Sunday, December 1, 2019. At the European Rolfing Association (ERA) in Munich, Germany, I received certification as a Rolf Movement Practitioner.
The training that began on July 7, 2017 had reached its thirtieth and final day.
I ended up flying between Tokyo and Munich six times. A television shoot came in partway through, so it ran a year and eight months later than planned — but in terms of timing I think it worked out well, because it gave me time to digest what Rolf Movement had put in front of me.
I wrote about the second half of Part 3 in How Does the Class Proceed? Feedback and the Atmosphere of the Room. The main work was a fifty-minute Embodiment presentation (on Embodiment, see Bodily Sensation: What Is Embodiment?). Four presentations a day for four days, and two on the last — eighteen in all.
I wrote about my own in My Presentation Came Last on the Second Day: How Did It Go? Because mine was done on the second day, I could give the following three days over to receiving the remaining ten students’ Embodiments with full attention and no nerves, which was good.
Rita Geirola (hereafter Rita) told the class that what matters in teaching is to practice and to enter into the process. The seventeen other people each had their own way of teaching, and there was a great deal I wanted to take from them.
What I learned from this training:
- To convey the content out of knowing my own strengths and characteristics
- Who is the audience? To prepare, in advance, words each of them can follow
- To hold the class having made clear what I want to convey
Commonplace, perhaps. What matters is having come to know it in the body.
Something else: listening to the feedback after other people’s presentations, I came to see that however good a class is, both good and bad opinions will come out — so it is better to hold on to what you yourself mean to convey.
What is interesting about giving a Rolf Movement session, or presenting to a group, is that there is no procedure. As I wrote in Confusion in a Good Sense, and On Tonic Function, the freedom in Rolf Movement means that how a session will come to a close can go out of view, and that can be unnerving. But it does come together as a session in the end, and what is asked of you is to trust the process of the body’s change further than you had.
Come to think of it, when I was taking Part 1 of Rolf Movement, Giovanni Felicioni recommended Guy Claxton’s Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less, and I picked it up during the training.
The book describes three kinds of mind:
- The mind that judges instantly — unselfconscious, instantaneous reaction, with the senses involved
- The mind that deliberates logically — what we call the intellect (Hare Brain)
- The mind that thinks slowly — contemplation (Tortoise Mind)
Deliberate comes from the Latin librare, to weigh in a balance, and behind it libra, the scales. I render it as thinking logically while weighing things up. Contemplate comes from con-, together, and templum, a temple, a place set aside for taking auguries — hence being absorbed in reflection in a place cut off from ordinary life. I render it as thinking slowly.
The first two are easy enough to grasp, but the slow-thinking tortoise mind gets far less attention. In fact, as with the Basic Training, in the Rolf Movement training too I digested what I had learned — the content, the knowledge, the technique — over time. Sometimes in confusion, sometimes leaning on intuition, sometimes just giving myself over to it.
Because scientific discoveries too are arrived at over time, the book argues, the tortoise mind is the stronger of the two. It is the same with Rolfing and bodywork: a different part of the mind is at work, and it takes time before experience settles to the level of felt sensation. Seen from the position of someone working in a company, where the efficient hare brain is what gets used, getting into the state of the tortoise mind is not something you easily grow accustomed to, and I imagine it is a struggle.
On the morning of the final day, at 8:15, this same subject came up in the individual interviews with Rita, France Hatt-Arnold (hereafter France), and Hervé Baunard (hereafter Hervé).
What I found interesting was France’s suggestion that I bring contralateral movement into my sessions rather more, and work on that skill. It matters a great deal in offering sessions eight through ten, so it was valuable feedback.
Rita, France, and Hervé all learned Rolf Movement from Hubert Godard, and all said it takes time to digest. Learning in the posture of the tortoise mind, precisely.
The conversation centered on how to improve a class, and which parts to work on, and it was interesting. They said my skill was steadily improving and that I should keep going with Movement, which was encouraging.
On the final day, after the last two presentations, we moved to the certification ceremony. We split into three groups and played a short game, and the whole thing had a genuinely warm and easy atmosphere, which I was glad of.
I owe thanks to a great many people for this certification, and I would like to express it again here. Now that I hold it, I am thinking about how to bring Rolf Movement into yoga classes, into ordinary sessions, and into maintenance sessions.
Note, August 2026
It was Giovanni Felicioni who recommended the Claxton, during Part 1 — the summer or autumn of 2017. I read it while the training was under way, and on the day I was certified, I wrote about it.
A book upstream, the practical work downstream. I had been through that shape before. In 2014, the Basic Training’s reading included Peter Levine’s Waking the Tiger. I took the Somatic Experiencing course seven years later. That much time can pass before a book you were handed begins to work.
With the Claxton, the subject of the book and the shape of the period in which I read it lined up. A book arguing that thinking slowly is the stronger way, read in the middle of taking thirty days spread across two years and five months.
That length was not something I chose. It was the result of a television shoot pushing everything a year and eight months back. But slowing down was built into the course to begin with. The three Parts are offered every twelve to fourteen months, with a stretch in between for testing the material in practice. The reason, the ERA explains, is so that Rolfers can carry what they meet in the classroom back into their work and return with the questions it raises.
Falling behind without meaning to, and a design meant to hold you back, were pointing the same way.
There is one more thing recorded from that morning’s interviews.
Rita, France, and Hervé all said the same thing: that it takes time to digest. All three learned from Hubert Godard.
Look at where the three of them come from and the language sits close. France practices in Geneva and studied with Godard for twenty years. Hervé is French. Rita is Italian, and studied with Godard as well. Godard’s thinking has come down through people positioned to receive it in French.
Set out my own routes to his work and this becomes clear. In 2014, in Phase II, Giovanni explained the theory to me and I did not arrive at it. In 2016 I received mentoring from Godard himself in Paris. In 2017 Gael Rosewood gave me examples and no theory; in 2018 Aline Newton gave me the same material organized into five factors. Understanding moved on the third and fourth of those. Giovanni and Aline both read French.
Which invites the explanation that the language barrier is what slowed me down. But the three people standing at the front of the room that day were all on the far side of that barrier. And they were the ones saying it takes time to digest.
The delay cannot be laid on language alone. If it still takes time when you are positioned to read it in the original, then taking time is part of how this material is received at all. That is where the phrase tortoise mind sits.