There was no exaggeration, to my mind, when Gael Ohlgren’s and David Clark’s article “Natural Walking” was called important and original in several corners of the world of Rolfian studies. I believe it is important, important enough to deserve a considered critique.

The start of the paper strikes me as crucial: Namely, a step-by-step critique of the standard kinesiological model. This standard model is the “culture” we live in, and we are perhaps never aware how deeply the socialization goes down. The only hope of gaining freedom from it is to face it head one, as the authors do. Significantly, this was one of the Rolfmeister of Zurich’s, Dr. Flury, biggest gripes with the paper. He felt that any attempt to argue with the kinesiological model puts you in entirely inadequate conceptual frame for a structural view, which finds the analysis of discrete parts anathema.

Flury may be right in a purist sort-of way, but his view reveals a certain idealism. That is, that sheer intellectual rigor (or even hands-on practical rigor, for that matter) is enough to keep us pristine from our over arching cultural tendencies: compartmentalization and mechanisticism. As a simple matter of human nature I think the authors tack makes more sense.

And anyway, it’s encouraging that somebody among us has taken the time to argue, almost muscle by muscle, for a Rolfian view of things.

This specific analysis allowed them to lay bare one very important fact for a developing theory of Structural Integration. Namely, that the femur medially rotates in locomotion. In other words, it doesn’t just rock forward. I don’t know, has anyone thematized the implications of this for external structural types, whose system is largely compressional and thus resistant to any kind of healthy rotational tendency which would threaten the locked, stacked-up system?

But as good as all this is, one finds again and again in this paper what I have called elsewhere the “perfectionistic” and also “Panglossian” tendencies of the Rolfian community. The perfectionism is manifest in the implicit, and occasionally explicit, desire to find a view of the body in which everything makes sense, L.g., ” … it makes no structural sense to build into a structure a rotational component that must be resisted…. ” (p.7). As it happens, I agree with the technical point they are making, but why do they assume that bodies make “sense”. Surely, there are at least as many, if not more, phenomena in nature that make little or no sense. And our bodies are as surely apart of “nature” as anything else is.

Thus far this kind of perfectionism is really pretty benign. But it has practical and theoretical implications when applied to a deep analysis of what makes integration possible. In the midst of description of the “swing phase” they write, for instance:

“It is not accurate to describe this [sic] a mild falling, because the [sic] is never a moment that one is not centered and grounded. It is true that falling would occur if momentum were suddenly interrupted. This is called tripping. At whatever speed the momentum of walking is proceeding, the body provides adequate support in every phase of walking to fully carry its own weight and therefore is never out of balance.” (p. 18).

Here are the perfectionistic and Panglossian tendencies mixed into one. When one reads this the implicit goal of Structural Integration will be to help the client find a state in which this description will obtain. Of course, the authors are humble enough elsewhere to make conceptual disclaimers allowing for uniqueness and so on. But one cannot escape the impression that there is a template at work (in fact, if I’m not mistaken, an earlier draft of this paper was subtitled “The Walking Template”).

So let me be blunt. To assume that bodies are ever, that’s right, ever balanced so perfectly that there is “never a moment that one is not centered of grounded” is just sheer wish fulness. It is a pleasant wish for people, but as I have argued elsewhere, such pleasant wishes are grounded in some oblique form of the need to control.

There seems to be only two real options with respect to gravity: (1) Bracing against it, which given our anatomy, involves some form of pulling back; or, (2) Going forward into it, allowing oneself to be pulled into it.

Of course Ohlgren and Clark are presenting another option-a kind of meta option-of being so rightly balanced with gravity that the slightly “out of control” phenomenon of “mild falling” no longer makes sense.

Their new view (or a revision of an old Rolfian template) would indeed make sense if ideas ruled reality instead of vice versa. Nothing is ever the same in a body from moment to moment. Even the most “integrated” body is not more than a responsive piece of change in a largely shifting world. If you ponder these facts, as I am absolutely sure the authors have (Ohlgren’s been my teacher twice), you have two possible options:

1. The quasi-New Age direction, which I believe the authors have chosen. This view is built around a kind of deep anthropomorphism of nature. It imagines that Nature’s intent is largely beneficent, and that it is ruled by things like “a principle of efficiency”. On this view, even a massive, often destructive force like Gravity, appears to have largely beneficial effects as long as we are rightly oriented towards it (balanced, unencumbered, etc.).

Keeping such a view at bottom, its easy just to allow for all sorts of human foibles and mortal misunderstanding of nature’s good intent. And such a view, often called compassion or sensitivity, allows the practitioner to explain why no one ever really makes total peace with the supposedly beneficial nature. Thus, to my mind, such a view is not overtly perfectionistic, but is covertly so, with no pejoratives intended.

2. The other view is a more “realistic” one. It refuses to anthropomorphize nature as beneficent. Instead it sees that nature’s effects on such a singular thing as an individual human body, are both bad and good. It sees gravity as a daunting force, compared to one body, whose effects are largely negative, unless of course, that body finds a way of using gravity in a humanly beneficial way. In this view the truly incredible discovery of Structural Integration by Dr. Rolf is set in sharper relief-the first attempt to deal with gravity’s effects forthrightly.

So what does this have to do with falling? If this were the best of all possible worlds, if there were a pre established harmony, then we could assume that it were possible to find a state where we could avoid some failing. But since perfect balance is impossible, we must chose between bracing or falling. Of course total falling is a non-choice since you’d preclude walking. Instead it is a type of falling which always involves some compensations, and allows each individual to walk with a unique ease!

“Compensations” should not be a bad word. There are pleasant and unpleasant compensations. Un integrated bodies have largely nothing but unpleasant compensations. By contrast, integrated bodies have largely pleasant compensations which accommodate the every changing body web to a potentially destructive force: gravity.

Of course, the authors have in some sense anticipated this line of thought. And I believe that it is what all the talk of helices is about. The helix is their catchall word to explain how the body could embody the template they describe, and still be the ever-evolving piece of movement so dear to Continuum practitioners. That is not a criticism. Their helix is a lovely aesthetic concept with some resonance with the scientific meaning, at least to the untrained eye.

But like all aesthetic terms it usually represents something more vague, and vagueness is certainly not always a bad thing. But the vagueness in the paper is how they came to assume so much. By contrast, I say with no personal pride, the realistic view I’m adumbrating never assumes very little.

1. It does not assume that primal peoples are healthier. (p.21). Aren’t the authors clued into how deeply skewed ethnographic evidence has been, how mind bending the noble-savage myth has been?

2. It does not assume that gravity is good or bad. Only that gravity’s effects on a large majority of people seems to be negative.

3. It does not assume that there is any templatial way of avoiding gravity’s effects. There are infinitely many unique ways of accommodating gravity. Thus making individual integration very difficult to describe. But by contrast the ways of avoiding it are structurally very similar and predictable. (In a way I see the brilliance of Ohlgren’s and Clark’s paper in having described in detail one particularly pleasant compensatory system or regime. One that is popular with those who ape primal (a.k.a. “primitive” peoples.)

The last thing this view does not assume is that if one is not balanced as they describe at length, that then one’s walking is not “natural,” and that such walking then is a “struggle”. Accommodation is not the same as “struggle”. But if you believe the universe is ruled by principles of efficiency, as responsible scientists do not, then accepting a more mundane fact like accommodation requires a disenchantment of the world. But such a disenchantment is not easy when we still have the deep-seated need to believe our world is an ultimately good one, and the universe’s forces tending towards balance, even in the painful face of the mountains of human suffering in the world and history.

Editor’s Note:

David Clark’s and Gael Ohlgren’s response to this review is located in the Letters section of this issue of Rolf Lines.

Natural Walking may be read in its entirety in the Explorations section of this issue of Rolf Lines.