What is Structural Integration?
“Our physical relationship with gravity determines whether our journey through life will be one of buoyancy and lightness or tension and struggle.”
— Will Johnson from “Balance of Body, Balance of Mind”
Introduction
Structural Integration is a creative and systematic process which includes the physical manipulation of the body’s fascial structure, somatic education, and the expansion of one’s awareness of both postural and movement patterns in order to cultivate and optimize balance, pliability, strength, freedom of movement, and an ease of being as we navigate our lives within the constant force of the Earth’s gravitational field.
The core body of knowledge and practice of Structural Integration was created, developed, and taught by Ida P. Rolf, Ph.D. from the 1950’s until her death in 1979.
Today, there are Structural Integration Practitioners active all over the world, and there exist at least 20 schools and training programs which continue to teach her work. The school where the two of us trained is known as The Guild for Structural Integration which is now located in Salt Lake City, Utah. If you are curious about finding a Structural Integration Practitioner or obtaining more information about a S.I. training program, visit International Association of Structural Integrators.
Working with gravity, not against it.
“When the body gets working appropriately, the force of gravity can flow through. Then, spontaneously, the body heals itself.”
To further explore what Structural Integration is all about, we need to examine the nature of gravity and its impact on our bodies. Without gravity, our world and consequently ourselves simply would not exist in form. One can imagine gravity as the binding force which through its laws of attraction creates the concrete stable environment we each rely on in order to exist on our planet. Of the four physical forces which collaborate to compose our universe, gravity is the only force we experience directly and consistently in our physical awareness. Our human bodies are incapable of sensing the strong and weak forces of sub-atomic physics without assistance from scientific instruments, and we can only sensually experience limited ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum without the help of instrumentation.
From the moment we are born through the instant of our last breath, our bodies are physically and functionalIy navigating and balancing theirselves in order to create an upright counterforce to the downward force field of gravity. For example, many of the primary learning activities for infants and toddlers take place within their explorations of the impact of gravity on their bodies and environment. They discover where does the ball go when it rolls off the table, how heavy is a feather compared to a cup, what happens when one empties a cup of water, and so on. At a critical point in life, toddlers and small children learn to stand and walk upright as they strive to balance their bodies upward and in motion within the downward force of gravity. They also learn how to maintain postural balance as they do other activities such as opening and closing doors or throwing a ball across the room. Gradually, these skills become refined expressions of humanity integrated within the field of gravity through activities such as sports, dancing, and climbing, along with the many miraculous achievements we obtain through the upright expression of our bodies.
However, because we are always under the influence of the downward force of gravity, as we age, our bodies lose their sense of uprightness, balance, and mobility. We become more rigid and stuck in repetitive patterns, and as a result, our movement takes more energy and effort. We become more susceptible to injuries along with having to endure chronic pain. Instead of collaborating with gravity as expressed by an elegant dancer, we go to war with it by resisting its influence, and eventually we become tired and frustrated by the aging process. Also, stress, illnesses, injuries, and repetitive movements will further throw the body out of balance as it compensates for these maladies.
Dr. Rolf’s brilliance was she saw how our bodies’ structural and postural characteristics fall out of balance with gravity, and that this could be remedied through the careful manipulation of connective tissue (or fasciae) along with the integration of a holistic sense of balance and movement for the entire body. In principle, a Structural Integration Practitioner doesn’t try to just relieve or repair the broken and painful parts in one’s anatomy, but instead he or she brings the whole body, or more importantly the whole person and how this person dwells in his or her’s gravitational environment into an higher state of organization and balance. This then helps to integrate the liabilities and setbacks a person experiences in their structure with the strengths and buoyancy of their character.
Short term and long term benefits.
In terms of experiencing a Structural Integration session, we have seen the range of client descriptions extend from feeling relaxed, to experiencing relief of tension and stress, to experiencing enhanced mobility and strength, to a growing sense of more energy and vitality, to an increased awareness of his or her’s body and structure, to the session feeling demanding like a workout, and to it being challenging, but relevant to what they want to change. After a session, most people feel a sense of lightness, more energy, improved balance, a greater ease and range of movement, a sense of being relaxed and yet alert, and so forth. How a person experiences a session depends upon the so many unique qualities related to that person such as how healthy they may be, their attitude and intentionality, the extent of their injuries, and their long term structural and postural aberrations and compensations.
For the next several days after a session a person will experience how the session has affected the body’s structural and movement patterns as they become integrated and absorbed by the body and mind. We label both the experience of the session and the short term after effects as “state” experiences. Besides the physical changes to the body, these short term experiences are vital in terms of heightening an individual’s awareness of one’s own body, and in becoming educated somatically and mindfully on how he or she can better organize and balance his or her’s own body in the gravitational environment.
However, the goals of Structural Integration don’t stop with the effects of the “state” experiences. We are actually much more intentional about trying to affect long term “stage” changes which then become permanent “traits” as they are integrated into a person’s structure along with their body and mind as a whole.
The magnificence of our bodies is they can skillfully compensate to aberrations created from injuries, illnesses, emotional and mental stresses, and an over abundance of repetitive patterns that are a result of sports and lifestyle commitments, along with the effects of imbalances influenced by postural habits. Loss of energy, pain, and a lack of freedom with movement patterns often take a long time to develop before they surface as symptoms resulting from the body being out of balance and alignment with gravity. Even when a person has a brand new injury it is often related to the previous patterns of the aberrations mentioned above.
This is why we inform our clients that it usually takes a series of sessions to remedy an injury because in order to get the changes to last, we have to integrate the injury back into the body’s structure as a whole. This requires us to attend to balancing the whole body in terms of its relationship to gravity. This is the difference between “state” oriented approaches which attempt to fix the particular problem at hand (but the solution usually doesn’t last because the deeper problems affecting it are not addressed), and “stage” oriented therapies which “holistically” integrate the whole body with the injury for a much more permanent effect.
“Any real integration, including Structural Integration, must concern itself not merely with the structure of the body as such, but with the structure of the body and simultaneously with the effect and influence of its energy environment, the gravitational field, on that structure.”
Is Strucutral Integration “Rolfing”?
“A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”
‘Rolfing’ is actually a subcategory to the body of work known as Structural Integration which was the term Dr. Rolf originally preferred to use in order to identify her ideas and teachings. ‘Rolfing’ is a trademarked label tied to a particular group of programs amongst several other schools and programs all over the world teaching Dr. Rolf’s work under the common identity known as Structural Integration. Dr. Rolf’s preference for her work being known as Structural Integration was evidenced by the fact that in the mid-sixties the first group of practitioners and teachers along with Dr. Rolf formed an association which they loosely called the Guild for Structural Integration. Then In 1971, Dr. Rolf and the core members of the Guild started the Rolf Institute in Boulder, Colorado. The name ‘Rolfing’ became an informal popular culture parlance used to identify the work of S.I. starting in the late 1960’s and still is used to the present day. This has lead many people to mistakenly interchange the name ‘Rolfing’ with Structural Integration. In 1979, the year Dr. Rolf died, the Rolf Institute trademarked the popularized term ‘Rolfing’ in order to try to solidify their market position by attaching the popularized name’s proprietary identity to their own particular S.I. program.
In 1989 Emmett Hutchins and Peter Melchoir, two of Dr. Rolf’s original designated teachers who also had been members of the original Guild for Structural Integration in the 1960’s, and were also part of the founding faculty at the Rolf Institute, left the Institute and started the second Guild for Structural Integration School in order to preserve and carry on what they believed were the essence of her philosophy and teachings.
This pivotal event further put pressure on Dr. Rolf’s body of work to be identified as Structural Integration, and not just as ‘Rolfing’ because it became apparent other schools and practitioners were teaching and practicing Dr. Rolf’s ideas and techniques under the S.I. banner.
In 2002 the International Association of Structural Integrators (IASI) was formed to to preserve and support Dr. Rolf’s teachings under the common umbrella identity of Structural Integration thus further reinforcing the fact that ‘Rolfing’ applies to only certain particular programs amongst many others.
As of this writing, there are over 20 schools and training programs teaching Structural Integration which are dedicated to the evolution of the art, science, and philosophy of Structural Integration. Because the two of us have had teachers from both the Guild for Structural Integration and The Rolf Institute, and thanks to the vision and leadership of the IASI, it’s been very refreshing to witness schools and practitioners exchange ideas and share processes rather than dodging harassment threats and lawsuits over trademarked names. It’s also been rewarding to see Dr. Rolf’s vision of her work evolve with so many creative perspectives and programs, each associated to the name Structural Integration.
In order to get a clearer understanding of the intentions and nature of Structural Integration, we urge you to research the IASI website we mentioned above in this section to help you identify and become informed about the many creative programs that have evolved from Dr. Rolf’s teachings, and this website is also quite helpful if you are searching for a Structural Integration Practitioner near you.