Therapist's hands-on method has gone worldwide
Published: 2010-07-05 06:30:28By: Patricia Yollin | San Francisco Chronicle | March 8, 2010
Marion Rosen describes herself as a bodyworker and physical therapist. Others call her a healer.
"I'm not a healer," said the 95-year-old Berkeley resident. "But people get well. It's not so much what I'm doing but what they allow to happen to themselves."
The Rosen Method, a style of body-centered therapy she developed over the decades, is taught and practiced around the world. It relies on gentle and direct touch to access the unconscious, where emotionally unmanageable experiences are buried - resulting in muscle tension and restricted breath. As people become more aware of the roots of their problems, they open up, and the barriers they've created begin to dissolve.
"A person's story is written on their body," said Sara Webb, Rosen's first pupil and now a senior teacher at Rosen Method: The Berkeley Center.
Rosen was born into a Jewish family in Germany in June 1914. As the Nazis gained power, she was abandoned by one gentile friend after another and grew more and more petrified. Finally, she decided to flee Europe and move to New York. She had to take an indirect route - from Sweden through Eastern Europe, Russia and Japan - and arrived first on the West Coast, where she stayed with relatives in Berkeley.
"It was June 16, 1940," recalled Rosen, sitting in the hillside home she shares with her daughter. "When I saw Berkeley, I said, 'That's it.' The beauty, the freedom - it was my kind of place. You could do anything. You could go out at midnight and hitchhike on San Pablo Avenue. I didn't do it, but I could have."
She learned physical therapy in Germany, Sweden and the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. She worked three years at Kaiser Hospital in Richmond, treating injured shipyard workers, then opened a private practice where she began, in the 1950s, to synthesize her training with her own discoveries and various somatic sources. She started teaching her approach in the early 1970s and it was named the Rosen Method in 1980, when the nonprofit Rosen Institute was founded.