The first three sessions with my client in the Phase III training — the Sleeve sessions — are finished. On the first day of the third week, in the form of a Case Presentation, each student took ten to fifteen minutes and, showing the class photographs from before the first session and after the third session of one of the two clients taken on, gave a presentation in front of the class.
Introducing two episodes that came up there, I would like to think about the Sleeve sessions and about how the work proceeds.
The first was this: when a client speaks of past experience — a traffic accident, an injury — there is no difficulty; but what is to be done when a client does not speak of it? In Rolfing it matters to proceed on the policy of not touching a client’s history unless the client raises it (the word used in the training was story).
We are not counselors; what matters is to face the person’s difficulty by way of the body and to help toward a resolution. And taking on unnecessary preconceptions affects the holding of the Neutral state that matters so much for a Rolfer (on this point, see “Phase III (4) — Space and the Room in the Mind“).
The second: what about a case where, after three sessions, there has been no response from the client’s body? Of course there may be a problem on the side of the practitioner, but if the procedure has been followed as given, in most cases what is more likely is that the client has not been able to respond because their understanding of their own body is insufficient.
I have taken up Hubert Godard’s Tonic Function before (see “The Muscles That Tire and the Muscles That Don’t — Tonic Function and the Support of Posture” and “Bidirectionality Brings the Body into Order — Tonic Function in Walking and Sitting“). How is the gamma motor system to be activated, and the Tonic Muscle — the continuously working muscle, high in energetic efficiency within the body — to be drawn on to the fullest?
The Rolfing Ten Series exists, it can be said, in order to organize these. Godard holds that the Tonic Muscle is affected by the following four aspects (in Phase III, Jörg called them the four components and called Structure the Physical).
- Structure, or Physical (posture and composition of the body, gravity, and so on)
- Coordination (how the body moves)
- Perception (how the world is seen)
- Meaning (how meaning is given to the world)
Rolfing works chiefly on Structure among these, but by way of Structure it can be said to bear on the other three: Coordination, how the body is moved; Perception, how the world is seen; and Meaning, how meaning is assigned to the world. In the end, by re-educating the client’s four aspects — offering new choices, one might equally say — the client comes gradually to understand the state of the body and its changes.
It may be close to knowing, while meditating or holding a yoga posture, the body’s state as it is right now, and knowing that the feelings that come and go are transient.
Seen that way, what matters is, first, narrowing the focus to what Rolfing can do; second, building a relationship of trust with the client; and third, giving the client a little space at a time for facing the body (on this point, see “[Phase III (4) — Space and the Room in the Mind]”). The third in particular leads to giving the client time and space for facing themselves.
What the Case Presentation taught was to acquire patience. That is something to keep valuing.
Note, August 2026
Hubert Godard’s four aspects appear in this piece: Structure, Coordination, Perception, Meaning. Jörg called Structure the Physical and spoke of four components. Rolfing works chiefly on Structure, and through it the remaining three are reached — that is the explanation.
What became of those four is worth setting down.
In January 2018, in Part II of the Rolf Movement certification training, the same theory was taught by Aline Newton, who was assisting. Aline studied in a study group Godard ran for ERA members. What she set out was not four but five: tissue, perception and cognition, thinking and words, meaning and the symbolic, and coordination. What had been added was tissue — the item holding that the fascial approach used in Rolfing bears on structure and on tonus.
The original four contain no place for the hands-on work itself. There is a reason for that. Godard had worked as a chemist; after seeing a dance performance in Paris he began ballet at twenty-two and went on to become a professional dancer, a choreographer, and a teacher of dance. A serious knee injury brought him into the field of somatics, and drawing on the work of Ida Rolf, F. M. Alexander, Moshé Feldenkrais, and Rudolf Laban, he became a Rolfer in the mid-1980s.
Someone who did not start from manual technique thought about the working of the muscles that support posture. So the four aspects are composed of the body’s state, of perception, and of meaning — with nothing about what the practitioner does.
With tissue added as a fifth, what a Rolfer actually does with the hands gained a position inside the theory. At the same time, thinking and words had become an item of its own.
To this point, the development is internal to the European lineage.
The Advanced Training of 2025 also taught a framework for classifying the body. Called Taxonomy, it has five divisions: structural and segmental, biomechanical, functional, psychobiological, and energetic. It was handed over as an instrument for choosing which standpoint to work from, given the state of the client.
Since the number is likewise five, it might look as though Godard’s four had developed into Taxonomy. They did not.
Taxonomy is a classification established chiefly by Jeff Maitland, and it comes from a line separate from Godard’s theory. In the Advanced Training the term Tonic Function does not appear, nor does the gamma motor system; g and g’ are not handled either. Where the European lineage has taken Godard’s hypothesis as its theoretical support, the Advanced Training rests on Maitland’s philosophy.
That said, the two do not fail to meet entirely.
Tonic Function was brought into the SI community by Godard, but the person who put it in order as theory and developed it further is Kevin Frank — the author of the 1995 paper that set out the framework of a gravity response system. And in the Advanced Training of 2025, the person cited in explaining the relation between energy work and bodywork was that same Kevin Frank: there is no essential distinction between bodywork and energy work, all of it is information.
One person has left his name in both lineages. The one who systematized Godard’s theory is also quoted in a Maitland-line training. The frameworks are not connected, but people move between them.
Which is to say that within the same Rolfing, two frameworks for classifying the body run in parallel. One asks what bears on the working of the muscles that support posture; the other asks which layer the practitioner works from. The very form of the question differs.
Taxonomy includes an energetic division. Neither Godard’s four nor Aline’s five has that layer. Conversely, neither Tonic Function nor Pre-movement has a place inside Taxonomy. It is not that one is right. They look at different places. And there are people who have in fact looked at both.
Having been able to learn from both across eleven years was good fortune. But for anyone who has learned only one of them, that the other exists is not even visible. At the point of writing this piece in February 2015, I took Godard’s four to be the standard framework of Rolfing.
There is one further passage here that carries forward.
Proceed on the policy of not touching a client’s history unless the client raises it; the word used in the training was story. Taking on unnecessary preconceptions affects the holding of a Neutral state.
In the Advanced Training of 2025, the words of the osteopath Jim Jealous were taught: the client’s process is none of our business; observe, but do not become part of the story. It was set within the explanation of Kind Indifference.
The same word, story, appears ten years apart. In 2015 it was taught as a prohibition: do not touch it. In 2025 it was handed over as a way of being: do not become part of it. From prohibition to a way of being. Reading back through the record of this training period, this shape appears again and again.
The piece closes by saying that what the Case Presentation taught was to acquire patience. Ten years later, waiting sits inside the system as a skill. Not making change happen but waiting for it to occur. What was written at the time as a frame of mind came later to be handled as a method.