The Phase III training has reached the middle of its sixth week. As the techniques and the sequence a Rolfing session requires have gradually come into view, so has something like individuality — how each student and each instructor works with their hands, how each of them observes a body.
Jörg comes from a physiotherapy background, and one thing we can learn from him is how to look at the body in simple, mechanical terms. At the same time, because he goes for the essential thing, he sometimes departs from the sequence of a given session. That he proceeds without concerning himself about this is interesting to watch. Long experience is doing the work.
Andrea comes from the crafts. Because of this, she always checks the body’s movement before and after the work, so that whether a session has had an effect is unambiguous. Her demonstrations are extremely useful for seeing what the work has done.
Giovanni is a master of putting pauses into the middle of the work. He respects the person in front of him while assembling a session freely according to what the situation offers.
Patricia von Weichs, the other instructor in Phase II, takes her time gathering information from the body as she organizes it. That is why her demonstrations were difficult to follow. Not all of it was difficult, though; what left the strongest impression was her way of organizing through the vibration of sound. This apparently comes out of Emilie Conrad’s Continuum Movement, and it was interesting to be able to observe changes in the body — particularly in adjusting the spine — through sounds the client made.
Rolfing instructors, in short, are no two alike.
Why is there such diversity? Diversity has come up in this column before (see Alternative Therapies and Diversity), and a recent post by Takami Kamata, a Rolfer based in Frankfurt, writes about it more clearly. Titled “Customizing the Session (in Japanese only),” it describes what makes a Rolfing session interesting as the way it is customized for whoever is present — a dynamic in which there is no need to follow a manual, and in which what is happening in that person right now is the only thing that instructs.
What I find interesting, having begun observing the students’ client sessions in the Phase III training, is that individuality is gradually emerging among the students as well. In some cases it comes to the front through trial and error.
There are those who think by mapping the body against anatomy, those who are skilled at picking up information from the body, those who are good at working pauses into a session. Backgrounds vary as well — someone who majored in anatomy at university, someone who came from design, someone from an IT company — and since they come from a range of countries, each of them appears to be starting to look for the approach that suits them.
What I find admirable in the education ERA offers is that it respects each person and thinks in terms of extending their strengths. Considered carefully, there is no single correct version of anyone’s way of working, and establishing an approach suited to each person is unquestionably what matters.
I have no idea how long it will take, but I hope in time to establish a Rolfing style suited to my own strengths and character. That is one more reason to concentrate on learning what can be learned during the training.
Note, August 2026
This entry sets five instructors side by side. Jörg departs from the sequence. Andrea checks the movement before and after. Giovanni places pauses. Patricia von Weichs takes her time receiving information. And it locates the reason for the diversity in differences of professional background — someone who studied anatomy, a designer, someone from an IT company, all in the same room.
The explanation is not wrong. The layer it was looking at, however, was shallow.
Tracing Andrea Clusen’s history afterward, “from the crafts” does not cover it. As a child she spent her pocket money on materials for baskets and treehouses rather than on sweets. She trained as a dressmaker, studied CAD pattern making for the fashion industry, trained as a carpenter, and worked for years managing property at one of Munich’s theatres. Whatever material is put in front of her, she adapts how she handles it and tends to it so that it serves its purpose. Her official ERA profile says that responding to the changing requirements of any system has become second nature to her.
Her route into Rolfing came out of the same work. Strain from craftwork sent her to a physiotherapist, who worked on her with Rolfing. Her unending interest in materials of every kind turned toward the body as a material.
The observation in this entry — that she checks the movement before and after — was accurate. What was not visible at the time is that it belongs to a consistent stance toward materials.
There is something else that could not have been known then.
Andrea was certified as an Advanced Rolfer in 2010. According to her official ERA profile, that training was the only Advanced Training ever to have taken an energetic taxonomy as its leading notion. During the same period she was using SourcePoint Therapy in her practice from 2009 and completed Module 3 in 2011. She became a licensed SourcePoint Therapy instructor in 2016 and a licensed ScarWork instructor in 2017. ScarWork is Sharon Wheeler’s method.
Sharon’s Bone Work would be taken in Tokyo in November 2016; SourcePoint Therapy would be encountered in Osaka in May 2015. At the time of this entry, neither was known. Someone holding both was assisting in the same classroom.
The diversity of that room, then, was not a matter of professional background alone. Several lineages that had diverged within Rolfing were overlapping in a single instructor.
The Taxonomy in the Advanced Rolfing Training taken in 2025 also includes categories that deal with the energetic. If the 2010 training was the only one to have made that its leading notion, then the course fifteen years later incorporated the same subject as one part of a classification. Not a single attempt, but a precedent.
The same holds for Patricia von Weichs. The entry mentions her way of organizing through the vibration of sound and notes that it comes out of Emilie Conrad’s Continuum Movement. Continuum Movement would come around again two years later, by a different route: the workshop with Gael Rosewood. Gael met Emilie Conrad in 1980, and having met Ida Rolf in 1969, she stands on the side of how Rolf Movement came to be at all. The same source reached the classroom in Munich and the workshop in Shinjuku two years later along separate paths.
What was visible in March 2015 went as far as the fact that people work differently. Why they differ was explained by differences of history and temperament. In fact, each of those teaching carried a distinct lineage into the same room.
The entry calls it admirable that ERA respects each person and thinks in terms of extending their strengths. That assessment stands. What was being extended, though, was not only the students’ strengths. Those teaching also brought in what they had received along their own routes, and the institution was not smoothing that out. What it means to have no textbook reaches this far as well.