The second session focuses on the feet, mostly. It’s already fading from my memory, even though it was just a few hours ago. We chatted a bit first about changes from last week. I told her I’d felt I was breathing a bit more freely. I hadn’t felt any difficulty breathing before, but you know how in yoga they tell you to breath deep into your lower chest/abdomen, and you have to think about it a little bit? Well, since she worked on my ribs, there’s no thinking. It just happens, and it’s sort of floaty like. So that’s nice. I imagine my body is appreciating some extra oxygen or something.

I also told her that a couple of postures in yoga had started working better. Those were standing stick and standing separate leg head to knee. In standing stick, I had been told many times to bring my hip down so both are in line parallel to the floor. This is very difficult for me, and I’d been working on it for months, with slow progress. When I went to yoga after my first rolfing session, I suddenly had no problem keeping my hips level in that posture.

And standing separate leg head to knee was just awesome. This is another one where you’re supposed to level your hips. I felt rock solid in that posture. I think my hips were very level and I felt very steady and strong in it. This is a pose where one tends to tip to one side or the other.

Some other yoga postures were actually “worse” for me. I needed to back out of my usual depth and almost start over. Half moon was particularly notable in this category.

I also felt like I was able to get deeper in standing bow pulling pose–getting my body down all the way parallel, but my balance was not good so I kept falling out.

The rolfing helper dog brought me a tennis ball and I threw it about a dozen times for him. We are best frenz nao. Rolfing helper kitty had other obligations and was not available to sit on the table with me.

The rolfer started by watching me walk back and forth in my underwear a bunch of times. Funz! At least this wasn’t as uncomfortable as the picture-taking part.

She had me lay down on my back with my feet at the table edge. She pulled on each leg to test the mobility. She said I had good movement on the left, but the right was a bit stuck.

She worked on the front of the thighs, front and back of the lower leg, and all parts of the feet. The thigh stuff was most intense. The rest of it was not bad at all. There was also some stuff where she had me bend my knee and move my foot. At one point I felt some painless popping in my leg. “I think that’s your fibula,” she said.

“Is that normal?” I asked.

“It can be if your fibula has been a bit stuck, like I think yours has been,” she told me.

There was more walking around in my underwear. She said I had pretty good movement in the hips and back. Then she had me do some knee bends. Here’s a weird thing. At first, in the knee bend–which we do in yoga class–my right leg felt weirdly turned inward, even though it was perfectly straight. “Where are you tight?” she asked.

I showed her the outside of my knee. She went to work with her knuckles on the area, and then had me do more knee bends. No more tightness! There was also a thing she did with me standing with her hand under my heel.

At the end, she had me sit on the edge of the table and stretched the fascia out away from my spine with me slowly curling my body forward. That was pretty intense. There was not much difference for me before and after. “You were pretty loose there to begin with,” she said.

She finished with some neck work. That actually felt pretty good.

I’ll finish with an oddly unanswerable question she asked me. She said, “You have the prettiest eyes. What color are they?”

ETA: I forgot to talk about initial impressions after the work. There were no immediate huge changes. I felt a bit less clumsy and awkward walking afterward, and my feet feel “softer.” I am wearing my fuzzy slippers right now, and when I walk, I feel like there is perhaps an extra layer of silky fuzzy stuff in them, which is nice. The only specific trouble area I have that she hasn’t yet touched is the hamstrings. I don’t know what session is hamstrings. Not session three, I think. Other than that, any changes coming from the remaining eight sessions are completely unpredictable by me at this time.