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Review of Hours 1-8

Milestones of each session

Students discuss entropy

Review of Hours 1-8

(0:17) Do I thank God for somebody that really looks after me…? Good job! What I just wonder is, how I ever got here without Giovanna to guide my first 70 years. Okay.

(0:37) Now, let's just for fun, do a different type of reviewing than what we’ve been doing. Let’s in our minds eye, go back to the 1^st hour and to the randomness of the 1^st hour, and to the randomness of bodies. I walked out of my (you don’t need to be reminded of this, but maybe) I walked out of my bedroom into the living room a little while ago, and Mike was phoning…Mike has had his 1^st hour, his 2^nd, his 3^rd, his 4^th. But visualize that randomness and what causes it, and how it manifests. Owen, do you want to say anything about what you think about that, on that topic sentence?

(2:11 student) I see in some cases that the randomness is a, well I wonder 2 things. I see in one case, it is a lack of education in the part of the person to realize the level that they are being put into with their own health. That is, at the end of the 10 hours there is a certain amount of understanding of education of line and structure that is taught.

(2:45) Well this is true, but at the end of properly given 10 hours they don’t need the education. Take a 4 year old and it will be there.

(2:55 student) That’s right it should be there. What struck me is that, the other day I saw Malcolm down at the hot baths, or down at Esalen, and Malcolm has a desire, whatever his need is, to go around ‘like this’, and I know he can stand ‘like this’.

(3:07) I know too. I know Owen can sit with his feet ahead too, but look at them.

(3:17 student) So there is more to it then just placement. This sitting adds, as Michael was sitting, was more than just 4 hours of structure work. I don’t know quite how to tie this up. I mean in my mind, still a little dilemma.

(3:47) Would you like to tie it up, Bill?

(3:52 student) I have some ideas, but I’m not sure.

(3:54) Well, break them out. We need to look at this.

(3:55 student) To me it’s all tied together in this mind-body duality that we get seduced into, and I think we get in a psychological set for some reason. I don’t think it matters what the reason is that we’re there. But we make it possible for a person to get it out. We’re not forcing them into a better operating position; we’re making it possible for them to go in this better operating position. There are all kinds of things spinning around, and it hasn’t organized itself. Or I haven’t organized it.

(4:44) I know and this could be a valuable hour in the sense of each of you tried to organize what you feel around here rather than my taking it on and organizing. You all know the difference between my talking at you and your talking to me.

(5:05 student) Well, for me, a case I’ve been watching very closely is Misty, my daughter. And when she starts talking about Rolfing, or Structural Integration, she gets in the proper position. But if you catch her looking out the window or something, she’s gonna be, not where she was, but back on –

(5:19) Alright. Why will she be there?

(5:23 student) I think, in her case, it’s a lack of motivation. She hasn’t really been that so.

(5:29) I suspect that in her case, and most other cases, it is what most of you would call habit. And I say that there is really no such thing as habit. Just like there ain’t no psychology.

(5:50) Habit is doing the thing the way it is easy to you, and the way the thing is easy to you is determined by what is going on in the muscles, in the joints, in the tendons, in the connective tissue. Now when Misty really thinks about it, and straightens herself up, I think this is her motivation, of getting herself past the bond – which isn’t that badly fixed yet in Misty – of the shortness that produced that pattern. But I think that if the pattern is set – and some of you here know it, and more of you here will know it – if the pattern is set, you don’t fall back below that line. In all of these bodies there is a level to which you have climbed, and below which you will not fall back.

(7:14) Most of many of the people in this room remember how Dale sat 4 weeks ago, 5 weeks ago. Far worse than Mike could, under any circumstances, have produced, probably ever. Because the inside core of that man was so organized that this was the only way his body was easy, and it wasn’t easy there. Now, had we been watching Mike closely enough, I know that, as of this morning, his worst sprawl could not have equaled what he would have given three weeks ago before he started. You all see what I’m trying to say.

(8:03) This word ‘habit’ is one of the devils that there will be shortly in your life. Because all of your patients are going to say, “Yes Doctor I know, but this has been my ‘habit’ for so long that I can’t change it.”

(8:19) And whether you want to talk to them about this, or whether you don’t want to talk to them about this, realize that when they say, “This has been my habit, and I can’t change my habit that easily,” that what they’re really saying is that this has been the level of relationship of the internal structures in my body. So that there isn’t a thing properly called habit. There is the outward invisible sign of the internal relationship, which is most easy for you to get into; most simple. So it is from this level of randomness that you are going to build in the 1^st hour with a pattern.

(9:40) Hey Fritz, you always sit over in that corner, and I never see you, and you just get away with murder around here.

(9:52) We want to sketch in the most vital places to stop the change of that randomness.

(10:14 student) The change of the randomness, I think, is partially changing of the awareness of the person. And the Structural Integration positions, by beginning with the superficial fascia, you begin to change the body infrastructure; the body awareness almost. And by freeing the body from the sense of the shoulder girdles and the pelvic girdle, from the central core of the body, again this changes the person’s awareness of –

(11:09) Now you’re talking about 10 hours, aren’t you?

(11:12 student) I’m thinking overall.

(11:15) Well, what you’re saying was all right provided you specify that you’re thinking of an overall, but I am trying to get you to look at it hour by hour, without looking at it from the same vantage point that we’ve been looking at it.

(11:33 student) Okay. The hour you begin on the superficial fascia. And you begin on the upper portion of the body in relating this in a better position to the gravitational field. (I’m trying not to say too much). The 2^nd hour you begin with the lower extremities to again begin to organize these structures to fit under the organized horizontal.

(12:13) Pelvis that you’re trying to horizontalize. Okay.

(12:19 student) Right. The 3^rd hour deals with lengthening. We’re always dealing with lengthening in the body. This is in the back of our minds at all times. The 3^rd hour is dealing with the lengthening of the sides of the trunk, again to free the pelvis so we can horizontalize it. The 4^th, 5^th, and 6^th hours. Fourth hour, again, is dealing with the pelvis from below, and lengthening the midline of the body.

(12:56) To the extent that this can be done from below the pelvis.

(12:59 student) Right. Each hour is approaching this from one vantage point. The 5^th hour, again, is dealing with the pelvis from above, and the rectus, to lengthen the upper portion of the body. The 6^th hour again is dealing with the pelvis and is dealing with freeing the rotators, and horizontalizing the pelvis and working more specifically on the order of the relationship of the sacrum to the pelvis, as far as horizontalization.

(13:40) All of this is true. But now let’s take another look at it, and realize that in the 1^st hour you have gone to the diaphragm – not specifically, but to the fascia that is determining diaphragmatic posturing – and you have organized it. And you have gone to the psoas. See always you have this polarity going on between the diaphragm and the psoas. That’s what keeps the body upright. That’s what keeps a trunk organized; this relation between the diaphragm and the psoas. And when you come right down to it, that pelvic lift, every time you come to it – is relating the psoas to the diaphragm; through the lumbars, through the sacrum, etc. etc. But one of the things I’m trying to emphasize here is a relative simplicity when you come right down to it, as to what goes structurally wrong with the body. If you can organize psoas and diaphragm, you have it made. The only problem is what specific approaches do you need to relate these 2 ends of the poles, these 2 polar ends of the structure.

(15:53) Now, let’s look at this again a little more specifically. Fritz, how do you know when a first hour has been given? For example, you were in here, all of you people who were in the last class, you were in when Mr. James came in, and I said, “Give him a 1^st hour” to somebody or other, Hector I guess it was. And somebody said, “But he has had a 1^st hour” and I said, “But he hasn’t had a 1^st hour.” Now I’m not throwing rotten tomatoes at Peter’s 1^st hour. Peter couldn’t get in there. And God knows it was all I could do to get in there. I am calling your attention to the fact that you can know when a 1^st hour has been given. How? Not whether somebody has tried to dig his hands in there, but whether a 1^st hour’s been given.

(17:02 student) First thing that comes to my mind is the relationship of the anterior chest cage with the back. When you see a lengthening here and you see a [ ] of the back.

(17:12) Yeah. There’s something more significant than that. That can be simulated. It was particularly apparent in Mr. James.

(17:22 student) You see a general raising of the chest, and the raising of the diaphragm.

(17:25) Yeah, but one of the things was, Mr. James was made of wood; solid, just absolutely solid. And there were no joints in the man. Yeah, he could move his arms, and more or less he could move his legs, but not very much. But there wasn’t a single spinal joint working in that man. And as you looked at him trying to breath, you couldn’t see any movement of those ribs. Now, if you can’t see all of this happening, you just haven’t seen a 1^st hour, period. There should be movement all the way through that spine by the time you're through; there should be movement of the diaphragm. As you give a pelvic lift, the belly wall should at least show you that it knows it should be falling back, even if it can’t make the grade. And that amount of movement should get in there in that 1^st hour.

(18:48) See, there are lots of different ways of looking at a body, and I’m trying to give you, you know, I’m trying to go all the way around this phenomena, and let you look at it from several places. You have already looked at the fact that the front has lengthened more than the back. This is true. This is almost more of an index for a 2^nd hour than it is the completion of a 1^st hour, as you know.

(19:18) But movement should get into that body, and the movement should be appropriate in terms of these patterns. You begin to see movement of the psoas, which means the recti will fall back, the belly wall will fall back as you call for a pelvic lift. And the chest will be moving differently. The rib cage that you can see through the chest wall will be moving differently from what it was in the beginning. And this rigidity – and insecurity almost – that’s bolstered by the rigidity of that upper chest, should be falling away.

(20:14) Now you see, the guy still is going to be random, because there will be these various knottings deep in which make it easier to sit this way than to sit this way. Ok. But you can see that this rigidity has been disturbed.

(20:39) In the 2^nd hour, as you lengthen that back, you are still further disturbing the rigidity. And as you are doing the feet, you are further disturbing the rigidity of the trunk, as you all saw. And you are putting length in. And in all these earlier hours what you are seeing is the need for a generalized length.

(21:19) And in the 3^rd hour, you’re still working with that length. And you’re still working with the lengthening of the side, and now you are beginning to go in to get the rigid holdings you see, at a deeper level, through the quadratus. So here, at the end of the 2^nd hour, you again, you have a milestone that says, yes, this guy has had a 2^nd hour. And on that milestone, it talks about the feet, it talks about the extent to which the ankles have been horizontaled, it talks about the extent to which the external malleolus is no longer dragging in the dust, it talks about where on the knees – do you remember, all of you, the look of Malcolm as he came in here with respect to his legs and his knees? What a perfectly ghastly walk, you wondered how he could support his trunk on those cockeyed legs. But God knows the world is full of them. And by the end of the 2^nd hour, those legs were talking to you and saying to you, “Well, we are seeing alike.” And you were getting some movement in the back, and you weren’t getting any movement in his chest, still. Or you were getting more movement than would have been there before the 1^st hour, which we didn’t see at all.

(23:25) And then, in that 3^rd hour you’re going up and you’re again trying to relate those same old 2 things; the diaphragm and the psoas. And you’re realizing, you’re recognizing, the amount of tie-up there is in that diaphragm that deals with the length of the sides; that is anchored by the length of the sides. You can’t get the diaphragm where you want the diaphragm until you have length enough in the sides to stick that thing in where it belongs. And that diaphragm, after all, attaches as far down as that 2nd lumbar. So you see, one of those things you’ve got to do is start getting those lumbar back in order to get yourself the place where the diaphragm can fit.

(24:30) And as this guy gets up from the 3^rd hour, you look at him and you say, “Hmm, that anterior superior spine is really in a mess. If I try to come back and try to do a 4^th hour with that anterior superior spine caught up like this, I’m going to have trouble.” And perhaps you could pare it some for that 4^th hour. Because you see, you can’t get the pelvis turned up, you can’t get the psoas back where it can play back and forth with that diaphragm, until such time as you have this degree of movement.

(25:10) And that pelvis can be kept tremendously immobilized by those 5 muscles that attach there at the anterior superior spine. I doubt if there’s any other one place in the body – maybe, maybe the ramus – where in as brief an area you have as much going on in terms of how the body is held. Why? Because you have the sartorius, you have the rectus femoris, and the fasciae latae. (See, here’s the whole leg, all hooked right in good and tight to that rectus femoris. And relating that hooking, tying it in, is the gluteus medius at a deeper level. And the iliacus at still a deeper level. And as your iliacus is held, so must your psoas be held, because of the common tendon that they share. Now is this very apparent to you, the significance of this here?

(26:49) So as you see, this is one of the key points of observation in that 3^rd hour. If this is all hooked up and hooked in, you’re not going to be able to run a good 4^th hour. This is all hooked up and hooked in it says to you…

(27:27) It’s absolutely impossible for you to be able to organize your pelvis, to be able to get the relation between the psoas and the iliacus and the diaphragm.

(27:56) So at the looks of that anterior superior spine is your key, is a key, as to how well you have done your job in that 3^rd hour. And, you see, each one of these hours, if you are sufficiently familiar, will have these very specific…

(28:35) And so then, to the extent that you get this little band across here freed, you are more aware of the hooking down of the 4^th hour through the adductor group. And you can just look at those legs in your mind’s eye, and you can see the muscles that you’ve handled in the 3^rd hour. I’ve stressed them just now: the sartorius, the rectus femoris, and the fasciae latae, of course the tensor.

(29:19) And you can see how, the next thing to do is to go down to the slightly deeper level, and all those adductors are really a little more central.

(29:37) So then you come on further, and you go in to that next level. You have started to free the psoas; to free the psoas, not to place the psoas. That original pelvic lift, you see, was placing the psoas as best you might at that level. And all these pelvic lifts are placing the psoas as best you may at the level that you are at the moment. But now you go into the deeper level, which is freeing the pelvis itself, the bony structure itself, to shift enough to give you a different relationship now with respect to the psoas. And your different relationship depends, to a large extent, on the floor of the pelvis, and how well organized it is. And then turn the floor of the pelvis, and the way in which it becomes organized, is a function of the adductors; and everything depends on everything else.

(31:20) And so you begin to be freeing, that very key muscle, the psoas, and enough of you have been looking around, at enough people under enough circumstances and at enough times, to have seen the ways in which this thing varies, the ways in which half the people that you know, I suspect, have deficient function of the psoas and therefore structure of the psoas.

(32:08) They are not able to reach that psoas, they are not able to control that psoas. And if they don’t have the appropriate balance and function of the psoas, the psoas-diaphragm thing is going to be off. How could it be otherwise? So that you have to organize this at this level; so that the psoas is going to give you what you need to take on and up, and relate it to the diaphragm.

(32:52) And in the 5^th hour you’ve got to doing this, and you got to doing it in terms of the recti; in order, again, to get to the psoas.

(33:11) [Sound of three hits to a screen, to kill a fly]

(33:13) Shall we arrange a cease-fire?

(33:19 student) I think Mack needs another session.

…

(33:34) And you see, in order to change the psoas, you have to change the antagonistic of the psoas. I don’t know which one is the agonist and which one is the antagonist. I know that this knot says that the one that shortens is the agonist and the one that lengthens is the antagonist. Now, in that framework, which one of these is the agonist? And the answer is that neither of them is, because both the psoas and the recti are stuck. Neither one of them can lengthen. Both of them have to try to shorten.

(34:26) If you try to do a sit-up. If a relatively random body tries to do a sit-up, everything shortens. The psoas shortens what it can, and the recti shorten more than they can. And that’s the pattern of the random body.

(34:45) But the pattern of the body is that, if you try to do a sit-up, a flexion, across this joint here, the psoas should lengthen and fall back. This is something that nobody believes, because nobody’s ever seen it, really. They see it once in a while. They say how graceful, etc. etc., but it doesn’t occur to them that this is normal movement; that the psoas has got to lengthen and fall back as you flex this joint.

(35:28) And it isn’t until you get into that 5th hour that you begin to get to the place where you can really evoke this.

(35:44 student) Well, you shot me down with that. How the psoas is like that?

(35:48) Isn’t it? Put your hands in here deep.

(35:53 student) I can’t.

(35:58) You can’t? You mean those Rolf hands are still in there? You can even feel it that way.

(36:08 student) I can feel the falling back but the lengthening just isn’t in my comprehension.

(36:13) It isn’t in my comprehension either, it’s in my fingers. It’s in your fingers, and after you’ve done it, you feel it, and this is all there is to it. I cannot, and I will not, lie about what my fingers see; because I know that what we’re doing here is something that hasn’t been done before and therefore it’s got to be a different phenomenon back of it. And that’s the phenomenon. You just hold your fire for a while. You’ll see it presently.

(36:55) I thoroughly agree with you, it is not logical. Nobody said it was. Don, I suspect, and this isn’t in the anatomy book, I suspect that that psoas is hooked back by something else when it’s normally organized. It’s hooked back, and the something else shortens and pulls it back, and I don’t know what it is.

(37:25 student) I see.

(37:27) And I would like to do a little dissection and find out how that works, but I don’t know how. It’s going to be at the back of that pelvis and that abdomen. If a surgeon really wanted to know he’d find out, but.

(37:45 student) How about an iliacus?

(37:46) How ‘bout an iliacus? That’s not going to bring that psoas back the way that your fingers will tell you that it goes back. But this will come, and keep challenging it until you see it. Until your fingers see it so unmistakably that you’re not letting anybody tell you what you’re telling me, that it isn’t possible.

…

(38:19) And as I said before, in order to get the entirely new picture, which you have all seen coming out in this class, you have to go and look for something different; completely different, radically different, qualitatively different, … in terms of movement.

(38:48) How many of you as you are sitting on your chairs right now – I, even with my legs crossed, can do this – can go in there and feel yourself turn your pelvis under by ever so little, but in so doing you activate that whole hinge that goes across and is sort of defined by, the pubes. Mack almost has it. You can? But you couldn’t have 2 weeks ago… Only one week ago you couldn’t have?

(39:36 student) ‘Till Friday I never felt myself bending right on the hinge. Right here; this hinge.

(39:42) Right now, you can feel yourself flexing by a shortening of the psoas, I mean by going in there. There. Before Friday when you bent, you bent from your shoulders. That’s right. You can’t do it now. OK. You’ve got it made. You’ve graduated.

(40:06 student) But I don’t feel my psoas lengthen.

(40:09) With your finger tips you can. As you put your fingers there. When it’s no longer sore, you will find that that muscle falls back and your fingers go after it. And what you can call that, except lengthening, I don’t know! …

(40:45) So help you, gravity!

(40:51) I don’t know Mack, it may be that after we all get really familiar at looking at this phenomenon, we can get a set of words together which will be more acceptable… When I did dissection it was long before I had such funny ideas; long before. And you see, a dissection isn’t going to tell you a thing. Your dissection is going to tell you what was you before last Friday, but it’s not going to tell you what is you as of this Monday.

(41:44) Even Peter over there has a certain greater awareness of his psoas today. Jim [Horiscus] doesn’t know he’s got a psoas, and neither does Ed. And Beverly is 25% up. And Mike could find his psoas, but he isn’t looking for it…Owen could find his psoas, but he’s working so blang hard that he can’t feel it. And Bob doesn’t know anything about it, and Dale knows very little about it. And that guy back there, he’ll find it pretty soon.

(42:45 student) Not as fast as Gordon Frazier.

(42:53) Okay, he told you it was his first life on earth, but God knows my two thousandth or something. So I’m kind of worn down. So anyhow, I bet you Nick or Gordon wouldn’t be able to see his psoas. Anyway let’s get back on this job.

(43:22) Now, having found that psoas…

(44:53) So, now you see, having found out that there is a psoas, now, in order to establish the span of that psoas, you are going to have to get those lumbars and that lumbar sacral hinge where it belongs. Because otherwise what organizes the lumbars, which are the determinants – the precise determinates – of the psoas.

(45:36) You see you can go round and round and round this mountain, and as you go further along the circumference, you look at the top and it’s the same top that you see it, when you see another determinate of what that mountain is and where it is and how it is. And what I’m trying to do is to keep you moving round and round this mountain. Not simply looking at one set of values, which only determine the east side. And you can look at a sacrum as determining a pelvis. You can look at a sacrum as determining lumbars. (You jolly well better to.) And you see, when that sacrum doesn’t determine a lumbar, as it doesn’t in the case of spondylisthesis then you’re really in trouble. Then you’ve got a big job on your hands. And this guy, Joe Mulky… Some of you saw him 5 weeks ago, and you will be able to see him today, and to what extent he’s come further. And to some extent Fritz there will tell you…Did we have a picture of him?…

(47:20) But you see there, where there is an actual slipping on the hinge between the sacrum and the lumbar, there it becomes impossible for that psoas to get the kind of positioning that makes it possible for it to work. And so it is just literally geared out, as the reverse gear in you car is geared out when you’re going ahead. Or the other way around; the going ahead gear is geared out when you go into reverse. And this makes for a very complicated problem. So, here, once again, you now have your 6^th hour in that particular perspective, and you remember that you are getting your 6^th hour organized. You are getting your sacrum organized, through the relationship that you can establish between the outside and the inside; through the piriformis muscle, through the obturatus perhaps, the way to look at it a little longer [ ] is through the obteratus. And then, if you’ve done a really good job, you’ve done about all you can do at one end of the line. And you’ve got to go up to the other end of the line.

(48:56) And you’ve got to go up to the head. You’ve got to try to establish the span of the head; the span of the neck. Because the way that neck spans will determine the way the rib cage sits. And the way the rib cage sits, in turn, will determine the way the neck stands. And if your 1^st and 2^nd and 3^rd ribs aren’t up high enough, as for example: Malcolm, Owen, a lesser extent Dale – but not as serious – you can’t get those lower ribs, not at determining the position and span and tone of the diaphragm, to do this normally.

(50:14) So once again, even in that 7^th hour, you are still playing with psoas-diaphragm relationships. Now when you get through with your work around the neck, in other words, when you have done what you can to get the 1^st and 2^nd ribs up where they belong, then you have to go and try to organize the trapezius muscle, to get the 7^th and 8^th and 9^th ribs where they belong. And you do that, you remember, by sitting them on the floor, and bringing the trapezius muscle down and wide, to where it can sit back, the way that the psoas does when you flex it, and literally that trapezius muscle can sit back as you flex. Never did before.

(51:36) And you see these basic, fundamental, different concepts are as clear to you as the nose on anybody’s face. When you’ve seen them, you know it’s there. You see it there, you work with it there, and you’re going to have a lifetime of argument about it. ‘Cause a trapezius can’t go down when it flexes out, can it? It’s got to shorten. But it don’t. It lengthens.

(52:13) And all those real good books, that those real good kinesiologists have spent their lives writing, contain the old assumption; and they’re all written around those old assumptions, which were the way those particular types of aberrated bodies worked. And these boys and girls, it isn’t that they’re not going to be willing to hear you, but that for quite a long time they’re not going to be able to hear you, because they’ve been trained in the other thinking. You’re going to have a large-size job on your hands conveying to these people. The only way you can do it is by putting them on the floor and doing it. So, what, with one thing and another, I’m sending you out into the world. What would the good lord have to say about it, to preach the gospel and the healer’s sake, and etc., etc. And they have a bad time too.

(53:25) But you see, you have to change certain basic assumptions before you can get that changed body. Now this is why you go back to your random body, this is why you give me this whole big yarn about habit. I can’t tell you how many thousand times that guy Jerry is going to tell me about habit pattern before he really gets up out of that crunched in thing he’s got.

(53:55 student) Am I still crunched in?

(53:56) You sure are. The only thing is, you’re only half as crunched in as you were 10 weeks ago.

(54:04 student) I feel less.

(54:06) Yeah. You feel less, and this seems to you a lot. But you see, what you would say to me, even if he didn’t say, “Well he’s just been in a habit of sitting this way for all this time.” And what I say to you is, that there is stuff there lacking. When the stuff there lacking is built in, he will not be comfortable as he squinches in.

(54:28 student) I would never say that this is a matter of habit, because I’m aware of what’s happening to me, that it’s not habit.

(54:30) Well all right. These people would say it’s a matter of habit. He's still sitting with the same habit that he had 2 weeks ago.

(54:40 student) Well, I feel, that things that were a habit that I can’t get into now, I’m aware of that already. Being that it used to be, if you want to say habit – I never thought of it that way – but I can’t get in that position anymore.

(54:50) Okay. I still think, you know, everyone has kind of heard what I have to say, whether you happen to be the one that caused the habit.

(55:04) You see, before you change one of these postures we would call a habit posture, you have to get in so very deep, because that’s where it lives and you can’t change it where it doesn’t live! And if you haven’t the physical strength, and the physical pursuit of this; if you haven’t the ability to pursue it to where it lives, you can’t do it. That’s all there is to it.

(55:37) We got to the 7^th hour. We got to the 8^th hour, which you remember, is part of the job of organizing girdles. And you remember that, in the 8^th hour we made up our mind that we had to find out which girdle was in the holding position. Which one could we release, and get the most general body release from. And you all remember Frank, for instance, and how much change there was in his upper girdle by virtue of working on his legs. And you remember there were many other people in this room with the same situation. If you made the right choice, you got the right results. We didn’t have any example of making a wrong choice.

(56:50) If this class were given the way it should be given, we would take enough time that we could afford to make mistakes in order to rectify them. But we never can do this, because of the fact that we’re setting up with people who already have economic burdens on their shoulders of running a business, and paying bills for a family and this sort of thing. But there’s going to have to be a time when that’s done. In the old days, every once in a while, I used to do that. I used to let some of these very bright guys, who knew that they knew it all, take a man apart for about 40 minutes, and the more they took him apart the more confused they were. But at any rate, they got the message that you can take them apart and do a heck of a lot of damage. Fortunately, they can’t ever be taken apart to the place where they can’t be put together again (I don’t think. I’ve certainly never seen it.) – by the person who knows how to do it. But the reference has to be back to somebody else. And you see, the sad part about it is that, a man whose stupid enough not to see that he’s taken a thing apart in the beginning, is also egotistical enough that he can’t refer the guy to somebody else to correct his mistake. So there’s room for a lot of damage in there. I’m sorry. That’s the way it is. I didn’t do it.

(58:25) Then we were, as you saw, concerned with girdles. Now in general, also as you saw and as I told you, in general, the concern in the 8^th hour, will be with the girdle at the opposite end; will be with the pelvic girdle because, because as you’ve seen, there is always [disoutination] between top and bottom. And this is nothing mystical. This is just in that if you loosen to top, you’ve got to take it in at the bottom to maintain the span. It’s that simple. But it has very practical rewards. You get, for instance, poor old Mack’s psoas so sore that he can’t put his own hands in it, let alone mine, and then you go up to the top of it and you let it heal down there. By the time you get back to it 10 days or 2 weeks from now, he’s forgotten that it was so sore. Then he’ll let you in again. See what I’m talking about.

(59:30) And so, in general, you would go from the head to the pelvic girdle, but sometimes other things are indicated…

(59:54) Now that upper girdle work consists in, and most of what we’re going to be doing today as the 9^th hour. You see the 9^th hour has to be the other end of an 8^th hour; if you start with the pelvic girdle you’ve got to go to the shoulder girdle, if you start with the shoulder girdle you’ve got to go to the pelvic girdle. But that…shoulder girdle work, whether it be in the 8^th hour, or whether it be in the 9^th hour, has got to take into consideration the posture of the arms.

(1:00:38) Now, what determines how an arm is held? And the answer is, lots of things. The answer is the way a pectoral is attached, the way the pectoral minor is attached, the way a latissimus is attached, as well as the muscles that are within the arm itself. And all of these things have to be looked to and balanced in order to get the kind of balance that you need to establish the span of this electrical system that runs from the tail to the head; all of it.

(1:01:56) Now, it is interesting that it doesn’t make any difference whatsoever how much work you do locally on those arm muscles, you will not get those arms placed until you understand that when arm muscles are balanced, the elbow moves straight out and straight in. And there was one old duck who had something to say about this. And he said something about local something or other determining muscular movement, (muscular position), but the brain determines movement. And here you begin to involve some kind of central innervation that begins to tell these muscles how to balance each other.

(1:03:11) And if you start with a young enough person, or a free enough person, you can actually organize that shoulder girdle simply by mind-body directions, as Mrs. Lee would have called them. You tell the elbow to go straight out, and presently it will go straight out, and in so doing it will balance all these other muscles.

(1:03:48) But as people get older, and as they get more “habit patterns”, they get more deterioration of the flesh, and the mind can no longer get in there and really reorganize it. So somebody’s fingers have to get in there. And it’s the same old story; add energy to it.

(1:04:12) But the problem of the 8^th hour, that is the shoulder end of the line, is a different problem than the problem at the pelvic end of the line; because the shoulder, the arms are doing things, but they are not supporting weights. They are not transmitting weights, carrying weights, lifting weights. You see, the arms in general are not really fighting gravity to any great extent, to as great an extent, as the legs, which have to transmit that whole 170 lbs. of a man, or 210 pounds of a man. You see that’s a big job. It’s a heavy job. And in that it is a heavy job, it limits the degree of the levels of motion, the degrees of freedom with which this can be accomplished. And the shoulders have much more freedom in terms of the way they move, than the legs do; because they don’t have this gravity problem as a major problem. It’s a minor problem, of course.

(1:05:46) But so, we now get to the place where all movement that begins, that involves the arms, must begin at the elbow; either the inside or the outside of the elbow. Now when you do this, you are getting an entirely different integration of everything else that’s concerned with the shoulder girdle. And once again, all of this vast wealth of information, of kinesthetics, all this vast study, has to be looked at again, and revised again, and re-understood in terms of the energy patterns that arise in this connection.

(1:06:47) So now, today we are going to be doing a very great – practically all of what we are going to be doing today are going to be shoulder, upper body, organizations. And you will begin to see how this works out. But bare it in mind, be willing and be able to see, that whole organization has to do with directions in arm movement –where you start. That’s the story for today, and that’s what we will be seeing coming up.

Next day

…

Milestones of each session

(1:08:20) This is really what we were talking about yesterday. You know, when I looked at the end of the 1^st hour and the beginning of the 2^nd hour, the end of the 2^nd hour and the beginning of the 3^rd hour, and that sort of thing. That’s what I was talking about yesterday. I was talking about the specificity, which you should be able to tell – Dale, I swear, I’m going to take you on myself, and if I do you’re going to be sorry!

(1:09:00) I admit you have a problem because those legs of yours don’t fit anywhere. The seat is too low… What do you do with those legs except try to make them shorter by turning them under? I know all this.

(1:09:25) The specificity with which you should be able to look at a guy and tell where he has been, so to speak; how far along the road someone has taken him, and more or less, what they have neglected to do…, because you will find that you won’t be able to do your 5^th hour properly if they haven’t done their 4^th hour properly. It happens many, many times. And people will go from one of these coasts to the other, and go into Dick’s, or come the other direction and go into one of you people, into your office; and partly it’s a game they’re playing with you, partly it’s that they don’t believe you can see the difference… I think mostly it’s a game they’re playing with you, “Well, let's see if that guy is so damn smart.” And they don’t tell you – they’re not honest in terms of their history.

(1:10:33) I think it was Stacey Mills that was talking in the Los Angeles class about some guy that came into her and swore that he had never had any Rolfing. And she tried to start him with a 1^st hour, and her fingers immediately told her that this wouldn’t work. And then she looked at him with a 2^nd hour; no that wasn’t right. And she finally traced him up to the 6^th hour, and there she lost him. And finally the guy actually admitted to the fact that Dick Demerly had actually given him 6 hours of work! But you see his point was that he wasn’t contributing anything; he was paying for this, and by golly he was going to make it work. And, that’s the way it goes. So you’ve got to be prepared for all these little eventualities, and use your judgment.

(1:11:29) Now if they haven’t had the 6^th hour, your hands will tell you right now, when you put your hands into those rotators. If they haven’t had the 2nd hour, your hands will tell you right now when you put your hands around those ankles and shins. You see what I’m telling you: This is a little trick on which they are going to try to hang you up, because stories get around. This story that I’m telling you will get around. And there will always be those kindly people who are willing to contribute to the joy of the universe by seeing whether they can’t make it work. Well, they don’t know on anybody else that the work has been done, but they’re not going to know on me whether the work had been done, you know?

(1:12:17) Remember that it says in the recipe that you can tell what work has been done. If you can’t see, you can feel. And that was basically the milestone business.

(1:12:30) There was another little bit about milestones, too. If you are real sharp, you saw that the end of each hour sort of took you into the next hour; that the end of the 1^st hour called for a certain degree of lengthening of the back, to make the man more comfortable between his 1^st and 2^nd hour. You see, you were finishing the 1^st hour, but you were going into the 2^nd hour. Some of you noticed that at the end of the 2^nd hour you may have felt inclined to, or done, and something about easing around the whole spine, getting ready for the 3^rd hour. You may have had this in your hand, so to speak, the lengthening that was due to come up along the side. You see, as you looked at that man it became obvious to you at the end of the 2^nd hour, what his 3^rd hour needs were going to be. And in your head you knew the recipe anyway. And you would see perhaps that that was too short, and you would, just because you couldn’t control your hands, you’d go along and prepare for that 3^rd hour.

(1:13:55) And at the end of the 3^rd hour, as you looked at it, you saw that that anterior superior spines weren’t at all happy, and you recognized the fact that if they stayed that unhappy you were going to have trouble with your 4^th hour. So you would probably do something in there to relieve those anterior superior spines, making it more easy for you to get into the 4^th hour.

(1:14:20) And in the 5^th hour you know how many times you tried to organize the pubs and the synthesis, simply in order to relieve the strain which was involved by doing the 4^th hour and not going on to the 5^th hour.

(1:14:43) Because this is really one process. It’s really a spiral sort of thing, and as you get around to the end of one hour, it’s very apparent to you where the strain is going to be that’s screaming for the next hour. And the more you go on in this work, the more you are aware of the fact. And the more you are aware of the fact that this is a spiral processing and it’s going up, and when you stop at the end of an hour, you’re being fairly arbitrary. You’re being arbitrary because you know perfectly well that you can’t keep going with that guy forever; he gets too tired, and that time is necessary for consolidation and so forth and so forth. But time isn’t necessary for the progression. The road of the progression is traced right along from the beginning.

(1:15:46) And this is why I react as I reacted yesterday about Bob Ball. If these people could really work simply with that recipe until they saw the whole thing going, and then they could find something new that they could put into it, would add to it, then I’d be all for it. But the problem is, that the people that come to you and talk to you, talk to me about, you know I think it would be a wonderful idea if you did so and so, are always the people who are doing an inadequate job of processing. And that is, they don’t really have the complete feel for how this progression goes.

(1:16:33) Now, I don’t say that this is the final word. But I do say that until you know this word, you can’t add a word to it that’s going to logically enhance that procedure. This is all I’m saying. I’m not saying this is the final word, I don’t think it is. But I do think it’s the final word for, oh, 10 years, maybe. Until, out of you people as a group there will come one very gifted practitioner, who really has that whole feeling in his hands, and suddenly gets the vision that, “Oh my God, we can go on this way.” And then it will no longer be the final word. But you see, while that word isn’t clear in your own minds; and the progression of it, and the feeling of it, and the seeing of it, and the whole thing isn’t literally a part of you, you cannot honestly take it and add something to it. Because all you’re doing is throwing it into a hodgepodge and stirring it around.

Students discuss entropy

(1:17:40 student) Dr Rolf, I’d like to maybe, if we have a few minutes, answer the question that Don asked, because it pertains very highly to these two things.

(1:17:48) Go ahead…

(1:17:57 student) This is the idea of entropy, and what entropy means. It’s something that we sort of intuitively use, and maybe in a bad way, in explaining some of Structural Integration effects. And, to visualize entropy, let's take a deck of cards, a deck of playing cards, and we compulsively order it. The reds, ace through king, and then the blacks, ace through king. And we have our ordered deck, and we’re very careful with it. But we have a little accident, and we bang it and we drop it, and some of the cards are mixed up. You pick it up, and low and behold, you see it’s not quite in that perfect order that it was before we dropped it. So, oh well, what do we do? We take the deck and we shuffle it, and we look again and, low and behold, it’s even worse. We shuffle it again, and again, and again.

(1:19:04) That’s a beautiful metaphor, and this is what I’m talking about, shuffling. That’s what they’re doing, shuffling.

(1:19:09 student) People are shuffling through the games of life, and every time we do that, that deck is more and more random. And this, in a nutshell, is entropy. All physical materials behave in this manner. All physical materials are a closed system. That is, a system in which energy can neither get in nor out of, tend to become more disordered; tend towards disorder, disarray. That’s why physicists when they think of the universe becoming more disordered, that has to be because the universe is a closed system, and there’s no energy going in and out of the universe, so the state of the universe tends to go toward more randomness.

(1:20:09 student) Here. I have a question, before you go on. Does the randomness imply uniformity?

(1:20:16 student) It implies, yes – homogeneity.

(1:20:22 student) So the universe, at a total state of entropy would be a homogonous mass of energy perhaps of electrons; just a plasma.

(1:20:30 student) A plasma gas. This is first one of the observations that tend to support these kinds of notions about the universe. For example, if you had a perfect icebox. One which no heat, no energy could go in or out, and you put a cube of ice in it. That ice would melt. Not because of heat, but because of the intrinsic property toward randomness. ‘Cause the solid is more ordered than a liquid, and a liquid is more ordered that a gas, and so forth, so if you go along in this kind of a progression.

(1:21:25 student) Now, this process is inevitable and it’s irreversible. This change – increase in entropy in a closed system; a thermodynamically closed system. Now, it seems to me, that all of this is very interesting, and it tells us that we’re sort of looking along the wrong track when we even use the word entropy, ‘cause we’re looking for order. We’re not looking for disorder. Now it turns out that a concept, a very beautiful concept was developed, in the early 1940’s, due to the rapid proliferation of communication, radar in particular. There was no way of analyzing these radar signals, and so an entirely new system of mathematics was devised. This was probably the first, one of the major mathematical developments since Newton invented the calculus, from a theoretical standpoint, starting with new premises and so forth, and this theory is the theory of information, or Information Theory. Many of you are familiar with it from cybernetics. Now information theory turns out, mathematically, to be identical with the entropy theory of statistical mechanics. However, it approaches it from a different direction. Instead of approaching it from the disorder, in information theory we approach from the order. Information is a measure of order, whereas entropy is a measure of disorder. The entropy and the information are related, reciprocal (I say it’s negative because it’s a logarithmic function). So anyhow, they are identical formulations, so what we can say about information, we can say about entropy. But at least we have an idea of what to look for now.

(1:23:39 student) Now… if I could draw some of these things out…

(scratchy sounds…)

(1:24:53 student) For some of you who have some familiarity with mathematics, I’ve just mentioned this equation. Now, if there are 2 events, X and Y, with n possibilities for the 1^st and n possibilities for the 2nd. Then the information, or the ordering of the joint occurrences given by the sum of the probabilities – of their joint probabilities of occurrence – times the logarithm of the joint probabilities of occurrence. What does this mean?

(1:25:26 student) Well, in every day talk we represent an information system like this. We have a source, an information source, and this source is given to a transmitter, and the transmitter transmits this source, this information, along a channel – called a communication channel, where it is received by a receiver, and the message is given to the destination. So, source, transmitter, to receiver, destination. This box in the middle represents noise – noise energy, random energy – because it’s impossible to transmit something without noise. This is the essence of the communications block, the communication theory block. Now, the output, or the input for that matter, is represented by a series of states, or elements, in the energies, positions, momenta, tensions, elasticities, and general energies, points, states, elements. Okay. Column A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. This comprises a space, let us say, of the output; the space over on the receiver side.

(1:27:29 student) Stop me if you loose me, okay, because these concepts are really very difficult to get across without the mathematics. Now all of these points in the output space are connected.

(Continued on B6 Side 2C)