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THE SOMATIC REVOLUTION

Body, Mind, and the Birth of a New Practice — Part Two of Two

Steven Goldstein · Fascial Therapy Institute Australia

Continuing from Part One, which traced the Esalen crucible and the figures who came to the body through mind and psyche — Stewart Brand and Gregory Bateson, Alan Watts, Charlotte Selver, Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls, and the body-psychotherapists Alexander Lowen and Stanley Keleman. This second part turns to the hands: to those who worked most directly with the living body, to the scholars who named and legitimised the field, and to the science that, decades later, caught up with what they already knew.

The Body in Gravity: Ida Rolf

Ida Rolf (1896–1979)

Ida Rolf was a biochemist with a doctorate from Columbia University who spent decades developing a system of soft tissue manipulation — Structural Integration, now widely known as Rolfing — that proposed something radical: that the body’s relationship to gravity is the primary determinant of its function and dysfunction, and that the fascial system, not the skeleton or musculature alone, is the organ of that relationship.

Rolf’s insight was that chronic pain, restricted movement, and postural collapse are not primarily problems of individual muscles or joints but of the whole-body pattern of fascial organisation. Gravity does not forgive structural imbalance — it amplifies it over time. But fascia, and in some circles the thinking regarding bone, is plastic. It can be reorganised. And when it is reorganised systematically, along the lines of gravity and through the body’s major functional

segments, something more than local relief occurs. The person stands differently, moves differently, breathes differently. The change is global because the tissue addressed is global.

Her three questions — Where do I begin? What do I do next? How do I know when I am finished? — were not rhetorical. They were a clinical method. They kept her, and keep every practitioner who takes them seriously, perpetually returned to what is actually present rather than what the theory predicts should be there. They are, as this document’s companion pre-read suggests, phenomenological method enacted at the table.

Rolf was at Esalen from the late 1960s onward, and the encounter between her structural work and the consciousness exploration that Esalen facilitated was generative for both. She was a difficult person — demanding, uncompromising, sometimes fierce with students and clients alike. But her vision of the body as an integrated system capable of profound reorganisation, and her insistence that structure and consciousness are not separate domains, were foundational for everything that followed in the somatic world.

Some individuals may perceive their losing fight with gravity as a sharp pain in their back, others as the unflattering contour of their body, others as a constant fatigue, yet others as an unrelenting threatening environment. Those over forty may call it old age.

And yet all these signals may be pointing to a single problem so prominent in their own structure, as well as in their environment: they are off balance, they are at war with gravity. — Ida Rolf

The Fascial Web: John F. Barnes and Myofascial Release

John F. Barnes (1939–2025)

John F. Barnes died in December 2025, and the myofascial release community is still absorbing that loss. He was a physical therapist from Pennsylvania who began treating patients in 1960 and spent the following six decades developing, refining, and teaching what became the most widely practised approach to fascial work in the world. He trained over 100,000 therapists and physicians. Massage Magazine named him one of the most influential figures in the therapeutic profession of the last century. For the manual therapy world, those are not small claims, and they are not overstated.

Barnes is not an Esalen figure — his formation was clinical and physical therapeutic rather than countercultural, and he developed his approach largely independently of the California milieu. But his contribution to the somatic lineage belongs in this document because what he was doing clinically, arriving from a different direction, was saying the same things. That the fascial system is a whole-body organ of continuity and that restrictions anywhere in the web affect the whole. That chronic pain is rarely a local problem. That the tissue has its own intelligence and its own timeline, and that forcing it produces less lasting change than listening to it.

That last principle is where Barnes becomes philosophically significant beyond technique. His approach is emphatically not a method of force. It is a practice of sustained, gentle, low-load waiting — applying a precise pressure and then staying present while the tissue responds at its own pace, following the release rather than driving it. This requires a quality of practitioner attention and patience that the faster-moving, technique-oriented mainstream of physical therapy and massage therapy actively works against. Barnes was asking practitioners to slow down, to feel more and do less, to let the tissue lead. That is a somatic education as much as a clinical method. It connects directly to Trager’s question — what would feel better than this — and to Pauls’s conviction that the body already knows the way toward its own integrity.

He was described by those who studied with him as a renegade — unafraid to stand apart, speak boldly, and pursue unconventional paths in service of what he observed to be true. He taught people not just to do differently but to perceive differently. That is the mark of someone whose contribution will outlast the techniques that carry his name.

Learning as Healing: Moshe Feldenkrais

Moshe Feldenkrais (1904–1984)

Moshe Feldenkrais was a physicist, a judo master, and one of the most neurologically sophisticated thinkers the somatic world has produced. His central proposition was deceptively simple: movement is the language of the nervous system, and most of us have learned to move badly. Not because our tissues are damaged but because our self-image — the nervous system’s model of what the body can and cannot do — has been constrained by habit, injury, and the slow accretion of compensatory patterns.

The Feldenkrais Method works not by correcting tissue or re-educating muscle but by offering the nervous system new sensory information — new ways of organising movement — that it can incorporate into an expanded self-image. The work is educational rather than corrective. The practitioner is not fixing something broken but offering something new to a system that has forgotten what else is possible. The learning that occurs is not cognitive but somatic: it happens below the threshold of explicit thought, in the sensory-motor intelligence that Merleau-Ponty called motor intentionality.

Feldenkrais was decades ahead of his time neurologically. What he was describing in terms of self-image and somatic learning maps almost exactly onto what contemporary neuroscience describes in terms of predictive processing and the updating of body schema. The nervous system runs a model of the body and its possibilities. Restricted movement is a restricted model. The Feldenkrais lesson offers evidence that the model is wrong — that more is possible — and the nervous system, given credible evidence, updates itself.

He was, by many accounts, a demanding and at times difficult person. But his intellectual rigour — the fact that he was thinking in neuroscientific terms before the neuroscience existed to support him — gave somatic practice a kind of epistemological seriousness it badly needed.

Feldenkrais and Rolf were, in fact, personal friends — not merely contemporaries occupying adjacent corners of the same movement. They met at Esalen in the early 1970s, dined together, and corresponded for years. When the psychologist William Schutz once asked Rolf who had most influenced her work — a question she was notoriously reluctant to answer for anyone — she named Feldenkrais directly: his book Body and Mature Behavior, and specifically its chapter on gravity. The regard ran both ways. In a birthday letter to Rolf in 1976, Feldenkrais wrote the sentence that, more than any anecdote, settles the question of whether structure and function are competing lenses or a single lens ground two ways: “Structural Integration and Functional Integration have more in common than the word that connects them. Indeed, in the case of humans, structure and function are meaningless one without the other; so that when you integrate structure, as nobody else can, you improve functioning.”

That is not a diplomatic nicety between colleagues. It is the founder of a functional, nervous-system-first method telling the founder of a structural, tissue-first method that her work and his were, at root, the same undertaking seen from two necessary angles. Neither lens is optional. You cannot address structure without consequence for function, and you cannot address function without consequence for structure. When Rolf died in 1979, Feldenkrais wrote of her as “a very good friend of mine and a formidable woman who would be an honour to any nation.”

Movement is life. Life is a process. Improve the quality of the process and you improve the quality of life itself. — Moshe Feldenkrais

What Could Feel Better: Milton Trager

Milton Trager (1908–1997)

Milton Trager is perhaps the least theoretically elaborate of the major figures in this lineage, and in some ways the most philosophically interesting precisely because of that. He was a self-taught practitioner — later a medical doctor — who developed his approach through direct sensory inquiry rather than through intellectual framework. His question was not what is wrong with this tissue and how do I correct it, but what would feel better than this? And then: what would feel even better than that?

The Trager Approach works through gentle rhythmic movement — rocking, lengthening, softening — that addresses the nervous system directly rather than the tissue mechanically. Trager understood, intuitively and before the neuroscience was available to confirm it, that chronic tension patterns are held not in the tissue but in the neural instructions the nervous system is continuously sending to the tissue. Change the instruction and the tissue changes. You change the instruction not by force but by offering the nervous system a felt experience of what effortlessness feels like — and then asking it to remember.

His concept of Mentastics — mental gymnastics — extended this into movement re-education that patients could practice independently, reinforcing the somatic memory of ease between sessions. The word itself captures something important: that movement intelligence lives at the intersection of mind and body, and that cultivating it is simultaneously a physical and a mental practice.

What Trager brought to the Esalen milieu that the other figures did not was a quality of radical gentleness — a demonstration that profound change does not require force, effort, or even technique in the conventional sense. What it requires is presence, sensitivity, and the willingness to ask, over and over, what would feel better than this?

Moving Toward Wholeness: Stanislav Grof and Holotropic Breathwork

Stanislav Grof (1931–) and Christina Grof (1941–2014)

Stanislav Grof arrived at Esalen in 1973 as a Scholar-in-Residence, carrying with him two decades of research into non-ordinary states of consciousness that had begun in Czechoslovakia with psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and continued in the United States until the legal closure of that avenue in the late 1960s. What he brought to Esalen, and what he developed there with his wife Christina over the following fourteen years, was holotropic breathwork — a method for accessing the same depth of non-ordinary experience through breath, evocative music, and focused bodywork, without pharmacological assistance.

The word holotropic, which Grof coined from the Greek holos (whole) and trepein (moving toward), names the method’s fundamental orientation: moving toward wholeness. The premise is that the psyche, given the right conditions, has its own healing intelligence — that non-ordinary states of consciousness, rather than being pathological departures from normal functioning, are doorways into material that ordinary waking consciousness cannot access and that the therapeutic process needs to reach. Breath, sustained and deepened over a period of hours, creates those conditions without requiring chemical intervention.

For the somatic lineage, Grof’s contribution is significant on two levels. First, he demonstrated with rigorous documentation across thousands of sessions that the body holds far more than biographical trauma — that holotropic states can surface perinatal experience, what he called transpersonal dimensions, and material that exceeds any purely personal account of what a body carries. Whether one accepts the full scope of his cartography of consciousness or not, the clinical observation that breath alone can access depths of somatic and emotional experience that years of conventional therapy may not reach is one that practitioners who work with body and breath encounter regularly.

Second, Grof’s collaborations at Esalen — with Bateson, with Fritjof Capra, with Rupert Sheldrake — placed his work firmly within the systems thinking and ecological consciousness tradition that was the intellectual spine of the whole California milieu. Holotropic breathwork was not a technique detached from a worldview. It was an expression of a coherent understanding of the psyche as embedded in systems larger than the individual — familial, cultural, evolutionary, cosmic. That understanding connects directly to Bateson’s ecology of mind and to Prigogine’s dissipative structures: the person is always a system within systems, and healing at any level reverberates through all of them.

Naming the Revolution: Thomas Hanna

Thomas Hanna (1928–1990)

Thomas Hanna gave the somatic revolution its name. In 1976 — the same year Arthur Lincoln Pauls began teaching Ortho-Bionomy to students across North America — Hanna coined the word somatics to name the field of study and practice that had been accumulating around Rolf, Feldenkrais, Trager, and their peers without yet having a collective identity.

Hanna was a philosopher before he was a somatic practitioner — he had written on Albert Camus and existentialism before encountering Feldenkrais and undertaking his own somatic training. That philosophical background gave him the conceptual tools to articulate what the practitioners around him were doing in terms that could be taken seriously across disciplines. Somatics, as he defined it, is the field that studies the human being from the perspective of first-person lived experience rather than third-person external observation. It is the study of the soma — the body as experienced from within — rather than the body as observed from without.

This distinction is philosophically precise and clinically important. It maps directly onto Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between the corps vécu — the lived body — and the body as anatomical object. But Hanna arrived at it through clinical practice and movement education rather than through phenomenological philosophy, which means the two lineages — the European philosophical thread traced in the companion pre-read and the American somatic practice thread traced here — are saying the same thing from opposite directions.

Hanna’s concept of Sensory Motor Amnesia — the gradual loss of voluntary control over habituated muscular contraction patterns — remains one of the most clinically useful ideas in the somatic field. The muscles that will not release, the postural patterns that persist despite intention and effort, the chronic tension that resists stretching and manipulation — these are not structural problems in the tissue. They are neurological habits: the nervous system has forgotten that these muscles can do anything other than contract. The therapeutic task is not to force release but to restore sensation — to wake the soma up to itself.

I still quote Hanna. After forty years in practice, his framing of what we are actually doing when we work with the living body remains as clear and as useful as anything that has emerged since.

The soma is the body as perceived from within. It is not the body as an object seen from the outside, but the body as a living, experiencing process — the body that you are, not the body that you have. — Thomas Hanna

The Correct Application of the Laws of Life: Arthur Lincoln Pauls

Arthur Lincoln Pauls (1929–1997)

Arthur Lincoln Pauls was a Canadian osteopath, a judo master of twenty years, and the founder of Ortho-Bionomy — a system of bodywork whose name he defined with characteristic precision as the correct application of the natural laws of life. He always insisted that he did not invent Ortho-Bionomy. He discovered it, through attentive observation of what the body was already doing and what it was trying to do.

The pivotal encounter in Pauls’s development came during his osteopathic training in London in the early 1970s, when he encountered Lawrence Jones’s paper Spontaneous Release by Positioning. Jones had been treating a patient unsuccessfully for months using conventional manipulation techniques. The patient arrived one day in too much pain to be positioned for treatment in the usual way, and Jones — out of practical necessity rather than theoretical intention — placed him in the position of greatest comfort rather than the position of correction. Left there for a period, the patient’s tissue released spontaneously. Jones had stumbled upon what he would later call Strain and Counterstrain, and what the field now knows as Positional Release.

Pauls took this insight and extended it considerably. Drawing on his judo experience — which had taught him that you move an opponent not by opposing their force but by following and amplifying their momentum — he developed a system that worked with the body’s preferred positions and preferred directions of ease rather than against its restrictions. He added gentle compression toward ease, fine-tuned positioning to individual tissue responses, and integrated energetic and cranial approaches as the system evolved. The result was a form of bodywork of extraordinary subtlety, one in which the primary clinical skill is the ability to listen — to follow what the tissue is asking for rather than impose what the practitioner thinks it needs.

The philosophical coherence of Pauls’s approach is striking in the context of this document. His insistence that the body has everything it needs to heal itself, that the practitioner’s role is to facilitate self-correction rather than impose correction from outside, that working with the body’s intelligence is more effective than working against its resistance — these are not merely technical principles. They are a philosophy of the living system that connects directly to Spinoza’s conatus, to Whitehead’s creative advance, to Prigogine’s dissipative structures, and to the contemporary neuroscience of predictive processing. Pauls arrived at all of this not through philosophy but through hands and observation and forty years of clinical practice.

I came to Pauls through Ortho-Bionomy instructors in the Melbourne area rather than through direct study with him, which is how most living lineages travel. What reaches the practitioner is not the founder alone but the tradition that the founder seeded — the ideas and the quality of attention carried forward by those who studied directly and then taught in turn. That transmission is itself a somatic event. It cannot be reduced to text.

Allow the body to correct itself. It knows the way. — Arthur Lincoln Pauls

Giving the Field a Voice: Don Hanlon Johnson

Don Hanlon Johnson (1934–)

Don Hanlon Johnson occupies a unique position in the somatic lineage: he was the scholar who gave the field its academic voice. A Jesuit priest turned philosopher turned Rolfing practitioner, Johnson brought to somatic studies an unusual combination of theological training, philosophical rigour, and embodied clinical experience. He was among the first people to argue, in language that academic institutions could take seriously, that somatic practices constituted a coherent field of inquiry with its own epistemology, its own history, and its own contribution to human knowledge.

His edited anthology Body, published in 1983, and the subsequent Bone, Breath and Gesture, gathered writings from across the somatic field — from Rolf, Feldenkrais, Reich, and others — and presented them as a coherent intellectual tradition rather than a collection of unrelated therapeutic techniques. This framing was important. It allowed somatic practice to be taught, studied, and developed within academic institutions in ways that would have been much more difficult without it.

Johnson’s own philosophical work drew on phenomenology — particularly Merleau-Ponty — and on his direct experience as a practitioner to articulate what somatic education actually does: it restores to the person a quality of embodied self-awareness that modern Western life systematically suppresses. We live, he argued, in a culture that devalues felt experience, that privileges abstract cognition over sensory intelligence, that treats the body as an instrument rather than a subject. Somatic practice is, in part, a cultural corrective — a reclaiming of what Hanna called the soma, the body as experienced from within.

The Science of Living Change: Prigogine and General Systems Theory

Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003) and the Systems Thinkers

In 1977, while I was studying at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Ilya Prigogine received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The timing felt significant even then. What Prigogine had demonstrated, through rigorous thermodynamic mathematics, was something that somatic practitioners were observing clinically every day without the scientific language to describe it: that living systems do not simply resist change. They use instability to reorganise at higher levels of complexity.

Prigogine called these dissipative structures — open systems that maintain their organisation by continuously exchanging energy and information with their environment, and that, when pushed sufficiently far from equilibrium, do not simply break down but reorganise into new, more complex patterns. The key insight was that the instability — the moment of apparent chaos — is not a failure of the system. It is the precondition for its transformation.

For manual therapy, this is one of the most important scientific frameworks available, and it remains almost entirely unknown in most training programmes. The tissue that has been in a stable but restricted pattern — self-reinforcing, resistant to small perturbations — is a system at a local equilibrium. The therapeutic intervention introduces a perturbation sufficient to push the system away from that equilibrium, into a moment of instability. That is the release, the autonomic shift, the patient’s surprised exhale. And from that instability, a new organisation becomes possible.

Ida Rolf’s three questions make complete sense in Prigogine’s terms. Where do I begin — where is the system’s edge, where is it most available to perturbation? What do I do next — how do I follow the reorganisation as it cascades through the system? How do I know when I am finished — when has the system settled into a new stable pattern that is genuinely different from the one it began with?

General systems theory, which was being applied in that Western Washington programme to human services, psychology, and social work simultaneously, extended this framework beyond the individual body. The person on your table is not a closed system. They are embedded in family systems, social systems, ecological systems, all of which are operating simultaneously and all of which influence the tissue you are addressing. The restriction in the thoracic fascia is not only a local event. It is the local expression of a pattern that extends into the person’s whole life system. Bateson had said this through the ecology of mind. Prigogine gave it thermodynamic rigour.

The future is not given. It is under construction. — Ilya Prigogine

What the Revolution Established

The Somatic Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s established several things that are now so embedded in good manual therapy practice that we rarely stop to notice how radical they once were.

It established that the body is not a machine but a living system — self-organising, self-correcting, and responsive to far more than mechanical force. It established that the nervous system is the primary organ of change, and that lasting therapeutic change requires not tissue correction but neural reorganisation. It established that the therapeutic relationship is not the container for the real work but is itself a primary variable in clinical outcomes. It established that the practitioner’s own embodied state — their quality of presence, their autonomic regulation, their capacity for genuine attention — is not incidental but clinically significant.

And it established, perhaps most importantly, that working with the body’s intelligence rather than against its resistance is not a softer or less rigorous approach. It is a more complete one. The body already knows the way toward its own integrity. The practitioner’s task is to create the conditions in which that knowing can act.

That is what Rolf was doing with her three questions. What Feldenkrais was doing with his movement lessons. What Trager was doing with his rocking. What Pauls was doing with his gentle positioning toward ease. What Hanna was naming when he coined the word somatics. What Bateson was describing when he said that mind is the pattern that connects.