On Tuesday, September 27, 2016, a workshop led by Jonathan Martine (hereafter Jon), a Rolfer based in Boulder, Colorado, began in Suidobashi, Tokyo. The subject was Neural Fascial Mobilization (NM), one approach within Rolfing that works with the nervous system.
This was the first time I had studied Rolfing with an American Rolfer.
Fifteen months had passed since I opened my practice. Until then I had kept workshop attendance to a minimum, wanting to concentrate on making the techniques I had learned in Munich my own. What I held to was a single question: having digested the basic techniques, what kind of session could I offer within that range?
I had also had chances to study SourcePoint Therapy and other methods, and had tried applying them, but the result was a good deal of confusion, and I had set those aside for a time.
The last workshop I had attended was in early April 2016, half a year before this one.
Ahead of the Supervision Workshop with Pierpaola Volpones in December 2016, I resumed attending workshops, beginning with two mentoring sessions — one in London on August 30, the other in Paris on September 2 (see “An Experience in London (3): Keith Graham (2)” and “An Experience in Paris: Valuing the Foundations — Hubert Godard“).
By then I had given close to seven hundred sessions since opening the practice.
- Under what conditions does a body release?
- How can I use my own body so that the load on my hands is reduced?
- How do I bring movement into a session?
I had been working with themes like these. Some clients responded strongly; others less than I had expected. One thing I noticed was how many of them were carrying pain.
When I mentioned this to Keith Graham in London, he told me there was a technique called neural manipulation, that approaching through the nervous system makes the fascial work easier and the session more efficient, and that I would do well to learn it.
Partly because of that, I asked a Rolfer I knew whether there might be a place available in Jon’s neural manipulation course. One spot had opened in Part 2, and in the end I was able to attend both Part 1 and Part 2.
The first day moved from introductions into lecture. Until then, Rolfing training had centered on the names of muscles and on which territory to address in each session.
Here the discussion ran in another direction: where the nerves travel, and how they relate to the fascia.
Vessels, nerves, and muscles are connected through fascia, and that connection means something. The nerves running through the skin differ from those running through muscle. There are indirect and direct approaches for working with the nervous system. This was the ground covered.
A great many anatomical terms came up, but the thread was clear enough: for the head, neck, and shoulders, attend to the cervical plexus; for the arm, the brachial plexus; and follow how the nervous system connects out into muscle and skin. In the afternoon we worked in exchange sessions and by touching our own bodies.
What struck me was this: once you understand the structure of the nervous system, working with the outermost layer of the skin alone reaches deep into the interior of the body.
We put that into practice while checking range of motion in the neck and clavicle, working with the cutaneous branches of the cervical plexus — the lesser occipital, great auricular, transverse cervical, and supraclavicular nerves.
Very little force is needed. And rather than concentrating your attention on the person you are working with, you step back a pace and listen for what changes in them. Following what Jon said, I could feel the difference.
From tomorrow we look at the nervous system in finer detail, and at what to watch for. I plan to keep writing here about what I learn.
Note, August 2026
The reason I took this course appears in a single line in the middle of the article. In London, I mentioned to Keith Graham that so many of my clients were carrying pain, and he suggested that approaching through the nervous system would make the fascial work easier. That was what led directly to attending.
What I received from Keith was mentoring built into the ERA program. To become a Certified Rolfer you were required to take five mentoring sessions with advanced Rolfers — two between Phase II and Phase III, three between Phase III and Phase IV. This advice came in the third of them.
When I later sorted through what those five sessions had given me, the thread running through Keith’s was how to reduce the load on your hands. And this article happens to list the questions I was carrying at the time. One of them is exactly that: how to use my own body so that the load on my hands is reduced. The question I brought into the mentoring was the same question that decided what I would study next.
It is worth noting what else fell within that same week. On August 30 in London, Keith pointed me toward a new lineage. On September 2 in Paris, Hubert Godard told me to keep returning to the foundations. Go outward, and come back — two pieces of advice from two different people within a few days. Looking back, it was never a matter of choosing between them.
Those twelve days counted as twelve Intermediate credits toward continuing education. Advanced Training requires eighteen. I would eventually accumulate twenty-six, and the largest single block of them was decided here.
After certification, you choose what to study. It is the only stage on a Rolfer’s path where that is true. And my first choice came out of one remark made during a mentoring session the program had placed there.
Under the current ERA program, mentoring has been reduced to two sessions. Fewer sessions means fewer lineages you can come into contact with. Across the five sessions between 2014 and 2016, I met four advanced Rolfers. A single remark from one of them shaped the year that followed. The room for chance that the program had built in was, I think, the same thing as the room the learning had.