Craig Ellis: Should differing approaches to SI be recognized and honored? Should there be development of communication and exchange between schools? And, how might that happen?

Ed Maupin: My dream has always been along the lines of a university. This is a physical body of knowledge, and within it there are certain inevitable tensions. Like fix-it versus integration, like stay with the recipe or add other techniques. There are inherent dialogue points in any body of knowledge. Up until this point there has never been a central forum, there has never been a main university building to bring these departments together. So my first dream is for something to bring us into dialogue. I think this conference is a wonderful start.

IASI is not at this point serving the function of bringing schools together for that dialogueue. It is not becoming a university, though I do strongly support what it is becoming.

I’ve been sitting outside the Rolf Institute door since 1971. First as a rebel Rolfer that wouldn’t join – I’m sorry about that – then as a repentant Rolfer coming for a six-day with Emmett and Peter in 1988, to have my line evaluated and to join because I had promised Ida I would nine years before. And of course something happened and there wasn’t a Rolf Institute to join. But I’ve been waiting outside because I always thought the Rolf Institute needed a loyal opposition, and then after the split took place someone to be outside of both, and looking at it all.

So I’ve been waiting with my little school program for the Rolf Institute to drop its monopoly relationship with the Rolf Institute school, because that’s at the center of your lawyer difficulty about the service mark; your membership organization is not representing more than one school. There is a small group of faculty that are purporting to be the authentic transmitters of Dr. Rolf’s vision and use her name. This is like a monopoly and it’s always seemed to me a bit preposterous.

I’ve been waiting for someone to wake up and say that Ida Rolf, in her articles of transmission, specified that you are to set up an umbrella organization to certify several different schools. And that certifying of schools – she wanted there to be different schools – was never done and still needs to be done. Because Rolfing is not being fully represented by even the excellent work of the Rolf Institute. There are other people that have been developing curricula over the years with different emphases and these need to be umbrella’s under Ida’s original organization. I’m here waiting to join.

Shirley Norwood: In this one instance on this question, I feel empowered to speak for Hellerwork. What the Hellerwork community wanted me to say to you all is that we really love you, and we do want to play well with others. I would like to acknowledge Joseph because I feel like that from him, all of us Hellerworkers were inoculated or vaccinated from the beginning with a love, respect, appreciation and honor for Ida and all that she did and all that she taught. It is such a joy and a privilege and an honor to be in a group like this and share with each other.

Judith Aston: This question about philosophies depends on what part of the elephant you are looking at. It is all about interpretation. Have we ever been in one place and all described the event to someone else and had it be the same? It’s about who we are in our history that creates the difference, but that it could be complementary is, I think, what we are looking for.

I remember Dr. Rolf talking to me about the recipe and that she wanted people to do it for five years because it was a teaching tool. She wanted them to do it at least five years before they started making variations because not only was it a teaching tool but within it was the truth of the work and they would be able to answer their own questions if they stuck with it. If they started changing it too soon and went from point A to point Z and back to C, they didn’t have the understanding to develop the answers to their questions that would come.

Did Dr. Rolf every Rolf you with the recipe? I received all 20 sessions from Ida, both of my ten-session series and then advanced work with her and many sessions after that. As I started to develop my form of bodywork I was trying it out on her. She gave me the opportunity to work with her in Florida, Boulder, New Jersey, and Big Sur and she liked it. It wasn’t a recipe. She didn’t sit up and scold me and say, “You shouldn’t be doing that.”

Michael Murphy: I see IASI as this idea of something bigger that can happen. I look at this organization that, we have started and I think about the work I do, because it’s the way I relate to the world. When someone comes in to me and says they want some help, I look at where they are the most available, identify the layer that’s most available, and go to that layer and add intention, energy, direction, and love, and we get that layer to change. When I look at our profession, the same thing is happening. What we see here is that there is a particular layer in our Rolfing world, SI world, and there is a problem and it’s at an organizational level. And IASI has come along and said okay, we’ll add intention, energy, love, and a little direction to this organizational level and we’ll get this whole profession to shift. To me, the fact that we are sitting here is a testament that this is already happening. We’re only at the first hours, we only just learned to breathe with this, we have to learn how to walk with it next, and we have to learn how to move with it. I think all our differences can be resolved.

David Davis: One of the things I remember Dr. Rolf saying continuously is that this body of work, and what we do, and who we are, are educators. And sometimes the educational part falls into the background because I do manipulation and I do it well. And part of what we are doing is educating people into, shall we say, occupying a new space. Not just a new way of being, but how to come to a new perception about who we are and how we move through life and this world. And life is short. So, I just note that part of educational processes includes recreation. And this meeting is one of our recreational openings and opportunities. And so far we are playing pretty well together, and I like it. The other part of our job is that we have an opportunity to do a good job on educating the public or for that matter to work on the body politic. I just note that part of our job is to educate the public, and to the degree that we are fuzzy about who we are that we have slushy areas about “I’m this but I’m not that,” or “this work is this but it’s not that” – then we delude ourselves. I just want to add one thing. Dr. Rolf use to say that if you can say the right word at the right time to make that change happen, that too is Rolfing. So movement education among other things falls into exactly the same parameters and I dare say that we all have, in terms of this larger process, common problems and prospects.

Sharon Wheeler-Hancoff: I want to speak to the different ideas of the organizations from the perspective of being a practitioner. When I look at all the different resources for finding out about Dr. Rolf’s teaching, they are in different schools. It is important to me as a practitioner to be able to access those people. I don’t care what they say they are. I want to study wits whom I want to study with. My suggestion to the schools is that we find a way for students to pass back and forth between them Once that is accomplished, the rest won’t matter.

Cosper Scafidi: We have here the representatives of six different organizations That’s pretty amazing, if you think about it, in our history. We now have IASI, which is really about speaking to practitioners. When we get together as practitioners it becomes very clear to me that Ida Rolf lives At the organizational level we haven’t beer connected. In that lack of connection comes misunderstandings, misinterpretations and no coherence. As a board member of the Rolf Institute I would like to suggest that we somehow find a way to start connecting our organizations and create a larger conversation on how to manage and grow our organizations at that level. So we car start having these uncomfortable conversations in an atmosphere of respect. It is time to move forward. It’s true that we haven’ always played well together, but it’s time to play well for the benefit of our whole field. People are looking to us to put this together and I would offer to help bring that about if there is interest between the other organizations.

Cathy Ulrich: One of my question,, around the schools is I actually just completed serving on the board of a commission on massage therapy accreditation. Ii was a very interesting process and I learned a great deal about accreditation. I wonder what the schools are looking at in that regard. I think accreditation lends quite a bit of credibility.

Tessy Brungardt: The Rolf Institute is now moving ahead toward accreditation. We are in the process of doing that. It’shuge task. We are a trade school. The accrediting body is COMTA. There are several different national certification board; for schools of this type. We selected that one and we are moving it ahead after talking about it for ten years. We are moving ahead as a school to do this. I also agree that this is the way to go in the future. It’s going to become required in order for our people to practice in different states, that they come from certified schools.

Joseph Heller: I wanted to speak about accreditation because I went to the trouble of getting Hellerwork accredited and it was a huge amount of effort; written materials, trying to define procedures, and fit into their templates. It cost a huge amount of money, and it became mostly about money. They wanted money for everything. Changing the course title, changing the location; anything that you wanted to do required money. We found it to be of fairly little value in terms of either enrollments or recognition. After four years of being accredited, we decided not to continue. That is not to say that I don’t think it’s coming. I do think it’s coming. And I have a daring proposal. Instead of trying to fit through their hoops, why don’t we here form the accrediting body for structural integration schools, and stop jumping through their hoops.

Ed Maupin: I wanted to say that COMTA – I was part of this process – grew out of an attempt of the AMTA Council of Schools to make an accreditation body for massage schools. So it is possible, there is a precedent there.

Siana Goodwin: What about mentorship programs for graduates of other SI trainings?

Ed Maupin: A person approached me for a mentorship from Florida to spend three days with me. I contracted to spend a certain number of hours. It was very rich for both of us. She has organized other SI practitioners in Florida for me to go there and do similar material. Mentorship is something the mentees seek out. It needs to be described as a possibility. I’ve noticed it’s the high initiative students that seek out and grab those opportunities. The sit back and be fed students never seem to think of it.

Siana Goodwin: What direction do you see for the development of the practice and art of structural integration? How do you envision the work changing from your experience of changes that have happened in the past?

Tessy Brungardt: That is the question, what is structural integration? Each of us has learned a Ten-Series, learned a series of relationships in structure, and how to interact with it. Where does the work go? How you develop the work is truly an individual process. What are the defining limits? It’s very broad; there is the Ten-Series and all the other things that we do that are about integrating human beings for their higher potential. This is what we are after, really. We are all creating this together while somehow trying to stay true to the ideas of our founder. It’s more about the conversation, how broad is our conversation. Where are the limits to it? I don’t have a place we are going; it’s more about how we converse about it with ourselves.

Ed Maupin: Clearly one of the evolutions I have observed is a greater tactfulness. From what I’ve learned, the three things that need to be evolved are a better grasp of movement, touch, and image. I think all those things have evolved in my work, and in everybody else’s. Part of the development is easier access to deeper levels of intention and seeing.

David Davis: Each one of us came to this work for our own reasons. For me it was excruciating neck and back pain from a misspent youth and a couple of car accidents. What was begun is a process of personal evolution. I have been receiving this work for 31 years and practicing for 28. What I notice is that this work always takes me to the next plateau. The body of the work itself is an invitation to expand our parameters of knowledge, both of self and the body, as well as who we are as human beings. It’s always making new demands on me.

For myself, it’s a stairway toward my larger spiritual evolution as well. At the straight physical level, I have my own learning curve and every month or so I hit a new plateau – something that I never thought of before. I was incapable of thinking of that. I did not have that body of knowledge in this body. As this body evolves, I like to think that part of what we are doing is reclaiming our humanity, through this work as individuals, and as a larger collective.

Louis Schultz: I once told Dr. Rolf that I was not committed to her, I was not committed to the Institute, but I was committed to the work. Being committed to the work, therefore I was committed to the Institute, and therefore I was committed to her. She nodded and said that was the way it should be. That kept me going – my commitment to the work – through splits, through new friendships, through loss of friendships, through a very turbulent 30 years, until last year I crashed. Coming out of the hospital after seven months unconscious I started to come back to what is going on with life in general and I am so delighted with this meeting. I was so happy to come. This communication has always been my thing. We need communication, and I see we are having communication at this meeting and I am very happy.

Richard Rossiter: I am still around, and where I come from is where 98 percent of the U.S. is. If we are going to get this stuff out there we have to put it in some form that they can identify with. That’s probably where I come from and what I see the most is they can go on to Rolfing if they get that this stuff works. If they get that there won’t be a problem and that is why I made my decision to basically shut my practice to get in front of more people. It wasn’t that I was trying to do it against anybody, but more I was trying to get the idea out there that there is an easier way. Ida picked the medium, it’s connective tissue, but bringing it to the masses is what we are about. It’s not just having these meetings here, or just talking about it. We need to be able bring it down a bit. I keep going back to fix-it. I’m a fix-it person, I am a Rolfer, but I am a fix-it person and I think that we have to give that end of the spectrum more time and effort. That way ‘we can give them all ten.

Eric Jacobson: A lot of people have spiritual experiences from Rolfing. A lot of Rolfers get involved in spiritual traditions, often meditation and many other things. There is clearly a connection. How can we learn to talk about the spirituality of Rolfing in a way that is not sectarian or psychobabble but really starts to get at this phenomenology of spiritual experience? We are special in that way.

Nicholas French: In connection with Eric’s suggestion I’m getting a stronger and stronger feeling that this could be the beginning of something big. Because this is an important beginning, I would ask if we could try to find some way to define the work that is not called bodywork, and it’s not simply somatics either; those are only portions of it. It’s part of owning it. Dr. Rolf talked about when you touch the body you touch all the levels and I would like to find a way to open it up to that consciousness that can then be conveyed to the public.

David Davis: Part of what’s happening this weekend is that we are starting to expand the horizons of how we look at this work from the most grounded thing, which includes repair work. If somebody comes to my office with a sprained ankle and asks if I can fix it, I say, “Sure, I can do that.” It’s a good place to start; that’s what gets people in the door. If it leads to a larger process, that’s great. If it’s just a fix-it scenario with that person, if I really do a good job, my experience is I touch their life, not just a twisted ankle. That is in the power of each of us, how we touch everybody. How we posture, how we pattern ourselves to move through the world really makes a difference for ourselves and everybody we work with.

Norman Holler: Touch somebody and it opens up a consciousness, and that consciousness is the window, the conduit for the spirit to come through and reside in the body. I’m a Rolfer, not to fix things, but I believe and trust that what I do allows people to experience themselves in a better way, a greater way. How that manifests is not something that I can direct but it’s for them to experience. That is where I would like to see the spirit of Rolfing going.

Jaison Kayn: I would like to put a little different slant on this because I know that fixing things is important and practical. Sometimes somebody calls me and asks what I do. I’m about to go through this list of details of what I can do, and I just say: “I seek to make room in your body for who you are.” That changes the conversation entirely. I have a bigger audience then because they get excited. It’s not about their ankle or this or that, all of a sudden we are talking about something else. We have power between us that says, “I want to know more.” I hope we don’t reduce ourselves to our audience totally. Ida never did. She did in some ways accommodate, but a lot of the world revolved around her and I respected that.

Siana Goodwin: A number of years ago I was doing research about the- development of the work and Dr. Rolf. She taught her initial work through chiropractors and osteopaths, but nobody took it up as a body of work. Everybody took it up as just a cool thing to do, or if you couldn’t figure it out, send them to Ida Rolf and she would fix it. The group of people who first took up Rolfing as a profession, as a thing in itself, was a group of spiritual seekers in Los Angeles. It was because of that orientation that they really saw the potential of this work was beyond fix-it work. I do want to support Richard; that is the pathway in for a lot of people. Dr. Rolf said that nothing would raise your consciousness more than freedom from pain.

Jaison Kayn: I remember the words of the master on the fix-it issue, “We don’t fix things, we integrate. Now, fix those feet.”

Joseph Heller: I would like to offer a little contrary view of our future. I’m interested in being accepted and recognized by the system. But there is another part of me that thinks it’s not about to happen very soon because we are anti-system. What we really need to do is change the system, not fit into the system.