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R E S O U R C E S

As friend and colleague Fabiano often tells it, resources are reliable, accessible and ever present phenomena:

gravity 

ground

space 

breath

Tried and tested, these aspects of our experience are steady places to deliberately tune our attention to.

As a professional dancer, Rolfing® has helped me inhabit my body _ European Rolfing Associ
As a professional dancer, Rolfing® has helped me inhabit my body _ European Rolfing Associ

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Article by the Sunday Express - 25 August 2019

Image: pixabay: pixels.com 

As you read through these next few paragraphs, maybe have a pause between them to let words and meaning land before going on to the next.

What follows are some observations from a client who agreed to share parts of her process in her own words. I enjoy the clarity and honesty she writes from, and how she situates her series of sessions in a context (so important!) As you'll read, she had a significant emotional response to her second session. This is not to say that having a significant emotional response/release (or not) is always part of Rolfing - but to help normalise that it might be and it might be uncomfortable or challenging as well as sometimes necessary.

 

I contextualise this by remembering how we are living archives of our experience and when something is too much, in whatever way, we guard, or effort, to get through/around the overwhelm. Usually our nervous system stores the difficult parts until such a time as we have capacity to deal with them; this can be years, months, days or moments.

 

Sometimes it means feeling some of the original feelings or mess that had us holding in the first place... and now that we are no longer in the immediacy of the stress or trauma or challenge... we might feel distressed that this 'theme' has 'returned' when we thought it was over. It often means your system has more space to process now and can integrate the experience that was previously overwhelming. This can be challenging to feel into when we are encultured into an idea that bodies are separate from mind.

Depending what and how - this might need a few turns around a spiral of slow digestion and re-calibration. Systems take their own time. And often need another, trusted, system to help regulate through big changes.

So, thanks A, for sharing this. 

I’m neither a marketing expert nor a copy writing professional; my aim is not to persuade anyone. I’m also not a Rolfer. In fact, I’m very new to Rolfing, so I can barely speak about its specificities as a practice or its long term benefits. However, I guess one could say that I’m a body aware person; I work as a freelance dancer and a movement and Pilates facilitator. Therefore, I’ll speak about sensations, discoveries and wonders of my Rolfing sessions with practitioner Jennifer-Lynn Crawford.

20.10.2020

 

When I enter her practice for the first time, I’m buzzing. I’ve always liked any kind of session where the focus is me, my body, and my experience of living in that body, but this is new.

 

The space is beautifully arranged, clean, inviting. 

She asks, I chat, she listens. I get rid of some of my clothes and decide to share my skin. I feel comfortable. 

There’s some walking and some observing, also some pertinent comments here and there. Then there’s hands on; her hands on my flesh. My system’s reaction is quiet yet immediate. My skin is adjusting, reading the information that’s coming from her hands into my system.

 

04.11.2020

 

I wake up to the news of the American presidential election race; the numbers showing a pretty close pull between the desired and undesirable candidates. I eat breakfast and go off to a ballet class. In these pandemic times, walking to a dance class is a rare occasion and therefore a highly appealing one. However, today I’m feeling slightly unsettled. I bypass the signs of hesitation showing from my body and instead convince myself that everything is just fine; paying a little unconscious tribute to the early days of my dance training, when pushing through discomfort meant being a good student. 

    .... By the way last night I had my second Rolfing session.

I manage to move through the ballet barre; legs bending and stretching, arms floating up and down. As much as I try to shake off the anxiety, a rising cocktail of distress and sadness is pushing its way up through my sternum. Coping with the ballet routines, the people around me and this ‘something’ inside is becoming too much of a struggle. The moment arrives when I leave the room to find myself exploding, unable to control or contain the overflow of emotions. I burst into tears and, whilst working to control my breath, a flash of emotions shines from within me and out of my system. 

I now like to think of it as a transformation, like that one of Songoku - the main character in Dragon Ball - whose body suddenly irradiates a golden, bouncy aura when mutating into a super warrior state. Could his famous war cry ‘Kamehameha’ be actually a coping mechanism? What if that’s actually Songoku’s strategy to deal with emotional break downs? And even more important, am I now a super warrior?

 

I decide to discreetly get my stuff and leave the studio. Then I walk endlessly for hours, comforting myself with the warmth of a sunny, mild, autumn weather.

 

Back home, I take the rest of the day off; tuning into more recent dance training learnings where resting and embracing struggle as part of the living game is a thing.

I sleep for long hours and wake up to a calmer state. I’m able to process and understand that what we experience in a physical level has an impact, a connection to our emotional self and vice versa. I wonder whether the physical discomfort that brought me to try Rolfing is in fact a physical response to an emotional problem…

I email Jennifer-Lynn, my Rolfer, to share the outcome of our last session together. Her reaction is one of celebration for I’ve been able to let go and release an emotional knot; she also offers to chat online if I want to.

 

A few days go by and I feel tranquil. I have not uncovered the root of my emotional crisis but I feel at peace with myself; both within my body and my emotional self.

 

 

Let’s take a moment now to think back through some of the thoughts and feelings I experienced during my second Rolfing session:

 

.-Informative touch

.-Inviting her hands/fingers inside my flesh/home - a guest that you are happy to see and have around, with whom you can be yourself/honest

.-Her fingers acting like melting caramel into my marsh mellowed flesh

.-Riding a bike - when she is holding and micro manipulating my cranium it feels like she is the driver and I’m the vehicle

.-Reminding my scapula of who ‘she’ is, what ‘she’ can do, how ‘she’ can be more efficient/mobile

.-Engaging all my system to allow the guest into the intimacy of ‘our’ home

.-Feeling emotional, giggly, like crying…throughout the session

 

 

02.12.2020

 

I have my third Rolfing session in an hour and I must admit that I’m a little concerned. After my previous session, I had a strong reaction that resulted in an arduous emotional hangover. However, let’s not be dramatic and instead recall a useful, convenient old saying: After the storm comes the calm.

 

A few days after the turmoil generated from my second Rolfing session, my body felt better and somehow, so did my soul. A knot was lifted from my chest which had a positive impact; some positive impacts in fact. The posture of my skeleton softened, particularly around the chest and the thoracic spine. I was also able to notice micro anxieties that until then my system was either ignoring or delaying to deal with. And last but not least, I felt less self conscious and more able to be myself. I had lately been struggling with my confidence, constantly second guessing myself, which had made my self-esteem shrink and relating to others a little scary.

 

8.03.2020

I haven’t yet been able to go back to Rolfing therapy due to new lockdown restrictions that came into place during Christmas time. I was back home then, learning and adapting to a whole new bunch of Covid-19 rules; the Mediterranean approach to the pandemic. I noticed however, that the holiday break offered a generous amount of time for my body and mind to relax, disconnect and reset. Space for my whole being to absorb the corporal habits that I had recently got in touch with through Rolfing.

 

Reflecting on my still short Rolfing process, I am certain that the therapy has allowed me to become more aware of my body’s condition on a detailed level and has deepen my understanding that my body, as well as my mind, needs daily checking in and daily rebalancing in order to feel at ease and at peace. 

The ability to listen to what our body is demanding from us develops through time and with patience. Therefore making space for such listening has become crucial for me to hear what the body is asking for.

 

How do I feel in my body right now? How do I feel after not having had a Rolfing session for three months? Has anything from those distant sessions sunk in?

My straight answer is yes! I seem to experience a lightness in my shoulders that wasn’t there before as well as a wider range of mobility in the upper back area. It’s as if my scapulas have sunk into a new space, a wider, brighter apartment that they can now call home; a space that my shoulder blades were meant to inhabit, but didn’t naturally recognise as their own, probably due to old, recurrent, inefficient habits. 

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