Two Rolfers meet for supper in a pub and, after sharing a hearty and convivial meal (and downing a number of beers, which always helps to loosen the tongue), remove their gloves as they begin to propose very different views of “The Line,” whose certainties depend at least partly on refuting the validity of the other’s position:

Rolfer 1: The Line is, at best, an elegant concept, an image that can perhaps guide us as we view a client’s body but nothing more. And to view it as some kind of Holy Grail experience, awaiting us at the end of the Rolfing rainbow, is a rather ridiculous stretch and, furthermore, reeks of what Don Johnson so accurately described as somatic platonism. As such, it is more hindrance than help and really has no more than the most cursory application (we all want to stand up straighter) in our clients’ lives; hence, it would be just as well if we would just jettison the whole thing from the teaching and put it (and us) out of some misery. Even sacred cows eventually need to be done away with if they’re consistently getting in the way.

Rolfer 2: The Line is indeed an elegant image, but it is not mere concept. Somehow Ida Rolf clairvoyantly or intuitively understood that some kind of real and profound evolutionary growth would occur in a human being who was working to embody real and profound balance through performing two ordinarily opposite actions at the same time: totally relaxing the body (relaxation is nothing more or less than the complete surrendering of the weight of the body to gravity) while managing to remain as tall and upright as possible in a standing or sitting position. The Line, then, suggests a path of practices, or an attitude toward embodiment, that can reveal dimensions of consciousness and embodied experience that simply aren’t all that available if most of the time we’re still caught up in tensing our bodies, however subtly, just to keep from falling over or to defend ourselves from feeling the potency of embodied experience.

… to which Rolfer 1 naturally responds:

R1: Look here, Number 2, get a grip, and give me a break; you’re talking gobbledygook! And, besides which, not a single one of my clients in something like the last seven years has ever come to me saying that what they really want out of Rolfing is an initiation into a mystical path. So what if what you’re saying is profoundly true anyway? Is anybody listening? Is anybody even interested? IT DOESN’T APPLY!

R2: Oh, my dear Number 1, now you go and get a grip! I’m a someone, and I’m both listening and VERY interested. In fact, that’s what Rolfing Structural Integration always was for me. And I get that that’s what it can also be for anyone who’s grappling big time with this nagging, altogether icky, and way-too-pervasive a sense of existential angst and dissatisfaction that, scratch the surface, can be found sitting right smack dab in the middle of the body-mind of most everyone on this planet. Rolfing work is about creating happier bodies, isn’t it? And something starts happening to the body-mind, something very wonderful and happy-making indeed, when someone is able to “find one’s Line.”

R1: You ignorant imbecile, you! You could make me just scream! First of all, you’re presupposing that something like “The Line” actually exists as an experience, not just as a kind of sexy concept (and a particularly pernicious and tawdry one at that because it decks itself out in such haute importance and presents itself as describing an embodied experience available to anyone when, in fact, because it’s just a flipping concept, whatever it pretends to represent is available to exactly no one)! Talk about a mind fuck! Your  intellectual slovenliness is going to drive me to drink (even more)! Haven’t you ever heard that wishful thinking is not a cure for existential angst?

R2: Dear, dear, Number 1, you are having a bad day aren’t you?! But now that you’ve mentioned it, it seems to me that “wishful thinking” has been exactly the favored remedy that most people have historically turned to as a balm for what the Buddha so accurately (and uncomfortably) described in his First Noble Truth: namely, that life is fraught with pain and unsatisfactoriness (most people finding themselves as either striving for what they don’t currently have or hoping, if they find it, that it won’t get lost, taken away, or destroyed, and besides which we haven’t a clue where we’ve come from, what we’re doing here, and where we’re headed, if anywhere). And, as far as remedies go, you gotta admit that “wishful thinking” has a whole lot of adherents really, really believing in it (and happily going to war over their particular slant on it), but frankly, when you really examine it critically…

R1: (As if you’ve ever examined anything critically in your life!)

R2: … you come to the inescapable conclusion that it ain’t all that effective to say the least. So, I agree heartily with you. Wishful thinking, once referred to as the opiate of the masses, ain’t gonna get us out of this pickle that we’ve been born into. And that’s where playing with balance just may have a significant and very important function. Only doing something about oneself stands a prayer of helping handle the pain, or as my homeboy Rumi said (in reference to religious scriptures):

“You can’t untie this knot by listening to fairy tales.

You have to do something inside yourself.

The smallest fountain inside of you

Is better than a raging river outside.”

R1: Yeah, yeah, pretty words all right, but so what? And don’t try to distract me! If I’m hearing you correctly, you’re actually claiming that “playing with balance,” which you evidently equate with the active  embodiment of what Dr. Rolf spoke of as “The Line” (God!  I always hated that they went and capitalized it!), can serve as a remedy or a path of practices that will have a profound effect on healing the intrinsic pain of the body-mind. Of all the ridiculous things I’ve ever heard in my life, that takes the cake! I’d be better off just doing drugs.

R2: Well now, Number 1, that might not be such a bad idea! It worked for Shiva – legend has it that Shiva would ingest a marijuana concoction called bhang and that his body would start making spontaneous movements, and that out of this surrendered activity, the body-oriented practices of dance and yoga were brought to the planet; incidentally, share this story with any of the twenty- or thirty-somethings who’ve gone into ecstatic states at raves, and their response will generally be something like: “Yeah, sounds about right.” And you gotta admit he’s not exactly the worst role model for someone who’s wanting to explore and explode open the energies and sensations of the body, and furthermore…

R1: Can we get back to the point… PUH-LEASE?!

R2: Yes, of course, and thank you, friend. You know how the mind sometimes just wanders. OK. Here’re the real goods: It’s really all about emancipating the (literally sensation/al) feeling presence of every cell in the body. On every part of the body, down to the smallest cell, sensations can be felt to exist, and even though these sensations are unimaginably small in size and are oscillating at almost unimaginably rapid rates of vibratory frequency, they can still be distinctly felt. As a shimmer that pervades the entire body. Sometimes as ecstatic bliss. And yes, sometimes as pain that makes you want to scream out and cry. However, most of the time most of us are completely oblivious to the full range of sensations that could be felt filling the body. Now, doesn’t this forfeiting of awareness strike you as truly bizarre and weird? Why don’t we feel what’s here to be felt? Well, when we actually start feeling sensations, it becomes apparent rather quickly why we’ve blocked them out. Sure, there are lots of shimmers like soft falling rain that are nice to feel. But there’s also a whole heck of a lot of pain that comes to the surface to reveal itself as well, sensation we haven’t wanted to feel but, by not feeling it, we’ve just gone and enshrined it instead and then covered it over under a blanket of numbness. The more we’re able to feel the body, the more we’re able to allow deep residues of pain (the direct result of consistent reactions¬ – be they physical, emotional, or mental) to come out of hiding. If we can continue then to just feel them and surrender to their very organic dance of unfolding, they can gradually release their intense charge, eventually settling out as sensations of spaciousness and shimmer. And this is the healing process. When we’re able to feel the whole body from head to foot as a unified field phenomenon of shimmering, pulsating, vibratory, tingly tactile sensations, consciousness is radically affected. It’s not just a shift in tactile presence. It dramatically alters our sense of who and what we are. Directly engaging the feeling life of our bodies, we become more fluid and gelatinous and less dry and brittle in all areas of our life. And wet’s good in my book. Speaking of which – excuse me, ma’am, could you bring another round to the table please?

R1: Yawwwwwwnnnnnnnnnn. How, pray tell, does what you’ve just said have anything at all to do with your drippy infatuation with what always was and always will be a very brittle concept, the uncapitalized-thank-you-very much line? Talk about wet dreams!

R2: But it’s not a concept, and it has everything to do with the emancipation and liberation of sensations, dear Number 1. The alteration in consciousness that an embodiment of The Line creates is simply not available to a body that has lost touch with itself and can’t experience its sensation/al, feelingful presence. Hence, such an out-of-touch body will naturally hear as bogus and make-believe the effusive reports of someone who is in touch with this feeling presence! But sensations ARE available to everyone, and here’s the punch line if you’ll just follow me a little further. Introducing actions of tensing and patterns of holding into the musculature of the body is the best way we know to muffle and block out the feeling awareness of the body’s sensations. We hold our breath (and block our sensations). We withhold feeling certain emotions (and block our sensations). We hold back on sharing the truth and fullness of ourselves (and block our sensations). We hold onto beliefs and concepts regardless of whether they reflect what’s actually going on or not (and block our sensations). We hold and brace ourselves against the pull of gravity that, in an imbalanced body, just messes with us continually and will pull us to the ground in a second flat should we ever lessen our vigilant bracing for even a single moment by actually relaxing (etcetera, etcetera, you get the idea). Relaxation is critical because only through relaxation do the underlying sensations of the part of the body being relaxed come out of hiding and make their way to our awareness as palpable, feeling sensation. Brace and hold, and we create a numbing blanket that snuffs the life out of our sensations and keeps them unfelt and suppressed. Relax, and they start popping up everywhere in our body like fireflies on a Louisiana night.

By playing with The Line, by opening to the dance – subtle or not – of balancing, we’re able to remain standing AND relax at the very same time. And once we initiate this single gesture of surrender (a real somatic puzzle if there ever was one!), a whole organic process of tactile unfolding starts to kick in. Sensations start emerging. Energies can be felt to be activated now here, now there. The body may begin to start making spontaneous movements. And sensations beget more sensations, and energetic rush reveals deeper energies, so the process is kind of like going on an archaeological dig of our body-mind down through the layers of our life.

Once initiated, how does it continue? Well, if we could get out of our own way (which means not to resist anything that’s happening to us, but also not to heroically try to manufacture some kind of trumped-up state that our minds, in a fit of aggrandizement, might mistakenly think is spiritual or noble or “Lined” or whatever), in other words, if we can continue to truly accept ourselves exactly as we are in this moment, to really feel this moment’s version of embodied truth, if we can continue just to play with balance, if we can keep surrendering to every new wave of sensations which we realize is nothing but the current of the life force that flows through us and is us, if we can continue to surrender to the breath itself that wants to liberate itself from deep inside the body, then things start slowly shifting and changing and dissolving and unwinding on their own, and ever more sensations can come flooding to the surface, and this flood is the kind that brings much needed nutrients to the flooded plain, like the land around the Nile, because the more sensations keep revealing themselves, the more we feel ourselves healed of our bodily and mental woes, and…

R1: Whoa, whoa, and did I say whoah?! So now you’re suggesting (and in a sentence, no less, whose length violates all the rules of considerate conversation) that exploring the line is akin to a path of spiritual practice?!

R2: Yes, exactly that. This can easily be seen in the practice of sitting meditation which, regardless of whatever technique you’re focusing on as you sit, is fundamentally about exploring The Line in a seated posture. And if you can keep working with balance, breath by breath, so that your body increasingly moves into a more aligned, relaxed, and resilient condition, then the depths of the dharma teachings MUCH more easily reveal themselves. If you’re sitting with a lot of tension, the breath hardly moving through the body, the body bracing itself against gravity, the awareness of your intrinsic buddha nature is going to be pretty darned clouded over. And, in fact, what you will be manifesting through this kind of bodily confusion is “the consciousness that passes as normal in the world at large,” which is essentially a disembodied consciousness typified by, one, very little awareness of bodily sensation and, two, a whole heck of a lot of involuntary mind chatter. And living life with a numbed-out body and a mind that is out of control just ain’t my idea of a good time.

Better to feel what’s real, to ride the knife edge of sensations as they continue to reveal themselves (sometimes wildly pleasant, sometimes horrifically painful), to surrender to the deeply organic nature of bodily presence, to surrender to the current of the life force and the healing process of dissolving and unwinding that ever more revelation of sensations naturally initiates, to play with balance because that’s how the sensations deeply, madly, and truly come out of hiding.

Better to probe the goings on of the mind rather than just submit to and identify with its drivel, thinking that the yatter-yatter-yatter of the mind is our true voice (it is, at the least, disconcerting that we identify ourselves so closely with this level of the mind that itself can be traced to holding in the body. How do I know that we identify with this aspect of the mind? Well, by way of explanation you don’t have to go much further than realizing that we all call the speaker of this inner voice “I”). Just as we turn our attention to the awareness of sensations and more and more of them come flooding forward (Just hold out your hand for a moment, palm up, Number 1. No, you idiot!  Not the hand that you’re holding your beer mug in! Just let yourself feel what’s there to be felt. There you go . . . . Holy Heineken! Where did all those sensations come from?! And they’re just keepin’ on comin’!), so too can we probe the mind, to stick a virtual knuckle of intention right in the middle of the mind and make our way gently down through its many different layers and twisty corridors and familiarize ourselves with levels of mind and self that we may have never even known existed had we not probed in this way.

Whether you like it or not, playing with balance has the profound ability to expose and explode open powerful energies and sensations that ordinarily are kept contained and that cannot be otherwise felt. And it can also open us to levels of consciousness that cannot be otherwise so easily accessed. I sure don’t blame you for maybe not wanting to go anywhere near this stuff. The potency of the energies can be daunting. The dissolving of “the consciousness that passes as normal in the world at large” can be hairy. But like it or not, this is exactly the world that an exploration of The Line reveals. Furthermore, surrendering to these energies and awarenesses feels completely natural (what could be more natural than surrendering to the current of the life force?). They exist, albeit dormantly, in each and every one of us. And remember: this isn’t about pumping up some kind of exotic state. It’s about accepting ourselves as we are, shedding some not insignificant pain and burden in the process, and finding out who and what we are at our core. That to me seems to be a task worth pursuing.

R1: Well, hoop-de-doo. I’ll go broke as a Rolfer if this is how I present the work. Get real, Number 2; what you’re going on and on about simply has no application to the simple increase of functionality in the world. And no one wants this great dissolve that you’re waxing so effusively about. Yeah, right. I’ll go and pay this Rolfer a hundred and fifty clams a session to do what? To disappear? To dissolve into nothing? I don’t think so.

R2: Yes, yes, Number 1! Finally, I agree with you completely. You’re absolutely right: The Line is NOT about creating greater functionality in the world. The Line is about transforming embodied consciousness onto a whole different playing field. In fact, it simply isn’t possible to embody The Line and hold onto “the consciousness that passes as normal in the world at large” at the same time. It just can’t be done; and, if you do attempt to do this, you’re just going to create misery for yourself and a very inauthentic sense of presence. So, if you just want the rough edges of your life smoothed out a bit, but don’t want to go anywhere near this oh-so-natural and oh-so-deeply-organic process of surrendering to the sensations and forces and breath that lead to a real and profound transformation of consciousness, better stay far away from The Line. And, hey, that’s pretty understandable; the entire somataphobic bias of our culture doesn’t want you to go anywhere near such a transformation (I guess they’d rather just have you suffer along). However, if you truly take up the practices of The Line, you just might find yourself surfing on waves of transformation that are going to start cleaning out the cobwebs in your mind while activating the tingling feeling presence of every cell in your body. But it’s true: while most of us like the idea of a shimmering body, not so many of us are all that keen on dissolving our minds or, as the Sufis are so fond of saying, dying before we die. But, let me ask you this, dear Number 1: what if this notion of dying before you die is what’s necessary to really live while you’re alive, to really release the deep holding, pain, and suffering that you carry in your body-mind? Wouldn’t you as a Rolfer want to explore that? Listen to what my homey Rumi has to say about that one:

“You’ve suffered through so much pain

But still your pain endures

Because dying to your self is the master key

And you haven’t taken it to heart.

Not until you’ve passed through this death

Can your suffering come to an end.”

And it’s not just the Sufis. The Mahayana Buddhists speak about sunyata, this very open dimension of being, this feeling of very full emptiness. Dzogchen practitioners talk about it as rigpa, the natural state. Theravadin Buddhists talk about it  as bangha, totally dissolved. The Sufis call it fana, melting away. Furthermore, we needn’t be worried about our source of income drying up. People are coming to us for relief of pain of some kind or another. So, as Rolfers, our job – and what a noble one it is – is to simply help people come out of the pain and confusion that they’re aware of at this moment. All this stuff about The Line, this dredging expedition for the really deep pains and suffering of the body-mind, is best left for people to explore on their own (which is what a path of practice is all about anyway; it’s not a process of therapy whereby someone else does something to us; it’s a process of personal discovery wherein we adopt certain attitudes, explore specific practices, and discover things on our own). Viewed from a more purely physiotherapeutic perspective, the individual sessions of Rolfing are ends in themselves, but viewed from the perspective of the teachings about The Line, the actual sessions of Rolfing function more as a kind of initiation process for anyone wanting to seriously explore the embodied experience of The Line through intentional practices. It would be nice, of course, if we could let interested clients know what these practices were!

R1: Oh, Number 2, you just make my brain ache.

R2: Good, good, Number 1, because if we can get the thinking mind out of the way, we just might stand a chance of opening to the realm of embodied experience that The Line ushers us into. Look. I honestly don’t know what these very powerful energies and sensations that The Line so dramatically opens up are all about. And I certainly don’t understand yet what this shift in consciousness that also so naturally starts occurring is really all about. All that I do know is that they exist and that by exploring The Line as conscious, intentional-yet-surrendered practice through things like sitting meditation and spontaneous dance (marrying impeccable mindfulness to a complete surrender to the energies and sensations of the body) anyone can tap into these energies and sensations and the shift in consciousness that comes with them. Dr. Rolf clearly predicted that something altogether evolutionary and transformational would occur for someone who was truly able to embody relatively effortless balance as they stood upright, sat down, or moved through life. Now, are you suggesting that the old girl was off her rocker?! I don’t think so. Hey, she loved that rocking chair of hers! It was her favorite pulpit from which to espouse the gospel of gravity and the notion of The Line. In that heightened states of balance can affect bodies and consciousness in this altogether radical and dramatic way, doesn’t it make sense for us Rolfers to pursue this, to explore it, to experiment with how playing with the next breath’s possibility of balance directly affects our sensations and consciousness, to turn our bodies into our own personal laboratory experiment?

R1: (Grumble, grumble; I am so not gruntled by all this.)

R2: Now look, I can appreciate your disgruntlement. But, hey, it’s really quite good news. Think of it: finally, a spiritual practice that embraces the sensual rather than walls it off and relegates it (our very life!) to the dumpster. I kinda like to think of this as the path of “spiritual hedonism” in the best sense of both those words. When you open to the senses, something magical starts happening. Add in the play of relatively effortless balance, and you’ve got a practice worth writing home about. What I’m suggesting here is a path of exploration for anyone who truly wants to take to heart Dr. Rolf’s suggestion that somethin’ magical’s lyin’ buried over in them thar hills of balance. And know that it’s not about attaining some kind of perfected state of balance that you work so hard to establish and then have to maintain. Or some kind of perfected condition of consciousness or some other such nonsense. This is not about becoming perfect; it’s just about becoming human. Balance and our condition of embodiment are changing every single moment of our lives, so there’s nothing to attain and then maintain. What seems important to me is to just do the practices, to get out there and play with balance and surrender to whatever happens. And to do them, as much as possible, every day, as a celebration of the life force. Some days the practice can be so sweet. Other days it’s confusion city. Some days the body just naturally drifts into moments of effortless upright balance. Other days the energies start jerking us around, taking us into personas and postures that don’t look like they have anything at all to do with balance! So you can’t impose The Line from without. You can only surrender to the energies that a moment of real letting go (and this is what playing with balance allows you to do: to truly let go) can explosively release. Playing with balance through surrendering to these energies doesn’t mean that you’re always gonna look balanced! Get it? These energies and sensations have an organic life of their own, and like a river with a strong current, your best bet is to just go along for the ride. That place where we can truly let go and go along for the ride is where The Line reveals itself. Hey, there, Number 1, I love you a lot.

R1: I love u 2. Excuse me, ma’am? Another round please? My friend and I are just getting started.

Note: The first Rumi poem is from The Rubais of Rumi: Insane with Love, translations and commentary by Nevit O. Ergin and Will Johnson (Inner Traditions, 2007); the second is an unpublished translation by Will Johnson.A Polarized Conversation About, Amongst Other Things, “The Line”[:]