Over the five days from Wednesday, November 27 to Sunday, December 1, 2019 (see November 27 to December 1, 2019 (Second Half): What Homework Has Been Set, and How to Teach?), the second half of Part 3 of Rolf Movement began.
I flew into Munich the day before, on November 26.
On the first day, November 27, I came to the opening of the last five days of Part 3 of the Rolf Movement Training, and took the class alongside the eighteen participants.
The main work this time is a fifty-minute Embodiment presentation (on Embodiment, see Bodily Sensation: What Is Embodiment?). We present in groups of three, one leading and two supporting. The groupings are the same as in the first four days.
At the start of the first day, the order of the eighteen presentations was announced. Four people presented that day. Each had their own character — one building the thing up logically, piece by piece; another steering the class in directions you could not predict — and the ways of presenting varied widely. Within the fifty minutes allotted, they expressed what they had to the full.
What can be said above all about this training is that a psychologically safe space is in place. A certain amount of risk is permitted, and that came through in what each person did.
After each presentation came a period of feedback. The students gave honest, direct opinions on what had worked, what had given them pause, and how it had felt in the body — comfortable or uncomfortable. It was instructive.
At the very start of the first day, Rita Geirola (hereafter Rita) explained that Rolf Movement can only be learned through practice: that each person has to go through presenting, and that the process of failing is what feeds the learning. Partly because of that, what came out of the feedback from Rita and the rest of the staff registered strongly.
Who should the lesson be given to? And which words do you choose for them? Each person has a way of using language with their own culture behind it, so learn it through the act of teaching itself. That was Rita’s main note.
Rather than judging someone as poor or skilled, how can they improve and let their own character show? France Hatt-Arnold (hereafter France) spoke mainly about the importance of putting a thing together logically.
When one student introduced work done sitting, France offered this. To sit is to feel gravity. Where is the weight felt, and what moves? At what point do you bring the student’s attention to Phoric Function (see Where to Look in Movement: Phoric Function and Fixed Point)? Since some of the people you teach are better at Grounding and others at Space and Orientation, it is better to convey Tonic Function with options in hand.
When teaching a yoga class, how do you put movement into words in a way that carries? And when bringing movement into a Rolfing session, how do you say it? There is a great deal to learn from teaching toward a room of eighteen. My own presentation is set for the end of the second day, so I am looking forward to it.
Across the five days, after taking the eighteen presentations through to Saturday, certification and individual interviews are held on Sunday, December 1. I want to hold a good edge of tension right through to the end.
Note, August 2026
What Rita says in this piece comes down to almost a single point. Who are you teaching? And which words do you choose for them? Each person has a way of using language with their own culture behind it, so learn that through the act of teaching.
Take the word customization, and you can watch its subject move over these eleven years.
In March 2015, in the Phase III class on diversity, the idea appears that a practitioner customizes more as they grow more skilled. The one doing the customizing was the practitioner. Materials from RISI at the same period speak of developing individualized strategies for treatment: what was being customized to was the particularity of the client. By the Advanced Training in 2025, the developing itself has become a procedure — set the expectation, find the principle that is missing, use the taxonomy to design. Customization had become a sequence of steps.
What Rita is saying is none of these. The person in front of you is not a client but a student. To hand over the same content, change your words according to who is receiving them. It is not a matter of technique but of language.
When I wrote about it in Phase III, customization lived inside the session. Four and a half years later it had moved inside the room where teaching happens. Nothing was replaced; a layer was added.
There is something else visible in this piece.
Rita and France return words of different kinds to the same student, on the same presentation. Rita asks who you are teaching. France speaks about building the thing logically, and about tightening where tightening is needed. To the student who introduced work done sitting, what France returned was structural: to sit is to feel gravity, so where is the weight felt and what moves?
Both of them studied with Hubert Godard. The same theory behind them, and the words they hand back point in different directions. Rita looks from the side of the person in front of you; France from the side of the structure.
And inside France’s note is a line about how some of the people you teach are better at Grounding and others at Space and Orientation. On the point that you change how you convey a thing according to who is receiving it, she is saying what Rita is saying. Only the doors are opposite; where they arrive overlaps.