Q: Rolfing® Structural Integration (SI) found an early audience in the human potential movement of the 1960s, at the intersection of mind-body-spirit. The culture has changed a lot since then, yet our work continues to have a relationship to psyche and consciousness. Please share what you find interesting about this interplay, whether an experience, a story from your practice, ways you consider your own consciousness when working, ways you open a student’s or client’s perspective, etc.
A: It is a fact, we all, as human beings, are not in this interplay, we are this interplay: body-psyche-consciousness-energy-body- spirit. The culture has changed a lot since the1960s. Social, political, family, and work relationships have changed. The way people live has changed. The way Rolfers™ andpeopleingeneraltalkaboutwhat Rolfing SI is has changed. What brings students to Rolfing SI trainings (at ABR in Brazil, at least) has changed.
But how and why and the way we get to be human beings are things that have not changed (although too much technology and pure rational/logical perspectives can reduce our consciousness, psyche, ourselves, our lives). How can I back up such a statement? Well, has your way of knowing you are alive changed? I doubt it! Or has the way you would be aware of stepping on a small rock changed? Consider, when we step on something we didn’t see, we immediately become aware of whether we stepped on a small rock or on a small insect! We feel-sense if it is something alive or not alive.
For me, it is not possible to not have this interplay of body-psyche-consciousness- energy-body-spirit in our practice of Rolfing SI. If it is not there, we are not practicing Rolfing SI. In order to open the perspective of a client or a student, first we need to develop the ability to be an open presence to the client/student, to inhabit our own body. We can’t go to, or invite someone else into, places we didn’t go before ourselves, or places we don’t know through experience.
In our current times, bombarded by technology and an exclusively rational and logical perspective, the tendency is that we become objects. For example, we commonly see people walking around who don’t seem to consciously inhabit their bodies in the way we describe as ‘embodiment’ in Rolfing SI. Our presence in the relationship with clients and students, our presence in our own bodies in relating to others, our refusing to put our words onto the other’s experience – these are the context that creates the possibility for the student or client to inhabit the full dimensionality of being human. He/she is not just a physical body with pain. A painful body is also a painful psyche, a painful spirit.
The relationship may not be obvious at first (mainly for the client and sometimes for the Rolfer also), but since the process is based on the principles, theory, method, and techniques of Rolfing SI, as the client becomes a more integrated person – much more or just a little bit more, it does not matter how much – the relationship exists and sooner or later will be visible.
For example, I once worked with a client who loved the whole process but didn’t feel that his goals had been reached (he wanted more body flexibility). And so, there he was, at the interview after the fifteenth session (we did structural and movement sessions), telling me that the work had been good to receive but hadn’t made a difference in his life. I wasn’t expecting this and was surprised! I thanked him for his honesty and told him that although his main goal of much greater flexibility wasn’t yet in place, something very important had happened, even if he could not see it or consciously know what had happened. I continued, noting that we both could see postural changes in the before and after pictures, and stated that as posture changes, other things are changing. I finished by saying that he could come back for a body of work in the future, and maybe then he would attain the body flexibility that was his main goal. Well, three months later he phoned me. He was very happy and once more said he was grateful for the process we did together. He was really happy! I asked him whether he had gotten the body flexibility he wanted, and he said not yet, but that everybody who knew him was saying, and he was also feeling, that now he was a light and happy person. He was surprised, and really happy.
This example is interesting because it has various levels we can elucidate. First, we can speculate that his consciousness and psyche developed after the process ‘ended’, as frequently happens. Second, we can imagine that the client’s single-minded focus on flexibility kept him from seeing/ feeling other things. There’s the old adage that says “If you only have a hammer, all you see are nails.” So what happens when there are no nails? Nothing is there. For Rolfers, this example shows us that if we are focused on visible body changes (sometimes to prove to ourselves that we are good Rolfers), we can become blind to other dimensions of changes.
Sometimes either practitioner or client may not be able to see the relationship between body-mind-psyche-spirit, as seeing it requires an ability/skill we may need to develop. As human beings we evolve our human potential as we develop the ability to be present in our own body, to hold any experience in a significant and personal way, in a creative way or personal gesture. It is easy to say the words ‘presence’ and ‘embodiment’, easier to say them than to experience them.
How can we facilitate the development of consciousness? Say that after a first session, the client says she feels taller. You could end it at that, “Good! It worked!” Or you can take it further: “Is that a good or bad experience?” Take care to not assume it is a good experience, because the experience is not yours, but the client’s. Let’s say the client replies that it is a good experience. You can support that being enhanced by saying, “Great! And as you walk around the room feeling you are taller, what is your good experience like?” Or, “Now, when you walk around the room feeling you are taller, is there something else you can feel or become aware of?” One client in this situation said she was seeing the whole room in a different way: she could meet the space with a feeling of peace, breathing easily. So a simple dialogue can open the client’s experience to a new embodied experience and bring her to other levels of consciousness.
Self- perception, self, psyche, and consciousness are human dimensions created and developed through body experiences lived in presence and in relationship with other human beings. We invite clients and students to inhabit their bodies by living experiences, a process that never ends. The skills we need for this depend upon our own personal evolution. It is not something we can learn or teach in the way that we learn and teach techniques. The principle of holism, the first important skill for the practitioner, must be embodied in ourselves in the nature of our own relationship with ourselves, with the environment, with the theory and practice of Rolfing SI, and with clients.
To finish, I would like to remember one of Dr. Rolf’s statements from Rolfing and Physical Reality that I read in Therapeutic Relationship classes: “What I am trying to do is to create a group who can work back and forth from ideas to substance and understand why and how this is done.” Wouldn’t it be good if we included more time in the trainings for the second part – understanding “why and how this is done”?
Hulda Bretones
Rolfing Instructor
A: I really appreciate this question, as it relates directly to what keeps the work interesting and fresh for me. Our global culture shifts increasingly to one of technologies, and an interest in discerning the causality of events. Our work is not immune to this, and while these are natural outgrowths of wanting to understand, I find the field of exploration of values, like consciousness and embodiment, to be the most invigorating activity. For me, Rolfing SI is literally a re-creational activity for which I am compensated in real world terms. Aside from the financial livelihood that Rolfing SI and Rolf Movement® Integration provide for me, it is the opportunity to create meaning and value for myself, and to facilitate the same for others, that drives me.
It is the simple act of attending to the sensation of my body in the context of my present environment, what we might call orientation, that generates meaning. This is a multiple-step process. First we must quiet ourselves, then tune into our feeling internal sensation, while keeping awareness of our external environment.
The act of observing is a first step, but incomplete. Einstein noted that simple observation is meaningless, “as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure” (R.W. Clark, Einstein: the Life and Times. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1973, pp. 227-228). In order to generate meaning or value, we need to experience our perception in a context, or a relationship. In my own work, I orient to the room or the horizon, or to the contact I have with the floor, or some other element of my current situation. So, we have layers of awareness, the sensation layer, perhaps pleasant or perhaps unpleasant, perhaps neither, in the context of the current time and space. When contextualized in this way, often a shift occurs in the intensity or quality or locus of sensation. When I become aware of this shift, I may shift my cognitive construct about it. It may bring forward a cognitive construct, a label, an image, or a memory. When I become aware of the relationship between the construct and the sensation, I have an opportunity, through the light of awareness, to bring that construct present in time.
For example, if through this process I perceive a sensation, let’s say tightness, which evokes a memory from another time, let’s say fear, and I stay oriented to my present context, let’s say my office, then I have an opportunity to allow my current self to just accompany those perceptions and to watch what happens. Perhaps the sensation of tightness dissipates, perhaps it shifts to another quality or location. Perhaps it disappears. There is no guarantee that this process will resolve into an unmitigated pleasantness, however it is an opportunity to recognize that it is there. This process of recognizing patterns of association is essential for me in order to be clear about what I am bringing into my relationships, and in particular, to the therapeutic relationship with clients.
Once I have some familiarity about what it feels like to be myself, by myself, then I can begin to notice how different contexts or therapeutic environments affect me. When I begin to anticipate the arrival of a particular client, what happens in me? Do in feel light or alert? Or do I feel tired or heavy? Do I feel anxious or lose volume somewhere, etc.? If I notice that, and allow it to be there, then I can begin to do my own work (somatic-based therapy, meditation, rest, or other supervision) to begin to be able to be more fully present, e.g., neutral, able to experience the fullness of my being, in the future.
When I am with my clients, I can help them to reference these same hallmarks of presence and embodiment, the feeling of increased adaptability or volume or support or filled-in-ness. At the same time, I have to recognize that they are also negotiating their presence in the presence of another person, myself. The layers of complexity of the therapeutic container cannot be underestimated. In science, when we begin to explore an area that falls outside the bounds of objective knowing we call it ‘transcomputational’, which means that the situation is so complex that it defies algorithm. Bryan Appleyard (Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of the Modern Man. New York: Doubleday,1993, pg. 153) puts it very succinctly: “Complexity is real, it is not just an excess of simplicities.”
When I reflect that the therapeutic container of the session is complex beyond our capacity to parse, and then I add in the additional layers that touch and touch within the context of a Rolfing structural or movement session include, then I begin to understand why this field does not lend itself to reductionist study. As Dr Rolf said, Rolfing SI is not defined by its technology. While we can explore particular elements within the session, or technologies (what we might call ‘techniques’), what continues to remain untouched by them is the value of the work for both the practitioner and the client. Yes, I need to develop strategies for hands-on intervention, which the series provides for us, and at the same time, I need to be open to whatever happens next in my self and my client. Or, as Jeff Maitland (personal communication, 6/16/2017) so succinctly states, “Work like hell and meditate.”
Duffy Allen Rolfing Instructor
A: For me this is the most fundamental premise of our work: the unity of being and several dimensions of the experience. I start my teaching there, and remind students that the choice of addressing the human being from the bodily perspective is just an entryway. Dr. Rolf said this in a very clear statement in the very first chapter of her book.
Fascia connects and makes possible the interplay of all of these dimensions. Any joint is in a moving system that is a person. Different systems come to play like a beautiful symphony. Explorations regarding human being and integration reinforce this premise daily, so this topic is still very contemporary.
To fully embody this premise of mind- body-spirit integration is not simple. Our culture does not currently trend this way, meaning that we must make it – instructor and students, practitioner and clients – a continuous exercise and exploration. Here are some useful lines of inquiry:
Consciousness plays a big role in this exploration, and we deal with the whole spectrum of consciousness in our work – from unconscious to conscious. Many times the client’s unconscious can be affected by somatic work, with the impact wobbling through layers until language and consciousness gradually come into play. Here the practitioner (or instructor) can play a vital role by finding the layer of availability in the client (student), as well as himself/herself. Being conscious in this way will help affect whether the process moves towards greater consciousness or not.
It is also possible to work from the other direction, to use consciousness to help access more reflexive somatic layers, such as starting with pattern recognition, the search for the meaning of a behavior or a pattern. In any case, client and student interactions are enhanced by acknowledging emerging changes in a conscious way.
I have written a number of times for this journal about my research into the psychobiological domain of Rolfing SI using reports from NAPER (the São Paulo Rolfing ambulatory project). Even in comments on the initial interview, both Rolfers and clients were speaking to body/ mind unity, for example in:
Client goals for the process:
and mind
Rolfer goals for the client’s process:
Results of process on client’s perception:
Pedro Prado Basic & Advanced Rolfing Instructor, Rolf Movement Instructor
A: Rolfing SI burst into awareness in the context of the human potential movement.
In 1962, on a stunning stretch of land bordering the Pacific Ocean in Big Sur, California, two Stanford graduates named Michael Murphy and Dick Price founded a small retreat and workshop center called The Esalen Institute, otherwise known simply as Esalen. Their goal was to create a space where people could explore and practice what Aldous Huxley called “human potentialities” — or various holistic approaches to wellness and personal transformation that involved the body, mind, and spirit (D. Ollivier, “The Esalen Institute and the Human Potential Movement Turn 50.” Huffington Post 5/25/12).
Esalen was the epicenter of the human potential movement, and its message of transformation radiated out from the California coast. It was at Esalen that Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt Therapy, invited Dr. Ida Rolf to begin teaching her work of Structural Processing – later known as Rolfing SI. Rolfing SI quickly became an integral part of the human potential movement. The body – not only mental attitudes and beliefs – could be changed. As Dr. Rolf stated, “the body is plastic”! Don Johnson’s The Protean Body, as well as Kurtz/ Prestera’s The Body Reveals, Ken Dychtwald’s Bodymind, and Huxley’s The Doorsof Perception soonbecamecherished dog-eared pages on my nightstand.
A key phrase in the movement was self- actualization and ‘the body’ became an essential portal to that realization. Dr. Rolf’s emphasis on the ‘Line’ and upright alignment gained traction within this movement.
I first heard the term ‘Rolfing’ SI from my beloved high-school teacher Sr. Donna Nickel. Donna, who left the convent in the early 1970s, wrote me about an incredibly expansive process that changed her life. For me, Rolfing SI became synonymous with transformation – intensity – psycho- emotional growth. Those words described everything I was looking for at that time. However, it took seven years for me to find a Rolfer. In 1969, Detroit libraries had no knowledge of it in their reference sections.
I continued moving west. Once in Seattle, in the mid-1970s, I discovered two of Dr. Rolf’s students, Ron McComb and Jack Donnelly. I had the great pleasure of getting Rolfing sessions from them. It was on their tables that the seeding of Rolfing SI, transmitted through their hands and hearts, initiated the unfolding and calling to study Dr. Rolf’s work.
In those early days, trainings were held at 302 Pearl St. in Boulder, Colorado, in the Annex and Skylight rooms. What a generative time it was! Auditors and practitioners sold cars, homes, collected pre-paid Ten-Series sessions, etc. to finance their study. The Rolf Institute® was – and I believe continues to possess the potential of being – the ‘mystery school’ for anyone wishing to study the multiple dimensions of the body as the integral ingredient in the realm of human development and evolution.
As Dr. Rolf fondly stated: “The body is what you can get your hands on.”
Carol A. Agneessens Rolfing & Rolf Movement Instructor
Further Resources
Because consciousness is so deeply interwoven with the work of Rolfing SI and Rolf Movement Integration, the topic is often addressed by our faculty in their writings and interviews in this journal. While there are many examples, we particularly refer readers to the following (in alphabetical order):
Rolfing and Rolf Movement Instructor Carol Agneessens: “‘The Map Is Not the Territory’ – ‘The Word Is Not the Thing’” (July 2015 issue), “Flowing Wholeness: The Vibratory Resonance Beneath Perceivable Form” (December 2013 issue), “The Female Pelvis: Igniting a Transcendent Portal” (December 2017 issue), among others.
Rolfing and Rolf Movement Instructor Monica Caspari: “Self, Other: New Considerations in Rolf Movement Integration” (June 2014 issue).
Rolf Movement Instructor Kevin Frank: “What Is the Role of Language When We Integrate Structure?” (July 2015 issue); and “Energy Work: Re-conceptualizing an Inclusive Spectrum of Interventions within an Informational Model of SI” (June 2017), among others.
Basic and Advanced Rolfing Instructor and Rolf Movement Instructor Lael Katharine Keen: “Rolfing SI, Trauma, Orientation, and the Autonomic Nervous System” (July 2015 issue).
Basic and Advanced Rolfing Instructor Sally Klemm: “Explorations of Earth and Sky: An Interview with Sally Klemm” (June 2017 issue) and “Presence, Perception, and Embodiment” (this issue).
Advanced Rolfing Instructor Jeffrey Maitland: the books Embodied Being: The Philosophical Roots of Manual Therapy (excerpted in our March 2016 issue), Spacious Body: Explorations in Somatic Ontology, and Mind-Body Zen: Waking Up to Your Life; also from this journal “The Being of Rolfing SI” (June 2014 issue), “Seeing” (December 2014 issue), “The Felt Capacity to Do Work: Working with Energy” (June 2017 issue), “Letting ‘What Is’ Show Itself: Jeffrey Maitland on Mind, Zen, and Energy Work” (June 2017 issue), and “The Mystery of Consciousness Is the Mystery of the Body” (September 2017 issue), among others.
Basic and Advanced Rolfing Instructor Ray McCall: “The Work of ‘The Work’: An Interview with Ray McCall” (March 2016 issue) and “Energy, Geometry, and Presence: Part 2 of an Interview with Ray McCall” (June 2017 issue).
Rolfing and Rolf Movement Instructor Lucia Merlino: “Metaphors of the Body” (July 2015 issue).
Basic and Advanced Rolfing Instructor and Rolf Movement Instructor Pedro Prado: “An Ongoing Inquiry into Mind and Body: An Interview with Pedro Prado” (March 2016 issue) and “The Role of Consciousness in Transformational Rolfing” (written with Heidi Massa; July 2015 issue), among others.
Advanced Rolfing Instructor Michael Salveson: “Burning Man: An Interview with Michael Salveson, Part 1” (March 2016 Issue) and “Burning Man, Part 2: Continuing the Interview with Michael Salveson” (September 2016 issue).
Advanced Rolfing Instructor Peter Schwind: “Navigating Between Technical Refinement and the Vast Dimensions of the Soul: An Interview with Peter Schwind” (March 2018 issue).
Basic and Advanced Rolfing Instructor Russell Stolzoff: “Therapeutic Use of Self in Rolfing® SI and the Bodynamic System: An Interview with Russell Stolzoff” (July 2015 issue)
Rolf Movement Instructor Hiroyoshi Tahata: “Working with Ma: Further Refinement of the Yielding Approach through Time, Space, and Intersubjectivity” (March 2018 issue).Rolfing® SI, Psyche, and Consciousness[:]
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