Rolf Blog - Rolfing’s Blog

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Releasing Stress Heals Fibromyalgia
Do you have ongoing, non-specific pain? Is this pain worse when you’re tired or stressed? If you answered yes, you may be suffering from Fibromyalgia.
If you google stress and Fibromyalgia, you’ll see that Fibromyalgia is a hot topic. For my Stressed Out blog, I [...]

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There’s an 80% chance you will see your doc about back pain during your life. In the last article, you learned the distinction between acute and chronic back pain, and how to not cause either. And you learned that breathing is the key to preventing and healing back tension. This article will explore, in [...]

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It seems researchers discovered that subcutaneous fat might be a good thing. “Even more surprising, it wasn’t that abdominal fat was exerting negative effects, but that subcutaneous fat was producing a good effect, ” Professor Ronald Khan.
As a Rolfer, I am in the process on conducting a pilot study on reducing cellulite for women. I [...]

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This post is an article that was published in the Rolf Institute’s journal by Gael Ohlgren, a Rolfer and her teaching partner Robert Litman about the body, exercise, breathing and staying young. They discuss Continuum, a body and movement therapy which is the a beautiful compliment to Rolfing with its teaching the body about deep [...]

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A recent MSNBC article writes about how doing exercise or yoga can cause spontaneous emotional releases. The article relates many anecdotes of people breaking into tears from just moving. The article does not give any explanation why this happens.
Essentially, when emotions are unable to be expressed they are stored in our soft tissue – not [...]

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Preventing a healing crisis 
Anticipate that your body/mind will detox. Create a network of support using what I mentioned earlier. Be proactive with your communications and your detoxing; don’t wait until you are in a position where you have to do it. 
Also, investigate detoxing programs. There are many of these programs available. They may include cleansing [...]

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Support through expressing emotions 
I discovered if you could take what was emotional stress stored in the body and convert it back to expressed emotions, healing crises could be avoided or reduced in intensity. To facilitate this I have recommended to clients that they go out and rent a set of movies that represent the five [...]

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Emotions
When clients tell me what the biggest benefits to being Rolfed were, they usually say that it’s not that the symptoms that brought them in are long gone, but that their emotional/stress state is much better. I was naïve as to how much stress impacted my body and its tension level, and how [...]

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 Symptoms
Symptoms range from the most subtle physical release to the occasional, intense emotional release. Here is list of some of the most common healing crisis reactions I’ve observed in the past 30 years:

extreme fatigue
listlessness, feeling “spaced-out” and/or confusion
restlessness
emotional sensitivity
melancholy
neediness and/or wanting to be left alone
outbursts of emotions such as: anger, fear/anxiety, sadness/grief
dizziness, a [...]

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Scope
These healing crises can occur within the first few sessions of Rolfing, or they can occur months after the basic series of sessions are completed. The healing crisis can last a few hours, such as a headache, or for months as with a feeling of exhaustion.
The body may progress through cycles of contraction and expansion [...]

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