The Phase III Rolfing training has reached its midpoint. Sessions with my client have run through Session 5. As in Phase II, at the midway stage an interview is held between two instructors and one student (on the midterm interview in Phase II, see “The Midterm Interview: What Was the Feedback?“).
The interview, close to ten minutes, took place around 9:40 in the morning on February 26, 2015.
Giovanni Felicioni, the instructor last time, had spent a short period in Japan, studying kabuki theater at Toga, and understood well how to work with Japanese students. Jörg Ahrend-Löns, by contrast, was teaching a Japanese student for only the second time, and at the outset took care to say:
“If anything is uncomfortable or on your mind, please tell me.”
Having spent seven years in the United States myself, I did not expect difficulty. And in this interview with Jörg and the assistant Andrea Clusen, it turned out there was none; the concern had been unfounded.
Taking the training, my impression of Jörg was of someone who, in the German manner, conveys things directly. At the same time, when students raised criticisms — that he talked too much on his own as instructor, that the assistant should be given more chance to speak — he had ears for them, and he is an instructor who gives real thought to how the class might be made better.
Giovanni in Phase II came from the stage, and being well versed in anthropology and in art, he conveyed the value of sensibility and bodily sensation (on the classes, see for example “The History of Painting and the Body (1) — How the Body Is Seen Through the History of Western Painting” and “The History of Painting and the Body (2) — How Do We View the Face and Head Through the History of Painting?“).
Jörg in Phase III came from physiotherapy and is good at thinking things through logically. From long experience he knows well how to put an enormous body of learning in order and fit it into a single framework (see for example “ The Introduction, and Organizing What Is Known“). The assistant Andrea gives sessions and advice faithful to the fundamentals, so it can be said that from the two instructors I am learning to return to the basics.
What came up in the midterm interview was my own strengths.
Jörg named as a strength the giving of Space to the person in front of me — space, interval, room; Hold the space, as it is called (on the interval, see “Space and the Room in the Mind“). This was precisely what I had learned from Giovanni and had wanted to acquire, so it was a pleasure to hear. On the interval and Giovanni: Takami Kamata, who studied Phase II with the same instructor in a different period and works as a Rolfer in Frankfurt, has written the following.
“To put Giovanni in a word, he is someone who embodies space. Space, whether called space, or the interval, or room — any of these might do. He is truly aware that the interval presses the switch that draws a person out. The pauses he places deliberately during a session, the way he handles the border with the client, answering a question with a question so that the person is given the interval to search for themselves, and so on.”
Being told this means that in Phase II it had genuinely taken hold. I am truly glad of it.
He named a second strength as well: Inner perception, the perceiving felt on one’s own inside. That is, trusting what is felt oneself and facing the client with that as a guide. At the Phase II stage, learning took everything I had, and observing a body left me overwhelmed by the volume of information. What to do with it was not clear. So as not to be overwhelmed, I came to hold to two things:
Spending almost no time on body reading. Once the session has begun, setting body reading aside and trusting what the hands feel.
As a result, enough room of mind — enough space — arose to trust the Inner perception.
What was of interest was Jörg’s question:
“Which are you better at, the Sleeve sessions or the Core sessions?”
I answered that I was better at Core. Why I answered that way is hard to explain, but at the opening stage of a session I already know, through intuition and bodily sensation, how the work at the deep core is to be carried out. Because of that, once in a Core session, my attention goes to detail, and that in turn can affect the manual work.
Jörg said:
“Step back from the client, observe the body from the wider view of the approach used in the Sleeve sessions, and respond according to that sense — it will improve.”
This struck me as a most interesting point, and something to try from next week onward.
What we discussed as a task was learning anatomy in closer relation to the sessions. Part of my reason for wanting to take up breathing and walking in this column in relation to anatomy has been to put my own anatomical knowledge in order. That is something to keep going.
Four weeks remain. What will be found in them? And how will the client have changed once the ten sessions are done? I want to enjoy the coming month of life in Munich.
Note, August 2026
The two strengths Jörg named in the midterm interview were Hold the space and Inner perception.
What stands out on rereading is that neither was something I put forward myself. That I was giving space to the person in front of me; that I was using inner perceiving as a guide. Only on being told did I recognize that I had been doing it. One’s own hands are not visible until someone from outside says so. That was what the interview was for.
First, Hold the space.
This came from Giovanni Felicioni in Phase II. Takami Kamata’s words, quoted in this piece, capture him well: someone who embodies space, truly aware that the interval presses the switch that draws a person out.
Giovanni came from the stage, and had spent a short period in Japan studying kabuki theater at Toga. Which is to say he was someone who knew the interval of the Japanese stage in his body. From him, an Italian instructor, I was taught the interval; and a German instructor named it as a strength. A Japanese student received a Japanese concept by way of two Europeans.
The term keeps returning. In the note to the sixth piece in the Body and Mind series I wrote that Hold the space appears three times across eleven years. The first of those is this piece. The second is 2018, in the Rolf Movement certification training, as a design in which weight fell on holding the space. The third is 2025, in the Advanced Training, as the definition of the practitioner’s role: holding a field in which healing can occur.
A strength that was pointed out became, over ten years, a central concept of a system.
Next, Inner perception.
Two devices for it are set down here. Spending almost no time on body reading. Once the session begins, setting body reading aside and trusting what the hands feel.
This faces the opposite way from the piece written eight days earlier. That one introduced Ida Rolf’s Auditing stage, where no hands-on work was permitted and only observation continued, and the Saturation Method, where information is supplied until the eye is formed. In training, observation accumulates; in practice, observation is cut short. At the time this did not strike me as a contradiction. Both were simply written down.
What arrived ten years later was not the answer of cutting observation short. It was the Somatic Sensorium: taking things in with the whole body, engaging not only sight but touch, hearing, and interoception. In Ray’s phrasing, “seeing with your own eyes” invites misunderstanding; observation means receiving with the whole body.
Not reducing the amount of observation, but changing what observation refers to. Moving at the time from seeing with the eyes to feeling with the hands was arriving just short of that. What was missing was a word for calling it observation.
Finally, the moment of answering that Core was the stronger side.
At the opening of a session, how to handle the deep core is already clear through intuition and bodily sensation. So once in a Core session, attention goes to detail, and that affects the manual work. That is what is written.
Jörg’s advice was to step back from the client, observe the body from the wider view used in the Sleeve sessions, and respond to that sense. Leave the detail and look at the whole.
Ten years later I was taught the equivalent as a method. Ray’s way of being is the sense of the body’s axis, the LINE, and the process by which the client’s axis is evoked through concentration near the sacrum. Not looking at detail but at the axis — and not trying to see it, but waiting for it to come up.
An answer to what was named at the time as a weakness had been prepared, ten years on, inside a system. The pointing out came first. The answer came afterward.