Big Sur Hotspring July 1966

Audio Files and Transcripts From Classes with Dr. Rolf

IPR Audio Files
Big Sur Hotspring July 1966

Contents are currently only cataloged for Part 1.

Esalen Lecture Part 1

30:00 Man as a whole in an environment. People at esalen are most interested in man as a psychological being but... Persuade and convince you that it is urgently important that you look at man (also) as a material mass in a three dimensional world and therefore subject to the laws of the three dimensional world.

The reason for this is that by means of his physical body he has to take into his subconscious (if not into his conscious) the various forces with which he is surrounded in this real world. Some of which he is conscious and some of which he is unconscious. This man is living in the moist of them and they are all acting on him whether he knows it or not.

These forces are around you as a physical mass and you are generally not aware of them. The basic energy requirements of the body must be met before you have energy left for other activities.

4:00 If a man is looking for greater comfort he has got direct his attention toward this physical mass and how it operates. Orthodox methods of medicine are dealing with the chemistry of the body. They are not dealing with the body in terms of its physics. You always live in a gravity field so you pay practically no attention to it. This is the neglected element. All of these energy fields must be appropriately received by man before he can convert them to his own use. They must have methods and paths of distribution so that there is a free flow for these energies to distribute through the body and supply the needs of the body. There must be appropriate receptors and appropriate and uninterrupted distributors. Any interruptions of any of these energies the man feels as a lessening of himself. He then begins to feel inadequate and insecure. This can be interpreted as a psychological insecurity.

7:00 What this describes is the somatopsychic situation (as opposed to psychosomatic). The primary damage is to the somatic aspect and is impacting the psychological aspect. The opposite can also occur where the problem arises psychologically and the emotions in themselves can cause the actual interference with the actual physical flow within the tissues. By so doing they actually change the structure. As the circulation to the tissue changes the tissue itself changes.

10:00 The fact that there is very often a problem of somatopsychic genesis. However even the psychosomatic aspects can benefit from the manipulation of the tissue. The balance established through the manipulation, changing the balance in the body, starting the whole life process going at a different rate. Then, oddly enough, the emotional contents of that psychosomatic episode (and the episode itself) very often come to light and can be dealt with.

12:00 No one has yet looked at the body as consolidations of segments. It is not a single thing but is a consolidation of segments, consolidated by a membrane. Block model... Strain among the segmental relationships will show up in the membrane. They are reflecting the fundamental structure (it is structure not posture, the difference is that posture is something which you have placed, whereas structure is something that is existent down deep in thorax, in the pelvis). These strains register as complaints and symptoms.

17:00 Body is a structure that is wider at that top than at the bottom. It is the symmetry of the balance of the segments that gives it any stability. {This width difference once again points to the primary design function of the human being that of mobility (walking) rather than standing i.e., Feldenkrais from "Body and Mature Behaviour". The width can be balanced more easily when we imagine the rolling function of the functional morphology of the legs.}

18:00 Body is a plastic medium, not a fixed medium. Tent model.. The right side of the tent holds up the left side and the left side holds up the right. The function of the tent pole is to hold those segments of plastic material so that they can be balanced. If you want it to go up on the left it must go down on the right and vice versa. Whichever way that you look at this problem it is a problem of creating balance and symmetry. The body uses the various 'knots' to balance/create symmetry. As the body is balanced these begin to disappear and you see a more resilient flesh. This is the place where the psychological aspect begins to resolve.

28:00 Discusses appropriate alignment... and when you have this arrangement you get the kind of weight that goes through the hip joint, through the knee joint, through the ankle joint, down through the heavy bones. There you have the sort of thing where you begin to get the lift of the body instead of the downward collapsing of the body.