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SI: Formula or Process?

Monday, November 29th, 2010

An osteopath friend writes:

As a ten-fingered osteopathic physician and fasicanista who has also experienced SI and KMI from several master practitioners, I would suggest that there are times when skill overrides protocol. One of my training… mentors is Ilana Rubenfeld, Rolf’s contemporary in developing bodywork. She used to refer to Grandma Ida’s cookbook of ten recipes. Surely SI is more than formulaic!

As a DO, I have been instructed in figuring out how to use touch for diagnosis and treatment. Sadly, most DOs nowadays practice medicine as non-MDs with less overt usage of osteopathic manipulative medicine or treatment (OMM & OMT). Medical intentional therapeutic touch recommends reconsidering a finding if it reappears more than a few times– is something else needing attention or incompletely resolved? When receiving Rolfing by Tom Findley MD PhD SI and by Rosemary Feitas SI DO (alphabet soup after all our names), our work required several more sessions than ten to feel complete. Is this right or wrong?!? No!!! Yes!!!

Teachers are happiest when students take the work a step further. Let us commit to doctrine without dogma to better ourselves, further our work, and develop new models and methods as individual and our clients/patients are!

And my hot reply:

Without trying to usurp your work or your degree, I consider myself a ‘ten-fingered’ afascianado myself. One of the wonderful things about a kinesthetic conversation between two intelligent systems is that information can go both ways at once without loss of signal. (The same does not apply for spoken conversations – just tune into Fox News for proof of this assertion.) We can be feeling / assessing and treating at the same time – it’s a wonderful, protocol-free state that I imagine both you and I share in an thrive on.

Dismissing Grandma Ida’s cookbook and SI as formulaic is an easy path that many have taken before you. Not to be bellicose, but in California of the 70′s, I encountered many students of Ilana’s (not Ilana herself, I hasten to add) whose reflexive reversion to “And how’s that manifested in your life?” amounted to an unchanging protocol that soon grew tiresome.

If SI was so fixed, I doubt it would have fascinated Ida or even the likes of me for a professional lifetime. The idea of a multi-session map to the territory of the body with a beginning, a middle, and an end built into it – whether that is ten, twelve or forty steps in the process – is an idea which DO’s, DC’s, LMT’s, psychotherapists and a host of other workers could usefully incorporate.

In practice, so many of these folks go on and on treating week after week, month after month without end – and I have many personal examples of OMM DO’s in this Maine area who do this with clients I refer to them – until the client either runs out of money, or comes to their own conclusion that the treatment has lost effectiveness.

While understandable from an economic or inertia standpoint, I feel strongly that this is a bad model to work under, and hope that osteopathic schools will come to see the value in designing a treatment plan that includes a ‘recipe’ for integration, completion, and letting go.

Too few of us, in performing the neighborly function of treatment, understand the value of an endgame to complete the process, or at the very least the value of fallow periods where the body integrates without further treatment. Ida and SI understand and incorporate this value into the schooling and the ‘formula’.

If SI were actually a fixed protocol, I could sit still for the ‘Ida’s cookbook’ remark. But it is not – her recipe is defined as a series of territories, goals, considerations, all dependent for actual treatment on the wonderfully complex findings within the client.

Of course, the best meals come from using a recipe as a guide, and either adding your own spice, or even throw out the recipe altogether because it inspired you to something more interesting, or because you had other ingredients on hand. All this metaphor applies to well-done SI.

Sorry for the diatribe, my dear, you just hammered an oft-pounded thumb.

And David Lauterstein adds:

“Lovely, Tom. The first part of what you’ve written recalls a beautiful passage from “Body, Memory, and Architecture” by Charles Moore (RIP) a brilliant and kind man: “The haptic sense is the sense of touch reconsidered to include the entire body rather than merely the instruments of touch, such as the hands. To sense haptically is to experience objects in the environment by actually touching them (by climbing a mountain rather than staring at it). Treated as a perceptual system the haptic incorporates all those sensations (pressure, warmth, cold, pain and kinesthetics) which previously divided up the sense of touch, and thus it includes all those aspects of sensual detection which involve physical contact both inside and outside the body. For example, if you accidentally swallow a marble you may haptically sense it as it moves through your body, thus experiencing part of the environment within your body. Similarly, you may sense body motion haptically by detecting movement of joints and muscle through your entire bodyscape. No other sense deals as directly with the three-dimensional world or similarly carries with it the possibility of altering the environment in the process of perceiving it; that is to say, no other sense engages in feeling and doing simultaneously. This action/reaction characteristic of haptic perception separates it from all other forms of sensing which, in comparison, come to seem rather abstract.” And, as far as forms go, though I don’t practice the SI protocol (just never learned it that way), I do the ZB protocol and of course, the twelve bar blues. :) ”

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One Plus One Makes Three

Wednesday, November 10th, 2010

Along with the Tensegrity You Tube I FB’d yesterday, this wonderful lecture on the basics of tensegrity in the body is worth a read:

8th International Congress of the F.M. Alexander Technique 10 – 16 August 2008 in Lugano, Switzerland

Lecture by Doris Dietschy, Basel, Switzerland

One Plus One Makes Three

(Buckminster Fuller’s principles of complementary forces as a way to understand our ability to balance and move)

I want to talk today of the synergetic quality opposing forces may show when they meet in a intercomplementary situation. Synergy means that a system as a whole (the human body for instance) functions in a new quality very different from what could be predicted from studying all the single parts involved.

I do not talk to you as a physicist, but as person who spent more than half of her professional life in the architectural world. Working later as an Alexander Teacher meant to get into contact with a new aspect, but again one of architecture. My eyes, my fascinations and my feelings continue to be those of a designer.

The person who spent a lifetime to explore the principles and conditions of synergy was the American ingenious engineer, inventor, artist and philosopher Buckminster Fuller, (P 1),who lived from 1895 – 1983. With his structural models he made the invisible forces involved experienceable and useable, and if we Alexander teachers ever heard about him, it is thanks to the structural system called „Tensegrity“ (P 2), to the Tensegrity models or even to Tensegrity toys. Tensegrity is Buckminster Fuller’s abbreviation for „tensional integrity“ on which the system is based. He himself applied it mainly for architectural constructions (P 3) and with them he found his first acknowledgement. Later biologists and physicians began to apply the models and principles to their work and so did people interested in body functions like us, with the result, that Tensegrity might even be misunderstood as a new theory in natural science or a new therapy. It is not. It is a structural reality and Fuller’s name for his demonstrations of basic principles, to be discovered everywhere in the universe, including our living bodies.

For me his most important contribution is that he developed ways to really show how principles of energy and synergy work. He showed that they do so in the macrocosm, in the scale of our daily world, as well as in the microworld. Fuller was deeply convinced that with the help of his models he could speak to the senses directly and encourage new ways of comprehending which he called “embodiments of mind.“

To demonstrate for instance why he calls the triangle (P 4) the “minimum flex-cornered polygon … that holds its shape“ Fuller uses three tubes strung on a dacron string. Pulling the loose ends slowly closer and closer together he obtains in the end a triangle. Its stabilitiy is not dependent on any fixed angles or corners but uniquely on the intercomplementarity of two forces: one, that of the pipes which push out against each other so that each pipe always stabilizes the opposite angle built by the two other pipes. The other force is that of the through (1) running string which continuously pulls. The result is synergy pure: an absolutely stable triangle, with new qualities not predictable by the qualities of its components. In the tetrahedron, the polygon built of 4 triangles, Fuller finds “the minimum structural system of the univers“. (P 5) We find it in the microworld of molecules, cells, viruses, etc as well. The various Tensegrity models (P 6) are elaborations of the same principles, demonstrating that stability can be gained without fixing the solid parts to each other and hence maintaining flexibility throughout the whole structures.

The human body as a whole can be understood as one Tensegrity system (T 7), a stable- flexible structure. Within that system the heavy bones push outwards, away from each other. Connective tissue (as the name says), muscles and skin constitute the complementary force of inwardly directed tension throughout the whole body. Looking into this one whole Tensegrity body you can detect smaller partial Tensegrity systems, such as, for instance, the pelvis (P 8) with its bony parts tending to move apart and outwards. The strong short muscles, tendons, fascia and ligaments draw it together to a very stable yet still flexible structure. To look at the spine (P 9) from a Tensegrity point of view reveals a combination of all principles: Vertrebae with their inner tetrahedron like texture are resistent to pressure and take on the role of struts. All intervertebral discs are complete Tensegritysystems by themselves: under pressure their liquid kernel pushes out to the elastic hull which tends back in. They function like shockabsorbers between the vertebrae. Again, connective tissue and muscles around and all along the spine complement in such a way that the whole spine functions as the stable- flexible and load bearing structure we count on.

Anatomy books describe the bony structure of the body as the part which carries load and gives the body its dimensions, while muscles and connective tissue provide stability for the skeleton and move the bones. It is a truth which nevertheless leads to the misunderstanding of many body trainings, that optimal body stability requires a maximum work of muscles. True, muscles do stabilise. But over trained, chronically hard working muscles shorten and thicken (T 10). They loose their elasticity, their ability to lengthen and they constantly press onto the organism. Mobility and stability seem to oppose each other.

Is this contradiction a fact we have to accept? (T 11) Buckminster Fuller’s research and structural models prove a different truth: that the human body synergises mobility and stability into the mobile, stable-elastic condition which is so significant for human beings.

I repeat: in our bodies the heavy, compact bones tend to move – or shift – apart and so trigger the stretch resistence of the tissue and the muscles which then contract. Or the other way arround: the abiltiy of tissue and muscles to respond to the moving apart of the bones by maintaining elasticity in contraction allows the bones to move freely, with unfixed joints. This continuous interplay of forces works in all positions (P 12), no matter how or where you stand, on your feet, on your hands, hanging or floating and garantees the intergrity of the whole bodily system. Fuller demonstrates these principles with construction material. But they are just as true for living beings and we can rely on them.

Men and animals also have an extended and complex nervous system. The diversity of the system allows it to initiate muscle reactions to maintain positions independently of our awareness and it provides us at the same time with the possibility to make conscious decisions to act and to steer our actions according to our ideas, needs and judgments. We are able to transform our energy into willed action. Different from unanimated objects we can move on our own will and we can actively influence our surrounding.

However, in spite of a reliable body structure and the most extraordinary nervous system, to be active in this world our body is dependent on forces which counteract to it’s weight. To move from one place to another I am dependent on a world outside of myself, which is solid enough to resist and support me whith its forces of substance and form, from which I can repel. The more dense for instance the ground is on which I want to move, the easier it is to walk on it. Walking on sand is more difficult, because the loose sand lacks density to resist my weight. We cannot walk on water, but in the water, when I do the swimming movement, I push back the water with my arms and legs while I am pushed forward by the water’s resistance.

I want to move a heavy object. Its weight is a force which resists mine. To overcome it (P 13) I push by repelling from the floor or even from the wall behind me. It is with my weight that I apply force upon the ground under me. Its density determines the force of resistance which is directed back toward me, along my entire structure. Or in a physisict’s terms: Resting objects exert forces against their supports and at the same time the supports exert an upthrust against the object resting upon them.

Balance, too, results in an interplay of forces. Take for instance some large pieces of stone, one put on top of the other to form a pillar (P 14). They are heavy, dense, and therefore resistant to pressure. Because of this resistance they may be considered as actualle pushing away from each other. It is the gravitiy of the enormous mass of the earth, which ‚catches’ them back into a stable balance between the two forces, perpendicular over the center of the earth.

Yet the parts of the human body very rarely arrange neatly one on top of the other (P 15) like the stones in the examples before. Every movement contradicts that state. Moving I leave the balance I just had. Moving I risk that my bones fall asunder. Yet I trust, that my connective tissue and my muscles bind the bones which move away from each other back to a new balance, which again allows a next shifting away into a next balanced movement.

In every movement the body parts shift away from each other. Let’s have a closer look (P 16) at a diagram of a person in the act of squatting, seen from the side. Use your imagination to see and sense how the weight of that person is delivered throught the bones to the ground. The ground resists with its density force in the opposite direction, in this case upwards along the bones. The lower legs receive it in an angle of about 45°, the thighs receive it in a counter angle of maybe 90° and hand it on to the trunk and head, again in an angular direction. Each part has its specific center of weight, wide apart from the others. It is the correlation with the continuous contracting, yet elastic quality of connective tissue, skin and muscles arround each bony part and throughout the whole bony structure which assures the synergetic integrity of the body in every movement.

These dispositions we all bring with us to this planet and this planet meets us with its permanent support, allowing us to employ our structural freedom in all dimensions.
As said before we can discover the working of the complementary forces in unanimated as well as in animated nature. The more we know, understand and embody these principles, the more we can let them work for us, in each moment, in every act, as a basic in the use of ourself.

Constructive use of the self includes my awareness that it is a multitude of systems, (T 17), which interact into one functioning human being. Many of these systems function autonomously. Others, like our voluntary breathing, are also influenced by our consciousness. The most elaborate in this regard is the nervous system, which steers most functions without our being conscious of it and has at the time brought forward a human brain and mind, capable to generate conscious goals, needs, believes, fears. actions etc, developed during evolution, and also in every individual life.

We consider ourself as self-determining beings, sometimes to such an extent that we believe we ought to or could will our whole organism or steer all of it consciously. I use Mind over Body as a headline for this attitude.We all know of the opposite idea: Let the wisdom of the organism find its best way and the headline could be Nature over Mind. (T 18)

It is my strong belief that no hierachical either – or point of view is of any help, For our existence in this complex world we are dependent on a multitude of different well functioning systems in us. One of them is what we name our consiousness and self determination. A very different one, one of many, is what I call the Tensegrity system in us, our autonomous inborn mobile-elastic stablity. (P 19) The aim of this lecture is to demonstrate how interactive complementary forces within us and without us bring forth a synergetic third condition, which is more than its parts. This is a truth which can be experienced kinesthetically, as mobility within stability and stability within mobility. Simply put, we move with more trust with this understanding.

And to finish I would like to cite my favorite quote from Buckminster Fuller, which says: (T 20) Unity is plural and at minimum two (Fuller 1992, p. 57)

Bibliography

Fuller, R. B. Cosmography (1992) Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller
Fuller, R. B. Your Private Sky (1999) Lars Müller Publishers
Fuller, R. B. Your Private Sky – Diskurs (2001) Lars Müller Publishers
Roberts, T. D. M. Understanding Balance (1995) Chapman & Hall
Levin, St. M. (1998) A different approach to the mechanics of the human pelvis: Tensegrity’ ATI Exchange 6 / 2; pp. 1, 4-10
Levin, St. M. (1998) ‘Continuous tension, discontinuous compression’ ATI Exchange 6 / 2; pp. 25 – 27

Doris Dietschy had her first experience in the Alexander Technique in 1979. She trained with Y.Kuperman and was certified 1985. She maintains a private practice in Basel, Switzerland, and taught from 1991 – 2005 as co- director at Kathrin von Schroeder‘s Training Institute for F.M. Alexander Technique in Basel, Switzerland. She owes much to the work with Walter and Dilys Carrington, Shmuel Nelken, Marjorie Barstow, Tommy Thompson, Joan Murray and intensiv exchange with Barbara Conable. She was member and chairman of the bord of the Swiss Society / SVLAT and director of the 6th International Congress of the F. M. Alexander Technique, 1999, in Freiburg, Germany

Doris Dietschy, Bäumleingasse 6, CH – 4051 Basel, Switzerland e-mail ddietschy@bluewin.ch www.emindex.ch/doris.dietschy

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10-sessions, Explained

Wednesday, October 13th, 2010

A reader asks: Can someone please explain to me the 10 sessions of Rolfing? Are all 10 sessions needed, and what is the specific focus for each session? What is the ultimate goal, to restore good posture or to relieve chronic pain?

From I Rolf’s point of view: “If you’re symptoms get better, that’s your tough luck” – she was going for a specific functional alignment in gravity. If your pain was due to constriction, compression, or compensation of this type, the pain goes away – but the goal is the improvement of support, balance, and alignment. Its aim is systemic, not symptomatic.

In Rolf’s ten series, three sessions deal with the superficial sleeve – front, back, and sides, Four sessions deal with the core myofascial relationships, and then the final three integrate the body’s movement. With someone well-versed in yoga, dance, or the like, I can usually reduce that to 8, but all the steps are necessary, even of they can be done in less time. Conversely, others can require more sessions, more time, to cover the same steps.

In our own system, KMI, we use 12 sessions, but based on the same principles. These sessions are outlines in detail in an appendix at the back of the book Anatomy Trains – www.anatomytrains.com

Bronnie – if you got temporary relief, either: 1) your pain is not really structural, and so would respond better to another method or 2) (and more likely) the pain is anchored somewhere else in your body, sometimes well away from the site of pain, and needs a more skilled practitioner to see, feel, and unhook that link.

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Breathing

Wednesday, October 6th, 2010

In response to a request, let’s think for a minute about ‘stuck on the exhale’ vs ‘stuck on the inhale’: (I have great sympathy for the following, being somewhat bipolar and thus familiar with both extremes)

Of course both such people are continuing to breathe, but what the term means is that someone’s postural pattern tends toward either end of the bell curve where, in one instance, they cycle mostly around a position where the ribs are up, the diaphragm down, and the lungs are full. While these ‘stuck on the inhale’ people are circulating air enough to continue metabolism, they never really breathe out to where the lungs are empty, the diaphragm relaxes up, and the ribs fall.

At the other extreme lie those who hover around the exhaled position: ribs down, slumped, diaphragm unvibrant, lungs compressed. Again, they respire enough to live, but not through the full excursion of the ribs and lungs. Blood chemistry can change, and these folks tend to the depressed side. It’s hard to get your energy up when your breathing is down. This positional tendency tends to cast your eyes and attention down and inward as well – at the extremes these folks cannot get out of their own way.

Those stuck on the inhale are likewise manifesting a shaped pattern that has a meaning – we just haven’t developed a ‘Prozac’ for this disease. The inability to collapse breeds an (exclusively) outward looking manner that defies introspection and relies instead on others’ opinions to form one’s self-image. Hence we often see these barrel-chested in-breathers in positions like politicians, talk show hosts, and car salesmen, where the feedback is direct and self-worth in others’ eyes can be easily measured.

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Evolution of Collective Learning in Kinesis

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010

I am feverishly reading the work of Howard Bloom in preparation for meeting him. His overview of the development of group consciousness (Global Brain, Wiley, 2000) mirrors my own thinking, but carries it deeper and with more supporting evidence. His ideas on the elements of a ‘collective learning machine’ (an epithet that applies to each of us as cell aggregates, to KMI / Kinesis, and to the bodywork / movement profession in general) are particularly relevant to understand our process and advance it. Where are you in this spectrum? (Hint: you can inhabit several places within it in different endeavors, but you cannot be nowhere.)

In every collective learning machine – and I paraphrase Bloom for the rest of this – there are five active elements, more or less in order, but all interacting in a developed system at all times: All of these elements have constructive and destructive phases or uses; read of them without judgment, but notice your affinity.

1) Conformity enforcers impose identity through similarities. These similarities help the group through adverse circumstances, develop a common language, and help the crowd pull together on collective enterprises. The induction process of the KMI training performs this task for us as a group – giving us a common presumptions, approach, language for bodyreading and strategy, the 12-series, and the common goals of length, alignment and a complete body image. Anatomy Trains (and our new effort of ‘Fascial Fitness’) seeks to diffuse a common language to speed the process of collective learning among the larger enterprise of physical education or, as I call it, Spatial Medicine.

In spite of the power it generates, of course, too much cookie-cutter similarity will be the death of any learning machine, so evolution builds in:

2) Diversity generators give birth to variation. Each individual represents an hypothesis in the communal mind. Many of the diversity generators are useless or even potentially harmful, but when circumstances change, some few of these folks hold the key to successful adaptation to the future. In your immune system, many white blood cells harbor antigens which are useless (and therefore kept under control) until a specific invader germ enters the body. Suddenly, these previously useless WBC’s are vital to the body’s survival. The ‘odd ducks’ within a group can be annoying or even detrimental in ‘good’ times, but some few can hold the key to new opportunities in one kind of adversity or another.

The diversity generators are allocated resources by the:

3) Inner judges continually take the measure of results, rewarding contributions of value, and punishing bad guesswork. If we’ve solved a knotty problem, we hear the cheers of fellow workers or family members, and our systems flood us with positive hormones that swell our chests, give us energy, and set our minds ablaze with confidence. If we cannot get a grip or cannot find agreement in what we are offering, our inner judges activate self-destruct machinery (stress hormones) that literally kill off brain cells and dull our wits, steal our pep, and isolate us. Inner judges are sometimes generous but often far from kind. But whatever their action on the individual, they are essential to complex adaptive learning systems.

The inner judges decisions activate the:

4) Resource shifters shunt riches and influence to group members who succeed (in whatever terms success is measured). The resource shifters embody Jesus’ algorithm: To he who hath shall be given, from he who hath not, even what he has shall be taken from him. Again, not very kind or ‘just’, perhaps, but it is the law of the group in learning.

Resource rich groups then engage in:

5) Intergroup tournaments or face offs evoke cooperative effort and innovation from each collective intelligence in an effort to survive and thrive. The mechanism here is familiar from Darwin’s natural selection, but applies in this context to group interactions or ‘wars’. This can range from a friendly dispute over technique to the competition among schools to the competition among methods to nuclear confrontation, but these are the forces – mostly unseen at the level of ‘culture’ that make mass minds click.

Obviously this has implications from family therapy right up through realpolitik on a global level, but let’s stick to the nested group of the individual practitioner, the KMI school, and the collective SI endeavour currently embodied in the IASI.

The KMI training is designed to produce (in an ever-improving recursive iterations) a conformity enforcement of practical fascial pattern-altering skills within a conceptual framework of the 3- and 12-series, but allowing enough room in our admissions policies and methods for ‘odd ducks’ who make us shake our heads and roll our eyes right now, but may at some future date innovate something of real value to the ever-changing situation of the marketplace. Thus our teachers are conformity generators with an eye (and an allowance) for the diversity generators. Once graduated, the group’s inner judges (not individual people, but collective ideas and feelings) will promote some to successful practitioners; others fall by the wayside and seek elsewhere.

Some successful practitioners will become teachers, and material and non-material resources will be ‘paid’ to those who correctly read and fulfill a need in the marketplace of ideas and techniques. These teachers / clinic heads / writers / presenters / volunteers et al. are building and will continue to create the identity of KMI / Kinesis within the SI community and beyond. This identity competes in an intergroup tournament going on among the schools within IASI for the resources of the small group of those interested in structural integration. But there is a larger intergroup tournament among the various bodywork methods for dominion over the larger marketplace of hands-on healing. So even though we compete within IASI for the ‘resource’ of students for practitioning, we band together in IASI to form a group for competing / cooperating with groups outside SI to enlarge the group of potential practitioners (and clients) interested in SI. These intergroup tournaments will improve the outcome of the new physical education and therapy on offer in the 21st century, paving the way for the movement component of health care, if and when we should ever collectively decide to trade in ‘sick care’ for true health care. Ultimately, we are part of the larger intergroup tournament with the medical system monopoly and the old ideas entrenched within it.

Our social health and (I believe) continued existence on the planet requires dismantling and successfully rebuilding our system of caring for and educating our Neolithic children in the human-constructed environment of the Electronic Age. We at Kinesis are an actively conscious part of that process. Conformity enforcement, diversity generation, inner judgment, resource shifting, and intergroup competition may not sound so attractive, and can sometimes be bloody in tooth and claw like Nature herself (it is Nature herself), but it is all part of improving our collective learning in the service of the human experiment.

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Some Trinitarian Advice

Friday, July 9th, 2010

Someone in a good position asked me:

As an established expert in our field, if you could offer students and new, grads one piece of advice to further themselves, what would it be?

And I answered:

The one advice God answers as a Trinity:

1) Be clear in your intent. Knowing what you intend to do can inform your hands and inform the client / patient at a subtle level in such a way that makes up for your ignorance of exactly where everything is and what is going on in their tissues. The other side of that coin – mucking around hoping to find something that works (the ‘press and pray’ strategy) is occasionally a way of causing damage.

2) The contrary but still consistent advice is: experiment. When what you know is not working, make a conscious choice to explore in search of a new way. How else do you think all the things you know now were discovered? Most scientific discoveries are not made to the sound of ‘Eureka!’, but to the sound of ‘Hunh?’.

3) The 11th commandment: Thou shalt not bore God. If you are bored, you are doing something wrong. This is the most interesting profession going and it’s a largely unexplored area. If you’re bored, you got down a cul-de-sac, and you need to back out and go on in another direction. If all your sessions start looking and feeling the same, this is a good indication you are bored. Get help via mentorship or a new class.

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The future of the massage profession

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

In historical terms, the modern resurgence of the massage profession is just getting underway, and the opportunities to earn more if you learn more are simply tremendous in the coming years. The principles and knowledge-base of the contemporary LMT will apply to many different clinical and educational settings in the new social environment which will follow the renewal of health care in America.

Three aspects that new and on-going therapists need to learn are:

1) Holistic anatomy: There’s no way around it – to sit at professional tables in this field you need to know the nomenclature. All the same, traditional anatomy (origins, insertions, etc.) is increasingly irrelevant as anatomy is revised in light of the new research on fascial remodeling and kinetic linkages like the Anatomy Trains Myofascial Meridians. So we need to know biomechanics, and we need to be on top of the new developments. This is what we are doing at Kinesis – winnowing the latest research and giving you the results. Being up on developments will raise your status in the eyes of other professionals and clients, and thus raise your income through increased referrals.

2) Client education: This is an ever-increasing requirement for all manual therapists: the ability to give specific, relevant, and informed ‘homework’ to your clients to help them enhance what they get from your good work. The days of just having a relaxing massage without follow-on care are largely gone already. The skill level of Pilates teachers, personal trainers, and movement teachers must be matched by the massage therapist –a great learning and earning opportunity to distinguish yourself from the pack.

3) Self-development: Nothing keeps your income up like excitement; when you are excited, it communicates and people are excited to be with you. Nothing excites you like learning new stuff. Sometimes that new learning can be a concept, like 1) above, or a technique, like 2) above, but honestly the most exciting things are emotional or spiritual. While we hope you buy our DVD’s or read our books, the most exciting things happen in our longer training classes , or in family life or on an adventure where your deep insides get changed.

Fall in love. Go on a challenging trip. Allow yourself to be changed by your life partner (fall in love again). Really go into your own spirituality or pain deeply. Any of these things will probably result in a short-term loss to your practice, but in a long-term gain.

Neil Armstrong said he never exercised because he believed that one ‘only has so many heartbeats’, so he didn’t want to raise the rate unnecessarily. The problem with this argument is that the raised heart rate of an exercise session results in a lowered heart rate for the rest the day – a net lowering. Same deal: sacrifice some income temporarily to take real care of yourself, and you will find your income grows when you’re back on the job.

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An Alternative To The “Myofascial Pain” Construct?

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

Now concerning this Bogduk article on my site: — I gotta say I respect his careful method but not his conclusions because I disagree with his assumption of where the ‘instant axis’ of movement is when you contract the psoas: the spine does not support itself or move around the bodies / discs, but rather around the neural arch / facet joints. But that’s my observation and intellectual conclusion, not a scientific finding.

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Bowen Conference in London

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

I am looking forward to the Bowen Conference that is coming up in a couple of weeks, and I have chosen to speak on the concept of tensegrity there, covering the many hierarchies though which tensegrity sports itself from the molecular and cellular through to the organismic and societal.

Bowen is an odd approach, if you don’t mind my saying so, to soft-tissue manipulation. You can research the history of Tom Bowen and the various factions and different interpretations of his work, but I latched onto Julian Baker – or rather he latched onto me and we formed an immediate bond. Julian has an insatiable curiosity about how this all works, and the courage to ask the difficult questions of himself and of anatomy in his search to explain Bowen’s results.

The Bowen ‘moves’ usually involve rolling a few times gently over tendinous areas such as the biceps tendon or the origins of the erector spinae, with a long pause in between each move to allow the body to ‘absorb’ and adjust to the changes made. Given my long history of working with the fascia, this seemed ridiculous to me on two counts: that such small, gentle, and non-invasive moves could have much effect on tough fascial planes, or that several minutes were required to adjust to such tiny inputs.

And yet the anecdotal evidence for the effectiveness of Bowen was sufficient to pique my interest. Like Kinesiotaping, the story seemed firmly in left field, but the results were unignorable. In other words, both of these – Bowen and Kinesiotaping – are methods in search of a theory. And I admire and support Julian’s fierce courage (as well as his knockout sense of fun and sharp humor) in searching out skeptics and critics who might advance his quest even as they discounted his explanation.

And I would have been tempted to dismiss the lame theorizing myself until I had 1) seen Guimberteau’s film of living fascia, Strolling Under the Skin and 2) studied the research of Helene Langevin , whose findings about the highly active areolar tissue – same stuff Guimberteau is filming – show how biologically active and responsive this surface, soft, fractally organized, fatty, viscous, everywhere material really is.

It seems quite possible – nay, by this year leaning toward the probable – that the areolar tissue should be considered an organ system of its own, following Gil Hedley and combining him with Guimberteau and Langevin. What if Bowen somehow intuitively tapped into super-responsive areas within this soft and highly responsive system of loose areolar tissue (which lubricates between layers, around tendons, and anywhere things have to move). Langevin has shown how active this layer is to the stimulation of acupuncture. Perhaps Bowen causes responses in this layer also.

If so, the mechanism for carrying this information around the body would be cellular and intercellular tensegrity. It’ll be interesting to hear the questions and responses from this group later this month.

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Tensegrity Cranium

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

I’ve been in love with biotensegrity from the git-go, and so therefore smitten with the models of Tom Flemons Intension designs . Tom has found sophisticated ways to model the foot, knee, pelvis, and spine (whether accurately or not, only time will tell, but interestingly for sure). The cranium, however, was always a cartoon, just a round tensegrity sphere on top. Of course, the cranium is far more complicated and influential than just a happy face on top of our ever-so-complex tension dependent structure.

But now Graham Scarr, an English osteopath whom I met at the Ulm Dissection Conference, has proposed a way in which the dural membranes can be seen to hold the bones of the neurocranium apart as well as playing a leading role – as we knew they did, but this provides such an interesting mechanism – in the bone growth and shaping.

More on this soon, but here is a link: Tensegrity in the Cranial Vault

Posted in Body, Fascia, Miscellany, Spring | No Comments »

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