Note to Sue: this content was updated by Jeff on June 3 2026.

Ida P. Rolf, PhD was born in 1896 in New York City. Her father was a civil engineer, and large project building contractor. From early childhood she had a marked swayback, and a pre-diabetic diagnosis. She went looking for answers to both these problems. She earned her undergraduate degree from Barnard College and then a PhD in Biological Chemistry from Columbia University.

She then did biochemical research at Rockefeller Institute, now Rockefeller University University, for 12 years, during which time she was also a serious student of yoga, read the literature of the Osteopaths and married an electrical engineer.

During her years at Rockefeller she studied with prominent osteopath Kenneth Little. In 1944 she traveled to Los Angeles to study Physiosynthesis for six weeks with Amy Cochrane DO. Dr. Rolf’s elder son Richard Demmele describes how it was immediately after her study with Dr. Cochrane that she started doing her own work which she originally called Postural Release.

During summers from 1948-1952 she taught her work in England, initially at the European School of Osteopathy in Maidstone, where she met and studied with additional Osteopaths, notably John Wernham. She later taught through the Gurjief Association in London.

Dr. Rolf’s second name for her work, Postural Dynamics, reflected that her work assisted people to move beyond release to actively better alignment and movement.

Beginning in 1953, Dr Rolf taught independently in the USA, first in Los Angeles. In 1964 Gestalt Therapy founder Fritz Perls invited Dr. Rolf to work and teach at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. It was here that she first had a significant number of students. At Esalen she met Mosche Feldenkrais who called his work Functional Integration. Hearing this, she said, if his work is Functional Integration, then my work is Structural Integration. The name stuck. While Dr. Rolf continued to call her work Structural Integration, the popular name for her work continues to be Rolfing.

During her years at Esalen Institute Dr. Rolf founded The Rolf Institute of Structural Integration® and trained several teachers of Rolfing®, as well as over a hundred individual Rolfers. Her Institute moved its headquarters to Boulder, Colorado in 1972. Ida Rolf died in 1979 in New Jersey.

Quotes by Dr. Rolf

“There is one first rule of Rolfing®. If at first you don’t succeed, get the hell out! It is somewhere else. There is no use just taking hammer and tongs and trying to pull it apart. The whole trick of Rolfing is going around and around and around and not barging through. Get the system sufficiently resilient so that it is able to change, and it will change. You have to avoid forcing at all costs.”
-Ida P. Rolf PhD

“The message of Gurdjieff, and Ouspenskii who followed him, was that it didn’t matter what you did as much as how you did it. Many years ago, in a Sunday supplement, I saw a picture of the Olympic races. Among the first four contestants in this picture, the thing that was so outstanding was that the man who won was operating in form and all of the others were operating out of desperation that they had to get there. The front runner was perfectly quiet and easy and could have carried on a conversation all the time he was running. This is form.”
-Ida P. Rolf PhD

“Fascia is the organ of posture. Nobody ever says this; all the talk is about muscles. Yet this is a very important concept, and because this is so important, we as Rolfers must understand both the anatomy and physiology, but especially the anatomy of fascia. The body is a web of fascia. A spiderweb is in a plane. This web is in a sphere. We can trace the lines of that web to get an understanding of how what we see in a body works. For example, why, when we work with the superficial fascia does this change the tone of the fascia as a whole?”
-Ida P. Rolf PhD

“Rolfers make a life study of relating bodies and their fields to the earth and its gravity field, and we so organize the body that the gravity field can reinforce the body’s energy field. This is our primary concept. This is the gospel of Rolfing®: When the body gets working appropriately, the force of gravity can flow through. Then, spontaneously, the body heals itself. As people come to Rolfers with their aches and their pains, we can see where their bodies are literally offering blocks to the gravitational forces. The gravitational force is immense, and their resistance isn’t much good except to close the body down, compress it. Sometimes the block has been put into the physical picture by a physical trauma. This block is in the actual structure, in the flesh of the body. Then there is the kind of block that is basically emotional. “
-Ida P. Rolf PhD

“The law and the prophets (I being both of them) say that in Rolfing® you start at the periphery. You start at the outside of the body and you start more or less at the ends of the body. In the first hour, the fact is that a Rolfer is working only superficially, but this is not what the client’s body tells him. It’s telling him that we’re working down to his soul. We’re not: we’re working on the superficial fascia. The reason for his feeling of depth is that the superficial fascia gets reflexes from everything that’s gone wrong inside his body. So if there is something that’s wrong in the stomach, there will also be something strained in the overlying superficial fascia. As the structure of the superficial fascia is changed, both the structure and the function of the deeper-lying organ will be influenced. “
-Ida P. Rolf PhD

“This is what Rolfers are doing: we are lifting a body up. We’re getting the uppermost pole of the body lifted up. Sometimes you wonder what the relation is, the connection that makes one man a rigid stalk and another man flexible and lifted. It all sounds so much alike: I will lift up my head; I am lifting toward the Lord; I am lifting toward the mountain. All religious thinking has tended to understand that there was a lifting up in terms of growth in the spiritual realm. I hate to use that word -spiritual- because I know I don’t know what it means. Nevertheless, I call it to your attention. Lifting up has been recognized down through the years as something that has to do with behavioral patterns – behavior in a deeper sense than just psychological behavior.”
-Ida P. Rolf PhD