Edward Maupin, Ph.D. 1996Stated most simply, the goal of Rolfing is to enable one to move and balance from the core of the body, from the center line of gravity. This has both physical and experiential (psychological, spiritual) aspects which we can discuss separately.It deserves attention that Ida Rolf, the originator of Rolfing, was a scientist, a biochemist, who, though she moved far away from her field, never lost her clear attention to physical reality. Both the force of gravity acting upon every body and the fascial tissues she worked to reorganize are real in the scientific sense. At the same time, she understood that the body is the form of our awareness, the lens through which consciousness experiences life, and this "experiential" aspect was never far from her mind.The Body as a Physical Object in GravityThe first principle of Rolfing is that the body must relate continually to the physical force of gravity. The various segments of the body must be more or less aligned one on top of the other, or else the external muscles begin to labor to maintain the upright posture. Pelvis, abdomen, chest and head balance easily when their centers of gravity are in a line, so that the upright balance can come from deep muscles which operate by reflex to relate the body to gravity.Fascia Shapes the BodyPeople are ordinarily not aligned in this way, however. The easy relationship to gravity can be disorganized by many factors, including accidents, misguided habits, and deep attitudes of various kinds. Fascia is the all-pervasive webwork of connective tissue which holds the body in its shape. As we struggle to move in a gravity field, the fascial webwork adapts to support our movement, and the shape slowly changes..Fascia can be Reorganized with MovementIda Rolf's discovery was that fascia can be re-organized with correct movement--movement which is in accord with the geometry of the skeleton--and that this reorganization can be hastened by deep manipulation which holds the fascial tissues in place while the client moves. Her maxim:"Hold tissues where they are supposed to be and induce movement."Through years of experience she developed a series of ten sessions which systematically reorganize the whole body, proceeding from the outside layers to the deeper ones and bringing all the major segments into an integrated system of balance. Rolfers generally work within this ten-session framework, though they may use quite different procedures to accomplish the same goals. The overall goal is to find a sense of balance which comes from the core, unobstructed by unbalancing distortions in the myo-fascial system.The Experiential CoreBut it is an interesting fact that this core balance which we call "The Line" is closely related to the core feeling of one's own being. When the outer layers of the body release to permit the inner layers to function, a deeper awareness opens up. "The Line" is not a physical entity, but a sense of inner space. It is no accident that those centers of feeling which Indian yoga calls "chakras" lie along the same central line of gravity.The usual sense we have of ourselves and the world is based on characteristic patterns of tension. When we release these tensions and rely on the expansional balance of the core, The Line, we move the center of our experiencing into the core as well.Now, in the most radical terms, the effect of the ten sessions could be a major re-experiencing of one's Being: a dramatic change of consciousness. Thought patterns based upon one's contracted ego, would release and be replaced by a different viewpoint. Ida Rolf spoke of "turning people out" by which she meant they are brought into the core so that they exist and relate out into the world from there.The poet, William Blake seems to be talking about the same thing in this famous quotation:"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern."(from Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1793)Blake was criticizing the viewpoint of scientific materialism which takes the external world seriously as independent and "out there". It causes us to forget that our experience of the external world is created by the mind, or as Blake would have it, the imagination. Your experience of anything is organized by your habits of perception. It is not in itself. It is not objective in the sense we have been trained to believe it is.To experience from the core is to take responsibility for the extent to which we create this experience. It is to move away from an externalized "over there" kind of perception into a real continued link with our feelings, perceptions, and responses.If you think what you're perceiving is "out there", you are looking out through your senses as if through chinks in the cavern wall of your dualistic perception.. If you move into a continued contact with your core experience, you are cleansing the doors of perception. Blake is talking about returning to core experience. And most mystics and really good poets have talked about the same shift.Ida Rolf's approach to this was to organize the fascia in a physical body in a three-dimensional gravity field. But this is not only working on a material body. This is the body as it is experienced: the phenomenological body. This body is real in an entirely different sense. It exists in the mind. If all of reality is created, in the sense of organized, by your Imagination, the image-ing faculty of your core being, then the body exists in the imagination. In fact, Blake would say the body exists in the imagination rather than the imagination existing in the body.Releasing Traumatic Emotions and MemoriesIn the process of moving attention through the outer layers of the body into the core people sometimes re-experience emotions and memories which are stored there. This is a valuable part of the process of becoming more aware, and sometimes people use deep tissue bodywork like Rolfing as part of a process of psychotherapy. The fact that the person is experiencing these emotions in the context of the body means that they are grounded, less confusing and more safe than might otherwise be the case.Other people do not experience these dramatic moments of recall. Anyway, what is important is the the increased awareness and presence in the body. Good sessions are almost like meditations which bring deeper levels of one's physical being into awareness. The awareness remains, and it is this that helps people be more grounded and centered as a result of Rolfing.Combining the Physical and PsychologicalArranging the body so that it balances around the actual physical line of gravity is the key to the opening of the core. The work is neither too etherial and ungrounded in physical reality, nor so purely physiological that it ignores the experience of the person. It is a meditation of a high degree. When one experiences an open balance of some part of the body in Rolfing, it is often with an interior sense of rightness, of recognition of the body as it was always meant to be. At the same time it has the elegance of a geometry lesson, purified of subjective distortion and confusion. In a sense, Ida Rolf managed what William Blake never did: to combine a scientific understanding with an adequate grasp of soul.To view more articles written by Ed Maupin Please click here.

Edward Maupin, Ph.D. 2006The purpose of this essay is to describe an approach to Structural Integration which emphasizes awareness – the awareness both of the practitioner and especially of the client – as the central agent which produces structural change.While in the beginning many of us probably thought of mechanical force, how hard we were pushing, as the element producing results, most of us have evolved ways of softening the blow, at least, to reduce the pain. This is one of the ways.Dr. Rolf foresaw that there would be divergent interpretations of her method of Structural Integration, and that different schools would grow up, each with its different set of emphases. I want to describe one such divergence, an emphasis upon awareness, leading to its own special results and discoveries within the practice of SI.As I saw her, (in "my Ida Rolf" as one of my psychiatry professors would have said) she was a material scientist, a physiologist, albeit with a sculptor's eye.[1] The body she touched was the body of material science: anatomically correct and biochemically vital. She was awesomely accurate, penetrating with elegant precision to the special points of distortion and potential change. Sometimes — not always — it hurt like hell, but it was over quickly because of her accuracy.She was not particularly interested in our subjective experience. The pain was unavoidable, a valuable part of the learning process as one discovered how to release it. If her hands contacted a pocket of grief or emotion she was respectful: she waited for the tears to clear, but she did not pursue their meaning. She was not a psychologist.This is not to say she was not spiritual. She was the real thing, with a gleaming intelligence and deep, caring attention. "Momma Knows Best" was palpable in her presence, and there was no doubt that momma wanted the best for us. There were times I knew she was a bodhisattva, a realized being, from the Presence in her hands.Still, she was not a psychologist, and furthermore she thought most psychological problems were the result of structural insecurity. She pursued the world's ills by straightening out its bones.Time passed. Her early students were not precise and quick, and the pain was not over in a moment. It became apparent to most of us that we needed to refine our touch.Her assumption that pain was a necessary part of the process came into question. Certainly it was not necessary so often for the process to be painful. There was also the interesting phenomenon that the pain of good bodywork often morphs into something profound and even pleasurable. Curiously, when one is not afraid of the sensation but learns to accept it without resistance, it changes character completely. I remember my former wife commenting that childbearing was a lot like being Rolfed from the inside, except that it wouldn't quit upon request.Dr. Rolf knew this about pain, of course: it was an essential part of the learning she felt pain offered, but she didn't focus on how the morphing took place. She only told us to "stop resisting."Consciousness, Awareness, and AttentionThe experience of pain transforming into pleasure was a fertile opportunity for observing the important role of consciousness, awareness, and attention in the work.Let's define some termsThe term 'consciousness' was introduced by the 18th Century English Philosopher, John Locke, to refer to what you are aware of bein g aware of. This is your consciousness: everything you can find in your awareness at this moment. If you can find it, it's conscious. It is highly organized by conceptual thought–how you understand things–and, on a more fundamental level, by the way in which consciousness mimics vision as it breaks things down into separate elements, analytically.[2]'Awareness' is much larger. Your body is responding at every level to all sorts of stimuli. It adjusts to gravity, causes your heart to beat, transports molecules across membranes, exudes hormones, ensures the balance of muscles across joints. It is 'aware' in the sense that it is responding on all these different levels. It is even integrated and unitary, because all the systems have to work together. It is the Self, but mostly it is not conscious. Awareness and Consciousness are not the same.Freud and his psychoanalytic followers, like many other traditions, have made a similar distinction between what is 'conscious,' what is 'preconscious' (which can be conscious if attention is brought to it) and what is 'unconscious' (and thus cannot be known).'Attention' is the focus you can bring to bear upon what is in your field of consciousness. Not many things in our lives are free and subject to our own will, but though it is conditioned, habitual, and follows time-honored restraints, you can consciously choose to direct your attention! Though it is only free to a limited extent, it is nevertheless our one point of power. As it happens, this is very important in producing changes within the body as well in other realms of human experience.Two MindsWe have arrived now at the idea that each of us contains two minds. There is the conscious mind of conceptualization and language. It is always engaged in 'explaining' the world to itself. But the other mind, the body awareness, has no need to explain: it knows. We can call the conscious mind 'the relative mind' because it is always relative to what is real, always an interpretation. The other mind we can call the absolute mind. Because it is taking in the world as it is to its senses (not necessarily how it is in itself, of course) and responding to what it knows, it is in a state of pure being rather than interpretation. It is extraordinarily intelligent in the way it is managing your physiology, and who is to say where pure physiology ends and potentially conscious body awareness begins? Does this mean it is always objectively correct? Of course not: it can be strongly influenced by the relative mind, by the world it 'thinks' it lives in (consider how often it responds inappropriately to the present in terms of past traumatic events, even to the point of creating illness). Still, it is not mediating its reactions through conceptual interpretation.It is the non-conceptual nature of this awareness that makes it so inaccessible to 'consciousness.' The conscious mind proceeds by explaining reality with words and concepts. The pure awareness of being is 'void' because it is void of conceptualization. Only a trained consciousness can learn to be even partially aware of it. Direct, non-conceptual existence is very difficult to know. In fact, the most radical and extreme experiences of "Being" take place in states of mind so foreign to the 'ego' ("I) that they are 'ineffable' and so mystical as to be inexpressible in words. "The T'ao which can be named is not the T'ao."Nevertheless, since the 'relative' mind is essential to our successful adaptation to the external world, and the 'absolute' mind is the process of our very being, it is clear that communication between the two is highly desirable.How can this communication take place? The conscious mind must make room for something it cannot entirely know, or even notice. To do so is to be open to creativity and intuition. It requires being attentive and present in the moment rather than lost in thought.Most simply put, the conscious mind must learn to shut up and pay attention to the sensory awareness, to what can be felt in the present moment. Shut up with all the thoughts and explanations: what is the physical experience now? That's the beauty of it: if the conscious conceptual mind can be induced to pay attention to the qualitative aspects of what is going on – to sensory experience – it steps temporarily out of the thought realm and into the external rind of being. Sensation takes place in the 'here-and-now'. That's the difference between concept and experience, between quantity (the analyzed) and quality, between the "I" and the "IS", between the brightness of the conscious mind and the void of Pure Being.This has been the explicit goal of a good many consciousness traditions. The yogic union of the ida and pingala, masculine and feminine, knowledge and compassion, reason and energy – it's all about the union of the two minds under an innate awareness, a witness to both.Lo and behold! Our profession is perfectly poised to bring these two minds together. Sensory experience is the outer rind of a being that extends all the way into unknowable levels of physiological response. When the thinking mind quiets down and pays attention to the sensory awareness of the being, we bring the two into unity.As it happens, it is awareness that makes something change in the client's body. Mechanical force can only go so far, and when the fledgling SI practitioner begins to feel damage in the hands, he will do well to consider working more with awareness – his own and that of the client.Awareness Makes the ChangeDr. Fritz Perls, the formulator of Gestalt Therapy, had a maxim: "Put your attention where your awareness is, and the next gestalt will take place." That is, by bringing one's attention into the more subtle parts of the field of awareness, changes which are already contained in the situation will take place.He also said, "Don't push the river. It flows by itself"This is particularly apt for people working deep into the body.No need to go into detail about Perls' role in the spread of Rolfing. Because he was at Esalen, Dr. Rolf went there to work on him, and later to teach others of us who were drawn to her method. As Gestalt Therapy spread, Rolfing spread in its wake. It is probably accurate to say that the material scientism of Dr. Rolf was leavened by the experiential focus of humanistic psychology and the Human Potential Movement at Esalen.Dr. Rolf's effect upon the body was very deep, and her early students were working much too hard to get that deep. To put it bluntly, we hurt like hell. We were applying mechanical pressure and struggling mightily. That kind of work hurts, and it isn't fully effective.One solution is to take into account the experience, especially the physical experience, of the client as subject. There is someone there. That one is not so much the social-verbal "I-conscious" person who walked into your office as it is the body awareness at its most external level, its capacity to be aware of your touch. You are engaging with a profound and multi-layered creature through your use of touch, pressure, and movement.To state it quite radically, you are not primarily touching the body; you are touching the awareness within the body. This engenders a radical shift of technique, both in terms of what you do and what you expect of your client.Touching to KnowIt is apparent in the 2006 IASI yearbook, that very many structural integrators (integrationists?) have developed sensitive or receptive touch along many interesting lines. For instance, Heather Keene writes about a very sensitive awareness of what the body wants. She is building on one of Dr. Rolf's most curious instructions about the work: "Let the body tell you what it wants." There were other approaches in the same yearbook, and all of them moving in a similar direction.My own method I call "Touching to Know." Basically it involves shifting my attention from too much emphasis on what I am doing and toward what it is that I am sensing and feeling. Technique comes from perception.Touching to know What? Open-minded awareness permits you to be aware of many things: the feeling of the flesh, the patterns of holding, the energetic vibration within the body and the energy you can feel inside your hands as well as more subtle things, such as the "being" of the client, images and feeling which arise in the contact and many other things. A strange phenomenon appears: when you become aware of something in the client – for example a holding-pattern - the client often becomes aware of the same thing and the pattern releases.How does it start? When you begin to push into anywhere in somebody's body you will encounter a barrier beyond which you cannot push without causing pain. If you wait there, the barrier begins to shift. Something, an awareness, is shifting its boundary. Waiting and listening at the boundary is the beginning of communication with the client's body awareness.Your hands are inviting attention; the body is responding. Structural Integration is a two-way street. In awareness-oriented work, the client remains engaged, participating, and as the bodyworker you need to know how to pay attention and listen, calling out the client in a profound interactionThere is more to say about the practitioner's state of mind, but first, the client needs to be trained to participate. It is not enough to lie down and receive the work passively: the client must learn to be actively involved.Training the Client: Four Steps1. "Pay attention to the touch." The client learns to focus on the point of contact. "When your mind wanders, bring it back to the touch." It's a somatic meditation. The conscious, external mind is paying attention. The fact that the touch is a qualitative feeling experience suspends verbal-conceptual activity.2. "Draw me in (like a sponge or a magnet)." This is also a conscious function. The client chooses to want you to be there. Not all people understand at first how to draw you in, but you can train them. Receptivity is the skill of making a space for something to happen. In time your client will be able to draw you into places you couldn't otherwise reach.3. "Pay attention to the pleasure." Now, when your client begins to notice those moments of pleasure, you have captured the attention of the body's own awareness below the conscious mind. You cannot make up fleshly pleasure, (for example the pleasure of scratching an itch,) but your body is guided by it. Some clients have trouble making the step. Pleasure may be forbidden, or they may be dissociated in some way from the body experience. Very constructive psychological work can be done at this juncture.4. "Use my hands." This step can take many forms.[3] In structural integration we are often asking our clients to move in certain geometrically accurate ways. When the experienced client begins to participate on this level, these movements provide part of the stuff of improvisation. The body is telling you what to do, guiding with its sense of what is pleasurable, which is to say what is 'right.'The Bodyworker's MindThe bodyworker's awareness is of course is a much bigger subject, but it can be boiled down into two questions: what are you imagining, and what are you aware of?What you imagine is what you touchWhat are you imagining? This is the active, or yang side of our work. We are imposing a conceptual structure of how the body moves in gravity, of how a particular joint needs to be balanced to participate in a larger, more integrated whole. Above all, we are Thinking Bones because only with the bones and joints in mind can we understand the segmented nature of the body's adaptation to gravity. (I often encounter practitioners who are so focused on muscular anatomy that they miss this deeper skeletal perspective.) How we conceptualize the body we are touching has a powerful influence on what the client experiences. Visceral touch elicits visceral feeling, cranial-sacral touch elicits perception of the cranial-sacral pulses: Structural touch elicits awareness of the interior myoskeletal body.But our technique is not yang. We are not caught up in what we are doing, but in what we are sensing. Technique follows perception, an improvisation in response to the situation.What are you aware of? Notice that this is not "what are you doing?" Here we are yin. We receive; we listen; we use touch, pressure and movement to explore this body. The technique a response to what you feel.What are you aware of?Just as the client makes a space to draw you in, you make a space, a void, for something real to happen. I have to admit that one major area of learning at this point is how not to fall asleep. Maintaining this kind of focus, with so little distraction by thinking, is definitely an altered state. You are 'entranced', and the conceptual mind tends to fall asleep. However, you are not the first meditator who has had to learn this lesson.At the very moment you have fully accepted the assumption that you are not touching a body so much as the awareness within the body, you begin to look for subtle cues. You wait to see how the barrier responds, how the boundary communicates. The technique of 'unwinding' comes to mind as a special case of this phenomenon. If one makes contact and then waits in the proper way, with some such question as 'what are you going to do with this?' the body begins to respond, to move, to 'unwind' and then the bodyworker can follow, rather than guide, the process of change.The Mirror of AwarenessThis is one formulation of the method. The aware bodyworker is touching the aware client. The body is guiding the work. Non-verbal, non-conceptual communication is taking place.This is the goal. In addition to a host of structural improvements, the client has become present in the body in the here-and-now. The bodyworker also, has stepped out of personal limits into the creative mystery of an answering consciousness.Such is the blessing of our work.NotesJeff Linn, a scholar of the Rolf archives, thinks Dr. Rolf started with the visual sense of where flesh is displaced in disorganized bodies, and then added the anatomy. It is also true that she warned against getting too caught up in anatomy. (Personal communication)This reflexive meaning of 'consciousness' is different from the meaning it has in certain spiritual contexts, where it refers to "Pure Consciousness which transcends all objects" (Zen) or "Divine Consciousness" (Arica)Think of a hog, scratching its back on a barbed-wire fence.To view more articles written by Ed Maupin Please click here.

from The Structural Metaphor Edward Maupin, Ph.D. 1990In 1967, while a resident at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, I met Dr. Ida Rolf. At that time she was coming to Esalen during the summer and practicing her method of body work, called "Structural Integration," in a massage room in the baths. I no longer remember what prompted me, but I made an appointment with her and began the process of "Rolfing." She had come originally to work with Fritz Perls, the originator of Gestalt Therapy. He had been helped so significantly that he became her ardent supporter, almost child-like in his admiration of her. When I arrived, she informed me that I must commit myself to ten sessions. I agreed to her terms, though I'm not sure whether I even understood that the work was intended to improve my balance and posture.I had begun meditating several years before, using a Zen Buddhist technique of observing, following my breath. In the innocence of my youth, the meditation had pitched me into a very high state which I would now characterize as a beginner's enlightenment. I was able to observe my consciousness from a very detached, aware perspective, without fear or distraction. It formed the fundamental direction of my later career. Among other things during those wonderful three months, I discovered my body. As an intellectual I knew, of course, that I had a body, but I wasn't particularly conversant with it. Now I became aware of my body as an on-going response process, quite intelligently participating in here-and-now reality. This body response was holistic, organic, and very Real when compared with my usual mental processes. I discovered (1) that my thoughts are themselves derived from an anterior feeling process which I could now observe in my body, (2) that my body is always responding appropriately to the world it thinks it lives in, and (3) that the quality of my conscious process is conditioned upon the location within my body in which I am centered at the time. I also knew, although I could not explain how I knew, that this observer, remaining in the here-and-now, is eternal - whatever that meant. It was a remarkable vacation from fear.In the subsequent nine years I finished graduate school, worked at UCLA as a psychologist, and moved to Esalen as a Residential Fellow. I wanted to recapture my enlightenment experience, and I was particularly interested in body approaches, which seemed to me to be the key. After I got to Esalen I worked with a variety of methods, including the movement improvisation work of Mary Whitehouse, sensory awareness classes with Charlotte Selver, breathing work with Magda Proskauer, Bioenergetics with Alexander Lowen and Stanley Keleman, and so on. For some reason, Ida Rolf's work was especially striking to me. Somewhere around my fourth session with her I felt that the work was in touch with my body in ways which were similar to the original meditation experience. I asked her to train me. Several months later when I had forgotten all about my request, she wrote me a letter saying I could participate in a class she was going to teach, provided I read certain things and wrote a paper showing I had mastered certain information. She added at the end of her letter, "This work will change your life." I can honestly say that she was right.I completed that training in mid-1968, the seventh person to be trained in her classes (she had taught several apprentices before she began the classes), and began practicing immediately. My first ten clients were the members of Esalen's Third Residential Program, of which I was the director. These brave and unwary students had never heard of Rolfing. Certainly my work was very painful in those first, uncertain days. I am grateful that they kept coming for sessions and, in fact, asked for more.As of this writing, I have practiced this method of body therapy for twenty years. I have adhered rather closely to the structural principles Ida Rolf taught. In fact, I have always considered myself to be a rather orthodox Rolfer. This book is an attempt to formulate my present understanding of the basic principles of structural body work which were originally passed to me.In one respect, however, I feel I have developed something slightly different from my teacher. This is in the understanding of movement. I do not mean to disparage her model of movement. She speaks of lift and lightness in the integrated body, and she understood that gravity gives energy to the well-organized body. But she was not a dancer. In practice she applied a rather static conception in which the body is seen as a stack of blocky segments, their centers of gravity to be lined up one on top of the other. It is an adequate model for most people we encounter, and I applied it in my own work for about eight years. Then I met a remarkable dancer/teacher named Oscar Aguado (now Michael Nebedon), who thoroughly refreshed my sense of movement and balance. He gave me a new view of what I was attempting to bring about in my clients. An adaptation of his model, which he called expansional balance, is presented here.Expansional balance works with various internal extensions in such a way that the body is felt as expanding in all directions rather than resting, one segment upon another. As the legs extend down, the proper alignment of the sacrum allows the spine to extend up - a bipolar expansion we call the vertical polarity. The arms are also extending to the sides in a polarized internal expansion, the horizontal polarity, which removes the load of the shoulder girdle from the neck and allows the head to float upwards.The differences are subtle, perhaps not even very important with many of our clients. But in the case of highly-evolved bodies, such as first-rate dancers or very effective athletes, the differences are profound. For example, Ida Rolf could never accept the turn-out of the legs used by ballet dancers. She felt turn-out was simply a distortion-producing error. She saw the undeniable damage caused by excessive use of turn-out. However, turn-out is necessary to achieve the leaps, the high aerial capacity which dance requires. Expansional balance, with its understanding of pelvic extension, reconciles the two positions. Dancers can turn out and leap without incurring this Rolfer's disapproval, so long as they can return to the parallel organization of the legs.This manual, then, is an attempt to clarify the principles of body work specifically aimed at the reorganization of physical structure. In the course of years of practice, I became aware that body work could accomplish a variety of goals:Structural OrganizationEmotional ReleaseClarification of ConsciousnessSensory AwarenessPhysical HealingOrganization of EnergyTherapeutic IntimacyAll of these results came about, sometimes, with some people, as effects of my structural work. In fact, any of these goals might be appropriate to pursue with certain clients. And the same touch I was using to accomplish structural change might produce any of these results. (The converse is also true, that any one of these goals, including structural organization, can be approached with a variety of different types of touch.) This wealth of possibilites can be confusing. If one touch, intended to change structure, can produce many different results, and if many different types of touch can produce the same result, then what are the specific principles of structural work?These principles are the ones which Ida Rolf emphasized in my training. They are discussed more fully in Chapter I.The Primacy of GravityGeometry: the Relationship of the Skeleton to SpaceThe Role of Fascia in Shaping the BodyThe Use of Movement to Reorganize FasciaThese same principles are today being used by the many methods of structural organization which are off-shoots of Ida Rolf's method. They may be expected to be primary in Heller Work, Aston Patterning, and the generic brand of structural organization we teach at the Institute of Psycho-Structural Balancing (IPSB) in San Diego.When I consult my own sense of what is most central to this work I come up with the skeleton, the geometry of its movement, and the fascial network which creates the entire form. These are the three most persistent images in this book. Once they are clear, the body worker will use many different strokes or even types of touch to bring about structural change. Although I have described my procedures in many instances, this is not a stroke-book. Readers who are looking for a step-by-step how-to-do-it manual will be disappointed. However, if the bodyworker has a clear concept of the skeleton - how it underlies the very flesh he is touching - and can superimpose a geometric concept of how it is supposed to move, he will be able to bring about structural improvement using the principle of reorganization by movement.This book is, of course, no substitute for Ida Rolf's own book, Rolfing: the Integration of Human Structurees, (Santa Monica, CA: Dennis Landman, Publishers, 1977). That great lady put down more than 40 years of accumulated wisdom about the body there. Many of her specific insights about particular balances, structures, and muscles are not reproduced here. On the other hand, a reader would be hard put to know, from her book, just what to do. She even concealed the order of work in her ten sessions. The reasons for her secrecy are perhaps no longer relevant, since the information has long been available elsewhere. It is my hope that I can assist in making this marvelous information available to a world of clients which surely needs it.The founders of the present-day schools of body work were often extremely exclusive and possessive about their methods. It was as if, having dedicated tremendous energy to the realization of a personal insight, each felt that he or she was in possession of the only true approach. They often disparaged each other's work and mostly refused to acknowledge common elements between them.But a later generation of us who learned from these originals has usually taken a different position. It seems apparent that the body can be approached in a variety of ways, and each approach has its strengths and weaknesses. We have tended to be more eclectic, to include more. The human body is infinite, a key to the vast dimensions of human consciousness. Now, in the l980's, we have been exposed to ancient techniques and mystery schools which see the body as a matrix for evolution of consciousness. And most people being trained as body workers today have had prior experience with more than one technique.Eclecticism, the ability to draw on a broad range of viewpoints and methods, is appropriate and desirable. But diversity can also mean confusion. An organizational scheme for comparing methods is needed so that a body worker can move easily from one to another and still specify what he or she is doing. In teaching at the lnternational Professional School of Bodywork I have found it is useful to describe any method of body work in terms of three dimensions: Touch, Movement, and Imagery.Touch may refer to anything from no touch at all (e.g. stroking the aura), through light stroking, to the deepest possible pressure. Movement varies from immobility, through rubbing, jiggling or pressing, to structural work in which the client is asked to do the moving along geometric lines. But the most important of these dimensions is Image, for it contains the entire reason for doing what you are doing. Image determines how you are going to approach the body, what you expect to perceive there, and what you think you are doing to it. With this scheme, then, it is possible to specify the major images which distinguish a particular method of body work. It is also a useful device for remaining receptive as one works. I have included an extension of this system, the "5 by 5 System" in the chapter on touch.To view more articles written by Ed Maupin Please click here.