By Pedro Prado and Heidi Massa, Certified Advanced Rolfers™ and Rolf Movement® Practitioners

ABSTRACT Monica Caspari, of São Paulo, Brazil, was for many years a key figure in the Rolfing® Structural Integration community worldwide. Her contributions, through her teaching and her writing, are enormous. Here she is remembered by two colleagues. We also share a selected bibliography of her written contributions.

 Thoughts from Pedro Prado

Rolfing® Structural Integration (SI) and Rolf Movement Integration are young sciences, and as every young science does, they depend for their development and propagation on their most  astute  and determined pioneers. One of these pioneers was my friend and faculty colleague, Monica Caspari, whose  efforts over thirty years were essential to the evolution of our work. Since she first became a Rolfer in1989, up until her untimely death, Monica dedicated  her formidable talents and energy to advancing Rolfing teaching and practice, as well as to spreading the word about it worldwide and building the international community we enjoy today.

Monica’s true passion was Rolf Movement work, which she early and rightly perceived to be inseparable in a practical sense from the structural work. Together  with her ABR1 colleagues, she was instrumental in the design of the ‘dual certification’ curriculum, which treats as a single body of work its two complementary faces. Monica continued to integrate movement concepts into the basic curriculum; and her synthesis, “The Functional Rationale of the Recipe” (Caspari 2005), has been for many years a basic text in the canon at the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute®.

Monica’s contact with Hubert Goddard and deep study of his theories of perception greatly  enriched  her   own   teaching and practice, making her approach to movement work far more nuanced and sophisticated. Fortunately, she applied her didactic skills to make Goddard’s vast and complex studies intelligible and accessible to Rolf Movement students worldwide.

Monica taught extensively in Brazil and the world over – in Germany, Japan, Australia, South Africa, Argentina, and throughout the United States – always weaving the warp and the woof of the structural and movement aspects of the work, together with complementary local resources, into a single intricate tapestry of the reality of human being. She believed that while every person is organized in relation to space and gravity, the way each person experiences the relationship is not only unique, but also culturally influenced – and that to honor cultural differences in connection with our work is essential (Caspari 2011).

 Her projects, beyond being intellectual and pedagogical, were  humanitarian  and evolutionary – always in the service of particular human clients, students or colleagues, including herself. Monica walked her talk, using what she taught and practiced on her own path of personal growth. May we all honor and give thanks for her presence among us, and for her legacy.

Thoughts from Heidi Massa

Monica Caspari was far more than a Rolfer: she was a bruja. For over forty years, Monica devoted her gifts of attention and insight to bringing others through life’s most challenging passages: to be born, to give birth, to die, and to become our better selves.

She began her life’s work at the age of twenty-five, when a brother in his pain of dying asked her to just do something. She discovered that her hands had power, that she could set him to sleep by rubbing his back. Monica helped others through their dying – including her own gynecologist, who had been sending pregnant patients to Monica for her to just do something to ease their way. Self-taught and instinct- guided as a doula, Monica helped the women through pregnancy and labor, and their babies into this world, long before she became a Rolfer. She worked as a doula for nineteen years.

When Monica taught and practiced Rolfing SI – and her paradigm even in clinical practice was always that of a teacher or a guide – the essence of her work remained the same: she helped her students, as well as her clients, through the big transitions.

As Monica explored her own abilities,  her work came to emphasize movement. With keen perception and deep empathy, she established kinesthetic conversations with others, allowing herself to receive their movement and be touched by it herself. No need for laser pointers: Monica read others’ bodies through her own, and taught her students to do the same. She brought the curiosity, openness, and respect that allowed each person to feel not just seen, but understood. When Monica ‘got you’, the effect was magical. As she traveled the world, teaching throughout the Americas, Australia, Asia, and South Africa, Monica recognized  that cliché Rolfing norms around being in the body would not necessarily work for everyone everywhere. She empathized and improvised, and was ceaselessly creative.

Monica was adept at jeitinho, the Brazilian art of finding a way: “You can’t do that. Unless, of course, you have to, in which case . . .” In the early 1990s, at the very start of her teaching career, Monica was assisting in Boulder, Colorado, in what today would be called a Unit I. She was assigned to teach  the  curriculum  on kinesiology, a subject in which she herself had no training at the time. But there were eight kinesiology lessons  – for twenty-four highly motivated college- educated students. Monica’s  solution was to divide the class into groups of three, and to have each group choose one of the lessons to master and teach  to the others. Everyone learned a great deal through that inspired workaround.

Monica always found a way, a way to serve each client, and a way to teach each student 2, to bring each person who sought her guidance through their passage. This stance required perseverance, faith, and courage. It also required confidence: though disarmingly modest in her demeanor, Monica never demurred as to her abilities. She knew who she was and what she could do and she owned it – never mind the discomfort of those who would have preferred greater deference from her.

But Monica deferred only rarely; and once she set her path, she dug her heels in deep. Monica insisted on finding a way to teach student-organized movement courses in the US; Rolf Movement certification courses in Brazil fully subscribed with international students; and the first-ever certification series for the first graduating class of Argentine Rolfers. Monica insisted  on  all  of these things and more, despite local hardships and institutional resistance. Much to the chagrin of many a bean-counter, bureaucrat, and fellow traveler, once Monica decided, the question was closed.³

Monica prized loyalty.  To those  with  whom she shared that bond, she was singularly generous. She showed you the way forward and watched your back.

 “Dearest Monica, those whom you have touched, and whom you have allowed to touch you, are far better for it. You were taken from this world by surprise and much too soon – and we, your loyal friends, send you beijos and abrações, and wish you Godspeed to wherever your travels next take you.”

She  solved problems, made connections, and found resources. She gave everything from good counsel  on  life’s  essential  questions to a home-cooked meal and a bed for the night. Her generosity was in full force to the end: suffering from wrenching ill-health, she was still refining movement curricula, hosting study groups, and entertaining and sustaining her friends and family.

Finally, Monica was admired for her personal elegance. Her world was imbued with grace and beauty. She needed these qualities around her the way others need oxygen, and they always informed her work. For Monica, structural and functional integration wasn’t about geometry, symmetry, or palintonicity:

I want my clients to experience delicious movement – not  just  to  look better, but be [only] like ancient Greek statues. As Rolfers, we are after grace, pleasure, aliveness, and coherence of the body in motion. Deliciousness, joy, and happiness are more important than perfection.

Dearest Monica, those whom you have touched, and whom you  have  allowed  to touch you, are far better for it. You were taken from this world by surprise and much too soon – and we, your loyal friends, send you beijos and abrações, and wish you Godspeed to wherever your travels next take you.

ENDNOTES

1. Associacão Brasileira de Rolfing (Brazilian Rolfing Association).
2. See page 66 in this issue for “Observations of a Blind Rolfer™,” – a conversation between Monica and Tomas Makiyama.
3. This was a good thing. In 2014, she diverted an entire Nepal trekking party from one location to another at considerable expense to all concerned, having simply decided that she didn’t care  to  go  to  the planned destination. The original destination had been Annapurna, the area which – at the very time they were to travel– suffered catastrophic avalanches, which caused what was then Nepal’s worst-ever trekking disaster. Had Monica not insisted on having her way, she and her entire party (which included other Rolfers) might very well have been killed.

 Selected Bibliography in English

Note: For a more complete bibliography, including Monica Caspari’s works in Portuguese, please see https://tinyurl.com/ caspari-articles. This link takes you to The Ida P. Rolf Library of Structural Integration, an online resource. (Registration is required to access the articles.)

Caspari, M. 2011. “One World, One Work, Many Cultures.” IASI Yearbook 2011 pp. 5-13.

Caspari, M. 2010 Jun. “Movement Strategies for the Stomatognothic System.” Structural Integration: The Journal of the Rolf Institute® 38(1):43–47.

Caspari, M. 2005 Mar. “The Functional Rationale of the Recipe.” Structural Integration: The Journal of the Rolf Institute® 33(1):4–24.

Caspari, M. and A. Zorn 2001 Summer. “Beyond the Recipe: Process-Oriented Rolfing.” Structural Integration: The Journal of the Rolf Institute® 29(3):9–13.