July 8, 2017. The Rolf Movement training reached its second day
I wrote about the curriculum last time (see “What Kind of Curriculum Does It Follow?“).
The first day covered session 1; the second day, a review of the basic thinking behind session 2 and what needs attention from the side of movement.
How is it experienced in the body through movement (Embodiment)?
How do you approach it from the side of structure? How do you approach it from the side of function and movement?
Each session was worked through in discussion from these three perspectives, with the key points written out on large sheets of paper. And, as in the basic training, it included a session of experiencing the material in one’s own body.
Pierpaola Volpones (hereafter Paola) explains the more tangled ideas in Rolfing in a way that is easy to follow, which helps.
In Rolf Movement, movement is thought about through the relationship between the body and gravity. As I have touched on repeatedly in this column, Hubert Godard’s thinking is the basis.
Movement has four structural approaches (for details, see “Bidirectionality Brings the Body into Order — Tonic Function in Walking and Sitting“).
- Physical: how is the body changing?
- Coordination: how do the parts of the body move together?
- Perception: how is the world seen?
- Meaning: how is meaning assigned to the world?
Rolfing, for its part, has a particular idea about space: that directing awareness to the space within the body — articulation — lets unnecessary muscular effort fall away. The word used is evoke (see “The Word Articulation — On Making Space Within the Body“)
And it treats as central the question of how to balance the four Articulations, the four spaces: upper body and lower body, front and back, left and right, inside and outside.
According to Paola, there are three kinds of touch.
- Containing touch: imagining a region of the body as a container, and approaching it that way.
- Orienting touch: approaching while aware of the body’s two directions (see “Basic Concepts — Bidirectionality (Palintonicity)“).
- Give support: approaching so as to support the body.
This touch can also be understood as sensing — how you perceive using your own body. Through it, I could feel awareness of the body’s interior heightening.
On top of these tools, we took up how to put what the body feels into words.
- How do you listen actively for the information a Rolfer needs (Active Listening)?
- Rather than questions answerable with yes or no, how do you ask about the state of the body using open questions?
- And what is the difference between using language to instruct and using it to educate — to guide?
That coaching elements are built in is interesting. Only by using these tools does the brain’s map of the body get rewritten, and new options for movement come into being.
Session 1 is the breath and session 2 is building the foundation of the feet, so the training centered on feeling the approach to each region within one’s own body (Embodiment), on how to make contact manually, and on how to listen.
What interested me was that using imagery can produce more variety in a session.
Take the difference between the body hanging from a puppet’s strings, which raises awareness toward the upper body, and the strings being cut, which brings awareness down — you can feel how the adductors and abductors are used differently in each.
And without any approach to the fascia at all, slow movement and the laying on of hands raise the sense that space inside the body is widening.
At the end of the second day, so much information is coming in that digesting it will take time. But it looks useful, and I want to start bringing it in once I am back in Tokyo the day after tomorrow.
Note, August 2026
Look at the words that appear in this post and some of them do not belong to a Rolfing course.
Active listening. Open questions. The difference between instructing and educating. I wrote at the time that it was interesting to find coaching elements built in.
The previous autumn, during the twelve days of Neural Fascial Mobilization, I had reached for the three levels of listening from Co-Active Coaching to organize what the course was teaching. That framework was one I brought in myself. Jonathan Martine never used the word listening. He said: feel the back of your hand, take in the whole room. Naming that level 3 was my doing.
Here it runs the other way. The course had the vocabulary built into it from the start.
Because Rolf Movement is a course that works with words rather than hands. If the client is the one moving, how you convey things becomes the substance of the technique. So the use of open questions is taught with the same weight as manual work.
As for the distinction between instructing and educating, I had heard it half a year earlier, from the same person.
Pierpaola Volpones taught the Supervision Workshop in December 2016 — the six days that close the basic training. There she explained it this way: to teach is to hand over a procedure step by step so that it can be memorized. To educate is to draw out what is already in the student, having them work out for themselves how to proceed. Edu means to draw out.
The same person, half a year later, teaching the same distinction — this time as how to speak to a client.
Teaching and practicing turned out to have the same shape. Do you have the student memorize a procedure, or think for themselves? Do you instruct the client, or guide them so that they notice for themselves?
At the time I recorded these as two separate things. One went into the summary of the Supervision Workshop, the other into this article.
Nine years on, offering coaching as one of my occupations, what I can see is that they were one thing all along. Make it possible for the other person to find their own answer. What you do toward that, and what you refrain from doing. In a classroom or in a treatment room, the question does not change.
One more thing, about language in this course.
Sixteen participants from nine countries. Probably not one of us had English as a first language. And in that room, we trained in putting bodily sensation into words.
Some people, given too many words of guidance, could not process them and stopped moving altogether; others would not move at all unless the guidance was thorough. I wrote about that in the next post. Differences of cultural background showed up directly as differences in how words landed.
Taking a course about words in a language that is not your own looks like a disadvantage. It is not only that. Because the language is not transparent, you can see which words reached and how. In Japanese, I think I would have passed straight over it.