The Rolling Pin

…and other forces for positive change

Photo by permission

Before he moved away, I took t’ai chi lessons from Trevor. He’d hang out on a weeknight in a local park and offered to teach for free. Hardly anyone came to these classes. My guess is, it was just too hard. If you’re thinking, “Oh I know what t’ai chi is….” well, let’s just say I thought I had some understanding, too. But then I met Trevor.

He’s like, “No, you don’t know enough yet to wave your arms around. Learn how to stand.”

And really, it was so hard! He told me he had bodybuilders and weightlifters give up on this practice.

Too hard. Too hard to stand properly for 10-15 minutes at a time. Yes.

“Learn to taste the bitter,” Trevor said. It was a phrase he’d picked up from his teachers in China. But as I learned over time, Trevor’s point was: We can choose to taste the bitter, or the bitter can come to us in some other form, perhaps less palatable.

Interestingly, the most regular attendees at class were women. Dancers and body workers were well represented.

And often enough, it was just a couple of students there, or even just me. Standing with Trevor under the trees in the park’s picnic area within hearing of the shouts from evening softball games, I did my best to learn. I’m standing there, my knees slightly bent, elbows hanging loose, my hands with an imaginary beach ball between them. Soon, I’m trembling. Sweating. If I moved to relieve the strain, Trevor provided gentle corrections. After a few sessions of this, Trevor came over and turned up the palm of one of my hands for inspection. My palms were flushed, bright red.

“Good,” was all he said.

And I remembered how as a small boy, my hands had often looked like this, with this kind of rich, ample circulation. One time holding my dad’s hand in the parking lot at Topp’s — a discount department store — he called me “Hot Hands Scholz.” What happened to my circulation since then?

As winter came on, Susan, the body worker friend who had introduced me to Trevor, offered to host his class in her basement so we could practice indoors. This was during the holiday season. Five or six of us gathered. More than usual.

“I have a Christmas present for you,” Trevor said. He held a rolling pin in his hands. He was not exactly brandishing it, but that’s how it seemed in retrospect. “You can either go the slow way, or the fast way,” he said.

Well gosh, isn’t faster better? I had no idea what I was agreeing to.

“Lie down.”

Trevor pressed and rolled the rolling pin into the muscles of my hips and thighs. The pain was off the charts. I screamed. Everybody who went through this on different parts of their bodies screamed. A lot. Screaming helped, some. The pain got to a point where I started to lose my mind.

“You’re managing! You’re managing!” my body worker friend called down, leaning over me. She’d seen me starting to lift out of my body to avoid the pain. I hadn’t meant to; it was reflexive. I had no idea how not to. And I kept right on screaming.

Finally, Trevor seemed satisfied. He stopped. I stood.

“How about your shoulders?” he asked.

I felt myself blanch. I was horrified at the thought. That was enough bitter for one day. Later that evening, the handles on the rolling pin broke and, working on others, Trevor had to apply pressure holding the pin itself. But by the end, everyone who got rolled was laughing. Giggling, even. Endorphins? That’s my guess. Merry Christmas!

When we went upstairs, my friend’s boyfriend cooking dinner said that he’d been worried about us. He’d heard all the screaming.

A little background: At the time of this experience I’d had some pretty nasty injuries during five years of kung fu practice. One of these injuries was to my knee: a badly executed leg sweep had passed laterally across the joint, wrenching it badly. I had to crawl to the edge of the mat, and I hobbled out to my car after class.

After a few weeks off, I could walk more or less normally again. I went to practice a few more times, but I could no longer sit in seiza position — a traditional way of sitting on one’s heels — to bow in and out of class. Eventually I stopped kung fu. By the time of the rolling pin, it had been years since the injury. I never mentioned the injury to Trevor, but I guess he saw it somehow, because he knew how to fix it.

After all that screaming, when I got home I could sit with my heels beneath me again for the first time in years. I went the fast way.

During the year or so of our work together, Trevor had emailed me a link to a YouTube video showing autopsied human muscle tissue. When the person in the video pulled apart a big hunk of thigh muscle, you could see many thin fibers growing sideways through the tissue, running perpendicular to the heavy muscle fibers. According to Trevor, these fibers grow every night. They proliferate when the muscle does not stretch or move, locking the muscle into a particular shape. And I guess there’s other stuff, too: adhesions and points of attachment of the fascia tissue that surrounds the muscles. I’m no expert, but taken all together this is why it’s important to stretch and move. Activity helps break up those stuck places, those points of dysfunctional attachment. We wake up and reflexively yawn and stretch. There’s good reason for that. We do yoga or get a massage. It helps.

However, our physical habits, many of them originating in emotional habits, can over time affect our posture, our shape. Likewise, cultural patterns like chair-sitting. Or loss of range of motion while healing from an injury, as with my wrenched knee. All these can encourage these fibers and adhesions to proliferate. Growing sideways through us like nails through wood, for better or for worse they lock us into a particular shape.

That evening under the rolling pin, a lot of those little points of attachment broke free. My body could literally take on postures I couldn’t take in years. It was a huge gift.

And what I’m noticing now is the pattern of perpendicularity in both stability and change. Right angles. Hardware fasteners work on the same perpendicular principle: nails, screws, bolts, staples. With enough of such little points of attachment you can hold a house together. These are functional points of attachment. And then sometimes along comes an enormous perpendicular force like a bulldozer, a hurricane, or even just gravity, and they break — those points of attachment. Now, goodness knows how many little points of attachment, places where I was stuck together — had prevented me from sitting on my heels. Those points of attachment may have been necessary during my healing process, but not anymore. Then came the perpendicular force of the rolling pin.

Everywhere we look, we see points of attachment that hold structures in place. These include emotional patterns, habit patterns, relationships, social systems, beliefs and ideas. We get attached in all kinds of ways. The question is, which of these are freeing us, like the healed ligaments in my knee, and which ultimately constrain us, like the muscles that hardened up in the aftermath of that healing?

And, change doesn’t always have to be painful or bitter. A well-timed kiss on the cheek can knock us out of our emotional habits, if we let it in. Even a kind word or other gift can have its own kind of perpendicular power, if we really open to receive it. I’ve definitely been bowled over in helpful ways by such things. For example, the impact of one book — a gift for my 60th birthday — changed my life and ultimately led to the creation of this Substack channel. Need to get out of a rut or out of harm’s way? The best move is often sideways. And yes, if we do feel stuck in a rut with a bunch of attachments working keep us there, in seeking to change we sometimes will encounter a bit of an upslope, some effort required to get out of that rut and move into new ways.

So, this overall principle of right angle forces breaking up unhelpful patterns works on many levels. Has political polarization got ya down? Find a place to stand outside that. Instantly, to the extent we do, we become a perpendicular force in the attachment dynamic that holds things in place. And at that point it’s up to us to decide if we want to be more like gravity or a rolling pin. Of course, it’s true that as we roll, a lot of points of attachment may start screaming. And it’s probably worth re-emphasizing that not all points of attachment are dysfunctional. It was a strain on functional, necessary points of attachment in my knee that ultimately led to the formation of less functional points of attachment during the healing process.

Personally, even though rolling pins can be helpful, I mostly take the sun and earth as my models. As much as I can, I just want to gravitate and radiate. These are perpendicular forces also. Often, gentle consistency works best in breaking up unhelpful patterns inside myself and beyond. Here’s some suggestions: If it seems like everyone is glued to screens and encouraging ever more of the same, maybe we can look up at the sky more, or learn to better see one another in person. If it seems like everyone’s talking, maybe just listen. Or sing. Is everyone in their heads? Move into the heart and body. Everyone in a panic? Reason and expanded vision might be an option. Going it alone? Maybe connect with others. Feeling lost in the crowd? Be ever more yourself. Each of these options can be a lateral move, a shift out of a dysfunctional structure with points of attachment that might not be working as well as they could, and toward something that works better.