal and muscular structures and energetic processes within my body. I learned that I could breathe with my pelvis, actually flex the bones there, opening and closing them slightly. Similarly, I learned to move individual vertebrae and individual bones in my skull.

This contravened everything I was taught in med. school. The pelvic girdle and the skull are both supposed to be monolithic bone structures formed of multiple fused bones. These individual bones are not supposed to have the capacity of individual movement or adjustment, and no-one is supposed to be capable of the muscular control necessary to move a single vertebra. School’s wrong; I did these things.