Ritchie Mintz is a Certified Advanced Practitioner of Rolfing® Structural Integration. Trained at the Rolf Institute® in 1978, he has decades of experience straightening human frames and aligning bodies with gravity. Ritchie is the founder of the Texas School For Structural Inte- gration, the first and only school in Texas teaching the Ida P. Rolf Method of Structural Inte- gration. This is also the only school in the world that teaches Balanced~Movement©, a unique form of ancient wisdom about human movement and its relationship to structural alignment, balance, and function. Ritchie is the author of Foundations Of Structural Integration (self- published, illustrated, 130 pages). www.RitchieMintz.com [email protected]

Is it possible that the foundational ideas of structural integration are actually quite simple? Can structural integration’s body of knowledge be put into a form that ordinary, everyday people understand?

We live in a fascially illiterate world. That must change if Dr. Rolf’s ideas are to permeate society. As a contribution to that change, I submitted this article to the IASI Body of Knowledge (BOK) project.

The most important thing I’ve learned in 33 years of Rolfing is that there comes a time for each of us when we must speak from our own authority. For me, that time is now. I learned the art and science of structural integration from its original masters. I had my first session in April 1973, from a Rolfer™ who had his first session from Ida Rolf herself. That was when the future Rolf Institute® was called The Guild for Structural Integration. I still have my Polaroid “before and after” pictures. That is when my education really began.

I witnessed The Split at the Rolf Institute and the proliferation of SI schools. I was there when the Principles of Structural Integration were inaugurated as the way to work. I remember when different modalities entered the curriculum, first as a way to sharpen our listening skills and then as part of our toolbox. Now, all these years later, it is clear to me that Structural integration as I experienced it, learned it, and practice it barely exists today. I cannot help but notice that all too often, the principles that were supposed to clarify the work have confused it and that the modalities that were supposed to make better practitioners actually diluted the work and made it less effective. I think that we have been pulled from our roots in ways that have made the work difficult to understand, hard to teach, complex to learn, and mystifying for new practitioners.

I ask myself: Am I crazy? Am I out of touch? Am I just a blathering old fool clamoring for the good old days? Or is it possible that I am a link to something precious that will be lost forever if I don’t speak up? Every time I think I’m nuts, I get clients on my table who report receiving work from certified practitioners that is clearly not SI, and who feel to my fingers “un-Rolfed.”

My intention is to look back at the foundational ideas of structural integration as I perceive them and give them a new look. My hope is that I can cut through the layers of complexity that have been heaped upon structural integration so that the foundational ideas of SI can be seen as simple and easy to learn. That is necessary for the ideas to permeate the culture.

It turns out that Ida P. Rolf left some very clear roadmaps. In the gradual conversion from “gravity as therapist” to “fixing this and that,” many of her roadmaps have fallen out of favor in the decades since her passing. My intention is to look back into the history of Rolfing and reclaim the concepts that are our inheritance. I want to go back and gather together some of the ideas that have fallen off the table so they can get a fresh look-see.

What are the foundational ideas of structural integration and how can we put them in terms that everyone can understand? I have spent the last 33 years continually contemplating just that. I have discerned six foundations of structural integration. There could be more and I’m sure there are, but in my view, there are six for sure. So to stamp my copyright, I announce here that I wrote a book and titled it Foundations of Structural Integration. I have no publisher and you won’t find my book on any store shelf. But anybody who wants a copy can order it from me The six foundations of structural integration as they exist in my world are a way to explain what structural integration is and how to do it. The six foundations are the heart of how I practice SI. Most importantly, these six foundations speak to me about why bodies get into the structural troubles with gravity that pervasively afflict the human race and what we as structural integrators can do about it.

In my world, the six foundations of structural integration are Fascia, Plasticity, Gravity, Segmentation, Alignment, and Balanced Movement.

I begin with fascia because I believe that Dr. Rolf’s first foundational contribution to the work was the notion that fascia is the body’s organ of structure and support. In the world of firsts, this has to be a first. Yes, I know that historically, Swedenborg, Sutherland, and Still said it long before Ida P. Rolf, and they even used fascia as a tool. But I don’t believe that even Sutherland or Still ever accomplished the wholesale rearrangement of the body fabric the way that structural integrators routinely do every day by working with fascia. I think that SI is the first work that affects the huge volume of transformation that remodeling fascia affords. That is worthy of its own headline and that is why Fascia gets my vote for Foundation #1.

This is foundational for me because we live in a fascially illiterate society where the prevailing paradigm is about muscles, bones, and nerves. How can we penetrate that paradigm? Where is the entry point? I believe that we structural integrators have a job and an opportunity that is more primary than doing sessions: We must educate the public. One thing I’ve learned in 33 years of Rolfing is that most of the body’s structural problems are caused by the collapse of the fascial body in gravity. Our banner headline is that we intervene into the fascial body and change its shape. We re-channel the course of gravity through a body causing a re-integration and self-healing that is unprecedented outside our SI studios. No other modality or system does what we do. This is our point of power.

We must explain to the world that fascia has a very special and magical property to it. It is plastic. I consider the plasticity of fascia to be the biggest trick behind the magic of SI. That is why Plasticity is Foundation #2.

Plasticity is where science and magic converge. Remember that behind all magic is a trick. The trick that makes the magic of SI possible is that structural integrators have “The Touch.” We handle fascia in a special way that dissolves the fixations in the fascial body and reveals the tissue layers. This deeply penetrating touch of ours is what makes plasticity our tool. I believe that The Touch can be taught and learned.

Gravity is the third Foundation. My affection for gravity and its centrality to all we do made me want to place gravity as Foundation numero uno. But it is difficult to appreciate the effects of gravity upon bodies until your mind has been opened to the plasticity of fascia. So in my world, the subject of gravity must have a prequel. That’s why gravity follows fascia and its special gift from the Universe, plasticity.

Gravity is our most powerful ally and our most important tool. If there is any scintilla of possibility that gravity has slipped from our headlines, I now look back to a time when we proudly claimed our position as the only discipline in the world that deliberately and systematically organizes the human body with gravity.

The conversation of “fixing versus organizing” is ancient and represents a delicate balance. I remember a time when organizing the body with gravity was a lofty goal and considered to be plenty good enough. My experience tells me that when I can get gravity to flow unimpeded through the body, gravity becomes its own therapist. Now, it seems, the emphasis is to fix this or that ache or pain. Furthermore, I observe a need to identify the troubled strands and fibers of tissues that are to be “corrected” before an intervention is to be made. I find this particularly disquieting because it brings us back to a cycle of diagnosis and prescription that I thought, as a profession, we have been trying to distance ourselves from.

The drift away from organizing structure and toward fixing pain places a burden upon the newly trained practitioner that I believe is unreasonable. There are libraries filled with all the reasons why people hurt. I do not expect a beginning practitioner to know them all. Further, chasing symptoms takes us away from our real gift, which is the manipulation of fascia and gravity.

My 33-year professional experience tells me that most chronic non-pathological structural pain is caused by the collapse of the fascial body in gravity. That is what compresses joints and wears them out. That is what stresses the nervous system and skews it toward sympathetic (as opposed to parasympathetic) activity. The effect of gravity upon the fascial body over time is also an important component of what society calls “aging.” SI’s greatest gift is that we can reverse all that and turn it around. Our seeing eyes recognize the collapse and our deeply penetrating touch releases the fixations. Our sculpting hands organize the fascial spans. We restore lost space and length. We decompress joints and nerves. If the collapse of the body in gravity really is a component of aging, that is one element that we actually can control.

Segmentation is Foundation #4. Dr. Rolf was known to say that segmentation was the tool that made it all usable. Segmentation is a sword that cuts both ways. It is at once the problem and the solution. If the body were not segmented as it is, it would not collapse in gravity as it does. Yet it is this same segmentation that allows us to align the body with gravity.

Segmentation merely means that the body is fully jointed. A normally functioning joint should not be chronically displaced to its end range of motion in any direction. It should spend most of its time in some soft place in the middle. But in the collapsed body, over- recruitment of either flexors or extensors forces the joint to a sticking point. Now imagine an entire body full of joints that are displaced, and that pretty well describes the average random body. That is the bad news about segmentation.

The good news is that the very same segmentation that allows for the collapse can be turned around and made to work for us. That is why segmentation is such a valuable foundational tool that I use every day to unlock chronically fixated joints. When all of the body’s major joints are able to find that soft, neutral, middle point of its range of motion, the Line emerges.

Alignment with gravity is Foundation #5 and it is a natural progression from segmentation. When I was trained, alignment was perhaps our greatest touchstone. Maybe that was because, between the mirrors and the Polaroids, alignment was right in front of us. So that was the easiest part to see. We wanted to see straight bodies. Yes, we watched our models walk and movement was important. But “lumbars back and top of the head up” was the order of the day. Line was spelled with a capital L. Now, a more relaxed kind of Line seems to be in vogue. Nonetheless, The Line is still worthy of its own page-one, red-banner headline, and that is why it glowingly takes its place as Foundation #5 in my world and in my book.

Is alignment with gravity a worthy end goal? Is it good enough? Is it excellent enough? What if every person in the world was aligned with gravity? Would that be worth doing? I say yes, but even I know that alignment is a step toward a higher goal, which is Foundation #6, Balanced Movement.

Rolfing lore has it that Dr. Rolf used a set of movement exercises from an osteopath named Amy Cochran. Cochran’s movement exercises came down to us and have been refined over the years to become what was taught to me in my training as Ida Rolf’s Movement Exercises. They weren’t really exercises per se because they weren’t designed to build strength or endurance, nor were they intended to be repeated endlessly. What they did do was to teach where the body hinges are and in which direction(s) they are intended by design to move.

Sadly to me, in many quarters of the SI world, Ida Rolf’s Movement Exercises have also slipped off the radar to become a mere mention. If I remember correctly, in the earliest days that Dr. Rolf hung her shingle, she did little more than take people through the Movement Exercises. And her people got better—a lot better. Still, she quickly realized that something more was needed.

Dr. Rolf added the idea of restraining the tissues while calling for the movements of the exercises and, she says, that was where Rolfing was really born. In the “old days” when I was Rolfed, that was Rolfing. There was a constant pinning down of sleeve tissues and calling for core movement. The mantra was: Toes up, foot up and step down through your heel, step down through the ball of your foot. We tracked knees “straight forward” and elbows “straight out.”

Everybody knew the top of their head and we reached that place up toward the stars. All the while, the Rolfer’s steady hands and elbows held back just the right tissues at just the right depth. And guess what? Magic happened!

To me, restraining tissues and calling for just the right moves is the essence of balanced movement.

Balanced movement is somewhat a fetish with me because it ties directly into the beloved old Rolfian idea that fascia gets it plasticity by virtue of its layers. Ah, layers. Now it all begins to come together. Follow me from the start: Fascia is the body’s organ of structure and support. Fascia gets its plasticity by virtue of its many ubiquitous layers, which slip and slide upon each other. This causes an entire-body collapse of the segmented body in gravity. That’s the bad news.

But, the good news is that the same layering of the fascia that allows for the collapse can be made to work for us. By applying artful inputs, the fixations within the layers can be released. Then gravity is the therapist and alignment emerges. Once alignment prevails, balanced movement can be nurtured and enhanced through movement systems that are a conversation for another day. That’s how we help our clients achieve the magical feeling of floating.

Fascia, plasticity, gravity, segmentation, alignment, balanced movement. To me, the utility of these six simple ideas is that, when put together, they explain to the casual inquirer what we do. Most important, they also simply and elegantly reveal to anyone who is interested and curious how to be a practitioner.

The real beauty of it all is that every one of these foundations is already on our shelf. Since we are Dr. Rolf’s heirs, they are already ours.

How I’d most like to be known and remembered is as the Magic Moment guy. The Magic Moment is the pivotal concept around how I perceive the body and how I work. The way I see it, there are two kinds of bodies in this world: bodies that have had their Magic Moment and those that haven’t. The Magic Moment is how I use our beloved ten-session structural integration Recipe to work for me. Working the Recipe has been maligned in the last couple of decades of my 33 years. It has been attached to the word formulaic.

Dr. Rolf was pretty emphatic that as Rolfers, we work from the outside in. She said, Start at the outside and work in. Most manipulative therapies start at the inside, at what they say is the “cause.” Maybe it is the cause; I don’t care if it is. I say you can’t start there. You’ve got to start where you can unwind the trouble. (Feitis, IPR Talks, pg.153)

For years, I worked as instructed from the outside in. Then I found ways to simultaneously work from the inside out. When I work in both directions at the same time, there comes a point when the two directions meet and cross. This is the Magic Moment. And a magnificent moment it is! When the two directions meet and cross, the front of the body lets go of the back and the sleeve lets go of the core. Then, as our Founder is oft quoted, “The body spontaneously heals itself.” I’ve always thought that this is a pretty audacious statement from the lady who warned us to exert “scientific caution.” Still, as I repeatedly experience my clients’ Magic Moments with them, I witness again and again how bodies heal themselves. The Magic Moment is the last piece of the puzzle. If you combine the six Foundations of Structural integration with The Magic Moment, you can create the space where people who are interested and curious can recreate my experience of structural integration.

Now, all we need to do is to put it into a form that the world will universally understand. My purpose for these six foundations is the same as Dr. Rolf’s purpose: to educate the public about human physical structure. She wanted her ideas to permeate our culture. So do I. We need a way of explaining structural integration to ordinary everyday people in an ordinary everyday manner. It is time to say our Mass in plain English. When we can do that, Ida Rolf’s dream that her ideas would permeate the culture will be reality. I hope that the Six Foundations of Structural Integration and the Magic Moment contribute to that future.

So what have I learned in the last 33 years? I’ve learned that structural integration is its own unique thing that stands on its own and is plenty good enough just as it is. It needs no adjuncts or amendments. In teaching it, it is possible to teach too little but it is also possible to teach too much. I hope to teach just enough to recreate structural integration’s foundations without losing its essence

Foundations of Structural Integration