The workshop reached its final day, October 13.
The Rolf Instructors this time are three: Rita Geirola (hereafter Rita), France Hatt-Arnold (hereafter France), and Hervé Baunard (hereafter Hervé). Rita leads, with France and Hervé alongside her, adding to what she says from time to time.
The ERA opens at 8:30 a.m., with fruit, hot water, and water set out. You can take your time in the break area and get ready for the class.
Class begins at 9. Rita opens by presenting an Embodiment (on Embodiment, see Bodily Sensation: What Is Embodiment?). The Part 1 and Part 2 classes also began with an Embodiment; what is different here is that once it is finished, you are asked to say clearly what intention you built it with.
Watching how the class was going, Rita would at times divide us into two groups — one observing her Embodiment, the other receiving it — and set aside time for watching. There are not many chances to look at a group from the position of the person teaching, and what you take in through the eyes is considerable.
According to Rita, a human being learns to see through education and experience. The other two senses, the vestibular sense and the kinesthetic sense, are already there, which makes the contrast. I have written about this before in this column (see Organizing the Balance of the Three Information-Gathering Systems). With sessions and with Embodiment alike, watching a great many of the students’ own is how you acquire a way of observing.
The class proceeded while she set out three points to observe:
- How each student is grasping the Embodiment
- How to offer support
- How the dynamics of the class are shifting
The practice extended to floor work and bench work. Mainly, how to integrate the upper and lower body across sessions 1 to 3. Paired with a partner, we worked a session using words. Word choice is read differently across cultures, and even in English one person’s reading differs from another’s, which made it a valuable chance to learn about choosing words.
After each of us took a lunch break, groups of three were given thirty minutes to prepare. One person presents and the other two support. The presentation runs ten minutes, the discussion about fifteen. With what intention was the Embodiment presented? Mainly, we set it against the basic ideas of Rolfing and Rolf Movement.
For reference, the ideas we drew on here are set out below, if you are interested:
- Palintonicity (see Basic Concepts — Bidirectionality (Palintonicity))
- Embodiment (see Bodily Sensation: What Is Embodiment?)
- Articulation (see The Word Articulation — On Making Space Within the Body)
- Hubert Godard’s Tonic Function (see The Muscles That Tire and the Muscles That Don’t — Tonic Function and the Support of Posture and Bidirectionality Brings the Body into Order — Tonic Function in Walking and Sitting)
- Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal Theory (see The Face Makes Safety — Polyvagal Theory and the Two Vagus Nerves and Freezing, and Immobilization Without Fear — Neuroception and Social Bonds)
From these viewpoints, feedback was also given.
Feedback was given from these angles. And on feedback: it was interesting that the handout Giovanni Felicioni gave out during Phase II of the Basic Training was shared again, and that the process followed that guide (see Feedback: How Is It Given and Received in the Training?).
On the second day we finished thirty minutes late and I wondered how it would go, but by the third day the students had begun managing the time well on their own, and we were finishing before six.
Still, receiving six Embodiments in a day is genuinely demanding. Among the eighteen participants, some dropped out, and you could see Rita and the other instructors working at how to hold the room.
Today is the last day. Only the final day is set to end at 4 p.m., and my own Embodiment presentation is still ahead. What shape will it take? I want to enjoy it and see.
Note, August 2026
The arrangement I describe here — one group observing, one group receiving — I had already been through four and a half years earlier.
That was the structure of Phase III. Each student took on two clients and carried out a ten-session series with each. Across the ten rounds you watch sixty sessions; your own hands move in twenty of them, and the remaining forty you observe.
Ida Rolf’s teaching had a stage called Auditing — a period of observing without giving sessions. By Pierpaola Volpones’s account, the Munich training of the 1980s came in two stages, nine weeks of Audit and nine weeks of Practitioner, and during the Audit no hands-on work was done at all. Putting seeing first goes back that far.
But in Part 3 the direction had turned. What I observed in Phase III was the body of the person receiving. What I was observing here was how the person teaching moved through it. Not looking from the position of the one receiving, but from the position of the one giving. The same seeing, with what it is aimed at reversed.
Rita’s line is in this piece: a human being learns to see through education and experience. The vestibular and kinesthetic senses are there from the start; seeing alone is learned. I had written that contrast down once already, in 2015. Four years later it came back — no longer about my own capacity to observe, but about the capacity to observe that teaching requires.
There is one more thing here, a confusion of terms.
The five items I list, this article calls the principles of Rolfing. But the principles are something else: Support, Adaptability, Palintonicity, Closure, and Wholism. Those are what Phase III taught.
Of the five listed here — Palintonicity, Embodiment, Articulation, Tonic Function, Polyvagal Theory — only Palintonicity belongs to the principles. The rest are ideas the Rolf Movement training draws on, not principles. Embodiment is the subject of the training itself; Tonic Function is Godard’s theory and Polyvagal Theory is Porges’s, and both came in from outside.
At the time I wrote all of it down as principles, without distinguishing. The distinction came only once I learned that the five principles are not Ida Rolf’s, but were put in order after the split of 1989, chiefly by Jeff Maitland and Jan Sultan. Until you know where something came from, everything the classroom leans on looks to carry the same weight.