Introduction
A month and a half has gone by since I sat an intensive Naikan retreat over the New Year holidays.
Afterward, the four of us who took part set up a group chat we named Pandora’s Box, and we have been comparing notes since.
What I noticed during Naikan has been finding its way into my Rolfing sessions.
Mind and Body Are Connected
Mind and body are connected. The state of the mind shows up in the state of the body, so what matters is knowing what condition one’s mind and body are actually in. The body is the easier of the two to read, which is why I work from the body toward the mind.
The mind can be approached from its own side, through the right questions.
Asking What Trouble You Caused
What I learned from the retreat was how much it matters to ask how much of a burden one has been to others — what trouble one has caused.
No one lives without other people. Not noticing this has consequences. During the retreat I heard that a family falls apart when someone in it cannot see the trouble they cause, and that people who go off the rails tend to have no sense of causing trouble to anyone.
There is more to it. Self-centeredness, a large ego — these can be looked at from the angle of trouble caused as well.
We tend to assume that someone who chooses everything for themselves is the self-centered one. But a person who has been handed everything from outside and decides nothing, and a person who plans everything and decides everything themselves, are differently conscious even if both look self-centered.
The reason is that what others count as self-centered behavior and what one counts oneself are not the same. Someone who does their own deciding can see from another person’s angle, and so tends to refrain from what others would call self-centered.
Naikan makes you able to see things from where the other person stands. That, I was told, is also why it helps people pass the bar examination. Whether the part about examinations holds up I cannot say, but standing where the other person stands is exactly what Naikan has you do, over and over.
Asking How, Not Why
What is remarkable about Naikan is that it puts questions to you that you would never put to yourself — about lies, about taking, about trouble caused — and has you look at the facts.
But when you come up against those facts and feeling arrives — self-loathing, the urge to look away — the question turns into “why am I like this?” and you start backing away from what is in front of you.
Taking it in instead, and asking “how do I make something of what I am?”, and thinking about the trouble caused on the basis of fact — this changes how you think.
Conclusion
My Rolfing sessions run on coaching, the Naikan way of seeing, and bodywork together. Asking the right questions, holding some thread toward whatever the person is working through, while working with the body — that is what changes how well the body settles.
Note, September 2026
An intensive Naikan retreat runs a week. For that week you are cut off from outside information: no books, no phone. You sit in a space of about half a tatami mat, screened off, and every ninety minutes there is an interview in which you say what you have remembered.
In those interviews nothing you say is denied. Nothing is criticized. You are received, completely.
It felt like sixty sessions of counseling. It still does.
About the distinction drawn in this article, something has been confirmed since.
When you come up against a fact and the question “why am I like this?” arrives, you back away from what is in front of you. Change the question to “how do I make something of what I am?” and your thinking shifts. That was what Naikan taught.
I had the same distinction from the coaching side. When I revised an article about the first consultation in 2026, I rewrote a passage to say that asking after causes leads a person into explaining their circumstances and justifying themselves. Naikan and coaching were learned in different places, but on the direction a question should point, they said the same thing.
There is something else. The article closes by listing coaching, the Naikan way of seeing, and bodywork together.
Rereading it now, Naikan sits differently from the other two. Coaching has a technique — how to ask. Bodywork has technique in the hands. Naikan has no procedure you carry out during a session. And yet I wrote that the three go together.
In the 2025 Advanced Training, one phrase kept coming back: what is asked of you is not technique but the state you are in. Being neutral. Staying interested in the person while holding no attachment to the outcome. Not a procedure, but what condition the practitioner is in while standing there.
Naikan belongs to that layer. Which is why it does not appear when I set out the steps of a session. At the end of 2019 I wrote up three things I had been working on that year, and what is listed there is energy work, range of motion assessment, and Rolfing technique. Naikan is not named. That was a piece about procedure. It does not mean I stopped.
I am still at it. Keep at it and you become, in the good sense, self-centered. Your own axis comes into focus. What you like and dislike becomes clear. It is training in seeing from where the other person stands, and what comes out of it is that your own side becomes definite.