Transcription of Gary Gurney for the show Courage & Resilience #3
Lisa: Today in the studio we have Genevieve Morgan with us, she’s the wellness editor for Maine Magazine, who is a sponsor of our show. We have another special guest that I’m going to let Genevieve introduce.
Genevieve M.: Thank you Lisa. Today in the studio we have Gary Gurney, who is a certified rolfer, who practices at Wild Wood Medicine in Portland, Maine. Since 1988 Gary has been dedicated to helping people find natural ways to feel great and live more fully, which we really like.
Lisa: Yes we do.
Genevieve M.: Many of his clients have found that rolfing gives results that go far beyond the usual deep tissue massage and other forms of body work. His passion is to help people find lasting relief from pain, discovery greater mobility, and increase their sense of physical vitality. Thanks for coming to the studio Gary.
Gary Gurney: Thank you.
Genevieve M.: We’re so happy to have you. I’m particularly happy to have you on the Main Magazine minutes, because you and I did a interview for the July issue about feet, and that’s the foundation of fitness. We’ve had a long relationship. Gary, can you tell our listeners out there a little bit about yourself and why you started your practice in rolfing structural integration?
Gary Gurney: I had moved to Maine in 1998, after graduating massage school. Very quickly found that I did not like being massage therapist; ended up teaching yoga, so my massage career ended up going nowhere. Around 2004 I had a neck problem that I was unable to fix with chiropractic, osteopathic work, massage, my yoga practice wasn’t helping. I had a met a rolfer years earlier and came across his name and decided to get some work, and very quickly he cleared up neck problem. I found benefits that were beyond clearing up my neck pain that inspired me to pursue a career as a rolfer. That’s my full-time work now.
Genevieve M.: Well, that’s a common mis-perception about rolfing, isn’t it? That it’s really painful, turns a lot of people off. I was rolfed, you’ve rolfed me, and it was great, it was therapeutic. I had a chro- … I herniated two cervical disks that you healed through rolfing. Tell me why people think it’s painful, because that has not been my experience?
Gary Gurney: In the 1970’s when rolfing first came on the scene, when Dr. Rolf was still alive, there were a lot of young and new practitioners, there wasn’t a lot of experience teaching at the Rolf Institute. The work tended to be very aggressive. In the last 30 years, as practitioners have gained experience, we now have rolfers that have been practicing 40 years. They’ve discovered that there a lot of ways and techniques that you can release tight tissue that don’t involve making a person more uncomfortable than they can bare. They found that’s actually counterproductive. The brain the nervous system ultimately control the state of your tissue and the tension in your muscles, and if you don’t respect the nervous system, you can run a bull dozer over the muscles and they’ll go right back to being tight once the bulldozer is gone so to speak.
Lisa: So far we’ve heard about neck pain and neck pain. What other types of issues are helped with rolfing structural integration?
Gary Gurney: Well, the interesting thing, most people who come to me have some specific issue that they’ve been dealing with years, generally some ache and pain in the neck, lower back, hip, shoulder, what have you. The real goal of rolfing, as Doctor Ralf outlined it, was to really clear up the tissue on the whole body and to try to allow a person to become more resilient, more flexible, more adaptable to every day stresses and strains. The main client for rolfing is a person who just feels like they’re out of whack a little bit. A lot of clients are people in their late 30’s, all the way into the late 50’s, up to any age. People who feel like their resilience and their capacity to recover from stresses and strains is diminished. They come to me to get that stuff cleared out of their body so that they can go forward and just have more energy to live their life and feel really great.
Lisa: That’s perfect, because we’re talking about resilience and courage to live one’s life today. It is breast cancer awareness month and we’re talking about, we were talking with women earlier who were involved with breast cancer. I know this is specifically your field, but it is about resilience, so it’s interesting to note that you have people who come in and that’s what their main focus is.
Gary Gurney: Yes, our belief is that human being, the human body is an amazing organism, it has an incredible capacity to adapt to stresses, strains, injuries and illnesses. Overtime, for a lot of people, the stresses and strains in their body, whether it’s injury, whether it’s emotional stress, whether it’s stress from their jobs or just accumulation of lifetime dings, so to speak. After a while a lot of people feel they’ve run out of their capacity to adapt. A little strain that in your 20’s might get over in a couple of days, all of a sudden when you’re 40 it feels like it’s two months later and you can’t get over it. A lot of my clients are people who want to try to recover some of that capacity.
Genevieve M.: It works actually, but I’d like to go back to when you were a massage therapist and decided you didn’t want to be a massage therapist, but rolfing is body work, I just want to make that clear to the listeners out there. It’s a different kind of body work, but why don’t you briefly describe what a a lay person like myself, would expect. I know when I walked, first time I walked into your office I didn’t know what to expect.
Gary Gurney: Right, well what was difficult for me as a massage therapist was I would have someone come in with a sore hip. I knew deep tissue techniques, as a massage therapist, and I would grind away on their hip and work on their hip. The person would feel good on the table and they might feel good for a day, if we were really luck they’d feel good for two days. They would come back repeatedly with the same problem showing up. It didn’t matter how many times or how hard we worked on their hip, it always seemed to come back. The first thing, when I got rolfed, the rolfer looked at my ankle and said, “What happened to your ankle?” I had sprained it four or five years earlier, and he felt that my neck was trying to adapt to a sprained ankle that never really healed itself. A lot of that work was to get my feet under me and to get my ankles and knees working properly, and just work his way up through my body until he was able to clear up the tissue in my neck. My whole body was able to support that change.
Lisa: Well, I’m interested in why you specifically got in … were doing yoga, you were a massage therapist, this body work was very important to you. I understand that you have a background as a sound engineer possibly or some other things, you’re also an athlete, you’re a father, but why did this call to you specifically?
Gary Gurney: For me, I had been doing yoga and meditation for about 12 years, pretty avidly at the time I got rolfed. Interestingly enough, I found that the type of touch that I received from the rolfer and the awareness that I got of my body was something I hadn’t really learned through doing yoga and meditation or even receiving a lot of massage work, which I had. I found that awareness of my body, and that ability to perceive myself, I was able to just release a lot of anxiety and tension that had been there my whole life and I just hadn’t quite recognized it.
Genevieve M.: Gary, what results can people expect to see after a few sessions of rolfing?
Gary Gurney: Typically, in a successful rolfing session or series, people often, one of the most common comments I get and it still surprises me to this day, is people often feel much younger. I had a client who is a chef in one of the more well-known restaurants in Portland, and as you know that’s grueling work, they’re on their feet all day and long hours. He told me at the end of his series he felt like someone hit a reset button in his body, and he felt like he got the clock turned back ten years. That the long shifts were not making him as tired, and he would recover much better so he could enjoy his time off.
Genevieve M.: That’s … talk about resilience, setting the clock back ten years, not bad.
Gary Gurney: Yes, and a lot of it will just be joint mobility, flexibility, people often feel lighter, that’s a very common comment. People just feel like someone took a 20 pound weight off their shoulders, and that walking down the street is, tends to me more pleasurable in and of itself.
Genevieve M.: Well, and I wanted to touch on that briefly, movement is very important in the rolfing sessions, how people move. I know that when we were working together I would walk about the room and you would see, look at my gate, look at how I was standing. Explain that.
Gary Gurney: That’s a good question I think, because it’s where rolfing is a little different. As a massage therapist I found someone would come in with a strained back, and they would feel great on the table, and then they’d jump up off the table and their back strain would immediately come back. In rolfing what’s important isn’t how you necessarily feel on the table; it’s how you feel when you’re moving and walking. We use walking as a diagnostic to try to be able to figure where strains are in people’s bodies that are holding them back from feeling really free and easy in their movement. I also like to incorporate movement in the work. A session is much more interactive than a massage. I’ll be helping someone to figure out how to move through a strained joint or a tight joint, in such a way that they don’t have to use as much effort as they think they often do to feel easy and free.
Dr. Rolf came up with a really wonderful template, which we call the recipe in rolfing lingo, it’s a series of ten sessions. She set those ten sessions up so that each session has a specific focus on areas of the bodies and a function of the body, and that each session accumulated and builds on the previous session. You’ll get your entire body worked on in a ten series cumulatively, but you will not get a whole body say massage in one session. The idea is that you work on specific functions of the body through the series to create this integrated structure.
Genevieve M.: Then you can come back for tune-ups as you need to.
Gary Gurney: Yes, a lot of my clients, if they go through ten series with me and they find the work is rally successful, a lot of them, if they really enjoy the work, will come back occasionally for tune-ups. Sometimes just one session here and there if they say, get a little crook in their neck or something. Other people just three times a year maybe in the spring or something, just to clear the cobwebs of winter out and move on. It’s really very individual.
Genevieve M.: Thank you so much for joining us Gary, it’s been great to talk with you. To learn more about Gary Gurney and the many benefits of rolfing, visit Gary Gurney dot com, or read my wellness column featuring Gary in the July issue of Maine Magazine, available online at mainemag.com. The October addition of Maine Magazine can be found at your local news stand.