Editor’s note: This article is presented as a personal and historical reflection rather
than a clinical or professional recommendation. The views expressed are those of
the author and arise from his lived experience within a specific lineage of somatic
and contemplative practice. Psychedelics occupy a complex and evolving place in
contemporary therapeutic, ethical, and legal discourse. We do not endorse the use
of illegal substances, nor do we advocate practices that fall outside established
professional scopes or regulatory frameworks. At the same time, we believe there is value
in thoughtfully examining how practitioners understand altered states, embodiment,
and transformation – particularly when these conversations are already occurring, often
implicitly, within the field. By publishing this piece, we aim to foster informed reflection
and dialogue, not consensus. Readers are encouraged to engage with the material
critically, with attention to personal responsibility, professional boundaries, and the
diverse contexts in which somatic work is practiced.
During the 1970s, as the work of Rolfing® Structural Integration began to take off, what drew the majority of students to the work of Ida Rolf, PhD (1896-1979) was her audacious and completely original suggestion that wellbeing and evolutionary awakening were a function of the body’s relationship to the gravitational field of the Earth. While she had been developing structural integration for decades, she was a strong fit with the contemporaneous birth of the human potential movement. Many of us who were there viewed Rolf’s work as pivotal to the awakening of our greatest human potential. Concurrently with this moment in time was the advent and availability of psychedelic substances. This article is about how psychedelics were central to many of us in exploring the work as a path not just of physical healing, but of evolutionary awakening in ourselves.
Out of the wellspring and headwaters that were the genius of Rolf, two great tributaries have sprung. The first is the celebrated and renowned hands-on work taught by Rolf. Regardless of which structural integration school we have attended, doing Rolf’s work means delivering the genius of fascia and gravity-informed manual therapy.
She taught in the 1970s an approach to touching bodies and a ten-session ‘Recipe’ of navigation that guides us as we bring more integrity to the random nature of the bodies that show up in our office. Today, numerous structural integration schools have sprung from Rolf’s original insights. While each school may have different approaches to structural integration work, they are also fundamentally similar. All structural integration schools are vocational training schools, not unlike any school that teaches a trade that you can take out into the world and earn a living with, and they all provide a foundational understanding of how to touch intelligently and help our clients experience ease in their bodies.
The second great tributary is the mystery school aspect of Rolf’s teachings, which, in my opinion, has been neglected, expunged from the paradigm, or given lip service by the large majority of structural integration vocational schools. Rolf wanted to be recognized as a teacher of evolutionary transformation, not just a teacher of biomechanics, and she left us with instructions on breathing and exploring upright balancing that guides us in our personal evolution just as clearly as her insgihts on how to touch bodies guide us in our work with clients. The notion of a mystery school, a term mostly associated with the many clandestine schools in ancient Greece, appealed to many of us as we began experiencing radical transformations of embodied consciousness through exploring her teachings on structure and breathing as encapsulated in her image of ‘The Line’.
Rolf’s vocational teachings give us a continual supply of tools and strategies to help heal our clients’ aches and pains. Accessing The Line reveals a path of practices that can initiate an altogether natural evolutionary transformation that allows people to experience deeper states of consciousness. It was clear to those of us who were fortunate to study with her personally that she wanted two things of us. First, she wanted us to learn how to touch bodies to help people in their journey from pain to ease, and second, she expected that we would engage in a personal journey to experience how an exploration of The Line could radically affect and alter one’s sense of embodied self.
Studying with Rolf
I was fortunate to have met and studied with Dr. Rolf in 1975. At that time, the predominant buzz around Rolfing sessions was not so much on how the hands-on work could relieve chronic pain, but on how it created a springboard for exploring evolved states:
“Today I hope that among you there are the kind of fish that will go out and bring in another school of fish . . . not to get their aches and pains taken out, not to have their symptoms removed, but that they may contribute to the understanding of energy in the human universe.”
– Dr. Ida Rolf, personal communication
What was clear to me from her first lecture was that she viewed the work that bore her name not as a quick fix but as a way of life that could lead to evolutionary awakening and that our guide on this way was The Line. She was clearly fascinated by the elegant, upright
structure of Egyptian Pharaonic statuary, its representations of the divine rulers, not as expressions of beautiful bodies but of the higher consciousness that emanated from a body so vertically aligned. She spoke of the statues as teaching tools for consciousness-raising directed toward the Egyptian people: work to bring greater vertical alignment into your body, and you, too, can experience the higher consciousness in which the gods and goddesses who rule the land abide.
When Rolf’s class was out for the week, some of us would head to the mountains, forests, or the seashore and explore how playing with The Line affected our condition of consciousness. And this brings me to what I really want to address in this article. Some of you may feel deeply resonant with what I’m about to share; others of you may feel irritated, but my personal experience and honest observation are that those of us who were exploring Lined states while taking psychedelic substances – cannabis, psilocybin, MDA, LSD; also referred to as entheogens (god-inducing) – were experiencing at times explosive personal awakenings that others of us not inclined to combining ‘Lined’ explorations with entheogens just weren’t having.
What was it that we were opening into?
I hesitate to use the phrase “altered states of consciousness” because the radical revelation of a far more expansive consciousness beyond the purely egoic sense of a separate self felt not altered but innately natural, even if awe-inducingly unfamiliar. It’s who I am behind who I think I am. Furthermore, because we really did have to let go of unnecessary tension in the body to access Lined states, these awakenings felt like the logical conclusion to a body drawn to working to free itself of unnecessary fascial holding.
This is my personal journey, and I share it as such – not as an endorsement of illegal drug use. More and more, the medical and therapeutic communities are seeing the value of psychedelic substances for some people in their healing journey. It is a good idea to seek medical and therapeutic support for these kinds of choices. And I endorse compassion when addressing people who struggle with addiction; they deserve to be treated medically and supported fully. What I’m talking about is light and moderate explorations, in safe and supported environments, to allow for a deepening of the experience of The Line. Follow the laws where you live, and in your professional life, stay within your scope of practice. What I discovered, I share with you here for your own contemplation.
An Unexpected Opening
In the teaching I do with meditation students, I emphasize two primary principles, and both of them come directly from Rolf. We could call them physiological hacks or somatic koans.
The first is her vision of upright verticality. Playing with upright balancing guides you to a sweet spot that feels as though it transforms your experience of gravity from a force against which you have to brace into a sea in which you metaphorically float instead. Rolf would say that a direct experience of The Line would allow a phenomenal thing to start happening. Because you can relax so many unnecessary tensions, what she called evolutionary energies that had long been suppressed would explode open and start moving through the body. And when that would occur, consciousness would be evolutionarily awakened.
Such an extraordinary statement! These evolutionary energies were extremely
powerful, and she directly linked the evolution of consciousness to their physical stimulation and liberation.
The Dance Begins
My first explosive awakening through The Line occurred about six months after I’d completed my initial Ten Series. I recall smoking a joint in the late afternoon and then walking down to the garden of the hundred-acre ranch I was caretaking. It was a beautiful moment. I began playing with this strange notion of The Line and the effortless balancing about which my Rolfer™ so passionately spoke. And, suddenly, it happened. I felt my body spontaneously shifting something in how it was standing, and began to feel a lightning start coursing through its entire length.
“Oh-my-God! This is what Dr. Rolf must be talking about!” I remember feeling elated.
And then my body erupted in energy. Powerful, explosive sensations started coming alive, and as they built in intensity, they began to move my body. The first thing I can recall, as the sensations kept building and blossoming, was that my left arm was lifted up in response. The first motion turned into the next, and then the next, and the next. It was just happening naturally, and everything just kept changing. I’d certainly never experienced anything even remotely like this before.
It felt like I was being led down through layers of my psyche: one moment a huge, blossoming glow that would morph into deep compression, both physically and emotionally, then release into an even brighter glow. And through it all, everything kept moving.
And then, about twenty minutes into the opening, I got scared. The awakening energy and the motions they created made their way up into my cranium, and very weird characters started expressing
twenty-four years old, out alone in the forest. What was occurring was powerful beyond anything I’d ever experienced, and I remember feeling a very real concern that maybe the release of these energies wasn’t such a good idea after all.
And so, I stopped it. Two things happened. The first was that I saw I could shut it down. “Okay, that’s good,” I thought. I’m not completely out of control and going crazy. The second was that, as soon as I stopped it and went back to normal, it felt so awful in comparison to what I’d been experiencing. I said to myself, “Here goes nothing,” and surrendered once again to the awakened energies and the movements they made.
Fifteen minutes later, it started slowing down. This was the beginning of what I’ve always called my dance, and I’ve pretty much kept surrendering to and exploring it ever since. Sometimes I do this standing, other times sitting upright in meditation posture. I know that many of you reading this have had similar experiences, but we don’t talk about them very much, do we?
Only many years later would I learn about the Subud Latihan, a spiritual practice that originated in Indonesia, in which the body starts making spontaneous movements and sounds that emerge from our inner being. It became clear to me what had spontaneously opened in me that day at the edge of the garden. There was talk about the Latihan amongst circa-1970s Rolfers, and I recall Emmett Hutchins (1934-2016), who was the teacher for my Rolfing training, speaking of his original Rolfer being a member of Subud.
And then there was the story I heard of Dr. Rolf meeting John G. Bennett (1897-1974), British academic and writer on psychology and spirituality. He was a student of P. D. Ouspensky (1878-1947), himself a student of the teacher of mystical awakening George I. Gurdjieff (1866-1877-1949). Bennett told Rolf that the first time he was opened to the Latihan, he finally had a direct experience of everything that Ouspensky had been talking about all those years.
I hadn’t known until recently, though, while viewing the beautiful tribute film, Dr. Ida Rolf – Mother of Fascia (Urbanczik 2026), that Rolf had officially joined Subud in England and would have personally been exploring the Latihan. And it makes sense to me how that had to influence her later vision of what actually happens while exploring The Line: the letting go of
tension and eruption of dormant, deeply buried, and very powerful energies are intimately accompanied by allowing spontaneous movements to occur throughout the body. Furthermore, you don’t get one without the other. The Line unleashes a healing force that causes motions to occur as it touches into and releases deep patterns of holding from the inside out in much the same way that our hands touch our clients’ bodies from the outside in.
The Breath as Body
The powerful breathing practice that I explore and teach is a companion and logical outcome to surrendering to Lined states. This comes directly from Rolf, although it took me at least fifteen years after hearing it from her before I really began to digest and have glimpses of what she was talking about.
Toward the end of my auditing class, the first phase of Rolfing training in the 1970s, there was much discussion about the evolved human, and someone asked her the question of how the evolved human would breathe. Her response was that, because the body could deeply relax, it no longer had to brace itself against gravity, the contraction of the diaphragm during inhalation would generate a force that would transmit motion through every joint of the body, including the sutures of the skull and joints between the small bones in the feet!
Many years later, I came across the instructions on breathing from the Satipatthana Sutta, an early Pali text whose words are ascribed by many scholars to the historical Buddha himself. While the initial instruction is simply to remain aware of the breath at the front of the body (the classical foundation of mindfulness training), the culminating instruction (which, interestingly, virtually no one in the Buddhist world goes anywhere near) tells us not just to watch the breath at the front of the body but to breathe through the whole body.
Rolf’s vision was that the force of breath could move through a Lined body, not unlike how a wave moves through a body of water. Buddha’s culminating instruction on breathing described exactly the same thing. And what gets doubly fascinating is that while the Buddha’s opening instruction to focus awareness on the breath is primarily a mental exercise, the culminating instruction describes an entirely somatic practice, which is why I think the mind-focused orientation of contemporary Buddhism has so many challenges in understanding how to access it.
The culminating instruction doesn’t even mention the mind or awareness. Buddha isn’t saying: as you breathe in, be aware that you’re breathing through the whole body. He’s saying just figure it out for yourself how such a breath can occur. Feel the inhalation touch into and stimulate every cell of the body while expanding the entire body as well. It’s like filling a balloon and then emptying it on the exhalation. Just do this, the Buddha seems to be saying, over and over and over again, and experience what starts happening when you do. Just keep breathing like this, and the transformation of consciousness happens on its own.
A dear friend and fellow Rolfer, Tom Pathe, who trained a year before me, heard Dr. Rolf express the same sentiment but in a far more lyrical way:
The body is something wrapped around the breath;
Let the wraps flow freely like silk scarves.
This little phrase has become my go-to koan to teach meditation students how this awakened breath works. Let every breath, like an amoeba, expand through the flesh and sensations of the entire body on the inhalation and retract through the exhalation, relaxing everywhere. The body stays in constant, altogether natural motion that never comes to a standstill or sits still, and deep holding patterns embedded in the body’s tissues start to let go.
We often associate wraps with Egyptian mummies: hardened, solid, and unmoving. When I conceive of the body as something wrapped around breath, not like a mummy wrap but like silk scarves, I’m guided to relax tension everywhere as I feel an expansion and retraction of the breath throughout my entire body, and it gives a clearer understanding of what the Buddha was telling us and why.
Entheogens as Catalyst
Let’s get back to the observation that, for some people, psychedelics can radically accelerate the awakening down through the layers of self to what Rolf visioned as an evolved condition of consciousness. Again, you may be pleased or annoyed by what I’m about to say, but both of the above practices – allowing spontaneous motions while exploring the dance of upright balancing and breathing through the whole body – appear to be powerfully accelerated when you explore them while taking some kind of entheogen. My preference is for a small amount of cannabis, and at times, psilocybin (a naturally occurring psychedelic compound produced by several species of fungi) or LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide, commonly known as ‘acid’, is a potent synthetic hallucinogen).
Many of us have experienced these substances as powerfully healing on their own. What I’m talking about isn’t just about taking the substance; I’m not talking about abusing substances, and some people should not take psychedelics for their health and wellness. Talk with your doctor about these decisions. The practice I’m describing explores the koans of The Line with moderate use of the substance for support.
Over the course of centuries, as Buddhism migrated to new territories with new spiritual worldviews, its practices would naturally change and evolve. The gentle Chinese monks sailed to Japan, where they encountered the samurai and Zen, becoming fierce. The teachers from Northern India climb the Himalayas onto the Tibetan Plateau, where they encounter the shamanistic and animistic culture of the Bon-po, the indigenous people of Tibet, and the teachings of what has become Tibetan Buddhism far more closely resemble the practices of the Bon-po than what the Buddha was teaching so many centuries earlier.
The teachings are on the move again, and this time they are clearly coming to the West. Looking back, as I near my ninth (!) decade on the planet, I can cite two homegrown, explosively spiritual events that have occurred in the culture into which I was born. These, I believe, need to find a place in the creation of a uniquely Western form of practice. One, rave culture, electronic dance music parties where everyone is moving, and second, the advent and availability of psychedelics. For me, both are key to the evolution of embodied consciousness that occurs for someone exploring Dr. Rolf’s ultimate koan: The Line.
Reclaiming the Mystery School
Over the decades, the fascination with the transformational Line that permeated my auditing class with Dr. Rolf appears to have taken a distant seat to our focus on helping people overcome their aches and pains through the hands-on work. I certainly have no problem with this and, to this day, love getting regular work. It supports the practices on awakening I’ve been speaking of.
In thinking about how the focus on Rolf’s legacy has been largely consolidated on the genius of the hands-on work, I’ve come to a conclusion that there’s also a natural, and legitimate, reason for this shift away from much interest in exploring Lined states. In our attempts to be viewed ever more professionally as being able to provide relief, we’ve had to conform our standards of practice to those of a professional culture that still looks on psychedelics as decidedly off-limits to how we present our work and provide services to our clients.
Psychologists and medical practitioners are currently challenging the taboo against entheogens, and many research groups are investigating the potential of psychedelics as medicine (Stringer 2024). Courageous psychotherapists are seeing rapid and profound shifts in many of their clients who are grappling with issues like post-traumatic stress disorder, addictions, and major depressive disorders through professionally supervised sessions that include entheogens.
To my Rolfing community, let me challenge us and publicly voice what to me is obvious: There is an extraordinary place for these substances in the big picture of what constitutes Rolfing Structural Integration. Furthermore, without the support of entheogenic substances, the eruptive awakening that I’ve been describing doesn’t appear to occur. In my opinion, exploring The Line without psychedelics is . . . meh.
When I was recently asked if I’d undergo the transformation that occurs while exploring Lined states without the support of an entheogen, my honest and immediate answer was, “I can’t. It doesn’t work for me without the psychedelic catalyzing. Simple as that.” I’m not saying that this is for everyone. People need to make informed choices about their therapeutic experiences, and for many, this kind of awakening is neither interesting nor appropriate. But this awakening does exist, it’s very real, and it’s a direct product of exploring Rolf’s vision of The Line. Even if neglected, it’s an integral and literally extraordinary part of our heritage, and for that reason alone, it warrants our committed exploration.
Many of us in the greater structural integration world have been drawn to spiritual practices outside of the religious traditions we were born into. We end up exploring things like Buddhist dharma (vipassana, Zen, the Vajrayana), Hindu yoga, martial arts, and Sufism. What I want to stress here and leave with you is this:
Dr. Rolf has given us the keys to transformation. As students in the school of philosophical inquiry that Rolf created, we’re the rightful custodians of this technology for profound spiritual awakening. And, if we don’t claim ownership of these teachings, they will either be lost or appropriated by someone else.
I’ve benefited so much from my exposure to all the above-mentioned teachings. Over the decades, as I learned to shun Buddhism’s shadows in order to experience its light, I’ve had to inject into them Dr. Rolf’s two great principles of transformation – playing with the dance of upright balancing while opening to a breath that can be felt through the entire body – while simultaneously letting go of the shame that these traditional practices have directed toward the homegrown, explosively spiritual events of my lifetime. The mix continues to be extraordinary.
Will Johnson has been a Certified Rolfer® since 1976. He and his wife, Coco, run the Bambu Hueco Retreat Center in Costa Rica, where they invite serious students to come and explore the practices presented in this article. Johnson is the author of sixteen books, two of which have won awards as Best Spiritual Book of the Year, all of which speak of the body’s role in spiritual awakening and address The Line as the secret door to that awakening. His website is www.embodiment.net.You may contact him at [email protected].
References
Stringer, Heather. 2024. The emergence of psychedelics as medicine: A look at the potential of MDMA, ketamine, and psilocybin to help people with treatmentresistent mental health conditions. Monitor on Psychology 55(4) Available from https://www.apa.org/monitor/2024/06/psychedelics-as-medicine.
Urganczik, Ales. 2026. Ida Rolf – Mother of fascia. Available from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt33254981/.
Keywords
Rolfing Structural Integration; Ida Rolf; The Line; entheogens; psychedelics; psilocybin; embodied consciousness; somatic practice; evolutionary awakening; spontaneous movement; breathwork; mystery school. ■
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