In the European training, two sessions called Mentoring (Mentor meaning a guide or teacher) must be taken between Phase II and Phase III (in the interval from November 27, 2014 to February 2, 2015).
Mentoring means going to the office of an Advanced Rolfer to learn technique, disposition, and the like. Since I was in the middle of a trip around the world and time was hard to come by, I arranged to take them during a stay in the UK from November 27 to December 2, 2014.
In the UK, training was held for the first time this year, centered on Giovanni Felicioni, from whom I had just received the training, producing twelve Rolfing graduates. Wanting to receive Mentoring from two people other than Giovanni, I arranged sessions with Keith Graham and Alan Richardson on November 27 and 28.
This piece covers the experience with Keith Graham.
Keith Graham is a master of tai chi and has been giving Rolfing sessions since 2001. Tai chi resembles Rolfing in the sense of organizing the body, but according to Keith, tai chi attends to placing the feet firmly on the ground and organizing the posture from there.
Organizing the body makes it possible not only to give oneself an appropriate amount of space in relation to the other person, but also to let the various kinds of negative energy received from the other person run off into the ground. In electrical terms, it becomes easy to grasp by thinking of the hand that touches the body as the plug and the ground as the earth.
During the Rolfing training it had become clear that a bias in the vestibular sense (dominant on the left) was producing tension in the shoulders and neck, so from Keith I was able to learn an approach to the neck: how to deal with tension in the neck and shoulders.
The following exercise was taught.
Take the face as a sheet of paper and the nose as a pen. Bring the nose parallel to the ground. Adjust the position of the body so that a straight line runs from the crown of the head to the ground. Then, using the pen (the nose), draw straight lines on the paper (the front of the face), vertically and horizontally. Once that becomes familiar, draw a circle.
Next, imagine that there is a face on the back of the head, with the nose in the same position as the nose on the front. From the face at the back, draw the same vertical and horizontal lines and the same circle. The back is naturally more difficult, but what is interesting is that doing this exercise alone leads to a reduction in neck tension.
One other thing introduced was an exercise for the movement of the eyes, learned in the Feldenkrais Method. It can be started from either side. Turn the face to the right and, while looking to the right, rotate the face to the left (the nose staying parallel). Holding the right is difficult, but move as far to the left as it will go. Do the same starting from the left. Repeating this two or three times genuinely eases the tension in the shoulders and neck.
Beyond that, Cranial Sacral Therapy, which involves only placing the hands on the cranium, was also experienced. Being able to feel the sensation of stagnant energy draining away from the head through the spine and into the lower limbs was interesting.
The bodywork that Rolfing opens onto is genuinely deep. Once back in Germany, I would like to receive a ten-series from an Advanced Rolfer and add to my own experience.
Note, August 2026
What Keith explained first was not a technique but the feet. Place the feet firmly on the ground and organize the posture from there. Doing so gives oneself an appropriate amount of space in relation to the other person, and also lets what is received from that person run off into the ground. The touching hand as the plug, the ground as the earth — the 2014 record preserves the analogy as it was given.
Two years later, in Paris, Hubert Godard began from the same place. What matters in Rolfing is grounding, feeling that both feet are on the ground; being able to use the whole foot, toes and heel included. On that basis, so that the whole body comes to rest on those feet, attention goes to the sagittal plane — which is where the meaning of looking at the breath lies, and why there is a first session (see “An Experience in Paris: Valuing the Foundations“). The order of it, entering through the principle and descending to the technique, has the same shape as Keith’s explanation.
The three ways of cultivating Neutral given in the Advanced Training in 2025 were Shape the Hand, Finding Back Space, and connecting to the Hara. Tai chi, the European lineage of Rolfing, and the Japanese word Hara — the terms and the lineages differ, and what they point to overlaps. The single point is that a practitioner cannot touch another person without holding a position of their own.
Eleven years on, this understanding came to be confirmed from outside the work as well. Two years of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, begun in May 2024, made clear that judging distance from an opponent requires a reference on one’s own side (see “Two Years of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu — On Distance, and on Learning with the Body“).
On the days when there is no sense of where one’s own feet are and what lies behind one’s back, it ends with being driven back. Before the phrase Finding Back Space was ever taught, the person on the other end of the grip was asking for the same thing.
And judging distance turned out to mean handling the Territorial Body and the Body of Action at once: entering the other person’s territory while holding one’s own. Touching is the same. Entering it having lost one’s own can only be an intrusion (see “Space Is Felt Differently by Each Person — Tonic Function and Peripersonal Space“).
What Keith called letting it run off into the ground, back in 2014, was one way of holding that territory. For the one working and for the one grappling, what is required does not change.