This article was written in August 2015 and added to in September 2026. The explanation of the virtual midline has been moved here from a separate piece on the fourth Rolfing session, and a record of movement sessions I did not write about at the time has been added. A note from 2026 follows at the end.
Introduction
A month since I began offering Rolfing sessions in a rented session room. How do I explain Rolfing to people encountering it for the first time? I put it across with slides, and every day I feel how hard it is to convey in words.
I first learned that this work existed through two books: Loosen and Reset: A Rolfing Class by the Noh performer Noboru Yasuda, and The Body’s Home Position by Yasushi Fujimoto, who writes about the body.
Later, on December 23, 2013, at a party celebrating the marriage of a friend living in Italy, I met Akinori Ito, one of the Rolfers practicing here — which is what led me on (see How I Found Rolfing — Searching for a Way to Deepen the Postures).
I have kept an eye on both writers, and had the chance to read the latest from each: Yasuda’s The Japanese Body and Fujimoto’s Getting Back the Capacity to Feel.
A Body Described Roughly
Yasuda’s book approaches the Japanese view of the body historically.
For a Japanese speaker, hiza — knee — meant the whole front of the thigh, from the kneecap up to the hip. Kata — shoulder — took in everything from the acromion up around the neck. Where the anatomical kneecap or acromion looks at the body as a point, roughness is the basis of Japanese bodily language.
And today, he writes, as Western medicine has become the mainstream, the names of illnesses and injuries have grown finer and finer. In the past there was no distinction between a cold and influenza, or between diarrhea and irritable bowel syndrome.
Take a pulled muscle. A single naming pulls you along with it, the question of how the body feels is forgotten, and treatment for “a pulled muscle” begins. What gets lost is the particular situation in front of you — this person’s leg.
To set aside the question of how you feel your own body, and leave it to others or to something objective: seen from Japanese history, this is a new sensation.
Karada and Mi
Originally, the Japanese word karada meant a corpse. The living body was called mi, and in that thinking, mind and soul were one.
In time the living body came to be called karada, and the body separated from the self and became an object. Once it is an object, the thinking arrives at handing it over to a specialist — someone else. Following the language is an interesting way to learn how the body is being seen.
Karada has its root in kara, husk or shell: setting a firm boundary between yourself and what is around you, putting up a wall between yourself and others. Where the boundary with others is vague, you can also hold that another’s suffering is your suffering and another’s joy is your joy. For the view of the body from Japanese history, including this contrast between mi and karada, I would recommend Yasuda’s book.
The Virtual Midline
In his earlier book, Loosen and Reset: A Rolfing Class, Yasuda uses an expression that is indispensable for understanding the deep sessions in Rolfing.
In the upper body a midline runs as a series of bones — head, neck, spine, sacrum, down to the pelvis. In the lower body it suddenly disappears. Below the pelvis the body divides into two legs.
What developed in its place were the adductors and the pelvic floor. Yasuda calls this the virtual midline.
Where there ought to be bone, there is muscle. Support that bone would carry is being carried by muscle instead. That is why the fourth session in Rolfing goes to the adductors and the pelvic floor. It is not the midline itself that is being worked with, but the place where the midline breaks off in the lower body.
That the person who wrote the history of the Japanese view of the body and the person who coined this expression are the same seems, to me, not to be a coincidence. What can be named as bone, and what supports without a name. The region treated roughly turns out to be, on the body’s side too, the region without bone.
From the Working of the Nerves
The other book is Fujimoto’s. It had only just come out, but it goes deeper than The Body’s Home Position, with everything superfluous stripped away, and it is clear. Feeling every day how hard writing is, I read it straight through, moved.
Let me introduce part of it.
What Yasuda described as the weakening of the capacity to feel the body, Fujimoto approaches scientifically, as a concrete ability everyone shares: the working of the nerves. He writes about how that working can be activated with the smallest of adjustments.
The Alexander Technique places weight on releasing the head and the spine, and it is good that he states this first.
Then there is the jaw work that helps it along: holding a disposable chopstick between the back teeth. Something that simple. That the force goes out of the whole body from this is, I think, remarkable.
Fascia, and Space
Exploring why, he moves on to how the nerves work. Why does releasing the jaw release the whole body? At that point he takes up a single word: fascia. His account of what it means is clear as well.
Fascia has two functions.
Making space. It is the wrapping of muscles and organs, creating the space in which an organ can work steadily.
Making connection. It holds organs to one another, and works to draw the whole body into one.
In the Rolfing training I took in Germany, of these two, making space carried more weight than making connection.
As I have written elsewhere, Giovanni said that in Rolfing, how you make space is what matters. I think this shows in the fact that the training deliberately uses the word articulation rather than joint for the joints (see The Word Articulation — On Making Space Within the Body).
Originally, articulation means space or interval more than connection; it is related to the verb articulate, to make distinct, in the sense of putting an interval into a sentence. From there, articulation comes to mean space.
To convey how much space matters, the training emphasized this: when you turn awareness toward the fact that there is space — articulation — within the body, and evoke it, the surplus force goes out of the muscles. The idea of bidirectionality in Rolfing also derives from this notion of space (see Basic Concepts — Bidirectionality (Palintonicity)).
Breath, and the Choice of Words
And then breath, used to bring out the fullest capacity of the fascia.
To raise awareness of the body, Fujimoto says, it matters not only to touch the body but to feel the breath. At that point, toward the place you want awareness to go, he suggests:
“I think the natural wave of the breath reaches ○○.”
From his own experience: saying “be aware of the breath” leads to trying hard, and the switch it throws to the fascia is too strong. Saying “imagine the breath” stays a reaction inside the head, and is too weak. In the end he arrived at “I think.”
In Rolfing, breath is looked at from the first session onward, centered on the muscles of respiration, but we did not go as far as the choice of words (on breath and Rolfing, I put together what the papers handed out in the training say in Exhaling Takes No Effort — Conscious and Unconscious Breath).
There are other things I would like to write about, but the work he proposes is practical, and I would like to bring it into my own sessions.
These two books may well become valuable texts for me in learning how to explain Rolfing from here. I want to keep them at hand and read them again.
Note, September 2026
This piece is a record of reading two books side by side. Noboru Yasuda and Yasushi Fujimoto — both Rolfers in Japan, and both writers.
These two books were also the entrance through which I learned that Rolfing existed. The books came before meeting Akinori Ito.
There is something the piece does not say. I had already received sessions from Yasushi Fujimoto.
On July 18 and 25, 2014, two Rolf Movement sessions. This was just before Phase I began in Munich, and just after I had left the pharmaceutical company. I received three more from Kaori Nakamura, on August 1, 7, and 21. Those five make up the five movement sessions required for application.
Two of Nakamura’s fall inside the Phase I period. She lives in Munich, so I was receiving them outside the classroom.
I learned that Rolfing existed from books, received sessions from the people who wrote them, and those sessions satisfied a requirement for applying; the following month I was in the classroom. This piece is from a year after that, a month into practice, rereading the newest books by the same two people. This time not as someone receiving, but as someone explaining.
At the top I write that I feel every day how hard it is to convey this in words. Eleven years on, the subject has not gone away; how to put Rolfing into language is still unresolved.
And the passage on breath that this piece quotes from Fujimoto comes to matter later.
“Be aware of the breath” leads to trying hard. “Imagine the breath” stays inside the head. So he arrived at “I think.” The choice of words changes how the body responds.
I would reach the same place by another route. Hubert Godard, who built the theory behind Rolf Movement, set out from an observation made while teaching dance: give the same task, and how people dance changes according to how you speak. Trying to understand why, he entered the inquiry that put the response to gravity at the center of movement.
When I took the Rolf Movement course between 2017 and 2019, what Rita Geirola asked again and again was: who are you teaching, and which words are you choosing for them.
The passage I read in Fujimoto’s book in 2015 stands at the head of that line.
What I took from Yasuda’s book also draws together now.
When a name is attached, treatment for that name begins, and the body in front of you goes out of view. Attach the name “pulled muscle” and treatment for a pulled muscle begins — not for this person’s leg.
Writing about the Ten-Series, I set the policy of holding the judgment to gravity alone, and of not treating improvement in symptoms or sensations as the result. That is: do not judge by the name of a symptom. What I had taken from this book eleven years earlier had become the policy for how to write.
The virtual midline runs the same way. The midline that can be named as bone ends at the upper body; the lower body is carried by support that has no name. Look only at what has a name, and you do not see it.