Embodiment and Creative Transformation
The common thread woven through all of Darrell's work and teaching is the facilitation of creative transformation in the experience of the whole person.
A Powerful Force for Holistic Change
Within each of us there resides a powerful force expressive of life's movement. This life force is continually calling us forward to greater health, vitality, and fulfillment of potential. This transformational impulse is always in a dynamic balance with our need for stability and safety, whether structural, psychological or relational. Darrell offers an environment where this creative transformation, eager to come forth given the right conditions, can be invited into expression in a person's life. Whether the gateway is structural changes offering new physical freedom and movement, or psychological changes offering new emotional freedom and movement, the creative change which manifests is an expression of transformation taking place within the whole person.
Structural Transformation
Through Rolfing® Structural Integration, structural changes and a transformed relationship with gravity and verticality invite the client to re-negotiate a new way of being embodied in the world. The creative skill which Darrell brings to this enterprise is more than simply a bio-mechanical understanding of the body's structure. It is the ability to discern and encourage the subtle flow of movement, perhaps as yet unexpressed in the client's body, which is waiting to open into a new experience of his or herself in the gravitational field.
Recognizing and Inviting Movement
This discernment of transformational movement and potential is also used in calling forth the client's creativity, imagination and inner resources in other realms as well: in the transformation of trauma, in explorations which are the hallmark of Darrell's movement or personal growth work with clients (psychological, relational, spiritual…), and even in his work as teacher, be it training somatic therapists or tango dancers.
Creativity, Imagination, Wonder
As human beings we are creators, and life creates through us continually. Creativity is a movement of the most authentic force of human manifestation, and an inherent, realizable potential of our nature. The primal power of creativity is prodigious and inconceivable. In our creative moments and processes it simultaneously comes through and asks us to listen, to follow, and to respond with change. It invites us to surrender to a force immeasurably vast and incomprehensible to our conscious minds.
It takes practice and imagination to see limitations and obstacles as a kind of illusion, to view them not as impediments to transformation but rather as questions to be answered by movement and expressions of change. Imagination inspires us to face uncertainty, as we wait for the transcendent opening, trusting in a process that is inherently mysterious and universal. We then experience the emergence of the new, the transformation of opposites into a nascent fullness. When this happens the self is changed. The body and our perceptions are changed as well. We are increased with energy, knowledge, and wonder.
For more about creativity and Rolfing structural integration, see Darrell's article Reflections on Creativity in the Context of Structural Integration, published in the 2011 Yearbook of Structural Integration.
