Rolf Movement Faculty Perspectives Orientation
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
tructural ntegration S ® I THE JOURNAL OF THE ROLF INSTITUTE JUNE 2011 Table of conTenTs STRUCTURAL Integration: Columns THE JOURNAL OF ® Rolf Movement Faculty Perspectives: 2 ® THE ROLF INSTITUTE Orientation and Empathic Resonance June 2011 ® Vol. 39, No. 1 GAIT AnD RolFInG sI Elastic Walking: The Fascial Engine 5 PUBLISHER Adjo Zorn and Kai Hodeck The Rolf Institute of Natural Walking and Running 9 Structural Integration® Owen Marcus 5055 Chaparral Ct., Ste. 103 Dr. Strangegait, Or 13 Boulder, CO 80301 USA How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Hip Extension (303) 449-5903 Matt Hsu (303) 449-5978 Fax Your Fate Is in Your Gait 17 (800) 530-8875 Brian Fahey On Gait: It’s Hard Looking from the Inside Out 21 EDITORIAL BOARD David Clark Craig Ellis Jazmine Fox-Stern ConsIDERInG THE FEET Szaja Gottlieb Anne F. Hoff, Editor-in-Chief The Arches of the Feet in Standing and Walking, Part 1 22 Linda Loggins Lael Katharine Keen Heidi Massa Four Fundamental Relationships in the Foot 28 Meg Maurer Michael Salveson Robert McWilliams, Managing Editor Deanna Melchynuk Barefoot Walking Inspires Healthier Shoe Choices 31 John Schewe Karin Edwards Wagner Why I Got Foot Surgery 33 Layout AND Rob McWilliams GRAPHIC DESIGN InCoRPoRATInG VIsCERAl WoRK In RolFInG® sI Susan Winter Widening Our View of the Fascial Net 36 Articles in Structural Integration: The Peter Schwind, Allan Kaplan, Anne Hoff, Gabriela Arnaud Journal of The Rolf Institute® represent the The Culture of the Viscera 40 views and opinions of the authors and Liz Gaggini do not necessarily represent the official positions or teachings of the Rolf Institute Pelvic Organization and Psoas Function as 44 of Structural Integration. The Rolf Institute Influenced by Inflammation and Pregnancy reserves the right, in its sole and absolute Dorit Schatz discretion, to accept or reject any article for publication in Structural Integration: The Assessment and Thoracic Viscera in SI 46 Journal of The Rolf Institute. Jeffrey Burch Structural Integration: The Journal of The An Informal Case Study of Using Other Maps 50 Rolf Institute® (USPS 0005-122, ISSN 1538- to Explore the Rolfing® Territory 3784) is published by the Rolf Institute, Allan Kaplan 5055 Chaparral Ct., Ste. 103, Boulder, CO 80301. Postage paid at Boulder, Colorado. PERsPECTIVEs POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Comments on the World Congress on Low Back and Pelvic Pain 51 Structural Integration: The Journal of The Bruce Schonfeld Rolf Institute®, 5055 Chaparral Ct., Ste. 103, Boulder, CO 80301. A Commentary on Stecco’s Fascial Manipulation Work 53 Russell Stolzoff Copyright ©2011 Rolf Institute. All rights reserved. Duplication in whole or in part InsTITuTE nEWs in any form is prohibited without written permission from the publisher. Research Update – Rolfing® SI for Children with CP 55 “Rolfing®,” “Rolf Movement®,” and Graduates 56 “Rolfer™”are service marks of the Rolf 2011 Class Schedule 56 Institute of Structural Integration. Contacts inside back cover c olumns with those for which its physical shape, Rolf Movement length, and density are appropriate. With biological systems, resonance is different than with inanimate objects. One Faculty Perspectives can describe many forms of resonance between and within cells, plants, and animals. We watch life forms mimic and Orientation and Empathic Resonance dance with, or repulse away from, other Considered as Psychobiological Elements nearby life forms. Two plant stems may grow around each other. A dog and a cat in Structural Integration may learn to share close proximity, but perhaps only at certain times and places. By Kevin Frank, Certified Advanced Rolfer™, Resonant behavior in biology is selective Rolf movement® Instructor and specific, like guitar strings. Resonance relevant to somatic work is the Rolfing® [Structural Integration] is about good technique, and rapport, and rapport, combination of psychology and biology and rapport, and rapport . (psychobiology) called empathic resonance. Empathy is a capacity to feel in one’s own Gael Ohlgren body what another is doing or feeling in his/her body. Empathic resonance is when two persons (or a group of people) sense rientation is the basis for how we response, orientation and the physiology of the empathic exchange, consciously or (mammals) do anything at all. First, motor control, and “psychology” because o unconsciously, and find mutual interest without exception, we need to know where we work with perception, meaning, and the in the exchange. This can, in turn, evoke we are in relation to gravity or “up and belief construct around “having” a body. a sense of “shared attention.” This quality down.” Then we perceive. We assemble The SI process is a format where we can of shared attention, this resonant state, our perceptions. With our perception, we examine and evoke what are normally can be sustained as both people allow build and populate a world to which we invisible threads of communication. it. An empathic resonant state supports orient, and then we go about our business. Synergies of communication around somatic work because it is a state where As we do our business, communication is body awareness are themselves shifts in body patterns that are normally fixed are also critical. consciousness. These shifts of consciousness more plastic. Communication in somatic (body-oriented) are opportunities to remake the inherent therapies such as structural integration (SI) sense of body, to loosen beliefs about Empathy is about more than words. Communication, body limits, and to revive body-friendly We live at a time when empathy between in the somatic context, embraces all the coordination. Communication that supports animals and/or human beings finds channels of sensory awareness: skin takes shifts in belief, and change in body shape, is scientific credibility. There is, for example, part in communication, the breath is part necessarily a cooperative event, one where the “mirror neuron” effect. Neuroscientists of communication, the intellect participates client and practitioner manage somehow, observed, first in monkeys and then people, in communication, and movement is part consciously or unconsciously, to share brain activity that indicates empathic of communication. Sounds (not limited to awareness with each other or to resonate activity. We now know that a person words) are part of communication. Silence with each other. Thus, resonance suggests observing another person’s movements will is also filled with communication. itself as a metaphor, a way to refer to a exhibit sensory and motor brain activity phenomenon that can’t be fully explained, that corresponds with the brain activity The back and forth of communication links but is nonetheless a vital part of the work. of the mover. We see a movement and we necessarily back to orientation – gravity feel it, at an unconscious brain level. We orientation and general orientation – how Resonance can also learn to feel another’s movement we locate this body in space. We literally consciously, at a sensory level. We can, in “hold the space” for our work through Resonance, in the language of physics, is a fact, learn to empathize specifically and orientation. Successful negotiation of matter of waves and specific harmonies of somewhat reliably. Skillful empathy is part orientation and sense perception is a movement that can occur within a system. of empathic resonance but the latter is a step central ingredient in client-practitioner If you pluck a guitar string, other strings further along in the skill set. As structural communication and rapport. Successful move. You hear the harmonics as other integrators we learn to empathize with communication and rapport is worth strings vibrate. A key feature of resonance another person’s experience as a part of examining when we think about the process is the specificity with which one object learning to do the work. of educating SI practitioners. has the freedom to respond to certain wave frequencies exclusively from others. An example of empathic skill in SI is “body A body-oriented look at communication All objects are filters of energy. An object reading.” Empathic body reading is a between client and practitioner highlights effectively “filters out” those waves passing skill that structural integrators develop to what has been called the psychobiology of through it that don’t resonate, and resonates determine what needs work, what effect SI – “biology” because we work with gravity the work has had, and what to do next. 2 Structural Integration / June 2011 www.rolf.org c olumns It helps to be able to “see” what is alive What evokes willingness to allow this level the container. Stable orientation tends to and differentiated, and what is less able of intimacy? What evokes empathy? What reduce ungrounded reactivity. Ungrounded to move in a client, so one can assist the qualities of attention in the practitioner hold reactivity means my personal reaction to client to move more freely, and with more a container for empathy-based work? Does your experience, which is not relevant to clarity of function. We “see” or “see/feel” the way we orient and attend affect those your process (and not relevant to my support another’s places of ease, or places of effort/ in our presence? These questions lead to of your process). Reactivity, such as eager compression because our body senses considering one’s attentional field. enthusiasm or subtle recoil, tends to pull subtle motor activity within ourselves that clients out of their experience. Reactivity is imitates the person observed. The capacity shapes of Attention typically the enemy of resonance. to imitate gives us a capacity to see. The goal Empathy is affected by the shape of our Inclusive Attention is to acquire the capacity for the process to field of attention. Every moment our become conscious and deliberate. “movement brain” maps the space around The capacity to empathize while Empathic body reading is meaningfully us with a combination of conscious and simultaneously sustaining a broad and enhanced through differentiation of one’s unconscious orientation.