Two days of the training remain. This time I would like to introduce the Alexander Technique (AT), which comes up from time to time during the Rolfing training, and to think about what it has in common with Rolfing.
More than a year before I began the Rolfing training, I came to know about AT through Toshihiro Aramaki (Toshi), an AT teacher, in the Mysore class of the Ashtanga yoga I was practising at the time.
What drew my interest was that Toshi had mastered the very difficult Ashtanga series in a short period. Where did that come from? That was the question. Of course, another large part of it was that I was practising Ashtanga yoga and still had effort held in my body (see Untangling a Body That Won’t Let Go — What Yoga Was Missing).
As I have written in Untangling a Body That Won’t Let Go — What Yoga Was Missing, AT involves attending to the relation between the head and the spine, noticing the body’s unnecessary automatic reactions, and learning to stop them. It is one way of letting the body learn to release effort. It was developed by Frederick Matthias Alexander, an Australian actor and reciter.
As an aside, Ida Rolf, who developed Rolfing, Frederick Alexander, and Moshe Feldenkrais, who developed the Feldenkrais Method, are called the three great figures of bodywork in the West. Moshe and Ida were of the same generation, and Rolfing was influenced by AT as well.
So I paid a visit to Body Chance, where Toshi was studying. The introductory session I attended was given by two AT teachers, the director, Jeremy Chance and the interpreter, Basil Kritzer.
Let me share what happened there.
After we performed the action of picking something up in our usual way, the teachers went round to each of us and, in order to bring bodily awareness to the relation between head and spine that AT holds central, placed their hands lightly on the AO joint, where the skull meets the spine, and guided from there. This is called hands-on.
Strangely enough, the tightness in my neck eased simply through that. It made a strong impression at the time. Attending the foundation course several times afterwards, my yoga poses improved as well, and I wanted to join the professional course. So from April 2013, at a pace of once every two weeks, I studied there for about eight months, until work grew busy and I had to take leave partway through.
The professional course is aimed at those training to become AT teachers, but the training I received consisted mainly of anatomy and of receiving AT hands-on. On the professional course, receiving hands-on from AT teachers lets the sensation soak into the body. This is what Rolfing calls Embodiment (see Bodily Sensation: What Is Embodiment?).
Each AT training session took up basic actions: working at a PC, sitting, lying down, yoga poses. All of them were given over to directing awareness to the relation between head and spine and letting the body learn it gradually.
Giovanni, who taught in Phase II of the Rolfing training, knew this AT hands-on well. In AT it is cultivated over at least three years, and an AT teacher receives around 1,200 hours of training in total. In Rolfing terminology, hands-on is called gamma touch: the practitioner’s body comes into a state in which the gamma motor system is dominant, and the work is done with those hands. Working with that quality of touch matters in Rolfing.
As I wrote in The Muscles That Tire and the Muscles That Don’t — Tonic Function and the Support of Posture, Rolfing comes down to this:
how to bring into play Tonic muscle, which works continuously under the gamma motor system and is efficient in its use of energy within the body, rather than Phasic muscle, which works temporarily under the alpha motor system and brings fatigue
In AT, the relation between head and spine is used to let this gamma motor system become dominant within the body, and that is carried into the hands-on. As in Rolfing, the body is re-educated toward bringing Tonic Muscle into play. In that sense the two are aiming in similar directions.
Once AT has soaked into the body, one is ready to work on others. Then, in working, the process is examined in detail, on the basis that the relation between head and spine has been firmly established. AT holds that without it one cannot work on anyone else.
This is much like what was taught in Phase III:
how a Rolfer has dealt with their own body comes through to the client
(see How You Have Dealt with Your Own Body Comes Through in the Session).
Rolfing and AT also have something in common in how the training is conducted. What Rolfing places weight on is watching, over and over, how body reading is carried out in each session. As I wrote in Seeing and Perceiving (1): Seeing Begins with a Concept, this is sharpened by a continuous supply of information until the eye for the body is formed.
In the same way, AT continues until the relation between head and spine has thoroughly soaked into the body. Both share what is characteristic of bodywork: learning to perceive rather than cultivating an analytical eye.
The two methods have a great deal in common in that they are directed at the same end, releasing unnecessary effort, and that makes them interesting. Their approaches also differ, so in a sense AT and Rolfing stand in a complementary relation. I will leave that point for another occasion.
Note, August 2026
This article states Rolfing in a single formulation. How to bring into play Tonic muscle, which comes under the gamma motor system, rather than Phasic muscle, which comes under the alpha motor system. And it sets the Alexander Technique’s hands-on beside it as gamma touch, a matter of the same neural system. It was written the day before certification, the last article of the training period.
The terms in that formulation were already on a handout given in the first part of the basic training. A chronology of research into postural control, running from Sherrington through Magnus, Rademaker and Bernstein to Penfield. Gamma innervation and muscle spindles were written into it, along with the way of calling the spindles small brains.
I did not read that handout. So these terms came not from the paper but by another route. Hearing them from Giovanni in the classroom, taking them into the body on the professional course of the Alexander Technique, then arranging them myself into a formulation. What had been on the sheet of paper and what I reached over two years by a different road turned out to be the same words.
The formulation has further to go. Pairing the gamma motor system with muscles that work continuously would be handed over in the Rolf Movement Training as a system with a name, Tonic Function, and with the name of Hubert Godard attached.
The continuous activity that organises posture, the stage before a movement occurs, the part perception plays in changing habits of coordination. What was written here in a single line had become the subject of a thirty-day course.
At the end of this article stands the line that Rolfing and the Alexander Technique are in a sense complementary. Ten years later, in the advanced training, I would be taught the concept of Neutral. Not through the relation between head and spine but as three requirements, one of them Hara. Entering from the side of the centre of gravity.
The destination is close, and where one enters differs. What that word complementary caught hold of at the time was, I think, this difference.