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Rolfing: Relieve Stress and Physical Discomfort through
Structural Integration
Ross Hackerson
ROLFING works with the connective tissue. Connective tissue
wraps the body entirely, much like a wet suit does a swimmer.
It wraps each muscle and muscle fiber in a continuous network,
even supplying the internal membranes that wrap our bones
and support our internal organs.
We all hold tension and stress in our bodies. You may feel
it in your head, neck, shoulders and back most often. The
stress may come from physical trauma like an auto collision,
a fall or maybe surgery. It may be generated by life situations
such as divorce, moving, abuse or a death in the family.
So what is ROLFING? To say that ROLFING is a technique for
physically aligning and standing the body upright in gravity
in 10 sessions somehow misses the point. For me, ROLFING is
Dorothy, aged 67, a polio victim at three and surgery at 12,
free of back pain and able to walk up and down stairs in a
normal manner for the first time in 30 years.
ROLFING is Joyce, a 35 year-old attorney who says, "my shoulder
and neck pain are gone, and the greatest surprise is my new
attitude and positive outlook on life." ROLFING is an Olympic
medalist in gymnastics who had lived with the pain of working
out and performing with bones broken and muscles torn in childhood,
saying, "my back is better, the pain is gone and I feel better."
The body responds to stress by tightening and shortening.
Most people can identify the muscular body tightening associated
with momentary stress. We say we 'hold ourselves together.'
What most of us miss is how the yearly accumulations of day
by day tightening and tension are locked into the body and
affect our overall health. A distortion in one part of the
dynamic system affects the total system. A hurt back, knee
or neck might cause us to favor that area. Since we live in
the field of gravity and are constantly struggling to hold
ourselves upright our initial favoring can become a chronic
imbalance and a limited movement pattern.
Physical approaches to dealing with stress and imbalance in
the body have been around for a while. ROLFING is one of the
earliest and most profound of the manipulation techniques;
it is the most structured and developed system of "deep tissue
work". Rolfing's premise is that the body's organ of structure
is the fascia; and that life is an ongoing encounter with
gravity, the force that is always with us.
Dr. Ida Rolf (she called it Structural Integration, her followers
called it ROLFING), said:
"One individual may experience his losing fight with gravity
as a sharp pain in the back, another as the unflattering contour
of his body, another as constant fatigue, and yet another
as an unrelentingly threatening environment. Those over 40
may call it old age, yet all these signals may be pointing
to a single problem so prominent in their own structure and
the structure of others, that it has been ignored; they are
off balance. They are all at war with gravity."
Rolfing is also my 72 year old Uncle -- who at 72 was still
teaching tennis and golf despite chronic pain in his neck,
shoulder and heels -- standing upright in the kitchen telling
my wife he still thought ROLFING was strange, but somehow
it worked, he was no longer in pain.
This article was written by Ross Hackerson, Certified
Advanced Rolfer, Rolf Institute. Ross has 30 years experience
and has been helping his clients become more aligned, balanced,
and energetic through Rolfing. If you would like a free consultation,
or more information on Rolfing in general, visit Ross at http://www.livingbodywork.com
Article Source: www.easyarticles.com
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