When I took part in the basic Rolfing training in Munich, what was hardest of all to understand was the relationship between Rolfing and Tonic Function.
I received an explanation of the Tonic Function hypothesis from Giovanni Felicioni, who had learned it directly from Hubert Godard — a Rolfer who teaches at a university — but it was harder to grasp than I had expected. How was I supposed to use it in a session? In the end, in the training at that time, it remained something I knew only as knowledge.
Because Gael Rosewood is the Rolfer who certified Hubert, on the final day (Day 4, March 27, 2017) she presented, with concrete examples, “how to apply Tonic and Phasic Muscle in the work.” Through Gael’s workshop this time, my understanding advanced to a certain degree.
Rolfing deals with the relationship to gravity.
I wrote about this in detail in “Body and Mind (2) — Tonic Function (1),” but Hubert focused on the function of the muscles that work continuously against gravity, calling the continuously working muscles the Tonic Muscle and the transiently working muscles the Phasic Muscle.
Gael explained the former as the Intrinsic Muscle and the latter as the Extrinsic Muscle. Whereas the Phasic Muscle is a muscle that works immediately, the Tonic Muscle works continuously, and its sensation cannot be grasped without conscious awareness.
According to Gael, it takes about five seconds for the Tonic Muscle to engage, and about five seconds to release as well. Once the Tonic Muscle switches on, it keeps working and knows no fatigue. Yet through the effect of some accident, injury, or trauma, the switch turns off.
She also explained that the Tonic Muscle is a muscle that works before movement (learned in Rolfing terminology as “Pre-movement”), giving concrete examples.
For example:
- When raising the whole arm, if nothing else happened the balance would break and the body would tip forward, so before the movement the soleus muscle engages.
- Before the hand is used to grasp something (here the hand meaning the palm and the fingers), the serratus anterior engages.
- To maintain the stability of the neck and face, the tongue rests against the palate (the area above the teeth), keeping balance.
I would like to touch on this a little more concretely.
When using a smartphone, many people use it frequently with their fingertips (the fingers), but few use it with awareness extending to the palm. As a result, the serratus anterior stops working, the balance of the upper body is lost, and tension runs into the shoulders and neck. Working in pairs, I could actually feel that, when touching the forearm — once with the fingers alone and once with the fingers and the palm — the serratus anterior engaged in the latter case.
One tends to think that, given the relationship with gravity, resting the tongue against the area below the teeth releases the downward force. But in fact, from Gael’s experience, resting the tongue against the palate keeps the balance better. Indeed, the difference between placing the tongue up and placing it down was striking: in a demonstration, I could see that when the tongue was down, the gaze was almost completely unstable.
The human body tends to be captured by vision. Because of this, one assumes that the line of sight sits at the very center of the head. In fact, this is not so: the position the tongue reaches when making the sound “ka” is exactly the position of the center of the head.
As one would expect, the examples that only Gael — with her many years of Rolfing experience — could give were easy to follow, and Tonic Function came in as knowledge I could hold.
Tonic Function can in fact be grasped as a sensation in a session. This, too, was done as partner work: while exhaling slowly with the breath (exhaling prompts the release of tension; making a humming sound is also fine), we carried out:
- Drawing the pubic bone and the coccyx toward each other.
- Drawing the two ischial tuberosities toward each other.
- Drawing the left and right anterior superior iliac spines (ASIS) toward each other.
- Drawing the iliac bones of the back toward each other.
- Lifting the coccyx.
Working through all of them, I felt the breath enter the whole body. The sensation is subtle, but I could feel that incorporating it into Sessions 4 through 7 makes a session richer.
We also did work while sitting in a chair — how to connect the feet and the spine while searching for the place where the least force is applied — bringing awareness by tapping lightly down the spine (tat-tat-tat). Over the four days, we were able to cover nearly the whole body.
With that, the final day came to a close, and we took a photo with all the participants and Gael.
It was a more wonderful workshop than I had expected, and there was much to learn. This year, the Rolf Movement training also begins in Munich in July 2017. By incorporating not only hands-on manual work but also movement, I hope to widen the range of what a session can offer.