I have been blessed to recognize, and work from, a level of consciousness where what a client’s structure needs, and in what order, is information that presents itself  as I work. I believe this is because I drop agenda, become fully present, open myself to perceive what is, know and trust that a higher level of consciousness and truth is present in both the client and me, and know that the client’s structure knows exactly its own right answers. Years ago I worked with a client where her Rolfing® Structural Integration (SI) sessions made no sense to me until two to three days after a session. I confessed to her, “I have always known I am not the conductor on this train, but until you, I hadn’t realized I’m riding three cars back.”

Recently, I did an event of mini-sessions. A lady came into my room for a session wearing a knit cap on top of scraggly hair, torn jeans, and a worn-out coat. I’ll confess: I thought (rudely) to myself, “What am I going to do with this for fifteen minutes?” She took off her coat, sat cross-legged on top of my table, and looked at me. I asked her if she had any ache or pain places, and she said no. I asked her why she came for a mini-session, and she said because she was curious. Then, what came into my consciousness was a question I’ve never asked before. I said, “In the depths of the depths of who you are, what are you working on right now?”

As she pondered the answer to that question, more and more color came into her pale face. Her whole energy shifted and kept shifting, and I watched her, second by second, become beautiful. By the time she began to speak, she was amazingly beautiful. She said that she hides behind masks out of fear and disappointment and is trying to figure out how to be okay. Of course I told her of the transition I had just watched, and told her that she’s beautiful (in a way so she could hear it). For me, it was a sight to behold: to see a body/person/ structure shift like this in a matter of ten seconds. I didn’t know this was possible. Then, I silently asked her structure where and how it needed me to engage, and we did our mini-session.

Someone recently asked if you need to get to this level before you have it. I said we all already have it (though many don’t know this and/or have blockages to it). Just start from wherever you are.

Consciousness, Simply Stated

Consciousness is the awareness of oneself and one’s environment. That’s it, plain and simple. However, there is a vast spectrum of levels and layers to one’s awareness of self, others, experiences, and environment. Also, there are base levels of consciousness we get stuck in, and perhaps don’t know we’re stuck, so we continuously look for the answers there. They say consciousness is the ability to think and feel which, then, builds the framework to what one knows. I suspect those Rolfers who are skilled in the energetic taxonomy would be more comfortable saying higher consciousness is always available and is accessed through perceiving and sensing.

Consciousness determines what you pay attention to, your experiences, what you hold as true, what you think you know, life skills, professional skills, and your inner world. It influences who and how we get to be, the possibilities available to us, and defines the ways we engage with life. What’s challenging is that much of this, that which limits our access to higher levels of consciousness, is held in our sub- or unconscious.

Those who have had NDEs (Near-Death Experiences) are hard pressed to find words to convey what they experienced and now know. They do, however, have a common opinion about how we live our human lives and what we’ve been thinking we know. They suggest we question all of it.

Original Formation

The beginnings of our conscious awareness came through the development of our bodies and brains. As is known from practitioners of Brain Gym®, not all of us learned or evolved all the same patterns. For example, since I went straight from sitting to walking as an infant (i.e., never crawled), I don’t have the cross-crawl pattern in my systems. Patterns we developed, or didn’t, through physical development, could be a severe dysfunction, a nuisance, or could be the basis of the uniquely special gift called you.

Family Conditioning

Family conditioning is something we all got at a very early age and were indoctrinated in for years. It dramatically shapes our consciousness through who- you-are and how-you-are-to-be in order to survive and succeed (and sometimes succeeding is merely surviving). It includes norms, values, rewards, punishments, observations, and reactions. Some of these are spoken and much is unspoken, but everyone in the family knows them. Family conditioning can also be so subtle that, while we sense it, we can’t put words to it, or it can be so ingrained that we don’t know it’s there, think it’s normal, or have been conditioned to doubt our own sense/ knowing of what’s happening.

An example of this subtle stuff, from my own family, is: the children’s accomplishments were owned by the parents. As a kid I called it living vicariously. It was a sense that my accomplishment, pride, and excitement were being sucked off of me while I began to live this experience that the accomplishment had never been mine to begin with. My youngest brother, the youngest of five and ten years my junior, told me, when he was a teenager, that he never tells mom and dad what he’s going to do, or has accomplished, so it won’t get swallowed up. Over time, family conditioning is so ingrained that we enact the patterns/dynamics, unconsciously, on ourselves, and these can take decades to unlearn and un-embody. I believe family conditioning is how we pass dysfunctional patterns from one generation to another, and (for those whose worldview includes it) from one incarnation to another.

Sometimes, though, some aspects of our family conditioning can disturb us in a way that we begin to search out the message, recognize its falsehood, and choose to discard it. As an example, in my family there was a pattern of offering something to someone so that the other could thank you while repeatedly declining what you offered. In my twenties, I recognized this and decided I was done with it, no matter the consequences. I told myself if the family disowned me, so be it. Later, during one visit to my grandparent’s home, my grandmother went on and on about how poor the crop of raspberries had been that year. (Mind you, my grandmother’s raspberry jam was to die for.) The crop had been so tiny that they had only gotten seven jars of raspberry jam. Only seven. She asked if I wanted one. Contrary to family conditioning, I immediately said yes. The look on her face, and the quality of the moment that hung in the air, was as if the planet had cracked in half for her. This is how potent family conditioning is, and it forms the foundation to our maps of how things work in life, in living, with others, and in the world.

Some of us live our whole lives at a level of consciousness that is ruled by family conditioning. With this, defense mechanisms (ego, masks, denial, hiding, etc.) become our way of coping with the disharmony between our true self, our conditioned self, and the inner and outer environments we constantly try to negotiate. All the dualities are prominent and dominant at this level. Luckily, we can grow, choose, and change.

Other Conditioning

While our most primary foundation to early consciousness is the family, we also get conditioning from education, religion, community, locale/state, nation, etc. For those who have experienced trauma, abuse, injury, or loss/absence of a family member in the course of growing up, even more complexity shapes one’s consciousness, who we are, and how we are trying to find our way.

It is crucial to realize that conditioning, maturation, and education affect our level of belief in, trust for, and knowing of self. It moves me nearly to tears to think of the ways we have learned to shut down, turn off, and inhibit our own inner knowing.

My favorite story of all time was published in Reader’s Digest® many decades ago. A mother wrote it. The gist of the story is that one day the mother saw her toddler walking toward the bedroom of her newborn. She followed, quietly, to see what was up. The toddler walked in the room, pressed his face against the crib, and said to the sleeping infant, “Will you please tell me what God looks like because I’m beginning to forget.” I relayed this story to one of my clients who just so happens to have a toddler and a newborn. The following week, he shared with me that when he asked his toddler what God looks like, she scowled at him and went back to playing. I told him perhaps she doesn’t remember or perhaps she does but it is too special for her to talk about. A week or so later, he texted me that he had asked again, and she didn’t hesitate for a second before saying, “He looks like golden sunshine.”

We have all been socialized about how we are ‘supposed to’ pay attention to ourselves, to others, and to our environment. In the course of this, at very early ages of growing up, we learn not to pay attention to, no less trust: our intuition; our inner sensing/perceiving (like animals use when they know a tsunami is coming or a predator is behind the next bush); the gift of imagining (which is really an incredible tool); and a direct relationship with, and the embodiment of, our bodies. And, yet, our bodies, because they sense and perceive, are one of the direct lines to higher levels of consciousness.

He Said, She Said

Through socialization and education we acquire another level of consciousness where we learn to pay attention to our thoughts. From this, we become entangled in analyzing, and in our emotional reactivity to thoughts and experiences. I call this the ‘he said, she said; he did, she did’ level of consciousness. Many of us live our lives here, and there is absolutely no healing, no resolution, and no potential for change at this level. We simply spin endlessly around on whether what was said or done meets our expectations and beliefs or doesn’t. When we talk to friends or associates, we focus on whether they agree or don’t. If they don’t, we’re off spinning again about this apparently new ‘he said, she said’. That word, ‘apparently’ is important here because it’s not new at all. Our response is a common pattern, based on beliefs, that we have set up in order to survive, manage, and succeed in our lives. Shifting out of a ‘he- said-she-said’ level of consciousness starts with identifying one’s beliefs.

Beliefs

When I spoke with someone recently, he thought ‘beliefs’ meant religious beliefs. He hadn’t yet realized that we formulate beliefs about everything. It’s how we began to map out the way to make sense of, organize, self-protect, manage, and move forward in our lives.

We formulate beliefs about life, self, and others. Beliefs can be found by listening and hearing reactions, intensities, behaviors, thoughts, and the interpretations and judgments you form about self and others. These are indicators that can point you toward questioning what your experience and perspectives have taught you to hold as true. Beliefs are not thoughts. Beliefs are embodied. Our thoughts and reactivity arise from the beliefs that we hold in our systems as true. People can hold onto these, and defend them, like they preserve the very pillars of truth and life when they are really only the pillars of our map/ worldview. In some ways, beliefs could be compared to operating systems and application programs.

At an energy and energetic level, beliefs are resonances/vibrations that permeate the field in which we live and function. As resonances/vibrations, they have a direct hold on what we, and our physical body, can do. Beliefs are a tough nut to crack because they organize and affect our experience (mentally, emotionally, physically). So, from experiences we form beliefs. Those beliefs then inform and direct our experience. Then experience reinforces our beliefs, and beliefs reinforce our experience. Recurring experiences, emotions, and thoughts are indicators to our embodied beliefs.

To shift to a higher level of consciousness, one has to recognize, challenge, and discard many of one’s beliefs. Some of our beliefs fall away in the course of doing Rolfing SI and Rolf Movement work, but many require great courage, persistence, and a ruthless commitment to picking apart one’s own psyche in order to recognize patterns and find solutions or ways to transcend the belief.

There is value in challenging everything we think we know. We, and each one of our clients, are grappling with this kind of material, each in our own unique way and at our own pace and level. This material can be disturbing, confusing, frustrating, and most often not at all rooted in what we thought was the answer. So back to what the NDE folk say: question everything.

Patterns

We have all been perplexed by circumstances that seem to happen to us repeatedly, or happen with the same outcome no matter what the circumstance or venue. Beliefs, and the ways we made sense of our world as we matured, formed patterns that most of us don’t realize are there and yet these inform and determine our awareness, our consciousness.

The consciousness level of patterns is where the potential for change and healing happens. This is why our work   is so valuable. Rather than fixing people’s symptoms (which we all are incredibly skilled at), we work at the structural pattern level, the level where real change is possible. Our work, and particularly Rolf Movement, allows people to expand their conscious awareness. I also hold it as a goal that this work can help people regain access to their intuition and, thereby, regain a sense of trust: in self; in their capability and possibilities; and in sensing their own truth.

Base levels of consciousness demand our respect because they encompass how a human being put himself together in order to mature and survive. At the same time, though, structure changes most easily when we connect into the true/innate self of the client as we work.

There are Rewards

As practitioners, getting out of our heads, our techniques, and what we think we know, and finding ways to find, follow, and trust our inner knowing, sensing, and perceiving has tremendous rewards in how to do this work and also holds high value for our clients. One’s inner voice, sensing, perceiving, and experiencing that feeling in the cells of your body of knowing, of “yes, that’s true and accurate,” are  pathways to higher consciousness. Over time, we acquire enough experiences to realize we can trust ourselves, trust our inner knowing, and trust the information that arises into our conscious awareness.

I’m reminded of the young lady, age twenty-two, who called me early in my career. She had a rare bone disease that caused additional bone growth. As a result, she had had a surgery to remove bone every two years since her birth. Physical tissues had been reattached by the surgeons anywhere they could. By the time she came to me, she had half of each scapula, bone pieces had been cut out of lower legs and forearms, and each innominate was nothing more than an arc of pubic bone, hip joint, and SI joint. Everything else had been cut away. I contacted three Rolfers who were also MDs about this bone disease and this lady’s desire to do Rolfing SI. All three of them said clearly and emphatically, “Don’t touch her!” Meanwhile, my inner voice was screaming at me to work with her. I called her back with the only approach I know that works best: be straight up and honest about where you are. I told her I had no idea what to do for her or how to help. She said she never asked if I knew what to do or how to help. She said she was asking if I was willing to take the journey. Oh my God! Yes!

I have never had another client who accessed core/psoas as quickly, and used it as efficiently, as she did. She used it like a super highway and found her trust in self again. I was blessed to have worked with her through her basic Rolfing SI process. Then she went to Africa for two years on an educational mission.

Clients and the Mind, Body, Spirit Relationship

Some clients come to us with an understanding that mind, body, and spirit are intertwined. Some may be sure of this and some may only suspect it. Some may feel they have plateaued in their personal journey because mental and emotional issues feel to them to be stuck in their bodies. These clients may be ready to begin to question or pick apart base levels of consciousness. Some clients come to us for specific physical reasons only to realize, at a deeper level, that they really arrived here in order to begin dismantling their mental, emotional, and spiritual blockages. There are also some clients who have many years of, and many skills for, healing their own mental, emotional, and spiritual self.

No matter where the client is, engaging the interplay of mind, body, and spirit begins with becoming familiar with where the client is, his or her worldview or map, and how his or her physicality is expressing itself. What is possible depends on what the client’s true/innate self (meaning ‘structure’, which means physical plus all of who s/he is) is calling for.

I use the beginnings of the traditional Rolfing SI process to become more familiar with these aspects of a client and to let the client acquire some trust in my skills. I am an avid listener and an avid questioner. I have zero qualms about asking a ‘dumb’ question. I strive to have a huge worldview because it is then more likely that I will be able to comprehend whatever my client’s worldview is. It is not the job of my clients to understand or accept my worldview. It is my job to understand theirs. This is the meaning of ‘meet the client where the client is’.

In my ideal world, when a client comes to this work knowing there is an inseparableness and interdependence of mind, body, spirit, and ‘God’ (whatever God means for you), my hope is that the client would know this at an experiential level. Most don’t. The experience is not ‘thoughts about’; not hoping and asking; not doing or making it happen; not beyond one’s grasp nor being with held. It is the very nature of being, and it evolves and unfolds for us within us. Rolfing SI and Rolf Movement are the most potent vehicle I’ve ever experienced to bring mind, body, spirit, and ‘God’ (whatever God means for you) into a reality that you experience and live.

I look at a client as a coherentins eparableness that knows exactly why s/he is in my office. My framework is that it’s my job to listen to the inseparableness, to hear what it needs from me, from my work, and for my client. I would hope for clients, ideally, that this work becomes a discovery and reclaiming of their inner knowing, self-truth, trust in self, trust in intuition, and embodiment of body-with-spirit and spirit-with-body to the fullest of one’s abilities at that moment. I know we’re on the right road when they experience their body supporting them or connecting into parts they haven’t been living in, or come to realize that their body is a partner, or realize that the aches and pains of the body are its only way (when we’re not embodied) to signal that there is a distortion in the system that is keeping them from experiencing the amazing journey that is who they are. Do I say this to potential clients? No. Do I do the best I can for them to possibly discover on their own that this is happening for them? Yes.

A Specific Client Example

I worked with a fellow who came to Rolfing SI because his wife told him he was slumping. He thought slumping was a structure issue, and then he heard from me that Rolfing SI works at the structural level. We made a lot of really good progress with his structure over about eight sessions, but he was unable to sustain it. In addition to working with his body, in one session he mentioned he thrives with analyzing and that he expects/wants only basic survival: to keep a job and provide for his family. A session or two later, he talked to me about his meditation practice and how he knows God is out there, and he’s been trying to get out there and connect. I told him God is not “out there”; God is in you, it is here, inside, and you won’t find what you’re looking for by trying to get “out there.” In the following session he said he’d been sitting with the idea that God is “in here” and likes it. To this,  I said that the truth is that God is out there AND in here, and everywhere, all the time. My client liked this even better because he now realized that if he goes inside, he can then sense “out there” and still also be “in here” to sense what his truth is.

Our next session was 70% talking. He went back to the subject of analyzing. He talked about so many things he should and shouldn’t be doing, that he is trying to follow these, has reasserted a new resolve, and is determined to find his purpose in life. I suggested he let go of the purpose question, that many times purpose is too big of a question to answer. I suggested instead that he look for those places where he can make a contribution and that, from this, over time, the purpose may become more clear to him. I told him a contribution doesn’t have to be money or volunteering. Sometimes it can be as simple as slowing down and flagging a driver that you’ll let him make his left-hand turn.

I also asked him if he realized that ‘should’, ‘ought to’, ‘have to’, and ‘must’ were rules we live by but didn’t create. He kind of got this, but not really, so I said, “When we live based on ‘should’, we either get to do what we should, or do what we want as we get angry at ourselves for not doing what we should have done. I turned my body to the right for “do what you should,” then turned to the left for “be angry that you didn’t”; then turned right, left, right, and left, to demonstrate the craziness of living in a should world. He got it. I gave him the beginnings of the process to eradicate ‘should’ from one’s life. (This process is explained at the end of this article.) During this session, I also taught him how to recognize what yes and no feel like in his physical body. I asked him if he could think of a simple activity in his life to begin noticing this physical experience of yes or no. He said he could use it to find out if he should eat one thing or another for lunch. I looked at him blankly and said nothing. He looked at me oddly for about three seconds and then burst out laughing when he realized he had said ‘should’. I congratulated him on noticing.

In his next session, he reported he did only one day of noticing ‘shoulds’ and then completely forgot about it. He said, however, that he had found many ways every day to make contributions. He was practically beaming as he told me all the ways he’d applied this idea. As for the ‘should’ homework, I told him it is common to forget if the task is too big, or the issue is so ingrained in us, or when it’s just not yet time. After this brief conversation, his session was 100% Rolfing SI with micromovements. We’ll see what the-structure-of-who-he-is wants help with next.

These concepts are very common for me to use with clients who are beginning to get a connection between body, mind, and spirit or have been working on it and not making much progress. For others who come in with a lot of tools and skills already, I draw on all they know and listen to their structure for the directions on how I can contribute to move them forward.

How to Eradicate ‘Should’

‘Shoulds’ are really important when we are kids because they protect and teach us. You should hold hands and look both ways before crossing the street. You should stop at a red light. However, that rule no longer applies when the stoplight is broken and staying red for ten minutes. Every ‘should’ has at least one or dozens of exceptions in real life. Shoulds, ought tos, have tos, and musts are all rules, and you are not their creator. When we live by these, we live in an environment where we do what we should or berate ourselves for not doing what we should have done. We go back and forth between the two poles never realizing: it is running our lives; it is deciding our choices; and that we are stuck here. This pattern deserves eradication.

After hearing this, many decide to stop using these words, but this is only a decision. It is a thought. It has little power over the pattern/rules that are imbedded in who/how we are. Plus, we humans are far too quick to settle on limited data before we run out to fix something. If you go after changing ‘shoulds’ at this point, the task will be long, frustrating, and incomplete.

The first step in eradicating ‘should’ is data collection. For one to two weeks, the only job is to listen ruthlessly to everything you say and notice every time you speak the word ‘should’. Do not change a thing except to start really hearing what you say. Once that is accomplished, the next task is to spend one to two weeks ruthlessly paying attention to when you think the word ‘should’. You will need to pay even greater attention during this phase because our thoughts pop in and flash through our minds very quickly. I tell clients I know the solution to ‘should’ but, also, that I won’t give them the answer until they do their data collection.

Once you have completed these two phases of data collection, you will have accomplished two things: 1) you’ll have a good sense of how persistent you’ll need to be with the rest of this task; and 2) you will have acquired the skill of immediately identifying when you speak and think this word.

The final task: Change the ‘sh’ of ‘should’ to a ‘c’. ‘Should’ is a rule; ‘could’ is a choice. If you’re like me, you’ll probably spend another week tripping over your words, like, “I sh- sh- sh- could have gone to the store.” You are now on your way to eradicating should from your thoughts and spoken word.

As I said, there are always exceptions to a ‘should’. A lawyer-client once challenged me on the premise that he’s in the business of telling people what they should do. He’s right. I suggested that he distinguish between the ‘shoulds’ that he needs for his profession and any predisposition for using ‘should’ that may be limiting his choices in his personal life.

Conclusion

You never know, really, why people show up in your office and how this work is going to feed into the life they are going to live. What I do know is that the potency of Rolfing SI and Rolf Movement work can open a whole new world of possibility and ways of being. As a practitioner, it is a blessing to know how to be open and present in the moment, to perceive what is so for my clients, and perceive what is needed so they can get what they’re after, even if they’re not yet consciously aware of what that is at this moment. It is an honor to witness their consciousness, questioning, and experience unfold as they expand in ways they hadn’t known were possible, and to see light and lift come into them  as they experience the possibility of new possibilities. Being invited by clients to take this journey with them is a blessing.

Deborah Weidhaas is a Certified Advanced Rolfer and Rolf Movement Practitioner. She has been in practice for over twenty-five years. She had over 110 Rolfing SI and Rolf Movement sessions in her body before she trained as a Rolfer. After a Rolfing SI and a Rolf Movement series, this large number of sessions was prompted by her inner voice, which told her to go back to Rolf Movement and it would tell her when she was done. For two years, she coupledweekly Rolf Movementsessions with guidance from her inner voice to clarify and pick apart her own psyche/consciousness levels. 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 consciousness issues that arise from receiving Rolfing SI. She recently relocated from Los Gatos, California to live and practice in Richmond, Virginia.

Consciousness: Challenge Your Worldview[:]