Blog
Patellafemoral Syndrome
Best of all, I’ve had fleeting moments of sensing something new and important about my stance in the world.
Touching into Presence Podcast
Wide-ranging conversation about tensegrity, Rolf Movement®, and the principles of Rolfing Structural Integration.
Tongue Support for Diaphragmatic Breathing
Within your oral cavity, you now have both descent (your mandible resting down) and ascent the subtle lift of your tongue. Notice what that does for the sensations at the juncture of your head and neck.
Strength: A Wake-up Call
I have never been very robust in my fitness program. Having a flexible body, I’ve always been drawn to movement disciplines where that is at the forefront: yoga, improvisational dancing, Tai Chi. Strength training and competitive sports were not my thing.
Spatial Orientation as a Source of Support
This exploration is one I share with nearly every one of my private clients. Awareness of the space around our bodies is uplifting. It emancipates joints, making movement freer, as I hope you’ll be able to feel for yourself..
How to Sit in Your Car
Car designers seem to devise seats to support the lowest common denominator of posture, believing that people need soft seats that cradle the derriere, and backrests that ignore the capacity of your spine to support itself.
Use Your Toes to Protect Your Knees
When there’s a problem in the knee, there are probably imbalances in the feet. My friend had no complaints about her feet, but when I watched her move I could see that, especially on the side of her knee surgery, she wasn’t using the full articulation of her foot.
Pelvic Tilt and The Neutral Spine
Dr. Rolf treated everyone (including me with my too flat lumbar spine) as if they were hyper-lordotic. What that did for me was gap the lumbar facets (so they were in constant slight flexion) and make my lumbosacral area unstable. I had low back pain for years after first being Rolfed. IMO Rolf got most things right, but not this.
Your Tensegrity Body
Your body is a floating compression structure—bones float within a tensile matrix of soft tissue. This is a very different model from the old idea that your body should be lined up like a stack of blocks.
Pandiculate for Fascia Health
Unlike cats and dogs, humans tend to stifle this natural urge. In polite company such movement expression is considered rude.
Manspread Explained
To roll forward onto an upright pelvis often requires a manual adjustment men would rather not make in public. He told me about friction between the fabric of jeans, an undergarment, and the skin of the scrotum. Especially when the weather is warm . . .
Fascia and Fitness
Healthy, hydrated fascia is an essential ingredient in enduring youthfulness and grace of movement. The stiffness we experience when we begin to age is a sign that fascial layers are dehydrated and are becoming adhered to one another.
Mastectomy, Spatial Perception and Movement
After explaining these phenomena to my client, I suggested she notice any sense of diminished movement on the affected side. To become more aware of the space around her body she could imagine a sphere—something like a snow globe—and standing within it, notice differences her sense of the qualities of the space on each side.
Posture, Elbows and Consciousness
As a Rolfing® practitioner, I've observed that tension in the elbows affects the whole body. Habitual flexion there, however slight, pulls the upper arm forward in its socket, starting a chain reaction that pulls the shoulder blades forward, and the collarbones and chest down, and the neck forward. Elbow tension often corresponds with flexion in the spine just behind the diaphragm, and that interferes with fullness of breath. The postural end result feels, and certainly looks, nothing like the upper crust ladies of Downton…