The Body Blessed!

Yesterday I wrote about the site of my body as the place
where God is.  Later in the day my email had a wonderful message
from Will Johnson the teacher of "Embodiment Training."
Below you will find the contents of the email from Johnson and above you
can see the sun teasing the top of my current knitting project.  Knitting
for me is the body and mantra in motion because I have replaced
"knit" and "purl" with my favorite mantras.

______

Dear Embodiment family,

    Life's twists and turns have placed me in Penang, Malaysia for the
past month or so where I've put on my business hat and am meeting some
truly fascinating people who are collaborating with me in helping
secure the foundation that allows me free time to explore practices on
my own, to take months off to enter into writing projects, and to share
the practices as relatively freely with as many people as possible.
    The Lonely Planet guidebook describes Penang as historically having
attracted "adventurers, dreamers, artists, intellectuals, scoundrels,
and dissidents" to which I immediately thought:  hey, sounds like my
kind of place!  I'm definitely liking it here.
    Rubais of Rumi, the latest collection of translations that I've
completed with Nevit will be available this September right around the
time of Rumi's 700th birthday celebration.  Inner Traditions is also
republishing the gazing book in a softcover edition retitled as The
Spiritual Practices of Rumi, and that will also be available at about
the same time.  There is some talk of getting me out to the east coast
(New York, Baltimore) around that time as well for some celebrations. 
I'll let you all know as plans get firmed up.
    Other projects on the horizon include an email interview I'm doing
with the editors of Tricycle Magazine (which, I think, is scheduled to
be published in August).  And I just finished up another email
interview with the editors of Rolf Lines, the scholarly journal of the
Rolf Institute.  There was a lot of interesting information that came
out of that interview so I decided to share it with you.  In truth,
this interview will probably mostly appeal to those of you with a
bodywork background, but it touches on some of the central themes of my
work (and how it differs quite dramatically from conventional Western
approaches to "therapy" and "bodywork") that I thought I'd share it
here with those of you who might be interested.
    Winter in British Columbia has its charms, but warmth is not one of
them, so I'm enjoying the balmy nights and hot days of Penang.  Short
sleeve shirts work better for my body than down parkas!  Stay warm.
Your body will love you for it!

with care and love,

Will
www.embodiment.net

Email Conversation between Anne Hoff (Q) and Will Johnson (A)


Q:  Our work as Rolfers is to shape the body, but what is the body?
Many spiritual traditions lead us to understand that our bodies are
much different from our ordinary reified conception of "body". From the
perspective of where your work has led you, how do you view/define body
and how has that affected how you work with bodies?

A:  Instead of paying much attention to intellectual classifications of
body (physical, emotional, energetic, mental, causal, etheric, etc.),
as helpful as these classifications can be in pointing to different
aspects of our embodied self, I prefer simply to focus on the direct
experience of the body:  the lived, felt, palpable, vibratory,
throbbing, quivery, spacious, compacted flux of tactile stuff whose
location, and point of emanation, can be traced to what my eyes
recognize as my physical body.  The felt awareness of the entire body
as a constantly changing tactile presence is the wild and wonderful
path of practice that Rolfing launched me on.
    For me, Rolfing was a very direct introduction to the world of tactile
sensations--both gross and subtle.  On the gross level, there were the
strong and  intense sensations of being Rolfed.  But through that work,
and in its aftermath, I started to become aware of a much subtler level
of sensations that I’d never before felt, and I think everyone knows
what I’m referring to here:  the minute, pin-prickly, tingly, little
blips of tactile stuff (the current of the life force?) that we feel
coursing through our body, probably in some parts more than others. 
Now, even though these individual sensations are unbelievably small in
size and are vibrating or oscillating at almost unimaginably rapid
rates of vibratory frequency, they can still be distinctly felt.  IF,
that is (and this is a big if), we surrender to their presence, and I
have since come to the belief that the source of all existential pain
in the body can be traced to our fearful resistance to feel the
literally sensational presence of the body.
    Where things started getting really interesting was when I began to
realize that, if I give myself permission to do two things
simultaneously--1) to surrender to balance and 2) to feel the feeling,
the sensation, in every little part, every little nook and cranny,
indeed in every little cell of the body--then my sense of self would be
altered quite radically, and I liked it there.  And the only place
where I was able to find descriptions of these kinds of very open, very
dissolved, and yet very present and grounded embodied states was in the
spiritual literatures.  Rumi, for example, was taught the doctrine of
ma’iyya by his father who himself was an accomplished mystic.  Ma’iyya
tells us that God (or whatever word works for you) cannot be found in
the mind.  It cannot even be found in the heart alone.  It must be felt
as sensation in each and every part of the body.
    And indeed the ability to come to balance and feel the whole body as a
unified field of shimmery tactile presence automatically and
spontaneously ushers in what we might call ma’iyya consciousness.
    So..., to come full circle, the body to me is the play of sensations
plus the conscious presence that inhabits that play at any given
moment.  The question we all have to ask ourselves is how much
sensation do I really want to open to?  The more sensation, the greater
the push into this dissolved, yet very present, consciousness that is,
for many people, utterly appealing.  But the more sensation we risk,
the more we also have to let go of the old, tighter patterns of the
mind and its belief in separation from the whole, and many people find
this--what the Sufis call “dying before you die--” utterly unappealing.
    In terms of actually Rolfing people, I’m far more interested in
stimulating a renewed sense of feeling awareness in my client than in
“changing” his or her structure as I believe, quite strongly, that a
body needs to feel what’s really going on at the level of sensation,
and then structural change will happen accordingly.  This frees things
a lot for me and allows me to just put my hands on the body and see how
they want to move and what they want to do.  In effect, I like to get
out of my mind and tissue surf with compassion.

Q:  If I remember right, your book Balance of Body, Balance of Mind
equates holding in the body to ego structure or ego holding;  in Yoga
of the Mahamudra you speak of an open, embodied, and sensing state as a
mystical state.  You are clearly looking at the body and Rolfing from a
spiritual or evolutionary perspective, not just a biomechanical or
structural/functional perspective.  It seems to me from the writings
and stories out there that Dr. Rolf was interested in all of these
aspects.  Was this spiritual/evolutionary viewpoint discussed in your
original training?  Do you feel it is given its due in our community at
present?

A:  I didn’t know Ida all that well.  I did my auditing in the summer
of 1975 at one of those early combined basic/advanced training classes
that we used to hold, and she (along with Jan) was the teacher, and I
was also able to spend a bit of time with her privately, outside of
class.  I can’t honestly say that there was a lot of focused discussion
on the kinds of understandings and the linkages between body and
consciousness that I raised in the two books that you mentioned, either
in private conversation with her or in class.  But, even so, what there
was a lot of in those days was a spirit of adventure, fascination,
experimentation, and excitement, a gut feeling that what Rolfing was
ultimately all about was nothing less than a bona fide path of inquiry
into the mystery of the embodied self.  And Ida would constantly allude
to this through implying that the Line was a kind of mudra of
transformation (my words, not hers) that would help us in solving (or
dissolving into) that mystery.  She clearly presented the Line as a
value and clearly believed that an embodiment of the Line would have an
evolutionarily propulsive effect on the person, and she would even go
so far as to suggest that Rolfing was perhaps one of the first attempts
by humans to consciously accelerate the pace of evolution.
    There was always talk in those days of developing Rolfing into a kind
of mystery school, but that’s never really happened.  At this point,
the Institute has become a first rate trade school that very
successfully trains practitioners in the art, science, and profession
of Rolfing people, but in no way can it be considered a mystery school
dedicated to an experiential understanding of how the physical
embodiment of Lined states affects, alters, and ultimately transforms
consciousness.  The Institute (and the other offshoot schools as well)
has focused virtually all of its attention on its very important
exoteric mission of training practitioners, but has basically turned
its back on any systematic exploration of the esoteric core assumptions
that Dr. Rolf insisted on:  that an embodiment of upright balance can
radically accelerate conscious growth in the individual.  That the Line
has been progressively relegated to the very back burners of our
inquiry has always struck me as particularly tragic.

Q:  The Institute still teaches the Line:  there is still the
fundamental idea that Rolfing is a process of aligning the body in
gravity around this ideal Line, so on a physical level it would seem we
are doing the same thing, but from a perspective that has become more
physical and less evolutionary. This brings up the question of how much
the "propulsive effect" of Rolfing on consciousness depends on the Line
itself, and how much it depends on the field (practitioner, client,
society) holding an evolutionary perspective. In the time you
reference, a large segment of society - the whole "counter-culture"
movement - held a perspective and expectation of transformation. Now
that's dropped back to a lower volume in the field of society as a
whole, and some clients have no interest in anything beyond pain
relief, at least initially.

A:  The “Line” that you’re speaking about is more of an intellectual
construct than a lived experience.  And for the purposes of our work
with clients, this construct is invaluable.  As a teaching tool, it not
only gives our work intentionality and a philosophical rationale, but
also serves as a guide to help us strategize how best to work with
clients.  I think we all hold, as an image in our mind, a picture of
the Line.  When we view a client’s body, we inevitably are going to
compare what we see with this image in our mind, and the discrepancies
that exist give us many of our clues as to where and how to work.
    The application of the Line that I’m referring to, however, has
nothing to do with strategizing session work.  It refers instead to a
lived condition of embodiment and a suggested path of practices that,
if followed, leads to that condition.  Its application to spiritual
practices--sitting meditation as well as movement practices--is
explosively powerful, and yet it is an application that has been almost
totally ignored not just by the Institute, but by all of the other
offshoot schools of Rolfing as well.
    So, if our community isn’t all that actively exploring this
application of the Line, who is?  The answer (from the communications
I’ve had from people who’ve read my books) is serious meditation
practitioners, dancers, yogis, and martial artists.  And these people
are not just playing with the Line as a theoretical construct.  They’re
diving into it with their entire body and mind, spending long hours
surrendering to the profound shifts in bodily awareness and states of
consciousness that naturally occur when you begin seriously to explore
balance as a path.  The path of the Line is a path of deep and potent
healing, but like any path worth following, if you want its rewards,
you have to expose yourself to its fire.
    You ask if perhaps the kind of evolutionary perspective that I’m
suggesting was as much a result of the spirit of the times as it is a
direct application of the Line.  I want to be very clear that it is the
experiential exploration of balance that is the igniting element that
explodes open the meditative inquiry (and the evolutionary energies
that fuel that inquiry like hydrogen in the sun).  I’m talking about a
very specific experiential phenomenon that occurs as the result of
learning how to retain an upright (and uplifted) posture while
surrendering the entire weight of the body to gravity.  Strong energies
and sensations are spontaneously liberated, and consciousness can
undergo radical (and this is not a word that I use lightly)
alterations.
    It’s true that, far and away, the majority of clients coming to see us
are looking for the relief of pain, and I don’t think anybody is going
to argue with, or criticize, the decision of the faculty to pursue the
perfection of our physiotherapeutic skills of manipulation as the
centerpiece of what Rolfing has become.  The mission statement of the
Rolf Institute speaks to the training of Rolfing practitioners; it does
not mention promoting the lived experience of the Line.  But it has
always struck me as peculiar that our founder presented the Line as the
most important value of our work, and yet we haven’t gone anywhere near
developing a protocol or system of practices that would allow people to
explore for themselves the dramatic evolutionary shifts in awareness of
self that she always suggested would occur.  And it is this omission
that I’ve been attempting to address in the work and practices I’ve
been putting together and intend to start sharing in workshop/retreat
format.

Q:  I see from your website (www.embodiment.net) that your "embodiment
work", which I was first exposed to about nine years ago as a gazing
practice, has since evolved into a system encompassing a series of
practices. You've written a number of books over the years, and
different books are now shown to be related to different practices that
are part of the work as a whole. I get a sense that there has been an
organic development and interweaving of your writing, your personal
practices and explorations, and your overall thread of inquiry. Would
you speak about what "embodiment" means to you, how your system has
developed, and also give a sketch description of some of the practices
and books of yours that relate to them?

A:  I first encountered the word “embodiment” in the early to mid 70s
in a book by Herbert Guenther called The Tantric View of Life and
resonated with it immediately.  Guenther, one of our most important
western Buddhist scholars, spoke of embodiment as pristine clarity of
mind grounded in the fully felt awareness of body.  Implicit in
Guenther’s use of this term is the understanding that this clarity,
which is the apparent goal of Buddhist practice, cannot be experienced
unless we also include a fully activated awareness of head to foot
bodily presence.  In other words, if you want emptiness of mind, you
need first to experience fullness of body.
    I came across this term about a year after I had begun getting Rolfed,
and it uncannily reflected the emerging experience and awarenesses that
my initial Rolfing had started opening up in me.  When I spoke earlier
of ma’iyya consciousness, it is fundamentally identical to Guenther’s
very specific use of the term “embodiment.”  Over the past thirty
years, the term has become a kind of fuzzy buzz word for describing
anything and everything related to the body, but my initial exposure to
it, and subsequent use of it, was and remains very specific.
         Consciousness is altered radically if we can include in whatever
we’re doing an awareness of the entire body as a unified field of
shimmering tactile sensations.  I’ve heard of studies that suggest that
we are using perhaps only  five to fifteen percent of the full
potential of our brains, and I would suggest that what is also true is
that most people, at any given moment in time, are probably only
feeling between five and fifteen percent of their bodily sensations. 
And I would further suggest that these small percentages are directly
related.
    What is so extraordinary about the gazing practice that you mention is
that it rather wildly stimulates the awareness of sensations throughout
the entire body.  I honestly haven’t a clue as to why it does this.  I
just know that it does.  And, then, what it also does, just as
Guenther’s understanding of embodiment suggests, is to radically alter
and affect consciousness.  As the conventional sense of the body’s
apparent solidity dissolves into a field phenomenon of shimmering
tactile sensations, so also does the unrelentingly solid, conventional
sense of self also dissolve, and you find yourself suddenly immersed in
the condition of embodied consciousness that the Buddhists refer to as
sunyata (ordinarily translated as “the void” or as “emptiness,” but
which Guenther, again in the same book, quite beautifully translates as
“open dimension of being”).  What’s clear to me is that this condition
is a birthright state for all of us and definitely worth whatever price
of admission is asked.  That I would eventually present the gazing
practice in the context of the relationship between Rumi and his great
friend Shams was just one of those serendipitous things.  For 750 years
nobody has supposedly known what these two were doing behind the closed
door of their retreat room that allowed them to emerge in such a state
of ecstatic intoxication, and indeed their relationship has mostly been
revered in the Sufi world from a safe distance as a kind of “divine
mystery.”  But if you read Rumi’s poetry with an understanding of the
gazing practice, you quickly see that allusions to the practice,
descriptions of how Rumi and Shams entered into the practice together,
and specific instructions on how to do the practice yourself, are
EVERYWHERE in the poetry.  To  play spiritual sleuth in this way has
been a lot of fun for me.
    Ok.  Let me go back to how all this relates to the embodiment of the
Line.  A Tibetan mahamudra text tells us to “do nothing with the body
but relax.”  And the only way we can truly invite relaxation into our
lives in an upright posture is to embody the Line so that the force of
gravity, not muscular contraction, can provide us with our primary
source of support.  What we also know is that tensing the body (or
holding the breath, and they are basically the same thing) is our best
and most reliable strategy NOT to feel.  So if we can truly relax, then
the formerly unfelt sensations of the body (the 85 to 95 % of
sensations that we ordinarily aren’t aware of) can come flooding
forward out of their hibernation or wherever it is they’ve been hiding.
    Balance of Body, Balance of Mind was my first attempt to enunciate
this kind of understanding.  Quite clearly, our understanding of the
Line provides a very important, and previously almost entirely
unacknowledged, key to the experience of sitting meditation practice. 
Likewise, I believe that the Buddhist psychological model holds an
equally vital key to the work of somatic practitioners who seek to
relieve unnecessary holding and tension in the body, but aren’t
oriented to considering that the ongoing manifestation of egoic mind
may itself be the result of the most fundamental, and largely
unconscious, myofascial holding pattern that exists in all of us.
    My subsequent books have mostly looked at different pieces of this
embodiment puzzle.  Posture of Meditation focuses on sitting practice. 
Aligned, Relaxed, Resilient focuses on mindfulness practice.  Rumi: 
Gazing at the Beloved is about the gazing practice.  And Yoga of the
Mahamudra is about the spontaneous movement practices that I call
Sudaba (short for “surrendered dance of balance”).  What I’d like to
stress here, though, is that the individual sessions of Rolfing and the
subsequent exploration of balance have always been central to my
understanding and development of all these interrelated practices.
    What I’ve been attempting to do is to create a path of practices based
on the most potent technologies that the spiritual traditions have
developed over the centuries, but that is explored through the lens of
our contemporary somatic understanding, and most specifically through
the application of the teachings of the Line.  Clearly, if we want to
experience these radical alterations to self that all the traditions
speak of as so fundamentally wholesome, we need to do, on a daily
basis, intentional practices that have been shown to support that
alteration.  Ideally, we would devote some time every day to these
practices as well as enter into longer, intensive retreats from time to
time.
    Rolfing, sitting, mindfulness practices, standing and moving
practices, gazing practices:  it’s a potent brew, and I’m always on the
lookout for new pieces of the puzzle.  Lately, for example, I’ve gotten
extremely excited about adding binaural beat technologies to sitting
meditation practices.  By sending tones of slightly different
frequencies into each ear via headphones, we can quickly shift the
brain out of the beta states that we ordinarily pass our lives in and
move down into alpha (associated with relaxation), theta (associated
with creative thinking and dreaming), and even delta states (associated
with both deep sleep and very deep meditation).  These technologies
almost seem to me to be a form of Rolfing the brain and the nervous
system, and I’m finding that they produce a profound, deepening effect
on my meditation.
    Exercise and nutrition are two more areas that it seems foolish not to
address to support this shift into embodied states.  And then there’s
the whole issue of the breath.  I recall hearing Hubert Godard say that
posture IS breath, and certainly how we breathe in this moment is a
direct reflection of our current condition of embodiment.  The Buddha’s
primary instruction on breath is to breathe in and out “with the whole
body,” and over long hours and long days of sitting practices that
focus on the principles of the Line (alignment, relaxation, and
resilient movement), this is what begins naturally to occur.  In a
fascinating correlation across time, I also recall Dr. Rolf saying in
my auditing class that as breath moves through a truly integrated and
balanced body, every joint in the body should be able to move in
response to the breath and that this will include the sutures in the
skull as well as the joints between the small bones in the feet!

Q:  Our skills of manipulation and our broadening understanding of how
to influence structure (through such things as, for example, spinal
mechanics and the application of cranial and visceral work) have become
much more sophisticated over the years.  Has your understanding of how
to embody the Line also changed over time?

A:  Our early attempts (mine as well as most everyone else’s) at
consciously embodying the Line were quite willful and, frankly, didn’t
work all that well.  With Ida occasionally barking things at us like
“bring your lumbars back!,” we would attempt to force our body to
approximate what we believed the Line to be.  But what many of us found
was that this kind of approach just brings with it another overlying
pattern of holding (never has the expression “chains of gold are just
as effective at keeping us imprisoned as are chains of iron” been so
clearly demonstrated to me), and Don Johnson did us all a great service
in bringing this posturing to an end with his warnings about what he
called “somatic platonism.”
    The Line can’t be forced on a body from the outside in.  Do this, and
you’ve got hell on your hands.  It needs instead to emerge naturally
from the inside out through playing with and surrendering to balance
and seeing how, over time, this affects the sensations and feeling
presence of the body.  Alignment alone can’t be the goal of the Line
(or every soldier standing at attention would be enlightened).  It has
to come with a deep relaxation (which is nothing more or less than the
dropping of the weight of the body in response to the pull of gravity)
that allows resilient movement to occur throughout the entire length of
the body.  Then, breath by breath, sensation by sensation, things can
begin to shift spontaneously, on their own, and this continues to be
the way I explore the magic of the Line.
    An exploration of the Line is an intensely personal undertaking. 
Playing with balance allows what the Theravadin Buddhists call the deep
sankharas, the deep and largely unconscious residues of holding and
contraction, to come to the surface of awareness where they can be
released.  This unwinding or releasing of tensions occurs spontaneously
and organically to the degree that we can surrender to its impulses,
rather than by attempting to superimpose our ideas about how it should
look.  It is a deeply healing process, and everyone’s experience of it
will be uniquely their own.  I find it much more helpful to think of
the Line as a process, rather than as a thing.  It’s an infallible,
moment to moment guide as we work to unravel the deepest tensions and
holdings that keep us stuck and limited.  It’s not something to attain
and then maintain.

Q:  Are there any other thoughts you'd like to share?

A:  As powerful and healing as the individual sessions of Rolfing are,
an even deeper process of healing awaits the person who explores the
embodiment of the Line as an intentional, meditative inquiry.  But for
this inquiry not to just spin its wheels on the slippery surface of the
mind, the individual sessions of Rolfing appear to me to be
indispensable.  Seen from this perspective, the basic series of Rolfing
functions as a kind of preliminary practice that then will allow
someone truly to begin exploring the Line.  And as this exploration
proceeds, regular supplemental Rolfing sessions help keep us on track
and deepen the inquiry.
    Many years ago I did a three week sitting retreat during which I had a
Rolfing friend come in every second or third day and work on my body. 
What an experience!  About two-thirds of the way through that retreat,
my body just found that place of effortless balance, and the
understanding of the relationship between alignment, relaxation,
resilience, and consciousness came flooding in.  I began rather
furiously writing down my insights, and the result was Posture of
Meditation.
    It’s time for me to start sharing this, and my vision would be to hold
retreats that explore intensive sitting, standing, and moving practices
based on our understanding of the Line.  What these retreats would also
include would be regular Rolfing sessions as well.  In the beginning,
it’s going to be more practical to limit participation in something
like this to Rolfers so that participants can pair up with and work on
each other, much as we do during basic training.  It probably makes the
most sense to launch something like this as a six day or week-long
residential retreat, but can you even begin to imagine what it would be
like to re-explore and re-experience the ten series in the context of a
21 day retreat focusing on the embodiment of the Line?!  Somewhere down
the road I could see offering something like this to non-Rolfers as
well, but for that to work, I would obviously need a cadre of Rolfers
wanting to work on people in this kind of format.
    I’d ask that, if what I’m talking about here resonates with whoever’s
reading this, then get in touch with me and let me know of your
interest.  It would be a great experiment.  That’s for sure.

______

Blessings and Peace,
Portico