Author’s note: The following story is true, but as many names as possible have been omitted, altered, or abridged to protect the brave truth-tellers who came before me.
As we arrive on the scene, downtown Northampton, Massachusetts, where there are more bodyworkers than there are baristas… where you can’t throw a yoga instructor without hitting at least a dozen massage therapists… one must be careful when speaking about the coveted Deep Back Line.
It's reminiscent of the time we were road-tripping in the South and tincturing herbs along the way… somewhere in Nowheresville, West Virginia, I made the mistake of asking where I could get grain alcohol in a local diner. You know, y’all from around here? Iced tea? Sweet or unsweet? Need any directions or anything? “Yeah, do you know where to get grain alcohol?” Y’all best be … turns to look, and the entire place is so quiet you could hear a pin drop. Folks around here don’t take too kindly to outsiders asking such questions… “No… I meant for medicine making…”
Talking about the Deep Back Line (DBL) without reading the room gets a similar reaction. The DBL gets only whispers, in dark corners… when the practitioner makes sure no one is listening…
I stroll into a local coffeehouse, and I begin unpacking my rucksack. Armed with anatomy books and notebooks from the past few years of research, class notes, and printouts of articles with my chicken scratch and highlighter marks all over them… a string of strange phenomena is already afoot.
My usual order was mysteriously 86’d from the menu at the Woodstar Café. They had just run out… however, the counter helper (mysteriously wearing an earpiece) was able to order all the ingredients separately. Odd. No bother.
I found my usual chair and began assembling my workstation. That’s when I noticed my typewriter was frozen.
This is the device I prefer for writing my humble articles — frozen. I tried powering it off and back on. Still frozen. I tried the secret reset… hold for 15, 30, one minute… nothing.
Okay, it's technically a hybrid between a word processor and a computer… it has a screen like that of an e-reader, connects to the internet to share my writings to my drive, but cannot access any distractions. No spelling or grammar check. Editing is nearly impossible, and that’s by design. No web browsing, no social media, and certainly no doom-scrolling. It only toggles between documents, and the lever to do so looks like something out of a retro-futuristic control panel. It's perfect… just the right amount of tech, and the battery lasts forever.
Except for today.
As I go to finally write down the hidden knowledge I have uncovered about this sacred and secret myofascial meridian… my typewriter is frozen. Not out of battery. Just. Frozen.
I adapt… moving to pen and paper. I pull out my sketchpad and begin writing, “In Search of the Deep Back Line,” when suddenly my headphones die with very little warning.
“Recharge headset,” she said, in an English accent… or the accent I imagine a British robot might have. Those were her last words.
Suddenly, the already loud coffeehouse was filled with the white noise and flutes I was blaring to drown it out. It jumped right from headphones to cellphone speaker. Now I am only adding to the chaos. I quickly hit the volume down several times… opened the phone… closed the apps… okay.
I muddle through. I reach for my keychain, which hides a metal, waterproof, screw-top vial, and within it, my earplugs. I plug my ears and continue…
Before long, my pen runs out of ink. Luckily, it's one of those fat multicolored pens. I click the next best thing to black and carry on.
“Keep calm and carry on,” I imagine my British headset robot saying.
Meanwhile, my sandwich is called.
“Feeven,” someone at the counter calls out. “Order for Feeven.”
I had ordered under my name — “Steven… with a ph” — and… yeah… the sandwich was assembled… but in a to-go bag.
No bother. I only eat half at once anyway and save the rest for later.
But the barista apparently didn’t get the memo that I was writing sensitive materials. That I was blaspheming as we speak.
No — my mocha was served in a nice ceramic cup with a dollop of homemade whipped cream — just like I like it.
And as a bonus, whoever these silencers of the truth were, they didn’t know who I was… because they can’t even spell my name.
I sat back down and continued writing…
There is a mystery that has been plaguing bodyworkers for some time, ‘Does the Deep Back Line Exist?’ I think, at the most fundamental level, it has more to do with our need for symmetry and pairs in our anatomy — particularly in our nomenclature and naming schemes.
When it comes to muscles, for example, if a muscle’s name contains the word profundus, it means it is located deep to a similar muscle, which will then get the title of superficialis. So the extensor digitorum superficialis will be located on top of, or superficial to, the extensor digitorum profundus. Also, there are pairs like longus and brevis. So, sticking with the extensors, if we have an extensor digitorum longus, you will have an extensor digitorum brevis. Longus means… well… long. And brevis means short. Or, as I like to say, “That short king is short but brave!” And it's not just muscles we find these pairings in…
The nervous system gets in versus out, voluntary versus involuntary. The circulatory system gets away from and toward the heart. The lungs get big branches versus little ones. The digestive tract gets wider versus narrower. Even in the basics—day-one directional terminology—we get: anterior/posterior, medial/lateral, superior/inferior, etc.
So, when it comes to myofascial continuities, you can see we’re already used to thinking this way. These paired relationships are expected.
It was circa 2008, and we had an influx of students during the economic recession, some of whom were studying athletic training, strength training, and conditioning at a local four-year college down the street from the massage program I was teaching in. It was an exciting time… I not only suddenly had much larger classes than I had over the past few years, but the majority of the program was enthusiastic about going deeper and learning more. They challenged each other to want to do better. And when they got to my muscles-and-bones class… they really let me guide them into some fun territory.
I like to explore concepts, get creative, dive deep, find connections — make learning not only challenging but fun. I like to weave in concepts outside of the basics. In this case, instead of just thinking about muscles as having two types of attachment and one type of action… I like to think about what this muscle does when it's elongated and still contracting… how does it hold posture? Think of the whole personality of a muscle, not just what’s on its driver’s license… but what’s on its social media profile page! There’s just so much more to think about with a muscle and its relationships…
Armed with a few texts that had me thinking outside this box — Endless Web, a text written by some traditional osteopaths who were also Rolfers™ — I got my first glimpse of myofascial continuities: that is, muscles not ending at the insertion and not beginning at the origin, but functioning in a longer line of sorts.
There was another text, one aimed a bit more toward athletic trainers — “Manual of Structural Kinesiology.” I had ordered it for its wonderful charts on innervations (which nerve plugs into which muscle). I found this page that had an image of all of the muscles attached to the scapula and how they turn it. It was the first time I had seen a diagram like that. So simple.
It was around midterms. We had just finished the muscles of the upper extremity, and I created a group project, disguised as a game, that counted toward their midterm grade — and it was cooperative. Those who were participating and engaged got an A, which counted for half of their midterm! Even if they were wrong. If they could articulate what they were thinking, that was it.
What was the game? Take the scapula as the center point. Now tell me every muscle it attaches to, and therefore every bone it connects to via those muscles. I drew a skeleton on the board. The students had to draw each muscle they agreed on and attach it from the scapula to its other bones. These muscles were colored red (for those attached directly to the scapula). Name the muscle, explain its function at the scapula (in the simplest terms), and make sure you got all of its attachments right.
Now go back to those non-scapular attachments. If another muscle picked up from there… let's add it in (these were in blue) and try to explain a rationale for how they “functioned” together.
Essentially, I combined the concepts in two books… remember this wasn’t about getting it right or getting a textbook answer — this was for getting our minds thinking about myofascial chains.
We found a few interesting connections like this, following my oversimplified mnemonic of “bone–tendon–muscle–tendon [–bone]” (say that out loud and repeat… it’s the baseline of an anatomy song).
Within a day or two, a student from a different class caught me in the hallway. He had seen our project left on the board from the day before, and he couldn’t believe I had never heard of Anatomy Trains. I figured it was some kind of YouTube Crash Course thing… then he showed me a binder where he had printed off the entire book that would become my new bible… or perhaps the New Testament to the Trail Guide. I needed it. I had to have it.
So he got me a thumb drive of the PDF that had been circulating around his strength training and conditioning program. Sorry, Tom, but I found you via bootleg! Hopefully, becoming your devotee has made up for all the piracy.
It was in reading an illegal copy of Anatomy Trains that I began to realize that the myofascial connections to the scapula didn’t stop at the pelvis or the neck… but went all the way to the foot and to the head. What? I was astounded!
I read that book like I read the KJV growing up. By which I mean, I felt compelled by a power greater than myself to read it cover to cover in both a state of ecstasy — for I knew there was some sacred truth in there — and also bewilderment, for much of that truth went right over my mortal head.
Finally, I convinced the publisher to send me a “desk copy.” That’s teacher code for a free book. They were quite reluctant. There was a time when I could justify almost any anatomy, science, ethics, or massage book under the secret code of “desk copy.” But this sacred text was a bit more coveted than others. I had to justify my status and clearly articulate the class I was pitching it for and who I was pitching it to.
Not a problem. I knew I wasn’t lying. I was about to take that girl to curriculum review and force everyone to read it. At least as a supplement. At least look at the pictures!
While I was teaching an East Asian Bodywork class, we were looking at the acupressure pathways (meridians), and I was just about to hand out photocopies of the Sinew Channels when someone said I had a package on the clinic desk. On break, I unboxed it, and it was as if a golden light beamed from inside my cardboard Ark of the Covenant… there it was, in all its glory: the sacred text, most holy of holies — I had finally received my own legal (if still free) copy of Anatomy Trains, 2nd edition.
I flipped through it, and to my surprise, there was an appendix dedicated to the similarities between myofascial continuities and the main twelve acupuncture channels (Ordinary Vessels). But… and admittedly I don’t know why it didn’t click before… I HAD seen this all before. The sinew channels and the myofascial continuities — they bore a huge resemblance.
I photocopied each line and returned to class. Now I was armed with two sets of handouts: sinew channels from thousands of years ago and myofascial meridians from modern fascial research. “Okay, kids, let’s see if we can match these lines to the channels we’re studying…”
The Bladder Channel, the Bladder Sinew Channel, and the Superficial Back Line were the most obvious. But my students were determined. I had a cheat sheet; they didn’t. They had unlabeled photocopies to place in categories: Bladder Channel, Kidney Channel, Gallbladder, Liver, etc. They debated, mixed and matched, got out atlases from Netter’s Atlas to the Seirin Pictorial. Eventually, they declared they were done.
I gave them the Deadman book and my new treasure, and they were really accurate — scarily accurate. Once we made final arrangements and labeled the handouts, those handouts went straight into their binders. Then we palpated the meridians with newfound curiosity.
The conclusion was that the channels are inside the myofascia. Or, as one student put it, “the myofascia is inside the human energy system, closely related to the channels.”
It was also in that class that we started noticing something missing. Where there’s a yin organ, there’s a yang. Where there’s a superficial, there’s a deep. A front and a back. Everything is in pairs. There are Superficial Front Arm Line (SFAL) and Superficial Back Arm Lines (SBAL). There’s a Deep Back Arm Line (DBAL) and a Deep Front Arm Line (DFL). On the torso, there’s a right Lateral Line and a left Lateral Line. There’s a superficial front line and a Deep Front Line. But with the back line… There was only a Superficial Back Line. Not a deep.
Maybe the front and the back lines were the superficial pairs, and the core was its own thing… and the naming scheme was just a bit off.
By now, I had incorporated these materials into my muscles and bones class as well as my East Asian Bodywork class. And just under the surface, this question was always stirring: am I just caught up in a name, or am I missing a line? Where would you even put a deep back line?
Many moons later, I finally got to join my first Anatomy Trains course. No mention of the Deep Back Line. I asked. It didn’t exist.
A few more years passed, and I took the same course again… this time with Tom Myers himself. I had more pressing questions and had let it go.
Then, I was so inspired by the course, and the world was all but shut down, that I went up to Maine and took the whole Structural Integration training at Tom’s school.
And… over a thousand hours in… they let their devotees in on the secret.
The Deep Back Line.
WHAT?
Here I am, prepping for class, books open, laptop open… watching the pre-game video they sent out. The Deep Back Line. My hands trembled. I opened my notebook to the next chapter — The Deep Back Line. My body shook. It was real. It did exist.
The Deep Back Line.
Record scratch.
Oh. They’re saying it's just a conceptual framework… there isn’t really a real line… just the nickname for a session.
Then Tom said something interesting. He had a teacher, “Mr. Y.,” who was convinced it existed.
Y’all — this was on our homework pre-class video!
When I got to class the next week, one of my teachers was THE Mr. Y., the guy Tom had just mentioned, who was a true believer in the Sacred Order of the DBL.
That week, our course covered the territory of ATSI Session 9, a.k.a. the Deep Back Line. The very line that didn’t exist… but we had half a week dedicated to it? You must be joking.
I finally got Mr. Y. alone. I let him know I’d pay the tithe, blood sacrifice, or anything to know the Truth… but he wouldn’t budge. He didn’t want to deviate from the program.
I tried Ms. K., one of the unsung heroes of the ATSI program — she’s basically the school’s mom. She liked me. She would tell me.
Her truth, what she said, was: “It’s the front of the back and the back of the front.”
I pressed further. What kind of esoteric sleight of hand is that?
But she was steadfast. In her mind, it was that in-between space, those fascial coverings where the DBL and the SBL met — the differentiation between those — touching down to them, engaging, or even “evoking,” the core.
That was the Deep Back Line.
And I began to believe in Ms. K’s Line.
It was real. It had some weight to it.
After all… when we opened the seam to greet Tom, Dick, and Harry [See Tom just wanted a coffee], we evoked something within ourselves and our clients. When Mr. Y. taught me how to reach under the hamstrings, in between the hams and the adductors… it was powerful.
At one point, more confident than before, I asked Mr. Y. again, and this time he simply said he had written an article on the DBL in the Journal of Structural Integration. If I wanted to read that, he’d be willing to talk to me about it — but outside of class.
Mr. Y. wrote and published a paper on his findings of the DBL, in a prestigious journal, and wasn’t banished from the program? How was this even possible?
I scoured the internet that night. Sent it to print at my Airbnb. Made three copies for my study buddies (now known as the Equinox Crew… not because we were a cult, but because we rode around in a Chevy Equinox). And I studied.
Now I had two Deep Back Lines.
DBL 1: The front of the back and the back of the front. So, I needed to map the front of the muscles of the Superficial Back Line (SBL), and I needed to map the back of the muscles of the Deep Front Line (DFL). In addition, as I was learning in class, there were some structures that I had been including in the SBL that were “more so” located in the territory of the Deep Back Line session. So that’s going in the pot.
DBL 2: The “proposed” DBL that got a whole article in a journal, which I held in my hands. Map, study, etc.
Just when I thought I had enough confusion to work with… I got Tom.
I think it was in one of the breakout sessions that we called “Salon.” In there, I asked if he could illuminate things any further.
We had his PowerPoint lecture, the pre-game. We had a week of class where we discussed a session dedicated to it. I had this article by one of his teachers, and I had another teacher’s words — “front of the back and back of the front.” We worked on it with each other. We worked it on outside clients. And…
I don’t know if you know this about Tom Myers, but if he sees you’re truly interested — even if it's off-topic or a bit weird — if there is time and space, he will indulge.
And instead of confirming DBL 1 or DBL 2, he acknowledged that both of them had some merit and then quickly moved on to talk about a craniosacral practitioner who had their own DBL?!
And because this was in a semi-private setting, and my mind was freakin’ blown, I honestly could not tell you whether I had notes or whether my Dictaphone was running. I have hours and hours still to transcribe.
But with a few web searches and some time, I found that craniosacral analysis of the DBL… and it's basically the fascia associated with the craniosacral system (think more Upledger than Biodynamic)… but with a few additional myofascial whatnots thrown in for good measure.
As I was about reveal the great mystery of the Deep Back Line, put ink to paper and finally map it out in its entirety – I noticed a group of menacing-looking Pilates instructors headed in my general direction. I quickly packed up my belongings and headed out the back door.
Joke’s on you — my sandwich was already in a to-go bag!