The Rolfing training has entered its sixth week. Seven of the ten sessions are done. Sessions 1 through 3 are the Sleeve sessions and Sessions 4 through 7 the Core sessions, so this marks a division, and a Case Presentation was held as it was the last time (for the Case Presentation after the third session, see Case Presentation (1): After the Third Session).
What I found most interesting was that the discussion took up the integration sessions (8 through 10) in relation to the body map.
Through the seventh session, the purpose is clear: how to approach the body. From the eighth onward, the content of a session shifts according to each client’s needs. The reason is that the work is completed in ten sessions. Part of what happens is that the client takes what has been learned across the ten into daily life, and since the aim is to encourage the client’s autonomy, the approach naturally differs from person to person (see The Integration Sessions).
Once the sessions through the seventh have been carried out in order, every part of the body has been touched. Over that stretch, whatever the difficulties are — or the tasks — becomes clear. Is this person’s difficulty low back pain? Left–right balance? Tension across the shoulders?
Having touched the whole body does not guarantee that its parts move in concert. Rolfing places particular emphasis on the coordination of the shoulder girdle and the pelvis. When the two work together and the rotation of the spine is used — contralateral, in Rolfing’s vocabulary — movement is accomplished with minimal effort (see The Integration Sessions).
With Jörg and Andrea, each student took ten minutes to present a brief summary of one case, including photographs (three of them: before Session 1, after Session 3, and after Session 7, each taken from four angles — front, right and left sides, and back).
The case I found most interesting as a problem involved a woman. Because she held a body image of not wanting to be like a South American woman, this had apparently surfaced as an unconscious posture that concealed the chest — a body schema. Body image and body schema here refer to two different body maps.
The body schema is the body map assembled automatically, unconsciously, as the brain gathers information from various external sources. The body image is a map built out of subjective impressions formed by the environment one grew up in, by culture, and so on. This column has covered each of these in detail (see The Body Map and the Phantom Limb).
Once Phase III begins, a good deal is said about how to use language in communicating with a client, and this bears on the body image. Not wanting to be like a South American woman is that person’s own image, particular to her. She does not want remarks made about it. From the practitioner’s side, what matters is not passing judgment on it as right or wrong.
Pointing out that a given area is tense, or noting what is wrong with a body, can also amount to a denial of the body image, since a client may carry insecurities about it. The body image, in short, is bound up with the ego, and a judgment leaves the client feeling denied.
What Rolfing can do is not to confront that body image directly, but to become neutral — and to concentrate on what Rolfing can do. That is to bring into awareness the body map that has been operating unconsciously as body schema, and to rewrite that map little by little by offering new options, new patterns. Through this, one hopes the body image changes.
If the subject of South American women comes up, for instance, the response is not to view it as right or wrong, but to offer a new way of seeing the body — there is another way to use it, movement through the spine, say. And one hopes that by the tenth session some change will have appeared in how she regards her own body image.
It occurred to me during the Case Presentation that the relation between body schema and body image resembles the relation between BEING and DOING in coaching. This column has described coaching as a means of listening to a person and considering how to raise that person’s potential (see Sensing, Doing, and Coaching — Thinking It Through from CTI’s Educational System).
There,
- DOING = what one does
- BEING = how one is to be
and the essence of coaching, as described there, is that working on BEING — the values that tend to remain unconscious — or, put another way, rewriting those values, changes DOING, which is conscious, of its own accord.
This closely resembles the relation between an unconscious body schema and a conscious body image.
Meeting the body image is one of the pleasures of Rolfing, and no two clients are alike. This Case Presentation offered a range of body images to listen to, and I am very much looking forward to seeing how each client regards her own once the ten sessions are complete.
Note, August 2026
Almost everything taught in this entry takes the form of a prohibition. Do not pass judgment on a body image as right or wrong. Do not point out that a given area is tense. Do not name what is wrong with a body. The reason is given as well: the body image is bound up with the ego, so a client who is judged feels denied.
And immediately beside those prohibitions sits the word neutral. Not confronting the body image directly, but becoming neutral.
This is the second time the word appears in the entries from this period. The first was the coaching phrasing — making one’s mind neutral. In neither case is there any account of what it refers to. There is only the explanation in the negative: not judging.
Ten years later the word arrived with a procedure attached. What was given as the requirements for Neutral in the Advanced Rolfing Training of 2025 came to three, and all three concerned how the practitioner places the body: how the hand takes its form (Shape the Hand), how one finds the space behind oneself (Finding Back Space), and the belly (Hara). Not what to refrain from, but where and how one is.
A prohibition had been handed back as a way of being.
The same shape appeared elsewhere in Phase III. Do not touch the client’s story, we were told. What came ten years later was phrased as not becoming part of the story. Whether a prohibition has been observed can only be checked afterward; a way of being can be checked by the practitioner in the middle of the work.
There is also something reaching this entry along a different route.
During the Case Presentation, it occurred to me that the relation between body schema and body image resembles BEING and DOING in coaching. The CTI coaching had been taken in 2009, before Rolfing was known to me at all. Touch the values operating unconsciously and the conscious behavior changes of its own accord. That stance — engaging a person’s values without passing judgment — had been learned there first.
What came from the side of manual work and what came from the side of conversation overlapped in the same room on the same day. At the time it went as far as noting the resemblance.
In the later vocabulary this stance is called Kind Indifference. Interested, without attachment to the outcome. It was introduced as a phrase of Jim Jealous’s. The prohibition against judging and the stance of trusting a person’s possibility had by then become a single term.
The case of the woman from South America is also the one place in this entry where a specific person appears. A posture that concealed the chest and a wish not to be a certain way were connected in the Case Presentation. As far as I recall, it was the only time an instructor brought in the terms body image and body schema.
The approach taken in that case was not to avoid the subject. It was to offer a different way of using the body — movement through the spine. Not correction, but the addition of an option. Two years later, in Gael Rosewood’s workshop, the same principle would be taught as a way of choosing words.