This article brings together two pieces written in September 2015, combined into one in September 2026: one on the fact that Rolfing has an end (September 11), and a record of the first client I worked with completing the ten sessions (September 28). A note from 2026 follows at the end.
Introduction
What surprised me when I first experienced Rolfing was that it has an end (on that first experience, see After Completing the Ten Sessions).
Unlike massage or seitai, Rolfing finishes in ten sessions. That means taking what you learned across those ten sessions into your own life, and it means the practitioner works with the client’s independence in view. For me, this is one of the main reasons I came to like this method.
The Three Sessions That Move Toward the End
What Ida Rolf meant by an end is, I think, concentrated in the integration sessions, 8 through 10.
Because what to do toward closing — closing in the sense of an ending, of encouraging independence — what has been learned so far, and which direction to go from here: the sessions proceed by facing the client with these three in view, and by talking them through.
In Rolfing, the practitioner uses hands, elbows, and forearms to apply slow pressure to the fascia that wraps the muscles, touching the client’s whole body across ten sessions and releasing tension. By the end of session 10 the body has come into order in relation to gravity, and the series finishes with the client recovering the way their body naturally moves.
In the training, Giovanni Felicioni described the sleeve sessions as taking out, one by one, the pins in the surface of the body that are getting in the way of movement. For the core, the image of a stethoscope may help. The hand searches the depth, locates where the trouble is, gives a stimulus from the hand, and waits for a response from below. What matters is that the change occurs from the inside.
On how the ten-series is put together, I have written separately.
- What Is Rolfing’s Ten-Series? — Three Phases in Which the Body Changes, and the Flow of Each Session
The First Completion
It has been nearly three months since I set up the session room ZERO. The name and the logo have been settled, and I have been fortunate: sessions in the room I have rented since June 2015 have come to nearly a hundred.
On September 14, 2015, about two and a half months after starting, the first client I worked with reached completion of the ten sessions.
The client was Toshihiro Aramaki, who used to practice alongside me at Mysore Tokyo. He now works as an Alexander Technique teacher at ENN in Nihonbashi, and as a yoga instructor.
Three or four years before I took the Rolfing training, it was Aramaki — then assisting in the Ashtanga Mysore class I was practicing in, and already an AT teacher — who introduced me to the Alexander Technique. That led me to study the AT professional course at BodyChance for about eight months, and before I set out to travel around the world I had the chance to invite him to my home to run AT workshops several times. I wrote about that in On the Relation Between Rolfing and the Alexander Technique (1) — Two Ways of Learning to “Let Go” Through the Body.
There were two reasons I became interested in AT. Aramaki had mastered the very difficult Ashtanga series in a short span, and I wondered where the key to that lay. And when I tried it myself, it had a large effect on my own yoga practice — my backbends went deeper.
Aramaki came to the session room on July 7, 2015, and received eleven sessions including the introductory one. At the start I was unsure whether I could offer him something different from AT.
But by the time we had finished ten sessions at a pace of one a week, I think he too could feel the change. It shows in what he wrote.
With his permission, I quote:
“As during the sessions themselves, I feel that the sense of my legs connecting to my upper body is becoming clearer day by day. Because of that there has been a large change in the quality of my practice, especially in the vinyasas — jump backs, jump throughs. And in the ordinary feedback I get from people about how I come across, what I hear most often lately is that I have ‘become more masculine’ (laughs). There are of course many factors involved, but I am convinced, as a bodily experience, that the process of integration through Rolfing has a great deal to do with it.”
“Become more masculine” is an interesting response, but that there was a large effect on his yoga practice, and that Rolfing could offer something AT could not, fits my own view that AT and Rolfing stand in a complementary relation — which I find interesting.
He later sent a full version of the testimonial.
I am grateful to Aramaki for staying with the ten sessions, and as more clients come to complete the series from here, I look forward to what kind of accounts come out of it.
Note, September 2026
At the top of this piece I write that what surprised me when I first experienced Rolfing was that it has an end. That was the ten sessions I received from Akinori Ito between December 2013 and April 2014.
And the second half is a record of my seeing someone else reach that end. What surprised me as the person receiving, I am writing a year and a half later from the side of the person offering.
Counting now, 196 people have completed the ten-series (out of 380 to whom I have offered sessions; as of August 15, 2026). The first of them is here.
There is something else I notice now about who the client was.
It was through him that I learned of the Alexander Technique. We practiced together at Mysore Tokyo, where he was assisting at the time; I learned of AT from him, received work, and the pain in my neck improved. That is where my interest in bodywork began, and from there I went on to Akinori Ito’s Rolfing.
The person who made the entrance to Rolfing was the first client to complete the ten sessions. I have written about that path in The Path to Becoming a Rolfer, but that he was the first is not in it.
This piece also confirms something about the relation between AT and Rolfing.
It says the outcome fits my view that the two stand in a complementary relation. What matters is that the confirmation came back in the words of the person receiving. He had studied AT for seven years and taught it; I had studied it for eight months. Someone who knows the range AT reaches is putting into words what it did not reach.
What he named was the sense of his legs connecting to his upper body. An advanced movement using the psoas — coming up from a long sit into a handstand with the legs straight — became possible for the first time.
Hubert Godard has described the difference between the Feldenkrais Method and the Alexander Technique. The two often use the same task: standing up from a chair and sitting down again. What differs is the point of reference. Feldenkrais takes the ground and the pelvis as the reference point, every time. Alexander takes the neck and the chest, and the direction upward. And, Godard adds, you need both to have a line.
What Aramaki put into words was the side from below. Someone who had studied AT for seven years names the connection between legs and upper body as what AT had not reached. It is not that one is better than the other. The point of reference differs.
Two pieces set these two side by side, written in March and April 2015: Two Ways of Learning to “Let Go” Through the Body, and On the Relation Between Rolfing and the Alexander Technique (2). Both were written from my side. In this piece, for the first time, the words of the person receiving come in.
He later sent a full version of the testimonial. The passage quoted here is part of it.