Aligning the body with gravity
Aligning the body with gravity
The Psychological Growth Rolfing Imparts
Rolfing affects body language, self concept, sense of well-being, consciousness, interpersonal relatedness and the physical and psychological adaptations to unfinished traumas.
Most of us have heard that body language communicates more than verbal interactions. Body language definitely is a presentation of psychological posturing, mostly unconscious. How we walk across the room is how we walk through our life. As Rolfing releases chronically held physical tension patterns, the psychological foundation of such patterns is necessarily altered. Then the attachment to the associated psychological patterns revises itself. One cannot have a muscle tense and relaxed at the same time. Subsequently, Rolf clients routinely have vivid memories of past events or realizations that require attention. As such things come to mind, most people make shifts very rapidly. With fewer restrictions, strengths emerge. With increased strengths, people inevitably make positive changes.
The limitation of chronic injury or physical limitation can shatter self-image. As physical coordination improves, people demonstrate better competency. With better competency comes better success and necessarily an improvement in self image.
Psychological ease increases with lessened or absent physical insecurity, limitation or pain.
Changes in personal interactions occur. Interpersonal boundaries improve. Many people make major shifts in work or relationships due to a clearer sense of self and purpose.
Another psychological shift occurs, better understood by experience than description. Humans have a thinking brain, a feeling brain and a movement brain. Rolfing affects all 3. With more and more Structural Integration, each of the 3 functions deepens its capacity and its interrelatedness. People definitely feel more alive, a deeper sense of normal. This becomes a new default sense of self. Well Rolfed people feel a better capacity to concentrate, calmer yet fuller and clearer emotional function, more effective movement and a more stable and reliable sense of physical well being. Consciousness improves.
Rolfers understand that postural habits modify structure, and that structure influences identity. We can become locked into a particular conception of our self, our identity, because our physical structure becomes “locked” into a particular pattern.
Psychological trauma can be “stored” in the body as “armor” or perhaps a local stiffness around which the rest of the body must compensate. Such compensations lead to imbalances which in turn lead to fatigue and/or pain. With an unresolved physical or emotional trauma, a person inevitably develops protective psychological patterns against the recurrence of such an overwhelming or unwelcome memory. Rolfing goes right to the heart of the matter.