It was a great pleasure to go out walking on the high plains of Colorado with my compadre Til Luchau. Til and I taught together at the Rolf Institute in the 90’s. I handed over to him my portion of the curriculum as I left to form my school which became Anatomy Trains. Till likewise left the Rolfing school a few years later to form his highly successful Advanced Myofascial Trainings. There are not too many of us who have been able to keep up a traveling circuit of continuing ed classes over the years – and then adapt to their sudden closure this past year. In a wide-ranging conversation with him and his beautiful wife Loretta (who took the photo – yeah, we took the masks off to pose), we looked back on our previous selves and our foibles and laughed.
I asked how he was adapting to online teaching, and his response: “Wonderful!” with dripping irony in his voice. We’ve adapted, we’ve had to, but we are both looking forward to getting our hands back in gear.
But I am glad to say so much more of our talk leaned very much forward to redefining bodywork, kinesthetic education, and self-care in the post-Covid era. This terribly upsetting and isolating period we have been through can be seen as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to really establish movement self-care as a motivation from the inside of the 20-somethings, rather than what has pertained up until now, through my lifetime anyway: The imposition of ‘exercise’ as something we ’should’ do, rather than responding to the movement our bodies ‘want’ to do.
There will always be enough work for integrative manual therapists, movement teachers, and rehab specialists, but generational success will look like more people internalizing their movement self-care as part of auto-regulation. A nice long walk in the katabatic winds of Colorado’s high plains was just the kind of auto-regulation my system needed to calm down and feel un-alone. Thanks, Til.
