Introduction
This June, I revised the fees for Rolfing sessions. It is the first time in ten years.
Having kept the same fees for so long, some may wonder, “Why now?” I have been asking myself something close to the opposite: why I did not change them for ten years. Today I want to write about that as honestly as I can.
Why I Did Not Change Them
Several reasons overlap.
One is prices. Over these ten years, prices in Japan barely moved. There was no particular strain in leaving the fees as they were.
Another is the pandemic. At a time when many people were unsettled in body and in daily life, I could not bring myself to raise fees.
And there is the fact that I came late to the Advanced Training. Before going one step deeper as a Rolfer, moving the fees first felt, somehow, out of order.
So Why Now
Honestly, the economic judgment is the largest part. Prices have begun to move, and holding ten years of the same fees is no longer realistic. I want to acknowledge that plainly, without dressing it up.
But if that were all, I would not have felt moved to write about it here.
Over these ten years, 185 people walked the ten-session series through to the end. And more than anything, my hands and my understanding have clearly changed. A sense of “this is something I can stand behind” has finally grown in me, and it feels like the right moment.
From Organizing the Body to Organizing Perception
What changed most over these ten years was how I myself understand what Rolfing is.
For the me of ten years ago, Rolfing was the work of undoing a stiffened body and organizing posture and movement. That has not changed. But over the past several years, a question grew slowly in my hands. Where is the connection between a body changing, and a person’s way of feeling and living changing?
Put into words, the “definition of Rolfing” inside me has moved like this.
| 2016 | 2026 |
|---|---|
| Organizing the body | Organizing perception |
| Looking at the body | Looking at the person through the body |
| Making the body easier | Aiming at the integration of body, mind, and perception |
| Offering a technique | Offering a place for inquiry |
| Touching the body | Walking alongside a life |
The left side has not disappeared. Posture coming into order, symptoms easing — these are still important entrances. It is that the view opening out beyond them has become clearly visible.
The turning point was the twenty-four days of training to become an Advanced Rolfer, which I took from spring into summer of 2025. What the instructors Ray McCall and Hiroyoshi Tahata returned to again and again was the balance between bringing about change (Making) and setting in order the place where change happens (Letting).
Ten years ago I leaned, if anything, toward the former. I was trying to move the body with technique. But deep change does not come from prying something open by force; it begins on its own when the place is in order for that person’s body to move itself again. I came to understand this not with my head but with my hands.
In the same training, there was another way of thinking that affected me deeply. Jeff Maitland, a philosopher and a Rolfer, set out three ways of looking in bodywork — Relaxation, Corrective, and Holistic. The sense of moving rightward in the table above overlapped exactly with shifting the weight toward Holistic. On the three ways of looking, I have written in more detail in What Is Holistic Healing?
This is continuous with what Husserl called intentionality, and what Merleau-Ponty took up into phenomenology as the body schema — the core of phenomenology, that perception and the body cannot be separated. What I had been feeling in my hands, I learned afterward, had been named long before.
When the body softens, the way of feeling changes. The texture of the floor, how gravity lands, the depth of the breath. And beyond that, how one grasps oneself and the world begins, a little, to move. That is also why I can now say much more concretely than before what kind of self-care can carry a person through the time during and after a session.
Even for the same “one session,” the content has become something other than what it was ten years ago. The fees are the result of trying to stay honest to that deepening.
What the Revision Does Not Change
Meeting one person, and the body of that day, with care. That alone has not changed by anything at all since the first day.
The new fees begin on June 15. The details are set out in A Time to Meet Yourself as You Are — Notice of Fee Revision. If anything is on your mind, please say so at any time.