Ida Rolf Rolfing: Did It Hurt?
Fritz Smith The realization, or maybe I should say experience, was that Ida didn’t hurt me while she was Rolfing me. This was totally incongruous with what we students were doing with each other. Those other Rolfings really hurt. I was in pain when others worked or me and I hurt people when I was […]
A Reply
Both of these articles address an aspect of the chiropractic model, what has been called the “foot-on-thehose” theory or the “hard-bone-on-a-soft-nerve” theory. Both do so with some justification, and both with some misunderstanding. Ida takes a structural slant and Marcela Ullman a neurologic one, though both use the model as a starting place. Ida criticizes […]
The Myth of the “Pinched Nerve”
According to data published by the renowned Emnid Institute, two thirds of all German citizens complain of recurring pain in their locomotor system, 61 per cent are impaired in their daily activities by it, and every third day of work disability is caused by back pain. Yet 85 per cent of these chronic back patients […]
An Interview with Erik Dalton
SI: Do you call all of the bodywork you do “Rolfing”? ED: Since the primary focus of my practice is on assessing and correcting neck and back pain, I do not feel justified defining my work as Rolfing in its purest form. But as my schedule allows, I still perform the “tenseries”, usually with five […]
On Collagen
The title of this book naturally catches a Rolfer’s attention; and it is worth some attention. The book is written for those who are neither engineers nor physicists; it’s a layman’s introduction to aspects of both. There is a lot in it about tensional and compressive structures, for those of us who are wondering about […]
The Fascia (reprint)
Philosophy of Osteopathy was written and published by Andrew Taylor Still in 1899. Especially interesting is its picture of therapeutic premises, manipulative and otherwise, at the turn of the present century. Andrew Taylor Still, founding pioneer of Osteopathy, lived and worked in Kirksville, Missouri, where he established a school, the American School of Osteopathy, still […]
The Unifying Spatial Field
All Rolfers would agree that part of what makes our approach unique is our work with the body not just in terms of mobility, but in terms of its spatial order how the body’s parts relate to each other spatially and how the body as a whole is organized in gravity. However, saying that we […]
The Z Position and the Advanced Training
A quick note on the Z and some thoughts on “standardized” advanced training. I taught the Z as Ida taught it to me in my advanced class. I struggled with this position for years, and tried to come up with a way to teach it that gave the practitioners a way to evaluate whether or […]
Somatic Mapping
Some clients, despite having received Rolfing and exhausted standard medical treatments, have found little sustained relief from their physical problems. Absent an underlying pathology, practitioners sometimes postulate an emotional, psychological or energetic component based on one or more systems of correlation among experiences in the physical and other realms – i.e., on “somatic maps”. This […]
Switching Sessions
One way I think about the recipe is that it is a way of understanding how large anatomical segments relate to each other according to a Structural Integration view. This understanding includes a staging of sessions based on certain embedded relationships in the body, an alphabet of relationships which Ida saw, and which we cannot […]