Every Rolfing training session opens with something called Embodiment. It is a key word in cultivating bodily sensation. Looking Embodiment up in the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary gives:
a person or thing that represents or is a typical example of an idea or a quality
which in Japanese comes out as gugenka, “making concrete.”
On first encountering the word, no sense of what it meant came through at all. The experience of an Embodiment session simply did not connect with “making concrete.”
In an Embodiment session, the body moves. The theme of each session — the up-down, front-back, and left-right of upper body and lower, and the central axis taken up in Session 4 — is learned through movement, as a question of how these register within the body. What is interesting is that some of the movements imitate the movements of animals. The teaching covers, by way of evolutionary theory, how the axis developed, and lets the body remember that history as experience.
Asking Giovanni about the meaning of the word, his answer was that Embodiment becomes easier to grasp when taken as sensation (sense) or as experience.
Indeed, tracing the etymology of Embodiment (via the Online Etymology Dictionary):
- em: in
bodi: body
ment: a noun-forming suffix
which yields something like “to take in within the body.”
Becoming a Rolfer requires honing bodily sensation. Without having experienced that sensation within oneself, grasping what is happening inside a client’s body is difficult. This resembles the way a yoga teacher can only teach within the range of how much they have practiced themselves.
Embodiment, then, is best thought of as the work of taking sensation and experience in within the body. And the greater the number of experiences, the more body reading is refined.
Alongside the practice of manual technique — the training calls this the practicum — Embodiment is a pillar of Rolfing training. Cultivating bodily sensation in this manner is interesting to see.
Note, August 2026
This piece defines Embodiment as the work of taking sensation and experience in within the body. It was understood as the work of the receiving side.
Three years later, the word came to carry another meaning.
From July 2017 through December 2019 came the ERA Rolf Movement Practitioner certification training — an intensive course of thirty days under seven instructors (see “On the Path to Becoming a European Rolf Movement Practitioner — The Road to Certification“).
Embodiment there was something to design oneself and present to others. On days eight through eleven of Part I, each student created a ten-minute program and presented it in two groups of eight. On the final day of Part II, fifteen students each presented for ten minutes. And in Part III, how to run an Embodiment class became the subject: ten minutes in the first half, fifty minutes in the second, each built and delivered in front of everyone.
The formal title of Part III is “Introduction to Leading Rolfing Movement Groups” — the stage that covers how Rolf Movement is used in group lessons.
Among the points the instructor Rita Geirola raised for building a class: the teacher’s presence, the choice of words, the capacity to deal with group dynamics, and how the flow of the class is read — from the structural themes of individual students to the energetic level of the room as a whole (see “November 27 – December 1, 2019 (Second Half): What Homework Has Been Assigned? + How to Teach?“).
The understanding written here — that the greater the number of experiences, the more body reading is refined — had been extended there beyond a single body, to reading the room.
Embodiment began as the work of taking in within the body, and continued as the work of handing that on to others.