What Phenomenology Changes in Practice — Part 2 of 3
Ask an experienced practitioner why they worked where they did, and sometimes no answer comes back. They are not holding out on you. They genuinely do not have it in a form that can be explained. Pressed, all they can say is “can’t you see it?”
So how did that person come by it? And how do they hand it on to the next one?
In Part 1 I wrote about suspending judgment, waiting for what is to show itself, and giving up the stance of the onlooker. I also wrote about Rolfing’s five principles, and about the body and space.
Reading a book about swimming will not make you able to swim. You follow the reasoning. The arms go like this, the breath goes like that. Get in the water and you sink. It isn’t that you lack knowledge. It is that the body still knows nothing.
Reading phenomenology has something of the same in it. Understanding something, and actually changing how you experience, are two different things. Part 2 is about that distance. It is a criticism of what Part 1 said, and at the same time an answer to the first question: how can “Being” be taught?
Perception Doesn’t Happen Inside the Head
What I have looked at so far is phenomenology through Maitland. He is absent from this section alone, because cognitive science is not his lineage.
In 1991, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch published The Embodied Mind. Varela was a biologist and cognitive scientist; Thompson is a philosopher.
The mainstream cognitive science of the time treated mind as symbol manipulation. To get past that, they reached for phenomenology — which had already spent a century refining a way to treat lived experience in the first person.
But the book does not carry phenomenology forward. It sets out why phenomenology stopped where it did.
The Pragmatic Dimension Was Missing
Husserl said “to the things themselves”: bracket the assumptions of theory and describe experience itself. The three authors point out what was absent there.
Husserl’s turn toward experience and “the things themselves” was entirely theoretical, or, to make the point the other way around, it completely lacked any pragmatic dimension.
Describe, he said — but there was no trained procedure for doing it. So the natural attitude that was supposedly bracketed comes back inside the reflection.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that it could not overcome the rift between science and experience, for science, unlike phenomenological reflection, has a life beyond theory.
Science has a laboratory. A place outside theory where you move your hands and check. Phenomenology had none.
And they don’t stop the criticism at Husserl.
Indeed, this criticism would hold even for Heidegger’s existential phenomenology, as well as for Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of lived experience. Both stressed the pragmatic, embodied context of human experience, but in a purely theoretical way.
Everything written up to this point becomes the target of that criticism.
Wait for what is to show itself, we say. Touching and being touched are different, we say. All true, and saying it changes nothing. On Merleau-Ponty, the three write that science and phenomenology alike have always explained our concrete, embodied existence after the fact.
So what is needed?
What we are suggesting is a change in the nature of reflection from an abstract, disembodied activity to an embodied (mindful), open-ended reflection. By embodied, we mean reflection in which body and mind have been brought together.
And then this sentence.
…reflection is not just on experience, but reflection is a form of experience itself.
The discipline for doing this repeatedly is what the meditative traditions have refined over 2,500 years. Bring the missing practice in from there: that is their proposal.
This answers Part 1’s chapter on the principles. Maitland came to Rolfing from the side of Zen. Varela and his co-authors went from cognitive science toward meditation. Opposite directions, and the same meeting place.
Perception Is Action
The concept the book produced is enaction.
Our intention is to bypass entirely this logical geography of inner versus outer by studying cognition not as recovery or projection but as embodied action.
And the definition follows.
…the enactive approach consists of two points: (1) perception consists in perceptually guided action and (2) cognitive structures emerge from the recurrent sensorimotor patterns that enable action to be perceptually guided.
Perception is not receiving. It is action.
The same thing is said on the Rolfing side. Newton’s 1995 article has it that perception is a form of intentionality, a movement in a direction. In 1991 and in 1995, the same thing was written in two separate places.
Perception has a page of its own (Perception as a Way of Seeing — What Is Rolfing Actually Looking At?).
Not an Event Inside the Brain Alone
Alva Noë took it a step further. Perception doesn’t happen inside the brain. The body’s exchange with the world is itself perception. Digestion is not an event inside the stomach alone, and seeing is not an event inside the brain alone.
This reaches the table directly. To change a client’s perception, you don’t have to work on the head. Change the exchange between body and world, and perception changes. Change how the soles meet the floor, and what they see changes.
Thompson has drawn one line from 1991 to the present as Varela’s co-author. In The Blind Spot (with Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser), he asks this: can science do without human experience?
It cannot, is the answer. Every measurement and every theory begins somewhere that someone is experiencing. Forget that, and you have science’s blind spot.
Here Mach comes back, from the first section of Part 1. The one who dropped an assumption no one had ever seen — absolute space — and began again from what appears to the senses. A century later, cognitive science returned to the same location.
From the Study of Movement
One more person came in by another door. Edward Reed brought the phenomenological view into movement research. Reed wrote that movement studied apart from its context cannot be applied to rehabilitation.
At the root of every action system, he says, are lying, sitting and standing. And at the root of those, a relationship with the gravitational field has to be established.
That layer is exactly what Rolfing works with.
All I Can Get My Hands On Is Physical
What the Hands Can Reach
Many names have come up so far. Last, I want to write about the person who made Rolfing.
Ida Rolf (1896-1979) lived at nearly the same time as Merleau-Ponty. She started as a biochemist and turned toward the structure of the body.
She said this.
Only thing that I can get hands on is physical.
It isn’t that she refused to deal with anything but the body. At the association’s 1974 annual meeting she spoke of wanting to see what happens in the energy field within and around a person when structure is organized, and how behavior changes alongside it. Change in structure, change in field, change in behavior — she took them as one continuous phenomenon.
What her hands could reach was the body, so she entered through the body. It reads as being that simple.
Gravity as Support
And on gravity. Among the words of Ida Rolf that Maitland quotes is this.
Yoga as it is taught today does not go far enough. The body organized through yoga achieves joint mobility but does not consciously recognize and seek out the gravity field as its basic supportive factor.
Whether gravity can be used as support rather than as load. The whole of Ida Rolf’s work hangs on this.
And it points to the same thing as palintonos. Supported by the ground while extending upward. Both holding at once.
Can Seeing Be Taught?
Thrown into the Water
The hardest thing in Rolfing is not touching but seeing. Let me return to the scene at the opening. An experienced practitioner cannot explain why they worked where they did. Asked, all they can say is “can’t you see it?”
This is not Rolfing’s problem alone. Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus set out skill acquisition as five stages, and wrote that at the last stage a person has stopped following rules. The expert sees the situation as a whole and moves. So they cannot say, in the form of a rule, why they did what they did. The practitioner who can only answer “can’t you see it?” is at that stage.
And the question the Dreyfus brothers ran into was the same one. How do you teach what cannot be explained by rules?
▶ Rethinking Embodiment and Skill Acquisition Through Artificial Intelligence — a three-part series. Part 1 is the five stages of skill; Part 2 reads eleven years of training back through those five stages
Ida Rolf’s way of teaching, it is said, was to throw people into the water. Swim or sink. Afterwards, the association tried to fill the gap by building a system. Some, like Peter Schwind, answered that if you refine the precision of your touch you will get there even without seeing.
Maitland had a fourth answer. He built an exercise for seeing.
The result is a simple three-step exercise based upon insights I gained from years of practicing Zen, Rolfing Structural Integration (Rolfing SI), philosophy, and phenomenology. But, by far and away, the most potent insight came from Goethe and the way of seeing he called “exact sensorial imagination.”
And the one who taught that workshop with him was Ray McCall — one of my instructors in the 2025 Advanced Training.
The First of the Three Steps
The exercise goes like this.
What Goethe set out had two steps. One is active seeing: quiet the verbal, analytic mind and turn attention to the senses. The other is exact sensorial imagination: close your eyes and reproduce what you have just taken in, in imagination and in your own body.
And then you go back and forth between the two. Look, close, picture, look again, add what was missing, correct what was distorted. Repeat until the other person’s wholeness emerges.
Maitland added one step — and made it the first.
…before you do anything else, your very first act must be to shift your orientation or intentionality from an onlooker experiencing the world through abstractions of the analytic/verbal mind to becoming a participant in the lived perception of the world.
This step alone has to be sustained through the whole process. The other two alternate; this one can’t be set down.
Maitland writes that the shift itself is already an intervention — that it can produce change on its own. And that when Ida Rolf spoke of becoming one with the client, this shift was what she meant.
The question set at the opening of Part 1 gets its answer here.
In Part 1 I wrote that with “Being,” it isn’t clear how to teach it. Maitland made it the first step of a procedure. Not inspirational talk, not a technique either, but built into an exercise.
Without a Concept, Nothing Is Seen
Maitland describes an experiment about seeing. There is a drawing that looks like a meaningless collection of blotches. Look for a giraffe in it, and a giraffe appears.
No lines were added to the drawing, nothing about it changed. What changed was that you acquired the appropriate concept of giraffe. … But notice it was not there in advance of your seeing it.
Which returns us to the opening question.
A name makes the body in front of you invisible. And without a name, nothing is visible at all. By the same working that lets “torn muscle” narrow the field, the concept of a giraffe brings a giraffe out of the drawing.
Suspending judgment is not discarding concepts. It is holding them without being taken over by them. Having them, and not using them. That is different from having none to begin with.
And the Hands?
So far I have written about seeing. But this is work done with the hands.
Recall the difference between touching and being touched. Touching is an act of will; being touched is an act of allowing. And allowing is neither active nor passive.
Seeing has the same structure. Going out to look is not enough. You have to stand at the same time on the side that allows what is to show itself. The activity of looking for a giraffe, and the waiting for something to come out of the drawing, happen at once.
And this, I think, is palintonos. Stretched-back-and-forth harmony. Active and passive held as the right tension between two poles, rather than collapsed into either one. The same shape as a body supported by the ground while extending upward.
Enaction’s claim that perception is action says the same thing. Neither receiving nor projecting. The exchange itself is perception.
The Phenomenon Comes First, the Name After
In what I wrote in 2015, the phrase “what is strange is…” shows up again and again. Things I couldn’t explain, and that were certainly happening. Ten years later, in the Advanced Training, some of them received names. Neutral, and a procedure for cultivating it.
The phenomenon comes first, and the name after.
Maitland writes the same thing. Closing a 2007 paper, he recalls asking his Zen teacher how one heals people, and remembers how simple the answer was: become one with the other person. And he adds:
he is astonished at how many words it took to arrive there.
This piece is more of those words. Reading it changes nothing. But without names, you can’t see what is happening either.
▶ Part 3: A Body Is Not the Sum of Its Parts — Where Phenomenology and Gestalt Psychology Diverged
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.