Rolfing Ten Series: Session Five

I’ve tried physical therapy, chiropractic, acupuncture, Pilates, sacro-wedgies (further info on request), yoga, weekly massage, cortisone shots (well, just one), hip-strengthening machines, ice, heat, and I’m sure I’m forgetting something else. Hip, back, leg: still hurt. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but never gone.

Rolfing feels different, somehow. It felt very different last week, when all my bones and muscles and tendons were complaining. I’ve worked so hard all these years, my body says, to let you walk so stiffly. I’ve immobilized your sacrum, tightened up your psoas, ignored that nutty Atlas vertebra in your neck – and now all of a sudden you want me to loosen up? Well, I’ll show you.

But yesterday when I stood up from the table that tug of war had ended. I felt substantial on my feet. They pressed evenly into the earth; I could feel gravity. And yet, when I walked, I was light, filled with helium. And nothing hurt.

Halfway through. I have one foot in each world, she said, and today that’s just how I feel. A little bit tugged, but in the right direction.

 

 

Swimming in the Fifth Dimension

I like to think about people jumping (or being forced) out of their goldfish bowls of certainty. The sun revolved around the earth, until it didn’t. The earth was flat, until it wasn’t.

Paradigm shifts, in other words. When the aliens arrive, or we go there. When neutrinos go faster than light (maybe).

Last week, on Thursday, I had lunch with a friend who’d decided, for some reason I couldn’t quite figure out but which sounded like a good idea, to start doing things she hated. Like shopping, or reading historical novels or books about dreams.

I hate shopping and historical novels too, but I’m pretty interested in dreams. It’s so weird, making up all that stuff in the middle of the night when, by the looks of it, you might as well be unconscious.

So that was a fun conversation, talking about things we hated and why (she’s not interested in any of the things my erstwhile (and late) friend Connie used to call “the spooky stuff” – dreams, or telepathy, or God (my friend’s goldfish bowl is atheism.))

On Friday I walked with another friend, who told me about the time her partner’s obese mother got stuck in a bathtub and had to stay there till her caregivers arrived to haul her out. She (the obese mother) thought it was hilarious, laughing and laughing as they pulled her out.

On Saturday I got an email from my Thursday friend (whom I’d not spoken to since then). I quote:

After all my badmouthing of dreams, I had a weird one last night and told [her husband], who thought it was pretty funny. It involved a bunch of country dudes in their sixties, trying to heave a laughing, nude 300-pound woman out of a tub. Take that, Sigmund.

The scientists at CERN (maybe feeling a little defensive since they haven’t found the God particle yet) are busy coming to Einstein’s defense – like maybe the Opera physicists didn’t measure the neutrinos’ tunnel right, or maybe they forgot about tidal effects (I didn’t realize physicists could be so prosaic).

But I’m hoping what the guy (Joe Lykken) from Fermilab said is right:

“Special relativity only holds in flat space, so if there is a warped fifth dimension, it is possible that on other slices of it, the speed of light is different.”

And that in that warped fifth dimension, my Friday conversation met my friend’s dream.

Rolfing, Session Four

In the middle of the night, at 1:11 to be exact, fire engines showed up at the apartment building across the street, which happens every so often but never results in anything like the incineration of the infernal air handler that handles its air with such gusto right across from our bedroom window. They left, but some sort of electrical-problem-fixing truck remained, idling its wheezing, creaky engine.

I know this much about it because at 2 am I walked across the street to find out what was going on; the extraordinarily rude guy (probably awoken from a dead sleep just slightly earlier than I had been) says to me, of all things, “What’s going on?”

When I responded with the same question he says “Electrical equipment shorted out.”

“Does this truck need to keep idling?”

“Yes it does, until someone gets here to help me.” (very helpful)

“What electrical equipment?” (hoping it was the air handler)

“A cut-off. You know what that is?”

It’s hard to be treated like a dumb blonde anytime, much less in the middle of the night. I crept back home, and so, while listening to the truck idle for a few more hours, had time to think about my bones busily rearranging themselves.

Everything ached, especially the very end of my spine, which apparently curves nastily to the left, toward the aching hip, before dipping back to the right. It felt so good, there on the table as she nudged it back, as I rhythmically pointed one heel, then the other, at the far wall. (How did Ida Rolf figure out all these things?)

When I stood up I felt light, filled with helium. Walk, she said. Remember the bobble-head.

It takes some rearrangement of thought to connect an aching hip, which mine had been for the last week, with that wonderful Atlas vertabra. I’d totally forgotten about it.

A very obvious thought suddenly occurred to me: Rolfing is a partnership. It’s not like a massage, where you lie there and feel good and go home and feel good for awhile and then ache again and go back the next week to do it all over again.

Here I am today, bones rearranged, truck gone, bobbling.

 

 

Rolfing, Session Three

I walk from one foreign language to another, from one fugue state to another, as I move from my Italian class to my Rolfing session, just a few blocks apart. What is that blasted word for “fifteen,” which was right there where it belonged as I recited 100 numbers on my way to the train. In the class: gone.

Rolfing fugue: things float back to me haphazardly as I lie there. The goal of the first session is the breath, she says. The breath? I forgot all about the breath. I did the scary thing with eyes and mouth wide open, but you were also supposed to breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth. Totally forgot.

Foreign language: We round to the form, she says. This has something to do with connective tissue reshaping itself to hold the newly Rolfed structure in place (I think), but conjugating essere suddenly seems a lot easier.

As she explores my lateral alignment, the goal of the third session (the second had to do with feet, apparently – that didn’t penetrate my fugue last time), I learn that my twelfth rib (one of those two weird ribs that float) is right on top of my ilium on the side that hurts. Very confusing to hear as I float in and out – I never realized part of the intestines and the big hipbone were homonyms, and so I’m trying to picture my rib floating down among all those twisted tubes. Italian and anatomy – neither one comes easy.

Quindici.

ten years hence

It’s not even here yet and I’m sick of all of it, guilty that I’m feeling sick of all of it, yet obsessively reading the retrospectives and everybody’s accounts of where they were and what happened to them and how they felt … yet I too am remembering that day.

After I retired from my organizational change consulting business (that, unfortunately, didn’t really change any organizations), in the process of searching for my new place in the world I discovered Pendle Hill, a Quaker retreat and study center in the next town over. I’d been going there for over a year, taking classes and, every weekday morning at 8:30, going to Meeting for Worship. When I got there, that sparkling September morning, the room was dark, empty. No one was there, no one arrived.

There was no Meeting for Worship that day – all the staff was on a retreat.

I went back home, and at around 10 of 9 Chip called. A plane had flown into one of the World Trade Towers.

I never went back to Pendle Hill. God, if there was such a thing, was no longer there for me.

It was only after I’d told this dramatic story for a few years that I realized it wasn’t true. It all happened, but on different days. I’m not even sure of the sequence anymore.

This much I know is true: Benjamin, who was living here at the  time, and I watched the smoke and the flames and wondered why there weren’t any helicopters to rescue the people on the roof, until the towers fell. And then we realized there hadn’t been any people on the roof – they couldn’t get to the roof. I told him everything would be different from then on; that we were going to go to war. His generation had never known war.

Phoebe and her then-boyfriend, who had broken up at the beginning of that first year of med school, came here and held hands on the couch.

We had a comfort-meal dinner: meat loaf, potatoes, peas.

And then there was the Anthrax and the plane crash on Long Island and two wars and Bush and more Bush and yes, everything was different.

All these memories take us back to the time Before. On September 10, 2001, America was at peace, we did not torture, and comfort could still be found at Pendle Hill.

 

 

Rolfing, Session Two

I hate instruction manuals that number their pages with a dot, like 1.01; 2.27; and I hate outlines that do the same. What’s wrong with consecutive numbering, or the good old-fashioned I, A, 1, a, etc.?

And yet I see that for some reason I titled my previous post Rolfing 1.01, as if there were going to be many sections about my first session before I moved on to the second. Well, there was a next event involving a trip to the ER, but it had nothing to do with Rolfing Session One, or with my head floating so gently on Atlas, despite what my husband thought (“And what did you do differently in the past week?” “Well, I dug up a tree root and fell down on the driveway and oh yes, I got Rolfed.”).

It was a bit of a weird thing, though, in that I landed on the opposite side from the shoulder that didn’t start hurting until the next day. And also weird in that, after one naproxen, the shoulder that couldn’t even support a coffee cup was totally fine. As has been my hip.

Which brings us to Rolfing, Session Two. (“I had in mind some gentle walking, not necessarily heavy shoveling and falling,” she said.)

It’s almost like being here, lying on that table. (This is Chip, watching evening descend over the island we camped on in Maine.)

Something gently happens to muscles and bones in my feet, in my neck, and, yes, my shoulder. An hour, or two, or only half, goes by.

Walk around the room, she says. Let your head float on the top of your neck. (Who knew heads were supposed to float on necks? My head, trained for ballet, grew up balancing books.)

Homework: eyes and mouth wide open, sway back and forth, side to side (have to be careful not to look in a mirror or I’ll scare myself.)

Train home; head floats.

Rolfing 1.01

If someone had told me, before I tried it, that bobbling my head would help my hip I would have thought they were crazy.

I’m getting Rolfed, or, to put it more descriptively, I’m getting structurally integrated. I learned, in the first session, that the flat back/tucking your tail thing they talk about in yoga and Pilates is not such a good idea – that your lower back should arch. I learned that it’s possible to lift your kneecap up toward the ceiling while lying flat without moving anything else (but I haven’t yet figured out why I should be pleased about this). And I learned that the very top vertebra of your spine is a big deal.

It’s called the “Atlas” vertebra, because it holds up your celestial head (those are the heavens that Atlas is holding up there, not the earth as most people think). It looks like this:

My poor Atlas was apparently working as hard as Atlas up there, locked forward in my customary chin-down position. In neutral, where it’s supposed to be, your head “bobbles” on the axis of your spine and, somehow, this affects your lower back – and my hip.

My homework was to practice finding neutral, and it feels so good I find myself doing it all day long. My head feels like it’s floating on my neck. My hip, which has hurt for over a year, feels fine. I look a little drunk, but I can live with that.