Perception as a Way of Seeing — What Is Rolfing Actually Looking At?

Background and further reading

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.

Rolfing is work done by touching the body. But the tissue isn’t the only thing being touched. How a person senses space, how they take in the room they’re in — change that, and how the body gets used changes.

I’ve been writing about this across a number of articles for more than ten years. This page is a map of them. Start wherever you like.

One Way of Seeing

Here is the spine of it.

Perception is not receiving. It is taking hold. The word comes from the Latin percipere — per (through) and capere (to take). By its very shape, the word says perception is not passive.

So perception is something made, and what is made can be remade. And when perception changes, how the body gets used changes. That is why Rolfing works with perception — the way of seeing shared by the articles below.

There are two ways of looking at perception.

One of them asks about the side that is looking. Why did you look there? What is keeping the rest out of sight? That is the question from the side of phenomenology.

The other investigates how what is seen comes about. Say one shoulder appears to be up — it is up relative to something. Change what it is compared with, and what appears changes. What you are making figure, and what you are making ground. That is the question from the side of Gestalt psychology.

Both drop a premise. What they drop is different. Phenomenology drops your own way of seeing; Gestalt psychology breaks the conditions under which the appearance holds together.

What this page traces is mainly the latter. The side of the practitioner who is looking is taken up on the phenomenology page.

The article that takes the latter head-on is “Looking at the Same Body, Seeing Different Things — What Gestalt Psychology Revealed About Seeing“: figure and ground, the laws of grouping, and what is going on in body reading.

Start Here

One article takes up perception directly. Working from Caryn McHose and Kevin Frank’s How Life Moves (2006), it traces the etymology, the competing definitions, why phenomenology is needed, and how perception changes. Hubert Godard wrote the foreword to that book.

▶ We Don’t See the Same Thing — Why Work with Perception?

A second article takes up how what you see gets decided head-on. It brings what Gestalt psychology spent a hundred years finding back to the moment of body reading.

▶ Looking at the Same Body, Seeing Different Things — What Gestalt Psychology Revealed About Seeing

Start from What You Want to Know

On Seeing

“Coming to see” runs in three directions. You come to see because you hold a concept, you come to see because you have moved, and you come to see because experience has accumulated. On the first two, ten years apart, I wrote on the same subject from opposite ends.

• Phase III (6) — Seeing and Perceiving (1): Seeing Begins with a Concept — auditing and the saturation method. The giraffe
• Phase III (8) — Seeing and Perceiving (2): The Sum of the Parts Is Not the Whole
• A Body Is Not the Sum of Its Parts — Where Phenomenology and Gestalt Psychology Diverged — the sequel to the two above, eleven years on. Where the proposition “the sum of the parts is not the whole” came from, how Gestalt psychology came about, and how it differs from phenomenology
• Two Ways of Seeing — Movement, and Concepts — sight restored by surgery, head-fixation in monkeys, the kitten carousel
• I Was Never Taught a Procedure — Eleven Years of Training, Read Through the Body — coming to see because experience has accumulated. Seeing is learned through teaching and through experience. A record of eleven years of Rolfing training, read back through the five stages of skill

Posture and Perception

Perception is one of the things that determine posture. It sits in the same list as skeletal alignment and the state of the fascia. Hubert Godard placed it there, inside the framework of Tonic Function.

• Our Relationship to Gravity: A Guide to Tonic Function — the view that puts perception among the factors of posture. A three-part series and its hub. The difference between focal and peripheral vision is there too
• Why Good Posture Is Not a Matter of Muscle Strength — Tonic Function and Its Relationship to Gravity

State, and Observation

There is a second lineage here. The term Seeing comes not from Godard but from Jeff Maitland, a Rolfer and philosopher. This page draws its material from both.

• Jeff Maitland — Three Questions, State, Perception, Self-Organize
• Principles and Observational Skills in Rolfing — Jeff Maitland’s Approach — the three stages of Seeing
• Reading The Textbook of Natural Leadership — Sensation Before Theory — interoception and peripheral vision

Sensing the Inside of the Body

Perception doesn’t only face outward. There is a route for sensing the inside of one’s own body, and that is part of perception too.

• Psychological and Perceptual Change — The Body Map
• There Are Sensors Inside the Body Too — The Vagus Nerve and Interoception

Where to Go Next

There are other entry points into how Rolfing sees the body.

• Fascia as a Way of Seeing — What Is Rolfing Actually Touching? — from the side of the tissue the hands touch. If perception is the doorway, fascia is the object
• Our Relationship to Gravity: A Guide to Tonic Function — from the side of the body’s relationship to the world. Perception is one of its four aspects
• Where Does Your “Being” Come From? — Phenomenology for Bodyworkers — from the side of the practitioner who is looking. Where the one taking in perception is seeing from
• A Body Is Not the Sum of Its Parts — Where Phenomenology and Gestalt Psychology Diverged — from the side of Gestalt psychology. Perception can be seen from two sides, phenomenology and Gestalt psychology; the difference is worked out inside a session. Part 3 of the three-part series What Phenomenology Changes in Practice
• What Energy Work Is — Where the Word Points, and How It Entered Rolfing — from the side of the information offered to the body. Energy work is also a training of perception
• Perception, Not Analysis — Why a Philosopher Was Hired to Evaluate Artificial Intelligence — from the side of artificial intelligence. Drucker wrote that a philosophy asking about perception rather than analysis might be called a Critique of Pure Perception. Part 3 of the three-part series Rethinking Embodiment and Skill Acquisition Through Artificial Intelligence

What We Know, and What We Don’t

What is presented 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.

What is presented here renews how we take in the person our hands are touching. It promises no particular outcome. I want to keep the line between what is known and what isn’t drawn honestly.

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You can’t see your own perceptual habits by yourself. There is a point past which it only begins by having someone else look.

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