(note: this is a short version of this article. A longer version is here.)
Dr. Rolf was in part a mystic; we don’t fully know all of her travels in that realm. In part because of what was available at that time in our culture and of what concepts and language in which she had to express ideas.
She saw her work as moving humanity forward in our evolution, both individually and as a species. She also felt that our work was on the whole human being, at all levels including physical, emotional, mental, and energy fields. It’s just that we can get our hands on the physical body so that was the focus of her methods.
At this moment we have perhaps a wider more sophisticated basis to think and express understandings in the arena she was interested in. We can make more distinctions and have a more expanded world to play in.
I am contributing some of my understanding that has arisen in the practice of her work from where I am, with my unique perspective. Other people are contributing theirs, based on what we have been given and what we can understand. Her legacy is growing and expanding, flourishing in this time and place.
Thank you Dr. Rolf for your brilliant creative gift to humanity.
Session 1
1 is opening the door to a new sense of who we are.
I start on the arms where people first connect and reach out to each other and the world. It’s a mutual place. Here we open up a hole in the dam of stuckness so that life energy and freedom can begin to flow. All future work is about expanding the size of this break in that dam.
The client gets a first experience of the truth that we are buoyant free energy and consciousness which is creative and self-expressive. They experience the difference this place is from where they have stood and get a glimpse of what is possible for them.
We free the breath, the life force; experience expansion and our natural lift and lightness. We begin connecting those possibilities into our legs and hips and opening to freedom and movement.
Session 2
We connect deep into our feet and through our legs. Length and organization arise out of having the up direction and the down simultaneously.
We experience the pleasure of the life energy flowing through us, especially from the feet, and allowing it to come from there and fill our whole body-mind experience.
This life energy is the source of healing for our body, mind, emotions, and soul. It is a dimension of how love expresses itself in this physical experience. Experiencing this pleasure, delight, joy, harmony coloring all our experience is what it means to be alive. Experiencing this energy/love is what healing is. Anything else is just shifting around the burden of pain.
Session 3
Here we let the freedom, well-being of the first two sessions fully into our whole body. We begin to experience our true size, length, volume and fullness.
We feel new levels of expansion and appreciation for our physical form. We have new levels of presence and joy at being in the physical.
Session 4 & 5
We become aware of and start building our center, and awareness of our own uniqueness and beauty.
We are coming to appreciate and experience our personal power and creative center; the center where our body, mind, heart, and soul can be integrated into a powerful, unhindered unity of our self as a unique creative being.
Session 6
We begin opening the back, where much of our being and resources are, apart from the social self of the front of our body. This social self is where we live in our social world and it tends to consume our awareness. Yet our social persona is only a small part of the wonder and magnificence of what we truly are. This session helps us to experience and bring into awareness more of the fullness of who we are and to feel some of the power of what lies within us.
Session 7
7 is about the head. We tend to live in our head and face, our social identity. In 7 we work at clearing away a lifetime of stuck patterns built around maintaining our social persona. The understanding and experience from the previous sessions of the energetic, conscious, and profound nature of who we are provide a potential to experience the world from this new expanded sense of who we are. The universe itself now can be seen from this new perspective to be a vast multi-level energetic experience.
In 7 we expand our sense of presence into a new connection with creation. In the past we have tended to identify ourselves with our social persona and with the thoughts in our head. Now we can see more clearly our energetic connection with creation. We can understand that our thinking mind is not who we are, but only a sensory organ that perceives thoughts. Some thoughts come from what we have learned, some are generated by processes within us, some come from outside of us, some are inspirations.
We can begin to stand as an energetic being in communication and resonance with an energetic universe.
Session 8 & 9
Now that we have opened up to an expanded sense of what we are with many facets and dimensions and experience; these two sessions reintegrate all these aspects into a coherent whole sense of ourselves integrated around a central line or sense of self and in harmonic flow with our environment; so that we can live a joyful, loving, creative life in an amazing universe.
Session 10
The tenth is the completion of our journey of discovery and integration at a higher level. The completion of one cycle is the beginning of a new cycle. We are born anew into a new world.
According to a teaching I have been working with:
The basis of life is freedom.
The purpose of life is joy.
The result of joy is transformation.
Further thoughts
Each series is different depending on the goals of the client and practitioner and what is available to them at that time. It is always a transformational process for both of us. Yet I think these spiritual dimensions are always present consciously or unconsciously as part of Dr. Rolf’s inspiration and creation.
