A few years ago I considered, and on sane consideration firmly rejected, taking a course of Rolfing treatments. Deep massage, to all possible levels of deepness, is the core technique. That would seem to be a reasonable approach to stress reduction for better health. However, the usual association of "soothing" with "massage" does not apply in this case. Rolfing is defined as a hands-on method of manipulating soft tissue to reorganize the body.
"Reorganize" is the key term here.
You are perhaps familiar with the sayings "Pain is good, in that it makes us aware of being alive" and "No pain, no gain"? To fully appreciate the benefits of Rolfing, you must subscribe unreservedly to either of these beliefs, or better yet, to both. The process is as follows:
First, the practitioner (a dedicated sadist with superbly toned hand muscles) spares no effort in reminding your large muscles, your primary muscles of dexterity, and all associated nerves that they are undeniably -- more to the point, inescapably -- alive.
Once this consciousness-raising has evolved (or plunged) through awareness-of-life to wishing-for-death -- to the point where your jaw muscles are volunteering to chew the rest of you to bits to escape the pain -- your masseur or masseuse changes focus and performs the same lively service for the underlying layers of muscles and nerves, including some of your involuntary systems such as the muscles and nerves controlling various glands and organs.
(It should here be noted that while your practitioner's hands are in perfect shape, and Rolfing is indeed a profession devoted to full-body massage, the rest of your practitioner's shape, whatever it may be, is arranged solely for effective manual leverage. However, you are not at this point interested in the aesthetics of his or her shape anyway, your procreative urge having been entirely subsumed by deathwish. Unless you're into an extreme-M form of BDSM, in which case you're reading the wrong site.)
As many of your involuntary systems have no actual "pain" nerves of their own, they communicate their outrage through "referred pain" -- a rather clever bit of electrochemical forgery. You may therefore receive urgent messages of distress from parts that thought they'd paid their dues already, along with any that prematurely assumed they'd escaped the ordeal. To get the best results from your Rolfing therapy, you must treat these messages as the hoaxes they are. And a truly expert practitioner should at this point helpfully remind you that where you think it hurts, is not really hurting.
Perception of reality is generally supposed to be an aggregate of mental and emotional coping skills developed through subjective experience, filtered through your basic electrochemical systems. Rolfing uses intense structural and glandular stimulation to produce a parallel revivification of your mental and emotional systems.
The jury is still out as to whether the long-term posture, energy, and immunity benefits of Rolfing are due to purely physical effects, or better attributed to a subconscious condition of permanent, sheer horror that you were capable of doing that to yourself in the first place, and terror that you might ever do it again.
Copyright 2001 Robin Hilp