Dr. Ida P. Rolf´s 1976 Annual Meeting Message
OPENING REMARKS Greetings to you all – to rolfers, their families and their friends and our guests. I am happy to win the place of choice – early in the program to welcome you all, and to again have the privilege of greeting you, individually and collectively. Year by year I become more painfully aware […]
The Art of Rolfing
When it was first introduced in the early ’60s, structural integration – or rolfing, as it is more commonly known was considered a revolutionary method of aligning the body with gravity through direct, hands-on manipulation. Gradually developed and refined over several decades by Dr. Ida Rolf, a biochemical researcher at the Rockefeller Institute, rolfing quickly […]
External Rotation of the Femur
I would like to share with you some thoughts about “external rotation of the femur”. Jan Sultan clarified an important point for me in his description of “internal and external types”. His external type had a tension in the piriformis muscle of the external rotator group. The effect of a short piriformis is an internal […]
Stress, Stimulus Intensity Control, and the Structural Integration Technique
In recent years, important developments in the field of neurophysiology have led to major discoveries regarding the sensory and motor nervous systems. Computer techniques for analyzing brain waves have made possible new uses for the electroencephalogram in studies of sensory and perceptual functioning. A number of studies have indicated systematic relationships between electrophysiological, biochemical and […]
Health and Natural Law
On reading the appreciation by Dr. Rolf on the new edition of Dr. Henry Lindlahi?s Philosophy of Natural Therapeutics for which I am responsible, I have little to add. I would, however, like to make a new additional observations. The thing which I feel to be most important about this and other works of Lindlahr […]
Rolfing – This Body Therapy Has Gotten Gentler, More Subtle
Clay is just platelets of silica and alumina. Bodies are infinitely complex. But When Garrett Whitney Rolls a client, his fingers move through certain connective body tissue in a fashion that’s somewhat similar to how his hands once worked at a potter’s wheel. “You don’t poke. You move slowly and steadily through a substance, which […]
The Organ of Form: Towards a Theory of Biological Shape
What is shape? Living organisms have shape. This is so obvious a statement that we take it for granted and become oblivious of the fact that there is no adequate theory of living form and shape in contemporary biology. In this paper, when we employ a theory of shape we shall be concerned with not […]
Integrating Manual and Movement Therapy with Philosophical Counseling for Treatment of a Patient with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis: A Case Study that Explores the Principles of Holistic Intervention
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) is a progressive degenerative disease of the central nervous system that involves the motor neurons.(1,2) Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is also the most frequently occurring motor neuron disease among adults. The common early symptoms of ALS are weakness in the arm, leg, and bulbar musculature (ie, the […]
The First Journey
There was an old woman who maintained at the edge of the clearing on the foot of the mountain. Out of percept and open sky, she welded her wisdom of the everyday and the extraordinary. She was Indian, mostly some mix. She claimed the mountain was a still point around which all moving was done. […]
The Hundredth Monkey
The Japanese monkey, Macaca fuscata, has been observed in the wild for a period of over 30 years. In 1952, on the island of Koshima, scientists were providing monkeys with sweet potatoes dropped in the sand. The monkeys liked the taste of the raw sweet potatoes, but they found the dirt unpleasant. An 18-month-old female […]