Saturday, December 19, 2020. With the Go To Travel campaign suspended under the pandemic, I flew out of Haneda at 6:20 and into Itami at 7:30 for my last trip to Osaka of the year.
The purpose was to study IMAC (Integrative Movement Assessment & Conditioning), one of the methods developed by Hiroki Sato — everyone calls him Hiro — the Rolfer who runs TEN ~the space for your Life & Body~.
I completed the basic Rolfing training in Munich in March 2015, and over the two years of offering sessions that followed, various problems came into view.
There was a great deal I learned and deepened in the Rolfing training, but what I learned most was sensation and the balance of the body. Rolfing is a bodywork of Western origin, so one might expect science, anatomy included, to be given weight — and yet, throughout the training, we were told to treat anatomy textbooks as reference only.
Probably because looking too closely there means seeing a person as a machine and missing other important signals.
After two years of accumulating sessions, deepening my knowledge of anatomy and physiology made it clearer how to assess the state of the whole body rather than approaching it blindly, and I noticed that fewer things were slipping past me in the work.
I received the Rolfing Ten Series between December 2013 and March 2014. The Rolfer was Akinori Ito. Hiro, Ito’s teacher, has a background as an athletic trainer and a wide store of knowledge about the body, and I met him in Osaka for the first time in May 2015, after finishing the basic Rolfing training.
I had several chances to take the trainings Hiro runs after that (the introductory course, the upper limb, and the lower limb, between December 2015 and April 2016), but although I understood physiology and cell biology, anatomy was another world entirely. For about three years after qualifying as a Rolfer, taking Hiro’s trainings, none of it went in at all. I stopped taking them for a while after the lower limb course in April 2016.
When I took the visceral course, one of IMAC’s Advanced Courses, in 2018, changes in the body began going in from the perspective of anatomy. That became the occasion for taking the Basic Courses in 2019 and the Advanced Courses in 2020.
IMAC is set up so that it can be studied in two stages, Basic and Advanced.
The Basic courses cover overall assessment (EROM) and the fundamentals centered on the limbs and the musculoskeletal system (upper limb, lower limb). The Advanced courses move on to more practical content (spine and viscera, head and neck) and finer manual work.
Complete the three Basic courses (EROM, upper limb, lower limb) and the two Advanced ones (spine and viscera, head and neck), and you can at last join the final integration class.
That is what I took this time. Twelve of us who had taken all five IMAC classes (more than half were repeating) came together for a full review of what we had learned and a chance to deepen the manual work.
What makes IMAC interesting is that it looks at East Asian thought and medicine from Western science — anatomy and physiology.
The key is range of motion in the musculoskeletal system. Assessing it makes it possible to grasp the state of the meridians and the organs as understood in East Asian Medicine. Beyond assessing before and after in Rolfing or Source Point work, you can also examine the influence of glasses and mobile phones. I found that prism glasses were affecting me.
Western medicine is built on the premise that as you gather more and more people, you approach the mean. (This is mathematically demonstrated, which is presumably why the thinking runs that way.)
Judging whether a body is normal or abnormal by blood tests, and the way drugs are prescribed and dosed, work the same way.
The view is of how far from the mean something falls.
The premise is that every body is the same.
In fact, there is more that cannot be explained without taking each person’s constitution and differences as the starting point.
Genes inherited from one’s parents, the environment one grew up in, diet, what medications one has taken — all of it changes things.
Which is why work suited to each individual becomes necessary.
How, then, do you assess a body in order to see what makes each person different?
Assessing the connections of the twenty meridians of East Asian Medicine — the eight extraordinary vessels and the twelve primary meridians — through musculoskeletal range of motion, using the IMAC method, gives a deep understanding of the state of the body.
What is interesting about the IMAC Hiro offers is that it looks at East Asian Medicine from Western anatomy and physiology, and it is remarkable that the wisdom of East Asia — the chakras, the eight extraordinary vessels, the twelve primary meridians — can be spoken about in the shared language of science.
In the end, working with the meridians so that all twenty are open sorts out the traffic within the body, and a clearing-out proceeds.
Mind and body are connected, as they say.
In IMAC, to improve range of motion, methods such as the generating relationships of East Asian Medicine and placing magnets on the relevant points are used, and what is interesting is that things release without any strong work on the fascia.
The result hoped for is that the body finds its own answer and heals of itself.
The integration class was one of deepening what I already knew, but there were discoveries:
- The eight extraordinary vessels are deeply involved in the embryology of the passage from fetus to newborn, particularly in the formation of the body’s midline. Working with the eight vessels before working with the twelve meridians makes improvement in the body proceed faster.
- Learning technique and theory leaves you at the mercy of that knowledge; what matters is being neutral. How do I become neutral, and give the other person an opening to resolve things themselves?
- An unexpected relationship between the chakras and the twenty meridians. Bringing the twenty meridians into order has a good effect on the mind and the balance of the body, increasing judgment and the capacity to act.
From the standpoint of bodywork and nutritional biochemistry, I take it that the body’s own healing capacity rises, so it would be interesting to use the IMAC method of assessment to look into how supplements — vitamins, minerals — affect the body, from next year onward.
Over these five years, what I learned from Hiro is that two things matter: a sound method of assessment (theory), and the capacity to observe. From next year I want to make sharpening observation, rather than technique, my aim in offering Rolfing sessions.
If you would like to know the state of your health through the meridians, or to bring your body into better order, please come to Ebisu.
Series
- IMAC (1) — The Introductory Course: Assessing the Body Through Range of Motion and Anatomy
- IMAC (2) — The Upper Limb: In What Order Do You Take Range of Motion, Test, and Work with Fascia?
- IMAC (3) — The Lower Limb: Not Loosening What Is Tight, but Finding Where Information Is Not Reaching
- IMAC (4) — The Viscera and the Muscles: How Does Muscular Function Affect the Organs?
- IMAC (5) — EROM: Learning How to Assess Range of Motion from the Ground Up
- IMAC (6) — The Lower Limb: Where Anatomy Meets the Meridians, and What Range of Motion Reveals
- IMAC (7) — The Upper Limb: Range of Motion and the Meridians — Reading the Organs and the Autonomic Nervous System
- IMAC (8) — The Spine and the Viscera: Learning to See Them Through Embryology
- IMAC (9) — The Head and Neck: Working with the Body Through the Meridians of the Head and Neck
Note, September 2026
This is the course that completed the whole sequence, five years on. From the introductory course in December 2015 to the integration class in December 2020, with two and a half years away in between and the Basic courses taken twice.
The twenty meridians come together here — the eight extraordinary vessels and the twelve primary meridians.
And there is a passage in this article about Western medicine. That it is built on the premise that as you gather more people you approach the mean; that blood tests and drug dosing look at how far from the mean something falls; that the premise is that every body is the same.
I would not write it that way now.
Statistics is a way of thinking by building models. It works out what can be said about a population. In doing so, the differences between individuals are handled as variance. Moving away from the individual is not a defect in the model; it is the condition under which a model is a model at all.
That was exactly what I had worked with. Nine years of medical research at graduate school, eleven years in medical marketing at a pharmaceutical company. How efficacy is demonstrated, how a study is designed to demonstrate it — I had watched all of that from the inside. The work was building what could be said about a population.
So I must have known what statistics was doing. And yet I wrote “the premise is that every body is the same.”
Where that phrasing came from became clear later.
In September 2015, at Motoko Saito’s series of classes on pranayama, I heard about the difference between Western and East Asian medicine. Western medicine diagnoses in the order of question, analysis, inference. East Asian medicine meets medicine through acceptance, observation, experience. Western medicine takes what is common to the majority as normal, and uses the mean. East Asian medicine has to judge what is normal for each person.
That was three months before I took the introductory IMAC course. And the person who introduced me to Saito was Hiro.
What I wrote in this article five years later was not a framework I had thought out. I was using what had been handed to me, as it was.
But the form I received it in and the form I wrote it in five years later are slightly different. What Saito said was that Western medicine uses the mean. This article carries that as far as “the premise is that every body is the same.” A point about the instrument in use has slid into a point about a premise.
Words get received and used, and the shape shifts a little at a time. That is what happened, I think.
Accumulate sessions and you find that the same sequence, the same places touched, brings back something different from person to person. From the same person, different on different days. What can be said about a population and what happens in the one person in front of you sit on different levels.
That does not mean the model is wrong. The model was built to explain a population; it was not built to explain the person in front of you. Both are needed — that is all it was.
It took six years to be able to write that.
The same holds for the East Asian side. This article says it is remarkable that the wisdom of East Asia can be spoken about in the language of science. Take a range of motion and the state of a meridian becomes visible. That surprise went straight onto the page.
Now I can see that being visible and being effective are two different things. That a range of motion changes can be observed. What brought the change about is another question.
In the note on the spine and viscera course the month before, I wrote that I had come to think there was something to the physical view, knowing it to be the minority position. That caution does not show in this article. I was still taking the measure of something newly acquired, I think.
There is one more thing. This article says the result hoped for is that the body finds its own answer and heals of itself.
Now I would write that the body moves in the direction of organizing itself. Organizing and healing are different things, and the second cannot be promised.
Still, I do not think what I wrote was wrong in substance. There were genuinely occasions when range of motion improved, and things did release without strong work on the fascia. What I was seeing was real; the words for it had not caught up.
And this is not only a matter of limits on the Western side.
East Asian Medicine has a limit of its own: it is weak in modeling and in logic. Which makes it hard to put into words when explaining to people at large. Those who understand it understand; those who do not are not reached. The wisdom I called remarkable cannot, as it stands, be handed to anyone else.
That is what Hiro is doing, I think. With range of motion — something anyone can take and take the same way — he has made a phenomenon as hard to grasp as a meridian into something that can be assessed. He is covering what is weak on the East Asian side with a Western instrument.
A model that explains a population, and an eye for the person in front of you. Not one or the other; only with both can you face that person.
At the end of this article I wrote that from the following year I wanted to make sharpening observation, rather than technique, my aim.
That direction has held.