Phase III is proving a good opportunity to review what has been learned so far. Among those things are the five principles of Rolfing, taught at the very beginning. They have not yet been explained in this column, so this piece takes them up.
Rolfing is understood to have five principles: Wholism, Support, Adaptability, Palintonicity, and Closure.
The first is Wholism.
While valuing the scientific view in which the whole is the sum of its parts, one is also asked to see the whole as whole. It amounts to bringing the analytical view and the perceptual view into accord (on the difference between the analytical and the perceptual, see “Seeing and Perceiving (1): Seeing Begins with a Concept” and “Seeing and Perceiving (2): The Sum of the Parts Is Not the Whole“).
Take stiff shoulders. Rather than focusing on the shoulders alone, one considers how they relate to the other parts of the body. As a result, one begins to look for another way of using the body, one that does not depend on the strength of the shoulder muscles. In English this is called compensation.
The second is Support.
For the body to come into good order, support from the foundation — the legs and feet — is essential. Support also covers building the relationship with the client, and helping the client turn attention toward bodily sensation.
The third is Adaptability.
How does one adapt to an environment that changes daily? Information has to be gathered from outside for that to happen. This column has taken up the importance of the visual system, the vestibular system, and the kinesthetic system in observing posture, and described within that the value of putting the kinesthetic sense in order (see “The Three Elements of Posture: Visual, Vestibular, and Kinesthetic“).
When the feet and hands are in a state that makes new information easy to receive, adapting to a new external environment becomes easier.
The fourth is Palintonicity.
The word derives from the Greek palintonos, meaning to draw back in the opposite direction, and it speaks to the importance of the body holding two directions (on Palintonicity, see “Basic Concepts — Bidirectionality (Palintonicity)“).
The lower body feels gravity, downward; the upper body takes that as its foundation, the spine lengthening and moving freely, upward. The idea also connects to Hubert Godard’s Tonic Function (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“).
To activate the gamma motor system and draw the most from the Tonic muscles, which are efficient in their use of the body’s energy, those muscles need to be given two directions.
The fifth is Closure.
A defining feature of Rolfing is that it ultimately encourages the client’s independence. As this column has noted before, Rolfing differs from massage or seitai in ending after ten sessions (see “The Integration Sessions“). Those ten sessions are also a matter of taking what has been learned into daily life, which is to say, fostering the client’s autonomy.
So Rolfing has five principles, and each session of the ten-series falls somewhere among them. In the Phase III training, these principles are consulted often — when the thread of the ten-series is lost, and when returning to the basics. Five principles are simple enough, and there is a great deal to learn in them.
Note, August 2026
Where the five principles came from
In March 2015 I did not receive the five principles as something with an origin. They were the basics, taught at the very beginning, an ordinary framework reviewed in a Munich classroom. Rolfing has these five, I wrote. Who established them, when, and by what route went unasked.
What became clear eleven years later is that the five principles were not left by Ida Rolf. They were a framework established on the Rolf Institute side after the split of 1989, centered on Jeff Maitland and Jan Sultan.
This forces a revision to the map drawn in the Sharon Wheeler series. In the note to “What Sharon Said (3),” I wrote that Rolfing has three lineages: the European lineage, the Maitland lineage of the Advanced Training, and Sharon, who transmits what she received directly from Ida. Between the European lineage and the Maitland lineage, I took the sole point of contact to be Kevin Frank.
That was wrong. The five principles are a second point of contact. And where Kevin Frank came into view only during the Advanced Training of 2025, these had been in use since the first day of the basic training. In use, without any sense that they were the product of another lineage.
Sharon described the split of 1989 as political and said the introduction of Maitland’s philosophy served to differentiate. The account from the Advanced Training side was a methodological divergence, from the Formulaic to the Non-Formulaic.
I still hold no material for deciding between them. What can be said is that this philosophy, introduced for the sake of differentiation, was being taught as unquestioned basics in a European classroom with no direct connection to the split. The boundaries between lineages are not visible from inside them.
From a place to return to, to a place to begin
The closing lines read: when the thread of the ten-series is lost, and when returning to the basics, these principles are consulted often. The five principles were where one went back to. A point of reference for when one was lost, not an instrument for moving forward.
In the Advanced Training of 2025, the same five sit in the opposite position. One reads what is happening in the client, asks which principle is lacking, and builds the session from there. The principles are what one picks up first. That design is recorded in “Designing Individual Sessions Through Framework“.
The same five changed function. The content did not change; the position they occupy moved from the back to the front. What is a place to return to while learning becomes a starting point once it can be handled.
Before the name settled
The original text gives the fifth principle as Closure, glossed in katakana as kurōjingu — closing. The English word Closure carried a Japanese gloss for closing. It is a trace of a time when the two were used interchangeably.
By the Advanced Training of 2025, the range covered by CLOSURE had itself changed. What had been placed at the end of the ten-series had widened to what is placed at the end of every session. That shift was taken up in the note to “The Integration Sessions.”
The wavering before a word settles has stayed in the record just as it was.
A fragment finding its frame
On Wholism, the text says: while valuing the view of the whole as the sum of its parts, see the whole as whole.
“Seeing and Perceiving (2): The Sum of the Parts Is Not the Whole” was a piece that took a phrase heard in class and put it straight into the title. What was received then was a fragment, with no sense of where it belonged. The same content appears here holding a place within a framework, as the first of the five principles.
Reading back through the Phase III pieces, this order recurs. The phenomenon or the phrase comes first, and the frame that holds it comes afterward.
The bow and the lyre
With Palintonicity, though, the order runs the other way.
The word palintonos has long been discussed in connection with a fragment of Heraclitus, alongside the image of the bow and the lyre. The string pulls one way, the wood pushes back the other. Only when opposing tensions hold each other in balance does a bow work as a bow. Slacken it and it stops being an instrument; strengthen one side alone and it breaks.
Bidirectionality is not a technique for lengthening in two directions. It names a state in which tensions that face away from each other hold in balance. The oldest record of that understanding is this image. What was taught in Munich as the lower body downward and the upper body upward had carried a name for two and a half millennia.
That Palintonicity had been formalized as one of the five principles was taken up in the note to “Basic Concepts — Bidirectionality (Palintonicity).” Here is the thing itself.