Twice in this column I have written about bodywork from the standpoint of psychology, centered on the Esalen Institute (see “The Esalen Institute (1): Psychology and Bodywork” and “The Esalen Institute (2): The Popularization of Psychology and the Atmosphere“). This time I would like to take up Shinichi Yoshifuku’s thinking on what it is to be a therapist. For this first piece, the subject is how a therapist might look at a person.
Yoshifuku held that the work of a therapist comes into order when a person is looked at with reference to four levels of the mind:
- Power of Becoming — the power of relationship
- Power of Being — the power of existence
- Power of Emotion — the power of feeling
- Power of Brain — the power of the head
The higher the position, the greater the weight. The fourth, the power of the head, is acted on by the third, the power of feeling; the third is acted on by the second, the power of existence; and the first, the power of relationship, bears on all of the other three.
The power of the head is thinking with the head, and where it shows its force is in explaining logically with words. What matters, in Yoshifuku’s view, is that a person who appears to be explaining logically has very often had a feeling come first — the wish to blame, to show how badly the other party has behaved — and that self-justification is likely to be at work. What is striking is that the power of the head is placed lowest of the four.
So with someone using the power of the head, what is to be looked at is the state of that person’s feeling. Here the third level matters.
Feeling, in Yoshifuku’s terms, is life energy, and in itself it is neutral. The ego works as a filter, and it is only through that filter that feeling is colored as joy or as anger. Since feeling is one thing, holding down a single feeling leads to the whole of feeling being held down, and the power of feeling drops.
Feeling is natural when it is freely expressed. Taking it in as it is, without passing it through the filter, is what serves it. And here the second level lends its help.
The power of existence is, put simply, Hara — how settled the belly is — or a mind that is not shaken. The stronger it is, the more fully any feeling, one’s own or another’s, can be received.
What is of interest is that this power is said to come neither from being taught nor from having come through adversity. Having come through hardship, the ego gets in the way instead.
What matters, then, is experience that adds thickness to a person. The method Yoshifuku names as most effective is the surrender of one’s own identity — in his words, the collapse of identity. Quitting work outright, with nothing lined up. Not knowing how life will be lived from tomorrow, and quitting anyway; then taking time before moving to what comes next. Titles and self-protection lose their hold, and the words of others cease to shake a person. The point is that this is undertaken deliberately rather than under the pressure of circumstance; done that way, the manner of seeing changes.
This calls to mind an episode from a study of the business leaders who carried the postwar Japanese economy. When Tsunao Okumura, newly installed as president of Nomura Securities, paid a courtesy visit to Yasuzaemon Matsunaga — the man known as the king of electric power — Matsunaga told him that a person is not fully formed until three passages have been made: masterlessness, illness, and imprisonment. Okumura, he observed, had been through none of them. This too is a way of honing the power of existence.
The highest level is the power of relationship, which looks at the relation between self and other. Five relations can be posited here: mother, father, siblings, peers, and society including the natural world. What is of interest is Yoshifuku’s extreme position that no healthy relationship exists within any of them — and that in building one, the key word is parting. To part, a genuine meeting has first to take place.
Concretely: parent and child have met in the form of the parent-child relation, but the child has seen only the aspect of a human being who carries the role of mother or father, and has not met that person as a person. To meet mother and father, through the eyes of the child, as individual human beings — that is what a genuine meeting means. Once that becomes possible, the strong attachment and the strong rejection can both be left behind. Meeting and then parting leads to parting with the images of mother and father held inside, and the same movement can be applied to every other human relation, and to nature and society as well.
In reading tarot, I often look at the relation with a parent. And I ask whether there has ever been a meeting with that parent, one to one, in which thanks were given in the word “thank you.” That word is the secret of bringing a relation to a close — I use the word “graduation” for it myself — and it is remarkably effective.
As a result, honing the power of relationship makes it possible to look calmly at the other three levels without being swung about by relations with others.
Looking at the state of the four levels in this way shows at which stage a person is holding to Neutral, and at which stage within each level the difficulty lies. This is an idea that matters not only in coaching but in Rolfing as well.
Next, I would like to introduce the three elements met with in the field of a therapist’s work.
Note, August 2026
This piece was written in May 2015, two months after certification as a Rolfer. At a point when I had only just begun taking on clients of my own, and in the form of introducing someone else’s framework, I set down most of what I would later be handling myself.
The paragraph on the power of existence, in particular, sits differently when read eleven years on.
Yoshifuku explains Power of Being as how settled the belly is, as a mind that is not shaken — the strength to receive any feeling, one’s own or another’s. And he adds a caution: it comes neither from being taught nor from having come through adversity. Having come through hardship, the ego gets in the way instead. The method he names is the surrender of identity. Quitting work with nothing lined up. Taking time before moving on.
All of this is written as a matter of what happens inside a person.
From July 2017 to December 2019, I took the Rolf Movement certification training run by ERA — thirty days in Munich, from Part I through Part III. What I met there was a setting in which this same capacity was handled not as an individual quality but as the design of a place.
In Part II, in putting together a three-series, the procedure was not taught in detail. There was no line of the kind given for the Rolfing Ten Series, where strategy is set and the steps follow. What was asked for instead was taking a risk and bringing in a different method — reducing the work done on the table and running the session standing, for example. Nothing had to be done in a particular way. In its place, weight fell on holding the space.
In Part III, I met the effect of this from the receiving side. Because a place had been prepared where students could speak easily, I too was able to try things I had not tried. That is what I wrote in the summary piece.
A state in which risk can be taken, then, does not come from inner nerve alone. It can be supplied from outside. What Yoshifuku set down as the surrender of identity, the Munich classroom had prepared as a condition of the place.
There is a second correspondence from the Rolf Movement side.
Yoshifuku explains the power of relationship by way of parting: to part, a genuine meeting has first to take place. A child sees mother and father only as roles and has not met them as human beings. Meeting them as human beings makes it possible to leave attachment and rejection behind.
In March 2017, at Gael Rosewood’s workshop, the principle taught about the use of words was this: not what is correct, not how to set something right, but how to prepare new choices and widen awareness and sensation. Not correction, but the addition of a choice.
The genuine meeting Yoshifuku describes is not an operation that sets a relationship right either. It prepares a different way of seeing the same person. Attachment and rejection can be left behind not because the relationship has been corrected but because one more choice has appeared. The two explanations differ in what they handle and share the same shape.
A last word on the vocabulary used in this piece.
Yoshifuku writes that feeling in itself is neutral, and that the ego as a filter merely colors it. Then, at the close of the piece, comes the question of at which stage a person is holding to Neutral. The same word is used both for a property of what is observed and for the state of whoever is observing.
In the second sense, Neutral would be defined again in the Advanced Training of 2025, as a way the practitioner uses the body — and one of its requirements is Hara. Reading now the explanation Yoshifuku attaches to Power of Being, the names turn out to match.
And the three-part sequence — power of the head, power of feeling, power of existence — very nearly matches the three-layer observation of brain, heart, and body that I use in coaching today. The framework was not newly assembled. Three of the four received at the outset were drawn out and put to use. The fourth, the power of relationship, falls outside it.
Reading tarot with attention to the relation with a parent, the word “thank you,” and my own term “graduation” are all here already. Eleven years on, they are still in use.