Whole-body Blog

After studying philosophy, living in poverty, and starving himself on one grain of rice per day, the Buddha decided to stop. He gave up on all of the traditional rules about how to get enlightened, took a forbidden bath in the nearby river and was scandalously given milk by a young woman who saw and felt sorry for him. After that, he began to think of a way to forget all of the teachings that he had accumulated in his wanderings in an effort to find some unspoiled ground to begin his spiritual efforts anew.

What the legend tells us is that as he contemplated this unspoiled ground, he remembered sitting contentedly as a child in the shade of a palm tree, happy without cause, sinking deeper and deeper into his contentedness, losing all trace of time and worry. It was this memory that gave him the idea to sit under a tree, without austerities and punitive practices, just as he had in childhood. Thus he began the contemplation that would bring him to enlightenment.

I like this story because it speaks to my own experience. My memory is of sitting in a room with Sanguran cloth wallpaper, redwood shutters and our first color-TV. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon. It was summer. The light outside was soft and forgiving. I was twelve and I had just finished reading Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. I had been told the story of the Buddha: how he had contemplated the “twelve link chain of causation” and become enlightened.

Having just finished the book I found myself in a state of very deep peace, and in the midst of that peace I tried to imagine what the Buddha must have been contemplating that led to his enlightenment. I remember getting as far as visualizing a chain when, like a secret river, a voice bubbled up that has not left me since.

When I contemplate this moment and this voice, even now, I am filled with love. I forget about the people that I’m angry at, my worries about the future. All of those things simply do not exist. In fact, I do not exist. There is no source, no voice, no “I”. And afterward, there is a sense of order, clarity and peace about the world.

Eventually I entered high-school and then college. I became utterly confused chasing philosophy. I ignored this voice and its source and found myself in pain.

I’m sharing this story because Rolfing as I see it is a way to bring you back to your voice. You have a voice that you know is you. You know when you’re connected to it and when you’re not. When you’re connected, life flows and you have a greater capacity for love; you embody more patience and compassion. When you’ve lost your connection, life sucks. It is dark and scarce. The Rolfing equivalent of this inner-voice is called the Line.

The Line

The Line is your fountain of youth. You can live from it. You can feel it, but you cannot see it. You can manifest it, or not. It gets obscured by going for other things in the way that I went for philosophy, but it can also be recovered, cleaned up and maintained.

The Line is not anatomical, but it effects your anatomy and your anatomy effects it. If you have ever felt really lost or adrift, the chances are—in Rolfing language—that you have lost your Line. If you are having one chronic pain pile up on top of another, there’s a good chance that you’ve lost your Line. If you keep injuring yourself, the chances are that you’re off your Line.

The Line is like a hinge for the door through which your being travels between the manifest and the un-manifest. You want the hinges oiled and working so that they don’t make a lot of noise when you enter and leave the world, or so that you don’t get stuck on one side.

The Line gets obscured in many ways: intense sports injuries, whiplash, breaks, sprains, poor nutrition and toxins in our environment. It is a vital piece of energetic health, fundamental to your well-being on the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual levels.

Of course there are things that you can do to maintain the health of your line: meditation, yoga, live a happy vibrant life, spiritual practice, eat properly. But sometimes the Line is buried beneath so much emotional, mental, physical or spiritual stuff that it needs extra help.

Of course Rolfing can help you to get rid of aches and pain. But in the simplest terms, the purpose and essence of Rolfing® structural integration is to help you get back on-line.