Integration
Working in Bodywork's Big Tent

By Deane Juhan

It was in bodywork’s big tent that I began my training and career. It all started for me at Esalen Institute in the ’70s, when there was too much going on there to herd the various modalities under any sort of conceptual tent. We did manage to coin the usefully vague phrase “human potential.” And the thing about human potential that I learned straightaway was that every single human has one. A valid one. An important one. How to bring this potential forward for every individual was the focus of Esalen’s “Ed Sullivan Show” of new and experimental ways of helping people to understand themselves and to empower them in their lives. The only ideology that interested Richard Price, Esalen’s cofounder and leader, was that there not be one.

Tapping the Potential
Ida Rolf was fond of saying, “Just give me the connective tissue and you can have the rest.” On the other hand, my teacher, Milton Trager, was just as fond of saying, “It’s all in the mind. Create a shift of feeling in the unconscious and all the changes in the tissue will follow.” Several of my postural integration buddies and I have been at it for years over this difference in approach.

Now, this is the sort of philosophical loggerhead that can threaten marriages, let alone professional acquaintances. But over the years we have learned to come to it with more and more humor, actually keeping the debate up just for the fun of it rather than expecting some final resolution one way or the other. It became obvious that the argument itself was a non-starter, about as ridiculous as the shopworn one about “nature versus nurture.” It served us, however, as an important part of our education and development. It drove home one of the fundamental issues underlying the holistic revolution in alternative forms of healthcare: There is nothing holistic about separating and prioritizing tissues to establish hierarchies of modalities.

In other words, one does not have to dig too deeply into physiology to realize that the various structural and energetic activities of connective tissue have a great deal to do with the unfolding of our experiences that we call “mind,” and that the reactive and self-directive activities of the mind are continually spinning and molding the structures and energetics of fascia. And I daresay you could frame this sort of debate between virtually any modalities that have obvious differences in approaches and stated intentions. What on earth could chiropractic have to do with Feldenkrais, or yoga to do with reflexology?

But as James Oschman, the cell biologist and author of Energy Medicine, likes to say, “There is this theory and that theory, this approach and that approach. Then, there is the way the critter actually works.” And this is what unites us, after all — the critter. And the critter is us. And each one of us is human. And each has a potential. A valid one. An important one.

We must remember where all of our differing modalities came from: A particular individual, with a particular talent and worldview, was faced with a personal problem, or with a particular population of clients, and worked out an innovative method of bringing relief and restored function. For Moshe Feldenkrais, his Judo-damaged knees led him to develop a rehabilitation plan based on a highly specific series of movements. For Trager, it centered around open-ended, never-quite-the-same exploratory movements. For Rolf, connective tissue was the thing. Craniosacral, reflexology, and on and on — they all focus on a particular tissue, a particular part of the body, or a particular theory about how the critter works.

And guess what? The critter is sufficiently complex and suffers from enough conditions that there is ample room for all of them to be true. Or if “true” is not an accurate word for our fragmentary insights into the working of the critter, then let us say there is plenty of room for them all to be effective. Which they are. And we all know that hierarchies of effectiveness in this business have far less to do with touted modalities than they have to do with the depth, the quality of presence, and the experience of the therapist. It will never be this or that modality that emerges as superior. It will always be the human who has learned to tap the potential.

A Blessing, A Caution
This is an exciting time of growth and diversity for biology and for bodywork. The vast “we” that have sustained interest in these things have made great strides toward a fuller understanding of how the critter works and have all contributed a great deal toward helping it work better. Science has helped us bodyworkers to understand what it is we do, and we have opened the eyes of any researcher or clinician that could receive and observe with an open mind the possibilities that we have to offer, both practically in the processes of healing and theoretically with regard to new ideas about how the critter works.

“Burgeoning” is the only word for what is going on in our bodywork tent. The alternatives are the fastest-growing sector of the health professions. About 15 years ago David Eisenberg, M.D., published a study that reported the fact that more money — $13 billion — was being paid out of pocket for alternative forms of healthcare than for conventional ones. A more recent follow-up study put the figure at $26 billion. Why? Because they often work when conventional treatments have failed.

And some third-party payment plans are beginning to honor payments to a wide variety of alternatives. Why? Because these companies are cautiously discovering that alternatives can be very — sometimes extremely — cost-effective.

Yes, very heady times for us alternatives. But there is no blessing without a caution. All this growth — and money — brings with it a lot of attention. One synonym for attention is recognition. Another synonym is scrutiny. The best sort of attention brings with it renewed self-esteem for ourselves and our work. A synonym for this self-esteem is ego. Acceptance in the larger world of healthcare puts us closer to the mainstream of commonly available and well-reimbursed therapies. A synonym for the mainstream is “the system.”

I hope we all do a lot of well-deserved celebrating about how far our mutual enterprises have come and how much good they are doing in our own lives and in the world. But I do want to touch on some things that I believe, if addressed together, will make our celebration longer lived, ring truer, and make the brightness of our futures more truly reflect the strengths of our legacies.

Keeping Sight of Our Roots
We are to a large and inevitable degree the products of our surrounding culture and time. We have imbibed the doing and assumptions of the mainstream, the system, all our lives — have been rewarded by its payoffs and punished for its taboos. What it has deemed real is what we have assumed is possible. We have been mightily wooed by the mantra that what serves the organizational collective is also what serves the individual. Our ersatz national ethos is “rugged individualism.” Much of our actual behavior reflects conformity and cravings for recognition and acceptance.

In times of conflict or crisis, or even simply in times of novel developments and confusion, we all have more of a tendency to fall back on these familiar values than we are able, let alone willing, to admit. Imitation, after all, has been our primary learning tool from infancy onward. This is one of the ways the critter works: We internalize what we witness.

So when we hanker after well-established business models in order to become more prosperous and efficient, we would do well to remember that the largest selling book in the corporate world is Sun Tzu’s The Art of War . And when we hanker to become more “mainstream,” we would do well to remember that the medical establishment is one of the most rigid hierarchies and spiritually exhausting workplaces that civilization has ever developed. And when you hanker for that lucrative third-party payment trough, remember that they will tell you exactly what you can be paid for and what you will be paid for it, and that they generate enough red tape and paperwork to drive many physicians out of their practices.

We must keep our focus vigilantly on two aspects of all our founding fathers and mothers of modalities: the driving forces that fueled them and that kept them at it, the visions and intentions that most attracted us to them, that excited and inspired us the most, that caused us to change our lives and our livelihoods to learn from them and to further their work.

First of all, they wanted to change the world. They all had secure jobs before they developed their innovations. They were not by their nature drawn toward curriculum development and standards control, administrative concerns, marketing strategies, and the endless conflicts that real change always entails. But seeing what they saw and knowing what they knew compelled them to do whatever it took to make a change.

And what they saw was that there is something fundamentally wrong with, and missing from, the mainstream models of healthcare, education, and emerging trends in our society. Make no mistake about it — these were revolutionary urges, tilted against powerful interests and ingrained beliefs. The things that are wrong are one thing. We merely have to somehow convince those interests that this or that needs to be fixed, in the face of their conviction that things are serving them rather well as is, thank you. But to get them to address what is missing, we have to find a way to help them see that something new is even possible. These are tall and often thankless orders, but it was our teachers’ audacity to take them up that made us love them.

When I found bodywork, I knew I had found my arena of political and social activism, an avenue for my fragile talents to have a chance of making a difference. It was not easy for me. The physical and emotional intimacy that it thrust me into was not something my experience had prepared me for, no matter how much I might crave them. And many of my clients had qualities I did not crave to be close to at all. But I found myself obliged to persist, and eventually I began to see past their personalities and into their humanity, and with it a glance at my own potential. And in the end, it was this experience that I aspired to give, not this or that genre of a session.

It is when we lose sight of these roots that we fracture into bickering and competing self-interests and are drawn strongly toward the secondary rewards offered by the system as it exists — acceptance, prestige, buckets of money, and a measure of authority, when we fall back on the familiar and forgo the effort to change it. This is when you and I begin to focus on what is wrong and missing in each other and lose track of what brought us together in the first place.

Growing Pains
I want to dwell for a while on some common threads of development I have seen evolve in a number of organizations — Esalen, my own Trager Institute, and others I have witnessed. I have long puzzled, beginning with observing my own father as he aged, over the dynamics that turn institutes into institutions, young pioneers into old pols, radical intentions into desires for creature comforts. It seems to me there are some definite phases modalities and organizations — those emphatically not informed by The Art of War — go through, in a similar order and in similar ways. I will be surprised if you do not find them familiar.

Phase 1: Someone, working largely in isolation, hatches an idea and works it up into a novel approach to therapy (or stumbles into a novel and effective approach and then works up the ideas to support and articulate it). Let us call this person the “master.” This phase is always grounded in practical problems suffered by the master, his patients, her family, what have you. This is the alchemical phase of the development of something new, and it is imbued with excitement, growing success, and conviction. It is here that the compelling idea of something wrong and something missing in the system is forged and tempered. Because they are absorbed in their own discoveries, the masters often are unaware of other innovators in the field.

Phase 2: The master attempts to take the new discovery into the system. This is always met with various degrees of resistance, from incomprehension to a shrug to professional or legal threats. This second phase requires a great deal of ego, strength, and determination on the part of the master. Some degree of frustration, resentment, and bitterness is often congealed here.

Phase 3: Finally, one day someone approaches the master and says, “Teach me how to do that,” and the development of a training is born. This is typically an incandescent phase. The master has finally met acceptance and acclaim from his or her students and sees the avenue through which the discovery might find its footing in the world. The initial students — let us call them the “old guard” — are inspired by the novelty and power of the work and share a sense of mission to learn it and bring it forward. The master is robust, authoritative in the best sense, training is very hands-on, and the transference of the work is direct from the source. Numbers are small, spirits are high, and there is a sense of uniqueness, vision, camaraderie. The work is relatively unknown, and the small group is still working in relative obscurity. There is both the delicious sense of a shared secret and the strong desire to make it public. The old guard share deeply the master’s desire to have the work seen, appreciated, understood, and utilized.

In addition, the old guard has to confront a burdensome issue: How to transform the new development into a livelihood. This introduces a major new element into the process. There are the isolation and the money issues to deal with, but this period is also very free, with little outside scrutiny, few institutional standards imposed, and a great deal of latitude for the old guard, as they and the master explore an exhilarating and open-ended field.

Phase 4: Some of the old guard graduate into “instructors.” Successive waves of new students are trained and enter the marketplace. Instructors eventually have to come to grips with the fact that they are not only spreading the work, but are systematically creating their competition.

All of the phases of the training are no longer taught exclusively by the master, and the additional forces of different personalities begin to inform the students’ ideas about the work and how it is done.

Also, the first “crystallization” of the master’s work occurs: The need to break it down into simplified pieces in order to teach it in a way that is systematically coherent when more than one teacher is doing it. The work begins to be “defined” in a whole new way, and this is what successive generations of students imbibe more and more. For instance, the open-ended exploratory movements of Milton Trager become moves in the classroom, with increasingly specific parameters.

Phase 5: A new modality, a new profession is on the threshold of being firmly established. And new needs suddenly present themselves. One of the most pressing is a wider market, both to support ongoing trainings and to support a growing base of practitioners.

Marketing begins in earnest. This is a naturally developing need; as any marketer will tell you, there are three ways for your business to fail — don’t advertise, don’t advertise, and don’t advertise. But it does lead to a further crystallization and simplification of the definition of the work in order to get it across to a larger and more naive and/or skeptical public.

During these last two phases, a very significant development has taken place. A bureaucracy is born. Records need to be kept, more and more trainings need to be organized, increasing cash flow has to be managed, standards need to be defined and enforced, and legal relationships need to be created and maintained. Now, none of these skills are usually possessed to any impressive degree by the master, the old guard, or most of the students. We all wanted to get out of that world, but we discover that we need it.

Now “bureaucracy” has an unpleasant ring to it, because we have seen so many dysfunctional variations. It is neither good nor bad itself, and it is absolutely necessary at a certain level of growth and organization. All it requires to accomplish its work well is to be united with the master, the old guard, the instructors, and the students in a common purpose and a common will. The organizational ethos is still to change the world, right what is wrong, and be a source of what is missing.

However, a distinct line is crossed at this point, one that holds potential hazards. From master to old guard to instructors to initial generations of students, there has been a hands-on continuity in the work. Now, for the first time, there is a team serving a vital purpose but which typically is not as directly involved with “the work,” precisely because different skills are now needed. And it is often the case that the flexibility often required in the work out in the field can be at odds with enforcing standards and maintaining clear business practices. The office staff and board of directors tear their hair out, and the ones in the field grow increasingly restless about more and more highly defined standards being imposed. There are seldom any villains here, just differing responsibilities, needs, and ideas about how to most effectively manage things. During this time, an often troubling question is very likely to arise: “Whose institute is this, anyway?” If the legal authority of the board is not in line with the needs in the field, or vice versa, the question becomes more than merely troubling. For some modalities/organizations, this has become a fracture point.

Phase 6: Things bubble along. The master is less and less active, older, more withdrawn from the day-to-day teaching and operations. More and more responsibility — and authority — devolves to the board and office staff. Instructors — and by extension practitioners — develop increasingly idiosyncratic ways of working and teaching.

Some get more work and more professional recognition than others. Feelings are hurt, jealousies develop, cliques are formed. Some wish to continue in the spirit of revelation and revolution; others wish to settle down in a comfortable job or become more mainstream. And necessary divisions of labor begin to generate divisions in purpose, in vision. Bureaucratic skills are different from teaching skills, which are different from practitioners’ skills, which are different from marketing skills, which are different from inspirational skills. Different populations with different needs and perceived self-interests emerge.

Differentiated jobs, skills, and needs begin to create increasingly problematical interpersonal and interdepartmental strains. This is not very different from the tension between the separation of powers, the hankering after authority, and the need for a common purpose that is so palpable now in our national politics. And the consequences for the modality/organization are not very different either.

A Common Purpose
Again let me stress: These evolving situations are almost never the result of deliberate malfeasance. None of the parties involved intend to do harm to others or to the modality/organization. These are human responses to human conditions, perpetually negotiated conflicts, and resolutions revolving around the core issue of any group of any size — achieving a mutually functional balance between the individual and the collective, self and society, subgroup and the organization. These issues are irrevocably human; how we handle them has everything to do with our potential. And we must never forget the inherent difficulties in achieving mature, mutually functional collective arrangements; this is not to raise the specter of despair, but to give us patience and forbearing in the process.

If these conflicts are allowed to develop to the point of procedural logjams and entrenched resentments, the modality/organization arrives at a critical juncture, facing a potential future that will in the end serve no one’s purpose. And once the master ages and dies, there is no longer an implicit authority and standard to fall back on, and fragmentation is the easiest reaction to the difficulties. It is the nature of some types to duck their heads and just quietly get on with their own practices. It is in the nature of others to jockey for power and to manipulate the system. And it is in the nature of other types — often some of our best — to simply walk away from it, and we lose them.

All these parties are intelligent and well-meaning, with eloquent justifications for their opinions and demands. There is seldom anything resembling a conspiracy (indeed, if even a sturdy conspiracy could be achieved through the successful collective negotiation of a subgroup, the situation might be improved). But in the meantime careers suffer, enthusiasms are squelched, constructive structural changes stymied, and dysfunctional structures are allowed to creak along. Some of the best folks leave. Some of the most stubborn — as distinct from the most able — hang on.

Now this phase, this state of drift, can last a very long time, even though nobody is satisfied with it. This is one of the more peculiar features of a most peculiar critter. For many collectives, there never arrives a phase seven, where mature cooperation establishes the staying power to continually deal with each new human situation that arises. Human beings have a genius for muddling along. It is one of our potentials.

The work goes on, dues continue to be paid, the bureaucracy carries on, classes fill and graduate, livings continue to be made. But the thrill is gone. Working within the collective becomes dispiriting, and isolation returns — this time without the consolation of exciting and novel discovery. Working alone can free us from much of the muddle, but it is lonely, and also has its limitations. Much of the juice, the potential, is lost. And more than that, something that could have — that surely would have — benefitted humanity is lost.

None of this constitutes a real crisis. Things can go on and on, or they can simply end. Nothing is written, and phase seven, if it is ever attained, will have none of the predictable features of the first six. All failed organizations fail in similar ways; every successful one succeeds in its own unique fashion.

It actually makes one yearn for a crisis. I can understand apocalyptic thinking — the belief that after a time even God will not be able to stand the muddle and will decide to dynamite the whole damned thing, saving us the trouble.

So, what to do? This brings me to a marvelous quote of Ida Rolf’s: “If you have got to live in a stable world, you had better quit. Your stability lies in appropriate relationships, and that is all.”

That is the holistic approach to health, to education, and to society in a nutshell. Our relationships together and to the work are the only tangibles we truly have. Nothing can be more important than their integrity, their honesty, and their unflinching commitment to negotiation, that dedication to the constantly shifting balance between self and society.

Only we have created our muddle. Only we can deal with it. Apocalypse, after all, is wishful thinking. The first thing, perhaps, is to admit that we love our muddle. We love it in some fashion, or we simply would not tolerate it. We love it because if it disappears so does our project. We love it because it is human.

But then we do have that other potential. If we can empower one another, and empower anyone else who will stand for it, we can find our way back to that strength that forged our legacy: The desire to make a difference in our world, to address what is wrong, and to discover what is missing. If we can focus on the ways we can empower ourselves and each other, and on the ways and means of working together to pass that empowerment along to our clients and our students, we will find that cohesive common purpose that was the juice of earlier days. That is where our masters started, and it is what sustained them, and it is what they tried to give us: In the words of Milton Trager, “World peace, one body at a time.”

If you can decide what you have to do, and decide what you won’t do, all other decisions become substantially easier. All that the problem of the muddle requires is that we get collectively tired of it and collectively interested in our potential. This will not be heralded by the shouldering of a burden so much as it will be a resurgence of the joys of relationship and mutual discovery. As each of us struggles to find our place in the collective, it will be of value to hold in mind an idea that has been expressed by, among others, Martha Graham: “There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.”

And that leads me to a final closing thought for those of us who are feeling mired in the muddle. This is from Winston Churchill: “When you are going through hell, keep going.”

Deane Juhan is the author of Job’s Body: A Handbook for Bodywork published by Station Hill Press. Juhan is a practitioner of Esalen Massage and the Trager Approach. He taught at Esalen for many years and continues to teach for the Trager Institute and lectures widely throughout the United States and Europe.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally presented as the keynote address to the inaugural convention of the International Association of Structural Integrators in Bellevue, Wash., on Oct. 14, 2005.

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