The fifth week of the Phase III training has ended. Since we have now worked through Session 7, each of us has taken in at least forty-two sessions in all, counting the students’, the instructors’, and our own client sessions.
Watching the client sessions, some people have an awareness of their own body and some do not. Experience with yoga or Pilates tends to bear on that awareness, though not always.
That Rolfing uses the terms old pattern and new pattern — the pattern held before the work and the one that comes after — has been taken up here before (see “Old Patterns and New Patterns“). What matters is that the result of the work is not “right” and the state before it “wrong.” What is being offered to the client is a choice.
The same holds for having an awareness of the body. This piece considers that awareness through its relation to perception. The reason for taking up perception is simple: it is the word heard most often in the feedback from Jörg during client sessions.
Looking up perception in the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary gives the following senses.
- Noticing things, especially through the senses.
- The capacity to understand the true nature of something.
- An idea, belief, or image formed as a result of how one sees or understands something.
Perception, then, is the act of perceiving, and it is bound up with the beliefs and images a given person has taken on. Before looking at how perception relates to Rolfing, consider the aim of each Rolfing session.
Set out in order, the aims through Session 7 run: organizing the breath (Session 1), the feet (Session 2), the lateral line of the body (Session 3), the pelvic floor (Session 4), the psoas (Session 5), the sacrum (Session 6), the head and face (Session 7).
By releasing unneeded force through the fascia, each targeted region of the body is brought into order. And how the client is aware of that region — the manner of that awareness, the manner of that perceiving — is precisely what constitutes that person’s perception.
Seen this way, perception can be put as
using one’s five senses to understand and perceive the outside world
and it can be called the habit a client holds in using the body. Through Rolfing, a new perception — a new choice — comes to be known and taken on.
In Phase III, Jörg says that to increase the choices available within a client’s perception, they need to learn from their own body, to be educated by it. And within that, learning how to use the body through movement is one effective way. So Rolfing involves not only hands-on work but movement exercises, so that a way of using the body can be taken in.
There are many of them: how to breathe, how to move the pelvis, the sacrum, the spine, how to use the sitting bones.
In Phase II it took everything I had just to learn the ten sessions; in Phase III, how to bring movement into a session, and how to have the client learn a way of using the body through movement, is set before the students as one of the large tasks.
Three weeks remain of the training, and little more. I want to go on widening the range of choices available in my own client sessions — not through hands-on work alone, but through exercises that go by way of movement.
Note, August 2026
Not Right, Not Wrong
At the center of this piece is a single sentence: the result of the work is not “right” and the state before it “wrong.” What is being offered to the client is a choice.
In March 2015 this was an attitude received from Jörg. It came with no explanation that could be given, and it was set down as simply how things were.
Eleven years later, the same thing was handed over as theory.
In the Advanced Training of 2025, Ray McCall introduced Jeff Maitland’s three paradigms: relaxation, corrective, holistic. The corrective paradigm treats the body as a machine and centers on curing symptoms, on straightening what is out of line. Maitland’s observation is that practitioners working from this position tend to overlook how the body as a whole is responding to the injury or to their own intervention. That framework is set down in “What Is Holistic Healing? — Reexamining Through the Lens of “Paradigms”: Relaxation / Corrective / Holistic“
The corrective paradigm rests on a premise: that a correct state exists first, and deviation from it is the problem. That anything can be judged by “right” and “wrong” belongs, in itself, to that position.
The sentence written in 2015 was a declaration that this premise would not be laid down. There was no awareness of that at the time. It said only that a choice was being offered. Ten years passed before what it declines to do could be put into words.
And that the body is not something to be judged right or wrong is also Ida Rolf’s. It is quoted in “Insecurity and Security.” The same thing was being said long before the three paradigms acquired their name.
One word, placed in two systems
The word heard most often from Jörg was perception, the piece says.
That word later branches in two directions.
One is Godard’s lineage. In “Case Presentation (1)” I wrote about the four aspects — Structure, Coordination, Perception, Meaning — with Perception as one of them. When Aline Newton handed the same material back as five viewpoints in 2018, it gained an independent position as perception and cognition. It is a word that sits inside the theory of Tonic Function.
The other is the lineage of the Advanced Training: the Somatic Sensorium of 2025, Maitland’s three questions. Perception here weighs toward the side of how the practitioner perceives.
The same word, placed in two systems, in two different positions. In one it is a component of a theory; in the other it is a matter of how the practitioner is.
In the note to “The Five Principles,” I wrote that people moved between the two systems but the theory did not cross over. Seen from the side of the words, the circumstances come into slightly better view. The vocabulary exists in both. That the same word appears in both does not mean it points to the same thing.
A task handed over became a curriculum
What Phase III set before us was how to bring movement into a session. Not hands-on work alone, but movement exercises: how to breathe, how to move the pelvis, the sacrum, the spine, how to use the sitting bones.
The Rolf Movement training itself came between 2017 and 2019 — thirty days divided into three parts, the first of which takes as its subject deepening the functional aspects of the ten-series, so that a practitioner can offer clients movement explorations that resonate more, session by session.
The task carried alone in March 2015 had become, two years later, the description of Part 1.
That training still sits outside the basic training, as a separate and complementary program. What changed is the order in which it is taught. I took it as the functional understanding of the ten-series, then the design of a three-series, then the leading of groups; now Part 2 is the leading of groups and Part 3 the design of a three-series. Leading a group moved from the back toward the front.
The ERA description puts it this way: movement education has grown because it has become clearer how much orientation to gravity, perception, coordination, expressivity, and the regulation of the nervous system determine whether changes in posture and function last.
The perception this piece took up sits in that list.