Week 4 crossed the halfway point for both students and myself with this Unit 3 Rolfing® training. What started feeling incredibly spacious and like we might be here forever is beginning to pick up steam and nearing that fever pitch where parts of the internal monologue start saying less “la-di-da, so much time” and more “oh crap, how are we going to get everything in?!”
Day 22 – September 5
Today was Labor Day and thankfully and enjoyably a day off. This made for the final day of a nice 4-day weekend and a good chance to unwind and sort of take stock for me. I spent the morning relaxing, checking in with some dance friends, and getting some more ideas of how to get more connected with Boulder again. While it had been great to have 4 days off I also hadn’t planned a lot of activity for it and ended up feeling a bit cut off from people.
So there happened to be a Labor Day Weekend Boulder Creek Hometown Music Festival going on complete with duck floats, a Zucchini car race which looked similar to Pinewood Derbies but with Zucchini as the car basis instead of a block of wood. There was also the seal-your-self in balls for floating on the water pictured above but sadly they seemed limited to kids about 8 or younger. I tooled around the festival for a few hours then got tea at the iconic Dushanbe Tea House then happened to find my way to Press Play bar and arcade on Pearl Street. Finally I made my way to Kakes Studio at 9pm for some dancing to Jeremy Mohney.
Day 23 – September 6
Tuesday was session 6 (back line) with my client. As I had walked in to class today the mural above had caught my eye. This mural sits across from the Rolf Institute and while it spans the whole building, the “Your smile matters” part had grabbed my attention this morning. I’m not sure what to share about it other than to say that smiling has been one of those things I felt I had to force for a long time and this year has been a brilliant space of finding ways to have it start coming back naturally. Thanks to the mural for reminding me that it is a powerful and valuable thing to have back too. 🙂
Day 24 – September 7
Wednesday seemed to be a day with a feeling of divergence. Students had their session 4 (inner line of the leg) with one of their clients while having just finished session 6 with their other client the previous day. It had also been a week since they had seen this client and most recently had done movement sessions with them. While it doesn’t seem like much, that week break is the longest any of the clients will have gone without getting work during the course of this series. And something about the further shifting placement of sessions between the two clients helps to nudge that feeling of “this is going to be real work soon” since clients in a practice situation are rarely coming in on the same session on the same day (though it is fun when the stars align and all your sessions one day seem to have the same theme).
With the end of today I realized it’s the halfway point for me, everyone else’s halfway point having been over the weekend. I’d hoped to spend more time being active and getting in a bit better shape while I was out here but have so far felt a little sporadic about it. So as I’m getting out dancing more I also wanted to start being more active elsewhere so I took a run around the lakes by RISI after class and got this gorgeous picture of the sky reflecting off the water.
Day 25 – September 8
Thursday morning saw me early into the office for another run around the lake which happened to include running into this delightful sign. Today was session 7 (head, neck, mouth, nose) with my demo client which is probably most often the weirdest session of the series to most people. It ended up being a great session but one where the time got away from me a little bit and I was relieved to find that my client didn’t have to start work until slightly later than usual so we had time to get her out the door without creating a problem.
After class I had a dance friend coming in for a session and got to spend an hour or so doing a more casual session not under the observation of a 10-person group. It was really nice to have that moment to just get back to working for the sake of working for a bit and to have the conversation time to catch up a bit on how the dance scene is in Colorado lately. We got dinner, had some more conversation, then headed off home.
Day 26 – September 9
Friday was a class day today since we had our whole week shifted by a day on account of Labor Day. So it was a day that demanded less work from me since Neal was demoing today, but we had a lively conversation about trauma and how to work with it in the morning.
I finished up class and drove down to Denver for what was intended to be dinner with a colleague, who I’d met in Scotland, followed by going to a dance. However, due to awesome conversation and tasty foods and beverages we ended up hanging out until after midnight and I bagged on going to the dance which ended at 10:30. The photo for today is of one of his coffee table books which just seemed quirky enough to make me think it would be a good photo for today. We had some delicious food at a place called Cho 77 and then walked around the neighborhood for a bit catching up and talking about assisting and such before having a final drink in which we finished off a bottle my friend had brought back from Scotland which seemed a little poetic somehow and a great way to end the week’s work.
Day 27 – September 10
WEEKEND TIME!!! This morning started with sleeping in followed by barely making it up in time to go meet a new dance friend and her boyfriend for brunch. Bagels from Moe’s Bagels were the order of the day and man they had a lovely home. He’s an architect who has lived in Boulder for 60+ years and designed and built several of the homes on the block, culminating in the current home which was just incredibly beautiful. It was a fun and interesting sort of reminder of what that sort of commitment to one place might allow for as I’m currently wondering how much longer I might remain in the Triangle. Following brunch we took a nice easy hike around the foothills area and then I headed home for the afternoon.
A bit of article prepping and vegging out to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell brought me dance luck in the form of a Facebook post. At about 4pm, I happened to catch a post about live music and dancing at Stem Ciders in Denver. I headed down to Denver a few hours later for some solid swing with Odessa Rose and some tasty cider. The crowd was small and a bit more social than dancy that night but the band was good and the energy picked up after the lesson at the first band break. Also ran into a dancer who was a recent transplant to Denver and spent some time talking Rolfing and moves and many other things. It continues to amaze me how much of my energy to socialize, chat people up, make small or large talk, and enjoy being in a crowd has been freeing up since I sold the house.
Day 28 – September 11
Another drive down to Denver Sunday morning, this time for a chat with my demo client. Since she’s interested in potentially training to be a Rolfer it has always been my policy to make time to talk about Rolfing training outside of the treatment room. Not that it can’t be discussed in session but there are so many nuances that could be lost if one was constantly trying to talk and receive or give a worthwhile session. So down to Denver I headed with a registration packet and a copy of one of Dr. Rolf’s books for her. It was a great talk with lots of nuance both about possible ways to go about training and about what being a Rolfer is like for me. I continue to be more excited about the possibility that she will end up becoming a Rolfer and at times it was hard not to burst out with “OMG go already, you gonna love it!!!”
Took my time heading home after a leisurely fancy Mexican lunch at Leña and a trip through what a colleague had described as Denver’s fanciest Goodwill. After getting home I ended up taking an extended nap that lasted from something like 3:30-7:30. I woke up hungry and decided to go for a walk to find dinner. After a few Google Maps searches I finally landed on going to Snarfburger which is an offshoot of Snarf’s, my to-date favorite sandwich shop chain in Boulder. Incidentally it appears that Snarfburger is located in the spot where Daddy Bruce’s Barbecue used to be.
I’m going to end this post waxing slightly poetic about Daddy Bruce’s. I was introduced to Daddy Bruce’s by Michael Polon in my Unit 1 training close to 9 years ago now. I was jonesing for some barbecue one lunch and asked if there were any good places. Michael sent myself and a few of my classmates down to Daddy Bruce’s which, oddly enough, was right next door to the campus of Naropa, the Buddhist university in Boulder. It was about as bare bones of a barbecue shack as I’ve ever been in but it felt like a breath of fresh air walking in for me. There was basically just room for take away or there may have been 2-3 tables. Everything was served in Styrofoam take out trays with piles of meat, a side or two, and a generic store bought sandwich cookie for dessert. The beef ribs were pretty hefty caveman style eating and downright delicious. The older black gentleman running the joint, who I can only assume was Daddy Bruce, appeared to run the entire operation by hand including doing all of the calculations for order pricing by hand on a sheet of paper. It was one of those places that somehow just etched itself in your memory and felt like you were stepping into something just rustically authentic and unfettered by the dressing up that so often accompanies barbecue restaurants nowadays and it gave me a taste of home in my first training when I was deeply in need of one. It’s a place I expect to miss just a little bit for many years to come if not every time I come to Boulder for the rest of my life.
Jason Sager 
Leave a Reply