When Ida Rolf devised the ten-session series of Rolfing, there was no scientific theory behind it; it was built on her own experience in yoga, osteopathy, the Alexander Technique, and the like. The one who gave Rolfing its scientific grounding was the French Rolfer Hubert Godard. Last time, I touched on Tonic Function (see “The Muscles That Tire and the Muscles That Don’t — Tonic Function and the Support of Posture“).
How do the muscles work against gravity? And why is Rolfing effective? Pursuing these questions to their roots, Godard arrived at the idea of Tonic Function.
Godard divided the muscles into two — the Phasic, which work transiently, and the Tonic, which work continuously — and sought to explain the body from the standpoint of how to activate the gamma motor nervous system and make the fullest use of the energy-efficient Tonic Muscle within the body.
In this piece, I would like to consider what kind of change needs to occur within the body in order to maintain the quality of the muscles under the environment of gravity — to “keep tone” of the muscle.
The key is bidirectionality (Palintonicity) (see “Basic Concepts — Bidirectionality (Palintonicity)“). The idea is that by giving the body two directions, the Tonic Muscle comes into order.
I would like to give a few examples.
To walk efficiently, two directions are needed: the lower body feeling gravity (downward), and, on that foundation, the spine of the upper body extending and moving freely (upward).
When sitting in a chair, too, the most fitting movement arises when the feet rest on the ground, the chair supports the sit bones (the feet and sit bones going downward), and there is an awareness of extending the upper body upward from the base of the sit bones (the upper body going upward).
Also, as taken up in “Letting Go of Tension (3) — Awareness of Gravity and Space,” I described how the body has up and down, front and back, left and right, and how holding an awareness of widening the space in each of these is what Rolfing is. This, too, is an example of holding two directions.
By giving the body two directions in this way, we can come to know where we are headed, what kind of beings we are, and how we move. I was taught that this is what makes it possible, in English, to determine Orientation — the positioning of how the body moves — in relation to Movement.
Of body and mind, Rolfing is distinctive in that it brings order chiefly by way of the body; but Tonic Function is also influenced by coordination (how the body moves), perception (how the world is seen), and meaning (how meaning is assigned to the world).
Ninety-five percent of human activity is spent gathering information from the outside. When the volume of information received is too great — heartbreak, an unexpected accident, violence, and so on — it comes to exert a serious effect on the body. As touched on in “Trauma Stays in the Body, Not in the Event — What Happens in the Deep Sessions,” the body becomes unable to cope with the excess of information, and it remains within the deep layers in the form of trauma.
According to Giovanni Felicioni, such things are stored within the interior of mind and body. Rolfing, by bringing the body into order, comes to release these as a result; but how to settle oneself in the space between the new pattern gained through the work and the old pattern of the past (see “Phase II (24) — Old Patterns and New Patterns“) is a process that takes time.
That said, a Rolfer who performs Rolfing is not a therapist. The idea of Tonic Function seems to teach that there are many approaches to body and mind.
Note, August 2026
This piece explains bidirectionality through the examples of walking and sitting. The lower body to the ground, the upper body to space. Three years later, these two directions would be given names.
What stays and what moves
This piece explains bidirectionality as a relation between above and below. The lower body feels gravity; the upper body moves freely. Walking and sitting alike are examples that divide the body in two, upper and lower.
On September 1, 2017, the fifth day of Part 1 of the Rolf Movement certification training, Pierpaola Volpones gave an explanation of Phoric Function (see “Where to Pay Attention in Movement? — Phoric Function and Fixed Point“).
Phoric means to carry the weight, a term Godard began using.
Insofar as the body feels gravity, it carries weight. Weight can be felt throughout the body, but once the body begins to move, the weight falls unevenly — as when, in walking, some parts feel light and others heavy.
This is where two directions are needed. Something stays — the Fixed Point, the part that feels the weight — and something moves — Orientation, the part relatively free of weight. Holding these two brings space into being within the body (Articulation), and movement comes more easily.
Applied to the examples in this piece: in walking, the lower body is the Fixed Point and the upper body is Orientation. In sitting, the feet and sit bones are the Fixed Point, and the upper body extending from them is Orientation.
What the practice three years later took up was that this relation is not confined to above and below. In the movement practice for Session 5, the work centered on locating where the Fixed Point lies according to a given Orientation.
When the arm moves, is the Fixed Point the scapula, the thoracic spine, the pelvis? When the pelvic girdle moves, is it the lumbar spine, the sit bones, the sacrum — or the knee, the sole of the foot? In thoracic breathing, is it the thoracic spine, the cervical spine, the scapula? In abdominal breathing, the sole of the foot, the pelvis, the thoracic spine, the lumbar?
Bringing these into awareness within movement releases effort that had entered where it was not needed, and makes the force of the deep muscles available.
What had been understood in 2014 as a pairing of above and below had been handed over as a relation that can be set at any part of the body. Bidirectionality was not a matter of an axis dividing the body in two. It was a relation appearing somewhere anew each time movement occurs.
When there is too much information
This piece holds a passage that steps slightly outside the theory of Tonic Function.
“Ninety-five percent of human activity is spent gathering information from the outside. When the volume of information received is too great, it comes to exert a serious effect on the body.”
With the word information, it joins the body to trauma. At the time it was written as a way of carrying forward what Part 1 had taken up from Levine.
In the 2025 Advanced Training, this framework of information covered a far wider range. According to the Rolfer Kevin Frank, bodywork is an approach to physical structure — the fascia, the skeleton — while energy work is an approach to a field of information that cannot be seen. The two do not stand opposed; they can be grasped as the two ends of a continuum sharing the transmission of information (see “Journey to Becoming an Advanced Rolfer — A Summary of the Road to Certification“).
In short, bodywork and energy work alike can be understood as an exchange of information.
What was written in 2014, as information in excess remaining in the body, had widened eleven years later into a framework that grasps the touching of the body itself as information.
On writing that a Rolfer is not a therapist
This piece ends with the following line.
“A Rolfer who performs Rolfing is not a therapist.”
It is the counterpart to Part 1’s “Rolfing is not all-powerful.” The range of what can be handled is being marked out from within.
In 2017, at Lael Keen’s workshop, that marking would be handled in practical terms. Fifty percent of sessions go well with the ordinary ten-series; the remaining fifty call for some approach to trauma (see “Trauma Workshop – Lael Keen — How to Incorporate the Thinking of Trauma into a Session?“).
Not a therapist, and yet what is happening in the nervous system is something to look at. The technique sits in that middle position.
Where this piece writes that there are many approaches to body and mind, it was acknowledging that middle.