The Advanced Training: An Opportunity to Deepen Our Understanding of the Subjective
Earlier in this series, Michael Salveson and Jeff Maitland addressed the educational value of the Advanced Training, describing the curriculum and stressing the goals of skill deepening and refinement and student empowerment. Michael explained how the Advanced Training enhances the students’ abilities to address the relationship between structure and the field that supports it; and […]
Letter to My Children
February 21, 1996 Dear Children, Two of you are barely six years old, my dear twins, Camille and Meredith; and Willie, you have just turned two. I have no idea when you will read this or be able to extract any meaning from it, but I do want you to know about someone who was […]
Creating Boundaries and a Margin of Safety for You and Your Clients
In the movie “I am Sam” starring Sean Penn there is a scene where a potential employer for this cognitively impaired character (Sam) asks him how he would deal with customers in his store. Sam’s response is “I will be friendly, but not too friendly.” And in that scene the cognitively limited protagonist establishes a […]
Ida Rolf and the Two Paradigms
The history of Ida Rolf’s early work in the field of biological chemistry, long before her creation of structural integration, has always been a very short story. A Ph.D. from Columbia, a decade of work at the Rockefeller Institute, a few papers published, and then she left the world of science, later taking a long, […]
Life on Land
Emilie Conrad has been my teacher for over thirty years. When I first met her, I recognized that she was pointing to a truth that was not so complicated, yet was obscured as a blind spot in our current culture. Her vision, for me, picked up where Ida P. Rolf’s left off. I saw movement […]
On Core (and Sleeve) – reprint
…In which a review of existing theories leads to yet another theory; that, too, is rejected in favor of the priority of tradition; and the essay proceeds to an appeal for a return to Ida Rolf’s original formulation. But this is discovered to be ambiguous; and the essay concludes, inconclusively, with speculation as to what […]
Visceral Patterns in Scoliosis
I have found a way of understanding scoliosis patterns that helps me to know how much help my work is going to be in solving these curvatures. There are different degrees of spinal curvatures we see. The more severe patterns, often classified as idiopathic or congenital, have a particular misalignment of the visceral organs that […]
The Passing of Ida Rolf
I had never laid eyes on Ida Rolf before that raw March 1979 Sunday afternoon when I visited her in a Pennsylvania nursing home. I had come to tape an interview. I had wanted to go directly to the source of the structural integration movement to report the original doctrine rather than someone’s paraphrase. She […]
Self-Care for Rolfers
Q: I’ve been practicing Rolfing for several years now, and was wondering if you could give me some advice regarding self-care. Areas that have come up for me include: minor aches and pains in my arms and hands that seems to be progressing a bit, taking on clients’ energy during sessions, and feeling drained at […]
SourcePoint Therapy and Its Implications for Rolfing Structural Integration
The SourcePoint Blueprint and “The Line” SourcePoint Therapy theory brings with it the powerful implication that the “vertical line,” Dr. Rolf’s “line of gravity,” is an actual energetic structure – an energetic organ with a function as vital to our being as breathing. Rolfers talk about “the Line” as an indicator of order; but it […]