The Rolfing training has no textbook. This came up earlier, in How the Teaching Proceeds, and it likely reflects something characteristic of Rolfing as one of the alternative therapies.
While turning this over, I read Banana Yoshimoto’s Q kenkō tte? on the Kindle and came across a passage that made the matter click.
The book consists of conversations with four practitioners in the field of alternative therapy; one of them is Hiroyoshi Tahata, a Rolfer and Yoshimoto’s partner. What I found most interesting was the afterword, in which the seitai practitioner Yōjirō Katayama sets out his criteria for bodywork and for approaches to health.
He draws a concise distinction between medicine and alternative therapy. In medicine, every technique aims at standardization: at least in principle, the same treatment should be available anywhere. The various approaches to health that fall under the heading of alternative therapy work the other way. However much they share at the level of essentials, they tend to diversify in outward form — and the more skilled the practitioner becomes with a given method, the more it gets customized.
In Phase II and Phase III, notes on how the ten sessions are constructed are distributed as electronic files.
Comparing the notes of Giovanni in Phase II with those of Jörg in Phase III, some parts resemble each other and some do not. Several books by accomplished Rolfers have also been published, and those differ in places as well.
What both Giovanni and Jörg emphasize is the importance of summarizing the ten sessions in one’s own words. Perhaps this is because, as Katayama’s observation suggests, each practitioner eventually arrives at a form of the ten-series that suits that practitioner.
After three to seven years of experience as a Rolfer, one becomes eligible for the Advanced Training, which leads to certification as an Advanced Rolfer.
Looking at the page for this curriculum on the website of RISI (the Rolf Institute of Structural Integration), the phrase develop individualized treatment strategies appears. This seems to confirm exactly the point that human beings differ one from another, and that offering work suited to each of them requires thinking in terms of customization.
Three weeks remain. I am looking forward to what they will bring, and I intend to keep watching the training with diversity in mind.
Note, August 2026
What stayed with me in Katayama’s formulation was where he placed the subject of diversification: with the practitioner. The same method, customized further as the practitioner grows more skilled. The March 2015 entry takes that framing at face value. The absence of a textbook, and the differences between Giovanni’s notes and Jörg’s, are both settled by attributing them to the nature of the field.
The subject has moved twice since.
On Awareness of the Body placed the reason for customization on the client’s side — not the degree of the practitioner’s skill, but the body in front of him. Neither right nor wrong, only another option.
In the Advanced Rolfing Training taken from April through July 2025, it moved again. A session is designed by asking what the client expects, which principle is missing, and where the situation falls within the Taxonomy. Customization was no longer something that arises on its own as skill accumulates; it was the object of design from the start. The practitioner’s skill, then the client’s particularity, then the procedure of design — the subject moved along that sequence.
The three did not replace one another, however. The phrase on the RISI page, develop individualized treatment strategies, already carried a verb in 2015: to develop. Not something that comes about of itself, but something built. At the time the word “individualized” held my attention and the verb went past me.
Something else became visible later.
Movement in Phase I was taught by Rita Geirola. She was certified as a Rolfer in 1987, certified as a Feldenkrais practitioner in 1992, and has taught Pilates since 1998. She studied with both Hubert Godard and Peter Levine.
In December 2019 I received certification as a Rolf Movement Practitioner from her. The teacher who taught Movement on the first days of the basic training was there again at the end of a course five years later. What she returned to repeatedly in those final classes was the question of whom the teaching is for, and which words to choose in addressing them. Each person carries a way of using language shaped by his or her own culture; that, she said, is why the process of teaching is itself the way to learn it.
Customization was not confined to manual technique. The same thing happens on the side of language. In March 2015 I understood it as nothing more than attending the Movement classes.
The same holds for Hiroyoshi Tahata, who appears in the entry above. He was, at that point, a Rolfer who appeared in a book of conversations with Banana Yoshimoto. That he would teach me as an instructor in the Advanced Rolfing Training of 2025 was not something I considered. It was the very course the entry describes as becoming eligible for.