Bodywork at Its Best: Rolfing for the Rest of Us, Part III

An experienced Rolfer shares a clear, comprehensive explanation of Rolfing Structural Integration in non-intimidating language that everyone can understand.

In the old days, like 40 years and more ago, Rolfing was a lot more painful than it is now. It used to be taught that way, and when you think about what was going on 40 years ago, this makes a lot of sense. Rolfing came of age in the 1960s and ‘70s at Esalen, in Big Sur, California. Ida Rolf had been developing it for 30 years by then and found a willing audience for her transformative ideas and techniques among the people who gathered at Esalen. Esalen was a center for the personal growth movement and was the home to EST, Primal Therapy and other transformational ideas. Whereas the 1950s were a time when Americans were looking for stability after the upheaval of WWII, by the mid 1960s there was an itch for something different. People began trying out new ideas and possibilities on a considerable scale. Psychotherapy became popular, and alternative lifestyles, drugs and organic foods all appeared on the scene. New bodywork modalities like Rolfing were a part of that explosion of possibility. Esalen was on the cutting edge, attracting people with an open mind and a willingness to explore anything that might improve the human condition.

Rolfing found fertile ground. But because bodywork was so new to most people, the work tended to be much more dramatic than what it is today. Those early Rolfers were, for the most part, touching people that had never been touched in a therapeutic fashion before, who had layers of tension and feelings locked up in their bodies along with injuries and experiences that they were only beginning to be aware of. Deep Rolfing was often necessary to break through the armoring and lack of awareness most people lived with, hence the reputation for pain the current generation of Rolfers have inherited. However, this is an outmoded belief. These days, Rolfers are trained to be just as effective but without the level of pain past generations of Rolfers believed were necessary.

Rolfing no longer deserves the reputation for pain it did in the past. Times are different, and most people come to Rolfing with more awareness of their bodies than people did a generation ago.

In addition, the field of bodywork has evolved techniques with more finesse and sensitivity, and Rolfing has benefited from those advances. The current Rolfing training incorporates cranial sacral therapy, gentle spinal derotation techniques and movement education. It also teaches the need to lighten up if appropriate, keeping in mind to always be sensitive to the ability of the client to breathe with the pressure.

After Rolfing, most people can stand up straighter without effort. They find that old injuries and pains have eased or disappeared, and they often report feeling like they’ve taken steps into new possibilities in their life, now that some of their energy is not being used up in poor posture, compensating for old injuries or movement patterns.

by Jill Gerber, LMT, Certified Advanced Rolfer and Rolfing® Movement Integration Practitioner

© copyright 2009 Jill Gerber all rights reserved.

Bodywork at Its Best: Rolfing for the Rest of Us, Part II

An experienced Rolfer shares a clear, comprehensive explanation of Rolfing® Structural Integration in non-intimidating language that everyone can understand.

Up until Dr. Ida Rolf came along, the prevailing belief was that bodies do not change. If someone slumped, they were always going to slump. If someone was pigeon-toed or knock-kneed, they’d be that way for life. Dr. Rolf proved that this is not true. She was a visionary who knew that, with the proper input, bodies are eminently changeable. She saw that many health conditions, such as breathing trouble or lower back pain, are often related to posture and a poor relationship with gravity. If someone is chronically slumped, for instance, that will compress the lungs and ribs, making breathing more difficult. If the feet are splayed out like a duck’s, the knees usually have to lock and the lower back has to arch for balance, eventually causing chronic lower back pain. Our bodies can be seen as a conglomeration of compensations for injuries, postural habits, genetics, and emotional patterns that have physically solidified in the body. Rolfing helps the body find relief from those patterns and that history, as well as gain resiliency to better cope with future life events.

Rolfing helps with the big picture of what causes painful symptoms, restricted movement or an inability to stand up straight. Working the symptom directly is not usually as effective as addressing the overall pattern or old injury compensation that creates the symptom to begin with. A painful area is often the end point of a strain pattern, as in the case mentioned above of splayed-out feet causing lower back pain. Therefore, the entire pattern needs to be addressed, not just the painful end point.

When someone is in pain and gets a massage, a well-trained massage therapist will do a very thorough job of massaging the painful area and the related areas. For example, if someone has lower back pain, the therapist will also massage the legs. A poorly trained massage therapist will work only where the pain is, not the larger area. As a Rolfer, however, I may not do much initially where the symptoms are, but will prepare the area first. For example, if someone comes in with chronic lower back pain, I will look at the feet, at the knees, at the relationship of the legs with the pelvis, and at whether the rib cage is slumped down onto the pelvis, contributing to the lower back pain. Those areas will usually get addressed first, so that when I work the lower back, it will be much more effective because the bigger strain pattern has been eased, rather than only the symptoms being addressed. This means that, with Rolfing, there is a much better chance that the changes will be permanent.

The body is always doing the best it can, and sometimes the best we can do still causes us pain. When we have a choice to move in a way that does not create strain, we do so. Rolfing is a process of building support for these kinds of changes, so that with each step we take, with each decision of how to sit, we have new options for ease. The old ways of moving, sitting and standing become the harder ways, and we stop choosing them. It’s mostly an unconscious process, just like our old habitual movement and postural patterns were unconscious: we didn’t even realize we started favoring one foot a decade ago when we sprained that ankle and then never stopped; we still tilt our head to one side a little bit since that car accident when we were a teenager. These are the big patterns we live with, the big picture that Rolfing talks to.

by Jill Gerber, LMT, Certified Advanced Rolfer and Rolfing® Movement Integration Practitioner

© copyright 2009 Jill Gerber all rights reserved.

Bodywork at Its Best: Rolfing for the Rest of Us, Part I

An experienced Rolfer shares a clear, comprehensive explanation of Rolfing® Structural Integration in non-intimidating language that everyone can understand.

Rolfing® is one of those things that a lot of people have heard about, but they don’t always know what it actually is or how it might help. Many people have heard that it is really painful or pulls muscles off the bones. It’s amazing the misinformation out there! In this three-part series, I will share a little about what Rolfing is, give a bit of history on it, and hopefully clarify some of the many misconceptions about it.

Rolfing® is a type of structural integration. This means that we work with helping the various structures of the body integrate into an easier relationship with the rest of the body. Let’s use the shoulder girdle as an example. Some people don’t have an arm, but, rather, an “armshoulder.” You’ve probably seen people like this…when they walk, it looks like their entire shoulder is swinging back and forth with the arm. Or, conversely, some people have an arm that swings like a marionette’s, with no involvement from the shoulder at all. Most of us are somewhere in between those two examples, with arms and shoulders that would feel better if each segment was functioning independently yet coordinated with the other, like nature and anatomy intended. That’s what Rolfing® does: it differentiates each part of the body from the other, and integrates it all back into a more cohesive and better-functioning whole.

Working initially in a ten-session series, Rolfing® creates a body that is more efficiently organized, can stand up straight more easily, and can recover more quickly from injury. Those first ten treatments address the entire body from the big layers of surface tissues to the deeper core structures. Each session has an underlying intention that is the same for everyone, but the territory covered might be different for each person. For instance, the first session is always about increasing the ability of the breath to move freely through the body. Dr. Ida Rolf, the founder of Rolfing®, realized that the body changes most easily when there is more breath available. The majority of us chronically hold our breath, or only breathe using one part of our ribs and lungs. For one person, this might indicate work on the front of the rib cage, whereas, for another, the work might be focused on the back of the ribs or the diaphragm area. Wherever it looks and feels like breathing is being restricted, that’s where the Rolfer works. Each session’s territory and level of pressure is adapted to the needs of the individual.

After receiving the first ten-session series, clients sometimes come in for mini-series as they feel the need.

by Jill Gerber, LMT, Certified Advanced Rolfer and Rolfing® Movement Integration Practitioner

© copyright 2009 Jill Gerber all rights reserved.