From July 2017 to December 2019, I took the Rolf Movement certification training run by the European Rolfing Association (ERA). To complete the thirty days, I flew between Tokyo and Munich six times.
This article is the summary I wrote in December 2019, added to and reworked from where I stand in August 2026. The original was mostly a look back at the schedule. This time I have rebuilt it around what each stage was a place to learn.
How the certification system works — what it requires, and where and from whom you can learn — is covered separately (How the Rolf Movement Practitioner Certification Works — The 30-Day Requirement and Choosing Where to Train). This article focuses on what I learned and experienced at each stage while training with ERA between 2017 and 2019.
The basic training I took to be certified as a Rolfer is written up in Becoming a Certified Rolfer in Europe — The Certification Training of the European Rolfing Association. This article follows on from it.
The origins of Rolf Movement are covered in another article as well, but there is one thing worth noting here for the background.
It was Ida Rolf herself who invited Moshe Feldenkrais to the Esalen Institute. The two did not regard their methods as opposed, and they received each other’s work. I heard this directly from Sharon Wheeler (Bone Work – Sharon Wheeler (3) — Through the Third Day: What Sharon Said (1)).
ERA gives a similar explanation in its material on Rolf Movement. Ida Rolf and Moshe Feldenkrais knew and valued each other’s work, and they discussed their respective approaches — Ida Rolf’s Structural Integration and Feldenkrais’s Functional Integration.
“Why not Osteopathy, Feldenkrais or Physiotherapy?“, published on ERA’s site by the Rolfer Lea Kabirschke, quotes a passage from a letter Feldenkrais wrote to Ida Rolf in 1976.
“Structural Integration and Functional Integration have more in common than the word that connects them. Indeed, in the case of humans, structure and function are meaningless, one without the other; so that when you integrate structure, as nobody else can, you improve functioning.” –Moshe Feldenkrais
In Rolfing, a course centered on function and movement is set up separately from the basic training in structure. Feldenkrais had already told Ida Rolf, in 1976, what it means to learn structure and function apart.
This connection between the two appears again and again in what follows.
Of the seven teachers I studied with, the one involved in all three Parts was also a Feldenkrais practitioner, certified in 1992. One of the participants in my group of three in Part 3 was a Feldenkrais practitioner as well.
So for anyone who has explored movement through the Feldenkrais Method or the Alexander Technique, Rolf Movement is not a distant method. I have rewritten this article so that it can be read from that angle too.
How Rolf Movement itself came about is covered in a separate article (Where Rolf Movement Came From — A History from Ida Rolf to the Present).
Why I Decided to Take It
When I finished the Rolfing basic training, one problem was left with me.
In Phase III we learned how to bring movement into a session. But while I had the hands-on technique, how to convey movement to a client and let them experience it had not yet taken shape in me.
In March 2017 I took a four-day workshop with Gael Rosewood. It was four days of receiving the thinking of someone involved in the founding years of Rolf Movement — not as finished theory, but through concrete practice (Gael Rosewood Workshop (1) — Knowing the History and Basic Principles of Rolf Movement).
Through that workshop it became clear that alongside working on structure with the hands, there is a body of work on the side of movement.
At the end of June the same year I took a workshop with Peter Schwind in Munich. It was framed as preparation for going on to the Advanced Training, but I felt something was off on the first day, and by the end of the three days I had decided not to take the Advanced Training with him (Peter Schwind WS (1) — What Purpose Does a Technique Serve?).
That experience changed the order in which I approached the Advanced Training. I decided to learn Rolf Movement first.
Less what I actively chose than what I decided not to choose is what set the course of what followed. The criteria behind that judgment are written up separately (How to Choose Continuing Education — Four Things I Look At Before Signing Up).
That I had practiced yoga for a long time had a lot to do with the choice as well. Conveying to people how to use the body through movement, and not only through the hands, was a direction I expected to keep exploring and practicing.
Six Trips
Here is the schedule I actually took.
Part 1: The Functional Aspect of the Ten-Series
Functional Embodiment of the 10 Rolfing Sessions.
- July 7–9, 2017
- August 31 – September 3, 2017
- October 19–22, 2017
Eleven days in all. It was led by four teachers: Pierpaola Volpones, Rita Geirola, Giovanni Felicioni, and Hervé Baunard (Impressions of the Three Rolf Movement Instructors and the Atmosphere of the Class).
Part 2: Designing a Rolf Movement Three-Series
Strategy and Design of a Rolf Movement 3-Series.
Held January 24 – February 4, 2018. January 27 and 31 were off, making ten days of teaching. It was led by four teachers: France Hatt-Arnold, Rita Geirola, Aline Newton, and Nicola Carofiglio.
Part 3: Leading Rolf Movement Groups
Introduction to Leading Rolf Movement Groups.
- October 10–13, 2019
- November 27 – December 1, 2019
Nine days in all. It was led by three teachers: France Hatt-Arnold, Rita Geirola, and Hervé Baunard (How Does the Class Proceed? Feedback + the Atmosphere of the Class).
Across the three Parts, I ended up learning from seven of ERA’s Rolf Movement teachers. What I received from each of them I come back to later.
The Gap of a Year and Eight Months
I chose the intensive format, but in practice a year and eight months opened up between Part 2 and Part 3. A television interview came in during April 2018, and I postponed the Part 3 I had planned.
The interruption did not put me outside the flow of the training.
Each Part is offered at regular intervals, and taking the course across several years is permitted. The reason the course is divided into three is so that you can bring what you learned in the classroom into your practice, and return to the next Part with the questions that came out of working with clients. The system itself was designed to accept that participants use time differently.
For me, that year and eight months was not simply a blank. It became the period in which I tried the three-series design from Part 2 in actual client sessions and took it into my own practice.
The Order of the Parts Is Different Now
Part 2 and Part 3 have since been swapped, relative to when I took them.
Then, Part 2 was designing a three-series and Part 3 was leading groups. Now Part 2 is leading groups and Part 3 is designing a three-series. Group teaching, in other words, has moved from the final stage of the course to the middle.
This article is a record of the curriculum before that change. The change itself, and the current certification system, are covered in a separate article.
What Part 1 Teaches
Part 1 is where you look at the Rolfing ten-series again from the side of movement and function. The ten-series you learned as hands-on technique is traced once more from the standpoint of how the body moves and how it organizes itself (What Kind of Curriculum Does It Follow?).
In the material Pierpaola Volpones prepared, the key points of each session of the ten-series were organized along four axes.
- General Goals
- Regional Goals: goals for each region of the body
- Structural Goals
- Functional Goals
For the same session, you look not only at how structure is changed, but at how that change shows up in movement and in bodily function.
Part 1 introduced the basic thinking of Rolf Movement: four structural approaches, four Articulations, and the use of words (An Introduction to the Basic Way of Thinking).
Three Ways of Touching
For touch, we learned three approaches in practice.
- Containing Touch. Touching a part of the body while holding it in mind as a container.
- Orienting Touch. Touching so as to convey orientation in space, aware of Palintonicity, the body’s property of extending in two directions.
- Give Support. Touching so as to give support, so that the body can move and organize itself.
In all three, what is central is the use of imagery and words. Less what your hands do to the body, and more how you touch and what information you hand over.
Phoric Function
Part 1 also treated the idea of Phoric Function as concrete practice (Where to Pay Attention in Movement? — Phoric Function and Fixed Point).
What matters here is a combination of two things.
- Fixed Point, or Reference Point
- Direction, or Orientation
Where the body takes its support, and in which direction it is going from there. You learn how to convey these two through touch and through words.
In sitting, for instance, if the feet and the sit bones work as a Fixed Point, the upper body can move freely from that support. And where the body is heading in space becomes settled.
Where you take support, and where you are heading. The combination changes the quality of the movement (What Comes into View Through Movement?: Words and Direction).
Following the Ten-Series in Order
The eleven days of Part 1 proceeded by following the ten-series in order — first sessions one to three, then four to seven, then eight to ten. We practiced bringing movement into the goals of each session, combining touch with words (To Encourage Bodily Awareness: Slowly, Carefully, Into Words; How to Relate the Body’s Movement to Tonic Function?; Body and Brain: Why Is Slow Movement Important?; On Receiving Training in Europe).
What Part 2 Teaches
Part 2 is where you give Rolf Movement sessions to actual clients. The aim was to be able to design and carry out a three-session series of Rolf Movement’s own, separate from the Rolfing ten-series.
Taking the Hands Off the Fascia
We began with students working in pairs.
The task was to build a forty-minute session without using any hands-on technique that works directly on the fascia, centered instead on the movement approaches learned in Part 1. What we used were methods that invite the client’s movement and perception — Active Movement Participation (AMP), gamma touch, and others (The State of the Practitioner’s Own Body Is Reflected in the Session).
Where the term gamma touch came from I learned only later. It was originally coined by a doctor to describe the delicacy needed to move a baby in the womb from outside.
Godard used the term for a touch in which the one touching holds a two-way sensation inside their own hand. You feel the other person’s body and at the same time attend to the back of your own hand. Rather than working on the other person in one direction, you touch while remaining in your own body as well.
Godard puts it further. If the practitioner’s own thorax is not organized, you will not reach the other person’s midline. One of the important tasks for a Rolfer, he says, is to stay in your own midline while giving a session.
The title of the article referred to above — The State of the Practitioner’s Own Body Is Reflected in the Session — points at exactly this.
When you take away hands-on work on the fascia, what is left in a session? It was time to find out, from both the receiving side and the working side.
After that we moved on to sessions with actual clients. With guidance on what to observe and where to place attention, we practiced giving Rolf Movement sessions (What Comes into View Through Intuition and Body Observation…).
No Procedure Is Handed Over
Here the character of the course showed itself clearly.
For designing a three-series, no detailed procedure was taught. There was no fixed form of the kind “set your strategy like this, then proceed in this order.”
What was asked for instead was to leave your familiar methods and deliberately try something different — reducing the work done on the table, for instance, and running the session mainly in standing.
The emphasis fell less on doing something to the client and more on preparing an environment in which change can happen. Put another way, on holding the space of the session. There was no procedure that had to be followed (Confusion in a Good Sense, and on Tonic Function; The Atmosphere of the Class, and Building the Relationship with the Client).
At the same time, the basic thinking that supports the practice was shared throughout the class (Territorial Body and Body of Action; Organizing the Balance of the Three Information-Gathering Systems; Pre-movement, Yoga, and the Alexander Technique).
On the last day of Part 2, fifteen students each presented an Embodiment with ten minutes allowed. Four presented in a row, then a fifteen-minute break (Presenting an Embodiment to the Group).
What Part 3 Teaches
Part 3 leaves the one-to-one session and moves to conveying the thinking of Rolf Movement to a group. You learn how to open Rolf Movement as a movement class and deliver it to participants (Taking Part in the Workshop Held in Munich, October 10–13, 2019 (First Half)).
There were eighteen participants — the largest of the three Parts I took.
The First Four Days
To be able to hold an Embodiment class, there is nothing for it but to teach. So over the first four days, every participant built a ten-minute class and taught it in front of everyone (Presenting the Embodiment: Learning Each Person’s Intention and Points for Improvement).
Six questions were given in advance of teaching.
- What was the process of making the class like?
- What was easy, and what was difficult?
- What drew out your creativity?
- What meaning did you find in it?
- How did you connect the general principles to the meaning of this class?
- What methods did you use to bring the general principles into concrete practice?
After teaching, the review went in three stages. First the person who taught explains the aim and intention of the class. Then the students who took part say what they received and how it felt. Last, the instructors give feedback and point out what could be improved.
At this point the material on feedback that Giovanni had handed out in Phase II of the basic training was shared again (Phase II (25) — Feedback: How Is It Given and Received in the Training?).
I had read it once as someone being assessed. Now it was handed out as a guide for observing another person’s practice and giving them words back.
Learning to See
Some days began with an Embodiment led by Rita. When they did, the participants were sometimes split into two groups. One received Rita’s work; the other watched.
Chances to see a whole group from the position of the one teaching are not that common. There was a great deal to be had from watching people’s movement and the unfolding of a class from outside, rather than receiving the work yourself (How Is the Class Proceeding? — The Flow of a Day).
According to Rita, human beings learn to see through education and experience. The inner-ear sense and the muscular sense are already in the body, but what you attend to and how you look at it are grown through experience.
Watching many sessions and Embodiments is therefore not only about learning other people’s methods. It is about acquiring how to see the body and movement.
The thinking behind this I found later in Godard’s material.
Godard says he was formed by a way of seeing without naming, which he calls a non-cortical gaze. Rather than applying words and categories in advance, you look in a way that welcomes the other person’s body into your own subjective space. Doing so, he says, makes the body easier to read.
Seeing is not simply an innate capacity. It is learned and grown. That is why this course gave as much time to watching others practice as to teaching.
A Safe Space
What stayed with me most from the first four days was the range of things the three instructors did to make a space where it was safe to learn (The First Half (Four Days) Is Over. What Came into View?).
They made an atmosphere in which it felt all right to fail, and gave their directions as suggestions rather than orders. When someone could no longer keep up with the volume of information, an instructor gave that student a session. And they spoke to each of the eighteen participants, so that no one was left isolated.
Because the space was held that way, I too could try things I had not tried before, without fear of failing.
The Relationship to Feldenkrais and Alexander
When we worked in threes during the first half, one of the people I was grouped with was a Feldenkrais practitioner. That gave me the chance to hear about the difference between Feldenkrais and Rolf Movement.
According to him, Feldenkrais and Rolf Movement have in common that they explore fine movement carefully. But Feldenkrais does not include the frameworks Rolf Movement works with — Phoric Function, Tonic Function, the five principles of Rolfing. Having those principles, he said, is what characterizes Rolf Movement.
Looking back on that conversation, though, I notice four things worth thinking about further.
The first is that Godard himself explained the difference between Feldenkrais and the Alexander Technique more concretely.
The two often use the same action as a task — rising from a chair, sitting down again. The difference lies in what is taken as the reference point.
In Feldenkrais, movement is explored with the floor and the pelvis as reference points. In the Alexander Technique, the reference points are the neck, the chest, and orientation upward.
What should be compared, in other words, is not which one contains what, but where in the body the reference point is taken when movement is being built.
And Godard says that to produce a line in the body you need both: support from the floor and the pelvis, and orientation upward from the neck and chest. Rather than choosing one, you hold both at once.
The second is that the Alexander Technique was actually treated within this training. One of the basics shared in Part 2 was the relationship between pre-movement, yoga, and the Alexander Technique (Pre-movement, Yoga, and the Alexander Technique). How the body prepares itself before movement begins — three approaches were set side by side to think about that subject.
The third is that ERA frames the relationship between Feldenkrais and Rolf Movement differently from the way my fellow student did.
According to ERA, Feldenkrais got results by raising awareness of the body through movement. Ida Rolf first spent time organizing the structure of the body within space and gravity, and moved the focus to movement from there.
The starting points and the order differ, but both roads head toward the same goal of bodily awareness and integration. Rolfing has Rolf Movement sessions too, and like Feldenkrais they foster awareness and integration through movement.
Here the two are not divided by what one has and the other lacks. They are seen as differing in the order — whether you start from structure or from movement. The focus is placed quite differently from the explanation I heard from the student next to me.
The fourth is that Rita, standing at the front of the room, was herself a Feldenkrais practitioner certified in 1992.
If I wanted to know the difference between the two methods, I could have asked not only my fellow student but Rita, who had practiced both for many years. I come back to this later.
The Second Five Days
The task for the second half was to run a fifty-minute Embodiment class alone.
The assignment was given about a month and a half in advance, and Rita sent by email the points to consider in preparing the class (November 27 to December 1, 2019 (Second Half): What Homework Has Been Set, and How to Teach?).
The questions were along these lines.
- How will you structure the lesson as a whole?
- How will you connect the content to the relationship with gravity?
- What Presence will you have as a teacher?
- What words will you choose (Wording)?
- How will you adjust the content to the participants (Adaptability)?
- How will you respond to changes that arise in the group?
- How will you read the flow of the class?
- How will it unfold from beginning to end?
Five further questions were given: what kind of client the content suits, in what setting the class is held, whether it is taken as a single experience or as part of a longer process, whether it is aimed at beginners or at the experienced, and whether the goals come from your own inquiry or from the client’s needs.
Almost all of it is questions. There was not one sentence giving an answer of the form “teach it this way.”
Participants submitted a proposal by email in advance, with the title of the lesson and an outline, and taught the fifty-minute class on that basis.
Eighteen Presentations
In the second half, four people taught each day, and two on the last, making eighteen presentations over five days (How Does the Class Proceed? Feedback and the Atmosphere of the Class).
Some built up one element at a time in a logical order; others led participants in directions you could not predict. How the class was put together, and how words were used, differed widely from person to person.
Behind that range was the psychologically safe space that had been made. An atmosphere in which you could take some risk and try something new, without fear of failing, showed in each of the classes.
Feedback time followed each presentation.
What worked. What was of concern. What the class produced in your body. The participants gave frank and specific responses.
Rita’s feedback concentrated on two points. Who is this lesson for. And what words do you choose to reach them.
France, on the other hand, centered on building the class logically. When a student presented work done in sitting, France reframed it from the side of structure and gravity: sitting is also feeling gravity, so where in the body do you feel weight, and what moves from there.
Watching the same class, the two attended to different things. I come back to this later as well.
My Own Presentation
Mine came last on the second day (My Presentation Came Last on the Second Day: How Did It Proceed?).
The theme I chose was the integration covered in Rolfing sessions eight to ten. I designed it as a class for people who had already finished the ten-series.
Partway through, the participants started laughing, and the energy in the room changed considerably. So I changed the plan I had prepared. I let go of a plan I had spent a month and a half building, on the basis of what was happening in front of me. The class I had planned for fifty minutes finished in thirty-five.
Many participants said they had enjoyed it. One said that unpleasant memories of receiving the ten-series had come back, and that she had nearly cried.
Take the same class, and what it calls up differs from person to person. When you offer a group class, you have to keep in mind in advance that reactions you did not anticipate can occur. That is what I learned from the experience.
France advised me to make the closing of a class clearer, and if possible to give participants time at the end to look inward on their own.
What This Course Does Not Hand Over
Across the three Parts, the character of the teaching was consistent. To make it clear, it is more accurate to write from the standpoint of what I was not taught than of what I was.
No Procedure
What is handed over is not a finished procedure but a question.
The design of a three-series had no set method. In the first half of Part 3, six questions were handed over in preparation for the presentation. In the second half came nine points for making a class and five considerations.
All of them prompt you to think for yourself. There is no instruction saying “follow this procedure.”
This way of teaching is not confined to Rolf Movement. In the Advanced Training I took in 2025 I would receive Jeff Maitland’s three questions. Building a session from questions rather than from a fixed procedure puts the two on the same ground.
Having no procedure does not mean anything goes. It means you have to observe the person in front of you, judge for yourself, and take responsibility for that judgment.
With that much freedom, there were times when I could not see where a session was heading or how it would end, and felt uneasy. Even so, by keeping attention on it, it came together as a session in the end. Precisely because there is no fixed procedure, you are asked to trust the process of change happening in the body.
So what were the teachers doing? Not managing the content in detail, but holding a space in which learning could happen.
Godard says the same about his own teaching.
I have a studio, a small program. I know what I want to do, but I know it will have to be responsive to the people. I’m not hanging on to my program. I’m not hanging on to the way it should be, and I’m not keeping distance. I see what I want to do like on a horizon – but I don’t build all the space between me and the horizon. It’s a continuum, so I can meet people where they are. I don’t lose my thread, but I stay open.
Godard goes on about expectation. Hold too much of it and the space between two people is already filled before they meet. It is the space filled by that expectation, he says, that gets in the way of one person meeting another.
Up to here I have described this course from the side of the person learning in the classroom. Godard’s words describe the same classroom from the design side, from the standpoint of the one teaching.
No Ideal Body
There is one more thing this course did not hand over: an image of how the body ought to be.
Godard says that when he restores a line in the body, he does it in a way that does not create an idealized self-image. When you try to realize an ideal self, the effort tends to show up as work in the outer musculature.
Gael Rosewood, of the first generation of Rolf Movement, also points out the danger of imposing an ideal on the body. She calls it Somatic Platonism.
Set up an ideal image of the body and the options available to the body narrow; the person’s original tendencies get exaggerated in line with a particular hierarchy of values. Ida Rolf’s emphasis on a long lumbar spine, Rosewood says, injured no small number of bodies.
Godard sees the same danger as a problem for the one teaching. Movement specialists and bodyworkers readily apply the way they themselves experience movement to other people. They project the story of their own body onto students and clients.
This is what Rita kept asking about.
Who are you teaching. What words do you choose for that person. How do you take into account that each person has a use of language rooted in their own cultural background.
At the root of these questions is the idea that you do not press the teacher’s ideals or story onto someone else’s body.
The Teaching Side Does What It Teaches
The thirty-day course is divided into three Parts. Between them is time to try what you received in the classroom in your own practice, and to bring the questions raised with clients back to the next Part. Rather than finishing everything at once, you proceed while fitting the experience into your own work.
The fifty-minute presentation in the second half also had about a month and a half between the assignment and the day itself.
That time was not only for finishing the content. It was for working out what you want to convey, who the class is for, and what words to use — and for trying it out while you build it.
The whole course was designed to wait for experience to settle into the body and the practice, rather than to reach an answer quickly. That larger structure was repeated inside the month and a half of the assignment.
The same showed in how the teachers behaved.
What Part 3 asks of you is to open a Rolf Movement class to a group. And the kind of space you will one day offer your own students, you first experience yourself, in how you are taught.
The points given for the second half included Presence, how you are as a teacher, and Wording, how you choose your words. What was being asked about was not only technique and procedure but the state you are in when you stand in that room, and the words with which you engage the person in front of you.
Teachers who ask you to leave room for your students to explore were themselves leaving room for the participants to explore, without giving too many answers.
What they were teaching and how they taught it matched.
Theory Is Handed Over in a Form You Can Test
It is not that theory goes untaught.
Tonic Function, Phoric Function, pre-movement, Territorial Body and Body of Action. The theory that supports the practice was shared throughout the training. But it is not explained as finished knowledge to be memorized. It was handed over in a form you could check on the spot, using your own body.
When Rita explained that vision is a sense grown through learning, for instance, she made the students’ own bodies the site of the experiment. Rather than explaining by argument, she had us experience on the spot how the body and its movement change according to how attention is directed.
This way of teaching can be traced back to Godard’s own practice.
In workshops, Godard demonstrated the unbendable arm from aikido. He also had participants raise a leg in standing while he supported the sacrum and gave an orientation upward, having them feel the weight of the body at the same time. With those conditions in place, he showed on the spot that the hip could flex further.
Godard has also reported research examining such phenomena with electromyography.
In a task of resisting an externally applied force with the forearm extended, activity appeared in the biceps, the antagonist, when no particular imagery was given.
When participants imagined their fingers extending to the wall, or a beam of light going from the fingertips to the wall, the force the examiner felt increased three- to fourfold, and activity in the biceps almost disappeared. When an obstacle was placed between the body and the wall, blocking the projection into space, biceps activity reappeared.
This is presented as electromyography research Godard carried out at the National Cancer Institute in Milan.
Hand over theory first in a form the body can test. That way of teaching was not thought up on the spot. It rests on an accumulated effort to examine the relationships among body, attention, imagery, and space, from both practice and research.
Which Teachers I Learned From
Across the three Parts, I learned from seven teachers.
Pierpaola Volpones, Rita Geirola, Giovanni Felicioni, Hervé Baunard, France Hatt-Arnold, Aline Newton, and Nicola Carofiglio.
Several of them had also taught me in the Rolfing basic training. Following their backgrounds shows the kind of people through whom Rolf Movement has been carried.
The One at the Entrance and the Exit
Rita Geirola was involved in all three Parts.
Not only that. In August 2014, in the first week of Phase I of the basic training, the one teaching Movement was Rita. And in December 2019, the one who handed me the Rolf Movement Practitioner certificate was Rita.
When I entered Rolfing education, and when I finished the Rolf Movement certification course — the same teacher was at both the entrance and the exit.
Look at Rita’s background and you see the making of Rolf Movement overlapping within one person.
She started from physical education and the Mézières Method. She was certified as a Rolfer in 1987, as a Feldenkrais practitioner in 1992, and as a Rolf Movement Practitioner in 1997. She studied with both Hubert Godard and Peter Levine, and she writes herself that the Feldenkrais standpoint is the ground of her work.
I wrote earlier about asking the Feldenkrais practitioner in my group of three about the difference between Feldenkrais and Rolf Movement. But Rita, running the room at the time, already held both methods within her.
Movement First, or Hands-On First
France Hatt-Arnold taught Part 2 and Part 3.
She came into Rolf Movement in the reverse order from Rita.
France became a Rolf Movement Practitioner in 1986 and was certified as a Rolfer four years later. Movement first, hands-on after. Rita was certified as a Rolfer in 1987 and became a Rolf Movement Practitioner ten years later. Hands-on first, movement after.
The entrances were reversed, but both studied with Hubert Godard. France studied with him for twenty years.
Even so, the direction the two taught from was clearly different.
What Rita kept asking was who you are teaching, and what words you choose for them. What France emphasized was building a class logically, and closing clearly what you have opened.
Rita looks at a class from the side of the person receiving it. France looks at it from the side of its structure and unfolding.
With the same Godardian theory behind them, they had come into Rolf Movement through different entrances, and gave the students words back from different directions.
The One Who Taught Both Hands-On and Movement
Giovanni Felicioni taught Part 1.
In the basic training he taught the Touch week of Phase I and the whole of Phase II. A teacher who had taught me hands-on work was in the Rolf Movement course as well.
Giovanni offers Rolfing and yoga in London, and has explored the relationship among touch, movement, awareness, and contemplation for thirty years. Through that inquiry he has been involved for over twenty years in Godard’s development of Tonic Function.
Giovanni’s method of feedback is based on Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication. At its center is distinguishing the fact observed from the evaluation added to it.
The feedback material handed out again in Part 3 was originally his, from the basic training.
Someone Who Knew the 1980s Course
Pierpaola Volpones taught Part 1. After the basic training she also taught me in the Supervision Workshop, which corresponds to Phase IV.
She took her training in Munich in the 1980s, when the course was in two stages: nine weeks of Audit, or observation, and nine weeks of Practitioner.
During the Audit period, no hands-on work was done at all. There was no textbook, no photographs, and no practicing of technique. It was, I was told, simply observing sessions.
When Part 3 split us into a group receiving a class and a group watching from outside, it becomes clear that giving large amounts of time to observation was not something invented on the spot. Growing the capacity to see the body has been carried down from an older layer of this course.
The One Who Handed Over Godard’s Theory as Five Factors
Aline Newton taught Part 2.
She was certified as a Rolfer in 1984 and studied with Godard from 1990.
She organized Godard’s thinking into five factors and handed it to us (Confusion in a Good Sense, and on Tonic Function).
- Tissue
- Perception and cognition
- Thought and language
- Meaning and symbol
- Coordination
That was when Godard’s thinking, which I had been receiving in fragments, began to move as one theory in me. How that came about I go into in the next section.
The Number of Teachers Is Small
Nicola Carofiglio taught Part 2.
As of 2026, of the three Movement courses in Level 1 of the basic training, Carofiglio teaches two and Rita teaches the third.
So two of the four teachers I had in Part 2 now teach Movement at the entrance to the basic training.
The number of teachers of Rolf Movement at ERA is not large. That is how one teacher, like Rita, comes to be involved from the entrance of the basic training to the exit of the Rolf Movement certification.
That I learned from seven teachers does not simply mean I had many to choose from freely. It also shows that a limited number of teachers support this education while carrying several stages of it.
Hervé Baunard taught Part 1 and Part 3. He is French. I come back to him in the next section.
Set their backgrounds and their teaching side by side, and you see that Rolf Movement was not made by one theorist or one method. It is carried down with several bodily backgrounds and educational lineages overlapping.
What I actually received from it is the subject of the next section.
From Whom Did I Receive It
What is taught and what you actually receive do not necessarily match.
Godard’s theory first began to move in me when I learned it from a fourth teacher.
In 2014 Giovanni explained it as theory, and I did not understand it then. In 2016 I received mentoring from Godard himself in Paris. In 2017 I learned from Gael Rosewood, not through a systematic explanation but through concrete examples. Then in 2018 I received it from Aline Newton as a system organized into five factors.
From those near the source of the theory I received examples; from those further downstream I received a system. From the first teacher, in between, I could not yet make it my own.
Why the fourth? There are two ways of seeing it.
Language as a Condition
The first is language.
Hervé Baunard, who taught Part 1 and Part 3, is French. I began thinking about what that means at the final meeting on the day I was certified.
Rita, France, and Hervé were all there. All three told me that it takes time to digest what you learn in Rolf Movement. All three had studied directly with Hubert Godard.
France practices in Geneva, in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Hervé is French. Rita is Italian, but she studied with Godard for many years. Giovanni and Aline both understand French.
Godard’s theory reached me through people who could receive it in French first. Put that way, it is tempting to explain the time my understanding took as a language barrier.
But the three on the far side of that barrier were themselves saying that it takes time to digest.
Rolf Movement theory is not something you understand fully by the end of a thirty-day course. You have to take what you received in the classroom back into practice and check it, over time, in your own body and work. That is what the three of them were saying.
How Far the Giver Had Reworked It
The other way of seeing it is how far the one teaching had digested what they received and reshaped it into a form that reaches others.
Aline’s work had a depth I only learned about later.
During the training, material on Godard’s theory was handed out several times. Two of those documents were written by her.
One was an interview with Godard published in Rolf Lines in 1992. The other was an overview of his thinking published in the same journal in 1995.
In the 1992 interview, Aline states her position clearly. She met Godard at the 1990 annual meeting and then took two six-day classes. She writes that she wants to offer the conversation as an entry point into his work.
The 1995 overview carries a similar caveat. What she can present there, she says, is no more than an entry point into a very rich and complex approach.
Aline received Godard’s work in 1990, made a form for handing it to others as an interview in 1992 and as an overview in 1995. And in 2018 she taught that system to us.
The same person spent twenty-eight years understanding a theory she had received, organizing it, and delivering it to others.
That I could receive it from the fourth teacher was not only because I was ready. It was also because the one handing it over had spent that long reshaping the theory into a form that arrives.
Language Alone Does Not Explain It
There is a clear counterexample to the view that language governs understanding.
Monica Caspari (1953–2019), a Brazilian Rolfer. She was certified in 1989 and went on to teach Rolfing and Rolf Movement around the world for thirty years. She also designed the dual certification course in which structure and movement are learned as one body of work.
Caspari was not from a French-speaking background. She nonetheless engaged with Godard and studied his theory of perception deeply. And she reshaped his vast and complex inquiry into something Rolf Movement students around the world could understand and approach. She taught in many countries, Japan among them.
That structure and movement were inseparable for Caspari seems to have come from more than organizing a theory. Before that thinking there was a long experience of engaging with other people’s bodies.
For nineteen years before becoming a Rolfer, Caspari worked as a doula, present where people are born. There is also a story that at twenty-five, asked by a dying sibling to do something, she found she could stroke his back and lead him into sleep.
Feeling another person’s body through your own, and finding the work it needs. That form of practice came before the theory.
There is an indirect connection between Caspari and me as well.
Gael Rosewood, with whom I studied for four days in March 2017, was one of the two who taught the first Rolf Movement training in Brazil in 1991. One of the students in that training was Caspari.
Differences of language and culture do make understanding harder. But when the one handing something over has digested it fully and reshaped it into a form that arrives, those differences can also be crossed.
Caspari is one example of that; Aline was doing the same work in another form.
The Lineages Overlap Within One Person
Whether you can receive something is not decided by language alone, nor by which lineage you belong to.
Set the seven teachers side by side and it becomes hard to sort any of them under a simple label.
In Rita, Rolfing, Feldenkrais, and what she learned from Peter Levine overlap. In France, Rolf Movement and hands-on work overlap in the reverse of the usual order. In Giovanni, hands-on work, Movement, yoga, and Nonviolent Communication come together.
In my summary of the basic training I wrote that teachers cannot be grasped through a single lineage. It was the same in the Rolf Movement training.
You cannot decide who to learn from by the name of a lineage alone.
And whether you can receive what is taught does not turn on the learner’s readiness alone. How far the one teaching has digested what they received, and reshaped it into a form that reaches the person in front of them, changes it greatly as well.
Certification and After
On December 1, 2019, at ERA in Munich, I was certified as a Rolf Movement Practitioner.
It was the thirtieth day of a training that began on July 7, 2017, and the final day of the whole course.
The Final Meeting
From 8:15 on the last morning, I met with Rita, France, and Hervé (Training Completed: The Tortoise Mind and the Hare Brain, and What It Means to Learn Slowly).
France suggested I bring more contralateral movement — coordinating the two sides of the body diagonally — into my sessions, and build that skill further.
Contralateral movement matters a great deal in handling the integration of Rolfing sessions eight to ten. It was valuable advice for the practice that followed.
The meeting centered on how to improve my classes from here, and which parts to develop further.
Being told that my skills were improving and that I should keep at Movement was a considerable encouragement.
Tortoise Mind
While I was in Part 1, Giovanni recommended Guy Claxton’s Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind, and I read it during the training (Training Completed: The Tortoise Mind and the Hare Brain, and What It Means to Learn Slowly).
Against the quick-reacting mind that tries to process problems logically — the hare brain — Claxton sets a way of working that takes time to receive things and waits for understanding to take shape: the tortoise mind.
Scientific discoveries and creative insights, too, can come not while you are consciously hurrying toward an answer, but while you step back from the problem and let the thinking ripen. In that sense the tortoise mind has a strength the hare brain does not.
I took a thirty-day course over two years and five months.
It was a period of being confused by what I did not understand, using intuition, sometimes not hurrying the answer, giving myself over to what was happening, and digesting the content little by little.
I was reading a book about the strength of thinking slowly in exactly that kind of time.
The Certification Ceremony
On the last day, after the remaining two presentations, the certification ceremony was held.
The participants split into three groups and played a simple game. The day that closed the thirty-day course was not tense but warm and easy.
I remember the relief at having the whole dense training behind me.
Practice After Certification
Since being certified, I have brought the thinking and practice of Rolf Movement into yoga classes, ordinary Rolfing sessions, and maintenance sessions after a ten-series.
What mattered most was becoming able to convey the same process from the side of movement to a client who had finished the ten-series.
What I had conveyed mainly through the hands, I could now convey using words, imagery, touch, and movement. With more ways of conveying it, I could choose the one most likely to reach the client in front of me.
The question Rita kept returning to has stayed with me since certification.
Who are you teaching. What words do you choose for that person.
It has become a question underlying not only Rolf Movement classes but all of my sessions now.
Conclusion
Having finished the thirty days, what stays with me most strongly is that I was not handed a fixed procedure. The Rolfing ten-series has a clear order. In the basic training I learned what that order means and learned to trust the process. In Rolf Movement I was asked to build sessions and classes for the person in front of me, starting from a place with no order given in advance.
Trusting an order you are given, and constructing from a place where there is none. Both, I now think, were necessary.
For anyone considering Rolf Movement training in Munich, or in Japan or elsewhere, I hope this article is of some use. On what the certification requires and where and from whom you can take it, please see the article on the system (How the Rolf Movement Practitioner Certification Works — The 30-Day Requirement and Choosing Where to Train).
References and Links
- Aline Newton, “An Interview with Hubert Godard,” Rolf Lines, Winter 1992
- Aline Newton, “Basic Concepts in the Theory of Hubert Godard,” Rolf Lines, March 1995
- Caryn McHose, “Interview with Hubert Godard: Phenomenological Space,” Contact Quarterly, Summer/Fall 2006
- Hubert Godard, foreword to Caryn McHose and Kevin Frank, How Life Moves: Explorations in Meaning and Body Awareness, North Atlantic Books, 2006
- H. Godard et al., “Neurophysiological Study of the E-motion,” Department of Rehabilitation, National Cancer Institute, Milan, and others
- Kevin Frank, “Rolf Movement® Integration: An Historical Overview through an Interview with Heather (Wing) Starsong and Gael (Ohlgren) Rosewood,” Structural Integration, June 2012
- Pedro Prado and Heidi Massa, “Remembering Monica Caspari,” Structure, Function, Integration: Journal of the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute, Vol. 48, No. 1, March 2020
- Guy Claxton, Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind
- European Rolfing Association, “Rolf Movement™” (rolfing.org)
- Lea Kabirschke, “Why not Osteopathy, Feldenkrais or Physiotherapy?”, European Rolfing Association blog (rolfing.org)
Related Articles on the Rolfing Training
- What It Takes to Become a Rolfer — An Overview of Qualifications, Organizations, and Training, Explained by a Rolfer
- Becoming a Certified Rolfer in Europe — The Certification Training of the European Rolfing Association
- Continuing Education After Rolfing Certification — The 18-Credit Framework and a Map of the Teachers
- How to Choose Continuing Education — Four Things I Look At Before Signing Up
- Where Rolf Movement Came From — A History from Ida Rolf to the Present
- How the Rolf Movement Practitioner Certification Works — The 30-Day Requirement and Choosing Where to Train
- Journey to Becoming an Advanced Rolfer — A Summary of the Road to Certification