February 4, 2018. Part 2 of the Rolf Movement training is finished. What remains before certification as a Rolf Movement Practitioner is the nine days of Part 3: October 10–13, 2019, and November 27 to December 1 (on the curriculum, see “What Kind of Curriculum Does It Follow?“).
This time I kept up my yoga practice alongside the training, and forward bends and backbends came easily, with a strong sense that upper and lower body were connected.
What matters most is that I can now practice with more awareness of where the pre-movement is while I am in a posture. So let me take up pre-movement here.
As I wrote in “What Comes into View Through Intuition and Body Reading,” Aline Newton (hereafter Aline) describes pre-movement as where effort enters in order to stabilize the body before an action is performed. The movement before the movement.
And I learned that it is easiest to observe in the transition from standing to sitting.
Watching people practice Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga, many put effort into the trunk and the pelvic floor.
You are taught to take postures using bandha — a word meaning a binding — understood as one of the techniques for closing inward so that prana, ki in Japanese, does not leak away.
Practicing with bandha in mind, more effort goes into the coccyx and sit bones, and the spine tends to be drawn downward. The back rounds, the coccyx pulled down and the head pulled up. The chest narrows on the opposite side and the posture becomes one of constriction. Shoulder range narrows, and backbends and forward bends become harder to take.
In Rolf Movement, from all fours and from sitting, you learn an exercise for becoming aware that the pelvic floor holds the pubis, the sit bones, and the coccyx, and that the three move independently. Through it, breath enters the pelvic floor more easily, shoulder range widens, and low back pain moves toward relief.
And I could feel, through sessions with clients too, that attending to pre-movement produces striking change in the body.
On the ninth day, for instance. In a client session the effort in the shoulders and chest would not release, and Rita Geirola suggested that it would shift if I worked with an awareness of releasing the pelvic floor, coccyx included.
She was right. The client had been struggling to sense her sit bones while sitting in the chair, and I had thought something was there. Taking the suggestion and actually working with an exercise for releasing the pelvic floor, a sense of the spine lengthening came up — and shoulder range widened without any work on the shoulders at all.
It brought home that with a body it matters to look not only at the shoulders and chest but at the whole of it, spine included.
Pre-movement resembles the attention paid to the relationship between head and spine in the Alexander Technique. There, you attend to that relationship, notice the unnecessary automatic reactions of the body, and learn to stop them. It is known as a way of learning through the body to let go of effort, and I had studied it before taking up Rolfing’s manual work (see “On the Relation Between Rolfing and the Alexander Technique (1) — Two Ways of Learning to “Let Go” Through the Body“).
Noticing unnecessary bodily reactions before moving, and undoing the tension, is a way of changing a habit. It is also something that changes strikingly, so I want to keep attending to pre-movement.
Note, August 2026
This piece is about my own practice.
Watching people practice Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga, many put effort into the trunk and the pelvic floor. Practice with bandha in mind and effort goes into the coccyx and sit bones, and the spine is drawn downward. The back rounds, the chest narrows, shoulder range narrows, and backbends and forward bends become harder.
Bandha sits at the center of Ashtanga. It is done to close prana inward.
And I am writing that the technique may be narrowing my range.
By that point I had been practicing yoga for close to ten years. Before I studied Rolfing, that practice was already shaping how I used my body.
I had received a structurally identical observation the previous March, in Gael Rosewood’s workshop.
With yoga or Pilates, matching breath to posture organizes rhythm, but it does not necessarily get you out of a state governed by the mind. That is what I wrote at the time.
But I wrote it as though it were about someone else. An observation aimed squarely at my own central practice, and I did not take it that way.
This piece is different. It names a specific technique, bandha, and describes what it is doing to the spine and shoulders. It has been confirmed in my own body.
From eleven years on, this is not a rejection of yoga.
Bandha is not the problem. Understanding it as a technique of applying effort was. The translation — a binding — had become the way I used my body.
The same as the difference received in “Territorial Body and Body of Action“: not lengthening, but lengthening. Two things that look like the same action, and the body works differently in each.
And the way out is written here. The pelvic floor holds the pubis, the sit bones, and the coccyx, and the three move independently. Learn the exercise for sensing that, and breath enters the pelvic floor more easily.
Not tightening one mass, but handling three separately.
Understood as a binding, they cannot be separated. You put effort into all of it at once. Once they can be separated, only what is needed works.
What long practice has shown me is that the hardest thing in yoga is neither form nor flexibility, but not crossing over to the side of thinking. The moment you try to do it correctly, the practice becomes work for the head.
Trying to tighten bandha correctly was exactly that crossing.
There is one more thing here: the resemblance to the Alexander Technique.
Pre-movement is like attending to the relationship between head and spine. Notice the unnecessary automatic reaction before moving, and stop it.
Before studying Rolfing I spent eight months with the Alexander Technique. I wrote at the time that attending to the AO joint, between the neck and the spine, gave me my first sense of effort leaving the body.
Three lineages pointing at the same place. Bandha in yoga, head and spine in Alexander, pre-movement in Rolf Movement. All of them concern what happens before movement.
And two of the three had been in my hands before I ever studied Rolfing.
It was not that learning something new made it clear. What I already had was restated in other words, and only then did I see what I had been holding.