(This article appeared in the August, 2021 edition of the Journal of the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute)
First training — Boulder, 1994
It’s mid-February, 1994, on our first day of training and we are about to start the first practicum. Our task is to explore the range of movement of the upper leg. I have zero massage experience and have never done anything like this before. My practicum partner, Michelle, is supine and I am holding her leg, slightly bent, off the table at an angle of about ninety degrees. I am in a buoyant mood because I have just heard that I have secured a contract teaching job in Taiwan for one year starting in April, a great relief because the cost of the training has left me broke.
I start to push Michelle’s leg around, at first slowly, then gradually speeding up. I am swept along with the excitement of the first day of class and meeting many people. My movements are clumsy and jolting. Michelle doesn’t let on how bad it must feel.
The assistant appears at my side. “What are you doing?” Bob asks.
“Exploring,” I reply.
“But that’s way too fast. Here, let me show you.”
Bob steps in, takes hold of Michelle’s leg and carefully supports its weight. Instead of pushing her leg as if it were an inanimate object, as I was doing, he leans his body forward and carries it with him, forward, back, shifting to the side in a kind of dance.
“You get the idea? Now you have a go.”
I take hold of the leg more carefully than before and start to push, but Bob stops me and places a hand gently on my back.
“Let your weight settle into your feet.
”I feel the muscular tension in my arms relax as my feet hug the floor. “Yes, that’s it. Now… slowly start to move.”
This time I feel connected to Michelle’s leg, compared to before when it was like a foreign object. My hands support her leg evenly as I lean my body forward. It is difficult to coordinate at first but becomes easier after rocking forward and backward a few times. I start to get a feel for the end point of the femur and how it swivels in the hip socket. It dawns on me that the secret is in minimising effort, not using strength.
“This feels like Tai Chi,” I say.
“And it feels much better!” Michelle adds, evidently relieved.
I first came across Rolfing while teaching English in Iida, Japan, in 1993. My employer and friend Shigeho called me one day and said: “You need to meet this guy; he talks like you.” She was referring to Mark Caffall, a Rolfer who was teaching a form of Structural Integration (Shin-Integration) to a group of Japanese students in Ina, Nagano Prefecture. Shigeho had been quite depressed for a week after dropping a knife on her foot. When she called me she was euphoric and claimed that seeing Mark for thirty minutes had turned her mood around. I never got to meet Mark Caffall as he moved away but I did get hold of and study Ida Rolf’s book and was hooked by the first line, the Norman Wiener quote: “We are not stuff that abides, but patterns which perpetuate themselves.” Soon after I called the Rolf Institute and made the commitment to go to Boulder for the first part of the training, called Foundations of Bodywork (FOB) at that time.
That first training in the two-floor building on Pearl Street was excellent. Til Luchau led an extremely creative class assisted by Jon Martine and other teachers were involved. Cornelia Rossi taught anatomy; Peter Levine came in for a couple of days to talk about the autonomic nervous system and trauma; Jim Oschman also gave a couple of lectures and Vivian Jaye and Caryn McHose took us through some embodiment pieces. Tom Myers was around for a few days and a few of us attended an early morning stretching class that he offered. The FOB students bonded well as we plunged into the rich phenomenological realm of embodiment, gave and received many massage hours and explored the fascinating dynamics of therapeutic relationship. As the class progressed I was the Rolfing Movement model for Jane Harrington’s class in the adjacent room and also received my first Rolfing Series from Pam Rankin, who practiced in the Rolf Institute building. Just before the class started I completed Reiki levels one and two and also attended Tai Chi classes. The whole experience was a crash course in somatic ontology and I loved it.
At the end of the class four of us went to the Grand Canyon, descended into the valley and slept by the river for three days. It was a fitting way to round off what had been a deeply transformational experience in Boulder. After this I went to Taiwan to earn money for Phase 2 in Sao Paolo, Brazil, in 1996, and then taught for another two years in Japan to save up for the third and final part of the training in Salvador in Bahia, Brazil. I was certified as a Rolfer and Rolf Movement practitioner by Tessy Brungardt and Lael Keen on 7th August 1998.
Starting a Rolfing practice in London, 1998
I am standing near the esoteric bookshop on Neal Street, close to Covent Garden tube station. It is lunchtime on a cold grey day in November, three months after arriving in London, and it is about to rain. My Rolfing clinic is a three-minute walk away in Neal’s Yard, a charming little alley with organic food cafes, a Chinese herb shop and Neal’s Yard Remedies, a shop which sells natural health products.
The framework for my Rolfing business is in place: my clinic here in Covent Garden, my other office at home in Clapham, a website, business cards, leaflets, an advert running in Time Out. Yet in spite of being in the ideal location my new business has not got going. In the whole of October I have seen just five clients and I am concerned about paying the rent.
One problem is that I am new to London, having recently returned from years living abroad. My only contact in London on arrival was my brother. The second problem is that hardly anybody has heard about Rolfing. It is difficult to just sit back and wait for clients to come. I have to do something.
I watch the people walking past me on Neal Street. Clutching a batch of leaflets in my left hand, I take one in my right hand and hold it up, breathe deeply and try to banish thoughts of my own ridiculousness.
“Rolfing! Rolfing!” I shout to the passing crowd.
There is an Arabic saying: “Throw your heart in front of you and run ahead to catch it.” Sometimes you just have to take a risk and ignore inhibitions or embarrassment in order to make a bold statement about what you believe in. This was one of those moments. I gave my leaflets to several people and extolled the benefits of Rolfing. Although none of these people ever contacted me to arrange a session, the moment seems in hindsight to have been important.
Admittedly in the first six months after arriving back in the UK I had doubts about creating a viable business as a Rolfer. I had been living away from the UK for eleven years, was experiencing reverse culture shock, and no one in the UK seemed to know about Rolfing. Jeffrey Birch and Darcy Ortolff had practiced briefly in London in the 1970s, and James Bardot and Tom Myers later practiced there in the 1980s. By the time I arrived these people had left and I was one of only eight Rolfers in England. Jennie Crewdson, Prue Rankin-Smith and Allen Rudolf were the elders. My back up plan to make a living if the Rolfing didn’t work out was to become a Japanese translator, but it never got to that. Somehow the act of standing outside a bookshop in the cold proclaiming Rolfing to the world crystallised my determination to succeed. It required digging deep into inner resources of tenacity to get out of my comfort zone. In talking the talk I came to believe I could walk the walk. Standing in the rain on a cold day shouting “Rolfing! Rolfing!” spurred me on to put the word out and believe it could work. I went on to do leaflet drops and a few Rolfing talks and demonstrations. Gradually the clients showed up.
Being a Rolfer
Looking back on twenty two years of practice as a Rolfer it is possible to identify some key moments and important learning points. It took a couple of years to get the work into my hands and grow confident from practice and encouraging results. After a few years I discovered that it is easy to get complacent in this work, get into a set rhythm, to just tick along, buoyed by sufficient positive feedback from clients to persuade myself that I was doing really good work, when in fact the quality could have been much better. When my enthusiasm started to flag I registered for a workshop. The continuing education really paid off as it gave me new techniques, concepts and approaches that could be integrated into my way of working. This was an incremental and continual process: stagnation; workshop and new inspiration leading to improved quality of work — two steps forward; stagnation after a while — one step back; new workshop, two steps forward, and so on. Some forward leaps were more significant than others.
The biggest influences on my work have been my two-year Craniosacral Therapy (CST) diploma, the Advanced training and assisting classes. Before the CST training I had been almost carelessly pushing myofascia around, basically ‘fascia mashing’. The theoretical model for our work in my Basic Rolfing training was the thixotropic effect where the friction, pressure or heat we applied with our fingers, knuckles and elbows changed the consistency of fascia from a gluey gel state to a semi-liquid sol state. Robert Schleip was already talking about the role of the nervous system but the gel-to-sol model prevailed for some time.
My CST training involved many hours using extremely light finger and hand pressure, basically just sitting and waiting for ages, almost like meditation. It was the opposite of the funky sliding movements I had been doing in Rolfing. But this still, patient, waiting approach to client contact taught me to respect the client’s nervous system. This perspective of trusting the inherent healing capacity of the client started to become baked into my way of working. Before CST training a session would involve performing a string of myofascial techniques with very little space between them. After the CST training this way of working changed to a process of carefully contacting the tissue, withdrawing after an appropriate time, sitting back and waiting, consciously giving space, then contacting the tissue again. CST showed me how to touch the myofascia with permission from the client’s nervous system, and gave me an appreciation of how important a sense of timing and space is to a positive outcome. Music is the space between the notes.
The Advanced training, with Tessy Brungardt, Jan Sultan and Harvey Burns in 2006, was a second awakening. In the training there was plenty of time to ask questions that had been hanging for years as well as to try out new things. Beforehand I was accustomed to sliding about in the tissue, but the Advanced class gave me the space to learn and develop a different way of contacting the fascia, namely by hooking and waiting. This was a revelation to me at the time and seemed to improve the quality of my results significantly. In the CST I had learned how to wait for the nervous system response and how to track the subtle rhythms, but only by using very light pressure (5 grams). The Advanced class taught me that this waiting and tracking could also be effective while sensitively using considerable pressure deep into the myofascial system. I was starting to wake up to the importance of making deep precise contact with the tissue at the available layer and making subtle modifications of compression and direction while holding a receptive global awareness of the client’s body.
The CST training and the Advanced class were such powerful influences that I only did a few workshops in the next five years because I was still absorbing and embodying the rich material from those two trainings. The next step in learning came when I assisted a few Phase 1 modules (two Touch and one Rolfing Movement) and two Phase 2 classes, one in Munich with Harvey Burns (2018) and the other in the UK with Giovanni Felicioni (2019). The privilege of interacting with the students, finding ways to help them learn and witnessing their huge progress is deeply rewarding. It has also further improved my own knowledge and practice.
Rolfing and the pandemic
The pandemic of 2020 was a challenge for most Rolfers because of the restrictions on physical contact. For me it was disappointing not to be able to visit Boulder as scheduled in April 2020 for the first time since that life-changing training twenty seven years ago. It was also disappointing that the Phase 2 I was due to assist in Munich in October was cancelled. The UK is currently in its third national lockdown which started just before Christmas 2020. Overall in 2020 there were twenty-four weeks where UK Rolfers were prohibited from doing contact sessions. It was frustrating that Osteopaths, Chiropractors and Physiotherapists were able to work from about mid June, whereas Rolfers and the rest of the bodywork community were bizarrely grouped under the heading of Massage Parlours and shut down. When we were able to open again at the end of July 2020 there was something noticeably different about the sessions. After suffering restricted human contact for four months, both myself and clients derived extra benefit from the neurobiological interaction of the Rolfing sessions. Clients came in for their first session in months looking wonky and tense after sitting for hours a day working from home, looked great by the end of the session and seemed surprised and relieved to rediscover their embodiment.
It was beautiful to see the opera singing on the balconies in Italy at the start of the pandemic and to take part in the clapping of the National Health Service front line care workers at 8pm on Thursday evenings. Deprived of the social contact normally taken for granted, people created opportunities for social engagement wherever possible, saying hello to strangers in the park or chatting to the Amazon couriers. The irony is that during this pandemic most Rolfers are unable to work at the very time when people most need Rolfing. When people are denied physical contact they need touch in order to regulate their frazzled nervous systems and stay connected to their bodies. Rolfing helps people to claim the somatic part of their identity and brings the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual aspects of their being into harmony.
The human condition is like an enigma wrapped in a mystery. Nietzsche said:
“What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an over-going and a down-going.”
These words evoke the human range of being, between an earthbound animalistic existence and airy mental experience, somewhere between a beast and a god. In a digital age where many people seem to identify more with their mental side, Rolfing has an important role to play in bringing people home to their bodies. Rolfing not only integrates a person’s structure, but can also create and reinforce the habit of mindful embodied awareness.
At the height of the pandemic a series of free webinars was offered, first by the Guild and then by DIRI. Many teachers generously gave their time to share their knowledge and wisdom. In a time of isolation, forbidden to do the work we love, the sense of community created by these webinars was heart warming. In the middle of a crisis for our profession, the webinars reaffirmed a sense of belonging to a remarkable group of people dedicated to helping other people flourish. I am pleased to belong to such a collection of people.The world needs groups of people like this: people like us.