The legendary Chinese sage Lao Tzu expresses what we all know: hardness hurts. To be alive is to continually adapt to a dynamic environment; with every step, the latter changes. If we fail to respond, we suffer & die. When our bodies stiffen, we lose this capacity for responsiveness.

A circle is perfect if every point of its perimeter lies equidistant from its center. A triangle is isosceles if each of its angles measures 60°.Four corners engender a quadrilateral.

Everyone loves to be busy. There's nothing wrong with that, especially if we love it. Day jobs, camping, soccer games, school, volunteering, dinner parties—that's just an average Wednesday. Our activities define us. But from the whirlwind, it's not difficult to lose orientation & forget which way is up.

In the prior post, I presented Rolfing® Structural Integration as a consummate method to increase our quantity of life. By potentiating our vital energies, & by establishing us in a condition of continual embodiment, Rolfing SI augments the breadth & depth of our living experience; we receive life at a higher bandwidth.

When a client comes into The Way of the Elbow Headquarters, we enter into a cooperative relationship in which his or her flourishing is our shared aim. Ultimately, Rolfing® Structural Integration benefits the client by increasing both the quality & quantity of her life. How? I will address the latter component of this claim first since it probably appears the more outrageous.

"The goal of Rolfing® Structural Integration is the integration of the structure."

Clearly, this tautology means almost nothing; I basically just repeated myself. Not only are such statements recursive, but they are also vague. But there is another important shortcoming of this first sentence, which is less obvious than the vagueness (& ergo maybe more insidious): this description of Rolfing is conceptual.

That's Nietzsche, of course, from Thus Spake Zarathustra. The latter fellow was an ancient prophet from Persia, "Zoroaster," he was called in Greece, "Aureate Star." But when the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said that "a man never steps in the same river twice," he simply dressed Nietzsche's message in a fluvial metaphor.

First, please don't believe anything I say—see for yourself. But likewise, don't disbelieve it because I said it—see for yourself in that case, too: "When the bird & the book disagree, believe the bird." ” I think John Audubon said that.

One aspect of Rolfing® Structural Integration that appeals to people is its promise of progress. While the effects of conventional massage often do not extend far beyond the end of the session, any Rolfing® session leaves lasting ripples in its wake. Rolfing SI seeks progress over time.

All forms of Nature take part in the grand circum-ambulatory cakewalk of creation. Too much growth suffocates; too little, and we wither away to non-being and appropriating our elements for the creation of new marvels. So we see life as a tango performed between the twin poles of creation and annihilation, an interminable dance of dynamic oscillation.

Ceci n'est pas une pipe

The concurrent coincidence of opposites: the pipe is not a pipe. Why? If it were a pipe, you could take it in your hand and feel its weight, its balance & its texture. You could fill its belly with tobacco, & muse about Being & Nothingness in the fading light between intermittent puffs.

As Rolfers™, we've earned a reputation, or ten. We probably deserve at least two of them. I flatter myself to think I have deserved at least this: a true concern for (W)holism. Consider a client stiffly striding into company headquarters to complain of a sore neck: it is tempting to squelch the cervical mutiny with an ulnar blade & call it "the way of the elbow."

Suppose our behavior is a block of marble: the latter matter which conceals a secret David or Donna deep within. The sculptor's art is to remove the extraneous fragments so that the figure might stand forth in all its essential majesty.

When I walk into a room, what do I see?

Let us, for our purposes, stipulate two categories of possible objects: one solid & the other vacuous. The said secernment accommodates the following investigation: