How to Choose Continuing Education — Four Things I Look At Before Signing Up

Once you are certified, what you study is yours to decide.

In Rolfing, the Advanced Training requires eighteen credits. Which courses fill them is not specified. It is the one stage on a Rolfer’s path where the content of your learning is your own choice.

The framework, the five taxonomies, and the leanings of teachers and regions I have written about separately (Continuing Education After Rolfing Certification — The 18-Credit Framework and a Map of the Teachers). Here I want to deal with what you actually look at when the options are in front of you.

First, the courses I took between 2016 and 2017. Then the criteria I was using to judge them.

The six courses

Neural Fascial Mobilization (Jonathan Martine, September–October 2016, twelve days, Tokyo)

An approach to the nervous system, taught by a Rolfer based in Colorado. Parts 1 and 2, six days each.

The material rests on Hilton’s law: the cutaneous nerves running through the skin connect to the nerves of the deeper layers. Touch only the outermost layer of the skin and you reach the interior. Pain is less a matter of tissue damage than of the brain concluding that things are not safe and saying, do not move. Send the message from the skin that things are safe, and the brain redraws its map of the body.

Fifteen months into practice, I had noticed how many of my clients were carrying pain. Finding out that a body could release without being pressed hard mattered a great deal.

I wrote about these twelve days in eight installments.

Bone Work (Sharon Wheeler, November 2016, five days, Tokyo)

One of those who learned directly from Ida Rolf, beginning around 1970. Ida took her anatomy and physiology books away from her, and she built her work on sensation instead.

You take hold of a bone, apply the right pressure, and wait. The bone begins to move. Follow that movement and the body finds the position it wants and stops there. The practitioner does not move it into the correct place.

Why this happens is not scientifically understood. Sharon asked Ida and Ida could not answer. Teach it anyway, because it helps — that was the position.

I wrote about these five days in five installments.

Cranio Work (Sharon Wheeler, January 2017, four days, Seattle)

The same teacher, working with the cranium. A complement to Session 7 of the ten series.

A class of four. You watch nearly three hours of demonstration, then go straight into three hours of practice. Almost no anatomy. Plain language, and by the next day you can use it.

I wrote about these four days in three installments.

Trauma Workshop (Lael Keen, March 2017, one day, Tokyo)

An American living in Brazil, an advanced Rolfing instructor and an instructor in Somatic Experiencing. A single day held alongside the Japan Rolfing Association’s general meeting.

It opened with this: about half of a ten series goes well with ordinary sessions, and the other half needs some approach to trauma. Attend not to the traumatic event itself but to what it did to the nervous system.

Dimensions of Integration (Gael Rosewood, March 2017, four days, Tokyo)

One of those who met Ida Rolf at Esalen in 1969 and trained alongside Sharon Wheeler. She also took part in the first Rolf Movement Training, taught by Judith Aston beginning in 1971, and after Judith left she was one of the five who kept Rolf Movement going. Hubert Godard was among her students.

You work with words rather than hands. Not what is correct or how to fix it, but how to offer a new option. Use Push, Reach, or Meet for the same action and the way force enters the body changes — and how a person responds differs from one to the next.

With almost no fascial work, the coordination between upper and lower limbs improved. Structure changed without technique.

Within half a year I had been taught by two people who had been in the same room in 1969. At the time I did not notice.

I wrote about these four days in four installments.

Peter Schwind WS (June–July 2017, three days, Munich)

Organized by the ERA, positioned as preparation for the Advanced Training.

The content was specialized toward technique. Which tests clarify a frozen shoulder. How you enter from the latissimus dorsi and work toward supraspinatus and infraspinatus. Procedures out of long clinical experience, laid out down to the detail.

I wrote about these three days in two installments.

Which category each course falls into, and the breakdown of the twenty-six credits, I have set down in Continuing Education After Rolfing Certification — The 18-Credit Framework and a Map of the Teachers.

What follows is the substance of this article.

1. Is the feedback based on observation?

This is the largest of the four.

People often speak of teaching that draws out your strengths versus teaching that corrects your weaknesses. I do not think that is where it actually turns. The dividing line is whether the feedback rests on observation or on the judgment of the person giving it.

You can take in a weakness being named, provided it is stated as an observation, because then you know what to change. Praise, on the other hand, does not stay with you if it is only someone’s impression.

The feedback from Giovanni Felicioni, who taught Phase II, was grounded in NVC — Nonviolent Communication (on the three stages of the basic training, see Becoming a Certified Rolfer in Europe — The Certification Training of the European Rolfing Association). Observation is kept separate from evaluation. He would describe what had happened and then indicate what could be developed from there. So you knew which part of your own conduct was being pointed at.

The institution had the same property.

Phase I ends with an interview, and that is where permission to continue is given. But the assessment is not done all at once on the final day. Each week, the teacher of that week fills out an evaluation form. Three weeks, three independent assessments, accumulating. The structure does not rest on one person’s judgment.

The items were specific. In the Movement week: can you ask for help, can you observe a body, can you support a dialogue. In Anatomy: can you find the bony landmarks, is your palpation reliable. In Touch: can you vary the roles of your two hands, can you treat fascia as a three-dimensional net. Each scored on a five-point scale. You know from the beginning what is being looked at.

Nor was the outcome a simple pass or fail. Two of the three gave me their unconditional agreement; Konrad Obermeier, in Anatomy, gave a conditional one. That I needed more anatomy and more hands-on experience, and that I was well aware of this myself. And that I should study from an anatomy textbook rather than looking at plates in an atlas.

Not only what was missing, but what to do about it.

Beyond that, the three teachers pointed at the same thing in three different vocabularies: that I was not staying fully inside my own experience. Three independent assessments turned toward one point. That is not agreement between opinions. It is agreement between observations.

I have the contrasting experience as well.

It does not count toward credits, but in the year I was certified I took a seventeen-day program. The feedback after the midterm examination was: no sense of connection with the client, not twenty percent of your potential showing, so absorbed in your own technique that as things stand you are being discourteous to your clients.

None of that is observation. It is evaluation. And the standard behind the evaluation is not given, so there is no way to know what to change. What remains is the feeling of having been sorted by someone’s taste.

The structure differed too. Instruction on individual techniques contradicted itself between the instructor and the assistants. Feedback came several hours after the examination, all at once, and there were moments when I could not tell how to improve, as I wrote at the time.

Back then I took it as my own problem. After the final examination, progress was acknowledged, and I finished the program grateful. I even wrote that I would go on to the next level.

I did not. What remained afterward was only a sense of not fitting.

It is not a matter of technique. Your hands hesitate. Put your hands on someone while unsure what is wrong with you, and you end up auditing yourself as you work. Is this too much pressure? Is this the right angle? You believe you are concentrating on the other person, and your attention is on yourself.

Those seventeen days did have one other effect.

They were where I first understood what the basic training had been giving me. While you are inside a fair assessment, it looks unremarkable. It took another kind of room to see what that had been.

There are things you cannot see without experiencing a place that does not suit you.

If you want ways to tell, there are three. Who is doing the assessing. Whether what is being assessed is stated in advance. And whether you can tell which part of your own conduct is being pointed at. The third is the most reliable. If you cannot tell, it is evaluation, not observation.

2. Will you come to trust the technique?

If you do not trust a technique, your hands hesitate. Hesitant hands always reach the other person.

What it takes to arrive at trust differs from person to person. For me it was an account of why something works. The relationship to other regions, whether there is an effect, how it bears on a body coming into order. Only then can I put my hands down with confidence.

But some people need no account at all. If you receive things through sensation, the reasoning can come later.

Sharon Wheeler’s courses were exactly that. Almost no anatomy. Why bone moves is not understood, and we teach it because it helps.

I could trust this. The absence of an explanation is not the absence of grounds. Someone who has done a thing tens of thousands of times says: do this and this follows. You can see what is stacked up behind the procedure.

Neural Fascial Mobilization, taken the same year, was the opposite. It begins with Hilton’s law — the cutaneous nerves of the skin connecting to the deeper layers — and goes on through the difference between nociceptive and non-nociceptive information and how to work with the Ruffini endings in the skin. Why it works is laid out in anatomy and physiology.

A course at the far end of explanation, and a course with none. I could trust both.

Which means what I was judging was not the presence of an explanation. It was whether the thing had settled into one shape inside the person teaching it. Sharon had decades of consistent procedure; Jon had the theoretical grounding. Neither hands it over with hesitation.

The course I could not trust differed there. On individual techniques, the instructor and the assistants gave conflicting feedback. I went through it without knowing which was correct, as I wrote at the time. Not a shortage of explanation — a lack of agreement among the people teaching.

What matters is knowing what brings you to trust. An account, a demonstration, a change felt in your own body. And whether the people teaching are handing it over without hesitation. A course that does not give you this will leave you certified with hands you cannot use.

3. Now, or later?

Good material will not go in if the timing is wrong.

There is a program called IMAC, developed by Hiroki Sato in Osaka: a method of assessing the body through the range of motion of joints and muscles, strong on anatomy. I first took it in December 2015, six months into practice, and followed with the upper- and lower-limb modules in March and April of 2016.

Then I stopped.

There were three reasons. My hands-on experience was too shallow and I had no feel for it. My grounding in anatomy was insufficient. And I had given too few sessions to know how to apply any of it.

The material was excellent. I was not ready to receive it. I wrote at the time that I could study it and it would not stay.

I left it for two and a half years and went back in November 2018, around the time my hundredth client had completed a ten series. This time it went in. The following year I retook the basic courses; in 2020 I completed the advanced ones.

Same course, same teacher, different outcome. The only thing that had changed was me.

So when you find a good course, the question is not only whether to take it. It is whether to take it now or later. What tells you is whether you can picture, concretely, the situation in which you would use the material. If you cannot picture it, it is early.

A similar judgment applies to how much you are committing.

I took Peter Schwind’s workshop in Munich in June 2017 because I intended to take his Advanced Training. Peter was certified in 1980, studied with nearly the whole first generation, and has studied more than thirty years with the osteopath Jean-Pierre Barral. The material was sound.

Even so, something did not sit right from the first day. It was specialized toward technique, and that was not the direction I wanted to go. Across those three days, I decided not to take it.

And yet at the end of that article I wrote that I was looking forward to next year. I did think there was value in learning from someone whose direction differs, and the anticipation was real.

There is no contradiction. Three days, I will take. Whether to commit five weeks is a separate judgment.

On a short course, there is value in a teacher who faces a different way; your own position gets put in relief. On a long one, that does not hold. Committing five weeks means thinking inside that person’s framework for five weeks.

4. Which direction to develop — using the taxonomies as a map

The three above are for deciding whether to take the course in front of you. There is one more question, upstream of them. In which direction do you develop your work at all?

The five taxonomies help here.

In the 2025 Advanced Training I received the framework of the Taxonomies (on the road to that training, see Journey to Becoming an Advanced Rolfer — A Summary of the Road to Certification): five divisions of the vantage from which you see a body — structural and segmental, biomechanical, functional, psychobiological, energetic. It is originally a tool for choosing, within a session, which vantage to work from.

But the five apply to the practitioner as well. Everyone has a vantage they are good at.

In my case the functional territory is at the center. I came in through yoga. I had been practicing for nearly twenty years before I studied Rolfing, and I had the habit of seeing a body through movement. On top of that sits an interest in how to make a session safe to receive. My sessions carry a coaching perspective and a concern with holding the space — psychobiological and energetic, in the language of the taxonomies.

I use structural approaches too, but as preparation for going into movement.

This does not come from the yoga background alone. Who taught you in the basic training has already shaped your distribution.

Phase II was taught by Giovanni Felicioni, who works in London. He has more than thirty years as a bodyworker, movement teacher, and therapist. He studied yoga with Mary Stewart, in the line of Vanda Scaravelli, and taught regularly on her London-based teacher training. He taught for years at Independent Dance, founded by Siobhan Davies and others, and teaches on the Masters in Creative Practice at Trinity Laban. In 2012 he founded the British Academy of Rolfing.

And thirty years of inquiry into the relationship between touch, movement, awareness, and contemplation led him to more than two decades of study with Hubert Godard during Godard’s development of Tonic Function.

Which is to say the teacher of Phase II stood at the center of the functional territory. From both yoga and dance.

Jörg Ahrend-Löns, who taught Phase III, is a physiotherapist, strong on structure.

Take the same program with different teachers and the leaning changes. If you want to know your own distribution, start by looking back at who taught you in the basic training.

Giovanni offers Rolfing sessions and yoga classes in London. If you are in the UK, I would encourage you to experience his work (Rolfing® & Yoga in London).

Once you can see your distribution, the next decisions get easier.

Concretely, you can work backwards from who you would choose in an advanced course. After certification in Rolfing there are two paths: the Advanced Training in manual work, and the Rolf Movement training. The latter is taken by people who have finished the basic training, and it runs longer than the manual Advanced Training.

And the teachers of each course stand for a taxonomy. Who sits where I have listed in the companion article.

From there, two ways of choosing continuing education follow. Reinforce, in advance, the direction of the teacher you have chosen. Or the reverse: fill in beforehand, elsewhere, whatever that person will not be able to give you.

Mine was the second. I went deep into the functional territory through Rolf Movement (see On the Path to Becoming a European Rolf Movement Practitioner — The Road to Certification), and in 2025 I chose Ray McCall and received the energetic territory directly. What I had accumulated over the preceding decade was structure, psychobiology, and the surroundings of the energetic. I deepened my strong territory in the formal courses and filled in what lay beside it through continuing education.

But I did not have this classification in advance.

The territory filled in afterward

After receiving the Taxonomies, I laid out what I had studied and noticed something.

Bone Work, working with bone. Peter Schwind, teaching precise work with joints and muscle. Gael Rosewood, working with movement and language. Lael Keen on trauma and the nervous system, and the thirty-two days of Somatic Experiencing I took four years later. And on the energetic side, SourcePoint Therapy, Jikiden Reiki, and a form of work that orders the meridians by way of the viscera.

Spread evenly across the five territories.

I did not fill them deliberately. I did not know there were five to fill. The names arrived nine years later. I looked into things as curiosity took me, and what suited me stayed; that was all.

And three of the five are held up by courses that carry no credits. What the institution counts and what actually settles into your hands do not necessarily coincide.

The clearest case is IMAC. Of Rolfers in Japan, Hiroki Sato has influenced me most. He is the teacher of Akinori Ito, from whom I received my ten series; he worked as an athletic trainer in the NFL and MLB; he is a Rolfer and a certified SourcePoint Therapy instructor; and he has interpreted for osteopathy classes for more than fifteen years.

What I received from him does not sit in one territory. It began on the structural side with range-of-motion assessment, moved into viscera and embryology, and developed into an assessment that incorporates the meridians. Craniosacral biodynamics, which the Rolfing program does not cover, I also learned from him.

I went thinking I was going deeper into one territory, and I had crossed several without noticing.

I do not think this was luck. Choose by the three criteria above and things scatter on their own. Teachers who draw out what you have are each in a different territory. Techniques you can trust do not gather in one lineage.

Deepen a single system, on the other hand, and your territory narrows. And you will not notice that it has.

So use the classification as a map rather than a blueprint. Instead of setting out to cover five territories, keep choosing for some years and then lay out what you have. You will see where you are thick and where you are thin. What to develop next can be decided from there.

You have to look before you know

One last thing.

Whether something suits you cannot be known before you look.

The program I abandoned partway, I began with expectations. I took it because it had worked on a problem I had carried for years. The course I did not take, I had intended to take when I set out.

The judgment usually becomes words afterward. On finishing, I wrote that I would continue. At the end of the preparatory workshop, I wrote that I was looking forward to next year. Both were sincere at the time. What had actually been happening became clear much later.

So you have to look. But it is worth deciding, in advance, what you will look at once you do. The four here are for that.

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Hidefumi Otsuka

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