With every region organized by the end of session 7, session 8 opens the integration sessions. From here, the view shifts from the body as parts to the body as a whole.
Where Session 8 Sits
This is the first of the integration sessions. What it works with are two girdles: the shoulder girdle, around the scapulae, clavicles, and sternum, and the pelvic girdle, around the pubis, sit bones, ilia, and pelvic floor.
Sessions 8 and 9 carry paired themes. Session 8: being, presence, structure, stillness, stability. Session 9: fluidity, doing, function, movement, integration. Being and doing, if you like.
First comes a state in which you are supported without moving. Then a state you can hold while moving. Session 8 takes the still half, session 9 the moving half.
These are also the first sessions without a fixed procedure. The textbook version has session 8 on the two girdles and session 9 on the connection out to the extremities, but what actually happens depends on what is left after session 7. Whether a session leans upper or lower gets decided for the person. Conventionally, session 8 goes lower to balance the lift session 7 produced, and session 9 goes upper in preparation for closing. Session 8 is sometimes used as a continuation of session 7.
What follows is one version of it.
Why Two Girdles
The shoulder girdle is the basis for the movement of the upper limbs — shoulder, elbow, hand. The pelvic girdle is the basis for the lower — thigh, shin, foot. How freely your limbs move is settled by how free these two are.
And the two are linked. Walking turns them in opposite directions: your left arm swings forward as your right leg does. Let one seize up and the other loses range as well.
The weight of session 8 falls less on releasing each one than on getting them to move in coordination. With that, the foundation for whole-body movement is in place.
Yoga makes it easy to see. In downward dog or in an inversion, how the two girdles balance is the whole question. Take the pose without considering it and the shoulders or the lower back carry far too much. In the basic training, Giovanni Felicioni, who also teaches yoga, showed this with examples.
What Trying to Have Good Posture Has Cost
Sit on your sit bones and lengthen your spine. A great many people do this by engaging the abdominals.
That is not laziness. It is the opposite — the trace of an effort to have good posture. A body that has been told to sit up and not to slump found a way to carry out the instruction, and the abdominals were what it reached for.
But used that way, psoas major just inside them, and the muscles around clavicle and sternum, tense along with it. One way of sitting reaches the whole body. The effort to have good posture is exactly what has been firming the two girdles.
Session 8 is not about making anyone stop trying. When it turns out that the spine lengthens without the abdominals, the body starts choosing that instead.
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 the abdominals engage when you sit on your sit bones and lengthen
- Whether there is congestion around the clavicles and sternum
- Whether the two girdles turn in opposite directions as you walk
- Whether the pelvis answers when you raise an arm
- How wide the sit bones are, and how free the sacrum is
The Conditions the Session Works Toward
For the pelvic girdle, the work opens the route that runs from the sit bones up through the spine to the head.
- Lying on one side, the ligaments joining sit bones and sacrum release
- The hands go to the muscles joining pelvis and ribs, around quadratus lumborum. This is what governs the coordination of the two girdles
- Sitting in a chair, the sit bones widen and the sacrum is given time to release. With the abdominals soft, the spine lengthens from the sternum
- Feet against the wall, body folded to a right angle, hands on a chair. Close to downward dog, the same movement gets checked from another angle
For the shoulder girdle, the work goes to the fascia from thoracic to cervical spine, lying supine, so that the congestion around clavicle and sternum comes undone.
A New Pattern Takes Time
The spine lengthens from the sit bones without the abdominals. Once that way of working is in the body, letting go gets easier everywhere.
But it is a new pattern, and new patterns take time to settle. This is something to keep practicing after the ten sessions end.
The old pattern does not disappear, either. A new pattern arrives as one option alongside the old one. The body gains a choice; it does not get overwritten. So when you are tired or in a hurry, the old one shows up. That is not a relapse. It means there are still two options.
This is why the integration sessions assume there will be an afterward. Ending at ten and continuing afterward are not in conflict.
What the Body Takes In During This Session
Describing session 8 as releasing quadratus lumborum or working the sternoclavicular joint moves away from what is actually happening.
What is taken in, as I understand it, is the information that the arms and legs may move from the torso. Moving a limb does not require firming the shoulder or the pelvis first to make a base. When that arrives, a body that had been fixing before moving starts reorganizing toward moving while connected.
What Counts as Organized
Whether the shoulders and pelvis feel softer is not, in itself, the result.
What is looked at as the session closes is the relationship with gravity. Can the two girdles rotate without obstructing each other? Does support from below travel through the pelvic girdle to the shoulder girdle, and out into the arms?
After the Session
- Neck tension eases
- The chest is freer
- The sit bones widen, and the sense of the sacrum broadens
- The arms and legs become movable from the torso
On to the Next Session
Once the two girdles are working together, the ends come next. Session 9 takes up the coordination of the whole body, out to the hands and feet.
- Session 9: Continuity — Out to the Hands and Feet
- The Integration Sessions: Bringing It Together
- 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.