The Roots of Rolfing®: Tracing a Line from Ancestral Healing to Structural Integration
This is the first in a series of essays reflecting on the intellectual lineage behind Rolfing, osteopathy, and other body-centered practices. This essay serves to show we can learn a great deal about the cosmos and ourselves without the most rigorous modern scientific research. Research on fascia and techniques of fascial manipulation is still in its infancy, currently being funded in part by the Rolf Research Foundation. Since my masters degree was an MS in Logic, Computation, and Methodology from Carnegie Mellon University, I find myself constantly musing these ideas of truth, belief, knowledge, validity, and soundness as regards Rolfing and other forms of bodywork. I'm as pro-science as they come, but sometimes a hyperfocus on the strictest data gathering and analysis ignores the vast wealth of knowledge we've gathered with less certain means.
Introduction
There is a TV show called “Ancient Aliens” in which various people claim that much of the technology of the ancient world was not invented by humans, but was brought to Earth by aliens. In one instance, they claim carvings in an Egyptian pyramid show aliens gifting some technology to humans. Their reasoning is always highly specious. Regardless of what we think about the existence of aliens, the show ultimately hinges on the supposition that the people of that age could not possibly have invented or constructed such a wonder themselves, so there’s no logical explanation besides the beneficence of visiting aliens. The problem with that assertion is we know of countless examples of human ingenuity in the ancient world and we often have a very good idea of how advances were made.
Creator unknown
Ancient Ingenuity
There are countless examples of human ingenuity in the ancient world, not only because we can piece together how something has happened through field work, but many times we have surviving texts from these peoples. Many think of the ancients as ignorant people, but we live in a world in which people who believe in a flat Earth still exist. This despite the fact that not only have people known the earth is round for millennia, but Eratosthenes, who was born in 276 BC, even figured out the circumference of the earth and we know how he did it.
In 1543 Nicolas Copernicus published his theory of the heliocentric model of our solar system, that we revolve around the sun. Many are under the impression that the view of all humanity prior to Copernicus was that the stars and sun revolve around us, but this isn’t true. The word “planet” is Greek for “wander”. Why is it that the ancient Greeks had a specific name for them, and why did they call them wanderers? Don’t they just look like stars in the night sky? Well, they’re so named because of their unusual motion across the sky over a year. From Earth’s vantage point, they undergo retrograde motion, which means that they zigzag across the sky instead of proceeding in a perfect line or arc. This happens of course because the planets are revolving around the sun like we are, instead of revolving around us or our solar system at vast distances. The retrograde motion of the planets has long been an observation that has no good explanation in a geocentric model of the universe, which usually posited one or more perfect circles or spheres containing the stars around Earth.
Osteopathy & Rolfing: A Lineage of Bone-Setters
Experimentation in the ancient world of course goes well beyond cosmology. They also knew a great deal about the body.
We can see the knowledge that has been passed down for thousands of years through martial arts. Surely ancient warriors knew of vulnerable places to strike a person. In tai chi, one can see how the practice places importance on proper hip involvement, which is essential for healthy and efficient transfer of movement and force. One of the most common problems I see in my practice is clients who don’t move much at the hips, which gets compensated by moving and loading with the low back. You have a large, deep ball-and-socket hip joint at your center of gravity. Use it!
Tai chi stances. You can see the emphasis on moving at the hips and keeping the torso upright.
Trephination, the practice of cutting holes in the skull as a treatment for serious conditions, is well-documented to have been practiced in Neolithic societies, possibly as far back as 10,000 years ago, with varying but decent survival rates. Not surprisingly, the outer layer of connective tissue (fascia) is called the dura mater needs to stay intact as the brain is dangerously exposed without it. Obviously, archaeologists don’t always have clear answers for why trephination was performed, but it’s believed that in at least some cases, it successfully relieved intracranial pressure.
This practice is a great example of a common phenomenon whereby ancient peoples, often independently throughout the world and at various ages, have come up with a practice that can be beneficial to the human body through rough trial and error, even if their explanations of how it works are lacking.
Jeffrey Burch is a treasure trove of knowledge regarding Rolfing Structural Integration and its osteopathic roots. Osteopathy was started by A.T. Still in the late 1800’s, osteopathy meaning “pathology (disease) of bone”. In the early days, osteopathy was similar to Rolfing today with various hands-on treatment to help the body recover from injury, relieve pain, and so on. Still said that he learned much of his work from the local Native Americans of the Shawnee tribe. Burch says,
“So I would ask questions like, what are the roots of structural integration? Where did this come from? This led me not only back through osteopathy, but there have been traditions of manual therapy in peoples everywhere in the world since pre-history. These traditions are known by various names; in the United Kingdom they are called bonesetters, and indeed, they might have set broken bones. But they were also doing manual therapy.
In Portugal, there are people referred to as algebrista, which comes from the same root as algebra...In Germany, Wundartz (sic, Wundarzt), literally, wound healer. In Mongolia, they are called Bariachi.“
We often think of ways of working with the body like physical therapy and Rolfing as rather new. While our knowledge of the human body and how it works is well beyond that of ancient peoples, this kind of work of healing and improving ourselves is ancient, as old as humanity itself, if not older. This despite the lack of scientific rigor we seek today. The advent of science will be written about in another essay in this series. Without robust scientific results, what can we claim to know?