Alignment and Posture: Creating Space

Whenever I look at a client’s body, I’m looking to see the whole person as they are, just simply standing there, and what their alignment tells me about how they're handling life.

“Alignment,“ says Judith Astor, a great movement teacher who has changed the lives of thousands of people with her amazing capacity to read a lot about a person just by the way they stand, “refers to the body's structure, and how its parts are positioned to make up the whole.“ 

Alignment includes knowing that, at their best, our bodies have the ability to function with whatever task we put upon them, whether it be climbing into a car or carrying a bag of groceries, or a tired child at the end of a great day on the slopes. 

Posture is not a way that we hold ourselves up; it’s how we use our bodies. Posture asks, “How ready are you to respond to the all-pervasive gravitational pulls toward the earth; to your old-patterned ways; your mood; your energy level; your sensitivities to what’s going on around you?”

If you are nodding your head, you know how all of these things affect you.

You see, when a body has restrictions that are hard to solve, people often assume there’s no chance for change, and they think they have to settle for something that hasn’t really changed. There’s a thickening of the connective tissue (fascia), and that thickening creates adhesions and restrictions in range of motion, and as a person grows older, they think their gradual loss of motion is inevitable and unchangeable. 

 It is not.

With rolfing, alignment changes as soft tissue changes. Creating space and freedom in the joints throughout the body, creating a flow in the body between all of its parts and health prevails in the structural soft tissue and organs. 

In Rolfing® Structural Integration, we think about how the use of your body (posture and the pull of gravity), may influence all the other systems: cardiovascular, digestive, nervous, reproductive, and urinary as well as emotional attitudes and inhibitions. With Rolfing, you can become your own informed teacher and learn when and how to affect positive change within yourself. 

Rolfing is life affirming!

Learning to see this perspective as you go through your rolfing treatments will introduce you to a different, more dynamic, biomechanical paradigm for observing your overall state of being functioning in the world.