The Phase II training has reached its midpoint. Away from work and from where one was born, in an entirely different setting and drawing on a different brain — a different set of capacities — the training absorbs everything. The position is that of a beginner, and the image that keeps returning is of raising a building from nothing at all.
The words that carry this best come from Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.
The line comes up more than once in Rolfing training. Studying Rolfing means widening not only the client’s awareness of space but one’s own as well (on the Rolfing conception of space, see “Letting Go of Tension (2) — The Importance of Being Aware of Space“). Widening that space asks for a mind that stays open to some degree.
Learning the manual work now means a good deal that does not go well. Too much force. Injury to the fingers and hands. No clear sense of how much pressure. Learning in an environment where that is permitted would be difficult in actual work — even knowing that improvement comes only through trial and error.
Yet once knowledge accumulates and a specialist’s way of seeing takes hold, a different problem arrives. Judgment and analysis begin to operate against a standard.
On this point Suzuki writes:
As soon as you see something, you already start to intellectualize it. As soon as you intellectualize something, it is no longer what you saw.
In Rolfing, what is asked is not only seeing with the eyes but feeling with the body (see “Seeing with the Eyes, Feeling with the Body“). Catching this present moment presumably requires mobilizing the whole of the senses.
Beginner’s mind is also a conception whose importance became apparent through stepping away from work and traveling. It is worth holding onto from here.
Note, August 2026
Eleven years have passed since this was written. Certification as a Rolfer came in March 2015, as a Rolf Movement Practitioner in 2019, and as a Certified Advanced Rolfer in 2025 (see “Journey to Becoming an Advanced Rolfer — A Summary of the Road to Certification“).
The move to the side of what Suzuki calls the expert’s mind happened somewhere along the way.
At the time of writing, the link between Zen and Rolfing served as a figure of speech from outside. Then came Phase III, and among the papers distributed was the name Jeff Maitland — the person who systematized Ida Rolf’s teaching into theory and opened the way to a Rolfing not bound by protocol, the non-formulaic approach.
Maitland was a scholar who taught philosophy at Purdue University and, at the same time, a Zen monk. He studied under Joshu Sasaki Roshi, a Japanese-born Rinzai Zen priest who came to the United States and founded Rinzai-ji and the Mount Baldy Zen Center. Maitland himself received the dharma name Hōgaku. Hiroyoshi Tahata has written on this lineage in detail in “On Zen and the Art of Healing” (note, only in Japanese).
What Maitland emphasized above all was training the capacity to see — not mere visual inspection, but listening to the body with the whole of the sensory apparatus. This points to the same place as Suzuki’s line about intellectualizing beginning the moment something is seen. Zen was not a citation brought in from outside Rolfing; it had worked its way into the interior of the theory (see “Principles and Observational Skills in Rolfing — Jeff Maitland’s Approach“).
One more thing. What Ray McCall and Hiroyoshi Tahata emphasized repeatedly in the 2025 Advanced Training also overlapped with what this piece describes: that what matters most in Rolfing is not technique but the perceptual capacity and the way of being that listens to what the client’s body needs. It is precisely after the technique has been acquired that the forward rush of judgment and analysis warrants caution.
The line read eleven years ago — that intellectualizing begins the moment something is seen — registered then as a caution addressed to beginners. In fact it is a line that takes effect the more experience accumulates.