In Rolfing training, two words often come up as a pair: Sensing and Doing.
When should we sense — paying attention to the changes taking place in the client’s body as we work — and when should we do — intervening on the basis of what we see through body reading? The timing is not always clear.
The difficulty is that Doing naturally changes in response to Sensing. If we follow every sensation that arises, we can end up being pulled around by what we perceive. On the other hand, if we become too focused on Doing — on technique and what we think needs to be done — Sensing can easily be neglected. At times, what we perceive through body reading and what we sense through touch do not seem to agree.
It seems to me that coaching offers a useful clue for thinking about this balance.
I studied Co-Active Coaching at The Coaches Training Institute (CTI) in 2009. Through people I met there, I was later introduced to calligraphy, tea ceremony, tarot, and other practices. In that sense, CTI had a considerable influence on the direction my life took. Of all the courses I attended, the first foundational course — just two and a half days long — was perhaps the richest.
Coaching is one way of listening to another person and exploring how that person’s potential might be brought forward. Within Co-Active Coaching, an important distinction is made between Doing and Being, with particular emphasis placed on Being.
The distinction can be put simply:
- Doing = what one does
- Being = how one is
Attention in coaching can easily gravitate toward technique — toward Doing. But the Co-Active approach suggests that coaching often becomes more effective through the coach’s way of being.
That “way of being” includes qualities such as character, attitude, values, and beliefs. In everyday life, we tend to judge such qualities as good or bad. Coaching instead treats them as information — important clues for understanding who a person is.
Focusing on Being also shifts the central question for the client toward something like: How can I recover a way of being that feels genuinely my own?
In my own experience of coaching, I witnessed this several times. By focusing on how a person was being, communicating with them from that perspective, and helping them recognize their own Being more clearly, their understanding of what to do could change considerably.
For this to happen, however, the coach also needs to understand something about their own way of being — to remain neutral enough not to lose themselves in the interaction.
Turning toward Being can bring unexpected changes. What matters then is the ability to respond flexibly to what emerges.
In Rolfing, Sensing seems to occupy a similar territory. Through Sensing, a dialogue with the client becomes possible. The bodily sensations discussed elsewhere in this blog are also part of this process (see “Bodily Sensation: What Is Embodiment?“).
Technique — Doing — is of course essential in Rolfing. But the real question is how to bring together what is perceived through Being and Sensing with the techniques we have learned.
How do we find the balance?
At times, this requires knowing ourselves, returning to neutrality, and allowing perception to guide technique rather than letting technique determine what we perceive.
I still have much to learn technically, but I want to continue meeting Rolfing with these perspectives of Being and Sensing in view.
Note, August 2026
When I wrote this in 2014, I thought I had reached a wall in learning Rolfing and was looking outside Rolfing — toward coaching — for a way through it.
Reading the piece eleven years later, however, I realize that the sequence was actually the reverse.
I studied Co-Active Coaching at CTI in 2009. I first received Rolfing in December 2013 and began Rolfing training in August 2014. Coaching had therefore come five years earlier. Tarot, too, entered my life through a classmate at CTI, and I began offering individual tarot sessions in 2010.
Rolfing was the third practice to arrive, after coaching and tarot.
Seen from that perspective, this piece was not so much an attempt to borrow ideas from coaching and apply them to Rolfing. It was an attempt to understand a new practice — Rolfing — through a framework that was already part of me.
The correspondences eleven years later
At the center of the 2025 Advanced Rolfing Training were three ideas already present in this 2014 piece: Being, Sensing, and neutrality.
Ray McCall spoke about the practitioner’s way of being — Being — as fundamental to creating the sense of safety from which perception and the session itself can begin.
Hiroyoshi Tahata approached the same question through the body. His work emphasized maintaining an appropriate bodily tonus through awareness of the center of gravity in the hara. The central concern was not simply technique, but the practitioner’s way of being (see “Journey to Becoming an Advanced Rolfer — A Summary of the Road to Certification“).
We were also given three practical points for cultivating neutrality: the shape of the hand, awareness of the space behind the body, and connection to the hara.
What I had described in 2014 as a premise of coaching — understanding what kind of person one is, remaining neutral, and not losing oneself — had, eleven years later, been translated into bodily practice.
An answer to the Sensing-and-Doing problem
The original piece presents Sensing and Doing as a dilemma.
If we rely too heavily on Sensing, we may become pulled around by everything we perceive. If we focus too heavily on Doing, we may become fixated on technique and stop sensing what is actually happening.
What Ray later offered was a framework that dissolves this opposition: the distinction between intention and intentionality.
Intention tends to operate through causal thinking: the practitioner sees a problem, decides what should change, and acts in order to produce that change.
Intentionality begins somewhere else. If consciousness is always directed toward something, then the way the practitioner attends to the client already shapes the field in which the session takes place. The relationship itself becomes part of the process of change.
From this perspective, the work can shift from something primarily developmental — linear, sequential, and organized around stages — toward something more fruitional: nonlinear, emergent, and responsive to what is already becoming possible.
Rather than trying to produce change, the practitioner learns to trust the conditions in which change can occur.
The second of Jeff Maitland’s four methodologies of healing, the Indirect Approach, points in a similar direction. What matters is not simply which technique is chosen, but whether the practitioner’s intentionality is oriented toward changingor toward allowing.
Sensing and Doing, then, were never simply a question of which one should take priority.
When intentionality changes, the relationship between Sensing and Doing changes with it.
Recovering one’s own way of being
In the original piece, I described one aim of coaching as helping a person recover a way of being that feels genuinely their own.
Eleven years later, Ray McCall described the aim of Rolfing in remarkably similar terms: to support the client’s body and system so that the person can follow their own path — encouraging the conditions in which they can become more fully themselves.
Maitland’s concept of orthotropism belongs to the same line of thought.
Just as a sunflower naturally turns and grows toward the sun, the human body contains an inherent tendency to orient itself upward while remaining in relationship with gravity. The role of Rolfing is not to impose that organization from outside, but to support it without getting in its way.
Not organizing the person, but yielding to the forces through which the person organizes themselves.
What I had first encountered in coaching as the recovery of one’s own way of being had, from the side of the body, arrived at a similar conclusion.
Unforeseen change and responding flexibly
The original piece contains another line that now stands out to me: turning toward Being may bring unexpected changes, and what matters then is responding flexibly.
This, too, would later acquire a more precise formulation.
Ray spoke of Right Action: finding an appropriate balance between Letting — allowing what is happening to unfold — and Making — actively intervening to bring something about.
The presence cultivated through neutrality is what makes this discernment possible.
What I wrote in 2014 simply as “finding the balance — that is the crux” had, eleven years later, acquired a name.
Toward the eight principles of coaching
My coaching practice has since become organized around eight principles: silence as a source of information; neutrality held with positive intent; three-layer observation across brain, heart, and body; tools of somatic observation; interventions appropriate to the client’s state; throwing intuition; the distinction between New Discovery and Improvement; and recognizing the dual nature of what appears to be a weakness.
Of these, throwing intuition comes directly from CTI.
And neutrality has remained at the center from the time this piece was first written.
Rolfing, coaching, tarot.
Only much later did I begin to see that the same underlying principles were operating across practices that had once seemed separate.
This piece, written in 2014, is a record of the first moment I began to touch that underlying structure.