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.

 

 

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.

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.