by Rob McWilliams | Feb 4, 2009 | Uncategorized
What is the story of my birth? Well, my mother never really seemed to fit with my father. I think at the time, 1957, she was teaching elementary school, in Santa Maria California, after having been with him for about a year.
By all accounts, I was a happy baby/toddler. I remember climbing out of cribs a lot. I was a little performer, early, with all older siblings and their friends to entertain. A sweet, early memory is of galloping with a stick horse, cowboy hat on, around the pre-K childcare area at Santa Maria High School, where my mother was teaching at the time. I guess the climbing from cribs is the earlier memory.
I was born 10 miles from the ocean in Santa Maria, CA. It was a temperate climate, rarely getting down to freezing and rarely much over 80 degrees, and foggy sometimes. I was always comfortable in water, being likened at times to a “water sprite”. I played water polo in High School, which I gave up for acting in the HS plays, and later started dancing. Pretty much as soon as I started dancing in a formal way, I was offered scholarships and work in prestigious institutions, like the New York City Ballet School and the Oakland Ballet. I opted to train at SUNY Purchase in Purchase, New York, a conservatory-type institution in the state university system. I learned later that this was one of the top schools in the US for modern dance training (it still is.) Most of our teachers also taught at Julliard. I chose Modern dance instead of ballet because it suited my temperament and particular physicality, and did very well in the field. Once I became a full-time dance student and later professional, I gradually gave up the skiing and running that I used to love. After sustaining serious ankle injuries at 31 due to ankle bone spurs (which were supposed to be career ending) I started doing weight training to supplement the Pilates, Alexander, Dance training, swimming and water workouts that weren’t enough to get me out of bad chronic inflammation cycle. I continued working as a performer for another 15+years after that.
Weight training, wove its way into the fabric of my body then, for better or worse. Sometimes this can set up conflicts, which also result in injury. A rotator cuff injury, sustained recently while out dancing with friends definitely feels like the response of my arm/shoulder to recently received body work not setting me up to support the exaggerated speed and strength still present in my muscles/nervous system. In a twisting lateral arm motion, later snapping back to medial, while springing up into the air, I heard a “pop”. It’s swollen and painful. Sigh. I can tell that it will be better soon, though.
I’ve lived in big cities-NY, Munich and university town exurbs like Berkeley, Boulder or Norman, Oklahoma. Its great to be back here, near and among mountains. I feel good here.
My family has little bit of an uptightness tendency, physically. Some of it is just normal “shades of the old” Scottish sternness. We were not a “warm” and physical bunch, as I was growing up. Every one of us, including my mother, has been working on that, influenced by the general zeitgeist concerning individual growth.
I didn’t get to spend much time with my father. I’ve often wondered what I got from him, and once created a Dance Theatre work entitled “My Father’s Hands” which examined some of that. My hands are like my father’s, and he was very skilled with his, as an airplane mechanic and oil worker, refinery technician. My hands are strong and sensitive. I enjoy using them for piano playing, writing and Rolfing. ®
At this point, the main thing I’m remembering about my father is the time of his death, in 1990. I got the news through an answering machine message while at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts graduate school for dance. I completely lost control for a while, weeping and falling down one moment, talking and functioning pretty normally the next. The thing was, I got the news the first day of a five-performance run. The Dean of the department asked me to tough it out and perform for the shows, as I could not be replaced, and I assented. Actually, at the time I felt that he “would have wanted this”. I’ve wondered about this, since, but that’s what we did. My stepmother put my dad on ice for those five days, so that I could attend his funeral.
My cultural attitudes about the body are heavily colored by the world of dance and theatre that I was involved in and evolved into my whole adult life. Even earlier, as a 9 year-old, I performed child roles in the professional theater in the town. Throughout my life, I have performed in work that was at times aesthetically distanced, and other times confrontational with the audience, as in “physical theater”, Performance Art or Dance Theatre. Each style has a distinct aesthetic. I received a thorough grounding in the art form, after my undergraduate training in dance, from my first main engagement, for ten years, with the Murray Louis Dance Company, based out of New York City. We learned a technique and philosophy heavily influenced by the German Modern Dance tradition, which was rooted in the theories of Rudolf von Laban. I still enjoy performing very much, and this was one of the reasons I left my most recent university position, as Assistant Professor of Modern Dance at the University of Oklahoma.
I sustained several injuries in my career as a dancer, some deeper than others. I once threw my hip all the way out of the socket on stage in New York, and that has probably helped distort my pelvis since that time. My body map includes, but is not limited to, these injuries:
bone spurs in left big toe joint that limit movement; bunion formation, both feet; large bone spurs, about 7 total, in both ankles, some limits on movement; severe ligament damage, right foot; minor knee issues, both knees; continued weakness, loss of coordination, left leg/hip, seemingly from recent back injury; x-ray-MRI revealed moderate damage to disc at S1-L5, T11-12, cervical vertebrae, too; teeth issues; moderate/severe injuries to left arm at elbow; many minor injuries to both arms/shoulders; permanent ligament damage, left shoulder; current right rotator cuff damage, hopefully not too bad.
I suffered some serious physical manifestations-perhaps, in hindsight, of a need for massive change. In the summer of 2005 I wrenched most everything in my lower back out of place, between T11 and S1, in one quick maneuver. Somehow, I had gotten it in my head that in order to relax, after a difficult semester teaching at OU, it might be nice to lie around, get ou
t of shape, then go out and do intensely difficult things. Two months of this rhythm, plus the strain of an unhappy marital relationship, caught up with me in July when I injured myself jerking fence stakes out of the ground for a few days. It wasn’t my age, it wasn’t the activity, it was my stupidity. This was the worst back injury I’ve ever had, which is something in itself. I couldn’t stand properly on one foot for about 8 months after that (the sciatic nerve was/is involved, too) and I’m still dealing with it a little. In September of 2005 my Appendix burst, and I later got a secondary infection and had to stay 7 days in the hospital. The appendix rupture, the back injury, problems at home and at work combined to create an especially traumatic time for me. In retrospect, this made me a more empathetic healer and teacher.
I am constantly learning more about increasing my sensitivity to and focus on the needs of another’s’ body. I’ve learned many things about doing that through various meditative, reflective, imaging and somatic practices. I admit that some times it takes a crisis, unfortunately, to get me to meditate regularly. Among several disciplines, I use Yoga stretching and breath work, TM, journaling, and creative imagination work. Ideokinesis, which uses vivid imagery for imagined movement training, is also a deep practice, for me. Some times I source creative ideas through meditation, and some times I restrict that to working before resting. I usually engage in some sort of contemplative activity, in movement, writing or music, playing the piano by ear when I can find one. I am actively pursuing more in-depth education in Contact Improvisation, Continuum and psychology at this time.
Now, dealing with the life choices I’ve made, I am feeling “older” all the time. This isn’t so terrible, really. The acute edge of the age issue for me is this: I can’t get a job performing in a company that pays enough to live on anymore, for the most part. This is good in that it also allows me to spend more time creating stability, even if I have lost some of the “highs and lows’ of my professional dancer youth. Because of this, I am more available, now, to my listening, receptive, more feminine side
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by Rob McWilliams | Oct 22, 2008 | Uncategorized
I’m sitting in a cafe, writing a post about our sedentary lifestyle. While I write, I remind myself to add micro-movements to neck, thorax, pelvis, knees, toes. I let breathing ripple through me like a tide; some ripples large, some small, never symmetrical, each breath a unique moment in time. I remember the experience of driving in to town from my home, applying micro-motion to help stay alive as I drive. I remember noticing that allowing a fluid focus keeps my response time up rather than down, by allowing me to respond gently and appropriately to traffic rather than bearing down.There are ads on TV encouraging people to walk farther to their cars, to lose their excess pounds. This is great! Use the stairs! Walk to work, when you can, etc. What I’m getting at here is more basic to our experience of ourselves in space and time. Refuse to deaden yourself, physically, or at least, set functional limits, and see these as a way to promote better health, well-being AND better thinking and problem-solving. The evidence supporting this claim is close at hand to you. Find a place in your body that is stiff, itching to move, impatient or in pain and finds ways to move the area. If it’s too painful to move there, search around in your body for small movements that start to give you a sense of relief, like a small spontaneous sigh and “ahh” feeling. Do more of the ones that work. Exact repetition can deaden our experience of such a release, so give each motion a slightly different rhythm, speed and texture. Go smaller, rather than larger, in your attempted range of motion. Play with rocking, swaying, undulating, flexing, extending, circling, twisting. Enjoy putting motion into your pelvis so small, your co-workers wouldn’t notice (though you’ll probably want to practice that in private first!)To me, a major challenge of our computerized, sedentary times is to allow and utilize the inherent movement always present in our bodies; to develop and refine our bodily “felt sense” of the “all that” of a situation/environment ( after Eugene Gendlin in “Focusing”) as a resource rather than a distraction from the rational mind. The micro-movements I am referring to can reflect that felt sense back to you if you let them. What is the message in the movement right now? Could you put a word to it?After doing so, does it start to shift? Does this shift modulate, moderate, exaggerate or in any other way modify the earlier words used to put a “handle” ( Gendlin’s term, again) on the felt sense of the whole situation now?These messages don’t always provide cognitive resolutions to the problems they bring to light. For instance, sensing into my shoulders now, I can feel a sense of “holding myself back”. Sure, this begs the question: “from what?” Also, we can’t always vent our impulses with large muscular movements in the midst of social or work situations. This kind of movement might not be what your nervous system is “asking for”, anyway. Awareness and micro-movement in the area of your body that asks for it may allow more sensation, reflection and perspective to filter in to your thinking, giving depth and volume to what may have been a more 2-D sense of things. Gendlin says it takes 30 seconds of attention to allow a felt sense to come through our usual inner babble. Time yourself for thirty seconds to get a sense of how long that is, then try it! This has to have at least as much potential value as many things we are interested in. Astrology comes to mind here. It would…I am a Gemini, after all.
by Rob McWilliams | May 2, 2008 | Uncategorized
Movement, Stability & Lumbopelvic Pain: Integration of research and therapy, 2nd Edition, Edited by Andry Vleeming, Vert Mooney and Rob Stoekart
By Robert McWilliams, Certified Rolfer®, BFA, MFA Dance
Movement, Stability & Lumbopelvic Pain: Integration of Research and Therapy (2nd Edition; Churchill Livingston, Elsevier 2007) is a compendium of articles on lumbopelvic function and pathology from over fifty authors, including many hundreds of book and study source citations. As the editors state in the preface, one individual author could never put forward so many diverse aspects of the anatomy, epidemiology, clinical treatment experience and theory of this subject. All the material presented is “evidence based,” and as it doesn’t all agree yet, the editors seek to help clinicians develop an “evidence informed” approach to helping clients with lumbopelvic pain. For me, as a “non-scientist” and new Rolfer, it was hard to get through some of it, because of the density and depth of presentation. I have, however, found the sections I persisted with to have paid off. In practical terms, the work has given me a clearer sense of structures to free, connect and stabilize in order to achieve a particular effect. It is an opportunity for Rolfers who are not yet familiar with the vocabulary employed by physical therapists, osteopaths and orthopedists, to become more so. Concepts ranging from the lumbopelvic “self-bracing mechanisms” of form and force-closure, “moments of force” in joint kinesiology, and coupling motion concepts in the spine with alterations depending on the center of rotation are detailed and explained. For example, a different center of rotation will create either a counterclockwise, clockwise or fixed position of a vertebral problem given the same mix of lordosis and side-bend, a fact which has definite implications in “spinal mechanics” work with clients.
The opening chapter starts off describing the continuous ligamentous “stocking” in which the lumbar vertebrae and sacrum are positioned as being a key to its support, stability and function through the “self-bracing mechanism” of the area. It goes through a series of layer-by-layer dissections, with clear descriptions of the interconnections of the fascial layers and muscles affecting the whole region, ranging from the hamstrings to connections through to the mid-thoracics. Much discussion is devoted to potential stabilizing and de-stabilizing factors for the sacroiliac joint (SIJ), and lumbars. I think most Rolfers would find the images and discussion contained in the first chapter enlightening, as it includes clear imagery and concepts based on new information. The evidence in the work is often based on porcine and cadaver studies. Some of this information is hard to make out with the grayscale used, and some of the graphics were not always the easiest to follow, but definitely worth the effort.
This 2nd edition is significantly updated from the previous one, with new authors, and drawing on many studies as recent as 2006. Though it seeks to be based on hard science, it is not monolithic. Several points of view are represented, and some of them conflict. For example, questions about form closure versus force closure at the SI joint remain unresolved, in sum, by the array of varying ideas, dissections and kinematic studies presented. The work is full of amazing facts to ponder, such as “the degree of pain perceived from injury to the spinal ligaments is related to the speed of the injury and not to its extent” (Willard, referring to Olmarkrer et al., 1990). This would speak to the trauma and problems caused by car accidents, and some of the difficulty treating them.
In addition to sections on lumbar and sacral anatomy, the book focuses on function, clinical experience, kinematics, theory of SIJ stability, instability, form and/or force closure, diagnostic methods including CAT, MRI and x-ray, and demonstrates many manual tests for instability at the SIJ. In a photographed case study, Diane Lee shows the clinical benefits of specific motor control retraining of the multifidi and associated stabilizers to ease lumbar pain. Levin presents tensegrity theory, and theories on the possible evolution of the pelvis from costovertebral joints are gently disputed within various articles throughout the work. I was intrigued by Serge Gracevotsky’s wide-ranging discussion of “stability or controlled instability” that rolls through evolutionary subjects, gait, “creep”, spinal coupling, until concluding with the importance of a ridge structure at the tip of the transverse processes of S1 and S3 that locks into the innominates and “transfers the vertical loads” that he considers to be weight-bearing.
If there is a fault, it might be the decidedly mechanistic slant of most of the articles, as if “lack of stability in structure X here is remedied by exercising muscle Y there,” which is clearly limited as an approach. There is no real development of ideas anywhere on psychosomatic pain in the lumbopelvic region. Many passages on rehabilitative movement and exercise contain no discussion of quality of motion. Anticipatory reflex action mechanisms and their importance in setting muscle tone are discussed in a fascinating article, “Motor Control in Chronic Pain: new ideas for effective intervention” by G. Lorimer Mosely. Diane Lee and Andry Vleeming are given the last word in “An integrated therapeutic approach to the treatment of pelvic girdle pain.” This article focuses on combining the physical and emotional/cognitive factors involved in influencing joint motion, termed a “functional integration” approach to detrimental motor and patterns.
No Rolfers are quoted in the work, but some of the authors are probably already familiar to the Rolf community: Jean-Pierre Barral is cited; so are Serge Gracevotsky, author of The Spinal Engine, Diane Lee, an eminent clinician/author on pelvic pain, and Stephen M. Levin, MD, who writes here about the tensegral model. To me this begs the question: why no mention of Rolfing®? It would seem that Rolfing is completely off their radar. Because of the focus on fascial planes, functional “slings” and the interconnectedness and relatedness of structures in cases of dysfunction and pain, it would seem that the editors are looking for a general, holistic model. Perhaps some scientific minded Rolfer can present it to them in a way that is “evidence-based.”
by Rob McWilliams | Feb 20, 2008 | Uncategorized
What would perfect posture be for you? Even the process of asking yourself that is a sort of meditation. Ask yourself:
What would complete support feel like?
What would complete freedom of movement allow me to do with my body?
What would an elegant sense of poise and balanced tone feel like?
One thing that happens is the experience of this “perfect” alignment can actually be “unremarkable”. This means that nothing stands out, and in some ways the body ceases to be a nuisance or irritant.
This can also mean a heightened sensitivity to inner subtlety, coupled with an increased tolerance for outer agitation and worldly troubles.
For me, the first consideration is the issue of support: how well is my body resting into ground, in standing,walking and general movement? How effortlessly is this happening? What’s getting in the way?
How well does the rest of my body adapt to these needs for support from the ground? When we have structural integrity throughout our body-system, the body takes up its natural space, without being collapsed in on itself or pressed outwards tensely. This is what is alluded to above by “balance of tone” in the body. The lines of movement release out in to space in all directions, and we retain a sense of depth, and of weight, in motion and stillness. There are words for this: “palintonicity”, a word coined by Jeffrey Maitland to mean “even tone”, and also meaning a balance of tensions extending inward and outward in all directions, effortlessly. To me this also implies an ability to connect experientially, in the moment, to the opposite side of the focus of our conscious attention in movement. For example, sensing the back of the hand while efforting to mold or sculpt a client’s tissue in bodywork; to use the feet/legs to push up from the floor while lifting a heavy box or just yielding into the ground to allow a wave of ease up through my body after working with a task that keeps my arms and hands busy way over my head for too long.These can be subtle cues, these reminders to maintain a balanced tone! Even with this subtlety, great power and potential is made available to us in this way.
Please notice that I have tried to avoid being doctrinaire regarding Rolfing®, spiritual practices, diet, exercise, sexuality, ethics and all of the various “postures” we can ( and should) maintain in life. Everyone has their own path. This being said, Rolfing Structural Integration is a highly effective method for pursuing the definition of “perfect posture” for you which you can apply to yoga, dance, sports, work and play. Please see the rest of this site at rolfinginboulder.com for more information on Rolfing.
