THE ROLFING TEN-SERIES
Ten sessions of Rolfing……
help you feel more balance and ease in your body so you are more comfortable with being you, moving in the world
help you more easily release traumatic histories and feel more energized in the moment
nourish and heal structural imbalances and prevent them from occurring again
offers you sensory perceptive tools that stay with you and keep progressing along your way
Living in Gravity:
All around us, we can find health care providers who specialize in helping our bodies from injuries and pain and we can find therapists who help us with our life problems. But you still don’t feel you’re getting what you need.
That’s because the body and mind are not meant to be addressed separately. They are deeply entwined and connected. They inform and effect one another.
What is the Rolfing Ten Series?
The Rolfing® “Ten Series” can be viewed as a basic recipe which all Rolfers™ follow to achieve our common goal of balancing a body in gravity. However, every Rolfer and every client are unique and so we adapt the recipe to suit specific needs.
Though it’s important to address your needs, it is also important to not hold specific expectations, but instead, stay curious and open to the present moment. That is where the gifts lie - where healing happens more generously.
Rolfing begins with a commitment to a series of ten (or just the first three) sessions to systematically work through your whole body to progressively clear out old postural patterns and rebuild new ones so you feel lasting change going forward.
The sessions begin and end with observation—looking at how you stand, move, and walk—so changes can be seen and tracked over time. Each session concentrates on different regions of the body, building on the last to improve your overall structure and ease of movement.
The Rolfing Ten-Series: a progressive unfolding through your whole body by accessing your fascia system, through how it organically works; sensing and connecting.
This is a focused, time-limited investment in your body. Progress comes when you show up consistency. For best results, plan to come in every week to every other week as you move through the series.
Treatment Possibilities:
To reduce pain and increase coordination and ease of motion for any of the following:
tennis elbow
carpel tunnel
head, neck and face injury
scar tissue impairment
migraines
lack of motivation
having trouble with break throughs
needing support to focus on greater healing
low back pain
scoliosis
breathing restrictions
pelvic movement restrictions
shoulder impingement
jaw and facial restriction
neck impingements
plantar fascia
Ten Series Overview:
Sessions 1–3:
We begin with the outer layers in order to prepare to go deeper during the middle sessions. We align and open up space around the pelvis, find better balance over the feet and enhancing a sense of elongation and width front to back and bottom to top. Here we begin to differentiate between structural restrictions and familiar holding patterns, creating space and allowing breath to move more freely.
Sessions 4–7:
The focus shifts deeper and we work with the core layers that stabilize the body. This phase continues to deepen support; releasing holding patterns, rebalancing and reorganizing your body’s structure around your more balanced pelvis, helping everything to align better.
Sessions 8–10:
As you gain more access to true order in your body, our work turns toward integration—helping you recognize, move from, and sustain these changes and new perceptions in your everyday life.
What is a session like:
During your Rolfing session, there is time dedicated to the manipulation of fascia and time spent in education in gravity (Rolf Movement).
I listen to your needs and real life experience and then look at your postural alignment as you stand and walk, and ask you to notice whatever sensations you may notice. These observations, as well as, several manual tests, allows me to approach your symptoms in their globalism along with a personal strategy for your session.
I then invite you to lie down on a massage table and with my hands and forearms, I work progressively with your physical structure, or the substance that connects everything in the body together like a net. Light and deep pressure with direction generate suppleness and fluidity to the different tissues. Little by little, they become organized and balanced and your overall tone improves.
As we progress together through the series, I invite you to welcome new perceptions that these changes provide and propose simple movements to enhance that, helping you to be present to your impressions and your new ways of moving. Enhanced circulation occurs in the areas being worked, allowing better relationships between different body parts and greater efficiency and ease of movement. The autonomic nervous system also balances, permitting a healthy alternation between states of alertness and relaxed attention.
Once you return to a vertical position – sitting, standing or walking – I propose a short period of time to pay attention to how your posture is transforming itself, giving access to a new coordination of movements and appreciation for a state of embodiment that you can return to at any time.
Many new perceptions typically emerge: the feeling of the feet being anchored, the sensation of lightness, ease of breathing, the opening of space around you and therefore an upward lengthening of your posture, fluidity of movement with a feeling of overall stability.
The reason for Rolf Movement explorations are added to the sessions is to perpetuate and stabilize these new sensations by revisiting them, recognizing them, naming them and anchoring them in your perceptual view of being in the world. They become tools for refreshing your sense of your self in the moment.
What to do After a Session:
After your session, a long walk—about thirty minutes to an hour—can help the work settle and integrate into your body and nervous system.
You might consider joining a Rolf Movement® class between sessions to deepen the awareness you’re building and continue developing new movement patterns beyond the session.
What to do after completing the Ten Series:
Rolfing® is effective because it remains sensitive to and works with the body’s innate wisdom. Rolfing always changes the body but only at the speed it wants to change. You may have the feeling at the end of the series that just a few more sessions would complete the process. We can discuss this option for you.
I often recommend that you keep coming for SourcePoint sessions, which are session by session treatments offering Rolfing interventions within an energetic container.
The Rolfing work you received and your new sense of awareness continues to bring change long after the series is finished. If you are only interested in Rolfing, then I suggest you wait a few months after the series to see where the body wants to go before receiving more work.
After that, I suggest a follow up series of five or three POST TEN tune up sessions, specific for graduates of the Ten Series. Rolf Movement classes are being offered at Canopy so you can easily join a class. Movement work helps to more fully integrate and embody your new structural changes.
You are welcome to schedule occasional treatments whenever you feel the need.
