Rolfing® Reverses Aging!

Rolfing® can relieve stiffness and tightness we associate with ageing.

One of the most impressive things I’ve learned from my years of Rolfing® is how gravity affects the ageing process. You’re probably too familiar with the obvious effects of gravity. But gravity also causes the stiffness and tightness we associate with ageing. The stiffness is actually caused by lack of movement. That’s why you feel better when you start to exercise. The problem with taking on more movement to change your stiffness level is that you aren’t really in touch with the places where you are stuck. So you will move around the places where your movement is restricted, rather than through them.

Your movement patterns are generated by your relationship with gravity.

Many times restrictions are the result of an old injury that has healed, but full function was never restored to the affected area. Even after decades, a person’s movement patterns might reflect the aftermath of a relatively minor injury. This is because the first thing your body/mind does after an injury is to find a way to move that doesn’t hurt. People frequently say, “I hurt my knee three days ago, but it’s OK now.” Things don’t heal in three days. What you’re talking about is that it took your body/mind three days to learn how to walk in a way that didn’t hurt.

The new way of walking is always less balanced than the old, to spare the injured knee the stress of gravity. The knee then heals at its own pace, out of your awareness. The new walking pattern has been developed subconsciously, to keep the impediment of the knee injury out of your experience.

Unfortunately, it is not automatically changed back into a balanced pattern after the knee heals. The unbalanced pattern becomes your new pattern.

Without some conscious intervention, your walk will have been changed forever by that knee injury. Now add the effects of this minor injury to all the other ones you’ve had in your life. You can see how part of what we call aging is the accumulation of all the little traumas generated by living in relationship to a large planet. Dr. Ida Rolf said that ageing is nothing but a symptom of your losing fight with gravity.

In the process of bringing your body back into alignment with the gravitational field, Rolfing® will remediate many of these old problems and relieve the stiffness that you interpret as feeling old.