Writing a scientific paper begins with defining terms, then citing prior work and stating what the new finding is. The framework — introduction, methods, results, discussion — is fixed to a degree, but the reader is a human being. Turning it into a story requires assembling something that moves the heart to some extent.
During the years in science, it became apparent that constructing the logic was a means of a certain kind. The audience, expert or not, is human, and unlike a machine, a human has a mind that feels things. So even while using technical terminology, a paper needs to be written as a story that reaches the reader. The better the journal, the stronger that tendency runs.
Which is to say: science is also a world in which the sensory side — what one finds interesting — carries considerable weight. Individuality shows in a paper, and reading one, emotion sometimes shows as well. The discovery of the double helix by Watson and Crick, for instance, cannot be appreciated with sensibility left out.
Science and art resemble each other in that both carry centuries of accumulation and build a new story on top of that context. To express something is to produce a change in another person’s mind and bring about a new realization.
Sensibility had always seemed important, but this time, in the Rolfing training, the impression is one of learning a great deal about sensibility rather than logic, technique included.
This blog has taken up Rolfing terms such as Articulation, Palintonicity, and Embodiment. A class would ordinarily begin from the definition of the term. What makes Giovanni’s approach interesting is that he deliberately refrains from explaining the definitions one by one, and has the students think instead.
Embodiment was covered in “Bodily Sensation: What Is Embodiment?“: the approach works through the movement of the body, letting students arrive at their own answers about a word through the senses.
Articulation, for instance, is simple enough to define as space. But learning how the body is used in an Embodiment session brings other things within the reach of the word: space within the body, space felt outside one’s body, the space between oneself and another person as a sense of distance, the space between sounds. The use of the word widens.
The anatomical terms work the same way. Rather than emphasizing knowing them, which is to say memorizing them, the muscles are felt in one’s own body through Embodiment, and their movement comes to be known through practicing the work and through observation. Because the whole of the senses is mobilized, it is as though each anatomical term were expected to enter the mind not as mere lettering but as something living, carrying depth.
Fundamentally, every person is a different being. Understanding human diversity requires the ground within oneself to receive that diversity. Understanding words through direct experience refines sensibility, and it may well lead to an understanding of diversity as well.
That an education of this kind would come in Europe was entirely unexpected. What comes through is the depth of Europe, and at the same time the sense that a long history and a culture of diversity have cultivated this ground.
Savoring the depth of each word, the intention is to meet the second half of the Rolfing training in the same spirit.
Note, August 2026
What this piece describes is Giovanni’s way of teaching: not giving the definition of a word first, but letting the student arrive at the answer through the body. At the time it registered as the depth of European education.
Eleven years later, it became apparent that this way of teaching had a theoretical background.
Among the ideas taken up in the 2025 Advanced Training is Jeff Maitland’s three-stage method for training the capacity to see. First, shifting one’s intentionality — letting go of self-centered intent and moving into a state open to the object. Second, mobilizing not only vision but touch, hearing, interoception, and the rest, taking things in with the whole body. Third, waiting for the change that the client’s body shows of its own accord (see “Principles and Observational Skills in Rolfing — Jeff Maitland’s Approach“).
Withholding the definition belongs to that first stage. When the definition comes first, it becomes a standard, and the intellect runs ahead. It points to the same problem as Shunryu Suzuki’s line about intellectualizing beginning the moment something is seen (see “Beginner’s Mind and the Expert’s Mind“).
The other subject this piece takes up — the widening of words — also went on to develop.
In the Rolf Movement training that began in 2017, how to put what the body feels into language was addressed directly. Rather than questions answerable with a simple yes or no, open questions are mixed in while asking about the state of the body. And the difference is learned between using language to instruct and using language to educate — to draw out (see “
Rolf Movement – Part 1 (2) — An Introduction to the Basic Way of Thinking”).
This distinction between instructing and educating came up again in Phase IV. According to Pierpaola Volpones, to teach is to convey the procedure step by step so that the student memorizes the technique; to educate is to have the student think about what to do, in order to draw out what is good in them — educere meaning to lead out. Giovanni withholding the definition was the latter.
The understanding written here about scientific papers — that they need to be written as a story that reaches the reader — connects to the use of language in a session. Both address the same problem: placing words so that something moves inside the one receiving them.