On November 12, 2016, the Bone Work reached its fourth day.
The first three days were covered in the entries below.
What Sharon Wheeler said across those three days was interesting enough that I would like to set it out in a list.
- A person comes to hold their current bodily structure through an unforeseen accident, but once the cause becomes known, the body responds to that and moves toward improvement. Ida’s sessions were apparently genuinely painful (Sharon described them as pretty intense, and as putting you into the next dimension). Even so, Ida produced results, and so clients gathered. And in cases where the cause of the accident could be identified, almost all of them improved.
- When Sharon obtains information from a client about the cause of a physical problem, rather than holding in mind the names of muscles as written in anatomy, she holds in mind the object that delivered the impact — a truck, a horse’s leg, for instance. Keeping in mind that the object is departing from the body is what brings improvement, she says.
- Ida said that working thoroughly on the feet lets the shoulders drop and lets the shoulders broaden overall. This raised the question of whether Ida had originally placed Session 2 first. Sharon said this might well be true, and added that Session 1 may have been created for marketing purposes. Since the feet are something some people cannot feel, she suspects that a session organizing the breath — something the body can feel more readily — was brought in as Session 1.
- On leaving intervals between the ten Rolfing sessions: younger people have good metabolism, so roughly one session every two weeks works well, while for older people a month is better. In Sharon’s experience, when someone goes through the ten-series more than once, an interval of six months between them is good.
- After a session, a kind of tiredness can arise. Muscles that have not been in use may come into use. It takes one to two weeks for them to begin moving. When a session ends, it is worth paying a little more attention to that tiredness.
- When Sharon was asked how Ida came up with the ten sessions, she said that Ida never spoke about her own past at all. Sharon summed it up in a phrase: Divine Inspiration.
- While Ida was teaching at the Esalen Institute, it was known that she had been invited by Fritz Perls, but Ida loved New York, where she was born and raised, so however much those around her wanted her to live at Esalen, settling there was apparently difficult.
- It was Ida who invited Moshe Feldenkrais to Esalen. Ida and Feldenkrais got on well, never came into conflict, and recognized each other. Feldenkrais received Rolfing and Ida received the Feldenkrais Method. The Alexander Technique was also known during Ida’s time at Esalen, but Alexander had already died, so there was not much exchange.
- Esalen was created by Dick Price and Michael Murphy, and Michael Murphy’s family was enormously wealthy. The Murphy family purchased the land and built Esalen there, but Michael’s original interest was in running a bookstore. Also, because his parents’ discipline had been strict, Michael apparently held an aversion toward Esalen as the site of those memories.
- In the 1970s a wide range of people passed through Esalen, including Joseph Campbell, whose scholarship on mythology became the basis for Star Wars. Campbell was a person of great character, and his presentations, built mainly around photographs from his travels across the world, were apparently fascinating.
- Ida moved the headquarters to Boulder because Emmett requested it when she named him as an apostle to teach Rolfing. In fact, Ida had been considering New York.
Note, August 2026
What this entry records is a doubt about the origin of the ten-series. Ida said that working thoroughly on the feet lets the shoulders drop and broaden. If so, might she originally have placed Session 2 — the feet — first?
Session 1, the breath, may have been introduced later because some people cannot feel their feet. That is Sharon’s conjecture. The reading is that the order of the sequence may have been settled not by the logic of the body but by what a recipient can readily feel.
It overlaps with what Alan Richardson said two years earlier in the London Mentoring. Session 1 organizes the breath and is at the same time the process of building the relationship. Carrying it out while talking about how the following sessions will proceed makes the client want to return. It is a kind of marketing, but a reasonable one, as the entry from that time puts it. Two different people were speaking about the same session from the same angle.
Eleven years later, the doubt came to be resolved on the side of practice. What the Advanced Training in 2025 took up was the question of what to take as one’s bearings in designing a session once the fixed order has been set aside. What does the client want. Which principle is lacking. Which Taxonomy to work from. Doubting the origin of a sequence and building without a sequence sit at the two ends of the same question.
Sharon’s method, however, differs from that Advanced Training as well. When she has information about the cause of a physical problem, she does not hold the anatomical names of muscles in mind. She holds in mind the object that delivered the impact. A truck, a horse’s leg. Keeping in mind that it is departing from the body is what brings improvement. Rather than selecting a standpoint from a system of classification, she works with the event itself. It faces the opposite direction from the Advanced Training’s Taxonomy.
Something else this entry records is the network of people around Esalen. Ida invited Moshe Feldenkrais there; the two never came into conflict, recognized each other, and each received the other’s work. There is a sequel to this passage.
In the full Rolf Movement training taken between 2017 and 2019, one of the teachers, Rita Gerolia, was also a Feldenkrais Method practitioner. Asked how it differed from Rolf Movement, she answered that there is not much difference.
Two forms of work that stood side by side at Esalen in the 1970s were still standing side by side forty years later. Since the era when Ida said there is no such thing as psychology, only physiology, the ways of working with the body have branched many times over, and there is something that was never divided at the root. Hearing this from Sharon and then confirming it two years later, in practice, from a different teacher, was less a coincidence than a sign that the division had never been there to begin with.