Student: Why was there a buildup or an over-buildup, like a mass of muscle?

IR: Let me explain to you that this is the basic material that you will be working as a Rolfer. My question is, what is this mass?

Student: It’s deteriorated connective tissue that has lost its tone and doesn’t have a good blood supply; and it isn’t the muscle itself, it’s the connective tissue.

IR: Well, what you’ve said is to the point. It’s more to the point than what else has been said around here. But what has happened is the deterioration of the patterning of the muscles; one fiber gets stuck to the other and a third gets stuck to another; and as this happens, fluid enters in and can’t get out again. So you have this whole mass of stuck something with the fluid trapped in it. Little by little the fluid becomes less fluid and thicker and less differentiated, and by and by you have that typical mass. Now what Jan says is true, you see as the one muscle fiber glues itself to its neighbor it is pulled out of its space, then you get what Jan is talking about the lack in the neighboring space. Your job is to take the glue out of that stuff so that the muscle fiber goes back to the space where it belongs.

Jan Sultan: When you get peaks-and-valleys situations, the valleys are just as thick as the peaks are.

IR: Yes, they’re just as stuck, but lacking the material that wandered over to the peak.

Now, this is a random body. We do a lot of talking about random bodies – what are we talking about? You see again we are back to the semantics trip. When we are talking about random bodies, we mean just what we’ve been discussing here, that this that and the other muscle fiber and muscle tissue is pulled out of place, and therefore it is invested with fluid; or the fluid is gone out, one of the two. In either direction the tone of the tissue is no longer normal. And because the tone of that tissue is no longer normal, the chemistry of the tissue is no longer optimal for its job- no matter what its job is.

Jan Sultan: One thing you see, mostly in women, is all this fluid below the waist. But correspondingly, usually the top half of the body is too dry.

IR: It’s perfectly true. The reason it happens in women and not in men is that literally the male hormones give a denser tone to tissue and the women’s hormones give a softer-toned tissue and the tissue is so soft that the fluid just goes down, in addition to which you inevitably have an anteriority of the fourth and the fifth lumbars and possibly the sacrum. See, there is no support coming from below, so the fluid flows down in that soft tissue. But you see the physiological fact of the matter is that women are not men and men are not women. Some of you haven’t found that one out.

[general laughter]

There is a difference in every cell of those bodies, there is a difference in tone, there is a difference probably in chemicals that make the tone, etc., etc.

Student: What is tone?

[general laughter]

IR: Save it! It’s a good question, but not right now. [Ask it in] two weeks from now. It’s a question that comes up over and over again.

Do you want to lead further with your question, Norm?

Norm: No, but I have another observation that I want to share:

IR: Let’s hear it.

Norm: I had a new model who came in, and I was really quite surprised at the difference of his tissue compared to the people I had been working with.

IR: Whom had you been working with, other men?

Norm: Yes, other men.

IR: If you really want to get an idea of the differences in tissue, put your hand in little Takashi, where you get this beautiful almost we would call it a childish tissue, it’s so homogeneous. Children’s tissues, unless they are way out with some illness or some deterioration of the collagen tissue, unless they have a disease of the collagen tissue, their tissue tends to be just homogeneous, like a soft rubber mat. The individual muscles have not had time – or they haven’t the hormonal quality, I don’t know which – to form the differentiation that you get as you get the kid going on into 14 and 15 and you get the kid going on and he’s out playing baseball and basketball and fighting with his peers and so forth, it’s only then that you get that differentiation into the soft fibers and the hard fibers.

And why Takashi didn’t go through that phase, I’m not sure that I know. My own guess is that differentiation comes as the adrenals take on a more active role in the body, which is a part of the puberty change.

This was an important discussion. But what I fail to understand is why you fail to understand that this is the essence of the problem that we are dealing with in Rolfing; we talked about it as though it was an extraneous something, and it isn’t – it’s the whole trip. You get those muscle masses differentiating, doing their stuff, separating fiber from fiber and you’ve got the Rolfing job well on its way. After that all that you have to do is to see to it that these things relate in terms of length and in terms of spatial position, to the pattern which is the anatomical pattern. Anybody have any further comment on this?

Roger: It seems to me you can rationalize that on a broader scale, too: as the teres is built up, the rhomboids are going to be straining…

IR: There’s no question about that. As every muscle in the body – I think you al know this – every muscle in the body work; not by virtue of its own work but by virtue of its work in terms of balance with its antagonist. So that as you get deterioration either by hardening or by softening of one muscle, you necessarily get an effect on the other.

You see, where you make your mistake is asking, “What’s the mate of this?”, because if you answer yourself you will never see what the involvement is. You see, your answer stops your seeing, stops your looking.

Student: This leads me to the question a w to why delve so deeply in this study of anatomy and fascia…

IR: Because you have to. You have to in order to be convincing to the people who are the top dogs in this culture.

Student: In terms of dealing with the flesh, that is not the essence of this…?

IR: It’s not the essence of Rolfing. No indeed, it isn’t. In the old, old, days, I thought this could be done without [the study of anatomy]. But you see, it can’t really, because of the assumptions that are in the minds, as I say, of the top dogs of the culture. You have to know how to convince them that you know what you are talking about. Otherwise we are all going to be sunk. You can’t just go off on your own trip. Trips aren’t individual trips, they’re cultural trips. They’re systems trips, of which we are only one member; there a number of members in a system, and we have to carry our own weight and our own weight demands information of this sort.

Student: Does anatomy function like the recipe, as kind of a guidepost?

IR: It helps you understand the recipe. But seeing the need of the body is something different than understanding the recipe.

Student I went into something and my experience was total confusion; when I touch

IR: That’s alright, this is teaching Rolfing: total confusion [general laughter]. It’s also dealing with the essence of Rolfing, which is total confusion that has to made into order. See, what you are simply saying is that you are in the situation of confusion and what you have to get out of it is order. Now this is my entire sermon not only today but every day: the job of Rolfing is creating order.

…….

[after a comment comparing IR to God]:

IR: No, Ida Rolf is not in a class with God, she’s only the handmaid.

…….

Let’s go on into the consideration of [how] we got where we are today and where we got today, is the fact the models and ourselves are coming in for fourth hour work.

I’d like to hear from some of you people a review of what we have established so far, a review of what were the assumptions that we start with. In other words, I would like to get order in these past six days. Any ideas? Don’t look at me like that, I might call on you…

Student: The first three hours is like the beginning of the ten hours. Bringing this person along through the ten hours to a better relationship to gravity and his environment. The first three hours are superficially-oriented, making space for the work that we are going to start to get into in the fourth hour.

IR: Well, you sort of got into that work in the third hour.

Student: Right, on the quadratus.

IR: Yeah, right.

Student: The importance in the third hour especially is how you unwrap the superficial layers to make available getting into the deeper layers, and especially in working above and below the area that you are going to want to get into in depth.

IR: Why do you do that?

Student: Just to make that space available for that inner layer.

IR: That’s right, to make the space available. But I’d like to get a little expansion on that idea. You’re absolutely right, that’s the consolidated label, but I’d like to get a little expansion on that idea. Can you?

Student: I don’t know exactly what you’re…

IR: I know. .. we are developing this. Roger, could you?

Roger: You are taking what’s binding the shoulder girdle to the pelvis, almost more than – well, there is also what is binding the bottom of the rib cage to the pelvis…

IR: What is the actual technique of the first hour? When you look at it in terms of its meaning?

Student: Lifting the thorax off the pelvis.

IR: You do more than that. That’s the first thing you do. Keep going.

Student: Freeing the pelvis from above and below.

IR: “Freeing the pelvis from above and below.” What is the goal of the first hour?

[general silence]

……

Student: Turning the pelvis under?

Student: Mobilizing.

IR: Yes, but that’s a horrible way to express it…

Student: Horizontalizing.

IR: Horizontalizing the pelvis. Horizontalizing the pelvis, is the goal of the first hour, of the second hour, of the third hour, of the four hour, the fifth, sixth and seventh hours, the eighth, ninth, and tenth. And that isn’t turning the pelvis under.

Why do you have so much trouble with words? You’re not that dumb. But you get yourself balled up in inadequate words. I wish you would look at this … have you been to Erhard’s?

Student: No.

IR: Go. Maybe you will find out why you have this compulsion, when there are two words available, to take the poorer one….

[general laughter]

IR: It is a compulsion; it is a compulsion.

Your goal in the ordering of the body is to horizontalize the pelvis. And if you’ve really got the pelvis horizontalized, everything else will fall into place. This is the key. Now you should know – whether you do or not, I don’t know – but you should know that this idea was not invented for the sake of Rolfers. All manipulative schools recognize the fact that the key to the body is in the pelvis, but all manipulative schools do not recognize the fact that the pelvis has to be horizontalized in order for it to be able to work in the field of gravity.

This is where you go a long step ahead of chiropractic, osteopathy, naturopathy, all the rest of them. Those boys and girls feel that if they can get movement in the body, they’ve got it made. But this is not so. In order to maintain movements, in order to get fine, sophisticated movements, you have to have a pelvis which is horizontal.

And if you have a pelvis that is really horizontal, the chance that you’ll have a rotation in that pelvis is very slender. You will have taken out the rotation in the course of your horizontalizing that pelvis.

Now, I would like to be able to feel that in the mind of every one of you, as you look at a body, the first thing you look at, as when you come up to a strange door, and you have a key in your hand that your buddy has said here’s a key to my apartment. What do you look for, you look for where the lock is, where you are going to insert the key, what kind of a situation you’re probably going to get into with that key – this is one of these old locks that have been on there for 100 years and its just an old sort of situation, if the lock is dropped maybe you can’t get your key in, I mean this is what you are thinking of as you go to a strange door. And as you go to a strange individual you are thinking that the keyhole to establish order is that pelvis. This is where you must bring about your change if you are going to establish a major degree of order in that body. So then how do you start? Do you want to look at that, Noel?

Student: In the first hour the work is superficial. The work is above and below the pelvis.

IR: Why?

Student: You work above because of the major weight units compressing or…

IR: It’s more than the major weight units, it’s the compression of the body which has occurred not necessarily exclusively by weight but by the way the individual has used his body since he’s been a child. And if he is an aggressive little personality, he started very, very young in demonstrating to the whole world that even though he was a kid eight years old and rather small he could compete with the 15-year olds and the 25-year olds who were twice his size. And this was his psychological set and you see that’s more than just a weight. This is “grrr” he’s going to do it stuff.

Student: There are a lot of men in the culture who also have been brought up with that famous exercise called a sit-up.

IR: Oh, I know. You haven’t heard me talk about that? You’ve missed a lot. I know all about that.

Student: That is just knitting that thorax on to the pelvis…

IR: It’s doing worse than that. It isn’t knitting it on, it’s dragging it on. It’s pulling it down, it’s compressing it in, it’s doing all kinds of things; it’s shortening the spine, it’s shortening the recti abdominis, etc. It isn’t just knitting it, I wouldn’t object to it if it was knitting.

This will come up more extensively, when we get into abdominal work. But you see, this is what the object of this exercise is, to loosen some of that compression that has happened by virtue of the fact, probably, that that young person, in trying to express himself in that older, bigger culture, has put every bit of pressure and energy into it. If, on the other hand, the guy is not an aggressive type, he will have done better. If he’s just an easygoing type you will find that his muscles are in much better balance. But if he started in life as a competitive member of a family, he started to wreck himself in his very early days.

This is an interesting concept. And you can see how far it reaches, and you can see how much it gives you in terms of an understanding of the individuals of a culture. You can tell looking at them what you are going to find. You can tell in the way they use their eyes: are they seeing with their eyes, or are they grabbing with their eyes?

What I’m trying to do for you is to make you recognize how unitary is a body. I say to you, you can see this with their eyes what you are going to find down in their hips and down in their pelvis and so forth. You can, of course. And you see this question that Jan brought up about the fluids sinking in the soft tissues. You see, if you get a really competitive woman, you won’t have that.

Now, if you get an aggressive type he’s going to have exerted himself through his arms … by dragging us all in and tying it into the trunk and shortening the trunk. He does this through the recti, but he does it through the lumbar fascia even more, and through the spinae erector groups. Now I hope that you are following me in a visualization pattern and not just hearing my words. And this is where you start to get length in that body, to lift the thorax off the pelvis. Because the shorter that body gets, the more the abdominal contents are forced out.