Derek Gill: The story is told that Dr. Rolf gave you a mandate to go off and study cranial work with various osteopaths to bring that knowledge back to the Rolfing [Structural Integration (SI)] community.
Jim Asher: Yes. It started out when I was in a Rolfing class with Ida in the Florida Keys in 1971. In those days we didn’t have a Unit I, and some people didn’t have their anatomy down – they had done a college course, but hadn’t gotten a lot of gross anatomy. Ida asked me to do an anatomy class in the evening, so I was teaching them. Dr. Rolf had her copy of The Cranial Bowl1 by Dr. Sutherland with her and asked me if I would give a little talk on it. As I read it, I was fascinated by the whole idea of everything moving – bones, membranes, fluids in sync, everything moving inside of us. I had seen references to this, I understood the anatomy, but it was hard to picture it all happening together. Dr. Rolf gave a lecture on it herself after I had briefly gone over the anatomy, and she told the class, “if you want to learn this, the place to learn it is from the osteopaths.” Ida had studied with Dr. Sutherland and her osteopathic friends, but she didn’t feel it was her place to teach cranial work. In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Rolfing [SI] was really unknown – there were like fifteen or sixteen Rolfers in the world, and she was hoping that Rolfers would hook up with osteopaths and work in their offices. So, she didn’t want to be teaching the craniosacral work and have the osteopaths thinking that she was treading on their territory. She knew Dr. Sutherland, and she had an incredible cranial skill.
So I went off to an osteopath Ida knew in St. Petersburg, Florida, a Dr. Kimberly, and had some sessions with him. I started reading the cranial textbooks – The Cranial Bowl, Dr. Magoun’s Osteopathy in the Cranial Field,2 etc. There were also articles written by osteopaths on cranial work relating to the “core” work we were doing. This helped in understanding that the respiratory diaphragm and thoracic inlet/outlet are part of the core, thanks to a handout Ida gave the class about the core, “The Line,” and the three diaphragms. Because I had done my homework, some osteopaths would teach me a few of their skills. At that time, there wasn’t a lot of outside interest. Cranial work was seen almost as an occult thing. Most osteopaths did standard osteopathic spinal manipulations, but not a lot of cranial work. So that’s how I got started.
DG: So, was it more your own curiosity, or did she actually ask you to go out and gather a body of work that other Rolfers could use?
JA: Well, both. Dr. Rolf would encourage us to explore cranial osteopathy, among other things, like homeopathy. She asked me to do some in-depth research into the cranial field to bring back to the group. In 1971 we brought Dr. Rolf to Florida for a series of lectures and Rolfing demos at The University of Miami, Florida Atlantic University, the Southern Dental Association, and several “growth centers,” all of which were attended by various osteopaths. She introduced me to an M.D. from Stanford, Dr. Will McDonald – a brilliant guy. He did cranial work and Rolfing [SI]. She asked him how much Rolfing [work] he’d done and he said “not much.” He didn’t like putting pressure on his fingers because it then became harder for him to feel the cranial work in his fingers. I talked with him and he piqued my interest. Dr. Rolf suggested I learn cranial work from him, especially since he also did Rolfing [SI] with the cranial work.
At the same time Jan Davis was in class with me. Ida mentioned that she might want to explore this too. So Jan, who was also a doctor, went off and made friends with this osteopath and took some cranial classes. She steered me to some classes I might not have found out about otherwise. In those days osteopaths would show you a few things, but it was hard to get into their classes. You could find some that would spend half a day or maybe a full day with you, but that was all. So Jan had taken some formal classes and then she helped me meet some osteopaths who were more open to teaching.
In those days we used to travel around a lot. I used to drive from Florida to Colorado and sometimes I would stop in Texas. One time I got a treatment from Dr. Core, an osteopath in Dallas. I would always bring along my skull that was held together by wire [Editor’s note: an “exploded” or Beauchene skull], and he showed me a few things. In the early days, if you showed them you had a serious interest in learning, by having a skull, then they would show you some things. A few years later I studied with an osteopath named Dr. Fulford in Tucson, Arizona. At first he was really closed and stared at me almost like I was a communist or something. I was pretty serious and brought in all these fascial studies. I had slides and slides of fascia [dissections] that Ron [Thompson] and Louis [Schultz] and I had done. I said “I want to show you my research.” Then I showed him my skull and he said “well you take this seriously, don’t you!” and I said “yes, sir.” So he started showing me some things and let me in to a class or two with him. I found that that was the best way to study with people who had been doing it for a really long time – with people who were like seventy or eighty – you had to show them you were serious first, not just that you were going to read the book and then practice.
Luckily, here in Denver we had Dr. Magoun who wrote Osteopathy in the Cranial Field. I had a treatment with him, and then with his son, who recently passed away. Dr. Magoun had known Dr. Sutherland and he didn’t like talking much. He did these amazing treatments, and just by going in there and getting them done on yourself you could start intuiting or feeling his way of doing things. I would go to a lot of different people who had been trained quite a while ago and get a couple of sessions from them and feel their style. Each person was slightly different – almost like a different language in a way. People might be doing a very similar thing, but have some differences of style. I studied with a guy in Tucson once in a while, Herman Myers, I believe his name was. He didn’t do much cranial work, mostly some other form of osteopathy. He also taught there and he had a nice way of describing the work. I read a lot of books, too. I was really interested in the anatomy of it all, of the membranes, and how they move.
DG: Do you know where Dr. Rolf learned her cranial work?
JA: In her early days in New York, Ida was asked to work on a child, a young boy in the neighborhood. He was dragging his feet and she said his legs weren’t working too well. She worked on him and he looked better, his legs were looking better. It turned out his father was an osteopath, though Ida didn’t know this as the mother had called her up. He asked if he could come over and watch, which he did. He really liked what she was doing and he brought over another friend to watch. The second guy couldn’t see much going on and didn’t think much of it. The first guy got intrigued by it and he invited her to go to some of the classes that he was taking with Sutherland. So, she started taking some classes with Dr. Sutherland. There were one or two people who’d ask “Who are you?” because she wasn’t an osteopath, though she had a Ph.D. in biochemistry. She joked that she was the other doctor’s secretary, though he didn’t really treat her like a secretary. You have to remember that in the early days, like in the thirties or forties, there was just a small group of people you might refer to as handson healers or manipulators, or however you want to phrase it. So there weren’t a lot of cranial osteopaths – there weren’t a lot of osteopaths, period. They didn’t have many schools then and only a small group of them were doing the cranial work. It was more like an open forum. They weren’t holding it close to their chest; everybody was like “What do you do for this?” or, “How does what you do help?”
There was a lot of openness in those days, like when Dr. Rolf became good friends with a chiropractor named Byron Gentry who took her class. Byron had a very energetic approach. He could actually read [people] at a distance, so you could call him up and describe someone over the phone and he could tell you what to do. Ida had a lot of psychic friends, and a lot of, in a way, mystical friends. She had friends who were M.D.s. Did you know she was friends with Jonas Salk [the developer of the Salk polio vaccine]? She also knew Dr. Krebs, the guy who discovered the Krebs cycle. She introduced me to both of them: Dr. Krebs once in Miami, and Dr. Salk in California. Dr. Salk really liked Rolfing [SI]. He’d had a number of Rolfing sessions himself and encouraged Michael Baker, Ph.D., who worked with Dr. Salk, to study Rolfing [SI].
In the early days, when Dr. Rolf was developing Rolfing [SI], before she started teaching it, she was trading ideas with other people, including osteopaths. She worked with a blind osteopath in her hometown – I think it was New Rochelle, New York. She took two years off, after her husband died, to help her boys get settled into school. During the day while Dick and Alan were in school, she would go over to his office and read to him, because his books weren’t in Braille. They would discuss them and then he’d work on her and she’d work on him.
DG: Did she ever integrate cranial work into her sessions and demos during trainings?
JA: Yes, sometimes. I remember once, when we were in Vero Beach, Florida, doing a public demonstration, and she picked out this lady for a demonstration of the First Hour. She was a local politician. She had distinctive facial features; her face had a little asymmetry to it. Ida did a First Hour where she worked on her shoulder girdle and got the breathing to open up. Ida would always get the breathing to open so people could see that. Usually, she’d do one side and let the person feel into that side. She said, “Well, we’re going to get up in the head for a minute,” and she did a little neck work, and then did a frontal lift. She then had her stand up and it was amazing to see not only that her breathing was better, but also that her posture was a little better. Ida would always get your “Line” a little better, so when you stood up you just looked longer, more open. With this lady, her face changed a lot. Everybody was like, “Wow, look at that.” So after they saw that, everybody wanted a frontal lift! It’s like a frontal-ethmoid release. When she was teaching a Seventh Hour, she’d frequently talk about the ethmoid. One class, oh, in ‘71, she had us work on the temporal fascia. She would say, “When you get in there, just lift it lightly, like you’re lifting the parietal bones.” Her whole idea was that when you’re in that temporal fascia, you weren’t trying to crush the head or work as deep as you could dig. She wanted you to visualize that as you’re lifting that fascia the parietal bone would lift up too. So she would have you visualize the frontal and the ethmoid bones releasing.
DG: When she was doing a demo in a class, did she make a distinction between cranial work and Rolfing [SI]?
JA: No. Her Seventh-Hour sessions fit into the Recipe that she was trying to teach. She never got way off in the cranial work because she didn’t want to pull away from the Rolfing work. She would do some neck work and she’d do a little work on the sternum and the manubrium to get the breathing to open. She felt she just wanted to make sure the breathing and the thoracic inlet were open. Every session she did was a little different, so even though she had a “recipe,” her sessions weren’t all the same. She had a similar rhythm to them, though. Like in the Fourth Hour, she would always do some adductor work – she’d try to create a midline – but she didn’t do each person the same way.
Then I started bringing in my skull. I had a half-skull when I first started with her, and she said, “That’s really nice! Where’d you get it?” She talked about the Beauchene skull, so the next time I saw her, I had gotten one; all the bones will separate but are held together with wires. There was a woman named Connie, a student, and her husband was an osteopath who did cranial work. Connie freaked out a bit and said, “Oh, you can’t have that skull! My husband’s wanted one all his life! That’s all he talks about is having one of these.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but there’s a picture of Dr. Sutherland in one of the books, I believe the Magoun text, where he is holding a Beauchene skull in the photograph. Connie’s husband couldn’t believe that a mere Rolfer had this skull and he didn’t. The whole class was trying to buy it from me. I wound up ordering a second one and when I got it, I sold Connie the one I had. Anyway, I brought it to the class and pointed out the sutures – Dr. Rolf thought it important that everyone know the sutures. Then she discussed how the dural tube connected the cranial membranes to the sacrum and about the movement of the cerebrospinal fluid.
When Ida worked in the head, she didn’t use a lot of pressure. She did not have the smallest little finger in the world, so when she’d go in to someone’s nose, they’d feel a big shift in there. She didn’t go way in – she’d get in just enough to shift things a little bit. A lot of people can’t breathe through the nose, so she’d go in a little and make sure they could. Her mouth work was very profound, she’d get big changes. She worked under my tongue once – I could feel it release down through my throat and into my lungs. She didn’t want to get way off into something else, though. She also didn’t want the osteopaths to perceive that she was teaching cranial work. She’d indicate that osteopaths teach this, and that that was the best place to go learn it. Like I said, she kept encouraging us to make friends with osteopaths. Perhaps we could work in their offices, or have an office next to theirs. She thought that would make us grow, and also bring us inside the medical umbrella. She thought it would be a good fit.
DG: You mentioned that in her nose work, she didn’t go all the way in. Did she talk about going into the three conchae?
JA: Yes. She’d say there are three conchae in there, and that the goal is to get them open. She’d say, “You do what you can do.” Sometimes she would just get into the bottom one, which is the largest. She’d have you look at your anatomy book, and she wanted you to visualize those three conchae opening. Ida was a big believer in visualization. You visualized what’s underneath the skin and the connections [while you were working on it]. When you’re doing the sacrum, you’re visualizing the dural tube and all the way up, feeling up through the body.
DG: Did she ever mention any esoteric reasons for doing the nose work, like doing a Rolfing session on the brain or opening the third eye, or anything like that?
JA: Yes. She would have you visualize the pituitary gland, say “You’re affecting the pituitary gland.” She was especially interested in the pituitary. Sometimes she would talk about the third ventricle as well.
DG: So, I have another question about the seventh hour. Many Rolfers have abandoned the nose work these days. I’ve heard them say that they use a frontal and ethmoid lift, cranial techniques, and that this somehow accomplishes the same results as the nose work. How do you think Dr. Rolf would respond to this assertion?
JA: I think she would say that they both get a result, but they wouldn’t be the same result. Ida never felt like she was doing the only thing. She knew there were other ways to go about getting things done. She had good friends who were chiropractors and osteopaths and she felt like they did great work. She would refer you to certain [ones]. She knew how to work the vomer and the ethmoid and the frontal – I’ve seen her do a frontal-ethmoid release. When she was inside, you could feel her moving your vomer or maxilla. Or the hyoid – you can move the hyoid from the outside, but if you get that bottom part of the tongue to let go, if it’s tight, the hyoid moves in a much freer way than if you just wiggle it back and forth or even unwind it. So, Ida felt like they both got a result, but they got different results. Ida didn’t spend much time in the nose – it wasn’t a long thing. She would go in both sides and get out, then balance around it.
DG: Do you think there is something missing from a Rolfing [SI] standpoint if the nose work goes away and is replaced by more gentle cranial techniques?
JA: Yeah, I think so. I’ve had people come in who have had this or that done and they say, “I just need a good, old-fashioned finger in my nose.” I’ve had people come in and request it – those who have had the nose work and have had really good cranial work. I have one client whose grandmother does cranial work, and he has a number of really good cranial people he goes to and he feels that sometimes his nose is just not opening properly. I had a couple come in recently with their son and they said that he wasn’t breathing through his nose and they were thinking about an operation. So, during the first session all three of them were in the room and I pulled out a skull and was explaining to them what I was going to do. I did the outer work and then told the boy I was going into his mouth and wiggle this bone in there. When we finished the mom asked me, “Well, can you fix him and in how many sessions?” I told her that I didn’t know and she says, “Well, the surgeon wants to do a surgery and you didn’t do the nose!” I said, “Well, no, I just met your son and I’m not going into his nose twenty minutes after meeting him.” He was just an eight year old kid. I said, “We don’t go right into the nose – we go in the nose if it’s appropriate.” They had been going around getting opinions, so finally I gave her the names of three different osteopaths because I couldn’t tell them how many sessions it would take to get him breathing properly. I felt like they really wanted someone with medical credentials. I don’t know how they got the idea that I was going into her son’s nose. I never even brought it up. We might do that, but here it was not appropriate. Their son was a mouth breather and they were worried about it.
DG:DG:tongue work? Going under the tongue and how it affects the hyoid?
JA: Sometimes you go in and work under the tongue and sometimes you work on the top of the tongue because it is pushing up too much – some people are “pushers,” their tongues are always pushing up against the palate, and they can’t relax them. Even in their sleep, their tongues are pushing. They wind up having various mouth issues – that tension in the throat can cause various health issues. I have worked the tongue in very small babies and they don’t cry or get upset, because you’re not hurting them when done properly. If you feel the tongue is pushing up too much you just gently push it down. Some adults can’t relax their tongues. It’s not a big muscle so it doesn’t take much – you’re trying to get it to relax and drop down. Usually it’s pushing up and sometimes it’s pushing forward. I’ve also worked on people who, literally, couldn’t swallow at all – they were being fed with a tube. By doing some cranial work, some mouth work, and some tongue work, you can reactivate the swallowing reflex. I would also do some work in their throats. DG: Through the anterior compartment of the neck or through the mouth? JA: You work around the tongue and then you work the suprahyoids with your thumb and forefinger – it’s almost like you are translating, moving left and right a little bit. Sometimes you will see the voice box pulled off to the left or the right. With some of these people you work downward on the throat while with others you go real low and grab the cartilage and work up. They are not choking because you are being real careful. You can feel that it is stuck down in the swallow position. Dr. Rolf would teach this – go in there and grab the larynx, but only when someone needed it – you didn’t do it in every Seventh Hour. A person will not pass out or gag when doing this. You have to have your body in the right position and your hands are being real specific. You slowly take out that wrinkle. There are lots of ways to work in the throat but we don’t teach them all in the Seventh Hour. In the early days, Ida would show this work only on people who needed it. If someone had a problem, she would show you how to solve that problem. One of the reasons we don’t teach it is because we have students whose hands aren’t relaxed enough to do this work. Someone was working on me once and I had to tell him to relax his hands because he was gripping my head too tightly. He really needed some arm and hand work because his hands just couldn’t relax. Ida didn’t always have everyone practice every one of these techniques on each other. You would see it done and understand when to use it.
DG: How would you say your cranial background influences how you approach the Seventh Hour, since you have a strong Rolfing background and a cranial background? How does that guide you in a different way than someone who might not have that cranial background?
JA: Hmm. That’s an interesting question that I often ask myself. I think that they both help me. With a child or a baby, by understanding the mechanisms, I’m able to go in there and work at a real, real light level. I think I’m much more precise now. If someone comes in with trigeminal neuralgia, I pull out the techniques of Rolfing [SI] and the techniques of cranial work that are going to help specifically. I have a woman with tinnitus. I started working on her tinnitus in the first session. I do neck work because I know it is going to help her tinnitus, as well as working on her temporals and her A/O joint. If you get the A/O joint balanced, you’re taking pressure off the vertebral arteries and the little arteries that run down inside the dural tube. If you add in some Rolfing work, you are going to help the tinnitus much more quickly than if you were just doing cranial work. Frequently, if someone has tinnitus, the neck is really tight on one side as well. The other day a client said to me, “That’s interesting cranial work, do you ever do Rolfing [SI]?” I had been doing Rolfing work mostly – I’d do some Rolfing work on her then I’d do a temporal technique, then I’d do some Rolfing work on her and then I’d do a tentorium technique, then I’d do some Rolfing work on her and then I’d do a fluid technique. Ida kind of did this, but I actually learned more from Dr. Greenman, an osteopath from Michigan who taught osteopathy and wrote Principles of Manual Medicine.3 He was like Dr. Rolf in that he had the same exact pattern as to how the body should be. He wanted to get all the spinal curves balanced. I would watch him do cranial work in some classes, even though he was teaching how to translate and how to get a vertebra and all the joints to move properly. But sometimes he would say that this person needs cranial work and he would stop what he was doing and do some cranial work. I once asked him if he was doing long tide or short tide, and that was the only time I ever saw him get aggravated. He said, “I just do what the client needs.” He felt that this client’s neck was too short on one side and he adjusted it, and then he did some translation; then he did a little soft-tissue work on one side, then he went up and did some cranial work.
Back to my client with tinnitus: I ran into her downtown the other day and she said, “I have to tell you that all that noise I hear day and night was gone for about two weeks. It took me a while to realize why I was feeling so much better. But now it’s coming back.” Well, I had only treated her once or twice. She did come in again and I would work back and forth between Rolfing [SI] and cranial work. She could really use a Ten Series and some cranial work, but she has limited resources, so I’m just going to try and get right at the tinnitus by using a mixture of what I know. [Her background was that] she had stepped into a hole, like an open manhole cover. She went straight down on one leg, and when she hit, she landed on her ischial tuberosity. After that she would get these spasms running through her body as well as energetic problems. I hadn’t even gone down to work on her sacrum. I got her balanced while sitting on the bench – got her lumbar curve in and got her sacrum to move a little bit.
DG: Do you follow your intuition, what with the constraints of her budget? How do you strategize?
JA: For her it’s more the symptoms – she has major body symptoms, so I know I could do some Rolfing work to help her. I checked her two ilia and she had a posterior ilium that I was able to bring forward. I made sure her lumbars were moving a little and there was no serious sacral compression. I told her, “You have to tell me the three things that are the most important to you.” She has a lot going on and she knows it. She felt that if she didn’t have this noise ringing in her ears then she could sleep better and work better. So, addressing the tinnitus was going to help her the most.
DG: I’m curious as to when the cranial work became a staple in a Rolfer’s tool belt. When would you say that the tide began to turn?
JA: In the early days we would all share books. Chuck Siemers got a cranial book from his dentist. In those days it was hard to get an osteopathic book without going through an osteopath. When someone got a book we would pass it back and forth. I remember that Peter Melchior had a cranial book and he had loaned it to another teacher and later there was a discussion about whose book it actually was. You would find people who were interested and you would share what you were doing. The idea was to get out of the way and try and take in what others were doing. In Florida, Ron Thompson was doing some of this work. Jan Davis, an M.D., was able to get into more classes than we were able to. She really helped my perception tremendously because my cranial work was too heavy and I wasn’t feeling certain things. They both helped me work lighter. Then Dr. Davis would work on me and I could tell that her work was really different. She had me work on one of her friends and showed me how she would do it.
DG: So this was before [John] Upledger?
JA: Yeah, before Upledger, though she had met him before he started his Institute. I had already had a session or two with Dr. Core in Dallas. I had already read Osteopathy in the Cranial Field. Upledger did shift the perception of the work at the Rolf Institute. There was a wonderful Rolfer, Charles Swensen, who was an anatomy teacher at the Institute and he became friends with Upledger before he even had a school. Upledger was just traveling around doing classes. He was still affiliated with Michigan State. He did a class in Santa Fe and most all the Rolfing teachers were there – Emmett [Hutchins] wasn’t there but Peter [Melchior], Jan [Sultan], and I were there. He did a combined Level I/Level II class with a lot of unwinding techniques. It was open mostly to Rolfers, not that it was closed to other people, but there was just so much room in the class. In those days he would have a limit of fourteen to sixteen people. Then all of a sudden his classes got real big and he realized he could have forty people in the room. He ran it through the Unity church in Florida – these little old ladies who worked for the church would send out flyers and they would answer the phone.
DG: Do you think that it was Upledger teaching the faculty that made the shift?
JA: I think that helped. We were all there and realized that this was good stuff. Most of the people there already had somewhat of a handle on it. They had read Magoun or Sutherland and had their own take on it. The good thing about Upledger was that he gave you his recipe.
DG: A protocol?
JA: Yeah. You had a protocol and maybe you were good in one area but not in another area. Maybe you really understood the sphenoid, but you couldn’t lift it. He had a bigger vision. He had amazing hands. He would come over and do a visceral release on you. He was friends with [Jean-Pierre] Barral. I remember I was in a class with him [Upledger] once and my gall bladder was spasming. He came over and put his hands on my liver and said, “your gall bladder is spasming.” He said he could calm it down but he still sent me to this other osteopath over in Clearwater, Florida and this guy did something for my gall bladder. Upledger was able to diagnose it on the spot, but because it was a big class he didn’t have time to resolve it. He didn’t want to stop the class and have everyone come over and show them this great gall bladder technique. He wanted to show the class his recipe. He felt that that was the easiest way to get you started. I just want to say one thing for Upledger. People tended to act like he was this narrow-minded guy who had this recipe, but he had the hands to do it all. He could scan your energy field. But because he wanted to teach larger groups, he came up with a formula.
DG: Kind of like Dr. Rolf?
JA: Yeah, sort of. If you went and had a private session with him, it wasn’t anything like his formula. He was creative and intuitive.
DG: So, when did cranial work become part of the prerequisites for the advanced [Rolfing] training? And what was behind that?
JA: We had always encouraged people to read books to understand it, but we never really pushed it. Then we realized that we were getting students in here who had no idea about the head or the sacrum. We taught a great pelvic lift and we would pull the sacrum down and open up the lumbars and get the sacrum balanced with the lumbars. Ida would teach you to do it both ways – physically and energetically. If you took a cranial class you could feel the energetics of the sacrum as well as the physical part. We realized that it would help us work at both ends. It would help us at the head end because we were too rough on the head frequently. Some people were putting way too much pressure on the fascia when they were trying to get the parietal fascia to open, or sticking their finger way too far back on the pterygoids. So, the primary reasons we wanted them to have some cranial experience was 1) to broaden their spectrum of touch, so they had better touch skills when they came to the advanced training; 2) so that people were not putting pressure on the sphenoid; and 3) they had the cranial skills to give a client relief when needed, like doing a frontal lift or ethmoid release, etc.
DG: Well, Jim, we are out of time. Thank you for doing this interview.
JA: You’re welcome.
Bibliography
<i>Jim Asher trained with Dr. Rolf in 1971. In 1973 he was invited by Rolf to become a Rolfing instructor and to assist her in training basic and advanced classes. He assisted her until her death in 1979. He has been a Rolfing Instructor since 1974 and was one of the first advanced teachers.</i>
Cranial, Oral, and Nasal Work in Rolfing® SI[:]
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