Adventures in Assisting – UC 5.16 Week 3
Week 3 of this Unit 3 basic Rolfing® training has begun to feel like something of a different animal. We’re getting into the core/deep sessions of the series, students are starting to settle and hit their stride with their clients, and overall the momentum of the class feels more stable and up-and-running. The 4 weeks we still have to go feels at once very distant and almost an inevitable conclusion rushing towards us.
Day 15 – August 29
First day getting to drive into class instead of taking the bus. While I had arranged to rent a compact car, the rental agency saw fit to upgrade me after a 5 hour extra wait to get a vehicle at all. So for the upcoming month I had a Jeep Renegade to drive around town. First day or two driving it were a little nervous being that I’m unused to the shape of it; but at the same time it seems like another potential step forward in terms of getting used to standing in the full width of my body (something I’ve been working with for the past few years ever since John Martine’s Neural 2 class).
Today was Neal’s demo client day so I mostly got to sit back and observe with interjections of ideas when necessary. Continuing to get more comfortable with observing student sessions and adding input at appropriate times and such. There’s definitely an art to this that I expect will take some time to fully embody. That said, 12 years of teaching dance is definitely serving me pretty well in terms of feeling semi-comfortable jumping into it.
Day 16 – August 30
Session 4 demo day for me today. Session 4 remains a curiosity for me in terms of trust. For those of you not familiar, session 4 in the Rolfing 10-series works the muscles of the inner leg and thigh up to the pelvic floor and hips. It’s the first time in the series that you start really digging into territory that many people have never had touched therapeutically and it still amazes me sometimes how clients will trust me to work in odd areas after having only known me for a few hours of direct contact.
I’d spent a decent portion of the weekend mulling over and mapping out some various options for the session then ended up discarding more than half of those ideas mid-session. Session went great and as I’m continuing to settle into my side of the work I think my client and the students are getting better info and better results.
On the challenging side, I feel like my days seem to just be show up to class, do class things, get dinner, go to bed. I expect it to keep shifting as we go, but I’m hoping to start finding more of a social life here again soon so I can feel like there’s more to this trip than just work and survive. I’m also being patient with this evolution, letting it come, and keeping in mind how much change has gone down for me already this year.
Day 17 – August 31
Today was a fun and chill day. It was 2nd Movement session day for the clients who are doing movement work. One of my goals for the movement work was to do what we could to evoke a greater sense of play and to that end, we started off class with a John Cleese video on creativity. The thought behind this video being as much to evoke play in the day’s sessions as to suggest ways of staying open to grown and creation in the Movement work longer term so the Movement ideas continue to grow and evolve rather than becoming stuck in rote memorization.
Today felt like a good reminder about patience with growth. Planting ideas like creativity and play are these long-term sort of projects that require one to plant seeds, then sit back and not meddle too much while students work it out for themselves. Taking this as a good reminder too to be patient with some of my own growth aspects that are bubbling up this week.
Day 18 – September 1
Another grey day for my session 5 with my client. Got into some really rich territory and I’m feeling very grateful for having a client who’s down for the whole multi-faceted journey of the 10-series. It’s interesting to find myself leading someone else through some of the changes I went through as a Rolfer® and sort of evoking the idea that to help others as fully as possible you also get to be open to the work changing you as a practitioner as well.
Today marked our heading into a 4 day Labor Day weekend which I’m both looking forward to and have a bit of trepidation about. Lack of social time so far is starting to wear on me a little bit and although I am planning to hit up a dance in Boulder on Monday, I’m unsure how I’ll work through the extended downtime.
Day 19 – September 2
Not a great deal to report for this Friday. I was riding pretty high off of doing two really fun demo sessions and feeling like we had some solid rapport going with the students. I sort of semi-snoozed through part of the day then took myself out to see Don’t Think Twice at the local movie theater. It was a good if entirely chill day to the extent that this is basically the only photo I took that day and wasn’t really even thinking about documenting for the day.
Day 20 – September 3
Saturday morning I decided to take a hike up the trails around Mount Sanitas on the west edge of Boulder. Set off on foot from the house with about a 2 mile hike to the trail head. The last time I’d gone near Sanitas was about a year ago taking a night hike through the valley with a newly graduated Rolfer friend. We had hiked what turned out to be the very easy part of the trail which is the valley section on a nice easy slope. The summit trails turned out to be around 1350 elevation gain and then descent over about 3 miles. It was a beautiful hike and one I’m thinking might get repeated a few more times while I’m here, but definitely more intense than I was expecting.
Hiked my way back through Pearl Street Mall, got some street tacos, then napped and read for a good portion of the rest of the day.
Day 21 – September 4
Deer in the yard across the street from where I am staying this morning. Today was a little exploration and a lot of chill time. Took a drive down the foothills to Golden, CO and Denver. Took an afternoon nap and did some reading on student papers that need to be done by Tuesday.
Jason Sager 