07/16/2026
I came across this precis on a colleague's newsfeed. I regret that I did not capture the whole essay on some of the thought leaders he outlined in our somatic field. I also apologize that I was so excited by these thoughts that I did not capture the author's name.
This piece on Prigogine captures something that speaks to me of why hands on approaches, varied as they are, ALL have valid outcomes attributable to them.
Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003) and the Systems Thinkers
In 1977, 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 reorganize at higher levels of complexity.
Prigogine called these dissipative structures — open systems that maintain their organization by continuously exchanging energy and information with their environment, and that, when pushed sufficiently far from equilibrium, do not simply break down but reorganize 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 programs. 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 organization 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 reorganization 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 program 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 rigor.
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-organizing, 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 reorganization. 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.
The figures gathered in this document — Selver, Rolf, Feldenkrais, Trager, Barnes, Bateson, Lowen, Keleman, Grof, Hanna, Pauls, Rogers, Perls, Watts, Johnson, and Brand — are not historical curiosities. They are the living substrate of what I teach, what I do with my hands, and what I understand to be happening when something real occurs in a treatment room. They deserve to be known by the practitioners who have inherited their revolution.
The colleague who so succinctly translated these discoveries for us to consider is Steven Goldstein. It was inspiring to read this and I will do my best to discover and add his name to this share of his post. Australian Craniofascial Therapy School: Malcolm Hiort was in the comments following. Perhaps he will be so kind as to add the author's name for me in the comments... Jocelyn Olivier Thank you Malcolm. Now I can find Steven and follow him and dive into the rest of his generous explanation of our history as Somatic therapists.
