Archive for the ‘In My Life (Pro)’ Category

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. :)

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.

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.

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.

Fascial Release

Friday, July 9th, 2010

With so much going on about fascia in general, Anatomy Trains in particular, and this site in the middle, I though I would share a clarifying piece of an email I just received from James Earls, the head of Kinesis in UK. He and I are coming out with a book soon on Fascial Release. So, are we doing fascial release, Anatomy Trains, of KMI? (KMI is our flagship training in a Rolf-evolved integrative bodywork).

Fascial Release is a technique, a way of getting malleable but tough tissue – the sinews that hold us together – to relent long enough for the movement pattern to change. There are lots of people using such techniques, and other techniques that can be incorporated into the fascial release domain. It’s this simple: some massage techniques done deeper, slower, and with an awareness of the ‘wave’ in the fascia become Fascial Release Technique – by definition, but not necessarily in origin. ‘There is nothing new under the sun of manipulation’, said Ida Rolf, and I still find this true 30 years and many brand names after her death.

Anatomy Trains is a model – a map of how the myofascia connects in longitudinal slings around the body. As a map, it is neither definitive nor exhaustive, and it certainly is not the territory of the lived, whole body. But it is a useful map with explanatory power, especially in long-term problems where postural compensation has set in.

KMI – SI is a process whereby we gently and progressively unfold the client’s pattern toward something more complete, more open, more aligned, and juicier. We use the Fascial Release techniques as a modus operandi, and we use the Anatomy Trains as an organizing map, but KMI is a modus vivendi – a way of bringing all this to bear on the art of life and living in a structured, moving body.

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.

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.

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.

Touring the Biomechanical Lab

Friday, March 26th, 2010

We got to tour the biomechanical lab at the University of Ulm today. I am both fascinated (on an intellectual level) and repelled (on a human level) with such research. It seems to me that people are going to a lot of trouble to reaffirm Wolff’s elegant Law (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolff’s_law), which my students have heard me paraphrase many times, to be carved in gold over the door if I ever build a school: The Body Responds to Demand. Wolff was talking about bone, and others (Davis, I think) have applied it to certain connective tissues, but Wolff got it first and got it right – so much of the Anatomy we now learn originated in Germany, building on the foundations set in Padua and Bologna by Vesalius and his compadres. See Spalteholtz and Hoepke, among others.

The current amour with tissue ‘remodeling’ in these labs is just elaborations on the mechanisms and limits of Wolff’s Law. It has been fascinating in terms of understanding the mechanism by which mechanical tension / compression in the extracellular matrix is conveyed to the nucleus to alter gene expression (again, follow Don Ingber, or read that latter part of the first chapter in the 2nd edition of Anatomy trains for my take on mechanobiology). The altered gene expression in turn allows the ECM and the body to respond within biological limits to the new load.

I was fascinated to learn how fast this happens: astronauts in space lose 200-300 mg of calcium per day from their bones, and there is up to 40%-60% loss of bone mass in a paraplegic’s paralyzed limb – apparently the limits are pretty wide. I can imagine that would mean that with the same old usual genes, we would be pretty much planet-shaped (round) after an extended period in space.

Now, I know a number of Americans are attempting to reach this shape via fast food, but not being in space (other than in their anti-‘socialist’ little heads. (if only you knew how crazy all the Tea-Baggers look from Europe, painting Hitler mustaches on Obama’s face for this tiny transitional step toward what every European knows: Hitler was very, very much worse (and truly fascist) than Obama, and socialism in health care is a very good and economical idea) Being big and round on the planet Earth is really hard on your knee ligaments and your heart, but in space, adopting a round shape would be a sound adaptation.

But it is those strained knee ligaments – in sports as well as obesity – that concern the bio-engineers here in this state of the art facility. Our loud Russian friend Leonid, a pig-tailed Sue Hitzman, Kinesis UK’s James Earls and his fiancée and Pilates teacher Ines and some others sat around a table (in ‘laboratory chic’) examining a cadaverous knee. It had been stripped of muscle, and the two bones set into cones of bright yellow plastic, which will be held by the machine.

The machine, a modern torture instrument in looks, can hold the joint complex very firmly, and then apply multiple repetitions of flexion-extension or tibial rotation while maintaining true knee movement ( which is anything but simple – sliding and gliding and ‘screwing home’ (that’s the actual term) in the last degrees of extension – all accounted for in this machine. But they can add extra torsion or valgus or varus into the equation and then measure what that does to specific ligaments or fascia.

You might be shaking your head in wonder or disgust (there was a big portrait of Isaac Newton on the wall – had they never heard of Einstein or Wiener?), but how the hell else are they going to figure out how to make good artificial ligaments or better surgical procedures?

Another machine pulls on tendons to test recovery from stress and what happens in tendinous injury. Really intriguing problem: how do you hold onto a tendon, which is really slippery, to raise the tension to 50,000 Newtons (5000 kilos, more or less)? The homely answer is sandpaper between two metal plates. In this little detail I suddenly felt heartfelt empathy for these researchers, however much I rebel into being a proponent of holism when I see their reductionist approach and the endless beeping machines.

They are of course sincere (and in this case well-funded), but the elegant and homely solution to this problem (as well as the whimsical sculptured chairs in the lobby) earned my slightly grudging respect. They are still studying the body in parts, and there is still more to learn from this path, even though my own path takes me down the road toward what can be learned for the synergetic interaction of whole systems. As I have said before, scientists have the luxury as well as the discipline to reduce each question to a narrow single variable.

On a daily basis, the working therapist must juggle a thousand variables which cannot be either put out of the way or ignored – of fear, of relationships, of predilections and stubborn beliefs, of the need to lift children and tend to parents – in our clients. So we live in a no man’s land between science and art and craft. A scientist in a lab can dismiss our ‘unscientific’ attitude all he or she wishes, but let him be faced with the range of human suffering and striving every day, and see how many of his neat delineations survive in the rough and tumble of real therapy, real life, and hands-on-the-body application.

Anatomy Trains at BTI

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

Students enjoy learning the Functional Line assessments outside at North Carolina at BTI with Anatomy Trains teacher Carrie Gaynor.

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