The Rolfing training has reached its midpoint, with Session 5 completed. At the midterm stage, an interview is held between two teachers and one student.
Before the interview, an evaluation sheet on the two teachers is filled out — close to thirty items. The interview, roughly fifteen minutes, took place on the afternoon of October 31, 2014. Entering the room, the two teachers offered their usual warm welcome.
“How are you doing?”
The usual opening, and pleasant as ever.
The midterm report evaluates nine items. Seven are rated on a five-point scale, with the student submitting an evaluation sheet as well; the remaining two are written responses. The seven:
- Clarity about the goals and structures of individual sessions
- Pattern recognition and body reading
- Quality of touch
- Quality of body use
- Contact and relationship with clients
- Timing and orchestration of sessions
- Openness and attitude for learning
Among these, the assessment held that item 2 — body reading — and items 3 and 4 — quality of touch and of body use — could stand improvement.
The sense that more practice of the manual work was needed had been strong, so the assessment matched it exactly. What came as a pleasure was receiving the highest rating on item 7, openness in attitude toward learning. As covered previously on this blog (see “Beginner’s Mind and the Expert’s Mind“), the intention had been to approach the classes with a beginner’s attitude, and the rating seems to reflect that.
The assessment on body reading raised a question at first, but reading the remaining two items brought it into place. Those two responses follow (the Japanese renderings are loose; the English is worth reading directly).
Are there other specific areas in which this student shows ability?
You are curious, quiet, joyful and respectful. There is an excitement bubbling under – a huge resource that is starting to show up beautifully in your touch, body use and orchestration.
Are there other specific areas in which this student needs support?
We are wondering how this sentence seems to you: “can you build a space and a time inside your self for this curiosity and excitement that is bubbling in you and that also needs expression inside in order to go outside.”
In practice we are wondering how we can help you settle into the steps of presence, resonance, and listening. This will allow you to have space inside for the excitement and discover and then this can connect to the outer space and the other.
Something in this rang true. During the training, while observing or working on another person’s body, all sorts of thoughts came and went in the intellect. For the first two or three weeks the tendency ran toward observing the body unconsciously, on the basis of what had been thought through in the head. Gradually that shifted: rather than relying on the intellect, settling the mind and then meeting the client. And with that came the felt understanding that things come through the senses without the intellect being used at all.
The turning point came while practicing the work on Giovanni. As though he had seen straight through to what was happening inside, he gave specific responses: “This is a hand touching the body from the mind of intellect.” “This is the mind of the senses appearing in the hand.” “That pace carries heart in it.” Putting his responses into practice little by little, the “excitement bubbling under” that the teachers observed does seem to have started coming through.
Cultivating that capacity means turning attention further inward. The two teachers put it as making a larger space inside oneself. Presumably, the years spent through reading and psychology acquiring other people’s ways of thinking had come at the cost of building the space one needed inside — as though the answer lay elsewhere, when it was already within.
Trusting oneself more, it seems, is what leads to trusting others.
There was an earlier occasion of noticing, on stepping away from reading, that the interior space was unexpectedly small.
That space matters in Rolfing was put this way in “Letting Go of Tension (2) — The Importance of Being Aware of Space“:
Bringing awareness to the presence of space within the body — to evoke it — lets unnecessary muscular effort drop away.
What matters now is making space within oneself, and through that, creating conditions in which the other person finds that space easier to make.
The feedback is exactly what was needed at this moment, and the English it came in is beautiful. It reads as a set of markers for what to acquire across the remaining four weeks. Holding onto the beginner’s mind and turning attention inward, the manual work is worth refining one step at a time.
Note, August 2026
Reading the feedback recorded here eleven years later, it appears to have forecast the whole of the Rolfing learning that followed.
What the two teachers named were three steps: presence, resonance, and listening. And that making space inside would connect outward, to the outer space and to the other.
These three were precisely what stood at the center of the 2025 Advanced Training. Ray McCall spoke with “Being” as the axis, and called neutral touch Listening Touch. One of the three points for cultivating neutrality was “Finding Back Space” — deliberately sensing the space behind the body, which returns the center of gravity to the middle and allows one to stand in a stable position (see “Journey to Becoming an Advanced Rolfer — A Summary of the Road to Certification“).
Making space inside opens the relation to the space outside. What was pointed out eleven years earlier had been systematized as technique.
One more thing. What Giovanni said carries weight in retrospect.
“This is a hand touching the body from the mind of intellect.” “This is the mind of the senses appearing in the hand.”
The difference between a hand that explores through intellect and a hand that receives through sensation. This would later be formulated as Shape the Hand — letting the client’s body shape one’s own hand (see “The Deep (Core) Sessions“). The question of the hand’s direction had already been raised at this point.
And there is the self-observation recorded here:
“The years spent through reading and psychology acquiring other people’s ways of thinking had come at the cost of building the space one needed inside — as though the answer lay elsewhere, when it was already within.”
Eight years on, in a piece written from the practitioner’s side, this appears reversed. The one holding the answer is not the practitioner but the client, and what matters is the posture of waiting for the answer to emerge (see “The Approach from Sleeve to Core — From a Personal Sense of Place to Acquiring a Personal Standard of Judgment — Sessions from the Fourth Onward“).
Someone who noticed that the answer lay within themselves came to hold that the answer lies within the client as well. Feedback received from the position of learning had become a stance as a practitioner.