Another answer I give to the question of "How is Rolfing® SI any different from massage?" is that as a Rolfer™, I strive to serve my client to the highest degree that I can, and massage is a tool that I sometimes use. But it does no one any service if I decide to meet every situation I encounter with a single tool.

I try to come up with a different answer every time someone asks me this. But I'm a conservationist as well as a conversationalist, so occasionally, this latter impulse gets the better of me & I find myself recycling responses. One obvious difference between these two modalities is that Rolfing® SI gets to flaunt the little "®" ornament under the protection of legal mercenaries & the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, both parties who receive remuneration by our annual membership dues.

"If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands!" If you don't know it, don't do anything because you can't... Or, as former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld memorably presented this epistemological quandary:

This is the counsel of Monica Caspari, whom I have the privilege of having called my instructor for four months during my Movement & Unit III training in São Paulo, Brazil. In her foundational article "The Functional Rationale of the Recipe," published in Rolf Lines in 2005, she declares that "deliciousness, joy, and happiness are more important than perfection" (5) for our clients.

Autonomy is a wonderfully appealing concept. Who wants King George dictating whence we import our Breakfast Tea? In the context of Rolfing® Structural Integration, autonomy is not too shabby an objective either. By this, I mean to suggest that we seek a condition in which each part of our being contributes to the whole according to its design—not more, not less.

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.

Whenever we come upon an intersection along this circular journey, we have a choice: do we go left or right? Always go with your guts. But if this profound voice of wisdom perchance remains silent in this crucial moment, I feel it was a useful exercise to frame the decision according to a question: Does turning left increase or decrease my possibilities?

It often strikes me as I am explaining the process of Rolfing® Structural Integration that each of the said explanations is different. Though the goal might be the same, it seems that there are innumerable ways to describe it. Like many different fingers pointing at a single moon, there is an ineffable confluence at which all these descriptions meet.

In Part I of this bit, I tried to show how posture and morality come apart. That dismemberment, I feel, must be the first step. The second step is to yoke them back together.

"The seventh circle of Hell is reserved for those who...slouch?"

It is so natural to moralize about posture that we often do it without even noticing. We often apply such terms as "bad," "good," or "lousy" to our alignment & physiognomy without even pausing to consider the moral judgment implicit in such labels. I believe it is useful to recognize this tendency and to appreciate that posture in itself is neither good nor evil, rather "

"What are the benefits?"

Through Rolfing, we come to inhabit our bodies with greater skill. Life becomes easier as a consequence.

"What's the point?"*

Rolfing® SI allows us to live more skillfully in our bodies. To live is, most basically, to sustain a relationship with the world for approximately four years & ten. The finer this relationship, the easier our lives become. Rolfing® SI provides a path to this end—towards more natural integration of the body with its environment.

"Why in the world would you choose such an ominous name as "The Way of the Elbow" to call your business?"

No answer. But I can say I was going to call it the "Tao of the Elbow," but I made a compromise with normalcy...

...Or withstanding it?

I would like to suggest that standing with it was a more useful response. This is because the minute we try to avoid the physical discomfort, we have already generated "another nail," so to speak. Now we have three points of impalement:

After we appreciate that pain is fundamentally a message from the body (often including very pertinent contents!) to the conscious mind, we can move on to recognizing another essential aspect of pain: that it is at least as metaphysically nebulous as the term "metaphysically nebulous" itself. What I mean with this unnecessarily ambiguous description is that pain as such can not be measured

I suspect that everyone is familiar with unpleasant bodily experiences. Sometimes, a fellow doesn't even need to get out of bed in the morning to begin to study pain in its natural habitat—pain is endemic to living in a body. But despite our preconceptions, pain is not (necessarily) bad.

The body knows how to move & do it well–that is what it was made for. Conditions only conspire at inopportune times to obstruct this capacity that is innate in each of us. My job is to reawaken the capacity for movement that is balanced, fluid, & free.