A Life Journey to (and through) Rolfing.
You go to therapy, meditate, seek spiritual help, do everything in your power to overcome them. But those patterns, which probably grew up with you or “took root” at some intense moment in your life, are still there.
This happened to me a lot until I met Rolfing…
Here’s a short summary of my story:
My name is Renata, I’m 42 years old, Brazilian, from Sao Paulo, and I’ve been living in the Netherlands with my husband and daughter for the last 5 years. When my daughter was born 12 years ago, I was diagnosed with postnatal depression. The delay in accepting the diagnosis and starting treatment caused the depression to get worse and worse. When I finally accepted the diagnosis, the treatment proved to be very difficult and rigorous given the advanced stage I was already at.
For almost six years I fought hard against the deep depression using traditional methods: medication and psychotherapy. And the treatment was effective in some ways – at least it kept me alive – but I no longer recognised myself. I made several attempts to ‘wean’ myself off the medication, all of which were unsuccessful. I had already accepted that this would be my new life from then on: dependent on psychiatric drugs to survive in some way.
How yoga helped me overcome depression
One day, while walking in the neighbourhood, I decided to enter a yoga studio and sign up for a trial class. It was there that the change began: the way yoga works on the body and mind reconnected me with my body, with my being: feeling my body, feeling the pulse of my breath, the inner strength that sustained me in each asana (yoga postures)… all of this made me feel alive again. Not just alive. It revealed to me all the power of life that was still within me, but which depression had suffocated. It helped me to live in the present moment, to be grateful for what really matters, and to let go of past resentments and future ghosts.
Enchanted by this life process, I enrolled on a yoga training course. I wanted to learn more about this beautiful and powerful philosophy and tradition.
A year after graduating, I moved to the Netherlands with my family due to a job opportunity for my husband’s career. At the time, Brazil was going through an extremely turbulent socio-political moment, so leaving seemed like the best decision we could make.
This change of country brought with it dozens of new challenges, but let’s highlight one: my husband was going to work, my daughter was going to go to school, and I was faced with the question: “Okay, what am I going to do with my life now? I knew it wouldn’t be possible to work in the same profession as in Brazil, where I was a primary school Portuguese teacher.
Until one day, when I shared a bit of my story with new Brazilian friends, they suggested: “Why don’t you teach yoga? It would be great to have yoga classes in Portuguese! Hmm… “Why not?” I thought. And so I started giving yoga classes to two Brazilian women in my living room, dragging the sofa. Soon the word spread and, before I knew it, I was dragging the sofa around every day to give the classes.
Definitely, I had to find a more suitable place for classes, but then came the pandemic. Renting a room without knowing when the next lockdown would be was not feasible.
Then, through those great gestures of generosity that life gives us, we found a house with the potential to build a studio in the garden, with its own entrance and everything! We bought it and started working. And then, once again, I was faced with a huge challenge, perhaps much bigger than the others: entrepreneurship. Opening and running a business was such a challenge for me, since I used to think that I didn’t have an entrepreneurial profile.
I didn’t have another bout of depression, but during this period a depressive and negative pattern began to take over again: I was gripped by a chronic insecurity, that turned into an anxiety disorder when faced with challenges and, this time, not even yoga could help me. In fact, yoga and psychotherapy were helping me to live day after day without succumbing, but the truth was that I wasn’t doing well: the days were heavy, I was plagued by indecision, fear and a feeling of not being able to achieve what I had set out to do.
And here, at this point in the story, I come back to the question that opened this text: Do you know when you really want to get rid of certain patterns of thinking, feeling and behaviour, but you can’t?. I found myself at this point: psychotherapy helped me recognize my patterns, understand them and find ways to overcome them, but I simply wasn’t able to get rid of them once and for all.
Meeting Rolfing
Then, once again, in a great gesture of generosity from life, I heard about Rolfing.
That’s how it all began: while the studio wasn’t ready, I decided to go back to school. I was looking for a course that would deepen my knowledge of mind-body integration, and when I read about Rolfing, I somehow knew that I had found not only the training I was looking for, but something much more intense and profound. I dove in head first, not knowing the extent of the journey that lay ahead…
One of the requirements of the Rolfing training is to complete a series of 10 sessions. I had never heard of Rolfing before, but I was so determined to study it that I contacted a Rolfing practitioner in Brazil, travelled there and started the series without much idea of what it would be like. Today I can assure you: It was a milestone, a turning point that I really didn’t expect.
Do you remember the challenges I faced before Rolfing? Lack of confidence in the face of challenges, chronic insecurity, struggling with the feeling of not being able?
In the very first session, the Rolfer pointed out that my legs were too closed and my stride too tight. In other words, I had very little support from my feet and legs. Later, when I read Dr Ida Rolf’s book, I was struck when she said:
“Johnnies without number have felt insecure because they were insecure (…). For when your two legs are not properly under your body, you are insecure, and you’ll act like it and feel like it”.
Bingo! Based on the 1st assessment, the rolfer began to help me realise how much support I was missing from my legs and feet. By the end of the series, my legs were better distributed under my body, with a better ability to receive and distribute the weight of my body on both feet. My stride was more open, my walk more confident. The result: I no longer felt as insecure as before.
In addition, with better support from my legs, Rolfing also taught me a new way of relating to the space around me: not as if it were a threat, and I needed to withdraw in order to be safe and protected (I see now how much that physical withdrawal ended up expressing itself in emotional depression), but as what it really is: an open space that I, like everyone else, have licence and freedom to occupy.
This change of perspective – the way I felt and perceived myself in my own body, the way I occupied the space around me, the relationship of all this to my emotions and the way I understood myself: this change of perspective has been such an intense and profound journey that I feel I lack the words to express it.
But the proof that all this is real is that as soon as I returned from Brazil, I felt confident to start a new stage of my life: to start and run a business, to reinvent myself, to start a completely new career. Of course, facing the unknown always gives me a chill, but now there is a difference: now, that chill no longer paralyses me, on the contrary, it drives me forward.
This is where you can find Renata’s Rolfing® and Yoga practice: www.studioyogares.com
To find a Rolfer® near you, click on: Vind een Rolfer®
Would you like to know how to train to be a Rolfer? In september 2025 a Level 1 training will start in Amsterdam, click here to check it out.