“About suffering they were never wrong, the old masters: how well they understood its human position; how it takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.”

(W.H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts”)

In my favorite movie, Amélie, the main character’s love interest is trying to follow a path she has laid our for him, and he is stopped in front of a statue that points up to the next hill and clue. A child chides the dim hero with an old proverb, roughly translated as “When someone points at the sky, only a fool looks at the finger.”. Pain is the finger that points at the sky. The Rolfer is there to help the client examine the sky and relate it to the finger, not to simply remove, nor to be mesmerized by, the finger.

The Finger

Talking about pain itself becomes a verbal model of the complications existing around pain. Let me illustrate. When clients ask me what is causing a pain symptom (and they ask, because they don’t presume to know) – “Is it my old knee surgery scars?” “Is it my herniated disk?” “Is it the way I sit at my desk?” – I always ask around the it, instead of try to answer specifically. It is a trap. “Do you have an idea?,” I ask back. “Well, it hurts here . . .” they’ll begin. My usual follow-up is to ask about the pain, to gather as much information as I can about how the client uses language and gestures to describe his experience. I try to avoid coming to conclusions on the causes. It is my experience that once people’s minds reach a conclusion, new information has less of a chance to penetrate. For example, a client is convinced he has one short leg, and concludes that the discomfort in his back will always be there because he’ll never change his legs’ lengths. We may not change the leg length, but we may affect the discomfort anyway. How about them apples? We can make dangerous or obstructive assumptions about pain like “probably a nerve impingement,” or “sounds like a muscle tear,” and lose the trail of a more complete system—a system that maintains the pain symptoms. I am wary of being distracted and losing the clues that will lead me to great heights.

Pain is not the enemy. Why are we taught to try and rid ourselves of it?

As a Rolfer (with no other field of practice per se), my scope of knowledge revolves around the physical sensations that anchor the experience for us both. Relating the pain to the body brings us back around to talking about sensations again, where our information is. It’s the safe spot of paying attention again, and in due time, I am leading the questioning solidly out of the pain locale and into a general realm. “What else do you feel?” This new line of questioning is meant – in short – to lead us away from the distraction that pain can be, and relieve us both from the duty of fixing the problem, away from the cause/ effect model and away from coming to conclusion. Some clients are gifted at feeling a banquet of other sensations and some need our gentle prompting.

Primarily, we focus on the release of constricted tissue. In practice, I spend Ten Series after Ten Series following the logic that if I can help a body balance its tensional forces, people’s pain will either release its hold as we proceed, or it will eventually, with patience, lose the war of attrition to better posture in the long run. At the threshold of considering advanced training in Rolfing® Structural Integration (SI), naturally I feel the squeeze to know how to handle one-off appointments, where clients legitimately hope for immediate relief. Rolfing SI as a system does not lack the agility to address pain directly, but even if “relief” is realistically understood, and the client will forgive its brevity, is there not a larger responsibility, to address the mind/body and to respect the role of pain in its family of experience?

Back to the Sky

While I endeavor to pay attention to the whys and wherefores of a specific injured tissue, I also need to remember that a client’s pain is an intimate experience. Each person has an intimate, sometimes complicated, relationship with his pain. That relationship is as much part of the maintenance of pattern as it is key to relief, equal to other factors. The relationship he has with pain in general is a very interesting question. This question trumps all healing attempts and excursions off the bat. Clients may not know the nature or sensation in detail, or want to be too curious. The answers to “How do you feel about pain in general?” will be the basis for their whole experience, facilitate and block, spread caution or trust in proportion. They came to us, presumably to be free of pain, without ultimate awareness of how “pain-free” can be achieved. That’s what we’re here for, whether we lead them to ultimate freedom from pain, or lead them to their own acceptance of pain among the relationships of the mind/body family.

Recently, I have had a string of clients who had just “had enough” of their pain. Acute or chronic, pain had plagued them for months and years to some degree. I’m sure we have all had our share of clients with pain that we have wanted to instantly make vanish with the wave of a magic wand. And we have all held off, in the better judgment, to find a way to enable a body to support itself more ideally. Through Ida Rolf’s principle that gravity is the organizing factor, we instead encourage ease within gravity, which will, I presume to say, transcend pain, and enable the alleviation of it, at least as long as postural alignment can be judged a major contributor.

The Sky

Obviously, the pain of a broken leg should stop a body in its tracks. But even the dull pain of depression can be described as a way to slow down, alerting a sufferer to pay attention to his body/mind in a new way. The act of paying attention ideally brings enough information to find a way to generally and specifically adjust the system – a system that has, in effect, supported the painful condition – to shift it to support a resulting pain-free system. In other words, the relationships around the pain shifts focus away from the locus of the sensation of pain on to a host of other information.

But relationship is still the main issue. For one facet, a client’s relationship to his or her own pain is a point in the tensegrity model of the mind/body. One cannot work without it, whether attempting to deny, or attempting to relieve the pain. Other basic facets are the client’s relationship to his body, judgments about pain, attitudes about relief (e.g., never sees the doctor, takes lots of medicines, or “walk it off, sissy”), patience, trust, the perceived skills of his helpers, and more . . . all of these things hold place in the mind/body system, just as any bone holds place and relates to a structural model of the body.

How do we know how a client deals with these factors? The questions we ask about a client’s body are the most obvious opportunity to demonstrate real respect for how he feels about pain. But first, and frequently forgotten – how does the Rolfer feel about pain?

I’ll be honest. Like most practitioners, I’m afraid of not relieving the pain. I’m afraid of re-injuring someone when he needs healing the most. Without examining these attitudes, I run the risk of unconsciously imposing my fear or agendas onto my client. To sincerely put away my fear, acknowledging it and releasing it each time it arises, I can be responsible for the task at hand, and endeavor to remain as neutral as I can for the sake of uncovering the client’s attitudes, which are supremely pertinent.

Another major factor in my relationship to pain in general is my physical history with pain and injury in my own body, which can also be a silent participant in the healing room if I don’t acknowledge it. My story began with the migraines I had as a baby and that continued my whole early life. I was strong and athletic but these headaches put me down twice a month for twenty-four years before my first Rolfing series cleared the relationships that led to the pattern. Before Rolfing SI, though, I learned to pay attention to how I felt because of the pain itself. Warning signs, triggers, pressure points – the pain was motivating me to figure out how to relieve it! In addition, “my headaches” became part of my identity, how I got attention and was forgiven weakness, even as I was miserable with it. Long story short, my relationship with my pain became one of detailed curiosity, patience, “specialness,” and resignation as well. I can’t expect every (nor any) client to have the same tensegrity model of pain attitudes as I have. I have to listen and interact with what the client is reporting, applying my curiosity, patience, and acceptance to his whole system.

While pain legitimately takes up a lot of attention, if a client is encouraged to feel what else is present in the body, change can take hold perhaps better or more confidently. I ask questions that leave space for the acknowledgment of the discussion, letting the client fill in the blanks. As I was taught, I use statements of validation to prompt trust and confidence in whatever language or gestures the client uses to explore and describe his experience. I keep my language neutral, free of any of my own associations to pain and to not trigger any associations the client may have. I try to pick up nonverbal cues to the client’s acceptance or rejection of my touch or information. Questions that occur to me frequently include:

• Is the client not wanting to pay attention to sensation?
• Is he paying deep attention but not talking about it?
• Is he never taking suggestions of exploring on his own?
• Is he coming in with discoveries despite the presence of persistent pain?

Keeping open to answers to these questions and more are all ways of clueing in to the client’s approach and attitudes. And as always, having patience and respect for the wisdom of the client’s mind/body models. The truth is that we can’t speed up or impose the results we’d rather see, nor can he.

Clouds Move Slowly – A Bear Becomes a Bunny

I had a mechanic in Atlanta who was absolute gold. I could bring my car in and it’d be perfect in a day, never costing more than necessary. But while he could fix the car as soon as he looked at it, he always asked me the questions that led me to detail my experience, which was an indispensable quality when I had a real mystery to solve. “Its brake pedal becomes soft sometimes, and then I smell chemicals and then the brakes give out, but only every six months.” It was an improbable problem to have. “When the brakes cool down a while the problem goes away and it’s fine.” Of course he could take it from there. But he asked me about the smell some more. And what did I mean by soft, and how long did it go soft before the smell came, and the giving up? Did any of these things happen independently of the others? He couldn’t find anything mechanically wrong. But he believed me. And when my brakes really fried out in a scary episode, I limped it into Mr. Clarke’s and we replaced them. Twice in two years.

His ability to tap into my relationship with my car gave me the trust in him that I needed to eventually get the dangerous problem solved. And even if the brakes weren’t to be immediately fixed, I maintained patience and dedication to it because he valued and respected my relationship to my car when other experts did not. Eventually, it was only my close attention to the patterns after the third brake failure that led to a discovery that the pin got stuck open or closed at random times, doing damage that had little regularity. A car is a machine, but there’s also the driver’s relationship with the car that can save its self-destruction.

Pain as a Trust Process

So far, I’ve written about the pain of injury, stuckness, and misalignment in gravity. But pain is relevant to the client and Rolfer by way of the pain of healing itself. SI has deserved its historical reputation as a painful process, though it is no longer necessarily so. Still, in any modality can acknowledge the discomfort of a body’s healing process, even to speak of a scab over a cut beginning to itch as it knits.

In training at the Rolf Institute®, I learned to ask clients to let me know when the pain they feel under my hand feels like a four out of five or higher, so I could gauge my pressure. After a time, I have retired that practice, because I found that it made more of my clients nervous under my touch. (Maybe putting the question out there touched on my inner fears, but I’ve noticed positive results in not asking the question this way. But, I would like to emphasize that I’m not recommending this to anyone who may find the one-to-five model useful for clients.) My experience is that in asking clients to gauge the working pain:

1. I’m telling them I may go too far, which they will look out for with a preconceived vigilance in the nervous system.
2. I’m telling them that I’m afraid of hurting them, which sets up the idea that I may not be trusted or confident in my approach.
3. I’m suggesting that pain is not acceptable. Some clients are led to pay attention only to volume of pain, not quality of sensation.

In regards to number three, paying attention to sensation is primary in integrative work precisely because integration means we accept a certain amount of all sensations, including pain, and find their appropriate messages. Most clients do not have much ambiguity around pain and do not feel shy about expressing its presence (if nonverbally sometimes), but still I prefer to ask clients to describe any “sensations” as we work together, and to let me know what they need from me as we go along. I find that this encourages them to say, “I need less pressure” or “I need to stop you” if that is the case. When encouraging a client to expand his personal awareness, it is often more successful to trust him to feel more subtlety before he even has the confidence to do so – like asking a leg to bend cleanly when we know it will twist on the way, but we work to make “cleanly” the goal.

Pain is part of life. In another of my favorite movies, The Princess Bride, there is a great line: “Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” One of the motivations in a long and happy life is to be as healthy as possible, to enjoy pain-free days and nights. Too often, our chief complaints as humans revolve around the aches and discomforts that denote chronic misalignments, and indeed Rolfing SI can take a huge chunk out of the discomfort levels of our clients. At the same time, we also attempt to make sense of things that are not pointed out from the actual pain of the client. It is our job, as agents of integration, to help humans to move from the rejection of pain, and the medical model that pain must be relieved as quickly as possible (and sometimes at great future cost), into a clearer understanding of the part that pain plays in the whole – which of course is a matter of individual meaning: like clouds in the sky, the viewer sees what she sees.

Kerry E. structurhas been a Rolfer since 2005, practicing first in Atlanta and Chattanooga, and currently in Los Angeles. She has gratefully served on the committees for practice building and editing of Structural Integration: The Journal of the Rolf Institute®, and enjoys writing for her blog, http://rolfingmatters. wordpress.com. Kerry has been an actress, dancer, and stuntwoman on stage. Her poetry been published in Edinburgh, Scotland through the writing group she met there while on sabbatical in 2011.