Rolfing: somatic bodywork for greater ease in everyday life

Rolfing® Movement Integration focuses on the mind-body connection for an increase in health and vitality

If Rolfing® Structural Integration focuses on the body, somatics oriented Rolfing® Movement Integration addresses the nervous system. Using the mind-body connection to remove unsupportive habitual postures and movement patterns alleviates pain, stress, anxiety and more.

Much of what we experience as physical tension or stress is the result of an imbalanced body. When our physical structure is habitually bent, twisted, and compressed, the body glues itself together with tension in order to remain upright. The connective tissue that holds our bodies together is actually very flexible and will, with encouragement, adapt to new, healthy patterns of posture and movement.

How Rolfing Movement works

A Rolf Movement practitioner combines touch and verbal messages to help you become more responsive to your body's inner cues. By learning to recognize and respond appropriately to your body-mind connection, you will discover a new freedom of expression in your body, leading to a marked increase in health and vitality.

Client and practitioner then explore the sensations of freer and more fluid motion during breathing, walking, bending, lifting and other simple daily movements. Through further somatic experiencing, the client learns to embody the qualities of efficient and graceful movement during more complex activities in work or leisure environments. Through somatic bodywork the client fully embodies a Rolfing experience for lasting results.

The Rolf Movement process may occur within the Rolfing SI session and can also take place in separate movement lessons.

Where Rolfing Movement comes from

Rolf Movement work is a system of movement education that supports and advances the goals of the work done in Rolfing sessions. While the base Rolfing sessions affect change through fascial manipulation, Movement work affects change through exercises aimed at shifting coordination and posture in your day-to-day movements through the somatic (body-mind) connection.

Originally developed by mandate from Dr. Ida Rolf, who believed that movement education was a valuable adjunct to the hands-on structural work, Rolfing Movement Integration has evolved into both a therapy in its own right, and an inherent feature of the Rolfing Structural Integration process.