This article brings together five pieces written in August and September 2015, combined into one in September 2026. It covers the three kinds of ordering — belongings, work, and body — along with narrowing down information when listening, self-acceptance, how one relates to other people, and old patterns and new patterns. A note from 2026 follows at the end.
Three Kinds of Ordering
I take stock at regular intervals. Three kinds: ordering my belongings, ordering my work, and ordering my body.
The thorough version of the first came on July 29, 2014. Before setting out to travel around the world, I cleared out the apartment I had been renting near Okusawa Station. Diving gear I had used for years, the bed, the bookshelves, the rack for yoga storage. Having the books digitized let me dispose of them.
The result was that I could set out with luggage including clothing (13 kg), a yoga mat (3 kg), and a laptop and camera (9 kg) — 25 kg in total.
Next, ordering my work. This means looking at work through the question of what is my work and what is work for someone else to do.
In The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, the ideas of the psychologist Adler — who influenced Dale Carnegie and Stephen Covey — are set out in dialogue form.
Adler says that all problems are problems of human relationships, and that it matters to look at a problem through the question of whose task this is. We are prone to putting our noses into other people’s problems; the point is to leave other people’s problems to them and concentrate on the problems that are genuinely ours to solve.
In concentrating on your own problems, he says, self-acceptance matters more than self-affirmation — discerning what can be changed from what cannot.
Self-affirmation is telling yourself “I can do it, I am strong” when in fact you cannot. Self-acceptance is that if you could not do it, you accept that self as it is, and move forward toward being able to.
This view is useful when separating your own work from other people’s. What helped me think about it was a résumé. I became conscious of this after entering the foreign pharmaceutical industry. Not knowing when I might have to look for the next position, I rewrote my résumé on LinkedIn at regular intervals. Rewriting it helped a great deal in understanding what kind of work suits me.
And then ordering the body. I face my own body regularly through yoga. By “body” here I mean both body and mind.
Ordering Belongings Reaches the Body
Before starting the Rolfing training, through tarot card reading and coaching — which I had been studying since June 2010 — I had done close to five hundred one-to-one sessions.
What interested me was that more than half of those five hundred people were not on top of tidying up.
Bodily sense, including intuition and the five senses, comes out according to how far your belongings are in order. When things are scattered, the head is scattered too. People who cannot see themselves, people troubled in love, people holding on to something — that sense has dulled in them.
From the standpoint of danshari — a term from yoga for the practice of cutting off, discarding, and letting go of attachment — I found that putting the mind in order is efficient.
Self-Acceptance
The next thing I look at is self-affirmation and self-acceptance.
Someone high in self-affirmation is someone who can affirm themselves — who can accept their own good points and bad points as they are. Because their relationship with themselves is solid, they are less easily swayed by other people’s opinions. When it is low, people are pulled around by others, fit themselves to those around them, and compare. From all the people I have met, my sense is that the ratio of high to low is about one to ten.
I think it is self-affirmation that has to be in place before confidence follows, but according to Tadashi Matsumoto’s Living as You Are, there are two kinds of confidence: confidence without grounds, and confidence that comes from competence. The first is simply believing in yourself. The second is acquired by achieving things through work.
Lately I have felt uneasy with the phrase self-affirmation; it gives me the impression of forcing oneself to be positive. Self-acceptance — being able to accept yourself as you are — sits better with me.
What approach matters when it comes to recovering that sense of self-acceptance? What I pay most attention to is relationship. When I read tarot, I often look at the relationship with a parent. And I ask whether they have ever met that parent one to one and thanked them with the word “thank you.” That word is the key to bringing a relationship to a close once, and it is remarkably effective. I use the word “graduation” for it myself.
I have introduced Shinichi Yoshifuku’s Yoshifuku Shinichi no Kotoba before; the reason is that the power of relationship — how you see the relation between yourself and others — matters most (see The Four Levels of the Mind).
Five relationships are assumed: mother, father, siblings, peers, and society including nature. What is interesting is that Yoshifuku goes so far as to say there is no such thing as a healthy relationship among these. Building a healthy one, he says, hinges on parting — and to part, you first need a genuine meeting.
A parent and child have met in the form of a parent-child relationship, but the child sees only the side of a person carrying the role of mother or father; they have never faced them as one human being. To meet your father and mother, through a child’s eyes, as human beings — that is what a genuine meeting means. Once you can do that, you move away from the strong attachment or rejection you had before, and it leads toward self-acceptance.
Narrowing Down Information
There is another thing that can be put in order: information.
Since returning to Japan I have done about twenty tarot readings and about forty Rolfing sessions. What am I doing, in practice, when I listen to someone?
What I would emphasize is giving the other person the minimum of information, and preparing the time and the room in their mind for them to arrive at their own answer. And approaching them not on the premise that I fully understand them, but with fresh eyes — I do not understand this person at all. I have described that as a state in which the mind is neutral.
When communicating in Rolfing or tarot, thoughts come up: let me be useful to this person; what information should I give them; this is the information they need. This time too, without fail, all sorts of thoughts came. When that happens, I think you can take it as having gone too far into your own interior — a state in which you can no longer tell your own thinking from the other person’s. The result is that you lose sight of what they are actually thinking about and what they are actually carrying.
In the Rolfing training we took up the fact that in body reading, the more you rely on the eyes and observe, the more the quantity of information grows and the more you can lose sight of what matters (see Body Reading and the Quantity of Information).
When there is too much information, and given how much technique there is to learn in Rolfing, you stop seeing the person and lean on technique, and the session ends up not serving them. The countermeasure is to keep the aim clear and narrow the information down. During the training this was expressed as Less Is More. It leads to the greatest effect from the smallest amount of work.
The same holds when listening to someone. What matters is helping them go into their own interior and find the answer themselves. Listen as much as you can, and act as their guide.
Concentrate on the conversation. Ask about what catches your attention. Put the question that comes to you intuitively. As a result the information narrows itself down, and what had not been visible comes into view. If the person can speak about their own state in their own words and find for themselves the solution they need, that is a complete success.
So that you do not go too far into your own interior, and so that you are not pulled around by information from outside when facing another person, keeping a neutral state is essential. Having the body in order is one help toward seeing your own interior clearly.
The reason I came to feel that putting my own body in order matters is that listening to someone uses more energy than I expected. With your own interior clearly in view, you make a space the other person can enter; and from there you also go right into them to catch what is there. That balance between yourself and what is outside needs to be in order.
As a way of working on this, I spent the past year exploring how to put the body in order — through Rolfing, yoga, meditation, and Jikiden Reiki.
Through yoga and Rolfing I came to know where the tension in my body sits, and to grasp its condition. Through meditation I learned ways of not going too far into my own interior. Through Jikiden Reiki I came to sense the measure of not directing awareness too far outward, and of how to come back inside myself.
As a result, where listening used to take a great deal of energy, it now takes the least.
A neutral mind is a state in which attention is turned inward and outward at once, in balance.
Transactional and Circulating
I also want to write about meeting people.
Lately I have been meeting people more often. One large motive is to spread my own way of looking at the world, and I would be glad if it also led me to people interested in Rolfing.
Beginning with scuba diving in 2008, I went on to take an interest in yoga; in NLP, which came out of psychology; in CTI’s Co-Active coaching; in tea ceremony, calligraphy, tarot, Chinese, listening to jazz, and reading groups. Widening the circle of interests matters, but I think what draws good people to you is becoming someone easy to invite. When you meet someone new and want to keep the friendship going: do not turn down the next invitation. That, in the end, multiplies your connections.
Since coming back from traveling around the world, I have felt more and more how much it matters to earn trust. What prompted this was Giovanni, who taught Phase II of the Rolfing training in Munich.
His sense of distance with people was exquisite. In teaching he would say: so this is how you are seeing it, and that is fine — but how about looking at it this way. It was a proposal built on trust in the other person’s view. When someone was struggling he moved in to support them and eased the room. Believe in your own skill; failing is one part of the process of learning; effort is rewarded — he showed all of this by example. There was an atmosphere in that class in which ability was honed by being trusted. That my own ability in Rolfing opened up owes a great deal, without question, to his attitude toward the training.
Thinking about trust, I came to notice that people fall broadly into two types. The words came out of a conversation with a friend: the transactional person, who moves calculatingly while thinking about what they can get from you, and the circulating person, who gives what they can without seeking a return, so that it circulates and eventually comes back around.
Having belonged to a for-profit organization, I spent long stretches around transactional people. Travel is the opposite: regardless of age or title, without minding how others see you, you meet people openly rather than deciding what sort of person they are. You are judged not by calculation but by whether you can be trusted. On that trust, people give each other what they have — so during the period away from travel and from work, I came to spend more time around circulating people.
Coaching is one means of listening to a person and thinking about how to raise their potential. Within it, DOING and BEING are separated, and the focus goes to BEING. DOING is what you do; BEING is how you are. Working on BEING — the set of values that tends to stay unconscious — is what naturally changes the DOING that reaches consciousness. That is the heart of coaching (see Sensing, Doing, and Coaching — Thinking It Through from CTI’s Educational System).
Seen this way, the transactional person puts their weight on DOING and the circulating person on BEING. People do not fall into one category or the other; what matters is which proportion is larger, and acquiring that balance.
Old Patterns and New Patterns
What characterizes Rolfing is that it aims to bring the body into balance so that a person can bring out the capacity that is theirs.
In the training, two terms come up: the old pattern the person carried before the work — old habits of movement — and the new pattern after it, the habits of movement that arise as a result (see Old Patterns and New Patterns).
What I would ask you to note is that there is no “right” and “wrong” to a pattern. It is easier to think of it as being given a new option.
When a client is caught between an old pattern and a new one, there is room for negotiation and re-negotiation; over a series of sessions, through dialogue, the new pattern is gradually taken on. The image is of tidying away the old pattern little by little and ordering the body anew with the new one — a re-education of the body, or the building of a new arrangement in it.
Come to think of it, the body did not arrive at its present pattern on its own. It was acquired through a parent’s discipline, through schooling, through what one is taught about how to conduct oneself once out in society. To change that by way of a new option is, you could say, changing the mind by way of the body.
Whether transactional or circulating, if these too are a kind of pattern, then there is no right and wrong there either.
In the end, the body changes into one where the muscles relax naturally and exert force only when it is needed. That comes from the excess tension coming out through the work of Rolfing, but each session also has its theme, and through that process the body is put in order and something like a new arrangement takes shape.
The Body Map
Habitual movements in daily life carry something like a map, drawn up by the head without our being aware of it.
Why can we recognize our own posture and the parts that make up our body? Because a human being has a body map, and can know what is where by consulting it.
There are two kinds of body map: body schema and body image. Body schema is the map built unconsciously as the brain gathers information from outside. Body image is the map built from subjective impressions — the environment one grew up in, culture (see The Body Map and the Phantom Limb).
I have taken up the case of a woman before. It became clear that because she carried a body image of not wanting to look like a South American woman, it appeared in an unconscious posture of hiding her chest — a body schema (see Case Presentation (2): After the Seventh Session).
What Rolfing does is bring the unconscious body schema into awareness, and by offering a new option — a new pattern — rewrite the body map little by little. The hope is that the body image changes with it. Doing what you can do, and letting that change the body image. I think this leads toward self-acceptance as well.
As an approach to the mind, my sense is that belongings, then body, then words is the order of effectiveness. But I have a feeling that the approach through the body is going to advance further from here.
Note, September 2026
This piece takes up four things: belongings, work, information, and the body. At the time I wrote about them as separate matters, but what I was doing was one thing. Putting them in order.
Less Is More is danshari applied to information; old patterns and new patterns are danshari applied to the body. What prompted me to keep writing about ordering was Hiro’s comment that Rolfing is danshari of the body.
And at the end I set down an order. As an approach to the mind: belongings, then body, then words.
Eleven years on, that order has changed.
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, it does not take the form of starting by tidying up your belongings. The body comes first now.
Though the piece does predict this itself. I have a feeling that the approach through the body is going to advance further from here, reads the last line.
That I chose the word self-acceptance also tells, reading it now. Self-affirmation makes me uneasy, I wrote; it gives the impression of forcing oneself to be positive. Being able to accept yourself as you are sits better.
I made a choice in the same direction ten years later. The neutrality I took in in 2025 was not about adjusting, but about setting up the conditions under which things come into order. When I wrote about the Ten-Series, I set the policy of not writing about a limitation as a defect. No muscle becomes hard without reason. Limitation and possibility exist as a pair.
Accepting the self that could not do it, as it is, and moving forward toward being able to. Adler’s account of self-acceptance, quoted here, can be read straight across as a statement about the body.
I write about rewriting the body map using the terms body schema and body image, but neither term appears anywhere after this. In the Rolf Movement training, what they deal with continued, translated into the vocabulary of Tonic Function. It is a case of the word disappearing and the matter remaining.