It has been a while since I wrote about Rolfing. Less than a week remains until the next Rolfing training (departure for Germany is January 30, 2015; the training begins on February 2, 2015). Phase III is the final stage of a training that comes in three. The interval since Phase II ended has been narrow — a little over two months — and with the Mid term paper assigned between Phase II and Phase III, finding the time during the trip around the world was a struggle.
As covered on this blog, preparation for the Mid Term Report began after arriving in Buenos Aires, and it was written over two and a half weeks, finishing in Sucre (see “The Mid Term Paper and Altitude Sickness: Finishing the Assignment Mid-Journey in South America“). The Mid term paper called for 1,000 words each on the experience of receiving and of giving Rolfing among students, and 4,000 to 5,000 words on the ten Rolfing sessions.
The paper was submitted on December 19, 2014. The result arrived on January 25, 2015. It was accepted. That no rewrite was required came as a relief. There is of course still a need to keep studying, and Giovanni’s comments included notes on which points to improve going forward.
In Phase III, I will take charge of two clients and follow how they develop across the ten-series. How I develop is something to look forward to as well. Along with the group I studied with — eight of us, myself included — two more will join from Mexico and Singapore. How all ten of us develop toward graduation is something to look forward to.
There are goals I would like to set for Phase III.
- Finish reading Tom Myers’s Anatomy Trains (currently close to 40 percent through).
- Learn the anatomical names of the muscles to the minimum necessary extent (I bought a set of anatomy cards in Japan).
Getting to the school in Munich will mean taking the bus. The ride is about twenty minutes, and I would like to put that time toward studying.
What I notice about Rolfing will continue to appear on this blog. The training begins within a week, and I intend to look forward to it.
Note, August 2026
Both goals set for Phase III concerned anatomy. Finish Anatomy Trains; learn the names of the muscles to the minimum necessary extent. The twenty-minute bus ride was to be put toward that. The direction was toward increasing the quantity of knowledge.
Four months later, the direction began to shift. On May 26, 2015, in Osaka, I met the Rolfer Hiroki Sato — Hiro — for the first time, and received a Source Point Therapy (SPT) session on the spot. Almost no touch, no force applied by the practitioner in an attempt to make things better, and yet the body came into order of its own accord. It lay in a direction entirely apart from a plan of accumulating anatomical knowledge.
I continued attending Hiro’s seminars from 2016 through 2021 as well. The content would later be systematized as IMAC (Integrative Movement Assessment & Conditioning), a method for seeing the connections of the whole body through range-of-motion assessment. A path by which anatomy connects to the use of the body was there. And yet SPT was learned from the same person. Two directions — refining knowledge and yielding — were being received at once.
What became clear over the following decade is that the decisive factor was not knowledge but experience. The number of sessions, the daily yoga practice, and the jiu-jitsu practice taken up recently. Through these, each structure comes to stand up inside me as an image. Between a name memorized from a book and what is happening under the hand, there is a stretch of time that can only be crossed by repetition.
I think of what Sharon said in Tokyo in 2016. Her anatomy and physiology textbooks were taken away by Ida, and she accumulated her sessions relying on sensation. Hearing it at the time, it struck me as an extreme form of education. Now the sense of it is clear. With a textbook present, one looks at the textbook rather than at the body.
From increasing knowledge toward changing how things are received. When the Advanced Training in 2025 placed Somatic Sensorium — engaging the sensory apparatus as a whole to listen to the body — at its center, and took up Bob Schrei’s Source Point Therapy as an instance of energy work, both arrived as things already in hand. Because they had begun in Osaka ten years earlier.
And as for Phase III itself. The expectation written in this entry was to take charge of two clients through the ten-series and watch them develop. What was actually learned in the course of it was not that, I think. Trusting the sequence. Settling the mind. Twenty sessions across eight weeks, following a fixed order. When moving to the next session with no idea what will happen, what holds a person up is the fact that a sequence exists, and whether they can remain settled.