Paul Wirth
- Paul Wirth
- Certified Rolfer, LMT
- 801.638.0021
- Contact
When I was little, like most kids I was always racing around the house, the yard, the neighborhood with body and mind united, curious and excitable. And like many adults, I can look back and see that at some point, that fully lived, embodied existence gave way to something a bit more staid and mundane.
When I was around seventeen or eighteen, having had a relatively intellectual upbringing, I began to realize I loved to work with my hands. It made sense, since I played piano since early childhood and had recently discovered the physical (and visual) delight of oil painting in high school. For the next two years, as I worked my way around Europe on farms, in factories, in bars and in restaurants, I realized that this kind of work put my mind at ease because it put my body at the center of my experience—where of course it had been all along.
I sought out Rolfing a few years later as a client. It appealed to me because its view of the body has so much explanatory power while its practice is firmly based on some very concrete anatomical and physical principles. My main intention was to find a way to resolve some of the increasing pain and tension I was having as my body kept compensating for an injury from years before. And I hoped to learn something I felt was missing about living in and with my body, but that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
My first set of Rolfing sessions, with Georgette Delvaux in Berkeley, was a brilliant experience. Her work cleared a lot of the tension I had been having and gave me the foundations for feeling alignment in my body in a way that felt instinctive rather than controlled. And as time went on, that process became more profound as I found myself manifesting and incorporating more and more change that had begun in my sessions.
A few years later, after some forays in the decidedly desk-bound world of publishing, I decided to train to practice Rolfing. I was inspired and impressed not only by the work itself, but by the personalities of the Rolfers I had met. I continue to believe that was one of the best decisions I could have made.
This work gives me the opportunity to constantly learn from other people (clients and colleagues alike), to constantly refine, to work with my hands, and to point my attention towards helping all kinds of individuals get closer to a day-to-day experience in their bodies that feels good and rich with physical potential.
Mary Phillips
- Mary Phillips
- Certified Rolfer, LMT
- 801.809.2560
- Contact
Experiencing Rolfing allowed me for the first time to feel my own patterns of holding and movement and their profound physical and psychological impact. As those patterns changed and gave way to freer, more efficient patterns, I discovered that I could move and inhabit my body more expressively and openly. Finding support in my feet and hips for my spine was a radical shift from my held-up, ballet-informed posture. The feeling of an easy, more comfortable posture had deep, long-lasting effects on my body and movement.
It has been my intention since high school to work with the body in some form—I had studied dance, beginning with ballet. Dance and movement became clear openings for exploring and understanding myself and my world. In college my experience of dance changed: What was until then my own very personal relationship with dance and my body expanded as I studied contact improvisation, a form of dance that is about a constant improvisatory listening and response between two or more people moving together.
Contact improv opened up my world of movement to include all of the other people around me—not just other dancers, but everyone, at all times. I began to see and feel how so many layers of our experience—communication, isolation, touch, joy, fear, and all the rest—are conveyed, held, and expressed continually among us, body to body. The liberating feeling of practicing movement consciously and openly with others deeply affected my sense of what having a body means and can mean.
For me a natural next step was to work at a job that was physically challenging and engaging. I trained as a river guide in Moab, UT and for four summers learned to push myself and understand my body's limits. It was wonderful to work so hard physically and at the same time to become very in touch with the cycles and movements of nature. I also enjoyed helping people feel their own minds become less cluttered in the natural world without cellphones and TV's. The river and the desert are still very calming places for me.
After my time in Moab, I sought out a Rolfer to help me with some of the patterns of holding and tension I had developed from running rivers. In those sessions, I discovered not just those patterns, but also a whole constellation of other, older patterns, particularly the deeply ingrained ways of moving I learned in ballet. My Rolfing sessions allowed my body to adopt new structural relationships and new patterns of movement that felt deliciously free.
I realized that training to become a Rolfer would allow me to continue my exploration of the body, and to give me an opportunity to more deeply affect others as well. I have been working as a Rolfer now since 2003 and I am continually awed by how Rolfing works for so many different people, each with their own unique relationship to their body. It's an exciting privilege to be a part of each client's ongoing process of finding a natural sense of freedom, support and expression.