On Sunday, December 6, 2015, I flew from Tokyo to Osaka on the early morning flight, heading for TEN — the space for your Life & Body.
The last time I had been there was for Module 2 of the Source Point Therapy training, over the long weekend of November 21 to 23 (I wrote about those three days in “Concrete Ways of Accessing the Blueprint,” “How the Training Runs, and What Techniques There Are,” and “What Is Healthy Information for the Body?“). This was my fourth visit.
The training I was there for is called IMAC, short for Integrative Movement Assessment Courses. Where SourcePoint works with energy that cannot be seen, this course works at the level of the visible, physical body. How do you assess movement? Which part of a muscle do you look at?
It asks for anatomy, and for the reasoning that connects one observation to the next. The curriculum runs from this introductory course through the lower limbs, the upper limbs, the spine, and finally the trunk and integration.
During my Rolfing training in Munich, assessment had been taught inside the framework of the Ten Series. What was distinctive here was the focus on range of motion — the hip joint, latissimus dorsi, pectoralis major, gluteus maximus — and how to look at each region in turn. Some of it could be brought straight into Rolfing sessions.
I will leave the specifics aside here; anyone curious should take the introductory course. What Hiroki Sato, known to everyone as Hiro, has drawn out of many years of practice is remarkable. That said, I had only recently begun practising Rolfing, and some of the methods were still beyond me at that stage.
Being an introduction, the morning was given over to classroom work: embryology, fascial terminology, the Line in Rolfing, Tonic Function. It pulled a good deal of scattered knowledge into order. The assessment procedures that followed were clearly laid out. One point stayed with me.
If you palpate with effort, the tension in your own body makes it harder to receive information from the person in front of you. Which is why energy work — where you do not touch the body at all — can let more information through.
There were eighteen participants, in groups of three across six tables. Once the classroom portion ended, the day turned to trying the methods directly. Working through the afternoon in that hands-on form, and putting my hands on a range of different bodies, deepened what I took away.
At the end, Hiro mentioned that because IMAC carries so much material, taking a course again is welcome. As I wrote in my last column, my goal for the coming year is to let my Rolfing work mature. Sitting through IMAC, I felt again that what I have already learned in Rolfing also needs revisiting.
Settling each skill into my own body, and at the same time accumulating experience, both matter. In that sense, ending the year’s Rolfing training with the IMAC introductory course was a good place to finish. I will take more training in 2016, but the emphasis will be on letting the technique ripen.
Note, September 2026
Not a single term from East Asian Medicine appears in this article. The classroom work covered embryology, fascial terminology, the Line, and Tonic Function. Five years later I would be learning the twelve primary meridians and the eight extraordinary vessels from the same teacher, but there is no sign of that yet. IMAC begins from the structural side.
What I received here was a mechanical view of the human being. How far a joint travels, which muscle is working. You look at a client as an assembly of ranges and muscles. If what I had been learning in Europe came from the functional side, this came from the structural side, close to how Peter Schwind approaches the body.
There is real value in that view. It gives you a way to verify work that until then had run on sensation alone. And in fact, over the six years that followed, verification is what I took from IMAC above all.
Still, somewhere along the way I began to feel a resistance. Seeing a person as a collection of parts had a point past which I could not go. That resistance turned into distance, and after the lower limbs course in April 2016 I stopped attending for a while.
I made the same kind of judgement again the following year. In July 2017, on the first day of Peter Schwind’s workshop, I felt a similar resistance and decided within three days not to take his advanced work. The object was close, and the shape of the judgement was the same. What differed was the outcome. I never went back to Peter Schwind. I went back to IMAC two and a half years later.
I have written elsewhere about what returning was like. The material came straight in, and I could sort what I needed from what I did not. Same course, same teacher, and what I was able to receive had changed.
What had been missing was not knowledge. How to meet another person in bodywork — that was what I did not yet understand.
And I had been told as much sixteen months earlier. In August 2014, at the end of the anatomy week of Phase I, Konrad Obermeier gave me a conditional agreement rather than an unqualified one. More anatomy and more hands-on experience were needed; I was well aware of this myself; and I should study from an anatomy textbook rather than looking at plates in an atlas. That all three teachers pointed, in three different vocabularies, at the same single thing is something I have written about elsewhere.
Half of that advice I did follow. IMAC was precisely a place to confirm anatomy in the body. The half I could not follow was the other one, because hands-on experience is not something a course supplies. It is written into this article too: I had only recently begun practising Rolfing, and some of the methods were still beyond me. I wrote that myself, on the day.