Rolfing

A bit intimacy-phobic when I began working.

When I was doing Rolfing, a thing that I loved about Rolfing, structural integration work, is I'd give it my all, and then the 10 sessions were done, and they'd go away.

If they want to see me, they'd come back in six months or a year, I'll do a three series or a five series.

Basically, I'd do 10 sessions and they're gone.

In this episode, in season three, episode one, I am going to share a somatic journey and the embryological story.

I thought I would share a story I wrote for our-- my structural integration cohort.

This was designed as a somatic exercise.

Have a journal or a piece of paper ready to write on afterwards.

The alignment and functionality of the fascia is for overall health, not just the structure of the body.

And so I then became a structural integration therapist, which is the type of body work that Rolfers do.

In this whole process, I started having issues with autoimmune disease that had been passed down through my family.

And I found relief from some of it with the movement therapy and the structural integration.

And so just the word itself I like to follow with bodywork.

There's a lot of rolfing involved, there's a lot of tissue therapy that's sometimes maybe it's massage, but we get these words in our head of what something is and an idea and I just kind of somewhere in the middle of a blend of all those things.

Rolfing, what is that?

Rolfing is a type of tissue therapy.

So it's manual therapy developed by Ida Rolf.

It's her last name.

And she was a pioneer really in tissue work.

But Rolfing, generally speaking, is very slow directional movements.

and it's uh you know it's uh practices that can do that are fairly intense often um you know and rank was notorious for very intense practices it was just about breaking down the deep layers of armoring and not really thinking very much about how do you integrate all of that well but uh The subsequent developments there in somatic psychology are a little more refined.

I'm assuming rolfing was a spinoff?

Rolfing was connected.

It came out of the same time period, so there was a mutual influence, but not Not really direct, but yeah, there were definitely similarities.

And the Rolfers weren't paying a lot of attention to the emotional effects.

So you have to be really, really a- attuned, and that is so much what is missing in the neglect experience, having somebody really see such subtlety that they can understand the communication of your body, and if they, they can tell when you're gone.

And I remember I was probably 20 years old and I got Rolfed, which was a very controversial at the time kind of body work.

And this brilliant Rolfer who I worked with, he said to me, "Did you, did you know you went away?"

Hmm.

I try to do a lot for myself.

And you do something called Rolfing.

And then I've just gone down the Rolfing bunny trail.

So tell people about-

And I love it

I'm not at my pain threshold." So my body was a lot more aligned going into my fourth pregnancy.

All my p- births were very similar, but my fourth was like the least painful, and I was just mind-blown by that 'cause I'm like anything we can do to mitigate the pain of child, child-rearing and birth is [laughs] amazing.

So baby came out, and I ended up doing a full 10 series of Rolfing with someone I found while I was pregnant.