Reflections on the work, the body, and what it means to live well in gravity.
ESSAY
Rolfing and psychology.
It has been our experience that the tissues of the body are your emotions, spirit and soul made manifest. Opening, releasing and unwinding tissue that has grown still and stuck can have expansive effects on your psyche.
As your tissues become unstuck, you may notice more possibility for openness, flow and connection with other people and your environment. You may find yourself relating to the world with a deeper, fuller sense of self.
“There is an ongoing psychological change as well toward balance, toward serenity, toward a whole person.”Dr. Ida Rolf
POEM · BY MARY PHILLIPS
The work.
Sometimes it feels like sculpting,
the tissue wants to be physically met.
To know where it stands in the world,
where it stands in relationship,
to me,
to gravity,
to itself.
The flesh wants a new experience,
a different conversation.
To be exposed and altered.
I till the earth.
I am listening, the body tells me.
Sometimes it wants the conversation deeper.
Space and time shift, get wobbly.
I use my spine to stay in the room.
A pole around which everything can collapse,
and rebuild.
A dark container arrives in which old patterns unearth themselves.
Twist in bone from childhood mishap,
Scars in heart fascia from loss,
Tidal breath of tired organs.
A longing to retreat to a time before the first wound.
A longing for order.
Something about being seen,
wrenched rib
still liver,
crowded neck,
lets a new thing emerge.
Not getting back to a time before,
but making space for the damage.
Integrating the pain of being alive back into the miracle.
My spine listens, sees, contains,
I am not I.
I am a watcher,
A conversation haver,
A woman dancing a duet.
ESSAY
Gravity and Rolfing.
Gravity is a constant force in our lives. From our first breath, it weighs down upon our bodies, giving us something to push against in order to stand upright.
When our bodies are in alignment, gravity is a powerful force for positive organization. When we aren’t stacked up well, it can feel like a force dragging us down. Rolfing practitioners observe and work with your body as it organizes in the field of gravity, bringing alignment, order and awareness so that you feel easy and free in gravity rather than weighed down by it.
PRACTICE NOTE · MARY PHILLIPS
Source Point Therapy®.
Alongside Rolfing Structural Integration, Mary is a certified Source Point Therapy practitioner. Source Point Therapy is a simple approach to healing that seeks to reconnect the physical body to its blueprint for health—your innate relationship to order, balance, harmony and flow.
Working with the energetic field when needed helps structural work integrate at deeper levels in body and spirit. Mary combines hands-on Rolfing, visceral work and biodynamic craniosacral rhythms, and also offers sessions organized solely around the Source Point model.
