In Rolfing training, the two words Sensing and Doing often come up as a pair. When to sense — perceiving during the work what changes are occurring in the client’s body — and when to do — carrying out the work on the basis of body reading? The timing is not always clear.
The reason is this: because Doing shifts as a result of Sensing, one can end up at the mercy of Sensing; or conversely, fixating on Doing, on the technique of the work, can leave Sensing neglected. Body reading and Sensing also fail to agree at times.
The hint for this balance, it seems to me, lies in coaching. Co-Active Coaching, run by The Coaches Training Institute (CTI), was something I studied in 2009. Through the people met there came calligraphy, tea ceremony, tarot, and other pursuits — a course that shaped my life considerably. The first foundational course, two and a half days, was the richest of them.
Coaching is one means of listening to a person and considering how their potential might be raised. Within it, Doing and Being are separated, and the focus falls on Being.
Coaching understands Doing and Being this way:
- Doing = what one does
- Being = how one is to be
Attention in coaching tends to go toward technique, toward Doing, but the view holds that coaching works more effectively through “how one is.” That “how one is” amounts to the person’s humanity — character, attitude, values, beliefs, and so on. People ordinarily judge humanity as good or bad. Coaching treats these as equivalent, and regards them as important clues for knowing the person.
Focusing on Being makes the question “how does one recover the selfhood that has been lost?” the pivot for the client receiving coaching. In practice, having experienced coaching, there were several occasions of watching someone recover their own way of being: narrowing the focus to “how one is,” communicating with the client on that basis, and through the recognition of Being, the view of Doing shifting considerably.
For this, it matters that the coach grasps what kind of person they themselves are, holds a neutral state, and does not lose themselves.
Facing Being may bring unforeseen changes. What matters then is responding flexibly to circumstances. Being, in Rolfing, is precisely Sensing, and it is through Sensing that dialogue with the client is encouraged. The bodily sensation this blog has taken up is part of Sensing as well (see “Bodily Sensation: What Is Embodiment?“).
Technique — Doing — matters in Rolfing too, of course. But how does one hold together the sensation grasped through Being and Sensing with the technique itself, and find the balance? That is the crux. For that, knowing oneself and becoming neutral is at times necessary. Technique remains to be learned, but the intention is to keep these perspectives of Being and Sensing in view while meeting Rolfing.
Note, August 2026
At the time of writing, the sense was of having hit a wall partway through learning Rolfing and reaching outside it — to coaching — for a way through. Reading it eleven years later, the order turns out to have been the reverse.
Co-Active Coaching at CTI was studied in 2009. Receiving Rolfing began in December 2013, and the training in August 2014. Coaching came five years earlier. Moreover, tarot arrived through a CTI classmate, and individual tarot sessions began in 2010. Rolfing was the third practice, arriving after coaching and tarot.
Which is to say: rather than borrowing coaching’s thinking for Rolfing, this piece records an attempt to understand a new technique through a framework already in place.
The correspondences eleven years on
What stood at the center of the 2025 Advanced Training were the three words written here — Being, Sensing, and neutrality.
Ray McCall spoke of the way of being (Being) that allows a sense of safety as essential to the perception from which a session begins. Hiroyoshi Tahata aimed at a bodily state in which appropriate tonus is maintained, by way of the center of gravity in the hara. The subject was not technique but the way of being (see “Journey to Becoming an Advanced Rolfer — A Summary of the Road to Certification“).
Three points for cultivating neutrality were also given: shaping the hand, finding back space, and connecting to the hara. What this piece describes as coaching’s premise — grasping what kind of person one is, holding a neutral state, not losing oneself — had been organized as bodily technique.
An answer to the Sensing-and-Doing problem
What this piece describes is a dilemma between two options: being at the mercy of Sensing, or fixating on Doing and neglecting Sensing.
What Ray offered was a framework that dissolves the dilemma: the distinction between intention and intentionality. Intention rests on causal thinking and gives primacy to the practitioner’s understanding. Intentionality, on the premise that consciousness is always pointing toward something, treats the relationship with the client as itself the field of change.
Through this shift, the work moves from something developmental — linear, stage-by-stage — to something fruitional: nonlinear, emergent. It is a stance of trusting that change occurs rather than producing it.
The second of Jeff Maitland’s four methodologies of healing, the Indirect Approach, points to the same place. What matters, in that account, is less the choice of technique than the practitioner’s intentionality turning from changing to allowing.
Sensing and Doing were never a question of which to prioritize. When intentionality changes, the relation between the two changes with it.
“Recovering the selfhood that has been lost”
This piece names the aim of coaching as recovering the selfhood one has lost.
Eleven years later, Ray McCall described the aim of Rolfing this way: to support the client’s body and system and help them walk their own path — a process of encouraging the state in which the person is their original self.
Maitland’s notion of orthotropism belongs to the same line. As a sunflower naturally grows toward the sun, the human body holds within it a force that turns upward while in accord with gravity. Rolfing’s role is to support that without getting in its way.
Not organizing, but yielding to the force that organizes itself. What was learned in coaching as recovering a person’s own way of being had arrived at the same conclusion from the side of the body.
Unforeseen change and responding flexibly
The line here — that facing Being may bring unforeseen changes, and what matters then is responding flexibly — would also be formulated later.
What Ray spoke of was Right Action: taking an appropriate balance between Letting, allowing what happens to happen, and Making, engaging to bring something about. And the presence born from cultivating neutrality is what makes that judgment possible.
What was written in 2014 as “finding the balance, that is the crux” acquired a name eleven years on.
Toward the eight principles of coaching
The coaching practice has since been organized into eight principles: silence as a source of information; neutrality carried with positive intent; three-layer observation across brain, heart, and body; the tools of somatic observation; interventions specific to state; throwing intuition; the distinction between New Discovery and Improvement; and the dual nature of what appears to be a weakness.
Of these, throwing intuition derives from CTI. And neutrality has stood at the core from the moment this piece was written.
Rolfing, coaching, tarot. That the same principles operate across different fields came into view only much later. This piece is the record of first touching that structure.