Doctor Rolf's Story

Dr Ida P. Rolf was an associate professor of molecular biology at Rochester University in New York City in the early 1920s. In the 1940s, she began helping people with their bodies initially by giving them yoga stretches. After an accident of her own, she got interested in the osteopathic concept that structure determines function. Finally, she started actually moving tissue and discovered structural integration through working with a woman and asking if she felt better with the tissue "this way or that".

Dr. Rolf’s next breakthrough was the understanding of compensations and the universal nature of the fascia. (Fascia is a connective tissue that surrounds and gives shape to everything in your body including your muscles.) When trauma goes into the body, the strain travels along the fascial planes (think tendons, muscles, ligaments). This means a trauma to one joint, say a knee, would result in some of the strain being transmitted to other joints such as the hip or ankle. Likewise, treating only the joint originally affected could result in transferring strain to other nearby joints. Dr. Rolf figured out that the only option was to unwind the whole fascial system of the body from head to toe in order to clean up a lifetime of traumas and compensations.

As she explored how to unwind a person’s entire fascial network, she discovered that there were 10 windows that the body presented, and that the body was already set up to take this work in through a systematic process. She realized that by using this process to integrate a person’s structure to gravity, it allowed gravity to become the body’s therapist. Thus, Rolf Structural Integration, or Rolfing, was born.

Her goal was to give this to the medical community, but they did not feel they could spend such a large amount of time on each patient. This led some of them to just take a technique here or there which did more harm than good. She abandoned the hope of doctors doing the work and started teaching others the practice of Rolfing. This was the beginning of the Guild for Structural Integration, later changed to the Rolf Institute. This allowed her to shape their understanding of the work before they had developed biases developed from other education.

Finally, Dr. Rolf was able to create a school and started training teachers in the 1960s. Her refinement of the work never stopped while she was alive, and she continued to make improvements to the Rolf Method. In 1969, the first of a couple research projects was initiated which demonstrated for the outside world scientifically the changes that Dr. Rolf had been witnessing. Finally, she died in 1979 having left us with a holistic way to experience life with such fullness as never before conceived.

I am incredibly grateful to Dr. Rolf and her teachings.