Structure, Journal of the

Dr. Ida Rolf Institute®

Function,
August 2021

Integration.
Trauma, Self-Regulation,
and Embodiment
The process of Rolfing® Structural Integration
(SI) becoming trauma-informed work began
in the late 1970s influenced by the work of Dr.
Peter Levine and Dr. Anngwyn St. Just, and
later Dr. Stephen Porges. The conversation
is ongoing as we explore the connection
between disorganized bodies and traumatic
experience, and the way to trauma resolution
as part of the holistic process of integration.
We share a wide array of articles, including
interviews with Porges and St. Just.

Also in this issue

Joining the Dialogue about

Diversity and Inclusion
We share the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute® diversity and
inclusion statement as well as articles from SI
practioner group ‘liberation somatics’ including
explorations of Whiteness and White privilege in a
somatic context and a consideration of equitable
economics in Rolfing SI.

It’s a Family Affair

Thoughts from Rolfers® married to other Rolfers.
Marrying into Ida Rolf’s family. Osteopath Frances
Demmerle reflects on her grandmother Ida Rolf.
August 2021/ Vol. 49, No. 2

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Featured Artist

August Cover Art

‘Disconnect’
The featured cover artist, Stephen Paré, is a part of Structure, Function,
Integration’s history and legacy. He was on the editorial team for Rolf Lines®
in 2000; he was the Editor-in-Chief for Structural Integration: The Journal of
the Rolf Institute® from 2001 to 2005, and assisted on the editorial team until
2006. Since that time, Paré has carried on a Rolfing® Structural Integration
(SI) practice in Houston, Texas. He has been producing artwork since 2004,
and has written stories since 2012.
When preparing the theme of ‘Rolfing SI Is Trauma-Informed Work’, Paré’s
Front Cover by
original artwork came to mind, specifically the image ‘Disconnect’ which
Stephen Paré: captures visually what a traumatic stress state might feel like – and how it
might appear to a Rolfer.
Rolfer® and Artist
Paré became aware of Rolfing SI at a young age. He happened to read about
it in a book about massage (exotic enough in 1972), which happened also to
have a mailing address for the Rolf Institute® (he still remembers the address,
P.O. Box 1868). Intrigued by the brief description of the work, Paré wrote a
letter and heard back with a typed list of all the Rolfers in the world and a
gift of several back issues of the Institute’s journal. Paré eventually studied
Rolfing SI at the Rolf Institute, graduating as a Rolfer in 1999 and establishing
a practice in Houston.
Paré began creating digital images in 2004 and earned an MFA in 2013 from
the University of Houston. His artwork originates on mobile devices, yet the
images have a closer relationship with the culture and traditions of painting
than with photography. Today’s technology allows him to use his finger on
an iPad screen to simulate brushwork, and to use processes to simulate the
hand action of traditional painting. He calls what he does Virtual Painting. He
is also a writer of flash fiction, short texts that are inspired by his artworks,
and he is publishing a collection of about 125 images with stories in a book,
The Divers.
Website: www.stephenpare.art
Instagram @verbonnet
Soundcloud Stephen Pare
 Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021 www.rolf.org

Contents
From the Co-Editors-in-Chief 2

From the Board of Directors: DIRI Diversity 4

and Inclusion Statement
Columns
Fascia Insights: Remembering Thomas W. Findley, Physician, Researcher, Rolfer®, Visionary Leader 6
Letter from the Embryo: My Circular Life by Konrad Obermeier 12

Rolfing SI Is Trauma-Informed Work

The Beginnings of Trauma-Informed Rolfing® SI: An Interview with Anngwyn St. Just, PhD 15
by Anne Hoff and Anngwyn St. Just
Polyvagal Theory and Trauma: An Interview with Stephen Porges, PhD 18
by Lina Amy Hack and Stephen Porges
The Autonomic Nervous System and Rolfing SI: Clinical Considerations and Application 26
by Pedro Prado
Finding Resilience When Everything Is a Threat: Working Through the Pandemic 35
by Kristen Kuester
An Exploration into Cultural Somatics: Learning from Resmaa Menakem’s E-Course 40
by Lina Amy Hack
Trauma Support in Practice: Links Between Psychology and Rolfing SI by Heather L. Corwin 44
Polyvagal Institute: An Interview with Randall Redfield, Executive Director 50
by Lina Amy Hack and Randall Redfield
Notes on William Redpath’s Trauma Work and New Book Trauma for Beginners: Meditations 54
and Commentaries by R. Kerrick Murray

Diversity and Inclusion: Joining the Conversation

Introducing Liberation Somatics: SI Practitioners Organizing to Examine Racial Biases 57
by Organizers of Liberation Somatics
A Phenomenology of Whiteness in Rolfing SI by Tristan Koepke 58
The Somnambulant Trance of White Privilege: Exploring the Posturing of Supremacy 64
by Carol A. Agneessens
Reimagining Equitable Economics in Rolfing SI by Katy Loeb 67

It’s a Family Affair

A Rolfing Family by Bethany Ward and Larry Koliha 70
The Pleasures of Partnering in Life and in Our Work by Gale Loveitt and Thomas Walker 73
Dr. Rolf Gave Me a Purpose, a Passion, a Future, and a Family by Joy Beluzzi 76
A Gift from My Grandmother by Frances Eva Demmerle 79

Perspectives
Three Vast Nets by Kathy McConnell 81
Reflections in Lockdown on Being a Rolfer by Alan Richardson
®
82

Institute News 86

Global Contacts 88

1
 From the
Co-Editors-in-Chief
Lina Amy Hack
and Anne Hoff

We invite you to take the time to

Lina Amy Hack
enjoy each of the articles in this
issue, from trauma, to diversity,
to the Rolfing family. It is quite a
journey through these pages.

Anne Hoff
 Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021
In this issue of Structure, Function,
Integration: The Journal of the Dr. Ida Rolf
Institute® (DIRI) we offer three different
themes, each one distinct and meaningful.
Yet the three themes in sum speak to both
the individual and the collective, how we
heal at all levels, how we find belonging
and resonance, and the role of our work of
Rolfing® Structural Integration (SI).
Our first theme, Rolfing SI Is Trauma-
Informed Work, is always relevant but
even more so in this time of global stress
due to the COVID-19 pandemic. What is
trauma? Our authors offer both common
conclusions and unique narratives. The
threat response cycle is an unconscious
neurophysiological set of states that
drives survival; when traumatic stress
states are overwhelming, the flow of the
cycle is arrested. One unifying idea is the
importance of regulating our own nervous
systems as practitioners: helping others
starts with embodying self-regulation.
Our trauma theme features a wide range
of contributors. Among these we highlight
Dr. Stephen Porges, originator of polyvagal
theory, a profound explanation of how
human connection, relationships with safety,
and love are a reliable avenue of recovery
from traumatic stress states. Rolfers® will be
interested to read about his role as Director
of Research of the Rolf Institute® [now the
Dr. Ida Rolf Institute® (DIRI)] in 1990. We also
feature a contribution from Dr. Pedro Prado,
Advanced Rolfing and Rolf Movement®
Instructor, which offers a full description
of the threat response cycle in the Rolfing
context. We are also very pleased to feature
an interview with Dr. Anngwyn St. Just.
Author, global educator, and trauma
specialist. St. Just trained in Rolfing SI
in the early 1970s; alongside Peter Levine,
she was part of the early history of Rolfing
SI becoming a trauma-informed discipline.
We have numerous other contributors to
the theme, all offering nuance and support
about how to face our present moment and
our Rolfing work with presence, resilience,
and embodiment.
Our second theme, Diversity and Inclusion:
Joining the Conversation, was inspired by
the cultural reckoning beginning to take
place in the United States and around to
world. DIRI joins the numerous institutions
worldwide that are affirming a commitment
to engagement, and following this letter you
will find on page 4 the letter from Libby Eason
discussing the Institute’s official statement,
crafted through a long process between the
Committee for Diversity and Anti-Racism
www.rolf.org
and the DIRI Board of Directors, and then
on page 5 DIRI’s Diversity and Inclusion
Statement. Then, as you turn to the themed
articles, start with “Introducing Liberation
Somatics”, where you meet a group of SI
practitioners taking the initiative to uncover
and challenge inherent bias and racism in
our lives and work. Three members of this
group share articles from their explorations.
Tristan Koepke draws from his experience
as a professional dancer and Rolfer® to
discuss the aesthetic and phenomenology
of Whiteness; Carol A. Agneessens’s “The
Somnambulant Trance of White Privilege”
evokes introspection in the Rolfing context;
and Katy Loeb proposes equitable pricing
models that can expand the public’s access
to Rolfing sessions.
Our final theme, It’s a Family Affair, looks
to the experience of Rolfing SI within the
family. This is not about working with
families, but rather about our vocation
in a family context. With our work and
community now spanning several decades,
we have Rolfer parents with Rolfer children,
couples where both individuals are Rolfers,
the lineage and impact of Rolfing SI within
Ida Rolf’s own family, and the larger ‘family’
of the Rolfing community and the wider
‘family’ of the SI community. We hear from
two Rolfer couples (Bethany Ward and
Larry Koliha, and Thomas Walker and Gale
Loveitt), from Joy Belluzzi who married
into Dr. Rolf’s family, and from Rolf’s
granddaughter, Frances Demmerle, DO.
Besides our themed content, we direct your
attention to our Fascia Insights column,
in this issue a tribute to the work and
legacy of Dr. Tom Findley, who effortlessly
straddled the worlds of medicine, research,
and Rolfing SI, making numerous research
contributions and also helping birth the
Fascia Research Congresses. We also
learn what two Rolfers spent time on in
their periods of COVID shutdown. Kathy
McConnell wrote poetry, and shares her
poem Three Vast Nets. Alan Richardson
reflected deeply on his long Rolfing career
and what we can uniquely offer as our
clients return from their own imposed and
touch-deprived isolation.
We invite you to take the time to enjoy each
of the articles in this issue, from trauma, to
diversity, to the Rolfing family. It is quite a
journey through these pages.
Lina Amy Hack
Anne Hoff
Co-Editors-in-Chief
3
From the Board of Directors

From the Dr. Ida Rolf

Institute® Board of Directors
The Dr. Ida Rolf Institute (DIRI) has been updating its diversity and inclusion policies, and a year and a half ago created
a Committee for Diversity and Anti-Racism chaired by Tristan Koepke. The Committee did many hours of work, informed
by experience and culture, to devise language that captures the spirit of DIRI’s intent. There are many federal policies that
prevent discrimination, and those are listed in the statement. But the spirit exceeds those standards, and we wished to go
further. After discussion with the Board of Directors, the final version of the diversity and inclusion statement you see on the
next page was penned and approved on May 18, 2021. We hope the intent serves as an invitation to future enrollees at the
Institute, and inspires other, similar organizations to adopt and publish their own statements.
Moreover, a recent survey (crafted by Dan Somers, Board Member) included questions asking DIRI members how important
diversity and inclusion should be in DIRI’s mission. There was an overwhelming response to the effect that these principles
are very important.
We thank the committee members:
Tristan Koepke, Chair
Mary Contreras, DIRI Admissions Coordinator
Lu Mueller Kaul, DIRI Faculty
Marekah Stewart, Rolfer®
Brian Soderholm, Rolfer

On behalf of the DIRI Board of Directors,

Libby Eason, Board Chair

Committee for Diversity and Anti-Racism

Mary Contreras,
Tristan Koepke, Chair DIRI Admissions Coordinator Lu Mueller Kaul, DIRI Faculty

Marekah Stewart, Rolfer® Brian Soderholm, Rolfer

4
 Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021
DIRI Diversity and
Dr. Ida Rolf Institute
seeks to make anti-
racism, diversity,
and inclusion
cornerstones of Inclusion Statement
our educational
At the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute® (DIRI), we
experiences. DIRI are dedicated to diversity, equality, and
provides equitable inclusion. We commit to advancing the
principles of anti-racism and equitable
opportunities for access to resources and opportunities for
students, faculty, all students, staff, and faculty. Rolfing®
Structural Integration (SI) supports
and staff. We strive the health and wellness of all people.
to maintain a climate We recognize, value, and respect
differences and strive toward creating
and culture for optimal structure and function in each
success by engaging unique individual’s body. DIRI has made
Rolfing SI known all over the world,
with diverse and we proudly support our growing
perspectives. international community; we need and
welcome diverse perspectives, thoughts,
ideas, and actions in order to progress
into the future as thought leaders in the
greater field of healthcare and wellness.
We take real, visible action towards a
more diverse and inclusive community
of Rolfers® and clients. DIRI provides
innovative learning experiences in a caring
and supportive environment for individuals
of diverse backgrounds, cultures, and
abilities to prepare them for success.
DIRI’s faculty and staff proudly work with
each and every prospective student to
support them in meeting their goals and
ensuring the growth of our field of diverse
www.rolf.org
Rolfing professionals. Our admissions
process (https://www.rolf.org/apply.php)
is just one example: persons fulfilling the
requirements will be accepted into the
program, and we consult with individuals
who don’t have all requirements and help
them to achieve them.
DIRI is committed to ensuring individuals’
legal rights, as defined by Federal guidelines
(see below). Please do not hesitate to reach
out (https://www.rolf.org/contact.php) with
any questions and comments.
• Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of
1964 (Title VI), which prohibits
discrimination based on race, color,
or national origin;
• Title IX of the Education Amendments
Act of 1972 (Title IX), which prohibits
discrimination based on sex; and
• Section 504 of the Rehabilitation
Act of 1973 (Section 504) and
• Title II of the Americans with
Disabilities Act of 1990 (Title II),
which prohibit discrimination based
on disability.
5
Columns

Fascia Insights
Remembering Thomas W. Findley:
Physician, Researcher, Rolfer®, Visionary Leader

Contributors: Jason DeFilippis, Libby Eason, Ed Hemberger,

Eric Jacobson, Helene Langevin, and Robert Schleip

ABSTRACT Close associates contribute to this remembrance of Thomas W. Findley,

MD, PhD, who wore multiple hats as a Rolfer, researcher (fascia, rehabilitation medicine,
structural integration), physician, editor, and organizing force behind Fascia Research
Congresses. Findley was indeed a visionary, and he propelled the understanding of
fascia in research and manual therapies well into the future. Those of us who are
interested in the properties and mechanisms of fascia will be forever indebted
to him for his contributions not only to the field of structural integration, but all
manual therapies and basic science research as they are related to each other.

The Rolfing® Structural Integration (SI)
and fascia research community recently
lost a great friend and contributor with the
passing of Thomas W. Findley, MD, PhD,
from cancer on April 18, 2021. Findley wore
many hats and was instrumental in many
activities that bear upon our community and
our work. On the interweaving of his many
roles, Findley wrote the following to describe
his work in a biographical summary: “As a
physiatrist he treats many disorders of the
musculoskeletal system. As a scientist he
strives to understand their pathophysiology
in order to develop focused treatments
and prophylactic regimens. Fascia, part of
the connective tissues that permeate the
human body, may be the unifying structure
and concept that is essential to elucidate
the mechanisms of these dysfunctions”
(Hoff & Findley 2016, 32).

6

Findley described his career as connecting clinical practice,
basic theory, and applied measurements in rehabilitation
research, with a heavy dose of mathematical modeling.
This memorial is a tapestry woven from
pieces various close associates shared
about Findley’s life, career, contributions,
and the indelible impression he made.
The Person
Findley did not lack for accomplishments.
He earned an MD in 1977 (Georgetown
University), did a residency physical
medicine and rehabilitation at the
University of Minnesota, subsequently
earning a PhD in 1983 in rehabilitation
medicine. He trained with the Guild for
Structural Integration (GSI; basic training
in 1991) and the Rolf Institute® (advanced
certification in 1998). He had a significant
career as both a clinician and researcher,
and was also an educator, teaching at
the Department of Physical Medicine and
Rehabilitation, University of Medicine
and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ;
later merged with Rutgers University),
and one of the propelling forces behind
the Fascia Research Congress (FRC).
Findley described his career as connecting
clinical practice, basic theory, and applied
measurements in rehabilitation research,
with a heavy dose of mathematical modeling.
Tom Findley hiking at Yosemite, 2001.
Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021
Born on October 3, 1949 in Columbus,
Ohio, Findley came from a family lineage
of folks who, in the face of poverty and
hardship, were high achieving, resourced,
and ethical. He was smart but also loved
building things and working with his hands.
His inquisitive nature needed to try things,
but was satisfied and ready to move on
once he succeeded at an endeavor: a lucky
trait for the child who once successfully
built a bomb.
He studied psychology as an undergraduate
and was active in protesting the Vietnam
War. He was subject to the draft, but as
a Quaker was granted conscientious
objector status and did alternative service.
After working as a mechanic for a while
after college, he realized he wanted to fix
people not cars, so he entered the field of
rehabilitation medicine.
Findley lived with a steadfast reference
to integrity, his Quaker faith, curiosity,
humility, and an unwavering commitment
to help alleviate human suffering. His
“insistence” for novelty, and on giving
himself to his interests, often compelled
him to take risks, disrupt his life, and find
success on the other end. Besides anti-
www.rolf.org
war activism, Findley advocated for
disability access and the establishment
of rehabilitation centers. He learned to
be “radical but untouchable” (Becker
2018), a trait that allowed him later in his
career to keep valuable medical positions
while introducing alternative ideas into
the system. Outside of his career and
activism, family was important, and
this included his first wife Sally, his two
children Molly and Peter, his second wife
Patricia, and one grandchild, Benjamin.
The diagnosis of prostate cancer came
in 2010. With typical zeal, Findley
went to work to find out how best to
pursue treatment. He utilized allopathic
approaches and participated in clinical
trials while also utilizing alternative
approaches involving diet and exercise.
True to his nature, his research was not
just personal: in looking for exercise
interventions for his cancer, he studied
Delorme’s research from the mid-1900s
and picked up on an overlooked element
– that certain types of muscle contraction
can soften tissue. This led to a project
studying two different types of muscle
contraction and how those affect muscles
differently (Hoff and Findley 2016).
Jason DeFilippis notes: “In these last few
years, I was able to spend a little bit of
time with Tom. It was beautiful to see
him slow down and give his attention to
himself. The last few times I saw him were
very sweet: he was vulnerable, generous,
and funny. I wondered where that great
mind was taking him.”
The Clinician – Physician and
Rolfer
Findley was a physician and researcher
before he became a Rolfer, but he had
learned about Rolfing SI in 1969 through
Sharon Wheeler and Richard Wheeler
and went through the Ten Series between
college and medical school. One of his
mentors at Georgetown University medical
school was Frank Wenger, MD, who
invited Ida Rolf, PhD, and Richard Wheeler
to work on his patients, demonstrations
that convinced Findley that Rolfing SI has
a role to play in physical medicine.
7
Columns

clinical outcomes of our work. In his own

With Libby Eason (then President of the Ida P. Rolf Research® Foundation) at the fourth FRC in 2015,
holding the proceedings book, Fascia Research IV: Basic Science and Implications for Conventional
and Complementary Health Care, co-edited by Findley.
While Director of Research at the Kessler
Institute for Rehabilitation in New Jersey
(1988-1996), he organized a training for
nine Kessler physical therapists (PTs)
and himself, taught by the GSI in 1991.
Subsequent to that, the PTs did SI work
on patients, and Kessler had a structural
integrator on staff for fifteen years. Findley
was also a tenured professor at UMDNJ,
and continued to teach there (and
elsewhere) after he left Kessler in 2001
to work for the Veterans Administration
Medical Center in East Orange, New
Jersey, first as the Associate Director
(Hoff and Findley 2016), he expressed
disappointments that few SI practitioners
wanted to join him at the VA or take
VA referrals.] One application was for
treatment of anxiety: ease and balance
in the body is a condition for the same
in perception. His primary research at
the VA was in unexplained illness; this
work was broad, and yielded very good
research. One would often see him with a
mountain of articles on his desk; he would
speed-read these by the end of the day,
while also accomplishing other tasks and
assisting colleagues in their research.
practice, he’d bring clients to the VA to
make use of various assessment protocols
to gauge balance, nerve conduction, and
the like.
Working with severely injured patients, his
SI work could have life-changing results.
Ed Hemberger recalls seeing a video from
the VA hospital where a Ten Series helped
a veteran with a spinal cord injury regain
the ability to stand. Findley was also
credited for his work with Christopher
Reeves, the actor (Superman) who was
paralyzed in a riding accident. With
Findley’s help, Reeves was able to get
enough muscle strength to have periods
off of his ventilator. This story is shared
in Reeves’ autobiography, and also
depicted in a movie about the actor.
Jason DeFilippis remembers that
Findley was genuinely excited about his
research, his practice with fascia and
SI, and the evolution of the systems that
contextualize human progress. He says,
“I look back and see that what seemed
to me a very clinical approach to life was
actually imbued with a deep love, and
respect for humanity. He was a kind boss;
always teaching, and fostering the best in
me and in his colleagues.”
Research and Other
Publications
Findley had a prolific career as a researcher
with an abundance of studies as author
or co-author. These included studies into
structural integration, manual therapy,
rehabilitation medicine, and fascia. In a

Findley noted, “As I am uniquely positioned between the

science and clinical practice of both fascia and exercise,
collecting data on both clinical aspects and the cellular
mechanism has become a high priority for my research.”

for Research at the War-related Illness
and Injury Study Center. At the VA, he
conducted research and did clinical work
treating patients with pain.
As he had done at Kessler, Findley
brought SI into his VA hospital by getting
it credentialed, obtaining an NIH (National
Institutes of Health) grant, then doing
sessions. [In an interview with this journal
Findley also had a private practice in
Rolfing SI with offices in New York and
New Jersey. He brought his understanding
as a physician to bear on his Rolfing work,
utilizing a critical eye as to whether Rolfing
sessions or other care was needed. He
felt Rolfers would benefit from more
engagement with the healthcare system,
especially as we lack assessment of the
personal statement, Findley (2016) noted,
“As I am uniquely positioned between
the science and clinical practice of both
fascia and exercise, collecting data on
both clinical aspects and the cellular
mechanism has become a high priority
for my research.”
With an eye to how SI could be validated
through research, Findley shepherded

8

and had senior authorship on an article
(James et al. 2009) based on a huge
amount of clinical data compiled by Helen
James, a Rolfer and PT. He also initiated
a follow-up study on a larger selection
of James’ case records, Eric Jacobson,
PhD, and Katja Bartsch, are currently
preparing that for publication. Moreover,
case studies on the effects of Rolfing
SI were published in FRC proceedings.
Findley reviewed most of the published
abstracts and also gathered many of the
other articles published in those same
books and/or collaborated with others
who were scientific committee chairs of
individual FRCs.
Findley co-authored several papers on
the viscoelastic properties of muscles
and associated fasciae, and the
characterization of the stresses and
strains experienced by these tissues
during manual therapies. He understood
early on that the nascent field of ‘fascia
research’ would need input from many
angles, and his own research also reflects
this collaborative and multidisciplinary
approach. One of his papers co-
authored with Hans Chaudhry, PhD, and
others was awarded with the George W.
Northup, DO, Medical Writing Award by
the American Osteopathic Association
in 2009. This paper, with the title “Three-
Dimensional Mathematical Model for
Deformation of Human Fasciae in Manual
Therapy” contains a calculation of the
amount of force needed for a plastic
deformation of different fascial tissues
in the human body. According to Robert
Schleip, PhD, co-author of the paper,
“This paper has become one of the most
frequently mis-quoted publications in
social media debates around fascia-
oriented therapies. Many subsequent
authors have used our calculations as
evidence that it is impossible to induce a
lengthening effect with manual therapy on
dense fasciae, such as the iliotibial tract.
While we showed in this paper, that such
an effect is very unlikely when examining
fascia in vitro – i.e., on a cadaver tissue
analysis – we clearly discussed that when
working on living tissues, many additional
responses may be possible to account for
a palpable tissue elongation.”
In his later years, the interaction between
fascia and cancer became a research
subject, following on ideas proposed by
A. T. Still, DO. The effect of exercise on
reducing the spread of cancer was one
research topic, where Findley presented at
the 2015 Joint Conference on Acupuncture,
Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021
Findley holding his lifetime achievement award from the Ida P. Rolf Research Foundation at the fourth FRC
in 2015. Pictured with fascia researcher Antonio Stecco, MD, PhD.
Oncology, and Fascia (referenced below
with video link. Videos are available at
https://oshercenter.org/joint-conference-
2015-video-presentations/).
Findley was the first board president of the
Ida P. Rolf Research Foundation (https://
rolfresearchfoundation.org), which was
established by the Rolf Institute as an
independent organization in 2007 and
announced at the first FRC. With an eye
to supporting the development of future
researchers, he authored a series of articles
on research design and analysis. These can
be found at https://rolfresearchfoundation.
org/resources/fascia-research-resources
(click on the ^ at the end of the first
paragraph on that webpage to open the
substantial list of elements to consider to
create and conduct a credible research
project related to SI or fascia).
Together with Jacobson, Schleip, and
a few others, Findley also founded the
Fascia Research Society (FRS; see
https://fasciaresearchsociety.org/) in
2012. It began under the umbrella of the
Ida P. Rolf Research Foundation, and was
spun off as an independent organization
that includes the Fascia Research
Congress, effective June 1, 2020.
Findley also used his research background
to contribute in important editorial roles.
He was co-editor with Schleip of all the
Fascia Research proceedings books (I-IV)
associated with the first four FRCs and one
www.rolf.org
of the co-editors of the leading textbook
in the fascia field, Fascia - The Tensional
Network of the Human Body (Schleip et
al. 2012) and its recent update in 2020. He
served in an editorial capacity for various
publications (including International Journal
of Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork,
Journal of Bodywork and Movement
Therapy, and Journal of the American
Osteopathic Association). Articles and
abstracts from the 5th Fascia Research
Congress in Berlin, 2018, were published
in the Journal of Bodywork and Movement
Therapies (Elsevier).
Networker Behind the FRC
and Other Inter-Disciplinary
Congresses
Findley brought his pioneering spirit and
excellent networking skills to bear as he
closely collaborated with Schleip, Jacobson,
Stephen Evanko, PhD, and several others
to submit a respective conference support
proposal to the NIH. The concept was to
bring leading academic scientists from
different fields related to fascial connective
tissues together to exchange their insights
and questions related to aspects relevant to
manual and movement therapies.
The result was the first Fascia Research
Congress, held at Harvard University
Conference Center in 2007. It was hugely
successful and triggered a lineage of
9
Columns
In his study, 2020.
subsequent international FRCs, for all
of which Findley served as one of the
leading organizers and a member of
the scientific committee: Amsterdam,
Netherlands, 2009; Vancouver, Canada,
2012; Washington, DC, 2015; and Berlin,
Germany, 2018. Participant numbers have
been steadily growing, reaching beyond
1,000 (plus waiting list) at the most recent
congress in Berlin.
The FRCs have put fascia research into the
hands of SI practitioners, and also brought
SI into scientific discourse. Since that
time, many collaborations have expanded
understanding for both researchers and
manual therapies and built lasting bridges
between the two worlds.
Helene Langevin, MD, shares:
It is not an exaggeration to say that Tom
was a visionary. I first met Tom in 2007
when the first FRC was being conceived.
It was a totally new idea, and to
everyone’s astonishment was pulled off
with over 700 attendees, overflow room,
and groundbreaking presentations. The
meeting was significant for bringing
together scientists from radically
different disciplines (biomechanics, cell
biology, anatomy) and clinicians with
expertise in the ‘hands-on’ knowledge
of fasciae that is completely missing
from conventional medical education
and practice. There was electricity in the
crowd, and the atmosphere at times felt
more like a World Series game than a
scientific meeting. It was an eye opener
for many, and started a whole field.
10
Findley also served as close collaborator
and keynote presenter for the quadrennial
congress series Connective Tissues in
Sports Medicine, held at Ulm University in
2013 and 2017, and then most recently at
the Technical University of Munich in 2021.
Working with Langevin, he was one of
the organizers of the Joint Conference on
Acupuncture, Oncology and Fascia of 2015,
at Osher Institute for Integrative Studies,
Harvard Medical School and Brigham and
Women’s Hospital, that brought together
the Fascia Research Society (at that time
under the umbrella of IPRRF and part of the
2015 Fascia Research Congress), Society
for Acupuncture Research, and Society
for Integrative Oncology. Once again,
there were ‘lightbulb’ moments among
the various presenters, discussants, and
audience participants that can only happen
in this kind of multidisciplinary setting.  SI offices in New York and New Jersey
Another unique contribution from Findley
was the creation of academic think tanks.
The first one, held the day after the Fascia,
Acupuncture and Oncology Congress
in 2015, invited collaboration between
several of the keynote speakers. Findley
made sure they had excellent food and
wine, and managed to motivate them to
start writing a consensus statement. After
several months of additional work, this
was published in a prestigious academic
journal (Langevin et al. 2016). The second
think tank, associated with the Connective
Tissues in Sports Medicine 2017 congress,
produced a consensus statement on fascia
research and sports medicine (Zügel et al.
2018). A third think tank, again inspired by
Findley, happened at the FRC in Berlin in
2018 and focused on the cellular dynamics
of fascial tissues and a related publication
is close to completion. 
In closing out our memorial to Findley and
all that he contributed to the fields of Rolfing
SI and fascia research, Langevin shares:
Tom’s energy and eternal optimism
permeated all he did, but especially
his total commitment to advance the
field of fascia research.  Just thinking
about Tom’s contagious smile is
enough to brighten anyone’s day. His
bravery in facing the challenges of
his illness was truly amazing, as was
his curiosity and enthusiasm for new
ideas. He is leaving a huge void. 
You can read much more about Tom in
the interviews conducted for this journal
(DeFilippis 2018a, Hoff and Findley 2016),
and in his biography (Becker 2018) and
our review of that (DeFilippis 2018b). The
reference list below includes those as well
as a selection of his research papers and
other contributions.
Jason DeFilippis is a Certified Advanced
Rolfer in New York City. He worked with
Findley in 2004, as a research assistant
at the VA hospital in East Orange, New
Jersey, as well as assisting him with his
private Rolfing practice.
Libby Eason, Certified Advanced Rolfer,
Faculty Member, current chair of the Dr. Ida
Rolf Institute® Board of Directors, and past
president (2012-2019) of the Ida P. Rolf
Research Foundation worked with Findley
assisting in FRC production, FRS creation,
as well as managing organizational and
board business during those years.
Ed Hemberger is an SI practitioner in
New Jersey. He assisted Findley in his
for about a decade (from around 2005
until Findley’s retirement) and conducted
SI research under Findley’s tutelage that
resulted in a paper and poster presentation
at the 2007 FRC.
Eric Jacobson, PhD, MPH, Certified
Advanced Rolfer has a private practice in
Rolfing SI in Boston and teaches medical
anthropology and investigates alternative
medicines at Harvard Medical School. He
worked with Findley in formation of the
first FRC in 2007, and conducted the first
NIH funded clinical study on SI, Structural
Integration for Chronic Low Back Pain. He
collaborated with Findley on the first FRC
in 2007, and is currently President of the
Ida P. Rolf Research Foundation.
Helene M. Langevin, MD, is the Director
of the National Center for Complementary
and Integrative Health at the National
Institutes of Health. She worked with
Findley on organizing the first Fascia
Research Congress in 2007, as well as the
Joint Conference on Fascia, Acupuncture
and Oncology in 2015 and participated in
many of the FRCs.
Robert Schleip, PhD, is a Certified
Advanced Rolfer, fascia researcher, and
Executive Director of the Fascia Research
Project. He worked with Findley on
numerous congresses, co-authoring four
peer-reviewed journal publications, and
as a co-editor of Fascia - The Tensional
Network of the Human Body and
contributor to the second edition, as well
as Fascia Research (I-IV).

Selected References
Biographical
Becker, S. P. 2018. Fascia pioneer: Dr.
Thomas W. Findley, Jr. A Lifetime of Stories.
DeFilippis, J. 2018a. What shapes a life?
An intervi ew with fascia pioneer Thomas
Findley. Structure, Function, Integration:
The Journal of the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute
46(3): 67-70.
DeFilippis, J. 2018b. A Life of Mind and
Action. Structure, Function, Integration:
The Journal of the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute
46(3): 93-94.
Findley, T. W. 2016. Curriculum vitae,
September 2016. Shared by Robert Schleip.
Hoff, A. and T. Findley. 2016. Fascia
Pioneer: An Interview with Thomas Findley.
Structural Integration: The Journal of the
Rolf Institute 44(4): 28-32.
Findley’s Research and Other
Contributions
Avila Gonzalez, C. A., M. Driscoll, R.
Schleip, S. Wearing, E. Jacobson, T. W.
Findley, and W. Klinger. 2018. Frontiers in
fascia research. Journal of Bodywork and
Movement Therapies 22(4):873-880.
Chaitow, L., T. W. Findley, P. Huijing,
and R. Schleip (Eds). 2012. Fascia: The
tensional network of the human body.
London: Elsevier Urban & Fischer.
Chaitow, L., T. W. Findley, and R. Schleip
(Eds). 2012. Fascia research III: Basic
science and implications for conventional
and complementary health care. Munich:
Keiner Press.
Chaudhry, H., B. Bukiet, E.Z. Anderson,
J. Burch, and T. W. Findley. 2017. Muscle
strength and stiffness in resistance
exercise: Force transmission in tissues.
Journal of Bodywork and Movement
Therapies 21(3):517-522.
Chaudhry, H., B. Bukiet, Z. Ji, A. Stecco,
and T. W. Findley. 2014. The deformations
experienced in the human skin, adipose
tissue and fascia in manual medicine.
The Journal of the American Osteopathic
Association 114(10):780-787.
Chaudhry, H., B. Bukiet, M. Roman, A.
Stecco, and T. W. Findley. 2013. Squeeze
film lubrication for non-Newtonian fluids with
application to manual medicine. Journal of
Biorheology 50(3):191-202. Available at
www.academia.edu/13883926/Squeeze_
film_lubrication_for_non-Newtonian_fluids_
with_application_to_manual_ medicine.
Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021 www.rolf.org
It is not an exaggeration to say that Tom
was a visionary . . . [At] the first FRC . . .
there was electricity in the crowd, and
the atmosphere at times felt more like
a World Series game than a scientific
meeting. It was an eye opener for many,
and started a whole field.
Chaudhry, H., M. Roman, A. Stecco, and Schleip, R., P. A. Huijing, P. Hollander, and
T. W. Findley. 2012 Apr. Mathematical T. W. Findley (eds.). 2009. Fascia research
model of fiber orientation in anisotropic II: Basic science and implications for
fascia layers at large displacements. Journal conventional and complementary health
of Bodywork and Movement Therapies care. Elsevier Urban & Fischer.
16(2):158-164. Wearing S. C., R. Schleip, L. Chaitow, W.
Chaudhry, H., Z. Ji, N. Shenoy, and T. W. Klingler, T. W. Findley (eds.). 2015. Fascia
Findley. 2009. Viscoelastic stresses on research IV: Basic science and implications
anisotropic annulus fibrosus of lumbar disk for conventional and complementary health
under compression, rotation and flexion in care. Munich: Keiner Press.
manual treatment. Journal of Bodywork Zügel, M., C. N. Maganaris, J. Wilke, K.
and Movement Therapies 13(2):182-191. Jurkat-Rott, W. Klingler, S.C. Wearing, T.
Chaudhry, H., R. Schleip, Z. Ji, B. Bukiet, W. Findley, M. F. Barbe. J. M. Steinacker,
M. Maney, and T. W. Findley. 2008. A. Vleeming, W. Bloch, R. Schleip, and
Three-dimensional mathematical model P. W. Hodges. 2018. Fascial tissue
for deformation of human fasciae in research in sports medicine: From
manual therapy. Journal of the American molecules to tissue adaptation, injury and
Osteopathic Association 108(8):378-390. diagnostics: Consensus statement. British
Journal of Sports Medicine 52(23):1497.
Chaudhry, H., B. Bukiet, T. W. Findley.
Available at https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/
2008 Dec. Mathematical analysis of
bjsports/52/23/1497.full.pdf
applied loads on skeletal muscles during
manual therapy. Journal of the American
Osteopathic Association 108(12):680-8.
Findley, T. W. and R. Schleip (eds.).
2007. Fascia research: Basic science
and implications for conventional and
complementary health care. Elsevier
Urban & Fischer.
James, H., L. Castaneda, M.E. Miller, and
T. W. Findley. 2009 (July). Rolfing structural
integration treatment of cervical spine
dysfunction. Journal of Bodywork and
Movement Therapies 13(3): 229-238. https://
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19524847/
Langevin, H., P. Keely, J. Mao, L.M.
Hodge, R. Schleip, G. Deng, B. Hintz,
M.A. Swartz, B.A. de Valois, S. Zick, and
T. W. Findley. 2016. Connecting (t)issues:
How research in fascia biology can impact
integrative oncology. Cancer Research
76(21):6159-6162.
Schleip, R., T. W. Findley, L. Chaitow,
and P. Huijing (eds.). 2012. Fascia - The
Tensional Network of the Human Body.
Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone Elsevier.
11
Columns

Letter from the

Embryo
My Circular Life

By Konrad Obermeier, Basic Rolfing® Instructor

ABSTRACT The article provides a biodynamic account of embryology with specific

focus on polarities such as the relation between the embryo and its environment and
that between process and form in organ development.

In the very beginning, I, the ovum, accept
an impulse, the sperm, and then together
we ride out our developmental wave to
the shore. From deep down we access
a memory bank called DNA that allows
us to apply quite amazing skills. And
with this metabolic fulcrum we just swim
along, observing metabolic gradients and
Konrad Obermeier
obeying physical reality, responding in
our own way to every external demand
and question we encounter with our
whole being by orienting ourselves to the
guidance of the environment.
As a unified cell I ride out a circular life on
circulating fluids.
Let us begin with principles.
The amazing molecular stability of our
nucleus-DNA provides ‘stored’ biological
information (genetics). When this genetic
information is expressed and externalized
it is transformed into applied in-formation,
initiating and guiding directed, fluidic
cellular processes (microbiology). When
the results of these informed activities
are externalized onto cellular surfaces
(physiology) they meet our immediate
environment (epigenetics).
The cellular surface is the manifold where
directed metabolic processes meet the
external world:
Genetics > Microbiology > Physiology >
Environment.

12

The environment provides ‘information’
and thus is an integrated part of the cell.
The circular flow of biological information
is one of the organizing rules in biology.
Genes (DNA)
encode that regulate
RNAs
to build
Proteins
to form/regulate
organisms
This directional movement can be looked
at from the other side as well.
The world as environmental field is a flow
of unending questions that importunately
press upon the cell from its periphery. The
cellular membrane is thus ‘im-pressed’ by
all kind of questions (temperature, tension,
pressure, molecules, radiation, any kind of
Figure 2: Embryo with placenta, about week
three. Embryological images and illustrations are
originals from different publications by Dr. Erich
Blechschmidt, used with permission from the
author of this article and Kiener Verlag, Munich.
Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021
Epigenetics
that influence
Figure 1: My simple life
is embedded in circular
processes. The environment
Environments provides ‘information’ and
thus is an integrated part of
the cell. The circular flow of
that sense biological information is one
of the organizing rules in
biology. Image by the author.
information or ‘energy’), which it relays, as
‘in-formation,’ inwardly to the cytoplasm.
The cytoplasm is a relational field,
translating and transferring the external
questions to the nucleus by way of
integrins and other kind of cytoplasmatic
makeup. The nucleus then ‘ex-presses’
an answer, originating and pulled from a
stunningly stable memory-bank (DNA).
In this way directed metabolic processes
are described the other way around:
Environment > Physiology > Microbiology
> Genetics.
My simple life is embedded in circular
processes (see Figure 1).
The simple life of me, the embryo, in my
individual developmental movement, also
obeys and applies primary circulatory
principles – I just raise them to another
level of organization. Manifesting form into
a body-structure is essentially dependent
on circular processes.
The development of the embryo is
composed of growth, differentiation, and
maintenance of the structural components
at all times. As the molecular substances
needed for this constructive building
activity are provided by the body of the
maternal ‘host’, they need to be transferred
over to the embryo and then transported to
the areas of actual growth. In a cooperative
way ‘host’ and embryo establish reciprocal
metabolic processes that are often based
on metabolic gradients.
www.rolf.org
On a microscopic, cellular level simple
transfer of molecules generally happens
through diffusion, which applies these
metabolic gradients. The transfer from
mother to embryo manifests on the
membranous interface where the two
bodies actually meet – the placenta.
Initially, after implantation, the placenta
enters a phase of burgeoning growth. It is
exclusively the embryo that is developing
and preserving its structure.
When you imagine an embryo, make sure
your imagination includes the placenta
(see Figures 2 and 3). The placenta is an
externalized but fully integrated aspect of
the early body — from conception to birth.
Indeed, the placenta can be understood
as a pluripotent unity of lungs, kidneys,
and digestive system, provided that the
organs are grasped as functions and not
exclusively as forms.
Evidently, the placenta manifests a
structure of primary importance, where
the metabolic surface of the embryo
literally contacts the external world.
On a macroscopic, ‘long-distance’ tissue
level, molecular transport engages special
structures – vessels. All structures serving
long-distance transport are aspects of
the circulatory system. From the placenta
to the embryonic body, the molecules
required for growth, differentiation, and
maintenance are transported through
Figure 3: Embryo with placenta, about week
five. Embryological images and illustrations are
originals from different publications by Dr. Erich
Blechschmidt, used with permission from the
author of this article and Kiener Verlag, Munich.
13
Columns
Figure 4: Early circulatory system. Embryological images and illustrations are originals from different publications by Dr. Erich Blechschmidt, used with
permission from the author of this article and Kiener Verlag, Munich.
vessels in the umbilical cord. Allow me to
emphasize here the physiological fact that
the circulatory system is fully functioning
prior to the manifestation of the heart!
The graphic representation in Figure 4
depicts the already existing circulatory
system, prior to and during cardiac
development. The heart does not initiate
the circulation of blood. On the contrary,
the development of the heart is an answer
to increased metabolic activity and rising
blood pressure that results from an
increase of fluid volume – expansion and
14
growth. And growth depends on fluid-
based circular processes with bidirectional
metabolic movements as a precondition.
Circulatory processes are primary; the
manifestation of the heart, with its pumping
function, follows circulation and is thus a
secondary process. We understand that the
placenta is a completely integrated aspect
of the embryonic circulatory system. The
heart comes in and manifests structurally
as a (neuro-myo-fascial) compensation to
rising blood pressure.
In early stages of development, the
heart primarily serves the growth and
development of the brain. We can
see this in the close association and
topographic relationship of heart and
cranio-facial structures in Figure 5. The
heart-liver complex is massive, early
arms and legs appear almost ‘pumped
up’ by fluids, the brain growing so
ferociously that the arteries — visible on
the lateral cranium — can hardly keep
up with the pace of expansion.
All of life, not just the embryo, is fluid-
based.
Fluids have to move to keep life going.
Circulation means life moving fluids and
fluids generating forces of pressure.
Figure 5: Embryo, 11.4mm, week six. Embryological images and illustrations are originals from
different publications by Dr. Erich Blechschmidt, used with permission from the author of this article
and Kiener Verlag, Munich.
Tensional forces manifest when fluids
are contained and compartmentalized.
The containment of fluids creates forces
of pressure and tension — these are the
twins of life.
Sometimes I, the embryo, wonder why
everybody speaks about tension and
pressure gets so little attention. Maybe just
a habit — who knows? Then I remember
what the old Doctor said a long time ago:
The rule of the artery is supreme.
A. T. Still
Konrad Obermeier holds a degree in
communications from the University
of Munich and has been a Rolfer since
1991. Currently, he serves as chair of the
Anatomy faculty for the European Rolfing®
Association. He is the editor of a series of
books on the biodynamic embryology of
Erich Blechschmidt.
 Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021 www.rolf.org

The Beginnings of
Trauma-Informed
Rolfing® SI
An Interview with Anngwyn St. Just, PhD

By Anne Hoff, Certified Advanced Rolfer® and Anngwyn St. Just, PhD

ABSTRACT The work of Rolfing® Structural Integration has benefitted greatly from
the pioneering work of Peter Levine, PhD, and Anngwyn St. Just, who brought trauma
knowledge into our work. In this interview, St. Just shares some of the story of how
Rolfing® Structural Integration (SI) became trauma-informed and gets us up to date on
her further work related to systemic trauma.

Anne Hoff: We’re thrilled to have this
interview with you to learn how trauma
work came into the Rolfing community.
First, for those who don’t know your name
and background, can you share with us
Anne Hoff about our training in trauma modalities
and somatic modalities?
Anngwyn St. Just: During the early 1960s,
I trained as a registered nurse at Johns
Hopkins Hospital and worked there after
graduation in their trauma centers, then
simply called emergency rooms. I met
Peter Levine, PhD, in 1977 at a time when
we were finishing our graduate studies at
UC Berkeley, me as an art historian and
Peter as a medical biophysicist. We met
at a party for Dr. Rolf in Sausalito. Peter
was already a Rolfer® and I was in my
Anngwyn St. Just, PhD auditing phase of the training.
As the Somatic Experiencing® (SE)
work was developed, Peter was the
scientist and I was the historian, he more
focused on individual work and I more on
relationships. We needed credentials so
that we could practice in the world with
what we were developing, so we both
returned for more graduate work, Peter in
psychology and I in marriage and family
therapy and higher education and social
change. Peter and I also studied anything
somatic going on in the Bay Area and at
Esalen® in those days – craniosacral work,
visceral manipulation, traditional Chinese
medicine, acupressure, Reichian therapies
and Bioenergetics, Ortho-Bionomy®, and
so on. Eventually we launched the first SE
training in my Berkeley living room with
about fifteen people. Now there are over
15,000 SE practitioners around the world.

15
Rolfing SI Is Trauma-Informed Work
AH: When did the Rolfing community
become aware of the SE work?
ASJ: During the late 1970s and early 1980s,
Peter had begun presenting somatic trauma
theory at Rolfing conferences in Boulder.
Later, in the early 1990s as licensing laws
changed in California so that therapists could
not touch, we moved the SE organization
to Lyons, Colorado, which was somatically
friendly. With Rolfing backgrounds, we felt
very welcomed by the Rolfing community
and at home there. I practiced Rolfing SI in
a family practice clinic in Boulder that had
multiple practitioners, and both Peter and I
did SE sessions there as well. Peter wasn’t
doing Rolfing sessions any more, and was
focused on SE trainings.
AH: What was the Rolfing community
response to bringing trauma ideas into
the Rolfing paradigm?
ASJ: Reception was divided. While
there was some interest, there was also
some pushback from some of the more
conservative Rolfers against too much
emphasis on the nervous system and
from Ida Rolf who focused on fascia.
Also, we were concerned that Rolfers
were not trauma-informed and could
be re-traumatizing clients, and there
was pushback about that as well. There
had already been concern expressed
about unnecessary pain and possible
re-traumatization from Rolfing work, with
this viewpoint led by Judith Ashton, Rolf
Movement® practitioners, and also some
Rolfers. Dr. Rolf often said, “No pain,
no gain.” If a client was screaming, she
would say, “This is your pain.” I did all
of my auditing and practitioner training
with Michael Salveson in Berkeley,
and this was all exploding during my
training. Michael did all he could, with his
considerable diplomatic skills, to keep
some perspective for all involved.
AH: Did you incorporate SE into your own
Rolfing sessions? I recall hearing that you
Rolfers would do well to be aware
that every individual client is part of
a family, and other larger systems;
and that any intervention may have a
significant impact on their relationships
within those systems.
16
also did dual sessions where there was
another Rolfer and you did the SE?
ASJ: I always enjoyed four-handed
Rolfing sessions with trusted colleagues.
And yes, I did a lot of tandem work with
Roger T. Jordan at a somatically oriented
family-practice medical clinic in Boulder.
I greatly benefited from his Rolfing-
oriented somatic intelligence. It might be
interesting to interview him about those
times. My fondest memories are of the
Rolfing work we did together with children
at open-to-the-public Rolf Institute®
events. The New Thinking Allowed
interviews [see Resources at the end of
the article] I did with Jeffrey Mishlove may
be of interest since I touch on some of
my experience at the family practice clinic
in Boulder. It was a very somatic clinic. I
did both Rolfing SI and SE, four-handed
Rolfing sessions with some of the others
on staff, and Peter did SE.
AH: When did you stop doing Rolfing
sessions and why?
ASJ: For me, Rolfing SI is a somatic
understanding of our human bodies and
this will always be integral to my work. And
there came a time, in this later life, when I
needed to accept that I no longer had the
physical strength and stamina to maintain
a Rolfing practice along with trauma work
and the demands of international travel
obligations. Then the Covid agenda and the
fact that I am nearly eighty explains a lot.
Dr. Rolf used to say, “If anyone questions
your decisions, just say, ‘Well, I am eighty,
you know, and that should put an end to
it’!” Well, I am not quite there – but soon.
AH: Can you elaborate a bit on how the
Rolfing paradigm of the body is integral to
your work in other modalities?
ASJ: In essence, I am a trauma specialist
and trauma is always a somatic experience.
AH: You have done Bert Hellinger’s
Systemic Constellation Work. Is there
relevance there for Rolfing SI?
ASJ: Yes. Bert was a strong advocate
of bodywork and craniosacral work
especially. While he was a very important
mentor for me, the five-day meetings with
Bert, Peter, and me in Switzerland at a
retreat center in Lucerne were especially
important. We had ample time to explore
SE, Systemic Constellation Work, and
how they work together – somatically and
in other ways – and sometimes not.
AH: As I understand it, Hellinger’s work
is about the shape of the group, how
the individual constellates with family or
groups, or how groups constellate. Is that
an accurate description? And from your
background in that work, how should
Rolfers be aware of how families and
other groups may play a role in shaping
our clients’ psyches and bodies?
ASJ: Bert Hellinger’s work was about
systems and the need for balance. Rolfing
SI addresses issues in body systems that
also have to do with balance. Rolfers
would do well to be aware that every
individual client is part of a family, and other
larger systems; and that any intervention
may have a significant impact on their
relationships within those systems.
AH: What is your current work, and what
are your own contributions?
ASJ: So far, I have published ten books and
many articles, most are also now in Spanish
since I have been working in Latin America
for decades. There are many interviews
you can watch on YouTube [see Resource
at the end of the article]. Since COVID-19
restrictions started, I do not travel and am
continuing my international systemically
oriented training events on Zoom.
Also, together with my Spanish-language
publisher and in response to COVID-19
restrictions, we have just launched a bilingual
(English and Spanish) online university of
systemic studies; traumauniversity.org, of
which I’m the director and co-founder. I am
also a frequent presenter at international
conferences. My latest project is writing
another book, The House of Atreus, about
fate and family systems in classic literature.
AH: Do you think Rolfers should cross-train
in SE and combine the work, or send clients
out for SE? What would be the advantage
and disadvantages to each approach?
ASJ: Well, since most somatically oriented
modalities deal with trauma in the body at
many developmental levels, why not learn
about trauma? I don’t see a disadvantage
except for a need for more financial
investment by a client who expected their
 Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021 www.rolf.org

Rolfing SI is a somatic understanding of

our human bodies and this will always
be integral to my work . . . I am a trauma
specialist and trauma is always a
somatic experience.
Rolfer to ‘fix’ their issue. Trauma is, after New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey
all, a ‘somatic experience’. Mishlove. 2019, April 22. “Time, Space,
AH: You’ve had a rich and full professional and Trauma with Anngwyn St. Just”.
life, still ongoing. Do you have any regrets? [video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=ljg96k_npBE
ASJ: Yes, now in advanced age, I wish I had
taken advantage of more Rolf Movement New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove.
classes. Aging often presents a series of 2019, May 8. “Trauma and the Human
challenges to resilience and mobility. Condition”. [video]. YouTube. https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=-Cigh6m6rgk
AH: Thank you, Anngwyn, for sharing this
important history with the Journal. You Signos Ediciones. 2020, August 21. “Trauma
and Peter brought a critical element into Global”. Anngwyn St. Just y Peter Levine.
our work that changed it forever and made Aniversarios y repeticiones traumáticas.
it more trauma-informed, benefitting both [Anniversaries and Traumatic Repetitions]
practitioners and clients. [video in English and German, with Spanish
subtitles]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.
Anngwyn St. Just, PhD, is a systemically com/watch?v=km7bbib8kcw
oriented social traumatologist and cultural
historian holding advanced degrees from Signos Ediciones. 2020, August 21.
the Western Institute for Social Research “Trauma Global”. Anngwyn St. Just y Peter
and the University of California at Berkeley. Levine. Campo femenino y conexión a la
As founder and director of the Arizona tierra. [Female Field and Connection to the
Center for Social Trauma (ACST) she Earth] [video in English and German, with
specializes in developing multimodal, Spanish subtitles]. YouTube. https://www.
cross-cultural, and body-oriented methods youtube.com/watch?v=Cvay06g3Alo
for trauma education and recovery. Through Signos Ediciones. 2020, August 21.
ACST-International she offers international “Trauma Global”. Anngwyn St. Just y Peter
seminars and training programs in Levine. El “don” de la herida [The “Gift” of
systemic approaches to individual, family, the Wound] [video in English and German,
and social trauma. Anngwyn is the author with Spanish subtitles]. YouTube. https://
of ten books including Relative Balance www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-goo5VVIKU
in an Unstable World and Trauma: Time,
Space and Fractals: Volume I and II. Dr. St.
Just offers a compassionate and profound
understanding of individual and collective
responses to trauma, which opens a whole
new and hopeful venue of work. Her website
and blog are at http://www.acst-international.
com. She is the director and co-founder
of the virtual Systemic Trauma University
(https://www.traumauniversity.org).
Anne Hoff is a Certified Advanced Rolfer
in Seattle, Washington and one of the Co-
Editors-in-Chief of this journal.

Resources
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove.
2019, May 1. “Perpetrators and Victims with
Anngwyn St. Just”. [video]. YouTube. https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNDBOP7b7bg.

17
Rolfing SI Is Trauma-Informed Work

Polyvagal Theory
and Trauma:
An Interview with
Stephen Porges, PhD
By Lina Amy Hack, Certified Advanced Rolfer® and Stephen Porges, PhD

ABSTRACT Polyvagal theory is reviewed in a short introduction, followed by a

Lina Amy Hack conversation with Dr. Stephen Porges. Porges’s history as research director with the
Rolf Institute® (now the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute®) is discussed, as well as his body perception
questionnaire, the term neuroception, and how Rolfing® Structural Integration can be
polyvagal-informed.

Introduction to Polyvagal associated with traumatic events). The

Theory
Before diving into our interview with
Stephen Porges, PhD, we offer a brief
discussion of his polyvagal theory (Porges
1995) for context. The short story is that
the vagus nerve mediates a range of
physiological responses from terror to
compassion, and this is important to
us as Rolfers because clients in Rolfing
sessions may display vagus-nerve-
Stephen Porges, PhD mediated immobilization states, either
immobilization without fear (part of
compassionate social engagement) or
immobilization with fear (which can be
good news is that we can steer towards
compassionate social engagement through
how we interact. Compassionate social
engagement occurs when, with caring
intent, you allow your gaze to include the
face, eyes, and whole form of another
person while also staying connected with
you own at-ease self-regulating system.
Offering this state of presence is already
a neurobiological intervention, because
it works to modulate the state of the
receiver’s nervous system. It supports
and builds rest-and-digest states in the
client’s nervous system. Some have called
polyvagal theory ‘the love theory’ because

18

it provides an autonomic nervous system
explanation for the behavior of human
intimacy (Porges 1998).
Early anatomists named the tenth cranial
nerve (CN X) the vagus nerve. Vagus is Latin
for wandering, and their dissections showed
that the nerve wanders. Like all cranial
nerves, it is bilateral, with the left and a right
vagus nerve emerging from the brainstem.
Although we can simplistically think of
the left and right as having mirror-image
pathways, it is important to note the left
and right vagus’ unique paths in the cardiac
space (see Figure 1). With that in mind, the
vagus nerve innervates a posterior portion
of the dura mater, parts of the surface and
meatus of the ear, the soft palate, the carotid
sinus, and part of the pharynx. As already
mentioned, it has a cardiac branch, and also
travels to the larynx and pulmonary plexus.
The abdominal thoracic branches reach
widely throughout the subdiaphragmatic
organs including the stomach, omentum,
liver, pancreas, duodenum, small intestine,
ascending colon, hepatic flexure, and
descending colon (Barral and Croibier 2013).
Early animal experiments showed that high
tone in the vagus nerve lowered the heart
and breath rates of the organism. Accepted
knowledge about the vagus nerve is that
it is part of the parasympathetic nervous
system, involved in the rest-and-digest state
of the autonomic function of mammals.
This is true, and the vagus nerve is also
much more than that. It is polyvagal not
univagal. What Porges and his team
observed was the vagal paradox. They
were measuring neural tone in the vagus
nerves of both premature and full-term
babies. As is logical, full-term babies had
high vagal tone reflected in high heart
rate variability, good growth rates, and
healthy trajectories as they moved into
childhood. With the rest-and-digest state
dominant, development proceeded on
a rosy-cheeked path. But infants who
were born prematurely and had complex
health challenges also had high vagal tone
reflected in bradycardia and apnea, which
was potentially lethal. The paradox of how
both of these things can be true is that
while the vagus nerve lowers breath and
heart rates, it has two different outgoing
pathways by which it delivers this
message and the pathway used is context
dependent: compassion or trauma.
A nerve is really a bundle of more bundles
of nerves, so within the vagus nerve is
bundled the ventral vagus nerve and the
dorsal vagus nerve. Both originate in the
brainstem, but while the ventral vagus
Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021 www.rolf.org
Figure 1: Left and right vagus nerve pathways through the thoracic cavity. Copyright Thieme Medical
Publishers, Inc. 2017.
originates in the ventral aspect of the at risk. In contrast, the full-term infants
brainstem the dorsal vagus originates in had high ventral vagal tone, associated
the dorsal aspect. The brainstem location with successful bonding with caregivers
of the ventral vagus is in close relationship and active communication with facial
with the cranial nerves involved with facial expressions and vocalizations.
expressions and voice. In contrast, the Porges coined a new term, neuroception,
dorsal vagus nerve is an old pathway
to describe the global process of the
that we share with primitive fish – who
nervous system scanning for safety in the
had limited responses to life threat. They
internal and external environment. This
could flee, burning up a lot of energy to
relates to a third bundle of neural tissue
move away from predators, or they could
within the vagus nerve that is afferent,
freeze their motion, conserve resources,
taking information from the body to the
sink lower into the cold water, and
brainstem. Porges reports that 80% of
become very still. Similarly, in mammals
the vagus nerve tracts are afferent. Said
the dorsal vagus nerve lowers the heart
another way, the vagus nerve is sensory.
and breath rates as a subconscious
All the terminal destinations listed above
survival strategy to immobilize in
have sensory information collected
response to perceived threat. Conversely,
and sent ‘upward’ into the brainstem
the ventral vagal nerve is a mammalian
for higher order neural consideration.
neural pathway that becomes active
The brain is sensing the organs via the
under warm, prosocial circumstances.
information conveyed by the vagus nerve.
When we look a loving family member
This confirms that bottom-up manual
in the eyes, we smile as they smile. The
therapies like Rolfing SI, practiced with
nervous system experiences safety, and
compassionate social engagement and
this increases ventral vagal activation
intelligent touch of peripheral structures
leading to lower heart and breath rates
(especially the organs) are a way to access
and also immobilization but without fear.
and affect the neural tone of the brainstem.
In the vagal paradox, Porges reported When we work with the abdominal or
that premature infants had low ventral thoracic viscera, anterior neck structures,
vagal tone, a warning sign that life was temporal bones, or muscles of the face,
19
Rolfing SI Is Trauma-Informed Work

Manual therapies like Rolfing SI, practiced with compassionate

social engagement and intelligent touch of peripheral
structures (especially the organs) are a way to access and
affect the neural tone of the brainstem. When we work with
the abdominal or thoracic viscera, anterior neck structures,
temporal bones, or muscles of the face, we are working
directly with the vagus nerve. When we kindly meet our clients’
eyes and offer safety, we are working with the vagus nerve.
we are working directly with the vagus of the brainstem. As these primarily works. Which often requires a different
nerve. When we kindly meet our clients’ motor pathways exit the brainstem, they model because showing that something
eyes and offer safety, we are working with are joined with a third sensory pathway works is not really a scientific question.
the vagus nerve. to form the cranial nerve known as the I wanted to find out, before trying to
With this background, we’ll dive into our vagus. The vagus exits the brainstem generate large amounts of funding to do
interview with Porges, who has been providing neuroanatomy pathways to research, what does the client base think
interacting with the Rolfing community virtually all our visceral organs. of the intervention, were they getting
since the 1970s. If you want to learn LAH: Is the ventral vagus is more closely something from it? And so, I developed
more about polyvagal theory, there are a questionnaire.
associated with heart regulation, with
many articles and books that describe not many branches going below the At the start of that project, while talking to
the theory and clinical application (see diaphragm, while the dorsal vagus has more Alan Demmerle, I said, first, you have to
Porges 2021a for a list). We also invite nerve fibers with the subdiaphragmatic use subjective tools. People want Rolfing
you to read the article on page 50 for branches? I guess I am asking, can you work and they think what they’re getting
a conversation with Randall Redfield, clarify the difference in the ventral versus is helpful. So, we started to structure the
the CEO of Polyvagal Institute, which dorsal terminal branches? questions that asked:
discuss the coursework they are offering
SP: Neuroanatomists state that the 1. Who is receiving Rolfing work?
to support practitioners in understanding
the whole polyvagal model. primary motor fibers originating in the 2. Why is the client choosing Rolfing SI?
ventral nucleus of the vagus go to organs
above the diaphragm, and the primary 3. What expectancy does the client
have of Rolfing work?
Interview with motor fibers originating in the dorsal
nucleus of the vagus go to organs below 4. What is the outcome the client
Stephen Porges, PhD the diaphragm. perceived from their Rolfing sessions?
Lina Amy Hack: So good to see you for Were there benefits or contraindications?
LAH: Thanks for taking that deep dive
this interview, thanks for meeting with into the tissue. Some of our readers I don’t remember what we found, but the
me. Can we dive right into some anatomy questionnaire provided the roots of what
may not know that you were the Director
about the vagus nerve? Can you clarify is now the Body Perception Questionnaire
of Research for the Rolf Institute of
the difference between the left vagus (BPQ), which is available online on my
Structural Integration (RISI, now Dr. Ida
nerve and the right vagus nerve? webpage (Porges 2021b).
Rolf Institute) in 1990 and 1991, appointed
Stephen Porges: Hi Lina, nice to meet by Alan Demmerle, then president of RISI. LAH: I saw that, interesting measurement
you. Now to your question. The vagus You have published in this journal before. tool. Very detailed. The questions ask the
is lateralized, but the right vagus is the Back then you published a research article participant to report about a wide variety
major pathway to the heart’s pacemaker, where you laid out clear stages of what of body sensations; researchers must find
the sino-atrial node. information needed to be gathered about it very useful.
LAH: It took me a while to anchor my Rolfing clients, perceived expectations,
SP: It’s been translated into about a
understanding of polyvagal theory in the and outcomes (Porges 1991 Jan/Feb).
dozen languages and it’s getting a lot of
actual anatomy of the vagus nerve. Do You published a full questionnaire in
citations. We are conducting research to
you keep a mental picture of the anatomy Rolf Lines and asked Rolfers to use this
demonstrate that it’s a good surrogate
of this nerve as part of your working measurement tool with their clients and
for measuring physiology. I started that
model? And how would you describe mail the completed questionnaires back
questionnaire with the intention to build
your visualization of the vagus? to you (Porges 1991 Fall).
a database, or should I say an item-
SP: I initially focused on the two pathways SP: Yes. I basically said, as with any type based list of modified items, subjective
within the vagus – one originating in the of new intervention model, everyone measurements of physiological activity –
dorsal or back of the brainstem and the wants what we would now call ‘efficacy and actually, this preceded even polyvagal
other originating in the ventral or front research’. Research that shows it theory. Over the decades, it was online

20

This is the whole idea of neuroception: the body and the
nervous system react in a way that you’re unaware of what
it’s reacting to, but you are aware that it reacted. Your
interoception says “I’ve responded.”
and people would use it, and I [saw] I
need[ed] to go back and look at factor
structures in the questionnaire. Revised it.
And this has occurred within the past five
years. Now we have sub-scales within
the body perception questionnaire. For
example, it examines, reactivity above
the diaphragm and reactivity below the
diaphragm. It is really lining up very nicely
with people who have trauma histories or
people who have anxiety. It gets reflected
in their subjective view of the autonomic
nervous system.
Polyvagal theory emphasizes the important
influence autonomic state has in how we
react to the context, objects, people, and
challenges in our life. To stand back from it
is to realize that if your body is in a state of
defense, if you’re in a sense under constant
threat, the neural regulation of your visceral
organs changes. What Rolfing SI does, it
comes at it from a structural perspective
and says, if you shift the structure, the
underlying functionality of the nervous
system will change as well. And I think
that is an important contribution, and it’s
a different perspective from a neurocentric
one. Although, Rolfing SI emphasizes this
structural-centric view, you don’t have
neural function without structure. These
become portals of intervention.
LAH: With the BPQ, we can now ask verbal
questions and gather information about
autonomic nervous system function.
SP: The interesting part is when we skate
across the ice of the world of trauma.
Rolfers are doing that as well, people
come in and ‘want to be fixed’. There is
an acknowledgement that something is
not right and their body has restructured
in a defensive mode, curling in, pulling
in. I could always tell when the academic
world was getting too much for me
because my rib cage would change! A
little pushing on it was liberating.
LAH: Yes, sometimes the body is reacting
to something and the mind hasn’t
wrapped words around it, or hasn’t
brought it to our conscious awareness,
yet the structure has reacted. When I’m
aware that I’m curling forward I say to
myself, “I’m doing this, why?”
Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021
SP: This is the whole idea of neuroception:
the body and the nervous system react
in a way that you’re unaware of what
it’s reacting to, but you are aware that it
reacted. Your interoception says, “I’ve
responded.” The issue is, your last point
is the ‘why’ you did that – ask ‘why’ and
you start building narratives. I would say
most of the time those narratives are
wrong. They become who we are. They’re
the glue that we use to define ourselves.
We always justify why we are doing
these things as opposed to being a good
observer to what our body is doing. If the
body is under a state of threat, that’s what
we need to acknowledge. Then once
we honor that, we start building greater
resilience. We can’t take all the challenges
out of the way in the environment, but
those challenges don’t always have to
trigger defense.
LAH: Absolutely. Very much part of what
we focus on. How did you first hear about
Rolfing SI? Presumably you were a person
with a PhD out there in the world, getting
your research done, and then somewhere
you found bodywork?
SP: I always give credit to Peter Levine
who had a close relationship with the
Rolfing community. Peter was always a
curious expansive thinker. When Peter
was working on his PhD thesis and I was a
faculty member at the University of Illinois
– about 1975 – Peter was interested in
autonomic activity, [and] in his persistent
and interested way [was] on a mission. I
was able to help him to understand the
phenomena that he was observing. It had
a lot to do with structure, a lot had to do
with movement, position, and posture.
Peter was an interesting guy and I found
his comments and perspective interesting.
Peter invited me to a meeting at Esalen
about the biology of the affectional
bond, and that was really where I started
to meet this other group, the Rolfers.
And so, I started to meet these people,
interesting people, not academic, not
disciplined in the way that academics
are. I was already a successful faculty
member, I had an award from the National
Institutes of Mental Health, called the
www.rolf.org
Research Scientist Development Award,
[and] with this award I was able to do
whatever I wanted to do. It paid my salary
for more than nine years to, in a sense,
be exploratory, to learn. I took it seriously.
I was learning physiology, anatomy,
methodology, mathematics, and “Let’s
see what other people can bring.” So, I
found Rolfers to be very interesting.
One thing I learned along the way is – at
least within the academic world – people
are too concerned about being evaluated.
In a sense, they are reflecting that their
own bodies are under threat. And just like
a traumatized person can’t hug another
person, can’t allow another person
into their world [because their body is
under threat], academics who are under
constant threat can’t entertain alternative
ways of thinking. I fortunately wasn’t
biased to that way. I don’t know where
the boldness or the strength came from in
retrospect, but I wasn’t threatened by any
of this. I found it interesting.
LAH: Thank goodness. That is to all our benefit.
Did you ever have a Rolfing Ten Series?
SP: Yes, I had the entire Ten Series. I
worked with John Cottingham. I would
train John to do research and he would do
the manipulations on me. It was a good
friendship. We would go for coffee after the
Rolfing session to discuss the underlying
neurophysiology of the experience.
LAH: Well, that makes you an interesting
researcher as well, did your own body
inform your research? Or does your
own body inform your sense of nervous
system function?
SP: Of course, it does. Polyvagal theory
gives you a language to describe that
and you can take it back in time. I could
take it back to when I was a teenager and
played the clarinet. I talk about breathing
in my workshops, concepts like playing a
musical wind instrument is like pranayama
yoga, it is breath, it is with the facial
muscles. That, in polyvagal terminology,
is a social engagement system and it’s the
ventral vagus. It’s the calming system, the
coordinator, and the cheerleader. It keeps
you together. It gives you the resilience.
21
Rolfing SI Is Trauma-Informed Work
When I go back in time and think about
playing the clarinet, I can feel it in my
body, the calming and the ability to think.
You can translate that into Western-
world interest in meditation, people start
to understand that if you breathe out
slowly, if you extend the duration of your
breathing phases, that you become more
melodic in your voice. If you smile, if your
facial muscles are working, it’s all coming
into the brainstem area, not just calming,
but it coordinates with other parts of your
autonomic nervous system to make them
more resilient, so they can respond to
threat and then rapidly calm back down.
LAH: I love how you say that, I feel more
relaxed right now as we talk about it. So
interesting that Rolfing work was a part
of your landscape as a cutting-edge
researcher. You and Cottingham published
work together, as well, about Rolfing work
and the pelvic lift (Cottingham, Porges, and
Lyon 1988).
SP: Right, two publications together
actually, a second one about the effects of
soft-tissue manipulation. John Cottingham
is the senior author on both of those. [They
are] something for people to look into.
LAH: I agree, it’s not often Rolfing SI
appears in the peer-reviewed literature.
SP: They are important. I asked John
to deconstruct the Rolfing sequence to
identify elements that could be studied
in a laboratory setting. John said, “Let’s
look at pelvic tilt,” and he got this device
to measure pelvic tilt, then he evaluated
people before and after. And the beauty of
the procedure that he was doing – he said
that as you tilt the structure of the sacrum,
the manipulation had a neural regulation
effect. What we now know is this is the
newer ventral vagal system increasing in
tone. Think about dancing, think of hula,
think about yoga traditions of breathing
with posture shifts, various dance routines
of pelvic tilting, and even think about pelvic
tilting in intimate positions, because it has
a physiological consequence, it increases
vagal activity. It keeps the nervous system
When you start shifting the structures
and enhancing this ventral vagal
regulation, people become more
benevolent, more compassionate,
meaning they’re less defensive.
22
from going into defense. That promotes
the ability to maintain erection and to have
sexual intercourse.
The other part of that story, and this is now
a recent part, is that if people have trauma
histories you may have sexual problems.
If they have trauma histories and their
autonomic system is re-tuned to be more
threat- or defense-oriented, then you
have impotency, lack of orgasm. We have
been getting this information from work
we’re doing now with our BPQ. People
present with trauma history; the data has
that cluster. Females have similar things
but the effect is even stronger in males.
The bottom line is that through simple
structural manipulations we could see in
the Cottingham study how the autonomics
were impacted.
The other paper dealt with deep abdominal
massage (Cottingham, Porges, and
Richmond 1988). The interesting part was
that the pelvic tilt intervention gave you
this insight into Rolfing SI – that dynamic
structural manipulation changed neural
feedback – but deep abdominal massage
changed autonomic regulation; not just
immediately, it lasted for more than a day.
And in many ways Rolfers see this, they
see glows in the faces of their clients,
even though they may be screaming or in
pain when they are doing this, but they
have this exuberant glow and that’s part
of this autonomic system coming on and
feeling benevolent.
I also wrote a chapter for the series
Oxford Library of Psychology: The Oxford
Handbook of Compassion Science (2017),
the chapter was titled ‘Vagal pathways:
Portals to compassion’, and in a sense
Rolfing SI fits into that world too. When you
start shifting the structures and enhancing
this ventral vagal regulation, people become
more benevolent, more compassionate,
meaning they’re less defensive.
LAH: That brings a lot of ideas to my
mind. A question Rolfers are always
mulling over is why do our interventions
last? I believe we are reinforcing some
neural circuitry; we are inviting someone
to spend time in their wellness circuitry.
And that the relationship and the time
spent there is reinforcing.
SP: I totally agree. This is part of the model
of what I would call polyvagal-informed
therapies. As you know I developed
an acoustic intervention, the Safe and
Sound Protocol (SSP). The SSP basically
presents modulated vocalization that
function as the distilled essence of trust.
The sounds occur in the frequency band
of a mother’s lullaby. Certain frequencies
our nervous system can’t refuse. I
thought five, one-hour sessions would
be sufficient for permanent changes. For
many individuals it did [that]. Just like
you, I thought the social reinforcement
would reorganize that individual.
What I didn’t understand: because we all
entered the world of intervention being
very naïve, we don’t realize that many
people are going into environments
that are not safe, but potentially very
dangerous. To be an accessible person is
to be vulnerable, and a nervous system
can get hurt. When it gets hurt, people get
ill, they get a cold, they get sick, and the
nervous system shifts into that state. And
now the cues don’t work. The body has
shifted back to this other state.
LAH: In my Rolfing practice, I’m known to
be able to handle people who are suffering
a long time with chronic pain. They are
often frustrated because the physicians
haven’t found the solution to their pain.
I tell them that is great news: there is no
cancer, no serious degeneration, and in
chronic pain conditions Rolfing SI can
potentially make a big difference.
SP: I’ve been spending Wednesday
evenings in a think-tank seminar group
of spinal surgeons, pain physicians, and
psychologists. Their real concern is that
surgery doesn’t help. They got really
enthralled with polyvagal theory because
it helped them with their patients when
they took a polyvagal approach, an
approach that treats pain as part of our
global defense system. If we are safe with
others in an interaction, our cues of safety
reflexively downregulate cues of danger
including cues of pain.
I hurt my back this [past] summer. I twisted
and I was in severe pain for five weeks. I
couldn’t sleep in a bed. However, I was still
doing things like this. I was doing webinars
online. I even did a full-day workshop. And I
was pain-free during those periods of time,
because I was interacting with others.
LAH: Oh wow, yes.

SP: Even though it was a two-dimensional
screen, it was sufficient for my nervous
system to not be in a state of defense.
During the pandemic, this kind of
interaction, the Internet, has been my
social platform. And my platform is to
communicate to others. And as long as
I maintain my presence, my voice, my
intentionality, pain doesn’t even exist.
Rolfers are seeing people whose bodies
and minds, including their sense of self,
are under constant threat.
I always like to use the academic world
as an example, you can generalize
from that. As professors, it’s all about
evaluation, it’s all about ranking. It’s all
about publications getting evaluated,
grants get evaluated, everything gets
evaluated, how much money you bring
in. Everything is evaluated all the time.
But it’s not just the faculty – think about
the students. They start into elementary
school, into kindergarten where there’s
demands, and a lot of the kids are telling
you exactly what’s going on. They’re
talking with their guts. They’re in pain.
They’re telling you their bodies are being
really threatened. Why do we support a
culture that places the beauty of human
potential into a state of constant threat?
[Constant evaluation pushes in] as a
constant threat, an adaptive retuning of
the autonomic nervous system but really
of our structures as well. And that’s what
Rolfing work does.
Right now, my ventral side is showing
[in my posture] (see Figure 2A), and that
can be interpreted being an accessible
person or a vulnerable person. And
once the mind says “vulnerable,” what
happens? [Gestures forward flexion; see
Figure 2B]. You see this as Rolfers, you
see [demonstrates defensive gestures
protecting the chest], and you say, “How
do you feel when you loosen up that
area?” They say, “I can breathe again.”
What they are really saying is, “I’m in the
world. I’m reembodied.”
I think Dr. Rolf had an insight that
structural manipulation was an efficient
trigger to the nervous system. In the world
of medicine, the focus of treatments is
pharmaceutical or surgical, both of which
are often agnostic to the nervous system.
Medicine does not consider structural
organization. It treats structure as causal,
but it does not acknowledge the flexibility
of the organization of structure. Perhaps,
Dr. Rolf was saying that optimal function
of the body would spontaneously emerge
if the building blocks of the body are
Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021
A
B
rearranged. It was a very insightful model
that has been helpful to many.
The caveat that we have to all understand
is that we really can’t fix others without
leading them on a psychoeducational
journey. You can restructure, but they’ll
come right back unless they have a
greater awareness of the world they are
in. It’s the same thing in my work. I can
use an intervention that makes people
get accessible, but if their body interprets
accessibility as vulnerability, it’s going
to be threatening to them. If their body
interprets accessibility as its own agenda
in life, then they’re smiling. We are a
social species, [but] this culture teaches
everyone to be frightened of others; not to
be benevolent or to be generous, but to
take care of ourselves first.
I see polyvagal theory as part of my own
vocabulary, as a manual of how to live life.
Rolfing [SI] fits well within it, because once
you have an understanding of getting the
body out of defense, it promotes sociality
– and sociality supports the body being
out of defense. The ability to coregulate
supports this wonderful capacity of being
a social mammal. And so, I would actually
give this back to you as a Rolfer. Based
on your experience of having Rolfing
work, how did it make you feel?
LAH: It was a profound coming home. My
Rolfer, I felt like he brought me home and
gave me an adult form that was waiting
to emerge.
www.rolf.org
Figure 2: Dr. Porges gestures an
open ventral aspect (A) and a
defensive posture of protecting
the ventral side of the body (B).
SP: You became embodied through
receiving Rolfing work.
LAH: Yes, absolutely.
SP: I think we can’t be co-regulating
anyone else unless we can literally regulate
ourselves. What that means is our nervous
system is regulating our structures and
the feedback from structural integration
work is not just in the structure. The 1980s
work with John Cottingham that we talked
about, it really emphasized that structure
affects normal regulation: how people feel
afterwards, how they relate to each other;
it enables social interaction to be a neural
co-regulator of our physiology.
Another question for you, the people
that you gravitate to work with, do many
of them have comorbidities that reside
below the diaphragm?
LAH: Yes, for sure.
SP: Okay, so you’ve had miraculous
reversals, right?
LAH: Yes, one pops to mind right away.
SP: The subdiaphragmatic reaction is telling
you that the autonomic nervous system
is in the state of chronic defense. If they
have constipation, you would say constant
defense. If their body is falling into a shutting
down, almost dissociative defensive mode,
they have diarrhea, constipation, and/or
irritable bowel syndrome. These are our
body’s well-wired reactions to life threat
and to trauma. We have to, in a sense,
23
Rolfing SI Is Trauma-Informed Work
respect what our body’s trying desperately
to tell us.
LAH: I am so grateful to have been
taught how to be in my body, in my own
psychology, in my own nervous system.
As a Rolfer my state regulation is a huge
influence on the session. When I was
doing my psychology degree, it struck me
that people who are on the path towards
being therapists, they aren’t told how to be
in their system. We need to do the personal
work that comes up, listen to our bodies.
SP: Well, you will be sending cues to
your clients.
LAH: Exactly.
SP: Your point about the training of
psychologists, most of that training
is within the world of mental activity,
without an understanding that we are an
integrated nervous system. We should
focus on the brainstem instead of the
cortex. The brainstem is regulating all
the organs in the body. Or stated another
way, all the organs in the body tend to be
regulating our brainstem. The state that
our brainstem is in allows these portals of
activity to go up to higher cortical areas.
If the brainstem detects cues of defense,
forget accessibility of ideas, let alone
other people. When it comes to teaching
how to do therapy, some [students are]
just going to be great, they have intuitive
understanding. There are people who are
super co-regulators. They walk into the
room and it doesn’t matter what they say,
their presence, their facial expressivity, the
intonation of their voice, their gestures . . .
all you do is smile, and you’re very happy
and feel safe with them.
LAH: One of my psychology professors
helped me understand the placebo effect
more deeply, I had previously found that
word to be offensive, like a weapon used
against me to dismiss the value of my
work. But this professor helped me see
there is something very important to be
learned about the placebo effect. Would
you say so?
SP: I was asked to talk at the National
Institute for Complementary and Alternative
Medicine – it has changed its name since
I think we can’t be co-regulating anyone else unless we can
literally regulate ourselves. What that means is our nervous
system is regulating our structures and the feedback from
structural integration work is not just in the structure.
24
then. I wanted to talk about the placebo
effect because it is the body’s own healing
mechanisms. They wanted me to talk,
but they didn’t want me to use the term
placebo effect. I think we have missed the
importance of placebo in contemporary
medicine. If clients feel safe, they no longer
have pain and they no longer have these
diseases. That, to them, is a placebo
effect because they don’t understand the
linkage between our own sociality and
our physiology.
Turning off the states of defense enables
the body’s own healing properties to be
optimized. Physicians have never been
taught that, they think the power of health
is giving drugs or doing surgeries, not
in their hands in terms of support and
love and trust. That’s why medicine is so
intrusive for many people, so threatening,
because it is oriented to evaluation of the
body, not about respecting, honoring,
and learning about the body.
LAH: Those surgeons you speak with,
you’re telling them that they are the most
threatening ones out there?
SP: What’s interesting is the one who
created the group quit surgery and he
does group psychotherapy now, brings
people to pain-free states through talking.
He’s been very effective. Each time he
saves someone from surgery, he feels
really good because the surgeries from
his perspective don’t work and they can
even be catastrophic.
LAH: All Rolfers have seen that.
SP: It’s a heartbreaker, we all have had
friends who don’t want to listen. They want
to go to their surgeon. The issue is, we
have to be re-educated to understand that
acute pain is really something important.
Our nervous system knows that, but once
the tissue or the organ or the structure
heals itself, chronic pain doesn’t have that
adaptive function. We have to step into
giving up the pain. Our bodies have to be
convinced – not on an intellectual level, but
on a visceral level – that it is safe enough
to give up those defenses.
What if Descartes had been polyvagal
informed? [He said,] “I think, therefore I
am.” What if he had said: “I feel myself,
therefore I am.” What would Western
civilization be like?
LAH: Wow. That is worthy of contemplation.
Any final thoughts for our readers?
SP: There is a compassion movement
taking place in our culture now. With
Rolfers, you have stepped into the world of
trauma, you understand that people with
very complex and very difficult histories
often don’t want to share them. They feel
the pain again when they do. The point is,
we need to be good witnesses. People
want to right the wrong that has been done
to others, [and] this is moving too quickly
because the first step is to just be present,
to be non-evaluative. Let the person
express their feelings, without evaluation
by us the listeners. This allows them to
resolve. They don’t have to defend why
they are expressing it. They just express it.
LAH: Beautiful, thank you for sharing your
compassion science with us.
SP: You’re welcome.
Stephen W. Porges, PhD, is Distinguished
University Scientist at Indiana University
where he is the founding director of the
Traumatic Stress Research Consortium.
He is Professor of Psychiatry at the
University of North Carolina, and Professor
Emeritus at both the University of Illinois at
Chicago and the University of Maryland.
He served as president of the Society for
Psychophysiological Research and the
Federation of Associations in Behavioral
and Brain Sciences and is a former recipient
of a National Institute of Mental Health
Research Scientist Development Award. He
has published more than 350 peer-reviewed
papers across several disciplines including
anesthesiology, biomedical engineering,
critical-care medicine, ergonomics, exercise
physiology, gerontology, neurology,
neuroscience, obstetrics, pediatrics,
psychiatry, psychology, psychometrics,
space medicine, and substance abuse.
Before becoming an Advanced Rolfer,
Lina Amy Hack was doing water quality
laboratory work with her biochemistry
honors degree (BS) from Simon Fraser
University. Since becoming a Rolfer, she
 Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021 www.rolf.org

There is a compassion movement taking place in our culture

now. The point is, we need to be good witnesses. People
want to right the wrong that has been done to others, [and]
this is moving too quickly because the first step is to just be
present, to be non-evaluative.
completed the Somatic Experiencing® ———. 2021b. “Body Scales.” Available
training and an honors psychology degree from https://www.stephenporges.com/
(BA from University of Saskatchewan) body-scales.
where she did child development research
on parental touch patterns. Lina is also
the co-editor-in-chief of this journal.

References
Barral, J-P. and A. Croibier. 2013. Manual
therapy for the cranial nerves. Palm Beach
Gardens, Florida, USA: Barral productions.
Cottingham, J. T., S. W. Porges, and
T. Lyon. 1988. Effects of soft tissue
mobilization (Rolfing pelvic lift) on
parasympathetic tone in two age groups.
Physical Therapy 68(3):352-356.
Cottingham, J. T., S. W. Porges, and K.
Richmond. 1988. Shifts in pelvic inclination
angle and parasympathetic tone produced
by Rolfing soft tissue manipulation.
Physical Therapy 68(9):1364-1370.
Porges, S. W. 1991 Jan/Feb. Research
committee report: Preliminary report. Rolf
Lines® 19(1):12-13.
———. 1991 Fall. Rolfing research. Rolf
Lines® 19(4):37-40.
———. 1995. Orienting in a defensive
world: Mammalian modifications of our
evolutionary heritage. A polyvagal theory.
Psychophysiology 32(4):301-318.
———. 1998. Love: An emergent property
of the mammalian autonomic nervous
system. Psychoneuroendocrinology
23(8):837-861.
———. 2004 May. Neuroception: A
subconscious system for detecting
threats and safety. Zero to Three 24(5):19-
24.
———. 2017. Vagal pathways: Portals to
compassion. In The Oxford Handbook of
Compassion Science, eds. E. M. Seppälä,
E. Simon-Thomas, S. L. Brown, M. C.
Worline, C. D. Cameron, and J. R. Doty,
189-202. Oxford University Press.
———. 2021a. “Articles.” Available from
https://www.stephenporges.com/articles.

25
Rolfing SI Is Trauma-Informed Work

The Autonomic
Nervous System
and Rolfing® SI
Clinical Considerations and Application

By Pedro Prado, PhD, Rolfing Instructor, Somatic Experiencing® Instructor

ABSTRACT In this article, Pedro Prado, PhD, brings to the fore the importance of
the autonomic nervous system (ANS) for Rolfing theory and practice. The psychobiologic
perspective of the work expands its assessment tools by making use of the work of Peter
Levine, PhD (Somatic Experiencing®) and Stephen Porges, PhD (polyvagal theory).
Prado presents these theories and makes correlations that can be useful for the practical
application of SI.

Author’s note: The material presented in this
article is intended as guidance to navigate
the interface between the autonomic
nervous system (ANS) and our Rolfing
Structural Integration (SI) interventions.
Pedro Prado, PhD We are always affecting the ANS with our
work, but should you have an interest in
specifically managing ANS defensive states
and unresolved trauma, it is imperative that
you seek further training, such as in Somatic
Experiencing®. Always stay within your
scope of practice and training.
More and more attention has been given
to the nature, the function, and the role
of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) in
Rolfing Structural Integration (SI) practice,
and the ANS and its consequences for
manipulation and for the work of SI in its
various aspects is getting more attention
in the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute® (DIRI)
curriculum. These considerations fit well
with the psychobiological perspective in
Rolfing SI. We have an array of somatic,
observable tool for Rolfers® to access
their clients and strategize the work. I
invite the reader to consider how much
can we integrate ANS knowledge and
through that unfold more possibilities to
develop our clinical work.
Before identifying trends for our future
work, it’s important to consider the
groundwork already laid with the work

26
 Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021 www.rolf.org

of Dr. Peter Levine and Dr. Stephen

Porges considering ANS function and
ANS observation. Levine, a clinical
psychologist, humanist, and scientist was
trained as a Rolfer by Dr. Rolf in the early
1970s, and he then developed Somatic
Experiencing® (SE), a somatic approach
to healing trauma based in classical ANS
functions. Porges, in turn, innovated
polyvagal theory, another powerful entry
point for somatic practitioners. The
work of these two pioneers interfaces,
and Levine draws from polyvagal theory
in his SE methodology. The shared
essence of their perspectives is that
trauma and its consequences lay not in
the traumatic events but in dysregulation
of the reciprocal functioning of the
ANS branches. ANS reactions to the
events of our lives can build patterns
in the myofascial web, affecting the
organization of the structure in gravity and
its transformation. Thus, ANS awareness
is a crucial variable to be considered in
our work. In this article I will try to present
the essence of these theories and make
some correlations with Rolfing SI.
Trauma is in the nervous system, not
in the event (Levine 2021).

The Nature of the ANS

The ANS regulates our interaction with
the environment, internal and external,
seeking homeostasis – the relatively
stable state of equilibrium present when
the conditions of safety are experienced.
The ANS is a mediator of physiological
functions in the body and also has a
relational function. It regulates well-
being as well as protection, survival, and
maintenance of life of the individual and
ultimately the species. The ANS has a threat or fear, and these choices ultimately and cognitive) have encoded within them
crucial function as an ‘alarm system’ that build patterns. Our Rolfing work often their stress responses to trauma as well
triggers and regulates all other bodily unlocks ANS-patterned processes, which as ANS functioning in the wide range of
systems. In every moment, the nervous is welcomed as this is a crucial avenue to activities in daily life. Just as being trauma-
system is involved in an evaluation of restore, educate, and promote the client’s informed enhances our work, being ANS-
internal and external sensation, the balance in gravity. ANS awareness helps informed enhances our understanding of
degree of threat experienced, and the transformation because a client’s general how form and structure ‘happen’.
perception of danger and/or safety. behavior and patterns (postural, emotional,
Whichever of these aspects the person
is focused on – physical, emotional, or
rational – and whatever the response is –
orienting, flight, fight, or even freeze – an
Our Rolfing work often unlocks
unconscious evaluation of threat and/or
safety is occurring reflexively and shaping
ANS-patterned processes, which is
the body and its myofascial web. welcomed as this is a crucial avenue
to restore, educate, and promote the
This ANS regulatory function is directly
involved in the behavior of the individual
and how they move towards pleasure and
well-being as well as how they deal with client’s balance in gravity.
27
Rolfing SI Is Trauma-Informed Work
Figure 1: Threat response cycle (based on Changaris 2016).
The ANS and Survival
The two branches of the ANS are the
sympathetic nervous system, responsible
for increased arousal states, and the
parasympathetic nervous system,
responsible for relaxation. The relationship
between the branches is traditionally
described as reciprocal; that is to say,
when one branch is the dominant state, we
could say it is high tone, then the other has
low neural tone. This reciprocal function
model allows us to understand many of the
patterns we find in a person’s behavior,
and it also lends understanding to
structure. Sympathetic and parasympathetic
reciprocal functioning is thus an omnipresent
feature during Rolfing work.
Threat Response Cycle and
the ANS
The threat response cycle speaks to how
the ANS fluidly moves through stages
of response and integration in optimal
circumstances (see Figure 1). From a
healthy state of being alert (homeostasis),
internal or external stimulation can
move our physiology to a small amount
sympathetic activity (arousal) when a threat
is detected. Depending on the intensity
or unexpectedness of the stimulation,
the person’s nervous system may have
a startle response, where our orienting
and interpretation of the stimulus looks
28
for adequate ways to respond. We then
move into our array of defense responses
which includes facing or withdrawing
from the stimulation, with the organism
mobilized for flight, fight, and/or freeze.
When this arousal moves to execution of
an action, all the charge that has built up
can be discharged. Thus, when the threat
is managed successfully, the sympathetic
charge is replaced by parasympathetic
action (reciprocal response), which is the
recovery and integration phase of the
threat response cycle. This appropriate
reciprocal functioning of the two branches
of the ANS returns the organism to a state
of rest and balance, giving the person a
chance to reorient to reality.
The ANS can get dysregulated at any stage
of this cycle, generating fixations. Another
way of saying it is that an unsuccessful
response at any step can create an
experience of nervous system stasis: the
fluid movement has been arrested. It is
of particular interest for our work when a
person’s nervous system has mobilized to
attempt to flee or to fight, but the action
was not executed. Freeze occurs when a
further layer of protection is needed, where
the parasympathetic state can take the
form of dissociation or of immobilization.
Interestingly, a freeze state can present as
high tone in the myofascial system (tonic
immobility), or as the absence of muscle
tone (collapsed immobility). Interruption
of the threat response cycle can persist
past the event and establish structural
patterns based on the fixated ANS state.
If this persists long enough, these states
will become traits. As an example, a
person could perceive a continuous state
of threat, with associated pain because of
the holding in the body from unresolved
actions. Survival energy is running in the
body and hormonal system, resulting in
continuous holding (tension) in activated
regions of the body and the overproduction
of stress hormones.
This physiological activity of the ANS
comes together with feelings and
emotions, then meanings about the
situation are built into personal narratives
and further stored in our complex
memory circuits. This has survival
value: when similar stimulation occurs,
memory will be accessed. If the event
that triggered the original defenses was
successfully resolved, this knowledge
can be used in a new orientation to the
world. If the defenses were not successful
in preventing harm, there can be multiple
ways to get ‘hooked’ in the ANS
processes. Thus, the experience may
wobble through many levels and engage
multiple systems; we are talking about
many neurological circuits.
Let’s take a tour of some of these different
phases and analyze how is it that Rolfing
SI can affect the threat response cycle.
Orientation
Orienting is a key function to organizing
posture and our interaction with the world,
it is where our awareness is directed to our
senses, emotions, and intellect. It all starts
in the womb where the fetus explores and
builds a two-directional orienting system
(orienting internally to self and orienting
externally to mother). After birth, the
infant integrates the sensorial experience
of weight into having a sense of ground
and an outward sense of space around
them. Babies build a sensorial map, a
body schema, structuring the first layers
of identity, which also builds a sense of
safety in gravity and in one’s own sensorial
body. In an emotional layer, the fetus
experiences a connection with the mother,
where emotional ties are experienced and
are part of the formation of the ANS. The
reciprocity of the ANS branches is not fully
formed at birth and continues modulating
with the relationship of the newborn and
the caregivers.
This sensorial sense of safety combined
with its emotional experience will provide a

base for one’s somatopsychic and structural
development. This is the foundation for
eventually building subjectivity resulting
from one’s experience and the many filters
one builds along the life span. These lenses
are stored in the memory system and will
shape orienting in the present. When a
person is safe in their body, safe with self,
they are more likely to have continuous
orientation to the internal and external
reality – and thus have the security to relate
to self and others. Movement becomes free
expression from the self. Orientation is not
only a physical event; it is also a perceptual
event that builds the coordination system.
It includes emotional and worldview
perspectives that are also manifested in our
myofascial web.
How do we orient ourselves? To pleasure?
To pain? Which emotions do we avoid,
which ones do we look for? What set
of values do we organize around? And
how does the body behave around
these variables? The myofascial web
mediates these orienting tendencies. It
anchors emotions, choices, and personal
conditions. Orienting is a natural function.
It is so much more than what we look at and
what we listen to. It speaks to protection, to
adaptation, and to expression. Embedded
in the natural function of survival are “Who
am I?,” “Where am I?,” and “How can I
deal with the complexity of what I want
to express into the world?” In Rolfing SI,
we are concerned with orienting to these
multidimensional elements of the human
life force.
Rolfing SI and Orientation
Let’s take this into practice. We just talked
about the importance of orientation in
the formation of identity, movement
patterns, and emotional adaptation
to life. Preferences and possibilities
shape the client’s relationship to gravity.
The Rolfer may perceive the client’s
patterns of orientation during the initial
interview for a session or series, in the
body reading and movement analysis,
and can then work to include missing
dimensions. When vectors of orientation
(be it in physical or emotional layers)
are missing as a result of traumatic past
When vectors of orientation (be it in physical or emotional
layers) are missing as a result of traumatic past experiences or
as a result of interrupted development, posture gets altered.
Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021
experiences or as a result of interrupted
development, posture gets altered.
We can explore vectors of orientation using
Rolf Movement® and psychobiological
approaches; the ensuing ANS responses
help us understand how well the client is
integrating the experience, which helps us
track the intervention and anchor the new
possibilities in the flesh. As an example, if
you heighten the client’s awareness along
the ground/space dimension, observe
their ANS responses. By inviting clients to
expand into different vectors of perception,
they make contact with the missing piece,
and the new possibility may be observable
in the ANS. Does it bring in sympathetic
activation? Does it bring an experience of
safety in one’s body, with a balancing of
the sympathetic/parasympathetic?
Orientation is neither a single perceptual
event nor simply physical; it includes as
well perceptual and emotional tendencies
that shape the client’s movement and
posture. Thus, it is beneficial to devote
some attention to the emotional and
worldview aspects involved in orientation
as they are ‘downstream’ from the ANS
physiology. Is the client organizing around
avoiding feelings? Is the client moved by
helping someone else? What are their
values and how do they structure their
pre-movement and attitudes? Do they
believe they can succeed in a certain
endeavor? Can they look to the world
from a different perspective (e.g., head
up, chest responding to the breath)?
In this way, the ANS offers observable
physiological cues that we can use to
consciously track its function and its
relationship to the Rolfing process.
Defensive Responses
The minute one feels unsafe, defenses are
triggered, sympathetic activation comes
to the forefront, muscles are recruited,
muscles constrict, and the relationship
to gravity gets transformed. Body
and movement patterns change, and
defensive responses from the nervous
system are installed. These defenses
can get locked in the body/posture as
unfinished responses, and this will also be
revealed in the client’s behavior. Gestures
www.rolf.org
of expression may be completed . . . or
not. The person may have completed
the hug, the punch, the running away . .
. or not. The fascial system is recruited,
to monitor internal events that may have
triggered the alert, or perhaps to defend
by changing the internal environment
(e.g., tightening up if an internal
experience of emotion is too strong).
Tight fascia can thus be a response to an
emotional threat, an adaptation where the
the system constricts in order to contain
emotional overwhelm.
Rolfing SI and Defensive Responses
As we turn to practice, to the relationship
between our Rolfing work and the
defensive responses, remember that
touch is more than a mechanical feature;
it is information. When we touch the
myofascia, we are directly affecting muscle
tone: vectorized touch connects sensory
neural input and the state of muscle tone.
When we relate to muscle tone, we are
effectively working with any incomplete
ANS defensive responses locked in the
body. Discharges may happen, and we
need to follow the rhythm of the ANS so
as not to overstimulate the system – which
would only enhance constriction in the
defensive, sympathetic mode. However,
the client’s nervous system has intelligence
and wants to complete the threat cycle,
to restore homeostasis; when correctly
met, paced, and titrated, discharges like
trembling and big exhalations can be
part of the nervous system reregulation, a
restoration of the reciprocity of the ANS.
It is important for clients to understand
that this may be part of their Ten Series
or other Rolfing process. If the process
happens unconsciously, the client may
feel relieved, but this may not complete
the cycle. Sometimes emotions and
memories show up, as many of you have
witnessed in your practices, and we need
to encourage or gently invite the client to
experience the possibility of completing
arrested responses. If the client feels safe
enough to renegotiate these elements,
they may leave with a new memory-bank
response that will allow fluid flow at the
next threat response. (As noted at the start
of the article, this is intended as guidance
29
Rolfing SI Is Trauma-Informed Work
to help you with what may come up in your
Rolfing practice. It is not a substitute for
training in SE or polyvagal theory.
Intention and the premovement are
elements that we look for in using
Rolf Movement and psychobiological
techniques. An incomplete threat
response carries intention that did not
successfully manifest. Consider also
premovement and orientation, which
organize and precede movement by
reorganizing structure and function in
gravity. Thus, any action is preceded
by orientation and builds an intention
in the muscles, perhaps even a new
neural network is recruited in advance
of the final gesture. When guiding clients
to sense intentions and premovement
organization, they can track their
perception and the organization of their
gestures, and we can simultaneously
address the ANS state. ANS function
underlies intention. You will often see
freeze (contraction or collapse) as part
of a gesture that will relate to orientation
and expression. Using either touch or
Rolf Movement techniques, we can guide
the client to perception of the intention
held in the contraction or collapse
responses, and may then observe signs
of ANS charge or discharge as signals
that the defense response is completing.
Oftentimes the client is unaware of these
signs, yet other times they are clearly
conscious of what happens.
Rolfers have the choice to work with ANS
defensive responses through interventions
that consciously and directly connect
with the client or through those that are
unconscious and indirect. When we pace
the session to have small, titrated doses
of discomfort or charge in the tissues, we
are working with the unconscious ANS.
The changes will mainly be somatic. If
we consciously help the client engage
with the meaning of the experience,
then memory of these interrupted threat
response elements will be recaptured and
You will often see freeze (contraction or collapse) as part of
a gesture that will relate to orientation and expression. Using
either touch or Rolf Movement techniques, we can guide the
client to perception of the intention held in the contraction or
collapse responses, and may then observe signs of ANS charge
or discharge as signals that the defense response is completing.
30
renegotiated. We can work both ways,
consciously or not; again, one’s training
is a consideration. Conscious presence
with somatic discharges will build a
sense of containment and the experience
will have edges, which can be important
for reestablishing the power lost in a
traumatic situation. This can be easier
for the client to integrate. The integration
will depend on the readiness of the whole
system. As these transformations take
place, the structure may display a new
use of movement in gravity.
Talking about the decisions a Rolfer
makes brings in the relational field
between the Rolfer and the client. The
scope of the relationship goes beyond
the use of techniques: resonance and
therapeutic relationship are key concepts
for the work. How do the defensive
responses operate in the relationship?
This one question has the possibility of
opening a huge dimension. Also, is the
client’s nervous system open for contact?
Is the client avoiding contact? Can the
Rolfer help regulate the client’s ANS?
When a threat response finds completion,
how does that change the relationship in
the present moment?
If we do not consider ANS function as
we work, we may not be able to resolve
underlying states, meaning interrupted
defensive strategies would remain in
place. That is to say, the deeper survival
mechanisms are still operating and are
not transformed through the stages of
the threat response cycle. These patterns
then remain anchored in the fascial web,
perhaps even more intractably, affecting
the person’s structural relationship with
gravity. This speaks to the importance
of the ANS for our work, but it is also
important that the therapeutic relationship
be strong and that the Rolfer be working
from training and appropriate scope of
practice when consciously engaging with
the threat response cycle.
Reorientation
When we are not held in a defensive
state or oriented towards danger, we
can experience safety that allows the
parasympathetic function to come
forward, balancing out the energy-
expensive sympathetic activation of
defense in a process of integration and
reorientation. The attributes of a physical
sense of safety are many but may include
longer breath cycles, more ease in the
myofascial system, and the person being
able to stay present with sensations in their
whole body. The emotional experience of
safety is that one has sufficient resources
for the situation at hand and the ability to
contain and deal with the experience. In
these conditions, the ANS finds resiliency
and homeostasis, and this is expressed
through the whole structure. Thus, when
a threat response cycle completes, the
individual can reorient and relate from a
safe place, socially engaged and ready
for novelty, for what comes next, not
trapped in past experiences that manifest
as defensive states in the present and
projected on the future.
Rolfing SI and Reorientation
In Rolfing sessions, we can recognize and
observe this reorienting, integration, and
stability and track it through observable
ANS states. A wealth of information is
available in the face, eyes, eye contact,
facial muscles, and gestures. We can hear
it also in the client’s tone of voice, and in
what they are saying or not saying. Whole-
body gestures that display safety show a
shoulder girdle at ease, hands and feet that
don’t grip, and an appearance of resting
down into the pelvis and feet. We can ask
orienting questions. How safe do you feel
inside? How are you standing in gravity
and relating to it? How are you breathing?
How does it feel to relate? This is important
work to recognize the reorientation that
has happened and it honors the closure of

When the vagus nerve sends high tone signals to the heart, it is
slowing the heart down, but polyvagal theory tells us that this
can happen under two different conditions: in one, the client
in a state of rest and stillness because they are experiencing
safety and reorientation; in the other, the stillness is because
the person is immobilized by fear. Rolfers need to recognize
how to tell them apart, because the two can both look restful.
the threat response cycle. Closure also
includes the rebalancing of ANS activity
in a healthy pulsation and tracking
this experience of the client in gravity.
These pieces fortify the integration of
the myofascial net and bring about the
completion of the client owning the
changes. It has been my observation
Rolfers often don’t allow enough time for
this process.
Now that you have a sense of the
importance of the ANS to our work, and
that working the ANS-Rolfing interface
strengthens our clinical results, let’s
dive deeper into the knowledge base of
ANS functioning, particularly the work of
Stephen Porges (polyvagal theory) and
Peter Levine (SE). Resources for training
are listed at the end of this article.
Porges, the Polyvagal Theory,
and Rolfing SI
Stephen Porges, PhD, is a neurobiological
researcher who brought forward polyvagal
theory. (Editor’s note: you can read an
interview with Porges on page 18.) His
work adds another variable to the quest
of safety and reorientation. Porges coined
the term neuroception, which describes
the broad function of the polyvagal
system together with other neural circuits,
that is to say a person’s nervous system is
always scanning for safety, both with their
external environment and their internal
environment. He brilliantly considers
this is due to evolution of the ANS and
postulates that the vagus nerve, the tenth
cranial nerve is in large part responsible for
the main parasympathetic action involved
in the threat response cycle. Porges has
described that the vagus nerve has two
very distinct efferent neural pathways
(neural signal traveling from the brainstem
to the body). Although the vagus nerve
innervates many anatomical structures,
Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021
we often consider the innervation of the
heart to be one of its primary destinations,
and we are here going to use the heart as
an indicator of generalized vagal function.
When the vagus nerve sends high tone
signals to the heart, it is slowing the
heart down, but polyvagal theory tells us
that this can happen under two different
conditions: in one, the client in a state
of rest and stillness because they are
experiencing safety and reorientation;
in the other, the stillness is because the
person is immobilized by fear. Rolfers
need to recognize how to tell them apart,
because the two can both look restful.
The polyvagal theory describes a primitive,
ancient branch of the vagus nerve called
the dorsal vagal system, but mammals also
have a second vagal nerve branch, the
ventral vagal system, which is myelinated,
fast in its nerve impulse speed. One of the
functions of the ventral vagus system is
modulating social engagement, because
brainstem control of the ventral vagal
nerve is adjacent to brainstem control
of cranial nerves responsible for facial
expressions and vocal tone. Researchers
find that when a person is engaging in
prosocial communication with their face
and voice, their ventral vagus nerve is
functioning more dominantly. They are
at rest. Control of the dorsal vagal nerve
branch is also in the brainstem, but it is
not associated with social engagement; in
fact, the absences of social-engagement
cues in the face and head indicates that
the dorsal vagal system may be more
dominant. Ventral vagal dominance brings
in the higher function to the ANS or, said
another way, ventral vagal function allows
an experience of the present and brings
forward restful states connected to safety.
This includes relationships with others and
one’s environment.
Ventral vagal activity can regulate
sympathetic activity: when the ventral
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vagus is ‘on’, sympathetic activation
of the heart is inhibited. But when the
nervous system detects a threat, the
ventral vagus will turn its neural signals
‘off’, which automatically and quickly
allows sympathetic mobilization towards
defense. This takes us back to the
threat response cycle described earlier,
where the person moves through the
possible responses to threat: fight,
flight, and – when a threat is too big
for the system – freeze. The immobility
of the freeze response comes from
the dorsal vagal nerve; it is an old and
successful survival mechanism to keep
the alarming activation in the person’s
body down, with freeze and dissociation
offering protection during overwhelming
traumatic events. Porges calls this dorsal
vagal state immobilization with fear.
This is in contrast to the immobilization
that comes with ventral vagal states,
where the immobilization is a stillness
and rest associated with connection,
communication, and safety.
Polyvagal theory demonstrates that
the sympathetic and parasympathetic
nervous systems are not exactly in a
reciprocal relationship; it is not as simple
as when one is up the other is down. In
truth, there is a hierarchical arrangement
of engagement of these three ANS
responses to deal with threats. At the first
tier, a person may be living life with mostly
ventral vagal states: they have sufficient
sympathetic activation for engagement
(e.g., run to catch the bus), they have
parasympathetic action (can catch
their breath once on the bus), and this
modulates social engagement (able to
say hello to the bus driver). A second tier
is when threat responses are triggered,
sympathetic activity increases without
their conscious control and will raise their
heart rate. This change will happen to
different degrees as the brain modulates
the rise according the perception of
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Rolfing SI Is Trauma-Informed Work
Embedded in the structure of a person lies the history of
survival they have lived, held in patterns of activation and/or in
dissociation, in hyper- and/or hypo-tonus states.
threats that are present and the history
of threat the person has experienced in
the past. High heart rates and generalized
mobilization may be successful in the
person running away from the threat, or
maybe they are able to push away the
problem. But when fight and flight are
not successful or not possible, then the
third tier is the last resource of the vagus
nerve coming online: the dorsal vagal
parasympathetic nerve fibers become
engaged to dampen sympathetic
activation and may take the person to a
state of freeze and/or dissociation.
This brings forward a very important
element for Rolfers to consider, what to
do when freeze and/or dissociation is
present with our client. When the dorsal
vagal fibers are engaged, remember that
the sympathetic nervous system is also
engaged but it is being overpowered
by the vagus nerve. So, when our warm
therapeutic relationship with our client and
our intelligent touch navigates releasing
a freeze/dissociation state, the client
may next experience very high activation
in their body. It could be generalized to
having a lot of energy, ready to go for a
run, or it may be local and the high energy
quality leads to trembling in a region of
the body, like their jaw may start to shake
outside their conscious control. This is a
natural neurological state when the dorsal
vagal state lessens, the sympathetic
charges need time to also dissipate.
Social connection, a safe environment,
and a restful orientation is very helpful to
bring back the ventral vagus tone. With
ventral vagus activation, there’s a gentle
brake on the fight-and-flight responses
resolving in your client’s system; a new
moment can then be experienced by the
client, a sense of novelty may show up. In
Rolfing SI, we connect to the observable
signals of activity of each of these
branches of the ANS.
Let us now consider the broader scope
of where the vagus nerve innervates.
The vagus nerve innervates the heart,
but it also innervates the organs below
the diaphragm. Consider this example: a
Rolfer is working with and taking the time
to perceive the state of peristalsis in their
client’s belly, gentle visceral contractions
that are palpable as the stomach and
32
intestines have their sequential organized
contractions. The client is talking, their
face is animated, they are looking around
easily while feeling sensations – this is
ventral vagal neural dominance. Now
imagine that as the Rolfer’s hands gently
investigate a scar from a surgery to the
abdominal organs, the client remembers
something about that and the Rolfer
feels a total cessation of those earlier
movements: this may be dorsal vagal
freeze. We will talk further on about
how to handle this moment. Giving skill,
technique, and time to the tissue and
the whole person may allow the tissue
to release from the immobility so that
the Rolfer then feels heat and fluttering
of the tissue – discharge from the held
sympathetic activation. In sum, we could
imagine this was an incomplete response
held in the viscera; when resolved, the
Rolfer may observe that the presence of
the person and their communication is
even more natural and animated. Back to
ventral vagal dominance.
Levine, SE, and Rolfing SI
The question about what to do when we
encounter interrupted threat responses
and traumatic ANS states during a
Rolfing session has been answered by
our other esteemed colleague, Peter
Levine, PhD (Levine and Frederick
1997). Levine went from Rolfing SI to the
creation of SE. (Editor’s note: some of this
story is discussed by Anngwyn St. Just,
his close colleague, in the interview on
page 15.) SE certification and the clinical
application of Levine’s concepts empower
Rolfers to handle high sympathetic
arousal and/or high dorsal vagal arousal
causing immobility, dissociation, and/
or freeze. Levine carefully describes
observing, tracking, and generating
conditions to follow the flow of the ANS
during a session. Resolving trauma is
delicate work, and takes training and
conscientiousness on the part of the
practitioner. A high value is given to the
emotional experience of safety and its
correlation to the ANS ventral vagal
function, as well as knowledge about
how people have defenses entrenched
in their body, their person. Tracking the
experience of the client, with special
attention to the signs of ANS function, will
allow us to improve and master our work.
It is because of the depth of Levine’s
trauma work that we have the language
to make our Rolfing sessions trauma-
informed manual therapy sessions.
We start with offering clinical safety. As
we know, Rolfing work happens through
specialized forms of touch, be it through
our hands, words, or personal energy. We
are constantly dialoguing with the ANS in
all the steps of the Ten Series and post-
ten work. When our contact is interpreted
as safe, this can allow discharge of held
energy, therefore completing interrupted
threat response cycles. The safe space
of our offices allows the client to reorient,
as well as build capacity to contain ANS
charge related to their experiences. Rolfers
are constantly dialoguing with the ANS,
we deal with unlocking somatic patterns
as well as producing new experiences.
When the work takes place with safety, the
client has the opportunity for their nervous
system to produce new experiences that
become encoded into memory.
During healthy human development, it
is natural for the ANS system to develop
resiliency – that is to say, the person will be
able to overcome their experiences with
overstimulation and under stimulation.
Traumatic stress states can cause
individuals to lose this capacity, whether a
sudden traumatic event or an environment
that causes harm over time. What is
called shock trauma relates to events that
are physical and/or emotional that are
sudden, abrupt, and require immediate
adaptation from the nervous system to
build defensive strategies. On the other
hand, developmental trauma refers to
adaptations that the nervous system had
to make over periods of time to cope
with traumatic conditions, like chronically
overwhelming experiences being the norm
in a person’s life, which may interfere with
expected psychomotor development.
Adaptations that may work include
dissociation in part or in the whole being,
malformations of body segments, and/or
lack of sensorial integration. This in turn will
generate spaces, gaps in the relationships
between body systems that have not had
the chance to fully form. Embedded in the

structure of a person lies the history of
survival they have lived, held in patterns of
activation and/or in dissociation, in hyper-
and/or hypo-tonus states.
Levine describes that the nervous system
may attempt to integrate traumatic stress
states by joining events or elements of
an experience together; this is called
over coupling. It could be the body itself
tightening its parts, constricting the
musculature and other elements together
into seemingly one thing; for example,
a chronically held shoulder may also be
tightly linked with emotion, sensation, and
meaning involved in particular events of
the person’s life. These conditions likely
involve high sympathetic activation, a high
state of defense, unfinished responses, and
expressions from the traumatic material. As
the Rolfer works to soften the myofascial
tone, discriminating and relating planes of
fascia, the client may find the work triggers
discharge from their held sympathetic
activation. The Rolfer’s timing here is
crucial: if touch continues to overstimulate
the body, the client may get locked further
into a defensive state, recruiting more
sympathetic activity to deal with the input
(the touch of the practitioner). When touch
is not overstimulating and discharge
becomes possible, practitioners need to
track these signs and allow time for the
discharges to happen. This also gives time
for the natural resiliency of the ANS to show
up. Levine encourages practitioners to
pendulate between manageable amounts
of activation and rest/safety to allow
discharge to take place. The Rolfer must
keep a warm therapeutic relationship with
their client during these delicate nervous-
system conditions, to take the releases step
by step, be an observer to the unfolding,
and end with integration in gravity.
As already discussed, there are times
the sympathetic activation of a person’s
system escalates to the highest order
and then the parasympathetic system
will try to take over. Under coupling is
an unconscious protective response that
leads to the nervous system dissociating
from the experience, freezing awareness
and even fragmenting the experience.
This can happen at many levels. It can be
in one layer of the event, where the person
feels the sensation, for example, but not
the emotion related to it. Or it can be a
lack of connection to places in the body
that were impacted. Touch and directing
the client’s attention to the area may help
reconnect these dissociated parts. This
can bring new sensation and perception
Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021
that may initiate a process of integration
so the part can return to being part of the
whole. Inviting the client to do movements
or micromovements, and helping them
connect to premovement and underlying
intention, may bring in either over coupled
or under coupled elements with a variety
of ANS activity. Our response as Rolfers is
the same: we track what is happening, we
support discharge, we assist in ‘building
the container’ (which helps the person
to have the capacity to contain the
experience and the associated charge),
and we integrate these varieties of
When Rolfers teach clients to track ANS
flow as an education process, they are
giving a lasting tool.
energy into their sense of gravity, space,
and movement.
Therapeutic Relationship Is
Crucial
Successful intervention requires that the
therapeutic relationship consider these
ANS states and polyvagal theory. Making
contact with the client starts at the initial
interview, where practitioner and client
establish their relational patterns. If safety
is experienced, then the client will have
the ventral vagus active as their dominant
ANS state. This is observable: contact
feels comfortable, facial expressions
are relaxed, and the muscle tone of the
client and Rolfer reveals stability. If not,
the client may stay stuck in their patterns
or may get into defensive modes that will
not serve the SI process. In these cases,
they will present with muscle constriction,
won’t find ground as easily, and they
may lose orienting to different degrees.
Rolfers can build trust by having a restful
presence in their own relationship with
gravity; this helps co-regulate the state
of the client’s nervous system. If the
Rolfer can modulate their own levels of
activation, and find balance and safety
in their own body, the client will resonate
with this. The client will have a model to
build safety in their own system, reflecting
and mirroring the relationship qualities
experienced during the session with
acceptance and containment provided by
the Rolfer.
www.rolf.org
Education, Integration, and
Assimilation
Rolfers can offer many levels of education
to their clients. This can happen subtly
with the new sensory info we give
to tissue through touch, or with the
guiding instructions we offer with Rolf
Movement, psychobiological elements,
or energy assessments. We can also
offer direct information about the client’s
ANS functioning, which may assist them
in understanding the psychobiological
states they are experiencing. We educate
clients about their patterns, we open
possibilities to assist in assimilating
the new information, and we increase
awareness of their self through their felt
sense of their body schema. This is part
of our job, to assist clients to become
more aware of their relationship with their
self, others, and their environment. We
can also teach the threat response cycle,
what happens when there is interruption,
and the polyvagal states. Clients may
experience more safety with their bodies
when they understand the natural and
unconscious physiology they experience.
This will help them have consciousness
of who they are, their postural patterns,
and the meaning of the changes they
are experiencing. When Rolfers teach
clients to track ANS flow as an education
process, they are giving a lasting tool.
Integration and assimilation through
movement, resonance, and closure must
have safety and reorientation so the client
is able to keep this new experience in an
embodied manner with the corresponding
changes in the myofascial web in
gravity. Rolfer and client may naturally
find themselves both in observable
ventral vagal function with co-regulating
presence, alertness, and at the same
time a sense of rest and stability. Help the
client find their own words that describe
their experience of safety. We may invite
some knee bends or some ground/space
orientation to organize them around their
own stability structurally. Integration of
any new material from the session will
33
Rolfing SI Is Trauma-Informed Work
If the Rolfer can modulate their own
levels of activation, and find balance
and safety in their own body, the client
will resonate with this.
have taken place when the client has an
embodied presence in gravity.
Final Words
As a philosophy, we come from a holistic
point of view, with multidimensional
considerations (body, emotions, spirit,
mind). We talk about a body and its
anatomy arranged in the gravitational field,
as well, Rolfers are concerned with the
many layers of the client’s life experience
and how their ANS function is interrelated
with their body moving through space.
Over time Rolfing SI has evolved to
include these different layers, and as
a community of prefessionals we are
gradually developing techniques of
assessment and understanding more about
the complex relationships between the
different categories. The psychobiological
taxonomy that deals with our identity,
consciousness, and the emotional aspect
of our experience that shapes the body
and its myofascial arrangement; it is
fundamental, prior to any form we take
and any placement we adopt in gravity.
If we consider the ANS as the physiological
structure that shapes our bodies and
subjectivity, we have a concrete entry point
to this universe. ANS function can be like a
spotlight that amplifies our understanding
of our work, this knowledge can expand the
scope of research about Rolfing outcomes,
and serve our clients. This essay is far
from complete, as we are just starting this
inquiry of exploring and using the ANS
and its functions consciously in the Rolfing
context, but I hope it offers an entry way
and inspiration to many. Our concept of
the ‘Line’ and the human form in gravity
gives us a beautiful, synthetic reference
to access and deal with the mystery of
creation, through ourselves, our own form
and our experience.
Pedro Prado, PhD, of São Paulo, Brazil, is a
member of the Basic and Advanced Rolfing
and Rolf Movement faculties of the Dr. Ida
Rolf Institute®. In 1981, he became the first
Certified Rolfer from Brazil and brought the
work to Latin America. He was a founding
34
member of Brazil’s regional Rolfing
association, Associação Brasileira de Rolfing
(ABR). With his background as a clinical
psychologist and previous experience
as a professor of somatic psychology at
the Catholic University of São Paulo, his
special contributions to SI have centered on
movement and the behavioral dimensions of
the work. He has also developed extensive
clinical and teaching protocols to both track
and evaluate SI process outcomes and to
enhance awareness of the psychobiological
perspective. These protocols include quality
of life assessments according to World
Health Organization methods. His pioneering
research, which correlates SI with improved
quality of life, has been published as part
of his doctoral dissertation. Since 1998, he
has been a practitioner of SE, and has since
become an SE Instructor. He has developed
a method called Structural Stretches that
draws upon the principles and wisdom of
both SI and SE.
References
Changaris, M. 2016. “Somatic approaches
to treating trauma threat arousal cycle.”
Available from https://www.slideshare.
net/MCChangaris/somatic-approaches-
to- treating-trauma-threat-arousal-cycle.
Levine, P. 2021. “Nervous system
regulation: Somatic Experiencing® Building
Blocks.” Available at: https://www.tomf.
org/gd-resources/downloads/Dampsey_
Final.pdf.
Levine, P. and A. Frederick. 1997. Waking
the tiger healing trauma: The innate capacity
to transform overwhelming experiences.
Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
Training Resources
Peter Levine’s work of SE is taught through
Somatic Experiencing® International, https://
traumahealing.org.
Stephen Porges’s work on applying
polyvagal theory is taught through Polyvagal
Institute https://www.polyvagalinstitute.org.
See our interview with the Randall Redfield
on page 50.
 Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021 www.rolf.org

Finding Resilience
When Everything is
a Threat
Working Through the Pandemic

By Kristen Kuester, Certified Advanced Rolfer®, Somatic Experiencing®

Practitioner, Craniosacral Practitioner

ABSTRACT This article explores clinical protocols and self-care during global
crisis, and recognizes the role of Rolfing® Structural Integration (SI): touch, physical
presence, and real-time social engagement as an anchor to embodied life. It
celebrates our work as a counterbalance to the increasingly virtual/seen-through-
screens reality in which we find ourselves. It identifies the required depth and fortitude
to continue in our role as somatic practitioners when familiar external structures are
uprooted and traumatic experience is rampant.

The Global Intrigue exchange is phenomenal. How and where

Kristen Kuester
Orienting to the Cultural Complexities
– A Turning Point
At this writing, in February of 2021, we
have all endured a year of unprecedented
global calamity related to the COVID-
19 pandemic. Everything is in flux. The
telecommunications revolution has
accelerated exponentially in the past thirty
years. Beyond a televised broadcast,
the internet now provides instantaneous,
person-to-person global communication for
the first time in history. It has changed the
world. In the background of the pandemic,
the speed of commerce and human
we manufacture goods, how we trade
goods internationally, how we educate
ourselves, how and where we travel, how
we protect our borders, our privacy, our
health; who is in charge of global finance,
who is profiting at the expense of others,
is all changing. The relationship between
concentrated corporate power, the
authority of governments, and the needs
of those governed is growing more visible.
The role of elected officials and leaders to
keep the populace calm and safe versus
the role of the populace to keep the greed
and power of the leaders in check is all in
question. Human rights are being revisited
from every direction worldwide.

35
Rolfing SI Is Trauma-Informed Work
Fear is natural and powerful. It is a
reflexive response we share with all
vertebrates, and is necessary to ensure
survival. It is part of the neuroendocrine
alarm system to alert us to and protect
us from danger.
This grand social transformation requires
personal transformation. Orienting to
change insists on having a place from
which to observe and collect ourselves
for right action. As it is deemed necessary
that we spend more time in our homes,
we come to our bodies to provide us
with information about where we exist in
space, who else is there with us, and what
we need to do to increase our capacity
for survival. A turning point necessitates a
place from which to begin the turn. On a
somatic level, the Rolf ‘Line’ of gravity that
allows smooth mechanical movement
through the mass of our body is a good
metaphor. When we land in ourselves we
remember what we want. It is our desire
that initiates the push into the ground and
the reach into what’s next.
Fear
Fear is natural and powerful. It is a reflexive
response we share with all vertebrates, and
is necessary to ensure survival. It is part of
the neuroendocrine alarm system to alert
us to and protect us from danger. We fear
a virus that we are told could annihilate
us. We fear the news of a spreading death
in our communities. We fear each other’s
breath, spittle, or close proximity, or touch
points on objects. We fear other people’s
denial of the virus or refusal to obey rules.
We fear loss of income. We fear loss of
access to help or supplies. We fear for
our children’s development. We fear loss
of friends or family through death. We fear
loss of friends or family though mandated
inability to congregate, travel, or be with
sick or dying loved ones. We fear the
mutation of the virus. We wait for the
salvation of the vaccine. We fear what the
future may bring or ask of us.
Or we may fear that we can no longer
count on those in charge to provide us with
accurate statistical, scientific, or medical
information untainted by political or
monetary gain. We may fear that we do not
know what is real or true, as there are so
36
many conflicting ‘versions of the truth’ from
media sources or alternative researchers.
We may fear that what we intuit or know to
be true is very disconcerting. We may fear
the ideas and concerns of our friends. We
may fear our annihilation, not by a virus,
but by the vaccine, or by those humans
in authority over our lives. We may feel
betrayed, inappropriately controlled,
cloistered, isolated, masked, and silenced.
One way or another we are being fed fear
on a daily basis. Whether we are hearing,
“Lions, and tigers, and bears! Oh my!”
or we are hearing, “Stop. Hey, what’s
that sound? Everybody look what’s goin’
down.” Something is happening here and
what it is ain’t exactly clear! Within the
lyrics of that 1960s protest song written by
Stephen Stills we read, “Paranoia strikes
deep. Into your life it will creep. It starts
when you’re always afraid . . .” Chronic
fear wreaks havoc with our nervous
systems. We become ‘stuck on ON’ in the
autonomic/sympathetic response to threat
and lose ability to return to autonomic/
parasympathetic, “The tiger’s gone, it’s all
OK” mode. Ironically, this chronic fear can
negatively affect the ability of our immune
systems to ward off pathogens.
Safety, Resource, and
Resilience
I just saw a bumper sticker that read,
‘Imagine something going right’. I felt
those words warm my heart. I smiled,
alone in my car. It was a perfect interruption
to dwelling on what next may go wrong.
In the sea of masked, semi-depressed or
irritable people walking around to take
care of essential business I’m fortified
by the occasional grocery clerk who
seems to be cheerfully taking it all in
stride. These ‘serotonin donors’ among
us, undaunted by the bigger picture,
sewing masks, switching to Zoom and
FaceTime mode, cleaning their closets,
emailing excellent pandemic humor that
has served to encourage and amuse us
all, must be celebrated as heroes.
To bounce back from the fear and to
use what tools are available in order to
recreate safety and to continue onward
in life, is the essence of our humanity.
Resource is what feeds us. Some may
seek resource by defending their rights
and protesting in the streets, others
may seek resource by laying low and
doing what they are told until the storm
passes. Resourcing behavior may not
look the same from person to person, so
it can seem divisive. The urge to create
safety (which includes justice) and to
carry on bravely unifies us, stabilizes us
and gives us purpose in our capacity to
be of service to one another. Imbalance
precedes finding new balance. Can we
trust that homeostasis, or self-regulation,
is inherent in the greater culture? Can we
feel even just a little of that trust in our
beings so our bodies can relax a bit?
In the Trenches – Taking a
Breath
Back in the Rolfing office we have been
faced with numerous issues. The phone
stopped ringing as clients responded to
the cultural message that it is not safe to
be touched or to be in close proximity to
anyone outside our homes. We, in turn, felt
unsafe letting the public – who have been
where? doing what? with whom? – into our
offices in close proximity to us. We were
expected to follow new state mandates
for operation of our businesses. Medical
authorities deemed that it was necessary
to stay six feet away from each other, wear
masks, sanitize surfaces, quarantine after
travel or exposure, and wash our hands
frequently. There were immediate choices
we had to make if we wished to continue
to work – should we have the opportunity.
First, we had to determine what risks we,
as Rolfers, were willing to take. Could we
afford to not work? Was it time to train
in another profession, go back to school,
stay home with the children, or retire?
Could we tolerate the rigors of mask
wearing and repeated sanitizing to keep
safe and keep working?
Just as the pandemic began, I had read
the book Breath by James Nestor (2020).
It presented the importance of breathing
freely through the nose, and the disastrous
results of mouth breathing. The science
graphically reveals the role of mouth
breathing in adversely changing the

shape of the airways, shrinking the mouth,
narrowing the dental arch, and creating
crooked teeth, poor occlusion, mood
disorders, learning disabilities, blood
pressure derangements, etc. I wondered,
“Is it possible to have clear open nasal
breathing when masked for long periods
of time?” Even just to accomplish essential
business outside the house, mask-wearing
required overriding a variety of odd
sensations: pressure on the ears, fogged
glasses, itchy nose, and tedious ear-strap
conflict with glasses, hats, hair, or perhaps
hearing aids – as well as the inability to
breathe freely. I found this child’s chalk
drawing that struck me like archetypal
poetry in a park in 2020, bright blue mask,
shouting face like a note pinned to the
coat, and the figure balancing on a globe
with a diagonal no line through it (see
Figure 1). Most of us who are attracted
to bodywork as a profession are innately
gifted in experiencing sensation. When we
have spent years cultivating our sensate
abilities, attempting to ignore these
extraneous annoyances while working
with our clients requires uncommon skills.
To work all day in a mask seems to
require the sensory-integration flexibility
of a good herding dog who can hear and
respond appropriately to three different
whistle commands across a windy
acreage, and can then walk off-lead at
heel along a busy road in a cacophony
of traffic noise, undaunted. The dog can
adjust. The fine-tuned sensibility can be
turned off and on. Are we capable?
In the Trenches – Social
Engagement
Beyond the sensory nightmare of wearing
a mask, I found wearing a mask while
relating to a client challenging on a level of
social engagement. I learned that I ‘listen’
with my ventral vagal system which
sensitizes the face, throat, and chest. This
kind of listening enhances the subtleties
of meeting a client on an emotional level.
Behind a mask, whether during the intake
exchange or at the table, I felt there was
a dampening of my ability to receive
subtle information from my client. I felt
that our glances or facial expressions,
when dependent solely on the eyes, were
interrupted and potentially misread. The
vagus nerve exits the cranium at the base
of the brain, acts upon the heart, and joins
the function of the autonomic nervous
system to regulate activation of the alarm
system. The ventral or anterior half of the
Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021
nerve regulates social awareness (above
the diaphragm) and serves to identify
who is there with us, who might help, or
hinder, our survival efforts. The dorsal
or posterior half of the nerve educates
the enteric nervous system, (below the
diaphragm) providing a gut response.
Dorsal vagal collapse is the state that
becomes evident when fight or flight
options have expired and we drop into a
freeze state.
Despite these concerns, the general
population had received the mandated
message and had collectively agreed to,
‘Err in the direction of caution’. Some
agreed begrudgingly, some with fear-
based aggression. Given the potential
threat of becoming a culture deadened by
years of breathing impairment and social
engagement confusion, I questioned if in
the long run the virus was not the worst
outcome here, and whether masking
was, in fact, erring in the direction of
caution. But even when some thought
that a bandana in relation to a virus was
like throwing sand through a chain-link
fence, masks were mandated. End of
story. You socialize; you mask. Since our
work involves close contact which could
influence public health, and can’t be
www.rolf.org
Figure 1: A child’s chalk drawing
in a park in 2020. The body of
the person is drawn in pink, the
mask is bright blue, the globe
they are standing on is white,
and face on the chest is orange.
transferred to teleconferencing, we had
to mask while working – or put ourselves
at risk of noncompliance or disease.
Recognizing Traumatic
Response in Clients
Next, we had to determine what risks our
clients were willing to take. I worked with
a client who wanted help with a twisted
foot. He was so anxious about contracting
the virus that he insisted we work with
the doors and windows open and would
not let me work on any part of his body
beyond his feet or walk past him to go to
wash my hands. Given that what I felt was
off in his heel might be coming from his
sacrum, I let him know that perhaps the
risk of coming to a practitioner in this time
was creating more challenges than it was
potentially correcting. We agreed to wait
for further hands-on work and I gave him
a self-help regimen.
The ‘traumatology’ of the COVID-19
outbreak might be categorized as a global,
high-intensity event – in slow motion.
Global high-intensity traumas are those in
which everyone and everything is suddenly
in crisis, as in a tsunami, or an explosion.
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Rolfing SI Is Trauma-Informed Work
In this type of trauma, instantly, there is
nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, with
minimal resource to turn to. This pandemic
shared all of those characteristics, but
with the irony of everything seeming
mysteriously normal, for the most part.
For those of us fortunate enough to have
secure residence, even if there were two
adults and several children trying to work
and go to school while sheltering at home,
there was a cuddled safety along with an
explosion that threatened to erode the
external structures on which we depended
for survival.
What was instant and intense, however,
was global data and real-time media
coverage that sensationalized every
detail and gave us steady ‘game-show’
number counting graphics, which served
to amplify statistics as well as anxiety and
had many people terrified, anticipating an
encroaching ‘Blob That Ate Cleveland’.
Hopefully, after months of this, with
terrors slowly subsiding, more of us can
return to work. As we start to see clients
for structural work, honing our skills in
recognizing traumatic response and
preventing re-traumatization, in ourselves
or our clients, will be useful.
Protocols
Preventing re-traumatization starts with
clarity of protocols before the client
arrives in the office, so a boundary is felt
not as a defensive barrier, but as a place
where you can meet in agreement. In the
initial phone call requesting a session,
be willing, or have your scheduling
receptionist be willing, to discuss
anything special the client needs to feel
comfortable, and create that agreement
before they arrive. To avoid surprises,
which can flare anxiety, it is wise to state
your safety practices. You might start
with your own habits of social distancing,
limited social gathering, minimal essential
outings, or whatever you feel comfortable
sharing about your adherence to ‘safe’
behavior. Let them know your specific
office sanitation regimens, assuring them
of clean linens, sanitized touch points,
HEPA filter use, or the reality of what you
choose or refuse to employ in your office.
The ‘traumatology’ of the COVID-19
outbreak might be categorized as a global,
high-intensity event – in slow motion.
38
Let them know exactly what will or will not
be expected of them, like wearing a mask,
or receiving a temperature test. Signage
at the office entrance reiterative of the
specifics discussed on the phone is also
reassuring, so the session can be more
about Rolfing SI and less about anxiety.
As a negative example, when going to an
appointment mid-2020, I experienced a
medical assistant burst through a closed
door while pointing her temperature-
taking gun to my head with such thrust
that my service dog refused to allow me
to enter the building! Smart dog. Poorly
trained receptionist.
After the client arrives in your office it may
be a good idea to allow a little more time
at the beginning of the session to discuss,
not only the physical/structural issues
that brought them to your office, but to
grasp how the pandemic has impacted
them. Have they lost a family member?
Have they suffered from lack of medical
care, or some other hardship? Are they
angry about the whole mess?
Noticing Resources
Also listen for what resources have been
available to them. Perhaps they have
been thrilled to be working on Zoom in
their homes and no longer traveling in
traffic to get to work, or delighted that
they were forced to retire which led to
their playing the piano again, or happy for
more intimate family time, or grateful for
unemployment/stimulus checks. Perhaps
they are relieved to have just received the
vaccine, or glad to be back in your office.
If you sense there is a lot of charge in their
nervous system, even if they are speaking
of positive experiences, you might cue
them to notice how or where they feel the
relief or delight in their physical being, so
you have that somatic message to feed
back to them should there be a moment
of discomfort or overstimulation during
the session. This is a way to pendulate
between the sympathetic (fear alert) and
the parasympathetic (calm) responses of
the autonomic nervous system to assist in
building resiliency. For example, a person
who appears to be coping just fine, but is
seeking your care for help with alignment
after a slip-and-fall accident, may
suddenly have tears or shaking, which
may be evidence that all of that good
coping was derailed, by the fall and then
again by the realignment from the fall. At
that point you might suggest: “As you are
feeling these tears (or experiencing this
quivering), see if you can also remember
the quality in your chest you described
when you play the piano” (using their
resource words). This simple verbal cue
spreads out sensation awareness to
include more than the contraction related
to the trauma of the fall. Then, not only is
the structure realigned, but the autonomic
nervous system re-regulated as well.
This allows the body to fully ingest the
structural change, integrate it into the
client’s movement, and encourage a
return to ‘blueprint specifications’.
High Activation
If it seems there is a lot of charge or
activation present in the nervous-system,
slow down. Less is more. You will
accomplish more on a structural level by
including awareness of nervous system or
social/emotional response. Time for silent,
still touch, or time to move away from
the table, letting the client know you are
giving them a moment to ‘digest’ without
the touch of your hands, can be useful.
Returning to contact places previously
touched, with a neutral hand, can create a
better sense of containment, whole-body
awareness, and integration. Switching to
seated work with the eyes open – even if
returning to supine-lying afterward – can
bring a better sense of adult processing
in present time versus vulnerable infant or
long-ago memory processing.
You may register those clients who live
alone with minimal social input (even
before the pandemic) may be – even
unbeknownst to them – missing the
nourishing nuances of social engagement.
The loss of facial contact with grocery
store clerks, or restaurant staff, has been
greatly impacted by mask wearing and
business shut-downs. In this case you
may see if it feels safe to both of you to
work without masks, or to even stand
six feet apart and look into each other’s
faces briefly. Prolonged mask wearing
may flare issues related to being seen or
hiding, with related structural gestures.
Look for those whole-body gestures, for
example, subtle cringing, withdrawal, or
vapid qualities. Clients who have had
a challenging history involving masked

As Rolfers, we represent a bridge to physical sensation
and social contact in real time.
medical personnel may be affected by
seeing ‘the enemy’ everywhere during
the pandemic, so simple structural work
may release greater activation (shivers,
verbal chatter, or reactivity of any sort)
than it would have prior. Clients used to
teleconferencing, even though they seem
fine about that and glad of the social
contact or type of intimacy it brings,
may respond well to having at least brief
visual contact with your full face. Seeing
flat images of faces on screens invites
studying eyelashes, hairstyles, corners
of mouths, skin aberrations, or the
distraction of seeing our own face while
we see theirs. This is a huge contrast
to sensing into the full physical-soul-
being presence of a person who stands
before us. If you do negotiate a mask-less
moment you may wish to bring attention
to the three-dimensionality of being an
object in space, experiencing the room.
Attention can be directed to noticing how
you are gathering information about each
other on many levels as you look at one
another and what amount of conscious
relating feels comfortable.
As Rolfers, we represent a bridge to physical
sensation and social contact in real time. I
often say to myself as I first touch a client’s
body, “We are here and this is real.” Are
these agrarian, mammalian qualities, which
inform both our connection to the Earth and
our relation to each other’s faces, growing
obsolete? Remember John Naisbitt’s book,
Megatrends (1982)? He suggested that
where there is ‘high tech’ there needs to be
‘high touch’. Here we are.
Pacing the Cage and Other
Useful Exercises
I found myself in restless states during
this past year and instead of distracting
myself with another focus I stayed with
the quality of the experience. What did
this charge want me to do? I began
to move through my house, this cage
in which I was contained. “Pacing,” I
thought, “It could speak of anxiety, yet
they walk consciously in meditation
workshops . . .” I began to use it as a
discipline. It did not involve relating to
other people, or to the masked throngs,
or to thought, or to tasks. It related to
finding resource in my home, my body,
Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021 www.rolf.org
my center, the light that moved through bodywork practices. She currently is
the house, the things that I had collected teaching workshops in The Gesture of
there that pleased me. I could adjust Traumatic Response for Rolfers.
the pace of the pacing, the quality of my
steps. It became a practice to cope, a
waiting that included moving, a frustration References
release that included gratitude. This
Naisbitt, J. 1982. Megatrends: Ten new
reminded me of times I had encouraged
directions transforming our lives. New
highly traumatized clients to look out into
York: Warner Books.
the environment and simply name objects
– “door,” “carpet,” “chair,” “tree” – as a Nester, J. 2020. Breath: The new science
way to bring themselves back to present of a lost art. New York: Riverhead books.
time and integrate their sensory intake
with language. As we wait for the world
to ‘get back to normal’ or to evolve to a
more tolerable reality, we can invent new
strategies for ourselves, and find useful
exercises to share with our clients.
What’s Next?
When our new world unfolds, I’m curious
to see if touch therapies will thrive
again and be valued with even greater
reverence. I’m curious to see if the
demographics of our practices will shift.
Will we be simply a service class to the
rich? I remember in my initial training there
was mention that Dr. Rolf had suggested
our donating a portion of our work back
to the community to allow people who
might not be able to afford the current
market-value rate to experience SI. There
may be more opportunity for that charity,
and a lot more people who need to find
their feet, land into gravity, and look out
with fresh vision, a gift that Rolfing SI has
consistently given.
Kristen completed her certification as a
Rolfer in São Paulo, Brazil in 1987. She
completed the Somatic Experiencing
certification in 2002. Craniosacral studies
have been incorporated in her work since
1992. She has practiced yoga, tai chi,
and various contemporary body-mind
re-patterning techniques since 1975,
including two years of classes with Bonnie
Bainbridge Cohen. She holds a master’s
degree in sculpture/performance from the
School of the Art Institute, Chicago. Her
intuitive aesthetic sensibility, envisioning
and following the unique form each
individual may take, influences her work
and her teaching. She taught extensively
in the arts prior to teaching movement and
trauma work for application in massage/
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Rolfing SI Is Trauma-Informed Work

An Exploration into
Cultural Somatics
Learning from Resmaa Menakem’s E-Course

By Lina Amy Hack, Certified Advanced Rolfer®

ABSTRACT In this article, Lina Amy Hack presents the work of author and
trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem, specifically the five-day e-course offered by his
Cultural Somatics institute. The course is about racialized trauma, historical trauma,
intergenerational trauma, persistent institutional trauma, and personal trauma. Menakem
begins to introduce the ideas involved with ‘Black body’ trauma, ‘White body’ trauma,
‘police body’ trauma, and ‘communal body’ trauma. Hack discusses the implications for
Rolfers and the application to Rolfing® Structural Integration (SI) culture.

If something is hysterical, it is usually how important it is to recognize the culture

historical; that means the presence of
energy, more energy than there should
be, or the missing of energy where
Lina Amy Hack energy should be.
Resmaa Menakem (2021)
As a human and a Rolfer, I know my one
true home is my body. It follows, for the
purpose of this article, to name that I am
Canadian citizen of the world with British
heritage, writing these words from Treaty
6 territory and the traditional homeland of
the Metis1. This body of mine is a White
woman body in her forties. Since studying
Resmaa Menakem’s online e-course about
what he terms Cultural Somatics, I know
that this body of mine has been born into,
especially since I care about being an
excellent practitioner for all people.
Menakem is a trauma specialist; he
is an author, and he is offering online
courses about racialized trauma, i.e.,
the impact it has had for individuals
and communities, and how it can move
through the generations (Menakem 2017).
As Rolfers, we would be wise to meet this
moment by educating ourselves about
Cultural Somatics. Thankfully, Menakem is
speaking our language of embodiment and
has information we need. In the free five-
day e-course (Menakem 2021) offered by

40

Resmaa Menakem, author and trauma specialist. Credit: Resmaa Menakem press kit, https://www.
resmaa.com/about.
his Cultural Somatics Institute, Menakem
and his guest experts discuss cultural
trauma basics: ‘Black body’ trauma, ‘White
body’ trauma, ‘police body’ trauma, and
‘communal body’ trauma2.
When clients come into a Rolfing office with
pain, Rolfers need to hold the possibility
that they may be suffering historical trauma,
intergenerational trauma, persistent
institutional trauma, and/or personal
trauma. People may not have a coherent
narrative to describe their experience; and
so, it is imperative that we, the practitioners,
have the knowledge to truly help their
recovery process. Menakem is inviting
people to engage holistically with the whole
story involved with racialized trauma for
both people with Black bodies and people
with White bodies, people who have the job
of being law enforcement, and all of us who
are bearing witness.
Menakem says that White people need to
build a new culture around being present with
what has happened in the past to racialized
Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021
people and the harm that is continuing
to happen. It takes courage to face the
cultural truth that White bodies have been
made a standard of humanness; it takes a
compassionate heart to listen to the hurt this
has caused and continues to inflict. It takes
active participation of all groups of people to
change this idea so that all of us may, one
day, have generations of people who live in
a diverse and inclusive culture. In the global
human family, Menakem is leading the way
for healers to listen and to help people
suffering from the traumas of land theft,
genocide, colonization, and enslavement.
As Rolfers, we are encouraged to be
trauma-informed practitioners. Day one
of the Cultural Somatics e-course covers
familiar territory with the lens of racialized
trauma. The standard Rolfing SI intake
may include questions about personal
traumas the individual has experienced,
like car accidents, surgeries, conditions
of childhood; yet how would we begin
to assess if a person suffers a historical
www.rolf.org
racialized trauma? Menakem suggests
that person would have images, thoughts,
and dreams that may not be attributable to
their own personal traumas – they may be
attributable to the history of their people.
Historical trauma is hard for the individual
sufferer to explain, the person may not
have words to describe their experience.
Instead, the person may feel defective;
they may feel crazy with these images
and thoughts. “If something is hysterical,
it is usually historical” is a strong idea
presented by Menakem. What he means
is that a person may appear to be
overreactive and have too much energy
for the context they are describing.
Conversely, a person may appear to have
too little energy for the context they find
themselves in – they have dropped away.
These may be signs that a person is not
just suffering personal traumas. Historical
trauma presents as decontextualized
hyperarousal and/or hypoarousal.
Menakem presents his HIPP theory, that
racialized trauma would include historical
trauma, intergenerational trauma,
persistent institutional trauma, as well
as our more familiar personal trauma3.
He describes that an individual may be
suffering from pain in their chest, chronic
happenings in their neck, their back; and
at the same time, they might not remember
any event to explain these occurrences. It
could be that their body is remembering
the historical, intergenerational, and
institutional traumas of their people,
their family group, and their ancestors.
These types of traumas have been
experienced as groups of people, and
he suggests that health professionals
actually need communal approaches to
begin to address recovery. The first thing
Menakem suggests is to help people
develop context; to help people access
their bodies, the truth of their experience,
and the possibility that suffering can be
experienced by the individual when the
trauma was inflected on their group.
Black body trauma is a very complex idea
and Menakem gently begins to present
this construct in a clear way. People
who are born with racialized bodies
have experienced trauma because of
the color of their form and the culture
of their family groups. For White people,
it is uncomfortable to ‘hang’ with that
information. White people’s reaction may
be that we are all the product of history
and our ancestors. However, as Rolfers,
we care about supporting recovery from
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Rolfing SI Is Trauma-Informed Work

trauma; therefore, we need to bring
awareness to the truth that having a Black
body comes with historical trauma that
has not only happened in the past, but
also continues to happen now. In order
to help people with racialized trauma, we
need to build the capacity to remember
our ancestors and make space for our
brothers and sisters with these injuries
to remember and honor theirs. The truth
is people have experienced land theft,
genocide, colonization, and enslavement
as groups. These past actions can show
up in the individual as rage, apathy, and
mental health conditions. Menakem
presents the idea of traumatic retention:
that something that happened long ago
produces teachings and strategies to
enable progeny to survive those events,
lessons passed down through the
generations to survive the oppression.
White body trauma, in the sense that
Menakem means, is not about individual
traumas that have happened to White
bodies; it is about the role that White
bodies have had in racialized traumas.
White bodies constrict at the mention
suggests that this particular trauma has
to be dealt with by White people. To really
change and stop systemic Black body
trauma, White people have to begin to
develop culture around grappling with
and destroying White body supremacy.
In the silence of White body trauma, so
much harm has been done; now silence
needs to be overcome. Betrayal has
occurred, and atrocities continue to occur
for the comfort of all White people. The
truth of this wounding must be brought
to light with compassionate awareness.
This is not about individual White people;
this is about the systems that all people in
society all live within.
Menakem is very clear when he describes
that within the American culture (and
in many places around the world) there
are systems of White supremacy that
White people have all gotten used to.
What he means is that whole systems
(educational systems, health care
systems, governmental systems, to name
a few) are organized around White people
experiencing benefit while racialized
people experience pain and betrayal.
the Rolfing culture and the system we
have of asking people to bare their skin
to the practitioner. How have I been blind
to what that means to a person with a
racialized body?
What happens to White people when
we talk this honestly about race? We
constrict! Menakem describes that we
hold tension in our bodies, it is time that
we observe this with clear eyes. Popular
media often times portrays the White
body as the standard of humanness. This
needs to be acknowledged: something
has occurred in the past, harm continues
to occur in the present, and it all happens
in the name of all White people.
During the course, Rachel Martin speaks
about how White people need to earnestly
examine their role, she suggests that we
can even flip the script and start to identify
individuals with persistent re-traumatizing
colonizer and enslavement master
syndrome. White people need to build
tolerance to the idea that our communities
may not be benefitting everyone. It is time
to come alive around this subject for the

The hard truth that Menakem points to is that, for most

of our histories together, the White body has had full and
unfettered access to the Black body. What he means is
that, White people empowered by their roles of societal
systems (teachers, doctors, police officers) have given
themselves permission to violate the boundaries of
racialized people by having traumatizing contact with their
bodies, contact that White bodies did not have to suffer.

of race, whether the person is an ally
to racialized people or oppressive to
racialized people. As an ally, I feel that
constriction in my body. It is a very strong
and uncomfortable feeling. Menakem
posits that in the White body lives the
story of the White child who witnessed
Black body murders, normalized killings
in town centers. People with White bodies
have inherited silence, dissociation, and
constriction as part of the story of racialized
trauma. Also, Menakem presents how
Black body trauma has been used as
a suppressive force to create systems
that benefit White people. He strongly
White people have not had to develop
stamina as they move through those
systems because the process is designed
to be easy for them. At the same time,
Black, Indigenous, and People of Color
have had to learn strategies and build
stamina to endure those same systems
because they will be damaged and held
back by the system itself. Menakem
presents the idea that White people
see themselves as connected to these
institutions and connected to these
power structures, so they feel like they
have something to lose if those systems
are changed. This makes me think about
benefit of all people. When Rolfers are
assisting others with their trauma, we
need to have compassion for the trauma
people have inherited. It is important to be
authentic with the truth of our collective
culture, all people need to be empowered
to understand why we respond to things
in certain ways and how other people
interpret the world differently. If White
people don’t learn to have understanding
about our place as individuals in the reality
of racialized trauma, we may be missing
so much of the healing process.
Police body trauma is a very real and a
very current part of the story of cultural

42

somatics. Policing can be a positive system
within a community if the person in the
uniform is a citizen from that community
and the role they are asked to perform
is to keep everyone in that community
safe. The history of policing in America
is not that story. Menakem describes
American policing as having the history of
managing Black bodies in the context of
enslavement, land theft, colonization, and
genocide. There used to be slave patrols
comprised of middle-class White men
who needed a job. They were paid to make
sure the slaves were not escaping. They
were not a disciplined organization but
more like a paramilitary. The modern-day
‘patrol car’ is a term that comes from the
slave patrol. Menakem asks us to consider
those people who choose to be on a
police force, that they are being injured as
well while they are doing this job. Police
officers experience secondary trauma
when they are rendering aid to someone.
Police officers experience vicarious
trauma when they see other people being
traumatized. Police officers experience
moral trauma when their job directs them
to inflict injury on somebody and this goes
against their own moral calibration.
On the last day of the cultural somatics
course, Menakem brings it all together
with ideas around communal body trauma.
He starts with what we know helps:
acknowledgement of what has happened.
Historically, a hierarchy was developed by
European cultures, in science, religion, and
economics, organized around the idea of
Whiteness being the top of the hierarchy.
Now, White people have to begin to deal
with and hold that dissonance, so it can
begin to transform. Moving forward, White
people must begin to acknowledge that
something has to be done differently.
Land theft, genocide, colonization, and
enslavement did happen – continues to
happen – and it is all traumatic. Listening
helps. Building the stamina for the
awareness of racialized trauma helps.
The hard truth that Menakem points to is
that, for most of our histories together, the
White body has had full and unfettered
access to the Black body. What he
means is that, White people empowered
by their roles of societal systems
(teachers, doctors, police officers) have
given themselves permission to violate
the boundaries of racialized people by
having traumatizing contact with their
bodies, contact that White bodies did not
have to suffer. White people have seen
themselves as having entitlement to the
Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021
Black body. Now, as Black people show
some dominion over their own body,
Menakem describes that White people
have strong reactions. White people get
hysterical. He presents the example of
a person silently kneeling on a football
field in protest of brutality. The larger
White community loses its mind over it.
Imagine if instead the culture could have
acknowledged that something unjust has
been done, and we support the kneeler
as a human being.
Menakem ends his course with the idea
that all people need to learn how to
talk about race, to connect with a new
concept of race, and to know that the
old construct of race was made by our
ancestors to keep us separate and to
keep some of us comfortable and others
suffering. This has great relevance to our
Rolfing context. I know I have wanted to
be the kind of practitioner who is safe
for people who have suffered racialized
trauma, but not many have come through
my door. This course has helped me
learn so much about why that is. I did
not realize how much a Cree Indigenous
person in my community would have to
overcome in their own being to feel safe
allowing me, a White woman, to touch
them. Would my touch be safe? Would
my words be safe? I may represent to
them what my ancestors have done to
their ancestors, and I have not been
brave enough to ask and to listen to how
that would feel for them. So, I know as a
Rolfer, I have a long way to go. I’m grateful
to Menakem for offering this information,
from the practitioner point of view, inviting
us all to continue to learn together and to
create a different world for ourselves and
our children.
Endnotes
1. In Canada, treaties are agreements
made between the Government of Canada
and Indigenous groups, acknowledging
these agreements is a sign of respect for
the continuing rights of the Indigenous
and Metis people who have lived on this
land long before European colonization.
The author lives in the city of Saskatoon,
Saskatchewan, Canada, which is the
land of the 1876 treaty 6, as well as the
homeland of the Metis people.
2. The terms ‘Black body’, ‘White body’,
‘police body’, and ‘communal body’ are well
defined constructs in the social sciences
relating to culture and history. Race is a
social construct that historical majority
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groups have used as a mechanism to
control minority groups. These terms reflect
the racialized roles and the differences of
rights between the people of these different
groups (Nunnally 2017). Communal body
is the collective, a group of people who
share the same racialized construct,
like people with Black bodies, there is a
shared experience.
3. HIPP theory developed by Menakem is
a holistic idea that one person, or a group
of people, may be experiencing traumatic
symptoms personally because of the
genocide, colonization, enslavement,
and/or land-theft traumas experienced
by their ancestors. The trauma may be
historical, intergenerational, persistent
institutional, and/or personal.
Before becoming an Advanced Rolfer,
Lina Amy Hack was doing water quality
laboratory work with her biochemistry
honors degree (BS) from Simon Fraser
University. Since becoming a Rolfer, she
completed the Somatic Experiencing®
training and an honors psychology degree
(BA from University of Saskatchewan)
where she did child development research
on parental touch patterns. Lina is also
the co-editor-in-chief of this journal.
References
Menakem, R. 2017. My Grandmother’s
Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway
to Mending our Hearts and Bodies. Las
Vegas, NV: Central Recovery Press.
Menakem, R. 2021. Cultural Somatics
Free 5 Session Ecourse. Cultural Somatics
Training Institute. Can be access at https://
culturalsomaticsuniversity.thinkific.com.
Nunnally, S. C. 2017. (Re)defining the Black
body in the era of Black Lives Matter: The
politics of Blackness, old and new. Politics,
Groups, and Identities 6(1): 138-152.
43
Rolfing SI Is Trauma-Informed Work

Trauma Support
in Practice
Links Between Psychology and Rolfing® SI

By Heather L. Corwin, PhD, MFA, Certified Rolfer®

ABSTRACT The author describes the connection between the mind and body in
terms of her perspective as both a clinical psychologist and a Rolfer. Nervous-system
states can reveal the client’s trauma history, even if not disclosed by the client. Corwin
suggests practitioner intention, practitioner self-regulation, and developing professional
community referrals as strategies to support clients to have a strong relationship between
mind and body.

Introduction due to the belief that they are receiving the

The body and mind are inseparable. By
‘mind’, I mean the brain and cognitive
function; when I use the term ‘body’, I refer
Heather L. Corwin, PhD
to the involuntary responses the body has
in reaction to history, experiences, and
present moments. With body and mind,
one can and does often lead the other
in different circumstances. The power of
the mind is seen in the placebo effect:
when a person believes in the outcomes
of a suggested medicine or treatment,
they can experience those outcomes
even if administered a sugar pill or other
innocuous treatment instead of the actual
treatment. In such cases, the results are
correct medicine or treatment. Another
example of the power of the mind is how
the thought that something bad is about
to happen can triggers the fight, flight,
or freeze threat response, which is also
linked to anxiety. We also see the mind
leading the body when we smell an aroma
that brings a memory back with intensity.
The memory can hold trauma or joy, or
anything in between. Other times, the
body will offer signals in different forms
to alert the mind that a problem exists.
For instance, pain in the elbow after a
fall signals a compromise in the body,
like soft-tissue injury or a bone fracture.
The pain is the signal to the mind that

44

something needs to be done to support
the area of injury. Traumatic events impact
both body and mind. Sometimes they
complicate the body and mind relationship,
and the stress of managing these events
can cause bodily discomfort and pain.
As humans, we have a unique capacity
to impact our bodies with our thoughts,
and our bodies can impact states in the
mind. This can be put to positive use in the
service of Rolfing Structural Integration
(SI). We all work with both the body and the
mind. How might we harness this unique
mind and body connection? Through my
training as a clinical psychologist, I learned
to recognize some states that I did not
discriminate before, such as big emotions
or a void of affect that signaled deeper
turmoil. Because of this, I sometimes
refer bodywork clients to mental health
practitioners specifically, but I don’t offer
a diagnosis – that would be outside my
scope of practice because the client came
to me for Rolfing work, not psychological
assessment. What is important is to
recognize when other professionals could
be of service to your client.
In this article, I will explore how I have
integrated my professions of clinical
psychology and Rolfing SI by investigating
practitioner intention, practitioner self-
regulation, and recognizing arousal states
in clients.
The study of trauma began in the
nineteenth century with ‘hysterical’ patients
who suffered emotional distress. This
understanding evolved to include how
people experienced fervent emotions that
would not allow them to integrate traumatic
events, keeping the trauma separate or
disassociated with no adaptive value.
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, writes of the
observations of psychological pioneers
Freud and Janet: “Traumatic memories
persist primarily as implicit, behavioral and
somatic memories, and only secondarily as
vague, overgeneral, fragmented, incomplete
and disorganized narratives . . . To make
meaning of the traumatic experience is
usually not enough” (2004,176).
Current understanding is that trauma
has links in body and mind – the central
As humans, we have a unique capacity to impact our bodies
with our thoughts, and our bodies can impact states in the mind.
This can be put to positive use in the service of Rolfing SI.
Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021
nervous system (CNS) and areas of the
brain. The stress response is an adaptive
and healthy reaction to a stressful event,
characterized by the ability to integrate
events; events that cannot be integrated
constitute trauma. To support our clients,
it is helpful to be aware of these concepts:
we will see both adaptive stress responses
and trauma among our clients, along
with common comorbid diagnoses that
accompany trauma.
As bodyworkers, we touch the body to
facilitate change in both the body and
the mind, yet Rolfers are not trained in
the myriad of ways trauma and bodily/
emotional injury show up in the body.
It was through my clinical psychology
training that I became acutely aware of
the impacts of a variety of mental health
maladies, psychological conditions,
and associated physical challenges that
connect with these diagnoses. I make
these distinctions from my experience,
and note a distinct difference in
understanding before and after earning
my PhD in clinical psychology.
The power we wield as bodyworkers is
deep and rich, living in the nonverbal.
This is a potent realm of healing: erring
on the side of silence and support to give
the client room to process and integrate
has consistently proven an effective
strategy. While we aim to be of service,
sometimes our Rolfing clients will have
CNS states that relate more to their
mental health status and trauma history.
We need to be trained to deal with this
case presentation, and work as a team for
this client with their psychologist, or even
refer the client exclusively for mental-
health support, depending on the severity
of presentation. These considerations
taken all together inform my approach
to our work and the outcomes. Now,
let us look at an application related to a
situation that shows up commonly in my
bodywork practice.
Interfacing with Clients’
Trauma
One common challenge that occurs in
my Rolfing practice is when the client’s
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mind is engaged with trauma, commonly
exacerbated by anxiety. When such a client
is in my care, their body’s alert system or
arousal could be easily engaged, inspiring
panic or fear in conjunction with all the
physiological responses that tell the body
that a threat is present. Sometimes this
means the client will disassociate, other
times the client might sweat, shake, or
get nauseous, to name a few possible
reactions to hands-on work. Trauma
can also manifest in the body through
somaticizing, which can include any
variety of discomfort or pain including
digestive trouble, sleep interruptions or
inability to sleep, headaches, tension, and
more (Walton 2014).
What is important for us to recognize, as
people who work directly with the body,
is that we do not know what the triggers,
physical sensations, or perceptions are
that ignite the client’s nervous-system
arousal. Many times, clients will not know
an area of the body is a trigger until they
are in the middle of the physical reaction.
As support for the client and the Rolfer
are both recommended, the following
sections will address support, specifically:
• Some ways to recognize a client
who might need a slower pace of
work for the SI to be successful,
ideally avoiding a flight, flight, or
freeze response.
• Ways to speak to clients who may
be going through a heightened
physical response.
• When to find a ‘talk therapist’ or two
in your community to refer clients to
during their weeks of working with
you, and what that simultaneous
relationship might look like, (i.e.,
they see the talk therapist before or
after the Rolfing session).
• How working with therapists who
are somatically informed can help
your client base.
Recognizing Trauma/Anxiety
Awareness and intention are usually the
beginning of the process to understand
how we are consciously interacting with
our clients.
45
Rolfing SI Is Trauma-Informed Work
Intentions create an integrated state
of priming, a gearing up of our neural
system to be in the mode of that
specific intention: we can be readying to
receive, to sense, to focus, to behave in
a certain manner . . . This is the intention
to be open, not the receptivity alone but
the intention to be receptive, is itself
something which can be perceived
by the mind. This is the perception of
intention (Siegel 2007, 177).
Many of us have an awareness of our
own nervous system and can self-
regulate. This self-awareness and self-
tracking is the ground for a process
called scaffolding. Scaffolding is when
one person’s nervous system (the client)
relies on another person’s nervous
system (the practitioner) for their baseline
function, which I’ll discuss more below.
The essence is one person attuning to
the other, with the most settled being
the ‘leader’. We learn how to regulate
our CNS through scaffolding as infants
with our primary caregiver: optimally, the
adult caregiver has a settled CNS that the
baby is able scaffold to for regulation. It
is through this process that our ability to
track our emotional responses begins.
Awareness of our nervous-system state
can alert us to trauma or anxiety in another.
I notice how my body responds with a
client and I become linked to the client
through my nervous system. A necessary
preparation for this is a personal body
scan to discover how I’m feeling prior to
beginning a session. Knowing, on any
given day, if you have more to give or
are more fragile is important. With that
information, you can pace yourself and
understand at what level you are able to
support the client.
Besides my private inner check-in prior to
working with each client, I always begin
both Rolfing and therapy sessions with
a short client check-in that allows me to
assess if the person is coming in with a
charged state (angry, anxious, sad, cheerful,
energetic, etc.), to best determine how we
engage. You may already do this as part of
your traditional session format, recognizing
that for most people it feels good to orient in
the place and relationship prior to receiving
hands-on work. Physical signs you can
look for in your clients include how their
eyes interact with the space. For example,
do the eyes dart around, or are they able to
move about in a way that implies they are
focused, present, and taking in the room?
Are they sweating or breathing quickly? Do
they prefer to remain standing or do they
46
sit? All behaviors and physical attributes
give you clues as to what is going on with
the client. Simultaneously, tracking your
inner state to see how your own nervous
system is being impacted will give you
some clear information. You can ask your
client if your observation seems accurate
with their experience. As Rolfers, we do not
diagnose, but we do observe and use the
information we have to facilitate change in
the clients with whom we work.
In the process of scaffolding, which I
am continually practicing whether I am
working in as a mental-health therapist or
practicing Rolfing SI, I am on the lookout
for any nervous-system arousal – not only
in the client but in myself. Specifically,
I remain curious and attuned to any
physical activations of my CNS to clue me
in to the client’s CNS. This is both during
the check-in and when the hands-on
work has begun. Signs of arousal include
increased heart rate, sweating, shaking,
twitching, or absence of presence (also
known as disassociation). These states
offer a suggestion to pause and check
in, to see if my experience matches the
client’s. Either way, the pace needs to
be adjusted when I have a warning in my
nervous system. My body’s message is to
be on alert, to slow down and pause to
make room for the experience to catch up
to the warning, which may be the breath-
rate increase of the client signaling their
CNS arousal. Ideally, this slower pace
will soothe the activated nervous system.
Since CNS arousal can also be a result of
an anxiety or trauma response, slowing
the interactions and input as a practitioner
will always serve the client. Ways to further
support the client beyond taking breaths
and maintaining your own CNS regulation
include inviting the client to remain aware
of what is happening physically in the
present moment; for example, inviting
the client to hear the water fountain in the
room or feel the heat of the table.
Relating to Clients with Trauma/
Anxiety
The people who come to us for Rolfing
SI might not have active or debilitating
trauma, but those who do have trauma
require some extra attention when it
comes to how we work together. All
clients should be primed in the interaction
and empowerment to say no or stop
(Picton 2004). This is the beginning of
understanding boundaries to develop
tolerance the client has for the work,
and the ability to ask for what is needed,
which expands the clients’ ability to self-
advocate. It is important to recognize
when input is too much, and either the
Rolfer or the client may be the one to
identify this need to pause.
There are many reasons that could make
it difficult or impossible for a client to self-
advocate for their own personal boundaries.
As the practitioner, we may notice signals
that something might be too much, like
the client shrinking away from the touch or
tensing up to brace for the sensation. Part
of our role is to help educate our clients
to their own signals. If the sympathetic
nervous system – the area of the brain that
oversees fight, flight, or freeze – is engaged,
the client may not fully comprehend that
they have nervous-system arousal because
they are distracted by the touch sensations.
If a Rolfer applies strokes in succession
with little pause between them, it is harder
for both practitioner and client to notice
activation of the nervous system. As we
want the parasympathetic nervous system
– the part of the brain that takes care of
things when the body is at rest and safe
– to be our constant companion, building
pauses into our manual interventions
will give both client and practitioner
the opportunity to notice whether the
sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous
system is engaged.
Being able to self-regulate as a practitioner
means we can recognize when our own
bodies are feeling safe or when they are
not feeling safe, and we can manage this
stress by decreasing arousal actively when
we notice an engagement of fight, flight,
or freeze. If we are working with a client
who has a history of anxiety or trauma, this
ability will be useful to monitor continually
as you work with your clients. This is where
scaffolding, which I mentioned earlier,
comes in. Practitioner self-regulation is
important because the client’s nervous
system naturally tunes into the arousal
or rest state of the practitioner; the work
being done at the table is within this
scaffold of resonance between the two
people. Through your self-regulation as a
Rolfer, you can help the client feel safe.
The same soothing skills are used with
children when they are upset. Calming
an upset child is not as simple as saying
soothing words. Parts of the brain in the
child and adult attune to each other to let
the child know that they are safe, regardless
of words, which again is scaffolding.
Through these nonverbal cues, infants
learn from their primary caregivers how to
self-regulate.

Practitioner self-regulation is important because the client’s
nervous system naturally tunes into the arousal or rest state of
the practitioner; the work being done at the table is within this
scaffold of resonance between the two people. Through your
self-regulation as a Rolfer, you can help the client feel safe.
This brings attachment theory into our
discussion. A client who was neglected
as a child may have little ability to self-
regulate or to identify when there is danger,
which is its own type of trauma. When
children are not exposed to authentic
communication with early caregivers, they
are not given avenues to explore, express,
and experience their lives. Educator
Mary Gordon notes, “When we share our
feelings, opinions, value, and deeply held
beliefs with one another, we are able to
relate as human beings” (2009, 133). This
is true with both adults and children.
Doing Our Own Work
As Rolfers we do not have to know all the
types of trauma that we may encounter. In
fact, knowing that we will never fully grasp
the vast array of challenges our clients
may present with gives us the patience
needed to work with the client when we
feel agitated. We do not always need
the answers, but having the tolerance
for how wounds show up in our clients
is foundational to their healing. I am
often reminded of an interaction with my
daughter, that occurred when she was
three years old and having a reaction to
something that did not go as she wanted
it to, probably playing with a toy. I was
enjoying tea and conversation with a friend,
whom I had not seen in a while because
life with an infant was all-consuming,
when I saw that my daughter was getting
upset. When I recognized that, I asked
my friend to give me a minute. I crouched
down and named for my daughter that
she was having more than one emotion,
and that this was very human. We briefly
talked about her feelings, named them,
and then she was on her way to the next
toy. I probably would have forgotten about
this, except that when I sat back down to
visit with my friend again, she was agog.
She told me that she wished that she
had had someone in her life to help her
articulate her feelings when she was a kid.
I thought it was nothing, yet she thought
the interaction was amazing.
Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021
This reminded me that we all have different
skills and abilities we are not aware of
because of how we have been taught
to interact in the world. Not everyone is
fortunate enough to have self-regulation as
a part of their being. What is important here
is that we all can learn to become more
accurate in our engagement with others
to refine attunement and build attunement
skills. This can happen through working with
Rolfers as well as working with counselors
or therapists. The skills are both verbal and
nonverbal. If we are able to investigate our
own lives to foster healthy ways of being,
we consciously and unconsciously bring
those into our work. In other words, the
effectiveness of our work with our clients
can be partly a measure of the personal
work we have done ourselves.
Some family cultures and areas of
society still have stigmas around seeking
psychological support (Walton 2014).
However, change can happen if a person
can understand cultural restrictions,
the ways of thinking and being that are
holding them in unhealthy patterns.
This journey usually requires a guide to
illuminate the patterns. This is where a
licensed professional like a psychologist or
counselor is helpful to our clients dealing
with unresolved trauma, in conjunction with
our bodywork. Seeking mental clarity and
support is not only for those people who
have diagnosable problems. We all have
biases and ways of thinking that hamper
us. We all have values that are helpful and
others that are limiting. We all have family
dynamics that have inspired wounds, even
in the best of families. Finding ways to think
about how we engage in life, the stories we
tell ourselves, and how to move forward is
better when we have support.
Since Rolfers are that support for many, it
follows that we may want to be conscious
of the beliefs we have that we bring into the
room. If we are unaware of those thought
structures, we can do serious harm by
playing out those relationship dynamics
on the innocent bystanders who have
come to us for help. An outside counseling
relationship can be a valuable way for
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bodyworkers to work out any issues
experienced as a practitioner with clients.
For example, therapy might be useful to
you if you have a client who triggers a
feeling of dislike or anger that you do not
understand, or a client communication
that leaves you distressed. In the absence
of supervision (a process counselors and
therapists regularly engage in), Rolfers
may think they are left with working these
things out on their own. As the matters
often involve our own psychological
makeup, it can be valuable to have a
psychological counselor to explore and
clarify these issues.
How Our Clients May Benefit
from Talk Therapy
While I have so far addressed the
therapeutic relationship and how Rolfers
can be a support to client’s body-mind, it’s
important to reaffirm that clients may also
have a relationship within their physical
experience that requires psychological
examination and other professional
support beyond our scope of practice.
Trauma can certainly be helped by both
physical and emotional support. Pairing
Rolfing sessions with a counselor or
therapist can give the client two avenues
for processing and transformation, both
mind and body, each addressed by an
expert. Grief is another situation that
I have seen successfully addressed
through tandem work of body and mind.
The bottom line here is knowing that we
are complex creatures with a variety of
avenues to pursue wellness. We may
never achieve an absence of pain, but
the support we receive will have a direct
impact on quality of life.
Understanding how a belief came to
be can help us choose how that belief
informs life, rather than continuing to
let the belief operate under the radar,
below conscious thought, where we do
not have choices. As an example, I’ll
give a case study of ‘Clara’ – who is an
amalgam of many clients I have worked
47
Rolfing SI Is Trauma-Informed Work
with who share these issues. Clara came
to me for bodywork suffering anterior
pelvic pain after the birth of her second
child. There was scar tissue present in
the pelvic area with painful sensations.
I felt there was more to this pain than
the physical – hints of this included that
she had already sought help through a
variety of different physical therapies with
no improvement. Though I am trained in
clinical psychology, she did not come to
me for this, and it was therefore outside
of our implied agreement for working
together. I suggested that if anything
came up during our work, she could voice
it if she chose to. Sometimes revelations
that come forward in this manner will
clearly guide a referral to other types of
therapy. In Clara’s case, I knew already
that she was working with a talk therapist
as that is a question in my intake process.
While working on Clara’s pelvis, she had
a revelation of what happened during
the birth and could finally put words to
the sensations she associated with the
birth of her child, which was also when
she started having persistent pelvic pain.
The articulated revelation gave meaning
to the pain: she identified knowing in that
moment of birth that her life situation was
untenable. It was this truth about her life
that was not allowing her body to feel
relief. Just acknowledging the thought
gave her body softness, which allowed
the work we were doing to release the held
tissues around her pelvis. Because she
was already dealing with grief and other
areas of challenge in her marriage, she
had the resources to be able to process
her understanding. Grief, sadness, and
anger were a few of the emotions that
came up in this session.
This type of revelation is actually
something I have seen again and again:
a person knows life must change (which
does not always mean a need to radically
change their life). With such moments, I
recommend that a client attend to a deeper
investigation of the event we uncover, but
I am never forcefully directive. People
are ready in their own time. We exist and
are defined by past events, relationships,
An outside counseling relationship can
be a valuable way for bodyworkers to
work out any issues experienced as a
practitioner with clients.
48
and how our body holds the reactions
to these experiences – informed by our
environment and perception of safety. It is
thus useful to suggest to our clients that
having a team of professionals may give
them a better understanding of events in
their lives and support for healthy choices
of how to move forward.
Appropriate Referral
When I was in training to become a
Rolfer, many of the instructors used
psychological terminology and theories to
help the students understand the work we
were undertaking. What struck me then,
as it still does, is how some students may
have taken that very cursory education
as an invitation to play with a person’s
psychology in the hopes of helping them.
Many of us are nurturers, which is why we
enjoy this work supporting the evolution
of others, but Rolfers are not experts in
mental health. Sometimes we do not
recognize a problem until we have already
created it, such as the client becoming
flooded or overwhelmed during a session.
The best intentions are there, but with
clients who may have severe diagnoses,
this could be dangerous for both the
Rolfer and the recipient. It is important to
be clear: psychological therapy is not in a
Rolfer’s scope of practice.
Many of us are intrigued and learn a lot
about psychology out of natural curiosity.
My own curiosity let me to my clinical
psychology studies, as it has led some
of you to similar learning or training.
My specialty in clinical psychology is
somatic psychology, which is named
in my conferred PhD. This means that
I was taught about how to engage with
my psychotherapy clients in ways in
which the body leads the discussion or
the experience. In my training through
psychology, words are not necessary
but are helpful. How this translates to
work with talk therapy clients is we
allow physical stimulus – which is not
always direct touch – to lead. Playing
catch or rolling a ball to explore what a
balanced interaction feels like is one
example of what might happen. Using a
weighted blanket to help the client feel
their edges of being when overwhelmed
(aka ‘flooded’) with emotion is another
example. Naming sensations when the
client’s face gets flushed can also help a
client begin to link sensations to emotions
(as one possible example as to why this
flush might happen).
You’ll note that even though I have dual
training, I do not attempt to do both
bodywork and psychological work with
the same client. That too would be
outside the scope of practice for each of
my professions. Thus, whether you have
psychological training or not, it is advisable
to have relationships with mental-health
providers to whom you can refer clients.
This is not a requirement of you as a Rolfer,
so if you are not comfortable recommending
others or other therapies, do not do it. That
is your prerogative. What I am suggesting
is that you may be in the unique position to
recognize there is a layering of challenges
that go beyond the structural that could be
helped by additional supports, including
psychological. Because your client trusts
you, your suggestion may help them get
needed assistance. In my almost thirty
years of practicing as a Rolfer, it is rare
for a client who trusts me to dismiss my
recommendation of another avenue of
support. I am lucky to have relationships
within my community to be able to
recommend specific people who have
proven and refined skills in their fields.
If you do not have people to refer to
directly, you can suggest the client talk to
someone, and ask their friends, to let them
discover the expert individual who feels
good to them.
A vibrant element of my practice includes
a constant investigation of my community
and a short list of practitioners. The types
of the support I have found crucial in my life
includes medical doctors, psychologists,
physical therapists, acupuncturists,
health clubs, massage therapists, and
chiropractors. All health practitioners need a
circle of support both for their own wellness
but also as a resource to refer clients to
when they need a team of support as well.
I mostly have found practitioners by asking
clients and friends about their successful
experiences and beginning my connections
to others through recommendations. The
people who prefer my work often have
other professional connections in the
community that are of great interest to me.

You may be in the unique position to recognize there is a layering
of challenges that go beyond the structural that could be helped by
additional supports, including psychological. Because your client
trusts you, your suggestion may help them get needed assistance.
Then, I will try to find a way to have coffee
with other practitioners to learn more about
them and their practices, and I usually find
a reciprocal interest in my practice. Thus,
referrals are born from relationships.
If I do not have personal connections with
experts, I go to review sites to discover
who has the best reviews and what
people say about them. The reviews help
direct me to people in my community
who I would like to know better and
meet. Part of why I feel I have always
enjoyed a thriving practice wherever I go
is due to this practice of building a referral
network. The other part of my success, I
believe, is I find working with people and
helping them find relief to be thoroughly
satisfying. When that shifts in me, I will
then shift my career.
Conclusion
The body and the mind are in a constant
dance. As Rolfers, we partner with the
body as the leader. By investigating
practitioner intention, honing practitioner
self-regulation, and recognizing arousal
states in clients, we become better
support for our clients and better
working professionals. Knowing our
limits as practitioners helps us discover
resources in our communities to share
with those who might benefit from those
other modalities. Fixing is not what we
do, though getting people out of pain is
rewarding. As Rolfers, we might shed
light onto the connections and lack of
them in our clients, so that changes can
be made to enhance or create alignment,
ease, function, and adaptability through
our intention to do so. These are core
values of Rolfing SI. Our work gives us the
opportunity to identify areas of support
from which our clients might benefit; thus,
we can refer our clients to mental health
experts when appropriate. Humans are
social animals and need communities of
support and care to function best. I am
one ship in a fleet of health and wellness
professionals for my clients in managing
their lives. Knowing that also helps me let
go when I am not helping them anymore.
Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021 www.rolf.org
Heather L. Corwin holds a PhD in clinical
psychology with a somatic concentration
from The Chicago School of Professional
Psychology and an MFA in acting
from Florida State University/Asolo
Conservatory. Currently, Heather practices
as a clinical fellow at Lake Behavioral Health
Associates in River Forest, Illinois and also
runs her Rolfing studio located in Oak Park,
Illinois. As an actor for over twenty years
and theatre arts professor at places like
Roosevelt University, Ashland University,
and Pasadena City College, Heather’s
research and work examines behavior
through the lens of psychology, allowing the
flaws of being human to unite us through
creative expression. Heather is a Certified
Rolfer, a belly laugher, a talk therapist,
married to the love of her life, mom to an
energetic ten-year-old, and fan of historical
romance. To read more publications and
learn more about her, visit BodybyHeather.
com or CorwinCounseling.com.
References
Gordon, M. 2009. Roots of empathy:
Changing the world child by child. New
York: The Experiment Publishing.
Picton, B. 2004. Using the biodynamic
shock trauma model in the everyday
practice of physiotherapy. In Body, Breath
& Consciousness: A Somatics Anthology,
Ed. Ian Mcnaughton , 287-305. Berkley:
North Atlantic Books.
Siegel, D.J. 2007. The Mindful Brain:
Reflection and Attunement in the
Cultivation of Well-being. New York:
Norton & Company.
van der Kolk, B.A.2003. Posttraumatic
Stress Disorder and the Nature of Trauma
in Healing Trauma, eds M.F. Solomon
and D.J. Siegel168-403. New York: W.W.
Norton & Company.
Walton, A.G. 2014. “11 Intriguing
Reasons to Give Talk Therapy a Try.”
Available from https://www.forbes.
com/sites/alicegwalton/2014/06/03/11-
intriguing-reasons-to-give-talk-therapy-
a-try/?sh=5e0c79fb4ebb (retrieved
December 30, 2020).
49
Rolfing SI Is Trauma-Informed Work

Polyvagal Institute
An Interview with Randall Redfield,
Executive Director
By Lina Amy Hack, Certified Advanced Rolfer®, and Randall Redfield

ABSTRACT In this interview, Randall Redfield, the Executive Director of Polyvagal

Institute, discusses what the organization is teaching, how the group formed, and the
Lina Amy Hack application of polyvagal theory in the Rolfing® Structural Integration context.

Lina Amy Hack: Hello Randall, so nice
to meet you, let’s dive in. Tell me about
Polyvagal Institute. What is it?
Randall Redfield: Polyvagal Institute
(PVI; https://www.polyvagalinstitute.org)
is an organization we created to develop
community and education around
polyvagal theory. Polyvagal principles
had become really well known within the
psychotherapy world, particularly around
trauma, over the last ten years. I had met
Steven Porges when I was the CEO of
a company called Integrated Listening
Randall Redfield Systems (ILS), which is a music and
movement therapy. When he and I met
back in 2016, we ended up partnering to
release his auditory intervention, the Safe
and Sound Protocol (SSP). As we got to
know each other, and as I learned more
about polyvagal theory, I was fascinated
at its application and the way in which we
could use it at ILS, to help us have a better
understanding of the results that we were
seeing day to day with children having
learning and developmental difficulties.
The way in which Dr. Porges has mapped
out the nervous system, the way in which
our behavior and emotions are interrelated,
it became a wonderful piece of knowledge
for us to have to understand how our

50

Rolfers, like other body-based therapists, would find Polyvagal
Institute courses provide additional information that will enrich
their working in terms of their overall knowledge of the mind-
body connection, as well as their ability to work with clients.
therapy was regulating kids and adults.
Beyond that, as a father, I found polyvagal
theory really helpful for me to understand
my relationship with my boys, the way
that we could trigger each other without
knowing it, the way we all have our kind of
fallback survival modes. It helped me a lot
in terms of navigating and managing the
relationships within my family.
So polyvagal theory for me started out on
the therapeutic side of things but also on
the very practical level of understanding
how our therapy at ILS was helping
people become more regulated, and
then it moved into a really personal area.
Nothing really makes you want to act on
something as much as when it touches
your personal life. After my partners and
I sold ILS in 2019, I started speaking
with Steven Porges and Deb Dana about
possibly creating an institute that would
take polyvagal theory to other audiences
outside of the trauma world. It seemed
pretty obvious how it could help educators
– specifically teachers, administrators,
and schools – as well as parents and
people in organization management. So
many different disciplines could benefit
from polyvagal knowledge. We founded
the institute with that as our goal, to
create courses where you have polyvagal
theory applied to different disciplines.
Then, to create community around those
different areas.
LAH: I really relate to that. I have been
teaching polyvagal theory here in Canada
and, of course, people haven’t really
heard of it. But once I tell my health-care
colleagues just a little bit about it, they
sign up for the workshop, because they
want to know this evidence-based theory
that applies to our personal lives and our
work lives. I wonder, did you originally
want to make the institute a brick-and-
mortar location? I imagine it’s an online
offering with COVID-19 conditions.
RR: That’s an interesting question. Last
year I met with Steven and Deb in New
York, and the next day the pandemic was
announced on the news. So, the whole
question of what a brick-and-mortar
location for PVI would look like never even
Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021
had a chance to come up. We started out
virtually. And of course, over the last year,
companies around the whole world have
realized that brick and mortar is not quite
as necessary as we thought it was. Who
knows what it’s going to be like going
forward. I really believe in the value of
face-to-face meetings. We have a small
team now, and we need to be meeting
on a regular basis, but I don’t know if that
means necessarily renting an office space;
there are other ways to do it these days.
LAH: Rolfers are all over the world, and
we are connected by our passion for our
profession. How would Rolfers benefit from
taking the Polyvagal Institute courses?
RR: I think Rolfers, like other body-based
therapists, would find Polyvagal Institute
courses provide additional information
that will enrich their working in terms of
their overall knowledge of the mind-body
connection, as well as their ability to work
with clients. They would find a way of
expanding their knowledge of what they
are doing on a day-to-day basis, and they
might get some personal learnings from it,
in terms of how they can make themselves
more accessible to their clients and the
importance of doing that. Since Rolfing®
Structural Integration is a hands-on
therapy, Rolfers are in the polyvagal
world without necessarily knowing the
details. They can benefit from it in both
professional and personal ways.
Dr. Porges’ work has given us concepts
and specific language to articulate a
lot of insights that Rolfers may know at
an intuitive level, but may not have the
language to express very clearly. This is
what I hear back from therapists that have
worked with us, there is a real value to be
found in understanding polyvagal theory,
where they have these aha moments,
where they run across nuggets of phrasing,
where they realized things they knew that
at an intuitive level but didn’t really know
how to articulate it. I think that is what
people are getting from our courses, both
the knowledge and an increased ability
to articulate concepts. This supports
practitioners to understand their own work
better, and perhaps even come away with
www.rolf.org
some added self-knowledge to apply to
things they may be working on internally.
LAH: I wonder if the curriculum of the
courses is going to get into the detail of
the neurobiological model?
RR: Oh yes, very much so. We’re starting
out with a few courses around polyvagal
theory taught at different levels. We
have a two-hour course with both Deb
Dana and Steve Porges together, it’s
an overview of polyvagal theory. Then
there’s the four-hour class that Deb Dana
teaches called ‘Principles and Practice’,
which is wonderful because of the clinical
application of polyvagal theory. Then we
have one that’s about six and a half hours,
the ‘Art and Science of Polyvagal Theory’,
which is taught by both Steve and Deb
and combines lectures with case-study
analysis. So, we have these different levels
of courses that delve into different depths of
both the science side as well as the clinical
application. And on top of that course work,
Polyvagal Institute has a lot of different videos
and multimedia that relay what polyvagal
theory is about, to both professionals and
laypeople. The Rolfing community might
find those interesting as well.
LAH: One of the clinical applications of
polyvagal theory that I find interesting
is how important the face is to support
positive relationships. I wonder what you
think about the context of polyvagal theory
and the important reality of wearing face
masks to protect us from COVID-19.
RR: It’s a really interesting question. I think
we’ve all had a number of discoveries,
however small or large through the course
of the past year, through the physicality
of looking at people wearing face masks.
I personally had always thought that the
eyes were supposed to be the place where
people conveyed so much of their thinking.
What I’ve realized from face masks is that
the mouth is pretty important too. Just
looking at people’s eyes, without seeing the
mouth as well, it’s really hard to tell what
their reaction is to your interaction, right?
LAH: Totally, I think about polyvagal
theory a lot when I’m in the public context
where we are all wearing masks.
51
Rolfing SI Is Trauma-Informed Work
RR: I think that the way in which our
isolation happened has been a pretty
powerful reminder for everyone to realize
how much we need the interconnection.
Dr. Porges has this wonderful phrase,
biological imperative. It’s our biological
imperative as humans, or as mammals, to
be connected with others. When you think
about it, it’s in our DNA, we have to do it,
that sociability is there. And when it doesn’t
get fulfilled, it’s like going without food. So,
the isolation has been a kind of frightening
thing. People were being impacted in a
really, really serious way. Particularly older
people, in my experience, people in their
seventies, eighties, grandparents that can’t
connect with their grandkids. Isolation is
pretty serious – that’s why it’s illegal even
in most penal systems. So, yes, I think you
could say, on the clinical and social level,
the experience of COVID-19 very much
underscores many of the messages of
polyvagal theory. It also speaks to how we
all need more community, or new ways of
having community.
The community aspect of Polyvagal
Institute has just gotten started. It’s
interesting you bring up that Rolfers are
this tight-knit group that’s completely
global. That’s similar with polyvagal theory.
As an institute, we are trying to figure out
the best way to tell those not familiar with
it, to share the information, to make it
accessible and easy to understand. Our
thinking for developing community right
now is to do it around our courses. The
idea is to have different groups meeting
around polyvagal theory and polyvagal
principles in relation to people’s specific
discipline or area of interest.
LAH: Interesting. And I think you’re
right, that Rolfers have been intuitively
doing polyvagal-informed work without
necessarily having the language to
describe it. How would you describe what
polyvagal-informed work means?
RR: I think it starts with the self, in
particular for a hands-on role like a Rolfer.
The practitioner is transmitting, right?
You want to have yourself in the right
place to work well with clients. One of
the core concepts of polyvagal theory
is coregulation. In a sense our nervous
systems are always talking with each
Dr. Porges has this wonderful phrase, biological imperative.
It’s our biological imperative as humans, or as mammals, to be
connected with others.
52
other, whether we’re conscious of it or not.
And as a Rolfer, you’re in communication
with your client. And the more you can
have yourself grounded in a place where
you are open and relaxed, and accessible,
the more you’re going to take your client
to that place.
LAH: That’s nicely said.
RR: Anyone that gets into Rolfing work in
the first place probably wants to do that.
Particularly as you practice the craft and
science of Rolfing SI, you’re going to be
developing that sense within yourself,
you’re going to be highly conscious of
all those pieces. But it doesn’t mean you
can talk about it very easily. Polyvagal
theory is wonderful in that it provides us
with the language to articulate thoughts
like that. And in some cases, it might
be appropriate to talk about it with your
clients, so that your clients can take
those same concepts into their lives, to
their self, families, and friends, and use
those ideas as a lens to view the world
through. This is really getting to the heart
of what’s so cool about polyvagal theory:
it’s not an intervention, it’s not a modality
or something that you practice on a daily
basis. It’s more like a lens through which
you’re looking.
LAH: That is valuable. As Rolfers, we very
much care about having deep anatomy
knowledge. We think about the physicality
of the vagus nerve and where it goes in
the body. One of the takeaways that I
hope people will get from our talk is that
the function of the vagus nerve is also in
the relationship between two people as
well as in the touch, it’s both.
RR: Yes, good. A great question for
Rolfers would be, “How does polyvagal
theory inform your work?” I would love
to see what they say. I can give you my
opinion, but it would be more valuable to
hear a Rolfer’s opinion.
LAH: Good point. And I definitely relate
to what you’re saying about the personal
application. Self-regulation to simply be in
the world is a skill I’ve had to learn – that
I’m still learning – and making conscious
choices that help my nervous system
settle. I’d say polyvagal theory has helped
me make conscious decisions that help
people I’m in relationship with, how to
help them be more settled. It’s just such
valuable information.
RR: Well, it is, it’s huge information,
particularly if you’re working with
populations that are often dysregulated.
We know that teenagers and children
need help regulating their nervous
systems. We co-develop a little animated
video that you can find on our website;
it’s nine minutes, and it explains trauma in
the nervous system through a polyvagal
lens. [Editor’s note: see https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=uH5JQDAqA8E].
I’m really happy with it, and the feedback
we’re getting is tremendous. Therapists
are using it to explain polyvagal theory
to their clients. Rolfers can use this
resource too, to help people who want
to learn more. It’s a simplified version of
polyvagal theory in the context of trauma.
It explains what neuroception is, what
state hierarchy is in the nervous system,
and describes coregulation.
Also, we have another video (on the home
page, https://www.polyvagalinstitute.org)
that is a collection of interviews with seven
people of different professions, where I got
them to tell me why polyvagal theory is
important to them in two-minute vignettes.
And then we added a really nice piece
with Dr. Porges, explaining in four minutes
the basics of polyvagal theory. These
videos together will give you a good
sense of what polyvagal theory is, why
it’s important, and why you would want to
learn more about it.
LAH: One of the gifts I received learning
polyvagal theory was healing around the
experience of shame for physiological
responses that are not under our control.
Our culture can communicate shame to
people who experience immobilization
with fear states, and Dr. Porges has
shown us that it’s biological. That freeze
is an important survival strategy: it’s not
a failed survival strategy, it’s a successful
one and so important.
RR: Totally important. There are a number
of details like this that hit people as
emotionally powerful. Listening to Dr.
Porges speak, I watched the audience, and
it was really amazing to me how emotionally
 Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021 www.rolf.org

Listening to Dr. Porges speak, I watched the audience, and it

was really amazing to me how emotionally moved they were
despite the intellectual nature of information. Something about
it hits home on an emotional level. You could say it’s top-down
information about bottom-up processes.
moved they were despite the intellectual completed the Somatic Experiencing®
nature of information. Something about training and an honors psychology degree
it hits home on an emotional level. You (BA from University of Saskatchewan),
could say it’s top-down information about where she did child development research
bottom-up processes. on parental touch patterns. Lina is also
LAH: It’s true. We don’t expect science the co-editor-in-chief of this journal.
to do that to us. Despite all my studies
of polyvagal theory, the research papers
and the books, it was only in preparing
for my interview with Dr. Porges that I
learned he was director of research for
the Rolf Institute® (now known as Dr. Ida
Rolf Institute®) in 1990 (see page 18 for the
interview with Dr. Porges). I really want my
fellow Rolfers to know that Rolfing SI and
Polyvagal Institute are connected in this
way, and that you guys are growing and
thriving, making offerings to all of us.
RR: Thank you so much for doing this and
for doing the interview with Dr. Porges.
Hopefully, we can provide courses and
community that are accessible and
interesting. Maybe this interview will lead
to Rolfers starting a group discussion on
the Polyvagal Institute website.
LAH: That would be awesome. Thanks so
much for the chat today.
RR: You are welcome, take care.
Randall Redfield is the Executive Director
of Polyvagal Institute (PVI). He spent
the first half of his professional career
in international communications and
documentary production. His interest in
the therapeutic effect of movement led
to him co-founding Integrated Listening
Systems (ILS), the first program for
improving brain function through the
systematic integration of music and
movement. Randall also developed and
patented a sleep product utilizing bone-
conducted music, the Dreampad, which
won awards in the sleep industry. After
selling ILS, Randall co-founded PVI with
Stephen Porges and Deb Dana.
Before becoming an Advanced Rolfer,
Lina Amy Hack was doing water-quality
laboratory work with her biochemistry
honors degree (BS) from Simon Fraser
University. Since becoming a Rolfer, she

53
Rolfing SI Is Trauma-Informed Work

Notes on William
Redpath’s Trauma
Work and New Book
Trauma for Beginners:
Meditations and
Commentaries
By R. Kerrick Murray, Certified Advanced Rolfer®

ABSTRACT Rolfer William Redpath introduced his Trauma Energetics Held-

Energy SystemsSM work in a 1995 book. He followed up on this in a second book in
2020. R. Kerrick Murray here discusses the work and particularly the contributions of
the new book.

Twenty-six years ago, William M. Redpath,
MEd, MFA, Certified Advanced Rolfer
first published his seminal work, Trauma
Energetics: A Study of Held-Energy Systems
(1995). Redpath developed a method of
working with trauma that he calls Trauma
Kerrick Murray Energetics Held-Energy SystemsSM, and
that first book, now in its sixth printing,
contains his essential formulations
about the nature of trauma, ‘held-energy
systems’, and classical humanistic
literature, addressing contemporary arts,
media, societies, politics, religions, and
spirituality. I had the privilege of reviewing
that book for the Rolf Lines in 1996
(Murray). Now, with Trauma for Beginners:
Meditations and Commentaries (Redpath
2020), Redpath has fulfilled the promise
he made in his first book to provide an
educational aid to assist readers further
in understanding his insights.
What are these insights? In his original
work, Redpath postulated that the
experience of trauma and the resultant
holding in the body is a curiously literal,
energetic, and neurochemical event. He
termed this event a ‘held-energy system’.
Shock is at the center of traumatic memory,
and he theorizes that this shock manifests
as a two-dimensional area of blackness

54
 Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021 www.rolf.org

Redpath postulated that the experience of trauma and the

resultant holding in the body is a curiously literal, energetic,
and neurochemical event. He termed this event a ‘held-
energy system’.
deep within our neurochemistry, creating views on the nature of enlightenment, breathing, during the prenatal experience.
a place devoid of movement and oxygen. liberty, history, being, and breath. He Postnatally, shock and trauma manifest
This is not merely the black of achromatic explores how our personal and societal in many forms – physical, verbal, and
color value, but rather the black of physics; histories are formed, and how trauma is societal; it can result in changes of
the theoretical perfect absorber of all evoked and maintained. He discusses breath and movement throughout the
incident radiation (e.g., light, vibration, the history of alchemy, its ancient body, causing restrictions we structural
movement, etc.). If you’ve ever watched connections to trauma resolution, and integrators are trained to notice. He
Peter Jackson’s film The Hobbit: The its quest for metaphysical gold. Building poses the question: what if the oxygen
Desolation of Smaug, think of Gandalf’s on his original theory of shock being at we absorb is ‘zip coded’ for delivery to
duel with the disembodied Sauron at the center of traumatic memory, Redpath specific tissues? If so, then our alveolar
Dol Guldur; Sauron manifests as a life- shares and guides his reader through his sentinels, once compromised from
suffocating, enveloping swirl of blackness. heartfelt insights about what a trauma shock, knock us off our centers and, in
Or, better still, sit down with a new copy resolution looks like: nothing less than the turn, compromise our sites of physiology
of Trauma Energetics. The updated cover dissolution of shock into being and being and structure. Restricted breath links to
(see Figure 1) has an exceptional piece of into radiance. The excellent artwork on the specific trauma sites. He questions as to
artwork by Redpath that illustrates what new book’s cover visualizes this radiance whether the residue of such a shocked
he’s describing. In soft light, stare into existing within a crucifix of trauma, and system keeps us from experiencing an
the cover. The tunneling effect that this serves as a counterpoint to the Trauma ultimate, nonverbal experience of Eden,
exercise produces gives one a glimpse of Energetics cover art (see Figure 1). or original nature.
what we experience when triggered by a It is at the level of breath, Redpath writes, Structural integrators are in the business
moment of overwhelming shock or trauma. that the incarnation of spirit can be of evoking structural integrity. What does
Redpath first worked with Peter Levine observed, the densification into matter integrity look like? And when it’s achieved,
(among others), and he credits these witnessed, and places of toxicity and what comes next? These are refreshing
experiences as inspirational in developing trauma shock addressed. He states that questions, and Redpath makes a
his current protocols. He uses the term breath is our primary organ of perception convincing case that real integrity involves
and that shock is not limited to a postnatal a sense of being that evokes and nurtures
‘brain’ (not mind) to describe the process
event. Shock can register prior to active an inner silence. Developing a capacity for
of ‘central intelligence’, of spirit to energy,
energy to molecules, molecules into
neurochemistry, into tissue, muscle, organ,
and body. A Trauma Energetics session
focuses on the self-healing powers of
the brain, specifically those parts of its
traumatically held and deoxygenated
neurochemistry, in an indirect, non-
intentional manner. A session involves a
client and practitioner working together
in a conjoint, meditational ambience, with
minimal intrusion upon the natural ability of
the brain to resolve a trauma and thereby
obtain a renewed perception of its essence
as ‘clear’ energy.
To avoid any possible misunderstanding,
Trauma for Beginners is not an instructional
manual on how to hurt yourself or
others! Redpath’s book reveals itself as
a comprehensive treatise on the nature
and historical origins of trauma, and how
trauma is evoked and maintained in our
personal and societal systems. In his initial
chapters, he casts a wide net. Drawing
from a lifetime of academic, therapeutic,
and somatic experience, he shares his Figure 1: Redpath’s trauma books.

55
Rolfing SI Is Trauma-Informed Work
Redpath postulated that the
experience of trauma and the
resultant holding in the body is
a curiously literal, energetic, and
neurochemical event. He termed this
event a ‘held-energy system’.
inner silence is a critical skill in structural
integration as we hone our ability to ‘see’
our clients and be more present as we work
with them. Redpath states that our world
would benefit by changing the definition
of the adjective conscient to include this
inner silence and nonverbal alertness. As
with his first book, he provides a transcript
of a Trauma Energetics session with
commentary. He then offers his views
on energetics and Gestalt theory applied
to a wide range of tragic literature and
poetry, providing schematics with the
latter. I found his commentary insightful
on describing civilization as a collective
of garnered trauma forms and proposing
the American ideal as one of creating a
shockless world (or at least one where
shock’s power is integrated into invisibility).
He uses Gestalt awareness to remind us
of the most important aspect of myth and
literature: transformation.
In his middle chapters, he examines the
relationship of theological concepts with
energy. He provides more examples of
tragic themes in world literature, poetry,
and their relationships to the Gestalt. He
strongly advocates adopting a personal
Gestalt strategy that remains spiritual
in direction but not religious, one that
takes us away from narratives to an
energetic understanding of relationships.
He explores the energetic nexus that we
share with our parents and ancestors, and
how we take on the graces and trauma
patterns of our parents. In recognizing
It is at the level of breath, Redpath
writes, that the incarnation of spirit
can be observed, the densification
into matter witnessed, and places of
toxicity and trauma shock addressed.
56
Zoom sessions and can be reached at
redpathw@tiac.net.
R. Kerrick Murray has had an active
Rolfing® Structural Integration (SI) practice
in Montana since 1985. He has written
articles and given presentations on the
connections of general-semantics and SI
for both the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute® and the
Institute of General Semantics.  
References
the inability of parents to shed their own Redpath, W. M. 2020. Trauma for
parents’ patterns as being at the heart of beginners: meditations and commentaries.
inherited trauma process, he identifies Lexington, MA: Barberry Press.
a critical challenge to personal growth: Redpath, W. M. 1995. Trauma energetics,
eventually we face generational trauma a study of held-energy systems.
and self-perpetuating cycles of trauma Lexington, MA: Barberry Press.
held systems. His closing chapters draw Murray, R. K. 1996. Trauma energetics: A
from his professional life, and include a study of held-energy systems by William
lengthy letter to a teenager on sexuality, a M. Redpath: Review Essay. Rolf Lines
commencement speech given to a school 14(2):50-51.
for troubled youth, and a letter to an
academic friend about how the energetic
is acknowledged and addressed in
traditional humanities studies.
Both of Redpath’s books are intended
to be conversational in nature, and the
reader is invited to browse and cherry-
pick. The simple premise of his trauma
work, while easy to grasp, is presented
through an academic lens, and the result
can prove to be chewy, dense reading; I
found it necessary to keep a dictionary
and reference material close at hand.
I believe his insights make it worth the
effort, and I would recommend Trauma for
Beginners as an addition to our libraries,
not just as a solid work on understanding
the general nature and scope of trauma,
but a work that inspires a quest for an
inner experience that dissolves trauma
into a true healing.
You can read more about Trauma
Energetics Held-Energy Systems at
http://www.traumaenergetics.com. For
those interested to experience Redpath’s
work, he is available for Skype and
 Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021 www.rolf.org

Introducing
Liberation Somatics
SI Practitioners Organizing to Examine Racial Biases

By Organizers of Liberation Somatics

In the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, as well as the
subsequent amplification of the Black Lives Matter movement, our colleague Ryan
Hofer put out a call to structural integration (SI) practitioners interested in examining
racial biases and overtones within ourselves, our practices, our communities, and
institutions. This blossomed into Liberation Somatics, a collectively-organized group
of SI and somatics practitioners engaging our community around issues of racial,
social, and economic justice. Liberation Somatics supports a generous questioning of
internalized and institutionalized biases and beliefs, we encourage our community to
participate in exploring the previously unquestioned relationship of Rolfing® SI and anti-
oppression. The following three articles, written by members of Liberation Somatics,
are examples of such inquiries. Head to our website, where you can find resource lists
and information on joining us for meetings and supporting our upcoming projects.

www.liberationsomatics.org

57
Diversity and Inclusion: Joining the Conversation

A Phenomenology
of Whiteness in
Rolfing® SI
By Tristan Koepke, Certified Rolfer®

ABSTRACT This paper discusses aesthetic and phenomenological philosophies as

a lens to understand and discuss Rolfing Structural Integration (SI) and its relationship
to orientation, neutrality, and Whiteness. Three primary understandings of orientation are
discussed to investigate the aesthetic standards SI upholds, and the racialized implications
of such standards. The first orientation relates directly to the work of Dr. Ida Rolf and Kevin
Frank. The second, integral to this work, relates to scholar Sara Ahmed’s explication of
phenomenological orientation. Finally, the work of aesthetic philosopher Robin James
explores how these models of orientation illuminate the ways SI may uphold Eurocentric
hegemony. This paper outlines these orientations as an invitation to practitioners of SI,
as well as all somatic educators and explorers to challenge their own understandings
and assumptions of what a well-structured human should be. Questions are offered
Tristan Koepke
that may help somatic educators and scholars to question the ways in which they may,
unknowingly, uphold Eurocentric hegemony in their philosophy and praxis. The author
discusses his experience training as a Rolfer, and as a professional dancer and dance
scholar, putting into conversation SI theories that are academic, somatic, and personal.

58

Aesthetic taste, directed by
implicit social cognition, dictates a
standardization of what a structurally
integrated body should look like.
The Horizon
In this paper I discuss aesthetic and
phenomenological philosophies as
a lens to understand and discuss
Rolfing Structural Integration (SI) and its
relationship to orientation, neutrality, and
Whiteness1. I investigate the aesthetic
standards SI upholds, and the racialized
implications of such standards. I offer three
primary understandings of orientation
in order to complicate and expand upon
its predominant usage by Rolfers. The
first, in relation to the work of Dr. Ida Rolf
and Kevin Frank. The second, integral
to this work, relates to scholar Sara
Ahmed’s explication of phenomenological
orientation. Finally, I employ the work of
aesthetic philosopher Robin James, and
explore how these models of orientation
illuminate the ways SI may uphold
Eurocentric hegemony. This is not a
calling out so much as a calling in; I invite
practitioners of SI, as well as all somatic
educators and explorers, to challenge their
own understandings and assumptions of
what a well-structured human should be.
I offer questions that may help somatic
educators and scholars to question the
ways in which they may, unknowingly,
uphold Eurocentric hegemony in their
philosophy and praxis. As I weave my
argument, I discuss my experience training
as a Rolfer, and as a professional dancer
and dance scholar. At present, SI as a field
encompasses many different approaches
and methodologies that share a common
lineage. SI practitioners currently cross-
pollinate their practices with additional
somatic practices, such as The Feldenkrais
Method®, yoga, Pilates, and Somatic
Experiencing®. In this tradition, this paper
is also a cross-pollination, putting into
conversation SI theories that are academic,
somatic, and personal.
Orientation
In 2015, I paused my career in
contemporary dance performance and
began my formal training to study SI at
what is now called the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute®
(DIRI, having been renamed from the
Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021
Rolf Institute® of Structural Integration in
2018). SI is a collection of manual therapy,
myofascial manipulation, and movement
practices developed and taught by Rolf
throughout the 1940s-1970s2. Rolfing SI
aims to “enhance function by changing
structure,” and as such, supports the
human body’s ongoing and lifelong
process of coordination, balance, and ease
(Feitis, in the introduction to Rolf 1978, 5).
SI is, essentially, a continuous questioning
of two hypotheses (Koepke 2020): In
what ways can the structure of a human
change and evolve into a more graceful
and coordinated relationship with gravity?
Do coordinated structural relationships
within the soma create a more positive
experience of living for a human?
As noted, SI today is a diverse field of
practices, which all share roots in these
initial teachings of Rolf3. Rolf passed away
in 1979, yet her presence is still felt in the
DIRI classroom as the oral tradition of her
work continues (Dr. Ida Rolf Institute 2020,
International Association of Structural
Integrators 2020). Many anecdotes about
her teachings are shared, some of them
inspiring and intriguing, many of them
strange. At one point in my training,
during a lesson on psoas function and the
human body’s tendency to prefer either
groundedness or lift, I heard for the first
time that Rolf was an enormous fan of Fred
Astaire’s dancing, saying at least once that
he was the only human she knew of that
didn’t need SI4. Although I can’t find a direct
quote in any text, it is widely accepted
as truth that she upheld him as a sort of
physical and energetic ideal (Corwin 2012).
Rolf’s aesthetic taste and preferences are
still found in the teachings. Contemporary
research definitively demonstrates how
bias, both implicit and explicit, is present
in all education (Payne and Gawronski
2010). Explicit bias refers to conscious
beliefs, usually expressed directly about a
person or group of people, while implicit
bias operates on an unconscious level.
Both affect taste and preference. I bring
up the example of Rolf and Astaire not
to discount the importance and efficacy
of SI or Rolf’s teaching, but instead to
www.rolf.org
interrogate the ways in which this aesthetic
taste, directed by implicit social cognition,
dictates a standardization of what a
structurally integrated body should look
like. This interrogation is, at its heart, built
out of love for the work, its progressive
nature, and its bountiful future.
Gravity
Rolf stated that “the wonders of Rolfing
[SI] occur because of gravity. Gravity is
the therapist” (Dr. Ida Rolf Institute 2020).
Gravity, the force of attraction between
any two masses, is a constant in physical
reality. Common understanding of gravity,
the downward pull experienced by humans,
is the primary organizing principle in SI. As
humans learn to understand and create
their world through movement and action,
they experience context and space first
through a phenomenological observation
of gravity. Rolfer and Rolf Movement®
Instructor Kevin Frank states, “Gravity is at
the heart of how we build the world” (Frank
2007, 28). All sensation and perception
of the human body in movement begins
with the understanding that gravity is
present. Gravity is sensed, felt, given in
to, and pushed against. Gravity is a given,
a phenomenological assumption, an
orientation. Frank defines orientation as a
“dynamic background event,” and as such,
the perception of gravity guides and directs
the experience of a body, proprioceptively,
exteroceptively, and interoceptively (Frank
2007, 27). Orientation is the pre-movement
that guides action and posture, described
by Hubert Godard as the “crystallization
of attitude” (Frank 2007, 27). An
orientation towards gravity as a means to
‘uprightedness’ is the backdrop of all SI.
This model of perception as driving posture
and experience leads to an understanding
of context, the world-inhabited, affecting
the shape and movement of a body.
Let’s return to Rolf’s affinity for Fred
Astaire. Throughout his illustrious career
as an acclaimed tap dancer on the stage
and Hollywood film sets, Astaire appears
light and springy. His elegance is based
upon his ability to skim across the earth,
and into the air, seemingly unaffected by
the downward drag of gravity. As he moves
throughout his various works, he maintains
a long vertical axis, what I will refer to as
upright posture, or uprightedness (MsMojo
2018). Rolfers call this ‘the Line’ (Maupin
2014). Dancer and scholar Onye Ozuzu, in
her illuminating TedTalk “Technologies of
the Body,” describes such upright posture
59
Diversity and Inclusion: Joining the Conversation
Senses and concepts not only
orientate a body’s movements,
but also, more fully, its attention,
attitudes, assumptions, beliefs,
and actions. These orientations,
while unique to each individual,
are inevitably tuned to culture and
context, which include perceptions
of race: a racialized phenomenology.
as a Europeanist condition based upon
utility, necessity, and demonstrations of
power and righteousness (Ozuzu 2012).
Uprightedness is of course not limited
to Europeanist cultures or concerns,
however the distinct pursuit and assertion
of uprightedness as righteous and
harmonious is, in this case, racialized as
White. I employ Sara Ahmed’s notion
of a phenomenology of Whiteness as a
framework for understanding the goal
of uprightedness as a specific racialized
orientation within SI. Ahmed describes this
phenomenology as an orientation towards
White experience and standards.
White phenomenology builds the
backdrop of pre-movement that focuses
and directs a human body towards
culturally inherited habits, traits, and
technologies, or ways of moving that
are based upon colonial assertion and
assimilation. The sensorium of a White
phenomenological body is fixed on White
standards and affectations, and calls a
body towards action. From here on in, I
will refer to Europeanist uprightedness
as White colonial uprighting. Rolf, in her
assertion that Astaire stands alone in
not needing the work of SI to correct or
coordinate his body along the Line with
minimal effort, generated a vision for a
platonically ideal body in Astaire’s image.
Of note, tap dance developed from a
lineage of Irish jigging, English clogging,
and most notably, Juba dance, an African
American vernacular form (Siebert 2015,
88). Juba provided a primary foundation
for the rhythmic sophistication and
stylization of early tappers, and most
famous and influential twentieth-century
tap dancers, such as Bubbles and Buck,
Jeni Le Gon, Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson,
60
the Nicholas Brothers, were all Black.
Astaire is White. Rolf, focusing on
Astaire’s performances while ignoring
the lineage and influence of many of his
contemporaries, offers a clear example of
White colonial idealism.
Don Hanlon Johnson warns of upholding
any sort of somatic idealism (Johnson
1980). The critique of idealism within SI is
not new, however, seems to disappear from
mainstream perception. Johnson wrote
that this idealism “provides a constant
backdrop for invalidation for human life,”
and that “narrowing perception” to only
the structural field within this lens denies
the lived experience of people as social,
political bodies (Johnson 1980, 5).
Whiteness
Orientations are described by Godard
and Frank as pre-movement, and Ahmed
explicates this further: the body senses
the world, and is oriented towards
certain perceptions. Orientation, in
the phenomenological sense, is better
understood here as a verb. The senses
orientate the body. The body is directed
by its senses to create meaning about
what it senses. In turn, these meanings
and concepts further direct the body.
For Ahmed, senses and concepts not
only orientate a body’s movements, but
also, more fully, its attention, attitudes,
assumptions, beliefs, and actions.
These orientations, while unique to each
individual, are inevitably tuned to culture
and context, which include perceptions of
race: a racialized phenomenology.
Rebecca Chaleff writes, “Whiteness is not
strictly ontological, but phenomenological:
shaped by embedded histories of Euro-
American colonialism” (Chaleff 2018, 72).
Whiteness, rather than a fixed status, is an
active process and processing of bodies
in spaces. Agreeing, Ahmed writes that
Whiteness “orientates bodies in specific
directions, affecting how they ‘take up’
space” (Ahmed 2007, 150). Ahmed argues
that spaces, not just bodies, are orientated
in certain racialized directions. “Spaces
acquire the ‘skin’ of the bodies that inhabit
them . . . [They] take shape by being
orientated around some bodies, more than
others” (Ahmed 2007, 157). I explore her
notion of a phenomenology of Whiteness
as a framework for understanding a
specific racialized orientation within SI.
SI has been developed primarily by White
practitioners, responding to the needs,
concerns, and orientations of primarily
White clients. The field of SI is, at large, a
White space.
Ahmed states that Whiteness is “an
ongoing and unfinished history” (Ahmed
2007, 150). The global history of
Europeanist colonization and assimilation
begins with bodies and extends into space.
Being white-skinned is of course not the
issue. While there is always a diversity
of phenomenological experience within
each identity group, White bodies are
nonetheless generally orientated towards
certain attitudes, assumptions, and
affectations. Whiteness as an assimilated
colonizing identity has been weaponized
in the cultural fabric of a globalized
world, doing real, corporeal, damage. My
project of naming the phenomenology
of Whiteness within SI explores how the
body that experiences of Rolfing SI has,
regardless of intent, become part and
parcel of the idealist goals that adhere to
White colonial uprighting.
Many Rolfers have argued in favor of the
existence and pursuit of a neutral body.
Rolfer and actor Heather Corwin defines
this neutral body as “a body in ideal
alignment that functions absent of affect”
(Corwin 2012, 38). The notion of neutral
must be investigated. Although I’m not
assigning this motive to Corwin, neutral
is often code for White, and Whiteness is
often disguised as neutral, while remaining
complicit with racist and racialized
factors (DiAngelo 2011)5. A neutral body
is a body that adheres to the standard of
White colonial uprighting along a vertical
axis, the Line. In some texts, this, a
body in neutral alignment, is referred to
as a normal body (Rolf 1977). Within the
context of the neutral and the normal,

White phenomenological orientations slip
into the background, creating a landscape
upon which the other, the non-White
body, becomes the disoriented. As noted,
orientations affect bodies and spaces. In
this instance, White space is also a White
field: the discipline of SI. In such a White
space, racialized and non-White bodies
are full of affect, expressions, and patterns
that adhere to cultural lineage. In order to
adhere to a ‘neutral’ standard of health
within SI, in accordance with White colonial
uprighting, non-White bodies are asked to
sacrifice and ignore cultural expressions
and patterns that are non-Europeanist. For
example, scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild
elucidates the various Africanist aesthetics
and attitudes that take shape in movement
patterns. Gottschild writes, “the Africanist
aesthetic embraces difference and
dissonance, rather than erasing or resolving
it,” seemingly directly opposed to the basis
of SI, which prioritizes Europeanist values
such as “centeredness, control, linearity,
[and] directness” as a means to resolve
dissonant physical factors and sensations
(Gottschild 1996, 93-96).
Bodies and spaces are orientated towards
race; however, healthy biomechanics
in SI paradigms are often bolstered by
principles of physics and architecture that
are seen as universal. The body may be
looked at as an architectural structure, as
evidenced by Dr. Stephen Levin’s popular
notion of biotensegrity (Levin 2005).
Some argue that the Line is a universal
organizing architectural truth that, as a
concept, has no color or race. However,
like bodies and spaces, concepts are in
fact orientated towards race. In many
spheres of knowledge, however, Whiteness
is made invisible. That extends to physics
and architecture. The incredible work of
American Architect Lance Hosey, in his
critique of the foundational Architectural
Graphic Standards, explicated how and why
It is the logical next step to consider
racialized trauma – a diverse and
complex set of experiences inherently
linked to systemic racism that
accumulate over time – is woven
into the corporeal phenomenology,
structure, and movement of a person.
Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021
common models of architecture and design
have been orientated towards and served
White phenomenological experience.
These design standards have served to
support the pursuit of human structural
perfection, upholding white male bodies
as the primary orientation (Hosey 2001).
He also writes that architecture standards
based upon the neutral as code of White
and male offers groundwork to generate a
world of structures “for themselves in their
own image” (Hosey 2001, 101). Hosey
writes about buildings. SI practitioners find
utility in extending architectural principles
to the human body, and as such, the pursuit
of structures that serve White hegemony
reproduces White colonial uprighting.
In SI, phenomenology and the aesthetic
are inextricably linked. The foundational
understanding of a client’s health begins
with an understanding of the aesthetic
through a practice often referred to as
‘body reading’. SI practitioners are taught
to discern healthy structure, posture, and
movement through sight as well as touch,
and most SI sessions begin and end with
that process. Robin James writes, “though
aesthetic concepts may seem to be neutral
with respect to race, gender, and sexuality,
and have nothing to do with politics or
inequality at all, they only appear neutral
because they conform to hegemonic
norms” (James 2013, 111). Bodies, spaces,
and concepts, which are orientated, can
all appear ‘neutral’. That which appears
neutral, in White spaces and White fields,
assumes an unquestioning standard
of White hegemony. James continues,
“aesthetics’ apparent neutrality is actually
evidence of its centering of Whiteness and
heteromasculinity” (James 2013, 111).
White colonial bodies notice the world
as a means to take up space, to extend
themselves into the space, and to
assert their values. A phenomenology of
Whiteness does not only affect people
www.rolf.org
with white skin, but extends into the
contexts and spaces that reify them. The
bodies that ‘take up’ space are White and
non-White, although orientated towards
the standards of White bodies. The bodies
within SI practice (the practitioners, clients,
and students) are not exclusively White.
White and BIPOC6 in SI alike, however,
maintain an orientation towards White
colonial uprighting, manifested as the Line.
The Line, Revisited
Many in the SI field discuss horizontal
planes as a necessary foundation from
which the Line, the vertical organizing
principle, arises. I am interested in the
horizon, as a concept, and its ability to be
orientated and re-orientated. The horizon
is wide and broad, open and possible.
The horizon is far away, and also within
focus. Horizons may also be bodily,
describing that surface from which identity,
sensation, and feelings arise. Bodily
horizons are both the distant background
of experience, and also the nearby fabric
of skin. Robin James discusses bodily
horizons as orientations that are bodily
and corporeal. James, discussing the
foundational work of Sara Alcoff on
interpretive horizons, states that these
horizons “are not, however, biologically
determined: they are learned, habitual
comportments, the ‘background, framing
assumptions’ that we acquire by living
in specific sociohistorical relationships”
(James 2013, 107). In SI, as in much of the
world, gravity is an assumption. It is also
assumed that gravity works the same on
all bodies. While it may be true to some
extent, gravity is but one factor impressed
upon a body. Gravity works in tandem
with lived and generational experience
to shape the whole person (Koepke
2020). And so, I ask, can there be a more
expansive definition of SI? Can SI broaden
its orientation toward multiple directions?
Somatic historian and movement therapist
Martha Eddy defines SI as an approach to
“releasing the body’s structure from lifelong
patterns of tension,” and I consciously
and purposefully expand her definition to
include the intergenerational and racialized
traumas that are inherited and endured
(Eddy 2017, 30). SI practitioners look
to childhood traumatic events, such as
chronically falling while learning to walk,
an early ankle sprain, or getting the wind
knocked out after a fall from a tree branch,
as affecting factors of adult structures and
movement patterns. It is the logical next
61
Diversity and Inclusion: Joining the Conversation
step to consider racialized trauma – a
diverse and complex set of experiences
inherently linked to systemic racism that
accumulate over time – is woven into the
corporeal phenomenology, structure, and
movement of a person.
James suggests that horizons
and orientations “offer alternative
epistemologies that emphasize affect
over the visual. They focus not so much
on how bodies look, but how a body
kinesthetically senses itself” (James
2013, 107). The aesthetic adherence to
the Line, implicated as a factor of White
colonialist uprighting, cannot be the
primary focus of a progressive approach
to SI. SI has the ability to be a tool for
somatic liberation, but only if, in the
pursuit of grace, coordination, and health,
multiple orientations may hold equal
importance to gravity. I suggest turning
toward culture, inheritance, community,
and political fabric, without turning away
completely from gravity. In the words of
Rolfer Paul Wirth, “If a Line arises, let it
come from context rather than assertion”
(personal conversation 2020).
Yielding
I reiterate: It is out of deep love for SI
and its capacity to invoke change and
transformation that I call for this work. This is
personal to me, as a Rolfer, and as someone
whose life changed for the better through
experience of receiving Rolfing SI. My life
has also been radically altered by my own
opening to understanding my Whiteness
and how it affects my understanding of
the world. Both paths have taught me
that change happens through listening to,
interpreting, and assimilating stimulus and
information. When Whiteness is seen and
named, a common understanding of the
lived racialized reality of the current world
emerges. Race, racialization, and racial
phenomenologies affect all people, not
only People of Color. Practitioners of SI can
continue to develop a high quality of somatic
inquiry that holds true to its tradition, while
expanding the understanding of orientation
to include Ahmed’s, by actively including
racial and cultural phenomenology into the
bodily horizon.
As suggested, I encourage a turning
towards culture, inheritance, community,
and political fabric while continuing to listen
to gravity as a source for physical clarity.
This broadening of our phenomenological
orientation is a conscious turn away from
asserting or directing a body towards a
62
perceived somatic ideal, and an active
yielding into the lived reality of the world
around us. Yielding is a key concept for
many Rolfers. The hands yield to the
client upon contact, listening for qualities
of movement, mobility, and motility. The
hands yield to encourage the body to
move towards its own sense of support.
The hands yield, wait, and then follow the
movement towards new possibilities.
Yielding is an important first step for
practitioners of SI to work against White
colonial uprighting as a platonic ideal
for their clients and students. Instead of
asserting what tissue needs release or
tone, which hip should or shouldn’t be
higher than it is, practitioners of SI should
utilize a yield at its most basic definition:
a slowing down as a means to come
into relationship. SI is, after all, an inquiry
into coordinated relationships within the
soma. A true acknowledgement of these
relationships is an understanding that
there is no objective source of information,
no objective assertion of the right way to
stand or move. When an SI practitioner
honestly yields, the horizon broadens
to include physical functioning and its
inherent ties to gravity and culture as
equally important forces.
The journey towards health and more
positive bodily experience for all humans
begins and ends with questions. In my
experience, somatic education begins
with deliberate inquiry into felt sense
and movement, and the inquiry leads
to a multitude of both quantitative and
qualitative manifestations for different
people, depending on context. Sometimes,
SI leads to a height or weight change.
Sometimes, SI leads to a reorganization of
the body around the Line. But sometimes
it may be a softening of muscle tone,
or a deepening or exaggeration of a
physical sense or feeling. Whatever the
manifestation, yielding into inquiry invites
the most powerful transformation.
I offer these key questions to somatic
practitioners to reflect and engage with
my research. I hope that they open the
doors for your own reflection, negotiation,
and change.
1. In what ways does SI, or your
somatic practice(s), assume and
uphold White aesthetic standards of
health and beauty?
2. How can your understanding of
postural and structural health be
broadened to include non-White
standards and possibilities?
3. How does this re-orientation
change the ways in which you work
with your clients?
4. How does your own posturing and
body action inscribe your own cultural
positioning, and in what ways can you
understand your positioning in relation
to your clients?
5. In what ways do you assert your
beliefs through your work, and when
is there opportunity to instead yield
and listen?
Endnotes
1. A note on capitalization: it is now common
practice to capitalize racial identities, such
as Black, Brown, and Person of Color (POC)
to differentiate the racial construct from the
color. There is currently an ongoing debate
on whether or not to capitalize White when
referring to a racial identity. Some argue for
de-capitalizing White (white) as a political
act of de-centering an identity marker that is
historically privileged with so much visibility
and power. Additionally, the capitalization
of White has been argued to legitimize
racist beliefs upheld by systems and
organizations. For example, self-proclaimed
White supremacist organizations uphold
the capitalization as an effort to legitimize
their hate speech. However, for the sake
of clarity within this paper, I stick with the
capital “W.” For more information on this, I
suggest reading David Saunders reporting
for the Associated Press, and Kwame
Anthony Appiah’s writing in The Atlantic.
2. Rolf referred to her work as Structural
Integration, but her students affectionately
referred to the practice as Rolfing. She
soon adopted the terminology. Rolfing
is a trademark held by DIRI. I use the
terms Rolfing and Rolfer to refer to SI
practitioners who have trained at and
remained in good standing with DIRI.
3. My use of the word diverse here suggests
the diversity of approaches, techniques,
and methodologies. It does not suggest a
diverse racial makeup of the field at large.
4. Much of Rolfing SI is an oral
transmission, with the inevitable variances
of understanding that result. Since writing
this, I’ve heard from a DIRI senior faculty
member that Rolf’s comments on Astaire
were more specific to him having knees
that worked really well while dancing. That
may well be the case – and it still raises
an important point: a particularity about
Astaire’s knees somehow moved through

In what ways does SI, or your somatic practice(s), assume
and uphold White aesthetic standards of health and
beauty? How can your understanding of postural and
structural health be broadened to include non-White
standards and possibilities?
the oral tradition to a generalized mythology
about him having the perfect structure.
This hyperbolic (mis)interpretation speaks
to the unconscious working of bias
and White phenomenology in SI. Thus,
regardless of what Rolf actually said, there
is adequate support for my thesis.
5. I am not arguing that Corwin, who
has contributed greatly to the Rolfing
field through her practice and writings,
her article, or the work of any specific
Rolfer, is purposefully coding neutral as
White. I am theorizing, however, that, the
use of the word neutral has underlying
assumptions that are complicit with racist
logics, and perhaps Rolfers can think
imaginatively about possible alternatives.
6. BIPOC refers to Black, Indigenous,
and People of Color. It is a useful term
that creates solidarity between non-White
communities, although some critique its
usage for collapsing the diverse experiences
that various non-White communities face
into one monolithic grouping.
Tristan Koepke is a dancer, educator, and
Rolfer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
He has been a Rolfer since 2016, and now
serves as Chair of DIRI’s Committee for
Diversity and Anti-Racism. He is currently
the Associate Director of the Young
Dancers Workshop at the Bates Dance
Festival, is pursuing an MFA in Dance
at the University of Maryland, College
Park, and is a co-instigator of Liberation
Somatics. Tristan is also the Diversity and
Inclusion Editor of this journal.
References
Ahmed, S. 2007. A Phenomenology of
Whiteness. Feminist Theory 8(2): 149-168.
Chaleff, R. Dec. 2018. Activating Whiteness:
Racializing the ordinary in US American
postmodern dance. Dance Research
Journal 50(3):71-84.
Corwin, H. 2012. Evolving the Actor’s Neutral
Body. Structural Integration 40: 37-40.
DiAngelo, R. 2011. White Fragility.
Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021
International Journal of Critical Pedagogy
3(3): 54-70.
Eddy, M. 2017. Mindful Movement:
The Evolution of the Somatic Arts and
Conscious Action. Chicago, IL: Intellect.
Dr. Ida Rolf Institute. 2020. “History of
Rolfing” Accessed November 15, 2020.
https://www.rolf.org/history.php.
Dr. Ida Rolf Institute. “Gravity is the
Therapist.” Audio File, 25 minutes, Dr. Ida
Rolf Institute. Accessed November 15, 2020.
Frank, K. 2007. Posture & Perception in
the Context of the Tonic Function Model
of Structural Integration: An Introduction.
IASI Yearbook: 27–35.
Gottschild B. D. 1996. Digging the Africanist
Presence in American Performance.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press
Hosey, L. 2001. Hidden Lines: Gender,
Race, and the Body in Graphic Standards.
Journal of Architectural Education 55(2):
101-112.
International Association of Structural
Integrators. 2020. “What is Structural
Integration?” Accessed November 15,
2020. https://www.theiasi.net/what-is-
structural-integration-.
James, R. 2013. Oppression, Privilege,
and Aesthetics: The Use of the Aesthetic
in Theories of Race, Gender, and
Sexuality, and the Role of Race, Gender
and Sexuality in Philosophical Aesthetics.
Philosophy Compass 8(2): 101-116.
Johnson, D. H. 1980 Fall. Somatic
Platonism. Somatics: Magazine-Journal
of the Bodily Arts and Sciences 3(1): 4-8.
Koepke, T. October 15, 2020. “Towards a
Broader Application of Structural Integration:
A Reflection of Race, Trauma, Liberation
and Rolfing®.” Available from https://
liberationsomatics.org/blog/towards-a-
broader-application-of-structural-integration
Levin, S. 2005. Tensegrity, the New
Biomechanics.  Oxford Textbook of
Musculoskeletal Medicine, eds. Hutson,
M. and Ward, A. Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press.
www.rolf.org
Maupin, E. W. February 12, 2014.
“Expansional Balance and The Line.” ISPB
College. February 12, 2014. Available from
https://ipsbmassageresearch.wordpress.
com/2014/02/12/expansional-balance-
and-the-line/.
Ozuzu, O. 2012. “Technology of the American
Dancing Body.” 18:48. TEDxIIT. https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=eCxadUZwMo0
Payne, B. K., and B. Gawronski. 2010.
A History of Implicit Social Cognition:
Where Is It Coming From? Where Is It
Now? Where Is It Going? Handbook of
implicit social cognition: Measurement,
Theory, and Applications, 1-15. New York,
NY: Guilford Press.
Rolf, I. P., 1978. Ida Rolf Talks about
Rolfing and Physical Reality. (R. Feitis,
ed.) Boulder, CO: Rolf Institute.
Rolf, I. P. 1977. Rolfing: Reestablishing
the Natural Alignment and Structural
Integration of the Human Body for Vitality
and Well-being. Rochester, VT: Healing
Arts Press.
Seibert, B. 2015. What the Eye Hears: A
History of Tap Dancing. New York, NY:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
MsMojo. 2018, November 8. “Top 10 Iconic
Fred Astaire Dance Scenes.” YouTube
Video, 13:03. Accessed November
15, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=IQFamAFNALE
63
Diversity and Inclusion: Joining the Conversation

The Somnambulant
Trance of White
Privilege
Exploring the Posturing of Supremacy

By Carol A. Agneessens, MS, Certified Advanced Rolfer®, Rolf

Movement® Practitioner

ABSTRACT In this article, Carol A. Agneessens examines White privilege,

racialism, and the unearned advantages of belonging to the White dominant caste in
society. She discusses how racial bias may be held in an individual’s posture, visible in
their gesture, and informed by their movement. There is a somatic exploration inviting
the White reader to experience their felt sense of privilege.

In the article, “Unpacking the Invisible
Knapsack,” Peggy McIntosh describes
privilege as: “An invisible package of
unearned assets that I can count on
cashing in each day, but about which I was
Carol A. Agneessens ‘meant’ to remain oblivious. White privilege
is like an invisible weightless knapsack of
special provisions . . . It is unearned power
conferred systematically” (Center Working
Paper 1989, 189). White privilege refers to
the benefits and unmerited advantages
people receive because of their skin color.
Although White privilege can be recognized
through personal interactions, it originates
out of the culture that has violently fought
over centuries to secure its position as the
ruling and lawmaking class and in which
many are economically secure. This article
examines privilege, racialism, and the
advantages of belonging to the dominant
White caste. Unexamined racial bias
effects attitudes held in posture, gesture,
and movement. Somatic explorations are
included in this discussion.
White individuals often live in homogenous
communities where White body supremacy
is the overriding prejudice and systemic
order1. It is a lifetime of work we need to
do to unplug from the conscious but most
often unconscious behaviors that maintain
our prejudicial (pre-judging) perceptions
and actions. For myself, this means
continually reflecting on and appreciating
what privilege has been afforded to me
simply because I was born with White
skin. This is not to say that I and others
have not worked hard and dealt with life’s
inevitable stresses, losses, and hardships,
but with White skin privilege there are
multiple advantages that have come my
way through no effort of my own.

64

As I educated myself to the historical and present-day assaults
on the Black community, I began to understand the debilitating
effects of chronic stress and economic hardship on all aspects
of physical, mental, and emotional health and well-being.
However, because White people are
frequently unaware of their privilege, the
topic needs to be brought to the fore, again
and again. White dominance and privilege
are an unacknowledged contributor of
success. But like fish in the ocean, the
water goes unnoticed. White privilege
is so pervasive it is taken for granted.
Often because it is so pervasive and
unconsciously conditioned, the dominant
caste finds it difficult to empathize with
‘an-other’. In addition, it is naïve to think
that we White people can know through
our own bodies the daily onslaught of
microaggressions or the history of violence
both present and past. As I educated
myself to the historical and present-day
assaults on the Black community, I began
to understand the debilitating effects of
chronic stress and economic hardship
on all aspects of physical, mental, and
emotional health and well-being. We White
people can easily become entranced
by our assumed entitlement and fail to
see these life-endangering struggles.
White privilege allows us to feel ‘normal’;
not needing to change our actions or
speech (known as code switching2) as we
encounter others, people in authority, or
people of the culture to which we belong.
The dominant culture determines what
is allowed and what is suppressed. It
determines what history is written. The
positioning of Whiteness as the cultural
norm keeps White people from thinking of
themselves in racial terms. White people
may be particularly prone to negative,
defensive, and sometimes hostile emotional
reactions when engaging in racial dialogues.
This reactivity may be the acknowledgment
of one’s racial identity that includes facing
the reality of a history of systematized
racial supremacy, slavery, and genocide
amidst the security of White privilege (Allen
2018). The normalization of privilege often
makes it difficult for White bodies to see
and experience the support the culture
affords them. This can result in consciously
or unconsciously working to uphold the
invisibility of racism in the culture and
collective participation in it.
It is said that “Whiteness lies at the center
of the problem of racism” (Allen 2018, 39).
Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021
Buried within our neurology, blood, and
connective tissues live the Eurocentric,
Judeo-Christian, and colonial imprints
of superiority, ascendence, and power
over an-other. This ‘power over’ is the
posturing of unexamined beliefs behind
a White colonial imprint. Remember,
America was founded and built by the
enslavement of Black people and the
genocide of Native Americans. Recall
portraits of the writers of the Declaration
of Independence: wig-wearing and well-
heeled wealthy slave-owning men. From a
heritage of colonial wealth and rule, these
imprints foster unexamined biases and
further an assumed stature of authority.
This dominant posturing can easily result
in consciously or unconsciously working
to uphold the invisibility of racism in the
culture and one’s participation in it. If
racism continues raging behind a curtain
of denial, it perpetuates oppression and
creates obstacles for change.
An Interoceptive Inquiry
Several studies have identified a strong
correlation between White privilege
awareness with feelings of guilt and
shame, and on the other side of the
equation, feelings of conferred dominance
and superiority. Research suggests that
acceptable White behavior seems to require
a surface approach that disconnects
one from the “more raw experiences of
strong emotions and feelings that are part
of being human” (Allen 2018, 72). Many
diversity scholars believe this avoidance
of emotional depth is a particular feature
of the White culture. Dance therapist Anne
Rust D’Eye states that many people in the
West have learned to fear the body and
its sensations. It is a trait of privilege that
affords White people the opportunity to
distract from issues that are uncomfortable.
I call this behavior the trance of privileged
somnambulism. When the going gets
emotionally tough or the continuing fight
for social justice becomes exhausting,
with the skin-ticket of Whiteness, we
can easily step away and return to the
comforts afforded the dominant class.
Nevertheless, by connecting to internal
www.rolf.org
sensate experiences and bearing witness
to the treatment and history of violence
toward Black Americans, White people
have the opportunity to become anti-racist.
This means choosing to feel with heart,
body, mind, and emotion and not relegate
this sensorial knowing to the closet of
emotional fragility and historical ignorance.
It requires cultivating ‘kinesthetic empathy’
for the lived experience of an-other3.
As you read through the following questions
and explorations intended for readers
who are White (but everyone is welcome
to explore), take your time. Notice body
sensations, and where they arise inside.
Notice if there is a feeling ‘label’ or posturing
that you experience as you deepen the
exploration. Do you feel an emerging
stature, a lifting of your thorax or a bigger
inhalation? Is there relief in knowing that
because you are White you are detached
from directed assaults of racially motivated
actions? Are there feelings of shame or
guilt? Just notice your experience, breathe
into whatever arises within you and do not
try to change anything. Pay attention to
your response without judgement. Your
responses are informative.
Somatic Explorations
1. Take a moment to imagine or recall
a time when you experienced the
benefit of being White and entitled.
Perhaps you were stopped by the
police for a traffic violation, or looking
for an office, home, or apartment in
a desirable part of town, signing the
lease or getting a loan from the bank.
What was your experience? Recall
one of these encounters.
At the time, did you feel confident
(even though a bit nervous) that you
would not be harmed by the officer?
Did you ‘just know’ that your desired
choice of residence or office would
be affordable? Did you also realize
that you would not find barriers to
your occupancy?
Although you may have felt a little
anxious, what were the sensations
moving through your body as you
65
Diversity and Inclusion: Joining the Conversation
Through reading, conversing with, and understanding the multi-
generational trauma the Black community has endured, as well as
the present day lived experience of life in a racist American world,
I stand more fully in solidarity with Black people as the fight for
social justice continues.
realized your successful outcome:
excitement, relief, joy? Did you notice
any change in your stature? You did it!
What does that feel like?
2. Take a moment and recall a time
you may have witnessed (in person
or news footage) a Person of Color
being humiliated, treated with
prejudice or cruelty.
What is your experience? As you hold
this memory, notice your breath, the
shape of your thorax, lungs, a settled
or unsettled feeling in your heart or
in your belly. Just notice your body
reaction without changing anything or
judging the experience. Do you look
away, change the news channel or
distract yourself with something else?
3. As you reflect on your lifelong
immersion in the White dominant
culture: Is there a posture to your
“Whiteness”? Take a moment and
notice the sensory experience of living
in a White body. What is your feeling
sense of living with White skin?
4. If you were walking down the street
and saw a Black man walking toward
you what is your response? Do you
clutch your purse tighter? Do you walk
to the other side of the street? Do you
keep walking toward the Black stranger
to pass this person on the sidewalk?
Did you change your posture and
‘hold’ yourself differently?
Sense and then exaggerate your
body shaping. Is there a lift in your
chest or does your inhalation become
fuller? Do you experience a sense of
importance or greater capability or
responsibility? Allow these explorations
to inform you without calling it out
as right or wrong. For example, what
happens to your breath? What happens
to the connection of your feet or seat
with the floor? Can you feel and breathe
into your belly? Just notice without
judgement what happens throughout
your body.
Standing tall and upright is the structural/
functional goal of most body-oriented
66
schools. Feeling this upright alignment
is the hallmark of ‘good posture’ – and
besides it feels amazing. Yet ‘verticality’
requires the support and movement of the
diaphragms. From years of practice, I know
that in balancing functional horizontals
with verticality, volume and lift are more
easily expressed and sustained. Yet for me,
diaphragms offer not only the anatomical
support for structural poise and breath
but also engender a sense of whole-body
dimensionality. Through the movement of
diaphragms, as subtle as it can be, these
myofascial functions extend energetically
beyond my skin boundary. As I deepen
into this feeling sense, there is a yielding
into relationship with those around me
and the surrounding space. This feeling
state of coming into relationship with the
surrounding environment and those around
me becomes a lived experience of social
engagement, broadening my ability to bear
witness and be present with others beyond
the comfort of my White privilege. I can
then be affected by rather than removed
from their experience. Through reading,
conversing with, and understanding
the multigenerational trauma the Black
community has endured, as well as the
present-day lived experience of life in a
racist American world, I stand more fully
in solidarity with Black people as the
fight for social justice continues. Weekly
participation with Liberation Somatics has
accelerated this inquiry into White privilege
as well as issues of racial diversity within
the structural integration community.
Endnotes
1. Menakem (2017) throughout his writing
inserts the word ‘body’ to more fully describe
White Body Supremacy or the Black Body
experience. This speaks more fully to the
somatic lived experience of racism.
2. Code switching. Changing speech,
behavior and even appearance for people
of color to survive in a White working
world. Definition from weforum.org.2020.
3. Allen, Wendy. Quoting L. F. Gonzalez.
2018. Dance as Therapy: Embodiment,
kinesthetic empathy and the case of
contact Improvisation. Adaptive Behavior
27(1),91-100. Kinesthetic empathy is a core
concept in dance movement therapy and
refers to the ability to understand another’s
experience through somatic means.
Carol began her studies at the Rolf Institute®
(now called the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute®) in
1981 and now practices an integrative
approach including manual therapies,
movement education, and craniosacral work.
She teaches an embryological and tidal
orientation to craniosacral therapy. She is the
author of The Fabric of Wholeness (2001) as
well as numerous articles. She has been a
member of Liberation Somatics anti-racism
group since its inception June 5, 2020.
References
Allen, W. 2018. The somatic experience
of white privilege: A dance/movement
therapy approach to racialized interactions.
Expressive Therapies Dissertations. 1-59.
González, L. F. B. 2018. Dance as therapy:
Embodiment, kinesthetic empathy
and the case of contact improvisation.
Adaptive Behavior 27(1): 91-100.
McIntosh, P. 1998. White privilege:
Unpacking the invisible knapsack. In Re-
visioning family therapy: Race, culture, and
gender in clinical practice, eds. M. McGoldrick
and K. V. Hardy, 147-152. New York: The
Guilford Press. (Reprinted from 1989 Peace
and Freedom July/August, 10-12. Also
reprinted in modified form from 1989 “White
privilege and male privilege: A personal
account of coming to see correspondences
through work in women’s studies”, Center
Working Paper, 189).
Menachem, R. 2017. My Grandmother’s
Hands. Las Vegas, Nevada: Central
Recovery Press.
 Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021 www.rolf.org

Reimagining
Equitable
Economics in
Rolfing® SI
By Katy Loeb, Certified Rolfer®

ABSTRACT This article proposes equitable pricing models as key to expanding

access to Rolfing® Structural Integration (SI), as well SI’s opportunity to contribute to
socioeconomic and racial justice in a capitalist system. This article also introduces
specific models to consider.

Recently, I reopened my practice One’s earning power, income, and

in a new city and needed to set my
session price anew. This raised several
tormenting questions: How should I
set my price? Should I charge less than
my more experienced colleagues? How
do I make my work accessible? I could
Katy Loeb
not answer these queries by math and
competitive analysis alone, because a
session rate represents far more than
covering expenses. In a capitalist system,
which monetizes our bodily experience
and labor, our prices represent how we
value ourselves and Rolfing Structural
Integration (SI). In addition, we all have our
own relationships with money and class –
how we grew up, and where we are now.
One’s earning power becomes a piece of
one’s identity and as it is so personal, I
invite you to track your somatic reactions
as you consider the following ideas about
financial accessibility and our work.
financial success in the United States is,
in part, determined by the ways in which
capitalism intersects with aspects of one’s
identity, such as race, gender, sexuality,
disability, citizenship status, and the like1.
Of course, our inequitable systems affect
our clients’ abilities to afford our work
as well. In that regard, what we charge
becomes political. If we charge rates
that entire communities cannot possibly
afford, who is our work for? If we assert
Rolfing SI is client-centered and that we
want it to be more accessible – serving a
more diverse clientele – and more widely
known, we must reckon with who can
afford to benefit from it. Our rates are
inextricably linked to both our relative
privilege as practitioners (our race,
gender, etc.) and the radical potential to
contribute to greater economic equality
and access to quality care.

67
Diversity and Inclusion: Joining the Conversation

If we charge rates that entire communities cannot possibly

afford, who is our work for? If we assert Rolfing SI is client-
centered and that we want it to be more accessible – serving
a more diverse clientele – and more widely known, we must
reckon with who can afford to benefit from it.
When we are informed by the ways
structural oppression historically and
currently precludes income and wealth
accumulation, particularly for non-White
people, and acknowledge our own
privilege in being able to set our rates,
we can better appreciate and realize
the real impact we can have by offering
equitable pricing options2. By nature,
equitable pricing models are relational,
rather than transactional. Incorporating
them is a defiant posture against systems
of oppression.
I’ve heard a pattern of refrains from
colleagues and instructors about pricing:
“People that really want our work will find
a way to pay for it.” “Don’t give away work
for free; you’ll resent it and the client won’t
take it seriously.” “I gave a client a discount,
but they arrived to their appointment in a
Mercedes!” All express anxiety and fear
about preserving the value of our work,
maintaining boundaries, and being taken
advantage of. Living and breathing in a
capitalist system easily engenders fear as
a reaction to earning less money and being
taken advantage of financially, on top of
the realities of financial stress (Damien
2020). These reactions feel very real in
our bodies. What would it feel like to offer
some sessions at a more affordable rate
without affecting your income significantly?
How would it feel to be able to support
marginalized communities and contribute,
even in a small way, to economic justice?
In May 2021, I presented the following
research for a call hosted by Liberation
Somatics, a group of SI practitioners who
discuss issues of racial and social justice.
Referencing both research on income and
wealth inequality, as well as reparations
and what our colleagues offer, I group
equitable pricing models (or tools) into
five broad categories, two of which I will
explore in more depth.
1. Payment plans offer flexibility to
clients and are easy to manage with
online payment software (ex. Square).
2. Barter or trade is contested in
our community, but nonetheless an
opportunity to practice outside of
the norm.
3. Workshops or small group work are
a way to offer a version of our work
at a more accessible price point per
individual.
4. Scholarships describe discounted
or free sessions, or admission to a
workshop or class. We can budget for
the quarter, the year, or beyond, giving
us more control over our incomes3.
5. Sliding scales offer a price range
or ‘suggested price’ per session or
class. Similar to scholarships, we can
also build these into our budgets.
There are several ways to fund scholarships
or sliding-scale spots. For example, an
Anatomy Trains colleague used tips she
received to fund other sessions, eventually
starting a non-profit (Tip It Forward 2021).
Others have an ‘angel fund’ or simply
budget for a few sliding-scale spots in
their practice at any given time so they feel
they’re earning enough.
The big question that always comes up is
“who qualifies?” Here are three common
rubrics to try:
1. Income level: session price is
determined by household or individual
yearly income. “If you make below $X,
you pay $Y.” It’s extremely clear, but
income is relative. Two people could
live off the same salary, one with zero
dependents and zero debt, while the
other has a dependent and debt.
2. Self-Selection: a client pays what
they want or can afford, usually based
on a suggested price. This may not be
sustainable for a practice but might
be applicable to a workshop (or some
spots for said workshop). It gives the
client agency, but fewer guideposts to
understand what amount is appropriate.
3. Narrative: this offers a lot of
guideposts as it uses qualitative
descriptors on a spectrum to determine
rate. For example, “I am comfortably
able to meet all my basic needs” at the
top, “I have access to some financial
savings” in the middle, and “I qualify for
government assistance” at the bottom.
This requires an honest and possibly
uncomfortable conversation with the
client, but hopefully one that builds a
sense of understanding and support4.
As herbalist Alexis Cunningfolk states
in her guide to incorporating alternative
pricing models, those that can only pay
the lowest amount “deserve a community
that honors [their] price as equal an
economic offering as the person who
can pay the highest tier” (Cunningfolk
2015). To fully embody this sentiment, I
advocate we invite a creative, liberatory
mindset about pricing – like the kind we
bring to our work everyday. By offering
accessible rates, we acknowledge
systemic economic oppression, we meet
our communities where they need us, and
we expand the relatability and usefulness
of our work radically. When capitalist-

By offering accessible rates, we acknowledge systemic

economic oppression, we meet our communities where they
need us, and we expand the relatability and usefulness of
our work radically.
68
 Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021 www.rolf.org

driven fears of scarcity or difficult financial (Updated).” Accessed May 10, 2021.
conversations arise, we use our Rolfing https://apps.urban.org/features/wealth-
tools to listen, meet, and adapt. This is inequality-charts.
the transformational thinking and feeling
necessary for the future of our work and
our communities.

Endnotes
1. Gender pay and wealth gaps, racial
pay and wealth gaps, redlining, and
discrimination are well-documented, but
beyond the scope of this article. Please
reference Akee and Urban Institute below
as a starting point.
2. See note 1.
3. Please reference “How to Set Sliding
Scale Fees for Your Practice” (Good
Therapy 2021) for a commonly used way
to calculate sliding scale; actual budgeting
is beyond the scope of this article.
4. See Cunningfolk’s blog (listed in the
references) for a very helpful image of this
scale with more narrative examples.
Katy Loeb is lapsed art historian and Rolfer
based in Seattle, Washington. More of her
writing on justice and equity can be found
at liberationsomatics.org/blog, as well as
a longer resource list on this topic.

References
Akee, R., M. R. Jones, and S. R. Porter.
2019. Race matters: Income shares,
income inequality, and income mobility for
all U.S. races. Demography 56: 999–1021.
Cunningfolk, A.J. August 11, 2015. “The
Sliding Scale: A Tool of Economic Justice.”
Accessed May 10, 2021. http://www.
wortsandcunning.com/blog/sliding-scale.
Damien, Hadassah. May 2016. “Sliding
Scale: Why, How, and Sorting Out
Who.” Accessed May 10, 2021. https://
w w w. r i d e f r e e f e a r l e s s m o n e y. c o m /
blog/2016/05/sliding-scale-1.
Good Therapy. “How to Set Sliding Scale
Fees for Your Practice.” Accessed May
10, 2021. https://www.goodtherapy.org/
for-professionals/business-management/
money/how-to-set-sliding-scale-fees-
for-your-practice.
Livingstone, Kammaleathahh. “Tip it
Forward.” Accessed May 10, 2021 http://
www.sustainablehealthchoices.com/tip-
it-forward-1.
Urban Institute. October 5, 2017. “Nine
Charts about Wealth Inequality in America

69
It’s a Family Affair

A Rolfing® Family
By Bethany Ward, Basic Rolfing Instructor, Rolf Movement® Instructor
and Larry Koliha, Basic Rolfing Instructor, Rolf Movement Practitioner

Bethany Ward ABSTRACT Bethany Ward and Larry Koliha are both Rolfing® Structural
Integration faculty while also being husband and wife; in this article they share their
journey to co-creating their careers and their lives.

[Authors’ note: Larry and I worked on
this article together but, in keeping with
the topic, we are family, and that means
whoever is available picks up the slack.
Today it was Bethany’s turn. A lot of the
article is written in first-person because it
sounded more natural. But, rest assured,
we chewed on the topic together.]
Larry and I have been Rolfing collectively
for over forty years and teaching
bodywork for the majority of that
time. Oddly, we both came to Rolfing
Larry Koliha
Structural Integration (SI) as a second
career after working in manufacturing-
related corporate environments. Larry
was an engineer and I received an MBA
specializing in production and operations
management. So, we have similar
backgrounds in analyzing, improving,
and managing systems. Although we
didn’t know each other when we decided
to change careers, we each yearned for
something more and eventually found
our way to training at the then-named
Rolf Institute® (now known as the Dr. Ida
Rolf Institute®). Once certified, we were
both pretty involved at the school and our
similar interests kept bringing us together
at classes and trainings. We got together
in 2006 and married in 2013.

70

Perhaps one of the reasons a Rolfing career is so meaningful
is because Rolfing SI is more than an occupation – it’s a
philosophy and way of seeing the world. Much of what
applies to structure and function of an individual applies to
the world around us.
When we were asked to write something
about being a Rolfing family, Larry and I
found ourselves listing Rolfing couples,
and generational Rolfers, and were
surprised by how much company we
had. But the more we talked about it,
the more the idea of Rolfing families
made sense. Rolfing lore tells us that
when Dr. Rolf was asked what she was
most proud of, she mentioned, “creating
meaningful work.” “Meaningful” is an
apt description because it’s general
enough to encompass all the possibility
and potential that is Rolfing SI. Perhaps
one of the reasons a Rolfing career is so
meaningful is because Rolfing SI is more
than an occupation – it’s a philosophy
and way of seeing the world. Much of
what applies to structure and function of
an individual applies to the world around
us. Perhaps it is this shared perspective
on the world that contributes to the
frequency of multi-Rolfer families. It’s
hard to say which comes first. Does the
way we see and interact in the world self-
select us as individuals who are likely
to become – and befriend – Rolfers? Or
does studying and embodying Rolfing
sensibilities shape the way we act in the
world? Well, of course, it’s both.
Those Inclined to Study
Rolfing SI Probably Already
Have a Lot in Common
For most of the world, Rolfing SI is not a
common or obvious career choice. Just
getting to the point of deciding, “I think I
want to train as a Rolfer,” usually involves
a remarkable story of soul-searching
and overcoming obstacles. Furthermore,
Rolfers tend to be independent, process-
oriented people who value exploration and
personal growth over most everything else.
In a materialistic world that focuses on
money and things, Rolfers’ love of direct-
experience and self-expression already
predisposes special bonds between
practitioners. From this perspective, it’s
not at all surprising that many of us end
Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021
up choosing Rolfer life-partners who share
our unconventional point of view.  Furthermore, it was Rolfing SI that taught
The Practice of Rolfing SI
Further Influences How We
Perceive and Act
Inherent to Rolfing SI is an appreciation
of systems and nonlinear relationships.
Rolfing theory has resulted in a shared
language that facilitates our ability to do
the work and communicate it with others.
This language shapes our thinking. For
example, basic Rolfing theory breaks
structural interventions into phases
of preparation, differentiation, and
integration; we apply these concepts
holistically, including functional,
psychobiological, and energetic aspects.
But Rolfing concepts like preparation,
differentiation, and integration don’t just
apply to all aspects of the individual, but
to all systems in the universe.
What Does Rolfing Theory
and Language Have to
Do with Personal Rolfing
Relationships?
Because my husband is also a Rolfer, I
can (and do) use Rolfing concepts and
terminology to talk about everything
from choosing paint colors for a room
(we want to ‘differentiate’ the space
while still making sure that the color
choice ‘integrates’ into our general style;
creating a sense of connection and flow
throughout the house), to what’s going
on in the political arena (‘differentiation
without integration impedes function’
as in partisan lawmakers refusing to
work together). Furthermore, we often
find that applying Rolfing SI’s Principles
of Intervention – adaptability, support,
palintonicity, closure, and holism – to
non-Rolfing subjects provides objectivity
and insight. For example, when working
with groups, I’m often struck by the
potential for greater adaptability, support,
www.rolf.org
or the ‘unity in opposition’ of palintonicity.
me to appreciate closure and how most
situations benefit from preparing for
closure early on in the process. Whether
I’m writing an article or considering my
own short time on Earth, thinking about
closure helps clarify and focus my efforts.
Lastly, the meta-principle, holism, keeps
me attuned to the connectedness of all
things. 
Perhaps Larry’s and my zeal for Rolfing
language and concepts results from the
familiarity that comes with teaching the
material. I suspect other Rolfers don’t
mention palintonicity over coffee. But
even if they don’t use the exact Rolfing
terminology, I’ll argue that appreciating
relational concepts such as biotensegrity,
somatic awareness, and neuroplasticity
shape the way most of us see the world.
What better metaphor for understanding
our world’s innumerable interconnected
relationships than fascia itself? Obviously,
Rolfers find companions from all walks of
life. There are many other holistic vocations
and avocations that share our appreciation
for systems and soma. Indeed, there are
many happy holistically-minded pairings
out there. In our marriage, we suspect
the shared understanding of Rolfing SI
contributes to our compatibility. Perhaps
similar mindsets that brought us to Rolfing
work meant we had a lot in common to start
with. But our shared Rolfing perspective
and activities shape us in ways that
continue to strengthen the bond.
Rolfing Metaphors Often Give
Language to Understandings
That Go without Words
Larry has an amazing spatial sense. There
is nothing more fun than rearranging
furniture in a room with Larry. We each move
furniture to different spots, communicating
only in grunts and single syllables about
what works and what doesn’t. Determining
if a piece of furniture belongs in one place
over another in the context of a room
71
It’s a Family Affair

. . . to my greater Rolfing family. For

all the squabbles and conflict that
we bump into as a membership,
I remind myself that this is pretty
normal for a family.
goes beyond rational thought. Whether What else would we expect? A little unity
a chair is well positioned in a room is of opposition makes for a meaningful
something you sense in your body and in existence.
the moment. For example, when there isn’t
Bethany Ward and Larry Koliha are
enough walkway or all colors are grouped Dr. Ida Rolf Institute® (DIRI) faculty
in one area of the room, I sense a faint members who have been sharing personal
internal sense of compression or tension. and professional lives since 2006.
Likewise, when furniture and objects are Bethany co-chairs the Rolf Movement
positioned in a way that facilitates spatial Faculty and has served on the Leadership
balance and ease of use, this translates Council for the International Somatic
as a sense of somatic spaciousness, Movement Education and Therapy
expansion, or ease in my own body. Many Association (ISMETA). Larry has served
people (my family included) would find on DIRI’s Board of Directors as Faculty
these observations a bit esoteric, so it’s a Representative.
gift to have a partner who intuitively gets
what you’re talking about. Much of what
goes on between people happens at an
unconscious, subverbal, whole-body
level. So, when there’s agreement on
the stuff that’s always in the background
but usually goes unnoticed, you’re way
ahead. In this sense, Rolfing embodiment
may contribute to peaceful cohabitation
and communication.
Of course, it is not all bliss. Larry has an
unspoken and instinctual understanding
of feng shui, yet I am confounded by
the way he loads a dishwasher. I have
accepted that no additional years of
cohabitation are going to fix the haphazard
placement of cups and plates. As for me,
while my interoceptive awareness is alive
and well, I have absolutely no sense of
compass bearings and honestly can’t find
my way home without a map. My family
and friends cannot fathom why I must
rely on GPS, even on well-traveled routes.
But Larry doesn’t question, he just makes
sure my phone is charged.
While I enjoy being married to a Rolfer, the
deep sense of having an unusual outlook
that is appreciated and understood extends
beyond my life partner, to my greater Rolfing
family. For all the squabbles and conflict
that we bump into as a membership, I
remind myself that this is pretty normal for
a family. Perhaps this is even more so for a
family comprised of individuals who value
independent thinking and the subjective
experience the way we do.

72
 Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021 www.rolf.org

The Pleasures of
Partnering in Life
and in Our Work
By Gale Loveitt, Certified Advanced Rolfer®, Biodynamics Practitioner, and
Thomas Walker, Certified Advanced Rolfer, Rolf Movement® Practitioner,
and Biodynamics Practitioner

ABSTRACT Rolfers and life partners, Gale Loveitt and Thomas Walker, share the
dynamics of working together and being together.
Having a partner who is fabulous in
the general world of living, as well as,
playing together in our working world of
bodies, their mysteries, and the ongoing
deepening of our understandings is a true
blessing. ‘Talking shop’, writing together,
and teaching our continuing education
Gale Loveitt (CE) classes together, we share with our
colleagues the amazing ability of the body
to heal and reorganize itself, hoping to
broaden the understandings of our work
as Rolfers. It was 1994 when we first
met at a Rolfing® Structural Integration
(SI) conference. After a year of a long-
distance relationship, we began living
and working together out of our home
in Burlington, Vermont. This worked
well for us and our clients and we were
attentive about keeping our work and
living spaces separate. Upon moving to
Steamboat Springs, Colorado in 2000,
Thomas Walker we manifested a fabulous home. With
just a little remodeling, we now have a
client bathroom and two lovely offices on
the ground level of our home. Our living
space upstairs is quite separate from
our offices. Working out of our home
continues to work very well for us. Not
only are there tax benefits, but in a slow
week or week with a sporadic schedule it
is easy to manage our day without having
to drive to and from an office. We have a
wonderfully easy commute!
We each have our own fan club and
referral group, but as a couple we provide
a collective skill set of sixty-one years
of Rolfing experience. Whether a client
prefers to work with a man or a woman, we
have them covered, and to some extent
we each have fortes which may determine
who returns the phone call of a new client.
Though some folks will wait weeks to see
one of us specifically, some of our clients
will see whoever has the first opening. We

73
It’s a Family Affair

Gale has always seen her clients less as who they are in
any given moment, but more as who they are becoming . . .
Thomas tends to work with the bulk of our athlete clientele. As
a life-long athlete himself with experience both in coaching and
being coached, he has an excellent eye for movement and the
ability to discern what glitch is limiting an athlete’s function.
have shared some clients and suggested blossom as they let go of restricting We live in a small town that has many
to some that what they are working with patterns and habits and realize they have serious athletes. Thomas tends to work
might be better addressed by the other all the skills they need to rediscover and with the bulk of our athlete clientele. As
of us. Even though we have taken the increase the ease that is potentially in a life-long athlete himself with experience
same continuing education classes, our their body. In her first weeks of training both in coaching and being coached, he
interpretation of what we brought home Gale developed a love of anatomy. She has an excellent eye for movement and
from a training may vary. As we continue is interested in exploring connections in the ability to discern what glitch is limiting
to learn more ourselves, our clients have the body that sometimes are the key to an athlete’s function. He works well with
the opportunity to experience a broader helping a client with difficult, mysterious his many highly motivated young clients.
scope of new experiences. dysfunctions. She loves figuring out arm He has been where they are, aspiring
Over the years we have grown our and shoulder-girdle troubles. She loves to be the best in their field. With older
particular interests with some differences feet and lower legs and the whole process athletes, all of whom want to be able to
in our focus. Gale has always seen of being grounded. Figuring out what to continue playing at all the sports they
her clients less as who they are in any offer her clients as homework, so they love, he can easily see the key to their
given moment, but more as who they can more easily carry the table work into difficulties by just watching them walk
are becoming. Watching the process of their life out in their world, is particularly for a couple of moments. Even with all
a client growing more self-aware, more fun. Though anatomy continues to be a these skills, his continuing passion is the
familiar with the potential they have to resource for her, trusting in the wisdom process of deepening into the principles
change, and realizing they have the ability of her client’s own unique healing aspect, of biodynamics. We both are constantly
through their own attention and work to which knows the best path to their own amazed at the ability of the body to heal
become more functionally efficient and unique ‘Health’, is never far from her and reorganize itself. As we continuously
at home in their body is very gratifying. thoughts in partnering with the Health of practice the presence and patience
It is a delight for her to watch a client her clients. required to support the inherent healing
aspect of our clients and to stay out of
the way of their process, we continue to
grow in ourselves.
We also take CE trainings together.
One value of this is that we gather
more information as we each pick up
on different details from lectures and
experiences. A particular interest of ours
has been exploring the three models
of craniosacral therapy and working
to seamlessly integrate some of those
principles into the Rolfing paradigm.
Each of us abandoned the biomechanical
craniosacral therapy model after our first
classes. It seemed impossible for us to
integrate it into the work of de-rotating the
lower leg or increasing range of motion
in the hip. We have explored our work
together for twenty-three years. Very early
on we attended a lecture by Dr. James
Jealous, DO, a cranial osteopath. This
lecture not only gave us a very intimate
awareness of our own original primitive
streaks (the embryonic primary midline
of our creation) but it also was our first
introduction of the kind of cranial work we

74

By creating written information to share with our community
about what we have learned and what we have found to be
successful, especially in combining structural, functional,
and energetic aspects into our work, we hope to broaden the
understanding of our profession as Rolfers.
did want to learn – biodynamics – which
focuses on the ‘Fluid Body’ and how the
movements of ‘Wholeness’ create and
maintain our ‘Soma’ from conception
throughout life. This began our serious
search for a cranial training that was not
biomechanical but biodynamic (the study
of physical motion or dynamics in living
systems). This model also recognizes
that each body has its own ‘Inherent
Healing’ aspect, which is much wiser
about priorities for healing than any of our
brains could possibly figure out.
When we finally found the training we
were hoping for (thank you, Michael Shea),
this very exciting new viewpoint and
experience, requiring new touch skills,
patience, and presence, turned out to be
the catalyst and basis for the trainings we
now teach together, Listening Handds
Seminars (ListeningHandsSeminars.com).
For nearly two decades we have been
making space in our sessions to explore
and test the information, touch skills
and presence required to partner with,
rather than override, the Inherent Health
and wisdom of our clients’ systems.
Through our own growth in this process
we also have added more presence and
spaciousness within our own relationship
as well.
We have fun talking shop. Who needs
a television if you have a Rolfer for a
partner? We have talked all evening about
interesting experiences we have had
in our Rolfing day, or about some bit of
information gathered from a book that we
have been reading. Because we are both
continuously exploring how to work with
the ‘fluid body’ (70+% of the human body
is fluids) and partnering with the Inherent
Health of our clients to create the greatest
change possible in any given moment,
we continue to have interesting fodder for
our evening conversations.
Thomas is the scholar in our household
– he is the book buyer (golly, we have an
interesting library), the podcast listener
and the voracious reader. Thomas’s
ability to read or scan all the books that
Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021
show up in the house is amazing. His
ability to pick up on books to explore
from what he reads and listens to brings
a lot of learning into our home. Gale with
her bit of dyslexia does not find reading
to be her strong suit for learning. She
is, however, excellent at note taking and
we can revisit what we have learned in
classes and in our conversations. We
are blessed that in our ongoing chats we
gather a lot of information, new ideas,
and thoughts. Some may or may not
match our experiences and ideas, but
we can run these thoughts around in our
conversations and continue to explore
how best to interact with our clients using
our collective knowledge.
We Have Fun
Because we have common educations
and input, we also can write together.
Nearly any topic one of us can come up
with, the other can flesh out with other
ideas and experiences. By creating written
information to share with our community
about what we have learned and what we
have found to be successful, especially
in combining structural, functional, and
energetic aspects into our work, we hope
to broaden the understanding of our
profession as Rolfers. We will continue to
practice the principles of biodynamics as
they relate to or mesh with the Principles
of Intervention of Rolfing SI, the Ten Series
and the best practices of safety and
spaciousness for our clients to become
more fully themselves. Because we
share a common language we can also
enjoy quirky news stories and ideas. For
instance, we particularly had a great time
with the story of the “new organ” the MDs
“discovered” in 2018 – the fluids of the
body. That those fluids have been in the
studies of osteopathy for over a hundred
years, and that the fluid fascia has been the
tissue of choice for Rolfers for decades,
made this ‘great discovery’ particularly
funny. We have also loved that the touch
and viewpoint we have been teaching for
over ten years now, to work with a gentle
www.rolf.org
and listening touch so as to interact with
the fluids of the body, is now beginning to
be validated in recent fascial research.
It doesn’t have to be forced. It’s that
forcing that you have to avoid at all costs.
Dr. Ida P. Rolf
So, being partners in life and in our work
has, over these many years, been a
delight. Perhaps it is our example that has
inspired one of our daughters to become
a Rolfer and another to be looking to
train as a Rolfer so she will have the
skills that she can use to help others. We
opened this article by stating that having
a partner who is fabulous in the general
world of living and playing together, as
well as our working world of bodies, their
mysteries, and the ongoing deepening of
our understandings of how our amazing
bodies are created and maintained
through life, is a true blessing. Besides
all these other benefits we can work
with each other to manage the physical
troubles that come from our activities.
We often wonder how folks live without a
Rolfer in their house.
We both love this work and sharing what
we know with others!
Thomas Walker is a faculty member of
the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute® and has been
a Certified Rolfer for thirty-two years. He
began his study of craniosacral work in
1993. He has over 1,400 hours of training
in biodynamics and has been practicing
biodynamics in his Rolfing work for
over twenty years. Thomas created the
curriculum for Listening Hands Seminars. 
Gale Loveitt has been a Certified Rolfer
for twenty-nine years. She took her first
craniosacral in 1993. She is an Advanced
Rolfer and has had extensive training
in biodynamics and has practiced
biodynamic touch in all aspects of her
Rolfing work for more than twenty years.
She has assisted all phases of the Rolfing
Basic Training as well as other CE trainings
including Listening Hands Seminars.
75
It’s a Family Affair
Dr. Rolf Gave
Me a Purpose, a
Passion, a Future,
and a Family
By Joy Belluzzi, Certified Advanced Rolfer®
ABSTRACT Joy Belluzzi shares her story with Rolfing® Structural Integration, from
receiving sessions to working for Dr. Rolf, to training as a Rolfer, to marrying Dr. Rolf’s
younger son.
Dr. Rolf had an inimitable way of affecting
the lives of those who came in close
contact with her, and I was no exception.
Little did I know what was in store for me
when I first met her.
I moved to Philadelphia (not far from
where Dr. Rolf lived at the time in
Joy Belluzzi
Blackwood, New Jersey) in 1978. I had
received Rolfing sessions in 1976 from
Bob Pritchard, a Rolfer in Mill Valley,
California, so I was familiar with Dr. Rolf
and her work. In Philly, I encountered
Rolfer Robert Toporek in an EST (Erhard
Seminars Training®) seminar, and he
frequently spoke of Dr. Rolf. One evening,
I approached him and asked if it was
possible to meet her. He invited me to her
upcoming eighty-second birthday party,
which was being celebrated at his house,
and that was my first contact with her.
76
I began occasionally going to her
apartment in New Jersey to read to her,
as her eyesight was beginning to fail,
and shortly thereafter, Robert asked if
I would be interested in taking over the
job as her secretary. Her current secretary
would soon be leaving to train as an
acupuncturist. At first, I declined. I had
a degree in counseling and was hoping
to find a job in that field. Plus, in 1978, I
found Philadelphia less enchanting than
the San Francisco Bay Area I had recently
left. However, after some thought, I
realized that I had been curious about
and interested and participating in the
human potential movement in California,
and I decided it might be an opportunity
to ‘hang out’ with someone who was
both part of this movement and a master
in her field. So, I said I would commit to
 Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021 www.rolf.org

the position for a year. I had had a lot of

diversions in my life, and I figured that one
more wouldn’t hurt.
My time with Dr. Rolf was brief. I began
working with her in July of 1978 and
remained through her death in March of
1979. It was a profound and remarkable
experience for me. It was a fascinating,
challenging and, sometimes, difficult time
in my life, but those nine months with her
totally changed the direction of my life
and my future. Although I was hired as
her personal secretary, I actually became
more of a companion and nurse, plus
occasional cook and driver.
Right after I began working with her, she
was diagnosed with colon cancer. She
met this head on. She completed her
summer commitments of vacationing with
her family, attending the Rolf Institute®
annual meeting in Boulder, Colorado, and
being a guest of honor at the wedding of
Joe Heller (Rolfer and the president of the
Rolf Institute at that time) in Burlington,
Vermont. Then she focused on her healing
Ida Rolf with her younger
process. I was fascinated by Dr. Rolf’s
son Alan Demmerle and
exploration, open-mindedness, and
his children Andrew and
willingness to try out various therapies
Frances, 1969.
on herself, something I believe she did
throughout her life. We spent a week in
New York where she had treatments from recover. I often wondered if she wasn’t time together. While I was in California,
a psychic healer. We then went to Montego just checking things out to make sure that I realized that he had become a very
Bay, Jamaica, where she received Laetrile the Institute would manage without her. important person in my life, and I decided
therapy (not approved by the FDA, so She stayed alert, focused and concerned to move back to the East Coast to
unavailable in the US). Finally, she was until the end. follow the trail of that relationship. After
treated at the University of Pennsylvania It was especially meaningful and important completing my prerequisite work to
Hospital where she had colon surgery. to me that I was with her when she died. apply to the Rolf Institute, I drove back to
Although she never said this, I felt she was It’s a very precious moment to be able Washington, DC, stopping in Boulder to
exploring various types of treatment to see to be present with someone during that have my personal interview.
what they offered and to test their efficacy, transition, and I am forever grateful for I was, ultimately, accepted for the first
not so much that she expected a cure at that. After her death, I spent two months phase of training in September 1980, and
that point in her life. Until the very end, she helping her family sort and clean out her I completed my Basic Training in May
continued to have research papers read apartment. Plus, by then, I also decided 1981, setting up practice in Bethesda,
to her, she monitored the workings of the that I wanted to stay involved with her Maryland. In September 1983, I was
Rolf Institute, and she kept expanding her work. She had touched my soul! certified in the Advanced Training, and
vision of her work.  In the fall of 1979, I returned to northern shortly afterwards, Alan and I were
Not only did I respect and admire Dr. Rolf California to embark upon fulfilling the married. I became stepmother to his two
for her hard work, dedication, and unique requirements to become a Rolfer. I had children, Andrew and Frances, and we
vision, but I grew to love her as the focused, an undergraduate degree in education had a son, Justin, in 1988. 
committed soul that she was. I was moved and English and a master’s degree in Dr. Rolf continued to be a presence
by her as a human being and what she counseling, but I didn’t have much of a throughout our lives, both personally and
was trying to accomplish through her science background. I spent the next ten professionally. Alan, who was trained
work. Her hopes and efforts to improve months living in San Raphael, working in as an electrical engineer and whose
the evolution of mankind were not only Sausalito, getting my massage training hobby was building and construction,
inspiring, but daunting. with Rolfer Bob Brown in Oakland, and built a beautiful Rolfing room addition  in
taking an anatomy class at College of our home for me. Although Alan never
It was a privilege and a great honor to be
Marin and a physiology class at Berkeley. considered training as a Rolfer, shortly
present with her through this last stage of
her life. There were several times in the During the time that I was cleaning out before he retired from government service,
last few months when it seemed like the Dr. Rolf’s apartment, her younger son, and inspired by the possibility to actively
end was near, and she would suddenly Alan Demmerle, and I began spending support his mother’s work, he ran for the

77
It’s a Family Affair
Joy Belluzzi and Alan Demmerle at a Rolf Institute Annual Meeting in Boulder, 1988.
position of President of the Rolf Institute,
won the election, and served in that
office from December of 1987 through
the summer of 1992. This proved to be a
particularly difficult and challenging time
in the history of the Institute, with a major
split in the organization where some faculty
left and formed a new school (for which
they resurfaced the name the Guild for
The Demmerle-Belluzzi family. From left to right, Frances Demmerle, Alan Demmerle, Joy Belluzzi,
Andrew Demmerle, and Justin Demmerle in November 2016.
78
would in future be chosen by the Board of
Directors, giving the board the power and
authority it needed to govern effectively.
[Editor’s note: Alan Demmerle died on
August 12, 2019. You can read Joy’s
memorial to him (“Remembering Alan
Demmerle”) in the March 2020 issue of
this journal.]
Our son, Justin, never met his
grandmother, but both Andrew and
Frances spent memorable time with her
as children. Andrew and Frances were
sixteen and almost twelve, respectively,
when their grandmother died. Andrew
remembers regularly receiving work from
his grandmother when they visited, and
all of the grandchildren have experienced
Rolfing sessions at some point over the
years, so they know the work that their
grandmother pioneered.
There have been a few overlaps in family
careers. Like his father, Andrew works
at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland. He is
currently a Senior Interventional Radiology
Technologist. Frances, inspired by her
grandmother’s vision and contribution
to humanity, became an osteopathic
Structural Integration). Alan helped the Rolf
physician (DO). She has a private practice
Institute navigate this time, and although it
in Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine
was a painful process for all involved, he
/ Neuromuscular Skeletal Medicine in
later noted that Dr. Rolf’s primary interest
Charlottesville, Virginia. She shares a bit
was in widely disseminating her work,
of her story on page 79. Like Dr. Rolf,
and the formation of further schools was
Justin earned a PhD in biochemistry
in alignment with that wish. Also during
and is currently a postdoctoral fellow
his term, Alan led the effort to change
in the Department of Biochemistry and
the Institute bylaws so that the president
Molecular Biology at Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health in
Baltimore, Maryland.
I do believe that Dr. Rolf has had a big
impact on all of her family members.
We continue to share our memories,
thoughts, and stories about her and
our appreciation for her. In the end, my
chance meeting with Dr. Rolf gave me a
purpose, a passion, a future and a family. 
She was, and still is, an inspiration and a
guiding light for me.
Joy Belluzzi is a Certified Advanced
Rolfer with a practice in Chevy Chase,
Maryland. As described in this article, she
experienced Rolfing sessions, then was
secretary and companion to Dr. Rolf in her
final year. Belluzzi then trained as a Rolfer,
and later married Alan Demmerle, Rolf’s
younger son.
 Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021 www.rolf.org

A Gift from My
Grandmother
By Frances Eva Demmerle, DO

ABSTRACT Frances Demmerle shares how she became an osteopath and the
influence that her grandmother, Dr. Ida Rolf, had on her career trajectory.

My grandmother, Ida Rolf, died when several forms: pursuing an education,

I was not quite twelve years old. In my
short time with her, I learned she was
not the type to bake cookies or knit me
a sweater. Her gift to me was a sense of
confidence that only a family member
Frances Eva Demmerle can provide.
She taught me that preparation was
paramount. In her mind, preparation took
anticipating potential challenges, and
developing an action plan to achieve
a positive outcome. Preparation.
Preparation. Preparation.
When she asked me the typical question
many adults ask a child, the “What do you
want to do when you grow up” question, I
suggested the obvious:

79
It’s a Family Affair
Ida Rolf gifted Rolfing SI to the world. But
more importantly, and less conspicuously,
she gifted confidence and a desire to
learn to her young granddaughter.
“I want to be a Rolfer®!”
My grandmother told me Rolfing
[Structural Integration (SI)] was an
admirable path to consider but, if that
was my ultimate answer, she suggested
the best preparation would be a liberal
arts education followed by osteopathic
medical school. She challenged me not
to settle on my first answer as the only
answer. Rather, she encouraged me
to verify my answer by researching my
hypothesis. I must wait until I was twenty-
five years old, after all. [Editor’s note: The
Rolf Institute® used to not train anyone
under twenty-five.] Therefore, I had time
to attend college and medical school,
seeking the knowledge and experiences
to make an informed decision – not a
decision based on early and uninformed
assumptions. She harbored no
expectation that I follow in her footsteps.
All these years later I have mixed feelings
when I think about the fact that I never
sought Rolfing training. I describe myself
80
as a bit of an osteopathic purist. As a
result, I spent twenty years developing
a deep knowledge of osteopathy. I
am certain I found my life’s calling in
osteopathy and I am forever grateful to
my grandmother. She never presumed
to have all the answers. Rather, she led
me to understand that the answers need
to come from within. Her ethos wouldn’t
allow her life’s work to be the sole source
informing my professional journey.
I so appreciate my grandmother’s
encouragement to look beyond what
I knew, research my assumptions and
what informed them, and discover my
own path. Ida Rolf gifted Rolfing SI to
the world. But more importantly, and less
conspicuously, she gifted confidence
and a desire to learn to her young
granddaughter. I found my answer within.
Frances Eva Demmerle is an osteopathic
physician (Neuromusculoskeletal Medicine /
Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine) who has
a private practice in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Frances Demmerle with Ida Rolf, 1969.
 Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021 www.rolf.org

Three Vast Nets

by Kathy McConnell, Certified Advanced Rolfer®, Rolf Movement® Practitioner

Indra’s Net
Ancient Hindu God of the Sky
casts a Net
that stretches out/in
infinitely in all directions.
At every crossing of the silky threads
rests a multi-faceted magic jewel,
perfectly reflecting
every other jewel
on the Net.
Each jewel representing
an organism, a thing, a being,
a thought, an emotion,
ad infinitum.
Any change in one is mirrored in all.
The process of infinite reflection
is woven into the Cosmos.

The Fascial Net

AKA the Organ of Form.
A three dimensional web
contained within a body,
bounded by skin,
spun with a living liquid crystalline fiber
that morphs according to function;
tendons, ligaments, membranes.
A highly intelligent wrapping for
cells, organs, muscles, bones,
in charge of opening and closing the
gateways of physiology,
regulating what gets in and
what gets carried away.
It conducts light, electricity and other information,
instantaneously, faster than nerve signals.
The unifying whole-body communication system
akin to the freeways, bridges, tunnels,
country roads and wilderness pathways
we use to navigate Earth.

The Internet
World Wide Web
The electronic matrix.
We wish it were
as intelligent as fascia
or as beautiful
as Indra’s jewels,
but for now,
it’ll have to do.

Kathy has enjoyed practicing Rolfing® Structural Integration and craniosacral therapy in the San Francisco
Bay Area for over twenty years. She closed down her hands-on practice in March 2020 due to the pandemic
scramble, and began to receive poetry from the muses. She has also been pleasantly surprised to discover
that distance healing is within her range of abilities since touch therapies were verboten for a time.

81
Perspectives

Reflections in
Lockdown on
Being a Rolfer®
By Alan Richardson, Certified Advanced Rolfer and Rolf Movement®
Practitioner

ABSTRACT Alan Richardson uses lockdown time in the pandemic to reflect on his
training and career in Rolfing® Structural Integration and the value of our community.

First Training — Boulder, 1994 I start to push Michelle’s leg around, at

It’s mid-February 1994, on our first day
of training, and we are about to start the
first practicum. Our task is to explore the
range of movement of the upper leg. I
have zero massage experience and have
never done anything like this before. My
practicum partner, Michelle, is supine and
Alan Richardson I am holding her leg, slightly bent, off the
table at an angle of about ninety degrees.
I am in a buoyant mood because I have
just heard that I have secured a contract
teaching job in Taiwan for one year starting
in April, a great relief because the cost of
the training has left me broke.
first slowly, then gradually speeding up.
I am swept along with the excitement of
the first day of class and meeting many
people. My movements are clumsy and
jolting. Michelle doesn’t let on how bad
it must feel.
The assistant appears at my side. “What
are you doing?” Bob asks.
“Exploring,” I reply.
“But that’s way too fast. Here, let me
show you.”
Bob steps in, takes hold of Michelle’s
leg and carefully supports its weight.

82

Instead of pushing her leg as if it were an
inanimate object, as I was doing, he leans
his body forward and carries it with him,
forward, back, shifting to the side in a kind
of dance.
“You get the idea? Now you have a go.”
I take hold of the leg more carefully than
before and start to push, but Bob stops
me and places a hand gently on my back.
“Let your weight settle into your feet.”
I feel the muscular tension in my arms
relax as my feet hug the floor. “Yes, that’s
it. Now . . . slowly start to move.”
This time I feel connected to Michelle’s
leg, compared to before when it was like
a foreign object. My hands support her
leg evenly as I lean my body forward. It is
difficult to coordinate at first but becomes
easier after rocking forward and backward
a few times. I start to get a feel for the end
point of the femur and how it swivels in the
hip socket. It dawns on me that the secret
is in minimizing effort, not using strength.
“This feels like tai chi,” I say.
“And it feels much better!” Michelle adds,
evidently relieved.
I first heard of Rolfing® Structural
Integration (SI) while teaching English
in Iida, Japan, in 1993. My employer
and friend Shigeho called me one day
and said: “You need to meet this guy;
he talks like you.” She was referring to
Mark Caffall, a Rolfer who was teaching
a form of SI (called Shin-Integration) to
a group of Japanese students in Ina,
Nagano Prefecture. Shigeho had been
quite depressed for a week after dropping
a knife on her foot. When she called me
she was euphoric, and claimed that seeing
Mark for thirty minutes had turned her
mood around. I never got to meet Caffall
as he moved away, but I did get hold of
and study Ida Rolf’s book and was hooked
by the first line, the Norman Wiener quote:
“We are not stuff that abides, but patterns
which perpetuate themselves.” Soon after
I called the Rolf Institute® [now the Dr.
Ida Rolf Institute® (DIRI)] and made the
commitment to go to Boulder for the first
part of the training, called Foundations of
Bodywork (FOB) at that time.
That first training in the two-story building
on Canyon Boulevard was excellent.
Til Luchau led an extremely creative
class assisted by Jon Martine, and other
teachers were involved. Cornelia Rossi
taught anatomy; Peter Levine came in for a
couple of days to talk about the autonomic
Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021
I watch the people walking past me
on Neal Street. Clutching a batch of
leaflets in my left hand, I take one in
my right hand and hold it up, breathe
deeply, and try to banish thoughts
of my own ridiculousness. “Rolfing!
Rolfing!” I shout to the passing crowd.
nervous system and trauma; Jim Oschman
also gave a couple of lectures, and Vivian
Jaye and Caryn McHose took us through
some embodiment pieces. Tom Myers
was around for a few days and a few of
us attended an early-morning stretching
class that he offered. The FOB students
bonded well as we plunged into the rich
phenomenological realm of embodiment,
gave and received many hours of touch,
and explored the fascinating dynamics
of therapeutic relationship. As the class
progressed, I was the Rolf Movement
model for Jane Harrington’s class in
the adjacent room, and also received
my first Rolfing Ten Series from Pam
Rankin, who practiced in the Rolf Institute
building. Just before the training started, I
completed Reiki levels one and two, and
also attended tai chi classes. The whole
experience was a crash course in somatic
ontology, and I loved it.
At the end of FOB, four of us went to the
Grand Canyon, descended into the valley,
and slept by the river for three days. It was
a fitting way to round off what had been
a deeply transformational experience in
Boulder. After this I went to Taiwan to earn
money for Phase II in São Paolo, Brazil, in
1996, and then taught for another two years
in Japan to save up for the third and final
part of the training in Salvador in Bahia,
Brazil. I was certified as a Rolfer and Rolf
Movement practitioner by Tessy Brungardt
and Lael Keen on August 7, 1998.
Starting a Rolfing Practice in
London, 1998
I am standing near the esoteric bookshop
on Neal Street, close to Covent Garden
tube station. It is lunchtime on a cold
grey day in November, three months after
arriving in London, and it is about to rain.
My Rolfing clinic is a three-minute walk
away in Neal’s Yard, a charming little alley
with organic food cafés, a Chinese herb
www.rolf.org
shop, and Neal’s Yard Remedies, a shop
that sells natural health products.
The framework for my Rolfing business is
in place: my clinic here in Covent Garden,
my other office at home in Clapham,
a website, business cards, leaflets, an
advert running in Time Out. Yet in spite
of being in the ideal location, my new
business has not got going. In the whole
of October I have seen just five clients and
I am concerned about paying the rent.
One problem is that I am new to London,
having recently returned from years
living abroad. My only contact in London
on arrival was my brother. The second
problem is that hardly anybody has heard
about Rolfing SI. It is difficult just to sit
back and wait for clients to come. I have
to do something.
I watch the people walking past me on
Neal Street. Clutching a batch of leaflets
in my left hand, I take one in my right hand
and hold it up, breathe deeply, and try to
banish thoughts of my own ridiculousness.
“Rolfing! Rolfing!” I shout to the passing
crowd.
There is an Arabic saying: “Throw your
heart in front of you and run ahead to
catch it.” Sometimes you just have to
take a risk and ignore inhibitions or
embarrassment in order to make a bold
statement about what you believe in.
This was one of those moments. I gave
my leaflets to several people and extolled
the benefits of Rolfing SI. Although none
of these people ever contacted me to
arrange a session, the moment seems, in
hindsight, to have been important.
Admittedly, in the first six months after
arriving back in the UK I had doubts about
creating a viable business as a Rolfer. I had
been living away from the UK for eleven
years, was experiencing culture shock in
reverse, and no one in the UK seemed
to know about Rolfing SI. Jeffrey Burch
83
Perspectives
and Darcy Ortolff had practiced briefly in
London in the 1970s, and James Bardot
and Tom Myers later practiced there in
the 1980s. By the time I arrived these
people had left and I was one of only eight
Rolfers in England. Jennie Crewdson,
Prue Rankin-Smith, and Allen Rudolf
were the elders. My backup plan to make
a living if the Rolfing SI didn’t work out
was to become a Japanese translator,
but it never got to that. Somehow the
act of standing outside a bookshop, in
the cold, proclaiming Rolfing SI to the
world, crystallized my determination to
succeed. It required digging deep into
inner resources of tenacity to get out of my
comfort zone. In ‘talking the talk’, I came
to believe I could ‘walk the walk’. Standing
in the rain on a cold day shouting “Rolfing!
Rolfing!” spurred me on to put the word
out and believe it could work. I went on
to do leaflet drops and a few Rolfing talks
and demonstrations. Gradually the clients
showed up.
Being a Rolfer
Looking back on twenty-two years of
practice as a Rolfer, it is possible to
identify some key moments and important
learning points. It took a couple of years
to get the work into my hands and grow
confident from practice and encouraging
results. After a few years I discovered that
it is easy to get complacent in this work,
get into a set rhythm, to just tick along,
buoyed by sufficient positive feedback
from clients to persuade myself that I
was doing really good work, when in fact
the quality could have been much better.
When my enthusiasm started to flag, I
registered for a workshop. The continuing
education really paid off as it gave me new
techniques, concepts, and approaches
that could be integrated into my way of
working. This was an incremental and
continual process: stagnation; workshop
and new inspiration, leading to improved
quality of work, two steps forward;
stagnation after a while, one step back;
new workshop, two steps forward; and
so on. Some forward leaps were more
significant than others.
The biggest influences on my work have
been my two-year craniosacral therapy
(CST) diploma, the Rolfing Advanced
Training, and assisting in Rolfing classes.
Before the CST training I had been almost
carelessly pushing myofascia around,
basically ‘fascia mashing’. The theoretical
model for our work in my Basic Training
84
was the thixotropic effect where the
friction, pressure, or heat we applied
with our fingers, knuckles, and elbows
changed the consistency of fascia from a
gluey gel state to a semiliquid sol state.
Robert Schleip was already talking about
the role of the nervous system, but the
gel-to-sol model prevailed for some time.
My CST training involved many hours using
extremely light finger and hand pressure,
basically just sitting and waiting for ages,
almost like meditation. It was the opposite
of the funky sliding movements I had been
doing in Rolfing SI. But this still, patient,
waiting approach to client contact taught
me to respect the client’s nervous system.
This perspective of trusting the inherent
healing capacity of the client started to
become baked into my way of working.
Before CST training a session would
involve performing a string of myofascial
techniques with very little space between
them. After the CST training, this way of
working changed to a process of carefully
contacting the tissue, withdrawing after an
appropriate time, sitting back and waiting,
consciously giving space, then contacting
the tissue again. CST showed me how to
touch the myofascia with permission from
the client’s nervous system and gave me an
appreciation of how important a sense of
timing and space is to a positive outcome.
Music is the space between the notes.
The Advanced Training, with Tessy
Brungardt, Jan Sultan, and Harvey Burns
in 2006, was a second awakening. There
was plenty of time to ask questions that
had been hanging for years, as well
as to try out new things. Beforehand I
was accustomed to sliding about in the
tissue, but the Advanced Training gave
me the space to learn and develop a
different way of contacting the fascia,
namely by hooking and waiting. This
was a revelation to me at the time and
seemed to improve the quality of my
results significantly. In the CST I had
learned how to wait for the nervous-
system response and how to track the
subtle rhythms, but only by using very
light pressure (five grams). The Advanced
Training taught me that this waiting and
tracking could also be effective while
sensitively using considerable pressure
deep into the myofascial system. I was
starting to wake up to the importance of
making deep, precise contact with the
tissue at the available layer and making
subtle modifications of compression and
direction while holding a receptive, global
awareness of the client’s body.
The CST training and the Rolfing
Advanced Training were such powerful
influences that I only did a few workshops
in the next five years because I was
still absorbing and embodying the rich
material from those two trainings. The
next step in learning came when I assisted
a few Phase I modules (two Touch and
one Rolf Movement) and two Phase
II classes, one in Munich with Harvey
Burns (2018) and the other in the UK with
Giovanni Felicioni (2019). The privilege of
interacting with the students, finding ways
to help them learn, and witnessing their
huge progress is deeply rewarding. It has
also further improved my own knowledge
and practice.
Rolfing SI and the Pandemic
The pandemic of 2020 was a challenge for
most Rolfers because of the restrictions
on physical contact. For me, it was
disappointing not to be able to visit Boulder
as scheduled in April 2020 for the first time
since that life-changing training twenty-
seven years ago. It was also disappointing
that the Phase II in Munich I was due to
assist with in October was canceled. As
of this writing in January 2021, the UK
is currently in its third national lockdown
which started just before Christmas 2020.
Overall, in 2020 there were twenty-four
weeks where UK Rolfers were prohibited
from doing contact sessions. It was
frustrating that osteopaths, chiropractors,
and physiotherapists were able to work
from about mid-June, whereas Rolfers and
the rest of the bodywork community were
bizarrely grouped under the heading of
‘massage parlors’ and shut down. When
we were able to open again at the end of
July 2020, there was something noticeably
different about the sessions. After suffering
restricted human contact for four months,
both my clients and I derived extra benefit
from the neurobiological interaction of the
Rolfing sessions. Clients came in for their
first session in months looking wonky and
tense after sitting for hours a day working
from home; they looked great by the end
of the session, and seemed surprised and
relieved to rediscover their embodiment.
It was beautiful to see the opera-singing
on the balconies in Italy at the start of
the pandemic and to take part in the
clapping for the NHS [National Health
Service] front-line care workers at 8 pm
on Thursday evenings. Deprived of the
social contact normally taken for granted,
people created opportunities for social
 Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021 www.rolf.org

When we were able to open again

at the end of July 2020, there was
something noticeably different about
the sessions. After suffering restricted
human contact for four months, both
my clients and I derived extra benefit
from the neurobiological interaction of
the Rolfing sessions. Clients seemed
surprised and relieved to rediscover
their embodiment.
engagement wherever possible, saying to a remarkable group of people dedicated
hello to strangers in the park or chatting to helping other people flourish. I am
to Amazon couriers. The irony is that pleased to belong to such a collection of
during this pandemic most Rolfers have people. The world needs groups of people
been unable to work – at the very time like this – people like us.
when people most needed Rolfing SI. Alan Richardson began his Rolfing
When people are denied physical contact, training in 1994 with Til Luchau and Jon
they need touch in order to regulate Martine. He completed his Phase II in
their frazzled nervous systems and stay 1996 in Brazil with Lael Keen, Cornelia
connected to their bodies. Rolfing SI Rossi, and Vivien Jaye. His Phase III in
helps people to claim the somatic part 1998 with Tessy Brungardt and Lael Keen
of their identity and brings the physical, was also in Brazil. His Advanced Training
emotional, mental, and spiritual aspects was in 2006-2007 with Jan Sultan, Tessy
of their being into harmony. Brungardt, and Harvey Burns. His website
The human condition is like an enigma is www.rolfing-london.co.uk.
wrapped in a mystery. Nietzsche said:
“What is great in man is that he is a bridge
and not a goal: what is lovable in man
is that he is an over-going and a down-
going.” These words evoke the human
range of being, between an earthbound,
animalistic existence and an airy mental
experience: somewhere between a beast
and a god. In a digital age where many
people seem to identify more with their
mental side, Rolfing SI has an important
role to play in bringing people home to
their bodies. Rolfing SI not only integrates
a person’s structure, but can also create
and reinforce the habit of mindful,
embodied awareness.
At the height of the pandemic, series of free
webinars were offered, first by the Guild
for Structural Integration and then by DIRI.
Many teachers generously gave their time
to share their knowledge and wisdom. In a
time of isolation, forbidden to do the work
we love, the sense of community created
by these webinars was heartwarming. In
the middle of a crisis for our profession, the
webinars reaffirmed a sense of belonging

85
Institute News

Institute News
Message from Our Board Chair, Another trend that has been observed is the desire of many
massage therapists and other professionals to change
Libby Eason their life’s work.  DIRI provides the opportunity to change
professions to the original form of structural integration, while
Classes were suspended at
using some of their prior training as transfer credits for Phase
the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute® (DIRI)
One of the course.  This has the unique advantage of evolving
from March - September 2020. 
one’s skills and work, but also retaining the use of previous
Classes reconvened with all
skills as a foundation for the new paradigm.
state and locally mandated
safety protocols in place in Congratulations to all of the massage and bodywork training
October 2020.  That class, and institutions that have reopened, and best wishes for continued
all classes since, have been success.  We applaud all of your efforts and successes.
Covid-free. Graduates were
Sincerely,
very happy to be able to attend
and complete their Basic
Rolfing Certification training.
Our Board of Directors, staff and faculty have had to examine
facilities management, course content delivery and evolving
public health protocols, all while maintaining the standards that Libby Eason, Chair, DIRI Board of Directors, practiced massage
have been crucial in developing the theory and teachings as therapy for twelve years, has been a Rolfer® for twenty-nine
left to DIRI, the school founded by Dr. Ida Rolf fifty years ago. years, and faculty member for seventeen years.
DIRI is a COMTA approved training program, and as a result,
about half of our students take advantage of the federal
Title IV student loans available through the Department of
Education (DOE).   In addition, we received another DOE grant
that enabled us to give financial assistance to students for
lodging and travel, offsetting any concerns about potential
changes in airfare or living expenses if the class dates should
change due to illness.
Technology has been important as we have adapted to the
requirements of a new learning environment.  Use of the
CANVAS online learning management system has made
it possible for students to complete a lot of hours online,
outside the classroom for about 1.5 hours daily.  Students
also submit their assignments on CANVAS, and faculty can
review and give grades to each student’s work online.  The
days of passing stacks of paper between students, faculty
and administration are, thankfully, long gone.  After that break,
and with the concentrated study time in the middle of the
class day, students were better prepared for lectures and in-
class, hands-on portions of the training.  
We have been examining how to organize our curriculum to
reflect the need to minimize travel and in-person exposure.
This has led to looking at aspects of our training that are
more theoretical, like ethics and business practice, and
anatomical and embryological principles, being taught in a
distance-learning environment. Palpatory skills and aspects of
manipulation require in-person teaching. Creating segments
that allow students to distance learn maximizes the in-person
experience while minimizing face-to-face contact.

86
 Structure, Function, Integration / August 2021 www.rolf.org

Contacts
Officers &
Board of Directors
Libby Eason (Faculty, Chair)
bodfaculty2rep@rolf.org
Paul Van Alstine (Western USA)
bodwesternrep@rolf.org
Dr. Ida Rolf Institute Staff Japanese Rolfing Association
Christina Howe Yukiko Koakutsu, Foreign Liaison
Executive Director/Chief Academic Officer Omotesando Plaza 5th Floor
5-17-2 Minami Aoyama
Mary Contreras Minato-ku Tokyo, 107-0062
Director of Admissions Japan
& Recruitment +81+3-6868-3548

Florian Thomas (Europe) Pat Heckmann www.rolfing.or.jp

bodeuropeanrep@rolf.org Director of Operations & Systems jra@rolfing.or.jp
Management
®
Juan David Velez (Faculty) Rolfing Association of Canada
bodfaculty1rep@rolf.org Samantha Sherwin Beatrice Hollinshead
Director of Faculty & Student Sercices Suite 289, 17008 - 90 Ave
Cosper Scafidi (Eastern USA, Treasurer) Edmonton, AB T5T 1L6
bodeasternrep@rolf.org Wendy Griep Canada
Student Sercices & Financial Aid Advisor +1-416 804-5973
Greice Gobbi (International) (905) 648-3743 fax
bodinternationalrep@rolf.org Shannon Wilson
Receptionist & Clinic Coordinator www.rolfingcanada.org
Ines Hoffmann (At-Large, Secretary) info@rolfingcanada.org
bodatlarge2@rolf.org Brazilian Rolfing Association
Sally Nakai, Administrator
Jenny Rock (At-Large) Associação Brasileira de Rolfing - ABR
bodatlarge1@rolf.org R. Cel. Arthur de Godoy, 83
Vila Mariana
Dan Somers (Central & Mountain USA) 04018-050-SãoPaulo-SP
bodcentralrep@rolf.org Brazil
Executive Board Members
+55-11-5574-5827
Libby Eason +55-11-5539-8075 fax
Ines Hoffman www.rolfing.com.br
Cosper Scafidi rolfing@rolfing.com.br

Education Executive Committee European Rolfing Association e.V.

Neal Anderson, Chair Sabine Klausner
Tessy Brungardt Saarstrasse 5
Lisa Fairman 80797 Munchen
Larry Koliha Germany
Kevin McCoy +49-89 54 37 09 40
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 Structure, Function, Integration:
Journal of the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute

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