Where Does Your “Being” Come From? — Phenomenology for Bodyworkers

Background and further reading

Introduction

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 how the practitioner is present. 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. It has kept asking how we experience the world. That question has widened out into the body, into perception, and on into cognitive science.

I have been writing about the practitioner’s “Being” for more than ten years — as records of my training, and as things I learned from other schools of work. This page is a map that ties those experiences to the line phenomenology has run, so the whole can be seen at once. Start wherever you like.

One Way of Seeing

Here is the spine of it.

Before it is a theory that explains the world, phenomenology puts its weight on a method: how experience is taken in. Bracket the judgments and assumptions you normally treat as obvious, and begin from what appears in experience. The procedure is called epoché — the suspension of judgment.

The same move was made on the physics side before it was made in philosophy, by Ernst Mach (1838-1916). Newtonian mechanics rested on absolute space and absolute time — a container called the world, with things moving inside it. But nobody has ever observed the container.

Mach took it out. What does not appear in observation does not belong in the foundation of physics. What is left is what appears to the senses, and the relations among those appearances. Einstein started from there and built relativity. Take out the assumption, and what can be seen changes.

Mach called his own position phenomenological physics. The word “phenomenology” surfaced on the physics side before it became a term in philosophy. That is why Mach comes first in the table further down.

The one who put this method at the center of phenomenology was Edmund Husserl, the philosopher who established it at the beginning of the twentieth century.

There is one more important idea Husserl took over, from his teacher Franz Brentano. It is intentionality. Consciousness is always consciousness of something. Seeing something, feeling something, thinking something. Consciousness holds together in its relation to that object.

Here is a handle on the practitioner’s “Being”. Intention and intentionality need to be kept apart. An intention is something you set: I will do this. Intentionality points at the way you are already turned toward the other person before anything is set. It is at work ahead of technique, and ahead of any intention you choose.

One thing should be said plainly. Phenomenology was not, at the start, a philosophy of the body.

What Husserl worked on was consciousness. The body does not reach the front of the room until several decades later. Before anything is described, a person is already moving in the world — Martin Heidegger says that, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty says the thing that is moving is the body. Then in 1991 Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson, with Eleanor Rosch, turn it into the language of cognitive science in The Embodied Mind. They call the view enaction.

The word embodiment comes to the center here. The body is not only a channel that takes information from the world and carries it to the brain. What counts as my significant environment, what actions are open to me — the body is also at work making that relation.

So it is no accident that phenomenology speaks to someone doing bodywork. It took a hundred years, and the philosophy came over to this side. That move is traced in the two-part series below, under “Start Here.”

Varela and his co-authors also named what phenomenology still had to solve. The importance of describing experience had been stated, but a systematic training for doing it had not been developed far enough. What they drew on in working at that problem was the Buddhist tradition of meditation — putting phenomenology’s inquiry into first-person experience, meditative practice, and third-person measurement into conversation.

This parting of ways was taken up head-on inside a critique of artificial intelligence as well. Hubert Dreyfus held that there was a side of Husserl’s thought leading toward treating the mind as information processing, and he found in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty a human intelligence that the artificial intelligence research of the day could not capture. I have written up how that came about in a separate article.

▶ Perception, Not Analysis — Why a Philosopher Was Hired to Evaluate Artificial Intelligence

From Phenomenology to Embodiment — How the Thinking Moved

Here are the people who have appeared so far, set side by side. They were not all arguing the same thing. Seen as a movement — the question of how to take consciousness widening out into the relation between a human being and the world, into perception through the body, and on into cognitive science — the connections become easier to follow.

Person	Central question or idea	What it leads to
Mach	Take out the assumptions never observed (absolute space and time), and start from what appears to the senses	Relativity; the same move as epoché
Brentano	Consciousness is always directed at something (intentionality)	Husserl’s phenomenology
Husserl	Suspend judgment, and describe how experience appears	Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty
Heidegger	A person is already active in the world before observing it	Being-in-the-world, and an understanding of practical knowing
Merleau-Ponty	The body is the subject that perceives the world	Embodied cognitive science
Dreyfus	Skilled action cannot be explained by the application of rules alone	The critique of artificial intelligence, and the study of bodily skill
Varela	Cognition comes about through the interaction of body and environment	Enactive cognitive science
Thompson	Thinking life, consciousness, body and experience together	The dialogue between phenomenology and cognitive science

Note: this table is not meant to show strict teacher-student lineage, or one-way inheritance. It sets out points of contact, and how the thinking developed.

The philosophers and cognitive scientists here each worked on different problems. But one question runs through all of them. Is a human being only something that observes the world from outside, analyzes it, and then acts? Or is it something already engaged with the world through the body, finding meaning inside that engagement?

This question reaches the table directly. The moment a name is put on the state of a body, what is happening to the person in front of you can get fitted to knowledge you already hold. Suspend judgment, and observe what is happening now. And the principles are there as the frame for understanding what appears, and for thinking about what to do next.

So how can a way of thinking like this be learned, and acquired, in work that actually touches people’s bodies? From here on, I think it through by way of the records of my own training and practice.

Start Here

One article takes up the connection between phenomenology and Rolfing directly. Rather than descending from philosophy, it starts on the table and climbs toward the concepts, tracing a line from Brentano, named above, to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Much of the framework I learned in the 2025 Advanced Training came from one person, Jeff Maitland — a tenured professor of philosophy, a Zen monk, and a Certified Advanced Rolfer. Goethe is known as a poet, but he also left a method for observing nature. Maitland uses it — Goethe’s “exact sensorial imagination” — as an exercise in seeing.

It is a three-part series. Part 1 is suspending judgment, and Rolfing’s five principles. Part 2 is how seeing gets taught. Part 3 is where the principle of Wholism came from.

▶ Part 1: When a Name Appears, You Stop Seeing — What Phenomenology Changes in Practice

▶ Part 2: Can Seeing Be Taught? — The Pragmatic Dimension Phenomenology Lacked

▶ Part 3: A Body Is Not the Sum of Its Parts — Where Phenomenology and Gestalt Psychology Diverged

There is a second series, in two parts. This one is the history on the phenomenology side. A field that began with consciousness takes a hundred years to come down as far as the body. The answer to why phenomenology speaks to a bodyworker at all is in that history itself.

Part 1 is the period before the body is in the picture: Mach, Brentano, Husserl. Part 2 is the stretch in which the body moves to the center: Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Varela and Thompson.

▶ Part 1: It Began with Consciousness — Phenomenology Was Not, at First, a Philosophy of the Body

▶ Part 2: A Hundred Years to Reach the Body — How the Body Moved to the Center of Philosophy

Start from What You Want to Know

From here on, things are arranged so you can pick articles by the question you have. First a table of the whole, then four themes.

If you want to know	Read
How phenomenology and Rolfing connect	When a Name Appears, You Stop Seeing
How seeing gets taught	Can Seeing Be Taught?
Why you are told to see the whole	A Body Is Not the Sum of Its Parts
Where phenomenology came from	It Began with Consciousness
Why “Being” can be taught through the body	A Hundred Years to Reach the Body
Why you are taught “don’t judge”	Case Presentation (2): After the Seventh Session
What “Being” is	Jeff Maitland’s Three Questions ／ The Difference Between Intention and Intentionality
How it can be cultivated	How to Cultivate “Neutrality”
Why it cannot be taught as a procedure	I Was Never Taught a Procedure — Eleven Years of Training, Read Through the Body
How a practitioner sees	Principles and Observational Skills in Rolfing

Suspending Judgment

Much of what I was taught in the basic training came in the form of prohibitions. Don’t judge. Don’t point things out. At the time I couldn’t see why it had to be put that way. Ten years later, by way of phenomenology, I came to understand what it meant.

• Phase III (19) — Case Presentation (2): After the Seventh Session — a record of being taught in prohibitions. Next to it, the word “neutral” appears
• What Is Holistic Healing? — Reexamining Through the Lens of “Paradigms” — relaxation, corrective, holistic. The corrective paradigm assumes a correct state exists in advance
• “Karada” Once Meant a Corpse — The Japanese View of the Body, and Rolfing — a name makes things invisible. The example of a torn muscle

“Being,” and Neutrality

In the 2025 Advanced Training, a way of learning “Being” through the body became clear. Intention and intentionality are different; intentionality matters more than intention and more than technique. And there is a way of placing your own body that cultivates it.

• Jeff Maitland’s Three Questions — Being, Perception, and Self-Regulation — the three set side by side as a frame
• The Difference Between Intention and Intentionality – Understanding Neutrality – AT-1 (4)
• Principles and Observational Skills in Rolfing — Jeff Maitland’s Approach — the principles orient not only what you do, but what you look for
• How to Cultivate “Neutrality” — a seven-part series. Through Shape the Hand, Finding Back Space, Hara, and Listening Touch
• More Than Technique — The Question of “Being” — rather than the practitioner producing change on their own, the work supports the client’s own change
• Aligning “Being” Through the Body — Practicing Neutrality — “Being” handled as how you place your body

From Other Schools, to the Same Place

What I learned about “Being” also came in from outside Rolfing. Source Point Therapy, Jikiden Reiki, IMAC. I explored the direction of gaining more knowledge and the direction of reducing the practitioner’s own effort to do something, side by side, in the same period. Experiences that looked separate at the time came together, ten years later, under the single question of “Being.”

• SPT Module 1 (3) — Using Sensation Rather Than Knowledge: Accessing the Blueprint — the deeper the knowledge, the more one wants to intervene
• Source Point and Jikiden Reiki: How I Differentiate the Two — work without touch turned out to demand anatomy — not for intervening, but for reading what happened
• Taking the SPT Supplemental Course — How Should One Deepen Knowledge? — unnecessary as technique, necessary as understanding
• Jikiden Reiki (4) — Before and After — held up by something coming from outside, or standing by how you place your own body
• IMAC (11) — After the Integration Class: What Is a Healthy Body? — What Happens When You Do Nothing — hold the intention of doing nothing, and the other person’s body finds a healthy state of its own accord

Waiting

I had written about waiting from the side of coaching first — a subject I had before I knew Rolfing. Rather than hurrying to change the other person, you leave room for something to happen within them. In 2025 I learned it anew as a way of placing the body.

• Rolfing as an Extension of Coaching — On Being Neutral, and On Waiting
• A Five-Minute Demonstration — One Hand, and Waiting — a record of five minutes with one hand placed, waiting
• Therapist (2) — Context — neutral moving from the size of the container to how you place your body

Where to Go Next

There are other entry points into how Rolfing sees the body. The practitioner’s “Being,” which this page has dealt with, can also be thought through from perception, fascia, gravity, space, and energy work.

• Perception as a Way of Seeing — What Is Rolfing Actually Looking At? — from the side of perception. This page takes up the practitioner’s “Being”; that one takes up perception itself. The Gestalt psychology side, raised in Part 3, is carried by its main text, “Looking at the Same Body, Seeing Different Things“
• Fascia as a Way of Seeing — What Is Rolfing Actually Touching? — from the side of the tissue the hands touch
• Our Relationship to Gravity: A Guide to Tonic Function — from the side of the body’s relationship to gravity
• Where Does Space Exist? — Inside the Body, or Outside It — from the side of space. Hubert Godard on space
• What Energy Work Is — Where the Word Points, and How It Entered Rolfing — from the side of the information offered to the body. The distinction between intention and intentionality is at its center here too

How “Being” is actually acquired. There is an entry point from the side of learning, too.

• Rethinking Embodiment and Skill Acquisition Through Artificial Intelligence — from the side of skill acquisition. A three-part series based on Dreyfus’s Mind over Machine. Part 1 is the five stages of skill, Part 2 reads eleven years of training back through those five stages, and Part 3 is how a philosopher came to question artificial intelligence from the side of phenomenology

What We Know, and What We Don’t

What is presented here is what someone whose work is the body has taken from phenomenology, not a comprehensive explanation of phenomenology itself.

And phenomenology has problems of its own still to solve. The importance of describing experience was shown, but a systematic training for doing it had not been put in place. Varela and his co-authors raised this in 1991. Understanding an idea, and having the way you experience actually change, are not the same thing. That point applies to the way of seeing presented here as well.

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.

So, back to the first question. Where does “Being” come from?

It is not something you acquire by adding knowledge alone, or by repeating a technique. You notice what you are seeing and what you are missing, and you learn your relation to other people and to the world again, through the body. In that accumulation, I think, it grows a little at a time.

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Where you are seeing from is not something you can see by yourself. There is a point past which it only begins by having someone else look.

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