European Rolfing training is made up of three stages, and after them a Supervision Workshop, held over six days as a follow-up, is required.
n Munich I took the basic Rolfing training on the following dates.
Phase I: 4 August to 22 August 2014
Phase II: 6 October to 26 November 2014
Phase III: 2 February to 25 March 2015
On the training, please see On the Training in Munich (1) — Why I Chose to Study in Munich: The Application Process and the Costs and What Comes into View When You Study Alongside People Whose First Language Is Not English.
The first day of the Supervision Workshop came on 13 December 2016, and I met the Italian teacher Pierpaola Volpones (Paola below) for the first time. I had heard that Paola is a well-balanced person even among Rolfers, who tend to be strikingly individual, and that she sets out the techniques assembled by the field’s most gifted figures in a way that is easy to grasp, measured against the basic definition of Rolfing.
For someone wanting to go back over the fundamentals, she seemed exactly the right teacher (for details, see On the ERA Mentoring Sessions and the Supervision Workshop Ahead).
The assisting teacher was Fuensanta Muñoz de la Cruz (Fuensanta below), from Spain. Fuensanta is a Certified Advanced Rolfer who also holds a medical degree, and I had studied with her two years earlier when she assisted with Movement in Phase I.
The group came to thirteen: ten women and three men. The nationalities were German, Swiss, Brazilian, Italian and Japanese (two of us were from Japan).
As for the first day, the morning went into a discussion centred on what people wanted the Supervision to cover.
Body reading (observation of the body in Rolfing), and a review of how the ten-series is put together. How each session connects to the next. Working from questions sent by email beforehand and from what people wanted to know now, the morning proceeded with Paola and Fuensanta leading.
When I asked
with several clients, the ten sessions did not land at all — how should that be handled
the discussion turned into a workshop. We paired up, put hands on each other’s bodies, and were told
put into words how it feels
and one by one the words were taken down in pen on large sheets of paper. Hot. Trembling. A sense of energy moving. What came through was that the sensation of touching a body with the hands appears in a different set of words for each person.
For someone who cannot make out bodily sensation, placing hands on the various parts of the body and letting them understand the difference between the sensation in the body (Sensation) and the verbal expression thought out in the head (Cognition) brings the sensation back. That was something I could learn.
Next, and related to it, how to listen. What does it mean to hear what a client says? We did this after a piece of work in which the ten sessions are felt through the body, movement by movement — the Embodiment work done in Phase II (see Bodily Sensation: What Is Embodiment?).
Working with people I had not paired with before, listening turned out to be unexpectedly difficult. What came out of it: listening with a purpose; that a client need not necessarily join in the conversation, but that it matters for the client to be part of the communication; and that rather than supplying meaning to the other person’s words, one lets the other person work out the meaning of their own sensations.
In the afternoon a document Paola had made was handed out — notes setting out the key points of sessions one through ten — and we went back over the first and second sessions and did body reading in groups of three. For body reading, Paola’s material is very tightly focused and therefore easy to follow; it made for a good review.
Finally we worked in pairs on how to do body reading on the table for the first and second sessions. There was a great deal to learn in how the breath is observed.
The client sessions begin tomorrow. Foreign clients await, for the first time since Phase III, and I would like to write about that next time.
Note, August 2026
Two teachers were in that room over the six days. What I knew at the time was that Paola was a well-balanced person who set out the fundamentals clearly, and that Fuensanta held a medical degree and had assisted in Phase I two years earlier. Not much more than that.
Looking at Fuensanta Muñoz de la Cruz’s background changes how the room looks. She took her medical degree at the University of Córdoba in 1987 and was certified in 1990 at the Rolf Institute in the United States. Her teachers there were Emmett Hutchins and Jeffrey Maitland. Her advanced training in 2005 was with Michael Salveson and Hubert Godard; of Godard she says that she considers him her teacher.
Beyond that, she studied the psychobiological dimension with Pedro Prado, and Somatic Experiencing with Peter Levine and Lael Keen. The first of it was a course with Levine on Corfu in 1992.
The names on that list are ones I have been treating as separate streams. The side that carried on the form Ida Rolf first taught, the side that pursued theory, the European functional lineage, and the line that works with the nervous system and trauma. They sit in one person.
Paola’s background runs similarly. Her continuing education includes workshops with Jeff Maitland, Jan Sultan, Michael Salveson and Peter Schwind, and she writes that her Rolf Movement background owes a great deal to Godard’s teaching. She has studied visceral manipulation with Barral and others as well.
I have been thinking in terms of three lineages, but from the point of view of those who teach, that division turns out to be a line drawn afterwards, from my side. To someone learning, it was one classroom. And what was supposedly separate had been gathered in it from the beginning.
There is something else the two of them share. Both came in through moving the body.
Paola qualified as a physical educator in 1976, took a degree in sociology in 1982, and worked as a physical education teacher in state schools and as a swimming instructor. She has described what turned her toward Rolfing. While teaching swimming, she worked with a two-year-old girl who was autistic and hypotonic. She held the child in her arms, moved her passively, sang to her, played with her body and the water.
The child began to play with the water and to look at her. She was astonished that touching could call up a new aliveness in that child’s world. The order of her certifications runs the same way: Rolf Movement in 1986, Rolfer two years later. The movement side comes first.
What we did that morning was to put hands on a partner’s body and set down, one word at a time, what could be felt, written out on large sheets of paper. Someone who had been astonished that something happened through touch was making a place for putting what is felt through touch into words. What happened in the water forty years earlier and what was going on in that room are not far apart.