About Rosen Method
Rosen Method is a bodywork and movement education innovation that was created by Marion Rosen.
“This work is about transformation — from the person we think we are to the person we really are.
In the end we can’t be anyone else.”
Marion Rosen, P.T.
About Marion Rosen PT
Born in 1914 in Nuremberg, Germany, Marion Rosen was a young adult as she and her family began to experience the anxiety and fear of the Jewish community in Germany in the 1930’s.
In 1936 she began studying touch therapy in Munich with some of the leading innovators in body-oriented therapies in Europe. During her apprenticeship, she worked with many patients undergoing psychoanalysis and working with Jungian analysts. In this context, she drew on touch therapy to help people to access unconscious feelings. This was a seed that would inform her work many years later.
She left Germany in the late 1930’s as war broke out, and became a physiotherapist while she waited for US passage in Stockholm. She later completed her US licensure in physical therapy at The Mayo Clinic.
How Rosen Method came to be
Marion Rosen was a physical therapist for 70 years. What she noticed when working with her physical therapy patients is that when they would drop into their feelings and begin to say things to her like, “I’ve never told anybody this before…” she noticed the muscles would soften under her hands.
Not everyone spontaneously dropped into their feelings in physical therapy sessions of course, and what Marion Rosen found is that those patients would heal more slowly and would often be back in her office a few months later for a recurrence of their original injury or a new physical problem.
Those who did drop into and come to accept their feelings during a session did not have repeat injuries nearly as frequently, and they often continued working with her for the changes happening in their lives rather than for any physical discomfort.
From these experiences, Marion Rosen started to make the connection between the physical body and the emotional self. While to some this may sound like she pioneered a new form of energy work or touch-based psychotherapy, in actuality what she noticed is that this work was very much rooted in her training as a physical therapist: that the places in the body where things often came up was linked with the functions of the muscles themselves.
Through her work with her physical therapy patients she continued to see the interconnectedness of the whole being: the physical, emotional and spiritual selves. She was seeing experientially the depth of the bodymind connection.
How Rosen Method is practiced
The Rosen Method consists of two offerings: bodywork and movement education. Both are about bringing optimal function and ease to the body while also becoming more self-aware and embodied. Both are about living into one’s whole potential.
In the bodywork sessions this is accomplished in one-on-one sessions that incorporate touch and dialogue.
In the movement work this is accomplished in small group classes which invite people into an exploration of their movement potential.
Read more about each and how I can support you: