Friday, April 12, 2019. I went to Osaka to take the upper limb course (April 13–14) that Hiroki Sato — everyone calls him Hiro — runs at TEN the space for your Life & Body. IMAC here stands for Center of Integrative Movement Assessment.
As with the lower limb course last month (“IMAC (6) — The Lower Limb: Where Anatomy Meets the Meridians, and What Range of Motion Reveals“), I flew out and took the train back.
The cherry blossoms were at their peak. Seeing the evening blossoms at the Mint’s cherry blossom walk for the first time in twenty-five years was one gain, and there was plenty to learn in the upper limb course as well.
This was my seventh time at IMAC. The last upper limb course had been three years earlier, on March 26 and 27, 2016 (“IMAC (2) — The Upper Limb“).
Rolfing sessions put weight on sensation. My first year or two went into reproducing the methods and the technique, and into acquiring that sense.
Meanwhile, to move efficiently, knowledge including the anatomy for assessing change in the body is also needed. The basic Rolfing training offers little opportunity to study anatomy that deeply, and I had felt I would need to learn it somewhere.
I had taken on IMAC six months to a year after opening my practice, but I had too few sessions behind me and none of it was going in, so I stopped taking IMAC for a while and concentrated on accumulating session experience.
As described in last month’s lower limb course, I met Masamichi Abe, an acupuncturist at Kazenone Clinic, at the visceral course.
IMAC had also evolved and become clearer, and I found Abe’s thinking on the meridians interesting, so I began studying the relationship between East Asian Medicine, fascia, and Rolfing.
From April 2019 I was taking IMAC while also attending a course in East Asian Medicine that Abe teaches.
In this upper limb course, we learned methods for assessing the connections of the upper limb in meridian terms: the front-side connections (Lung, Pericardium, Heart) and the back-side connections (Large Intestine, Triple Burner, Small Intestine).
For reference, in the lower limb one learns the superficial connections (Stomach, Gallbladder, Bladder) and the deep connections (Liver, Spleen, Kidney). Together these make the twelve meridians.
The point is this: if the body can find the right balance, it organizes itself.
By bringing the meridians into order, the body becomes able to find that balance.
Taking range of motion in the upper limb is easier to follow than in the lower limb, since fewer parts of the body are involved. Because it can be seen at once, there is a real chance of seeing how the related organs are affected, and whether there is genuinely a problem. I am looking forward to it.
In fact, the lower limb and the upper limb each on their own left me feeling the body organize.
There was a month between the lower and upper limb courses, and in the sessions I gave during it I could feel Rolfing sessions moving faster.
What is interesting about East Asian Medicine is that it holds emotions to reside in the organs. Liver and gallbladder with anger; lung and large intestine with grief and sorrow; kidney and bladder with fright and fear.
Whether these really are connected to the meridians — if that can be told by taking a range of motion, it becomes easier to explain things to clients in a Rolfing session.
As it happens, many people make a decision about their lives after finishing the Rolfing Ten Series.
Which suggests: when the liver-gallbladder and kidney-bladder meridians come into order, fear recedes, and decisions become easier to make.
Dietary guidance too, if it takes the associated five tastes into account, may well make the effect of Rolfing last longer.
Going forward, what I want to watch is: first, whether the organs associated with the meridians come into order; and second, whether the controlling and generating relationships described in East Asian Medicine hold. According to Abe, he tested the second this time and the relationships do hold, so it looks as though priorities can be set.
Hiro also introduced simple methods he has been working on lately for settling the autonomic nervous system and the pericardial membrane, and ways of addressing the junctions of the upper and lower limbs. If you are interested, I can show you in a session — please get in touch.
Note, September 2026
The twelve meridians come together in this course. Six for the lower limb, and now six for the upper.
And one thing written here is different in kind from what came before.
In East Asian Medicine, emotions are held to reside in the organs. Liver and gallbladder with anger, lung and large intestine with grief and sorrow, kidney and bladder with fright and fear. After being given that account, the article says this.
Many people make a decision about their lives after finishing the Rolfing Ten Series. Which suggests that when the liver-gallbladder and kidney-bladder meridians come into order, fear recedes and decisions become easier.
The observation came first. People finish ten sessions and make a decision. That had been visible long before I knew anything about meridians. Four years into practice, session after session, it had happened again and again.
To be exact, the correspondence between organs and emotions had reached me once already, six years earlier. In 2013, at Sarah Powers’s yin yoga workshop, I was taught that the kidneys and bladder go with fear and with wisdom, the liver and gallbladder with anger and with compassion. I must have heard it. But it had not connected with the fact that people make a decision after finishing ten sessions.
Between knowing something and what is happening in front of you, an interval is needed.
The explanation was brought to it afterward.
It is just as well the order was not reversed. Had I learned the meridians first and then watched, expecting that kind of change, what I saw would have been different. What I had been seeing came first, and the words for it came later.
And the sentence says it suggests. It does not assert.
In the note on the previous course I wrote that not deciding in advance had made the difference. That was about the time before receiving something. Here it is after receiving it — trying to fit it to my own observations, and still not deciding.
Holding something without settling it. That is what was being done in this period.
The article goes on: what I want to watch from here is whether the organs associated with the meridians come into order, and whether the controlling and generating relationships hold. Items to be checked, set out in advance.
The framework of verification received in the previous course has turned toward East Asian Medicine as well. What was taken up in order to assess Rolfing technique has become, this time, a means of testing the very system just taken up.
Not in order to believe it, but in order to check.