All About Rolfing
"When a body is in pain or discomfort, whether physical or emotional, the unconscious response is to tighten and shorten in an effort to "get away" from the pain. Rolfing focuses on lengthening and balancing the body in order for the tightened tissues to have some place to go after the release."
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-Ida P. Rolf
More about Rolfing
The human body, like all other material structures, is controlled by the basic laws of physics with gravity being the most powerful. When we are out of alignment and balance, gravity drags us down just like it pulls down on any structure that has lost its integrity. Along with gravity, we have repetitive movement, stress, trauma (physical, mental, emotional, environmental, etc.) and even the way we learned to move and hold ourselves in our youth creating patterns of strain and holding. Tight tissues and muscles are responsible for locking your body into a slouch you just can't seem to break. Rolfing works to correct posture by lengthening the tissue in your body.
What we work on
Fascia is a type of connective tissue. It is a continuous, strong, resilient net that covers and holds everything in your body in place–muscles, bones, organs, blood vessels and nerves. It is like a three-dimensional web that creates the shape of your body and organizes the relationships of its parts.
How Rolfing differs
Rolfing differs from other forms of bodywork in a few key ways. First view bodies as if they are a built like a suspension bridge on the inside (more specifically we think of bodies as bio tensegrity structures). As a vastly simplified analogy, if you picture the Golden Gate bridge in your mind’s eye, the reason why you would drive over that bridge is because every single cable is doing its job. If that weren’t the case- if some were too short and others too long- you would never think of driving on it. Alas, in our bodies we often have “cables”, or lines of support in gravity, that are too short or too long, which leaves us with compensatory patterns. These compensatory patterns cause us to be prone to injury, chronic pain, poor posture, limitations to mobility or hypermobility, and a generally revved up nervous system.
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Rolfing addresses this by working in the connective tissue (rather than gliding over muscle bellies) to unglue the areas that have become short, dense, and adhered, as well as to wake up the areas that have fallen asleep on the job. In short, Rolfing is very specific, strategic, and holistic in how it approaches the body.
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Rolfing is a good choice for those who are dealing with chronic pain, injuries that beget other injuries and heal slowly or not at all, chronic stress, and people dealing with repetitive overuse and postural strain. Rolfing is also widely utilized to maximize peak physical performance (for athletes or performers), and simply to help people get in touch with a deeper sense of their bodies and more ease and grace.
Contact
I'm always looking to teach people about Rolfing.
Let's connect.
816.298.9328