By Tsuguo Hirata, Certified Advanced Rolfer™, Rolf Movement® Practitioner

ABSTRACT The author explores tension and the interface between tension in the mind/brain, muscles, and around bones. He introduces techniques of bone awareness and weight-transmission through bones as a means to retrain the brain and to allow deep tension to release and relates these to Dr. Rolf’s maxim that gravity is the therapist.

Introduction

Tensions limit movement of our bodies, but also our senses and motives, suppressing our potential. We hold tension at many levels, caused by many factors. One level of tension relates to the brain. Part of this is mental stress, ways that we use our minds to try to resolve difficult situations, generating both mental and muscle tension. When our energy goes into thought, the brain is focused there rather than on coordinating muscles. Another level of tension is in the muscles, which can be from physical activity, or from mental stress. There can also be tension held at deeper tissue layers close to the bone, such as shortened ligaments. This tension is often unconscious and may relate to old injuries, scars, etc. While not noticed, such rigidity around joints is likely an energy drain, impacting both movement and proprioception. These tensions all interrelate, of course. Particularly, when our body use is not optimal in relation to gravity, and when the transmission of weight is felt more in muscle than bone, it leads to deep patterns of body tension that also are conditioned in our perception and thus our brains.
It is my belief that muscle tension will often remain chronic unless the client employs both conscious physical methods as well
as mental relaxation. What I’ll call ‘brain tension’ we can alleviate by changing our views or attitude towards situations that cause distress, such as through Somatic Experiencing®, meditation, or a continual determination of will. Common muscle tension can be addressed through stretching, but the tension in the deeper layer around bones is best resolved through developing what I call bone awareness. We can learn to sense and direct weight transmission through bones, and also learn to touch in ways that access and hydrate/liberate tissue layers close to the bones. As we come to perceive these layers, we are giving new options for both movement and the brain.

Journey to the Bones

We are living in a three-layered body. The outermost layer includes skin, body contour, and our senses. We see and recognize each other by this outermost layer. The second layer is muscles, blood vessels, and nerves. Here we feel the power of movement, warmth, pain as proprioception, or liveliness in the body as a mixture of excitement and emotion. The innermost layer is bone and cartilage that gives structure, but we don’t relate to this layer consciously in our daily lives. Rather, based on sensation we tend to think we ‘live’ in our muscles. Their contraction and extension gives tension feedback, for better

We can learn to sense and direct weight transmission through bones, and also learn to touch in ways
that access and hydrate/liberate tissue layers close to the bones. As we come to perceive these layers, we are giving new options for both movement and the brain.

or worse. It is my contention that releasing tension at this innermost layer, and learning to bring awareness to bone and what I call ‘bone movement’ revivifies our potentiality to manifest a lightness of body, open awareness and perception, open clarity of observation, unimpeded body movement, and the like. Also, this sensing of the deep layer of the body can be objectified so that we feel more vitality and well-being. I believe it will have a reciprocal effect on muscle and brain tension.
How do we leave the domain of muscle tension (the usual state in which we live) and move into the world of the bones? I believe we bring this deeper layer to consciousness by developing bone awareness and bone movement. Key to this is putting weight through the bone axis or bone midline. The next section will guide you in the practicalities of developing bone awareness. When that is established, you will be able to guide your clients.

Bone-Awareness Exercises

Hand Fan

We start with our own awareness. First, here is an exercise called Hand Fan to develop bone awareness from hand to radius, humerus, and scapula. This exercise originally was developed among practitioners of Daito-Ryu Aiki Jujitsu, the antecedent of Aikido.
Widen/open one of your hands by being aware of the metacarpal bones, not the fleshy fingers. First extend your little finger

backward and spread it wide. Then also extend your thumb towards you and wide. Then add in extending and spreading your index finger. Finally add in extension and spreading of the middle finger and ring finger so your hand is fanned open with fingers lengthened and extended as seen in Figure 1. Feel the sensation of all of the metacarpals extending and opening fully like a fan. Do this exercise as many times as you can in your spare time. This can help opening the interosseous membrane of forearm.

Shifting Weight, Shifting Brain

Our next exercise, Shifting Weight, Shifting Brain, works with weight transmission through the bones of the arms, which develops bone awareness and also challenges fixed patterning in the brain of how we get our support (in this way, addressing brain tension as well.) There are two variations for the starting position. One is to sit on the floor with your legs extended and spread wide, and to open both hands and place the carpal bones close together on the floor near your pubic bone. The alternative is to sit on a wide chair with your legs spread, here placing your hands on the edge of the chair in front of your pubic bone.
Then, from either starting position, extend your elbows and let your scapulae move forward to support your weight on the carpal bones through the radius, humerus, and scapulae. Your body, especially the ischia, should lift from the floor or chair just a bit as seen in Figure 2. This gives the experience of your whole body, including the pelvis, being supported by your hand/arm bones. This exercise requires more than your weight shifting to be supported by the arms (rather than by legs and hips); it also challenges your brain to adapt so as to accept this change from the usual support configuration. It means our weight support is changed to the new route of hands and arms instead of the old route in which our weight should be supported by feet, legs, and pelvis.

Standing Bone Transmission

Our next exercise requires a half-round item as a prop. Find something similar in size and shape to what is shown in Figure 3 (A), which is the plastic cap from a salad-dressing bottle commonly found in Japan. (Once you understand 
the exercise, you can be creative in coming up with something similar.) In the exercise, you will be standing on this prop with it placed in front of your heel in the location I show in Figure 3 (B).

Standing, with one foot forward, put your weight into your back leg so that you can place your prop in position ahead of the heel of the front foot as seen in Figure 4 (A). As you bring your weight to the front foot, checking that you are squarely over your prop and also that your femur, knee, and tibia are aligned over the foot as shown in Figure 4 (B). Feel your weight transmitting through the bones from femur to tibia to talus to foot arch. Now shift your weight between the back and front leg thirty times. As this will lengthen ligaments attaching to the calcaneus, the exercise may cause slight heel discomfort as you begin doing it, but over time this exercise will realign not only the ankle hinge but also the knee hinge.

Cartilage-Layer Access Touch

Our next exercise is to access the cartilage layer attaching to the closer end of a bone. The cartilage layer covering a bony surface should be active and elastic. Fibers extend from the cartilage and interweave with tendon attachments and ligaments. Over time, the functionality of cartilage can decrease as it loses fluid
content and becomes brous. At the same time, tendons and ligaments it intermingles with may have shortened and become rigid.
The cartilage layer is below tendons/ ligaments and relatively insensitive in comparison. To find this layer, you will use your hand like a five-finger ‘claw’ as shown in Figure 5 (A). In Figure 5 (B) I show how you can position this claw over rigid fibers of tendons or ligaments you find around a joint. Use the bones of your fingertips to direct pressure through the tendon/ligament layer to the cartilage layer (a very thin layer between the tendons/ligaments and the bone). Once you are at that layer, you won’t feel the same intensity as you felt at the tendon/ ligament layer. Hold twenty seconds and feel for the cartilage layer to expand and recover its elastic quality. This can be practiced at any joint as you practice to develop confidence in perceiving and palpating the cartilage layer.
We access the cartilage layer so that it can recover its elasticity. Also so that we can perceive this deep layer and access it in movement as part of our shift from muscle movement / muscle tension to bone awareness and bone transmission. My thinking about this layer was much inspired by Dr. Ida Rolf’s book Rolfing: Reestablishing the Natural Alignment and Structural Integration of the Human Body for Vitality and Well-Being (Rolf, 1989). I encourage you to refer to her descriptions and explanations of the joints and bones in Chapter 11.

Gravity Is the Therapist

This article was originally slated for publication earlier in the year, but the publication schedule was disrupted, as was so much in our world, by the COVID- 19 pandemic. As I had to close down my Rolfing® Structural Integration (SI) practice, in June I started a weekly study group to read and translate into Japanese Dr. Rolf’s two books, the aforementioned Rolfing: Reestablishing the Natural Alignment and Structural Integration of the Human Body for Vitality and Well-Being and Ida Rolf Talks About Rolfing and Physical Reality (1978). Our purpose has been to find her intentions directly in her words and to understand deeply her message. For me it has been a great opportunity to unearth the treasures of Rolf’s discoveries. As I go through the pages, I have been inspired to develop new movements and various types of touch. I first got these books nineteen years ago but did not go through them completely. Now, with nineteen years of experience and questions about Rolfing SI, I am finding even more trust in her ideas and learning deeply from re-reading them.
Moreover, I am inspired that we Rolfers and SI practitioners have a particular role to understand and share her vision with our societies in current times. Rolf proposed that our body structure and movement should be in accord with gravity, and that the result would be increased potential for vitality and well-being. This is not addressed in the medical field, nor in other forms bodyworker. Fascial work and muscle training alone are not a solution. Rather, it is by understanding the relation between tension and structure, as well as by acquiring a sense of weight-through- bone transmission, that we can find harmony between the human form and the gravitational field. That is a real balance I think. I hope many Rolfers will enjoy exploring my bone-awareness exercises and touch and use that to benefit others and enrich their Rolfing practices.

Author’s Note: I’d like to thank Anne Hoff for her help in editing this article.

Tsuguo Hirata is a Certified Advanced Rolfer and Rolf Movement practitioner living in Yokohama and practicing in Tokyo, Japan. He incorporates ninja movements, yoga movements, and other martial arts into his Rolf Movement and Rolfing practice. In addition, Tsuguo’s interests have led him to study osteopathic biodynamics, Somatic Experiencing®, and the Barral Institute’s curriculum of visceral, cranial, peripheral nerve, and vascular articulation work, all of which he draws upon. Tsuguo’s concern lies in how to explore and manifest our potentials and share those secrets with our society. He would like to continue to introduce other excellent Japanese- origin bodywork techniques and ideas to Rolfers worldwide.

References
Rolf, I.P. 1989. Rolfing: Reestablishing the Natural Alignment and Structural Integration of the Human Body for Vitality and Well-Being. Rochester, Vermont: Healing Arts Press.
Rolf, I.P. 1978. Ida Rolf Talks About Rolfing and Physical Reality, Rosemary Feitis (Ed.). Boulder, Colorado: Rolf Institute.