Dr. Ida P. Rolf Ph.D. (1896-1979) was the creator of this practice we call "Structural Integration". A graduate of Barnard College in 1916 , she went on to earn her Ph.D. in biochemistry from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University in 1920. She worked at the Rockefeller Institute for twelve years making achievements which were especially notable for a young woman in those days. In 1927 she went to study atomic physics at the Swiss University in Zurich.

In the 1930's, seeking answers to personal and family health problems and being dissatisfied with the available medical treatment, Dr. Rolf explored Osteopathy, chiropractic medicine, Tantra Yoga, the Alexander Technique Korzybski's work on General Semantics and states of consciousness. She was also influenced by Ludwig Von Bertalanffy in the 1930's.

Initially she began working with health challenged people by doing hands on manipulations while the client was in yoga asanas. Her encounter with osteopathy evolved her approach from more yoga to more manipulation.

By the 1940's Dr. Rolf was working on Riverside Drive in NYC managing a full practice. She experienced many breakthroughs in her work with chronically disabled persons. It was during this time, in exploring a body’s relationship to gravity as pivotal to the viability of it's structural and functional patterns, she conceived of an orderly, progressive method for the reordering of a body's random imbalances in such a manner that would effectively resolve and prevent those imbalances from reemerging. This method became a sequence of manipulative sessions that has become known as "the recipe”, and the practice thereof, "Structural Integration".

By the 1950's her reputation had spread to England where she traveled to spend summers as a guest of John Bennett, a prominent mystic and student of Gurdjieff. She made attempts to teach her method to osteopaths in England, and in Oslo, Norway.

Then, in the early 1960’s, at the suggestion of Fritz Perls , founder of Gestalt Therapy, Dr. Rolf was invited to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. At Esalen she found an eager group who understood both practically and intuitively her system-oriented approach (as opposed to the the symptom-oriented approach preferred by the western medical establishment) to healing. It was from this group at Esalen that she began training the first practitioners and instructors of Structural Integration, leading to the formation of the Rolf Institute, as well as the adoption of the popular term for the her work "rolfing".

Newspaper and magazine articles began featuring the person and work of Dr. Ida Rolf, and soon the necessity for a formal organization became apparent. As early as 1967, the first Guild for Structural Integration was loosely formed and eventually headquartered in a private home in Boulder, Colorado.

Until her passing in 1979, Dr. Rolf actively advanced training classes, provided direction to her organization, planned research projects, was active in writing, publishing and public speaking. In 1977, she wrote "Rolfing: The Integration of Human Structures". This book is the major written statement of Dr. Rolf’s scholastic and experiential investigation into the direct intervention with the evolution of the human species.

At the time of her death in 1979, there were more than 200 certified "Rolfers" or SI practitioners around the word. Today, there are several thousand practitioners of Structural Integration currently in private practice world wide and currently, under the auspices of the IASI (the International Association of Structural Integrators) there are several schools training practitioners of Structural Integration, each having their own (usually small) variation or development on Dr. Rolf's pioneering work.

Dr. Rolf on SI -

It is an important concept: that practitioners (of Structural Integration) are integrating something; we are not restoring something. This puts us in a different class from all other therapists that I know of. It takes us out of the domain designated by the word "therapy," and puts us in the domain designated by the word "education."

One of the differences between practitioners of Structural Integration and the practitioners of medicine, osteopathy, chiropractic, naturopathy, etc., is that the latter are all relieving symptoms. They make no effort to put together elements into a more efficient energy system. We ask; how do we put a body together so that it's a unit, an acting, energy efficient unit?

From the first day we see a client, we are putting him together, we are integrating him. We integrate him at the end of his first hour, at the end of his second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth. At every hour before that man or that woman walks out the door, we should have integrated him to the place where he has the best, most efficient use of his system that he can have at that level. at the end of the eighth hour he should certainly have an efficient use of a higher level of operation than he had at the end of the seventh hour or at the end of the second hour.

If, in our presentation to the world, enough stress can be laid on this, we will have a certain amount of publicity indicating that we are less therapists than we are educationists. I am not hiding behind a bunch of words here. This is what I mean, this is my goal: an educational process.