Rolf Audio Tape Transcript

(0:28) And you see these things get stuck together too, and this also changes the whole energy pattern of either one or two of those agonists, and you see the whole pattern is changed in terms of when you add a stimulus of energy, stimulus from the nervous system and so forth, you get this kind of response.

(0:55) Now this becomes very basically important to you people. Basically important to you people, because what you are learning here is that a body, to function appropriately, to function normally, not to function averagely, but to function normally, these members, these agonists and antagonists, must be balanced. Now the minute you get the kind of situation that I have just outlined to you, you have a completely unbalanced situation.

(1:25) Now, you people have all watched people walking this room, and you have watched them, for instance, throw their leg around instead of walking straight forward. Now look at that situation. What is happening? The answer is that you have 2 agonists; and one of them is too short. And as you send this message of “I want this leg to move”, the one that’s too short picks it up first and tries to work, but it cannot contract that much; ‘cause it’s already contracted, and it’s already as tight as a walnut. And so it has to throw its leg around. It can’t go through. And the same thing is true of arms or heads or necks or what have you. And this is the mechanism whereby you get the characteristic patterns that distinguish a man. You say, “That can’t be John. I can’t see whether it’s John, but he’s not walking like John.” And this is what you’ve really talking about.

(2:40 student) That’s why the body can’t cure itself. That’s why somebody by himself will not get better; will not integrate himself. Because every time he moves by himself he will move that muscle in [tighter].

(2:51) That’s right. He can’t do it. That’s exactly right. And the additional thing there is the psychological thing. As far as he knows, this is normal. And he can’t figure his way into anything else. He sees that John Jones does it differently, but “Oh hell, it’s funny that John Jones does it differently, because this is the normal right way to do it. It’s my way.” Unless the thing is giving him a great deal of trouble, and unless he realizes that he’s doing a lot less well than John Jones does, then he begins to look at it. But even then, it doesn’t occur to him that even this can be wrong. He then goes into all kinds of complicated misunderstandings, because this saves face for him to himself. “Oh, my adrenal isn’t working”, or “Genetically I have this, that or the other thing”, and if it’s complicated enough, he doesn’t have to blush for himself, so to speak; whereas if you gave a little simple answer like this, this is just more than he can handle.

(4:07) But you see, this is what you are trying to get those muscles to move in their appropriate pattern for, because if you can get them there they will move independently, and in order to get them there you have to get them to move independently. This is a very circular situation, and there’s no simplicity in it. It’s very simple, but there’s no simplicity in it. I mean the concept is simple, and straightforward, and easy to understand; but always when you’re dealing with a biological situation you’ve got to go around this way, there is no going in that way. You go in that way and you destroy what you’re looking for. Always the approach must be circular. And the way you see it in your own approach to bodies as taught here is that you start at the outside, at the periphery, and you work in.

1^st Hour

(5:30) Steve, we didn’t get very far with that 1^st hour, did we now? Now, tell me the goal of the 1^st hour?

(5:48 student) The goal of the 1^st hour is to free the pelvis from the legs and the thorax.

(5:57) That’s right, to free the pelvis; to get the pelvis free enough to approach nearer to the horizontal. And you cannot do this in one hour, but you can start working on it.

(6:10) Now, realize that if a pelvis is not horizontal, the vertical line will be wrong too. Realize that if the pelvis is not horizontal there will be inevitably, a rotation in the pelvis. There has to be a rotation in the pelvis. So once again I say to you, the whole idea of this thing is simple, but the execution requires a great deal of subtlety.

(7:00) So, you start by disengaging the thorax, and as you disengage that thorax you get that great big chunk of velvet – for free – that respiratory activity. And this means, that to every place that you succeed in getting more circulation going through – all of you have seen people lying on this floor and you're working on their knees and you're working on their hamstrings, and their whole head is just completely flushed out with an entire change of circulation – and it means that that blood that has gone there is of a different quality and a different chemistry. It is carrying a degree of oxygen which is different, and which is going to act as a food, to remove waist, etc., etc.

(08:06) So that you have a very great asset there that just comes to our little groove. Now when you get down to the legs you don’t have this kind of an asset, but it is just as important because now you are really dealing with structure rather than the physiological primary of a function like respiration. But this structure and function combination you can’t separate. The function of the legs is, after all, a motor function, and you’re rehabilitating the motor function of those legs. The function of the chest is not basically a motor function, unless you want to look at the movement of the ribs, as being a motor function, but the function that is primarily the job of the thorax is the respiratory and the heart action.

Pelvic Lift and the Sacrum

(9:19) And then you build in the freeing, which you have done with your hands, through a pelvic lift.

(9:31) And that pelvic lift is a turning down of the sacrum – a separation of the lumbar vertebrae – so that they can begin to straighten out. You have seen and you will continue to see, short lumbars; and necessarily if you have a short lumbar, you’re going to have that reversal of the sacrum. This being the base, and this being the apex, the apex will be back, the base will be in, and the lumbars will be short. And as you lengthen the lumbars and bring them back – this has to happen, there is no way, nothing else can happen. And this is what you are accomplishing in your pelvic lift. You are organizing every one of those lumbar articulations, but particularly, 4^th to 5^th, and 5^th to sacral. And with your fingers you are very often stretching and reorganizing the muscle in its containing fascia that overlies the sacrum. You’ll find many, many sacrum that feel as if they were…

(11:12) As you go into that sacrum you very often can find overlays of stringy muscles, and the bone feels about like the rock of Gibraltar, and the 1^st thing you have to do is to get those stringy muscles with enough elasticity to allow the change in mobility.

(11:43) And then, in that the cervical spine is a function, a reciprocal function of the lumbar spine, it is in accordance with the logic of the situation that you begin to organize the cervical spine, and get that cervical spine lengthening, which in terms of the cervical spine, also means going back.

(12:23) And so you suddenly find that what you have really been doing is straightening that spine from one end to the other. The guy stands up and he says, “Why I feel so much straighter.” Of course he feels straighter, he is straighter, you made him that way, he made himself that way. Because all the way down along the line you have been demanding from him the kind of movement, which as you held the muscle and the fascia organized, he organized himself. But what you have to know is how to hold it, where to put it, what commands to give him to get him to do it.

(13:15) Now, the lord has been very, very good to me this summer. Both of the classes this summer have listened, have learned and said “Now just let your tail turn under.” It has taken me almost 20 years of teaching before I got a class that would do that. Because they will all say, "Now turn your tail under, that’s right, now lift. And the first thing that happens is that guy takes his hind end and he boosts it up into the air, because this is the only way he knows how to use his hind end. He doesn’t know how to use his hind end by letting the apex turn under, and you have to teach him. And any teaching function takes time, and it takes a step-by-step understanding. And when you tell a guy, “That’s fine, now boost your tail up, turn your tail under,” oh, I can’t tell you how many ways they can get of avoiding that little sentence, “Just let your tail turn under,” because if you do let it alone it goes back there! And I congratulate all of you. One, for being so intelligent, and two, for having such an intelligent teacher. Anyway, I really mean this.

(14:58) You see, it is as the individual holds himself that he holds, literally holds, the lumbar spine anterior. And he has learned to do this since he was a kid. The time he first learned to do it was when he stood on his feet. And nobody could show him – or did show him – they didn’t know how to show him, how to use his feet and use his knees appropriately so that his knees went forward and the other end of the leg went backward. They just said, “Well Johnny, here’s the ball now run after the ball.” And Johnny ran and toddled as best Johnny might, and so he got a pattern of movement, which got him after the ball. And this is a pattern of movement which he now identifies with success, and therefore this is the pattern of movement, which he maintains. This is what we were talking about the other day when we were talking about the feet down on the outside.

2^nd Hour and Gravity Lines

(16:14) Now we better get on with this deal. So anyway we get that cervical spine back, because we got to get up to the 3^rd hour today. So in the 2^nd hour all of a sudden you come up hard and fast against the idea that we haven’t done a darn thing about those legs below the knees. And you have seen many people in here and elsewhere, who thought they were standing upright, and yet their feet and their knees have exactly no relationship whatsoever to the overlying weight.

(16:52) You see, you give this concept to the ordinary individual – not to the ordinary individual, to the professionally trained individual – and he says, “My god, the man’s standing on his feet, where is his weight if it isn’t on his feet?” But you just look at him here and tell me where they are.

(17:15) So now you’ve got to get the organization, the relation of muscles in the leg, appropriate to the job of maintaining the weight of the body, and to the job of moving the weight of the body; this is function for the legs. And so you get on with it. And you go down and you take a look at what is holding it immobile, and you start making that move with your 'Toes up foot up, foot up toes up, toes down foot down,' that demand in every direction full movement while you see to it that the muscle is where the muscle belongs. And this demands that you know where the muscle belongs. And this demands that you read the anatomy book. And not all anatomy books are right.

(18:21) But with the anatomy books plus your mechanical intuition, and how the string is going to have to be if you’re going to move the joint [to] it, it’s easy enough to find out about this. Now there are two ends of this string, and one is the leg, and the one is the foot.

(18:50) And in the 2^nd hour you become more acutely aware of the problem of hinges. You have got to have appropriate hinges at the knees, appropriate hinges at the ankles – perhaps I should start the other way around – and appropriate hinges in the foot, across the dorsum of the foot.

(19:20) And this dorsum of the foot hinge is something that probably not one out of this group has ever considered before. But across the dorsum of the foot there has to be for movement, a literally a hinge joint; and when that hinge is in, then you can get the lift on the outside of the foot, and until that hinge is in, you can not really get that lift on the outside of the foot, and as long as the outside of the foot is down, as you see it is – as we look at the normal accidental business of growing up and walking on the side of your feet the other day – as long as that outside is down, that hinge on the foot cannot operate.

(20:23) But that foot is just like any other part of the body. In fact in some respects it’s more complicated then any other part of the body, how many bones are in a foot? 50 are they? 72 for the 2 of them? I don’t know. I keep forgetting about numbers. But at any rate you see what I’m talking about? Every one of those bones has 2 hinges; 2 ends, which form a hinge, an independent little hinge. And those little bones have to fit together, so that you get a big hinge, that is, big in terms of those little bones, across the dorsum of the foot.

(21:14) And then when you have that, then you will really begin to get an ankle that really walks. Now as you…work with ankles, you will find, just as you work with sacra, you will find that there is a great deal of deteriorated tissue around those two joints – of gristle. And those of you who did the work here to the foot the other day, undoubtedly were struck by the fact that in many of these ankles you find such dilapidated gristle with which that individual is trying to move his whole weight, heaven only knows how many thousand times every day. And there is nothing there to do it.

(22:52) So the answer is that the surrounding mobile tissue is put under too great a strain, and it begins to break down; and so you get the increase of disorganization. And you are apt to find much the same sort of thing, up around the sacrum. You will see whole areas of gristle in there. Some of the people as young as you’re dealing with – though there are some there. But along about the time they get to be 40, 45, and 50, for the same reason, that sacrum is having to try to support weight. It shouldn’t have to. But if there is no way that the weight is going to be transmitted up and down the legs, that sacrum is going to try to support weight. And just as the body protects itself from – if weight is transmitted over the wrong spot on the foot for instance, you get a callus. The body puts callus material, which is deteriorating gristly materially, so if it’s trying to support weight at the sacrum it will do the same sort of thing, it will put this callus of gristle around the bone; and you then have the job of reorganizing that gristle, and making a mobile tissue of it.

(24:34) Now it will reorganize. This is the odd part about it. Sometimes you’ll have to have recourse in such a thing as a program of food supplements, so you can get more of the material that’s needed for the repair of that; it will do it, slowly, gradually. But it won’t do it in an hour. It will rarely do it in one 10 hours through, but the second time you look at it, and you say “By George, that’s changed a lot.”

(25:16) So you see this whole picture, this whole patterning, becomes the outward and visible picture of what happens in movement. If the movement is normal, that outward manifestation of flesh is normal. The converse is true. If the flesh is normal the movement will be normal. Again you have this circular bit. And so your 2^nd hour is dealing with that.

(25:56) And then as you all saw, in that 2^nd hour, what was happening was that the back was looking too short. And you remember, you talked about it the other day, you remember that you realized why it was too short, you were getting movement of the ribs opening out, and you weren’t getting it in the back. And so there came the problem of how to lengthen the back. And you actually saw in the demonstrations here how when you brought the extensor muscles toward the position where you’re good common sense dictated they should go, not even the anatomy book, but your common sense – your common mechanical sense, or your mechanical common sense said they should go, that the spine then lengthened; and then all of a sudden there was room for the individual vertebrae to be able to exert some movement, each on each.

(27:15) And so, you got to the end of the 2^nd hour. And in many of these cases, as you remember, you again gave a pelvic lift in order to again get the end of the spine turned under. Because you remember that we call this thing Structural Integration, and we pride ourselves on the fact that we do not send them out that door with a basic area disorganized – non-integrated. With every individual that 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 had at that moment the best integration of function that is possible for the for the structure that you know they had at that moment.

(28:20) Now, if that sacrum is turned back – with the base forward, and the apex back – if it has slipped off the place where you put it after the 1^st hour, and it could of very well because you’ve been doing a big organizing job of the legs and of the back, then you see that body is not integrated; and it’s your job to integrate it. If the guy is coming in the day after tomorrow, well it’s not that’s urgent. (Let him do it anyhow, so you don’t forget.)

(28:55) But if he’s going away and he won’t be back for 6 weeks, and maybe then he’ll see another practitioner in New York or something, this you can’t afford to do, because the fellow goes away and in 24 hours he has symptoms. And aside from the purely moral responsibility, and the fact that you’re there to make the guy better, you get the very practical consideration that he goes around and he says, “Oh, that guy? He doesn’t know how to do this. You know, I had 3 treatments from him, and I was feeling worse at the end of the third treatment than I was when I came to him.” And this is what he’ll say. He won’t be worse, but he’ll be feeling worse you see, but he doesn’t differentiate. So it’s your business to know what a body looks like when it’s at these various stages along the line. What level can you expect to be? And if you aren’t there, whose fault is it; is it that guy's or is it yours? It’s usually yours.

(29:56) Once in a great while there’s a body that is so badly deteriorated or its disorganized, or it’s tangled with a Mack truck or parachuted down in a parachute in Oakland or something, and there it will be his fault.

(30:15 student) We don’t get many of those do we?

(30:18) You’d be surprised how many you do get, because those are the people that no body else has been able to help.

(30:26) I had a woman in England one time who had been in an elevator – (good old English elevator.) Well the ropes of the elevator had broken, and the elevator had fallen down 7 floors. I had a man one time who had fallen into an excavation that was I don’t know how deep, you know for one of these big modern buildings, and he had fallen from the top down, and hit on his head. You’re the one that gets them because nobody else fixes them. Then all of a sudden they come up against somebody who says, “Well I bet I know somebody that can fix it. Now you try it.” And so it goes.

Connections of the Feet

(31:08) So. Now we come up against the 3^rd hour…

(31:25 student) It seems to me, you know, you talked about a big plus of the 1^st hour is that you increased a person’s respiration. And then you said that when you worked on the feet and legs it’s mainly that they improve their motor function, but it seems to me that also a really deep plus is that you give a tremendous boost to the circulation, since it’s the motor activity of the legs which provides the means.

(31:46) No. I’ve said to you there is no such thing as a straight line when you’re working in a biological medium. You always go round like this. And you’re saying the same thing, more complicatedly, or less abstractly. Yes, you’re absolutely right, you’re absolutely right.

(32:09) You’re getting that oxygen where it belongs, now you see, with that change in the circulation. But the oxygen gets into the circulation in terms of the very greatly improved thoracic function.

(32:30 student) I’m just talking about that it’s the proper motor activity with the legs that aids the heart in pumping the blood. As I understand, it aids greatly in venous return –

(32:42) Well, this is certainly so, but I see that as a sort of “not negative” addition, whereas the other one is a very positive addition.

(33:03 student) Also the idea that from the foot, there may be kinds of direct, very horrible connection to the internal organs from the feet.

(33:10) There is no question that there is, and many of you here in this room have come into contact with these various practitioners of zone therapy, and believe me that is a powerful wonderful technique. And it is a something that you can depend on when all else is too complicated and fails.

(33:31 student) So in a sense what you’re really doing is building up the body energy a lot by working with the feet.

(33:39) I had a women brought to me in Canada one time. She had a funny history – she had been a very serious art critic – one of these wheelchair kinds. And she’d been in a hospital for several months. She was a youngish woman, 25 maybe. She had been in the hospital for several months, and at the end of those several months the hospital told her they didn’t want to keep her anymore, she should go home; they had done what they could for her, she should go home. And needless to remark, this threw her into the depths of despair. She lived in London, Ontario, and some little intern came up to her one day and he says, “I hear your going home on Thursday.” She says, “Yes” and he says, “Well don’t tell them that I told you this, but try this clinic in London, and you go to that clinic and you see if you can’t get some help. A chiropractic, arthritis clinic.” So he didn’t know the address, he just had heard of it. So low and behold, she goes home, she goes to this arthritis clinic, and the guy gets her going.

(35:03) He was a man 20 years older than she; I don’t know, 50 years older perhaps. He gets her going; she’s behaving practically normally for a year or more. Meantime, the doctor gets the idea he wants to marry her, and this throws her right back, again, into the arthritis, and this sort of stuff. And he now can’t get it out. He can’t budge it.

(35:40) So at this point I land up in Toronto and this man is a doctor who saw my demonstration and he said, “I have a friend that I’d like you to work on.” And I wasn’t enthusiastic, but you know you go up there and you’re telling everybody about how wonderful you are and then they say if you’re not gonna shut up you’ve got to put up.

(36:02) So presently he brings her in and this was demonstration material; the room was full of chiropractic practitioners, and I get her on that bed, and that woman is so sore that I can’t lay my hands on her. Furthermore she can’t lie on the bed. I can’t get her down to a floor – that was the way it started – I can’t get her down to a floor, cause she’s too sore to touch and she couldn’t lie flat on the floor anyway. So I send downstairs this was I in a big hotel, which I think some of you probably know. I forget [ ] – and I send down for a bed board, and by and by the bed board comes up, and I put it on the bed, and I try to get her on the bed. And again, she’s so sore that I can’t touch her. And she can’t lie flat, and I got her all prop her up on pillows the one end, pillows the other end, and now I’m really in a quandary because she’s so sore I can’t touch her.

(37:10) And finally I got a real bright idea. And so I’m going down to that woman’s feet, and I went down to that woman’s feet. And very, very gently I worked on that woman’s feet, and little, and little, and little she laid back, and she lay back, she lay back. And along about this time she burst into tears because she had not believed to see that she would ever be flat again. But this is incredible! This is incredible! All I had done is to work on that woman’s feet and it had let the whole [ ]

(37:58) Did you have something Robert?

(38:00 student) I was just saying that what you did was you swept to the other side of that circle.

(38:05) I know, but why didn’t somebody else think of that?

(38:15) It’s like the woman I was telling you about the other day, the wife of a doctor who had had headaches for, oh I don’t know, 3 or 5 years or something before somebody brought her in, and when the 1^st hour cleared up her headache ‘cause it was after all a cervical imbalance. The doctor said, “Well that’s just hypnotism.” And what I want to know is why he didn’t do it.

(38:38 student) But ask the doctor, what’s hypnotism?

(38:41) I never did see in this story–, its just hypnotism obviously.

(38:20 student) I never heard anyone explain hypnotism was.

(Tape break)

(38:57) – with the actual body of a man, which is a something that has come down through a million years, you have to sort of turn yourself backward, getting away from this kind of a technological advance, and trying to reproduce situations such as he developed in. I think this is one of the problems in our civilization; that we insist on getting our technological concepts ahead – I think it’s one of our problems in our medicine – our technological concepts get far ahead of where the body is able to accept the result.

(39:49) Because the body is still developing slowly onward, from the technology that was available 200 years ago. The same, this could be done 200 years ago just as well as it could be done now. It could have been done 2000 years ago, just as well as it’s being done now. What will we do in this room, I mean. And I think one has to start there, because these bodies have not changed.

(40:16 student) It may have been done.

(40:17) I think it was done but this is something you talk about at night, and not in the morning.

Intrinsic Muscles, Fascia, the Line and Stories

(40:29) OK. Another lead?

(40:34 student) something that I thought that Fritz –, that I wanted to bring up in the last class, what you meant – because I still don’t understand, in your questions that we had [ ] before, what you meant by intrinsic muscles.

(40:48) Very, very simple: the opposite of extrinsic muscles.

(40:55 student) I can. I’m just going to give an example. In the foot, for example, the muscles that are located entirely in the foot operate the joints individually; what would be the intrinsic muscles. The muscles…

(41:06) The muscles across the joint are extrinsic muscles.

(41:11) Of course in the sense in which he’s using it there are 50 or whatever number of joints in the foot, and those extrinsic are still crossing those joints, but they are not crossing with a view to large voluntary contributions. Intrinsic muscles in general are not too subject to voluntary movement. It is the extrinsic system; the outside system.

(41:34) Now I could make this very much more real to you by saying the intrinsic muscles are the muscles that you take the poultry shears to cut, the extrinsic muscles are the muscles that you take the carving knife to cut. Nothing like a good home [ ].

(42:01) But you see the extrinsic muscles have been developed down through the development of the human being for work and for flight and for voluntary activity. The intrinsic muscles are rather involuntary muscles, which presumably are operating on a different nervous system, which hold the structure together. Certainly within limits, a muscle which runs from here to here holds the structure together. But it doesn’t hold it in the same sense as the muscles that run from here to here do. And that’s what I meant by that question, and I was trying – in placing that question – I was trying to place it so that you would get to thinking about it and get to thinking about the balance that there is between these different nervous systems.

(42:57 student) I couldn’t find any material on it. My sense was that that was right, but –

(43:00) I know, that’s a minor detail, and the more people get frustrated about not finding material, the sooner there will be material to be found.

(43:15) Now Rosemary, for instance, really got herself stuck on that question about fascia. And she went to the library up there in Berkley, and she spent 2 full days trying to get some information about fascia, and she got about 2 paragraphs worth of information. Now as I say, the more of us get frustrated about that, the sooner there will be material available about fascia.

(43:44 student) I went to see my old physiology instructor and asked her about it, and she said, “Gee, I’ve never heard of it, actually there’s never anything wrong with the fascia.”

(43:54) This is it. Now you see, a hundred years ago, a hundred years ago it used to be that when the surgeons opened the abdominal cavity, they would take the whole gut, and they’d simply take it out and lay it next door so while they operated on something or other, something or other, and nobody recognized that that gut was an infinitely complicated working part of the body, and it wasn’t till the days of Claude Bernard, which was in the late 90’s. Some of you heard me tell this story, that Claude Bernard was given the Medal of Honor for his work in physiology. And so, naturally, he had to give a speech when he accepted it. And he got to his 2 feet and he said, “Gentleman, a man is a something, built about a gut.” This was the first time anybody had ever annunciated an idea like this believe it or not, or the first time in that immediate time period. And I don’t need to tell you the extent to which this attitude has changed at this point, all going, deriving, from Mr. Claude Bernard who decided that a man was a something built about a gut.

(45:19) Now the gospel according to Rolf says something different. The gospel according to Rolf says, “A man is a something built around a line.” And 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. This is just a difference that’s happened to ideas really, in a hundred years.

(45:45) Going back to that intrinsic and extrinsic muscle business, I would like to present one of my problems. One of my long time problems here, and it might be that some of you might by accident come up with an answer.

(46:06) In the 40’s – almost 30 years ago there was a paper that appeared, and I don’t know whether it appeared in a journal or whether it was some little separate publication from some little separate group. The group however, was a group here in southern California, and I‘m not dead sure, but that the men were osteopaths. And they were considering the matter of intrinsic verse extrinsic muscles, whether those particular words I don’t know, I no longer remember, and they said that in their opinion, the intrinsic muscles were innovated by the autonomic system, you see.

(47:05) That they were differentiating it in not merely sympathetic versus central, but within the autonomic system they were differentiating – I must be wrong on that…sympathetic verse parasympathetic. But this isn’t true because in the hands you don’t get parasympathetic – But at any rate, they called attention to the fact you see, that these muscles are going to be differently innovated from these muscles.

(47:43 student) There’s an interesting thing about that, as a matter of fact. Basically that probably can’t be true, but there is some evidence for example that palmer skin resistance, only in the palms and the feet where there are many intrinsic muscles, there is a very good correlation between the resistance and the amplitude of the algorithm in the brain, which probably has an autonomic balance.

(48:16) This is very interesting.

(48:18 student) This is not true anywhere else, except in those areas of very high intrinsic muscles.

(48:25) Well, what you are bringing up is a very interesting speculative idea, why is it that in the soles of the feet you are getting reflexes to the whole of the body? Why? And 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, I imagine. But you’re bringing up a very interesting speculative idea.

(49:01) Now, if ever any of you happen to run across a lead going back to here, I would be very much interested in getting it, because I think that this is part of the story of what we are doing. We are balancing you see, these different components of the nervous system. You might think some of the problems that are in the modern world are due to the vast imbalance.

(49:27) Eddie came in here last night with a very interesting story. A young man came into him for processing, 1^st hour processing. He was down at the baths – Eddie, I presume was working in one of the massage rooms there. And as this guy stood before him, he almost had a puddle of sweat around him; he was literally dripping sweat. And Eddie took a towel and he wiped him off, and he didn’t stay wiped and Eddie said to him, “Do you always sweat so much?” And he says, “Yes.” And so Eddie took and did the 1^st half of the body, and low and behold the whole half of the body from the head right on down to the feet, one half was dry, and the other was still dripping.

(50:14) Now you see, you have got to account for situations like that, and you can if you get deep enough down into the physiology of the nervous system. Actually I’ve never heard a story like that, and I was glad to have Eddie’s little contribution to oddities.

(50:44 student) I was thinking it’s not only an autonomic balance that one's dealing with, a sympathetic – parasympathetic imbalance, but there’s certainly a somatic autonomic balance also, and that’s possibly what was affected.

(50:55) Well, I was interested in it. At the time I saw this article, it rang a bell, and that bell has never stopped ringing. But I was too darn dumb – in fact in those days you didn’t have Xerox’s on every corner so it wasn’t possible to get copies. I was too darn dumb to make the effort to get it, because at that time I was doing a lot of work on spastic children. And you see the spastic is in trouble because of one nervous system not balancing the other. And what I was trying to find out was, how I could stimulate that nervous system to balance the other.

(51:32 student) About 25 years ago, a physiologist named Freeman did experiments where he measured autonomic – somatic balance, and he found that people who were spastic and uncoordinated were very off balance in that reactive.

(51:48) There was no question about that. But the thing that was interesting me at that time; I had a couple of spastic, little, little ones, and this was just very early on in this work, and I didn’t have recipes worked out and all this sort of thing, and what I was trying to find out was how could I approach these little, little ones and expect to get an immediate change. And that’s why this has stayed in my mind all these years.

(52:19) Now, here’s a nice little project for you.

(52:20 student) Another one. I’ve got the last one here. OK. What is it?

(52:32) I’d like at least references, as many as possible to this point of view of the balance between nervous elements in the body.

(52:40 student) There’s a lot of work being done.

(52:41 student) There’s a lot of work being done by Gelhorn on control of the autonomic nervous system.

(52:45) Yes, this I know, but I don’t see that any of it talks to us.

(52:53 student) That’s really classical physiology, even though it upsets all of the theories. But this guy Gelhorn had some interesting stuff I think.

(53:02) Because what I would like to do, is to get all of this material together and get into one place the kind of material that is significant to what we are doing here, so that we have a text book for Structural Integration, and you don’t have to go to heaven knows how many sources; the student doesn’t have to go, if they really get themselves thoroughly informed what is indicated in that text, they will have enough to put into background of general physiology, and give them a way of thinking that will lead them further. You know, for preparation for research.

(53:42 student) I’ll do some work on that. I’ll get –

(53:50) Well you see, when you know that the problem is there, when things come under your eyes that have to do with it.

(53:52 student) I have actually a file.

(53:53) Yeah, I’m sure. At least we can copy your file and put it out as a file for ambitious Rolfers.

(54:02 student) Maybe I’ll ask abstract some of the articles.

(54:10) This would be wonderful, this would be wonderful, and it would be wonderful for you to just publish 3 sentence long abstracts in the bulletin, so that among the practitioners, those of them who have interest and background to do that, can see whether this is where they want to go. And this you see, if you and Don between you could get 1 or 2 or 3 page long article 4 times a year in the bulletin it would help a lot of people to extend their concepts.

(54:55) OK, now. Today is the day when we begin applying 3^rd hour work and 1^st hour work. Now, in view of what we have just been talking about today, this hour, does that 1^st hour begin to take on additional dimensions? You see there is nobody that says – that I know of – that gives you definite information about how fascial sheets are innervated, but they certainly are innervated, what nervous system supplies them. There may be a lot of information around about this, but I’m more inclined to think that what that teacher of physiology, “There’s never anything wrong with the fascia, so you don’t need to know anything about it."

(55:53 student) We’re getting the literature searched and we’ll see.

(55:57) I understand this. But I’m trying to do a job to point out the fact that this is terra incognita in which we are walking, and our service has to be to make a map as well as to develop a territory. And you see, as I say, there is no information available, but it is possible, it is highly possible, that some of this balance of this fascia that we do in the 1^st hour, this balancing of the superficial fascia has to do with a balancing of the nervous system, these two nervous systems.

(56:41) People, so many times, come to me informed – relatively informed laymen – “Well I have had a relatively low basal metabolism for 25 years, of course you don’t do anything for the thyroid.” What’s the answer to that? You lay them down, and inside of 5 minutes you begin to see that flush of skin reaction saying that the glands of the skin are awakened, as they used to say in yoga, they are awakened, they’re doing there job. Now those glands are again, working on one nervous system circuit. And it’s not the same nervous system circuit as the nervous system that goes to the deltoid. It’s got to be the autonomic. And if you’re going to get better activity in that autonomic system, there isn’t anything that is going to be on that autonomic innervation that isn’t going to get stimulation, that isn’t going to get as the yoga people say, awakened. It’s impossible. And you will find people who will say to you, “I have had a low basal metabolism for 25 years,” and if you get a basal metabolism say at the end of the 4^th hour, their basal metabolism has changed very drastically. Sometimes it’s even normalized. Not always, but it always changes drastically. Period. And this you have seen; you don’t need measures for it, you have seen it all through, the people that you’ve seen processed and the difference in the way they work and they act and they look and they feel and they attack problems and so forth. You don’t need measures for this, but it’s just as well to know how to talk about them.

(58:37) So that, looked at from this point of view, you begin to get another perspective on that 1^st hour. You begin to get a perspective of, we are not merely balancing the fascia, which we are, but we are beginning to balance functions of communication in the body.

(59:05) You see we are going to take on a lot of 1^st hours today. This is going to review the actual technique, but it’s also going to give you a time to look at those 1^st hours and see what is happening to those bodies from a different perspective, from a different angle, from what you looked at them last week. This is one of the reasons why we do it this way, and sort of keep a lot of review material coming up from behind.

(59:40) Now in terms of your 3^rd hour work, you have now gotten you see, in the 1^st 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 that you saw so plainly on Sharon; where you could see that pelvis waving in the breeze inside the envelope, but there was no proper span in the envelope to keep the pelvis from waving in the breeze inside of it.

(1:00:30) And so as I say in that 1^st hour, we have gone toward the goal of making the pelvis more horizontal, organizing it on top of the legs, in order that it may be horizontal. And then in the 2^nd hour, realizing that except that we connected that pelvis up to the floor through the action of the ankle joint, we were not getting anywhere. And those of you who were real smart realized, that not only must you get movement in the ankle joint, but you must get movement in the foot.

(1:01:24) And as I usually express it in this room, you must get hinged joints, horizontal hinged joints, and you get the 1^st and the lowest one across the dorsum of the foot. Sometimes it’s pretty hard to get in; it’s always easier to get movement in the ankle joint, because they have had, if they are going to be mobile at all, and walking at all, they have to get movement in that ankle no matter how core it is, or how distorted it is, they’ve got to move the ankle. But 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 never the less 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 is a foot is a foot, and it’s my foot and therefore it’s a normal foot. This isn’t so. Your 1^st joint is, of course, the dorsum of the foot, your 2^nd joint is at the ankle, and both of them have to be operational before you can start getting operational joints, properly operational joints, at the knee, and at the hip, and then start up the spine. You see it’s an absurdly simple concept.

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