A week has passed since the Rolfing training began in Munich, and the second week is underway. The participants come from across Europe and from varied backgrounds — the youngest twenty-five, the oldest fifty-two, among them people from IT companies, yoga teachers, dancers, and osteopaths — which has made the learning enjoyable.
Rolfing is the work of addressing each part of the body, releasing chronic habits of movement, and integrating that part with the rest of the body through movement, so as to learn a way of moving that treats one’s own body kindly. It was developed by the American Dr. Ida Rolf.
Ida Rolf came from New York, and her field was biochemistry. Because her family faced difficulties, she sought solutions while drawing on yoga, osteopathy, chiropractic, the Alexander Technique, and other approaches.
Through the 1930s and 1940s she began giving the work to others as well, and her practice filled. In the 1960s Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt therapy, invited her to the Esalen Institute in California. There she began training practitioners and teachers, and the base later moved to Boulder, Colorado. The first European to take part at Esalen came from Munich, and so in Europe the work spread outward from Munich.
The work itself was called Structural Integration — the integration of the parts of the body — and in time came to be called Rolfing, after its founder.
Rolfing training consists of three stages, Phase I, Phase II, and Phase III. Phase I, three weeks in length, is what is currently underway.
Phase I is composed of:
Week 1: movement, and gait
Week 2: anatomy
Week 3: the manner of touch
Each week is led by different teachers and assistants — six teachers in total. On the final day, each student is evaluated in a ten-minute interview.
The first week covered the movement of gait. What is an easy posture, learned from movement? How does waking a sleeping muscle affect gait? How do breathing and gait shift with changes in the awareness of the senses? What forms does gait take when it works against gravity, and what forms when it makes use of gravity — in fact, the walk that draws on the spine proves most efficient. How gait is read, through body reading. From a range of angles, weaving theory and practice together, the movement of gait was taught in a way that made it clear.
The bodywork that made the strongest impression was the exercise on how the senses — sight, hearing, smell, and taste — affect breathing and gait. As it turned out, attending to smell produced the deepest breathing and the most alive walking: taking in a scent one likes on the inhalation, returning on the exhalation. Others responded to sight (widening the field of vision on the inhalation, returning on the exhalation), to hearing (listening for a distant sound on the inhalation, returning on the exhalation), or to taste (bringing a favorite food to mind on the inhalation, returning on the exhalation). The differences from one person to the next came through as well.
What proved interesting as a matter of cultural difference came up in the ten-minute interview on the final day. Having asked a good many questions, my participation in class was said to have made a positive impression as active. At the same time, there was an impression of it being unclear at moments what I was thinking — and whether that came from cultural difference was put to me as a question. Explaining that when something does not sit right, the tendency is to take time and put it into words slowly, seems to have been understood. Learning how differently Europeans think about this, putting things into words immediately — the teachers that first week were Spanish and Italian — was interesting in itself.
Two weeks remain. It is a new challenge, but the training feels approachable with a fresh mind. The intention is to keep learning at an unhurried pace.