With the sleeve released over the first three sessions, session 4 takes the work inward. What it starts with is the part of you that is touching the floor.
Where Session 4 Sits
Sessions 4 through 7 make up the second phase, the one that threads the medial line. Session 4 is the way in.
What it works with is the route that runs from the contact surfaces — the soles of the feet and the sit bones — through the adductors to the pelvic floor. Rather than touching the medial line itself, this session builds the footing that lets the line come through.
In the training, the theme of this session was the medial line: the line along which force travels from the floor to the center and back again. It is also the session where the work moves from the container built over the first three sessions to what the container holds.
Why these two — the adductors and the pelvic floor — I have written about separately. The medial line that runs through the upper body as a series of bones disappears in the lower body. These two muscles carry what the bones would have carried.
- “Karada” Once Meant a Corpse — The Japanese View of the Body, and Rolfing
- The Core Sessions: Working Beneath the Sleeve
Starting Where the Body Meets the Floor
Why the pelvic floor?
Because it sits at the center of the body, where the weight coming down and the support coming up meet. Without a felt sense of it, the medial line has nothing under it. The psoas and the sacrum only mean something once there is a floor beneath them.
And the pelvic floor cannot be touched directly. It is deep, and difficult to move at will. So the work comes in from the contact surfaces instead. The soles and the sit bones are among the few places where you are actually in contact with the ground, and attention travels from there, through the adductors, until it arrives at the pelvic floor.
Part of what session 2 was doing was opening the entrance to that route.
What the Adductors Have Been Holding
Whether your weight falls toward the inside or the outside of your feet changes how the pelvic floor can work.
Fall outward and the legs support you along their outer edges, and the route to the pelvic floor is broken. Fall inward and the adductors may be short, pulling the pelvic floor down with them. Either way, it is the support that person was able to find.
Adductor tension is often what remains from a period when the legs needed to stay closed. A way of sitting, a way of moving, a stretch of time spent braced. No muscle shortens without a reason.
There are also several ways this area drops out of awareness.
When the viscera are distended, the legs tend to take the weight along their outer edges. The more the outside works, the less the inner route is used.
The same thing happens when the abdominals are trained hard. A firm abdominal wall leaves the viscera behind it less free to move, and the pelvic floor takes up what that movement no longer does.
Where tension remains at depth, the psoas tends to stay short. The psoas connects to the pelvic floor, so sensation past that point does not arrive either.
And then sitting. Long hours with the legs crossed give neither the adductors nor the pelvic floor anything to do.
Session 4 is not about removing that tension, but about arranging things so that support is available without it.
An Area Rarely Touched
What session 4 works with runs from the inside of the legs to the floor of the pelvis.
For many people this is territory that rarely gets touched. Some have never thought about it; some have never felt it as anything at all. Being touched there is, in itself, an event.
So the pace changes. The work goes in a little at a time, waits, watches how the body answers. The autonomic nervous system can respond, which means the speed of the touch itself has to change. Questions of boundary can surface. More than in any other session, this one depends on the container holding.
It also helps to say out loud where in the process we are. That the sleeve is finished and the core has begun; that responses may differ from what came before. Knowing what to expect changes how the body receives it.
As support increases, old patterns become possible to let go of. Whether they are let go of is the body’s decision. The practitioner arranges the conditions and checks that the new way of supporting is actually working.
What Is Looked At as the Session Opens
In the Body Reading at the start — watching how you stand and walk — the points include:
- Whether your weight sits on the inside or the outside of your feet
- Whether the knees and the hips point the same way
- Whether you sit on your sit bones, or drop back toward the tailbone
- Where the pelvic floor sits, and whether it moves with the breath
- Whether adductor tension reaches as far as the pelvic floor
Putting a hand under the sit bones and asking someone to sit again will often change things on the spot. The pelvic floor responds the moment attention gets there.
What the Body Takes In During This Session
Describing session 4 as releasing the adductors or working the pelvic floor moves away from what is actually happening.
What is taken in, as I understand it, is the information that there is support below. Your feet and sit bones are in contact with the floor, and there is a route from there to the center. When that information arrives, a body that had been holding itself up from above starts reorganizing toward being held from below.
The sense of having your feet on the ground appears as part of that reorganization. It is not something you can produce by trying.
Something Shifts About Where You Are
Session 4 is often described as the one with the largest inner change.
When the places that touch the floor become sensible, your sense of where you are changes. Some people say the place they are standing has settled. The conversation is about the body, and it turns into a conversation about location.
I cannot fully explain why. But it is reported often, and the quality of the change is different from the breath and the feet.
It shows on the movement side as well. There was a period when a backbend in yoga brought pain into my lower back and I could go no further. After session 4 it opened up at once. It was not that the strength to arch had increased. With support arriving from below, there was less need to arch from the lower back.
This is a term from another system, but in yoga and in the Indian traditions this area is said to be the seat of the root chakra, a place bound up with trust in oneself. It is not a notion that comes out of Rolfing theory, so I will not lay one over the other — but the direction the two point in seems close.
What Counts as Organized
Whether the pelvic floor has released is not, in itself, the result.
What is looked at as the session closes is the relationship with gravity. Does the force returning from the floor travel through the feet and sit bones up into the pelvic floor? Is gravity working as a resource that supports from below rather than a weight that presses down?
After the Session
- The inside edge of the foot becomes a clearer place of support in standing
- A sense of floor appears at the bottom of the pelvis
- Breathing reaches down into the pelvis
- Sitting rests on the sit bones
- Something about where you are seems to have settled
On to the Next Session
With a way in from the contact surfaces to the center, the front of the spine comes next. Session 5 works with the psoas and the movement of the viscera.
- Session 5: The Psoas and the Viscera — The Front of the Spine
- The Core Sessions: Working Beneath the Sleeve
- What Is Rolfing’s Ten-Series? — Three Phases in Which the Body Changes, and the Flow of Each Session
- A Glossary for Reading the Ten Sessions
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Hidefumi Otsuka, Ph.D. | Certified Advanced Rolfer™ / Rolf Movement® Practitioner Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Medicine, the University of Tokyo. After eleven years in medical marketing at a foreign pharmaceutical company, he has offered Rolfing® sessions in Shibuya, Tokyo since 2015, working under the theme of integrating science and practice.