Rolfing has more than one thing to say and more than one way of saying. This has become a problem for us when we have tried to hold these sayings and ways of saying together too rigidly, and when these sayings and ways of saying haven’t had enough differentiation. Perhaps this is why there is so much tension around the question, “What is Rolfing?” I submit here three paradigms which are. different from Jeff Maitland’s, and which, I believe, allow Rolfers, Rolfing and clients more room to move, more differentiation, and more integration.

If I understand Dr. Maitland’s model correctly, he says that the first paradigm includes work such as massage, the second paradigm spot work and the third paradigm Rolfing or working with systems and relationships. Alternately, I propose that the first paradigm describes work which results in the client becoming relaxed or soothed. The second paradigm describes work which results in the client being fixed or cured. In this type of work, the intention of the therapist is important: the therapist has a goal. The third paradigm describes the arena wherein a person “self-regulates”, or heals him/herself: evolutionary work. In this type of work, the atmosphere in which the process goes on (Bill Smythe has called this the “therapeutic climate”) and the attention of the therapist is important. (Attention is differentiated from intention here: the therapist has no goals for the client as the client determines the session and its outcome.)

When looking through the lens of the three paradigms I am proposing, Dr. Maitland’s third paradigm is a subset of my second paradigm. For example, lengthening a client’s hamstrings or mobilizing articular fixations with the goal of seeing “the organized fluidity of functionally appropriate patterned activity throughout the entire body” (to borrow Dr. Maitland’s wonderful description of what he calls third paradigm work, and what I call second paradigm Rolfing), is manipulation of the client or fix-it work. To differentiate further, Dr. Maitland has said that Rolfing “has the potential to create a transformational organized fluidity in the body person sufficient to prevent regression back into previously dysfunctional patterns, and sometimes sufficient to transform the whole person.” This type of Rolfing lives in what I call the second paradigm, as the transformation does not grow out of the person, but is created by Rolfing.

In the same way, getting a client to work with you (work with your agenda) by calling for movement is also manipulation (sometimes we call this movement work or education). Even when we give movement or postural options we still manipulate the client’s awareness, which keeps the client from discovering their own unique posture/movement flavor.

The above types of second paradigm Rolfing and Movement work must go together. Without both manipulation and re-education, this new amalgam of their history and our ideas could not be “integrated”. Now that Dr. Maitland’s and my paradigms have been more clearly differentiated, from this point on when I refer to the three paradigms I will be speaking of mine: soothing, fixing, and healing.

Working in the second paradigm is not bad or inferior to working in the third paradigm. I imagine we all have bodies we would love to have fixed and dream of interventions which would quiet the symptoms caused by our chronic use patterns. However, fix-it work does pose a danger to the client when it is insufficiently differentiated from healing work, and I will discuss this danger later on. What is important is to recognize when we are “doing it to them”, when we are curing or fixing. This is second paradigm work and remains so whether the Rolfer engages the whole person or not.

What, then, is Rolfing in the third paradigm like?

I have caught glimpses of this quite different work in our membership. I believe that what Hubert Godard calls “welcome” is the Rolfer’s and, eventually, the client’s attitude in this work. Mr. Godard has said that welcome is “like Wu Wei”. I have found that this is not something easily taught or learned but that the concept arises out of the lived experience of something larger than our ego-selves; an experience concommitant with healing. Although it is tempting at this point to speculate upon who is being healed by welcome, Rolfer or client, I will leave that to the reader.

When the Rolfer’s welcome is combined with the gesture Hubert Godard has called “show” (I think of show as a type of touch in which the hands [we] become mirrors, doing nothing but reflecting, supporting, giving the client the gift of opportunity to work on themselves.

I think Vivian Jaye and Jane Harrington, in the technique they have called “taking over the holding”, which I interpret as supporting the client as he or she is at that moment, is a kind of third paradigm work.

Bill Smythe and Peter Levine’s “therapeutic climate” also sets the stage for third paradigm work. The client enters a world which supports the client’s ongoing improvement.

The above examples describe the Rolfer/client relationship which supports the self-regulatory functions which our touch recognizes as changes in the client’s motility.

We are working in the third paradigm when we respect the client’s leadership. I am not speaking of unwinding, but of a way of being with the client. I suggest that when we truly enter the world of third paradigm (what I will call the Rolf Matrix), we enter a world where the client knows best, where the client’s relationship to gravity not us is the therapist, and where we support what Szynt – Gyorgihas written of: the drive in living matter to perfect itself (whatever that perfection may be).

I believe this relationship matrix, the Rolf Matrix, is where the movement of “self-regulation”, which is the process of healing-as differentiated from second paradigm curing-lives.

In this third paradigm frame, we speak the language of the “body person” and follow his or her directions. The client makes use of the opportunity to do what needs doing: perhaps to find a new homeostasis at a more livable level of order.

In this frame, posture is movement, and not a position one should hold.

In this frame, one’s posture or movement is a personal, unique expression of one’s inner experience: motion is emotion metaphor/image, to borrow and add to Hubert Godard’s statement that motion is emotion.

In this frame, the richness or diversity of one’s inner experience is directly related to the quality of one’s contact with the image-filled world of the metaphoric mode, the substrate our ego personality rests upon.

I postulate that one’s motility reflects the way or degree that one identifies with and allows or disassociates from and fights the substrate. The substrate is larger than ego-us; is always moving, always changing, always homeostasis-seeking, is the immaterial potential of structure and function. It is archetypes and brainstorm patterns. It is the wisdom of the body.

After working in this matrix, our clients may not end up looking like our newest logo and moving as our latest theory says they should, but they will almost certainly move through life with (more of) the motile authenticity we call animal grace. Rolfers working in this paradigm will be able to breathe easier as the client, not us, does the work.

In the third paradigm of the Rolf Matrix, all Rolfing is “depth Rolfing”, and all Rolfing is Movement Work, the other disciplines best being described as bone-setting, Osteopathic irrigating of the fascia, sculpting, coaching, visceral manipulation, and yes, structural integration.

When a client stands before us and we evaluate him or her against a horizontal and vertical grid (or the grid of proper breathing, bending, walking, and so on), and then use this information to develop a strategy for the client’s evolution, we are working in the second paradigm. In the second paradigm we have no opportunity for “contacting” the substrate, as we are fixing, not “showing”, the client. In the second paradigm we leave the supportive “shifting sands” of the Rolf Matrix and enter into the Labyrinth of the Rolfer’s Agenda, a maze with openings into curing and fixing rooms, but without openings into the space from which our deepest work, and our client’s deepest healing, unfolds.

We enter into the third paradigm Rolf Matrix through the opening of Rolfer client touch movement metaphor/image emotion because we are “body workers”. To enter and remain in the Rolf Matrix, however, we must 1) admit that we have no idea of where the spinning wheel will stop and 2) maintain the opportunity for the unfolding of the client’s evolutionary process. We become maintenance men and women of the client’s drive to perfect him or herself. Tall orders, to say the least. Guiding the client’s evolutionary process (fixing) is often easier and safer for the Rolfer than supporting the client’s evolutionary process.

When Rolfing, second paradigm work should be given full potential measure with the other two paradigms, and I think that most Rolling sessions are actually mixtures of work in the three paradigms. A danger to the client comes when we don’t recognize which paradigm the client asks to work in. We don’t speak their language, so we “do it to them”. It is also dangerous for the client when we speak their language but don’t listen (or do what is safest for us), adding, as it were, insult to injury.

In our “deregulatory climate”, it is legal to teach Rolfing in deed but not in name. Fix-it work is touted as evolutionary work in the advertisements in mainstream and alternative publications, complete with before-and-after pictures and practitioners testifying about how easy it is to make people stand, breathe, and walk properly.

If we only work in the first and second paradigms we won’t be doing anything really innovative. We will be forced to compete with the Rolf look-alikes and Rolf spin-offs. We will have to compete with Chiropractors, Osteopaths, and Physical Therapists. There will be nothing left for us to do but battle for the honors bestowed upon the holders of the newest techniques, the truer vision, of the best body, and the most consistently replicable results. This is a nest of spines we will be forever struggling to leave but will be forever unable to because without the guidance inherent in the third paradigm (the wisdom of the client’s body) we will be unable to know whether we are helping or hindering people. The ability to differentiate and integrate these three paradigms into our work is essential to the free growth of the work as well as to our own health.