Dr. Ida Rolf Institute

ROLF LINES, Vol XXIV nº 03 August 1996

Volume: 24
Interviewer's Note: On June 14, 1995, 1 taped a phone interview with Rosalyn Bruyere for Rolf Lines. Rosalyn teaches healing internationally, is the founder of the Healing Light Center Church, publishes the Oracle: A Journal of the Future, authored Wheels of Light: Chakras, Auras and the Healing Energy of the Body (Simon and Schuster), and is the mother of two grown sons. She figures prominently in the early history of Rolfing® as the "aura reader" whose clairvoyant observances during the Rolf Study at UCLA documented by Dr Valerie Hunt for the Rolf Institute provided rare insights into the nature of our work. Plenty of laughter should be read between the lines of our dialogue. Rosalyn makes a delightful conversation partner and it was an honor to speak with her on behalf of the Rolfing community.

GH: I’m reviewing Valerie Hunt’s book, Infinite Mind, for Rolf Lines, and I did an article on Emilie Conrad-Da?ud when she was in town. So I was thinking, Well, the time has come to get the third party of this triumvirate of great women. (triumgynate?)

RB: Well, you know the last time I talked to Val on the phone she teased me about my age because I’m the baby of the group.

GH: Oh, is that right?

RB: And without those two magnificent women knowing it of course, in my mind at some very deep level, they probably reparented me during the time we were doing (the Rolf Study), because I was pretty young … I started researching when I was twenty-eight.

GH: Wow.

RB: I come from a matriarchal clan anyway, and I was raised by a grandmother and a great grandmother … and I’ll be fifty next year, grandmother of two, at this time. So Val was teasing me about it. She said, Ros, are you pushing fifty yet?’ And I said, Well, I’m pushing it pretty hard now! So it’s hard for us to believe because there were always these generations, and I think I had overlapped Emilie and Valerie as my mother and grandmother. I mean, they’re not old enough to be my mother and grandmother, but my mind had psychically done that.

GH: I see. Well, when I saw Emilie, I thought that she could be anywhere from thirty-five to a thousand.

RB: Until she moves, and then you know that she’s the high priestess of something!

GH: I know! I just couldn’t figure it out! … I did want to know how you came to be part of Valerie Hunt’s Rolf Study.

RB: It was through Emilie. In my early practice as a healer, I developed a reputation in the local area as a healer who could see the aura and it was well known to my patients that I used auric reading as a skill. And so through I think one of Emilie’s students, though I’m not certain, Emilie got hold of my name and called one day and said that she was a healer and she had developed an auric healing process and could she bring a patient to the house and do an auric healing, and have me review her and tell her what I saw because she was not clairvoyant in that sense. And of course, I was trained in spiritualism, but I hadn’t really gotten all the way into it yet … I had this preconceived idea in my head that she would put a patient in a chair and move her hands around the aura and the color would change and that would be the end of it. She had this very professional voice, so I was expecting this very business-suited professional woman to walk in, and of course she came in a leotard and tights, carrying a cobra basket!

(Interviewer’s Note: Technical problems intervene in my giving a verbatim account of the remainder of this delightful tale, but Emilie put on quite a show for Rosalyn that day of their first meeting. The man Emilie brought with her was a strapping fellow, and she proceeded to Rosalyn’s astonishment to dance and chant about, shouting into his kneecaps and shaking rattles and all. When Rosalyn finally managed to compose herself and “check in, ” her clear internal sense was that the real issue waswith a third person not present who had a problem in a particular area of the brain. She reported this to Emilie, who without further comment packed up her show and her “patient” and left! Some day’s later Rosalyn received a phone call from Emilie asking her to meet her at a hospital where Emilie’s real patient was being treated for a problem in the brain just where she had described! Rosalyn had apparently passed Emilie’s little test, and their journey together had begun, leading eventually to her connection with Valerie Hunt and Ida Rolf.)

GH: I was talking to Don Van Vleet yesterday, and he told me a story, I don’t know where he got it, that you kind of caught Ida Rolf with her hand over someone’s heart chakra and she was channeling into it or something?

RB: She was channeling.

GH: Tell that story, please.

RB: That’s absolutely true. At the end of the Rolf experiment, as we were analyzing the data, it was really quite complicated. There were no microprocessors in those days … so the big computers that ran corporations were loaned to us to analyze these three and a half billion bits of data.

GH: Oh my goodness.

RB: A pretty substantial undertaking. It took about three months for the computer systems to analyze what had happened. And from staring at the oscilloscope, we now think-we don’t know that radiation had gone through the oscilloscope. And a certain amount of radiation had come off, which may have been what triggered it-Valerie had had a form of polio as a young person. She developed polio myelitis and her back became weak and then her legs became weak and within about a week she was in the hospital, close to death.

GH: While you were doing the study?

RB: At the end of the study when she was analyzing the data.

GH: Oh, that happened then?

RB: Yes. And as I said, we think it was from her leaning over the oscilloscope replaying those tapes over and over again, looking for correlations. The radiation could have triggered it, we don’t know. It could have been her psyche. It’s interesting, there’s always something physical that puts you into the place. And she started having mystical dreams and she called me with some regularity to talk about it. I went to the hospital and she said, `They can’t figure out what’s wrong with me, do you know what it is?’ And I said, `It’s probably myositis. ‘And she said ` `What’s that?’ And I said, `I don’t know! You’re the doctor!’ It was another one of those things that popped through my mind. So she called her doctor the next day and they tested her and it turned out to be polio myelitis …. So then she began her recovery, and she got some healing and in order to get the muscles taut and strength back, because she had lost a lot of muscle, Ida flew from Colorado to work with her and be on her after she came out of the hospital, and they set up a low bed so that she could do some physical work on her in Valerie’s apartment. Ida was leaning over the table on one knee as she finished the process. I was sitting on the other side of the room because I had come to work on her earlier, and had stayed for tea, and so I was kind of watching. And I got very quiet suddenly in the living room because I knew I was going to get to watch Ida’s aura for the first time. So I sat very quietly like a mouse in the corner, not making any tinkles with my tea cup. So I was watching Ida work and when she finished the treatment she stood over her back and made this blue light that came up through her body, out through her heart, and she made swirls of green and she’d make circular motion over the heart chakra, and she was clearly moving energy, and hearing. There’s no question… This is what I expected Emilie Conrad to do the first day. I said, `What is that you’re doing?’ and she quickly pulled her hand and put it behind her back and said, ‘Nothing!’

GH: Caught with her hand in the cookie jar!

RB: It was! It was exactly like that. And I said, `But Ida, I saw…’ And she said `Nothing, it was nothing.’ End of session.

GH: That’s great! The story told to all the students at the Rolf Institute is that Ida Rolf would say, `I work on what I can get my hands on-I can get my hands on the tissue.’

RB: That’s right. She never wanted anything quirky or unphysical or un documentable associated with her work. She was adamant about it.

GH: `You can’t trust those vegetarians!’

RB: Right. She and I agree about that, by the way!

GH: I just finished my tuna salad.

RB: You’re a good boy.

GH: Among Rolfers, there are numerous theories regarding why Rolfing works. From your observations, and I’m not asking for a grand theory, how do things work from your perspective?

RB: From my perspective, the energy field of the body flows on the collagen, and nothing addresses with clarity the whole matrix of the collagen in the thorough way that Rolfing does …. If we were creatures who had some kind of spiritual practice, Chi Gong or something, where we moved energy through our whole body without developing repetitive patterns, Rolfing would perhaps be redundant. Perhaps. But I doubt it. I think the human mechanism is underutilized, so that wonderful period of time, six months, a year, three years after the time you’re Rolfed, you’re using more parts of the body for the stress and strain on the body, and the stress on the parts which you ordinarily used is greatly diminished. The reason an elephant’s leg is so big is because the elephant is so heavy. Most people are carrying their weight around without the utilization of their legs … they’re not over their joints properly. They’re just not lined up, and if you take that down to a micro-level, like the kidney, if you develop a right-handed movement pattern, in time all the energy flow that should flow through both kidneys, flows through the right kidney. Or as Ida often said, it could flow through the left and not the right. You could have this zig-zag pattern. She always maintained in frontaI of me, that if you have pain on the right, the problem is on the left.

GH: `Go where it ain’t.’

RB: Go where it ain’t. Right … energy can’t actually manifest through us unless the template is there. I think it was early in my career that I made the comparison between the Rolfed body and the Egyptian body, and the Egyptian theory of the body being the temple, and how differently the Egyptians looked at it than the Hindus or the Chinese, because it’s an earthier look. It’s an earthier stacking of the body, and the chakras are kind of open as opposed to straight and sweet and passive. There is a kind of warrior stance about it. It’s fascinating to me because now even the yoga movement is going in the direction of that same look, with all the very heavy Iyengar work … It’s kind of sweet and soft but it’s got some muscle and some gut to it-it kind of cracks me up, actually.

GH: So, how do you view the relationship of structural integrity and Rolfing to sustaining an integrated field?

RB: Well, it can only be done through muscle and motion. The muscle tendon connections are the vital key to the field and if it feels whole, it won’t disintegrate. If you look at certain psychological problems from a structural point of view, I hate to admit it but there’s a lot about Bioenergetics that’s right. I hate to admit it because sometimes those people are just as nutty as the vegetarians! But there are some truisms to it. Where everybody gets into trouble is when they make rules about it, which we all do. We all think that only what we do fixes that problem, but it’s not true. It’s always evolving and in due course it will fix itself, the question is how long do you want to let it go. With Rolfing available, why wouldn’t you do that first? It’s just more efficient than four more lifetimes! One of the interesting things about Rolfing is the number of people that have either childhood or past life experience that they’ve hidden from by simply using different circuits in their body instead of using all of their body. It is a hiding of psychological data and spiritual data in the tissue that we don’t use, because it has to be stored somewhere. And what happens when you’re Rolfed is we can’t hide from it anymore.

GH: I think that also explains why some clients stop halfway through the process. It’s like, `Okay, I get it. Enough. Not ready, Good-bye!’

RB: That’s right.

GH: And they’ll tell you a million different things.

RB: I did. I stopped at the end of five.

GH: Oh really?

RB: Yes! For three years, I wouldn’t go back.

GH: That’s very interesting.

RB: In fact, when I finally did go back and finish, and felt much better then of course, I couldn’t figure out why more people didn’t do that! And I looked back on what we did with the experiment because the people used in the experiment had two sessions a week.. I have no idea how they integrated that …. Clearly no one was hurt and people got vast insights and those of us who worked together on that have been fast friends all of our lives. One of the participants who was a Rolfer is Dr. Terry Ellison and he and I have been very close ever since.

GH: Small world.

RB: Whatever happened there, I think, is of a most intimate and spiritual nature, and that means you are connected at levels that most people don’t interconnect. Again, that takes me to the model of the old Egyptian mystery that everybody who in their consciousness would pay service to your spiritual family is your real family. But the truth of the matter is if your bodies’ frequencies resonate harmonically the same, then you do have psychic communication. And if they don’t, you don’t.

GH: I have a question about gravity. Dr. Rolf was always talking about integrating the field of the human person with the field of the earth. Can you clairvoyantly see gravity? I’m curious about this.

RB: You want me to read gravity!?

GH: Yes! Because if one can see the effect of gravity on the structure, I just wondered if it was possible to see gravity kind of warping the field or something?

RB: Oh that, yeah. I’m making fun of something that’s actually quite a serious topic in my life. You absolutely can see gravity move the aura. You actually can see it, it’s perceptible, or it looks like the wind blowing from the top down. And if you have a gravitational field that’s sideways, it’ll pull the aura sideways.

GH: That sounds neat.

RB: You know how seaweed is hooked to the bottom of the ocean, [moving] whichever way the water goes … that’s kind of what you see. That kind of motion, sort of in reverse. So gravity is very important and I’ve been involved in an ongoing argument in the consciousness movement for my entire twenty-seven year long career because I’m one of the few healers that moves energy from the earth up, and when I started, it was very controversial to do so. Now, I’ve convinced enough people, and Rolfing has convinced enough people that gravity is important. If they understand that plants grow up, animals grow up, people grow up, therefore the energy should come up from the earth. It’s the largest nearby gravitational body to us and it is highly significant. And healers who bring energy up are the ones like myself who have what appears to other people to be amazing stamina. The truth of the matter is we don’t do very much on our own energy: we [root?] in and we tap her [the earth]. And the people who try to pull it down from the top tend to bring it in through the head and neck and down through the arms and it never touches their body, so they get tired easily.

GH: I think I must be one of them.

RB: It’s easily fulfilled. And the difference in the practice of those of us who do it from the ground up and of course, I was trained from the top down. I was trained in spiritualism initially, but in my first five years I started working with Native Americans and Chinese, and people who are ground-up people from other cultures who don’t have God locked in heaven over your head, but who think of the forces as slightly different. And so, that’s when I began this very long, ongoing process of bringing energy up instead of only in one direction.

GH: Wow, that’s really a lesson for anyone in healing work to learn, in any kind of modality.

RB: Rolfers did it in front of me too, I mean, they proved my postulate to me, in front of me on that project because at that point I was the only person I knew who did that … and then the Rolfers all did it too, because when you’re stacked in your own gravitational field, every breath you take pulls the energy up. If you’re not, your sucking from other people, from the computer. The more grounded you are, which means the energy moves up the body, the better off you are. Other people don’t influence you, you don’t get jerked around, and you’re not vampired off by other people. And you’re not vampiring off of other people because there’s this larger connection that you have to the bigger reality. And people think of that as conceptual but it’s also physical. The interesting thing about what we used to think is spiritual, once you start seeing the field it becomes pretty literal for you and in my life it is pretty literal. And through the process of making energy real, instead of a concept or attitude, what happens is you start to sort things differently, and that process has taken me years. And periodically I still do it the way my culture does, because culture is a very big influence on us. So, you’ll start to discount data, like the field doesn’t exist, and every time you do, you’ll find yourself being wrong. Because if somebody is constantly pulling his energy, that’s how they’re always going to be, because they have no other mechanism, that’s their biggest trainedin pattern. It’s not that they are out to get you, they’re not. They just learn young that’s what they do. At some level you just have to kind of get it.

GH: So to what degree is the ability to have so literal an experience of clairvoyant perception a skill? Is that an inborn gift? I know you teach this stuff: how teachable is it?

RB: I would say that sixty percent of my students who are serious do learn it. Then of course, as I said, it takes thirty years to integrate it.

GH: So stick around.

RB: Yeah, hang in there. After you learn it, then you have to let it change everything you know, so the age you are at the time you get it does have an impact because of how programmed you are by the age you get it. However, having said that, I’ve trained people who are sixty, and I’ve trained people who are ten. The reason it is so trainable is that it is so natural, it is part of the normal human capacity. It’s not abnormal.

GH: And your children are proof.

RB: Yes.

GH: I read that story in the brochures or something.

RB: Yes, and my children by the way are now twenty six and twenty seven and both of them see auras. They stopped when they were teenagers as many people do.

GH: Your rock-and-roll break.

RB: It’s an hormonal break actually. I’m sure that sex was predominant from thirteen to nineteen, and then about nineteen or twenty it comes back in most people, a little earlier in girls.

GH: I’m looking forward to quizzing my little newborn in October about it. We’ll just have to wait a couple of years but I just kind of assume that little babies see this stuff. [Sarah Grace was born Oct. 30, 1995!]

RB: They do, that’s why they look at you like, `Oh Hi, how are you, I didn’t know you’d be here when I got here!’

GH: I just re-rented the movie, “Resurrection,” which I’ve seen about six times now, and which had a huge impact on me when I first saw it, and it still does. What was your involvement with the film?

RB: Technical advisor for it.

GH: I was desperately looking for your name in the credits the other night.

RB: It’s there at the end of the tape. You have no idea how proud that made my father.

GH: Oh did it really?

RB: When it was screened here in Westwood [CA], it happened to be the week it opened, he’d been at the Director’s Guild opening, and then he took a friend to the opening in Westwood, and when my name came up in the credits, the audience applauded, and my father was so proud. He was like over the edge.

GH: For awhile I had thought the story was sort of an autobiography of you, but then I learned that you have this real one instead.

RB: No, it wasn’t, but the reason I got the role [as technical advisor] was because so many people think this is my life story. By the time four people had told the director, the producer, and Ellen Burstyn that I was the person it was written about-all of us knew that wasn’t true because it’s actually more autobiographical of her life.

GH: Even your voices kind of sound the same.

RB: Yes, and we look alike in a funny kind of way. I certainly don’t have her breath-taking beauty.

GH: I think you’re looking pretty good in your press photo.

RB: She and I were married to the same kind of man, had the same kind of divorces, lived in the same parts of the country, went on spiritual quests at about the same time in our lives. I think that Emilie and Ellen are close to the same age. She’s a little older than I am and the only thing about the story that didn’t happen in my life is I didn’t have a near death experience.

GH: Well that’s nice.

RB: But people assumed it was my story and that’s why Universal hired me to be the tech on it, and then my role in it was really to spend time with Ellen and teach her how to hold her hands and what to do. The easiest way to do that with Ellen, because she has such a profound spiritual track of her own already, was just to teach her to scan and to do auras. I actually learned something about seeing auras from her.

GH: How so?

RB: She brought a patient into my office, and what we would do was I would scan the patient and then do a treatment. And after three days in a row of doing that, she brought up a friend who’s a therapist with her that we used as the patient and after I worked for twenty minutes she said, `Okay, do you want me to do you!’ And I said, `Sure!’ I mean who doesn’t want an Academy Award winner to `do you.’

GH: Do me, do me, do me!

RB: I watched and she did exactly what I did. She started halfway up the body, and as she got to about the hip, she said, `I can see the aura.’ And I said, `What did you do?’ I apparently moved one little muscle in isolation on my forehead and she’s such a subtle watcher, that she imitated it, and when she did she could see the aura.

GH: It was like setting up that mirroring resonance.

RB: Right.

GH: Wow, I want to try that.

RB: It was cool, it was way cool. And so a lot of the scenes that were healing scenes, I don’t know if this ever happens but most of the technical advisors in Hollywood stand on the outside and try to send subtle messages, what should happen, and usually we’re not listened to, but the director listened to every piece of advice that I gave him. I didn’t give him much other than, this should be more natural, or that should be more natural, but I worked a lot with Ellen and before certain healing scenes I would pump her up or psyche her up or something and then she would go in and do the healing. And the rest of it is her brilliance as an actress. I never realized to what degree she succeeded in doing me, until maybe five years after the film was released, we had relatives visiting us and the boys were showing them the movie, “Resurrection,” and one of the boys came out to the kitchen and said, `Mom, I had no idea how much she’s you!’ Because when your own children say, there are gestures and stuff, it’s kind of interesting. But first of all, there are similarities between our gestures that are natural, and then of course, she’s just brilliant. She captured me, right down to the fact that I tend to wear a big man’s watch so I can do heart-rate counts.

GH: So, is there anything you wanted to say to Rolfers, anything on life in the future or on the health care system or something?

RB: Yes, actually, since I’m one of the people who sits on the NIH [National Institute of Health] panel for alternative medicine.

GH: Oh are you? I didn’t realize that.

RB: Integration at every level is where medicine is going. It’s decided to pick up the mystery school traditions that it abandoned two thousand years ago. We’re trying to put them back in how.

GH: What are the signs of that other than this panel, which is a significant one?

RB: Well, out here in California of course, where a lot of this starts, everyone here has figured this out and regular medicine asks nutritional questions, asks exercise questions, asks all the stuff that we used to think was alternative practice or as holistic practice. It is now being asked in regular medicine. And I heard Deepak Chopra, he was on television yesterday, said this is going to be integrated into medicine, but medicine’s going to take credit for it. And that’s absolutely true. They’re going to take credit for the hard work that all of us did to break down the rigidity that was in the structure.

GH: Roman Catholicism does the same thing. You co-opt the heresy and integrate it into the establishment and then take credit for it, and say the Church has taught this for all time!

RB: And that is probably what’s going to happen. The important thing for Rolfers to do is to get their hands on as many of those doctors as they can, because they can not pull it off if they can not integrate it. Personal integration, i.e., integrity, only happens when you have it. It’s not something that you can fake for more than twice. God gives you a couple, then God asks you to put your money where your mouth is. And that kind of humility is not the strong suit of medicine, because medicine has had to work with materialistic structures for the last fifty years, and as it tries to break down the excessive materialism and put integration back in, it’s going to have bumps and grinds and struggle. As the individual people decide that for the first half of your life you can do what’s easiest for you, and that is what’s best for you, but for the second half of your life, what you have to do is what was so hard that you couldn’t do it when you were twenty. I had to try, at age forty, to cure my dyslexia, which is a life-long condition, and I’ve managed to pretty much overcome that shortness. Now I can learn to do things that I couldn’t do before because dyslexia was in the way of my doing this. So I’m basically mildly reading disabled, and I have coordination difficulties, which Pilates cured. When you have to do opposing movements with both arms and legs it starts to rewire your brain, and once your brain is rewired, then you can learn things you couldn’t learn before. So what people mostly do in our culture is they’re given aptitude tests, thank you educational system, and you can do what you have aptitude for, not what you necessarily find as your bliss, as Joseph Campbell would say… My original training in school was to be an electrical engineer.

GH: Oh really. Isn’t that something.

RB: I dropped out to have babies like a lot of the females did, dropped out, got married and had babies. But the reason that I went into a mechanical field is with dyslexia, that was easiest for me. I could do math and science all day and all night but if you asked me to do psychology or literature, which is my great love, or the arts, I had talent for some of the arts but with dyslexia, there’s a limit to what you can do. You can do everything that involves flow, I can’t do very much that involves certain kinds of articulation. So now literature has become easy for me. It’s even a little easier for me to learn languages now than when I was sixteen, which is absolutely the opposite of how it should be, at fifty to learn foreign languages.

GH: So, hey, thank you.

RB: You’re welcome. Sorry I got a little preachy there.

GH: Oh?

RB: Not that I feel strongly about the subject mind you!

Gil Hedley, Ph.D.

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