The Phase III Rolfing training began on February 2, 2015. The group this time consists of the eight from Phase II (one Belgian, two Swiss, two Germans, one French, one Japanese, one American) and two new arrivals (one Singaporean, one Mexican) — ten in all.
The instructors are two Germans: Jörg Ahrend-Löns and his assistant Andrea Clusen. Seven of the students were together through the eight weeks of Phase II, so we know each other well, which makes things genuinely easy. It looks possible to approach the training in a relaxed state.
Phase III is called the Clinical Application of Rolfing Theory, and it is where what has been learned so far is put into practice. Each student takes charge of two clients, and the two instructors take charge of one each. The clients are seen across four slots, an hour and a half to two hours each. There are two slots without an assigned client, and in those the sessions are observed.
The two instructors’ sessions, each student’s two assigned sessions, and the two observed sessions come to six sessions experienced and watched in a single session day. Since the series consists of ten sessions, that means sixty sessions seen with my own eyes in total.
The first day brought an introduction to how the training will proceed from here, and from 7 p.m. the clients actually visited the office of the Rolfing class, allowing an informal conversation over an hour and a half.
As noted above, this training has less to do with acquiring new knowledge than with moving into practice. The reality is that a great deal was gained in Phase I and Phase II and has not been fully digested. So in Phase III the focus falls on relating what is known to what else is known.
An example.
Rolfing consists of ten sessions. In Phase II, the principles of each session were studied and learned through demonstrations by the two instructors and through working on one another as students. That way of learning proceeds, it is fair to say, without knowing what the next session will involve.
In Phase III, by contrast, what each session involves is known to some degree. So the instructors’ explanations come from the standpoint of how the ten sessions connect organically, and of how to think about the strategy for the work while taking in all ten sessions from the vantage point of the first.
Each session is also reviewed, and in doing so the return is to the principles. The impression is less of packing in additional knowledge than of learning the importance of not clinging to knowledge — of deliberately letting it go.
The training will run eight weeks. I would like to write here about what I notice along the way.
Note, August 2026
The structure described in this entry largely determines what Phase III consists of. In a single session day: the two instructors’ sessions, the two sessions I take charge of, and the two I observe. Six in all. That continues for the length of a ten-series, so it comes to sixty. Sixty sessions witnessed across eight weeks.
The curriculum Ida Rolf first created was divided in two: Auditing, the stage of the observer and of perceiving, and Practitioner, the stage of hands-on experience. At the start there is no working on anyone — only observing others, exhaustively. This is what Sharon described in 2017. The structure was later reorganized so that the Practitioner stage enters from Phase I, but the weight of observation remained in Phase III. Of the sixty, my own hands are moving in twenty. In the other forty I am watching.
Ida called the notion that seeing itself becomes technique the Saturation Method. Information is supplied until observation has soaked into the body. Eleven years later, in the Advanced Training, this method would be explained as the rationale behind the basic training.
Something else this entry records is the difference in how the learning worked compared with Phase II. In Phase II the work proceeded without knowing what the next session would involve. In Phase III, with what each session involves known to some degree, all ten are taken in from the first session onward and the strategy is thought through.
The order is reversed. Phase II is walking and then looking at the map; Phase III is looking at the map and then walking. The same ten-series is traversed twice, from opposite directions.
The Advanced Training ten years later lay beyond this. The fixed order is set aside and the session is built individually from the client’s condition. It is the stage of drawing the map on the spot. But it can be drawn only because there is a memory of sixty sessions, and the order can be set aside only after the order has been traversed twice.
The impression recorded in this entry — the importance of not clinging to knowledge but deliberately letting it go — points to the same place. Only what has once been held can be let go.