Continuing from the last piece, I want to look at how Shinichi Yoshifuku thought about the work of a therapist. The first piece was about how a therapist might look at a person (see The Four Levels of the Mind). This time I want to take up the three elements a therapist meets in practice.
Yoshifuku (1943–2013) was a translator and therapist who introduced transpersonal psychology and much of the new spiritual culture that followed the counterculture to Japan. In Yoshifuku Shinichi no Kotoba, a collection of his words, the elements a therapist meets in practice are divided into three: context, process, and content.
The most important of these is context. In English, context means the connective sense of a passage, but it also carries the sense of a setting, a background, an environment.
Essentially, there is nothing a therapist can do for a client.
That is the premise from which Yoshifuku speaks about the therapist.
It comes close to something I touched on earlier, in the final question-and-answer period of the Phase III training in Rolfing:
“In the end, what Rolfing can do is not to add something to the client — treating them, for instance — but only to offer them a chance to notice. And from there, they choose what seems right for themselves.”
(see How You Have Dealt with Your Own Body Comes Through in the Session). When I first heard Yoshifuku’s line, my reaction was that it was a remarkable way to put it.
What struck me even more is that he states flatly that when a therapist steers a client, it does no harm but it does no good either. For someone who takes money while sitting with a client, and who thinks in terms of curing or guiding, this may come as a surprise. But the more you think about curing and guiding, the more your own ego comes forward, and the less you can see the person in front of you.
So what can a therapist offer a client? Yoshifuku calls it context. You could also call it a worldview, or a view of what a human being is. The therapist’s worldview and view of the human being act on everyone taking part in the therapy. What is unsettling is that this happens whether or not the therapist has put it into words, and whether it is conscious or unconscious. It shows up strongly in the room. The atmosphere a therapist gives off as a person — the presence, the quality of the air around them — colors the whole setting.
In the end there is no such thing as a complete human being, and what a limited human being can offer as a therapist is context — a vessel, you might say. Everything turns on how large that vessel is. To borrow Yoshifuku’s words: if someone has gone through, as far as they can in their own life, every form of hardship and suffering a person is likely to meet, and has come through it without their view of human beings becoming badly distorted — if they have lived a life in which they can hold a sound view of what a human being is — then as a therapist or a counselor, that is the best there is.
Studying coaching and NLP, one thing I have noticed is how many people who take these up as knowledge are themselves carrying psychological difficulties. There is nothing at all wrong with learning them to work through your own problems, or out of curiosity. But to stand on your own as a therapist, resolving your own psychological difficulties seems to come first (I wrote a little about this in The Four Levels of the Mind).
The ideal therapist walks alongside the client as a companion while remaining the context. It brings home how much it matters to hold a neutral stance, one that is not swayed by the other person.
Next, the process that unfolds in the therapeutic setting. Human beings have a natural capacity to heal, in body and in mind. But during that healing process, the environment a person is in — family, workplace, school, friendships — may not be able to allow it. Being misunderstood, admonished, or attacked, they suppress the symptom before it can appear.
The therapist’s role is to be the context: to make it possible, through trust, for the symptom to come out even when it does.
In Yoshifuku’s words, what is first asked of a therapist is to provide a context, and by providing it, to create a situation in which those taking part can approach whatever arises without fear and without rejection.
What is asked of the therapist, then, is to intervene as little as possible and to make a space in which the process can be trusted entirely and left to do its work.
The last of the three, content, is what fills in as a result of the process. It differs from person to person. Therapists tend to decide the content in advance and assume that the process will arrive there, and according to Yoshifuku that is precisely what not to do. It is surprising that the skill set comes last. But I was told the same thing in the Rolfing training. If the way you hold yourself is sound, technique follows.
While putting this piece together, something I was told during the Phase III training in Rolfing stayed with me:
Because how a Rolfer has dealt with their own body up to now comes through to the client.
(see How You Have Dealt with Your Own Body Comes Through in the Session). In the end, a therapist is a human being too, and that human being has a large effect. In Rolfing, and whenever I sit with another person, I want to keep that in view.
Note, September 2026
Near the end of this piece, I described the ideal therapist as one who holds a neutral stance, unswayed by the other person.
I had used the word neutral before this. When I was taught in Phase III in Munich to keep the mind neutral, it meant a state of mind, and the term had come to me from coaching (see Space and the Room in the Mind). In the Case Presentation piece, it appears a second time, sitting next to a list of prohibitions — do not judge, do not point out (see Case Presentation (2): After the Seventh Session).
What is different here is that the word is used for the way the practitioner is. And its content is explained as the sum of a life. Yoshifuku’s line says that a person who has lived through as many forms of hardship as possible without their view of human beings becoming badly distorted would make the finest therapist or counselor. Context, I wrote, is decided by the size of the vessel.
Put that way, the vessel becomes something outside your control. It is set by the years you have lived and the quality of what you have been through, and it is not something you can change in the session in front of you.
The neutrality I studied in the Advanced Rolfing Training in 2025 had three requirements. Shape the Hand — letting the body form your hand. Finding Back Space — bringing awareness behind you. Hara. Each of them is about how you use your body right now, and each can be set up on the spot. Not the size of a vessel, but a procedure.
That said, the vessel has not disappeared from the picture. Hiroyoshi Tahata explains that because the practitioner becomes an anchor and somatic resonance is always occurring, a calm state with no struggle inside is required. What I wrote here — that the atmosphere a therapist gives off as a person colors the whole setting — may be pointing at the same place. Perhaps only the vocabulary differs.
There is also the matter of order. In Yoshifuku’s framework, context comes first and content, which corresponds to the skill set, comes last. I wrote at the time that this was surprising, and added that I had been told the same thing in the Rolfing training. Ten years later, in the Advanced Training, three questions came before any technique (see Jeff Maitland – Three questions, state, perception, self-organize).
And then: a therapist can do essentially nothing for a client. That line says the same thing as what Ray McCall taught me in 2025 as intentionality — that the client is wiser than the practitioner. Hiroki Sato in Osaka has written the same conclusion after studying widely: the body is wiser. What I had written down in 2015 as Yoshifuku’s words came back to me ten years later from two people on the practitioner’s side.