On Saturday, October 10, 2020, the fourth day of the Module 3 training in Source Point Therapy (SPT) began. A typhoon was approaching Osaka just then, and I wondered how the day would go, but it passed by the afternoon and the rain stopped.
I have written about the first three days of Module 3 already (see “The First Day: Not Intervening, What Meditation and SPT Share, and the Relation to Shamanism” and “After Three Days: How Trauma Is Handled Within Energy Work, and Why Intent Matters“). Here I want to describe what the fourth day covered.
As it happens, five years earlier on this same date I took the Module 1 training with Hiroki Sato (hereafter Hiro), the Rolfer who runs TEN — the space for your Life & Body (see “Learning the Blueprint: The Information Needed for a Human Being to Take Human Form“). By coincidence, that date is also the birthday of Bob Schrei (hereafter Bob), one of the two founders.
Before the class began we celebrated. Hiro had bought a cake, and we marked the day together.
A day of Module 3 opens with a check-in: impressions from the exchange sessions in which we tried the previous day’s material with a partner, and questions and answers. Everyone speaks in turn, over about an hour and a half. After a break we move into the meditation led by Donna Thomson (hereafter Donna).
Meditation is closely bound up with SPT, so it works well to point out what the two share each time as the explanation goes on.
Then come the briefing on the day’s material and the demonstration. After the lunch break Hiro adds his own commentary, and the twelve participants pair up to practice.
Energy work carries the idea that less is more, and the guideline that the point of judgment comes once the body has begun to make its own adjustment. For that reason, one flow of work is covered per day.
The day closes with a meditation guided by Hiro.
This was the fourth day. As I wrote about the third, Module 3 takes up LEVEL as a way of deepening the understanding of the Blueprint.
There are five LEVELs: trauma, karma, emotion, ancestors, and belief systems. Module 3 takes up three of them — trauma, karma, and emotion. Trauma on the third day, karma on the fourth, emotion on the fifth. This day was karma.
Again we connected by Zoom to Santa Fe and heard Donna and Bob, with Hiro interpreting.
Two questions came up: how does one settle the mind, and how can SPT be used to settle it — is there a form of self-care?
Donna’s answer was that once you have experienced a settled state, you come to know the feel of it and can find your way back. What to watch for is judging yourself for not being settled, which unsettles you further.
In SPT you work with two points, the Diamond Point and the Rectangle Point, and both serve to return you to the original state. That is precisely why they come at the end when you are exploring the trauma or karma LEVELs.
What I found interesting was that time and healing are closely related. Suppose there has been a traffic accident and trauma remains. You go back to before it happened — Donna’s phrase was going back to the womb. Before asking what is happening and why it came about, you do not deny what took place; you proceed as though nothing had happened, and the healthy state can return. Providing the information of the Blueprint through SPT, she said, helps a great deal with this.
Following from that, Donna’s guided meditation for the day was a simple one: counting the breath to ten, for three minutes.
And then to the day’s main subject, karma.
Karma usually brings to mind reincarnation, past lives, things inscribed in the past — matters that occurred at the level of the soul. In SPT, karma is used to mean volitional action.
We tend to think that what happens at the level of the soul is fated, cannot be altered, and will go on punishing us. But karma in its proper sense carries the view that you can choose. When the information of the Blueprint is brought in through SPT, the choice that belongs to you can be made on the basis of healthy information.
In the end, asking what karma is can be replaced, I think, with asking what the choices in my life are, and how I respond.
Why, then, does karma arise?
As an illustration, Bob told us that he had studied Zen with Hakuun Yasutani Roshi of the Sanbo Kyodan, a Zen lineage based in Kamakura.
In his writings, Yasutani Roshi treats the causes of karma at various levels — the individual, the group, the nation — and divides them into the visible and the invisible. He explains it by way of monks practicing in the mountains, whose practice has a large effect on the world, and this shows how invisible karma acts upon visible karma.
Approaching at the level of karma with SPT affects not only the client but those around them. Practicing with a partner after the explanation, I could feel it.
After watching Bob’s demonstration over Zoom, I went into the afternoon practice with the meaning of karma still not especially clear to me, despite the verbal explanation. What carried me there was Hiro’s encouragement: just tune to it and you will understand.
There is indeed such a thing as the field of karma, I could feel. Tension in the coccyx, the left knee, pain in the right lower back — over four days these deepened little by little. The change in the body felt finer than it had at the level of trauma, which I found interesting.
Tomorrow brings the last of the LEVELs, emotion. I want to enjoy finding out what change it brings.
Note, August 2026
This day falls exactly five years after the first day of Module 1: October 10, 2015, and October 10, 2020. It was also Bob’s birthday. The fourth day began around a cake.
Karma received as a matter of choice
The subject of this piece is karma. How it is handled, though, is not what one might expect.
SPT uses karma to mean volitional action. Not reincarnation, not past lives, and not something already settled. This piece puts that into my own words: asking what karma is can be replaced with asking what the choices in my life are, and how I respond.
Something taken as fixed is set down again as something you can choose.
I received the same thing again on the last day
Two days later came Donna’s awareness session, an hour given to hearing how SPT came into being.
What I took from it, I wrote at the time, was this: more than words like trauma, karma, and emotion, what matters in life is choice, and one’s fate is not decided in advance but can be changed as you go (see “The Final Day: The Awareness Session, Practitioner Certification, and Knowing That the Choices in Life Lie Within You”).
What arrived on the fourth day as an explanation of technique came back on the last day as the message handed over directly by the founders. At the time I wrote them as records of separate days. Set side by side, they show that the six days were pointing at one place.
And the course itself was a choice
There is one more layer.
Taking Module 3 five years later was my own decision. I wrote it in a single line in the first piece: since Module 2 completes the basic techniques, I left Module 3 for later (see “From Meeting Source Point to What I Have Learned Since”). The plan had been April 2016.
In the basic training you choose neither your teachers nor your dates. After certification that changes. What to take, and when, becomes your own judgment.
I entered a course that teaches karma as choice five years late, by choice. None of that was in my mind at the time.
The meaning stayed unclear, and the hands moved anyway
This piece also records, plainly, something I had not understood.
I watched Bob’s demonstration and heard the verbal explanation, and still went into the afternoon practice without the meaning being especially clear. What pushed me forward was Hiro saying to just tune to it. And I did feel the field of karma. The record goes as far as the particulars: tension in the coccyx, the left knee, pain in the right lower back, deepening little by little across four days.
What became clear was not on the side of language but on the side of the hands.
This shape recurs in the courses that follow. In the Rolf Movement training from 2017 to 2019 I met the design repeatedly: questions handed over, procedures withheld. In the Advanced Training in 2025, working without a set procedure was the subject itself.
The order here is a little different, though. Usually the phenomenon comes first and the name arrives later. This day was the reverse. The name was there first — karma, and the definition of it as volitional action. What had not been handed over was the substance, and that came in afterward, through the hands.