Saloma Workshops

This article is reprinted with permission from Lou Gross, a structural integration body worker and yoga instructor.   His website is a great resource with tons of information on how structural integration bodywork can benefit literally any “body”.   

Lou’s website:  Back Fix Bodywork

 Structural Integration, Yoga and You

                     Introduction

“Rolfing” is a copyrighted term reserved for therapists who have attended the Rolf Institute.  Ida P. Rolf developed the bodywork generically referred to as “structural integration”, (it’s what she called the work) which is what I am trained to do.  It is basically the same 10 session approach developed by Ida P. Rolf  with  some minor adjustments developed and refined by some of her original disciples.  Essentially, my work is geared to work within the client’s tolerance and
barriers for deep work.  We don’t force the issue and keep in touch with the client throughout the session to make sure they are handling the work comfortably.

What is Structural Integration Bodywork?

Structural integration bodywork is a system of hands on treatments that manipulate the soft connective tissue that’s underneath the dermis, or inner layer of our skin, and that also surrounds and goes through all our muscles.  This tissue, called fascia, is fibrous and fluid, like putty, and it “bunches up” over time, through physical activity, including sports, and through emotional stress.  This accumulating shortness is why we often feel tighter and tighter in some areas of our bodies.

Understanding fascia “bunch up”.  It’s what we need to stretch.  The bunching up of the fascia shortens the available lengths of our muscles and also throws our body sections out of alignment.

How Structural Integration Bodywork Increases Yoga Benefits and  Improves Our Abilities to Do Yoga Better

Stretching is much easier, and it goes farther, because the fascia is softer and more malleable, and there is more differentiation between muscles since we’ve separated one muscle sack from another.

Yoga is about alignment. This kind of bodywork actually re-aligns your bones and muscles toward their optimal inter-relationship.  This enables stretching and other yoga benefits to improve the whole body system.

This alignment and tissue softening helps to prevent injuries and discomfort.  It prevents a lot of “stretching caused injuries” that happens when people try to pull a local part and the tight parts elsewhere hold it tight.

Yoga is about improving our mind-body inter-connection.  People who have had structural integration gain better mental awareness of their bodies and more graceful control of their movements.

Yoga emphasizes the breath, for both physical and meditative /awareness benefits.  After structural integration bodywork, even from just the first few hours, breathing is significantly fuller, deeper and easier.

Yoga is about health.  Not just a  stretching exercise, yoga is a method to balance and tonify the physiology of the body.  Softening and lengthening the hardened fascia improves the body’s nourishment and elimination processes at a cellular level, and it makes a clearer, bigger pathway for its immune cells to work in.

This can help people lose weight. Softening the fascia through the muscles makes it easier, and faster, to use up the fat cells into the body’s metabolism.

Chi, or Ki, energy flow is better.  The channels of energy that flow through the acupuncture meridians and circulate in the Chakra energy centers are also freed up.  And it makes these energy flow increases from the yoga class do more, every time.

The bodywork helps us know more about what the asanas are doing for us.  The treatment greatly increases “mind into body” sensing abilities.  In addition, the experience of being structurally integrated allows us to understand how  the different parts of our bodies affect each other.

Yoga helps us increase our emotional centeredness and maturity.  The bodywork itself actually improves the frequency of the muscle-fascia tissue, it improves the strength and clearness of the body’s energy field, and it increases many parts of our physiology and metabolism.

Yoga also helps us develop peace of mind and improved spiritual awareness.  The bodywork goes a long way in supporting this, as it  removes old stressful energies and trauma out of the tissues. Getting the bodywork helps yoga do more of this, too.