In the summer of 1972, I was living with Hector Prestera, MD and his two kids in a house four miles up a dirt road on the mountain above Esalen. We became close friends with a family from Bolinas, California. They lived in a small house near the ocean that somehow fit them and all six children and the astonishing ensuing chaos.
They were fine friends, brilliant and singular. We shared many of our interests with them in those years. We had more fun playing with George Simon and his partner Christine O’Reilly and their Community for Conscious Evolution. We met about every two weeks -sometimes in Pacifica at George’s and sometimes in Half Moon Bay near Chris.
They were our house guests in Big Sur. We were on staff at Esalen and could extend its hospitality to them of endless baths, great food, and always something new and interesting happening. We especially introduced them to Structural Integration. After I had finished working on the mom of the family, she said to me that she had just the one for me to start on out of her six kids; her youngest – the four-year-old – who had a “gimpy” left leg she wanted some help with.
The boy’s leg trouble had started with an accident he had when he was two and a half years old. A big pack of his older siblings and their neighborhood friends were running and riding bicycles through the hummocky grass that grows on the California coast near the ocean. He was too little to ride a bicycle, so he was running along with them. One of the children on a bike hit a grassy hummock with the front bike tire, and the bike swerved sideways and then the rider of the bike hauled the handlebars back up to save his balance. As he did so, the bike’s tire climbed up this little one’s left leg. When the tire got about halfway up his lower leg, both of the lower leg bones, the fibula and the tibia, broke inwards, towards the mid-line.
At the doctor’s office, the little boy was screaming, crying, and scared. Mom told me she thought the doctor was in a big hurry to get them out the door because she did not control her son and make him stop crying. The doctor put a cast on without straightening the bones out and sent the boy and his mom home. When the cast came off 6 weeks later, the leg had healed about 35 degrees off true. Noticing this very crooked leg, she asked the doctor what to do about it… and he offered to re-break it for her so it could heal again straighter. Her reply was “Over my dead body.”
Two years after the original break, this four-and-a-half-year-old boy had a crooked left leg about 35 degrees off true. When he ran, it looped around looking a little bit like a flipper. When I saw it, I said to his mom that I would be a tissue worker and that was a bone problem and that I did not think I would be able to help. She said to me ”You’ll think of something.” I answered her with a sarcastic “Yeah. Right. Sure, I’ll think of something. I don’t think so! However, it won’t hurt to give him ten sessions.”
In order to work with him, I had mother and son form a communication relay team. If I was bothering him too much, he could tell his mom and she would tell me, and I could adjust my pressure. I had mom lay down on the table with him to stay close and be available to him for comfort and companionship, as well as the occasional shameless bribe of a cookie, water, or juice or maybe even a story.
We worked along pretty well in this fashion, doing all right with the first three sessions of the ten series… and then it arrived: the fourth session in which I was to create a mid-line on the inside line of his legs. I was going to have to go right through the area of the break. I worried about getting him through his fourth session from the moment I first saw his crooked leg. I had visions of him screaming, and his mom protecting him – by tackling me to the ground, swooping him up and leaving, never to talk to me again. One good thing about that fourth session: it arrives reasonably quickly.
One general strategy of Dr. Rolf’s was to start the session’s work as far away as possible from the worst trouble to be addressed in that session. She thought that taking strain out of the better side would create some length or slack and help the work on the second side. It may also help the discomfort level of the recipient for the second side and the very least, the recipient will know what to expect – which eliminates some of the apprehension of the unknown for the most troubled side. So, this is what I decided to do. Work on his right leg which had never been broken first, then work on his damaged crooked left leg second.
It was a very warm sunny day and by the time I was done with the first leg, both the boy and his mom were both sound asleep side by side on the table. I woke him up and got him to turn him over, but very soon after I started working on his second side he went back to sleep. I got all the traditional fourth hour tissue work done on his left leg while he slept next to his sleeping mom.
Rather than wake him up when I was finished, I decided to look and see what else I could do for him while I had what Dr. Rolf would call my golden opportunity for doing him some good. I thought I saw that the left leg looked two or three degrees straighter, and I wondered if Structural Integration could have actually influenced the straightness of the bone. I decided to see if I could sense anything in the bone.
I walked over and stood next to the table. I put the palm of my right hand on top of the high point of the break on his left leg and my left hand on top of the right. Then I leaned my weight into his leg bones, slowly angling my pressure this way and that, then holding still and listening for any hint of change. I was pushing into the bone and holding still pressure deep in one spot for much longer than I would have if either the boy or his mom had been awake. Most Structural Integration moves through an area and does not linger in one spot for a long time. But in this instance, I must have held steady quiet pressure for between 45 seconds to a minute when I felt something big suddenly start to shift and change. Being well trained, I jumped on the change, and I followed the direction of the release – it felt a bit like surfing. As I followed the change, that crooked little leg went from thirty-five degrees off true to about four degrees off true in about seven to eight seconds. As the leg neared straight, the change rate slowed down and then seemed to finish up – stop and be done. I took my hands off and as I stepped back to sit down and look at what had happened, I felt my legs go a bit wobbly and give out – probably from the shock. I had to reach behind me to catch the bench and lift myself up on to it to sit. I just sat there and looked at that boy’s nearly straight leg for a long time. I remember feeling stunned. I then concluded that of course I was sleeping too, and I proceeded to pinch and slap myself. If I had had a pin, I would have stuck it in myself because quite impossibly, it seemed that I was awake.
The awful thought occurred to me that maybe his leg was now straight because I had just broken it. I went over and wiggled his leg from both sides of the old break to see if the two sides would move independently. It appeared to still be in one solid piece. There was also the fact that he was still asleep… and had slept through the whole event, so it did not seem likely that it was broken. I decided to try to see about that last 4 degrees, so I leaned into his left leg again. I think it went a tiny bit straighter- maybe a half a degree, but nothing at all like what had just happened. It seemed to be “done”. And what was I thinking? it had just straightened out a good 30 degrees. I probably should not quibble about those last few degrees. I should be happy to call it a session.
Then I had the thought that I might have destabilized and weakened his leg and it probably would fold up and collapse under him when he put his weight on it. So, I gathered up all my stuff and found my car keys because most likely we were all going to go to the emergency room.
I woke mom up first, gave her a glass of water and we talked for about fifteen minutes. Then she woke her son up. I made sure that I was ready to catch him when he stood up. But he was too quick for me. He scooted to the far end of the table, stood up and then he jumped as high as he could off the table up into the air and landed on the floor. If his leg was going to break, it had its chance right then and there. He leaped all around the room with abandon – jumping on the table and off the table over and over, even crawling under the table. He ran around and around with happy shrieks and bounding energy.
It was a pretty thorough test drive for his new left leg. He wound down after about ten minutes and started to get his shorts on to leave. I asked him to wait to get dressed for just a moment so he could show off his new legs for his mom. He kind of snapped to attention so she could admire him.
I asked his mom as casually as I could “Would you take a look at that left leg of his and tell me what you think?” She looked him over for a moment and what she said was: “Oh. That’s better. Thank you.” Like that was what she had expected me to do all along. What else was there to say? I said, “You’re welcome”.
The rest of this little boy’s ten sessions went reasonably uneventfully. I did try to straighten the leg a bit more in later sessions, pushing and holding from different angles. but I didn’t get much more of anything in any of the times I tried. It did stay as straight as he grew up.
I immediately went to Dr. Rolf and told her the story, and I told all my medically inclined friends including Hector, John Lilly, and Fritz Smith of Zero Balance. I told all my Rolfer colleagues, asking if anyone had ever heard of anything like this event. Dr. Rolf just shook her head and said she had no explanation and no one else I spoke to had ever any seen anything like this or had any explanation for what had happened except for the possibility that the young age of the boy was a factor in the straightening of those lower leg bones. “Strange things happen with small children” was the phrase I remember hearing.
Someone said maybe it had to do with the epiphyseal growth plates… but those are at the ends of the bones… not in the middle of the lower leg bones where this change had happened.
I was willing to write this episode off as a singular mystery related to the boy’s age … except that since then I have found many other fascinating examples of Bone Change in the bone in adults. And I have been able to apply the Bone Change techniques with good results to most of the bones in the body. I have also been able to successfully teach it to others. This suggests that Bone Change might be a property of bones.