Bill: Just to go through some of the Rolfing® models that we are dealing with on a day to day basis, and how our concept of these models is affected through dissection-You know the party line is that there is a build up of connective tissue as a result of habitual use patterns or trauma or the ongoing struggle with gravity, and because there is this build-up we’ve got a new status quo. But at the same time there’s this other concept of emotional trauma which causes one to lock in a particular place which we theorize is stuck in the tissue. So we’ve got these concepts of stasis or freezing. What is your “on the battle field” analysis of this that we are working with and spouting ten times a day?

Gil: Well, the bottom line, when you get into a cadaver, stuff is stuck together.

Bill: But is it stuck together because it’s a cadaver?

Gil: Well, yes, and this is really a very interesting thing to explore. Often people say, “Is this supposed to be stuck like this?” And I’m like, “Yeah it’s one thing.” The only way you are going to get it apart is with a knife. A other times it is very clear that we am dealing with an anomaly for what would be economic function. So sometimes it’s hard to say which is which. But I can say that I have been able to perceive-through doing this over and over again-the levels of muck, and how they build up. So when one is manually dissecting, doing what’s called blunt dissection, there are certain tissue textures that yield readily to your hand or finger. Cotton candy, gossamer threads that are very thin like spider webs. If you touch them they disappear. They melt. They vanish. And then you’ll find ones that need to be poked a little more firmly. They’re tougher. And on down the line, to the point where something is there that you need a knife to cut it with, because there’s no tugging that will separate it.

Now I see these levels as different layers that we can create through movement or rather lack of it. So for instance, I know that the scapula is supposed to be moving over that thorax. Sometimes there will be cotton candy between the two and you can touch it and it will disappear. But you can imagine when you go to sleep and wake up in the morning, that your body has begun to fill with cotton candy. And that when you stretch and move that cotton candy melts and yields quite readily. But if for instance, in the case of the scapula over the thorax, that cotton candy builds up and you don’t use your shoulder-maybe because you refuse to express joy or maybe for some more mundane reason like you bashed your shoulder and it hurts so you are holding it steady. For whatever reasons you’re holding steady, that cotton candy begins to build up and so threads become paralleled with other threads to the point where there is a certain level of real-time tissue fixation which can be melted through touch or movement. Now if you continue to not move that area for say 10 years, then the build-up of that cotton candy will become so arrayed and the array will become so complex, so dense, fat will begin to hang off of it, and those threads which had the cotton candy are accompanied by so many other threads, that we have wires. You end up having this big solid muck that has cemented the one to the other. We’ve all had a client that felt like that too-where there’s no way that you are going get that shoulder blade up off of the thorax and get your finger tips under there. It’s going to take a bit more movement than one session, although you can send it on a trajectory of movement and melt it. So as surely as spaces are manifested in the build-up of tissue in that way, movement will melt it. Full movement will melt it completely. A little movement will melt some of it. This I’ve seen on the table. Something that cadavers have taught me is to see these different levels of build-up right there in front of my face-and to develop a story around it that really does fit with our model of what’s going on. Whether it be an emotional holding pattern that instituted the build-up of adhesions, fibrosis, and fatty deposit, or whether it be some physical trauma at the level of the tissue, it pretty much looks the same.

Now that’s quite different from the kind of shielding that one can throw up if the person penetrates through too many layers without invitation. If you go too fast on your client and ignore or fail to respect the skin, superficial fascia, fascia profundus and the musculature because you have your eyes set on that periostium, and you are determined to sink into that, then that client-like we’ve all experienced-will shield and you will really have to work to get in there. Shielding is an ephemeral response, which doesn’t necessarily describe their condition. Or they are providing resistance just for the thrill of it-we have all had a client who says, “Go deeper,” and then they just resist more. You are in battle with them-locked like bulls with their horns together and not making any progress because you are being forced to work at greater and greater levels to match their degree of resistance. At which point you should just go get a cup of water and end the session ’cause that’s not going to happen. Or if you are just plain stronger you can bulldoze through them. But it’s not worth the energy to me. I couldn’t do that.

Bill: A related question, you know the Reichian notion of the bands of armoring. What do you find there?

Gil: Oh, well this is interesting. I’m thinking of Louis and Rosemary’s book and their discussion of the bands that they perceive. Yeah, that stuff is there. You can go looking like I said, if you want to find a “ligamentum Bill,” you can find it. If you want to find tubes you can find them. There is a level of truth to what we are seeking. In the same way, those bands that Rosemary and Louis have described I have found. It’s quite impressive to follow through the layer of skin, superficial fascia and fascia profundus, and right down to the periostium below the breast line-that chest band. That pinched belt can be perceived right on down through the layers-and it’s amazing. In terms of Reich’s perceptions of the body, and if we go further into bioenergetics, core energetics, and how John Pierrakos divvied up the human psyche into the oral, the psychopath, the masochist and the schizoid, I perceive those levels. Its there.

For instance, if you come to a person with a heavily upwardly displaced tissue arrangement-that they are big on the top and skinny on the bottom, go right down to their aorta and its branches-you will see that same pattern. I’ve found this over and over again. If you have a person with skinny legs and a huge upper body they will have a huge upper aorta and skinny little iliac arteries and femoral arteries. In other words, the image of the whole body is mimicked down at that level or vessel.

Bill: That’s interesting.

Gil: Very interesting. It blew me away when I started seeing that pattern and began looking for it. Of course what you look for you find. Ectomorphs don’t have a big superficial fascia layer.

Bill: There’s no way around this tautology. What you look for you find.

Gil: Well, and that’s OK.

Bill: I’m just saying that it can’t be otherwise…

Gil: But it just forces us to be very blatant to ourselves with knowing what we assume when we go in.

Bill: We need some perceptual equivalent of the Hubble telescope to start finding something different from what we’ve already got in mind.

Gil: Yeah, or to say this is so true that people find a model and then they cling to it like a life raft. As if it’s the truth because everybody wants to know the truth. Or fear that if another model could be true then we’ve stepped into the abyss of anarchy or antinomianism where there is no law, there is no role, there is no morality and then people get very afraid. So they’ll cling even more tightly to their model which is so limited. However, if we are functioning with this rational mind and the limits of its perception, I think the richer way to approach it is to just say, “Wow, that model really revealed some incredible truths.” But I would be in poverty if it were my only model. So let me add a model. What about this model and that model and the other model, and as you continue to build up the variety of models, you start to have a much richer field of perception with regard to the body. Somehow, the models will all come together, because they come together in us. I learned that from Robert Schleip and the way he taught it was so helpful. He said, “Well, here’s one model that we use in Rolfing and here’s another and another,” and I was like, “Oh, my God, of course.” There are things revealed by each of these models that are not encompassed by any one of them. So, although I will go off on allopathic medicine’s model of the body as a machine, I have learned so much from that model that I would be the last one to toss it. It provides way too much insight into the workings of the body to toss. However, I also want to look at the body as a river. I want to look at the body as a series of interacting fields. What does that say? Or as a personality expression. If it’s that then what do I learn? How am I brought together?

I ran into the same problem when I was writing my dissertation. I was taking apart the papal model of marriage and developing my own. I would fight with other graduate students at these luncheon meetings for the ethicists who would say, “Gil, you need to get this out there. We think you’ve got something here, and you need to defend it to the masses.” And I felt, “Not at all.” Actually, I would be the last one to stand behind my model and hold it up as the banner of truth, because then I would impoverish everybody. Rather, I would like to have my model added to the hopper of models so that people could say, “Oh, there’s another way of seeing things. If we do look at things this way how does this change our behavior, how does this transform our relationship to ourselves or our spouse or our pope?” Everyone seemed to find that a really disappointing approach.

Bill: It’s sort of an anti-academic approach for sure.

Gil: Well, you see that I’ve left academics.

Bill: So, back to models-one model that we get from the visceral manipulation framework is that we’ve got these motile organs that through their own motility interact with other organs. Without the motility there’s less than optimum functioning. What do you have to say about that? What might be called the bag layers?

Gil: Oh, it’s so rich for folks who are interested in visceral work to get their eyes on the viscera as well as their hands. If only because it’s such a complex affair. When you get in there and see the reality of it in this snapshot of this person at that moment, as it’s been modeled in a sense in the cadaver, you can say, “Oh, my gosh, look what was stuck to what and how that must have impaired movement! Or look here how the peritoneum is completely adhered to the transversalis fascia after that surgery, and you can see how things have become stuck together. Or look how this ovary has been adhered to this sigmoid colon and things are being jerked around in terms of movement. I never would have found this. I would have fantasized about touching it but is so far out of my range that I could only contact it energetically. But you cannot pin down this sphinchter of Odi. It’s just too slippery.”

To encounter it at that level is pretty exciting. I spent a lot time trying to teach people about the bags of organs-to understand some of the relationships of the peritoneum as it involves the organs as well as the pleura and the pericardium. Well, if you go looking for bags you will find them too.

There are these layers of bags which create different spaces, distinguishable compartments in the body and therefore relationships between those compartments, whether it’s the compartments between the thorax and the abdomen or whether it’s the stomach and duodenum, which are different bags. I find that if you just go in there with your hands and feel around they will create a whole new idea of how to work with those tissues. And how really very gentle one can be to introduce new levels of order.

Bill: That’s interesting because one of the basic elements of received wisdom when I came along was that one of the reasons that the Rolfers of the late ’60’s were so brutal was because Rolfing had been tried out on cadavers before it was tried out with human beings. There’s a difference between a dead body and living body and one of the differences is the hydration. So what it took to get some action on a dead body was what some of those early Rolfers took to get some action on a living body, so Rolfing got this reputation as being the most brutal thing that could ever be conceived of.

Gil: Bill, were you an old time Rolfer?

Bill: No, but I definitely step up to the plate. When homerun power is required, homerun power is forthcoming. Yeah, I am not a soft Rolfer.

Gil: Yeah, I’m absolutely convinced that there is a time for all the tools. One of the differences between the cadaver and the living, beyond hydration, is that hydration can be a person’s choice. We can actually make a choice through our thought to soften, and our body will soften. When we can make apparent to a client that they have a choice in the tone of their body, then they can do the work. A cadaver has no choice. In other words, you may have to wrestle a cadaver a part of the time but the client can certainly facilitate the process occurring.

Bill: So back to the visceral models one of the interesting things we’ve learned in the basic visceral class is that there’s an atmospheric pressure differential within the thorax. We’ve got minus atmospheres within the upper area so that we don’t have to use muscles to exhale. We can inhale, which is a muscular action, but the exhale comes from the air pressure, so we don’t use any muscles to exhale. Or we don’t need to. However, when we get below the sternum we’re suddenly up at say 20 atmospheres and below the belly button, roughly we’re up to 40 atmospheres. When we see war movies from World War II or the Civil War you’ve got this guy being bayoneted in the belly and all of a sudden his entrails come flying out-and from that moment on he’s trying to stick it back in and then he can’t do it.

Gil: Jack in the box will not go.

Bill: Right. I always wonder about this to tell you the truth-when you get people who have had colon cancer or a colostemy or something like that, they’ve had surgery. Now the pressure differential within the lower part of the thorax is not 40 atmospheres, it’s 1 atmosphere.

Gil: Well, it is true and because I am dealing with older-the cadavers are donated by old folks for the most part-there are often surgeries. And the evidence of that surgery is clearly apparent. Especially in, say, the hysterectomy where the intestines will have been dropped down into the pelvic space. The pressure differential between the pelvic space and the abdominal space no longer has its integrity because the wall has been removed. The intestines will move into the bowl of the pelvis in between the bladder and the rectum where the uterus once was. This pressure thing was also an epiphany to me because as I read through Barral and read about these pressure differentials, it got me thinking about the concept of lift and Rolfing. Jim Oschman wrote a wonderful article theorizing about lift and blood flow and the chi between the kidneys etc. as lift. I’d like to add to that that this pressure differential is a wonderful explanation of lift if you can align the big parts of the body-what is happening is that those pressure differentials are being allowed to express. So that the pelvic space lifts the abdominal space and thorax lifts the gut. The very doming of the liver and spleen into the diaphragm gives keen evidence that in fact the liver is being sucked up into the thorax in the same way. The intestines are being sucked up above the dome of the pelvic organ. It’s as if the lungs are the QEII floating over the ocean, it floats because it must. It’s much more powerful than the effect of gravity when you see the weight of the liver and you see that the so called ligaments-left and right triangular and the coronary ligaments of the liver-are clearly not strong enough to hold up a liver. The liver is not being held up but perhaps steered by those tissues. Certainly not held up, like dangling against gravity off of the dome of the diaphragm. Rather, the liver is being sucked up into the thorax. So, the question is, how can we get a whole body sucked up into the upright rather than suffering the slumped and collapsed postures or held-down postures that so many clients have.

At the same time, though, this real trauma that happens when surgery takes place may be lifesaving and we can be grateful for that-and yet the aftermath in terms of the integrity of those visceral spaces and relationships of organs and their movement, their mobility and motility-when you look at the cadaver you can really see-WOW something happened in here. Things are stuck. How wonderful it would have been for this person, after their surgery and before this lack of movement manifested in greater and greater degrees of adhesions, to have had some kind of gentle attention which could have said to the organs, “You are healed and there’s no need to create this cementing of yourself to each other.”

And yet at the same time I also marvel at the resiliency of the human body which after enduring this kind of surgery, then not having that kind of attention to help facilitate the reintroduction of healthy movement-how people just plug on and on and on and get more and more surgeries. I’ll see cadavers that have had many, many surgeries repeated over time-and it’s just a marvel to me that the person lived until 85 or 90 under those conditions.

Bill: Is there anything else that you want to cover?

Gil: Nerves as structural members. Students often marvel when they come across this white string and they go pluck, pluck, pluck and they say, “What could that be?” And I say, “it’s a nerve.” And they say, “I always thought a nerve was this or that.” And I say, “No, nerves are structural members.” It appears to me that when I look at the body and I go with my model of layers, that certain things are piercing the layers and it’s like wait, that doesn’t belong there. I’m looking for layers and there is something going perpendicular to the layers. And that would be these vessel trees of the heart-the arteries and veins. And also this incredibly complex nesting nerve tree. These sets of trees, the blood vessels and the nervous system, are running sometimes along with the layers but often perpendicular to them in such a way that they seem to my perception to hold the layers up. So it’s kind of like the lost chapter of structural integration. Perhaps partly what we are doing is resettling or helping the nervous system to support the body, as well. I’m not talking about in the Feldenkrais® way, but more like in a pure grunt work structural way. Where these incredibly tough sheathings of the nerve tissue are inter penetrating the layers, and perhaps those layers can settle on each other more freely when those penetrating tendrils of the nerve tree are enabled to freely support the whole structure. That’s one kind of fun thing I like to think about.

Rehabilitating fat-in all my classes I often announce, “I’m here to rehabilitate fat. Fat has gotten a terribly bad rap in our culture.” It is true that obesity is a serious problem in our country, but I’m not talking about obesity per se but rather simply the substance of lipid which we could not live without. Your kidneys are in serious trouble if they are not packed in fat. They’ll drop down into your pelvis. It’s the fat packing that holds them in place. Or the level of expression in the adipose layer just beneath the skin, and how so much information about a person is lying right there. So much of their life choices are expressed in that superficial adipose fat layer. If you have an aversion to it you miss that story-you will not read those chapters of that person’s diary. The action is really at this fascia profundus, this deep layer that wraps the muscles and bones, and you just skip over that. A quarter inch, or 2 inches, or 4 inches of adipose layer where the person is telling this incredibly complex story, which has its own structural integrity that can be supported, or you can help to bring fluidity in that layer or whole body. So I spend a lot of time in my dissections demonstrating that layer. Encouraging students to feel it in their own body and to answer the question-have I been ignoring this layer in my excitement to get to the tough stuff that I can really pull and lean on and feel it move? Well perhaps at the end of the day you don’t see the change you are looking for because you have skipped the layer where it’s happening. At the superficial layer. That’s a thought. I find that people who are revolted by fat have a tendency to not spend so much time there. Or people who avoid their own emotional layer as well. I do feel that the superficial layer is a very charged layer. It can have many, many different qualities as you go from cadaver to cadaver. It’s an incredibly rich and fascinating place. I hope to help people perceive it as a thing of beauty, something to be appreciated, acknowledged and understood. It’s another level where transformation can take place, that can be built into your skill set.

I went looking for kidney beans when I first started doing dissection. There’s supposed to be this kidney in there shaped like a bean. It’s brown and it’s sitting in there like they draw in Netter. I never found it. I always found this big fat yellow fish that’s settled into the shape of the posterior wall of the abdominal space. Then you have to pluck the kidney out of it. That sub-psorosal fascia which envelops the kidney-it’s that whole structure that’s keeping the kidney in its position. I have come across emaciated cadavers where the kidney is literally dangling there like a kidney bean and the person had starved and there wasn’t a drop of fat in them. You can see what an incredible structural deficit it is to be missing that fat.

Bill: How dead are these cadavers usually?

Gil: I used to say they were invariably 6 to 12 months since the donor had died. But I recently worked on some cadavers that were very new. I’m talking nine days or something. They had been flown in to me. It creates a whole different set of perceptions to work with a cadaver in which, frankly, the tissue hasn’t been fixed. This is another style of dissection. I know there are some videos which demonstrate the structures on an unembalmed dead body-which is to say, not cadavers but just dead bodies, unembalmed tissues. Having worked on numerous cadavers now where the tissue wasn’t fixed-the embalming agents were not well circulated due to problems in circulation that the person experienced in life-working on those types of tissues can be quite a different experience. The textures are different and I don’t know if you want to say closer to the living, but in some way they are. Although that can make it even harder to dissect – when the tissues are a little better fixed it’s easier to differentiate them because they are that much more abstracted from their original textures-which are all joined. Feel your flesh. It’s like a bag of water.

Bill: For people who are going to take your course in the foreseeable future do you recommend that they look at some of these dissection videos that are circulating these days?

Gil: Many of my students do and, I’m almost embarrassed to say, I haven’t looked at a single one myself. But I must and I will put it on my agenda to look at them and see whether I could recommend any or not. Students have told me that there are some out there that are quite excellent, and some that are really bad as well.

Bill: Topic for the next anatomy issue-maybe you would write a review of the anatomy videos.

Gil: Yeah, that’s a good idea.