Ida Rolf’s book Rolfing and Physical Reality, which I have taken up several times in this column, contains a good deal that is interesting about Rolfing, and I have made a point of returning to it during the training. She writes, for instance, that in developing the work she was influenced by osteopathy and homeopathy.
At the time these alternative approaches were still regarded with suspicion, but Ida took them up boldly in her own work. The idea that the structure of the body determines how the body functions owes a great deal to osteopathy.
What interested me most was that she was also influenced by yoga. Ida seems to have studied Yoga around 1920, before it became widespread in the West, when it was still called Yog. And she viewed it, from the standpoint of the body, in the following way.
the principle aim of yoga asanas is to increase the space at bony interfaces (joints). That is to say, the assumption of yoga is that bodies need to lengthen, and the means by which this length is achieved are positions in which opposing body parts pull or twist each other.
This seems to me to have had a considerable influence on one of the five principles of Rolfing (see The Five Principles), the idea of two directions (see Basic Concepts — Bidirectionality (Palintonicity)).
What is interesting is that Ida knew yoga had its strengths and its weaknesses. This comes through in the following.
Slowly she realized that the asanas did not achieve length and separation of the joints, that in too many cases there was actual contraction of the joint surfaces
I practise yoga regularly, and there was a period when the pain in my knees and the tightness in my shoulders and neck would not go away. What drew me toward the bodywork developed in the West was the question of why, when the poses were being held precisely in order to increase flexibility and stability, this kind of effort kept appearing.
In my own case, studying the Alexander Technique, one form of bodywork, and bringing it into my practice, brought a dramatic reduction in that effort. I have also written about how the Alexander Technique, which I had a year to study, has more in common with Rolfing than one might expect, in On the Relation Between Rolfing and the Alexander Technique (1).
I have written in this column about the relation between bodywork and yoga (see Untangling a Body That Won’t Let Go — What Yoga Was Missing). What I learned through Rolfing was that placing weight on observing the body taught me how different one person is from another.
That the skeleton and the structure of the body differ means that a variety of approaches is needed for each of them. This applies to yoga as well, and I think it expresses something characteristic of the alternative approaches, yoga included (see Alternative Therapies and Diversity).
Several yoga teachers are among the students here, so we talk about yoga from time to time.
In Rolfing, for example, whether the tension sits at the front or the back of the neck is examined in session 7. Depending on how the muscles at the front and back are holding, bending the neck in downward-facing dog in order to bring the gaze — drishti, in Ashtanga yoga — toward the navel may make neck tightness worse.
Equally, bending the knees in downward-facing dog and lengthening as though sending the sit bones toward the ceiling lets the spine lengthen, which may ease low back pain.
Yoga originated in India. It carries the influence of Indian ways of using the body and of Indian culture. Meanwhile, in Japan as much as in Europe and North America, working life is mainly desk work centred on a PC.
Looking for ways of practising that suit this seems to me an important angle from here on. From now on I want to look from both directions, yoga seen from Rolfing and Rolfing seen from yoga, and to take this up in the column.
Any physical method made by human beings has its strengths and its weaknesses, whatever it is. Even science, where securing objectivity matters most, sets down what remains unknown alongside whatever is newly found. Yoga has many schools, and it is worth understanding that each has its strengths and its weaknesses.
Rolfing, too, has its limits, having been developed by a human being. This was touched on in both the Phase II and Phase III training, so I plan to take it up in the column.
Note, August 2026
Everything this article says about yoga is said at the level of the individual pose. Bringing the gaze toward the navel in downward-facing dog may worsen neck tightness. Bending the knees in the same pose and sending the sit bones toward the ceiling may ease low back pain. Combined with the observation of whether tension sits at the front or the back of the neck in session 7, it judges individual poses one at a time.
Nearly ten years later, that way of looking shifted by one step. Taking up Brazilian jiu-jitsu in 2024 made clear what had been missing from Ashtanga. It leans toward the sagittal plane. Folding forward and lengthening forward and back make up most of it, and rotation and lateral movement are thin. Jiu-jitsu is the reverse: from lying positions, turning within a relationship to another person, moving sideways.
What had been seen pose by pose acquired an axis of classification, the plane. The question changed from which poses are unhelpful to which direction of movement has dropped out of the practice as a whole. A collection of individual judgements was sorted onto a single axis.
The observation this article quotes from Ida Rolf also reads differently now. Far from separating the joints, the asanas leave joint surfaces contracted in far too many cases. Someone who studied yoga in the 1920s set out from there and built Rolfing.
And the person writing this article had seen the same thing. Holding poses for flexibility and stability, and neither the knee pain nor the tightness in the shoulders and neck would go. Why does the effort keep appearing? That question is what sent me toward the bodywork of the West. Across some ninety years, the same observation was made twice. One of them built a method out of it; the other came to be on the receiving end of that method.
What I had at the time, though, was only the question. There was no vocabulary for saying what was missing. Of the two directions this article names, yoga seen from Rolfing and Rolfing seen from yoga, putting the second into words required a third thing that was neither yoga nor the bodywork of the West.