The
body is designed to maintain itself. For most people physical issues don’t
arise or persist until after the age of 30 or so, unless there is some trauma,
athletic or otherwise. Then suddenly, as if out of the blue, a problem will
simply not go away and thus begins the search for eradication of the problem,
by exercise therapy, pill, knife, etc., any means necessary. Most do not realize that their circumstances
have changed, usually in two ways. First,
modern citizens, as they get older, adopt sedentary lifestyles. They simply
move and exercise less. Second, the quality of our tissue becomes more dense and less fluid. The result is a decrease
in the body’s ability to solve its own problems as it once did when the person
was in his teens or even in his twenties. Put in another way, the body has lost
its resourcefulness, its ability meet a challenge and solve it on its own. One might refer to it as a loss of
adaptability or better yet resiliency.
The
immediate result is pain and limitation. What was once normal movement is
compromised and the result is a chain reaction of compensations throughout the
body as it reorganizes itself around the problem to limit its effects. Sometimes, the secondary effects are so
dramatic that years later the underlying causes have actually been forgotten or
are barely considered in the overall scheme of body ailments.
The
aim of Rolfing® Structural Integration is to return the body to normal movement
so that it can then maintain itself. The goal is not to repair, the goal is to
restore. The more the body functions as it was intended, the more youthful it
becomes, and the more it “cures” itself. As one of my clients once commented to
me about his Rolfing® sessions, ”This is
as close as I am ever going to get to the Fountain of Youth.”
The
natural state of the body is movement. Even with a body at rest there is the
subtle and critical movement of breath.
Many organs hang by ligaments in bags, like the heart in the
pericardium, so that they are toned and kept healthy through the movements of
the body. This maintains their health and efficiency. Movement is life or as I
put to it to with my clients, “If you stop moving, they take your pulse!”
The
goal of Rolfing® is to move the client along a continuum from Pain to Performance.
Once the limitations to normal movement are reduced, increased movement
stimulates the body’s abilities to recover and repair. Also psychologically and emotionally, instead
of seeing one’s daily life through the prism of a problem or pain, the client
can begin to treat that problem as secondary and being entirely manageable and
get on with enjoying their life.
It
is completely normal for active bodies to encounter problems. What is not normal is the inability of the
body to return to its healthy state. The critical element in a Rolfing® session
is not how the client feels right after a session---whether there is pain or
not---but how the body reorganizes itself days and weeks later. Of greatest
interest is the report of effects resulting from an incident (I fell and hurt
my back!) and whether the client’s body had sufficient resiliency to restore
normal function without intervention by a practitioner.
I
also want to take note of clients who have unusual situations from an early
age, such as scoliosis, etc. The goals are still the same, to create balance
and to increase the body’s resiliency and powers to restore itself. Whether the
problems are recent or lifelong, Rolfing® counters the effects of gravity and
the stiffening effects of aging, rolling back the clock to a time when the body
was more fluid, more agile, more resilient.
