‘…the suppleness of my muscles has always been the greatest when my creative energies were flowing most abundantly. The body is inspired; let’s keep the “soul” out of it…’
Nietzsche – Ecco Homo
This article is about how one becomes a Rolfer. It’s not about what you should study; how many credits of this or that subject you should accumulate; how long you should study; with whom you should study; what you should study first; or what the ideal curriculum should look like. These considerations are very important; of course, but not what I am interested in pursuing. What I want to explore is how one comes to manifest the way of being characteristic of being a Rolfer. What does it mean to say of someone that she “gets” Rolfing? For the sake of completeness and clarity, I should mention that this article builds on and is also a continuation of a number of previous articles in which I began laying the groundwork for looking at how one becomes a Rolfer.(1)
What Does It Mean to Get a Joke?
Although it may seem like a peculiar way to begin, let’s look at what it means to “get” a joke. More precisely, what conditions must be met in order for us to say that someone got a joke? The results of such an investigation could be illuminating for other domains of inquiry, such as aesthetic theory. Perhaps if we knew what it was to get a joke, we would be in a better position to know what it was to appreciate great art. Getting a joke and appreciating art are forms of understanding that are at the same time a bodily response – laughter in one case and being moved at a feeling level in the other. The bodily response is, in fact, inseparable from the understanding. The same is true for Rolfing or any form of somatic therapy. Mastering any somatic practice involves a bodily response that is actually a kind of understanding. In the fullest sense, you really cannot get a joke, appreciate art, or master Rolfing without this kind of whole-body understanding.
Appreciating art, getting a joke, and getting Rolfing in each case is more than just having a conceptual or intellectual grasp. With respect to the question of getting a joke, to laugh is to understand – in the fullest sense. If a person doesn’t at least snicker a little bit, he really cannot be said to get the joke. At this point, you might be thinking, “Not so fast. I have heard jokes that I don’t think are at all funny. I understand the humor of it and what others are laughing about. But it just doesn’t make me laugh. So I get the joke. I just don’t think it’s funny.” Unfortunately, this sort of response confuses merely understanding a joke with getting a joke. Clearly, if you don’t understand a joke, you will never get it. But it is also true that getting a joke and understanding it are really quite different.
To see how this is so, let’s imagine that you just heard a joke that is an example of the tasteless bathroom humor common to twelve-year-old boys. You probably responded with judgment rather than laughter, thinking, “Yikes! What a crude and stupid joke!” But let’s now imagine that you were suddenly transformed into a twelve-year-old boy again. How might you respond? More than likely, you would suddenly appreciate the humor of it all and laugh your heart out. When the laughter subsided and you were transformed into an adult again, you would no longer think it is funny. Since you lost the mind-set of a twelve-year old boy, you no longer get the joke. True, you understand the joke, but you don’t really get it. For in the end, really getting the joke requires some degree of laughter, or at the very least, an amused smile.
Seized With Understanding
Similarly, the practitioner who gets Rolfing manifests an understanding that involves his whole body. His understanding necessarily includes, but also goes beyond, an intellectual or conceptual grasp of the philosophy and science of Rolfing. Just because he may be able to speak eloquently about Rolfing does not mean he can deliver masterful work. His work is masterful because he gets Rolfing, and he gets Rolfing because his body understands. Getting Rolfing and getting a joke both require that your body is seized with understanding. In one case, you are seized with the understanding that laughter brings; and in the other, you are on fire with a whole-body felt sense of knowing that is closer to you than your breath.
Peter Ralston relates an incident that illustrates a dimension of this kind of whole-body understanding. When he was a student of judo, he wanted to practice more hours than his dojo was open. He solved this problem when he stumbled upon the idea of practicing his throws in his mind. In the process of practicing his throws in his mind and on the mat he refined both and discovered something amazing. “While sitting there one evening working on the throws in my mind, in a flash I simply ‘got’ judo. I got what it was, the essence of it. I understood what the founder of judo, Jigoro Kano, had in mind. Judo was supposed to be easy! Suddenly I didn’t have to learn technique after technique searching for “judo” – I could create techniques from my new understanding. It seemed unbelievable, even after my success with mind training, but the power of this insight was proven by an immediate change in my abilities. Overnight, I became good at judo. And, overnight I became a real fan of insight.” He practiced diligently and constantly until he suddenly grasped the principle or essence of judo. At the very same moment he grasped the essence of judo, his abilities were instantly enhanced. He made the profound but simple discovery that “conscious insight could make an enormous difference in physical performance.”(2) For our purposes what is also important about his discovery is that insight and enhanced performance were not two separate occurrences, but one and the same event.
Practice alone won’t create this kind of leap in performance and just being able to accurately conceptualize its essence won’t do it either. The kind of insight he manifested is not like an ordinary insight where you finally understand how to solve a simple math problem. Ralston’s insight captured his whole being. Not just his mind understood. Every bit of him knew and manifested the insight. All aspects of his training and his being were forged into one integrated understanding and all of him suddenly understood. Insight and enhanced performance were one and the same activity. He didn’t just know it in his bones – no, it’s deeper than that – all of him, including his bones, knew. Analogous to how you are seized with laughter when you get a hilarious joke, Ralston’s body was seized with understanding – his whole being simply and completely knew. He didn’t just understand judo, he got it.
You can easily see examples of Ralston’s discovery at work in the practice of Rolfing. Rolfers who get Rolfing are not bound by “recipes”; get better change with less effort; create new techniques in response to their client’s need; and get better results than Rolfers who just understand Rolfing, even when both are employing the very same techniques and treatment strategies. I think every Rolfer has heard about how Dr. Rolf was fond of always asking her students “What is Rolfing?” only to reject every answer they gave. Since I wasn’t there for Dr. Rolf’s question, I can only speculate about what she was after. I suspect that what she was looking for was not just a verbal definition, but the ability to manifest in words and comportment what it meant to really get Rolfing. Getting Rolfing is not just a matter of being able to define it in words. You have to get Rolfing with your whole being, including your flesh – you have to be seized with understanding, not just once, but over and over again as you develop and evolve throughout your career.
The Tao of Rolfing
Since I have only briefly sketched the difference between getting Rolfing and merely understanding it, we now need to look more closely at this ability to know with our whole body and try to understand what the practice of Rolfing looks like when it is enhanced by this kind of understanding. We can begin by drawing inspiration from the writings of the great Taoist philosopher and mystic, Chuang Tzu. What follows is a respectful, but slightly altered version of Chuang Tzu’s poem “Cutting Up an Ox.” I changed the text in critical places in order to make it more relevant to Rolfing. It first appeared nineteen years ago in Rolf Lines under the title of “The Tao of Rolfing.”(3)
John’s Rolfer was demonstrating
His art on a volunteer from the audience.
Out went a hand,
Down went a shoulder,
He planted a foot,
His fingers joined with the flesh,
The volunteer’s body shuddered,
Softened, lengthened,
And suddenly was integrated and at ease.
With a whisper,
The Rolfer’s fingers pulsated with the flesh,
Like a gentle breeze.
Rhythm! Timing!
Like a sacred dance,
Like “The Mulberry Grove,”
Like ancient harmonies!
“Good work!” John exclaimed.
“Your method is faultless!”
“Method?” said the Rolfer,
His hands still in contact with the volunteer,
“What I follow is the Tao of Rolfing,
Beyond all methods!
“When I first began
To Rolf,
I would see before me
The whole body
All in one mass.
“After three years,
I no longer saw this mass.
I saw the distinctions.
“But now, I see nothing
With the eye. My whole being
Apprehends.
My senses are idle. The spirit,
Free to work without the recipe,
Follows its own instinct
Guided by the natural Palintonic lines,
By the secret opening, the hidden space,
My hands find their own way.
I use no excessive force, I scour no bones.
“A good bodyworker needs a vacation
Once a year – he works with great effort
And large calluses.
A poor bodyworker needs a vacation
Every month – he mashes fascia with sweating,
Swollen hands.
“I am not a bodyworker.
And I have Rolfed this way for nineteen years.
My hands have touched
Thousands of people.
Yet they are soft and supple
Like a baby’s.
Never do I feel pain or dis-ease.
“There are spaces in the body;
My fingers can be either fat or lean:
When this deftness
Finds that space
There is all the room you need!
It goes like a breeze!
Hence I have Rolfed this way for nineteen years
Free of calluses and all effort.
“True, there is sometimes
Tough tissue. I feel it coming,
I slow down, I watch closely,
Hold back, barely move my hands,
And whoosh! something opens and makes way
Gently flowing like a river.
“Then I withdraw my hands,
I stand still
And let the joy of my work
Sink in. I wash my hands
And my work is done.”
John said,
“This is it. My Rolfer has shown me
How I ought to live
My own life!”
Chuang Tzu’s story is wonderful description of a practitioner who gets it with his whole being. The story also clearly illustrates the evolution in orientation, perception, evaluation, and how the work is delivered when a practitioner of any somatic discipline strives to master his art and finally gets it. When the Rolfer first began his practice, his perceptual skills were still developing; and he needed a “recipe” to guide him. As his perceptual vitality increased, he was able to make finer and finer distinctions that freed him to sometimes work outside the recipe. With more and more practice, he was able to finally completely shift his orientation or intentionality to where he was able to apprehend his client with his whole being. He was now able to find his own way to practice Rolfing without following a recipe. Because he was free enough to become one with his client, his hands became deft at finding and creating space and allowing tough tissue to release itself without effort. Whereas he used to work with direct muscular effort and will, he now finds that his hands are capable of allowing a space for the kind of change the body can afford. It feels as if something is working through him making room for change. He has become like the poet whose poems write themselves.
What is missing in the original Chuang Tzu story and in the above retelling and summary is an attempt to explicate the phenomenon of apprehending with your whole being. Since I have already laid the groundwork in a previous article, entitled “The Disclosive Power of Feeling,”(4) I only need to briefly summarize the main points in order to carry through this explication. Succinctly stated, apprehending with your whole being is a matter of learning to pay attention to and trust how your feeling nature perceives reality.
Although it is seldom understood or appreciated, our feeling nature is a form of perception. It “is not only deeply intertwined with and embedded in all our states of awareness, it is also what we share with all living creatures. It is how other forms of life, especially those without a brain or nervous system, perceive their world. Furthermore, what we recognize in ourselves as consciousness is a highly evolved elaboration of the same feeling nature that all life shares.
“Our feeling nature is a non-dualistic, participatory way of knowing that is not founded in thinking. It permeates every dimension of our being and every level of awareness and is fully integrated with our sensory and cognitive nature. Even though we regularly take no notice of it because our consciousness is dominated by our reflective “I-am-self,” it is always there bringing us into unity with our surroundings and revealing the greater ocean of sentience of which we are a part.”(5)
In order to elucidate how our feeling nature is a form of perception, “The Disclosive Power of Feeling” begins with some examples and a discussion of intentionality that is designed to show how perception involves the integration of the mind and the senses. We don’t just perceive with the senses alone. Our ability to see this as a tree or that as a mountain is called “aspect-seeing” and is the contribution our mind makes to perception. We are not passive receivers of incoming data. Rather, we are active interrogators reaching out and groping for variegated contours of meaning or sense. Not only does perception involve the integration of mind and senses, it also involves the integration of our feeling nature. As it turns out, our feeling nature is just as capable of perceiving objective qualities of our world as our senses. Not only that, our feeling nature is also capable of revealing aspects of reality that are unavailable to senses. By means of examples and a discussion of how we appreciate art, the article further demonstrated how the evaluation of clients during a Rolfing session requires the integration of our cognitive, sensory, and feeling natures. In order to see what apprehending with your whole being might look like during a Rolfing session, I gave a rather lengthy example of assessing a client.
By appropriating the insights gained from this investigation into the nature of perception, we can see that apprehending with our whole being requires first and foremost that we get in touch with our feeling nature. We also must get beyond our own conflicts and fixations, at least while we are working with clients, and learn to trust what it reveals to us. Eventually, we must come to realize that our feeling nature is just as reliable as our senses and that full-bodied perception involves not just the integration of the cognitive and sensory, but also the integration of our feeling nature coupled with the ability to stay open to what it reveals.
The Art of Rolfing
Our cursory look at getting a joke gave us a way to understand how getting Rolfing is a matter of being seized by a kind of bodily understanding. But unlike getting a joke, Rolfing is about bringing that insight into an activity that helps other people. When you stop laughing, you are done with the joke – nothing more is required, and you are soon on to what the next moment brings. When you are seized with understanding Rolfing, you are taken over with an insight that changes you and enhances your work with others.
Knowing that you are more effective because of your insight, your desire to help others is awakened at a deeper level. As you dwell in and work with the insight, you find yourself Rolfing more and more from your feeling nature and less and less from the intellect with its predetermined formulas and habitual ways of working. Certainly the intellect is indispensable to learning your craft and evolving your skills; but when your whole being finally gets it, you are able to work more creatively from your feeling nature. Your intellectual understanding is never abandoned, but it recedes to the background, informing your work rather than determining it step by step. As a result, your work ceases to be as mechanical and painful as you naturally work with more finesse and less force. Because you are working with your whole body, because your feeling nature compassionately apprehends by embracing and being embraced by your client’s feeling nature, your client’s body feels safe to reveal its problems to you. As your feeling nature participates with the feeling nature of your client, the deftness of your fingers “can either be fat or lean”; and instinctively, without thought or premeditation, they know where go next and how to creatively allow effortless change: “there is all the room you need! It goes like a breeze!”
The more you learn to perceive, trust in, and work with the integration of your feeling nature with your mind and senses, the more your experience of Rolfing clients resembles the creative performance(6) of a piece of music or a dance performance. In an inspired musical performance, the music seems to play itself through you rather than being the result of your playing the music. In an inspired dance performance, you and your partner dance as one and you experience yourselves as being danced rather than performing a dance.
Similarly, when you practice Rolfing from your whole being, you no longer experience your self working from the outside according to a protocol external to the body. Instead, your experience of Rolfing is transformed into a creative dance in which movement and change occur through you, as if something else, something bigger than you and the client, were doing and guiding the work. You do not so much will the work of Rolfing as allow it to take its own course. Like an inspired artist in whom inspiration and expression do not occur as two separate acts, but are realized as one and the same act, you feel no separation between assessment, intention, execution and your client. By getting your self out of the way, you allow your client to manifest her nature and problems and participate in the freedom of an inspired dance of transformation. The full-bodied perception of a problem in your client is already the initiation of its change. Perception, assessment, knowing where to work, knowing what to do next, and how and where to apply pressure with your hands becomes one seamless whole-body activity when you work from your integrated feeling nature.
Your experience of Rolfing becomes more and more like an inspired artist’s as you manifest the kind of freedom and joy that arises when you surrender yourself to the discipline of your practice. As you continue to plumb the depths of your feeling nature, you also become more aware of how to perceive and work with energy in the context of a Rolfing session. Even though it no longer feels as though you are Rolfing with direct muscular effort or will, your work becomes more effective. As you work more and more from your feeling nature, your hands do not so much make change in your client as discover ways to allow room for the kind of change her body can afford. You allow a clearing within which change becomes possible.
Conclusion
As every experienced Rolfer will tell you, getting to the point where you really get Rolfing is no simple matter. It takes time, money, practice, and study, and then more time, more money, more practice, and more study. It also takes a surrendering of self to the discipline of the work along with a concomitant opening to your unencumbered feeling nature. In the language of Zen, you must go to zero. Then, sometimes when you least expect it, a shift occurs; and you notice that you are perceiving more accurately, feeling more of your client’s state, more able to perceive and work with energy while effortlessly working with more finesse and less force.
Eventually, you begin to notice that the minute you enter your Rolfing room, you become a kind of beacon for the order that Rolfing stands for. Your ability to work from your unencumbered feeling nature brings with it the power to work with energy and to entrain the feeling nature of your clients. This fundamental change in your intentionality effortlessly and wordlessly calls forth change in your client. Because you have spent years studying and working as a Rolfer to the point where your psychobiological orientation is all but instinctive, your presence naturally entrains your clients along the lines of Rolfing. No matter how powerful a practitioner’s energy work might otherwise be, unless his psychobiological intentionality is saturated with the kind of understanding that comes from being an experienced Rolfer, he won’t be as able to entrain clients in accordance with the goals of Rolfing. He may be able to entrain them in other ways, but not in the ways of Rolfing. Finally, it is important to remember, as I previously pointed out, that the power of intention has no power unless there is a change in your intentionality.(7) Without this change in intentionality, your work is not as effective as it could be, and your intention to make change has no effect. With it, amazing things are possible.
Since you have good days and bad days, and since the nature of each session you perform is largely dependent on your clients’ limitations and possibilities, even if you get Rolfing at the deepest level possible, you cannot count on every session being a great inspired event. Although it is something of an exaggeration, it is largely true that a Rolfer is only as good as the people she works on. Some clients are so prepared for what the dance of Rolfing has to offer that they make you look like a great Rolfer. Others have so many problems that you have to work really hard to bring them along. Nevertheless, after all this talk about Rolfing as an inspired performance, it is important to remind ourselves that our job is to help people, not become some sort of diva. Getting Rolfing is first and foremost about the compassionate desire to help others.
Sometimes after a lot of hard work, you have a deep insight that fundamentally changes the way you work. But to your great distress, a few days later you find that you cannot sustain it. Fortunately, this regression is only temporary. What is actually happening is that you are relinquishing old patterns so that the new insight can take root. Since the insight goes so deep, the only way you can sustain and accommodate it is to undergo far-reaching changes in your way of being. After you go through the process of relinquishing old patterns to this new opening, these new, enhanced ways of seeing and working finally become fully integrated into your practice.
My choice of examples makes it appear as though all insight occurs suddenly and all at once. But this one-sided diet of examples is misleading. Sometimes these shifts in orientation accumulate as a series of small insights that you do not fully appreciate at first. But in time they add up to real understanding and you realize you are different. Getting a complicated practice like Rolfing requires getting it again and again at deeper and deeper levels. In the end, it doesn’t matter whether you get it suddenly or in small increments. What matters is that you get it.
Notes
Getting It[:]
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