Marcel Teeuw

Before Rolfing

'This study never ends and I am looking forward to continue to grow while I am helping others to grow.'

Born in The Netherlands, Marcel obtained a university degree in Public Administration at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. He then worked as a researcher, teacher and consultant in various jobs.

Since 2000 he is a practitioner of full contact karate an a teacher since 2008. This brought him in contact with the world of sports massage and injury treatment and prevention and he completed a training in Sports Massage, Sports Trauma Care and Taping in The Netherlands in 2004.

He then moved to Italy, where in 2004-2005 he received his first Rolfing® 10-series that completely resolved his severe back pain. He also took training in the Bates Method to help with his vision problems and for a certain period he managed to live again without glasses. These events planted the seed for a further development, in which his view on the plasticity of the human body and its self-healing capacities started to change and become grounded his own experience.

Inspiration to train in Rolfing®

“I love to dive into complexity and then make it concrete. This is what connects the passion I put into my university studies and previous jobs with my current profession as a Rolfer®.

Around 8 years after my first 10-series, I received another series of Rolfing® sessions, by a different practitioner. That was the first time I envisioned myself doing this kind of work. The time was ripe for me to become a student and to start learning about the human body and its potential from a completely new perspective.

I loved both the manual and the movement parts of the training. They are both valid ways of access to the body and the whole person in their own right. But they can also be smoothly combined, each inspiring the other. After my movement training, I have continued to explore my own karate practice as well as other somatic practices but always related to my inner experience of movement, connection, freedom, alignment and wholeness.

My craniosacral training added another layer to the refinement of my technical and perceptive skills related to inner movement and freedom in myself as well as in my clients.

I am extremely grateful for the richness in our Rolfing® community and I was able to study with over 20 different Faculty Members, including the osteopatic approach to nerve manipulation and visceral work based on the teachings of Barral.”

Teaching Method

“Looking back at my own process, and now observing students in their training, I am amazed by the effectiveness and the transformative power of the Rolfing® training, given its quiet pacing and relative shortness.

In the Teacher in Training process, I am being invited and guided into discovering and developing my own role and style in this beautiful training.

My role as I see it now is to guide students through their own transformation. That transformation includes the improvement of their manual skills, the development of their Rolfing® vision on the human being that connects the parts and the whole in gravity, and the awakening of their perceptive skills that work from the outside in and from the inside out. The better the students sense themselves, the better they can sense the others.

In this role as a guide, I think my teaching style can be summarised as: curious, embodied and relational. I want to be contagious and share my passion about how to appreciate the complexity and to curiously explore a concrete way to accomplish a fruitful intervention. I also hope to transmit the importance of staying with the 'being' and 'relating', in order to be successful in the 'doing'.

My study never ends and I am looking forward to continue to grow while I am helping others to grow.”