In the Rolfing training, there is a great deal to learn about how feedback is given to another person and how it is received from them. Of every training I have taken part in so far, this one has taught the giving and receiving of feedback in the most concrete terms. That comes from having specific guidelines, and from learning the method directly from Giovanni Felicioni.
Why feedback matters in Rolfing is that grasping how wide a gap lies between what I felt and what the other person felt is essential to refining the work.
Guidelines on feedback were handed out during the Rolfing training, adapted from material by the Rolfing instructor Monica Caspari and drawn from Marshall B. Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication. The thinking behind them runs like this: where the receiver consistently discounts or rejects what is offered, nothing can be gained from the learning environment, and what remains is a loop of reaction feeding reaction. Where what is conveyed is useful and the receiver can make use of it, learning takes place, and things move into a responsive flow of dialogue.
In summary, the guidelines run as follows.
On giving feedback
- Orient yourself in the world. Listen to your body. Participate with your whole body.
- Open to your Felt Sense.
- Intend to be of benefit to the other person. Don’t use feedback as a way of getting rid of your own discomfort. And don’t give positive feedback only to get the other person to like you.
- Be like a clean mirror. Be descriptive, not interpretive. Describe behavior, speech, or your own reactions. Emphasize what rather than why. Keep your personal concerns and opinions out of the message.
- Put yourself in the other person’s place. Consider their readiness to make use of what you have to say. Pick your time and place in a way that shows respect.
- Be specific rather than general. Describe specific behavior, not a general impression of the person. Refer to specific instances wherever possible. Don’t get sidetracked into unrelated matters. Simplify as much as possible.
- Own your own experience. Acknowledge your reactions as your own and share them as information rather than as pressure to make the other person change.
- Be direct and fearless. Keeping information from someone may do more harm than telling them.
- Say your piece and let it go. Allow the essence of time. Don’t be attached to what the person does with your feedback.
On receiving feedback
- Orient yourself in the world. Listen to your body. Participate with your whole body.
- Open to your Felt Sense.
- Have an open mind. Attend to simply hearing what is said. Don’t assume you already know what the other person means. Where clarification is needed, take the time to ask.
- Don’t explain. Resist the impulse to justify, defend, or explain yourself.
- Be curious about your own state of being. Notice what arises in you as you listen — to positive feedback and to negative alike.
- Appreciate the opportunity to learn. Be grateful for the other person’s generosity of interest and insight.
- Contemplate what you have heard. Use your own intelligence. Don’t assume the other person’s insight is more accurate than your own, or less. Don’t change quickly on the strength of what you are told.
- Recognize your feelings as your own. Don’t lay them on the person who gave the feedback.
- Work with your feelings with honesty, kindness, and the essence of time.
What can be read from these is that feedback is a process of learning. It is not about which side knows and which does not, nor about one being above the other. Feedback does not recount the other person’s failure; it recounts what changed as the result of something tried. That makes it a good occasion for learning.
Feedback, then, is something that benefits both sides by preparing time and space — an interval — between oneself and the other person.
Giovanni’s way of teaching acknowledges what is working, then offers a better way in the form of “and this would work better.” Behind it lies respect for the other person. That alone makes it worth learning from.
A final word on feedback. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, wrote about its importance in the piece “Bill Gates: Good Feedback Is the Key to Improvement,” and I would like to close with that.
We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve. If all my bridge coach ever told me was that I was ‘satisfactory,’ I would have no hope of ever getting better. How would I know who was the best? How would I know what I was doing differently?
Note, August 2026
This piece is a transcription of guidelines on feedback — what was handed out in the training, together with Giovanni Felicioni’s way of teaching. At the time it was written as a record about how to learn.
Read again now, it turns out to be a description of the work itself.
Feedback began from the body
The first and second guidelines are the same on both sides, giving and receiving.
Orient yourself in the world. Listen to your body. Participate with your whole body. And open to your Felt Sense.
Material about an exchange in words begins from the state of the body. At the time, what those two items meant was not clear to me.
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 (see “Journey to Becoming an Advanced Rolfer — A Summary of the Road to Certification“).
Participate with your whole body. The same thing had been written in material handed out eleven years earlier.
Before words are exchanged, where the body is placed. The manner of feedback began there.
Letting go after giving it
The last of the guidelines for giving holds this line.
“Say your piece and let it go. Allow the essence of time. Don’t be attached to what the person does with your feedback.”
In the 2025 Advanced Training, Ray McCall described the manner of relating to a client as Kind Indifference: not becoming excessively caught up in the client’s experience, while at the same time watching over it with deep interest.
The words of the osteopath Jim Jealous were offered as well.
“The process is none of your business. Observe, but do not become part of the story.”
Let go of what was conveyed. Do not become attached to how the other person changes. What this piece set down was a disposition for giving feedback. Eleven years later, the same thing is spoken of as the practitioner’s way of being.
The distance called for turns out to be the same, on the side that conveys and on the side that works.
And that distance has its grounds. Change is not produced by the practitioner; it arises from within the client. The practitioner’s part is to set the field in which that change comes about, to trust it, and to wait. Feedback runs the same way: what the other person takes from it, and how they change, is not the province of the one who gave it.
Acknowledging what works, then offering better
This piece describes Giovanni’s way of teaching: acknowledging what is working, then offering a better way, with respect for the other person behind it.
There was another characteristic, left unrecorded at the time. Giovanni rarely answered a question with an answer; he answered with a question. What do you think? What did you feel? Having asked in order to be told, the asker ends up doing the thinking.
In December 2016, in Phase IV — the Supervision Workshop — Pierpaola Volpones explained the difference between Teach and Educate. To teach is to convey a procedure step by step and have the student learn the technique. To educate is to have the student think through how to draw out what is good in them — edu meaning to draw out. Paola’s teaching leaned toward the latter.
Giovanni’s way of conveying stands on the same side. Answering with a question was not for want of an answer. Withholding the answer was itself the teaching.
Withholding an answer was also a way of making an interval.
Acknowledging what works runs the same way. What is already there is found, and the next move is offered in a form that draws it out.
The guideline about keeping what you convey to the sharing of information, so that it does not become pressure that the other person must change, comes from the same thinking. Whether to change is for the other person to decide, not for the one conveying.
Preparing an interval
This piece defines feedback as follows.
“Something that benefits both sides by preparing time and space — an interval — between oneself and the other person.”
Around the same period, the same word was being used about the body. Articulation is holding an awareness of widening the space within the body, and directing awareness to the presence of that space releases excess force (see “The Word Articulation — On Making Space Within the Body“).
Making space within the body. Making space between one person and another. Across two months of training, both were being written with the same word.
And it was the subject of Giovanni himself. Intervals deliberately placed within a session. How the boundary with a client is held. Answering a question with a question, so that the other person is given time to search. All of it, one thing.
I was doing the same thing while still a student — writing about the same thing in separate places. Space in the body, the interval in feedback, and the way the instructor taught. That these were one thing was not something I saw at the time.