Introduction
The same procedure, and what happens differs from person to person. The same practitioner, and it differs from day to day. Anyone who keeps at bodywork, or at coaching, runs into this sooner or later.
What is at issue there is not technique. It is how the practitioner is present — that is what people say. So what is “Being,” and where does it come from?
I came from the side of science, and for a long time I had no answer. Something like an answer began to appear only after I noticed, on the side of the body, that the order runs the other way. This is how that happened.
Starting Work at Thirty-Three
I began working at a pharmaceutical company at thirty-three. I had been at university as a postdoctoral researcher, so I entered working life ten years later than most. There was no induction; I went straight into a company. What abilities I was supposed to develop, I had no idea.
In research there is one measure — publishing papers — and thinking about my own results was enough. In a company I could not tell what was being asked of me. So I set about learning how a company is put together: why there is a board, what the executives are thinking about, what revenue and profit actually are. Alongside the basics of conduct in a Japanese company — how to exchange business cards, how to answer the phone — I studied business models.
I Thought Skills Were the Thing to Sharpen
What emerged from that study was this: the thing that matters most for living inside an organization, and is hardest to acquire, is communication skill. I worked mostly at international companies, and in internal surveys it was communication skill that came out at the top.
Skills, then, were the thing to sharpen. That is what I concluded. Five years into working life, around 2009, I began taking courses in coaching and in NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming).
What Taught Me Most Was Not About Skills
What taught me most, though, was not about skills.
What coaching showed me was to look at “Being” rather than doing. Work on how you are, and what you do changes by itself. In NLP I learned that changing how you use your body — how you perceive — changes how you are. I found that interesting, and my attention turned toward the body. Around the same time, in 2008, I had begun Ashtanga Yoga as a way of dealing with stress.
From Yoga to Letting Go of Effort
How do you get better at the postures? That question led me to other schools of yoga — Kripalu Yoga, Iyengar Yoga — and, along the way, to a form of bodywork: the Alexander Technique.
What came up there, again and again, was letting go of effort. Rather than working hard to produce the shape, release the effort you do not need, and the body works better. Perhaps, I thought, this is one form of “Being.”
And in the end I met Rolfing. I began training in 2014 and opened my practice in 2015. Because of how I arrived, I understand bodywork as an extension of coaching.
Letting Go of Effort Could Not Be Learned from a Book
Letting go of effort could not be learned from a book. The more carefully I was taught the correct form and tried to reproduce it, the less the effort went. You have to feel the moment it goes, once, in your own body.
That order of things landed hard on me.
Science Runs in the Opposite Order
Before all this I was in science. Science builds an ideal model first and then understands reality from it. On the side of the body, it was the other way round.
What comes first is the direct experience happening now; the explanation follows after. Once I saw that the order was reversed, I came to hold that lived experience is what matters.
I entered this path wanting skills, and found that skills are not what matters most.
Where Does “Being” Come From?
What a coach or a practitioner has actually lived through shows up in the session as it is.
Back to where this began. 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.
So what is “Being,” and where does it come from? This is where the hand stops. Technique can be taught as 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.
Where to Go Next
What phenomenology changes on the table: I have gathered what I noticed in training and in sessions, together with a hundred years of argument, into one line.
- Where Does Your “Being” Come From? — Phenomenology for Bodyworkers──a map that gathers the writing on “Being” into four groups
- When a Name Appears, You Stop Seeing — What Phenomenology Changes in Practice──the main text behind that map
- Perception as a Way of Seeing — What Is Rolfing Actually Looking At?──an entrance from perception itself, rather than from the one perceiving