What is Rolfing?
Rolfing® Structural Integration is a hands-on approach to exploring how the body is organized and moves in gravity.
Our bodies adapt throughout our lives-to the activities we do, injuries we've experienced, repetitive movements, stress, and the ways we've learned to stand and move. Over time, some of these adaptations can become habitul, and we may find ourselves using more effort than is needed.
Rolfing® uses slow, focused touch, movement, and awareness to explore these patterns. Rather than paying attention only to the place that hurts or feels restricted, we look at relationhsips throughout the body and how they contribute to the way you stand, breathe and move.
The intention isn't to create "perfect posture"or force the body into an ideal alignment. It's to offer new possibilities for organization and movement-often expeienced as ease, freedom, balance, and a sense of feeling more at home in your body.
Who was Dr. Ida Rolf?
Dr. Ida P. Rolf was an American biochemist who developed Rolfing® Structural Integration in the mid-20th century. She was deeply interested in the relationship between the body's structure,movement, and gravity and believed that greater organization within the body could allow us to move with more ease and less effort.
Her work placed particular emphasis on connective tissue and on viewing the body as an interconnected web rather than a collection of separate parts. These ideas continue to inform Rolfing® today, even as our understanding of fascia, movement, pain, and the nervous system continue to evolve.
What about Fascia?
Fascia is connective tissuetht surrounds and connects muscles, bones, nerves, blood vessals, and other structures throughout the body. Far from being a simple passive wrapping, connective tissues participate in transmitting force and contain sensory nerve endings that contribute to our experience of movement, position, and the body.
Rolfing® tradionally places considerable emphasis on working with fascia. Our understanding of fascia has evolved since Dr. Ida Rolf developed the work, and I dont think of my hands as simply "releasing" or reshaping fascia. Instead, I think of Rolfing® as a conversation with a complex living system. Pressure, stretch, shear, and movement provide mechanical and sensory information that the body and nervous system respond to. Sometimes that response is experienced as a softening of muscular effort, a change in movement, a fuller breath, or simply a different sense of yourself in space.
About Rolfing
Benefits of Rolfing®
Rolfing® is most effective when done as a series, usually as a series of ten sessions. Benefits of Rolfing® can include:
-
Improved alignment and posture
-
greater range of motion
-
reduction of aches and pains
-
ease of chronic pain
-
relaxation
-
more awareness
-
better coordination
For more information on The Ten Series click here.
FAQ
Is Rolfing® painful? What should you wear for your session? Find the answers to these frequently asked questions here.