I feel for you people. You're all seekers and you think I'm a leader. But I'm not. I'm only an investigator. I can sit here and know when I see something, but not necessarily be able to give you the implication of it. I am a scout rather than a leader. They're not the same thing.
In Her Own Words
Further Reflections from the Recorded Teaching of Dr. Ida P. Rolf
From the teaching of Ida P. Rolf, Ph.D., compiled by Joel Gheiler
This book gathers passages from the recorded teaching of Dr. Ida P. Rolf — talks, classes, and demonstrations from the 1960s and 1970s, preserved as audio tapes and later transcribed. Most of the material here was not included in Rosemary Feitis's 1978 edition of "Rolfing and Physical Reality," the canonical edited collection of Dr. Rolf's voice. Every passage has been cross-checked against that edition to ensure this book adds new material rather than duplicating what is already in print.
The selection is the work of the editor, Joel Gheiler, a Guild Certified Practitioner of Structural Integration, trained in the lineage of Emmett Hutchins. The compilation was prepared independently of the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute and Rosemary Feitis's estate, with the assistance of an AI editorial tool.
"Rolfing®" and "Rolfer®" are registered trademarks of the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute. This book is not authorized by, affiliated with, or endorsed by the Institute, Rosemary Feitis's estate, or any other rights-holder in Dr. Rolf's recorded teaching. The material is presented for educational and historical purposes under the doctrine of nominative fair use; readers seeking active Rolfing® practitioners should contact the Institute directly.
This book follows Rosemary Feitis's 1978 edition of "Rolfing and Physical Reality." It draws on the same body of recorded teaching that she first transcribed and edited, but does not duplicate her selections. It is offered in gratitude for her work.
Of the 1,597 passages collected here, 1,587 are paired with the original audio of Ida's voice. Click the play button beside any passage to hear her speak it. 1,091 match the recording verbatim; the remainder have been lightly polished for readability while the audio plays the original take.
Beginnings and the Work
Ida never claimed to have invented Rolfing — she insisted the body invented it, and she had simply been the one paying attention. What follows are her reflections on how the work began, what it owes to those who came before, and why the territory she walked into still has no adequate map.
Realize this. Get it so deeply within your soul: Ida Rolf did not invent structural integration. The body invented it. If I hadn't come along seeing it and hearing it, someone would have, sometime.
Maybe if I'd been a real bright girl, I would have known all these things, and I'd have gone on a head trip and said this is the way we're going to do it. But I wasn't a real bright girl. When I started this whole thing, I didn't know where I was going. All I did was follow what was perfectly obvious and hit my eyes.
I'll tell you a great secret, but don't ever tell anybody. I've never had an anatomy class in my life.
The reason I am the best person around here looking at photographs is that I spent so many hours looking at photographs — because I was too shy to look at the people.
One has to start somewhere. You've got to start where you are and put one foot forward. That's the only way that you move. When we started, we started with two pair of hands.
We had a key to open a door, and nobody else had ever had the key. So there were a tremendous number of doors that went wide open. We weren't really out looking for the doors that wouldn't open. We had all the work that we could do with the doors that would open.
Everything in Rolfing is so obvious, so simple. I remember, in one of the very early classes I had — in those days, there were only osteopaths and chiropractors — one osteopath said to me, I spent the whole of my trip from here up to Chicago trying to figure out why I hadn't thought of that. And he said, I finally found out it was too simple. It was too obvious. It was too trite. Every level of it is trite. Every level is obvious. You can't understand why a million people haven't taken that thing and put it together. But they haven't.
I look at this with utter amazement. When I get to a town, things begin to — I don't know why. I have no idea why. I remember Tom Mason of Los Angeles saying, When you come to this town, maybe nobody knows it, but my telephone starts ringing. And this is the way it is.
It's not that you're so smart. It's not even that I'm so smart. It's that nobody else tried on the hat.
A revolutionary idea develops first as an intuitive perception in the mind of the pioneer or the innovator. At this point in its life it is practically an art form — an art form perceived as a whole, embodying a total idea, demanding a total expression. And this is where Rolfing was in the days of Esalen.
When the day came that I heard a well-authenticated rumor to the effect that in the baths the subject of conversation now was Rolfing and not sex, I knew we had it made. And I knew then that there was nothing to do but work, and work hard. And work was what we did.
Rolfing is an organization of the body so that the body can do the things you have a body for, with the least expenditure of energy. All you really have to do is look at these bodies as they walk, as they sit, as they stand, as they do what they're trying to do, and evaluate in your mind's eye how much energy they are expending. That gives you the clue as to what needs to be done in that body.
If you are going to be promoters of Rolfing, you must understand what it is we're promoting. We are promoting energetic efficiency in bodies. I don't mean energy in the sense of, Oh, he's so energetic. Not that at all. I mean the kind of energy that is measured in a physics laboratory. How much work does your body have to do in order to effect what it is that you're being paid to do.
This is the important concept: you are integrating a something. You are not restoring a something. This puts you in a different class.
There is very little new in structural integration except integration. It is the integration you must understand — the level at which you work in order to get integration. This is the difference between you and every other school of manipulation that I know about. And I've been around for a few years. I've been around.
Structural integration goes deeper than these other techniques. It underpins them, it underlies them, it understands them.
I don't say this is the only method, but I do say that at this moment this is the shortest, most predictable method that's laid out on the table.
All you have to do to get structural integration going is to hear and feel and see that body. Then, as you walk in the direction mapped by structural integration, you go through the stages recorded by structural integration. If you use another map, you will go down another road. It's the same old story: if I wanted to go to Pittsburgh, I wouldn't start from here.
There is a regular routine which, in my domestic fervor, I have called a recipe. This goes right through the first ten hours. The individual variations really necessary for specific problems in a body are apt to come in the second five hours. The first ten hours have to follow this routine, because if it is varied, very often the muscles you want to work cannot work until certain preparations have been made — and those preparations are taken care of in that recipe.
That is the simplest and easiest way to get lost — to think you know so much more than that good old recipe, which came from God knows where, not from me. It came from bodies. It came from the story that the body showed me. If you get away from that, you've gotten away from a great deal.
I'm not busting the recipe, but I'm everlastingly surprised at the way the recipe works.
The only trouble is that you do that more and more, and presently you've thrown away the recipe. And believe me, when you've thrown away the recipe, you've thrown away the best tool you'll ever have.
In general, the first seven hours are largely concerned with freeing structures — almost taking apart. Only with the beginning of hour eight do we begin to balance the halves of the body and reintegrate the structure in this new space and at this new level. So the halfway point, as far as the work is concerned, comes with the switch from taking apart to putting together — even though the amount of time involved is disparate.
A person who begins fairly normal does not need more than ten sessions. On the other hand, somebody who has had polio or something of the sort certainly hasn't reached his optimum in ten.
You cannot do a first hour twice, any more than you can teach your child to read twice. When you've taught him to read, he reads. He can go on to more sophisticated reading, but you can't teach him to read a-b-c twice. When he knows it, he knows it.
There is no such thing as soft Rolfing, and the people who practice it have no right to call it soft Rolfing. They can call it soft something else if they like.
Reich was the first scientifically inclined man to look at the fact that body structure and body behavior had a relation.
Reich's view was not the view of the man as a whole. Reich's view was the view of the man as a pelvis. The man may be basically a pelvis, but he's more than that.
Reich was probably the first one who realized that if you were going to get Freudian results, you had to have a mechanics through which you got them. Reich set out to find that mechanics, and within limits, he did.
What you are doing would not be as precise if I had never heard of the ideas of Alexander. He contributed a great deal to my thinking. He was the first man — perhaps the only man before this school of work right here in this room — who ever gave real consideration to where a head belonged in relation to a body.
There have been people who thought about where the top vertebra belongs, the atlas, the axis. But there has been nobody who related the weight of the head to the structure of the supports.
The Alexander work is basically a suggestion work. Suggestion does work — but after it works, you've got to keep on suggesting.
It is certain that the Alexander Technique is a nice, gentle, sweet little thing compared with what happens in this room. It is also certain that, like all nice, gentle, sweet little things, it doesn't get very far until it has punch behind it.
Alexander and Reich have now done the two ends of the line, and now we can put them together in the middle.
He looked at me, and there were actually tears in his eyes. And he said, I can't tell you how I envy you. You do in ten hours what I try to do in two hundred, and I don't get done.
Those old fellows — we can't hold a candle to them in terms of what they understood about bodies. But they weren't around talking about what they knew.
Korzybski had a way of saying it. He said: If you start with Grandpa's premises, you come to Grandpa's conclusions. Grandpa wasn't very happy, but he managed, because he was so darn busy pushing the plow that he couldn't remember how his back ached. But Grandson sits at a desk all day, and he isn't that busy, and his back is killing him.
The reason we are so smart today is not that we are any smarter than Grandpa was, but that we have technical equipment Grandpa didn't have. We can do blood chemistries and muscle chemistries and measurements of wavelengths that couldn't be done in those old days. As technological information has grown and been applied to the particular field we're interested in, we think we're getting smarter. We're not, really. We're just getting more information.
Aristotle said, in essence: I've sat here and thought about this for a long time, and I've come up with the answer, and this is the answer. That was fine in the days of Aristotle. In the days of Rolf, he will fight every step of the way. There is only one authority, and that authority is the human body.
What has to be done by Rolfers, for Rolfers, for the information of all human beings, is to take a brand new look at all of this territory and create new maps — because our maps do not fit our territories.
Because I say something to you today doesn't mean I'll be saying the same thing two years from today. We are in a state of growth, in a state of development. We are looking at something no one else ever looked at. Naturally, we're going to come up with different answers.
All of this is not really telling you anything. It's pushing the barriers of the unknown a little further back. That's all. But that, after all, is the way we have gotten to where we are: pushing the unknown just a little further away, rather than looking at the known.
When I leave this earth, I want to leave a couple of hundred people who know how to make a recipe — who understand why a recipe is made.
You people are seeing the mountain from a different side. And when you get through, I hope, twenty years from now, there are going to be a great many people on your side of the mountain.
As soon as the structure has been rearranged, the body will go as far as it is physically able to go within the laws of physics. Structural integration per se is the beginning merely of a progression. There's no question about that, and you'll see it as you watch people who have been integrated, or as their friends call it, Rolfed. I don't doubt that there are other systems of structural integration in the world, but the one which is so popular around here is this one that their friends call Rolfing, which I had the good luck, if you want to call it that, of putting on the market.
I remember speculating as I was traveling on a train in Europe as to what was going to happen in terms of behavior if you change chemistry. How would you change chemistry? The first way to change chemistry would be to change physics. This I recall. I don't know where it came from. It was just an accident.
In those days, in the lunchroom and in the baths at Esalen, this story got around — people came from all over the world and stayed at Esalen a few weeks and in so doing got inoculated with the knowledge that there was this technique of Rolfing, that it worked, it was good. They carried the knowledge back to their various parts and literally the story got around. When the day came when I heard a well-authenticated rumor to the effect that in the baths the subject of conversation now was Rolfing and not sex, then I knew we had it made.
A revolutionary idea develops first as an intuitive perception in the mind of the pioneer. At this point in its life it is practically an art form — an art form perceived as a whole, embodying a total idea, demanding a total expression. This is where Rolfing was in the days of Esalen. But like so many ideas, this has progressed to a level where it is now being examined and analyzed and fitted with words suitable for the current idiom. The idea progresses from an art expression into a scientific understanding and thorough analysis. Do I think scientific analysis is the answer to all problems? Definitely not. I think synthetic integration is a far higher form, and this is what, by the grace of God, we will still be able to call integration.
I remember the first very serious problem I had when I was working on a little lady about seventy years old. All of a sudden, in the middle of my Rolfing, she started screaming at the top of her lungs. I started being terrified — were the neighbors going to send for the cops? When I finally got the thing unlatched, I did it by saying to her, now what do you see? And she saw cars coming down the road. What do you hear? She heard a bell, and this bell developed into the ambulance bell. She had been in an automobile accident where she had been very badly hurt, thrown out of the car, and this ambulance was coming to pick her up. The cop was bawling the driver out, saying, you don't know how to drive, you'll never know how to drive. All this the unconscious woman lying on the ground was hearing. And this was what she was reproducing on my mat.
You can always enhance the pain by resisting it. You can always lessen the pain by accepting it and simply going into it and making it pain as much as you can — and lo and behold, in another minute it's gone completely and you can't get it back again. Many times I've said to a client at the end of an hour, well, Mrs. Jones, I think that's about all for today. She'll look up wide-eyed and say, but John told me there was so much pain. When is the pain coming?
I heard a rumor that it took forty sessions with Fritz Perls. Fritz Perls was a good beginning. There will be people who will never accept that they should stop at the end of the ten. Fritz Perls was one of them. If one spoonful is good, forty spoonfuls has to be a lot better. But if you'll take one spoonful and then wait until you've gotten all you can get from it, you may find you've got quite a lot, maybe as much as thirty spoonfuls would give you, if not forty. Forty spoonfuls could kill you.
How would an individual find a Rolfer? He usually has heard about Rolfing through someone. The other way is to write to the Rolf Institute in Boulder and ask them for a recommendation of somebody that lives closest to himself. Of course, they're not going to say that John is much better than Jim, but they will say that John lives a lot closer to you than Jim, who lives a hundred miles away. It's a relatively small family still. And if there are problems in there, somebody will have heard.
How did your practice begin to form? The piano teacher had a friend who'd been to seventeen doctors and hadn't been able to get help. Then that one had a friend, and then the other one had a friend, and so it goes. We had a key to open a door and nobody else had ever had the key. So there were a tremendous number of doors that went wide open.
Integration is integration no matter where you catch it. Disintegration is disintegration no matter where you catch it. It can be in your personal relation with your mother or your father. It can be in the way you run your home. It can be in the way you run your books. It can be in the way you never know how much money you have in the bank. This is structural integration in action. This is what I'm talking about when I say structural integration is a way of life. A lot of you have picked up that slogan and are using it around you without really realizing what you are committing yourself to.
Five years from now there's going to be a lot of people asking about Rolfing, and this is the kind of thing they're going to throw at you: well, there have been lots of systems around — what have you got that makes it so damn good? There was dear old Madame Mensendieck, who was Prussian by birth and brought up in that system, and who had the energy to go up to Yale University and persuade those good old conservative New Englanders to put this system into their physical education program. Madame Mensendieck had a way of getting where she wanted to go. The thing is that she and I didn't see the same place as the same goal. The point of Rolfing is that you are studying how human beings can operate within the gravitational field with the least expenditure of energy.
Why do we start on the chest? First time Ida put her hands on me, she went right there. By working on the chest and the pelvis, you deliver the most experience of what we're trying to do. When someone gets a first hour, you're establishing in their cells what it is that Rolfing's about. Before you put your hands on them, they've only got ideas, abstractions. In the first hour you're giving them an experiential look at what goes on. You get the most done for the least amount of doing by freeing the breathing and the pelvis. You've taught them at a level that they can understand what Rolfing is, and that says more than all your words.
Gravity
Gravity was Ida's lodestar. Not a force to resist but a field to enter into partnership with — the one energy, she liked to point out, without entropy. What follows are her formulations of that partnership: why verticals matter, why horizontals appear, and why a body that has made its peace with the earth's field is finally free to do everything else.
In no form of animal life, including man, is the accepted posture an actual matter of inherited habit. Posture is primarily and essentially interaction between the physical power contained within the individual organism and the forces of gravity.
Gravity is the name that we give to the energy field that surrounds the earth. We could call it x-y-z. We could call it candy. By agreement, we give names. We're talking about energy within energy.
Entropy is disorder. All energies are characterized by a certain amount of entropy, and some energies have so much disorder that there's very little energy left — it's almost all disorder. But gravity isn't like that. Gravity is the one energy in which there is the least entropy.
Gravity doesn't care where it goes or what it does. It doesn't care whether the sparrow falls up or the sparrow falls down. It doesn't care about sparrows. It cares about energy. It is going to behave in accordance with the laws of energy. And we as human beings have now gotten to the place where the laws of energy concern us.
You never threw a ball up in the air and watched it go up indefinitely. You throw it up and it goes just that far, and it turns around, and it comes down. You don't have to be a seer, you don't have to be a psychic, to say this ball is going to come down. It is going to fall back toward the center of the earth. This is our common everyday knowledge.
We Rolfers are dealing with that which we have crudely called weight. This has been the route through which we have made the change. If you doubt it, feel what it feels like, how weightless you feel as you get older.
It's not support the weight, it's distribute the weight. How do you distribute weight most economically from the point of view of energy? This is the great big question around which Rolfing was built.
Gravity will always win while the body is random. The only solution is to get the body so that it is not random but approximately conforms to the lines of gravity, which are vertical.
It's not that I just like to see people vertical. This is not my hang-up. It is that when those people are vertical, everything inside them has the use of the energy.
The story was that we were made to be four-footed animals, and if we'd just been content to stay as four-footed animals, all would be well with our world. It is gravity that breaks us down. Is it gravity, or is it our stupidity in not getting our masses into a balanced pattern? Nobody thought of that. It seems incredible. Such a simple concept, and nobody thought of it.
Man is evolving. Man is evolving to a vertical unit. Man is straightening, and it is this straightening, this approach to the vertical, which is changing the picture of man as a more effective animal, if you like the word.
Have you ever considered that if you look directly down on the head of any adult human, you see at most the tip of his nose. He can have very bad posture, but you still see only the tip of his nose. As you look down on an animal, you see an entire face. What are we talking about? Oh, you say, elementary, my dear Watson — of course, the man is standing upright, the animal is going on four legs. This is true, and this is the clue. The man is vertical. The animal is substantially horizontal.
The thing that we want to research is, is there a connection between the fact that man has the reflexive consciousness that he has and the fact that his head is on the vertical line? We believe that there is, because as we bring a person into a more vertical position, their consciousness, their way of being, their presence changes.
As the nervous and glandular fields of the man are less bedeviled by gravity, the man apparently changes. His behavior changes. The man, we might say, becomes more human. He differentiates more. He feels more. He feels his own mental processes as being less confused, as being more adequate. He suddenly feels himself as the subject of more and more important insights.
There certainly is a something which pulls living matter up against gravity. You see it in the vegetable kingdom — when you plant a seed upside down, the thing still rights itself and starts up.
Mister Newton can have his apple. Anyway, I call your attention to the fact that my apple isn't dropping. My apple is rising. And that's the difference between Mister Newton and me.
In fact, nothing must rest anywhere. Everything must be suspended somewhere. This is going to be the difference between your thinking and the thinking that's going to overwhelm you on every side from these other well-meaning and, in their own opinion, well-informed people, because they know that gravity's always pulling everything down. Everything has to rest on something. It just ain't so. If you organize the field of force, it doesn't rest. It swims.
If you want to have some fun thinking, get back in the corner and realize the change in the ideas of support that have come in the last seventy-five years. When I was young, the symbol of support was the Rock of Gibraltar. An insurance company used as its symbol the Rock of Gibraltar. A bank used as its symbol a pyramid, or an Egyptian temple. This was support in those days. This was something you could rely on. But this is not what you can put the contents of a pelvis on. It's no good for that. It's not much good for banks either — those of you that lived through '29 knew that. The whole idea of support has changed.
Nowadays, our banks are secure when you put them into glass so that you can see the farthest corner of them any hour of the day or night. This is reflecting that whole change that came in around the turn of the century, when we began to understand relationship. Now that which is secure is that which is in a secure relationship — a hammock of energy that you're not going to fall out of. Something that is supported by imaginary lines.
If you can get that floor of the pelvis where the floor of the pelvis goes, you have an energy web underneath you which then lets you come up. It not only lets you come up, it buoys you so that you are more comfortable up than you are down.
What supports everything in life? And when it gives way, what gives way? It's the bottom of it. It's always the bottom of it. Not the top. The top gives way unless the top is lifting.
If you balance those paired muscles, you will not get a lift but permit a lift. There's a difference. Because the body wants to lift.
If you balance that plastic structure — and the tent is also a plastic structure — so that the pull on one side balances the pull on the other, gravity doesn't pull it down. The guy you're talking to thinks it's supported by a tent pole. But it isn't supported by a tent pole. The plastic structure is held apart, is balanced. You are seeing to it with your tent pole that you have as much material on the right side as you have on the left.
All bodies can be looked at as aggregates of big blocks — the head, the thorax, the pelvis, the legs. For a stable arrangement, the center of gravity of each block has to be above the center of gravity of the one below it and below the center of gravity of the one above it. Otherwise, you have an unstable arrangement.
Weight always has to go through a hip joint if a man is to stand or even to sit. After that, it has many options of where it can travel to get to the ground.
You'll see that the gravity line runs down toward the front of the foot, not behind. It runs in front of the knee. It runs through the hip because it has to, and then it runs up — and you see that it does not even approximate the bodies of the lumbar spine, which the good Lord created to do a certain amount of weight handling.
It's a perfectly absurd thing what we do with those lumbars. These are the biggest vertebrae in the body, and we throw them entirely out of the gravity line, so that we transmit the pull of gravity not through the bodies of the vertebrae, which were designed to take it, but through the soft tissue binding around those lumbars. We use that to transmit the weight of the upper part of the body down to the floor. Now this is crazy.
When the head is carried forward, you have a weight of twelve to sixteen pounds being carried out in front. You are carrying it just as surely as if you were carrying it in your two hands. And you're carrying it every waking hour, every hour that you're not flat on your back. You would also be tired if you carried eighteen pounds in your hands all day.
The way you really find the top of your head is to let your head go up and feel what it does to all the upper ribs, from about the fifth or sixth up. It lifts all of those ribs and puts them into position. When you have that, then you have up — and not until you have that.
The transverse horizontals are the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual verticality. Those horizontals are nothing more than that.
You can teach the whole damn thing if you never use the word horizontal and use only the word vertical. Because if you've got a vertical in there, you've got a horizontal in there, whether you like it or not. And vice versa. But the vertical is one line that goes all the way up. Horizontally, you're going to have a million of them.
If I start talking about the horizontal, then you start getting a brand new goal that you're working for horizontally. To me, that's not an appropriate goal. It's a landmark that you've gotten somewhere.
Those horizontals are not something to work toward. They're something that, if you have worked toward your goal appropriately, appear. This is why it's so difficult to get into that gut level — because you have never learned about this. You have been taught to be goal-conscious. Something is a goal, you're going to grab for it. Now you're in a process world, and you don't know how to look.
Vertical line is the balance. If the balance is in you, you think you see a vertical. If the balance is in you, you think you see horizontals.
If I can just get you so that you can realize that you are a situation rather than an individual. You listen to me and you say yes, and you go away and you think the same dumb old way. This is what I'm trying to jack you out of. I'm trying to jack you into realizing that you people are fields operating in fields.
The energy requirements of this physical body have to be met from your supply of energy before you have energy left with which to go swimming, to play a game of tennis, to go to a dance, or even to earn your living. If you are really considering the man, you have to think in those terms — because this is the man. The man is the energy field, the energy consolidation.
There is some sort of bank account of energy in the body which has to be drawn on for all energy expenditures. If you have a badly organized body — if, for instance, all day long when you're out of bed you have to be holding your head forward like this — you have to expend from that bank account a steady stream of energy. If your head gets up on top of its makeover, that doesn't have to be expended. The answer is that you have a greater balance in your bank account with which to do what you want to do.
If a joint is not truly seated with its neighbor, it takes a great deal of your vital energy to get movement organized.
When you have true verticality, you don't need to move widely. A small movement gets you where you want to go. You cannot have true verticality when you have hookings, bindings at the various joints. You can only have true verticality as you can make one joint truly vertical on its neighbor.
The longer they stand up and are fighting with gravity, the more gravity is winning. When you get a model standing up in front, there you sit and you're thinking about the movie you saw last night and what you're going to see tonight — thinking about everything except that that model is having a fight with gravity, and gravity is winning.
For thousands of years there have been sidewalks. For thousands of years there have been little girls, and little girls are always falling on sidewalks, and the sidewalk always wins. This is what I'm talking about. The sidewalk, the gravity field, the earth field, that great field of the earth — always wins.
Can we change the field of the earth? No. But we can change the field of the man, and we do change the field of the man.
The problem becomes, in terms of structural integration, what can we do to improve the relationship of man to his world of energy? The answer is that we need to relate within that group of systems we call man to the point where the man himself, the small energy field, can accept the energy field of gravity as a supporting framework. This is what structural integration is about.
The gospel according to Rolf says that a man is a something built around a line. I don't think we can dissect out the line. We can push the line around. We can break the line. We can fragment the line. But we can't dissect it out.
When something is accelerated, it doesn't mean the speed changes necessarily. It can mean just the direction of movement changes. When you go around the corner in a car at 40 miles an hour, you get accelerated — you get thrown against the side of the car. Acceleration is changing direction. The astronauts are accelerating all around their orbit because their direction is always changing. The reason it changes is gravity is always pulling in. Gravity was an absolutely unbalanced force on their bodies. I feel that the concepts of Rolfing are very important to the astronauts, and in years to come some of our descendants are going to be living in space or on small asteroids, not in a free fall condition. The concepts of Rolfing in terms of alignment and balance of the body are going to be as valid there as others.
Biological structures are different from all other structures. I set a bowling ball here, it can sit there all night and no work is done — there's no movement of a force through a distance. If I hold a bowling ball out here, even if I held one all night, in the Newtonian sense no work is done either. But the difference between the biological material holding that bowling ball and the desk holding it is that it does take energy in my body to hold my body in this configuration. It's a completely different energy trip for biological beings than for inanimate objects. As gravity pulls on me, in any way my bone structure is out of line, gravity keeps pushing things further out of line, and the only way I can keep them from going more out of line is by putting energy into the soft tissue. Therefore if I stand around all day in a slump, I need energy just to stand up. It takes more energy for me to stand this way than to stand this way.
I had the experience last spring of being with a group of scientists who were debriefing the astronauts who had been in space for long periods of time. Most of the men who have been away from the pull of gravity for the period of time it takes to get to the moon have come back and said, in their consciousness, that they did not wish to return to this planet. This did not occur to the men who stayed closer to the gravitational pull of the earth. These scientists were terribly concerned, because from a moral point of view, if we allow men to go into space, each one of these highly disciplined human beings is going to approach that.
I got so upset a couple of years ago because everybody was talking about energy. Energy, energy. We had an energy crisis. We didn't have any gasoline in our cars. What are they talking about? And then, lo and behold, when I really went to look into it, I discovered the statement that a vast part of the known energy in the universe equaled the gravitational energy that came out from vast bodies — suns, stars, planets. I didn't know that before. It gave me quite a few days of hard work and thinking. Gravity doesn't care where it goes or what it does. It doesn't care whether the sparrow falls up or the sparrow falls down. It doesn't care about sparrows. It cares about energy.
When those kids begin to faint at West Point, standing in the sun waiting for the President, you know that they are losing the fight and gravity is winning. Gravity will always win while the body is random. The only solution is to get the body so that it is not random but approximately conforms to the lines of gravity — vertical, in the sense of the center of the earth, coming out like the burrs on a chestnut in every direction. If your body can adjust within that field to conform with that field, it is not being torn apart. In fact, it is then able to accept energy from the gravitational field. It's not that I just like to see people vertical — this is my hangup. It is that when those people are vertical, everything inside them has the use of energy.
Have you ever meditated on the relation of a human being to the gravity field versus the relation of other animals to the gravity field? If you look directly down on the top of an adult human head, you see at most the tip of his nose. He can have very bad posture, but you still see only the tip of his nose. As you look down on an animal, you see an entire face. Elementary, my dear Watson — of course, the man is standing upright, the animal is going on four legs. This is the clue. The man is vertical, the animal is substantially horizontal. As a potential man approaches the vertical, his nervous system changes, and what he projects changes. The energy field which we refer to as gravity relates differently to his energy field. As the energy field of the man approximates the vertical, gravity — also a vertical field — becomes supportive.
The other guy says to you, well, this is nonsense because gravity always tears things down. And you say, oh yeah? Remember the time you were out camping — what held up your tent? If you balance that plastic structure so that the pull on one side balances the pull on the other, gravity doesn't pull it down. The guy you're talking to thinks it's supported by a tent pole. But it isn't supported by a tent pole. The plastic structure is held apart, is balanced. You are seeing to it with your tent pole that you have as much material on the right side as you have on the left side. And if you have more on the right than the left, the whole thing falls down.
Gravity is always there. You will never escape from it. From the day that single cell is fertilized and develops, gravity is with it. The fetus in the womb of the woman is under the effect of gravity. Nobody has ever looked at that and said, what can we do with this situation? This is what you people are looking at. This is what you people are working with. This is what you people must see — and I mean see in a literal sense, not a metaphorical one. As they come to you with their aches and their pains, you look at them, and you see where they are literally offering blocks to the gravitational force. And the gravitational force is immense. Their block isn't much good except to close them out of the picture.
It is only because we use gravity as a tool. We are the only people who have ever attempted to make use of gravity, and we are literally using gravity for our own purposes. The total experience of gravity, for the person you're trying to relate to, is one that is not supported. This is what is new — what you've got to introduce. Go on and give that person that experience.
The story used to be: we were made to be four-footed animals, and if we'd just been content to stay as four-footed animals all would be well with our world. It is gravity that breaks us down. Is it gravity, or is it our stupidity in not getting our masses into a balanced pattern? Nobody thought of that. Such a simple concept — nobody thought of it. So the story went on for as long as we've been teaching kids in school, a couple of hundred years now, about how gravity is the great enemy of human beings, because human beings insist on standing upright. At least they had this much sense: they recognized that the responsibility was on the human being and on his wish to stand. Yesterday we were thinking and talking about feet and legs. But we shouldn't really have been thinking about feet and legs. We really were talking about gravity — and the adjustment, through feet and legs, of the human being to the gravitational field.
Remember, you have seen the movie several times and you will probably see it again — the title of which is Gravity Is the Therapist. Don't get the idea, and for heaven's sake, don't put the idea out in front, that you are God, you are the therapist. Your job is to simply organize the body sufficiently that gravity can work through it. That's all. Gravity is the therapist. By that same token, gravity is also the destroyer of the random body. You are the only people who are simply directing a process, not creating a therapy. A man is an energy field, and the man is living in another energy field. He can either live in such a way that his energy field is broken down by the larger energy field, or he can live in such a way that he can draw additional strength from that larger energy field — that he can demand that it support him.
There is no muscle, no myofascial unit in the body, which is not designed to have a counterpart. The only thing is, you've never used it. You've never looked for it. You've never learned to use this muscular equipment so that you are not using merely the part, but the part plus the counterpart for it. In order for that counterpart to be used, it has to be in a certain place. If it's out of place, it's not where it can be balanced. So you don't feel lightness — you feel heaviness. Have you ever seen those garage doors that lift up? When it's counterbalanced, your five-year-old can push it up. Once you get it past a certain point, it just floats. If it's not counterbalanced, it takes six men and three horses and some cussing to get it up.
Fascia and Structure
For Ida, structure was never a noun — it was a relationship, a verb caught in the act of holding itself together. The fascial body was her great unmapped territory, the place where the old anatomists had cut through without looking. What follows are her field notes from that country: on plasticity, on the spider web, on the quiet wisdom of a design we have not yet learned to read.
Structure always means relationship. Structure is used on many levels — in theory, in metaphor, in discussing facts and their relationships — but never is it used except as it involves relationship.
Posture is the outward and visible sign of what the structure is where you don't see it.
You have to begin to think of a body as, shall I say, not a spherical spider web but a cylindrical spider web. One of the characteristics of a spider web is that if you disturb it at any one place, it will be disturbed at the farthest periphery of that spider web. This is actually what happens in a body. This is not what the anatomy books tell you.
All of these things are operational on that body, which is a plastic medium, and that plastic medium responds to these causes. Now, by the grace of God, it is a plastic medium, and until it is very badly hurt — very badly hurt — it can be brought back.
You can alter the structure, and having altered it, you can alter it back again. That's what makes it plastic. If you alter the structure and the structure insists on not altering back, it is not plastic. And the body is a plastic medium.
If you go to the dictionary, Mr. Webster says that a plastic is something which can be deformed extensively without breaking. Yes, this is one definition. The other definition is that it can be reformed without breaking. And people come to grief by virtue of the fact that these bodies of theirs have been being deformed under the pull of gravity since they were born, but nobody has gotten around to reforming them — because nobody has really taken a good look at the fact that it is a plastic body, and therefore can be reformed.
We moderns have found that physical stress accompanies our impatience with the limited world of the closed universe. But there are only a few of us that realize that physical stress is a distortion of fascial planes, which are the structural units of the body — not the bones, not the muscles.
Man is not a closed order, not even in purely biological terms. The biological man must be looked at as a collection of systems, not of atomistic aggregates. You can't keep collections of systems in a closed universe. The characteristic of such systems is that relationship is the determinant of what you get out of it. Described in these words, life is not a substance, it is a process. And the determinant is relationship.
In grade school and in high school, you were taught that bones held the body up. This is not so, except in a very special sense. Bones hold soft tissue apart.
As you look at this rib cage, you begin to need to understand that sturdiness is not necessarily solidity. Your rib cage isn't being balanced on bones. It's being balanced on the relation of bones, which is determined by connective tissue.
My contention is that the tent is not balanced on the tent pole. The left side of the tent pole is the right side up, and the right side of the tent pole is the left side up — and similarly with the front and the back. The function of the tent pole is to so hold those segments of plastic material that they can be balanced.
The Good Lord — let's keep using that as a metaphor — designed bodies very effectively. And it wasn't until you people came along that you decided the Good Lord didn't know very much about it. Come on, we'll do it this way. So you do it that way, and you throw all the counterweighting out. The point is, you do not recognize the kind of mechanical system that the Good Lord gave you.
There is no muscle, no myofascial unit in the body which is not designed to have a counterpart. The only thing is, you've never used it. You've never looked for it. You've never learned to use this muscular equipment so that you are not using merely the part, but the part plus its counterpart.
This protein collagen, which is the basis of all structure, has peculiar qualities. You can add energy to it, and as you add energy to it, you can change the chemical structure. Just as you take some gelatin and water — semi-solid — put it on the stove and add energy to it, it becomes a fluid. Same color, same gelatin, same water. A little more heat. In other words, a little more energy, and it becomes fluid.
Because you are mostly a collagen machine, it concerns you very intimately.
Add energy to it and it becomes more fluid, more sol. Subtract energy and it becomes more dense, more solid — a gel.
The muscle is the furnace that does the work inside of the sheath. And when I say furnace, I mean this literally. The oxidation, the chemical procedures from inside the cell to outside the cell — all of this stuff goes on inside. That is the muscle. That is the furnace. That's where you keep the fire going. But that's not where you change the position of the pipe that's come adrift.
A muscle is something which is capable of much faster alteration, much faster nutritional change, much faster circulatory shift than a sheet of fascia. How do you know it? Because you've all eaten legs of lamb in the course of your life. You get these tough fascial sheets in there, and you realize that what you're eating and enjoying and saying, "My, that's a good leg of lamb" — is the muscles of the leg, not the fascial planes.
And don't just reach for the word fascia. It is too fascist to do that.
With a human being, in theory at least, you could scoop out the stuff that makes the factory go — the chemicals and so forth — and you would have left this supportive body of fascia. And it is this body which has had very little, almost no exploration in the sense that we have been giving to it.
These anatomists have been cutting through fascia for four or five hundred years. What else were they looking for? They're not mapping this territory. There's the road, and they don't put it in.
You cannot answer the question of what is the function of fascia with a single answer. The more you think about it, the more convinced you are that all biological reality can only be described by circular methods. Round and round and round. The minute you stop, you kill the whole situation. It is no longer a living situation. It is now a dead situation, and you're analyzing it on the section table.
Your analysis is a way of getting to a higher level of abstraction, but not a higher level of reality. When you separate that body into these higher-level abstractions, you are not getting anywhere near the reality. You are getting further away from it. You are analyzing. You are not synthesizing.
You are not able to go into the random body as it comes off the street and go into the fascial plane. They just seem to be not there. It's not that they're not there — but their pullings and heavings and fallings disguise them. Your first ten hours, therefore, are creating the order within these planes which makes it possible for you to see and think in terms of fascial planes.
You are literally creating fascial planes out of seemingly nothing. You've all had this experience: you've worked like a dog over some little nut of consolidation, and all of a sudden, instead of having something the size of the top of your finger, you've got an area the size of your whole palm. You are creating it.
As the one muscle fiber glues itself to a neighbor, it is pulled out of its space. Your job is to take the glue out of that stuff so that the muscle fiber goes back to the space where it belongs.
All of a sudden somebody says, "Oh, that's terrible, it burns terribly." But that burning is nothing but your perception of the splitting apart. It has not to do with pain, and it has not to do with deterioration. It has to do with the fact that several fascial planes have been glued together, and you are now putting enough pressure and stretching on them that they have to respond by ungluing.
When soft tissue has to do the work of hard tissue, it becomes hardened tissue. So when you begin to get these hard wooden legs — well, they can't be wooden legs if they're balanced. They can only be wooden legs if they're not balanced.
It's not the end of a crutch. It's not a wooden foot. It is an interplane mass of tissues, all of which are elastic.
Twenty-five years ago you wouldn't have been able to visualize this. As of today, every one of you is wearing stretch fabrics. Do you remember when stretch fabrics first came on the market, and how amazed you were at the way they stretched, how you could put them on and barely feel the restrictions? This is what I'm talking about. Those feet are stretch fabrics, and they stretch in every direction.
In your working with that foot, as you all found out, you establish an arch. You don't put it there. You free it there.
Weight goes on the outer arch. All that you ever learned about taking these kids who have flat feet and walking them around boards is the diametrical opposite of the therapeutic truth. No foot has ever broken down until the outer arch breaks down. While the outer arch is intact, the foot is intact.
Flat feet are not in the feet. Flat feet are in the shins. They are where and how the muscles of the shins relate. And the place to go for your flat feet is not into the feet, but into the shins.
Your fibula has slipped. For some reason or another, it is displaced. And that imbalance begins to go all the way up through the body. You get the compensations that now make it possible for survival. And then look what happens — the compensation makes it impossible to establish a balance. So that which was put in there by the body in order to adjust to something now becomes the restriction by which the body cannot get out of the trap.
You cannot change anything further down until you loosen that compensation that's up there — that grew in there, was built in there to respond to the problem that was down here.
As change occurs in one place, all of you who have ever done any work are aware that it has also occurred in another place. If you open the ribs at the front, you'll find that the back is not as rigid.
You cannot change one vertebra. It's impossible.
The cervical spine mirrors the lumbar. You can do nothing in the lumbar spine that doesn't automatically accommodate in the cervical spine. You can do nothing in the cervical spine if the lumbar spine is unable to readjust.
The psoas spreads itself in front of the lumbar spine like a web that holds the vertebrae back. And that is the function of the psoas — to hold the lumbar vertebrae back.
What you call a spinal column is not a spinal column at all. A column is something which is supporting a weight on top, which is not the function of the spine. The spine is a beam that has been upended. And as such, it should lie where beams lie — along a surface — and the spine should lie along the dorsal surface.
That neck is a key control point for everything that is in the body. And the neck takes the gap every time. Every time your head is forward, you have straightened it out. Every time your head is forward, you shut off the circulation.
Big muscles are muscles whose job it is to move structures far and fast. You don't move neck structures, you don't move head structures far and fast. And these are small structures that run between vertebrae.
When you get these round bodies, they always have symptoms. As quickly as you release that roundness of body, the symptom disappears. The symptom may be the way they breathe, it may be that they have asthma, it may be emphysema — but always they have symptoms, because bodies are not made to be round. They are made to be ovoid. The lateral axis has got to be greater than the anterior-posterior axis for a body to work. This is true in the abdomen, true in the chest, and true in the pelvis.
All of Rolfing is based on just one premise. This is so incredible. The whole revolving process is based on one premise: that you take the working myofascial unit and you put it into the spot, into the direction, where it would require less energy to work. Its design is designed for that place. You bring it toward that place, and then you ask it to work. And lo and behold, it's so pleased with being put into a place where it doesn't have to work so hard that it stays there. All of Rolfing is that and nothing else. It doesn't make any difference how complicated you get, how sophisticated you get. This is all there is. There ain't no more.
This is the incredible thing that has taken us thousands of years to discover. Why? God alone knows. It's written right in front of you all the time. So your job is to find out where and how that body is when it works best — and get it there. Which you can do, because the body is a plastic medium.
This whole connected body of connective tissue is not really explored. That is your job in a larger sense: that sooner or later, it should be from our ranks that the people come who really explore that whole myofascial body.
Here's the key point. You've got a bag with all this stuff in it, just like the body. What are you gonna do to organize that stuff? How are you gonna do it? Well, the fascial planes are the organizational material for the body. If you look at it from an evolution standpoint, there's some massive protoplasm there. As that protoplasm gets more organized — in other words, as higher structures come to be, like a nervous system — instead of a bunch of cells just floating around in this large mass of protoplasm, the connective tissue organizes that into a system.
As these fundamental germ cells develop, they begin to differentiate according to the environmental demands made on them. Certain mesoderm cells are subjected to stretching — they develop the tractile properties. Other mesodermal cells are put under pressure for developing bone cells. So the entire skeletal model comes from one basic cell. They differentiate depending upon the source of energy that flows through them. Now as these cells become more and more specialized, there is one cell which stops at a certain level of differentiation and just becomes fascia. Fascia, the connective tissue cell, is the least differentiated. In that sense it is the most primitive and also the most labile, because it hasn't gone as far down the road of specialization. It stopped before it has had to make all these decisions about whether it's going to be bone, going to be muscle. And hence it has greater freedom, greater potential energy.
Collagen is a colloid, as are all large protein molecules. Colloids have certain qualities in common. An outstanding one is that by the addition of energy, they become more fluid, more resilient. Remember that half-set pan of gelatin? It's gelled. You set it back on the stove, turn up the light, and lo and behold, it liquefies. You take it off, set it in the fridge, and lo and behold, it solidifies. This is a generalized quality of colloids and it is a generalized quality of the connective tissue of the body. Add energy to it and it becomes more fluid, more sol. Subtract energy and it becomes more dense, more solid, a gel. What do we mean by energy? In the case of the jello, we're talking about heat. In the case of the body, in terms of Rolfing, we are talking about pressure — pressure at the right points, in the right directions, at the hands of the Rolfer.
Muscle is the soft stuff inside. Muscle is the stuff that makes the factory go, but fascia is the stuff that keeps it from falling in on itself, keeps you from falling on your face. It is your fascial body that supports you, relates you. As with a child, you fool them sometimes by scooping out the material of the orange and leaving the skin, and then putting the two halves together, and you say to the kid, now this is an orange. See how long it takes that youngster to find out that it isn't an orange — that it's a ball of fascia. With a human being, in theory at least, you could scoop out the stuff that makes the factory go, the chemicals and so forth, and you would have left this supportive body of fascia. I remember sending a student to the library to answer the question, what is fascia? She thought it would be fun, she'd have the answer in no time. She spent two days in the library and couldn't find the answer. This is indicative merely of the fact that we are going into an unknown territory, a terra incognita.
A great many modern surgeons are learning to not cut through the fascia, but to slide between the fascia to get where they want to go. These fascial planes have many reasons for being. Some of them are just holding things apart, seeing to it that your liver doesn't get balled up with your lungs or your diaphragm. But others say that the myofascia is the unit that relates parts appropriately — that it is where your fascial body literally is which determines that structural relationship. You cannot answer the question of what is the function of fascia with a single answer. The more you think about it, the more convinced you are that all biological reality can only be described by circular methods. The minute you try to pin it down, you kill the whole situation. It is no longer a living situation. It is now a dead situation, and you're analyzing it on the dissection table.
You are not able to go into the random body as it comes off the street and go into the fascial planes. It's not that they're not there, but their pullings and heavings and fallings disguise them. You can't go in and feel them. You can feel tendons sometimes, but you cannot feel fascial planes. Your first ten hours, therefore, are creating the order within these planes which make it possible for you to see and think in terms of fascial planes. This is why in those last hours you must spread your hands. You must remember that you are working with fascia.
We have layers of fascia, or fascial sheaths, and I feel that the tough sheaths are due to improper use of the body. What we're looking toward as the ultimate is a really relatively soft bed of connective tissue rather than these tough sheets that are found between the different muscle layers. I have a lot more respect for fat now than I had before, because I used to think of fat as being just something your hand sank into. What I got aware of in the dissection is that the fat itself may be sort of lardy, but it's embedded in pockets of very heavy collagenous fibers, so you're getting a tone to fat that I hadn't thought of. When you're working through fat, you're not just going through it, because the fat itself has a lot of structure and tone.
One concept of the old fascial thing that we've not really given much thought to is that there is also fascial coverings of all the organs — the kidneys, the intestines and so forth — all of which are continuous with this kind of fascia that I'm talking about in the muscles. This will never be a practical addition to cultural information until we can tie it up with measurement. You have to be able to measure these things before it goes into the textbooks. I hope you're beginning to understand that you can get this different idea of a body as a something centered, going out, instead of something contained in the skin with some cubbyholes in it. The very essential understanding of the different role of human beings is going to come out when somebody does some heavy thinking about how this thing can be a center reaching out in every direction through the fascial planes.
When you are dealing with fascia, you are dealing with a structural system, an organ of structure. But you are also dealing with a very delicate and sensitive environment in which other cells that don't have a direct structural significance live, and which can be strongly influenced by the manipulation of the fascia. It is common knowledge that infections often migrate along the fascial planes. Fluids traverse along the planes. And when Ida talks about the body being basically an electrical something, it is along fascial planes that those ions and electrical charges are transmitted. You begin to get a feeling that it is literally another system of communication in the body. There is the nervous system. There is the circulatory system. You can look at the fascial system in a similar way.
The thing that always intrigues me about fascia is the range of characteristic — the range of quality. People sometimes say, oh, that's terrible, it burns terribly. But that burning is nothing but your perception of the splitting apart. It has not to do with pain, it has not to do with deterioration, it has not to do with any of the functions that pain is usually talking about. It has to do with the fact that two fascial planes or several fascial planes have been glued together, and you are now putting enough pressure and enough stretching on them that they have to respond by the gluing undoing — ungluing. If you've ever been butchering animals, you take your hands and run them down between the groups of muscle. You get this feeling of how they are adhered, and how you can put your hand in there and kind of dissect them apart without actually breaking anything. This is what you're feeling during processing.
A lot of you, before you ever heard of me, had heard of foot reflexes. You heard that this line of the foot had to do with the spine, and it does. You heard that back here on the calcaneus had to do with the sacrum, and it does. What you are saying is that this is no metaphysical connection at all. It is very much a physical connection. Only the woman that put this together wasn't smart enough in the body as a whole to see that physical connection. There is a direct fascial sheath. I spent twenty years looking for it, and I couldn't find a solitary soul that knew about it, except about two people in the osteopathic group who carefully saw to it that they didn't really spread that information. In none of the books that you have read have you ever seen a reference to it. These anatomists have been cutting through fascia for four hundred years. Unless they were looking for it, they wouldn't find it. If you go out in the desert and you're not looking for gold, you'll walk right over it.
This is my favorite picture — a cross section through the abdominal wall. The main tie-up with the fascia is on the back. If you remember that the gut and everything develops from the back, that makes more sense, because that was the original tightness, the original support — back here. So a lot of the lack of connection in front, I feel, is an over-connection back here. The large intestine was really glued down to the fascia on the back. Very tight. As the gut develops, it does hang at first, until the body grows around it. If we think then that we're not only loosening erectors, quadratus and psoas, but we're also loosening the attachment of the gut in the back here — there's a lot more application of psoas work than just freeing the leg.
The Body, Aging, and Wholeness
Ida did not believe in aging the way the doctors did. She believed in dilapidation, in the slow substitution of calcium for hydrogen, in the body's quiet bookkeeping of every fall, every accident, every cultural posture. But she also believed the process could be reversed — that what we call old is often only tired, and what we call finished is still becoming.
We are all unfinished business during the entire process of our life. That's what Rolfing is. It's a conscious effort on our part to bring ourselves nearer to finished business, in the sense of an organism which is capable of working easily, economically.
A human being is a pattern. A set of waves, a set of energy fields created by God knows what. By the energy which is the basic energy of the universe. Who directs it? I don't know. What directs it? I don't know. The law directs it — the law as to how energies work together. And I call that law God.
You are looking at facts that concern the human body. You are looking at the fact that a human body cannot stop moving and continue in health. You are looking at the fact that death starts the minute you begin to interfere with movement.
Aging isn't aging. Aging is dilapidation.
The more minerals are substituted in there, particularly calcium, the more tired you are when you get up in the morning and can't stretch out. This is the process which some people call aging. It isn't truly aging at all.
Collagen is a protein, a weaving of three strands of amino acids. Those strands are united by mineral atoms. According to the energy in that body, those mineral substances will differ. In a young person, those unions may be hydrogen, may be sodium. As a person gets older, these elements change and the mineral unions become calcium. And you all know what happens when it gets to be too much calcium.
The next time you want to sing that song — Oh, how I hate to get up in the morning, my back bothers me, I can't straighten up, I must be getting old — try it to a different tune. Try telling yourself that the colloidal material which is you has not had enough energy added to it. See whether it changes your attitude. It might.
You can't see with glasses, you can't see without them; you can't walk with canes, you can't walk without them — and this you should like to have. So be sure you all get old and find out about it.
Time invariably makes demands of new adjustments.
The readings went up from childhood to about age 25, and then they started down. Gradually it slid down the curve until a 60 year old indicated much less energy than a 25 year old. And interestingly enough, the peak was at 25. It wasn't at 40, where you'd expect it. We think of a man as being in the real prime of his life at 35 to 40. This said no — a man is in the prime of his life at 25.
Look at the world above you and see how, as the energy level of the individual deteriorates, his structure deteriorates. Look at old people, how they go into that spherical pattern. They do this to the point where they absorb the material of the bones.
Walk down the streets of any town with the new eyes you have in your head and see what the 40 and the 50 and the 60 and the 70 year olds are dragging around with them. Not a clean-cut leg in the whole outfit. And every one of those legs is pulling the pelvis along, pushing it, heaving it.
While the man is young and vigorous, he can handle it. He can take his vital energy and force himself to do this, that and the other thing. But as he gets older and loses some of that vital energy, he can no longer force himself. Little by little the body begins to break down, until all of a sudden it comes to a crisis, and then it breaks down a lot. Because you no longer have the reciprocity of pull, the reciprocity of energy field activity, which makes it possible for it to spontaneously come and restore itself.
A body is a summation of energies. What we call a body, in terms of energy, is the summation of the energies of various areas and various organs — that the organs are energies. And so the body itself becomes the algebraic sum of these various energies.
If you've got a liver structure that's functioning very badly, you are taking energy away from the rest of your body to keep that liver going — and the answer is, you don't feel so well. Because what you are registering when you say I feel is the sum total of that energy. But remember, that sum total is an algebraic sum. Some of those systems are going to be pluses and some are going to be minuses, unless you are very well stacked.
It will help you to realize that not only does your body live as a whole, but that every part of it is alive and more or less independent — more or less taking care of its own requirements, more or less trying to adapt to the needs put upon it, more or less adapting to the structural demands. What you get is a very complicated picture.
Systems. Not units, not individual muscles, not individual organs. Systems where smaller units work into a something which is able to work as a larger unit.
Those of you who have a liking for metaphysics, perhaps you're beginning to compare the story that a man has many bodies with what I'm saying — that a man has many systems.
The body becomes a unit. A trunk, a core, and rather independent girdles that do the work. A core, a unit for literally not dying. You don't die because somebody cuts off your legs or your arms. But you do die if somebody cuts you off in the middle, in the core. Because the living unit is that central core which supports and keeps going the girdles which do the work.
I would like to erase the concept you all have — which is in my speech as well as yours — about their heads, meaning their intelligence. The head isn't an intelligence. A human being is an intelligence, perhaps. But the head is just another part of the doggone mesodermic system.
Don't think I am putting an absolute preeminence on what lives in the cranium. I am not. What lives in the cranium is only the other end of a long structure, and it happens to be turned up.
A man doesn't do his living through his nervous system. He does a lot of it through his motor. You have this core structure, but his motor system is wrapped around it like two curtains. This is his doing system. And before you have that man where you want that man, you have to establish a balance between that being system and that doing system.
The head of an embryo develops first, the feet develop last. You all know this because you've all seen very young babies, and you all know that their legs and their feet look like nothing we've ever seen before. They don't look as though they're ever going to be able to stand on them.
We're constant embryos from conception to death. We're on a long embryonic cycle, and the head is the first part of the creature to develop and then the rest of this stuff proceeds.
Children aren't born perfect. This is some more of the old crow's universe stuff. People aren't born perfect. They are evolving.
Practically every child is not normal at birth. They've been through a very heavy experience, and that heavy experience has distorted their bodies.
A child is born without an arch. People will come to you over and over again and say, Oh yeah, my flat feet, sure, I was born flat-footed. And if you're smart, you say, So is everyone else.
The little three-year-old stands up straight, and his head is twice as big as anything else on him, and he stands there like a tulip holding up his head. And his knees go straight forward — if you have luck.
You'll find many three-year-olds who will go along like tulips. The head is held up, and they're walking under their head, and their head is going up. But by the time they're seven, various things have happened to them. They've fallen down that many more times. They've learned how much they want to copy papa or mama. They've learned to throw a ball, and they've learned to throw it badly. They've gotten themselves all involved with trapezius and latissimus, and everything has gone astray from the pattern.
How they will finish depends on how much mama and papa and cousin Tilly and the pediatrician know about what a child should look like. And the weakest of the whole chain is the pediatrician, because he has been taught to look at averages and call them normals.
You do not encourage a child before they try to stand. And everybody is doing this to the kid so they can go around bragging to the neighbors that he's only so many months old and is standing.
The only problem with little kids is that they have already, no matter how little they are, had a cap of attitudes set down on top of them long before they've come to you. One of the attitudes is that they mustn't, under any circumstances, be hurt. From the minute they're born, we fit this on top of them. And they learn it all too fast — instead of learning that minor hurt is like minor joy. It's part of the balance.
It is never possible to get true symmetry in a body. How can you, when you've got the difference between a heart on one side and a liver on the other? But you can certainly get something that is better balanced in terms of weight. The good Lord never meant for a true symmetrical balance. He apparently means for an essential, a virtual balance.
If you examine skulls upside down in a museum lying in a case, you're just bowled over by the fact that the inside of those skulls have no relation to balance. None whatsoever.
I will never forget my disbelief, many years ago, when I went into a small anatomical museum and was examining skulls, and all of a sudden I realized that the bones didn't match. There was more bone on the right side or the left side, literally more bone than there was on the other side. Because down through the whole lifetime of the fellow whose occiput that was, he had been using his head to balance his imbalances. His structure had changed in accordance with the demand he put on it.
When you come right down to it, there are very few people you get on your hands who haven't had some accident that has made major changes in their bodies since they were born.
When any individual is subjected to a great deal of violence, you say his knee was broken. But are you, as a practical human being, of the belief that a man, woman or child can be subjected to enough force to break his knee and feel that nothing else has happened there? We call those compensations. Sometimes those compensations happen at the time of the accident, but more often they happen as a result of what the individual has to do to compensate for the problem in movement which results from the accident.
These compensations work just as surely as the primary accident worked — just as surely and just as vitally and just as devastatingly.
What happens when you drag down? For one thing, you're interfering with what normally goes on in terms of secretions of hormones. You're putting strain on the entire reproductive system.
The sex hormones, which the ordinary person thinks of as having to do with physical reproduction — that is a very small, limited part of their job. Their job is to contribute vitality to the human being for the rest of his life, or her life.
Women are not men, and men are not women. Some of you haven't found that out yet. There is a difference in every cell of those bodies. There's a difference in tone. There's a difference probably in chemicals that make the tone.
When you have that random body that has been subjected to the distortion, the disorganization, the disintegration of thirty or forty or sixty or seventy years of life, it's no more the same than is that frozen meat. If you'll have patience and not try to get the meat into the pan by sawing through small pieces of it — if you just let it thaw — it begins to resemble meat again. And the same thing is true with bodies.
The man is not straight, but after all it took him sixty years to get here, and it will take a little more than three weeks.
This is a remarkable idea — that you have in the human body something so plastic that you can develop it; that it was once developed for sheer rigid strength, so called, and that now you're trying to develop it to the polar opposite. This is an unbelievable thought if you get right down into it and look around at it: that the human condition is such that it can be shifted at will to meet various demands.
This is what we are depending on: that human beings have an instinct for order. They work best when their life, including their bodies, are orderly.
It determines the whole man — the level of his being, the relationship between his parts, the appropriateness of his function in terms of an optimum. It answers the question: how human is that human being?
The physiologic age of a person is almost based on their rigidity of structure. I've seen this time and time again. The tighter they are, the older they are. The harder they breathe, more chance of emphysema, shortness of breath, the chest changes. Time, as we measure seconds, minutes, hours, days, and years, is nothing but one way of looking at spatial relationships. So if a man is twenty-two years old and he looks forty, and you alter his spatial relationship within his body, he's got to change in his time configuration. There's no way to get around it.
In a young person, a bone's length can change. The fashion in which bones change as they mature — the closure of apertures, the change in pattern of individual vertebra. I am not talking about aging at this place. I am talking about maturation. In Marjorie Williams, for instance, who when she came to us had never had her feet under her, today those bones would have to show changes under x-ray. Her feet are getting larger. There are a great many things in the body that can change only slowly, and a great many things in the body that can change so much faster than you think it's possible that they should change. It's unbelievable that this should happen, but it does.
The various parts of the body operate on energy, with energy, by energy, creating their own energy, taking in their own energy. They are individual energy machines. And according as you add these energy machines, appropriately or inappropriately, you get addition or subtraction from the energy machine as a whole. If you've got a liver that's functioning very badly, the rest of your body, which might be doing reasonably well — you are taking away the energy from it to keep that liver going, and the answer is you don't feel so well. Because what you are registering when you say 'I feel' is the sum total of that energy. But remember, that sum total is an algebraic sum. Some of those systems are going to be pluses and some of them are going to be minuses unless you are very well stacked.
Look at the world above you and see how, as the energy level of the individual deteriorates, his structure deteriorates. It does its best to negate the message of the bones. Look at old people, how they go into that spherical pattern. They do this to the point where they absorb the bony structure. At a lower energy level everything goes round. It's only as you get to the higher energy level that you get to patterning that is then maintained by a bony or harder fusion structure.
By the grace of God, the body is a plastic medium, and until it is very badly hurt, it can be brought back. You can alter the structure, and having altered it, you can alter it back again. That's what makes it plastic. If you alter the structure and the structure insists on not altering back, it is not plastic. And the body is a plastic medium. This is the incredible thing that has taken us thousands of years to discover. Why? God alone knows — it's written right in front of you all the time.
The next time you want to try that song, try it to a different tune. Instead of 'Oh, how I hate to get up in the morning, my back bothers me, I can't straighten up, I go around so slowly, I must be getting old' — try telling yourself that that colloidal material, which is you, has not had enough energy added to it. See whether it changes your attitude. It might. The more minerals are substituted in there, particularly calcium, the more tired you are when you get up in the morning and can't stretch out. This is the process which some people call aging. It isn't truly aging at all.
Your wife says, now today we're going to move those books back to the left side so I can organize this attic differently. You go up there and try to drag those same packages around, and somehow they seem twice as heavy as they did last Saturday. Why? Because last Saturday, in your effort to move that heavy load, you displaced those extensor muscles laterally — past the point of elastic return. By next Saturday they are in a new position, and that new position is a less efficient position mechanically. But you have to do the same amount of work with a less efficient mechanical apparatus. The only reason these are called the changes of aging is because you have had more time to change those muscles around, and more demands on your back and your front and your sides. Time invariably makes demands of new adjustments.
Feldenkrais was the first man that I know of that called attention to the fact that all negative emotion weakened extensors, strengthened and tightened flexors. Under negative emotion, you've got this typical breakdown into the random body. The random body is always characterized by a flexor system that is too strong for the extensors. As soon as you consistently carry your body in a fashion where the flexors overbalance the extensors, you are putting a whole series of hooks in that body that gravity can get a hold of and pull him down. This is what made the old premise so dangerous — that gravity always broke the body down. It was not apparent that it was possible to so organize that body, to so develop that body, that gravity wouldn't break it down.
I sometimes use the metaphor of the time that you take your overcoat to the cleaner in the springtime. When it comes back, you don't take it out till the fall. When you get it out, you say, my goodness, what's happened to this coat? You take it to the tailor and he says, you took that to a cheap cleaner, didn't you? How do you know? Well, the lining has shrunk, but the wool hasn't. This is the sort of thing that happens in the body. The lining shrinks because of the effort that you so many times put into the fascial frames.
Fascia is the stuff that keeps you from falling in on yourself, falling in on your face. It is your fascial body that supports you, relates you. As with a child, you fool them sometimes by scooping out the material of the orange and leaving the skin, and then putting the two heads together and you say, now this is an orange, and you see how long it takes that youngster to find out that it isn't an orange — it's a ball of fascia. So with a human being, in theory at least, you could scoop out the stuff that makes the factory go, the chemicals and so forth, and you would have left this supportive body of fascia. The first balance of the body is a static stacking, but as the body incorporates more changes, the balance ceases to be static. It becomes a dynamic balance. The whole person evidences a more potent psychic development. The ratio man-energy to gravity-energy has increased, and therefore the force available to reverse the entropic deterioration is greater. Our world is no longer running down. It seems capable now of building up.
We know that our bodies change approximately every seven years, but have we ever thought that our body changed on every breath? Have we ever thought that atoms and molecules are constantly replacing themselves and being altered, that hormones are in a constant state of motion and alteration, that electrodynamic and electromagnetic energy changes are occurring constantly which are affecting our body? And yet we try to conceive of the body as static and educate it in the same way. Our physical senses really tell us very little about our bodies. They tell us that which is on the surface and the outside, and that's about all.
If you take that coarse material body, which can get itself into too coarse trouble to be influenced by the finer body — no thinking, no psychological approach is going to straighten that cockeyed spine. It's too cockeyed. If you want to get such a system working, you have to place that coarse material mess on top of the finer body, which does not really lose its shape seriously. It's the three-dimensional body that goes haywire. The finer body stays there and energizes the three-dimensional body, but often is unable to change it because of the coarseness of the deviation. The symptom is the disharmony, the strain between the coarse body and the fine body. So much of this problem is something that has gone very seriously wrong with that very coarse body, and the fine body hasn't quite the punch necessary. So it takes somebody's elbow, somebody's fist, somebody's knuckles to give it that coarse punch, and then it's ready to go.
Demonstration and Teaching
Ida taught the way she Rolfed: by challenge, by repetition, by refusing to hand over the answer. What follows are her instructions to her students about how to think, how to see, and how to convey a body to a world that has been taught it cannot be touched. The classroom was her laboratory; the recipe, her gospel; the map, never the territory.
The job of Rolfing is creating order. You are in a situation of confusion, and what you have to get out of it is order. This is my entire sermon — not only today, but every day.
The map is not the territory. You have to learn what they learned thousands of years ago: that somebody goes out and makes a map, and it isn't always right. It often has no relation whatsoever to the territory. It often has a very misleading relation to the territory.
The toughest part of your training is going to be to forget what we insisted that you study in the books in your preparation for a class. The toughest part is going to be deciding whether what it says in the book is so. And who's going to be the judge? You, and the experience that's standing on two feet out here.
It is a brand new experience — to experience a body rather than to know about a body. And it's not easy. It's neither easy on the teaching nor on the learning to get that transition.
There are two ways of knowing things: either by knowing the recipe, which is strictly an intellectual deal, or by looking at the body, which we agreed a week ago was the boss.
What you people are doing is learning a recipe. And that recipe is good. But unless you learn that the recipe is a response to what goes on in the body, it is not doing what you do. The recipe is like all cookbooks — an ever-present help in time of trouble. But if you get good enough, you don't have times of trouble.
When I leave this vale of tears, I want to leave some chef material lying around behind me. How do you get to be a chef? You begin to understand the laws that are behind the kinds of material that we use for food. The world is full of cooks. Mama taught them that first you put in the egg, then the sugar, then the flour. But realize that behind those recipes there was once someone who understood why you put in this before you put in that.
My job is not to train you to use the recipe, but to make you see why the recipe works.
I will guarantee that if you follow the recipe, you'll get the result. The cake will come out alright. I recommend that you stay with the recipe — period — for a long time to come. A year, two years. And then if you want to play around, alright. But if you play around early, you just lose the vision that comes through the repetitive performance of a certain passion.
People think I'm terribly rigid. But if you follow that map, you know where you're going and you get there — not in 99% of the cases, but 100% of the cases, if you do your work properly. If they don't call it Rolfing, I don't care. But if they do call it Rolfing, they've got to keep the map, because that's the only map that takes them to the town.
I was giving a class twenty years ago, demonstrating on a very little child, and getting very impatient because I couldn't get the child where I wanted. There was a very wise osteopath in that class, and he said, Doctor, the trouble is you have forgotten to put some compound essence of time in your prescription. You have to have some compound essence of time in there.
You start where they are. That's all you can do. When you're taking a small child out to walk, you can't walk at four miles an hour and have that kid keep up. He doesn't have the legs for it. So you adapt your legs to the one mile an hour pace that that kid can handle.
Teaching is about going from here to here to here to here. When you get up there, you can afford to stop and look around and say, by golly, I wonder how I got here.
I can tell you the answer, but after I've told you the answer, you won't really know it as you will if you tell me the answer.
Some believe the way to do this thing is to help these people. I don't. I believe the way to do this is to challenge them. I do not believe that helping a person, in this sense of helping, develops people's sight, people's thoughts, people's independence.
Don't let me throw you. It isn't that you don't know, it's that you have let me throw you. Which is a mistake, because I'll do it every time. It doesn't mean I don't love you. As a matter of fact, around here it goes that whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth. And who the heck am I to improve on the Lord's pattern?
Stay in the place where you're confused. That's the way to get out of the confusion. I mean this literally — this is painful, but this is the only way out. Stay in the area where you are confused and keep looking at it.
When you get up to the eighth hour, it's very painful — not for the Rolfee but for the Rolfer, because he has to start thinking. Earlier he's just followed the lesson. Now you've got to start thinking. It hurts all of us. It's me too.
When you see what you can really do, what you can really do is to throw away all the givens, everything I've told you, and start fresh. Because everything I've told you, I have sort of planted on a fresh sheet. And there is no fresh sheet. Now you have to consider what you can put onto a sheet that's already so crowded with writing that you have to turn it around and write up the side and then across the top.
We can't take a piece out of your skull and drop it in. We can only say, look. And if you don't see it, you better say you don't see it. It's our job to try to clarify. But you have to keep realizing that a living system is not a mathematical system. It is not a geometrical system. But an understanding of mathematical and geometrical systems can often help you to see vital living systems.
When I pitch something to you in a higher order of abstraction, the thing that goes into your brain is what is already in your brain. You are using it to color what you tell the next person she said. So what gets to her ears may or may not have anything to do with what she said.
You are always in trouble when you're talking to your Rolfees, because the word that you think comes out of your mouth is not the word that goes into their heads. The word that goes into their heads is completely colored by their hopes and their fears.
We do not have the available words that carry the shades of difference that there are in the actual reality. We use words which are out here when we're talking about differences in here. We can't get our words to flip the experience.
I had an old yoga teacher once upon a long time ago, and he used to say, if you can't define things in words, you don't know what you're talking about.
When I studied with that yoga teacher, one of his favorite questions was: what is the most powerful thing? The answer is suggestion. And there are all kinds of levels of suggestion.
There are things that, quote, everyone knows, and because everyone knows it, nobody has ever verbalized it. People don't verbalize that which seems to be obvious.
You've got to learn what your neighbors regard as obvious, thread that obvious apart, give it some words, and make them say, yes, that sounds as though it might be so. Your job is not to put a hat on them and pull it down around their ears, but to let them try the hat on and see if it's becoming to them.
You'd better remember that they live in a Newtonian world, and in the world in which they live, common sense is the thing that appeals to them. If what you say to them, they shake their head and they say, yeah, that sounds as though it could work — you've got it made.
No esoteric catchphrases will do the job. They don't belong with these people. They've never heard of them. They don't know about atomic physics. They sometimes try to con you into thinking they do, but they don't really.
I hate that word horizontal, because they reach for it before they understand what it's about. It's a two-dollar word. And the point of Rolfing is to get them down to a nickel word.
Why is a dirty word. When I answer your question why, in your subconscious there is a depth of authority put on the answer which makes it almost impossible for you to throw that answer over and look further.
You can't convey the meat with words, but you can convey the bait with words. If you can't do this, you have no hope of establishing your importance in the community. And I'm not interested in you as being important. I am interested in you as being an outstanding representative of an idea — that people have to look at as an idea.
Go home and try to tell your mother what you're doing. Go home and try to tell anybody what you're doing. Pick out the most intelligent people you know. They can't understand, because they've always been taught that it isn't so. And yet here you come, and very casually you do first this and then that and then that, and lo and behold, you've got an entirely different body.
If you do not have an aliveness in your consciousness, you're not going to be able to put it across. And the neighbors will say, oh, that nut — since she went off to Boulder, she's a little bit crazy. Somehow you have to impress them with the fact that you're not randomly crazy. You're only crazy in a certain direction. And that they might do well to go crazy in themselves.
I am not one of those people who just entertains them for an evening. That's not my own image. My image is that I — by my voice, by my words, by my gestures, by my presentation — want to convey credibility, an image of reality.
You better hurry up and grow and get some aids to your message. The first aid you better get is your own body. You better surprise the gal sitting opposite you with the way you carry your body. Some of you are not going to be able to make the grade, but a lot of you can, if you will really accept this as a goal.
You are in a class. You have lots of people you can watch. Watch how they get ideas, how they convey ideas, how they impress ideas. You've got all this experimental data lying in front of you. For heaven's sake, use it. And when you come to conclusions about your classmates, try extending it to the world around you.
Don't just turn your head and talk to your neighbors. Look at the differences in the various bodies in the course of their unconscious use as they undress. You don't look at people when they are not conscious. You should be looking at them, because that's the time they talk to you.
Start looking for movement. Right now you're looking at static stacking. Stop it. Start looking for movement.
Oddly enough, we tend not to see either our own bodies or other people's bodies. We tend to look at them and simply take them for granted. It isn't until we translate them into profiles that we can see the change. Then, through the symbol, we learn to look at the body itself and see the change in the actual living body.
You don't have to go into an anatomy lab to see these things. They are to be seen in your kitchen. Only you don't look at them in your kitchen.
I want to get you thinking — not about whether you remember to buy the potatoes at the store or whether there's fresh cream in your icebox, but about ideas. In this world where details seem to be so important, this is a hard job. You don't have time to think about ideas.
It's the job of an educated person to know where ideas come from. Whose shoulders are you standing on?
This is why it takes five years to make a Rolfer. Because these things happen maybe once a year, and there are five of them.
You've been with me for about six or eight years, and you've heard this thing over and over and over. But it takes the six hundred and first time.
When I taught my own class, nobody got worked on before we spent ten minutes looking at their body, and everybody would say what they saw, and then I would say what I saw. In detail. This is an elementary class, and that's the time they should go and see. My weakness as a teacher is the weakness of most other teachers, I guess — that which is so utterly apparent to me, it never occurs to me that I should want to teach it. I wouldn't bore you to death if I tried to. I know I'd bore myself to death.
This is the problem with all of you verbals. You do so damn much verbalizing you just spill the stuff all over the floor instead of building it up. Jan pushes his seeing away with his everlasting verbalisms. And even when he doesn't open his mouth, he's doing an internal verbal trip which pushes his seeing away. I listen to him verbalizing to all the people he's managed to accumulate over in that corner, and I know darn well that they're not seeing one more thing, because his verbalization is a wall pushing out.
Jason believes that the way to do this thing is to help these people. I don't. I believe that the way to do this is to challenge them. I do not believe that helping a person in that sense is the way to develop people's sight, people's thoughts, people's independence. When you're just helped, when you continue to help them, you never get them to a place where they can answer a challenge. All they do is back up and start to cry. Jason's way lets them relax. And they do it that time, but they don't know how to get it the next time.
I studied with most of the teachers, and usually when I wasn't getting something in a class they would come up and shove me aside and show me how to get it. I would learn what their fingers looked like as they were getting it, and then I would try to annotate that. Now here in this class, if I'm not getting something, you tell me to get it, and then I have to go in and figure out how to get it myself. — Well, this is what I'm trying to do. But remember that behind this method and this class is a great many classes where the kindergarten teachers taught.
Your particular method has a qualitative difference to the method of helping. Even though you might badger me or anybody — go deeper, go deeper, go deeper — and I would be sitting there sweating, killing the person and still not understanding it, the six hundredth time you said it, on Monday morning I would have had the most wonderful experience. There's a qualitative jump in the level at which I can operate. — That's exactly it. The helping won't necessarily get you to that level. If it does, it's lucky, and usually it's so ad hoc. And you may never get that hoc again.
I remember one time, oh, twenty years ago, I was giving a class and demonstrating on a very little child who was in a lot of trouble. I was getting very impatient because I couldn't get the child where I wanted. And there was a very wise osteopath in that class, and he said, "Doctor, the trouble is you have forgotten to put in some compound essence of time." You are learning that the laws of learning say that time is a factor.
You do that more and more, and presently you've thrown away the recipe. And believe me, when you've thrown away the recipe, you've thrown away the best tool you'll ever have. Don't improvise too much. That is the simplest and easiest way to get lost and to think you know so much more than that good old recipe which came from God knows where — not from me. It came from bodies, came from the story that the body showed me. If you get away from that, you've gotten away from Rolfing.
Why delve so deeply into the study of anatomy and fascia? Because you have to, in order to be convincing to the people who are the tough dogs in this culture. But in terms of dealing with the flesh, that is not the essence of it. In the old days, I thought that this could be done without. But it can't really, because of the assumptions in the minds of the top dogs of the culture. You have to know how to convince them that you know what you're talking about. Otherwise we're all going to be sunk.
Why do you make your mistake asking what's the main of this? Because if you answer yourself, you will never see what the involvement is. Your answer stops your seeing, stops your looking.
In the third hour you have a lateral line, and you're working from front to back. When you're talking about balancing, it's only yak yak. But when you're putting in your lateral line, you are communicating with the silent level. In the whole ten hours this is the only time that you will be balancing on two sides of the lateral line. Therefore, when you let yourself be derailed in the third hour and you go to the back and you go to the front and you go to forty-five other places, you are cheating that guy of his third hour.
You have a big educational job to do as well as just changing a body. And the more you do your educational job, the quicker will we get to the levels of the culture that we want to change. It isn't what you do on the individual body that will put us there. It will be the words that you put into the minds of significant members of the culture. They're too confused why you're doing it. You have to give them the abstraction, which to them, with their teaching toward abstraction, has more meaning. People communicate with each other only through symbols — through words, through drawings.
No esoteric catchphrases will do the job. Your job is to keep them in this common-sense world where all of a sudden they look at you and they say, "Gee, yes, that sounds sensible. I'm willing to try that." I will not stand for these labels if I don't believe you know what the label is about. You go and speak to a roomful of average individuals about reflexes, and they sit there and they nod — yeah, they know all about it. Then you ask them what a reflex is and you find they don't know one darn thing about it. As Mr. Casey says, you start where they are. That's all you can do.
The Practitioner
Ida was forever telling her students what the job actually was — and what it wasn't. The Rolfer is neither healer nor therapist nor priest. He is a man with eyes in his fingertips, working in a real world, charged with the privilege of changing bodies. What follows is her instruction, her warning, and her benediction.
Your job is to learn to see. Your job is to learn to construct in your mind's eye energy models that work.
You are given the great privilege of changing bodies. You are given the great responsibility of knowing what you can change and what at a given moment you cannot change. This is your dual role.
Not by seeing x-rays, but by getting x-rays into your fingertips. By getting x-rays into your eyes. Because when somebody's atlas is crooked on his axis, you better be able to see it by the way he carries his head. That's what you're here for — not to repeat theories, but to learn to see.
The body says to you, I need this or I need that. This is the only way that you will ever progress — not by knowing the recipe, not by pinching John or James's notes because he was in a class ahead of you. That will not make you a Rolfer. Your eyes make you the Rolfer.
Take a look at the ribs. Which of those ribs have been knocked so that they're not lying like this, but they're lying like that? It's all lying there. All you have to do is look at it. You don't even have to look at it. You lay your hand on it. It tells you.
The real law is: when you don't know what comes next, go ask the body. The body tells you. The body tells you.
Let your fingers tell you. Let your fingers talk to you.
Eyes palpate at a distance. It doesn't take you as long to put your eyes around as it does to put your hands around.
You have no idea where Rolfing has been done. It's been done at midnight on the broken-down floor of a porch of a broken-down house with no lights, where there was an emergency. Your job is to recognize what happens with that emergency and get in there and do something. Roll up your sleeves and do something. Don't just think. Thinking is fine in the right place.
You're going to spend the rest of your life fighting the words with which people hide facts that they don't want to look at.
Nobody told you it was going to be an easy trip. Nobody told you that being able to offer help to another human being was going to be an easy trip.
The most important part of what you people have to learn as Rolfers is timing. How much timing do you put on this, and how much timing do you put on that?
You can do the eighth hour on the third hour, but you cannot do the third hour on the eighth hour. There's only one time you can do the third hour, and that's after the second hour and before the fourth hour.
By understanding the significance of the individual pieces of the recipe, you can deal with them in such a way that you enhance the significance, not that you depart from the recipe. This is a great temptation. You're so dead sure it's right there, when it's really down here.
A recipe is fine. It works, as each and every one of you has reason to know. But when you get to be a chef instead of a cook, you create your results not by a recipe but by your recognition of the interplay of food and nutritional materials.
There's no more recipes. You've got to use your head.
Don't just reach in and pray to God that you're getting something that will give you a result. Reach in and know that if you can contact such and such a member of the system, you will get a result.
How in hell do you know where you need to work until you go and look? How do you know it's the oblique? Half the time it isn't the oblique. Half the time it's a failure of the tendon in there. Stop jumping at conclusions. Walk up to them and look at them first. One of these days you're going to jump at a conclusion and find it's a dragon with an open mouth, and you'll jump right into the mouth of it.
One of the reasons you people get so tired of working is that you have never learned to let something happen. If your bodies are properly, directionally organized, you take the brakes off and let things happen. And you can't do that.
He thinks the size of his hands is going to make a difference. He thinks the size of his hands plus the amount of power that he puts on them. That makes him a good Rolfer.
You think if you get into that hurry, you will have protection. Your protection lies in what you can do.
Look this thing over, and by and by you'll get to a point where you don't look so big to yourself. And if you don't look so big to yourself, you are much safer — because then you can learn.
The moral is that you've got to have the guts to look at something and say: this has not been done. Whether it's you that hasn't done it or the next guy that hasn't done it is unimportant. Fix it.
I want to live in a universe that I can look at and rely on what I see. I want to be able to tell the truth about what I see. Go and take a look at what comes out of your mouth in the course of the day dealing with a lot of different people. See how much of it is true. See how much of it you've laid on to get service out of them.
Differentiate your own mind. What do I know? And what do I think? And how much of what I think and talk about do I really know?
I know damn well when I did a good job, but I don't need the rest of the world to tell me. I know when I've done a good job. And so do you people, if you look at it. You don't need somebody laying it on.
Anybody and everybody can put hands into a body and change a body. And have mercy, good Lord, on you if you come and say to me: well, I know I did a good job, because I changed the body.
All you have to do is get your fists into somebody. You change that body — and you can change it very unhappily. It's just as easy to take a body apart. In fact, it's a lot easier than it is to put it together. But the reason you call yourself a worker in structural integration is because you put it together.
There ain't no such animal. There is such an animal as the best Rolfer for certain types of problems. The best Rolfer for problems of the pelvis. The best Rolfer for problems of the arms. The best Rolfer for understanding the relationship between behavior and structure. But there's no such thing as a best Rolfer.
You hook them with a different bait. Doesn't say a bluefish is any better a fish than a mackerel. Some people just like it better.
Those reflexes are useful to you as a diagnosis, and you just remember that under no circumstance are you licensed to diagnose. But you do what you always do with the things you're not licensed to do. You do it anyhow — but you shut your mouth. That's the important thing.
The thing I want to implant in you so deeply that it grows into a big tree of protection for you is this: don't start playing God. Don't start talking as if you were God. Keep a proper perspective of your size and your vulnerability.
Just remember that you do not have to give salvation to every human being that walks the earth. Your job is to make them walk a little more comfortably when their salvation has to come from some other sources.
There are all kinds of cultural taboos that you're running into, and it's none of your business. Your business is to organize these bodies so that they operate appropriately. Anything else is pure, unadulterated velvet.
You will make an observation, for instance, that if that solar plexus for one reason or another gets knocked into a cockpit, you're in a pretty serious emotional place. It is still not your business to fool with the solar plexus. It's your business to fool with the whole man — organizing the systems into a whole man.
All of these things are part of the structure which you need to understand. You need to do more reading and more observing, and not simply decide that you know a technique and that technique will do anything. Technique won't do anything. It'll help lift the energy levels toward normal. But don't go promising people the moon. You can't deliver it. That's a grave mistake.
It is only the kindergarten Rolfers who think you can remedy everything with Rolfing. The further on you go, the more you are uncovering and making apparent these very deep imbalances.
Quit while you're winning. If you don't know about that, go to the horse races and find out. That's not my job to teach you. Quit while you're winning.
You cannot, by repeating a technique, ever get your result. You have gotten the juice out of that already. It's done. It's through. It's finished, and you've got to go where it is. Don't let anybody tell you, go back and do that again.
One of the things you have to learn — and it takes a hell of a lot of discipline to learn it — is not to teach people who aren't ready to hear, who haven't got the basic fundamental understanding to put what you're saying in its right perspective. You must learn to shut up. It's the toughest thing you ever learned.
In order to make other people understand it, you have to understand it yourself. You have to at least have reality on this. You have to have reality on the fact that you are being privileged to make changes in human beings such as have never been made before.
There's no place this guy can go for help. He's got to be a pioneer too. There's no book that's going to tell him how to do it.
I never worked with a body without getting a thrill. And my thrill comes from the recognition that you can change a body. And you can do it in relatively very short time.
This is where you people are being sent out as the apostles to preach the gospel. You better know the gospel that you're going to preach.
My experience was that I was scared when I got out of practitioner training. I'd done 20 sessions in my life, and I was being turned loose on the world as a rolfer. So I just stayed in that recipe like it was a life preserver. That's appropriate. I decided to stay in it for five years, which was my own commitment to myself. I figured if it takes a carpenter in the old school five years to become a journeyman, it's going to take me that long. So I just made that little contract — for five years, one through ten were always the same. Every once in a while I'd see an arm that needed a little something, but for that period of time I just decided I would hang right there. And the recipe always brought me right.
The word patient bothers me. It very much brings to mind the doctor-patient relationship where the patient has no responsibility and in fact is trying as hard as he can to get rid of it. The Rolf work is anything but that approach. They aren't patients. We don't have patients or do treatments. Rolfing is not a treatment in any sense of the word.
The people I would attract by a lecture may not be the same ones that will be attracted to a lecture by you. Your job is not to talk to the people whom I would attract. My job is not to talk to the people whom you would attract, because you will pick better words for them. Realize this. Don't be afraid to see it and to acknowledge it and to say, Tom can do a better job in this town than I could, or Harry over here can talk to that group of students and I wouldn't be able to reach them. This doesn't mean that Harry's any better than you are or that you're any better than Harry. It does mean that you're different. Nobody is better than anybody else, but they are better for a certain purpose.
There's no such thing as a best Rolfer. There is such an animal as the best Rolfer for certain types of problems — the best Rolfer for problems of the pelvis, the best Rolfer for problems of the arms, the best Rolfer for understanding the relationship between behavior and structure. But there's no such thing as a best Rolfer. When you talk about it in those terms, it becomes apparent to all and sundry that you don't know anything much about Rolfing. You don't know anything much about differentiation. You don't know anything much about matching qualities with problems.
People repeat something that somebody said. They say, Rolfing is a wonderful technique. They are repeating something that somebody said — they're not saying, Rolfing is a magnificent technique for such and such a purpose. They're saying, Rolfing is a magnificent technique. I would like to see you as a group go out into the culture and be a significant seed in that culture to change their way of thinking.
You cannot take these kind of people without changing them. You cannot get the results of Rolfing without changing them. So where do you start? You start in the first hour. The answer is: who does know what's going on inside your skin if you don't? And don't be too sweet about it. You have got to get these people recognizing responsibility. I not only am unwilling to take it on my shoulders for you, but I cannot take it on my shoulders. It is impossible. And if you are going to be good Rolfers, you have got to learn how to solve that problem. Each one of you will have to learn how to do it for himself — how his personality can hook into other people's personality and draw on it. I wish I could give you a bottle of this and tell you to take a teaspoon and get going. But nothing will do it except your own progression.
I strongly suspect that some of you in the class that's graduating today are feeling yourself highly inadequate to go out and make like a Rolfer. Your safety lies in the fact that however poor you are, you will be making some changes. People will be feeling some changes. Like a good massage, you will be aware of the fact that you aren't really a Rolfer yet — but the changes will come.
In the attempt to see a body, one of the things we do is to project our awareness toward another being. We look, we reach out with our senses and our awareness and try to cognize what's going on with that other person. You start putting your hands on their body and you start to act upon what you've evaluated. Invariably, you're going to run into the person's persona when you start trying to modify their body pattern. That's one of the first things that emerges — the personality starts to manifest more strongly. Very often there's emotional content in what's going on for that person as you work on them. You really have to make a clear choice for yourself about where you're going to stand with respect to that person — how you're going to establish your own territory and maintain it while you're taking that on.
I have spent years enough worrying about the patient. Now I've taken on worrying about the Rolfer. Somewhere there are people who understand the cleansing, not of the other guy, but of the stuff that comes from the other guy and is poured into you. This is a reality, and all of you have experienced it. All of you have been through the elementary classes, and you know that on the first day, at the end of that day, you're so tired you can't even go to dinner. Somewhere there are people that know how to take care of that. We don't.
What gets me into a sheer fury is when one of my practitioners comes in with a patient on whom obviously poor Rolfing has been done and says, Yes, I've given this girl twenty hours of work, but she really isn't ready to go on further. This is sheer unadulterated bunk. They're always ready to move on if you're doing your proper work. When they're not ready to move on, just be suspicious that you have overlooked something. You can't do a good job and then say, Well, I'll take these people as far as ten hours, and then I'll quit. After that, it takes smart seeing, smart thinking, smart doing. You yourself have to recognize when you're not seeing further on.
Basically, what you are doing with flesh is stimulating it by stretching it. The basic physiological stimulus to flesh is stretching. It doesn't make any difference where the flesh is. The other basic stimulation is rapid alternation of pressure. This is why I'll get at you every so often. I'll say, you're moving too fast. You're not relaxing. You're stimulating. You have to realize these two very fundamental differences.
I'll caution you on the way you talk about promising the moon. A friend of mine does brilliant demonstrations — he'll say things like, A Rolfer can always tell what hour you've had. It doesn't matter, you can go from one Rolfer to the next, you'll always know what you're ready for. He really builds up a Rolfer's authority. And then a guy walks in and says, This is it, I'm ready, what am I ready for? They call your cards. Don't try to get at it that way. Don't run down the other guy. Ida is fond of saying, someone walks in and she says, Who was this guy's practitioner? Who can say where the guy started? How far along on the spectrum he is? What's happened to him since he got Rolfed? Just be positive. Be humble. Roll up your sleeves. I hear a lot of Rolfers analyzing the people — telling them what something means. Oh yes, there's a lot of pain in the chest. I just cringe when I hear that. We're nobody to spell it.
Psyche and Soma
Ida never accepted the partition. For her, what we call psychology was simply the behavior of three-dimensional tissue — emotion anchored in flesh, attitude written into fascia. These passages circle that conviction from many angles: pain and pleasure, grief and resentment, the silent level beneath all our words.
The medium through which the individual can respond to change of any sort is myofascial, and his safe and speedy escape from emotional rejection patterns is dependent on the resilience of these systems. A man whose myofascial components are in reasonable balance is able to recover his emotional equilibrium thanks to physical elasticity. A man at the edge of physical balance has no margin of safety on which to rely.
The same thing goes on at the psychological level as it does at the physical.
Any man in his emotional crises is responding not to the emotion which he thinks is driving him, but to chemical and physiological changes going on inside his skin. At this level, psychology cannot be seen as the primal driving force. Its place has been taken over by physiology.
By and by, you get where all good lovelies are: that there ain't no psychology. There's only physiology. Now, that's rough. Any of you who are coming to heaven with me have to subscribe to this.
At the level of everyday problems, psychological organization of emotion can be immeasurably furthered by any system able to create or restore more vital physiological response. This is the level at which we realize that although psychological hang-ups occur, they are maintained only to the extent that free physiological response is impaired.
Where does emotion express itself? It has to express in a body if it is going to have anything to do with you. What is you? I don't know. But I do know that except as this thing expresses in that stuff inside your skin, it is nothing.
Pain is the label we place on sensation when a rigid system is bombarded by an excessive burden of stimuli which, because of the nature of its rigidity, it cannot cope with. Pain is experienced when stimuli, whatever their nature, exceed certain limits. Might it not be simply stated that pain is too much?
Pleasure is experienced when the system is resilient and is bombarded by the same number of stimuli.
They've never heard that pain is intensity of sensation. They've never heard that it's all right to have a lot of sensation. They are used to living in a very dull, grey environment. There are no bright lights in the living of most people.
They may have been taught from the days they were very small children that when something becomes intense, they had better look out, stay away from it, stop it. Don't really win. You don't want to win. You don't want to get out of that dull, grey place.
Pain is rarely, if ever, entirely devoid of emotional coloring, and its intensity is all too often dictated by anxiety and related variables.
The average human is not really interested in the verbal abstraction equipoise, but he is widely concerned with lessening his pain. When he uses the word, he is usually referring to his own perception of his emotional level. Watching the world around us, especially our young people, their facial expressions and their behavior, one sees that their level is all too near chronic pain.
You have looked around at your culture, and you know the extent to which the average individual is bound into negative emotions. As you look back, you understand that the predominant emotion is not joy, but fear, worry, and out of fear, resentment. You get it from both sides: from the cultural pattern of how the muscles have been used, and as the body expression of the emotional expression of our culture, which is fear.
We don't think to the level where we recognize that the behavior of a man is the outward and visible sign of a relationship of energy centers. And that if we happen to be able to change those energy centers, we will change the behavior of that man.
If you take on somebody who has had a great deal of physical problem, you are also saying he has a behavior problem, because his behavior problem concerns the behavior of the particular organ or system in trouble. It manifests its trouble through behavior. It isn't working right. It is, in the words of the good old catechism, the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual disgrace.
The things you people say with your mouth and don't believe with your gut — that if you climb off this body it will go to a relatively good functional level — that it is your own hands dragging around your own neck that's putting you where you are.
When you want to know what a man is thinking, don't listen to what he's saying. Observe what he's doing. I recommend this to your meditation. Your whole life is oriented around listening to what these fellows are saying and thinking it has some relevance. It doesn't. For the most part, words are devices to hide what a man really is. Until you get to the place where you can handle that concept, you're stuck.
Can you describe your digestion? Can you describe your heart action? Can you describe when you love somebody? Can you describe when you hate somebody? The point is that words do not convey experience.
The basic level, the level that keeps every one of you going, is the silent level. The level that goes on without noise, without words, without direction on your part. It is the level where the energy does its own thing in its own way. And then human beings, being the funny animals they are, are not content. They've got to make a noise about it.
The silent level is the same old silent level. It's just that we put other symbols on top of it. And because we put other symbols on top of it, we kid ourselves that we have found out something new about it. Sometimes we are finding out something new — not because there's anything new there, but because our minds, dealing with a different tool, seem to see it in different relations.
Accept the game that you're playing as the reality of the life that you're living. All of this will be reflected in that physical body — in the contours, in the wax, in the exaggerations of that physical body. It's all going to be written there.
It's the compression of the body, which has occurred not necessarily by weight, but by the way the individual has used his body since he was a child. If he was an aggressive little personality, he started very, very young in demonstrating to the whole world that even though he was a kid of eight, rather small, he could compete with the fifteen-year-olds and the twenty-five-year-olds who were twice his size. This was his psychological set.
If he's just an easygoing type, you will find his muscles in much better balance. But if he started life as a competitive member of a family, he started to wreck himself in his very early days.
Providing you get something done, you think you're a good girl or a good boy and real smart. It doesn't occur to you that you may be smart enough to be breaking down that body by putting in patterns which then interfere with the latter.
This game of life, for that vital principle which you name as yourself, is a game with restrictions which somebody — and that somebody has to be you — has put around it. You put around yourself certain fences which you have to jump, certain ditches which you have to cross. And if you don't cross, you get nowhere. You just sit within the greatly limited area you have constructed for yourself.
Every time we are faced with something tougher than we can ordinarily handle, we tighten. We tighten the abdomen, we tighten the shoulder girdle, the thorax, we bring the scapulae forward and lateral and around. We separate the erector spinae. All of this is part of the pattern that we call effort.
Take, for example, grief. You hardly call the posture of grief defensive, but it is certainly a very definite posture, which all of us recognize as somebody goes down the street in a posture of grief. If they maintain that posture of grief long enough, they cannot, of their own volition, get out of it. But somebody else, who knows which muscles have tightened and which have not, can reorganize those muscles to a point where they balance each other, and the person gets out of that picture and is able to take on a new one.
The sphenoid is particularly vulnerable to emotional as well as physical trauma. A person who has suffered a very deep emotional grief will very often just have that sphenoid drop back, and their eyes seem so deep in their heads. And lo and behold, after you've given the sun power, those eyes start coming out — they start looking at the world again, being in the world again.
Grief certainly is an emotion, but like all emotions, it has this physical component. It moves flesh. It moves bones. Grief moves it by pulling out stability. You're just so shook up that nothing is stable anymore, and it's not stable chemically either.
I don't feel you can predict that because a man has grief, it's going to be in this part of the body, or because he has anger, it's going to be in that part. It is certainly true that in males, where you get a lot of stored-up anger, it will be stored in the groin areas. I've seen this over and over again. But it's not the only area in which it will be stored, and it's not in every male that it will be stored there.
When your instinct is to contain your joy, you're putting a negative emotion squarely on top of your positive emotion.
There are very few people, even in this room, who have developed sufficiently to be aware of how their extensors are living at this particular moment. Give some consideration to that, every one of you. What do you feel about the muscles of your back? Are you able to be aware of the flesh that holds you upright?
Psychological stress, psychological trauma, is anchored — literally anchored — in flesh. As you take it out, you are going to be stuck with an alternative. They're in trouble now. Right now, you have released something, and that something is throwing itself out. It's vomiting itself out of that body.
You are going to have to deal with this. And the only way you can deal with it is not by making yourself into a psychologist, which you aren't, but by empathizing with them. Not sympathizing — empathizing. Not playing games with them. By this time, they will be below the games level. They will be in the vomiting levels, which are the no-games levels.
A cloud, a miasma of something gets released as you organize that floor of the pelvis. And in accordance with what the miasma was when it settled in there originally, so will be the nature of it as it gets released.
One of her ribs was pretty loose. Her tenth rib was not properly anchored. She had been in a car wreck in Mexico in which she had been driving and her husband had been killed. She'd been picked up and taken to a hospital, and they had never set that rib. When I got through with this session, she said, "You know, that's funny. Always before, everything inside of me has been black. Now that's crazy. You can't be black inside you." I said, "How do you know you can't be black inside you?" "Well, it's all gold now."
The first hour is mostly a joyous hour. They feel so good they cry with joy sometimes. Because all of a sudden, an individual who in his heart of hearts feels there is no hope for him — he is always going to be this way, always going to have to drag this around — all of a sudden, he gets a vision that maybe he doesn't.
I've seen men cry too, because the release on their nervous system is so great. All of a sudden they're finding out that something can happen that they knew could never happen to them. They have movement in their arm.
In those first ten hours, what you did was to mobilize an outer level. As a result, you begin to get arising all kinds of material which had been suppressed. What you find is not what was left after those ten hours, but what reconstituted itself after them — probably a map of how they got there in the beginning. So you get a picture of the man at an earlier stage, and very, very often you get them saying, "I have a pain now that I had when I was twenty."
Sometimes he imagines that this is basically a psychological insecurity, but in point of actual fact, it is very often an actual physical insecurity. He is not really able to deal with the forces of his environment that are around him.
The psychotherapist looks at it and he's sure he's dramatizing an attitude. But that wasn't the history of this man when it got uncovered. As a late teenager, he went swimming off the coast of Cornwall, which is a very rocky coast and where winds come up very rapidly. Before he got to shore again, he was being buffeted by wind and thrown against a rock. That rock did all kinds of things to his rib cage. Once you got those ribs back where they belonged, this became the man. It was no more complicated than that. No dramatization.
You will go into a thousand people who have been through psychological processes, and there will not be one in a thousand who realizes the difference between emotion and dramatization. Because all this whole verbal screen level, and all of these allied techniques — that is all dramatization.
Once you are inside that body, you are in dangerous territory, and it may blow up on you anytime. Do not ever under any circumstances go into the mouth of anybody whose emotional stability you doubt, because you don't know what you're touching. You don't know how emotion-charged those areas are, and they're not telling you. This is literally a shut-up box of emotion that has to do with birth and very early nursing experiences of childhood.
What we do is to release the physical thing first, expecting that then it is a much simpler thing for the psychological problem to be released. We do not claim to be displacing the psychotherapists, but we do claim to be making life easier for them, and making them able to accomplish things in a shorter order.
The first balance of the body is a static stacking, but as the body incorporates more changes, the balance ceases to be a static balance. It becomes a dynamic balance. These are the physical manifestations of the increasing balance, but there is an outgoing psychological change as well — toward balance, toward serenity, toward a more whole person. The whole person evidences a more apparent, a more potent psychic development.
Time, as we measure seconds, minutes, hours, days, and years, is nothing but one way of looking at spatial relationships. So if a man is 22 years old and he looks 40, and you alter his spatial relationship within his body, he's got to change in his time configuration. There's no way to get around it. The physiologic age of a person is almost based on their rigidity of structure. I've seen this time and time again. The tighter they are, the older they are.
As you work with bodies, you get a certain reality on the fact that there are various bodies — like a body of awareness and like a three-dimensional cellular body. Sometimes these bodies can literally be superimposed one on the other, perfectly matched within their patterns. When something goes wrong in the body, this matching falls apart. This is what some of these mediums see — that this other body, this energy body, isn't matching, doesn't have the right relation to the physical body. And this is what you are doing here. You're putting the physical body on the pattern body, not the pattern body on the physical body.
I think there are more flows in a body than the fluid circulatory flows that run in blood vessels and seep through membranes. I think there is a flow of energy field. And don't ever let me catch you saying this outside this room — but I think maybe these occultists know what they're talking about when they talk about a finer body. That finer body is what determines and energizes the material body. This is the fundamental premise on which psychology is based, on which metaphysics is based, all of these far-out notions as to what you can do with thinking and with speech. It is saying that the finer body is the causal body for the coarser body — not the coarser body for the finer body.
The metaphysicians down through the centuries have always had a story about how there are many different bodies that make up a man. This is what they're talking about — the different functioning of these different bodies, these different systems, which they choose to call bodies, which put together make up a whole man. It is your job to put them together in such a fashion that they can be mutually supported. When your ribs are in the right place, you will do appropriate breathing. When you try to control your breathing or your digestion or your excretion or your nutrition — any of those functions which should be automatic — you start on an endless row of trouble. Don't let me hear you telling the guy to send the breath down into his foot. A process of this sort will take care of itself within limits.
Negative emotion immediately precipitates departure from myofascial balance, myofascial ease. Visual perception tells us that negative emotion immediately emphasizes hypertonicity in myofascial flexors. We see that a man subjected to emotional shock, if he starts from a seriously distorted physical balance, is less able than his more physically balanced neighbor to recover his emotional equilibrium. Any man in his emotional crisis is responding not to the emotion which he thinks is driving him, but to chemical and physiological changes going on inside his skin. At this level, psychology cannot be seen as the primal driving force. Its place has been taken over by physiology. Psychological hang-ups occur, but they are maintained only to the extent that free physiological response is impaired.
All too often emotional pain — depression, grief, even anger — is a perception of a physiological imbalance, an awareness of chemical lacks or overloads in blood and tissue. These may be at macro or micro levels, down to and including the cellular. The affective dimension of this imbalance — negative, withdrawing, destructive — may be thought of as one facade of pain. Physicians as well as psychologists know that pain is modified by the interpretation given to it. Today, in spite of our sophisticated measuring devices, we do not know at what point in the chain of events the physiological process becomes psychic.
There is a very interesting observation. If the man or woman you're working on has gone through an extreme emotional catastrophe — the death of a spouse — you will find it in that attachment of the rectus. And freeing those recti may well pitch them into all kinds of emotional vomitings. It also does something which you don't understand at all: it affects the cardiac function. The guy whose heart rhythm you've been monitoring from the first day suddenly gets his heart rhythm into a pattern, and there it's going to stay — but not until the attachment of the rectus to the pubes is organized and balanced left and right.
There is a psychosomatic aspect to problems. But I want to call your attention to the fact that in so many instances, problems are essentially somato-psychic rather than psychosomatic, and need to be approached in this way. Even in the psychosomatic situation, we are beginning to find in groups of this sort that the change occurs by virtue of the actual change that occurs in the tissue through the manipulation. This reestablishes the circulation, breaks down the barrier, sets the whole life process going at a different rate and a different pace. And then oddly enough, the emotional content of that psychosomatic episode comes to light and can be dealt with fairly easily and fairly quickly.
The first balance of the body is a static stacking, but as the body incorporates more changes, the balance ceases to be a static balance — it becomes a dynamic balance. These are the physical manifestations of the increasing balance, but there is an ongoing psychological change as well: toward balance, toward serenity, toward a more whole person. The whole person evidences a more apparent, a more potent psychic development. This means that the ratio of man's energy to gravity energy has increased. The ratio has therefore increased the force available to reverse the entropic deterioration. Our world is no longer running down. It seems capable now of building up.
This physical body you must recognize as a fundamental, as a very primary level. You've got to deal with it, whether you like it or not. Its energy requirements have to be met from your supply of energy before you have energy left with which to go swimming, to play a game of tennis, to go to a dance, or even to earn your living. If you are really considering a man or a woman, you have to think about this physical body first — because by means of his physical body, he has to take into his subconscious, if not into his conscious, the various forces with which he is surrounded in this real world.
I think it was after my seventh hour. I woke up in the middle of the night, and my body was completely awash in the kind of thing I had only experienced once before with acid — there was sensation, there were images, it was like smelling colors. I understood for the first time what the mystics were talking about when they spoke of a bodily experience. These were not out-of-the-body experiences. The mystical experiences were precisely in the body. What came out of that experience was the realization that when you change the structure of the body so that you have flow where there is more sensation, you are also increasing a kind of imagery in the body. The more the body feels, the more you begin to think actually with the body.
Resistance and Change
Ida returned again and again to the paradox at the heart of her work: that bodies want to change and refuse to change in the same breath. What follows are her observations on the conservatism of flesh, the tyranny of habit, and the small, hard-won openings through which transformation actually arrives.
Conservatism can be seen throughout the animal kingdom. The tendency to maintain and protect the status quo, to avoid the unknown, to avoid change, is universal. Attempting to label some of these phenomena, we refer to our more superficial conservatisms as habit patterns.
Humans resist change. Somehow, under existing circumstances, they've made it. What assurance do they have that they would continue to make it under a different set of circumstances?
It is very important, as you are working, to recognize the fact that that which you think is solid isn't solid. Because if this is so, there's nothing that holds it, there's nothing that keeps it, there's nothing that prevents its changing. This can be the greatest help, in terms of an idea, that you've ever had — to assure you that it is possible to affect change.
Nobody can prick the fact that you can change your body. You know it. You see it. You feel it. You do it every day.
By the addition of energy, change occurs in the structural material of the body. You can change relationships within that body by adding energy.
This is what makes the human being the dominant species of animals — this ability of change. This ability to voluntarily, within limits, decide what they want to do and how they want to do it.
It is this capacity for change, and the fact that from somewhere out of the blue we are given a vision of how we can change, that keeps us a valuable contributor to the culture of today.
Since the earlier part of this experience is felt by the individual as an unknown experience, as change, it turns on his anxiety. And change, he remembers subconsciously, is something he must resist at all costs. Naturally, he names this intense experience pain.
You feel you are you when those various tight things are in place. Now you're shifting around. You no longer feel the same. Therefore, you resist change. You are not new. You are not yourself any longer. There is change in the wind, and it hurts.
It takes much, much more energy before you're willing to face change.
You have to make them uncomfortable before it reaches their mind that there is a different position. If you're just trying to keep them comfortable all the way along, it never gets to their head that what they're doing is off balance.
You can always enhance the pain by resisting it. You can always lessen the pain by accepting it, going into it, and making it pain as much as you can — and lo and behold, in another minute it's gone completely, and you can't get it back again.
I don't like endure. Make it worse. It's a positive direction. Get it as bad as you can stand it. Can you get it any worse?
He's holding on for a very simple reason: he can't let go. There's nothing he can let go.
Every problem that you have in your body, you have put into your body. Yourself. And you can undo it only by learning to let.
What they have to do to help it along is to undo, not to do.
They began to see that there was a balance between a doing and a letting. Recognize, however, that in order to get letting possible, somebody has to interfere with doing.
You must have the feeling within you that to get extension there is a letting quality, a relaxing quality.
Once you've surrendered, you're occupying more space. And it's just a process of starting over again. It's a process.
In order to change the body, you have to be aware, and you have to be willing and able and anxious that it can change.
Don't just go along without looking at how you operate. Can I change it? Can I get more mileage out of the stuff that's inside my skin?
I say that there is really no such thing as habit. Habit is doing the thing the way it is easy to you. And the way the thing is easy to you is determined by what is going on in the muscles, in the joints, in the tendons, in the connective tissue.
When patients say, "This has been my habit for so long that I can't change it," what they're really saying is: this has been the level of relationship of the internal structures in my body. There isn't a thing properly called habit. There is the outward and visible sign of the internal relationship which is most easy to get into, most simple.
Before you change one of these postures that we would call a habit posture, you have to get in very deep, because that's where it lives, and you can't change it where it doesn't live.
Mama has told you since the days you were that high that if you work — see, that indoctrination gets in early. It is your doing that makes you a good boy or a good girl. It is your effort. And so you grow up with this concept very deeply embedded in you: that you must do something, you must work hard, otherwise you're not a good boy.
I don't know when effort was first valued, but necessarily effort was first valued in the days when the economy ran on slave labor — the boys that had to row their ships and that sort of thing. At that point effort was really valuable, not for the guy that put it in, but to the master.
Every time a physical instructor tells a group of men in army training, "Shoulders back," he is telling them: put your spine forward of where it belongs. He is deliberately — and I mean deliberately — trying to wreck the physical bodies of those men. He doesn't know it. He was trained that way too.
The cultural pattern deliberately breaks down bodies. They're taking these young men and they're literally, deliberately breaking those bodies down.
The orthodox pattern of the masseuse is to bring all those back muscles up toward the neck, to thicken it up through the shoulders, to thicken it up through the neck. I work real hard to organize those muscles in pattern. And then the people go down there and pay ten dollars for a massage in order to get them put out of pattern.
His father always walked like that. Isn't he cute? He's just like his father. And cute is so much more important than: isn't he using his energy pattern appropriately to what an energy pattern should be. Cute is the word.
Parents are always making the child's assurance smaller. I'm not quite sure why. Maybe because this was done to them. Maybe because it makes a child easier to handle. I only know that it's so, when you look around and see it happening in every direction.
The problem comes in circumscription — a narrowing not of their awareness, but of their willingness to believe what they're aware of, their willingness to think that this reflects reality. And partly this stems from childhood training.
The implication is that the person to whom you say "why" knows the answer. There's also the implication that there is one answer. And in the human condition there is never one answer. But the minute you get the answer to that question — "Why?" — you stop looking. Because the authority said that.
You people are so used to going to somebody and accepting them as an authority. You're not a pioneer when you work it that way.
That's the answer to why people want the conventional type of education. They don't want to take responsibility. They always want to feel that right there is somebody who will take this.
You have to change your premises. If you're going to use grandpa's premises, you come to grandpa's conclusions, because grandpa was a really right, smart boy — and with the premises he was working with, he got as far as they would take it. There's no use looking down your nose and saying, "Well, I'm fifty years ahead of grandpa." You're not fifty years ahead of him at all.
The toughest part of teaching structural integration is to teach people to get reality about a process world, because the world in which they have been brought up is a black-and-white world, and they haven't been taught to recognize the different shades of gray. But the real world is not a black-and-white world.
The fact of the matter remains that you are still goal-oriented, not process-oriented. This is the way you're still seeing the world.
That first hour is the beginning of this process work — taking the outside and letting some of the inside start its stuff. But the place where you fall on your nose is when you try to get perfection.
I have had people come to me explaining how, "I'm gonna start on Monday. I'm gonna stop taking cream in my coffee. You'll see, this will come down." It's not that simple.
They expect you to push a button, and they're going to be so well that they can do anything.
Neither by will alone, nor by manipulation alone, can it be done. It has to be done by your helping, through manipulation, those people to come to a level where it is then possible for them to change — to let go.
Always you can get some change. Always you can get some help. Always you can bring something a little nearer to where it belongs. And having gotten it a little nearer to where it belongs today, tomorrow it can take over and do a little something, and the next day you can get to do a little more pushing and shoving and heaving and hauling.
The fact that it's been in says it can go in again, and will go in again.
The question we're now asking alters. It's no longer whether we can change it, but how is it possible to change it? Why can we expect to make such a drastic change in a human? And the answer is that the structure of the body permits it.
At the level of everyday problems, psychological organization of emotion can be immeasurably favored by any system able to create or restore more vital physiological response. Obviously, this can happen at any of several levels — glandular, neuro, myofascial, etcetera. Restoration of function can be initiated at many levels as well. But establishment of myofascial equipoise is one of the most potent, one of the most obvious, one of the most speedy approaches. Only to the extent and at the speed that restoration of physiological flow occurs can the hang-up be erased. All of this, however, is an exploration of change.
Humans resist change. Somehow they've made it under existing circumstances. What assurance do they have that they will continue to make it given a different set of circumstances? Conservatism can be seen throughout the animal kingdom — the tendency to maintain and protect the status quo, to avoid the unknown, to avoid change, is universal. Attempting to label some of these phenomena, we refer to our more superficial conservatisms as habit patterns. Resistance to change is both understandable and predictable, but change so often manifests as pain.
Pain is a conservative mechanism in the organism that maintains its present pattern. A threshold is set to maintain the boundaries. So what I've said is that you resist change. And as you begin to understand change in your body, your resistance is expressing itself as pain. Pain is experienced when stimuli, whatever their nature, exceed certain limits. Pleasure is experienced when a system is resilient and is bombarded by the same number of stimulants. It isn't really the intensity of the stimulus, but the intensity of the stimulus to a rigid or to a non-rigid structure.
It might be an idea for you people, as you work with them, to call their attention to the different qualities of pain. You all know that there is a pain of stretching fascia, but you also know that if you get on a vertebra which is badly distorted, there is a pain which is not that pain at all. It's a sick pain. It reports to you that there is something very wrong here. The fascial moving pain is a very high octave of pain, and that thick pain is a deeper one. It may be that stretching fascia reports to the individual not by conduction through a nerve pathway. This seems to me a possibility.
Pain is the label we place on sensations in a rigid system bombarded by an excessive burden of stimulation. By implication, if you can get that system less rigid, you change the pain and the pain reception and the whole trip. Now that's where we live. A rigid system, because of the nature of its rigidity, cannot cope. Coping is a musculoskeletal adjustment. Pain is experienced when stimuli, whatever their nature, exceed certain limits. It is therefore not qualitative. Might it not simply be stated that pain is too much? Pleasure is experienced when a system is resilient although it may be bombarded by the same number of stimulants.
Neither by will alone nor by manipulation alone can it be done. It has to be done by your helping, through manipulation, those people to come to a level where it is then possible for them to change, to let go. As I was looking at those pictures, I noticed that the people that changed the most, that had the most profound changes, were people that somewhere along the line in the process had to decide whether they wanted to change or not. Those are the people that I saw changed the most. When those people got to the place where they were willing to change, they had already changed a great deal under your hands by your manipulation.
Pain is the teacher because pain tells you where you have to go. We have to immediately differentiate between traumatic pain — this sort of injurious experience — and the organizing quality of the experience that by habit we call pain. But pain is the teacher and it always tells you where to go. You move in a direction of discomfort. You take risks in a supportive environment. You move toward the pain and breathe into it. You move into that and perhaps back up. It's that kind of risk-taking that gets you through the old habit. The next time you go there you find that that's no longer your boundary — you can go a little bit further. One step at a time leads you to another place.
Where do you put a person's attention if you want him to not be in pain? If you let him focus on the pain, he will intensify it. People do that. Put the individual into the experience — simply allow him to experience what he's doing — and then the idea is to stop the holding. Part of the sensory experience of pain is in the flexion or the withdrawal response. If you put him into the pain experience and then teach him to let go, to stop the holding, then the pain is going to go away.
They've never heard that pain is intensity of sensation. They've never heard that it's all right to have a lot of sensation. They're not used to this. They are used to living in a very dull, grey environment. There are no bright lights in the living of most people. They have been taught from the time they were very small children that when something becomes intense they better look out, stay away from it, stop it. Don't go into it. If you get out of that dull grey place, you may have to experience things, and you don't want to experience things.
When you have deep disorganization of that material body, those are the people that are harder to work with. Those are the people that you've got to understand. You're not going to get them just by going on and tearing them up more and more apart. You're not going to get the pain out, because that chemistry just isn't that way. You don't need to be invalidated by Mrs. Jones saying to Mrs. Smith, "Oh yeah, he told me I wouldn't hurt after the fifth hour, but I hurt just as much." Sure — she's got the chemistry of the tissues that's always going to hurt because it is way off a balanced setup. You as a Rolfer are pretty good, but you're not that good.
Give morphine, ten milligrams, to a hundred people. Seventy percent will show a significant reduction in pain. Others may not. Morphine is a painkiller — sometimes it does not work. On the other hand, give a placebo to a hundred people and over thirty percent will show a reduction in pain if you tell them it is a pain pill. You bring a guy in and he is anxious; you tell him that the seventh hour is going to be a bear, and you've got him off already, so his pain tolerance is down. People sitting around the lounge waiting for their seventh hour — you've got a problem. They're going to be tough on that seventh hour, not because of your fingers, but because of what they did to set themselves up.
The kid falls off his bicycle and gets pretty badly lashed in the thigh. For several days as he walks, this hurts. It also hurts if he carries his body in a certain pattern. The pattern that may be hurting may be the normal pattern. So he will shift that normal pattern to something that will take the hurt off. Once the body has assumed these deviations, the effect on balance is that there is less motility in the region of the unbalance. Certain muscles begin to shorten and harden. As that happens, there's less movement, less flow of vital fluids into the area, less pumping of nourishment — and the vicious cycle is started.
Healing and Health
Ida had no patience with the idea that health was something a doctor handed you across a counter. For her, health was form — a body's pattern in space — and illness was form gone astray. What follows is her quarrel with chemistry, her quarrel with quackery, and her stubborn faith that a body given half a chance will take hold again.
Physical ill health is always the outward and visible sign of a structural problem. To the extent that you correct that structural problem, you increase that physical health.
A body is a field of energy, a pattern of energy. If the pattern is good, it works well. If something interferes with the pattern, then we put them in the hospital and we say, Oh my God, his heart is gone, his lungs are gone, his disorder is that, it's gone. And they haven't gone at all. The pattern has gone astray.
His form has been destroyed through this invasion of a virus or what have you. And I don't think any of you have ever really sat down and thought about this. His form has been destroyed. His face is swollen. His tissues are holding water. The relationship of part to part has been violated.
Now you take your hands, and with your hands, you restore the form. And now you have a brand new problem on hand. Now you can't keep the guy down.
You add energy to a mess where the entropy has gone high, and the entropy, the disorder, decreases, and the order and the ability and the capability of the guy is restored.
The one characteristic that seems rather universal in Rolfing is the fashion in which people say, I have so much more energy. I'm not going to keep you on a hook letting you think that fifteen minutes from now I'm going to tell you what energy is, because I don't know why Rolfing increases energy. There is a huge field here which will take us twenty-five years at least to explore as to the relation of Rolfing to energy. But explore it we must, if we're going to know what we're doing.
In the old days they used to talk about looking for causes. They talked about: we will go and find the cause of this and the cause of that. But the fact of the matter was that what they came up with usually was not the cause, but the antecedent condition which they then called the cause — but which was not the cause.
This business of taking things apart and taking things apart and taking things apart is what has destroyed our system of therapy in this twentieth century. They have forgotten that there is a man.
It is the whole tendency of our age, and it is the reason why we're in trouble in terms of health understandings now, because we have broken these down into too small parts, and we cannot see the whole because we keep looking at the trees. We can't see the forest.
Our dominant school of healing is not manipulation. It's medicine. It works through chemistry. And the reason this is so is because the chemical school of healing came to its own about one hundred and twenty-five years ago.
In terms of the orthodox methods used by your doctor, in general they are dealing with the chemistry of the body. They are not dealing with this low end on the totem pole, this forgotten man, this forgotten element of the body — the actual physics of the body.
In the old medicine you were dependent on something else, something outside that you introduced into a body, and in so doing the symptoms were relieved. That was the philosophical basis of the old medicine. All you had to do was open your mouth and let the spoon in, and the job was practically done.
We've always thought that by introducing some alien substance, it, the alien substance, would do the job. Now we're getting to the place where we are beginning to accept the fact that we have responsibility for getting those parts of that body into a relationship which makes it possible for them to work.
Nothing wrong with medicine. But the living process, the going on of life, the growing up of your children — this doesn't depend on medicine. This depends on a process of livingness. And when you get stuck with that process of living, then maybe it's time to go to the medic and say, Hey, look, I'm in trouble. Can you help me?
In dealing with the current medical world, you must realize that you are not dealing with individuals and what they know. You are dealing with the stuff that was dumped into their heads as students and that they haven't really had the time to examine critically. Because in the education of a doctor, we make them bite off so much more than they can chew. Realize this and you will understand your problem better.
It is very important that you don't go out there shooting off your mouth about these dumb medics. In the first place, they're not dumb; and in the second place, if they were dumb, you'd be much smarter if you didn't talk about it.
Encircle the place. See where the points of weakness are. But don't go just out fighting the medics. You can't win. They're a big union, a very potent union, and they've got some damn good politicians.
The idea that you can spatially reorganize a body will not strike a medically trained person as nearly as revolutionary as the idea that you can functionally change a body by changing it in space. The idea that you can take a chronic cardiac case and, by changing the position of the space in which it is sitting, change its function — this is the basic revolutionary principle that we are talking about, that we are preaching.
All manipulative systems, to the extent that they are therapeutic, depend on the establishment of balance. They are not always aware of the fact that this is what they're going after. They think they're going after movement in some way, but they can't get movement until they get balance.
There is no question about the fact that any and all types of bodies, a hundred percent of bodies, will give you a desirable response in terms of the mechanical. All bodies will function better if they are ordered mechanically.
One of the many ways we help organs get better is just simply by making more space. When you take that thorax and lift it off the pelvis, and you turn the pelvis under, then the organs are sitting in a better relationship than they have been; they themselves are more alive.
All kinds of things can happen, and frequently do. Allergies that have been with an individual since birth can disappear, and frequently do. Digestive processes can become very much more effective, and frequently do, as you get the liver working, as you get the depths of the gallbladder no longer interfered with. But that is not your job.
It's definitely not a medical treatment. There are many medical improvements that show up. But I always say to them, Well, that's your hard luck. If you've lost your indigestion or your constipation or something, that's your hard luck. We didn't set out to do it.
The answer to Rolfing is not to get an addiction to it.
I think it is a far better situation to give them the idea that they are purchasing a package, than that they are getting into something to which they're going to be hooked for the rest of their life. I see no need for that. Any human being can be made to operate very much more happily and soundly through those ten hours of work.
To the extent that it is doing better, the body itself will spontaneously go along changing. So when they come into you at the end of another six months or the end of the year, they're not the same bodies. You have entirely different structures.
If you fall for that, you have deprived these people of the opportunity of this spontaneous change. And it is only really the spontaneous change that amounts to anything. Not the change you make. The change they make.
In the average human being, especially the average young human being, there is enough recuperative element within that body that if you help it along by bringing the body in the direction of lessened strain, the body can get hold of itself and recuperate by itself.
It says a great deal for — well, you name it, the vital force, god, life, what have you — that you can take very maltreated blocks and bring them back. You release them from the strain, and they come back and take hold. It's like that little fuchsia up there. This is the picture of life. You give it half a chance, and it's off again.
Anybody who gets into a problem with a virus or a bacteria or anything of this sort is going to show you these distortions. You say, well, it's past John on the street. He looks perfectly terrible. What do you mean when you say he looks terrible? You mean literally that he's all off his lines. And this is a part of this mystery that's going on in the body.
As you bring the guy back toward his lines, he is feeling better, and he is more capable of dealing with the toxic situation which has arisen locally as a result of the invasion. What you are being able to do is to see to it that there is a faster flow of nutrient media — blood, lymph — to the blocked area.
I would think that probably eighty percent of what's diagnosed as arthritis is not arthritis at all. There is something properly named arthritis, characterized by changes in the chemistry of the blood. But mostly when the guy goes to the doctor and claims, Doctor, I can't raise my arm, I can't bend my hand back — and he, wanting to get off his hook, says, well, you know, you're getting on now, how old are you? — this is not arthritis. This is the sort of thing that we have been undoing here.
I have never seen a true arthritic really cured, completely cured, by virtue of the fact that this is probably a genetic glandular disorganization. But these people get sufficient help that they're always knowing that next week or next month or next year they're going to have no arthritis. So you have trouble getting them off your neck. You're going to have to learn a good technique of literally kicking them out, because you cannot really cure it, but you can get them feeling so they can live in the world relatively happily.
I have never yet seen a heart condition that wasn't accompanied by a rigidity and a distortion and a disorganization of the left rib cage. To the extent that you change this and bring it back to normal, it comes back to normal.
Look at the great American illness. How many dollars worth of anti-constipation remedies are sold annually, daily? What happened? How does it get that way? Why does it get that way? It gets that way because the psoas is literally thrown out, geared out.
What are the commonest things for which males and females get into hospitals even as of today? Somebody's got to take the uterus of the female out, and somebody's got to doctor up the prostate in the male. Because there's been no support. And support is not a solid thing underneath.
This drug, cortisone, is a terrible thing. It's a very potent drug. Once in a great while it does a lot of good. Most of the time, in my opinion, it does harm rather than good. Most of the time you're much better served by just getting the neck and head going, so that the place where this thing should be taken care of naturally has a chance to.
Well bodies, bodies that are really balanced and in health, don't change any function that fast. When you get a body that changes rapidly — I weigh five pounds more this week than I weighed last Friday — be aware of the fact that there's something all wrong in that body, and maybe you should keep an eye on it.
I can't give you a recipe for living. I can't say you should have so much red meat, so much pink meat, so much white meat, so much fish. I don't think this is possible anyway, because the enzymes that digest these various foods vary in different people, vary largely in accordance with liver function.
Our ideas are fine while they're just ideas. But for heaven's sake, don't try to apply them to me. They're perfectly lovely while they're abstractions — and this food business drives me simply stark raving mad.
It's just too bad that there is still a prejudice in the community about men doing dancing. Because really, dancing is a much better exercise. It's an upgoing. It's a lightening. It's a surrender of your own cycle to another cycle — the music cycle.
All exercise, any exercise, is within its own limits beneficial, because it gets oxygen to the tissues. That's why you feel good. But you are paying for that oxygen with certain types of exercise. You are paying for that oxygen, and the price can be too high.
When he goes into a hospital for surgery, he expects to be exhausted. When he comes to you, he expects to give you — it's so good of him — an hour or an hour and a half of his time, and then he expects to go like hell the rest of the day.
The amazing thing about structural integration — the absolutely amazing thing — is that within literally minutes of the time you lay your hands on them for the first time, they begin to feel better. So you have both things going on: a long-term spontaneous organization, and that short-term improvement where the screaming pain is often relieved inside of two seconds. This is something that really requires prayer and meditation to open up the understanding.
In the majority of people, it is superseded immediately by a feeling of physical joyousness, which is entirely different from the pain following hurtful damage of some sort. The sensation following nervous bombardment — a toothache, for example — is one of exhaustion: I'll be better after a good night's sleep. But the sensation after the integrational fascial restoration has none of this quality. It is a high, a sense of great well-being, totally enveloping the individual.
As we go on, instead of relying on this thinking tool, we are relying on a shifting of energy levels as a means of mental and physical healing. And by healing, I'm not talking really about fixing up a broken bone or remedying a stomachache. I'm talking about making a man a whole man.
We now play a game before we take in cancer patients. I'm working with a number of research groups, mostly medical doctors, so I don't have my neck on the line. We give them a little test. The test is a gradient. Number one: what could somebody who has cancer be getting out of this as a positive value? Number two: what could you possibly be getting out of having cancer? Number three: what are you getting out of this? If they say absolutely nothing, we won't work with them at all, because it requires a change in consciousness as well as doing something with the physical body. I've made the mistake of healing people with cancer and having them go out and commit suicide or kill others on a freeway accident. It's not a good thing to do.
He had had a brace which held his shoulder way up in the air and backwards. Over a period of four months, naturally it disorganized his neck and shoulder girdle considerably. As I began to work on his neck and shoulders, it was like taking layer by layer, taking the weight off his shoulders. The most surprising thing to him was, he said, "It's as if there was pressure pushing on my eyes, and you released the pressure from behind my eyes." The disorganization as a result of the brace had so disorganized his neck that the pressure in his eyes was part of that headache. It's not surprising to us as Rolfers, but it was surprising that the man could experience it so clearly.
She had had a triple break in her ankle. They had tried several times and it wouldn't heal, so they went in and pinned it and tied some ligaments. That did the trick as far as healing the bones. The doctor took an x-ray and said, "You're healed." She said, "But my ankle doesn't work." He said, "Well, as far as we're concerned, you're medically healed." This is another example: once the orthopedic work is finished, there are many things that can still be done. By the time she came to me, the disorganization was all the way up that side of the body and over onto the other side. You couldn't just work on the one bad ankle, because you could see the traces of that change in that ankle all the way up the body.
As you began in those first ten hours, what you did was to release, to mobilize an outer level. As a result of that, all kinds of suppressed material begins to arise. So what you found in those bodies was not what was left after those ten hours, but what reconstituted itself after those ten hours and after the loosening. What reconstitutes itself is probably a map of how they got there in the beginning. You get a picture of the man at an earlier stage, and very often they say, "I have a pain now that I had when I was twenty. I haven't had this pain in years." What you've done is to turn the situation back to the place where the pain was the symptom of that particular imbalance. Now you're reconstituting that imbalance.
Hands will never do the job. I cannot underscore that too much, because every masseur, every chiropractor, every osteopath thinks that by manipulation he can do some job. It is only through the work, the literal work, the literal movement of the individual concerned, that you get appropriate rebalancing of those muscles. You help the individual. You do not, and you cannot, do it. I don't call this a therapy. I call it a development, an education, a leading out, an evolution. Anything you like, but not healing, not therapy. The acute situation is the job of the medic. The chronic situation is your job, because chronic situations all have to do with improper structure. All chronic situations involve a problem with gravity, a distortion from the point of balance.
I can't yell any louder than I've been doing for the last five years. Anyone there who doesn't feel he knows when a situation is chronic — it is only after the acute situation has become the chronic situation that the changes occur in the body which you are qualified to change. Gravity cannot mend an injured nerve, nor is it likely that any method you will use will mend an injured nerve, and you've got no business in there if you want to stay out of jail. If a man was in an accident, you go to work organizing the disordered symmetry, perhaps on his back, carefully staying far away from the point of impact, the point of pain.
I remember the first very serious problem I had. I was working on a little lady, about seventy years old. All of a sudden, in the middle of my Rolfing, she started screaming at the top of her lungs. I started being terrified — were the neighbors going to send for the cops? What was I going to tell the cops when they knocked at the door? And she kept right on screaming. I finally got the thing unlatched by saying to her, "Now what do you see?" She saw cars coming down the road. "What do you hear?" She heard a bell, and the bell developed into an ambulance bell. She had been in an automobile accident where she was very badly hurt, thrown out of the car, and the ambulance was coming to pick her up. The cop was bawling the driver out, saying, "You don't know how to drive, you'll never know how to drive." All this, this unconscious woman lying on the ground was hearing. And this is what she was reproducing on my mat.
Many people experience no pain at all. A lot of it has to do with the extent to which you resist. A lot of the pain being re-experienced is literally that — being re-experienced. If your problem in Rolfing is the releasing of some traumatic injury that came, for example, through being thrown from a car, you will probably re-experience the same sort and the same amount of pain you had when the injury was introduced. You can always enhance the pain by resisting it. You can always lessen it by accepting it, going into it, and making it pain as much as you can — and lo and behold, in another minute it's gone completely and you can't get it back again. I have had many people, after I worked on them for an hour, get up and look at me bewildered and say, "Why, I thought it hurt. Mary told me it hurt so much, and I haven't had any pain."
They're responding to the word pain — that mama taught them, "Oh, you poor thing, it hurts so much, it's so painful. Come, mama will kiss it and then it won't pain so much." They're responding to all those words. Some of you have been present with the children — they're lying there just being completely interested in what's going on. Those pictures should be thrown around with the caption: "Rolfing is so painful." The other job is to stay in touch with people you're Rolfing and find out whether they're telling people it's painful. Don't say, "Have you been telling people it's painful?" — ask them how they feel about the process. In a particular session where perhaps I went beyond their energy limits, their reaction would be to go home and tell whoever they lived with, "Boy, that really hurt." It was my error. That's how it gets out there in the first place.
Patterning is very valuable in its own way. Its greatest value, in my opinion, is that a person who goes into patterning commits a certain number of hours of his time to being aware of how he uses his body, how he might better use his body more efficiently, and how he then turns and uses his body more efficiently. He goes to a Rolfer and expects to have something done for him and to him, but he doesn't have any such expectation when he goes to a patterner. When he goes to a patterner, he goes with the understanding that he is going to do something differently.
Lindlahr shows very convincingly that disease is, in fact, the result of our individual or collective violation of basic laws, either through ignorance or willfulness, and that it is therefore in our power within a very reasonable time to rid ourselves of disease. What is less cheering is that he shows also very convincingly that much disease is not only self-made but doctor-made. In spite of very good progress in surgery and obstetrics, it is sometimes difficult not to feel that the negative and suppressive methods so widely employed are putting doctors in the unhappy position of treating more disease than they cure. The physical body as we perceive it through our ordinary senses is not the whole man, and perhaps not really the essential man at all. The physical body should be looked upon as part of a much larger whole, linked to other bodies which act upon it and are acted upon by it. You people think you're getting real smart when you put this out as a new idea, but it was around seventy-five years ago and before.
I took on traveling over to Amarillo to work with a group of people into primal scream therapy. I would Rolf thirty-five or forty people there and then come home and get sick. They were screaming in two rooms down, and the air conditioning duct was right over the Rolfing table. When someone's on the table and they're discharging heavily, I can keep my center and not get pulled into their space — but this stuff coming down on my head, I couldn't protect myself from. After the third trip I said to the guy sponsoring me, "I'm not coming back. I don't want Rolfing used to make your screaming better. I don't want people on the Rolf table screaming because I'm pressing on them and they think they're going to get it out." I would get someone nicely organized and they would go in the next room and scream, and when I saw them an hour later, they'd taken themselves apart. We are parting company.
Beyond Therapy
Ida always insisted that Rolfing was not a therapy but a doorway. In these passages she turns from the body on the table to the larger question: what kind of human, what kind of culture, what kind of universe are we working toward? Here she is the philosopher, the gadfly, the gospel-bearer of an opening world.
Life is a process. Rolfing is a process. Living is a process. This is what you have to get into your guts and not into your head — that what is going on is a process, and that what comes out of it depends on the feeding in of all kinds of stuff.
This takes our work out from the group of real therapies. I don't call this a therapy. I call it a development. I call it an education, a leading out, an evolution. Anything you like — but not healing, not therapy.
The gospel that I teach is that man is capable of a personal evolution, an evolutionary development.
Not only are you not born perfect, you're not even born good. You are an evolving species, and you can afford to say thank God. If you get the real conviction that you are an evolving species, you may be somewhere where you can do something about it. As soon as you get the idea good and solid in your mind that you're born perfect, you're through. That's the end. There's no place to go. There's nothing you can do. There's nothing anybody can do.
Your salvation as an individual and as a species depends on your acceptance of the fact that you are part of a process world, and your hope for salvation depends on the assurance you have or fail to have about the extent to which you can direct that process.
It is the unfinished business at the top that makes your evolutionary progress.
I don't know what energy is. But I do know that I can change the way it flows. And I do know that if I change the way it flows, the man is changing his behavior. He's changing the way he looks at the world. He's changing what he produces.
Realize that somehow you're in the middle of a miracle, and like all miracles, you don't understand it. Because you don't understand it doesn't mean you can't work with it. I don't know what electricity is either, but I do know that if I come in the room and push the switch, lo and behold, the lights go on.
We've used the word energy as a myth in our day and generation. Everything we can't think of explaining some other way, we call it energy. This is all right, providing you know that you're talking about a myth. What is energy? We don't know. Nobody knows. The physicists talk about it as if they knew, but I doubt that. Except that we know that people, after we have subjected them to certain techniques which we call integration, report that they have more energy. And they know what they're talking about, even though we can't find it.
As you get more energy, you get more into the spiritual field.
You are the only people who are simply directing a process, not creating a therapy. You are directing a process that has nothing to do, really, with you. It has to do with the world in which this energy field exists — because a man is an energy field, and the man is living in another energy field. And he can either live in such a way that his energy field is broken down by the larger energy field, or he can live in such a way that he can draw additional strength from that larger energy field.
I'm not talking about a great big bearded guy that sits in the sky. I say that you cannot mock, you cannot try to get away from the law which says: if I have this plus I have that, then I have that. That is what the universe is about. And what you people are about is watching what happens as you change this — and whether you are getting, as a result, something that works better.
By and by, when you sit down and think about it, it occurs to you that the good God hasn't got much imagination. He only imagined a few ways of doing things, and everything conforms to them. You see those few ways expressed in endless levels — but there are still only a few ways.
Going to the Lord in prayer is fine if you give the Lord something to work with. But it's a low-down lousy trip when you go to the Lord in prayer and you're not doing the damn things of the Lord.
You don't call the end of the fibula A and the end of the tibia B and say A equals B. Life ain't like that.
When you try to get a living system working as though it were a mathematical structure on a piece of paper, a geometrical structure on a piece of paper where you can take an eraser and your pencil and erase what's there and put in something new — you are just displaying the fact that you have not understood that living systems do not work the way symbolic systems work. Living systems are vital systems. They are not symbolic systems.
You have been taught that the educational process was going to simplify things — put them into categories, put them into equations. It can do that, all right. By the time you get it done, you've got a dead body. You don't have a vital living body, because that quality of life refuses to be put into a tight symbolism.
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to obtain new ways of thinking about them.
Modern science at its best keeps testing maps. And it is only through the creation of new maps that new ideas arise, new visions of reality.
Life is nothing but a group of chemical reactions. The brain is nothing but a computer. This point of view obviously describes a closed universe — a universe defined by hard boundaries designed to exclude. Such thinking automatically limits a world.
Linearity arose originally as a projection of man himself, because man speaks linearly, one word after another. He thinks — or he tends to think — linearly, one idea after another. Taught by Aristotle, he reasons linearly, and he calls it logic. He measures linearly. At this point, life is a linear chain of fragments, not a continuum.
The life sciences and the sciences of life cannot be fitted on this Procrustean bed. For life is a continuum — certainly not a one-dimensional linear continuum, nor for that matter a two-dimensional continuum. Its multidimensions have not been explored, not even guessed at as yet.
The universe is opening. Hard boundaries are disappearing. It is becoming defined by the position of the center rather than by the hard boundaries of margins. And this is characteristic of an open universe.
A closed universe is a projection, a higher abstraction of an open universe. And like all higher-order abstractions, it lacks richness. It lacks the continuity given by the lower experiential order. It is a projection, not an experience. In the language of general semantics, it is a map and not a territory.
All people who subscribe to a holistic concept subscribe to a definition which says that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And what do we mean? Perhaps spirit is that intangible increment which, in its addition, creates a whole.
Perhaps it is relationship which determines what we call energy. Perhaps it isn't something that you pour in the tank like gasoline. Perhaps you have to restore relationships, or create relationships, in order to attain to energy. And while you're at it, give consideration to the fact that relationship is another word for order.
Before we can understand meaning, we must come to it through an understanding of order and its place in our lives, in the cosmos, in life in general, in all biological organization.
The key word at this moment in time is order. The key need is the creation of order. Not necessarily that compulsive type of order which some of you associate with the Victorians — not having known too many Victorians.
In the language of the physicist, we are lessening the entropy — the tendency to confusion, the tendency to disorder, the tendency to breakdown. In the language of the philosopher, we are enhancing the spiritual, or if you prefer it, the mental manifestation of individual men. Through them, we may reach collective man.
Our world is no longer running down. It seems capable now of building up. Is this the work of that other energy — the one that does not manifest obedience to the law of inverse squares, the stuff I've called psychic energy? At this point, we do not know. But it is an open question.
This idea downgrades our long-overrated intellectualism — the game of spending a life playing with symbols and looking at a symbolic world. A man is not his mind, nor is his mind the man, though it may be the measure of the man. The concept that the mind is the man is a highly closed universe.
I do not think that anybody can ever get away with dealing with a human being understandingly without talking about metaphysics. Not at this level. Maybe a thousand years from now we'll know so much about it that we'll no longer call it metaphysics. What we are doing is just pushing back the matter. Less matter, and more physics.
I think that maybe these occultists know what they're talking about when they talk about a finer body — and that that finer body is the body which determines and energizes the material body.
The symptom is the disharmony, the strain between the coarse body and the fine body. The symptom is the measure of the strain.
When you've looked at it long enough, you begin to find something very thrilling and very limiting. You begin to find that no man has ever really invented something completely alien to something he had inside of his skin. All the wheels, all the axles, all the poles — the model of them is inside his skin. Or he can't figure it out.
All experience is godly. This is what makes a god. He gets enough experience until he begins to get understanding.
The time is just about at hand when mysticism as such should take a back seat. We need to look at what it is that we call a mystic, and what we think of as his mystical reality. The Zen masters used to say: It is wonderful. I drink the tea, I wash the dishes, I mow the lawn. If mystical reality can't be fitted into that kind of reality, there is something wrong with our ideas — because that is where we are living.
For three thousand years — perhaps ten thousand, for all I know — people have been talking about the difference between being and doing. In their religious and philosophical systems, they have been trying to develop it. For the most part, what they've been trying to develop is the being system. All this meditation has been a development of the being system. They have seemingly felt their lack in being rather than in doing.
You have a spontaneous, self-creating, vital something here. It is no longer an accidental being knocked around, an effect unit. You are now getting it to the place where it can begin to be a cause of its own well-being. The reason it can be cause is by virtue of the actual energy reorganization coming through. Where you have organization and where you have order, there is the opportunity for a creative cause.
Let's go back to nature. That's fine — go back to nature, but for heaven's sake see what you're going back to, and what you're going back with. You don't want to go back to nature. You want to go ahead to where the goal is for the upright man. That's where you want to go.
You are disciples of a new point of view. You are the ones who have to go out and preach a gospel, and do it convincingly: the gospel of a human being as an energy unit, and the various ways in which that energy unit is altered.
You are preachers of the opening universe of man. This is a tough assignment, and it may take you a lot longer than one lifetime to deliver.
All of you, as well as myself, are in a very privileged position. We are the forward-moving boundary of ideas. This is a difficult position, but it is a privilege — a great privilege. There are relatively few people who ever get into that position, and you pay for it by the way you sweat there.
I recommend Rolfing as a means of becoming a citizen of a more open universe — a land where more interesting experiences and insights occur, a land where a man has a greater human potential.
Who knows where this work can evolve to?
Do you consider Rolfing to have the benefits of psychotherapy as well as the benefits of physiological realignment? Yes, I do — but I don't say that we are displacing the psychotherapist at the time we get through with the Rolfing. There's always plenty to do for that psychotherapist still. But he can get at it more easily. This is the one message I have about psychotherapy: we can prepare that body so that it is able to change.
Rolfing is definitely not a medical treatment. There are many medical improvements that show up, but I always say to them, well, that's your hard luck. If you've lost your indigestion or your constipation, that's your hard luck. We didn't set out to do it. What Rolfing sets out to do is make that body conform to the standards for a proper template for a body of that age and that sex.
Beyond that fourth area, says Bachelard, is the area of a psychic borderland. A psychic borderland — the area that Dr. Bach referred to as serendipity, the area that Dr. Carl Jung referred to as synchronicity. Both of them belong in this fifth area, an area where time sequences, as we ordinarily think of them, become confused. I think as you pass through the energy level of that fourth area, you come not merely to the borders of the fifth, the psychic world — you may well have the opportunity of entering that world. We've had at least six cases of major psychic understandings and openings, a full and complete psychic perception in people suddenly appearing after their Rolfing. Now don't mistake me — do I recommend Rolfing as a route to psychic experience? No. But it happens.
What I'm seeing is that whatever buttons I've got — sex, anger, money, whatever — they're gonna get pushed. And I need to be aware of that. People are looking for them. That's wonderful. Everybody's welcome. You came here to push my button. It's at that point that your work becomes also your own path. Because as you are having your buttons pushed, you constantly have to come back to yourself and reorganize your own system so that you can come back to the work anew and do it better. You'll find that your own psyche gets in the way of your being able to do the Rolfing. You'll reach plateaus where you see that some neurotic pattern of yours is keeping you from getting any further with the Rolfing. And then you've got to do some homework.
A lot of people fail to see that their responsibility is constantly to come back to themselves. That's where they say, well, the Rolfing doesn't really work — let's throw in a little acupuncture, let's throw in some chiropractic, let's throw in some faith healing. Those other things are fine in their place, but they should not supersede the practitioner seeing that the responsibility is with him to keep getting better at the work. Everybody I know who starts adding or subtracting and patting themselves on the back for being really neat over here in this new area — it's always that there's something inside they can't work through. It's a block.
You must understand if you are going to be promoters of Rolfing what it is we're promoting. We are promoting energetic efficiency in bodies. I don't mean the kind of thing some of you are thinking of — oh, he's so energetic. Not that at all. It's the kind of energy as is measured in a physics laboratory: how much work does your body have to do in order to effect what it is that you're being paid to do. As we came down here this morning out in the rain, a well-meaning young student was jogging. He had lots of goodwill, lots of rage, but there was no way in which he transmitted the movement from his legs up into his torso. It just stopped right there. Was he doing what he was supposed to do — getting blood and circulation and energy around in his body? No. Because he didn't know how to make the connection.
All chronic problems involve mechanics. All mechanics involve the gravitational behavior of material substances in a three-dimensional field. That's what mechanics is: the study of the behavior of material substances in a gravitational field. Those people — the chiropractors — are taught to see acute problems. You are being taught to see chronic problems.
You're going to have the job very shortly of going out and talking to people about what you are doing. Their first question is: Rolfing — what's Rolfing? You'd better have a convincing answer, and you'd better remember that they live in Newtonian worlds, and in the world in which they live, common sense is the thing that appeals to them. If what you say to them, they shake their head and say, yeah, that sounds as though it could work — you've got it made. Common sense is still king in this world. No esoteric catchphrases will do the job. They've never heard of Rolfing. They don't know about atomic physics. They sometimes try to con you into thinking they do, but they don't really. Your job is to keep them in this common sense world where all of a sudden they look at you and say, gee, yes, that sounds sensible.
Patterning is valuable in its own way. Its greatest value, in my opinion, is that a person who goes into patterning commits a certain number of hours of his time to being aware of how he uses his body, how he might better use his body more efficiently. He goes to a Rolfer and expects to have something done for him and to him, but he doesn't have any such expectation when he goes to a patterner. When he goes to a patterner, he goes with the understanding that he is going to do something differently.
What is Rolfing? Rolfing is a process where you prepare the body to be able to accept the gravitational field of the earth for support, for enhancement. The random body is such that gravity cannot work through it. The field that surrounds the earth cannot work through it — it has to work against it. It is not until you get out of this randomness and you organize that body so that it has a model around a vertical that you begin to get a body which can accept the energy of the earth.
When did you begin to get the clear notion that there were stages, one after the other, which would be the exact way to realign the body? The body talks about it. That's all I can say. The body talks about it. If you start with the first hour which I teach you, by the time they come in for the second hour, every one of those ten people will show you the same mal-symptom. They will show you that their legs are not under them, that their feet aren't walking properly. The body screams at you. So to stop it screaming, you get down there and try to do something with it. And if you stop it screaming, then it begins to scream somewhere else, and you do that in the third hour. You just chase the scream until it has no place to stay, and then you kiss them goodbye and tell them it was nice knowing them.
Aphorisms Unbound
Ida talked the way she worked: in sudden pressures that opened things up. What follows are fragments caught on tape over the years — none rehearsed, all unmistakable. Read them slowly. She meant every word, and she meant you to argue with some of them.
The physiology, the function of the man is what is the man.
There are a great many situations in life where you do not know what you are dealing with. You only know that you can deal with it.
What happened? What kind of energy was put in? Where? To the structure of the human body. That's all I know.
There's no such thing as an ideal type. There are only types more suited or less suited for the job you have on hand.
Individuality, when it is rigid, is not good.
Ideas conveyed by words are linear. Life is much more complicated than that.
Generalities stated in words convey misinformation, because what I think I'm saying, you don't hear as I think I'm saying. And this is characteristic of human communication.
I once had a yoga teacher whose aphorism was: if you can't put it in a nickel's worth of words, you don't know your stuff. And it's true.
And don't let those anatomy books bulldoze you — they were all wrong.
Those aren't normal kids' legs. Those are average kids' legs.
Just as soon as you try to control a process which the Lord intended to be below your control, you're in trouble.
The muscles begin to be used as structural components instead of motor components.
There should be abdomen between pelvis and ribs.
Direction as well as place is of major importance.
You can't get a horizontal until you have a bow in the direction.
It's a seesaw situation — a slow seesaw. When does this end stop going up and start coming down? Just at the minute when this end starts going up, this end starts coming down.
It's all right for the elbow to go back. The thing that isn't all right is for it to be stuck back.
Thickness and normal functioning do not go together.
You can tell whether a joint is normal as you watch it not moving.
The body will go as far as it is physically able to go within the laws of physics.
You don't need metaphysics for it. Physics will do.
I really don't know whether the breath organizes the sacrum or the sacrum organizes the breath.
When you get the electrical system balanced, you don't have an electrical system.
Your eyes are an inordinate feeling. It's only that your eyes are so lucky — they do that feeling at a distance.
The Greeks, when they wanted to represent the principle of transportation, represented a young man with wings on the outside of his heels. They were not saying they thought a god came around with wings on his feet. They were saying that the principle of getting around fast and satisfactorily consisted in walking as though you had wings on the outside of your feet. It still is the same — and it's not wings on the inside.
I know that wherever you're going to go on a walk, you've got to start by putting one foot out in front of where you're standing.
What's the most efficient stimulus for flesh? You.
I want you to walk around this elephant, not simply to feel his trunk.
Get firmly in your mind what is proof and what is fun to talk about.
If you can get hold of this little twelve-inch ruler, you can do a great deal to look critically at your own thinking, and at the thinking of people who present ideas to you more and more loudly as they're less and less sure of them.
For two thousand years Aristotle has been taught as the father of logic, the authority beyond which there is no authority. Aristotle said there is a black and there is a white. With blazing decree, he threw out all the glazing between in order to facilitate teaching the black and the white separation.
Aristotle was a great guy. I wish I had half his brain. But Aristotle was no good in the twentieth century, because the things that give us our ideas at present weren't available.
I am not a stickler for who got there first. I am a stickler for who put the idea across.
It's all very well to have bleeding hearts. But if you want to get something done, stop the bleeding of your heart and get your brain to working.
Don't be afraid to make mistakes. We all do.
Man, you've got to have a lot of trouble, so you'll learn a lot.
Problems come on all levels. Solutions come on all levels.
There's one thing we can be in this room. There's one thing we can be in the community. We can be honest with ourselves.
I'm just trying to get you people to tell the truth and shame the devil.
Personal determination is what determines the life quality.
People think I'm God Himself, and I'm not really. I don't ultimately admit it.
For the next reincarnation, I'm going to know some of the answers instead of some of the problems.
And the more you see, the more trouble you're in.
It's just — the more you come with, the more you go out with.
Remember: today is the day in which the words that come out of your mouth express the reality.
Those first six hours, those first seven hours really, are separational hours. They are analytical hours. I wouldn't call them linear, but if it's going to make life simple for you, you can. I would call them creative. You are literally creating fascial planes out of seemingly nothing. You've all had this experience. You've worked like a dog over some little nut of consolidation, and all of a sudden, instead of having enough the size of the top of your finger, you've got an area the size of your whole palm. You are creating it. It's something like when you've forgotten to get the frozen meat out of the freezer, and you have to have it for supper. You take that dull frozen package out and you try to separate it. You can cut through it with a saw. But after you cut through it with a saw, it has no seeming relation to that meat as it was before it was frozen. Now if you'll have patience and not try to get that meat into the pan by sawing through small pieces of it, if you just let it thaw, it begins to resemble meat again. And the same thing is true with bodies.
Your job is to be the liaison man between that body and health. And it isn't intellectual. It is practical. It is experiential. So you need to be able to differentiate between these two levels of operation. And don't go talking to that body and say, Dear little body, we have got to get these muscles back. Your body doesn't care. It just wants to be where it belongs. You have got to make yourself familiar with the fact that you're riding two horses at once. For some reason at this moment, the vision that comes into my mind is of myself as a teenager trying to ride a canoe with one foot and a rowboat with the other, and paddle this combination over to the float where I could put the canoe on the float and take the rowboat back to shore.
When your ribs are in the right place, you will do appropriate breathing. Your ribs, your diaphragm, your autonomic nervous system. When you try to control your breathing or your digestion or your excretion or your elimination or your nutrition or any of those other functions which should be automatic, you start on an endless row of trouble. Don't let me hear you telling the guy to send the breath down into his foot or anything else but where it is. The metaphysicians down through the centuries have always had a story about how there are many different bodies that make up a man. This is what they're talking about — the different functioning of these different systems, which they choose to call bodies, which put together make up a whole man.
It's so easy to say, Well, he displaced his coccyx. That's a good old standard way of looking at it. You displace your coccyx and you find out what it is. For one thing, you can't sit comfortably for anything. All kinds of things happen with your legs. But it's so much simpler, if you have a very complex situation like a body, to just throw some of them into the back of the bottom drawer. Instead of saying a body is like an onion, it's layered. If you jab a knife into an onion good and deep, you've killed it. You can't grow onions from an onion into which you jab a knife. But you can grow onions if you take off two or three of the outside layers without damaging the inside layer. And bodies are like that. You start at the outside and relieve the outside restrictions to the actual functioning of that body.
There is only one authority. What is it? The body. There is only one authority and that authority is the human body. If you have realized that what is in those medical history books is the exact opposite of what I'm saying to you — Aristotle said, This is so because I say so. He said in essence, I've sat here and thought about this for a long time and I've come up with the answer and this is the answer. That was fine in the days of Aristotle. In the days of Rolf, he will fight every step of the way.
Up to this point in time, none of the fads about bodies has touched the mesomorphic body. In the days of Claude Bernard, there was one kind of a fad. Twenty years later, was another kind of a fad. And because of these fads, intensive work was done on certain aspects of the body, and as a result our information increased very markedly. But nobody up to very recently has really looked at that mesomorphic system, the connective tissue, the organ of structure. This is the only edge that you have, because there are hundreds of researchers in the world who know more about the ectomorphic system than you are ever going to know if you work from now to the end of the line. The same is true of the endomorphic system. But the same is not true with the mesomorphic system. Here, you people are the investigators.
It's like a solid spider web. And wherever you touch it, it goes into something else. You can't wrap any system of the body up in a paper bag and tie a string around it and have a picture of what's going on anywhere in the body. You have in front of you all kinds of exhibits. Don't just turn your head and talk to your neighbors. Look at the differences in systems which these various bodies are exhibiting for your inspection in the course of their unconscious use of their body as they undress. This is one of the assets that I scream about that you don't use. You don't look at people when they are not conscious. You should be looking at them because that's the time they talk to you.
You've all eaten legs of lamb in the course of your life, and you realize that you get these tough fascial sheets in there, and you realize that what you're eating and enjoying and saying, My, that's a good leg of lamb, is the muscles of the leg, not the fascial planes. I know it's really just terrible to look at food as anatomy, or to look at anatomy as food. But by golly, you better get there. Sometime when you can't think of what else to think about, just wonder why a T-bone steak tastes different from a sirloin that lies next to it. Why is one side of that bone a tenderloin and the other not? These are things which if you happen to mention to your mama, she will say, such a thing for a person to be thinking about. Why can't you be thinking about poetry? But if you're really going to understand bodies you have to look at the various things that constitute bodies.
As far as you are concerned, your arms end at the elbow and your legs end at the knees. Those final segments of arms and legs are for the modification of movement, not the creation of movement — sophistication, rotation, extension, all kinds of modifications come from what is in the lower arm and what is in the lower leg. But your major carrying yourself around comes in terms of more near the center. There is no such thing as starting too early in the Rolfing process to become aware of certain significant points. You'll find some of your holiday friends explaining graphology to you — but your handwriting changes completely in accordance with the balance that you can get in the muscles. Don't tell them that, because you confuse them.
Mr. Webster says that a plastic is something which can be deformed without breaking. It can be deformed to a great extent, extensively, without breaking. And I say to you, yes, this is one definition of a plastic. The other definition of a plastic is that it can be reformed without breaking. And people come to grief by virtue of the fact that these bodies of theirs have been being deformed under the pull of gravity since they were born, but nobody has gotten around to reforming them because nobody has really taken a good look at the fact that it is a plastic body and therefore can be reformed. I sometimes say that the good Lord didn't trust these dumb guys. He was afraid they might lose some of their segments and he put them all into a shopping bag.
One of the booby traps in this system is that it looks so simple that you go home and you try it on your mother-in-law. I one time spoke to three or four hundred people in the chiropractic college in Canada. I got back six weeks later, and a kid walked up to me and he said, you know, that system of yours isn't any good. I said, how did you find out? He says, well, I saw your work, and I went home and tried it on my mother-in-law. My mother-in-law has a bad heart, and she has Bright's disease. It didn't help any. So don't try it on your mother-in-law — unless you really want to kill her.
For two thousand years Aristotle has been taught as the father of logic and the authority beyond which there was no authority. Aristotle said there is a black and there is a white. He just threw out all the grays between in order to facilitate trying to teach the black and the white separation. This is what was put in in the 1900s — that in any consideration there was a spectrum. There was black and white, but there were all kinds of shades of gray in between. Whereas for two thousand years we kept thinking a body is a body is a body is a body. There is one body and it's all wrapped up and it doesn't change. It grows up, it grows older, to maturity and to death. Now, this is not so.
Part
Part Two — The Ten Sessions
The Recipe is the ten-hour series Ida developed for her basic class — a sequence of sessions that progressively unwind the body. The chapters that follow gather her teaching about each session, in order. She insisted the Recipe was not a recipe; the work, she said, has to follow the body. Both ideas — sequence and responsiveness — are present in the passages below.
Session One
The first hour looks simple and it isn't. You are not chasing muscles, not yet reaching joints — you are putting your hands on the superficial envelope and asking the whole body to declare itself. Everything that will happen in the next nine hours is foreshadowed here. Read these passages with that in mind.
In your first hour, what you are doing is declaring your faith.
See this for what it is: that whole first hour that seems so big and seems so complicated is really simply one thing — a loosening, an energizing, and therefore an organizing of the fascia that invests the trunk. This is what it amounts to. And this is what makes it a single lifeblood.
In the first hour, what we want to do is to free the pelvis from above and below. So we start bringing the ribs and lifting the thorax.
You are doing once over lightly in that first hour. You are dealing primarily with superficial fascia. You are not dealing with individual muscles. You cannot get to individual muscles in the first hour.
You need to be constantly conscious of the fact that in that first hour you are dealing with the superficial fascia. You are not trying to get down to the bony joint. You are dealing with the tightening of the superficial envelope which has resulted from the problems in the joint. And if you deal with that superficial tightening, you then permit the joint to fall nearer to where it belongs.
In that first hour you just took the safety pins out that were holding on to the superficial fascia. The superficial fascia had gotten stuck in various places.
What you are doing in that first hour is dealing with the superficial fascia. But as you deal with that superficial fascia, you are allowing the reflexes that lie deeper, in between the ribs, to get going. So you have a very complicated situation really occurring in that first hour.
All colloids exist either as sols or gels. A gel is semi-solid; a sol is more fluid. You get from a gel to a sol by the addition of energy — whether you add it in the form of heat or any other type of energy. My suspicion is that what is going on in that first hour is that you are adding mechanical energy to the gel of the superficial fascia, thereby getting a sol whose properties of conduction are different.
In that first hour, you have done something to the guy. You have literally added energy through your elbow, through your fist, through your hands, and sometimes through your words as you made him understand differently. You have done a lot of draining off of toxic material in that first hour. You have done a lot of putting in of oxygen.
During that first hour, you do several things for the man. You improve his oxygen exchange. You free his thorax so that he can get more fuel for his machine to start working — so that it will have the circulation and the oxygen to establish the changes that you allow.
That whole first hour, which you will presently understand, is really an abstraction of the whole ten-hour bit. Very little is going to be done in the ten hours that hasn't been foreshadowed in this first hour. You are dealing with the man as a whole, and the man as a whole can almost be mathematically expressed in terms of energy. It is this figure that expresses the man we're dealing with in this first hour.
Don't get a notion that you're going after this muscle or that muscle. In the first hour, you can't get to individual muscles. You can only get to areas of overlying fascia. You can only modify areas of overlying fascia.
Most of you make your mistake right here. You insist on trying to get that thorax in the first hour to a place where that thorax needs to be in the ninth hour.
What you have latched on to is the how-to-do-it. But that isn't the objective of the first hour, really.
From the minute you start your first hour, what you are trying to insert is length. Figure that you have a lot of spools on a spiral spring. How would you get those spools to sit one on top of the other? Only by lengthening that spiral spring to give them the space where they can shift so that they get one squarely on the other.
Lightness, whether it happens to be in a garage door or in a Rolfee's arm, is simply a measure of the extent to which you're getting counterweighting. What you are doing in that first hour when you get going with those arms is putting the structure that the good Lord designed as a counterweight to work.
Do the arm test and observe where the arm is tied up before that. Is it tied up in front? Is it tied up in the back? Is it tied up at the spine?
More important than your estimate of what is wrong is the necessity of introducing your Rolfee to the notion that something real is going on — that they can immediately observe the change themselves. People almost always are aware of that sickness; sometimes it's the first time in their life they realize their arms don't move properly, because the way they move their arms has always been to them the proper way. All of these things you are dealing with in that first hour, and this is one of the reasons why we go back and back and back to that first hour, observing all the little edges where you can push the unconsciousness back.
You jolly well get this into your soul: anybody who gives the first hour — and a lot of other hours — without a pelvic lift is going to tangle with me if I can catch them.
It allows the lumbars to come back so that the sacrum is fitting now under the lumbars. That is the key to the first hour. And believe me, if you forget it, you have failed your first hour. You may have failed all the other hours all the way down the line because you have not positioned the lumbars where they belong.
There should be movement all the way through that spine by the time you're through. There should be movement of the diaphragm. As you give a pelvic lift, the belly wall should at least show you that it knows it should be falling back, even if it can't make the grade. That amount of movement should get in there in that first hour.
The goal of the first hour, the second hour, the third, the fourth, the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth hour is a freed and therefore more horizontal pelvis — a marbleization of the pelvis, getting movement into a place where movement should be and where in about fifty percent of people movement is not.
Horizontalizing the pelvis is the goal of the first hour, the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth hours. And that isn't turning the pelvis under.
Having worked with a view to changing the lumbar spine, you must now work with a view to allowing it to change by getting the cervical spine into the right position for it. You don't have to do a lot of changing of the cervical spine in the first hour. You only have to do the kind of loosening which will not make that lumbar spine renege on its progress.
From the first hour, you have been trying to make these people aware: where is the top of your head? Where is your waistline? Let your waistline come back — no, don't push it back, let it come back. These sound like very simple words, but they are a very basic teaching procedure to get that man, that woman, to understand what constitutes himself.
People will often say to you, even after the first hour, "I see things I didn't see when I came in here. I can see that corner of the room clearly. Isn't that funny? You didn't do anything to my eyes." No — but you better have freed the cervical ganglia, or you haven't done your stuff.
In any pathological situation, those people who are seers can see holes in the aura body. And those same seers will tell you that after the first couple of hours, those holes in the aura are very rapidly mended. That's what you feel — and why you feel so much better after the first hour.
Each horizontal that you bring out down below reflects itself upward. When the tissue is in tension, that's stored energy that you release into the body. And its energy is not a metaphysical something. These molecules are aligned in a particular way. You change their alignment. The change spreads.
It is also true that you can never do a first hour of Rolfing twice.
You can never really get any results by trying to do a first hour again. So an hour, when it's done, it's done.
Every time you let somebody drag in somebody else to an hour which is not a first hour, you live through the clinic. They go out and talk all over the county about what a terrible technique this is, how vicious it is, how violent it is, and all the rest of it. Don't do it. Tell them no.
People call you on the telephone. They would like to come in for an examination. I say, we don't give examinations. But if you want to come in for a first hour, you can. You see, it is their behavior under this kind of work that constitutes the examination. This is the only thing that tells you where they are in terms of the energy level.
The first hour foreshadows everything you're going to do in the next ten — through that fascia. And in that first hour, the fascia does not let you through. Thank God. Otherwise I couldn't be teaching, because I'd be afraid somebody was going to put his hand into an appendix that was just ready to burst.
What you did in the first hour is getting the screaming louder for the second hour.
If you were really sharp, you saw that the end of each hour takes you into the next hour — that the end of the first hour calls for a certain degree of lengthening of the back to make the man more comfortable between his first and second hour. You are finishing the first hour, but you are going into the second.
Part of what you people have to learn as Rolfers is timing. How much timing do you put on this, and how much timing do you put on that? If you're going to take forty-five, fifty minutes on that pelvis, what are you gonna do with the lower half of the body? It isn't important that you bring the thorax up to there. All that's important is that you raise the thorax and bring the rest up to the same level. What you're trying to do is to raise the level of operation of the entire body, not to get the thorax so that the arms will go round and round and round. This becomes the most difficult thing to get people to understand. They understand it in their head, but they can't get it into their gut. I can't get my advanced students out of this business of trying to get a thorax looking like a ninth-hour thorax in the first hour either. So don't you people get to feel how stupid you are — you've got a lot of company.
You are first of all doing one thing and only one thing — releasing the pelvis, which you are interested in mobilizing and changing. Releasing the pelvis from the immobilization that the various things that have happened to the thorax in the course of the life of this individual have caused to happen. Sometimes just plain accidents. Sometimes the time the kid fell down the cellar stairs. Sometimes the time the kid looked off the porch roof and decided that that green grass down there looked so soft, he'd just jump and find out whether it was.
You see that girl lying there — there's very little. And the minute you begin to get those ribs changed, that breathing is going to be changed. If you start on the right side, she is going to feel that the right side is breathing differently — that she is getting half as much more air from the right side. There isn't anyone in this room who knows so little about biological chemistry that they don't understand that getting more air in and getting it moving faster is going to change the chemistry of every cell in the body. So what have you done? You have started changing the chemistry of every cell in that body inside of ten minutes after you get your hands on their rib cage. All of a sudden you see the skin becoming pink. All of a sudden you may see the skin being a little more moist.
We are lifting the thorax off the pelvis. You can't really help the feet until you get the pelvis moving. It's the mobility of the pelvis to come over the leg that takes the stress off the feet. And you can't get a mobile pelvis until you get the load out off of it. It's just like if you ever carry somebody piggyback and you get too far over, that's it — you've got to get them off your back or your back is going to break. It doesn't matter what caused it. A lot of people say, well, what caused this? It could have been a car wreck. It could have been just psychological stress, you know, crummy marriage. But we're not marriage counselors. What does matter is you understand you have to lift that up off the pelvis to start getting mobility in the pelvis.
The first hour is the beginning of the tenth hour.
Hour after hour, you have progressed with your overall view. Your first hour is a completely random pattern, and it goes into an overall pattern of: now we have a longer front. When your second hour comes in, now we're going to get a longer back. And your third hour says, well, the sides are short, I've gotta get longer sides. Everywhere you are adding length. You must add length to get a person out of his misery, because his misery dates from the fact that the gravitational force is pulling him down, and the point of weakness will be the point where he will accommodate to the gravitational force pulling him down and shorten.
In the old days, there were fewer anatomists in the class and more artists. I used to stand that person up and say, can you see that it is the whole knitting line from the top of the head down to the soles of the feet that is short. And this they could and did see. Nowadays, we're getting into this mechanistic view of looking at actual muscles and what it is that's holding. And sometimes this isn't as useful. Sometimes what you need to think about is the overall view.
Ida doesn't look at the back much. She just lays them down. She can see through the body, see where the pins are. You're releasing the pins to let the thorax out to breathe. And as that happens, you start getting the four-way breathing pattern of the chest — the up and down, side to side, front to back, and the Venetian blind effect.
See this for what it is: that whole first hour that seems so big and seems so complicated is really simply one thing — a loosening and an energizing and therefore an organizing of the fascia that invests the trunk. This is what it amounts to. And this is what makes it a one simple lifeblood.
The pelvic lift is more than just an organization of what you've freed. It usually involves a repositioning of either the third or the fourth or the fifth lumbar and the sacrum. When you people have done enough first hours, you'll know that that's so. Something down there is going to really give.
The only place that you can begin to change the relation of the body to the earth is around the head of the femur, and you're blessed by the fact that the head of the femur is the junction for all of this stuff. This is a piece of velvet that God gave you as a wrapper.
This thing is called the pelvic lift. Naturally, that's what it ain't, so it really is a good name. I pinched that name from somebody else who did a pelvic lift. At this point, realize that your pelvic lift is not a pelvic lift. It is a pelvic settling. It is a lumbar settling, a lumbar moving back. If you've got a better name for it, bring it up.
Keep that simple metaphor in mind: that spine, after all, is your tent pole. And you've got to be a very expert tent erector before you can just put that tent pole up once and have it where it belongs. You shift it at the top, you shift it at the bottom. You shift it here, there, and the other place to get those two sides better balanced before you're through.
This is not the man who goes out and tries to establish every fact himself. He can't do it. As you well know, they go to medical school and somebody takes a piece out of their skull and dumps a whole bunch of stuff in. And this stuff has become the orthodoxy through sometimes a good many thousand years, but more often just a few hundred. They don't have the time to look at this and to see that it isn't so, because little Susie is down with the measles, and Mrs. Jones is on the telephone every seven minutes saying, doctor, please come, she's got a temperature. He knows it's the measles, but that doesn't help to get Mrs. Jones out of his hair.
In a Rolfed body, as you walk, the flexion bringing the leg forward should be in the psoas. In an unRolfed body, the flexion is distributed between the rectus abdominis and the rectus femoris. This is the reason why when you look at skiers, they have these enormous thighs. Many of our dancers have. Thighs out of all proportion to their body size. They started their dancing or their skiing with relatively imbalanced structures, and they got a hold of the one they could get a hold of. And the one they can always get a hold of is that rectus femoris, that quadriceps structure. In gymnasiums and places where people are trained in sports, such a huge percentage of the talk is about training of those two anterior muscles. What do they do to balance it? Not one thing.
In the first hour, when you have that person lying on the floor, your hand goes onto his abdomen, and what happens to it? In anything that even resembles balance in the body, your hand depresses the belly wall. But this isn't what happens. That belly wall is going to show you how smart it is, how well trained it is, how it can resist you and all the likes of you. It keeps that belly wall mounted, and it keeps your hand out. Just as soon as you begin to get relaxation in the rectus abdominis and the belly wall falls back, the psoas takes its place in the abdominal picture of what is going on in movement. When you give that pelvic lift and see that belly wall fall back, you are entitled to say, Eureka, I have made it.
All the way along from the first day, somebody should have been oh-ing and ah-ing when the belly wall falls back in breathing instead of mounting up. Somebody should have been saying with their oh-ing and ah-ing: ah, now the psoas is participating. As the belly wall falls back, you have evidence that the psoas is beginning to act with the recti.
How do you know when a first hour has been given? Not whether somebody has tried to dig his hands in there, but whether a first hour has been given. One of the things was that Mr. James was made of wood. Absolutely solid. There were no joints in the man. He could move his arms more or less, he could move his legs, but not very much. There wasn't a single spinal joint working in that man. And as you looked at him trying to breathe, you couldn't see any movement of those ribs. If you can't see all of this happening, you just haven't seen any first hour, period. There should be movement all the way through that spine by the time you're through. There should be movement of the diaphragm. As you give a pelvic lift the belly wall should at least show you that it knows it should be falling back, even if it can't make the grade.
By the end of the first hour you have a milestone that says, yes, this guy has had his first hour. There should be movement all the way through that spine. There should be movement of the diaphragm. You begin to see movement of the psoas, which means that the recti will fall back, the belly wall will fall back as you call for a pelvic lift, and the chest will be moving differently. The rib cage that you can see through the chest wall will be moving differently from what it was in the beginning. And this rigidity and insecurity that's bolstered by the rigidity of that upper chest should be falling away.
Your job is with the pelvis. Your job is with the pelvis from the first moment you take that guy on to the last moment when he kisses goodbye. I hate to tell you, but you boys are going to have your minds predominantly focused on pelvises for the rest of your life. You don't have to focus through all the time — you can start at the periphery. It's like an onion ring.
What has happened in those four hours? Four times you have approached the skull and added something to it. Every one of those four hours has had to do with the horizontalization of the pelvis. Every one of them has built up, or should have in your mind, the outstanding importance of the pelvis as a piece of structure in the body. Here we are talking about putting in ten hours straightening the body. And four of them, forty percent, have gone now and we haven't done one doggone thing except look at that pelvis and find out what was holding it and where it was being held.
I doubt if there's any other one place in the body, maybe the ramus, wherein as brief an area, you have as much going on in terms of how the body is held. You have the sartorius, you have the rectus femoris, you have the fascia lata. Here's the whole leg all hooked right in good and tight for that rectus femoris. And tying it in is the gluteus medius at a deeper level and the iliacus at a still deeper level. And as your iliacus is held, so must your psoas be held because of the common tendon that they share.
The anterior superior spine is one of the most important of all the hang-ups of the pelvis. That anterior superior spine hangs up the pelvis on the bottom, and it hangs up the pelvis on the top, and then hangs the pelvis, period. If you're really clearing out around there, there are five different muscles at that anterior superior spine: the gluteus minimus, the tensor fasciae latae, the sartorius, the iliacus, and part of the quadratus. All of those can — this is what I'm talking about when I'm talking about how it gets darned in. Darned in is exactly what it gets.
There's a big nervous factor in that whole breathing situation, which will right itself as that nervous system that lies anterior to the spine relates itself to the spine. As the spine opens up, you get a lot of innervation that otherwise can't get there. It's one of the points where structure and function relate pretty obviously.
You'll find many sacrums that feel as though they were made of stone. As you go into that sacrum, you will very often have to literally stretch and reorganize the muscle in its containing fascia that overlies the sacrum. With your fingers you are organizing every one of those lumbar articulations, but particularly fourth-to-fifth and fifth-to-sacral.
You start by disengaging the thorax. As you disengage that thorax you get that great big chunk of velvet for free — that respiratory activity. To every place that you succeed in getting more circulation going through, you've seen people lying on the floor and you're working on their knees or their hamstrings and their whole head is just completely flushed out with an entire change of circulation. That blood that has been dormant is of a different quality, of a different chemistry. You have a very great asset there that just comes to you out of the blue.
Session Two
If the first hour opened the breath and freed the sleeve, the second hour asks the harder question: what is this body standing on? Here Ida turns our attention downward — to feet, ankles, the plantar webbing — and to the gravitational conversation that begins at the ground. Without organized legs, there is nothing to set the trunk upon.
As we were thinking and talking yesterday about second hours, we were thinking and talking about feet and about legs. But we shouldn't really have been thinking and talking about feet and legs. We were really talking about gravity — and the adjustment, through feet and legs, of the human being to the gravitational field.
What you're doing in the second hour, below the leg, is simply finishing unfinished business of the first hour.
The body talks about it. If you start with the program — start with that first hour I teach you — lo and behold, by the time they come in for the second hour, every one of those ten people will show you the same mal-symptom. Their legs are not under them. Their feet aren't walking properly. The body screams at you. So to stop it screaming, you get down there and do something with it.
Before you are going to work with an upper body and get an upper body organized, you have got to get those feet organized. And I don't mean you have to avoid them for forty-five minutes. That's like sending your kids into the bathroom to wash their hands — and they come out and you suffer.
You are trying to get the sack that you lengthened and eased off in the first hour setting on top of something that will support it — namely legs and feet. And you're trying to get legs and feet articulating cleanly and clearly, so they can make the junction at those important joints with which they can then move that body separately and sophisticatedly. This is what you're trying to do in the second hour.
In hour one, when you have them sitting up there and you are going down their back, you are balancing. But in hour two, you have a very different goal. You have the goal of taking those antigravity muscles and getting them where they belong, to act as extensors.
In the first hour, you were only trying to balance up what you had available. In the second hour, you were trying to make some more available. You were progressing with your change of the body.
Having gotten there, now you're going to have to look at how the man fits within the gravitational field, in order that he may maintain himself at that level and go forward. So in the second hour, you depart from your stance of "I'm going to kick this guy upstairs." You start thinking, in terms of the floor upstairs, how can I keep him on his upright?
You cannot turn the legs on the pelvis, because the sole of the foot has to be horizontal to support you appropriately.
The pelvis has to adjust to the legs, because the other end of the legs are unadjustable. They have to be parallel. The foot cannot object. And if adjustment is going to occur, it has to be around the head of the femur.
You have got to have appropriate hinges at the knees, appropriate hinges at the ankles — and a hinge in the foot, across the dorsum of the foot. This dorsum-of-the-foot hinge is something that probably not one in this group has ever considered before. But across the dorsum of the foot there has to be, literally, a hinge joint.
Every one of those bones has two ends which form a hinge — an independent little hinge. Those little bones have to fit together so that you get a big hinge, big in terms of those little bones, across the dorsum of the foot. When you have that, then you will really begin to get an ankle that really walks.
Your first joint is across the dorsum of the foot; your second joint is at the ankle. Both of them have to be operational before you can start getting properly operational joints at the knee and at the hip, and then start up the spine. It's an absurdly simple concept.
If the foot is going to work with its arch, the outer arch — the part that is attached to the two outer toes — has got to tip up slightly. When the foot is standing and the part attached to the outer toes is down, not up, then you get a perversion of the whole pattern of movement and the whole pattern of energy flow.
No matter whether you've turned this outward from the hips, or rotated it outward from the knee, or rotated it from the ankle — no matter what, you've lost the structure. You've lost the possibility of normal movement. Because normal movement deals with those two toes. And when you've done that with it, there are no two toes there. They're on the foot, but they're not functioning.
The thing I want to make vivid in your mind is the way the foot is a webbing — an interwoven webbing. In order to change what you see as a foot, you have to have clarity about this webbing, how it should relate within itself and to the bones that are keeping it stretched.
Realize, gut-realize, that when you are working on those peroneals, you are working on toes, on feet — not on legs. When you have flat feet, you don't have flat feet. You have disorganization of the muscles of the shin, muscles crossing the shin.
You don't look at a foot and say, oh, this is a flat foot, I've got to get down on this foot and poke around in it. What you have to do is get the muscles of the leg so organized that they can change the foot, the bones to which they are attached.
When you have flat feet, you look to this stuff up here to cure it.
Feet show you, perhaps more clearly than any other thing in the body, how muscles go askew. A bunion, for instance — all those muscles dealing with that great toe have gone off, have moved off a quarter of an inch, sometimes even a half an inch from where they belong. And this is what has pulled the toe.
As they walk consistently on the outside of their feet, the retinaculae take on the job of holding those muscles in a place to walk on the outside of the feet. Then the pattern is anchored. Within the pattern, you get the change of the individual structure, of the chemistry, of the failure of circulation through the structure. And now, all at once, you have a totally inadequate foot.
What you are going to have to do, in order to get those feet back, is get every one of those muscles individualized. Each one doing its own thing. Each one sliding across its neighbor when it needs to. Each one balanced in tone — which means balanced in chemistry and balanced in energy. Then you've got something to stand on.
In every flat foot you'll ever see this goes on, and it goes on in a lot of feet that aren't flat. Except and until you bring that soft tissue around and wrap that shoe, the horizontalizing of the knee is just out of bounds. Either you can't get it, or if you get an apparent horizontal there, you've gotten it by virtue of putting a great deal of strain below.
Correlate what's going on with the sole of the foot with what's going on with the knee. Look at every one of these people. See who has flat feet and who has a decent arch. What does the decent arch have to do with the state of the knees?
I happened to have been blessed with flat feet, which I had never really remedied. And you see what those flat feet do? They hang on to those knees from the bottom.
In a foot, there are about fifty joints. In a hand, there must be another fifty. And the spinal joints are pretty important too — more important than the foot and the hand. You can get along if you can't move your hand. You can get along if you can't move your foot. But you very often can't get along at all when you come to grief with your spinal joints.
A thing like clubfoot — it's ordinarily regarded as a pathology of the foot, but it isn't at all. That clubfoot goes all the way up and down the spine. It's not just a question that by accident these feet are off. It's a problem of the whole body.
A lot of you, before you ever heard of me, had heard of foot reflexes. You heard that this line of the foot had to do with the spine — and it does. You heard that back here on the calcaneus had to do with the sacrum — and it does. What you are talking about is the fact that this is no metaphysical connection at all. It is very much a physical connection. Only the woman who put this together wasn't smart enough about the body as a whole to see that physical connection.
What goes on on the sole of the feet can give you a back-door key to what you have to fix up. You have a very precise tool, and a very useful tool, in those foot reflexes.
Why is it that in the soles of the feet you're getting reflexes to the whole of the body? Undoubtedly there are also reflexes in the hand, but you can't find them — because the hands are always moving so much that they won't allow these little points of immobility to form.
They don't have to move at the dorsum of the foot. They can walk around that joint. They don't walk very well, but nevertheless they move. And they're never aware of the fact that they ought to be walking better. Because as far as they're concerned, this is a foot, and it's my foot, and therefore it's a normal foot. This isn't so.
If you will meditate on this experience, you begin to see how, as you let your feet and legs do what they want to do, they are throwing your whole body off. So part of the correction, if you want to call it that, consists in getting your feet and legs so positioned that you can walk on them without throwing your body off.
If those people had ever taken the skin off the sole of a foot and looked at the plantar aponeurosis, they couldn't have come to a conclusion like that. The way that connective tissue lines itself up with use — essentially with stress — that plantar fascia suggests a distributed walking pattern, where the weight goes across the three-pointed arch in a symmetrical way, not coming off the big toe.
In all pictures of Hermes, of Mercury, the wings are on the outside of the feet. What they were saying was: if you want transportation, you must walk as though you have wings on the outside of your feet. The principle of walking was to walk as though you had to bring something outside of the feet as you went.
The general business of the second hour is not a compensation. It's just that we start to clean the room, and we don't get it all done at once.
By the time you begin to really organize those legs so that the tibia and fibula sit squarely over the ankle, and the ankle joint leads squarely onto the foot, those points of distress disappear. You no longer find them, except when you come into some acute situation.
There's just something nobody has brought out, and I'm sure you must all have seen it: hour by hour, something more surfaces. And "surfaces" is the right word. That back in the second hour is not that back in the first hour. There's more available in the back in the second hour. So you go and you work with the more that is available.
The goal of the first hour, the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, the eighth, the ninth, and the tenth hour is a freed and therefore more horizontal pelvis. A marbleization of the pelvis — getting movement into a place where movement should be, and where in about fifty percent of people movement is not.
If you were real sharp, you saw that the end of each hour sort of took you into the next hour — that the end of the first hour called for a certain degree of lengthening of the back to make the man more comfortable between his first and second hour. You are finishing the first hour, but you are going into the second.
At the point of the seventh hour in a series of ten sessions, the concentration has been chiefly in hours four, five, and six in the pelvic area — the fourth hour on the inside of the legs, the fifth hour on the abdomen coming down to the pelvis from the top, and the sixth hour on the back of the legs and into the rotators and the gluteal muscles in the seat. So a lot of concentration has been at that end of the body. The balanced energy system that the body is, the body is beginning to feel the strain in the neck. Nine people out of ten will come in before their seventh hour very aware that that hour has to have something to do with the neck.
Having gotten through the first session, somebody needs to take it out of the first session into the second. It seems to me that at least the first part of the second session is really not out of the first session — it's still part of the first session. Looking at the pictures of the pre-two people, and remembering how I felt as a pre-two person at that time, that whole area from just above the knees on down has not caught up with what's going on. My sensation of the first hour was lengthening the front. My weight felt thrown back on my heels. That brings up another goal of the second hour — to lengthen the back to equal that out.
As a kid grows up walking on the outside of his feet — and those of you who have kids, go back and look at those kids sitting in a chair doing anything, always on the outside of their feet. They'll even play walking on the outside of their feet. As they walk consistently on the outside of their feet, these retinaculae take on the job of holding those muscles in a place to walk on the outside of their feet. And then the pattern is anchored. Within the pattern, you get the change of the individual structure, of the individual chemistry, of the failure of circulation through the structure. And now all at once, you have a totally inadequate foot.
Every picture of every foot in this book is of an everted foot. How do you get a consistently everted foot? You get it by shortening on the outside, lengthening on the inside, and all of this is then glued into place with the two retinaculae, the one above the ankle and the one on the foot itself. These boys recognize that the lines of force for the foot should be vertical, but they don't recognize that the minute you evert a foot and turn it outward, you can't have that. The guy that wrote this book had all the evidence spread out right in front of his nose. He knew how to think about it, but he didn't know how to see about it.
Flat feet are not in the feet. Flat feet are in the shins. They are where and how the muscles of the shins relate. And the place to go for your flat feet is not into the feet, but into the shins. There you organize the muscles that control the feet. Your goal is to establish an ankle which acts as though it were horizontal. You do that by getting an appropriate relation between the outer side of the foot and the inner side. As soon as you do that, you begin to find out that as you make a demand on your foot to move, what is really moving is your leg. And if it isn't really moving, you don't have an appropriate ankle.
There are two levels of operation in the foot. One color is attached to the three inner toes. The other color is attached to the two outer toes. The yellow sits on top of the gray. Get reality on this: if you can lift the gray, you've got it made. If you lift the yellow, you've thrown it away. If you lift on the inner arch, you've thrown it away. If you lift on the outer arch, you've got it made. The Greeks, when they wanted to represent the principle of transportation, represented a young man with wings on the outside of his heels. They were saying that the principle of getting around fast and satisfactorily consisted in walking as though you had wings on the side of your feet. And it's not wings on the inside.
In the second hour, you become acutely aware of the problem of hinges. You have got to have appropriate hinges at the knees, appropriate hinges at the ankles, and a hinge in the foot across the dorsum of the foot. This dorsum-of-the-foot hinge is something that probably not one out of this group has ever considered before. When that hinge is in, then you can get the lift on the outside of the foot. Until that hinge is in, you cannot really get the lift on the outside of the foot. And as long as the outside of the foot is down, that hinge on the foot cannot operate. Your first joint is across the dorsum of the foot, your second joint is at the ankle, and both of them have to be working.
In the first hour you have started on the outside of that body and done a pretty good job all around, permitting the pelvis to become more mobilized within the envelope of the flesh. This is the sort of thing you saw plainly on Sharon, where you could see that pelvis waving in the breeze inside the envelope. There was no proper span of the envelope to keep the pelvis from waving in the breeze inside of it. In the second hour, realizing that unless we connected that pelvis up to the floor through the action of the ankle joint, we were not getting anywhere. You must get hinge joints — horizontal hinge joints — and you get the first and the lowest one across the dorsum of the foot.
One of the indications of how that joint is moving is by the folds of the skin when they flex the foot or when they're walking on it. If the folds are horizontal, then the joint itself tends to be acting as a horizontal hinge. The ordinary aberration is the gluing together of the two peroneals. What you want to do is to separate them so that they can each operate independently. When you have flat feet, you don't have flat feet. You have disorganization of the muscles of the shin, muscles crossing the shin. So that you don't look at a foot and say, oh, this is a flat foot, I've got to get down on this foot and poke around in it. What you have to do is to get the muscles of the leg so organized that they can change the foot to the bones of which they are attached.
On the bottom of the foot there are three tendons medially, two tendons laterally. On the dorsum we have the tibialis anterior, the extensor of the first toe, and the common extensor — three tendons. So all told we have three tendons on the dorsum of the foot, three on the medial side, and two on the lateral side. The peroneus longus comes across the foot this way and the extensor comes the other way. That forms the arch. You have a pulley action between the two. Down on the bottom you have the plantar fascia binding it all in. If your binding is too short on the outer arch, the proper balance and movement of these tendons will be interfered with. The thing I want to get vivid in your mind is the way in which the foot is a webbing, an interwoven webbing.
In the chest, every place that you succeed in getting more circulation going through — all of you have seen people lying on this floor while you're working on their knees or their hamstrings, and their whole head is just completely flushed out with an entire change of circulation. That blood that had been dormant is of a different quality, a different chemistry, carrying a different degree of oxygen. So you have a very great asset that just comes to you out of the blue. When you get down to the legs, you don't have this kind of an asset. You are really dealing with structure rather than the physiological function. The function of the legs is a motor function, and you are rehabilitating the motor function of those legs.
I think you need to look and see, when you've gotten as much free movement as you can by working right at the ankle, what's hanging the ankle up — whether it's above or what. I've seen people go from the ankle to the leg and I've seen people go from the ankle to the bottom of the foot. I assume that what they're doing is looking and seeing where they'll get the most movement, the most results right at that point.
Often you'll have a situation where the tibia is too far posterior with relation to the femur. Situations like that will determine which way you take the tissue on the leg. If the tibia is too far posterior, you might want to get in from both sides right behind the tibia and even behind the fibula and lift the tissue along that whole leg. The tissue in front of the leg — tibialis anterior fascia — you generally want to take up and in, because it's migrated too far down and too lateral. The tissue medially might even go down sometimes and the tissue laterally might go up as a part of raising the fibula. There are no general rules; you have to look at the body and see.
There are two factors involved in why you don't do the second hour right after the first, and you better listen to both of them. One is that it really is too much for that party. The second is that if they think it's too much for that body, they're not going to keep you on their payroll. There's another factor that seems important — you're establishing contact with the person in the first hour. Let them settle into those changes of the first hour and then give them the second hour. The strain that would have been released by the work of the first hour won't yet have been released.
The goal of second hour is to begin to establish relatedness to the ground. We work on the arch of the foot, the extensor and flexor functions, the arch itself, the toes, and the ankle. We begin to free up the leg above the ankle, working back and forth around it. The focus of this hour is the hinge at the ankle. We work back and forth below it and above it, around it, to reorganize the whole structure — and finally up to the knee, as much to organize the ankle as to organize the knee.
It is the abduction which is weak in every leg you will ever see. If you will meditate on this experience, you begin to see how, as you let your feet and legs do what they want to do, they are throwing your whole body off. Part of the correction consists in getting your feet and legs so positioned that you can walk on them without throwing your body off. The whole leg structure is different if you are sitting than if you are lying. When you have accepted a certain amount of correction in those legs, then is the time to go down to do it live. But these are two different situations.
It becomes more important sometimes to start with the peroneal group on the legs than to start with the retinaculum, because it becomes apparent to your fingers — not to your head — that you're not going to get anywhere with the retinaculum until you've got that freed first. There's a functional plane and there's a structural plane. The plane on which it folds will be horizontal — but the plane on which it folds is not necessarily the plane marked by the internal and external malleolus. By virtue of the difference in length of the tibia and fibula, the structural plane cannot be precise. The function of the foot is to relate us to the earth and to gravity — to have solid energy flow through our feet and legs to contact us with the earth.
How do you define a pelvis as being horizontal? By the line connecting the second segment of the coccyx with the pubes — and the underpants don't slant down. You are going to have to lift the pubes and drop the coccyx. Chances are that neither of them will be where they belong. What connects the coccyx with the pelvis? It's like a ligament, but it's behind — the coccygeus. When the calcaneus gets set on straight, the coccyx changes. And when you change the coccyx, you change the calcaneus.
Do you see the difference in the quality of the knee? It is one knee that is in trouble, not two. I would have hesitated to lay him on his face because of that problem in the lumbars and sacrum. To a certain extent that has eased the leg, but it's not getting where the problem is. His problem is so much higher. You see how spontaneously this pelvis is trying to do something for us — it's playing off on that hamstring. Seems to be that same old problem with the separation of the floor of the pelvis from the legs.
It used to be quite incredible to people to see that the shortening of the body comes in by virtue of the spreading apart of those spiny erectors, and the lengthening of the body can be produced by the tightening together of those spiny erectors. As you brought those two strands together, all of a sudden you had length in the body. As the body has shortened, the scapulae have come apart. The converse is also true — as the scapulae are pulled apart by poor use of the shoulder girdle, the body shortens. Consequently, in order to lengthen the body, you have to get the scapulae in where they belong.
At the end of the second hour, you have a milestone that says, yes, this guy has had his second hour. On that milestone, it talks about the feet. It talks about the extent to which the ankles have been horizontalized. It talks about the extent to which the external malleolus is no longer dragging in the dust. It talks about where the knees are. Remember Malcolm as he came in here with respect to his legs and his knees — what a perfectly ghastly walk. He wondered how he could support his trunk on those cockeyed legs. By the end of the second hour, those legs were talking to you and saying, well, we are seeing a light.
In that first hour we finish with the knees up, and that's right. Do you see how these exercises give you a diagnosis of yourself and of the other guy? These are things which you as Rolfers must not know with your head but feel with your body. And you must feel with your body what is needed in the other body.
As we turned to come down here this morning out in the rain, I noticed a well-meaning young student jogging. I looked at him and thought, well, he's got lots of goodwill, lots of rage, but there was no way in which he transmitted the movement from his legs up into his torso. It just stopped right there. Was he doing what he was supposed to do — namely getting blood and circulation and energy around in his body? No. Because he didn't know how to make the connection.
Session Three
By the third hour, the peeling goes deeper. Ida was emphatic: this is the only hour devoted to the lateral line, the only hour you balance on two sides of it. Stray from that and you cheat the client. Here she circles the quadratus, the twelfth rib, and the first real descent into the body's interior.
In the third hour, you begin to get deep to that superficial fascia. And if you really want to understand the third hour, you must understand that you're peeling around and around, and now you're beginning to get down to the level where the peeling is going to do something drastic to the structure — it lengthens the structure.
Hour after hour, you have progressed with your overall view. Your first hour is a completely random pattern, and it goes into an overall pattern of now we have a longer front. When your second hour comes in, now we're going to get a longer back. And your third hour says, well, the sides are short. I've got to get longer sides. Everywhere you are adding length.
When you're doing the third hour, do the third hour.
In order to get a balance, you have to balance on two sides of the lateral line. Recognize that in the whole ten hours this is the only time that you will be balancing on two sides of the lateral line. Therefore, when you let yourself be derailed in the third hour and you go to the back and you go to the front and you go to forty-five other places, you are cheating that guy of his third hour.
If you work across the lateral line, you have a thick pillow under your fingers that you are stretching. If you work in front of the lateral line, you don't have that.
The third hour becomes basically the hour of the quadratus. Up to this point you were playing with superficial fascia, basically. Now you're beginning to get into deep structures.
When you begin to get to the quadratus, which you are doing in that third hour — that is essentially what you are doing in that third hour — you are allowing the quadratus to take its place within the structure. And when that happens, the structure is now able to come to a different relationship within itself. This is the first step toward getting the inside out.
The quadratus is the key to that whole business of whether you can get the shoulder girdle up and the pelvic girdle down. And it is the key through the mechanism of the twelfth rib, plus the eleventh rib, plus the tenth rib — because the eleventh and tenth aren't going to be where they belong if the twelfth isn't where it belongs. It establishes the kind of spanning which gives you the length you need.
The twelfth rib and the fibula are about the most vulnerable structures inside the skin.
How does the trunk lengthen? What is the mechanism? Organizing the quadratus, the twelfth rib becomes more elevated. You stretch the soft tissue, and then the hard tissue — the tent pole — can go into place.
Look at your skeleton and realize that you've got to get the whole depth of that iliac crest clean. And by clean, I mean the flesh so organized that it can stretch as it is demanded — as you make the demand on it to stretch, it is able to stretch.
As you organize that third hour, what you are really doing is relating the pectoral to the latissimus. It's that simple. That is what is going to be the most superficial balancing mechanism of that shoulder girdle.
You've taken that body and, like an onion, you have peeled it from the outside. But never have you peeled very deeply yet. In the third hour, you begin to peel more deeply.
The third hour begins the separation of shoulder girdle, and lumbar and pelvic girdle, from the trunk. You really have to have a gut understanding of that.
When you're talking about balancing, it's only yak-yak. But when you're putting in your lateral line, you are communicating with the silent level.
The body screams at you. So to stop it screaming, you get down there and you try to do something with it. And if you stop it screaming in one place, then it begins to scream somewhere else — and you do that in the third hour.
In the third hour, once again, you look at the body. If I were writing an examination for you people, one of the questions would be: how is the technique developed? How is it being developed day by day in this room? And the answer always is, by looking at the body. It is the body that presents it — not some symbol in your mind, good and complicated in order to blow up your ego.
The third hour is a milepost. You've brought them to a place where, if you never touched them again, they've profited from what you've done. If you're going further, you're going deeper. To understand the idea behind this, you have to understand the deepening that the third hour is bringing in.
Did it occur to you perhaps that the fourth hour was a summation hour? That is, it was the fourth hour, not the first hour you'd go on in these structures. Four times you have approached the skull and added something to it. And every one of those four hours that you have given has had to do with the horizontalization of the pelvis. Every one of them has built up, or should have in your mind, the outstanding importance of the pelvis as a piece of structure in the body. Here we are talking about putting in ten hours straightening the body. And four of them, forty percent, have gone now and we haven't done one doggone thing except look at that pelvis and find out what was holding it and where it was being held.
The quadratus lumborum is the key to that whole business of whether you can get the shoulder girdle up and the pelvic girdle down. And it is the key through the mechanism of the twelfth rib, plus the eleventh rib, plus the tenth rib, because the eleventh and tenth aren't going to be where they belong if the twelfth isn't where it belongs. It establishes the kind of spanning which gives you the length you need. And it is the first time that you've really gone deep into that body. You have taken that body and like an onion peeled it from the outside. But never have you peeled very deeply yet. In the third hour, you begin to peel more deeply.
You have got to go across. This is a shortened and distorted quadratus lumborum. So the third hour becomes basically the hour of the quadratus. And realize what that is going. You were playing with superficial fascia, basically. Now you're beginning to get into deep structures.
This is the stuff that you are dealing with in the third hour. You're trying to get that ordered. You're trying to get that patterned. And along about the time that you have the job done, you've got your third hour done. In fact, you may have to take more than that one hour to do it. But now open your Lockharts and look at the way stuff is attached around the anterior superior iliac spine, because this is the ilium too. And you can't put pressure one place on that ilium without your getting pressure other places on that ilium. They're all the same bone.
If something has knocked the twelfth rib out of place, you cannot get the spanning that's necessary to hold the whole outer surface of that body apart. You can't get the spanning in the lumbar fascia if it has no span there at the level of the quadratus. And if you don't have that kind of spanning, you're going to be in trouble with all your obliques, because all those obliques will have reinforced themselves to try to take the place of the quadratus, which has gone off its face. Another thing that happens to the quadratus is just exactly what happens to the other extensor muscles of the back. It wanders too far lateral. And part of your informational job in the third hour is to know where the quadratus should be in terms of the crest of the ileum.
Somebody forgets to be the king of these hours. This is the reason why over and over again we keep coming back to be sure that they look at that bunch of keys that they have in their hand and they see one labeled third hour, and they use it in the third hour and not in the fifth hour. The third hour is where the real block concept really starts to come in. Because the real block is deeper than the first hour. The first real block is that quadratus lumborum. Here's where you begin to go down to the deeper structure which determines the relation of the thorax to the pelvis.
The quadratus is sort of the meat in the sandwich. You got erectors behind, quadratus in the middle, and psoas in the front. Before you can get that quadratus to span properly, you have to free the shoulders from the thorax, because they're still weighing it down. If your quadratus is really badly aberrated, your twelfth rib is aberrated, your eleventh rib is probably aberrated. Those are floating ribs, and that quadratus would have brought them down, brought them toward the pelvis. Consequently, you don't have what this guy likes to call spanning.
In private practice when I'm working with people, when I get to the end of the third hour, I tell them, if you're gonna get off, get off here. Because after this, I want a commitment that I'm going to be able to do ten sessions. So three to me serves as a place — okay, you've had the experience, you know by now whether it's your cup of tea — and what I want is a contract that we're going all the way if you go past this place. The third hour is a milepost. You've brought them to a place where you can never touch them again and they've profited from what you've done. And if you're going further, you're going deeper.
There is a tendency that all of us have to think about the first three sessions primarily in terms of freeing. And at the third hour, you begin to approach something that really needs to be stressed — the whole organizational aspect of it — in that you're really knitting the anterior and posterior surfaces of the body together. In other words, it's not just the separation. You're also relating the work you've done in the first hour and the second at that very crucial lateral moment.
I used to feel I went until I started looking at the midline. You just see the shortness of the midline. You can't let people walk around like that. So we have a fourth hour to go after that midline. As I said, the feeling after that third hour is chunky. I felt stacked up alright, but I didn't feel real loose with the stacked up. It was like stacked up and with glue on it.
Up until this point you've been dealing with levels like the lumbar fascia, for instance, if you went down the back and lengthened the lumbar fascia. But you never got as deep as the quadratus before. So now, in order to get to the causal situation in the pelvis, you go in as far as the depth of the quadratus, and that's the third hour.
In that third hour, you're going up, and you're again trying to relate those same old two things, the diaphragm and the psoas. And you're recognizing the amount of tie-up that there is in that diaphragm that deals with the length of the sides, that is anchored by the length of the sides. You can't get the diaphragm where you want the diaphragm until you have length enough in the sides to stick that thing in where it belongs. That diaphragm, after all, attaches down as far as the second lumbar. So one of the things you've gotta do is to start getting those lumbar back in order to give yourself the place where the diaphragm can fit.
This guy gets up from the third hour. You look at him and you say, that anterior superior spine is really in a mess. If I come back and try to do a fourth hour with that anterior superior spine caught up like this, I'm gonna have trouble. I doubt if there's any other one place in the body where, in as brief an area, you have as much going on in terms of how the body is held. You have the sartorius, the rectus femoris, the fascia lata — here's the whole leg all hooked right in good and tight. And relating, tying it in, is the gluteus medius at a deeper level, and the iliacus at a still deeper level. And as your iliacus is held, so must your psoas be held, because of the common tendon that they share.
If you do the eighth hour on the third hour, you cannot do the third hour on the eighth hour. There's only one time you can do the third hour, and that's after the second hour and before the fourth hour.
I look at a man and I see that somewhere around his waist there is a sudden indentation — that a man starts here and then goes in. It's only by making for this spanning, just like we make for the spanning of the rectus, that you change that. And you have got to be on the iliac crest. The lumbodorsal fascia by itself doesn't do one darn thing for you.
That quadratus that connects the crest of the ileum and the twelfth rib — you get it standing out by your very effortful work there. It begins to do its function of supporting the twelfth rib instead of hanging on to it. Almost every hour so far ends with some major structure which connects the two body segments together. And in hour three, it happens to be the quadratus and the crest of the ilium and the twelfth rib.
This will be the first hour where we do any deep work, when we start to work with the attachment of quadratus lumborum to the pelvis and the twelfth rib — not only to lengthen the sides, which are now short relatively since we've lengthened the front and back in one and two, but because we want to do everything we can for the future to free up the pelvis. The quadratus seems to be one of the keys of really getting the pelvis into a position where we can work with it and place it in a functional position.
The twelfth rib and the fibula are about the most vulnerable structures inside the skin. There's nothing to balance the balance of the ribs going up from the twelfth. Because the position of that twelfth rib, anchored there in that connective tissue, is the sturdy base on which the upper ribs sit. And as you look at this rib cage, you begin to need to understand that sturdiness is not necessarily solidity. Sturdiness can be and is balanced just as much as it is solidity. Your rib cage isn't being balanced on bones. It's being balanced on the relation of bones, which is determined by connective tissue.
One of the things you need to look at in Rolfing technique is that you start with the periphery of the body and work in. When you begin to get to the quadratus, which you are doing in that third hour, you are allowing the quadratus to take its place within the structure. And when that happens, the structure is now able to come to a different relationship within itself. Because you are beginning — this is the first step toward getting the inside out.
In that third hour you are definitely dealing with the iliacus. You deal with it up at the top where it attaches quite close to the crest on the inside. You deal with it around the anterior superior spine. And the anterior superior spine is one of the most important of all the hang-ups of the pelvis. That anterior superior spine hangs up the pelvis at the bottom and hangs up the pelvis at the top — hangs the pelvis, period. If you're really clearing out around there, there are five different muscles attaching at that anterior superior spine: the gluteus minimus, the tensor fasciae latae, the sartorius, the iliacus, and part of the quadratus. This is what I'm talking about when I'm talking about how it gets darned in.
You are given the great privilege of changing bodies. You are given the great responsibility of knowing what you can change and what at a given moment you cannot change. This is your dual role. There was a very wise osteopath in that class and he said, Doctor, the trouble is you have forgotten to put in some compound essence of time in your prescription. You have to have some compound essence of time in there.
It once came to me that if heaven really comes to you, in the seventh hour you get a good glimpse of it. How about the fourth? It's almost the other end of the line. Very Christian. You go through purgatory. Before Rolfing I used to have a very distinct sense of top and bottom, and somewhere along the line that really changed. Beyond the fifth hour, that sense of unifying connection was made — through those three sets of muscles, the quadratus lumborum in the back, the psoas in the middle, and the rectus abdominis in the front. Some kind of lengthening and connecting process from top to bottom takes place, and a balance among those three as well.
You work on the lateral line between the head of the humerus and the trochanter of the femur to establish a lateral line. With respect to the front line and the back line of the body, you establish a lateral line down the side of the body on each side. You begin going in deep. We're talking about the same area we were talking about in number two — that strap that comes down in the back — except going into a deeper layer of that strap, the quadratus lumborum, which goes right from the crest of the ilium up to the twelfth rib. And that muscle often seems to be about like a piece of dried leather, and the twelfth rib really gets yanked down sometimes.
You couldn't get very wide adjustment because you couldn't get the pelvis dropping down and back when all of that soft tissue and that pressure was keeping the mounding along the top of the pelvis. So now if you get some of that mounding out of the top of the pelvis, you will be able to get something. And this you are doing in the third hour when you lay them on their side and you begin to separate from the lateral lines. You have got to go across.
In the third hour, we decided yesterday that we lengthened the quadratus and that this was the key of the third hour. I'm not letting you off that hook — that's a good hook. You should hang on there for what else happened. When I got off the table at the end of the third hour, I had that really solid feeling of organization.
Session Four
The fourth hour is where we stop circling the body and finally enter it. Having opened the outside in hours one through three, we turn to the medial line — the inside of the legs, the adductors, the floor of the pelvis. This is the port of entry to the core. What follows is Ida's own map of that threshold.
Fourth hour. Now you begin to go down and get to what you've really been gunning for since the first time you laid your hand on that individual. You begin to take a precise look at the immediate problems, the adjacent problems, the contained problems of the pelvis. How to get it horizontal.
Everybody who comes in for a fourth hour shows one picture. They show a picture of lack of length in that midline. Most of the time, this lack of length is advertised by the crookedness of the medial line of the legs. And by golly, if somebody comes in for a fourth hour and doesn't show this, some Rolfer has been falling down on the job.
You don't need to ask him what hour he's had. If those medial aspects look like all the medial aspects you saw yesterday, you simply start in giving him a fourth hour. And if they don't look like that, you don't give him a fourth hour. He may tell me he needs a fourth hour, but if his legs don't look like that, don't believe him. Look first.
Your center line connects down the inside of the leg. Your center line is destroyed as weight goes onto the outer arch.
In the fourth hour, it becomes apparent that you have been working on the outside of the body and that the midline has been neglected. For the most part, what you see is a sort of thumbscrew up there between the groin a little further back that feels too tight. You want to loosen it so they can have a little more room going down that adductor structure.
When you go in there you have nothing but a slick sheet — a sheet covered like a sheet of iron, like a sheet of plastic. You have to start dividing that sheet. It's not a sheet of glass, it's a mixed-up group of tendons. You have to go into the mixed-up group of tendons and get an ordered group of tendons, and you can do it best by going in from the inside of the leg.
In the fourth hour, you're doing a job on adductors. Again, you are straightening legs, but you're doing much more than that. You're organizing core. Because until you get to that fourth-hour adductor organization, you have nothing through which to get to the floor of the pelvis.
If you really establish the medial line of the body, you will have established the pelvic floor. Quite true, the pelvic floor is your goal, but it's not a separate goal. It's just the end point of a road. And if you go along that road, you can't help getting to that end point if you go far enough.
In order to really get the floor of the pelvis organized, you have to approach it from a triangular set of premises. The first thing you've got to do is to get yourself a decent set of adductors — to lengthen the inside of the leg, to lengthen the middle line of the body, so that you have a decent set of adductors there to serve as structural uplift.
When you have mounds of stuff lying along the lame eye or around the hip joint in the third hour, the rami in the fourth hour, the knees, the adductors — when you have a storage situation going on in there, you do not have the kind of situation that you can call on to give you a horizontal floor.
Have you ever noticed how when I walk at the end of a really good fourth hour, the leg sets back with each step?
I do not know, as I've said before, the precise mechanism whereby you get that setting back. But I know that you do get it. You don't always get it in the fourth hour because sometimes there's so very much change to be made. But you're always on your way to it in the fourth hour. And if you're not on your way to it in the fourth hour, you are not doing a good fourth hour.
That fourth hour becomes the port of entry to this harbor of greater tone.
The fourth hour does a very great deal toward making physically intolerable marriages physically tolerable. A certain peace and quiet settles into these marriages, and they either are willing to adapt or they're going to really split. But at any rate, they're no longer sitting on the fence. They now have the physical data which enables them to make up their mind.
You won't be able to do your first hour properly if they haven't done your fourth hour properly.
Sometimes they'll feel happy if you get them the third hour with their lift out. And then by the time you get to the fourth hour they're not happy again — they've got pain in their leg or something. Put the lift back. Don't force the issue. Take out half at a time. Take it out of one pair of shoes and not out of another pair of shoes.
You're not going to get the kind of results that you need in a fifth hour situation if you haven't given it the opportunity in the fourth hour. Even though it may look as though at that fourth hour you really should be going back and repeating the third hour or something — you can't do these things. You just have to keep adding to it.
In the fifth hour, you're working your way upward out of the pelvis into the structures whose well-being depends upon the positioning of the pelvis. Your fourth hour has taken on the positioning of the floor of the pelvis. The fifth hour begins to turn it up in the front so that it has support under the abdominal organs.
This is what structural integration is about. It's not about the second hour or the third hour or the fourth hour. It's about how segments of the body are joined and how they are able to move in relation each to each.
Horizontalizing the pelvis is the goal of the first hour, the second hour, the third hour, the fourth hour, the fifth, sixth, and seventh hours, the eighth, ninth, and tenth hours. And that isn't turning the pelvis under.
The fourth hour was in the context of general preparation of the entire structure of the body — lengthening, loosening, widening at a most superficial level. By the end of the fourth, the loosening and the freeing has taken place. What emerges as the fifth is the only area that hadn't been worked on, that is the anterior aspect of it. The fifth is a something which connects with hamstrings, because it's the hamstrings that get you into more trouble with pelvis. Most anything else, you pick the head thing today and tomorrow it's right back where it was before. These are uninterrupted muscles. The extensors of the back are interrupted muscles — they attach here and they attach there, and one segment can be off and the other segment not nearly so off. But with the hamstrings, you're stuck. There's just three places where you can affect the hamstrings: the ischial tuberosity — most important — those elements of the hamstrings in the middle of the thigh, and the knee. Those are the only three places where you can really go to town on a hamstring.
In practical terms, you're going to find yourselves dividing into two classes in the fourth hour. There's a bunch of guys that get on the ankles and are completely unhappy unless they can get the foot and the lower leg lined up. You move along the road of organizing the leg, you are now organizing practically all of the leg beneath the pelvis. And then the pelvis clicks. Why? Because the floor of the pelvis connects with the leg and connects with the spine. Around and around and around we go.
There's another important reason for working with piriformis, and that is it's coming from the inside of the pelvis to the outside. This is why you give a lot of physiological changes in people. The obturator internus comes from way in here out to here, and the obturator fascia, which is almost a thickened fascia around the obturator internus, is actually the attachment of the iliococcygeus muscle. So you can actually affect tone of the pelvic floor by just working on that one particular fascial reflex. You're not just working on a muscle, you're working on an awful lot.
The look of that anterior superior spine is your key as to how well you have done your job in that third hour. Each one of these hours, if you are sufficiently familiar, will have these very specific markers. To the extent that you get this little band across freed, you are more aware of the hooking down of the fourth hour through the adductor group. You can just look at those legs in your mind's eye, and you can see the muscles that you've handled in the third hour — the sartorius, the rectus femoris, the fascia lata, the tensor. And you can see how the next thing to do is to go down to a slightly deeper level, where all those adductors are really a little more central.
The feeling after that third hour is chunky. I felt stacked up alright, but I didn't feel real loose with the stacked up. It was like stacked up with glue on it. You can see that whole midline pulled down — it's just very solid. There isn't a lot of stretch through the middle of the body, middle of the trunk. So in the fourth hour, you begin to go to work on that interior of the leg. One of the things you're looking for in the fourth hour is more and better horizontality in the ankle and the angle. The key to this hour is the adductors, which run up the inside of the leg and attach along the ramus. So this hour is again preparing pelvis — this time from below and inside instead of below and outside the way you were working in the first and third hour.
Psychologically, it almost seems that more the pattern is that we're sucked up into the midline. We're not quite ready to let our legs come down to earth. People could be pulled down into their ankles too, but in any case, that midline usually looks short. Another source has said one time — the pubococcygeus, that's the goal. We're to separate the adductors and the PC so that the floor of pelvis can come into its own.
The problem in the fifth hour is lifting the pubes in order to make it possible for that pelvic floor to get into a horizontal position and stay there. And where do you start? Up here. You go down letting out that rectus abdominis all the way along from the origin to the insertion. If someone's into developing their body with sit-ups, usually they're so aberrated that they can't lift the pubes by shortening their recti. The rectus balances with the psoas. The psoas is possibly the most important structural unit in the body, because it goes from the leg — it's outside the trunk — it crosses into the trunk and originates in front of the upper lumbar spine. It mostly zags and not zigs across the pelvis so that it can cross the line of the pubes and then attach to the legs. I used to teach the psoas as being an antagonist of the rectus. But how can that be? Antagonists can't be practically lying next to each other. As the rectus arises from the pubes and the psoas crosses the pubes, they are just neighbors, practically immediate neighbors. How can they act as antagonists? Somehow in a healthy body, neither one of those muscles functions independently. Always they are evoking an antagonistic action from each other.
By this fifth hour, if you've done your job properly, even if they've got a great, big, deep belly — and there aren't that many abdomens around where in the fifth hour the work has been done — you get your hands in there, and by this greatest of all flesh stimuli, you get more energy into that psoas. And lo and behold, the lumbar can drop back, because it is the psoas held on the front, the psoas unable to do its stuff, the psoas unable to battle with the everlasting heaving and hawing of the recti, that is what is holding. Until you get some resilience in that psoas, you can't get your lumbars to drop back. Heretofore, comparatively, we have been talking about lifeless tissue when we talked about the muscles of the leg, compared with the life and the change and the vitality and the vital importance of the psoas.
In the third hour you had no way of influencing the psoas. By this time you and that psoas should be getting acquainted. Visualize into your fingertips what happens when a psoas is out of condition and out of commission. The answer is it gets glued to the front of the lumbar spine, and it shortens. As it deteriorates, it shortens. In shortening, it's going to pull some of those vertebrae and jam all of those vertebrae together. So the first place you go is the lumbar spine. Get that lumbar spine really viable — making a lumbar spine out of it, not just a piece of connecting wood. Then you begin getting a different level of physiological operation in that psoas.
In order to really get the floor of the pelvis organized, you have to approach it from a sort of triangular set of premises. The first thing you've got to do is to get yourself a decent set of adductors, to lengthen the inside of the leg, to lengthen the middle line of the body so that you have a decent set of adductors there to serve as structural uplift. See how from the first hour you have been trying to build structure under the pelvis. In that first hour, down as far as the knees, you built from the outside — from the abductors, from the hamstrings, which is the back of the pelvis. In the second hour, you were only influencing the pelvis indirectly from what was below the knees, but you were influencing it. In the third hour, you were very deliberately influencing it from the abductor structure, lengthening the outside of the leg so that when you got to the inside of the leg, you had a guideline established already. That's the fourth hour.
How do you define a pelvis as being horizontal? The pubes in line with the second segment of the coccyx — and the underpants line.
In the fourth hour, what we see is that there's no medial midline and we want to begin to create that, and we see rotations that are coming out more in the ankle and the knees. This is an hour that I'm going to be able to affect three joints — the knee, the ankle, and the pelvis. If you follow the inside of the thigh vertically, where does it go? It's going into the belly. It's going right up the front of the spine, and that's where you see the shortness, through that whole aspect of the body inside. What you want to do is start creating that midline and start moving things that way. That's the way the tissue wants to go. Essentially, you're trying to let out that shortness that you see from the floor to the diaphragm.
What we usually see when a person comes in after a third hour is that there's a shortness in the midline of their legs. There's a cockeyed crookedness in the leg. There's a corkscrew effect on the leg itself, and there's also a shortness and a bunching up around the ramus. You can actually see it.
My statement shows my view of the fourth hour is still one-sided because I'm still thinking of it too much in terms of the legs. You can afford to think of the legs in the fourth hour — that's what comes in. But you are affecting the muscles that go into the floor of the pelvis. You're also affecting the muscles that go up from the neck to the occiput. It's right down the back.
When you have them pull their legs up, you see what's happening. You see how the ischial tuberosities are placed with respect to each other — see if they're too close to the other or too wide, or maybe one is closer than the other. You see if their gluteals are spreading as they pull their knees up to their chest, as they should. You see if there's a fluid movement of the tuberosities as they're pulling their legs up. You want to get that. And you see what is happening in the hamstrings — if they're grabbing as they're pulling up. You just go in and you get those places where they're short.
Occasionally — more than occasionally, frequently — you get this break between the fifth and the sixth rib, a structural break. The fifth rib comes down over the sixth, or it's twisted. You've got to do what you can to put them together into a viable structure. Then you work on the rectus abdominis by lifting it headwards and ceilingwards with that finger motion, starting at the costal arch and going down to the pubes, giving that lift, stretch, length. You never want to spread on the rectus abdominis. Why? The linea alba can be ruptured very easily — the whole thing can come apart. All the fibers are vertical, so you don't want to spread them. Then, having done that, you're at the pubes, and you really have to clean off the pubes. As the body collapses towards its central areas, the pubes are stuck in the middle. So there's always a lot of gunk chunked up on the pubes.
You don't go looking for that psoas early on. You wait certainly beyond your fourth hour. You wait probably beyond your fifth hour before you begin to look to modify the place of the psoas. In that time, you have turned the pelvis under, and in turning the pelvis under, changed the chemistry and the physics of that whole area. Your fingers tell you that if you've been following it along. You aren't ready to go into that psoas until this change has happened, at which time the actual physical stuff in there is just in a different level of tone.
As you have an anterior pelvis, there's going to be a lot more strain on that inguinal ligament than there will be once you start turning it under. There is no use sending a man to get a surgical repair of a hernia until you've got a pelvis appropriately turned under. Tell him to wait until you've got that structure organized so that the surgical repair can then function. This is the story of why it's recurrent. If the pelvis is turned down this way, the strain on that area is just the same after the surgical repair, or even perhaps a little more than it was before.
You've first gone into the floor of the pelvis very primitively. You have actually approached it in terms of the muscles which literally attach at the edges of the floor of the pelvis, which is logical. This has been your fourth hour, and you've gone all around it. You've made your first step into the area by way of the adductors, all of the adductors. Because it is the adductors that are most intimately attached to the actual muscles which constitute the floor. Then you realize that by the time you get to the adductor magnus, you're not really in a true adductor in the sense that it attaches to the ischial tuberosity, and it is the immediate neighbor of the hamstrings. Its function is not that different from the hamstrings. I'm not quite sure as to why it was named as an adductor.
In that fourth hour — and let's settle this once and for all now — we are going to do the abductors. We are going to finish with the hamstrings. By the time you've done all that, those subjects of yours have had it. You better bring them to a place of balance where you can terminate the hour appropriately with the pelvic lift and something to organize the neck, and call it a day.
The pelvic floor — it's not those half dozen muscles which we named as being the pelvic floor. Not at all. It's the sacroiliac articulation. It's the articulation between the fifth lumbar and the sacrum. It's the articulation between the fourth lumbar and the fifth lumbar. Just as soon as you shift any of those lumbars on any of those lumbars, you're going to get a different relationship in that pelvic floor. Just as soon as you take on the type of athletic training which shortens and tightens the hamstrings to the exclusion of their antagonists, you're going to interfere with that pelvic floor. Just as soon as you do any of these habitual postures that spread the knees wide, thereby shortening the adductors and altering the hamstring relationship, you're going to interfere with that pelvic floor.
My theory goes along with a tight ass. As you are sucking in at the anus and therefore at the gluteus, you are pulling out this way all the time — which is where we came from anyway. In a sense it may be that the legs never came forward to allow the space for the lateral rotators to develop to their fullest. They didn't have permission to move their pelvis. I did a lot of looking when I was in Mexico, and at first I thought that particularly among the male population, they certainly moved their pelvises a lot more than the old American male. But then I found, as I watched more, that they had just different problems. That sucked-in part seems to be more typical of certain parts of this country. You don't see it in Greenwich Village.
Often the reason we can't get to the hamstrings is because we start too high. Part of it is the fact that the adductor magnus lies underneath the hamstrings, which is certainly something I never thought of, and you can't really get the hamstrings moving until you lift them off the adductor magnus underneath. The hamstrings are literally glued down on the other side to the adductor magnus. The adductor magnus is totally underneath the hamstrings, and indeed ends up attaching over there in conjunction with the origin of the vastus lateralis. So it makes a lot more sense now why we are having the difficulty — because we are not lifting it, we are not getting a wide enough view.
This is showing the back of the pelvis, and you see how the fascia tends to go right with the leg out to the side — the way the leg always fell, which makes sense when you figure that all the muscle development is back here. When we rotated the legs inward, we immediately got an anterior pull. They tilted forward. You can see the beginning of the strain where ultimately this actually develops into a strap that holds the bottom of the gluteal fold. The bottom of the gluteal fold is not the gluteus maximus — it's rather the strap, and the gluteal fold really doesn't go with the gluteus maximus.
By the time you get a horizontal pelvis, you're on your way to removing the strain from the contents of the pelvis. What goes on in that reproductive system? Simply reproduction? Not on your life. The livingness of the being goes on in the pelvic area. Through hormonal secretion and control. The sex hormones, which the ordinary person thinks of as having to do with physical reproduction of a human being — that is a very small, limited-in-time part of their job. Their job is to contribute vitality to the human being for the rest of his life. Don't get any simplified notions as to what a pelvis is about. It is your livingness that depends on your pelvis. And if you want to add to your livingness, the first thing you've got to do is to add to the ease of the pelvis and the pelvic contents. You accomplish this by horizontalizing that pelvis.
In the fifth hour, the chief power should be the clearing up of the groin, the clarification of the groin. The groin is kept from clarifying by the deterioration of the psoas as it crosses and goes into its insertion at the lesser trochanter. If between the lesser trochanter and the crest and the pubic arch you don't have an adequate resilience for that psoas, you're going to have a very jammed-up groin. In that fifth hour, if you've done your stuff properly, you begin to get that sense of a groin that knows its business. It comes out. It gets long. It actually starts to kind of hinge.
You will find pubes in the strangest places. They may be almost literally projecting outside the abdominal wall, and they may be so deep in that it's all you can do, searching with your fingers to find them. You say, my God, the guy's lost his pubes. It may take a considerable search to find it. In either of those situations, when you have cleared the psoas and the rectus, either one will come to a midpoint, to a balance at a midline where you find it easily with your fingers and it talks to you, and your fingers can differentiate between rectus attachment and psoas transmission. Sometimes you'll find that the whole pubic structure just dives down on one side. You can't find it on one side, and it's in a perfectly normal position on the other side. The guy has trouble with his walking, and he doesn't know why. He has pain in one hip, and he doesn't know why. All of these things, your fingers are going to learn about.
Session Five
The fifth hour is where Ida's work meets the core. The psoas — that strange muscle crossing from inside to outside, link between leg and diaphragm — is the heart of it. What follows is her insistence that you cannot fake this hour, cannot postpone it, cannot get it back later. Get in there.
The psoas is possibly the most important structural unit in the body. One of the reasons is that it goes from the leg and is outside the trunk, crosses into the trunk and really originates in front of the upper lumbar spine. It zigzags across — mostly zags, not zigs — across the pelvis so that it can cross the line of the pubes and then attach to the legs, which are independent.
The muscles that go from the inside to the outside of the body are few and far between, and they have very significant functions. The primary one is the psoas.
This fifth hour has to do with the horizontalizing of the floor of the pelvis. I haven't heard anything in this class — nor do I hear much in any class, come to think of it — to indicate that you people recognize that it is the floor of the pelvis that is the vital structure in this trip. We talk about pelvis. We are really talking about the floor of the pelvis.
In this fifth hour, you are working your way upward out of the pelvis into the structures whose well-being depends upon the positioning of the pelvis. Your fourth hour has taken on the positioning of the floor of the pelvis. The fifth hour begins to turn it up in the front so that it has support under the abdominal organs.
The psoas is the motor link, the connecting link, between the legs and the diaphragm and the rib cage. In other words, it is the thing that holds the top and the bottom together.
Always you have this polarity going on between the diaphragm and the psoas — that's what keeps the body upright, that's what keeps a trunk organized. And when you come right down to it, that pelvic lift, every time you come to it, is relating the psoas to the diaphragm.
When I used to try to simplify things, I would think of the psoas and teach the psoas as the antagonist of the rectus. But how can that be? Antagonists can't be lying practically next to each other. And yet somehow they act this way in a healthy body — neither one of those muscles functions independently. Always they are evoking an antagonistic action from the other.
You cannot organize a psoas until you organize the rectus. And you cannot organize the rectus until you organize the psoas.
The psoas is unique in many respects. In the first place, it has a motor function. But it has a different quality about it than a motor muscle, because it is so intimately connected with the autonomic nervous system — the lumbar plexus is practically embedded on its surface. Therefore anything that exercises the psoas, that gives the pumping function which changes the metabolism of an area, is going to affect the metabolism of the lumbar plexus.
The lumbar plexus lies on the surface of the psoas. All stretching and contracting of the psoas literally exercises the tissues around the lumbar plexus, brings more metabolic material to it, gives it more opportunity to build itself up.
Visualize into your fingertips: what happens when a psoas is out of condition and out of commission? The answer is, it gets glued to the front of the lumbar spine and it shortens. As it deteriorates, it shortens. And in shortening, it is going to pull some of those vertebrae forward and jam all of those vertebrae together.
In order for those lumbars to have strength, they have got to be supported and webbed from the front. The shortening of the psoas has pulled that webbing away from the front of the lumbar. So you look at them and you say, there are great weaknesses in the lumbar — and what has happened is that somebody pinched the support for the lumbar and put it somewhere else where it couldn't work.
Until you free that psoas as it crosses the pubes — until you have got something resilient there, something that moves under your fingers, something that says to you it is live tissue — the lumbar does not move back.
The fifth hour should emphasize the clarification of the groin. The groin is kept from clarifying by the deterioration of the psoas as it crosses and goes into its insertion at the lesser trochanter. If between the lesser trochanter and the crest and the pubic arch you don't have an adequate resilience for that psoas, you are going to have a very jammed-up groin. In that fifth hour, if you've done your stuff properly, you begin to get that sense of a groin that knows its business. It comes out. It gets long.
When you work in that abdomen in the fifth hour, you should be working sufficiently deeply that you can contact the anterior surface of the spine with your fingers. You can't always do that in the first fifth hour — sometimes the belly wall is so aberrated, or there is so much scar tissue, that you can't get through. But in theory, your hands are going down and they are going to get onto that psoas, and you are going to stretch it up and down, use it, excite it, awaken it.
You have been working on these bodies. I could point out one after another after another who I see as not having really reached the source. You're going after it, but you haven't gotten any. And if I had the time and the energy, I would put you one after the other on the table and I would go to that psoas, and you would scream — but you would get up vertically.
They haven't gotten the recognition of the fact that if they don't get that psoas moving in the fifth hour, they have missed the boat. They've missed it forever. There is no later point at which you will get a psoas moving. You gear it in. You have got to get it in the fifth hour.
In your scraping, it isn't that you scrape the psoas off, but that you scrape some energy into the deteriorated structure.
You start the fifth hour going to the origin of the rectus on the fifth rib. You keep working it, clean it as best you may. If you start working down low, you may put so much strain on the recti right there that you contribute to a spreading or herniation of those two pieces. But if you get enough resilience from the top, where it's perfectly safe, then it is safe to go down lower.
In lifting the thorax, what you are really trying to do is to establish a reciprocal relationship between rectus abdominis and the psoas, so that as one lengthens, the other adjusts. Either one could do its stuff, and the other has to adjust.
If a relatively random body tries to do a sit-up, everything shortens. The psoas shortens while it can. The recti shorten more than they can. That is the pattern of the random body. But the proper pattern is that if you flex across this joint, the psoas should lengthen and fall back.
This is something nobody believes, because nobody has ever really seen it. They see it once in a while and say, how graceful. But it doesn't occur to them that this is normal movement — that the psoas has got to lengthen and fall back as you flex this joint.
From the first day, somebody should have been oohing and ahhing when the belly wall falls back in breathing instead of mounding up. And somebody should have been saying, ah — now the psoas is participating. As the belly wall falls back, you have evidence that the psoas is beginning to act with the recti. I don't care whether it is inhalation or exhalation. The belly wall should fall back in both.
As you see that belly wall fall back, you are entitled to say: Eureka, I have made it. Because now you are beginning to call on the psoas to take its place in the line.
Back in the 1880s or '90s, a man named Head observed that with an agonist and antagonist combination — any two muscles working synergistically — when you have a distortion of one, a shortening or thickening or deterioration, and you direct effort into it, the effort first goes into that thickened member, and it can't go further. So as soon as you get the body distorted by push-ups and pull-ups, the minute you make effort, you go into that distorted rectus abdominis. The effort does not go into the weaker member, which in this case is the psoas.
The rectus is the muscle we train in all our orthodox physical training programs. All the push-ups, all the pull-ups, every last one of them is designed to shorten and to thicken. The more you shorten and thicken the rectus, the more you gear out the psoas and its function, letting it little by little completely deteriorate, so that you have no appropriate metabolic support for your nerve center.
Exercising a psoas does not mean doing push-ups. Exercising a psoas means that when you walk, you walk properly. When you breathe, you breathe properly. By proper, I mean in accordance with the physiological design, the anatomical design. That is what evokes the activity, and therefore the well-being, of the psoas. This whole idea is honored in its absence, not in its presence, in this culture.
As people have a history of more and better walking, then you begin to see the action at the groin. You begin to see the psoas sweeping the thigh forward as far as the knee. There the psoas stops acting and you stop flexing. You don't try to handle your leg. You only go as far as the activity of the psoas goes.
Astaire knew, consciously or unconsciously, that leg movement does not start with the rectus femoris. It starts with the knees — because that is where it starts when you really get the psoas integrated into the picture. Astaire knew this, and this was the grace of his dancing.
In the random body, you do your walking with a great injection of the rectus femoris. But when you have the Line, you don't. That is what the Rolf Line is about — to swap off the interjection of the rectus femoris and put in its place the psoas.
It was so obvious — and it is always obvious in a scoliosis — that the problem is in the psoas. There has never been a scoliosis on this earth where the problem wasn't in the psoas.
Don't let me catch you telling these people to control their respiration. You control it by virtue of what you do with their thorax, with the individual ribs that have gotten into trouble, with the position of the diaphragm, with the extent to which the diaphragm is hooked down next to the psoas, with the extent to which the psoas is shortened so that the crura of the diaphragm aren't able to lie back against the spine. This is where and how you control the various systems of the body.
I remember in the old days, when I was developing this, I was amazed that many heart conditions didn't respond until you got into the fourth and fifth hour, when you got down to what I thought was the attachment of the rectus. I didn't understand this. But now I say I wasn't dealing with the rectus at all. I was dealing with the psoas, and with the diaphragm.
You are not going to get the kind of results you need in a fifth-hour situation if you hadn't given it the opportunity in the fourth hour. Even though it may look as though at the fourth hour you should really be going back and repeating the third hour or something — you can't do these things. You just have to keep adding to it.
Very often you people will find that between the fourth and the fifth hour, you get a recurrence of the symptom that brought them in. Why? Because there is just too heavy a dose of toxins thrown in in the course of exchanging the stuff that you are breaking down for new stuff.
What happens to your recipe is that you don't put in enough. You didn't put in enough fifth hour into that guy. And so when you get to the sixth or the seventh and the eighth hour, with all the gone-bys, you still didn't.
To free the psoas — not to place the psoas. That original pelvic lift was placing the psoas as best you might at that level. Always, pelvic lifts are placing the psoas as best you may at the level you are at the moment.
The importance of your work on the recti is to so organize the rectus and the psoas as to make one mechanism, one system. Up to this point in the random body, it is not one system. There is no other single system in the body as important to the well-being of the body as this psoas-rectus combination.
The goal of the first hour, the second hour, the third hour, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, the eighth, the ninth, and the tenth hour is a freed and therefore more horizontal pelvis. A marbleization of the pelvis — getting movement into a place where movement should be, and where in about fifty percent of people, movement is not.
By this fifth hour, if you've done your job properly, you begin to find your psoas in streams. You get your hands in there, and by this greatest of all flesh stimulus, you get more energy into that solar plexus. And lo and behold, the lumbar can drop back, because it is the psoas that rules on the front. The psoas unable to do its stuff, the psoas unable to battle with the everlasting heaving and hawing — that is what is holding. I didn't say it was causing them; I said it was holding. And until you get some resilience in that psoas, you can't get your lumbars to do that. You realize that heretofore, comparatively, we have been talking about lifeless dreams when we talked about the muscles of the leg, compared with the life and the change and the vitality and the vital importance of the psoas.
The normal psoas works together with the rectus femoris — it lengthens. The only time it shortens is when it is not balanced. Your fourth hour and your fifth hour are really two halves of one hour. Your sixth hour is going to be another one of the same. These are key hours in the organization of the body — three keys — and they've all got to be put in at once and used at once. You must remember in your fifth hour to look to the insertion of the psoas at the lesser trochanter of the hip. If that tendon between the iliacus and the psoas is too short, there is no movement within it, no indication that there is an adjustment possible. This means you have a relative immobilization of what I think is the most important muscle of the body.
That original pelvic lift was placing the psoas as best you might at that level. Always pelvic lifts are placing the psoas as best you may at the level you are at the moment. But now you go into the deeper level: freeing the pelvis itself, the bony structure itself, to shift enough to give you a different relationship with respect to the psoas. And your different relationship depends to a large extent on the floor of the pelvis and how well organized it is. In turn, the floor of the pelvis and the way in which it becomes organized is a function of the adductors. Everything depends on everything else. So you begin to be freeing that very key muscle, the psoas — to free it, not to place it.
In practically all bodies, the psoas extends as far as the second lumbar; in some bodies, it goes as high as the first. The answer I'm trying to get you to make real is how the psoas really connects with the vertebra. It probably gets stuck to those vertebrae, and that condition of being stuck prevents it from acting freely as it should to keep those lumbars back. Anatomically, there is some space between the crura and the psoas — in theory. But in practice, when things get aberrated, they move around and become random. Work on the psoas frees the diaphragm. As people are worked on the psoas, their breathing frees — they get more movement in that diaphragm and the costal arch. It's important, working at the psoas, to get it not only in the lower part of the abdomen but also in the upper part near its origin. You have to go in almost under the cusp of origin to really get that.
As you step, if you're doing walking from the twelfth dorsal — if you continue with that thrusting of the knee forward, you begin to lift the knee. This is still shortening of the psoas. Bunch people up and let them just walk, and observe what is going on at the groin. You will find that just about all your auditors will have nothing going on, or very little going on. As people have a history of more and better walking, then you begin to see the acting at the groin. You begin to see the psoas sweeping the thigh forward as far as the knee. There the psoas stops acting, and you stop flexing. You don't try to handle your leg — you only go as far as the activity of the psoas goes. And the activity of the psoas goes from the twelfth dorsal to the knee. That's a long way. It doesn't fold by shortening; it folds by lengthening, by falling back and letting that groin have length to turn.
All the way along from the first day, somebody should have been oohing and aahing when the belly wall falls back in breathing instead of mounting up. As the belly wall falls back, you have evidence that the psoas is beginning to act with the recti. I don't care whether it's inhalation or exhalation — the belly wall should fall back in both. The importance of your work on the recti is in order to so organize the rectus and the psoas to make one mechanism, one system of it. Up to this point in the random body, it is not one system. There is no other single system in the body that is as important to the well-being of the body as this psoas-rectus combination. The psoas lies anterior on the spine, and the spine is well into the body. It's the key to the horizontal pelvis, and equally, the horizontal pelvis is the key to the effective interplay of psoas and rectus.
In a Rolfed body, as you walk, the flexion bringing the leg forward should be in the psoas. In an unRolfed body, the flexion is distributed between the rectus abdominis and the rectus femoris. This is why when you look at skiers, they have these enormous thighs. Many of our dancers have thighs out of all proportion to their body size. They started with relatively imbalanced structures, and they got hold of the one they could get hold of — the rectus femoris, that quadriceps structure of the legs, and the rectus abdominis. Just as soon as you begin to get relaxation in the rectus abdominis and the belly wall falls back, the psoas takes its place in the abdominal picture of what is going on in movement. When you give that pelvic lift, you are evoking the activity of the psoas. You are putting it into a new position. You are allowing the lumbars to go back and the psoas to exercise its webbing effect in front of them.
Visualize into your fingertips: what happens when a psoas is out of condition and out of commission? The answer is it gets glued to the front of the lumbar spine and it shortens. As it deteriorates, it shortens. And in shortening, it's going to pull some of those vertebrae forward and jam all of those vertebrae together. So the first place you go is the lumbar spine. Get that lumbar spine really viable — make it something that isn't just a piece of connecting wood. Then you begin getting a different level of physiological operation in that psoas. And if you've got a different level of physiological operation in that psoas, you're going to have a different level of physiological operation in all those lower plexi. Anything that happens in the psoas, anything that happens to the core of the diaphragm, has to reflect.
The rectus is the antagonist of the psoas. This is a fact which nobody seems to have ever put to work consistently. The psoas is a relatively unique structure in the body. When did you ever hear of an antagonist lying right next door to its agonist? Yet this is the way the thing works. As they cross the rim of the pelvis, the psoas is practically contiguous with the rectus. And I am telling you that these things are agonist and antagonist. The psoas does have a motor function, but it has a different quality about it than the ordinary motor muscle, because it is so intimately connected with the autonomic nervous system — the lumbar plexus is practically embedded on the surface of the psoas. Therefore, anything that exercises the psoas, that gives that pumping function, affects the autonomic system.
The fifth hour should emphasize the clearing up of the groin, the clarification of the groin. The groin is kept from clarifying by the deterioration of the psoas as it crosses and goes into its insertion at the lesser trochanter. If between the lesser trochanter and the crest and the pubic arch you don't have adequate resilience for that psoas, you're going to have a very jammed-up groin. In that fifth hour, if you've done your stuff properly, you begin to get that sense of a groin that knows its stuff — knows where and how it's going to work. It knows its business. It shows that it knows its business. It comes out, it gets long, it actually starts to hinge.
There's another function of the psoas you need to put in its place — the recognition that the psoas is the motor link, the connecting link, between the legs and the diaphragm and the rib cage. It's the thing that holds the top and the bottom together. Remember that the psoas attaches on the anterior aspect of the first, second, and third lumbars. The crura of the diaphragm lie immediately adjacent to it on the anterior surface of the first and second lumbars. So along about the time that you get your psoas pulled up, you've also got your diaphragm pulled up. I remember in the old days, how amazed I used to be that many heart conditions didn't respond until you got into the fourth and fifth hour. I thought I was dealing with the rectus. But now I say I wasn't dealing with the rectus at all — I was dealing with the psoas, including the diaphragm and the lumbar plexus, the whole rhythm of the heart control coming through there.
If you look from above down on the fifth hour, in lifting the thorax, what you are really trying to do is to establish a reciprocal relationship between the rectus abdominis and the psoas, so that as one lengthens the other adjusts — either one could do its stuff and the other has to adjust. There is a certain theoretical problem with calling rectus and psoas antagonists. But when you look at it this way, as the rectus adjusts in one direction, the psoas has to adjust to it. It may not be that when the rectus lengthens the psoas shortens, but adjustment necessarily has to occur there in an organized body. Goodheart shows that when you have the pelvis in a tipped alignment, the forces acting through the psoas sometimes accumulate to more than a ton — something on the order of 2,300 to 2,500 pounds of force exerted by the psoas. It's no little muscle. It's a huge, mighty mover if you get it into an aberrated position.
You don't go looking for the psoas early on. You wait certainly beyond your fourth hour. You probably wait beyond your fifth hour before you begin to look to modify the place of the psoas. By that time, you have turned the pelvis under, and in turning the pelvis under, you have changed the chemistry and the physics of that whole area. Your fingers tell you that if you've been following it along. You aren't ready to go into that psoas until this change has happened, at which time the actual physical stuff in there is just in a different level of tone. As you have an anterior pelvis, there's going to be a lot more strain on that inguinal ligament than there will be once you start turning it under. One reason we can do so much on the psoas is as long as you stay out toward the anterior superior spine, where there is no canal, you can put pressure in this region.
Somewhere along the line, my sense of top and bottom really changed. I think it was beyond the fifth hour that that sense of unifying connection was made, and I think it's made in those three sets of muscles — the quadratus lumborum in the back, the psoas in the middle, and the rectus abdominis in the front. Some kind of lengthening and connecting process from top to bottom takes place, and I have some sense of balance among those three as well. The relationship from middle and back that is created in the fifth hour — that's the heart of the fifth hour process. Four and five can be looked at as one hour. If you pull your perspective back, you get a sense of the three-dimensionality of the inside and the outside of the body, and that you're starting to organize one with respect to the other. Four and five are a continuum.
In that fifth hour, if you've done a good job, you can usually get right down to the psoas by going in under the rectus. But you've got to do a lot of work first just to free that psoas as it goes across the pubes. It's all part of that picture of getting the psoas and the rectus working together, which they haven't been able to do. Every time a kid is put through push-ups, he is shortening and thickening the rectus. In shortening and thickening the rectus, he is throwing the psoas out of the picture and permitting deterioration in the psoas. Along about the time he does that, he is permitting deterioration in that whole autonomic system, which is intimately bound up with the psoas in one or two of its plexi. You're really going after that psoas all the way along the line — from the place where it crosses over the pubes to the place where it attaches at the diaphragm.
What would be the outward sign that you have done your fifth hour well? What happens when you put a person on his back and ask them to lift their knees in the air? If the psoas is working, you can see how well it's working — by the way, the rectus does not belly up. You should have been able to get through that abdomen in that fifth hour to get behind the rectus, way back to the crura of the diaphragm. Every once in a while you get somebody with a nice, big abdominal wall, and it takes a lot of doing to get by it. But if you've done well by your rectus, even these mounded, heavy abdomens can get through. They just let you by. You're sliding between this, that, and the other special plane.
There's a function we need to get into — the rectus balances with the psoas. The psoas is possibly the most important structural unit in the body. One of the reasons is because it crosses from the leg, outside the trunk, into the trunk, and originates in front of the upper lumbar spine. It zigzags across the pelvis — mostly zags and not zigs — so that it can cross the line of the pubes and attach to the legs. Muscles that go from the inside to the outside of the body are few and far between, and have very significant functions. I used to teach the psoas as being an antagonist of the rectus. But how can that be? Antagonists can't be practically lying next to each other. As they are just neighbors, practically immediate neighbors, how can they act as antagonists? Somehow they act — in a healthy body, neither one of those muscles functions independently. Always they are evoking an antagonistic action from the other.
You get the interconnection between these three layers — erector spinae, quadratus lumborum, and psoas — by a very distinct fascial layer. The psoas has its own fascial covering on its ventral surface, which becomes continuous with the iliac fascia covering the iliacus. The fascia covering the erector spinae and quadratus lumborum is continuous with a pronounced layer connecting to the transverse processes. There's also a continuation forming the aponeurosis of the transversus abdominal muscle, continuing as the transversalis fascia all the way around and forming part of the underside of the rectus sheath. This shows structurally the relative potential function between the rectus abdominis and the psoas — another important continuity to consider when relating these muscles functionally.
If you lift the front of the thorax from the pelvis, the back of the thorax goes somewhat down. This means you have a different balance in the diaphragm. This means you're affecting respiration. This means you're not putting the strain on the horizontality of the pelvis. Up to this point you have rather consistently pulled the curtain across the back of the body — the organization with respect to the pelvis. Now you've got to take that curtain away and look at this carefully. You've got to look at the way the diaphragm sits next to the lumbar wall, and the way the psoas comes up and sits next to the core of the diaphragm. You're affecting the whole through the plexi on the anterior surface of the spine. You're not merely stimulating them, you are releasing them — releasing them from the atypical pulls that have gotten into those muscles. You are releasing strain from the solar plexus. And this you are getting into in the fifth hour.
When the person comes in for the fifth hour, the shortness really deep in their body is beginning to show, and it's in the core. The place it shows up most spectacularly is between the pubes and the sternum, and the mid-chest. There's usually a good deal of shortness in the very front part of the body, which is deep — not only shortness in the rectus but also deep down shortness in the psoas and iliacus. So the fifth hour works on these areas. In order to get into the deeper structures, you have to release the abdominis rectus first. The release of the rectus is usually really important to freeing the chest from the thorax. The immediate thing you watch in the fifth hour, particularly in the early part, is the breathing. You want to release the thorax from the pelvis, so you'll work first the attachments in order to release the breathing and get a lifting and spreading of the chest.
Both the psoas and the recti are stuck. Neither one of them can lengthen. Both of them have to try to shorten. If a relatively random body tries to do a sit-up, everything shortens — the psoas shortens while it can, and the recti shorten more than they can. That's the pattern of the random body. But the pattern of the Rolfed body is that if you try to do a sit-up, a flexion across this joint, the psoas should lengthen and fall back. This is something that nobody believes because nobody's ever seen it really. They see it once in a while and say how graceful, but it doesn't occur to them that this is normal movement — that the psoas has got to lengthen and fall back as you flex this joint. It isn't until you get into that fifth hour that you begin to get to the place where you can really evoke this.
If the psoas works, you get different strains put upon the various nervous centers, the plexi, that are in the lower pelvis and lower abdomen all along the line. This different stress, we hope, we believe, is going to reflect into a different sense of well-being. So here we have the job of the fifth hour. Up until the third hour, you've never gotten as deep as the quadratus before. To get to the causal situation in the pelvis, you go in as far as the depth of the quadratus, and that's the third hour. Then you've prepared things for your fourth hour. By the time you reach the fifth hour, you are ready to address the psoas, which sits behind everything you've been preparing.
In that fifth hour, your job, in addition to directors, is so organizing the psoas that it is able to fall back and act with the rectus as a reciprocal — if you don't like the word antagonist. Those of you brought up in kinesiology have devoted a lot of attention to a lot of other muscles, and have not devoted attention to the psoas. I don't know of any group except ourselves that has called attention to the fact that as the body flexes, the psoas falls back. That's what's done in achieving balance, and this is a concept that they just plain don't have. This is the gospel that you people have to teach to anybody informed enough to understand that he has a psoas and he has a rectus. Before you can teach that gospel, you've got to know that gospel. This is what makes the fifth hour so important.
The psoas starts way up there, comes down crossing the pubes, going down into here. The balance is between that and what is lying on the back of the thorax — the rhomboids. If you're tied up here and your psoas is deteriorated, that psoas cannot lengthen and set back. The cockeyed part of it is that when you flex a psoas, it lengthens. The accepted part of mechanics is that if you flex a thing it shortens. Consequently, you can't get simplistic about that psoas. The neck muscles don't push. When you put your hand on it, it tells you it's not pushing. That psoas lets go, and your fingers go through it. It doesn't tighten up and push your fingers out. There's a release of force in the extension — a longitudinal release.
In the pre-sixth hour look, you've gotten from the underside of the pelvis and the back around the hamstrings, and you've gotten the front side of the pelvis. There's still something obviously wrong, so you look to the rotators. Starting at the periphery — which can be the ankles — coming up the front side of the shin, usually on the lateral side, there's some tie-ups with most people's legs. You free, going up and separating the hamstrings. The key to unlock the block on the pelvis at this hour is the piriformis. The reason that's so important is because it comes from the anterior part of the sacrum — the part we haven't been able to get to, and usually the part that the base is anterior and the apex is posterior too much. The hallmark that you've done a pretty good job is that the breathing starts. When the breathing starts, you can see the pumping action of the pelvis when they're lying on their stomach.
Getting back to the original recipe, it's only as you free the ribs that you're going to get the length for the psoas to span. You haven't really had the opportunity to do a clean-cut job on the ribs up to this point. As you free the ribs from the pull of the rectus, you begin to see this guy really fell against this rib and knocked it away from that rib. You begin to clear out the stuff that's obscuring your understanding of that rib cage. You want to free the rectus above and below — on the ribs and on the pubes — so that it lengthens and is organized for support. You've got to get under the rectus so that you can get to the psoas. You can't do that if it's short and tight. So you have to lengthen it, and then you're working to lengthen the psoas and to get the lumbar to go back, for the balance between the psoas and the rectus.
The thing that's unique about this is that one of those groups is on one side of the spine and one on the other — the rhomboids are on the back of the spine and the psoas is in the front of the spine. This is a unique junction; no other junction is like this. You can get hold of the rhomboids on the outside and draw them down. You can also get hold of the psoas on the inside by using it as that hinge we've been working with. Both of these are under conscious control. That whole rhomboid section, particularly the lowest part of it, can be drawn down to balance against the psoas, and thereby you get a vertical line. You've gone the whole trip round. You've started in your first hour on the outside of the body, and now you've gotten to the place where these two significant muscle groups control the whole trip.
It's important to have the hands horizontal rather than vertical on their axis, so that you're not puncturing. You go in onto the psoas and give it a lift headwards, inwards, and ceilingwards. You call for movement — get right on that psoas and have them bring their tail up and down. When the knees are pulled up, you are taking strain off the pelvis. You can then work in there without feeling that the strain you're putting on the structure is going to disrupt the pattern. As the body gets itself better organized, then you can begin to work with the legs stretched out, because the pelvis is turned under whether the legs are stretched out or not. It's a question of judging how far along this individual is with reference to turning that pelvis under.
I suspect that the psoas is hooked back by something else when it's normally organized. Something else shortens and pulls it back, and I don't know what it is. I would like to do a little dissection and find out how that works. It's going to be in the back of that pelvis and that abdomen. But this will come — keep challenging it until you see it, until your fingers see it so unmistakably that you're not letting anybody tell you that it is impossible. In order to get the entirely new picture coming out in this class, you have to go and look for something different, completely different in terms of movement. Even with my legs crossed, I can go in there and feel myself turn my pelvis under by ever so little, but in so doing, I activate that whole hinge that goes across, sort of defined by the pubes.
In a balanced body, the lumbar comes back as the person moves his legs. Until you free that psoas as it crosses the pubes — until you've got something that's resilient there, something that moves under your fingers, something that says to you it is live tissue — the lumbar does not move back. In these women with this anterior sacrum and anterior lumbar, when you palpate for that psoas, you can't find it. You can only find something that is stuck and glued to that pubic bone. There is no movement, no stretch available. Once you begin to get stretch available as it crosses the pubes, you then get something you can use to bring back the lumbar vertebra and hold it back. If you get that picture I'm preaching at you of that web that is literally the support for the lumbar vertebra, you then get the picture of this integrated web.
Session Six
The sixth hour is the hour of the sacrum. Ida insisted that this single bone, more than any other, determines whether a body has found its core. Here she lays out the goal, the route in through the rotators, and the unmistakable hallmark by which you know you have arrived: the sacrum moving with every breath.
The sixth hour is really the hour of the sacrum. Can you balance that sacrum by virtue of organizing the piriformis, basically, and the obturator in the second place?
In your sixth hour, you are still working with the pelvis and balancing that basin. You are now going in primarily to balance the sacrum with the rest of the pelvis. Just as through the entire series, we have never gone where we are working. So here, you don't go where you are working — you go to the areas that influence the sacral position.
This is a unique situation where you can get the prevertebral organization of the sacrum from the outside of the body. Offer me a suggestion as to what single bone of the body and its position is more important than the sacrum. Now in order to get to those rotators, you have to have a fair degree of resilience up the back of the leg, because if you don't, the gluteus maximus will not let you in. It is that simple.
The rotators are the only structures in the body where you can put your finger on the outside and the other end of your finger, so to speak, goes onto the lining of the sacrum. There is no other muscle that you can get hold of in these hot little hands where you can do this. So the lowest part of that spinal structure, a basic part of the pelvic structure, you can directly influence through those rotators. This is literally a gift of God. Pure velvet. We had no business to expect it.
Do you believe that the piriformis controls the sacrum? And if you don't, God help your unbelief.
You're looking for the key to unlock this pelvis, and at this hour the key is the piriformis. The reason that's so important is because it comes from the anterior part of the sacrum — the part we haven't been able to get to, and usually the part where the base is anterior and the apex too posterior. The hallmark that you've done a pretty good job is that the breathing starts.
There are anatomists who consider that the psoas is only a tail of the iliacus. The iliacus and the psoas give you help for the lumbars, but you have to get down to the piriformis before you get help to push the sacrum back.
In order to balance the rotators, one of which is the immediate determinant of sacral position, you have to also give a lot of attention to the hamstrings, and thereby to the back of the legs. Because everything is connected with everything else, and there's no way of escaping this.
What I see in a lot of people's work is that in the fourth hour, they take too long — too long in the ankle and too long in the knee. They don't get up from the pelvis quick enough. Then they start working the pelvis and their energy goes down. The hour becomes more and more painful. Frequently they cut out the hamstrings — they do them, but not with a real intention of getting the hamstrings. Their intention is finishing the hour, letting this poor person get out of here.
You free the gluteus, and you've got to get the hamstrings free, and put some more order in the hamstrings. Then you free that whole area around the buns, working from the superficial level on into the deeper, layer by layer, so that you can get into the rotators and start strumming those and getting some length into them.
If one piriformis is tighter than the other, you're going to have a rotation in the entire pelvis. When a person comes in the first hour, you start thinking about those later hours, because when you get there, it's too late if you haven't been analyzing that body all along.
There's no way you can get rotation in the sacrum and not get rotation in the legs.
Until you let that gluteus medius lengthen, you're not going to get what you're looking at. It's the medius — the straight line right in here. If your medius is too short, you won't get the appropriate freeing with the piriformis as it goes from inside the sacrum to the outside.
It is the gluteus medius between the greater trochanter and the crest of the ilium. If it's too small, it offends your eye aesthetically. You don't need to know that it's the gluteus medius.
Everything that has to do with that whole sitting arrangement calls for the spreading of the gluteus.
The position of that coccyx is going to do a great deal in determining the extent to which you're going to be successful in horizontalizing your pelvis. Having dealt with the rotators, and having found you're not happy with them, you don't just climb on the rotators and stay — you get off and go and look at the coccyx. Having organized the coccyx, then go and look at the sacrum. You'll find that the ilii are jammed up against the sacrum, and the sacroiliac junction is marked by a small mountain range.
More than half of the people you will work with will have problems of the coccyx. Be sure that you don't get beyond the sixth hour without getting those problems well on the way to solution. Because you cannot organize that spine with the coccyx completely out, off to one side, going forward.
Releasing the sacrum won't release the coccyx as much as releasing the coccyx will release the sacrum.
It's only as you free the erector spinae up in the dorsal area that you begin to get movement in the sacrum.
In order to get movement of the sacrum in respiration, you punch the button in the dorsal. This is completely unexpected. You think when you float around the sacrum, when you float on the anterior side of the sacrum, that you're going to get movement of the sacrum. But this isn't true.
As you inhale, the apex of the sacrum dives forward in order to let the base of the sacrum come back, in order to separate from the fifth lumbar, in order to separate from the fourth, in order to separate from the third. You just carry it along.
The milestone that tells you you've gotten where you should be is the fact that that sacrum is moving with every breath. If you haven't got that, there's something you haven't done.
There are certain hallmarks that say to you you've done a good job on the sixth hour. One, when the sacrum nutates, moves with each breath, and there's no mistaking it. Two, a little further beyond that, is when you begin to feel movement at the dorsal hinge.
This cannot occur until you've got reasonably good relatedness all down the spine. It cannot occur until you've got reasonable function in the psoas. It cannot occur until you've got the whole lumbar area spanning, in terms of its soft tissue and in terms of its bone. You've got to have the lumbar vertebrae back where they belong, relating appropriately to the sacrum, before this can occur.
The whole pelvis goes with the sacrum as it moves, but the sacrum can't move till you get the lumbars back. So the pelvis can't move till you get the lumbars back, because the sacrum is a part of the pelvis. The lumbars are not.
You have to have that organization within the group of the rotators before you can get that sacrum doing its thing — and because the sacrum is now doing its thing, you can get into the coccyx. If the sacrum is doing its thing properly, the coccyx is going to turn much further under and the base of the sacrum is going to come further back. If the base of the sacrum comes back, then those lumbars are going to have to come back to form your line.
For 20-year-olds who don't understand one damn thing about physiology — very cute and employed by Helena Rubinstein — tell women to stand against the wall and tuck that tail in. What happens is that consistent, persistent tucking the tail in drags the whole sacrum forward. They literally have an anterior sacrum, instead of just having a sacrum which is relatively weakly balanced. Then they have nothing on which the top weight sits. And this is being done in every city in this country today at this moment.
The lotus positions, all of them, send the sacrum way forward. If there's any weakness in the sacrum, the lotus will bring it forward. If there's any weakness in the fourth and fifth lumbar, the lotus will bring it forward.
All these people with anterior sacrums love to get in the lotus position because it's comfortable to them. Why? Because their sacrum is anterior to begin with, and they are pandering to the weakness of the sacrum when they get into the lotus position and it's comfortable.
If there's no way that weight is going to be transmitted up and down the legs, that sacrum is going to try to support weight. Just as the body protects itself when weight is transmitted over the wrong spot on the foot — you get a callus — if the sacrum is trying to support weight, the body will put this callus of gristle around the bone. You then have the job of reorganizing that gristle and making a mobile tissue of it.
Realize what determines where the pelvic floor is. It's not those half dozen muscles which we named as being the pelvic floor. Not at all. It's the sacroiliac articulation. It's the articulation between the fifth lumbar and the sacrum. It's the articulation between the fourth lumbar and the fifth. Just as soon as you shift any of those lumbars, you're going to get a different relationship in that pelvic floor.
The pelvic floor is your goal, but it's not a separate goal. It's just the end point of a road. If you really establish the medial line of the body, you will have established the pelvic floor.
If you know what your goal is in the sixth hour and you look at that body and see something is interfering with that goal, you'll go get it, won't you?
In terms of a general description, your sixth hour deals with all kinds of things below the waistline. Anything below the waistline that's interfering with the establishment of that sacral floating is appropriate to your work. If you really have a thoroughgoing understanding of what you're trying to do, basically, then you will draw yourself a map as to how to get there.
You will see each one of you getting stuck at a certain level, and that sixth hour is so easy to get stuck at.
When you do Rolfing according to the recipe, all of a sudden at the end of the sixth hour you find your sacrum responding to the respiratory process: the base of it goes back on inspiration and the apex goes forward on inspiration, and on expiration this is reversed. As far as I know, we are the only school, the only people who just automatically demonstrate this. I never tried to. There it was.
What you see in that pumping of the sacrum is what Mr. Sutherland was talking about, I think — but Mr. Sutherland did not know how to induce it in this fashion. What it really does is literally establish a polarity between the cranium and the coccyx, a polarity in which there is a spanning, and the tone of the spanning has a rhythm. This is the vital mechanism within a man.
At the end of today, you are through half of the manipulative work that you're going to do. When you get to the fourth, the fifth, and the sixth hour, you have a package in your hands which is the central core of what is going to be done here.
You should begin to see connection between the cranium and the sacrum, which means that now we begin to have a core structure.
The hallmark of the sixth hour is the shortness of the body first. The whole back of the leg is too short, and everything. There's no fluidity in the back. You can see some movement of the pubes, but you don't see any fluidity of movement in the back. There's no sliding. The sacrum is not only too tight, it's too jerked up. It hasn't been allowed to drop down yet.
By the end of the sixth hour, you have built up from the ground up an organization that should have its two feet pretty squarely on the ground, its legs over its thighs, its pelvis over its thighs. Just as through the entire series, we have never gone where we are working — so here, you don't go where you are working, but you go to the areas that influence the sacral position.
The hours leading up to that sixth hour are really preparing the body to assimilate that respiratory flow into its whole body. The work around the rotators and the piriformis is really the hallmark of the sixth hour — the fact that you begin to see the sacrum participating in the respiratory movement. That's what tells you you've got the job. So that sixth hour which looked as though it might not amount to very much is really an extremely important key. When you're opening your door, the door is controlled by three different depths of locks. This thing is basic, basic, and you can't get anywhere without it.
The significance of the rotators is that they connect the outside with the inside. And this is the significance of the piriformis even more than the other rotators — that it has its origin right there on the sacrum itself.
What I see in a lot of people's work is that in the fourth hour they take too long in the ankle and too long in the knee, and they don't get up from the pelvis quick enough. Then they start working the pelvis and their energy goes down. The hour becomes more and more painful. Frequently they cut out the hamstrings — they do the hamstrings, but not with a real intention of getting the hamstrings. It's as if their intention is finishing the hour, getting it over with, letting this poor person get out of here. So when people come in for the sixth hour their hamstrings are really tight. And then a lot of people spend thirty minutes at the ankle and another thirty at the knee, and they get up to the sacrum and say, gee, the sacrum isn't moving.
Invariably you start the sixth hour in the lower half — not the front half or the back half. Just as the upper half is the target in the fifth hour, the lower half is the target in the sixth. You have to get the hamstrings free and put some more order in the hamstrings. Then you have to free that whole area around the buns, working from the superficial level on into the deeper level, freeing the top layers and working layer by layer so that you can get into the rotators and start strumming those and getting some length into them.
At the point of the seventh hour, the concentration has been chiefly in hours four, five, and six in the pelvic area — the fourth hour on the inside of the legs, the fifth hour on the abdomen coming down to the pelvis from the top, and then the sixth hour on the back of the legs and into the rotators and the gluteal muscles in the seat. So a lot of concentration has been at that end of the body. The balanced energy system that the body is, the body is beginning to feel the strain in the neck. Nine people out of ten will come in before their seventh hour very aware that that hour has to have something to do with the neck.
The real reason for the sixth hour is experiential. The real reason is to get the hinge in the sacroiliac. If you have followed this map, you have gotten to a place where only the sixth hour will give you the look of the body which tells you he is free to do this movement at the hips. At joint after joint after joint, you have worked to get freedom of movement, to get practical segmentation. But you have not worked at that part of the hip joint that gives you the sitting movement. The purpose is stacking up to the sixth hour — the sixth hour is the first movement.
Four, five, and six are really one hour — but it takes three hours to do them. It's important to take those three hours and don't leave it all for the sixth. If you don't look at them as a total, you're not dealing with that pelvis in the proper perspective either. I remember working on a model when I was an assistant teacher, and I had to go back to those pubes in the sixth hour, because it was clear that person's sacrum wasn't going to get there until we let it out a little bit more. Had I had my old concept of, well, I've gotten four and five, now I've got to get on to the back of the legs and get to the sacrum — the sacrum wouldn't have come home as well.
In the sixth hour you have not yet had the real opportunity of devoting an hour to the sacrum. You'd better get it done, because you've been going around and around and around. You've been talking about the floor of the pelvis as being so important, and it is. But the floor of the pelvis does not have to do literally with the nervous plexi, which are the important determinants of that body. The sacrum is. So now it behooves you, in trying to put this body together, to start by getting that sacrum where it belongs.
The sixth hour is really the hour of the sacrum. Can you balance that sacrum by virtue of organizing the piriformis basically, the obturator in the second place which does the inside of the pelvis really into the inside of the sacrum? This is a unique situation where you can get the prevertebral organization of the sacrum from the outside of the body. Offer me a suggestion as to what single bone of the body and its position is more important than the sacrum.
In order to get to those rotators, you have to have a fair degree of resilience up the back of the leg, because if you don't, the gluteus maximus will not let you in. And it is that simple.
Having dealt with the rotators and finding that you're not happy with them, you don't just climb on the rotators and stay. You get off the rotators and go and look at the coccyx and see what effect this has. The position of that coccyx is going to do a great deal in determining the extent to which you are successful in horizontalizing your pelvis. Having done as well as you can in organizing that coccyx, then you go and look at the sacrum. You'll find that the ilii are jammed up against the sacrum in so many instances, and the sacroiliac junction is marked by a small mountain range.
In the sixth hour, unless you get the proper length in those ligamentous spannings, you haven't got anything. You'd better go back and look at each and every one of those ligamentous spannings and how they fit into one another to give you the kind of width that now makes a balance around that lower pole possible. If they are pulled too tight so that the girdle is too tight on the core, you're not going to be able to establish a balance. Your pelvis has to have the right width to be able to balance the spine above it, and that fundamental width can only be contributed by an appropriate length in the ligaments.
If this whole spine is a pumping device, you are going to get movement all up and down the spine in normal respiration. As you inhale, the apex of the sacrum dives forward in order to let the base of the sacrum come back, in order to separate from the fifth lumbar, from the fourth, from the third — you just carry it along. In the sixth hour, if you have done your stuff, you are then able to unhook the hook that's up in that dorsal, put there by the fact that you were not lengthening your spine in respiration. The milestone that tells you you've gotten where you should be is that the sacrum is moving with every breath.
Forty percent of the hours have gone, and we haven't done one doggone thing except look at that pelvis and find out what was holding it and where it was being held. Here we are talking about putting in ten hours straightening the body, and four of them have been spent looking at that pelvis. Build up in your mind an ongoing picture of how you have taken the nails out of that pelvis so that it's been horizontalized.
The real goal of working up the back of the leg is to get under the gluteus. This is the first hour where we have some hope of getting at the anterior aspect of the sacrum by working externally with the insertion of the rotator which arises in it. The movement of the sacrum and the breathing cannot occur until you've got reasonably good relatedness all down the spine. It cannot occur until you've got reasonable function in the psoas. It cannot occur until you've got the whole lumbar area spanning in terms of its soft tissue.
Your sixth hour deals with anything below the waistline that's interfering with the establishment of that sacral floating. People who do a lot of skiing will always have very tight rectus femoris areas. If that rectus femoris is tightened up, you won't be able to balance it with the stuff in the back. If you have a thorough understanding of what you're trying to do, then you will draw yourself a map as to how to get there.
I feel that the term lateral rotator is something that's gotten us into trouble. I see this as often a fan-like arrangement of muscles, each having a particular function — particularly the origin of the piriformis on the inside of the sacrum and the origin of the obturator internus on the inside of the pelvis. In terms of function on the femur, the gluteus minimus is just an extension of the rotators. If we get away from that terminology of lateral rotators, it makes it a lot easier, because you are usually overusing part of one of these anyway, or two of these, and not using them all in a balanced way — and that includes the minimus. The idea of rotation begs the question of what happens when the leg swings forward or back. You don't ever make a simple rotation anywhere. You are going to abduct some or flex some. We don't make those kinds of moves in isolation.
When he crosses his legs — and that's a consistent pattern of his — he doesn't cross his legs the way I am or the way Michael is. He takes and twists that whole thing in the hip joint. And what does he do behind that hip joint? He's shortening his rotators. He throws the whole abdominal wall out. The coccyx is very anterior — almost a right angle. When he sits like that, he makes himself the bottom part.
When we worked up at the fifth rib and the sixth rib and the seventh rib to free those ribs from the pull of the rectus abdominis — what happened to the back of the rib? You didn't do anything at that point. At this point you need to balance what you did in the front in the back of the dorsals. And you've got to pay attention to the continuation of the neck down into the dorsal area.
In the sixth hour you are still playing with that pelvis. You're organizing this pelvis at this time in order to have something on which you are then going to organize a cranium — a major nervous plexus that is going to determine the man. What you are doing is organizing structure, organizing connective tissue, organizing fascia, organizing collagen in order to organize a nervous system for the best possible service that nervous system can give.
Palpate his fifth hour areas and his sixth hour areas, and tell us where the tension is, the greatest tension. There's a sense of dimension around the pelvis which we didn't get before. It's like that pull that would have been going down into their knees and their ankles — you can see it from the pubes up now. He couldn't be needing his fifth hour.
There is a specific muscle pattern in there that you find almost invariably in the sixth hour — the piriformis, and the location of it. That depends on the whole trip, but it's a pattern you will see again and again.
Session Seven
By the seventh hour, the body below has been organized — pelvis horizontal, legs beneath, shoulder girdle freed. Now the head must come home. Ida treated this hour as the meeting of the two poles: what sits on top of the spine determines what the man is. Below are her sharpest observations on the neck, the cranium, and why the face is only the other end of a vertebra.
When you go to the top half of the body, you are no longer going step by step — you're going by a jump. You are jumping the shoulder girdle and going up to the weight of the head. And trying to put the weight of the head back on top of that floor of the pelvis. Nothing more.
The object of this hour is to bring the neck into that vertical line. Most people before the seventh hour have a look of the head very anterior. The head is not on that vertical line we've been talking about all through the class at all. As a result of this hour, that head comes back onto the line.
With most individuals in our culture, the head is carried too far forward. You've got to relieve it and allow it to go back.
When the head is carried forward, you have a weight which runs from about twelve to sixteen pounds being carried forward. And this you are literally carrying just as surely as if you were carrying it with your two hands in front of you.
There are different levels of structure that determine the head and neck. There is a very superficial level of muscular tilt that connects the cranium over to the shoulder girdle. And then there is a very much deeper level.
In that seventh hour work, when you're working on the neck, your fingertips are closer to controlling structures than they are in any other hour. You better know how those structures should be, because you can get right down on top of them.
The body is beginning to feel the strain in the neck. Nine people out of ten will come in before their seventh hour very aware that that hour has to have something to do with the neck. It becomes clearer and clearer as the time gets closer to the hour.
The literal free-space balance of the head depended and depends on muscles that are inside the head as well as outside the head. It never occurred to me that, in terms of the physical carriage of the body, the individual who carries his head forward in order to balance the imbalance below will have managed to get himself a kind of muscular imbalance inside of his head — which has many significances.
This face which we think of as something very different — our face, our facial — is really nothing but the other end of the neck. It is constituted of muscles that connect to the cervical vertebrae. We don't think in those terms. We think about a face as being something entirely different. And we think about the muscles on the skull as being something entirely different, as if under the hair — like under a rug you don't have to clean.
All of the muscles which constitute the face connect back to the cervical spine, either directly or indirectly. So in order to organize the cervical spine you have to be informed about where the stuff is that you call your face. It's very hard to get the idea that your face is just some more muscles — because, by golly, it's your face.
The fascial network in the neck is very complex. There are numbers of smaller muscles than in most other parts of the body, and the layers — the numbers of muscles on top of one another — are greater than in most places. So the possibility of complication and of trouble is greater.
If you were to take a section through the neck, you would see all the fascial planes in the form of cylinders. The cranium is like a bowl that sits on all those fascial planes, and they are both hanging from and holding up the bony surfaces of the skull. Any kind of change from anywhere in the body is going to be reflected up in those places, because everything hangs from those bony surfaces all the way around.
Up to this point you have only been organizing and lengthening, making more resilient the superficial structures of the neck. Only after you have that superficial layer sufficiently resilient is it possible to go under it and begin to get to the very sturdy but unsuspected structures — those very small muscles that run through all of the neck. Remember: big muscles are muscles whose job it is to move structures far and fast. You don't move neck structures far and fast.
One of the reasons the anterior sixth cervical has always been the major boogerboo to osteopaths and chiropractors is that they haven't understood they can't get a sixth cervical back until they let the prevertebral soft tissue come back. In order to organize the cervical, you have got to organize that soft tissue. And so you go into the mouth. The smarter you are with your preparation, the less necessity there is to go into the mouth. But there is a certain amount of necessity, no matter what.
You have to get that tongue back where it belongs, because that tongue is everlastingly pulling on the oral and cervical fascia.
You are interested in putting those strong extrinsic muscles back where they belong — the trapezius and the levator are always the ones that get lost. This is the first time you can really get those two muscles, because always before they've had the weight of the head coming forward. Temporarily — you hope permanently — you have lifted the weight of the head off them, and you can get in there.
These people didn't make any attempt to relate what was going on in the neck and head with what was going on in the rest of the body. They just went in and tried to change the position of the throat and the muscles that constituted that organization. And it wouldn't work. It not only wouldn't work, but every once in a while they collapsed the various fascial rings that hold it, and they had quite a serious accident on their hands.
They can swear by all that's holy that you have damaged them forever, and there's nobody to disprove it because nobody knows except you. So be careful with this technique. There's a good reason why some people avoid this seventh hour stuff. And yet, unless you get that head where it's going, you haven't done what you can do.
A fully evolved human has a head in which the top of the head is horizontal and the plane of the face is vertical.
What we are evolving toward is the place where, when you look straight down on the top of the head, you see nothing except perhaps the tip of the nose.
The other thing you find in the random body is that there is generally one single relationship between the head and the neck. To move the head, the person hardly does it by changing it with respect to the neck — they have to change the whole neck, or the whole body. Whereas as a result of the Rolfing, there is an independence between the neck and the head.
Whatever happens to the neck, the head organizes independently. When the person is at rest the head literally moves with the breath — reorganization as you breathe in and out.
You cannot evoke that movement fully until you get extension in the neck, lift in the head. The minute you revert to anteriority of the head and the neck, that minute you revert to throwing away the rotational possibility of the neck.
Sutherland was a good observer. He watched the movements of the bones of the head with inspiration. He saw these things. And he saw that under certain conditions they became aberrated.
He advanced the theory that respiration was not primarily a function of the lungs — of what we ordinarily consider the system of respiration at all — but that respiration essentially, basically, was a function of a cyclic movement in the cranium and in the spine. That respiration as we see it is simply an accompaniment of this basic respiratory livingness.
Everybody knows the head is solid. Everybody knows the head doesn't move — just as the sacrum doesn't move, the skull doesn't move. They're ridiculous. The fact of the matter is that the skull does move.
This is one of the things that makes me put a question mark after cranial osteopathy. Certainly, the cranium moves. But how is it going to move very far if this thing is all hung down to a second rib that is out of place?
My idea of what determines cranial osteopathy is right down here — in the upper segments of the neck, between the neck and cranium. To me, that is where you go.
What that really does is literally establish a polarity between the cranium and the coccyx — a polarity in which there is a spanning, and the tone of the spanning has a rhythm. This is the vital mechanism within a man.
Just as the pelvis is the key to the vital being of the body, so the positioning of this tremendous nervous plexus within the head is the key to the behavior that depends on nervous tissue. The stuff within that cranium is in a hydrostatic equilibrium — it is really a fluid material. If you tip that head up this way, you're going to get different pressures on centers than if you tip it that way.
As you do a proper job on the neck and the head and the organization of that top segment of the body, you get all kinds of very dramatic episodes — in terms of hearing, sightedness, hay fever, twenty-year-old sinuses, postnasal drips, asthma and emphysema. You just always put your finger on and turn around the things you get into in that next structure, if you do a good job.
You are organizing this pelvis in order to have something on which you are then going to organize a cranium — a major nervous plexus that is going to determine the man.
What lives in the cranium is only the other end of a long structure, and it happens to be turned up.
When a human being walked in what we call random, he manifested all kinds of light. And along about the sixth or seventh hour, his light changed to white light — in other words, the balanced summation of lights of other wavelengths and speeds.
The test for whether your first ten hours is satisfactory is whether you can pick them up by the head and see waves of energy and motion go through that body.
Sometimes by the time the eighth hour comes — which is the next one — you see a body which looked very disorganized before, as if one cork or one plug that was holding the pelvis or the shoulder girdle in an unbalanced position has now been released by the work you did in the seventh hour.
What we do in that seventh hour in terms of organizing the head and neck is extremely important in the sense of organizing the body as a whole. And we can't afford not to do a good job.
The seventh hour marks the corner with the signpost.
The head simply goes along for the ride.
Look at how you are seeing a similar process going on at the two ends of the spine. Think about the kind of strain that's going on between the cranium and the atlas, and at the other end of the line, the fifth lumbar and the sacrum. Recognize how that similarity is going to make these two joints the most vulnerable joints in the body. The ribs hold the thoracic vertebrae in a certain relationship — this is not true of the cervical vertebrae and it is not true of the lumbar vertebrae, which have no similar attachments and are therefore highly vulnerable. So if your thoracic cage is where the relative immobility of the structure is, what's above it and what's below it is going to have to accommodate. This is the reason why the lumbars and the cervicals apparently travel together. They don't really travel together — they're only compensating the different strains.
What goes on inside this area? Here's your shopping bag. Your shopping bag is the two membranes, the arachnoid and the dura. And inside that shopping bag you have the brains, which are very smooth, the cerebellum, the brain stem, the various systems of the third and the fourth ventricle. Realize that what you have there is a hydrostatic system. It's practically a water system. And therefore, as you move it, you get greater pressure in some directions than in others. And that may or may not be what that brain was designed for. It may not have been designed for a cockeyed pressure down in that third ventricle, which is adjacent to the eyes, or a cockeyed pressure in that fourth ventricle which is in the whole center of the head. You see, you're taking this water and tipping it. And that means a different set of pressures. So why is it necessary to get the top of your head up?
Your seventh hour starts, like all seventh hours, at the periphery. It starts at the periphery of the cranium, at the neck — the splenius, the sternocleidomastoid, the trapezius, the what have you. The outside working in. And you free these muscles much more than they have been freed. You have to remember that those muscles attach down as far as the second rib, that those muscles are interfered with when the clavicle is glued down to the first rib. This has to be organized in order to permit that cranium to set itself squarely within the shoulder yoke.
Just as the pelvis is the key to the vital being of the body, so the positioning of this tremendous nervous plexus within the head is the key to the behavior that's dependent on nervous tissue. The stuff within that cranium is in a hydrostatic equilibrium. This is really a fluid material. And if you're tipping that head up this way, you're going to get different pressures on centers than if you're tipping it the other way. The thing you are doing in that head is enabling you to relate that head to three space, to get those eyes looking out on a horizontal, to see a horizontal line of the mouth, to see a three-dimensional organization of that head.
Every moment that a man makes tells you what his structure is. You only have to have one local joint movement to tell you what's wrong with that body. It can be the toe, it can be the knee, it can be the head. Because if this has changed this way, that must have changed that way, and that must have changed that way. Every time you people get a thick neck, this whole round thing is disorganized. All you say is, I've got a stiff neck — but look where it goes to. And when you say I've got a headache, I've got a stiff neck, I don't bother with your neck. I come down here.
All of this structure connecting all the spinous processes is the ligamentum nuchae — not just a thin line going up the back. It's a planar ligament. So when you're working on that you're obviously affecting alignment through all of the cervicals. You can't organize a mess while you have that divorce in there, with apparently a separate area that has nothing going through it. This is what happens as that neck becomes disorganized. You get this separation of function. You can do all the things you need to do in the neck in terms of movement with the extrinsics, but except as you have the joining, your movement of the neck does not evoke activity in the intrinsics.
Remember that those cervical plexi have to do with a very wide area. The superior plexus has to do with the head and the organs of special sense. The middle plexus has to do somewhat with the eyes and the nose. But then you begin to get connections going down to the heart — most importantly that it can shut off life itself. And through the vagus, you have connections all the way down through the entire distance to the far end of the chart. So that neck is a key control point for everything in that body. And the neck takes the rap every time. Every time your head is forward you have shut off the circulation. Because that which makes the guy is above, and you're shutting it off. So what are we doing at the end of the seventh hour? You are interested in putting those strong extrinsic muscles back where they belong — the trapezius and the levator. They're always the ones that get lost. This is the first time you can really get those two muscles.
As you look at the neck of people and the head, you begin to see where and when the girdle structure has started to interfere with that central structure and has perhaps shortened the actual spine. Lo and behold, now you begin to get a brand new idea. You begin to get the recognition — because for the first time you can see it — of the fact that there is an inside and an outside to his body. Before, you've never seen an inside. But now that inside is laid out right where you can see it, right where you can feel it, right where you can change it, in terms of the muscles that lie on the outside of the skull, on the face, on the chin.
With most individuals in our culture, the head is carried too far forward. And you've got to relieve it and allow it to go back. I wasn't the first one that got that idea. There was an osteopath, his name was Lake. He did a great deal of work by going into the mouth and organizing the inside of the throat. But these people didn't make any attempt to relate what was going on in the neck and head with what was going on in the rest of the body.
Sutherland's theory was that the lungs were not the organ of respiration — that the spine was the organ of respiration. The lungs were only a pair of bellows which affected the spine. And the true function of respiration was a pumping of spinal fluid. This spinal fluid included fluid that was in the brain and in the ventricles of the brain and wrapped the brain. So there was a very close connection between the health of the brain and the health of the respiratory function. Most of us know that intuitively, but we never think to really formulate it in terms of a physiological understanding. Sutherland wasn't the guy that discovered it. Sutherland was the guy that put it into the culture through the osteopaths.
The cranium is kind of like a bowl that sits on all these fascial planes, and they're sort of hanging from or holding up — both things are true — from all the bony surfaces of the skull. Any kind of illness, any kind of local tension is going to be reflected up in those places because everything hangs from those bony surfaces all the way around. If you have a stomach ache and it's relatively confined to your stomach, it's going to be shown up there. If the liver isn't working right, it's going to be shown up there. This is going to be the point of major disturbance, greater disturbance many times than the local point of problem.
There is no really good way of separating head and neck. They are one structure. And very oddly, nobody ever seems to think of this. There is no muscle on the face or in the head that doesn't cross over and get an anchorage in the cervical vertebrae. So you've got to get the recognition of the fact that all these things that relate the head to the neck have two ends. One of them is in the neck and one of them is on the head. So you organize those two ends and you begin to get normal structure. Oddly enough, we all have intuitive appreciations of the normal. When we see something which is normal, we say, isn't that person beautiful? Nobody asks you to define beauty. Everybody knows what you're talking about.
There seems to be evidence that at some time in the evolutionary history of man, the dens was the spine of the atlas. And in those days, a head couldn't turn like that. But now a head is designed to rotate around the dens. And this is the function not of extrinsics that go over to the shoulder, not of a sternocleidomastoid. It is the function of the intrinsic muscles that are wrapped closely around this vertebral structure. And you cannot evoke that movement fully until you get extension in the neck, lift in the head. The minute you revert to anteriority of the head and the neck, that minute you revert to a throwing away of the rotational possibility of the neck.
If you consider the structure under the base of the skull, you see that most of the fibers run either up and down or on a diagonal. So most of the movement in seventh hour goes across those fibers. What you see, a movement like this, is really lengthening individual fibers as you go back and forth in there. The fingers are really your best tool. The knuckle sort of opens up the surface, but most of the head work is really detail work. As the neck gets forward, some of the tissue gets pushed back almost behind the ears and needs to be brought back. Some of it needs to come this way. You have to be very careful how you move tissue back in there. More than 50% of the time it needs to go back, but some of this stuff needs to come forward.
You see, that whole collar is a superficial thing. As you put your hands on the neck, as you have been doing in every hour from the first one on, you are preparing that collar to allow you greater length between these cranial structures and the rib cage. In the third, fourth, fifth hour I say: don't try to really change what is deep there. Just organize it so that there is more resilience, so that these structures can live together a little more happily. And that's all you have been doing up to this point — and this is where you start your seventh hour. Only after you have that collar sufficiently resilient is it possible to go under it and begin to get to the very sturdy but unexpected structures of those very small muscles that run through all of the neck. Big muscles are muscles whose job it is to move structures far and fast. You don't move neck structures, you don't move head structures, far and fast.
All of the muscles which constitute the face connect back to the cervical spine, either directly or indirectly. So in order to organize the cervical spine you have to be informed about where the stuff is that you call your face. It's very hard to get the idea that your face is just some more muscles. Because by golly, it's your face. Go into your seventh hour recognizing these two different levels: the level of the collar and the level of the depth. The collar doesn't have that much to do with the face. The collar has to do largely with the shoulder girdle.
You have to let loose of the wrappings of the splenius. The splenius is always involved in this thing. The fascial wrappings of the splenius are stuck down on that second rib. And before you can really get it loose, you have got to get a tongue back where it belongs, because that tongue is everlastingly pulling on those oral and cervical fascia. The thing you do not sufficiently recognize is the fact that there is no muscle in the head that does not connect directly or indirectly to the vertebra of the neck. We all think of a face as a face, a head as a head.
One of the criteria which must be present before you get that cranium free on that neck is the line at the top of the head, the top of the hair. See how he moves away from his hair. See what I mean when I say that the way he moves away from his hair shows you the freedom. See how little more is going to be necessary to horizontalize the top of his head — see how it just twists around like a cork in a bottle.
It might in theory be possible to get a head where you had the head structure more or less horizontal and the head was free. I don't think this is possible, but it's conceivable. But if you did that, you do not get the relation between these two ends of this field. You must have your horizontal head, and it must be lifted up to the place where you get appropriate and symmetrical spanning. Get the feeling of what happens in terms of the neck muscles when you say to a guy, get the top of your head up, and he does. And then the converse — what happens to a guy after you have given him his seventh hour, and you can't get through his thick skull, and he has to get his head up if he's gonna keep it.
You can look at the inside of skulls in anatomical museums, and you have seen that the inside of skulls are not necessarily symmetrical. They're asymmetrical more often perhaps than symmetrical. I remember my amazement when I first saw a skull lying in a case, and I looked at it and said, but this is all crooked. And as I threaded this whole thing out, I realized that I must be looking at the skull of a scoliosis. You are never going to really balance this kind of a head, but you sure can get a lot closer to it. You can get them acting as though their heads were symmetric. And this acting as though seems to me a very important realization.
In the seventh hour, you really take a good look at the trapezius muscle, which is one of the most important muscles in the body, structurally speaking, and you try to get it organized. You do this by getting this guy sitting down on the floor. The sitting down on the floor is important for two reasons. One is so that you can really get on top of his shoulders, which you cannot very well as he sits on a chair. The other reason is that when he sits on the floor, his lumbars are necessarily back where you can demand the spanning necessary to organize the cervicals. You do not go back to the business of his sitting on the chair and taking your elbows and going down his back. This is not what you're after. You are no longer dealing with the rectus, the glutes. This isn't what you're after in that seventh hour.
You go in there finding out for yourself perhaps that the positioning of the tongue determines where your second and third cervicals are going to be and where your sixth cervical is going to be. When you get to the hard palate, you are no longer dealing with those cervicals. Then you're dealing with the relation between frontal and temporal and sphenoids. All of these bones are related through elastic connective tissue. So there is no earthly reason why they can't be eased, if you're smart enough, into areas that are easier. The sphenoid is particularly vulnerable to emotional as well as physical trauma. A person who has suffered a very deep emotional grief will very often just have that sphenoid drop back, and their eyes seem to be so deep in their heads. After you've given the seventh hour, even before, those eyes start coming out, they start looking at the world again and being in the world again.
Up to this point you have taken that body apart by unwrapping it from the outside. And at this point you change your approach, and you put that body together from the center and from the inside. You start with your seventh and your eighth hour in the middle of the body and not at the vertebrae. Because this is where the thing has to fit together. When you're working with the head over on the knees, you're doing a great deal of stretching — basically with the erector spinae. At no time earlier have you really been working with trapezius, and at no time earlier have you done very much.
When you go to the top half of the body, you are no longer going step by step. You're going by a jump. You are jumping the shoulder girdle and going up to the weight of the head. And trying to put the weight of the head back on top of that floor of the pelvis. Nothing more. You're no longer playing at the lumbar dorsal junction which is where you would think you would be playing next. Actually you are playing there, but you don't know it. You are now going to jump up to the head in order to take the head and put it into that width.
If you haven't got the levator and the trapezius reasonably movable, then you're not going to be able to get your diaphragm related, because your psoas minor is going to go in accordance with the way the trapezius and the levator are going. If the levator is consistently picking up, lifting the level of the scapula, the pectoralis minor also must lose its ability to stretch. Until you learn to use your arms properly, your arms tie up and they get to feeling like rocks. If they get that way long enough they deteriorate, and the flesh itself begins to become kind of grizzly. Then through the attachment of the arms and the trunk, you begin affecting the trunk with every movement that you make, because the muscle is too short and too non-elastic to give. So all the use that you make of your arms in walking is really pulling your body apart.
The muscles that cause the movements of the vertebral column, the head, the shoulder, and the upper part of the intestinal tube form independent mechanical systems. But these muscles are crowded on the side of each other or over each other in the region of the neck. When you get something really going wrong with the body, you determine it in your head. If your head isn't affected you say my arm, my knee, something or other. When your head is affected you say I am sick. Until your head is affected you don't take it seriously. You can see this very well with that levator scapula. You can see it the minute somebody starts having a temperature — the face gets flushed, the neck gets thick, the neck doesn't move. I feel terrible. It is through these special plates in the neck that you get the transmission of trouble.
If you need a sixth hour, you're gonna talk about the sixth hour. And if you need a fourth hour, you'll have a different light on the fourth hour than the other guy will. The more you watch it, the more you see this coming up, the more you're going to understand human beings, their complaints, their ineffectiveness. It isn't partial understanding as much as it's emphasis — insistence on your looking at — that comes out of your own aberration.
Visualize any other animal than man. Visualize that you are looking down on the top of his head, and what do you see? You see a very great deal of space. Visualize yourself being directly over a human at his best. Looking down directly on the top of his head, what would you have seen? The top of his head with some projection of his shoulder, perhaps even the very tip of his nose, but possibly not even that. This is the kind of change in structure which has given you the kind of change in function which you refer to as the human use of the human being. This has meant different pressures in the skull. This has meant different inspiratory engagements. And as a result of the difference of impact on that nervous tissue, certain changes have developed in humans of which on the whole we are exceedingly proud. This is the point in making a human bipedal.
In the seventh hour, as we get those extrinsics coming back, leading into the verticality that happens at the end of the hour of the cervical spine, we have then a new bipolar tension established between the upper vertebra — which is the head — and that floor that we've been trying to horizontalize. There is a core tension or spanning that does result from this seventh hour position. This is the place where we reach toward zero balance, and at that point the energy is released into these higher functions.
Session Eight
By the eighth hour, the work changes character. We are no longer unwrapping smaller segments; we are listening to the body as a whole fascial complex and asking how its halves relate. Ida insisted that integration is not what happens when you finish taking something apart — it is what you must consciously add. This section gathers her thinking on that turning point.
What you have to get away from in the eighth and ninth hour, if you're going to get true integration, is listening to the individual screams of individual parts. You are beginning to understand the body as a fascial complex. In the advanced hours, you are looking at the body no longer as this plus this plus this plus this. You're looking at the body as a large-sized piece of the whole fascial complex.
Up till now it seems to me we've been working in smaller units, smaller segments of the body. Now we're beginning to work with larger masses. Even though it may be one specific tendon that is locking the whole thing, once a little bit of work is done there, suddenly whole areas shift rather than having to go back into minute work over the whole area.
Up to this point you have taken that body apart by unwrapping it from the outside. At this point you change your approach and put that body together from the center and from the inside. You start with your seventh and your eighth hour in the middle of the body, and not at the vertebrae. Because this is where the thing has to fit together.
In the eighth hour your job is to get the top half on the bottom half — or maybe it's to get the bottom half under the top half. This is another question you can ask yourself. You've come to that eighth hour and now you have to ask: which is the way I'm going to do this? Am I going to get the bottom under the top, or the top over the bottom? It is not the same.
The law for the eighth hour is this: you go to the half which will give you something for the other half. The only way you can judge whether you've done anything is — have you gotten something for the other half?
You have one consolation: if you make the wrong choice, it will be apparent to you inside a matter of minutes after you've started to work on that body. If you've chosen to work on the lower half and they really need work on the upper half, two minutes after you've started — certainly inside of five minutes — it will be apparent that that body is not adding new dimensions of stability.
Now comes the eighth hour and you have to make your decision: where are you going to start? You're going to start where they don't fit together. And where don't they fit together? They don't fit together at the lumbar. That's the place you can change, by virtue of the fact that the lumbar spine is relatively independent — it is not held in place by a whole bunch of ribs.
Until you get everything on the lower half of the body relatively in balance, you're not free to lift it. You're not even free to get your cranial osteopathy going.
The body is one. The body is one big spider web, and wherever you're affected, everything else is affected. When you get tempted to just consider the upper half or the lower half — or even the middle half — this is the temptation. It's not realistic. The body is one.
As you look at these people when you get to the eighth hour, it begins to shout at you what was not done thoroughly. This is not necessarily a condemnation. They might not have been able to take it at that time. They may have been tired, overtired, sore, sick. All kinds of things may have happened. But what wasn't done?
Part of the moral of this story is: don't hesitate at that eighth hour to say, well, my God, this hasn't been done. I can't judge this — it hasn't been properly prepared. Have the courage to go back and get it organized.
What happens to your recipe is that you don't put in enough. You didn't put in enough fifth hour into that guy. And so when you get to the sixth or the seventh and the eighth hour, you still don't have it, with all the good intentions in the world.
Sometimes by the time the eighth hour comes, you see a body which looked very disorganized before — as if one cork, one of the plugs that was holding the pelvis or the shoulder girdle in an unbalanced position, has now been released by the work that you did in the seventh hour.
As you come to the eighth hour, you get to the place where you recognize that most of the things that have to be taken apart have been taken apart.
It's the eighth and the ninth and the tenth hours that you're depending on to do it. But if you don't see with your eyes what has to be put in the eighth hour, you're not going to see it in the tenth hour either. This is really the peak of the difficulty. The body doesn't go there of itself. The myth among manipulators — and for that matter among psychotherapists — is that if you take the thing apart, it's just automatically all right. If you release the hang-ups, it's automatically all right. It isn't so. You have to add to the energy of that body by showing it where it's going to go.
In the eighth, ninth, and tenth hour, you are now dealing with relationships. What I expect to be seeing as you get into your models practice is your minds working literally in terms of: how do I relate this to this — instead of what causes this.
You are not going to be able to relate a shoulder girdle to a spine if the individual elements that determine the position of the shoulder girdle are out of place. You've got to do more than free the teres or free the levator or free this, that, and the other thing. Having freed them, you've got to relate them. This is the job of the eighth hour.
You people come into structural integration believing in relatively simple mechanistic ideas as being the basis for therapy. What I'm trying to do is shake you up and let you see that there ain't nothing simple about it. The minute you introduce your change here, something is going to answer. I don't know what you're going to call that something — whether you call it energy, spirit, life, vitality. It will depend on your philosophy of how you relate to the world around you.
We call this structural integration, and when somebody takes me on the carpet for that name, I say: we call it integration, and we are the only practitioners who at the close of every intervention we make to the body, integrate the body as best we may at that level. Always reintegrate that body before they go out the door.
There are many criteria by which you can judge a body, and you don't have an integrated body until you get all those criteria saying the same thing. This is what you are trying to do — to induce integration in the body.
We pride ourselves on the fact that we do not send anyone out that door with a basic area disorganized, nonintegrated. With every individual who goes out that door, what you are doing — in theory — is looking at them to see that their contour and their movement say that they have, at that moment, the best integration of function possible for the structure you know they have at that moment.
Do I think scientific analysis is the answer to all problems? Definitely not, certainly not. I think synthetic integration is a far higher form.
Our work is synthetic integration — a contribution toward knowledge and a creation of wholeness, and an understanding of how a man who is more nearly whole behaves. It is not merely the knowledge of anatomy, not even fascial anatomy and its facts. It is the voluntary creation of a man nearer to the goal signified by Norbert Wiener: a more human use of human beings. This is our goal — to create that kind of a man.
The superficial fascia is the shopping bag. It's a flexible bag containing everything in a very general relationship. Now in that bag, you got a bunch of stuff. Let's put some brains in there, a heart, some bones. Throw in some glue. What are you gonna do to organize that stuff? Well, the fascial planes are the organizational material for the body. Just start putting some planes inside that bag — some horizontal planes — and start putting those random parts into different positions. That's what the fascia did. And the glue inside the bag breaks and starts gluing everything together. So the deep fascia is more specific in ordering the body into various systems and relating those systems together into a whole.
Just like these surfers wear these wetsuits, that's the superficial fascia. Just below that, there's another wetsuit. Another wetsuit wrapping the whole body from head to toe. Within that, there's numerous planes — the large extrinsic planes. Then there's another system around the spine, running from the occiput up into the brain all the way down to the sacrum. Then there's a serous system, or pretracheal fascia, running from the front of the spine all through the gut down into the pelvic floor. And then none of the books do this, but why not also make up a system going from the inside of the pelvis to the outside — that is, from the deep to the surface.
The fascia around organs is sort of just holding the organ. But the fascia around muscles is almost indistinguishable within the muscle from the fascia itself. It's all so tightly interwoven together. Although the sheets around the muscle are distinguishable, you can't go in and dissect the fascia of one muscle fiber away from it. There is a reason why it is called the myofascial body. A great many modern surgeons are learning to not cut through the fascia, but to slide between the fascia to get where they want to go. You have to use your imagination — your imagination of the analytical breakdown of this body, and your recognition that your analysis is a way of getting to a higher level of abstraction, but not getting to a higher level of reality. When you separate that body into these higher level abstractions, you are not getting anywhere near the reality. You are analyzing. You are not synthesizing.
In this advanced work, your job will be to try to understand the pulls and the equilibria that are involved in the fascial planes as you get them organized. The advanced work is a study of fascial planes, a study of fascial relationships; the elementary work is only making these relationships possible. You are not able to go into the random body as it comes off the street and go into the fascial planes. It's not that they're not there, but their pullings and heavings and fallings disguise them. You can't go in and feel them. You can feel tendons sometimes, but you cannot feel fascial planes. Your first ten hours, therefore, are creating the order within these planes which make it possible for you to see and think in terms of fascial planes.
The myth among all manipulators, and for that matter among psychotherapists, is that if you take the thing apart, it's just automatically all right. If you release the hang-ups, it's just automatically alright. It isn't so. You have to add to the energy of that body by showing it where it's going to go. Up until now we've been working in smaller segments. Now in the eighth, ninth and tenth hour we're working with larger masses. We are again working with fascia — not the superficial layer, but with those superficial layers of fascia. Not fascia surrounding individual organs, but with the fascia that relates the body. As far as I know, this point has never been brought up. As far as I know, nobody's ever really used their head on fascia anyway.
When you give demonstrations, you can bank on the fact that you're going to have one or two people in the audience who are going to say, how does this happen? And you say something about it happens by means of fascia. And there will be a great many people in the audience who haven't heard your word fascia, because this is an unfamiliar word to them. They not only don't know what fascia is, but they never heard the word and it means nothing to them. Sooner or later, someone of us has to be smart enough to really trace out fascial patterns of the shoulder girdle and fascial patterns of the hip girdle. If the fascial patterns were as clear to us as the muscular patterns are, I think there would be a great deal less problem in teaching this.
I've never been a hunter, but anybody who was butchering animals or cleaning animals — you take your hands and you're cleaning it to separate the muscle groups and run your hand down between the groups of muscle. You get this feeling of how they are adhered and how you can put your hand in there and kind of dissect them apart without actually breaking anything. You do the same thing with an orange or a grapefruit, any of those fruits that come in cellular packages. You just very gently split them apart. This is what you're feeling during processing. You're feeling splitting apart, then all of a sudden somebody says, oh, that's terrible, it burns. But that burning is nothing but your perception of the splitting apart. It has nothing to do with pain. It has to do with the fact that two fascial planes have been glued together and you are now putting enough pressure and enough stretching that they have to respond by ungluing.
I can teach practically nobody how to take a body apart. And I can teach practically nobody how to put the body together. So I have now gotten to the point where in desperation I really work at getting you to see the necessity for putting that body together. You've got to put those units together in terms of relative significance. Up to this point you have taken that body apart by unwrapping it from the outside. At this point you change your approach and you put that body together from the center and from the inside. You start with your seventh and your eighth hour in the middle of the body and not at the vertebrae. Because this is where the thing has to fit together.
Collagen is a colloid, as are all large molecules of protein. Colloids have certain qualities in common. An outstanding one is that by the addition of energy, they become more fluid, more resilient. Remember that half-set pan of gelatin? You set it back on the stove, turn up the light, and lo and behold, it liquefies. Set it in the fridge, and it solidifies. This is a generalized quality of the connective tissue of the body. Add energy and it becomes more sol. Subtract energy and it becomes more dense, more gel. In the case of jello we're talking about heat. In the case of the body, we may be talking about heat — but in Rolfing, we are talking about pressure. Pressure at the right points, in the right directions, at the hands of the Rolfer. I'm not talking about reflex points, because reflex points have to do with a phenomenon of the nervous system. I'm talking about energy being added by pressure to the fascia of the body.
The first hour, if you like, is the hour of the shopping bag. What you're really doing is taking your shopping bag, which is stretched around these cubical blocks, and you're pulling it this way and you're pulling it that way, and it lets the conical blocks sit more squarely. It says a great deal for — well, name it, the vital force, god, life, what have you — that you can take very maltreated blocks and bring them back. Release them from the strain and they come back and take hold. It's like that little fuchsia up there. This is the picture of life. Give it half a chance, and it's off again.
Here's the outer investing layer of the deep fascia. Here's the superficial fascia out here. There are veins that run from the deep to the outside. They come through this outer investing layer of fascia, then go out into the superficial. In here, the size of the lumen — the diameter of the blood vessel — is reduced because the fascial system takes part of the pressure loading of the blood vessel. If this fascial system fails, in other words collapses like a stocking that has become loose and soggy, the veins can no longer take the pressure loading. So they start swelling, and then you see them popping out on the leg. That's what creates varicosity. You still have tonic flexion going on in the leg, but the venous system has broken down. The veins really aren't that strong by themselves. They depend on the support of the supporting system, which is fascia.
The problem with the tonic flexion model is that it doesn't work without appropriate fascial structures. If the fascia breaks down in the leg and is not organized appropriately, the tonic flexion model just pumps it randomly. It's just like a broken fire hydrant — the water goes everywhere. We're not saying the tonic flexion system doesn't exist. We're saying there is also another pumping situation, which comes from fascial planes. It's a Chinese finger trap. You can squeeze it one way or the other, and the direction is upward.
In the late 1890s, it was customary in medical schools to do dissections, and as they opened the individual, they took the whole abdominal contents and just dumped it on the slide. Nobody paid any attention to it as suggestive stuff. It wasn't until Claude Bernard got the bright idea that maybe in that heap of stuff there was something significant. When he was awarded the medal for his work and got up to give his speech, he opened it by saying, Gentlemen, a man is something built around a gut. Someday we're going to get up and we're going to say, Gentlemen, a man is something built around a fascial web. And before we're through, we're going to talk about it being built around an electronic system. Because we've gotten to the point where we are past putting it around the fascial system. But we had to go through understanding the fascial system as a system of support.
I believe a lot of the readings Barbara Brown is getting in her biofeedback work are coming from fascia. That isn't the skin at all she's getting readings on — she's getting readings from the fascia. Now don't forget you're talking about stuff which develops embryologically from the same layer. All of this develops from the mesoderm. The bone develops from the mesoderm, the fascia develops from the mesoderm, the connective tissue develops from the mesoderm. So when you're talking about it connects here, it connects there — the deltoid connects there — it was there, and it developed from there. These things are all one. They are not connected. They are one.
Why don't we just say the superficial fascia is the skin? It's not the skin. That's no good. But it's like the skin. When you peel the skin off an animal, that white pearly stuff — that's the superficial fascia. If you say it is the skin, you're confusing yourself somatically, because the skin has all kinds of glands and so forth, and that fascia doesn't have it at all.
Sometimes you open up the flower box, and the flower's a little flaky, so you add a little something to make it a little more mixable. That's what we're doing with bodies. Some people come in where their hamstrings are tighter than others. You work on them all the more. And if they're tight here, they're tighter somewhere else. You've got to work to where that tension is balanced somewhere else in the body — not just in one place, but in many places. It's a matter of balance all the time.
When a baby is born, the skull is together. You put your hand up there and feel the pulse — what's holding the brain in is literally the connective tissue at that point. It's just like a little drum up there. There's no bone at all. The connective tissue is holding it in. Then it becomes more collagenous and more cartilaginous, then more bone-like, more ossified. But that doesn't say you don't still have that superficial fascia up there. It's still there. In some people it stays loose and continues. Those two superficial layers go from the very top of the head all the way down to the feet, and they are totally continuous.
I have a lot more respect for fat now than I had before. I used to think of fat as just something your hand sunk into when you got past it. What I got aware of in dissection is that the fat itself may be sort of lardy, but it's embedded in pockets of very, very heavy collagenous fibers. So fat has a tone to it that I hadn't thought of. When you're working through fat, you're not just going through it, because the fat itself has a lot of structure and tone. Often what you get at the surfaces of these heavy sheets is fat in pockets — almost like popping out bubbles, that transparent stuff that you pop. Sometimes as you work on people it feels like that in certain areas.
At the posterior margin of platysma, the superficial fascia and the deep fascia fuse. I wonder whether this hadn't developed as a result of the necessity of getting from a four-footed position to a two-footed position, where you have the weight of the head being reinforced. As you come up, you need something more like a tie that holds it. Because if this stuff is shortened, it pulls the head forward, since it's anterior. And in the very ancient skulls in anthropology, the jaw is what shows — the chin doesn't come out as far. All of this had to do with that development process. There seems to be some correlation between this change in the head and the peculiar mental qualities that come with it.
In the process of working on superficial fascia you're doing some very deep work. In the first hour we're getting to the joints while still dealing with superficial fascia. We are starting to work at the joints, but we are working in terms of levels of where those joints are tied down. The first area they're tied down is on the surface. We cannot go freeing them by digging deep into the axillary region or deep into the hip joint until we've got the looser stuff. The looser superficial layer is the bed in which the deeper work becomes possible.
My preference now — and I don't always do it because I've got to change my head on this — is I prefer to call it connective tissue. I think we're in a lot less trouble if we do. Every organ has its fascia, so we would have to say myofascial. When I talked about fascia, it was to think of the wrapping around muscle. Then I realized fascia is fascia around all the glands, all the organs and so forth. The myofascial is just a part of the fascia, and as long as we consider that we are affecting more than that — that we are affecting the glandular system — it may be easy to say that a beginning effect comes from affecting its fascia and affecting its circulation, because indeed we have all the blood vessels in the connective tissue.
By the time you begin to get the quadratus where it belongs, you begin to release the twelfth rib. The twelfth rib and the fibula are about the most vulnerable structures inside the skin. There's nothing to balance them. The position of that twelfth rib, anchored there in connective tissue, is the sturdy base on which the upper ribs sit. As you look at this rib cage, you begin to need to understand that sturdiness is not necessarily solidity. Sturdiness can be balanced just as much as it is solidity. Your rib cage isn't being balanced on bones. It's being balanced on the relation of bones, which is determined by connective tissue.
You could split Bob right down the middle and have such completely different halves that you wouldn't know they belong — you wouldn't know you could put them together and get the same man. One man. Sagittal section. Even the way he moved his arms. There isn't any great use in learning all this intellectual labeling stuff unless you put it into the flesh as it stands before you.
This business of taking things apart and taking things apart and taking things apart is what has destroyed our system of therapy in this twentieth century. They have forgotten that there is a man. If you start studying anatomy, you end up there — unless you start with the right premises in your head.
Now you have to remember which half of the body you did. If you don't see him for another six months, he's not gonna remember and you're not gonna remember. But if you just saw him the day before yesterday, you remember that you did the lower half. Today you're gonna do the upper half. Now you begin to get something that looks very much more like what you would make if you were a creative god and had the problem of how am I going to make a human with these parts. I don't think there's anybody here who would be willing to make a human looking like some of the humans we've seen on this couch, because they wouldn't work very well. And god is no dumber than you. He knows it too.
In the first hour, you can't get to the so-and-so and the so-and-so muscle. You can only get to areas of overlying fascia. You can only modify areas of overlying fascia. Then expect to utilize at a later date the positive values which manipulating that overlying fascia has granted you. Don't get the notion that you're going after some specific muscle. You are dealing with the tightening of the superficial envelope which has resulted from problems in the joint. If you deal with that tightening of that superficial fascia, you then permit the joint to fall nearer to where it belongs.
When the tissue is in tension, that's stored energy that you release into the body. And its energy is not a metaphysical something. These molecules are aligned in a particular way. You change their alignment. The change spreads. Each horizontal that you bring out down below reflects itself upward. You can see his rib cage absorbing the change as you work on his leg.
Always before when I looked at the back, I saw — there's a scapula sticking out at me. Instead of thinking that the superficial fascia is a reflection of what's happening deep. There's a bump there. Something's pushing out at me. That was kind of a revelation: whatever is deep is reflecting into the superficial fascia. I was always looking scapula, instead of just looking out at the mountains.
When people ask me if I'm perfect, I ask them if they can float. I tell them: when they can float up off of the ground, they're perfect. I ask that with all seriousness. Weight bearing, even if you're going to sophisticated levels like compression and integrity — that's still a Newtonian approach. It's levers and pulleys. With these other things, you have to go to new things. You can't define them in terms of levers and pulleys.
Session Nine
By the ninth hour, the practitioner has left behind the anatomy of parts. What remains is relationship — the fascial complex as a whole, and the question of what the upper half can contribute to the lower, and the lower to the upper. Ida's instruction here is unsentimental: choose well, and finish what the eighth hour began.
What you have to get away from in the eighth and ninth hour, if you're going to get true integration, is listening to the individual screams of individual parts. You are beginning to understand the body as a fascial complex. In the advanced hours, you are no longer looking at the body as this plus this plus this plus this. You're looking at the body as a large piece of the whole fascial complex.
The body is one. The body is one big spider web, and wherever you're affected, everything else is affected. When you get tempted to consider just the upper half or the lower half or even the middle half — this is the temptation. It's not realistic. The body is one.
Since in the eighth hour you decided to go to, let's say, the lower half, your ninth hour is really a continuation of the eighth. They are a pair. They go together. But you can't wear out the client by working them all that long, so you put something off into the next hour. You go to the other part — rather than the bottom, go to the top. It should be a reversal. And if it isn't, somebody has goofed, either in making the choice or in getting the job done. There is no room in the recipe for repeating the same hour.
If you've done your eighth hour properly, there's no soul searching in the ninth, because all you have to do is the rest of it. You have to remember which half of the body you did. If you don't see the client for another six months, neither of you will remember and you'll have to think again. But if you just saw him the day before yesterday, you don't have to think — you did the lower half, and today you're going to do the upper.
If you make the wrong choice, it will be apparent to you within a matter of minutes after you've started to work on that body. Certainly inside of five minutes, it will be apparent that the body is not adding new dimensions of stability.
In the first seven hours — for six hours, certainly — you start at the ends and work toward the middle. In the eighth and ninth hours, you start at the middle and work toward the ends.
It is in the eighth, ninth, and tenth hours that you are now dealing with relationships. What I expect to be seeing as you get into your practice is your minds literally working in terms of how do I relate this to this — instead of what causes this.
It isn't the end of the hour. It's after the first five minutes, after the second five minutes, after the third five minutes — have you contributed to the upper half?
What can the upper half contribute? What can the lower half contribute? These are the questions of the ninth hour.
As I do the work, the considerations that go through my head are: are the legs the way they are because of what is happening above, or is the upper half of the body the way it is because there is no grip of the legs? You are no longer asking what causes what — you are asking how each end serves the other.
It seems to me that in the eighth, ninth, and tenth hours we are working with the superficial layers of fascia — not the fascia surrounding individual organs, but the fascia that relates the body. The body is made whole by its fascia. As far as I know, this point has never really been brought out. Nobody has ever really used their head on fascia anyway.
An appreciation of the body as a set of interrelated systems — rather than an aggregate, a summation of individual myofascial pieces — is what is necessary to get a body together. This synthesis of systems is the job and the understanding needed for hours eight, nine, and ten. Those systems are laid down in the body as great fascial planes.
Most of you make your mistake right here: you insist on trying to get that thorax in the first hour at a place where that thorax needs to be in the ninth hour.
I can't get my advanced students out of this business of trying to get a thorax looking like a ninth hour thorax in the first hour. So don't you people feel how stupid you are — you've got a lot of company.
The repeating of an hour should only very rarely be done, and then only to patch up work that hasn't been properly done. There is no such thing as giving two ninth hours, any more than there is such a thing as giving two first hours — any more than there is such a thing as teaching a human being how to read twice. When he knows how to read, he knows how to read. When he's got the relationship of the hour, he's got it, and you can't give it to him again.
The goal of the first hour, the second hour, the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth — the goal of every hour — is a freed and therefore more horizontal pelvis. A marbleization of the pelvis: getting movement into a place where movement should be, and where in about fifty percent of people, movement is not.
The myth among all manipulators — and for that matter among psychotherapists — is that if you take the thing apart, it's automatically all right. If you release the hang-ups, it's automatically all right. It isn't so. You have to add to the energy of that body by showing it where it's going to go. Taken-apart bodies don't have the right level of energy. They can't put themselves together. They don't know how.
You begin to see, as you get past the eighth and ninth hour, that it is no longer the static — it's the dynamic. Something has to be added to the static before you get the dynamic. You somehow have to get this intuitive feeling for the change from static to dynamic.
When you begin to really recognize the extent to which if you work in the forearm you are changing the rib cage, you then begin to believe the preachers who say to you the body is one. You cannot take little isolated lumps of mud and throw it at it and have it stick and have it work. Those little isolated lumps of mud are going to change what's going on right into the center of things, providing you get them integrated. The body is one big spider web, and wherever you are affected, everything else is affected.
When have you affected the shoulder girdle before? You did a certain amount in the third hour. You did a certain amount in the fifth hour when you released some of the recti pull. You did quite a bit in the seventh hour when you were working up around the neck. But still in all, you've never critically worked with the shoulder girdle the way you critically worked with the pelvic girdle. And the day of reckoning has come. When you look at the body along about the ninth hour and you say, I don't know what's the matter with it, but it's no good — you've got a fair chance of putting the blame into what has not happened to the upper girdle.
By moving the arms around and working on the forearm, you release the humerus. And if the humerus gets released and turns around up there in its socket, there is an awful lot attached to that humerus — six muscles at least, maybe more. So this tends to send a freeing and releasing wave throughout the entire fascial network.
In your first hour you did largely total work — total down to the knees. But in your second hour you went down. In your third hour you went up. In your fourth hour you went down. In your fifth hour you went up. In your sixth hour you went down. In your seventh hour you went up. And the expectation is going to be that in your eighth hour you're going to go down. Usually that's the way it is — three times out of every four. But the fourth time you're going to have to go up to the shoulder girdle. The whole first ten hours of processing deal with a freeing and an ordering of the girdles with respect to the trunk. And only when the girdles are ordered with respect to the trunk is it possible to get your vertical in.
Until you learn to use your arms properly, your arms tie up and they get to feeling like rocks. And if they get that way long enough they deteriorate, and the flesh itself begins to become kind of grizzly. Along about that time, through the attachment of the arms to the trunk, you begin affecting the trunk with every movement that you make, because the muscle is too short and too non-elastic to give. So all the use that you make of your arms in walking is really pulling your body apart.
In order to get from the horizontal pelvis up to the cervical, we've got to go through here. And if this is stuck and this is too short, the sternals are glued and the ribs are not balanced in their separation, you can't get the adjustment of the cervical. So you go there and you look, and lo and behold all of a sudden you've got the exercise of the breath exercising the entire spine. And you know you've got it. Then you have to go in and get up there to make the adjustment to get that cervical operating in tandem with your lumbar.
Each session like the fifth hour, raising the front of the thorax, starts to set the shoulders back. In the sixth hour when the sacrum starts to drop down, the shoulders find their home a little bit more. So by the time you get to seven you've really done a lot to organize the shoulder girdle even though you haven't worked it directly. But you've come up so gradually with the pelvis, so stepwise — and now you're making a jump. You're no longer going stepwise.
Take a look at Owen. You see how there's no connection really between his neck and either the head or the thorax. Such a sad break — you don't get any. It's a really complete break. I think that can be gotten out of there, but I don't think it can be kept out of there unless you stop the heavy work. If you go back to playing the flute, I think they can get these ribs up. The problem is that they start so far off than normal. They start way down here and they're working like hell all the way up. They never give themselves time to catch up with themselves.
Before you can get that quadratus to span properly, you have to free the shoulders from the thorax, because they're still weighing down and it's not going to help much if you don't get that going. The latissimus — it's just a big sheet that just covers the whole back like wings. In fact, in birds, the latissimus ends up at the elbow and it's the thing that brings the wing down. The way they use their shoulder, we see that it's usually pulled too far forward. In order to get it back, you have to take the tissue and put it back. And in order to put the stuff back, you also have to hang on and bring something forward.
You stay on the sternocleidomastoid, and you don't get down into what I used to call the salt cellars. You've got to get the salt cellars of the neck flattened out. But in order to do that, you've got to get your fingers down behind. The deepest layer sheaths the scalenes as it comes down — the scalenes, the brachial plexus, the serratus posterior, the serratus superior, all the muscles in the back of the neck, the rhomboids — and eventually fuses with the lumbar fascia. That's why when you work either at the top or at the bottom, you get relief somewhere on the other end.
When we're dealing with the neck we are really dealing with a system of muscles that raise and position the shoulder girdle, a system of muscles that come up from the back and really are extensions of the back muscles, a third group of muscles that rotate the head, and finally an extension of the gastrointestinal tract.
Singer talks about the neck really in two sections. For him, the neck is forward of the angle of the trapezius — he calls this the nape. The reason for the distinction is that the muscles in the back of the neck, the nape, are really muscles of the back. When you look at the fascia, the fascia goes down the back here, and you don't have that when you move anteriorly. The neck tends to be stopped — it's almost like there's an inguinal ligament that runs across in the front, and although there's transmission downwards, there's that boundary.
As you get the spacing of the shoulder girdle, you begin to get an appropriate behavior of shoulders — and the appropriate behavior of shoulders is that shoulders move with every breath. They become wider and they drop. This is your touchstone: have I done the work, or haven't I done the work?
Now you've gotten the two girdles into fairly good shape. Now you have got to get the trunk into the kind of shape where those girdles can relate to it. Every person who has a distortion of the first rib or the second rib or the third rib is having the kind of situation which will not allow that shoulder girdle to become appropriately placed. You're going to have to get in there one way or another and lift those ribs one by one. You've seen various techniques of various degrees of, shall I say, violence to get that done.
Why is it different from the other six hours where you've been putting the head underneath? By her coming straight up with her head, now that we've laid the cervical back so they're in line with the rest of the spine — by working primarily to get the whole spine related, working close to the spine on this hour — we can maintain a relationship that we can't get when she's bending forward and the spine is curving. At no time earlier have you really been working with trapezius, and at no time earlier have you done very much with it.
You come in here with all kinds of things wrong with you, and we say, yes, we can fix it. But then you take on Rolfing. God help you.
This is one of the things that makes me put a question mark after cranial osteopathy. Certainly the cranium moves. But how is it going to move very far if this thing is all hung down to a second rib which is out of place? Recall how these neck muscles fasten down as far as the second rib.
Failure of support from the dorsal — this is what I'm trying to get you to look at. It's the underpinnings again. How are you going to get his cervical along the midline so that you can do the fascial work on a balanced structure? You're not going to get that straight without getting to those ribs. Down to the second rib, it's all connected up through here. This is very difficult for you people to take on because you adore being dramatic and impressing all these guys — oh my gosh, you can go in there. But the answer is on the outside of that.
At the seventh hour, the concentration has been chiefly in hours four, five, and six in the pelvic area — the fourth hour on the inside of the legs, the fifth hour on the abdomen coming down to the pelvis from the top, the sixth hour on the back of the legs and into the rotators and the gluteal muscles in the seat. So a lot of concentration has been at that end of the body. The balanced energy system that the body is, the body is beginning to feel the strain in the neck. Nine people out of ten will come in before their seventh hour very aware that that hour has to have something to do with the neck.
Sometimes by the time the eighth hour comes, you see a body which looks very disorganized before the eighth hour — as if that one cork, or that one plug, that was holding the pelvis or the shoulder girdle in an unbalanced position has come out. The work in the seventh hour goes as far as the level you have done in the pelvis, and perhaps even deeper.
Most of the things that have to be taken apart have been taken apart. And your job at this point is to fully understand pecking apart that blob on the head. You begin to put that head together with this body, which is beginning to surprise you by looking truly superior. Your first six hours, you approached largely from the periphery to the south. When you get to the eighth hour, you are going to start at the center and go to the outside.
Session Ten
The tenth hour is where the work comes home to itself. Ida saw it as the moment of relating — intrinsic to extrinsic, plane to plane, static to dynamic — when balance ceases to be an arrangement and becomes a quality. What follows are her own words on what this hour asks of the practitioner and reveals in the body.
The material stuff in the three-dimensional universe works at its optimal when it is under a law of balance. And this is what your tenth hour is about.
The job of the tenth hour is to organize joints to get from static to dynamic. You're not going very far dynamic today, but you're going to make the transition today, I hope. You're going to understand what it is that makes the transit from static to dynamic — and it is literally freedom of the joints.
In the tenth hour you are working with the body in its entirety. And anything that you haven't done will rise at this point to confront you. Find out all about karma — the karma of the unknown as well as the karma of the done.
It is in the eighth, ninth, and tenth hours that you are now dealing with relationships. What I expect to be seeing is your minds working in terms of how do I relate this to this, instead of what causes this.
In the tenth hour you've got to get wherever this thing is headed, but your job in the tenth hour is a relating. It is a relating of the planes of space, but it is also a relating of the planes of fascia. Because the thing that violates the planes of space is the stuffness of the planes of fascia.
Not merely the establishment of balance — that's important — but the recognition and the seeing of balance. The seeing when you don't have balance. Recognition of what is going wrong with the body as a result of that lack of balance.
In your material universe, balance is very often associated with symmetry. Not always, but symmetry is a very useful measuring stick for balance. In order to establish balance, you will very often use this measuring — symmetrical around a line — and the chances are pretty strong that you've got a much greater degree of balance than you hoped before.
In that tenth hour you are going to stack these joints on horizontal planes, and after you get them stacked on horizontal planes, you see the planes. It's as simple as that. It looks as though you have a stack of Victrola records, one on top of the other, a little wider perhaps.
Those horizontals are not something to work toward. They're something that, if you have worked toward your goal appropriately, appear. This is why it's so difficult to get into that gut level — because you have never learned about this. You are told to be goal conscious: something is a goal, you're gonna grab for it. Now you're in a process world, and you don't know how to look.
When you get to the end of your tenth hour work, if you have done it properly, you find that you have a core, you have a sleeve — the vertical core of the spinal structure, the sleeve of the two-thirds curves. This is the intrinsic and extrinsic balance of the body. You have the sleeve that does the work of the body, and you have the core that does the vital living.
The reason for ten hours is because at that tenth hour you balance those intrinsics against the extrinsics. There are plenty of people to whom that would be sheer words, and there are others who take this on. That is the reason for the tenth hour.
What you're really seeing, as you see this beautiful serene eighth, ninth, tenth hour picture coming out — what you're really seeing is that the extrinsics are no longer working madly.
This silky business is something that comes in as you near the tenth hour. Sometimes it comes in in little local areas before then. What you are feeling is the fact that fascial plane can slide on fascial plane. As you get fascial plane sliding on fascial plane, and the absence of interference, you begin to feel it.
When the person is sitting straight and hung up with the tuberosity, holding the head, pulling up on the side of the head, jiggling it back from side to side — you can feel the spine as a continuous wave all the way down to the sacrum. You have more weight on the end of the line with no interference along the spine. That is a test of balance. Something isn't out of line. Something is balancing its opposite number. And so you get this uninterrupted wave through the body.
As you look at that tenth hour picture, you are aware that the soft tissue on the outside of the body has been freed and is adapting and adjusting, but that the deepest layer of that body, whereas it has listened to you, has not gotten to the place where it is bouncing off the outer layer.
There will come a time when bodies are sturdy enough and relaxed enough that you can afford to work with them other than on a flat plane on a bed or on a floor. But in a tenth hour you're still taking off the strain of the gravity that you will get exaggerated and exacerbated if you try to work in sitting or standing position.
The myth among all manipulators — and for that matter among psychotherapists — is that if you take the thing apart, it's just automatically all right. If you release the hang-ups, it's just automatically all right. It isn't so. You have to add to the energy of that body by showing it where it's going to go.
In the eighth and ninth and tenth hour, if you're going to get true integration, you have to get away from listening to the individual screams of individual parts, because you are beginning to get into an understanding of the body as a fascial complex. In the advanced hours, you are looking at the body no longer as this plus this plus this plus this. You're looking at the body as a large-sized piece of the whole fascial complex.
We are going into an unknown territory, a terra incognita, trying to find out what changes in that body are going to develop into what changes in the personality that calls itself the owner of that body. I'm talking about energy being added by pressure to the fascia, the organ of structure, to change the relation of the fascial sheaths, to balance these around a vertical line which parallels the gravity line. The first balance of the body is a static stacking, but as the body incorporates more changes, the balance ceases to be a static balance. It becomes a dynamic balance.
I used to say, trying to scare people off from doing this little river system to drive them back to fix up some little thing here and there, that as soon as you put some more work on top of the tenth hour, you destroy the picture of the tenth hour. And you do, but you don't. That deep building stays there. But the quality that I'm talking about at this moment disappears.
You become a degree of master as you learn how to use suggestion. When you send your patient over to get a picture taken, do you ever make the suggestion: now get that feeling as you're walking. In so doing, you miss the boat for him. With your lack of understanding of how to suggest, you have thrown away the work of the last hour — maybe the work of several hundred hours.
The chronic that they've had for years suddenly changes. The way they walk changes. They begin to stride across here as you've seen with several of your confrères. They begin to use their legs so differently.
If you take the map of the recipe and travel along it, you will come to the same mileposts irrespective of how many times you travel along it. The milepost still says tenth hour, six hours off. Tenth hour, five hours off. No matter how many times you've gone over this road, those white mileposts stay right there. And yet you are on a different level. You are really not traveling straight — you are traveling circularly, spirally.
While the tenth hour is something that puts some joints together, it is something very much more complicated than that. It is something which creates the kind of unbelievably effective body. Not merely effective in movement — effective in function.
There is no answer because, as I said to you before, you can't really balance a person. You can talk about it. You can approximate it much more closely than the random body does. But you never get there. By this time, your hands will tell you that this is a chimerical goal because the structures are different on the two sides, because the ribcage has grown different. If you examine skulls upside down in a museum lying in a case, you're just bowled over by the fact that the inside of those skulls have no relation to balance. None whatsoever. If you examine dental molds, they have no relation. You look at that mold and you say, this is a mold of a bony structure. I should be able to balance that. You can get a balance of function in the soft tissue. You can get a balance of appearance in the soft tissue. You can get a balance of weight as you stand on two scales.
Lots of times you will get more result, really, by doing that fourth session considerably after the third, letting them consolidate and settle in.
In the old days, I used to say, trying to scare people off from doing this little river system to drive them back to fix up some little thing here and there, that as soon as you put some more work on top of the tenth hour, you destroy the picture of the tenth hour. And you do, but you don't. That deep in building up stays there.
Any of you that think you know about the tenth hour, do you think that Paul shows the quality of the tenth hour? After all, that man should have a tenth hour in him, and he should have a lot more in him. And if he doesn't show that characteristic, why doesn't he? Part of it has to do with something that we talked about over and over again, which is a kind of spinal unity — a feeling of connectedness. He hasn't got it. Not yet. He had more of it when he came in six weeks ago. Paul never had it with respect to his head, but he did have it with respect to his pelvis.
What is the test for the tenth hour? When do you know you have done a good tenth hour? The person sitting straight, hung up with the tuberosity, holding the head, pulling up on the side of the head, jiggling it back from side to side — you can feel the spine as a continuous wave all the way down to the sacrum. You have more weight on the end of the line with no interference along the spine. Recognize how that is a test of balance. Something isn't out of line. Something isn't catcher. Something is balancing its opposite number. And so you get this uninterrupted wave through the body.
That wave occurs in the mesodermic body — the body that has derived from the mesoderm. But the behavior pattern that it instills is in the ectodermic body, in the body that has derived from the ectoderm, the nervous system. And it may or may not, it probably will but not predictably, carry through into that endomorphic endodermic body, the gut body, the gland body. How does it carry through to the epidural? I don't know. Several things in life I don't know, and that is one of them.
Your tenth hour is about recognizing the fact that the material stuff in the three-dimensional universe works at its optimal when it is under a law of balance. Wherever you are going in that material universe, you have got a much greater degree of balance than you had before.
Your myofascial tissue becomes something that is infinitely valuable to you because you can reach it. You can't just get ahold of the thyroid gland and drag it around hither and yon and expect to get service out of it. But you can get ahold of a lot of myofascial tissue in the neck which controls the nervous innervation to the thyroid and drag it. You can't get ahold of a nerve trunk and just pull it and yarn and expect to get service out. But you can do it with myofascial tissue.
Another way of saying that was said by Wagoner anyway. He said, the Rolfing is twenty hours of work, and eleven of them go to the tenth hour.
The seventh is sort of like my favorite hour because so much good things happen. It once came to me that if heaven really comes to you, in the seventh hour you get a good glimpse of it. The fourth is almost the other end of the line. Very Christian. You go have through purgatory.
Look back at your understanding of a vertical body on the first day that we started talking. Even the first day that we started the advanced class. You saw verticality as being so much more important. And as of today, you are beginning to recognize that it isn't verticality. It's no longer the static, it's the dynamic. You think that the dynamic is further along the static — that something has to be added to the static before you get the dynamic. You get the beginning of that when you get that tenth hour balance, where you take the head and you feel the relation that there is between the intrinsics of the spine and the extrinsics of the sleeve. But the person is not sufficiently experienced at that time to be able to get ahold of intrinsic musculature and hang onto it, use it, demand from it. And so in your eleventh hour you are taking this person who has had an illumination, and you're trying to convert it into something that they can use.
I have never yet given an eleventh hour to a person without their having a drastic sense of improvement. The chronic that they've had for years suddenly changes. The way they walk changes. They begin to stride across here. They begin to use their legs so differently.
Your eighth and your ninth hour and your tenth hour are operations that are going on in your understanding on a fascial level of connection and relation. We make the choice — we are going to choose the big part of the body that will give us the greatest support for the remainder of the body, that will give us the greatest help organizing the remaining part of the body. That is the key for that eighth hour. Ask yourself, will the upper part help the lower part? Will the lower part help the upper part? In the ninth hour, if you've done your eighth hour properly, there's no soul searching, because all you have to do is to do the rest of it.
It is never possible to get true symmetry in a body. How can you, when you've got the difference between a heart on one side and a liver on the other side? But you can certainly get something that is better balanced in terms of weight. The good Lord never meant for a true symmetrical balance. He apparently means for an essential, a virtual balance. The asymmetry of the body, the true structural asymmetry, is largely above the pelvis. There's another place where you can't get symmetry, and yet I tell you to look for it. You've got a horizontal across those ankles. You can't have a horizontal across those ankles because the fibula is bound to be lower than the tibia. It has to be. Yet as those ankles work, when they work properly, they work like a horizontal hinge. You've got to get used to the idea that physiological is not the equal of anatomical.
Al came out of his sixth hour complaining about his feet. He thought by this time, at the end of the sixth hour, his feet should be straight, and they shouldn't be falling all over on the side. So we went down there and did these foot exercises. We got quite a decent pair of feet at the expense of throwing the whole rotation up again into the torso. At sixth hour, I had taken it out of the torso and put it into the feet, and for demonstration purposes, I took it out of the feet and put it back in the torso. If you know enough of these men, you can play this way back and forth.
You have to remember that you never get a closed goal. There is no such thing in a living biological system as a closed-end goal. As soon as you get to sunset somewhere, something else starts happening. Some other adjustment starts occurring. If there isn't anything else, it's the normal procedure of aging — and I do not mean the abnormal procedure of falling apart. You always have that open-ended goal in front of your mind's eyes, and you're always moving toward it. You never really get to it and really latch onto it forever and ever. Life isn't that way.
The whole first ten hours of processing deal with a freeing and an ordering of the girdles with respect to the trunk. Only when the girdles are ordered with respect to the trunk is it possible to get your vertical in. And as your vertical comes in, your horizontals will come in. Your horizontals really are only a different aspect, a different view of the vertical.
A woman came in to interview me for an article. She sat here, and across from her there were five Rolfers — Penny, Andy, John, Michael Kilbro, and still another one. They were all sitting there on the couch. Suddenly she looked up and said, you know, it's such a strange experience to look at five people sitting across from you and every one of them sitting straight. She was a random body. She didn't know anything about random bodies or about Rolf bodies, except that her job was to get an interview. But somehow this appealed to her aesthetic sense. Why is it that a balanced body gives you pleasure? You relax as you look at a balanced body. Feel yourself looking at a balanced body and feel how you relax in your pelvis.
Dear old Sam Bois, who was one of the fathers of General Semantics — his way of getting this used to be to say, feel the seat of your pants. Feel the seat of your pants and see what you do with it.
Now we get to the eighth hour, and there isn't a thing left for us to do except put it together and see what we get when we get it put together. We're still in the rather interesting state of mind where we don't know what we're going to get, but we do know that we've got to do something about this.
You could trace the hours through in terms of horizontalizing the pelvis. You could trace the hours through in terms of getting the knee to go straight forward — just kind of abstracting from the body in particular, taking one particular area and then tracing the hours through to see how you affect that area.
There is something I would like to call to your attention now, because you won't see it later — you won't see it after the first couple of hours. Where the muscles of the body seem entirely independent of each other. They live literally inside of a bag, but they aren't integrated. They aren't knit into each other. As you put your hand in there, you feel these various levels or various areas, and you feel them all separate, all going separately. My guess is that this is what happens when you take a body that's reasonably strong to begin with and you just over-enforce it to greater and greater effort with respect to limited goals. By limited goals I mean there is no balance in terms of what you're calling on the body to do. If you're calling on it for two hours of work with its legs, you are not then taking it and giving it about three quarters of an hour of work with its arms. The old yoke system of exercise as taught by teachers who were really well informed was that way. If you were working today principally on the legs, you did fifteen or twenty minutes' worth before you finished it up.
One of the very fundamental observations about the third hour is that in that third hour, you start dealing with girdles. Either girdle is a doing, not a being, apparatus. You can live without either girdle. As you organize that third hour, what you are really doing is relating the pectoral to the latissimus. That is what is going to be the most superficial balancing mechanism of that shoulder girdle: the pectoral to the latissimus.
The whole fourth hour is very intimately wound up with the whole problem of sexual adjustment and recognition. By the fifth hour, you are working your way upward out of the pelvis into the structures whose well-being depends upon the positioning of the pelvis. Your fourth hour has taken on the positioning of the floor of the pelvis. And the fifth hour begins to turn it up in the front so that it has support under the abdominal organs. In your sixth hour, you are still working with the pelvis and balancing that basin. You are now going in primarily to balance the sacrum with the rest of the pelvis — just as through the entire series, we never go where we are working. So here, you don't go where you are working, but you go to the areas that influence the sacral position.
The problem of the shoulder girdle in the eighth hour — the shoulder end of the line — is a different problem than at the pelvic end of the line, because the shoulders, the arms, are doing things but they are not supporting weights. They are not transmitting weights, carrying weights, lifting weights. The arms in general are not really fighting gravity to any great extent — not to as great an extent as the legs, which have to transmit that whole 170 pounds of a man or 210 pounds of a man. That's a big job. It's a heavy job. And in that, it limits the degrees of freedom with which this can be accomplished. The shoulders have much more freedom in terms of the way they move than the legs do, because they don't have this gravity problem.
If you start with a young enough person or a free enough person, you can actually organize that shoulder girdle simply by mind-body directions, as Mrs. Lee would have called them. You tell the elbow to go straight out, and presently it will go straight out. And in so doing, it will balance all these other muscles. But as people get older and as they get more habit patterns, more deterioration of the flesh, the mind can no longer get in there and really reorganize it. So somebody's fingers have to get in there — same old story, add energy to it.
We're in a degenerative force field. We're standing erect against the field that's trying to pile us down onto the ground. We're trying to stand erect, because when we really stand erect, the force field is with us. It's while standing erect that we have our problem. It's while the body is random that we have our problem. But when we really become erect and motile within the field, the problem disappears.
Part of the genius of Dr. Rolf is in developing a sequence in which the onion can be unpeeled without disordering — so that you can take layer by layer, in a sequential way, each hour bringing in a level of organization. It's easy to take a body apart, but it's not so easy to put it together. That's the key to it.
Beyond the Recipe
After the ten sessions, the work does not end — it deepens. Ida insisted the Recipe was never a formula to be outgrown, but a living principle to be inhabited. These passages trace her thinking on what it means to move from cook to chef: to keep the road while seeing the body whole.
A recipe is fine. It works, as each and every one of you have reason to know. But when you get to be a chef instead of a cook, you create your results not by a recipe but by your recognition of the interplay of food and nutritional materials. This is the level where we are now. The recipe is going to be good down to the end of the line for beginning work. But after all is said and done, we have many demands that are further along than beginning work.
That recipe is good. But unless you learn that the recipe is a response to what goes on in the body, it is not doing what you do. A recipe is like all cookbooks — an ever-present help in time of trouble. But if you get good enough, you don't have times of trouble.
It's as though my tool bag gets bigger and bigger and bigger, but the recipe stays the same.
The body talks about it. That's all I can say. If you start with the program — start with your first hour, which I teach you — lo and behold, by the time they come in for the second hour, every one of those ten people will show you the same symptom. Their legs are not under them. Their feet aren't walking properly. The body screams at you. So to stop it screaming, you get down there and you try to do something with it. And if you stop it screaming, then it begins to scream somewhere else, and you do that in the third. You just chase the scream until it has no place to go, and then you kiss them goodbye and tell them it was nice knowing them.
I don't believe there is a precision approach that always works. But in order for you people to learn from zero, you have to learn on the assumption that there is a precision approach. As you get much more experienced, you learn that you change the approach. But the problem comes when you have done two hours of work and your ego says, oh well, after all, I know more than she does. Let me try it this way. And then you try it that way six times and you've forgotten the path that would lead you. I will guarantee that if you follow the recipe, you'll get the result.
Only I recommend that you stay with the recipe, period, for a long time to come — for a year, two years. And then if you want to play around, alright. But if you play around early, you just lose the vision that comes through the repetitive performance of a certain passion.
My experience was that I was scared when I got out of practitioner training. I'd done twenty sessions in my life, and I was being turned loose on the world as a rolfer. So I just stayed in that recipe like it was a life preserver. In fact, I decided to stay in it for five years, which was my own commitment to myself. I figured if it takes a carpenter in the old school five years to become a journeyman, it's going to take me that long. The recipe always brought me right. The people at the end of the tenth hour would have a line, and they'd feel good.
I do not want to leave this veil of tears with you people with only a recipe. When I leave this earth I want to leave a couple of hundred people who know how to make a recipe, who understand why a recipe is made.
Don't improvise too much. I am warning all of you not to get yourselves lost that way. That is the simplest and easiest way to get lost and to think you know so much more than that good old recipe — which came from God knows where, not from me. It came from bodies. It came from the story that the body showed me.
I have seen the recipe now sort of stroboscopically over maybe six or seven years. Each time I encounter you and go through a class situation, it's different. The recipe is constantly changing. But from that, I have abstracted a continuity within the change, which is sort of reassuring. One year the fascia asks you to go this way; originally we used to separate on the midline of the thigh one way, then a year later we were digging in and pulling it up, and the next year we were pushing it toward the midline. What I've begun to see is that indeed the fourth hour takes you to the leg — but the body demands what it is that you do. These different techniques begin to form a body of possibilities that you can apply on the fourth hour. The recipe constantly leads you to the place in the body which this road is following. What you do there, you have to respond to the body's need.
Sometimes you'll run into a body where the adductor structure is undifferentiated from the hamstrings. It's as though it has all become functionally one mass, and so some of the work will be to actually separate those. Other times you'll run into what feels like a slick layer covering a relatively differentiated structure. So you have to stay right on that slick layer and excite it and demand circulation come through it. There are all these different variations constantly being presented. It's like fingerprints — they don't come up the same way twice.
You see the genius of Doctor Rolf — part of her genius is in developing a sequence in which the onion can be unpeeled without disordering. Layer by layer, each hour bringing in a level of organization.
The first hour is the beginning of the tenth hour. The second hour is a follow-up of the first. The third hour is a continuation of the second and the first. It is literally a continuation. The only reason it was broken into ten sessions was because the body just couldn't take all that work at once.
As you got real sharp, you saw that the end of each hour took you into the next. You are finishing the first hour, but you are going into the second. At the end of the second, you may have felt inclined to do something about easing around the spine, getting ready for the third — you may have had this in your hands, the lengthening that was due to come up along the side. At the end of the third, as you looked at it, you saw that the anterior superior spines weren't at all happy, and if they stay that unhappy, you're going to have trouble with your fourth. In the fifth, how many times you tried to organize the pubes and the symphysis simply in order to relieve the strain involved in doing the fourth and not going on to the fifth — because this is really one process. It's really a spiral sort of thing.
Each one is a step that you're laying on top of the step below it. And if the step below it is out of line and not deep enough, you've got nothing on which to build.
In the third hour you begin to get deep to that superficial fascia. If you really want to understand the third hour, you must understand that you're peeling around and around, and now you're beginning to get down to the level where the peeling is going to do something drastic to the structure and lengthen it.
The eighth session has to deal with integration. There is a point at which trying to achieve something like the lumbars a thirty-second of an inch further back is disruptive rather than integrating. The eighth doesn't deal with the lumbars coming back another thirty-second. It doesn't deal with the femur turning another whatever. Primarily it deals with the relationships within the fascial system. That's the point of view, the perspective, that needs to come around.
In the eighth and ninth hour, if you're going to get true integration, you have to get away from listening to the individual screams of individual parts, because you are beginning to get into an understanding of the body as a fascial complex. In the advanced hours, you are looking at the body no longer as this plus this plus this. You're looking at the body as a large-sized piece of the whole fascial complex.
You somehow have to get this intuitive feeling for the change from static to dynamic. You get the beginning of it in that tenth hour balance, where you take the head and you feel the relation between the intrinsics of the spine and the extrinsics of the sleeve. But the person is not sufficiently experienced at that time to be able to get hold of intrinsic musculature and hang onto it, use it, demand from it. In your eleventh hour you are taking this person who's had an illumination, and you're trying to convert it into something they can use.
I have never yet given an eleventh hour to a person without their having a drastic sense of improvement. The chronic that they've had for years suddenly changes. The way they walk changes. They begin to stride. They begin to use their legs so differently. And then of course what you're going to have to do next is balance the cuff on the bottom. And all of a sudden you find that the arm structure is responsible for a great deal more aberration than you had any idea of.
What I try to have happen with you people is that you get to the recognition that you do a good job in those early hours. This business of, oh well, I'll have them for the rest of their life means that you are sloppy and slovenly. When you begin to keep on going with advanced hours, if you're any good, you're going to get down to a depth of problem that you cannot handle. And then they're going to have some fancy symptoms, and you're not going to know how to get them out of it. Quit while you're winning. Five years from now they're struck by an automobile — that's fine, then you've got a good excuse to go back. But you'll find that pretty much what you put in there is in there. It's just been knocked.
What's the difference between elementary and advanced work? You're affecting the whole. You're working with the fascial structure of the body — with the fascial spider web. As advanced rolfers you should visualize that body as a spider web, not on a plane as most spider webs are, but in a three-dimensional system with webs going in each direction.
In those first ten hours, you can get on to a precise point and get freedom from a precise point. In the advanced work, you can't find your precise point. Your precise point has spread out into the body as a whole.
When you get into advanced work, what you are trying to do is to control, establish, and bring forth appropriate dynamics for the project.
There is a pattern you can watch. People who have a first series of work — and it is not always ten, it is often more — go through a period of expansion. They expand to occupy their space differently, but oftentimes get bigger and heavier. Then, when advanced work comes — and by advanced work I don't mean just work after ten, but work that is designed to actually affect the rotation that usually gets revealed in those first series — then there is a consolidation that goes on in the body, and you'll see people giving the impression of taking up less space.
I want somebody to talk about the difference between the pattern at the end of the tenth hour and the pattern at the end of the advanced work. What I think I'm seeing is a greater lift from the core, greater liveliness from that internal core after the advanced work. At the end of the tenth, what I'm seeing is more in relationship to joints and the freedom of those joints. The metaphor I use is different levels. The first ten hours concern one level, and we integrate a person on that level. In the advanced hours, we're going to another level with that person. This is true.
The only way you're ever going to integrate parts is by taking a close look at the parts and how they can fit together. You take that eleventh hour and things really start to integrate to a degree that you haven't seen before. It's a powerful lift to that body, indicating that this word integration, and the reality behind it, really carries a punch.
We must know more about the structure with which we as rolfers are dealing. What is it we're doing to and with these structures? For it is the change in structure which manifests — or doesn't manifest. Or is it only an index for behavior?
My personal goal in the study of Rolfing is the study of the energy body and how it works. What constitutes the energy body? And how are these structures affected by Rolfing or by other techniques? We as rolfers are basically concerned with the application and improvement of the technique called rolfing, but unless we have a basic understanding of what it is we are trying to affect, and how these energy units can express themselves in what we are pleased to call the real world, we are in a dark confusion.
This world that you are heading into is an uncharted world, and you are going to have to do some of that charting. Some of the answers to what is going on have to do with your expertise in how you are going to use this advanced work.
To experience a body rather than to know about a body — that is not easy. It is neither easy on the teaching nor on the rolfer to get that transition.
A recipe is fine, it works, as each and every one of you have reason to know, but when you get to be a chef instead of a cook you create your results not by a recipe but by your recognition of the interplay of food and nutritional materials. This is the level where we are now. We have got to understand those nutritional materials and be able to understandingly put them together, not to supersede the recipe — in the early stage of the game, that recipe is going to be good down to the end of the line for beginning work. But after all is said and done, we have many demands that are further along than beginning work.
That which worked five years ago, six years ago, ten years ago, it still works, but it doesn't work well enough, it doesn't work deeply enough, it doesn't get where we should be going in order to show what Rolfing really can do. I have written, gravity is the therapist, and this is true. I make no claim to be a therapist, but I do make a claim that Rolfing changes the basic web of the body so that that therapist, gravity, can really get in there.
Those old anatomy boys that worked in the fourteenth century and the fifteenth century were mighty smart babies, and I cannot imagine how they got the kind of understanding that they put into those old anatomy books. They did, and it worked, and it works up to a certain point, and then it doesn't work anymore. Then you've got to go on from there. That is what the advanced class hopes to do — to take you people who have been brought up on classical anatomy and give you an understanding of the kind of anatomy which a Rolfer needs to know in order to create what he's looking for. You can't explain life to a five year old in terms of the same symbols that you use to a 45 year old. He doesn't understand them.
What you have to get away from in the eighth and ninth hour, if you're going to get true integration, is listening to the individual screams of individual parts, because you are beginning to get into an understanding of the body as a fascial complex. In the advanced hours, you are looking at the body no longer as this plus this plus this plus this. You're looking at the body as a large-sized piece of the whole fascial complex. Because of the integration of the whole body to its fascial network, you may have to go somewhere else — the ankles, for example — to get help for the shoulders or for some other part. All of you know how to take a body apart, and none of you ever know how to put it together.
You must understand what it is we are promoting. We are promoting energetic efficiency in bodies. I don't mean the kind of thing by energy that some of you are thinking of — not, oh, he's so energetic. I mean the kind of energy as is measured in a physics laboratory. How much work does your body have to do in order to effect what it is that you're being paid to do? The point about Rolfing is that you are studying how human beings can operate within the gravitational field with the least expenditure of energy with the greatest energetic effectiveness.
Our work is synthetic integration, a contribution toward knowledge and a creation of a wholeness and the understanding of how a man who is more nearly whole behaves. It is not merely the knowledge of anatomy or anatomical facts, not even fascial anatomy and its facts. It is the voluntary creation of a man nearer to the goal signified by Norbert Wiener — a more human use of human beings. This is our goal, to create that kind of a man.
You have to remember that you never get a closed-end goal. There is no such thing in a living biological system as a closed-end goal. As soon as you get to sunset somewhere, something else starts happening. Some other adjustment starts occurring. Some other change comes. If there isn't anything else, it's the normal procedure of aging — and I do not mean the abnormal procedure of falling apart. So you always have that open-ended goal in front of your mind's eyes, and you're always moving toward it. And you never really get to it and really latch onto it forever and ever. Life isn't that way.
Al came out his sixth hour complaining about his feet. He thought that by this time, at the end of the sixth hour, his feet should be straight, and they shouldn't be falling all over on the side. I said, alright, I'll show you how we can straighten the feet. We went down and did these foot exercises, and we got quite a decent pair of feet — at the expense of throwing the whole rotation up again into the torso. At sixth hour I had taken it out of the torso and put it into the feet, and for demonstration purposes I took it out of the feet and put it back in the torso. If you know enough of these methods, you can play this way back and forth.
How do you really get symmetry in a body which is organized with a heart on one side and a liver on the other side? How do you get symmetry in a body where most of your work is done with your right hand? Except that to a certain extent you separate girdle from core. But you can't take out that heart and put it on the other side.
None of the fads about bodies has touched the mesomorphic body. There are hundreds of researchers in the world who know more about the ectomorphic system than you are ever going to know if you work from now to the end of the line. The same is true of the endomorphic system. But the same is not true with the mesomorphic system. Here, you people are the investigators. The stuff that develops through the mesomorphic system, the connective tissue, the organ of structure — this is the only edge that you have. This is still unknown.
That twelfth dorsal vertebra is the center for the innervation for everything around except your head. It is the innervation for digestive activity, for eliminative activity, for reproductive activity, for the kidneys, for the adrenals, for the spleen. There is nothing within that body that doesn't have some sort of connection — most of them directly, some few indirectly — to that lumbodorsal junction. You have a new way of looking at a body. You have a way of looking at it as an extension of that twelfth dorsal area, of that lumbodorsal ridge — as a something centered going out, instead of something contained in the skin with some cubbyholes in it.
I remember many years ago when I used to first read metaphysical literature, they used to talk about how a body personality was made up of many bodies, and that these bodies interpenetrated, like water being in a glass of sand. Inside your glass was sand, and then you filled it with water. This very sand and this water had very different qualities. I remember how much trouble I had before I really got to the place where I was familiar with that metaphor and what it might be portending. I'm offering you the same metaphor now and expecting that you're going to have just as much trouble with it.
You'll find that Mr. Webster says a plastic is something which can be deformed, deformed without breaking, deformed to a great extent without breaking. I say to you, yes, this is one definition of a plastic. The other definition of a plastic is that it can be reformed without breaking. And people come to grief by virtue of the fact that these bodies of theirs have been being deformed under the pull of gravity since they were born, but nobody has gotten around to reforming them, because nobody has really taken a good look at the fact that it is a plastic body and therefore can be reformed.
Invariably, you're going to run into the person's persona when you start trying to modify their body pattern. That's one of the first things that emerges — the personality starts to manifest more strongly. Very often there's emotional content in what's going on for that person as you work on them. You really have to make a clear choice for yourself about where you're going to stand with respect to that person — how you're going to establish your own territory and maintain it while you're taking that body apart and putting it back together.
It's very important that you recognize that these various systems in a body have to be developed in order to get efficient, happy living. You go along and look on the foot stand and find the body beautiful, and there's very little being in it — it's a doing system. They have managed to overstress that doing until they get an absolutely immobilized organization. Those guys that you see on that body beautiful are good for very little work. Put them out to mow the lawn for an hour, and they can't work for a week. If you happen to be anywhere around where prizefighters are training, you see the same sort of thing. They run just so and so many feet, then they come home and rest. Then at eleven they take on their sparring partner for just so long, and they rest. They can't do a day's work.
In order to get that spine back, he's got to get the pelvis under. If he gets the pelvis under, he's got to get the spine back. If he gets the spine back, he's got to get the shoulder blades together. They have to come together. There's no other way to get a spine back. A body is a summation of energies. The fact which we call a body, in terms of energy, is the summation of the energies of various areas and various organs of a body. The organs are energies. And so the body itself becomes the algebraic sum of these various energies.
If you have a thorough-going understanding of what you're trying to do, basically, then you will draw yourself a map as to how to get there. In terms of a general description, your sixth hour deals with all kinds of things below the waistline. Anything below the waistline that's interfering with the establishment of that sacral floating is appropriate. People who do a lot of skiing will always have very tight rectus femoris areas, and if that rectus femoris is tightened up, you won't be able to balance it with the stuff in the back.
The thing that you are doing in every hour of Rolfing is lengthening that body, thinning it for the most part, and lengthening it. In order to lengthen it, you have got to get greater length in those spiny erectors. The shortening of the body comes in by virtue of the spreading apart of those spiny erectors, and the lengthening of the body can be produced by the tightening together of those spiny erectors. As you look at these bodies, you find that as the body has shortened, the scapulae have come apart. The converse is also true. As the scapulae are pulled apart by poor use of the shoulder girdle, the body shortens. Consequently, in order to lengthen the body, you have to get the scapulae in where they belong.
This boy was now being tutored in fifth grade work. This boy had been tutored in his first grade work. What happened? What kind of energy was put in? Where? To the structure of the human body. That's all I know. The body is plastic. Verticalize that body so that it is lying appropriately within the field of gravity of the earth. I don't need to tell you that that was a different boy.
In whatever city Rolfers are working, there are always people who will get into this thing and say, well, I just saw her doing that. I saw her putting a knuckle in and just pushing. They have no idea of the sophistication necessary to that movement in order to create good. A guy one time said to me, I saw you give a demonstration. I went home and I tried it on my mother-in-law. She has a heart condition and Bright's disease, and it didn't do her any good. Your method's no good. All of this energy has to be added in an appropriate direction. The wrong direction breaks the structure down.
The patterning is valuable in its own way. Its greatest value, in my opinion, is that a person who goes into patterning commits a certain number of hours of his time to being aware of how he uses his body, how he might better use his body more efficiently. He goes to a Rolfer and expects to have something done for him and to him, but he doesn't have any such expectation when he goes to a patterner. When he goes to a patterner, he goes with the understanding that he is going to do something differently.
Sports and exercise build strong bodies and rigid body images. In terms of structure they're not very stable. These are task-oriented. They are not exploratory. They are not experiencing. There are a limited number of potential responses when you do exercises — a very limited number of potential responses. It's a closed system. You learn an exercise, you do it, and that's about what you can do with it. Your body is not beautiful or ugly or healthy or deformed or swift or slow simply because it's thrust upon you like this at birth. Rolfing changes what you are, the conception of what you are, and through it, it changes the nature of the body itself.
Part
Part Three — The Practitioner's Hands
A Rolfer is a body working on a body. The passages in this part collect Ida's teaching about the craft itself — what to see, where to put your hands, how to pace, how to read what is on the table in front of you, and how to remain whole as a practitioner over time.
Seeing
Ida insisted that seeing was the practitioner's first instrument — not feeling, not technique. Before the hands know anything, the eye must learn to read what gravity has written on a body. These passages trace what she meant by trained perception: looking at the territory rather than the map, at relationships rather than parts, at the whole rather than the symbol.
I'm going to get you to look at the territory, not at the map — to look at the map only secondarily and say, well, by golly, that's a map all right, but this isn't what I saw when I looked at the territory.
A body is not something that comes out of an anatomy book, and an anatomy book frequently isn't anything that comes out of a body. This is why you will find Rolfing something that is difficult. It goes against every method of teaching that you have ever been subjected to since you were five years old. Nobody ever taught you to look at the experience. They taught you to look at the symbol of the experience, at the abstract of the experience.
Your job as Rolfers is to understand what pattern gives you good function. And you look at a guy and you say to yourself: what is it in that man, what is it in that woman, that in its deviation from the pattern that I know gives good function is giving him trouble?
The job of the practitioner is to see how it deviates from the pattern, and what can I do to bring it closer to the pattern, thereby conserving the energy which is the function of this particular guy.
To the seeing Rolfer's eye, contour is the clue to the personality, both the physical personality and the psychological personality. But interestingly enough, both the contour and the personality, contrary to much popular opinion, can be changed. This is the Gospel according to Structural Integration.
It is difficult to see changes in a living three-dimensional individual unless you are trained to see them. Most of the work that goes on in the first six weeks of our training is a training to see bodies — three-dimensional living bodies — and to see them as they change and how they change.
I remember many years ago working with an artist. He was a good artist; he has work in the top museums of this country and Europe. I'd take a look at it and say, Tony, for God's sake, the man can't walk. Can't you see? He can't walk. No, he'd say, I don't see that. Where's his weight going? It had never occurred to this man that there is a reality — the reality that you have some sort of weight, and that weight has to be supported, and the ground you walk on seems to have been put there to support it.
You can tell looking at them what you're going to find. You can tell in the way they use their eyes. Are they seeing with their eyes, or are they grabbing with their eyes?
When you can get to the place where you can see peripherally, you will begin to understand relationships. As it is, you just look straight ahead and see what's in front of you. This is a weakness of your entire personal understanding — not only of Rolfing, but certainly in life — because you limit your understanding.
On the retina, there is only one spot which really sees clearly. That spot is straight in. As the light comes straight into the eye and falls on that spot, you get clear vision. By accident and by effort, you can try to spread that vision over more of the retina, and then you no longer have clear vision.
The advanced students have to begin to see bodies as spider webs, cobwebs — a solid cylinder of cobweb. And the characteristic of the cobweb that every child knows is that if you disturb it even at the outermost thread, every thread in that cobweb is disturbed.
Observe the message that pants are giving you. How many of those pants even try to be horizontal? There is one that tries, but look at the rest of them — they fit up, they fit down, but they don't fit horizontal. Don't tell me it's the way you put your pants on in the morning. That has very little to do with the case. Automatically, you settle those pants into the lines of your anatomy, and those pants then call attention to how the anatomy runs.
Perceive through those clothes. Not merely with your fingers, but with your awareness — your realization of exactly where that joint is, your realization of exactly how the weight is going through that joint. Begin to see the stupidity of thinking that you've got to get people undressed to know what's going on.
This business of keeping pants on people is a great help in seeing them. As you get used to looking at people with pants on, you see more about them — how the lines of the clothing go, how the clothing hangs.
A hundred years ago, the jewelry of the day was a cameo. If you go into the old antique shops and look at cameos, you see they are carrying a message — the same message that all statuary carries, a suggestion of how a head should be carried. The head is related to planes. If you look with your now-Rolfer's eyes at those heads, they will tell you what was the body that lay under them.
Look at the people who are showing you imbalance in the rotators — the people whose tail end is out, waiting in the breeze, instead of dropping down the damn hill. Realize how much is involved. You get trouble in the rotators, you've got trouble in a very large system.
Look at that fan of muscle. If you wanted to make something which could bring a body in, could you figure out how to do it better than that? Look at the great sophistication which exists in this structure. The good God didn't just run something from up here to down there. Appreciate the tremendous utilitarian wisdom of this structure.
The more you look at these anatomical drawings, the more able you are to see the aesthetics of it.
I would strongly suggest that you get into your anatomy books with a transparent sheet over the page and trace. Only by that kind of work are you going to know. Your eyes do not tell you, because we train our eyes to see quickly and to pass over. But as you trace it with your pencil, you will begin to understand the function of these various things.
You looked through the body and saw the bones — this is something you knew about. You saw the big gross muscles — this is something you knew about. But as you look at those pictures now, look and you will see within those pictures those very thin, tough, shiny fascial planes. Keep looking at meat as you cut it.
One of the things you need to look at in Rolfing technique is that you start with the periphery of the body and work in.
Could you, by any chance, instead of looking at the means, look at the whole man — just the whole gestalt? First the gestalt of each one of those men, and then take the gestalts and put them into a bigger gestalt.
In Rolfing, you have to see this as an appreciation of the body as a set of interrelated systems, rather than an aggregate, a summation of individual pieces. A synthesis of systems, not individual pieces. This is the understanding necessary for hours eight, nine, and ten and the more advanced hours.
You see why you make your mistake in asking what's the main thing of this. Because if you answer yourself, you will never see what the involvement is. Your answer stops your seeing, stops your looking.
The only way you're ever going to integrate parts is by taking a close look at the parts and how they can fit together.
As you look at those bodies, are you beginning to see what is going on at a much deeper level under the skin? This is where you people have to train yourselves.
Here we are talking about putting in ten hours straightening the body. Four of them — forty percent — have gone now, and we haven't done one doggone thing except look at that pelvis and find out what was holding it and where it was being held.
What you are seeing there is the fashion in which people adapt to effort by the actual position of the myofascial human changing. When you make a great effort with your shoulder girdle, those extensor muscles of the back move away from the middle. While your effort is within the range of elasticity of those muscles, they will go back over the course of a night's sleep to where they were. But is that the way you run your life? Very rarely.
One of the things you have to look at is where the heaping of tissue is on that leg. Is it all on the outside along the fibula? If something has gone seriously wrong with the fibula, you will have heaping and a solidifying of tissue on the lateral half. If there is some semblance of balance, you will have tissue balanced on two halves of the leg. Legs come in all kinds of ways. You'll see them absolutely bare-boned on the front and lots of tissue on the back, and you say I can't get anything here, there's nothing here but bone. Don't you believe it.
You have to look at the way shoulders sit. One of them knows exactly where it sits and what it wants to do. The other is just going along for a ride, doesn't know where it wants to sit.
As you look at the shoulder and head of an individual, it behooves you to look critically at whether the ribcage below is giving support. It is your first and second ribs and their position which give you a fundamental support for that neck.
There is something in that woman that insists that she carry her head anywhere but straight. There is nothing inside her that says this is the way her head should be held. And you can see, as you look at her eyes, how much her eyes are suffering all the time.
You don't have to look at anything except the head position to tell you what's going on in the body, head and neck.
You go and look at the guy and say, he or she still has a pelvic rotation. Sure they have, and by golly, they're gonna die with it, and you're not gonna take it out. Now you people have got to get onto this process swing, and you don't. You are still in a black-and-white situation.
In every body that you look at, in every individual that you look at, there is a difference between those two sides of the body.
I used to teach: always look and see which is the worst side, and then go to the better side, so that you can borrow from the better side. Because there's too much stuff over here. And before you can get it over here to use it, you've got to clean it over there.
Why is it that a balanced body gives you pleasure? You relax as you look at a balanced body. Feel into yourself at what I'm saying. Feel yourself looking at a balanced body, and feel how in your pelvis you relax.
Every time you look at a right-angled statue, your body tends to go right-angled as far as it can. This is the effect of suggestion on your subconscious. And those old Egyptians knew about it. That was the way they used it, and that was the way they transmitted it.
Don't push information away from you if you hope to become a Rolfer. Because the job of the Rolfer is to pick up the information, to put it together, and to see.
You younger people, I've got an assignment for you today. Go around and look at every pelvis that passes you and see whether it's moving. Don't tell me they're all dressed. You can tell through the dressing — through any amount of dressing, through an overcoat, through heavy boots.
I would like to know that when you get out of this room today, you never look around a room of people without seeing more than you would have seen yesterday.
What you really want is that I should take a teaspoonful of seeing and put it through a hole in your skull. But I don't know how to do it except by keeping you thinking and thinking and thinking around and around, and by and by you know where the center is. That's the only way I know how to teach this kind of relationship.
It's so darn hard to see out of one's own blindness. Much of this stuff has to do with where our culture put us. Much of your job in life consists in getting people aware of where they're stuck, in what kind of cultural mores — so they can go on, and they can get a much wider understanding.
It is of interest to consider that the development of psychic ability is really along a road of increased discrimination. Much of what we call psychic ability is really just that you are seeing or hearing or feeling a great many things that you could not have discriminated before.
Your hands at all times are taking positions in space — not in lines, in free space. And you can't help getting information about free space with your hands. You can help getting information about free space with your eyes, and many of us are using only one eye at a time, so that actually we are aware of planes or of lines with our eyes rather than of depth.
One of the intents of this project is to see to it that you get rid of the notion of extra-sensory perception. We're going to make it sensory perception for you. You'll get the extra-sensory anyhow. I am happy to see that grounding in everyday reality is now getting extra-sensory to you too.
Until you get your mind sufficiently sophisticated to look at many dimensions in interplay, you are not looking at a human being. You are looking at a projection of a human being, and the projection doesn't do the job.
By relating parts of the body, each to each, we change behavior. And by behavior I am talking on every level. For instance, if you have an atom of sodium and an atom of chlorine and they combine to give you salt, that salt has a certain behavior. It changes the taste of water, it changes the solubility, it changes the boiling point. This is behavior. All material behaves in accordance with its own laws. The behavior patterns that change a human are relatively easy to spot — they are the inability of the various parts of that human to relate appropriately, to integrate.
Structure always means relationship. Structure is one of those fourth-area words. It deals with relationships as causes, not specific material situations. They're material and they are specific, but only in the sense of relationship. If you are going to look at what you're seeing, you'll see a relationship in everything you look at, if this is what you're looking for.
There are some Ralfers who along about the fourth day that they visit their Ralph say to him or her, you know, I was walking down the street just on my way here and I saw a man and how he needed you. They would never have said that earlier. They had never looked at the fact that structure as such determined relationship.
Where were their departures from the vertical line? Where should that vertical line have been that it wasn't? That falling of the abdomen rarely goes symmetrical. It's further down on one side, further around on the other side. Anybody know why? Because when that belly does what it does, it's doing it in response to a rotation within the pelvis. I am going slowly, I am pausing, to give you people time to put images into your mind and look at them and see whether those images conform to what I'm saying.
A woman came in to interview me up in San Francisco. She sat across from five Rolfers — Penny was there, Andy was there, John was there, Michael Kilbro. They were all sitting on chairs. And she suddenly looked up and said, you know, it's such a strange experience to look at five people sitting across from you and every one of them sitting straight. She was a random body. She didn't know anything about random bodies or about Rolf bodies. But somehow this appealed to her aesthetic sense. Why is it that a balanced body gives you pleasure? Feel yourself looking at a balanced body and feel how you relax in your pelvis.
For one thing, you have to be sure that whoever you're talking to understands what is the vertical. Plenty of people don't. Everybody thinks they understand what you mean when you say stand up straight, but you watch them try to do it and you realize they don't understand that either. All chronic problems involve mechanics. All mechanics involve the gravitational behavior of material substances in a three-dimensional field. That's what mechanics is.
You have to begin to think of a body as, shall I say, not a spherical spider web but a cylindrical spider web. One of the characteristics of a spider web is that if you disturb it at any one place, it will be disturbed at the farthest periphery of that spider web. This is actually what happens in a body. This is not what the anatomy books tell you. You have to get this different picture of what constitutes a body — this interrelated, interlocked set of webbing which we call fascial planes.
The body is plastic. Verticalize that body so that it is lying appropriately within the field of gravity of the earth. I don't need to tell you that that was a different boy. This boy was now being tutored in fifth grade work. This boy had been tutored in his first grade work. What happened? What kind of energy was put in? Where? To the structure of the human body. That's all I know.
None of the fads about bodies has touched the mesomorphic system. In the days of Claude Bernard, there was one kind of a fad. Twenty years later, was another kind of a fad. Nobody up to very recently has really looked at that mesomorphic system, the connective tissue, the organ of structure. This is the only edge that you have. There are hundreds of researchers in the world who know more about the ectomorphic system than you are ever going to know if you work from now to the end of the line. The same is true of the endomorphic system, but not the mesomorphic system. Here, you people are the investigators.
You have in front of you all kinds of exhibits. Don't just turn your head and talk to your neighbors. Look at the differences in systems which these various bodies are exhibiting for your inspection in the course of their unconscious use of their body as they undress. This is one of the assets that I scream about that you don't use. You don't look at people when they are not conscious. You should be looking at them, because that's the time they talk to you.
How many of you got these garage doors that lift up? Counterbalance. Your five-year-old can push it up. Once you get it past a certain point, it just floats. If it's not counterbalanced, it takes six men and three horses and some cussing to get it up. There is no myofascial unit in the body which is not designed to have a counterpart. The only thing is, you've never used it. You've never looked for it. You've never learned to use this muscular equipment so that you are not using merely the part but the part plus the counter for it.
My feeling of a body when it's normal, in our terms, is that it's weightless. It's weightless because of how we have arranged the body in this weight bearing. There's gravity and it pulls us down. But also, when we're up, we're aware of gravity. And by being aware of gravity, there's a system in us — almost like a gyroscope — that when we have consciousness of it, becomes available in the fascia.
As you moved, I was remembering how you would have looked when I first met you. Either the bones have come into a position where they have repositioned the soft tissue or contrariwise. But be that as it may, you now have a structure of different dimensional relations. This gives you something which is behaving differently. The lower ribs, for instance, in your body, like those of all Rolf bodies, have a supporting structure for your tensile units that is very, very different. This has got to mean something different in the way energy vectors are concerned.
It is impossible to create a model of a really ordered body. All the models we see sitting around have certain degrees of disorder. There is no such thing even among athletes, even among people like Sonja Henie, even when I was quoted as having said it was perfect. Even among people like that, there are all kinds of recordings of earlier activities and earlier traumatic episodes and emotional episodes.
One of the things I've been finding helpful is to imagine that the bones weren't there at all. Then I begin to get the sense — when I'm working on someone, what I want to create is the continuity that goes all through the leg. That continuity will be a function of soft tissue continuity and not a function of the hard tissue continuity. Take the bone out of the man's collar, and the collar has a form of its own, which is not given by that bone. But when you get the bone in there, the bone preserves it.
In the average random body, the vertebrae don't develop distress lines that belie a continuous compression function throughout lifetime. You see those stress lines all up and down the leg bones. You see them in the head of the femur. You see them in the calcaneus, those two places really well. Interestingly enough, you see them in the sacrum. That's an excellent argument for the vertebra being non weight-bearing.
In the attempt to see a body, one of the things that we do is to project our awareness toward another being. We look, we reach out with our senses and our awareness and try to cognize what's going on with that other person when you're trying to evaluate what you're going to do. Invariably, you're going to run into the person's persona when you start trying to modify their body pattern. That's one of the first things that emerges — the personality starts to manifest more strongly.
You have to be able to see it if you want to communicate to the woman in the corner. If you have to be able to see it, you have to be able to count it. If you can see it and count it, you can almost drag anyone down the path. And even if you can't see it and count it, if in your story you can make these sections examples of where you can see it and count it, you can take them further.
Gravity is an energy field that acts with a constant force vertical to the plane of the earth. When we move through space and we're not vertical, gravity breaks down a body. But here you diverge from the teacher: if the body is random, if the body does not relate to the vertical, gravity destroys it. You have laid out a program with which you expect them later to subscribe when they have looked at bodies the way you have looked at bodies.
We all have intuitive appreciations of the normal. When we see something which is normal, we say, isn't that person beautiful? Don't they move beautifully? Nobody asks you to define beauty. Everybody knows what you're talking about. It's an intuitive appreciation of normalcy.
I've been asking for some time now for an explanation for the ovoid shape of the thorax. I haven't got any clear answers yet. But I think it's probably got to do with the principle of efficiency. This spine relates to two sides — left side to right side. That's why I want to be able to see if I can get this whole thing functioning as a unit. It may turn out that that ovoid shape is the most efficient way of setting that particular structure up.
Notice that even if you're talking about a curve, the way you look at it is you take a straight line through it, and you approximate everything with straight lines — the same as you approximate the infinite with finite. I've set it up with tensegrity. In other words, straight lines.
Go up through the axillary space — you're going to learn something more. Keep following on that rib cage right up to the top. What's going on? There's nothing under my fingers right there. The tissue is very soft, like a hole. Those ribs are not related properly. If those ribs were related properly, you would not be conscious of a hole. He wouldn't be conscious of a weakness.
In any pathological situation, these people who are seers can see holes in the aura body. Even that Englishman who worked with colored lenses could see holes in that body. And those same seers, who I have had in the fringe of my group, will tell you that after the first couple of hours, those holes in that aura are very rapidly mended. And that's what you feel — you feel so much better after the first hour. The energy body, the pattern body, isn't matching. You're putting the physical body on the pattern body and not the pattern body on the physical body.
Touch and Pressure
For Ida, the hands were the language. What follows are her observations on what pressure actually is, what it does to fascia, and why the quality of contact — not its force — determines whether a body changes. She insisted that pain, when it arises, is information; and that the deepest work begins with the most superficial layer.
In terms of Rolfing, we are talking about pressure. Pressure at the right points, in the right directions, at the hands of the Rolfer. Some of you are saying, oh yes, you mean reflex points. No, I'm not talking about reflex points — reflex points have to do with a nervous phenomenon. I'm talking about energy being added by pressure to the fascia of the body.
When you press on a given point, you literally are adding energy to that which is under that point. And in structural integration, by way of an unbelievable accident of how you can change fascial structure, you can change human beings. You can change their structure, and in changing their structure you are able to change their function.
Through the pressure of your hands, you are actually applying energy.
I'm talking about energy being added by pressure to the fascia, the organ of structure, to change the relation of the fascial sheaths of the body, to balance these around a vertical line which parallels the gravity line. Thus we are able to balance body masses, to order them within a space. The contour of the body changes, the objective feeling of the body to searching hands changes. Movement behavior changes as the body incorporates more and more order.
Food is the outstanding adder of energy to a body. But there are other ways that you can change it. You can add it mechanically, and this is what the Rolfers do. They add it mechanically by pressure. The pressure may be of a finger, it may be of a knuckle, it may be of an elbow. But all this energy must be added in an appropriate direction. The wrong direction breaks the structure down.
You don't just push on it. You move it in the direction in which you know it should go. And that's what you're here for at this point — to find out what direction it should go in.
If a practitioner is going to listen to a patient every time the patient says it's too much, he's never going to get his job done. He has to develop his own independent evaluation of whether it's too much. If the guy says it's too much, try doing a rapid review of your direction. Aren't you mashing at this point rather than moving? Shouldn't you be going up at this point instead of down? This is very often the answer. What he means is not that the pressure is too much — the pressure is not right.
What we have been doing consistently is working from the periphery to the central part of the body. A body is like an onion, it's layered. If you jab a knife into an onion good and deep, you've killed it. You can't grow onions from an onion into which you jab a knife. But you can grow onions if you take off two or three of the outside layers without damaging the inside layer. And bodies are like that. You start at the outside and relieve the outside restrictions to the actual functioning of that body.
The gospel that the osteopaths preach is that you try to go to the center to get to the cause and change it. The gospel as I preach it is that you can't get to the center and change it until you have gone through the outside. The body is like an onion, and if you really want to get to that little plant in the deep inside without injury, you have to peel it — outermost layer, next layer, third layer. You're peeling your onion, making first the outermost layer more resilient, then the second, then the third. And when you finally get down to the bottom, you are in a position with an uninjured core to get to it.
Always you're using two hands, and you're moving away, and you're establishing the span of the superficial tissue. And if there's a hang up deep in the rib cage, you just let it hang. Keep looking at how different this idea is from chiropractic, osteopathic, any other technique that you know about, which immediately goes for the deep hang up.
In the third hour, you begin to get deep to that superficial fascia. If you really want to understand the third hour, you must understand that you're peeling around and around, and now you're beginning to get down to the level where the peeling is going to do something drastic to the structure — it lengthens the structure.
I hate to discourage you by simply saying to you, you're not going deep enough, but you are not going deep enough. And do you want me to lie about it?
There wasn't one of you that went down to where the things were held, that went deep to where things were held. Every intervention that I made was to get down to the depth of this first place. There's nothing I can do about this except to present you with the recognition that if you are going to change a body, you've got to get down to the level where the problem is.
You can get away with this. You can earn your living with it. You can make people who have had a certain amount of change go out and tout you from one end of the country to the other about how wonderful you are. But by golly, you look out at yourself and don't kid yourself. Be able to judge with your eyes whether you have done your job. You haven't gotten deep enough, probably.
As you begin to feel this, you really begin to understand that there is an interaction between gravity and people. Up to this point it's all been taught. And the funny thing is, if you go in too deep, then you don't feel that difference.
The other basic stimulation is rapid alternation of pressure. This is why every so often I'll say, you're moving too fast. You're not relaxing. You're stimulating. You have to realize these two very fundamental differences.
It's pure physics as it's taught in physics laboratories. The strange part is that the organ of structure is a very resilient, very elastic, very plastic medium. It can be changed by adding energy to it.
Here's an area of hardened, thickened tissue. What was it supporting? Because tissue doesn't harden and shorten and thicken except as it is called upon to support something that is not where it belongs. If you really have this as gut knowledge, you've got Rolfing as gut knowledge.
You can feel that his spine is dropping back more, especially through this area now. As he breathes, there's more movement in his rib cage. Fascia gets stuck between layers. Fascia is the covering of muscles, the envelope.
All I know is what I experienced — that oftentimes there's a warming, like a melting feeling, that the place that was stuck, the place that wasn't moving, all of a sudden gets warm and starts moving. They get stuck partially by hardening, or there's a fluid substance that has been hardened and isn't reabsorbed in the flesh — at time of injury, time of sickness. And it seems that whatever it is that constitutes the stuckness between the layers of fascia is what's reabsorbed when our pressure, our energy, is placed on the body.
Anybody who was butchering animals or cleaning animals — you take your hands and you're cleaning it to separate the muscle groups, and you run your hand down between the groups of muscle. You get this feeling of how they are adhered and how you can put your hand in there and kind of dissect them apart without actually breaking anything. You don't break anything. You do the same thing with an orange or a grapefruit — any of those fruits that come in cellular packages. You just very gently split them apart. This is what you're feeling during processing. You're feeling splitting apart.
Somebody says, oh, that's terrible, it burns terribly. But that burning is nothing but your perception of the splitting apart. It has not to do with pain, it has not to do with deterioration, it hasn't to do with any of the functions that pain is usually talking about. It has to do with the fact that two fascial planes, or several fascial planes, have been glued together, and you are now putting enough pressure and enough stretching on them that they have to respond by ungluing.
You don't try to feel that silky thing. It just is there, and you have to settle for it. This silky business is something that comes in as you near the tenth hour. Sometimes it comes in in little local areas before. The only thing I can be relatively sure of is the fact that what you are feeling is that fascial plane can slide on fascial plane. As you get fascial plane sliding on fascial plane, in the absence of interference, you begin to feel it.
He's responding all the time. As the tissue responds — it's like he chooses to move. I put my hand where the tissue is stuck, and it begins to move after a certain moment.
You have all experienced something of what bodies should look like in young children — this resilient and relatively homogeneous something. You put your finger in and you get the same resistance to your pressure in all directions.
All people have differing responses to touching. Some of them dislike it intensely. Some of them want it and don't dare admit that they want it. Some of them want it and do dare admit that they want it. All of this you get put into the stew pot when you begin letting a lot of people touch your raw feet.
There were those who heard a girl just arguing her head off with me about how well she was. And wherever you put your hand on her and tried to press on it, she screamed with pain. But she'd never been sick a day in her life.
It could hardly be expected that profound tissue changes — changes in position, changes in tone — could be accomplished without a dramatic report submitted by the tissue to the central awareness that we call the man. Many people refer to this report as pain, but even these people are quick to acknowledge that this report differs from what they ordinarily call pain. For one thing, it is too transitory. The minute the pressure is removed, the pain is gone.
The sensation resembles pain but it is not a message about the destruction of tissue. And you learn very quickly to interpret it as such.
Pain is experienced when stimuli, whatever their nature, exceed certain limits. It is therefore not quantitative. Might it not be simply stated that pain is too much? Pleasure is experienced when the system is resilient and is bombarded by the same number of stimuli.
The pain is information. It tells you about holding, it tells you about a kind of adjustment on a lifestyle. God knows what you'd lose if you got rid of that painful response.
It might be an idea, as you work with them, to call their attention to the different qualities of pain. You all know that there is a pain of stretching fascia, but you also know that if you get on a vertebra which is badly distorted, there is a pain which is not that pain at all. It's a sick pain. It reports to you that there is something very wrong here.
There's certainly a difference in the type of pain. As you go in over the thoracic, right against the thoracic, over four, five, and six on the pectoralis minor, it's pure unadulterated pain — it's sharp, it hurts. As you put your hand up and get it between the major and the minor, it's almost always a burning sensation.
In this description about A fibers and C fibers, what the C fibers — the smaller fibers — report is often described as burning pain. I don't think that has to do with C fibers. I think that has to do with interference with fascia.
If you go deep into the body without stimulating the surface areas — where certain discrimination fibers are available that turn on and turn off to the pain intensity — then you are going to increase the painful experience. So as you are going in deep, surrounding areas ought to be gentle.
The more awareness you have in the spot that you're working, the less pain that person has in the spot.
The person who is the patient can't always be trusted, because he does all kinds of things to escape from the pressure of change and the pressure for change. You see the same thing in the psychotherapy world. They'll give you all kinds of rationalizations as to why you can't do it, or you can't do it at this time. Some of them almost sound convincing.
Each one of those muscles, as you get to it and you are putting pressure on it, is able to do its own individual giving independent of its neighbor. This is what cleaning off means.
There's one problem about knowing too much. You break down your overall passion into details. You get the notion that, oh, I'm going after the hypothalamus or something like this. Just as soon as you do that, you've lost your touch.
The way in which I work, and the way all of us work, is such a reflection of our personality. Someone can't just show me how to do it and I can do it. Someone can show me how to do it and I can see how far I am, in personality, from being able to operate that way.
The language of Rolfing is primarily tactile, but there is, especially in the beginning, some mind learning.
The most striking thing has been the feeling of my hands in the tissue. I've always been a very sight-oriented worker, and I've always had trouble learning to also trust my hands — when I see an area to go to, to feel just exactly where I need to be there, and to deal with various qualities of tissue.
Don't push information away from you if you hope to become a Rolfer. The job of the Rolfer is to pick up the information, to put it together, and to see.
When you watch Doctor Rolf's hands, you see that there's a lot of movement from that last joint. And it's a lifting action — as we lift the flesh, lift the connective tissue. All I know is what I experienced, and that is that oftentimes there's a warming, like a melting between the layers of muscles.
When I was blindfolded, my hands would just run up to the crest for no apparent reason, as though they knew where to go without my eye. I trust my hands more than my eyes anyway. My eyes fool me sometimes, but I can't ever remember when my hands have fooled me. When you see something, you go, and then you put your hand on for verification. You should put your hand on it and put your eye on it for verification.
Tissue doesn't harden and shorten and thicken except as it is called upon to support something that is not where it belongs. Here's an area of hardened, thickened tissue — what was it supporting? If you will apply that measuring stick every time your hands hit hardened tissue, you've got Rolfing as gut knowledge. There will come a day when you can afford to use only your eyes, but first you have to explore the field that the blindfold opened for you.
When you've got their feet and legs up to their knees done, you begin to be aware that with that entire new balance below the knees, their back is really holding them up, holding them down, holding them, period. You better get in there and get that back lengthened. The thing you are doing in every hour of Rolfing is lengthening that body — thinning it for the most part, and lengthening it.
All this energy must be added in an appropriate direction. The wrong direction breaks the structure down. A guy one time said to me, I saw you give a demonstration. I went home and tried it on my mother-in-law. She has a heart condition and Bright's disease, and it didn't do her any good. Your method's no good. People have no idea of the sophistication necessary to that movement in order to create good.
Rolfers believe that in ordering a body, in changing its relationship in space, they have either added energy to the processed body, or freed the energy already contained in that body, so that it may flow, so that it may innervate the personality.
Something happens to the superficial fascia. Something does. The man looks different, so something must have happened to the superficial fascia. Because if nothing happens to the superficial fascia, the man's not gonna look different. Has this occurred to you? — Working with the fascia, the fascia gets stretched. — God help us, send for the cops if it's broken. It mustn't be broken, and you better know it mustn't be broken.
If you go deep into the body without stimulating surface areas where certain other discrimination fibers are available, you are going to increase the painful experience. So as you are going in deep, surrounding areas ought to be gentle. In a Rolfing situation where you may be going deep into the gut, it makes sense to be stimulating around that gut area on the surface with as much of your hand as you can — so that you're not turning on those C fibers and eliminating the control that the A fibers have over the total experience of sensory overload.
It doesn't make sense to get rid of pain. The pain is information. It tells you about holding, it tells you about a kind of an adjustment on a life style. God knows what you'd lose if you got rid of that painful response.
A lot of the pain being re-experienced in Rolfing is literally that — being re-experienced. If your problem in Rolfing is the releasing of some traumatic injury that came, for example, through being thrown from a car, you will probably re-experience the same sort and amount of pain you had when the injury was introduced. You can always enhance the pain by resisting it. You can always lessen the pain by accepting it and going into it and making it pain as much as you can — and lo and behold, in another minute it's gone completely and you can't get it back again. Many times after I've worked on someone for an hour, they look up wide-eyed and say, But John told me there was so much pain. When is the pain coming?
If the individual is set that they're going to resist it, it will be painful. There is no question about it. If, on the other hand, they're going to accept what they have not as pain but as intense sensation and go with it, they won't express it as pain. Relaxing to the pain — so it's painful, so what? That's the attitude I'm trying to express.
If you start with the program of the first hour I teach you, lo and behold, by the time those ten people come in for the second hour, every one of them will show you the same mal-symptom. They will show you that their legs are not under them. They will show you that their feet aren't walking properly. The body screams at you. So to stop it screaming, you get down there and try to do something with it. And if you stop it screaming there, it begins to scream somewhere else, and you do that in the third hour. You just chase the scream until it has no place to stay — and then you kiss them goodbye and tell them it was nice knowing them.
The body talks about it. If you've studied in my classes, you know what I mean when I say the body talks about it.
Those old anatomy boys that worked in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were mighty smart babies. I cannot imagine how they got the kind of understanding that they put into those old anatomy books. They did, and it worked — and it works up to a certain point, and then it doesn't work anymore. Then you've got to go on from there. You can't explain life to a five-year-old in terms of the same symbols you use to a forty-five-year-old. He doesn't understand them. The same is true as you begin to understand what constitutes a body. You have to start there, but in order to get a more sophisticated control of the body, you have to work your way out of it, beginning to see the actual realities as they emerge.
In the old, old days, when there weren't as many people who had seen demonstrations of Rolfing, it used to be nothing short of a revelation to people to see that the shortening of the body comes in by virtue of the spreading apart of those spiny erectors, and the lengthening of the body can be produced by the tightening together of those spiny erectors. As you look at these bodies, you find that as the body has shortened, the scapulae have come apart. The converse is also true: as the scapulae are pulled apart by poor use of the shoulder girdle, the body shortens. Consequently, in order to lengthen the body, you have to get the scapulae in where they belong.
Shoulders back. Gut in. What happens when you put your shoulders back? Chest goes up, you can't talk too good. The dorsal spine goes forward — that is the big key there. The point of Rolfing is that your body begins to learn how to move within the gravitational field instead of fighting gravity.
Everybody thinks they understand what you mean when you say stand up straight, but you watch them try to do it and you realize they don't understand that either. You have to be sure that whoever you're talking to understands what is the vertical. Plenty of people don't.
Whatever buttons I've got — sex, anger, money, whatever — they're gonna get pushed in this work, and I need to be aware of that. Because people are looking for them. At that point your work becomes also your own path. As you have your buttons pushed, you constantly have to come back to yourself and reorganize your own system so that you can come back to the work anew and do it better. You'll find that your own psyche gets in the way of your being able to do the Rolfing. You'll reach plateaus where you see that some neurotic pattern of yours is keeping you from getting any further with the Rolfing. And then you've got to do some homework. And then you come back to the work.
All of a sudden, in the middle of my Rolfing, this little 70-year-old woman started screaming at the top of her lungs. And I was terrified — what was I going to tell the cops when they knocked at the door? When I finally got the thing unlatched, I did it by saying to her, Now what do you see? And she saw cars coming down the road. What do you hear? She heard a bell, and this bell developed into the ambulance bell. She had been in an automobile accident where she was very badly hurt, and the cop was bawling the driver out, saying, you don't know how to drive. All this, the unconscious woman lying on the ground was hearing. And this was what she was reproducing on my mat.
The people who would be attracted to a lecture by me may not be the same ones that will be attracted to a lecture by you. My job is not to talk to the people whom you would attract because you will pick better words for them. Don't be afraid to acknowledge it. This doesn't mean that Harry's any better than you are or that you're any better than Harry. It does mean that you're different. Nobody is better than anybody else, but they are better for a certain purpose. There's no such thing as a best Rolfer. There is the best Rolfer for problems of the pelvis, the best Rolfer for problems of the arms.
You never can do a first hour of Rolfing twice. Many times people come into Rolfing on the East Coast saying they want to get Rolfed, and they don't mention the fact that they've had three Rolfings from Rolfers on the West Coast. But very presently the Rolfer sees that he's just not doing his first hour, and he says to them, You've been Rolfed by someone. Oh yes, of course, I had three hours of Rolfing.
As you watch the Rolfing go on, the muscles start doing their own work instead of being grouped all in one big glob. Then you get movement which comes from deep in the body as well as on the surface. The language of Rolfing is primarily tactile, but in the beginning there is some mind learning.
I remember one dinner party I went to, and I was keeping an ear on what my neighbors were saying. Here were two men next to me, and one was saying to the other, Oh, my wife is so excited over this Rolfing — she's had to buy a bigger bra. Literally, it changed her configuration in a very nice way.
This boy was going to school. It was nothing short of a cane. It would have carried the message to his peers that this boy couldn't stand quite as much buffering around. Now the body is plastic. Verticalize that body so that it is lying appropriately within the field of gravity of the earth. That was a different boy. This boy was now being tutored in fifth grade work. Before, this boy had been tutored in his first grade work. What happened? What kind of energy was put in? Where? To the structure of the human body.
The Practitioner's Hands
Ida was relentless on one point: you cannot reorganize a body with your hands alone, and yet your hands are everything. They carry the energy, they read the fascia, they tell the truth your eyes miss. What follows are her instructions to the practitioner about the instrument she or he must become.
Myofascial units are something you can lay your hands on. With your hands you can affect it. With your hands you can put it somewhere and ask it to work. You can't do that with the stuff that derives from the ectodermic product. You can't get a hold of a nerve trunk and pull it hither and yon and expect to get service. But you can do it with myofascial tissue. Therefore, your myofascial tissue becomes something that is infinitely valuable to you, because you can reach it.
You cannot reorganize a body with your hands. You can only help that body to reorganize itself through movement.
Food is the outstanding adder of energy to a body. But there are other ways you can change it. You can add it mechanically, and this is what the Rolfers do. They add it mechanically by pressure. The pressure may be of a finger, it may be of a knuckle, it may be of an elbow. But all this energy must be added in an appropriate direction. The wrong direction breaks the structure down.
In whatever city Rolfers are working, there are always people who get into this thing and say, well, I just saw her putting a knuckle in and pushing. They have no idea of the sophistication necessary to that movement in order to create good.
Some right voice says to you, now can you tell me just what you're doing? What muscle is your third finger on, and what muscle is your second finger on? And you say, I can't, because they're not on muscles. Your fingers, the energy of your fingers, are being distributed through the fascia. Your finger is not touching a muscle. You're not working on a muscle.
Sometimes your definition has to be with your hands.
Your hands at all times are taking positions in space, not in lines — in free space. You can't help getting information about free space with your hands. You can help getting information about free space with your eyes, and many of us are using only one eye at a time, so that actually we are being aware of planes or of lines with our eyes rather than of depth.
We are not really talking about mathematical lines here. We are talking about something functional. It is not a mathematical line, but it is a something which, when you get it between your two fingers, says, ah, that's it. There's a something in the feeling of it when it's horizontal that says, ah, that's it.
That functional horizontal talks in terms of tone and tonus to your fingers as well. You don't have to put it into this metaphor of horizontality, which is a three-space metaphor. You can put it into a feeling of tonus. Those muscles feel different when they're horizontal.
It's not only that it stands out as your hands go down there; you know immediately when they're stopped by a retinaculum. It isn't a question of stiffness only. It's a question of feelingness as well.
I noticed in the last six weeks I've been able to go a lot deeper with less effort. Is it that your less effort is less fear? No, I think it's less effort. The word clarity fits too. I feel more clarity in my own body, and when I'm working there's more clarity under my hand.
The last work you did put into your fingers, and this work that you're going to do puts into your fingers a knowledge and an authority that other people feel. This is the difference between the advanced work and the elementary work.
Taking notes puts it in through your muscular system, which is a much better system than your visual system, because your eyes are so overloaded. Your whole visual reception system is so overloaded. If you put the thing in through your hands, you are much more likely to get a deeper understanding.
Perceive through those clothes. Not merely with your fingers, but with your awareness, your realization of exactly where that joint is, your realization of exactly how the weight is going through that joint. Begin to see the stupidity of thinking that you've got to get people undressed to know what's going on.
Not one of you went down where the things were held — went deep to where things were held. Every intervention I made was to get down to the depth. If you are going to change a body, you've got to get down to the level where the problem is.
One of the reasons you have to start at the outside to get in is because you've got your hands and you want to get your hands somewhere, and by loosening the outside you can get a little deeper.
You have the good luck in the rotators that you've got something you can get your hands on, the other end of which will do something for you that your hands can't get to.
When you work in that abdomen in the fifth hour, you should be working sufficiently deeply that you can contact the anterior surface of the spine with your fingers. You can't always do that in the first fifth hour, because sometimes that belly wall is so aberrated, or there are so many scar tissue areas in there, that you can't get through. But in theory, your hands are going down onto that psoas, and you're going to stretch it up and down, use it, excite it, awaken it.
Until you free that psoas as it crosses the pubes, you've got to get something that's resilient as it crosses the pubes — something that moves under your fingers, something that says to you, it is live tissue. Until you get that, the lumbar does not move back.
They will be squirting around under your hands.
It's very important that your mind have these goals conscious. Are you freeing the rectus from the ribs, or are you freeing the ribs from the rectus? You'll behave differently if you're thinking one way or the other. Your hands will behave differently.
In that seventh hour work when you're working on the neck, your fingertips are closer to controlling structures than they are in any other hour. You better know how those structures should be, because you can get right down on top of them.
I regard with horror your working in this area and knowing nothing about it, except that you lay your hands on a fellow's neck and sort of ring it around.
The neck just isn't that big. So if you've got two hands on it, there's not much it's going to get away from. You are literally handling under your hands the stuff that makes all of this tick.
The thing that's so important about the tongue is realizing that there must be a very rapid metabolism going on in there, or we couldn't produce the changes as rapidly as we can. The tongue necessarily is a sort of connecting link between psyche and soma. You can take a tongue and reduce it to half its size by putting your fingers properly in. Inside of a minute, that tongue becomes much smaller, or much larger.
This is different from a psychotherapy session, where the words coming out of your mouth have to hook into the other individual — and for all you know, every word coming out of your mouth is irritating. This isn't true when it comes to your hands. If you're using your hands properly and establishing order and symmetry with your hands, he's not being irritated. He's being soothed.
There are plenty of people for whom psychotherapy is completely out. Just listening to the words that come out of another man's mouth is something they can't tolerate. But there are mighty few people who, if you approach them with the proper love in your hands — not your heart, your love in your hands — can't tolerate it, and respond to it.
Invariably you're going to run into the person's persona when you start trying to modify their body pattern. That's one of the first things that emerges — the personality starts to manifest more strongly. Very often there's emotional content in what's going on for that person as you work on them. You really have to make a clear choice for yourself about where you're going to stand with respect to that person.
The other people will take seriously the emotion that is freed by your manipulation. If they're angry, they're angry at you. If they're resentful, they're resentful at you. You shouldn't be doing this. I remember Adelle Davis explaining to me at length, in a tone of voice that simply split the rules, how I knew, or anybody else knew — I don't like to put anybody through this. And you don't, Dorothy doesn't, nobody does. All this anger and frustration had been released from the woman, but she directed it toward me. Did you ask her whose legs brought her into the room? I knew she'd get over it. She now calls me the slave driver.
It's a job with which you literally pay with your hide, and you better be aware that this is what you're taking on. If you handle your body properly, the skin that comes off the hide is thin.
As you can see, this is heavy work. And Judith Aston is a slight person. She would attempt to do more than her structure allowed, and there's still some stress that's too much for it. The effect of that stress is that it harms the structure, disintegrates it rather than integrating it.
Judith Aston, a student of Dr. Rolf's, found her own body breaking down with the stress of this work — other Rolfers doing the same thing — and developed a technique to help reinforce and evolve the pattern of the Rolf body, the Rolf line.
I do absolutely nothing with myself, and I admit I'm not a shining example at 16; but at 82, I think I'm doing all right. And I wouldn't be caught dead doing exercises. It's just a question of using your body differently.
You think of the line. If the movement is going away from the midline, you start at the side of the elbow. If the movement is coming toward the midline, it is from this point of tension.
All movement of the shoulder girdle presupposes an awareness at the elbow.
It doesn't make any difference how much work you do locally on those arm muscles. You will not get those arms placed until you understand that when arm muscles are balanced, the elbow moves straight out and straight in.
The elbow joint is not really the elbow joint. It depends on how you think of it. When somebody comes in and says, I have a tennis elbow — you're not working here, you're working here. That's all part of that elbow joint.
When somebody has fallen very badly out of their knee and their knee is really killing you, you can often get a lot of relief from working around the elbow. You see how different this is from the ordinary concept of, oh well, they just hurt their knee, or they've broken the bone of their arm, and that's all that has happened. There's no such thing as all that's happened.
When you look at that other being, you have to see that the other being is a complicated integration of bodies. The problem may be anywhere along the line. But there is a very good chance — much better than even, much better than three-quarters, much better than ninety percent — that you can start getting help to that other individual through the myofascial structure. And you can lay your hands on them.
You are using the index of the fascial organization. That fascial tissue is a heavy coarse tissue — sometimes a very slow-metabolizing tissue, sometimes somewhat faster — but you've all had your fingers in these deteriorated fascial messes that speak very loudly of the fact that it's going to take a long time to change them.
So much of this problem is something that has gone very seriously wrong with that very coarse body, and the fine body hasn't quite the punch that's necessary to take and do it. So it takes somebody's elbow, somebody's fist, somebody's knuckles to give it that coarse punch, and then it's ready to go.
You have to build step by step. You have to climb onto the next step in order to get to the following step, and you can't jump. This becomes your problem as you get out of this class and start to work. You know it in your head, but somehow your hands have not gotten the rhythm.
This is a tough assignment — to keep getting down from the type of abstraction by which we have all been taught in the schools, to the actual consideration of something that is under your hands, something that is alive under your hands. Don't throw it in the corner and say, well, this is just that woman's notion. It's more than that. It's a trying to shift you in your understanding of the living world from a set of abstractions to a set of actual experiential situations.
I cannot and I will not lie about what my fingers see. Because I know that what we're doing here is something that hasn't been done before, and therefore there's got to be a different phenomenon back of it.
You have in your hands at this particular moment something that is so precious and so priceless, because there are only a hundred and fifty-two people in the world that have had enough experience to sit down and really think about this and use it.
Anybody and everybody can put hands into a body and change a body. But the difference between this method and all other manipulative techniques I know of is the following: you do not let an individual get away from the table until you have done the best you can to integrate him each time you work on him. You cannot reorganize a body with your hands. You can only help that body to reorganize itself through movement.
This is the basic difference in concept between what you are going into here and the other much more orthodox manipulative techniques. Their assumption is that they can replace something that has been displaced. You can, but you can't make it work there. He has to make it work there. A lot of people will pitch to you a nice little negative of, oh well, I want something I can do myself, and then you get them in here on the floor and they lie like a clod of dirt waiting for you to do something for them. This is a system which demands the participation of the individual being worked on for best results.
In the attempt to see a body, one of the things we do is project our awareness toward another being. We look, we reach out with our senses, and try to cognize what's going on with that other person. You're watching someone move around, you start putting your hands on their body, and you start to act upon what you've evaluated. Invariably, you're going to run into the person's persona when you start trying to modify their body pattern. The personality starts to manifest more strongly. Very often there's emotional content in what's going on for that person as you work on them. You really have to make a clear choice about where you're going to stand with respect to that person — how you're going to establish your own territory and maintain it while you're working.
You have no business to be in a stand-up position if that pain tolerance is so low. The other thing was that when you have someone in the stand-up position, it's very hard on the practitioner's structure to get enough leverage to do right by the person you have standing. I work from a logic of my own body — the physics of two bodies, one of them trying to move another into a different position. When I get my body where I'm most efficient, that's often lined up with where that person has to go, in some kind of logic which is kinesthetic, not mental.
Even more important than your estimate of what is wrong with it is the necessity for introducing your Rolfee to the notion that there is something real going on — that they can immediately observe the change themselves, that you can get them to say, that's fantastic. People almost always are aware of that sickness. Sometimes it's the first time in their life they realize their arms don't move properly. Because the way they move their arms has always been to them the proper way. You are dealing with this in that first hour, and this is one of the reasons we go back and back and back to that first hour — observing all the little edges where you can push the unconsciousness back.
Your effort is made to bring the muscle and the fascia into the place where it belongs in terms of the least energy being needed for the thing to do its work. If the muscle or the fascia has moved off its appropriate position, you bring it back toward that position and then you demand that it work, because hands will never do the job. Every masseur, every chiropractor, every osteopath thinks that by manipulation he can do some job. It is only through the literal movement of the individual concerned that you get appropriate rebalancing of those muscles. You help the individual. You do not, and you cannot, do it.
If at first you don't succeed, get the hell out of there. When the tissue is in tension, that's stored energy that you release into the body. And its energy is not a metaphysical something. These molecules are aligned in a particular way. You change their alignment. The change spreads.
What you have just seen is this medic giving a chiropractic treatment in a Rolfing class. There is a school within the chiropractic school who call themselves basic technicians. What they do is exactly what David did. They go in and look for the piriformis and twist it around a little until they begin to balance the weight of the two sides of the body on a split scale. They keep at it until the scale shows about the same weight on each foot. That is the treatment. It's a perfectly good treatment, but what in heaven's name is going to keep it there? Nothing. They haven't prepared that body. They haven't taught that body what it feels like when it's even. What they now have is a fishhook for life.
You need to be constantly conscious of the fact that in that first hour you are dealing with the superficial fascia. You're not trying to get down to the bony joint. You are dealing with the tightening of the superficial envelope which has resulted from the problems in the joint. If you deal with that superficial tightening of that superficial fascia, you then permit the joint to fall nearer to where it belongs. Indoctrinate yourself that this is what you're doing in the first hour.
With every individual that gets through and goes out that door, what you are doing — or in theory what you are doing — is looking at them to see that their contour and their movement says that they have at that moment the best integration of function possible for the structure you know they have. If the guy is coming in the day after tomorrow, well, it's not that urgent. Let him do it anyhow so he won't forget. But if he's going away and won't be back till six weeks, this you can't afford to do, because the fellow goes away and in twenty-four hours he has symptoms. Aside from the purely moral responsibility, he goes around and says, oh, that guy, he doesn't know how to do this.
You have got to organize it. You do not have to work on it. That's the reason this thing is so stressful. Every time you let somebody drag in somebody else to an hour which is not a first hour, you live through the clinic. They go out and talk all over the county about what a terrible technique this is, how vicious it is, how violent it is. Don't do it. Tell them no. If they won't take no from you, tell them, there's a little old lady back there in the East that will haunt me if I let you do this.
What we're looking for — that very subtle, very fine kind of tuning — isn't going to happen until the body takes over that function. You can work and work and work and it isn't going to happen. People who come to me running primarily on nervous energy, worry types, think they're sick. To get them switched over to this more subtle energy level is really a difficult problem because they recognize it as some kind of malaise as they start to unwind. To me, those are the most difficult people to really get into this kind of joint movement we're all looking for.
Generally in the second hour it's appropriate to do the neck after the back rather than a pelvic lift. The reason is that when you finish the back, the neck is just screaming for work. You really need to get the head set onto the body. You've done a lot of work on the back and the pelvic lift is not being screamed for right at that point so much as the neck is.
Do you see how these exercises give you a diagnosis of yourself and of the other guy? In traditional yoga, this one is sometimes done with one leg turned back. What is the difference between sitting on the floor with your knees up, sitting on a chair with your knees out? These are things which you as Rolfers must not know with your head but feel with your body. And you must feel with your body what is needed in the other body.
As you begin to give them reality on these things, you are released from the necessity of finding words which are going to convey this. You are getting from that order of abstraction down to reality. When you have your own patient there, you can take and show them their own pictures and say, do you see how your lower leg is not supporting your knees? It's not supporting your upper leg. It's not supporting your thigh. It's not supporting your pelvis. Make them understand this, and make yourself understand it.
Sometimes you get a lot of success by literally establishing that midline and going way deep in until you're really literally on the bone, then getting that fascia stretched right around the bone. This is sort of non-anatomy in a way, because there's a place where the body will admit your hand sort of deeper than if you were a half inch over — where you'd be running into something that said no.
How do you know when you've got the right position of the arm? You can observe whether the shoulders drop on inspiration. You can watch how it hangs and see if it hangs so that the shoulder, elbow, and hand fall on midline. You can watch the movement of the elbow straight out. But I look for a feeling of ease, serenity, a good feeling, like a smile — as opposed to a wiring together. It's hard to wire those bones together.
What I'm calling attention to is the difference in temperament of the various people, and how much easier it is for certain of you to get this than others. Some of you are so energetic that getting serenity bores you. Some of you will look for serenity because it takes less energy out of you and you don't have that much energy available. The next thing you see is that as the elbow does move out, you do change the way the head of the humerus fits into that shoulder girdle.
Now let your elbow go straight out by an inch. You feel how, in order to accomplish that, the humerus has to turn around in the shoulder itself. Throw away all those notions about how you've got to shorten this and lengthen that. If your humerus has turned in that socket, it just automatically goes where it belongs. And if it hasn't, it doesn't. And you work like the very Dickens trying to get it there. This is the essence of Rolfing — to get all of those myofascial patterns to the place where you don't have to add energy to them to move. Conscious energy.
What's in my head is that's a very specific job that needs to be done at that moment. It's not a little bit of something that's going to add up to something some other time. It's this opportunity that you have to grab right then and complete. Almost with every hour, you're through with the hour and there's a real sense of non-connection between the head and the pelvis. The sides are long, they look good, but somehow the pelvis and the head doesn't connect. The pelvic lift and the neck work is what connects.
In this teaching program, we talk oversimplistically. One has to, to convey an idea. But then, having gotten that simple-minded fundamental schematic recognition, you have to put into it what you actually see in the actual bodies. Skulls are not necessarily symmetrical. You are never going to really balance this kind of a head, but you sure can get a lot closer to it. You can get them acting as though their heads were symmetric. And this acting as though seems to me very important.
In that first hour, when we finish the first hour we sit on the floor with the knees up. In the second hour it's on the chair you're sitting. It is not the same curve. It is a curve from which it is more simple to get those erectors closer to the spine. One of the reasons is that you are not invoking the activity of the pelvic floor there as you are in the other. In the first hour you are invoking the activity of the pelvic floor because you are invoking the activity of everything you can reach. This is the way you people have to learn to see what you see.
Let me offer you a clue. If you're going to work on the fifth hour the day after tomorrow, it's not that important whether you go down the back or not. If you're going to work on the fifth hour six weeks from now, then it's urgently important that you get the best possible balance at that particular moment.
You saw verticality as being so much more important. As of today, you are beginning to recognize that it isn't verticality. It's no longer the static, it's the dynamic. You think that the dynamic is further along than the static — that something has to be added to the static before you get the dynamic. You have to somehow get an intuitive feeling for the change from static to dynamic. You get the beginning of that in the tenth hour, where you feel the relation between the intrinsics of the spine and the extrinsics of the sleeve. But the person is not sufficiently experienced at that time to be able to get hold of intrinsic musculature and hang onto it, use it, demand from it.
Really you are taking over something which is very significant, because the mechanism of your adjustment to gravity is a balancing between flexors and extensors. In the random body, you always have too much contraction in the flexors. This is part of our cultural pattern. Everything you do, you do in front of you — with the muscles on the anterior side of your body. You carry your bundles that way, you take the sink apart that way, you carry the baby that way. Nobody calls to your attention the fact that if you preserve the well-being of those extensors from the time a kid starts to grow up, you're going to have a body that has good functional usage.
Pacing the Work
Ida always insisted that Rolfing happens in time as much as in tissue. A session has its own rhythm, and so does the ten-series, and so does the life of the body you are touching. What follows are her remarks on when to push, when to wait, and what only time itself can finish.
There was an osteopath in my class, and we did some fantastically fine work on a little two-year-old kid. I was impatient. He looked at me once in a kindly old-fashioned way and said, "Well, doctor, there's just one thing you forgot. In your prescription you didn't put in any compound essence of time."
The flesh doesn't change that quickly. He's got that too, too solid flesh stuff — that takes time.
I think myself that I'm much better off spacing those hours and giving time the opportunity to get into that man.
What happens at the end of those ten sessions is that misalignments much deeper in the body than we were able to reach will begin to surface. You may need more work — but after a while. Give it time to surface. Give it time to show up. Give it time to make the changes that are inherent in the changes we've made.
My idea of the best time sequence is about six to eight weeks. Run the first four hours in two weeks. After that, run them when convenient. Why those four hours in two weeks? That is the essence of it — the awareness of the person. He is aware that two weeks ago today he couldn't do so-and-so. If you let it drag out over two months, his awareness has slipped.
This whole idea of time is so vague in the minds of most patients. They come in for their first hour, and you could really give them a first hour which completely changes them inside. They come in for the second hour and you say, "Well, how do you feel today?" "Well, I have a pain in my—"
You tend to foreshorten this thing. You do that in Rolfing a few times and you no longer have any patience because you haven't gotten the result. So you're out of luck and you're broke. You'd better go back and learn the details of how you do this.
There is only one rule, and that rule is that the more time you spend on that guy, the more exhausted he's going to be.
You have one hour to get through that man. When you take half of that hour trying to talk to him — "now put your head up" — he does this and he does that and he can't feel his head up because he hasn't got the mechanism. You have then shortened your available time for therapy to a place where you can't get it done.
There are certain types of body that are not able to respond fast. You can't get into them. There you have a problem where you have to spend more time. But to take an average body and just keep punching on it and punching on it and punching on it — it's alright if you need to buy the babies a new pair of shoes.
Each time we approach the pelvis, we pull the nails out of a different harbor.
You do not let an individual get away from the matter until you have done the best you can to integrate him each time you work on him. It would be completely out of order to do your first hour without doing a pelvic lift, without doing something to balance the change in the lower part with the upper part, without attempting to make the man conscious of the fact that he is going into a new alignment.
In order to get a balance, you have to balance on two sides of that lateral line. Recognize that in the whole ten hours, this is the only time that you will be balancing on two sides of the lateral line. Therefore, when you let yourself be derailed in the third hour and you go to the back and you go to the front and you go to forty-five other places, you are cheating that guy of his third hour.
Everybody that comes in for a fourth hour shows one picture. They show a picture of lack of length in that midline. Most of the time, this lack of length is advertised by the crookedness of the medial line of the legs. By golly, if somebody comes in for a fourth hour and doesn't show this, some Rolfer has been falling down on the job.
Fourth hour. Now you begin to go down and get to what you've really been gunning for since the first time you laid your hand on that individual. You begin to take a precise look at the immediate, the adjacent, the contained problems of the pelvis. How to get it horizontal.
The quadratus is the key to whether you can get the shoulder girdle up and the pelvic girdle down. It establishes the kind of spanning which gives you the length you need. It is the first time that you've really gone deep into that body.
Sometimes by the time the eighth hour comes, you see a body which looked very disorganized before — as if one cork, one plug that was holding the pelvis or the shoulder girdle in an unbalanced position has now been released by the work you did in the seventh hour.
As you look at these people when you get to the eighth hour, it begins to shout at you what was not done thoroughly. Now, this is not necessarily a condemnation. They might not have been able to at that time. They may have been tired, overtired, something may have been sore, they may have been sick. All kinds of things may have happened. But what wasn't done?
One of the reasons people come in saying "I'm so sore from last time, you can't put a hand on me today" — what do you say? If you're smart you say, "Well, I'm not going to put a hand where it's sore. We don't do that. We go to a different part of the body." If they're complaining about the top, you go to the bottom. But in general, it's deeper than that. It is because the other half of the body that you didn't work on last time is showing you that you didn't work on it.
How many times does somebody come in and say, "I can't work today. I'm so sore from last time." The progression there is, well, now where did we work last time? Down here. Well, we're not going to touch that today. By the time you get them down somewhere else, they will have forgotten all about their soreness — they aren't that sore at all. All they need is somebody to get that circulation moving.
You get poor old psoas so sore he can't put his own hands in it, let alone mine. So you go up to the top of it and let it heal down there. By the time you get back to it ten days or two weeks from now, he's forgotten that it was so sore.
This is not ready to match this yet. The fibula is still out of its normal position. There's no use forcing it. Give it time to consolidate.
In the old days, twenty years ago, they always used to say, "Well, when they left us last time, they were looking much better than they do right now. Let's give them another one." Sometimes when I was feeling particularly cantankerous, I said, "Alright, you take your best friend and give them another one and see what happens."
Those eleventh hours are magnificent the first time you do them. But if you do an eleventh hour and then an eleventh hour, you're wasting your time and their money.
Sometimes they'll feel happy if you get them in the third hour with their lift out. Then by the fourth hour they're not happy again — they've got pain in their leg. Put the lift back. Don't force the issue. Take out half at a time. Take it out of one pair of shoes and not out of another pair of shoes.
If a practitioner is going to listen to a patient every time a patient says it's too much, he's never going to get his job done. He has to develop his own independent evaluation. If the guy says it's too much, try doing a rapid review of your direction. Aren't you mashing at this point rather than moving? Whereas you say it's too much pressure — this isn't what you mean. What you mean is the pressure is not right.
The person who is the patient can't always be trusted, because he does all kinds of things to escape from the pressure of change and the pressure for change. They'll give you all kinds of rationalizations as to why you can't do it, or you can't do it at this time. Some of them almost sound convincing.
Don't say it's not the right time for them to get rolfed. It's not the right time for you to get busy.
Some bright boy one time said that the whole of the Rolf technique consists in decompensating the compensations. He said a mouthful. This is almost literally what you're doing. You're going after one compensation after the other. You are getting the most superficial — probably the late compensations — first. You're turning back the picture. And as you turn back the picture, you're going to get symptoms that had been the symptoms of that old level of compensation.
Osteopaths and chiropractors have seen this same thing, which they have called retracing, and they like it very much. Sometimes, for my money, they overdo it — every time a patient comes in with a new pain, they think it's a retracing pain. It may not be. It may be that they didn't do the job properly and they've given them a new symptom.
The more you go on in this work, the more you are aware that this is a spiral processing, and it's going up. When you stop at the end of an hour, you're being fairly arbitrary. You can't keep going with that guy forever — he gets too tired, and time is necessary for consolidation. But time isn't necessary for the progression. The road of the progression is traced right along from the beginning.
It will reorganize. This is the odd part about it. It won't do it in an hour. It will rarely do it in one ten-series. But the second time you look at it you say, "Oh, by George, that's changed a lot."
You have to build step by step by step. You have to climb onto the next step in order to get to the following step, and you can't jump. This becomes your problem as you get out of this class and start to work. You know it in your head, but somehow your hands have not gotten the rhythm.
You are using the index of the fascial organization. That fascial tissue is a heavy, coarse tissue — sometimes a very slow-metabolizing tissue, sometimes somewhat faster. But you've all had your fingers in these deteriorated fascial messes that speak very loudly of the fact that it's going to take a long time to change them.
When you take on a person and give them the first hour, or the first and the second hour, and you are not getting your results — then it's time to scratch very carefully under the surface. If they're on barbiturates that some medical doctor prescribed them five years ago and forgot to un-prescribe, they think it's none of your business. If they're on thyroid prescribed three years ago, none of your business either. But from the first hour you get working, you start that thyroid going.
When we keep our own models, we are apt to pick up on our problem before it gets too far out of hand. We can go back and remember — oh yes, on the third hour, this girl was really screaming. She was really in pain. I let it go thinking, well, I'll pick up on it next time. You remember that piece of history. The guy that you sent it to somewhere else doesn't know anything about it.
There will come a time when bodies are sturdy enough and relaxed enough that you can afford to work with them other than on a flat plane. But in a tenth hour you're still taking off the strain of gravity that you will get exaggerated and exacerbated if you try to work in sitting or standing position.
As you all know, by the time you have won a man mentally, the problem of dealing with his muscles is a good deal easier.
With these people who have never paid any attention to themselves and their responses, you will have a terrible time. You say to them, "What kind of a pain is that?" "Oh, I don't know, it's pain." They don't know what kind it is, they don't know how much it is. They're applying that nice four-letter word to anything that is sensation, not pain. You cannot quickly get them trained to the place where they understand the difference between sensation and pain.
Your patients are always saying, "Why? Why? Why is this? Why is that? Why do I hurt?" You can see what a morass you're going to be in if you really answer them on that why-level and they accept it as authoritative. Because, I hope you know by this time, you don't know. But they don't know that.
The body talks about it. Those people who have studied in my classes know what I mean when I say the body talks about it. If you start with a program — start with your first hour as I teach you — lo and behold, by the time they come in for the second hour, every one of those ten people will show you the same mal-symptom.
This is the purpose of the advanced class: to give you the time to look at this. This is the reason you're not given two models instead of one — to give you the time to think. Our problem is we don't have the time to think.
"Doctor, the trouble is you have forgotten to put in some compound essence of time in your prescription." This was a very wise verbalization of the whole situation of learning. You have to have some compound essence of time in there.
You are the vanguard, and you have to answer the questions, and you have to put forward the ideas. I do the best I can, but my address is time-limited.
How long does a session last? Somewhere between an hour and an hour and fifteen or an hour and twenty minutes depending on the size of the individual. A great big two fifty pound man is obviously going to take a lot longer than a 90 pound woman. Do you do it day after day? No, you don't. You do it as you can do it. When I am able to arrange it, I prefer to have say three sessions in the first week and two in the second. And then once a week or once a month or once in six months for the end as it's possible to get together.
I heard a rumor that it took 40 sessions with Fritz Perls. Is that correct? Fritz Perls was a good beginning. There will be people who will never accept that they should stop at the end of the 10. Fritz Perls was one of them and I could name you several others. If one spoonful is good, 40 spoonfuls has to be a lot better. But if you'll take one spoonful and then wait until you've gotten all you can get from it, you may find you've got quite a lot, maybe as much as 30 spoonfuls would give you, if not 40. 40 spoonfuls could kill you.
It is always so that when we take on, say, an 11, even after a year, even after five years, all of a sudden we're ahead of where we were at the end of 10. This we found over and over again. It's also true that you never can do a first hour of rolfing twice. Many times people come into our rolfing, say, on the East Coast, and they say they want to get rolfed, and they don't mention the fact that they've had three rolfings from rolfers on the West Coast. But very presently the rolfer is seeing that he's just not doing his first hour, and he says to them, You've been rolfed by someone.
On the whole our basic cycle is a cycle of 10 sessions. This is just catch as catch can. Many times we have somebody that's come up from South America and he's going to stay until Saturday and how many sessions can we give him? Well, he'll be back from South America probably six months from now. Maybe he'll be staying for three sessions. If we give him three now and three then, he'll have six, and then maybe he won't be back for five years. We just go, as I say, catch as catch can. We're a pretty adaptable bunch. The 10 sessions are better not taken that close together. It's better to take about a month for the 10 sessions or six weeks. But where we're stuck with an emergency, we try to meet the emergency.
Each session, is there a logical progression of what is worked on? You just bet there is. And this depends on what the body shows. But the bodies always show the same sort of progression. The shoulders in one individual may need a great deal more work than the shoulders in another, but that doesn't say that in the day in the session where it is basically hips rather than shoulders that are getting worked on, that we'll stay with those shoulders. We'll go to the hips and bring them along. Because many times as we organize the hips, the shoulders begin to find out what life should be like for shoulders.
The body talks about it. And those people who have studied in my classes know what I mean when I say the body talks about it. If you will start with your first hour which I teach you, lo and behold, by the time they come in in the second hour, every one of those 10 people will show you the same mal symptom. Will show you that their legs are not under them. Will show you that their feet aren't walking properly. The body screams at you. So to stop it screaming, you get down there and you try to do something with it. And if you stop it screaming, then it begins to scream somewhere else and you do that in the third hour. You just chase the scream until it has no place to stay.
Now if you're going to add that kind of a burden to the body in addition to the change and the burden that you've added in the first hour, you've got a situation where you cannot afford to take the chance and let your client go out and drive 200 miles up into the mountains. They come and they expect to drive themselves home. The point is to let them settle into those changes of the first hour and then give them the second hour. There's another factor that's really important. It has to do with the Rolfee's first reception of processing. Nine out of 10 will go away really lifted because that energy has indeed been raised in the body. It is going up. And I think that message of going up is the primary message. That's verticality. And I think it's established there.
I had to do it with one person that had no other time. There was such stuff on the feet that I did two hours in one hour. I'll never do it again. The person went to bed for three days. There are two factors involved and you better listen to both of them. One is the factor that it really and literally is too much for that party. And the second factor is that if they think it's too much for that body, they're not going to keep you on their payroll. And this is — both of them are important, and I'm not minimizing the second one.
The thing that you are doing in every hour of rolfing that you do is lengthening that body, thinning it for the most part and lengthening it. And in order to lengthen it, you have got to get greater length in those spiny erectors. The shortening of the body comes in by virtue of the spreading apart of those spiny erectors and the lengthening of the body can be produced by the tightening together of those spiny erectors. As the body has shortened, the scapulae have come apart. The converse is also true. As the scapulae are pulled apart by poor use of the shoulder girdle, the body shortens. Consequently, in order to lengthen the body, you have to get the scapulae in where they belong.
I was scared when I got out of practitioner training. I'd done 20 sessions in my life, and I was being turned loose on the world as a rolfer. So I just stayed in that recipe like it was a life preserver. That's appropriate. I decided to stay in it for five years, which was my own commitment to myself. I figured if it takes a carpenter in the old school five years to become a journeyman, it's going to take me that long. So I just made that little contract and just for five years, one through 10, were always the same. Every once in a while I'd see an arm that needed a little something, but for that period of time I just decided I would hang right there. And the recipe always brought me right.
The feeling I have is that during any of the hours, the deepest level you go at, that person will only be in balance when the whole body is balanced at that level. If a person's very open in a certain spot, you go all the way down to the nitty gritty, but you can't even get into the shoulders. This is true throughout the work — you constantly have to work at the level of the person, that you can bring the whole body to balance, because you can take someone apart anywhere along the road by doing too much too fast.
How about looking at it from a slightly different point of view? Not looking at it from a point of view, do you need to go here or do you need to go there? But can the top contribute more to the bottom than the bottom can contribute to the top? Or can the bottom contribute more? If you just shift your point of view slightly, you may get a lot of help in making that decision.
In the eighth and ninth hour, if you're going to get true integration, you have to get away from listening to the individual screams of individual parts because you are beginning to get into an understanding of the body as a fascial complex. In the advanced hours, you are looking at the body no longer as this plus this plus this plus this. You're looking at the body as a large sized piece of the whole fascial complex. All of you know how to take a body apart and none of you ever know how to put it together.
If they want me to show them a lot of patterns, I say no. You have to get patterned to do that. You have to go to a patterner. I'm not gonna pattern you for another hour now. I had a girl once. I patterned her, and she came back and wanted to review the patterns. That's totally absurd. I'm not gonna spend an hour reviewing with you. I have other things I wanna do. I wanna go out and canoe. I don't wanna sit around and review you the rest of my life. How would you like it if every time you taught me yoga, I ran over to your house and wanted a review when you were trying to do this or do that. I think you have to — it's really a valuable thing to establish that rapport early.
It's at that point that your work becomes also your own path. Because as you are having your buttons pushed, you constantly have to come back to yourself and reorganize your own system so that you can come back to the work anew and do it better. You'll find that your own psyche gets in the way of your being able to do the rolfing. You'll reach plateaus where you see that some neurotic pattern of yours is keeping you from getting any further with the rolfing. And then you've got to do some homework. And then you come back to the work.
The hour that they're with me is such a small time and most of the work comes outside. The way it was presented to us in Mill Valley is that you take on a certain responsibility with the person when they come in and for that hour. And they make the choice after that whether they're gonna go out and put on their old clothes or move toward it. I know a couple of rolfers that actually sit down and contract with people. What is it exactly that you expect from the rolfing process? They make them write it down and they go over each item and say, Yeah, we can do this if such and such. Yeah, I feel that this can happen. No, I feel that this is totally absurd and this can't happen for you necessarily.
Patterning is valuable in its own way. Its greatest value is that a person who goes into patterning commits a certain number of hours of his time to being aware of how he uses his body, how he might better use his body more efficiently, and how he then turns and uses his body more efficiently. He goes to a rolfer and expects to have something done for him and to him, but he doesn't have any such expectation when he goes to a patterner. When he goes to a patterner, he goes with the understanding that he is going to do something differently.
We take pictures only for the sake of giving them to the patient. We don't do that for our own use. We do that for the patient because that patient never believes — never, I underscore never believes — that he is able to make the change which we later show him, or that he has made that change. If we show him that picture at the end of ten hours, he doesn't believe what he looked like before we started the whole first hour. Our pictures are really part of the psychological treatment that we give to people.
Is it a painful manipulation? That very greatly depends on the individual. If the individual is set that they're going to resist it, it will be painful. There is no question about it. If, on the other hand, they're going to accept what they have not as pain but as intense sensation and go with it, they won't express it as pain. Many times if I've given a first hour of rolfing, I'll say at the end of it, Well, Mrs. Jones, I think we've had about as much as we can take on today. She'll look up wide eyed and she'll say, But John told me there was so much pain. When is the pain coming?
Madame Mensendieck thought that she could cure a curvature of the back by telling them to stand straight or to do such and such an exercise. The next week they came in and they looked just as bad, and she says, Well, go home and do it twice as many times every day. You must understand if you are going to be promoters of Rolfing what it is we're promoting. We are promoting energetic efficiency in bodies. It's not this kind of thing — Oh, he's so energetic. Not that at all. It's the kind of energy as is measured in a physics laboratory. How much work does your body have to do in order to effect what it is that you're being paid to do.
Reading the Client
Ida had a clinician's eye and a teacher's ear. She read bodies before they spoke, but she also read what people said about themselves — their excuses, their resistances, their suggestibility. These passages gather what she taught about listening to the person on the table: when to push, when to plant a seed, and when to keep your mouth shut.
When you get to be a Rolfer, you see better when they have their clothes on than you do when they have their clothes off.
We don't work with acute situations, emergency situations, because that involves diagnosis and all the rest of it, which is not our ballpark. If it's a new injury, no — I'd let it hit an equilibrium position, and then I'd do the work.
An individual should not look at Rolfing as a medical treatment, but as an educational process to re-educate the body. There are many medical improvements that show up, but I always say to them: well, that's your hard luck. If you've lost your indigestion or your constipation, that's your hard luck. We didn't set out to do it.
Do some of your clients resist the body changes? Some of them do. But on the other hand, if they resist enough, they won't be in.
The first area of concern I would move to in beginning the first hour would be to have the person lying on their back, observing their breathing — to get a feeling of how their thorax is tied down or pinned down.
Invariably, you're going to run into the person's persona when you start trying to modify their body pattern. That's one of the first things to emerge — the personality starts to manifest more strongly. Very often there's emotional content in what's going on for that person as you work on them. And you really have to make a clear choice for yourself about where you're going to stand with respect to that person.
Anybody can put affect out of the body. But not everybody can take someone to a place where there is no longer the need to express that affect. People think that just because they can get someone releasing tremendous amounts of emotion, they have done something for them. Simply going there doesn't make it possible for them to achieve a new way of relating to that same material, because they are still stuck, still out of balance.
I don't push people when they put up a real wall of resistance. That is the worst of the defenses — that's the defense you can't go by. My technique at that point is usually to plant some kind of seed for the future. I'll say, well, maybe this isn't the time. You've got to check what this is doing for you, not to change right now. What's it doing for your life? Usually within as little as two or three weeks, but certainly no longer than six months, they'll show up again and say, you're right. Let's get started.
The thing that gets me into a sheer fury is when one of my practitioners comes in with a patient on whom obviously poor Rolfing has been done and says, well, yes — I've given this girl twenty hours of work, but she really isn't ready to go on further. Now this is sheer unadulterated bunk. They're always ready to move on if you're doing your proper work. And when they're not ready to move on, just be suspicious that you have overlooked something.
It's when you begin to get emotionally pushed that you no longer have precision. I've seen this happen in class, where a subject emotionally pushes the practitioner to the place where he gets good and mad, or he gets an I'll-show-him sort of game going. You've just got to develop to a greater degree of maturity. I don't know how to get you there except to put you into these situations.
You have got to start where the guy is. Those of you whose education has taught you to live in high-order abstractions — it's alright for you, but it's not alright for the patient you're working on.
Find out who you are, where your place is, where your place as a teacher is — because you are not therapists, basically. You are teachers. You can function over a wide spectrum. You can take the level of a three- or six-year-old, where you're not appealing to a mind at all, you're just moving along with it; or you can take highly sophisticated, intellectually developed people. You've got a technique that fits them all. What doesn't fit them all is what comes out of your mouth. That you have to try on carefully and get the right words.
When you add the component of pain to the component of physical touch, it's like the subconscious just goes open. And very often there's no sense of humor there. You say something which normally would be ho, ho, ho, and it goes right in and sticks. Ten years later, they're still running that program. You have to be very careful about what you say to somebody while you're Rolfing them, because you are putting them in a place where they're wide open to any suggestion that might come out from you.
There's a tendency for practitioners, especially the early ones, to spend a lot of time with their clients showing them what's wrong with their bodies. Now you're rotated this way, and this leg's short, and that shoulder's down, and your head's over here — and the person starts freaking out. I decided I wasn't going to talk to people about what was wrong with them. They would come in and I'd say, here's where you're going — not here's where you are.
I tell people: if I say something to you that you think doesn't fit, throw it out. I'm not a guru. You paid me a good fee for my services, and you can do with them what you want. But I want to feel free to make whatever observations I think are relevant. And if you don't think they're relevant, don't take them to heart. Just throw it out.
I hear a lot of Rolfers analyzing the people — telling them what something means. Oh yes, there's a lot of pain in the chest, or something like that. I just cringe when I hear that. We're not — nobody is to spell it out.
I personally wouldn't think of telling them I'm going to work on their shoulders today, because as a matter of actual fact, I might be working on the shoulders from my feet. Many times you'll be working on their legs below the knees, and they'll say, oh, those funny things are happening in my shoulders. We don't know why, but somehow there's a connection.
I have seen people who could not hear themselves, who could not become aware of what was going on — lying their stiffest, who, when they were lying flat on the ground on a fine cushion that gives all the support, would say, well, I'm so relaxed, it's marvelous — and all the time everything is going to pieces. This is a self-awareness that no amount of talking and teaching could ever do.
Stop listening and stop thinking, or saying, or doing, or something.
It's not only that it stands out as your hands go down there, immediately stopped by a retinaculum. It isn't a question of seeing only. It's a question of feeling as well.
Most necks, when they first come for Rolfing, are moved on the surface alone. They're like the rest of the body — there is very little adjustment on the inside. There's very little differentiation between the outside and the inside.
When they come in loose-jointed, they presently get to be mono-jointed as you organize these muscles. The thing changes, and it changes chemically. Sometimes right under your hand, you can feel the change occur.
What you have to get away from in the eighth and ninth hour, if you're going to get true integration, is listening to the individual screams of individual parts — because you are beginning to understand the body as a fascial complex. In the advanced hours, you are looking at the body no longer as this plus this plus this plus this. You're looking at the body as a large-sized piece of the whole fascial complex.
You can't understand how these people that you're working on are in life and apparently holding down jobs and doing things and ranging through this whole cycle of life. You can't understand how they can do it when they're as far out of reality as this.
When somebody opens his mouth and speaks, if you have your hand on him, you can feel the vibration of the tone right through the body. This, I think, is what the old metaphysicians are talking about when they speak of the power of the word — because you are getting vibration going through the entire body when you speak. Every breath you take is exercising just about literally every muscle in the body.
There is, as you also know, a certain amount of literal addiction in this. They felt better when they had their hands on you, or you had your hands on them, and they can't understand why they shouldn't feel better by having this once a week if they can afford to pay for it.
For most clients, the ten sessions will give them a package with which they're very well content. When they start not feeling too good at the end of two years or so — whether some accident has happened or they've had an illness — they'll come back. We try to keep them from just getting hooked. This we try to avoid at all costs. When there's something that really needs changing, we're more than happy to change it. But we don't want them to get the idea that this is a medicine they'll be taking for the rest of their lives.
If I can't communicate with the person, then I usually don't even try to do the job.
There are plenty of people for whom psychotherapy is completely out. Just listening to the words that come out of another man's mouth is something they can't tolerate. But there are mighty few people who, if you approach them with the proper — shall I say, love in your hands, not your heart — your love in your hands, can't not only tolerate it, but respond to it.
I have spent years enough worrying about the patient. Now I've taken on worrying about the office. Somewhere, there are people who understand the cleansing — not of the other guy, but of the stuff that comes from the other guy and is poured into you. This is a reality, and all of you have experienced it. You know that on the first day of an elementary class, at the end of that day, you're so tired you can't even go to dinner.
It's also good to have quite a little exposure to giving massage, to find out whether you really like to deal with bodies — because there are plenty of people who don't. They think in their heads that they do, but when they really get their hands on bodies, they find that it has a slight repulsion for them.
We have never had the kind of money that makes it possible to do follow-up studies, but I see people I worked on many years ago, and they look very different. They know they look different. They know they feel different. They say, you'll never know what you did for me. When they say that, I just go my way and know that my job is done.
I'll wish you what everybody wishes — that you have a long, long life, so you can get as miserable as people get when they get old.
What we teach to the prospective Rolfer is a picture, a template of what a body should look like — how it should look, what the relations within the body are, what sort of arms should a certain set of shoulders have, what sort of shoulders should a certain head have. You very often find all kinds of disparities. Mama knows that when she wants to make a dress for Mary, she's got to get a size ten for the skirt and a size eight for the blouse. We all have seen this sort of thing. This is not in accordance with the template, and our job is to bring a body toward that template.
In classes we teach a half a dozen people in a row so that the student can see the half a dozen people. And those half a dozen people will all show the same type of picture. If they're all in the second hour, they will all show that their legs and feet need work. If they're in the third hour, they will all show that the side of their bodies seem too short. The body talks about it. If you start with the first hour I teach you, lo and behold, by the time they come in for the second hour, every one of those ten people will show you the same mal-symptom.
Many times if I've given a first hour of Rolfing, I'll say at the end of it, "Well, Mrs. Jones, I think we've had about as much as we can take today." She'll look up wide-eyed and say, "But John told me there was so much pain. When is the pain coming?" If the individual is set that they're going to resist it, it will be painful. There is no question about it. If, on the other hand, they're going to accept what they have not as pain but as intense sensation and go with it, they won't express it as pain.
I certainly wouldn't tell the client what I'm going to work on, because I think it's the job of the individual to feel what's going on. I don't see why I should tell them I'm going to work on their shoulders today, because as a matter of actual fact, I might be working on the shoulders from the feet. Many times you'll be working on their legs below the knees, and they'll say, "Oh, funny things are happening in my shoulders." As one fascial sheet stops being pulled taut, it allows its neighbor also to relax.
There are those who are willing to use their bodies without strain, but there are also those who have been using strain in their bodies all their lives, and they don't know how to do their ordinary activity without strain. Those people are going to have to have further work. A great big two-hundred-and-fifty-pound man is obviously going to take a lot longer than a ninety-pound woman. When I am able to arrange it, I prefer to have three sessions in the first week and two in the second. Then once a week or once a month or once in six months, as it's possible to get together.
He knows what he should do because he's been led back and forth in front of mirrors, and he's seen what his body looks like and what it feels like now. Posture is the outward and visible sign of what the structure is, where you don't see it. When you see a person all bowed over, he has a very bad posture — he doesn't have a vertical structure. When you bring him from that bad posture to the vertical structure, the structure is taking care of itself.
The people who would be attracted to a lecture by me will not be the same ones attracted to a lecture by you. Your job is not to talk to the people whom I would attract; my job is not to talk to the people whom you would attract — because you will pick better words for them. Don't be afraid to acknowledge it: Tom can do a better job in this town than I could, or Harry over here can talk to that group of students and I wouldn't be able to reach them. This doesn't mean Harry's any better than you are. It does mean you're different. There's no such thing as the best Rolfer. There is such a thing as the best Rolfer for certain types of problems — the best Rolfer for problems of the pelvis, the best Rolfer for problems of the arms, the best Rolfer for understanding the relationship between behavior and structure.
I know a couple of Rolfers who actually sit down and contract with people: "What is it exactly that you expect from the Rolfing process? Write it down." They go over each item: "Yeah, we can do this if such-and-such. Yeah, I feel this can happen for you. No, I feel this is totally absurd and can't happen for you." I write those things down. Someone comes up later and tells me they've had a disease or this or that — I say, "Why didn't you tell me here first of all?" And I pull out the card. Every time someone told me about something good that happened to them, I'd write it down. People would come in saying, "Rolfing, I don't know what it's doing for me, seems like it helped my girlfriend." And the other part of the hour they'd be telling me about all the fantastic changes they had. So you always had this double message going.
After you've gotten their feet and their legs up to their knees, you begin to be aware of the fact that with that entire new balance below the knees, their back is really holding them up — holding them down, holding them, period. You better get in there and do some changing. You better get that back lengthened. The thing you are doing in every hour of Rolfing is lengthening that body — thinning it for the most part, and lengthening it. In order to lengthen it, you have got to get greater length in those spinal erectors. The shortening of the body comes in by virtue of the spreading apart of those spinal erectors, and the lengthening of the body can be produced by the tightening together of those spinal erectors. As you bring those two strands together, all of a sudden you have length in the body. As the body has shortened, the scapulae have come apart. The converse is also true: as the scapulae are pulled apart by poor use of the shoulder girdle, the body shortens.
When you finish the back, the neck is just screaming for work. You really need to get the head set onto the body. You've done a lot of work on the back, and the pelvic lift is not being screamed for at that point so much as the neck is. The cervicals almost always need to go back — I've never seen a case where they don't. Stand the person up, take a look at them, and have them do a knee-bending thing where they bend their knees forward, and watch to see how the knees are tracking. If they're not tracking straight, it's appropriate at that point to work on their knees while they're standing.
I would not recommend to any Rolfer that he take on anybody who might be suspected, even suspected, of having cancer — given the legal implications. I do know that the person who may be suspected of having cancer would feel himself very much better if somebody had the courage to Rolf him. But there are so many things you have to take into consideration in terms of our culture.
Practically every child is not normal at birth. They've been through a very heavy experience, and that heavy experience has distorted their bodies. Sometimes their body hasn't grown to a normal template during birth, and if left alone will approximate it — but Rolfing may even hasten it up.
Many of my clients intuitively know what a leg should feel like — even though they never had a leg that felt like that. I always wonder how they know. But they intuitively make that comment: "That is the way it should feel."
On Becoming a Rolfer
Ida was clear-eyed about what it took to make a Rolfer. Not enthusiasm, not good intentions — but training, discrimination, hands that could see, and the patience to walk a long road. What follows is her counsel to those who would carry the work.
A Rolfer is a highly trained individual.
There's such a long road between the "I want to be a Rolfer" and the place where you are suitable to really be a Rolfer.
You have to work on two levels. You have to work on the level of becoming a good technician. But you also, I hope, will work on the level of being a teacher.
You are being taught to see chronic problems. All chronic problems involve mechanics. All mechanics involve the gravitational behavior of material substances in a three-dimensional field.
I call it an education — a leading out, an evolution. Anything you like, but not healing, not therapy. And in getting yourself, your two feet firmly fixed on this idea, you are taking yourself out once and for all from the domain of the medics, whose job is therapy. See that you stay out of there, and see that you don't behave so that other people get the notion that there is therapy going on, that there is repair going on, that there is medical healing going on. The acute situation is the job of the medic. The chronic situation is your job, because chronic situations all have to do with improper structure.
This is one of my great complaints in life: that ninety-nine out of every one hundred people don't discriminate. They repeat something that somebody said.
The point of these questions is to find out whether the individual, in answering, goes to the textbook and copies the textbook, or whether he takes the material and constructs an idea independently.
It's true, especially in the beginning, that the language of Rolfing is primarily tactile. But there is also some mind learning, and we ask that of trainees. I took anatomy at a medical school, and some other Rolfers have too — but all Rolfers take anatomy before they work.
It's also good to have quite a little exposure to giving massage, to find out whether you really like to deal with bodies. There are plenty of people who don't. They think in their heads that they do, but when they really get their hands on bodies they find that this has a slight repulsion for them.
The next thing they do is go into what we call an auditing class. There will be perhaps six people learning Rolfing manipulation, and then ten or fifteen sitting around as auditors, looking at the changes, learning to see. Auditing is not learning to hear, but learning to see. The auditor has not yet started doing the manipulations himself. He learns to see what needs to be manipulated, and how, when it is manipulated, it changes. He learns that if you do six people in a second hour and do their feet, lo and behold, they all show the same thing. He learns that he should be able to tell, by the body configuration, exactly how many treatments a person has had.
A Rolfer has to be able to relate to a person — to make that client feel he is sympathetic with him, that they are working together.
And there are an infinity of other details which demand that he be a skilled, well-trained craftsman.
When you are dealing with people — and this goes for a student and it goes for an audience — as Mr. Casey says, you start where they are. That's all you can do. When you're taking a small child out to walk, you can't walk at four miles an hour and have that kid keep up. He doesn't have the legs for it. So you adapt your legs to the one-mile-an-hour pace that the kid can handle. When somebody says, "Ma, you're going slowly," you say, "Yes. But I'm training a child." This is a very important pedagogic consideration. If you pick out too high a level and try to introduce your zero man to it, he can't make it.
What gets me into a sheer fury is when one of my practitioners comes in with a patient on whom obviously poor Rolfing has been done and says, "Well, yes, I've given this girl twenty hours of work, but she really isn't ready to go on further." This is sheer unadulterated bunk. They're always ready to move on if you're doing your proper work. And when they're not ready to move on, just be suspicious that you have overlooked something. The trap is this: in the beginning, what you do for the individual is good as far as it goes. And then you think that by doing a lot more of the same, you're going to get further. But you're not.
Your safety lies in the fact that however poor you are, you will be making some changes. People will be feeling some changes, and like a good massage, they'll be feeling better, and they'll begin to get a story around that you're a good Rolfer. Don't tell them you're not.
This is why we don't let auditors go out and practice, or have people working at night or every weekend while they're part of the school. Once it's let out, it's out. Just like letting a lion or a cat out of the cage — you're not going to get it back that quick. It's just not that easy. Bodies are very difficult things.
Occasionally someone comes along who I see has a tremendous load of emotional history that they're carrying with them. I make it very clear to them that I'm not a psychologist, that I haven't the time nor the interest to delve into that particular realm. My work is with organizing the body in the gravity field.
I don't want Rolfing used to make your screaming better. I don't want people on the Rolf table screaming because I'm pressing on them and they think they're going to get it out. I get someone nicely organized, and they go in the next room and scream, and when I see them an hour later, they've taken themselves apart — and we are parting company.
Did any of you tell me that your breakpoint of weakness is that you have tunnel vision and you only see one thing at a time? Keep meditating on this; it's still true. When you can get to the place where you can see peripherally, you will begin to understand relationships. As long as you just look straight ahead, you won't. This is a weakness of your entire personal understanding — not only of Rolfing, but certainly in life — because you limit your understanding.
And the books never integrated it, because they never had the idea that a body was one. Anybody know where the idea of a whole man came from? It came from the man Jan Smuts. He was the Governor General of South Africa. You people should know to whom you are indebted.
Nobody had told me how to use it. And may I assure you that I had ten very dry years. I just went in and worked. This happens to pioneers — if you don't know where to go and you dare to jump in. I did make a marvelous, dramatic discovery, which is really quite simple: it wasn't what I wanted to happen. I wanted to discover a fact and a thing. What I discovered was that everything I found out didn't fit into anything I knew. And that's really quite shocking — to find out that what you're finding out doesn't fit into anything you've got any information about.
That which worked five years ago, six years ago, ten years ago — it still works, but it doesn't work well enough, it doesn't work deeply enough, it doesn't get where we should be going in order to show what Rolfing really can do. Rolfing in the sense of this deep changing of the patterns of the fundamental structure of the body to conform with gravity.
Our primary job is teaching practitioners — making more skillful and wiser, more knowledgeable teachers of human structure and function. But teaching, in my opinion, is not enough. We, your teachers, must know how and through what means this revolutionary technique of Rolfing works. We must.
There's somebody in this room that says, what I wrote to you simply proves that I want to be the best Rolfer there is. I don't care whether he's the best Rolfer there is. There ain't no such animal. There is such an animal as the best rapport for certain types of problems. The best Rolfer for problems of the pelvis. The best Rolfer for problems of the arms, the best Rolfer for understanding the relationship between behavior and structure. But there's no such thing as a best Rolfer. And when you talk about it in those terms, it becomes apparent to all and sundry that you don't know anything much about Rolfing. You don't know anything much about differentiation. You don't know anything much about matching qualities with problems.
You go into one of these human potential audiences, and obviously you can use a great many different words and ideas than you can if you go into a very small town audience where the audience is largely agricultural. That doesn't say the agricultural audience is dumb. It simply says you hook them with a different bait. Doesn't say a bluefish is any better a fish than a mackerel. Some people like it better. All of this has to become a part of you, a gut part of you, if you are going to fill a unique significant place in your culture.
Those people are taught to see acute problems. You are being taught to see chronic problems. All chronic problems involve mechanics. All mechanics involve the gravitational behavior of material substances in a three-dimensional field. That's what mechanics is: the study of the behavior of material substances in a gravitational field.
The first thing we do, if we take in people who have no background in physiology or anatomy or the medical biological sciences, is give them almost a year of reading. And then at the end of that time they are supposed to write us a report answering certain questions which we give them, the point of these questions being to find out whether that individual in answering that question goes to the textbook and copies the textbook, or whether he takes the material and constructs an idea independently.
We prefer the mesomorph, but we do take on other types. They've got to be sturdy, and they've got to have been Rolfed long before they come into any kind of training of ours. Rolfing is a very strong discipline. You need a great deal of physical strength. You've got to have a sturdy body. You've got to have a body which picks itself up and goes on no matter what happens to it. You've got to have somebody who has, at least metaphorically, shoulders broad enough.
When they get through with the actual Rolfing training, they are free to go and find which of their friends are good natured enough to pay them some money to Rolf them. You go to a given Rolfer because your friend recommended him, and your friend went to him because his friend recommended him. It's a relatively small family still.
You've all heard me scream and wail: you all can take a body apart, but the number of people who can put it together are very few. Analysis is a necessity, a preliminary of synthesis, of conscious synthesis, of conscious integration. Science permits and encourages replication. And before the method can be taught, replication must be possible.
The point of Rolfing is that you are studying how human beings can operate within the gravitational field with the least expenditure of energy with the greatest effectiveness. Don't get yourself mixed up about this, because five years from now there's going to be a lot of people asking about Rolfing. And this is the kind of thing they're going to throw at you: well, there have been lots of systems around. What have you got that makes it so damn good?
You are going to have the job, unless you can con somebody else into doing it, of going out and talking to people about what you are doing. And their first question is: Rolfing — I've never heard of Rolfing. What's Rolfing? You better have a convincing answer, and you'd better remember that they live in Newtonian worlds, and in the world in which they live, common sense is the thing that appeals to them. If what you say to them, they shake their head and say, yeah, that sounds as though it could work — you've got it made. No esoteric catchphrases will do the job. They don't know about atomic physics. They sometimes try to con you into thinking they do, but they don't really.
If you have a problem getting into a certain area, get that person feeling what's going on under your fingers — the tendons and the stretching and the burning — and you'll get away from creating intense pain. The development of psychic ability is really along a road of increased discrimination. Much of what we call psychic ability is really just that you are seeing or hearing or feeling a great many things you could not have discriminated before.
I like to caution you on the way you talk about promising the moon. A friend of mine gives brilliant demonstrations — he says things like, a Rolfer can always tell what hour you've had. Doesn't matter, you can go from one Rolfer to the next. And then a guy walks in and says, this is it, I want to see it — what am I ready for? Don't try to get into that. Don't run down the other guy. Be positive. Be humble. Roll up your sleeves.
I hear a lot of Rolfers analyzing the people — telling them what something means. Like, oh yes, there's a lot of pain in the chest. I just cringe when I hear that. We're not anybody to spell it. A client will say, is it painful? And somebody will say, oh, well, there's pain involved. Yes is the answer.
You cannot get the results of Rolfing without changing them. So where do you start? You start in the first hour. You have got to get these people recognizing responsibility. Then there's the other guy — middle-aged, usually highly intelligent. You talk and you talk about responsibility, and finally you get him to a place where he says, yes, I accept this is my responsibility, I've done it to myself. Not at all. Those are just plain words. This is the challenge to you, Rolfers. I not only am unwilling to take it on my shoulders for you, but I cannot. There's such a long road between the I-want-to-be-a-Rolfer and the place where you are suitable to really be a Rolfer.
You have to release the superficial stuff before work on the deep stuff does any good. You just have to go in layer by layer. If you go in too deep too fast, you take the guy apart. If you dig a bit too deep, the sides fall in. I once saw that happen. A non-Rolfer worked on a girl for about two hours and really took her apart. He went to a lot of layers trying to show her he knew something about Rolfing. He let her out so fast that she never has gotten totally straight. She looked better before one than she did after ten. Once it's let out, it's out. Just like letting a lion out of a cage — you're not going to get it back that quick.
Your significant work on that silent level is very important. But in terms of a gospel, you have to get off that silent level and into a level of abstraction, into a level of symbols. People communicate with each other only through symbols, through words, through drawings. So you've got to dish out on two levels.
I was giving this whole thing some thought last night. I asked myself, why do we start on the chest? Why is it that that's how it's been ever since I got into it? First time Ida put her hands on me, she went right there. By working on the chest and the pelvis, you deliver the most experience of what we're trying to do. When someone gets a first hour, you're establishing in their cells what it is that Rolfing's about. Before you put your hands on them, they've only got ideas, abstractions. In the first hour you're giving them an experiential look at what goes on. You've taught them at a level that they can understand what Rolfing is, and that says more than all your words.
Some of you are old enough to have been through the routine by which we as Americans train our young men — through games, and still more through their period of service in the Army. Shoulders back. Gut in. What happens when you put your shoulders back? Chest up. The dorsal spine goes forward. You can't talk too good. That is the big key there. Recognize that one of the greatest nations we have had on earth regarded that as a goal. The Germans got their boots and helmets on and got so mad with their discomfort that they went out and conquered the French. But did they do it with the least expenditure of energy?
The body talks about it. Those who have studied in my classes know what I mean. If you start with your first hour which I teach you, lo and behold, by the time they come in for the second hour, every one of those ten people will show you the same mal-symptom. Will show you that their legs are not under them, that their feet aren't walking properly. The body screams at you. So to stop it screaming, you get down there and try to do something with it. And if you stop it screaming there, then it begins to scream somewhere else, and you do that in the third hour. You just chase the scream until it has no place to stay. And then you kiss them goodbye and tell them it was nice knowing them.
Rosemary and I were the people who got together and organized Rolfing as you know it now. I sometimes think of that old saw about how we did all we could on six days of the week and the rest we did on the seventh. That was the way we worked in those days, because we had to Rolf on six days of the week, and we had to plan and write books which are still not published on the seventh. Then Dick Demmerle managed to get himself licensed in some seven or eight different states so that he could go into those states demonstrating Rolfing. In those days he was a voice crying in the wilderness, and now I feel we have no voices crying in any wilderness anymore.
Times have been changing, and thank God they've not only been changing, they've been developing. I hear a certain amount of complaints these days from some of you in those older earlier brackets of Rolfing, because we keep telling everybody about the difference in the teaching nowadays from the old teaching. But if we weren't changing in this very rapidly changing world, we also would be in the garbage pail. The next time you are inclined to complain because it is being suggested that you take further training in Rolfing, recognize the fact that what worked five years ago, six years ago, ten years ago — it still works, but it doesn't work well enough, it doesn't work deeply enough.
A recipe is fine. It works, as each and every one of you has reason to know. But when you get to be a chef instead of a cook, you create your results not by a recipe but by your recognition of the interplay of food and nutritional materials. This is the level where we are now. We have got to understand those nutritional materials and be able to put them together understandingly — not to supersede the recipe in the early stage of the game; that recipe is going to be good down to the end of the line for beginning work.