I’m nearing the end of a two-year training journey. I’ve been learning to treat movement problems with Structural Integration (or Rolfing, also SI). As a Yogi – and as a martial artist before that – I’ve hurt myself many times. I tried physio (and acupuncture)…with some success. But the one thing that could fix me every time (and quickly) was Rolfing and in the end, I decided to learn how to do it myself.
The biggest learning of all? Where it hurts is not where the problem is. Where it hurts is where one’s overworked in compensating for a silent problem elsewhere. And that silent problem has persisted long enough for strain elsewhere to cause the pain.
Current practice is to treat symptoms. So you (as I did) get physio/ rest/ do special exercises and after a while, the pain eases. But when you start using it again, the pain returns. Well, yes…the problem – the real problem – was never addressed. In other words, treatment keeps us sick.
As a kid, I used to watch a comedy called Only When I Laugh. It was about a group of men whose lives were so complex that they would do anything to extend their hospital stay. In fact, any suggestion that they might be discharged was a threat to the status quo. The comedy was all in how creative they were in ways to stay in hospital, rather than addressing their lifestyle difficulties.
I think there are parallels to be drawn. I know in my life, I’ve often avoided one difficulty by choosing other difficulties. I might’ve disliked my career, but the only thing I could actually bring myself to do was get a better paid version of my existing job. It’s never easy to change employers, but I guess it somehow seemed easier than changing employment. And the money was something to feel good about – but the money never really did make anything better.
Changing oneself – for instance, accepting less money – that can be hard. It was hard for me anyway. In that sense, it’s oddly helpful to just keep “treating the symptoms”. It’s a line of least resistance that gets a person through the day. We preserve our status quo by eroding our insides a little more every day. Well, lots of jobs – even “good” jobs – can feel like that anyway.
Dealing with the actual issue – from an SI perspective – means taking the excess load away from the area that’s overworking. The patient must change fundamental movement patterns that result in overload. Luckily, we all learned how to move before we learned how to speak: Rolfers “talk” directly to the body’s movement mechanisms. After treatment, the patient is a different person (from a movement perspective), although all they will be aware of is that movement is now pain-free.
If there is a way to a pain-free life, why do we so often persist in problems? Well, I don’t have any magic answers, but I think the source of it all is fear. Think about it: if preserving the status quo is more important than how I feel, then I must think that there’s some kind of threat to me. It must seem safer to bear the pain to keep other things going.
A few weeks ago, I was asked to present a talk on mindfulness to a large group of civil servants. The speaker before me did a great job of talking about how one can reframe threats as challenges by realising that there is no risk to safety either way. It could be the same in other spheres of life: once one realises that living without various luxuries is still living, the threat of losing them is gone. It becomes the challenge of how to replace them with more positive and fulfilling things. Threats turn into challenges.
Fear is a big part of our culture perhaps. We have the saying: “fight fire with fire”. This is all about fear: the only way to deal with difficulty is to do more difficulty. Of course – and as we all know from our own lives – all you get is more fire. In fact, I think it’s probably supposed to be written:
Fight: fire with fire
That is, if I insist on fighting all the time – if I always act out of fear – then all I’ll ever experience is fire (from the world) with fire (from me). I think the saying is supposed to be an encouragement not to fight fire with fire.
There’s an interesting line in a track I heard recently:
Eye for an eye until every one of us are blind: Ghetts, Street Politics
You get the idea, I’m sure. We can see that fear and retribution are part of the cultural backdrop we’ve all grown up with. It’s understandable that we would all act from a place of fear, unless some other method had been offered…which of course is what Yoga does; it quietly shows us that we have self-dependence.
But from this place of fear, we make compensations so that we can accommodate the unpleasant. Bearing this load on a compromised structure creates problems. We can shore up the structure, but the pain doesn’t go away until we ditch the load. But that requires dealing with fear.
I see this in working with people therapeutically. One of the most common problems I’ve met so far is shoulder pain resulting from poor muscle tone in other parts of the back. Yes, that’s right: your shoulder pain might have nothing to do with your rotator cuff. Well, it is your rotator cuff now, because that’s been overloaded. Often, the whole back displays different muscle tone on the left and right sides. The rotator cuff keeps inflaming until other back muscles wake up. Rolfing can help the body realise what it needs to do: when it energises itself in a new way, movement is different and there literally is no problem any more.
How does the shoulder relate to fear? That’s another whole blog, but think about it. You have to “put your back into it” when you need to work hard; you have to “shoulder your responsibilities” and get on with it, or “they’ll be giving you the elbow”. There’s definitely more to say, but the body, mind and spirit really might be linked and we may have structured our very language around this knowledge…
As my course draws closer to its end, I’m beginning to conclude that healing isn’t about fixing problems. There never was a problem; just a misunderstanding of how to be in the world. Healing seems to be realising that we’re not our jobs, or our relationships, Yoga would say that we’re not even our bodies. What we are is undeniable: when we lean into that, it stops being frightening – but never loses its challenge.
