The Role of Gravity  “This is the gospel of Structural Integration: When the body gets working appropriately, the force of gravity can flow through. Then, spontaneously, the body heals itself.”    “Some individuals may perceive their losing fight with gravity as a sharp pain in their back, others as the unflattering contour of their body, others as constant fatigue, yet others as an unrelentingly threatening environment.  Those over forty may call it old age.  And yet all these signals may be pointing to a single problem so prominent in their own structure, as well as others, that it has been ignored: they are off balance, they are at war with gravity.” Ida P. Rolf, Ph.D.    When a body is not aligned around its vertical axis, muscles which are designed for certain tasks, must work harder at keeping the body up. As an example, the head is designed to sit on top of the neck which can sit directly on top of the shoulders. In this position, the body can support the weight of the head with little effort. When the neck tilts forward, the head is inclined to roll forward. In response, the muscles in the back of the neck that are attached to the base of the skull are overworked and become tense trying to keep the head upright.    Because the discomfort caused by such stress and tension is structural in nature, no amount of massage or any other type of local treatment to the neck can possibly eliminate the problem. The pain may ease temporarily, but as normal activities resume, the tension and stress reoccur.    Any such local structural problem, in addition to adding tensional pulls along fascial planes throughout the body, also has a global effect in shifting segments elsewhere. As the center of gravity shifts forward in the upper body, compensation must occur somewhere below.  Often, looking at a body from top to bottom, segments are shifted forward and back from the vertical axis. Under a forward neck, the thoracic spine rounds back into increased kyphosis, the lumbars sink forward into extended lordosis, the knees might be compensating by hyper-extending and the body’s weight is transmitted too far forward through the feet. With rotational aberrations such as in the case of scoliosis, the global effect is far more complex.     This is why it is so important to work on the whole body and reposition all of its segments through a series of structural integration.