Sunday, October 13, 2019. Having finished the last day of the first half of Part 3 of the Rolf Movement Training — the fourth day, and the twenty-fifth overall — I landed at Haneda Airport late at night, around 11:30 p.m., on Emirates via Dubai.
It was my first time abroad since February 2018 (see Pre-movement, Yoga, and the Alexander Technique). This trip, too, was a valuable chance to be among people from other cultures, mostly European: Germans, Swiss, French, Italians, Spaniards, British, Austrians.
When someone is presenting an Embodiment (on Embodiment, see Bodily Sensation: What Is Embodiment?), and the words do not come across clearly, or something in the body feels unpleasant, the Europeans say so plainly. A Japanese person would put it more softly, I think. But afterward everyone laughs and talks without anything left hanging between them. That is part of what makes taking a workshop abroad interesting.
On the final day I presented my Embodiment second. Pairing up back to back, one person leads a movement and the other follows it — something simple. Leaving a little space, walking slowly with attention on the sensation of the body. It came to a group session of about ten minutes for fifteen people.
There was a moment of being told my voice was not carrying and to speak up. But laughter came partway through, and by the end the partners were exchanging thoughts without being asked to. It was enjoyable.
In the feedback, students said the holding of the space had gone well, and that the instructions were clear. There was also an honest comment that while moving, the spine of the back was hard to move and it hurt. Some of the participants were stiff, I expect.
The three Rolf Instructors — Rita Geirola, France Hatt-Arnold, and Hervé Baunard — gave me points to work on: that it matters to observe the students and offer support where it is needed. Comments such as putting a blanket under the back, or that standing makes it easier to move than sitting. Apt feedback given on the spot is genuinely welcome, and as I will describe, I can take it into account in preparing the fifty-minute presentation coming in the next block of Part 3.
What is interesting is how much the three instructors do to create a safe space. The amount of information in an Embodiment is large, and several people dropped out. The instructors gave sessions to students themselves, and spoke to each of the eighteen individually. That stayed with me.
A few other things:
- Work that invites curiosity makes it more likely the body will change
- An atmosphere is built in which failing is allowed
- The instructors’ directions are put as proposals, with nothing forced
I recently read Amy C. Edmondson’s The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation and Growth. What a company needs in order to produce innovation, she argues, is psychological safety: a setting in which failure is permitted and people may speak freely.
How do you go about building a safe space? Edmondson’s book works through a range of cases, and holds that what matters is building into the structure itself an environment where failure can be forgiven.
Japan tends toward a setting in which failure is not much allowed, and things become constricted. What is good about the training at the European Rolfing Association is that a space like this is made. Through these experiences I have a sense that I will be able to draw on this when I run seminars and communities of my own. Rather than a relationship of teacher and student, how do you build a safe space and draw out what each person has to say? That is what I want to learn from here.
As an aside, one of the two people I was grouped with was a practitioner of the Feldenkrais Method. That gave me a chance to ask about the difference between Feldenkrais and Rolf Movement.
Both pursue fine, small movement. But Feldenkrais, he said, does not contain what Rolf Movement contains — Phoric Function (see Where to Look in Movement: Phoric Function and Fixed Point), 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), the five principles of Rolfing (see The Five Principles) — and that having the principles built in is what distinguishes Rolf Movement.
I would like to take a Feldenkrais class at some point, so I want to find an occasion to feel the difference for myself.
The whole schedule is done, and the next block begins on Wednesday, November 27. I will receive certification on Sunday, December 1.
The homework for next time is a fifty-minute Embodiment, to be built around two questions:
- What was your strategy to connect the specific to the general?
- How do you bring the session to an end and have the client bring it back to their everyday life?
I have about a month and a half. I want to take the time to think it through.
Note, August 2026
That one of the people I was grouped with practiced Feldenkrais, I set down as an aside. The aside has a turn in it I did not see at the time.
Rita Geirola, standing at the front of that same room, had been a certified Feldenkrais practitioner since 1992. She was certified as a Rolfer in 1987 and took the Feldenkrais qualification five years later; her Rolf Movement certification came five years after that. The Feldenkrais perspective underlies her work, she writes in her own professional profile.
Which means that to ask about the difference between the two, I did not need to turn to the student beside me. Someone holding both was running the class that day.
This is not only true of Rita. The Movement week of Phase I was also taught by Rita. From the first week of the Basic Training, then, someone who had been through Feldenkrais was teaching. Go back further and it was Ida Rolf herself who invited Moshe Feldenkrais to Esalen; the two were not at odds, and each received the other’s work. The ERA’s own account holds that Rolf Movement took shape partly through exchange with the movement researchers of that period.
What I was comparing as a separate lineage had been inside the same one from the start.
There is something else I was doing in this piece.
Having written down the observation that a safe space was being made, I reach for a book from management studies — Edmondson — and put the term psychological safety to it. A framework from outside Rolfing, borrowed to name what was happening in the room.
I had done the same thing more than once before. I used coaching’s three levels of listening to organize a workshop on the nervous system, and coaching’s notion of Resource to explain the stance a Rolfer takes. A framework learned in another field arrives first as a tool for explaining.
The safe space I named here did not stay a tool for explaining. In 2019 I was writing about it as a property I had observed in a European classroom. When I became the one running seminars and communities, it turned into something that had to be built. The end of this piece says I have a sense I will be able to draw on it. The sense was written down first; needing it came later.