What Phenomenology Changes in Practice — Part 1 of 3
Introduction
Technique in bodywork can be learned. Where to make contact, in what order to work, what to assess. The list of procedures can always be extended.
And then, past a certain point, it stops taking you further. The same procedure, and what happens differs from person to person. The same practitioner, and it differs from day to day.
What is at issue there is not technique. It is the way the practitioner is present — their “Being.”
This is not particular to bodywork. I also work as a coach, and the same thing happens there. How many questioning techniques you have matters less than how you are; that is what settles the quality of a conversation.
So what is “Being,” exactly? And how would you deepen it?
This is where the hand stops. Technique can be taught as a sequence of steps. With “Being,” it isn’t clear how to teach it at all. Turn it into inspirational talk and you have said nothing.
There is a field that has worked on this question for a hundred years. Phenomenology.
How a person takes in the world. What they assume before they take anything in. How those assumptions might be set aside, even once. What phenomenology has dealt with is exactly the side of “Being.”
And Rolfing turned out to be connected to this field more deeply than I had thought.
In August 2014, my basic Rolfing training began in Germany. The names of philosophers kept coming up in class. Descartes, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Goethe. Phenomenology, structuralism, Gestalt.
I had come to learn how to work with the body. Why any of this was there, I did not understand.
Eleven years later, in 2025, I took the Advanced Training. Much of the framework I received there came from one person: Jeffrey Maitland. A tenured professor of philosophy, a Zen monk, and a Certified Advanced Rolfer.
Names I had only known separately fell into a single line.
This piece is the record of tracing that line backwards. How a practitioner sees the body in front of them. Not descending from philosophy, but starting on the table and climbing toward the concepts.
I am writing for people who do the same work. Though I hope it can also be read by those who receive sessions. What is being done to you in a session isn’t something you can learn by asking about the steps. Where the practitioner is seeing from is closer to what is actually happening.
Suspending Judgment
Setting an Assumption Aside
Let me begin with physics.
Newtonian mechanics rested on two assumptions: absolute space and absolute time. A container of a world exists first, and things move inside it. Space itself is there even with nothing in it. Time itself flows even when nothing happens. That foundation was taken to underwrite the motion of things.
But nobody has ever seen space itself. What we can measure is always a relation between one thing and another. The train moves relative to the platform. The platform stays still relative to the ground. The ground moves relative to the sun. Nobody can say “moving relative to space itself.” There is nothing to point at as the other term.
So Ernst Mach (1838-1916) set it aside. It makes no sense, the reasoning goes, to put at the base of a theory something that never shows up in any observation. What remains is what appears to the senses, and the relations among those appearances.
Einstein started from there and built relativity.
Drop the assumption, and what can be seen changes.
A Name Makes Things Invisible
The same shape shows up on the table.
Eleven years ago I wrote about a book by the Noh performer Noboru Yasuda (“Karada” Once Meant a Corpse — The Japanese View of the Body, and Rolfing). In Japanese, hiza (“knee”) covered everything from the kneecap to the top of the thigh, and kata (“shoulder”) reached from the acromion up toward the neck. Where anatomy sees the body as points, a certain coarseness was basic to the Japanese language of the body.
Then comes the example of a torn muscle.
A single name takes over. How the body is felt drops out of view, and treatment aimed at that name begins. What gets forgotten is the particular situation in front of you — this person’s leg.
Drop the name, and the body in front of you becomes visible. The same shape as what Mach did in physics.
Epoché as a Procedure
This gesture of setting something aside has a name on the philosophical side. Epoché — the suspension of judgment. Bracket what a theory assumes, and begin from what appears in experience.
The one who established this as a method was Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), called the father of phenomenology. Before him stood Franz Brentano (1838-1917), who identified intentionality: consciousness is always consciousness of something.
Brentano was a philosopher, and he also played an important part in the history of psychology. In 1874 he wrote Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint.
Psychology at the time was trying to become physics. Treat the mind the way matter is treated: break it into elements, find the laws by which the elements combine, put numbers on them. Wilhelm Wundt opening his experimental psychology laboratory in Leipzig in 1879 belongs to that line. It was taken for granted that nothing else would count as science.
Brentano objected. There is one decisive difference between matter and mind. The mind is always about something. Seeing is seeing something; fearing is fearing something. A stone, however far you go with it, is not about anything. This is the intentionality just named.
Break the mind into elements and measure it, and the “about” drops out. The method makes invisible the very thing that makes mind mind. So he chose to describe mental activity itself rather than divide it and measure it. That is what “from an empirical standpoint” meant in his title.
Borrow the method of physics, and the essential part of mind goes out of view. This is the mirror image of Mach in the earlier section. Mach took out of physics what never appears in observation. Brentano kept the method of physics out of psychology. Opposite directions, and both are about what a framework makes invisible.
Freud sat in on his lectures, and his thought also fed into the formation of Gestalt psychology.
And Husserl himself named the forerunner of this method. At the opening of his 1928 Amsterdam Lectures he describes how the new science called phenomenology came about: by radicalizing a phenomenological method that a few natural scientists and psychologists had already demanded and used before him. The ones who were conscious of that method, he says, were Mach and the physiologist Ewald Hering. What drove them was a revolt against building theory out of concept formation divorced from intuition, and out of mathematical speculation (Husserliana IX, p. 302).
The Mach who dropped absolute space in the first section comes back here as the forerunner of phenomenology. It was not merely the same shape.
This particular lineup is Maitland’s. In his 2016 book Embodied Being: The Philosophical Roots of Manual Therapy, he names Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Goethe as the ones who advanced phenomenology. And he defines phenomenology this way.
Phenomenology turns the tables on the Cartesian worldview by embracing experience as it is lived and not as it is thought about later in reflection.
And also this.
There is plenty of theory associated with phenomenology, but it is more a method for how to attend to experience than a theory of experience.
Not a theory, but a method. For someone whose work is the body, that difference is large.
Aline Newton, who organized the theory behind Rolfing, wrote this in her 1995 article “Basic Concepts in the Theory of Hubert Godard” (Rolf Lines, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, March 1995, pp. 32-43), after touching on phenomenology.
Even when pain brings our attention to a particular area or muscle, still we do not experience ourselves as a collection of nerve impulses, muscle fiber contractions, or sidebends and rotations.
What can be described in the language of anatomy and what the person is experiencing are two different things. The practitioner is dealing with the second.
Taught in the Form of Prohibitions
Much of what I was taught in the second half of the basic training came as prohibitions. Don’t judge. Don’t point things out. At the time I couldn’t see why it had to be phrased that way.
In the 2025 Advanced Training I received the term Kind Indifference. Not cold indifference, but keeping a distance. The osteopath Jim Jealous was quoted as well. Observe, but don’t become part of the story.
Each of these says, in its own way, to suspend judgment.
Waiting for What Is to Show Itself
It Has Already Begun in the Engagement
Once judgment is suspended, what then?
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) pushed Husserl’s method toward the side of the world. A human being does not survey the world and then engage with it. We have already begun in the engagement.
The example of the hammer is well known. While it is being used well, the hammer has disappeared from awareness. Only when it breaks and leaves the hand does it appear as an object. Skilled engagement comes before theoretical recognition.
Maitland states this position in a single sentence.
You have to give up your stance as an onlooker/bystander in order to let what is show itself to you.
This is Heidegger’s definition of phenomenology itself — letting what shows itself be seen from itself, just as it shows itself. Maitland rewrites it as a procedure for the session.
…shift your orientation from trying to accomplish results and evaluating structure to an orientation of allowing what is to show itself. You simply get out of the way by expanding your perceptual field, dropping your self, and opening a loving space.
In the 2025 Advanced Training, this was taught as waiting for “what is” to show itself. What had been written in a 2016 book had reached the classroom nine years later.
Intention, and Intentionality
Then there is the matter of intention.
Among practitioners you often hear that intention matters more than technique. Maitland argued that the claim doesn’t hold. Intention and intentionality are being confused.
Intentionality is how the practitioner is turned toward the world — their “Being.” Intention is only one of its forms. Daydreaming, anger, fear, problem-solving, perceiving: all of them are forms of intentionality.
So intention is a kind of technique, and its effect depends on intentionality. To say intention matters more than technique is to say that technique matters more than technique.
Intentionality matters more than intention, and more than technique. That was the conclusion (I wrote about it in The Difference Between Intention and Intentionality – Understanding Neutrality – AT-1 (4)).
Zen Arrived by Three Routes
Maitland was also a Zen monk. His teacher was Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi.
For me, Zen arrived by three routes.
The first is family. Our grave is at Gotokuji in Setagaya, a Soto Zen temple. I didn’t come to it by setting out to learn it; it was there first. In 2000, the year my father died, I visited Eiheiji.
The second is Shunryu Suzuki’s book, which I read on my own. When I picked it up, I wasn’t aware that it belonged to the same stream.
The third came through as an institution. From Sasaki Roshi to Maitland, from Maitland to Ray McCall, and into the classroom in 2025.
The first was the last one I noticed.
That said, heavy criticism would later be directed at this position of Heidegger’s. I take that up in Part 2.
Principles as Qualities to Discern
Not Procedures, but Qualities
Rolfing has five principles. Wholism, Support, Adaptability, Palintonicity, Closure.
Ida Rolf did not formulate them. After the association split in 1989, Maitland and Jan Sultan made them while teaching advanced classes together. Michael Salveson later added the corrections that were needed. Maitland says so himself.
I was taught them during the basic training in 2014-2015 (Phase III (12) — The Five Principles). I received the same five again in the 2025 Advanced Training (Principles and Observational Skills in Rolfing — Jeff Maitland’s Approach).
At the time I took them as something like a procedure. Which to look at first, in what order to apply them. That wasn’t it.
Maitland’s principles prescribe neither a mechanical order of priority nor a tool of intervention. They are qualities for discerning whether something is already present, or whether it still needs to be evoked.
The principles settle not what you do, but what you look for. Here they connect with the two preceding chapters. When you suspend judgment and wait for what is to show itself, you need a frame to receive whatever appears. The principles are that frame.
Of the five, only Palintonicity is an unfamiliar word — it isn’t in the English dictionary either. Maitland coined it. He introduced it in 1991 in “The palintonic lines of Rolfing” (Rolf Lines, Vol. 19, No. 1), and formulated it as a principle the following year with Sultan in “Definition and principles of Rolfing” (Vol. 20, No. 2).
There Was No English for Spannung
The starting point was Spannung, a German word Ida Rolf liked to use. Tension, heightening, stretch, span. It works for a guitar string in good tune, and for a tensional structure like a suspension bridge or a human body. It also works for intense attention, for aesthetic contemplation, for the quality a body shows in the middle of meditation.
No single English word held all of that. So Maitland went looking, and arrived at ancient Greece — a fragment of Heraclitus (c. 500 BCE).
They do not apprehend how in differing with itself it is brought to agree with itself: stretched-back-and-forth harmony like that of the bow and lyre.
The Greek behind “stretched-back-and-forth” is palintonos. Palin means “back and forth” or “returning”; tonos is the root of the English tone, used for musical pitch, for muscular tonus, and for emotional tone alike.
Heraclitus, Not Plato
Maitland then draws a contrast with Plato.
Plato looked for freedom in the denial of earth and body — an eternal, unchanging realm not of this world. Heraclitus did not. Harmony is found not by denying one pole, but in the right tension between both.
Harmony results when the poles which constitute the opposition are held in a unified balance. “Palintonos” means, therefore, “unity of opposition” or “oppositional balance.”
Tension requires opposition. Without opposition, no harmony.
Maitland sets Zhuangzi alongside this.
Can a man cling only to heaven / And know nothing of earth? / They are correlative: to know one / Is to know the other. / To refuse one / To refuse both.
Here phenomenology and the East arrive at the same location. That Heidegger questioned the framework running from Plato onward, that Heraclitus stood before Plato, and that Zhuangzi said the same thing in other words — all of it lands in one section.
About the Standing Body
And what the word points to is the standing human body.
Most animals orient themselves in time and space with the spine parallel to the ground. Humans don’t. Feet on the earth, head lifted toward the sky. Supported by the ground while extending upward. Both holding at once — that is what palintonos names.
This is what Rolfing calls bidirectionality (Bidirectionality (Palintonicity)).
The Body Is in Space, and Space Is in the Body
The Body Is Not What Gets Perceived
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) took up head-on the body itself, which Heidegger had left thin.
The body is not the object that gets perceived; it is the side that perceives. We have the world through the body. Before we think, the body already knows what it “can do.”
Body Schema Is Not Merleau-Ponty’s Term
A correction belongs here.
It is sometimes written that Merleau-Ponty proposed the concept of the body schema. I have written that myself. It isn’t correct.
The body schema originates in a 1911 paper by the neurologists Henry Head and Gordon Holmes. The body image was presented by Paul Schilder in 1935. The two came out of different lineages and were paired only afterwards. Merleau-Ponty (1945) took an existing neurological concept over to the phenomenological side.
There is a personal history to this correction. In 2014, in the earliest phase of the basic training, a paper by Shaun Gallagher and Jonathan Cole was handed out. It was written precisely to sort out the confusion between these two terms. A chronology came with it, with 1911 and 1935 spelled out.
I didn’t read it. And without having read it, I later wrote on the subject.
Maitland is explicit about what he received from Merleau-Ponty.
At the end of the thread I discovered the sentient (self-sensing) body uncovered first by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In time I realized that what I was calling “the sentient body” was a clear example of consciousness as a somatic event.
Consciousness and body stop being two mutually exclusive kinds. The framework inherited from Descartes gives way here.
Touching, and Being Touched
On touch there is a passage in the other book, Spacious Body: Explorations in Somatic Ontology (1994). For anyone who works with their hands, I think it is decisive.
Touching is an act of will, a movement out and away from yourself designed to accomplish a certain end. … Being touched is not an act of will; it is an act of allowing.
And allowing, he continues, is neither active nor passive.
Things contact other things—just because your body is in contact with hers is no guarantee that she is being touched.
Being in contact and touching are not the same. If the other person isn’t allowing it, the hand is merely resting on a body.
“Where You Are” Comes First
Which brings us to space.
Erwin Straus (1891-1975), a German-born neurologist and phenomenologist, made “the upright human posture” the starting point of his philosophy. He fled the Nazis for the United States and spent thirty-eight years at a veterans hospital. In her 1995 article, Newton quotes his paper “Upright Posture” at length three times.
First, on environment.
Men and mice do not have the same environment, even if they share the same room. Environment is not a stage with the scenery set as one and the same for all actors who make their entrance. Each species has its own environment.
And standing upright, he continues, is not a question of mechanics.
Upright posture preestablishes a definite attitude toward the world; it is a specific mode of being in the world.
One more passage has stayed with me for a long time.
While the heart continues to beat from its fetal beginning to death without our active intervention and while breathing neither demands nor tolerates our voluntary interference beyond narrow limits, upright posture remains a task throughout our lives.
Standing is never finished. Every morning you take it up again. Straus adds that gravity is never fully overcome, and that upright posture keeps its character of counteraction, continually demanding our activity and attention.
And on the body schema, he says this.
The body scheme is not so much a concept or image that a person has of his own body as it is an ensemble of directions and demarcations—directions in which we reach out toward the world and demarcations that we encounter in contact with the world.
The space of the body doesn’t end at the skin. We cast the reach of our senses out into the space around us.
Hubert Godard, who built the theory behind Rolf Movement, called his account of space Phenomenological Space in a 2005 interview. He said that is what the chapter should have been titled.
The body is not merely in space. Space is also in the body. Godard looked at scoliosis not as a problem in the shape of a spine, but as a problem in that person’s space.
The same has to be said about Merleau-Ponty. Criticism has been directed at him too, the one who took the body head-on. That also comes in Part 2.
I plan to write on this subject separately, as a series.
That is Part 1. Suspend judgment and wait for what is to show itself. The principles settle not what you do but what you look for. The body is in space, and space is in the body.
But the question set at the opening still has no answer. How can “Being” be taught? And what has been written so far has had criticism directed straight at it. Part 2 begins with that criticism.
▶ Part 2: Can Seeing Be Taught? — The Pragmatic Dimension Phenomenology Lacked
This article is the main text behind Where Does Your “Being” Come From? — Phenomenology for Bodyworkers. The articles that take up the subjects touched on here are gathered there, group by group.