October 3, 2016. Jonathan Martine’s workshop (hereafter Jon) resumed, and we entered the fifth day.
I have written about this workshop four times so far in this column.
- 1: The Nervous System and Rolfing
2: Pain and Approaching Through the Nerves
3: Teaching and Noticing
4: Coaching and Global Listening
The theme of the fifth day was the pericardium, the diaphragm, and the organs around them — heart, liver, stomach, intestines. Until now the neural work had centered on the upper and lower body; today it turned toward the center of the trunk.
Jon explained anatomically how the pericardium enclosing the heart connects to the diaphragm, the clavicle, the spine at the thoracic vertebrae, and the skull. He gave concrete examples: someone looking at a phone or a computer settles into a single posture, leaning forward and fixing the chest, and the muscles and organs around the pericardium lose their mobility.
It also served as review of what I had learned in Munich for the first Rolfing session (see “Session 1: Organizing the Breath“). Fifteen months of offering those techniques to clients has shown me some things and left others unseen.
- Is there a more efficient way in?
- Is there something that would benefit the client more?
These were the questions I had been carrying.
Jon shared several techniques I had not learned in Munich. Releasing the diaphragm by approaching from both sides, working with the floating ribs — the twelfth — and the ribs on the front of the body. Approaching the psoas with the floating ribs and the knees bent. Lengthening the pericardium through the neck and through breath work.
For the liver, stomach, heart, and intestines as well, what I learned was simpler than the methods I had studied earlier in Chi Nei Tsang.
I think what made me ready to take in new technique was this: that I had learned the basic methods; that I had been able to settle them into myself through practice in sessions; and that the anatomical terms have been gradually arriving as something felt rather than merely known.
Jon’s workshop will end before long, and the sessions I offer from late October will carry new tools. The range of what I can do in each session will widen, and my own way of working looks likely to change with it.
Part 1 finishes tomorrow. The fifteen participants are a genuinely varied group — not only Rolfers, but a Pilates instructor and bodyworkers who approach the body by other routes. The questions each of them raises during the workshop are useful in themselves, and there is a great deal to learn from how each of them lives inside their own field.
I am looking forward to seeing how the first half of the workshop closes.
Note, August 2026
What was covered that day begins with an anatomical account: how the pericardium enclosing the heart connects to the diaphragm, the clavicle, the thoracic vertebrae, and the skull. Meeting a teacher who taught this strictly from anatomy was something even the certification training had not offered.
The anatomy classes given by Konrad Obermeier in Munich were substantial in themselves. But the anatomy hours and the technique hours were separate. Here, the anatomical explanation was itself the explanation of where to place the hands. Knowing the terminology and being able to contact that structure accurately ran continuously into one another.
Two months after this, I would receive the exact opposite from Sharon Wheeler. Ida Rolf took her anatomy and physiology books away from her, and she built her work on sensation instead — studying under Ida’s conviction that what is written in books is not the fact of the matter. It is not a question of which is right. Both are inside Rolfing.
But what I needed at that point was clearly the anatomical side. Fifteen months into practice, I was at the stage of raising the precision of my technique. Know the terms, grasp the structure accurately, and place your hands on that basis. Before entrusting things to sensation, there is work to be done. What this workshop gave me was that order.
The other thing is that the day’s material served as review of the first session I had learned in Munich — pericardium, diaphragm, breath.
I would return to the first session many times afterward, always through a different entrance. Half a year before this article, during the mentoring in Paris, Hubert Godard told me to keep returning to the foundations. The following March, Gael Rosewood taught me how to work with Session 1 from the movement side, and there I received Break the Breathing Pattern — not correcting the breath, but keeping the usual rhythm from establishing itself for once.
Earlier still, in the autumn of 2015, I took a three-day course in prāṇāyāma in Shibuya: techniques that suspend the breath, raise the pressure inside the body cavities, and work on the nervous system.
The same session, entered from anatomy, from movement, from breath work. All of it was learning about the first hour of the ten series. At the time I recorded them as separate things.
The first session of the ten series is the most basic one. Being basic also means being the place you return to. What I can see eleven years on is that you can keep returning because something different appears each time — not because you are going back to confirm the same thing.