For three days, from November 21 to 23, 2015, I traveled to Osaka for training in Source Point Therapy (SPT). It was my first time back since Module 1 last month. This is the second of the three modules. I wrote about Module 1 separately (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“).
Of the fifteen participants in Module 1, thirteen continued to Module 2, and two who had taken Module 1 in March 2015 joined us, so the training began with fifteen. We started with introductions and shared what we had taken from Module 1.
What struck me was the answer to a question about what to do when there is no felt sense of anything happening with SPT. According to Hiroki Sato (hereafter Hiro), using SPT does not necessarily produce a physical change, but change occurs without fail. What do you take as your measure for saying that something has changed? Keeping that in view, he said, is a good way to think about a session.
Before we moved to technique, Hiro gave an hour-long presentation, as he had last time, on what Module 2 covers.
Module 1 had placed its weight on explaining the concept of the Blueprint, drawing on Native American thought, Tibetan medicine, Kabbalah, and physics. The techniques introduced there — the Diamond Point, Navel Point, Sacral Point, blockage point, and Entry Point — centered on how to access the Blueprint.
Module 2 centers on ordering the body through more concrete techniques, building on the connection to the Blueprint learned in Module 1. There was footage of a mosque and quotations from a quantum physicist and from osteopathy, but as in Module 1, the classroom portion did not quite land.
One thing did interest me. In explaining the Guardian Point, used to bring the body into balance, Hiro reached for an analogy from molecular biology: chaperones. A protein synthesized inside a cell can end up in the wrong three-dimensional structure. Since a protein only functions when it takes the right three-dimensional structure, it stops working.
To take the right structure, it needs to fold correctly, and chaperone molecules do that work. Something similar, he said, happens in the body — a function that protects structure — and the Guardian Point assists it. We learn the Guardian Point on the second day, so I am looking forward to it.
After the lunch break, the afternoon covered two techniques involving the sacrum: the Sacral Diamond Point and the Sacral Hold.
We had learned the Sacral Point in Module 1, but the Sacral Diamond Point in Module 2 takes four points around the sacrum, as the Diamond Point does: the right PSIS, the coccyx, the left PSIS, and the third lumbar vertebra, with the hands held above each in turn. The PSIS is the bony prominence at the back of the pelvis.
The Sacral Hold places the hands near the sacrum, or on both the sacrum and the occiput, and serves to integrate the work done in SPT. No awareness of the Blueprint is needed for this one. Since the latter is something we also do in Rolfing, the discovery for me was in the former.
The Sacral Diamond Point, I was told, produces work similar to Rolfing session six, which addresses the sacrum. Since it may also help with lower back pain, I would like to try it with clients whose back pain resolves during a session only to return after a while.
Finally, something I was glad of on the first day: that Hiro gives feedback on your work directly. To give examples — that being aware there is also space behind you while working lets you see the whole; that scanning in SPT is better done more slowly. For improving my Rolfing work as well, this kind of thing is welcome.
Two days left. Practical techniques are coming, and I want to take them in properly before heading back to Tokyo.
Note, August 2026
Two things from the first day of Module 2 are recorded here: an answer given during questions, and the one analogy in the classroom portion that landed.
What you take as your measure
Someone asked what to do when there is no felt sense of anything happening with SPT. Hiro’s answer was that using SPT does not necessarily produce a physical change, but change occurs without fail, and that it is worth thinking about a session while keeping in view what you take as your measure for saying something has changed.
At the time I wrote it down and thought no further about it.
Ten years later, in the Advanced Training, I learned Test, Intervene, Re-test as the sequence for verifying integration. Observe, make the minimum necessary intervention, observe again. And what you look for then is not whether a change occurred. It is whether the client’s own self-regulation has begun (see “Journey to Becoming an Advanced Rolfer — A Summary of the Road to Certification“).
The object of attention is different. Not what the practitioner did, and not whether a visible change appeared, but whether something has started moving on the other person’s side.
Hiro’s answer pointed at the step before that. There is more than one possible measure, so decide where you are placing yours. The complaint of feeling nothing usually comes from having placed it on physical change alone.
The analogy from proteins
Of the classroom portion that day, I wrote that almost none of it landed — not the mosque, not the quantum physicist, not osteopathy.
One thing did: the chaperone analogy used to explain the Guardian Point. A protein made inside a cell functions only once it has folded correctly, and chaperone molecules assist that folding. Something similar happens in the body, and the Guardian Point assists it.
I took my doctorate in molecular cell biology and spent years afterward on the research side of medicine. This was vocabulary I had used for close to a decade.
The same thing happened ten years later. In the 2025 Advanced Training, Hiroyoshi Tahata explained the principle of Yield work through anchoring in molecular cell biology: as an adherent cell settles onto its substrate, the client yields to the contact surface of the table. Only once a stable foundation forms does inner change occur of its own accord.
Energy work is the domain within Rolfing that took longest to put into language. For me, on both occasions, it arrived as something happening inside a cell.
I had thought I left my earlier profession behind when I came to bodywork. As it turns out, the old vocabulary was the way in.