How Has Energy Been Treated Within Rolfing?

Tracing Energy Work (Part 2 of 3)

Introduction

Part 1, “What Does Energy Work Actually Address?,” took up what the word energy points to, and what the practitioner is actually doing. This part traces how energy has been treated within Rolfing.

The map of the whole is “What Energy Work Is — Where the Word Points, and How It Entered Rolfing.”

The Energetic View Was Already Inside Rolfing

Energy work was not suddenly imported into Rolfing from outside. Ida Rolf herself held a strong interest in the relationship between human structure and energy.

In 1974, at the association’s annual meeting, she said this:

I want to see what happens to the energy fields in and around an individual as you order his structure and what is the change in his behavior that parallels this change in energy. I want to see whether those fields get broader, whether they get brighter, whether they get more vertical, whether they get less confused.

Here she is not looking at bodily structure alone. Change in structure, change in the energy field, and change in behavior are taken as one continuous phenomenon.

In the same address she went on:

I hope that among you there are the kind of fish that will go out and bring in another school of fish . . . Not to get their aches and pains taken out, not to have their symptoms removed, but that they might contribute to the understanding of energy in the human universe.

For Ida Rolf, Rolfing was not simply a method for removing aches and symptoms. It was also an inquiry, entered through bodily structure, into what energy is in a human being.

In March 2016 I attended the annual meeting of the Japan Rolfing Association. Ray McCall and Carol Agneessens, Rolfing instructors from the United States, spoke on how Ida Rolf thought about Rolfing.

One story concerned 1978, the year she sold the rights to Rolfing to the Rolf Institute. She asked that three schools be established: one in California for the psychological side, one in New York for the medical side, and one in Colorado for the spiritual side. It never happened, but it shows she was trying to preserve the non-physical aspects within an institution.

She also asked one of her students to go up into the mountains around Boulder, find an energy spot, sit there, and report back. To a client who became emotionally disturbed during a class, she advised touching the solar plexus, saying it would settle — and it did.

At the same time, she left this remark:

Only thing that I can get hands on is physical.

It is not that she did not work with energy. What her hands could reach was the body, so she entered through the body. That is how it reads. What I heard at that meeting is recorded in “Attending the 2016 Japan Rolfing Association General Meeting — Learning the History of Rolfing.”

From Controversy to a Special Issue

Ida Rolf’s own interest in energy was one thing; where this territory belonged within Rolfing’s education was another, and it stayed unsettled for a long time.

In the summer of 2007, a course called An Energetic Foundation for Rolfing was announced in the Rolf Institute’s newsletter. It was taught by Bob Schrei and Ray McCall, and based on Source Point Therapy.

A heated argument broke out on the association’s forum, and letters of protest reached the board questioning whether the association should be sponsoring a course of this kind. In response, the course was voluntarily resubmitted to the continuing education committee and approved a second time.

If anything, the controversy raised interest. Seats and assistants were added, and it became the first continuing education class in several years to fill.

The following year, in 2008, Bob Schrei, Ray McCall, Jeff Maitland, and Duffy Allen held an exchange in the association’s journal on the question. Its title was What Did Dr. Rolf Want?, and placed at its head was Ida Rolf’s remark from 1974.

In that exchange Bob Schrei describes the background to Source Point Therapy. During an Advanced Training with Michael Salveson and Jeff Maitland, it became an issue that Rolfers were explaining their own work by borrowing external systems — acupuncture, chakras, biodynamics. As long as you explain in borrowed language, what is distinctive about the Rolfing work itself stays undefined. Out of that came the question of an energetic foundation belonging to Rolfing, and, after a long inquiry, Source Point Therapy.

Then in June 2017, the journal gave an entire issue to the subject: Rolfing SI and Nonphysical Reality. Kevin Frank, Jeff Maitland, Ray McCall, Bob Schrei and others each wrote on the energetic territory from their own position. A subject that had provoked a fierce argument in 2007 had become a special issue ten years later.

Incidentally, doubts about the term energy work did not begin in 2017. In 2007, Jeff Maitland set out four ways in which healing comes about. The fourth is carried out without touching the body, and is commonly called energy healing. Maitland declined to call it an energy approach. Energetic techniques can be found in all four, he reasoned, so naming only the fourth that way is not accurate. I have written about these four in “How Healing Comes About — Jeffrey Maitland’s Four Approaches.”

How Did the Touch Change?

The way this territory developed also has to do with a change in how Rolfers touch.

From the 1980s onward, with John Upledger at the center, craniosacral work and biodynamic thinking were transmitted to practitioners beyond osteopaths, and this had a large influence on the Rolfing community. The strong pressure of Ida Rolf’s era was no longer the whole picture. More weight came to be placed on subtle contact, and on a way of being in the practitioner that lets the body and space reorganize on their own (see “Jeff Maitland’s Three Questions — Being, Perception, and Self-Regulation“).

The same current came up at the 2016 meeting in Japan. Osteopathic craniosacral and visceral techniques entered Rolfing, and it became clear that the body has the capacity to change of its own accord without active intervention. Firm contact is not the only kind that works; simply being present in the field can function as touch.

I learned this current from the Source Point Therapy side as well. In the supplemental course in 2017, we went into the Sacral Hold and the Guardian Point in more depth. That meant the history of cranial work beginning with William Sutherland, and the anatomy behind it: the three levels of biomechanical, functional, and biodynamic; how cranial work relates to energy work; and how the Guardian Point differs from it. That day is set down in “Taking the SPT Supplemental Course — Deepening Knowledge Through Practice.”

Bob Schrei, who created Source Point Therapy, is a Certified Advanced Rolfer and at the same time a biodynamic craniosacral therapist. A system made by someone carrying two lineages will have both in it.

What Is the Blueprint?

At the center of Source Point Therapy is the idea of the Blueprint: the fundamental order-information a human being needs in order to be well as a human being.

What is interesting is that this is a word Ida Rolf herself used. In her book she writes:

A joyous radiance of health is attained only as the body conforms more nearly to its inherent pattern; this form, this Platonic Idea, is the blueprint for structure.

She is not thinking of health simply as the absence of symptoms. She takes it as a state in which the body has come closer to its own order, the person’s structure following the pattern inherent in it.

Elsewhere in the same book she goes further, and asks:

Is “balancing” actually the placing of the body of flesh upon an energy pattern that activates it? The pattern of this fine energy would not be as easily disrupted and might well survive, relatively intact, traumatic episodes that distort the flesh.

The question is whether the flesh is itself the source of order, or whether there is, behind it, a pattern that organizes it.

Bob Schrei placed this passage at the head of his article in the 2017 issue. Perhaps, he wrote, all we are doing as practitioners of structural integration is helping the body align with this pattern. Having studied architecture, he says, he was in the habit of asking what a structure stands upon.

This way of thinking was not confined to Ida Rolf’s book. Karl Humiston, a student of hers, recalls that she used the term blueprint of perfection over and over in classes.

And the association’s Standards of Practice contains the following:

Equally fundamental is the recognition that each human being has an inherent internal pattern for optimal organization of form and function, which pattern is essentially self-organizing.

The intent of Structural Integration is to identify and address that which keeps each person’s pattern from manifesting as a higher level of order and function.

The idea of a blueprint is not only one person’s phrase; it has found its way into the association’s own standards.

The Blueprint of Source Point Therapy stands in this line of thought. Through daily tension, emotion, and all kinds of experience, our connection to that order can weaken. The practitioner accesses the Blueprint and works so that the body can recover its connection to that information (see “Learning the Blueprint: The Information Needed for a Human Being to Take Human Form“).

The idea also supplies a measure of what is healthy for the body (see “What Is Healthy Information for the Body?“). If you know the direction you are heading, you can find your way back when you have moved away from it. That does not mean the practitioner carries the body to an ideal form by force. You know the direction, and you leave the process of change to the body.

Two Origin Stories

There is a widely told account of where Rolfing came from. Ida Rolf’s background as a biochemist, her interest in fascia, her exchanges with yoga and osteopathy. And the influence of Swedenborg, general system theory, Korzybski, and Buckminster Fuller. I have written about this line in “Ida Rolf, the Scientist.”

In 2017, Bob Schrei set out a different facet.

A new client came to him, and he asked whether she had received Rolfing before. Thirty or forty sessions, she said. From whom? From Ida Rolf.

The first thing she remembered about the sessions was that they were painful. What had stayed with her most, though, were the stories Ida Rolf told her. She said, again and again, that her work had not come out of her research as a scientist alone, but derived from information channeled from ancient Egypt. When the client later asked her mother and her mother’s friends, they had heard the same stories.

Bob Schrei made this public in 2015, as his contribution to a memorial held at Ida Rolf’s gravesite. Confirmation came back from first-generation teachers. I was in those classes, they said; she told the story to anyone who would listen. One of them added that she had said the Ten Series itself had been an initiation in an ancient mystery school.

Peter Melchior also recorded her remarking in a class that this work is at least three thousand years old. And according to one of her students, although she held that Rolfing should be described as an educational process, when pressed on where it really belongs she said: shamanism.

I do not read the scientific origin and this one as opposed, and I have no means of judging which is true. What matters, I think, is that Ida Rolf inquired into the body scientifically while also speaking about a background that science alone cannot account for.

In the United States of the 1950s and 60s, people practicing outside the orthodox were arrested and had their work destroyed. That is what happened to Wilhelm Reich in 1956. In that climate, it would have been safer to say only that she had developed the method as a scientist studying fascia. She did not hide the other story.

Knowing this background makes it easier to see why Source Point Therapy has the shape it does. On the first day of the final course, we were taught what the work shares with meditation, and how it relates to shamanism. Illness has been understood to arise from a breakdown in the relationship with the supernatural. Negative energy entering from outside obstructs the flow. Repairing that through ritual and imagery was the shaman’s role (see “The First Day: Not Intervening, What Meditation and SPT Share, and the Relation to Shamanism“).

At the time I took it as the sort of thing that comes up in an energy work class. Looking back now, I think the founder was explaining which tradition the system he had made belongs to.

Bob Schrei has written that Source Point Therapy was made to fill an energetic gap inside Rolfing. What he set out to fill may have been less something Rolfing lacked than an aspect of it that had gradually stopped being spoken about.

Next time, I consider why Rolfing needs an energetic perspective, within its five taxonomies.

The whole series is gathered in “What Energy Work Is — Where the Word Points, and How It Entered Rolfing.”

Tracing Energy Work

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Hidefumi Otsuka

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