Jonathan Martine’s workshop (hereafter Jon) has moved into Part 2, with only two days remaining. Part 2 largely follows Part 1, with the addition of a focus on how to approach the vascular and visceral systems.
I have written about this workshop six times so far in this column.
- 1: The Nervous System and Rolfing
2: Pain and Approaching Through the Nerves
3: Teaching and Noticing
4: Coaching and Global Listening
5: Learning a Simpler Approach
6: Scenes from the Training
Part 2 also opened with Hilton’s law, the basis for approaching the nervous system that we covered in Part 1.
I want to set down the content of this workshop as far as I was able to follow it.
The cutaneous nerves spread through the skin, at the surface, connect to the nerves of the deeper layers. Among the main structures those deeper nerves connect to are the joint capsules and ligaments, the attachments of muscles at the joints, and the plexuses of the organs. By applying light pressure to the cutaneous nerves at the level of the skin, you affect what they connect to further in.
This law also underlies Dermo Neuro Modulation (DNM), the method developed by Diane Jacobs. Learning Jon’s technique and feeling it in your own body is what makes its force land. It is on this principle that Part 1 approaches the nerves.
Supporting it further is an account of nociceptive information and the Ruffini endings. When nociceptive information is sent through the body, the region in question registers as dangerous and in need of protection.
Conversely, non-nociceptive information — this is safe, this is all right — can be sent from the limbs to the brain as afferent input to the central nervous system. The Ruffini endings are densely distributed in the skin, and it is through them that this becomes possible. Moving the skin layer slowly sends the message that things are safe.
What Rolfing and the neural approach are doing, then, is this: taking the places the body holds as dangerous, or barely registers at all, and letting them be recognized as safe rather than threatening. The brain redraws its map of the body as a result, and change follows in the body itself.
Hearing this alone would have made the workshop worth attending.
That the appropriate strength of touch reflects how much danger a person is registering in their environment, and that this has a large bearing on the work. That soft touch — SourcePoint Therapy, craniosacral work, the neural approach — and the stronger touch of the fascial work I learned in Munich produce different effects in different people. Which is to say that the solution differs from one person to the next. Now I understand why.
Jon also described the hierarchy the body follows when it detects danger. Vessels, nerves, and organs take precedence over muscle. If circulation is impaired, for instance, the brain mediates a protective response aimed at restoring blood flow.
What interests me is that the touch differs between the nervous and vascular systems. For the nerves, the approach works in the thin layer of the skin, using what is called pumping (see “The Nervous System and Rolfing“). For the vessels, you take up slack — slack meaning to gather the tissue, and the method being to gather and then lengthen.
Through Part 2 I have also been picking up how to approach the visceral system — bladder, liver, stomach, esophagus, small intestine, colon, heart, kidneys — and having some knowledge of the vessels and nerves makes it clear what to watch for.
None of this was taught in anything like this detail in Munich, so it feels genuinely new. And the timing could not be better.
Above all, because the framework of the ten series is in my head, I can take the workshop while thinking about where each piece might fit. And since I am seeing clients after the workshop ends, that becomes review as well.
Two days left. Jon plans to address how to apply this within the ten series.
Note, August 2026
What this installment records is that a question about the strength of touch finally received an explanation.
Soft touch — SourcePoint Therapy, craniosacral work — and the stronger fascial touch I learned in Munich. The two produce different effects in different people. The same body under two hands, and it reaches some people and not others. Now I understand why, I wrote.
The framework of the explanation was a single axis: danger and safety. If nociceptive information is sent, the region registers as dangerous and in need of protection. Work slowly with the Ruffini endings in the skin, and non-nociceptive information — this is safe — travels to the brain instead. A place the body holds as dangerous comes to be recognized otherwise, and the brain redraws its map.
So whether a given strength of touch works depends on how much danger that person is registering in their environment. The solution differs from one person to the next, the article concludes.
As I have written, for about a year after opening my practice I had studied IMAC and SourcePoint Therapy, been thoroughly confused, and set them aside. That confusion was most likely this. Entirely different ways of touching, standing side by side, with no way to tell which to choose. This installment hands over the reason both hold.
Nine years later I would receive another form of the answer to the same question: the Taxonomy of the 2025 Advanced Training. Of the five — structural and segmental, biomechanical, functional, psychobiological, energetic — which do you work from now? What was explained here along a single axis of danger and safety is organized there as five perspectives.
One axis, five categories. Neither is superior. But a single axis serves the one person in front of you, and it cannot set options side by side for comparison. A classification makes comparison possible.
As for the one called energetic: this workshop set out the frame and little else. Part 2 included material on energetic pathways, but what was actually handed over went no further than an introduction to how the larger picture is framed, and the word energy does not appear anywhere in this article. Receiving it directly would wait nine years.
That a frame carries a name, and that something passes within it, are two different matters. An item stands in the outline, and in practice goes untouched. I did not experience this as a lack at the time. I did not know the name for it.
The name arrived in 2025.