Introduction
Technique in bodywork can be learned. Where to make contact, in what order to work, what to assess. The list of procedures can always be extended.
And then, past a certain point, it stops taking you further. The same procedure, and what happens differs from person to person. The same practitioner, and it differs from day to day.
What is at issue there is not technique. It is the way the practitioner is present — their “Being.”
This is not particular to bodywork. I also work as a coach, and the same thing happens there. How many questioning techniques you have matters less than how you are; that is what settles the quality of a conversation.
So what is “Being,” exactly? And how would you deepen it?
This is where the hand stops. Technique can be taught as a sequence of steps. With “Being,” it isn’t clear how to teach it at all. Turn it into inspirational talk and you have said nothing.
There is a field that has worked on this question for a hundred years. Phenomenology.
How a person takes in the world. What they assume before they take anything in. How those assumptions might be set aside, even once. What phenomenology has dealt with is exactly the side of “Being.”
And Rolfing turned out to be connected to this field more deeply than I had thought.
In August 2014, my basic Rolfing training began in Germany. The names of philosophers kept coming up in class. Descartes, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Goethe. Phenomenology, structuralism, Gestalt.
I had come to learn how to work with the body. Why any of this was there, I did not understand.
Eleven years later, in 2025, I took the Advanced Training. Much of the framework I received there came from one person: Jeffrey Maitland. A tenured professor of philosophy, a Zen monk, and a Certified Advanced Rolfer.
Names I had only known separately fell into a single line.
This piece is the record of tracing that line backwards. How a practitioner sees the body in front of them. Not descending from philosophy, but starting on the table and climbing toward the concepts.
I am writing for people who do the same work. Though I hope it can also be read by those who receive sessions. What is being done to you in a session isn’t something you can learn by asking about the steps. Where the practitioner is seeing from is closer to what is actually happening.
Suspending Judgment
Setting an Assumption Aside
Let me begin with physics.
Newtonian mechanics assumed absolute space and absolute time. A container of a world exists first, and things move inside it. Ernst Mach (1838-1916) set that aside as something never observed.
What remains is what appears to the senses, and the relations among those appearances. Einstein started from there and built relativity.
Drop the assumption, and what can be seen changes.
A Name Makes Things Invisible
The same shape shows up on the table.
Eleven years ago I wrote about a book by the Noh performer Noboru Yasuda (“Karada” Once Meant a Corpse — The Japanese View of the Body, and Rolfing). In Japanese, hiza (“knee”) covered everything from the kneecap to the top of the thigh, and kata (“shoulder”) reached from the acromion up toward the neck. Where anatomy sees the body as points, a certain coarseness was basic to the Japanese language of the body.
Then comes the example of a torn muscle.
A single name takes over. How the body is felt drops out of view, and treatment aimed at that name begins. What gets forgotten is the particular situation in front of you — this person’s leg.
Drop the name, and the body in front of you becomes visible. The same shape as what Mach did in physics.
Epoché as a Procedure
This gesture of setting something aside has a name on the philosophical side. Epoché — the suspension of judgment. Bracket what a theory assumes, and begin from what appears in experience.
The one who established this as a method was Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), called the father of phenomenology. Before him stood Franz Brentano (1838-1917), who identified intentionality: consciousness is always consciousness of something.
This particular lineup is Maitland’s. In his 2016 book Embodied Being: The Philosophical Roots of Manual Therapy, he names Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Goethe as the ones who advanced phenomenology. And he defines phenomenology this way.
Phenomenology turns the tables on the Cartesian worldview by embracing experience as it is lived and not as it is thought about later in reflection.
And also this.
There is plenty of theory associated with phenomenology, but it is more a method for how to attend to experience than a theory of experience.
Not a theory, but a method. For someone whose work is the body, that difference is large.
Aline Newton, who organized the theory behind Rolfing, wrote this in her 1995 article “Basic Concepts in the Theory of Hubert Godard” (Rolf Lines, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, March 1995, pp. 32-43), after touching on phenomenology.
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.
What can be described in the language of anatomy and what the person is experiencing are two different things. The practitioner is dealing with the second.
Taught in the Form of Prohibitions
Much of what I was taught in the second half of the basic training came as prohibitions. Don’t judge. Don’t point things out. At the time I couldn’t see why it had to be phrased that way.
In the 2025 Advanced Training I received the term Kind Indifference. Not cold indifference, but keeping a distance. The osteopath Jim Jealous was quoted as well. Observe, but don’t become part of the story.
Each of these says, in its own way, to suspend judgment.
Waiting for What Is to Show Itself
It Has Already Begun in the Engagement
Once judgment is suspended, what then?
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) pushed Husserl’s method toward the side of the world. A human being does not survey the world and then engage with it. We have already begun in the engagement.
The example of the hammer is well known. While it is being used well, the hammer has disappeared from awareness. Only when it breaks and leaves the hand does it appear as an object. Skilled engagement comes before theoretical recognition.
Maitland states this position in a single sentence.
You have to give up your stance as an onlooker/bystander in order to let what is show itself to you.
This is Heidegger’s definition of phenomenology itself — letting what shows itself be seen from itself, just as it shows itself. Maitland rewrites it as a procedure for the session.
…shift your orientation from trying to accomplish results and evaluating structure to an orientation of allowing what is to show itself. You simply get out of the way by expanding your perceptual field, dropping your self, and opening a loving space.
In the 2025 Advanced Training, this was taught as waiting for “what is” to show itself. What had been written in a 2016 book had reached the classroom nine years later.
Intention, and Intentionality
Then there is the matter of intention.
Among practitioners you often hear that intention matters more than technique. Maitland argued that the claim doesn’t hold. Intention and intentionality are being confused.
Intentionality is how the practitioner is turned toward the world — their “Being.” Intention is only one of its forms. Daydreaming, anger, fear, problem-solving, perceiving: all of them are forms of intentionality.
So intention is a kind of technique, and its effect depends on intentionality. To say intention matters more than technique is to say that technique matters more than technique.
Intentionality matters more than intention, and more than technique. That was the conclusion (I wrote about it in The Difference Between Intention and Intentionality – Understanding Neutrality – AT-1 (4)).
Zen Arrived by Three Routes
Maitland was also a Zen monk. His teacher was Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi.
For me, Zen arrived by three routes.
The first is family. Our grave is at Gotokuji in Setagaya, a Soto Zen temple. I didn’t come to it by setting out to learn it; it was there first. In 2000, the year my father died, I visited Eiheiji.
The second is Shunryu Suzuki’s book, which I read on my own. When I picked it up, I wasn’t aware that it belonged to the same stream.
The third came through as an institution. From Sasaki Roshi to Maitland, from Maitland to Ray McCall, and into the classroom in 2025.
The first was the last one I noticed.
That said, heavy criticism would later be directed at this position of Heidegger’s. I take that up in a later section.
Principles as Qualities to Discern
Not Procedures, but Qualities
Rolfing has five principles. Wholism, Support, Adaptability, Palintonicity, Closure.
Ida Rolf did not formulate them. After the association split in 1989, Maitland and Jan Sultan made them while teaching advanced classes together. Michael Salveson later added the corrections that were needed. Maitland says so himself.
I was taught them during the basic training in 2014-2015 (Phase III (12) — The Five Principles). I received the same five again in the 2025 Advanced Training (Principles and Observational Skills in Rolfing — Jeff Maitland’s Approach).
At the time I took them as something like a procedure. Which to look at first, in what order to apply them. That wasn’t it.
Maitland’s principles prescribe neither a mechanical order of priority nor a tool of intervention. They are qualities for discerning whether something is already present, or whether it still needs to be evoked.
The principles settle not what you do, but what you look for. Here they connect with the two preceding chapters. When you suspend judgment and wait for what is to show itself, you need a frame to receive whatever appears. The principles are that frame.
Of the five, only Palintonicity is an unfamiliar word — it isn’t in the English dictionary either. Maitland coined it. He introduced it in 1991 in “The palintonic lines of Rolfing” (Rolf Lines, Vol. 19, No. 1), and formulated it as a principle the following year with Sultan in “Definition and principles of Rolfing” (Vol. 20, No. 2).
There Was No English for Spannung
The starting point was Spannung, a German word Ida Rolf liked to use. Tension, heightening, stretch, span. It works for a guitar string in good tune, and for a tensional structure like a suspension bridge or a human body. It also works for intense attention, for aesthetic contemplation, for the quality a body shows in the middle of meditation.
No single English word held all of that. So Maitland went looking, and arrived at ancient Greece — a fragment of Heraclitus (c. 500 BCE).
They do not apprehend how in differing with itself it is brought to agree with itself: stretched-back-and-forth harmony like that of the bow and lyre.
The Greek behind “stretched-back-and-forth” is palintonos. Palin means “back and forth” or “returning”; tonos is the root of the English tone, used for musical pitch, for muscular tonus, and for emotional tone alike.
Heraclitus, Not Plato
Maitland then draws a contrast with Plato.
Plato looked for freedom in the denial of earth and body — an eternal, unchanging realm not of this world. Heraclitus did not. Harmony is found not by denying one pole, but in the right tension between both.
Harmony results when the poles which constitute the opposition are held in a unified balance. “Palintonos” means, therefore, “unity of opposition” or “oppositional balance.”
Tension requires opposition. Without opposition, no harmony.
Maitland sets Zhuangzi alongside this.
Can a man cling only to heaven / And know nothing of earth? / They are correlative: to know one / Is to know the other. / To refuse one / To refuse both.
Here phenomenology and the East arrive at the same location. That Heidegger questioned the framework running from Plato onward, that Heraclitus stood before Plato, and that Zhuangzi said the same thing in other words — all of it lands in one section.
About the Standing Body
And what the word points to is the standing human body.
Most animals orient themselves in time and space with the spine parallel to the ground. Humans don’t. Feet on the earth, head lifted toward the sky. Supported by the ground while extending upward. Both holding at once — that is what palintonos names.
This is what Rolfing calls bidirectionality (Bidirectionality (Palintonicity)).
The Body Is in Space, and Space Is in the Body
The Body Is Not What Gets Perceived
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) took up head-on the body itself, which Heidegger had left thin.
The body is not the object that gets perceived; it is the side that perceives. We have the world through the body. Before we think, the body already knows what it “can do.”
Body Schema Is Not Merleau-Ponty’s Term
A correction belongs here.
It is sometimes written that Merleau-Ponty proposed the concept of the body schema. I have written that myself. It isn’t correct.
The body schema originates in a 1911 paper by the neurologists Henry Head and Gordon Holmes. The body image was presented by Paul Schilder in 1935. The two came out of different lineages and were paired only afterwards. Merleau-Ponty (1945) took an existing neurological concept over to the phenomenological side.
There is a personal history to this correction. In 2014, in the earliest phase of the basic training, a paper by Shaun Gallagher and Jonathan Cole was handed out. It was written precisely to sort out the confusion between these two terms. A chronology came with it, with 1911 and 1935 spelled out.
I didn’t read it. And without having read it, I later wrote on the subject.
Maitland is explicit about what he received from Merleau-Ponty.
At the end of the thread I discovered the sentient (self-sensing) body uncovered first by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In time I realized that what I was calling “the sentient body” was a clear example of consciousness as a somatic event.
Consciousness and body stop being two mutually exclusive kinds. The framework inherited from Descartes gives way here.
Touching, and Being Touched
On touch there is a passage in the other book, Spacious Body: Explorations in Somatic Ontology (1994). For anyone who works with their hands, I think it is decisive.
Touching is an act of will, a movement out and away from yourself designed to accomplish a certain end. … Being touched is not an act of will; it is an act of allowing.
And allowing, he continues, is neither active nor passive.
Things contact other things—just because your body is in contact with hers is no guarantee that she is being touched.
Being in contact and touching are not the same. If the other person isn’t allowing it, the hand is merely resting on a body.
“Where You Are” Comes First
Which brings us to space.
Erwin Straus (1891-1975), a German-born neurologist and phenomenologist, made “the upright human posture” the starting point of his philosophy. He fled the Nazis for the United States and spent thirty-eight years at a veterans hospital. In her 1995 article, Newton quotes his paper “Upright Posture” at length three times.
First, on environment.
Men and mice do not have the same environment, even if they share the same room. Environment is not a stage with the scenery set as one and the same for all actors who make their entrance. Each species has its own environment.
And standing upright, he continues, is not a question of mechanics.
Upright posture preestablishes a definite attitude toward the world; it is a specific mode of being in the world.
One more passage has stayed with me for a long time.
While the heart continues to beat from its fetal beginning to death without our active intervention and while breathing neither demands nor tolerates our voluntary interference beyond narrow limits, upright posture remains a task throughout our lives.
Standing is never finished. Every morning you take it up again. Straus adds that gravity is never fully overcome, and that upright posture keeps its character of counteraction, continually demanding our activity and attention.
And on the body schema, he says this.
The body scheme is not so much a concept or image that a person has of his own body as it is an ensemble of directions and demarcations—directions in which we reach out toward the world and demarcations that we encounter in contact with the world.
The space of the body doesn’t end at the skin. We cast the reach of our senses out into the space around us.
Hubert Godard, who built the theory behind Rolf Movement, called his account of space Phenomenological Space in a 2005 interview. He said that is what the chapter should have been titled.
The body is not merely in space. Space is also in the body. Godard looked at scoliosis not as a problem in the shape of a spine, but as a problem in that person’s space.
The same has to be said about Merleau-Ponty. Criticism has been directed at him too, the one who took the body head-on. That also comes in the next section.
I plan to write on this subject separately, as a series.
Perception Doesn’t Happen Inside the Head
So far I have looked at phenomenology through Maitland. He is absent from this section alone, because cognitive science is not his lineage.
In 1991, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch published The Embodied Mind. Varela was a biologist and cognitive scientist; Thompson is a philosopher.
The mainstream cognitive science of the time treated mind as symbol manipulation. To get past that, they reached for phenomenology — which had already spent a century refining a way to treat lived experience in the first person.
But the book does not carry phenomenology forward. It sets out why phenomenology stopped where it did.
The Pragmatic Dimension Was Missing
Husserl said “to the things themselves”: bracket the assumptions of theory and describe experience itself. The three authors point out what was absent there.
Husserl’s turn toward experience and “the things themselves” was entirely theoretical, or, to make the point the other way around, it completely lacked any pragmatic dimension.
Describe, he said — but there was no trained procedure for doing it. So the natural attitude that was supposedly bracketed comes back inside the reflection.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that it could not overcome the rift between science and experience, for science, unlike phenomenological reflection, has a life beyond theory.
Science has a laboratory. A place outside theory where you move your hands and check. Phenomenology had none.
And they don’t stop the criticism at Husserl.
Indeed, this criticism would hold even for Heidegger’s existential phenomenology, as well as for Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of lived experience. Both stressed the pragmatic, embodied context of human experience, but in a purely theoretical way.
Everything written up to this point becomes the target of that criticism.
Wait for what is to show itself, we say. Touching and being touched are different, we say. All true, and saying it changes nothing. On Merleau-Ponty, the three write that science and phenomenology alike have always explained our concrete, embodied existence after the fact.
So what is needed?
What we are suggesting is a change in the nature of reflection from an abstract, disembodied activity to an embodied (mindful), open-ended reflection. By embodied, we mean reflection in which body and mind have been brought together.
And then this sentence.
…reflection is not just on experience, but reflection is a form of experience itself.
The discipline for doing this repeatedly is what the meditative traditions have refined over 2,500 years. Bring the missing practice in from there: that is their proposal.
This answers the chapter on the principles. Maitland came to Rolfing from the side of Zen. Varela and his co-authors went from cognitive science toward meditation. Opposite directions, and the same meeting place.
Perception Is Action
The concept the book produced is enaction.
Our intention is to bypass entirely this logical geography of inner versus outer by studying cognition not as recovery or projection but as embodied action.
And the definition follows.
…the enactive approach consists of two points: (1) perception consists in perceptually guided action and (2) cognitive structures emerge from the recurrent sensorimotor patterns that enable action to be perceptually guided.
Perception is not receiving. It is action.
The same thing is said on the Rolfing side. Newton’s 1995 article has it that perception is a form of intentionality, a movement in a direction. In 1991 and in 1995, the same thing was written in two separate places.
Perception has a page of its own (Perception as a Way of Seeing — What Is Rolfing Actually Looking At?).
Not an Event Inside the Brain Alone
Alva Noë took it a step further. Perception doesn’t happen inside the brain. The body’s exchange with the world is itself perception. Digestion is not an event inside the stomach alone, and seeing is not an event inside the brain alone.
This reaches the table directly. To change a client’s perception, you don’t have to work on the head. Change the exchange between body and world, and perception changes. Change how the soles meet the floor, and what they see changes.
Thompson has drawn one line from 1991 to the present as Varela’s co-author. In The Blind Spot (with Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser), he asks this: can science do without human experience?
It cannot, is the answer. Every measurement and every theory begins somewhere that someone is experiencing. Forget that, and you have science’s blind spot.
Here Mach comes back, from the first section. The one who dropped an assumption no one had ever seen — absolute space — and began again from what appears to the senses. A century later, cognitive science returned to the same location.
From the Study of Movement
One more person came in by another door. Edward Reed brought the phenomenological view into movement research. Reed wrote that movement studied apart from its context cannot be applied to rehabilitation.
At the root of every action system, he says, are lying, sitting and standing. And at the root of those, a relationship with the gravitational field has to be established.
That layer is exactly what Rolfing works with.
All I Can Get My Hands On Is Physical
What the Hands Can Reach
Many names have come up so far. Last, I want to write about the person who made Rolfing.
Ida Rolf (1896-1979) lived at nearly the same time as Merleau-Ponty. She started as a biochemist and turned toward the structure of the body.
She said this.
Only thing that I can get hands on is physical.
It isn’t that she refused to deal with anything but the body. At the association’s 1974 annual meeting she spoke of wanting to see what happens in the energy field within and around a person when structure is organized, and how behavior changes alongside it. Change in structure, change in field, change in behavior — she took them as one continuous phenomenon.
What her hands could reach was the body, so she entered through the body. It reads as being that simple.
Gravity as Support
And on gravity. Among the words of Ida Rolf that Maitland quotes is this.
Yoga as it is taught today does not go far enough. The body organized through yoga achieves joint mobility but does not consciously recognize and seek out the gravity field as its basic supportive factor.
Whether gravity can be used as support rather than as load. The whole of Ida Rolf’s work hangs on this.
And it points to the same thing as palintonos. Supported by the ground while extending upward. Both holding at once.
Can Seeing Be Taught?
Thrown into the Water
The hardest thing in Rolfing is not touching but seeing. Experienced practitioners sometimes cannot explain why they worked where they did. Asked, all they can say is “can’t you see it?”
Ida Rolf’s way of teaching, it is said, was to throw people into the water. Swim or sink. Afterwards, the association tried to fill the gap by building a system. Some, like Peter Schwind, answered that if you refine the precision of your touch you will get there even without seeing.
Maitland had a fourth answer. He built an exercise for seeing.
The result is a simple three-step exercise based upon insights I gained from years of practicing Zen, Rolfing Structural Integration (Rolfing SI), philosophy, and phenomenology. But, by far and away, the most potent insight came from Goethe and the way of seeing he called “exact sensorial imagination.”
And the one who taught that workshop with him was Ray McCall — one of my instructors in the 2025 Advanced Training.
The First of the Three Steps
The exercise goes like this.
What Goethe set out had two steps. One is active seeing: quiet the verbal, analytic mind and turn attention to the senses. The other is exact sensorial imagination: close your eyes and reproduce what you have just taken in, in imagination and in your own body.
And then you go back and forth between the two. Look, close, picture, look again, add what was missing, correct what was distorted. Repeat until the other person’s wholeness emerges.
Maitland added one step — and made it the first.
…before you do anything else, your very first act must be to shift your orientation or intentionality from an onlooker experiencing the world through abstractions of the analytic/verbal mind to becoming a participant in the lived perception of the world.
This step alone has to be sustained through the whole process. The other two alternate; this one can’t be set down.
Maitland writes that the shift itself is already an intervention — that it can produce change on its own. And that when Ida Rolf spoke of becoming one with the client, this shift was what she meant.
The opening question gets its answer here.
With “Being,” I wrote, it isn’t clear how to teach it. Maitland made it the first step of a procedure. Not inspirational talk, not a technique either, but built into an exercise.
Without a Concept, Nothing Is Seen
Maitland describes an experiment about seeing. There is a drawing that looks like a meaningless collection of blotches. Look for a giraffe in it, and a giraffe appears.
No lines were added to the drawing, nothing about it changed. What changed was that you acquired the appropriate concept of giraffe. … But notice it was not there in advance of your seeing it.
Which returns us to the opening question.
A name makes the body in front of you invisible. And without a name, nothing is visible at all. By the same working that lets “torn muscle” narrow the field, the concept of a giraffe brings a giraffe out of the drawing.
Suspending judgment is not discarding concepts. It is holding them without being taken over by them. Having them, and not using them. That is different from having none to begin with.
And the Hands?
So far I have written about seeing. But this is work done with the hands.
Recall the difference between touching and being touched. Touching is an act of will; being touched is an act of allowing. And allowing is neither active nor passive.
Seeing has the same structure. Going out to look is not enough. You have to stand at the same time on the side that allows what is to show itself. The activity of looking for a giraffe, and the waiting for something to come out of the drawing, happen at once.
And this, I think, is palintonos. Stretched-back-and-forth harmony. Active and passive held as the right tension between two poles, rather than collapsed into either one. The same shape as a body supported by the ground while extending upward.
Enaction’s claim that perception is action says the same thing. Neither receiving nor projecting. The exchange itself is perception.
The Phenomenon Comes First, the Name After
In what I wrote in 2015, the phrase “what is strange is…” shows up again and again. Things I couldn’t explain, and that were certainly happening. Ten years later, in the Advanced Training, some of them received names. Neutral, and a procedure for cultivating it.
The phenomenon comes first, and the name after.
Maitland writes the same thing. Closing a 2007 paper, he recalls asking his Zen teacher how one heals people, and remembers how simple the answer was: become one with the other person. And he adds:
he is astonished at how many words it took to arrive there.
This piece is more of those words. Reading it changes nothing. But without names, you can’t see what is happening either.
This article is the main text behind Where Does Your “Being” Come From? — Phenomenology for Bodyworkers. The articles that take up the subjects touched on here are gathered there, group by group.