My Journey From Rolfing to Hakomi
One of the themes I come back to again and again in my life and work is transformation.
It feels a little funny to talk about transformation right now when the world, in many ways, doesn’t feel like it’s evolving. But I believe it’s timely to discuss because, as I’ve come to know in my 12 years of private practice, an amazing amount of growth begins with pain.
It didn’t seem like long ago that I was living a life organized around pain. Not physical pain, but the pain that stemmed from not living my mission, and instead chasing others’ definition of success while drowning myself in a career that provided zero fulfillment.
Rewind 20 years and this was my story, and I was miserable. I was working in San Francisco at a global investment bank during the dot-com party. Working 90 hours a week was my norm, and I most often watched sunrises, sunsets, and gorgeous Bay Area weekends from the window of my 41st floor office. My career looked good on paper, but I was completely out of spiritual alignment.
And I consider myself one of the lucky ones. I consciously exited a career – and a lifestyle – that was not serving me as a whole human and moved into one that felt more like my calling. That happened when I discovered Rolfing Structural Integration.
Now, my path toward Rolfing wasn’t the same as most of my peers. I’ve found that most times stories about people becoming Rolfers center around their experience of Rolfing solving chronic physical pain where nothing else could, and the inspiration that then came to share that experience with others. That is a beautiful story, and certainly reflects a transformative event in these peoples’ lives.
This, however, is not my story. Like many people, I’d heard about Rolfing before (I’d definitely heard the rumors!), but I really learned about it from my wife during her experience as a client. And what drew me in was the raw transformative potential of the practice, not the pain relief it could provide. As I read and learned about Rolfing I was deeply inspired by the possibility of what could come for people that radically up-leveled their connection to and confidence in their bodies. This tapped into the exact same inspiration I’d had as a martial arts teacher in college.
My intent as a Rolfer became to help the world change through the actions of people with greater body-centric awareness and consciousness. What drew me to Rolfing really was that I was hoping to inspire in others the same transformation I was seeking in my life. So I made the jump from a 10-year finance career to studying to become a Rolfer and opening my private practice in Austin. I was happy and relieved to find an inspiring career path and, in some ways, thought I’d “made it” and had arrived where I was supposed to be.
Well, the next layer of my transformation began a mere 2-3 years into my Rolfing practice.
In my first office, clients exited by heading down a long hallway to the lobby. When I said goodbye to clients, I might catch a view of them walking away. One particular session is seared into my memory here – I’d helped a client get massive improvement in long-term shoulder pain. Rolfing was the bomb in this moment! His entire shoulder structure opened up, and we both noticed a major shift in how his arm hung and moved in a relaxed, easy way rather than being jammed up into his ear like it was when he’d walked in. It was a huge win and we were both ecstatic.
Then, as he walked down that hallway on his way out, I watched him put that jammed-up-into-his-ear pattern right back on without knowing it, undoing in seconds the improvement he’d achieved in our session. My jaw dropped and I just stood there, stunned, as I watched the entire session unravel before my eyes.
That moment, and other ones like it, inspired my next steps. How could I help clients unravel the “Why?” underneath their pain or postural problems. To not just “fix” their bodies, but to help them uncover why it had arrived where it was in the first place. It was time for my career to move to the next level.
I’d known about Hakomi, a form of mindfulness-centered somatic psychotherapy, for some time but it wasn’t until 2014 that I really dove into the deep end. After taking a short workshop series on how psychology influences our body structure in 2012 and beginning what would become years of work as a Hakomi client even before that, I finally fully committed to the 2-year comprehensive program. When that concluded, I did my “post-grad” intensive work over about a year to become a Certified Hakomi Practitioner in 2018 and began to assist subsequent trainings. And in 2019, I had the good fortune to teach a “Psychology of Bodywork” course to the Advanced Program at the Lauterstein-Conway Massage School, Austin’s premier bodywork school (where I first began my new career in 2006!) based on the exact Hakomi principles that I’d been drawn to after that jaw-dropping moment nearly 10 years earlier.
Integrating Hakomi into my life and practice allowed me to help my clients reveal why they were experiencing pain, or why they were stuck in patterns that didn’t work for them – often complex issues requiring the space to be uncovered and worked through in order to resolve the what. I found that in focusing only on what was causing them pain, or only on the body, we weren’t addressing the whole person. Addressing the why is what creates transformation.
I’ve been witness to clients completely shifting their lives – leaving toxic situations, creating new boundaries, and having the courage to leave a job they hated and reinventing themselves to live their dreams. This transformational work has been extremely fulfilling; it’s been a path that I wouldn’t have found had I not been open and willing to seek out my own transformation.
As you think about your own growth and transformation, and what you want to achieve in your life, I invite you to consider the following questions (ones that I also consider in transformative moments):
Where in my body do I feel tension or resistance?
What pain patterns regularly recur in my body?
What are my habits that feel familiar yet vaguely uncomfortable?
What do I notice as a recurring theme or challenge over the years?