Introduction
As you organize the body through Rolfing, or through bodywork of any kind, the way you see the world gradually shifts.
Put simply: you had been seeing things by an external standard, and you come to see them by an internal one.
Why does this happen? That is what I want to set out here.
This piece was written in January 2024 and has since been combined with another piece from the same month. Why an internal standard is needed, what it means to say that the world is made of concepts and assumptions, and what happens when fascia begins to move — those were added to the second half.
Seeing through knowledge — the beginner and the expert
How do we learn to see, to observe? If there were a school that taught observation, I would enroll. But training in seeing things as they are is not something schools take up.
Most of us are educated the other way: learn the knowledge, then look at the world through that lens.
Shunryū Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind has these lines.
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.
As soon as you see something, you already start to intellectualize it. As soon as you intellectualize something, it is no longer what you saw.
West and East — seeing through knowledge, or seeing directly
This holds worldwide: in primary and secondary school we learn a scientific way of seeing, and we learn to look at the world through that lens. In the East, by contrast, meditation, koan practice, and movement — yoga, breathing methods — are used to value seeing directly.
Roughly put: the East values looking at things directly, the West values looking at them through knowledge.
Turn that over, and you find that scientific knowledge lets you dominate the world, which leads to a life spent controlling it — while the Eastern side leads toward things as they are, toward being one with nature and living alongside it.
The West turns East — phenomenology
In the twentieth century, the Western way of seeing moved closer to the Eastern one.
Phenomenology comes up in the Rolfing basic training. Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger — the founders of that tradition developed a philosophy grounded in what might be called natural thinking, or living nature, which sits close to Eastern thought.
What they share is this: in looking at something, they built their view of the world not out of the intellect but out of what was directly experienced.
The body schema, and the operating system
A human being has, as the organ through which the world is seen, something that cannot be divided into subject and object: the body schema. (Schema here means a framework, a diagram.) This is why each person can have a character of their own.
“Body schema” on its own does not explain much, so let me say a little more.
The body gathers information continuously — visual, musculoskeletal, tactile — and sends it to the brain. What gets updated there is your view of the world: the operating system, if you like.
What corresponds to that view of the world is what phenomenology calls the body schema, or the body map. The term itself comes out of neurology. Merleau-Ponty took a concept that already existed and brought it over into phenomenology.
The flow of sensation from skin, joints, muscle, and viscera keeps the information current. Sent to the brain, it is updated day by day, the way an operating system is. And the body schema processes all of this unconsciously, automatically.
What is worth noticing is that the body schema is shaped by the environment you grew up in — schooling, the workplace, the people you serve — by culture, and by experiences of psychological trauma.
Working with the body means changing the body schema
Working with fascia through Rolfing changes the flow of sensation from skin, joints, muscle, and viscera. The operating system shifts as a result, and the body schema is processed differently.
Where you had been seeing things through knowledge, it becomes possible to let go of a standard given from outside — by education, by the world at large. What follows is that you can judge by a standard of your own.
That is what lets a new way of seeing appear, what makes decisions easier, what makes intuition available, and what builds a sense of the body.
Why an internal standard is needed
People want to be recognized. This is a drive like hunger, like sex, like sleep — one drive among others, and it arises within us unconsciously, of its own accord.
Being aware that the wish for recognition arises on its own is what matters. You acknowledge that you have it, and on that footing you judge for yourself. Otherwise you end up judging by whether others will recognize you — by an external standard.
Awareness accumulated in this way leads to building your own criteria and being able to decide without being swayed by others.
You could think of it as a kind of strength training.
Concepts and assumptions
What matters here is knowing that the world is made of concepts and assumptions.
By concept I mean an agreement that human beings have settled on. By assumption I mean a way of seeing things acquired unconsciously or consciously.
Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind argues that what characterizes human beings is sociality — that we have lived by cooperating with one another, and that this put us at the top of the animal world.
Sociality is relationship. No one lives alone, and by learning from others we come to know the agreements that human beings have settled on. Among those others, parents carry the most weight, then siblings, teachers, classmates, friends, colleagues.
What is interesting is that these are held in the fascia, and that they carry considerable weight as assumptions — as ways of seeing acquired unconsciously or consciously.
Fascia moves where it wants to move
Past trauma and troubles carried in the mind are held in the fascia as tension. Fascia has a direction it wants to move in. Trauma and past experience make that movement harder, and this bears heavily on posture.
The practitioner becomes neutral and guides the fascia toward where it wants to move, and the fascia begins to move on its own. The body follows, moving toward the organization it is after. What comes of it, in the end, is the body putting itself in order so that it can be used efficiently.
What interests me is that once the fascia begins to move where it wants to move, agency starts working from inside the body, and this becomes the occasion for judging by a standard of one’s own. Letting go of attachments and habits of thought held unconsciously turns out to be easier than expected.
Conclusion
Working with the body means updating the version of your own operating system — the body schema. What follows is a sense of the body, the availability of intuition, and the capacity to judge by a standard of your own. This piece also took up why that standard is needed in the first place.
Note, September 2026
This piece calls the body schema an operating system. Information from the body arrives continuously, and it is updated day by day. The comparison was there to explain.
I had used the same comparison about two weeks earlier. A piece from December 2023 likens telling the brain where the body is to an operating system. It came to mind, I used it once, and I used it again.
These days I speak of a Recognition OS. It is the system underlying thought, feeling, and action, and it is not only in the brain — it is written into the body, the nervous system, the patterns of the fascia. I now take it in four layers: the Logic OS, the Sensory OS, the Dialogue OS, and the Perspective OS. What Rolfing works with is mainly the Sensory OS.
What had been a comparison became the name of a framework.
Going back further, a piece from 2017 explained the same thing with two terms, the unconscious and the conscious — a reasoning brain and a feeling or intuiting one.
In 2017 it was divided in two. In 2024 I applied the comparison to an operating system. Now it is in four layers, worked out down to what sharpens each of them. This is not a different claim. It is the same thing, said again each time in whatever words were at hand.
One more thing was corrected here.
The piece originally credited the body schema to Merleau-Ponty. In fact the term comes out of neurology. Body schema originates in Head and Holmes’s 1911 paper, body image in Paul Schilder’s 1935 book; the two came from separate traditions, twenty-four years apart, and were paired only later. Merleau-Ponty wrote Phenomenology of Perception in 1945. He took a neurological concept that already existed and brought it over into phenomenology.
The material setting out that distinction had been handed out in August 2014, in Phase I of the basic training — a timeline and a paper, distributed by Giovanni Felicioni. I did not read them. Ten years later I was writing about the same term without having read them.