Gravidynamics

Olivia Ireland, based on interviews with Joseph Heller

Olivia Ireland is a Certified Soma Practitioner with a private practice located in Olympia, Washington. Academically trained in creative writing at Harvard College, and in both applied and fine arts during her career as an interior designer, she devotionally harbors the notion that even mundane human existence offers a chance to engage with life in an enchanting co-creative endeavor. Find her at www.olivebodyworks.com.

Joseph Heller graduated from Cal Tech and worked as an aerospace engineer in the NASA space program. In 1972 he became intensely involved in humanistic psychology, gave up his science career, and was trained by Dr. Ida Rolf. After establishing his practice, he was appointed by Dr. Rolf to become the first president of the Rolf Institute®. During the 70s

Joseph studied with Judith Aston, Dr. Brugh Joy, and Hal and Sidra Stone. As a result of his unique combination of training in structural integration, movement education, and body energy awareness, Joseph left the Rolf Institute and founded Hellerwork® Structural Integration in 1980. He currently resides and works in Mt. Shasta, California. Photograph of Joseph Heller © Nicole Katano, all rights reserved.

Inspiration and a new sense of creative potential are some of the gifts of structural integration work.

The spirit of personal evolution, which structural integration embodies, demands that we ceaselessly, ruthlessly reflect, question everything, and finally winnow meaning from life, sometimes at great personal expense. Its reward is deeper purposefulness.

To become whole within our lives is to do as much as we can to heal the world. Below, Joseph Heller, one of the most established structural integrators, shares how he has developed his craft to attend to just this paradigm; the article is based on a series of conversations with this co-author in late 2012.

He who knows that power is inborn . . . throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head.

(Emerson, 1841/1993, p. 38)

Since its birth in the mid-1950s, the practice of structural integration has evolved alongside an American culture that has seen political, social, and economic shifts, twists, and revolutions unprecedented in such a short amount of time.

Sixty years’ worth of radical redefinition—and more surely to come.

The world has been shrunken and its problems grown gargantuan. No person alive today can hope to remain untouched by the wild ramifications of that fact.

Of course, and as anyone over forty knows personally, absolutely everything changes. As J.D. Powell says resignedly in the 1953 film How to Marry a Millionaire: “That’s one of the advantages of age: Disappointments become a normal part of life” (small comfort, that). We each live chaotic individual lives, yes, no question. How might we align ourselves best with change on our own individual scale? And perhaps just as importantly, how do we as individuals fit most effectively into the perpetually dynamic human collective that experiences change on a global scale? I propose here, that only by learning to care for oneself, can one best inform and support everyone else.

Philosophically, structural integration has always stood straight and strong. The Line, for Dr. Rolf, was, aside and apart from being physically palliative, symbolic of an evolution of individual consciousness toward clarity and freedom, grace under pressure, and personal (as evidenced by structural) integrity.

The evolution of the species through the alignment of individual humans with powerful natural forces was her raison d’être. Her series has a definite beginning and end. She believed deeply, as all of us in this field do, that to work on the body was to work on the spirit in the body, with such credulity that she felt comfortable allowing the client to remain a mostly passive participant. (Of the hour spent in session, perhaps five minutes was devoted to any work off the table, educating movement.) And while her intention might have been to encourage a certain autonomy of spirit, her method of working looked a lot like today’s conventional practitioner- centered health-care model, which mostly forgoes the individual’s conscious connection to their body and its dis-ease as well.

Dr. Rolf ’s method of working rightly befitted a woman of her generation: consummate doers and builders who fought overseas in, and worked at home to support, world wars, and who brought economies, infrastructure, and industries to new heights of production following World War II. She did incontestably effective work to optimize the structure of the body, using whatever means necessary to get there. Rolfing was legendarily painful, requiring the proverbial stiff upper lip to carry on. Furthermore, from Mr. Heller’s recollections Ida’s own personality was “strong-willed and strong-minded . . . she would overpower people and they wouldn’t feel very independent.” Though the client was undoubtedly more deeply sourced in his or her body by the end of the series, his conscious role took short shrift to Dr. Rolf ’s role as the practitioner, skilled craftswoman, and structural architect of the process, both during the session, and afterwards.

This culture glorifies the mind. ( J. Heller)

Today, those who work with their heads are the highest paid and, in a culture that values money highly, it’s no wonder that our educational system is designed to still the body and empower the brain from an early age. It’s essential for our productive national economy that we create predictable machinery out of living bodies, and to do that, strict measures must be taken from early childhood to lock down natural flow and intrinsic, feeling-based knowledge that was born into the body. In America, one can earn one’s PhD and still only barely be aware that one owns a body. Even if one’s body were to shout out or break down, no self-reflection or growth is really expected; only a trip to the right specialist who knows how to do the right thing to fix the part that’s gone out of whack. Of course, that’s a best-case scenario. Most disease is so confounding to conventional practitioners that their clients become serial patients, or wander in a Google-induced haze of information from one treatment room  to  the next. (Could it be that this tragi-comic procession accounts for our current fascination with the concept of zombie apocalypse? We are in fact surrounded by “disembodied walking heads.” Our power centers are in corporate buildings, not in our corporeal bodies.)

Lucky for us, eventually our bodies do break down; we do eventually feel pain; we do eventually need to deal with matters material. Only then are  we faced with the choice that may lead to our own personal evolution, on which precipitously hangs the evolution of our species.

Movement is the context of [structural integration] work; why can’t it also be the content? ( J. Heller)

Joseph Heller founded the Hellerwork® School of Structural Integration in part to address the somewhat one-sided structural integration practice developing at the time within the larger somewhat one-dimensional culture. Changes in the  body were best integrated, he felt, by incorporating client movement and consciousness practices as integral facets of session work. “I attempt in all my work to empower my clients,” he says.

Philosophically, structural integration has always stood straight and strong . . .

And his work, even in this wider arena, has evolved into what he terms a gravidynamic model, the term denoting “a body that fits well into the flow of gravity.”

He explains, “gravidynamic work involves getting the client off of the table . . . sitting, walking, moving while we work on them. This way, they register the differences and changes in the field of gravity, many times in one session.” A gravidynamic session elicits more, and more efficient, learning than a conventional structural integration session, because a client is getting a lot of in-office practice moving in just the natural ways they are going to once they’re dressed again and released into their own life, their own personal laboratory.

For example, work on the upper body would be achieved sitting on a rotating stool. The practitioner might touch the attachments of the quadratus lumborum muscles, the erector spinae, and then move more lateral to the latissimus dorsi attachments at the iliac crest, all the while feeling for bands that are not moving, and calling for movement from the client (rotating, forward bending, etc.). The entire time, the practitioner’s hands and her entire body is moving as well, feeding and encouraging new movement in the client. “No movement is bad,” says Mr. Heller: as in, lack of movement is bad, and any movement is good.

Movement alone can free tissue, as with Feldenkrais, or Continuum work, but gravidynamic work recognizes the significance of consciously realizing, in the sense of making real, making meaning out of new-found freedom. Only through their very own explorations of their very own bodies can clients make Tom Myers’ miraculous Anatomy Trains® more than an inspiring theory, and instead a very real practice of turning free energy and will into their own unique realities.

In the gravidynamic model they automatically adjust so there’s not too much pain for them. ( J. Heller)

In conventional bodywork, pain and the tight places are the focus, often from the first discussion one has with a client. As Mr. Heller rightly notes, people do tend to get “stuck in the stuckness.” Putting undue attention on places where the client is blocked creates a narrow focus and a one-way or even dead-end somatic conversation, whereas encouraging a wider perspective on what is perceived as “the issue” is part and parcel of structural integration work, and is only further developed in the gravidynamic model. Here, the client has the knowledge. The practitioner brings his or her knowledge base, like anatomy, quality of touch, mentorship. But only the embodied soul knows deeply what the next step is toward its evolution. And if spirit and body are one, and body sensation is how spirit speaks in the material world, pain therefore is not The Thing, but The Way Out. As Karen Bolesky, director of the Soma Institute puts it (Soma Advanced Training, 2012), “pain requires movement to heal; it is a call for movement,” change, adaptation, a dynamic relationship with reality. So perhaps a structural integration practitioner’s most essential ability is the ability, as Mr. Heller posits, “to tap into the knowledge in the client’s body . . . [which] knows more about the needs of that body.” To work gravidynamically is to draw out their deep wisdoms, to “make intellectual the knowledge they have already.”

While they may not be able to get to that understanding on their own, it comes as a relief to clients to learn that they can use the whole of their body to adapt to and inform the change they desire, using pain as the glittering light on their path to wholeness. “When face down, tight places would be painful . . . but here they can adapt . . . practically all the pain goes away when I work this way,” explains Mr. Heller. In building a feedback loop, wherein a client can more easily move around the pain until it shifts, “they can feel what movements cause ease and discomfort . . . what muscle is connected to the tight place.” They become active participants. He adds too, “The more the whole body moves, the more the work can be immediately integrated into structure.” Sessions can even be shortened to half an hour because the amount of information processed by both the practitioner and client flows so much more strongly.

[Traditionally] a practitioner has knowledge and the client is the recipient of that knowledge. I ask, “How can I put the client in charge of the work?”( J. Heller)

To move through pain to pleasure, and integrate that newborn understanding with a bigger picture; what does this train us to do but to “lean into the light?” Here we experience the magic of embodiment: We can feel, we can change, and for the better, over and over again. “Clients tell me where to put my hands, because they can instantly feel what’s moving and what’s not,” says Mr. Heller. A practitioner becomes, not the only authority, but a valuable resource for helping a client orient to his own inner authority.

Echoing this same co-creative spirit, Mr. Heller has developed another extension of gravidynamic work, which he calls “partnered self-care.” In a workshop setting, people with even minimal experience with bodywork can learn to work on each other’s bodies. Perfect not only for those who need to bring more frequent movement to their physical issues, but also for building a skill set, learning healthy somatic independence, healthy interdependence, and how to ask for help.

I had a woman with frozen shoulder. I would work on it once a week for thirty minutes, but in between, it would relapse. I realized that she needed more frequent interactions, and told her to bring her husband in to the session. I taught him how to work the shoulder; how to do the stock type work that she could not do herself, to release around the shoulder. I haven’t seen her [in the studio] since, but when I saw her in town she says she is getting better and better. ( J. Heller)

Mr. Heller reports also that gravidynamic clients start to bring their own, real-life movement issues into the studio, tapping his knowledge for their own purposes. For example, one man, flummoxed by a yoga posture, asked to work on it during a session, and discovered a new balance in it.

It does seem only logical that when we are better integrated with ourselves and our own personal self-expressions, we can touch more of life. We become more deeply interconnected with others, not quantitatively, but at a high-quality level, when we can source from a deeper, richer sense of self. The spiritual leader and philosopher Osho said:

So I am not saying that when you become selfish you are not unselfish then—no, just the opposite. When you try to be unselfish you remain, deep down, selfish.

When you become totally selfish a tremendously beautiful unselfishness happens in your life. (n.d.)

The social web thickens, mycelium-like, and grows stronger when inter-digitated like this. Who can say for sure what effect this has; but perhaps the effect is something like the apocryphal story of the butterfly fluttering its wings and causing a typhoon halfway around the globe. Could a hundred local problems, solved by greater self-possession, self-reliance, a bigger toolkit, and a bigger support network, lead to the solution of a global one?

Gravidynamic work involves getting the client off of the table . . . sitting, walking, moving while we work on them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a treatise on self- reliance in 1841. In it, he reflects on the extent to which an individual’s sense of self is necessarily, but also wrongly, subsumed in order to ensure survival of the social order. Since we are each of us both a unique individual soul, and an entirely social creature, then in a healthy person there can be no rectifying the two, only existing moment by moment in a dynamic state of relationship with self and society. In a person who is not integrated, whole, aligned with and comfortable with his self, an inflated sense of self might well result in a pathological narcissism. But for the person who has learned the value in becoming real to himself, his inner integrity only results in a stronger connection to the outer world, since his deepest need—the need for personal meaning—has already been served. We come to know ourselves better with practice. In this sense, movement in the individual’s body during a session inevitably leads out into the world, into real, soulful social movement.

[Ida Rolf ] wanted people to take the work out into their lives and make their own meaning from it. ( J. Heller)

Structural integration has always been slightly subversive. Into modern consumer and capitalist culture it dares to introduce another value system, the one inalienable to any living person, the one superior to and more elevated than any system born of man: that of sensation coupled with consciousness. At the end of ten or eleven sessions, “parts” of a body become inseparable from the sense of a functional system; a gestalt; whole.

As Mr. Heller puts it, it could be seen as a “losing battle” as “most people don’t want to take care of themselves.” There is an unabashed idealism in this work, idealism that seems relevant and even crucial to encourage in these uncertain times, when social structures are asked to include more people and information than ever and at the same time stretch to encompass issues of global proportions. Perhaps by simply considering client movement of primary importance, and sensitive touch as something that only supports natural movement already fomenting in each person, a practitioner takes a profound stand for the high level of personal responsibility and integrity required to best serve our brotherhood of man.

References

Emerson, R. W. (1841/1993). Self-reliance, and other essays. New York, NY: Dover Publications.

Osho. (n.d.). Tao the three treasures: Talks on fragments from Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, Vol. 2. Retrieved from http://www.osho.be/New-Osho-NL/Audio-Video/ TalksOnMP3cds-1.htm

Gravidynamics