Monday, December 12, 2016. With the stay in Frankfurt at an end, I traveled to Munich by way of Leipzig.
The purpose of the short stop in Leipzig — half a day — was to take a Mentoring session. Incidentally, this was the first stay in a city of the former East Germany since Dresden.
As described earlier, three Mentoring sessions must be taken between Phase III and the Supervision Workshop (in the interval from March 25, 2015 to December 12, 2016) (see “Training in Munich (3) — Mentoring and the Supervision Workshop”).
A Mentoring session, as described in “An Experience in the UK (1),” means going to the office of an Advanced Rolfer to learn technique, disposition, and the like. Becoming a Certified Rolfer requires taking five in total.
This year, between August 29 and September 4, 2016, I took two Mentoring sessions: with Keith Graham in London (see “An Experience in London (3)“) and with Hubert Godard in Paris (see “An Experience in Paris: Valuing the Foundations“).
In Leipzig, the Mentoring session was with Kathrin Grobelnik, who served as Giovanni Felicioni’s assistant in Phase II in 2016.
Early on December 12, the train (DB BAHN, ICE, 7:20 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.) covered the three hours from Frankfurt to Leipzig. After a short rest at Leipzig Hauptbahnhof, the tram took twenty minutes; twenty-five including the walk, and there stood a large session room.
武術を教えているというKathrin先生は、気さくに、丁寧に部屋へ迎え入れてくれた。お茶をいただきながら、お互いの自己紹介を経て、私のKathrin, who also teaches martial arts, welcomed me into the room warmly and with care. Over tea, after introducing ourselves to one another, she answered my questions in full detail.
- How much time between each session? (Two weeks to a month.)
- After finishing the ten sessions, how many months should be left before starting again? (Six months to a year.)
- How to work with women who are pregnant? (Generally not done. When it is, the approach stays superficial, centered on the face, feet, and back. After the birth, one to two years are left before sessions resume.)
She then showed me into the session room, and we moved straight into practice, answering my questions in hands-on form.
This time, centered on a review of the ten sessions, we spent close to two hours on approaching the fascia without using the fingers — how to work with the elbow, the back of the hand, and the palm in the sleeve sessions (the first through third), together with the use of the body. We practiced approaches focused on the whole foot and the quadratus lumborum, and Kathrin gave a range of feedback.
There had been many chances to practice approaches to the nerves and the bones through neural manipulation and Bone Work, but few for approaching the fascia — that came home to me again. From tomorrow, December 13, comes six days of Pierpaola Volpones’s Supervision Workshop. Client sessions are part of it, which makes this an ideal occasion for review.
Kathrin’s Mentoring session ran four hours in total (12 p.m. to 4 p.m.), a long stretch that went by in no time. After parting with her, I boarded the 5:48 p.m. train from Leipzig Hauptbahnhof and traveled close to five hours to München Hauptbahnhof. The train ran late, and part of the rolling stock was uncoupled along the way, forcing a change of carriage; even so, I reached the hotel near München Hauptbahnhof safely at 11:40 p.m.
From tomorrow, at last, the Supervision Workshop — the highlight of the time in Munich. Something to enjoy to the fullest.
Note, August 2026
The practice in this session was working without the fingers. In approaching the fascia in the sleeve sessions — the first through third — the elbow, the back of the hand, and the palm are used, together with the use of the body. Close to two hours on the whole foot and the quadratus lumborum.
Three months earlier in London, what Keith taught was also a use of the body that spares the hands. The same question had come back at a different teacher’s, in a different form. What appeared repeatedly across the five Mentoring sessions was not a matter of adding techniques but the question of how to manage without using the hands.
Stop pressing with the fingers and something else becomes necessary. This is not a matter of tools — of the elbow or the forearm. The elbow cannot be used unless the whole body moves. When Shape the Hand was formulated in 2025 as not trying to do something with one’s own hand but letting the client’s body form that hand, what it presupposed was the practitioner’s whole body.
A question about the hands always turns into a question about everything but the hands.
Something else is recorded in this entry: the recognition that while there had been many chances to practice approaches to the nerves and bones through neural manipulation and Bone Work, there had been few for the fascia. What sits at the center of Rolfing had been thinning out.
The month after this was written, in January 2017, I went to Seattle and learned Cranio Work from Sharon Wheeler. After that came the full Rolf Movement training. A record that put into words what was missing was deciding what came next.
Laid side by side, the five Mentoring sessions form a single line. Where to be before touching (Keith, 2014). How to approach, and when to enter (Alan, 2014). How to reduce the burden on the hands (Keith, 2016). Returning to the fundamentals however many times it takes (Godard, 2016).
And working without the fingers (Kathrin, 2016). It was not a collection of five techniques but one thing received five times, from five angles. The requirement of five sessions for becoming a Certified Rolfer is presumably designed that way.