Due to the efficacy of Rolfing, Minneapolis Yoga (and Pilates) teachers all across town receive Rolfing from me and refer their clients and students. In fact, Rolfing and Yoga have a forty-year history of exchange and cross pollination. Yoga and Rolfing share core principles of lengthening, opening, aligning, differentiating and freeing the body, resulting in greater health and inner peace.
Creating a body that is balanced, strong and pliant is a goal of both Rolfing and Yoga. A Rolfer’s hands can lengthen, release and reorganize tissues with a specificity that even years of yoga cannot approximate. And Yoga delivers many benefits that no bodywork system could ever accomplish. They fit together beautifully.
Both Rolfing and Yoga specifically work against the rigidifying, contracting effects of stress, gravity and aging. Yoga accomplishes this through repeatedly held postures; Rolfing accomplishes it on the bodywork table.
Whatever unique limitations you come up against in your Yoga practice, Rolfing may offer a potent boost to move through them. People often marvel at how postures that, because of soft-tissue restrictions, used to be difficult or even hurt, now feel easy after Rolfing.
Every attitude and belief you hold is expressed and held in place by unconscious muscular patterns throughout your body. Over the years, these patterns and attitudes become locked into your very shape. Rolfing frees up these patterns, allowing greater possibilities for new ways of being in the world.
Rolfing often releases old, stored emotions from the body, washing away rigidity, stiffness and contraction. As the body regains more of its childlike pliancy, many people experience greater spontaneity, freedom and wholeness in their lives.
The Rolfing experience itself can be one of profound relaxation, centering and quieting of the mind. Rolfing frequently brings you into a fuller experience of embodiment. The more mind and body merge, the more you awaken into the boundless present moment.
“The last session was incredible. Ever since then I’ve felt my whole body starting to change and readjust. It also created space for a lot of emotions to come up, a lot of inner-child stuff.”
TB, retired