While learning various techniques in the Rolfing training, I am told from time to time by the instructor:
“People grasp things in terms of right and wrong, but what is right for the practitioner is not necessarily right for the client. So rather than thinking and interpreting on your own, it matters to give the other person space, to make time for them to think as well, and to do the work as though accompanying them.”
In learning a technique, the tendency is to think, as though a correct answer existed, that the work must be done correctly. Or a state of mind sets in where anything short of perfect execution feels like an error committed. Thinking this far ahead, the information the other person is sending goes unreceived.
Through school education and parental discipline, I had been poisoned by a single notion — that things have a right and a wrong, and that mistakes must not be made. This was a moment of being made aware of that. Rolfing, after all, is learned through a great deal of trial and error.
What is a correct answer for me is not necessarily a correct answer for the other person. Each is judging it right by a standard of their own, and every body differs. Accepting the diversity of people means, I think, understanding that people judge on the basis of a variety of standards.
In Rolfing, the terms used are old pattern — the old habit of movement the person held before the work — and new pattern, the new habit of movement born as a result of the work. What deserves attention here is that there is simply an old pattern and a new pattern; these are not right patterns and wrong patterns. It may be better to think of it as options having been made available.
And when a client wavers between the old pattern and the new pattern, there is said to be room for Negotiation and Re-negotiation. Throughout, as sessions accumulate, these patterns are considered through dialogue.
In class, time is spent digging into bodily sensation to explore what sort of change occurs in the transition between the old pattern and the new. What is interesting is that in many cases, even the slightest change in the deep layer brings movement within the emotions. Valuing that process, and considering with the client, little by little, how to take in the new change — that is what it comes down to.
Come to think of it, the body did not arrive at its present pattern on its own. Posture has been formed through parental discipline, school education, the mindset expected of a working adult after entering society, and the like. To change that old pattern from the deep layer, little by little, brings about more change than might be imagined. And within that old pattern there may also be psychological trauma that the person does not feel.
In the training to come as well, I hope to deepen the process of learning while holding to a mindset that accepts diversity rather than right and wrong.
Note, August 2026
This piece grasps the body through the word pattern. There is an old pattern and a new pattern, and that is all — not a right one and a wrong one. Where that way of seeing arrived in later years can be traced in two directions.
How the old pattern was made
This piece holds the following passage.
“The body did not arrive at its present pattern on its own. Posture has been formed through parental discipline, school education, the mindset expected of a working adult after entering society, and the like.”
In January 2018, in Part 2 of the Rolf Movement certification training, Aline Newton took time to explain Tonic Function. Stabilizing posture calls for the force of muscles working continuously — Tonus — and that stability is subject to a range of factors. Newton set out five perspectives (see “Confusion in a Good Sense + On Tonic Function“).
Tissue; perception and cognition; thinking and words; meaning and the symbolic; coordination.
The second of these, perception and cognition, corresponds exactly to what this piece describes. It is acquired in the course of growing up and taken into the body in the form of habit, adopted chiefly to protect oneself from threats in the environment.
The third, thinking and words, came with a more concrete example. Take a single phrase such as “straighten the back”: whether that means lengthening the spine, putting effort into the spine, or letting the spine lengthen of its own accord differs from person to person, and settles into the body as differing experience. Discipline and education forming posture is something that happens at this level.
What was written in 2014 came out of observation, as a felt sense. Four years later it had been organized into five factors and handed over as a framework for observing the body. Where to direct the work becomes clear through these five perspectives.
The view that an old pattern has its reasons became, here, a technique.
Giving space becomes a principle
At the opening of this piece, the instructor’s words are quoted.
“Rather than thinking and interpreting on your own, it matters to give the other person space, to make time for them to think as well, and to do the work as though accompanying them.”
In the 2025 Advanced Training, Ray McCall set out two ways of grasping things: 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, takes the relationship with the client itself as the field of change. This stance moves the work from the linear and developmental toward the nonlinear and fruitional. What is asked for is an attitude that trusts change to occur rather than producing it (see “Journey to Becoming an Advanced Rolfer — A Summary of the Road to Certification“).
Rather than thinking and interpreting on your own belongs to the side of intention; giving the other person space belongs to the side of intentionality. Words received eleven years earlier turned out to be the contrast between those two concepts.
The manner of relating was given a name as well. Ray called it Kind Indifference: not becoming excessively caught up in the client’s experience, while at the same time watching over it with deep interest. Accompanying them — that was this distance.
Working with the wavering
This piece writes that when a client wavers between the old pattern and the new pattern, there is room for Negotiation and Re-negotiation.
At the time it was noted down as the name of a technique. Read again now, what the term presupposes comes into view. The wavering is not a problem to be resolved but something to be worked with. Which of the two to take is not for the practitioner to decide.
What the 2025 training taught was the premise underlying that: trusting that the body of the other is capable of self-regulation. The practitioner’s part is to set the field in which change arises, to trust it, and to wait.
The new pattern is not the right one, this piece wrote. That is precisely why room for negotiation is needed. Only where two options stand does the structure hold in which the choosing belongs to the client.