I have now written twice about how Shinichi Yoshifuku thought about the work of a therapist. The first piece introduced four points for how a therapist might look at a person: the power of relationship, the power of being, the power of emotion and feeling, and the power of the head (see The Four Levels of the Mind). There I touched on the first two. The power of being is the atmosphere, the quality of presence, that comes out of a person as a whole. It differs from person to person, and whether being with someone brings a sense of safety belongs to it as well.
The power of being is cultivated through relationship. Through contact with nature, parents, colleagues, school, and work, a person builds an identity — a sense of what they are. But none of those settings lasts forever, and when a situation arrives in which the old ways no longer work, the identity has to be broken once and rebuilt. Yoshifuku called this the collapse of identity (see The Four Levels of the Mind).
The second piece took up the three elements a therapist meets in practice (see Context). According to Yoshifuku Shinichi no Kotoba, they are context, process, and content. Context is a view of the human being and of the world. I described how that view shows up strongly in the therapeutic setting whether or not the therapist has put it into words, and whether it is conscious or unconscious, and how much weight it therefore carries in the room.
This time I want to write about the relation between context and process.
In therapy, Yoshifuku placed importance on being with the client. That stance means trusting, absolutely, that the client has within them the power to go past their own edge.
For that, he points out that listening and empathy can get in the way. Rather than supporting the client, they can turn into pity — a kind of assumption about the person — and lead to licking each other’s wounds, to going along with them.
This is why the context I wrote about matters. In a sense it comes close to holding the space.
I have written about that term before. What it means is this: when a person is going through something, giving them the time and the space so that the setting feels safe to them. What matters is providing a safe, steady environment — not judging, not criticizing, not blaming. A neutral condition, you could say, in which the person can be as they are. And trusting their intelligence, so that they can arrive at their own answer.
(see On Knowing the Importance of Holding the Space).
The phrase came up often while I was in the Rolfing training in Munich. In practice, when you neglect to hold the space, you lose the connection with the client (I wrote about losing yourself in the training in When You Don’t Know What to Do).
Going past your own edge also means helping the client face their own theme. That is, facing the things you would rather not look at. In the end, it is the client themselves who is choosing what they find unpleasant, and only when the therapist accepts that does change begin to happen.
What finally matters is trusting the client’s process completely and staying quietly beside them. The key to that is whether the therapist can look at themselves squarely, without deceiving themselves. In the end, a person does not see what is not already within them — which, turned around, means that although you cannot see what is not within you, it is all within you, so it should be possible to see.
I would like to write about the therapist again when the chance comes.
Note, September 2026
I bring up holding the space in this piece, but not as something I heard in the classroom. I bring it in myself, to explain Yoshifuku’s notion of context.
Its position differs from the two pieces before it. Part 6 of the Body and Mind series (3 March 2015) and On Knowing the Importance of Holding the Space (21 March) were both records of something received in the classroom in Munich. This one comes two months later, in Japan, in a piece about therapy. A term I had been taught is being used as a tool to explain something in another field.
That makes three times in three months. In the note to Part 6 of the Body and Mind series I wrote that holding the space had appeared three times across eleven years — 2015, 2018, 2025. It appeared three times in 2015 alone.
Whether context and holding the space point to the same thing is not something I can settle even now, rereading it. Yoshifuku’s context is about a therapist’s view of the human being and of the world showing up in the room whether or not it has been put into words. Holding the space is about keeping a neutral condition in which the other person can be as they are, without judgment, criticism, or blame. The first seeps out; the second is held. At the time I wrote that it “comes close” and stopped there. Not deciding was probably right.
The three requirements of neutrality I studied ten years later belong to the second side. Shape the Hand, Finding Back Space, Hara. Each is about how the practitioner uses their own body in the moment. None of them seeps out.
There is one more thing set down here. Listening and empathy can get in the way — because they can turn into pity, into licking each other’s wounds, into going along with the client.
I had taken the Co-Active coaching course through to the applied level in 2009, so listening was part of my own skill set. This is a record of putting a reservation on a tool I had acquired. The same place would come back to me in 2025 under the name Kind Indifference, together with Jim Jealous’s caution to observe without becoming part of the story. The form in which not coming too close is stated as a way of being had not yet reached me.