Structural Integration: Our work as Rolfers is to shape the body, but what is the body? Many spiritual traditions lead us to understand that our bodies are much different from our ordinary reified conception of “body.” From the perspective of where your work has led you, how do you view/ define body and how has that affected how you work with bodies?

Will Johnson: Instead of paying much attention to intellectual classifications of body (physical, emotional, energetic, mental, causal, etheric, etc.), as helpful as these classifications can be in pointing to different aspects of our embodied self, 1 prefer simply to focus on the direct experience of the body: the lived, felt, palpable, vibratory, throbbing, quivery, spacious, compacted flux of tactile stuff whose location, and point of emanation, can be traced to what my eyes recognize as my physical body. The felt awareness of the entire body as a constantly changing tactile presence is the wild and wonderful path of practice that Rolfing” launched me on.

For me, Rolfing was a very direct introduction to the world of tactile sensations-both gross and subtle. On the gross level, there were the strong and intense sensations of being Rolfed. But through that work, and in its aftermath, I started to become aware of a much subtler level of sensations that I’d never before felt, and I think everyone knows what I’m referring to here: the minute, pin-prickly, tingly, little blips of tactile stuff (the current of the life force?) that we feel coursing through our body, probably in some parts more than others. Now, even though these individual sensations are unbelievably small in size and are vibrating or oscillating at almost unimaginably rapid rates of vibratory frequency, they can still be distinctly felt. If, that is (and this is a big if), we surrender to their presence, and I have since come to the belief that the source of all existential pain in the body can be traced to our fearful resistance to feel the literally sensational presence of the body.

Where things started getting really interesting was when 1 began to realize that, if I give myself permission to do two things simultaneously – 1) to surrender to balance and 2) to feel the feeling, the sensation, in every little part, every little nook and cranny, indeed in every little cell of the body – then my sense of self would be altered quite radically, and I liked it there. And the only place where I was able to find descriptions of these kinds of very open, very dissolved, and yet very present and grounded embodied states was in the spiritual literatures. Rumi, for example, was taught the doctrine of ma’iyya by his father who himself was an accomplished mystic. Ma’iyya tells us that God (or whatever word works for you) cannot be found in the mind. It cannot even be found in the heart alone. It must be felt as sensation in each and every part of the body.

And indeed the ability to come to balance and feel the whole body as a unified field of shimmery tactile presence automatically and spontaneously ushers in what we might call ma’iyya consciousness.

So … to come full circle, the body to me is the play of sensations plus the conscious presence that inhabits that play at any given moment. The question we all have to ask ourselves is how much sensation do I really want to open to? The more sensation, the greater the push into this dissolved, yet very present, consciousness that is, for many people, utterly appealing. But the more sensation we risk, the more we also have to let go of the old, tighter patterns of the mind and its belief in separation from the whole, and many people find this-what the Sufis call “dying before you die” – utterly unappealing.

In terms of actually Rolfing® people, I’m far more interested in stimulating a renewed sense of feeling awareness in my client than in “changing” his or her structure as I believe, quite strongly, that a body needs to feel what’s really going on at the level of sensation, and then structural change will happen accordingly. This frees things a lot for me and allows me to just put my hands on the body and see how they want to move and what they want to do. In effect, I like to get out of my mind and tissue surf with compassion.

Structural Integration: If I remember right, your book Balance of Body, Balance of Mind equates holding in the body to ego structure or ego holding. In Yoga of the Maharnudra you speak of an open, embodied, and sensing state as a mystical state. You are clearly looking at the body and Rolfing from a spiritual or evolutionary perspective, not just a biomechanical or structural/ functional perspective. It seems to me from the writings and stories out there that Dr. Rolf was interested in all of these aspects. Was this spiritual / evolutionary viewpoint discussed in your original training? Do you feel it is given its due in our community at present?

WJ: I didn’t know Ida all that well. I did my auditing in the summer of 1975 at one of those early combined basic/advanced training classes that we used to hold, and she (along with Jan Sultan) was the teacher, and I was also able to spend a bit of time with her privately, outside of class. I can’t honestly say that there was a lot of focused discussion on the kinds of understandings and the linkages between body and consciousness that I raised in the two books that you mentioned, either in private conversation with her or in class. But, even so, what there was a lot of in those days was a spirit of adventure, fascination, experimentation, and excitement, a gut feeling that what Rolfing was ultimately all about was nothing less than a bona fide path of inquiry into the mystery of the embodied self. And Ida would constantly allude to this through implying that the Line was a kind of mudra of transformation (my words, not hers) that would help us in solving (or dissolving into) that mystery. She clearly presented the Line as a value and clearly believed that an embodiment of the Line would have an evolutionarily propulsive effect on the person, and she would even go so far as to suggest that Rolling was perhaps one of the first attempts by humans to consciously accelerate the pace of evolution.

There was always talk in those days of developing Rolling into a kind of mystery school, but that’s never really happened. At this point, the Rolf Institute’ of Structural Integration has become a first rate trade school that very successfully trains practitioners in the art, science, and profession of Rolling people, but in no way can it be considered a mystery school dedicated to an experiential understanding of how the physical embodiment of Lined states affects, alters, and ultimately transforms consciousness. The Institute (and the other offshoot schools as well) has focused virtually all of its attention on its very important exoteric mission of training practitioners, but has basically turned its back on any systematic exploration of the esoteric core assumptions that Dr. Rolf insisted on: that an embodiment of upright balance can radically accelerate conscious growth in the individual. That the Line has been progressively relegated to the very back burners of our inquiry has always struck me as particularly tragic.

Structural Integration: The Institute still teaches the Line: there is still the fundamental idea that Rolfing is a process of aligning the body in gravity around this ideal Line, so on a physical level it would seem we are doing the same thing, but from a perspective that has become more physical and less evolutionary. This brings up the question of how much the “propulsive effect” of Rolfing on consciousness depends on the Line itself, and how much it depends on the field (practitioner, client, society) holding an evolutionary perspective. In the time you reference, a large segment of society – the whole “counter-culture” movement – held a perspective and expectation of transformation. Now that’s dropped back to a “lower volume” in the field of society as a whole, and some clients have no interest in anything beyond pain relief, at least initially.

WJ: The “Line” that you’re speaking about is more of an intellectual construct than a lived experience. And for the purposes of our work with clients, this construct is invaluable. As a teaching tool, it not only gives our work intentionality and a philosophical rationale, but also serves as a guide to help us strategize how best to work with clients. I think we all hold, as an image in our mind, a picture of the Line. When we view a client’s body, we inevitably are going to compare what we see with this image in our mind, and the discrepancies that exist give us many of our clues as to where and how to work.

The application of the Line that I’m referring to, however, has nothing to do with strategizing session work. It refers instead to a lived condition of embodiment and a suggested path of practices that, if followed, leads to that condition. Its application to spiritual practices – sitting meditation as well as movement practices – is explosively powerful, and yet it is an application that has been almost totally ignored not just by the Institute, but by all of the other offshoot schools of Rolfing as well.

So, if our community isn’t all that actively exploring this application of the Line, who is? The answer (from the communications I’ve had from people who’ve read my books) is serious meditation practitioners, dancers, yogis, and martial artists. And these people are not just playing with the Line as a theoretical construct. They’re diving into it with their entire body and mind, spending long hours surrendering to the profound shifts in bodily awareness and states of consciousness that naturally occur when you begin seriously to explore balance as a path. The path of the Line is a path of deep and potent healing, but like any path worth following, if you want its rewards, you have to expose yourself to its fire.

You ask if perhaps the kind of evolutionary perspective that I’m suggesting was as much a result of the spirit of the times as it is a direct application of the Line. I want to be very clear that it is the experiential exploration of balance that is the igniting element that explodes open the meditative inquiry (and the evolutionary energies that fuel that inquiry like hydrogen in the sun). I’m talking about a very specific experiential phenomenon that occurs as the result of learning how to retain an upright (and uplifted) posture while surrendering the entire weight of the body to gravity. Strong energies and sensations are spontaneously liberated, and consciousness can undergo radical (and this is not a word that I use lightly) alterations.

It’s true that, far and away, the majority of clients coming to see us are looking for the relief of pain, and I don’t think anybody is going to argue with, or criticize, the decision of the faculty to pursue the perfection of our physiotherapeutic skills of manipulation as the centerpiece of what Rolling has become. The mission statement of the Rolf Institute speaks to the training of Rolling practitioners; it does not mention promoting the lived experience of the Line. But it has always struck me as peculiar that our founder presented the Line as the most important value of our work, and yet we haven’t gone anywhere near developing a protocol or system of practices that would allow people to explore for themselves the dramatic evolutionary shifts in awareness of self that she always suggested would occur. And it is this omission that I’ve been attempting to address in the work and practices I’ve been putting together and intend to start sharing in workshop/retreat format.

Structural Integration: I see from your website (www.embodiment.net) that your “embodiment work,” which I was first exposed to about nine years ago as a gazing practice, has since evolved into a system encompassing a series of practices. You’ve written a number of books over the years, and different books are now shown to be related to different practices that are part of the work as a whole. I get a sense that there has been an organic development and interweaving of your writing, your personal practices and explorations, and your overall thread of inquiry. Would you speak about what “embodiment” means to you, how your system has developed, and also give a sketch description of some of the practices and books of yours that relate to them?

WJ: I first encountered the word “embodiment” in the early to mid 1970s in a book by Herbert Guenther called The Tantric View of Life and resonated with it immediately. Guenther, one of our most important western Buddhist scholars, spoke of embodiment as pristine clarity of mind grounded in the fully felt awareness of body. Implicit in Guenther’s use of this term is the understanding that this clarity, which is the apparent goal of Buddhist practice, cannot be experienced unless we also include a fully activated awareness of head to foot bodily presence In other words, if you want emptiness of mind, you need first to experience fullness of body.

I came across this term about a year after I had begun getting Rolled, and it uncannily reflected the emerging experience and awarenesses that my initial Rolfing had started opening up in me. When I spoke earlier of ma’iyya consciousness, it is fundamentally identical to Guenther’s very specific use of the term “embodiment.” Over the past thirty years, the term has become a kind of fuzzy buzzword for describing anything and everything related to the body, but my initial exposure to it, and subsequent use of it, was and remains very specific.

Consciousness is altered radically if we can include in whatever we’re doing an awareness of the entire body as a unified field of shimmering tactile sensations. I’ve heard of studies that suggest that we are using perhaps only five to fifteen percent of the full potential of our brains, and I would suggest that what is also true is that most people, at any given moment in time, are probably only feeling between five and fifteen percent of their bodily sensations. And I would further suggest that these small percentages are directly related.

What is so extraordinary about the gazing practice that you mention is that it rather wildly stimulates the awareness of sensations throughout the entire body. I honestly haven’t a clue as to why it does this. I just know that it does. And, then, what it also does, just as Guenther’s understanding of embodiment suggests, is to radically alter and affect consciousness. As the conventional sense of the body’s apparent solidity dissolves into a field phenomenon of shimmering tactile sensations, so also does the unrelentingly solid, conventional sense of self also dissolve, and you find yourself suddenly immersed in the condition of embodied consciousness that the Buddhists refer to as sunyata (ordinarily translated as “the void” or as “emptiness,” but which Guenther, again in the same book, quite beautifully translates as “open dimension of being”). What’s clear to me is that this condition is a birthright state for all of us and definitely worth whatever price of admission is asked. That I would eventually present the gazing practice in the context of the relationship between Rumi and his great friend Shams was just one of those serendipitous things. For 750 years nobody has supposedly known what these two were doing behind the closed door of their retreat room that allowed them to emerge in such a state of ecstatic intoxication, and indeed their relationship has mostly been revered in the Sufi world from a safe distance as a kind of “divine mystery.” But if you read Rumi’s poetry with an understanding of the gazing practice, you quickly see that allusions to the practice, descriptions of how Rumi and Shams entered into the practice together, and specific instructions on how to do the practice yourself, are everywhere in the poetry. To play spiritual sleuth in this way has been a lot of fun for me.

Ok. Let me go back to how all this relates to the embodiment of the Line. A Tibetan inahaouudra text tells us to “do nothing with the body but relax.” And the only way we can truly invite relaxation into our lives in an upright posture is to embody the Line so that the force of gravity, not muscular contraction, can provide us with our primary source of support. What we also know is that tensing the body (or holding the breath, and they are basically the same thing) is our best and most reliable strategy not to feel. So if we can truly relax, then the formerly unfelt sensations of the body (the 85% to 95 % of sensations that we ordinarily aren’t aware of) can come flooding forward out of their hibernation or wherever it is they’ve been hiding.

Balance of Body, Balance of Mind was my first attempt to enunciate this kind of understanding. Quite clearly, our understanding of the Line provides a very important, and previously almost entirely unacknowledged, key to the experience of sitting meditation practice. Likewise, I believe that the Buddhist psychological model holds an equally vital key to the work of somatic practitioners who seek to relieve unnecessary holding and tension in the body, but aren’t oriented to considering that the ongoing manifestation of egoic mind may itself be the result of the most fundamental, and largely unconscious, myofascial holding pattern that exists in all of us.

My subsequent books have mostly looked at different pieces of this embodiment puzzle. The Posture of Meditation focuses on sitting practice. Aligned, Relaxed, Resilient focuses on mindfulness practice. Rnnni: Gazing at the Beloved is about the gazing practice. And Yoga of the Mahanualra is about the spontaneous movement practices that I call Sudaba (short for “surrendered dance of balance”). What I’d like to stress here, though, is that the individual sessions of Rolfing and the subsequent exploration of balance have always been central to my understanding and development of all these interrelated practices.

What I’ve been attempting to do is to create a path of practices based on the most potent technologies that the spiritual traditions have developed over the centuries, but that is explored through the lens of our contemporary somatic understanding, and most specifically through the application of the teachings of the Line. Clearly, if we want to experience these radical alterations to self that all the traditions speak of as so fundamentally wholesome, we need to do, on a daily basis, intentional practices that have been shown to support that alteration. Ideally, we would devote some time every day to these practices as well as enter into longer, intensive retreats from time to time.

Rolfing, sitting, mindfulness practices, standing and moving practices, gazing practices: it’s a potent brew, and I’m always on the lookout for new pieces of the puzzle. Lately, for example, I’ve gotten extremely excited about adding binaural beat technologies to sitting meditation practices. By sending tones of slightly different frequencies into each ear via headphones, we can quickly shift the brain out of the beta states that we ordinarily pass our lives in and move down into alpha (associated with relaxation), theta (associated with creative thinking and dreaming), and even delta states (associated with both deep sleep and very deep meditation). These technologies almost seem to me to be a form of Rotting the brain and the nervous system, and I’m finding that they produce a profound, deepening effect on my meditation.

Exercise and nutrition are two more areas that it seems foolish not to address to support this shift into embodied states. And then there’s the whole issue of the breath. I recall hearing (Certified Advanced Roller) Hubert Godard say that posture is breath, and certainly how we breathe in this moment is a direct reflection of our current condition of embodiment. The Buddha’s primary instruction on breath is to breathe in and out “with the whole body,” and over long hours and long days of sitting practices that focus on the principles of the Line (alignment, relaxation, and resilient movement), this is what begins naturally to occur. In a fascinating correlation across time, I also recall Dr. Rolf saying in my auditing class that as breath moves through a truly integrated and balanced body, every joint it the body should be able to move in response to the breath and that this will include the sutures in the skull as well as the joint between the small bones in the feet!

Structural Integration: Our skills of manipulation and our broadening understanding of how to influence structure (through such things as, for example, spinal mechanics and the application of cranial and visceral work) have become much more sophisticated over the years. Has your understanding of how to embody the Line also changed over time?

WJ: Our early attempts (mine as well as most everyone else’s) at consciously embodying the Line were quite willful and, frankly, didn’t work all that well. With Ida occasionally barking things at us like “bring your lumbars back!” we would attempt to force our body to approximate what we believed the Line to be. But what many of us found was that this kind of approach just brings with it another overlying pattern of holding (never has the expression “chains of gold are just as effective at keeping us imprisoned as are chains of iron” been so clearly demonstrated to me), and Don Johnson did us all a great service in bringing this posturing to an end with his warnings about what he called “somatic platonism.”

The Line can’t be forced on a body from the outside in. Do this, and you’ve got hell on your hands. It needs instead to emerge naturally from the inside out through playing with and surrendering to balance and seeing how, over time, this affects the sensations and feeling presence of the body. Alignment alone can’t be the goal of the Line (or every soldier standing at attention would be enlightened). It has to come with a deep relaxation (which is nothing more or less than the dropping of the weight of the body in response to the pull of gravity) that allows resilient movement to occur throughout the entire length of the body. Then, breath by breath, sensation by sensation, things can begin to shift spontaneously, on their own, and this continues to be the way I explore the magic of the Line.

An exploration of the Line is an intensely personal undertaking. Playing with balance allows what the Theravadin Buddhists call the deep sankharas, the deep and largely unconscious residues of holding and contraction, to come to the surface of awareness where they can be released. This unwinding or releasing of tensions occurs spontaneously and organically to the degree that we can surrender to its impulses, rather than by attempting to superimpose our ideas about how it should look. It is a deeply healing process, and everyone’s experience of it will be uniquely their own. I find it much more helpful to think of the Line as a process, rather than as a thing. It’s an infallible, moment-to-moment guide as we work to unravel the deepest tensions and holdings that keep us stuck and limited. It’s not something to attain and then maintain.

Structural Integration: Are there any other thoughts you’d like to share?

WJ: As powerful and healing as the individual sessions of Rolfing are, an even deeper process of healing awaits the person who explores the embodiment of the Line as an intentional, meditative inquiry. But for this inquiry not to just spin its wheels on the slippery surface of the mind, the individual sessions of Rolfing appear to me to be indispensable. Seen from this perspective, the basic series of Rolfing functions as a kind of preliminary practice that then will allow someone truly to begin exploring the Line. And as this exploration proceeds, regular supplemental Rolfing sessions help keep us on track and deepen the inquiry.

Many years ago I did a three-week sitting retreat during which I had a Rolfing friend come in every second or third day and work on my body. What an experience! About two-thirds of the way through that retreat, my body just found that place of effortless balance, and the understanding of the relationship between alignment, relaxation, resilience, and consciousness came flooding in. I began rather furiously writing down my insights, and the result was The Posture
of Meditation.

It’s time for me to start sharing this, and my vision would be to hold retreats that explore intensive sitting, standing, and moving practices based on our understanding of the Line. What these retreats would also include would be regular Rolfing sessions as well. In the beginning, it’s going to be more practical to limit participation in something like this to Rolfers so that participants can pair up with and work on each other, much as we do during basic training. It probably makes the most sense to launch something like this as a six-day or week-long residential retreat, but can you even begin to imagine what it would be like to re-explore and re-experience the Ten Series in the context of a 21-day retreat focusing on the embodiment of the Line?! Somewhere down the road I could see offering something like this to non-Roffers as well, but for that to work, I would obviously need a cadre of Rolfers wanting to work on people in this kind of format.

I’d ask that, if what I’m talking about here resonates with whoever’s reading this, then get in touch with me and let me know of your interest. It would be a great experiment. That’s for sure.

WILL JOHNSON BIBLIOGRAPHY

Balance of Body, Balance of Mind (Hum anies, 1993).

The Posture of Meditation (Shambhala, 1996). Also available in German (Meditieren in der richtigen Haltung. Das Praxishnch; Herder/ Spektrum, 1999) and Italian (La Postnra di Meditazione; Ubaldini Editore,1997).

Aligned, Relaxed, Resilient: The Physical Foundations of Mindfidness (Shambhala, 2000).

Runni, Gazing at the Beloved: The Radical Practice of Beholding the Divine (inner Traditions, 2003). Also available in French (Rumi: Union des regards, fusion des Ames; Gange Editions, 2005).

The Sailfish and the Sacred Mountain: Passages in the Lives of a Father and Son (Inner Traditions, 2005). Also available in Russian (Terra Mystica; Mockba, 2005).

Yoga of the Mahanmdra: The Mystical Way of Balance (Inner Traditions, 2005).

The Forbidden Rumi: The Suppressed Poems of Runni on Love, Heresy, and Intoxication (Inner Traditions, 2006; commentaries and translations by Will Johnson and Nevit O. Ergin).[:de]Structural Integration: Our work as Rolfers is to shape the body, but what is the body? Many spiritual traditions lead us to understand that our bodies are much different from our ordinary reified conception of “body.” From the perspective of where your work has led you, how do you view/ define body and how has that affected how you work with bodies?

Will Johnson: Instead of paying much attention to intellectual classifications of body (physical, emotional, energetic, mental, causal, etheric, etc.), as helpful as these classifications can be in pointing to different aspects of our embodied self, 1 prefer simply to focus on the direct experience of the body: the lived, felt, palpable, vibratory, throbbing, quivery, spacious, compacted flux of tactile stuff whose location, and point of emanation, can be traced to what my eyes recognize as my physical body. The felt awareness of the entire body as a constantly changing tactile presence is the wild and wonderful path of practice that Rolfing” launched me on.

For me, Rolfing was a very direct introduction to the world of tactile sensations-both gross and subtle. On the gross level, there were the strong and intense sensations of being Rolfed. But through that work, and in its aftermath, I started to become aware of a much subtler level of sensations that I’d never before felt, and I think everyone knows what I’m referring to here: the minute, pin-prickly, tingly, little blips of tactile stuff (the current of the life force?) that we feel coursing through our body, probably in some parts more than others. Now, even though these individual sensations are unbelievably small in size and are vibrating or oscillating at almost unimaginably rapid rates of vibratory frequency, they can still be distinctly felt. If, that is (and this is a big if), we surrender to their presence, and I have since come to the belief that the source of all existential pain in the body can be traced to our fearful resistance to feel the literally sensational presence of the body.

Where things started getting really interesting was when 1 began to realize that, if I give myself permission to do two things simultaneously – 1) to surrender to balance and 2) to feel the feeling, the sensation, in every little part, every little nook and cranny, indeed in every little cell of the body – then my sense of self would be altered quite radically, and I liked it there. And the only place where I was able to find descriptions of these kinds of very open, very dissolved, and yet very present and grounded embodied states was in the spiritual literatures. Rumi, for example, was taught the doctrine of ma’iyya by his father who himself was an accomplished mystic. Ma’iyya tells us that God (or whatever word works for you) cannot be found in the mind. It cannot even be found in the heart alone. It must be felt as sensation in each and every part of the body.

And indeed the ability to come to balance and feel the whole body as a unified field of shimmery tactile presence automatically and spontaneously ushers in what we might call ma’iyya consciousness.

So … to come full circle, the body to me is the play of sensations plus the conscious presence that inhabits that play at any given moment. The question we all have to ask ourselves is how much sensation do I really want to open to? The more sensation, the greater the push into this dissolved, yet very present, consciousness that is, for many people, utterly appealing. But the more sensation we risk, the more we also have to let go of the old, tighter patterns of the mind and its belief in separation from the whole, and many people find this-what the Sufis call “dying before you die” – utterly unappealing.

In terms of actually Rolfing® people, I’m far more interested in stimulating a renewed sense of feeling awareness in my client than in “changing” his or her structure as I believe, quite strongly, that a body needs to feel what’s really going on at the level of sensation, and then structural change will happen accordingly. This frees things a lot for me and allows me to just put my hands on the body and see how they want to move and what they want to do. In effect, I like to get out of my mind and tissue surf with compassion.

Structural Integration: If I remember right, your book Balance of Body, Balance of Mind equates holding in the body to ego structure or ego holding. In Yoga of the Maharnudra you speak of an open, embodied, and sensing state as a mystical state. You are clearly looking at the body and Rolfing from a spiritual or evolutionary perspective, not just a biomechanical or structural/ functional perspective. It seems to me from the writings and stories out there that Dr. Rolf was interested in all of these aspects. Was this spiritual / evolutionary viewpoint discussed in your original training? Do you feel it is given its due in our community at present?

WJ: I didn’t know Ida all that well. I did my auditing in the summer of 1975 at one of those early combined basic/advanced training classes that we used to hold, and she (along with Jan Sultan) was the teacher, and I was also able to spend a bit of time with her privately, outside of class. I can’t honestly say that there was a lot of focused discussion on the kinds of understandings and the linkages between body and consciousness that I raised in the two books that you mentioned, either in private conversation with her or in class. But, even so, what there was a lot of in those days was a spirit of adventure, fascination, experimentation, and excitement, a gut feeling that what Rolfing was ultimately all about was nothing less than a bona fide path of inquiry into the mystery of the embodied self. And Ida would constantly allude to this through implying that the Line was a kind of mudra of transformation (my words, not hers) that would help us in solving (or dissolving into) that mystery. She clearly presented the Line as a value and clearly believed that an embodiment of the Line would have an evolutionarily propulsive effect on the person, and she would even go so far as to suggest that Rolling was perhaps one of the first attempts by humans to consciously accelerate the pace of evolution.

There was always talk in those days of developing Rolling into a kind of mystery school, but that’s never really happened. At this point, the Rolf Institute’ of Structural Integration has become a first rate trade school that very successfully trains practitioners in the art, science, and profession of Rolling people, but in no way can it be considered a mystery school dedicated to an experiential understanding of how the physical embodiment of Lined states affects, alters, and ultimately transforms consciousness. The Institute (and the other offshoot schools as well) has focused virtually all of its attention on its very important exoteric mission of training practitioners, but has basically turned its back on any systematic exploration of the esoteric core assumptions that Dr. Rolf insisted on: that an embodiment of upright balance can radically accelerate conscious growth in the individual. That the Line has been progressively relegated to the very back burners of our inquiry has always struck me as particularly tragic.

Structural Integration: The Institute still teaches the Line: there is still the fundamental idea that Rolfing is a process of aligning the body in gravity around this ideal Line, so on a physical level it would seem we are doing the same thing, but from a perspective that has become more physical and less evolutionary. This brings up the question of how much the “propulsive effect” of Rolfing on consciousness depends on the Line itself, and how much it depends on the field (practitioner, client, society) holding an evolutionary perspective. In the time you reference, a large segment of society – the whole “counter-culture” movement – held a perspective and expectation of transformation. Now that’s dropped back to a “lower volume” in the field of society as a whole, and some clients have no interest in anything beyond pain relief, at least initially.

WJ: The “Line” that you’re speaking about is more of an intellectual construct than a lived experience. And for the purposes of our work with clients, this construct is invaluable. As a teaching tool, it not only gives our work intentionality and a philosophical rationale, but also serves as a guide to help us strategize how best to work with clients. I think we all hold, as an image in our mind, a picture of the Line. When we view a client’s body, we inevitably are going to compare what we see with this image in our mind, and the discrepancies that exist give us many of our clues as to where and how to work.

The application of the Line that I’m referring to, however, has nothing to do with strategizing session work. It refers instead to a lived condition of embodiment and a suggested path of practices that, if followed, leads to that condition. Its application to spiritual practices – sitting meditation as well as movement practices – is explosively powerful, and yet it is an application that has been almost totally ignored not just by the Institute, but by all of the other offshoot schools of Rolfing as well.

So, if our community isn’t all that actively exploring this application of the Line, who is? The answer (from the communications I’ve had from people who’ve read my books) is serious meditation practitioners, dancers, yogis, and martial artists. And these people are not just playing with the Line as a theoretical construct. They’re diving into it with their entire body and mind, spending long hours surrendering to the profound shifts in bodily awareness and states of consciousness that naturally occur when you begin seriously to explore balance as a path. The path of the Line is a path of deep and potent healing, but like any path worth following, if you want its rewards, you have to expose yourself to its fire.

You ask if perhaps the kind of evolutionary perspective that I’m suggesting was as much a result of the spirit of the times as it is a direct application of the Line. I want to be very clear that it is the experiential exploration of balance that is the igniting element that explodes open the meditative inquiry (and the evolutionary energies that fuel that inquiry like hydrogen in the sun). I’m talking about a very specific experiential phenomenon that occurs as the result of learning how to retain an upright (and uplifted) posture while surrendering the entire weight of the body to gravity. Strong energies and sensations are spontaneously liberated, and consciousness can undergo radical (and this is not a word that I use lightly) alterations.

It’s true that, far and away, the majority of clients coming to see us are looking for the relief of pain, and I don’t think anybody is going to argue with, or criticize, the decision of the faculty to pursue the perfection of our physiotherapeutic skills of manipulation as the centerpiece of what Rolling has become. The mission statement of the Rolf Institute speaks to the training of Rolling practitioners; it does not mention promoting the lived experience of the Line. But it has always struck me as peculiar that our founder presented the Line as the most important value of our work, and yet we haven’t gone anywhere near developing a protocol or system of practices that would allow people to explore for themselves the dramatic evolutionary shifts in awareness of self that she always suggested would occur. And it is this omission that I’ve been attempting to address in the work and practices I’ve been putting together and intend to start sharing in workshop/retreat format.

Structural Integration: I see from your website (www.embodiment.net) that your “embodiment work,” which I was first exposed to about nine years ago as a gazing practice, has since evolved into a system encompassing a series of practices. You’ve written a number of books over the years, and different books are now shown to be related to different practices that are part of the work as a whole. I get a sense that there has been an organic development and interweaving of your writing, your personal practices and explorations, and your overall thread of inquiry. Would you speak about what “embodiment” means to you, how your system has developed, and also give a sketch description of some of the practices and books of yours that relate to them?

WJ: I first encountered the word “embodiment” in the early to mid 1970s in a book by Herbert Guenther called The Tantric View of Life and resonated with it immediately. Guenther, one of our most important western Buddhist scholars, spoke of embodiment as pristine clarity of mind grounded in the fully felt awareness of body. Implicit in Guenther’s use of this term is the understanding that this clarity, which is the apparent goal of Buddhist practice, cannot be experienced unless we also include a fully activated awareness of head to foot bodily presence In other words, if you want emptiness of mind, you need first to experience fullness of body.

I came across this term about a year after I had begun getting Rolled, and it uncannily reflected the emerging experience and awarenesses that my initial Rolfing had started opening up in me. When I spoke earlier of ma’iyya consciousness, it is fundamentally identical to Guenther’s very specific use of the term “embodiment.” Over the past thirty years, the term has become a kind of fuzzy buzzword for describing anything and everything related to the body, but my initial exposure to it, and subsequent use of it, was and remains very specific.

Consciousness is altered radically if we can include in whatever we’re doing an awareness of the entire body as a unified field of shimmering tactile sensations. I’ve heard of studies that suggest that we are using perhaps only five to fifteen percent of the full potential of our brains, and I would suggest that what is also true is that most people, at any given moment in time, are probably only feeling between five and fifteen percent of their bodily sensations. And I would further suggest that these small percentages are directly related.

What is so extraordinary about the gazing practice that you mention is that it rather wildly stimulates the awareness of sensations throughout the entire body. I honestly haven’t a clue as to why it does this. I just know that it does. And, then, what it also does, just as Guenther’s understanding of embodiment suggests, is to radically alter and affect consciousness. As the conventional sense of the body’s apparent solidity dissolves into a field phenomenon of shimmering tactile sensations, so also does the unrelentingly solid, conventional sense of self also dissolve, and you find yourself suddenly immersed in the condition of embodied consciousness that the Buddhists refer to as sunyata (ordinarily translated as “the void” or as “emptiness,” but which Guenther, again in the same book, quite beautifully translates as “open dimension of being”). What’s clear to me is that this condition is a birthright state for all of us and definitely worth whatever price of admission is asked. That I would eventually present the gazing practice in the context of the relationship between Rumi and his great friend Shams was just one of those serendipitous things. For 750 years nobody has supposedly known what these two were doing behind the closed door of their retreat room that allowed them to emerge in such a state of ecstatic intoxication, and indeed their relationship has mostly been revered in the Sufi world from a safe distance as a kind of “divine mystery.” But if you read Rumi’s poetry with an understanding of the gazing practice, you quickly see that allusions to the practice, descriptions of how Rumi and Shams entered into the practice together, and specific instructions on how to do the practice yourself, are everywhere in the poetry. To play spiritual sleuth in this way has been a lot of fun for me.

Ok. Let me go back to how all this relates to the embodiment of the Line. A Tibetan inahaouudra text tells us to “do nothing with the body but relax.” And the only way we can truly invite relaxation into our lives in an upright posture is to embody the Line so that the force of gravity, not muscular contraction, can provide us with our primary source of support. What we also know is that tensing the body (or holding the breath, and they are basically the same thing) is our best and most reliable strategy not to feel. So if we can truly relax, then the formerly unfelt sensations of the body (the 85% to 95 % of sensations that we ordinarily aren’t aware of) can come flooding forward out of their hibernation or wherever it is they’ve been hiding.

Balance of Body, Balance of Mind was my first attempt to enunciate this kind of understanding. Quite clearly, our understanding of the Line provides a very important, and previously almost entirely unacknowledged, key to the experience of sitting meditation practice. Likewise, I believe that the Buddhist psychological model holds an equally vital key to the work of somatic practitioners who seek to relieve unnecessary holding and tension in the body, but aren’t oriented to considering that the ongoing manifestation of egoic mind may itself be the result of the most fundamental, and largely unconscious, myofascial holding pattern that exists in all of us.

My subsequent books have mostly looked at different pieces of this embodiment puzzle. The Posture of Meditation focuses on sitting practice. Aligned, Relaxed, Resilient focuses on mindfulness practice. Rnnni: Gazing at the Beloved is about the gazing practice. And Yoga of the Mahanualra is about the spontaneous movement practices that I call Sudaba (short for “surrendered dance of balance”). What I’d like to stress here, though, is that the individual sessions of Rolfing and the subsequent exploration of balance have always been central to my understanding and development of all these interrelated practices.

What I’ve been attempting to do is to create a path of practices based on the most potent technologies that the spiritual traditions have developed over the centuries, but that is explored through the lens of our contemporary somatic understanding, and most specifically through the application of the teachings of the Line. Clearly, if we want to experience these radical alterations to self that all the traditions speak of as so fundamentally wholesome, we need to do, on a daily basis, intentional practices that have been shown to support that alteration. Ideally, we would devote some time every day to these practices as well as enter into longer, intensive retreats from time to time.

Rolfing, sitting, mindfulness practices, standing and moving practices, gazing practices: it’s a potent brew, and I’m always on the lookout for new pieces of the puzzle. Lately, for example, I’ve gotten extremely excited about adding binaural beat technologies to sitting meditation practices. By sending tones of slightly different frequencies into each ear via headphones, we can quickly shift the brain out of the beta states that we ordinarily pass our lives in and move down into alpha (associated with relaxation), theta (associated with creative thinking and dreaming), and even delta states (associated with both deep sleep and very deep meditation). These technologies almost seem to me to be a form of Rotting the brain and the nervous system, and I’m finding that they produce a profound, deepening effect on my meditation.

Exercise and nutrition are two more areas that it seems foolish not to address to support this shift into embodied states. And then there’s the whole issue of the breath. I recall hearing (Certified Advanced Roller) Hubert Godard say that posture is breath, and certainly how we breathe in this moment is a direct reflection of our current condition of embodiment. The Buddha’s primary instruction on breath is to breathe in and out “with the whole body,” and over long hours and long days of sitting practices that focus on the principles of the Line (alignment, relaxation, and resilient movement), this is what begins naturally to occur. In a fascinating correlation across time, I also recall Dr. Rolf saying in my auditing class that as breath moves through a truly integrated and balanced body, every joint it the body should be able to move in response to the breath and that this will include the sutures in the skull as well as the joint between the small bones in the feet!

Structural Integration: Our skills of manipulation and our broadening understanding of how to influence structure (through such things as, for example, spinal mechanics and the application of cranial and visceral work) have become much more sophisticated over the years. Has your understanding of how to embody the Line also changed over time?

WJ: Our early attempts (mine as well as most everyone else’s) at consciously embodying the Line were quite willful and, frankly, didn’t work all that well. With Ida occasionally barking things at us like “bring your lumbars back!” we would attempt to force our body to approximate what we believed the Line to be. But what many of us found was that this kind of approach just brings with it another overlying pattern of holding (never has the expression “chains of gold are just as effective at keeping us imprisoned as are chains of iron” been so clearly demonstrated to me), and Don Johnson did us all a great service in bringing this posturing to an end with his warnings about what he called “somatic platonism.”

The Line can’t be forced on a body from the outside in. Do this, and you’ve got hell on your hands. It needs instead to emerge naturally from the inside out through playing with and surrendering to balance and seeing how, over time, this affects the sensations and feeling presence of the body. Alignment alone can’t be the goal of the Line (or every soldier standing at attention would be enlightened). It has to come with a deep relaxation (which is nothing more or less than the dropping of the weight of the body in response to the pull of gravity) that allows resilient movement to occur throughout the entire length of the body. Then, breath by breath, sensation by sensation, things can begin to shift spontaneously, on their own, and this continues to be the way I explore the magic of the Line.

An exploration of the Line is an intensely personal undertaking. Playing with balance allows what the Theravadin Buddhists call the deep sankharas, the deep and largely unconscious residues of holding and contraction, to come to the surface of awareness where they can be released. This unwinding or releasing of tensions occurs spontaneously and organically to the degree that we can surrender to its impulses, rather than by attempting to superimpose our ideas about how it should look. It is a deeply healing process, and everyone’s experience of it will be uniquely their own. I find it much more helpful to think of the Line as a process, rather than as a thing. It’s an infallible, moment-to-moment guide as we work to unravel the deepest tensions and holdings that keep us stuck and limited. It’s not something to attain and then maintain.

Structural Integration: Are there any other thoughts you’d like to share?

WJ: As powerful and healing as the individual sessions of Rolfing are, an even deeper process of healing awaits the person who explores the embodiment of the Line as an intentional, meditative inquiry. But for this inquiry not to just spin its wheels on the slippery surface of the mind, the individual sessions of Rolfing appear to me to be indispensable. Seen from this perspective, the basic series of Rolfing functions as a kind of preliminary practice that then will allow someone truly to begin exploring the Line. And as this exploration proceeds, regular supplemental Rolfing sessions help keep us on track and deepen the inquiry.

Many years ago I did a three-week sitting retreat during which I had a Rolfing friend come in every second or third day and work on my body. What an experience! About two-thirds of the way through that retreat, my body just found that place of effortless balance, and the understanding of the relationship between alignment, relaxation, resilience, and consciousness came flooding in. I began rather furiously writing down my insights, and the result was The Posture
of Meditation.

It’s time for me to start sharing this, and my vision would be to hold retreats that explore intensive sitting, standing, and moving practices based on our understanding of the Line. What these retreats would also include would be regular Rolfing sessions as well. In the beginning, it’s going to be more practical to limit participation in something like this to Rolfers so that participants can pair up with and work on each other, much as we do during basic training. It probably makes the most sense to launch something like this as a six-day or week-long residential retreat, but can you even begin to imagine what it would be like to re-explore and re-experience the Ten Series in the context of a 21-day retreat focusing on the embodiment of the Line?! Somewhere down the road I could see offering something like this to non-Roffers as well, but for that to work, I would obviously need a cadre of Rolfers wanting to work on people in this kind of format.

I’d ask that, if what I’m talking about here resonates with whoever’s reading this, then get in touch with me and let me know of your interest. It would be a great experiment. That’s for sure.

WILL JOHNSON BIBLIOGRAPHY

Balance of Body, Balance of Mind (Hum anies, 1993).

The Posture of Meditation (Shambhala, 1996). Also available in German (Meditieren in der richtigen Haltung. Das Praxishnch; Herder/ Spektrum, 1999) and Italian (La Postnra di Meditazione; Ubaldini Editore,1997).

Aligned, Relaxed, Resilient: The Physical Foundations of Mindfidness (Shambhala, 2000).

Runni, Gazing at the Beloved: The Radical Practice of Beholding the Divine (inner Traditions, 2003). Also available in French (Rumi: Union des regards, fusion des Ames; Gange Editions, 2005).

The Sailfish and the Sacred Mountain: Passages in the Lives of a Father and Son (Inner Traditions, 2005). Also available in Russian (Terra Mystica; Mockba, 2005).

Yoga of the Mahanmdra: The Mystical Way of Balance (Inner Traditions, 2005).

The Forbidden Rumi: The Suppressed Poems of Runni on Love, Heresy, and Intoxication (Inner Traditions, 2006; commentaries and translations by Will Johnson and Nevit O. Ergin).[:fr]Structural Integration: Our work as Rolfers is to shape the body, but what is the body? Many spiritual traditions lead us to understand that our bodies are much different from our ordinary reified conception of “body.” From the perspective of where your work has led you, how do you view/ define body and how has that affected how you work with bodies?

Will Johnson: Instead of paying much attention to intellectual classifications of body (physical, emotional, energetic, mental, causal, etheric, etc.), as helpful as these classifications can be in pointing to different aspects of our embodied self, 1 prefer simply to focus on the direct experience of the body: the lived, felt, palpable, vibratory, throbbing, quivery, spacious, compacted flux of tactile stuff whose location, and point of emanation, can be traced to what my eyes recognize as my physical body. The felt awareness of the entire body as a constantly changing tactile presence is the wild and wonderful path of practice that Rolfing” launched me on.

For me, Rolfing was a very direct introduction to the world of tactile sensations-both gross and subtle. On the gross level, there were the strong and intense sensations of being Rolfed. But through that work, and in its aftermath, I started to become aware of a much subtler level of sensations that I’d never before felt, and I think everyone knows what I’m referring to here: the minute, pin-prickly, tingly, little blips of tactile stuff (the current of the life force?) that we feel coursing through our body, probably in some parts more than others. Now, even though these individual sensations are unbelievably small in size and are vibrating or oscillating at almost unimaginably rapid rates of vibratory frequency, they can still be distinctly felt. If, that is (and this is a big if), we surrender to their presence, and I have since come to the belief that the source of all existential pain in the body can be traced to our fearful resistance to feel the literally sensational presence of the body.

Where things started getting really interesting was when 1 began to realize that, if I give myself permission to do two things simultaneously – 1) to surrender to balance and 2) to feel the feeling, the sensation, in every little part, every little nook and cranny, indeed in every little cell of the body – then my sense of self would be altered quite radically, and I liked it there. And the only place where I was able to find descriptions of these kinds of very open, very dissolved, and yet very present and grounded embodied states was in the spiritual literatures. Rumi, for example, was taught the doctrine of ma’iyya by his father who himself was an accomplished mystic. Ma’iyya tells us that God (or whatever word works for you) cannot be found in the mind. It cannot even be found in the heart alone. It must be felt as sensation in each and every part of the body.

And indeed the ability to come to balance and feel the whole body as a unified field of shimmery tactile presence automatically and spontaneously ushers in what we might call ma’iyya consciousness.

So … to come full circle, the body to me is the play of sensations plus the conscious presence that inhabits that play at any given moment. The question we all have to ask ourselves is how much sensation do I really want to open to? The more sensation, the greater the push into this dissolved, yet very present, consciousness that is, for many people, utterly appealing. But the more sensation we risk, the more we also have to let go of the old, tighter patterns of the mind and its belief in separation from the whole, and many people find this-what the Sufis call “dying before you die” – utterly unappealing.

In terms of actually Rolfing® people, I’m far more interested in stimulating a renewed sense of feeling awareness in my client than in “changing” his or her structure as I believe, quite strongly, that a body needs to feel what’s really going on at the level of sensation, and then structural change will happen accordingly. This frees things a lot for me and allows me to just put my hands on the body and see how they want to move and what they want to do. In effect, I like to get out of my mind and tissue surf with compassion.

Structural Integration: If I remember right, your book Balance of Body, Balance of Mind equates holding in the body to ego structure or ego holding. In Yoga of the Maharnudra you speak of an open, embodied, and sensing state as a mystical state. You are clearly looking at the body and Rolfing from a spiritual or evolutionary perspective, not just a biomechanical or structural/ functional perspective. It seems to me from the writings and stories out there that Dr. Rolf was interested in all of these aspects. Was this spiritual / evolutionary viewpoint discussed in your original training? Do you feel it is given its due in our community at present?

WJ: I didn’t know Ida all that well. I did my auditing in the summer of 1975 at one of those early combined basic/advanced training classes that we used to hold, and she (along with Jan Sultan) was the teacher, and I was also able to spend a bit of time with her privately, outside of class. I can’t honestly say that there was a lot of focused discussion on the kinds of understandings and the linkages between body and consciousness that I raised in the two books that you mentioned, either in private conversation with her or in class. But, even so, what there was a lot of in those days was a spirit of adventure, fascination, experimentation, and excitement, a gut feeling that what Rolfing was ultimately all about was nothing less than a bona fide path of inquiry into the mystery of the embodied self. And Ida would constantly allude to this through implying that the Line was a kind of mudra of transformation (my words, not hers) that would help us in solving (or dissolving into) that mystery. She clearly presented the Line as a value and clearly believed that an embodiment of the Line would have an evolutionarily propulsive effect on the person, and she would even go so far as to suggest that Rolling was perhaps one of the first attempts by humans to consciously accelerate the pace of evolution.

There was always talk in those days of developing Rolling into a kind of mystery school, but that’s never really happened. At this point, the Rolf Institute’ of Structural Integration has become a first rate trade school that very successfully trains practitioners in the art, science, and profession of Rolling people, but in no way can it be considered a mystery school dedicated to an experiential understanding of how the physical embodiment of Lined states affects, alters, and ultimately transforms consciousness. The Institute (and the other offshoot schools as well) has focused virtually all of its attention on its very important exoteric mission of training practitioners, but has basically turned its back on any systematic exploration of the esoteric core assumptions that Dr. Rolf insisted on: that an embodiment of upright balance can radically accelerate conscious growth in the individual. That the Line has been progressively relegated to the very back burners of our inquiry has always struck me as particularly tragic.

Structural Integration: The Institute still teaches the Line: there is still the fundamental idea that Rolfing is a process of aligning the body in gravity around this ideal Line, so on a physical level it would seem we are doing the same thing, but from a perspective that has become more physical and less evolutionary. This brings up the question of how much the “propulsive effect” of Rolfing on consciousness depends on the Line itself, and how much it depends on the field (practitioner, client, society) holding an evolutionary perspective. In the time you reference, a large segment of society – the whole “counter-culture” movement – held a perspective and expectation of transformation. Now that’s dropped back to a “lower volume” in the field of society as a whole, and some clients have no interest in anything beyond pain relief, at least initially.

WJ: The “Line” that you’re speaking about is more of an intellectual construct than a lived experience. And for the purposes of our work with clients, this construct is invaluable. As a teaching tool, it not only gives our work intentionality and a philosophical rationale, but also serves as a guide to help us strategize how best to work with clients. I think we all hold, as an image in our mind, a picture of the Line. When we view a client’s body, we inevitably are going to compare what we see with this image in our mind, and the discrepancies that exist give us many of our clues as to where and how to work.

The application of the Line that I’m referring to, however, has nothing to do with strategizing session work. It refers instead to a lived condition of embodiment and a suggested path of practices that, if followed, leads to that condition. Its application to spiritual practices – sitting meditation as well as movement practices – is explosively powerful, and yet it is an application that has been almost totally ignored not just by the Institute, but by all of the other offshoot schools of Rolfing as well.

So, if our community isn’t all that actively exploring this application of the Line, who is? The answer (from the communications I’ve had from people who’ve read my books) is serious meditation practitioners, dancers, yogis, and martial artists. And these people are not just playing with the Line as a theoretical construct. They’re diving into it with their entire body and mind, spending long hours surrendering to the profound shifts in bodily awareness and states of consciousness that naturally occur when you begin seriously to explore balance as a path. The path of the Line is a path of deep and potent healing, but like any path worth following, if you want its rewards, you have to expose yourself to its fire.

You ask if perhaps the kind of evolutionary perspective that I’m suggesting was as much a result of the spirit of the times as it is a direct application of the Line. I want to be very clear that it is the experiential exploration of balance that is the igniting element that explodes open the meditative inquiry (and the evolutionary energies that fuel that inquiry like hydrogen in the sun). I’m talking about a very specific experiential phenomenon that occurs as the result of learning how to retain an upright (and uplifted) posture while surrendering the entire weight of the body to gravity. Strong energies and sensations are spontaneously liberated, and consciousness can undergo radical (and this is not a word that I use lightly) alterations.

It’s true that, far and away, the majority of clients coming to see us are looking for the relief of pain, and I don’t think anybody is going to argue with, or criticize, the decision of the faculty to pursue the perfection of our physiotherapeutic skills of manipulation as the centerpiece of what Rolling has become. The mission statement of the Rolf Institute speaks to the training of Rolling practitioners; it does not mention promoting the lived experience of the Line. But it has always struck me as peculiar that our founder presented the Line as the most important value of our work, and yet we haven’t gone anywhere near developing a protocol or system of practices that would allow people to explore for themselves the dramatic evolutionary shifts in awareness of self that she always suggested would occur. And it is this omission that I’ve been attempting to address in the work and practices I’ve been putting together and intend to start sharing in workshop/retreat format.

Structural Integration: I see from your website (www.embodiment.net) that your “embodiment work,” which I was first exposed to about nine years ago as a gazing practice, has since evolved into a system encompassing a series of practices. You’ve written a number of books over the years, and different books are now shown to be related to different practices that are part of the work as a whole. I get a sense that there has been an organic development and interweaving of your writing, your personal practices and explorations, and your overall thread of inquiry. Would you speak about what “embodiment” means to you, how your system has developed, and also give a sketch description of some of the practices and books of yours that relate to them?

WJ: I first encountered the word “embodiment” in the early to mid 1970s in a book by Herbert Guenther called The Tantric View of Life and resonated with it immediately. Guenther, one of our most important western Buddhist scholars, spoke of embodiment as pristine clarity of mind grounded in the fully felt awareness of body. Implicit in Guenther’s use of this term is the understanding that this clarity, which is the apparent goal of Buddhist practice, cannot be experienced unless we also include a fully activated awareness of head to foot bodily presence In other words, if you want emptiness of mind, you need first to experience fullness of body.

I came across this term about a year after I had begun getting Rolled, and it uncannily reflected the emerging experience and awarenesses that my initial Rolfing had started opening up in me. When I spoke earlier of ma’iyya consciousness, it is fundamentally identical to Guenther’s very specific use of the term “embodiment.” Over the past thirty years, the term has become a kind of fuzzy buzzword for describing anything and everything related to the body, but my initial exposure to it, and subsequent use of it, was and remains very specific.

Consciousness is altered radically if we can include in whatever we’re doing an awareness of the entire body as a unified field of shimmering tactile sensations. I’ve heard of studies that suggest that we are using perhaps only five to fifteen percent of the full potential of our brains, and I would suggest that what is also true is that most people, at any given moment in time, are probably only feeling between five and fifteen percent of their bodily sensations. And I would further suggest that these small percentages are directly related.

What is so extraordinary about the gazing practice that you mention is that it rather wildly stimulates the awareness of sensations throughout the entire body. I honestly haven’t a clue as to why it does this. I just know that it does. And, then, what it also does, just as Guenther’s understanding of embodiment suggests, is to radically alter and affect consciousness. As the conventional sense of the body’s apparent solidity dissolves into a field phenomenon of shimmering tactile sensations, so also does the unrelentingly solid, conventional sense of self also dissolve, and you find yourself suddenly immersed in the condition of embodied consciousness that the Buddhists refer to as sunyata (ordinarily translated as “the void” or as “emptiness,” but which Guenther, again in the same book, quite beautifully translates as “open dimension of being”). What’s clear to me is that this condition is a birthright state for all of us and definitely worth whatever price of admission is asked. That I would eventually present the gazing practice in the context of the relationship between Rumi and his great friend Shams was just one of those serendipitous things. For 750 years nobody has supposedly known what these two were doing behind the closed door of their retreat room that allowed them to emerge in such a state of ecstatic intoxication, and indeed their relationship has mostly been revered in the Sufi world from a safe distance as a kind of “divine mystery.” But if you read Rumi’s poetry with an understanding of the gazing practice, you quickly see that allusions to the practice, descriptions of how Rumi and Shams entered into the practice together, and specific instructions on how to do the practice yourself, are everywhere in the poetry. To play spiritual sleuth in this way has been a lot of fun for me.

Ok. Let me go back to how all this relates to the embodiment of the Line. A Tibetan inahaouudra text tells us to “do nothing with the body but relax.” And the only way we can truly invite relaxation into our lives in an upright posture is to embody the Line so that the force of gravity, not muscular contraction, can provide us with our primary source of support. What we also know is that tensing the body (or holding the breath, and they are basically the same thing) is our best and most reliable strategy not to feel. So if we can truly relax, then the formerly unfelt sensations of the body (the 85% to 95 % of sensations that we ordinarily aren’t aware of) can come flooding forward out of their hibernation or wherever it is they’ve been hiding.

Balance of Body, Balance of Mind was my first attempt to enunciate this kind of understanding. Quite clearly, our understanding of the Line provides a very important, and previously almost entirely unacknowledged, key to the experience of sitting meditation practice. Likewise, I believe that the Buddhist psychological model holds an equally vital key to the work of somatic practitioners who seek to relieve unnecessary holding and tension in the body, but aren’t oriented to considering that the ongoing manifestation of egoic mind may itself be the result of the most fundamental, and largely unconscious, myofascial holding pattern that exists in all of us.

My subsequent books have mostly looked at different pieces of this embodiment puzzle. The Posture of Meditation focuses on sitting practice. Aligned, Relaxed, Resilient focuses on mindfulness practice. Rnnni: Gazing at the Beloved is about the gazing practice. And Yoga of the Mahanualra is about the spontaneous movement practices that I call Sudaba (short for “surrendered dance of balance”). What I’d like to stress here, though, is that the individual sessions of Rolfing and the subsequent exploration of balance have always been central to my understanding and development of all these interrelated practices.

What I’ve been attempting to do is to create a path of practices based on the most potent technologies that the spiritual traditions have developed over the centuries, but that is explored through the lens of our contemporary somatic understanding, and most specifically through the application of the teachings of the Line. Clearly, if we want to experience these radical alterations to self that all the traditions speak of as so fundamentally wholesome, we need to do, on a daily basis, intentional practices that have been shown to support that alteration. Ideally, we would devote some time every day to these practices as well as enter into longer, intensive retreats from time to time.

Rolfing, sitting, mindfulness practices, standing and moving practices, gazing practices: it’s a potent brew, and I’m always on the lookout for new pieces of the puzzle. Lately, for example, I’ve gotten extremely excited about adding binaural beat technologies to sitting meditation practices. By sending tones of slightly different frequencies into each ear via headphones, we can quickly shift the brain out of the beta states that we ordinarily pass our lives in and move down into alpha (associated with relaxation), theta (associated with creative thinking and dreaming), and even delta states (associated with both deep sleep and very deep meditation). These technologies almost seem to me to be a form of Rotting the brain and the nervous system, and I’m finding that they produce a profound, deepening effect on my meditation.

Exercise and nutrition are two more areas that it seems foolish not to address to support this shift into embodied states. And then there’s the whole issue of the breath. I recall hearing (Certified Advanced Roller) Hubert Godard say that posture is breath, and certainly how we breathe in this moment is a direct reflection of our current condition of embodiment. The Buddha’s primary instruction on breath is to breathe in and out “with the whole body,” and over long hours and long days of sitting practices that focus on the principles of the Line (alignment, relaxation, and resilient movement), this is what begins naturally to occur. In a fascinating correlation across time, I also recall Dr. Rolf saying in my auditing class that as breath moves through a truly integrated and balanced body, every joint it the body should be able to move in response to the breath and that this will include the sutures in the skull as well as the joint between the small bones in the feet!

Structural Integration: Our skills of manipulation and our broadening understanding of how to influence structure (through such things as, for example, spinal mechanics and the application of cranial and visceral work) have become much more sophisticated over the years. Has your understanding of how to embody the Line also changed over time?

WJ: Our early attempts (mine as well as most everyone else’s) at consciously embodying the Line were quite willful and, frankly, didn’t work all that well. With Ida occasionally barking things at us like “bring your lumbars back!” we would attempt to force our body to approximate what we believed the Line to be. But what many of us found was that this kind of approach just brings with it another overlying pattern of holding (never has the expression “chains of gold are just as effective at keeping us imprisoned as are chains of iron” been so clearly demonstrated to me), and Don Johnson did us all a great service in bringing this posturing to an end with his warnings about what he called “somatic platonism.”

The Line can’t be forced on a body from the outside in. Do this, and you’ve got hell on your hands. It needs instead to emerge naturally from the inside out through playing with and surrendering to balance and seeing how, over time, this affects the sensations and feeling presence of the body. Alignment alone can’t be the goal of the Line (or every soldier standing at attention would be enlightened). It has to come with a deep relaxation (which is nothing more or less than the dropping of the weight of the body in response to the pull of gravity) that allows resilient movement to occur throughout the entire length of the body. Then, breath by breath, sensation by sensation, things can begin to shift spontaneously, on their own, and this continues to be the way I explore the magic of the Line.

An exploration of the Line is an intensely personal undertaking. Playing with balance allows what the Theravadin Buddhists call the deep sankharas, the deep and largely unconscious residues of holding and contraction, to come to the surface of awareness where they can be released. This unwinding or releasing of tensions occurs spontaneously and organically to the degree that we can surrender to its impulses, rather than by attempting to superimpose our ideas about how it should look. It is a deeply healing process, and everyone’s experience of it will be uniquely their own. I find it much more helpful to think of the Line as a process, rather than as a thing. It’s an infallible, moment-to-moment guide as we work to unravel the deepest tensions and holdings that keep us stuck and limited. It’s not something to attain and then maintain.

Structural Integration: Are there any other thoughts you’d like to share?

WJ: As powerful and healing as the individual sessions of Rolfing are, an even deeper process of healing awaits the person who explores the embodiment of the Line as an intentional, meditative inquiry. But for this inquiry not to just spin its wheels on the slippery surface of the mind, the individual sessions of Rolfing appear to me to be indispensable. Seen from this perspective, the basic series of Rolfing functions as a kind of preliminary practice that then will allow someone truly to begin exploring the Line. And as this exploration proceeds, regular supplemental Rolfing sessions help keep us on track and deepen the inquiry.

Many years ago I did a three-week sitting retreat during which I had a Rolfing friend come in every second or third day and work on my body. What an experience! About two-thirds of the way through that retreat, my body just found that place of effortless balance, and the understanding of the relationship between alignment, relaxation, resilience, and consciousness came flooding in. I began rather furiously writing down my insights, and the result was The Posture
of Meditation.

It’s time for me to start sharing this, and my vision would be to hold retreats that explore intensive sitting, standing, and moving practices based on our understanding of the Line. What these retreats would also include would be regular Rolfing sessions as well. In the beginning, it’s going to be more practical to limit participation in something like this to Rolfers so that participants can pair up with and work on each other, much as we do during basic training. It probably makes the most sense to launch something like this as a six-day or week-long residential retreat, but can you even begin to imagine what it would be like to re-explore and re-experience the Ten Series in the context of a 21-day retreat focusing on the embodiment of the Line?! Somewhere down the road I could see offering something like this to non-Roffers as well, but for that to work, I would obviously need a cadre of Rolfers wanting to work on people in this kind of format.

I’d ask that, if what I’m talking about here resonates with whoever’s reading this, then get in touch with me and let me know of your interest. It would be a great experiment. That’s for sure.

WILL JOHNSON BIBLIOGRAPHY

Balance of Body, Balance of Mind (Hum anies, 1993).

The Posture of Meditation (Shambhala, 1996). Also available in German (Meditieren in der richtigen Haltung. Das Praxishnch; Herder/ Spektrum, 1999) and Italian (La Postnra di Meditazione; Ubaldini Editore,1997).

Aligned, Relaxed, Resilient: The Physical Foundations of Mindfidness (Shambhala, 2000).

Runni, Gazing at the Beloved: The Radical Practice of Beholding the Divine (inner Traditions, 2003). Also available in French (Rumi: Union des regards, fusion des Ames; Gange Editions, 2005).

The Sailfish and the Sacred Mountain: Passages in the Lives of a Father and Son (Inner Traditions, 2005). Also available in Russian (Terra Mystica; Mockba, 2005).

Yoga of the Mahanmdra: The Mystical Way of Balance (Inner Traditions, 2005).

The Forbidden Rumi: The Suppressed Poems of Runni on Love, Heresy, and Intoxication (Inner Traditions, 2006; commentaries and translations by Will Johnson and Nevit O. Ergin).[:es]Structural Integration: Our work as Rolfers is to shape the body, but what is the body? Many spiritual traditions lead us to understand that our bodies are much different from our ordinary reified conception of “body.” From the perspective of where your work has led you, how do you view/ define body and how has that affected how you work with bodies?

Will Johnson: Instead of paying much attention to intellectual classifications of body (physical, emotional, energetic, mental, causal, etheric, etc.), as helpful as these classifications can be in pointing to different aspects of our embodied self, 1 prefer simply to focus on the direct experience of the body: the lived, felt, palpable, vibratory, throbbing, quivery, spacious, compacted flux of tactile stuff whose location, and point of emanation, can be traced to what my eyes recognize as my physical body. The felt awareness of the entire body as a constantly changing tactile presence is the wild and wonderful path of practice that Rolfing” launched me on.

For me, Rolfing was a very direct introduction to the world of tactile sensations-both gross and subtle. On the gross level, there were the strong and intense sensations of being Rolfed. But through that work, and in its aftermath, I started to become aware of a much subtler level of sensations that I’d never before felt, and I think everyone knows what I’m referring to here: the minute, pin-prickly, tingly, little blips of tactile stuff (the current of the life force?) that we feel coursing through our body, probably in some parts more than others. Now, even though these individual sensations are unbelievably small in size and are vibrating or oscillating at almost unimaginably rapid rates of vibratory frequency, they can still be distinctly felt. If, that is (and this is a big if), we surrender to their presence, and I have since come to the belief that the source of all existential pain in the body can be traced to our fearful resistance to feel the literally sensational presence of the body.

Where things started getting really interesting was when 1 began to realize that, if I give myself permission to do two things simultaneously – 1) to surrender to balance and 2) to feel the feeling, the sensation, in every little part, every little nook and cranny, indeed in every little cell of the body – then my sense of self would be altered quite radically, and I liked it there. And the only place where I was able to find descriptions of these kinds of very open, very dissolved, and yet very present and grounded embodied states was in the spiritual literatures. Rumi, for example, was taught the doctrine of ma’iyya by his father who himself was an accomplished mystic. Ma’iyya tells us that God (or whatever word works for you) cannot be found in the mind. It cannot even be found in the heart alone. It must be felt as sensation in each and every part of the body.

And indeed the ability to come to balance and feel the whole body as a unified field of shimmery tactile presence automatically and spontaneously ushers in what we might call ma’iyya consciousness.

So … to come full circle, the body to me is the play of sensations plus the conscious presence that inhabits that play at any given moment. The question we all have to ask ourselves is how much sensation do I really want to open to? The more sensation, the greater the push into this dissolved, yet very present, consciousness that is, for many people, utterly appealing. But the more sensation we risk, the more we also have to let go of the old, tighter patterns of the mind and its belief in separation from the whole, and many people find this-what the Sufis call “dying before you die” – utterly unappealing.

In terms of actually Rolfing® people, I’m far more interested in stimulating a renewed sense of feeling awareness in my client than in “changing” his or her structure as I believe, quite strongly, that a body needs to feel what’s really going on at the level of sensation, and then structural change will happen accordingly. This frees things a lot for me and allows me to just put my hands on the body and see how they want to move and what they want to do. In effect, I like to get out of my mind and tissue surf with compassion.

Structural Integration: If I remember right, your book Balance of Body, Balance of Mind equates holding in the body to ego structure or ego holding. In Yoga of the Maharnudra you speak of an open, embodied, and sensing state as a mystical state. You are clearly looking at the body and Rolfing from a spiritual or evolutionary perspective, not just a biomechanical or structural/ functional perspective. It seems to me from the writings and stories out there that Dr. Rolf was interested in all of these aspects. Was this spiritual / evolutionary viewpoint discussed in your original training? Do you feel it is given its due in our community at present?

WJ: I didn’t know Ida all that well. I did my auditing in the summer of 1975 at one of those early combined basic/advanced training classes that we used to hold, and she (along with Jan Sultan) was the teacher, and I was also able to spend a bit of time with her privately, outside of class. I can’t honestly say that there was a lot of focused discussion on the kinds of understandings and the linkages between body and consciousness that I raised in the two books that you mentioned, either in private conversation with her or in class. But, even so, what there was a lot of in those days was a spirit of adventure, fascination, experimentation, and excitement, a gut feeling that what Rolfing was ultimately all about was nothing less than a bona fide path of inquiry into the mystery of the embodied self. And Ida would constantly allude to this through implying that the Line was a kind of mudra of transformation (my words, not hers) that would help us in solving (or dissolving into) that mystery. She clearly presented the Line as a value and clearly believed that an embodiment of the Line would have an evolutionarily propulsive effect on the person, and she would even go so far as to suggest that Rolling was perhaps one of the first attempts by humans to consciously accelerate the pace of evolution.

There was always talk in those days of developing Rolling into a kind of mystery school, but that’s never really happened. At this point, the Rolf Institute’ of Structural Integration has become a first rate trade school that very successfully trains practitioners in the art, science, and profession of Rolling people, but in no way can it be considered a mystery school dedicated to an experiential understanding of how the physical embodiment of Lined states affects, alters, and ultimately transforms consciousness. The Institute (and the other offshoot schools as well) has focused virtually all of its attention on its very important exoteric mission of training practitioners, but has basically turned its back on any systematic exploration of the esoteric core assumptions that Dr. Rolf insisted on: that an embodiment of upright balance can radically accelerate conscious growth in the individual. That the Line has been progressively relegated to the very back burners of our inquiry has always struck me as particularly tragic.

Structural Integration: The Institute still teaches the Line: there is still the fundamental idea that Rolfing is a process of aligning the body in gravity around this ideal Line, so on a physical level it would seem we are doing the same thing, but from a perspective that has become more physical and less evolutionary. This brings up the question of how much the “propulsive effect” of Rolfing on consciousness depends on the Line itself, and how much it depends on the field (practitioner, client, society) holding an evolutionary perspective. In the time you reference, a large segment of society – the whole “counter-culture” movement – held a perspective and expectation of transformation. Now that’s dropped back to a “lower volume” in the field of society as a whole, and some clients have no interest in anything beyond pain relief, at least initially.

WJ: The “Line” that you’re speaking about is more of an intellectual construct than a lived experience. And for the purposes of our work with clients, this construct is invaluable. As a teaching tool, it not only gives our work intentionality and a philosophical rationale, but also serves as a guide to help us strategize how best to work with clients. I think we all hold, as an image in our mind, a picture of the Line. When we view a client’s body, we inevitably are going to compare what we see with this image in our mind, and the discrepancies that exist give us many of our clues as to where and how to work.

The application of the Line that I’m referring to, however, has nothing to do with strategizing session work. It refers instead to a lived condition of embodiment and a suggested path of practices that, if followed, leads to that condition. Its application to spiritual practices – sitting meditation as well as movement practices – is explosively powerful, and yet it is an application that has been almost totally ignored not just by the Institute, but by all of the other offshoot schools of Rolfing as well.

So, if our community isn’t all that actively exploring this application of the Line, who is? The answer (from the communications I’ve had from people who’ve read my books) is serious meditation practitioners, dancers, yogis, and martial artists. And these people are not just playing with the Line as a theoretical construct. They’re diving into it with their entire body and mind, spending long hours surrendering to the profound shifts in bodily awareness and states of consciousness that naturally occur when you begin seriously to explore balance as a path. The path of the Line is a path of deep and potent healing, but like any path worth following, if you want its rewards, you have to expose yourself to its fire.

You ask if perhaps the kind of evolutionary perspective that I’m suggesting was as much a result of the spirit of the times as it is a direct application of the Line. I want to be very clear that it is the experiential exploration of balance that is the igniting element that explodes open the meditative inquiry (and the evolutionary energies that fuel that inquiry like hydrogen in the sun). I’m talking about a very specific experiential phenomenon that occurs as the result of learning how to retain an upright (and uplifted) posture while surrendering the entire weight of the body to gravity. Strong energies and sensations are spontaneously liberated, and consciousness can undergo radical (and this is not a word that I use lightly) alterations.

It’s true that, far and away, the majority of clients coming to see us are looking for the relief of pain, and I don’t think anybody is going to argue with, or criticize, the decision of the faculty to pursue the perfection of our physiotherapeutic skills of manipulation as the centerpiece of what Rolling has become. The mission statement of the Rolf Institute speaks to the training of Rolling practitioners; it does not mention promoting the lived experience of the Line. But it has always struck me as peculiar that our founder presented the Line as the most important value of our work, and yet we haven’t gone anywhere near developing a protocol or system of practices that would allow people to explore for themselves the dramatic evolutionary shifts in awareness of self that she always suggested would occur. And it is this omission that I’ve been attempting to address in the work and practices I’ve been putting together and intend to start sharing in workshop/retreat format.

Structural Integration: I see from your website (www.embodiment.net) that your “embodiment work,” which I was first exposed to about nine years ago as a gazing practice, has since evolved into a system encompassing a series of practices. You’ve written a number of books over the years, and different books are now shown to be related to different practices that are part of the work as a whole. I get a sense that there has been an organic development and interweaving of your writing, your personal practices and explorations, and your overall thread of inquiry. Would you speak about what “embodiment” means to you, how your system has developed, and also give a sketch description of some of the practices and books of yours that relate to them?

WJ: I first encountered the word “embodiment” in the early to mid 1970s in a book by Herbert Guenther called The Tantric View of Life and resonated with it immediately. Guenther, one of our most important western Buddhist scholars, spoke of embodiment as pristine clarity of mind grounded in the fully felt awareness of body. Implicit in Guenther’s use of this term is the understanding that this clarity, which is the apparent goal of Buddhist practice, cannot be experienced unless we also include a fully activated awareness of head to foot bodily presence In other words, if you want emptiness of mind, you need first to experience fullness of body.

I came across this term about a year after I had begun getting Rolled, and it uncannily reflected the emerging experience and awarenesses that my initial Rolfing had started opening up in me. When I spoke earlier of ma’iyya consciousness, it is fundamentally identical to Guenther’s very specific use of the term “embodiment.” Over the past thirty years, the term has become a kind of fuzzy buzzword for describing anything and everything related to the body, but my initial exposure to it, and subsequent use of it, was and remains very specific.

Consciousness is altered radically if we can include in whatever we’re doing an awareness of the entire body as a unified field of shimmering tactile sensations. I’ve heard of studies that suggest that we are using perhaps only five to fifteen percent of the full potential of our brains, and I would suggest that what is also true is that most people, at any given moment in time, are probably only feeling between five and fifteen percent of their bodily sensations. And I would further suggest that these small percentages are directly related.

What is so extraordinary about the gazing practice that you mention is that it rather wildly stimulates the awareness of sensations throughout the entire body. I honestly haven’t a clue as to why it does this. I just know that it does. And, then, what it also does, just as Guenther’s understanding of embodiment suggests, is to radically alter and affect consciousness. As the conventional sense of the body’s apparent solidity dissolves into a field phenomenon of shimmering tactile sensations, so also does the unrelentingly solid, conventional sense of self also dissolve, and you find yourself suddenly immersed in the condition of embodied consciousness that the Buddhists refer to as sunyata (ordinarily translated as “the void” or as “emptiness,” but which Guenther, again in the same book, quite beautifully translates as “open dimension of being”). What’s clear to me is that this condition is a birthright state for all of us and definitely worth whatever price of admission is asked. That I would eventually present the gazing practice in the context of the relationship between Rumi and his great friend Shams was just one of those serendipitous things. For 750 years nobody has supposedly known what these two were doing behind the closed door of their retreat room that allowed them to emerge in such a state of ecstatic intoxication, and indeed their relationship has mostly been revered in the Sufi world from a safe distance as a kind of “divine mystery.” But if you read Rumi’s poetry with an understanding of the gazing practice, you quickly see that allusions to the practice, descriptions of how Rumi and Shams entered into the practice together, and specific instructions on how to do the practice yourself, are everywhere in the poetry. To play spiritual sleuth in this way has been a lot of fun for me.

Ok. Let me go back to how all this relates to the embodiment of the Line. A Tibetan inahaouudra text tells us to “do nothing with the body but relax.” And the only way we can truly invite relaxation into our lives in an upright posture is to embody the Line so that the force of gravity, not muscular contraction, can provide us with our primary source of support. What we also know is that tensing the body (or holding the breath, and they are basically the same thing) is our best and most reliable strategy not to feel. So if we can truly relax, then the formerly unfelt sensations of the body (the 85% to 95 % of sensations that we ordinarily aren’t aware of) can come flooding forward out of their hibernation or wherever it is they’ve been hiding.

Balance of Body, Balance of Mind was my first attempt to enunciate this kind of understanding. Quite clearly, our understanding of the Line provides a very important, and previously almost entirely unacknowledged, key to the experience of sitting meditation practice. Likewise, I believe that the Buddhist psychological model holds an equally vital key to the work of somatic practitioners who seek to relieve unnecessary holding and tension in the body, but aren’t oriented to considering that the ongoing manifestation of egoic mind may itself be the result of the most fundamental, and largely unconscious, myofascial holding pattern that exists in all of us.

My subsequent books have mostly looked at different pieces of this embodiment puzzle. The Posture of Meditation focuses on sitting practice. Aligned, Relaxed, Resilient focuses on mindfulness practice. Rnnni: Gazing at the Beloved is about the gazing practice. And Yoga of the Mahanualra is about the spontaneous movement practices that I call Sudaba (short for “surrendered dance of balance”). What I’d like to stress here, though, is that the individual sessions of Rolfing and the subsequent exploration of balance have always been central to my understanding and development of all these interrelated practices.

What I’ve been attempting to do is to create a path of practices based on the most potent technologies that the spiritual traditions have developed over the centuries, but that is explored through the lens of our contemporary somatic understanding, and most specifically through the application of the teachings of the Line. Clearly, if we want to experience these radical alterations to self that all the traditions speak of as so fundamentally wholesome, we need to do, on a daily basis, intentional practices that have been shown to support that alteration. Ideally, we would devote some time every day to these practices as well as enter into longer, intensive retreats from time to time.

Rolfing, sitting, mindfulness practices, standing and moving practices, gazing practices: it’s a potent brew, and I’m always on the lookout for new pieces of the puzzle. Lately, for example, I’ve gotten extremely excited about adding binaural beat technologies to sitting meditation practices. By sending tones of slightly different frequencies into each ear via headphones, we can quickly shift the brain out of the beta states that we ordinarily pass our lives in and move down into alpha (associated with relaxation), theta (associated with creative thinking and dreaming), and even delta states (associated with both deep sleep and very deep meditation). These technologies almost seem to me to be a form of Rotting the brain and the nervous system, and I’m finding that they produce a profound, deepening effect on my meditation.

Exercise and nutrition are two more areas that it seems foolish not to address to support this shift into embodied states. And then there’s the whole issue of the breath. I recall hearing (Certified Advanced Roller) Hubert Godard say that posture is breath, and certainly how we breathe in this moment is a direct reflection of our current condition of embodiment. The Buddha’s primary instruction on breath is to breathe in and out “with the whole body,” and over long hours and long days of sitting practices that focus on the principles of the Line (alignment, relaxation, and resilient movement), this is what begins naturally to occur. In a fascinating correlation across time, I also recall Dr. Rolf saying in my auditing class that as breath moves through a truly integrated and balanced body, every joint it the body should be able to move in response to the breath and that this will include the sutures in the skull as well as the joint between the small bones in the feet!

Structural Integration: Our skills of manipulation and our broadening understanding of how to influence structure (through such things as, for example, spinal mechanics and the application of cranial and visceral work) have become much more sophisticated over the years. Has your understanding of how to embody the Line also changed over time?

WJ: Our early attempts (mine as well as most everyone else’s) at consciously embodying the Line were quite willful and, frankly, didn’t work all that well. With Ida occasionally barking things at us like “bring your lumbars back!” we would attempt to force our body to approximate what we believed the Line to be. But what many of us found was that this kind of approach just brings with it another overlying pattern of holding (never has the expression “chains of gold are just as effective at keeping us imprisoned as are chains of iron” been so clearly demonstrated to me), and Don Johnson did us all a great service in bringing this posturing to an end with his warnings about what he called “somatic platonism.”

The Line can’t be forced on a body from the outside in. Do this, and you’ve got hell on your hands. It needs instead to emerge naturally from the inside out through playing with and surrendering to balance and seeing how, over time, this affects the sensations and feeling presence of the body. Alignment alone can’t be the goal of the Line (or every soldier standing at attention would be enlightened). It has to come with a deep relaxation (which is nothing more or less than the dropping of the weight of the body in response to the pull of gravity) that allows resilient movement to occur throughout the entire length of the body. Then, breath by breath, sensation by sensation, things can begin to shift spontaneously, on their own, and this continues to be the way I explore the magic of the Line.

An exploration of the Line is an intensely personal undertaking. Playing with balance allows what the Theravadin Buddhists call the deep sankharas, the deep and largely unconscious residues of holding and contraction, to come to the surface of awareness where they can be released. This unwinding or releasing of tensions occurs spontaneously and organically to the degree that we can surrender to its impulses, rather than by attempting to superimpose our ideas about how it should look. It is a deeply healing process, and everyone’s experience of it will be uniquely their own. I find it much more helpful to think of the Line as a process, rather than as a thing. It’s an infallible, moment-to-moment guide as we work to unravel the deepest tensions and holdings that keep us stuck and limited. It’s not something to attain and then maintain.

Structural Integration: Are there any other thoughts you’d like to share?

WJ: As powerful and healing as the individual sessions of Rolfing are, an even deeper process of healing awaits the person who explores the embodiment of the Line as an intentional, meditative inquiry. But for this inquiry not to just spin its wheels on the slippery surface of the mind, the individual sessions of Rolfing appear to me to be indispensable. Seen from this perspective, the basic series of Rolfing functions as a kind of preliminary practice that then will allow someone truly to begin exploring the Line. And as this exploration proceeds, regular supplemental Rolfing sessions help keep us on track and deepen the inquiry.

Many years ago I did a three-week sitting retreat during which I had a Rolfing friend come in every second or third day and work on my body. What an experience! About two-thirds of the way through that retreat, my body just found that place of effortless balance, and the understanding of the relationship between alignment, relaxation, resilience, and consciousness came flooding in. I began rather furiously writing down my insights, and the result was The Posture
of Meditation.

It’s time for me to start sharing this, and my vision would be to hold retreats that explore intensive sitting, standing, and moving practices based on our understanding of the Line. What these retreats would also include would be regular Rolfing sessions as well. In the beginning, it’s going to be more practical to limit participation in something like this to Rolfers so that participants can pair up with and work on each other, much as we do during basic training. It probably makes the most sense to launch something like this as a six-day or week-long residential retreat, but can you even begin to imagine what it would be like to re-explore and re-experience the Ten Series in the context of a 21-day retreat focusing on the embodiment of the Line?! Somewhere down the road I could see offering something like this to non-Roffers as well, but for that to work, I would obviously need a cadre of Rolfers wanting to work on people in this kind of format.

I’d ask that, if what I’m talking about here resonates with whoever’s reading this, then get in touch with me and let me know of your interest. It would be a great experiment. That’s for sure.

WILL JOHNSON BIBLIOGRAPHY

Balance of Body, Balance of Mind (Hum anies, 1993).

The Posture of Meditation (Shambhala, 1996). Also available in German (Meditieren in der richtigen Haltung. Das Praxishnch; Herder/ Spektrum, 1999) and Italian (La Postnra di Meditazione; Ubaldini Editore,1997).

Aligned, Relaxed, Resilient: The Physical Foundations of Mindfidness (Shambhala, 2000).

Runni, Gazing at the Beloved: The Radical Practice of Beholding the Divine (inner Traditions, 2003). Also available in French (Rumi: Union des regards, fusion des Ames; Gange Editions, 2005).

The Sailfish and the Sacred Mountain: Passages in the Lives of a Father and Son (Inner Traditions, 2005). Also available in Russian (Terra Mystica; Mockba, 2005).

Yoga of the Mahanmdra: The Mystical Way of Balance (Inner Traditions, 2005).

The Forbidden Rumi: The Suppressed Poems of Runni on Love, Heresy, and Intoxication (Inner Traditions, 2006; commentaries and translations by Will Johnson and Nevit O. Ergin).[:ja]Structural Integration: Our work as Rolfers is to shape the body, but what is the body? Many spiritual traditions lead us to understand that our bodies are much different from our ordinary reified conception of “body.” From the perspective of where your work has led you, how do you view/ define body and how has that affected how you work with bodies?

Will Johnson: Instead of paying much attention to intellectual classifications of body (physical, emotional, energetic, mental, causal, etheric, etc.), as helpful as these classifications can be in pointing to different aspects of our embodied self, 1 prefer simply to focus on the direct experience of the body: the lived, felt, palpable, vibratory, throbbing, quivery, spacious, compacted flux of tactile stuff whose location, and point of emanation, can be traced to what my eyes recognize as my physical body. The felt awareness of the entire body as a constantly changing tactile presence is the wild and wonderful path of practice that Rolfing” launched me on.

For me, Rolfing was a very direct introduction to the world of tactile sensations-both gross and subtle. On the gross level, there were the strong and intense sensations of being Rolfed. But through that work, and in its aftermath, I started to become aware of a much subtler level of sensations that I’d never before felt, and I think everyone knows what I’m referring to here: the minute, pin-prickly, tingly, little blips of tactile stuff (the current of the life force?) that we feel coursing through our body, probably in some parts more than others. Now, even though these individual sensations are unbelievably small in size and are vibrating or oscillating at almost unimaginably rapid rates of vibratory frequency, they can still be distinctly felt. If, that is (and this is a big if), we surrender to their presence, and I have since come to the belief that the source of all existential pain in the body can be traced to our fearful resistance to feel the literally sensational presence of the body.

Where things started getting really interesting was when 1 began to realize that, if I give myself permission to do two things simultaneously – 1) to surrender to balance and 2) to feel the feeling, the sensation, in every little part, every little nook and cranny, indeed in every little cell of the body – then my sense of self would be altered quite radically, and I liked it there. And the only place where I was able to find descriptions of these kinds of very open, very dissolved, and yet very present and grounded embodied states was in the spiritual literatures. Rumi, for example, was taught the doctrine of ma’iyya by his father who himself was an accomplished mystic. Ma’iyya tells us that God (or whatever word works for you) cannot be found in the mind. It cannot even be found in the heart alone. It must be felt as sensation in each and every part of the body.

And indeed the ability to come to balance and feel the whole body as a unified field of shimmery tactile presence automatically and spontaneously ushers in what we might call ma’iyya consciousness.

So … to come full circle, the body to me is the play of sensations plus the conscious presence that inhabits that play at any given moment. The question we all have to ask ourselves is how much sensation do I really want to open to? The more sensation, the greater the push into this dissolved, yet very present, consciousness that is, for many people, utterly appealing. But the more sensation we risk, the more we also have to let go of the old, tighter patterns of the mind and its belief in separation from the whole, and many people find this-what the Sufis call “dying before you die” – utterly unappealing.

In terms of actually Rolfing® people, I’m far more interested in stimulating a renewed sense of feeling awareness in my client than in “changing” his or her structure as I believe, quite strongly, that a body needs to feel what’s really going on at the level of sensation, and then structural change will happen accordingly. This frees things a lot for me and allows me to just put my hands on the body and see how they want to move and what they want to do. In effect, I like to get out of my mind and tissue surf with compassion.

Structural Integration: If I remember right, your book Balance of Body, Balance of Mind equates holding in the body to ego structure or ego holding. In Yoga of the Maharnudra you speak of an open, embodied, and sensing state as a mystical state. You are clearly looking at the body and Rolfing from a spiritual or evolutionary perspective, not just a biomechanical or structural/ functional perspective. It seems to me from the writings and stories out there that Dr. Rolf was interested in all of these aspects. Was this spiritual / evolutionary viewpoint discussed in your original training? Do you feel it is given its due in our community at present?

WJ: I didn’t know Ida all that well. I did my auditing in the summer of 1975 at one of those early combined basic/advanced training classes that we used to hold, and she (along with Jan Sultan) was the teacher, and I was also able to spend a bit of time with her privately, outside of class. I can’t honestly say that there was a lot of focused discussion on the kinds of understandings and the linkages between body and consciousness that I raised in the two books that you mentioned, either in private conversation with her or in class. But, even so, what there was a lot of in those days was a spirit of adventure, fascination, experimentation, and excitement, a gut feeling that what Rolfing was ultimately all about was nothing less than a bona fide path of inquiry into the mystery of the embodied self. And Ida would constantly allude to this through implying that the Line was a kind of mudra of transformation (my words, not hers) that would help us in solving (or dissolving into) that mystery. She clearly presented the Line as a value and clearly believed that an embodiment of the Line would have an evolutionarily propulsive effect on the person, and she would even go so far as to suggest that Rolling was perhaps one of the first attempts by humans to consciously accelerate the pace of evolution.

There was always talk in those days of developing Rolling into a kind of mystery school, but that’s never really happened. At this point, the Rolf Institute’ of Structural Integration has become a first rate trade school that very successfully trains practitioners in the art, science, and profession of Rolling people, but in no way can it be considered a mystery school dedicated to an experiential understanding of how the physical embodiment of Lined states affects, alters, and ultimately transforms consciousness. The Institute (and the other offshoot schools as well) has focused virtually all of its attention on its very important exoteric mission of training practitioners, but has basically turned its back on any systematic exploration of the esoteric core assumptions that Dr. Rolf insisted on: that an embodiment of upright balance can radically accelerate conscious growth in the individual. That the Line has been progressively relegated to the very back burners of our inquiry has always struck me as particularly tragic.

Structural Integration: The Institute still teaches the Line: there is still the fundamental idea that Rolfing is a process of aligning the body in gravity around this ideal Line, so on a physical level it would seem we are doing the same thing, but from a perspective that has become more physical and less evolutionary. This brings up the question of how much the “propulsive effect” of Rolfing on consciousness depends on the Line itself, and how much it depends on the field (practitioner, client, society) holding an evolutionary perspective. In the time you reference, a large segment of society – the whole “counter-culture” movement – held a perspective and expectation of transformation. Now that’s dropped back to a “lower volume” in the field of society as a whole, and some clients have no interest in anything beyond pain relief, at least initially.

WJ: The “Line” that you’re speaking about is more of an intellectual construct than a lived experience. And for the purposes of our work with clients, this construct is invaluable. As a teaching tool, it not only gives our work intentionality and a philosophical rationale, but also serves as a guide to help us strategize how best to work with clients. I think we all hold, as an image in our mind, a picture of the Line. When we view a client’s body, we inevitably are going to compare what we see with this image in our mind, and the discrepancies that exist give us many of our clues as to where and how to work.

The application of the Line that I’m referring to, however, has nothing to do with strategizing session work. It refers instead to a lived condition of embodiment and a suggested path of practices that, if followed, leads to that condition. Its application to spiritual practices – sitting meditation as well as movement practices – is explosively powerful, and yet it is an application that has been almost totally ignored not just by the Institute, but by all of the other offshoot schools of Rolfing as well.

So, if our community isn’t all that actively exploring this application of the Line, who is? The answer (from the communications I’ve had from people who’ve read my books) is serious meditation practitioners, dancers, yogis, and martial artists. And these people are not just playing with the Line as a theoretical construct. They’re diving into it with their entire body and mind, spending long hours surrendering to the profound shifts in bodily awareness and states of consciousness that naturally occur when you begin seriously to explore balance as a path. The path of the Line is a path of deep and potent healing, but like any path worth following, if you want its rewards, you have to expose yourself to its fire.

You ask if perhaps the kind of evolutionary perspective that I’m suggesting was as much a result of the spirit of the times as it is a direct application of the Line. I want to be very clear that it is the experiential exploration of balance that is the igniting element that explodes open the meditative inquiry (and the evolutionary energies that fuel that inquiry like hydrogen in the sun). I’m talking about a very specific experiential phenomenon that occurs as the result of learning how to retain an upright (and uplifted) posture while surrendering the entire weight of the body to gravity. Strong energies and sensations are spontaneously liberated, and consciousness can undergo radical (and this is not a word that I use lightly) alterations.

It’s true that, far and away, the majority of clients coming to see us are looking for the relief of pain, and I don’t think anybody is going to argue with, or criticize, the decision of the faculty to pursue the perfection of our physiotherapeutic skills of manipulation as the centerpiece of what Rolling has become. The mission statement of the Rolf Institute speaks to the training of Rolling practitioners; it does not mention promoting the lived experience of the Line. But it has always struck me as peculiar that our founder presented the Line as the most important value of our work, and yet we haven’t gone anywhere near developing a protocol or system of practices that would allow people to explore for themselves the dramatic evolutionary shifts in awareness of self that she always suggested would occur. And it is this omission that I’ve been attempting to address in the work and practices I’ve been putting together and intend to start sharing in workshop/retreat format.

Structural Integration: I see from your website (www.embodiment.net) that your “embodiment work,” which I was first exposed to about nine years ago as a gazing practice, has since evolved into a system encompassing a series of practices. You’ve written a number of books over the years, and different books are now shown to be related to different practices that are part of the work as a whole. I get a sense that there has been an organic development and interweaving of your writing, your personal practices and explorations, and your overall thread of inquiry. Would you speak about what “embodiment” means to you, how your system has developed, and also give a sketch description of some of the practices and books of yours that relate to them?

WJ: I first encountered the word “embodiment” in the early to mid 1970s in a book by Herbert Guenther called The Tantric View of Life and resonated with it immediately. Guenther, one of our most important western Buddhist scholars, spoke of embodiment as pristine clarity of mind grounded in the fully felt awareness of body. Implicit in Guenther’s use of this term is the understanding that this clarity, which is the apparent goal of Buddhist practice, cannot be experienced unless we also include a fully activated awareness of head to foot bodily presence In other words, if you want emptiness of mind, you need first to experience fullness of body.

I came across this term about a year after I had begun getting Rolled, and it uncannily reflected the emerging experience and awarenesses that my initial Rolfing had started opening up in me. When I spoke earlier of ma’iyya consciousness, it is fundamentally identical to Guenther’s very specific use of the term “embodiment.” Over the past thirty years, the term has become a kind of fuzzy buzzword for describing anything and everything related to the body, but my initial exposure to it, and subsequent use of it, was and remains very specific.

Consciousness is altered radically if we can include in whatever we’re doing an awareness of the entire body as a unified field of shimmering tactile sensations. I’ve heard of studies that suggest that we are using perhaps only five to fifteen percent of the full potential of our brains, and I would suggest that what is also true is that most people, at any given moment in time, are probably only feeling between five and fifteen percent of their bodily sensations. And I would further suggest that these small percentages are directly related.

What is so extraordinary about the gazing practice that you mention is that it rather wildly stimulates the awareness of sensations throughout the entire body. I honestly haven’t a clue as to why it does this. I just know that it does. And, then, what it also does, just as Guenther’s understanding of embodiment suggests, is to radically alter and affect consciousness. As the conventional sense of the body’s apparent solidity dissolves into a field phenomenon of shimmering tactile sensations, so also does the unrelentingly solid, conventional sense of self also dissolve, and you find yourself suddenly immersed in the condition of embodied consciousness that the Buddhists refer to as sunyata (ordinarily translated as “the void” or as “emptiness,” but which Guenther, again in the same book, quite beautifully translates as “open dimension of being”). What’s clear to me is that this condition is a birthright state for all of us and definitely worth whatever price of admission is asked. That I would eventually present the gazing practice in the context of the relationship between Rumi and his great friend Shams was just one of those serendipitous things. For 750 years nobody has supposedly known what these two were doing behind the closed door of their retreat room that allowed them to emerge in such a state of ecstatic intoxication, and indeed their relationship has mostly been revered in the Sufi world from a safe distance as a kind of “divine mystery.” But if you read Rumi’s poetry with an understanding of the gazing practice, you quickly see that allusions to the practice, descriptions of how Rumi and Shams entered into the practice together, and specific instructions on how to do the practice yourself, are everywhere in the poetry. To play spiritual sleuth in this way has been a lot of fun for me.

Ok. Let me go back to how all this relates to the embodiment of the Line. A Tibetan inahaouudra text tells us to “do nothing with the body but relax.” And the only way we can truly invite relaxation into our lives in an upright posture is to embody the Line so that the force of gravity, not muscular contraction, can provide us with our primary source of support. What we also know is that tensing the body (or holding the breath, and they are basically the same thing) is our best and most reliable strategy not to feel. So if we can truly relax, then the formerly unfelt sensations of the body (the 85% to 95 % of sensations that we ordinarily aren’t aware of) can come flooding forward out of their hibernation or wherever it is they’ve been hiding.

Balance of Body, Balance of Mind was my first attempt to enunciate this kind of understanding. Quite clearly, our understanding of the Line provides a very important, and previously almost entirely unacknowledged, key to the experience of sitting meditation practice. Likewise, I believe that the Buddhist psychological model holds an equally vital key to the work of somatic practitioners who seek to relieve unnecessary holding and tension in the body, but aren’t oriented to considering that the ongoing manifestation of egoic mind may itself be the result of the most fundamental, and largely unconscious, myofascial holding pattern that exists in all of us.

My subsequent books have mostly looked at different pieces of this embodiment puzzle. The Posture of Meditation focuses on sitting practice. Aligned, Relaxed, Resilient focuses on mindfulness practice. Rnnni: Gazing at the Beloved is about the gazing practice. And Yoga of the Mahanualra is about the spontaneous movement practices that I call Sudaba (short for “surrendered dance of balance”). What I’d like to stress here, though, is that the individual sessions of Rolfing and the subsequent exploration of balance have always been central to my understanding and development of all these interrelated practices.

What I’ve been attempting to do is to create a path of practices based on the most potent technologies that the spiritual traditions have developed over the centuries, but that is explored through the lens of our contemporary somatic understanding, and most specifically through the application of the teachings of the Line. Clearly, if we want to experience these radical alterations to self that all the traditions speak of as so fundamentally wholesome, we need to do, on a daily basis, intentional practices that have been shown to support that alteration. Ideally, we would devote some time every day to these practices as well as enter into longer, intensive retreats from time to time.

Rolfing, sitting, mindfulness practices, standing and moving practices, gazing practices: it’s a potent brew, and I’m always on the lookout for new pieces of the puzzle. Lately, for example, I’ve gotten extremely excited about adding binaural beat technologies to sitting meditation practices. By sending tones of slightly different frequencies into each ear via headphones, we can quickly shift the brain out of the beta states that we ordinarily pass our lives in and move down into alpha (associated with relaxation), theta (associated with creative thinking and dreaming), and even delta states (associated with both deep sleep and very deep meditation). These technologies almost seem to me to be a form of Rotting the brain and the nervous system, and I’m finding that they produce a profound, deepening effect on my meditation.

Exercise and nutrition are two more areas that it seems foolish not to address to support this shift into embodied states. And then there’s the whole issue of the breath. I recall hearing (Certified Advanced Roller) Hubert Godard say that posture is breath, and certainly how we breathe in this moment is a direct reflection of our current condition of embodiment. The Buddha’s primary instruction on breath is to breathe in and out “with the whole body,” and over long hours and long days of sitting practices that focus on the principles of the Line (alignment, relaxation, and resilient movement), this is what begins naturally to occur. In a fascinating correlation across time, I also recall Dr. Rolf saying in my auditing class that as breath moves through a truly integrated and balanced body, every joint it the body should be able to move in response to the breath and that this will include the sutures in the skull as well as the joint between the small bones in the feet!

Structural Integration: Our skills of manipulation and our broadening understanding of how to influence structure (through such things as, for example, spinal mechanics and the application of cranial and visceral work) have become much more sophisticated over the years. Has your understanding of how to embody the Line also changed over time?

WJ: Our early attempts (mine as well as most everyone else’s) at consciously embodying the Line were quite willful and, frankly, didn’t work all that well. With Ida occasionally barking things at us like “bring your lumbars back!” we would attempt to force our body to approximate what we believed the Line to be. But what many of us found was that this kind of approach just brings with it another overlying pattern of holding (never has the expression “chains of gold are just as effective at keeping us imprisoned as are chains of iron” been so clearly demonstrated to me), and Don Johnson did us all a great service in bringing this posturing to an end with his warnings about what he called “somatic platonism.”

The Line can’t be forced on a body from the outside in. Do this, and you’ve got hell on your hands. It needs instead to emerge naturally from the inside out through playing with and surrendering to balance and seeing how, over time, this affects the sensations and feeling presence of the body. Alignment alone can’t be the goal of the Line (or every soldier standing at attention would be enlightened). It has to come with a deep relaxation (which is nothing more or less than the dropping of the weight of the body in response to the pull of gravity) that allows resilient movement to occur throughout the entire length of the body. Then, breath by breath, sensation by sensation, things can begin to shift spontaneously, on their own, and this continues to be the way I explore the magic of the Line.

An exploration of the Line is an intensely personal undertaking. Playing with balance allows what the Theravadin Buddhists call the deep sankharas, the deep and largely unconscious residues of holding and contraction, to come to the surface of awareness where they can be released. This unwinding or releasing of tensions occurs spontaneously and organically to the degree that we can surrender to its impulses, rather than by attempting to superimpose our ideas about how it should look. It is a deeply healing process, and everyone’s experience of it will be uniquely their own. I find it much more helpful to think of the Line as a process, rather than as a thing. It’s an infallible, moment-to-moment guide as we work to unravel the deepest tensions and holdings that keep us stuck and limited. It’s not something to attain and then maintain.

Structural Integration: Are there any other thoughts you’d like to share?

WJ: As powerful and healing as the individual sessions of Rolfing are, an even deeper process of healing awaits the person who explores the embodiment of the Line as an intentional, meditative inquiry. But for this inquiry not to just spin its wheels on the slippery surface of the mind, the individual sessions of Rolfing appear to me to be indispensable. Seen from this perspective, the basic series of Rolfing functions as a kind of preliminary practice that then will allow someone truly to begin exploring the Line. And as this exploration proceeds, regular supplemental Rolfing sessions help keep us on track and deepen the inquiry.

Many years ago I did a three-week sitting retreat during which I had a Rolfing friend come in every second or third day and work on my body. What an experience! About two-thirds of the way through that retreat, my body just found that place of effortless balance, and the understanding of the relationship between alignment, relaxation, resilience, and consciousness came flooding in. I began rather furiously writing down my insights, and the result was The Posture
of Meditation.

It’s time for me to start sharing this, and my vision would be to hold retreats that explore intensive sitting, standing, and moving practices based on our understanding of the Line. What these retreats would also include would be regular Rolfing sessions as well. In the beginning, it’s going to be more practical to limit participation in something like this to Rolfers so that participants can pair up with and work on each other, much as we do during basic training. It probably makes the most sense to launch something like this as a six-day or week-long residential retreat, but can you even begin to imagine what it would be like to re-explore and re-experience the Ten Series in the context of a 21-day retreat focusing on the embodiment of the Line?! Somewhere down the road I could see offering something like this to non-Roffers as well, but for that to work, I would obviously need a cadre of Rolfers wanting to work on people in this kind of format.

I’d ask that, if what I’m talking about here resonates with whoever’s reading this, then get in touch with me and let me know of your interest. It would be a great experiment. That’s for sure.

WILL JOHNSON BIBLIOGRAPHY

Balance of Body, Balance of Mind (Hum anies, 1993).

The Posture of Meditation (Shambhala, 1996). Also available in German (Meditieren in der richtigen Haltung. Das Praxishnch; Herder/ Spektrum, 1999) and Italian (La Postnra di Meditazione; Ubaldini Editore,1997).

Aligned, Relaxed, Resilient: The Physical Foundations of Mindfidness (Shambhala, 2000).

Runni, Gazing at the Beloved: The Radical Practice of Beholding the Divine (inner Traditions, 2003). Also available in French (Rumi: Union des regards, fusion des Ames; Gange Editions, 2005).

The Sailfish and the Sacred Mountain: Passages in the Lives of a Father and Son (Inner Traditions, 2005). Also available in Russian (Terra Mystica; Mockba, 2005).

Yoga of the Mahanmdra: The Mystical Way of Balance (Inner Traditions, 2005).

The Forbidden Rumi: The Suppressed Poems of Runni on Love, Heresy, and Intoxication (Inner Traditions, 2006; commentaries and translations by Will Johnson and Nevit O. Ergin).[:it]Structural Integration: Our work as Rolfers is to shape the body, but what is the body? Many spiritual traditions lead us to understand that our bodies are much different from our ordinary reified conception of “body.” From the perspective of where your work has led you, how do you view/ define body and how has that affected how you work with bodies?

Will Johnson: Instead of paying much attention to intellectual classifications of body (physical, emotional, energetic, mental, causal, etheric, etc.), as helpful as these classifications can be in pointing to different aspects of our embodied self, 1 prefer simply to focus on the direct experience of the body: the lived, felt, palpable, vibratory, throbbing, quivery, spacious, compacted flux of tactile stuff whose location, and point of emanation, can be traced to what my eyes recognize as my physical body. The felt awareness of the entire body as a constantly changing tactile presence is the wild and wonderful path of practice that Rolfing” launched me on.

For me, Rolfing was a very direct introduction to the world of tactile sensations-both gross and subtle. On the gross level, there were the strong and intense sensations of being Rolfed. But through that work, and in its aftermath, I started to become aware of a much subtler level of sensations that I’d never before felt, and I think everyone knows what I’m referring to here: the minute, pin-prickly, tingly, little blips of tactile stuff (the current of the life force?) that we feel coursing through our body, probably in some parts more than others. Now, even though these individual sensations are unbelievably small in size and are vibrating or oscillating at almost unimaginably rapid rates of vibratory frequency, they can still be distinctly felt. If, that is (and this is a big if), we surrender to their presence, and I have since come to the belief that the source of all existential pain in the body can be traced to our fearful resistance to feel the literally sensational presence of the body.

Where things started getting really interesting was when 1 began to realize that, if I give myself permission to do two things simultaneously – 1) to surrender to balance and 2) to feel the feeling, the sensation, in every little part, every little nook and cranny, indeed in every little cell of the body – then my sense of self would be altered quite radically, and I liked it there. And the only place where I was able to find descriptions of these kinds of very open, very dissolved, and yet very present and grounded embodied states was in the spiritual literatures. Rumi, for example, was taught the doctrine of ma’iyya by his father who himself was an accomplished mystic. Ma’iyya tells us that God (or whatever word works for you) cannot be found in the mind. It cannot even be found in the heart alone. It must be felt as sensation in each and every part of the body.

And indeed the ability to come to balance and feel the whole body as a unified field of shimmery tactile presence automatically and spontaneously ushers in what we might call ma’iyya consciousness.

So … to come full circle, the body to me is the play of sensations plus the conscious presence that inhabits that play at any given moment. The question we all have to ask ourselves is how much sensation do I really want to open to? The more sensation, the greater the push into this dissolved, yet very present, consciousness that is, for many people, utterly appealing. But the more sensation we risk, the more we also have to let go of the old, tighter patterns of the mind and its belief in separation from the whole, and many people find this-what the Sufis call “dying before you die” – utterly unappealing.

In terms of actually Rolfing® people, I’m far more interested in stimulating a renewed sense of feeling awareness in my client than in “changing” his or her structure as I believe, quite strongly, that a body needs to feel what’s really going on at the level of sensation, and then structural change will happen accordingly. This frees things a lot for me and allows me to just put my hands on the body and see how they want to move and what they want to do. In effect, I like to get out of my mind and tissue surf with compassion.

Structural Integration: If I remember right, your book Balance of Body, Balance of Mind equates holding in the body to ego structure or ego holding. In Yoga of the Maharnudra you speak of an open, embodied, and sensing state as a mystical state. You are clearly looking at the body and Rolfing from a spiritual or evolutionary perspective, not just a biomechanical or structural/ functional perspective. It seems to me from the writings and stories out there that Dr. Rolf was interested in all of these aspects. Was this spiritual / evolutionary viewpoint discussed in your original training? Do you feel it is given its due in our community at present?

WJ: I didn’t know Ida all that well. I did my auditing in the summer of 1975 at one of those early combined basic/advanced training classes that we used to hold, and she (along with Jan Sultan) was the teacher, and I was also able to spend a bit of time with her privately, outside of class. I can’t honestly say that there was a lot of focused discussion on the kinds of understandings and the linkages between body and consciousness that I raised in the two books that you mentioned, either in private conversation with her or in class. But, even so, what there was a lot of in those days was a spirit of adventure, fascination, experimentation, and excitement, a gut feeling that what Rolfing was ultimately all about was nothing less than a bona fide path of inquiry into the mystery of the embodied self. And Ida would constantly allude to this through implying that the Line was a kind of mudra of transformation (my words, not hers) that would help us in solving (or dissolving into) that mystery. She clearly presented the Line as a value and clearly believed that an embodiment of the Line would have an evolutionarily propulsive effect on the person, and she would even go so far as to suggest that Rolling was perhaps one of the first attempts by humans to consciously accelerate the pace of evolution.

There was always talk in those days of developing Rolling into a kind of mystery school, but that’s never really happened. At this point, the Rolf Institute’ of Structural Integration has become a first rate trade school that very successfully trains practitioners in the art, science, and profession of Rolling people, but in no way can it be considered a mystery school dedicated to an experiential understanding of how the physical embodiment of Lined states affects, alters, and ultimately transforms consciousness. The Institute (and the other offshoot schools as well) has focused virtually all of its attention on its very important exoteric mission of training practitioners, but has basically turned its back on any systematic exploration of the esoteric core assumptions that Dr. Rolf insisted on: that an embodiment of upright balance can radically accelerate conscious growth in the individual. That the Line has been progressively relegated to the very back burners of our inquiry has always struck me as particularly tragic.

Structural Integration: The Institute still teaches the Line: there is still the fundamental idea that Rolfing is a process of aligning the body in gravity around this ideal Line, so on a physical level it would seem we are doing the same thing, but from a perspective that has become more physical and less evolutionary. This brings up the question of how much the “propulsive effect” of Rolfing on consciousness depends on the Line itself, and how much it depends on the field (practitioner, client, society) holding an evolutionary perspective. In the time you reference, a large segment of society – the whole “counter-culture” movement – held a perspective and expectation of transformation. Now that’s dropped back to a “lower volume” in the field of society as a whole, and some clients have no interest in anything beyond pain relief, at least initially.

WJ: The “Line” that you’re speaking about is more of an intellectual construct than a lived experience. And for the purposes of our work with clients, this construct is invaluable. As a teaching tool, it not only gives our work intentionality and a philosophical rationale, but also serves as a guide to help us strategize how best to work with clients. I think we all hold, as an image in our mind, a picture of the Line. When we view a client’s body, we inevitably are going to compare what we see with this image in our mind, and the discrepancies that exist give us many of our clues as to where and how to work.

The application of the Line that I’m referring to, however, has nothing to do with strategizing session work. It refers instead to a lived condition of embodiment and a suggested path of practices that, if followed, leads to that condition. Its application to spiritual practices – sitting meditation as well as movement practices – is explosively powerful, and yet it is an application that has been almost totally ignored not just by the Institute, but by all of the other offshoot schools of Rolfing as well.

So, if our community isn’t all that actively exploring this application of the Line, who is? The answer (from the communications I’ve had from people who’ve read my books) is serious meditation practitioners, dancers, yogis, and martial artists. And these people are not just playing with the Line as a theoretical construct. They’re diving into it with their entire body and mind, spending long hours surrendering to the profound shifts in bodily awareness and states of consciousness that naturally occur when you begin seriously to explore balance as a path. The path of the Line is a path of deep and potent healing, but like any path worth following, if you want its rewards, you have to expose yourself to its fire.

You ask if perhaps the kind of evolutionary perspective that I’m suggesting was as much a result of the spirit of the times as it is a direct application of the Line. I want to be very clear that it is the experiential exploration of balance that is the igniting element that explodes open the meditative inquiry (and the evolutionary energies that fuel that inquiry like hydrogen in the sun). I’m talking about a very specific experiential phenomenon that occurs as the result of learning how to retain an upright (and uplifted) posture while surrendering the entire weight of the body to gravity. Strong energies and sensations are spontaneously liberated, and consciousness can undergo radical (and this is not a word that I use lightly) alterations.

It’s true that, far and away, the majority of clients coming to see us are looking for the relief of pain, and I don’t think anybody is going to argue with, or criticize, the decision of the faculty to pursue the perfection of our physiotherapeutic skills of manipulation as the centerpiece of what Rolling has become. The mission statement of the Rolf Institute speaks to the training of Rolling practitioners; it does not mention promoting the lived experience of the Line. But it has always struck me as peculiar that our founder presented the Line as the most important value of our work, and yet we haven’t gone anywhere near developing a protocol or system of practices that would allow people to explore for themselves the dramatic evolutionary shifts in awareness of self that she always suggested would occur. And it is this omission that I’ve been attempting to address in the work and practices I’ve been putting together and intend to start sharing in workshop/retreat format.

Structural Integration: I see from your website (www.embodiment.net) that your “embodiment work,” which I was first exposed to about nine years ago as a gazing practice, has since evolved into a system encompassing a series of practices. You’ve written a number of books over the years, and different books are now shown to be related to different practices that are part of the work as a whole. I get a sense that there has been an organic development and interweaving of your writing, your personal practices and explorations, and your overall thread of inquiry. Would you speak about what “embodiment” means to you, how your system has developed, and also give a sketch description of some of the practices and books of yours that relate to them?

WJ: I first encountered the word “embodiment” in the early to mid 1970s in a book by Herbert Guenther called The Tantric View of Life and resonated with it immediately. Guenther, one of our most important western Buddhist scholars, spoke of embodiment as pristine clarity of mind grounded in the fully felt awareness of body. Implicit in Guenther’s use of this term is the understanding that this clarity, which is the apparent goal of Buddhist practice, cannot be experienced unless we also include a fully activated awareness of head to foot bodily presence In other words, if you want emptiness of mind, you need first to experience fullness of body.

I came across this term about a year after I had begun getting Rolled, and it uncannily reflected the emerging experience and awarenesses that my initial Rolfing had started opening up in me. When I spoke earlier of ma’iyya consciousness, it is fundamentally identical to Guenther’s very specific use of the term “embodiment.” Over the past thirty years, the term has become a kind of fuzzy buzzword for describing anything and everything related to the body, but my initial exposure to it, and subsequent use of it, was and remains very specific.

Consciousness is altered radically if we can include in whatever we’re doing an awareness of the entire body as a unified field of shimmering tactile sensations. I’ve heard of studies that suggest that we are using perhaps only five to fifteen percent of the full potential of our brains, and I would suggest that what is also true is that most people, at any given moment in time, are probably only feeling between five and fifteen percent of their bodily sensations. And I would further suggest that these small percentages are directly related.

What is so extraordinary about the gazing practice that you mention is that it rather wildly stimulates the awareness of sensations throughout the entire body. I honestly haven’t a clue as to why it does this. I just know that it does. And, then, what it also does, just as Guenther’s understanding of embodiment suggests, is to radically alter and affect consciousness. As the conventional sense of the body’s apparent solidity dissolves into a field phenomenon of shimmering tactile sensations, so also does the unrelentingly solid, conventional sense of self also dissolve, and you find yourself suddenly immersed in the condition of embodied consciousness that the Buddhists refer to as sunyata (ordinarily translated as “the void” or as “emptiness,” but which Guenther, again in the same book, quite beautifully translates as “open dimension of being”). What’s clear to me is that this condition is a birthright state for all of us and definitely worth whatever price of admission is asked. That I would eventually present the gazing practice in the context of the relationship between Rumi and his great friend Shams was just one of those serendipitous things. For 750 years nobody has supposedly known what these two were doing behind the closed door of their retreat room that allowed them to emerge in such a state of ecstatic intoxication, and indeed their relationship has mostly been revered in the Sufi world from a safe distance as a kind of “divine mystery.” But if you read Rumi’s poetry with an understanding of the gazing practice, you quickly see that allusions to the practice, descriptions of how Rumi and Shams entered into the practice together, and specific instructions on how to do the practice yourself, are everywhere in the poetry. To play spiritual sleuth in this way has been a lot of fun for me.

Ok. Let me go back to how all this relates to the embodiment of the Line. A Tibetan inahaouudra text tells us to “do nothing with the body but relax.” And the only way we can truly invite relaxation into our lives in an upright posture is to embody the Line so that the force of gravity, not muscular contraction, can provide us with our primary source of support. What we also know is that tensing the body (or holding the breath, and they are basically the same thing) is our best and most reliable strategy not to feel. So if we can truly relax, then the formerly unfelt sensations of the body (the 85% to 95 % of sensations that we ordinarily aren’t aware of) can come flooding forward out of their hibernation or wherever it is they’ve been hiding.

Balance of Body, Balance of Mind was my first attempt to enunciate this kind of understanding. Quite clearly, our understanding of the Line provides a very important, and previously almost entirely unacknowledged, key to the experience of sitting meditation practice. Likewise, I believe that the Buddhist psychological model holds an equally vital key to the work of somatic practitioners who seek to relieve unnecessary holding and tension in the body, but aren’t oriented to considering that the ongoing manifestation of egoic mind may itself be the result of the most fundamental, and largely unconscious, myofascial holding pattern that exists in all of us.

My subsequent books have mostly looked at different pieces of this embodiment puzzle. The Posture of Meditation focuses on sitting practice. Aligned, Relaxed, Resilient focuses on mindfulness practice. Rnnni: Gazing at the Beloved is about the gazing practice. And Yoga of the Mahanualra is about the spontaneous movement practices that I call Sudaba (short for “surrendered dance of balance”). What I’d like to stress here, though, is that the individual sessions of Rolfing and the subsequent exploration of balance have always been central to my understanding and development of all these interrelated practices.

What I’ve been attempting to do is to create a path of practices based on the most potent technologies that the spiritual traditions have developed over the centuries, but that is explored through the lens of our contemporary somatic understanding, and most specifically through the application of the teachings of the Line. Clearly, if we want to experience these radical alterations to self that all the traditions speak of as so fundamentally wholesome, we need to do, on a daily basis, intentional practices that have been shown to support that alteration. Ideally, we would devote some time every day to these practices as well as enter into longer, intensive retreats from time to time.

Rolfing, sitting, mindfulness practices, standing and moving practices, gazing practices: it’s a potent brew, and I’m always on the lookout for new pieces of the puzzle. Lately, for example, I’ve gotten extremely excited about adding binaural beat technologies to sitting meditation practices. By sending tones of slightly different frequencies into each ear via headphones, we can quickly shift the brain out of the beta states that we ordinarily pass our lives in and move down into alpha (associated with relaxation), theta (associated with creative thinking and dreaming), and even delta states (associated with both deep sleep and very deep meditation). These technologies almost seem to me to be a form of Rotting the brain and the nervous system, and I’m finding that they produce a profound, deepening effect on my meditation.

Exercise and nutrition are two more areas that it seems foolish not to address to support this shift into embodied states. And then there’s the whole issue of the breath. I recall hearing (Certified Advanced Roller) Hubert Godard say that posture is breath, and certainly how we breathe in this moment is a direct reflection of our current condition of embodiment. The Buddha’s primary instruction on breath is to breathe in and out “with the whole body,” and over long hours and long days of sitting practices that focus on the principles of the Line (alignment, relaxation, and resilient movement), this is what begins naturally to occur. In a fascinating correlation across time, I also recall Dr. Rolf saying in my auditing class that as breath moves through a truly integrated and balanced body, every joint it the body should be able to move in response to the breath and that this will include the sutures in the skull as well as the joint between the small bones in the feet!

Structural Integration: Our skills of manipulation and our broadening understanding of how to influence structure (through such things as, for example, spinal mechanics and the application of cranial and visceral work) have become much more sophisticated over the years. Has your understanding of how to embody the Line also changed over time?

WJ: Our early attempts (mine as well as most everyone else’s) at consciously embodying the Line were quite willful and, frankly, didn’t work all that well. With Ida occasionally barking things at us like “bring your lumbars back!” we would attempt to force our body to approximate what we believed the Line to be. But what many of us found was that this kind of approach just brings with it another overlying pattern of holding (never has the expression “chains of gold are just as effective at keeping us imprisoned as are chains of iron” been so clearly demonstrated to me), and Don Johnson did us all a great service in bringing this posturing to an end with his warnings about what he called “somatic platonism.”

The Line can’t be forced on a body from the outside in. Do this, and you’ve got hell on your hands. It needs instead to emerge naturally from the inside out through playing with and surrendering to balance and seeing how, over time, this affects the sensations and feeling presence of the body. Alignment alone can’t be the goal of the Line (or every soldier standing at attention would be enlightened). It has to come with a deep relaxation (which is nothing more or less than the dropping of the weight of the body in response to the pull of gravity) that allows resilient movement to occur throughout the entire length of the body. Then, breath by breath, sensation by sensation, things can begin to shift spontaneously, on their own, and this continues to be the way I explore the magic of the Line.

An exploration of the Line is an intensely personal undertaking. Playing with balance allows what the Theravadin Buddhists call the deep sankharas, the deep and largely unconscious residues of holding and contraction, to come to the surface of awareness where they can be released. This unwinding or releasing of tensions occurs spontaneously and organically to the degree that we can surrender to its impulses, rather than by attempting to superimpose our ideas about how it should look. It is a deeply healing process, and everyone’s experience of it will be uniquely their own. I find it much more helpful to think of the Line as a process, rather than as a thing. It’s an infallible, moment-to-moment guide as we work to unravel the deepest tensions and holdings that keep us stuck and limited. It’s not something to attain and then maintain.

Structural Integration: Are there any other thoughts you’d like to share?

WJ: As powerful and healing as the individual sessions of Rolfing are, an even deeper process of healing awaits the person who explores the embodiment of the Line as an intentional, meditative inquiry. But for this inquiry not to just spin its wheels on the slippery surface of the mind, the individual sessions of Rolfing appear to me to be indispensable. Seen from this perspective, the basic series of Rolfing functions as a kind of preliminary practice that then will allow someone truly to begin exploring the Line. And as this exploration proceeds, regular supplemental Rolfing sessions help keep us on track and deepen the inquiry.

Many years ago I did a three-week sitting retreat during which I had a Rolfing friend come in every second or third day and work on my body. What an experience! About two-thirds of the way through that retreat, my body just found that place of effortless balance, and the understanding of the relationship between alignment, relaxation, resilience, and consciousness came flooding in. I began rather furiously writing down my insights, and the result was The Posture
of Meditation.

It’s time for me to start sharing this, and my vision would be to hold retreats that explore intensive sitting, standing, and moving practices based on our understanding of the Line. What these retreats would also include would be regular Rolfing sessions as well. In the beginning, it’s going to be more practical to limit participation in something like this to Rolfers so that participants can pair up with and work on each other, much as we do during basic training. It probably makes the most sense to launch something like this as a six-day or week-long residential retreat, but can you even begin to imagine what it would be like to re-explore and re-experience the Ten Series in the context of a 21-day retreat focusing on the embodiment of the Line?! Somewhere down the road I could see offering something like this to non-Roffers as well, but for that to work, I would obviously need a cadre of Rolfers wanting to work on people in this kind of format.

I’d ask that, if what I’m talking about here resonates with whoever’s reading this, then get in touch with me and let me know of your interest. It would be a great experiment. That’s for sure.

WILL JOHNSON BIBLIOGRAPHY

Balance of Body, Balance of Mind (Hum anies, 1993).

The Posture of Meditation (Shambhala, 1996). Also available in German (Meditieren in der richtigen Haltung. Das Praxishnch; Herder/ Spektrum, 1999) and Italian (La Postnra di Meditazione; Ubaldini Editore,1997).

Aligned, Relaxed, Resilient: The Physical Foundations of Mindfidness (Shambhala, 2000).

Runni, Gazing at the Beloved: The Radical Practice of Beholding the Divine (inner Traditions, 2003). Also available in French (Rumi: Union des regards, fusion des Ames; Gange Editions, 2005).

The Sailfish and the Sacred Mountain: Passages in the Lives of a Father and Son (Inner Traditions, 2005). Also available in Russian (Terra Mystica; Mockba, 2005).

Yoga of the Mahanmdra: The Mystical Way of Balance (Inner Traditions, 2005).

The Forbidden Rumi: The Suppressed Poems of Runni on Love, Heresy, and Intoxication (Inner Traditions, 2006; commentaries and translations by Will Johnson and Nevit O. Ergin).[:pb]Structural Integration: Our work as Rolfers is to shape the body, but what is the body? Many spiritual traditions lead us to understand that our bodies are much different from our ordinary reified conception of “body.” From the perspective of where your work has led you, how do you view/ define body and how has that affected how you work with bodies?

Will Johnson: Instead of paying much attention to intellectual classifications of body (physical, emotional, energetic, mental, causal, etheric, etc.), as helpful as these classifications can be in pointing to different aspects of our embodied self, 1 prefer simply to focus on the direct experience of the body: the lived, felt, palpable, vibratory, throbbing, quivery, spacious, compacted flux of tactile stuff whose location, and point of emanation, can be traced to what my eyes recognize as my physical body. The felt awareness of the entire body as a constantly changing tactile presence is the wild and wonderful path of practice that Rolfing” launched me on.

For me, Rolfing was a very direct introduction to the world of tactile sensations-both gross and subtle. On the gross level, there were the strong and intense sensations of being Rolfed. But through that work, and in its aftermath, I started to become aware of a much subtler level of sensations that I’d never before felt, and I think everyone knows what I’m referring to here: the minute, pin-prickly, tingly, little blips of tactile stuff (the current of the life force?) that we feel coursing through our body, probably in some parts more than others. Now, even though these individual sensations are unbelievably small in size and are vibrating or oscillating at almost unimaginably rapid rates of vibratory frequency, they can still be distinctly felt. If, that is (and this is a big if), we surrender to their presence, and I have since come to the belief that the source of all existential pain in the body can be traced to our fearful resistance to feel the literally sensational presence of the body.

Where things started getting really interesting was when 1 began to realize that, if I give myself permission to do two things simultaneously – 1) to surrender to balance and 2) to feel the feeling, the sensation, in every little part, every little nook and cranny, indeed in every little cell of the body – then my sense of self would be altered quite radically, and I liked it there. And the only place where I was able to find descriptions of these kinds of very open, very dissolved, and yet very present and grounded embodied states was in the spiritual literatures. Rumi, for example, was taught the doctrine of ma’iyya by his father who himself was an accomplished mystic. Ma’iyya tells us that God (or whatever word works for you) cannot be found in the mind. It cannot even be found in the heart alone. It must be felt as sensation in each and every part of the body.

And indeed the ability to come to balance and feel the whole body as a unified field of shimmery tactile presence automatically and spontaneously ushers in what we might call ma’iyya consciousness.

So … to come full circle, the body to me is the play of sensations plus the conscious presence that inhabits that play at any given moment. The question we all have to ask ourselves is how much sensation do I really want to open to? The more sensation, the greater the push into this dissolved, yet very present, consciousness that is, for many people, utterly appealing. But the more sensation we risk, the more we also have to let go of the old, tighter patterns of the mind and its belief in separation from the whole, and many people find this-what the Sufis call “dying before you die” – utterly unappealing.

In terms of actually Rolfing® people, I’m far more interested in stimulating a renewed sense of feeling awareness in my client than in “changing” his or her structure as I believe, quite strongly, that a body needs to feel what’s really going on at the level of sensation, and then structural change will happen accordingly. This frees things a lot for me and allows me to just put my hands on the body and see how they want to move and what they want to do. In effect, I like to get out of my mind and tissue surf with compassion.

Structural Integration: If I remember right, your book Balance of Body, Balance of Mind equates holding in the body to ego structure or ego holding. In Yoga of the Maharnudra you speak of an open, embodied, and sensing state as a mystical state. You are clearly looking at the body and Rolfing from a spiritual or evolutionary perspective, not just a biomechanical or structural/ functional perspective. It seems to me from the writings and stories out there that Dr. Rolf was interested in all of these aspects. Was this spiritual / evolutionary viewpoint discussed in your original training? Do you feel it is given its due in our community at present?

WJ: I didn’t know Ida all that well. I did my auditing in the summer of 1975 at one of those early combined basic/advanced training classes that we used to hold, and she (along with Jan Sultan) was the teacher, and I was also able to spend a bit of time with her privately, outside of class. I can’t honestly say that there was a lot of focused discussion on the kinds of understandings and the linkages between body and consciousness that I raised in the two books that you mentioned, either in private conversation with her or in class. But, even so, what there was a lot of in those days was a spirit of adventure, fascination, experimentation, and excitement, a gut feeling that what Rolfing was ultimately all about was nothing less than a bona fide path of inquiry into the mystery of the embodied self. And Ida would constantly allude to this through implying that the Line was a kind of mudra of transformation (my words, not hers) that would help us in solving (or dissolving into) that mystery. She clearly presented the Line as a value and clearly believed that an embodiment of the Line would have an evolutionarily propulsive effect on the person, and she would even go so far as to suggest that Rolling was perhaps one of the first attempts by humans to consciously accelerate the pace of evolution.

There was always talk in those days of developing Rolling into a kind of mystery school, but that’s never really happened. At this point, the Rolf Institute’ of Structural Integration has become a first rate trade school that very successfully trains practitioners in the art, science, and profession of Rolling people, but in no way can it be considered a mystery school dedicated to an experiential understanding of how the physical embodiment of Lined states affects, alters, and ultimately transforms consciousness. The Institute (and the other offshoot schools as well) has focused virtually all of its attention on its very important exoteric mission of training practitioners, but has basically turned its back on any systematic exploration of the esoteric core assumptions that Dr. Rolf insisted on: that an embodiment of upright balance can radically accelerate conscious growth in the individual. That the Line has been progressively relegated to the very back burners of our inquiry has always struck me as particularly tragic.

Structural Integration: The Institute still teaches the Line: there is still the fundamental idea that Rolfing is a process of aligning the body in gravity around this ideal Line, so on a physical level it would seem we are doing the same thing, but from a perspective that has become more physical and less evolutionary. This brings up the question of how much the “propulsive effect” of Rolfing on consciousness depends on the Line itself, and how much it depends on the field (practitioner, client, society) holding an evolutionary perspective. In the time you reference, a large segment of society – the whole “counter-culture” movement – held a perspective and expectation of transformation. Now that’s dropped back to a “lower volume” in the field of society as a whole, and some clients have no interest in anything beyond pain relief, at least initially.

WJ: The “Line” that you’re speaking about is more of an intellectual construct than a lived experience. And for the purposes of our work with clients, this construct is invaluable. As a teaching tool, it not only gives our work intentionality and a philosophical rationale, but also serves as a guide to help us strategize how best to work with clients. I think we all hold, as an image in our mind, a picture of the Line. When we view a client’s body, we inevitably are going to compare what we see with this image in our mind, and the discrepancies that exist give us many of our clues as to where and how to work.

The application of the Line that I’m referring to, however, has nothing to do with strategizing session work. It refers instead to a lived condition of embodiment and a suggested path of practices that, if followed, leads to that condition. Its application to spiritual practices – sitting meditation as well as movement practices – is explosively powerful, and yet it is an application that has been almost totally ignored not just by the Institute, but by all of the other offshoot schools of Rolfing as well.

So, if our community isn’t all that actively exploring this application of the Line, who is? The answer (from the communications I’ve had from people who’ve read my books) is serious meditation practitioners, dancers, yogis, and martial artists. And these people are not just playing with the Line as a theoretical construct. They’re diving into it with their entire body and mind, spending long hours surrendering to the profound shifts in bodily awareness and states of consciousness that naturally occur when you begin seriously to explore balance as a path. The path of the Line is a path of deep and potent healing, but like any path worth following, if you want its rewards, you have to expose yourself to its fire.

You ask if perhaps the kind of evolutionary perspective that I’m suggesting was as much a result of the spirit of the times as it is a direct application of the Line. I want to be very clear that it is the experiential exploration of balance that is the igniting element that explodes open the meditative inquiry (and the evolutionary energies that fuel that inquiry like hydrogen in the sun). I’m talking about a very specific experiential phenomenon that occurs as the result of learning how to retain an upright (and uplifted) posture while surrendering the entire weight of the body to gravity. Strong energies and sensations are spontaneously liberated, and consciousness can undergo radical (and this is not a word that I use lightly) alterations.

It’s true that, far and away, the majority of clients coming to see us are looking for the relief of pain, and I don’t think anybody is going to argue with, or criticize, the decision of the faculty to pursue the perfection of our physiotherapeutic skills of manipulation as the centerpiece of what Rolling has become. The mission statement of the Rolf Institute speaks to the training of Rolling practitioners; it does not mention promoting the lived experience of the Line. But it has always struck me as peculiar that our founder presented the Line as the most important value of our work, and yet we haven’t gone anywhere near developing a protocol or system of practices that would allow people to explore for themselves the dramatic evolutionary shifts in awareness of self that she always suggested would occur. And it is this omission that I’ve been attempting to address in the work and practices I’ve been putting together and intend to start sharing in workshop/retreat format.

Structural Integration: I see from your website (www.embodiment.net) that your “embodiment work,” which I was first exposed to about nine years ago as a gazing practice, has since evolved into a system encompassing a series of practices. You’ve written a number of books over the years, and different books are now shown to be related to different practices that are part of the work as a whole. I get a sense that there has been an organic development and interweaving of your writing, your personal practices and explorations, and your overall thread of inquiry. Would you speak about what “embodiment” means to you, how your system has developed, and also give a sketch description of some of the practices and books of yours that relate to them?

WJ: I first encountered the word “embodiment” in the early to mid 1970s in a book by Herbert Guenther called The Tantric View of Life and resonated with it immediately. Guenther, one of our most important western Buddhist scholars, spoke of embodiment as pristine clarity of mind grounded in the fully felt awareness of body. Implicit in Guenther’s use of this term is the understanding that this clarity, which is the apparent goal of Buddhist practice, cannot be experienced unless we also include a fully activated awareness of head to foot bodily presence In other words, if you want emptiness of mind, you need first to experience fullness of body.

I came across this term about a year after I had begun getting Rolled, and it uncannily reflected the emerging experience and awarenesses that my initial Rolfing had started opening up in me. When I spoke earlier of ma’iyya consciousness, it is fundamentally identical to Guenther’s very specific use of the term “embodiment.” Over the past thirty years, the term has become a kind of fuzzy buzzword for describing anything and everything related to the body, but my initial exposure to it, and subsequent use of it, was and remains very specific.

Consciousness is altered radically if we can include in whatever we’re doing an awareness of the entire body as a unified field of shimmering tactile sensations. I’ve heard of studies that suggest that we are using perhaps only five to fifteen percent of the full potential of our brains, and I would suggest that what is also true is that most people, at any given moment in time, are probably only feeling between five and fifteen percent of their bodily sensations. And I would further suggest that these small percentages are directly related.

What is so extraordinary about the gazing practice that you mention is that it rather wildly stimulates the awareness of sensations throughout the entire body. I honestly haven’t a clue as to why it does this. I just know that it does. And, then, what it also does, just as Guenther’s understanding of embodiment suggests, is to radically alter and affect consciousness. As the conventional sense of the body’s apparent solidity dissolves into a field phenomenon of shimmering tactile sensations, so also does the unrelentingly solid, conventional sense of self also dissolve, and you find yourself suddenly immersed in the condition of embodied consciousness that the Buddhists refer to as sunyata (ordinarily translated as “the void” or as “emptiness,” but which Guenther, again in the same book, quite beautifully translates as “open dimension of being”). What’s clear to me is that this condition is a birthright state for all of us and definitely worth whatever price of admission is asked. That I would eventually present the gazing practice in the context of the relationship between Rumi and his great friend Shams was just one of those serendipitous things. For 750 years nobody has supposedly known what these two were doing behind the closed door of their retreat room that allowed them to emerge in such a state of ecstatic intoxication, and indeed their relationship has mostly been revered in the Sufi world from a safe distance as a kind of “divine mystery.” But if you read Rumi’s poetry with an understanding of the gazing practice, you quickly see that allusions to the practice, descriptions of how Rumi and Shams entered into the practice together, and specific instructions on how to do the practice yourself, are everywhere in the poetry. To play spiritual sleuth in this way has been a lot of fun for me.

Ok. Let me go back to how all this relates to the embodiment of the Line. A Tibetan inahaouudra text tells us to “do nothing with the body but relax.” And the only way we can truly invite relaxation into our lives in an upright posture is to embody the Line so that the force of gravity, not muscular contraction, can provide us with our primary source of support. What we also know is that tensing the body (or holding the breath, and they are basically the same thing) is our best and most reliable strategy not to feel. So if we can truly relax, then the formerly unfelt sensations of the body (the 85% to 95 % of sensations that we ordinarily aren’t aware of) can come flooding forward out of their hibernation or wherever it is they’ve been hiding.

Balance of Body, Balance of Mind was my first attempt to enunciate this kind of understanding. Quite clearly, our understanding of the Line provides a very important, and previously almost entirely unacknowledged, key to the experience of sitting meditation practice. Likewise, I believe that the Buddhist psychological model holds an equally vital key to the work of somatic practitioners who seek to relieve unnecessary holding and tension in the body, but aren’t oriented to considering that the ongoing manifestation of egoic mind may itself be the result of the most fundamental, and largely unconscious, myofascial holding pattern that exists in all of us.

My subsequent books have mostly looked at different pieces of this embodiment puzzle. The Posture of Meditation focuses on sitting practice. Aligned, Relaxed, Resilient focuses on mindfulness practice. Rnnni: Gazing at the Beloved is about the gazing practice. And Yoga of the Mahanualra is about the spontaneous movement practices that I call Sudaba (short for “surrendered dance of balance”). What I’d like to stress here, though, is that the individual sessions of Rolfing and the subsequent exploration of balance have always been central to my understanding and development of all these interrelated practices.

What I’ve been attempting to do is to create a path of practices based on the most potent technologies that the spiritual traditions have developed over the centuries, but that is explored through the lens of our contemporary somatic understanding, and most specifically through the application of the teachings of the Line. Clearly, if we want to experience these radical alterations to self that all the traditions speak of as so fundamentally wholesome, we need to do, on a daily basis, intentional practices that have been shown to support that alteration. Ideally, we would devote some time every day to these practices as well as enter into longer, intensive retreats from time to time.

Rolfing, sitting, mindfulness practices, standing and moving practices, gazing practices: it’s a potent brew, and I’m always on the lookout for new pieces of the puzzle. Lately, for example, I’ve gotten extremely excited about adding binaural beat technologies to sitting meditation practices. By sending tones of slightly different frequencies into each ear via headphones, we can quickly shift the brain out of the beta states that we ordinarily pass our lives in and move down into alpha (associated with relaxation), theta (associated with creative thinking and dreaming), and even delta states (associated with both deep sleep and very deep meditation). These technologies almost seem to me to be a form of Rotting the brain and the nervous system, and I’m finding that they produce a profound, deepening effect on my meditation.

Exercise and nutrition are two more areas that it seems foolish not to address to support this shift into embodied states. And then there’s the whole issue of the breath. I recall hearing (Certified Advanced Roller) Hubert Godard say that posture is breath, and certainly how we breathe in this moment is a direct reflection of our current condition of embodiment. The Buddha’s primary instruction on breath is to breathe in and out “with the whole body,” and over long hours and long days of sitting practices that focus on the principles of the Line (alignment, relaxation, and resilient movement), this is what begins naturally to occur. In a fascinating correlation across time, I also recall Dr. Rolf saying in my auditing class that as breath moves through a truly integrated and balanced body, every joint it the body should be able to move in response to the breath and that this will include the sutures in the skull as well as the joint between the small bones in the feet!

Structural Integration: Our skills of manipulation and our broadening understanding of how to influence structure (through such things as, for example, spinal mechanics and the application of cranial and visceral work) have become much more sophisticated over the years. Has your understanding of how to embody the Line also changed over time?

WJ: Our early attempts (mine as well as most everyone else’s) at consciously embodying the Line were quite willful and, frankly, didn’t work all that well. With Ida occasionally barking things at us like “bring your lumbars back!” we would attempt to force our body to approximate what we believed the Line to be. But what many of us found was that this kind of approach just brings with it another overlying pattern of holding (never has the expression “chains of gold are just as effective at keeping us imprisoned as are chains of iron” been so clearly demonstrated to me), and Don Johnson did us all a great service in bringing this posturing to an end with his warnings about what he called “somatic platonism.”

The Line can’t be forced on a body from the outside in. Do this, and you’ve got hell on your hands. It needs instead to emerge naturally from the inside out through playing with and surrendering to balance and seeing how, over time, this affects the sensations and feeling presence of the body. Alignment alone can’t be the goal of the Line (or every soldier standing at attention would be enlightened). It has to come with a deep relaxation (which is nothing more or less than the dropping of the weight of the body in response to the pull of gravity) that allows resilient movement to occur throughout the entire length of the body. Then, breath by breath, sensation by sensation, things can begin to shift spontaneously, on their own, and this continues to be the way I explore the magic of the Line.

An exploration of the Line is an intensely personal undertaking. Playing with balance allows what the Theravadin Buddhists call the deep sankharas, the deep and largely unconscious residues of holding and contraction, to come to the surface of awareness where they can be released. This unwinding or releasing of tensions occurs spontaneously and organically to the degree that we can surrender to its impulses, rather than by attempting to superimpose our ideas about how it should look. It is a deeply healing process, and everyone’s experience of it will be uniquely their own. I find it much more helpful to think of the Line as a process, rather than as a thing. It’s an infallible, moment-to-moment guide as we work to unravel the deepest tensions and holdings that keep us stuck and limited. It’s not something to attain and then maintain.

Structural Integration: Are there any other thoughts you’d like to share?

WJ: As powerful and healing as the individual sessions of Rolfing are, an even deeper process of healing awaits the person who explores the embodiment of the Line as an intentional, meditative inquiry. But for this inquiry not to just spin its wheels on the slippery surface of the mind, the individual sessions of Rolfing appear to me to be indispensable. Seen from this perspective, the basic series of Rolfing functions as a kind of preliminary practice that then will allow someone truly to begin exploring the Line. And as this exploration proceeds, regular supplemental Rolfing sessions help keep us on track and deepen the inquiry.

Many years ago I did a three-week sitting retreat during which I had a Rolfing friend come in every second or third day and work on my body. What an experience! About two-thirds of the way through that retreat, my body just found that place of effortless balance, and the understanding of the relationship between alignment, relaxation, resilience, and consciousness came flooding in. I began rather furiously writing down my insights, and the result was The Posture
of Meditation.

It’s time for me to start sharing this, and my vision would be to hold retreats that explore intensive sitting, standing, and moving practices based on our understanding of the Line. What these retreats would also include would be regular Rolfing sessions as well. In the beginning, it’s going to be more practical to limit participation in something like this to Rolfers so that participants can pair up with and work on each other, much as we do during basic training. It probably makes the most sense to launch something like this as a six-day or week-long residential retreat, but can you even begin to imagine what it would be like to re-explore and re-experience the Ten Series in the context of a 21-day retreat focusing on the embodiment of the Line?! Somewhere down the road I could see offering something like this to non-Roffers as well, but for that to work, I would obviously need a cadre of Rolfers wanting to work on people in this kind of format.

I’d ask that, if what I’m talking about here resonates with whoever’s reading this, then get in touch with me and let me know of your interest. It would be a great experiment. That’s for sure.

WILL JOHNSON BIBLIOGRAPHY

Balance of Body, Balance of Mind (Hum anies, 1993).

The Posture of Meditation (Shambhala, 1996). Also available in German (Meditieren in der richtigen Haltung. Das Praxishnch; Herder/ Spektrum, 1999) and Italian (La Postnra di Meditazione; Ubaldini Editore,1997).

Aligned, Relaxed, Resilient: The Physical Foundations of Mindfidness (Shambhala, 2000).

Runni, Gazing at the Beloved: The Radical Practice of Beholding the Divine (inner Traditions, 2003). Also available in French (Rumi: Union des regards, fusion des Ames; Gange Editions, 2005).

The Sailfish and the Sacred Mountain: Passages in the Lives of a Father and Son (Inner Traditions, 2005). Also available in Russian (Terra Mystica; Mockba, 2005).

Yoga of the Mahanmdra: The Mystical Way of Balance (Inner Traditions, 2005).

The Forbidden Rumi: The Suppressed Poems of Runni on Love, Heresy, and Intoxication (Inner Traditions, 2006; commentaries and translations by Will Johnson and Nevit O. Ergin).[:]Embodiment and the Line: