In the December 2013 issue of Structural Integration: The Journal of the Rolf Institute®, I published an article about the symbols shown in Figure 1. I remembered these from class t-shirts when I did my Rolfing® Structural Integration training in the mid- 1990s, but I couldn’t find a source for this set. Variations on the symbols for sessions seven to ten could be traced back to Emmett Hutchins and Peter Melchior, but this full version remained a mystery despite queries to those with some familiarity with the symbols.

Figure 1: Stick-figure images circa mid-1990s (recreated by Michael Vilain, from a t-shirt image provided by Don Bruce).

Fortunately, publication of the article has brought forth the artist who drew them, and the Rolfer who solicited her skills with his draft. Rolfer Vickie Kovar emailed Michael Vilain – who provided the image for Figure 1 – stating that she drew the figures for Rolfer Greg Knight’s graduating class in 1993-1994.

When I contacted Vickie, she said:

I was a student at [the Rolf Institute] in 1994 when Greg Knight (class before my class) asked me to redraw the stick figures (from a rough penciled draft) for his class’s t-shirts. I do not know where Greg got the configuration.

All that remained was to contact Greg, who wrote that he doesn’t remember all of the details, but he clearly recalls the excitement of how “each figure had a reason, a simple teaching embedded in it.” Here’s his story:

It was my Combined Studies class of 1994 that produced the t-shirts with the ten symbols. The back of the shirt had a quote of Dr. Rolf’s, “Evolution is not a closed road but a consistent slow open-ended path.” We were reaching the end of our training and we wanted to do something to commemorate our experience. As any Rolfing practitioner likely remembers, there are a lot of details to learn when going through the training. Without this recent article, I would not have known or remembered the derivation of the symbols for sessions seven to ten. We must have seen them or been shown them in our class. As I recall it, I had the idea of creating images for the different back work for the other sessions of the Ten Series. With some help from fellow classmates, we came up with the stick figures. Each image told a story of the back work for each session as we were taught [it]. It’s true that the images are not completely consistent – with the first six being more about the actual back work and the last four about something that is evoked in the session. Still, there seemed to be some logic to it all. As one progresses through the series and reaches the last four sessions, the back work is not as proscriptively defined. Mostly designing the images was for fun, with a little bit of teaching folded into it all.

Mystery solved!The Mystery of the Ten-Series Symbols – Solved![:]