Holly’s Blog

Yoga has been a source of great personal growth in my life. It has created much ease in my body and peace in my mind. I have developed strength and flexibility through my practice. It has inspired me to examine my behaviors and psychology. It has given me great tools for life.

In my Rolfing training, my teacher pointed out several “bad” structural habits that yoga has taught me, which had been translating into some spinal discomfort. (For my fellow yoginis, these include hinging too much at the ninth thoracic vertebra, being in constant hyperextension through my thoracic spine, and having very tight rotator cuffs in my shoulders as exhibited by my elbows pointing straight back when they’re at rest.) While certain physical actions are really important to learn in yoga, once you have learned to execute them well, you can use too much of a good thing; you can either get stuck in those actions or learn an exaggerated realization of the action.

Additionally, over the last few years, I have struggled to reconcile some yoga instructions with my anatomy and physiology knowledge. Sometimes the action that is encouraged seems counter to how I know the body is supposed to work (i.e., An instructor recently said to take the shin back, which could either mean to slide the shin in the ankle or knee joint, which I think might be incorrect at the knee, or it could be encouraging more muscular compaction of the calf and shin.) Other times, you can create the called-for action with engagement of different muscles. (i.e. Drawing the tailbone down can either be a call for reducing anterior pelvic tilt, which may engage the hamstrings, or it may be a call to engage the pelvic floor.) I really dislike feeling conflicted when learning yoga—having a teacher telling me to do one action while I believe that good physiological movement would encourage another action—and it confuses my teaching.

So I have shied away from my yoga practice during the last two weeks. I have been hesitant to practice my yoga habits that might counter the bodywork I’m receiving in class. (I have also shied away from my regular running schedule for similar reasons.) After attending a yoga class two weeks ago, I returned home and found myself gripping my spine in my classic yoga habits, and I had to spend some time consciously de-activating those tendencies.

As a yoga teacher, you teach from your own experience and practice. For that reason, I often feel compelled to practice for the sake of my teaching and my students. Since I’m not currently teaching, I’m not placing that same expectation on myself. And, as I’ve gotten better at yoga and as I’ve received a lot of bodywork that has improved my flexibility and agility, it is more difficult to be as thoroughly physically challenged as I once was. So my practice doesn’t feel as engaging, needed, or constructive as it once was.

I hadn’t really questioned my avoidance of yoga until a couple days ago when I noticed my mind feeling less settled and calm than it normally does. I realized that while my teacher had commented on “bad” habits from yoga, she had not acknowledged all of its amazing benefits (and I had allowed her comments to influence my own valuation of yoga). Without my regular practice, I was not receiving my regular dose of mental medicine and physical openness that it provides.

As one’s physical yoga practice improves, one can move on to exploring the mental benefits and challenges of yoga. If I want yoga to be as engaging or challenging as before, I merely need to shift my focus. And, I can be physically challenged by trying to blend my new physical understanding of my body from my Rolfing experience into my yoga practice. (Again, for you yoginis, bringing more flexion into my thoracic spine has made my entry into handstand considerably easier!) Another lesson learned . . . and I’m off to yoga class for the morning :)

I am so glad that some of you have been reading my blog.  While I enjoy writing for the solitary purpose of processing my life, it is fun to know that I’m sharing with others as well.  I hope some of my thoughts evoke ideas and explorations in your lives.

I am currently reading Julie and Julia, a book based on a woman blogging her way through her experience of cooking her way through Julia Child’s cookbook.  She raises the inevitable questions of bloggers—who am I to think that anyone would really want to read what I write (and she is far, far funnier and clever with a turn of phrase than I am)?  So, as I’ve said before, I love the fact that someone might be reading this, and I’m really fine if no one ever reads it.  (Believe me, without an editor fixing word usage, checking for parallel structure, and restraining my grandiose, overarching statements, it’s a personal struggle for me to publish less-than-perfect writing.  Please excuse my syntax errors and leaps of logic)

I have been especially grateful for the comments I’ve received.  I love having long-distance dialogue!  I have wanted to respond to them, but my internet connection is so spotty (at home, I sometimes catch an illegal connection in the far corner of my bedroom or in my bathroom) that I haven’t done so.  I type my blogs beforehand and post them during the five minutes I’m connected, which also explains why you get a week’s worth of writing on one day and why some of my posts are un-godly long!

Cheers to you all.

As many of you know, a primary motivation for my foray into bodywork was discovering how one’s mind can become different when one’s body changes. If you recognize that the “mind” is composed not only of the brain, but of the whole nervous system that resides in and manages every physical fiber of our being, it makes logical sense that one must address the physical body as well as our mental processes to change our mind and our way of being.

As I’ve mentioned before, our physical postures and movements reflect how we perceive and interact with the world. We react to the world through our body—our facial expressions, our voice, our body language. Our posture is an accumulation of our attitudes. Our physical presence reflects our psychological experience.

I have explored many of my less than desirable personality traits during the last few years, and have used both mental self-analysis as well as bodywork. I come from a highly logically family who, during my childhood, would pursue the minutiae of an issue to its deathbed. I learned how to analyze, dissect, and find holes in logic at an exceedingly early age, and this logic was applied to our emotional experiences as well as discussions of bedtimes and religion. (Of course, by claiming these analytical skills, I recognize that I’m just asking for a logical ass-whooping on arguments I make in this blog or elsewhere.)

So, as a child, I developed both logic skills and a willingness to broach my psyche head-on. And I came a long way using those analytical skills. I became a person I enjoyed more. I changed behaviors and attitudes of my own volition.

But, often one eventually reaches an impasse with a certain approach. I got to a point where confronting some of my emotional responses head-on was just a collision of my feelings and an inability to see how my feelings could possibly be any different—I was good at acknowledging the emotion, but not at understanding how I might be able to change it. I didn’t know how to be different. My emotional evolution was at a relative standstill.

I have always thought that I am smart enough that if all that psychological change required was analysis, I could have become a better, nicer person much earlier. But, somehow that had not been enough. And then I discovered bodywork and the “somatic psychotherapy” effects it can have.

Through my bodywork experience (and really, also through my yoga training that had started years earlier), I became much more aware of the specificity of my physical sensations and I began monitoring how my body was feeling when I was having an emotional response—my chest felt tight, my lower ribs felt brimming with too much energy, my face crunched up, my shoulders got drawn into my ears, and so many more. And whether that physical feeling was the cause or the result of the emotion was somewhat irrelevant. I had learned a very real, tangible way to get in touch with my feelings.

When I could “feel” my emotions, I could “relax” my emotional responses. I could calm my body through relaxation, breathing, or meditation exercises. This access to my emotional responses was manageable and far less scary than trying to think out my fears, sadnesses, and frustrations, which usually just sent me into overload or avoid-avoid mode. Once I had calmed my physical response to the emotion, I was able to look at it through more objective eyes. I had defused the overwhelming nature of my physical response, which gave me the space to approach my issues with rational dissection again. I was able to sit with my emotion long enough to examine, understand, and glean some meaning from it. And with understanding comes change. As I recently read, “The way to meaning is, first, deep experience and, second, a questioning of that experience.”

If the body only knows way of being, then its physical patterns that are associated with its emotional patterns hold you in a fixed mode of being. My experiences gave me another way of physically being and feeling that gave me the insight and room I needed to be different in all ways.

In order to change your psyche, you have to change your experience of life—the way you think, feel, hold yourself, interact with the world, and/or interact with your own being in all regards. Accessing change through one’s physical experience was just the breakthrough I needed, and it’s one of many tactics that I believe need exploration in order to fulfill our full potential.

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Each of the ten sessions in the Rolfing series has a theme, areas of the body covered, functional and structural goals, and principles of Rolfing that it emphasizes.  For example, in the first session, the theme is beginning to establish where you end and other begins—your boundaries.  The principles emphasized are adaptability and holism (I’ll discuss later).  The rib cage, shoulder girdle, and pelvic girdle are touched in upon, and structurally and functionally, you address opening the breath, freeing the pelvis, and connecting the rib cage and pelvis.  The specific tactics used in a session depend upon the patterns the client’s body is using.  For example, to free the breathing and open the chest, one person’s tightest restriction may be in the shoulder girdle, another’s in the neck, and another’s in the forearms.

Rolfing work is driven by five main principles: holism, adaptability, support, palintonicity, and closure.

Holism: all parts of the being—physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual—are affected when any one part of the being is affected.

Adaptability: the body needs freedom and openness in certain areas to be able to receive and retain the benefits of work in other areas.  (i.e., If I work on someone’s rib cage, but their arms are clamped at their sides, the rib cage does not have the room to expand, integrate, and retain its changes.)  Because of the holism principle, people also need adaptability in the rest of their life to integrate changes that Rolfing facilitates, such as needing families that are flexible enough to allow their members to transform.

Support: similar to adaptability, the body needs structural support to receive and retain other changes.  (i.e., If the feet and legs do not support the pelvis, changes made to the pelvis while the client is on the table will quickly dissipate once the client has to negotiate their own way in gravity.)

Palintonicity: this is a made-up Rolfing word (based on some German word, think palindrome).  It means a “unity of opposition.”  When there is balance in the body, length and openness occurs in opposing directions—up/down, front/back, left/right, and inside/outside.

Closure: all change requires integration and closure that allows the client to “own” and retain the changes they’ve experienced.

The principles emphasized in the second hour of Rolfing are support and holism.  Support is established through work on the feet and shins so they can receive the body’s weight and more easily transfer your weight to the ground.  Since a primary principle of the session is support, and as the principle of holism indicates that work on one area of the human affects everything else.

I received an excellent second Rolfing session last week, and that night I had a psychologically relevant dream. In this dream, I was recently single (I wasn’t aware of whom I had recently split from), and I hung out with a couple of old high school boyfriends.  After a delightful walk home with an old boyfriend who had been a good friend before and after we dated, I returned to my lonely apartment.  Without a moment’s rest, I quickly began to search my mind for whom I could call for a date.  I was searching for external support.  Then these thoughts passed through my mind: 1. I didn’t really need to be looking for love; I just needed to find peace in my time by myself; 2. Lucidity began to set in as I couldn’t remember who had been my significant other and I knew that information might be important.  Maybe I would want to be with them.  (Glad I had this thought before I lucidly threw in the towel on my current relationship and began adulterously pursuing new men in my dreamsJ )  I thought this dream solidified in my unconscious mind the good progress that I’ve made in establishing my emotional strength and independence, while still recognizing that I might want, but not desperately need, someone to love.

I found out today that, prior to my next unit of Rolfing studies, I have to write a long, long summary of the 10-series process.  So, as that writing must happen, there will probably be some more posts regarding the details of these 10 sessions.

One of the most inspiring and interesting elements of the Rolfing work is the potential it creates for personal transformation. On one level it changes the shape of the body, but it also has the ability to change the way in which we relate to the world and to ourselves. For the work to fulfill its maximum benefits, the Rolfer recruits the client and his or her resources to evoke change in the body.

Fascia is the medium in which Rolfers work. Fascia is connective tissue that provides structural support for every element of our body. It covers and supports every muscle fiber, nerve, artery, organ, bone, and more, and therefore it is the fascia that really holds us together and creates our shape. Fascia is tough and strong yet somewhat elastic, malleable, and ever changing in response to the stresses we place on our body.

Fascia becomes less elastic and pliable and gloms together in response to injury and the way we use our bodies. When the fascia becomes dense, our fluids cannot reach that area and nourish, clean, and hydrate that portion of the body. Parts of us quite literally dry up. Rolfing opens up, re-organizes, and re-hydrates the fascia of the body.

In Rolfing, we deal with two types of restrictions to our ability to move freely. One type of restriction is structural—lesions in the tissues, thickening of the connective tissue that prohibits full range of motion. The other type of restriction is functional—inhibitions in our movement based on our perceptions of the world, the coordination of our nervous system, and our beliefs and attitudes about how the world receives us. As one Rolfer said, “The way we walk across a room is the way we walk through life.” When these functional restrictions are manifested in our actions day after day, especially found in our perpetual breathing patterns, they can become structural restrictions.

Accordingly, Rolfing includes two components that change the fascia of the body—structural and functional work. The structural work is the approach in which the Rolfer provides hands-on work and the client helps through movement or mental engagement to release and re-organize the fascia. The functional (or movement) work is where the client explores and finds new ways to move his or her body. This changes the stresses that perpetual movement patterns have placed on the fascia and allows the body to change its shape through use.

The main goal of Rolfing is to expand our possibilities for movement and interaction. By providing new options, new patterns, we are able to recognize that habitual patterns are habitual, but not unchangeable. They are not necessarily an indelible part of our personality. But by recognizing these patterns, we do not lose them; we gain the option of using them when they’re appropriate and using other patterns in other situations. We do not lose ourselves, which I believe people often fear when they face changing themselves; we instead expand our potential, further embodying the full range of what we are capable.

The components of a Rolfing session often are (although they may not be so clearly differentiated or defined in a session):
1. Identify a structural or movement pattern in the client’s body. Acknowledge that this pattern has both served this person very well and has limited him or her.
2. Free the body of some restriction, through either movement or structural work, to allow for new patterns to be possible.
3. Integrate the new pattern in gravity through sitting, standing, and walking. Optionally, also integrate the new pattern with more familiar patterns. Find how you enter your habitual pattern and how you come into the new pattern so both are accessible and can be used when appropriate.

You may now wish me luck in manifesting all of this in my future sessions with clients.:)

I must comment upon the luxury of my current life. While school is intense and the school days are long, I am well prepared for the work, and we get three-day weekends. We get the long breaks because not only is our brain receiving a lot of information, we are also receiving a lot of Rolfing work—ten structural sessions and three movement sessions—in seven weeks. Most people would generally receive this much Rolfing work over six months or so. Since our bodies have so much to process, we need integrating time or we’d be mush for that fifth weekday. So, we get three-day weekends.

I live in an apartment in the basement of a Rolfer’s home. We share the laundry, but otherwise, it’s solo living. I have plenty of space and ridiculously inexpensive rent considering that I pay by the week, it’s a three-bedroom apartment, it’s in Boulder, and it’s less than a mile from downtown. For me, having my own kitchen was a necessity and everything else is luxury.

I love living on my own. As much as I adore Brett and the slumber party nature of living with one’s love and best friend, the peace and quiet of a life alone is fabulous, and I get plenty of interactions with great people at school. At home, I read, run, go to yoga classes, work on a quilt, journal about my life, read, cook, occasionally meet up with classmates for a movie or a hike, and even watch a little TV. And all of it is done at lovely, relaxed pace because I’m free of any responsibility other than learning and caring for myself. So far, it has been a fabulously restoring and integrating experience.

I have had several fascinating conversations recently about dreams and have been particularly struck by the variation in dream experiences.  For me, dreams appear to be a pretty clear reflection of my psyche, as I expect is true for most people (although we may be more or less willing and/or able to decipher their meaning). What do these variations in dream styles indicate about our psyches?

The meaning or inspiration behind my dreams these days is usually clear.  While I used to have anxious, restless dreams, my dreams are pretty calm these days and seem to be inspired by recent events, that which my brain is processing

The most consistent theme of my dreams is houses.  I just wander through houses, often finding more and more unknown rooms and always excited or intrigued to be exploring this new house.  I have heard that houses represent one’s self in dreams and finding new rooms is discovering new elements of yourself.  I also dream of mystery plots (without much suspense, though), activities of day, and people I’ve recently seen or thought about.  As I said, pretty straight-forward,

But, as I’ve talked with others though, I’ve discovered a richness in dreams beyond what I experience.  I’ve heard of fantastical settings, animals as main characters, and the spoken word driving the plot.  While these may not sound unusual to you, they have made me aware of how limited my dreams are.

For example, I don’t know if I ever dream in words.  As a highly verbal person and one who struggles to visualize images in my mind during the day, I find it surprising that I dream in vivid pictures and ideas, but not in words.  Has my unconscious mind high-jacked my right brain for its evenings’ amusements?  What experiences might I be missing?  Could I be getting something different out of my unconscious hours?

Yet, my dreams seem susceptible to mere suggestion.  One person told me she had swashbuckling dreams, to which I replied that I wished I did, and I promptly had a sword fighting dream that very night.  Does this mean that lucid dreaming could be around the corner for me?  What wonders might lucid dreaming have in store?

By exploring and changing our physical patterns, the Rolfing experience can shake up the psyche as well.  Our teacher suggested we pay special attention to our dreams one evening after a potent exercise.  So I ask myself, will I experience any fun, exciting, different dreams during the next seven weeks, and what might they reveal about myself? :)

Our posture reflects much about the way we relate to the rest of world as well as to ourselves.  It demonstrates how we open, quite literally, our hearts and our minds.

When we balance our structures as well as our relationship to the world and others, we hopefully create a sense of being present with ourselves and being present with “other.”

The position of our upper chest says much about how we relate to the world.  In the chakra system, the lower three chakras—pelvis through abdomen—represent our sense of survival and self-worth, our sense of ourselves.  The upper three chakras—throat through head—represent our self-expression and mental abilities, our relation to the external world.  The middle chakra—the heart—merges the two, our sense of self and relation to other, our emotions, how we feel about relating to others.

In my class we’ve discussed two tendencies—being more “gravity-centered” and oriented to oneself, and being more “space-oriented” and oriented to other.  Those who are gravity-oriented are more grounded to the earth and tend to start their walking from their pelvis or lower abdomen.  The weight of their upper body is often shifted back – physically this represents moving away from others and into oneself.  One’s spine is ultimate home base, and they are moving towards that.

Those who are more space-oriented tend to lead with their chests or some place on their rib cage.  Their upper body is moved forward, representing moving into the world and away from themselves.

So relationships, as I mentioned before, are the ability to give and receive equally, the ability to be present with self and other, to go out into the world while being balanced in your awareness of yourself.

The two sides of people’s bodies play very different roles for almost everyone. Prepare for generalities: One side usually provides agility; the other stability. One tends to lead; the other to fall back. With one, you reach out into the world, engage with others, search for information—your proactive side; the other is your home base, where you come back to yourself, receive information—your more passive, receptive side. You tend to experience pain more, or solely, on one side; the other side is a rock, either representing stability or possibly lack of awareness. You tend to identify more strongly with one side or even like it better; your connection with the other tends to be less well established, or you possibly like it less.

My suspicion is that these traits reflect some nervous system patterns—what role does each side of your brain play in your life? Additionally, as your organs are really the only significantly asymmetrical elements of your body, I suspect that weaknesses and strengths in your organs may affect how you experience your two sides.

This discrepancy struck me the most when we did the eye exercise where you lead with one eye and receive with the other (posted as “Cool Exercise from Tuesday”). My right eye is my dominant eye; it leads the show. My left eye has difficulty with physically reaching out into the world, and my right eye has difficulty being passive.

I’m taking my class notes on my laptop (which I LOVE!), but I haven’t spent this many hours sitting, typing, and reading for years. My eyes are like lazy couch potatoes who have not walked more than a block in years. As my left eye is even more out of shape since it’s not dominant, it finally deserted me today and gave me a striking left-sided headache.

Just as Millstein vowed to become more balanced by doing everything from pong to writing with his left hand, I have vowed to train my left eye. And considering how intricately linked eyesight is with brain function, I suspect this will . . . MAKE ME SMARTER. As those of you who saw me this holiday season might know, this is exactly what I felt I needed a splash of. Maybe I’m wrong and it won’t smarten me up, but I’m sure I’ll get something out of it—some facial balance or maybe just a more dashing iris.