For three days, from October 10 to 12, 2015, I traveled to Osaka for training in Source Point Therapy (SPT). It was my first time in the Kansai region since visiting Kyoto and Osaka in May.
According to Hiro’s website, SPT is an energy work developed by Bob Schrei, a Certified Advanced Rolfer, and Donna Thomson, a healer and meditation teacher. It approaches points in the human energy field and connects the body with the information of the Blueprint.
When I visited Osaka in May, I received SPT from Hiroki Sato, a Rolfer who runs TEN — the space for your Life & Body in Osaka (hereafter Hiro). He is also the person who set Akinori Ito — the Rolfer who first worked on me, then at Relief Space and now at The Circle — on the path toward certification. I wrote about that session separately (see “Receiving Source Point Therapy at TEN in Osaka“).
He asked me then whether I would be interested in training over the October and November holiday weekends of 2015. I said yes on the spot. That is what Modules 1 and 2 are. Unexpectedly, a Chi Nei Tsang training ended up wedged in between, which doubled the load.
Since returning from my journey around the world, my days have been taken up with one training after another. Even so, this was one I very much wanted. Today the first day passed without incident. The venue was TEN, Hiro’s session room.
The first day opened with the historical background of SPT. Donna Thomson and Bob Schrei have practiced Zen for close to ten years, and Bob Schrei has spent time in Obama, a coastal town in Japan. His interests in art and architecture, and in geometry, intuition, and healing, led him toward the energetic side of Rolfing.
Ida Rolf herself, in her lifetime, spoke about the importance of the flow of energy in building the framework of Rolfing. What I noticed in Europe, though, was that this side of the work was left out of the explanation entirely. Pursuing what had been left out is what crystallized into SPT.
While working with clients who were difficult to treat, Donna Thomson began bringing insights from her meditation into clinical practice. That became SPT, and because Bob Schrei was a Rolfer, it spread among people practicing Rolfing. At first only Bob Schrei taught it. Recently a German practitioner and Hiro have also become able to teach.
Eight years ago, while studying in the United States for his Rolf Movement certification, Hiro saw one of the teachers practicing SPT and became interested. Two years ago, in 2013, he began inviting Donna Thomson and Bob Schrei to Japan.
By the time he was able to teach it himself, the framework had been organized, and he says the form has become simpler over the past two or three years than it was when he first met it eight years ago. Until now Hiro had been involved with SPT as the interpreter for the two of them. This was the first class he taught on his own.
SPT works best combined with Rolfing, Reiki, acupuncture, Pilates, or yoga, because its techniques let you find out where the trouble in a body is. Of the fourteen participants, three were acupuncturists, two were yoga instructors, two were Rolfers, and there were a Pilates instructor and a judo therapist among the others. Bodyworkers made up the core of the group.
Before moving to practice, Hiro gave an hour-long presentation outlining SPT. He worked through slides on what the Blueprint and geometry have meant for the body and the mind, drawing on Native American thought, Tibetan medicine, Kabbalah, and physics. None of it quite landed.
The Blueprint is the information needed for a human being to take human form, and SPT is what connects you to it.
Putting it that way, it finally made sense.
In the practical part, we learned to hold the hands in turn above four points called the Diamond Point: two beside the navel, one at the feet, one at the head.
Unlike Jikiden Reiki, where the hand is used as a plane, here the hand is held in awareness as a point. It had to be learned as a separate method from Reiki, but it was less demanding than I expected, and felt simple. Holding the hands twenty to thirty centimeters above the designated places, we learned how the body changes, through demonstration and practice with one another.
We also practiced the Navel Point and the Sacrum Point. With the Navel Point, I was struck by how quickly you can feel what Chi Nei Tsang does in softening the area around the navel. The Sacrum Point produces something close to the sixth session in Rolfing. That the body starts moving on its own without being touched was another surprise.
Where I felt SPT most strongly was during meditation. Guided by Hiro, we brought attention to the four keywords of SPT — Order, Balance, Harmony, Flow — or to the four corresponding points of Source, Grounding, Activation, and Transformation, which are the Diamond Point. The body began moving on its own, the spine lengthened, and the posture settled into place. That genuinely surprised me.
Two days left. Since we are working without an interpreter, the pace is faster than I expected. We are due to learn several more techniques from tomorrow, and I will write about those separately.
Note, August 2026
This piece records how Hiro came to SPT. Eight years earlier, studying in the United States for his Rolf Movement certification, he saw one of the teachers practicing it and became interested. At the time I noted this down without knowing anything more.
Eight years earlier means around 2007. Following the record on the American side makes clear what was happening that year.
Where the line came from
In the summer of 2007, a course was announced in the Rolf Institute’s newsletter: An Energetic Foundation for Rolfing, taught by Bob Schrei and Ray McCall, based on SPT.
A heated discussion soon broke out on the association’s forum, and letters of protest reached the board over whether the association should be sponsoring an energetic course. In response to the objections, the course was voluntarily resubmitted to the continuing education committee and approved a second time. And despite the controversy — or because of it — interest ran high. Seats were added, assistants were added, and it became the first continuing education class in several years to fill completely.
The following year, Bob Schrei, Ray McCall, Jeff Maitland, and Duffy Allen held an exchange in the association’s journal about the whole affair. Its title was “What Did Dr. Rolf Want?”
This piece does not say which teacher Hiro saw in the United States. But he later said that he first learned the work from Bob Schrei and the Rolfer Ray McCall.
And in 2025, ten years after my certification, one of the instructors of the Advanced Training was Ray McCall. It was a course that took up energy work directly (see “Journey to Becoming an Advanced Rolfer — A Summary of the Road to Certification“).
What I received in a room in Osaka in October 2015, and what I received in a classroom in Tokyo ten years later, crossed at the same person.
I wrote this piece eight years after that course.
Seen from the side of the institution
There is one more thing recorded in this piece. Ida Rolf spoke in her lifetime about the importance of the flow of energy, and yet the basic training I took in Europe left that side out of the explanation entirely.
The 2007 controversy is part of the answer. It had not been left out; it had not been settled. Opinion within the association was divided, and the subject was one where approval could be sent back once. And when approval came the second time, the class filled. The interest was there. Where to put it was not.
In that exchange, Bob Schrei also described how SPT came about. During an Advanced Training with Michael Salveson and Jeff Maitland, the group discussed how Rolfers borrow other systems — acupuncture, chakras — as frameworks for their own work, and how poorly that serves them. Out of that came the view that Rolfing needed an energetic foundation of its own. That became his long-standing project.
So this method was made to fill a gap that lay inside Rolfing. What I began learning in Osaka in October 2015 had come out of that gap. None of which was visible to me then. What is written here is only the fact that the explanation was missing.