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. 
”
