Introduction
When we are standing, it looks as though we are doing nothing. Inside the body, something is adjusting continuously and minutely so that we don’t fall over.
And the muscles doing that work also register changes in emotion. That is why a change in posture reaches your mood, and why a shift in feeling changes your posture.
In Rolfing, this work has a name: Tonic Function. Tonic comes from tonus — muscular tone — and the term grew out of a question: how do we keep the quality of the muscles in a gravitational environment?
It was brought into Rolfing by Hubert Godard, a French Rolfer. He was a dancer first, then a choreographer, and eventually someone who trains teachers.
I’ve written about this across three articles. This page is a map of the three. Start wherever you like.
One Way of Seeing
Here is the spine of it.
Tonic Function is the body’s ability to organize itself in gravity. Not the name of a category of muscle — the name of an ability. And the system that carries that ability is also the system of expression. Which is why a conversation about posture becomes a conversation about mood, and why the body softens when something in the mind settles.
The Three Articles
| What it covers | Read | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it came from | An impasse in the dance studio. The attitude held before movement gets a name | Part 1 — What Hubert Godard Saw |
| What it points at | The body’s ability to organize itself in gravity. The system that supports it, and two directions | Part 2 — What Is Tonic Function? |
| What it sees | Structure, coordination, perception, meaning. One system with four faces, and what they look like | Part 3 — What Does Tonic Function See? |
Where It Came From
Tonic Function was born in the dance studio. The same arabesque carries different meanings in different periods. The difference is not outside the form. It is before the form begins.
Godard followed a duet in which Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly danced the same gestures at the same time, slowing the film frame by frame. The difference was there before the movement started. He gave it a name: pre-movement.
▶ Part 1 — What Hubert Godard Saw: Tonic Function Was Born in the Dance Studio
What It Points At
The definition is in an article Aline Newton wrote in 1995. The body’s ability to organize itself in gravity.
And why we keep saying “relationship to gravity”: gravity is the first thing we meet. How we are held, how we are laid down, the whole process of coming to stand — all of it is a negotiation with gravity. The terms we settle on stay with us. And they can be settled again.
▶ Part 2 — What Is Tonic Function? The Body’s Ability to Organize Itself in Gravity
What It Sees
Godard has a sentence: in the body, there is no difference between the gravity system and the expression system.
From there come four aspects: structure, coordination, perception, and meaning. Not a classification — one system with four faces. And three examples: Graham’s contraction reversing from concentric to eccentric; Germany in the 1930s, where an interest in verticality found radically opposed outcomes; Cunningham and Trisha Brown handling the ground from the erasing side and the showing side.
▶ Part 3 — What Does Tonic Function See? Four Aspects, and What They Look Like
It Works in the Ground, Not the Figure
The three converge on one way of seeing.
Figure and ground are terms for looking at a painting. What you are looking at is the figure; what lies behind it is the ground. What we see as “movement” is the figure. Tonic Function is working in the ground, in front of it.
Which makes it hard to see. Hard to see, but not small. The same form reverses; a society’s history gets inscribed; the order in which things reach the viewer swaps around.
Start from What You Want to Know
| If you want to know | Read |
|---|---|
| Why posture and mood are connected | Part 1 |
| What Tonic Function is | Part 2 |
| What Rolfing is looking at | Part 3 |
| The mechanism, in more detail | Why Good Posture Is Not a Matter of Muscle Strength |
| Perception itself | We Don’t See the Same Thing |
| What happens in a session | Session 7 ／ Sachiko Aimoto’s Testimonials 3 |
Tonic Function turns up all over this site — posture, breathing, walking, training records. Written a piece at a time over more than ten years, so the articles are scattered. Here they are, in four groups.
Further into the Theory
The mechanism touched on in Part 2, written out from the side of science. Tonic and phasic, the alpha and gamma motor systems, muscle spindles, tonus. Ground this hub doesn’t cover.
▶ Why Good Posture Is Not a Matter of Muscle Strength — Tonic Function and Its Relationship to Gravity
And three posts written in 2014 and 2015, when I was starting out in Rolfing and sorting it out for myself. There are places where the understanding is thin, but what I made of it at the time is preserved.
▶ The Muscles That Tire and the Muscles That Don’t — Tonic Function and the Support of Posture ／ Bidirectionality Brings the Body into Order — Tonic Function in Walking and Sitting ／ Space Is Felt Differently by Each Person — Tonic Function and Peripersonal Space
From the Training Room
Where, and from whom, I received this. The five-second figure in Part 2, and the examples of soleus, serratus anterior, and the tongue, all came from hands-on training.
- Gael Rosewood Workshop (4) — How Do the Gravity-Related Tonic Muscles Keep the Body in Balance?──five seconds, soleus, serratus anterior, the tongue
- Rolf Movement – Part 2 (8) — Pre-movement, Yoga, and the Alexander Technique──the definition of pre-movement. The bandhas in yoga and the head-spine relationship in the Alexander Technique point at the same place
- Rolf Movement – Part 1 (6) — How to Relate the Body’s Movement to Tonic Function?
Seeing the Body Through Gravity
If Tonic Function is what happens inside one body, this series looks at gravity from the side of the species. Squatting, sitting, standing, walking. Why a posture came about, and what differs from one culture to another.
- What Is the Difference Between Squatting and Sitting — The Influence of Chair Culture on the Body ／ Why Sitting for Long Periods Is Bad for the Body ／ Why “Standing” Is Not Tiring ／ Why “Walking” Is Fundamental to the Human Being ／ Why a “Comfortable Posture” Exists ／ The Inhaling Body and the Exhaling Body — Breath Seen Through Gravity
From the Session Room
How the theory shows up in an actual session. Records of work with clients.
- Left and Right Came into Balance, and the Weight Came Forward — Sachiko Aimoto’s Testimonials 3──weight in the feet, and switching between vision and hearing
- Session 7: With the Support of the Back, the Head Came to Rest──the three senses involved in posture, and what each session calls up
- Reading The Textbook of Natural Leadership — Sensation Before Theory──interoception and peripheral vision
One note. Some articles describe the three senses involved in posture as vision, the inner-ear sense, and the muscular sense. A training record from 2014 and a session record from 2024. That differs in its third term from the eyes–feet–inner ear of these articles. The same three appear ten years apart, so there must be a source somewhere, but I haven’t traced it.
Where It Is Taught, and How
Tonic Function is not evenly distributed across Rolfing. That said, it isn’t a story of “it never reached America.”
In Europe it is a premise. The European Rolfing Association positions Godard’s approach as particularly groundbreaking and points to Per Haaland’s paper as its account of Tonic Function. Rolf Movement training runs in three parts, and there is no class named “Tonic Function.” It doesn’t need to be a subject, because it is the ground the whole course stands on.
In America it is something you can choose. The design combines units to reach thirty days, and classes can be taken on their own. “The Tonic Function Model of Rolf Movement,” a six-day class, appears as one example among the classes offered.
And in the advanced training I took in 2025, Tonic Function was not mentioned once. Something I confirmed by being in the room.
For thirty-five years there have been teachers, books, translations, and classes. And still the treatment differed by course. Whether a theory arrives is not decided by whether a route exists. It is decided by how it gets treated.
It wasn’t that there was no contact and so nothing passed across. There was contact, and still nothing passed across.
Where to Go Next
▶ Fascia as a Way of Seeing — What Is Rolfing Actually Touching?──from the side of the tissue the hands touch. If gravity is a relationship, fascia is the object.
▶ Perception as a Way of Seeing — What Is Rolfing Actually Looking At?──the page that develops “perception,” one of the four aspects. Everything this series didn’t go into is there.
▶ Where Does Your “Being” Come From? — Phenomenology for Bodyworkers──from the side of the practitioner who is looking. Where the practitioner stands when watching the response to gravity
▶ What Energy Work Is — Where the Word Points, and How It Entered Rolfing──from the side of the information offered to the body. What finally tells you whether it is Rolfing is the body’s relationship to gravity
What We Know, and What We Don’t
Tonic Function is one model shared within Rolfing, not a theory that has itself been demonstrated.
How the four aspects relate differs by source. Within one book, the authors and the writer of the foreword point in different directions, and even the names differ. I don’t have the material to decide which is right.
What is presented here renews how we take in the body 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.
References
- Aline Newton, “Basic Concepts in the Theory of Hubert Godard,” Rolf Lines, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, March 1995, pp. 32–43. The definition comes from this article
- Hubert Godard, “Le geste et sa perception,” in La danse au XXe siècle, Bordas, 1998, pp. 224–229 (English translation: “Gesture and its Perception,” Writings on Dance, No. 22, 2004)
- Caryn McHose, “Phenomenological Space: Interview with Hubert Godard,” Contact Quarterly, Summer/Fall 2006, pp. 32–38
- Caryn McHose & Kevin Frank, How Life Moves, North Atlantic Books, 2006. With a foreword by Godard
- Aline Newton, “An Interview with Hubert Godard,” Rolf Lines, Winter 1992, pp. 42–48
- Three papers by Kevin Frank (1995 / 2007 / 2014) ／ Per Haaland, “Tonic Function Model: The Human Gravity Response System,” Structure, Function, Integration, Vol. 50, No. 3, November 2022 ／ Jeff Maitland, Spacious Body, 1995 (the source of the term Palintonicity)
What Eleven Years Have Made Clear
What Godard was looking at, and how Kevin Frank organized it, you can trace through the sources. What happens on the receiving end is not written down anywhere. Between knowing something as theory and having it in your hands, there is time.
Godard himself pointed out that history has left almost nothing about dancers. There are records of costume, music, and choreography, but not of how a dancer trained or handled their body. What happens on the receiving end is hard to record. This series, and the articles on this site, are an attempt to write down that harder part.
There is something about what is happening in a body that you can’t know without actually touching it.