Once breathing has organized the upper body in session 1, the ground is ready for the lower body. What session 2 works with is the foot as a whole, and at the center of it, the sole.
Where Session 2 sits
The first phase of the ten-series, sessions 1 through 3, is given over to releasing the sleeve. In terms of the spatial axes, sessions 1 and 2 work with up and down. Breathing organizes the upper end of the body, the soles the lower end, and together they lay the foundation of the vertical axis.
A foundation does not necessarily get built from the bottom up. If breathing stays shallow, the tension of the rib cage remains throughout the body, and releasing the soles alone will not hold. Release above, then come down — that is the reason for this order.
Another axis enters here as well. There are two feet. Two points of support means a left-right relation comes into being. The rib cage is single, so session 1 has no left and right. The left-right axis enters the body from session 2.
In the training, the aim of this session was put as freeing the foot: the foot that forms the foundation becoming able to move freely.
Session 2 is also where three sequences cross. It sits in the middle of the three sleeve sessions; it opens the sessions that work with the lower body (2, 4, and 6); and it is the first step in bringing breathing and walking together into one.
Breathing and walking are the two movements everyone repeats all day long. Session 1 works with the breath, session 2 with the foundation of walking. The process by which these two stop being separate and become a single flow continues through all ten sessions. They meet in session 3, meet again at a deeper level in session 5, and become one flow in session 10.
A hard sole is not a failure
A fallen arch, toes that do not reach the floor, tight calves. None of this is treated here as a defect to be corrected.
The sole firms up because that is a reasonable response when information from the floor cannot be read. When the ground underfoot is uncertain, the body stiffens its contact surface to stop the sway. Years in shoes that did not fit, walking to avoid pain, working on unstable ground — each of these gives the sole a reason to firm up.
By firming, the person was able to stand. Session 2 is not about taking that response away. Once the conditions are there for standing without firming, the body begins to let it go.
Why the feet
When the sole is tense, that tension runs through the fascia into the calves, the hamstrings, the lower back, the shoulders, and the neck. When the sole releases, the whole back of the body releases with it.
The clearest case is lifting an arm. Just before the arm rises, the muscles along the back of the leg — from the sole through the calf in particular — begin working to support the whole body. Movement is prepared from the feet up. That people with stiff shoulders tend to have tight calves is an expression of the same chain.
In Rolf Movement, this activity that has already begun before a movement starts is called Pre-movement. The soleus engages before the arm lifts; serratus anterior engages before the hand grasps. How to support is settled before what to do.
And once the soles can genuinely be used, the tension in the back lets go, and the deep muscles inside it come within reach. The core sessions from session 4 onward only become possible after this stage.
What shoes have taken over
Behind the underuse of the soles are shoes.
A thick sole absorbs the impact even when you land on the heel. Landing hard on the heel sends the return force from the floor into the knees and the lower back. Walking barefoot or in thin soles moves the landing naturally toward the forefoot and midfoot, and the whole sole starts distributing the force.
This is not the fault of shoes. Shoes have taken over the work of the foot. As long as the cushioning absorbs the impact, the sole does not have to distribute it. A function that goes unused stops being felt. That the sense of the arch develops poorly follows naturally from this.
When the soles begin to move in session 2, that work is gradually taken back. Spending time barefoot helps the change settle, for the same reason.
Eye of the Foot — supposing there is an eye on the sole
Suppose there is an eye on the sole of each foot, and open and close it. This is an exercise Ray McCall introduces in every training, called Eye of the Foot. I did it in the advanced training in 2025.
Standing with the eye closed, the whole body draws inward and the contact with the ground changes. Opening it, the pelvic floor and the diaphragm release, and the relation to gravity shifts. Opening and closing it while walking, the sense of distance to your surroundings feels different each time.
What is interesting is that nothing is done to the sole itself. Merely supposing the eye to be open changes the tone of the pelvic floor. No instruction was given to any muscle. When the placement of perception changes, the body redistributes its tone. Nor is this simply going slack: open, and release is invited; closed, and a core runs through the inside. The body finds the tone that suits the situation.
What this exercise works with is not only the foot. It is space.
Space is not an empty place. It has quality, and it exists as something the body responds to. Attention on an object and attention on the space between you and that object produce different responses. One participant described space as feeling moist, as having density. In my own case, I found the sense of switching between foreground and background. That front-back switching carries directly into the theme of session 3.
In a record from the basic training in 2014, I described a foot that works well as a foot with an eye on it. At the time it was a figure of speech. Eleven years later, it was handed over as a procedure.
What was said repeatedly in the training was this: rather than trying to correct a pattern, meet the force that is producing that pattern. Rather than going to fix the hardness of the sole, touch where that hardness came from. That is what it means to say, as at the start of this piece, that a hard sole is not treated as a failure.
The same holds on the practitioner’s side. Rather than reaching to touch, listen to the quality of the space around and within the person. In doing so, the Rolfer moves closer to being a place that allows things to happen than a person who does something.
Toes and heels — balancing vision and hearing
Once you can tell the toes and the heels apart, the way vision and hearing divide the work becomes something you understand by feel.
Using the eyes tends to bring the weight toward the toes; using the ears brings it toward the heels. The reason lies in the structure of the face. The eyes sit at the front, the ears further back, so which sensor you favor is reflected directly in where your weight sits front to back.
Put the other way, once you can tell which you are using more right now, the toes or the heels, you can also notice the bias in how you use your senses. In a yoga pose, being able to read the balance across the sole makes the gaze easier to settle.
There is a way of seeing the sensors that support posture as a triangle with three vertices: the eyes, the feet, and the inner ear — the Triangle of Support. Session 2 works with the feet and session 7 with the vestibular sense, touching two vertices of the same triangle. Organizing the feet alone does not steady the triangle.
When the joints of the foot begin to move
Yoga has a preparatory practice called sukshma vyayama, in which each joint of the hands and feet is moved slowly, one at a time. The point is to move in time with the breath, slowly, carefully, while sensing the body. Moving each toe separately, circling the heels, opening and closing the hands — the movements are unremarkable.
Tsuruji Sahoda, the founder of the Japan Yoga Zen Association, encountered yoga and this preparatory practice in his sixties, recovered the health that had been poor until then, and lived into his late eighties.
When I teach yoga, I always begin here. Standing and seated poses taken afterward make the use of the feet and hands easier to sense, and the poses steadier. In sitting, the body becomes readier for meditation.
In my experience, the hardest thing to sense in this preparatory practice is the sole. Once the release of the soles becomes clear in session 2 of Rolfing, the practice itself changes.
What is looked at as the session opens
In the Body Reading at the start — watching how you stand and walk — the points include:
- Whether the weight sits toward the toes or the heels
- Whether the arch has collapsed, or is held high and rigid
- Whether the toes meet the floor or hover above it
- Whether movement below the ankle carries through the knee, the hip, and the pelvis
- Which part of the sole leaves the floor when walking
Checking the same movements after the hands-on work lets you register the change as your own sensation. It is this accumulation of noticing that makes the change last beyond the session.
The conditions the session works toward
What session 2 aims at is a state in which three things hold:
- The whole sole, arch included, is available for use
- The connection between the sole and the whole lower body can be felt
- Awareness connects from the sole up the spine into the upper body
Loosening the sole is not the goal. Once the sole can take in information from the floor, the way it meets the ground changes by itself. That sense of being suctioned to the ground is not something produced by trying. When the conditions are there, it comes about.
Even among the yoga instructors who come for sessions, more than you would expect have not found this sense of the feet. When the feet do not settle in a standing pose, the spine becomes unstable, and the whole body tenses to hold it. A pose that leaves only fatigue behind tends to begin here.
What the body takes in during this session
Describing session 2 as releasing the plantar fascia or working the lower leg moves away from what is actually happening.
What is taken in, as I understand it, is the information that the floor is here. Support is below, and the foot is free to be the side that receives it. When that information arrives, the body begins to reorganize how it supports itself. Supporting by firming is replaced by supporting by receiving.
What counts as organized
Whether the sole has become softer is not, in itself, taken as the result. If softness were the goal, loosening would be enough.
What is looked at as the session closes is the relationship with gravity. Does the force returning from the floor pass through the ankle, the knee, the hip, and into the pelvis? Is gravity working as a resource that supports from below rather than a load that pulls downward?
The return of ground contact appears as a consequence of that relationship having changed.
After the session
- More of the sole meets the floor
- Tightness in the calves eases
- The front-back sway in standing gets smaller
- Stride and the sound of your landing change
- Tension in the lower back and shoulders lets go as a change coming from the feet
After a session, it helps to put into words how the relation to the floor has changed. Is there a sense of landing? Can you let your weight rest into the floor? Can you let go? Can you push off? Can you lift? Is there a sense of reaching toward something?
The return of ground contact is a name for all of this. To be able to meet the floor is also to be able to trust it.
The foot, seen from walking
This piece has looked at what happens to the foot in the second session. The structure of the foot itself, and the foot as it appears in walking, I have written about separately, in four parts.
How the foot collapses and then locks within a single step. Why the muscles that move the foot are not in the foot. Where the leg actually begins. And how gait can be read through gravity. The Eye of the Foot and the Triangle of Support, both touched on here, are taken up there as well.
- Part 1: The Foot Changes Shape With Every Step — How the Arches Are Made
- Part 2: The Problem in the Foot Is Not in the Foot — From the Lower Leg to the Pelvis
- Part 3: The Leg Begins Below the Ribs — The Psoas and the Diagonal
- Part 4: Reading Gait Through Gravity — Tonic Function and Palintonicity
On to the next session
Once the vertical axis is organized, front and back come next. Session 3 works with the sides of the shoulders, arms, spine, and thighs, and the body comes to be understood as a volume rather than a plane.
- Session 3: Organizing Front-Back Balance — From a Plane to a Volume
- 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.