Esalen, 1967

In the spring of 1967, I had my first Rolfing Structural Integration (SI) session with Jan Sultan at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. I hoped that it would ?make room for my heart? as Fritz Perls claimed it had for him. I?m not sure it really did that for him or for me, but it certainly opened up my breathing. For days, I felt intoxicated.
Nineteen sixty-seven was an intoxicating year for people interested in the development of human potential, especially for those living in the region between San Francisco and Big Sur. San Francisco was moving into its famous Summer of Love, full of hippies, psychedelics, hope, and media fame. The free speech movement had already drawn attention to Berkeley slightly to the north. In Palo Alto, the Mental Research Institute pioneered in family therapy and both dolphin and human communication. In Carmel, Eric Berne was elaborating his theory of ego states, the differing ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving that go together and which he labeled Parent, Adult, and Child, basic existential positions, and ways of conceptualizing and changing interpersonal transactions, including those he called ?games.? And then, a little further south, there was Esalen.
Esalen was an old estate perched high on the cliffs above the Pacific Ocean. The setting and its sulfur hot springs made it an attractive place to relax and meet. Michael Murphy inherited it from his grandparents and, after returning from studying with Sri Aurobindo (a Hindu mystic who had established Auroville, City of the Dawn, an experimental community in south India), he turned Esalen into a place for people who wanted to explore ?human potential.? Then, as now, the majority came for weekend or week-long stays characterized by three-hour group sessions, fine meals, and the baths. Different group leaders, many of them famous either then or later, came each week, but the early superstars were Virginia Satir and Fritz Perls.
Satir had just published her ground-breaking book Conjoint Family Therapy. It is difficult now to describe her effect on people ? charismatic is too mundane a word. People felt deeply understood and touched, and they responded by meeting her expectations. A few detractors complained that she ?seduced? people into mental health. That was the best they could do to explain the effects she had, but it missed the fact that she had a clear system for relating to people and that it could be taught and learned. At the time, she was associated with the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, which had been established by Don Jackson and his team, including Jay Haley, John Weakland, and Paul Watzlawick. From them emerged a host of therapies including strategic, constructivist, and a communication-based family therapy. However, Satir became the first training director of the Esalen residency-training program, a year-long program for young people, many of them ex-Peace Corp volunteers, who were interested in ways to facilitate human growth.
Fritz Perls was a different story! When he moved to Esalen from Los Angeles and built a house there, he already had a long history of triumphs and failures ? a person who, as he entitled his autobiography, had been In and Out of the Garbage Can. A one-time psychoanalyst and a refugee from Nazi Germany, he and his wife, Laura, had developed Gestalt Therapy, a mixture of Gestalt psychology, psychodynamics, the early work of William Reich, the dramatic techniques of Max Rheinhardt, the zeitgeist of Weimar (including the Bauhaus movement), and an existential emphasis on being in the here-and-now. Perls was a powerful therapist and many of his techniques have been incorporated ? generally without acknowledgement ? into a variety of therapies now popular. However, personally he could be quite thorny and difficult.
It was Perls who, after a heart attack, brought Ida Rolf to Esalen. ?She made room for my heart? was his way of describing what she did for him. Some of us felt he had needed it. My wife, who was one of his trainees, noted that he softened emotionally. His endorsement gave Rolf a certain mystique even before she arrived there to set up training programs. Soon, a number of young Rolfers? were available.
Like many others at the time, I was not at all clear how or why Rolfing SI worked. There was expectation of catharsis and abreaction ? as there was for almost all the therapies at Esalen ? and it offered the hope of major rapid change. [Editor?s note: For those of not familiar with the term, ?abreaction? is pretty much equivalent to ?catharsis.?] Later, we also began to appreciate the importance of gradual change and integration.
Rolfing SI also seemed to compliment the Sensory Awareness approach of Charlotte Selver, a little old lady who wore a black dress down to her ankles, and who was then a frequent workshop leader. Following her revered teacher Elsa Gindler, she encouraged the here-and-now microsecond-by-microsecond awareness of changing bodily sensations. Charles Brooks, her husband, who was associated with the jazz scene in New York City, associated it with certain aspects of Zen. Today, we might appreciate it as a form of mindfulness meditation. Many of us followed her back East to summers on Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine, where the locals and summer painters looked down upon us as ?The Breathers.? We really didn?t care because Sensory Awareness seemed so nicely to complement Rolf?s muscle realignment and to be another way to follow Perls? admonishment to get out of our minds to come to our senses!

Follow-Up Interview

<i>with Robert McWilliams, Certified Advanced Rolfer?, Rolf Movement® Practitioner </i>

Robert McWilliams: What was the reputation of Rolfing® SI at that time?

James Allen: There was a reputation that Rolfing [SI] was painful, that Ida was dictatorial, and that you had to be brave to engage in Rolfing [SI], which was different than the usual Esalen massages, which were calming, relaxing, and went maybe into sexuality. Rolfers didn?t do that; they just pushed, pounded [laughter], and prodded, and left bruises. The session I had was on the floor of the cottage I was staying in, a floor of pebbles and cement. The Rolfer just had me lay right on the floor with no blanket or anything ? so that he would have resistance, I suppose. He did push, and go in with his elbow.
I remember that some of the usual Esalen folk disapproved of the work because it was seen as intrusive and violent compared to what they were used to ? work that was rather soft and sweet, at least for the workshop attendees. For the staff that worked and lived there, however, it [Esalen] was not always so sweet. People got into fights, largely about such things as who was sleeping with whom. But for those who came as paying guests, it was a gentle place, and Ida was not. Dr. Rolf?s training sessions lasted six weeks or so. Consequently there was some questioning of her and her people being there so long, and so, in a way, her group was kind of isolated.

RMcW: You had just the single session, at that time. Were you able to get an impression of Dr. Rolf and of the scene?

JA: My impression was that she was a really strict teacher, and wanted it done her way, and that she had a very clear program. There were ten sessions and, by God, you got ten sessions. The first session was on breathing and . . . every single rib was taken care of. Indeed, I found it was magical, despite my bruises. I had the sense of being intoxicated by getting a fuller breath and more oxygen. There were some questions from the other people I knew about the remaining sessions. Some felt [they] were not as useful as the first session.

At that time, people at Esalen were into abreactions. I believe that later on Peter Levine would pick up clients who went every month looking for abreactions, but never got better. They just abreacted. There was a belief that Rolfing clients would have abreactions, and memory flashes and all that . . . but the Rolfers wouldn?t touch them [the abreactions]. They just let it go. Those of us that were therapists thought that they were missing this great opportunity. However, people expected to be cured and cured quickly.

RMcW: What did they want to be cured of?

JA: Psychological traumas. And do it quickly. Do it and get it over with. I think Rolfing [SI] did offer that hope. Reflecting on that now, I don?t think that catharsis for the sake of catharsis is very useful. It?s like a religious experience: the important thing is integrating whatever it is into one?s daily life. My later experiences of Rolfing [SI] sessions were that the client is not dealing just with a technician, but also with someone who is able to titrate. This, as in the hands of Stacey Mills and especially you, is more like modern psychotherapy. Personally, I didn?t have any great abreactions, but I had the smell of vinegar. As I recall, Perls felt that the Rolfing [SI] and abreactions were useful, and that he would integrate them. He didn?t say that people were left in an unintegrated place from the sessions, but that Rolfing [SI] was an important supplement to his sessions ? or vice versa.

Dr. James Allen, MPH works at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in the College of Medicine, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

Robert McWilliams is a Rolfer and Rolf Movement Practitioner in Boulder, Colorado and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.Rolfing® SI in Context[:]