Continuing from last time on modality. Here I would like to take it up in relation to Rolfing (see Modality (1): What Modality Means, and How It Is Used in Rolfing).
In Phase III there are opportunities to watch client sessions given by Jörg and Andrea, and changes of modality can often be seen in them. Varying the pace while walking, for instance, or releasing effort around the eyes by directing awareness to the back of the body.
Modality is a matter of how the body is used in perceiving, and I touched on this last time in relation to NLP. I also described how a state where something is wrong (being scolded) and a state where things are going well (being praised) are stored in different (sub)modality forms of VAK, and said that what a person responds to is not the event but the memory of the event.
Modality can be used in observing the body as well. Take a yoga pose. A yoga instructor teaches the intention of opening space on the inhalation and of lengthening the body on the exhalation. What happens if that is turned around and the reverse is done? This too is an occasion for seeing a change of modality. Something interesting happened during the body reading of a student who had come from teaching yoga.
Ordinarily, raising both arms from the standing pose (tadasana) is done on an inhalation. What could be seen was that the muscles at the back of the body — the trapezius and the rhomboids — were being used to push both arms up. Next we tried the same movement while exhaling, to see what would happen.
What was surprising was that the arms went up smoothly without using the muscles at the back and without effort through the body as a whole, even though the gestures showed some hesitation in the act of raising them.
Only the breath had been changed. That there are ways of using the body which go unnoticed even at the level of a yoga instructor, and that altering a single one of them has an effect this large, left me simply astonished. It shows clearly how much modality affects the body.
In client sessions there were many occasions to observe changes of modality being brought in: not only the breath, which could equally be called bodily sensation, but imagery (the image of pressing the feet into sand), smell (the aroma of orange) and sight (widening the field of vision). When the time comes to work independently and offer Rolfing sessions of my own, I want to keep an approach that includes the five senses and modality.
Note, August 2026
What astonished me in this article was not the result of the experiment. It was that someone who had been on the teaching side of yoga did not know how she raised her own arms. On an inhalation the muscles at the back were used; changed to an exhalation, the arms rose without them. To her, both had been nothing more than raising the arms.
Once something is well practised, the way it is done becomes ordinary. What has become ordinary drops out of what can be sensed. The longer it has been kept up, the less visible it is.
Running a month behind Phase III, in the same building, was Phase II. Its teacher, Harvey Burns, had been a professional percussionist. His first Rolfing session came some forty-five years ago, in the middle of playing a drum kit, and what it showed him was that he had been working with too much effort. His pattern of tension had become his own normal. Flow and coordination appear only when the effort is let go, though letting go is not collapse — healthy tonus is needed as well. What had been invisible was not the technique of playing but the body that was playing.
The same holds for the person who wrote this article. I had practised Ashtanga yoga for years, and neither the pain in my knees nor the tightness in my shoulders and neck went away. If the poses were being held to increase flexibility and stability, why did the effort keep appearing? That question is what sent me toward the bodywork developed in the West. What happened to the student from a yoga background in that classroom had happened to me a few years earlier.
In that sense, the line about looking outward because something had not been taught has a step before it. Looking outward was necessary because the inside could not be seen.
The operation of swapping the breath also acquires a name later on: Break the Breathing Pattern. Undoing a habitual pairing of breath and movement changes which muscles are recruited. In the classroom of 2015 it was handed over in the general phrasing of changing the modality, with no explanation of why it worked. The fact that it worked came first.