Bill: We know all kinds of stuff about you, and most of it I think should not be repeated at this time.

Jim: That’s a good start.

Bill: Well, were you already Rolfing when you started figuring out that cranial work might be something interesting for you?

Jim: No. I started studying cranial when I decided I wanted to be a Rolfer.

Bill: That long ago? How did that happen?

Jim: To be a Rolfer, you had to write a paper and study. I had applied and gotten turned down by Ida’s secretary, so I kept studying and I ordered all of the Bulletins of Structural Integration which included articles by Dr. Isabel Biddle on cranial work. They were about the falx cerebri, the tentorium, and the bones and the fluid and so forth. Since Ida had edited all those Bulletins, I realized it must be important.

B: When people think of Ida, they don’t think of cranial work, but she was thinking of cranial work.

J: Yeah, Ida had been trained in cranial work. When I trained with her in ’71 I was teaching anatomy for her at night, and she asked me to do a lecture on sutural strains. I said I knew where the sutures were, but I didn’t know what sutural strain was. So she gave me her copy of The Cranial Bowl, and she said, “Here, read this. This will help you.”

B: Who’s the author of that ?

J: Dr. Sutherland. He’s the originator of cranial work in the United States. So I read the book and lectured-mostly talked-about sutures. Ida passed the book around and said, “This is a great book, but I can’t teach this work. My job is to teach Rolfing. You can find an old osteopath to teach it-it’s a good thing. And if you have babies, make sure your baby’s head gets checked out by an osteopath.”

Then I noticed, when I was watching her work, that sometimes she would do these odd things with the head that didn’t quite match her recipe. So, after class I went out and got a cranial session. I didn’t think anything was happening until afterwards I noticed I was different. I was sort of in an altered state. Then I started seeking out the cranial osteopaths all over the country. In those days, there were very few of them. I went out and bought a skull-a half skull-in 1971. Then the next year, I bought an exploded skull. I began teaching with Ida in ’73 and I would bring it in and along with Rolfing, I would teach about the cranium, mobility and cranial sacral theory.

B: Well, this is interesting because I always assumed that one of the tenth hour tests was to hold your hands out outside of the temples and the energy was somehow supposed to be balanced.

J: Yeah, right.

B: I thought that was serendipitous.

J: No, actually the first time I was with Ida we did it after the seventh hour also. The way she explained it in that class was that you could feel energy coming off of the sphenoid and you had to tell her if it was hot or cold energy, or coming in waves or bursts, for instance. Then you had to balance it out. You had to feel the energy coming up off the top of the head.

B: You had to balance it out with your hands off the body?

J: With your hands off the body, right. But you were also looking at the sphenoid. When a person stood up, Ida would frequently say: “Look at their sphenoid. Look how changed,” even though we hadn’t done sphenoid work. Iother words, it could an eighth hour or a sixth-any hour. So she was always calling your attention to fact that you can change part of the body and it will sometimes change the head a positive way, without touching it. Also sometimes the sphenoid would look worse, that told you something else: maybe the session had gone on too long, or the had a lot of cranial problems or spinal rotations. It was still good information.

B: I guess in those days it was the same way as when I did my training. The teacher d say “look at that” and everybody would go, “Ahh…,” and hadn’t seen anything.

J: Well, it’s a funny thing. Some people saw really well, and some people didn’t. I’m sure why that is. When I trained, I went in knowing my anatomy very thoroughly. I noticed that half my peers were struggling, looking at their anatomy books instead at the model. So, in class, I was able to just watch, trying to see which layer she was working on. I could just look for the change, without worrying about the anatomy.Some of the others were so worried about figuring out what Ida was working on that they didn’t actually see the change. But some of the students who weren’t strong in anatomy could still see very well. One guy, Ron Thompson, was an underwater photographer. He had a great eye for movement and for form. We need to find ways to tell students just to look for change, and what that might look like. This is something we are really improving on.

B: Yeah. Well, since you are now basically a master at cranial work, it seems a simple matter to jump back and forth between the fascial system and the cranial system.

J: Yeah, you can do it. But I don’t do it a lot.

B: No?

J: No. My preference is to do a good job at one or the other, and at the end, check for balance. So, if I’m doing a Rolfing session, I tend to try to balance all of that out and then maybe do cranial work at the end. Or, if I’m doing a cranial session, maybe do five minutes of Rolfing-if their body is tight, you know. I’ll open the back and neck up and then go into the cranium or the sacrum. That’s just my own tendency. People that I have watched running back and forth seem to get lost.

B: Yeah.

J: Even the people who say they don’t get lost are sometimes lost. It’s not that it is not possible, but you sometimes lose your bigger goals. So really balancing the cranium means checking out a lot of things. It means checking out the position of the bones in relationship to each other, checking out the fluid system, the membranes, the nerves in the brain and the movement in the brain. You cannot balance all of these things with one quick adjustment. Some people literally try to adjust the cranium, chiropractic style. I think that is too narrow a view of working with the cranium.

Just as some people do a couple of moves in the body and then they think they have Rolfed a person. You may open the body up by doing five minutes of Rolfing, but you are not really giving the person a Rolfing session. I5 minutes, you have opened the body, you’ve gotten something moving, something is available; but a Rolfing session is in service of larger goals, like balancing the shoulder girdle with the spine or more S fluid movement, for example. Opening the body just starts the process, like turning r, on the ignition. Warming the car up doesn’t mean you’ve really gone anywhere; you haven’t made the trip. A Rolfing session takes a body to a new place, not just spacing somebody out. That doesn’t cut it.

B: When you were learning cranial work, were the people you were learning from all senior citizens? My fantasy was that you were going around trying to find these old D.O.’s-half of whom were senile.

J: Well, they weren’t senile. The interesting thing was that all the young D.O.’s thought the old guys were. But when you got a session from one of the old osteopaths, if you knew your cranial anatomy, the bones, the falx and tentorium, and if you knew where the sutures were, they were impressed. They would get excited about sharing the work. The younger generation of D.O.’s hadn’t bothered to learn that stuff. They didn’t even care about it. I once had an osteopath who had been working for 45 years spend the whole day teaching me. And she refused to charge me.

B: Did you just go up to her and say: “I want to learn” ?

J: I had to fly to Michigan and then drive for 5 hours to get to her. She lived in this little town four blocks wide and four blocks long. All the farmers for hundreds of miles around came to get work from her. I heard about her and called her.

B: And you said, “I want a session from you, and I want to learn this stuff.”

J: Right. I told her I was a teacher. I told her that I might teach it someday. I didn’t hide that. At that time, some cranial osteopaths felt like Rolfing was too heavy on the head-and they were right. We were putting too much pressure on the cranium in the early days.

B: We still do.

J: Yes, we still do in a lot of cases and shouldn’t. There’s no need for it. The fascia on the head isn’t that thick. The fascia in the mouth is extremely thin. It takes no more than a couple of ounces to change the fascia in the mouth. It doesn’t take pounds. So there really is no need for the seventh hour to be a rough session. I think this is one thing we still need to work on as a faculty. We also need to get the Rolfers out there to quit using so much pressure on the cranium. It simply is counter-productive.

I’ve had people call me up and say they have headaches after the seventh hour because the Rolfer beat on their head. That’s a sad thing.

B: What about visceral work?

J: Well, recently it has sure become popular. Ida used to really go in and do a lot of visceral work with her hands. She would take her hands and go over the top of the pubic bone, then go way down inside, and, for instance, lift the bladder. We used to frequently talk about people having a prolapsed bladder and going into lift it. Ida would have you feel the fascia) connections around the organs-how it was pulled over to one side, or twisted, whatever. That was a skill you were expected to develop over the years.

B: Is that fifth hour work?

J: Well it could be any hour. You could do it in 5 or 8 or 10 or something. Usually you wouldn’t do it in the first or second session because the body isn’t resilient enough.

After Ida died, several Rolfers got into what I call “Ida bashing.” “Ida didn’t know this; Ida didn’t know that; Look at page 36 of Ida’s book. That proves Ida didn’t know anything-it proves I’m a genius.” Well, Ida knew some things in her book were wrong before it came out. But she was tired of it-she had worked her tail off on it. She overemphasized certain things like the issue of the cervical curve. In the pictures in the book, she made them too straight on purpose to try to get an idea across. She was so tired of people having their heads way out in space. But she knew there was supposed to be a cervical curve. She had John Lodge draw the neck fairly straight, and now everybody acts like Ida Rolf didn’t know the cervical spine was supposed to have a curve. Well, she exaggerated it on purpose that day. It was a momentary thing. Later on she said, “Yeah, maybe I got carried away to get a point across.” But she didn’t feel like rewriting the book. She said, “I’ve done that book and I’m not going to do that book again.”

B: Right.

J: People today don’t realize that 20 years ago, the technical information about spinal mechanics just wasn’t as available. The model for posterior cervicals and posterior lumbars wasn’t developed by the osteopaths until after Ida’s book was published.

But back to the original topic, about visceral work. Ida did get in there and do some amazing work. She could recognize visceral problems by sight. Someone would stand up there and she would say, “It looks like you have problems with your left kidney. Tell me about it.” Sometimes the person still had their clothes on. She could just see it. She would say,” It looks like your thyroid is not working.” She could recognize athyroid that did not work.

Ida always wanted to put together a heart clinic and show Rolfers how to recognize certain kinds of heart conditions and how to fix certain ones. For some reason, it never happened. People were afraid she was going to get into trouble. For some reason, the people who ran the school didn’t trust lda. But Ida knew what she was doing. I would see her pick out heart problems and say, “This is a heart problem I can fix.” Or she would say, “if I could fix this I could be a millionaire.” But she knew she couldn’t fix that one. So in some ways, because we were sort of young and immature, there were certain things we didn’t learn from Ida because there were a lot of what I called “ego problems.” Ida was a task master. Some people couldn’t stand that. They flipped out about the whole thing and still act like Ida ruined their lives-when in fact, Ida enriched their lives. And so, with all this Ida bashing, and people putting Ida down, we’ve really gotten away from talking about the richness of the early days. Now all of a sudden people act like visceral work is something you’ve got to learn outside of the Institute, but visceral work was something that used to be taught inside the Institute by Ida Rolf herself. I’m not saying Rolfers shouldn’t study with other people. I’ve taken several classes with Jean Pierre Barral himself – Frank Lowen was assisting him at the time- about 6 years ago, before visceral work became so well-known. I think Barral is a wonderful teacher and really facilitates people’s understanding of the viscera and pelvis and so forth. He has a beautiful style of working. But, his way is one way to do it. I’ve seen Rolfers do very effective visceral work in their own style a marriage of an energetic and a manipulative approach.

The same thing is true for the cranium. We used to have a lecture on the cerebral spinal fluid of the cranium. Then somewhere along the line it was passed down that maybe we shouldn’t talk about it so much. The problem was, who was going to teach, it? There was a real struggle about who was going to teach cranial work, you know. For a while there was an osteopath who was supposedly going to teach three teachers. Those three teachers were going to teach the other three, if they were lucky. But, it never happened, for whatever reasons. But, that was a long time ago.

B: When was that?

J: This was in the early seventies. I remember in 1973, two teachers had a huge argument over who owned this one copy of The Cranial Bowl. One teacher claimed he had loaned it to another teacher and they argued over it for a year. We had a lot of silly arguments. We still do, but there is progress. The arguments have changed. But I like to tease about the teachers. I think there has been a lot of progress in the last fifteen years-especially in the last two years. We’ve upgraded the way we teach-taken a lot of things and tried to explain them better, instead of making it all a big mystery.

That’s the problem with some of the teacher candidates that come in. They want to come in at the old level. They want to teach the way they were taught eight years ago. But the world is different today. To be a teacher today you’ve got to be a great teacher and a great Rolfer. Ithe old days you had to be a great Rolfer, and then you learned to teach. We can’t afford to have new teachers at that level anymore. That doesn’t mean that we have a double standard. It simply means that the world is more competitive and that students are demanding more and deserve more.

Rolfing is a long term process. People still think, “Gee, I took a basic class, and three six-days, and I took my advanced class, I don’t need any more training.” Well, chiropractic college is 4 years, full-time, acupuncturists study for 4 years, and they all take classes for years and years after they graduate. Rolfers should expect to do continuing education for the rest of their lives.

B: I think that Rolfers take a lot of classes outside of the Rolf Institute. One of my things is that they should be taking classes inside the Rolf Institute instead of going off to learn cranial work from Upledger, and visceral work from Upledger-that they should learn that stuff within the Institute because then it can be taught within the context of Rolfing. That’s why I’ve been pushing this post-advanced curriculum, so that people could really have intensive study-like several years-in a particular area with a hands-on exam at the end so that you get a post-advanced certification in a particular field.

J: I’m all for post-advanced training. One of the things I put together, which I originally put together for physical therapists, was a whole whiplash course, as a way of interdigitating soft tissue work, movement mechanics, joint mobilization and cranial work. With these four overlapping tools, you can handle a lot more than whiplash. The consequences of a whiplash injury can be in the head, neck, sacrum, etc. The course covers all these problem areas, and helps your understanding of chronic pain regardless of the original cause. It is much broader than what we usually think of with whiplash.

B: We should market it to Advanced Rolfers, you know?

J: Well I agree, most Advanced Rolfers would really enjoy it. Yeah, I’m all for post-advanced training. You know, some Rolfers say we need more advertising. Well, I say, if you can solve whiplash problems you don’t need as much advertising. If you’re really good with head, back, neck and sacrum problems, which may include working the feet or the arms, you are going to be a busy person. And again, I think that this is something that we have started to do with the advanced class. In the basic and advanced classes, we are trying to give people a better understanding of how to deal with specific problems. Now, I think that the challenge of the advanced class “is not to throw the baby out with the bath water. Some people don’t want to teach any kind of a recipe in the advanced class because the advanced recipe, as it has been taught, isn’t efficient or evolutionary for lots of people. I feel you need to teach lots of tools, and teach people how to evolve a program specific to each person. The Z position, for example, simply isn’t appropriate for a lot of people due to their pelvic formation-an example would be an out flare, where the Z will aggravate their pattern, instead of improving it. It’s also inappropriate for certain types of knee problems.

Historically, the advanced class just kept going in circles. First, a four session series was taught, then five, then every year they changed when you worked with the head, and every year they changed when you did the rotators, or something like that. But people weren’t really learning new skills. This is- no longer the situation. Michael Salveson and I brought in the idea of having 4 practicums in the first two days of an advanced class-right at the beginning-to help train feeling and diagnostic skills on specific areas like cervicals, sacrum, cranium and ribs. Then the work is to continue to build these skill levels all the way through the class. This is the direction we must move in now.

A person ought to leave a class knowing how to do the work themselves-not just that the teacher is great. This is the teacher’s responsibility-to make sure the students walk away with the ability to do what they saw done in class. Understanding and inspiration are important, but they are not enough. And just teaching new jargon doesn’t cut it either.

Each advanced teacher tends to have certain things they do for certain kinds of problems. They have a system of sorts in their hands for posterior lumbars, for posterior cervicals, for torticolis, or whatever the problem is. We should present the different approaches, and what structures they work for, how and what they apply to, and leave out the mysticism. There is a shamanistic quality to Rolfing or Rolfing Movement work, no doubt about it, but I don’t think that we’ve got to act like we are shamans.

B: So to put some kind of form to this, the idea of having a whiplash track might be part of the post-advanced certification program. So have three courses in cranial and then three or four six-days in whiplash and have that be a post-advanced certification in cranial. Or you could have three in cranial and three in visceral, and then get a certification in cranial-visceral.

J: Well, my idea was this. You know, I just had a Rolfing session from an advanced Rolfer who took the advanced class four or five years ago, and my neck felt worse. I finally had to tell them what to do. And this has happened to me a couple of times. The person is a good person, but they never really understood how to balance a neck or maybe it wasn’t taught to them, which I suspect. I don’t know. But it’s not something you learn overnight. You just don’t and can’t. If you could learn overnight, you wouldn’t go to chiropractic school for four years. So, the whole idea was to find a way to teach people how to resolve problems. Whiplash is one kind of neck problem, but the whiplash course would cover solving whiplash and any form of neck injury, along with some back and other spinal injuries, as well as cranial injuries. Sometimes the whiplash creates a tremendous amount of inter-cranial injury. Like when the dura starts to pull on the eyes, for example.

So there’s a place where people need to be able to inter digitate modalities and understand the mechanics of the problem. You’ve got to know soft tissue joint mobilization. You’ve got to know how to do it slowly so the person can assimilate it, instead of just thrusting it. And then you’ve got to know how to balance tissue and how to balance the cranium, and get the head and neck working together. For a certain number of people, one modality or the other won’t work. You’ve got to implement the whole package. And that is why I decided to put this whole thing together. You come out knowing a lot about neck and jaw, the TMJ, cranium and the entire spine. It goes right along with the whiplash and cervical problems.

The work in the maxilla-you’ve got to really understand mouth work because that goes along with certain kinds of inter-cranial problems that sometimes stem from whiplash. And, you need to know back work because a lot of times, let’s face it, the back is not supporting the head and heck, and so you’ve got to really understand tons of varieties of back work. Again, that is something we’ve improved on tremendously-and we can still improve upon. This is something I am very hopeful of with the j faculty. We are now really saying, “Okay, we can improve what we are teaching every year.” Instead of trying to be a bunch of magicians, and just showing everybody how terrific we are. When someone graduates, they should j feel like they are terrific, like they have skills. My gosh, j they shouldn’t just be impressed with the teacher.

B: It’s hard not to feel humble when you come out of a class with one of the masters on this.

J: Well, I don’t know. Again, I think it is teaching and lecturing style. The more you get down on the table and spell out how it’s done, rather than just saying “watch me,” j the better they are going to come out, the more empowered they are going to be. That is something that I really believe in. But it means you have to teach eight hours a day-you can’t teach two hours a day.

B: So, how would you feel about getting the whiplash thing started soon?

J: I’m ready to roll. I’ve been working on it for a while now. You know, putting the materials together the handouts, the lectures, and the table labs. Now there is a way to weasel it all together, maybe squeeze it in some. See, you really can’t teach cranial work in 4 shots. There’s a basic, an intermediate, a level three and a level four-and some people need to repeat. That’s just how it is, if you want to get really good at it and just be okay at it.

B: Would you want to offer separate certification in whiplash for advanced Rolfers?

J: I do think that I could teach enough cranial work in three six-day whiplash courses so that you would know enough cranial work to help a whiplash, but you still wouldn’t be a cranial master or cranial expert. But you would be on your way.

B: So, you would want to design a course where it wasn’t taking specific courses that got you through it would be mastering certain material to get you through.

J: Right. You’d have to master certain material, but that implies taking courses in a way.

B: It implies taking courses, but it also implies repeating the courses if you don’t really have it.

J: Yeah. Some people enjoy repeating, but that’s really individualistic. Because cranial work is subtler, this is a challenge.

The question on the post-advanced training is not should it happen, it’s how or just when or how to get them started and keep them going.

B: So you’ve now designed a post-advanced course on whiplash which involves the entire spine and the cranium. What is the format the course is going to take and when are you going to offer it?

J: A series of 6-days which could start this winter or spring.In Profile… Jim Asher