Friday, March 24, 2017. The workshop of the American Rolfer Gael Rosewood (hereafter Gael) began. Held at Shinjuku Mura Studio, it ran for four days.
On the first day, Gael explained how Rolf Movement — which she was involved in from its founding period — came to be born and developed.
In 1969, she met Ida Rolf at the Esalen Institute (on Esalen, see “The Esalen Institute (1): Psychology and Bodywork” and “The Esalen Institute (2): The Popularization of Psychology and the Atmosphere“) and took Rolfing training together with Sharon Wheeler (on Sharon, see “Bone Work – Sharon Wheeler (3) — Through the Third Day: What Sharon Said (1)“; Sharon was two years older than Gael).
The Phase I and Phase II training of that time was combined, and the main focus was placed on training the theory of Rolfing and the eye for looking at the body.
In the body reading part, when the dancer Judith Aston (hereafter Judith) was asked by Ida, “What do you see?”, she was able to explain — including movement patterns — with humor mixed in, so the story goes. Ida requested that Judith teach Movement work for bringing awareness to the body.
From 1971, the first Rolf Movement Training by Judith was held. Gael also took part in that training, so she was involved in the founding period of Rolf Movement as well.
The training continued for ten years, held before and after Rolfing’s Basic Training in coordination with it.
After ten years, Judith left the Rolfing association and became independent as Aston Patterning.
The remaining members of the Rolfing association (five, including Gael) kept it alive and developed it as the Rolf Movement Training. Among Gael’s students are Hubert Godard (see “ERA Mentoring Session (4) — An Experience in Paris: Valuing the Foundations — Hubert Godard“), Pedro Prado, Monica Caspari, and Carol Agneessens.
And in Europe, Hubert, and in Brazil, Pedro and Monica, each developed Movement in their own way.
In this way, Movement came to be recognized in its diversity according to the culture of each country; but Rolf Movement, the story goes, follows the basic principles of Rolfing.
Gael explained the basic principles in five words: how to find support from the body (Support), how to organize the body (Alignment), how to move the whole organically (Coherence), how to bring awareness to space (Space), and how to prepare new options for movement (new choices), and so on.
In the case of Movement, rather than using the hands, words are used. So, regarding the way words are used as well — where to direct a person’s awareness (Awareness) and attention (Attention), and how to magnify (Magnify) and amplify (Amplify) it? She emphasized that preparing language for directing awareness to the body is important.
What is especially important, she said, is not words like “what is correct” or “to correct,” but words like “how to prepare new choices and expand awareness and sensation?”
Beginning from such foundations, the work moves toward the breath of the second and third days, and the approach to the shoulder girdle and the pelvic girdle. Next time, I’d like to write about the atmosphere of the class as a whole and the work.
In this way, diversity grew in Movement according to the culture of each country; but Rolf Movement, the story goes, follows the basic principles of Rolfing.
Gael explained the basic principles in five words: how to find support from the body (Support), how to organize the body (Alignment), how to move the whole organically (Coherence), how to bring awareness to space (Space), and how to prepare new options for movement (new choices), and so on.
In the case of Movement, rather than using the hands, words are used. So, regarding the way words are used as well — where to direct a person’s awareness (Awareness) and attention (Attention), and how to magnify (Magnify) and amplify (Amplify) it? She emphasized that preparing language for directing awareness to the body is important.
What is especially important, she said, is not words like “what is correct” or “to correct,” but words like “how to prepare new choices and expand awareness and sensation?”
Beginning from such foundations, the work moves toward the breath of the second and third days, and the approach to the shoulder girdle and the pelvic girdle. Next time, I would like to write about the atmosphere of the class as a whole and the work.
Note, August 2026
At the center of this piece, a single question is recorded. It is the question Ida put to the dancer Judith Aston: what do you see? Judith was able to answer, movement patterns included, and on the strength of that answer Ida asked her to teach work for bringing awareness to the body. The first Rolf Movement Training, beginning in 1971, grew out of that exchange.
The same question is recorded in another place. It appears in what Sharon Wheeler said in 2016 and 2017. The reason Ida valued Sharon was that Sharon saw bodies the way Ida herself did. Yet Ida had no method for teaching how to see. The words Sharon passed on were: “Put him into water and let them swim or drown.” That gap became the starting point of the roughly fifty years that followed, moving toward a systematized education, as set down in the notes to the Bone Work pieces.
What becomes visible eleven years later is that this piece records the other way the gap was filled. To the same question, Sharon answered from the side of bone and structure, and Judith answered from the side of movement. Within the two years from 1969 to 1971, two roads separated out of the same classroom.
And Gael was present in both places. She met Ida at Esalen in 1969 and trained alongside Sharon; in 1971 she took part in Judith’s first Rolf Movement Training as well. After Judith left ten years later to establish Aston Patterning, Gael remained as one of the five who kept Rolf Movement alive, and among her students is Hubert Godard.
In the notes to the Bone Work pieces, I wrote that three lineages coexist within Rolfing: the European lineage (Godard’s Tonic Function), the Advanced Training (the five principles and Taxonomy of Maitland, Ray McCall, and Hiroyoshi Tahata), and Sharon (who passes on what she received directly from Ida with almost no anatomy and almost no theory). That reading needs a correction. The European lineage and Sharon are not two independent strands. They cross at Esalen in 1969, through one person: Gael.
At the time of writing this piece in March 2017, I had not noticed that. Sharon’s accounts had been heard four months earlier — in Tokyo in November 2016 and in Seattle in January 2017 — and both sets of pieces were already written. Even so, the line stating that Gael trained alongside Sharon in 1969 is set down as a plain fact and passed over.
The basic principles Gael described were five: Support, Alignment, Coherence, Space, and new choices. In a Phase III piece written a month before this one, the five principles of Rolfing are given as Wholism, Support, Adaptability, Palintonicity, and Closure. Between the two sets of five, only Support is shared. The Advanced Training of 2025 has five principles as well. Systems drawn from the same source are each arranged into five, and the contents do not overlap. How names are assigned is itself a record of where a given lineage has been looking.
One last point, on what Gael emphasized about the use of words: not “what is correct” or “to correct,” but how to prepare new choices and widen awareness and sensation. Four months after this workshop, in July 2017, the main Rolf Movement training run by ERA began. What I met there was a place where those words were carried out as the stance of the teaching side. In designing a three-series, the procedure was not taught in detail, and there was no “it must be done this way” at any point. Receiving, from the side of how I was taught, what I had heard as a principle took two and a half years.