Rolf Audio Tape Transcript

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Ida Rolf Audio Tape Transcript
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1^st Hour review

(0:09) …if you are getting improvement, and maybe, I doubt it, I was going to say maybe we’ll have the good luck here. People come in here and 6 months ago they had hepatitis, infectious hepatitis, and they’re having the time of their life complaining about how they never get out of their hepatitis. As you go into that abdomen, palpating it, you realize that they’re right; their liver is halfway down in their pubes. And you go through your 1^st hour, and you go back and you take a look at that abdomen, and low and behold, the liver is up where it belongs. It’s the same as some of you saw with that Art the other day.

(0:59) But you are working through the fascial body. It is the way you relate the fascia, and the fascial planes, and the fascial strains, that then reorganizes what’s going on outside them, what’s going on next to them, etc, etc. I know, lots of you don’t believe a word of it. That’s all right.

(1:28) So, now. We take, in that 1^st hour, and we are dealing with the outermost, the most superficial, fascial layer. And because all fascial layers are connected, you are going to be dealing with the fascial layers of the things that are giving you the problem. That liver I was just talking about. And the 1^st hour was a demonstration of just exactly this. You were getting that outside fascia reorganized, repatterned, and you knew that you are re-patterning it correctly if you have got the pelvic basin horizontal, or approaching it. And you went into your re-patterning with the idea of making that pelvic basin horizontal, because this is the position where it worked.

(2:56) And so the first thing you did was to get the thorax climbing off that pelvic basin, because there were all kinds of communications between the pelvic basin and the rib cage; communications in the sense of muscles, in the sense of fascial planes, in the sense of tendons, always in the sense of mesoderm. And you’ve had the good luck, the sheer unadulterated good luck, to completely change the respiratory pattern as you did this.

(3:36) It wasn’t what you started out to do. What you started out to do was free the pelvis of its burden from the rib cage, and as you did this, low and behold, the rib cage got to working. And after you got the rib cage to working, the diaphragm is part of it, then you go down and you get the legs independent of the pelvis so that they are not dragging on the pelvis.

(4:20) Walk down the streets of any town with the new eyes that 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, and heaving, and hauling it. This is what you’re trying to obviate, so that the pelvis can get its job done.

(5:00) And in the 1^st hour you worked only as far as the knees, as you remember. Not because this finished the job, but because there’s a limit to what you can impose on any individual.

(5:14) Now some of these individuals gave you a lot of emotional excretion, shall I say, in this 1^st hour. But most of them don’t. Most of them come to other hours, which releases the emotion. Some few of them, yes, will get it from the 1^st hour.

(5:44) Very rarely do you get reactions in the 1^st hour. The kind of thing, where the guy comes back and he says, “Oh, I’ve been feeling terrible since that 1^st hour.” Every once in a while you do. Every once in a while you’ll hear, “Well for the first 24 hours after that I was really feeling awful, but I feel good now.

(6:00) I wouldn’t say it happens that you get a reaction in the 1^st hour once in 500 cases. Mostly the 1^st hour is a joyous hour. They feel so good they cry with joy, sometimes, because all of the sudden the individual, who in his heart of hearts feels there is no hope for him – he’s always going to be this way, he’s always going have to drag this around with him – all of a sudden he gets a vision that maybe he doesn’t. And it is such a release on his nervous and emotional system as a whole, that he’s apt to be crying before he leaves the room, or after. And you see you get all kinds of responses from that nervous system, as you get tremendous feeling of, well maybe it happens.

(7:10) Our friend Frank here wrote me a letter as to his 1^st hour, who is more or less a stinking letter when you came right down to it. He said he wanted me to know, he was in the depths of fear, and it was all my fault. He was way down at the bottom, and it was all my fault. He wasn’t really interested in sitting up straighter, or he wasn’t interested in his standing, really. He was interesting in getting rid of this bladder situation, he was interested in getting healing on this sex situation.

(7:50) Now you hear what I’m saying; not mesoderm. They’re not willing to accept the mesoderm. They’re looking for the other things, and this you can’t promise him, and this I never promised him, and in the presence of the whole of the class I talked to Frank, and I made minimal promises.

(8:05) I said I can make you operate with a lot less expenditure of energy and therefore you’ll be able to operate better. And I don’t think any of you don’t believe that I’m carrying that out. But this wasn’t the way Frank saw it, and he sat down and he wrote me a 2 page letter, 2 large pages, in which he said that I had given him this hope, and this was a very cruel thing, and I had done it because I was trying to impress the MDs. Yesterday before he left he said, “I’m being impressed,” I said “Don’t bother, this is garden variety around here.”

(8:52) But you see this is the emotional drainage coming off the man. It’s not the rational man, it’s the irrational man, who chose to irrationalize by writing me this letter of the stuff that was coming out. And you have to be able to take this purely objectively, and see it as purgation. It’s not always easy.

(9:21) So that does the 1^st hour. You have organized each area, center of gravity on top of center of gravity, in order to minimize the moment of rotation of these various areas; drag them on this stable balanced position.

2^nd Hour

(9:53) And now you have to begin to take that chunk of man that you organized, and you’re going to have to put him on the earth, because that’s where he lives.

(10:07) And so in the 2^nd hour, as you saw yesterday, you have to begin putting feet and legs under the piece of man that you worked out in the 1^st hour.

(10:25) And in order to do this, you are now going to have to begin to study anatomy. This is really tough. And you’re going to have to get your anatomy books, and you’re going to have to look at what it is that gets stuck, that gives them the broken down arches, the calves that won’t work, the knees that are crooked, the ankles that aren’t ankles, the feet that are not under the legs, the fibula that are halfway around the tibia, etc, etc. And you have to go back, and you’ll have to get your anatomy books out and really take a look at this.

(11:09) Now one of the best of these books is this Moliere [Plastiche Anatomie], in the sense that it is highly simplified, and highly misleading.

(11:30) One of the things you have to realize as you start dealing with the foot, is that there are two levels of operation in the foot. You see the difference in color here? The 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. Now 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. It’s that simple. Only some of you that were working didn’t find it so.

(12:52) Even the ancients knew this, why I had the nerve to put in “even” I don’t know. The ancients knew this. The Greeks, when they wanted to represent the principle of transportation, the principle of getting around, represented a young man with wings on the outside of his heals. They were saying, not that they thought there was a god that came around with wings on the sides of his feet at all, they were saying that the principle of transportation – of getting around, of getting around fast and satisfactorily – consisted in walking as though you had wings on the side of your feet. It still is the same. And it’s not wings on the inside of the feet.

(13:55) And those of you who have been through the medical bit of taking flat footed children and making them walk on inclined boards like this.

(14:05 student) and giving them marbles to pick up with their toes.

(14:08) Well, yeah. Depends on how they pick them up. You see again, it isn’t what you do, it’s how you do it. And somebody has to supervise the doing to see that it’s done properly. Now as you pick it up right then, you let the outside of your foot go down.

(14:25) And we had to sit straight and bring it up like that.

(14:28) Yeah, always letting the outside of your foot go down.

(14:37) Now you see what was happening was, that these boys were brought up with Aristotle – for every cause there is an effect, and of cause you can look at the effect. And the affect is, that if you want to get that inner arch up, you lift the inner arch. You don’t. You lift the outer arch.

(15:04) This is one of the things that the 2^nd hour is about. How do you lift the outer arch? And why isn’t the outer arch lifted anyway? Well the answer to that is very easy. The answer to that lies development of the child, whose undeveloped legs as he’s born, and as he lives for a year, a year and a half or so, is always this way. It isn’t until that child starts to walk that other things begin to happen. And with too many children not enough other things happen.

(15:46) 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 your shins, and there you organize the muscles that control the feet.

(16:16) Now, what are you trying to do there, and what is your goal? And your goal is to establish an ankle which acts as though it were horizontal. And you do that by getting an appropriate relation between the outer part, the outer side of the foot, and the inner side by establishing this link.

(16:54) Now as soon as you do that, and many of you, as you were experimenting yesterday found this out, 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, you don’t have a balance of the leg, you don’t have a balance of the foot. So how can you get there?

(17:37) Near an amazing lot of joints in the body, and certainly the joints in the arms, and the joints in the legs; you have muscles held into positions by retinaculea. And retinaculea is our good old fascia again, under a different name, and you’re to go in and get those retinaculea sufficiently stretched and organized and elastic, that you can get some movement under them. Those retinaculea are there to hold the strings of the muscles in place, it’s as simple as that, and if the string is pulled so tightly and can’t be moved and can’t be loosened and nothing can happen, the muscles can’t move.

(18:40) Now as a kid grows up, walking on the outside of his feet. And those of you who have kids, go back and look at them, sitting in a chair, doing anything, sitting like this, always on the outside of their feet, always on the outside of their feet. See they have never brought it around, it has never been presented to the child or to the individual that there is a goal to bring it around. No one presents this. If it happens that the kid is a good mesomorph, maybe he’ll bring it around, but it’s just as likely to not happen. And Beverly is going to go home, and she’s going to have an awful time, ‘cause she’s got 3 of them at her house, and everyone of them is off walking on the outside of his feet. They’ll even play walking on the outsides of their feet! You all know it.

(19:40 student) Is that one of the reasons why Gail is so –, tripping over her feet all the time?

(19:47) Yeah, but it’s not the only – the anchorage is higher, but certainly you’ll find it there.

(20:00) So that as they walk consistently on the outside of their feet, these retinaculea take on the job they’ve got to do to of holding those muscles in a good place to walk on the outside of their feet. And then the pattern is anchored! And then within the pattern you get the change of the individual structure, of the individual chemistry of the structure, of the failure of circulation through the structure, etc, etc. And now all at once you have a totally inadequate foot. And maybe you have a foot that no longer really sits under that ankle. This is almost one of those feet that doesn’t sit under that ankle. And here are some more. A foot can’t get like that if it’s sitting under the leg bones. A couple of real pretty pictures in here.

(21:30) Now just as soon as you turn a foot out, well here you are again. Here’s this guy who was undoubtedly a good old athlete, going up on his toes to be the model of this picture. Where’s his weight? On the outside of his foot, where else would you expect it to be? Does his weight go through his ankles? Heavens no. He doesn’t want it to. It doesn’t occur to him that there is any point to it.

(22:10) Every picture of every foot in this book is an everted foot. How do you get an everted foot, 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 retinaculea, the one above the ankle and the one on the foot itself…

(22:55) Now you see these boys recognize the fact that the lines of force through a foot should be like this, but they don’t recognize the fact that the minute you evert a foot and turn it outward, you don’t have that. And you can’t have that. And 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. He had all the evidence laying there that you have in this class and are working with, and he didn’t put it together. And he turned out these atrocities of feet, and he turned out the assumption that every foot has to be turned out.

(23:55) Now actually what you are going to have to do in order to get those feet back is to get every one of those muscles individualized, each one doing it’s own thing, each one sliding across it’s neighbor when it needs to, each one balanced in tone, and this means balanced in chemistry, and balanced in energy, and then you’ve got something to stand on.

(24:29) Now, the actual practical bit here is to start with the retinaculea because that’s where the things get the most glued up. (No not the most. Anyway it’s practical for the most part). Sometimes you’ll see me starting further up on the leg. Sometimes you will feel that you want to start further up on the leg where the major problem is. Sometimes its smart going to the major problem where the major problem is, sometimes it isn’t that smart at all.

(25:03) More often than not, the way to attack a major problem is from the periphery. And so if you have a great big problem here, and you get down here and start organizing the feet through moving it, but through – (where is Mark? Listen) – but through holding the muscle as near to possible to the position where it should be, in terms of its structure, you will get it moving. And you start at the periphery, and you follow the 1^st law of Rolf – that you have to get it towards where it belongs and there you have to demand that it moves.

Foot Bunions

(26:07) And feet show you, more clearly I think, than any other thing in the body, how muscles go askew.

(26:15) A bunion for instance. All those muscles that are dealing with that great toe, have gone off, have moved off 1/4 of an inch, sometimes even ½ an inch off where they belong, and this is what has pulled the toe. But also, in a bunion the thing that starts the problem, is that the muscle that should just cross the joint there, that slips first, and then everything else slips to try to hold the situation together so the guy can continue to walk. And in the case of a bunion, what you have to do is to just literally keep putting those things back where they belong. And all of a sudden there is no more bunion. This doesn’t happen in one hour, but it often happens in the first half. If the bunion is a great big problem to the person and so the process puts a lot attention on it, he takes a look at it in the 2^nd and he takes a look at it as he goes by in the 4^th, and he takes a look at it in the 6^th and takes a look at it in the 8^th, and low and behold by the 10^th hour, that bunion will be an empty envelope. And in a month or so that empty envelope will have refitted itself on the underlying structure.

(27:50) And along about that time the guy who has told you the day he first came in when his feet were killing him, and he’s told you, “I will have you advertised from one coast of this land to the other if you can cure that.” When you told him that you’ll fix that up, he goes off and he’s forgotten about it. Always know that the guy who says he will talk about you from one coast to the other, you will never hear from again. Always know that. This is part of what you learn.

(28:20) But you see the funny part of this that all these guys and these gals, think that if you can straighten that one little bone of that big toe, that is the most important of anything you could possibly do for them. And the fact that in the meantime you’re going to really get their lumbars organized, that means nothing.

(28:45) So you can expect to be – people without honor [there is a kind].

(28:50) But now come and look at those diagrams and see what has happened, demonstrations, that I’ve ever seen of its kind. Let us remember that gal Sharon, that pretty gal, Sharon. Before the hour yesterday she stood up there and her lumbars were terrible, and you all remember it, and her legs were quite good. And when Owen got through working on her legs, she stood up and her lumbars were good and her legs were awful.

(29:47) By and by today, we’ll take a look and see what happened today. But you see it is rare happens that you have the opportunity to see anything that is as clean cut as that demonstration on Sharon yesterday; very rarely. So you’re all in luck. You’re all in luck anyway with a lot of the things you see in here.

(30:06) Now, what happens that the back is short? We have worked on the front, and to the extent in the 1^st hour that you weren’t too lazy, you worked on the back, but most of you knew that your hands were hurting like the dickens, that you couldn’t stand it another second, that it was easier to work on the front than to get in under the back, and so you worked on the front and kind of prayed to God that the back would come along, and the back didn’t, and your prayers weren’t that good.

(30:45) So, now they stand up at the beginning of the 2^nd hour and you see that your prayers have been no good. And you see that the muscles, which Don insisted that you look at this way, those extensors, those vertical extensors of the back. And which I insist that you look at this way, oh golly, and this way, schematized of course. You see that those things are still all glued down. And you see that some places they’re glued worse than other places. And some areas, perhaps between the 4^th and the 6^th dorsal, they’re much too short, and the rib therefore has jumped out, or maybe the rib has jumped out as a result of your knocking against the edge of something sometime, and therefore the extensors can become glued short.

Back Lengthening

(32:17) You find an infinite variation in pattern on those extensors, and you have got to get it back to one pattern. This is the mentally troublesome image around here. You’ve got to get all these people conforming to one pattern, and the neurotics among them don‘t want to do it, and they’ll fight you every step of the way. You watch. But now let’s get back here.

(32:57) How do those muscles get out of place other than by accident? Now what I’m about to describe is still an accident. It’s a question of you trying to do something that is too heavy for your equipment. You do something in a flexed position. The simile I usually use, is a family that’s cleaning out the attic, and mama wants the trunk full of books from this corner over to that corner, because she wants to wash the floor under there and then she wants to put down linoleum because it’s marking up the floor, but papa has to drag that trunk full of books diagonally across the attic floor and he starts to drag it, and it’s about all he can handle. Now what’s he doing? If you will simulate that right now, that kind of a muscular movement, you will feel that the most lateral of the muscles is moving more lateral. And very few of you have feeling enough to be able to say the most lateral fiber of the most lateral muscle is moving lateral. And while he is putting this terrific effort and energy into doing this, he is putting that amount of effort and energy in moving that lateral muscle lateral.

(34:41) Now if he is in good shape, and at age 25 as I told you, when he has the most energy, the chances are that when he stops pulling that trunk those lateral muscles will move back medial to where they belong, but comes the day when he no longer has that level of energy. Maybe he never had it in the beginning, and he has pulled that muscle lateral, and it is not able to go medial. He has pulled it past the point of elasticity. And now it’s out there, its metabolism is interfered with, and there it is. And he feels vaguely, “Well, I overdid it yesterday. I shouldn’t have over done it. I hope I get out of this.” Now comes next week, and mama has now fixed up the corner, and now she wants the whole trunk of books back. So, he obediently goes up there and he starts pulling that trunk of books. And what happens? “Well, I just don’t know why this seems so much heavier than last time. But damn it all, I did this last week and I can do it this week, come on!” Now what happens then? He pulls the next set of fibrils lateral, and they are now past the limit of what they are supposed to be, and they can no longer spring medial again. And so they get themselves glued down. They get themselves glued down lateral to their normal position.

(36:45) Because when things get injured, the actual mechanism and process of injury and of healing, restoration of an injury, is somehow an exuding of material, which, as it dries, forms a crust and glues. And so now he has some of those fibers glued over there. Well moving that trunk of books isn’t all the hard work he’s going to have to do in his life, but he now is literally – he has a perverted muscular pattern with which to do this work. And every time he does a real heavy job he is repeating this pattern, within limits, and by and by you see these muscles literally moved lateral of their position and anchored there. Now what do you see when you look at that man? You see an overbroad back, and an over short back, and an over thick back. The nearest approach to it here is Mark, and Mack might have it, and you have it all right. You’re not too badly off right now.

(38:28) And the neighbors say, “Oh just look at John, he’s so big and strong and sturdy and healthy. I wish my Ned was like that.” And this is the way the myths get going.

(38:46) Now, how do you lengthen it? And if I put every one of you up with a back that you needed to lengthen, I am very sure that all of you newcomers would start lengthening the back, but you don’t lengthen it by lengthening it, you lengthen it by crossing it…..

(39:43) You cross those muscles, and this is the thing that in practice gives you the length. And as you bring those muscles in, you see the spine lengthen. And a blind man can see it with his hand, as an old teacher of mine used to say. And it’s not myth and it’s not theory, and it’s not – maybe it will do it 6 months from now – and its not, if I do this to you a year from now, you’ll be feeling fine. You do that and you see the spine lengthen, and free, and get movement in it, because a long spine moves. A spine that isn’t moving has been shortened, one way or another.

(40:39) And everybody – I shouldn’t tell you this, I should make you see this – everybody that you have ever seen that is in trouble of any sort, whether it be a near postural problem, or a problem like Frank’s, or a problem even like Bob Driver’s, everybody will be too short. The 1^st thing, the 2^nd thing, the 3^rd thing, the last thing the 10^th thing, the 20^th thing the 100^th thing you’ve got to do with a body you’re working on is make it long. But it’s got to be long all over, and not in the back only.

(41:33) I had a very interesting experience one time several years ago. I taught a class in Texas, and in those days I didn’t have this system of making people sit through and watch the whole deal. But I took people like osteopaths, and assumed that I could teach them immediately because they had the whole background. And I couldn’t do it. They weren’t expecting as complicated a teaching as this. It never occurred to them that maybe they should have notes. Nothing occurred to them except they had spent some money and they were going to sit there and listen to it. So they sat there and they listened to it, and there where 3 of them tried to work on each other, (two of them were a man and wife, and a very close friend), and so when I got out of the town they were all boiled up. And the one thing they remembered was how good it felt to have somebody lengthening their back as they went down like this. And so they’d meet at least once a week, and possibly twice a week to talk about structural integration, which they’d completely forgotten, and what came out of it was that all 3 of them landed up by just lengthening backs. And about a year after, somebody called me up and said, “Would you please come down here, we’ve gotten to be a very funny looking bunch and now we’re getting all kinds of new symptoms. They didn’t tell me why. So, needless to remark, I stopped in Texas. And I took one look at them, and I knew why. You can’t do it that way. But you see, all of these orthodox methodologies think you can if you give them one treatment and that’s good. If you give them 10 treatments of the same dose, and that’s better, and you give them 100 treatments, or a treatment every day, and that cures them. Yet it does, like putting on a new suit; by shifting the string, and therefore the center.

(43:53) So, the moral always is that you have to visualize where you’re going to want your stuff, and this is the object of those first 10 boring hours where you’re sitting around watching things change. And in the 2^nd 10 hours you’ve got to get your flesh material there and see that you balance it. And this is not, doesn’t always [ ], Okay.

(44:30 student) Ida?

(44:32) Sir?

(44:38 student) A very simple thing about legs, which I just thought of. My [development] cable broke in my car a couple of weeks ago. I had to walk all the way, and I took it down to the shop and asked the guy, why did it break? And it broke at its base when it went into the gear box. And so I thought, well probably something in there grinding it and then it’s idle. So I take it down, and he says “Well yes, if it breaks down in there, that means it’s locked at it’s origin. And that’s what I think we’re talking about in feet. Is that the inside, was a little eroded in the interior block yet it broke 4 feet away, at the greatest point of strain.

(45:15) And the mechanic knows that, and it doesn’t surprise him but the doctor doesn’t know that, and it does surprise him.

(45:30) You see, this is the funny part about our culture. It really is the funny part about our culture. Our automobile mechanics and our airplane mechanics know so much about mechanics that the guy that studies body mechanics never thinks about.

(45:44) How ‘bout that coffee?

(Tape Break)

(45:52 student) Like anything like that out of it

(45:55) But that isn’t your dish.

(45:57 student) Well, I know something about those things but I don’t know the circumstances under which the tests were taken… yeah, I got it from Peter.

(46:22) One more man on my list! He was on his way here?

…

(46:32 student) We have a tape also that Julian made for us Friday night…it’s more specific and better than the one we heard…

(47:27) Does anybody think it might be a good idea to review what happened last week? Let me ask you, …Mark, to start in…start right back at the beginning. I want to see whether you’ve gotten yourself really mentally organized with it or not…now never mind what it begins with. That’s what I gave you fits about last time.

Fascia

(48:14) Supposing somebody comes up to you and says, “What is Rolfing? What is Structural Integration?” What are you going to answer them?

(48:17 student) What happens in Structural Integration is that the body is restructured by a method mostly by working with the fascia, the superficial and deep fascia. It begins with the superficial, and what happens is the fascia’s either stretched or broken or somehow moved in some way to get the muscles underneath breathing room, so to speak.

(48:36) You mean we stretch ‘em or we break ‘em? God help us. Send for the cops!

(48:41 student) Well there was talk of having something burning down around his ankle, which was something happening to the fascia I would imagine.

(48:54) I know it mustn’t be broken, and you better know it mustn’t be broken.

(48:58 Student) Would the fibers be loosened?

(49:01) No.

(49:08) Something happens to the superficial fascia.

(49:10) 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 going to look different. Has this occurred to you?

(49:30 student) Yes. Working with the whole, I don’t know exactly how to name it. I mean you wouldn’t call it stretching fascia or …

(49:35) The fascia gets stretched. This is all right.

(49:40 student) The fascia is stretched. That’s what happens.

(49:46) Is that the only way you designate it? That the fascia is stretched?

(49:55 student) Well, no. It’s not an isolated process. Because to work with fascia your hands touch the bones, and they touch the skin, and other structures involved so – a cornerstone is that….

(50:08) Do your hands ever touch the bones?

(50:15 student) Well you can feel bone. They might be covered with fascia and muscle but you can feel the bone.

(50:20) Well, they sure are covered with a great many things or the undertaker is catching up with you darn fast.

(50:33 student) In order to structurally reintegrate the body then, we work with these fascia, basically fascia paths on muscle. It starts with….

(50:47) What’s the difference between fascia and muscle, Mark?

(50:49 student) Well, fascia is a fibrous-like tissue.

(50:57) What’s it made of? What’s it consist of, I should say.

(51:00 student) It consists of…

(51:23) The fiber is a cell, in itself. OK. You’ve been on the hook long enough.

(51:32) Let me get you on the hook there. See what happens. Well, how would you answer, “What is Structural Integration?”

(51:47 student) I’d say it’s a technique for aligning the body so it functions better directly.

(51:55) That’s right.

(51:56) And how you would do this, this superficial fascia of the body, this…What I’m groping for is words to describe, the fascia gets stuck, the fascia itself gets stuck together, drag on the muscles of the body.

(52:36) What’s the difference between muscles and fascia?...Not all fascia, some fascia, acts simply as the things that hold together; that hold the man together. But all muscles are enwrapped in fascial envelopes. Okay? Alright. Going on from there. What do you do with that fascia?

(53:20 student) You stretch the fascia that is stuck.

(53:22) What’s the point of stretching it? To get it unstuck?

(53:25 student) Get it unstuck so it will allow premovement of all the muscles.

(53:30) Alright, now, how do you do this?

(53:40) Do you want to take that question, Jim? You two see if you can play a duet.

(53:46 student) Well, you begin by applying energy to certain areas.

(53:50) Energy how?

(53:54 student) Through your hands.

(53:56) That’s right, through pressure of your hands you are actually applying energy. I wanted to know whether you people had that concept, right. And then?

(54:08) There also seems to be a chemical process involved with the energy.

(54:12) Yeah. This isn’t really your bit right yet. Go on. You’re doing all right.

(54:18 student) The energy at various points, loosening the fascia, allows the organism and the muscles to get themselves back into a balanced position.

(54:30) That’s right. And your effort is made to bring the muscle and the fascia, or should I say the fascia and the muscle, into the place where it belongs in terms of the least energy being needed for the thing to do its work. In other words, sticking loosely the right place. If the muscle or the fascia has moved off its appropriate, precise position, you bring it back toward that position and then you demand of it that it work, because hands will never do the job. Now I cannot underscore that too much. Because every masseur, every chiropractor, every osteopath thinks that by manipulation he can do some job. I’m not going to say at this moment “cure”. Most of them don’t really believe they can cure, God knows they can’t by that method. But it is only through the work, the literal work, the literal movement of the individual concerned that you get appropriate rebalancing of those muscles.

(55:55) You help the individual. You do not, and you cannot do it. Now is there anybody in this room that doesn’t hear? Because this is an extremely important concept. And this is the thing that takes this work out from the gloop of real therapies. I don’t call this a therapy. I call this a development. I call it an education; an [ ]; a leading out, an evolution, anything you like, but not healing, not therapy.

(56:50) And in getting yourself, your 2 feet firmly fixed on this idea, you are taking yourself out once and for all – and I mean for all – from the domain of the medics whose job is therapy. And see that you stay out of there. And see that you don’t behave so other people get the notion that there is therapy going on, that there is repair going on, that there is medical healing going on.

(57:30) 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 as far as I have ever been able to think, and I’ve done a lot of thinking about it. All chronic situations involve a problem with gravity, a distortion from the point of balance, a permanent distortion from the point of balance that cannot through your mind be remedied. And that is the chronic situation. If you can remedy simply by changing thought, I don’t think it’s a chronic situation. Now I’m willing to hear a lot of argument from a lot of you on this, and if we do get into an argument about it, probably we’ll get it further clarified, but you realize that when I begin to sit down and talk about this, there is nobody with whom I can redefine the concept. I have to just go off in a corner and say, “Let it be,” and it is, so to speak. And this isn’t the way, really, to get out a well-tempered instrument. Well anyway.

(59:00) So this is Structural Integration, and you two have done a fairly good job of defining it.

(59:09) Now, where do you start? And give me a big concept. I don’t want you to put your hands on his ribs.

(49:26 student) Well, the idea is to naturally get the pelvis horizontal.

(59:32) That’s the goal. It’s not where you start.

(59:38 student) You begin with the thorax, trying to free that from –

(59:40) You’re still not giving me the answer that I’m looking for. You’re all right. I’m not complaining too bitterly, but I’m trying to present a picture. You know what I want to say here? You start on the outside. You start from the superficial fascia. You always start on the outside! You always start on the outside and work toward the center, whether it’s on the outside of the body going toward the center, or whether it’s on the end of the limbs going toward the trunk – you always start at the periphery. Now here again, is a very fundamental difference between this and other systems. Other manipulative systems will tell you, when you find the cause, and you go straight to that cause and you fix the cause. Isn’t that logical? And I say, “No it isn’t,” and so I can get myself thrown out not only from the medics, I can get the osteopaths to throw me out and I can get the chiropractor to throw me out, and I can … thrown out, period.

(1:00:48) There used to be a saying in our family. There are two ways to do things, the right way and the [hamerdemerly way]. Well, at any rate.

(1:00:56) This is the story you see. You start on the outside, and that which is on the outside is the superficial fascia. So you have to start by loosening the superficial fascia in order to give yourself room enough to start reorganizing body units.

(1:01:24) Now, I don’t think that I stressed enough in this class the fact that if you have an unhappy situation in an underlying – in an organ, you will have it reflected into pain and tension in the overlying fascia. I wasn’t the one that discovered this. That was discovered a long time ago. Was that Head’s Law? Yeah.

(1:02:02) And he lived in the last half of the 19^th century, oh, the 80’s the 90’s. He lived and worked, he was a physiologist mostly, as I remember. I don’t think he was an American. I think he was an Englishmen.

(1:02:20 student) As I recall this had to do with close central connection of the spinal chord, the reflex arches…

(1:02:24) That’s right. Now tell me something. You seem to know more about this guy. You’re perfectly right. And when I went to try to check what I was trying to write in my book, and get the reference for it, I couldn’t find it. I thought Head was responsible for a law which said, approximately, if you have two muscular members of a motor unit, and one of them is tighter, thicker, less mobile then the other, and you put in energy, the one that is tighter and thicker tightens first and tightens most, at least the energy goes into that one, further constricts it further shortens it, thereby increasing the imbalance between the two members. Now I could swear that that was Head’s Law, but I cannot find the reference to it, and I really worked on that.

(1:03:34 student) There were 2 laws that I’m confused between the two. One is Head’s Law, one is Wolf’s Law. Sticking them together. I do not remember what you are speaking of here, what I remember was something about two organs.

(Continued on B2 Side 2)

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