The Rolf Method
The Rolf Method is a practice of structural integration developed to balance your body’s structure in gravity. To balance your body’s structure, the practitioner looks at how your entire body has compensated in its chronic patterning.
Because Structural Integration deals with Structure and form, people usually experience overall a sense of renewed vitality. This comes from the structural changes that take place through an organization process. Each session has a distinct territory and premise. The sessions stack upon each other in a sequential manner. As the client moves through the series, they begin to “come out” of patterns of holding both emotionally and postural. People tend to “grow taller” they may feel more grounded or connected to themselves in ways long forgotten.
My hope and intention as a practitioner is that the individual continues to “live” in this new place or old forgotten place that the work recreates in the body.
Before/After Photos
The Ten Series
The goal of the Structural Integration Ten Session Series is to balance your body’s structure in gravity! To balance your body’s structure, the practitioner looks at how your entire body has compensated in its chronic patterning. The Ten Session format allows me to systematically open the body and re-pattern those compensations. This approach is about re-coordinating the entire Postural Pattern. Organizing and balancing the deep patterns naturally addresses any local and acute complaints that the client may be focused on and also concerned most with relieving, while investing in the ten session series. As practitioners, we are trained and practiced to be acutely aware of our individual client’s specific needs. Physical range of motion movement education is an integral element to the session work. Clients will be asked to participate in the process of “contacts” that are being applied to fascial layering weaving throughout and over all underlying musculature and bone tissue. This is “the meat” of the work.
Ideally, the Ten Series is completed over a duration of 8-10 weeks with one session every week or two. This is only ideally and does not necessarily mean that the client is strictly regimented to this time line. The world is a busy, constrained place and this work could take longer depending on the person’s schedule. My clients are required only to commit to what they can afford and find time for. The work will still have its effect in lengthening and creating higher degrees of vitality no matter if it takes two months or six!
Rolf Method Benefits
Relieve Chronic Pain
People suffering from aches and pains in areas such as the neck, shoulders, hips, arms, legs, etc.
Improve Posture
People dissatisfied with their posture and long to increase their physical mobility and appearance.
Aid Recovery
People in physically demanding occupations, who feel pain, stress, tension, stiffness and suffer from injuries, accidents.
Improve Performance
Crafts people, artists, athletes, dancers, yoga and meditation practitioners, musicians, martial artists, etc.
Rolf Method History
In 1920, Ida Pauline Rolf received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. Despite the resistance she faced as a woman in the field of science, she furthered her knowledge of the body through research in organic chemistry at the Rockefeller Institute. Driven to find solutions to her own health problems as well as those of her two sons, she spent many years studying and experimenting with different systems of healing and manipulation.
Throughout most of her life, she was intrigued with and explored many forms of alternative healing including homeopathy, osteopathy, chiropractics, and yoga. The notion that proper alignment, physiologic function, and anatomical structure are related is the basis of many of these healing methods. Dr. Rolf agreed that the body functions best when the bony segments are in proper alignment. She added her observations that lasting improvement in alignment and an overall sense of well-being required a closer look at the effects of gravity on our bodies. She believed that the imbalances in structure placed demands on the body’s pervasive network of soft tissues: muscles, fascia, tendons, and ligaments, thereby creating compensations throughout the body structure.
Dr. Rolf posed this fundamental question: “What conditions must be fulfilled in order for the human body-structure to be organized and integrated with gravity so that the whole person can function in the most optimal and economical way?”
Her life’s work was devoted to this investigation which led to the system of soft tissue manipulation and movement education that we now call Rolfing. In order to pass along her work to others and to make the education process accessible, she developed an expedient series of ten sessions, which came to be known as the Ten Series.
Dr. Rolf continues to be recognized as a pioneer and leader in soft tissue manipulation and movement education.
“This is the gospel of Rolfing: When the body gets working appropriately, the force of gravity can flow through. Then, spontaneously, the body heals itself.”— Dr. Ida P. Rolf
Since her death in 1979 at the age of 83, the Rolf Institute of Structural Integration has continued to share her work by certifying Rolfers and Rolf Movement Practitioners, supporting research, and building upon her inspiration. Today, there are more than 1,550 Rolfers and Rolf Movement Practitioners worldwide.
“What conditions must be fulfilled in order for the human body-structure to be organized and integrated in gravity so that the whole person can function in the most optimal and economical way? “-Dr Ida P Rolf