I’ve always wanted to do this, and the opportunity never arose until now. If you don’t know what Rolfing is, it’s basically like undoing all the muscular adhesions in your body that start to build up over time. And they cause things that you probably think aren’t reversible, like your bum shoulder, or your stiff low back, or your knee problems. Rolfers undo all the stuck bits so that your muscles actually can move the way they’re supposed to. Which, magically, clears up all sorts of stuff.

I’m as guilty as the next person with “putting up” with stuff because… I get busy, or I think stretching enough will fix it (and since I’m not stretching enough, that’s why it won’t go away), or it doesn’t ALWAYS bother me, so I forget about it. For a while. The premise of rolfing is that things get screwed up muscularly because we’re always fighting against gravity. Look at yourself the next time you’re at the computer. Gravity is pulling your shoulders forward and down, so your head starts to jut forward to see the screen, and you might be raising your shoulders because your keyboard is too high… never mind how you stand during the day! That’s why the Rolf Institute’s logo is like this:

If you go whole hog, Rolfing is in 10 sessions, with each session focusing on something specific: chest and shoulders, or outside line of your body, or back line, or neck and head, etc. I remember hearing about this nearly 20 years ago — how Rolfers would actually release the muscles of your jaws. At the time, I wasn’t so sure about it, but after nearly 2 decades of running my own business, I’m thinking my jaws could use a break ;-)

I’ll have to let you know about the jaw session — it’s next week. The guy I’m seeing here in Austin is fantastic — Christopher Horan. You can’t call these people “deep massage therapists” — it’s really a disservice to the level of training they have to do. They have to live in Boulder (poor things) and go to school at the Rolf Institute for, like, ever before they graduate.

And people have some association that Rolfing is enormously painful, and it could be, but Chris does a great job of getting results and not giving me the experience of torture. In fact, I’d have to say that walking around uncomfortably 24/7 is more than anything he could dish up.

I have to tell you, though — he’s started fixing things that I was certain would never go away. I’m hoping he’ll take me back the proverbial decade in physical mobility — while I can’t actually get my foot behind my head, yet, I can definitely see some movement in that direction!