The Rolfing ten-series begins with the breath. For someone who comes in with a stiff neck or a sore lower back, this often comes as a surprise. Why start with breathing rather than with the shoulders or the back?
Where Session 1 sits
Sessions 1 through 3 make up the first phase, in which the superficial fascia is released. These three sessions work with two spatial axes: up and down, and front and back. Session 1 takes the upper body through the breath, session 2 the lower body through the feet, and session 3 the front-back balance. Once the vertical axis has a foundation, the work can move inward to the medial line from session 4 onward.
What is touched in session 1 is the superficial fascia around the rib cage, the intercostals, and the diaphragm.
Shallow breathing is not a failure
One thing should be said before anything else.
A body that breathes shallowly is not treated here as something defective. When the rib cage has become firm, that firmness has been holding something. Through a long stretch of strain, the body steadies itself by holding the chest. Work that demands a strong voice, work that involves lifting, a period spent in pain — each of these gives the rib cage a reason to firm up.
Limitation and possibility exist as a pair. What now shows up as a restriction was once the best option available to that body. So session 1 is not about removing a bad habit. It is about creating the conditions in which the body can register that this particular way of holding is no longer needed.
Why begin with the breath
There are two main reasons.
The first is that breathing is linked to the fascia of the whole body. When breathing stays shallow, the rib cage stiffens, and that tension travels outward into the neck, the shoulders, and the back. When breathing deepens, the pattern of tension throughout the body begins to loosen. As a place to build a foundation, it is efficient.
The second is that breathing is the way into bodily sensation.
Interoception, or sensing from within
The five senses receive information from the outside world. There are also sensors that register the state of the body from within. The organs, the muscles, the bones — information gathers from all of them and forms the sense of how you are, right now. This is what is called interoception.
Breathing is one of the very few interoceptive channels you can reach consciously. Heartbeat and digestion do not answer to intention, but breathing can be felt the moment attention turns toward it, and it can be changed. That is what makes it an entrance.
There is an interesting piece of research on how interoception relates to judgment. John Coates, a former trader turned neuroscientist, and his colleagues asked financial traders in London to count their own heartbeats. The traders scored better than a control group of non-traders, and their scores corresponded to their individual profitability and to how many years they had survived in that world (Scientific Reports, 2016).
A decision made on a gut feeling, then, is not a hunch without grounds. It rests on the ability to read signals coming from the body. Annie Murphy Paul cites this study in The Extended Mind – The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain as one instance of thinking with the body.
People who have been through a series often say afterward that their intuition works more readily, that decisions about work or direction come more easily. The causal link cannot be established, but the reports are frequent.
Two kinds of breathing, and how breathing becomes tiring
Breathing comes in two kinds: unconscious breathing, or quiet breathing, and conscious breathing, or effortful breathing.
Quiet breathing is handled by the autonomic nervous system. Muscles work on the inhale and release on the exhale. Effortful breathing is handled by the brain, as in speaking, singing, or a breathing practice, where muscles are used on the inhale and the exhale alike. “Take a deep breath” and “just breathe naturally” produce different bodies.
Trouble arises on the quiet side. If the muscles do not fully release at the turn from inhale to exhale, they keep working through a phase that was meant to be a rest. Breathing, repeated some twenty thousand times a day, becomes strength training. Behind a stiff neck and stiff shoulders, this is often what is happening.
This is where the theory of Tonic Function comes in. Under gravity, two kinds of muscle are at work: those that fatigue (phasic muscles) and those that do not (tonic muscles). The former are what you use in the gym, and using them leaves soreness. The latter support posture and do not tire, however long they work.
Tonic muscles have a particular character. They take roughly five seconds to come on, and roughly five seconds to release. Once engaged, they do not tire. But an accident, an injury, or a strong impact can leave that switch turned off. Losing the ability to hold posture is not necessarily a matter of lost strength.
- Why Good Posture Is Not a Matter of Muscle Strength — Tonic Function and Its Relationship to Gravity
- Why “Standing” Is Not Tiring — The Mechanism of Gravity and the Antigravity Muscles
- Gael Rosewood Workshop (4) — How Do the Gravity-Related Tonic Muscles Keep the Body in Balance?
What is looked at as the session opens
A session moves through observe, intervene, observe again. At the start, the practitioner watches how the client stands, walks, and breathes. In Rolfing this is called Body Reading. Where is there excess tension, and how does the body sit relative to the line of gravity? Reading the body is where a session begins.
In session 1, the points to watch include:
- Which is harder, the inhale or the exhale
- Where the breath moves: the front of the chest, the back, or the sides
- Which part of the rib cage is not moving
- Whether the neck and shoulders lift along with the inhale
[Image: breathing and the muscles involved]
Then comes a question: which muscles are you breathing with right now? Most people find that far more muscles have been recruited into breathing than they had assumed. That recognition alone accounts for half of what session 1 does.
What the body takes in during this session
Describing session 1 by the names of techniques moves away from what is actually happening. It is more accurate to ask what the body received than what was done to it.
What is taken in during session 1, as I understand it, is the information that breathing need not be tiring. The rib cage may move here. The neck and shoulders do not have to carry the breath. The support belongs to the muscles that do not fatigue. When that information arrives, the body starts to redistribute the work on its own.
Breathing also works between two people
There is another side to the breath.
During a session, the practitioner is breathing along too. With a hand resting on the client’s rib cage, the practitioner’s own breathing draws toward that rhythm. After a while it is no longer clear who matched whom. There is an expression about breathing in time with someone; what happens here is exactly that.
This too belongs to the middle voice. Neither party is matching, and neither is being matched. Being in the same place, it comes about.
The prerequisite is that the client can feel their own breathing. A breath that cannot be felt cannot be joined. Saying that session 1 is the way into interoception is not only about the relationship you have with your own interior.
And this becomes the ground for the later sessions. From session 4 the work goes deeper, and accumulated feeling can surface. Whether it is possible to go there depends on whether trust has been established. More often than not, that trust is settled at the level of the breath before it is settled in words. Beginning with the breath makes sense not only as an order of physical work, but as an order for moving through ten sessions.
Change is not produced; it occurs
This is the hardest thing to convey about session 1.
The practitioner does not deepen the breath. Nor does the client deepen it through effort. Under the hands, the breathing becomes deeper. What takes place belongs neither to the one doing nor to the one being done to.
Ancient Greek had a voice for events of this kind. It is called the middle voice: neither acting nor being acted upon, but coming about through involvement in something. Most of what happens in a session belongs to this voice.
So what the practitioner does is not to produce change, but to hold the space in which change can occur. Not going out to look for something, but letting what is there show itself.
What counts as organized
A deeper breath is not, in itself, taken as the result.
What is looked at as the session closes is the relationship with gravity. Is the rib cage supported within gravity? Is gravity working as a resource for support rather than as a load? A deeper breath appears as a consequence of that relationship having changed.
Reverse the order and the work becomes indistinguishable from a breathing exercise. Rolfing is defined not by its techniques but by this aim.
After the session
- The chest widens, and more of the back meets the floor when lying down
- The diaphragm moves, and heaviness or congestion in the abdomen eases
- You find where the shoulders can let go
- Turning attention to the breath yields more information than it did
When the diaphragm moves, the organs can move as well. Once the organs begin to move, many people describe a sense that the body is ready to use its own sensing.
More on the physiology of breathing
The account above is from the practitioner’s side. On the physiology of breathing itself, there are four earlier entries, written in 2015 during the basic training in Munich, a month before certification.
Why exhaling in quiet breathing requires no muscular effort. How the diaphragm reaches the skull through connective tissue. How breathing changes when posture collapses. And how breathing can be read through gravity. The theory behind the distinction between muscles that fatigue and muscles that do not is treated there in more detail.
- Part 1: Exhaling Takes No Effort — Conscious and Unconscious Breath
- Part 2: The Diaphragm Reaches the Skull — Breath and the Placement of the Organs
- Part 3: When Posture Collapses, Breathing Changes — Extensors, Flexors, and the Scalenes
- Part 4: The Inhaling Body and the Exhaling Body — Breath Seen Through Gravity
And in 2023, eight years into offering sessions, the same subject is taken up again from the side of the research: carbon dioxide and the quantity of breath, the diaphragm and heart rate, mouth breathing and the shape of the jaw, and the vagus nerve and interoception.
Breathing, Revisited (Four Parts)
- Part 1: A Body That Breathes Too Much — When Carbon Dioxide Runs Short
- Part 2: The Diaphragm Reaches the Heart — Breath, Heart Rate, and Two Nuclei in the Brainstem
- Part 3: The Jaw Is Made by Breathing — Mouth Breathing and the Teeth
- Part 4: There Are Sensors on the Inside — The Vagus Nerve and Interoception
On to the next session
Once the upper body is organized through the breath, the ground is ready for the lower body. Session 2 works with the superficial fascia of the soles and the calves.
- Session 2: Organizing the Feet — The Superficial Lower Body and Its Relation to the Ground
- What Is Rolfing’s Ten-Series? — Three Phases in Which the Body Changes, and the Flow of Each Session
- A Glossary for Reading the Ten Sessions
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Hidefumi Otsuka, Ph.D. | Certified Advanced Rolfer™ / Rolf Movement® Practitioner Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Medicine, the University of Tokyo. After eleven years in medical marketing at a foreign pharmaceutical company, he has offered Rolfing® sessions in Shibuya, Tokyo since 2015, working under the theme of integrating science and practice.