Saturday, January 26, 2018. The first three days of training finished.
I wrote about the first day in “The State of Your Own Body Shows Up in the Session.” These ten days put the weight on practice: I will give a three-session series to two people, one fellow student and one outside client.
On the first day back, when we split into Rolfer and client roles, how should each of us observe and assess ourselves? Rita Geirola (hereafter Rita) introduced the following guide. As always it was written out on large sheets of paper and stayed up on the wall through the workshop.
For the Rolfer:
- What was your felt sense in the approach?
- What model for body reading?
- What level do you focus on, and what triggered you there?
- How do you strategize?
- What technique do you choose?
- Your felt sense while working.
- How did you evaluate the result and the quality of relationship?
For the client:
- Felt welcomed?
- Felt read?
- Did the work match your need?
- How do you evaluate the result and the quality of relationship?
What interests me about this workshop is that, in designing the three-session series, we did not learn the fine points — form the strategy like this, the procedure runs like that — in the way the ten-series procedure was taught.
If anything, the weight falls on building strategy and technique afresh each time, following the guide above, according to intuition and body reading.
On language, the assistant Aline Newton (hereafter Aline) introduced the phrase come to term: experience settling into memory as words.
When reading a client’s body, which of the many pieces of information do you select?
When a Rolfer places a hand somewhere to direct the client’s awareness there — a point of reference, in English — how does the body change?
When you are with a client, what words do you use? Not only naming problems, but: what is a strength, a resource? Where does awareness go, and where does it not? Putting into words the places likely to become an opportunity — something that draws awareness.
The impression is of learning all this through practice.
On body reading, I had unclear points about the idea of pre-movement in Rolf Movement — called primary lesion in osteopathy — and had the chance to ask Aline.
According to Aline, you observe where effort enters in order to stabilize the body before an action is performed. That is what makes it worth observing the movement before the movement.
And pre-movement becomes clear, she says, by watching the transition from standing to sitting. Take someone who stands up with effort held around the coccyx and sit bones: between bringing no awareness to it at all and releasing the effort around the coccyx, the way force enters when they stand and push someone away with a hand is entirely different.
Next time I want to write about the relationship with Tonic Function.
Note, August 2026
What was written on those large sheets of paper and left up on the classroom wall is recorded here.
Seven questions for the Rolfer, and four for the client.
What was your felt sense. What model did you read the body with. Why that level. How did you strategize. Which technique did you choose. What was your felt sense while working. How do you evaluate the result and the relationship.
And on the receiving side: did you feel welcomed. Did you feel read. Did it match what you needed.
Only the questions were handed over.
No answers. Nothing about which felt sense is the right one, which model to use, which technique to choose.
The piece says it plainly: in designing the three-session series, we did not learn the fine points, the way the ten-series procedure was taught.
Nine years later I learned that this has a name: Non-Formulaic.
By the history taught in the 2025 Advanced Training, when the Rolfing association split in 1989, the Guild chose to keep faithfully to Ida Rolf’s procedures, while RISI, around Jeff Maitland and Jan Sultan, moved toward a form not bound by procedure. Where the basic training teaches procedures, treating each person as an average human being, the advanced work builds a session around the particular person in front of you.
And what was handed over for that were three questions. Where do you start? What do you do next? When are you done?
The same shape.
In Part 2 of Rolf Movement, eleven questions. In the Advanced Training, three. Both hand over questions rather than answers.
Without a procedure, you lose your bearings. There is a piece from this year that says so — the confusion in a good sense, which comes next.
The questions, I think, were the footing that let you stand inside that confusion.
There is one more thing here: pre-movement appears for the first time.
Where effort enters to stabilize the body before an action is performed. That was Aline’s explanation. And that it is easiest to observe in the transition from standing to sitting.
What this says is that the object of observation is not the movement itself. Something has already been decided before anything moves.
In Godard’s system this sits at the center. Tonic Function concerns the muscles that hold posture, Phoric Function the distribution of weight, and pre-movement what gets prepared before an action.
All three look at what lies just before the visible movement.
And the same holds on the practitioner’s side. Where are you before you touch. That was what Keith Graham handed over in London in 2014. Something has already begun before your hand goes out.
To observe pre-movement is to look at what comes before the beginning.