Self-Care, Starting from Perception — Eyes, Light, Sound, Breath, Ground, Hands, Rest
On this page
Introduction
Rolfing ZERO has written about the body from five angles: perception, fascia, gravity, energy work, and phenomenology. Each of them is a framework for thinking about what is happening in the body.
But what can a person do on their own? This page is the map for that. It is divided into seven chapters: eyes, light, sound, breath, ground, hands, and rest.
Each chapter leads to two places. One is an article on what can be done day to day, which covers the actions only. The other is a series that goes into the mechanism. If the actions are all that is wanted, the first is enough. If the question is why any of it works, the second is there.
There is no need to read these in order.
Why These Seven
Eyes, light, sound, and breath are being treated here as ways of changing perception. Ground and hands were added to those four. And rest stands as the seventh.
Behind all six is the relationship with space. In phenomenology, cognition is understood to arise through the interaction between body and environment. Space is not a container stretching out around the body. Hubert Godard, who has taught Rolfing Movement for decades, put it this way in an interview: “I’m in the space and the space is in me.” The relation runs in both directions.
The first six chapters are the places where that interaction can be worked on. Light and sound fill space, and the eyes and ears are what take them in. Breath is the traffic of outside air through the body. Ground is what holds the body up. And the hands are what reach out into it.
The first six are also connected from the body’s side. In Rolfing, the work of sensing posture is described as a triangle: the Triangle of Support. Its three corners are vision (the eyes), the vestibular system (the inner ear), and proprioception (the soles, muscles, and joints). When one corner weakens, the others take over. There is also a known tendency: relying on vision shifts weight toward the toes, while relying on hearing shifts it toward the heels. Eyes, sound, and ground are not separate subjects.
Breath belongs here too. The diaphragm and the iliopsoas share attachments on the front of the spine. Breathing and walking pass through the same place.
The hands belong to the same triangle. Proprioception is not only the soles. Hands and feet are both collecting the world, continuously.
And of the three, only vision is learned. Rita Geirola, a Rolf Movement instructor, made this point during training. Seeing is acquired through education and experience; the inner-ear sense and the muscular sense are there from birth. Vision is also the easiest of the three to be aware of, which is why it tends to dominate — and when it works too hard, the inner-ear sense and the sense of gravity grow faint.
That settles what the first six chapters are for. Not to restrict vision, but to bring the other senses up to the same level. To stop getting by on the eyes alone.
Only the seventh chapter runs the other way.
Godard’s sentence runs in both directions, as noted above. But what the six chapters deal with is only the side that runs from the body out into space. By turning the senses outward again, the relationship with space gets remade.
What remains is the opposite direction. Drawing the outward-facing senses back from inside. In the eight limbs of yoga this is called pratyahara, the withdrawal of the senses, and it is placed fifth — the limb said to bridge outer and inner.
That is what the rest chapter takes up. Even lying down, the eyes are still on the ceiling and the ears are still picking up what is outside. The body can be resting while the senses keep working. That is the first sense in which resting and sleeping are not the same thing.
The Seven Chapters and the Three Senses
Set out against the three senses that carry posture, the seven chapters line up like this.
| Chapter | What it covers | Sense involved |
|---|---|---|
| Eyes | Viewing distance, field of vision, separating eye movement from neck movement | Vision |
| Light | The body clock, three hormones, sleep | Vision, but by a pathway that is not for seeing |
| Sound | Listening, and making sound yourself | The vestibular system and hearing |
| Breath | How much air, nasal breathing, the resting posture of the mouth | Interoception, the sense of the body’s interior |
| Ground | Being supported, standing, walking | Proprioception, from the soles, muscles, and joints |
| Hands | Where the fingers and wrist begin, elbow and shoulder, placing the hands | Proprioception, from the palms, muscles, and joints — and touch |
| Rest | The conditions for sleep, resting while awake, the area in contact with the floor | Drawing attention back from all three |
Note: this table sorts the chapters by the sense each one leans on. In practice the senses work together, and no chapter deals with only one of them.
The relationship between space and the body is covered in more detail elsewhere.
▶ Where Does Space Exist? — Inside the Body, or Outside It
▶ Where Does Your “Being” Come From? — Phenomenology for Bodyworkers
From Mechanism to Action
All seven chapters follow the same order.
- What is happening inside the body (WHAT)
- Why it happens — the mechanism (WHY)
- And from there, what can be done (HOW)
Once the mechanism is clear, there is no need to memorize a procedure. A way of working that suits your own body becomes something you can find for yourself. The reverse also holds: anything that hands over a procedure without explaining the mechanism is worth being skeptical about. That is why the action articles and the mechanism series are kept apart. The point is not to stop at the procedure.
When it comes to what can be done, there are three tiers.
- Changing behavior and daily habits
- Food and supplements
- A physician and prescription medication
This page and the articles it leads to deal only with the first.
There is also nothing here about effects. In their place is how to check what is happening in your own body. The same practice does not produce the same thing in two people.
Seconds and other numbers do appear in the articles. They are there as a way of knowing your own state, not as rules to keep. Trying to get it right can itself put the body’s sensation out of reach.
The Seven Chapters
Eyes — Seeing, and the State of the Body
Eye movement does not happen in the eyes alone. Stanley Rosenberg sorts the cranial nerves by their relation to food, and in that sorting, the muscles that move the eyeball, the neck muscles that turn the head, and hearing all fall under one single function: finding and identifying food. Eyes, neck, and ears work as one piece.
Changing viewing distance. Comparing one eye against the other. Narrowing to a point, and widening the field. Moving the eyes without moving the neck. This chapter is about the relationship between how the eyes are used and the state of the body.
▶ What can be done day to day: Your Eyes Learned to See That Way — Eye Strain and the Triangle of Support
The mechanism in detail: Where Does Space Exist? / Rolf Movement – Part 2 (7): Balancing the Three Sensory Systems / Part 3: Focus and Fat-Burning Both Start in the Nervous System — Using the Day
Light — The Body Clock and the Shape of a Day
Light entering the eye is not used only for seeing. The retina holds cells carrying a pigment called melanopsin, and when those cells respond to light, the signal reaches the suprachiasmatic nucleus in the brain. This is how the body clock gets set.
Three hormones are moving here. Morning light fixes when cortisol rises, daylight builds serotonin, and darkness at night turns that serotonin into melatonin. What is done at the start of a day comes back that same night.
Sleep belongs in this chapter as well. After a session has changed something in the body, whether that change stays has to do with sleep.
▶ What can be done day to day: Light Tells Your Body What Time It Is — Sleep and the Circadian Clock
The mechanism in detail: Part 1: The Body Has a Clock — Light and Food Set the Day
Sound — Listening, and Making Sound
Sound has two sides. Taking it in, and putting it out.
Listening is also a way of knowing how far space extends. There are two small muscles in the middle ear, and they have a part in what gets heard. When the body is in a fight-or-flight state, voices become harder to pick out and ordinary sound starts to register as noise. It shows up as a hearing problem, but it is not about the ears.
On the other side there is humming, and ujjayi breathing, and other ways of making sound yourself. While a sound is being made, there is no room left to try to breathe correctly. Attention goes to the sound, and the breath changes as a result.
▶ What can be done day to day: Your Ears Are Measuring the Room — Listening, and Making Sound
The mechanism in detail: The Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP) and Polyvagal Theory — a Reunion with Takami Kamata / Why Does Ujjayi Breathing Reach “the Depths of the Body” / Gael Rosewood Workshop (2) — Approaching the Breath Through Rolf Movement and Sound
Breath — How Much Air, and Carbon Dioxide
More air is not better. Oxygen is carried by the hemoglobin in red blood cells, and without carbon dioxide in the blood, hemoglobin does not release that oxygen. This is the Bohr effect. Take in too much air and too much carbon dioxide goes out with it, and the oxygen has a harder time reaching the cells.
Breath also has a question of direction. Breathing in a collapsed posture is called concentric breathing, and it is distinguished from eccentric breathing, which rests on palintonicity, or two-directionality. It is the same idea as the two directions in the ground chapter.
This chapter covers how to check the state your own breathing is in, nasal breathing, and the resting posture of the mouth. Making the exhale twice the length of the inhale is here too, along with the reason not to rush into holding the breath.
One thing should be said plainly. Yogic breathing is not meant to be learned from a book or a text. This is to avoid the harm that comes from practicing it wrongly; it has been passed from teacher to student directly. What this chapter covers sits before that — the range that can be checked in ordinary life.
▶ What can be done day to day: You Breathe More Than You Need To — Nasal Breathing and Carbon Dioxide
For the mechanism there are two series. One looks from the side of science: Breathing, Revisited — Seen Through Science (4 parts).
- Part 1: A Body That Breathes Too Much — When Carbon Dioxide Runs Short
- Part 2: The Diaphragm Reaches the Heart — Breath, Heart Rate, and Two Nuclei in the Brainstem
- Part 3: The Jaw Is Made by Breathing — Mouth Breathing and the Teeth
- Part 4: There Are Sensors on the Inside — The Vagus Nerve and Interoception
The other was written in 2015, during basic training, and looks from the side of structure and gravity: the Breathing Series (4 parts).
- Part 1: Exhaling Takes No Effort — Conscious and Unconscious Breath
- Part 2: The Diaphragm Reaches the Skull — Breath and the Placement of the Organs
- Part 3: When Posture Collapses, Breathing Changes — Extensors, Flexors, and the Scalenes
- Part 4: The Inhaling Body and the Exhaling Body — Breath Seen Through Gravity
From the yoga side, there is Why Do Breathing Methods Change “the State of the Body” — Pranayama and Modern Respiratory Physiology.
Ground — Support, and Walking
The body is held up by the ground at every moment. And the feeling of being held up usually does not reach awareness.
Walking is continuous falling. The center of mass tips forward like an inverted pendulum, and the next step catches it. Standing and falling are switched, step by step.
What makes that work is palintonicity, two-directionality. The term is Hubert Godard’s: when a downward direction (feeling the ground) and an upward direction (lengthening upward) hold at the same time, posture organizes itself. Feeling the ground and lengthening upward are not alternatives.
This chapter also connects to safety. The word grounding comes from electricity — the earth wire that lets a charge run off into the ground. English keeps the same link in ordinary speech: a person can be down to earth or well-grounded, and a frightened one gets cold feet or is on their toes, up off the heels and ready to run. The language puts a state of mind in the position of the feet, and it is not only a figure of speech. Weight on the toes with the heels lifted really is the arrangement for running.
▶ What can be done day to day: The Ground Decides How Safe You Feel — Standing, Walking, and Being Supported
The mechanism in detail: Rolfing Rewrites the Map of Safety — Restoring Connection through the Lens of Polyvagal Theory (Part 4). And the Walking Series (4 parts).
- Part 1: The Foot Changes Shape With Every Step — How the Arches Are Made
- Part 2: The Problem in the Foot Is Not in the Foot — From the Lower Leg to the Pelvis
- Part 3: The Leg Begins Below the Ribs — The Psoas and the Diagonal
- Part 4: Reading Gait Through Gravity — Tonic Function and Palintonicity
Hands — Moving Them, and Placing Them
There are 27 bones in the hand, nearly the same count as the foot’s 26, packed into a smaller space. The hand was built in the trees. Grasping a branch, taking weight, reaching in three dimensions, reading an uneven surface continuously. What the hand touches now is flat, uniformly hard, and does not move.
Gael Rosewood, a Rolf Movement instructor, said that when the palm becomes usable, the serratus anterior steadies. The serratus runs from the outside of the ribs to the inner edge of the shoulder blade, holding the floating blade against the ribcage. When it steadies, that connects to Tonic Function. In Rolfing, getting the hands and feet moving is treated as the first step in organizing posture.
And there is one thing the hand can do that the foot cannot. It can be placed. On the eyes, on the belly, over the kidneys. English keeps the hand inside its word for the most technical form of medicine: surgery, from the Greek kheirourgia — hand-work.
▶ What can be done day to day: You Use Your Hands Without Moving Them — Fingers, the Shoulder Blade, and Placing Your Hands
The mechanism in detail: Rolf Movement (body schema and pre-movement) / Our Relationship to Gravity: A Guide to Tonic Function (tonic muscle and palintonicity) / Meridians as a Way of Seeing (another map of where to place the hands)
Rest — Drawing Back, and the Conditions for Sleep
This chapter alone runs opposite to the other six. Not turning outward, but drawing back.
What there is to do divides in two. Setting the conditions for sleep, and resting while awake.
The key to the first is adenosine. While you are awake, this substance keeps building up in the brain. The longer you have been awake, the more there is, which is why it is described as a device that measures how long you have been awake. That is sleepiness. It is set by how long you have been awake, not by how tired you are. This is also how caffeine works.
The second is yoga’s shavasana, a posture of systematic muscular relaxation in which you stay awake, with attention on the breath, rather than falling asleep. Yoga nidra, and what English calls NSDR — Non-Sleep Deep Rest — point at the same state.
And the more of the body that touches the floor, the deeper the release. The account of support from the ground chapter comes back here, from the side of rest.
What to look at changes in this chapter too. Not the hours slept, but whether you feel refreshed when you wake.
▶ What can be done day to day: Your Senses Stay On While You Rest — Naps, Caffeine, and Non-Sleep Deep Rest
The mechanism in detail: Part 1: The Body Has a Clock — Light and Food Set the Day (the hours caffeine works over, and temperature) / Why Does Feeling “Space” Change the Way of Sitting (sitting, and space)
Turning the Senses Out, and Drawing Them Back
Sorted by direction, the actions across the seven chapters fall out like this.
| Chapter | Turning outward | Drawing back |
|---|---|---|
| Eyes | Comparing, moving, holding a point, looking around (nearly every item) | 6. Widen the field of vision |
| Light | Morning light, daytime brightness, darkness at night (1–10) | 11. Move through a dark place by something other than the eyes |
| Sound | Picking sounds apart, making sound yourself (1–3, 5–13) | 4. Make time with little sound |
| Breath | Checking, nasal breathing, adding sound (1–15) | Not in this chapter |
| Ground | The soles, two directions, walking (1–12) | 13. Spend time close to the ground |
| Hands | Fingers and wrist, elbow, shoulder (1–8) | 9–11 (placing the hands on the eyes, the belly, over the kidneys) |
| Rest | Not in this chapter | 13–16 (shavasana, contact area, time with nothing to look at or listen to, time doing nothing) |
Laid out this way, it shows that the first six chapters sit mostly on the outward side. Drawing back gets one item each in eyes, light, sound, and ground; none in breath; three in hands. The rest chapter deals with that side alone.
One thing should be made plain. Drawing back is not shutting out. Item 4 of the sound chapter made the point that the safety built by cancelling the outside with a device runs in a different direction from being settled while the outside is still audible. Blocking from outside with a tool and drawing attention back from inside are two different things.
Start from What You Want to Know
Sorted by what might be on your mind, here is which chapter to go to.
| What is on your mind | Where to read |
|---|---|
| Tired eyes. A stiff neck and shoulders | Your Eyes Learned to See That Way |
| Hard to get up in the morning. Hard to fall asleep at night | Light Tells Your Body What Time It Is / Your Senses Stay On While You Rest |
| Voices are hard to pick out. Ordinary sound is distracting | Your Ears Are Measuring the Room |
| Breathing feels shallow. The mouth sits open | You Breathe More Than You Need To |
| Standing is tiring. Walking is tiring | The Ground Decides How Safe You Feel |
| Unsettled. Not quite on the ground | The Ground Decides How Safe You Feel |
| Hands and arms get tired. The shoulder does not move freely | You Use Your Hands Without Moving Them |
| Long hours on a screen | Your Eyes Learned to See That Way / You Use Your Hands Without Moving Them |
| Focus does not hold | Your Eyes Learned to See That Way / Your Ears Are Measuring the Room |
| Resting does not take the tiredness away | Your Senses Stay On While You Rest |
| A nap makes it harder to sleep at night | Your Senses Stay On While You Rest |
| Wondering about what time to drink coffee | Your Senses Stay On While You Rest |
| How to keep what a session changed | Light Tells Your Body What Time It Is |
| Where the limits of self-care are | What We Know, and What We Don’t, on this page |
Note: if there is pain or a symptom, please see a medical professional first. What is covered here is not a way of treating anything. It is a way of checking your own state.
Where to Go Next
This page is the entrance from the side of practice. From the side of theory there are five.
- Perception as a Way of Seeing — What Is Rolfing Actually Looking At? — from the side of perception. What the seven chapters are trying to change is perception itself, and that page takes it up directly
- Fascia as a Way of Seeing — What Is Rolfing Actually Touching? — from the side of the tissue under the hands
- Our Relationship to Gravity: A Guide to Tonic Function — the background to the ground chapter. Tonic muscle and palintonicity have their full treatment there
- What Energy Work Is — Where the Word Points, and How It Entered Rolfing — from the side of the information offered to a body
- Where Does Your “Being” Come From? — Phenomenology for Bodyworkers — from the side of the interaction with environment. This is the thinking behind the present page
There is also the other direction — not doing it yourself, but what happens in a session.
- Why Does Life Change After Receiving Bodywork — from the side of the word transformation
If this is your first visit, start here.
What We Know, and What We Don’t
Set side by side, the seven chapters have two things in common.
The first is that most of what they ask for is a change in the environment. Step outside in the morning. Lower the lights at night. Put a mat down on a concrete floor. The body is not being asked to try harder; what the body is responding to is being changed.
Why the environment, though. Because the way the body is built and the environment it now sits in have come apart. The eyes were built to look into the distance, the hands to grasp branches, the feet to read uneven ground. What the eyes look at now is a screen at arm’s length, what the hands touch is a flat surface, what the feet stand on is a floor of uniform hardness. The body has not gotten worse; what it is responding to has changed. Which is why changing what it responds to comes before trying to fix the body.
The second is that none of it is about getting it right. Try to breathe correctly and the breath falls under judgment. The methods that go through sound, or through holding two directions at once, are here because they change something without imposing correctness.
Put another way, there is one method running through all seven chapters: changing where attention is directed. Changing viewing distance in the eyes chapter, listening to a sound you made yourself in the sound chapter, checking the pressure under the soles in the ground chapter, finding where the fingers begin in the hands chapter — these are all the same move. Phenomenology calls it intentionality; what it amounts to here is changing the direction of attention without trying to produce a correct shape.
With that said, here is the other side.
The frameworks used here — the Triangle of Support, Tonic Function, polyvagal theory, the body clock, the eight limbs of yoga — are each a model. None of them accounts for the whole body, and some, polyvagal theory among them, are still under debate among specialists. Every framework has its limits.
Nor is there an effect to promise. The same practice does not produce the same thing in two people. That is why this page puts, in place of effects, ways of checking what is happening in your own body.
And there is one limit to what a person can do alone.
How you use your own body is hard to see from the inside. A habit of many years registers as simply how things are, which means it never even becomes something to change.
These seven renew how the body is seen; they do not promise any benefit. Rolfing is not medicine, and it is not aimed at treatment. If there is pain or a symptom, please see a medical professional first.
How you stand, how you walk, how you breathe — none of it is visible from where you are standing. There is a part of this that only begins when someone else looks.