ABSTRACT In this interview, Rolfing® instructor Marius Strydom presents his path to becoming the first Rolfer in South Africa and his spatial approach to the work. Strydom explains how space is subjective for each person and that Rolfers invite inquiries into their clients’ perception of space by asking about what they are specifically experiencing. Developing a broad perceptual field for both internal body space and the space around one’s body helps people stay in the present moment and have the possibility of a new body experience.
“Our body is not primarily in space:
it is of it.”
– Maurice Merleau-Ponty, translated by Donald Landes
(2013, 171).
Lina Amy Hack: This conversation was inspired by ‘Part 1’ of our theme – ‘Space, Ground, and Gravity’ – in our July 2023 issue. Marius, you reached out to me as you have a specific point of view about space in the Rolfing paradigm. That is what we will discuss here to share with our structural integration colleagues. You presented your ideas about a spatial approach to changing form and function at a workshop at a conference in Prague years ago, which I hope you will also talk about as we go along.
My plan is to pass the ‘microphone’ to you, but before we get technical, let’s introduce you to our readers. Marius, you live and work in South Africa, you are a Dr. Ida Rolf Institute® (DIRI) faculty member who teaches Basic Training in South Africa, Europe, and the United States. Can you tell us about how you became a Rolfer® and how long you have been a Rolfing® Instructor?
Marius Strydom: Thank you, Lina. I like the plan of doing this in an interview format, and it’s nice to chat. And it’s good to see you over Zoom. I have found it difficult to write about this subject, and I am going to do my best to find the words to attempt to describe my experience and development of perception of this matter as accurately as possible. I trained to become a Rolfer in Boulder [Colorado] from 1994 to 1995. I did the Basic and Rolf Movement® Training all in one go and then returned to South Africa to start my practice. So, I’ve been a practicing Rolfer and Rolf Movement Practitioner since 1995. I did my Advanced Training in Brazil in 2000 with Jeffrey Maitland [PhD, Advanced Rolfing Instructor, (1943-2023)] and Pedro Prado [PhD, Advanced Rolfing Instructor]. Around that time, I started assisting with the trainings in Boulder and Munich, Germany. I became a DIRI faculty member in 2001for Phase I, and for Phase II and III in 2005.
LAH: Full disclosure to our readers: I was in your first solo Basic Training, and I’m a huge fan of you; you were the first instructor I ever had who taught nonverbally with presence as much as with your voice. What got you into doing this work in the first place? How did you hear about Rolfing Structural Integration?
MS: Those are kind words Lina, thank you. While studying economics at university, I taught martial arts four evenings a week. After university, I got the opportunity to go to the Middle East for a couple of years to do martial arts professionally. I basically lived in a dojo during that time, trained and taught mainly karate, and there was also yang-style tai chi. There was a shiatsu1 bodywork component as well. It was a combination of those three. My fascination with teaching movement in that format grew with the realization that there were some things (seeming restrictions, holding patterns) that people could move through and other things they could not. Sometimes, people could change the quality of their movement and adapt what is anatomically available for movement easily, and some people had restrictions that did not respond so readily. I started to become more and more fascinated with what is the nature of these things that we seem not to be able to move through.
At the same time, I became more aware that I needed a complete change in my relationship with what I was doing physically and what I was doing with my life. I was looking for something, and when I came back to South Africa, it took about two years before my search led me to find Rolfing [Structural Integration].
There were five elements I was looking for in particular. One, I wanted something grounded in anatomy, not something based on a system constructed by someone else, but something where I could study anatomy directly and influence the anatomy of the clients’ systems by doing the modality. Secondly and thirdly, I was looking for something that combined touch and movement. There were a lot of modalities that were movement based, but very few that really combined those two.
The fourth idea was to find something that had the ability, the potential, to transform. I needed something that would bring really in-depth change. My primary motivation was not to work to alleviate symptoms. I wasn’t in pain. I felt fantastic. I was super fit, but I still felt that I needed a really deep change in my own body away from the deep-seated kind of rigidity that I’d been building up in myself somehow.
And then, the fifth element was wanting something where the context was broad enough so that anything that I or that the person on the table would be experiencing would be welcomed into what we are working with somehow. So a broad, broad scope of practice. I didn’t want to work only with the person’s physical body, only with their psychotherapeutic reality, only their spiritual aspect, or any of those individually. It had to be something that had a big enough insight into the human being that would incorporate all of them somehow and would welcome all of them. And I tried everything that was available. I spoke to everybody, and I started hearing more and more about Rolfing® [Structural Integration].
When I found Ida Rolf’s [PhD, (1896-1979)] book, Rolfing: Reestablishing the Natural Alignment and Structural Integration of the Human Body for Vitality and Well-Being (1989), what I was looking for fell into place. There were no Rolfers in South Africa, I didn’t have the opportunity to try it out myself. I phoned up a good friend in Switzerland who was emigrating to South Africa. I asked this person if they’d please have a Rolfing session for me and tell me what it was about. And she literally did that! She spent two hours with a Swiss Rolfer on my behalf; the Rolfer described the whole method to her; he answered all her questions and did a session with her. When she came back to South Africa, her descriptions confirmed what I’d been hoping it was. That was my journey.
LAH: That is a unique entry into our profession, and it sounds like a conscientious choice.
MS: Ultimately, it was a very strong gut feeling. It didn’t make rational sense, the practicalities of getting to the United States to study were challenging. I had this strong pull to do it. I’m so happy that I jumped into it.
Space is Subjective
LAH: Speaking of jumping into it, here’s my first question. When you think about the space, ground, and gravity that your client occupies, what are you paying attention to and what are you thinking about?
MS: Wonderful. Well, the first thing is I’m loving that you framed this inquiry about gravity by including space. Space is primarily what I want to talk about today, specifically the individual experience of space. The human experience of space is subjective. This is my starting point. Our job is to learn about their experience of space, and our own experience of space.
I’m reminded of the very first session I had, the very first intervention that my Rolfer did in my very first session as a client; she put her hands on the front and back of my rib cage and asked me a question. As I was breathing with her hands there, she asked me, “What do you experience between my hands right now?” In all the years I had spent with all the touch modalities, studying and teaching movement, no one had ever asked that simple question – what is it that you
are experiencing?
This whole world becomes available and opens up the body, and yet, for me, I had no language to describe these experiences. I wasn’t able to translate that into my linguistic schema2, my ability to put that into language. Yet that world was there. There were sensations, there were movements, there were all these things that I subsequently enjoyed trying to put into words. And, so, what does this do? We are including people’s subjective experience as a primary part of their process; it makes their experience immediate and relevant.
Relevance Matters
MS: The physicist David Bohm [PhD, (1917-1992), American-Brazilian-British scientist] puts relevance at the core of communication, even coining the verb ‘to relevate’3. When we need to lift something into our awareness or our clients’ awareness, we relevate that something. Whatever we are talking about, we need to make it relevant for the person first. The most effective way seems to be, and we teach this in Phase I at DIRI at length, to ask open-ended questions. What is it for this person, right now?
Whatever we’re dealing with, whatever anatomical structure, whatever spatial experience, whatever movement, or quality of breath, what does that mean for the person? When we ask them that open question, they have the opportunity to become present with it – to notice it, to locate it, and to attempt to put it into language. This allows a foreground to emerge from their bodily experience, which is inherently relevant to them.
Putting it into language is not the end all and be all; it doesn’t have to be put into any language for it to have an effect. Inviting the person into presence, into their anatomical reality, in their immediate environment, in the moment does profound things. It reorganizes the nervous system. It does what we want to do through the manipulation already. So when you ask me about how is space important in our Rolfing work, the first thing to consider is the subjective nature of experience.
We need to be asking non-leading, open questions in our sessions; it invites our client to be present; they locate the area under question in space and notice their direct experience of it. Then, as practitioners, we can interact with that and make whatever we are doing in our Rolfing sessions more effective and meaningful than if we do not invite the person to be present.
LAH: We invite people to feel themselves here and now. So when you think about space, ground, and gravity, you right away think about how the client is experiencing their space, both in their tissue and in the space around them.
MS: Yes, space is about feeling here, feeling now, my anatomical reality within my spatial reality. When I first started learning about how to ask these open invitational questions, I’d say something like – what do you feel here between my hands? Then I realized this is a leading question, too. I want my inquiry to be as open as possible. I realized, as I was asking these questions that each person has different categories of direct experience. Some people will talk about sensations more than others; some relate their experience of weight and temperature, and some people speak about some visual aspect or texture.
For example, my skeleton became visually available to me as I experienced the Ten Series. I suddenly realized that I could feel and see the shapes of my bones, and it came to light so to speak. As my bones got touched and as I moved my skeleton in relation to my Rolfer’s hands, these internal experiences mapped into visual knowledge.
Each person’s experience is unique. This is helpful because if I want to ask questions that help people deepen their experience, then it’s helpful for me to stay within the categories that they already have articulated. If they talk about sensation, I can ask them questions about sensation to help them deepen. If they talk about different layers of substance, I can ask them what is deep to that layer. This helps them deepen how they are experiencing themselves.
I am trying to describe my slow sense-making, an ongoing attempt to put this perceptual landscape into words. As the years have gone by, my own interoceptive4 landscape has taken shape, and I’ve realized the value of asking clients questions about a category that they haven’t talked about. This broadens their perceptual field. I notice what they haven’t described yet, and then, all of a sudden, they find something else, something new. If I talk about space and then what is happening in a particular joint – it feels dense, tight, or whatever the case may be. What is their sense of space as it moves around? Does it feel tightly packed or loosely wrapped in its surrounding soft tissue? Is there a sense of having space or a lack of space?
New Category of Experience
MS: Finding a new category of experience that the person can immerse themselves into also deepens their ability to remain present with the area and the things that we are working with. What I found is that just that presence alone amplifies the changes. Manipulation of the tissue will introduce changes; the combination of manipulation and movement that we do can bring substantial change. This kind of spatial awareness can bring change even though there’s no specific touch or movement intervention, as the person’s postural coordination is changing. By change, I mean a reorganizing of tissues and the spatial position of the skeleton, which is posturally visible and available. These changes are accessible to the client in their perceptual field. They become centrally involved in the process of change, collaborate with us in our offices, and, at times, even lead it.
For me, Rolfing Structural Integration has three components: touch, movement, and subjective awareness. We engage with the client’s senses and help them deepen their access to their anatomical space while working on all three components. Individually, each is an effective intervention. In combination, there is even more effect.
LAH: How can a practitioner amplify this idea of space while working with touch and movement? How do you observe a person’s spatial awareness?
MS: Okay, my intention was from the beginning to make this ‘working with space’ as practical as possible. I have been fascinated by the eloquent writings of our colleagues, people like Jeffrey Maitland [PhD, (1943-2023)], author of Spacious Body (1994), Hubert Godard [French Rolfer and European Rolfing Instructor Emeritus], Kevin Frank [Rolf Movement Instructor, United States], Aline Newton [Rolf Movement Instructor, United States], Rebecca Carli Mills [Rolf Movement Instructor], Monica Caspari [(1953-2019), Rolf Movement Instructor], Caryn McHose [Certified Rolfer, Rolf Movement Practitioner], and especially the ideas from our Rolf Movement Faculty as a group. For my contribution, I want to link spatial topics directly to our anatomical reality. I want Rolfers to understand the spatial construct as part of our usual feedback loop of learning that we offer our clients. People are assessing our work by observing the changes in their body position, postural coordination, and qualities of movement. Spatial awareness work links to the same processes that we access in our usual structural work.
Let’s zoom back in time before we had this knowledge about the importance of space orientation – what did we look at before? I think the anatomical reality is essential. I value anatomical precision while touching. We need to know what is contracted, what seems to be pulling on what, and what anatomical relationships provide the shape in front of us.
As Rolfers, we look at what we can see anatomically, such as what is contracting, what is rotating, what is eased, what is strained, etc. We are grounded in an anatomical reality. Then, through time, for me, as I teach this work, there’s always been this language of space. My experience of space, of the person in space, in the direct relationship to space, became more and more clarified. I would say it became a more profound and central understanding. Part of my gradual realization happens when I made it personal.
When I scanned my body and asked myself to feel what was active, what was relaxed, and what stood out for me, the head of my left humerus surfaced again and again. I started realizing what events in the past had a direct impact on that. The fact was that it was usually not resting. I had to do something to allow it to rest. Then, I became aware of the long head of the triceps and what it was doing. It was active. It was always doing something. As it activated, it pulled the humerus superiorly and anteriorly in the glenoid fossa, while pulling inferiorly on the infraglenoid tubercle of the scapula. There were two different directions being created by this anatomical structure. These particular holdings would elevate and anteriorly push the humerus and do something else to the scapula.
This awareness of my humerus came back again and again and again. Then, I realized the event that happened had something to do with somebody throwing something at me and that impacted on the head of my humerus. I realized that there was a reaction or an action still active that had a relation to the memory of this event. It was like there was an expectation that this event was going to happen again. I realized this holding pattern in me is acting on space around me. It’s acting on how I’m perceiving the space immediately in front of me, to the left.
I then started realizing that this phenomenon is not just an anatomical structure that is tensing. Something is directly acting out on space. When I realized that, I expanded my curiosity. I asked, what happens in my sternum? It’ll either be projecting into space in front or actively injecting, or introjecting, if I can use that word, into the internal space of the rib cage. It’s active. It can also condense in on itself.
We’ve all worked with the sternum. When we touch it, sometimes we find that the person’s sternum is compacted into the body somehow. Or it’s not as loose and springy as it could be. There are different things we can find with the sternum, it can orient upwards, or it can orient inferiorly, etc. There’s an activity that is expressed in space, a direct relationship to space. I found the language for this part of our specialty in phenomenology and the writings of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty [PhD, (1908-1961)].
There is a whole world to discover about the subject of experience in relation to space. Focusing on the space part, I started realizing and seeing that each individual anatomical structure can be described in terms of its direct, active relation to space. When I included that idea more in my body reading, there was a different landscape that emerged. I started seeing the person in a more direct relationship with his or her environment. Almost, in a sense, how they constitute themselves.5 How they put themselves together in space, not just anatomically through contractions and relaxations, but also the rotations – as a kind of a gesture, as a kind of momentarily arrested gesture in space, acting on space. Then, I wanted to find out if my perceptions were accurate or not.
LAH: How do you check perceptions for accuracy?
MS: Let’s take my example of the head of the humerus if I were facing that presentation as a Rolfer. I would approximate where I think this anatomical structure is pointing towards. I would take my fingertip, put it on a structure, and ask the person to meet me there.
People need to be able to do two things to do that. The first is to be able to anatomically locate it. They need to be able to locate my finger within their anatomical structure. When they do that, it feels like they are touching me back, like my finger is touching another finger.
I’m sure all Rolfers have done this with the spinous processes of our clients, we ask them to meet our fingertips at their spinous and transverse processes. Usually, you can immediately feel if the person is able to do this. When they meet you, you’re there, it’s like two fingers touching each other. It’s a hundred percent secure and there’s a direct nature to the contact.
Secondly, they need to be able to meet me in the vector or direction that I am contacting them with. So, initiate the movement from that specific place and in a specific direction. Remember, I am testing my perception. It is not that they are obligated to meet me, it is that if they straightaway go in another direction, I know my perception needs to be adjusted right there. I got the vector that they are orienting into space with – wrong. It is delightful, this ‘making spatial orientation concrete’ somehow.
So, the same thing can happen with any of these anatomical structures. If they are able to locate me immediately and meet the vector that I’m applying, I know that my perception has been correct because they are already orienting in that direction, with that structure.
The step after that is to go to the other side of the structure, in this case, the head of the humerus is available to us anatomically! So, I touch the other side of the structure, and ask the client to meet me there. Almost invariably, it takes a while for the person to locate my contact point, and for them to exert some pressure in the same vector I am applying. It takes total concentration for the client! They are totally engaged, and their nervous system is reorganizing while they orient, while they work. Once this opposite vector is activated, and they can go back and forth in both directions, initiating from the two different points that were contacted, I can support/encapsulate the whole structure with touch and ask them to initiate or rather explore movement in all possible directions. This loosens any active orientation into space, into a configurative way of organizing (Paillard 2005), which lets it rest or ‘hang loosely’ in space, with any direction of movement being easily available. [This is a central component of integration for me, a central component of our relationship to space, our relationship to gravity in this bodily method of being present.] These micromovements have been taught by DIRI for a very long time.
LAH: What do you mean by vectors of orientation?
MS: We are talking about people’s direct experience of being in the world, with the body in space. We are oriented towards alignment in gravity, oriented towards my relationship with my environment, and oriented towards being present. While presenting a workshop in Prague some years ago, I was struggling, as I am struggling now, to describe this experience of space as a primary orienting substance. When thinking about the relationship between presence and perception, this phrase popped out – reflexive vectors of orientation. This phrase brought it all together for me.
Reflexive Vectors of Orientation
MS: A reflex is movement below thought. It has a lot to do with how we organize ourselves spatially; our body positions and movements happened long ago, and our movements today are a collection of what we did before – they’re reflexive. By vector I mean that tissue has a direction into space. Let’s go back to the sternum, even if the sternum is orienting into the deeper anatomical space, the internal space, it is still orienting with direction. Tissue has vectors of direction; it may be superior in its position, inferior, anterior, or posterior, and beyond. Tissue can be oriented to the periphery of the body, the space immediately around the body, or maybe as far as the horizon. All of those imply some form of direction; tissue has a relationship to direction. I use the notion of vector for that quality; I invite you to focus on the direction of action as much as the action itself.
LAH: I must admit, as we talk, I am thinking about bone specifically, maybe because of the density, it is easier to think of bone having direction, both in the body and toward the space around the body.
MS: This is the way I understand it at this stage, and it comes from my actual experience. When this became clearer, I realized my whole body is actively oriented in space. It’s a direct part of my environment.
For me, space is becoming a substance in which I’m living. I am active in the substance. Alva Noë [PhD, American Philosopher] writes about Action in Perception (2004), that we are actively doing something when we perceive. We are actually reaching into the world with knowledge and experience. “We enact our perceptual experience; we act it out” (Noë 2004, 1).
Think about when we are developing our skills and learning to do body readings with our clients. When we start out in our first year of practice, what we can see grows with our years of practice, and then ten years down the line, we have changed. We had the opportunity to test and refine our three-dimensional perception of putting our hands onto bodies, interacting with clients, and realizing that what we perceive visually, in the beginning, informs what we do in the future. Through this beautiful feedback loop that happens in our work, this amazing work, we have the opportunity to understand our relationship with space better.
Space as Substance
MS: When I was doing tai chi, one of the ways to do the movements is to imagine that you’re standing in water while doing the practice. If you’re standing neck deep in a pool and you move your body, you get different feedback because that fluidic environment has a different density than air. Air is like dry water. Imagine air as dry water.
This is one way to make substance out of space, and this will affect the nervous system. This change in perception will affect our bodies. Let’s take internal space, for example. If you take the density and weight of the liver, we can imagine this whole organ and the space it occupies. For a moment, we can allow the musculoskeletal structures around the liver, which are usually doing all the support of the liver, to allow them to rest. We invite them to receive support by resting into the substance of the liver. So there can be a reciprocal supportive relationship that can be invited, where the liver supports the musculoskeletal surroundings to rest. We can also invite receiving support by floating into the fluid movement of the breath. Inviting our breath to float our liver can bring some internal changes. It may bring changes to the tonus of those supporting structures.
LAH: Is this one way you are inwardly accessing the nervous system?
MS: Exactly; this kind of inquiry about space allows an inward reorganization of the nervous system. It is an invitation to relax. It has a physical substance within that it can relax, facilitating a change in tonus. This can change the way we experience ourselves. It can change the quality of movement that will then be initiated; something else may be available. Exploring ourselves for the fluidity of movement where space has a substance, and we are in relationship with that substance.
So, that’s one aspect of it. There is another point I wanted to make. Any anatomical structure that I can differentiate for myself in my own body, it has this relationship between the substance on the inside of the body – anatomical space – and also the substance on the outside of the body – peripersonal and extrapersonal space. It has a direct reciprocal relationship of support, invitation into movement, and fluidity of movement, as a few examples. Right? It is in relation to each other.
LAH: That makes me think of the classic example of sitting with a cup of tea. We have the desire to drink the tea, and we need the arm and hand to bring it to us. That task and gesture are extremely complex neurologically. You are slowing it down and zooming in to a part or small region, and this location has a relationship with the cup of tea, the table it’s sitting on, and the air-space substance. Am I understanding what you are saying?
MS: Yes, exactly. Slowing it down, and clarifying any area of interest. Or, possibly more accurately, from any area’s ‘point of view’. To be curious about how that area is active in organizing a whole-body pattern.
As you mentioned when we got started, I presented a three-day workshop on this topic in Prague some years ago to manual and movement therapists, and these are the types of ideas I presented.
LAH: Yes, and you have shared with us some of the notes you distributed at that event. And we have at the top of our article, the quote by Merleau-Ponty that leads your conference notes – it is of space – is quite an evocative phrase.
MS: Perfect, that leads us to my next point – my body is space. Merleau-Ponty’s quote in Landes’ translation reads: “. . . our body is not primarily in space, it is of it” (2013, 171). One way this might be true is with the concept of body schema, which is a neural representational map of the body, of the anatomy, the structural space we’ve been talking about, but also, the space around the body – the peripersonal space. Just like we have nerves that signal when we touch something, when we are touched by something, we also have nerves that fire when something enters our peripersonal space. In other words, our nervous system monitors when we are being touched in peripersonal space.
The body schema differentiates between peripersonal space, the space around us that we can reach easily, and extra-personal space, which is the space just beyond our immediate reach. There is a study that illustrates this spatial model very well by Maravita, Spence, and Driver (2003). They were studying if it was possible to change the shape of the peripersonal space.
They gave a monkey a stick, put a banana just beyond his reach, and the monkey reached with the stick to get the banana. When they measured the neural activity in the brain and how their nerves fired together in relation to space, they realized that the stick was now included in the monkey’s neural mapping of peripersonal space. The duration of time that it took for this change was roughly seven seconds. This is not a long time when you think about neural map plasticity in the brain. Also, this change of the peripersonal space endured.
So, if any of us use tools, if we do things differently from our usual habits, if we interact with the space we inhabit differently, then our neural map has changed. For example, if we walked into a room with the intent of doing parkour and looking at what we can jump off of, or what we can roll over, or how we can turn this room into our urban jungle, rather than walking in and seeing a table and a chair, it changes our experience of gravity. It changes our experience of this space that we have access to. We’re creatively interacting with it. And that changes what happens in our body. It changes the tonus, the movements.
Body is of Space
MS: If we take what Merleau-Ponty was saying, the body is not in space, it is of it. This essentially means that the fact that my body is also an object and in space doesn’t mean that it’s only an object. It means that other objects can also be spatial in nature. Let me take the ground; let me take the floor as an example.
You’ve taken my class, so you know I work with push hands with students, as I have been working with this for years and years. Push hands is the tai chi form of sparring, it’s very gentle and a lot of fun. It’s almost like making jokes with each other, like a scherzo in music. You’re playing with each other’s balance. You push and you pull, and the other person does the same. And if you push too far or you think you are pushing something solid and the person moves away like a fluid, then you lose your balance and it gives you feedback.
LAH: Good old feedback.
MS: I realized that in this practice, the body instinctively learns how to redirect vectors of force, reflexively as the push from your partner comes into your body. It turns horizontal vectors of force into vertical vectors of force. We’ve got to find a way to relay it through the alignment of the joints and the movements of the body, to adapt to the present moment, and ultimately, these vectors of force need to go into the ground.
Going into the ground becomes an experienced reality. After decades of doing push hands, dealing with a high number of potentialities of where push force can go in my body, and how this can go into the ground, I realized what I’m walking on. And should I access that experience, it is ‘inhabited’ by a myriad of vectors and spatial orientations. My body is an object on the ground, and there is still a spatial experience of what is beneath my feet. Not just the texture of it, not just the substance or the give of it, but this enrichment of potential vectors below me that I can play with and interact with. This informs what is happening to my body above ground. Think, for example, of the difference between standing with bent knees and slowly pushing the ground away versus slowly reaching into the ground; the difference that has in the quality of movement is significant; how we think about the space shifts the way the body feels doing the movement.
This is the heart of what I hoped to communicate: in terms of our spatial experience, this is not only about the physical substance of our anatomical space but also beyond into that air substance and the objects out in those peripersonal and extrapersonal spaces, including the substance of the ground upon which we stand, walk, and move.
LAH: You’re describing the physical nature of the human system so beautifully, and I mean that in the physics sense. Your words remind me of walking on thick snow that has collected all winter. My feet can project down to where the ground is, which may be several feet under the snow, and when walking on that snow, my body is trying to anticipate how the snow will feel (and if I’m going to break through to the bottom layers). That’s my Canadian life showing.
What is the Body?
MS: What we are putting language to is answering the question – what is the body? The first answer is that it is an object, which is what I see in the mirror or when I see another person. This is true; the body is an object. And the study of the body as object can give us an immense amount of information in terms of the anatomy, their relationships, and how they function.
It doesn’t tell us anything about being a body. Each body is unique in their experience, the body is the locus of our experience, of our subjective being. Each of us has a unique experience of having a body and being a body. Our neural maps, our body schema, has developed into a specific perceptual field.
Let’s answer the question – the body is a subject. We walk into phenomenological methods. In our case, we are interested in the human body in gravity, then we have to approach it from as many varied points of view or perceptual methods as possible. This is a ‘variational method’. Where they all overlap will be the essence of the phenomenon. The total circumference of all our ‘models of seeing’ attempts to describe the whole phenomenon.
When I graduated from Phase III, I walked down Pearl Street in Boulder, Colorado, and I asked myself to try to simplify everything I had learned. To think back to the beginning and describe the essence of Rolfing Structural Integration. I was left with two main concepts.
1. We are concerned with the alignment of the body in gravity, with an immense amount of anatomical detail.
2. The other concept was consciousness within the tissue.
Realizing that experience is subjective, like we started with at the beginning of this interview, when we invite our clients to notice their sensations and fields of perception with our open-ended questions, it informs their interoceptive awareness. Adding in peripersonal space as part of the body space really shows we are embedded in our environment – our social environments and spatial environments. And these experiences directly inform the objective body, how we are constituting ourselves through our postural coordination and our movement habits.
When we include the person’s direct experience, the nervous system starts to reorganize. The nervous system is attentive and present to these inquiries of space. When we stay with the exploration, the body starts to reorganize. This spatial approach, with the anatomical precision of our manual interventions and our biomechanical insights, are the tools that make our work an effective method.
LAH: Thank you for framing this construct of space. Any final thoughts?
MS: Our work happens in the present moment. We extend this multisensory invitation, through our being and through our work, to our clients to ‘swim upstream’ in their nervous systems to where they’re constituting themselves in the present moment, where they are putting themselves together.
Even though I have this thing in my left humerus that I might be doing, even if I do it every moment of every day for three decades, it’s still being done in the present moment. I’m still organizing myself in this moment. And when we’re there, in that place with our sense of presence, there is a relationship for me between presence and perception, perception of the moment on a broad scale. Open questions are an invitation for our clients to explore their experience in a meta way. And remember, “I don’t know” is a valid answer.
You don’t have to have an answer. We don’t actually have to have any content; we don’t have to have anything form into words. There is something that happens just being asked the question. We have to locate the area in the body, which brings the nervous system to attend to the area, and then it tries to find something that can be put into words possibly, or that can be stayed with, can be experienced. The spatial orientation, or reorientation, we perceive from inside the body that something is happening. This works regardless of what the person says.
LAH: I appreciate that you reached out to us with Structure, Function, Integration to talk about this spatial approach.
MS: This article is intended as a big invitation to our colleagues to one of the most fascinating constructs we work on in our school teaching Rolfing Structural Integration. Being in classrooms, we invite everybody’s subjective experience into the room, because teaching and learning the work is going to relevate that topic for them. When we are in our offices, we are talking with an individual person, and knowing this spatial approach to perceiving our own body and our client’s body will inform you about the variety and depth of the human experience. We have so much to understand about the human subjective experience, and as we do our Rolfing work, this information is available to us in that room.
How we put ourselves together is unique, creative, and endlessly interesting. Being present with the client can be a great gift, for them and us, as we continuously learn with each session that we offer. You are welcome Lina; this has been wonderful. Thank you for your time and presence in doing this.
Endnotes
1. Shiatsu is a non-invasive therapy originating from Japan. It uses a combination of kneading, pressing, tapping, and stretching techniques. These gentle techniques aim to reduce tension and reenergize the body.
2. I use the term ‘linguistic schema’ to refer to the ‘landscape’ of my experiential field of my body that I can put into language. It’s inspired by the work of Professor Matthew R. Longo, PhD, who leads the Body Representation Laboratory of Birkbeck, University of London (2016); he investigates embodiment from a cognitive neuroscience perspective.
3. The verb ‘to relevate’ was introduced by Dr. David Bohm in his 1980 book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, from which the adjective relevant is derived. Ultimately, the word comes from the root ‘to levate’, meaning ‘to lift’. That is to say, to relevate something about a person’s body and the space they occupy is to bring it to their attention for a specific context for consideration and bring it into language.
4. According to Chen et al. (2021), interoception is the representation of the body’s internal world. It is a process whereby the brain communicates with internal organs and the periphery via the peripheral nervous system and non-neuronal systems. It includes processes by which an organism senses, interprets, integrates, and regulates signals from within the whole system. Key components of this unified system include: interoceptive signals; interoceptors; ascending and descending pathways; central interpreters; central integrators; central regulators; and interoceptive effectors. They report that dysfunction of interoception may be a component involved in neurological, psychiatric, and behavioral disorders.
5. “Bodily sensations originating from the skin surface or from the vestibular and proprioceptive senses contribute major information about the way we are constituted” (Azañón et al. 2016, 636).
Marius Strydom became a Rolfer® in 1995, Certified Advanced Rolfer in 2000, Phase I Dr. Ida Rolf Institute faculty in 2001, Phase II and III faculty in 2005. He started the South African Rolfing certification trainings in 2010 and has taught all phases of the Rolfing training in South African, United States, Germany, Japan, and Canada, and he has taught continuing education in the Czech Republic and Poland.
Lina Amy Hack, BS, BA, SEP, became a Rolfer in 2004 and is now a Certified Advanced Rolfer (2016) practicing in Canada. She has an honors biochemistry degree from Simon Fraser University (2000) and a high-honors psychology degree from the University of Saskatchewan (2013), as well as a Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner (2015) certification. Hack is the Editor-in-Chief of Structure, Function, Integration.
References
Azañón, Elena, Luigi Tamè, Angela Maravita, Sally A. Linkenauger, Elisa R. Ferrè, Ana Tajadura-Jiménez, and Matthew R. Longo. 2016. Multimodal contributions to body representation. Multisensory Research 29:625-661.
Bohm, David. 1980. Wholeness and the implicate order. London, UK: Routledge.
Chen, Wen G., Dana Schloesser, Angela M. Arensdorf, Janine M. Simmons, Changhai Cui, Rita Valentino, James W. Gnadt, Lisbeth Nielsen, Coryse St Hillaire-Clarke, Victoria Spruance, Todd S. Horowitz, Yolanda F. Vallejo, and Helene M. Langevin. 2021. The emerging science of interoception: Sensing, integrating, interpreting, and regulating signals within the self. Trends in Neuroscience 44(1):3-16.
De Preester, Helena, and Veroniek Knockaert (eds.). 2005. Body image and body schema: Interdisciplinary perspectives on the body. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing Co.
Holmes, Nicholas P., and Charles Spence. 2004. The body schema and the multisensory representation(s) of peripersonal space. Cognitive Processing 5(2):94-105.
Longo, Matthew R. 2016. Types of body representation. In Perceptual and emotional embodiment: Foundations of embodied cognition volume 1, eds Yann Coello & Martin H. Fischer, 117-134. London, UK: Routledge.
Maitland, Jeffrey. 1994. Spacious body: Explorations in somatic ontology. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books.
Maravita, Angelo, Charles Spence, and Jon Driver. 2003. Multisensory integration and the body schema: Close to hand and within reach. Current Biology 13(13):R531-9.
Merleau-Ponty, Marice, and Donald Landes, trans. 2013. Phenomenology of perception. Oxfordshire, UK: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group.
Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in perception. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Paillard, Jacques. 2005. Vectorial versus configural encoding of body space: A neural basis for a distinction between body schema and body image. In Body image and body schema: Interdisciplinary perspectives on the body, eds Helena De Preester and Veroniek Knockaert, 89-110. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Rolf, Ida. 1989. Rolfing: Reestablishing the natural alignment and structural integration of the human body for vitality and well-being. Rochester, Vermont: Healing Arts Press.
Keywords
Rolfing Structural Integration; space; perception; shiatsu; Rolfing training; South Africa; to relevate; David Bohm; open-ended questions; interoception; space orientation; push hands; vectors of orientation; Maurice Merleau-Ponty. ■
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