This is a clip from a microscopic movie made by a French hand surgeon who was curious about the mobility and adaptability of the fascia of the wrist. This is live tissue, in all of its moist, adaptable glory!

I finally started reading this book a client gave me 10 years ago (I can’t believe it took me this long, but there it is) called Healers on Healing last night. One of the writers, Serge Kahili King, has a really lovely way of describing health. A couple of passages you might find interesting:
“…Let’s call health ‘a state of harmonious energy’ and healing ‘to harmonize and energize’. For sickness/illness/disease we’ll use the word ‘disharmony’, and for that which causes such a condition we’ll use the word ‘distress’, meaning excessive stress or tension.
…Basically there are only two things we can do about distress: either remove what is being resisted, or cease resisting it (change the reaction). All healing methods, even the spontaneous ones of the body, use one of these two methods…an ordinary individual uses the first method when he or she puts out a fire to avoid getting burned, while a nonordinary individual might use the second method and alter his or her body so that the fire doesn’t produce a burn.
…I am convinced that health is a natural state of harmonious energy that gets covered up or inhibited (disharmonized) by distress. Remove the excessive stress by action or reaction and health appears, because it was there all the time just waiting to manifest.”

This article in the New York Times goes out of its way to stress the reputation of Rolfing® as being painful. It’s sort of a shame, since it seems like they only spoke with one practitioner, and I’ve watched a lot of excellent Rolfers do their work without any discomfort for the client at all. Some Rolfers lay it on pretty heavy, this is absolutely true, and I have been known to lean hard in order to try to get some change at times, but by and large, I find my clients are surprised at how NOT painful the experience is. It doesn’t have to hurt to get change to happen, and I am usually trying to find the easiest way to get movement, which is not to pin my client to the mat and watch them squirm.
I do like the way the article references the more metaphysical aspects of the process, even for the skeptical:

“Beau Buffier, a 35-year-old partner at a corporate law firm in New York, says he started Rolfing treatments after he injured his neck and shoulder in a fall. Despite three M.R.I.’s, surgery, physical therapy, a chiropractor, acupuncture and deep massage, the pain remained. Stress from his high-stakes job didn’t help.

But somehow Rolfing did the trick. “It’s dealing with the physical manifestations of something that’s kind of emotional or spiritual,” Mr. Buffier said.”

It’s pretty great when you can give someone the visceral experience of recognizing the mysterious ties between body, spirit, and mind, and have them report as much to the New York Times, and, really, it’s pretty great that there is mainstream media coverage for this truly helping profession.

One of the things I was taught in both massage school and my Structural Integration training was that when emotions come up for people during bodywork, the best thing that you can do for them is just to be with them, without judgment. This sounds so simple, but for the longest time I just had no idea what they were talking about. I wanted to make things better for people, not just “be” with them while they felt bad. I could see, when watching my teachers (Neal Powers, Peter Melchior) in S.I. training, that there was something going on beyond where they put their hands and how hard they pushed, and I got that it was their Presence that really helped move things for their models, but how to cultivate that presence? It seemed so elusive, and I was so distracted and restless.

Turns out, I needed to have a lot more of that kind of presence offered to ME first; I needed to experience the grace of someone just holding the energy of the room so that I could touch the edges of my own sensations without feeling like I was going to blow up the world with what I felt. Once I got comfortable with some of my own discomfort, this sense of Presence started to feel a lot more available to me.

In Brazil, Lael Keen really pushed that sense of Presence to the forefront of the Rolf Movement training– greatly assisted, I think, by her training in and experience with Somatic Experiencing. Perhaps it was just that I was ready, after all of my own personal work, to see how she did it, but I watched with fascination as she showed us how to use our own nervous systems to settle the clients’, how to drop in at a level where people can feel you there at a comfortable distance, one that allows for a sense of being gently held without any expectation or need. It was revelatory.

My Somatic Experiencing training adds depth to this notion of Presence by acknowledging subconscious nervous system activation. In S.E. we parse out the sensations of the body from their associated emotions, and beliefs so that one has the opportunity to experience them all as discrete strings instead of giant knots of overwhelm. The role of the practitioner in this process is, more than anything else, to be Present with the client and to hold the space for them so that they don’t feel overwhelmed again– it is incredibly helpful to feel the edges of a container when you are testing your own sense of what IS, and to have that container be a compassionate, resonant human is a real gift.

I have a long way to go to master this fine art, but I am grateful to have been shown at last where I can start, and grateful for the odd opportunities (such as appendicitis) to experience my own need for another person’s Presence.

“A great massage goes to the core of who we are. Not only does it feel good, but massage teaches us the art of being without doing– the secret of contentment. In the right hands, massage releases much more than our muscular tension. It allows us to relinquish our fears, let go of pent-up emotions, feel our untapped joy, work through grief, and surrender the old, conditioned responses and ideas that no longer serve us.”
– From the article “Hurts So Good, In Search of the Perfect Massage” by Mari Gayatri Stein in ABMP‘s Body Sense Magazine (Spring/Summer 2010)