Introduction
I wrote about how I first encountered Rolfing in “How I Found Rolfing — Searching for a Way to Deepen the Postures.”
After meeting Akinori Ito on December 23, 2013, I received my first session the following week, on December 29. From there, I continued at roughly one session per week, completing all ten sessions on March 2, 2014.
Working with fascia and exploring how unnecessary tension could be released brought a number of changes that made my body feel easier to inhabit.
Looking back on those ten sessions, three discoveries stand out.
The Rolfing Ten Series is organized into three broad stages. Sessions one through three work with the Sleeve — including breathing, the area below the knees, and the sides of the body. Sessions four through seven move into the Core, working with areas such as the pelvic floor and adductors, the abdomen and psoas, the sacrum, spine and external rotators, and finally the neck and head. The last three sessions focus on Integration.
Breathing Became Three-Dimensional
The first and clearest change was in my breathing.
Through yoga, I had learned to move slowly and deeply into postures while coordinating movement with the breath. But after beginning Rolfing, I noticed something I had not been aware of before: I could feel my breath expanding into the back of my body.
Until then, I had experienced breathing mainly in two dimensions — up and down, and from side to side. Now I was beginning to sense a third dimension: front to back.
As this dimension became available, my breathing felt deeper and my body became more flexible. Backbending postures that had previously been difficult began to open more easily.
Kazuma Ito, in his Japanese book Ago o Hikeba Karada ga Kawaru, describes three patterns of breathing and associates each with different effects:
- Up-and-down breathing, which he describes as potentially contributing to tension in the jaw and shoulders.
- Side-to-side breathing, which he associates with movement and the ability to maintain intra-abdominal pressure.
- Front-to-back breathing, which he associates with parasympathetic activity and a calmer state of mind.
Seen through this framework, discovering the front-to-back dimension of breathing felt significant to me. It offered one possible explanation for the sense of relaxation and increased freedom I was experiencing.
The Body Seemed to Change Before My Thinking Caught Up
The second discovery concerned the relationship between bodily experience and conscious thought.
During the sessions, I often had the impression that my body recognized a change before I could understand it intellectually.
Something could immediately feel easier or somehow “right,” while my thinking mind remained behind, trying to understand what had happened.
This became particularly noticeable during the Core sessions. At times, unexpected emotions or responses would arise while deeper areas of the body were being worked with. My immediate bodily response and my intellectual interpretation of that response did not necessarily occur at the same speed.
At the time, I wondered whether the mind needed additional time to make sense of changes that had first been experienced bodily — interpreting them, fitting them into an existing framework, and eventually putting them into words.
This was only my own hypothesis, but the experience itself was striking.
I had tended to assume that understanding comes first and the body follows. Rolfing suggested another possibility: sometimes bodily experience changes first, and conscious understanding comes afterward.
Discovering how strongly the mind can hold on to familiar patterns, even after the body has begun to experience something different, was one of the most surprising parts of the process.
That the brain proves surprisingly conservative when the approach comes from the body and the thinking shifts afterward was both a surprise and a fresh discovery.
A New Sense of Connection Through the Whole Body
The third discovery was a growing sense of connection between the upper and lower body.
As the Ten Series moved toward Integration, this connection became increasingly tangible.
I began to develop a clearer bodily sense of where effort was necessary and where it could be released. Rather than experiencing different parts of the body as working independently, movement began to feel more coordinated and interconnected.
I noticed this most clearly when walking.
Previously, my neck, chest, pelvis, knees, and feet had seemed to operate almost as separate parts. Now I could feel movement passing through the hip joints and knees while the chest and neck participated as part of the same whole.
Walking began to feel less like moving individual parts and more like moving as one body.
These were only my first discoveries through Rolfing.
As I continue to study the work, I expect my understanding of these experiences to change and deepen. For now, I want to continue paying attention to my own body and move forward one step at a time.