Anatomy Trains

The other debt to Ida I wanted to repay was to get some research started.  I am not a researcher; I am not even a clinician - I suppose I am a spokesperson or some such these days.  But it was great to see all the research in the fascial field that Robert Schleip and Diane Lee and Helene Langevin have been doing, along with the ringers from outside - the incomparable Donald Ingber, the startling imagery of Dr Guimberteau, and the easy humor of Serge Gracovetsky.

Wherever it goes from here - and you will see lots about this in the magazines, the Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies, in the next edition of the Anatomy Trains book, and on our website - something has been started.  Again, I had little to do with it except for an initial spark, but there were those waiting in the wings, like Tom Findlay and Robert, who made this fly.

And fly it did.

www.fascia2007.com

This last week was a fulcrum in the debt that I owe to one Ida Rolf, who provided me with a vision of significant work to do some 34 years ago. Some have said that I am a drag on her mission, diluting the work with the changes I have proposed to the recipe, and by offering courses that blur the line between her work and other related therapies. Others, happily, see my work as a contribution to the understanding of Structural Integration.

Within my own world, neither these sins nor my advances are particularly noteworthy. The work is developing quietly on a number of fronts, with or without me. But I wanted to catalyze two things, as return favors to my mentor and teacher, however brief my encounter with her. For one, I wanted to see an umbrella professional organization that would draw in the various schools, some of which started before Ida died, some of which have sprung up in these last few years. When Marilyn (Beech) accosted me in Montana in 2002, I was willing to give IASI a go, though I held little hope for its success in the face of the egos involved.

Its success - largely due to Marilyn, but I will take a little credit for the initial presentation to the community - was measured this weekend with the second convention in Cambridge, MA. With 350 of the 900+ members in attendance (around 50 of them KMI grads), including teachers from most of the schools (the Guild for Structural Integration, a once-important school, is sadly and noticeably absent), the IASI has brought in the whole community into one professional body, one with power and possibility. The speakers and panels were generally good; the breakout sessions less so, but the conversation in the halls was great.

The exam that accompanied this convention - psychometrically valid for use in legislation and accreditation - was good but strange. I turned back about 30 of the 120 questions as having no good answer or (more often) too many. The exam was not easy, was constructed to require a lot of thought, and made presumptions about how the work was being taught that I don’t think we can yet make. In the middle of it, I found myself thinking, “My friends made up this exam?” I cannot comment on the content, but it will provide good grist for the mill of people objecting to this or saying we should have more of that. In combination with more cross-pollination among the faculties and administrations, I can see a way that finally the historical separation among practitioners of this work could be bridged and progress made in getting us a seat at the table.

We have for many years been stuck in our own navel-gazing, internicene conflicts, and unsurety as to where to go. Though there is still some talk of avoiding regulation with exemption or head-in-the-sand strategies, more and more we begin to live in the real world where the undoubted contribution of Rolf’s work can shine where it can - in fascially based postural compensation.

For my own part, the 48 hours of the conference were proof that one can live on pure attention and coffee alone. I felt like a hummingbird, wings beating 100x / second, going from blossom to blossom, either taking nectar or giving it to/from so many people I rarely get to see. So many great people in this crowd! By the time I got home from this kind of performance, I was a wreck - too many people, too many expectations, too many encounters, so I am a blob for a couple fo days catching up on sleep and solitude.

Just before I introduced Judith Aston to start the conference, one pill with a downturned mouth stung me like a scorpion from something insulting that I had done to her 18 years previous! Another student of mine was looking daggers at me until I confronted her to lance the boil. Last meeting, someone similar took me to task for something I did 27 years earlier. How the human mind hangs on! How our sins live on!

In turn, I was also carrying a lot of garbage for a senior Rolfing instructor who showed up for this, from earlier times when we were both immature - and he had seemingly dropped it utterly so that my residual angst was for nothing.

I hope I have changed in the intervening, but probably not much. You pays your money and makes your choices and the chips fall. In this case, the balance is strongly ‘Yes!’ and this one debt to Ida is paid.

Those who know my work have been regularly treated to moans about how visually and auditorially dominated our educational system is, how much the kinesthetic has fallen by the wayside in our electronic age, where the kids sit slumped over their consoles, frantically pushing buttons and riding joysticks in virtual worlds, which their body in this one moves from slacker to hacker to simply hacked.

We need, I often say, a physical education for the 21st century. And the computers get the blame for so much workplace trauma (my friend Erik Dalton has an X-ray of a person slouched at a desk workstation with the caption ‘Severe spinal damage at 0 mph!’) and youth degradation. Well, maybe the computers are going to help us out of this problem to which they have contributed.

Those in the know are aware that the computerized games are getting more interactive, with remote-like devices acting like golf clubs and tennis rackets, so that with one of these in your hand, you can be interacting with a computer screen but directing a virtual ball with the whole body in increasingly naturalistic sportive movement. In other words, computers are learning about us as fast as we learn about them.

Well, get ready for the next stage - haptics. Drawn from the Greek word meaning ‘able to be grasped’ - a wonderful root meaning ‘handy’ that will take us easily to habit, rehabilitation, ability, and homo habilis - it refers to our advanced sense of touch and kinesthesia, especially in the skin of the hand.
Computer haptic devices simulate the feel of an object - an edge could be felt as an edge, a virtual sphere would be felt as a sphere, ‘encountered’ by your finger (you have to wear a special glove that’s hooked in) every time you come to its wall. But it’s better than that - they are already able to simulate a rough rubbery sphere or a smooth ivory one, so it could feel like a basketball or a billiard ball.

For one engineer working on this, “The holy grail is to do fur” - calling to mind the ‘feelies’ in Aldous Huxley’s strangely prescient Brave New World, where viewers grasp knobs to add the feel of every hair on the bear rug to the lovemaking scene in the movie. Besides the obvious applications to pornography (always the first industry to happily and gainfully employ new technology), we can imagine more prosaic applications to educating the ‘feel’ of surgery or other skilled professions, or even more prosaic, giving your finger the ‘feel’ pushing a button on the flat virtual screens of such things as my iPhone.

But it is in our own field that I see great possibilities. I have written against allowing on-line learning to take over continuing education in our hands-on profession. It is a great idea for shut-ins or the geographically isolated, but filling in a multiple guess test after reading an article or a book is an awful substitute for actually getting your hands into tissue and feeling what happens when you apply this or that intervention under supervision.

But with this technology, we could both teach and assess hands on skills without being in the same room, as a doctor in India could perform gall bladder surgery on a child in Cleveland via computer-driven laproscopic devices.  This has a truly Brave New World feel, and will be rejected by some as too cold and remote, but it certainly could be possible that the technology could become refined enough to tell when someone was pushing too hard, entering too quickly, or whether they could recognize different states of myofasciae or joint tissues under their fingers.

For me this is a bright-eyed possibility: maybe I can stay home, avoid all airplanes, and still teach students worldwide.

What a world! What imagination we have!  How little we use in our headlong race to destruction!

I started my journey at:
http://www.isfh.org/haptics.html

(Thanks, Eric)

Harvest as a word sounds like a superlative - finest, fullest, harvest. This year it has been fine and full indeed, as this season’s dry sunny days have pulled the brussels sprouts, beets, broccoli and beans out of the rich soil of Julia’s old garden. It’s our first year for limas and brussies, these latter grow so oddly, like bubonic tumours filling the armpits of the cabbagy fronds.

Annie has worked hard to make the small plot maximally productive, and September’s full moon is a time of reward. If you don’t have zucchinis (courgettes) lying around your counter these days, that is almost definitive of not having any friends.

Yesterday it was time to get the carrots out before they get woody. Annie has a new long spatular tool that avoids them breaking off, and we ended up with a mounded basket of very long carrots. We lugged it to the sink, dumped them in, and swirled them like a washing machine. The water turned opaque brown with the soil, but up from it came each orange carrot, some with strange mandrake shapes, ready for the vegetable brush treatment and into the freezer bags.

With Misty over at the table doing her college homework, and the music alternating between Jack Johnson’s jazzy lilt, Jerry Douglas’s dobro behind Alison, and some style brisée lute, one could almost imagine a calm domestic scene, so I let myself bathe in that feeling for the hour or so it takes to turn every carrot clean, shiny, and in the bag. Nothing like your own grown food.

But peace is short-lived these days. Because one of those bags, plus some apples, will come with me to see my guts through Boston for a harvest of another sort. After 30 years in the making, we (I guess I mean the heirs of Ida Rolf) are having the first Fascial Research Conference down in Boston this week, and I am totally nervous about it. Though I started this project with Marilyn Beech of IASI, it was soon out of our hands and now I am a small potato in a very large field that includes too many PhD’s to count, as well as osteopaths and docs galore. I have been retained on one panel, and I am well out of my depth.

My book is full of 5-syllable words, but really I am just a poet of the scientific metaphor, and the actual rigors, by-laws, and vocabulary of science are quite beyond me. I will be expected to be up to date on the research and the people doing it, but what with various domestic crises in the business and in the family, I am winging it once again. I speak so often in front of people, few can credit that I get stage fright almost to the point of being sick most times beforehand, but this one is worse than usual.

But the harvest of the ideas has me very excited - seeds planted so long ago by Ida, so long in the growing through drought and wind, and now so full and ripe in the fruition.  With Vleeming, Lee, Huijing, Khalsa, Ingber, Langevin, Gracovetsky, Grinnell. Willard, Hinz, and Gabbiani, it is a worldwide fusion cuisine of fascial research, so we’ll see what further seeds it plants (or manure it makes, just as likely).