Nobody ever taught you to look at experience before. They taught you to look at the symbol of the experience; at the abstract of the experience. Dr. Ida P. Rolf (class notes)
Perception is central to the practice and theory of Rolfing Structural Integration (SI). Yet, the eye a Rolfer™ needs is probably the most difficult skill to teach – especially when you consider that the standard for this work was set by Dr. Rolf, who, as everyone knows, was possessed of a truly uncanny ability. Jan Sultan reported how during his training Rolf told him that he was looking but she was seeing. Most of us probably have an intuitive sense of what she was driving at with this distinction. But when we try to make her meaning fully explicit, words escape us. To this day, we have no agreed-upon standard way of understanding what ‘seeing’ consists of or how to teach it. There are probably many reasons behind our difficulties surrounding seeing. Oddly enough, one of the more important ones has to do with the influence of René Descartes (1596-1650).
How we think about perception is deeply informed by Descartes’ self-defeating, overly narrow comprehension of subjectivity and objectivity. The Cartesian worldview is so pervasive that many people who have never heard of Descartes accept his way of looking at things as common sense. Unfortunately, they do not realize how it undermines our every attempt to understand the nature of perception. For example, you do not have to look far to find Descartes’ influence lurking in the background of many theories in cognitive science.
Fortunately for us, the kind of seeing that was only implicit in Rolf’s way of assessing clients can be made more fully explicit by combining phenomenology with Johann Wolfgang Goethe‘s (1749-1832) qualitative science of nature. Some two hundred and fifty years ago, Goethe explored a proto-phenomenological approach to seeing that uncovered the critically important missing piece we have been looking for – a step-by-step procedure for cultivating a way of seeing that makes explicit and teachable the Rolfer’s way of seeing.
Part I: Philosophical Background2
The Cartesian Worldview
In order to clearly understand how phenomenology paves the way to a solution of our problem, we need to expose how the Cartesian worldview undermines every attempt to understand the phenomena in question. Pictured here in Figure 1 is a cartoon summary of the causal/representational theory of perception. Many problematic presuppositions find their source in the confusion surrounding this widely accepted theory, first championed by Descartes and Galileo (1564-1642). In this view, knowledge of the external world comes about through the way our senses and nervous system causally interact with material reality outside of us. From the interaction of our senses with physical reality, our brain produces ideas that serve as representation (mental pictures) of whatever is beyond our senses. According to the theory, we do not have direct access to the world external to us. We only have access to the appearances, that is, to the representational ideas in our mind.
The theory is supposed to explain how we have knowledge of the external world. Unfortunately, it makes the very thing it seeks to explain impossible. In order for us to know whether an idea is a hallucination cooked up by the brain or a true representation, we must be able to compare the idea with the object represented. Comparing idea and object is only possible if we have access to both idea and object. But the theory rules out this possibility. It clearly states that we only have access to the ideas, not to the objects themselves. As a result, knowledge of the external world and other minds is impossible in this view.
Figure 1: Causal/representational theory of perception. From Mind Body Zen: Waking Up to Your Life by Hokaku Jeffrey Maitland, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2010 by Hokaku Jeffrey Maitland. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
These problems result from conflating the report of an experience with a causal explanation of the experience. Since a causal explanation can only give us the conditions that make perception possible, it cannot describe our experience. For example, it cannot tell us what the content of our perception is. It cannot tell us what we are seeing. Not only that, the conditions it specifies are, for the most part, a series of causally linked neurological processes that, in principle, cannot be directly experienced. It both mis-describes and conflates the process by which something comes to be seen (comes into appearance) with the object it comes to be seen as (say, a tree). It does not describe our experience of how something comes to be perceived as something. The causal account is not and cannot be a description of our experience, because it deals with causally linked neurological processes that can never be our direct experience. To say it differently: you cannot reduce a first-person ontology to a third-person ontology. Clearly, neither the causal nor the representational aspects of the theory are capable of grasping our experiential reality. As we shall see again and again, the causal/ representational theory is problematic because it is self-defeating, conflates a causal explanation with a description of experience, and confuses abstract, reflective thought for direct lived experience.
Conflating the report of an experience with an explanation of experience is so pervasive that hardly anyone recognizes the mistake. From the proverbial man in the street to the highly trained neuroscientist, you will see the ever-present influence of Descartes’ worldview on our thinking. Here is a clear-cut example of the mistake: “If I wish to lift a glass to my mouth, I can conceive of this idea in my brain (perhaps stimulated by thirst, perhaps by my discomfort on a first date, it matters not), turn it into a code of dots and dashes, send this code down through the spine, out through the brachial plexus, and down to my arm. At the neuromuscular junction, the message is decoded into meaning – and the relevant muscles contract according to the coded sequence” (Myers 2001, 31). Surely, no one experiences moving his arm this way. Isn’t it odd how perfectly acceptable this bizarre explanation seems at first? But once you wake up to the confusion, you see it everywhere.
To bring these confused ways of thinking into sharper focus, let’s look at some more examples of how experience is distorted when we are under the spell of the Cartesian framework. If you begin, as Descartes does, with the assumption that the body and mind are utterly incommensurable ontological kinds, any interaction between mind and body would be impossible. After all, how can something that takes up no space (mind) effect something that does (body)? The above example of conceiving an idea (which does not take up space) in your brain (which does take up space), and turning the idea into code so that it can be decoded later as meaning and movement partakes of these mistakes at every level.
Since the only source of self-activity that this way of thinking recognizes is the human mind, nature is stripped of all its psychic and sentient qualities and is conceived as inert. The body is part of nature and just as inert. Hence, both nature and body are essentially dead. If the body were truly inert, it would be wholly external to the mind; and it would be experienced as a totally alien object to which we are mysteriously attached. But wait, it gets worse. If something that takes up no space could not affect something that does, we could not even experience our bodies in the first place (Bortoft 2012, 46).
Our final example also exhibits a way of thinking about experience that seems like common sense to many (Bortoft 2012, 172 ff.). Imagine someone you know is walking toward you and raises his arm in greeting. Without thinking, you wave back. Without thinking, you immediately understood his gesture. It was all there present in the moment, present as lived-experience, for you to see and understand. There was no doubt that you were seeing the meaning of his gesture. But, suppose in the next moment that a person who lives too much in his verbal-intellectual mind were to ask you, “What did actually you see? Did you really see the greeting or just the movement to which you then added the meaning? After all, the meaning of the gesture can’t be measured because it doesn’t take up space. The movement of his arm takes up space, but the meaning of the gesture does not take up measurable space. So, where does the meaning reside?” Obviously, our Cartesian colleague concludes that the meaning is an internal mental event; and you added the meaning to the movement of his physical body.
This story is a familiar way of explaining phenomena while under the influence of the Cartesian framework. Of course, it suffers from the same self-defeating problems. Since we have no access to our friend’s inner state, to the meaning of his gesture, we could never know, in principle, whether the gesture was meant as a greeting or just a way to loosen his restricted shoulder. But notice, when you attend to lived-experience, it is perfectly clear that the meaning is given with and within the gesture.
To aid us in our exploration of the phenomenological approach, here is a list of the more problematic assumptions that arise from the Cartesian framework:
Both sides of the subject/object distinction are very severely narrowed. The subject side is seen as mind, the in-here, enclosed thinking self; and the object side is seen as the measurable, mechanical, non-conscious out-there. It is useful to ask yourself whether this is really the way you experience your self in relation to the world: as an enclosed, non-spatial in-here relating through a soft-machine-body to a non-conscious, mechanical out-there. As we are about to see, all of these difficulties arise from not grasping the difference between pre-reflective and reflective experience.
Phenomenology to the Rescue
Key figures in advancing phenomenology a rF r az B rn t ao ( d i s c o vrd intentionality, 1838-1917); Edmund Husserl (considered the father of phenomenology, 1 8 5 9 – 1 9 3 8 ) ; M a r t iHi dg gr (championed an existential, hermeneutical phenomenology, 1889-1976); Maurice Merleau-Ponty (extended existential hermeneutical phenomenology to include the lived body and a deeper understanding of perception, 1907-1961); and of course, Johann Wolfgang Goethe (practiced a kind of proto-phenomenology and developed a science of quality, 1749-1832).
Phenomenology turns the tables on the Cartesian worldview by embracing experience as it is lived, not as it is thought about later in reflection. Lived experience is experience as we pre-reflectively live through it. The minute we think about what we are doing, we are no longer in the pre-reflective orientation of consciousness. In reflection, the world is experienced as subject and object.
There is plenty of theory associated with phenomenology, but it is more a method for how to attend to experience than a theory of experience. In order to get our bearings, we can begin with a very simple description of how phenomenology approaches perception. Phenomenology begins with the lived-experience of perception and attempts to catch the pre-reflective activity of perceiving and the coming into being of its object as it is occurring. By recognizing the difference between reflection and pre-reflection (lived experience) and staying with the ongoing interplay of reflection and pre-reflection, the phenomenologist participates with what is in the process of appearing or coming to be seen. Implicitly, reflection is always at work making explicit what is only latent in pre-reflective experience. By cultivating this kind of disciplined attentiveness to how things come into being, the phenomenologist is not seduced into substituting abstract theory for lived experience. He is thus able to give descriptions of experience that have not lost touch with the phenomena being investigated. As a result, the phenomenological description is more likely to avoid the conundrums of traditional philosophy.
To catch perception in the act, Bortoft (1996, 281) says, “there has to be a refocusing of attention from what is conceived to the act of conceiving, while engaged in the act of conceiving that which is conceived.” Within experience we must learn to shift our attention away from the achievement of what is experienced into the experience of the achieving what is experienced. This shift within consciousness leads to a transformation of our way of seeing that in turn transforms what is seen without adding to its content. We suddenly see in a new way and see what is seen in a new way. This shift is at the heart of Rolf’s way of seeing and an important part of the first step in learning to see.
Seeing-As and the Shift in Orientation
Let’s look at an example of suddenly seeing in a new way. It will be easier to catch the lived activity of perceiving and the required shift in orientation if we use a simple example. Get ready, you are about to catch perception in the act. Redirect your attention to the activity by which a figure emerges from an apparently random bunch of squiggles. When you look at this drawing (Figure 2) from Bortoft (1996, 50), what do you see? At first, probably nothing more than a circle with a bunch of meaningless ink splotches. But now look for a giraffe and watch it come into being. Did you suddenly see a giraffe emerge from the splotches? No lines were added to the drawing; nothing about it changed. What changed was that you acquired the appropriate concept of giraffe. Once given the concept, you were able to see the giraffe – you were able to call it forth and make what was indeterminate determinate. But notice, it was not there in advance of your seeing it. All of this adds up to the recognition that perception has a cognitive dimension, and whatever we perceive is always perceived ‘as something’. We see this as a chair, that as a bird, that as a herd of cows, or that as finding your ‘Line’, and so forth.
As long as we continue to orient toward nature as an onlooker, in the way the Cartesian philosophy demands, we will remain blind to the intimate intertwining of nature and human nature that is required by this kind of participatory, cognitively infused perception. Not surprisingly, we are brought once more to the inability of the Cartesian subject/object distinction to grasp lived perception. These considerations also demonstrate that to perceive something as something is already the same as perceiving meaning. This conclusion is significant because it also brings us face to face with one of the most important concepts of phenomenology – intentionality.
Figure 2: Giraffe. Image from The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way toward a Science of Conscious Participation in Nature by Henri Bortoft. Lindisfarne Books, 1996. Used with permission.
Intentionality
“The question about intentionality is at bottom a question about meaning. To speak of an intentional act is to speak of an act which reaches toward or gropes for a meaningful content” (Schrag 1969, 82). With the discovery of intentionality and its vectoral character, Husserl was able to transform and reconfigure the simple subject/object distinction into an invariant fundamental condition of experience that limits and makes possible what appears to us. As a result, he was able to begin the process of breaking the stranglehold Cartesian metaphysics had on how we understand our world.
Consider any experience you might have, and you will notice that it always has two correlated poles: what is experienced and the manner in which it is experienced. Often intentionality is described as the view that experience is always the experience of something. This characterization is not quite adequate because it does not fully grasp how these two poles are always correlated and, hence, mutually implicate each other. Every experiencing is directed toward what is experienced, and everything experienced reflects or refers back to a mode of experiencing. In other words, whenever there is an experience (e.g., an act of perceiving), there is also that which is experienced (e.g., what is perceived). Wherever there is that which is experienced, there is a mode of experiencing it. Because they are correlates, they mutually implicate each other. Unlike subject and object, which are late arrivals to the scene, they are not separate and independent. Their relationship is a correlative unity such that one cannot occur without the other, and one cannot be understood or investigated without including the other. This correlative unity is the prior condition of the separation into subject and object. Husserl calls these two correlates ‘noesis’ (the how of appearing) and ‘noema’ (what appears).
When we engage the world cognitively, we step out of the flow of lived experience and become an onlooker/observer standing over and above and separate from what is being seen. You, the seer, are the subject, and that which is seen is the object. The object of perception and the subject who perceives it arise together at the same time the subject sees the object as a tree. Subject and object are based upon and emerge from noesis and noema. At this level of analysis, there is no problem with the subject/object distinction.
The problem arises when we mistakenly take that which appears at the reflective level for the process of coming into appearance from the pre-reflective level. Confusing what is seen with the activity of becoming seen is at the heart of the Cartesian worldview and the causal theory of perception. Within the Cartesian framework, seer and seen are viewed as two separate independent aspects of reality in a contingent relationship. If this contingent relationship of subject and object is mistakenly projected onto lived experience, we lose sight of the necessary inseparability of noesis and noema.
If we pay attention and try to catch perception in the act, we will notice that while there is a distinction between noesis and noema, there is no separation between them. The appearance of the separation only occurs when we focus on what is seen instead of the activity of coming to be seen.
Intentionality is both directed toward the world and solicited by it. Thus we see that intentionality is also a vectorial structure probing for the emergence of meaningful content. Contrary to Descartes’ picture, the discovery of intentionality reveals that consciousness is intrinsically open to the world. Thus, “. . . far from being self-enclosed, the very nature of consciousness is such that the world is already included within it” (Schrag 1969, 49).
We can define phenomenology as the art, philosophy, and science of describing what shows itself to us, as it shows itself, without imposing on it any inappropriate conceptual framework and before we turn it into an abstraction. As a way to deepen our understanding of phenomenology, recognize that the word phenomenon means “that which shows itself or that which appears.” Accordingly, Heidegger (1996, 30) says to do phenomenology is “to let what shows itself be seen from itself, just as it shows itself from itself.” Bortoft (1996, 17-27) also makes the point that phenomenon means the showing of what shows itself or the appearing of what appears. Thus, examining the word phenomenon brings to light two important aspects of appearing – what appears and the appearing of what appears. Another way to make this point is to say that perception involves both the process by which something comes to be seen (appearing) and the object it comes to be seen as (what appears). Typically, when we reflect on what is happening, we tend to only pay attention to what appears as an object of perception and miss entirely the process by which it comes into appearance.
Because we have not trained ourselves to pre-reflectively participate with what we are seeing, when something is coming into appearance as something, we pass over its activity of appearing. We miss entirely the activity by which something comes into appearance as something. Comfortable in our reflective stance toward the things of our world, we tend to see only the result of the activity of appearing. If we are seeing something new for the first time, it is easier to participate in its coming into being. Typically, however, we usually focus only on the object of perception and let the lived experience of the appearing itself slip through our fingers. Over time, as we get used to its presence, it eventually recedes into the background as so much wallpaper.
The logos in phenomenology means the site at which being (that which shows itself) reveals itself. Following Bortoft, it would be more precise to say that the logos is the site at which the showing of what shows itself is revealed. Or the logos is the site at which the appearing of what appears is revealed.
At this point, an important question needs to be asked: “Is it possible to experience what shows itself as it truly shows itself without contaminating your experience of it with your own biases?” Heidegger holds that ‘logos’ does not mean ‘the study of’, ‘logic’, or ‘the word’, but rather ‘the site at which Being reveals itself’. To simplify the history of phenomenology a bit, unlike the early Husserl, Heidegger insisted you can never take a God-like survey of any phenomenon. Because the experience of what shows itself always takes place within its own unique context, you can never give a pure non-contextual description of anything. You can only interpret it. To try to describe a phenomenon without its context is not to experience it as it shows itself. Part of the discipline of phenomenology consists in laying bare the presuppositions and biases that are embedded in the contextualized field in which we always find ourselves. To do phenomenology is to pre-reflectively let ‘what is’ show itself as it shows itself contextually and then to appropriately interpret it reflectively.
The practitioner of phenomenology must develop the ability to pre-reflectively experience and feel, without conflict, into what is. In so doing, he opens an un-conflicted space, a clearing, within which the things and people of our world are revealed. By letting his way of seeing be shaped by the phenomena under consideration, his reflective interpretations of phenomenology come to rest upon an understanding that participates with what is understood. Phenomenology invites us to remain true to the things themselves and to our experience. Let’s accept that invitation and look at how phenomenology advances our understanding of perception and, in particular, how it can illuminate and deepen our understanding of the Rolfer’s way of seeing.
Seeing Holistically and the Shift in Orientation
Jan Sultan’s brilliant discovery of the internal/external typology is an excellent example of seeing with the Rolfer’s eye. It clearly demonstrates the shift in orientation that brings about a new way of seeing things. One day as he was contemplating the craniosacral rhythm, he was taken with how the body went into external and internal rotation. And then it hit him: there are actually two types of bodies in terms of which we can understand how all these structural differences belong together toward what is experienced, and everything experienced reflects or refers back to a mode of experiencing. In other words, whenever there is an experience (e.g., an act of perceiving), there is also that which is experienced (e.g., what is perceived). Wherever there is that which is experienced, there is a mode of experiencing it. Because they are correlates, they mutually implicate each other. Unlike subject and object, which are late arrivals to the scene, they are not separate and independent. Their relationship is a correlative unity such that one cannot occur without the other, and one cannot be understood or investigated without including the other. This correlative unity is the prior condition of the separation into subject and object. Husserl calls these two correlates ‘noesis’ (the how of appearing) and ‘noema’ (what appears).
When we engage the world cognitively, we step out of the flow of lived experience and become an onlooker/observer standing over and above and separate from what is being seen. You, the seer, are the subject, and that which is seen is the object. The object of perception and the subject who perceives it arise together at the same time the subject sees the object as a tree. Subject and object are based upon and emerge from noesis and noema. At this level of analysis, there is no problem with the subject/object distinction.
The problem arises when we mistakenly take that which appears at the reflective level for the process of coming into appearance from the pre-reflective level. Confusing what is seen with the activity of becoming seen is at the heart of the Cartesian worldview and the causal theory of perception. Within the Cartesian framework, seer and seen are viewed as two separate independent aspects of reality in a contingent relationship. If this contingent relationship of subject and object is mistakenly projected onto lived experience, we lose sight of the necessary inseparability of noesis and noema.
If we pay attention and try to catch perception in the act, we will notice that while there is a distinction between noesis and noema, there is no separation between them. The appearance of the separation only occurs when we focus on what is seen instead of the activity of coming to be seen.
Intentionality is both directed toward the world and solicited by it. Thus we see that intentionality is also a vectorial structure probing for the emergence of meaningful content. Contrary to Descartes’ picture, the discovery of intentionality reveals that consciousness is intrinsically open to the world. Thus, “. . . far from being self-enclosed, the very nature of consciousness is such that the world is already included within it” (Schrag 1969, 49).
We can define phenomenology as the art, philosophy, and science of describing what shows itself to us, as it shows itself, without imposing on it any inappropriate conceptual framework and before we turn it into an abstraction. As a way to deepen our understanding of phenomenology, recognize that the word phenomenon means “that which shows itself or that which appears.” Accordingly, Heidegger (1996, 30) says to do phenomenology is “to let what shows itself be seen from itself, just as it shows itself from itself.” Bortoft (1996, 17-27) also makes the point that phenomenon means the showing of what shows itself or the appearing of what appears. Thus, examining the word phenomenon brings to light two important aspects of appearing – what appears and the appearing of what appears. Another way to make this point is to say that perception involves both the process by which something comes to be seen (appearing) and the object it comes to be seen as (what appears). Typically, when we reflect on what is happening, we tend to only pay attention to what appears as an object of perception and miss entirely the process by which it comes into appearance.
Because we have not trained ourselves to pre-reflectively participate with what we are seeing, when something is coming into appearance as something, we pass over its activity of appearing. We miss entirely the activity by which something comes into appearance as something. Comfortable in our reflective stance toward the things of our world, we tend to see only the result of the activity of appearing. If we are seeing something new for the first time, it is easier to participate in its coming into being. Typically, however, we usually focus only on the object of perception and let the lived experience of the appearing itself slip through our fingers. Over time, as we get used to its presence, it eventually recedes into the background as so much wallpaper.
The logos in phenomenology means the site at which being (that which shows itself) reveals itself. Following Bortoft, it would be more precise to say that the logos is the site at which the showing of what shows itself is revealed. Or the logos is the site at which the appearing of what appears is revealed.
At this point, an important question needs to be asked: “Is it possible to experience what shows itself as it truly shows itself without contaminating your experience of it with your own biases?” Heidegger holds that ‘logos’ does not mean ‘the study of’, ‘logic’, or ‘the word’, but rather ‘the site at which Being reveals itself’. To simplify the history of phenomenology a bit, unlike the early Husserl, Heidegger insisted you can never take a God-like survey of any phenomenon. Because the experience of what shows itself always takes place within its own unique context, you can never give a pure non-contextual description of anything. You can only interpret it. To try to describe a phenomenon without its context is not to experience it as it shows itself. Part of the discipline of phenomenology consists in laying bare the presuppositions and biases that are embedded in the contextualized field in which we always find ourselves. To do phenomenology is to pre-reflectively let ‘what is’ show itself as it shows itself contextually and then to appropriately interpret it reflectively.
The practitioner of phenomenology must develop the ability to pre-reflectively experience and feel, without conflict, into what is. In so doing, he opens an un-conflicted space, a clearing, within which the things and people of our world are revealed. By letting his way of seeing be shaped by the phenomena under consideration, his reflective interpretations of phenomenology come to rest upon an understanding that participates with what is understood. Phenomenology invites us to remain true to the things themselves and to our experience. Let’s accept that invitation and look at how phenomenology advances our understanding of perception and, in particular, how it can illuminate and deepen our understanding of the Rolfer’s way of seeing.
Seeing Holistically and the Shift in Orientation
Jan Sultan’s brilliant discovery of the internal/external typology is an excellent example of seeing with the Rolfer’s eye. It clearly demonstrates the shift in orientation that brings about a new way of seeing things. One day as he was contemplating the craniosacral rhythm, he was taken with how the body went into external and internal rotation. And then it hit him: there are actually two types of bodies in terms of which we can understand how all these structural differences belong together as expressions of a larger unified whole. Before Sultan saw this distinction, no one understood the hidden dynamics of what we were seeing. The whole thing was basically invisible to us. We knew about internally rotated femurs, flat lumbars, high arches, etc., but nobody saw how these patterns fit together to form a whole-body pattern. No one saw, for example, that flat lumbars went with externally rotated femurs. Instead, we saw all these odd structural features in a piecemeal fashion. Nobody saw how the human body could be expressed in two coherent patterns. No one saw how all of these different structural features belonged together as a unified relational whole. No one was seeing holistically.
Once the distinction was made, everyone could see it. But, like all such discoveries, it seemed too obvious. Of course, it was not long before a number of Rolfers with too much time on their hands began pooh-poohing the distinction, while superciliously claiming, “Oh yeah, I’ve always known that!” Such comments are based on a mistaken notion that these types were already there just waiting to be seen – not realizing that prior to Sultan’s discovery, the typology was actually invisible to us. If those who claim to have always known the typology actually had known it, its obviousness would have spread through our community just as Sultan’s distinction did. By making the distinction, Sultan made the difference visible for the first time. He did not apply labels to already known objects. His process of discovery brought the typology into being for the very first time. If you look at what he accomplished at the level of subject and object, you will think that the two types were just lying there waiting to be seen. But in point of fact, by making this distinction, Sultan brought them into being so that they could be seen by us in the first place. Thinking the types were ‘out there’ ready to be discovered presupposes that this distinction had already been made.
Sultan’s typology came into being the same way the giraffe (Figure 2) came into being. At the moment he got the concept and saw the two types, they stood out for the first time – they came into being for the first time. You could also say that they come into meaning. Coming into being or meaning does not imply that there are pre-given things existing ‘out there’ just waiting to be labeled, or that what comes into appearance is something we subjectively create.
Coming into being is neither subjective nor objective. We neither create a subjective reality nor discover an objective reality. Rather, it is a matter of “the world ‘calling forth’ something in me that in turn ‘calls forth’ something in the world” (Bortoft 2012, 25). In part, that means we are led by the power of the thing to manifest itself. We make something stand out, make what was indeterminate determinate – in a word, we ‘there’ it. Because of this calling forth, we now see bodies as two kinds, as both related and different at the same time. Speaking holistically, we can say they are related because what is distinguished must be distinguished from something, and that something must be related to what is distinguished. Speaking analytically, they are different because they are distinguishable.
Part II: The Opposite of Aesthetic is Anesthetic
The Beauty of Rolfing SI
Seeing beauty and seeing order appear in your client depend on similar conditions. To appreciate this way of seeing, let’s hear what Rolf herself had to say about perception. Notice that she sometimes recommends that you change your way of being when you work. Shifting your orientation is the first step in learning how to see. Also, I speculate she discovered that, in and of itself, the right orientation by the practitioner is capable of changing structure.
Rolf (1978, 186) said: “And when you see normal structure all of a sudden you say, Why yes, of course, I recognize this as normal structure. Oddly enough, we all have intuitive appreciation of the normal. When we do see something that is normal we say, Isn’t that beautiful?, Doesn’t he move beautifully? etc. etc. Nobody asks you to define that beauty, everybody recognizes it. It’s an intuitive appreciation of normalcy.” (For those of you who do not appreciate the word ‘normal’, remember Rolf also said that average is not normal.) With this insight, we have arrived at what the goal of Rolfing SI looks like before it becomes an abstraction. With surprising depth, the being of Rolfing SI is brought forth aesthetically as a certain kind of beauty. The claim that beauty is the intuitive appreciation of normality shows us how certain indicators of order, such as SI and functional economy, were experienced before they became abstractions. Even though the beauty of normality cannot be captured by the narrowly conceived categories of subjectivity and objectivity, it is as much a part of our reality as a kidney is. Moreover, if anything is a clear and certain indicator that a Rolfing session is over, the appearance of beauty is certainly one of the more profound.
Rolfing assessments are replete with these sorts of aesthetic qualities and judgments. In fact, we cannot do without them. Here are some more examples: being grounded; seeing core lift; sensing the balance of spatial masses; seeing lines of order such as horizontals and verticals in the tissues; sensing spirals, waves, vortexes, strains and pulls in the tissues; finding your Line; and so on. These phenomena are excellent examples of aspects of reality that are neither subjective nor objective but fully there to be perceived by anyone trained to see them. An important indicator of order is Rolf’s concept of horizontality. It is less general than beauty, but no less important to our understanding of balance. Its appearance will affect the entire body. You could expand our understanding of horizontality by coming up with ways to measure horizontality and its effects on structure. You could add to our understanding of the psychobiological taxonomy by collating subjective reports about it. To good effect, you could approach most of our fundamental concepts the same way. But the aesthetic experience of horizontality is, as all such concepts are, the prior foundation of any attempt to turn it into an object of scientific investigation. The lived experience of horizontality cannot be reduced to any possible measurement of horizontality, because any particular measurement of horizontality is but a perspective on horizontality, not its lived reality.
From the way Rolf talks about the importance of horizontality, you can see she is interested in more than its measurability; she is also interested in it as a kind of revelation of beauty and wholeness. At the very least, it is both an aesthetic assessment of wholeness and an important aspect of beauty-seeing. She says (Rolf 1978, 180), “You’ve got to keep looking, and as you look, you’ll suddenly see the horizontal. You’ve got to keep looking; you’ve got to evaluate every body that you see. When he gets up and walks does his pelvis look different? And all of a sudden you’ll analyze the difference and you’ll say, ‘Oh my God, yeah, that’s Rolf’s horizontal.”
This experience of ‘all of a sudden’ seeing the phenomena is characteristic of the shift of orientation that is required to see in a new way. This shift is an important part of the first step in learning how to see. Recall the giraffe example. On first inspection, it looked like a bunch of ink splotches and squiggles. But when you were instructed to look for a giraffe – suddenly there it was. Having the concept ‘giraffe’ allowed you to see the squiggles as a giraffe. Although the examples we have been considering are far more complicated and take longer to see, the all-of-sudden appearance of the phenomena as something is common to all. When you ‘get it,’ the cognitive and the sensory are integrated; and you see the phenomena as something – as horizontality or a giraffe, for example.
When all of a sudden the giraffe appeared, it ceased being invisible for you and came into being. It stood out for the first time. You could also say that the squiggles came into meaning. What comes into being (or meaning) is not a pre-given thing just waiting ‘out there’ to be seen. What comes into being is the ‘appearing-as’ something. In virtue of appearing-as something (say a giraffe, horizontality, or an internal or external type), it appears as meaningful. As we have already seen, coming into being is neither subjective nor objective. Led by the power of the thing to manifest itself, we make what was indeterminate determinate – we there it.
Bringing forth the world is far more complicated than seeing the giraffe. But, in principle, we there our world in the same way. Similarly, we also there our fundamental assessment concepts, our indicators of order – such as horizontality or finding your Line. We learn to see by saturating ourselves for a period of time in all things Rolfing SI, by observing a great number of Rolfing sessions, by learning the taxonomies of assessment and indicators of order – then, all of a sudden, we integrate concept and sensory experience and finally come to see.
What we call ‘seeing’ in these cases is beyond the ken of the Cartesian onlooker who stands aside and separate from the object of perception. Rolf’s way of seeing demands that the seer participates in the very act of seeing, thereby bringing forth wholeness and the beauty of normality. As I suggested above, the kind of lived perception that Rolf is talking about is most akin to aesthetic appreciation: it is about waking up to the beauty of normality.
To the question: how do we learn to perceive the beauty of normality, Rolf says, look and feel. But this answer is just a way of saying, see it like a Rolfer, which is just what the beginning Rolfer is trying to figure out. The advice she offers (Rolf 1978, 96) is only useful to those who can already see or are on the verge of it: “Rolfers don’t need verbal feedback. As you observe more, all kinds of things speak to you . . . . For me, he [a client] is not something different. When I am Rolfing, he and I form one for at least the time that I’m working. Look and feel. A guy walks in displaying all kinds of things that talk to you. You don’t need feedback – you need to look at what’s there.” Eventually, you will gain an intuitive appreciation of it. Then, you will just see it. Not only that, you will also embody it. Notice that learning to see beauty or horizontality or any of our similar concepts of order requires a practice of quiet contemplation and the ability to become one with your client. “Yes,” says the beginning Rolfer, “but how do I make the turn into the kind of seeing that will allow me to take this advice?” Notice that Rolf says that the client and practitioner form one for at least the time of the session. Forming one with the client is an important aspect of what we call later in this paper, “shifting your orientation or intentionality.”
If you want to change a dysfunctional structure, Rolf (1978, 201) says, “Insist that it get itself into a position which, in your mind’s eye, you recognize as the normal. (This is the reason why Rolfers have to sit and listen so much – in order to find what is normal.) When you see it, you can begin bringing the body toward it.” You must spend time contemplating the human body as it shows itself to you. To come to know normal you must saturate yourself with the phenomena of Rolfing SI by quietly observing session after session after session until finally you see order or its lack.
Even though a great many of our assessments are of the aesthetic kind, Rolfers also depend upon many different kinds of objective assessment as well. We try to make these assessments without falling into the tendency objective assessments have of viewing the body as a soft machine. Qualitative assessments tend to be about wholeness and relationship. Objective assessments tend to pass over wholeness in favor of finding symptoms and performing measurable assessments. Objective assessments are important to every form of therapy. But because they are often based on conceiving of the body as an assemblage of parts, they tend not to be attuned to interdependant relationships that characterize holistic processes. As a result, at times they miss how the whole responds to both dysfunction and manual therapy. An obvious and elegant exception to the problems surrounding holism and its measurement is John Cottingham’s holistic research, which uses a vagal tone monitor to measure integration (Cottingham 1988; Cottingham et. al. 1988; Cottingham and Maitland 1997, 2000).
Since Rolfing SI is a holistic practice, Rolf (1978, 189) can say, “The body as a whole must be balanced. For example, you cannot get movements into a sacrum until you’ve gotten balance up through the thorax. Realizing this gives you a very different picture of how a totality integrates.” The body clearly is not as a machine cobbled together from pre-existing parts. The body at one level is a relationship of relationships appropriating the relationship of gravity. Thus she says (Rolf 1978, 69), “I’m dealing with problems in the body where there is never just one cause. I’d like you to have more reality on the circular processes that do not act in the body but are the body. The body process is not linear, it is circular; always, it is circular. One thing goes awry, and its effects go on and on and on and on. A body is a web, connecting everything with everything else.” The circular wholeness of the body cannot be easily grasped in the narrow confines of objectivity or subjectivity alone. But it can be experienced with an eye that is tuned to the aesthetic.
These comments are all well and good; but unfortunately, they only raise the same pressing questions again. How do we experience beauty? How do we wake up to it? How do we become tuned to the aesthetic? How does the advice “look and feel” help us to see? Clearly, beauty is not something that we can measure. Nor is its way of being very obvious. Calling it subjective also misses the mark. What kind of presence is this, that is neither subjective nor objective, yet can feel so intensely there when you contemplate it? It is important to understand and appreciate the richness and depth of knowledge and feeling that this kind of lived experience can call forth and know that your experience is not simply a subjective fantasy.
Whether you are talking about the beauty of a flower, a work of art, or a body that has undergone Rolfing SI, beauty in every form is a pre-objective, immeasurable presence that presences with the kind of autochthonous, determinate features that invite and enable you to see it. To see it, you must keep looking (quietly contemplating and feeling the situation) until it makes itself known to you, until you see it as something. Rolf’s aesthetic assessment of beauty is the result of the same kind of practiced seeing found in phenomenology and Goethe’s approach – a dynamic way of perceiving the beauty of normality. Thus, with some justification, we can say that the Rolfer’s eye, the phenomenologist’s eye, and the artist’s eye are the same eye.
Part III: The Exercise
There-ing It
Although she was not adverse to objective assessments and did not use the language developed here, there is little doubt that Rolf thought learning to see the indicators of order and make aesthetic assessments was of utmost importance. We have already seen how she thought you had to quietly look and look until you finally saw holistically. The importance of this protracted practice of quietly looking at session after session is reflected in how she originally structured the training of Rolfers. The first phase of the training was called Auditing, and the second was called the Practitioner phase. Auditing was designed to teach you how to see. As an auditor, all you were permitted to do was to watch, to look, and keep on looking at the practitioners working on each other and their models until you, hopefully, began to see what Rolfing SI was all about. Usually, no hands-on work was permitted until you entered the Practitioner phase.
Rolf’s way of teaching seeing could be called the Saturation Method. It consisted of placing students in a Rolfing-SI-rich environment until they were so saturated with the way of Rolfing SI that they developed the Rolfer’s eye. Today, the Rolfing-SI-rich environment is more extensive. It includes horizontality and all the traditional indicators of order but adds to the mix new refinements such as the taxonomies of assessment. Over the years following Rolf’s death, Rolfing SI evolved in many important and profound ways. Reflecting these changes, the faculty revamped all three levels of the training (foundations, basic, and advanced training). The saturation method is still in place, but the Auditor phase in its original form disappeared. All in all, the changes and additions seem to have greatly improved the quality of the teaching. But, when it came to the nature of seeing, it was still something of a mystery for many.
At some point, it finally became clear to me that we needed a procedure for training perception. If only we had a step-by-step procedure, we could add it to the saturation method and we would finally have a way to teach and practice the Rolfer’s way of seeing. As it turns out, a little over two centuries ago Goethe discovered just what we have been looking for – a step-by-step procedure for training perception.
Let’s begin with a flower and initiate our appropriation of Goethe by first reducing his procedure to its barest bones and filling in the details as we go. Goethe recommends that we engage in what he calls active seeing and exact sensorial imagination (or, if you prefer, exact intuitive perception). In active seeing, we direct our attention to examining the details of the sensuous presence of the flower by means of a sensory/feeling/pre-conceptual openness. Active seeing suspends the verbal/ analytical/intellectual mind by directing attention to sensory experience. Then, in exact sensorial imagination, we create a space for the flower in our imagination and lived body by visualizing what we just received/perceived. Next, we check our image with the flower and add and correct what we missed. We do this over and over again, oscillating between active seeing and exact sensorial imagination, until finally the wholeness of the flower appears and lives in us.
We bc o mp a r t i c i p at s “ it hphenomenon instead of onlookers who are separate from it. When we return to the sensory encounter with the phenomenon, we will find that our senses are enhanced and we begin to become aware of the more subtle qualities of the phenomenon. As we follow this practice of living into the phenomenon, we find that it begins to live in us. Whereas the intellectual mind can only bring us into contact with what is finished already, the senses – enhanced by exact sensorial imagination – bring us into contact with what is living, so that we begin to experience the phenomenon dynamically in its coming into being” (Bortoft 1996, 55).
It is important to recognize that there is a significant difference between this kind of enhanced seeing and everyday perception. Everyday perception and enhanced perception are both forms of ‘seeing-as.’ As such, both are saturated with the cognitive. The critical difference is that enhanced perceiving, where the phenomenon lives in us and we in it, must be cultivated by practice. Enhanced seeing is a participatory perception that arises from practicing active seeing and exact sensorial imagination. Everyday perception does not require this kind of conscious cultivation.
If you wish, you can work your way up to people by practicing with plants first.3 But at this point, we will give an example for working with people. First, find a partner to practice with, preferably a Rolfer. To create an exercise we can practice, we need to simplify the Rolfing process. Think of what we are envisioning as tiny mini-sessions. The idea is to learn this way of seeing on a small scale until you ‘get it’ and it becomes second nature. When it becomes second nature, you can see this way without having to think about each step. As a result, your sessions will naturally go faster. Interestingly, more experienced practitioners are likely to think that they are already doing something very much like what Geothe prescribes. In fact, they probably are. The difference is that Goethe’s way is far more explicit than most Rolfers’ way. The fact that some Rolfers sense a similarity only lends further support to the claim that these ways of seeing are the same.
However, before we go any further, we need to underscore an important point that is absolutely crucial for getting good results. This point cannot be stated too strongly or enough: before you do anything else, your very first act must be to shift your orientation or intentionality from an onlooker experiencing the world through abstractions of the analytic/verbal mind to becoming a participant in the lived perception of the world. You must shift your orientation to allowing what is to show itself. You simply get out of the way by dropping your self and simultaneously expanding your perceptual field to allow the opening of a loving space. Just allow the spaciousness to appear with no thoughts of trying to change your client for the better. The clarity and safety of this clearing makes it possible for the being of your client to wordlessly reveal his troubles to you. This shift is actually a kind of intervention that, all by itself, can create change. Remember Rolf recognizes this shift when she says that she becomes one with her client.
As I said, the importance of this shift in orientation from onlooker to participant cannot be over-emphasized. It is part of what we mean by shifting consciousness and includes what Bortoft (1996, 281) means by: “There has to be a refocusing of attention from what is conceived to the act of conceiving, while engaged in the act of conceiving that which is conceived.”
It is the logically prior precondition for seeing – hence, the key to seeing. In emphasizing it, I am making explicit what is often only implicitly presupposed. It is so important for our purposes that I am adding it to the two-step process I first extracted from Goethe. In our approach, it will be considered the first step in a three-step process and the only step that must remain in effect throughout the entire process of seeing. The three steps are: 1) shift your intentionality or orientation from onlooker to participant; 2) engage in active seeing; 3) engage in exact sensorial imagination. Go back and forth between active seeing and exact sensorial imagination until whole phenomena begin to appear and make sure that you remain in the role of a participant throughout.
Here is a simple formula of how to train yourself to see:
(SO)g(ASnESI)
And here is its translation:
(1.Shift Orientation) g (2.Active Seeingn3.Exact Sensorial Imagination)
In the simplest of terms, the exercise looks like this:
Completely open yourself, body and all, to your colleague, and with the help of your senses (all of them, where appropriate) experience in detail the sensory qualities of your partner and feel the mood that comes with it. As a Goethean researcher says (Seamon and Zajonc 1998, 37)4, “allow your way of seeing to be shaped by the phenomena.”
Close your eyes; visualize what you saw. Re-create in your mind’s eye and re-feel in your body the details of the sensory experience of your partner. You might draw what you saw rather than visualize it. You could also imitate how your partner comes to bodily-mind-presence with your own body-minding.
If you have been visualizing, open your eyes/ senses/feeling-nature. If you have been doing something else, come back to the sensory and once more appreciate in detail your colleague’s sensuous presence.
Then close your eyes again. Add any detail to your visualization or your drawing or your whole-body gesture that you missed the first time or correct something you may have distorted.
Open your eyes/senses/feeling-nature again to the sensuous presence of your partner.
Close your eyes and visualize again.
Continue engaging in the practice of active seeing and exact sensorial imagination until the wholeness of your partner and/or his dysfunctional whole patterns emerge. Now, take what you saw into a mini session on your partner. If you saw a thwart to wholeness, don’t think you must treat it. Just leave it be. Or, if you decide you want to treat it, in one or two moves only, try to change it – see/feel/work big and holistically.
Practicing oscillating back and forth between active seeing and exact sensorial imagination is designed to activate your imagination while taking you progressively deeper and deeper into an experience of the being of your partner. You begin with shifting your orientation and gathering immediate and direct information by means of your senses – not by means of your intellectual/verbal mind. Pay attention and make conscious your first impressions and the mood that accompanies them. Don’t lose your orientation shift by rushing ahead into theorizing, explaining, or categorizing. After engaging in active seeing and exact sensorial imagination for a while, you will begin to notice that your sensory experience and your imagination are intensified.
Whereas active seeing perceives things as separate, when you move into exact sensorial imagination, you are in the realm of relationship, creating a space for and participating with the being of your colleague. You are taking the dynamic relational character of the whole being into yourself in order to reveal the formative principle or self-organizing character of the being of your colleague. In time, you begin to sense his way of being in the world as a kind of core gestural signature. Depending on the person, the core gesture can be very complicated or very simple. When he is so far away that you cannot see his face, it is what allows you to recognize your friend in how he moves or just stands. This core gestural signature is an expression of his fundamental psychobiological intentionality. As you contemplate the emergence of this whole-being gesture, who he is becomes clearer and more defined. This gestural orientation is his way of being who he is. It is manifest not just in his comportment but also in all aspects of his being. It is not just an action, but action saturated with meaning. Attending to it allows you to more clearly grasp the principle of his self-organization – how he forms himself according to himself. When you grasp it, you do not grasp it through words, but through lived perception. Making drawings, imitating in your own body, putting it to music are all useful ways to sketch the formative gesture of your colleague. As you continue this process, you will begin to perceive your colleague’s fundamental impulse to be.
Your ability to make these kinds of assessments is a complicated form of seeing-as, which, in turn, depends upon your ability to shift your orientation. Just as the concept of ‘giraffe’ allowed you to see the squiggles and splotches as a giraffe, the taxonomies of assessment allow you to transform looking into seeing. The more detailed our categories of assessment become, the more we will be able to see and be prepared to see in our clients. As always happens, the resulting enhanced perception will result in new ways of intervening.
As you continue to allow ‘what is’ to show itself, the wholeness of your colleague’s pattern, along with his patterns of distortion in relationship to the whole, come into clearer focus; suddenly you see-visualize-feel it ‘coming into’ being as a unified whole. The unified whole that constitutes your perception is the result of integrating the cognitive with your sensory and feeling nature. At one and the same time, you are one with your colleague’s condition because you feel it and separate from his situation because you see it. Simultaneously, you feel his distortions in yourself and see them in his body. Your perception is not a matter of having two different perceptions, one in yourself and one of him ‘over there’. Rather, your perception is one integrated, unified whole in which you are both separate and one with your colleague. When you can feel aspects as well as see them, your ability to read your client’s emotional and psychobiological orientation is much more accurate than when you deduce them from visual patterns displayed by your client’s body. When you perceive your client’s structural problems and his comportment as sad and angry, you are see-feeling by means of the integration of your cognitive, sensory, and feeling nature. Unlike deducing emotions from visual patterns, you are seeing directly what your client is going through.
Now switch places with your colleague and let him go through the same three-step process with you.
If this exercise is successful, as a Rolfer you will transform your seeing from that of an onlooker to that of a participant. If you continue this participatory practice of seeing, you will probably be amazed by what shows itself to you. Some of what you will see is what you have always seen. But in time you will probably see aspects of the whole person that you did not think were possible.
Part IV Conclusion
Just as you cannot find the unity and harmony in a piece of music by breaking it down into individual notes, you cannot find the wholeness of the body when you consider it a thing made of parts. Rolf (1977, 65) wrote, “To a seeing eye, the surface contour of a body delineates the underlying structure. To the practitioner of Structural Integration, the problem becomes one of learning to see spatial masses and to sense their balance.” Upon first reading this quote, you are likely to think, “Well, yeah, every Rolfer knows that.” But notice, Rolf’s entire theory and practice is present with this simple statement. What does she mean by this highly suggestive term, ‘spatial masses’? Is she just speaking loosely or does she mean something deeper? To wonder about balance is already to wonder about gravity and integration. If there were no such thing as gravity, it would make no sense to ask about balancing spatial masses. Finding balance in gravity is Rolf’s very core teaching. As we consider what is meant by sensing balance and learning to see spatial masses, we are once again drawn into wondering about a qualitative/ aesthetic perception. Although she is not adverse to objective assessments (she is a scientist after all), the level of experiential, pre-reflective understanding that Rolf is pointing to cannot be grasped through objective measures alone. To appreciate the lived reality of the knowledge this kind of understanding brings, our indicators of order have to be sensed the way we sense all holistic phenomena – aesthetically.
Before we end this discussion, I want to make a few remarks that require further development. What I call the infusion of the cognitive in perception, Goethe and his followers call the work of the imagination. When you are seeing by means of the sensory, you see the separation between things. But when you suddenly see the giraffe or horizontality appear, that is the work of the imagination. The senses reveal the world of separation, while the imagination reveals the holistic world of relationship and connection. We can depict the separate objects given to us through the senses, but we cannot depict the relationships and connectivity of holism. Even though we cannot depict holistic phenomena, we can, through the power of imagination (or cognition), see it. Seeing in the enhanced manner of Rolf or Goethe must be cultivated to where there is an integration of the sensory and the imagination (cognition). When integration is achieved, we experience separation and the relationship and connectivity of holism simultaneously in one simple act of enhanced perception. Through practice of exact sensorial imagination, the senses are also enhanced. As a result, our enhanced senses make it possible for us to participate in the living presence of the phenomenon and experience it coming into being.
There is more to Goethe’s approach than I have sketched here. The complete explication would require a delineation of his discovery of the ur-phenomenon. Unfortunately, this project is a large one that would require another long article to do it justice.5
Where Goethe sees two factors at work in perception – the sensory and imagination – I see a third. I call it our feeling-nature. I encourage you to continue on this path of perception well beyond the integration of the cognitive (imagination) and sensory to the point where you can also integrate your feeling-nature. If you pursue this path of perception long enough, you will discover something truly amazing. When you integrate your feeling-nature with the cognitive (imagination) and the sensory, your perceptual vitality and acuity will be enhanced and your overall skill level (including your perceptual skills, of course) will be suddenly greater and more effective. Not only that, if you keep on keeping on, your feeling-nature will continue to be released from its fixations and conflicts, and you will continue to wake up to your freedom.6
What I have attempted here is a work in progress. It is by no means the final word. I invite you to practice this little exercise to see where it takes you. Keep your boundaries clear, your heart open, your perception immaculate, and practice, practice, practice, practice. Then, please let me know how and if it works for you.
ENDNOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bortoft, H. 2012. Taking Appearance Seriously: The Dynamic Way of Seeing in Goethe and European Thought. Edinburgh, UK: Floris Books.
Bortoft, H. 1996. The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way Toward a Science of Conscious Participation in Nature. New York, NY: Lindisfarne Press.
Cottingham, J. 1988. “Shifts in pelvic inclination angle and parasympathetic tone produced by Rolfing soft tissue manipulation.” Physical Therapy 68(9):1364- 1370.
Cottingham J., S.W. Porges, and T. Lyon 1988. “Effects of soft tissue mobilization (Rolfing pelvic left) on parasympathetic tone in two age groups.” Physical Therapy 68(9):352-356.
Cottingham, J. and J. Maitland 1997. “Three-paradigm treatment using soft tissue mobilization and guided movement-awareness techniques for patients with chronic low back pain: a case study.” The Journal of Orthopedic and Sports Physical Therapy 26(3): 155-167.
Cottingham, J. and J. Maitland 2000. “Integrating manual and movement therapy with philosophical counseling for treatment of a patient with ALS: a case study that explores the principles of holistic intervention.” Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine 6(2): 120-8.
Heidegger, M. 1996. Being and Time, A Translation of Sein und Zeit. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. New York, NY: State University of New York Press.
Myers, T. 2001. Anatomy Trains: Myofascial Meridians for Manual and Movement Therapists, first edition. New York, NY: Churchill Livingstone.
Rolf, I.P. 1977. Rolfing: The Integration of Human Structures. Santa Monica, CA: Dennis-Landman Publishers.
Rolf, I.P. and R. Feitis 1978. Ida Rolf Talks About Rolfing and Physical Reality. New York: Harper & Row.
Schrag, C.O. 1969. Experience and Being. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.
Seamon, D. and A. Zajonc 1998. Goethe’s Way of Science. New York, NY: State University of New York Press.Seeing[:]
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