Strutural Integration
Structural Integration is a series of 10 sessions designed to address the body as a whole from the outer layers to the core layers.
What is Structural Integration?
Structural Integration is a series of 10 sessions designed to address the body as a whole from the outer layers to the core layers. Every session includes Bodywork, Dialogue and Movement Re-Education.
The Bodywork is hands-on soft tissue manipulation. It is designed to create space, release holding patterns and compensations in the body. Through this work I will facilitate better alignment, balance and organization through your whole body.
The Dialogue themes for each session are used to increase your awareness of how emotional stress is stored in the body and how it relates to physical tensions and alignment.
The Movement Re-Education is to empower you to take all the work we just did and implement it into your daily life. The Movement Re-Education can help you create new, more balanced movement patterns.
Breakdown of the 10 SERIES
Sessions 1-3 – “The Sleeve”
Works the superficial layers of fascia. The goals of the first 3 sessions are to open, lengthen, and generate organization in the extrinsic layers of the body. This will create space for the deeper layers to unwind and release into.
Sessions 4-7 – “The Core”
Works the core of the body. The goals of these sessions are to open, organize and create space in the intrinsic muscles; the muscles closer to the spine that help support posture and alignment.
Sessions 8-10 – “Integration”
The goals of sessions 8 & 9 are to release any patterns still holding in your body. And the 10th session brings into living reality the feeling of core-sleeve balance and integration throughout the whole body.
Benefits of Structural Integration:
Increase energy, vitality and fitness
Enhance physical performance
Release chronic pain, tension and stress
Improve posture and alignement
Increase flexibility and ease of movement
Easier and fuller breath capacity
Improve athletic performance and injury prevention
Enhance body awareness
Improve balance
Reduce effort in activity
Look and feel younger
Expand sense of well being
The History of Structural Integration
Dr. Ida P. Rolf developed the process of Structural Integration as a holistic system combining soft tissue manipulation and movement education to restore the body to its natural state of alignment and balance - by lengthening, restoring, and reorganizing the fascia.
Fascia is the connective tissue matrix of the body. Fascia surrounds and supports all of the muscles, bones and organs in your body in continuous web-like layers. This fascial webbing is the body's internal system of flexible support, giving it strength and shape. The fascial system responds to injury, chronic tension and habitual movement patterns by shortening from both the forces of gravity and the mechanical forces of habitual movement patterns.
When your fascia shortens, thickens and becomes glue-like, it locks in less-than optimal patterns of strain and pulls your body out of alignment. Dr. Rolf's work is based on the insight that your body is more at ease and functions most effectively when its structure is balanced along the vertical line of gravity. In this place, gravity gently lifts and supports your body rather than pulling it down. By systematically restoring the integrity of your fascial system, your body becomes aligned and the entire system can be a smoothly functioning and coordinated whole.
Dr. Rolf believed form determines function. Structural Integration can create a more adaptable and supportive form that can function more optimally in the field of gravity. Structural Integration re-educates the person and the human body to live and move in harmony with the field of gravity instead of being in conflict with it.
Structural Integration is an integrated series designed to restore the whole body. It is not a remedy for illness. It is a process of transformation to a higher state health and well-being. Although Structural Integration may be effective for temporary pain or tension relief, pain and tension are usually the result of an overall pattern of imbalance occurring in the body. rather than treating the pain or tension symptoms, the focus is on re-balancing the entire body --returning it to a more aligned, relaxed and fluid state.