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Audio Files and Transcripts From Classes with Dr. Rolf Big Sur Lecture/Demo |
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Ida Rolf Audio Tape Transcript AUDIO FILE Tape B3 Side 1 MP3 File (aprox. 11MB) TRANSCRIPT Paper by Peter Levine read by Dr. Rolf Planned Healing Research Community (0:05) The question is how do I build that body so this idea can work through? Therefore it becomes a little more important for you people to be able to answer the question that I started with yesterday morning, “What is Structural Integration?” We won’t go into that this morning. (0:26) So the 2nd hour becomes a putting of a support under the pelvis, and it consists also of a lengthening the back in order that you can balance the trunk up over the pelvis. You see, it’s still on that same trail you were on that 1st hour. That 1st hour you started up on the trunk to get it freed from the pelvis, you went down to the legs to get it freed from the pelvis. Now you go down to the legs to give it foundation. You come up to the pelvis again, you go up to the trunk again, and you go up to the trunk in order to get it out of this posture and into this posture, because when one is sitting on top of the other there is no moment of rotation on the part of gravity to break it down. And all the rest of it, our little tricks within it, you see, to make it possible to do that. The trick of how do you get that back lengthened. (1:40) I remember what a time I had with Bill Shutz, who insisted on believing that you lengthen a muscle by going along it, and lengthening it. But you don’t; you lengthen a muscle by going across it, etc, etc. But those are tricks within this single, simple-minded notion of what you want to do with that body in order to get it balanced within the gravitational field. And those of you that remember your physics remember that it is a question of getting the moment of rotation retired; zero, or as near zero as you can make it. And you can only do it by getting this vertical alignment. (2:47) So. Now. We have been talking about another trick, and the 3rd trick is that when we work we work from the periphery toward the center. (3:19) Now when you come right down to it, we’ve been doing that in the 2nd hour when you go and you get to those extensor muscles in the back, you are certainly at a deeper level than you were when you were working with that superficial fascia. In the early stages of the game nobody believes that you are really working with that superficial fascia in the 1st hour, but actually as you go further along and get more familiar with it, you begin to realize that you are working with that superficial fascia, and that you are stretching that superficial fascia, and it is by virtue of the change that you put into the superficial fascia that you begin to get change in underlying structures. (4:05) And over and over again I have had people in the class, boys who were MDs, or either osteopaths, or pre-MDs and so forth, that get absolutely green when they see you going into the abdomen, as we do even in the 1st hour. And they’re so dead sure that some one of these days they’re going to go into an abdomen that way where there’s an appendix just ready to burst, or something of that sort, or situation equally difficult, and that this is going to do a great deal of damage. But it won’t, because the job of the superficial fascia is to keep you out if it isn’t safe! And it will do it. (4:51) And the job of the superficial fascia is to distribute the energy that you add with your fingers over a wide area, and it does do it. And you won’t get in specific on an organ that is seriously deteriorated. It won’t let you. Now by the 2nd time you come in, you’ll be able to go into there, unless you’ve got a very sick man who’s really needing a knife, and then it will let you go in there. And then you can go in there and do something about it. And if you could look at it, you’d see the same sort of picture that you saw in Eric’s ear that day. (5:40) So I’m saying to you, 1st hour is superficial fascia, the 2nd hour you’re going down a little deeper and you’re getting into the extensor muscles that lie on the dorsum of the body. And the 3rd hour you’re beginning to look for something deeper yet which is determining the relation of the thorax to the pelvis through the medium of the lumbar vertebrae. (6:22) And you come to this by a perfectly logical unwinding. This is not a revelation from on high, it’s just what you do when you open the Christmas presents; unwind the wrappings, see what each layer brings forth. (6:49) And so your next layer deeper is going to have a characteristic element within it which you can use. And it is–, Owen. You did do. You’re having too much fun listening to me. (7:08 student) I’m still back at the Christmas presents. (7:11) I’m not going to give you any entertainment if you don’t come out of it. We’ll see if Fritz can haul you out of the Christmas present. What’s inside the Christmas present Fritz? (7:30 student) You came down onto the muscle layers, and looking particularly to free up the 12th rib. (7:39) This isn’t what you’re looking for; this is what you have to do. You’re looking for the next deeper layer, which is the quadratus lumborum. Now does anybody want to fault me on that anatomy? Not seriously. The only thing we haven’t talked too much about is the lumbar fascia, but this all comes into that 3rd hour too. (8:14) But you see, the key to that 3rd hour is the quadratus, the key to the possible position of trunk to pelvis is the quadratus, and what determines where the quadratus is going to be? (8:31 student) The 12th rib. (8:33) That’s why you’re looking for the 12th rib. Now is this thoroughly clear? (8:50) Now as I talk, this seems beautifully delineated, and separated, and differentiated, and so forth, and as your hands go into those bodies it just plain isn’t so. It’s a mess. It’s mixed up confusion, particularly if something has knocked the 12th rib out of place. Because if something has knocked the 12th rib out of place, you cannot get the spanning that’s necessary to hold the whole outer surface of that body apart. You can’t get the spanning in the lumbar fascia if it has no span there at the level of the quadratus. And if you don’t have that kind of spanning, you’re going to be in trouble with all your obliques, because all those obliques will have reinforced themselves to try to take the place of the quadratus which has gone off its base. (10:12) Now, another thing that happens to the quadratus is just the thing to the other extensor muscles of the back; it wanders too far lateral. And part of your informational job in the 3rd hour is to know where the quadratus should be in terms of the crest of the ilium. (10:49) Now if you look in some of your books…what is the name of that book? One book has a beautiful picture in it that shows the attachments of the various muscles to the crest of the ilium…there may be one in Lockhart, but the particular picture that I had was in a [Frasier]… would you bring me the [Frasier], Lee? (12:35) Here it is. Now. Can any of you see this, and if not could you come closer? (12:54) Here we are, the external oblique, the internal oblique, the latissimus dorsi, iliac and [transversalus] fascia, transverses, and this only is the quadratus way back here. Now as I said, in functional terms it belongs with those other extensors, and consequently if you get this moving lateral of those other extensors, this is going to go along. Here’s your sacral spinalis and your illial lumbar, and you see these things are all balled up in there, and when you had your fingers in there yesterday, you knew they were all balled up. And you see what this does is to make an entire block, not of wood but tough of chewing gum, of everything that’s attached here. And you have to add energy and add energy and add energy – if you want to use that particular metaphor – in order to get differentiation between those particular muscles. (14:28) Now, here you have another level, and you can see where your psoas comes in, and this is going to have be the quadratus, and here’s your sacral spinalus, and you can still see, [paired ears of the transverse] fascia, the internal oblique, the external oblique. It’s getting a little bit simpler, but not that much. And this is the stuff that you’re dealing with in a 3rd hour. You’re trying to get that ordered, your trying to get that pattern. (15:09) Now does this clarify the picture for you? Who is still in a vast fog? (15:24 student) You actually worked on this, and you worked right on the inner edge of the rim of the pelvis. (15:25) Right exactly on top. And then sometimes if you’re suspicious that the illiacus is in a lot of trouble, you try to get around the corner, you see, around the corner and down into here. But this begins to present to you an understanding of the confusion that you get in these bodies and why you get a confusion. Okay. (16:00) So this is the story of the 3rd hour, and along about the time that you have the job done, you get your 3rd hour done, in fact you may have to take more than that one hour to do it. (16:29) But now look you, open your Lockhart’s and look at the way stuff is attached around the anterior superior iliac spine, because this is the ilium too! And you can’t put pressure one place on that ilium without you get pressure other places on that ilium. They’re all the same bone. (17:04) These chiropractors talk about the compensations, (or the osteopaths), in the body, but what I want you people to get at this moment is the reality of what is a compensation? How does it get that way? Where does it go? How does it traverse the body? This is not a mythological height on which you are flying in the wild blue. This is right down to earth idea as to how strains become transmitted in a body. Yes? (17:50 student) Was that ticklishness in Sharon an indication that there were obliques that they were compensating for…? (17:57) Not necessarily that they were compensating. I don’t know what it is. You’ll get tickle in a young person, and you say this is the same thing that I had and so and so under your hands, but in an older person it won’t be ticklish. You rarely get ticklishness in an old person, you get tension; and it feels the same under your hand. But the young person calls it ticklishness and behaves in a pattern that we recognize as ticklishness. Particularly a child. I don’t know the answer. I know that sometimes it gives you a great deal of problem in getting past it, more often with men than with women. And one of the problems with men is that they are guarding the whole area, they are guarding it. They are unwilling to relax in order to let somebody else’s hand go in; they’re putting up their defenses. And sometimes, if I have to, I will take there own hand and put it there, and put my hand on top of their hand and work through their hand. And of course you don’t get that much done, but you get it open enough that then they eventually let it, but it can be an awful nuisance to you. But there is no question that ticklishness is a defense. (19:38) So, look at that anterior superior spine and realize that you have 5 muscles coming reasonably close together there. You have the gluteus medius, you have the iliacus, you have the tensor fasciae latae, you have the quadratus femoris… sartorius. Now in your mind’s eyes, picture where the other ends of these muscles are, and realize that anything at the other end of these muscles has this end into trouble now, and this end at the anterior superior spine is now going to begin to affect what’s going on at the back of the crest. And now take another look at your goal, which is to get the pelvis horizontal, and realize what can be interfering, and how far it can be from the seat of the problem. (21:15) And so, anything that you find practically on the lateral side of the body in the 3rd hour is fair game. But the actual technique of the 3rd hour is always of this thing, not of this thing. Always a stretching sideways, always a two-handed job. Your hand is way back here, but it’s always working. It’s a stretching situation. It’s a letting out, so that these various muscles can have a place to work. (22:01) You didn’t really do an awfully good job on that superficial fascia on the side on the 1st hour, did you? So all of this comes in, you see. And you don’t have to know all of this in your head along about the time when your hands really know it, but you better know enough about it for the questions that are fired at you one of these days by the boys and girls up in the medical clinic, because it’s going to happen. And if they know that you know your business, we’ll be alright. But if they know that you don’t know your business it’s not going to be that alright. (22:41) So this is the story of the 3rd hour. Now, you will be changing the position of the lumbar vertebrae in that 3rd hour, won’t you? You can’t help it. And if you’re going to change the position of the lumbar vertebrae in that 3rd hour, you’re going to need to change the position of the cervical vertebrae to balance it. And you can finish it up, again, by the pelvic lift, which organizes the bottom of the lumbars and the sacrum. You can do some organizing of the neck; in other words remember, that you are an integrator, and in your mind, have clearly in mind what has to be integrated. Basically, what has to be integrated in a body are these various segments of the spine. If the various segments of the spine are really integrated you’ve got nothing else to do. (24:00) So, you go back and take a look at this situation and you integrate those various segments of the spine… (24:36) So let’s have some coffee… (Tape Break) Paper by Peter Levine read by Dr. Rolf (24:56) – “Which we seek to determine, are the effects of Rolfing, hence we would like an overall description of changes in terms of concrete, fundamental, and clearly known parameters. Certainly it is instructive to know that evoked brain potentials changed in a direction, which suggests a heightened vigilance or intentional capacity. However this is something that can be measured directly, without introducing brain waves. This fundamental load and lotus of generation is still largely unknown itself. Recent evidence even suggests the alpha wave, the so-called meditation pattern, is an artifact. And it has long been known that delta patterns can be recorded from a bowl of Jell-O dessert. One is reminded of a brainwave researcher’s creed, “I’ll see it when I believe it.” (25:46) “To clarify there are changes initiated by Structural Integration, they must be exceedingly careful and selective in the parameters we so chose. A simple before-after photograph has long been employed as an effective representation of the gross structural changes brought about by Rolfing. This is so, because a picture, even though simple, static, and two-dimensional, is at least a representation of a man as a whole. Much more striking to the experienced eye is the changed movement of individuals as they are processed. What is it exactly that these observers see? Is it objective, and can it be quantified? Does it give us a framework with which to eventually explore the physio-chemical basis of these changes? I believe there is just such a precise objective integrating notion that can be aptly applied to this problem. It is a concept of energy. In physics long before the molecular mechanical explanation, the gross properties of matter were described by the laws of thermodynamics. It is one of the most striking testimonies to the parsimony in nature, that 2 simple mathematical formulations were able to describe most of the properties of matter, and provide a framework with which to understand these phenomena on a molecular level.” (27:12) “These laws, the 1st and 2nd of thermodynamics, describe change or flow, and ordering of energy respectively. Are these not the very same concepts that when intuitively invokes to describe the process of Structural Integration? Mainly that the person’s structure has become more ordered and that he is more alive, that his energy is more flowing and that he somehow has more of it.” (27:36) “The question now is, can these intuitive perceptions be grounded in a mathematical energy formulation, which will not only describe this process, but point toward a unified understanding of the underlying bio-physical changes. When we think in terms of the energy in a biological system, what likely first comes to mind is oxygen consumption. However, when asked a [priory] to predict how it should be changed by processing, one is in a bit of a quandary. We might predict an increase in basal O2 uptake, because less is needed due to improved efficiency. Alternatively, one could argue, that an increase in basal oxygen intake reflects the increased needs of a higher energy system, that is, it meets the requirement of previously starved undemanding tissue. For this reason basal measurements are apt not to mean much without accompanying photo thermal profiles. When the 1st law of thermodynamics states DE=W-ΔQ, where “DE” is the change of the energy in the system, “W” the work done, and “ΔQ” the heat dissipated.” (28:44) “Some of these difficulties could be circumvented by also securing estimates of maximum oxygen consumption. Procedurally, this is a trivial matter of measuring the increase in heart rate to a given sub-maximum work load, and extrapolating [numergraphically] to set maximum oxygen consummation. Such a measure gives us a fair estimate of the body’s capacity to utilize energy, and defines an upper limit of how much work the system can do. Priorly, there is only one direction in which this number should go as a consequence of processing, and that is up.” (29:27) “Let us assume for the moment that the maximum O2 capacity does increase. There are 2 possible reasons for this; one is simply, that due to greater static alignment of the body segments with respect to gravity, energy is freed for other purposes. Alternatively, or rather in addition, the total energy configuration of the myofascial system might be reorganized in a dynamic matter so as to facilitate the flow of energy. The definition of flow will be deferred to the following paragraph. That a body becomes more ordered in a gravitational field as it [comes forth] from processing is undisputable. The inertial centers of the body segments can be derived from considerations of Newtonian mechanics, and the total unbalanced force, torque energy, calculated. This energy can then be compared to the increased maximum oxygen consumption. If they are equal, we need look no further. If however, the increased maximum oxygen is greater than predicted from the postural argument, we must look deeper to considerations of energy flow.” (31:30) “Let us consider the body to be made up of an ensemble of energy generating organs, the vector sum of which we shall call the body energy. This is a paraphrasing of a statement made by Dr. Rolf. As a simplifying approximation, let us first consider only organs directly involved in locomotory behavior; that is the bones, muscles, and connective tissue. Specifically, we have a mechanical system of joints, articulations, energy sources, the muscles that let supply of innervations, springs, the elastic components of the muscle and fascia, and viscous damping forces, the inelastic components of muscle and fascial tissue. Action at a joint is then represented by a lever powered by an energy source – a motor – driving a spring, and dash part, damping force, connecting in parallel.” (31:22) “These various modular organs would be interconnected by networks of parallel combinations of elastic and damping components. Considering first, action at a single joint, we see that if the viscous elements greatly outweigh the elastic ones, motion will be impeded and energy wastefully dissipated. The problem is compounded when one realizes that all of the individual energy sources are interrelated through their myofascial investments. If we examine a simple act such as walking in the light of this marvel, it is apparent that the maximal efficiency these various energy sources must operate in precise, synchronous, often reciprocal patterns. If the interconnecting networks are overly viscous, then no one joint can be moved without dissipating energy throughout the entire system.” (32:12) “If, by some process, the viscous elements could be changed into more elastic ones, what would the model predict? Clearly, an increased capacity for energy flow between joints is to be expected. Know, that this by itself will effect an overall change toward more rhythmic efficient energy flow is not true. If the individual elements are still unbalanced with respect to each other, than the increased capacity for energy transfer may be of little use, or may even give the appearance of less synchronicity. This is so, because all of the modules have there own intrinsic frequencies of oscillation, and if they are in the wrong phase relationships with each other, their energies may tend to collide or interfere with one another.” (33:03) “What then, is the resolution of this problem? The various energy sources must then be modified so as to bring the system as a whole as near to a resonance condition as possible. Returning briefly to the world of Structural Integration, the first few sessions, mainly the 1st, are devoted to reworking the superficial fascia. To the practitioner these early sessions change the resilience of the body tissue to his touch. In the later sessions, muscle groups at increasingly deeper layers are manipulated, unstuck, loosened, repositioned, etc. The end result of this process is an individual no longer torn by the force of gravity, and moving with an ease and mobility he did not have before.” (33:52) “Let us now look at this process in terms of the model. Could not the [lever] working in the superficial fascia correspond to reducing the viscosity of the damping elements, which interconnect the arrays of energy modules. If the multitudes of energy sources were themselves operating in proper timing sequences, then this initial operation should bring the system into ordered functioning. This is clearly not the case with individuals being processed, and the model suggests that the individual energy sources, one by one, must be then adjusted so that the total complex action of these aggregates is brought into resonance. The practitioner might choose the word harmony, or relationship. The word resonance in the model is a precise mathematical formulation which states that there will be sets of unique relationships between the periodicities, elasticities, and viscosities of the energy modules, such that an optimum exchange, or flow of energy, results if certain conditions are met.” (34:54) (That’s a beautiful definition.) (34:56) “If this is so it can be tested in a very simple way; before or after motion picture photographs can be taken of subjects with markings painted at various joints as they walk. The relative motion of the joints can be analyzed by a Fourier power spectrum representation; each joint pair being considered as an energy oscillator. All of these joint pairs are inter-coupled to each other with energy necessarily going between. If they are properly linked, as a function of the relative frequencies and damping of the other components, then a minimum of energy will be dissipated in the process. The body will be then in a maximal energy configuration. Might not this correspond to other practitioner and processor described as being connected and no longer dragging? These measurements, along with the static talk ones; can now be compared with the oxygen uptake and thermal data. From this we should be able to make a solid beginning toward understanding the process which begins after mechanical energy is introduced into the tissues by the practitioner.” (36:04) That is a magnificent paper. That is the best contribution that’s ever been made by somebody who has done this work, (36:20 student) Thank you very much. I almost didn’t turn it in. (36:21) Why, you were scared of Ida? No, I think that is absolutely beautiful. I think you should go along with the idea that you have there, and then I think it should be published. It should even be published without stills of a motion picture. ‘Cause after all you can’t publish in a journal motion picture, but this will bring this into the periphery of people who are ordinarily not exclusively in biological fields. (37:00 student) That was the reason I had hesitancies about the paper, because it didn’t say anything specifically neurological or biological, and I’m sort of not used to thinking along –, this is sort of a recent thing for me too, thinking like this a little bit. (37:13) I think this is beautiful. I think this is the beginning of something that could go very far. And I think a paper like this, for instance, could be published in “Science”. (38:25 student) …I’d like to make a comment on the paper here. I agree that this is really a nice crystallization of some ideas, however, putting myself in the place of somebody reading Science Magazine, or whatever, there are passages about the organs and resonance and stuff I think are in danger, by the way they are worded, of being misinterpreted as being kind of black boxy, Wilhelm Reich kind of stuff, and I – (38:500 student) The obvious is to make it black box real physics, and to sort of get away from it. As a matter of fact I was going to make a paragraph to separate this kind of energy from mystical energy. (39:05 student) To continue talking in terms of organ resonance at this point I feel is premature because I don’t think there is any evidence to show it, frankly. It may or may not be the case. (39:17 student) Actually I think there is. There was a cerebral mechanism work done the last 3 or 4 years on rabbit reflexes where they knew – (39:25) Then I would certainly quote that liberally. (39:30) Well, this isn’t a finished job. (39:35 student) This is some of the stuff that the chiropractors got in trouble with in Canada, and I wanted to warn about publishing something that sounds like that. (39:42 student) I will maybe define my terms batter. That’s a good idea. (39:45 student) I wanted to pursue one point that you made there. I think it’s a very bright collection of ideas. I think it does have some problems. (39:55) May I interject at this point? What utterly amazes me, and pleases me so much, is the fact that this man in his 10 days worth of exposure to these ideas can put them together in an entirely different pattern. This is what joys my heart. (40:17 student) What I wanted to ask you about, the measuring of oxygen consumption, how did you propose in the paper to do that? I thought you were relating oxygen consumption to increased heart rate. (40:30 student) Yep, that’s right. Look at it this way. In terms of delivering oxygen you’ve got to consider which is the weakest link in the cardio pulmonary circulatory system. (40:42 student) Let me just say that’s not a good way to measure oxygen consumption; by increased heart rate. (40:50) Not by increased heart rate. For example, if the person has got something wrong with their lungs, that obviously is going to be the weak link in processing oxygen. Ninety-five percent of the population, the weak link in this process is the ability of the cardiovascular system to respond. Now it turns out, that if you actually measure the form in which the heart rate actually increases and returns to base line after exercise you get within a 10% error. And this is literally in a thousand, two, three thousand subjects – you get within 10% accuracy, a prediction, of the maximum oxygen consumption run by exhaustion tests, treadmill exhaustion tests. So it’s really surprising, it amazes me that this was such a good measurement, but apparently it is, and apparently it’s well documented. (41:54 student) So you talk more about the general form of the increase and the return to [respiration]. (41:54 student) In the general form. In other words, a different person, after going like this, the heart rate is up to a 150 you see. They’re saturated, there is no more work it can do, whereas if the heart rate rises slowly and returns fast, this indicates that they have a potential for processing, for transferring, a lot more oxygen… (42:27 student) Yes. There is defiantly a correlation, you know the [active translator] of quick return to resting pulses and nice slow level. So in that case I think that you could get pulmonary function [ ]. (42:41 student) There is sure a lot to be done. This is… sort of just so I can see what I was thinking a little bit. Because sometimes it’s a little confused. (42:45) This is an introductory. (42:54 student) The thing I like about the paper the best, Peter, is that it is provocative. People are going to read it and say, “Oh yeah?” They’re either going to have to go along with it or attack it or something, but they can’t leave it alone, and I think that that’s good. (43:07) The thing I like best about this paper is that I’m not talking. I mean this isn’t my hash. It’s something that Peter is getting in brand new. He’s taken the ideas I’ve given him and he’s transformed them, and this hasn‘t happened before. It happened within much narrower limits, and that’s what I like about it. So Peter, god bless. (43:43 student) That’s really where I’d like the most some ideas to come from you people, and this is the key, I think, to making quantitative boundaries, which we can say, well if this falls in this, must be so, this is where to look; is the question of the energy measurement. I think that possibly doing some of this energy stuff with thermal photographs, with some kind of clear thermal thinking, we can say how much of the energy is been working and how much is going to keep and so forth. (44:13) Well, this work that is going on up there in Vancouver help with this. (44:20 student) Perfect. This crystal thermagraph stuff. (44:30)…find out what there is there. Maybe Peter could go up with you. Maybe Peter could go up with you and you could do some processing and he could do some measuring, and out of the whole thing you would have a real contribution. (44:45 student) It would be nice if we could get this guy’s technique down so that we could play with it – crystal. Wasn’t it in Scientific American that article was published? Does anybody remember which one? I remember seeing some of those pictures holding a pair of pliers. Oh it was in Life. They’re what? They’re doing it at USC? (45:10 student) and then at [Armotate’s] hospital in New York. They have the whole set up there… (45:17 student) This is an old technique. It’s about 3 years old… (47:22) further discussion of Peter’s paper I do think is a very important subject for discussion at the moment… (47:48) Ok, we’ve got to get back to the fact that we’re doing, good heavens, that we’re doing 4th hours today, aren’t’ we? All right, so why don’t we get all you 4th hour people lined up. (48:17) Owen? Are you still dragging, Owen? Since that last hour he had he looked so beautiful. And I think he’s fallen apart, not so much spontaneously, as because yesterday he really worked hard, you know, one after another after another, after another after another after another. And this is what is going to happen to you until you come to a certain level of solidity, you can’t do it without falling apart and without coming back to your peers to get some help. (48:40) Would anybody give Owen a sheet, or does he have to go and make his own bed and lie on it? (48:50 student I feel –, my experience is I’m a bit more together than I was yesterday, and I don’t know whether the together ness is slipping back into the old structure, or whether my new structure is solidifying. Cause I really feel very solid at this point. (49:00) Your new structure is solidifying. But it isn’t far enough along. (49:09) Somehow, we’ve got to make more of a mesomorph out of you. I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but we’re going to have to. (49:15 student) Put more potatoes in his dessert. (49:18) That would make an endomorph. … (Tape break) Planned Healing Research Community (49:30 student) – Not good enough. It’s ok for learning but not if you’re really going to do our job well. We have to somehow understand the total being which includes this context and the whole epistological system that this began, and that means understanding that context and how it affects him and how he affects it and that sort of thing. And about the same time I began to be very much aware of how the environment, our setting, affected the programs going on there; the attitude of the people, the kind of staff that we had the shapes of the rooms, the way the room were laid out, the color, that was interdependent relationship. (50:08 student) And then I began to realize too, that as we had more and more people getting connected with us that were strong, potent people, they had difficulty sharing the same spaces, which was concerning me too. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, it’s just they had a difficult time and it seems to me that if we were going to create an environment that was large enough, or broad enough, to make it possible for these people to exist and have their own spaces and then find ways to make contact, well this would be a nice thing. And by these people, I just mean that if we’re in the business of really trying to open people to their potential, that potential in everybody could begin moving in that direction, and then eventually you get to the place where they have their own vision and they want to move with it, and they don’t want to have to listen to anybody else, and they want to make that happen, be real. (51:20 student) And we’ll arrange, that will be a problem, so the question was how to create environments, settings in which it would make possible for larger number of people to explore their personal visions, open up and let that happen. So, that was another thing that kind of consumed me. So it’s kind of slowly, but surely I began to think about-, and then there was a number of leaders and different people who said, gee, if we could build houses in proximity to your place, we’d rather be there, than a lot of people that came as participants of friends and so forth said, gee we’d sure rather live in proximity to this kind of environment than we would in a tract, or a golf course or tennis courts or something, feel richer, life style in proximity to. (51:54 student) So it made me think about a concept to create a broader environment for our situation. Which could make all these possibilities begin to happen. And so the outcome was thinking about, and talking to a lot of people, and getting feedback and doing some writing and taking notes and letting that kind of be born, which has culminated in the ideas that are in the paper. I don’t feel very good about the way it is written. The way it’s presented, but I think the ideas are great. I feel good about the notion. I somehow feel –. Another thing that I began to become aware of is that first there was Esalen, and then we came into existence, and then one center after another after another after another, and all of a sudden there’s a crunch of [ ] very fast, and I was very concerned about this growth and it’s movement and not becoming some type of fad, another type of fad that would just be nothing. (52:49 student) It seems to me that the only way that would be possible was to take these processes and ground people in the living process so that they’re living and learning the experiences and so not really suckered in the environment we have now. Because I’m beginning to see old tendencies now because even with Esalen there’s an attempt for a lot of people to find ways to build in proximity, to kind of have their own homes. This is happening it seems to me up here too. But yet stay, you know, in relation to each other. (53:35 student) So, I felt kind of stuck a lot of times about how to arrange the stuff, how it worked, how to do it and so forth. I used to take walks on this property and begin to kind of talk to me about it, how to solve some of the problems, and I feel good about that. Most of it’s kind of [ ]. Then some of the practical aspects of it. It’s a fairly large piece. About 400 acres. The guy wants about $600,000 dollars. A lot of money. I thought, my god, you could buy land a lot cheaper someplace else but the question in my mind that then came up was how can we create an environment which is 30 minutes from a major metropolitan area, so [ ] living in a different kind of lifestyle than what would be available. And that somehow if we were to work out a way to pay more for a piece of land that was closer in, that because of being close to the resources [ ] that would make it work out. Of course this is characteristic of everything in the whole economic trend. You know you don’t put a shopping center out where there is no people. (54:45 student) How far is this from a major city? (54:50 student) Well, it’s 30 minutes from Mission Valley, which is really considered kind of the center of San Diego… (55:43 student) I’m very interested too in exploring the relationship between the kind of things that are emerging out of growth centers and their relationship to the culture, and how it developed to the present model… (continue about plans) (102:49 student) …fades out. [End] |
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