Zen And The Art Of Body Maintenance
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday September 1, 1995
Learn to Love Gravity. Recover pelvic integrity. Restore structural awareness. This is obviously not aerobics - it is the language of Bodywork: a '90s blend of exercise, therapy and spirituality.
Once associated solely with panel beaters and dinged car doors, bodywork has become an umbrella term for regimes that sound like jazzercise on Jupiter: Reiki, Rolfing, the Feldenkreis Method, Alexander Technique, Somatic Pulsing, Pilates Method, Zone Therapy, Hellerwork, Tragerwork and Kinesiology.
The American New Age Journal jests that, in California, everyone falls into two categories: they are either getting Bodywork or giving it. In Australia, Simply Living magazine calls it the "fastest growing area of alternative health care". But a growing number of nurses as well are taking up forms of it and you might even find a groovy doctor referring you to a Bodyworker.
Those who rely upon their bodies for a livelihood - such as athletes or actors who cannot afford a "structural distortion" - are often devoted to one variety or another. Even people who view their body as merely a place to park their brain, have found ease from Bodywork.
It can also make you look better, but Bodyworkers loathe this kind of crass chit-chat. One of them would admit only grudgingly that his comment - "Rolfing helps you use your body in a way that allows gravity to contribute energy" - actually translated as a "perkier figure".
They prefer the jargon: modalities, functional integration, primary control, core strength; in darker moments I suspect all Bodyworkers of cherishing a secret handshake.
Listening to a pack of practitioners prattling on could reduce even an unreconstructed hippie to calling for the nearest liposuctionist. Where is your tongue right now? Are you aware of the connection between it and your pelvic area? What emotions are coming up? Move your tongue: how is your pelvis now relating to your reality?
While tricky questions of this nature are only a fraction of the Bodywork equation, it is nevertheless tempting to slouch defiantly off into the sunset. But Bodyworkers tend to be walking endorsements of their beliefs. Glowing, zestful, they glide like graceful children: loose, limber, gravity-defying and perfectly postured. Clients brandishing before-and-after photos claim results ranging from bad backs made good to recovery of repressed memories.
Bodyworkers say intelligence resides not just in the brain but in every cell, nerve and muscle of the body. So it is not by accident that we speak of feeling "nervy", or of feeling something "in our bones". Prolonged misuse of the body, along with established "holding patterns" - we may mentally get over trauma or grief but still hold it in our body - leads to ungainly and dysfunctional bodies.
The idea that Bodywork can correct the body, tame unruly emotions, settle a restless mind and bestow grace, is clearly appealing. But apart from requiring time and money, there is another problem: Bodywork is devoid of official standards and regulations. If I advertised the "Normanic Technique - Body Awareness and Structural Refocusing for Love Power", I would, given the way things are, rustle up a few clients. They'd eventually try to dismember me, but I couldn't be sued.
Nobody wants to pay money to be prodded, asked personal questions and told to stop slouching. And if the recovered memory element is even half true, an under-qualified practitioner could possibly precipitate a serious breakdown.
Consumers are responsible themselves for checking whether a practitioner has qualified after several years' training or a mere weekend workshop. But the apparent benefits of Bodywork and the fact that this season's Spandex leotard is not a prerequisite, induced me to clothe myself in the recommended baggy track pants and slump along to investigate.
Just as there are cat people, dog people, guinea pig people and so on, different types of Bodywork suit different people. Bodyworkers are all equal, but some are more equal than others. All contact telephone numbers are for organisations encompassing people trained to the peak of their particular branch of Bodywork.
ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE
It's 10.30 am. Do you know where your hipbones are? It seems many people, myself included, merely think they do. "Mismapping" is thought by practitioners of the Alexander Technique to cause a host of problems. Intellectual, rather than "hands-on", the method aims to re-educate people. Adored by actors and taught at NIDA, it was started by an Australian-born actor, F.M. Alexander (1869-1955), after his career-threatening throat problems were pronounced incurable. Noticing that the way he held his head was depressing his larynx, he altered that and not only recovered his voice, but lengthened his back. From there he developed "smart movement" techniques.
How big, asks Alexander practitioner Michael Shellsea, do I think my spine is? My "roughly the size of a 50 cent coin" guess is "a common mismapping - most people think of it as being like a string of pebbles when it is actually like this ..." He makes a saucer- sized circle with his hands. It is somehow a striking and strengthening image.
"Once people are informed about their bodies, they can make logical changes." Shellsea demonstrates how people waste energy and garner inappropriate tension in their everyday movements until I feel I am hopeless at everything from watching television to washing dishes.
Shellsea smiles kindly. "We are all born with perfect posture. The Alexander Technique is simply re-educating people in what their bodies already know. I used to sit like this ..." He slumps into a ghastly, stoop-shouldered, pot-bellied wreck of a man, and I feel better.
Michael Shellsea (02) 411 7488. Australian Society of Teachers of Alexander Technique; toll -free (008) 339-571. Cost: $35 to $50 per session, with about 30 classes recommended.
FELDENKRAIS METHOD
In his day, Moshe Feldenkrais (1904-1984) was an atomic physicist and the black belt judo champion of Europe. After damaging his knee playing soccer, he developed his "functional integration" method. An early student of the Alexander Technique, he disagreed with Alexander's intellectual approach.
The Feldenkrais Method is enmeshed with psychology, "transforming and enriching self-image". Dissatisfied with saying we're made to bend from the hip, not the waist, and the like, Feldenkrais saw "neurotic bodies". Like his scientific colleague, Albert Einstein, Feldenkrais believed we fulfil only a small part of our potential. But, he argued, "by improving the state of our body, we improve the state of our mind".
Practitioner Maria Geogouli, a dancer with a Bachelor of Education degree in Human Movement, even smiles with suppleness. "As you learn new ways of moving, you learn new ways of doing and being," she says. I think that if she asks me to tuck my ankle behind my neck, I will certainly show her new ways of being.
But the session involves lying down, having various limbs moved around and being asked how I feel. Well, I feel like a big doll, but there is an ebullient sense of life being full of possibility. It's only spooky when she cradles my head, pulls it up and about, but insists said head is moving of its own accord. Afterwards I feel (and look) lighter, taller and happier. I could go a few rounds of judo.
Maria Geogouli (02) 597 7112. Australian Feldenkrais Guild, Victoria (03) 817 6333; NSW (02) 555 1374. Cost: $55 for a private lesson, with no set number recommended. Group classes in awareness of movement cost $10.
ZONE THERAPY
This therapy, also known as Reflexology, looks like a pretentious pedicure sans toenail varnish but is "an ancient system of healing and cleansing the body through pressure points in the feet". Every millimetre of the foot supposedly corresponds with various body bits. So, not only can, say, gastric ulcers be diagnosed through a foot grope; they can be treated with one as well.
Most doctors would get a gastric ulcer if they saw a Zone Therapist massaging an ankle while crooning, "Round and round the uterus, up into the Fallopian tubes - bit of scarring there? - and down the cervix ..." Proponents touting pictures of people such as Buddha receiving foot rubs say Zone Therapy is thousands of years old. Its modern revival is credited to an American, Eunice Ingham, who "re-pioneered" it in the 1930s.
Zone Therapy teacher Catherine Chan digs her knuckle into my foot and I wince, so she diagnoses dodgy bowels. She refuses to believe they're not. "The proof is in the pudding," she says, inviting sceptics to try a little DIY reflexology next time they have a headache: "Wiggle and massage the big toes and the headache will vanish."
Chan won't accept that the worrying discolouration on the top of my foot results from a botched fake tanning job and not a wrecked gall bladder. "Well, fake tan is really bad for you," she says.
Catherine Chan (043) 62 2795. Reflexology Association of Australia NSW (02) 970 6155; Victoria (03) 9625 4594. Cost: approximately $45 per session, with weekly sessions often recommended.
REIKI
Followers insist that Reiki, Japanese for "universal life force", is "not a religion". But the "hands-on healing" technique prompts religiously fervent testimony. Contributors to the newsletter Reiki Happenings rave about its curing everything from warts to cancer. Weeds vanish from the garden; wounds heal without scars; whales go back to sea. You name it and Reiki does it.
Conveniently, once you've got the knack, it can be "sent" long-distance, so that Reiki is also apparently healing the planet. The international New Age phenomenon, Louise "Heal Your Life" Hay, who gives an emotional cause/remedy for every disease, is a Reiki Mistress. It is a real scene and I am apprehensive.
I do not want to emerge as the kind of person who meanders around mumbling, "This is not dandruff: it is my inability to make decisions, but I am a focused being living joyously in the moment." Thankfully, Sophie Morton is rather fun.
As a professional-events organiser or "freelance party girl", she heard about Reiki at a Melbourne Derby Day. She thinks it's "absolutely fantastic. It is an exchange of energy. Once you've gained access to this energy, it's yours for life," she says, as her beautifully manicured hands lie across my torso. It all sounds too simple. "Life is simple," she beams beatifically. Clients popping in for a single zap of Reiki are encouraged to attend weekend seminars for the permanent effect and/or to become Reiki practitioners themselves.
Reiki Network NSW (02) 969 1623; Victoria (03) 96905057. Beverly Bultitude, Reiki Master (02) 540 4193. Cost: from $20, but first Reiki session is complimentary. Weekend seminars start at $300.
PILATES METHOD
If dancers ruled the world, there would be memorials to Joe Pilates (1880-1972) on every street corner.
The German-born boxer and circus performer developed his method while interned as an enemy alien in England during World War I. It is renowned for producing lithe physiques and more arcane benefits prized by dancers: mind-muscle harmony, breathing/postural correction and body awareness.
A blend of calisthenics, ballet and yoga, the method is performed with classical or no music to aid complete concentration. Clients can't start an exercise till they've straightened the spine, relaxed shoulders, elongated the neck, tucked tummies and aligned hips, knees and ankles. Then they've got to get their breathing right.
The equipment looks like a collection of mutant jungle gyms and torture racks, but is in fact user-friendly. Dancer, actress and Pilates instructor Megan Williams rules her Sydney studio with a rod of iron.
"The Pilates body is long, slender thighs and calves, a flat tummy, a strong back and high tushie," she says. "Now, breathe into your diaphragm. Your hips are uneven." Williams and instructors lurk around to ensure synchronised breathing and that the correct muscle is engaged.
Anyone can do Pilates and it is addictive, as results are seen quickly, but it helps if you are well-heeled.
Megan Williams's Pilates Studio (02) 363 5033. Body Control Studios (02) 267 8223. Andrew Baxter Body Concept Studio (03) 9684 8666. Cost: about $25 per session, with two to three per week recommended, but bulk discount rates are available.
ROLFING
It's painful, and the Bodywork most likely to make you wish you'd paid attention in biology class. But Rolfing, an extraordinarily deep massage of the fascia, can create spectacular results. Part of the connective tissue network, fascia is a kind of web wrapped round our body that gives it its shape.
Biochemist Ida Rolf (1896-1979) developed Rolfing in the 1940s, arguing that what we see as the elasticity of youth, is really a healthy fascia. Chronic stiffness, soreness or aches actually mean the fascia is in trouble. Her theory was that a well-balanced body (ie: Rolfed) is kept in tone merely by walking and breathing. Restoring the natural elasticity of the fascia brings about a full range of movement and possibly a differently shaped body. Rolfers believe painful feelings stored in the fascia are released in the treatment. Dhyaana Turnbull says not to worry if anything "comes up". You're encouraged just to "release it".
It is sometimes painful, and unlike any other massage I have experienced. No mucky memories emerge, but when Turnbull splays his fingers under my shoulder blades and wriggles them, it feels like a clean-out of ancient muck. I haven't had tension there since.
"You can't fix the head without fixing the body. I got this voice from Rolfing," he explains in deep, matinee idol tones. "It was always one of those thin, squeaky ones but something released in my throat. I opened my mouth and I've had this voice ever since." Weirdly, after just one session I was a centimetre taller and clothes felt looser.
The Rolf Institute (Australia). Dhyaana Turnbull (02) 363 4591; Michael and Paula Arnel (03) 9383 5045. Cost: $60 per session, 10 sessions recommended.
HELLERWORK
As an aerospace engineer at a jet propulsion lab in Pasadena, Joseph Heller decided he was "an ageing body carrying my head around, intellectually preoccupied and succumbing to the eventual decline of my body". Rolfing changed his life and he became president of the Rolf Institute, before hiving off to develop his own, "more extensive", method in 1978.
Based on the same principles as Rolfing, Hellerwork is a lot more into psychotherapeutic-style dialogue and movement education la the Alexander Technique. Hellerworkers really go for it with names like "Inspiration", "Reaching Out" and "Feminine Energy" -associated with various body bits. They engage in "dialogue to bring the emotional and attitudinal components of stress to consciousness" - which means they ask probing questions whilst prodding your body.
Before long I'm confiding everything - from how my mother wouldn't let me have my ears pierced to mystification at the weird turn Melrose Place has taken - to Hellerworker Lorraine Grewcoe. Am I supposed to feel as if I am being sculpted?
"You are," she says. "Our bodies are more fluid and capable of transformation than we realise. We fight them every step of the way. This prevents physical decline, which is caused not by age but by living an inefficient physical life." The movement education part of the session demonstrates just how inefficient a physical life can be. Even the way I stand demonstrates (thanks to locked knees) a resistance to change.
Australian Hellerwork Practitioner Association (02) 818 3969. Lorraine Grewcoe (02) 810 6100. Cost: $90 per session, with 11 recommended.
KINESIOLOGY
Fancy the idea of yourself as a computer? On the basis that most of us are a mass of twitching, non-integrated circuitry, Kinesiology uses "muscle testing" to ascertain what the body needs. This means you hold out an arm while the practitioner runs through a series of queries and when your arm goes down ... bingo!
"The answers to everything," says George Goodheart, the American chiropractor who invented the technique in the 1960s, "are inside you." Practitioner Penelope Ward is fond of statements such as, "I am the writer, director, producer, and the actor in the movie of my life." She is, she explains, about to identify my "blockage" and how to cure it. The process makes me feel like a plane having its pre-flight check. I stand with wing-like extended arms while Ward mutters things like "Zero charge. All seven etheric bodies charged. Meridians clear. Check!" And so on.
Gabbling through grotty emotions from something called the Behavioural Barometer, she diagnoses a block from "betrayal". No matter that I don't feel betrayed: it is buried deep and Ward is going to find from where the "negative charge" stems. More jargon and more arm-flapping until she triumphantly announces that all of my problems stem from something that happened to me 10 hours after conception.
I won't go into how I had to talk to myself as an ovum and other things but the final prescription was to take supplements of the mineral manganese and do five star-jumps a day. Honestly.
Australian Kinesiology Association (03) 9578 1229. Penelope Ward (02) 974 4038. Cost: from $50, with frequency of sessions variable.
SOMATIC PULSING
Somatic Pulsers say our bodies, which are mostly water, too often resemble a clogged-up creek rather than the desired bubbling flow. Pulsing your body is similar to "throwing a pebble into a pond. The gentle rhythms create pleasant, wave-like shimmerings that resonate throughout your whole body, awakening your capacity to move and flow on all levels."
One of the more recently (1993) developed Bodyworks, it is supposed to ease pain, restore joint mobility and help in healing. "Pulsing is the most feminine of Bodywork," says Summer Smith, as she jiggles away at my feet. "Others are more masculine and tell us how to change. Pulsing just gives us the space to change."
Feeling as if I am transforming into a waterbed, I manage to say it sounds like Zen Buddhism, and she beams. "Yes!" You can burble on about your feelings or "work on issues", as it is called, but Smith is just as happy for clients to "stay in the Not Knowing". The session consists of gentle rocking and jiggling which is supposed to freshen up the old bodily fluids.
Allowing the fluids in our body to flow makes us more, er, fluid in movement as well as letting us live in a more enlivened and mindful body. Afterwards, I pour myself off the massage table and straight into Smith's loo. This is a normal result of the fluids sorting themselves out. Then I float out of the house like a giant jellyfish, only to spend the next 24 hours soaked in sweat as the fluids flow.
Australian Somatic Integration Centre and Summer Smith (02) 719 8602; Melbourne (03) 9481 5648. Cost: $60 per session; at least three recommended.
TRAGERWORK
"Agelessness" is one of the apparent benefits of Tragerwork and the after-session "homework", Mentastics. A teenage pro-fighter in the 1920s, Milton Trager became known for curing everything from the muscular ailments of fellow boxers to his dad's sciatica.
Thus inspired, he set up an informal practice, got a medical degree and is today still teaching his method of "psycho-physical integration ... We assume protective, restricting modes and these compensations become part of who we are." Tragerwork attempts to show the mind that the body can move in a different way, so that the nervous system learns new patterns.
Physiotherapist and Tragerworker Pauline Chester-Itzkowic starts by "hooking up", which is a Trager term for "bonding with the universal life force and establishing a climate of enhanced sensitivity. It means I won't allow my reality to intrude upon yours," she explains sweetly.
As she rocks me every which way, she says, "There's no point trying to think in a new way if your body is still stuck in the old way." Afterwards, she shows me some shake-out kind of exercises which are Mentastics or mental gymnastics. She asks me to walk down the hall. I do feel lighter, cheerful, and like a pillow that's been fluffed up.
Pauline Chester-Itzkowic (02) 552 6574. Australian Tragerwork Contacts (02) 327 7034; (03) 9822 5420. Cost: $30-$60 per session, with several sessions recommended.
And coming soon to a neighbourhood near you: Holistic Pulsing, Aston Patterning, Ortho-Bionomy Bodywork, One Brain and Lomi - all of which are offshoots of one or more of the above.
© 1995 Sydney Morning Herald