BILL: I’ve been Rolfing for seven and a half years; and unbelievable as it is, I don’t know anything about you: where you came from; how you became our senior teacher; how long you worked with Ida Rolf-how did you get where you are and who are you?

JAN: I think it’s accidental and purely opportunistic that the people who were chosen as teachers were chosen. We just happened to be there and available, and Ida needed someone to help her. I truly don’t think it was the best talent, but we were available. It’s like getting in on the ground floor, because there weren’t so many people, the opportunities were there. So I don’t count it as any great skill of mine that occurred.

BILL: How did you get in on the ground floor?

JAN: I was Rolfed by Ida Rolf.

BILL: How did that happen?

JAN: I was working at Esalen [Institute in Big Sur, California] and had my own business on the side. I was working hard doing physical labor and got hurt. And somebody said, ‘Why don’t you try Rolfing?’ So I did, and the rest is history. I got inspired; I thought I could do it.

BILL: What was it like meeting Ida Rolf in 1968?

JAN: It wasn’t at all pleasant. My first introduction to her was when somebody said, ‘There’s Ida Rolf’; I went over to introduce myself and tell her that my knees were giving me trouble and that I was working in construction. She looked me up-and-down and said, ‘Of course, your knees hurt: look at your pelvis.’ And it basically stayed the same all during my relationship with her.

So I signed up and got Rolfed. When I had my first few sessions, I thought I wouldn’t continue, because it was very painful and she was very aggressive. By the time I had four or five sessions, I started to feel the impact; and the net effect on me was miraculous. That’s what turned me on; that’s what got me focused oh, I want to do this!

ALINE: So you noticed after about five sessions that you were different?

JAN: Yeah. I felt my body open; and in retrospect, I think the opening I felt was the shift from an adolescent to an adult body. I was carrying my adolescence very tightly wound in and around my skeleton. When the release began, it just let out; and I have never looked the same.

BILL: What is your favorite Ida-anecdote?

JAN: I told it to you.

BILLThat was it, huh?

JAN: ‘Of course, your knees hurt; it’s your pelvis’.

ALINE: Did you go right into training? Did she have any qualms about accepting you?

JAN: Yeah, she had serious qualms about me, because, after my eighth session when I told her I was interested in training, she rolled her eyes and said, ‘You have no college you know. You’re a crafts-person. How can I let you do this?

And I said, “I’ll do anything you want! Just tell me what to do”.

So, she said, ‘Get a California massage license and come back and see me’.

I went to Pomona School of Massage and did my 500 hours, and when I had the license, I showed up with it and said, “Okay, I’m ready!”

I went through auditing and practitioning in twelve weeks, straight-through. And my first year I had this great opportunity, because the Residential Program at Esalen was going. People would come and live four months and participate in the seminars. One of the things offered was Rolfing. Peter Melchior and I Rotted the residents, and we alternated sessions on several groups of these people. Peter was a year ahead of me in practice, so he was my touchstone. We had this great dialogue, because wewere working on the same people through ten sessions. It was really great!

ALINE: I have another question: how did it work in terms of getting together with other people who were learning with Dr. Rolf?

JAN: Well, my main person in Big Sur for the first couple years I was Rotting was Peter. He and I were good pals. We hung-out and talked shop about our struggles with the work and tried to understand what it was we were supposed to get done. There wasn’t any kind of formal gathering of Rolfers in those days. There weren’t enough of us, and Peter and I lived within a few miles of each other so we saw each other socially and around the work. Both of us were working for Esalen as well. We weren’t full-time Rolfers then; we were just doing it a little at a time.

ALINE: When did you have advanced classes with Ida?

JAN: Well, then I moved from Big Sur and went to New Mexico; and I was there about a year and a half. I didn’t have any contact with Rolfers-there were no other Rolfers in the whole Rockies. And then I went back to Big Sur for advanced training in 1973. And that was a class that we had-God! We were all there: John Lodge, Emmett, Peter, Don Setty, Chet Wilson, Al Drucker, Beverly Silverman, Giovanna D’Angelo, and a few others whose names escape me now.

ALINE: Was movement work already a part of….

JAN: Judith Aston was there.

ALINE: So did you guys do movement and Rolfing all the time together, or …

JAN: No, no. We watched Ida “beat-up” Judith routinely; but you know, that was kind of her style. Ida used to say, ‘Who the Lord loveth, she chastiseth’. It was her style. Now I know it was really a teaching attitude she carried. She was not intrinsically mean, but there was a really hard edge to her demand. She wasn’t quick with compliments. Being a real paranoid myself, I can count three compliments I got from her in all the years I was around her. Three positive thing she said to me, and one of them was, ‘I want you to be a teacher’. Which took me totally by surprise, considering how thin the compliments really were this sort of came out of left field.

ALINE: What were the other two?

JAN: Oh, something like … I finished a session and she said, ‘That’s a good job’. Once. (chuckle).

ALINE: Boy, we should count ourselves lucky!

JAN: Yeah!

ALINE: You Rolfed Georgia O’Keefe?

JAN: Mmn, hm… l was her Rolfer, and I inherited her from Ida who worked on Georgia in New York in-as Georgia remembers, not Ida-1937 or ’38. Ida used to go to Georgia’s apartment in New York with a mat and a sheet and work on her once a week. And they had a relationship that went over the years-Georgia tried to get Ida to come to New Mexico, and she did make a couple trips and stayed with Georgia in Abiquiu and worked on her there. But then Ida just didn’t have the time or energy to make that kind of pilgrimage in those days. It really was a pilgrimage to get there, so she sent Georgia tome. I must have worked on Georgia sixty or seventy times over ten years. I went to her house a lot when she got older.

BILL: There’s a Georgia O’Keefe quote which I don’t have word-for-word: essentially she said the reason she was so vital well into her 90’s was because of Rolfing.

JAN: She attributed her vitality, in part, to the work she had when she was in her late 40’s and early 50’s which was how old she was in the late 1930’s. She said it really made a big difference, that it opened her up and got her posture organized; and she really felt she got much stronger after she was Rolfed.

BILL: And what did Georgia O’Keefe think of your Rolfing after having been Rolfed by Ida Rolf?

JAN: She said I wasn’t as good as Ida Rolf. Every time.

BILL: Every time, she said that?!

ALINE: But by then, you were used to that kind of treatment, right?

JAN: I attract those kind women-don’t quote that! But she appreciated it. She just said, ‘You’re good, Sultan; but you’re not as good as Rolf’. And that was true!

BILL: It’s not true now!

JAN: That’s only because I’ve outlived her; but it was great to have Georgia’s perspective on Ida, as a client and a peer.

BILL: She was probably Ida’s only peer.

JAN: Maybe so. She commented to me once, ‘You know, when Rolf used to come and see me’-she always called her “Rolf”, not “Ida Rolf” ‘in New York, we were both in our 50’s; but she was really old then’ (chuckle). And Georgia was noted for being a “wild child”, you know. She was really a serious tradition-breaker, boundary pusher, a real champion of women doing their lives. A lot of people have taken inspiration from her, and I’m sure (relative to Ida) she was quite outgoing and active, where Ida was pretty serious.

BILL: Over the years, your contribution through Rolfing could be said…

JAN: What Sultan added to the work is the external/ internal model. The external/internal model consolidates a lot of the diverse themes that were emerging for me over many years which I didn’t identify as having a central theme until I had the insight about internal and external. I realized I had been looking at a pattern in pieces, seeing the feet with high arches; those with flat feet; the knees that turn in and the knees that out; the various spinal patterns of kypho-lordotic spines as opposed to relatively straight spines; and ribs that were inhalation-fixed or exhalation-fixed; people who carried their chests high or low. I was looking at all the diverse pieces and struggling, very early on, with what I saw. Of how the standard recipe worked and then how it didn’t apply to certain people, because the tissue directionality didn’t fit what was implied by the recipe. So early on, I was struggling with the recipe and trying to make room in it to accommodate these variations I was seeing. The internal/external model put together those pieces, and when I realized there were parts of a larger pattern that did have continuity and then that really blew the recipe out. I realized there were two recipes. That you had to interweave them based on how people were patterning the lines of transmission through the structure. This started a lot of conflict in our group. The recipe became sacrosanct, and the variations became suspect, which was a great tragedy to me. I really think the internal/external (model) simplified Ida’s work in terms of how the practitioners are able to get-it-done. Once you see internal/external, it gets easier on the client, because you’re working directly on their postural stress lines and not stirring up a lot of turbulence in areas that aren’t involved in changing that postural pattern.

ALINE: And it introduces the whole notion of structural logic which changes the way we think about Rolfing.

JAN: Yeah … Well, I also think I got interested in the body more than the recipe, very early on. I was more interested in the medium than in the method; and so the questions I kept asking were more about how the body worked than how the recipe worked. And that’s been a constant theme for me. I am a tinkerer, and I like to mess around with things: machines, gardens, landscapes, and so the fascination with the body really let out all kinds of stuff. And the recipe became, in my estimation, a teaching tool first and foremost; secondarily, a learning tool. So people who were novices could get in and begin to discover what the body was about. The recipe was never meant to be held as a catechism.

BILL: Is the advanced series a unit, a piece like the basic series is a piece?

JAN: That’s a loaded question.

ALINE: We have data to support this from our surveys!

JAN: I don’t think the advanced series has the genius that the One-thru-Ten [series] has. It’s not inspired in the same fiery and beautiful way that the One-thru-Ten was. If you go to a formula that organizes the work around positions within advanced work, the opportunities you miss are much bigger than in a One-thru-Ten. The generalized approach works pretty well for most people. It’s brilliant. The advanced series demands the Rolfer go more specific to what that individual brings you. If you apply a formula there, you’re much more likely to miss the real meat and maybe even impose a pattern on the body that isn’t what the body is asking for. Your preconception can keep you from seeing what really is. Like always. I use the five-series as a teaching method, but I don’t use it as a practice method.

ALINE: The data we’ve been gathering supports this, because almost no one is doing the five-series in advanced work. It just doesn’t seem to be useable for most people.

JAN: Yeah… right. It’s a good teaching format. You have a time-frame you’re working in, which is a six-week framework, so five sessions are about right to take one region of the body a week and explore it in depth and to use the practicum part as a way to train hands and eyes to observe certain thing. But in terms of what the client brings, the variation is so broad that this recipe is not big enough to contain it. Whereas, I really think the One-thru-Ten recipe, given the internal/external understanding, is big enough to really hold water. I’ve been Rolfing twenty two years, and I still do One-thru-Ten series on people all the time, and they even look like One-thru-Tens! You know, if I step back and say, “Oh, this is the fourth session,” well, by golly, there I am on the inside of the legs, the pelvic floor, doing fourth session work. When I do advanced work, I do what I see.

ALINE: I am curious if you’ve ever formulated your philosophy of teaching.

JAN: I do have a method. For a long time, I didn’t know I had a method; but in studying how I teach as a function of teaching, I’ve seen that I do have a method which is grounded in two ideas: one is pattern-recognition and the other one is structural logic, which is seeing how the anatomy and the physiology interact to produce the form which you see in front of you. That is pattern-recognition. We have certain shapes of people who we see over and over again, and they’re wearing different suits, but you say, “Oh, there are those legs and there’s that rib cage again”. There’s a predictability once you recognize those patterns. You do the same thing to resolve them, more or less, each time, because they have to have certain tension patterns in them to look like that. So, my whole thing is pattern-recognition and the logic of why a body looks the way it does and trying to raise the predictability and simplify the approach. And it’s paradoxical, because when you go deeper into the body, you have to learn more. When you come out the other end, the work looks simpler as it’s done; it’s not as intrusive; and you have a wider range of technical approach from gross digging into fascia and stretching it out to almost to esoterica where you’re practically working off the body, and you’re actually letting the body unwind its own pattern and not imposing a pattern on it. So, I’m really interested in this application range.

BILL: Another loaded question: are there character implications to the particular types?

JAN: My bias is not to project value on posture, because it’s so easy to put my own shadow in the other person and identify, let’s say, their postural habitus as having a certain emotional content. And I’ve been wrong enough that I quit doing that. You know, I stepped back and I said, “No, I’m going to let the person assign their own value to what’s going on. My job is to open the structure so change is possible. I don’t make it change. I create opportunity for change and try to get a continuity of tonus established”. Then they begin to say, ‘Oh, my chest in this position is my anger”. That’s their discovery, not my projection. I teach this way. I teach Rolfers to stay out of this territory of pre-disposing themselves to certain postures having certain emotional values. Of course, we do have our suspicions. You see people and you say, “Boy, that person is really angry”, just by the way they look. But you’d better be careful (if they’re your client), because that may not be anger. That may be grief overlaid with withholding and compression. And then a secondary layer of trying to build charisma that functions in the real world; and if you think that’s simple anger, you got another guess coming. And if you go in there thinking it’s anger and you’re going to get to anger to release and you’re going the wrong way, you may actually put the person deeper into their stress, ’cause they couldn’t let go. Your vision may actually hold them where they are. Your misinterpretation just didn’t work for them.

BILL: Hubert Godard has been talking about Ida and Alexander as working beneath emotion, to a level before the emotion even gets there.

JAN: Yeah, yeah. I think emotion is aberration.

BILL: I don’t know if we’re going to quote that one!

JAN: Well, but I’m referencing Peter Levine by saying there’s a big difference between feeling and emotion. Emotion is stasis. Feeling is movement and feeling is a normal state for people. We respond to things that happen to us, that happen around us, that happen inside of us. Our connection to feeling is our life. Emotion, typically, is a loop that’s not completed which keeps rolling itself around. Iessence, you make your blood boil and you get cold by the feeling you carry around with you, and this stasis really disrupts normal physiology; because emotional states are always activated. They don’t get activated, resolved, and come back to a baseline. And I think a lot of the value in Rolfing is that in the process of just “ironing out the body”-you know, “getting the wrinkles out”-the habitus of a lot of emotion is opened up. It can move out without having to form a cognitive loop. One of the great things in Rolfing is that it bypasses a lot of cognitive psychology-not that it doesn’t have value, but that a lot of the small stuff gets cleared. And then you’re left with the really central issues which often then get clearer for people, as you know.

They know what they have to work on to get back to feeling and out of emotion. So, that’s Levine’s distinction, and I use it all the time.

JAN: I want to say I don’t hold Rolfing as a finished work. I really hold Rolfing and the Rolf Institute as a school of inquiry around what constitutes normal for humans; and I think there’s a real distinction between emerging New Age therapies and Rolfing. Rolfing is really all-American: it’s grown in American soil and it responds and exists because there’s a need in our culture for this kind of rendering people more permeable. It is practical, empirical, and profound. It can open up armor to get them flexible, so their minds can shift and their beliefs can change.

People hold their worlds in their bodies; and if we make their bodies open, they have a bigger world or they have more choices in their world. And I think the more that is, the better. But Rolfing is not a finished product, and we don’t do the Founder a service by holding Rolfing in a narrow framework. She certainly didn’t, and she was also very active in perusing other people’s thinking for ideas that supported her premise. I think that process should continue. To draw arbitrary boundaries and say, “Well, we won’t look at the osteopaths; because if we look at what they do, we won’t be Rolfing” is very parochial thinking. If you don’t take in information that supports what you do, then you’re really locking yourself out, and I don’t think our school should do this. We should really step forward and say, “We are a school of inquiry. We want to know what other people are thinking. Our ideas are well enough grounded that we’re not going to lose our center by adapting technology or theory from other people”. This is a natural, lively process.

There’s been a lot of garbage around us about what is and what isn’t okay in the context of Rolfing. And what I say is if you’re working with a Rolfer’s ideas and hands, you’re Rolfing! The technology that’s available is diverse and the information flow has increased so radically in the last twenty years that we have access to data that Ida never saw; we would be very narrow not to acknowledge that.

Rolf said, ‘Work on the body, ’cause it’s what you can get your hands on’; and this really grounds us. We are a hands-on school of manipulation and education, teaching people how to utilize what they have; and we help them get more space to do that. Any technology that’s appropriate can be adapted to fulfill that need. You know you don’t work on babies the same way you work on elderly people. There isn’t a hard and fast way that Rolfing is done. That’s a myth.

ALINE: It’s been really interesting talking to people and discovering that pretty much across the board every Rolfer studied or studies something else and other techniques; and almost no one does Rolfing and another technique. Almost all of them say, ‘We’re trying to get these goals; and we bring whatever we have to bear on that goal’.

JAN: Right!

ALINE: That’s been really consistent throughout the people I’ve talked to.

JAN: You know, the whole business of the split between Rolfing and GSI [Guild for Structural Integration] started around these theoretical issues; and it’s more about personalities and feelings, ultimately, than it is about technology. Technology was the bone of contention; and then feelings got involved in the split, apart from problems with the way the Institute’s money was being handled. The fact is, the real issues were about “What is Rolfing philosophically and technically?” and “We’re trying to build a stronger training. GSI thinks you don’t need to build a strong school, that you can just teach the technique”. We are very far apart in this way!

BILL: So the question is, “What are your ideas on what we should do next? How should the Institute move?”

JAN: I would like to see our research effort directed to a very specific aim, which is being able to make claims about what we can and cannot do: validated claims which Imply clinical research. It doesn’t say “Basic research”; it says, “Yes, the autonomics’ vagal tone may improve with range-of-motion changes at the hip joint”. This was a great thing from [John] Cottingham. Or the whole idea that a pelvic lift only worked on internals-that was a smashing piece of information, which validates something I’d been saying for years. I’d like to see our research focused very clearly toward being able to dialogue from the base that our culture accepts which is science and say we can reliably tell you that we get these things to happen in Rolfing. The abstract research is fun and interesting; but it is not putting anything in our pockets. It is just more of the same introspective stuff: you, know … how great we are. We have to use research as a spring board for dialogue; that’s first and foremost.

Second, we have no business doing PR right now. Our house is in disorder, and this is not the time to be blowing our horn. I think it is all wrong! PR: put it on hold. Give me my raise back with that money, because I’m working at a loss. Every class I teach I lose $2,000.1 might as well write a check to the Rolf Institute for two grand and hand it to them to let met each a class; and this is appalling to me.

I think we really need to empower the school, because this is the foundation that the whole thing stands on, and the faculty is in serious chaos. Your faculty is not 100% with their shoulder-to-the-wheel. People are looking around and saying, ‘I could really make a good living teaching this stuff somewhere else’; and historically, institutes don’t value their faculties. That’s standard. But I don’t want that to be true in this organization. So I would like to seethe Board really support the development of the curriculum in this deepening that we’re talking about, this looking at the holes in the training.

The Comprehensive Studies Program furthers the foundation. Take some stuff out of it and put some stuff in it. Keep beefing that thing up until it’s a credible prerequisite course that trains people in things they must know to be good Rolfers and that it’s backed up by good science. The research should support the curriculum, and the curriculum and the faculty should be supported to actually teach it and move it out. And at that point, then we can blow our horn and say, “Look, how great our training is!” The problem now is we’re saying, “Look, how great Rolfing is” with our PR; when, in fact, it ain’t that great. It’s a lie: it has to get better! And that’s not okay. So, I think the orientation really has to be more internal in this phase of our history if we’re going to get through this phase.

So, we have to (a) survive; (b) research has to support curriculum and then curriculum has to train students. We have to mature at this very basic level or we can’t go further. God, the Florida massage people are better trained in terms of their foundation courses than we are, and that’s not okay. We’re supposed to be at the top of the field, and it begins to look like a myth. I suggest we re-arrange our priorities to reflect this.

ALINE: The tricky part about this is… one thing was almost entirely consistent among 150 surveyed members is that what’s hardest for them is that no one knows what Rolfing is. They also think the Institute needs to do more PR and teach the public what Rolfing is. So, if we’re trying to get them to feel the Institute supports them and at the same time saying, “We’re not going to do PR, because we can’t…

JAN: But here’s the place when you do research that is good science and allows you to make claims, then your PR can be, “Our research says this….” and you publish it everywhere, because you can back it up. That’s the main thing. This PR effort is insubstantial, because it’s not supported by this very thing…

ALINE:…data.

JAN: This loops. The thing they’re asking for is that the public be taught about what Rolfing is and that’s not through hype; that’s through good science that’s published and distributed. And so, it’s not a well thought-out strategy. These things all interlock, if this can be seen.

ALINE: I think that’s a good point; that would be a nice thing to have written down and put-out so one can understand.

JAN: This takes us out of the New Age and firmly plants us right where we belong, which is as a viable part of the therapeutic community and not as some sort of superficial adjunct which people can do without. I want Rolfing to be indispensable, not discretionary!

ALINE: The key is formulating the specific research question that can be proven. I think people are deeply afraid that if they try to conduct a study of what Rolfing can do, they’re going to find they can’t do what they think they can do.

JAN: Hey, I had a whiplash proposal before the Board five years ago; it just got put on “hold”.

ALINE: What did it consist of?

JAN: A clinical study of whiplash. I had an “in” with an orthopedic surgeon who said, ‘We’ll give one group of people regular PT [physical therapy], and we’ll give one group of people regular PT plus Rolfing. And we’ll see who improves.

BILL: We can still do that, presumably.

JAN: The simplest of simple: you just track them; you use anecdote, you use range of-motion; you use electromyographic studies; and you say the Rolf group improved more. And then you have established Rolling is a great adjunct for treating whiplash. And then you just work your way through the body. That’s clinical stuff. If we can’t deliver on that, we should be out of business.

BILL: That still can done. Do you still know this man? How much money do you need?

JAN: I don’t actually. He’s not available to me anymore. It was a window of opportunity that opened and closed.

ALINE: So you would need someone who could supply you with whiplash cases?

JAN: Well, I’m not even saying, “Let’s do this.” I’m giving this as an example of where our research needs to focus.

BILL: One of the key moments you’ve referred to is that of losing Judith Aston, and it seems to me our movement work has been lost ever since.

JAN: We moved from Judith Aston to Janie [French] and Annie [Duggan] and to a lot of in-fighting in the movement group which happened after Judith split. I think a great opportunity was lost when the movement didn’t step back and re-group and conduct an open inquiry about how various systems of movement either support or don’t support Rolfing. You know, like Tai Chi, like the whole Taoist view of organization and how energy moves through the structure. They spent 5,000 years figuring it out, and we ignore it. We stumble on it. If you study it, you realize we’re completely congruent with their thinking.

But the movement work sort of closed back into pre-Aston toes-up/foot-up; and initially, it didn’t have the resilience and vitality. Now I think Jane [Harrington] and Vivian [Jaye] have re-vitalized the Rolling Movement work, and people who study with them say it’s very useful and appropriate. Rolfers feel they get more tools from this; but again, there’s no empirical line, and that’s the thing we lack. We have not done our homework in science. We’ve even enough data around to draw some conclusions, but there isn’t even anybody who’s examined the whole thing and said, “Look, this all points to some conclusions.” [Jim] Oschman with his body electrics stuff has come the closest; but he was disempowered and has gone away mad, as so many creative people have done.

BILL: I don’t have the whole story, but….

JAN: I don’t have the whole story either, but I know it’s chaos. The main point I keep coming back to is that Ida was a scientist and a metaphysician and a practitioner; and she said you’ve got to validate your observations before you can publish them. Publishing theories doesn’t cut it. We haven’t validated what we do. If our research is not aimed right for that, then we’re wasting money, because we can’t draw from it. I asked [Dr. John] Upledger what should Rolfers do to validate what we do. How should we conduct science? And Upledger said, ‘You need a five-year plan. You startwith basic clinical studies, and you know you’re going to use them as the platform to then go deeper with the next layer of research. Then you’re going to do another one that builds on the first; you know where you’re going form the beginning. You don’t just do a study here and a study there and hope there are threads to tie them together.’

ALINE: Give an example of basic clinical research at the first level.

JAN: The first level would be a whole layer of observations about clinical effects on injuries. The secondary would be the histological kind-of-stuff where we actually ask, “When we press on them, do they change?” So it’s histology, chemistry-you know, basic connective tissue stuff field phenomenon, what’s going on here. Third, you study form and economy of motion; then you can say, “Okay, we get our results, because these things are true”. So, then we’ve got results, and we’ve got science which says why we get it. Then we can take another step and say, “Now, we’re interested in the whole structure. We’re not really interested in the legs and necks and the backs and the knees. What we’re really interested in it is the continuity and the efficiency, the decompression and the establishment of a medium which is health-promoting and consciousness-promoting. Then, the [Stephen] Porges’ big vision that was established five years ago (that was never done) would have a place to be. But they wanted to put this study up first with none of this foundation in between, and it was expensive and wouldn’t give us what we wanted. So, as far as I know, this isn’t getting done yet, in spite of what Alan [Demmerle] says: that it isn’t being thought of this way as strategic, developmental, hierarchical-to get you to the place where you say in public, ‘We can do certain things”. Then you can put it in the New York Times: “Rolfing Is Good for Whiplash”. God, everybody’s got whiplash! You know, the most popular way to get hurt in America is get hit in a car. Far and away over anything else. And these high velocity traumas, blunt trauma at velocity, disorganize people. We have to demonstrate this, as well as competence at restoration of function.

Seventy-five percent of the people coming to me are coming because they’re in pain of one kind or another. Most of them aren’t coming any more for spiritual development or psychological process. Most of them are coming so they can keep working.

ALINE: But that’s your interest too. Your interests are directing your practice. It seems tome there’s a clear split: there are many people who are doing what you’re doing and there are many whose clients come primarily for psychological growth, who are trying to work in that interface and don’t have any more tools than the ones who are…

JAN: …who are interested in orthopedics.

ALINE: Yeah.

JAN: Well, I’m not stuck on orthopedics. I notice over the last couple years, the volume of men in my practice has been steadily rising because of the men’s movement starting to catch up with the women’s movement. Men get to say, “Hey, I’m in pain! Hey, I need to move. Hey, I’m not okay. Hey, I’m working my ass off, and I feel like hell.” So, I’m not denying the growth side, but I think everyone of those people who comes for psychological growth would say, “Hey, you know my back hurts all the time too”.

And if you go, “Oh, you’ve got a motion-restricted facet here” and if you know you can fix it with your left hand as you go by-and you’ve got your eye on the Big Project … if you don’t know how to do that, you may make the symptom exacerbated through trying to move the structure when you’ve got a stuck place that’s very deep and not accessible in the usual way.

BILL: The thing about whiplash, I just feel compelled to say, is there is a level of whiplash where what-we-do doesn’t help. And it’s when the dura-matter really starts pulling the eyes down into the spinal column, so much that the eyes get “dislodged”. Then the whole nervous system is thrown off and whatever we do doesn’t make any difference at all.

JAN: Oh, but if you’d know how to release the dura and if you know how, then you can go and interplay between the dura and the myofascial system and bring someone along appropriately. If you happen to have a “blank spot” there, then you start pushing myofascia; and the dura can stress more. And without that knowledge, that again is contraindicated.

Back when Upledger was really working with us a lot he sort of gave up on us too-we’d take his classes, but he was really interested in opening a dialogue. And he said, ‘I want to give a class in pathology for Rolfers, because you guys don’t know the first thing about what you shouldn’t work on!’

And there’s a list! I do it in advanced training, but I’m not very comprehensive. I hand out this contraindications’ list. There are about 15 conditions which either preclude Rolfing or at least raise a cautionary note for the Rolfer to be careful when you work on this person.

ALINE: We need the list!

BILL: I’m sort of tongue-hanging-out-of-mouth: where is the list?

ALINE: Even basic classes should be getting that!

JAN: It’s a hand-out here: a little paragraph on each one.

BILL: So, why didn’t it work with Upledger? What happened?

JAN: There wasn’t enough interest on the faculty to do it. The same kind of thing happened when Upledger gave the cranial seminar: all the teachers were invited, and I said, “Let’s all take this together so we have a foundation in which we can conduct these discussions”….

BILL: Well, is it a closed window now?

JAN: Yes, Upledger really has other fish-to-fry at this point. When the Upledger Institute was just forming, John asked me to come to Las Vegas and address the D.O.’s [doctors of osteopathy] annual convention. While I was there, I said, “You know, John, this cranial work has really disrupted our organization: it changed how we view the body”. And he replied, ‘That was my intention. You guys are hide-bound.’ And so he saw us and said, ‘I’m going to put this information in there and watch what happens.’ What it did was, it blew us up!

But the attempt to create the dialogue, the field in which it would happen, was to get all the instructors at that thing and say, “Let’s learn this together, so at least we can talk”.

ALINE: Do you feel at this point in time that you as a group of instructors are able to work together without undermining each other?

JAN: I don’t see any active undermining happening. I think the people who are on the Board are pretty well able to accommodate information and to talk, even to disagree and continue. The problem with the instructors now is that the economy is killing us. When I talk to the other teachers, what I hear is, ‘I’m going broke being a Rolfing teacher!’ You know my income has been horizontal for ten years, and my discretionary income has been dropping like this, so when I could absorb a $2,000 loss per class ten years ago, now it takes me months to get that $2,000 back again. So, I’m always struggling to recover from teaching a class-and it’s not just my energy; it’s my money. So, where the disunity now is that people are not working as a team: they’re covering their own asses. And even with our struggles, up to a point, we worked as a team. So in a way, I think this is even more insidious and not recognized at all.

ALINE: Do you have any suggestions about how to bring it out into the open and do something that would change its course?

JAN: What I said is that I would like the organization behind me. I have the feeling that I’m over herewith a pick and shovel digging a trench and that some of the resources of the organization which should be hiring a backhoe so I don’t have to use a pick and shovel are being spent hiring vocals in L.A. to tell people how great Rolfing is! And I resent it, because I’m still down in the trench! Teaching is a real serious work, you know, emotionally, energetically, financially … so that’s what I want. And I think if this faculty felt like the organization were really rallied behind us and moving, then our unity would come together. But when the organization is going that way, and we’re going over here, it’s every man for themselves. And I think that’s kind of the feeling. I don’t know if anybody’s actually said it like that, but I think it’s in the air.

ALINE: Let’s talk about psychological trauma and Rolfing with regard to the faculty.

JAN: While Bill Smythe is still junior in teaching, his connection to Peter Levine and the integration of Levine’s work into the basic meat of Rolfing is very valuable; because this is the first physiologically-based psychological model that has ever appeared-and Bill is a good teacher to boot!

ALINE: Bio-psychology is a very old study, and other people have been studying reflexes and psychomotor development…

JAN: …okay, but what I meant was that was accessible to us through Levine and Smythe and these are people trained as Rolfers so there’s a bridge of continuity and a point of integration, of physiological sight into our manipulative system. It’s very tangible: you can see it happen; you can watch people react in certain ways and with Levine’s research we can say, “Oh, this person has a ‘tuned’ autonomic system that’s unresolved emotional stress or physical stress”.

And then there are tools available to resolve that so the larger evolution can take place.

BILL: There’s a larger question around having Levine’s work as our model. Levine’s work explicitly is a trauma model; and I wonder how many of our clients really have been traumatized in a scientific way … to the degree that we would say, “Yes, this is a trauma”.

JAN: Here’s the evidence. The evidence is the recovery movement which is ripping through the culture says, “Yes, we have a disordered culture; and we’re traumatized from the way we are Americans”. We are practically all abused, neglected, or denied in-some way!

BILL: But there’s a difference between a trauma where your mother looked at you in a funny way and a trauma where you’ve been the victim of satanic practices, and these are the people Levine started working with.

JAN: Okay, so let’s say there is a physical trauma and there is developmental trauma: emotional, psychological, spiritual. Levine has really keyed into the fact that emotional traumas and physical traumas both create “tuned” autonomics! That’s the main point. It’s not really as Ida said, ‘It doesn’t matter how people got where they are’. Your job is to resolve it.

We need a working [psychological] model. This is as close as anything that’s come down the pike, in the sense it’s non-judgmental and it’s identified in physiology. It’s not identified in “That guy looks angry”, and this is coming back to that same thing of not projecting content, but identifying physiology and pattern-recognition and then following the logic of the structure to bring it out. This means learning how the structure interprets and deals with trauma; and we’re not sophisticated enough; and Levine to me is the line that “holds the most juice”.

And when Vivian [Jave] and Jane [Harrington], for example, heard Peter’s morning [presentation] at the faculty meeting, they said, ‘Oh, great, a language!’ An organized filing system, in a way.

BILL: The other wonderful thing is Hubert Godard’s work. It’s a breakthrough as far as I’m concerned. It’s so clear and well presented.

JAN: I would tap Hubert as a potential faculty member at some point. I had my first encounter with him when he sponsored the advanced training in Avignon [France] in 1987; and I saw what and who he is. I thought, “O, my God, there’s a resource!” My sense of bringing people into the faculty is that they should not just be a good teacher, but they should have a contribution to make. They should be someone who interacts in the group, makes us examine our premises in new ways. Because if we don’t keep examining our premises, we aren’t going to get to any more conclusions!

BILL: Right!

JAN: Ida Rolf!