There are times when a change of rhythm releases effort that has built up in the body. Walking slowly and then picking up the pace. Asking someone who habitually raises the arms on an inhalation to raise them on an exhalation instead. Changing how the body is used can leave a client with a different way of using it, and in the Phase III training this is sometimes brought into a session.
A different way of using the body — that is, a change in perception — is spoken of in Rolfing as changing the modality. Looking up this unfamiliar word in the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary gives three meanings:
- the particular way in which something exists, is experienced or is done.
- the ideas expressed by modals.
- the kind of senses that the body uses to experience things.
The one used in Rolfing is the third: the kind of senses the body uses in order to experience.
Unfortunately, the Phase III training offers no occasion to learn in any detail what modality is or what effects it has on the body. So I would like to approach modality here through NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming), one of the psychologies developed in the United States.
NLP is a kind of psychological model developed in the 1960s by Richard Bandler, who had studied psychology, and John Grinder, a linguist. The model came out of analysing and modelling three gifted psychotherapists, who were also called wizards of therapy: Milton Erickson, who practised hypnotherapy; Fritz Perls, of Gestalt therapy; and Virginia Satir, of family therapy.
As an aside, Ida Rolf’s book Rolfing and Physical Reality records that by the 1950s she had been practising in New York for twenty-five years while teaching her technique in the United States, Canada and Britain.
Rolfing became known worldwide after Ida visited the Esalen Institute. It was Fritz Perls who invited her. She began to exchange ideas with him there, and went on to run Rolfing training at Esalen in earnest. Seen in that light, NLP seems to have influenced Rolfing in some form.
NLP is made of three words: Neuro, the recognition of the world through information gathered by the five senses; Linguistic, the putting of that information into language; and Programming, the programs formed within a person through experience.
NLP analyses the client’s present state and then addresses how the client might arrive at a desired state. A range of skills is prepared for this: building trust, observing the body, choosing words. Among them, the skills that work with modality express what is most characteristic of NLP.
When a person perceives the outside world, the various components felt through the five senses — sight, hearing, bodily sensation — are combined and stored as memory, and these components are what is called modality.
What is interesting is that people have habits here: in most cases one of the three is dominant, visual (V), auditory (A), or kinesthetic (K), together known as VAK. NLP then looks at VAK in fine detail, which is referred to as Submodality.
When a person goes through an event, it is remembered: a roller coaster, being scolded, being praised. The experience is stored within the submodalities of VAK.
Let me give my own example.
When I bring to mind an experience of being scolded, visually the image sits at close range, below and to one side of my line of sight, and it appears in monochrome. In hearing, the event is easier to catch with the left ear; the volume is a six out of ten, the voice is high, and the sound moves fast. In bodily sensation, I feel it around the heart; the temperature is cold, it has weight, and it feels dense and hard.
When I bring to mind an experience of being praised, visually the image sits above the centre of my line of sight, it looks large, and it appears in colour. In hearing, it is the right ear; the volume is a four out of ten, the voice is in the middle range, and so is the speed. In bodily sensation, I feel it throughout the body; the temperature is warm, and it feels light and soft.
A state where something is wrong (being scolded) and a state where things are going well (being praised) are stored in different submodality forms of VAK.
So what happens if the experience of being scolded is shifted into the VAK of the state where things are going well? What is surprising, when one actually tries it, is that the view of the negative event changes in an instant.
Memories of experience are stored in the form of VAK. From then on, when the same kind of event is met again, what is responded to is not the event but the memory of the event. And as the above suggests, changing VAK makes it possible to rewrite the memory of the event.
Seen this way, it becomes clear why, in observing the body, it matters to know how negative and positive experiences have been stored in VAK.
Next time I would like to say more about this in relation to Rolfing.
Note, August 2026
Halfway through this article there is an admission that something was not taught. What modality is, and what effects it has on the body, are not covered in any detail in Phase III. And the gap is filled with the vocabulary of NLP, which I had been studying until two years earlier.
Reading it eleven years later, what begins here is not a patch for one article but a method of working. Explaining Rolfing by connecting its vocabulary to a system from outside it. This article used NLP; afterwards came polyvagal theory, Somatic Experiencing, immunology, neuroscience — the subject changing, the operation the same. Not a single act of looking outward because the classroom had not explained something, but the shape of everything I would go on to write, taking form here.
The borrowed framework had its limits. VAK as a classification was drawn in the 1970s from observation of three psychotherapists, and it is not a system with experimental support behind it. The triad of sight, hearing and bodily sensation has a different origin from the sight, vestibular sense and kinesthetic sense discussed in The Three Elements of Posture: Visual, Vestibular, and Kinesthetic, and the two cannot be read as the same thing. That distinction was not clear to me at the time.
There was also a framework for modality within the training itself. It simply did not appear in the classroom of March 2015.
Three years later, in the Rolf Movement Training, France Hatt-Arnold would teach the distinction between Territorial Body and Body of Action. Each region of the body was matched to the perception through which it could be experienced. For someone unable to sense the inside of their own body, movement that yields proprioception. For approaches to the various regions of the body, movement directed at Peripersonal Space. For the sense that the body belongs to oneself, movement that works through the surrounding environment.
France was certified in Rolf Movement in 1986, four years before her Rolfing certification. She came in from the side of movement. And she studied with Hubert Godard for twenty years: the tonic activity that organises posture, Pre-movement and how it is addressed, the part perception plays in changing habits of coordination. The table handed over in that classroom had come out of those twenty years.
This article ends by listing what can be used — not only the breath, but imagery, smell, sight. What was handed over three years later was that same list turned into a set of correspondences: what to apply where. Things that had stood side by side had become a table.
The term Peripersonal Space has a history further back still. It appears in a paper handed out in Phase I that I did not read. Having left it unread, I received it three years later as a practical procedure in a classroom, and later still wrote an article of my own on personal space.