On May 26 and 27, 2015, I traveled to Kyoto and Osaka. I had two purposes. One was to see a friend living in Osaka. The other was to receive a session from Hiroki Sato, a Rolfer who runs TEN — the space for your Life & Body in Osaka.
He is also the person who set Akinori Ito — the Rolfer who first worked on me, then at Relief Space and now at The Circle — on the path toward certification. Counting the session and the time around it, we spent close to three and a half hours together, and we were able to exchange a great deal of information.
Hiro’s treatment room, TEN, was spacious. It had an area for giving talks, a second table available for rent, and bookshelves. It was the kind of space that made me hope I might one day have a studio like it. The room itself also felt like it held good energy.
I arrived at TEN at noon, and we went straight out for lunch and talked for about an hour. As I listened, I found myself wanting to receive Source Point Therapy, a form of work that grew out of Rolfing. I ended up receiving a session of close to ninety minutes. What follows is an account of that experience.
This was not the first time I had received Source Point Therapy. Before I began the Rolfing training, after completing a ten-series with Akinori, I received it once (on that session, see “After Completing the Ten Sessions“).
At the time, what interested me was not the result of the session but the fact that the work was done with almost no touch. I later spent five months in Munich taking the Rolfing training while traveling around the world (on that period, see “Returning to Japan — Looking Back on the Training and Thinking About What Comes Next“), and my understanding had probably deepened in the meantime.
The session I received from Hiro left a completely different impression from the one with Akinori.
Rolfing is a form of bodywork developed by Ida Rolf. Among the connective tissues that hold the skeleton in place, it focuses on fascia. The work can be described as a process of returning twists in the fascia, and distortions in skeletal position, toward where they belong.
According to Hiro’s website, Source Point Therapy is an energy work developed by Bob Schrei, a Certified Advanced Rolfer, and Donna Thomson, a healer and meditation teacher. It approaches points in the human energy field and connects the body with the information of the Blueprint.
The Blueprint holds not only what is needed for health, but also emotion and energy. For most people, this connection with the body has become blocked somewhere. The practitioner accesses the Blueprint and works toward restoring that blocked connection.
That said, I had only just heard about it, and very little time had passed since. Putting it into words is difficult. It may be quicker to read how I experienced it.
The session began with the same kind of body reading used in Rolfing. Asked what I was noticing, I said that my balance was weighted toward the right and that there was tension on the left side of my neck. During the session, it also became clear that I was holding tension around the abdomen, and that there was an imbalance around the sacrum as well.
I then lay on my back, and Hiro began holding his hands above my body. In Source Point Therapy, accessing the points is understood to give the body the information it needs, so the practitioner gathers information through the hands. What is interesting is that the hands do not touch the body. Apparently more information comes in when there is no contact.
This is what Source Point Therapy calls scanning. There are said to be several kinds of points, and in my case the Diamond Point was used. I had no idea what any of it meant, but as he moved from one area to another, blockages where the flow of energy had stalled were released. Even releasing the blockages was done without touching the body.
Before long, changes began in my body. My legs started moving on their own, one at a time, and my left leg felt as though it lengthened. My sacrum, which had been weighted to the right, felt as though it was moving toward neutral. The other place was my neck. It, too, began moving from side to side on its own.
Hiro had told me to observe carefully without following along, but it was an eerie experience. I could clearly feel the tension releasing in the muscles around my neck. I do not remember all of it, but I believe he also released tension in the fascia of my left thigh and abdomen, and did work that integrated the sacrum and the head.
When I stood and walked at the end, my weight was leaning to the left and something felt off. Although very little had been done to the fascia, I felt as though I had received several Rolfing sessions. It was more than enough to make an impression.
Learning to practice Source Point Therapy involves three stages, as Rolfing does, and can be completed in twelve days in total. Because the method was developed by a Rolfer, it spread historically among Rolfers, but it is open to people who are not Rolfers. And, fortunately, it can be studied in Japan. The training is scheduled to run at Hiro’s TEN from October 2015 through March 2016. I thought it would serve me well in refining my Rolfing work, so I signed up without hesitation.
I will be starting Rolfing sessions before long, and there is a great deal to learn. What kind of work will I be offering clients a year from now? I am looking forward to finding out.
Note, August 2026
I wrote this piece just after being certified as a Rolfer, and just before I began seeing clients. Reading it again, two things stand out: what I could not see at the time, and what I felt but could not put into words.
What I could not see
In this piece I introduce Source Point Therapy as a method that grew out of Rolfing. But at the time I barely knew that a field called energy work existed. In five months of basic training, this side of the work never came up (on the content of that training, see “Becoming a Certified Rolfer in Europe — The Certification Training of the European Rolfing Association“).
This was not accidental. Jeff Maitland, who has been involved in Rolfing education for many years, has said that energetic work and subtle skills should not be taught at the beginning. They belong to the closing stages of training, after clear touch, presence, and a grounded, calm state have been established. Opinion among the faculty has been divided, and the basic training has handled the subject with caution.
Still, the fact that I could not see it does not mean no one was there. Andrea Clusen, who assisted in the final stage of my training in Munich, had been using Source Point Therapy in her practice since 2009. She later became an instructor in ScarWork, Sharon Wheeler’s method.
I would not receive Sharon’s Bone Work until November of the following year, and I would not encounter Source Point Therapy until three months after writing this piece. Someone who held both lineages at once was in the same room with me, before I had met either one.
Then, in 2025, ten years after certification, energy work became a central subject of the Advanced Training. One of the instructors, Ray McCall, had been teaching Source Point Therapy with Bob Schrei since 2007 (see “Journey to Becoming an Advanced Rolfer — A Summary of the Road to Certification“).
One question, two answers
This piece records the order in which the session proceeded. It began with the same body reading used in Rolfing, and I was asked what I was noticing. Then I lay on my back, hands were held above me, scanning was done, and the places where things had stalled were located.
Ten years later, in the Advanced Training, I received Maitland’s three questions. The first is: Where do you start? The answer offered there was that the practitioner holds a perceptual state in which safety and reassurance can be felt. In other words, a way of being.
Source Point Therapy has its own answer to the same question. Ray McCall has said that scanning a client’s energy field by hand reveals not only where the primary blockage sits, but where the client’s body is asking you to begin. Honoring that starting point makes the session more consistently effective.
One question, two answers side by side. One locates the answer in the practitioner’s state; the other, in reading the field. The ninety minutes recorded here happen to contain both, one after the other. The body reading was Rolfing’s way of asking the question; the scanning was Source Point Therapy’s way of answering it. At the time, I saw them only as things that happened in sequence.
What I could not put into words
This piece says outright that putting the experience into words is difficult. I described my body moving on its own as eerie. I did not yet have the language to describe energy work.
Writing without the words for it runs through the records of this period. The Rolfing training had no textbook. So I had to write my own, and the columns eventually numbered more than a hundred. What could not be taught was what drove the writing.
One word does appear, though, and it stayed. I wrote that my sacrum, weighted to the right, felt as though it was moving toward neutral. The word itself was already in my hands. It came from the coaching training I took in 2009, and I had used it during the Rolfing training as well, in the form of keeping the mind neutral.
Until then it had referred to my own mental state as I approached a session. Here it refers to something happening in my body as the person receiving. The same word had moved from the mind to the body.
In July of that same year, after studying Jikiden Reiki, I used the word again — writing that I had become able to stay neutral without effort. This time it was back on the practitioner’s side. And in the 2025 Advanced Training, neutral was treated as a central theme: shaping the hand, sensing the space behind you, connecting with the Hara.
All of them are ways of placing the body. It was described as a state of continuously finding the balance between limitation and possibility (see “How to cultivate ‘Neutrality’“).
I received the word as a state of mind, experienced it as a sensation in the body, and had it handed back to me ten years later as a way of placing the body. The word came first, and what it held kept changing.
At the time I wrote this piece, I had not yet given a single session. From here, 380 of them would follow.