Illustrations by Eva Furnari.

Editor’s Note: Metaphor was the subject of Dr. Merlino’s PhD thesis, “Metáforas do corpo em transformação: Experiência, Percepção, Posturaas relações com a Integração Estrutural Rolfing,” which translates as Metaphors of the Body in Transformation: Experience, Perception, and Posture and Their Relationship to Rolfing® Structural Integration.”

Somatic practices, which constitute a relatively new and still-evolving field of study, emphasize the subjective experience. Though some of these practices are grounded in anatomy and neurophysiology, they acknowledge the phenomenon of the human body from a proprioceptive, or first-person, perspective (Hanna 1995). Some practices have developed around the social and cultural implications of questions about the body: our bodily experience is influenced by our interaction with our surrounding environment, as we come to understand ourselves and our world through our bodies. In some sense, these practices take as their point of departure various philosophical, scientific, and cultural approaches to the body, which, in the past few decades, have garnered increasing interest.

When transformative insights arise in the context of somatic practices, metaphors emerge to express the transformations and assist the client to own the changes. In my Rolfing Structural Integration (SI) practice, I have observed certain patterns in my clients’ use of metaphors. While metaphors sometimes describe physical sensations, they also generate sensation, as well as cognition and emerging self-understanding. Therefore, improving our understanding of metaphor can inform and advance the Rolfing process.

How Metaphor Organizes Our Existence

Images and metaphors have long been used in many cultures as aids to therapeutic, curative, and mnemonic processes. They appear in spiritual and shamanic practices, religions, and more recently in psychotherapy, as well as in neurological and motor rehabilitation. Metaphors inspire relaxation or movement in sports and dance – and in our Rolfing sessions.

In linguistic studies, metaphor was long considered a mere ornament, unnecessary to daily human communication. Beginning around 1970, some linguists broke from this objectivist view and began to reformulate the theories of metaphor. In his classic, “The Conduit Metaphor,” Reddy (1979) described how – contrary to the then-prevailing view that metaphor is poetic or figurative – metaphor is part of ordinary English. The new paradigm posits metaphor as a key cognitive function, indispensable to how we conceptualize the world we experience. Expressions generalized through metaphor are not in the realm of language, but of thought itself, ways of mapping conceptual intersections where one mental and conceptual domain is cast in terms of another. That metaphor helps us understand abstract concepts such as time, change, causation, and action – not to mention emotions such as love and hate – signals its importance for how we comprehend the world and ourselves.

In their pioneering work Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) attributed to metaphor a key cognitive role in science, arguing that metaphor unites reason and imagination, and that imaginative reasoning is as essential to science as it is to the arts. What’s more, they proposed that the metaphors through which we comprehend our world – those that illuminate and render coherent our personal history, dreams, hopes, and ambitions – are grounded in physical experience.

Recent linguistic and psychological studies show that metaphor is ubiquitous in ordinary thought, as manifest in common language. Researchers have sought to identify systematic patterns in the use of metaphor by studying common thinking and expression such as poetry, storytelling, and nonverbal gestures, as well as through psycholinguistic experiments. As Gibbs (2004) reports, studies in cognitive linguistics reveal that human cognition is not so much represented by specifically defined terms as it is structured through various patterns of our perceptual interactions, physical activity, and manipulation of objects. These patterns, which form experiential gestalts that Gibbs calls imagetic schemas, arise during sensorimotor activity as we manipulate objects, orient ourselves in space and time, and direct the focus of our perception to particular ends. For Gibbs, imagetic schemas are by nature imaginative rather than propositional, and operate with structures organized through the experience of body perception and movement. These theories suggest that a new metaphor is a sign of emerging self-comprehension. A key moment in a Rolfing session is when, after release of connective-tissue restrictions, the client perceives his body differently. The sensorimotor system functions differently, and movement can flow with unaccustomed facility. Even the ordinary act of walking feels disconcertingly foreign, as new sensations, perceptions, and images arise. Clients often say it feels like learning to walk all over again. This process is deepened when the novel sensations are accompanied by new metaphors.

In twenty years of clinical practice, I have collected myriad images. Many recurring images accompany sensations such as heat or friction typically induced by the Rolfing touch. Clients often perceive the touch as like a small knife. After the work, or when we invite clients to notice differences between the side that received the work and the one that did not, we Rolfers are accustomed to hearing clients describe their sensation as lighter, softer, or bigger. Often, however, the images are surprising or novel. Some clients experience reveries and reminiscences from long ago, or childhood memories. Occasionally, clients manage to connect these images to a particular spatial and bodily organization, though more commonly they do not know where the images come from. In either case, these are new imagetic schemas, which, according to Gibbs, arise as clients seek to organize novel experiences.

My own research sought to categorize into three types the bodily metaphors that arise in connection with Rolfing SI and other practices of raising body awareness through somatic education: didactic metaphors, sensory metaphors, and metaphors of connection. Didactic and sensory metaphors describe bodily sensation before, during, or after the session. The Rolfer uses didactic metaphors to instruct the client, whereas the client uses sensory metaphors to describe images that arise from his own internal listening. Metaphors of connection, which bring greater complexity and go beyond internal body sensations, arise when the client seeks to organize his experience in relation to the world. Because a metaphor of connection describes a state of bodily organization that brings with it an overall gestalt, the metaphor enlarges the perceptual field, helping to remap the body in space and reorient the person’s relationships in the environment.

Didactic Metaphors

Didactic metaphors are presented to students and clients by therapists and teachers of somatic education, dance, martial arts, and movement in general in order to stimulate a particular kind of cognition and coordination of movement. Today we have scientific evidence that using mental images to simulate movements enhances both learning and performance (Jeannerod 1995; Landers 1983; Suinn 1980). The term motor imaging, used in neurological rehabilitation and physical therapy, refers to imagining a body movement without actually executing it. With the activation of sensorimotor representations during motor imaging, patients whose current neurological conditions preclude execution of movements can nevertheless maintain a neurological program of motor activity, which preserves the capacity for actual movement later. An athlete, musician, dancer, or a patient with neurological damage, can use motor imaging to activate the brain regions that correspond to particular exercises. Didactic images are effective when, by imparting a strong stimulus to the nervous system, they create interest. As an enticing lure, they must be somewhat unusual, perhaps disconcerting, ridiculous, beautiful, or exaggerated. Many examples from dance and martial arts show parallels to animal movements, the forms of objects, and sensations and forms of nature. Because metaphors are personal, what works for one client will not necessarily work for the next, and Rolfers must seek the most effective metaphor for each. As Rolfing and Rolf Movement instructor Monica Caspari observes, when an image comes to her mind during a session, it is not formulaic, but rather an inspiration in that particular moment for that particular client.

Most didactic metaphors are either anatomical or perceptual. In somatic practices, the use of anatomical didactic metaphors is often called experiential anatomy. This is an excellent resource to raise the client’s body awareness, but because many clients have virtually no comprehension of their own anatomy, it can require some preliminary education. For example, when I showed one of my clients a three-dimensional model of the bones of the foot, the client got a sense of how absurd it was to conceive of the foot as an unarticulated block.

Because the way we imagine and describe the workings of our bodies influences how our bodies actually work and the sensations we experience, anatomical didactic metaphors should approximate the biomechanical function of the structure at hand. For example, my client gained more possibilities of movement just by virtue of an anatomically correct image of the foot. On the contrary, when the client’s image of how a joint works is unclear, the use of that joint is most likely disorganized. While pictures can be helpful, a three-dimensional skeletal model that can be touched, visualized, and experienced is best.

In Rolfing sessions, proprioceptive metaphors can facilitate a variety of explorations with objects. In Hubert Godard’s movement work with bamboo sticks, for example, the client is stimulated to hold the bamboo with a haptic touch – i.e., to allow oneself to be touched by the bamboo at the same time one is touching it. For example, following the movement of raising the bamboo stick to the ceiling, the instruction is to allow oneself to hang from the bamboo, while at the same time to push the bamboo away. These seemingly paradoxical instructions engage complex neurophysiological structures in support of the movement. In our sessions, we can use perceptual metaphors around touch, hearing, sight, and smell/taste to stimulate other dynamics of both movement and proprioception. These perceptual images can be used to create novel relationships with everyday objects.

Finally, didactic metaphors introduce our clients to a language for describing bodily sensation. For persons not used to giving words to their sensations, didactic metaphors create a verbal domain in which they can develop their own words for description or discussion of the body.

Sensory Metaphors

These metaphors are chosen by the clients themselves, and arise from the sensory experience of their own bodies before, during, or after sessions. Clients can be extremely creative as they seek to describe sensations through their personal repertoires of images. During sessions, it is essential for Rolfers to accept and legitimize the descriptions clients bring, and to exercise our listening skills and attention at the same time we are refining our work strategies. Usually, the client’s first images are accompanied by timidity and insecurity, and the client needs encouragement from the Rolfer for the images to persist and be developed. Because clients are not used to talking about their sensations, we Rolfers are introducing them to a new tool of expression. At the same time, to honor the novelty of the experience, we must be patient and not pepper our clients with incessant questions about how or what they are feeling.

During sessions, it is imperative to use the client’s exact words. This is key to effective communication through images. First, an apparent synonym might fail to convey the client’s perception. Second, using the client’s exact words legitimizes and dignifies the client’s experience and makes space for the experience to be concretized in image and language. A receptive and accepting environment – unlike the anesthetizing and stultifying hyper-stimulation of the modern world – stimulates the client to observe and express new sensations.

Surprisingly, sensory metaphors are often based on gastronomic images. Before one session, a septuagenarian psychoanalyst described the discomfort in her leg: “My leg feels as if theater ushers with flashlights are running up and down it. My leg is on high alert!” And after the session: “The leg feels warm, like a stretched mozzarella cheese. It’s not on high alert any more!” She then shared childhood memories about vacation time spent in the country with her family. She told of one idyllic day when everyone was making mozzarella together, and explained how they used hot water to stretch the cheese. Or – as a young student of cinematic set design described the sensations on the side that had received work: “It feels like a crepe when you put it in a hot skillet – all spread out and melted.”

Other metaphors are based on the natural world or on common objects:

• “This side is black, like a dry, dead tree. But the side you worked on feels like a living branch, running with sap; it’s wide awake, blue.”
• “You know how computer cords can get all tangled up? In the leg you just worked on, it feels like the cords are lined up and well-arranged. In the other leg, the cords are still all tangled up.”
• “My shoulder feels like an all-wrinkled-up bed sheet – like a sheet that was in a bucket of water, and all the water dried up, leaving the sheet all dry and wrinkly.” During one session, an elderly lady reported pain when I touched her foot and asked me if I were applying a pincushion to the sole of her foot. When I denied it, she had to look for herself before she believed me. The pricks of pain she felt diminished and eventually departed as the work progressed. Ida Rolf talked about thorns stuck in the flesh, and this metaphor arises for clients over and over. When the lady felt her hip freeing up, she observed, “It’s as if I’ve had a cord wrapped around my waist that has now been loosened – and now I can breathe.”

Metaphors of Connection

Clients present metaphors of connection when the recognition of new postural organizations alters perception of the world and others in it. Here, new inferences, meanings, and sensations arise from the bodily and perceptual reorganization. Based on the cognitive view of metaphor, when the metaphor of connection springs up, it both illuminates and expresses abstract ideas underlying human thinking – ideas that guide how the person views the overall environment and the objects within it. These metaphors express the precious moments in which the client comes to own the transformations that the Rolfer’s work has facilitated, as the client describes new relationships and new ways of being and acting in the body during ordinary activities such as walking, sitting, or breathing.

Among the three types of body metaphor, this is the type that can link to the social, political, and artistic realms. The metaphor of connection brings insight, which arises when the client is in a creative state, no longer isolated within the internal territory of subjective perception but creating a bridge between subjective perception of self and objective perception of the outside world.

Godard (2013) suggests that metaphors of connection arise in the context of a person’s liberation or disengagement from the grip of the metaphor that has been the person’s pattern so far. The client steps outside the habitual metaphor and enters into an experience for which, because it is novel, there are no words. It is at first empty, silent. The disengagement, followed by the emptiness and silence, creates the opportunity for new metaphors. One client remarked at the conclusion of our process, “It seems that I’m no longer alone, that I have joined the flow of the world. Previously, I was drawn into myself and alone. This brings up strong feelings for me.”

The body’s memory – this aggregate of sensorimotor patterns organized around habit, life history, and beliefs about what is good alignment – creates a body posture. This posture is registered in the tonic musculature and determines the degree of tension in the body, defining for each human gesture a specific quality and color. Our work with posture can be considered a work of composition, of putting together: it lets the client organize and relate to the flux of perception and sensation. Posture is not something we can relegate to the outside, but rather something that comes from the inside, something that happens in the meeting of the inside with the outside. One young client realized that her new posture was possible when she stayed present in her surroundings. This took courage: “If you don’t get this idea, it’s a place where you do not exist yet. You want to say you exist, but don’t have the words. I can’t maintain the old posture I’m used to – with that lover’s heart, like a good bride, absent, passive.”

My empty hands are filled with nostalgia.

Another young woman, a performing artist, describes her sensations after our work: “It’s like I’m free from a condition of being crushed in a vise, from a silent suffocation. It feels like two eyes in the mouth of the stomach are opened, and that there is a vast space in the front. It feels like flying.” One client, a man of forty, discovered “a sense of shame in being vertical, upright. I think I carry things from my past in my body, making everything compressed and fearful.” The Rolfer’s task includes working through these complications, which make it harder to improve anyone’s posture. Of course, as we help clients get used to their new metaphors, we can balance their connective-tissue tonus, too.

Final Considerations

Our engagement with Rolfing clients has a creative aspect. As Rolfers make the transition from subjective perception of the client’s unique physicality to the objective analysis of the client’s structure, they are like film choreographers helping the client to find a different musical score – one that’s more fluid, more integrated in the world. As Rolfing SI induces changes in bodily perception and sensation, the client can recreate internal images and patterns of relationship and use metaphor to develop a new narrative of his own experience, refining it as he shares it with the Rolfer.

One explanation for the emergence of images and emotions, which are the points of departure for the narratives, is that by touching fascia, the Rolfer conveys the possibility of a joint, which, unlike a block, actually articulates. This allows the client to gain plasticity and differentiation, and to make relational space, inside and outside, within himself and with the world. The sensation that one is articulated, differentiated, and most of all autonomous, can be very powerful: it is no longer necessary to brace oneself.

The body dislikes going in opposite
directions.

The memory, a product of the body’s encounter with the world, is re-formed each time one encounters one’s own body. When the Rolfer recognizes that emerging metaphors express the client’s taking ownership of the changes that Rolfing SI can bring, the Rolfer can open the therapeutic context to receive whatever words come to the client. During Rolfing sessions, as the client returns to a state of emptiness free of rigidified tensions, the words of the body help the client to understand and process the experience. Tissue and memory meld into a new configuration that is more fluid and articulated; and through metaphor, narrative becomes a tool of formation and transformation. If there is a receptive and accepting witness, so much the better.

Author’s Note: The author wishes to thank Eva Furnari, who generously allowed the use of her illustrations, and Heidi Massa, for her commitment and excellence in translating this article into English.

Bibliography

Gibbs, R. et al. 2004. “Metaphor Is Grounded in Embodied Experience.” Journal of Pragmatics 36(7): 1189-1210.

Godard, H. 2013. Unpublished interview with Lucia Merlino.

Hanna, T. 1995. “What is Somatics?” in Bone, Breath, and Gesture: Practices of Embodiment, D.H. Johnson ed. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books.

Jeannerod, M. 1995. “Mental Imagery in the Motor Context.” Neuropsychologia 33(11):1419-1432.

Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Landers, D. 1983. “The Effects of Mental Practice on Motor Skill Learning and Performance: A Meta-analysis.” Journal of Sport Psychology 5(1):25-57.

Reddy, M. 1979. “The Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language About Language.” In Metaphor and Thought, A. Ortony ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Suinn, R.M. 1980. “Body Thinking: Psychology for Olympic Champions.” In Psychology in Sports: Methods and Applications, R.M. Suinn ed. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Burgess.