Q: Can you speak to something in your own life that has cross-pollinated with your Rolfing Structural Integration (SI) practice, leading you to a particular perspective, understanding, or way of working?

A: Speaking of the cross-pollinations that have affected my perspective on the body, and on Rolfing SI, the first mandate from Ida P. Rolf (IPR) was to stick with her way of doing the work for five years, or “until you think you know what you are doing . . .” I have to say that I have yet to feel that I know what I am doing unto this day, but that I am driven by her mandate to keep at it.

The Rolfing work that I was taught was forged in the crucible of the human potential movement at Esalen Instute. Peter Melchior and I were the resident Rolfers™ at Esalen, and we alternated sessions on people who were in the residential program. The stated object of the exercise was to facilitate the psychological work that the Residents were exploring with Fritz Perls, Will Schutz, and Abe Maslow. This exploration did not exclude broader studies in exploring boundaries of all kinds.

When I left that environment and moved to rural northern New Mexico in 1971, there wasn’t another Rolfer for about 800 miles in any direction, and more importantly, no one had a clue what Rolfing SI or the human potential movement was. As I began to build a client base, I did all Ten-Series work most of the time, but at the same time people came out of the woodwork who needed immediate help, and came because I was the guy who worked on people’s bodies. It was an assortment of knees, backs, and necks . . . the usual aches that drive people to seek help. I worked with whoever showed up, adapting the elements of the Ten Series to the situation at hand. This was the only thing I was doing to make a living – it sure was not my hobby – so I was not so anal about only doing the Ten Series. Virtually no one came for personal growth, and I had to educate my clients about the other potentials of the work. Many of my ‘first-aid’ clients went on to do the Ten Series with me, and many sent their friends for Rolfing sessions, and first aid as well. As I went along in those first years, I felt that I was woefully ignorant about the body, and I began to look for books by other practitioners who also worked on the body. It was not so much that I was looking for technique as for perspective and better understanding of the ‘nature of structure’. I got lucky in finding a copy of Osteopathy in the Cranial Field, by Harold Magoun. I read it front to back like a novel, and then picked it apart. I had no practical instruction, but it awakened me to the idea of fluctuations of pressure beyond heartbeat, peristalsis, and respiration. Hmmm, the body moves onto itself . . . it is not a discrete mass. Another book that came my way was a manual of chiropractic technique by a DC named DeJarnette. He had a method, and I did my best to understand what he thought about the body. I was examining premises.

It’s important to realize that in those years there was no Internet, no seminars to teach nuggets of information and technique. If you wanted to know more about the field we were in, you basically had to steal it. There was an old-time naturopath in Santa Fe named Jay Scherer, who had a school of massage. He was a lifelong vegetarian, a bit of a mystic. He was a vigorous manipulator, and a hell of a bonesetter. I took a course of study from him to get my New Mexico massage license, and got lots of private work from him. I also gave him a Ten Series. He thought Rolfing SI was radical, and called me Mao Tse-tung because it hurt so much. I learned to do spinal manipulation from him, and had my first introduction to fasting and ideas about cleansing the body.

I was really lucky to meet Sensei Nakozono, who was a Japanese acupuncturist and shiatsu doctor, a master of aikido, and a teacher of a meditation system called kototama. He was a WWII veteran who had marched with the Japanese army into Machuria. I studied with him and got my introduction to oriental medicine. His treatments were more painful than Rolfing sessions, and he was relentless. I found this comforting, in a way: I was not the most painful practitioner around. Still, I learned through his hands, and his feet – in addition to shiatsu, and bonesetting, he also walked all over his patients, using his heels and the balls of his feet. At 5’8” he weighed about 180 pounds, with no fat. I sat with him in his kototama meditation classes for a couple of years, and endured his methods. In those first years after my training, living in New Mexico, I did not get much Rolfing SI, as there was no Rolfer near me. Still, I sought out these people practicing ‘on-the-body’ techniques, and they formed a foundation that augmented what I had learned from IPR. By the end of 1974 I was back in Big Sur for the first Advanced Training (AT) with IPR. There were about sixteen of us in that class, and IPR put us through her newly designed advanced ‘recipe’, a four series that ended with what was the equivalent of a Seventh Hour. In retrospect, that advanced work did not impress me so much. I did not think another formula was where I needed to go. I wanted to go deeper into what I was calling the ‘nature of structure’. That is not to say that the time with IPR was unproductive: I loved being in the class, and with my colleagues, learning from my first real teacher. Still, her choice to come up with another recipe, as the AT, did not turn on the lights for me.

I can see that in the wake of Dr. Rolf’s passing, and with Peter, Emmett Hutchins, and I being the first Advanced teachers, the seeds of our differences regarding the work were sown in that first AT. I was sure that the way to train and develop a Rolfer beyond the basic Ten Series was to deepen the understanding of structure and the process of evolving the client’s inner connection to structure and function; to deepen the Rolfers’ ability to discern where their client’s growth was happening, both internally and in movement; and to function as both a manipulator and a teacher in support of that growth. Along this path, there have been many more experiences and learning that have influenced my understanding of both the limits and possibilities inherent in Rolfing SI, but the foregoing represent some of my formative conditions.

Jan Sultan Advanced Rolfing Instructor

A: I sit at an airport in Eastern Europe waiting for a flight back to Munich. And I remember the many ideas I exchanged with Ray Bishop, a Rolfing colleague and professional musician who is not with us any more. We had met many years ago at a workshop in Santa Fe. And I remember a few talks with my colleague Harvey Burns: a late evening after co-teaching in Munich, the two of us listening to a slow motion of a string quartet composed by Joseph Haydn. I remember a present he once gave to me, a book about Miles Davis. And I will always remember the quality of Harvey’s touch. Our talks – the talks of musicians – are perhaps not that interesting for bodyworkers. However, one aspect is worth mentioning: musicians’ hands are permanently trained to establish a better connection to certain areas inside the brain. Not only to the cerebellum, also to the limbic system. Playing an instrument helps to make finer and finer distinctions for coordination of movement and tactile perception. It helps one to use the two hands differently, it helps one to be passive (‘supportive’) with the palm of the hand while the fingers give an active stimulus. The philosopher Theodor W. Adorno once wrote: “Music is similar to language without being language itself.” The same may be true for human touch.

Peter Schwind Basic & Advanced Rolfing Instructor

A: It is extremely difficult to follow what Peter has written, because he has managed, as often in the past, to put subtle sensory experiences into words. Reading it has prompted me to write a few words from my side.

I believe there are a few important things from my life as a musician that have been of great value to me in my work as a Rolfer. Naturally, one of the most useful abilities is a sense of rhythm and timing. This has helped me enormously, in class and practice, to organize elements musically/rhythmically in a way that flows and makes sense.

In the tunes of the so-called ‘standard’ jazz repertoire of the twentieth century, in which I was deeply steeped, there exists a particular phenomena that I believe sees its reflection in the work of talented practitioners. Each of these standard tunes has a set melody and musical shape – a beginning, middle, and end, and the same number of bars – whoever plays it. So it is the same tune, but interpreted differently by different musicians in the way they improvise. But the tune is always the same. This ability to stay oriented within an agreed frame and goal, and yet find ways to improvise that stay true to that goal, is what transforms our Rolfing work from a set of techniques into an ever-evolving way of working.

Years ago, I spent hundreds of hours practicing the ability to play any rudiment leading with the left hand or the right. Now after more than thirty years I feel that I am beginning to bring this love of twohanded improvisation into my work and teaching, whilst still feeling I am playing the Rolfing ‘song’.

Harvey Burns Rolfing Instructor Rolf Movement® Instructor

A: Despite being raised in an urban environment, my upbringing included enough camping trips and excursions into nature to instill an early and deep appreciation for the phenomenal world. Growing up in the San Francisco Bay area also provided me an early introduction to meditation and contemplation. During a thirty-day meditation retreat in remote upcountry Maui at age nineteen, the serenity I felt when out in nature merged with meditation’s access to inner calm, and that forged into that “something” in my life that has richly cross-pollinated with my Rolfing practice.

Through meditation I discovered that the quality of presence I sought out and so valued in nature was available in my own inner nature. Over the years I’ve allowed myself to relax more into my practice (be it Rolfing SI or meditation). And eventually the efforts of trying so hard to achieve the goals of any given session or to sit still have given way toward a greater ease of being. Out of the various styles of meditation I’ve explored, the one I currently find most beneficial to my practice is the Tibetan Buddhist Nyingma tradition of brief and more frequent meditation. In both my meditation and Rolfing practice, allowing the dynamic of the breath to bridge the connection to gravity and ground serves to bring awareness out of the mind’s thoughts and into the realm of sensation in a relaxed and embodied way.

Sally Klemm Basic & Advanced Rolfing Instructor

A: In recent years I came across Janet Adler’s method of Authentic Movement, which seems to me an entrance into a journey that allows a balance of what I perceive as ‘my inner world’ and what surrounds me. Or – how I find a space in which I have permission to listen to the world and to myself at the same time. The link between her work and Rolfing SI is the question of what prevents structure and function from allowing more space, less ‘contraction’, more listening and curiosity, less concepts and more openness.

Working with clients it seems to me very often that we are moving on a line of balance between flexibility and stability. A prerequisite for ‘playing’ with this balance is a certain amount of structural ability – like physical elasticity, range of movement, and coordination of movement. Another is the willingness to open to change, to risk moving out of common patterns. This is meaningful not only for a process of integrating physical and coordinative structure, but also for perceptive and psychobiological balance. Authentic Movement allows movement practice in a very subtle and protected way, to experience and reflect upon perception and expression – in movement and verbally.

Jörg Ahrend-Löns Rolfing Instructor

A: When I look back, it seems everything I’ve done has influenced who I am as a Rolfer. And now, being a Rolfer influences how I am in the world today. From the start of my working career, I’ve always been placed in leadership roles. Even when I started out on yard crews at fourteen years old, I had my own crew. Out of high school I joined the military and in two years became a sergeant tank commander. When I came home, I worked for an engineering firm that made mechanical parts and again took on supervisory roles. All of this helped me gain experience about creating ‘rapport’ with people and how to work with others to get things accomplished.

On a personal level, having three daughters educated me on the differences between the mannerisms of both sexes. My friends and family have also shaped me. Being with loved ones as they struggle with challenges such as divorce and addiction deepened my understanding of the relationship between physical pain and mental anguish that is so often the case for our clients.

Participating in a lot of different of sports helped me understand the different ways clients relate to their bodies. Before I received Rolfing sessions, I treated my body as a tool that I could command to do things. After my Ten Series, I came to think of my physical body as a member of my team that needs to be understood, appreciated, and cared for.

My job as a mechanical manufacturing engineer helped me view things in three dimensions. Not only do I try to sense what’s on the side I can’t see, but also how it relates functionally to the side that is near me. Even now, when I look at someone in a session, I see lines, levers, and rotations.

My first experiences receiving bodywork were painful, humiliating, and ultimately educational. In my first massage, the therapist came in, uncovered half my body and jammed the sheets in places they didn’t belong to expose my legs — all without a word of warning. Naturally, my body went on alert and I tightened everywhere. Throughout the session, she wondered why my body was so “tight.” My second massage with a more experienced massage practitioner left me black and blue for a week. At the time, she thought that was what I needed, and I was proud of the fact that I could take it. These experiences have left an indelible mark on my consciousness and taught me what not to do.

All of these experiences have helped me define who I am as a practitioner and how I related to others. They influence my ‘ways of seeing’ and how I create boundaries and a safe space that responds to my clients’ needs. Thankfully, my experience as a Rolfer has also bled over into my personal life. Because of my Rolfing training, I better understand my body and my responsibility to work with it. It changed the way I relate to my friends and family, increasing my sensitivity to what they were going through. I am more compassionate. Lastly, it has made me more aware that processes in nature are different from manufactured parts. With guidance and education, profound change is possible; but natural change happens in its own time and sometimes it just takes a while. I am thankful for my life and my Rolfing career. It is a blessing that has helped me find happiness and joy on both the personal and professional levels. Thanks to all who have contributed, even that therapist who gave me a ‘wedgie’. I’ve learned a lot from all of you.

Larry Koliha Rolfing Instructor

A: I had been working in clinical psychology with a body-oriented approach when I encountered Rolfing SI. Discussions about the body-mind conjunction were omnipresent in my field, and the main thing of value I brought from it into Rolfing work was the notion of process. That understanding of the unfolding of one’s existential path combined with the physical, structural transformation of Rolfing SI gave me a particular viewpoint on Rolfing work and its timing. This also allowed me to move into an understanding of non-formulistic work, strategizing sessions with a view that is not simply structural, but also process-oriented. This understanding of both the ‘Recipe’ and process helps me with the psychobiological unfolding that occurs as the Rolfing process happens.

Pedro Prado Basic & Advanced Rolfing Instructor Rolf Movement Instructor

A: In 1985 Tom Wing was the lead teacher in my Phase 2 Basic Rolfing training. I loved watching him work. I describe it as watching a Native American mold a fine piece of pottery. He was incredibly perceptive. I now know that what I was experiencing in his work was a profound sense of presence. After the training ended, I asked what else he had studied besides Rolfing SI that contributed to how he worked. Tom’s only reply was that he studied a form of Asian energy healing. I remember him saying that if I go to the depth and essence of whatever healing modality I am practicing, I will discover the essence of many other disciplines. I tell this story to students who ask me the same question, because I have found his insight to be true in the progression of my own practice.

Rolfing SI has deep roots in osteopathy.What has influenced me most is studying and deepening into the three models of craniosacral therapy as articulated by William Sutherland, DO. A common and important thread between the three models is the significance of fluids. Most fascinating to me is working with the ways the whole body responds to these different fluid models. These three models are biomechanics, functional, and biodynamic. Simply and briefly, the biomechanical model is anatomy oriented / fascia focused; the functional model is based on fluid flow and fluctuation; the biodynamic model looks at how fluids ‘breathe’. Learning how to shift my perception between these models, and how I have to change within myself to perceive the different fluid expressions of each model, has contributed the most to further my understanding of what we are practicing and what I do as a Rolfer. It has been a fascinating exploration to learn how I can augment each model to organize a leg, balance the autonomics, untwist a bone, and enhance integration.

The biodynamic model describes embryology from an epigenetic perspective, which says that there is a blueprint (an intention) that animates the fluids in the embryo, which then influences genetic expression creating the details that we recognize as a human being. This epigenetic process of embryogenesis is a function that spatially organizes the shape and then the myriad forms within the embryo through fluid movements. This inherent function of the fluids continues into adulthood and throughout life. This process is always ‘working’ to keep spatial order and function as optimal as possible. And, most amazingly, we can perceive these fluid motions with our hands and augment their ordering function to achieve the goals of Rolfing SI.

Dr. Rolf also spoke of a blueprint. However the expression of the blueprint will frequently be limited and distorted by the compensations required from the injuries and disturbances of ‘life’. Our purpose as Rolfers is to help our client’s body to ‘remember’ its blueprint. As Rolfers, we have a system (the Recipe) that can reorganize the pieces. The changes we see in our clients (enhanced space, length, depth, groundedness, and ability to orient to the environment) are our confirmations that this system works. We order the anatomy so these qualities can appear. The Recipe provides a framework that helps remove the impediments to the embryonic intention so that the expression of the blueprint can emerge.

Science says that 70% of the adult body is fluid. Yet we study and work with the 30% we call anatomy. As recent studies have shown, healthy, ordered fascia has a highly fluid quality. The anatomy is suspended in the fluidic fascial web. By working with and enhancing the fluidic nature of fascia, I am able to help order the environment in which the anatomy lives and thus am able to affect the ordering of the anatomy in a much more comprehensive manner. Even though I am often consulting one of my anatomy books, when I work now, anatomy is not in the forefront of my perception. I have learned to inquire, to ‘hear’ with my touch:

• Is there a rock in the stream inhibiting connectivity or flow?

• What is the shape of this area? Does it fit with the rest?

• Is there fluid flow?

• Are there enough resources for the tissues to be capable of taking on a new form or pattern?

I am also listening for wholeness as expressed by inherent motion. By synchronizing with the fluids, we have the potential to experience the body as one entire whole. Wholeness then becomes an experience instead of a concept. To experience the body not as bones, muscles, and organs, not as its details, but as one comprehensive whole is an amazing thing!

As I continuously deepen into my explorations working with the fluids, instead of trying to change dysfunctions I now seek wholeness within the dysfunction. I listen for what is working, where the kernel of essential health is. I can then shift within myself to synchronize with inherent motion so the dysfunction can more readily reintegrate into the whole. To do this, I have to practice presence. I have to change within myself. I have to respect the inherent wisdom within my client. When I’m working with fascia, I am always looking for ease in the tissues. This makes my work much easier on my hands as I do much less pushing, focusing, and directing. I attend to the perceptions I receive from the fluid system. I work slowly and with patience, allowing the inherent health of the body to guide my work and to reorganize itself in relation to the intention of the blueprint. To practice this relationship with the fluid body and partner with its inborn function of order and ease has contributed the most to further my understanding of how I can help my clients and continue to progress as a Rolfer.

Thomas Walker Rolfing Instructor

A: There is evidence to suggest that we can consider Rolfing SI and Rolf Movement work as pathways to subcortical processes – brain processes below conscious awareness. Rolf’s work allows us to influence parts of ourselves that aren’t changed easily or directly; parts not changed by will power, imitation, or ‘figuring it out’. Subcortical processes aren’t the point of traditional education – education, for example, to acquire knowledge or exercises to strengthen muscles. Rolf education, by contrast, involves communication with parts of the brain that govern posture, coordination, and nervous system regulation. We can, for simplicity, call those parts of us the ‘movement brain’. The phrase is, among other things, less geeky. Then, a way to describe SI is that it improves conversation between the thinking brain and the movement brain. We call the result structural integration because behavior changes – how people navigate life, physically and psychologically, changes in ways that continue to deepen and integrate into life. But before any of this made any sense to me, I had to do some homework.

I grew up in an extended family comprised of, and networked with, social scientists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts. Thinking and talking about human behavior was a household pastime. That had some advantages probably. But, by high school, in the 1960s, I perceived troubling limits to ‘intellect-only’ ways to meet life’s deeper issues. I looked and stumbled into the Zen option. I found a Saturday morning class taught by one of Huston Smith’s students at MIT. (Smith was a professor of religion at MIT and had written the introduction to Kapleau’s Three Pillars of Zen.) The class introduced us to Zen, which involves a lot of sitting (zazen). The sitting crossed legged and staying perfectly still part was intimidating – as in, the hardest thing for me to even imagine doing. But, it also felt like maybe a good choice – maybe because it threatened everything familiar and everything for which I had some sense of competence. It turns out that even an overly intellectual, physically stiff, and moderately fearful person can participate . . . eventually.

Later, a takeaway gleaned from zazen – and before experiencing Rolfing SI – was that body posture is a precious and miraculous event. The body knows how to hold itself up, effortlessly. As the body stabilizes and finds support, there’s a platform for investigating being simply present, and also for gnarly questions –questions like, “Who am I?” or “How do I die?”; stuff like that. It’s ultimately movement-brain territory (below thought), at least after a while, because one’s struggle to think of answers fails. Something other than thinking has a chance to kick in.

Rolfing SI and Rolf Movement Integration offer people ingredients to access movement brain wisdom as well. In addition to an experience of plasticity in shape and movement, the work helps one distinguish what Jeffrey Maitland terms ‘pre-reflective’ experience from ‘thoughtabout’ experience. (Maitland has written lots of good stuff about the relation of Zen and SI.) When I started Rolfing practice, my go-to, for clients in distress, was to invite them to notice that when things are hard, thoughts don’t help much – and so I asked them, “What can you notice that isn’t thought?”

As I entered Practitioning (what we now call Phase 3) of Rolfing training, the universe was kind. Gael Rosewood assisted the course. (It was interesting to discover that Gael is Huston Smith’s daughter.) Gael offered a free Continuum class each morning before the ‘official day’ started. Continuum helped me reboot an “I can do this” feeling during training. Why? I would now describe the reason as that it promotes body security. Continuum helps one deal with psychological challenge – challenges like those that can occur in Rolfing trainings – in a movement-brain way. At times one needs better resources than thoughts and memories of former success – one really needs a quality of adequate body security. Body security helps one do the work, independent from the ideas about oneself – a way to step out of local identity and, at the same time, become more present. Specifically, Continuum offers ways to replenish the rich sense of body – a bodily sense of volume, density, and substance. The intensity of the (Rolfing) training, for me, had the effect of erasing that important sense of substance. It’s a movement-brain issue. We can’t will ourselves to feel our substance. But we can invite it, through playful improvisation in movement, imagination, breath, and sound expression, which, in turn, provokes sensory experience, and thus restores a welcome felt sense.

As the years of Rolfing practice unfolded, Continuum retreats helped differentiate my body maps. Better mapping permitted me to see/feel a more differentiated perception of client bodies. Freshly back from doing extended Continuum in a group, it was easier to see what was going on in people, and to better feel what to do about it. (Much later, while attending a Continuumbased workshop, a seasoned Zen teacher commented to me that it might be helpful for Zen teachers, in general, to do the sort of sensation integration and tracking that those workshops provide.)

Along similar lines – differentiation of maps feeding the movement brain – two other pieces fit this story: the experiential anatomy and the evolutionary movement curricula of Caryn McHose. After experiencing McHose teach and experiencing her private sessions, I came to appreciate other, perceptual, dimensions of SI. McHose’s early self study, drawing on, among other things, Mabel Todd’s The Thinking Body and, later, Rolf’s Rolfing: The Integration of Human Structures, led her to perceptionbased approaches for shifting body maps. Her work produced (to me) impressive change in how people experienced their bodies, and how they moved. It would take me some time to articulate what I felt and observed, or speculate about why this happens. I would say now, however, simply that experiential anatomy demonstrates that the body is, effectively, ‘hungry’ to feel and know itself better, to know its bony architecture and articular capacities – to differentiate its maps. Better information gets recognized as such. Evolutionary movement demonstrates that body image is very plastic; the body hungers for morphological plasticity. The body is responsive to invitations to embody non-human life forms and shapes. In fact, these ‘other’ life form shapes are implicit – embedded within human morphology and movement.

The lesson to me is that movementbrain (subcortical) potentials lie dormant until called upon – until called to come alive through introduction of imagery, playful improvisation, embodiment of anatomical detail, and creative expression. The integration of thinking and movementbrain parts of our beings has, historically, either been largely implicit within traditional culture or explicit when pursued by fringe individuals who chose to separate from the larger societal context to study and live as shamans, yogis, mystics, monks, etc. The domain of persons who choose to separate has been considered religious or spiritual in nature. Rolfing SI has, in its own history, had trouble finding adequate and appropriate acknowledgment of these esoteric or spiritual implications of the work. We now have secular opportunities to learn what was formerly less available, and scientifically validated ways to talk about those previously elusive realms.

We never fully capture wordless consciousness with words, or represent the totality of personal or intersubjective experience in standardized categories. Nonetheless, grounding the cortical/ subcortical integrative process in modern concepts from brain science and motor control helps allow our work to at least appear reasonable to a broader audience. When we support students to engage in processes that lead to deeper embodiment, their confidence improves. These sorts of processes foster practitioners who are better prepared; practitioners with critical skills for differentiating what they see, and for how they educate and find appropriate language to support a more varied spectrum of people within clinical practice.

The challenge remains: how do we translate the serendipitous processes many of us experienced over the past decades into user-friendly education that meets the contemporary student population for Rolfing SI and Rolf Movement Integration? Developing effective and accessible approaches to somatic education at the Rolf Institute®, education that fosters depth of embodiment, is a fertile investigation.

Kevin Frank Rolf Movement Instructor

A: I laugh because I remember my father shaking his head and telling me, “You’re smart but you’re all over the place.” I’d majored in psychology in college and spent my summers interning at psychiatric facilities. The plan was to get my doctorate in clinical psychology, because I wanted to work one-on-one helping people help themselves. But when the time came to apply for graduate school, something in my gut just didn’t sit right. I wanted to work with skill-building and personal growth, and I was getting ready to spend the next seven years in an environment that relied heavily on pharmaceuticals. Something told me I was going in the wrong direction, so I stopped and decided to work for a while.

Qualities that served me well in counseling and academia – being able to listen, communicate, problem-solve, and develop strategy – turned out to be ideally suited to business. I worked in several manufacturing environments and eventually returned to graduate school, but not as previously planned. I received a master’s degree in business administration and specialized in operations management and management science. Basically, I designed systems to work efficiently. During graduate school, I worked part-time teaching prospective graduate students how to raise their scores on entrance exams. I was surprised how much I liked to teach.

By the time I finished graduate school, I’d consulted in enough large organizations to realize that the corporate rat race wasn’t for me. Again, my stomach tightened and I knew I had to readjust my goals. I was starting to worry I’d never find my passion. For a couple of years, I wrote marketing materials for companies because I could work for myself. It wasn’t my dream but I liked to write and I learned that I enjoyed running a small business. Eventually, long hours at the computer created pain and my yoga teacher suggested I see a Rolfer. One session, and I was never the same. Before my Ten Series was complete, I was signed up for Basic Training.

Everything I did before shapes the Rolfing practitioner and teacher that I am. I often say to students that we each have to find the Rolfer in us. This work is about being authentic, and becoming a good Rolfer is a process of self-discovery. My dear father thought I was unfocused, but my body knew better. Thank goodness I listened each time I needed to adjust my plan.

Looking back, everything significant that I’ve done influences my perspective as a Rolfer. I remember what originally drew me to psychology and counseling – I wanted to work closely with others to help them find answers for themselves. I wanted to help people create meaningful change. During graduate school, I learned I had a knack for explaining things and that I could make complex ideas relatable. Business school taught me to think about systems and how to target small changes that had global effects (this is key to the way I think about our work). Rolfing SI combines all these loves: I get to help people find ways to enjoy their lives more; I get to teach clients and students everything from fascia science to somatic awareness; I get to work for myself; and I work to find ways for systems to run more efficiently. I just work with fascia instead of assembly lines.

Bethany Ward Rolfing InstructorCross-pollination of Rolfing® SI and Other Endeavors