September 5, 2017. From Munich, via Düsseldorf International Airport, I arrived safely at Narita. I had flown out on August 30, so it was a short stay of one week.
Without much trouble from jet lag, I was able to give my full attention to the workshop, which ran from nine in the morning to six in the evening (five on the final day), August 31 to September 3. The content was dense, and all of it usable in my own sessions. I found myself looking forward to the sessions starting tomorrow, September 6.
I wrote about the composition of the group last time (see “Three Rolf Movement Instructors, and the Atmosphere of the Class“). Five men and twelve women, seventeen in all. One Belgian, seven Germans, two Swiss, one Pole, one Czech, one French, one Dutch, one Russian, one Swede, one Japanese. The three Rolf Movement instructors are Italian, and the assistant is French. A good chance to come to know how many cultures were in the room.
What differs from training in the United States is that almost no one had English as a first language. Among the instructors, only Giovanni Felicioni does.
So on August 31, the first day, Pierpaola Volpones (hereafter Paola) gathered everyone around a round table and gave each person a turn to speak.
The participant from Russia spoke first. He spoke slowly, as if pulling English words out of his head one at a time, and the people around him, Paola included, worked to understand and carried him along.
From the second day, we split into groups of four to six, with about thirty minutes set aside to talk over what we had learned the day before. In those discussions I was often paired with the Germans. Rather than one person talking at the others, there was an atmosphere in which each person could put a view forward naturally. We were taking the same workshop, and our eyes went to different places. That this was respected struck me as good.
When Giovanni taught me in Phase II of the basic training, for the first two weeks we had to submit reports on what we had been looking at in each session, so that he could gauge where each student stood. Again I felt how differently each person understands things — and what is good is that this understanding was not graded as better or worse.
In the exchange sessions between students too, differences of national background aside, I could feel how differently each person works as a Rolfer.
Paired with the Russian participant, for instance, the words were fragmentary, but bodily sensation is universal. What someone intends comes across without words. I could also watch how the two Rolfers who had been with me from Phase I through III approach a session, down to the delicacy of their contact, and it was stimulating.
The content was dense, though. What we covered were the deep sessions, four through seven. Receiving two sessions a day puts a real load on the body. During the breaks, many people lay down and slept, which said something about how concentrated the training was.
The next block is six weeks away, October 19–22, 2017. The same group will be there, and I am looking forward to it.
Note, August 2026
What I recorded at the time shows what happens in a room where language does not come easily.
Of the seventeen participants, not one spoke English as a first language. Of the four teachers—three Italians and one Frenchman—only Giovanni did. The students came from nine different countries.
On the first day, Paola gathered everyone around a round table and gave each person a turn to speak. The first was the participant from Russia. He spoke slowly, drawing English words out of his head one at a time, while everyone in the room worked to understand him and helped carry him along.
From the second day onward, we met in groups of four to six and spent thirty minutes discussing the previous day. This arrangement kept the discussion from becoming a matter of one person speaking while everyone else listened.
It did not happen on its own. It was designed.
In a room where language is difficult, what easily happens is that only those who can speak well end up speaking. Going around the table so that everyone has a turn, and dividing the class into small groups, were both ways of preventing that.
I had experienced the same kind of care during the Basic Training. In Phase I, the teachers took great care to ensure that everyone had an equal opportunity to speak. In Phase III, Jörg told me at the outset that he had little experience teaching Japanese students and asked me to speak up if anything arose.
Something else from that time also stands out to me. Regarding the reports we submitted to Giovanni in Phase II, I was struck by how differently each person understood the material—and by the fact that these differences were not judged as better or worse.
There was no ranking of understanding. No sorting of people into those who followed and those who did not.
Eleven years later, I now think that these were two expressions of the same underlying principle. Giving everyone a turn to speak and refusing to rank different forms of understanding protect the same thing: the possibility of saying that you do not understand.
If you continue without understanding, you merely memorize the form. A technique memorized only as form cannot be used in practice.
There is another passage here that has stayed with me.
I was paired with the Russian participant for an exchange session. Our words were fragmentary, but bodily sensation was universal. What he intended came across without words.
Someone whose language you do not share—and yet your hands understand each other.
Rolf Movement is a practice in which words matter. You guide the client through language rather than through your hands. And yet, within that very training, I had the experience of reaching someone through touch when words could not carry what needed to be communicated.
The two do not conflict. Language is one entrance into the body, but it is not the only one.
In my coaching work now, my first instrument is silence. I do not immediately offer words; I wait. I think that is something you can do only once you know that there are places words cannot reach.
My first felt sense of that came in a classroom in Munich.