The Integrative Power of Four Hands
“The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion at the cradle of true art and true science.”
— Albert Einstein
Introduction
Indeed, Four-Handed Structural Integration is as mysterious as it might sound. A Four-Handed session is where the two of us, Leslie and Christo, work together with a client. This does present an unique opportunity to experience the work of Dr. Rolf in much the same way as she taught it. As a student practitioner goes through the Structural Integration training, often he or she is working on a model alongside with the teacher.
Besides receiving instruction and words of wisdom, the student practitioner is able to directly experience the energy of the instructor as it effects the body’s fascial structure. This is in effect where Four-Handed sessions evolved from. Within the beauty of experiencing a Structural Integration training, a great deal of the learning one experiences comes through directly working with the teacher and model in order to obtain and develop skills in terms of assessment, intentionality, sensing the body, and learning to touch with empathy and connection.
Also with Four-Handed sessions, a student learns to recognize different types and states of energy, how to sequence the work, and one gains an overall insight into how all these qualities mentioned beforehand work together holistically.
Because we met each other in our Advanced Practitioner training in 2001, and because we had compatible approaches to Structural Integration, we were effortlessly able to translate working together with Four Handed-Sessions from the time we joined forces through to the present. The only hitch in the process was we did have a child, Alexander, in 2009, and that caused us to juggle our schedules with each of us primarily doing regular sessions as we attended to the demands of raising a child. However, we have always felt our greatest gifts to our clients comes through the Four-Handed work, so in 2020, as our son has become more independent, we decided to focus on only offering Four-Handed sessions.
Long term effects require long term solutions
“There came a time when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
Dr. Rolf designed Structural Integration to be primarily orientated towards making long term more permanent changes with the body’s structure verses focusing entirely on the immediate short term changes experienced in the session and the few days following the session. This is also why balanced posture and freedom of movement are emphasized in our work, because structural, postural, and movement patterns represent the core aspects of our embodied selves since all three qualities have been characteristics of our essence from the moment of our own conception, and will remain so to our last breath. Consider the many chapters and layers that overlay the characteristics of each of our own unique structural, postural, and movement patterns. Examples of how our individual patterns influence our structures can range from the period of time of one being an infant learning to crawl and eventually walk, to the athleticism of an adolescent, to meeting the physical demands as a young adult in the military, to the standing hours upon hours a day as a nurse or teacher, to the endurance of long term physical compensations after surviving a near fatal accident, to becoming tired and weak after a debilitating illness which then causes a person to be inactive for a long period of time, and so forth.
Though we do work on injuries, we are always focused on the body as a whole which is why we are always addressing an injury in terms of its relationship to the entire body’s structural, postural, and movement patterns.
And, this is where the effectiveness of Four-Handed work takes over in that we are able to address both the short term aberrations one is experiencing along with the long term and often lifetime imbalances and compensations that have become integral characteristics of an individual’s experience with his or her own body. With our Four-Handed sessions, a client receives between the two of us several decades of experience. Leslie started practicing in 1992 and Christo in 1997. Our sessions bring together both of our individual perspectives in terms of assessing and working with our clients. We each have distinct styles of touch and application of energy in relationship to working with the body, and we each possess our own historical and experiential perspectives in terms of offering our clients educational explanations and suggested applications associated with Structural Integration. At the same time, a client experiences our sense of collaboration through our shared set of values and intentions along with a synergistic experience of wholeness, and an awareness of his or her’s entire body as sensed through receiving our touch together.
But, what really makes the Four-Handed session unique is you our client. Besides bringing your own unique intentional, physical, emotional, mental, and energetic qualities to our session, you also bring your unique history, worldview, passions, and sense of commitment to our collaboration. So though the term ‘Four-Hands’ identifies the practitioners, it really doesn’t communicate the extent of the collaboration between ourselves and you our client. It is a remarkable experience to bring three people together with similar intentions, and then to creatively collaborate together in order to fulfill those intentions.
The two of us are passionate and committed to our work with our Four-Handed sessions because we have seen significant changes in the body take place much quicker than in regular sessions with a single practitioner. They also tend to take hold in a more permanent fashion in that the majority of our clients are able to function on their own independently without having to see us as often as when we were working with them individually.
The creative challenge
“All we are given are the possibilities to make ourselves one thing or another.”
And finally, like many professionals, we like to push ourselves to grow with our work as Structural Integration Practitioners. Dr. Rolf’s vision has taken many wonderful twists and turns as seen in the work of individual practitioners, schools, trainings, philosophies, and research over the last several decades. With the growth of the breath and depth of Structural Integration, we asked ourselves what could be our unique creative contribution to our profession?
Because we are married and love to be with each other, we decided to take advantage of our always being together so as to turn our Structural Integration practice into a vehicle for each of us to grow together through our collaboration as well as individually. From this commitment to collaborate together with our practice, we hope to be able to gift our community and clients with a sense of hope, equanimity, and integration not only within their own bodies, but also with their relationships to others, as well as their relationships to their environments.