In a Rolfing session, I spend time listening before I put my hands on anyone. For a first visit, that can take an hour, sometimes longer. This article is about what I am listening for.
This article combines five pieces written between November 2015 and February 2016, with material added in September 2026. The body is the original record; a note from 2026 follows at the end.
An Hour of Talking Before Any Hands-On Work
What I value most in a Rolfing session is the consultation. For a first visit, I may set aside an hour for it, or longer. This part matters a great deal in building trust.
There are four things I pay attention to:
- What difficulty the person is carrying
- What they value
- What words they use
- Which senses they rely on (do they listen, do they look, or do they feel?)
The difficulty is whatever trouble or problem the person has. It may be physical — stiff shoulders, low back pain — or it may be about clutter at home, relationships, or work. Sometimes this becomes clear during the first session, sometimes over the course of the ten-session series. Once it is clear, a way forward is easier to offer. I have also found that waiting patiently, letting the person put it into their own words, brings it out more fully.
The overall flow of a session, along with fees, is described separately (see “The Session Process“).
Communication Is Perception
Why these four? The starting point goes back to my years as a company employee. When I moved from a university research institute to a private company, the internal satisfaction survey kept returning the same problem: not job skills, but communication. In research, it had never come up at all. I have written elsewhere about how that led me into the subject (see “What Is Communication Ability? — How I Became Interested”).
The clearest definition I found came from Peter Drucker, in Landmarks of Tomorrow. According to Drucker,
Communication is perception.
Communication only takes place once the receiver perceives it. It works only within the range of what the other person can perceive. And people perceive what they want to perceive, see what they want to see, and hear what they want to hear.
Without working with this, communication becomes one-directional and does not take place at all. So the first thing to find out is how the other person is perceiving.
Which Senses a Person Uses
The last of the four. Do they listen, do they look, or do they feel? As with handedness, people have their strengths.
Which of the three — visual, auditory, kinesthetic — is dominant can be inferred from the words a person uses. Speaking in the language that comes from their most comfortable sense gives them a sense of safety. In Rolfing, once I have a sense of this, I sometimes bring smell, sight, or hearing into the work itself.
The words themselves also matter. How a word is used depends on when a person grew up, on their family, on their schooling. Knowing how someone uses a word is essential to understanding where their thinking differs from mine. Words like “love,” “effort,” “trying hard,” or “sitting right with me” look as though everyone uses them the same way, but one person uses them positively and another negatively.
Work, hobbies, love, relationships. For any of these, the meaning I attach to a word may differ from the meaning a client attaches to it. Some people think of work as a means; others think of work as doing what they love. Knowing what a word means to someone tells you what they care about, and it brings their difficulty into clearer view.
Looking at Being Rather Than Doing
What I hold most important in listening is to look at being rather than doing.
I learned this in 2009, in the Co-Active Coaching program run by The Coaches Training Institute (CTI). When someone speaks, two sides can be distinguished:
- Doing — what a person does
- Being — how a person wants to be
Sorting a conversation along these two lines makes it easier to follow (see “Sensing, Doing, and Coaching — Thinking It Through from CTI’s Educational System“). And when you work with being — the invisible layer, the values a person is not conscious of — the doing that surfaces changes on its own.
Looking at being turns a person toward themselves, which makes it easier to convey the thing that matters most: that the answer is within them, and not in someone else, books included.
Being can also be understood as turning attention to the present moment. People carrying a difficulty often spend nine parts of the conversation in the past or future and one part in the present — regretting something that happened, or describing a dream with no ground under it.
Rolfing raises awareness of the body, which raises awareness of the present, and the balance of the conversation shifts with it. Gradually, what a person thinks is worth caring about begins to change. Once someone can attend to the present, most problems resolve.
Leaving Space to Think
If I hand over everything I think, I may take away the time a person needs to look at things for themselves.
Conveying 100% is impossible anyway. If I convey 70% and leave 30% as time for the other person to think, they begin to speak in their own words. Letting emotion out — tears, for instance — allows a person to reset. As a result, they become more open to a new way of seeing.
The same applies to teaching. Rather than teaching 100%, stopping at around 70% is also a way of leaving space. Leaving 30% gives the person time to digest, and understanding deepens.
I think I learned the importance of leaving space from Giovanni, in the Rolfing training.
If you had to describe Giovanni in one phrase, he is someone who embodies space. Space here could mean room, or interval, or a gap. He is genuinely aware that an interval is what presses the switch that draws a person out. The pauses he puts into a session on purpose, the way he handles the border with a client, answering a question with a question so that the person has an interval in which to search for themselves — and so on.
Leaving space, then, means things like:
- Giving the person time to sort out their thinking
- Giving them time to take a breath
- Making room for emotion to come out
When that happens, the person starts telling their own story. What comes out is usually not what I expected. That is the moment of finding, and accepting, that this person and I are different people.
Not Telling My Own Story — The Answer Is Within the Other Person
Listening to someone’s troubles calls for care. When I am consulted, my own thinking finds its way into the other person’s difficulty. I forget that we are different people, start telling my own story, and my ego surfaces — even knowing that the answer lies with them.
The idea I hold most firmly, in working through a difficulty, is that the answer is within.
I first heard this from a senior colleague during a setback in graduate school. It was what brought me back on my feet, and I have valued it since.
However much I might tell someone,
“You should go out into the world and experience X” “Hardship is worth seeking out”
none of it moves them unless they are convinced, unless they are ready, unless it reaches them. These are means toward an end, nothing more.
What I had to watch, at forty-five, was that I had accumulated a certain amount of life experience. With someone younger, having more experience makes it easy to start speaking through my own lens — my own story.
In the end, we are different people, with different sensibilities and different characters, using different systems of language and different senses. Telling someone my experience is no guarantee of use to them.
What I can offer is a moment of noticing. The answer has to come from them in the end. All I can do is create the occasion.
The reason I keep repeating “the answer is within” to myself is that I have met teachers who take away a person’s judgment by issuing instructions — do this, don’t do that. It is convenient for the teacher, since it keeps the other person under control. But then the person moves only for the teacher’s satisfaction.
What Rolfing values is the person’s independence. Which is why what matters is listening to each person and drawing out what they are carrying.
That brings us to listening, and to keeping the mind neutral. What listening requires is to give the person minimal information and to prepare the time and the inner space they need to arrive at an answer. With that in mind, I set up the conditions they need.
Having given 1,500 tarot sessions and over 4,000 Rolfing sessions, I have come to think that “look how much I know” is not only unnecessary in a session but gets in the way. Facing each person with fresh eyes — on the premise that I understand nothing about them — serves them far better. If I approach someone as though I already know them, they feel unheard and close down.
When someone has closed down physically, Rolfing helps a great deal, I wrote at the time. As the body’s rigidity releases, the mind opens. The American psychologist William James left the well-known line:
We do not cry because we are sad; we are sad because we cry.
Which is to say that the physiological response comes before the psychological experience of emotion.
Essentially, it is a matter of providing conditions in which the mind can open, and then waiting with persistence. Letting go of each of my own experiences and offering only the minimal information — the moment of noticing — that the person needs. With that as a hint, asking the questions they need and giving them time to think, the answer comes out of them in the end.
And the answer a person arrives at is precisely the answer. That is what lies behind “the tarot was accurate” or “the Rolfing helped.”
Offering Another Way of Seeing
I also learned about plurality of viewpoints from Giovanni, in Phase II of the Rolfing training. Through listening and checking, he would grasp how a person saw things and then offer a new way of seeing.
For instance:
“So that’s how you’re seeing it. That’s a fine way to see it — but what if you looked at it this way?”
Why is this effective? As William James’s line suggests,
⟨Working translation⟩ The strongest of all human feelings is the craving to be recognized by others.
people want to think of themselves as having value, and at the same time want others to see them as having value. In psychological terms this can be called a sense of one’s own importance. Respecting how a person sees things and then adding an option to it means offering an alternative while that sense is met. Whether or not they take it up, the chances that they will listen are high.
It also matters to understand that people do not change easily. The way of seeing someone has built up may be there for a positive reason they themselves are not aware of.
Praise, and Holding the Space
“Praise three things, and grow one of them” is something I learned from Hitoshi Kakizawa. According to his book Chugoku Joriku (no English edition; the title means roughly “Ashore in China,” on doing business with Chinese colleagues), when he hired Chinese staff for the Japan Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo, he set himself the following:
I decided to go with a positive orientation: praise one thing rather than correcting one thing, or praise three and grow one of them.
He also writes about the effect of praise in the morning meeting:
My idea of a “positive morning meeting” is that each member of staff, in turn: reflects on themselves the day before; states their goal for the day; and praises someone among their colleagues other than themselves. The third is the key. Nobody dislikes being praised. Being praised is how a person first notices what is good about them, and where confidence comes from.
Growing people through praise rather than through severity. I have written before about what Giovanni did to draw out people’s strengths during the Rolfing training.
Giovanni placed great importance on holding the space in order to create a safe learning environment. Whether you looked at your phone, slept, ate, or talked with one particular person, you were never reprimanded, and the training carried on. That is how that person learns, and he respected it to the fullest. He did not simply leave people alone, though. The moment someone looked sad or troubled, you would be called into another room, out of earshot of the others, and he would listen quietly and offer a hand.
In a severe environment, or one held under tension, people shrink and lose motivation. On top of that, negative energy becomes the engine. That can do harm, and if that person later becomes a teacher, they may impose the same thing on their students.
Consultation Is a Skill
In this line of work, people come to me for consultation often. In my experience, being consulted is a skill in itself — because asking the right question is something the person seeking advice has to do. Most people are carrying a difficulty, and want to consult someone, precisely because they have not asked the right question. Put the other way round, once the problem is sorted out, the way to solve it usually comes into view.
What I value personally is grasping the present situation rather than producing an answer straight away. I proceed on the premise that the other person and I hold entirely different views of the world and use different systems of language. What is this person carrying? We work it out using language we can both understand.
What to watch here is to avoid the cause-seeking question,
“Why did that happen?”
and to use the problem-solving form instead. A cause-seeking question leads through explanation and self-justification into excuses, which does nothing to sort out what the person is carrying.
When people put an experience into words, only part of the experience makes it into language. Understanding which words they use, I draw out what is missing. That is how we arrive at the question, and the problem, that leads to a solution.
Being consulted is, in a sense, helping someone tidy up. What matters in the end is that it brings the person to understand that the answer is within them. Offering a moment of noticing through the right question. It is something I want to keep valuing.
Working on Perception
Up to here is what I wrote by February 2016. All of it is about language and perception. Look at which senses the other person uses, and match their system of language. Start from the premise that nothing gets through beyond the range of what they can perceive.
Later, Rolfing arrived at the same place from its own side.
I took the Rolf Movement training between 2017 and 2019 — a thirty-day course, separate from the basic Rolfing training. What it addresses is orientation to gravity, perception, coordination, expressiveness, and regulation of the nervous system. Perception sits there as one of the things that determines lasting change in posture and function.
The theoretical backbone of this is the work of Hubert Godard. He was a dancer, and the starting point was what he observed while teaching dance: give the same task, and how you talk in the studio changes how people dance. Change the words and the person’s sensing changes; change the sensing and the movement changes.
The order is the same as what I had written in 2016. But the direction was reversed. At the time I was writing from the side of choosing words to match the other person’s perception — as a way of getting through to them. From Godard’s side, words are not a means of delivery; they are an intervention into the person’s perception itself.
In the Rolf Movement course, the choice of words was part of the practical work. Saying “lengthen” rather than “stretch” changes how a person uses their body. Rita Geirola, one of the teachers, treated the question of whom you are teaching, and which words you choose for them, as a theme of the course itself. Each person carries a use of language shaped by their own culture, she said, so learn it through the process of teaching itself.
This is the same thing as matching a client’s system of language in a session. It is only that what I had thought of, in 2016, as a technique of communication turned out to be a means of working on the body as well.
Incidentally, the figures in the body — 1,500 tarot sessions, over 4,000 Rolfing sessions — are current as of September 2026. By number of people, I have worked with 380 clients (as of August 2026). At the time of writing in January 2016, the tarot figure was close to 600 and I had been offering Rolfing for six months.
Not Becoming Part of the Story
There is one more thing I found words for later.
What I wrote in 2016 was about not telling my own story. When consulted, my own thinking finds its way into the other person’s difficulty — and I wrote about taking care that it does not.
In the Advanced Training in 2025, one of the central terms was kind indifference. It does not mean taking no interest in the person. It means staying engaged while keeping a distance.
The osteopath Jim Jealous put the same thing this way:
The process is none of your business. Observe, but do not become part of the story.
What I wrote in 2016 was about not telling my own story. In this formulation, it is about not becoming part of theirs. Not only not telling — not entering.
In the session, the other person’s process is underway. If I step into it, the direction of what is moving changes. Listening also means staying outside it while watching.
Conclusion
Communication is perception. It takes place only once the receiver perceives it, and only within the range of what they can perceive. So in that first hour, I am looking at which senses a person uses, and what their words mean to them.
And I do not tell them everything. Seventy percent rather than a hundred, with the rest left as their thinking time. The answer is within them, and all I can do is create the occasion.
I work through the body, but what matters more than that is listening. It yields more to go on, and more to notice. And listening to someone teaches me a great deal.
If you are considering a session, it may help to read what people who have received one have written (see “Rolfing Testimonials — Read by Symptom and Purpose“). What happens in the body over ten sessions is described separately (see “What Is the Ten-Session Series?“).
Note, September 2026
What this article describes is what I am looking at during the hour before a session. The difficulty, the values, the words, the senses. At the time I thought of this as preparation before touching the body — time for getting to know someone, separate from the hands-on work that would follow.
The Rolf Movement training changed that order.
One of the things Rolf Movement addresses is pre-movement. According to Aline Newton, this is where the effort goes in order to stabilize the body before a movement is carried out — the movement that happens before the movement. A person is already doing something before they begin to move.
What carries this is the musculature that works continuously under gravity. In the Tonic Function hypothesis of the Rolfer and dancer Hubert Godard, the muscles working under gravity divide into two kinds. The phasic ones engage quickly and tire quickly. The tonic ones do not know fatigue, but cannot be sensed without attention. Pre-movement is handled by the second kind.
This musculature takes time. At a workshop with Gael Rosewood, I learned that tonic muscle takes around five seconds to engage and around five seconds to release. It is not a fast layer.
Godard found what he found while teaching dance. Give the same task, and how you talk in the studio changes how people dance. He was not correcting the movement; the way of speaking changed, and the movement changed with it.
Which is to say that the moment you speak to someone, their pre-movement state has already shifted.
If that is so, the hour of talking is not preparation. When I speak in a way that matches a person’s language, I am already in contact with their pre-movement. It was not time before the hands-on work; it was time spent working at the same layer.
And this layer does not speed up. You cannot work quickly on a musculature that takes five seconds to engage. The length of that hour was never a matter of my own thoroughness. It belongs to the layer being touched.
There is one more thing I noticed afterwards.
This article mixes together the business of being consulted and the business of teaching. “Teach 70% rather than 100%” was written about teaching. At the time I set the two side by side thinking they merely resembled each other.
In Rolf Movement they were treated as the same thing. Godard’s starting point was a teaching situation, for one. And Rita Geirola, one of the teachers, placed the question of whom you are teaching, and which words you choose for them, at the center of the course. Each person carries a use of language shaped by their own culture, she said, so learn it through the process of teaching itself.
In that words are chosen to work on another person’s perception, teaching and doing a session are the same technique. The two things I had set side by side in 2016, thinking them separate, were not separate.