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.