About Gael

Gael Rosewood’s path has been blessed with great teachers, serendipity, and instincts that led her to take the challenges and adventures that furthered her life’s inquiry.

Farmers and philosophers, preachers and teachers make up her lineage. Her grandfather, Henry Wieman, was a proponent of a humanistic philosophy with a sensibility for a greater intelligence in an animate world. Gael’s father, Huston Smith, author of The World’s Religions, devoted his career to bringing cross cultural understanding and appreciation for the different religious traditions. Dinner time guests included Alan Watts, Pete Seegar, Aldous Huxley, Peace Pilgrim, Timothy Leary, Michael Murphy, (founder of Esalen) and more.

Yet Gael’s life long explorations made the missing piece her center piece. Where does the body fit in the world of abstract and mind opening dialogue? What is the potential for us to open and evolve not only through ideas but through experiences that take us beyond thought? Who are we under the socially encoded behaviors of our time and place?

Gael was fortunate to meet pivotal and visionary teachers at just the right time. In 1969 she met Ida Rolf at Esalen Inst. Ida Rolf understood that there was a way to restore balance and structural integrity to the body via manual manipulation of connective tissue or fascia. The idea that physical function could be improved via educated touch was a radical and questionable idea in her time. Further, science is only now catching up with her intuition that the fascial web, or connective tissue, plays a crucial proprioceptive and self organizing role in the body, interacting with the force of gravity and informing the body of its orientation in space. Training with Ida Rolf led Gael to become an observer of human posture and movement. These skills were greatly enhanced by 10 years of classes with Judith Aston, another student of Ida Rolf who went on to create her system of therapy called Aston Patterning. This led Gael, in time to present an article on the physiology of walking; her point of view that puts the development and coordination of walking closer to the animal world and further from the standard mechanics presented by physical therapy manuals. (place a link to this article here)

After Judith Aston left the Rolf Institute to pursue her own work, Gael helped to create the Rolf Movement program at the Rolf Inst. She joined the faculty there in 1978 and later in 1989 became a Rolfing Instructor as well. After stepping down from the faculty in 1998 she still teaches CE courses and mentors students on request.

Her skills were augmented with Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing training in 1998. Other courses in visceral manipulation, nerve sheath release, scar tissue work, cranial/sacral technique and specific work with injured bones have informed her private practice as well.

In 1978 Emilie Conrad and Susan Harper entered Gael’s life. Emilie Conrad, founder of Continuum Movement, was another visionary and a powerful influence on Gael’s life. In a nutshell, she saw that the fluid within the body was not separate from the fluids of our planet, and universe and functions as one resonant stream of information. Fluid is the innate state of life. There is no life without it. We can invoke and participate with this fluid energy much to the enhancement of our own health and well-being. In doing so we discover a primordial wisdom that lives under the cultural adaptations and socially encoded roles we play in life.

In 2008 Emilie Conrad and Robert Litman developed an 18 day Continuum training called the Wellsprings Practitioner Training. This program is a longer immersion in the values, principles, and modalities of Continuum. It was created in response to a call from the somatic practitioners who wished to employ Continuum in service to their healing professions. As Emilie was dying, she and Robert asked Gael to step into this co-created program. As it is evolving it has become an excellent preparatory course for those who wish to become Continuum teachers as well as those who are seeking healing via this form of self care. You can find more information about the program here or at www.wellspringsofcontinuum.com.

Gael is also a teacher/mentor for the Continuum Teacher’s Association and helps support aspiring Continuum teachers to learn and develop their practice to prepare them for offering to others.

Gael continues to teach and practice locally on Vashon Island, off the coast of west Seattle, and also travels and teaches internationally. She has co-taught with her father, Huston Smith at Esalen Inst., with Hubert Goddard, Susan Harper, Emilie Conrad, Amber Grey, Caryn McHose, and Robert Litman, as well as most of the senior members of the Rolf Inst. faculty. Her classes and workshops have been offered in Boulder, CO, Berkeley, CA, Austin, TX, Holderness NH, and N. Carolina, as well as England, Germany, Japan, and Finland.