Monday, October 12, 2020. Osaka was clear, the air was clean, and the weather was fine.
It was my eighth day in Osaka, and the last day of the training.
I have written about the earlier days of Module 3: the first day (see “The First Day: Not Intervening, What Meditation and SPT Share, and the Relation to Shamanism“), the third (see “After Three Days: How Trauma Is Handled Within Energy Work, and Why Intent Matters“), the fourth (see “The Fourth Day: How the Class Proceeds, and Karma as Volitional Action“), and the fifth (see “The Fifth Day: Approaching the Emotional Level, and Working at a Distance“).
What stood out on this day was, above all, the awareness session with Donna Thomson (hereafter Donna). It was a good chance to hear, among other things, how Source Point Therapy (SPT) came into being.
Awareness means noticing.
According to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, awareness is the ability to notice something using your senses.
In SPT, awareness is understood as something that lies ahead of the five senses and is formed through experience.
Over fifteen years of practicing Zen meditation, Donna came to be able to access another dimension of awareness. The state she enters through meditation, with her eyes closed, came to be called an awareness session.
Donna described it not as something she does because she wants to, but as something she came to be able to do of necessity. She was also emphatic that it is quite different from psychic reading, or channeling.
Broadly, an awareness session is said to yield a wisdom through which each person can receive information that supports them in their own existence. That is not something you can grasp without experiencing it.
SPT was born out of the awareness sessions.
In 1986, Bob, then working as a Rolfer, had a client he was finding hard to help. In the course of an awareness session, he asked what would help this client improve.
The answer, remarkably, was to work on the right side, outward along a line from the navel.
He then approached that single spot on the right side, patiently, for about two years. That alone seems remarkable to me.
It worked for some people, but some clients reported that balance was hard to come by.
So, two years later, he asked again in an awareness session. This time one point after another was found, and in time it was built into the system that is SPT. In fact, the curriculum is arranged in the order in which the points appeared in the awareness sessions.
For the meditation on the last day, Donna introduced a method called awareness of awareness, guiding us in a meditation in which you observe the five senses from outside. That prepared us for her awareness session.
The day before, gathered around Hiro, we had drawn up the questions to put to Donna and sent them in advance.
The awareness session ran about an hour. How SPT came into being, and with what feeling the founders built it — it was a session in which Donna’s love came through, and it passed in no time.
We had been working with trauma, karma, and emotion. More than those words, though, the message I came away with was a consistent one: what matters in life is choice, and one’s fate is not decided in advance but can be changed as you go.
Because of the time difference, the certificates were handed out at this point, and we took photographs with Bob and Donna through the computer screen. Here we said goodbye to the two of them.
Then came the lunch break. Having more or less finished learning the techniques SPT calls for, and with time to spare that day, I went out to Doshomachi over lunch.
Doshomachi is where the pharmaceutical companies are concentrated — the head offices of Takeda, Ono, Dainippon Sumitomo and others. And it turns out there is also a shrine there dedicated to medicine.
I had been to Kitahama in Osaka many times, but this was the first I had heard of the shrine, so I paid a visit.
It brought back the person I had been when I worked at a pharmaceutical company.
In the practice session we did exchange sessions holding a Source Point for about fifteen minutes, and with that the training came to a close. At the end, gathered around Hiro, each of us shared our experience of the six days.
What I found interesting was Hiro’s own experience.
How did he come to SPT? When he received a session, he had a sense of being more settled than he had after Rolfing. That led him to learn it.
At the outset he learned not from Bob and Donna but from Bob and the Rolfer Ray McCall. Because SPT had spread through the Rolfing community, his attention went to the differences between Rolfing and SPT, and the content of the training was hard to follow.
On top of that, he did not know how to render the words and terms that come up in energy work into Japanese, so he brought SPT into his sessions while working through related books.
As he communicated with Bob over time, it became clear that the work had been made through Donna’s awareness sessions and Bob’s practice. That led to inviting them to Japan, and to where things stand now.
Hearing the historical background from Hiro, what comes up is simple gratitude that he brought such fine energy work to Japan.
Now that I have taken Module 3, I hope to hold on to that feeling and to help as many people as possible move in a good direction for their health.
With the last day’s schedule complete, I flew home from Itami to Haneda without trouble. The tiredness came over me all at once at the end, but it had been a full six days.
Through a difficult time in the pandemic, Hiro stayed in close contact with Bob and Donna and handled both the organizing and the interpreting. And it was Akinori Ito who introduced me to this work. To both of them I want to express my thanks again.
Note, August 2026
This piece records how SPT came into being, in Donna’s own words. The origin was disclosed on the last day of the six.
One spot, for about two years
In 1986, Bob, then working as a Rolfer, had a client he was finding hard to help. In an awareness session he asked what would help. The answer was to work on the right side, outward along a line from the navel.
What follows is the long part. Bob approached that single spot for about two years. It worked for some people; for others, balance was hard to come by. When he asked again two years on, one point after another began to appear.
And the piece records one more thing: the curriculum is arranged in the order in which the points appeared in the awareness sessions.
The order of teaching preserves the order of discovery
That last point makes this system unusual, I think.
The Rolfing Ten Series is a sequence assembled after the fact. There are reasons for what is done in what order, and those reasons are explained as the logic of the body. After the split in 1989, the search began for ways of working without that sequence, and in the Advanced Training in 2025, working without a set procedure was the subject itself.
SPT is different. It is laid out in the order things were found. The first thing learned in Module 1 is the Source Point, and that is the single spot found first, in 1986.
So taking this course in order also meant retracing the path of discovery. I did not see it that way at the time. I thought I was learning techniques in sequence.
The route by which it reached Japan
Something else came out in the sharing on the last day.
Hiro first learned SPT not from Bob and Donna but from Bob and the Rolfer Ray McCall.
Ray McCall is one of the teachers who would go on to teach me in the Advanced Training in 2025 (see “Journey to Becoming an Advanced Rolfer — A Summary of the Road to Certification“). He is also someone who taught SPT with Bob over many years.
I met SPT in Osaka in 2015, learned from the founders directly in 2020, and in 2025 studied Rolfing with the person who stood upstream of the route by which it had reached Japan. At the time I wrote this piece, I did not know who Ray McCall was.
The work of putting it into Japanese
There is a further particular in Hiro’s experience.
At first, his attention went to the differences between Rolfing and SPT, and the content of the training was hard to follow. And he did not know how to render the words and terms of energy work into Japanese, so he brought SPT into his sessions while working through related books.
The person receiving it came to understand it by translating it. Across these six days, Hiro was the interpreter. He was teaching and translating at the same time.
I would later have the experience of learning while interpreting, in a different course. Where I could not translate was where I had not understood.
The day I walked through the street of my old trade
Over the lunch break on the last day, I went out to Doshomachi. In a district where Takeda, Ono, Dainippon Sumitomo and others have their head offices, I learned there was a shrine dedicated to medicine, and paid a visit. And it brought back the person I had been when I worked at a pharmaceutical company.
On the day I completed the basic training in an energy work, I walked through the street of pharmaceuticals. I had been to Kitahama many times, and this was the first time I knew the shrine was there.
On the first day of this course I had brought in neuroscience and the history of pharmaceuticals, by way of Michael Pollan. On the last day I walked through the old street. The same thing sits at both ends of the six days.
At the time, I wrote only that I had time to spare, so I stopped by.