Introduction

What is your own response to the question, “Is the work that you do as Rolfer physical or energetic?” I think that most of us would say that it is both.

What do you mean by ‘physical’ and what do you mean by ‘energetic’? Why is this important to you when you work? I think that the idea that you have about what a body is will determine how you approach the body of your client, how you work on his/her body, and how you bring about desirable changes.

Learning About the Physical

When I started out as a Rolfer, I found it reassuring that Ida Rolf had a PhD and was a researcher at the Rockefeller Institute, one of the leading scientific research institutions in the U.S. at the time. Ida’s background in science seemed to give more credence to the work that I was doing.

I had come to Rolfing Structural Integration (SI) after a short but intensive education in Esalen Massage – a form of full-body massage with oil, long strokes pushing into the body to find and loosen places   of hardness and tightness in the muscles. Rolfing SI opened the playing field of where I worked in the body to include working in the fascia. My Basic Training was at least three decades ago. In class we worked from the ‘Recipe’, and notes were gathered and passed down from one class to the next, telling where we should go first and then where to proceed until we had gone on to loosen the important points in the session.

My first six-day continuing-education seminar was with Jan Sultan and he opened my eyes to a new challenge. He asked us a question. “If you have only one place to work, where will you choose to work on this person next?” There was no handful of written notes. Suddenly, we had to look, to evaluate, and to think. No more painting by numbers. (In the Ten Series, we had a goal for each of the sessions. The strategy we created to help the client get there was up to us.)

We had anatomy study with Louis Shultz, but that class was separate from the hands-on demonstrations. Watching the demonstrations in the class, I was not that strong in my anatomy, and my teachers did not always name the structures that they were working on as they were working.

The teachers worked relatively softly. By contrast, when it became our turn to work on our clients, my classmates and I worked as hard as we could pushing into the models’ bodies with as much force  as we could muster. We wanted to make sure that we got positive changes and our unspoken idea was that the more force we used, the better.

Where did we get this idea? I remember hearing in my Rolfing classes that Ida had said that the practitioner should plow their fingers, fist, or elbow slowly and firmly through the tissue creating friction. This was supposed to warm up the ground substance of the connective tissue, turning gel to sol and thereby melting it. Observing the work, the angle of the application of force, in the old days, was into the body at a 45- or 90-degree angle. (Most body therapists – not just Rolfers – still work this way, pushing into the body with a fair amount of pressure. Those who describe their work as “deep-tissue release” seem to believe that the harder they push, the deeper they get into the body and the more effective their treatment is.) We may have also gotten our idea of how to work from hearing that Ida preferred to have students who were men and who had good, strong physical structures. They could handle working hard pushing and pulling their hands firmly into their clients’ bodies.

Becoming ‘Softer’

On this point of how to work, Peter Schwind was the first teacher I had who tried to communicate how we should work with our hands in the client’s connective tissue. My earlier teachers focused on helping us to decide where to work, but Peter put into words how to work, and he showed me that extreme force was not necessary. He had us sensing into the clients body while we were working, and said we should place our fingertips lightly on the surface of the body and let them float down through the tissue until we hit a resistance that felt a little bit like grains of sand. Then we should work at that depth and release the tension there.

This was very far removed from kneading muscles as I had learned in classes in Esalen Massage, or plowing through the tissue with my elbows in my first attempts at Rolfing SI. It changed how I worked. After I completed my training as a Rolfer, I took some courses in energy medicine with Jim Oschman (who had co-taught with Ida in her last Advanced Training). He was intent on passing on a picture of the qualities of connective tissue and how to affect it. Jim had watched many Rolfers over the years. I prided myself when he said in class that I was one of the “softest” that he had observed.

Sliding Layers

Robert Schleip and Tom Myers taught a model of connective tissue that the body was made up of “bags within bags within bags.” For me, this model developed into an approach of sliding adjacent structures in relationship to each other. The structures were the bones, the muscles, the tendons, and the visceral organs. Releasing tensions between two adjacent structures and getting them to slide in relationship to each other gives a good result in terms of aligning the body in the field of gravity and in terms of improving the client’s movement. ‘Sliding layers’ and not ‘pushing into the body’ became the essence of my approach to the work. I’ll explain more about how to do this in the ‘application’ section of this article. For now, let’s look at what aspect of connective tissue it works with.

The kind of connective tissue between adjacent structures is loose connective tissue. Strolling Under the Skin, the video taken by French hand surgeon Jean-Claude Guimberteau, brilliantly captures this, showing that the loose connective tissue is finer than the finest lace imaginable. Part of the reason the film is so important is that while we have lots of anatomical drawings, very few of them show loose connective tissue – it’s hard to draw because it is amorphous and dries out very quickly; it is not solid like the Achilles tendon of the fascia lata, and at the molecular level it is more like water and ever-changing. (If you do not know the video, you can watch parts of it on YouTube.)

The legacy of that lack of imagery of the loose connective tissue is that therapists who learned anatomy and physiology before (or in present time, without) Guimberteau’s film usually do not have much of an idea about it, and, as a result, they often do not work in it. Guimberteau’s film gives us a whole new world to consider, and new implications for how we work. It becomes unthinkable to me that there is any need to push hard into this stuff to get it to change. Guimberteau’s film shows this loose connective tissue under the skin, and some body therapists work just getting the skin to slide with great results. However, there is also loose connective tissue between adjacent ‘bags’. I find it very effective to work there, and I get a lot of improvement in both structure and the movement.

Hard Movements vs Soft Movements

I learned karate to the level of brown belt when I was in graduate school at the University of Hawaii. Karate is an example of generating a force to overcome another force – meeting force with force. The idea is to develop speed and momentum greater than your opponent. Most people think of developing a greater force when they want to do something to another person, whether it is martial arts or bodywork.

After graduate school, I moved to New York and one day bumped into John, a guy I knew from Hawaii, at the coffee shop in Greenwich Village where he worked washing dishes. He told me that he had started to learn tai chi, which translated as ‘universal energy’, and everything that he told me about it sounded wrong.   I was proud that the karate teacher I had found in New York was a fourth dan – an advanced level black belt. John’s teacher did not even have a colored belt. I prided myself on having learned to move fast with my karate movements, and I was in fact starting to learn how to focus the force of my blows to break boards. John said that he did his tai chi movements in slow motion and went on to claim that tai chi was an effective martial art. That sounded absurd. How could something slow and soft stand up to my hard and fast movements?

We went out back and John gave me    a demonstration of his tai chi form. John’s character was a bit flakey, totally unconcentrated, and he had a hard time getting his life to hang together, yet as he stood there relaxing into his stance with his arms along his side, getting ready for his movements, his whole demeanor changed. He ‘came into his body’. As he started to make his movements, he suddenly had great presence and concentration. This made me curious, and I asked to meet his teacher, Ed Young, who was himself a student of Cheng Man-Ch’ing, one of the greatest teachers of tai chi in the world.

Meeting Ed and seeing him move blew me away. He was so poised, simple, and quietly graceful. I saw power and focus in his movements. I decided to study with him and over a few months I learned the Yang Style short form. Eventually I went to see Ed’s teacher, Professor Cheng, and he blew me away even more. Walking through the door of his studio in a loft in Chinatown, I saw some people learning and practicing the tai chi form that I was learning. Professor Cheng was seated at   a long table with his fingers on patients’ wrists reading their pulses and prescribing Chinese herbal medicine. At one end of the big room, other people were doing ‘push hands’ – where two people stand with their arms up making light contact at the wrists, then move back and forth slowly, shifting their weight from one foot to the other, until all of a sudden one of the two seemingly tenses up in his whole body only to be lifted vertically into the air and thrown horizontally backwards. As I watched, sometimes people would fly three to four feet through the air before being ‘caught’ by the wall behind them. Strangely enough, when you are thrown with a tai chi push, you relax rather than tense up, so people were never hurt when they hit the wall – but so many people had been thrown against the wall so many times that the plaster and the bricks had crumbled little by little, leaving a hollow indentation the height of a man and several inches deep.

You can see Professor Cheng in the video, “ChengManChing-Pushhandsplay”(www. youtube.com/watch?v=fSYPOhSgiis), and my teacher, Ed, is the student wearing a vest in the second to the last clip. The tai chi push is as an example of how a force of four ounces can overcome a thousand pounds. It is hard to put this into words for people not familiar with push hands. Since our work as body therapists for most of us has often been a question of pushing into the client’s body, it is interesting to see the power that Professor Cheng generates from his postural alignment and his sensitivity.

I did not understand how these tai chi practitioners ‘did it’. When another of my tai chi teachers, John Chung Li, would push someone and the person would be lifted a few inches off the ground and fly away, Mr Li would laugh and say, “I didn’t do it, the chi came out.” Tai chi is is a form of wu wei, which means to do without doing. Push hands creates an automatic response in the body. Rather than wanting to do something the way that we usually use our bodies, the body responds immediately and automatically when you sense tension in the other person. The tai chi writings do not offer an intellectual explanation on how this works to satisfy the curiosity of a scientific mind. They give you a picture, and then they suggest a way of doing something, which you try and practice.

Savoir Faire

When I started to do tai chi seriously, I stopped using using my body the way that I had out of my understanding of karate. I stopped trying to use my physical force to overcome resistance in the client’s body. Instead, I switched to trying to push into the client’s body according to the principles that I was learning from tai chi.

Chi is the Chinese word for energy. When you want to make a movement with chi, the first step is to send yi. As I understand it, yi is the idea, a form of visualization. Next you send the chi, which is a form of energy, the emotional desire of wanting to do something. And then you send the body, which results in a movement. Every time that you do anything with a process involving yi and chi and followed by a physical movement, you are moving ‘consciously’ – ‘with an intention’. It has a different quality and a different force. In tai chi, we can practice moving consciously with an intention. Professor Cheng said that your chi is like water. When you practice using the combination of yi, chi, and the physical body, you build up your chi one drop at a time. One drop of water is not very much, but one drop again and again can have a lot of power – think of how accumulated water movement carved the Grand Canyon. (I’ll return to this in the application section.)

My craniosacral therapy teacher, Alain Gehin, said that working with osteopathy was not something that you could learn and know intellectually, but it was a ‘savoir faire’, a ‘know-how’ – a knowing how to do with your hands. Similar to Professor Cheng’s view of the accumulated drops of water, Gehin said that a practitioner started to have savoir faire when s/he had given 10,000 sessions.

Rolf and J.G. Bennett

The way tai chi led me to working with intention was part of what got me into Rolfing SI. I had first heard about Rolfing SI from Ann Parks, my teacher in Esalen Massage. What she told me sounded interesting so I decided to find out more about it. At the time, there were no Rolfers in Denmark, where I was living, so I went to Berlin and met with Sigfrieid Libich, a Rolfer from southern Germany. We had a good long talk about many things. I told him of my interest in working with intention from my practice of tai chi. He said that Ida Rolf had also been very interested in intention and often talked about it in her classes. I was sold.

Some years later, I was asked to teach tai chi to an experimental theatre group in Copenhagen. The director of the group was Horacio Munoz from Chile. He had been studying spiritual development with John

1. Bennett (originally a student of Gurdjieff) and was taking his actors with him to study for a week at Bennett’s center at Sherborne House near Oxford in England. He invited me to join them.

Years later, I found out that Ida Rolf had a deep connection to Bennett and had several times come to Sherborne House for a few months at a time to be with him. Bennett had a publishing house for his own books, and published one of Ida’s early writings, “Structural Integration: Gravity, An Unexplored Factor in a More Human Use of Human Beings” (available at https:// tinyurl.com/Bennett-Rolf). The connection of Rolf and Bennett was confirmed for me some years after that when I took a course in craniosacral therapy with Jim Asher, one of the original Rolfing teachers. He told me that he often gave sessions to Ida, and that during these she relaxed and talked about many things. He confirmed that she often spoke about her experiences with Bennett.

I don’t know what Ida learned from Bennett, but I’ll share what I’ve learned from my week at Sherborne and from my readings of his work, tying that into what I learned from tai chi and how both have informed how I now work with my clients.

Consciousness

In his teachings, Bennett explained that the energy of consciousness is a heightened state of awareness that everyone experiences sometimes. One of the goals of his work was to increase the amount of time that one was in this state of consciousness.

He said that consciousness can be explained in a metaphor: it is like someone watching television; you have the show on the screen and there is someone watching the show. Consciousness has to do with witnessing – with not only watching what is on the screen, but at the same time being aware that you are watching.

Directed Awareness Is a Form of Mental Energy

The idea of putting our attention into different part of the body comes up many places; for example, yoga nidra, where you scan through the body slowly, one part at a time. Many body therapists use a form of this directed awareness, for themselves as a practice, or guiding clients.

My first day at Sherborne I was given their first level of meditation. Sitting with my eyes closed, I was directed to move my awareness through the parts of my body. But this meditation was a little different than anything I had done before and anything that I have done other places since then. There was a unique addition in Bennett’s version of body sensing. I learned to ask, “Where is the last digit of the little finger on my right hand?” Then, when I sensed it, I should say to myself. “There is the last digit of the little finger on my right hand,” followed by “I am sensing the last digit of my little finger on my right hand.” In other words, I was sensing my body parts one at a time, but also recognizing that I was sensing.

The meditation then moved awareness to the other digits of the little finger one at a time, then to each of the other fingers, then to thumb, then to the palm, then to the back of my hand. From there, awareness was moved to the front of my wrist, the back of my wrist, forearm, elbow, and shoulder. And every time I moved my awareness, I would also called my attention to the fact that I was sensing that part of my body. Directing my mind in my body had an effect on my physical body. After I had ‘done’ my right hand, I looked at it and compared it to my left hand. Directing my awareness into my body had a big effect: my right hand was filled with more blood than it had at the start; it looked bigger than the my left hand and it had more color.

Application in

Rolfing Sessions

You can apply these ideas based on intention and directed attention in your sessions. First, applying the idea, from Bennett’s meditation, of sensing and being aware of your sensing, when you finish a stroke, take a pause on the physical level. Stop moving. Hold your body still. Sense what is going on in the client. Sense what is going on in you. The Ten Series opens pathways of awareness in the client’s body, which is why Rolfing SI allows us be more fully embodied.

Now let’s go back to the discussion of the connective tissue of the body being organized as bags within bags within bags. How we push into the body depends on our idea of the body. I mentioned earlier that many therapists push into the body at a 45- or 90-degree angle, but if working with the ‘bags’, this would push onto the surface of the bags and compress them. I thus work at a 180-degree angle.

I hook the tissue with my fingertips and then I slide it parallel to deeper layers.   As I am sliding the tissue, I am sensing/ searching for the very first sign of resistance to the sliding. Then I slide that bag in different directions in order to find out the direction of greatest resistance. When I find that resistance, I stop the movement of my hands and I do nothing. I keep my hands in exactly the same position and feeling the same level of resistance; that is, I do not back off. As I wait, the connective tissue ‘melts’ and the client’s autonomic nervous system (ANS) shifts – which you may recognize by the client sighing or swallowing. Gehin called this a ‘release’. The client’s release comes at the same exact instance that the resistance I was pushing against melts. This is a good way to achieve the changes that I want in my Rolfing sessions.

As an exploration of ‘bags’ and resistance that bridges between Rolfing SI and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), here’s an exercise where we use the groove between adjacent muscles (‘bags’) in the big muscles of the thigh. These grooves, which are the territory of the loose connective tissue, are often the pathway of acupuncture meridians. Pick one of these grooves and lightly run your fingertips in it. You will hit points of resistance and get ‘stuck’. In TCM, these areas of resistance are ‘congested’ acupuncture points. When an acupuncturist inserts needles into these points and then twirls them, first in one direction and then back in the opposite direction, the needles ‘grab’ tissue. There is more resistance in one direction and less in the other. Helene Langevin’s research discusses the anatomy of these acupuncture meridians and the relationship to fascia.

When you can recognize tissue resistance, you can add in the principle of yi from tai chi. As I wrote, yi is the idea, then you add chi, the energy of intention, and bring in the body. Here’s how I do it. I put my fingertips lightly on the client’s body and move my hands around to find the direction of resistance. This is working with directional energy. When I find it, I hold my fingers in the direction of resistance. I then send my thoughts, yi, in that direction. I add my desire sending the chi in that direction until I feel the very first sign of resistance. Then I stop and do absolutely nothing, but the tissue is already under resistance so I have the body component present. From this, I will feel the client’s tissue release and slide freely.

Closing Thoughts on Energy

I want to close leaving you with some brief thoughts on energy. Bennett wrote a book called Energies – Material, Vital, Cosmic that classifies different types of energy. He lists physical energies that we use when we work ‘hands on’ such as thermal energy, coherent energy, elastic energy. He also goes into emotional energies, kinds of mental energies, and levels of consciousness such as awareness and intention. There are implications for our Rolfing work. I will point to a few and leave you more to ponder.

Bennett starts by describing the mechanical energies. The first of the mechanical energies is a dispersed energy. It has no organization. Heat is the lowest, least- organized, and most insensitive form of mechanical energy. Everything that exists contains some heat – the air, the water, our bodies, the planets, and the stars. Heat just flows from where there is more heat to where there is less heat. The intensity of heat is measured as temperature.

Some forms of energy are directed energies. Directed energy occur everywhere where there is an attraction between two things. Everything on Earth has a certain amount of energy that comes from the fact that we are existing together in the gravitational field of the Earth. In addition to gravity, directed energies include magnetism, electricity, and light.

In our body therapy, we can also talk about the level of structural organization. When one person works on another person with his or her hands, there is a difference in the level of structural organization from one person to the other. We can observe or postulate that there is a flow of energy from the person with the higher level of structural organization to the other one with a lower level of energy.

Now we’ll look at cohesive, plastic, and colloidal energy, two forms of mechanical energy that are relevant to Rolfing SI.

Cohesive energy i s t hee r g y o f connectedness. Things are held together in a particular pattern because there are energies that bind them, for example chemical bonds. When things are bound together with a cohesive energy, they always have some things that they share. Cohesive energy is the source of the persistence of all kinds of bodies. It is much more highly organized than directed energy.

Plastic energy is the quality of changing shape without losing coherence. People can still recognize us by our shape after thirty years even though we have gradually succumbed to the ever-present pull of gravity. People generally develop a more forward-head position and an increasingly constricted thoracic cavity as time goes on. The fantastic thing that Rolfing SI does is that we are able to restore our shape to some extent and to turn back the clock.

The quality of these plastic energies in the human body is due to a combination of hormonal levels and which one of the three circuits of the ANS is in play. In the story of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” Goldilocks, in the cabin of the three bears, has just eaten a bowl of porridge. She is tired and wants to lie down to sleep. She sees three beds. She tries the first and it is too hard, then she tries the second and it is too soft, but when she tries the third, it is just right.

We can use the metaphor of the three beds as a description of states of the connective tissue under our fingers when we do our techniques. If the connective tissue is too soft, it is often from a depressive state, which we call the dorsal vagal circuit. If it is too hard, it comes from the spinal sympathetic chain If the texture of the connective tissue is just right, then we can say that it is coming from the ventral vagal circuit.

In terms of plastic energy, we have desirable qualities of elasticity and resilience. Without these, people would be rigid. Rolfing SI is possible because we have these energies, including the plastic energy. Increasing resilience and elasticity are the positive outcomes of Rolfing SI for most people, especially those who are rigid at the start of their Ten Series. Without elasticity and without resilience, people have the undesirable opposite quality of rigidity. This often goes together with a state of stress. On the opposite pole people can  be without sufficient elasticity, and have  a body that is too soft and that can hardly resist being pushed out of shape. Good old- fashioned Rolfing techniques do not work as well on soft bodies. If you work hard into the person’s tissue, it is often painful. These people often suffer from fibromyalgia. We might look for a different way to work with our hands. Here it might help to put your hands on the person and ask him to “come to your hands” with his awareness.

With colloidal energy the change is not in shape, but rather the actual  consistency of the ground substance of the connective tissue itself. The colloids are like jello, which when poured into a mold and cooled in the refrigerator takes the shape of the mold. If the jello is warmed, it becomes fluid and loses its shape. Ida talked about the firmer state as gel and the more fluid state as sol. She said that we could use friction from our hands to put heat into the tissue and get the gel to melt into sol. This works and is the reason that Rolfers plowed firmly though the tissue.

However, there is another energy that turns gel to sol in the human body. This  is awareness, which affects the colloids in the connective tissue. As the practitioner, if I become aware of the resistance to my very light push into my client’s body, then I get the positive change without the hard work and without causing discomfort to the client. My client’s awareness comes up to meet mine.

Another category is emotional energy, a big topic. On this I would suggest that you read my book, Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve (North Atlantic Books 2017), which goes into the new understanding of the ANS based on Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal Theory. One form of emotional energy is Love. You can open yourself to receive it, Love can come from your heart and be directed towards one person, to several people, or to everyone in the entire world.

There is also the category of the mental energies such as yi and chi, visualization, and consciousness.

One last element from Bennett, related to consciousness and with application to our work. In another of his books, How We Do Things, he talks about the ‘third force’, an idea he traces back to Babylonia. We usually think of cause and effect, but Bennett’s Third Force is a missing the third element, which is consciousness (which he terms the ‘passive’ in this model). According to Bennett, in order to create anything or to change things, three elements have to be present: the active, the receptive, and the passive. To bring about change, assess which of the two elements are present and what is the third element that is not present. If the person wanting to facilitate a change adds the missing element, s/he can be successful.

In the usual ways of thinking about hands- on work, there are only two elements: the active – the practitioner – and the receptive – the person receiving the work. “I do something to your body and you change.” That is the way that we have been conditioned to think, but it does not work. When the therapist stops doing and becomes passive, he can create the conditions for real change. In becoming passive and witnessing, we make room for the third force to enter the equation.

Stanley Rosenberg has been a Rolfer since 1983. He studied various areas of osteopathy with Alain Gehin, his teacher for thirty years: craniosacral and visceral as well as working on the joints. Rosenberg founded a school in Denmark that had thirteen teachers and taught these subjects. At the time, it was the largest craniosacral school in Europe. In December 2017, North Atlantic Books released his book Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve, which is based on his work for the past twelve years with Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal Theory.Rolfing® SI, Consciousness, Energy, and Awareness[:]