Our Mothers Speak

Olivia Ireland

Just one teensy but conscious experiment in ancient tantric breath rhythms, seven years ago, and the author’s life began to change and unfold in ways she could never have expected—in joyful, painful, exhilarating, annihilating, crushing, numinous ways. By gathering her allies—Soma Neuromuscular Integration® among them—she gathered back long-lost strength and vitality, and discovered along the way an ineluctable passion to serve her deepest Self by serving others in their quest to do the same. She plays queen bee at Wild Honey Studio, a private practice in downtown Olympia, WA. A deep-seated quest for meaning has her in hot pursuit of a master’s degree in Jungian and Archetypal Psychology.

This article arose from two inspiring conversations with long-time RolferTM Rosemary Feitis in September and October 2014, and is submitted with great respect for the years of experience with consciousness, trust, and human fallibility, from which it is so tempting to run, but from which it seems wisdom finally springs.

The Human Costs of Modern Life

Feeling is the last thing that enters the picture in modern life,” Alexander Lowen says (1989, n.p.). To observe the culture we moderns have created is to wonder, to gape, at the immensity of our needs. We the people want, and we want badly, and constantly. We have hungers and drives for personal satisfaction and fulfillment at all costs. Our myriad modern afflictions include materialism, sensationalism, base eroticism, addiction, and gluttonies. We spend energy recklessly and get cut off from the natural supply of nourishing, balancing feeling in the body.

Once this prototypically modern pattern is established, by the time we reach middle age, natural feeling is bottled up. Then accumulated pain, injury, drama, depression, and anxiety burst onto the scene where our constantly cogitating and conceptualizing consciousness carries on its tasks. Like food, feeling can make us sick with compulsions—or it can make us whole again if we can learn to relate to it consciously.

A troubled relationship to materiality describes a particularly modern frame of mind. Matter (including our bodies) becomes a “dry, inhuman, a purely intellectual concept,” wrote Carl Jung. “How different was the former image of matter—the Great Mother—that could encompass and express the profound emotional meaning of Mother Earth” ( Jung, 1968, p. 85).

The somatic concept of “matrix” represents the very same Mother, the material that represents, under our hands, a body’s particular quality and quantity of flow. Patterns and holdings in the body’s connective tissue share the same pathological origin as our modern compulsions and obsessions. The bodily suffering of someone conditioned to live from the intellect, without much regard for the real stuff of Life, represents the suffering of Mother Earth today.

Our modern incapacity to feel flowing natural movement results in holdings, pain, and eventual injury.

When the feeling sense departs, observe what has rushed in to fill the vacuum: an inundation of data, science, knowledge, procedures, and techniques. There is great value in all of these; I am alive today, for instance, because of medical science. But this great inundation tempts us away from the practice of its compensating principle: gifting our bodies with the silence and space needed to feel. No wonder so many people are drawn to healing encounters with Mother Earth. Her body is made of silence and space.

Healing Matrix

Restrictive structural patterns represent places in ourselves that have become less natural, less fluid, less dynamic, and less alive by force of habit. In her books, Rosemary Feitis draws clear connections between the physical body and the emotional body. She bridges the gap between body and mind.

Our modern incapacity to feel flowing natural movement results in holdings, pain, and eventual injury. Feitis calls these pathological patterns of tension bands (Schultz & Feitis, 1996), which clients are released from through structural integration (SI).

As structural integration practitioners, we free both tissue and emotion. We liberate clients to feel and to authentic lives. In other words, structural integration replaces part of that hard-headed intellectual consciousness—“the limited ego-thoughts of man,” as Jung put it (1964, p. 85)—with bits of embodied consciousness. We make it easier to feel—that is, to commune with the matrix on a more ideal level This is the healing we offer every day, every session.

It is no surprise that Feitis characterizes sessions as meditations . . . For both practitioner and client, the sessions are episodes of consciousness training.

Ida Rolf was highly educated in the sciences, but over many decades she developed Rolfing® through a complement to the sciences, an intuitive, feeling sense.

In the years since Rolf was in charge, our modality has sought to position itself within the western scientific field. But in a recent interview, Feitis said this increasingly scientific and medical approach to understanding our field “is not good for Rolfing.”

I agree. The healing we offer is much more than a scientifically applied “fix.” It may have a factual basis, but this healing modality we practice is a gestalt. It is not reducible to fact, however much the scientific mind wishes it were so.

Think of the word “fix” itself—as in “fixed” idea, or “fixed” opinion. It’s a word that suggests a static state is optimal. Meanwhile, the fix-it mentality is central to the modern construct for healing. Diagnostic codes, treatment plans, symptoms, manuals categorizing disorders: All of these things reveal the desire to make a defined “something” out of a someone. By definition, modern “health” excludes anything unknown or unwelcome. Modern health is a pristine body state that results from the negation  of unwanted material. It requires direct action: remove a herniated disc, detoxify the liver, prescribe antidepressants. Yes: All these approaches are effective sometimes; but in spite of all best efforts, no human can hope to remain “fixed” for long.

By contrast, there is a different sense of health, one that is supported by SI. To get there, we do what much of the world today cannot abide or believe: We must spend time in the world of the unknown. I assert here something that our Grandmothers (embodied in Rolf, in Feitis, and in all our experienced elders) have always said: that we must move forward in our own way, appropriate to our own time, and trust our own experience. We must turn from the quantifiable and pay a different kind of attention. As Feitis pointed out, we must hear those quieter voices below the surface. We must approach wisdom on its own terms (Schultz & Feitis, 1996).

Periphery, Knowing, Wisdom

In mythology, the periphery was always where the mysteries dwell. It was the locus of the unknown and the unwanted. “Here are lions,” wrote ancient Roman cartographers on unexplored areas of the map. In our practice, the periphery appears without direct intention. It also arrives with a real tinge of dread— the only attitude the controlling intellect could strike in the face of lions—that is, the unknown, the unreasoning, and the uncontrollable. But to hold that “open focus” that Feitis gives so much credence to is the business of our practice. As with feelings, we must allow in what we do not expect, know, or trust (Feitis, 2011).

It is no surprise that Feitis characterizes sessions as meditations (2011). They are meant to bring to light the hidden, the unknown, and the uncomfortable.

For both practitioner and client, the sessions are episodes of consciousness training.

Feitis’ very own introduction to the world of structural integration began in the periphery, as an assistant to Ida Rolf. Over time, she began to see that “there was something there,” she said, though she “knew nothing of bodywork.” Her explorations in the field began from an “uninformed” but deep knowing sense that there was meaning there. She even experienced the study of anatomy, like Rolf, differently than “literalists” did. It seemed to her just one “way of analyzing the body,” she said—just another mode of information transmission. Rolf herself practiced a similar non-literal process for years before arriving at a working system (personal communication, September 29, 2014).

In our interview, Feitis made it clear that there are bound, definable elements to structural integration— but that dissolving hard boundaries and constructs are also important elements of the work. Just as in a session, there isn’t any real way to know what a client’s pattern is made of until you get in really close, right then and there. Every situation is unique “You need a living image of the person,” said Feitis. “A very, very good way of getting that kind of information is through bodywork. It gives you a sense of the person’s energy dynamics as nothing else can. And it sets up an avenue of communication that allows the person to really say who they are (Schultz, Harvey, & Feitis, 1994, p. 12).”

Accepting the dynamic nature of life in the body, its waxing and waning, balances one’s own ideas and intentions with the truth at hand. “Data” suffices early on, Feitis said, but “another layer of information, born of experience” appears over time to inform your work, provided you pay attention (personal communication, September 29, 2014).

Modern life—with its with its drive, stress, and its anonymity—offers so many ways to change, but few ways to transform. It subverts maturation, that “feedback system” that Rolf said informs healthy growth.

Vast energies below the level of the rational intellect rise to inform us. To attend to them is a masterwork of consciousness. If we succeed, we become handmaidens to the divine aspects of human life.

Today it’s all too common to divest bodies of the magic within, but for most of human history that wasn’t the case. There was less media noise, less literal noise, less distraction. There was less science, fewer words, more space, and there was more nothingness within which to experience the self in relationship to something vast. Not long ago, reality came in many unadulterated flavors. Death and life and plentitude and privation were the stuff of the Mother. We were connected to her as a matter of course. So when we serve the feeling body today, we serve the goddess.

Not a proto-religious, anthropomorphic goddess, but the original Earth goddess: she of life, flow, beginnings and endings alike.

How appropriate it is to come to realize the marriage of fact and feeling by way of our own structural integration matriarchs. The fact that Ida Rolf, by the time she developed Rolfing, was no younger than forty, is metaphorically significant. For her students and her students’ students, and beyond, she was and is a deep well of wisdom, a mother source in her own right. Rosemary Feitis also still serves in this capacity, given her longtime connection to Ida, as well as her osteopathic training and decades-long structural integration and homeopathy practices. Our own wise women challenge us to accept our insecurities, to trust our own senses in exploring the unknown, and have led us, and our clients too, back to the Mother.

In mythology, the wise woman often takes the shape of an older woman. The role of this woman is as bridge, as midwife, as liberator. The wise woman ushers in new ways of being. Her power is in her age: the symbol of confronting death while still very much alive, as Feitis said, “embodying wisdom and fearlessness: the bridge to consciousness” (personal communication, September 29, 2014).

The creative cycle of life is in the image of the wise woman. She is feeling, responding, gestating, nurturing, and—in destroying too—she is rebuilding afresh. The role of “overseer” that Rolf played in her practice lives here in this concept. It means responding to natural rhythms. With full consciousness brought to bear on the living experience, the wheel will turn, what is down will be up, what seems difficult will need to be integrated and accepted.

Healing may not necessarily look clean or pure. It may not completely resolve an issue or condition. It’s more elementary, a change in inner attitude.

Healing is not achieving stasis. It is the act of being in relationship to life. Being aligned in gravity—the core of what we teach—represents a state of being within a working relationship to nature. The marriage of consciousness and feeling—so needed in modern life—births “a man who can enjoy a human use of his human being” (Rolf, 1977, p. 27). It’s a voluntary choice to live this way. Feitis said, “What you notice is what you keep” (Schultz, Harvey, & Feitis, 1994, p. 6). Rolf put it another way: “Your stability lies in appropriate relationship, and that is all” (Feitis, 2011, p.       43). The lonely modern hero is torn continually from the Mother by cultivated insensitivity and by endlessly chasing empty, extraverted, materialist desire. This type could use this new relationship to flow as a way to settle and relax. Rolf saw the “psychic man” as the ideal result of the series work: a person whose state of consciousness is in constant relationship to the challenges life brings (Rolf, 1989, p. 288).

In the context of increased flow and awareness, Rolf said, “strength is not the same as effort” (Feitis, 2011, p. 41). It might in fact require physical weakness or incapacity to develop this kind of inner strength.

Feitis suggests that to learn to be responsive and attentive to the body is to be healed. It is not a look or a fixed state, but an attitude to life, “the wisdom of uncertainty.” To be healed is accepting life as it comes, and using wisdom and strength of character to adapt, instead of “repeating the glories and mistakes of the past” (Feitis, 2011, p. 41). Rolf wrote that in structural integration “we are declaring our faith in relationships,” living as one with Mother Earth, her process, and her products (Feitis, 2011, p. 43).

Aptly, perhaps, Rolf ’s first client was named Grace and with her she began experimenting with what was to become structural integration. Feitis recalled that Rolf established a relationship with Grace relaxed enough for that kind of interchange, that kind of cooperation (Feitis, 1976). Grace embodied not just the actual client, but also the attitude “of grace” which Rolf took to arrive at the practice that bears her name. Ida walked away with a new modality of touch, and Grace seemed reborn.

Walking the Line

Fact and feeling coexist and together produce real healing. There is a uniquely moving, numinous experience in our work, and it transforms lives.

Modern life seems to cast wisdom traditions into the shadows and instead embrace beauty products designed to keep us looking young on the outside. Modern life—with its with its drive, stress, and its anonymity—offers so many ways to change, but few ways to transform. It subverts maturation.Our profession is steeped in facts, data, and research like never before; it has gained credibility. But it has also lost some of the deep glow and mystery and numinous meaning that I, you, and most of our clients have experienced in the work.

Our profession today is on a razor’s edge. We do not fit the medical model well. Nor do we choose to simply dissolve into a nebulous new-age culture.

Our profession is at midlife. It’s torn by political factionalism, and worried about the decentralization, medicalization, and quantification necessary to satisfy insurance companies and to validate ourselves to ever-more-sophisticated clients. We run the risk of splintering Rolf’s idealistic creation under the wheels of reality.

On the other hand, as Rolf herself intimated, Rolfing would not be necessary outside of the hard-driving industrial age. To maintain a healthy profession in the face of the immense rationalistic pressures of this age, our Grandmothers take us aside and encourage us to make room for silence and space, just as we do in the bodies of our innumerable clients. I believe this permission is in fact what we are in need of. The metaphor of evolution inherent in our work allows us to work meaningfully. Structural integrators have always served as bridges between the world of manifest reality and the world of infinite possibility.

However, Feitis foresees a danger in the field becoming “too turned in on itself, not allowing for expansion and growth” (personal communication, September 29, 2014). Perhaps fifty-plus years since the origination of the practice, it’s time to seek healing for ourselves, time to leave the cozy home that Rolf ’s writings and teachings represent, and step out in some new way. But it is still necessary to trust in the unknown. That above all is what our forebears described and made into a series, for the good of clients and—no question—for the good of practitioners as well.

Structural integration should always be conceived of as a living concept. It should be no more (or less) factual than you and I are the simplistic sum of our anatomical parts. Vibrant life is the essence of what we work with every day. It’s something transmitted but never explained. That is what the soul of our work is hungry for. Just as our clients heal, so our profession can, if we allow space and time for the wise woman to speak to each of us.

References

Feitis, R. (1976). An interview with Ida P. Rolf, Part 1.

Bulletin of Structural Integration, 5(4).

Feitis, R. (2011). The Wisdom of Uncertainty, In K. Schumaker, & P. Kemper (Eds.), IASI 2011 yearbook of structural integration, p. 41-45. International Association of Structural Integrators.

Jung, C. (1964). Man and his symbols. Aldus Books.

Lowen, A. (1989). Spirit and Body, video interview available at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=H6QRg-l7ntA

Rolf, I. P. (1977). Rolfing: The integration of human structures. Harper & Row.

Schultz, L., Harvey, B., & Feitis, R. (1994). In Profile . . . An interview with Rosemary Feitis and Louis Schultz. Rolf Lines, 22(1), 4-12.

Schultz, R. L. & Feitis, R. (1996). The endless web: Fascial anatomy and physical reality. North Atlantic Books.

Our Mothers Speak