The two instructors’ client session demonstrations have now reached the eighth session. Each one has been worth watching, and the individuality of each instructor comes through in the work. Session 8 turned out to be an interesting one, and I want to write about it.
In the discussion after the session ended (12 March 2015), Andrea described a moment partway through when she suddenly did not know what to do next and her mind went blank. It happened just after the work on the table had come to a resting point and the client had stood up to feel the effects of the session.
What she did was to return to the beginning, look again at what the purpose was, and eventually what needed doing came to her by intuition. That Andrea would say this openly was surprising, though presumably the atmosphere of the class is what makes sharing something like that possible.
That an instructor with twelve years of experience would say so was surprising enough; more surprising still was what Jörg said. Twenty-four years in, he too apparently still has moments of losing track of what he is doing. When that happens, he keeps in mind the phrase It will come, settles, and waits out the interval.
As it happens, a Phase II training is currently running in Munich alongside Phase III, a month behind, which is why we have moved to a different location for this stretch. The instructor teaching Phase II is Harvey Burns, who has thirty years of experience.
Yesterday, after the Phase III training finished, Harvey, Andrea, and Jörg happened to have dinner together, and this experience of losing one’s way mid-session came up.
Without saying when it was, Harvey mentioned that before beginning a demonstration during a Rolfing training, he had once found himself not knowing what to do next. And just as It will come suggests, after a certain interval he found himself working. Jörg put it this way::
A good teacher is one who can switch back on right after switching off.
This state of not knowing what to do tends to arise in Sessions 8 and 9. The reason is that, unlike Sessions 1 through 7, Sessions 8 and 9 do not follow a clearly defined sequence, leaving more room to respond to the individual client.
I have had the experience several times myself, in Phase II and Phase III, of not knowing how to proceed. In most cases it comes when the connection with the person I am working on has been lost — and those are the moments with the most to learn from.
During the practicums for Sessions 8 and 9, students are deliberately assigned difficult approaches and encouraged to change how they use their own bodies according to the client. In a sense this is one example of being taught that the experience of losing one’s way and the capacity to respond flexibly to whoever is in front of you are two sides of the same thing.
Six days remain before the training ends and I become a certified Rolfer. After that comes practice, where experiences like these will presumably occur, and when they do, these words from instructors with long experience will be encouraging.
I want to take in what can be learned in each moment. What I learn from is trial and error, and above all the times I am taking on something difficult. What kind of Rolfing style will come out of it I do not know, but I hope to move forward without fear.
Note, August 2026
Waiting comes up repeatedly in the entries from this period. What is being waited on, though, is always the client’s body. Take hold, apply pressure, and wait for the bone to begin moving. Spend time before making contact. Place a hand on the spinous processes and listen for a response. Stop the hands and wait for something to happen on the other side.
What is being waited on here is oneself.
When Andrea described the moment everything went blank, and when Jörg offered the phrase It will come, what they were waiting on was the arrival of the next move within the practitioner. Not the body in front of them, but something being prepared on their own side.
At the time, I knew nothing more about Harvey Burns, who had been at the dinner where those words came up, than that he had thirty years of experience.. From a post of his that I read later, he came to this as a professional musician. He had played drums and percussion from an early age, and his first Rolfing session came during a period when he was playing a full kit — an instrument requiring the coordination of all four limbs at once.
What he describes is having practiced for many hours over many years, and finding that the accumulation of knowledge and technique still did not carry over into his daily playing. The cause turned out to be simple. He was trying too hard. The stance of playing as well as he could had, over time, become a pattern of tension, and that pattern had become his normal. When the sessions interrupted it, what had been eluding him began to appear in the playing.
Flow and genuine coordination, he writes, appear only when one is relaxed — though relaxed does not mean collapsed, since a healthy tonus and a readiness to act are needed as well. The key lies in the balance between the two.
Not trying to force an answer when you do not know what to do next. That the phrase It will come emerged from that particular dinner conversation seems, in retrospect, to have something to do with this history.
Ten years later, this took form not simply as an attitude of waiting, but in how the practitioner positions the body. In the Advanced Rolfing Training of 2025, three elements were given for Neutral: the form of the hand, the space behind, and the belly. All three concern the practitioner rather than anything being done to the client. In Hiroyoshi Tahata’s account of the yield technique as well, what is asked of the practitioner is an inner state without struggle. The idea that it is the practitioner, rather than the client, who first needs tending to is already present in this entry from March 2015.
I still have moments in sessions when I do not know what to do next. What I rely on then is intuition, and when it leads things in a good direction, I thank myself for having trusted it. Doing so seems, in turn, to sharpen that intuition. What the instructors said, and what I heard with surprise eleven years ago, no longer surprises me. Those moments of not knowing have not gone away. What has changed is where I stand when they come.
There is something else this entry recorded without recognizing it at the time.
Three instructors with twelve, twenty-four, and thirty years of experience all described the same thing. Having written that this was surprising, the entry goes on: presumably the atmosphere of the class is what makes sharing something like that possible.
That observation matters more, in retrospect, than the content.
On completing the Rolf Movement training in Munich in 2019, I wrote the same thing in plainer terms — that a psychologically safe space had been established and that a degree of risk was permitted. Eighteen participants each gave a fifty-minute presentation, followed by an exchange of responses. The focus was not on whether it had gone well but on what could be learned from it.
What had been received as atmosphere in 2015 was written down as a condition of the course four years later. What one takes for an individual quality turns out to be the design of a room. The same can be said of the way Parts 2 and 3 of Rolf Movement made a space in which there was no way it had to be done.
That an instructor with years of experience could openly acknowledge not knowing what to do next was itself part of what was being taught.