Since entering Phase III, there have been occasions when Jörg has given this advice:
Go forward trusting the Recipe of each of the ten Rolfing sessions — the procedure, the method, the protocol — and things will go well.
In the Phase II training the method of each session, the procedure, is learned in detail; but taking on a client and facing that client is something done for the first time here. Clients often come to a Rolfer having already been through medical practitioners, physicians and manual therapists among them, and since what they report is low back pain, a stiff neck, pain of one kind or another, attention tends to go there.
So even with the Rolfing Ten Series and its procedure in hand, attention goes to the painful part, and the practitioner can lose himself. Against this, Jörg says to follow the method as learned: rather than fixing on the place that hurts, work on that place by way of the whole, and the pain will subside of its own accord. That is exactly why it matters to go forward trusting the procedure of the Ten Series.
Of course, in the case of acute pain, being examined by a physician matters greatly. But where pain has continued for years and become chronic, it is more apt to treat it not as local tissue restricting movement but as a problem of muscular movement through the connective tissue seen from the body as a whole — so rather than approaching it locally, it needs to be seen from the whole.
And as Jörg also says, when function becomes insufficient in one place and passes a certain limit, the body begins to work out a way of using itself that compensates for it by another route — Compensation, in English. This is why an approach to the whole is called for, weighing the balance with the perceptual rather than seeing analytically alone (see “Seeing and Perceiving (1): Seeing Begins with a Concept“).
Peter Schwind — a leading Rolfer based in Munich, who also teaches on the Advanced Rolfing training — puts it as follows.
One characteristic of the connective tissue system is that, as a three-dimensional network, it allows for compensatory changes in all spatial directions. So the altered tone pattern of one leg can affect the pelvis and thus involve the back as well. However, this process can occur in reverse as well: a structural weakness in the back forces one leg or both legs into a compensatory movement pattern and thus causes a long-term change to the fascial network.
Where a long-term change in the fascia has taken place, the ten sessions Ida Rolf developed are of use. And so, as Jörg put it above, just as cooking has its procedure, the body has one too, and following it moves the body in a good direction.
In the Phase III training, by valuing the method — the procedure — of the Ten Series with clients, I would like to feel its force for myself.
Note, August 2026
Jörg’s words sit at the center of this piece. Go forward trusting the Recipe of each of the ten sessions and things will go well.
The procedure is learned in detail in Phase II; in Phase III one’s own client is faced for the first time. The client reports low back pain, a stiff neck. The pull is to look there, but rather than fixing on the place that hurts, work on it by way of the whole and the pain subsides of its own accord. So go forward trusting the procedure.
This piece takes up, unchanged, the reading set out in the note to Phase III (1). In that note I wrote that what Phase III taught was trusting the procedure and settling the mind. One of those two has become the title of a piece six entries later. At the time these were written as a running record of the days, so it did not occur to me that they were forming such a structure.
There is another name in this piece: Peter Schwind.
The connective tissue system, as a three-dimensional network, allows compensatory change in every direction. A change in the tone of one leg reaches the pelvis and the back; and in reverse, a structural weakness in the back forces a compensatory pattern on the legs and brings about a long-term change in the fascia. That is the passage quoted, placed as support for the argument that the whole has to be seen.
At the time of quoting, I gave little thought to who this person was. A leading Rolfer based in Munich who also teaches on the Advanced Rolfing training — my interest went no further.
Eleven years on, the position of that quotation looks different.
Behind Peter Schwind lie osteopathy and the visceral manipulation of Jean-Pierre Barral. The focus falls on curing, on producing a result.
In fact, the original plan was to take the Advanced Training from him. I attended his workshop in July 2017.
That plan was set aside. The approach did not sit right. The focus falls on curing, on producing a result. The precision of the technique is high. Only, it was not the direction I was heading in.
As it turned out, the Advanced Training I took was in 2025, under Ray McCall and Hiroyoshi Tahata — the line that rests on Jeff Maitland’s philosophy. Not making change happen but trusting that change occurs. Kind Indifference, Letting and Making, Orthotropism. The focus falls not on curing but on holding a field in which healing can occur.
There were two doorways into the Advanced Training. At the point of quoting this person in February 2015, I did not know that. Looking back ten years later, the quotation stands at the entrance of a road I started down and turned back from.
This is not a matter of which is right. Within the same Rolfing, a position that focuses on curing and a position that waits for what occurs sit side by side. That the difference could be felt at all was because there was occasion to touch both.
Finally, back to Jörg’s words.
Trust the Recipe and things will go well. That sentence connects to either position. It can be read as: follow the procedure and a result will come. It can also be read as: entrust yourself to the procedure and keep your own judgment from moving to the front. Jörg meant the second. The point was about holding back the pull to look at the pain, and the procedure was what held it back.
Ten years later, that holding-back received a name: Neutral. Defined not as a procedure but as a state of the practitioner’s body. From trusting the procedure, to building a state that does not waver even when the procedure is set aside. The same problem, solved in a different place.