I have now written three times about how Shinichi Yoshifuku thought about the work of a therapist (see The Four Levels of the Mind, Context, and Process). This time I want to take up Less Is More, which I learned in the Rolfing training in Munich, alongside Yoshifuku’s thinking.
When giving a Rolfing session:
How far should I work — how much should I intervene — in any one session?
This looks like it is going to be a genuinely difficult question for me.
In Phase II we learned the Ten-Series by working on each other as students. Moving to Phase III, where it is applied to a client, I have the tools, but there are moments when I no longer know which tool to use.
An example.
As I wrote in Body Reading and the Quantity of Information, a Rolfing session begins with observing the body in walking and standing. But the more you rely on the eyes and observe, the more the quantity of information grows, and it becomes possible to lose sight of what matters.
- So: among the procedures learned in each session, how do you set the priorities?
- And how do you decide whether to work at all?
You narrow the information down.
In the training we were taught that not working more than necessary is one of the keys.
The reason:
The client is experiencing Rolfing for the first time. Give the body too much information and it is overwhelmed — which means they may lose track of what is actually changing inside them.
Jörg, the instructor in Phase III, put this as Less Is More.
How finely should this be judged? I want to look at it through Yoshifuku’s thinking, drawing on Yoshifuku Shinichi no Kotoba.
Yoshifuku explains it by pointing to what he calls the problem of over-intervention in contemporary Japan.
For instance:
- The announcements at stations, repeated constantly, asking people to stay behind the white line
- The disappearance of the mock cavalry battle from school sports days, so that children do not get hurt
- Self-development seminars teaching how to succeed in society, how to end up on the winning side, how to make money
When this is how things are run, people’s safety is protected and the prevailing mindset becomes one of avoiding danger. Over-intervention takes away a person’s own power. The skills for getting through a crisis are never acquired, and the mind breaks more easily. Chances to fail and climb back out on your own rarely come, and because you often do as others tell you, you lose the habit of thinking with your own head.
Looking back, my own first impression of Japan after returning from nine months traveling around the world was that the service here is excessive. On a train in Europe the announcements are minimal; in Japan they are everywhere. Walk into a shop and the sheer amount of attention stands out.
Seen this way, it makes good sense that over-intervening in therapy leaves the client dependent.
That said, is it better not to intervene at all? No. There is also the case of something happening and being let go by. A therapist wants things to go well for the client. It is easy for the eye to settle on the good signs and pass over the bad ones, and so to miss the moment when the right work would have been the right work.
What, then, does appropriate intervention look like?
Yoshifuku’s answer is a counterforce.
He explains it through bodywork.
A client carries, somewhere and unconsciously, what he calls muscular armor — tension and rigidity produced by held emotion. When the suppressed emotion comes to the surface, the armor begins to change. (This way of thinking comes from Wilhelm Reich, the source of what later became body psychotherapy.) A fine trembling movement is one example.
When the therapist places a hand on the part that is changing, the client notices the change in their body. Depending on how large the response is, the therapist alters how much pressure to apply, staying with the client. Because it follows the force, it becomes a counterforce. When the client’s emotion breaks through and surfaces, the therapist lifts the hand away. In the end, the emotion flows out.
If the response continues inside the body, three further steps are said to be effective: amplify, emphasize, encourage. If the trembling will not stop, for instance, you work in the direction of having the client feel it, and keep supplying the counterforce so that the trembling is amplified, emphasized, and encouraged. It sounds as though it heads somewhere dangerous.
But the opposite is true: if the therapist is overwhelmed by the strength of the client’s energy and becomes anxious, casting about for what to do, the client’s process is obstructed. Not only does no change occur — helplessness, guilt, anxiety, and fear take over. Trust the process the client is going through, keep going, and the moment of resolution arrives. That is what ends up offering the client a new insight.
To sum up: intervene and work in the right measure, and trust the process.
In Rolfing, I expect I will keep struggling with how much to do. In Insecurity and Security I quoted these words of Ida Rolf:
“That you can rely on yourself. What gives you security is what you can see and what you can feel for yourself. And it is entirely all right to feel that you do not have that security.”
From here on I want to keep valuing what I feel in the present moment, carry out faithfully what each Rolfing session calls for, and hold to the process the client is going through.
Note, September 2026
The three earlier pieces in this series all dealt with the practitioner’s way of being. How to look at a person. What a practitioner can offer. What a practitioner trusts.
This one alone deals with quantity. How far to work in any given session. And it ends without an answer — this looks like it is going to be a genuinely difficult question, I wrote.
Eleven years on, the question is still not closed. When I took the cranial work with Sharon Wheeler in Seattle in January 2017, her sessions ran three and a half hours. That July, meeting Peter Schwind in Munich, I found he worked in forty-five minutes; he had changed his thinking, he said, after encountering Richard Demmerle, Ida Rolf’s son. In the Advanced Training in 2025 the range stayed a range.
What did change is how the question is posed.
What I was struggling with here is how many moves to make. How to set priorities, how to decide whether to work at all. I was thinking from the side of quantity.
What I received in 2025 was a sequence: Test, Intervene, Re-test. You look again after intervening, and check whether the body has begun to organize itself. Not how many times to do something, but how to see from the outside when to stop. It resolved not by reducing quantity but by handing the judgment over to the body.
There was a period when I was doing exactly this without knowing the name for it. Five months after this piece, writing about practicing Source Point Therapy, I recorded that when a session went well the ending was short. That was the first Re-test.
One more thing sits in this piece: an observation from outside the treatment room. Returning from nine months of traveling around the world, I found the service in Japan excessive. Yoshifuku’s argument about over-intervention is backed up here by what I saw with my own eyes just after coming home. Checking things outside the treatment room recurs later, but the direction is reversed here: an observation from outside became material for a judgment inside.