What’s Gravity Got to Do With It?

press release from The Rolf Institute

Our bodies react to the constant influence of gravity like every other physical structure in the universe. When we are out of balance, gravity drags us down, just as it drags down a building that has lost its structural integrity. Whether from poor posture, injury, illness or emotional distress, an unbalanced body is in a constant tug-of-war with gravity. The result is an accumulation of tension and strain within the body’s muscles and surrounding connective tissue that gives rise to pain, rigidity of movement and depleted energy.

Rolfing’s primary aim is to permanently release this tension and to overcome deeply ingrained physical restrictions – balancing and realigning your entire body in relation to gravity. While Dr. Ida P. Rolf originally called her revolutionary bodywork approach Structural Integration, Rolfing is the popular name the public first gave her work. Unlike every other form of contemporary bodywork, Rolfing is the only manipulative system whose ultimate goal is to evoke highly integrated and efficient ways of moving that enable your body to remain effortlessly balanced in gravity.

One individual may experience his losing fight with gravity as a sharp pain in the back, another as the unflattering contour of his body, another as constant fatigue, and yet another as an unrelenting threatening environment. (Some) may call it old age; yet all these signals may be pointing to a single problem so prominent in their own structures and the structures of others that it has been ignored; they are off-balance; they are at war with gravity.

– Dr. Ida P. Rolf