Anatomy Trains

Diane, a prominent PT who has worked with the Japanese PT’s, kindly takes my panicked call as I head for Japan.  “I’m feeling inadequate, I’m not a trained PT – what do I do with these people?”

“Just put your hands on top of their hands, “ she says in her usual totally practical and friendly manor.

And she’s right:  The first two days are predominantly lecture, without much demonstration, but during the second course we fan out into the crowd of 40, laying on our hands to help them feel into the fascia and the feeling of fascial change.  It works.

And here’s how I know.  The Japanese go ‘Aaah’ in a special way when they get something.  An American may give a smile or an ‘Oh, wow,’, and a European an understated knowing look when they have an understanding, and that’s good grist for a teacher; something to live on.  Though a Japanese student might say ‘ooh’ a couple of times while searching for the feeling, or to convey that they are getting it, but when they really do get it, the “Oo-aaah!” that comes from up from their very hara through the dropped open throat is unmistakable, and there is no more satisfying sound for a teacher on the planet.

So, thanks Diane!

If Ida was the face that launched a thousand elbows, Louis was the voice that launched a thousand anatomy geeks - and I am definitely one of them!  After his 4-day Anatomy class - optional in 1974 when I started training - I was hooked, and everything that has flowed to and fro in my travels was birthed in the curiosity and wonder that he created in that wide sandbox of his mind and heart.

It is wonderful to see my students surpass me - like Gil Hedley and Christoph Sommer among many others - but all of them should know that so much that I taught them came from Louis and his embryological unity unfolding, Michael Murphy and his willingness to be a fool for the students’ benefit, and Dan Seltzer, a man whom nobody knows, but once, before he killed himself, he was a Harvard theater professor.  My first spiritual teacher, Dan taught me about finding the role deep, deep within the self.  He couldn’t do it himself, but he could evoke it in others.

No such doubts assailed Louis. Generous, kind, open, pragmatic and true to himself, Louis Schultz was an inspiration to us all.

Early on in my London practice, a trainer for a then-popular Western Zen weekend enlightenment course would visit my practice.  He had had an unfortunate accident where he walked into a moving airplane propeller, which had carved a scar down his face and mangled his shoulder.  Interestingly, no matter where you worked on him, he felt it in his shoulder.

As he left the last session I saw him, he said, “That’s what I like about you, Tom.  There’s so little of you left.”

I pondered that one for years.  Insult or compliment?

He later had the large welt of a scar removed from his face by plastic surgery, but unwilling to go unconscious about this event again, he agreed to do it only when the doctor agreed to do it without anesthesia.  He said that if he stayed right on the edge of the scalpel, he could control the bleeding, and there was a searing and tearing sensation, but no pain.  If he got an iota ahead or behind the moment, the very edge, the pain was intolerable.  I have used this technique since, but have never had any surgery.

In London in the 80’s, it was impossible to afford both a flat and an office, so I worked from a spare bedroom the entire time. Eight different addresses in as many years – Maida Vale, Regent’s Park Road, Marlborough Place, Leicester Close, Antrim Mansions, Lancaster Gate, Belsize Park, and finally Croftdown Road.

Early on in these years, a young man showed up - handsome, alert, intelligent – but even with all these attributes, it was clear he would never be a leader.  I wondered why. He was a runner, but you just knew he would never win a race – if he were out front, he would be looking back to see if he was doing the right thing.

When we got to the head session – the intraoral work can often bring stuff up – he got agitated, and then started screaming, which quickly dissolved into laughing hysterically - nay, maniacally.  I was worried that such a strange noise in a residential block of flats would bring the p’licemen, but thankfully no one called them on this weekday afternoon.  Such are the risks of integrative practice, but it was my strong intuition that he simply but definitely needed to play this out without interruption.  I sat with my hand on his belly and waited it out.

This uncontrollable laughing (bordering on shrieking) continued for some 20 minutes, until he finally calmed down and fell into a deep sleep-like state.  When he came round, I asked what had happened.  He said, “I am a twin.  When we were born we were both distressed, and my sister went out first.  I learned that if I want to survive, I need to go last.”

It’s funny how the mind works – when we are threatened, when the adrenalin’s running, our tape recorder memory carves the memories deeper – this has been established by research.  And when we are again threatened in any similar way, we pull out the whole tape recording and run it, regardless of which elements of our response were the relevant ones.  In this case, it didn’t matter to his survival whether he went first or second, but in his mind, it does.

Such memories are not verbal – he had no words at that point – and pre-verbal memories lodge more deeply in the kinesthetic self.

And even a singular event like that can hold less power over the individual if it is indeed singular.  In this young man’s case, his ‘secondary’ status was confirmed by his family over the years – his sister was first in many things, and got the best for some reason.  When he was laughing hysterically, he said, “I saw a picture of my family before my mind’s eye, and the more I laughed, the smaller it got.  I had to keep going until it was entirely disappeared.

Once he had hold of this patterning within himself, he went on to head an IBM office in London.

In the early 80’s, I had the opportunity to open a traveling practice in Rome.  To kick it off, my contact set up a talk at the Centro Macrobiotico, one of the few New Age-y places in Rome at the time.  As I passed through the restaurant on the way to the lecture room, there was a large table of people with an older gentleman as the clear center of attention.  He got up and was introduced to me as Il Maestro.  A short, handsome man with Fellini-like horn rimmed glasses, he also had a very obvious wig.  So obvious that one thought, “Oh, look at that old man with a wig!”  If he had left his head bald, you might say, “What a striking looking man.”

Il Maestro, whoever he was, said in English that he was looking forward to my talk, and given that I was nervous about it – one of the first in which I was translated – I politely (I hoped) shined him on and went in to set up.  The talk went well, and I was handed a full schedule for the next few days.

I was busily learning the Italian for ‘Foot up and down’, and ‘Please lie on your back with your knees up.’  I knew, of course, none of the names, so was surprised when Il Maestro showed up for a session.  “I wonder if you can help me …” – but with a thick Italian accent: “Ai wander eefew hcan hyelp me …”

And with that, standing there, he slowly and deliberately put his foot, knee extended, out in front of his collar bone.  Immediately awake and humbled, I allowed as how he was way ahead of me, and I would do what I could.  And help him I did, actually – the first lesson I had that one does not have to be able to do everything the client can in order to help them.  ‘You can’t take a client somewhere you haven’t been yourself’ is a limiting shibboleth we could do without.

Il Maestro had begun his career as a balletomaine, and had met Ida Rolf while on tour in America.  They studied yoga together in Nyack, NY, with Pierre Bernard, the scoundrel saint of Tantric Yoga.  Apparently she worked on him, as he was, he said, waiting for a student of Ida Rolf to make it to Rome.

After his career in ballet, he had become adept at both yoga and Tai Chi, hence his handle Il Maestro.  He had many students in both disciplines, and continued in both despite his advanced age.  His tissue was that of a much younger man.  He was also one of the first people I identified as ‘autosexual’ – in love with himself.  These people – and few they are – are usually nominally gay, as they are looking for someone as close to themselves as they can get.  Often their self-obsession turns out, as in Il Maestro’s case – to serve others.

He wanted me to do the whole ten sessions of Rolfing, so month by month we progressed through, becoming closer as we went.  Once, when I complained about the rickety table I had to use, I caught him as I came back from lunch for his sessions, coming down the street to my office schlepping a large treatment table.  “Il Maestro,” I cried, “You should have taken a taxi.”  He grinned sheepishly – he had carried the table ten blocks just to prove he still could.

When we got to the head session, out came his false teeth for the intra-oral work, no problem, but I knew enough not to ask him to remove that awful wig so I could get at his scalp, and he never offered.  I simply and silently worked around it.  Sometimes, after the neck work, the wig was a little askew.  Although I never mentioned it, I had a look I would give him as we finished, and by the time he emerged from the door on the ground floor, it would be back in place.

He died, I heard, a few years later.  I never took a class from him, but he taught me a lot.

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.

Early in my practice in Little Rock, Arkansas, I was visited by a former opera singer.  A grand dame in her seventies in the Southern tradition, she had long since stopped singing professionally.  She was tall, stately, with a chest as large as a diver, and a bosom you could have served tea on.  She would disappear into the practice bathroom with a sheet and emerge wrapped in it, her blonde beehive hairdo coming out of one end of the sheet, and her black patent leather shoes peeking out of the other.  She would doff the shoes and lie on the table under the sheet.  She had her undergarments on, but dignity must be preserved, and I never did see her, and had to do all my work by feel.

She had come to me to fix her knees.  With advancing age, she had worn the cartilage off the back of her knee caps (chondromlacia, I later learned) so that they hurt every time she bent them, as in going uptstairs. When she bent them reflexively in sleeping, the pain woke her up.  She also complained of migraines, but the knees were the main thing.  She’d heard good things about me from her son, so she was game to try this as one last clutching at straws before surgery.

Being a young rolfer, I was going through the 10-session series.  It was soon readily apparent that her quadriceps were overly tight, pushing her patella down onto the femur.  What hope I had of changing it lay in getting those quads to relax their grip.  So every session, I would tuck some work on the quads into the session.

When that failed to make any progress, I tried the antagonists, the hamstrings.  And when that didn’t work I tried the counterantagonists – the soleus and gastrocs.  I tried everything I knew how.  Maude was loving it – her migraine headaches were better, and she had more of a spring in her step, but “My knees!  Young man, when are you going to do something about my knees?”

I redoubled my efforts but nothing was working.  We cam to the seventh session, when we usually do intra-oral work and put our fingers up people’s noses.  I didn’t know if this dignified old lady was going to go in for this, but Maude was up for it all: “If that’s what you do, then go ahead.”

In doing her mouth, I noticed that her palate was high and narrow as a Gothic cathedral.  Since a high palate can sometimes be implicated in migraines, I worked intra-orally to widen her palate to lower the ‘ceiling’.  As I worked on the left side, she said, “I feel that in my knee.”  I didn’t pay attention – I was fully concentrated on working in this dignified woman’s mouth.  As I worked the other side, she said, “I feel that in my right knee.”

She called me the next morning: “Young man, you’ve done it.  The pain has gone from my knees.”  And that was it – we finished the session, but she never had another day of pain.  That was the only session I never went anywhere near her knees.

Old Ida Rolf was still alive at the time, so I called her up, “Dr. Rolf, I have found the naso-patellar ligament.”  (It was a joke in class – when we didn’t know what else to do, we would say, “Work on the naso-patellar ligament.”)  We talked about it a bit, and came to the conclusion that perhaps when she hit the high notes, which you bounce off your palate, she had reflexively forced her knees into a locked position with the quads, and somehow there had come to be an association between the palate and the knees.  Though one could manufacture a fascial connection, it was most likely a conditioned reflex.

And it certainly wasn’t talent, but a great stroke of luck, and a standing demonstration of Ida Rolf’s dictum, “Where you think it is, it ain’t.”

A friend of Maude’s showed up at the Rolf Institute in one of my classes 8 years later: “Maude’s still singing your praises. She’s even singing again.”  Luck – but covering the entire body via the recipe makes its own luck.