The Gingham Dog & the Calico Cat, Side by Side at the Table Sat...
Quadratus lumborum strikes again! I was not being facetious when I suggested this was a common complaint. In a recent post, I suggested that a "problem" in the body is never truly a problem of the body. I asserted that such cases are the physical expression of tension or struggle that we are sustaining with some aspect of our experience. wn mistaken metaphysics.
Ye Rainbow-eyed Devil of Habit & the Yoga Thereof
Plant a thought, reap an action. Sow a habit, reap your character.
Ye Elemental Epilogue
In the penultimate post of this series, called Ye Five Elements, Vertical, I presented the metaphor of an elevator traveling on a vertical trajectory about the pentad of elements. I suggested that good maintenance of the elevator is essential to a pleasurable experience (lest one end up stuck between floors in this five-storied turret and find oneself forced to breathe through one nostril withal as a means to ration oxygen while one awaiteth a coordinated rescue operation to save one from one's own refusal to release a particular involvement—remember, this is a metaphor...). Joyriding demands fluid transitions—otherwise, it's not joyful, and it really couldn't be called "riding," either.
Ye Five Elements Vertical
In this post's antecedent, I presented an elemental pentad as another paradigm of integration. In this model I employed the five elements of Earth, Water, Fire, Air, & Ether as symbols for various qualities of the human being & human experience. One might imagine such model to represent a horizontal dimension to this vital interplay. In such a conception, our task was to ensure a balanced proportion & inter-relation between all the several elements.
Ye Three Kingdoms & Ye Five Elements that Constitute Them
In a prior post, I introduced the metaphor of Three Kingdoms—World, Perception, & Conception—that together constitute the human experience. We might observe a correspondence between Body, Mind, & Spirit, respectively.
Ye Three Kingdoms of Integration
This is not an altogether uncommon complaint from a client striding through the door at The Way of the Elbow headquarters. My response is typically to do everything I reasonably can to alleviate his or her discomfort. Often a substantial aspect of this Structural (re)Integration will be to placate bellicose connective tissue by means of a gentle elbow, or two. Rolfing® SI, even in caricature, often really works: to (judiciously) apply this sort of pressure is a capital form of communication,* in the right circumstances. But there are other subtler channels for the exchange of information besides.
Somatic Myth-Making & Its Discontents
Story-telling is fun; weaving a retrospective narrative about one's journey to the present allows us to envelop our experience within the cradle of meaning. Such context is comforting, even if the pillows that line this contextual cradle are not real pillows but conceptual ones, wrought of no sterner stuff than stipulation.
Sand, Sunsets, Wild-flowers: Freeing Fixations of Fascia to Dissever the Fetters of the Soul!
Remember looking out over the water and realizing the whole meaning of everything in that very sunset? Or peering into the entire cosmos in a baby's eyes? Or maybe you found such a mystical experience in a cold beer & particularly delicious slice of pizza.
Plaster-Ceilings Seen Through the Looking-Glass: What's Wrought of Words Where the Elbow Fails
Like all generalizations, this claim is such an impoverished approximation as comparing my modest skill to that of Michelangelo. Happily for everyone, each of my clients is, from the outset, gifted by Nature with such an extraordinary design that it far outshines the bare Sistine Chapel ceiling—otherwise, mine would be a pitiful enterprise indeed.
"Find the Line" & the Limits of Language: Featuring Minotaurs, Labyrinths, & Midnight's Softer Sun
Three words. To actually perform said feat is something else entirely.
The words suggest the thing, but they are not it. This discrepancy between language and real stuff usefully delineates two types of understanding for any given posture or motion—one conceptual & the other embodied.
Differentia of Rolfing: Moonlight & Screwdrivers
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.
Differentia of Rolfing: Magic Snorkels & Registered Trademarks
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.
Push-me-pull-you & Other Figments of Intention
There is a certain feeling that besets a fellow on the freeway the minute he realizes that he never disengaged the parking brake after leaving the garage... better suffer this feeling than fail to notice altogether.
Endpoints of the Yellow Brick Road: Consciousness
"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:
Chauvenism versus "The Tyger"
Calvinism, Catholicism, antidisestablishmentarianism, & a mickle more -isms of this ilk: they all inform our experience. These belief systems are stencils through which we trace a pre-determined reality; when I wear red glasses, even avocadoes look red. Interacting through such belief systems, we see only what we already know. This modus operandi is useful for its expedience.
Endpoints of the Yellow Brick Road: Deliciousness
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.
Endpoints of the Yellow Brick Road: Autonomy
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.
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.
Waypoints of the Yellow Brick Road: Possibility
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?
Endpoints of the Yellow Brick Road
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.