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Structural Integration (rolfing)
What is Structural Integration?
Structural Integration dramatically alters your structure and posture and can resolve discomfort, release tension and alleviate pain. It can also restore and enhance flexibility, revitalize energy and have you feeling more comfortable in your body.
Structural Integration facilitates more efficient use of muscles, allowing your body to conserve energy, and create more refined patterns of movement with less effort. This reduces chronic stress and enhances neurological functioning.
Benefits of Structural Integration include:
- Increase flexibility and ease of movement
- Increase energy and vitality
- Improve balance
- Release chronic pain, tension and stress
- Enhance physical performance
- Improve posture
- Improve athletic performance
- Enhance body awareness
- Reduce effort in activity
- Look and feel younger
- Expand your sense of well being
Dr. Ida P. Rolf developed the process of Structural Integration as a holistic system combining soft tissue manipulation and movement education to restore the body to its natural state of alignment and balance - by lengthening, restoring, and reorganizing the FASCIA, the connective tissue matrix of the body.
Fascia surrounds and supports all of the muscles, bones and organs in your body in continuous web-like layers. This fascial net, or connective tissue matrix, is the body's internal system of flexible support - giving it strength and shape. The fascial system responds to injury, chronic tension and habitual movement patterns by shortening from both the forces of gravity and the mechanical forces of habitual movement patterns.
When your fascia shortens, thickens and becomes glue-like, it locks in less-than optimal patterns of strain and pulls your body out of alignment. Dr. Rolf's work is based on the insight that your body is more at ease and functions most effectively when its structure is balanced along the vertical line of gravity. In this place, gravity gently lifts and supports your body rather than pulling it down. By systematically restoring the integrity of your fascial system, your body becomes aligned and the entire system can be a smoothly functioning and coordinated whole.
Dr. Rolf believed form determines function. Structural Integration can create a more adaptable and supportive form that can function more optimally in the field of gravity.
The field of gravity is an unseen force that consistently interacts with the human body. Structural Integration re-educates the person and the human body to live and move in harmony with the field of gravity instead of being in conflict with it.
The Structure of the Ten - Series
Structural Integration is a system used to align and balance the physical body within its gravitational field by freeing and reorganizing the myofascia, or connective tissue that surrounds the muscles. Dr. Rolf discovered that the body is organized in layers and that in order to create lasting change, the Structural Integration Series must create length and space in the outermost layers before working with deeper, more core layers in the body. Structural Integration is a ‘system’ of ten sessions. The first three sessions are called “The Sleeve” and cover the superficial fascia, the middle four sessions are called “The Core” and cover the deeper myofascial structures, and the last three sessions are called “Integrative” and create structural and functional adaptability within the whole body.
The fascial web within our muscles.