Quotes - Alexandra Hamer, Therapeutic Massage & Bodywork, Durham & Cary, NC

"If you're familiar with the sweet pain of stretching muscles that aren't stretched, well that's the same kind of thing we're dealing with here. It's something that's totally under control of the client and something that the client and practitioner work out: how much stretch do you want to get out of this, how much sensation are you willing to put up with, or is comfortable for you. And that varies from client to client. There are some people who have really high pain thresholds and want to get a lot out of it, and "I'm paying you a lot of money, so do whatever you can to get it done." And other people are saying "Ease up a bit. I don't care if it takes a couple of extra sessions, I don't want to have all that sensation." And the pain level goes up and down with trust.

There is one exception to this. The whole design is not to impose pain upon the body, but to expose and eliminate pain from the body. And though we only have one word for pain, there are gradations and different colors to this type of sensation. There's the pain of telling the truth if you've been lying. But if you tell the truth you feel better afterward. There's a parallel here. There's areas where it's not being imposed pain from the outside. The pain that's already there on the inside is being exposed and released.

When there's pain stored in the body, I believe it has to be felt on the way out. Now that can be titrated, that can be done gently and gradually over a period of time, or it can be done more suddenly. The physical parallel to that is if someone's had a ski accident or a car accident and they've suffered a fracture to their tibia and that whole area was frozen and severely traumatized, when you go into that tissue, it's hard to avoid. There's pain stored in there that never got out. When you go in there, it's hard to avoid the client feeling some pain. But the feeling afterward is, "Oh my god, I can trust my leg again. I've got my leg back." It's worth it if it's a momentary thing. If that pain has been released from the body, then what's left is energy, joy and feeling."

M/B: What would you want SI students today to know about Ida Rolf?

TM: Her unflinching courage and honesty with herself and anyone else. The thing that attracted me toward this to begin with was that it was very honest. If you do a move and it works, you keep it. If it doesn't work, you have to try something else. So there wasn't any of this bowing down in front of the teacher or bowing down in front of a method. It was very much, "Let's look at what works."

The second thing about Ida Rolf that we need today is this ability to pay attention. Her ability to pay attention to her clients was fabulous. And so many people pay attention to someone else through a filter, through themselves. And she was totally unguarded. Her attention to her clients was total. She was not sympathetic in terms of the "Ah, there, there. That must have been awful for you having a parent like that." It was more, "You had a parent like that, so now what are you going to do about it." Real help as to how to get out of a situation.

She had the ability to take on all kinds of situations, people who were paralyzed. Sometimes she was able to work a miracle. Sometimes she was able to give them some help. And sometimes it really didn't work. Because, if we're honest, no one method works with anybody. That's why it's nice we have all these methods.

Her work is large enough to support work that is bodywork psychotherapy-oriented, that is more spiritually-oriented, that is more clinically-oriented, that's more movement-oriented.

"The series of sessions are designed to take you from one place of balance to another place of balance. Not necessarily to nirvana, just to another state of balance. That's what we hope to get within those sessions. Then we ask people to wait awhile. To let that settle in. That's a lot of information, a lot of change in the connective tissue. And it takes awhile for the body to settle into what has been done. Often we take pictures at the end of the sessions, then we take pictures six months later. They're not worse, they're better after those six months."