I have now written four times about how Shinichi Yoshifuku thought about the work of a therapist (see The Four Levels of the Mind, Context, Process, and On Less Is More).
The book these were based on is Yoshifuku Shinichi no Kotoba, a collection of his words gathered into a single volume by his students. For a therapist sitting with a client, it centers on what to attend to and how to draw a person out, using the four levels of the mind below.
Power of Becoming
Power of Being
Power of Emotion
Power of Brain
I wrote about each of these in The Four Levels of the Mind.
In July 2015 another book appeared, Sekai no Naka ni Arinagara Sekai ni Zokusanai — a record of what Yoshifuku said in his seminars. It is also worth reading.
I have mentioned somewhere that what drew me toward Rolfing was a sense of the limits of language, arrived at through practicing coaching and tarot. Yoshifuku speaks to that:
“In everyday life and in a therapy session alike, at every moment there is something far beyond what a single person can feel or understand — something beyond words. But once you hear an explanation, you get the feeling that you know. That sense of knowing, of having understood, comes in between you and the experience, and turns into a kind of block. Without having felt it through experience, it stays on the surface and never reaches you at all. In other words, people often finish by thinking they have grasped and understood everything, while remaining safe and secure. They are never cornered into a state of crisis. That is why, from a certain point on, I avoided words and understanding and ran my workshops explaining almost nothing.”
Words tend to be shaped by past experience. As a result they work as a block against the self that is trying to change. That is why it matters to withhold your own judgment as far as possible, to let the other person think, and to let them notice that the answer is in them.
Yoshifuku holds that human beings do not grow, and that they take great pains to maintain the status quo. It is precisely for this reason that he speaks of the value of letting the present state collapse once.
“Meeting many people and doing therapy with them, I found that people rarely grow. Human growth, I came to feel, is a great illusion. Even so, I kept the work going. What I came to think, watching many people, is that a person grows from childhood, reaches a certain point, and there the growth stops and goes no further. After that, almost no change occurs.”
“It is because the ego is constantly taking pains to maintain the status quo. It is extremely conservative. What most threatens that ego is the collapse of the status quo. By letting the present state collapse, you teach the ego where it actually stands — you are not in a position to govern all of me; step back one pace.”
Concretely, he says, one way to build that capacity is to quit your job outright, with nothing lined up. You have no idea how you will live from tomorrow, but you quit. And then you take your time before moving to whatever comes next. That, he says, is how the power of being develops — you stop being shaken by titles, by protecting yourself, by others speaking ill of you or naming your weaknesses.
To borrow his words once more:
“In my therapy I have always encouraged collapse. If a person collapses within the situation they are in, there is change — even if it cannot be called growth.”
“What happens afterward is none of my business. As I said, once you stop maintaining the status quo, any number of aspects have no choice but to change. Start a new life from there — that is my thinking.”
Since beginning to offer Rolfing sessions, one thing I have noticed is that there is a limit to what I can do. And that with change, with process, perhaps all one can do in the end is to watch over it warmly.
Thinking about that, I remember what Jörg and Andrea, the instructors, said as the final day of the Phase III training approached (see How You Have Dealt with Your Own Body Comes Through in the Session):
In the end, what Rolfing can do is not to add something to the client — treating them, for instance — but only to offer them a chance to notice. And from there, they choose what seems right for themselves.
To close, I want to quote his words on how he thought about the therapist.
“Why am I doing therapy? Why am I trying to save people? Holding those questions in my mind, I have gone on doing therapy for decades. I keep doing it not because I mean to save anyone. It is entirely selfish — I do it because I feel I need it to make up for what is missing in me. This is the key, and I do not want it forgotten. It may sound like a contradiction that does not add up, but that is the point: people do not live and act and lead their lives because they intend something. They live because there is a necessity, and that is how this goes on.”
“Once you have that point in hand, you can do therapy that people genuinely dislike. Why does being disliked matter? Because the therapy I have in mind means getting a person to admit what they absolutely do not want to admit. I say to them: that you are where you are, in the state you are in, is entirely down to you. However unpleasant the things happening to you may be, the one doing them is not society and not other people — it is you, because you want it that way. In ordinary society that is not a welcome thing to say
When someone is not functioning well inside a society they have built out of their own fantasies and projections, they will invariably blame that society. But when they stop blaming it, that is when the self is first established.”
Note, September 2026
This piece quotes Yoshifuku saying that he does not do therapy in order to save anyone — that he does it because he feels he needs it to make up for what is missing in him. He adds that this is the key, and that he does not want it forgotten.
Ten years on, I have come to understand that I offer sessions for my own sake.
The order runs like this. You can only convey to another person what you have experienced yourself. And what reaches them is your way of being. If that is so, then the practitioner continuing to experience something on their own side is itself a condition of the work. Doing it for other people does not make that order hold.
I had heard the same thing from Jörg and Andrea as the final day of the Phase III training approached — the passage quoted at the end of this piece. Rolfing can offer a chance to notice, and from there the person chooses. What this quotation shows is what that looks like when stated from the practitioner’s side.
The other thing quoted here is about not minding being disliked. Getting a person to admit what they absolutely do not want to admit. Yoshifuku himself acknowledges that this is not a welcome way to speak in ordinary society.
My reading of this has changed. At the time I took it as a question of how to speak. But what actually changed was not what I say to anyone. Through settling my own way of being day by day in mindfulness practice, how I am seen stopped mattering. It is not a technique for choosing words. The state of not minding comes first.
Because the axis is on my own side, there is no need to fit myself to the other person. Because there is no need to fit, how I am seen does not weigh. And how I have lived comes through as it is. These are not four separate things. They are one thing said from four angles.
This post has had a large influence on how I work in sessions now. Among eleven years of articles, not many are ones where what I read at the time became the shape of the work itself. Most acquired a name later, or came back to me by another route. Here, the words I copied down when I read them are the words that stayed.
This is the only piece in the series with a gap before it — five and a half months. The other four fall between 26 May and 1 June 2015, inside a single week. In between came Jikiden Reiki and Module 1 of Source Point Therapy, and Module 2 began five days after this piece.
The proportion of quotation is different too. The earlier four introduced Yoshifuku’s thinking in summary and quoted only at the key points. This one has six quotations, and they outweigh the surrounding text. Sekai no Naka ni Arinagara Sekai ni Zokusanai had come out in July 2015 — not a collection assembled by students, but a record of the man lecturing.
And what the piece describes, I had gone through a year and a half earlier. As a way of building the power of being, Yoshifuku names quitting your job outright with nothing lined up, and taking your time before moving on. I left the pharmaceutical company at the end of May 2014, set out on a nine-month journey around the world, and was in the classroom in Munich from August. The piece does not mention this. It writes about it as someone else’s story.