From “Physical Therapy”

John T. Cottingham is a physical therapist and a certified Advanced Rolfing Practitioner at Christie Clinic Association in Champaign, Ill. He has conducted investigations into alternative manual and movement techniques for the last 20 years and has published several related articles. He is the author of Healing Through Touch: A History and a Review of the Physiological Evidence. Jeffrey Maitland, formerly an associate professor of philosophy at Purdue University, is Director of Academic Affairs and a senior instructor at the Rolf Institute, Philosophical Counselor and Consultant, and Board Certified Diplomat in the American Academy of Pain Management. He is author of Spacious Body: Explorations in Somatic Ontology and forthcoming, Spinal Manipulation Made Simple. He practices in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Public Testimony for Presentation to the National Center of Medical Rehabilitation Research of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. March 19, 1992 in Bethesda, Maryland USA

…Linearity probably arose originally as a projection of man himself, because man speaks linearly one word after another he tends to think linearly, one idea after another…. Basically this was the frame on which hich the physiomechanical revolution of the 17th century was constructed…..When I was a “scientist” fifty years ago, my credo was that given time, this type of science of logical, linear thinking would describe-all that is within our universe. Life and time have uncovered the limitations of the notion…. The universe is opening its “nothing but” hard boundaries are disappearing. It is becoming defined by the position of its center rather than by hard boundaries…. A closed universe can be seen as a projection of a higher abstraction of an Open Universe.-Ida P. Rolf, Ph.D Structural Integration and the Open Universe 1974

“The biological man must be looked at as a collection of systems, not of atomistic aggregates; this in itself takes him out of a closed universe. The characteristic of systems is that relationship is the determinant of the final figure.”-Ida P. Rolf, Ph.D.

“There is no difference between structure and function: they are the two sides of the same coin. If structure does not tell us anything about function, it means we have not looked at it correctly.” -Andrew Still