September 1, 2017. The Rolf Movement training reached its fifth day.
As on the previous day (see “To Encourage Bodily Awareness: Slowly, Carefully, Into Words“), we began with an Embodiment session, serving also as a review of session five.
Handouts had been distributed in advance for each session — in this case four through seven — setting out the General Goals, Regional Goals, Structural Goals, and Functional Goals. Pierpaola Volpones (hereafter Paola) had condensed her thinking on each session onto a single sheet of A4, clearly laid out.
Sessions five and six were the hardest to follow in the basic training. I remember working through them in Phase II with the teacher’s help, during the exchange sessions between students.
Two years into practice, with some experience behind me, reviewing session five was genuinely useful.
Where session four works the adductor side from the soles of the feet to the pelvic floor, session five ranges widely: centered on the relationship between the rib cage and the pelvis, it takes in the pelvic and shoulder girdles, the region of the viscera within the abdominal and thoracic cavities, and the iliopsoas.
So the Embodiment grows complex too. Following Rita Geirola’s guidance, we spent about thirty minutes on it — sitting, walking, on all fours. The pace was slow, and yet the movement felt dizzying.
Where session four had four movement practices, session five had two. Practice is always done as an exchange between students, and this time each side took close to an hour — as long as a full session. From session four onward, fittingly called the deep sessions, the work reaches into far deeper places, and that takes time.
Before we began, Paola explained about Phoric Function.
Phoric means to carry the weight. It is a term Hubert Godard, who shaped the founding period of Rolf Movement, began using.
As long as the body is in gravity, it carries weight. Weight can be felt through the whole body, but once the body moves, a bias arises in it. Walking, for instance, some parts come to feel light and others heavy.
Weight, then, produces a bias. And as I wrote about in connection with Tonic Function, when the body holds two directions, space — articulation — is born within it, and moving becomes easier (see “What Comes into View Through Movement: Words and Direction“).
The two directions are:
- The part that stays still (something stays — the Fixed Point, the part that carries the weight)
- The part that moves freely (something moves — Orientation, the part relatively free of it).
In the movement practice for session five, we looked at where the Fixed Point lies, according to the Orientation.
- When the arm — the shoulder girdle — is moving, is the Fixed Point the scapula, the thoracic spine, or the pelvis?
- When the pelvic girdle is moving, is it the lumbar spine, the sit bones, the sacrum, or the knee, or the sole of the foot?
- In thoracic breathing, is it the thoracic spine, the cervical spine, or the scapula?
- In abdominal breathing, is it the sole of the foot, the pelvis, the thoracic spine, or the lumbar spine?
Bringing these into awareness during movement — or being guided into them by the Rolfer — releases effort that had been entering unnecessarily, and makes the deeper muscles available. I could feel the result after the practice ended.
Rolf Movement is by no means a replacement for a Rolfing session. But as a tool for raising awareness within the body, bringing movement into a session earns its place.
Two days left. Through practice and the teachers’ feedback, I hope to raise the precision of the manual work and my grasp of the sessions further.
Note, August 2026
A new term appears here for the first time: Phoric Function.
We were told that phoric means “bearing weight.” As long as the body is subject to gravity, it is always bearing weight. When we stand still, this weight can be felt throughout the body. Once we begin to move, however, the weight shifts: some parts of the body become lighter, while others become heavier.
The concepts of Fixed Point and Orientation, introduced in the previous post, describe how the body organizes this shift. One side receives the weight, while the other is freed to move. This differentiation between the two sides creates space within the body.
The term comes from Hubert Godard. And Godard’s work has another well-known term: Tonic Function.
The two look at different things.
Tonic Function concerns the work of the muscles that hold posture — those that work continuously and those that fire briefly, and what gets prepared before movement begins. It was taught in Phase II of the basic training, and at the time I understood almost none of it. It came in the following March, when Gael Rosewood handed it over as concrete examples.
Phoric Function concerns the distribution of weight. What is supporting, and what is free to move.
The first is about the character of muscles; the second, about how weight is spread. Within one person’s system, two angles on the body.
And what joins them is space. When the bias of weight divides into two directions, articulation appears within the body. Where there is space, the tonic muscles can work. What Gael showed by example was that the soleus fires before you raise your arm, and serratus anterior before you grasp something — but for that to happen, there has to be room.
What strikes me eleven years on is the question of why Godard’s vocabulary splits in two.
One term looks like it would do. The work of holding posture and the distribution of weight can be read as two descriptions of the same phenomenon.
From the practitioner’s side, though, they differ. Tonic Function explains what is happening inside the client’s body. Phoric Function tells you where to look. When the arm is moving, is the fixed point the scapula, the thoracic spine, or the pelvis? Put the question in that form and the observation becomes concrete.
A vocabulary for explaining, and a vocabulary for observing. The system held both.
Nine years later, in the Advanced Training, I met the same structure. The five principles were the explanatory vocabulary; the Taxonomy was the observational one. You assess which principle is currently lacking, and choose which vantage to work from. The theory and the instrument for using it come as a pair.
That, I think, is the shape a system takes. Words for saying what is happening will not, on their own, move your hands.