About Tom Myers HEART AND SOULI have been so very fortunate to be involved with bodywork – making a living through touching people with the intent to create progressive change toward balance – since 1974, now 43 years ago. After so long, I’m grateful to be invited to share a few of its lessons.(Actually, it reaches back further in my life: when I was in summer camp in the 1950’s I used to give my counsellors ‘back rubs’ – that is, until another boy called me ‘queer’ for doing it. I was nine years old and had no idea what ‘queer’ meant but it sounded bad, so I stopped. The things we do to each other, all unwitting!
I am so grateful I had the good fortune to return to this native talent as an adult. I remembered those early back rubs during a hypnotic regression a few years into my career.)Performing manual therapy professionally is an art and a craft and a science, as well as a business, let’s be honest. It is hard to sustain a practice if it is not giving you a good living so let us look at one practitioner’s journey in all three sides of that triangle.As a young adult I had likely heard of massage but in those days the separation between legitimate therapy and adult entertainment had yet to be delineated.
So if massage was brought up I likely tittered like the rest of the populace at that time. In 1973, however, I quit the path my parents and university had set me on and set out to, as the saying went, ‘find myself’.America was tilted at the time so, like many seekers of that era, I rolled west toward California. Also, as with many, I happened onto meditation and Gestalt psychology and what was then called the ‘Human Potential’ Movement (a term I have always preferred to ‘New Age’ or ‘alternative medicine’.
As far as I am concerned, I am still in the human potential camp and I continue to be astounded at what humans can do.)I was in a meditation ‘boot camp’ and some of the members were sneaking away from their focus for a couple of hours and coming back with welts on their bodies. “What are you doing?”, I enquired. “Oh, we’re getting rolfed” came the answer, to which I raised a quizzical eyebrow.One member of the group said, “I’ll show you”. He placed both hands on my chest and flayed the skin off my breastbone.
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It hurt like hell but my teeth started to tingle and I could definitely feel my breath change. “Far out” – as ‘Awesome!’ was expressed back then.When, a few months later, I heard that Ida Rolf was giving a talk I tootled down Santa Monica Boulevard to a down-at-heels motel conference room to have a listen. Within that banal setting, a little white-haired old lady commanded the room and my full attention with a riveting talk (fully academic with a New York accent) on the human condition, at least with regard to body use.Another member of my spiritual ‘sect’ had taken a ride down with me and, after Dr Rolf’s opening lecture, he volunteered to be the model for her demo. In 45 minutes of precise, definite (to the point of pain) probing and prodding tissue, releasing the guy-wires and the secret places of tension, he stood up, visibly changed. His chest was deeper, his voice was deeper, and (I knew him) his emotional affect was deeper as well – even to my untrained eye.I had been headed for a career in promoting a form of highly verbal ‘American zen’ but at this moment my eyes were opened to another form of intervention. She had not psychologised my friend – indeed, she seemed remarkably unsympathetic, attentive but remote, as she practiced her craft on his body.
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If there was a placebo, she wasn’t giving it a chance. (That said, her focus truly was awesome but it was focus in her hands and in his body, not much sympathy in evidence.) And yet the effects of this single treatment lived on in his body for weeks after the session.I signed up for the series of sessions that constitute rolfing. (She herself hated that name; her name for her work was ‘structural integration’ but we hippies tagged it as ‘rolfing.’ Structural Integration now names the profession that has stemmed from her work.) I signed up to be a model in one of her classes which meant I got the sessions cheaper – hey, I was 23 and running on a shoestring.Turned out I was the one-too-many class model but that meant I got lucky; I was worked on after class by her assistant, with some of the students staying on to see the session and ask questions they didn’t dare ask in Ida’s presence.