Michael Vilain • Certified Advanced Rolfer™

What is Rolfing?

Rolfing^® Structural Integration — An Approach Toward the Whole Human Being

This is a short film of some of the older Rolfing practitioners. Think of them as master chefs who’ve just been asked how to make some well-know dish, like, say, beef stew. Each would give their own take on it. Some I’m drawn to and would like to make or taste. Others, not my thing. This is how you should select a Rolfing practitioner. Use the FIND A ROLFER feature on my site or the rolf.org site below to locate practitioners in your area. Call some and talk to them. Get a session from the one you connect with as that’s where a lot of the work happens — in the relationship between the client and the practitioner.

A human being is more than a collection of parts. There is a pattern, an order, in human bodies. That pattern–how parts fit and work together as a whole–is a basic factor in well being or its lack.

Rolfing structural integration promotes well being by enhancing the body’s pattern of organization. It balances the body in gravity and enables participants to function at successively higher levels of efficiency and ease.

As in all matter organized into biological units, there is a pattern, an order, in human bodies Rolfers make a life study of relating bodies and their fields to the earth and its gravity field, and we so organize the body that the gravity field can reinforce the body’s energy field. — Dr. Ida P. Rolf

Rolfing is a brand name. The proper generic term for Rolfing is Structural Integration. Your physical body is a structure, however, when a Rolfer says structure, the Rolfer is not talking only of your physical body. Structure, to a Rolfer, is all of who you are because your experience, history, beliefs, perceptions, and consciousness, etc., are embodied and expressed in your tissues, movements, and postures.

The official definition of Rolfing Structural Integration is that it is a change process which asks your structure to change how it is organized, balanced, aligned, and integrated within itself and with gravity.

For information about Rolfing in your community, contact or write to: