In the European training, two sessions called Mentoring (Mentor meaning a guide or teacher) must be taken between Phase II and Phase III (in the interval from November 27, 2014 to February 2, 2015). During a stay in the UK from November 27 to December 2, 2014, I arranged the first with Keith Graham and the second with Alan Richardson.
This piece takes up the Mentoring session with Alan Richardson (for the session with Keith Graham, see “An Experience in the UK (1)“).
Alan Richardson spent four years in Japan during the nineties. He encountered Rolfing in Japan, returned to the UK, and set up practice as a Rolfer. According to Alan, there are currently thirty-five Rolfers in the UK, with the number trending upward year by year (for reference, Japan has more than a hundred and Switzerland has fifty).
He certified in Boulder, Colorado in 1998, and in 2003 he also qualified as a practitioner of Cranio Sacral Therapy.
Talking with him, unlike with Keith, there was a quality of detailed questions and logically ordered speech, while receiving the work left an impression of sharpened sensation.
This piece covers what was learned.
That Rolfing consists of ten sessions has been described throughout this blog. The first is organizing the breath, and the breath is, in a sense, also the process of building the relationship.
Since it is the introductory session, Alan noted that proceeding while talking about how the body will be organized from the second session onward makes the client want to come back for the following sessions. It is a kind of marketing, but a reasonable method.
What was learned most concerned touch. In doing bodywork, paying respect to the other person matters. The body is a presence with an intelligence of its own. According to Alan, rather than entering the work abruptly, what matters is organizing one’s own body before touching the other person’s, and taking the time until that person is ready to receive.
Before touching Alan’s body, the hand was held a hundred centimeters away and brought in toward the toes, narrowing the distance little by little, taking nearly twenty minutes until the atmosphere of receptivity was in place. In an actual session it becomes shorter than this, but what preparation is came to be understood through the body.
According to Alan, the body has layers, and Rolfing proceeds by releasing the fascia of the layers a little at a time. At first, though, the client is not ready to receive it inwardly, so a careful approach matters. Taking time to check that state of readiness before touching the body makes the timing become apparent, which is interesting.
And once the timing is clear and the readiness is in place, the approach then moves actively into the body so that the person actually experiences the work (here Alan used the word Bossy, in the sense of taking a degree of initiative).
As can also be said of yoga and Thai massage, without trust in what is inside the client’s body, the other person tenses up and the effect of the work is halved. That it is all right to proceed with confidence in one’s own work was another thing learned.
As it happened, I met a massage therapist in London who said this about touch:
What matters is refining it until it is like touching toward the yolk without breaking the raw egg.
Going forward, the technique matters in carrying out Rolfing, but so does the preparation that comes before the touch, and I would like to keep that in view.
Note, August 2026
What Alan demonstrated was the procedure that comes before touching. The hand is placed a hundred centimeters from the toes and the distance is narrowed little by little. It took close to twenty minutes until the atmosphere of receptivity was in place. Even if an actual session runs shorter, what preparation is had been shown through the body.
A year later, at the final interview of Phase II, the one thing Giovanni named under areas needing support was to give myself and the client time, to allow the work to travel through (see “The Final Interview“). What arrived as a comment in words had already been shown by Alan as a procedure.
The words did not come first with the demonstration following; the demonstration came first, and the words arrived afterward.
The Neutral taken up in the Advanced Training in 2025 is the name given to this waiting. Alan’s explanation, however, does not stop there. Once it is clear that the readiness is in place, the approach then moves actively into the body.
Bossy was the word used at that point. Waiting and entering are both inside one procedure. The distinction in the Advanced Training between Intention (strongly wanting an outcome) and Intentionality (pointing a direction while staying open) is the concept that handles this turn. Waiting alone does not make a session.
Two metaphors for touch are also recorded in this entry. Alan’s account of releasing the layers a little at a time, and the words of the massage therapist met in London — refining the touch until it is like touching toward the yolk without breaking the raw egg.
The metaphor returns later from another lineage. In the Cranio Work learned from Sharon Wheeler in Seattle in January 2017, the explanation was of tracing the bone along the outside of the jaw, mouth, nose, and eyes as though tracing wet sand (see “Cranio Work – Sharon Wheeler (2): How the Class Proceeded“).
It has the same shape: arriving without breaking. And Shape the Hand, in 2025, points to the same thing not as a metaphor but as the name of a technique — not trying to do something with one’s own hand, but letting the client’s body form that hand.
Taken together with Keith’s plug-and-earth analogy from the previous Mentoring, what was received over these two days was in no case the technique itself. Where to be before touching, how to approach, how far it is possible to arrive without breaking. Immediately after finishing the basic training, that is what was handed over first.