January 27, 2019. Hiroki Sato — everyone calls him Hiro — came up from Osaka to teach the foundational IMAC course, EROM, at Denenchofu Athletic Plus in Tokyo, and I took the one-day seminar.
This was my fifth time at IMAC, the first since the visceral course last November (“IMAC (4) — The Viscera and the Muscles: How Does Muscular Function Affect the Organs?“).
I first came across IMAC just after starting out as a Rolfer. I wanted to know how Hiro thought about things, in order to understand anatomy.
It turned out to have been too early, though it did help me see where I actually stood.
IMAC introduces not only anatomy but MAT (Muscle Activation Techniques), muscle testing, and more — excellent material. Unfortunately, at the time I had few sessions behind me and no capacity to take in what was being offered, and I could not turn any of it into practice: how do I make this useful for the person in front of me?
So after the introductory course and the upper and lower limb courses (“The Introductory Course,” “The Upper Limb,” and “The Lower Limb“), I gave up taking any more, in order to concentrate on making the technique I had learned in the basic Rolfing training my own.
Three and a half years of offering sessions.
Gradually the problems in my own work came into view.
What matters is verification.
When something is not working, how do I improve it?
I had felt things not working, more than once. For that, what is felt in the body has to be thought through with the left brain and put into words. Then verified, and prepared so it can be reproduced. That is the direction I began working in.
That said — how do you put sensation into words, in Rolfing? The basic training does not go that far.
So, in order to follow the changes in a session with words, I realized again late last year that I needed anatomy (where things are in the body and what they do) and physiology.
Not memorizing anatomy, but applying it. Using anatomy as a tool for verifying whether a session is working.
While looking for a seminar of that kind, I rediscovered IMAC.
The visceral course happened to be held in Osaka, and last year I took part for the first time in two and a half years. What made it possible was that Module 3 of Source Point Therapy was cancelled, which freed up the fee for IMAC.
What I noticed in that visceral course was that the content had been renewed, and that at this point in my life it would go in.
So I decided to join the IMAC courses being held the following year and learn from the ground up, one step at a time. That led to EROM.
The course was exactly what I had hoped for.
When a person is lying supine, what ways are there to take a range of motion? The relationships between the joints and the muscles involved are shown in diagrams, so it is clear which muscles to learn and easy to follow the changes. Then the relationship between muscles and organs, between muscles and breathing, between muscles and the nervous system. How to look at the balance of the body. That there are several methods of verification within the connections of the whole. A great deal to notice.
Workshops like this usually teach textbook material. What is interesting is that Hiro works from clinical experience, putting into words what he has arrived at in practice. There are not many workshops like that. I did not understand all of it, but I was taught principles, which means I can go on exploring for myself.
In fact, though it was only a one-day workshop, when I got home and tried it out straight away it was working, and I am looking forward to what comes next.
Barring anything unusual, I plan to take every course through to the integration class this year, and I hope that through IMAC I can be of use to as many people as possible in living healthy days.
Note, September 2026
The article describes two kinds of putting-into-words.
One is my own. What is felt in the body has to be thought through with the left brain and put into words; then verified, and prepared so it can be reproduced. It also says that how you put sensation into words, in Rolfing, is not something the basic training goes as far as teaching.
The other is on the side of the person handing it over. Workshops like this usually teach textbook material; what is interesting, the article says, is that Hiro works from clinical experience, putting into words what he has arrived at in practice.
Both sit in the same article: the receiving side’s putting-into-words, and the handing-over side’s.
And the article goes on: I was taught principles, which means I can go on exploring for myself. Procedures have to be memorized; principles let you carry on by yourself.
How much there is in learning from people who can put things into words is something I have felt again and again since.
Takashi Haitani, who created INNOCHI GLASS — eyewear made not to correct vision but to tune the wavelengths entering the eye to each person’s brain — put into words the relationship between how we see and how we stand. Astigmatism induces a twist through the body, and that twist reaches the bite, the rotation of the pelvis, the difference in height between the shoulders.
When the extraocular muscles work, the suboccipital muscles at the back of the neck work with them. Move the eyes too much and the neck tightens; use the neck well and the eyes work better.
It is a domain that looks visible and yet cannot be explained by the person living in it. He divided it into four functions — receiving what is seen, teamwork between the eyes, directing attention, and expressing — and brought each down to something as concrete as play.
Pedro Prado has put the psychobiological side into words. The Brazilian lineage has carried this domain, and what has stayed with me is Prado’s observation that because this classification is difficult, practitioners tend to swing either toward timidity and skepticism or toward uncritical exaggeration. Until now, he said, people have either hidden from the question or spoken about it in extremely loose terms.
And then he added that however skeptical a Rolfer may be, they hold, inwardly, events and observations they could speak about. The answer does not come down from above. The Brazilian association has been accumulating a databank of two thousand cases.
He has put into words, about a domain that resists being spoken of, why it is not spoken of. And he has built a means of gathering the material for speaking about it.
All three take something that ought to be knowable only from inside and turn it into a form that can be handed to someone else. Hiro, clinical sensation as principle. Haitani, how we see as four functions. Prado, the difficulty of speaking as the shape of a problem.
That verification became the subject of this article is, I think, because putting-into-words comes first. What cannot be put into words cannot be verified. Nor can you tell what to change when something has not worked.
Six years later, in the Advanced Training, I would receive the framework of test, intervene, re-test. Check before you do anything, and check again afterward. Before I knew its name, I had received what stands beneath it, here.