Jan Sultan

This whole idea of core, brings up and important issue for me. One of Ida Rolf’s injunctions in the early days was a whole process that was called general semantics, which was, in essence, a science of the use of language. It was in response to the yellow journalism that was around at the time. The example Ida used was, a newspaper headline would say “The Yellow Peril” when they were referring to the Japanese. You can see it today. “Family Values” is a way to rally you, a charge as a way to get America cleaned up. Ida was actually somewhat ambiguous in this, because she insisted if you ever opened your mouth and said a word like “freedom” around Ida Rolf, the next thing that would come back is “What do you mean by freedom?” Because everybody in the room, if I just say the word freedom, is going to a different place. We all have our own kind of definition of freedom. So, if I want to talk about the freedom of the knee to go straight forward and back, oh, then everybody relaxes, “OK, I know what that is”. So, the object of this little symposium we’re having here is to reclaim the core. Ida’s original definition of this was actually very straight forward. Actually she struggled with this in the first advanced class I ever took. She was looking for a way to describe that something that happens to people when they get Rolfed, that emergent quality. She said that there is something in a human that reaches up. It’s almost like a tropistic drive, the way a plant will orient to the light. She was fishing for a way to describe this, she said it’s just like putting a key in a lock and turning it, and then it opens. Or it was like the armature in a field in an electric motor generating a current. And then she said it’s like a core in a sleeve. Then the light went on, it was the core in the sleeve. But in that formulation, her description of the core was an energetic event, and the sleeve referred to the flesh in general, that which was bore on by gravity. So you had a real clear distinction in her original definition of core. So, then we have an intervening 20 years of the use of the word core, that, for me, the distinction began to become more and more bleared, and you would hear the word “core” used like “freedom”.

There was a little bit of the elitist in Ida Rolf, and she really thought that she would create a race of superior humans if we all got Rolfed. One of great wishes was that she could observe a community of Rolfed people behave. I don’t think we really have to look any further than Ida Rolf’s original formulation to see what it is we are referring to when we’re talk about core. But I also think that it is not an exclusive quality of Rolfing. You can see other systems of consciousness transformation or somatic refinement that produce core responses in people, which is that the energy and the somatic sphere organize in a volitional way that gives you something greater than the sum of the parts. I don’t know if that leads to better behavior or not, but hopefully it leads to a more interesting experience. You can see this in martial arts training, certain of the Chinese martial arts in particular, that postulate that through these exercises, you’re organizing and concentrating chi in various ways inside the organism. When you see people move who are in these disciplines, if you were Rolfing them, you would say, “There’s the core”, you can see it. It has to do with the synthesis of that experience. Certain kinds of yoga do it. And I think it has to do with paying attention to what’s happening inside of you. With the flow of events in how you are responding to your own inner states and your responses to the environment.

To get this down towards science, I think some of the structural logic lies in the way our brain is organized. You can look at Carl Sagan’s book “The Dragons of Eden” for some sort of popularization of the work that was done in brain physiology; Mc Clean, and Walter Penfield, and some of the others. They point to the reptile complex, the hypothalamus, as the center where rhythmic and hierarchial functions are organized. And that this is very much concerned with very primary orientation reflexes in the body. So that when you see someone walk into your practice who has a postural fixation, and you start touching specifically into that, you have a direct access into the most primitive layers of the nervous system. That’s very much hard-wired material in terms of how we behave, but a good deal of our early learning is also consolidated there. For the most part, this is below the level of consciousness, so it’s not accessible by volition, except in some people who have really practiced their martial arts, their yoga, their meditation. But for the average person, events organized at this level are not consciously accessible. So one of the things that happens in Rolfing is, you reach in there and you grab those deep layers of fascia, and you are in. You are in under the brain and under the mind. People don’t usually have their defenses organized at this layer, and it gives us a very particular access to the deepest layers of an individual. I think when people begin to have the experiential ah-ha of being]touched at that layer, then it’s our educational inputs that helps them synthesize the experience with a cognitive loop. Then they begin to develop core strength.

Everybody comes with a core. It’s not something we give people. Ida Rolf used to say we educate, and the latin root of this is educare, which is to lead out. So don’t suppose that you are giving somebody this. This would be sheer arrogance. To facilitate somebody’s experience by making contact with their deepest layers, and helping them form these cognitive loops so that they can actually change their behavior, they can monitor their own process, and they can become more autonomous as this happens.

There’s another piece of this, which is that Ida Rolf used to say Rolfing is not a job, it’s a way of life. And I frankly hated that. But, over the years as I’ve come to terms with it, what it really means to us as practitioners, especially with reference to this core idea, is that to the extent that you monitor your own process, your perception gets more and more specific. And you can make finer and finer distinctions about what is going on in the client while you’re working. When you’re tuning into your own core, your primitive layer is unfolding these events all the time as you start touching the deep fascia in another person; if you’re listening, your own system will start ringing bells when you’re contacting relevant material, or when you’re in a layer that is unconscious or perhaps very highly guarded. It gives you the ability to pace more appropriately. You’re much less likely to overrun something in somebody’s body and in a sense reinforce that state in them rather than help them to discharge it. I believe that to the extent that we do our own homework, we just get to be better and better at this work. Whether or not that makes us superior people, we have yet to see. Thank you.

Jeffrey Maitland

Well, those of you who know me, know that this is the type of question that would get me going for hours. Michael said I have fifteen to twenty minutes. Actually, we just finished an advanced class together and I’m a little tired, so I won’t overload you with my major concerns in life.

The question, “What is the core?” for me is a very big and important question. There are a lot of ways to ask it. What is the core of the human being, seems to me to be the same question as what is the being of the human being. And this is a deep philosophical question, and it concerns who we are and how we exist in all of this. And it seems to me what Ida Rolf initiated with her system is a profound discovery of the importance of the body. When I look at the history of western thought up until the present moment, what you see is a complete disremption of the body, you see a denial and opposition of the body and the earth. Plato said the mind is to the body as the pilot is to the ship, Descartes said the body is just a soft machine, and somehow we are a ghost which inhabits this soft machine. About the end of the nineteenth century there was the beginning of a revolution of thought, and part of that revolution began with the influx of eastern thought. You’ll see the beginning of the understanding of Taoism and Hegel’s philosophy, and so forth, and Schopenhauer also incorporated in a rather perverted way certain Buddhist teachings. But, there was this interest in the teachings of the east. And, if you look at what’s going on in modern philosophy right now, there’s a whole movement in phenomenology that looks to the nature the of the body. And as one of my colleagues said, “The body is not something we inhabit, the body is something that is the condition for inhabiting things”. We tend to think of the body as a thing, a container, and somehow the self or the soul is inside this thing. We say that the body is the temple of god, if we’re religious. But even that notion that the body is a temple has this idea as if the body where a container, it has boundaries, and that somehow we are inside this bound thing. The old greek word for boundary was peras, and meant not the place where something stopped being what it was, but the place in which it began being what it is. In a very fundamental sense, the body is the place at which we begin being who we are. So when I look at the thing Ida Rolf did, she initiated a profound question about what it means to be a human being. And this revolution, I believe, was a revolution not about the transformation of consciousness at all. I mean, I think that is a premature and inappropriate way to talk about transformation. The transformation is really about what it means to be an embodied being, and so the transformation has to do with the transformation of our embodied being on this earth and in our relationship to others. Ida Rolf instituted a profound investigation into that. It wasn’t simply a philosophical investigation, in my estimation, it was a philosophical one as well. But what was so wonderful about it is grounded in the truth of the body.

Every time we make these high level abstractions, I always hear Jan in the background, “That sounds like an ungrounded abstraction to me Maitland”, and one of the things I like most about this community is every one of my flights of philosophical fancy have to brought back into the reality of what it means to be this embodied being.

So for me this question “What is the core”, asks a profound question “What is the being of the human being”. This is also the question, “What is the self?” What is the human self? Before I get too carried away with these philosophical abstractions, I want to say it is very important for us to be able to take this investigation down to the level where it is perceivable in the human structure, in the human body.

We’ve been playing with what we’re calling four taxonomies. A taxonomy is a system of classification, so for example, the bio-mechanical taxonomy has come out of chiropractic and, out of osteopathy are the taxonomies that tell you how things are positioned in space, how bones are positioned in space. There are descriptions to assist you to understand when you look at a spine and one side of the spine is higher than the other, what does that mean? What does that bump mean? Well that is a rotation and a side bend and so forth. There has been in other fields, a development of taxonomy, systems of classification by which we recognize certain consistent patterns in the human body. Every taxonomy in a manipulative system carries with it certain tests and ways to understand when the body has reached normal and when it hasn’t and, certain ways to change it. So what we have been playing with is that there are probably four fundamental taxonomies that are relevant to our system. The first one that we have put the most effort into is the structural or the segmental taxonomy. So our logo, for example, is a segmental taxonomy. It shows a pictorial representation of what a body looks like when it is out of order and, what a body looks like when it approaches order. All of you, I’m sure, in your attempts to describe Rolfing to people, pull out a card and say “See, it’s like this”. Here’s this little kid, he had ten sessions of Rolfing, this is what he looked like before, this is what he looked like after. You notice his pelvis is twisted, and his head is going forward, and so on and so forth. So, that’s a taxonomy. A very straight-forward, simple taxonomy. Once you have a taxonomy, you have a way of recognizing order, and a way of recognizing disorder. And then it is incumbent upon you to create a set of techniques by which you can bring about order from the disorder. That’s a taxonomy. So, the bio-mechanical taxonomies all of us have been working on, absorbing that information, and trying to create a technology which is appropriate to Rolfing as a way to bring order back into the body. The structural/segmental taxonomy we understand very well. The other taxonomy we are also aware of is the geometrical taxonomy. Lines, blocks and cylinder’s, right? So often times when we look at a body and we talk about a line, we are not always talking about a line of gravity. There’s a lot of ambiguity in our talk, but a lot of times we’re talking about a line of strain through the tissue. Make some order, and we see that line of strain straighten out. We talk about oblique lines, and then we have all the functional taxonomies. We have all the movement taxonomies, the taxonomies which tell us what normal movement looks like, and what abnormal movement looks like. What Gael and David have done is, in my language, have provided us with a taxonomy. The beginnings of a taxonomy for normal, unencumbered walking which is powerful. Now we can take their work and put down ten points, here are the taxonomies of normal, unencumbered walking. The work of Willi and Hans also have created the beginnings of a taxonomy by which we recognize normal function and when the body is not functioning normally. Then there’s the work of Peter Levine which has to do with neurological taxonomies, shock trauma, what’s normal neurological functioning, what’s abnormal neurological. functioning. And we’ve got many other ways. Then there are all the emotional taxonomies, what’s normal emotional behavior, what’s abnormal emotional behavior like. You’re all familiar with the work of Reich and the work of Ron Kurtz and his drawings. That’s a taxonomy. That’s an emotional taxonomy of various types. And then there’s the piece we haven’t spent any time laying out, or understanding, or working on clearly as a group, and that’s the energetic taxonomy. That’s the cutting edge of where we are heading as a group in the class Michael and I just taught. We spent some time with the group trying to articulate what is it we mean when we say the energy has shifted? Are we talking about the adrenals, or are we talking about the electro-magnetic, or are we talking about what the Taoist and the Zen people talk about when they talk about energy, which is not any of those other two things. So what does an appropriate, energetic taxonomy look like for the Rolfing system. And, I would suggest that we actually have a lot the pieces, we just haven’t worked clearly to put them together in a coherent form. So, given that we have these four fundamental taxonomies, you can see how there would be a lot of other taxonomies created that might fall under one of these four fundamental taxonomies. If you have these four taxonomies in mind, then it seems to me now we have a way to start to answer the question, what is the core. If we want to understand what the core is for our system, we need to ask it across all four taxonomies.

What is a structural/segmental, what do we mean by core when we talk about structure. One of the things Jan worked out and Michael worked out was a view of the core as the visceral space. From the pelvic floor to the nasal pharynx. That whole space that is bounded by the pelvis, the abdominal fascia and musculature, the rib cage, the visceral space of the neck, up into the palate. Well there are the beginnings of a kind of structural model of the core. These are important to our work, these are not fantasies because as you all know, when you work in certain places in the body, you get and see openness and length through what we call the core of the body. So, if we can conceptualize the level of the core we talking about, then we can all agree,”Oh yeah, that happened when we did that, when we worked on the pelvic floor, the core space opened, and it stopped at about the luibrium?”. If we’re not clear about that when you talk about the core, you could mean something different then when I talk about the core. Then we have the geometrical notions of the core. And I think the most exciting piece is the movement now into the neurological understanding of the core. When we see core, what is it that we perceive when we perceive core. There’s often a lot of agreement, oh yeah, the core opened up. Well, what opened up? What is it that opened? Now we can talk about it structurally, but can we articulate this correctly from a neurological point of view. I think that is one of the dimensions of our work which is unfolding in a rapid and a really interesting rate. So what do we mean by core from a neurological point of view? Peter will have lots to say about that I’m sure.

What is the energetic core? One of the things we discovered when we had a couple go arounds in class about what each person saw when they saw energy, when I say see, think of that in the broadest sense of perception because some of see visually, some actually see energy flowing through the body or energy around the body. Some of us feel it, some of us can make our bodies a mirror, and then in our own bodies, we can feel what is occurring in another person’s body. And some of us simply know it. There are many ways to perceive. So, when I say see, I mean all of these ways. Anyhow, when we had our discussion about the ways in which people saw energy, it was fascinating. Some people were talking about energy flow, some people talked about energy as spatial distortion, when you look you see a kind of distortion of the space. And these lines that we talked about I think are also energetic lines, actually that’s my perception that part of what we mean by a line is it’s an energetic phenomenon, but what kind of energetic phenomenon are we talking about. A line is not necessarily a flow. There are flows that we see in the body, there are lines coming into the energetic space, energy occupies space, it manipulates space, and it distorts space. The polarity therapists, for example, have a whole way of looking at energy which is grounded in shape, say to look at energy spatially. Then there is also charge and undercharge, which is different again. So, there’s a whole area of investigation here about all of these levels of core.

What I would suggest is that we start thinking in terms of these various different taxonomies of core. You’re going to hear some really fabulous ideas when John Cottingham tells you some of his research. The fact that Porges was over in India using his vegel tone monitor on swamis and what that means. What is it that we perceive when we perceive core. That’s a huge question, you know. What I’m trying to suggest is that there are at least four levels at which we can begin answering the question. If we are clear about what taxonomy we’re in then we’re clear on how to go about offering answers to this question.

Finally, let me say, you know I want to ground all of our most magnificent abstractions into what is perceivable and observable in the body. I do believe energy is perceivable, at a lot of levels. It can be observed and there have been high levels of agreement about what we are seeing when we see energy. This issue of core also seems to me an ontological question; ontology is a branch of metaphysics which inquires into the nature and meaning of being. So the core is the being of the being. And the core of the human being is the place at which being is revealed. This is what I would like to say ultimately about what the core is. And so at this deepest level, core is both self and not self. At one level, core faces towards the human world with its conflicts, fixations and miseries, and in another level, this is just a metaphor facing, it facing towards a level which is not human, but is not apart from the human, and is not self, and is not will. “The eye by which I see God is the same eye God sees me”. This is a nice definition of core, I could buy that from that level. We’re not yet at a point where we can articulate this clearly, but I would suggest to you that our investigation is a philosophical investigation, is one in somatic ontology. What is the nature and meaning of the human being? Of the being of the human being? The being of the human being is not separate from the body, and this is our investigation. If we pursue it correctly, all of these vistas open before us. Thank you.

Peter Schwind

When I hear the notion of core, sometimes I think of a story or an observation I made during one of the classes Michael Salveson taught as a first European class in Europe, way back in an old castle in France. I remember that one of our students was working at a model’s foot, and did something very efficient. The practitioner would have the foot of the model in his hands, give pressure to the tissue; there was a significant shift around the joint, and we could all see this with our eyes. Then there was this strange French guy sitting next to me with his wild beard and his wild eyes, he was watching that. “Do you see how dangerous this is for the cranial?” So, what did he see, and what does it mean? Because obviously our student was doing the right thing to the ankle, and I think with the question of the core is did he do the right thing for the person also? The guy that was sitting next to me was very sensitive, he was one of those osteopaths that are very faraway from thinking in bony relationships. And, his sensitivity was somewhat stimulating for us in those days, to explore in a practical context, what are we doing to the individual parcel of the person; the individual parcel of the human being. What are we doing to that whole complex arrangement of structural settings by working in one place, in the next place, and going on further onto the next place and the next place. And in that sense I would say the core, for me, is a symbol for the human integrity. The core is a symbol for that amount of integrity for this one human being can achieve in that face of its individual life.

It’s very different from that in our practical work, which I would call cosmetic Rolfing, I was very good at cosmetic Rolfing. And what I mean by cosmetic Rolfing is that we try to make the person look nice from the outside. That is sometimes very important, and it’s interesting, and it’s not very fatiguing for a practitioner to do that. But, I think it’s not, that is why we need an almost metaphysical term like core, its not in my understanding, the most interesting thing that we can do with this kind of work. So, what is the most interesting thing? I think the most interesting thing is to try to figure out how the connective tissue acts as sort of a mediator between different systems of the human organism. And by doing that, by playing the role of the most important mediator between different systems of the human organism, I think this was probable from a physiological standpoint, the great contribution of Dr. Rolf. The connective tissue system is probably more important, for example, than the system of the musco tonus system. Because I think the way that the musco tonus develops is strongly regulated in the way how the proprioceptive systems through the golgi cells perceives the inner space within the organism. If you put your fist or hand underneath a person’s back, and let the person settle down, and you feel the tissue melt, or the muscle groups relax around your hand or around your fist, what’s actually happening is, the proprioceptive system self-orientates around your hand, around your fist, and at the same time, there is sort of a dense filter system in between your hand and the tissue of organ or the muscle, and that is the connective tissue. So what I’m suggesting is that we see the connective tissue system, we call it the fascial net, the only mediator between different systems which interact with each other all the time, as long as our organism is alive. When I say systems, I mean systems in a very practitional way, like you may describe the lymphatic system or the nervous system. From a standpoint of physiology or anatomy, you may just take some segments of the body and say the system of individual weight segments of the body, how they interact with each other, and how they create a certain geometric, or more or less geometric, picture of the body that we can observe from out side.

Why is it necessary to discuss the term core? I think it is necessary, because if you work with an organism, you roll up your sleeves, you have the person on the table, on the foam mat, you have them on the bench, you do all those things, that you learn or teach in a basic class. You may arrive with a body that has a little bit more length, the segments may fit better together, and the person moves, let’s say in the best case, more economically, with a little bit more grace. Now you send, at the same moment that same person to another practitioner of another field, let’s say somebody who works more with energetic systems of the body or somebody who is a specialist in the mobility of the membranes in the cranial or the mobility or motility of the organs. Maybe the practitioner will check out the model, and say “According to my taxonomy the person is worse than before”. But make this practitioner work with the same person, and go to another school, and show what that practitioner did, and they will do an evaluation, “OK, this looks nice, and that looks nice, but again, according to my value system, you disrupted the organism”. And I think, if we don’t want to think about our work in too orthodox way or a scholastic way, if you don’t want to go back to the Catholic church or the 16th century where they refused to look at certain things and if we don’t want to go back to this orthodox attitude, we have to be ready to face this kind of criticism. Just a few weeks ago I worked on a person who had an incredible amount of different types of body work from different schools. According to my very personal system of evaluation, those organisms usually show a level of the core with the highest amount of disturbance, because the individual structural setting has been pulled into so many different directions at once; the main event of the therapeutic process actually created what I would call artificial trauma.

So how do we avoid all that? This is the most important and practical question. We can avoid that if we take what we see from outside only as one component for a collection of information on and about the body. The second important approach is that we try to refine our touch in a way that we can observe the inner movement systems in the body in a very detailed and clear way. What I suggest to start with is that we evaluate the three dimensional manifestation of the grieving motion in the organism, in addition, for example, to the segmental alignment. I think that Rolfers can benefit more, for example, about cranial strain, if they can really train their hands to absorb how the breathing motion manifests inside and outside the cranium. In the different membranes, they might be more productive by doing that than trying to copy or to observe that what comes out of Sutherland tradition in cranial manipulation. Also we can, if we use some of the contributions that have been made about the mobility and motility of the organs. If you really take that and translate it into the structural spatial arrangement of the human body, we can observe the organ’s journey while breathing and I tell you, we can forget about most of the so-called spinal mechanics if we are just ready and can resolve most of the 80% to 90% of the chronic back problems by trying to correct those spatial journeys that the organs do while the breathing is happening inside the abdomen. So that’s a very, my suggestion very easy way to start the evaluation of the core, and goes back to Jan’s and Michael’s definition of the visceral space, because of course, the space that the viscera takes up seems to be one of the most significant components for a long term development of whole shape of the human organism. And as I like to say, I think the stupidity of muscles is enormous, and that is why it’s so fascinating and why so many people like to work on muscle tension, which is something which is very obvious. But I think it is only a condition of human structure, a very important condition, but it is not the main condition of human structure. I think this subject is congruent with what Ida Rolf wanted to say about human structure.

So, coming back to my suggestion for a definition of core, where I said it’s a symbol, it is a poetic definition of course, not very scientific, it’s a symbol for the integrity of the human organism. I believe that it’s not so important whether the practitioner is a Feldenkrais practitioner, a Rolfing practitioner, an osteopath or whatever, I think that all that really matters is approaches. If the technique is applied, in relationship to that very individual setting of structural components of this one person, it doesn’t matter what kind of technique we apply, we will arrive with the different techniques with the same results. This was once my fascinating experience when I met Jean-Pierre Berrault the first time, and he worked with me for approximately seven to eleven minutes and what he did was he would lean with his elbow somewhere on my right sitting bone, and then after it, work a little bit around the coccygeal area, touch the mid-section of my back, and some area high on the other side. Then I was standing up and walking around, and had that feeling of absolute horizontal totality of the pelvis with a little, little bit of tilt forward, and over a line that has nothing to do with trying to stand up straight. Just a line of a spacial system of things floating around it in all different segments of the body. He was not a trained Rolfer, and he was not even aiming for that kind of thing, and he was not thinking about gravity, but he was arranging my body in the most economical way from a analytic perspective of how the segmentions should interact to make movement possible in an economical way from a gravity perspective. So, what he was obviously able to do is use his method in accordance with my own tendencies to rearrange integrity in my body in a way that it almost happened itself in eleven minutes. Not blood or sweat for integrating the core, that’s what I have to say.

Michael Salveson

Our next speaker I think you have all heard of, Dr. Peter Levine, who by the way is also a Rolfer, even though his career has taken him, I think, following his own vision of neurological order. He carries with him his lineage wherever he goes. I remember training with Peter. We were in the practitioner class together that Dr. Rolf taught, and Beverly Silverman was his practitioner. Dr. Rolf had just given us the admonitions regarding the coccyx. Telling us that whatever we did, don’t lean on the coccyx with our elbow because we could break it, which, my experience is that it’s not so easy to do actually. But nevertheless, we were appropriately terrified, and we came back for lunch for the practitioners, the second round of practitioner sessions, and Beverly Silverman was going to work on Peter. Peter came in, lay down on the table, and he had brought a small stick in with him, and it was in his hands underneath his belly when he was lying prone on the table. Well you can see where this is going. So when Beverly got close to the coccyx and started working around there on the sixth session, Peter just very surreptitiously broke the stick at the right moment, and there was this snap. This is where Peter learned about shock and trauma.

I believe Peter has just finished a book of long labor, which will probably always be in process, but it’s with great pleasure that I introduce Peter Levine.

Peter Levine

It?s really good to be here. By the way, the end of that story is that Beverly gave that stick to my twelve-year-old model to bring to my session with him. What goes around comes around.

I’ve wondered, over the years, as you said Michael, that my path has taken me in a very different direction since my Rolfing training. I Rolfed for a few years, and I’m really glad I did because it gave me that feeling, that vision of the structure and integrity of the body. But I’ve wondered why I’ve kept my association for so many years. I know why today. This is really, really wonderful to be here, and I just enjoyed tremendously the panel, the discussion so far, and I’ve just enjoyed being here. I think it’s really true that your tribe is your tribe, and wherever you go, you come back to your tribe, it’s still you tribe, it’s homecoming. It’s very much that for me. I was not really looking forward to coming here, you’ve got all these wiped-out people, I’ve also finished a three-week training on trauma, that a number of Rolfers here were in. And I thought, “Oh gosh, it’s my duty, I’ll do it”. I came up, and being out for an hour with the horse demonstrations, I tell you, the energy and the “emotional field” are so different this year than they have been any other year, anybody notice that? So something is happening here which is damn good. And I’m glad to be part of it.

I’m going to talk a little about history. During the last, twenty, twenty-five years in developing my work in trauma and the energetic neurological responses in the organisms, I realized something that takes me back to what I think Dr. Rolf’s struggle was. These things certainly didn’t come to me in any kind of linear way. The came in fits and spasms, and hallucinations and dreams, and hard-work in the library, and self-work and soon. It became evident that this work, worked well, and was important and was an important contribution to healing of trauma. So the next step was, where was I going to teach that. I didn’t know what I was, I mean I didn’t follow steps, I didn’t know how I got to where I was. It became a very difficult, and sometimes anguishing task at breaking down into the blocks, cubes, different units that I could give to people so that they could start to get the experience that I have and delegate it in working with clients. So I had to somehow compress into twenty-five years plus my whole background before that into something that a person could use, and find that process inside themselves. And find that evolution of that inside themselves. I think that was very much the dilemma that Ida Rolf faced in trying to part Rolfing. And being one of the fortunate people to have studied with her in the late sixties, early seventies. I think she purposely had to really pair down what she taught, although she adored vision, that was obviously her passion. She would get into talk about this and that, general semantics, energies, and the chiropractors who went to jail with their energy machines and so on. Then she would say, “Well, I guess we have to get down to the second hour”. At that time I think there we maybe ten or twelve Rolfers period, so we would try to find a Rolfer and usually we would try to find Jan who was up in some tree somewhere in Big Sur, and say, “Hey Jan what happens in the second hour”, and he would tell us some kind of a thing. We’d go in, and the model would come in, and Dr. Rolf would say “OK, what do you see, what do we do?” So of course, we had all given Jan’s speech on anatomy and she would yell “No! That’s not what you see!” For a while, I think with our eyes popping out, we would start seeing inwardly, to sense somatically, to know about that resonance. And to know that we were the vehicles for the work we were doing. It wasn’t, as Peter said, a cosmetic, outside job. That it came from very deep structure from within our own organisms. I really think that if Dr. Rolf were here today, and I don’t doubt that she is in some form, that she would be tickled pink to see the evolution of her work. I’m sure she wouldn’t agree with all of it, I’m absolutely sure about that, but I think she would be greatly moved and sated by the fact the work is evolving and can only be evolving because it’s not static. And the core, of all the concepts, is probably the most fluidly evolving. And Jeff’s giving us some taxonomy. Now, I think that’s great, that’s what we need, we’re structure people. And then we evolve with that; we always know we have to start with the basic structure, and then evolve inwardly and outwardly. Let me talk about my parts in this evolution a little bit.

In the ’69 training, in the woods at Big Sur, I had just gotten the idea, which Dr. Rolf was not pleased about at all, that the nervous system was playing a very important part in this. What had happened was that thermo graphic paper had just been invented, and so I was able to get some from one of the researchers from some laboratory back east that had just developed it. Of course it’s used for everything. I came in with a bunch of these sheets and cut them into little pieces, and I had numbered the body, you know one, two, three, and so on. And when we were working with one of the models, I would put these papers all over the model. So, we had this kind of light show, seeing the thermo graphic changes, and we would notice critical times, for example, during the pelvic lift and some of the cervical work. We’d get these profound shifts. It didn’t matter what the person was doing when these profound shifts would happen, that’s when something would really change within the organism of the person they were working on. At that class, Peter Melchoir was assisting, and so it’s complicated if there are two Peters, there always seems to be two Peters. I was Peter Paper, and Peter was Peter Hands. So, anyhow, after that time, I went back and I had dropped out of the University of California-Berkeley medical bio physics department at that time, and I thought “Oh gosh, this is it, I’m just going to drop out”, but something pushed me back and said “OK, let’s finish”. And so I started working on the whole theory of stress and stress in the nervous system, and the somatic reflections of stress, mediators of stress. In my work in research, I came across a gentleman named Steven Porges?, who has been at the University of Illinois. I sent him some of my work, actually, I guess it was my Doctoral work, my dissertation, and we immediately connected. It was almost like we couldn’t call each other because we were calling each other at the same time and our phones were busy, and it was this “Hey, wow!” And so, I got Porges interested to talk, I think it was through you Mike, and then he and John Cottingham came together. I’m very, very excited to see the evolution of that work. I think we’re all in for a treat with John’s contribution. Anyhow, it was then developing my models of charging, discharging, regulation, self regulation in the nervous system, and how the core of self regulation was affected by how we taste and touch and so on. Bill, now in his teaching, talks about quality, quantity, direction, depth, and duration. I would add to that tracking or following. One other thing I remembered after that, as I developed this work, I had a falling out with Dr. Rolf, actually someone had told her I was teaching Reichian bio-genetic therapy, which was not true. But she was very, very angry at me. I was a persona non great a for awhile, but again, tribes and bonds, we came together at a meeting of the teachers. I presented some of this work on the nervous system, and core regulation. Dr. Rolf, at that time was quite blind from diabetic retinopathy, and she looked to where I was sitting and she said, “Peter, I think you have the next step. Not quite, it’s not right yet.” And she’s absolutely right all the time. I hope she will always continue to be right about that.

So I want to talk a little bit now about activating the core. The neurologic-energetic self-regulatory core. I think that’s a very important concept. The organisms virtual infinite capacity to regulate itself in this creative, dynamic, on-going, life affirming way, to use platitudes to no end. I realized at one time, some years ago, if this is the stream of our life experience, the core, the essence of our life experience, that we have different eddies and disturbances in that experience, but basically these eddies, like the eddies of a stream, are reintegrated into the full continuity and coherence of our experience. And to me, this is the basic sense of core. This sense of continuity and coherence over time and space. In trauma, something happens, and there’s a profound breaching of the boundary that is between self and un self, and is also a boundary that can be seen in the nervous system. As a result, there’s a breach in this barrier. As a result of that breach, there’s a rushing out of the energies, the contents of that experiential self-stream. And that was the model of a few years ago, but it didn’t explain the profound healing that could happen when you were working even with the most severe instances of trauma. And it could happen often in relatively short amounts of time, you know, within an hour, or two or three sessions. And it came to me, actually on the night train to Sweden, which is very bumpy. I should say one other thing, when you have this basic breach, and this subsystem, this vortex, this whirlpool outside the main system, the organism has two choices here, one is to be drawn in and to be constantly reliving the trauma, or reenacting it, reliving it in the case of the therapy so “approaches” to trauma, or avoiding that, moving so far away from the trauma that one’s life, of course, becomes very constricted and restricted. But, what came to me in this vision, is that because the stream is still moving, and because you have these two vectors, what will happen in necessity, is that a vortex will form in opposition to this vortex. That is to say, if there is a counter-clockwise vortex, this is a clockwise vortex. We are able to focus on this vortex which is in the core of the organism, this vortex increases in it’s magnitude, and balances the trauma vortex which is outside the system. Then, the methodology is to move into this area where you get the warble because you’re coming into the area between the two vortexes. To move to the outer layer of the human vortex, and then to into this layer here, and then to integrate that layer into the next layer and so forth, the disturb vortex disappears, that is to say it is reintegrated into the stream of one’s experience. When I realized that, then I realized this idea of self-regulation. For me, it took on a reality. It was always kind of a concept up until that time, I realized how powerful are the organisms restorative capacities. Wherever it’s injured, it generates its capacity for its own healing. There’s a wonderful cartoon, the doctor is holding up the x-ray, and he says to the patient, “There’s nothing wrong with you that what’s right with you can’t cure.” I think that’s really the truth. The vehicle for being able to live in the core, to work in the core, is our own sense of experience of that.

I just wanted to share with you one other thing, which is of great interest to me. Anngwyn and I have been working on this project together, in applying some of this healing trauma model to societies. For example Yugoslavia and the Middle-East, Africa, South America, Central America, particularly Central America, where there are repetitive cycles of killing, violence and war. I really believe the same principals apply to the healing of societies as the healing of individuals, to the body of the society as to the body of the individual.

I know Anngwyn has something working with the trauma people in Russia, doing some really magnificent work over there. I think she’ll hopefully say something about it in this afternoon’s presentation. Also, my hope is, that some of you will be interested in these kind of projects. There’s one project we’re working on right now, working, for example, with mothers and their infants in two cultures, like Palestinian and Israeli, or the different cultures from Yugoslavia. I have some information about that project I would really love to pass that out to you, or make available to you, to get your input and spark your interest. I would love to assist these people to come out of these bodies that are so defended that they can only fight or freeze or flee. Anyhow, that’s where I hope to go with the next part of my life. Thank you.

Q & A

Question: Would Jean-Pierre Berrault have been able to do what he did with you if you had never been Rolfed before?

Peter Schwind: The answer is very simple, he would have accomplished it, but it would have done something different.

Question: Jan, when you were referring to adding in the cognitive loops, could you say something more about what you were referring to, practically?

Jan Sultan: Well, I think Peter’s tape was an excellent demonstration of that exact thing. That you will routinely get to junctures with a client, whether it’s a very strong flow of sensation. You can either go into catharsis, which is a complete recapitulation of that experience, it’s all stored in the nervous system, and it’s often dramatic, a lot of activity. Some crying, or some feelings of rage or frustration. Or, you can go into what we hope for, which is real discharge, which is a reintroduction of that vortex, that eddy formation, back into the main stream of the person’s experience. So this is a very delicately modulated process. Sometimes, you have to back off. If you’re in your Rolfing mode, it’s very easy to overrun these things. If you force it into catharsis, you risk deepening the eddy, and the eddy gets bigger every time that you go around. The big danger here, quickly, is that those high activation states are associated with a lot of endorphin activity, which is your own little opium factory. When you’re in a highly active state, and you’re traumatized, you are producing chemistry that blocks you from the sensation of the stress. And this is what happens in a lot of the early Gestalt therapy, where you hammer on a pillow and yell and get going, and you get finished and you’re really stoned. About ten days goes by, and you need another fix. Well, it’s just about time for your therapy session. And this just goes on and on for years. It’s great business for the therapist, but I think that somatic therapists, Rolfers, will get further faster with our clients if we tend to learn that you need to titrate the information and the flow so that the person can have a cognitive loop, “I get it, I get what’s going on here”, and that the charge begins to drop. So that pushing the charge up to push through is, I think, mythological. Once you have had the “Ah-ha”, you don’t have to go around again; you simply have to come to terms and know what you’re own sensations are telling you. You could see it in Theo, when he started jerking his head like this. He was right at the fork where he could go cathartic or discharge. Elevate the charge back to the recapitulate the original injury response, or that renegotiating and reintegrating. I think it was just a great demo.

Question: This is a question to all of you. What I hear you saying is that perception of the core depends on our abilities to perceive, in a large extent. I wonder if any one of you have some inkling how to get an objective measurement that would tell us how we get to the core or not.

Michael Salveson: I think if you come around 2:00, John Cottingham is the next on the program, and John is carrying on his research he’s been in collaboration with Dr. Steven Porges, who, as you know, has been research director at the Rolf Institute for a few years now, who has worked closely with Alan. John has a presentation that will get some indications of neurological processes that are objectively observable. Now I don’t think at this point we can say neurologically instrument the core, but John some will certainly offer some very provocative observations. And I think it’s important to remember that we will never get to the place that we can reproduce the sensitivity and the profound depth of feeling of the human being. So, objective observation is useful, but it will never replace the place of the practitioner when he or she is working.

Jeffrey Maitland: I appreciate your question, I think it’s an important one. I think that’s one of the things we’re trying to do. One of the ways to do this, which depends on what you mean by objective. I would really like to have a discussion about what we mean about objectivity and subjectivity. And I think one of the things that we mean by it is objectively measurable. I think that’s very important, and as Michael said, a piece of that is coming up in John’s lecture. There’s another way to do this, there’s another way of being objective too, and that’s through a dialogue with sensitive receivers. So, that if we create a community of people who can come to agreement about what their sensing and feeling, that what you’ve created is an objective phenomenology of experience. That’s another level of objectivity that I think we also need to be working toward. One of the first steps towards working toward that objective phenomenology is a clarification of the terms that we use as well.

Michael Salveson: A quick piece of this. I referred to Ida Rolf’s fishing for this core thing; there’s something in a human which reaches up. What this points to is that most science starts with observation, and you go toward building theories after you’ve had the inspiration and the observation. You go, “Oh my God, look what I’m seeing!” She saw it twenty-five years ago; there was none of the technology there to do any kind of validation. But we have been holding on and working along, making these observations, and finally, what we’re going to hear from John Cottingham, is that we’re beginning to get the science that supports our observations. Our job is to quantify that and get it out in the culture.

Peter Levine: That’s a multi-faceted paradigm, we’re so used to the dichotomy, it’s either subjective or objective. We’re missing the real richness and complexity of these phenomena which you would neither say are objective or subjective. They are something much greater than that. And that comes out of being able to ask questions from a lot of different directions, and to have some central, organizing theme. As Albert Einstein says, “Fact doesn’t determine the theory, the theory determines the observation”, the empirical observation. So it goes both ways.

Jeff Maitland: There’s a great quote from a book I was reading awhile ago, it goes like this, “The order of discovery is different from the order of explanation”. We’re in the midst of trying to come up with our explanations, and our order of discoveries going all over the place.

Question: The video that Peter showed felt very much like to me the Rolfing Movement class that I just came through. I think that it is interesting that in my basic training there was a little bit of information put into the fact that you can stop in the middle of a ten series and allow something like this to happen, although very little was given to us on how to really do that. I guess my question is, what I’m seeing is that there really is a coming, an integration of the fact that there are two different kinds of work in what we do. And I’m hoping that as we go through, continue on, with our trainings, people really will be given this base that if they are in the middle of the second session and if somebody starts turning into a tree that that’s OK. I guess my question is, as one is going into a structural integration Rolfing session, should one also look for where one can contact the core? Is that what we should be looking for as we’re doing a structural session? Or, is that something that may just happen? How do we find these places?

Michael Salveson: Let me just say one thing, if you think of “Rolfing” or “Structural Integration” as existing across all those domains or taxonomies that Jeff laid out, then it becomes very apparent that working in one domain becomes much more important than working in another domain. Your goal is structural integration, but in order to get it, it has to show up in all those domains. If someone needs to turn into a tree, that’s very important. If it serves the purpose of structural integration, and as Peter points out, we need to be able to observe what is integration, what is the pattern?

Jan Sultan: I think an important part of this, is that you need to set a context for that to happen with your client. That this is an agreement. Your agreement with the client has to be such that it is safe to move across those domains. That if the person is coming to you for myo fascial manipulation and release and make me cosmetically straight, well then you stay out of those other places, unless the whole contract shifts and you renegotiate. We are making contracts with people. So I think, if you see a developing pattern in a series with somebody, you should ask permission to change levels.

Michael Salveson: I just want to say one thing, because I think it’s a very important question. I think it’s possible, also, to work in structural mode, with qualities of sensitivity that don’t involve becoming a psycho-therapist, but your strategy changes upon the signals that you are getting from your client. You modify, as Bill teaches in his six-day, you modify depth, duration, intensity, touch, and your strategies evolve so you’re talking to the nervous system, well he’s the man himself…

Bill: This is very stimulating, I couldn’t sit still back there. This is certainly a very dear part of my work. Gael’s question really activated some things for me, and her question is something I’ve been struggling with for years since I’ve worked with this dear man. One of the things I want to make very clear is that you don’t go looking for shock trauma. This is one thing you want to make sure that you are very clear about. And furthermore, we’re not working with shock trauma, we’re working with the effects of shock trauma.
And they show up in all these four taxonomies that Jeff has clearly defined. I’ve been working with the effects of shock trauma for a long time, not only my own, but in my clients because it emerges in my practice, because I’ve developed skills to accommodate or to work with that. Something that Kevin Frank asked a little while ago, about the cognitive process, is that when I’m working with people, I don’t give them meaning to their experience, and this is very important, and Peter’s model that he teaches and writes about really clearly articulates that meaning must emerge from within the organism; from within the person’s core. So meaning emerges from core rather than us giving a symbol or a meaning for their experience. This is a trap in all of the healing arts.

Peter Levine: To just add one thing to that, I think that this in a sense is part of our revolutionary movement at this time as a group. It’s to move and start to learn about these things. We have to be careful, we have to be conservative, in a sense, because it’s very easy to become very undefined and very unboundried and go beyond our levels of knowledge and skill. I think it’s very important that we have people who are really working and researching in the areas. The Rolf Movement people have been doing really good work. Gael’s presentation this morning on walking is a wonderful example of that, some of the European work on movement. And again it’s kind of an interesting thing, you can move you finger, or you can move your finger from the core.