What is Rolfing Structural Integration?
Rolfing Structural Integration (SI) is a somatic practice utilizing fascial manipulation, awareness, and movement education that is used to help you better understand your relationship with gravity by accessing a sense of support when you yield to weight and expand into space.
It is typically a series of ten sessions that are framed to restore postural balance and functional ease by aligning and integrating your body in gravity.
SI is based on the work of Dr. Ida P. Rolf. It is practiced by people trained at schools and institutions in accordance with the standards established by the International Association of Structural Integrators (IASI). I went to the Rolf Institute and completed my advanced training in Rolfing Structural Integration in 2019.
The Importance of Structural Integration
The key principle of SI is that your body is significantly affected by the powerful force of gravity.
In a misaligned state, your body’s valuable resources are used inefficiently, laboring to keep you upright in the field of gravity. In addition, the stresses of daily life, physical injuries, unhealthy movement patterns, and attitudes are all forces that can take a toll on your physical structure.
Over time, your body will shorten and tighten to accommodate stresses, creating stiffness, pain, fatigue, and lack of well-being.
As a trained Rolfer™, I use a range of techniques to lengthen and reposition the fascia of your body, realigning you with both your inside and outside worlds.
What can SI address?
Your entire body is held together with the interstitium, a meshwork of strong and flexible connective tissue that looks random, but amazingly enough, is adaptive to any suggestion through force or stress. With skilled applied pressure and direction, it can be moved toward fundamentally cohesive and truer alignment with the gravitational pull of the earth.
Specific treatment for you can address or include:
Difficulty connecting with your own body
Jaw, face and neck work
Breathing restrictions
Pelvic movement restrictions
Scars and visceral adhesion
Neurovascular restriction
Visceral adhesions
Fascial abnormalities
Peripersonal space; your sense of internal body awareness and environmental distress
Eye tension
Adjustment disorder
Self-care, tension release
What Happens in an SI Session?
I like to work with a combination of manual and movement therapy that utilizes the following:
For the Structural Component: (I work on you as you lay on the table)
Continual assessment of how your body supports itself and moves in gravity
Soft tissue manipulation using specific, focused touch with subtle movement for release of tissues that restrict your movement or comfort
Essential re-education for integrated ease and comfort in basic and complex movement patterns
Observation of the relationship between your posture, your pain and your habits of movement to better prepare your living process
For the Functional Component: (I guide you through movements where you’re asked to think about what you’re doing and therefore we develop greater functional capacity.)
Actively find your support in each moment
Change your movement initiation so that you can reduce your strain patterns that drag you down, helping your body function better
Discover your capacity for agency in the moment that brings you lasting, replenishing ease
Learn to find better ways to approach your body in the moment, as your perceptions always inform your choices
You can expect to do movement work fully clothed. Please wear comfortable, non-restrictive clothing that allows for easeful movement.
Consider the Rolfing 10-Series Special Package Deal to get started. After that initial and thorough process, each session can vary, depending on what your hopes and goals are.
Wherever you’re at in your process, the goals we develop for you together guide us, but there are generally components of personal check-in, bodywork, education, movement and awareness exercises, and practice development/real life integration woven within the session.
Why Rolfing Structural and Functional Integration?
If your awareness of space surrounding your body is limited, you condense your posture inward. By limiting your point of view in that way you may be too condensed or too collapsed, keeping you in a blocked state of held beliefs, fear of change, negative points of view, staying too long in dysfunctional situations, or not realizing recovery is necessary long after the signs are there to move on.
In other words, the tone of your body becomes an attitude that can control or dominate or elevate your exchange with yourself and the world.
Whether you’re collapsed/contracted or uptight/rigid or frozen, you may be prohibiting yourself from experiencing the freedom of a flow that comes from within and in exchange with gravity (the force of the earth and sky).
The result may be causing perpetual feelings of insecurity, and, then unconsciously, you may feel the need to seek stability in other ways.
Contact me today for a 30 minutes of introduction where we can discuss your hopes and goals for bodywork.
How do you become connected to that which has been lost: A sense of support?
You gain alignment only by feeling what you’re aligning to. Support is only there when you feel what contacts you, and you let it meet you.
I teach you a greater connection to yourself and the world through movement contemplations, very different from rote exercises. It’s explorative, so we go at your pace.
I never was drawn to words like “exercise” and “workout” because they imply that the body has to be put through hard discipline in order to gain strength. It’s work that’s repetitive, and it can feel grueling, but you muscle through it. “No pain, no gain” does not necessarily bringing joy.
These words have a domineering sense over the body, like an enemy, which results in a disembodied way of being. It lacks an invitation to feel the experience, or to sense what’s going on. People pay a lot of money to hire motivation to do it over and over again.
Have you ever enjoyed getting disciplined?
When you simply add a sense of orientation to space and weight, you dismantles chronic holding patterns because your body registers support. Your brain receives the benefit of lasting, neurological change.
Likewise, there are a lot of hands-on modalities that may feel like relief to you at the end of a session, but does it hold up, or did it just feel good?
Your body needs you to come to your senses, not someone else.
I’m offering structural change through hands-on Structural Integration, as well as sensory movement education through Functional Integration.
Individual sessions typically start with a discussion that flows into movement considerations (about 30 minutes), followed by hands-on strategies at the table (45 minutes to an hour) that bring about lasting, reliable perceptive change.
My movement guidance invites you to be present with your physical experience. I ask you to notice connections to sensations in your body, with the ground and with space that you haven’t noticed or valued before. This experience is introspective and requires your full attention and curiosity to get results.
By doing the movements, your ability to concentrate deepens, leading your brain to develop new neurological connections that integrate better movement patterns.
You gain lasting change that feels more efficient, graceful and fully expressive.
These movement experiences are always nuanced because they start with perception.
They’re quite distant from repetitive, disengaging workouts on the treadmill while watching TV, a common habit which separates your senses from what you’re doing, resulting into deeper patterns of disconnection from yourself.
The movements I guide you through won’t make you stronger or more flexible. They are movements that sharpen your awareness.
Every day, I hear clients tell me how they appreciate noticing more about how they now move differently and better. They like gaining greater sensory awareness and coordination because it enhances their sense of feeling whole and coherent. Their pain goes away and stays away.
They’re learning how to organize around the midline of their bodies in a free, unencumbered way that is supportive, adaptable and available in any moment. It brings ease, efficiency and effectiveness to all parts of their lives.
They feel they have better choices available to them.
Once you try this, you will feel the difference, too.