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Muscular Growth

3^rd, 4^th and 5^th Level Thinking

Integrating Hours

Chasing the Stress

Understanding Fascial Planes

Arthritic Symptoms

Muscular Growth

(0:08 student) -come and migrate

(0:05 student) say it again, would you. For the tape?

(0:06) yea, do that. Say it again for the tape, because this is something that is going to need thinking by some of us. Thinking through.

(0:18 student) Let me back up one step. Apparently muscles can arise either segmentally, with a called myotome pattern, where each myotome vertebral level or section gives off one pattern, or they can come-, your leg and arm muscles can just come from a different bud, and they don't come from a myotome pattern, I can't think of the name. They have a whole different way of developing. Muscles of the neck and the head, the intrinsic muscles of the back come off the base of the tongue in embryology, and they migrate down in a segmental pattern

(1:02 student) even the false vertebral muscle? Did you say intrinsic neck muscles?

(1:12 student) No. The long-, the flat broad muscles of the back, the trapezius and some of these, arise totally different to their-

(1:18 student) they are intra-lateral

(1:22) yea, but they’re not a myotome pattern; this is the big point. They’re not segmental in origin. They start and they kind of grow, and they fan out as the body migrates.

(1:33 student) They come from laterally at least.

(1:35 student) Right. With intrinsic muscles, start from the base of the tongue; migrate.

(1:44 student) I had forgotten the principle. I recall it now that you bring it up. I’m trying to think of the word.

(1:49 student) Of the other type?

(1:50 student) Yea. There is a word for it. The difference between a muscle that grows in that spot and stays there, and the muscle that goes away from its original spot. For instance maybe, muscle in the forearm, if it were in its proper location, might be somewhere back here, instead of out there.

(2:14 student) Yea. The arms get confusing because the arms and legs have a whole different budding system. You almost have to stay on the body when you’re talking about this. But something like the latissimus dorsi or the trapezius are broad flat muscles which migrate. The intercostals muscles are truly still a segmental muscle. They grow out with the ribs. Each intercostal muscle is just that one muscle segment, which has grown out. And they carry their nerve along with it. And a lot of muscles, they can tell the development by looking at the nerve pattern through the facial muscles which grew up in the face, they all pick the same nerve, and something starts to spread out through the curve, so you can tell from where it arises by its innervations

(2:55) Well, the thing that is interesting me there is that it seems to me that there may be structures in connecting them, situations in there which account for the reason that the position of the tongue is so very important, other than a third area thinking of the fact that simply the tongue is pulling on it.

(3:23 student) right

(3:24) because there is no question but that if you take a tongue and depress it, and organize it; put it in the right place during a heart attack for example, that heart will come along and try to do it’s stuff. You can help a person a great deal that way, if you have the nerve to do it.

(3:45) There is no question I don’t think, that if you organize the positioning of the tongue, you will get much better function of the thyroid.

(3:58) Now I told you, and it may be so, or it might not, that this would probably be by way of the 6^th cervical; That the positioning of the tongue is dragging the 6^th cervical forward. Nor merely the position of the tongue, but the way one uses ones tongue in speech is dragging that forward and putting an everlasting strain on that 6^th cervical which in turn is changing innervations to thyroid and parathyroid. But this is a relatively simple-minded way of looking at things, which is perfectly adequate for these teaching purposes, but needs to be looked at very much more precisely and sophisticatedly for people who are able to handle more sophistication, sophisticated thinking with it. So I am very much interested in what you say about that tongue, and I suggest that it would be a very good subject for meditation; see how much more you can get out of that.

(5:13 student) Have you ever thought that [kens verrebrance] is the fascial connections, because it’s all arising the same place. It has to all be in related fascia.

(5:20) Seems to me the tongue can be looked at as a sack of fascia with something inside it, and the sack can change very quickly

(5:32) Well, anyway, so in a 7^th hour, this is what is going on. Now then, this beautiful looking-, yea?

3^rd, 4^th and 5^th Level Thinking

(5:45 student) May I interrupt? You’re saying that there are phenomena that occur that are not explicable in a usual level type of thinking

(6:00) Well, you’re doing a lot of your thinking in the 4^th area. Oh, I’m saying about the 5^th area?

(6:03 student) No. Well. Phenomena occurs –

(6:07) I would certainly say that in the 5^th area there are certainly phenomena that occur that certainly don’t obey the ordinary rules

(6:13 student) Nah. I mean Mr. Foot in the Heart, ok? You know, you try to explain something that’s a trip, and you might find some kind of circular long way to do it, but basically you can’t do it.

(6:32) That’s right. Well, wouldn’t you agree that basically you couldn’t do what we do here?

(6:36 student) True. But what I’m asking is that in the face of that, the thinking , rather than being a left to right thinking, takes on some other character; that’s what I heard you say; some other way to view that, and that must be your fourth area.

(6:53) The fourth area is a more sophisticated way of viewing something that’s down there that you can’t explain in terms of your third area view. That’s all. It just is saying that it’s a different way of getting meaning out of-, it is a more advanced and further along way, lets put it that way; it is a further along way of getting meaning out of the phenomenon that you see.

(7:22) Does anybody like that, or dislike that, or what? This is just as I understand these areas, they are just different, less and more sophisticated ways of looking at the phenomena of life, and trying to make sense of them. I mean the meaning

(7:45 student) But does it still involve the same kind of thinking, logic, that’s in the third area –

(7:50) Lets get back to the 8^th hour, which we have to be doing. We have to be doing 9^th hour’s today. And we’ve got to know how we got there.

(8:05) It be now practically eleven o’clock, which means we spent 20 minutes more on this than we are entitled to.

Integrating Hours

(8:13) So, we’ve got that 7^th hour, and now we took on the 8^th hour. Again according to the same laws, but now we are getting a greater understanding of these laws. The same laws which we’ve been using before, except now we’re integrating. We’re really consciously integrating. We’re consciously using fascial levels which have not, in referred area thinking, been used as causes. And we’re looking at them more as causes in the sense that they establish relationships. And they do. And it is the establishment of this relationship which becomes the new cause at a new level, which you’re now going to have to deal with.

(9:23) And so your 8^th and your 9^th hour, and your 10^th hour for that matter, are operations that are going along in your understanding on a fascial level of connection and relation.

(9:58) You all saw and went through a certain amount of soul searching and mind searching the other day about, which area do I work on in the 8^th hour on this body? You continue to do so; searching the mind, searching the map, as long as you work.

(10:34) You all saw something you never expected to see; that if you made the right choice the other one came along. Now this has been something that has been operating from the 1^st hour. But right now we’re putting it way out in the middle of the table and taking a good look at it.

(11:04) You all saw that in the 2^nd hour for instance, you work on the right foot, you have a longer whole right side. But you weren’t able to look at it in quite such a sophisticated and knowing fashion as you are now.

(11:28) so we made the choice of, we are going to choose the big part of the body and organize it. 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. And that I told you ,is the key for that 8^th hour.

(12:00) Ask yourself, will the upper part help the lower part? Will the lower part help the upper part? I think it was Owen… somebody said, I think we worked on the pelvis. And when Don lay down, that was apparent when it wasn’t apparent when Don was standing up. Mainly, that the soles of his feet, and his legs, as they were released from the over set lying weight, were not able to carry that overlying weight through in a balanced pattern at all. And I said, “I know it’s the lower part of the body,” because I saw that the guy was not able to try to balance his shoulders on the ground until he had feet that balanced on the ground. Now the 9^th hour, if you’ve done your 8^th hour properly, there is no soul searching, because ‘all’ you have to do, is to do the rest of it.

(13:36) So now you have to go and you have to remember, or the patient has to remember which half of the body you did, if you don’t see him for another 6 months, he’s not going to remember and you’re not going to remember and you’re going to have to think again. But if you just saw him the day before yesterday you don’t have to think you remember that you did the lower half, and today you’re going to do the upper half, and put those two together.

(14:01) And now you see, 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.

914:21) I don’t think there is anybody here who would be willing to make a human looking like some of the humans we’ve seen on this couch, because they’d know that they really wouldn’t work very well. And God is no dumber than you. He knows it too. So now you are going to have a really creative experience in the sense of taking this human being and putting him together, into a human being-, into a relationship that is now capable of operating on a different level.

(15:08) And if any of you, I’m talking to you Mr. Drucker, can hand me any better way of looking at it - I’m serious. I’m not being sarcastic about this - than to say that what you’re getting is the result of relationship in that improved functioning that comes at and after the 10^th hour, and after the 9^th hour if you like. I’d like to know about it, because frankly, I can’t see it. I mean I see it as the result of relationship in there. And there may be a better way of looking at it, I just haven’t seen it, and am willing to hear. But not this minute. Right now, we’ve got to get moving on, unless you have a pat answer, which I doubt.

(16:05) So, there you have the creation through the establishment of the relationship. You’ve done it, with your hands, with your eyes.

(16:27) Now you’ve all heard me say that all these people who go through these classes can take bodies apart. Some of them can take bodies ‘aparter’ than other people can, but the problem is that they can’t put bodies together. And again I refer back to what I was talking about 10 minutes ago; a person who is living in the third area doesn’t understand the fourth area, and at this point you are all fighting your way to get out from the level of the thinking in which you were brought up; as children in high school, or college chemistry and that sort of thing, to a more sophisticated creation and relationship.

(17:25) and when you fall down, and you look at the body and you say, “I know this isn’t right but I don’t’ know what to do about it,” realize that this is what you are talking about, and at least get conscious of your problem…

(17:46) ok, what do you say we have some coffee?

(Tape Break)

Chasing the Stress

(17:48 student)…working on Eric, and you started

(17:52) If Eric doesn’t sit on his tail end, and sits in the middle of his back he’s going to hear from me very shortly. Yea. Working on him again.

(18:00) you worked on his upper half for a while, and then when he got up to walk I thought I could see a tremendous difference in what you had done, and yet when he came back you went back to the hips. Was it because you didn’t see things happening in the lower half?

(18:14) I didn’t see enough happening in the lower things, and when Eric stood up there in the beginning, I said, “I’m going to his hips.” And having laid him down, someone was rash enough to say, “how are you feeling?” And Eric said, “I’ve got a terrible pain in my back.” Now that was enough to throw me off of those hips, so I went to the back. And having gone to the back, I stood Eric up, or somebody-, Eric stood Eric up, and I looked at him and here was the same old mess all over again. I hadn’t cleared the hips. That was where I should have gone if I could have resisted the temptation of that fate of, “I’ve got a terrible pain in my back,” and let that line, the whole lot of his [toeses] temptation; Not to listen to the patient; to resist, to just follow the recipe and you’ll get to where you’re going to go.

(19:13) And I really thought I could get the pain out of the guys back, and I also realized at the time that that back being what that back was, it was really more than I was going to get done in one hour anyway. I mean I couldn’t just leave it to the 9^th hour and expect to get it all out. But I can expect to get a lot more going today.

(19:32) But you see, had I stuck with the upper half, and not gone down to the lower half I would then be faced tomorrow morning with a lower half that wasn’t organized and an upper half that was a quarter organized. And you saw how the thing did open after I got into the lower half. You all of you saw that, and this is completely clear –

(19:54 student) I was-, If I had done something like that, and saw that much results on the top half I think that I’d have been as lazy –

(20:04) You’d have been satisfied. Yea. Well

(20:09 student) But it was a clear picture of what you were talking about, about watching the other half to see if the experience [ ]

(20:13) yea. It was indeed. It was indeed. You see there was a lot of change in the upper half. But the change that came in the other half was a forced change and not a released change. And a release change wasn’t there. So as I said before, resist temptation. Now who wants to-. Yes?

Understanding Fascial Planes

(20:42 student) May I ask you? The one procedure I’m still very much confused on is what you are doing or how you accomplish the balancing of the neck. Now I’m not speaking of the 7^th hour where you’re working on the neck, I’m speaking of, at the end of each hour, what-, you comment about what you’re doing in the neck of the body. I really don’t understand what tissues you’re dealing with–

(21:04) Well mostly it will be a question of stretching the sternoclidos, won’t it? Some of it will be a question of stretching the scaleni. You know, taking the stuff back, because all of these necks are too far forward, even though they’ve had the whole 10 hours or more before. You remember Al Ducker here in the early stages of this class. Al had had 10 hours of work, from no less of an authority, five of them, than herself. And still his neck, his head was out there. His head wasn’t out there when I finished with him first, but his head got to be out there because the depth of change was not enough to permit him to feel that he was easier with his head up, than he was with his head forward. And so he carried his head forward, in addition to which he had gotten a dose of flu just before this class, etc.; all of these things would tend to disorganize that. Is this clear now?

(22:15 student) When you feed back, could you say that you’re really working with the long muscles of the neck the sternocleido-

(22:21) Yea

(22:22 student) The muscles which are connected with the trunk

(22:24) With the shoulders

(22:26 student) rather than the intrinsics of the neck

(22:27) rather than the intrinsics. Yes. Definitely. See those intrinsics you begin to get into very definitly on the 7^th hour.

(22:34 student) Right. I realize they’re two different things

(22:36) They’re two completely different things. And unless you release the long muscles, the intrinsics can’t take over, so when those long muscles go to shortening again-. Got something?

(22:51 student) Well I guess I’ve got a question. Are there Rolfers' in New York besides Dick?

(22:55) No

(23:00) so that in order to encourage the intrinsics to let go, and to accept their role in life, etc., etc., you have to at least leave them free of having those long muscles camping on them

(23:24) See, so each time I always do a little something about the long muscles. Now the trapezius, as you know, is the center of them all.

(23:37 student) I noticed that I’ve been worked on in the same [dance] as this. They did a lot of work, whoever has been doing it, along the clavicle, which makes sense now. You mentioned sternocleidomastoid as getting the critical end of the-; that helps.

(23:50) You see in the last half of these hours I assumed that you would see - and I still assume probably that you probably have seen – in the last half of these hours you will see as these people turn their heads that they’re not turning the stenciled anymore, they’re turning the intrinsics. And this gives you an entirely different picture energy wise

(24:22) This is again a something which needs somebody smarter than I that has mathematical background to translate into terms of actual energy operations. it may be a long time before this is done, but it’s got to be done. what is the energy balance of that body when it is working largely on the intrinsic instead of mostly the extensors with the intrinsics; Instead of working on the intrinsic limitational extrinsics

(24:56) You see what you are really seeing as you see this beautiful serene 8^th , 9^th and 10th hour pictures coming out, what you’re really seeing is that the extrinsics are no longer working madly.

( 25:13 student) I realized yesterday that just working on Eric very briefly here standing up, I cannot turn on my intrinsic muscles of the neck unless my head is held up.

(25:25) That’s right

(25:27 student) And this is another way of finding the top, is where you can turn on the intrinsics

(25:30) No. That’s not the way. Because you can turn when that’s quite a little way off center. But the way you really find the top of your head, and all of you stop and take it right now, is to let your head go up and feel what it does to all the upper ribs; the 5^th or the 6^th up. And it lifts all of those ribs and puts them into a position. And when you have that, then you have up, and not until you have that. And you can get a lot of variations from that where you can do a lot of this and a lot of that, like a lot of turning your head. But when your head is really up, this point, this point which is the intersection of the plane that bisects the ears and the plane that bisects the nose; the intersection is the “up” point. Now this is just plane ordinary common sense. It doesn’t require any revelation from on high.

(26:36) And you see, when you have that “up” position then your eyes are looking straight out, and they are not out like this, as many of you people still are. But you see a lot of these people are getting horizontal with respect to their eyes. Look at Hector. Look even at Eric. Look at Lloyd. And Eddie better have it or else. And Al can get it, but he’s awful lazy about his neck.

(27: ) And Hal can’t get it yet. He doesn’t like that feeling yet, and he doesn’t like it because there’s still too much holding below. And the holding may well be on the prevertebral level there you see, not being matched with the postvertebral, etc.

(27:39) These guys like Al, whom you look at from the beginning and there’s “nothing wrong with them,” not a thing; Just that beautiful, healthy, big, rolley-polley specimen, that’s round, firm, fully packed. That’s the point you get. Because there is nothing obvious about it. You get no help from the obvious. And you see there is enough flesh there, like Bill Shutz. God knows of all-, somebody said to me, I think it was in New York, “Did you ever Rolf a rhinoceros?” and I said, “No not yet.” And somebody else said, “Oh yes she did. She did Shutz.”- And really, I mean literally here is this great big ,burly, healthy guy, (and I don’t know how many of you remember Shultz before, before we started in on him here in this room for instance. Where we did the final work on him.) But you see, those people are really tough birds. Wonder if we put some tenderizer on you, up around the shoulders whether they would open.

(29:00 student) I noticed yesterday he was carving along, carving along, and then the picture shows this kind of thing is even out further at the end of the hour, rather than –

(29:10) Well, I wasn’t carving to get that thing in, he was carving to get the ones above it out, which was something else again. It will come. But it may take-. You know what we could do? Poor ol’ Bill. We could start a new [tide] unit; One Schutz’s, two Schutze’s

(29:35 student) 10 little Indians

(29:40) I don’t know what we’d do if we didn’t have Bill here to give us amusement.

(29:51) Is it clear to everybody that you must be conscious of the fact that you’re working with fascial planes if you’re going to get the put-togethering done? Is it clear to everybody that when you see me foaming at the mouth because somebody has taken somebody apart and hasn’t put them back together, it is because the practitioner hasn’t understood the problem of planes? Is it clear to everybody that I don’t know how to make you understand the problem of planes. I really don’t. I know I don’t because enough of you fail, and this is not your failure, it is my failure.

(30:44) So if you will bend your mind of consolidated intelligences toward trying to help me formulate in words a concept which will give more of you the realization of what’s lacking in the plane situation, you can help everybody; yourself, me and all your forthcoming generations. I just don’t know how to tell it to you. I wonder Hector, I wonder if we did enough work to anatomically present the fascial structure, whether it would help there imaginations of understanding how those planes had to be. Give this some consideration. I mean it’s not something that you can just answer off the top of your head.

(31:45 student) Well, the only comment that I was going to make is that the little sense I had of what you are talking about, talking for myself, I have not grasped it; me, myself. But the little sense that I have had, when I’ve had it, has been that this is indeed some other kind of space of experience.

(32:12) It’s not outer space. It may be an outer space experience, but-

(32:14 student) Not other, another kind of space.

(32:15) yea I know and I understand

(32:19 student) In other words, the sense of relationship as you put it, is something I would find very hard to verbalize

(32:29) very tenuous

(32:30 student) And yet I know that experience, the little bit that I have seen, that I have seen

(32:33) well somehow or other we have got to get verbalization going. With the kind of culture that we have here you would suppose there would be somebody who could put together an elastic model, or something, that would give this thing a greater reality, but I wouldn’t know where to find it. I do think that sooner or later some one of us has to be smart enough to really trace out fascial patterns of the shoulder girdle, and fascial patterns of the hip girdle. Because you see, this is what we’ve been dealing with.

(33:30) And then there is the problem of the connection between say the 10^th rib and the crest of the ileum, which is another fascial problem. But how do these hip girdle fascia fit together with the fascia that enwraps the obliques, for instance?

(33:56) Now if the fascial patterns were as clear to as the muscular patterns are, I think there would be a great deal less problem impeaching this. If there were a book to which we could refer about how those fascial planes run as we refer back to our anatomies here as to how our muscular patters run.

(34:26) It might be that it would be easier to turn out practitioners who understood that they were dealing with fascial bodies. You see, when you people get to the place where you go out and give demonstrations, you can bank on the fact that you are going to have one or two people in the audience who are going to say to you, “and how does this happen?” or, “What happens?” and you say something about, “It happens by means of fascia,” and there will be a great many people in the audience that you see haven’t heard your word fascia, because this is an unfamiliar word to them; They not only do not know what fascia is, but they never heard that word, and it means nothing to them.

(35:15) Now all of this is part of the educational process that lies ahead. It has nothing too much to do with the immediate job that you have to do today, and yet, if you and you and you become conscious of the fact that we are going to have to learn how to literally dissect out the fascial body, and remove everything else, and take a look at it, you will begin doing this in your mind today, then we will be one step nearer the problem of getting a more adequate method of teaching.

(36:00) Because you see, the problem of the next teachers coming up is beginning to get very imminent. And I was sort of holding Peter’s and Emmett’s hands the other night. They had their knees shaking, and they were quite green about the gills, because they were thinking that maybe they had to take on a class in January and I was comforting them with, there aren’t that many people lined up for January, but this isn’t true as I’ve found since. But you see, what I’m saying to you is that these people are scared to death to take on the problem of teaching, and we have got to have more teachers, and the problem is that the problems have not been properly worked out, and verbalized, and formalized, and made pictures of, and so forth. And this is the reason why these prospective teachers have their knees shaking under them.

(37:00) And so that this becomes a problem for some of you, whereas actual processing becomes a problem for many of you. But the problem of teaching, and what is missing in the teaching picture, and how to supply it, and what kind of pictures we can get, and where we can get an artist who can make a picture of fascia which conveys the idea of fascia. Now this becomes a major problem. And I don’t know of such a man

(37:28) Bob [Landman] cannot do it. This I know before I start. I don’t know of any artist who knows enough about bodies that he can-, by putting him through what you’ve been through here is going to really convey it to him.

(37:40) How about Giovanna. Does she draw, as well as sculpt?

(37:46) She claims she doesn’t. she’s been absolutely unwilling to take on any of that drawing board. She doesn’t even do such a thing as correct[ Landman’s] drawings, when it’s perfectly obvious to me what’s wrong with them, except I can’t do it. And I would have expected that Giovanna could. Giovanna has a great certainty in what she does, but apparently she doesn’t feel secure to venture into a field that is scientific rather than conveying an artistic-

(38:20 student) I’m going to get in touch with Joel [Shecter], that man I was telling you about at the beginning of the session, when I get back to Los Angeles, because he might be the person.

(38:33) see there is no place this guy can go for help. He’s got to be a pioneer too. There’s no book that he can go that’s going to tell him how to do it.

(38:45) So I’ve done a real good job of teaching this morning in that I haven’t solved any problems and I’ve put a lot of mine on your lap. But this is a something which is much too great for me, singly, to be able to solve. It’s got to somehow come out of a group of thinking.

(39:10 student) Is fascia like skin? I mean is it sort of a sense of a uniform plane or surface-

(39:14) It’s a surface but it’s not uniform. You can feel it. I mean, this is what is giving you the stretch. All of a sudden you say, “Oh my, that gave.” Don’t you? What gave? Some of that fascial non-uniformity has become more uniform.

(39:32 student) I’ve never been a hunter, but I’m sure anybody who is butchering animals, or [feeding] animals, just take your hands and [repeating] it to separate the muscle groups, and running your hand down between the groups of muscle, you get this feeling for how they are adhered, and how you can put your hand in there and kind of dissect them apart, without actually breaking anything

(39:55) You can do the same thing in just an orange, or a grapefruit, or any of those fruits that come in cellular packages, and you just very gently split them apart.

(40:12) And this is what you are feeling during processing. You’re feeling splitting apart, and then all of a sudden someone 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, and it hasn’t to do with any of the functions that pain is usually talking about. It has to do with the fact that 2 fascial planes, or several fascial planes have been glued together, and you are now putting enough pressure and enough stretching on them, they have to respond by the gluing undoing, ungluing.

((40:55 student) The thing that engage me about fascia is the range of characteristic or quality. It’s all the way from fascialata which is practically tendonus, to some of the muscle inscriptions, which are like cobwebs. It isn’t like bone is going to bone. Fascia is a wide range of density and texture.

(41:14) Well, I wish that some of you, who are more or less-, who have a beginning information but are intrigued by it, would get together enough material so one could have a couple of very short articles for instance in the bulletin. It would help all of our people, and it would be the beginnings of a more formal, larger book that is going to have to be done sooner or later. If you wait ‘til you’ve get everything together you will never start on it. But if you start in terms of, I am going to write a 2 page article or a 4 page article, in the bulletin on fascia as I see it. You will have a beginning of something that will be of great value to your fellow citizens here

(42:01 student) Seems to me there is going to be a language problem also, because from what you say Don, we have one word fascia, like we have one word snow, and the Eskimo has 5 different words for snow. And we also-, I’m getting a little confused about fascial planes, and fascial patterns. And we used all kinds of-

(42:20) Well there is more-, there are several terms that I used to designate connective tissues of various sorts; cartilages, and fibrocartilages, and etc, etc. there are 4 or 5 different words there which you will be able to dissect out of your probably first chapter of Lockhart. There are several of those anatomies that will give you the bare bones on this. There are also those articles which I showed you the other day, here in this room, on collagens, which to some of you is going to convey information and suggestion as well as information. And I strongly suggest that you get on it. Don’t ask me to suggest when you get on it. But I do suggest that you get on it and kind of meditate on it.

(43:31) And I suggest that maybe you write a couple of pages on what has been said; a review article you see, because it’s hard to get hold of these articles back in the 1950 Scientific Americans. And you are also, you professionals here, are also very well aware that the greater number of the practitioners are not able to separate the material out from an article like that and make reality out of it. So that if you can do this will be a very great service, a very great teaching service. And I know that if people can come into this teaching situation, this room, if they can come into it with some clarified ideas about what they’re dealing with, it’s just as you three who have the professional background know, that you have seen endlessly more than the people in this room who haven’t had a professional background, even though they are going through it for the second time. Since the more you come with, the more you go out with.

(44:45) So that all of this could be a very great service, and in the next class when you are going to be together, if you could talk about this and really get the beginnings of it down. It’s easy enough having gotten the beginnings of it down to edit it and you know smooth it, etc., etc.

(45:15 student) If I was making the body

(45:19) You [would] make them fascia

(45:20 student) Well it seems to me that a structure that would make some sense would be a structure involving elastic structure like muscles surrounded by a package that keeps them together, and then some lubricants between these packages, between these envelopes

(45:34) That’s what you’ve got now

(45:40 student) OK. So what’s happening is the lubricant is becoming a glue

(45:43) That’s right. The lubricant becomes a glue in cases of injury, or in cases of illness; the lubricant becomes a glue. Now that –

(45:55 student) I’m sort of raising the issue of some sort of chemical action, in terms of food and –

(46:04) You see, the thing you’re not taking into consideration, you’re talking like an engineer, is your talking about a system that isn’t a living changing system. Or rather that the change occurs so much more slowly that it’s relatively inorganic compared with the very fast organic.

(46:20) You see your lubricant has to carry all kinds of supportive materials; materials that can be changed from this to that, and from that to this. You’ve got to get those materials in, and you’ve got to get those materials out. You’ve got to have membranes that transmit the materials from the outside to the inside, and membranes that transmit from the inside to the outside. and all of these makes a problem which is so much more sophisticated than the problem that you’re outlining. Your outlining a-, little man, what have you, a homunculus; a model little man. but you see your model little man is fit to be put only in a museum case. He can’t come into the world of Big Sur; he can’t adapt.

(47:25 student) One image I don’t quite think is accurate, I must say, is this lubricant between muscles. I really don’t think this occurs. It isn’t as though they are all slick. this is true where a tendon-, as a muscle goes into a tendon, and as it goes over a bony process, around a corner, there’s a [burse] underneath this, and in the sack there is fluid. Not enough to put a needle in. you don’t get anything out. There’s not that much fluid

(47:50) Unless it’s injured. Unless it’s injured.

(47:55 student) Yes. Yes. I see a normal amount. Yea. An injured knee will puff up and you can draw all sorts of fluid

(48:03) When you have Bursitis in your shoulder your shoulder is swollen, and you know that there is fluid in there.

(48:08 student) It’s true. But this concept of having liquid between all of the muscles I don’t think that is accurate, and i just want to-

(48:10) One of you go in and get [Sammy’s ] book. I still want to show you that picture that I couldn’t find the other day. It’s in the bookcase there

(48:23 student) Yea. But it occurs to me that the total movement of muscles, is only a few, maybe a few millimeters really, a centimeter at the most; total relative movement. And so you don’t need consider large lubricating surfaces as much as ability for differentiated movement locally.

(48:45 student) Excuse me. In the cell are your structures so it can move rather than oil between two binding surfaces as you do see over tendon and over the bone

(49:00) thank you [ ] Nice point, both of you

(49:02) Now I told you the other day when we were talking about this, and I’ll reiterate it; Sammy, by accident, stuck a needle into one of his rats and something distracted him and he left the needle in to take care of the distraction. And then the next day when he picked up the rat, or the next week, or something of the sort, he finds that he has a nodule, a grain, a walnut, a something-or-other within the tissue. And it’s a little different from the kind of hardening that happens when you, say, hit your leg with the ax – not the cutting end of the ax – and bruise it, and the thing hardens. And two years after, when somebody starts to Rolf you, you say, “Well I’ve this now for two years. This happened the time that I hit my leg with the ax.”

(50:00) It’s a different thing that Sammy found. He found something within the tissues that slid. And he dissected some of those out and this is what he found, and this is what forms in connective tissue when you injure the connective tissue by nothing more poisonous than getting some air in there in the wrong concentration, and not coming in there as oxygen held in a hemoglobin, held in a red blood [globule] or something, but just crassly injected. And this is the way that the body chooses to respond to it.

(51:00) Now you see, what this is talking about is the livingness of all tissue and the decisions that that tissue makes. That’s what I mean when I say to Al that this little man is much too unsophisticated; that this isn’t the way it goes. But that all of these tissues have their own life, their own patterns, they are able to a great extent to modify their own patterns in terms of events happening to them, good, bad, or indifferent. Within large limits they can modify their own patterns.

(51:48) Now this is part of what you are doing in your work. You are putting all of those cells back into positions where they have least modification that have to be done; where they are relatively balanced situation. And therefore their chemistry and so forth can go back to this level on which they have released energy that needs to be extended on overcoming problems

(52:21) Now I don’t know what body energy is, and I don’t know what psychic energy is, and I don’t know what energy is. I do a lot of talking about it. I do a lot of feeling about it, because I had people that I know know less about energy than I do talking as though they know all about energy.

(52:48) I do not know whether there is a separate body, a separate psychic energy and I doubt it. I look into all sorts of psychological books and I see page after page covered with psychic energy. I know nothing about it.

(53:05) but I do think that in terms of what you observe in this room, and some other rooms, I do think there is some sort of bank account of energy in the body, which has to be drawn on for all energy expenditures. And I know perfectly well that if you have either a badly constricted body, or badly organized body, if for instance through the whole day when you are 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, of something. Which if your head gets up on top of it’s may pole bit, doesn’t have to be expended. And the answer to that is that you have a greater balancing in your bank account with which to do what you want to do. This is the simplified way in which I interpret what I see going on here, and some of you would say, “Yes, I’ve felt this.”

(54:31) Like all explanations, it’s probably wrong, but at least it gives you some words which you can convey to other people something of what you are thinking.

(54:50) So that then the problem becomes the problem of balance, the problem of the May Pole, the problem of the guy wires, so that there isn’t this – what the old osteopaths and the old [riders/writers] used to call, “consistent leak in energy.” I remember when I was 20 years old and somebody used to fire that story at me, how I foamed at the mouth then. I’ve been foaming at the mouth a long time. “Leaking energy! Leaking energy! What in God’s name does that guy mean, leaking energy? There’s no leak! There’s no energy.” [I don’t believe that nonsense]. So anyway-

(55:33 student) It also is probably some sort of a propagation of chaos in the body, in the energy thing. Like if something is already disordered than –

(55:44) Than disorder happens more easily than happens when it’s ordered. Yes. Exactly so. But this is that whole second law of thermodynamics stuff. And what needs to be done, again, is for a good popular writer to take and translate that second law of thermodynamics into an article which can be read by people that are not trained in physics and still make sense out of them. There are such people. I don’t know who they are, but someday, something of this sort will happen. And if you people can start the thing going, by just putting articles in the bulletin, that then a man who can translate that article into a popular book, an interesting and amusing popular book, he can then take that article and he can spread the idea. This is the way education goes.

(56:45) Anyway, what more can be said, should be said, about that 9^th hour?

(56:58 student) I saw a diagram at some convention one place, talking about setting bones, but it applies to your question about planes and moving some of these things [aprappodium]. It’s 2 pictures. The main [sane] picture of a boat was a long dock. Going out here at the end of the dock is this ocean liner, which is moored there. And the first guy is running out to stop the boat, and is probably going to push this boat out to sea, and he’s hitting it with all his force. The second picture is a guy who is standing there leaning on this boat, and the boat is, you know, going off. And I see this in moving some of these planes.

(57:35) Yea, you stand and lean against it. That’s right

(57:38 student) It is moving this mass, moving the whole thing, rather than getting into a force like this. Which is different than the first few hours, where you may be doing a lot more of this

(57:48) That’s right. That is a very good, very good metaphor. Yea, I like that. Something else was coming up there

(58:10) Ok. Supposing we start on some of the people so that we get done at a decent hour tonight, just for fun. There is porridge to be made tonight, and it takes a long while to cook…

(Tape Break)

Arthritic Symptoms

(58:40) We can do it relatively briefly, and it is of significance to a lot of you here.

(58:50) I would think that probably 80% of what is diagnosed as arthritis isn’t arthritis at all. There is a something which is properly named arthritis that is characterized by changes in the chemistry of the blood as well as other tissues. But mostly when the gal or the guy goes to the doctor and claims that, “Doctor, I can’t raise my arm. I can’t bend my hand back.” And he won’t even get off his hook, says to them, “Well, you know, you’re getting on now. How old are you? Well as you know, arthritic changes do happen.” This is not arthritis. This is the sort of thing that we have been undoing here. Now true arthritis is a changed characterized by chemistry changes in various parts of the body, particularly in the blood. In that it is characterized by changes in chemistry, it must arise from somewhere, and the somewhere that it arises from is a problem probably in glands; I have never seen arthritis that I didn’t think probably had something to do with the liver, perhaps with the pancreas, perhaps with the thyroid. So there is an arthritis, and there is a pseudo-arthritis.

(1:00:13) Now to the extent that you are changing the way that the glands work, these arthritics are feeling better, moving better, and getting better. And 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 are always knowing that next week or next month or next year that they are going to have no arthritis, so you have trouble getting them off your neck. And you’re going to have to learn a good technique of literally kicking them out; Making them stay away. Because you cannot really cure it, but you can get them feeling as though they can live in the world relatively happily.

(1:01:13 student) I recall a reason within the UCLA in which arthritic conditions were about the size of rice growing, two pulling muscles being [over intense] from the excess pressure

(1:01:23) Well this is fine. But I don’t think this accounts for the blood chemistry changes. It does for the 80% changes. But there is the [100%] chance, yes, that Rolfing will change that completely. But there is that group of people walking, that it is not possible to keep that chemistry going thoroughly normally

(1:01:50 student) Is there some correlation with stress in arthritis? Like I know I had a[ ] a lot of stress -

(1:01:50) Well there’s a correlation with stress for everything; any problem that you have, any point of weakness in a building comes under stress and it gives. Hurricane comes along and where does it give? It gives at the point of stress. Sure.

(1:02:12 student) A person comes in complaining of pain, they say it’s arthritic pain. “ I have arthritis.” And you take x-rays, and you see arthritic changes. You go ahead and work on them and their pain goes away. And you take x-rays and the arthritis, there is a degenerative thing that hasn’t changed. And I agree with Dr. Rolf the diagnosis is wrong. They may have arthritic changes [ ] but their –

[End]