ABSTRACT Elisa Jane Noel, former Board Chair of the Guild for Structural Integration, talks about her mentor, Emmett Hutchins (1934-2016), with Editor-in-Chief of Structure, Function, Integration, Lina Amy Hack.
Lina Amy Hack: Thank you for meeting me to talk about your career as a structural integration practitioner and your mentor, Emmett Hutchins (1934-2016). It was difficult to learn that your school, the Guild for Structural Integration based in Utah, had to close its doors in 2023. You have graciously agreed to talk about these things with me for our Structure, Function, Integration (SFI) readers.
For those who may not know, our schools used to be one school, The Rolf Institute® for Structural Integration [now called the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute®, (DIRI)], formed in 1971. Ida Rolf, PhD (1896-1979) trained Emmett Hutchins. According to our records, he became a Certified Rolfer on June 27th, 1969, an Advanced Rolfer on August 12th, 1974, and was certified as an instructor on January 31st, 1976. He was one of the school’s first instructors. By 1989, the Rolf Institute’s faculty was embroiled in conflict. Emmett and Peter Melchior (1931-2005), another one of Dr. Rolf’s personally trained faculty, left together with others from the Rolfing® community and started the Guild for Structural Integration. Those of us who have trained at DIRI tend to call that event “the split.”
I graduated from DIRI in 2004, and you graduated from the Guild in 2007 – we are the same ‘era’ of practitioners – and our training came well after the split. I have heard about the pain of the split from my DIRI community, and you, of course, are well versed in all the issues born of that ‘divorce’ as you have been an instructor and administrator for the Guild. There are hurt feelings on both sides; for those who went through that era, it sounds quite painful.
As someone who graduated fourteen years later, my feelings are milder. I don’t think it’s professional to harbor animosity and destructive feelings toward colleagues who graduate from a different school yet do the same work as myself. I care about collaborating positively with people and building our profession.
I like to focus on the fact that we share a passion for the work Dr. Rolf taught. Although we have learned structural integration from different instructors, we have a love for this work in common. Part of why I do this work, as a Rolfer and as editor-in-chief of SFI, is to positively contribute to the future of the structural integration profession. Emmett was a part of Rolf’s trusted faculty. The step we are taking here is to write about Emmett’s work and legacy. You are an excellent source for this topic.
Is there anything else you’d like to add to my brief synopsis? Did I get it right from your point of view?
Elisa Jane Noel: Thank you for asking me to do this, Lina. The only thing that I would add is that Emmett used to talk about the very original group that Dr. Rolf started; she called it “the Guild for Structural Integration.” That’s where Peter and Emmett picked that name back up after the split; it was their way of honoring the origins of the work they were teaching.
And yes, it’s interesting; I have heard many variations of the story of the split. At this point, I feel it is good for us to honor the hurt that happened but also, like you mentioned, to come together and move forward. Moving forward is what this work is about anyway; we’re about healing. When I joined the board of the Guild, it was a goal of mine to open up to the community at large. My partner Amber Burnham-Noel [Advanced Structural Integration Practitioner, former IASI Board Member, and Instructor with the Guild] was a big part of that too. I don’t want to speak for her, but it’s important to mention much of what we will talk about today involves her; it has been the two of us on this journey with the Guild.
LAH: Good points. I’m glad you mentioned that Amber is a big part of this story, many readers will know her and her work. Of course, you are telling your point of view here, yet you have been working together for many years. And, of course, you are married partners as well. Thank you for letting us talk about stuff that is your professional life and that touches on your personal life as well. For me, this work can get personal, too.
In the 1970 volume, second issue, of this journal, which was then called the Bulletin of Structural Integration, the very last two lines of the book are the name of Dr. Rolf’s group and their address: Guild for Structural Integration, 1874 Fell Street, San Francisco, California. This was back in the days when Dr. Rolf was teaching in Big Sur, California, before she moved the school to Boulder, Colorado.
EJN: I have some of those early issues of the Bulletin of Structural Integration; they’re so awesome.
LAH: They are great. Dr. Rolf started this journal to be a place where colleagues could communicate about structural integration ideas, argue about points of interest, debate principles, and develop the profession. Here we are, carrying her legacy forward in 2024.
About Elisa Jane Noel
LAH: On that note, please introduce yourself to our readers; how did structural integration become your career? I know you have a sports background – what is your sport? How do you describe your work?
EJN: My background is in kinesiology and physiology. I started out in athletics, and I played college basketball. My graduate studies were in exercise physiology with an emphasis in kinesiology, my goal was coaching and teaching at the collegiate level. Ever since I was young, I wanted to do that. That’s the beginning of how I got into studying the body, movement, and working with people. I was in my dream job, coaching basketball at the collegiate level, when I decided to become a structural integration practitioner.
I loved being an assistant coach; I worked with our athletes on their conditioning and strength training and I also got to help scout future players. I loved it. It was everything I ever wanted to do.
LAH: That’s cool. How did you come across structural integration? How did it lead to a pivot from your dream job?
EJN: While I was studying and doing my graduate work, I started personal training with people, and I was working in a lot of group fitness settings. The motivation of my clients was more around aesthetics and wanting to be perceived in a specific way. And I really struggled with that motivation. My motivation for working with people was to help people be able to participate in their body the way that they wanted to. The word embodiment wasn’t in the conversation in my world at that time, in the early 2000s. We didn’t have that vernacular.
So then I started to go towards athletics, working with teams because then we had a goal of working towards function with the body. Working with people’s performance made sense to me; that was something that I felt would be a better path.
Then, I was out running, I was actually training for the Chicago Marathon, and I was at school in Illinois – I got hit by a car. It broke my sacrum and did a number on my soft tissue. After that, I was in years of pain. My medical team wanted to do a hip replacement. I was way too young to be looking at these things. I wasn’t in so much pain that I couldn’t participate in my life. I was still coaching and playing with the athletes, so I was actually quite physically fit. In retrospect, I trained hard into patterns that weren’t super helpful in my body.
But ultimately, it led me to find a structural integration practitioner when I moved back to Salt Lake, Utah, to teach and coach. My sister saw me come off the plane. I was in so much pain, and she was in massage school; it was her who told me about Dr. Rolf’s work. That was it. The structural integration practitioner I found was Amber. She had been practicing for about seven years at that point. I was sold after I received my first session.
You know how you get clients who come with one issue, and they measure the value of every session thereafter by that issue? Amber helped me see my issue as a whole-body story right off the bat. And I loved that. I was saying to myself, “Oh, this is it.” She didn’t tell me I couldn’t do things. Every other professional I was consulting with was telling me what to do and what not to do. She helped me find what worked for me. She would say, “Well, pay attention to how it feels when you’re doing these things.” Even this kind of question was new information for me. I hadn’t gotten that permission from any other physiotherapists or doctors that I had worked with, and I found that exciting.
And then session two, I’ll never forget, I was lying on my back and had one foot long. She was working through my fibula, calling for movement, and she got very specific and detailed around her requests. It reminded me of how I was with my athletes, but it was in a totally different context that I had yet to discover. That’s when I thought to myself, “Okay, yes, this is what I need to learn.” I signed up for the Utah College of Massage Therapy and then off to the Guild immediately after graduation.
LAH: That makes sense, because you were already immersed in the world of kinesiology. With Amber as your structural integration practitioner, did you go to the school where she completed her structural integration certification?
EJN: Not exactly. Amber started her career as a Certified Massage Therapist in 1995 when she graduated from Utah College of Massage Therapy. Later, she completed the structural integration program taught by Norm Cohn and Andy Crow. Andy Crow had been trained by Dr. Rolf, and, at that time, they had a school in Utah.
When I was asking her about the work, she talked about Dr. Rolf, and I wanted my learning to be from someone as close to Dr. Rolf as I could. She said Dr. Rolf had trained these two gentlemen, Emmett Hutchins and Peter Melchior, and they were among the first people she ever trained to teach the work. Peter had passed away by then, but Emmett was still teaching. Amber already had a plan to do her Advanced Structural Integration Certification with Emmett, which led me to look into it as well, and we were both introduced to him in the same year.
So, she redid her practitioning training with Emmett while I did the basic training.
Photos printed with permission.
Let’s Talk about Emmett Hutchins
LAH: Tell us about Emmett Hutchins as an instructor. What was he like? What are the qualities about him that linger in your mind?
EJN: It does feel daunting to me to try to convey who he was in this short of an article. In a way, I had three relationships with him: one was where he was my practitioning teacher, second, he was my colleague, where I was an instructor and assisted him for many years, and lastly, he was a dear friend. He had a different relationship with all of his students, and he had this magical way of making everybody feel empowered. Even when people would struggle, they would know that they’re going to be able to figure this out, they’ve got this. He made all of his students feel very loved and special. That was something that I have valued in his qualities as a teacher — he was empowering.
I was so lucky to receive a ton of work from him, I got so many sessions from him, and his touch was so empowering. He had this reputation that his touch was deep. In class, he would work with students at the table, and he would make just one contact, and that student would say it changed their lives. I would inquire further about the quality of his touch, and a lot of times they’d say, “It doesn’t feel that deep.” I think that was because the second he started to get deep, he would let you have the change, and then he’d back off. He’d let the person have the intervention through movement or whatever he was after.
I felt like it was almost a disservice that people thought he was only delivering deep contact because, after having multiple series of sessions with him, I can honestly say that his touch was not controlling. It was empowering. He honored Dr. Rolf and he had spent his life studying her work, honoring what he learned while he was with her. And I could see that in every class he taught. I could hear it in all of his lectures and demonstrations that he gave; he really honored his teacher.
About the Guild for Structural Integration
LAH: If a person outside our structural integration community were to ask us – what’s the difference between a practitioner trained at the Guild for Structural Integration and the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute – what is our answer? My sense of this question is that Emmett and Peter were traditionalists and kept their eye exclusively on exactly what Rolf taught. Just keeping our focus on your school - Do you agree with that, or is there another way you’d answer that question?
EJN: Yes, I would agree with that 100%. And oh my goodness, his stories about Ida were important to all of us. I feel lucky that I was able to be in the classroom with him from my practitioning class in 2007 and thereafter until he passed in 2016. Amber and I got to spend a ton of time with him. So, we heard the same stories often.
Every time he would tell a story, I could see the love gushing from him around the topic of Dr. Rolf. Often at times it was a funny story, he had an authentic feeling toward her that he communicated through the stories. He taught her work in the stories, that was a part of how he conveyed the work and had us understand this process.
LAH: That is true for us, too; every one of the DIRI faculty members I’ve trained with references the Remembering Ida Rolf (1997) book and Ida Rolf Talks (1978) and the stories from our legacy faculty who trained with her as well. People’s memories of her words are so valuable to us as practitioners. I imagine, for both our schools, this is another commonality where we capture the wisdom of interpretation. Like you said, as close to Rolf as we can get.
What was his focus when he taught? I suppose, by that I mean, what level of the human being-ness did he like to center his lectures?
EJN: He would talk about relationships and functions with regard to what he was doing in a demonstration, for example. Obviously, we all needed to understand anatomy and he used it as a map. While I would not say he was as anatomy-focused as some instructors, it was one of the models to say where he was contacting. Rarely would he talk about anatomy when describing what he was doing. For that, he would talk about relationships, and he was very focused on functions. Back then, not a lot of instructors we were working with were talking about it like that. It was so effective that Amber and I dove into understanding this aspect of Dr. Rolf’s recipe. We then helped Emmett convey this more in his basic training classes, helping the students understand we are referring to the relationships between anatomy structures and the functions of these spaces. That was definitely his focus.
I am forever grateful for Emmett as a teacher and the support he and Richard Stenstadvold (1935-2012), the Guild president, extended to us. These two elevated Amber and I so much.
LAH: This work is personal, and I hear you saying that teaching this work was personal for you behind the scenes. When it’s all said and done, this is a story about people caring about each other.
EJN: Absolutely. Amber and I were both there through Richard’s death process in 2012, helping him and his family. And same with Emmett. They empowered us to be in the classroom, and part of our role was to help Emmett be able to teach as long as he could. We loved being there for them; they had done so much for us. We would hold the container of the classroom and we took care of the details, nuts-and-bolts stuff.
When we met Emmett, we had already been teachers in our own disciplines since 2000. We came into this already knowing the role of the teacher in physical topics like this. We didn’t know the work, obviously, so we enjoyed our knowledge going to a whole new level with the time that he gave us as students and then as colleagues. He gave everything he could to his students, but especially those he was bringing up to be able to teach his work – Amber and I, Isaac Osborne, and Jason Pan Esterle.
Emmett would have us over to his house on the weekends during the basic trainings we were teaching together, to collaborate together in his studio. He was really interested in craniums the last ten years of his life, and he’d want to show us something about what he was doing. He would often work with our craniums, talking us through what he was doing. Then, he would get on the table and ask us to try to feel what he was teaching us, to feel it while working with his own body. He would make sure that any new concepts were, first of all, effective because he was aware that he was just exploring and being curious. He wanted to make sure that we understood it. He would say, “Don’t bring this to a basic training class; this needs to be for the advanced class.” Or, other times, it was a good fit for the basic classroom.
He would take that time almost every weekend during trainings; he was so generous with his time. He’d let us work with him. He had asked for us to put him through the ten-session series; we did a four-series and a full series with him. What teacher would allow their students to have so much of their time? Five months before he passed, he called us in Salt Lake City and asked us to come out and give him a three-series. And for me, when your teacher asks you to get on a plane and they’re in their mid-eighties, you do it. Amber and I both went out there, stayed with him, and did a round-robin three series.
LAH: Beautiful.
EJN: That was when I received the last work from him, the last three series. And the last three series Amber and I got to give him. It has been so impactful in my work, those three sessions that he gave me, I still feel them in my body. I still feel what he was teaching me in those sessions. And I think he really prioritized bringing people up to continue Dr. Rolf’s work.
LAH: It is like you’re painting the picture of a manual therapy laboratory, like a test kitchen.
EJN: And with a lot of laughs. He and I had a different relationship than Amber and he did. He and I got a kick out of making each other laugh. He was really funny; he liked jokes, and he’d hand out a joke at the end of the day to the students. And we loved it.
LAH: What else would you like people to know about Emmett?
EJN: Even though he gave so much of his time to his students and instructors, he was a little bit of an introvert. Sometimes, that was misunderstood by people; at times, he just needed to gather up his energy. When he would be in bigger groups, it would take a lot of his energy to be in front of the class and deliver his teaching. That wasn’t naturally what he wanted to do. I think that for him to do that, he stepped out of his comfort zone, and he did that in honor of Dr. Rolf. I don’t know if his students knew that or how much people knew that side of him. He had to round his edges out that way to teach.
He had the biggest heart of anybody I knew, a big, gushing heart. You could feel it in his contacts when he would work with you. He would love on you when you were on the table. As I think about this, it reminds me how much I love him, and I feel indebted to him for all he gave me. It feels daunting to try to convey that to people because all the details from that time, of his teachings, needs to be written about in a book.
The Ten Series
LAH: I know what you mean; it is daunting to capture the wisdom in print of these special legacy holders of Rolf’s work. What did the Ten Series mean to Emmett?
EJN: Exactly. I would say the Ten Series was his main practice, and he played within it a lot. He always honored the Ten Series, and he did a lot of advanced stuff within its context. He took this process Dr. Rolf gave him and used it as part of his spiritual practice; a path for growth.
In his last days, I was sitting next to him, and I remember this was maybe three days before he passed. This was my last contact with him. He was a little ethereal, still in consciousness, but he was a little bit in and out of my realm where I was. We had just had lunch and I looked over at him. He’s sitting there, he’s looking so cute with his little bald head and his ears, and he’s sitting there with his eyes closed and rocking back and forth. My immediate concern was that he was in pain. And then I see the look on his face – not pain. After observing him for a minute, noticing what he was doing, I checked in, “Emmett, are you okay?” And he said in his deep rumbling voice, “Yeah, I’m just trying to feel all my ribs.” He was playing with his Line in his dying process. And that was Emmett, he was interested in his Line until he ascended.
LAH: That’s beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. That is sacred time. I resonate with what you are saying and appreciate the care you’re describing. When I was caring for my dad in his final days, being on my Line helped me immensely. There is a place for this wisdom at the end of life.
Rolf gave us so much, a road map for living all the stages of our lives. Embodiment in gravity gives us confidence in being human, elevates us athletically, gives us peak experiences with peak performance, and, here, when we are facing death, it helps us when we are there, too. From growth and development to knowledge embedded in the Ten Series, this work helps us at the beginning, middle, and end of our lifespan.
EJN: And you know what? I think that’s why I decided to do this work. I went into it for performance and I have come out with a completely different idea around what I needed.
There’s this conversation that Emmett used to have with all of his students towards the end of the training; he would talk about getting big. In some ways, he meant for people to inhabit their space. He would say, “We need more people, like-minded people like us, to inhabit this space and to be big. Don’t shrink. Get big.” I think that lesson is so important and I have this conversation with many of my clients. And I have this conversation with my own self all the time. I hear Emmett in my mind saying that, “Be big, inhabit your space.” It’s helped me through many things.
LAH: Hearing you say that makes me think our schools have been co-evolving along the same lines. We also love this notion of inhabiting big space, to the horizon. The qualities Rolf was teaching, that our legacy holders have taught us, there are universal qualities about human beings that we all possess.
What was Emmett’s story before meeting Dr. Rolf? He was thirty-five when he first certified with her. What was he doing before then?
EJN: He was a computer engineer at Boeing, and he had a cush job in Los Angeles, California. He worked a lot from home and he had a lot of freedom. But he had a lot of pain in his rib cage, and he had what he called flat feet, which he was told as a young man was a character defect. Somebody had told him along the way that Rolfing [Structural Integration] could help him get arches. So he found a Rolfer, it was Hadidjah Lamas (1932-2016), and he started working with her. When he was getting the ten session series, he was inquiring, inquisitive, and curious. One thing about Emmett was he was always reading and learning. I loved that about him too. It’s important to be evolving as a person. He evolved so much in his last years.
So, anyway, he was getting the ten sessions from Hadidjah, who did not talk during her sessions. She practiced silently like a meditation while working. He asked questions and she just wouldn’t say anything. Once they were done the whole series, he still had all these questions, and went on with his life. A few months later, he got a phone call from Hadidjah and she said, “You know when you asked me all those questions during your sessions?” He said, “Yes.” She said, “Well Dr. Rolf is here in Los Angeles teaching a class. Here’s the number you can call her at.” And I think it was the Beverly Hills Hotel. She said to ask if he could join the class or at least sit in.
He called Dr. Rolf and it happened to be the second day of the class, so they’d already had the big first day where all the foundations were discussed. She answered the phone and he started asking questions. Dr. Rolf said, “Oh, you can’t come in, you’ve missed the whole first day. You’ll never be able to understand anything. You’ll never catch up.” And Emmett said, “Well, okay.”
At that time, Dr. Rolf was looking for teachers. She wanted to pass this work on to people who could teach. Back then, they would have been talking on those old rotary phones. And I guess, when you hung up, people would call that “ringing off.” And just as Emmett went to hang up the phone because she had shut him down, she goes, “Well, don’t ring off now.” Okay, he held onto the phone. And she said, “Have you ever taught anything?” And he told her that he had taught computer programming. So she said, “Okay, come tomorrow at 9:00 am.” That’s how he got into his auditing phase. It was the same class that Peter Melchior was in as a practitioner.
It was through that story that we [Emmett’s students] met Dr. Rolf. And then the story goes on with Richard, Emmett’s partner at the time. She finagled Richard to start organizing her life slowly over time, sending mail to his house, having him run errands until he was running her school. I think I would’ve liked her.
LAH: It must’ve been so wild to be at the Esalen® Institute with them, that whole pack of people around Dr. Rolf, working and learning together.
EJN: Can you imagine? I went there one day, we had a student that was working there and got us a pass. Amber and I walked around. We visited the Dr. Rolf Room.
LAH: I’d like to do that someday; they are still a beautiful venue for wellness practices.
In 2023
LAH: In 2023, you and your colleagues made the difficult decision to close down the operation of the Guild for Structural Integration. That must not have been easy, and it’s a loss for all of us. What would you like us, your structural integration colleagues, to know about that process?
EJN: Right, it wasn’t easy. It became untenable, and it wasn’t sustainable. When I was the President of the Guild from 2017 to 2023, I learned so much running it, and I feel so grateful for the education. It was such a hard decision.
What I want to say most is that I feel so grateful to the people who started the Guild, to Dr. Rolf first of all, but to Emmett, Peter, and Susan Melchior, his wife. And to Richard.
In 2017, at the IASI Symposium [the International Association for Structural Integration], Amber and I were a part of this teachers’ meeting. This was the year right after Emmett passed. IASI had a meeting at the symposium with all the people running all the recognized IASI schools – their board members, presidents, and education directors. It was really cool that they got all the people in charge of all these different structural integration schools together. There were about seventy people in the room, and they went around and asked everybody to introduce themselves and say who they trained with.
The majority of those people had trained with or were a straight lineage from Peter or Emmett. I sat there in awe of the reach that Emmett and Peter have had. This was an international group of people. That was amazing and that’s what I think about looking back at it all. Can you imagine that?
LAH: I can; what a charge to feel that much connection and expanse about your teacher’s legacy.
EJN: And that’s what I want to be recognized; the Guild has so much meaning for me; the work, as taught by Emmett, reaches out to many, many people. This is Dr. Rolf’s work. It’s Emmett’s. And it’s what he gave me as a practitioner, and it’s what I give to my clients, and I help them with all this wisdom. The reach of our school continues through those of us who were there.
In my own life, my sole professional focus now is my practice, and it’s a really sweet place for me to be and learn from. To step out of the classroom for the first time in twenty-four years and learn from my clients. I’m putting my energy into my own little community here, and it is wonderful and unique. Those sixteen-plus years I gave to the Guild, I’m so filled with gratitude, and I feel indebted to all the people who started it. I’m grateful to the students I got to work with, all the faculty and colleagues I got to teach with. And now I’m in this new relationship with work and I am really enjoying it.
LAH: Well said. It is clear that the school was loved, the teachings were meaningful, and you did the hard thing of giving the organization an end with dignity. I wish all of you well.
Part of the inspiration for this article came from the news last year, 2023, that DIRI invited Guild members to apply to become members of DIRI and become trademark-holding Rolfers® (Hack and Eason 2023). That was a huge moment that you and Amber helped negotiate. I was so touched to hear that a bridge was being built – and surprised!
EJN: That was huge news, Guild members becoming Rolfers. When Libby [Libby Eason, Rolfing® Instructor and Director of the Board for DIRI] and I were talking about this offer that DIRI was extending to us, this is exactly what we were talking about at the beginning of our chat today; we are weaving the profession together.
Amber and I had been inviting DIRI teachers to come and teach our students for years. We have hosted Jonathan Martine, [Certified Advanced Rolfer, Rolf Movement® Practitioner], and Mary Bond [Certified Advanced Rolfer, Rolf Movement Practitioner]. We’ve been enjoying building bridges this way for a few years with different instructors and their courses. We had Denise Foster Scott from Soma, she’s taught a lot with us, and she’s lovely. It’s wonderful to learn the language of the other schools, and to hear the stories of the other schools. I feel like that extension offered to Guild members to join DIRI comes from years of bridges being built. And it was huge. I felt it was a healing move for the community as a whole. I’m grateful for that to be offered to our students and for them to have a place, if they choose, to go there for membership.
LAH: Exactly, my thoughts and feelings are quite similar to yours. In my area, I enjoy community with a few Hellerworkers®, being open to the big tent of structural integration has come easy for me that way because of their friendship. I don’t want to focus on the tension that separates us. I know, perhaps, that even this article may upset colleagues I care about. I hope they can see that we need to focus on the future, on our profession surviving. One school closing is a cautionary tale, in my opinion. This is an entirely new cultural moment; globally, are structural integration professionals going to find their place?
We are in this together. Perpetuating the tension from the split is not our story at this moment. Professionals who graduate from different schools do not have tension between them while going about their work day. They respect each other and focus on the task at hand – helping the people who come to us for our expertise.
EJN: Yes, I agree. That’s not what our body of work exudes. We are in this to help people become embodied, to help people to integrate, to be adaptable, and to heal. And I think as a community, this is showing we can extend this into something bigger than just our physical bodies because that’s what the work is, the work is not just about our physical bodies.
LAH: Thank you for venturing into this delicate territory with me today; we are like two diplomats shaking hands across a table where great battles have taken place before our time. Sure, we have sidestepped some topics, with intentionality. On purpose, I’m putting my attention on collaboration and community building. And on that note, I appreciate meeting you; your practice in Utah sounds super cool.
It’s a big editorial moment to honor Emmett’s memory in our pages. Let’s remember that Dr. Rolf cared for Emmett, Emmett dedicated his life to teaching her work, and he’s left a meaningful legacy in her name.
EJN: Thank you for doing this. I appreciate it.
Elisa Jane Noel graduated from Southern Illinois University with a Master’s Degree in Kinesiology and Exercise Physiology and a Bachelor’s in Physical Education from Weber State University. She has worked as a personal trainer, group fitness instructor, and conditioning coach for the Women’s Basketball program at Salt Lake Community College. In 2006, Noel became a Licensed Massage Therapist with the Utah College of Massage Therapy. That same year, she attended the Guild for Structural Integration and became a Certified Structural Integration Practitioner and an Advanced Structural Integration Practitioner in 2009 with Emmett Hutchins (1934-2016). Elisa became an assistant instructor for The Guild for Structural Integration in 2012 and a lead faculty member in 2015. She served as the Guild for Structural Integration Board President from 2017 to 2023. For more about her private practice, visit https://centerforlength.com/about/.
Lina Amy Hack, BS, BA, SEP, became a Rolfer® in 2004 and is now a Certified Advanced Rolfer (2016) practicing in Canada. She has an honors biochemistry degree from Simon Fraser University (2000) and a high-honors psychology degree from the University of Saskatchewan (2013), as well as a Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner (2015) certification. Hack is the Editor-in-Chief of Structure, Function, Integration.
References
Feitis, Rosemary and Louis Schults (eds.). 1997. Remembering Ida Rolf. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books.
Hack, Lina Amy and Libby Eason. 2023. A path to DIRI membership for graduates of the Guild for Structural Integration. Structure, Function, Integration 51(3):90-93.
Rolf, Ida Pauline. 1978. Ida Rolf Talks About Rolfing and Physical Reality. New York, NY: HarperCollins.
Keywords
structural integration; structural integration education; Guild for Structural Integration; Dr. Ida Rolf Institute; Rolf Institute for Structural Integration; ■
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