The Change: 5

Am I Being Rolfed?

(This is an ongoing story. If you want to start at the beginning, click here.)

Before I’d ever met her, I decided that AE was a Reiki healer. This seemed totally reasonable to me even though it was based on very little information and I wasn’t even sure what a Reiki healer was.

The information I used was this:  My husband said that when AE’s hand hovered over his ankle, he could feel the energy coming from it and he began to sob uncontrollably. He said he felt something shift in his body – something he couldn’t describe –and when he walked out of his session, he said his body felt unmistakably different.

Everything about what he described appealed to me, especially the sobbing part.  Because I love things that seem deep and mystical and difficult to comprehend. As long as they’re not too scary.

Reiki is a type of energy healing where the practitioner transfers or stimulates your life force to heal what ails you. They may lay their hands on you, or they may hover their hands over you, but in either case, it couldn’t be more gentle.

In fact, AE does use energy healing as part of her repertoire, but she doesn’t refer to herself as a Reiki healer.  She calls herself an Intelligent Body Worker and that includes a few different modalities.

One, it seems, is Rolfing.

I don’t know why I know anything about Rolfing, except I feel like I may have learned about it when I was a Psych major a hundred years ago.  When I think of Rolfing, I think of pain.  People touching me in such a way that I would start screaming and crying, and the process would be a catharsis (a very popular Psych major term back in the day).

I studied a lot of different “therapy” models as a Psych major and I remember thinking that any one of them would be fascinating to delve further into.  Except Rolfing.

Why? Because I am adamantly opposed to pain on almost every level.  I don’t like physical pain. I don’t like emotional pain.

I don’t even get pedicures because the act of someone handling my feet is far too intense for me.  It tickles to the degree that it hurts.  Not. For. Me.

AE says that “soft Rolfing” is part of her bag of tricks. If I had known that before I started with her, I may not have ever shown up.

Rolfing is a form of bodywork that is also referred to as Structural Integration.  The practitioner manipulates the deep connective tissue in the body – the fascia (more on this later) – and in so doing, frees up a lot of stuff going on in the musculoskeletal system. I could only surmise that a self-described “soft rolfer” would embark on this work in a gentler way, although even containing the word “rolfing” in the description, it didn’t seem like it could ever be gentle enough for me.

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