Tracing Energy Work (Part 3 of 3)
Introduction
Part 1, “What Does Energy Work Actually Address?,” took up what the word energy points to, and what the practitioner is actually doing. Part 2, “How Has Energy Been Treated Within Rolfing?,” traced the history within Rolfing. This part considers why Rolfing needs an energetic perspective, within its five taxonomies.
The map of the whole is “What Energy Work Is — Where the Word Points, and How It Entered Rolfing.”
The Five Taxonomies of Rolfing
Rolfing divides the ways into the body into five taxonomies: geometric, biomechanical, functional, psychobiological, and energetic (see “Principles and Observational Skills in Rolfing — Jeff Maitland’s Approach“).
These do not have separate aims. Whichever entrance you begin from, the work ends up addressing bodily structure and supporting the process by which the person adapts better within gravity. There is one destination and five entrances.
The energetic territory is the fifth. It is also the one that took longest to find language.
In Japan there is another significant current within it: the YIELD work that the Rolfing instructor Hiroyoshi Tahata has been exploring. The client yields themselves to the contact surface; a stable foundation forms, and change arises naturally from within.
Tahata is explicit that this is not a technique but an embodied state of awareness. It can be carried into any session, he says — structural work, movement, craniosacral. It is treated less as one item within the taxonomies than as something that runs across them.
What is interesting is that in describing this work, Tahata used the word energy hardly at all, saying instead the integrity of the system. He is exploring the energetic territory, and yet the language he uses to describe the work is drawn from a more bodily, systemic vocabulary.
I learned this work from Tahata in the Advanced Training in 2025 (see “Neutrality and Waiting for Change — Yield Work and Changes Between Sessions“). He has also taught hara and ma-ai — the interval held between two people — for the European Rolfing Association.
Tahata has also written about the taxonomy itself. What matters, he argues, is that the practitioner can stand without bias toward front or back, left or right, up or down. Neither crushed downward by gravity nor overstretched upward — and he sets this out in bodily and spatial terms. That inquiry, he holds, is Ray McCall’s significant contribution to the energetic taxonomy.
The territory that took longest to find language is being given the concrete language of the body and of space.
Why the Energetic Perspective Is Needed
In Parts 1 and 2 I looked at what energy work points to, and at how it has been placed within Rolfing. Why, then, does Rolfing need an energetic perspective at all?
In the 2008 exchange in the association’s journal, Bob Schrei states the reason plainly.
When he took the Advanced Training with Michael Salveson and Jeff Maitland, it became a subject of discussion that Rolfers were borrowing external systems — acupuncture, chi gung, chakras, biodynamics — to frame their own work. Learning a dozen energetic approaches and grabbing at them does not give you a ground for understanding Rolfing itself.
That led to a conversation about how Rolfing needed an energetic foundation, or energetic taxonomy, which was unique unto itself, in order for Rolfing to truly be a third-paradigm (holistic) approach.
Out of that came the idea that for Rolfing to be genuinely a third-paradigm — that is, holistic — approach, it needed an energetic foundation, or energetic taxonomy, of its own.
The third paradigm here is the third of the three paradigms set out by Jeff Maitland. The first is the relaxation paradigm, the second the corrective paradigm, and the third the holistic paradigm. I learned this framework in the Advanced Training in 2025, and have written about it in “What Is Holistic Healing? — Reexamining Through the Lens of “Paradigms”.”
In the holistic paradigm, the body is understood not as an assembly of parts but as a web of relationships in which everything affects everything else. The aim of intervention is not to fix the troubled part on its own but to help the order and harmony of the whole recover.
What Bob Schrei is pointing out is that if you claim to work with wholeness while leaving out the energetic dimension, the method is not holistic in any real sense.
Ray McCall puts the same thing more strongly:
Without the energetic, it would not matter whether we were accepted by the collective or not — we would no longer be practicing the holistic art of Rolfing.
Without the energetic, whether or not we are accepted by the scientific world ceases to matter — because at that point we are no longer practicing Rolfing as a holistic art.
Cut the energetic dimension away and Rolfing becomes one manual therapy among many, losing the wholeness it set out to work with. That is why the energetic perspective is needed.
To Answer the Three Questions
The need is not only a matter of principle. The perspective does practical work in a session.
In the Advanced Training, Ray McCall set out the three questions a Rolfer always faces on entering a session: where do we start, what do we do next, and when are we finished?
Scanning the energy field around the body with the hands, as in Source Point Therapy, can let you sense where the primary blocks or discontinuities are. More importantly, it gives you a clue to where the client’s body wants you to begin.
Rather than deciding the starting place by the practitioner’s analysis alone, you honor the starting place the body indicates. When you do, Ray McCall says, the session is consistently more effective — and this holds whether you are working within the set course of a Ten Series or doing non-formulaic advanced work.
We are trained to observe structure and movement and to analyze where the problem lies. But visible structure and movement do not necessarily indicate where the problem begins.
From the viewpoint of energetic medicine, energy always precedes structure and function. A movement pattern seen in the foot and lower leg, or a scoliotic pattern in the spine and ribcage, may in fact arise from an energetic blockage in the interosseous membrane of the forearm.
In other words, the visible problem and the principal factor producing it are not always in the same place. What is thwarting movement may lie not in the fascia, the biomechanics, or the nervous system, but in the energetic territory.
The energetic perspective does not deny structural or movement analysis. It adds another source of information for finding where to begin — something those methods alone do not readily reveal.
To Cultivate Perception
Jeff Maitland gives another reason: energy work develops the capacity to listen to the body.
To say that perception is everything would be an exaggeration, though not much of one. Energy work sharpens the practitioner’s perception. The better you can grasp what a client needs, the more precise your work becomes.
Maitland makes an important point here: a thwart in any one taxonomy will show up as a thwart in all of them.
Rolfing has five taxonomies — geometric, biomechanical, functional, psychobiological, and energetic. They do not exist separately; they are related to one another. So to the extent that you cannot read a client through one of them, your work through the others is limited by just that much.
Conversely, becoming able to read the energetic taxonomy raises the precision of your work through the other four. Whether you are working on structure and movement or addressing a symptom directly, you come to grasp more of the client as a whole.
In this sense, energy work is not for people with some special ability. It is also a training of perception, for handling all five taxonomies together.
What Makes Something Rolfing?
Once energetic work is placed within Rolfing, a question follows: what is Rolfing, and what is not?
Ray McCall recounts an anecdote about Emmett Hutchins asking Ida Rolf. Suppose the practitioner stands across the room and thinks of the psoas lengthening and the interosseous membrane opening. Suppose that change actually occurs, and the person becomes more integrated in gravity. Is that Rolfing? She thought for a while and said she thought so.
What this shows is that Rolfing is defined not by particular techniques but by its aims and results. Whether you use strong direct pressure, light contact, or work from a distance is not on its own a decisive criterion.
Ray McCall does set a limit, though. If you are going to use the methods of another system, you have to know when you are doing it. If you start singing a different song, you have a responsibility to tell the client.
And there is something to check at the end of a session. Is the body in a better relationship with gravity? Is gravity a resource that supports the body rather than a burden? That is where the judgment lies.
Words like energetic and spiritual are vague. But in Rolfing what is checked is not only what the word means, but how the relationship between body and gravity has changed as a result of the work. As long as there is a test, the vagueness of the word is not fatal.
The Same Subject, Through Different Entrances
The five taxonomies are not entirely separate from one another. Sometimes the same subject is addressed through different entrances. Trauma, karma, and emotion are the clearest examples.
In the psychobiological territory, Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing and Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory address the subject. The former follows, carefully, the response that remains in the body; the latter looks at how the autonomic nervous system answers safety and threat. I learned these in the basic Rolfing training (see “Trauma Stays in the Body, Not in the Event” and “The Face Makes Safety — Polyvagal Theory and the Two Vagus Nerves“).
Peter Levine is also one of those who studied directly with Ida Rolf. He took from her the relationship with gravity as the measure of bodily integration. He took posture as an expression of consciousness rather than appearance, and the habit of observing the body as tension, line, and flow rather than surface form. A representative figure of the psychobiological territory was a student of Rolfing’s founder. The taxonomies are lines drawn afterward; at the level of people, they cross.
The energetic territory addresses trauma, karma, and emotion as well. These three were what I learned in the final course of Source Point Therapy.
There, words that tend to be used loosely are given definitions again. Karma is used to mean volitional action, not reincarnation or past lives — not something already settled, but something that can be chosen again (see “The Fourth Day: How the Class Proceeds, and Karma as Volitional Action“).
A healthy state in emotion does not mean having only certain emotions. It means being able to move from one emotion to another without effort. Whether an emotion is good or bad is not the point, and it can be worked with even when its content is not understood in words (see “The Fifth Day: Approaching the Emotional Level, and Working at a Distance“).
With trauma, the details of the event are not asked for; there is no confronting it head-on and no re-experiencing. That what is addressed is not the event but what remains in the body is shared with the psychobiological methods. What differs is whether that response is followed or not (see “After Three Days: How Trauma Is Handled Within Energy Work, and Why Intent Matters“).
One destination and five entrances — this is part of what that means.
This is where the series ends. Where, and from whom, I learned energy work is written on the map.
The whole series is gathered in “What Energy Work Is — Where the Word Points, and How It Entered Rolfing.”
Tracing Energy Work
- Part 1 What Does Energy Work Actually Address?
- Part 2 How Has Energy Been Treated Within Rolfing?
- Part 3 Why Does Rolfing Need an Energetic Perspective? (this article)