How does a person heal?
Jeffrey Maitland carried that question for a long time. He was a tenured professor of philosophy, a practitioner of Zen, and a Rolfer. In 2007 he set down his inquiry in the association’s journal, dividing the ways healing is facilitated into four.
I read the article after finishing the Advanced Training in 2025. It came to me through an acquaintance.
How Do You Heal People?
The article does not begin with theory. It begins with a question.
More than twenty-five years earlier, Maitland set out to ask his Zen teacher, Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi: how do you heal people? He had been practicing Zen for some time and was making a living from Rolfing, a gentle and highly effective form of manual therapy. He was interested in the nature of healing. Who better to ask about healing, he thought.
But when he attended a sesshin and came before the Roshi in sanzen, the question left him. The intensity of koan practice obliterated every other concern. However hard he tried, the question would not come. He was possessed by a question that would not leave him alone, and he lost it in the presence of the one person he thought could answer it. He describes the position as exasperating.
In the last sanzen of the retreat, his memory came back. How do you heal people?
The Roshi answered without a moment’s thought. You must become one with them.
It took years before he began to understand what that meant.
Baby Wisdom
When the meaning did begin to dawn on him, it came with a memory.
He was in his last year of graduate school, writing his dissertation on Kant’s aesthetics. His wife had gone to work and it was his turn to look after their infant daughter. She was particularly fussy that day and needed a great deal of attention. In the afternoon she woke from a fitful nap full of tears. When he picked her up, she wrapped her little body around him and stopped crying.
As he comforted her, she melted into him with such open heartedness that he lost all sense of himself and dissolved completely into her. Moved by the depth of the boundless, unencumbered love and oneness in which they were embraced, his eyes filled with tears.
At the time he remembered it as a deeply moving experience without grasping its significance. It happened years before he began practicing Zen.
Babies are filled with this love, he writes, because, like the Source, they have no self, no will, and no agenda to get in the way.
Health Is Returning to Zero
Health, the Roshi once said, is going to zero. Zero is one of the many terms he used for unity with the Source.
When you dissolve your self by returning to zero, you simultaneously dissolve your conflicts and fixations. Let go completely and experience what is called the great death, and you drop your suffering and dis-ease and resurrect a new self, free and at peace with the world.
Going to zero also turns out to be essential to the work of healing.
The closer the healer is to zero, the more effective, effortless, and profound the work becomes. Every healer must come to appreciate an astonishing phenomenon, he says: the more selfless, spacious, and unencumbered the healer’s heart, the more willingly and eagerly the client’s body communicates the secrets of its dis-ease to their hands and senses. The body actually shows where and what its problems are, to the open-hearted healer.
To hear what the body has to say, the healer must go beyond the confines of ordinary, everyday thinking and drop the self by returning to zero. Zero is without guile, without agenda. So the body instantly knows and trusts the healer who practices zero.
Who Maitland Was
Jeffrey Maitland (1943-2023) was a tenured professor of philosophy, a practitioner of Zen, and a Certified Advanced Rolfer. He served for many years on the faculty of the Rolfing association.
Rolfing’s five taxonomies, the five principles, the three questions — he was at the center of establishing all of them. Much of the framework I received in the Advanced Training in 2025 comes from this one person (see “Journey to Becoming an Advanced Rolfer — A Summary of the Road to Certification“).
Four Ways of Facilitating Healing
This is the heart of the article.
He divides the ways healing is facilitated into four. He puts it in the language of manual therapy, but with a little more explanation, he says, it applies to all systems and disciplines of healing.
The Direct Approach
The most common form. Energy or force is applied directly to a restriction or fixation, producing change in a predetermined direction.
The high-velocity, low-amplitude thrust you receive from an osteopath or chiropractor is typical — the adjustment where the joint pops. Rolfing has direct techniques too. The practitioner places the client in a seated position, directs them to curl forward, and runs an elbow down the back under heavy pressure. That is a direct myofascial technique.
Direct techniques apply energy directly to problem areas. The purpose is to release fixations and restrictions by forcing the body to change in a predetermined way.
They are effective in most cases. But the room for the body to release in its own way is comparatively small. There is no attempt to listen to how the body wants to be approached; the healer is forcing his will and intentions on the body.
The Indirect Approach
More refined than the direct approach, because it takes advantage of the body’s intelligence and its drive toward wellness. Osteopaths discovered and cultivated it.
He gives a simplified example. Imagine a structure that is bent to the left. Instead of pushing it to the right to straighten it, the indirect approach takes the lesion further into its strain — further to the left. With the body’s permission, the practitioner slowly and carefully pushes the structure as though to complete an arrested gestalt.
When it reaches the limit of that strain and can go no further, a pause occurs; the activity is suspended. And after a moment of stillness, something remarkable happens. The structure begins to move on its own, in the most unpredictable ways, unwinding out of its left side bending and eventually straightening itself out.
In the second part of the technique, the practitioner’s job is to suspend his will, drop any intention for change, and let the body find its own way to normal.
What separates this from the direct approach is not the choice of technique. It is that the practitioner’s orientation shifts from changing to allowing.
The Organizing Forces Approach
The third is exemplified by the work of William Garner Sutherland.
He discovered the inherent movement of the cranial bones, understood the importance of the craniosacral system, and found ways of working with it through indirect techniques. Late in life he arrived at a phenomenon he called the breath of life. The approach to facilitating healing that grew out of perceiving it is known in most circles as Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy.
Maitland calls it the Organizing Forces Approach.
What are the organizing forces? He uses the image of a water fountain. The form of the fountain remains relatively constant while the material — the water — is constantly turned over and renewed. The human body is the same. The difference is that in a fountain the organizing force maintaining the form is an external machine, whereas in the body the forces that sustain and maintain us are inherent to life and to the wholeness of the body itself.
This last point matters, he writes. The organizing forces are in no way external to the wholeness of the body. They are a manifestation of wholeness itself. Since wholeness lives in every detail, the wholeness of life and its organizing forces are one and the same and live in every detail of the body.
In this approach the practitioner does not begin with technique. When she places her hands on the client’s complaint, there is no application of subtle pressure, no attempt to move a structure, no application of energy, no negotiation with the body — and above all, no intention to change or heal anything.
In the first phase, the healer’s primary job is not to change her client but to fundamentally change her orientation to her client. She must get out of the way, drop her self and any agenda for change she might have, and simply listen to what the body wants to reveal to her. Before applying any technique, she keeps a wide perceptual field and holds open a space in which the ordering forces can appear in and around the client.
Simply stated, the healer must return to zero. Otherwise even the slightest intention to help can interfere with what the body wants.
When the forces reveal the patterns of dysfunction and how they want to be treated, the second phase begins. Here the practitioner decides either to allow the organizing forces to perform the work of healing, or to employ techniques that use intention to direct the forces.
This third approach demonstrates two profoundly important points about the nature of healing, he writes.
First, healing can occur simply in response to the orientation of the healer. As long as the healer practices zero, it is possible for him to heal without applying any technique whatsoever.
Second, it partially reveals what is at work in all forms of healing. As the inquiry deepens, it becomes increasingly evident that what makes itself present in all healing is a loving faceless activity that cannot be reduced to technique, intention, skill, or the application of force.
The Zero Distance Approach
In the fourth, that faceless activity manifests most clearly.
Here the orientation shifts from trying to heal through the application of techniques to practicing zero with the client. And the work is done without touching.
He offers an image of a dark room. A room contains many workers and various powerful tools for maintenance and repair. The room is pitch black. Normally the darkness poses no problem: the workers are comfortable in the dark, and as long as the work is routine they can do it blindfolded. But when there are emergencies they need to see — and to see with informed eyes. Unfortunately, motivated as they are, they do not know how to turn on the lights and their eyes do not work very well.
The healer’s first job here is to turn on the lights. His other job is to lend his attention to the problems the workers uncover, to continue attending to them while they are being repaired, until he no longer feels them. Neither job requires his onsite presence. Nor is the work about rolling up his sleeves and pitching in. What the workers need is the light and the informed perceptual vitality the healer brings. When there is nothing left to feel or attend to, the light withdraws.
Central to this approach is the practice of zero — unification with the client. Healing is the result of the healer’s orientation rather than the application of technique.
Because he works without touching, his perception is not narrowed by the limitations inherent in perceiving with the hands. Becoming free of his hands allows him to expand his perception so that he sees with his whole being, body and all. When he listens with his whole being rather than the hands alone, he sees and feels more. His perception is much more vital and expansive, and more difficult problems are more precisely revealed.
Most remarkable of all, his perception of, and effect on, his client is not limited by distance. It does not matter whether the client is in the room or on the other side of the world. Either way the healer’s orientation still provides a loving space in which the body eagerly reveals its problems and is healed.
Why He Does Not Call It an Energy Approach
The fourth way is often seen as a form of energy healing.
Maitland does not call it that. His reasoning: energy healing techniques are found in every one of the four approaches. So calling the fourth an energy approach is not precise enough.
The name he gives it instead is the Zero Distance Approach.
That this was written in 2007 matters.
The criticism that the term energy work is too vague was put again ten years later, in 2017, by the Rolfer Kevin Frank. Is it energy work if you do not touch? If you use imagery? If you work at a distance? If you use strong force? None of these gives a definition, he argued — and he proposed a framework of information rather than energy.
Maitland’s remark, then, was set down before that. And it was not made as a criticism. In the course of dividing up how healing comes about, he needed a name for the fourth, and judged that the word energy would not do.
The question of what the term energy work actually points to has been dealt with inside this field for close to twenty years (see “What Energy Work Is — Where the Word Points, and How It Entered Rolfing”).
Intention and Intentionality
Later in the article comes a section on intention.
These days, among healers of every persuasion, you often hear it said that intention is more important than technique. Sometimes it is stated more modestly: intention is every bit as important as technique.
And yet, he goes on, as often as you hear one of these claims made, you almost never hear it explained. Therapists nod their heads in enthusiastic approval when they hear the maxim, but what does it really mean? What is the relationship between intention and technique? Does intending make it so, or does intention plus technique make it so?
These maxims embody a confusion between intention and intentionality, he says, and that confusion obscures the important insight they are trying to express.
Intentionality is a term from phenomenology. He also calls it the healer’s orientation. Consciousness is always the consciousness of something. Intentionality is an orientation toward and an opening onto the world; it is always directing itself toward and being solicited by the world.
And intention is only one form of intentionality. The intention to do something is one example of it. According to phenomenology, daydreaming, anger, fear, sadness, problem-solving, hope, faith, feelings, thinking, gardening, perception — all are forms of intentionality.
From here his conclusion follows.
Intention is a technique, and its effectiveness depends on the healer’s intentionality. So the maxim that intention is more important than technique does not hold. If it did, it would reduce to the nonsensical claim that technique is more important than technique.
Put properly: intentionality is more important than intention, and more important than technique.
The intentionality of the healer who practices zero is the way to the faceless loving activity that sits at the heart of all healing.
Where Does Yielding Fit?
Set the four side by side and a question arises. Where does Yielding, as it is taught in Japan, fit among them?
I learned this work in the Advanced Training in 2025, from Hiroyoshi Tahata. The client yields themselves to the contact surface on the table; a stable foundation forms, and change arises from within. He explained it by way of anchoring in molecular cell biology.
Try to place it among the four and it does not settle. There are moments without touch, but it is not the Zero Distance Approach. Leaving things to the body’s spontaneous forces brings it close to the Organizing Forces Approach, but that is not all it is.
The reason is that the two are asking different questions. The four approaches distinguish how healing is facilitated. Yielding is about how the practitioner is.
Tahata is explicit that Yielding is not a technique. It is an embodied state of awareness; the practitioner does not “do” Yielding. It can be carried into any session, he says — structural work, movement, craniosacral.
In Maitland’s terms, Yielding sits on the side of intentionality, not intention. Before you choose which of the four approaches to use, it settles where you are relating from.
Read that way, the four approaches and Yielding do not compete. Whichever of the four you are using, intentionality sits upstream of it. It points at the same place as Maitland’s conclusion: intentionality is more important than intention, and more important than technique.
I have written about Yielding in more detail in the summary of the Advanced Training (see “Journey to Becoming an Advanced Rolfer — A Summary of the Road to Certification“).
The Relation to the Three Paradigms
Maitland has another well-known framework: the three paradigms — relaxation, corrective, and holistic (see “What Is Holistic Healing? — Reexamining Through the Lens of Paradigms”).
The two frameworks ask different questions.
The paradigms divide what you are aiming at. Releasing tension, correcting symptoms, or restoring the order of the whole. It is a hierarchy of aims.
The four approaches divide how healing comes about. Direct, indirect, leaving it to the organizing forces, or zero distance. It is a hierarchy of the practitioner’s orientation.
And they mesh. Once you stand in the holistic paradigm, the question of how you actually engage is answered by the four approaches. Aim and method.
The dates differ as well. The three paradigms come from Embodied Being (2016); the four approaches from the 2007 article. Nine years apart, the same person set out two frameworks.
Conclusion
Having laid out the four, Maitland adds a caution.
Distinguishing them clearly in thought does not mean advocating that they be kept separate in practice. In the hands of experienced practitioners educated in all four, they are often mixed together according to what is deemed best and most effective for the individual client.
And in closing the article, he looks back over the road of his own inquiry.
Having come to the end of his exploration of the Zen of healing, he recalls the Roshi’s simple statement about becoming one with the person to be healed, and is struck by how many words it took to get there.
It is not that the intellect is irrelevant. The insights articulated there arose from the always-ongoing practice of learning how to see and feel freely, without the encumbrances of everyday perception.
Reading it, I understood where what I received in those twenty-four days had come from. Neutral, presence, intention and intentionality — all of it is in this article. What was written in 2007 was being taught in a classroom in 2025.
Reference
Jeffrey Maitland, “Zen and the Art of Healing,” Structural Integration: The Journal of the Rolf Institute®, June 2007, pp.21-25