This is the fifth of six pieces in the Body and Mind series. The series was written across the periods of Phase II and Phase III of the Rolfing Basic Training. This piece was written during Phase III, looking back on the Polyvagal Theory taken up in Phase II.
Following on from last time, I would like to take up Polyvagal Theory (see “The Face Makes Safety — Polyvagal Theory and the Two Vagus Nerves.“). There I touched on the three nervous systems a human being holds: the newer vagal system (involved in psychological distance and sociality), the sympathetic system (involved in Fight/Flight), and the older vagal system (involved in Freeze), each standing above the next in a hierarchy.
Porges calls the grasping of the world through these three systems Neuroception — perception by way of the neuron (Porges SW et al, Zero to Three, May 2013). What draws attention to this account is that where Neuroception runs into difficulty, disorders of the nervous system are thought more likely to appear.
An example.
When a child is placed in a new environment or meets a complete stranger, the nervous system responds at the moment the situation is felt to be dangerous, a threat to life. In fact, even where the brain registers no danger, the body may respond regardless — the heart rate rising, a shiver passing through.
Switching off this defensive response (also called Fight/Flight) and entrusting oneself to another in safety is what switches on the sociality mode, Social engagement. This is among the roles of the newer vagal system, and for it, two things are carried out spontaneously: assessing risk, and, on registering the environment as safe, switching off Fight/Flight and Freeze.
A note on Freeze is needed, though.
The freezing this column has taken up (see “Trauma Stays in the Body, Not in the Event — What Happens in the Deep Sessions“) can also work to a person’s benefit. In conception, in the birth of a child, in raising a child, and in forming social bonds, a state close to Freeze is said to arise — immobilization (mobilize, to move, with the negating im).
In this case it becomes a state of immobilization without fear, and it developed out of the Freeze that turns lethal so as to be usable in building social bonds. The brain came in time to carry receptors for it, and oxytocin, secreted at the birth and raising of a child, is now known to be released. This substance is secreted when social bonds are being supported as well. Where danger is registered nearby, however, it is not.
As touched on last time, control of the nervous system governing the facial muscles matters in building social bonds too —
- making eye contact
- inflection and rhythm entering the voice
- expression appearing on the face
- the working of the middle ear being regulated so as to separate a human voice from the sound behind it
Where the situation is felt to be dangerous, a threat to life, the force in the facial muscles weakens: the eyelids lower, inflection leaves the voice, emotional expression in the face grows thin, attention to human voices decreases, and sensitivity in matters of sociality falls off. Worth noting is that a situation being dangerous, a threat to life, may arise from two kinds of factor — external (a stranger, a dangerous scene) and internal (fever, pain, physical illness).
What, then, is thought to occur where the Neuroception described so far runs into difficulty? Porges gives such examples as these: in schizophrenia and autism, activity is absent in the temporal lobe, thought to inhibit the functions of Fight/Flight and Freeze; and patients with anxiety disorders or depression show a failure to regulate heart rate, along with thin emotional expression in the face.
What is interesting is that in Porges’s laboratory, results are being achieved with autistic patients whose Neuroception runs into difficulty in some form, through active intervention in the nervous system governing the face and head, the working of the middle ear in particular.
For my own part, Polyvagal Theory strikes me as worth knowing in understanding the relation of body and mind, and further in facing a client in Rolfing. As described throughout, the expression of the face gives more information than expected. I would like to keep watching this theory.
Note, August 2026
This piece handles a reversal within freezing. The lethal Freeze, and the immobilization without fear that forms bonds. The same stillness, with the meaning turned around. Ten years later, that distinction would appear as technique.
Change arises through yielding
Among the pieces of work taken up in the 2025 Advanced Training was YIELD work. Hiroyoshi Tahata developed it through his own exploration, drawing on the influence of Rebecca Carli-Mills and Carol Agneessens in the course of qualifying as a Rolf Movement Instructor (see “Journey to Becoming an Advanced Rolfer — A Summary of the Road to Certification“).
With the client resting on the table — face up, face down, on the side — a neutral place is found, the 1st Position, and remaining there works on the client’s system.
The principle lies in the client yielding to the surface of contact on lying face up on the massage table. As with anchoring in molecular cell biology — the substrate for adherent cells — change from within occurs naturally only once a stable foundation is in place.
Remaining. Yielding. Not moving becomes the condition for change.
This is the same structure as the immobilization without fear described in this piece. Only in a state where no danger is registered does stillness work on the side of bonds and of change. Where danger is present, that same stillness becomes the lethal Freeze.
Which is why the practitioner setting the field is required. What matters, it was explained, is that transformation arises through the practitioner ordering the field. Where there is no safety, yielding does not occur.
What was read as theory in 2015 had been handed over, ten years on, as procedure.
The middle ear, a small detail
This piece holds two fine-grained notes. The working of the middle ear being regulated so as to separate a human voice from the sound behind it. And results being achieved in Porges’s laboratory with autistic patients through intervention in the nervous system governing the face and head, the middle ear in particular.
The middle ear sits within the temporal bone. So does the inner ear.
In Session 7, working with the head and face, one of the principal aims was the vestibular sense, which adjusts the balance with gravity (see “Session 7: The Head and the Face“). Within the same bone sit the organ of equilibrium and the organ that sorts sound. The former bears on posture, the latter on sociality. Session 7 is carried out at a position where either may be touched.
And the intervention in the middle ear this piece describes as work in a laboratory had, ten years later, been established as a procedure.
The Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP). Developed by Porges on the basis of Polyvagal Theory, it uses specially filtered music to regulate the autonomic nervous system. Its aim is to strengthen the ventral vagal complex by way of an approach through hearing.
The key lies in the middle ear muscles, the stapedius and the tensor tympani. In a state of fight-or-flight, or of freeze, these muscles become chronically tense or inactive. The human voice grows harder to make out, and ambient sound becomes noise. The filtered music restores elasticity and plasticity to the middle ear muscles. This is not training in hearing; it is a bringing of the nervous system into safety.
The line in this piece — the working of the middle ear being regulated so as to separate a human voice from the sound behind it — turns out to be the principle of the technique itself.
Since December 2025 I have been receiving SSP with Takami Kamata, a Rolfer working in Frankfurt (see “The Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP) and Polyvagal Theory — a Reunion with Takami Kamata“). What a week of it brought was a sense of the balance between left and right inner ear — not a balance worked out in the head, but one available in fine detail as bodily sensation.
The vestibular sense was learned in the Basic Training as one of the three elements of posture (see “Phase II (21) — The Three Elements of Posture: Visual, Vestibular, and Kinesthetic“). Session 7 handles it from the side of the fascia; SSP handles it from the side of hearing.
There is one further point of design worth noting. SSP requires over-ear headphones with noise cancellation switched off. What is being cultivated is not a safety that shuts the world out, but a nervous system that can feel safe within the world.
The hierarchy this piece sets out explains why. The newer vagal system works upon registering the environment as safe. Shut the environment out, and there is nothing left to register. Without safety within connection, the upper system does not develop.
On reading expression
This piece ends with the following line.
“The expression of the face gives more information than expected.”
It was written in the context of what is worth knowing in facing a client.
In the 2025 Advanced Training, what Jeff Maitland stressed most was training the capacity to see. Not mere looking, but listening to the body with the whole of the sensory apparatus — gathering information through the Somatic Sensorium. Ray McCall likewise spoke of observation as receiving with the entire body.
The observation in this piece still stands at the stage of the eyes. Its framework is one of reading a visual signal, the expression.
Eleven years later, that framework itself had been called into question. The direction, though, is not denial. Drawing information from expression is right; touch, hearing, and interoception are added to it. It is an expansion.
What was being seen in writing that the face gives a great deal of information was the entrance to the Somatic Sensorium.