Introduction
Two people hear the same words and take away different things. If words only carried information, that wouldn’t happen.
The person receiving them interprets them against their own sensation. That interpretation is what we call perception.
So to communicate something is to touch someone’s perception.
In a session I might say, “see if you can feel the soles of your feet.” Same words, different results. One person’s stance changes; for another, nothing happens. It isn’t whether the words arrived. It’s whether they touched that person’s perception.
Ten years ago I took this for a problem of how to say things. Going back through what I wrote then, I found I had it backwards.
Communication is perception. And Rolf Movement is work that acts on perception.
This article takes up perception directly. What is it, seen by someone whose work is the body?
Let me name the source I’ll be working from. Caryn McHose and Kevin Frank’s How Life Moves (2006) — a book on perception and the body written from the Rolf Movement side. The foreword is by Hubert Godard, who brought Tonic Function into Rolfing.
Where I write “the book,” “the main text,” or “the foreword” below, I mean this book.
There Are Things We Don’t See
Around the body there is a range that our attention reaches. Arm’s length. What’s behind us. The size of the room. It isn’t uniform; it has different thickness in different directions.
In dance and bodywork this range is called the kinesphere — from the Greek kinein (to move) and sphaira (sphere). The sphere of movement.
This range can be missing. The example in the book is a blow to the head. Struck on one side, a person stops sensing the space on that side. It affects movement and daily life profoundly, and they don’t notice. It stays hidden until a practitioner begins to see that person’s perceptual structure.
Which is the difficult part. What we don’t see includes the fact that we don’t see it. It doesn’t show up in looking at the body, or in measuring range of motion.
Much of both physical and psychological therapy, and trauma work especially, is concentrated on rebuilding that missing kinesphere, the book says. But blows and trauma are not the only causes. A far more ordinary one comes next.
“What Should Be” Is the Thickest Wall
Someone in a group feels uncomfortable and naturally moves their body away. And then concludes about themselves that they lack the capacity for intimacy.
The book puts it this way: acknowledging the distance that is genuinely comfortable is itself the beginning of self-organization and the regulation of health. Once you notice what’s true, you can be present in the relationship even at a distance in space.
And then —
Often our greatest barrier to health is an image of what should be.
Setting aside judgment and self-image, and asking what is actually true. That is what I care about most in a session. Not going after good posture, but making it possible to feel what is happening now.
What Perception Is
Start with the word.
Perception comes from the Latin percipere — per (through) and capere (to take). To take, through.
From the same capere come capture, conceive, and receive. A gesture of seizing sits at the core of the word.
So by its very shape, the word says perception is not passive. We are not receiving what arrives; we are taking hold of it. This comes back later.
Messages arrive at the brain continuously from skin, sense organs, muscles, and viscera. Kevin Frank calls them messages addressed “to whom it may concern.” Addressed to no one in particular. Most of them pass by unnoticed.
What gets noticed is what makes up perception.
Perception is the interpretation we make of our sensation.
The introduction has another formulation. Perception is how each person organizes the flow of sensory information arising in that moment. And then it asks: we respond to what we perceive — so what are we perceiving? Is our interpretation of the world real, imagined, or some mixture?
The answer is stated plainly.
the perception that we create is just that–a creation.
A creation of the mind, a selected reconstruction of the real world.
This isn’t a pessimistic claim. If it is made, it can be remade.
The capacity to sense where we are in gravity is called proprioception. The book writes that it is not locked inside memory and image.
There Are Two Directions
Going back through my own writing, I noticed something. I had written about “coming to see” twice — and the two pointed in opposite directions.
A Concept Makes It Visible
The first came from training in Germany in 2015.
Ida Rolf’s curriculum has a stage called auditing: before you work on anyone, you spend a long time on the observing side. And the saturation method — you simply keep looking.
What I was taught there: a concept makes things visible. What you have no name for doesn’t register, even when it’s in front of your eyes. Once you have the concept, the same body starts to look entirely different.
There is a story about drawing a giraffe. Someone who has never seen one, drawing from description alone, doesn’t produce a giraffe. What is seen settles into the shape of the concept already held.
Moving Makes It Visible
The second I wrote in 2024, and it points the other way.
Three experiments, drawn from a book by the neuroscientist Yūji Ikegaya.
- Sight restored by surgery. A person blind from birth receives light after an operation, and still cannot judge distance right away
- Head-fixation in monkeys. Raised with the head immobilized, vision develops differently
- The kitten carousel. The kitten that walked came to see. The one carried in a gondola, watching the same scenery, did not
Same view, same amount of time. The only difference is whether the animal moved itself.
Seeing is not receiving. Moving is what makes seeing.
The philosopher Alva Noë argues this head-on: perception is not something the brain receives but something the body does. He builds on the same kitten experiment.
Noë gives another example: tactile-visual substitution. A device converts a camera image into touch on the back or the tongue. At first a blind user feels only that their back is being touched. But as they move the camera themselves, it starts to feel like something out in front of them, not on their back.
The incoming signal stays tactile throughout. What changed is the relationship between the signal and one’s own movement.
The Two Don’t Contradict Each Other
A concept comes first and things become visible. Moving makes things visible. This is the first time I’ve set the two side by side.
They look contradictory, but I don’t think they are. Perception is built from above and from below. The frame of a concept from above, the experience of movement from below. Neither alone brings things into view.
What happens in a session is mostly the second. Not explaining until someone understands, but having them move — and something starts to become visible inside them.
That said, this is my own reading, not something I found written anywhere. It’s what appeared when I set the two together.
The Definition Differs by Who You Ask
I’ve been working from Kevin Frank’s formulation, but the definition of perception differs from person to person. Outside body work too, people are pointing at the same place with different words.
- Kevin Frank — perception is the interpretation we make of our sensation
- Francisco Varela — the world is brought forth through action. Perceiver and perceived don’t exist first and then meet; they arise together
- Alva Noë — moving is what makes seeing
Close, but not the same. Making an interpretation and being brought forth through action place the subject differently.
I think the disagreement is the important part. That the definitions don’t line up means perception is still an open question. Body work, philosophy, and cognitive science are each reaching toward it from their own place, and they haven’t arrived at one word.
Why Phenomenology
A question may come up here. If the work is the body, why do we need the language of philosophy?
Aline Newton gives the reason.
An appropriate relationship with gravity is basic to human health. That was Ida Rolf’s central insight. Describing that relationship as alignment from the structural side and as biomechanics from the functional side is the standard approach.
But both drop the person’s experience. Biomechanics sees the body as one more sophisticated machine, starting from the premise that movement can be fully understood in mechanical terms. Subjective experience is granted no importance.
And then she writes:
Even when pain brings our attention to a particular area or muscle, still we do not experience ourselves as a collection of nerve impulses, muscle fiber contractions, or sidebends and rotations.
That is why phenomenology is needed.
Phenomenology set out to study the experience of perception from the subjective side. It refused the old division of subject and object, and tried to treat the human being in the world as it is experienced. For a phenomenologist, the body does not exist separately from the body as lived. A person does not exist separately from the environment but is embedded in it.
Working with bodies, you run into this daily. Release a structural restriction and the movement pattern doesn’t necessarily change. Teach a new way of moving and have someone repeat it mechanically, and it doesn’t either. What changes it is a change in perception.
So the language of mechanics alone isn’t enough. That is why this article puts perception at the center.
Perception Has Habits
I ask: what are you feeling right now?
One person names a distant sound. Another starts with neck and shoulders. Another with the contact of the feet on the floor. The habit shows not in the content of the answer but in where they answer from.
McHose and Frank call this perceptual structure: the tendency to use sensory channels along familiar grooves. By listening to reports and watching carefully, you can begin to draw a person’s perceptual structure.
One scene stays with me. In the basic training, we all looked at the same body and checked whether our assessments converged. In Rolf Movement training, perception doesn’t converge. Watching the same person make the same movement, what people take in differs.
Not converging isn’t an error. If perception has a structure, and that structure differs between people, this is what follows.
Built Not to Change Easily
So should we just change the habit? It isn’t that simple.
Survival depends on movement being predictable. In a dangerous moment there is no time to think each thing through. So perception and coordination are built not to rewrite easily. A lock that opens easily is no use as a lock.
The book cites the neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinás: an animal converts incoming sensation, almost instantaneously, into a reality based on past experience. The result of that conversion is muscular recruitment.
Which means that meeting things “as they are” is nearly impossible.
Let me be straight about this. It is easy to say “feel the present moment.” The body is built to convert the present into the past.
And Still, It Changes
Built not to change, and it changes anyway. Several routes are described.
Fuel It with Another Sense
Godard writes in the foreword that we now know how much each sensory channel depends on the activity of the others. And then —
The only way to go beyond the limits of perception is often to fuel it with another sense.
Link awareness of movement to touch, sound, smell, or the sense of motion. A place that is stuck doesn’t move by staring at it. Enter from another door.
The inverse is written too. When imagination stops working well, that is often tied to clinging to a single sensory modality.
The Skin as a Detour
There is a concrete example.
The main text records it as Godard’s suggestion. Even where proprioceptive sensation is impaired, working with the sensation of the skin changes the quality of movement. Pinching and drawing the skin is given as a specific approach.
Skin sensation is not proprioception, but it does something like it — the book calls it proprioceptive-like. When the front door is closed, there is a way around.
Perception Is an Action
There is a text on the Rolfing side that says the same thing — Aline Newton’s 1995 article. Having shown an experiment in which changing perception changes the firing pattern of muscles, she concludes:
Perception is a form of intentionality, a movement in a direction.
Perception is not receiving. It is going toward. The etymology from earlier comes back here: per (through), capere (to take). A gesture of seizing. Which is why changing perception changes how the body gets used. The experiment is described in What Does Tonic Function See?
Back to “the definition differs by who you ask.” That sentence was written in 1995 — four years after Varela and his co-authors published The Embodied Mind. And Varela’s name does not appear once in Newton’s article. Not in the references either.
It wasn’t influence. They started from separate places and arrived at the same one.
Imagination and Perception Are One Phenomenon
The largest sentence in the foreword, I think, is this one.
As many writers have emphasized, the work of imagination and the work of perception point to one and the same phenomenon.
Which makes the teacher’s job this:
The teacher’s function should be to rehabilitate the imagination in areas of fixation.
If perception and imagination are one work, then imagining is neither escape nor consolation. It is a direct means of moving perception. That is why images of direction and metaphors get used in a session.
Seeing Is Already Projection
So far this has been the client’s side. The same thing is happening on the practitioner’s side.
Godard writes in the foreword that the act of perception cannot be separated from the intention to explore or from the object being sensed. Two examples.
The hand. What a hand senses depends on the activity of the muscles palpating, on the internal map of one’s own body, and on the preconceptions one holds about what is being touched.
The eye. How something looks depends on the activity of the muscles moving the eye. Those muscles follow the direction of gravity through the inner ear. And it depends further on the meaning emotion gives to the object.
Projection has begun before the touch, before the look. “You can tell by touching” isn’t accurate. Part of what you feel when you touch is what you brought with you.
In what Godard wrote about dance, the same thing appears on the watching side. Watching another person move, a sense of one’s own body’s movement arises immediately inside the watcher. What is seen and what is felt cannot be separated.
What holds us is the sense of our own weight. It is what keeps us from confusing the stage with the real. On a train, you can lose track of whether your train moved or the one beside it did. When that distance wavers and the certainty of one’s own weight is lost, the watcher becomes, in part, the other’s weight.
Godard calls this kinesthetic empathy, or the contagion of gravity. I think the same thing happens in a session.
Change Isn’t Something You Cause
A phrase recurs through the book: happy accident.
New coordination arises from allowing new perception. But you can’t produce it on purpose. What you can do is set up conditions and raise the odds. No exercise on its own restores anything, the book says. Trying raises the probability that something new occurs.
The aim is stated as well. Not acquiring a new and better form. Discovering that form can change.
Not Organizing, but Trusting What Organizes
Why would setting up conditions be enough for something to happen? There is a premise underneath this work.
The Rolf Institute’s practice standards put it this way: each person has an inherent pattern for optimal organization, and that pattern is essentially self-organizing.
In the advanced training in 2025 I received the same thing in different words: trust that the body can self-regulate. The premise I was taught in coaching training has nearly the same shape: people are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole.
The practitioner does not assemble the body into a correct shape. The power to organize is already on the other person’s side. What you can do is set up the conditions in which that power begins to work.
This overlaps, I think, with Francisco Varela’s work. A living thing goes on making itself. Perception too arises not as a device for receiving what comes from outside, but as part of that ongoing self-making.
That said, I have no record of any personal connection between Varela and Rolfing. Neither Ida Rolf nor Godard mentions him. The same thing is happening here as with Newton’s sentence.
One more phrase, cited as Godard’s: inhibiting the inhibition.
We make stories to deal with the world — recalling events, picturing them, retelling them to ourselves. By replacing stories about others with sensory impressions, we can learn to quiet our defenses against failure.
I find this more accurate than saying “let go of tension.” What gets let go is not effort but bracing.
The foreword ends with Penelope, who wove by day and unwove by night while waiting for her husband’s return.
We have to unweave our perception and coordination every day — to prolong the moment where possibility is open, and to allow a new gesture to come again.
What We Know, and What We Don’t
What I’ve written here is how perception looks to someone whose work is the body, not a settled view of what perception is.
The definition itself differs by who you ask. Kevin Frank, Varela, Noë. Close, but not the same. It is still an open question.
And let me draw the line between what is in the sources and what is my own reading. That a concept makes things visible, and that moving makes things visible — setting those two together and writing “perception is built from above and from below” is mine. It isn’t written anywhere. It’s what appeared when I put them side by side.
What is presented here renews how we take in the person our hands are touching. It promises no particular outcome.
What Lies Beyond
Start asking about perception and you end up in philosophy.
In this article I’ve written from the side of body work. What is happening in the body in front of me, what moves in a session. Perception as far as that view reaches.
But others have traced the same question from the side of philosophy. Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Varela. What they found is a subject in its own right.
References
- Caryn McHose & Kevin Frank, How Life Moves: Explorations in Meaning and Body Awareness, North Atlantic Books, 2006. With a foreword by Hubert Godard
- Hubert Godard, “Le geste et sa perception,” in La danse au XXe siècle, Bordas/Larousse, 1998
- Aline Newton, “Basic Concepts in the Theory of Hubert Godard,” Rolf Lines, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, March 1995, pp. 32–43
- Rodolfo Llinás, I of the Vortex, MIT Press, 2001
- Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads, Hill and Wang, 2009
- Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson & Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind, MIT Press, 1991
- Yūji Ikegaya, Yume o Kanaeru Tame ni Nō wa Aru (The Brain Exists So That Dreams Can Come True), 2024
A list of everything written on perception here is collected at Perception as a Way of Seeing — What Is Rolfing Actually Looking At?
You can’t see your own perceptual habits by yourself. There is a point past which it only begins by having someone else look.