I recently re-watched a number of interviews with members of the faculty who work at the Rolf Institute in Colorado. The 'problem' with trying to understand Rolfing is that it does not work in a x,y,z system. While we use language to 'put it into words', it is essentially about waking up and re-finding wordless experiences. Often clients become less and less chatty as the series goes on - they turn off their analytical brain, stop trying to make it all something that can be packaged up and taken home in a box. Instead, they start really listening to what is actually there, not what they have seen in diagrams, remembered from GCSE Biology or heard from exercise classes. If I hold some tissue and ask you to move around it, then you will get new feedback from your own body and learn from it. Often people don't have any sense at all of a place in their body, they don't even know they have a 'there' there. But how do you explain that in words?
Once you have been Rolfed, the explanations make sense. Before you have been Rolfed, they don't. And if you try Rolfing for a single session, you may decide that it's not for you but you haven't had long enough to start getting the information going. So of course it doesn't make sense. Other people feel that it is just hitting the spot from the first moment that they walk in the room. Rolfing allows us all to be DIFFERENT. It celebrates that. We just want that to be comfortable for you and good for the body and the mind. Some clients feel better and less discomfort but don't really know why. Other clients can pinpoint what has been found and how much support and help it gives them, or what can now move that has not moved in years. And they can feel how movement builds on movement, and stillness/holding builds on stillness/holding, and that they are now waking up a system ( a Structure) which is simply 'better' for them both physically and emotionally.
We have to make an attempt to do marketing, though. And this video about Structural Aging from one of our most experienced tutors Valerie Berg is a pretty good place to start. Given that you have to start somewhere. Her description of a process in the structure and strategy of moving which leads some people to age fast and put excess effort into movement is a really accurate but accessible description of Rolfing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrGVlvYxCwM
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