June 30, 2017. The first day of a workshop with Peter Schwind (hereafter Peter). It is held as a preparatory stage for the Advanced Training, which makes it an ideal chance to see how Peter teaches.
The headquarters of the European Rolfing Association are in Munich, and the city alone is said to have close to eighty Rolfers. Among them, Peter is as well known as Robert Schleip. Giovanni Felicioni from Phase II, Pierpaola Volpones from the Supervision Workshop, and Konrad Obermeier, familiar to many in Japan, have all studied with Peter and been shaped by him.
Peter was certified as a Rolfer at the Rolf Institute in Boulder in 1980 and has taught the basic classes as a Rolfing instructor since 1985. From 1991 he assisted and co-taught in advanced classes, and in 1999 he was certified as an Advanced Instructor. That makes thirty-seven years as a Rolfer.
He also knows the Feldenkrais Method well, and has studied for more than thirty years with the osteopath Jean-Pierre Barral. He worked for several years as a table assistant in Barral’s classes and has taught visceral manipulation for the Barral Institute. So there may be something to learn here on the movement side as well.
Three participants from Switzerland, one from Italy, one from Austria, six from Germany, one from the UK, and myself — thirteen in all. As ever, a room full of people from a range of backgrounds.
We began with introductions, each of us saying how long we had been practicing Rolfing and where our interests lay. On the first day, frozen shoulder came up most often, followed by the iliopsoas, so the workshop was built around those two.
Here I want to set down what was said.
What characterizes Peter’s teaching, as with Sharon Wheeler, is that he teaches by recounting what he has gone through alongside his patients.
The difference is that Sharon turns toward the darker psychological regions of a person. Having established a safe and settled environment, she speaks from questions like: how does this person come to notice who they actually are? How do you meet them? How did Ida Rolf think, and how did she actually work?
Peter is far more specialized toward technique. How do you resolve the symptom? Which technique should you use to do it? What experience did he draw on in solving the problem? His is a clinical, problem-solving approach, precise and finely detailed.
How I go about my own sessions is closer to Sharon’s approach. So there is more for me to learn from her — but learning a different approach matters all the same. Seeing the foundations of Rolfing from the side of anatomy and the science of fascia is genuinely useful, and there is a great deal to take from Peter.
Peter has been strongly shaped by the first generation of teachers who learned directly from Ida: Jan Sultan, Peter Melchior, Michael Salveson, Emmett Hutchins, Jim Asher, Tom Wing, and Ida Rolf’s son, the chiropractor Richard Demmerle.
Jan Sultan influenced him most. A teacher who says yes and no plainly — don’t do this, do that — which he found useful in constructing his own sessions. Sultan also taught him the importance of managing time, finishing a session in fifty to fifty-five minutes.
Peter’s sessions originally ran about an hour. What changed his thinking was meeting Richard Demmerle, who worked so efficiently that a short session might finish in fifteen minutes. Through that encounter Peter came to see that taking too much time may teach the brain a great deal of information it does not need. Since then he has kept his sessions to around forty-five minutes.
For Peter too, everything is explained in terms of raising the quality of touch so as to construct a session with clear intent, and of how the practitioner uses their own body to make the work easier on themselves. Why the table is raised and lowered. What is wrong with tables as they are made now. The detail runs that fine.
He also spoke about the importance of giving a session light and shade — that intensity is needed at some moments and soft touch at others.
What stayed with me was what he said about the quality of touch while discussing the Feldenkrais Method. Ida Rolf’s touch was famously strong, and by his account Feldenkrais worked with a touch of comparable force. Only by knowing both intensity and softness can a session hold real variety — that struck me.
Next time, I’d like to write about more concrete content of the workshop and about the Advanced Training.
Next time I want to write about the more specific content of the workshop, and about the Advanced Training.
Note, August 2026
Something was decided across those three days: that I would not take Peter’s Advanced Training.
The workshop was held as preparation for it. I had come intending to enroll. Between the first day and the third, that turned into a judgment that his direction was not mine.
The reason is written in the article by my own hand. Peter is specialized toward technique. How do you resolve the symptom, which technique do you use, what experience did he draw on in solving it. Clinical, precise, finely detailed — the detail running as far as why the table is raised and lowered. And there it is: how I go about my own sessions is closer to Sharon’s approach.
What I felt was not a question of quality. Peter was certified in 1980, while Ida Rolf was alive, and studied with nearly the whole first generation — Jan Sultan, Peter Melchior, Michael Salveson, Emmett Hutchins, Jim Asher, Tom Wing, and Ida’s son Richard Demmerle. He has studied more than thirty years with the osteopath Jean-Pierre Barral, and has written books of his own. Everything being taught was sound.
I could follow it. It simply was not the direction I wanted to go.
Eleven years on, I think the decision was right. There is no other word for it than fit.
Eight years later, in 2025, the Advanced Training I did take was with Ray McCall and Hiroyoshi Tahata. What I learned most across those twenty-four days was a way of being as a bodyworker. Neutral, Kind Indifference, Right Action. A course concerned not with running a session efficiently but with how the practitioner is.
Had I taken Peter’s training, I would have received something else entirely. Neither is superior. But the direction I was facing in 2017 and what I received in 2025 lay on the same side.
This article also holds a contrast about time. Peter’s sessions originally ran about an hour; after meeting Richard Demmerle he came to see that taking too much time may teach the brain more information than it needs, and brought them down to around forty-five minutes. From Jan Sultan he had learned fifty to fifty-five.
Five months before this, in Seattle, I took Sharon Wheeler’s Cranio Work. The demonstration session ran close to three hours; the session I received ran three and a half. The same Rolfing, with that much distance between them. Do you hold that change takes time to arrive, or that the risk is giving too much?
I received these two within half a year, on opposite sides of the world. And the one I felt close to was Sharon’s.
After certification, you choose who to learn from. Being able to choose also means being able to decide not to. The requirement is eighteen credits, but nothing specifies which teacher or which course fills them. What those three days gave me was less a technique than a judgment about which way I was headed.
A workshop meant as preparation turned out to be useful for reaching the conclusion not to go.