Working with Energy

By Jeffrey Maitland, Advanced Rolfing® Instructor, and Deborah Weidhaas, Certified Advanced Rolfer™, Rolf Movement® Practitioner

 

Deborah Weidhaas: Okay, I’ll start with this: my definition of ‘energetic’ is that the root, or origin, of what’s happening in the structure is mental, emotional, or spiritual. So, what’s present in the client’s structure is having a clear effect in the physical body, but this effect didn’t originate as physical. What is driving this physical response is something mental, emotional, or spiritual.

Jeffrey Maitland: Okay, that is one way to look at it. But, instead of trying to explain energy or say what it is (whether it is spiritual, physical, or incorporeal), I begin with a much simpler and more circumspect question: How do you experience energy? Beginning this way is a more manageable approach, and we are less likely to be seduced by metaphysical or speculative explanations. Then I borrow from physics the idea that energy is the  capacity to do work.

Central to all forms of energy is the capacity to do work. This way of looking at energy suits the physicist, but only partly captures what is important to the energy practitioner. A bigger concept of energy is needed to capture the experience of energy work. Our understanding of energy work must acknowledge the felt experience of energy. To do this work, the manual therapist has to be able to experience the energy – to feel it – whereas the physicist is not interested in feeling his definition of energy.

At the heart of energy work is the ability both to feel and to manifest the capacity  to do work. Thus, as a preliminary and tentative attempt to understand how we experience energy, we can say that energy is the felt capacity to do work. Our job is not to explain it, or bring it in line with some metaphysical concept, but to properly describe how we experience it.

DW: I like your distinction between energy according to physics and energy according to a practitioner’s perception. I really like quantum physics because it is beginning to come toward the dynamics I experience as I do Rolfing Structural Integration (SI) work with clients. Or, to say it another way, when I read the last two chapters of The Rainbow and the Worm by Mae-Wan Ho, where she theorizes about what’s going on, this was the first time any scientist got anywhere close to what I actually feel in my hands every day.

JM: I had a similar experience. She caught what I feel. The body as a liquid crystal became reality in my hands.

DW: To experience energy, and allow it  to let the body change, requires a highly skilled level of perception.

JM: Yeah, that’s critical. Energy work, for us, requires a highly skilled perception. This kind of skilled perception doesn’t happen overnight. I fell into it over time.

DW: Yeah, actually, I did too.

JM: I have talked with a number of energy practitioners who found their way into energy work similar to the way you and    I did. Here and there, I took some classes in energy healing. I’d have these moments where I saw or felt something out of the ordinary. It became clear to me that there was something there that I needed to attend to. I didn’t always know what it was and, for years, I struggled with how I knew it and what part of me knew or felt this. I only had inklings in the beginning. In time, I knew I was opening up to energy. There were times when I’d catch myself and think, “Wait a damn minute, what just happened? What did I do?” And that really set me on my ear. I learned to set aside my onlooker’s perception and intellect and participate with what I was perceiving. As I worked,  I discovered that I can feel energy-at-work with almost any part of my body. I realized that the root of perception (what I know as ‘sensorium’) is the whole-body-person-energy. I realized that one of the first distinctions an energy practitioner had to make for himself or herself is the distinction between energy and physicality. When you can feel the difference between those two things, then you are on your way.

DW: That’s cool, and I’m not arguing with you when I say that I thought the most important, or the first one, was to have a clear distinction between you and me.

JM: That’s very important, but the first step is one in which you open yourself to what’s there and create a sensitive space for change. And if you truly open that sensitive space, that loving space, people begin to feel safe. When you truly open to that, in itself, it has the potential to start the process, and to resolve dysfunction, without your doing a thing. If you can simply sit or stand there in that space, then everything flows from that. This is the first step, fundamental and common, to all energy work.

DW: Can you tell me more about what that space is. I’m not asking in general, “What is that?” I’m asking what kind of qualities do you live in, in order to step into that space?

JM: That’s an interesting question. “Stepping into that space” is a quality that you live and feel. We are actually “stepped into that space” every day of our life. There’s not a time when we’re not. So, yes, we’re already in it, and our job is to learn to see that it is so. We don’t have to do anything to get there. We have to not- do to get there and to see what’s true. We struggle because our worldview has been skewed by the mechanistic approach to nature and perception. This mechanistic approach has us thinking the world is made up of separate people, objects, things, diseases, rocks, and so forth when, in truth, everything is connected and in process. The more you spend time examining this, feeling it, the more obvious it becomes, and the clearer it becomes. But you cannot know it through your ordinary thinking mind, the objectifying mind. You can’t see it through that mind. You have to see it through your feeling. You have to get to the point where you understand that our feeling-nature is capable of revealing or disclosing aspects of reality; that our feeling-nature is also capable of revealing and disclosing aspects of reality; that our feeling-nature is also capable of perception. In fact, the totality of ‘what-is’ is capable of perception. We live in an ocean of sentience. So the job is to come to see what’s always so. Does that answer your question?

DW: Yeah, it does. For me, I have come to experience that there’s a field of conscious awareness, and it’s not the conscious awareness that we all live in all day long, and it’s not the chattering mind; or any of that. It is literally a field of accurate truth. I use the term “stepping into it” because it’s a shift in my own level of consciousness to go there; it is always here, but it’s a shift for me to step out of my everyday and go to that field. And when I get into that field, literally, the information and the answers just come. And when I ask questions, the information and answers I get are accurate.

JM: Yup, that’s it. The shift is absolutely essential.

DW: But I actually don’t have the experience of feeling a client’s symptom in my own body.

JM: How do you perceive it?

DW: I would say it is like the bat or whale. It is like having sonar as my perceptual skill.

JM: So you have a metaphor that is of limited help in helping us understand what you’re doing. So can you drop your metaphor and try to think back to a really clear experience in which you perceived exactly what the body needed? What did you see? How did you see that? Which part of you saw that? Remember our approach: How do you experience that?

DW: You’re really going to challenge me here.

JM: These are the questions to answer. You are up to it. Because you have a highly tuned sensorium, you can answer these questions.

DW: I don’t think I see it. I feel it.

JM: Yeah, I know you feel it, but what is it you feel? How do you feel it? What part of you feels it?

DW: Oh, that’s tough. I’m going to have to think on that one a bit.

JM: If we stop and experience how we’re doing what we’re doing, and work with it, we can then begin to articulate our experience in a way that would be beneficial to a whole lot of other people. So when you say what you say, I’m trying to gently suggest that you look even deeper. There’s something that you’re aware of in that process of seeing where to work that you haven’t put into words yet. I am suggesting that you look deeper. Because we have trouble finding the words, and delving into the experience, we say, “My eyes saw it” or “My brain or my sonar picked it up.” No. You saw or felt it. Your eyes didn’t see it – you saw it. It’s an experience of the whole person. It’s not just a part of you that has an antenna or sonar. Your sonar metaphor takes you out of your experience.

DW: Yes, it is a whole-person experience, an entire-being experience for me. And that’s why it’s hard to say it’s this or it’s that. And it’s also hard for me to attach it to seeing, feeling, hearing, tasting, smelling, because we are so much bigger than those five senses.

JM: So how do we describe that? That’s the place where we have to come in very carefully to try to understand what that is. So I suggest that we have a feeling-nature and the feeling-nature is perceptual. It is part of our perceptual framework. And it can be trained.

DW: Trained and also refined.

JM: Refined, yeah, absolutely.

DW: So, let’s be really clear about what you’re saying here, in Basic Rolfing Training, in Advanced Training, when instructors say, “What do you see?”, are they literally asking you to say what your eyes see, or are they asking you to tell them what you perceive? And when you say “feeling-nature,” you’re not talking about the five senses – you’re talking about feeling/perceiving as a full being?

JM: Your teachers want you to perceive. As for the feeling-nature, you have feelings by virtue of having a feeling-nature. If you had no feeling-nature, you would have no feelings. So we’re not interested in your feelings in this context. We’re interested in your feeling-nature and how it perceives.  I got that from Zen. Also, I think, years of meditating opened this up for me. It took me a long time to see it. It was right in front of my face, but it took me a long time to realize that.

But to describe it, it took a while for me   to find the right language. I’m still not convinced I have the right language. I’m saying that energy is just as obvious to    us as our hand is to us. I’m saying we have to disabuse ourselves of this notion that because we’re not familiar with how to talk about energy, that we don’t know what energy is. We do know. It is with us all the time. But we have not learned how to perceive it, how to just stop and become the sky. The cultivation of the sensitive, sentient space comes from Taoism and the practice of wu wei, which means ‘not doing’. Working with energy is not an act of will only, it is also an act of allowing. You allow what-is to be what-it-is, and let it take shape. As you’re in the presence of it, you then begin to understand it because you take it in, and you clarify it, and you come to understand what it needs, and you respond appropriately. (For more on this, see Chapter 6 in Spacious Body and Chapter 7 in Embodied Being.)

I do want to say one thing, and make sure I say this clearly: I don’t think that we should be teaching energy work in the Basic Training. I think it confuses most students. I think working with energy should be saved until the end of the Advanced Training.

DW: Yeah, I agree completely.

JM: Most people I’ve had this conversation with, among Rolfers, are in agreement with it too. Because of years of doing and receiving Rolfing SI, I can’t help but practice energy with the eyes of a Rolfer. All the concepts of Rolfing SI can be in play when I’m working energetically.

DW: It was a fascinating thing when I worked on the Standards of Practice (SOP) Committee. One of the things I contributed to that was ruthlessly holding the line that a definition is a what not a how. And toward the end of our work, when we’d submitted everything to the Rolf Institute® Board of Directors, two of us were really grappling over this one final question we couldn’t answer. We grappled with it behind the scenes, debated it with each other, and then all of a sudden I realized, or it dawned on both of us at the same time, that we didn’t need to answer the question. We didn’t need to answer the question because, literally, in Basic Training, as we are being taught Rolfing SI, everything is already there. In our SOP, we didn’t need to distinguish that you get these pieces in Basic Training, or those pieces in Advanced, or this other stuff in continuing education. It’s all already there. So you learn what you learn in Basic, and then over time, and through continuing education and experience, you will become enlightened to more of this stuff that was already there to begin with, you just weren’t at a level where you could see it yet. So how do you get students to transition from Basic Training to feeling their being/perceptual state, and working from there? Or is it something they just evolve into over time at their own pace?

JM: Your realization, “It’s already there” is a smashing insight. If you stage the teaching of the material in the right way, you can train very competent energy practitioners. Ray McCall and I facilitated a couple of seminars on perception. We did one for the faculty. We called it A Seminar for Peers. No one person was the teacher. We had a wonderful bunch of people come just to discuss energy work. Everybody was in agreement that you had to take that first step into letting what-is show itself. That was critical. The level of understanding, presence, and talent in the  room was amazing.

DW: When opening myself to a Rolfing session, it feels like I’m stepping into the field and suspending  my  ordinary  way of paying attention to things. Suspending these everyday concerns allows something else to come forward.

JM: Yeah. So you are integrating will and allowing in order to live from an allowing- will rather than the willful-will. When we’ve discovered the difference between what the physical feels like and what the energetic feels like, we have discovered something profound. In my latest book, Embodied Being, I present an exercise, a three-step process, on how to see holistically as experienced Rolfers do. I borrowed a piece of Goethe’s thinking to create this process. Even inexperienced people can find this way of seeing.

DW: I figure that all the senses, plus much more, are all working at the same time. And all of them together are what cause me to come up with the conclusion of “I need to be there” or “This part is calling to me.” I’ve worked with clients where I’ve even gotten information from smell.

JM: Interesting.

DW: Did you find language for describing how inexperienced people shifted from not seeing to seeing?

JM: Yeah, I have some. There’s a chapter on seeing in my latest book. The chapter on seeing is theoretical, but the next chapter, Chapter 7, “The Beauty of Normality,” is where I lay out the exercise.

In delving into this subject of energy, we need to appreciate that we are under the spell of Plato’s and Descartes’ worldview, which puts us in the position of being onlookers who live in separation. These limited frameworks muddy the waters and leave us in confusion about our work. We know what energy is because everyone has experienced it, to one degree or another – whether they fully realize or not. We work in it, and bring about change with it, whether, as practitioners, we acknowledge this or not. Our job is to learn to see that this is so, and to recognize that this is so. We need to discuss, and experiment in groups, and come to consensus as to what it is we’re talking about.

Hokaku Jeffrey Maitland, PhD, is internationally known as an author, instructor, innovator, and expert in soft-tissue manipulation. He has spent most of his adult life deeply investigating Zen practice, philosophy, and the nature of healing. He has practiced Zen over forty years and is   a Zen monk. He is also a Certified Advanced Rolfer, an  Advanced Rolfing Instructor,  a former tenured professor of  philosophy  at Purdue University, and a philosophical counselor. In addition to teaching Rolfers, Maitland also teaches workshops and classes in myofascial manipulation to physical therapists, chiropractors, and other healthcare professionals, as well as workshops in perception and energy. Maitland has published and presented many papers on the theory of somatic manual therapy, Zen, philosophy, and Rolfing SI. His research, articles, and book reviews are published in numerous professional journals. He is the author of four books: Spacious Body: Explorations in Somatic Ontology, Spinal Manipulation Made Simple, Mind Body Zen (written at the request of his Zen teacher),and Embodied Being. He lives and practices in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Deborah Weidhaas is a Certified Advanced Rolfer and Rolf Movement Practitioner. She has been in practice for twenty-five years. She had over 110 Rolfing SI and Rolf Movement sessions in her own body before she trained as a Rolfer. After completing a ten-session Rolfing SI and a ten-session Rolf Movement series, and doing a few tune-ups, her inner voice told her to go back to Rolf Movement, and it would tell her when she was done. For two years, she actively worked her own healing process by coupling weekly Rolf Movement sessions with the mental, emotional, and spiritual healing processes that her inner voice presented her. Even so, she spent her first two years as a Rolfer ignoring the energetic/perceptual information that presented itself to her about her clients as she worked with them. She spent the next two years cautiously testing and verifying the accuracy, reliability, and sources for the information she received. Deborah recognizes herself as highly adept in the organization and dynamics of the structure of being and in engaging her clients in ways that allow them to resolve their own mental, emotional, and spiritual issues that arise from receiving Rolfing SI. She recently relocated from Los Gatos, California to live and practice in Richmond, Virginia.

Bibliography

Maitland, J. 2016. Embodied Being: The Philosophical Roots of Manual Therapy. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books.

Maitland, J. 1994. Spacious Body: Explorations in Somatic Ontology. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books.

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