Introduction
This year marks the tenth year since I began offering Rolfing sessions. I have come to think of Rolfing as an extension of coaching, and I want to set down why.
This piece was written in January 2024 and has since been combined with another piece from the same month. What it means to be neutral, when that neutrality slips, and what it means to wait for someone’s words — those were added to the second half.
Looking for a way to build communication skills
I spent most of my twenties in a research institution — graduate school — and only entered the private sector in my thirties. A few years in, my manager and colleagues began telling me that communication skills mattered, and that I ought to work on them.
What a private company actually meant by “communication skills” did not come into focus for me at the time. But when people around you keep saying it, you start paying attention. And once you are paying attention, chances to work on it start appearing.
I like to read, so I picked up a great many books on the subject. Along the way I became interested in speed reading.
Photoreading
Looking into it, I found that a method of reading a page the way a camera takes a photograph — Photoreading — could be studied in Japan. A search turned up a course.
On September 13 and 14, 2008, I took the two-day Photoreading course at Genius Brain (only in Japanese).
Two days, and it cost 100,000 yen.
Photoreading was developed by Paul Scheele.
What I found interesting about the course was that roughly seventy percent of it went to removing what the instructors called mind blocks. That sounds odd until you see the method, which is genuinely strange. Most people carry the fixed idea that reading means following the letters with your eyes. Unless that idea is set aside, the technique cannot be used. Setting it aside is what the mind-block work is for.
From speed reading to NLP and CTI coaching
Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is what that mind-block work draws on.
NLP turns out to be full of practical methods for building communication skills. It also helps with self-acceptance and self-image, not only with communication. In October 2008, I decided to take the NLP Practitioner course at the NLP-JAPAN Learning Center (only in Japanese), an affiliate of Genius Brain.
Through people I met in that course, I also came across the fundamentals and advanced courses in Co-Active Coaching offered by CTI Japan (only in Japanese).
I finished the NLP Master Practitioner course in June 2009 and the CTI Co-Active Coaching advanced course in December 2009. Both sets of skills have been of great use in the way I communicate during Rolfing sessions.
What coaching is — an idea that came out of tennis
You could say that coaching takes someone from zero toward the positive, that it raises motivation. My own sense of it is different. Rather than working on behavior, you look at what the person values. When that shifts, behavior follows of its own accord. Helping that along is what coaching is.
This way of thinking came out of the work of a professional tennis coach.
Put roughly, the difference between NLP and coaching comes to this:
- Coaching works from the right brain, looking at BEING and DOING in broad outline.
- NLP works from the left brain, looking at BEING and DOING in detail.
As an aside: tarot cards contain elements of both coaching and NLP, and I pass that on when the occasion allows.
Coaching and NLP complement each other, and learning both is how communication skills get built. If pressed, I find coaching the more interesting of the two.
How Rolfing and coaching connect
So: is there a connection between Rolfing and coaching? There is a great deal of one.
Touching the fascia sets the body moving of its own accord toward where it belongs. The Rolfer’s part is to wait for the change and to guide it. The person finds their own easy posture as a result.
Coaching works the same way. Touching BEING — what the person values — lets the direction, the DOING, settle by itself. Rolfing does this without going through language, through the body.
That is why I think of Rolfing as an extension of coaching.
I have several times seen someone finish the ten-series and then suddenly decide something they had been unable to decide. What I take from this is that an easy posture and a set of values are the same thing.
Being neutral means giving the least information
Both coaching and NLP emphasized becoming neutral. Find the middle. Do not judge. Return to the beginner. There are any number of ways to say it.
In the session room, I put it this way.
Give the person the least information, and make time and room in which they can arrive at their own answer.
Showing how much you know would be easy enough. But every body is different, and there is no telling whether what you know will apply. Meeting each person on the premise that you understand nothing about them works better.
If you approach someone as though you already know everything, they feel unseen, they feel judged, they feel the room is not safe — and they close.
How hard it is to wait for words
Putting a difficulty into words takes far longer than one expects.
Kiyokazu Washida’s Matsu to iu koto — “On Waiting” (in Japanese) — puts this well, and I want to quote a little of it.
⟨Working translation⟩ If listening means receiving someone in their own words, then listening is waiting. From the speaker’s side, it is the sense that whatever they say will be taken in, that their words will be received without reservation, that they themselves will be accepted as they are. If that is so —
to listen is to wait for the arrival of an other, with no way of knowing what form the words will take as they fall.
Why is going out to meet the words the worst form of listening? Because to speak is to put distance between oneself and what one is speaking of. In difficulty, a person wishes someone would share the weight of it, and yet that difficulty is the hardest thing of all to speak. The harder it is, the harder it is to say. The reasons run several layers deep.
To begin with, a person in difficulty does not speak of it to others at all. It is above all the thing they want to forget, and speaking of it only brings it back. And it is a thing that no one outside the person can readily make out. ⟨/Working translation⟩
When neutrality slips (1) — wanting to be of use
Working in the room, neutrality slips.
Let me be of use to this person. Let me fix this. Let me use this skill.
Each of these moves away from neutral. You have gone too far into your own interior, too far into your own view, and the line between what you think and what the other person thinks stops being visible. When that happens, you lose sight of what they are actually thinking and what they are actually carrying.
When neutrality slips (2) — relying on the eyes
The same holds when observing a body.
The more you rely on the eyes, the more information accumulates, and the more likely you are to lose what matters.
As the amount of information grows, you stop seeing the person as they are. Knowledge and technique run ahead, and the session stops serving them.
The remedy is to be clear about the aim and to narrow the information down. In Rolfing this goes by the phrase Less is More: the least intervention, for the greatest effect.
The same holds when listening, and when working with fascia. What matters is helping the person go into their own interior and find their own way out. Listen as much as you can, and be their guide.
Stay with the conversation. Ask about what catches your attention. Put to them whatever surfaces intuitively. The information narrows itself down as a result, and what had not been visible comes into view. If the person can describe their own state in their own words and find the solution they need, that is a success.
Conclusion
This piece set down why I think of Rolfing as an extension of coaching, and went on to what it means to be neutral.
The people Rolfing suits are the ones who find their values hard to put into words but want to know them all the same — who come to know them through the posture of the body.
Sessions are available. If this interests you, please come.
Note, September 2026
This piece says that coaching and Rolfing are doing the same thing.
I had written the same thing ten years earlier. “Sensing, Doing, and Coaching — Thinking It Through from CTI’s Educational System,” written during the Rolfing training, applies the distinction between Being and Doing that I had learned in coaching to the problem of Sensing and Doing during a session. I was using a framework learned in 2009 to make sense of a new technique in 2014.
What differs is how waiting is handled.
The 2014 piece does not contain the word. What it has is a single line — that facing Being may bring unexpected change, and that one has to be ready to adapt. It is a matter of holding yourself open to whatever comes.
Here, for the first time, waiting comes to the front. And the words for it were not mine. I had read Kiyokazu Washida and borrowed them. Listening is waiting. To listen is to wait for the arrival of an other, with no way of knowing what form the words will take as they fall.
Borrowed words, used to name what I had been doing.
The following year, in the 2025 advanced training, the same thing arrived from another side.
What was given there was not a frame of mind for waiting but a way of placing the body. The shape of the hand (Shape the Hand). Sensing the space behind you (Finding Back Space). Connecting to the hara. These three are how neutrality is cultivated. Letting, and Making — Ray McCall described holding the balance between the two as Right Action (see “Journey to Becoming an Advanced Rolfer — A Summary of the Road to Certification“).
One year and three months after putting it into words from a book, the procedure came from the side of the body.
In 2014 there was no name. In 2024 I said it with a name borrowed from a book. In 2025 it was shown as where to put the body and how. The same thing, three times, received from three different places.
There is one more thing here that appears nowhere else.
What 2025 gave was a way of cultivating neutrality. What this piece describes is the shape neutrality takes when it slips. Wanting to be of use, wanting to fix, wanting to use the skill. And the way information accumulates as you rely on the eyes, until what matters is lost.
The cultivating was taught. The slipping I had found on my own, in the room.