With every region organized by the end of session 7, the integration sessions begin. This is the third phase of the ten-series, and it changes how a session gets built.
The Question Changes
Sessions 1 through 7 asked which region to work with, and how. Sessions 8 through 10 ask something else.
- What needs to happen on the way to closing?
- What has been learned so far?
- Where does this go from here?
These three run through the phase. They are not only questions about the work; they are questions put to the client.
It Was Seven Sessions Once
Ten was not the original number.
The series once ended at seven, and in the basic training a bottle still gets opened when the seventh is done. The three integration sessions were added afterward.
Seven sessions cultivate awareness; the last three let the body take that awareness in as structure. In the order of things, what came later stands at the end.
The Spine Turning
One theme of the integration sessions is the spiral — the turning of the spine.
When the spine lengthens and turns, Rolfing holds, walking becomes possible with the least force gravity will allow. Lengthening alone will not do it, and turning alone will not either. Effort leaves the walk when both happen at once.
But none of this stands without a sense of front and back, left and right, up and down, and the medial line. That is what the first seven sessions are for. The integration sessions can only be placed on top of them.
From Procedure to Design
Sessions 1 through 7 have a procedure. Breath, feet, front and back, pelvic floor, psoas, sacrum, neck. The order is set, and so is the region for each session.
Sessions 8 through 10 are different. What gets worked with depends on what changed over the previous seven sessions and what did not. This is not a phase for following a sequence; it is a phase for building something for the person in front of you.
To borrow the language of the advanced training: not a procedure but a design. The same eighth session touches different places on different people.
The Three Sessions
Sessions 8 and 9 carry paired themes. Session 8: being, presence, structure, stillness, stability. Session 9: fluidity, doing, function, movement, integration. First a state in which you are supported without moving; then a state you can hold while moving.
Session 8 works the two girdles, shoulder and pelvic. The shoulder girdle is the basis for the upper limbs, the pelvic girdle for the lower, and when the two move in coordination the foundation for whole-body movement is there.
That said, this arrangement is the textbook one. In practice the sessions are built around whatever remains after session 7. Which of the two leans toward the upper body and which toward the lower gets decided per person. Conventionally, session 8 goes lower to balance the lift session 7 produced, and session 9 goes upper in preparation for closing.
Session 9 carries the work out to the ends. The aim is a whole body in which the hands and feet coordinate as one movement. In class the ideal was described as the girdles becoming invisible. Structures that are working well drop out of awareness.
Session 10 takes in the whole. Rather than finishing off what is left, it leaves space, and lets gravity organize the body over time.
What Has to Line Up
Integration is not only about the body.
The training taught it in four layers: physical structure, coordination, perception, and meaning. Work the fascia over sessions 1 to 7 and the relationships between parts, and the relationship with gravity, change first. That changes muscle tone and adaptability, which changes how you sense yourself, and finally how much range you have in how you act.
The four are closely bound, and they run in both directions. Something at the level of meaning can change and the body follows. Each layer settles on its own timescale.
Integration, then, means these four working together freely, with some play in the joints between them. Which layer comes forward differs by person. A change may lift the chest without carrying over into the walk. The breath may not follow. Feelings may come loose. Sessions 8 through 10 are the time in which those gaps get closed.
Closure
Ending at ten, and continuing afterward. The two are not in conflict.
In the advanced training, one of Rolfing’s principles is closure — giving a process a proper ending. The reason stayed with me: closure matters because it makes what comes next possible.
Because something ends, something else can start.
These principles were not laid down by Ida Rolf. They were established around Jan Sultan, who studied with her directly, and Jeff Maitland: wholism, support, adaptability, palintonicity, and closure. Five of them. In Maitland’s own writing they are organized as six, with continuity added.
The names came later; the things they name were built into the structure of the ten-series from the start. What matters, on this account, is seeing which principle is missing for this person now, and building the session from there.
Three Things That Help Integration Along
The advanced training named three.
The first is supporting self-regulation. Trust the client’s own capacity to organize, and support it. The practitioner is not the one producing change but the one arranging the place where change occurs.
The second is coming into accord with gravity. Ida Rolf held that integration is exactly this. When the body is supported by gravity, standing and moving take the least effort they can.
The third is recovering wholeness. Integration is not a musculoskeletal matter alone. It is the process of getting back the connection across sensation, feeling, and awareness.
The Subject Moves
What happens across the integration sessions is that the subject of the work moves.
There was once an assumption that the practitioner held the knowledge and could predict the change. Not anymore. The one doing the work is the client; the practitioner arranges the conditions. Something from the continuing education put this plainly.
So the aim of session 10 is not to finish the treatment. It is that the capacity develops to take what the ten sessions taught into daily life. Once you can notice your own body and organize it, the change carries on after the sessions end.
What Rolfing offers is not a finished product. It is a body that goes on changing.
What Counts as Organized
The test does not change in the integration sessions either.
What gets looked at as a session closes is whether the body is in a better relationship with gravity — whether gravity is working as a resource rather than a load. Rolfing is defined not by its techniques but by that aim.
The Individual Sessions
- Session 8: The Two Girdles — Shoulder and Pelvis
- Session 9: Continuity — Out to the Hands and Feet
- Session 10: Integration — The Door to the Client’s Independence
After the Ten
For those who want to take integration further, there is the advanced series of five sessions. Rather than following a set procedure, each session is designed around the state the person is in. The way of building that began in the integration sessions simply continues for five more.
That series had a procedure once, too: return to the line, set the body in given positions, organize the hinges at knee, elbow, and shoulder. It was not Ida Rolf who wrote it but two of her successors. Hold too tightly to a procedure, though, and you can ask more of a client than they can carry — so it gave way to building from principles, individually.
Jan Sultan has described what moved him. Ida Rolf said repeatedly that working with someone beyond the basic ten demanded a higher order of specificity. And what got handed down instead was a format organized around positions. He saw the contradiction, and chose to teach the reading of patterns rather than the sequence.
Before
- The Sleeve Sessions: Why Rolfing Starts at the Surface
- 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
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.