Wednesday, January 24, 2018. Reaching Munich via Haneda, Fukuoka, Haneda, and Paris, I made it into the Rolf Movement Training an hour and a half late.
Since July 7, 2017, I have been taking the Rolf Movement Training run by the European Rolfing Association (ERA). It comes in three stages, Part 1 through Part 3, which means attending the workshop in Munich six times in all (see “What Kind of Curriculum Does It Follow?“).
This trip brought the first day of Part 2.
Rita Geirola (hereafter Rita), who also taught in Part 1, returned as instructor — an Italian who works as a Rolf Movement instructor and as a Feldenkrais practitioner.
Three people joined as assistants: France Hatt-Arnold from Switzerland, Aline Newton from the United States, and Nicola Carofiglio from Italy. An entirely different lineup from last time.
Above all, it was a surprise to meet Aline Newton (hereafter Aline) again at the ERA — she had visited Tokyo as a tourist the previous year. Aline has been taught directly by Hubert Godard many times, so she looks likely to help in learning Godard’s thinking, Tonic Function included (on Tonic Function, see “The Muscles That Tire and the Muscles That Don’t — Tonic Function and the Support of Posture“).
The ERA curriculum gives you the chance to learn from a range of teachers. The Rolf Institute of Structural Integration (RISI) requires learning from four Rolf Movement instructors, and I think it is remarkable that I have already been able to learn from seven different ones.
In parallel, Phase I of the Rolfing basic training was running in another room. Pierpaola Volpones was there as an assistant, so we met again. It also turned out there were people I knew among the Phase I group. It looks as though I will be able to enter this course in good company.
Fifteen participants in all: one Belgian, one Swede, five Germans, one Pole, one Russian, one Czech, one Swiss, two British, one Dutch, one Japanese. A genuinely international group.
Part 2 runs ten days (January 24 to February 4, 2018, with the 27th and 31st off). The plan is to give Rolf Movement sessions to two people: three sessions with one client (January 26, 30, February 3) and three with one fellow student (January 25, 29, February 2). A good chance to work on building a three-session series.
We arrived at the ERA at 10:30, and after a break, from 11:00 we worked in pairs of Rolfers. Centering on what we had learned in Part 1, without approaching the fascia at all, we gave forty-minute sessions using movement only — AMP (Active Movement Participation), gamma touch, and so on (on AMP, see “To Encourage Bodily Awareness: Slowly, Carefully, Into Words“).
Partners were chosen in an interesting way. Those taking the Rolfer role and those taking the client role separated into two groups, and the clients chose their Rolfers. It produced pairings between Rolfers who had not worked together.
During the session, a cue came from the instructors and assistants: step away from your client and take a moment to organize your own body. When it came, I stepped out of the session briefly and looked at the state of my own body.
In my usual sessions I did not take such time; I tended to get on with it. So I could feel how much it matters to know the state of your own body.
According to Rita, this is what counts when a Rolfer works. The state of your own body, how you use it, your habits and quirks, show up in the session exactly as they are. So how do you come to know that for yourself?
The body-reading work at the end of the first day was a concrete case. First you know the state of your own body. Having organized your own axis and made space inside yourself, you then receive the client’s information through your body rather than through your eyes.
Far more information comes in that way, but it also tends toward the subjective. In fact, when four people observed one person in groups of five, each of us felt a different place.
According to Rita, that is fine. If the discrepancy is closed between client and Rolfer through communication in the end, the session works.
The Embodiment done first thing in the afternoon was also interesting: work for slowly feeling the two directionalities with respect to gravity, and, in a group of five with four surrounding one person, also feeling gravity while entrusting the body to the four.
Nine days remain. After returning home, I would also like to offer standalone Rolf Movement sessions, so I want to learn as much as I can while I am here.
The Embodiment first thing in the afternoon was also interesting. There was work for slowly feeling the two directions in relation to gravity, and work in which four people surrounded one, who entrusted their body to the four and felt gravity through them (on Embodiment, see “Bodily Sensation — What Is Embodiment?“).
Nine days left. I want to bring standalone Rolf Movement sessions into my practice once home, so I intend to learn thoroughly.
Note, August 2026
What Rita said here became the subject itself nine years later.
The state of your own body, how you use it, your habits and quirks, show up in the session exactly as they are. So how do you come to know that for yourself?
And there was a mechanism for training it. Mid-session, a cue arrives from the instructor: step away from your client and take a moment to organize your own body.
They are interrupting the work.
At the time I wrote that in my usual sessions I did not take such time and tended to get on with it. The interruption must have looked like waste.
What I learned most in the 2025 Advanced Training was a way of being as a bodyworker. The three requirements of Neutral, the distinction between Intention and Intentionality, Kind Indifference, Right Action. Every one of them concerns how the practitioner handles themselves.
And Neutral stands at the entrance. Unless you are in Neutral, the other person’s body will not begin to regulate itself.
The order runs the other way from what I expected. Not refine the technique and then attend to how you are. How you are comes first, and the hands follow from it.
That order had been built into the first day of Part 2. Stop their hands mid-session and send them back to themselves. Repeat it.
There is one more thing recorded here. In body reading, four of us observed the same person and each felt a different place. Rita said that was fine — if the discrepancy is closed between client and Rolfer through communication in the end, the session works.
Observations need not agree, in other words.
In Phase I of the basic training, three teachers wrote their evaluations independently and pointed at the same thing in three different vocabularies. That was agreement between observations.
Here the opposite is being said. Four people look at one body and feel different places. That is normal.
I do not think it is a contradiction. What agreed in Phase I was the teachers’ assessment of a student’s state. What did not agree here is the information received from a body.
The first is evaluation; the second is perception.
Perception does not converge. In the same room, looking at the same person, what arrives differs. Which is exactly why what you receive changes with whom you learn from.
That, I think, is why this course is built around seven teachers.
The RISI requirement is four, as I noted here. It came to seven. Not because more is better, but because perception is the kind of thing that does not converge, and so it has to come from several people.