In discussing Body Reading, this column has looked at what posture a body is holding. The question that arises here is why a body is able to hold a posture at all.
Why is it that one can locate one’s own feet, knees, hips, shoulders, arms, and hands with such certainty? Why is it possible, with the eyes closed, to touch the nose, the mouth, the eyes? Considered carefully, it is strange. Before turning to the explanation, I want to begin with something that happened during a client session.
It came up in the sixth session (the session itself is described in Session 6: Organizing the Sacrum). The client had a history of low back pain and had undergone surgery in which the nerves at three lumbar vertebrae were severed. Despite having gone through a range of practitioners — hospitals, osteopathy, and others — the pain apparently persisted. Session 6 organizes the sacrum, which sits at the end of the spine.
Since the sacrum connects to the lower limbs by way of ligaments, the work moves through both the spine and the legs from the posterior side. This time it arrived at the low back, which lies at the center of that territory.
As the session drew toward its close, I had the sense that the body had connected in a straight line from the backs of both legs up to the neck. For some reason, though, the client could not feel that connection on the right side. Wondering why, I called Andrea over so that we could address it together.
Sessions remain, and this stays at the level of conjecture, but it may well be a form of phantom limb. A phantom limb is what a patient who has lost a hand or a foot to accident or illness experiences when the hand or foot continues to feel present despite its absence. The thought was that pain from long ago may have continued after the surgery.
In such cases, the approach is apparently to send a signal that someone here is paying attention, and to work from there by degrees. In this instance, I finished by placing a hand on the spinous processes running up from the low back and listening quietly for the body’s response. Whether this will lead to improvement remains to be seen. I want to keep going, session by session, with close attention and patience.
The question raised at the outset — why one can recognize one’s own posture and the parts that make up one’s body — and the phenomenon of the phantom limb are two sides of the same thing. In either case, it is because human beings have a body map, and it is by relying on that map that one knows what is where.
In The Body Has a Mind of Its Own by Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee, two kinds of body map are introduced: the body schema and the body image.
The body schema is a body map the brain builds unconsciously. It is assembled largely from the five senses (vision, hearing, touch, and the rest), from proprioception — perception governed by information from the limbs and the rest of the body, or the perception of bodily position — and from the vestibular sense. The body schema updates its information continuously through sensations in the skin, the joints, and the muscles. Bodywork of every kind, not only Rolfing but tai chi and yoga as well, works by bringing this unconsciously operating bodily sense into awareness.
What makes this interesting is the relationship between the phantom limb and the body schema. One hypothesis, put forward by V. S. Ramachandran and other researchers known for their work on phantom limbs, holds that when a limb is lost the brain reconstructs the body map unconsciously within a matter of hours.
The phantom limb appears at this point. When the brain accepts the new map, the phantom may disappear; in longer cases it apparently stays for decades.
The body image, by contrast, is a body map built through conscious perception of the body. It could be said to be formed by personal experience, by attitudes, by one’s expectations and assumptions about oneself. Feeling oneself to be overweight while being thin is one instance of a body image.
The body image can also be said to bear on perception — on how one perceives one’s own body. This column has touched before on the way Rolfing works to offer perception new options (see Insecurity and Security).
In doing Body Reading, it helps to hold the body schema and the body image apart. Knowing these two makes it clearer where the work of a Rolfing session should be directed.
I intend to return to the body map in a later entry.
Note, August 2026
Just before turning to the phantom limb, this entry introduces the term body map, taking a general-audience book by Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee as its source. The body schema is built unconsciously; the body image is built through conscious perception and assumption. At the time I took myself to be receiving that distinction from the book.
The primary source had been handed out seven months earlier.
Among the Phase I materials is a paper by Shaun Gallagher and Jonathan Cole, published in 1995 in the Journal of Mind and Behavior and reprinted in 1998 in Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader. The source is written on it in Giovanni’s hand. In that paper the two authors point out that body image and body schema have been used interchangeably among researchers, that the conflation has obstructed an understanding of how each functions, and they set the distinction on firmer ground. The Blakeslee book appears as well, on the last line of a chronology handed out at the same time.
I did not read it. It registered as nothing more than an English-language paper in a stack of materials.
The paper takes as its subject the case of a single man, IW. A neurological illness at nineteen left him without proprioception or the sense of touch below the neck. He feels pain, temperature, and muscular fatigue, but does not know where his limbs are. He rebuilt posture and movement out of vision and conscious judgment alone. Walking takes concentration. In darkness he cannot move. If his attention shifts elsewhere while he is holding an egg, his hand crushes it.
It is the record of a man whose body schema stopped functioning, substituting body image for movement.
What this entry describes is the counterpart. In a phantom limb, what is absent is felt as present. In IW, what is present cannot be felt. Both belong to the body map rather than to the body itself.
What Rolfing does falls between the two: making felt what is present but unfelt. The client here could not feel the right side of a connection running from the backs of both legs to the neck. The tissue is there on the right as well. On the map, that region was faint.
Placing a hand on the spinous processes and listening quietly for a response was the method taken at the time. Sending a signal that someone here is paying attention. Neither pressing nor moving. Seen from a distance, this form of work belongs to a series. In Sharon Wheeler’s Bone Work, one takes hold, applies pressure, and waits; the bone begins to move, and the body finds its own position and stops there. In the mentoring session in London, Alan Richardson spent twenty minutes before making contact. In the Advanced Rolfing Training of 2025, the same thing was put as waiting without strategy, without analysis, without expectation.
Eleven years ago this method was not used because it had been taught, but because there was nothing else to do.
The chronology handed out alongside the paper laid out a century of research into postural control: Sherrington, then Magnus, Bernstein, Penfield. Gamma innervation and muscle spindles are named on it. The gamma motor system would later become central to understanding the theory of Tonic Function. The body map and postural control sat on the same sheet of paper in Phase I.
The two terms have not surfaced in the same way since.
Tonic Function came up again and again as theory, gaining resolution each time. The pairing of body schema and body image, as far as I recall it being used in class, appeared once — in the Case Presentation that followed shortly after this entry. It was brought in by the instructor to account for a case involving a woman from South America, connecting a posture that concealed the chest with a wish not to be a certain way. This was the point at which the design of the integration sessions came into view. Unlike the first seven sessions, which follow a set order, everything from there differs from person to person. The distinction was called upon at the moment that shift needed explaining.
The two terms do not appear in the Rolf Movement training either. The vocabulary used there is that of Tonic Function.
What they describe, however, did not disappear. Takami Kamata, a Rolfer based in Frankfurt, read this entry and wrote a piece of her own on Rolf Movement and the body map (in Japanese: ロルフムーブメントと身体地図). It opens by saying that the concept is indispensable for discussing movement, but that she had hesitated, expecting to get bogged down in unfamiliar technical terms. What Rolf Movement pursues, she concludes, is the redrawing of the body map.
Without reading the English paper, I received the same distinction seven months later from a general-audience book and wrote it up in Japanese. What I wrote drew out a piece that someone who already knew the material had been putting off. There was no textbook, but the paper had been handed out. Not having read it became the occasion for it to be written somewhere else.