Andri Hanekom Certified Rolfer

02/12/2025

Well well well.....

RETRACTED!!!

Reviews on the safety of glyphosate and Roundup herbicide that have been conducted by several regulatory agencies and scientific institutions worldwid…

07/11/2025

The Human Body: The Bridge Between Worlds

Part 1. Why People Seek Help: Pain, Posture, and Performance
Most people do not begin with philosophy. They come because something in their body has stopped feeling right. It may be pain, posture, or performance, the three main doors through which almost everyone enters the world of bodywork and self-understanding.

1. Pain. When the Body Can No Longer Ignore Itself
Pain is the body’s most direct way of asking for attention. It may show up as a hip that locks, a back that tightens, or an ache that never seems to rest. At first we see it as an enemy, a fault to be fixed. But pain is not a malfunction. It is a message.

2. Posture. How We Hold Ourselves in Space
Posture is not just the stacking of bones; it is the physical expression of self-perception. A slumped chest, a lifted chin, rounded shoulders, each tells a story about how safe, open, or worthy we feel. When posture collapses, breath shortens and confidence drops. When posture opens, we feel lighter and more present.

3. Performance. The Desire to Function at Full Capacity
Performance is the wish to do life better, to move, think, and feel at full potential. Athletes, artists, and professionals all experience moments when the body seems to hold back even without pain. Performance depends on clear communication between body and brain. When tension or fear interrupts that communication, precision and flow disappear.

4. Three Doors, One Root
Whether someone seeks relief, alignment, or optimization, they are describing the same thing: the body’s conversation with itself has become confused. Pain, posture, and performance are three dialects of one language, the body asking for recalibration.

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Part 2. The Body as the Interface Between the Inner and Outer Worlds
Inside each of us is the world of thoughts, feelings, and imagination. Outside is the world of gravity, relationships, and circumstance. The body is where these two meet. Every inner event shows up as a physical change, a tightening throat, a lifted chest, a quickened pulse. Every outer event shapes the inner one, a hard chair, a harsh word, a sudden noise. The body is the translator between the invisible and the visible.

1. How the Interface Functions
Millions of signals cross this bridge every second. Sensors in the fascia, muscles, and skin tell the brain about pressure and movement. The brain replies with instructions: contract, release, breathe, balance. When this loop is clear, we move easily and feel grounded. When it jams through injury, stress, or emotional strain, the brain issues protective commands that linger long after the threat has passed.

2. The Inner World Shapes the Body
Emotions have postures. Fear narrows the breath. Anger hardens the jaw and shoulders. Grief collapses the chest. Shame lowers the eyes and rounds the spine. If these reactions last too long, they sculpt the body. The protective shape becomes the permanent shape. The body begins to carry the biography of the mind.

3. The Outer World Shapes the Body
Gravity, environment, and culture all leave marks. Screens, shoes, and chairs reshape how we stand. Modern life teaches constant forward focus and little rest. The nervous system adapts by bracing, a jaw that never relaxes, shoulders that never drop. Eventually this constant readiness feels normal, though it is not.

4. What Clarity Really Means
Clarity is when information moves accurately across the bridge. The body tells the truth about what it feels, and the brain responds appropriately. Effort drops, coordination returns, and emotion can move without getting stuck. That is what people sense as lightness or energy flow: accurate communication restored.

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Part 3. How Rolfing® Structural Integration Works
The body functions like a living computer. The hardware is the tissue, muscles, fascia, joints, bones. The software is the nervous system, the command center that tells the hardware what to do. When stress or injury strikes, the software writes emergency code: “Brace here, protect there.” Over time those commands become permanent. The hardware stays tight even when the danger is gone.

1. Rolfing Works on Both Levels
Rolfing® Structural Integration addresses the tissue and the messages controlling it. A Rolfer’s touch gives the nervous system new sensory information. Firm or gentle contact activates specific receptors in the fascia, telling the brain: “This area is safe. You can release now.” The nervous system updates its command, and the tissue softens immediately.

2. Fascia. The Body’s Communication Network
Fascia wraps every muscle, bone, and organ like a three-dimensional web. It is filled with sensory endings that constantly inform the brain about the body’s shape and tension. When fascia is stiff or glued, the brain receives distorted data and responds with unnecessary tension. Rolfing restores glide and hydration to the fascia, letting information move cleanly again.

3. Gravity as a Partner
Unlike most manual therapies, Rolfing always considers gravity. The goal is not to stretch or manipulate but to help the whole structure organize within the gravitational field. When segments of the body stack in balance, gravity supports instead of compressing. The person feels grounded and upright without effort.

4. Integration
Over time, the nervous system adopts new default settings. Breath, balance, and movement synchronize. People describe a feeling of coming home to themselves. Rolfing® Structural Integration is not just manual therapy; it is education through touch. It teaches the body to listen, the brain to trust, and the person to move through life with less effort and more awareness.

06/11/2025

Rolfing® and the Interface Between the Inner and Outer Worlds

“Posture is politics. Breath is biography. Alignment is freedom.”

The Body as Bridge Between Two Realities

Every human being lives simultaneously in two worlds: the inner world of mind, feeling, and perception, and the outer world of physics, society, and environment. The two meet in a single medium: the body.

The body is not a vessel that carries us through life. It is the interface through which life is experienced. Every thought, emotion, belief, or trauma in the inner world, and every social, gravitational, or environmental force in the outer world, must pass through this living interface. When the flow of information across it becomes distorted, the person loses coherence physically, emotionally, and existentially.

Rolfing® Structural Integration works precisely at this interface. It restores clarity of communication between the inner and outer worlds, between experience and expression, perception and posture, mind and matter.

1. The Inner World: Mind, Emotion, and Perception

Inside each of us is a vast field of invisible activity: thoughts, memories, beliefs, fears, and longings. The nervous system continuously translates these inner states into muscular tone, breath patterns, and micro movements.

When emotional truth is suppressed, the diaphragm tightens. When vigilance becomes chronic, the shoulders rise. When grief is unresolved, the chest contracts and breath shallows. Over time these emotional translations harden into structural habits, tension patterns that no longer serve the present moment but still dictate how the person moves through it.

Rolfing’s touch and movement dialogue invite these patterns back into awareness. As fascia softens and breath returns, long frozen emotions often begin to move again. This is not catharsis for its own sake. It is the body remembering its native language. The practitioner’s attuned presence teaches the nervous system, by experience rather than concept, that feeling is safe again.

2. The Interface: The Body as Communication Medium

The body is both message and messenger. It listens to the inner world and the outer world simultaneously, translating impulses from one into responses in the other.

Fascia, the connective tissue web under the skin, forms the sensory matrix through which this translation occurs. It contains hundreds of millions of mechanoreceptors feeding data about position, pressure, and vibration into the nervous system. When that tissue is fluid and balanced, communication is clear and the person feels in their body, grounded, and present.

When trauma, chronic stress, or defensive posture stiffens that network, signals distort. The brain receives unreliable input and organizes movement around protection rather than expression. The compass misfires. Rolfing re educates this network, restoring accurate sensory input so that perception and movement can once again synchronize.

3. The Outer World: Gravity, Culture, and the Social Field

The body does not float in emptiness. It lives in relationship with the physical and social forces that surround it. Every day it must negotiate gravity, economics, technology, and politics, the weather systems of collective life.

Gravity and Physics
Gravity is the first and constant teacher. When alignment is coherent, gravity supports. The person stands with effortless lift, energy flows through the fascial lines, and balance feels natural. When alignment collapses, gravity becomes an adversary, compressing joints and burdening the nervous system with continuous correction. Rolfing re aligns the body to restore cooperation with gravity, turning physics back into physiology.

Culture and Conditioning
Cultural norms also sculpt the body. Societies that reward productivity and control produce rigid spines and clenched jaws. Gendered conditioning shapes movement. Men armor vulnerability. Women restrict power and space. Social inequality teaches bodies to shrink, defer, or perform. Rolfing does not preach against these patterns. It gives the body back its permission to choose. When space and breath return, so does autonomy.

Politics and Economy
The political climate literally lives in the body. A society marked by instability and competition generates collective hyperarousal, millions of nervous systems braced in quiet alarm. Bodies under chronic uncertainty mirror collapsing markets with constricted diaphragms, shallow breathing, and restless sleep. Rolfing sessions interrupt that contagion one body at a time. Each time a person’s system re learns safety, it becomes a local correction in the social field. Regulation spreads.

Technology and Environment
The modern outer world demands constant forward focus through screens, deadlines, and artificial light. Heads tilt, necks strain, breathing becomes vertical. The body forgets its back, its ground, and its horizontal expanse. Rolfing invites awareness back into three dimensional space, restoring not only posture but orientation. This is how it quietly reintroduces people to the physical world, to gravity, air, and relational distance.

Even the planet itself communicates through this interface. Climate, noise, and light affect fascia, hormone rhythms, and mood. When the body realigns, it begins to receive nature’s signals again, warmth, stillness, season, and breeze, as guidance rather than stress.

4. Restoration: Repairing the Bridge

When the body reclaims balance through Rolfing, the dialogue between worlds resumes. From the inside out, emotion can express as movement, voice, or choice rather than symptom. From the outside in, gravity, sound, and contact once again nourish rather than overwhelm.

This is the deeper power of the work. Rolfing restores the transparency of the human interface where mind and matter speak the same language again.

Healing in this sense is not the removal of pain but the re establishment of communication. It is when the organism can once again tell what it feels, respond to what it senses, and trust its own signals.

5. The Living Field

To receive Rolfing® Structural Integration is to be reintroduced to reality, not abstract reality, but the tangible field in which body, mind, and world are interwoven. It is to remember that posture is politics, that breath is biography, and that alignment is freedom.

Each session is a re negotiation of belonging: belonging to gravity, belonging to relationship, belonging to truth.

When this belonging is restored, the person stands differently, not just taller but truer. Gravity supports rather than suppresses. Society feels navigable rather than oppressive. The inner world becomes a reliable guide again.

In Summary

Rolfing® Structural Integration works because it restores integrity at the junction between the subjective and the objective, between the inner pulse of consciousness and the outer field of forces. By refining this living interface, the body, it brings both worlds back into conversation.

The result is not just relief from pain but the reappearance of meaning. A body that once fought to survive begins, finally, to participate.

Trademark Notice:
Rolfing® and Rolfer® are registered service marks of the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute®.

26/10/2025

Fascia - The Hidden Organ of Feeling

Beneath the skin there is a fabric that listens. It wraps, connects, and transmits, and for a long time it was dismissed as packaging rather than perception. Research over the last two decades shows a different picture. Fascia is richly innervated. It is a source of proprioception, interoception, and pain modulation. Schleip described fascia as densely supplied with mechanoreceptors and free nerve endings, which positions it as an active organ of sensing rather than inert wrapping. Myers pushed the same point from anatomic continuity, arguing that fascia should be regarded as an organ of communication, a bodywide medium through which force and information move. Through this lens the compass does not begin in the abstract. It begins in the body’s fabric, which reports tension, glide, temperature, and load in a constant stream of sensation toward the brain.

A Web of Continuity

Fascia is not a collection of local sheets. It is one continuous tensional network. From scalp to plantar fascia, every region is invested by layers that blend and transmit strain. When the arm reaches forward, lines of pull travel into the trunk and hips. When the diaphragm moves, the abdominal and pelvic layers answer. Findley and Schleip described this continuity as a tensional web that organizes movement at the whole body level. Myers mapped these relationships into long vectors that link distant regions through fascial sheaths. The lived effect is simple. Posture is never local. A stiff foot alters pelvic rhythm. A slumped thorax changes cervical effort and breath. The compass reads these global relationships because the fabric is continuous and transmitting at all times.

Receptors That Listen

Fascia contains multiple receptor classes that change firing with stretch, shear, pressure, and vibration. Ruffini endings are slowly adapting receptors sensitive to sustained tangential strain. Pacinian corpuscles are rapidly adapting receptors that prefer vibration and quick changes in load. Interstitial receptors respond to pressure and chemical milieu and likely contribute to both proprioception and interoception. Schleip catalogued these sensors and showed that fascial tissue also contains contractile cells that can modify baseline tone, which means the fabric not only reports force but can adjust its own tension set point. Afferent traffic from these receptors ascends through spinal pathways to the brainstem and into the insular cortex, a key hub for interoceptive awareness described by Craig. In practice this means that the way a joint glides or a rib cage expands is immediately translated into feeling. When a line is short and dry, the brain hears strain. When it hydrates and glides, the brain hears ease.

Touch, Movement, and Autonomic Tone

Mechanical input into fascia is not neutral. It triggers cellular and autonomic responses. Langevin demonstrated that connective tissue fibroblasts change shape with stretch and that this deformation can alter cytokine release and local inflammatory tone. Manual contact and slow movement therefore influence chemistry as well as mechanics. Schleip reported that specific kinds of fascial stimulation can decrease sympathetic activity and increase parasympathetic influence, which is the neurophysiological signature of safety. A long exhale through a lengthening side body changes the firing of receptors in the thoracolumbar fascia. A gentle shear across the plantar fascia changes stance and breath. Hydration states matter as well. When fascia is well hydrated, layers slide with less friction, reducing nociceptive input and easing the body’s baseline alarm. In the language of the compass, these changes quiet noisy channels and improve the fidelity of internal signal.

The Sensory Internet of the Compass

Taken together, these findings reveal fascia as an interface between structure and perception. Mechanoreceptors convert deformation into neural language. Afferent fibres carry that language to the insula, where the brain constructs feeling from bodily state. Autonomic tone then shifts in response, which feeds back into the tissue through changes in blood flow, temperature, and muscle recruitment. The loop is complete. A posture is also a prediction. A movement is also a message. When fascia glides and responds, interoception becomes clearer. When it is rigid, sticky, or overprotective, interoception grows confused and emotion follows that confusion. The compass depends on this fabric. Touch, breath, and movement are not symbolic. They are instructions transmitted through the sensory internet of fascia to update the body’s map of itself.

Evidence and Empirical Foundations
1. Schleip, R. (2003). Fascia as a Sensory Organ.
2. Schleip, R., Findley, T., Chaitow, L., Huijing, P. (2012). Fascia: The Tensional Network of the Human Body.
3. Findley, T., & Schleip, R. (2007). Fascia Research I.
4. Langevin, H. M. (2013). Mechanotransduction in connective tissue. Journal of Cellular Physiology.
5. Myers, T. (2009). Anatomy Trains.
6. Craig, A. D. (2015). Interoception and Emotion.

Exerpt from The Compass Buried: A Guide for Authentic Emotional Living

04/01/2025

https://www.abmp.com/textonlymags/article.php?article=2631&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1DwF3-wm5jsLy690NbWPsS0aatkCFndMm8K7H79J0QXJpp-bBASlx2ot4_aem_y5Dau3hWtY6SB2f6snRF0g

Serving the massage therapy community since 1987 through practice support, ethical standards, legislative advocacy, and public education.

01/01/2025

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/motheroffascia/

"Mother of Fascia - One Woman's Tireless Quest Through 20th Century Turmoil" is a captivating documentary that follows Dr. Ida P. Rolf, the founder…

16/11/2024

15/10/2024

https://youtu.be/3uK92zS8qq8?si=pEnn8Hy2w25n2Vbh

At this moment, a global revolution in anatomical research is underway, fundamentally changing our understanding of the human body.This revolution centers ar...

28/09/2024

Cerebrospinal fluid unites the nervous system by extending beyond the central nervous system into peripheral nerves.

16/09/2024

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7237395/ #:~:text=Results,48%25%20knees%2C%20respectively

31/08/2024

https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/11/19/5878?

Background: Recent work has investigated significant force transmission between the components of myofascial chains. Misalignments in the body due to fascial thickening and shortening can therefore lead to complex compensatory patterns. For the treatment of such nonlinear cause–effect pathology, c...

20/07/2024

A wonderful statement in support of Craniosacral Therapy by HRH King Charles, given to our 3rd Breath of Life Conference in London in 2005. Here is his full statement:
"I am delighted to support this third Breath of Life Conference on approaches to holistic health. As many of you will know, I have for many years been pursuing a vision of a truly integrated healthcare system in the UK, one which brings together the best of conventional, complementary and alternative approaches. As part of this whole person approach, I am particularly keen to see a more holistic and spiritual dimension brought into mainstream healthcare.
Through the work of my Foundation for Integrated Health, we have made great strides in making complementary and alternative medicine more acceptable and available to the general public, but I am well aware that there still is a long way to go before we achieve a properly regulated system in this country.
There is no doubt that work such as yours is vital to the health and well-being of our society which is, now more than ever, so desperately in need of mental, physical and spiritual sustenance. I am convinced that your work with babies and young children, in particular, is crucial in helping to avoid the suffering of future generations by healing imbalances so early in the young lives of individuals.
I was heartened to hear that the Craniosacral Therapy community has embraced the drive towards self-regulation of the profession, with the help and support of my Foundation – a necessity if complementary therapies such as yours are to be taken seriously in the future. I have also noted the progress of the Cranial Forum, over the last few years, as it has moved towards creating a strong and cohesive group that will act as a single regulatory body for this invaluable work.
I wish you every success with this conference, and I hope that it will provide a valuable and fruitful forum for discussion and education for you all in your various professions within the healing arts."
HRH The Prince of Wales