ABSTRACT Dr. Rolf’s ‘Recipe’ gives us a proven and intelligent way to work with body and ‘being’ to achieve structural change. The author shares her personal experience, both as client and practitioner, on the need for learning to trust yourself to ‘deviate’ from the Recipe. In addition to her experience, the author believes the Recipe is pure genius but also, primarily, a learning tool. She was taught that the Recipe works for about 60% of the population; recognizes the Rolfing® Principles of Intervention as underlying truths to the Recipe’s genius; realized in Advanced Training that we were acquiring the skills to design recipes specific to each client; and, through it all, learned the impeccable value of trusting oneself, trusting consciousness, and trusting the innate intelligence in a client’s structure-of-being.

Sometimes I wonder if I am the queen of deviations. I left my Basic Training with the same message you got: “Do the Recipe for five years to learn what this work is.” For my first five years, the majority of my clients were people who had done this work ten to twenty years earlier and needed tune-ups or a mini-series or had rare medical conditions for which they wanted to experiment with what this  work could do for them. In addition, on a scale of one to ten, where one is flexible/ responsive and ten is extremely tight, I got clients who were elevens and twelves. In my first nine months as a Rolfer, for those who did want  the  traditional  Recipe,  my integration sessions didn’t produce the results I had learned to expect from class. I don’t think this was the fault of the training nor of the integration approach itself. I think my internal experience of structure, and my curiosity  about  how  to help clients acquire a highly dynamic structure, allowed me to see something else, to recognize another dynamic, to find another way, and I did. I’ve been doing integration sessions that way ever since with stunning results. Further, my early clients taught me a bit about scar tissue. They also taught me to realize clearly that Rolfing Structural Integration (SI) is a change process and that you can’t ask the body to consider a conversation about changing how it’s organized when all it is saying is, “I hurt, I hurt, I hurt.”

One of my most common deviations is   to use the first appointment or two to lessen the physical body’s experience of pain and to find and ease the structural contributors to that pain. This is not about getting the client to be  able  to say, “I hurt less.” This is  about  getting the body to a place where it is being less reactive, protective, guarded, and bound- in-on-itself so that it can begin to engage and participate in a conversation about structural change. When a person does not report pain but is bound, tight, and taut (like a head-to-toe cement block or hard rubber ball), I will use the first one to five appointments to lessen the body’s binding before beginning the Recipe. With high pain levels and excessive tightness, I deviate in order to allow the body to acquire the ability to do the Recipe, in order to reach a level where the structure (body and being) can actively participate in the Recipe. Only then can structure inform me how it needs to change and in what order change can happen.

As a new Rolfer, follow  the  Recipe  and then begin to use the Recipe to develop your skills in conversing with the structure-of-being. You do this by feeling through the tissues for its answers to, “what’s first, what’s next, where do you need me, what input do you need from me here, when are we done,” and trusting the information that arises in your conscious awareness. From there, hone your skills to distinguish when the information that is arising proves to be accurate, reliable, and dependable.

Within these non-Recipe, prepare-the- structure-for-the-Recipe sessions, I will work wherever the structure calls me. I can also revert to this kind of session at any time and commonly revert to these between sessions three and four and sessions seven and eight. In my first ten years as a practitioner, many of my clients had TMJ issues, scoliosis, teeth grinding, and jaw clenching. It made no sense to me to leave these issues unaddressed until session seven. What made more sense is that these issues could inhibit or prohibit the changes that could be achieved during sessions one through six. I sat  with the question of, “How can I address jaw issues early on in a way that will help and not hinder the client, structure, and Recipe?” The answer that came to me      I later wrote about in “A Global Hold    for the Upper Pole” (Weidhaas 2008). This approach can be done anytime in     a person’s Rolfing process, even as the very first contact in a first session. It can also be done repeatedly and will give more information about what the structure needs with different results each time    it is used. There have been times when    I have been baffled about where to go next, and I can use the global hold to give me structural information and direction. Sometimes, it turns out, the global hold work itself was needed.

Some general perspectives I hold are: 1) while the physical body is a structure, the structure of a human being is so much larger than its physical body, and its dynamics and characteristics cannot be understood and engaged by understanding and engaging anatomy only; 2) I don’t have preconceived notions about what a client’s process will be and didn’t ever subscribe to the dogma of ‘do ten sessions and then don’t touch the person for a year’; 3) I don’t need to get everything completely done, or perfect, because once a critical mass of the structure has become more integrated, it will continue changing, for the better,  on its own; 4) I will suggest a client stop spending his time and money when he is not making progress; 5) if the structure needs to process and evolve, I’ll suggest a break; and (6) when the structure feels complete (whether or not we’ve done the integration sessions), that completeness is experienced and honored by both me and the client.

Regarding scar tissue, if you haven’t done Sharon Wheeler’s scar-tissue class, I can tell you it was priceless. Before that, though, I learned a bit about scar tissue from one client early in my career. She became a client when she was in her mid- forties. On her intake form, she reported  a gall bladder surgery as an infant at six months of age. I did session one of the Recipe with her and then spent three sessions releasing all the bits and parts that the gall bladder surgery (compounded with growing up) had restricted in her structure. After session two, we needed three more sessions of everything that surgery and its scar tissue had affected. Her whole Rolfing process continued at this pace. It was as if each session of the Recipe then allowed associated surgical restrictions to show themselves. A week after each session of the Recipe, it was clear to  me  that  the  structure  would  be unable to receive the next Recipe session until the now-presenting surgical restrictions were released.

After doing Sharon’s Scar Tissue class, I became impressed with the ability to work directly with scar tissue and, also, to feel throughout the structure for what was the result of scar tissue in the system and what was pure structural disorder. The most amazing session for me on this was a client who had done the Recipe with me and returned for a tune-up a year and a half after giving birth to her first child. While I didn’t see it during standing and movement evaluations, once she  was on my table, all my attention was drawn toward her belly, so my first move was to rest my hand on her belly. I was shocked to feel the right side of her belly as taut, fixated, and unresponsive while the left side of her belly was completely flaccid. I had no idea how this was even possible. So, I thought to myself, let’s approach this like scar tissue and see what happens. I worked for about twenty minutes using Sharon’s scar-tissue approaches. Then, for whatever reason, I started explaining to the client what I had originally noticed about her belly,  how I was working with  it, and why. The client then told me that during labor, the medical people had left her on a hard-surface table. Though she had complained and asked to be moved to a more comfortable surface,  they’d  left her there.  She went on to say that  her labor had been long, and the medical staff seemed frustrated with how long it was taking. She said, as a result of this frustration, once delivery began, one nurse leaned all her weight into the left side of my client’s belly in an attempt to “push  the baby out.” The nurse’s full-body- weight-pushing continued for over thirty minutes. Now I completely understood why my client’s belly felt the way it felt. The nurse’s pushing had caused the left side to become flaccid and caused the right side to brace and fixate against pushing. For the whole tune-up, I worked with her belly as scar tissue. At the end of the session, when my client stood, she had a huge smile on her face, and her structure looked as balanced as it had at the completion of her original Rolfing process. Thank you Sharon Wheeler!

It is quite common for me to say to a client something akin to, “This is your tenth appointment and we are at session six in the traditional Rolfing process.” For those clients who are not tracking directly with the Recipe, it is common for me to ask them where they feel we are and, simultaneously, give them my sense of where I feel we are. I don’t worry about deviating, and usually find that we are in- sync in our summations, when I trust the structure to guide me where and how to engage. With each client, I stay conscious of where we are in relation to the Recipe, what we’ve done, may not need to do, and may not have done yet. The goal of Rolfing SI (to organize, balance, align, and integrate the physical body and being with itself and with gravity), and where the client is, drive all my decisions to follow the Recipe or deviate.

At the end of the Recipe’s session seven, I ask a client to ponder for the coming  week, “Do I feel complete?” I tell the person, “This doesn’t mean complete forever. It means for now so that you are ready for the final integration sessions.” I say that feeling complete is something you experience and that if there are residual issues to be addressed, these are best addressed before sessions eight, nine, and ten. One client told me at session eight that he wasn’t complete. We made a plan to add three sessions before doing integration. We did these three,  and at the end, I looked at him and said, “You are completely complete.” He said, “No, no, we have the last three integration sessions to do.” I said, “No, you’re done,” and he said, “Yeah, I really feel it.” We didn’t do Recipe sessions eight, nine,  and ten. I had another client who told me she was complete and ready for session eight. We did sessions eight and nine. At session ten, with tears streaming down her face, she said, “I’m not complete.” I told her “It’s okay” and proceeded with a few more sessions, asking her structure where and how it needed input, before we did session ten. Clients know. They feel it.

I think my whole Rolfing experience (as client and practitioner) led me to become extremely comfortable with deviations.  As a client, my Rolfer never did a session five with me because my body wouldn’t let her. Her exact words were, “Your body pushes me out and fizzles my brain.” For session five, instead, she worked with my right hip, which led to twenty to thirty minutes where both of us watched my body tremor and quake as it released deeply held restrictions. When I did my Basic Training, I realized my Rolfer never did a classic session nine with me (even though I remember asking if we were  ever going to work with my arms). I also realized, with perfect clarity, that her decision to do a second session eight instead of the session nine was the exact, right decision for my structure. My own process (before I trained as a Rolfer) of Rolfing SI and an extended process of  Rolf Movement (over ninety sessions) allowed me to let go of any notions about what each person’s process will be. The extended Rolf Movement process gave me a highly dynamic, multidirectional, multidimensional structure that, then, as a practitioner, allowed me to see something else, to recognize another dynamic, and to find another way to do the integration sessions eight, nine and ten. Through it all, I’ve considered myself very lucky to be in the hands of Rolfers who trusted themselves (and my structure) enough to deviate from the Recipe. In doing so, they gave me, and my structure, what I needed while also contributing (unknown to me at the time) to my skills as a practitioner.

Deborah Weidhaas is a Certified Advanced Rolfer and Rolf Movement Practitioner practicing in Richmond, Virginia with over twenty-five years of experience.

References

Weidhaas, D. 2008 Sep. “A Global Hold for the Upper Pole.” Structural Integration: The Journal of the Rolf Institute® 36(3):31–33.