On Saturday, March 5, 2016, I attended the Japan Rolfing Association (JRA) at the Lutheran Ichigaya Church. It is almost one year since I was certified as a Rolfer in Munich, Germany, on March 25, 2015.
In the morning, I was able to hear the talk of overseas Rolfing instructors (Carol Agneessens and Ray McCall) for a full two hours (9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.). It was also that they had come to Japan for the Advanced Training for Rolfers held up until the day before, but it became a precious opportunity.
Of the 124 Japanese Rolfers (as of March 5, 2016), 38 were participants. I was able to hear a talk about how Ida Rolf thought about Rolfing.
To summarize the content simply:
According to the Rolfer Emmett, when Ida Rolf sold the rights to Rolfing to the Rolf Institute (hereafter RI) in Boulder, in the U.S., in 1978, at the same time as she wrote into the contract a certain percentage of the instruction fee for teaching, she made a request to RI to establish three kinds of schools. A school covering the psychological part (California), a school covering the medical aspect (New York), and a school covering the spiritual aspect (Colorado). This means that Ida Rolf was also thinking about the importance of the emotional part and the spiritual part in Rolfing, beyond the physical aspect. Schools of this form were not realized, though…
Why did Ida Rolf emphasize a bodily approach like seitai? It is because the only thing that can be touched and contacted by hand is the physical part (“Only thing that I can get hands on is physical”).
As history advanced, the manual techniques of osteopathy’s craniosacral therapy and visceral manipulation entered Rolfing, and it became clear that the body has the ability to change of its own accord, even without actively intervening from this side.
It came to be understood that, for the touch of the hand as well, not only firm contact but also the touch of merely being there (To be present) is useful, and it also became clear that there is a contact by hand suited to each individual person.
With the range of touch also having widened, there was also an introduction of an episode that, whereas (apparently) a woman could not receive Rolfing instruction unless her weight was 160 pounds or more, ordinary women too came to be able to receive it.
Ida Rolf was also interested in the energetic aspect, and would ask one of her disciples to go find an energy spot in the mountains of Boulder where RI is and tell her the impression of sitting there; and she advised, for a client whose emotions were disturbed during class, that touching the solar plexus is calming. There were also cases where the person actually calmed down.
In this way, Ida Rolf was rich in knowledge and knew many things, but at first she reportedly thought of conveying the knowledge of Rolfing to physicians. However, for some reason, that did not go well, and ultimately it came to spread in the form of instructing manual laborers, such as cooks and cleaning staff, at the Esalen Institute.
While listening to the talk, we did pair work of touching a hand to the partner’s thigh. The first time was in a state of preparing nothing; the second time, in a way of bringing awareness to my own body, being aware of the center line of the body with space behind, and floating the hand while letting information come to the hand from the thigh. As I felt it, when the body was touched with the latter hand, I received the impression that the whole body changed and became organized.
At the end, I asked from my side to be told how Ida Rolf made the ten-session series, since it is not written in the literature. While stating that such things are not written in the literature and so are not known, the answer was that, since what she first taught orally was being taken home by students who stole the ideas, she came to prepare the ten-session format.
The thought was also introduced that this may include not only the marketing aspect of the ten-session format being easy to sell, but also a numerological way of thinking, as if each single number has meaning. It was also stated that, at first, it was called not Structural Integration but Body Rebalancing.
It was interesting that the point made was that, if anything, what should be asked is: what is it that is not Rolfing? Perhaps it may be something like a concern that the range that Rolfing covers has become wide.
As we talked about various things in this way, two hours passed quickly. I had the impression that it is important, from time to time, to hear from an instructor in this kind of form.