Where Rolf Movement Came From — A History from Ida Rolf to the Present

Introduction

Rolf Movement is a course of training set apart from the hands-on work of Rolfing, approaching the body from the side of movement. It is a certification taken after you are already a Rolfer, over a further thirty days. I took mine in Europe between 2017 and 2019.

I wanted to write down, in one piece, where this course came from.

It began in 2018. Partway through my own training, fellow Rolfers asked me to share what I had learned so far, and I ran seminars twice, in February and in March. I talked about the history then too, but it was stitched together from the materials I had to hand and from what I had been told, and much of it I had not been able to verify.

Afterward I got hold of several primary sources. An interview with two people who carried the early years of Rolf Movement; an essay one of them wrote in 1982; two interviews with Hubert Godard; the published materials of the various associations. Reading them, I found that a number of the years and the numbers of people I had been quoting were wrong.

This article is the result of setting those sources against one another and writing it again.

The system side of Rolf Movement — how you actually obtain the certification — is written up separately (How the Rolf Movement Practitioner Certification Works — The 30-Day Requirement and Choosing Where to Train). My own record of taking it is separate again (On the Path to Becoming a European Rolf Movement Practitioner — The Road to Certification). This article deals only with the history.

One caution. The history of this field is told differently by different people. The years, the numbers, who did what. As you will see below, Kevin Frank, who wrote one of the primary sources, states himself that his account is not the final word on who did what. Please read this article in the same spirit. The sources are named in the text and listed at the end.

The Era Ida Rolf Lived In

Ida Rolf was born in New York in 1896. She was a biochemist who held a position at the Rockefeller Institute, and she took her doctorate at Columbia University. Her career as a researcher, and how she came from there to the body, I have written about separately (Ida Rolf, the Scientist — Why a Rockefeller Institute Biochemist Reached for the Body).

What I want to look at here is the era she lived in. That is the part that bears on how this course came about.

Medicine That Looked at the Whole Was Close at Hand

In the United States of that time, from the nineteenth century into the early twentieth, irregular and folk medicine was the mainstream. Physicians had neither power nor wealth, and their standing was low. Medical education was not conducted in graduate schools of medicine, and you could become a physician by declaring yourself one. Whether to take a treatment was, in the main, the patient’s choice.

One alternative widely established was homeopathy. Schools were founded in the United States during the nineteenth century, and by the beginning of the twentieth there were a considerable number of homeopathic medical colleges, hospitals, and pharmacies.

Then in 1916, Ida was kicked by a horse and nearly died. What saved her was osteopathic treatment.

Homeopathy and osteopathy both stand on the position of looking at a person’s whole condition rather than chasing the symptom itself. In the United States of that era, that was not the exception. Someone trained to break things down into their elements would later turn toward the structure of the whole — and before that turn, medicine that looked at the whole was close at hand.

I am not going to claim that her way of seeing came from this. She was simply someone who lived inside that environment.

On the relationship between Rolfing and scientific evaluation, I have written a separate piece (Is Rolfing Pseudoscience? — Understanding Rolfing Through the Science of the Body: The Latest Fascia Research and a PhD’s Perspective on the Evidence).

When She Encountered Yoga

In 1920, Ida studied hatha yoga with Pierre Bernard, a teacher of tantric yoga living in New York.

Knowing where yoga stood at that time makes this surprising. Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888–1989), who had a large influence on modern yoga, was training in the Himalayas from around 1916 to 1923. In the India of those years, people who practiced yoga held low social standing and were closer to street performers.

In that era, she was studying hatha yoga in New York.

The Man Who Joined Mind and Body, and How He Ended

In the latter half of the 1920s, Ida went to Europe. This was before the United States became a scientific power, when the countries of Europe were at their height.

From the nineteenth into the twentieth century, contemporary thought and psychology swept through Europe.

Ida may have encountered Wilhelm Reich’s (1897–1957) idea of muscular armor. Reich, a psychoanalyst, noticed that clients tensed their muscles to hold in sorrow, anger, and fear so they would not have to feel them. He then worked directly on the body to release that tension, and got results.

During Reich’s stay in the United States, from 1939 to 1957, Ida took in his thinking and began to bring the relationship between body and mind into her own work.

Reich, meanwhile, was charged with contempt of court after the Second World War for failing to comply with an injunction concerning a device he had developed. He was imprisoned and died in prison. Partly because of this, it is said, Ida became wary of speaking about the invisible or the spiritual, and rarely spoke of anything outside the scientific.

This is worth holding on to. The way into the relationship between mind and body was opened, but on how to speak about it, the founder herself turned toward silence. How later generations struggled with this subject is a matter for a later section.

From around 1940 Ida began doing bodywork. By around 1950 she was teaching chiropractors and osteopaths. At the time it was called Structural Dynamics.

What Was Missing

From here on is the prehistory of Rolf Movement.

Kevin Frank, a Rolf Movement Instructor, offers one reading of how this work began. In the passage below, IPR is Ida P. Rolf.

Ida P. Rolf (IPR) synthesized a new way to look at the human body; her method evoked lasting shifts in economy of function and, in particular, changes that manifest in the way we stand and move through space, with consequent shifts in psyche and emotion. At the same time, she had a hard time teaching what she knew because there was no pre-existing language for it. There were few people, including trained dancers, who could recognize or define what ‘normal’ looks like, let alone tell you the particular change of coordination that had taken place. A new language was needed, as well as a new set of hallmarks for normal. This is still a work in progress. IPR was additionally hampered because she was not able to demonstrate what she was looking for with her own body. She needed others to do that. After speaking with Heather and Gael, I got the impression that Rolf Movement work started as an answer to these missing dimensions within Dr. Rolf’s project.

Movement Was Not Added Later

There is an essay written in 1982 by Heather Wing, who carried the early years.

Ida Rolf began developing Rolfing in the early 1940s, and from the start she worked with movement as much as with manipulation. Even as Rolfing took shape, she kept saying that this was an educational process. When she began formally training practitioners, she first defined the goals of each session in the language of movement. And she made a set of balancing exercises for holding the changes after Rolfing, which she taught to every practitioner who graduated.

Movement was not something added on afterward. What was missing was the language for conveying it.

Dorothy Nolte and Structural Awareness

The first person to try to fill that gap was Dorothy Nolte.

Dorothy Louise Law Nolte (1924–2005) was born in Los Angeles, the only daughter of an electrical engineer. As a teenager she volunteered at a hospital and found that she liked listening to patients’ troubles. That, she said, was what started her toward the work she later did.

She trained as a family counselor, but she was not someone who stayed in one occupation. She ran courses for parents, founded a kindergarten, became a childbirth educator, and spread Rolfing. The record of the early years says she came from nursing and human relations and became a Rolfer in the late 1950s. It reads less as a Rolfer reaching over into education, and more as someone already on the education side passing through Rolfing.

While giving sessions, she noticed that clients wanted something they could do for themselves afterward. Working closely with Ida Rolf, she developed Ida Rolf’s movement work into an independent educational body of work. It was named Structural Awareness, and she began teaching it in 1962.

That the word “awareness” is in the name is interesting. Rolfing works on the fascia from the standpoint of how, starting from the structure of the body, awareness inside the body can be raised. That thinking is inside this word.

In the training I took in Germany, the emphasis was indeed on how you move the body slowly and carefully, and on how you attend to the body in order to think with the body rather than with the head. A name given sixty years ago is still alive in it.

Dorothy’s work passed to Rachel Harris, who studied with her for many years. Research evaluating the effects of Structural Awareness, and self-study materials, have been produced.

A Poem Written in a Kitchen

Dorothy has another side.

In 1954, pressed by a deadline for the family page of a Southern California weekly, she wrote a poem in her kitchen. Its theme was that children learn what they live. She sent it in and then, she said, forgot about it. That poem has been translated into more than thirty-five languages.

In 1998 she published a book based on it. Her coauthor was Rachel Harris — the same person who carried on Structural Awareness.

The person at the first branch on the movement side was someone who, as a teenager, found she liked listening to patients, and who wrote words about how children grow in her kitchen.

To Esalen Institute

In 1965, Dorothy attended a seminar with Frederick (Fritz) Perls (1897–1970), of Gestalt therapy, at the Esalen Institute (The Esalen Institute (1): Psychology and Bodywork).

There she gave a Rolfing session to Perls, who had heart trouble. Impressed, Perls invited the founder, Ida, to Esalen.

With Ida teaching at Esalen, Rolfing spread across the United States. On the character of Esalen as a place, Jeffrey J. Kripal’s Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion goes into detail.

One More Person Invited – Moshe Feldenkrais

There was one more person Ida Rolf invited to Esalen: Moshe Feldenkrais.

The two were not at odds; they received each other’s work. This is something I heard directly from the Rolfer Sharon Wheeler (Bone Work – Sharon Wheeler (3) — Through the Third Day: What Sharon Said (1)).

ERA gives a similar explanation of the relationship in its material on Rolf Movement. Ida Rolf and Feldenkrais knew and valued each other. They discussed their respective approaches — Ida Rolf’s Structural Integration and Feldenkrais’s Functional Integration.

A letter Feldenkrais wrote to Ida Rolf in 1976 is also quoted. In the case of human beings, structure and function are meaningless one without the other; so when you integrate structure, you are improving functioning.

And ERA writes this about how Rolf Movement came about. Ida Rolf asked how the body could be used, taking into account the three-dimensional network of fascia. The goal was to stand upright naturally, supported by gravity. Her exchanges with Moshe Feldenkrais and with many movement researchers of the time influenced the development of her Rolf Movement approach.

Work that approaches the body from the side of movement had gathered in one place in this period. Rolf Movement did not grow only inside Rolfing.

Judith Aston

Next comes Judith Aston.

She was a dancer and a teacher, and a movement facilitator in Gestalt therapy. She became a Rolfer in the late 1960s.

According to Gael Rosewood, because Judith was small and a dancer, Ida Rolf asked Dorothy to instruct her. At the time Judith and Gael were in a training that covered only work with children, and the two of them moved to a separate room to be taught by Dorothy. Ida Rolf loved Judith’s ability to imitate the movement patterns being observed.

Dorothy came before Judith. That order is worth holding on to.

In 1971, Judith was asked by Ida Rolf to develop the movement work, and ran the first movement training. From the end of that same year she began training teachers, called Patterners. The name of the body of work at this point was Rolf/Aston Structural Patterning. The name Rolf Movement did not yet exist.

There Were No Defined Words

Gael describes the early years this way. The movement work suffered from a lack of defined terms and language. So people experimented. The early pioneers each had deep experience, and each had their own reading of what should be called forth.

On top of that, Ida and Judith leaned different ways on what chiefly obstructs normal. Ida pointed to excessive lumbar lordosis as the problem, and asked for a midline held against a grid of horizontals and verticals. Judith saw that people could work with less effort if they used gravity rather than fighting it, and spoke of grace and ease in moving between planes through spirals and arcs.

Kevin Frank likens these two descriptions to two blind men touching an elephant. Both may be right, and neither may be seeing the whole.

Describing normal function has remained elusive throughout.

The Break with Judith Aston

In the introductory portion of the Rolfing training, Judith began directing attention to ease of function rather than to Ida’s postural model. Thinking it more useful, she also began teaching indirect fascial techniques. The Rolfing faculty were saying something different, and students were confused.

The faculty asked Judith to follow their line, and Judith left. It was settled in a single meeting. Heather Starsong says she remembers Judith being furious after the 1976 training. It had been building over a long time. Both were strong personalities.

In 1977, Judith left the Rolf Institute and renamed her work Aston-Patterning. Those who had trained with her had to choose between following her and losing her as a teacher.

Heather says this rupture was as large as the split with the Guild. That assessment matters in a later section.

From 1978 to 1980

The name and the form of Rolfing Movement Integration came into being in 1978.

Former Patterners Gael Switzer and Heather Wing joined with the Rolfing teachers Peter Melchior and Emmett Hutchins to make a movement course for students. That autumn five more former Patterners joined, each bringing what they wanted to keep from their own methods.

In the same year, Aston Patterners gathered at Heather’s home studio to discuss what should be developed. They all chipped in for the airfares. Gael describes it this way. What are the principles, what are the goals, how do we teach it. That was the discussion. It was an exciting, fulfilling period of sharing and organizing what had been implicit in Judith’s teaching.

In 1979, Heather and Megan James ran the first training. That June a Movement Committee was formed, and on January 1, 1980, nine movement teachers were recognized as members of the Rolf Institute. Nine more joined over the following year.

The Seven Principles of 1982

In a footnote to the essay Heather put together in 1982, seven basic principles of Rolf Movement Integration are listed.

Core, Dynamic Balance, Support, Responsiveness, Lengthening, Integrity of Movement, Harmony with Gravity.

A caution here. These are not the five principles of Rolfing. The five principles of Rolfing are Support, Adaptability, Palintonicity, Closure, and Wholism, and they were put in order after the 1989 split, chiefly by Jeff Maitland and Jan Sultan. The seven principles of 1982 need to be read as a list belonging specifically to Rolf Movement Integration at that time.

Support appearing in both, and Responsiveness being close to Adaptability, makes them easy to mix up.

The Organization Takes Shape at the Same Time

In the summer of 1978, Ida Rolf transferred the words Rolfing and Rolfer to the Rolf Institute. It was a few months before her death. In 1979 the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted the Rolf Institute exclusive service mark rights in the word ROLFING. Ida Rolf died the same year.

The period in which the movement side began to take shape and the period in which the organization fixed its names overlap.

The Splits Were There from the Start

What becomes clear in writing all this is that the field was turbulent from the beginning.

After Judith left, a group continued studying with her. They kept learning her work as it widened to include hands-on technique, and they claimed against the Rolf Institute that they were the ones who held the real work. The faculty’s reply, it is said, was that they should sort it out among themselves.

Meetings between the two groups were held many times, and teaching jointly was attempted. It was extremely political and uncomfortable, Gael says. Heather puts it more strongly: it was devastating, there were fights over ownership and power.

The Problem of the Psychological Side

There was another hard problem.

How far to bring the emotional expression held inside a pattern into the movement work. When it looked as though emotional causes were being sought, this work became rather creepy for a good many people. Because the line between insight and clumsy therapy is difficult, Gael says, this conundrum is often dropped from the training.

There Hubert Godard found a way to bring in awareness of lost perceptual circuits without leaning on therapy. According to Kevin Frank, Godard placed orientation to gravity at the base of the human process of orientation.

Psychological safety is woven, at a biological level, into the response to gravity and to orientation. This ordering gave Ida Rolf, posthumously, an opportunity to update her message about gravity and her message about the psyche at the same time.

On Gender

Ida Rolf valued Judith highly, yet did not accept her bringing her own work into the field. On top of that there was the matter of gender. In the early period, Heather says, the movement teachers were almost all women and the Rolfing teachers almost all men.

The Split into the Guild and the Rolf Institute

In 1989 the Rolf Institute split in two.

To understand this split, it helps to look first at where the names came from.

In 1967, Ida Rolf incorporated her teaching as the Guild for Structural Integration. The Rolf Institute was founded four years later, in 1971. The Guild, in other words, was the earlier name.

In 1989, Peter Melchior, Emmett Hutchins, Neal Powers, Stacey Mills, and David Davis re-established the Guild for Structural Integration under that name. The Rolf Institute continued with Jan Sultan, Michael Salveson, Jeffrey Maitland, and others.

Peter and Emmett were the two Ida Rolf herself chose to teach her work. What happened in 1989 reads less like the founding of a new organization, and more like a split between those returning to the original name and those going forward under the name of the Institute.

The year is unsteady across sources, and some accounts give 1990 or 1991. The departure, the incorporation, and the start of teaching may have fallen in different years. Here I follow the 1989 given in the lineage chart.

What diverged on the hands-on side — the shift from a fixed sequence of procedures to a principles-based form — is covered in my summary of the Advanced Training (Journey to Becoming an Advanced Rolfer — A Summary of the Road to Certification). Here I look at the effect on the movement side.

The Shape of the Course Diverged

From the time she first began teaching Rolfing, Ida Rolf divided the curriculum into two stages.

Auditing: the observer stage. This taught how to observe, with no hands-on work at all. It continued until you had taken in what mattered to observe. Then Practitioner: once you were ready, you moved to the practitioner stage (Seeing and Perceiving (1): Seeing Begins with a Concept).

After the split, the Rolf Institute side reviewed its curriculum. The practitioner stage entered Phase 1, and along with it came Hubert Godard’s thinking on Tonic Function. The Guild side stayed with two stages.

This difference can still be checked today. The Guild in Boulder stopped teaching in 2023, but the course list of the American Guild for Structural Integration, which carries on the lineage in the United States, has Basic Auditing Class and Basic Practitioning Phase in it.

In Europe, the European Guild for Structural Integration, founded by Aleš Urbanczik in 2011, carries the same lineage.

I have been taught by someone who took that two-stage course myself. Pierpaola Volpones, who taught Part 1 of Rolf Movement, took her training in Munich in the 1980s, when the course was two stages of nine weeks each, Audit and Practitioner. There was no textbook, no photographs, and no practice of technique — you simply observed sessions.

Ida Rolf’s two stages survived in 1980s Munich, and after the split only the Institute side went to three. The present system of Levels follows on from that.

Theory Enters in the 1990s

On the Rolf Institute side, after Ida’s death, current findings began entering the classes. The knowledge of Robert Schleip, a leading fascia researcher based in Ulm, Germany, is one example.

Schleip is a Certified Advanced Rolfer and also a Rolf Movement Instructor. Findings from the science side and theory from the movement side overlap even within one person.

In the 1990s, psychological elements entered as theory: Hubert Godard’s Tonic Function, and Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing. This had a large effect on the Rolf Movement curriculum, and how you attend to the body while moving became much clearer (How the Rolf Movement Practitioner Certification Works — The 30-Day Requirement and Choosing Where to Train).

I have also heard a different explanation of the split. The Rolfer Sharon Wheeler told me it was driven by political factors, that there was no difference in curriculum, and that the introduction of Maitland’s philosophy was for differentiation. The same, she said, for the change from two stages to three. I have nothing with which to judge which is right. I think there was value in hearing both.

Spreading Across the World

Gael’s students include Hubert Godard, Pedro Prado, Monica Caspari, and Carol Agneessens (ERA Mentoring Session (4) — An Experience in Paris: Valuing the Foundations — Hubert Godard).

In 1991, Gael and Heather taught a movement training together in Brazil, the first there. Among the students were Lael Keen and Monica Caspari.

Heather stepped down from the faculty in 1994, and Vivian Jaye and Jan Harrington took over. After the training in Brazil, Gael developed a strong interest in gait, and has gone on watching the functional patterns that appear in walking and how they affect structure.

In Europe, Hubert Godard, and in Brazil, Pedro Prado and Monica Caspari, each developed Rolf Movement in their own way.

Monica Caspari (1953–2019) designed the dual certification course, which treats structure and movement — two complementary sides — as one body of work. She held that everyone is organized in relation to space and gravity, while how that relation is experienced is particular to each person and shaped by culture as well, and that respecting cultural difference is essential.

She taught in Brazil, Germany, Japan, Australia, South Africa, Argentina, and across the United States.

The Four Licensees

The Dr. Ida Rolf Institute — founded in Boulder in 1971, now in Lafayette, Colorado — has four official licensees. Each offers its own training, compatible with the training in the United States.

The European Rolfing Association in Munich, Germany; the Associação Brasileira de Rolfistas in São Paulo, Brazil; the Japan Rolfing Association in Tokyo, Japan; and the Rolfing Association of Canada in Edmonton, Alberta.

This is why the credits I earned in Europe count in Japan as well.

Work has gone out from Japan too. Hiroyoshi Tahata is a Certified Advanced Rolfer and a Rolf Movement Instructor. He was already teaching in the United States by 2012, and in 2023 and 2024 he taught hara and ma-ai at ERA’s Rolf Movement certification workshops.

Hara is the lower belly, and in Japanese usage it carries the sense of a center a person acts from; ma-ai is the distance and timing held between two people, a term from the martial arts. Thinking that grew in the United States entered Europe, and thinking that grew in Japan is taught in Europe. It travels both ways.

What Is Still Going On

Finally, I want to write about how this history has not ended.

Gael puts it this way. Looking across the whole, we have struggled with the question of manipulation or education. The split between students who want the functional and educational side, and students who want to learn hands-on manipulation but not movement, is still with us.

Heather has a concern too. She is still involved with Phase 1 students, and sometimes a student who says they have received a movement session describes something that was structural hands-on work rather than education. That bothers her.

Gael says further that what Godard brought was an exciting standpoint, with more concrete language and scientific grounding, while she does not know how well that contribution was integrated with the movement curriculum that preceded it.

Kevin Frank’s view is a little more optimistic. Some stages of the work may in fact be coming together, he replies, at least as far as some movement instructors are concerned.

The Mission, and One in Four

Seen from the side of the numbers, this split is still there.

The mission of the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute is given as providing quality education and fostering research in order to advance Rolfing Structural Integration and Rolf Movement Integration, its distinctive methods for optimizing human structure and function. The two are set side by side.

Yet according to the European Rolfing Association’s educational material, about 25 percent of all Rolfers within ERA hold the additional Rolf Movement certification.

What the organization’s mission treats as a pair is, in practice, taken by one in four. The split Gael described is inside that figure.

The Language Is Still a Work in Progress

I want to return to Kevin Frank’s reading, placed at the opening. A new language was needed, and new hallmarks for normal. This is still a work in progress. That is what he wrote.

What is striking is that Hubert Godard set out from exactly the same place. What formed him, he says, was teaching dance. Give the same task, and how people dance changes according to how you speak. Trying to understand why, he entered the inquiry that put the response to gravity at the center of movement.

The starting point of the theory of Tonic Function was an observation about how words are handed over.

What Ida Rolf did not have was a language. Dorothy Nolte put “awareness” into the name. People experimented under Judith Aston because there were no defined terms. The origin of Godard’s theory was the observation that words change movement. And in the training I took in Europe, what Rita Geirola asked again and again was: who are you teaching, and which words are you choosing for them.

For nearly a hundred years, the field has been circling the same problem.

References and Links

  • Kevin Frank, “Rolf Movement® Integration: An Historical Overview through an Interview with Heather (Wing) Starsong and Gael (Ohlgren) Rosewood,” Structural Integration, June 2012
  • Heather Wing, “Evolution of Rolf Movement® Integration,” 1982 (published alongside the above; originally in The Bulletin of Structural Integration, Spring/Summer 1982, Vol. A, No. 1)
  • Caryn McHose, “Interview with Hubert Godard: Phenomenological Space,” Contact Quarterly, Summer/Fall 2006
  • Pedro Prado and Heidi Massa, “Remembering Monica Caspari,” Structure, Function, Integration: Journal of the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute, Vol. 48, No. 1, March 2020
  • Dr. Ida Rolf Institute, “About the Institute” (rolf.org)
  • European Rolfing Association, “Rolf Movement™ Training” (rolfing.org)
  • European Rolfing Association, “Rolf Movement™” (rolfing.org)
  • Lea Kabirschke, “Why not Osteopathy, Feldenkrais or Physiotherapy?”, European Rolfing Association blog (rolfing.org)
  • Dr. Ida Rolf Institute® Europe, “Education Overview” (September 2025 edition, rolfing.org)
  • European Guild for Structural Integration, “Structural Integration and its many names” (rolfguild.eu)
  • American Guild for Structural Integration (rolfguildusa.org)
  • Jeffrey J. Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion
  • Eric Jacobson, “Structural Integration: Origins and Development,” Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 17(9), September 2011
  • Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice
  • Christopher Reed, “Dorothy Nolte” (obituary), The Guardian, 5 January 2006

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