by Rob McWilliams | Mar 29, 2015 | Rolfing, Uncategorized
Working with a client today with back and rib pain, and a lot of scoliosis. We started ‘the big project’ today of unraveling things from the ground up. For someone with a lot of scoliosis, this means ( for me) working on a particular restricted pathway or joint in the legs, then having them stand up and see what happened.
Sure enough, after doing work on her legs and thighs, the scoliosis asserted itself much more visibly even just in standing still. It’s as if we decompensated her legs, meaning that we worked to release a lot of the compensatory holding in her legs and hips caused by the scoliosis. You could see this as a corkscrewing action into the ground that enables someone whose spine is fairly twisted to face forward. Once the legs are uncoiled, the scoliosis is free to express: one knee way in front of the other, one hips way forward, hips skewed far to the right with the torso way over to the left and so on. Then we worked to release the ‘driver’ of this pattern, in her case ( and everybody is different!) strong restrictions in fascial tissues in the area near where the descending colon becomes the sigmoid, as well as around the kidney, bladder and down into the hip itself. A flattening in the torso above has been straining her ribs, causing them to pop out, and I worked with her to open related fascias. But, again the legs looked a little disconnected. Solution for today? Tracking, i.e. getting the joints to work properly in simple knee bends by guiding them with my hands in standing. For me, this is about finding the counter-rotational movements at tibia and femur, in addition to engaging the client’s nervous system while relating to gravity. The result: hips back over the feet, also an absence of pronation ( which has been a problem) and noticeable increase in space at the waist ( and a more even connection to the floor, all the way to the top of her head.)
That was just our third session, though ( and, in my mind, was a “Session 2′ in Rolf speak, as in “initiating bilateral support.” There was no way I was going to do that “2” without using elements of 4 ( the inseam line), because, simply, the pronation and knee knocking were not at all driven by her lower leg. In a test on the table for me to assess motion at the knee, counter rotation between femur (slightly lateral) and tibia (slightly medial) seemed perfect to me. So…maybe this gives you some idea of all the stuff that goes through a Rolfer™’s mind?
by Rob McWilliams | Dec 8, 2014 | Dance, Rolfing
I made a breathtaking ( okay, maybe more ‘breath giving’) discovery today. I got a wonderful Rolfing® session a week ago today (Monday) from a friend and colleague Tim Shafer in Fort Collins CO last week. Even though since that time I have been very stressed by traveling, work, relationship questions, managing my own business, I still felt a tremendous shift in my dancing today in the dance studio, alone, and I totally believe it came from Tim’s session last week. On a day like this, when I haven’t been able to work out for a week really and have been seriously stressed, I know to start slowly and not have huge expectations of myself athletically. I just work to regain flow, mind/body connection and trust in my technique to help me cultivate support and re-awaken strength. As I worked I naturally starting opening and releasing in the legs, and noticed a quality of breathing through and between my inner thighs. Suppleness; coordination came effortlessly to me.
I knew it was related to my friend’s Rolfing work because I know anatomy: in addition to the fascial chains of movement between abdomen and legs, the pelvic floor/visceral space can greatly affect the lumbar plexus nerves that really govern the legs, notably the obturator and femoral nerves. I myself have found it best often to check for visceral restrictions to alleviate restrictions in hip opening because if I don’t, all the work I try to achieve to open there may come to nought. Well, the same could be true for you, if you are trying to gain ( or re-gain) fluidity and openness at the hip and inner thigh area.
Do you have to get someone to work on your belly to get this? At first, it sure helps, but I think once you find this, and deep visceral restrictions are opened up a bit, I believe we can work though this area quite well in movement, especially using the slo-ball to accentuate movement through that area. This is the focus of my Rolfing practice, too: to help people along the path to self-care and empowerment.
by Rob McWilliams | Dec 1, 2014 | Dance, Rolfing
When you drive, do you automatically have a sense of things like the car’s speed, stopping distance, turning radius on the particular road surface, of the particular power curve of this car’s engine? You can almost sense the car as an extension of your own body, probably, ranging from the ability to do this of a brand-new novice driver just learning to drive and struggling to create this connection from body sense to ‘getting a feel for the car to the thrilling competence of a stunt or race car driver. A wonderful term for a calmly competent driver is someone who ‘drives from the seat of his or her pants’. To me that means that they have a feel for the road and flow of the car through the bottom of the pelvis (aka pelvic floor) and are feeling good and easy connection from the lower body up to their upper body and connection to the steering wheel. They are able to stay present in their bodies even as they are projecting a sense of coordination and appropriate movement out into the frame of the car, moving at sometimes stunning velocities or rates of turning. In those moments, we are not merely present and attentive while driving; part of us, in our essential sense of ‘where and what is my body feeling and doing’ that is “embodiment” is the car. (This gives a new wrinkle for me to the phrase ‘baby you can drive my car’, hence the title.)
So I’m zipping along in my car on the back roads between Lafayette and Boulder Colorado, and am about to take a corner when the thought came to me: “Slow down a little as I don’t have my turning shoes on.” This inner statement had a certain dreamlike echo for me, as I realized that I was cross-referencing another sense of ‘projected embodiment’ like driving: dancing. Now dance, you might think, is just a simple body-based embodiment and not at all like driving a powerful machine. I am proposing here that they are similar.
When I think of not having my “turning shoes” on, it referred directly to the fact that my all-weather tires will not allow tight cornering like the summer tires do. My sense memory is something akin to trying to do a pirouette while wearing sticky-bottom shoes, which give a certain benefit in traction but too much floor surface friction to allow easy spinning in place. It’s just really a felt-sense for me based on years ( and years..and years) of professional dancing experience under variable conditions.
Like driving a car, the dancer must often project his or her self into a form outside of their own body: the pirouette, for instance, involves a center of balance that is not actually directly over the point of contact en pointe or on releve. Rather, studies in the physics of dance have shown that the center of balance in the controlled spin of a pirouette falls rather slightly towards the lifted or gesture leg, maintained there, even though there’s not contact through that line to the ground, by the gyroscopic force of the turn. To me, this is why just practicing balances is not enough. The weight has to shift off the leg slightly in a good pirouette. You have to practice actual turns to get that. Another feature of a good pirouette: micro movement adjustment within the turn. Look at slow motion studies of Baryshnikov and you will see this, even within a multi-turn pirouette. For me this also validates the schools of teaching that tell people to hop to stay on their leg in turns when first learning, because this hop could evolve into a smaller and smaller adjustment. This also gives credence to me of the turn preparation that emphasizes getting all the way on the leg in tendu with even a little weight into the gesture leg, allowing the strength of connection through the inseam line of the standing leg that could be termed ‘the third leg’, which the dancer will need to be comfortable with to be secure in the turn – even though the weight center is essentially a little bit “off the standing leg.”
In similar fashion, those who enjoy contact improvisation – or really any form of partner dancing – intuitively project their bodies into a common movement form (when things are going well :~> ), again, intuitively finding common pivot points, duo momentum and tracking a moving center of gravity between the two bodies. So, this is another sort of “projected embodiment”, like driving a car.
One problem in this is that we can be sucked into some negative patterns of projected embodiment: think of the smartphone pulling your whole body into a small box as you use it. Check in with that some time! What is your breating like when you’re doing that? Can you turns your neck freely. How well can you feel released and connected to the ground or chair that you’re in? Have you kept that ‘seat of your pants’ sense of ease in your pelvis described above? Is there a way to keep that felt sense of ease while you manipulate the smartphone, tablet, lap or desktop tool at your disposal?
This meditation brings up deeper questions for me about child development and how, perhaps, we learn to embody emotion through experiencing and learning from parents, siblings and people and situations in our environment. This will be probably modulated by our “mirror neurons”, which we like all mammals are gifted with. They allow us to navigate all kinds of existential and social/psychological situations through a similar process to the projected embodiment idea: ‘when I see this in her body (perhaps, for example, a stiff neck in the walk towards me of an angry mother getting ready to censor punish me). I will look at that in a later piece, hopefully.
by Rob McWilliams | Nov 26, 2014 | Rolfing, Uncategorized
Normative; average; optimal; fantastic!! So so. Boring. Pleasurable. Painful. Ordinary. Bland. Special? Unique? Finely tuned awareness. Blunted sensation. Strong. Weak. Sad. Happy. Angry. Warm. Spacious. Open.
What of the above describes your sense of “normal?” The Germans and French use this word very often as a way to discuss what one can expect in conventional manners, ethical behavior, government, restaurant fare and more. It has to do with social expectations; basic requirements fulfilled. For Americans, it relates more to psychology and non-abberant personal attitudes and behaviors, and in recent times is generally under question, as in “what is a normal, any more?” For Dr. Ida P. Rolf, the word, as it relates to human structure and function, took on a different sense, more related to the sense of the normative and optimal. So, reading the paragraph above, where many of us might lean towards “average”, “so, so”, “boring”, “bland,” “blunted sensation,” (and perhaps even angry, sad or weak), she taught a whole new vision of normal that could include optimal, and perhaps even fantastic, strong, spacious and open. And why not also “finely tuned awareness?” That is part of our given equipment. An animal in nature has definitely trained its senses and responses through use, not just instinct alone (hence “finely tuned”).
So, in this sense, most of us rarely meet the criteria of “normal” as envisioned by Dr. Rolf, rather staying stuck in an ‘average’ state of mild to moderate dysfunction (and much worse than that and we’re a basket case). But when we work together, client and practitioner can sense the increase in the natural grace, ease and support that is our birthright as human beings.
by Rob McWilliams | Oct 19, 2014 | Dance, Rolfing
Check this out:
ballet can move from a grounded sense
For me, as a dancer, teacher, choreographer and Rolfer™, what’s key here is the strength and ease of movement out from the center of the pelvis of both dancers. Because of their individual commitments to that, too, they are able to flow into a common weight center, of find a common fulcrum of movement out in space, away from their individual weight centers, seamlessly. Sometimes, I watch local dancers doing a Pas De Valse traveling step in ballet class, and I know they don’t get that fully. Dancers, please watch how the movement seems to expand out into space from the hips and low spine. That’s what Modern Dance used to be all about, in my early training at least; study works including but not limited to companies of Martha Graham, Jose Limon, Paul Taylor, Merce Cunningham, Murray Louis ( yes! we moved through space exquisitely), Lar Lubovitsch, Jennifer Muller and you’ll see what I mean. Could you imagine wedding that power with the clarity of balletic lines? We did! I see that a lot in good contemporary ballet. William Forsythe’s dancers were excellent at that too, and I think there are other great examples floating around on the web from the contemporary ballet world. Sometimes Post-Modern Dance and Dance Theatre got too static for me, in it’s search for intellectual and aesthetic probity and socio-polical relevance.
by Rob McWilliams | Oct 3, 2013 | Rolfing
The subject of this brief article could be summed up as: for the hip joint to work well in all directions, as in flexion, extension, rotation, circumduction, anteversion and more, it has to be positioned well (as in Rolfing® Structural Integration goals), and it also needs balanced tone. Otherwise, your body will not feel able to release into full range of motion if an area is too weak, not just badly positioned. You will feel tight and want to stretch, but it won’t work.
I am speaking from experience here. In 2010 I had surgery on my left foot. A side effect of this was that specific muscles in my left hip got really weak*. My experience, however, was that my hips were just super tight. I could hardly stretch forward with my legs spread apart on the floor at all. You have to understand, I used to practically live in the splits. I could flop down into a deep stretch without warming up or even without having worked out or danced for months. This time, it was an absolute no-go.
Hidden in there though were the results of an old injury: when I was 22, I actually dislocated the hip joint onstage (City Center Theater, NYC). Being 22, I was back performing two days later. I just compensated for having no ability to lift my leg to the side turned out by changing how I did it. It looked ok, but was just throwing me more off kilter. My ligaments there never healed back well, and my hip joint tends to slip out of position.
So, it occurred to me to test the tone balances in my hips, and sure enough, it was really weak there, on the left. My body simply refused to let me stretch into an under-toned area. I did and received Rolfing work on the hip to help improve position **, and gave myself targeted exercises with ankle weights to strengthen the hip muscles. After a few weeks, I started to regain flexibility. Phew! I thought I had lost that forever. Because of that inherent weakness, though, and the fact that my injured big toe joint doesn’t work normally, I will probably always need to get work realigning (Rolfing) and strengthening my left hip. Which is ok. When I do the work, I feel progress – increased stability, confidence in standing, walking, climbing and especially strength in lifting – in the exercise room, but also in my work, and in Contact Improvisation (I feel confident to sling tallish 240 pound persons around, albeit slowly, on my shoulders).
In my opinion, it is hard to beat the work of a good Rolfer™ for helping to realign and reposition the hip and other joints in the body. It feels like it is pretty hard to bring things back into place with exercises alone (unless they are not too far out of alignment to begin with, and if the muscle use patterns are already really excellent. I watch personal trainers work to do this almost every day at my gym. Maybe this is because a badly position joint also re-positions all the muscles, tendons and ligaments attached to it, so the pulls from these won’t be able to work normally to stabilize the area. It essentially keeps pulling itself out of line, causing pain. We just feel like something is confused, not right, or unclear about the area. (I have read that another term for pain in the body is confusion – it’s as if the body doesn’t really have clear enough sensory feedback for the area, so it sends a pain message to alert us to that dysfunction.)
This is why I always encourage my clients to do specific toning and stability-oriented exercises as needed. In order for this to really be effective, I always use a Rolf Movement® body awareness approach with this. In a nutshell, one really good repetition of an exercise really is worth four bad ones. I mean, it’s never perfect. It’s always a process of growth and deeper embodiment.
*The adductor group, which pull the thighbone across the mid-line of the body, and also help flex the thigh at the socket (and/or pull the hips over the thighbone).
**Releasing Obturator Externus and Iliopsoas was key here, for those of you that are interested.
