Saturday, November 17, 2018. An early flight from Haneda to Itami, and on to Osaka.
The destination was TEN ~the space for your Life & Body~.
I took part in a two-day training run by Hiroki Sato — everyone calls him Hiro — who is a senior colleague of Akinori Ito, the Rolfer from whom I received my own Ten Series.
The training is called IMAC.
I was certified as a Rolfer on March 25, 2015, and opened a practice within walking distance of Shibuya Station on June 1 of the same year.
From December of that year through April 2016 I took IMAC — the introductory course, the upper limb, and the lower limb — but for the following reasons I found that what I learned was not taking hold:
- My experience with hands-on bodywork was shallow, and I had not yet got hold of the feel of it.
- My foundational knowledge of anatomy was insufficient.
- I had too few sessions behind me to know how to apply any of it.
So I concentrated instead on bringing what I had learned in the basic Rolfing training into my sessions.
In October 2018, having reached my hundredth client to complete the Ten Series, I began to see the problems in what I was offering.
For instance:
- 1) I had been working by feel, but seen from the muscles and the skeleton, what exactly was changing? And how does one assess movement?
- 2) Many clients have trouble in the trunk or the viscera. Seen from the muscles and the skeleton, how should that be approached?
- 3) Many clients are in pain. How can a session be offered that reduces it?
On the first.
In bodywork, feel matters, but if what is happening can be put into words, there is a chance of reproducing it. The vocabulary of anatomy helps in that putting into words. Athletic trainers, physiotherapists, and others who work with the body know their anatomy well; in my case, biochemistry and molecular biology are my strengths and anatomy is not. Now that accumulated experience with Rolfing sessions has deepened my understanding, I have the sense that if I had a few more tools for assessing my own sessions, their quality would rise.
On the second.
Experience has shown me that when Rolfing works with the trunk and the viscera, posture shifts and the body organizes. How food taken into the body is digested and absorbed is something I can follow through biochemistry, but connecting that to Rolfing requires understanding the relationship between muscles and organs.
On the third.
When I trained in Munich (“Becoming a Certified Rolfer in Europe — The Certification Training of the European Rolfing Association“), the approach to the fascia was strong, and pain often came with it. It does produce results — but this year again the pain was severe enough that some clients stopped partway through the Ten Series, and I began looking for technique that produced results without pain.
That is why I took the IMAC class on manual approaches to the viscera.
Over two days I learned the relationship between the viscera and the musculoskeletal system, and above all a method of assessment: how to read the state of the organs from the movement of muscles.
What I noticed:
- When the whole body is brought into balance, the body’s physiological functions work properly — a sense of the healing capacity, of the autonomic nervous system organizing, of the breath deepening.
- As a result, joints move, restrictions in range of motion decrease, and muscular output recovers.
- Embryology helps in understanding balance. Knowing how the body comes together from conception to birth, and how the organs form, makes it easier to grasp.
- As the body organizes, thinking clears, and it becomes easier to understand what is influencing it — electromagnetic fields, stress, trauma.
- It looks possible to acquire technique that produces results without pain.
In fact, most people are out of balance because of stress on the body.
Where in the body the balance breaks down can be followed by feel, but since different muscles work with different joint movements, looking at range of motion shows which muscle is restricted.
From there, approaching the side opposite the restricted muscle and applying a fine, painless load by hand produces results in a short time. I felt that directly.
In the Rolfing and osteopathic technique taught abroad, releasing the viscera involves a certain amount of load, and pain with it. But when you know from fetal embryology how the organs come together, you can follow that movement in your approach — and results come without pain.
Similarly, when the iliotibial band is tight, the large intestine; when the sternum is tight, the pylorus. The relationships between muscles and organs become clear when looked up against the Chapman’s reflex points.
Two days with a great deal to notice, and now I am looking forward to working out how to bring it into my sessions.
Accommodation was extremely expensive (an APA Hotel at 27,000 yen a night), and the hotel I had booked through Booking.com told me on the day that it had ceased operating. I wondered how it would turn out, but the two days in Osaka were genuinely worth coming for.
I had originally planned to take Module 3 of Source Point Therapy, and it was cancelled. IMAC was what I took instead. Grateful for that coincidence, I hope to bring at least some of what IMAC offers into my sessions over the new year.
Note, September 2026
As the reasons for returning, this article sets out three questions. I had been working by feel, but seen from the muscles and the skeleton, what was changing? How should clients with trouble in the trunk or the viscera be approached? How can pain be reduced for those who are in it?
An aside: these three came after seeing a hundred people. One month before returning, on October 11, 2018, the hundredth client completed the Ten Series. The number has an origin. In 2009, studying coaching with CTI, I was advised to coach a hundred people. Nine years later, I arrived there in a different form.
Reaching a hundred gave me confidence in my hands. It was the moment I was made to see how much experience matters.
And the third reason for the interruption reads: I had too few sessions behind me to know how to apply any of it. What was missing in 2016 had been filled in here.
Back to the reasons for returning. Only the third came from outside me.
The article says this. In Munich the approach to the fascia was strong, and pain often came with it. It does produce results. But this year again the pain was severe enough that some clients stopped partway through the Ten Series.
What set the return in motion was not a matter of my own learning. It was that people receiving the work had stopped.
What I took from those two days was a method: approach the side opposite the restricted muscle, and apply a fine, painless load by hand. And another — that knowing from fetal embryology how the organs come together lets you follow that movement as you touch, and results come without pain.
Six and a half years later, in the Advanced Training, I would hear the same thing told as history. When Ida Rolf developed the technique, applying physical pressure to the fascia organized the body efficiently. But it came with pain. In the 1980s, biodynamic craniosacral work from osteopathy was taken in, and with light touch and proper presence, sessions could be effective without physical pressure being applied.
What I received in Osaka in 2018 was a part of that turn. Without knowing its name or its history, I was heading there for one reason: the client in front of me had stopped.
Through the two and a half years away from IMAC, pain was still being followed. But it faced the other way.
I took the lower limb course in April 2016 and left at that point. At the end of August that year, in London, I had a mentoring session with Keith Graham. What I brought was a question about the strain on my hands. Enter through the nervous system and the fascia becomes easier, he said — and from the following month I was studying pain and the nervous system in Jonathan Martine’s workshop.
The pain then was the pain in my own hands.
What brought me back in 2018 was the other person’s pain. The fact that someone receiving the work had stopped partway.
Something called by the same word had turned around over two and a half years. From a question about whether my own body would hold up, to a question about what I was doing to someone else’s. What I had left was IMAC. The subject of pain had been in my hands the whole time.