I learned a lot about bodies and about Rolfing SI in my training at the Rolf Institute®. But I learned a great deal more from my clients and their bodies through the practice of the art and science of Rolfing SI. This article is about what I learned from two particular clients.

People and their bodies get pretty banged up here on planet Earth. Most people recover from their injuries and move on without a second thought. On the Rolfing table, however, many clients report remembering old and seemingly insignificant injuries. Many times, in the recall of the event, clients realize that the injury was more severe than originally thought at the time. This tells me that fascia is one location where the record of traumatic events is stored.

Most injuries are imposed upon the body from the outside. Boxing is an example of a sport where simple impact injuries are common. When a boxer takes a left hook to the head, the force clearly comes from the outside and is directed inward. In a punch to the abdomen, try to imagine the shockwave that spreads from the impact site through the body. Consider other examples that lead to a myriad of other injuries, e.g. an auto collision, a fall from a ladder or down a flight of stairs, stubbing a toe. If the blow to the body is forceful enough, a bone may fracture.

After the initial impact, fixation is the next phase in an injury to a bone. Bones are highly vascularized, with a rich blood supply. When a bone fractures, blood seeps into the surrounding tissues. (Bones do not have to break for blood to infiltrate surrounding tissues. A simple bruise is caused by broken blood vessels.) After the bone is set and begins the process of healing, the liquid portion of the blood infiltrate (plasma) is slowly reabsorbed into the body. Some of the cellular matter of the blood can also be slowly metabolized and returned to the body as waste to be excreted, but a lot of the cellular particulates do not reabsorb. They remain engorged in the layers of the tissues surrounding the fracture and they fixate into a gooey, gluey cast that restricts future movement. This restriction is not just for the duration of the healing; it remains an impediment to normal movement from that point onward. That is the nature of injury: impact and local fixation.

I worked with the first of these two clients of which I speak at the beginning of my Rolfing career, and I must admit that I was unprepared for what I was about to encounter (although I did eventually figure it out). The second client was later in my career, and when I encountered this similar situation, I was better prepared to work with him.

Client One – Struck by Lightning

My first example introduced me to a different kind of injury. I was a pretty freshfaced Rolfer, but I had taken quite a few people through the ten-session series of Rolfing SI. I had also done enough post-ten work to have a pretty good feel for bodies and their tissues. However, from my first touch, this woman felt different. Gooey and gluey does not begin to describe the level of fixation that I felt. It was as if the goo and glue permeated to every layer and level from her skin to her bones and beyond. It was not fixated locally; it was everywhere! Every attempt of mine to penetrate and release it was met with resistance. Everything I tried to input bounced off and got reflected outward. Her entire body was matted and welded into one immovable unit from left to right, front to back, top to bottom, inside to outside, locally, regionally, and globally. Furthermore, she was in great pain and hypersensitive to my contact. She winced with every touch.

I knew in the opening moments of the first session that something about her was different from all the people I had ever touched before. I asked her, “Have you ever had any accident or injury that might have changed your tissues?” She assured me that, no, except for the usual fender benders and falling off her roller skates as a kid, nothing untoward had ever happened to her. She continued her series with me, and the work went on. Many times throughout her series, I had to stop and ask again, “Are you sure you never had some kind of really traumatic injury?” “No, nothing,” was her reply.

This went on, week after week, until we got to the middle of the ninth session. Every other person with whom I had worked had made significant progress toward integration by this time in the series. But here, I felt I had barely made any progress and, truth be told, I was a little exhausted from feeling all my input getting bounced back at me. I paused the session to take a breath and ask yet again, “Search back through the feelings of my input. Are you really sure you never had a bad wreck or traumatic event?” I could see in her eyes that she was leafing through the Rolodex of her life. Suddenly, her eyes lit up and she said, “Well, I was hit by lightning when I was nineteen. Is that what you mean?”

We looked at each other in silence for a long time. Now my mind was racing. “Wow,” I finally said. “Bless your heart. And you didn’t think this was worth mentioning to your Rolfer?” And she said, “It was so long ago, I forgot all about it. I just remembered.” Only then did she tell her story. She had been a counselor at a summer camp. There was a thunderstorm one afternoon, and she had gone running back through the rain to the tent to secure the flaps so the bunks would not get wet. The flap rope was tied to a nail in a tree. Just as she touched the nail, the tree was split in two by a lightning bolt. She was badly burned and taken to a hospital for a day and released.

In that moment, it all made perfect sense. This was not the usual type of injury I had dealt with. This was very different. The impact did not come mechanically from the outside. In this case, every atom of her body had been instantly lit up from the inside. Because the body’s interstitial fluids are naturally ionized by virtue of their electrolyte content, the fluids were a perfect conduit to distribute electrical current to every cell of her body at once. Imagine dropping a plugged-in toaster into a bathtub of salt water; a toaster, however, operates on 110-volt house current, and this woman’s body fluids were conducting perhaps millions of volts. To add to the trauma, consider the suddenness of the event. A mechanical injury spreads through the body in a progressive shock wave. A lightning strike illuminates the entire body at once.

When I considered all this, it made sense that every layer of this woman’s body would be fused together from stem to stern and from port to starboard. It explained a lot. I thought back on my experience of every other body with which I had worked. To work with most bodies is somewhat like untying a shoe. When tying a shoe, you begin with a half hitch and then tie a bow on top of that. The bow functions to keep the half hitch in place so that it remains tightly cinched. When you want to untie it, all you have to do is pull out the bow and the half hitch comes loose. With my previous clients, if I untied enough knots, I would come to a place where the deeper layers would give it up and let go. But not here! Here, every layer had to be ‘peeled’ open one layer at a time, in order, from the surface inward. I say that because, as I mentioned, this client was hypersensitive to touch. In order for her to tolerate the work, I had to peel her layers open from the outside in, one at a time. Any time I peeled too much at a time, she squirmed and gasped.

I was already in the middle of the ninth session when I had this insight into my client. I knew I only had a session and a half to do as much as I could. The first shift I made was to drop the goal of getting her to where I was able to get everyone else in ten sessions. I recognized that the extremely rare event of getting struck by lightning made this client unlike most of the rest of humanity. We did the best we could in the remaining time left in her series of Rolfing work.

We continued with advanced work for several years. Those advanced sessions confirmed for me the effects of electrical burns in the body. My strategy for the work was the same; peel her burned and boiledtogether layers apart in small increments that she could tolerate. I knew that if I exceeded her very sensitive boundaries, I would lose her trust. Because of that, I developed a way of working that I called ‘shaving a balloon’. It was deliberate and delicate work. The delicate balance was getting that close shave without popping the balloon. Popping the balloon, in this case, meant eliciting any kind of pain response, even a twitch. But after a few years, we were able to accomplish many goals.

I only encountered one other client through the years who had suffered a similar injury. That was a carpenter who had accidentally drilled into a 440-volt cable. He told me about getting electrocuted in our introductory consultation. As soon as he mentioned it, I thought, “Oh boy, here’s a great chance to check my theory.” His tissues were sufficiently similar to the woman struck by lightning for me to conclude that there is a special type of injury that I can call ‘burned from within’. The good news is that this kind of injury is quite rare.

Client Two – Cancer Survivor with Radiation Sequelae

This is where the story gets personal. If you know me, you know my wife, Gloria Gene Moore. Gloria is a three-time, thirty-sevenyear cancer survivor. She was diagnosed with stage three Hodgkin’s lymphoma, her first cancer, at age twenty-eight. She had a fist-sized tumor growing around her aorta at a time when Hodgkin’s was considered a death sentence. Her doctors told her there was hope, and sure enough, she was among the first to survive Hodgkin’s. The survival was not without its costs, though.

Gloria told me her story when we met. Her surgeons performed a thoracotomy (chest crack) to excise the tumor and followed up with radiation. I heard what she said but it didn’t connect with me until the moment I touched her tissues, after we became a couple. I expected to find structures out of place and out of proper alignment because that is the usual aftermath of any surgery. What I didn’t expect to find was that the radiation that saved Gloria’s life had also ‘burned her from within’. The usual structural displacements from the surgery were there, but in addition, those displacements were solidly fixated into place by the ‘boiling’ together of her tissue layers from the radiation burns. It was the lightning lady all over again!

Lightning injuries are extremely rare, but radiation after-effects are rampant. Nuclear therapy is a standard part of cancer treatment today and its use is growing. I can still say that in my whole career I have had only one person as a client who was hit by lightning; the number of cancer survivors who come to my Rolfing table with radiation sequelae is immense.

It started innocently enough. Gloria and I were at an SI conference where Dorothy Nolte led the group in her exercise of “Drop a line from the front of your sacrum and hook it to the center of the earth; now raise a line from the top of your head and hitch it to a star.” I had no trouble following the imagery but Gloria told me, “I can’t do that.” And, sure enough, she couldn’t find her ‘Line’ because the radiation-treatment sequelae had shortened the front of her body.

Soon after that, a seventy-seven-year-old client came to me with his head, neck, and thoracic spine positioned so severely anterior that he couldn’t lie on his back without nine inches of pillows under his head. His friends and family said he was “bent with age,” but his story held other clues. In his initial consultation, he told me that he’d had thyroid cancer that was treated with large doses of radiation. The treatment worked, the cancer was gone, but the scar tissue that formed from the radiation had left him bent and bowed over in front. He said he couldn’t understand why the cancer treatment had changed his structure. I was no longer a rookie about burns from within, so I was able to help him. After that, cancer survivors with forward-head posture sought me out.

Droop-Neck Syndrome

One evening, Gloria and I were sitting at home on the couch. I was watching TV and she was reading a Facebook page called Survivors of Hodgkin’s. Suddenly, she said, “There’s this thing here that they’re calling ‘droop-neck syndrome’.” I grabbed the remote and shut off the TV. She had my complete attention. As we perused the page, I knew that I, and the entire SI world, had a syndrome on our hands. Unlike years ago, when I struggled to understand why my lightning client was so different, I knew that Rolfing work could be effective for people with tissue damage from radiation.

The general mission of Rolfing SI is alignment of the body with gravity, as seen in Figure 1. Applying these alignment principles to droop neck syndrome (DNS) becomes problematic when every fiber of tissue in the body is ‘burned’ and fused into a web of seemingly intractable fixation. DNS is not an exception to any of the foundational ideas of SI, but it is an exaggeration of the patterns that afflict every human on Earth. Therefore, it falls squarely within the spectrum that Rolfing SI can address. We, as practitioners, can help, but only if we know with what we are dealing. This combination of severe misalignment plus burned-fromwithin fixation makes for a daunting long-term project.

The Work Required

I would like this next section to be read like an open letter to SI practitioners, but the public is invited to read along and listen in. On the one hand, I apologize for the jargon, but on the other hand, I welcome its use, because it is time to educate the public about human physical structure. Our fascially illiterate public must set aside its obsession with bones, muscles, and nerves and consider that fascia, the soft-tissue frame of the body, is the organ of structure and support. Since DNS is a fascial issue, this is a teachable moment.

For a random structure (the normal client who has not received any SI work), it is common for the structure to slump forward. If you are working on a client with a combination of DNS and ‘burned from within’, ten sessions will be just the beginning, but it is a good way to begin because the Ten Series is designed to create balance between the front and back of the body.

Take the case of my seventy-seven-year-old thyroid cancer survivor who was “bent with age.” I don’t see him as bent with age. I see a neck and thorax that was ‘burned’ through so that his flesh became like parchment stretched thinly over his ribcage. Because his tissues desiccated and shrank during treatment, they rotated each rib downward so that each thoracic vertebral body was forced into an anterior tilt. The tilt was more exaggerated when moving higher up the spine, so that each thoracic vertebra was more forward than the one below, and so on, up to T1.

T1, the first thoracic vertebra, is an interesting structure. T1 launches the first ribs that connect in the front to the sternum. T1 is also the launch pad for C7, the first cervical vertebra. If T1 is tipped forward, the neck has no chance to launch upward; instead, it is forced anterior into the droop shape of the syndrome. If each rib is rotated downward in front, the sternum will be dropped in the front relative to the vertebra in back that launched the rib. That is the hallmark of DNS: the sternum is dropped in front relative to the spine. To undo the syndrome, the Rolfer’s job is to de-rotate each rib-vertebra unit upward in front so that the sternum and each rib can lift instead of collapse. Then, the neck can rise upward instead of being forward and droopy.

1. The Little Boy Logo showing the ‘mission’ of Rolfing SI.

That sounds easy to a Rolfer and in most cases, it is. But here, the collapse is compounded by the burned-from-within fixation. All the tissues are desiccated, fused together, and fit the bones like a tight shrink-wrap. A quote from Dr. Rolf (that I cannot attribute) speaks to this type of tissue fixation, although she probably was not referring to what I call burned from within: “The problem is there’s nothing to work with because it’s all stuck to the bone. That’s your job: Get that tissue up off the bone.”

So, that’s the Rolfer’s job: get that tissue back to being layered and lifted up off the bones. If that sounds easy, it’s not. To a client who is truly burned from within, every touch feels intrusive. It brings us back to the strategy I developed of ‘shaving a balloon’. Shaving the balloon means peeling the stuck layers in tolerable increments. After many advanced sessions of shaving my way in from the outside, I found I had reached a point where my clients could allow a deeper form of peeling that I call ‘tissue loading’.

Tissue loading means that I gather any loose fascial layers that I can find and deftly press (load) them against a handy nearby bony margin. If I load at just the correct angle and in just the correct direction, I can feel the deepest layers open. I feel deep fixations release. I feel joints de-rotate. I feel the body differentiating sleeve from core and able to find its front and its back. I feel the body find its alignment with gravity. These are changes that Rolfers routinely achieve in ten sessions. But in a body that is ‘burned’ through, it takes a lot of gentle ‘shaving’ to release the deep pressures that make the body hypersensitive and hypervigilant. Only after the fascial body is decompressed and desensitized is it ready for tissue loading.

Thus ends my professional counsel to any practitioner of SI who might find a client with DNS following radiation therapy on their table. To any reader who is experiencing DNS, or if you know someone who is, my advice is to find a practitioner of Rolfing SI and share this article with him or her. My experience is that it will probably take a lot of delicate work, but results are achievable.

Ritchie Mintz received his initial Rolfing Ten Series in Boulder, Colorado in 1973. He trained at the Rolf Institute of Structural Integration (RISI) in 1978 and did his Advanced Training in 1981. Ritchie is the author of Foundations of Structural Integration. He lives in Austin, Texas.‘Burned from Within’ and Droop Neck Syndrome