The Body Tells the Truth
Marion Rosen and Body Work: An Interview
by Joseph Roberts
Common Ground Magazine, March 1998
For forty years Marion Rosen has practiced and developed a bodywork
system. Her devotion to letting people experience their inner emotions
through the deep relaxation of their muscles can be seen in her hands.
She has literally worn her fingerprints away.
Her method begins with the body but also engages the mind. As her
subjects relax, Rosen tells them what she sees in their muscles. For
many of the people she treats the gentle relaxation of the body lets
the emotion and the pain float to the surface. Her patients speak and,
sometimes, they cry.
Marion Rosen understands the body as a repository for all the
person´s experiences, conscious and unconscious; using a
special kind of touch, unique to the Rosen Method, as well as simple,
direct communication, Rosen and her students look to release the
body´s truths.
Joseph Roberts spoke with the 84 year old Rosen recently. German, by
birth, Rosen spoke movingly of the truths the body has to tell.
JR: How did you first start doing this work?
MR: When I was twenty-two years old I was in Germany attending classes
with a woman who was doing massage breathing in connection with a
Jungian psychiatrist who was treating people. They found that when
people had bodywork accompanying their treatment it was easier for them
to access feelings and their treatments were shorter. Thirty years
later, a young woman in America asked me about that work and if I could
teach it to her. During my teaching, very exciting things began to
happen with the people we treated. This is really how the whole method
developed. We watched what happened to people when we treated them. We
got quite a lot of information about what is happening when you treat
people, when you let them be relaxed in a way that you don´t
intrude: it allows them to get in touch with their feelings. Often we
accessed their unconscious where they get in touch with experiences,
thoughts and feelings they had totally forgotten about. All of a sudden
these experiences were available to them again. With that great changes
would take place in people.
JR: What is the theoretical basis of your work?
MR: The theoretical basis is that the body doesn´t lie. The
body retains thoughts, experiences what really happened. It
doesn´t
change it in any way. So some times when we are asked a question and we
answer with our thinking we can influence our thinking, but the body,
the breath especially, cannot be influenced. Something very spontaneous
occurs which we can feel with our hands. We can gain access to
experiences and feelings that otherwise are not accessible.
JR: Describe how you see the body when you work on someone.
MR: When I look at a body I get the
picture of how this body would look if it was showing itself in the
best working order and then I look and see what has happened, how it
has deviated from its perfection. I believe there have been some
experiences that could not be handled at the time we experienced them,
and so we put them in our unconscious with the help of muscles. The
muscles suppress the feelings or the knowledge about what has happened
to us, and, as a consequence, the muscles working on that experience
appear different in the body.
JR: How does movement relate to the Rosen Method?
MR:
Movement shows where a person is not free. For example a child usually
moves very freely. But if a child grows up with experiences that are
frightening or hurtful or if they have feelings that were suppressed,
things that could not be said that want to be expressed, then all kinds
of muscles will constantly hold and form a barrier to free movement. So
when we see a person move we see where they allow themselves to move
freely or where they don’t allow themselves to move.
JR: In this
process, what does the client and the practitioner experience when
these emotions surface?
MR:
The practitioner feels the breath increase, feels or sees the colour in
the face change and sees a movement – a rapid eye movement
– sometimes hears a sound in people’s breathing. What the client feels is
really the feeling – the authentic feelings – that they
felt at the time when
a trauma or difficulty happened. It is not something they think about
but something they really feel.
JR: How does
this connection between body and consciousness happen?
MR:
Well when you relax and you allow these feelings to come up, the body
feels differently because it is not under pressure and the feelings,
whatever they are, can be expressed through crying or laughing or
saying it. Whatever is all right for the person to have happen or
whatever just will happen. I don’t think they think about it.
They cry because they need to cry, when they bury it under there, they will cry.
And they will cry for a while or they will be just talking for a while
about how painful it is. But they go through their experience very,
very quickly. And after they have gone through it very soon they feel a
great relief. Like a pressure cooker, let off some steam. When it comes
out there is no more whistling. And it is similar to when we work on
somebody who is getting in touch with an experience that has been
suppressed for a long time.
JR:
Could you recall an actual story of this awareness coming into
consciousness, with one of the people you worked with.
MR:
I treated a psychiatrist for a very short time, maybe just twenty-five
minutes. He had a large protruding stomach, which was caused by a very
tight diaphragm. As I worked on him he told me his father had died when
he was nine years old. He had worked on this for seven years in
analysis while he was in training. But while I was working on him he
started to cry and said he never felt how it was for him as a nine year
old boy to be told that "now you are the head of the family, now you
have to look after your mother and your small brother and sister." And
then I said, "But I am only nine years old. I cannot do that I can
never be like my father. I can never do that." In his real life he was
very successful but he always felt he was never good enough. But after
his experience of feeling how it was, not by knowing, but just by
feeling it, he felt very, very different. He felt very good. And when
he got up he was very surprised to see that his stomach, his protruding
stomach, had disappeared. His diaphragm had relaxed and instead of
pushing the stomach out it now allowed the stomach to go into its
original position so the diaphragm could move up and down the way it's
supposed to. He said he just could not believe that within twenty
minutes he could access his feelings while it took seven years of
working on it and never really feeling the way he had felt as a nine
year old.
JR: Explain how talking works in the Rosen Method.
MR: As I touch the person I will state what I feel – which place
in the body is very tight – which does not move and where the
breath does not move into because when the muscles are tight there is
no movement of the breath there. So we can feel it with our hands and
see it with our eyes. And then there is a lot of listening that I do.
If people will say something or look differently. But I do not ask many
questions.
JR: What do you say?
MR: I say more statements. For instance I say there is a lot of
tightness between the shoulder blades and that means that the muscles
that move the shoulder blades hold them in place so if you want to
reach out when you try to do something there is always a barrier; the
barrier to reaching out and the barrier to do what you really like to
do.
Then I let that sit. And sometimes people will pick it up. So if it is
important to them they will say something about it or sometimes they
just, you know, they just start breathing in a much more – in
a deeper way. It is noted by us that they have contacted some feelings.
And sometimes we’ll say "well your breath is going to the
shoulders now so it seems like we have touched something." I may say
that or I may not say that, but that is how the dialogue would be:
stating changes, stating the location of the holding, that there is a
holding around the legs – then hold the legs in place. It
keeps the leg to really step out – take big steps, hold them in
…
JR: When pain and anger come up in a Rosen session, what do you do?
MR: It is just allowed to be there. Pain sometimes happens when a
muscle releases that has been tight for a long time. Because when it is
tight a long time it seems numb, as if it was not alive any more. When
it becomes alive again it first seems to hurt. But when you are aware
of the holding and of your own emotional pain that’s when the
pain will leave.
JR: How does fatigue and tiredness develop?
MR: Fatigue has a lot to do with tension because tension is work. You
constantly are working your muscles. If you have many areas in your
body where you have to do that it takes away your energy. But when you
relax you don'’ have to hold. You do not spend energy working
against yourself. Normally the body alternates between relaxing and
tensing, tensing and relaxing is. When that happens, the body does not
get tired. But on the other hand if you tense and tense and tense and
tense and tense and tense without moments of letting go this is where
tiredness comes from.
JR: If people are not breathing properly what happens?
MR: It creates a lot of problems such as a shortage of oxygen, as a
holding – you know in parts of the body – if the
diaphragm is not allowed to do its work it can not properly massage the inside of
the trunk many thousand times a day. So correct breathing is really a
factor in keeping the body fit. If we do not allow that to occur
because of tensions, we do not get the benefits.
JR: There are other breathing techniques such as yoga or meditation
where the breath itself becomes a method to get back in touch with who
one really is.
MR: We think so too but we think that by allowing the automatic breath
to fully function again that it is a much better way than thinking
about how you breathe and what you are doing. We just help the body to
relax and remove the barriers that make us not breathe right in the
first place.You see we can think about breathing right but when we
sleep or when we work and don’t think about it, then we
don’t breathe as well. But if the barrier to holding and not
breathing well is removed, then we breathe in a different and more
auspicious way. It really helps the body to function well.
JR: There have been times in my life where I have felt totally
supported in an intimate loving relationship. When you talk about the
Rosen Method it seems to be very close to that space where one is held
and supported in a subtle totally accepting loving space.
MR: Exactly. In a relationship of course we hope for that but very
often when we have a lot of baggage around ourselves we do not –
we are not able to fully give of ourselves nor are we fully able to
receive what the other person gives us. That has a lot to do with being
yourself, with not having to hide your feelings, with not having to
hide your potential, with allowing yourself to be touched by another
person and not having to be afraid.
JR: What are your thoughts on acceptance and spirituality?
MR: I feel it is a lot reflected by our breathing tool the diaphragm.
For the diaphragm has to contract, you know, the inhalation phase and
then when you breathe out it has to totally relax and let go. That only
can happen, or it comes in conjunction with, trust being created. The
person feels an okayness with themselves or with the practitioners or
with the world. Then comes the next stage, which I think is the most
important one, that is the stage of surrender. When you really feel it
is quite all right, whatever happens. You can allow your breath to
course through you. You can allow your body to be open. You give
yourself up to what is and in that moment you give yourself up to
something beyond yourself. Some people experience that as universe
– the higher power - or as God, whatever they might call it.
All
people are really impacted by this process and contact something
beyond. Some people say, "I feel so at peace. I feel so good. I feel as
nothing can hurt me any more." This is what happens in a body that is
totally letting, when the letting go happens. And this, I feel, is our
link to what we call spirituality.