Dr. Rolf designed Rolfing to happen in a ten-series format as a way of ensuring that the whole body is attended to. Her reason for doing this was to ensure that clients will have significant and long lasting change in how the body looks, moves, and feels.

Still curious?:

“But I don’t care about the whole body, it’s just my [insert problem area here] that hurts!” So here’s the thing: the only reason we bother being so particular about attending to the whole is because all things are connected (honest, it’s not just and airy-fairy idea) and without attention paid to the connections between things, whatever is symptomatic for you can’t heal fully.

For example, say you come in for neck pain. As I look at your posture, I can see that you’re holding your head way out in front of you. Depending on the size of your melon, that’s 8 or 9 lbs suspended out in space that your neck has to work very hard to support. Because your head is ideally designed to be effortlessly supported by your spine, this forward head alignment means that your posterior neck muscles are supporting significantly more weight than they are designed to. They rebel by going into spasm. If I were to address this by taking the compartmentalized view, I would work only on those particular tight muscles. Unfortunately, if no attention is paid to changing the orientation of your head and neck, those neck muscles are going to get really tight again- really quickly.

As Rolfers, we’re much more interested in getting your head in alignment with the rest of your body so that when the neck muscles relax, they can stay that way. To do that we’ve got to look at a base of support for your head through your feet, pelvis, core, thorax, shoulder girdle- you get the idea- the whole body. At the end of the day, we Rolfers are a pretty pragmatic bunch. We want to see things get better and stay better for as long as possible.

“Does a ten-series mean it’s some formulaic recipe where you’ll do the same thing in each session no matter how I feel” you ask? Nooooo. Definitely no. Each of the ten sessions has guidelines that help us to check in with specific issues- whether it’s the breath in session one, or the abdominal core in session five- however, they are only guideposts. Everything happens in the context of you, the individual. That means paying very close attention to your unique patterns, and what may be symptomatic for you. This is not formulaic robot work.