A month is about to pass since the Rolfing training ended. As I have written in this column, I did not gain my certification in Boulder, Colorado, the place of origin, but completed my training in Munich, Germany (see On the Training in Munich (1) — Why I Chose to Study in Munich: The Application Process and the Costs).
How I came to that point is set out in the same article, so I will leave it aside, but I think the choice to study in Germany was the right one.
As a child, from the first year of primary school to the second year of middle school, I lived in Los Angeles and had the good fortune to attend a local school. After returning to Japan, and once I began working, I had many occasions to use English, so English is close to a first language for me and the language itself posed no difficulty.
Training in Germany, unlike in America, puts you together with people from a range of countries. Looking at the backgrounds of the participants, two countries had English as a first language (the United States and Singapore) and the other nine did not (Belgium, France, Switzerland, Germany, Ukraine, Mexico, Japan, Sweden and Denmark).
Among the teachers as well, one country had English as a first language (the United Kingdom, though he is from Italy), and the other three did not (Italy, Spain, Germany).
For most of those taking part, then, English is a second language. Having lived in America, I can see why it is sometimes described as Egocentric: things proceed there on the assumption that everyone in the world can speak English. English is spoken very fast as a result, and since Americans are educated to believe that speaking up matters, someone from outside can feel that no interval is left in which to speak at all.
What was good about the training in Germany, by contrast, is that the pace of spoken English was slow and careful, reflecting the background in which English is a second language.
Something I understood only after living in Germany is that Europe, with its long history, makes an effort to respect the cultures of each country and to understand that diversity, perhaps because of the differences of language and people. It shows in education within Germany, among other places.
Concretely, it is not only that the English is slow. Space is deliberately made in the class so that people from different cultures can speak.
Jörg Ahrend-Löns, who taught Phase III, showed this consideration:
I do not have much experience teaching Japanese students, so if anything comes up, please be sure to tell me
and he followed through on it to the end.
The training places weight on an education that draws out individuality, and for more detail on that I would point to Individuality and Education.
That there was room to speak was also fortunate. To give one example, a Swiss colleague who was struggling with the material put questions to Jörg again and again — I cannot accept this, please do something about it. Jörg met each of them seriously and worked through the problems one by one. Needless to say, this helped the rest of us understand the material as well.
What made an impression was something said by that Swiss colleague, who had taken Phase I in Colorado and joined the German training from Phase II. In the training in Colorado, he said, spoken English was very fast and no interval was left even to ask a question.
People in Switzerland — this may be hard for someone in Japan to imagine — can almost all handle English. That such a remark comes even so suggests to me that the issue is not language.
I have written about the training itself in this column, so I will leave it aside (see, for instance, The Final Interview and Certification as a Rolfer), but slow as the English was, understanding one hundred per cent of it was considerable work.
The training was very interesting, and the density of what was covered meant that by the end of a day, not only I but most of the students were spent. Had the English been fast and had there been no chance to ask what one wanted to ask, my understanding would have been halved.
Choosing to study Rolfing in Colorado, where it began, matters. But I would like the option of Munich, in Germany, which is not widely known, to be known as well.
Note, August 2026
The weightiest thing in this article is what the Swiss colleague said. Someone who took Phase I in Colorado and moved to Munich from Phase II said that in Colorado the English was fast and no interval was left even to ask a question. People from Switzerland almost all handle English without difficulty. And that person said there was no interval. So the issue is not language, this article concludes.
Eleven years on, I think that conclusion was right. These were places teaching the same work, and the handling of intervals differed. What differed was not the speed of the words but the design of who gets time to speak.
It is not that there was no traffic between them. Pierpaola Volpones, who taught the Supervision Workshop, took her training in Munich in the 1980s, and the teacher then was an American Rolfer. There was a period when people came from the United States to teach in European classrooms.
Theory failing to cross over is something this series has seen a number of times. What failed to cross here was not theory. It was the part that never gets written down — how much time in a classroom is given, and to whom. What is not written does not travel with the people who move.
And the consideration this article describes became something I would later use myself. Making space so that people from other cultures can speak. Jörg saying at the outset that he had little experience teaching Japanese students and asking to be told if anything came up.
Building a setting with an awareness of where the other person has come from and in which language they think is the same operation as what one does with a client. What was received while learning became what is used while giving.
The article is written by someone for whom English is close to a first language, saying that the environment of those for whom it is not was the better one. That it comes from someone on the side that was not inconvenienced is, I think, where its value lies.