The client sessions in Phase III have reached the tenth. What I learned most from them was, without question, the importance of keeping Hold the space in mind. This was something I had also learned in reading tarot cards, and it never occurred to me that it would matter as much in a form of bodywork like Rolfing. This time I would like to take up Hold the space.
How should Hold the space be explained? It comes up often in Rolfing, and yet it does not appear in the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, so I looked it up online. What came back was a piece on MindBodyGreen, ‘Holding Space: What Does It Mean & How Do We Do It?‘
It explains Hold the space as follows.
It means when someone is going through something, you hold down the ground for them to have their own time and space to work out whatever they’re going through.
You provide stable, solid ground for them to be completely where they’re at without judgement, criticism, or blame. A neutral territory for the other to just… be. You have faith in their intelligence to figure out of their own.
What matters in Hold the space is providing an environment secure enough that the other person can arrive at their own awareness. That sense of security means an environment in which anything can be said, and in which one is not judged, criticised or blamed by the other. From this it follows, as I have touched on repeatedly in this column, that it matters for the Rolfer to be in a state of Neutral.
On top of that, Phase III also taught me the importance of keeping Less is More in mind, which is to say attending to which part is not worked on (see Space and the Room in the Mind).
Doing so gives the other person time to notice what is happening within their own body. This is also a way of conveying what is called Teach without teaching.
Let me give an example.
Watching Giovanni’s client demonstration sessions in Phase II, what I felt was that he valued the client’s awareness and worked in accordance with it.
Jörg’s client demonstration sessions in Phase III, by contrast, have the same freedom, but he leads more from his side — Decisive, in English — providing an environment in which the body’s awareness can be discovered. He then works in accordance with the client, but the emphasis differs slightly.
This shows in the fact that during Giovanni’s sessions it made no difference whether students were eating and drinking or handling a PC (Mac, iPad, iPhone), and he was entirely unshaken by anyone coming close or watching from directly in front. There was even the addition that moving one’s body was permitted, taking a yoga pose during a session, for instance.
During Jörg’s sessions, the moment any sound came from a PC, a firm NO followed. There were cautions about moving as well. He too sometimes had students come close, but the impression of a distance between him and the students who were there to learn was strong.
Even so, what the two of them shared was that both drew a boundary with the client, kept Hold the space in mind, and gave themselves to making an environment in which the client could face their own body directly.
Hold the space is a theme I want to keep returning to, so I will come back to it.
Note, August 2026
This article begins by looking up a term that is not in the dictionary. It is used constantly in a Rolfing classroom and yet does not appear in the Oxford. So an explanation found on a wellness site was borrowed instead. The training did not hand over a definition, and one was taken from outside.
The borrowed explanation is not far off, even now. Holding down the ground so that the other person has their own time and place. A neutral territory, without judgement, criticism or blame. Trusting their intelligence to find their own answer. Across eleven years, no need arose to revise that understanding substantially.
What did not stay the same was not the content of the understanding but the reason for writing about it. I have written about this term four times in eleven years: shortly before this article, in this article, in 2018 and in 2025. Each time about the same term, and each time about something else. Once as a matter of how space is felt, once as a matter of the practitioner’s own state.
Here too is the shape in which the name arrives first and the meaning fills in afterwards. In this case, though, the filling in did not finish in one go. The definition was in hand from the start, and what that definition pointed at kept changing as experience accumulated. The term did not move. What moved was what I looked at through it.
The contrast between the two teachers described here bears on the same thing. In Giovanni’s demonstration sessions it made no difference whether students were eating or handling a PC or watching from directly in front. In Jörg’s sessions, a firm NO followed the moment a sound came from a PC. From outside, the two look like opposites.
And yet this article records, as what they shared, that both drew a boundary with the client and gave themselves to making a place where the client could face their own body.
To do the same thing, the two of them used entirely different means. Changing how something is handled according to the material is common among those who teach in this training. Andrea’s earlier working life, which I learned about only later, ran from tailoring to CAD pattern-making for the clothing industry, then carpentry, then stage management at a theatre in Munich. Adjusting the handling to the material had become second nature to her.