Sunday, February 4, 2018. The workshop, too, finished its final day. Saying goodbye to the participants, I moved to Munich International Airport by Deutsche Bahn. Via Paris’s Charles de Gaulle International Airport as a transit point, I arrived at Haneda International Airport at 8 p.m. the next day.
Until next time (Part 3), homework has been assigned in groups of three (sharing a case study on Rolf Movement), so I’m truly looking forward to exchanging by email/Skype between Sweden and Russia.
The Rolf Movement training, too, has passed 21 days, and various things have come into view. The content is practical.
I experienced three Rolf Movement sessions, with clients and between students. Unlike the ten-session Rolfing series, because it is necessary to build the session according to each client’s individuality, taking a risk and incorporating a different method was required (for details, see “Confusion in a Good Sense + On Tonic Function” and “What Comes into View Through Intuition and Body Observation…“).
That said, I do want to know within what kind of framework the Rolf Movement teachers think.
And so… On the eighth day, there was an introduction to the thinking about Rolf Movement from the Swiss Rolf Movement Instructor France Hatt-Arnold (hereafter France).
Thinking by dividing into the Territorial Body (the body’s parts, corresponding to Rolfing’s body parts) and the Body of Action (the body’s movement, the movement treated in Rolf Movement) makes it easier to build a Rolf Movement session, she says.
Concretely:
When approaching the sense that the body belongs to the person (Sense of belonging), since the surrounding external environment is involved, incorporate movement that allows safety and reassurance.
For the viscera (Visceral) in front of the spine, incorporate Articular (creating space within the body) and musculo-skeletal movements.
For a person who cannot be aware within their own body (expressed in English as introceptive), incorporate movements that allow the Proprioceptive to be obtained (in Japanese, “koyū kankaku” — proprioception: perception controlled on the basis of body information such as that of the limbs, that is, the perception of body position).
To feel space and depth within the body (expressed as Volume in the training) — for example, the space between the spine and the sternum, the space between the back of the head and the forehead, and so on — incorporate Vectorial Space, which makes the two-directionality felt with respect to space, and Coordination-type movement for the body to move jointly (on two-directionality (Palintonicity).
When the Border with the client, the Frontier (opening up), or Security is called for, incorporate Orientation (two-directionality) into the movement.
In the case of approaching the other body parts (Territory of Flesh), incorporate movement with respect to the Peripersonal Space (the space around the body).
Before the third session began:
- How do you imagine you want to bring closure with your client? (how to bring it to closure with the client?)
- What was the theme of your client? (what was the theme across the three sessions?)
- Where are you with these themes? (at what stage of the theme are things?)
By these questions being posed, it came into view that “this is how to build it!”; and France explained it well from the Territorial Body and the Body of Action.
As for Rolf Movement, there is the influence of Hubert Godard’s Tonic Function (see “Confusion in a Good Sense + On Tonic Function“), but it is also important that the three information-gathering systems — vision (Visual system), the inner-ear sense (Vestibular system), and the muscle sense (kinesthetic system) — work in good balance. Next time, I’d like to touch on that.