Something That The Whole Universe Is Doing

Rolfers make a life study of relating bodies and their fields to the earth and its gravity field, and we so organize the body that the gravity field can reinforce the body's energy field. This is our primary concept.
Ida P. Rolf, Ph.D.


As people come to Rolfers with their aches and their pains, we can see where their bodies are literally offering blocks to the gravitational forces. The gravitational force is immense, and their resistance isn't much good except to close the body down, compress it. Sometimes the block has been put into the physical picture by a physical traumatic episode -- a fall down the cellar steps, out of a tree, out of a high chair, off a tricycle or bicycle, out of a speeding automobile, etc., etc. This block is in the actual structure, in the flesh of the body. Then there is the kind of block that is basically emotional. Little Jimmy loves Papa. Papa goes along bent over, so Jimmy goes along like that because this allows him to be Papa in his mind. And by and by Jimmy gets a set into his muscular body which he cannot let go of. To get it out, he has to have help.
Ida P. Rolf, Ph.D.


I am dealing with problems in the body where there is never just one cause. I'd like you to have more reality on the circular processes that do not act in the body, but that are the body. The body process is not linear, it is circular; always, it is circular. One thing goes awry, and its effects go on and on and on and on. A body is a web, connecting everything with everything else.
Ida P. Rolf, Ph.D.

"In the first hour, the fact is that a Rolfer is working only superficially, but his is not what the man's body tells him. It's telling that individual that we're working down to his soul. We're not: we're working on the superficial fascia. The reason for his feeling of depth is that the superficial fascia gets reflexes from everything that's gone wrong inside his body. So if there is something that's wrong in the stomach, there will also be something strained in the overlying superficial fascia. As the structure of the superficial fascia is changed, both the structure and the function of the deeper-lying organs will be influenced."
-- Ida Rolf from "Rolfing and Physical Reality"

"Feldenkrais called attention to the fact that all negative emotional expressions are accompanied by a shortening of flexor muscles. Therefore, about the time that someone gets overly interested in negative emotion, he begins to get chronic shortening of the flexor muscles. The energy in a chronically flexed body has to work just to hold it up; the man continuously has to add energy to that body to keep it going. Such chronic flexion gives a feeling of tiredness, of "depression."
-Ida Rolf [Rolfing and Physical Reality]

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“You are something that the whole universe is doing, in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing.”

—	Alan Watts

and via Whiskey River,

link

"It comes, then, to this: that to be "viable", livable, or merely practical, life must be lived as a game - and the "must" here expresses a condition, not a commandment. It must be lived in the spirit of play rather than work, and the conflicts which it involves must be carried on in the realization that no species, or party to a game, can survive without its natural antagonists, its beloved enemies, its indispensable opponents. For to "love your enemies" is to love them as enemies; it is not necessarily a clever device for winning them over to your side. The lion lies down with the lamb in paradise, but not on earth - "paradise" being the tacit, off-stage level where, behind the scenes, all conflicting parties recognize their interdependence, and, through this recognition, are able to keep their conflicts within bounds. This recognition is the absolutely essential chivalry which must set the limits within all warfare, with human and non-human enemies alike, for chivalry is the debonair spirit of the knight who "plays with his life" in the knowledge that even mortal combat is a game.
No one who has been hoaxed into the belief that he is nothing but his ego, or nothing but his individual organism, can be chivalrous, let alone a civilized, sensitive, and intelligent member of the cosmos."
- Alan Watts
The Book on The Taboo against knowing who you are