The Rolfing Experience: Integration in the Gravity Field

Author
Translator
Pages: 25-26
Year: 2006
Dr. Ida Rolf Institute

Structural Integration: The Journal of the Rolf Institute – March 2006 – Vol 34 – Nº 01

Volume: 34

It happened more than once: A group of bright, creative people who were drawn to leave behind other careers to come and learn structural integration, and who were struggling to attain fluency in anatomy, physiology, biology and other complicated sciences, would fall silent, noticing that Ida Rolf was studying them, and she would firmly remind them, “What we’re doing here is – we’re trying to learn to see.” It was a calm, yet urgent reminder of context, and of our individual share of responsibility for the work. Betsy Sise has given us a book that’s not only quite readable and informative, but is also a reminder of the richness and variety of the individual energies that came together to form the foundations of the work we share. It’s a great fund of information for clients, for potential students and for anyone who wants to know about Rolling, but most of all, I think it’s an important book for us, the practitioners who are still trying to learn to see.

The writing is a lot like Sise herself: interesting, warm, bright, idiosyncratic and evocative of new ways of thinking. She’s also quite thorough; the material covers basic Rolling theory and the Ten Series, the experience of the work from both theoretical and personal angles, what’s involved in training to be a Rolfer, some research, and her reflections on those aspects of the work – including the spiritual – that have been of great consequence for her personally. She has an easy way of ranging back and forth between the specific and the general, the clinical and the anecdotal, finally establishing a fluid balance that contains contrasting elements in a manner that respects all of them. She doesn’t shy away from technical explanations of the structural and functional components of the work, and then grounds and illustrates complex ideas by offering case examples and clients’ reports.

Acknowledging a long-term interest in “the mind-body connection,” Sise weaves together threads from the works of Rolfers Louis Schultz and Rosemary Feitis, and scientists Candace Pert, Mae Wan Ho, and Jim Oschman to portray some of the processes underlying what we and our clients experience with Rolling. I was particularly interested that she cited early Rolfer Ron Kirkby’s essay proposing “tensegrity” (tensional integrity) in support of Dr. Rolf’s statement that, “Gravity lifts the body up,” noting his general statement:

“The whole structure can stand on its own because it represents a series of vector equilibria…[and] is stable because every force is balanced by an opposing force” and then links that to Ho’s microscopic view:

“…The entire cell is mechanically and electrically interconnected in a ‘solid state’ or ‘tensegrity system’, “adding, “The entire cell acts as a coherent whole…it’s ‘solid state’ of membrane, skeleton, cytoskeleton, microtrabecular lattice and nuclear scaffold, form an interconnected ‘tensegrity system,’ that always deforms or changes as a whole when local stresses and strains are experienced.”

I found Sise’s use of quotations helpful in moving me back and forth from macro-view to micro, providing contrast and depth, and adding color and humor (they range from Joseph Chilton Pearce and Alfred Korzybski to Henry Miller, Walt Whitman and Steve Martin).

While the book is a rich mixture of instructive theory, personal reflections and speculations about how Rolling works, for me its most provocative segments are those derived from interviews with four veteran Rolling teachers: the late Peter Melchior (the first instructor Rolf chose), Emmett Hutchins, Jan Sultan, and Tom Wing. These are bright, thoughtful men who found themselves drawn to Rolf’s work, and ever since have worked to understand and teach it clearer and more effectively. The following are excerpted from their replies to Sise’s question, “What was the most profound and lasting concept, introduced by Dr. Rolf, that captivated you?”

Peter: “The idea that the situation could be changed! She said flat out: ‘There’s no situation in the human body that I’ve ever seen that hasn’t been able to be affected in some way.’ As far as I was concerned, you got issued a body and that was it, and if you didn’t like it, too bad. That’s what changed for me in my first session of Rolfing. ‘Oh my God, this is a lot more mutable than that. This is a whole different thing,’ I thought.”

Emmett: “The ‘Line’ – that’s where the weightlessness comes from… It’s just the very basic fact that Mother Earth cannot lift me up in the air any harder than I am willing to give weight to her. You become weightless because you give it all up. You put it all down. If you throw it all down you don’t feel it anymore, because then it is supported by the earth. I’m still trying to get all my weight into the earth. The morel do that, and the better my feet get, the more I get rid of the scar tissue from the early traumas in my life.”

Jan: “First, it was the impact on my structure – the initial opening of my lungs; and then I read her book[let] Structural Integration: Gravity and the Unexplored Factor in a More Human Use of Human Beings… and gravity made sense because I was a builder; if you don’t get things stacked they are not stable. The whole idea that people could change and grow was suddenly thrust into our awareness… That is a monstrous paradigm change. Rolf stepped right into the middle of that with her technique and people appropriated it right and left to grow in whatever ways they might have wanted to. She said all these things in the body are in relationship. You can’t affect one without affecting everything else, so a comprehensive approach was called for.”

Tom: “I started clearing stuff out of my lungs – I had twenty years of chronic bronchitis and pneumonia before that. When it started clearing and I started being able to breathe for the first time, oh my God the lung surface was so expanded that I was getting air onto the surfaces of the lung I hadn’t gotten air onto for decades. I was fascinated. Things were different. Things were different in my body, and this was clearing out and there was great hope in it… Change was possible… If you wanted to get Ida activated, all you had to do was say to her… ‘Well, Dr. Rolf, there’s nothing you can do about that.’ And she’d go, ‘Humph! You can always do something about anything.’ ”

Whatever their intellectual focus, it’s obvious that it was the personal experience that got these four guys’ attention. Rolf well knew that facts have the power to ground abstractions, and immediate physical experience is an unambiguous fact.

For me as a practitioner, a good deal of this book’s significance lies in the way Sise cites the four teachers’ views in regard to diverse subjects. Each has a different focus, shaped, naturally, by his background, education, personal experience, psychology, interests and so on, and we’re given a good look at how they were affected by Rolf, and how they, in turn, affected Rolfing. After all, Rolf charged the faculty not only with improving the understanding and teaching of the work, but also with “evolving” it. No matter how much agreement there was on basic principles, each taught with different emphases (I can promise you that the faculty meetings I attended were anything but quietly meditative gatherings), and inevitably shaped Rolfing as their students went on to enter membership and practice. Here, thanks to Sise’s extensive interviews, we get a feeling not only for what Rolfing means to these four, but also for the way they have defined and expressed the work.

Over the years, there have been grumblings about the faculty growing distant from the membership, not being very receptive to questions about how its vision of the work was evolving or how the teaching was changing. The training has changed a lot over time, and there will probably always be disagreements over those revisions. Reading these teachers’ words, I found myself recalling what a rare presence Rolf Rolf was, and speculating about how difficult it is to find a balance between respect for our foundations and the knowledge, discipline and openness to experiment with “improving” the work. Is there really such a thing as “Classic Rolfing”? I believe Sise has made a truly valuable contribution by sharing with us both the consistency of their loyalty to Rolf and the private differences they discovered and worked to resolve. They are at least of historical interest, and might be found instructive as we all seek our individual paths in the work.

I suggest that the stories about Rolf and the kinds of thought processes her work provoked in Melchior, Hutchins, Sultan and Wing have not only been an important of part of the quality of their teaching, but should also somehow remain part of our teaching. Even if some of her science is now outdated, Rolf was a force that showed many of us how limited our vision and understanding were. There is value in that tradition, and this book demonstrates it.

Some of what Sise presents will probably not suit everyone. The research she cites is dated, and some of it is not widely accepted, but it does help emphasize the need for research, which the Rolf Institute is now moving to accomplish. Sise’s spiritual focus and the metaphysical ideas she enjoys will not be everyone’s cup of tea, either, but when hasn’t that been true in our motley community?

Having said all this, I want to emphasize that the book contains a lot of stuff I didn’t know and it has stimulated new ways of seeing and thinking that I’ve already found useful in my practice. The way Sise describes her work indicates what a fine Rolfer she is. I’ll be very surprised if many readers in the general public aren’t spurred to beat a path to her door – and perhaps to ours.

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