Sharon Wheeler’s Bone Work reached its final day on November 13, 2016, and came to a safe close.
Four entries have covered this workshop.
- “The First and Second Days“
- “The Atmosphere of the Workshop“
- “Through the Third Day: What Sharon Said (1)“
- “The Fourth Day: How the Clients Responded“
The final day was given over to review, with Sharon working through the techniques covered so far, from the upper body to the lower, across two blocks: the morning (11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.) and the afternoon (2:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.).
What makes Sharon’s Bone Work interesting is not only the technique but her ability to reproduce, word for word, what she learned from Dr. Ida Rolf. Sharon’s auditory memory is exceptional, so each story as it is told comes back to life.
Remarkably, Ida’s own training was conducted mostly in the form of telling stories she had experienced personally, with almost no anatomy in it.
Part of that was leaving explanations of anatomy to others when they were needed, but it also rested on a firm conviction that what is written in books is not the fact of the matter.
The check-in began at 10 a.m. Each participant described what they had felt. The review then proceeded, and throughout it she told stories about Ida nonstop. A few of the more interesting ones follow.
“How did you come up with Bone Work? Tell us about the process.”
When a question along those lines came from a participant, Sharon said that she had acquired the technique in the end because she is dogged and tenacious by nature — and added that beyond that there was the influence of her teacher, Ida, and began to speak about her.
This was during a session in an advanced class. Sharon could see, of her own accord, the changes in the person acting as the client in Ida’s session — the pulmonary artery and the blood vessels widening, for instance.
When the class ended and Sharon told Ida exactly what she had seen:
“I couldn’t see that.”
said Ida. And then, in turn:
“If that’s what you can see, then please stay near me and tell the students exactly what you see.”
she told Sharon.
What followed was the valuable opportunity of supporting the training at Ida’s side, and Ida’s thinking became easier to understand.
The result was an understanding that Ida saw what ordinary people cannot see and felt it to be entirely unremarkable. Awkwardly, when a student could not see a change in a body, it made her irritable.
“So what kind of education did Ida actually give for seeing the body?”
I asked. The answer that came back was startling.
Put him into water and let them swim or drown.
She apparently did not know how to teach a way of seeing the body.
As a related episode: on an occasion when Sharon was absent, Ida began telling the Rolfing students why she valued her.
“I value Sharon because she sees the body the way I do.”
she reportedly said.
This column noted earlier that Ida had no idea what to make of it when Sharon discovered Bone Work. In fact, though she never spoke about bone changing, she was apparently able to do it.
That became clear when Ida demonstrated in front of Sharon that she could return a bent sacrum to its original state by applying appropriate pressure (in a form different from Bone Work).
Why did Ida never speak at all about her past, or about what she could see — what would now be called the spiritual?
At the time, the position of women was weak, and America was a litigious society where behavior outside the norm invited immediate lawsuits (the arrest of the psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich in the United States also had a considerable influence, she said). Sharon suspects that this social background counted for a great deal.
Ida was apparently a genuinely kind person at heart. She was truly skilled at taking someone who was unconsciously sitting in a place of trauma and bringing them back to where they had been, even forcefully. What is interesting on top of that is that she did it with humor.
At the height of emotion, in the worst of the trauma, she would make them laugh. Sharon described how it felt: as if she were pulling the person out of the mud and showing them the ground below from above.
Ida spoke of it this way:
There is no such thing as psychology only physiology.
Which also means:
“As the structure comes into order, the emotions release of their own accord.”
What made Ida remarkable, Sharon added, is that she presumably understood that returning a person to themselves changes their life.
She spoke about a great deal more, but for reasons of space I will stop here.
Five days that went by in no time. The atmosphere was superb, and I was fortunate in the people I was with. My thanks to the staff of the Japan Rolfing Association, whose excellent organization made it possible to concentrate on what the workshop had to offer.
Note, August 2026
The answer recorded in this entry about Ida’s teaching was: Put him into water and let them swim or drown. She apparently did not know how to teach a way of seeing the body.
Ida saw what ordinary people cannot see and felt it to be unremarkable. So when a student could not see a change in a body, it made her irritable. She was requiring seeing while holding no method for teaching it. Sharon was valued because she “sees the body the way I do.”
This gap made the history that followed. In 1989 the Rolf Institute split, and in order to differentiate itself from the Guild, the RISI side added content to the training that included Jeff Maitland’s philosophy, dividing what had been a two-stage structure into three.
What I took between 2014 and 2015 was that three-stage version. And the Advanced Training in 2025 supplied five principles and the classificatory system of Taxonomy — a framework for making it possible to select, from the side of the system, which standpoint to work from.
From having no method for teaching seeing, to having classifications for seeing put in place, took roughly fifty years. Being given a system, however, does not make a person able to see. What was taught first in Phase II was observation without being given definitions. What sits at the beginning of the basic training is still something close to being thrown in.
Sharon herself keeps her distance from this systematization. Her view was that there is no difference in curriculum between the Guild and RISI, and that the content was added out of a need to differentiate (described in detail in “Cranio Work – Sharon Wheeler (3): What Sharon Said (3)“). She could not accept the political maneuvering around the split, and never joined the Faculty.
That someone who received things directly from Ida has no need for a system assembled afterward is only natural. For a person who learned to swim without being taught how, a classification of strokes is an explanation after the fact. But the generations that follow have no entry except through the classifications. I received the framework of Taxonomy in 2025 and find it useful.
What these five days provided was a record of what Rolfing was before it was systematized. One of the few Rolfers who learned directly from Ida from around 1970 reproduces it word for word from auditory memory. Teaches using almost no anatomy.
Transmits it because it is useful, with no scientific explanation available. Having seen that form determined where I stood nine years later when the system arrived. Had I known only the system, it would have looked like the only form there is.