What is Rolfing or Structural Integration?

What is rolfing? A system that opens the fascia all over the body, including the plantar fasciaWorking with your Fascia, (or the web of your body matrix), the large, (or "coarse"), muscles in the body are lengthened and reminded of their ability to slide individually and appropriately under your skin, allowing the intrinsic muscles, (or "fine" core muscles), to awaken and participate in efficient body function.

The recipe of 10 sessions utilize breath and movement from the client with hands on bodywork to induce your own unique organized blueprint. Aligning the body segments of your fascial web* allows room for fresh insight into how you choose to live and move within your body.

The Process:

The first 7 "hour" sessions each have their own goal and create a demand on the body that calls for the following session to penetrate more deeply into your fascial web.*
The last 3 sessions organize your newly loosened and listening body

*Fascial Web: Fascia is connective tissue, which surrounds, penetrates, and connects every part of the body - our bones, muscles and organs. It gives your body its shape and is often referred to as our "organ of form".

How often do I need to go?

Rolfing can be like making your bed in the morning. You think you're going to get by without pulling that bed apart, so you pull up this cover and the next cover. When you get all the covers puffed up, you've got nine ridges running across the bed. Now you've got to go to a deeper layer and organize the deeper layer, and make your bed on top of that. Then you've got a made bed. Well it's the same with the body: you've got to organize those deeper layers.
Ida P. Rolf, Ph.D.

Each session is designed to unwind you through a system that chases kinks out of your being. An intensive approach is 2 sessions per week (four day intervals), and you are brought to a new space in your 10th hour. Freshly attuned, you are a newly organized being after these 5 weeks.

Some prefer a slower sequence; one per week, or two weeks between sessions. This allows for time to integrate in the energy unleashed and inspired in each hour, and some prefer more reflection time.

Occasionally people have experienced all 10 sessions in 10 days or less. This is much more challenging to integrate, and requires alternate support to ease the escalated shape-shifting of your body.

Why Rolfing instead of other bodywork modalities?

This is a recipe; an education in understanding your relationship with yourself in gravity. It is a process bringing you to a new place of beginning. There is value to processes aimed at taking you through an evolution. This learning occurs by going through a sequence designed to create new freedom within you through kinesthetic hands on manipulation. Experiencing the "Rolf" method of Structural Integration is one of many ways to remember, learn, and expand your growth in understanding yourself.

Ida Rolf spent over 20 years observing bodies and as she put her hands on them, the way they held themselves talked to her. She developed this series invoking a shifting of patterns to enhance our alignment with gravity. The territory covered in each "Hour" session has specific goals and territories. The series accentuates moving and standing with a reawakened alignment of your body, especially enhanced by the last three "organizing" hours on top of the first 7 "unwinding" hours.