Endpoints of the Yellow Brick Road: Situs

That means “place,” I think, in Latin. Or “site.”

In a way, the process of Rolfing® SI is a journey to the situs of this very moment; present time, present space. The road hither can be long & winding, since countless factors—from unhappy childhood experiences, to acute injuries, to traumatic encounters with great cats, to apprehensions about one’s financial prospects—conspire to alienate us from our experience. These factors aggregate to such an extent that the situs of the here & now becomes unfamiliar to us; concealed behind a veil of unhappy circumstances. The present is for most of us no more than a nostalgic flavor in our sensory memories, like popsicles in July when we were seven. Since that time we have perpetually been fleeing from the situs, “trying to make something happen” at the expense of embodying ourselves in our present experience.

Indeed, such distracting factors manifest in the body. Every body is a vast archive; Libraries of Alexandria, on legs! Our structures recount whole histories. This has consequences—the body relating to a fairytale rather then the freight-train when crossing the railroad tracks demonstrates this unhappy truth. We are not to blame—who could fault a fellow for losing himself in these interminable labyrinth of past stories & future prospects? The goal of Rolfing® SI is not to burn down the library. Rather simply to discover the door. Then we read when we want. And live for the the rest of it. In the journey to where we are now, we practice the possibility of interacting with the environment as it really is, & not simply our fantasies about it. Our stories divorce us from our experience, Rolfing SI brings us closer in communion.

Does this one look distracted? Go ahead, be a cobra & slither out the nearest exit…

 

 

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