As has come up repeatedly in this column, what matters in doing Rolfing work is body reading — that is, Seeing. In the Phase III training, Jörg has said that while Seeing matters, it is as well not to forget the balance with Sensing: perceiving, during the work, what changes are taking place in the client’s body (on the balance between Sensing and doing the work, see “Sensing, Doing, and Coaching — Thinking It Through from CTI’s Educational System“).
This time I would like to set out the relation between Seeing and perceiving.
When Ida Rolf began teaching Rolfing, the curriculum was apparently divided into two stages: Auditing, the stage of observing, and Practitioner, the stage of doing the work. (What follows draws on the source given at the end.) Auditing is the stage of teaching how to observe, and the weight falls on observing bodies.
That no hands-on work is done at all is what makes it interesting. Practitioners are observed, again and again. And it continues until what matters to observe about Rolfing has been taken in.
This way of working is called the Saturation Method — saturation, as in information reaching the point of saturation. Information keeps being supplied until the eye for the body has been formed, and through that the eye is acquired. This method is still alive in the current Rolfing curriculum, and a great deal of time given to observing other practitioners is a defining feature of Rolfing training (on the training in detail, see “On the Training in Munich (1) — Why I Chose to Study in Munich: The Application Process and the Costs“).
What is of interest is that one day, quite suddenly, the eye Rolfing requires arrives in body reading. In my own case, somewhere along the way during the training, body reading had been acquired without my noticing. So how is the necessary eye formed? Let me give one example.
Looking at the image above, it appears to be nothing more than an assembly of shapes. But what if the question is whether a giraffe can be found in it? Without a single line having been added, the giraffe suddenly rises into view. What changed is that the appropriate concept and meaning — a giraffe — was held on this side of it, and so a giraffe could be observed. Becoming able to observe a body perceptually in Rolfing resembles this process.
The matters introduced so far — where and how weight falls in the body, awareness of the medial line, the anterior and posterior tilt of the pelvis — can be understood by thinking of them as concepts (on these concepts, see “The Body Holds Six Spaces — Gravity, g and g‘”). And those concepts can also be perceived within one’s own body through Embodiment (on Embodiment, see “Bodily Sensation: What Is Embodiment?“).
As an aside, it follows from this that receiving work from a genuinely skilled practitioner also helps in acquiring a perceptual way of seeing.
Now, a way of seeing is better described as perceptual rather than as analytical grasping with the eyes. I have written before in this column that the history of Western painting can be read as a record of how those who paint have perceived the world, and of how that perception changed (see “The History of Painting and the Body (1) — Viewing the Body Through the History of Western Painting“).
What I find fresh in the Rolfing training is that it teaches how to cultivate a perceptual eye while continuing to value an analytical one. Looking back on years spent in research in graduate school, it was taken for granted to think analytically: what deserves trust is what can be quantified, and what cannot be quantified — anything sensory, a perceptual eye among them — does not.
To that eye, it seems sufficient to view the body mechanically, as made of parts, on the assumption that observing the parts yields the whole. In Rolfing, on top of that view, the balance matters with a sensory and perceptual eye that holds not that the sum of the parts makes the whole but that everything is to be taken as whole.
In Phase III, Jörg told the class more than once that body reading gets lost when it is grasped with the brain. This is easy enough to follow: when the analytical mind takes precedence over the perceptual one, it interferes with the giraffe rising into view.
The perceptual way of seeing and the analytical way of seeing. The perceptual is close to the phenomenology of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Husserl. If the timing allows, I would like to take up its relation to phenomenology in this column.
* Reference
- Maitland J. ‘Seeing’ Structural Integration Dec 2014, p24 (one of the materials handed out during the Phase III training)
Note, August 2026
At the end of this piece a single reference is set down.
Maitland J. ‘Seeing’ Structural Integration Dec 2014, p24 (one of the materials handed out during the Phase III training)
At the time it was treated as one handout among others. Read again eleven years later, that one line carries weight.
The ideas learned in the Advanced Training taken from April to July 2025 — the five principles, Taxonomy, Somatic Sensorium, the three questions, Orthotropism — were established for the most part by Jeff Maitland. On Ray’s recommendation, I read Maitland’s Embodied Being – The Philosophical Roots of Manual Therapy alongside the training.
From that same author, I had already been reading in February 2015. And on the subject of Seeing at that. The central subject of a body of thought I would receive as a system ten years later, from the person who built it — and at the time it was processed as a reference.
Why did Maitland write on this subject? The reason is set down in the note to one of the Sharon Wheeler pieces. Ida had no method for teaching how to see a body. In Sharon’s words, the way was to put him into water and let them swim or drown. That gap led, through the split of 1989, to the introduction of Maitland’s philosophy, and on to the five principles and Taxonomy. Roughly fifty years.
Auditing and the Saturation Method, described in this piece, are Ida’s own answer from before that gap opened. No hands-on work at all; observing, continuously; information supplied until the eye is formed. Not systematized as a method, but present as a design of time.
And three days before this piece, in the Phase III (2) piece, the same thing is written from the side of experience: six sessions a day, sixty across ten rounds, with the hands moving in twenty of them and the remaining forty spent observing. Three days later, this piece learns from Maitland’s paper that the structure derives from Ida’s Auditing. The experience comes first, and the source comes afterward.
Now, the piece closes like this.
The perceptual is close to the phenomenology of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Husserl. If the timing allows, I would like to take up its relation to phenomenology in this column.
The timing came ten years later. And not in the form of an argument, but handed over as a procedure for practice.
Maitland sets out three stages for cultivating the power of observation. First, shifting intentionality: releasing self-centered intent and changing into a state open to the object. Second, active seeing: engaging not only sight but touch, hearing, and interoception, taking things in with the whole body. This is the Somatic Sensorium, and what is called feeling-nature. Third, letting what is show itself.
All three are terms from phenomenology. Intentionality is Husserl’s central concept, and the formula of letting what shows itself be seen from itself overlaps with how Heidegger defined phenomenology itself.
Ray went further, pairing INTENTION with INTENTIONALITY. Intention rests on causal thinking and gives precedence to the practitioner’s understanding. Intentionality proceeds from the premise that consciousness always points toward something, and takes the relation with the client itself as the field of change. This difference moves the work from the developmental toward the fruitional. It becomes an attitude of trusting that change occurs rather than making change happen.
This piece, in 2015, speaks of a balance between the perceptual and the analytical. What arrived ten years later was not a matter of balance. Not adding perception while standing on the analytical side, but shifting intentionality itself — that was the procedure.
There is one more place where the wording almost coincides.
In this piece Jörg is recorded saying, more than once, that body reading gets lost when it is grasped with the brain. In 2025 Ray said that the phrase “seeing with your own eyes” invites misunderstanding, and that observation means receiving with the whole body. Two instructors, ten years apart, stating the same thing in different words.
Finally, on the giraffe in this piece.
In an image made only of assembled shapes, the moment the concept of a giraffe is held, the giraffe rises into view without a single line having been added. What changed is not the image but the side that looks.
I used this example again in a piece written eleven years later, in a passage explaining why the class on the history of painting was so interesting, within a piece on what the Rolfing basic training amounted to as an education. What was offered at the time as an analogy for body reading now serves as an instrument for explaining what an education in perception is. The example itself has not changed. Where it is used has.