Introduction
Alongside the parts of a session where I work directly on the body, as in Rolfing, there are stretches where I barely touch it at all. My hands rest near the body, or hold above it, so anyone receiving might well wonder what is going on.
This kind of work is generally called energy work. I have studied two forms of it: Source Point Therapy and Jikiden Reiki.
What is actually done is simple. Hiroki Sato, who teaches Source Point Therapy in Japan, describes the sequence like this. You access points around the body and use your hands to find the place the body wants attended to first. Then you locate where the flow is obstructed and work there. Once you have confirmed that the obstruction has cleared, you look for the next place.
Repeat this, and the body will sometimes recover its own order without the practitioner forcing anything on it. That is where I find energy work interesting.
The word energy, though, is remarkably vague. Aura, chakra, ki, life force — the same word points at quite different phenomena depending on who is using it. The word spiritual is no better; what it means is not always clear.
So on this page I want to work through, in order, what energy work addresses, what the practitioner is actually doing, and how it stands in relation to Rolfing. Along the way I will describe where and from whom I learned it.
One thing to say at the outset: I did not go looking for this territory. When I began studying Rolfing I did not even know it existed. It came into view slowly, afterward, through meeting a few particular teachers. That part of the story is here too.
What Does the Word Energy Point To?
In physics, energy is defined as the capacity to do work. The energy spoken of in bodywork is not used in that sense. It usually refers to changes that no single part of the body can account for. It takes in the relationship between practitioner and client, and the space around the body.
Define energy first and the discussion turns abstract fast. So I want to take two Rolfers’ accounts as a starting point. Both appeared in 2017, in the issue of the association’s journal given over to energy.
One is Jeff Maitland, the person at the center of organizing Rolfing’s five taxonomies. Rather than explaining energy itself, he began from the question of how we experience it. Then, adding a single word to the definition from physics, he took energy to be the felt capacity to do work.
A physicist only needs to be able to calculate it. A practitioner has to register, through their own senses, what is happening in the body. That is the difference the phrase marks.
The other is Kevin Frank, who has spent years organizing Hubert Godard’s theory within Rolfing. He questions the very division between energy work and bodywork. Is it energy work if you do not touch? If you use imagery? If you work at a distance? Conversely, is it bodywork if you use strong force? None of these gives a workable criterion.
What Frank proposes instead is a shift from energy to information. Touching fascia, directing attention to the space around the body, working with imagery. All of it can be understood as offering some kind of information to the body as a system.
Whether that information came to mean anything to the receiver is not for the practitioner to decide. It shows only when something changes in the person’s behavior: breath, posture, movement, expression.
I have written about Frank’s argument in more detail in “Understanding Energy Work and Bodywork Through the Lens of Information” and “The Relationship Between Energy Work and Body Awareness.”
Taken this way, energy work no longer needs to be thought of as a special power. A living organism is a system that rebuilds its own order in response to stimulus and information from outside. That is how general system theory understands life. In the Advanced Training in 2025, Ray McCall put it as: the body is a system that can self-regulate.
In Source Point Therapy, a field carrying order-information is understood to exist around the body, and the body is connected to it. The body is seen as an open system, continually exchanging information with what is outside.
The practitioner does not cure the body. The practitioner arranges the conditions in which the body can change on its own. That is how I understand energy work.
How Do Intention and Intentionality Differ?
The phrase offering information needs care. Heard on its own, it sounds as though the practitioner sends something in and thereby changes the other person.
In the Advanced Training in 2025, Ray McCall set two words side by side: intention and intentionality. I have written about the distinction in “The Difference Between Intention and Intentionality – Understanding Neutrality.”
Intention is doing something toward an outcome. The practitioner grasps what is happening in the body and works on it causally. Intentionality is a term from Husserl’s phenomenology, and refers to how consciousness is oriented toward the world in the first place.
On the footing of intentionality, the practitioner is not assumed to understand the client’s body completely. Rather, that body knows better what it needs. Change that the practitioner cannot account for causally may still be the change that person needs.
Jeff Maitland did not treat the two as options of equal standing. On his account, intention is one kind of technique, used toward an outcome. Intentionality sits upstream of technique — it is how the practitioner is oriented toward the world. Whether a technique works, and whether an intention works, is settled by that underlying orientation.
So the maxim that intention matters more than technique, Maitland says, does not hold. What holds is that intentionality matters more than intention, and more than technique.
So what the practitioner can do is not to make change happen but to arrange a field in which change can happen. Maitland writes that the practitioner must first open themselves and create a sensitive space for change. When that space genuinely opens, the person receiving begins to feel safe, and the process of recovery can begin without the practitioner doing anything active. He takes this to be the first step common to all energy work.
Source Point Therapy uses intention too. Which level you turn toward is set by intention. But what is set is the direction, not what will happen. You settle the ground of orientation, and use intention as a technique on top of it.
The Energetic View Was Already Inside Rolfing
Energy work was not suddenly imported into Rolfing from outside. Ida Rolf herself held a strong interest in the relationship between human structure and energy.
In 1974, at the association’s annual meeting, she said this:
I want to see what happens to the energy fields in and around an individual as you order his structure and what is the change in his behavior that parallels this change in energy. I want to see whether those fields get broader, whether they get brighter, whether they get more vertical, whether they get less confused.
Here she is not looking at bodily structure alone. Change in structure, change in the energy field, and change in behavior are taken as one continuous phenomenon.
In the same address she went on:
I hope that among you there are the kind of fish that will go out and bring in another school of fish . . . Not to get their aches and pains taken out, not to have their symptoms removed, but that they might contribute to the understanding of energy in the human universe.
For Ida Rolf, Rolfing was not simply a method for removing aches and symptoms. It was also an inquiry, entered through bodily structure, into what energy is in a human being.
In March 2016 I attended the annual meeting of the Japan Rolfing Association. Ray McCall and Carol Agneessens, Rolfing instructors from the United States, spoke on how Ida Rolf thought about Rolfing.
One story concerned 1978, the year she sold the rights to Rolfing to the Rolf Institute. She asked that three schools be established: one in California for the psychological side, one in New York for the medical side, and one in Colorado for the spiritual side. It never happened, but it shows she was trying to preserve the non-physical aspects within an institution.
She also asked one of her students to go up into the mountains around Boulder, find an energy spot, sit there, and report back. To a client who became emotionally disturbed during a class, she advised touching the solar plexus, saying it would settle — and it did.
At the same time, she left this remark:
Only thing that I can get hands on is physical.
It is not that she did not work with energy. What her hands could reach was the body, so she entered through the body. That is how it reads. What I heard at that meeting is recorded in “Attending the 2016 Japan Rolfing Association General Meeting — Learning the History of Rolfing.”
From Controversy to a Special Issue
Ida Rolf’s own interest in energy was one thing; where this territory belonged within Rolfing’s education was another, and it stayed unsettled for a long time.
In the summer of 2007, a course called An Energetic Foundation for Rolfing was announced in the Rolf Institute’s newsletter. It was taught by Bob Schrei and Ray McCall, and based on Source Point Therapy.
A heated argument broke out on the association’s forum, and letters of protest reached the board questioning whether the association should be sponsoring a course of this kind. In response, the course was voluntarily resubmitted to the continuing education committee and approved a second time.
If anything, the controversy raised interest. Seats and assistants were added, and it became the first continuing education class in several years to fill.
The following year, in 2008, Bob Schrei, Ray McCall, Jeff Maitland, and Duffy Allen held an exchange in the journal on the question. Its title was What Did Dr. Rolf Want?, and placed at its head was Ida Rolf’s remark from 1974.
In that exchange Bob Schrei describes the background to Source Point Therapy. During an Advanced Training with Michael Salveson and Jeff Maitland, it became an issue that Rolfers were explaining their own work by borrowing external systems — acupuncture, chakras, biodynamics. As long as you explain in borrowed language, what is distinctive about the Rolfing work itself stays undefined. Out of that came the question of an energetic foundation belonging to Rolfing, and, after a long inquiry, Source Point Therapy.
Then in June 2017, the journal gave an entire issue to the subject: Rolfing SI and Nonphysical Reality. Kevin Frank, Jeff Maitland, Ray McCall, Bob Schrei and others each wrote on the energetic territory from their own position. A subject that had provoked a fierce argument in 2007 had become a special issue ten years later.
Incidentally, doubts about the term energy work did not begin in 2017. In 2007, Jeff Maitland set out four ways in which healing comes about. The fourth is carried out without touching the body, and is commonly called energy healing. Maitland declined to call it an energy approach. Energetic techniques can be found in all four, he reasoned, so naming only the fourth that way is not accurate. I have written about these four in “How Healing Comes About — Jeffrey Maitland’s Four Approaches.”
How Did the Touch Change?
The way this territory developed also has to do with a change in how Rolfers touch.
From the 1980s onward, with John Upledger at the center, craniosacral work and biodynamic thinking were transmitted to practitioners beyond osteopaths, and this had a large influence on the Rolfing community. The strong pressure of Ida Rolf’s era was no longer the whole picture. More weight came to be placed on subtle contact, and on a way of being in the practitioner that lets the body and space reorganize on their own.
The same current came up at the 2016 meeting in Japan. Osteopathic craniosacral and visceral techniques entered Rolfing, and it became clear that the body has the capacity to change of its own accord without active intervention. Firm contact is not the only kind that works; simply being present in the field can function as touch.
I learned this current from the Source Point Therapy side as well. In the supplemental course in 2017, we went into the Sacral Hold and the Guardian Point in more depth. That meant the history of cranial work beginning with William Sutherland, and the anatomy behind it: the three levels of biomechanical, functional, and biodynamic; how cranial work relates to energy work; and how the Guardian Point differs from it. That day is set down in “Taking the SPT Supplemental Course — Deepening Knowledge Through Practice.”
Bob Schrei, who created Source Point Therapy, is a Certified Advanced Rolfer and at the same time a biodynamic craniosacral therapist. A system made by someone carrying two lineages will have both in it.
What Is the Blueprint?
At the center of Source Point Therapy is the idea of the Blueprint: the fundamental order-information a human being needs in order to be well as a human being.
What is interesting is that this is a word Ida Rolf herself used. In her book she writes:
A joyous radiance of health is attained only as the body conforms more nearly to its inherent pattern; this form, this Platonic Idea, is the blueprint for structure.
She is not thinking of health simply as the absence of symptoms. She takes it as a state in which the body has come closer to its own order, the person’s structure following the pattern inherent in it.
Elsewhere in the same book she goes further, and asks:
Is “balancing” actually the placing of the body of flesh upon an energy pattern that activates it? The pattern of this fine energy would not be as easily disrupted and might well survive, relatively intact, traumatic episodes that distort the flesh.
The question is whether the flesh is itself the source of order, or whether there is, behind it, a pattern that organizes it.
Bob Schrei placed this passage at the head of his article in the 2017 issue. Perhaps, he wrote, all we are doing as practitioners of structural integration is helping the body align with this pattern. Having studied architecture, he says, he was in the habit of asking what a structure stands upon.
This way of thinking was not confined to Ida Rolf’s book. Karl Humiston, a student of hers, recalls that she used the term blueprint of perfection over and over in classes.
And the association’s Standards of Practice contains the following:
Equally fundamental is the recognition that each human being has an inherent internal pattern for optimal organization of form and function, which pattern is essentially self-organizing.
The intent of Structural Integration is to identify and address that which keeps each person’s pattern from manifesting as a higher level of order and function.
The idea of a blueprint is not only one person’s phrase; it has found its way into the association’s own standards.
The Blueprint of Source Point Therapy stands in this line of thought. Through daily tension, emotion, and all kinds of experience, our connection to that order can weaken. The practitioner accesses the Blueprint and works so that the body can recover its connection to that information.
The idea also supplies a measure of what is healthy for the body. If you know the direction you are heading, you can find your way back when you have moved away from it. That does not mean the practitioner carries the body to an ideal form by force. You know the direction, and you leave the process of change to the body.
Two Origin Stories
There is a widely told account of where Rolfing came from. Ida Rolf’s background as a biochemist, her interest in fascia, her exchanges with yoga and osteopathy. And the influence of Swedenborg, general system theory, Korzybski, and Buckminster Fuller. I have written about this line in “Ida Rolf, the Scientist.”
In 2017, Bob Schrei set out a different facet.
A new client came to him, and he asked whether she had received Rolfing before. Thirty or forty sessions, she said. From whom? From Ida Rolf.
The first thing she remembered about the sessions was that they were painful. What had stayed with her most, though, were the stories Ida Rolf told her. She said, again and again, that her work had not come out of her research as a scientist alone, but derived from information channeled from ancient Egypt. When the client later asked her mother and her mother’s friends, they had heard the same stories.
Bob Schrei made this public in 2015, as his contribution to a memorial held at Ida Rolf’s gravesite. Confirmation came back from first-generation teachers. I was in those classes, they said; she told the story to anyone who would listen. One of them added that she had said the Ten Series itself had been an initiation in an ancient mystery school.
Peter Melchior also recorded her remarking in a class that this work is at least three thousand years old. And according to one of her students, although she held that Rolfing should be described as an educational process, when pressed on where it really belongs she said: shamanism.
I do not read the scientific origin and this one as opposed, and I have no means of judging which is true. What matters, I think, is that Ida Rolf inquired into the body scientifically while also speaking about a background that science alone cannot account for.
In the United States of the 1950s and 60s, people practicing outside the orthodox were arrested and had their work destroyed. That is what happened to Wilhelm Reich in 1956. In that climate, it would have been safer to say only that she had developed the method as a scientist studying fascia. She did not hide the other story.
Knowing this background makes it easier to see why Source Point Therapy has the shape it does. On the first day of the final course, we were taught what the work shares with meditation, and how it relates to shamanism. Illness has been understood to arise from a breakdown in the relationship with the supernatural. Negative energy entering from outside obstructs the flow. Repairing that through ritual and imagery was the shaman’s role.
At the time I took it as the sort of thing that comes up in an energy work class. Looking back now, I think the founder was explaining which tradition the system he had made belongs to.
Bob Schrei has written that Source Point Therapy was made to fill an energetic gap inside Rolfing. What he set out to fill may have been less something Rolfing lacked than an aspect of it that had gradually stopped being spoken about.
The Five Taxonomies of Rolfing
Rolfing divides the ways into the body into five taxonomies: geometric, biomechanical, functional, psychobiological, and energetic.
These do not have separate aims. Whichever entrance you begin from, the work ends up addressing bodily structure and supporting the process by which the person adapts better within gravity. There is one destination and five entrances.
The energetic territory is the fifth. It is also the one that took longest to find language.
In Japan there is another significant current within it: the YIELD work developed by the Rolfing instructor Hiroyoshi Tahata. The client yields themselves to the contact surface; a stable foundation forms, and change arises naturally from within.
Tahata is explicit that this is not a technique but an embodied state of awareness. It can be carried into any session, he says — structural work, movement, craniosacral. It is treated less as one item within the taxonomies than as something that runs across them.
What is interesting is that in describing this work, Tahata used the word energy hardly at all, saying instead the integrity of the system. He is exploring the energetic territory, and yet the language he uses to describe the work is drawn from a more bodily, systemic vocabulary.
I learned this work from Tahata in the Advanced Training in 2025. He has also taught hara and ma-ai — the interval held between two people — for the European Rolfing Association.
Tahata has also written about the taxonomy itself. What matters, he argues, is that the practitioner can stand without bias toward front or back, left or right, up or down. Neither crushed downward by gravity nor overstretched upward — and he sets this out in bodily and spatial terms. That inquiry, he holds, is Ray McCall’s significant contribution to the energetic taxonomy.
The territory that took longest to find language is being given the concrete language of the body and of space.
Why the Energetic Perspective Is Needed
So far I have looked at what energy work points to, and at how it has been placed within Rolfing. Why, then, does Rolfing need an energetic perspective at all?
In the 2008 exchange in the journal, Bob Schrei states the reason plainly.
When he took the Advanced Training with Michael Salveson and Jeff Maitland, it became a subject of discussion that Rolfers were borrowing external systems — acupuncture, chi gung, chakras, biodynamics — to frame their own work. Learning a dozen energetic approaches and grabbing at them does not give you a ground for understanding Rolfing itself.
That led to a conversation about how Rolfing needed an energetic foundation, or energetic taxonomy, which was unique unto itself, in order for Rolfing to truly be a third-paradigm (holistic) approach.
Out of that came the idea that for Rolfing to be genuinely a third-paradigm — that is, holistic — approach, it needed an energetic foundation, or energetic taxonomy, of its own.
The third paradigm here is the third of the three paradigms set out by Jeff Maitland. The first is the relaxation paradigm, the second the corrective paradigm, and the third the holistic paradigm. I learned this framework in the Advanced Training in 2025, and have written about it in “What Is Holistic Healing? — Reexamining Through the Lens of “Paradigms”.”
In the holistic paradigm, the body is understood not as an assembly of parts but as a web of relationships in which everything affects everything else. The aim of intervention is not to fix the troubled part on its own but to help the order and harmony of the whole recover.
What Bob Schrei is pointing out is that if you claim to work with wholeness while leaving out the energetic dimension, the method is not holistic in any real sense.
Ray McCall puts the same thing more strongly:
Without the energetic, it would not matter whether we were accepted by the collective or not — we would no longer be practicing the holistic art of Rolfing.
Without the energetic, whether or not we are accepted by the scientific world ceases to matter — because at that point we are no longer practicing Rolfing as a holistic art.
Cut the energetic dimension away and Rolfing becomes one manual therapy among many, losing the wholeness it set out to work with. That is why the energetic perspective is needed.
To Answer the Three Questions
The need is not only a matter of principle. The perspective does practical work in a session.
In the Advanced Training, Ray McCall set out the three questions a Rolfer always faces on entering a session: where do we start, what do we do next, and when are we finished?
Scanning the energy field around the body with the hands, as in Source Point Therapy, can let you sense where the primary blocks or discontinuities are. More importantly, it gives you a clue to where the client’s body wants you to begin.
Rather than deciding the starting place by the practitioner’s analysis alone, you honor the starting place the body indicates. When you do, Ray McCall says, the session is consistently more effective — and this holds whether you are working within the set course of a Ten Series or doing non-formulaic advanced work.
We are trained to observe structure and movement and to analyze where the problem lies. But visible structure and movement do not necessarily indicate where the problem begins.
From the viewpoint of energetic medicine, energy always precedes structure and function. A movement pattern seen in the foot and lower leg, or a scoliotic pattern in the spine and ribcage, may in fact arise from an energetic blockage in the interosseous membrane of the forearm.
In other words, the visible problem and the principal factor producing it are not always in the same place. What is thwarting movement may lie not in the fascia, the biomechanics, or the nervous system, but in the energetic territory.
The energetic perspective does not deny structural or movement analysis. It adds another source of information for finding where to begin — something those methods alone do not readily reveal.
To Cultivate Perception
Jeff Maitland gives another reason: energy work develops the capacity to listen to the body.
To say that perception is everything would be an exaggeration, though not much of one. Energy work sharpens the practitioner’s perception. The better you can grasp what a client needs, the more precise your work becomes.
Maitland makes an important point here: a thwart in any one taxonomy will show up as a thwart in all of them.
Rolfing has five taxonomies — geometric, biomechanical, functional, psychobiological, and energetic. They do not exist separately; they are related to one another. So to the extent that you cannot read a client through one of them, your work through the others is limited by just that much.
Conversely, becoming able to read the energetic taxonomy raises the precision of your work through the other four. Whether you are working on structure and movement or addressing a symptom directly, you come to grasp more of the client as a whole.
In this sense, energy work is not for people with some special ability. It is also a training of perception, for handling all five taxonomies together.
What Makes Something Rolfing?
Once energetic work is placed within Rolfing, a question follows: what is Rolfing, and what is not?
Ray McCall recounts an anecdote about Emmett Hutchins asking Ida Rolf. Suppose the practitioner stands across the room and thinks of the psoas lengthening and the interosseous membrane opening. Suppose that change actually occurs, and the person becomes more integrated in gravity. Is that Rolfing? She thought for a while and said she thought so.
What this shows is that Rolfing is defined not by particular techniques but by its aims and results. Whether you use strong direct pressure, light contact, or work from a distance is not on its own a decisive criterion.
Ray McCall does set a limit, though. If you are going to use the methods of another system, you have to know when you are doing it. If you start singing a different song, you have a responsibility to tell the client.
And there is something to check at the end of a session. Is the body in a better relationship with gravity? Is gravity a resource that supports the body rather than a burden? That is where the judgment lies.
Words like energetic and spiritual are vague. But in Rolfing what is checked is not only what the word means, but how the relationship between body and gravity has changed as a result of the work. As long as there is a test, the vagueness of the word is not fatal.
The Same Subject, Through Different Entrances
The five taxonomies are not entirely separate from one another. Sometimes the same subject is addressed through different entrances. Trauma, karma, and emotion are the clearest examples.
In the psychobiological territory, Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing and Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory address the subject. The former follows, carefully, the response that remains in the body; the latter looks at how the autonomic nervous system answers safety and threat. I learned these in the basic Rolfing training.
Peter Levine is also one of those who studied directly with Ida Rolf. He took from her the relationship with gravity as the measure of bodily integration. He took posture as an expression of consciousness rather than appearance, and the habit of observing the body as tension, line, and flow rather than surface form. A representative figure of the psychobiological territory was a student of Rolfing’s founder. The taxonomies are lines drawn afterward; at the level of people, they cross.
The energetic territory addresses trauma, karma, and emotion as well. These three were what I learned in the final course of Source Point Therapy.
There, words that tend to be used loosely are given definitions again. Karma is used to mean volitional action, not reincarnation or past lives — not something already settled, but something that can be chosen again.
A healthy state in emotion does not mean having only certain emotions. It means being able to move from one emotion to another without effort. Whether an emotion is good or bad is not the point, and it can be worked with even when its content is not understood in words.
With trauma, the details of the event are not asked for; there is no confronting it head-on and no re-experiencing. That what is addressed is not the event but what remains in the body is shared with the psychobiological methods. What differs is whether that response is followed or not.
One destination and five entrances — this is part of what that means.
What Is the Practitioner Actually Doing?
Energy work tends to suggest that the practitioner is using some special power. What Rolfing’s teachers describe, though, is the practitioner settling their own state.
In the 2017 issue, Ray McCall looks back on a seminar for faculty only that he held with Jeff Maitland in Phoenix. Asked whether they did energetic work in their own practice, every participant said they did. Asked what they were doing when they said so, the answer was, without exception, the same: they were shifting their own way of being, their presence, the state of their body.
He sets out the elements concretely. Placing awareness in the back of your own body. Touching in a way that lets the body shape your hand, rather than your hand shaping the body into some form. Keeping a hand in one place while extending perception to your own foot and hip, and out into the space around the body.
I read this after taking the Advanced Training in 2025. The three requirements of Neutral I had learned there — back space, the shape of the hand, and hara — were laid out almost exactly. They had been recorded in the journal eight years earlier, in the words of the same Ray McCall.
Source Point Therapy likewise holds together the practitioner having knowledge and not intervening too much. The deeper your understanding of what healthy means, the more precise your sessions become; that calls for knowledge, anatomy included. And yet the more knowledge you have, the more you want to intervene on your own judgment. What is asked is to hold the knowledge without using it to govern the body, and to yield to the process.
Holding it, and not using it. That is not the same as holding nothing from the start.
A Triad, Not a Dyad
Work is ordinarily thought of as a dyad between practitioner and client. Ray McCall, drawing on the view that came out of his conversations with Bob Schrei, places a third point there.
The third point is the source of order and health — what Source Point Therapy calls the Blueprint. The practitioner enters a relationship with the Blueprint and, at the same time, helps the client connect to it. Something other than two people facing each other takes place.
The manual for the Module 3 I took in 2020 states the same thing: the therapeutic relationship is a triad, not a dyad — the client, the practitioner, and the Blueprint.
Opening the heart does not necessarily mean a strong personal or emotional connection with the other person. What the practitioner turns toward is the Blueprint, and in opening to it they help the person receiving connect to that order themselves.
This asks the practitioner to hold compassion and detachment together. It does not mean being cold or indifferent. You can be warm as a person while keeping the focus on the side of the Blueprint. The manual adds that for most practitioners, what needs developing is not compassion but detachment.
Not intervening. That is placed at the center of the system.
The Two Methods I Learned
From here on, an account of how I came to study energy work.
Source Point Therapy
Source Point Therapy is an energy work created in the United States by Bob Schrei and Donna Thomson.
Bob Schrei is a Certified Advanced Rolfer and a biodynamic craniosacral therapist. He studied architecture as an undergraduate and fine art as a graduate student, and has held an interest in both geometry and healing. Donna Thomson is an intuitive and a teacher of meditation. Both have practiced Zen for many years.
It may come as a surprise, but Bob Schrei also emphasized the importance of anatomy. I heard this directly from Hiroki Sato, my first teacher in this work. Source Point Therapy is a system made by someone who has worked on bodies with his hands.
Over five years, from October 2015 to October 2020, I completed a course of fourteen days in total. Modules 1 and 2 I learned from Hiroki Sato at TEN in Osaka; Module 3 I received directly from the founders, Bob Schrei and Donna Thomson. The whole course is recorded in “Source Point Therapy — A Summary of Fourteen Days Across Five Years of Training.”
Jikiden Reiki
Jikiden Reiki is a hands-on method originating in Japan, developed in 1922 by Mikao Usui. Its full name is Shin Shin Kaizen Usui Reiki Ryoho.
Reiki effectively died out in postwar Japan while spreading to Europe and America by way of Hawaii. In 1987 it became known in Japan again, in what amounted to a reimport.
Jikiden Reiki transmits the line of Chiyoko Yamaguchi, who received teaching directly from Chujiro Hayashi, a student of Usui. Jikiden means taught directly by Hayashi.
I studied in July and December 2015 with Takami Kamata, a Rolfer based in Frankfurt. The background and the history are recorded in “The Background, and How the West Took It Up,” “How It Came Down to Us,” “Jikiden Reiki and Kotodama,” and “Before and After.”
What Separates the Two
Both use the hands, and both can be done with almost no contact. Where awareness goes, though, is different.
In Source Point Therapy you work having connected to the Blueprint. The palm is used less as a surface than as a point. Rather than the practitioner sending energy, the sense of yielding to the body’s process is strong.
In Jikiden Reiki you hold an awareness of energy flowing from the crown to the feet and going out naturally from the hands. The palm is used as a surface. Rather than reorganizing the structure of the whole body, it shows its strength when working on a particular place that is troubled.
The difference shows in the procedures for working at a distance. Both involve obtaining permission, forming an image of the person, and attending to the name and the place. Jikiden Reiki, however, requires a ritual element and the date of birth, while Source Point Therapy needs only the name and the place.
Energy work tends to be spoken of as one thing, but each system has settled on what it requires and what it does not. The two are not the same. Both, though, can be used alongside Rolfing.
I Could Not See It at the Time
Most of what is written above is something I understood afterward.
Through the five months of the basic Rolfing training, I did not know that a territory called energy work existed. I did not know that Ida Rolf had emphasized the flow of energy, nor that an argument had broken out in the association over that aspect.
This was not simply an oversight of mine. It also has to do with how carefully this territory has been handled in basic education.
Jeff Maitland has said that energy work should not be taught in the basic training. It risks confusing most students; if it is taken up, the end of the Advanced Training is the place for it. He said this in the 2017 issue.
Still, it was only that I could not see it — the people practicing it were close by. Andrea Clusen, who assisted in the final stage of the basic training I took in Munich, had been practicing Source Point Therapy since 2009. I met it three months after that training ended, in Osaka.
And in 2025, ten years after certification as a Rolfer, I took an Advanced Training with energy work at its center. One of the teachers was Ray McCall — the person who, in 2007, had opened with Bob Schrei the course that set off the controversy.
The twenty-four days are set down in “Journey to Becoming an Advanced Rolfer — A Summary of the Road to Certification.”
What I Think Now
I have written repeatedly that in studying Rolfing, choosing whom you receive it from matters. But choosing is only possible when the options are visible. A territory you do not know exists cannot be chosen.
That I ended up in energy work is down to meeting two people: Takami Kamata, whom I met in Europe during the Rolfing training, and Hiroki Sato, whom I met in Japan after certification. Had either meeting been missing, I do not think I would have entered this territory.
Choosing, and meeting. Learning needs both.
When I use energy work in a session now, what I hold in mind is not to try to make something happen. The body has its own capacity to come into order. What the practitioner can do is arrange the field in which that capacity begins to work.
The same holds for the person receiving. If there is a symptom, it is natural for attention to go there. But when attention gathers on the symptom alone, the space in which change can occur sometimes narrows. Hiro, who first taught me Source Point Therapy, described this as being pulled by the symptom.
When the same thing happens on the practitioner’s side, the field narrows further. For both practitioner and receiver, what matters is not to ignore the symptom but not to let it occupy everything.
In her 1974 address, Ida Rolf said that a Rolfer is not one who cures disease but one who evokes health — and that evoking it requires understanding what that pattern is.
To return to the words quoted at the outset: what she hoped for was not people who would take away aches and symptoms, but people who might contribute to the understanding of energy in the human universe.
Energy work is, I think, one of the roads that reaches that understanding of the pattern from another angle.
Related Articles
This page has given the overall picture of how energy work and Rolfing relate. What I learned in each training, and what changed, is recorded in the following.
Source Point Therapy
- Source Point Therapy — A Summary of Fourteen Days Across Five Years of Training
- After Three Days: How Trauma Is Handled Within Energy Work
- The Fourth Day: Karma as Volitional Action
- The Fifth Day: Approaching the Emotional Level, and Working at a Distance
Jikiden Reiki
- The Background, and How the West Took It Up
- How It Came Down to Us
- Jikiden Reiki and Kotodama
- Before and After