Editor’s note: This conversation took place on June 9th, 2025, over Zoom. The authors have edited their words for clarity and format.
Lina Amy Hack: Hi Aline and Rebecca, thank you for meeting with me to discuss an idea that I first heard in your 2022 Tonic Function Study Group – too much body. This idea was presented, if I recall correctly, in the context of clients seeking Rolfing® Structural and Movement Integration sessions to enhance their athletic and artistic performance. The concept continues to stand out to me as I look back at the study notes from your classes, and I am excited to share our dialogue with the readers of Structure, Function, Integration.
I have asked you both to collaborate with me to deepen our understanding about what you mean by the expression ‘too much body’. And before I forget, I hope you will also tell us about your newly published book, Reimagining the Body (2025). Please let us know about that as well.
Lina: To start at the beginning, let me first hear in your own words what embodiment is. And what do we mean when we say we want to help our clients become embodied?
Aline Newton: Thank you, Lina, for asking us to weigh in on this topic. At the most basic level, we are all already embodied. Embodied is being a body on the planet, in the gravitational field. And this may seem like quibbling over details, but I think it is important to be clear about our terminology.
As Rolfers, we are heirs of Ida Rolf [PhD (1896-1979)], whose premise was “appropriate relationship with gravity.” You are somewhere, and you’re relating to gravity. What we are seeing when we observe what we call the body is how that relationship is unfolding. How the body is unfolding moment to moment, but also, how it has been unfolding for the person’s whole lifetime. The patterns we see in people’s bodies reflect this
unfolding. How are they managing to move and express themselves in this gravitational field?
Being embodied is what you already are because you’re a human being who is incarnate. Personally, I don’t use the word embodied to describe a quality of being. Everybody is embodied. There’s nobody without a body. And there’s no body without a location. Philosophically, it’s really important that we are clear and grounded about our terminology, because it immediately changes our orientation. And that’s the point. The point is, you’re not inside this body disconnected from everything; you’re always in a relationship with your surroundings. It doesn’t mean other people don’t use the term differently. Within the Rolfing community, you’re going to find a lot of different uses of the word embodiment.
Thank you for bringing up our book, as it covers this material more systematically and in greater detail, including our discussion of embodied intelligence. Oddly, embodied intelligence usually refers to making robots, to artificial intelligence, not to somatics. For more information, people can refer to Reimagining the Body (2025).
Lina: Very good point, and please do talk about philosophical and theoretical edges to our terminology. Advanced Rolfing Instructor Jan Sultan often talks about that, too, how Rolf emphasized being concrete in our understanding of the words we are using. And truthfully, this is why I wanted to do this article with you both in the first place, to keep grounding my understanding of embodiment in reliable notions that are backed up by Dr. Ida Rolf Institute® faculty members.
Rebecca Carli-Mills: I find it interesting that both embodiment and somatics have become such popular words – they show up everywhere now: in psychology, bodywork, wellness, physical therapy, neuroscience, psychedelics, philosophy, and more. Sometimes they’re used with depth and meaning, and other times they’re sprinkled in like a bit of salt and pepper because, at the moment, they sell.
For me, the verb embodying is more alive than the noun embodiment. While we are living on earth, we are constantly embodying our relationship with the world around us – including gravity. We experience life through our senses, receiving an ongoing flow of sensory information that we continually filter
and organize into what we perceive as a coherent world. This process of perception is unique to each of us, shaped by our individual histories, cultures, and neurobiology. So, embodying isn’t a fixed state; it’s an ongoing, dynamic process of relating to and perceiving the world moment by moment.
The term embodiment can also refer to a specific movement practice – such as those developed by French Rolfer and movement expert Hubert Godard and described by Aline in her book. These practices expand, refine, and direct our perceptual capacities, allowing us to gather new kinds of sensory information from our environment – information that may have been overlooked because of our habitual perceptual patterns. With
this fresh sensory input, new pathways and possibilities for movement become available to us.
As practitioners, our own process of embodying is fundamental to the effectiveness of our work. Through consistent practice, we cultivate a kind of paired awareness – one that allows us to remain centered, relaxed, and self- regulated while simultaneously attuning to and engaging skillfully with another person. In doing so, we convey a sense of ease and communicate, both implicitly and explicitly, that we are meeting our client as a whole being – someone in relationship with the world – rather than as an object on our table in need of fixing.
Lina: That’s beautiful. Anything to add, Aline?
Aline: I would add one thing that comes up over and over again is this inside- outside division. We seem to have accepted it as fact that there is a “me” inside that is separate from that out there. Yet, consider, for example, the simplest level of the exchange going on with the environment in breathing. Interoception follows certain neural pathways, and we are also engaged in proprioception to know where we are, which involves different neural pathways. And there’s how the brain perceives the space around the body – the kinesphere or the perception of peripersonal space. Hubert would sometimes describe proprioception as “50% body, 50% world.” To live in this world, orientation to our surroundings is as important as interoception, but not always given the attention it deserves, I think.
Lina: I would like to describe a case from my practice and hear your reflections about it. The high-performance client I have in mind was a classically trained dancer in her youth, and her career now has many different elements of performance: social media posts to a large following, public speaking engagements, teaching movement to groups, and musical performance as a lead singer. She wanted help with some back and neck discomfort she was experiencing from injuries and life stress. She’s a super-mom, her young children are her main passion, and at the same time, she makes time to take care of her body as wellness is a priority for her. Let’s call her Romy.
When we met for her First Hour of the Rolfing Ten Series®, Romy wanted my assistance with persistent pains she felt were related to her inability to achieve better alignment. When it was time to do her body reading together, she went right to the mirror to show me what she felt were glaring asymmetries. And when I observed her in that moment, her main focus was on how her body looked from the outside, which made me think immediately – is this what Aline and Rebecca were teaching us? When a client’s orientation is too much about their body?
Part of the work I did right away with Romy included inviting her away from the mirror and orienting her toward feeling her alignment without visual cues. It seemed hard for her to trust her own ability to sense a balanced body at first. When in front of the mirror, I noticed she spoke very quickly, and she shared many
details she wanted me to understand about her body. When away from the mirror, feeling into her body, she showed signs of nervous system regulation, like spontaneous long exhales that were relaxing. I invited her gently to the idea of orienting to feeling her own sensations, the balance her body has, and she observed how comfortable that was. We mused together about what it might be like to perform from this feeling-self place, and this did feel great for her. She described the possibility of having some freedom from the tight places she seems to always have in her body.
Anyone who has studied with you both will know the movement work you teach using a stick as a prop. From your inspiring instruction, I have a long stick from my apple tree in my front yard, and I invited Romy to hold the stick horizontally in front of her and feel into her body sensations and body orientation to gravity all at the same time. Not only did her speech slow right down, but her focus on body symmetry melted away, and she understood the idea of being in relationship with the stick. She smiled and experienced that joyful curiosity when we played with imagining that the stick could move itself. When she imagined that, the stick was just floating upward on its own, while her hands experienced the texture of the stick’s surface. Her body became pain- free all on its own for that moment, and she marveled at this happening. We were just ten minutes into the first session and I hadn’t even touched her yet. It made her curious about what was happening to her.
In my mind, I was thinking, “This might be what Aline and Rebecca meant when they taught us about some people having too much body.” Was Romy focused on the external view of her body as an object? Were the comfort and joy she expressed from a re-orientation to her body as being?
Aline: It’s great to hear about your experience with your client and how you use the idea of ‘too much body’ in your own way while working with people. Your client’s story touches on so many important aspects of movement integration, including how much can change in a person’s way of being or orienting in gravity without necessarily starting with manual manipulation.
I give Hubert Godard credit for the practice with the stick as well as the expression, “too much body.” I first encountered these approaches in workshops with him in the 1990s. It’s hard to talk in the abstract about Hubert’s brilliant work because so much of it arises from a particular context, the moment in which the topic and expression arose.
Hubert was the first person to draw my attention to the importance of the contact with what I am touching, the stick in this case, which is a contrast with the tendency to locate ourselves inside our body. Instead, Hubert invited us to notice – where is the place of contact? Where is the exchange happening? From this perspective, ‘body’
is an ongoing relationship, with gravity, with our surroundings.
In this spirit, I think of the expression – too much body – as a koan, not a formula. It’s a paradox that leads us to wonder rather than a definition that is always applied the same way regardless of conditions. Like the famous koan, what is the sound of one hand clapping?
Rebecca: For me, part of the beauty of calling it a koan means that we don’t take these words literally.
Aline: Dr. Rolf also had her koans, one of which was, ‘in movement the pelvis should disappear’. Taking these two expressions together may be helpful: Dr. Rolf was inviting us to see that movement and anatomy are not the same. When we watch someone walk, if we see the pelvis behaving like a bowl, fixed and unmoving, it may suggest unnecessary muscular holding around the bony framework. When the proper coordination is available, the pelvis ‘disappears’ in walking – we see expression, a play of weight and space. Each element has its part in the whole: perceptual systems active, spine free to be the spinal engine, side-bending and rotating, pelvic muscles not interfering. In a moving person, we hope not to see ‘pelvis’ in the same way as it is represented in anatomy books that show a dissected cadaver.
To me, Rolf’s koan is the other side of the idea of ‘too much body’. In the context I originally heard the expression,
Hubert was speaking of a dancer. How do we describe what goes into graceful movement or what gets in the way? The body’s shape can disappear and all we are aware of is the movement and expression, the way we feel or the experience – for both the dancer and the observer.
Conversely, as in the case you described, we might see ‘too much body’ as too much effort or too much emphasis on shape, and as your session suggests, too much reflection in the mirror. At the Boston Conservatory, where I have taught commercial dancers, there are curtains to cover the floor-to-ceiling mirrors on all the walls. But I often see the young dancers pushing those curtains open so they can learn their choreography in front of the mirror. They inadvertently shape their bodies to what they see, a body image, not how they feel, their kinesthetic sense. The visual is so dominant!
Rebecca: When Hubert first used the phrase ‘too much body’, it lit something up in me – like fireworks – an aha moment, for sure. I’d been dancing, training in classical ballet and modern dance, since I was four, all the way through graduate school and beyond, and suddenly I could see it: I’d been trained in exactly that – too much body. So much of my dance education was built around the visual – the mirror, the image, the shape, rules of alignment, and most of the coaching was “inside body based,” not body in relationship with the surroundings, the environment.
At that time, other dance forms emerged, such as contact improvisation, the work at Judson Church, Skinner Release, Anna Halprin, Authentic Movement, and others. These approaches challenged the emphasis on visual form and mirror image, instead of exploring movement guided by kinesthetic awareness, gravity, weight, and spatial relationship. However, I didn’t encounter these influences until graduate school, by which point many of my perceptual habits were already deeply formed.
In my youth, even technical achievement was taught almost exclusively on “inside body.” For example, as a child, I was taught the broken-down biomechanics of how to jump. The belief was that you jumped higher because your leg hit the right position, not because you began
with the impulse to jump – like when you leap across a stream. When out in nature, you don’t think, Is my toe touching my knee? You want to get across the stream and land dry – or perhaps you are feeling particularly exuberant that day, so you sail across and still land dry. Jumping, like throwing, includes opening one’s perception to the space, not by solely focusing on what’s happening within one’s body. Some of us are natural jumpers, so this comes more easily; for those of us who aren’t, starting with biomechanics about placement or position, jams the gears. After studying with Hubert, I am a much more natural jumper at sixty-seven years old, than I was when I was ten in ballet class!
Rebecca: I did have an inkling about what I was missing. As an undergraduate, I remember one duet that was full of tricky balances. Rehearsing in front of the mirror, my head was full of commands: Point your foot. Place your ribs. Tuck your pelvis to catch your balance. Align this with that. The result? My dancing looked exactly how it felt – stiff, effortful, and joyless.
Then my friend Liz, a beautiful performer, dropped by rehearsal. I asked her for help. To my surprise, instead of more alignment cues, she invited me into relationship – with the expression, the space, with my partner Rudy. Together we played with a little story:
The warm sun draws me upwards from the floor My gaze takes in and welcomes
Rudy His presence draws my arms
and heart towards him, while the toes of my back foot linger with the space behind. (I am not balancing on one leg.) Until
my arms with this great stretch and I run towards Ruby, inhaling his embrace. . . . and so on . . .
This was now the song in my mind instead of all the biomechanical commands. Yes, there was a more expressive quality, but beneath that, relationship was created between me and earth and sky, inner and outer. The biomechanics arose from a natural impulse.
That shift – from fixing my body to following meaning, interacting with the space – changed everything. Suddenly the balances worked. The movement carried me. Technical precision arrived on its own once I connected to purpose, space, and relationship. Yes, I had trained
and knew the technique and steps – the choreography – but that didn’t translate into flow.
Of course, depending on the style, dancers need technique that includes form. But if training only focuses on internal corrections and visual shapes, the flow disappears. I began to see that expression isn’t extra – it’s essential to successful technique. And as I believe Dr. Rolf understood and Hubert Godard taught, at the core of expression is our relationship with gravity – how we feel our weight, connect to the environment around us, underlies the felt meaning of the moment.
Lina: As you reflect on that, would you call it an easing from the ‘too much body’ state of being? Changing the channel, new neural circuitry? New vectors of force through the fascia?
Rebecca: Yes, all that you mentioned, changing the channel, different neural pathways, different vectors, it begins with a perceptual shift. I was choosing to tune into different information that organized my movement differently. My training and habitual mode of perception was to focus almost solely inside my body – positioning its alignment. Now, I was including the interface between my senses, body, and the world. My senses attuned to information that was essential to balance, movement, connection, and the choreography followed. Also, the world felt more welcoming and kind when I wasn’t consumed by worry if my toes were placed just right at my knee, but rather, I was also taking in the ground as supportive, my partner as welcoming, etc. When we begin moving by shifting our perception to take in meaningful information, we shift our coordination without getting in our way – jamming our gears.
Aline writes about the neuroscience of perception and movement beautifully in Reimagining the Body (2025).
Aline: Years ago, I went to see a group of three-year-old dancers in a performance done in the tradition of Isadora Duncan. They were so young, so of course, they could not memorize complex choreography. Instead, the teacher had a pouch by her side with feathers in it, and she threw the feathers up in the air, and all the children reached up spontaneously as the feathers floated down. The teacher then brought out a large hoop, and holding
on to the hoop, the children walked together in a perfect circle. The children were moving together in response to a situation, relating to the present moment not to their memory of how their movement should look to another.
Unfortunately, our culture promotes the image of a body that is supposed to look a certain way: a flat stomach, or shoulders back, for example. “How should I look? What’s a good body? What’s a strong body? Where should my shoulders be?” People tell me their shoulders are too far forward based on seeing themselves in endless images on social media. They think they should be holding some other, better posture. There is an image in their mind, an idea of the body. But that line of thinking doesn’t lead to a body where we feel good and we feel secure. The competence that enables us to meet each situation does not arise from looking right. It arises from being able to respond to the particular circumstances without losing our balance.
Lina: Here we are, years later, and I’m still working with this notion in my own body and in my sessions with my clients.
When I was in your class, the discussion of the ‘too much body’ koan was at first so confusing; I had no idea what we were talking about. Hearing each colleague discuss the idea gave me a big aha: having
too much body was not something I had experienced directly. My direct experience in my first Ten Series, my Rolfer helped me originally to have ‘more body’, and I would say that I suffered ‘not enough body’. I had not considered the performance aspect of emphasizing the body as an object, observed from the outside. And how that may be in the way of a rich perception of the body’s sensations, relationship with self, and the world.
Is this a visual field effect in part? Is this part of performers being trained to attune to the information from their visual field, about themselves?
Aline: I think it stems from the tendency in our culture to describe movements in terms of shape and position, instead of quality of being and responsiveness. Let’s take the sun salutation as an example. Most often we learn the movement sequence by following the teacher and imitating what we see. This series of movements may be taught as a set of commands: Lift your arms; touch the floor.
Then what happens to saying hello to the sun? Greeting the sun, every day, that’s what a sun salutation is about. It is an opportunity to recognize or register something life-giving and important beyond ourselves. It is not a choreography performed from memory. Before Hubert Godard’s classes, I’d never been to a
yoga class where I was invited to greet the sun in the sun salutation. With Hubert, it was a completely different experience, in which my attention was directed at a quality of relationship.
It’s big. The two words – sun salutation – don’t define the movements. They open the door so that each of us is invited to notice an experience in this moment. How is my relationship with ground, with space, with sun, in each meeting? That is why I like to call these phrases koans. In the practice of contemplating a koan, something happens and you address the question, but you never answer it. In a relationship, you are never done.
Lina: That is so helpful to hear this reflected back; it’s deepening.
Lina: Would you say that people who are deeply dedicated to their athletic or performance pursuits could benefit from reflecting on this idea of too much body?
Rebecca: Absolutely. It comes up often in my practice. I work with many dancers – and athletes find their way to me too. Your questions brings to mind two people in particular: a dancer and a CrossFit instructor.
Rebecca: A highly-skilled dancer, Joe came in with a mild shoulder irritation issue. He showed me how he was managing it: he believed his lower ribs tended to flare out, so he tried to “fix” the pattern by drawing his ribs in and locking them down.
As he demonstrated, I watched his whole body. The more he focused on controlling his ribs, the more his weight shifted backward – towards his heels – his toes began to grip – and his focus narrowed sharply forward. I could see the effort it took to hold that shape. His breath had nowhere to go. Hubert Godard often said that when we start controlling our masses – treating parts of the body like blocks to be arranged – it’s the beginning of the end of movement. Once our coordination is preoccupied with controlling parts, what’s left for movement that’s responsive, expressive, or adaptive?
My work with Joe began by asking him to simply notice the floor through the soles of his feet. Taking it further, I asked him to let go of his whole upper
body, allow his shoulders and chest to round and soften forward, release his head, somewhat like a ragdoll, bigger audible exhales, so that he could more fully sense his weight flowing through his ankles and feet into the floor. Playfully, he began to plod around, like a large bear. Yes, this is an exaggeration of the movement, but that is often necessary when working with very refined movers who are accustomed to employing miniscule controls. As Joe began to play and enjoy this movement, he let go of the fixed position of his ribs. He could feel his weight spread through his feet and relate to the ground. He enjoyed feeling the freedom of his breath.
Then I asked him to open his senses to the space around him – the sounds in the space, the whole expanse of his visual field, imagining sun warming his back. He enjoyed hearing the sounds of children playing on a neighborhood playground. This brought him to a more upright posture without holding and I also noticed without rib flare or tucking. More importantly, both Joe and I sensed that he was more oriented and connected to the present moment – we were now working in real time. He discovered that his body already knew how to organize itself, if he stopped interrupting it by micromanaging the parts.
From here, we could explore what was actually happening with his shoulder, which as you might imagine, because of his rib tucking, involved his pectoralis minor shortening and pulling down creating neurovascular compression. I could have released this at the start, but then what would have happened if he went back to micromanaging.
Just to note, Joe is a very successful and beautiful mover who got trapped by trying to fix a painful issue by focusing solely on his body parts. Too often, culture teaches us to do this; think about orthopedics, we take our parts to a parts specialist, as if they are disconnected from our whole – and even if there is something surgical to fix in that part, how often does postsurgical rehabilitation involve reconnecting back to our whole being, sensing earth and space, moving in a context, moving in an environment that includes gravity?
Lina: That is an interesting example. And the other?
Rebecca: The other example that comes to mind is a woman, Ella, who is a CrossFit trainer. She wanted to show me her deadlift. She was having pain in her outer left hip. As she demonstrated, she explained that her key focus was “activating” her left gluteal muscle group before she lifted. But as soon as she did that, I noticed her weight rolled to the outside edge of her left foot. That small shift meant she lost her connection to support from the ground. Essentially, she was trying to prepare for a powerful, whole-body lift by isolating one muscle – using that as the premovement for the action.
I see this pattern all the time. It’s a reflection of our culture – how much emphasis we place on control. Well- intentioned teachers, trainers, physical therapists, and coaches often give people cues like “activate this,” “hold that,” and “place this here.” These instructions come
from a good place, but they often pull us away from our body’s innate capacity to organize itself.
If we can instead help people rediscover their innate connection – to gravity, to feel the ground, attune to the environment right now – they find support that’s alive and responsive. That shift in premovement changes everything.
In Ella’s case, once she stopped doing the activation and started feeling her weight through her feet connected to the ground as the premovement, the lift became smoother, stronger, and pain-free. The extra effort dropped away because she wasn’t layering conscious control on top of her natural capacity for stabilization.
Aline: Yes, let’s consider premovement for a moment. This expression is shorthand for: How do we prepare to move? What happens before an observer would see any obvious action? Below the conscious level, preparing to move is a complex process involving perception and memory and it always includes anticipating changes in balance.
The Russian neurophysiologist Nikolai Bernstein’s work on coordination makes clear that cognitively, we can’t micromanage the complexity of the numerous muscles and joints involved in creating even a fairly simple movement. Instead, the nervous system creates a motor pattern that links all the parts together. You could imagine that we have a kind of start button, and once that is pressed, the movement pattern unfolds. You can’t change a part of the
coordinated sequence once the start button has been pressed. Instead, you have to change the start button. But what is the start button? Scientists say the movement begins with a perceptual process – orienting to the environment by feeling the ground, sensing the space, or whatever we are imagining: soft earth, for example. That’s what happens first – how we are receiving and experiencing and imagining our environment – which includes the body. Noticing and working with the premovement is a perceptual act, it is not a voluntary command such as, “Contract your gluteal muscles.”
Hubert digested this very complicated idea into saying, “What is a well-organized movement? It’s a movement that you don’t see where it begins, because it begins in perception.” You may see me lift my arm, but what you see will change depending on whether I let myself receive the ground’s support before I move, or whether I let the space behind me expand, for example. Skillfulness is to be able to organize these coordinations from very different starting points depending on what is needed in the circumstances. It’s not a shape. It’s
never going to be a shape. We can say these ideas, but I think Rebecca, you would agree, that it’s something that you work with over and over, and after a while it becomes obvious.
If I lift my arm with only you as a focus, even over our Zoom video, you can see my neck contract. But if I rest into the ground, and imagine opening the space around me before I open my arms, I’ve got core stability now. I didn’t tell my transversus abdominis to contract, I changed my relationship to my environment and changed my perception. And that changes the coordination, which includes stability.
Rebecca and I use a shared vocabulary, and there is a lot behind it. This is why I wrote my book, and it was worth writing 300,000 words to go in depth with these ideas and experiential practices that lead the reader to their own embodiment. The culture has a very primitive view of posture and movement which suggests that I should hold my shoulders back, or activate my gluteal muscles. That is one way to see and understand movement. But for me, when I deliberately contract
my gluteal muscles, you can see as I lift my arm, that I have lost my range of motion.
Lina: You’ve made your case in my opinion. My body changed from taking those Zoom courses from you both, and I know that is true for many of us who have been your students. And I’m eager to read this information in a book format. We can only go so deep in an article; this is the tip of the iceberg!
Lina: What would you suggest for practitioners to begin to address this kind of perceptual learning for their clients?
Rebecca: Opportunities for perceptual learning appear in every session. In fact, I encourage practitioners to consider the whole session, door to door, as an invitation for perceptual learning.
New clients may come in for their first appointment with the idea that we, like many other medical and fitness professionals, will begin by analyzing what’s wrong, tell them about their weaknesses, and offer instruction and corrections that they are supposed to do. A client may say, “I know that I should
stand like this, [with their shoulders pinned back,] but I find myself standing like this, [pelvis tucked under, shoulders rolling forwards].” Or the person may have many complicated microcorrections based on visits to other well-meaning practitioners. I wrote about this in my article about scoliosis (Carli-Mills 2018). My client, Colette, would stand in front of me, continually rearranging her torso, pausing momentarily to ask, “Is this better . . . no wait . . . [more micromovements] how about this . . . Is this the right position? Am I straighter?”
So, what if, early on, we begin by sharing what we notice is working well and not just in a superficial way? What do we admire about this client’s stance and movement? Where in ourselves do we feel enjoyment when we watch them move? Perhaps there is an overall sense of balance and continuity, or a grounded sense in their gait, the way their feet meet the earth. Whatever it is, what if we begin from this place, by establishing a foundation of positive resources from which we can build, and our client can participate. Often, I find that this practice allows the client to have a whole-body
sense of letting go, or, in some cases, at least an exhale.
Perceptual learning unfolds, less like a technique and more like a thread you continually weave through everything you do. You may help your client notice reference points, such as the felt sense of the floor coming up to meet them or the space between the top of their head and the ceiling or sky. Which part of their back meets the chair? What happens if they invite their sit bones far back into the corner of the chair? Now, which parts of their body meet the chair? Instead of telling the client how to sit, you evoke contrast and curiosity and build a more refined capacity to sense the difference.
You may work with multiple perceptual channels by inviting awareness of shifts in the habitual ways a client may organize their senses. As the client is doing a rotational movement, invite “if you allow your eyes to soften, what changes in your spine?” And, “What happens when you allow the sounds of the birds to gently turn your head?” These kinds of subtle experiments help clients discover different qualities and pathways of movement rather than instructing or constructing them.
So important in our work is the concept of touch as a perceptual conversation, instead of an applied fix-it tool. I remember when Hubert taught us to be aware that the client is touching us, to receive the touch, and then to meet the client’s touch before launching into any agenda; we are working with the client, not on the client. Also, our hands don’t just release tissue; they also orient attention. In combination with our presence, our touch can offer
direction, focused attention, reinforce boundaries and safety, evoke continuity, encourage spaciousness, and more. We offer perceptual learning through the felt sense, rather than force or correction.
It’s important to remember that perceptual learning and reorganization often happen in pauses – give the client time and space to notice what they notice. They may need time to experience the shift, rather than understanding it through immediate verbal information. Value the pauses and silence that may be necessary for integration.
Lina: These are such beautiful examples, because all of us structural integration practitioners have some variation of these kinds of clients. The clients want us to join them in their world concept. I attune with them in their world view to build a therapeutic alliance with them, and then, I challenge them to join me in this other concept; come over here. For me, it can be an experience of push-pull a little bit. They may push back and say, “Oh, but no, don’t you see I am like this?” And I say, “Yes, I do, I see what you’re talking about.” And then I breathe. And then I allow my own concepts of ground, sky, and gravity orientation-space orientation fill my being with silence; hoping to inspire their curiosity with presence. You’ve said it so clearly for us.
Aline: Listening to both of you talk, what strikes me is exactly that, curiosity with presence. Rebecca, as you were talking about what it is to work with a client, your voice was creating safety and a valuing
of something that the culture might not value. Almost like you’re embodying the possibility that there’s a way to be here that is not about so much effort. This reminds me of a few lines of the popular Mary Oliver poem, Wild Geese (14, 1986):
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the
desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Most people have gotten the idea that they should work hard to have good posture and they feel they are doing something wrong. As a culture, we’re very much suffering from that. As a practitioner, we can offer a different tone, through our voice and our own body’s receptivity and clarity. Hubert emphasized being able to stay with our own center of gravity when touching another. We can offer an invitation that suggests maybe there’s another way to feel safe.
People have a movement strategy that has a meaning behind it: whatever the pattern, they are choosing that one for a reason, which is often nonverbal or preverbal, and for the purpose of safety. We definitely do not want to strip that away with a misguided notion that they should be some other way. What we can do is have a conversation, a physical conversation, and a verbal conversation about the experience.
I often invite my clients to show me an example of what they think of as ‘good posture’. When they’re in their idea of good posture, I can push them over. And when they do the thing that they’ve been forbidden to do, to let go, perhaps feeling they are slouching, they’re very rooted and strong. Each person can immediately experience this. Then we negotiate with the possibilities.
It doesn’t make sense to take things away from people; that’s not what we are trying to do. We’re meeting them in their world, and then together, we explore a range of options.
Lina: In the Tonic Function Study Group in 2022, you mentioned teaching a class at MIT and talking about these perceptual concepts with students working on the development of humanoid robots.
These stories you shared helped my learning, hearing about how you have used the robots to highlight aspects of what goes into moving on two legs – taking something rather complex and making it tangible so that it can inform us practitioners when working with clients.
Aline: Yes, I enjoy following the progress of humanoid robots. The robots are a foil that helps us see ourselves: early robots fell a lot, and even the robots that just recently ran the half-marathon in China were still mostly held by a rope, and had to constantly be picked up by people. The one that succeeded is not a segmented creature. It has a body made of one block of material and then legs that move very differently from the bodies evolution led us to have. Most recently, a robot was used at a fashion show, and was celebrated for having five poses in its repertoire. But it was not able to manage stairs, a much more complex action that we mostly take for granted. The robots’ struggles help us see what is remarkable about human movement capacity.
Lina: After taking your class, I sounded so smart sharing your lessons with my clients in my treatment room. People love hearing about robots. There are some clients for whom this is the perfect metaphor to help them feel what their living, breathing, and pulsing tissue is doing.
Action-Based Proprioception
Lina: Let me bring it back to Romy. This fits in perfectly here. I’d love to hear you talk about why the stick exercise works so well for helping a person soften the held places and engage the quiet places.
When I had asked her to feel her feet, she was quick to say, “Yes, I’m feeling my feet.” It was an easy thing for a yoga instructor to do. When Romy and I worked with her holding the stick, it was something new she had never done before, and she has done so much. It was meaningful for her. I led her on the steps that you gave us in class, and there she was, letting go, and the stick floated upward. We discussed whether her weight training could benefit from this type of sensory-movement playfulness.
This is the heart of what I’ve wanted to ask you – why did this work? Is it going to work like this for other people?
Aline: Well, I think there is a lot there. For one thing, the invitation to meet the stick instead of grasping it, is a change in perception, a change in premovement. In addition, our nervous systems are action- based. Our movement patterns are based on action in the world, and on perception. And yet another dimension is the way a stick can be a transitional object, bringing us all the way back to early childhood. So, when you put something in someone’s hand, you are potentially touching a lot of different dimensions of a person’s nervous system.
Rebecca and I study tai chi with Don Miller [https://mastodontaichi.com/ dt_therapist/don-ethan-miller/], who teaches a very unique approach in which we don’t learn a choreography, a predictable sequence of moves. We often alternate between using equipment in an actual action, such as holding a stick or moving a chair, and then find the same movement – forward/back or side to side – empty-handed. We are also using imagination: I can imagine pushing the air that resists me. I can also imagine assistance: something drawing my arms up. Holding the stick can make it easier to imagine, to start with a different premovement. I change what begins this movement by imagining a different quality in my surroundings, and that changes the whole coordination.
And let me add, that as you practice inviting clients to feel their feet, remember we’re not talking about feeling our feet, we’re talking about the feeling the weight as it meets the floor through our feet, or as with the stick, feeling the place of contact, the meeting.
But as to your question, “Will it work for other people, or every time?” There are multiple doors you can go through to invite a sense of weight. A lot of the time, the art is in how to reimagine what we’re doing so that we can keep coming up with new approaches to allow each client to access a new coordination. A coordination that will allow more options so that they can be more comfortable in more situations, instead of just the one that they have that’s working for them. But maybe it’s not working all that well, or they wouldn’t have come in to see us.
Rebecca: It feels like magic when Don, our tai chi teacher, asks us to use real objects in class. We might be practicing extremely slow low weaving steps across the floor, pausing with each one. I feel my
balance challenged – I have moments of clarity and more of fogginess. Then Don asks us to do the same movements while holding a stick as if it’s a spear. Now, I feel that my whole intention has changed – my focus consolidates, the movement has purpose, and any slight balance wobbles or concerns about the technique seem to magically disappear. It all comes together and makes sense.
Lina: When I first came to this work as a client, I didn’t have the language to understand my body as I have now, twenty years later, after decades of study and practice. When I arrived for my first Rolfing session, I would say my big body was paired with a proprioceptive map that suffered from what we could call ‘too little body’. I wished to be smaller and take up less space, and as a result, I didn’t inhabit my actual bodily self. I have previously discussed being in a larger body (Hack and Black 2022). The healing process Rolfing work gave me was coming home to myself, amplifying my body sensations. I imagine you have experience with clients on this side of the embodiment spectrum? If I can even frame it as a spectrum?
Aline: We also spend a lot of time thinking about this question. And what you just said, which is the context of Lina describing her experience as arriving and locating, that’s a beautiful description, and it makes total sense. I might not say someone doesn’t have enough body, for the reasons I mentioned at the start of our conversation, because all of us are embodied. But I’m not you, and hearing you say your experience, it’s a beautiful poem for me, it’s again, a koan. It’s not a formula. We aren’t doing math where variables have to become equal. One is not the opposite of the other, not at all.
In a sense, both ‘too much body’ and what you’re calling ‘too little body’ are qualities of organizing in gravity and in orientation that could be more skillful. In a sense, they’re both habits, or ways of approaching things, of orienting. That’s an important question: What is a skillful embodiment? And that always depends on what you’re faced with.
Maybe occupying a space on the ceiling is a very skillful response for certain highly stressful situations, but is it the only quality we would want to be able to employ in all
situations? Then it’s a question of skill- building for different situations.
The skin can be an important metaphor or physical boundary to attend to when we are not sure where we are in space. By directing attention to the places of contact, by differentiating clearly where I meet you in touch, we can at times help the earliest sense of wholeness.
There is a whole range of movements that support a variety of expressive needs, responses, and different qualities of being that we need just to get through a day. Can I expand and take up space without unbalancing myself? Can I focus and condense, and still breathe? We’re looking for a system with a lot of available responses, and they always include not falling over.
We have to see, how do we organize? Everybody’s doing okay if they’re walking around or wheeling around, but there are other responses that maybe they haven’t considered.
In a sense, we’re all dancers in the expressive quality sense of the term. We need to be organized with gravity. For me, there are times when I don’t expand, because when I expand, it feels unbalanced. I need to start with rooting and then I can find that expansion. So that’s a practice for me. Another person might need something else.
Rebecca: When I think about too little body, I first think of psychological states like dissociation or depersonalization. These can arise from a mix of trauma, biology, and environment. In those
moments, leaving one’s body can be a wise and necessary coping mechanism. It may have been the best option available at the time. Part of our work is to help create safety and a cohesive container so the person can gradually return, release, and build resilience.
Some clients arrive without a language for sensing their body; they’ve simply never been invited to pay attention in that way. Since developing our kinesthetic sense isn’t yet mainstream, it becomes an opportunity to help them build awareness – what do they notice, sense, or feel, and why might that matter? Even small steps in that direction can open a whole new world.
Lina: I appreciate your reflections. That mathematical part of my brain does like to create ‘variables’ and ‘equations’, which can lead a person into dualities, a limiting notion that reduces a concept to only two things. And cultivating vocabulary, that is my poem of my embodiment story. Thank you for reflecting these ideas back to me.
Rebecca: I also recognize too little body in my own dance career. I could be intensely focused on form – too much body in the external, visual sense – yet at the same time, too little because I was living inside a limiting body image. I wasn’t really feeling my own weight, my place in space. In that way, I was both too much and too little body at once.
Lina: That is insightful. I enjoyed listening to your poem; it has enriched my understanding.
Aline: This brings to mind one of my clients who is a dynamic fellow, up and
busy; he even walks fast. His wife often tells him that he walks very fast. And he has only negative associations to letting his weight be supported – feeling like an old man for instance. We found a way in through sighing. When I invited him to sigh, he was able to let his weight drop. So, it had the same effect as working with the stick, but a different way in. At his next session, he told me of being in the middle of a doubles game of tennis, and he had a moment of rest, and remembered the sigh. He marveled at how powerful his swing was after that.
Our clients are so dear to our hearts because it’s thrilling to see the joy they experience when they find a cue that helps them in their lives outside our offices. As each person’s story unpacks, there’s so much in it. That is part of what I love about being a Rolfer, that we’re in the
exploration of what really matters, which is how people feel about being in their life and how they organize. It is beautiful – using both poetry and biomechanics.
There’s something important about not letting go of the meaning-making nature of our lives, which can so easily be discarded in the mechanized and medicalized body. But that’s not the body we are. For me, it’s not so much ‘too little body’, but as Rebecca says, it’s stuck in one way of responding. Is it a body image that doesn’t allow the organism to be one with everything? As organisms, we are embedded in the environment. Our minds are all that separates us, our thinking. It’s a deep topic you’ve brought to us to discuss.
Lina: Yes, wow, very deep. Thank you for having this deep dive conversation with me. I feel inspired, like I always do, after listening to you two communicate your knowledge. I look forward to reading your book! People can also read a review of your book in this issue (see page 78). How can people order the book?
Aline: Reimagining the Body (2025) is available through your local bookstore or on the Singing Dragon website or through Amazon.
Lina: Perfect. And here is the link for people who read our journal digitally:
https://www.amazon.com/Reimagining- Body-Embodiment-Curriculum-Century/ dp/1805013769
Rebecca: That’s great. Thank you, Lina.
Aline: We appreciate your interest.
Aline Newton, MA, is a Certified Advanced Rolfer®, a Rolf Movement® Instructor, and Chair of the Rolf Movement Faculty. Aline has been offering Rolfing® work since 1984. She has studied with Hubert Godard since 1990 and continues to be inspired by his perspective. Her book, Reimagining the Body: Somatic Practice, Embodiment, and the Science of Movement, was published by Handspring Publishing in October 2025. In addition to her private practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Newton teaches experiential anatomy at the Boston Conservatory’s Alexander Institute. For more information, see her website at www.alinenewton.com.
Rebecca Carli-Mills is a Certified Advanced Rolfer®, Rolf Movement® Instructor, and ISMETA-Registered Master Somatic Movement Therapist with over thirty-five years of experience. She holds a BA and MFA in dance performance and choreography, and is a graduate of the Pennsylvania Gestalt Center for Psychotherapy and Training. A former Chair of the Rolf Movement faculty and past board member of ISMETA, Carli-Mills has taught somatic movement at several universities and remains active in the field through teaching, mentoring, and clinical practice. Her work is deeply shaped by her long-time studies with Hubert Godard and supported by ongoing training in craniosacral, osteopathy, and multiple forms of somatic movement therapy and education. She maintains a private clinical practice in Bethesda, Maryland.
Lina Amy Hack, BS, BA, SEP, became a Rolfer® in 2004 and is now a Certified Advanced Rolfer (2016) practicing in Canada. She has an honors biochemistry degree from Simon Fraser University (2000) and a high-honors psychology degree from the University of Saskatchewan (2013), as well as a Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner (2015) certification. Hack is the Editor-in-Chief of Structure, Function, Integration.
Carli-Mills, Rebecca. 2018. Embody, disembody, re-embody, body: Working with Scoliosis and Embodiment. Structure, Function, Integration 46(3):14-24.
Hack, Lina Amy, and Nicole Black. 2022. Finding body love after experiencing fat shame. Structure, Function, Integration 50(3):52-57.
Newton, Aline, and Rebecca Carli-Mills. 2025. Reimagining the body: Somatic practice, embodiment, and the science of movement. Philadelphia, PA: Handspring Publishing.
Oliver, Mary. 1986. “Wild geese.” In Dream Work, New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press.
embodiment; embodying; somatics; gravity; Rolfing Structural Integration; movement integration; Ida Rolf; embodied intelligence; proprioception; interoception; kinesphere; peripersonal space; koan; visual field; robots; body image; dance; proprioceptive map. ■
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