While learning various techniques in the Rolfing training, I am sometimes told by the instructor:
“People grasp things in terms of ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ but what is right for you is not necessarily right for the client. So rather than thinking and interpreting on your own, it is important to give the other person space, to make time for them to think as well, and to do the work as if accompanying them.”
When learning a technique, one tends to think, as if there were a correct answer, that “the work must be done correctly.” Or one can fall into a state of mind in which, unless it is done perfectly, one wonders whether one is committing an error. Overthinking in this way causes one to fail to receive the information the other person is sending out. It was a moment of being made aware that, through school education and parental discipline, I had been poisoned by a single notion — that things have a right and a wrong, and that one must not make mistakes. In the case of Rolfing, after all, one learns through a great deal of trial and error.
Even what is a correct answer for oneself is not necessarily a correct answer for the other person. Each is merely judging it right by their own standard, and each person’s body is different. To accept the diversity of people, I think, is to understand that people judge based on a variety of standards.
In Rolfing, the terms “old pattern” (the old habit of movement the other person held before the work) and “new pattern” (the new habit of movement born as a result of the work) are used. What I would like to note here is that there is simply an old pattern and a new pattern — they are not right or wrong patterns. It may be better to think of it, rather, as having been given options.
And when a client wavers between the old pattern and the new pattern, there is said to be room for Negotiation and Re-negotiation. Throughout, while accumulating sessions, these patterns are considered through dialogue.
In class, when making the transition between the old pattern and the new pattern, time is spent digging into bodily sensation to explore what kind of change occurs. What is interesting is that, in many cases, even the slightest change in the deep layer brings movement within one’s own emotions. I think it comes down to valuing that kind of process and, little by little, considering with the client how to accept the new change.
Come to think of it, the body did not arrive at its current pattern on its own. Its posture has been formed through parental discipline, school education, the mindset of a working adult after entering society, and so on. To change that old pattern, little by little, from the deep layer brings about more change than one might imagine. And within that old pattern there may also be psychological trauma that the person themselves does not feel.
In the training to come as well, I hope to deepen the process of learning while staying mindful of a mindset that accepts diversity rather than right and wrong.