Introduction
The television filming and broadcast are behind me now, and the inquiries have settled down.
The session ran fifteen or twenty minutes; what aired came to two and a half. Until it went out, I kept wondering whether what I try to convey in a session had come through at all.
Watching it back, I think the crew understood what mattered and put it together well. I am grateful to everyone at Fuji Television.
“The Body Knows Where It Belongs”
While I was working on Tetsuro Degawa, Kiyotaka Nanbara asked me what I was doing.
I said that I was touching fascia, and that the body knows where it belongs — that I am only guiding it there.
There is plenty to learn on the scientific side of Rolfing. But what matters most is not to pronounce a posture right or wrong. It is to work alongside the client on the premise that the body already knows the answer.
When Knowledge Takes Over, the Person Disappears
However much one knows, what remains unknown about the human body is greater still.
And yet, once anatomy and the rest of it are in hand, one starts leaning on that knowledge, and the gaze shifts from the person to what one knows. What this body, this person, actually needs — the eye goes to knowledge rather than to sensation, and the person is lost from view.
What matters is that sensation and the person come first, and that what happened is put into words afterward, against what one knows. The knowledge comes in after the fact. That is where the point lies.
Working Alongside the Client
This is why working alongside the client matters.
Staying in communication with the client, how can awareness be brought about? I think of Rolfing as continuous with coaching because coaching, too, meets the client on the premise that the client already knows the answer.
What follows from this is that clients come to choose, of their own accord, the posture that suits them.
So a safe space matters, and so does staying open, curious, interested; not being bound to one way of thinking; enjoying it; taking real pleasure in the work. And so does the state the practitioner’s own body is in.
Conclusion
The body already knows the answer. That is something I want to keep working from.
Note, September 2026
Of everything written here, what stays with me on rereading is the passage about losing sight of the person the more one knows.
Eight years later, in a piece on a book by Noboru Yasuda and Yasushi Fujimoto, I wrote the same thing in different words: once a name is attached, treatment for that name begins, and the body in front of you disappears from view. It came from Yasuda’s account of pulling a muscle and, rather than going to a doctor, observing his own body without putting a name to it. In 2018 I was writing about it as a matter of anatomical knowledge. It is the same thing.
Then, in the 2025 Advanced Training, came the phrase Kind Indifference — remaining interested in the person while holding no attachment to the outcome. Along with it came a line from Jim Jealous: the process is none of your business; observe, but do not become part of the story. A stance of suspending judgment.
Looking back, much of what was taught in Phase III in 2015 also took the form of prohibitions. Do not judge. Do not point things out. Do not react with surprise. At the time I could not see why so much needed to be held back.
There is one more thing in the text above: sensation and the person come first, and words come afterward, against what one knows. The work I am doing now has taken exactly that shape. I am rereading eleven years of records and giving names, after the fact, to things that had none at the time. In 2018 I had already written down that order.
A word about calling Rolfing continuous with coaching. The coaching I learned at CTI begins from the premise that people are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole. “The client already knows the answer” comes from there.
In the 2025 training the same premise appeared in another form: trust that the body can self-regulate. The Rolf Institute’s standards of practice state that each person carries an inherent pattern for optimal organization, and that the pattern is self-organizing in nature. On the coaching side and on the Rolfing side, in separate vocabularies, the same premise is in place.
When I wrote “continuous with” in 2018, I meant the order in which I had come to each of them. Reading it now, it is less a matter of sequence than of a shared premise.