The fourth day of Jonathan Martine’s workshop (hereafter Jon), which began on September 27, 2016, is behind us. We break for the weekend and resume on Monday.
I have written about this workshop three times so far in this column.
Jon’s workshop runs twelve days, but the basic format is a four-day course, which means this is a rare chance to take that course three times over.
I had originally thought I would study this in Germany, and instead I was able to do it in Japan. The workshop ends by six in the evening, which leaves room for clients afterward — and their feedback has been a valuable part of it. It also confirmed again that manual technique deepens through review.
One thing I noticed this time: as the number of sessions I have given accumulates, the anatomical landmarks are gradually settling into my head. That has deepened my grasp of the workshop, and when practicing what I have learned I can now be clear about my aim and ask the instructor only about what I actually need. For me that is real progress, and it makes me want to attend workshops like this from time to time.
Beyond that, what I am learning is how to approach a session.
The main thing this time is that concentrating too narrowly on one local area slows the change, whereas working while concentrating and still taking in the surroundings creates space for change to occur in the other person. I have watched this produce dramatic change in the person on the table more than once.
In 2009 I completed the applied course at The Coaches Training Institute (CTI), which offers Co-Active Coaching. It gave me the fundamentals, and in the introductory part we were taught that listening has three levels.
Level 1 is internal listening. You are trying to listen, but your attention is actually taken up by your own thoughts, feelings, and physical state, so you cannot give the other person a hundred percent. If anything, it is the other person who needs to be in internal listening — so that their attention turns inward and they come to know what is changing in them.
Level 2 is focused listening. Here you are genuinely listening, with every nerve directed toward the person in front of you. This state comes up often in a Rolfing session, though my sense is that intuition starts working more readily once you reach the next level.
Level 3 is global listening. When you listen, you attend not only to the words spoken and the visible gestures, but also to the other person’s feelings and energy level, which cannot be seen — a state of having your antennae up for whatever is happening around you. Intuition works more readily here, and when I reach level 3 during a Rolfing or tarot session, it becomes easier to hear the voice of the person’s body and their inner voice.
Level 3, I suspect, is what Jon means to convey. With his hands actually on the body he would say: step back a pace; feel the back of your hand; feel your arm; feel the back of your spine; take in the whole room. He was describing, during the workshop, where his own attention goes while working. And in practice, holding these things in mind moves a session along far more efficiently.
Put that way, you notice that listening to a person and listening to the voice of the body in a Rolfing session have something in common.
Jon says we will go deeper into this over the eight remaining days, so alongside the anatomy, I hope to learn a little more about how to meet a session.
Note, August 2026
The framework used in this installment is not a Rolfing one. It is the three levels of listening — internal, focused, global — learned in 2009 on the applied course in Co-Active Coaching. Seven years later I carried it into a workshop on the nervous system and concluded that level 3 was what Jon meant to convey.
It came from my previous career, learned for another purpose entirely. A framework taken up in the context of career and job change was being used to explain what happens in a room where people touch each other. And it was used not on the receiving side but on the organizing side: Jon never used the word listening. He said only, step back a pace, feel the back of your hand, feel your arm, feel the back of your spine, take in the whole room. Naming that level 3 was my doing.
The order of what followed is tangled. I learned coaching first, used it to make sense of Rolfing, and later still moved to the side that offers coaching itself. Eleven years on, coaching stands alongside hands-on work as one of my occupations.
At the end of this article I write that listening to a person and listening to the voice of the body have something in common. It is set down as a small realization. Now I offer those two as parallel occupations under separate signs. Getting from the point of noticing the common ground to the point of practicing both took eleven years.
There is one more thing here, about where a practitioner’s attention rests. Concentrating too narrowly on one local area slows the change; working while concentrating and still taking in the surroundings creates space for change to occur.
I would receive the same thing later, in other formulations. Space, from Gael Rosewood the following March. Kind Indifference, from Ray McCall in 2025. Not concentrating entirely on the other person is what serves them. It is treated not as a deficit of attention but as a question of the quality of attention.
In 2016 I understood it through the vocabulary of coaching. Which is to say the vocabulary was already in hand.