Two weeks have passed since I took Module 1 of the Source Point Therapy (SPT) training (on the training itself, see “Learning the Blueprint: The Information Needed for a Human Being to Take Human Form,” “Using Sensation Rather Than Knowledge: Accessing the Blueprint,” and “The Final Day“). Since returning to Tokyo from Osaka, I have been bringing SPT techniques into my Rolfing sessions.
What surprised me — and I can recognize it because I have received the work several times myself — is being able to feel through the client that the body is more integrated. At the same time, it was the moment I realized how much more important it is to study anatomy.
During the training, Hiroki Sato (hereafter Hiro), the SPT instructor, spoke about yielding to the Blueprint once you have downloaded it. The Blueprint is the healthy information the body needs. The secret to succeeding with SPT, he said, lies in one’s understanding of the word healthy. The deeper that understanding grows as a word, the better the sessions become.
The SPT techniques are very simple and anyone can practice them, which makes them easy to work with. But because change occurs in unexpected ways, you can also lose your bearings. What matters, in the end, is how you understand that change and put it into words, because that shapes the sessions that follow. In that sense, it has become clear to me that I will need more anatomical knowledge from here.
Anatomical knowledge also serves to improve one’s capacity to observe.
There is a risk to holding anatomical knowledge, of course. It is something I learned in Phase II of the Rolfing training in Munich as well: the deeper the knowledge, the more one wants to intervene.
As Hiro says, you gain knowledge and still yield to the process. That sense of balance is where sessions succeed, in SPT and in Rolfing alike.
I want to keep returning to the anatomy texts as I deepen what happens in my sessions.
The other thing I have noticed concerns how I use Reiki and SPT differently, and I want to write a little about that too.
Both SPT and Reiki can approach the body without touching it. By Reiki here I mean Jikiden Reiki (see “The Background, and How the West Took It Up“). Having brought both into sessions at the same time, my impression is that each requires awareness while you are using it.
In SPT, holding the awareness of the Blueprint means that in most cases the palm is used as a point. As a result, the whole body begins moving of its own accord on the basis of that awareness, and settles. It comes into its own when you want to restore the balance of the body as a whole. Using SPT feels less like using energy than like yielding.
In Reiki, once you hold the awareness of energy flowing from the crown down to the feet, Reiki comes out of the hands on its own, along with the warmth in the hands that is particular to it. Here you use the whole palm. Rather than addressing the whole body, it comes into its own in treating a specific place once a problem has been located. And using Reiki feels less like yielding than like using energy.
Finally, SPT can also be conveyed to your own body through imagery. Applied to yourself, it is useful not only for stiffness in the shoulders and neck but also for the posture of meditation. What is remarkable is that things settle without your directing attention to the body. SPT can be applied while holding a yoga posture as well, allowing a more clearly differentiated use of the body.
What will I learn through SPT from here? I hope to keep writing about it.
Note, August 2026
The first half of this piece is about realizing, as a result of taking up SPT, how much I needed anatomy. I had started using a method that barely touches the body, and found I needed to know more about what is inside it. The order looks backwards.
The reason is written down too. In SPT, change occurs in unexpected ways, so how you understand that change and put it into words shapes the sessions that follow. Anatomy, in other words, is not needed in order to intervene. It is needed in order to read what has happened.
I later heard the same thing from Hiro. Bob Schrei, one of the founders, also spoke about the importance of anatomy. That the originator of an energy work should value anatomy may seem unexpected. But he is a Certified Advanced Rolfer and a biodynamic craniosacral therapist. This is a system built by someone who has worked on bodies with his hands.
What knowledge is for
The question keeps returning in different forms.
At the supplemental course in 2017, I came to feel it directly: SPT can be done by learning the techniques without knowing anatomy, but knowing anatomy deepens your understanding and awareness in a session. Unnecessary as technique, necessary as understanding.
In the 2025 Advanced Training, it was taken up as a matter of observation. Maitland gives three stages for training the capacity to observe. Let go of self-centered intention and open to the object. Mobilize not only sight but touch, hearing, and interoception, sensing with the whole body. And wait for the change the body shows of its own accord.
Ray McCall said that “seeing with your own eyes” is a misleading phrase — to receive with the whole body is what observing means (see “Journey to Becoming an Advanced Rolfer — A Summary of the Road to Certification“).
Knowledge is not for going out to look. It is for reading what comes in. The line in this piece about how you understand change and put it into words was already pointing that way.
Writing the opposite on the same day
The second half of this piece is about using SPT and Jikiden Reiki differently. Its subject is the difference between the sense of yielding and the sense of using energy.
The first half faces toward acquiring more knowledge. The second faces toward the practitioner doing less. At the time I simply set them side by side as two things I had noticed.
Ten years later, the two fit inside one framework: Intention and Intentionality. You hold clear intentions while staying unattached to the outcome and remaining with the process. Knowing, and yielding. It was never a matter of choosing one.
Then again, the answer is in this piece already. Gain knowledge and still yield to the process; that sense of balance is where sessions succeed. I wrote it down as something Hiro had said. It took ten years to become my own.