With the two girdles coordinating after session 8, session 9 carries that as far as the ends. The aim is a whole body in which hands and feet participate in one movement.
Where Session 9 Sits
This is the second of the integration sessions. If sessions 1 through 7 take up regions and 8 through 10 take up the whole, session 9 is where the whole is drawn at its widest.
Session 8 took the still half; session 9 takes the moving half. The themes given in the training were fluidity, doing, function, movement, integration. From a state in which you are supported without moving, to a state you can hold while moving.
One other thing changes here: how movement gets assembled.
From reacting once something has happened, to being ready before it does. Support is arranged before the movement starts, and when and how much to accelerate is settled in advance. Pre-movement, worked with back in session 2, begins operating at the scale of the whole body.
The Girdles Go Invisible
In class the goal of this session had a memorable phrasing: ideally, the pelvic girdle and the shoulder girdle become invisible.
You move smoothly without having to think about your pelvis or your shoulders. They stop registering as the place a movement starts from. Structures that are working well drop out of awareness. The coordination built in session 8 heads, in session 9, toward not being felt at all.
Being organized and disappearing from perception turn out to be the same direction. That is what is interesting about this session.
Walking Runs on Diagonals
Human walking is built on diagonal coordination.
With every step the pelvis rotates four or five degrees, and that is what produces stride length. At the same time, your left arm comes forward as your right leg does. That contralateral pattern rotates the trunk, and the energy carries into the next step.
So what presents as a one-sided problem is often a problem along a diagonal. That chain is what session 9 works with.
Diagonal Differences Are Traces of Use
Watch how hands and feet coordinate in supine, and you may find that the line from left foot to right hand grips easily while the line from right foot to left hand hardly engages. It is not that one side is weaker. The two diagonals have different qualities.
This difference is not treated here as a distortion. It is evidence of use.
A dominant hand, a movement repeated at work, a practice kept up over years — each gives the body a direction. In my case, close to ten years of ashtanga vinyasa yoga had left a habit of using the right hand strongly and the left weakly.
Yoga asana are arranged to be done evenly on both sides. Asymmetry remains anyway, because an evenly arranged practice is received by an asymmetrical body. There are things volume of practice will not solve.
Session 9 is not about eliminating that difference. If the diagonal runs through, the whole can coordinate with the difference still there.
What Is Looked At as the Session Opens
In the Body Reading at the start — watching how you stand and walk — the points include:
- In supine, how the left foot–right hand and right foot–left hand pairings differ
- Whether the arm swing and the opposite leg correspond while walking
- Whether movement reaches the fingers and toes
- With eyes closed, after a few rotations, feet together and arms forward — which way the body drifts
- Tension remaining at the jaw and the AO joint
Balance with the eyes closed makes any bias in the sense of balance show up directly as posture. It is not unusual for the vestibular sense, worked with in session 7, to appear again here.
The Conditions the Session Works Toward
The session opens seated, with the sit bones widening so the sacrum can be freer. What was set up in session 8 gets confirmed before anything else.
Then, lying on one side, the fascial tension running from the toes through the sit bones to the pelvis comes undone, and from there attention moves to connecting chest and hand. The other side follows the same route.
Finally, supine, the fascia lengthens from thoracic spine along the vertebrae, and the AO joint behind the skull releases.
There is a way of counting six spaces in the body. They do not exist separately; they work in linkage. That linkage is what session 9 is working with.
You Cannot Let Go by Trying
One step in this session has stayed with me.
Lying on one side, the client is asked to move a hand while smell, hearing, and sight are engaged. And the hand lets go.
It did not let go by being told to. It let go when attention went elsewhere. Not as a result of operating your own body, but at the moment the sense organs began relating to the world outside — that is when the body released what it did not need.
The coordination session 9 aims at is of that kind. You do not connect the whole body by concentrating on it. It is connected the moment you stop trying to connect it. The girdles going invisible says the same thing from the other side.
What the Body Takes In During This Session
Describing session 9 as working from the shoulder girdle out to the periphery moves away from what is actually happening.
What is taken in, as I understand it, is the information that things reach all the way to the ends. Hands and feet are not parts detached from the torso. If anything moves anywhere, the whole is free to answer. When that arrives, a body that had been moving in parts starts reorganizing toward moving as a whole.
What Counts as Organized
Whether hands and feet move more freely is not, in itself, the result.
What is looked at as the session closes is the relationship with gravity. While walking, does the force returning from the floor pass through from the feet to the hands? Is there a point where it stops and only that place works? Is gravity operating as a current that runs the whole body?
After the Session
- Congestion in the chest clears and the breadth increases
- The connection from sit bones to head can be felt
- You walk without attending to the girdles
- Movement reaches the ends of hands and feet
- Swinging an arm or stepping forward starts from somewhere else
On to the Next Session
With the whole coordinating, what remains is the closing. Session 10 takes in the whole body, and the stage begins where what was learned over ten sessions goes home with you.
- Session 10: Integration — The Door to the Client’s Independence
- 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
Related Articles on the Rolfing Training
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.