Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/1102144
EDUCATION FOR THE BODY Whatever the version number, structural integration is a system of soft-tissue manipulation and movement education designed to: • Ease the standing body out of its accumulated, ineffi cient structural patterning, working toward a calm (unforced) alignment around the gravity line. • Release fascial adhesions and restore normal glide and hydration between layers of connective tissue to promote responsive movement and strain-free tissue tone. • Restore full kinesthesia—fi lling in the entire body image for accurate spatial perception and interoceptive awareness, which leads to robust autonomic self-regulation. Structural integration techniques and strategies, like most manual therapy, are practiced one-to-one in a therapeutic setting. Structural integration is applicable for many situations: in rehab and pre-hab, for persistent musculoskeletal pain, to advance developmental issues, as injury prevention, to facilitate somato-emotional release and trauma resolution, to reduce stress and autonomically induced anxiety, as an antiaging tonic, or for performance enhancement—either athletic or artistic. At heart, however, structural integration is an educational process—an intensive course in your body's structure and your perception of it. 2 Common responses to the work include smoother movement, better alignment, decreased pain, increased available energy, more expressive communication, and a feeling of being at home in your body. 3 Structural integration, as developed by Ida Rolf and her early teachers, 4 was a multisession protocol of direct, specifi c, and sometimes painful manipulations designed to release the literal "thorns in the fl esh" (to use her phrase), meaning the areas in our myofascial system that were too short or too stuck to move easily according to the body's design. 5 FASCIA'S ROLE Ida Rolf's initial experience was with yoga, though she was later infl uenced by osteopathy and the Alexander Technique. Rolf developed a 10-session recipe—a series of sessions that progressively cover the whole soft-tissue body. 6 Central to her idea was that our bodies assume a pattern (due to accident, injury, imitation, or life circumstance) that is written into the brain's habits, exported to the muscles, and fi nally rooted deeply into the body's biological fabric—the fascia. Fascial cells build many versatile materials. Connective tissue constructs your joints, your teeth, heart valves, the cornea of your eye, and glues and weaves all your 70 trillion cells together during your next loaded squat. 7 Fascia is coming into its own both as tissue and as a system. 8 Only a few of us took up Rolf's "fl ag" of fascia during the 1970s. Since her passing in 1983, though, a fl ood of new research on the extracellular matrix, motor learning, and sensory systems has deepened our knowledge and expanded our technical library. The properties of the nervous and cardiovascular systems have long been studied; now the overlooked fascial system is getting its due attention. The Fascia Research Congress, 9 begun in 2007, has done much to spread the word on fascia and to cross-link efforts from disparate areas of research—athletic performance, rehabilitation, and the basic properties and responses of fascia in the lab. The fascial system—the collagenous network, the extracellular matrix— is so pervasive that no intervention (therapeutic or coaching) can safely ignore its effects. Every intervention surely affects neurons, muscles, epithelia, and connective tissues with their extracellular matrix; many activities, from dressage to Olympic lifting, are fi nding that attention to fascia improves results. 10 WHAT MAKES STRUCTURAL INTEGRATION UNIQUE? Structural integration's coupling to fascial tissues gives it some unique characteristics. • The central methodology of the multisession protocol (or, as Rolf called it, the "recipe") means that structural 80 m a s s a g e & b o d y w o r k m a y / j u n e 2 0 1 9 Everything's connected—only by looking can we determine the particular connections in any individual client.