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Written by Shannon Murphy, owner of Wise River Rolfing
During my Rolfing training, as I was learning what Rolfing actually was, through experiencing it and practicing it, this `book’s description of a person’s experience helped me understand some potential. I hope it does the same for you. I’m sharing a bit of this book because the author, Jeffrey Maitland, an elder in the Rolfing community passed last week. I wanted to honor his vast contributions to the work and him as a beautiful soul.
“In my case, I came to Rolfing with a body that had endured a bad marriage, a resentment-filled divorce, several career crises, and a near-fatal auto accident seven years prior. The body spoke eloquently of these things by a chronic sinus condition, nagging back aches, and an occasional muscle spasm across the shoulders. On a more subtle level, there was also a persistent inability to swallow, fleeting anxiety, flutters in the region of the heart and annoyingly regular colds. Despite all of this, I held the belief that I was quite healthy: in other words, I simply wasn’t listening to my body. The voice it had fell on deaf ears. My intellect routinely overrode the messages of imbalance my body communicated.
In retrospect, I have come to realize that I like so many other of my contemporaries, did not know my body, did not fully trust it, and most certainly, did not live in it. I was almost entirely an intellect, residing in a system that I placed in low regard. The body was devalued and dishonored by neglect.
Each person’s body, it seems, contains an emotional blueprint and a spiritual map for that lifetime. Certain goals and principles are expressed in the physical form taken and shaped over time. To work with the body then is to touch the past, the present, and the future simultaneously. Memories of the life that was and dreams of that life come dance wistfully on the fingertips of the Rolfer. At times, waves of emotions swirl and abound as the tissue is touched and changed. In the hands of the Rolfer lies the Universe, contained in the body of a single human being. Each cell beats with a life force composed of energy, rhythm and sensation. Such work is sacred, as holy as the miracles of scripture and history recorded in the days of the Ancients. For here, in this body, resides God and Spirit and Openness.
Rolfng is a transformative process; I have been changed by the experience. Not only do I sense my world more acutely, but I envision more elaborately, as well. I have an intensified feeling about such things as honesty and deception. I tolerate less easily the day-to-day idiotic dances of illusion most of us endure for sheer survival. I suspect that I will leave behind the willingness to "make do" and replace it with a desire to expand the self that I now know to be truly limitless.
The future unfolds itself within me; the past resides more amicably now with my present self. Integration is continuing and my spirit self has married my mind and heart. It is a joyful union.”
Quoted from Spacious Body by Jeffrey Maitland.