People often ask me, “What IS Rolfing?” It’s a simple enough question – to which practitioners and clients alike have very diverse responses.
Rolfing can be a lot of things, and it’s a different experience for each person who partakes in the work. Obviously, the one person who could best answer the question would be Dr. Ida Rolf herself, since she developed this bodywork. Ida never called it Rolfing. She called it ‘Structural Integration’, which more clearly describes what it is.
‘Structural’ because it deals with the vertical, segmented assemblage of the body – namely the bones and soft tissue (muscles, fat, ligaments, tendons, organs, vessels, nerves) that comprise the human form.
‘Integration’ because the proper organization and synchronization of all the parts is vital to the overall function of the full body. Everything in the body exists in relationship, each segment affects another, as well as the whole, so if there is disharmony in one area, the entire body and the person will be affected.
There are 207 bones and over 400 muscles in the human body. Fascia wraps around and weaves through the whole structure, keeping everything held together, in gravity, as we stand and sit and move about. Rolfing deals specifically with this fascia to release areas that tight, dense or pulling bones out of proper alignment, thereby restoring natural upright posture and freedom of movement. When the structure as a whole is organized and integrated, then energy can flow more easily through, and discomforts eased.
A bit of background on Dr. Ida Rolf…
She was born in 1896 in New York and grew up in the Bronx. She graduated from Barnard College in 1916, in the middle of WWI, and was hired by the Rockefeller Institute in NYC where you worked while continuing her education, earning a PHD in Biological Chemistry.
Throughout her young life, Ida was interested in the wellbeing of the body and in movement, yoga and osteopathy in particular. She had been kicked by a horse as a young woman and it was an osteopath, Dr. Thomas Morrison, who finally worked with her to rid the persisting symptoms from the accident.
Both osteopathy and homeopathy were of interest to Ida, and fed into much of her understanding the body’s capacity to self heal and self regulate. Her Yoga training informed her that the body seeks to find balance and length, and that establishing greater physical ease brings emotional and spiritual benefits.
Slowly, Ida realized something else was needed. While working with people to improve physical and overall wellbeing, she became increasing or aware of the impact that gravity had on the physical structure of a body and a person day after day over the course of a lifetime.
And thus, Structural Integration began.
“In all Rolfing work, we are involved in a lengthening process.”
“If the forces acting around a bone are symmetrical, if it’s free to swing, the bone will horizontalize itself at the joint. It’s happier there. You are removing the restrictions, the imbalance that comes as a result of a weight above it which tends through torque to twist the bone. There are also forces that twist from below, and forces that are held from behind. So we try to get holding from behind to ease a little. And then we get contraction from within to ease a little. It’s always a question of allowing. If we remove the restrictions, the bone will want to horizontalize itself. It will go to the position that is “normal” – right for that structure.”
“When you get span in a body, you get tone; when you get tone, you get span. Span is a special thing; tone is physiological. Both words refer to balanced structure in a living body. Both tone and span indicate a readiness to act and respond that is the touchstone of a healthy body.”
“We can’t change the gravitational field…what we can do is change the way the parts of the body fit together into a whole which can transmit the gravitational field through that body in such a way that it enhances its energy field. You can change the body by virtue of the fact that it is segmented , and when you have changed it appropriately, gravity can flow through.”
“It is at the joints that deviation can and does occur, obviously not in the middle of the leg. At the joint, strain manifests most strongly. A body is an aggregate of segments; wherever one segment fits another, the greatest deviation is possible.”
Watch this to learn more about Rolfing from experienced Rolfers.