Introduction
So far I have written about reading through 540 articles, and about how nothing can be cut without a standard. This time I want to write about what happened in the reading, and about what cannot be cut even so.
The Ones I Keep Get a Note from Now
Where a piece is being kept, I write a note at the end of it. The headings read “Note, August 2026” and “Note, September 2026,” and what goes under them is how what I wrote eleven years ago looks from here. There are 230 of them as of 14 September 2026.
Writing them, I began to notice the same shapes coming round again.
The commonest is that the thing comes first and the name comes later. A record from 2014 says that such and such happened. Not knowing what it was called, I could only set down what had occurred.
Take the word neutral. I first met it in coaching, before I knew anything about Rolfing. It appears twice in my record of the basic training, and both times I am writing about a state of mind. Then in the advanced training in 2025 it arrived as Neutral and Shape the Hand — a procedure for how to use one’s own body. The same word, learned several times over, and the meaning had shifted.
It also runs the other way: the word arrives first and the substance fills in afterwards, written down when it was taught but taking ten years to become mine. Hubert Godard’s Tonic Function is one. I understood the reasoning early enough. What I came to understand through the sessions themselves was the larger part.
And some are not resolved. A question raised at the time, on which more material has since arrived and the view has shifted, but no answer has come. Those notes stay as they are.
Reading Back, It Was My Memory That Was Wrong
What surprised me most in the reading was finding that I had misremembered something I wrote myself.
There is a piece called “Training Phase I — On Letting Go, and the First Day,” a record of the opening day of the training. In a summary written later, I had said that what I was taught on the first day was letting go.
I checked the original. It said something else. Letting go referred to the state I was in before the training began, having decided to leave my job and spend a year out of the country. The first day itself was mostly introductions.
Given eleven years, it is the memory that moves. Reading back turned out to be, among other things, the work of setting memory against the record.
Some Things Cannot Be Cut
Taken one at a time, most pieces can go. What is here is in another piece as well; the later explanation is better made. That much can be said of nearly anything.
And yet some cannot.
Set what I was taught in the advanced training in 2025 beside what I was taught in the basic training in 2014, and it separates into what has been understood and what has not.
To be concrete: the European line has Hubert Godard’s Tonic Function, a way of understanding how the body answers gravity. I learned it between 2014 and 2019. The advanced training on the American side has another body of thought altogether, Jeffrey Maitland’s principles and taxonomies.
It is not that no one ever crossed between them. In 2013 there was a gathering of teachers working with the subtler end of the work, and both of the people who would go on to teach me in the advanced training were part of it. The contact was there.
Even so, Tonic Function as a body of thought has not carried over to the Maitland side. What carried was one anatomical landmark, the transverse axis of the hips. It is not that the absence of contact kept it from carrying. There was contact, and it still did not carry.
Only someone holding both records can say that. The record of what I received in Europe eleven years ago and the record of what I received in Japan now sit on the same site, which is what makes the observation possible. Delete one side and the relation itself goes. Sometimes what a piece is worth lies not inside the piece but between it and another. That is what I have watched for most closely in this work.
Not Working to the Number
The figure I have in mind is four hundred or fewer in each language. But I have no intention of working to it. If reaching four hundred means dropping something that should stay, the point of the exercise is gone.
Cutting is not for the sake of a smaller number. It is so that what someone needs is easier to find. A site with 540 articles on it is, from the writing side, an accumulation. To someone arriving for the first time, it is a place with no way in.
On the English Side, the Number Is Going Up
Alongside the cutting, the opposite is going on.
Pieces without an English version are getting one. There were about 170; there are now more than four hundred.
This is not translation. An explanation written for readers in Japan does not reach beyond it as it stands. Place names, magazine titles, book titles — none of them land without something added. And conversely, things that need no explanation in Japanese need a long one in English.
So the same piece takes a different shape in each language. There are paragraphs in the English that are not in the Japanese, and the other way round.
Different readers need different things. What to cut and what to add come, in the end, from the same place.
Conclusion
This piece has been about what the reading turned up, and about what cannot be cut even so.
Next time, once the new site is live, I want to write about what has changed.