A further extension of Dr. Ida P. Rolf's (r) Human Potential development tool.

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by Lou Gross
School Certified Master Postural Integrator - since 1983
Expert in Body-Mind Release Therapies; Netherton, Reichian, Bioenergetic, Structural & Energetic.  Since 1982.        
20 years successful experience with this particular system
For more information & free consultations, call 888-299-5973
louisryoshin@yahoo.com



Part 1 - Basics of Rolf's (r) Bodymind Improvements
The Human Potential benefits of
Structural Integration itself.
Specifically:  Integration, Alignment, and Release

Note:  All references to Dr. Ida P. Rolf PhD in this section have been taken from my readings and personal experience with the Structural Integration Method I learned in my Postural Integration training.  They are meant to give informative background only, as an educational report with my own interpretations.  It simply serves as a lead-in to the Postural Integration & Netherton sections that follow.  I want to make it clear that I do not do the "brand" of Bodywork that specifically uses her name, "Rolfing (r)."

        Ida P. Rolf was a PhD physiologist, but she had also been very interested in the Human Potential movement for many years.  She herself did yoga.  Just read through her big Rolfing book and you'll see she explains what we're doing with the Body-work in terms of how it creates personal growth, in fact, how it creates "evolution" for the whole human species.
        Rolf started out trying to improve people's specific physical conditions further than standard physical therapy and other established methods, including Chiropractic and Acupuncture.  She even found Yoga to be lacking, in creating the needed length in the muscles.
        She found manipulating the soft connective tissue, the fascia, could do this lengthening.  Working with bodies in this way led her to three important physical discoveries regarding the concepts of wholistic personal growth.

         One discovery has to do with integration of the body parts.  When the fascia of the muscles in many areas of the body gets lengthened, lo and behold, the whole body starts working in a much better way; the parts work together better as a system.  Our nerves are wired up that way.  When the treatment "processing" has reformed the structure's actual shape, this feature operates.  And we feel better, operate better and even look better.
         I've discussed this feature in great detail in the alignment and tensegrity chapters of my How to Make Your Body Work Better Book.  I think all massage therapists should read it because it can help them do a better job.
         If we also take "Integrated Movement" training, we can make use of this feature even more.  For one thing, we can stay relaxed better, yet get more power in our movements with less energy.  And it increases our awareness, immediately, at the same time.
        
          The second discovery has to do with aligning the body with gravity.  When we lengthen everything enough, the different parts of the body get arranged right on top of each other, so their weight is balanced with the force of gravity.  We don't have to keep re-tightening day in and day out just to hold ourselves up.  This saves a lot of energy, and helps people stay more open, relaxed and flexible.
         Rolf, a physiologist, even talked about how that helped the organs function better.  She said that humans are designed to stand vertically in this aligned manner.  So it's a logical extension that if the organs, including the brain, are put in their proper relationship to gravity, their fluids and cells will work better.
         Keep this in mind when you read below about Traditional Chinese Medicine; how the organ systems of the body include psychological and emotional aspects as well as physical ones.
        We could also propose that when the organs are positioned in space so they relate to gravity the way evolution wants, then the cells of the organs won't have the stress of gravity pulling on them at angles they weren't designed to experience.  We could make an analogy with stress fractures of bones. Tight muscular forces at improper angles can crack bones.
         When the organs are aligned properly, the energy force of gravity may indeed help them function better in a similar way that it makes the structure of muscles and bones function better.
         Dr. Rolf designed the Structural Integration Bodywork System to make people healthier.  It has aligning the body with gravity, and integrating the parts into a whole, as major goals.  Its steps are even organized to do this.

           As she changed people's bodies, Dr. Rolf also discovered that the body and mind were the same thing, so that psychological function was actually psycho-somatic function.
           For instance, the arms and sides have to do with reaching out.  And the legs have to do with getting us around and giving us a stance in the world.  Tense legs limit our mobility and make our standing unstable.  Tight sides keep our inner feelings and expressiveness from getting "out there."  As each body section was re-lengthened and its muscle-bone system was better organized, she found that part of the person worked a lot better psychologically as well as physically.
          There is also a relationship between the inner muscle system, called the intrinsics, and the outer muscle system, known as the extrinsics.  Our external muscles have the function of "doing" in the world, either for getting around and accomplishing things, or for protecting ourselves from blows coming from other people or from falls and accidents.  The inner muscle system is more where we "are," of who we are inside.
           Rolf was very big on psycho-somatic function, and her Structural Integration set of steps first works on the extrinsics, then on the intrinsics, and then we connect them together so we function in an integrated way, in depth, as well as from one part of the body-mind to another.
           Our forebrains conceive and activate a movement.  This sends signals through the motor nerves that first create movement in the intrinsic muscles, and that then activates the larger extrinsic muscles, and we move.
            So Dr. Rolf discovered that we could significantly improve our psychological function and interpersonal expression, just in the course of making our physical structures work better with the body manipulation system.

        But Rolf was as surprised as many of the rest of us are when we first see that this treatment also removes old emotional energy out of the body's muscles.  Actually, it's said that she wasn't as interested in this emotional release as she was in the long term affects of clearing the body and integrating and aligning it.  She believed this long term result was the more important improvement in people's lives. Yet I read she encouraged people to work with a psychological therapist during the process if they wished.

        Psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich MD knew about this emotional energy storage in the body decades before Rolf made her discovery.  Reich didn't manipulate fascia so he didn't know that fascia stores a lot of this energy and is the major factor in keeping our bodies stuck in the old restricted forms.  But he did discover that non-fascia related emotional energy also caused tightness, a lot of it.  And he found out how to use the long term structural tensions and misalignments to access, and release, a lot of the old, traumatic emotional energy.
        Years after Rolf found out about it, and a couple decades after Reich had started teaching his methods in America, Jack Painter, PhD combined the two systems.


Part 2 - What is Postural Integration?
A "System," of the Bodywork,
with Reichian Therapy techniques,
Chinese Medicine Theory & acupressure, and
Mind-into-Body Awareness

          I'll start by repeating a few of the introductory sentences above and add details.
          Simply stated, this is a wholistic form of Structural Integration Bodywork.  It includes Reichian body oriented psychological improvements, including emotional release and trauma release techniques, and has the ability to improve energy flow throughout the body.
           Postural Integration (colloquially called PI) was developed in the early 1980's by Jack Painter, PhD.  The headquarter school is The International Center for Release and Integration in Mill Valley, CA, just north of San Francisco.
           There are PI practitioners, and some trainers, in North and South America, Europe, Australia and other areas.  A number of psychotherapists have taken, and use, this training.  I was trained by two for my basic course in Los Angeles, and I took the advanced training from Jack Painter in Mill Valley, in 1983.

         Reich was an Austrian psychiatrist who studied with Freud and Jung and had a great interest in how emotions and psychology related to body functions.  He did a lot in the field of the autonomic nervous system.
         Reich confirmed that Freud's understanding of how early life events set up lifelong patterns was true, but the patterns are not in the unconscious mind of the brain.  Rather, they are in the muscles and organs themselves.
         He found that all our ongoing patterns are caused by emotional energy of specific past traumatic events. This physical "substance" got trapped in the physical muscle and organ tissue. The problems are not in something called "cell memory."  They are pollutions from foreign material. We have chronically tight muscles with the emotional charge stuck inside.  And the tightness stops the healthy flow of our current energy.
         Remove this energy and straighten out the muscles, and a lot of both the psychological, and physical, problems go away.  That's how we know our understanding is accurate.  The treatment works, consistently.

         If you're already familiar with what Structural Integration does, you'll recognize how it helps us achieve some of the Reichian goals and even how it helps Reichian therapy sessions themselves.  If so, just skip down to the Chinese Medicine part.  If not, let me explain how this works.

         Practitioners and clients of Structural Integration have experienced that chronically tight musculature is due in large part to chronically bunched-up fascia, the putty part of the muscles, that surrounds and holds together the muscle fiber and nerve part.
        The bunched-up fascia (fah shah) keeps the muscles from re-lengthening back to their proper full lengths.  In other articles on this website, I've explained how this happens in the purely physical realm, and how that manifests as tightness, pain and decreased athletic performance.

          In the psycho-somatic and emotional realms, re-lengthening the fascia also gets rid of a lot of the tight shape.  So we're not so psychologically restricted anymore. We now have the ability to express ourselves much better because our neuro-muscular and energetic capabilities have been improved.  Everyday people as well as actors and actresses notice they can express themselves emotionally, more fully and more articulately.
           Pushing on the fascia also squeezes old negative emotional charge out of the collagen fibers of the fascia, like squeezing tubes of toothpaste.  These thousands of tiny protein fibers are what create the fascia's shape.  And the fascia is what gives us our shape.  Fascia forms wrappings around and through all the muscles, it's in between the organs, and it's a big sack of fascia around the whole body.  Fascia, we say, is the "organ of structure."
           The collagen fibers get pushed closer and closer together and that causes our held-in tightness and misalignment.  And, when we're tensed up, hit, squeezed or otherwise physically pressed on, they also absorb emotional energies from surrounding people, as well as from us inside.  They're little sponge-like biological recording tapes.
           As we spread them out from one another, we're re-lengthening that bunching up and we're also cleaning out the energies that got stored in them.
           From a body oriented psychology view, Structural Integration is a whole-body approach.  Each area treated cleans us up and re-lengthens us at the same time.  The treatment removes both the physical tightness from the past traumatic experiences and the emotional charge of everybody involved in the incidents as well.  Then, as I'll explain further below, when we remove tightness in one set of muscles, it also loosens the tension that area was having on other muscles as well.  They can then release their tension and stored emotions better. 
           This purely bodywork improvement seems to erase the residues of events, for adults, going back even to mid childhood. In children, it clears out even earlier energies because they are closer to the surface.  In adults, they're usually further down inside.  The oldest person I saw a noticeable psychological release in was 87, the youngest 5.
           This "opens up" the muscle structure, too.  Muscles aren't as compressed or pulled in anymore. Nor as tightly glued to each other.  So the energies deeper inside, like in the organs and along the spine, can be cleared out with the Reichian techniques much easier.
           These deeper energies and tensions can be accessed with  Yoga, if it's strong enough.  My Structural Stretching technique of lengthening fascia and aligning the structure while stretching makes the positions, or asanas, release more energy.  But they also create some of the long term realignment and integration that Rolf aimed for.  So I use it in my trauma and emotional release phone sessions as well as the in-person Bodywork sessions.

            So besides loosening each individual area, this kind of bodywork gives us another benefit, the interconnected one.  In the Structural Integration method of Connective Tissue Manipulation, we find that re-lengthening one area of the body releases tension and stored emotional energy in other areas. 
            When we do connective tissue spreading on the chest, for instance, we're releasing energies out of the chest fascia.  But when we also do a lot in the arms, we open up deep areas of the chest.  And that releases emotional charge that was being held way in there.  When we lengthen the thighs, it also loosens tension and emotional energy out of the chest.
            (By the way, it seems to just go out.  In my sessions when there's just Structural Integration manipulations, people get happily clearer in the local area and nothing "heavy" comes out until we release some deeper, more traumatic events later on.)
 
             Also, remember that integrating and improving the alignment affects the body's energy system as well as its neuro-muscular movements.  The body becomes a more effective emotional releasing mechanism.  In fact, as people get more cleared, it's both easier to handle the next energies coming out and easier to access it and process it out.
           (My "Structural Bodywork" stretching technique helps both locally and inter-connectedly. It's like the hands-on Bodywork. Doing these stretches makes it easier and faster for people to release more early events when we do the Netherton-Reichian Therapy release session soon afterward.)

         Reich's understanding is that our psychology and physical condition are inter-related with our energy flows.  An energy flow can be decreased, blocked or imbalanced by a purely physical event, and by a physical event caused during a psychological event.  And once the energy flow is restricted or distorted, the psychological and physical condition shows disease.
           If you're familiar with Traditional Chinese Medicine, you'll recognize that Reich's understanding is similar to what these folks discovered centuries ago. They describe a specific set of relationships, how psychology and emotions are inter-related with the physical condition.  Each one affects the other.  Each internal organ in western terms is part of a system that includes a sensory organ, an energy flow, a structural kind of tissue and an emotional and psychological feature of our personalities.
         When we combine Reich's detailed body oriented psychology understanding with the Chinese Medicine knowledge, we get a more complete picture.  And with selected acupressure, and even herbs or food, we can adjust those energy flows so that psychology and physiology both improve.
            I know of one psychotherapist who purposely creates emotional release with acupressure.  Jack Painter's approach is more to use different acupressure points to help rebalance the system.  He'll decrease excess in one area and channel that energy into the area that's deficient.  This may also release stored emotional energy.
         This rebalancing is what acupuncturists do routinely, mostly to address physical conditions.  Jack is doing it from the point of view to balance psychology and emotions.  As I said, the Chinese saw both as different ways to look at the same thing inside ourselves; our energy state of being.
          But what the Chinese didn't do, and what Medical Doctor Wilhelm Reich also didn't do, is re-lengthen the fascia and greatly improve the integration of the body's structural parts with each other.
        That means they also don't align the structure with gravity.  And they miss out on the fact that lengthening and decompressing the fascia changes its condition noticeably. It increases blood and lymphatic circulation, it significantly increases the energy flows through it, and it actually changes the frequency and consistency of its own tissue for the better.
        An important psycho-somatic benefit of getting what we call Structural Integration Processing is that it integrates our own energies and physical function with our external environment; with gravity, with the electromagnetic field of the earth and even with the energies coming from other people.

         So Postural Integration, as done by Jack Painter, includes both the Structural integration System and a Reichian Therapy system.  Then it also uses Chinese Medicine "body oriented psychology" and energy flow understanding with acupressure.  All three.
           (In my PI plus, I also use tonic herbs and foods for the same reason.  I add my understanding of how both Chinese and western herbs and living foods affect the organ systems and the muscle-fascia tissue.  Because of my limited knowledge, I don't do as much energy rebalancing with acupressure points as Jack does, but I do apply some acupressure flow work and use energy with the Chakras and energy field.  Altogether, I apply a little wholistic Chinese Medicine.)
        
         Postural Integration also includes Gestalt mind-into-body self awareness psychology techniques, and some Alexander Movement somatic education.
           It's very important to get the mind into the body.  First, we want to consciously know what's in there; what's going on.  Second, doing just this can calm people down and help them get some resolution on the issue.  And third, it enables us to better release material and then keep ourselves functioning in a more aware way as well.
           
           Postural Integration emphasizes an approach to personal development that recognizes the inter-relationship, or unity of mind, body and energy.  It works to increase our mind's awareness of our body and energies. And its methods actually increase the "integration" of them. This is something Rolfing founder Ida P. Rolf, PhD had a strong interest in.  Postural Integration adds to what Structural Integration does for us in this area.


Part 3 - What is "Postural Integration - plus?"
Increasing Emotional Release Abilities,
Adding Bodymind Strength & Stability,
Deepening Relaxation and
Increasing the Power of Awareness

Next Page  Go To Part 2 - this P.I. Plus

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