Abstract The foundational theory of Rolfing Structural Integration (SI) is the Principles of Intervention. This article contains the complete description of the five Principles of Intervention as taught by Jan H. Sultan.
Authors’ note: This article is written in the voice of Jan H. Sultan. It is a consolidation of many conversations between the two co-authors, putting to the page the Sultan legacy teachings for the Dr. Rolf Institute® (DIRI).
In 1979, when Ida P. Rolf, PhD, died, she left the Rolfing® Ten Series to those who studied with her. We have passed it on to those of you who have in turn studied with us, and to the next generation of you who have studied from them. Within the Ten Series, she left both a way of thinking and a way of touch that works. Rolfing Structural Integration (SI) produces effects across a wide range of body types. It has fallen to us to coherently explain the how and the why of Rolfing SI’s outcomes. This article is about our inquiry into uncovering the underlying Principles of Intervention that drive these results. We don’t have much hard information on Rolf’s developmental history of the work. In her ‘Recipe’ we had her findings, but not her ‘searchings’.
I came to Rolfing SI as a client of Rolf, and as a virgin to bodywork in general. I had never had a massage or acupuncture. There was no internet to study beyond what Rolf taught, so for her early students she was the fountain of all knowledge. It was not until Rolf asked me to assist in her classes that I realized I needed a lot more study to be able to coherently represent the work. It was not enough for me to pass on the formula of the Recipe without understanding the nature of the body more fully. That realization has led my whole life on a journey of study in this area.
So it is here, halfway through my eightieth year, and with fifty years of practice behind me, that I want to pause and lay out my searchings as well as my findings. My hope in doing this is that the reader may use this to deepen their own journey of discovery. Rolf started me on a journey and introduced to me a way of thinking about the nature of human bodily being. For these fifty years I have been in a vigorous private practice, and engaged in teaching the work that I learned from Rolf. This distinction is essential. There is the work Rolf developed, and her ten-session formula. And now these many years later, there are a set of Principles of Intervention that differentiate Rolfing SI from other systems of manual therapy and somatic education. This is empirical science in action. The outcomes are predictable and can be reproduced by following this map. This is the technology of Rolfing SI that is embedded in the system that Rolf taught us.
I use this metaphor often: Rolf giving us the Ten Series is like somebody pulled a beautiful sports car up to the curb in front of us and said, “Go ahead, take it for a drive.” The keys are in it and it’s an automatic. The driver doesn’t have to do much, just get in, put it in gear, and drive it away. But if you want to know how that thing works, then you have to start backtracking. What makes a car a Ferrari? What makes it go so fast? What makes it steer and handle so well? In a way, the Rolfing faculty of the 1980s and 1990s looked at the Rolfing system and considered this project. We got the Ten Series as a universal template that produces generally predictable results. We had the experience that the Rolfing process helps to mediate the effects of aging, it resolves (perhaps) some genetically driven strains and stressors that the person inherited from their family line. We can mediate, if not fix, and guide the person’s understanding of their body to a place where their balance works better for them. And if they’re adolescent, Rolfing SI can support the emergent shape to be more coherent over time. The Rolfing faculty looked at all that and said to themselves, this is a Ferrari at the curb.
We were tasked with teaching this work. More than passing on the formula of the Ten Series, we had to go deeper in educating our students about the nature of the body. It was not enough to produce a technician who could follow the rules. We intended to teach a practitioner who could carry on the work, and the inquiry. We wanted to produce students who could be of use in their communities as a resource for supporting health and well-being.
With some noteworthy exceptions, most of the other professionals who work with the body are concerned with repair, and the restoration of function lost to injury or age-related conditions. With all due respect, the bodybuilder and the yogi are truly polar in their concept in working to build a ‘better body’ and not just repairing it. But, there is little attention given to the creation of a structure that is fluid, more resilient, ages well, and is both strong and graceful in motion. What we could call the heightened lived experience.
The Quest for the Principles of Intervention
What is the difference between Principles of Intervention and strategies (or tactics)? Simply stated, principles define the game that is being played, and strategies are how it is played well. Principles are usually simple and somewhat fixed, while strategies are emergent and fluid, within the context of the game. If we are playing the board game of checkers, we have the basic principles about how the pieces move, and what constitutes winning. Without those principles, it’s simply not checkers. On this basis then, we set out to understand what makes Rolfing SI what it is and what it is not. To do this we took apart that metaphoric Ferrari at the curb to study what make it so special. In mechanics, this process is called reverse engineering.
Unlike other professionals in our category like physical therapists, massage therapists, and even orthopedists, Rolfers are guided by principles; these principles are the upstream thinking that frames our perception and methodologies (Maitland and Sultan 1992). They establish the logical priorities when thinking about and executing a Rolfing session for the client. The Principles of Intervention are the a
priori (before the fact) thinking needed to plan strategy and then offer manual and/or movement intervention. What makes Rolfing SI unique in the field of manual therapy is that we work according to these principles. Just like we cannot play checkers without a shared understanding of the constitutive principles of the game, a Rolfer must apply all five Principles of Intervention at the same time to execute a Rolfing SI session: wholism, palintonicity, adaptability, support, and closure (see Figure 1). By definition, the principles do state the logical foundation of our work, but do not state a temporal order of the sequence of interventions. That level of action is under strategy and tactics. The strategic questions are “What are we trying to accomplish, and how do I work to get there?” And, usually, “How do I know when the intervention is done?”
Rolf gave us the Ten-Series Recipe, then the faculty of the then Rolf Institute® of Structural Integration (RISI) [now the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute® (DIRI)], went to work defining Rolfing SI, describing the paradigm of Rolfing SI (Maitland 1993), and an early publication of the Principles of Intervention described four of the now five principles (Maitland and Sultan 1992). As a profession we have moved from being a formula-driven approach toward client-centered sessions. This evolution is in part due to the history of the development of the Principles of Intervention. To present each principle, let us take a moment to first examine the role of abstractions as descriptors of process.
Abstractions
Rolf would say to the class that if we had a year to spare some time, Rolfers should learn about general semantics by reading Science and Sanity by Korzybski (1933). A classic quote by Alfred Korzybski is “There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything, or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking” (Moncur 2018). General semantics is about the language we use to store information in our brain, how language itself limits and organizes the knowledge that we retain. An abstraction is a word or phrase used to explain a complex concept. It can sound like a metaphor with profound meaning or it can sound like nonsense. Rolf used to say, “If you are going to use an abstraction, that is to use words disassociated from their common usage, you have got to take the time to define it for the reader or the listener.” The Principles of Intervention are such abstractions and here I will lay them out in as grounded a way as I can. In Rolfing SI we have this struggle about the difference between a really good abstraction that will help to grasp a big concept, and of using abstractions because it is easy to use high-level abstraction language. It can sound like great rhetoric and yet does not produce cognitive understanding. This has been the job of the second generation of Rolfing faculty after Rolf, to coherently define the work.
In retrospect, this concept of abstraction took up a fair amount of lecture time, as she struggled to teach her students how to think and communicate about the work. Rolf would point out, if you want to study abstraction, look at a transcript of a political speech and circle every word you can’t concretely define. You will see that there are loaded words, and that these words are being used to elicit an emotional response, without having a clear, grounded reference. That is how politics works. In order to be alert for this, if you run into an ungrounded abstraction, make note of the emotional response: it can be excitement, it can leave the reader ungrounded and uncomfortable. In this discussion of the Rolfing SI Principles of Intervention, we aim to have the abstractions linked with concrete ideas, and references. They are intended to elicit learning and communicate high-order phenomena about the human form; they are backed by my fifty years of teaching and practice. Here then are the Principles of Intervention.
1. Wholism
Rolf would say, “This is a wholistic approach to organizing the body.” Rolf intuited wholism from way back in the 1930s, and now, wholism is practically a household word in the wellness industry. Rolf talked about it long before the concept became a common idea in the culture as it is now. Wholism became the first Principle of Intervention in defining Rolfing SI. In essence, wholism is a meta-principle. Any place that you touch the body gives you access to the whole body. The idea, confirmed by the study of embryology, is that the skin is the outer layer of the brain. Imagine someone who is sitting quietly; if you touch them with the tip of a feather, or a fly lands on them, their whole system will orient to the stimulus. In an aware person, if their personal space is entered by another person, they know it even without touch contact. So in this way, the Rolfing SI idea of wholism is that you can get to the whole body from any place in the body. For example, if a Rolfer is working with a troubled joint, he or she is enjoined to also work two joints away to ensure connections in the brain/mind. In this way everything is interconnected. Rolfers don’t think in parts, we think in global terms. This is our wholism.
This is quite different from our colleagues in the practice of physiotherapy and massage therapy, to name only two. They are trained in the medical model, which carries the philosophy of reductionism. Their practice is to narrow the inquiry to the region of discomfort to do their work. Physical medicine is dramatically compartmentalized to the extent that an orthopedist may specialize in shoulder problems and would refer you to a hand surgeon for any symptoms in the hand. The insurance industry has something to do with this as well, to the extent that physical therapists cannot even work on potentially related parts of the body and get paid for it. The reductionist treatment model is driven by both economics (not spending to support health), and compartmentalized payment when the insured is in need. As Rolfers, our entire approach is, by definition, wholistic.
The Rolfing concept is that the human body is a unified whole that stands in relation to gravity (Rolf 1977). The execution of Rolfing work aims to allow a newly emerging pattern of order within the whole structure of the client, that these changes of organization in gravity must be brought to the highest level of available integration. The wholism principle applies to the academic concept the Rolfer develops from their anatomical and physiological studies. It applies to the body reading done by the Rolfer at the beginning and the end of sessions. And it applies to these Principles of Intervention (as a whole) as well. All the Principles of Intervention work together and wholism is a meta-principle where “no principle can be fulfilled appropriately unless all principles are” (Maitland and Sultan 1992, 19).
Wholism is a perfect example of an abstraction. What do we mean by Rolfing wholism? Rolfers do not address all aspects of wellness for a client, we don’t advise about nutrition or exercise (unless we have elsewhere acquired those appropriate credentials to do so). Rolfing SI is about how to approach the structure of the body in the gravitational field. We mean structural wholism and functional wholism; all the tissue components that, taken together, are the entire body of a person and all the behaviors that these tissues express. Rolfing SI is uniquely driven by the practitioner’s ability to see the shape of their client’s body organization in gravity. Rolfers look at how the body form takes up three-dimensional space, and how the person literally occupies that space.
Shape
What does the form of this person look like? Rolfers ask themselves this question that has spatial and temporal lines of inquiry and it delivers quite a lot of information about the client. We look at the silhouette of the person, the shape and global form. Rolfers use a unique professional gaze that involves taking the long look at the whole person in gravity. To that end, we have clients walk around the room for a minute, we tell them, “No, don’t try to look good, just be how you are.” We make mental note of their individual form, distribution of mass, how the shape goes through spaces, as well as, how does the person appear when standing still. We observe the push and pull phases of the gait, and how the weight is managed in motion. A Rolfer may have a client sit on a bench and stand up again, as an investigation of how the shape folds and unfolds. Rolfers get their information wholistically. The shape imprints with the Rolfer before doing other analyses.
Maitland gave us this important phenomenology question (Maitland 1994): what is the nature of human bodily being? We can evaluate the body objectively, as one type of inquiry. We also analyze how people report their sensations, and the gestures they use in description. Rolfers often ask: what is the present pre-reflective experience? That is to say, what is happening before a person grasps for words to describe the experience. There is a big container of knowledge that Rolfers draw from to work with the nature of human bodily being. We always come back to the body’s structure and function. Wholism doesn’t deny any part of the body.
In Rolfing SI, we know each client is a unique individual who is the summation of all their life experiences, their environment, and their genetics. Genetics express a host of characteristics that match their biological family members. A person’s structural shape is the end point of evolution of their ancestors, coupled with the wear and tear of their lifetime. In biology this is the nature/nurture equation. Every person has longstanding traits that are visible and have been with this person perhaps their whole lifetime. At the same time, people have relatively stable states that are the resultant of their life experiences. These are the more transitory qualities of autonomic nervous system function. Rolf was shape driven. She’d have people stand straight and direct them to get their geometry in order, and that’s all about shape. Rolf didn’t talk about trait, not ever. This idea came to me when I was chewing on the abstraction of wholism and what she meant by that, or indeed what it meant to me.
Trait
A trait is a distinguishing quality about a person’s shape, often it is an inherited characteristic from that individual’s ancestors, but it could also be an enduring state that has become fixated in their structure and movement. A trait is a long-enduring curve of behavior. By contrast, states may be enduring or transitory. The leading question “what is the nature of human bodily being” drops us right down into the traits of the person in front of us. This is one of the places where our work has influence. Rolfers are working with traits to raise adaptability, to get more plasticity of both shape and behavior, perhaps challenging the limits of my grandfather and grandmother (whom I’m carrying in my blood and bone). These limits can be stretched and shifted.
Let’s conduct a thought experiment. Let’s say we have person A and they are a person living in the northern Mediterranean as their people have done for a thousand years and we have person B who is Nordic in birth, life, and ancestry. Say they are the same gender, same height, weight, have had comparable stressors and strains through their lifetime, and at age forty they experience the same fall off a bicycle, for argument’s sake, the same twisting and deceleration forces. These two human forms will have very different adaptive responses to this injury because the traits they each possess are quite different. Their hard frame skeletons and the associated tissues for these two people would be so unique and individual, that when the forces of the fall get dispersed through the body, they would be distributed differently. The way the energy of the crash flowed through each body would be unique. This is the level of trait; it is a primary driver of the individual difference between clients.
As a person is nurtured, they take the form of the cultural imprint of their people and their family group, like a collective trait expression. Traits are these long, stable variables, they reflect where a person started out in life. Traits generally have less plasticity than states. These are the events that shaped a person on a relatively long time curve. Trait was this missing bit we had to figure out after Rolf. How do we make observations when somebody walks into your office? It’s not just their posture, it’s also their ancestors living in them. How much of this can you change? If you are trying to change adaptability from the genome, you’re in relatively stable material so you must put effort in to stir it up.
Rolf’s original technique put an organized stressor into the body so that some of the deeper genetic stuff could respond, and change the way it was adapted. In those old days, when we would do Rolfing sessions on people, some of them would change a lot. They would change what they were doing for a living, they would sometimes change their gender preferences. They would get a divorce. I don’t see that kind of dramatic lifestyle change after our work any more, and I believe it’s because we have backed out of the original technology enough that we’re not bringing latent traits online. I think the original Rolfing work did that.
When thinking about the traits of my client, the first thing I look for is whether the structure is congruent onto itself or incongruent. Trait-driven body reading brings in the question: what is dominant? Let’s say the dominant trait of a client is how the pelvis finds its support through the legs. I might try to bring the rib cage more over the legs, get more or less dorsal kyphosis, a little more cervical curve. Once those matched better, then I would start working on the legs to drive the organization up to a higher level. That’s how I work with trait, I really think about congruence and how well somebody fits together.
Sometimes we will have a client that comes with high congruence as a trait. We all intuitively know what a person like this looks like. Naturally well-organized structures have a beauty to their presence, in that they seem to be well put together. These folks are natural athletes if they choose. This is high congruence. With the well-organized structure, we can still raise the adaptability of their traits, we can resolve some of the old strains. When it comes to traits, sometimes the ancestry of the mother and the ancestry of the father come to produce a highly coherent offspring. They were born with coherence as a trait.
Incongruence in the traits can come from the ancestral line or it can be the result of an adaptive demand that made the structure take a different shape. Sometimes being the endpoint of a mother and a father from very different heritages will produce incongruent body segments for the person. But also, incongruence in the traits of a person could be from growing up in an abusive household for example. If a person is always ducking conflict or always walking quietly, that kind of adaptive behavior then gets imprinted deeply in the expressive behavioral traits of the individual. You see the person years later still walking quietly, still ducking their head, still always looking up as though the parent is going to come down on them.
Within the observable shape of a person, the traits are visible. Inherited from their parents and ancestors, there has been an interaction of genotype with the environment (their phenotype), and taken together, we are looking at the physical expression of genes, nurturance, culture, and adaptation when we look at one person’s whole shape.
State
States are transitory ways of being, visible and easily observed, they represent the structure and function of the autonomic nervous system. They have a lot of plasticity. States are events that are on shorter oscillations when compared to the long arc of traits. Considering a client’s state gets into the psychobiological line of inquiry, noticing information about a person’s worldview. To observe state is to notice the expressive behavior that people carry with them: always angry, depressed, or timid for example. People may be wired up about hard things that they are dealing with in their life, or they may be feeling generally happy – that is state. States fluctuate. An individual’s state is associated with their psychological adaptation. Are they able to modulate their own state as a means of self-care? Do they have habits that support good self-regulation in their lifestyle? A lot of times people will have discomfort due to the high arousal of their dominant state. They will do what they can to self-correct, like yoga or they go for a run. Then as they come down from the run or the yoga class, this helps to regulate their state, even as it may never touch the genesis of the habitual state.
Like shape and trait, state is a variable of wholism. Tracking state can offer quite a bit of information, both as the client’s state changes throughout a session, but also between interventions. Their habitual states may shift. Also, you may become aware of states of the person’s being that have become immobilized, their nervous system or part of their body may be stuck in activated states or stuck in muted states. A person can become habitually activated, like the car accident was happening every day from the perception of the person’s nervous system. The state can persist for quite some time, as it is being carried around in the tissue. It may look like the person is always angry or grumpy, or they are always scared. Some people can be easily triggered into high stress states. For a complete description of the range of stress states that people experience, see the work of Peter Levine, PhD, his discipline of Somatic Experiencing® is foundational knowledge for all Rolfers. Levine was a student of Rolf in the early 1970s and went on to develop his own unique brand of state-driven psychotherapy called Somatic Experiencing.
Trait + State = Shape
Wholism is the first Principle of Intervention applied by Rolfers, we look at the whole shape of our client during the body reading. A person’s structural shape is the end point of evolution of their ancestors, the nature of what our ancestors gave us: our blood, our bones. The preexisting states and traits visible to the Rolfer, the whole shape of the person, are the matrix that absorbs the life experience. There was a trait there before the hurt, and in that part, a Rolfer may have to get plasticity in the trait variable before they can get restoration of their normal function. A lot of times, if you want to get a state change, you’ve got to get a trait change, because the state and trait are intertwined.
State, trait, and shape are interacting variables that Rolfers are continuously paying attention to, tracking, following, and listening. During body readings, Rolfers make detailed observations of people and to apply the Principle of Wholism ask these three questions:
1. How much of what I’m looking at is an ancestral pattern?
2. What has happened to them, recently and in their lifetime?
3. What is their state right now?
2. Palintonicity
Palintonicity is a word Rolfers use to describe the dynamic geometry of tension within the body as it spans the lived space, stretched between the far stars and planet Earth (see Figure 2). This expression of palintonicity, of ‘The Line’, is Rolfing SI’s fundamental principle of organization (Maitland 1991). The word comes from Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher who was active around 500 bce. His doctrines included the unity of opposites (Graham 2021). Heraclitus posited that the harmony of the world is like the tension found in the bow and the lyre (an instrument like a violin). Rolfers started using the term palintonos in the 1990s to describe a similar nature of the body and its fascia in the gravitational field where the human body is organized or disorganized under the tension of being upright (Maitland 1991). ‘Palin’ is a Greek root word that means ‘back again’ and ‘same backwards and forwards’ like in palindrome. ‘Tonos’ is a Greek root word that means tone, like a musical sound from the balanced tension of a guitar string.
Rolf often spoke of the Line as a logo of relationship between the body and the planet, as well as a symbol of the relationship between the body and the far stars. As Rolf talked about the Line, she was talking about the physics of gravity between the planet, the human body, and the open space of the universe. Palintonicity is an organizing Principle of Intervention that integrates Rolf’s Line model with the notion of an ideal balanced tension within the structure and movement of people. Verticality with ease requires being both grounded on the Earth while also allowing an uplift to the sky. One pole of the human body cannot be fully organized without the other (Maitland 1991). Palintonic harmony is a visible quality about an individual, Rolfing interventions are directed towards clients finding their awareness of balance between the up and the down of verticality, in standing, sitting, and dynamic movement.
Over time, I came to call palintonicity the geometric principle as well, because so many people stumbled on palintonus. The geometric principle is concerned with the spatial order of the human body, which was another way we described Rolf’s original thinking about the Line. She would have us look at the horizontal structures organized around the vertical (see Figure 3). Rolf would talk about hinges (see Figure 4), planes (see Figure 5), the vertical Line, and the many horizontal lines of the body. Rolfing SI is a system of myofascial and movement interventions to organize the human body in gravity by creating palintonic order in the body (Maitland 1991).
Francisco Varela (1946-2001) and Humberto Maturana (1928-2021) described a similar phenomenon in biological systems called autopoiesis (self-producing). An autopoietic system has unity within a closed biological system where the molecular components maintain life by interacting with each other and having flux between components. Autopoietic organization refers to the nature and the boundaries that contain these components. They are subject to change and have compensatory adaptations (Zeleny 1981). Varela and Maturana were linking the way the body moves to the way an amoeba moves. The amoeba is a blob-of-an-organism that puts out a pseudopod to move, fills the pseudopod with itself, and moves. That the real function of a body is shape change in space, that we are flowing from one place to another, except as humans we’re articulated with bones and joints that clickity click along. When someone is moving with profound grace, they seem to flow . . . it’s more amoeboid. We know it when we see it, this is what is visible about the palintonic principle.
In this sense, Rolf’s original geometry of the vertical Line and the associated horizontals is a simple abstraction, whereas palintonicity is a high-level abstraction. Palintonicity is the felt sense that the head has an innate impulse to reach upward to the far stars while at the same time the feet and legs organize to reach to the planet. It is the abstract notion that arms reaching opposite directions have an interaction within the tissue of spaciousness pulling away from itself, the body can be moving in two directions at one time.
Palintonic lines can be thought of as mathematical geometry where the horizontal of the ground is the x-axis, the verticality of the Line is the y-axis, and the spacious organization of the shape is along the z-axis; that is to say this Principle of Intervention is concerned with the three-dimensionality of the human body based on the Cartesian coordinates. That in addition to the tension from gravity, each body segment has axes of movement, these axes relate between the segments through tensional relationships. Working with these multi-vector forces in the manual manipulation of tissue is the application of this Principle of Intervention. The higher-order application of the palintonic principle is being able to perceive the nature of each client: the Line, the horizontals, the three-dimensionality of their shape, and the multiple axial intra-segmental tensional relationships.
3. Adaptability
The adaptability principle was originally called the preparatory principle and stated that the Rolfing intervention is concerned with preparing the body to receive order in the gravitational field (Maitland and Sultan 1992). Changes introduced to a person’s structure must be capable of being sustained and integrated by the whole system. Rolfers raise the adaptive capacity of the organism as preparation for wholistic organization in the gravitational field. (It is interesting to note that Joe Pilates also developed a method of physical culture that he claimed would prepare the body for the demands that would come.) For example, if somebody comes to a Rolfer for a shoulder strain, the Rolfer applying the adaptability principle will consider: I have to get that strain in the underlying ribs resolved before this shoulder is ever going to rest easily. In order to get the ribs resolved I have to deal with the costotransverse junctions where the ribs and spine come together. And there you will see how linked the Principles of Intervention are, you are in wholism when thinking about adaptability.
Sometimes the intervention must go far from the region you’re trying to influence in order to make it more accessible to integration, instead of spending all your time on the area of complaint. The metaphor that comes to mind is from when I was a hunter. One time I was tracking an animal in snow and I had walked probably a couple miles following these tracks when I crossed the tracks of another animal, a coyote, and its footprints were fresh. The coyote had been travelling perpendicular to my path, crossing in front of me. I went on and then found the coyote tracks again but this time they were going the other way. Then I realized, this coyote was tracking me, but tracking me from being in front of me.
It was a great moment. To think that I was tracking one animal, carefully following my prey. But in the case of the coyote, they were predicting where I would be, ranging out away from my path and watching me, then crossing again in front of me and watching me. This is like the preparatory principle. In the tissue, sometimes when you’re following something, you have to go into unlikely places in order to observe what’s going on and to get an objective sense of the whole system. Like the coyote swinging far ahead in the hunter’s path, a Rolfer needs to head far and wide from the path to feed toward the objective. Sometimes when you’re tracking or you’re preparing your client’s system, the useful thing is to do something unlikely. This is the adaptability principle; it adds this unlikely element.
Often clients will come into my practice and they say they’ve got some back pain and then I start working on their feet. They ask me, “Why are you there? I came here for back pain. This is the unlikeliness of preparation.” I take the opportunity to give them some education by saying, “In order to get to your back, I have to get your legs a little better organized. I must get your lateral arches working. I must get your knees tracking better. I have to get your psoas and gluteal muscles to coordinate their dynamic tension better.” That’s the preparation of adaptability.
Like palintonicity, adaptability is a higher-level abstraction. What does it mean if a person’s structure is more adaptable? One of the positive outcomes of this work is that the people have better stress adaptability. When things get tough for them in their lives, either physically, like if they’re an athlete and they’re nursing an injury, high adaptability allows them to still rebuild, or if they’re simply under stress their system adapts to the need to relax. A person who has a wide range of adaptations can return to an easy state after their stressor has passed. The range of states the person’s system has available increases as they go through their Ten Series.
Another example of increased adaptability would be a person who presents with neck pain and they say, “Oh I had that injury in high school. Yes, I had whiplash,” and the Rolfer begins to restore normal neuro-myofascial tone with manual interventions. When the person reports comfort and ease with their neck, it implies that they will not be wearing that injury as they move more freely than before. Compare that with a sign of not being able to adapt. This is when a person has an old neck injury and then they get hurt again. The new injury goes right to those old places and locks them up. People will say, “The new injury made my old ones hurt.” The adaptability principle has the one outcome of getting them to stand up straight and be symmetrical, and also, their tissue has heightened adaptability for the stressor and strains in their future. The continuity of tonus in their tissues has been restored. A person who has high adaptability has a certain kind of grace that emerges in their movement, it is pleasing to see as a reflection of ease within.
There has been suggestion that continuity be brought forward as a sixth Principle of Intervention, and authors may make a case for it. Yet Maitland’s (2016) sixth intervention heading in the “The Principles of Intervention” chapter found in Embodied Being is not strong enough evidence to move forward with that claim; as he himself states “the continuity principle is a specific application of the adaptability principle” (43). What we are talking about here is what makes Rolfing SI strong in its theoretical foundations; what makes Rolfers unique within the professional category of manual therapy is the five Principles of Intervention. Only Maitland can speak to the absence of referencing his original publications of the Principles of Intervention when he described them in Embodied Being (2016); the short discussion of the adaptability principle is one place that reveals that the development of this concept was not his alone. The absence of noting Maitland and Sultan’s seminal publication “Definition and Principles of Rolfing” (1992) can lead one to believe that he was not speaking directly to Rolfers in particular. Here, we are talking about the specific technology that Rolfers apply.
Coming back to Rolf, the old firm touch technique may have activated potentials in the genome, and that strong vectorized touch was a highly organized stressor to which the body could respond in a positive way. Working in the adaptability principle is to create the opportunity for new movement, new behavior, to match the new present moment. If you get somebody better plasticity within their tissues and better connection between segments, the body mobilizes and changes to meet that challenge; then the person arrives in the present moment. Comfort is an outcome of adaptability; the person is more able to manage stress, to return to a baseline that is not high tonus, they can move into action when inspired, and then back to repose with grace.
4. Support
The principle of support started with a very basic idea: you can’t really organize the upper body unless you have organized the legs. The results we get while taking a person through a Ten Series are only as good as the leg organization. Years ago, we used to take polaroid photos of every session and put them up in sequence in order of each session. Then occasionally, I was able to see the client again several months after the completion of their Ten Series and take another set of photos before I intervened again. What was so obvious was that at the Tenth Hour, if the legs were well organized, the person got better over the time after their Ten Series. Better in terms of spatial organization and the front/back balance. But if the legs were still ‘in trouble’ at the Tenth Hour, as in they still had genu varum (bow legs), genu valgum (X legs), or not matching legs, then the person would have devolved in their structure until they met the available support in their legs. This led me to think over time, the job is only as good as the leg work to organize their support.
The support principle can be seen as an extension of the adaptability principle, that you can’t get something organized unless you have support for it. You can’t get something organized unless you have preparation for it. These principles have a lot of interlock when you start getting more abstract about it. This principle evolved out of that old pre-Eighth Hour question: is this session an upper session or a lower session? And the question would have to consider, can the legs as you see them now support or integrate any new change made today? If the answer is not yes to the pre-eight leg question, you’ve got a leg session in front of you. That is where the support principle came from.
5. Closure
The closure principle was the last one to be developed; oddly enough, we didn’t understand closure until after the other four Principles of Intervention were put into practice. The struggle was, when you finish the Rolfing Ten Series, you’re not done. Rather, a set of processes have been initiated in the body that sometimes takes a certain amount of time to show up. How do you define closure when you have an open-ended process that’s initiated by the work you’ve done? Maitland said, every intervention has a beginning, a middle, and an end (2016). Our closure is when the Rolfer leaves the process, either at the end of the session or at the end of the Ten Series. This influenced how I teach and how I work.
This is a framework: a client comes for a session and you have one hour. First twenty minutes is essentially opening the session by figuring out how you’re going to proceed. The Rolfer is to start with the Principles of Intervention, develop strategies, and move ahead with individually tailored interventions. The second twenty minutes is the depth and breadth of that work. In the last twenty minutes, you have to be going for closure and integration. It must start in that last third of the session in order to leave the person organized enough to carry the work back to their daily lives. So, the closure principle doesn’t mean end. It means leaving the process like a gardener; when you plant seeds you don’t get to harvest right away. But if you put down peas and you’ve built the trellises, pretty soon you’ll have peas climbing the trellises.
Closure is the Principle of Intervention that is giving space to the client because it takes time for changes to show up. In my practice, when people get off the table, I never ask them how they feel. I want to wait until they come back for the next session and then ask, how did that set with you? That’s a better measure, higher quality feedback. We don’t want them to reflect on how they feel right away. We want them in a pre-reflective state with just the session echoing through the domains of sensation and organization, allowing their proprioception to experience closure of the touch and of our time together. When you ask someone, how do you feel, as soon as you do that, you’ve gone to a different domain with them. Rolfing SI is education below the mind, which is in the domain of sensation.
Good Rolfing work initiates processes that take time beyond the session to show up for the client. This is why I’ve never been a fan of closely packed work. Can you do a Ten Series in three weeks? Sure, but that’s not closure. People don’t have time for the integration. When thinking about closure, you want people walking out the door with that pre-reflective state. You choose your words wisely, maybe as few words as possible, and the least direction. This is the best chance to keep them out of the cognitive so they may amplify their own sensorial landscape. I may offer a simple directive like, walk around the room, notice where your eyes are landing, invite your eyes to look at the horizon more often, when you’re in motion, when you’re walking, scan the horizon with your eyes. And because essentially the body follows the eyes, where you’re looking is where you are going.
Conclusion
The five Principles of Intervention - wholism, palintonicity, adaptability, support, and closure - they are an essential part of the technology of Rolfing SI. They contain within them the system that Rolf taught us. To teach this work, the Principles of Intervention define what this work is and what are the logical priorities that govern our strategies and interventions.
Jan H. Sultan’s initial encounter with Dr. Rolf was in 1967 as her client. In 1969 he trained under her. In 1975, after assisting several classes, Rolf invited him to become an instructor. After further apprenticeship, she invited him to take on the Advanced Training. Over the next ten years, Jan taught several Advanced Trainings with Peter Melchior, Emmett Hutchins, Michael Salveson, and other faculty members, collaborating on refinements to the Advanced Training. Jan currently teaches Basic Trainings, continuing education, and Advanced Trainings for the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute and to the extended SI community. He feels strongly that his responsibility as an instructor goes beyond simply passing on what he was taught, but also includes the development of the ideas and methodology taught by Rolf.
Lina Amy Hack is a Certified Advanced Rolfer practicing in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of this journal.
References
Korzybski, A. 1933. Science and sanity: An introduction to non-aristotelian systems and general semantics. New York, NY: Institute of General Semantics.
Graham, D. W. 2021. Heraclitus. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer Edition), ed. E. N. Zalta, Available from https://plato.standofrd.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/heraclitus/.
Maitland, J. 1991. The Palintonic lines of Rolfing. Rolf Lines. 19(1):1-2,43-49.
–––. 1993. Das boot. Rolf Lines 21(2):1-7.
–––. 1994. Spacious body: Explorations in somatic ontology. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
–––. 2016. Embodied being: The philosophical roots of manual therapy. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
Maitland, J. and J. Sultan. 1992. Definition and principles of Rolfing. Rolf Lines 20(2):16-20.
Moncur, M. 2018. “Quotation #42015 from classic quotes”. Available from http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/42015.html#note. Accessed September 30th, 2021.
Rolf, I. P. 1977. Rolfing: Reestablishing the natural alignment and structural integration of the human body for vitality and well-being. Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press.
Zeleny, M. 1981. What is autopoiesis? In Autopoiesis: A theory of living organization. ed. M. Zeleny, 4-17. New York, NY: Elsevier North Holland.
View all articles: Articles home
Share this article:
