Promoting Rolf Movement® Integration and Therapy

Ida Rolf was in many ways sixty to ninety years ahead of her time. She understood thoroughly the function of fascia long before the medical establishment had any clue about its significance. Only recently has fascia been seen by the medical establishment as an important enough tissue to be studied. Within Structural Integration (Rolfing), fascia, has been fundamentally recognized as the ground layer of the body and the organ of shape. Nerves, blood, lymph vessels, bones, muscles, and organs, virtually everything in the body is surrounded and held in place by the fascia. Where muscles move us and bones create support, fascia gives and defines our shape. When the fascial shape is changed then the body's container is changed and the body has an ability to move and support itself in a new way. Within the last few years, the recognition that fascia is not only surrounding and supporting the aforementioned tissues, it has also been found to be inside the organs, nerves, and walls of the Blood, and lymph vessels. This new understanding has created a shift into a realization of how fascial tissues work, that fascia’s effects are even more global than thought. With this knowledge we are able to effect more specifically atypical or pathologic issues of the body. This is done by understanding how collagen fibers, which fascia is made up of, and myofibroblasts that are inside fascial tissues, interact. Myofibroblasts are a form of muscle found sparsely within all fascial tissues. They are a form of muscle that is innervated by the autonomic nervous system and are situated within our bodies fascial continuum. Myofibroblasts structurally and functionally interact through the central nervous system (spinal cord) to adjacent tissues, thus creating structural convergence, and changes through the localized neuro-fascial feedback loop. The significance of this is that a regional feedback loop between myofibroblasts in the nerves, the spine, the muscles, and all tissues in a given area are interwoven and affecting each other. Regional issues then affect the body in a global way. Thus, globally interconnected myofibroblasts hold whole body’s structural positionality. Thus, contraction in the nerves creates neural sequencing, myofibril tone, then local and global structural alignment.