The movements you make out of habit, day after day, rest on something like a map that the mind draws without your noticing. Before I try to organize this idea of a map, which has come up repeatedly in this column, I want to start with posture itself.
Why is the body able to hold a posture at all?
Why can you locate your own feet, knees, hips, shoulders, arms, and hands so precisely? Why can you touch your nose, your mouth, your eyes with your eyes closed? It is stranger than it first appears.
The answer is that we carry a map inside us — a body map — and we rely on it to know what is where (for more on this, see The Body Map and the Phantom Limb).
There are two kinds of body map. Borrowing the terms Sandra Blakeslee uses in The Body Has a Mind of Its Own, they are the body schema and the body image.
The body schema is the map the brain builds without conscious involvement. It is assembled out of the senses — sight, hearing, touch — along with proprioception and the vestibular sense, none of it rising into awareness.
Proprioception refers to perception governed by information from the limbs and the rest of the body, or to the perception of where the body is positioned (Takami Kamata, a Rolfer based in Frankfurt, has written about Rolf Movement and the body map on her blog; see also The Body Map and the Phantom Limb).
The body schema is continually updated and rewritten by sensation in the skin, the joints, and the muscles.
Rolfing is not alone in this. Tai chi, yoga, and bodywork more broadly all work by bringing into awareness the bodily sensation that is already operating in this unconscious map.
The nervous system works in two directions. Information travels from the body to the brain, and instructions travel from the brain to the body — gathering information, and directing movement. Muscle serves both functions, but it cannot do both at once. Tension arises from the rigidity of directing movement; let the muscle concentrate on gathering information, and the tension releases on its own.
In Rolfing, we activate three information-gathering systems — the visual system, the vestibular system, and the kinesthetic system — so that gathering takes precedence, and through that we rewrite the body schema that has been built unconsciously.
An example. In Rolfing we describe this with words like palpatory and haptic, and what matters is that the feet and hands become able to move freely and to receive information. So we work the feet and hands, fingers included, lengthening the fascia to bring them alive. Gathering information then becomes easier.
The other map, the body image, is built by perceiving the body consciously. It takes shape out of personal experience and attitude, out of what you expect of yourself and what you believe about yourself. Feeling heavy when you are in fact thin is one instance of a body image.
The body image belongs to perception — how you perceive your own body, and by extension how you see the world. You could call it the psychological and perceptual side, and here psychology has an important part to play.
To put the two together: the body schema is the map the brain assembles automatically from the external information it collects, while the body image is the map built out of subjective impressions formed by upbringing, culture, and the like.
What Rolfing can do is not to confront the body image head-on, but to become neutral. From there it brings the body schema — the map that has remained unconscious — into awareness, and by offering new options it rewrites that map little by little. The hope is that the body image, the psychological and perceptual side, changes as a result (I took up a concrete instance of this in Case Presentation (2): After the Seventh Session).
This is an approach that moves from the body, where the map is unconscious, toward the mind, where the map is conscious. People sometimes tell me after a series of sessions that their outlook, the way they see things, has shifted. I think that is the moment the rewriting of the map becomes something they can feel.
I would like to help as many people as possible feel that change on the psychological and perceptual side through Rolfing.
Note, August 2026
I wrote this six months after being certified as a Rolfer. The distinction between the body schema and the body image is one I had taken from a popular science book by Sandra Blakeslee and organized for myself.
Eleven years later, I understand something I did not see then. That distinction had been handed to me almost two years earlier, on paper.
Giovanni Felicioni gave out two documents during Phase I. One was a paper by Shaun Gallagher and Jonathan Cole, which sorted out the confusion between the two terms by way of a man who had lost proprioception and touch from the neck down after a neurological illness. The other was a timeline of research on postural control, running from Sherrington to Penfield, with Blakeslee’s book set at the final line under the heading “today.”
I never read the paper. The book at the end of the timeline I picked up by another route entirely, and it is what I used to write this article. What was upstream I walked past; what it pointed to I received downstream instead.
The timeline said one more thing that I did not register at the time. The body schema originates in a 1911 paper by Head and Holmes, the body image in Paul Schilder’s work of 1935. The two came out of separate lineages — neurology and psychiatry — twenty-four years apart, and were paired only afterward. This article sets them side by side and explains them as a pair, without any knowledge of how they came to be pairable.
Something else has come into view since.
The terms body schema and body image do not appear anywhere after this article. They were not used in the Rolf Movement training (2017 to 2019), and they were not used in the Advanced Training in 2025. What was used instead was the vocabulary of Tonic Function: Pre-movement, Fixed Point and Orientation, Phoric Function.
The subject matter, though, continued. Takami Kamata, a Rolfer based in Frankfurt, has written that what Rolf Movement pursues is, in a phrase, the repainting of the body map. The words dropped away and the thing itself stayed.
At the end of this article I wrote that what Rolfing can do is not to confront the body image but to become neutral. At the time, “neutral” was a word borrowed from coaching, and it meant a disposition of mind. In the Advanced Training in 2025 the same word was handed to me as a way of placing the practitioner’s body: the shape of the hand, the space behind, the hara. What I had written as a state of mind acquired, eleven years later, a procedure.