How did you begin teaching anatomy?

At the time I was in practitioner training, I was living with Peter and Susan Melchior, and of course Peter and I would talk nightly. There was no anatomy before the training, and what I realized, having taught traditional anatomy and done anatomy dissections was that once people got up and walked around I didn’t know where the hell anything was. I didn’t know anything about living anatomy or kinesiology or anything like that. Physiology was all frog hearts. I was totally academic. And so, Peter and I started talking about putting together sort of a living anatomy. There was already a week (of training) with Judith Aston, which was fairly new. For the most part, you went in (to class) for six weeks and that was it. Then they added a week of movement, which she called movement analysis, and I went through that. I was so impressed that a year later I became a movement teacher.

At any rate, I started talking to Peter about the anatomy idea, and he got me together with Dr. Rolf, which was only about the second time I had talked to her. She said, “No, no, you cant do that until you do the training.” Here I was a brand-new Rolfer and she’s talking about advanced training! I’d barely learned to touch people!

So Richard (Stenstadvold) said, “Well, if you offer it as an elective then she can’t complain, because people can take it or not.” I thought that was a great idea. I offered it as an elective and some people took it and some people didn’t. What happened was what we hoped would happen, which was that the teachers saw the difference between those that took the anatomy and those that didn’t. So it was a year or two before it became a requirement. At about the same time that we were establishing the anatomy lead-in class, Peter and Dr. Rolf and I also organized the continuing education program which started the six-day workshops. Prior to that, the Institute offered only the basic training and the advanced training.

In the meanwhile then Dr. Rolf insisted that I take the advanced training. I wasn’t even a Rolfer a year yet. I said, “I can’t take the advanced training, I’m not ready.” And she said, “Well, okay, then you have to audit it”. At that time she didn’t allow anyone to audit the advanced training, so this was a really special thing that I was in there. In those days the advanced training was ten weeks, six weeks on the first ten sessions and then four weeks on your advanced series. I sat through lectures for the first six weeks and then there was a week break and she said, “Well, Michael Salveson usually gives the lectures on anatomy during the advanced part and he’s not going to be here, so I’d like you to do the lectures on fascia.”

Well, in medical school fascia was only the thing that you got out of the way to see the nice pretty muscle and bone. Also at that time, Emmett (Hutchins) was re-taking the advanced training, Peter (Melchior) was re-taking the advanced training, John Lodge was taking the advanced training, Don Johnson-and these people had been Rolfing a long time. Here I am getting up, a new Rolfer, and telling them about fascia. So believe me, I did my homework for that one. I almost had a nervous breakdown!

So then I decided in addition to giving these introductory classes for the training I would give review classes in the regions in anatomy. I went all over the country and much of the time I was driving. I would listen to these tapes of my lectures and I HATE my voice on tape-but I was listening for Dr. Rolf’s comments. I would say something, and she would do this wonderful-I mean she would come back on-it was not anatomy, but boy she would pick it right up and she would come back with some interpretation that turned it out of the academic into the very practical. So this is what I was listening to, driving all the way across Utah and Nevada, going crazy listening to myself, then I’d get to her voice and I’d back it up and I’d play it again and I’d back it up. That was how this whole fascial anatomy thing started.

So it came out of her comments?

Umhm. I would take it out of mainly the British Gray’s (Anatomy) which is pretty good. I started by just making the body stocking. You know, we had gloves, and we had collars, and we had hats, and everybody loved that. (It was) just to get the continuity, you know. And then I’d say, “Well, just like any stocking, if something sticks out, it’ll snag.” That’s the joints, of course, where the bones stick out. I built this model to start from, not even thinking about the stuffing! That came later! (laughs)

It was enough to get this stocking and the stocking was something they’d never had, just to get that continuity from head to toe. That was the beginning of it, and then later we filled it with stuffing, intertwining and all the other things that we do.

How did Dr. Rolf respond to that model?

She loved it. Her whole idea was continuity. This is what she was trying to pound into all of us, that you never worked on one part; any time you worked on any one part the whole body got affected. And see, within in a year I did my first training with Judith Aston in what we called structural patterning in those days, so the movement part came into my consciousness very quickly and then I was applying the anatomy part to that and seeing the connective tissue move. That combination got me going.

In most of the workshops I was doing in the regions were people who had Rolfed a hell of a lot longer than I had. The first workshop I gave, I remember, was in San Francisco, and in that workshop were Michael Salveson, Joseph Heller, Megan Gilchrist, Neal Powers, and others, you know, who were old-timers already. “Old timer” in those days was a couple of years. And I’d just sort of gulp and charge ahead. Fortunately, they got interested enough that I would get their feedback, so I was constantly learning from those who had worked longer than I had. It became this wonderful exchange as I went around the country doing this. And they enjoyed getting together to talk about anatomy because we just didn’t do that in those days.

How did what you were discovering about fascia, being able to see the fascia fit with what you were doing before, with the “dead” anatomy?

I don’t think it really came-I could verbalize it, but I don’t think it really made sense to me until-it was 1975, when Ron Thompson, Jim Asher and I did the first dissection in Philadelphia. That’s when we really started to see-because we’d just take the skin off and NOT get down to the muscles, and see the confusion, and see the interweaving, and see the complexity and start to really get the image, how we could imagine that that person might have moved, based on the way the connective tissue was arranged. So that was very exciting! This was just before my advanced training.

We had this fine dissection, and Ron Thompson had taken beautiful pictures and Jim had done some wonderful dissection of just the thin fascial layers over the bone. We were so proud of this, and we had Dr. Rolf come to visit. The way the cadaver was situated, we had just taken the wrapping off the head, so the skull was still covered with skin and hair. She walked in and took one look at the top of the skull and she described the whole body.

Is that so?!

And we all just went, “Why are we doing all this? She just has to look at the top of the head and she can describe all the rotations and know everything that’s going on right down through the whole body?” We just quit for the day! It’s like, what can you do when this woman has this kind of knowledge and can see this way?

Did you find when you were doing the dissection that you were able to trace the gross rotations and spirals through the fascia?

Not as much. We found we had to interpret a lot, because after all these bodies had been dead a couple of years and embalmed and laying flat on their backs. And so, I didn’t feel we found planes of fascia. What we found were connections and we found that in one area the denseness would be fairly superficial and then it would sort of dive deep. I was just in Seattle (giving a workshop for Rolfers), and they kept saying, “What layer are you at?” And I kept saying, “Not a layer, I’m in a bed of connective tissue.” Sometimes it feels like you need to stay on the surface and then all of a sudden you have to go deeper in your intention. Not necessarily you have to do heavier, but just your attention goes deeper because you feel the resistance at a deeper level. That can be following the same plane-whatever it is.

As if there were a plane-

Right-

So it’s not like layers like an onion

I think they’re sort of like bandages, you know bandages that you wrap around. And you know, bandages usually get loose at the joints, if you wear a bandage for a while. Or they get tight, they get extra tight. That’s sort of the way I see it. That image is one image I’ve used. I’ve used a lot of them over the years.

But there’s that depth thing, too, it’s not that it just wraps.

Yeah. It’ll go down around the bone and it goes through the muscle. That was the kind of thing that we saw in the dissection, and that put the stuffing in. That was when I really began to see much more clearly how it isn’t just a layer, and it isn’t just a stocking, but the stocking is a very useful tool to start with, as far as continuity. Then I put another sock, an inner one, of the bone, the periosteum of the bone, the ligaments and tendons being connected to the periosteum, so that was the inner stocking, but it took me a while to connect them.

We ended up dissecting two adults and two newborns, two stillbirths, so that we got a much clearer picture of what kind of organization might have been the result of the way a person moved and the way the person lived. And of course some interpretation.

Did you ever talk with Dr. Rolf about how she could see the whole pattern from a single point?

Oh no, she had no patience with explaining that. After I learned it -I’d watch people and, “Oh, yeah, I can do that.” I can do it from an anatomical point of view, see through the body and see what people are doing. But I know that isn’t the way she saw it. How she saw it, I have no idea.

She used to love to jab at me. She’d say in class, “Well, you don’t have to know anatomy to be a good Rolfer,” and she’d look at me and I would nod, because she didn’t know anatomy. She knew bodies, but she didn’t know anatomy. She always said that her work was applied physiology. In the later days she said that answers were really not in biochemistry but in physics.

I know the people in this workshop were saying that they really needed a camera rather than notes. They said, “Your description is okay, but it isn’t what you’re doing.” I said, “I don’t know what I do, I just -Rolf.” The only reason I’m thinking that I work in a bed of connective tissue is because Rosemary (Feitis) told me that. So! sort of know what I do by people telling me what I do. I just work. And I suspect that’s what Dr. Rolf did. Then she’d try to verbalize and that was where the frustration and the difficulty was, to get other people to see and to feel what she saw and felt.

She and I argued quite a bit, but she was not one to hang on to something. She was always on to something different. She didn’t carry resentments. We did have a lot of arguments. I told her that if I did everything she wanted me to do, I would be busy 24 hours a day doing things for her and never do any Rolfing. So I asked one thing she wanted me to do, and she said, “I want you to write a book on fascia,” so this is this book that Rosemary and I have been sweating on for ten years. The manuscript is finished and now we can’t find a publisher.* But I feel that this is my commitment to her. Because I told her that I would do this, and I HATE to write! (laughs)

Would you say our understanding of fascia has changed much since you first trained?

I can remember after I trained that I went back to medical school and there was one man there, an anatomy teacher, who was really into fascia to the point where his nickname was Fascia Jack. So when I went back, I thought, “Oh, he’ll be so excited to hear about this work.” So I talked to him, and he just looked at me and he said, “But of course you can’t move fascia.” And I just stopped, and said, “How’s your wife? It’s been nice seeing you. Good-bye.”

There’s so much of the deep fascia) work now, it’s getting into more of the mainstream, and more acceptance.

Is it your perception that we actually move fascia?

Well, it’s a combination of the fibers and the intercellular matrix. When we hold an area still, like for a long period of time out of habit, two things happen. In the embryo, any time they get constant pressure, they get an increase in the number of fibroblasts in that area, and an increase therefore in the number of collagen fibers, and the collagen fibers will then distribute in either direction of the pull. I think this also happens in the adult, and I think that’s when we get these ropes and knots in our backs.

The second thing is, when you’re holding something tight, particularly in a very sophisticated way, you cut off circulation. So you’re going to change that intercellular matrix from a sol to a gel. I don’t think we really move fibers. We change the physical nature of the gel back to a sol so the circulation can come back. Then the education part comes in on the person moving that part differently, and then the fibers can change secondarily. But I don’t think we can say that we, per se, change fibers directly. But it’ll change with a difference in the way that ‘he person moves.

We see profound changes in bodies just from Rolfing without movement work. So what is it, In Rolfing, that causes people to move differently?

What I’d say, would be the intention. I mean, it’s a very different intention from just relieving pressure in a certain area or relieving pain in a certain area.

But something like the intention on your part will change the-

Well, the intention and the education.

So you do some educating while you’re Rolfing.

Well, I’ve been a movement teacher for so long- Obviously nothing is permanent, but I think the reason Rolfing might be more permanent-

But Rolfing literally changes the body-

Yeah. It might not stay that way. I think it’s the education part, which is the movement, which enhances ceople keeping it. A lot of the education is not verbal. And that’s the tricky part of it.

So it’s re-directing the whole thing?

Yeah. So many of my sessions I don’t say a word, and yet I’ve done a lot of education. And they’ll say, “Oh, feel this stuff here.” And that was my education. I would prefer to do it that way, because verbal gets you back into dour brain.

Watching this third generation of Rollers come along, foes it still seem like Rolfing to you?

Yeah. Absolutely.

What is it that makes it so?

I think that in the case of most of the leaders in our field, they were not really good teachers of their own work. It’s the next generation that are the really good teachers, because they can interpret the first generation. Dr. Rolf could see so much and she got so frustrated. The next generation couldn’t see as much and so they could teach what they did see.

Would you speculate that something has been lost from that?

I don’t feel so, because I feel the work itself has a basis to it that I don’t think we could lose. I feel- a little nervous when we talk about doing less than ten sessions, I get a little nervous when we talk about shorter trainings and so on. I’m very happy about the idea that we have now-of integrating movement and Rolfing. I’ve wanted to do that for fifteen years. That to me is what’s been lacking. But that shouldn’t dilute the Rolfing, I think it should only enhance it and make it stronger. Dr. Rolf’s comment about the structural patterning, as we called it at that time, was that it took people off the table and out in the world.

What I heard you say in your own experience of it was that suddenly the movement work allowed you to see fascia.

Well, it started being muscle and then it went to fascia; you have to go through the gradations. So what I try to do is help to speed it up for other Rolfers.

I don’t teach the lead-in classes any more because we have six other people who love to do it. I love teaching these workshops for Rolfers. It’s really fun, because I can cut loose and be a little outrageous and tell them to break some rules. Rules aren’t what we go by; the body is what we go by.

* Louis and Rosemary’s book, The Endless Web, still needs a publisher. Can anyone out there help?An Interview with… Louis Schultz