Wednesday, 18 March 2015, the last OPEN day of Phase III, with no client sessions. Last week ran five training days, Monday the 9th through Friday the 13th, and what remains has narrowed to three (four, strictly speaking, but two of them are the final client sessions and the last day is the Final Interview and the presentation of certificates).
Munich has had a run of clear days and is growing warmer. Perhaps because of it, the students seem to be shifting into a holiday mood rather than practising.
With nine client sessions behind them, the students are moving into a state of wanting more experience. I have also begun to look forward a great deal to how I will carry what I have learned into practice.
This is a world away from the Phase II training, when I was groping in the dark to the end, unsure how to digest what was being taught. There is a real sense that the length of the training was right, and that I have learned the work and taken it in sufficiently.
The last OPEN day was given over mainly to questions and answers. The question that made the strongest impression came when one student asked Jörg and Andrea:
Growth as a rolfer, can you go back to the time when you were certified? What kind of lesson did you learn that helped you grow?
Both Jörg and Andrea said that understanding and organising one’s own body from the inside is what matters, and gave as the reason:
If you work with people and you are aware of your body this will be communicated to the client.
In the end, what Rolfing can do is not to add something for the client, treatment for example, but only to offer the client an awareness. And from there the person chooses, of their own accord, what seems right for them:
He will take what he needs and he has the freedom to choose what he takes.
This comes through well in a phrase Jörg used more than once during the training:
The body knows better than anything…
He also spoke about what is needed in order to hold this in mind:
Be open, be interested, be curious, avoid dogmatic concepts, have fun, enjoy work!
What was interesting was that both of them also shared their failures. Andrea had once repeated the third session when she should have been giving the fourth. Jörg, during his own Rolfing training, was told by his teacher that a session he had been certain he performed perfectly was one in which he had in fact lost contact with the client.
Counting Giovanni and Jörg, I was taught by ten teachers over the seventy-eight days of the training. Jörg apparently still puts his questions to his own teacher, twenty years on. I learned a great deal during the training, and there is a great deal still to learn, and questions will keep arising. I want to keep these relationships with my teachers going from here.
Note, August 2026
Of everything the two of them said that day, what carries the most weight on rereading is the failures. Andrea repeated the third session where the fourth should have been given. Jörg was told that a session he had been certain was perfect was one in which he had lost contact with the client. And Jörg, twenty years on, still takes his questions to his own teacher.
The basic training has no textbook. What came from ten teachers over seventy-eight days was not an account of procedures but a showing of how each of them handled a body. The line I took for the title of this article — that how a Rolfer has dealt with their own body comes through to the client — applies just as directly to the relation between those who teach and those who learn.
Why is there no textbook? That the institution has not caught up is the explanation that comes first, and it seems reasonable enough. But among the people who built this training there is a standpoint that doubts the putting of method into language at all. Sharon Wheeler valued experience, and kept asking what philosophy is able to say.
From that standpoint, the absence of a textbook is not a gap but a necessity. Hand over a book containing only what can be written down, and what cannot be written down falls away.
Sharing one’s failures, then, was a means of handing over the part that falls away. Not the finished procedure but the process of getting it wrong. Still asking questions after twenty years does the same thing: it shows, through conduct, that this is not a body of knowledge with an end to it.
That said, what has gone unarticulated does not necessarily stay that way. The care the two of them described here — understanding and organising one’s own body from the inside — would be given the name Neutral ten years later in the advanced training, and taught with a procedure for cultivating it, as three requirements, one of them Hara. What had been a personal way of being became something that could be taught.
The standpoint that doubts articulation and the side that pursues it both stand within this lineage. It is not that one of them is right. What moves, over time, is the line between what can be handed over and what cannot.