Thursday, September 29, 2016. The third day of Jonathan Martine’s workshop (hereafter Jon). Nothing this concentrated had come my way since Munich, between August 2014 and March 2015. Studying over a long workshop, with a fair number of Rolfing sessions already behind me, has turned out to be genuinely productive.
On the third day we put our hands on the major ligaments that matter when approaching the nerves, locating them and seeing what happens when you actually work. The focus was the forearm, upper arm, sacrum, and the area around the buttocks.
One good thing about this workshop is that someone is recording all of it, which lets you concentrate more fully on the class.
Acquiring knowledge matters when it comes to putting your own work into words. But the deeper I go, the more a sense of how much more there is to know takes hold, and part of me starts to rush.
Several times during the workshop, Jon has explained, with examples, that listening to the body is what matters.
Am I actually meeting my sessions in that frame of mind? The workshop teaches technique, certainly, but more than that it brings back what Jörg said in Phase III (see “How You Have Dealt with Your Own Body Comes Through in the Session“):
The body knows better than anything…
be open, be interested, be curious, avoid dogmatic concepts, have fun, enjoy work!
Fifteen months since I began working on my own.
What are my strengths? What am I good at? These come up when people ask for career advice.
It is true that when you are job hunting, sitting across from an interviewer, you need to think about your past experience and what you have equipped yourself with. But working on your own, the more you know, the greater the risk — the ego of instructing the other person, the tone of talking down to them.
In an individual session especially, unless circumstances demand it, teaching does more harm than good. Wait for the answer to come from the other person; offer a different perspective and give a hint. And watch over them warmly. That way, they become able to judge for themselves.
Since the ten series ends in the client’s independence, what matters is meeting them from a blank state — with nothing to teach.
This owes a great deal to Giovanni Felicioni, whom I studied with in Phase II in Munich. Ask Giovanni a question and he would deliberately withhold the answer, returning the question with another question. Students ended up thoroughly confused, and he saw straight through that and waited anyway. If you were stuck he would extend a hand, but even then he would not give you the answer. He was thorough about it.
It amounts to raising the other person’s self-image while making them think along their own axis of judgment. In a world where people more often lower your self-image by speaking harshly and press their own axis of judgment onto you, this way of teaching felt strikingly fresh.
Recently I came across a book by Steven D’Souza and Diana Renner on not knowing. I found it while looking into mindfulness. What makes it interesting is that it takes up the drawbacks that come with deepening your knowledge, the difficulty of not knowing, the difficulty of remaining a beginner — drawing on perspectives from a range of academic fields.
Whether in a Rolfing session, a tarot session, or a seminar, what matters in a relationship with another person is whether they feel they want to talk to you. Listening from a state of knowing nothing, versus listening from a state of knowing — the former opens the heart far more readily, and makes it easier to take in what the other person says.
The more my knowledge of Rolfing grows, the higher the risk of knowledge doing harm. I want to keep watching for that as I go into sessions.
Note, August 2026
What this installment sets down is a line of thinking about not teaching. In an individual session, unless circumstances demand it, teaching does more harm than good. Wait for the answer to come from the other person, offer a different perspective, give a hint, watch over them warmly. That way they become able to judge for themselves.
The source is named as well: Giovanni Felicioni in Phase II. Ask him a question and he withheld the answer, returning the question with another. He saw through the confusion it produced and waited anyway. If you were stuck he extended a hand, but he still would not give you the answer. He was thorough about it, I wrote.
In September 2016, this is written from the receiving side. It is an account of having been taught well.
Later, I came to experience the same thing from the giving side, during the Rolf Movement training from 2017 to 2019. When we put together a three-session series in Part II, we were not taught the procedure in any detail. There was no “it has to be done this way.” Instead the weight fell on holding the space, and the design waited for each person’s own way of working to emerge. What I had written down as a way of being taught turned out to be there as the structure of teaching.
More time has passed, and what I use most now takes a slightly different form from what this article imagined. In coaching, silence is my first instrument. This article says: offer a perspective and give a hint. It assumes something is handed over. In practice, the situations where leaving something unhanded works better are the more common ones.
Even so, the direction is the same. Making it possible for the other person to think along their own axis of judgment — that has not changed. What changed is what I do to bring it about. Handing over a hint and leaving a silence are both operations for keeping the choices on the other person’s side.
There is a second thing in this article: an anxiety about teaching. The deeper I go, the more a sense of how much more there is to know takes hold, and I start to rush. The more knowledge I have, the greater the risk of the ego of instructing, of talking down.
Against that anxiety, I reached for a book. I cite a volume on the difficulty of not knowing and write that listening from a state of knowing nothing opens the heart more readily.
Eleven years on, what I can say is that the quantity of knowledge is not the problem. The problem is whether you can hold knowledge and refrain from using it. What I received in the 2025 Advanced Training was a system of classification — five principles and the Taxonomy. I carry far more than I did then. Whether I can keep it from coming to the front during a session is decided by a different kind of practice.
The words from Jörg that this article quotes had already said as much. Avoid being bound by any one set of concepts. Not holding no system, but not being bound by the one you hold.