For three days, from October 10 to 12, 2015, I am staying in Osaka for training in Source Point Therapy (SPT). Today was the second day. I wrote about the first separately (see “Learning the Blueprint: The Information Needed for a Human Being to Take Human Form“).
The second day opened with a check-in. Chairs were set in a circle and each of us put into words what we had noticed on the first day. Sensing, perhaps, that we were struggling to learn each other’s names, it turned into something like a game: whoever spoke next began by saying the name of the person before them. Faces and names finally matched up.
This is possible because there is a certain amount of time to spare, and it also helps one’s own understanding along.
What matters in SPT training is understanding the idea of the Blueprint. The morning was given over to what the Blueprint is and how one accesses it.
We practice this repeatedly because understanding the Blueprint without words takes very little time, while putting it into words is hard. The clearest formulation to come out of the discussion compared the field to the internet. You search Google for the word healthy, and from the results you download the Blueprint. And once you have downloaded it, what matters is yielding to it.
What interested me was Hiro’s remark about the importance of thinking about the word healthy. The deeper your understanding of wholeness as a word, he said, the better your sessions become. Knowledge matters for that. And yet the deeper the knowledge, the more one wants to intervene — that is human nature. How to gain knowledge and still yield to the process. That, he said, is where SPT succeeds.
There are various ways of accessing the Blueprint: bringing awareness to the Diamond Point, holding a geometric form in mind, and others. Hiro introduced a range of methods, and I think I found one that suits me.
We learned two techniques on the second day. One was scanning, together with how to release what obstructs access to the Blueprint — the blockages. The other was the Rectangle Point.
For the Rectangle Point, you move to the four corners — upper left, lower left, lower right, upper right — place the hands there, and watch how the body changes. The method is the same as the Diamond Point, but the upper left affects the diagonally opposite lower right, and the lower left the upper right.
The Diamond Point, Navel Point, and Sacrum Point learned on the first day share something with the Rectangle Point: while accessing the Blueprint, you yield to the process through the hands.
Scanning is different. While accessing the Blueprint, you place both hands to release what obstructs it, and a small element of intervention enters. It was the hardest technique in SPT. Even so, and strangely, when you pass your hands slowly over the whole body, the obstructed places make themselves known.
There is a history to how they are found. When Hiro learned SPT eight years ago, part of it involved deciding intuitively while scanning. It was later understood that yielding to intuition lets bias in, that the practitioner’s own intent enters and things stop working, and that approach was dropped. SPT continues to evolve. What matters, then, is not intuition but asking the body as a system where the obstruction is.
With so many points appearing, the techniques can look hard to follow at first. But how much the body moves when you simply hold your hands above it was, honestly, a surprise.
Working with the Sacrum Point, you can release the fascia around the sacroiliac joint — the area addressed in the sixth Rolfing session — without releasing it manually. The Rectangle Point we did on the second day is a technique that will help with sessions eight and nine, where the upper and lower body are integrated. Since the latter is also useful with bodies that are asymmetrical, I am looking forward to working out who it might help.
Jikiden Reiki is another practice that uses the hands in a similar way. Compared with Reiki, I notice a difference in awareness. In SPT you work having connected to the Blueprint. In Reiki, the image is that it flows out from the hands automatically, so no particular awareness is needed during the work.
The difference shows in how the hands are held, too. In SPT, I feel the center of the palm as a point. There is a sense of being pressed against, or of something passing through. With Reiki, I feel the palm being used as a plane. What is interesting is that neither the pressure nor the passing-through is there. Instead, the place grows warm, or starts to tingle.
One day left. The third day is given over to review, and to learning how this can be combined with other methods.
Note, August 2026
Two remarks by Hiro are recorded in this piece. Both point at the same problem: what the practitioner does with what they carry inside themselves.
What to do with knowledge
The first concerns knowledge. The deeper your understanding of wholeness as a word, the better your sessions become; so knowledge matters. And yet the deeper the knowledge, the more one wants to intervene. How to gain knowledge and still yield to the process — that, he said, is where SPT succeeds.
Ten years later, in the Advanced Training, the same tension was handled with different words: Intention and Intentionality.
Intention is grounded in causal thinking and gives priority to the practitioner’s understanding. Intentionality proceeds from the premise that consciousness is always pointing toward something, and takes the relationship with the client itself as the field of change. You hold clear intentions while standing on intentionality. Doing so shifts the work from something linear and developmental to something nonlinear and emergent. Rather than making change happen, you trust that it happens.
Ray McCall went further and named the practitioner’s distance Kind Indifference. You do not get caught up in the client’s experience, and you watch over them with deep interest all the same. Not over-involved, but not indifferent either (see “Journey to Becoming an Advanced Rolfer — A Summary of the Road to Certification“).
What I wrote in October 2015 as a balance between knowledge and yielding was, over ten years, restated as intention and intentionality, and then as a matter of distance.
What to do with intuition
The second concerns intuition. This piece records a change in the method itself. When Hiro learned SPT eight years earlier, part of it involved deciding intuitively while scanning. It was later understood that yielding to intuition lets bias in and the practitioner’s intent with it, and that approach was dropped.
Intuition was removed, and asking the body as a system took its place. Which is to say the work stopped grounding itself in the practitioner’s own inner sense of certainty.
At the same time, on the Rolfing side, I was being told the opposite. Jörg Ahrend-Löns, who taught Phase III, emphasized intuition alongside the idea of Less is More.
And ten years later, in the Advanced Training, Maitland’s three stages for training observation were laid out: let go of self-centered intention and open to the object; mobilize not only sight but touch, hearing, and interoception, receiving with the whole body; and wait for what the body shows of its own accord. Not trying to see, but opening and receiving.
A system that removed intuition, and a system that trained it. I was learning from both at once.
Reading it again now, the two do not conflict. What SPT removed was the practitioner deciding on a location by hunch. What Rolfing set out to train was the sensitivity to receive what a body shows. Both point the same way: reduce what goes out from the practitioner, increase what comes in from the other person.
But reading it that way came later. At the time I wrote this, the most I could manage was to note that it was the hardest technique in SPT.