Introduction
On Saturday, February 24, 2018, I held the first of what I hope will become a regular seminar series at Salon ZERO, on self-care through Rolfing.
Three years had passed since my certification as a Rolfer in March 2015. Until then I had never run a Rolfing seminar for a general audience. From 2018 onward, I want to hold these seminars every one or two months, built around what I have noticed through my work with clients.
Three people attended the first one. The two hours were split between a talk and hands-on work.
The Talk: Where Rolfing Has Spread, and Why Structure Matters
I began with how Rolfing has spread internationally, particularly among athletes — figure skaters, players in the NBA and the NFL. I also touched briefly on the growing body of scientific evidence coming out of the fascia research community.
We then discussed a question together: why does it matter to organize the body at all?
Here I introduced an idea from Beau Lotto’s Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently — that we do not see the world as it actually is.
Only about ten percent of what we use to see comes through the eyes. The remaining ninety percent comes from the brain itself.
If that is so, then what matters is how we work on that ninety percent — on how we see.
Two Ways of Seeing
There are two of them:
- the part that is shaped without our awareness (body schema)
- the part we can work on deliberately (body image)
(For more on this, see Psychological and Perceptual Change — The Body Map.)
Yoga, Pilates, tai chi, Rolfing and similar practices give input to the part shaped without our awareness, reaching the brain through the body. The ninety percent gets updated, and information that had been scattered begins to sort itself out.
What matters here is whether information from the extremities — the hands and the feet — can reach the brain at all.
For that, the hands and feet need to be in a state where they can pick up what is around them, which is to say a state where they can move freely. (On the feet, see Phase II (5) — Session 2: Organizing the Feet.)
Hands-On: What Free Movement Feels Like
Each participant had time to feel, through a Rolfing demonstration, what it means for the hands and feet to move freely.
On fascia, I described two roles:
- giving form and space to the organs (the wrapping around viscera and muscle)
- connecting organs and muscles to one another
Working on the hand and forearm, participants could feel the shoulder soften.
Two hours went quickly.
The second seminar is set for Saturday, March 24, 2018, at 7:30 in the evening at Salon ZERO, where I plan to say something about homeopathy.
Conclusion
This was a record of the first self-care seminar: how far Rolfing has spread, the two ways of seeing (body schema and body image), and the two roles of fascia.
Note, September 2026
When I wrote this in February 2018, I had not learned the distinction between body schema and body image from its source.
That source is a 1995 paper by Shaun Gallagher and Jonathan Cole, which sorts out the difference: body schema is a physiological construction, body image a phenomenological one. Giovanni Felicioni handed out this paper during Phase I in August 2014. There is even a handwritten citation note on the last page.
I did not read it.
When I wrote about body maps in September 2015, I drew on a different book. And in February 2018 I gave the distinction to three people as “the part shaped without awareness” and “the part we can work on deliberately.” I had become able to use it in a seminar without having read the original. The order was reversed: using it came first, returning to the source came later.
Reading the handout now, I find something else. Body schema does not originate with Merleau-Ponty but with Head and Holmes in 1911, and body image goes back to Schilder in 1935 — both set out plainly in a timeline. The two came from separate lines of work, twenty-four years apart, and were paired only afterward. In 2018 I was explaining them as a pair without knowing where either had come from.
I do not think I said anything false. But I did not know what stood behind the two words I had put in parentheses.
There is one other thing recorded here that did not turn out as written. I said I wanted to hold these seminars every one or two months. The date and the topic of the second one were already fixed. After that, no record of this seminar survives. Whether I held them and did not write about them, or did not hold them at all, I cannot say.
The same has happened elsewhere. I wrote three times that I would become a Certified Advanced Rolfer in 2018; it turned out to be 2025. I wrote that the Rolf Movement certification would come in July 2018; it came in 2019. At the time of writing, each looked like a reasonable plan.
Through August and September of this year I have been going back through every article on this site, in order to build new Japanese and English versions of the Rolfing website. Rereading that handout happened in the course of that work. Since I am in the middle of sorting through everything I have learned, I am thinking again about running seminars on self-care and on Rolfing.