Rolfing
If you can imagine how it feels to live in a fluid, light, balanced body, free from pain, stiffness and chronic stress, at ease with itself and the earth's gravitational field, then you will understand the goals of Rolfing.
Rolfing is an original and scientifically validated system of body restructuring and movement education. Through a process of re-education Rolfing brings the body back into alignment with gravity .Rolfing isn't just vigorous deep-tissue massage - a Rolfer actually wants to change the structure of your body.
Like many other approaches, Rolfing is capable of releasing the body from restrictions. But unlike every other manipulative system, East or West, Rolfing is unprecedented in that it is the first and only system to recognise the importance of gravity when organising the whole body
"One individual may experience his losing fight with gravity as a sharp pain in the back, another as the unflattering contour of his body, another as constant fatigue, and yet another as a unrelenting threatening environment. Those over forty may call it old age, yet all these signals may be pointing to a single problem so prominent in their own structures and the structures of others that it has been ignored: they are off-balance, they are at war with gravity." (Ida Rolf)
Of all the forces affecting the human body, gravity is among the most powerful. Body misalignment in gravity results in chronic strain, lowered vitality, impaired biological and psychological functioning and often a predisposition to negative emotional states. Whether from poor posture, injury, illness or emotional distress, an unbalanced body is at war with gravity. We experience this war with gravity as pain, stress and depleted energy.
Over time, elements of our personal history and environment blend with our reactions to them to form a complex, individual body structure. When the body communicates that it is losing structural integrity,that poor posture is taking over, awkward patterns of movement occur with a sense of effort, heaviness, strain and fatigue.
Related therapy sections...
Structural Bodywork & Healing.