cov_esalenI recently spent some time at Esalen® Institute and while there picked up a copy of Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion by Jeffrey J. Kripal. This book recounts the fascinating formation and history of Esalen Institute, the 1960s epicenter of the human potential movement. Many people are familiar with the deep connections between Ida Rolf, Ph.D., founder and developer of Rolfing® Structural Integration and Esalen. (In fact the institute still has a meeting room named after Rolf.) What I wasn’t familiar with, up to now, was the connection between Swedish scientist turned religious writer, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Esalen. After all, Swedenborg lived between 1688 and 1772; centuries before Richard Price and Michael Murphy, founders of Esalen, were even born.

As these sort of synchronistic events go, I received notice in my email this week of a newly published article by Theodore Jordan in the International Journal of Osteopathic Medicine titled “Swedenborg’s influence on Sutherland’s ‘Primary Respiratory Mechanism’ model in cranial osteopathy.” Now there’s been an oral tradition in Rolfing SI (passed down to me) that Ida Rolf knew of, or had a copy of a rare book by Swedenborg titled The Brain. It had effected her thinking on the importance of cranial work in the structural integration process. In the Rolfing community we are highly cognizant of how Dr. Rolf’s thinking was influenced by her practice of yoga, the study of biochemistry, and treatments and training from pioneer osteopaths.

Jordan explains the connection between Swedenborg’s book and William Sutherland, DO, developer of cranial osteopathy, and how surprisingly Dr. Rolf carried on an oral tradition of that connection.

The connection between William Sutherland, DO and Swedenborg’s book, The Brain, is described by a person with close ties to osteopathy: Ida Rolf, PhD (1896–1979). Dr Rolf is best known as the creator of ‘structural integration,’ known commonly as ‘Rolfing.’ Structural integration is a unique form of deep bodywork that focuses on the remolding of the connective tissue of the body with the goal of restoring body symmetry and alignment.

While Ida Rolf was Ida_with_Client_lgdeveloping her approach to structural integration, she was known to have had an excellent rapport with a number of osteopathic physicians with whom she shared, discussed and demonstrated her ideas. For example, David Patriquin, DO, in a personal communication, described how she presented her ideas at an osteopathic conference in New York in 1955.

Ida Rolf stated in several lectures that she knew Dr William Sutherland and in a transcribed lecture, she told the audience how she learned about Sutherland’s methods after being hired as his secretary. Rolfing instructor Jim Asher reported she often showed off a signed copy of Sutherland’s book, The Cranial Bowl, that was dedicated warmly to her.

It was probably through her contacts with various osteopaths that Ida Rolf heard rumors that Dr Sutherland’s ideas were inspired by the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. Ida Rolf even went so far as to identify that the book used was Rudolf Tafel’s translation of Swedenborg’s The Brain. In a taped lecture to one of her advanced structural integration classes, Ida Rolf described this connection to the students:

[Tafel] made a translation which is pretty hard to get. And there are books [by Swedenborg], the titles of which are the Animal Kingdom, and the Economy of the Animal Kingdom, and those are not the same books …. And then there are these books, The Brain. Now The Brain is an impossible thing to get a hold of. Originally there were 6 copies, (or was it 4?) printed, and that’s all. Old … Sutherland haThe_Brain_V1d one of those. And when somebody accused him, or suggested to him, ‘Oh I see where you got some of your ideas,’ that book disappeared. And it hasn’t reappeared. Even after his death it hasn’t reappeared ….

Ida Rolf may have exaggerated the scarcity of this book (there were obviously many more than six copies published), but she is correct that Sutherland’s model seems to borrow heavily from the proposed physiology as described in The Brain.

To read more about the connection between Swedenborg and Sutherland I refer you to David Fuller’s “Swedenborg’s Brain and Sutherland’s Cranial Concept” from the Swedenborg Scientific Association.

So how was Swedenborg’s influence felt at Esalen through a separate line of transmission than Ida Rolf? Well, Kripal says Esalen was impacted by two different but connected psychological lineages:

the psychoanalytic stream, which focused on various mystical, occult, and erotic understandings of energy; and the gestalt stream, which focused on the nature, creative constructions, and awakening of consciousness.

Kripal sees the Swedenborg influence come in through the psychoanalytic or energy stream.

. . . Swedenborg became fascinated with the correspondences he saw in altered visionary states between spiritual union, sexual union, and the intellectual life.

This may sound a bit like Tantra and it is likely Swedenborg was exposed to Asian Tantric cultures. He wrote of a mystical energy, called influx, “that permeated the entire universe and descended into his own being in moments of inspiration.” This has much in common with the early hypnotic healers of the 18th and 19th century who used something called animal magnetism to induce trance, altered states of consciousness, and healing. It is this lineage of access to the sacred through the body, through the arousal of a certain type of energy that alters consciousness which gave rise to the psychological model of unconscious and conscious levels of the mind. Indeed, Freud himself had experimented with hypnosis later to abandon it for the “talking cure” eventually to become what we know today as psychoanalysis.

It is this lineage Kripal speaks to:

. . . much of modern psychological thought—that modern “soul-talk” (psyche-logos)—is structured around what are essentially secularized versions of what were once esoteric practices and altered states of energy. Much of Esalen’s history, particularly its rich psychological culture, is simply incomprehensible without a very clear awareness of this historical fact.

And that is how 18th century Swedish scientist turned Christian mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg, in search of the underlying unity between the physical, spiritual and divine worlds influenced osteopathy, Rolfing SI and the flowering of the human potential movement at Esalen Institute during the 1960s. Thank you Jeffrey Kripal for enlightening me!

I found so much material in the process of writing this first piece, I needed to write a second. Please read More Connections Between Emanuel Swedenborg, Ida Rolf & William Sutherland, DO.

© Carole LaRochelle, 2009.