Half of the Phase III training is over, and the remaining four weeks have begun. From this week the training moves to a different place and a different setting, a space called Body Bliss.
Compared with the building of the European Rolfing Association (ERA), the surroundings here hold organic shops, aroma shops, restaurants, and any number of cafés. Getting hold of things looks like it will be no trouble.
Now that Phase III has begun and sessions are being given to clients, there is one thing I try to keep in mind. Before a session starts, to empty the head — to let go, for the moment, of the knowledge and experience accumulated so far. The influence here is strong from the words of the Zen priest Shunryū Suzuki Roshi in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, taken up earlier in this column (see “Beginner’s Mind and the Expert’s Mind“).
To introduce them:
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.
And on how looking at things through the intellect makes them into something other than what is actually seen, he says the following:
As soon as you see something, you already start to intellectualize it. As soon as you intellectualize something, it is no longer what you saw.
Value what is actually seen over what is felt through the intellect. Perceiving, in other words. Lean too far on the head, on the analytical view, and the quantity of information grows until it is no longer clear what to look at (on the perceptual view, see “Seeing and Perceiving (1): Seeing Begins with a Concept” and “Seeing and Perceiving (2): The Sum of the Parts Is Not the Whole“).
Ida Rolf, who developed Rolfing, left several striking remarks in her book Rolfing and Physical Reality. On perceiving, having described the body as something unstable, like a waterbed — a rubber mattress filled with water — she says this:
This is the problem, to get secure in an art where there is no security. Your security comes only from relationship.
All kidding aside, if I can get you to a place where you recognize the security of insecurity, you will have made that first step forward.
So one of the things I’m trying to tell you is that here is only yourself and what you can learn to see & feel that will give you a certain security. I want to give you the feeling that it’s alright to be insecure.
The body is, in a sense, something that keeps changing, and not something that can be judged right or wrong. That is why perceiving, and what is felt inside one’s own body, comes to matter more than the knowledge stored in the head. What comes into view by entering a session with an emptied head is something I want to keep writing about.
Note, August 2026
Staying insecure
The title of the original piece is “Insecurity and Security,” but what Ida Rolf is describing is not a method for removing insecurity. It is a single point: that it is all right to remain insecure. And it continues — security comes only out of relationship.
It reads as an instruction not to seek security in the securable thing, which is technique. But then where is there anything to rely on? Her answer was: yourself, and what you can learn to see and to feel.
Seen from eleven years on, that “yourself” meant the practitioner’s body.
When Neutral was taught in the Advanced Training of 2025, it was not a procedure for quieting the mind. Shape the Hand, Finding Back Space, Hara — the form of the hand, the space behind, the belly. All three are matters of where the body is placed. Not a technique for producing a settled state, but a procedure for where to put the body.
In the note to “Space and the Room in the Mind,” I wrote that the phrase “keeping the mind neutral” was already in use in 2015, and that its equivalent within Rolfing turned out to be the practitioner’s own use of the body. The source of that is Ida Rolf’s words as quoted in this piece. Put security not on the side of technique but on the side of your own body — an instruction that was given three names, ten years later.
The phenomenon comes first and the name comes afterward. The order that keeps surfacing on rereading the Phase III pieces is here as well.
Emptying the head
Before a session starts, to empty the head, letting go for the moment of accumulated knowledge and experience. So it says.
This shape recurs through this period. In the note to “Beyond Technique,” I wrote that what Jörg pointed toward was the practitioner’s inside, and what Gael Rosewood pointed toward was the words handed to the client. The study of prāṇāyāma taught the same shape: at the moment of drawing on what has accumulated, set it back. “Emptying the head” here is a fourth instance.
Its source, though, is different. It comes from Shunryū Suzuki Roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind — from a book read on my own.
There is another route from Zen into Rolfing. Jeff Maitland trained under Joshu Sasaki Roshi and holds the Dharma name Hōgaku; his philosophy became the ground of the Advanced Training and reached me through Ray McCall in 2025. That line was traced in the note to “Beginner’s Mind and the Expert’s Mind.”
By 2015, then, Zen was touching Rolfing along two routes. One descended from upstream as an institution; the other was chosen and read. The same place, arrived at twice through separate entrances.
Trusting the recipe
More than ten years have passed since I began giving sessions. Counting trial sessions, I have worked with 380 people, and 196 have completed the ten-series (as of August 15, 2026). Among them, two reached the end without any felt sense of change. Those who return for maintenance come to somewhere between twenty and thirty percent.
There are still times when the recipe cannot be trusted. At those times I try to remember what Jörg said. And somehow, which direction to go settles into view.
What Phase III taught was trusting the recipe and settling the mind — that is what the notes to the pieces from this period have said. It turns out not to be something acquired by the end of the training, but a place returned to, again and again, across more than ten years of sessions.
The setting changed
From this week the classes moved to a different place, called Body Bliss. The setting differs from the ERA building, with organic shops and cafés nearby. When the setting is new, the way one looks at the world and the way one thinks may change, and that is something to look forward to, the text says.
That the eight weeks in Munich were not held in a single location is not recorded anywhere else.