Four weeks have passed since the Phase III training began. This piece turns to how the classes are actually run.
Phase III starts at 8:30 a.m. and ends before 6:00 p.m., so the schedule is held to more firmly than in Phase II, where the day sometimes ran until 7:30 p.m. There are two thirty-minute breaks along the way (10:00 to 10:30 a.m., and 3:30 to 4:00 p.m.) and a ninety-minute lunch break from 12:30 to 2:00 p.m. (On how the classes were run in Phase II, see “How the Teaching Proceeds (1)” and “How the Teaching Proceeds (2)“.)
What distinguishes Phase III is that clients are brought in from outside and sessions are given to them. Each student takes on two clients. The two instructors each take on one client of their own.
Ten students are currently studying Rolfing here, and the sessions are run in two rounds, with five students working at once. While they work, the remaining five observe. Each student experiences six sessions in a day: two instructor demonstration sessions, two sessions given by fellow students, and two sessions of their own. Across the full ten-session series, that comes to sixty sessions witnessed.
It is meaningful enough to prompt the thought that this is what learning through the body must mean.
Having already given client sessions during Phase II, I feel none of the tension I felt then, and the work moves smoothly, which is good in itself (see “Client Sessions“).
It may also be because Rolfing values perceiving alongside analyzing (see “Seeing and Perceiving (1): Seeing Begins with a Concept” and “Seeing and Perceiving (2): The Sum of the Parts Is Not the Whole“). There are many occasions to watch rather than work, and there is much to learn from watching as well.
Of the thirty days of training, nine are what the school calls OPEN days. These are given over mainly to explanations of the theory behind each session and to Practicum, the practice of the techniques. The theoretical explanations are kept brief, however, so preparation and review are necessary beforehand: the materials stored on Dropbox, and the Phase II material, which mainly means watching the recorded videos.
That preparation and review fills the days when there are no classes. The training period runs thirty days, with eight weekdays off and fourteen weekend days off. These are meant to be days of rest, but between reviewing Phase II, working through the papers and assigned reading distributed in Phase II and Phase III, and organizing my thoughts about Rolfing in this column, the free time disappears quickly.
Writing this column, in particular, teaches me a great deal. Something noticed in a Phase II video, something that struck me while reading a paper, something newly learned in the training — putting it into words brings order to the thinking. And, perhaps surprisingly, the Rolfing training distributes materials but has no textbook in any real sense. Seen that way, the sense of writing a textbook for myself, by myself, may be a strong one.
There are ten students. Two new students have joined, one from Singapore and one from Mexico. Just as the change from Giovanni to Jörg brought new things to learn, so do the new students. (On the differences between how Giovanni and Jörg teach, see “The Midterm Interview.”) There are fresh discoveries about how to take notes during a session, and a different teacher brings a different way of observing the body, which helps in working out how to conduct sessions in my own way.
Four weeks of training remain. I want to spend the time given to me here well.
Note, August 2026
A training without a textbook
“Materials are distributed, but there is no textbook in any real sense.” In March 2015 I wrote that as an inconvenience — hence the need to make one myself.
What became clear eleven years later is that this was not a shortcoming but a form the education of Rolfing has carried from its beginning.
In November 2016 I attended Sharon Wheeler’s workshop in Tokyo. She is one of the few Rolfers who studied directly with Ida Rolf from around 1970, and among the things she said was that Ida took her anatomy and physiology textbooks away from her. What is written in books is not fact — that was Ida’s position. Ida’s training consisted almost entirely of stories from her own experience, and when anatomy was needed she left it to someone else. This is recorded in “The Final Day: What Sharon Said (2).“
The absence of a textbook was not an oversight. It was a design for cultivating seeing and feeling outside of what is written down. The Dropbox materials and the recorded videos in the Munich classroom were traces of that design, still in place forty-five years on.
The design had a gap in it, however. Ida did not know how to teach a way of seeing the body, and the phrase that survives is that she put students into the water and let them swim or drown. That gap led to the split of 1989 and the introduction of Maitland’s philosophy, and by the 2025 Advanced Training the map is handed over first, in the form of the five principles and the Taxonomy. From an education that holds no textbook to an education that hands over a classification: Munich in 2015 sits partway along a shift that took roughly fifty years.
The approach observed at the Cranio Work in Seattle — all the demonstrations shown first, then a burst of practice — was an intermediate form. That is what results when the method alone is extracted from throwing students into the water.
Three days after this piece, the same subject is taken up again from a different entrance, in “Alternative Therapies and Diversity,” where it appears from the standpoint of alternative therapy as an institution.
Less is More, seen through time
Phase II sometimes ran until 7:30 p.m.; Phase III ends before 6:00 p.m., with the breaks fixed to the clock. At the time I wrote it down as nothing more than the mark of a meticulous teacher.
What Jörg said repeatedly was Less is More. Do not give too much. In the note to “Body Reading and the Quantity of Information,” I wrote that this phrase belongs to the same lineage as Peter Schwind’s forty-five minutes and faces the opposite direction from Sharon’s three and a half hours.
The class timetable has the same shape. Running long is not treated as a virtue; the work ends within the frame that was set. What he said about hands-on work and what he did in designing the setting were in agreement from the start. As an instance of a teacher’s disposition appearing outside the treatment room, this timetable is worth recording.