Introduction
Could fascia be what the meridians actually are? I read that hypothesis in June 2018, in Daniel Keown’s The Spark in the Machine. The Japanese edition had just come out; I bought it and finished it quickly.
But I had learned about the meridians themselves five years earlier, in 2013, during a yoga teacher training. The order is backwards.
I have practiced Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga regularly for years. The meridians came up as an extension of that practice. To be honest, I had no interest in them at the time. I was learning it in workshops, but what I wanted was for the postures — the asanas — to deepen, not an account of pathways for qi.
Later, finding that practicing asanas alone would not take me further, I turned to Rolfing, and began looking into ways of working with the patterns held in the fascia itself. That took me further still from East Asian Medicine.
And yet, little by little, the thinking behind the meridians came in.
This page gathers where and in what form the meridians came to me. There are five entry points, spread over eight years. Laying them side by side, what I found was that there was never a moment when I chose the meridians.
In time this connects to fascia as well. I have gathered that at the end.
Five Entry Points
Here are the five entry points.
| When | Where | What I learned |
|---|---|---|
| August 2013 | Meridian Yoga Instructor Training (Yoshikatsu Sakazaki, Katsuko Kaneko, Holistic Health Care Institute) | Asanas corresponding to the twelve meridians, the theory of the body axis, the five-phase correspondence table |
| November 2013 | Yin Yoga Teacher Training (Sarah Powers, Under The Light Yoga School) | Chinese meridian theory, qi, yin-yang, the five elements, the correspondence of organs and emotions |
| June 2018 | Daniel Keown, The Spark in the Machine | The hypothesis that fascia is what the meridians actually are |
| November 2018 – December 2021 | IMAC (Hiroki Sato, 11 courses) | Assessing the meridians through range of motion |
| April – October 2019 | The School of the Body: East Asian Medicine (Masamichi Abe, 6 days) | Yin-yang, the five phases, qi, blood and fluids, the meridians, pattern differentiation |
The first two came as practice. The third came as a book, as a hypothesis. The fourth as a question of how to measure, the fifth as theory. The same meridians, approached from four different angles.
A Slight Difference in Posture Divides the Meridians
The first place I encountered the meridians was the Meridian Yoga Instructor Training. What surprised me was that each asana corresponded to a particular meridian, one to one.
A seated forward bend with the legs extended is the Bladder and Kidney meridians. A seated side bend with the legs open is the Gallbladder and Liver meridians. The Governing and Conception Vessels are the corpse pose. Twelve meridians and two vessels, distributed neatly across seven shapes.
What interested me came next. In the same seated forward bend, if you lengthen the spine and open the chest it is the Kidney meridian; if you round the back it is the Bladder meridian. In the plough pose, turning the palms up and out is the Lung meridian; turning them down and out is the Large Intestine meridian. The posture has the same name. Only a slight difference separates them.
The direction of the palms. The opening of the legs. That alone changes which meridian is addressed. It is a way of pointing, from the side of posture, at where the meridians run.
The workshop had a second pillar: the theory of the body axis, based on the work of Hideo Takaoka at the Institute of Movement Science. Seen from the side, the body has four axes, and the third passes just in front of the spine, or through it. Its line begins slightly behind the arch of the foot, passes between the inner ankles, through the perineum, up the front of the spine, and out through Baihui at the crown.
The perineum and Baihui are key points on the Conception and Governing Vessels. The term used was the body axis, but the line it traces overlaps with the central line of the meridians.
And the precondition for forming that axis, I was taught, is letting go of effort. The reasons given were the vestibular system, the semicircular canals, the muscle spindles, and the pressure receptors in the soles. When a muscle is already holding excess tension, the information from the spindles distorts what reaches us about gravity. So to feel gravity, you have to let go.
I began Rolfing basic training a year after this. Tonic Function, as it is taught there, is a framework for how the body responds to gravity, seen through a triad of vision, the feet, and the inner ear. I had heard the same set of receptors named a year earlier.
A Single Line Running Through the Center
Three months later, in November 2013, I took Sarah Powers’ Yin Yoga Teacher Training over five days. It was a month and a half before I received my first Rolfing session.
This one focuses on the seasons — that was how I took it at the time. Meridian yoga travels the twelve meridians. I seem to have been holding the two side by side.
What I learned in yin yoga was quite different from meridian yoga.
A meridian is jing-luo: jing meaning to pass through, luo meaning what connects, what clings like a net. Four functions were listed, and among them were moistening the tendons and bones, and having a beneficial effect on the joints. The names of tissues appear. The five elements too have tissues assigned to them: tendons, blood, blood vessels, skin, bones and teeth, the fluid in the joints. The materials of the body, distributed across five.
The correspondence of organs and emotions was also taught here. Each of the five organs is paired with an emotion that appears when it is out of balance and a state that appears when it is in balance. For the kidneys and bladder, fear and wisdom. For the liver and gallbladder, anger and compassion.
On qi, Ted Kaptchuk’s The Web That Has No Weaver was quoted.
matter on the verge of becoming energy, or energy at the point of materializing
And I was taught about the Governing and Conception Vessels: that they are independent of the twelve meridians, and that in Chinese medicine these two correspond to what Sanskrit calls sushumna, the central channel.
A single line running through the center. What interests me is that here the vocabulary of yoga and the vocabulary of East Asian Medicine joined as one and the same.
The Hypothesis Arrives
On the meridians, five years pass.
In June 2018, the Japanese edition of Keown’s The Spark in the Machine appeared. It examines, from embryology and modern medicine, the claim that fascia is what the meridians actually are. I finished it right away, and liked it enough to read the English edition that December.
What the book brought was not an answer but a question. Where the meridians run, I had already learned in two yoga courses. Onto that was laid a different account: that this might be fascia.
That August I bought Erich Blechschmidt’s book on embryology, out of an interest in the embryology of the fetus. Then in November, in the visceral class of IMAC in Osaka, I began learning embryology from Hiroki Sato. Within half a year, embryology had come to me from three directions.
Assessing Range of Motion Without Asking What It Is
IMAC is a method developed by Hiroki Sato. I studied it from December 2015 to December 2021 — six years, twenty-one days. I have written about it in full elsewhere.
IMAC did not begin from the meridians. It began from three clinical questions, and arrived at the meridians in the course of looking for answers. It moves from structure toward the East. When I began in 2015, East Asian Medicine was not part of the course. It entered the IMAC curriculum in 2019.
What I learned there was a way of assessing the meridians through range of motion.
The method is Western; the object is Eastern. Range of motion is an index of how far a joint moves, measured in degrees — a tool of functional anatomy. Anyone measuring gets the same number, and you can compare before and after the work. That tool is then applied to something long described as invisible.
There have been attempts before to explain East Asian Medicine in the language of Western medicine. Perhaps the meridians are nerves. Perhaps lymph. Perhaps fascia. Each of these tries to say what a meridian is.
IMAC does not ask. It sets aside what a meridian is, assigns to each meridian a sequence of muscles, and measures their range of motion. Left against right, before against after. It takes out only the measurable form, without specifying the substance. That struck me as the innovation.
An article I wrote in April 2019 has the Lung meridian as an example. To examine the meridian related to the lungs, you follow a chain of muscles — subclavius, coracobrachialis, brachialis, pronator teres. If the lungs are in poor condition, somewhere along that chain the range of motion may not be available. Testing both sides at once and working with the unrestricted side brings the restricted side into order.
The meridian is written out as a sequence of muscles.
Then there are the magnets. Place a magnet on the Yuan-Source point of a meridian and the range of motion associated with that meridian changes. Sato has written that this discovery made it possible to create restrictions deliberately, and that this in turn made it possible to build a map. The magnet was not a tool for treatment but a tool for mapping. If you can create a restriction artificially, you can work through the ranges of motion and the muscles that correspond to that meridian, one at a time.
On that map, the meridians were sorted into superficial and deep, and into front, side, medial and lateral. Rolfing works with the body in terms of superficial and deep. The meridians were laid out in the same frame.
Looking at the Tool From Outside
It was in the visceral class of IMAC, in November 2018, that I met Masamichi Abe, an acupuncturist. We were paired for the practice session, and instead of practicing, Sato and Abe began experimenting: taking the range of motion of muscles along a meridian, then stimulating a point and seeing how the body changed. That was the first time I knew East Asian Medicine as sensation rather than theory.
From April to October 2019 I took Abe’s course, The School of the Body: East Asian Medicine — six days, twelve sessions. It began with yin-yang and the five phases, went through the five organs and six bowels in the order of wood, fire, earth, metal and water, took up qi, blood and fluids, moved on to the meridians, and ended with pattern differentiation.
My reason for taking it was less to learn East Asian Medicine for its own sake than to find out, from the side of East Asian Medicine, what IMAC was measuring. I already had a way of measuring the meridians through range of motion. So what were these meridians being measured? I wanted to look at the tool from outside.
Of the five entry points, this is the only one where I learned East Asian Medicine as a system, straight through.
Where the Standard Sits
Something from the first day has stayed with me.
Yin and yang are compared only after you decide what the standard is. So what counts as yin and what counts as yang shifts with what you are comparing. Being able to set the standard yourself, Abe said, is what makes East Asian Medicine interesting, and useful.
That runs opposite to the road I had come by.
Anatomy has advanced by dividing. Name the muscle, fix its origin and insertion, trace its innervation. The immunology I researched and the drug development I worked on in the pharmaceutical industry go the same way: divide, name, verify one at a time. And whether something is normal is decided by the average of a population.
I had heard the same contrast four years earlier. In 2015, in a course taught by a physician who also teaches yoga, I was told that Western medicine takes what is common to the majority as normal and works from averages, while East Asian Medicine has to judge what is normal for each individual.
This is not a question of which is better. Because there are averages, the effect of a drug can be explained to people. Because the standard sits inside the person, you can meet the one person in front of you. I have come through both, and I have no intention of giving up either.
What Disappears When You Divide
Dividing, though, came at a cost.
In dissection, fascia is the first thing removed. To reach the muscle or organ you are after, you strip away what covers it. And on a fixed, thinly sliced specimen, the fluid-filled spaces collapse and the tissue looks densely packed. Fascia went unseen for so long not because it was not there, but because the way of looking was itself removing it. I have written about this elsewhere.
It is like two ways of making a map. Dig into the ground and you can read the order of the strata precisely — but the moment you dig, the water that was flowing there is gone. There is also a way that does not dig: note where the grass grows thick, where the ground turns soft after rain, and draw a line where an underground stream seems to run. You get no cross-section, and the line is an estimate. But the water is still flowing while you look.
Anatomy was the digging kind; East Asian Medicine was the other. Which is why East Asian Medicine never named fascia as a tissue. What it named were the signs on the surface: complexion, nails, hair, posture, range of motion, where symptoms appear. It tied those to the internal organs and wrote them down as lines.
And in recent years a way of seeing inside without digging has arrived. Put an endoscope into a living body and the fascia appears just as it is, holding water and moving. What is seen there and the lines drawn without digging appear, in part, to overlap.
They appear to overlap. That is as far as it goes for now. They may have been two ways of looking at the same thing, or they may have arrived at similar shapes by chance. There is not yet a way to tell the two apart.
Order Restores Itself
The five phases held a surprise as well.
Wood, fire, earth, metal and water stand in relations of generation and restraint: each supports and each checks the others. So when one of the five is disturbed, the body moves of its own accord toward balance. Emotions, temperament, physiological function — rather than being divided finely, they are placed in the same group and handled as one.
Rolfing, Source Point Therapy and IMAC are all work that moves the body toward its own order. The same shape of thinking had come to me in an entirely different language.
Something similar has emerged from the side of Western medicine. Messenger substances travel from organ to organ and from cell to cell, and the body’s balance is maintained through that exchange. Whether generation and restraint and messenger substances point at the same thing, I do not know. But the shape — a whole that comes into order through exchange — is shared.
Six years later, in the Advanced Training, I was given a framework for telling these apart: the three paradigms set out by Jeff Maitland. Relaxation promotes recovery by releasing tension. Corrective addresses symptoms and misalignments. Holistic aims at integration, order and harmony, and at the functioning of the whole person. The three are layered, and working from the deepest reaches the ones above it.
Generation and restraint among the five phases belong, in these terms, to the holistic. When one part is disturbed the whole moves, and as the whole moves it goes toward order. You are not going in to fix a part. That is the one I keep in mind as well.
An Order for Entering From the Whole
I was also taught something about sequence.
In establishing a pattern, you do not go straight to the five organs. You first take hold of the whole through eight broad frames — yin and yang, deficiency and excess, cold and heat, exterior and interior — then look at the state of qi, blood and fluids, narrow to the five phases, and only at the end enter the five organs. Starting from the details, the reason goes, loses the whole. That the organs come last was unexpected.
It is the same as the way IMAC proceeds: enter through range of motion as a coarse index, then narrow down to the muscles. Seeing the whole is a phrase that easily goes vague. What I was taught here was not a vague whole but an order for entering from the whole.
There was also this: each of the five organs is assigned a posture. The kidneys are standing, the liver walking, the heart seeing, the spleen sitting, the lungs lying down. From the side of work that deals with posture, this is not something to pass over. Rolfing deals with how the body stands within gravity. That act of standing is tied, in this system, to an internal organ.
It has not been demonstrated as causation. But a framework that thinks of posture and the organs together has been written down for two thousand years.
The Meridians Are Arranged by Position
A few things from the sessions on the meridians.
The meridians have yin and yang, and are arranged by position on the body according to their strength. On the front, greater yin (Lung, Spleen) and yang brightness (Large Intestine, Stomach). On the back, lesser yin (Heart, Kidney) and greater yang (Small Intestine, Bladder). On the sides, reverting yin (Pericardium, Liver) and lesser yang (Triple Burner, Gallbladder). It is easier to remember them by position, I was told. We divided into groups and taped all twelve meridians onto one person as a model. Once taped, you can see each of them sitting in its own region of the body.
It is essentially like taking the range of motion of muscles in IMAC — that is what I wrote at the time.
Then the Governing and Conception Vessels. The Governing Vessel manages all the yang meridians and runs along the spine. The Conception Vessel manages all the yin meridians and runs up the center of the front of the body. Abe said he had found, in his clinical work, that if you put these two in order first, the places you need to address in the twelve primary meridians narrow down. The Governing and Conception Vessels put the center line of the body in order.
That stopped me.
The Rolfing Ten Series works the superficial layers while preparing for the center line, then works the deep layers and the center line, and integrates at the end. The Diamond Points of Source Point Therapy are also there to put the center line in order. The same shape of thinking — pass through the center first — appears again.
Something came back to me. In October 2015 I had the chance to study a meditation from the Daoist tradition, and was taught a practice called the Microcosmic Orbit. It circulates along the Governing and Conception Vessels. Five places — the navel, Guanyuan, the perineum, the sacrum, Mingmen — are held first as points, then connected into a line. The perineum is the same place the third body axis passes through in meridian yoga. Mingmen sits on the Governing Vessel.
The same single line is called the body axis in yoga, the Microcosmic Orbit in Daoist practice, the Governing and Conception Vessels in East Asian Medicine, and the midline in Rolfing. It was then that I first noticed there were four names for it.
One more thing from that teacher has stayed with me: that energy in the sense physics uses it, and qi, are entirely different things. The word energy is used to explain qi more and more often, he said, but they are not the same.
And in the Yin Yoga training of November 2013, I had already been taught that the Governing and Conception Vessels correspond to the central channel. What I heard from Abe six years later, I had learned once in that first year.
Learned Twice
Laying it all out, I found I had learned several things twice.
The five-phase correspondence table, in meridian yoga in August 2013 and in IMAC in September 2020 — seven years apart. The correspondence of organs and emotions, in Yin Yoga in November 2013 and in the IMAC upper limb course in April 2019. That the Governing and Conception Vessels are a single line through the center, in Yin Yoga and in Abe’s course in September 2019.
The first time, each of these passed by inside a yoga course. That it had not settled in me is there in what I wrote at the time. In 2015 I wrote that I could see the point of yin yoga, but could not feel the ideas of East Asian Medicine as lived experience — that a part of me was asking whether it was really so.
The second time, I learned them again in a form I could verify in the body. It is true that the second time is what made them mine, but it would not be accurate to say I had learned nothing the first time.
The correspondence of the five phases and the emotions, incidentally, is not anyone’s particular theory. Liver and anger, heart and joy, spleen and thought, lungs and grief, kidneys and fear — this goes back to the Suwen of the Huangdi Neijing. The three accounts agree because they come from the same classical source.
What I Had No Interest In Came In Anyway
Arranged by date, the first two entry points are yoga in 2013 and the last three are from 2018 on. In the five years between sits my Rolfing basic training.
East Asian Medicine did not appear in that training. What it deals with is fascia and gravity. I had set aside what I had seen of the meridians on the yoga side entirely.
And yet, in what I studied after certification, the meridians appeared again.
In October 2016, for continuing education credit in Rolfing, I took Jonathan Martine’s twelve-day workshop on neural fascia. The description gave, as the theme of the second half, neural, visceral and energetic integration, and listed assessment based on the meridians and the flow of energy among the goals of the class. The word meridian sat inside a course carrying official Rolfing credit. I had not signed up for that. I chose the workshop on the advice that entering through the nervous system would make fascia easier.
It was two years later, at IMAC, that I actually put my hands on the meridians again. Sato is not someone who started from the meridians either. He came from structure and arrived at them while looking for answers.
And gradually I came to see why he had.
When you touch the viscera in a Rolfing session, the range of motion changes somewhere else. Whether by hand or through movement, when you work on the body the organs answer. There is an order in how they answer, and when you try to see what is linked to what, a map of muscles and bones is not enough. You need lines that connect the organs to the surface of the body.
The meridians were written as those lines.
I did not decide to believe in the meridians. It is only that when you try to read the state of the organs from the side of the body, that map already existed. What I had passed by without interest came back when I needed it.
And Then, the Question of Fascia
That is the record of how I learned the meridians.
Fascia takes its name from a Latin word meaning to bind. It is a continuous tissue that wraps and holds in place the muscles, organs, bones, nerves and vessels, connecting the whole body as one, and it conducts electricity readily. One can say that putting this network in order and putting the flow of qi in order are continuous with one another.
Keown’s book argues, from embryology, that the meridians run within the fascia that binds muscle to muscle, and that how the organs move as a fetus becomes a newborn matters in the forming of the meridians.
It is an appealing hypothesis. But laid alongside the five entry points, it is the newest of them and the least verified.
How Far Can It Be Said
Let me draw the line at the end.
The claim that fascia is what the meridians actually are has not been established. There are suggestive observations and inferences from embryology: that fascia conducts electricity readily, that the course of the meridians appears to overlap the fascial planes, that the movement of the organs may be involved in how the meridians form. All of it is interesting material, but independent verification has not accumulated.
Fascia itself is a different matter. That it is a living continuum, that sensory nerve endings are richly distributed through it, that it is elastic, that it is plastic — these have been confirmed again and again. Of course these too may be overturned. Nothing in science is settled; there are only degrees of confidence. But the degrees differ.
This page does not claim that the meridians are fascia. Nor does it claim that Rolfing cures illness, or that putting the meridians in order improves the internal organs. It sets out what I have learned and the question I have on hand.
And I find the question interesting. It is interesting because it has not been established. If it had been, it would be in a textbook.
There is one more thing this page does not take up: what thought the ideas of yin-yang and the five phases came out of, what the word qi has referred to, how any of it relates to Daoism or Buddhism. I have barely touched those layers. That side I intend to take up elsewhere.
Conclusion
The meridians have been treated as a shape of the body: as posture, as position, as a sequence of muscles, as range of motion. They are said to be invisible, and yet every one of the five entry points taught them tied to something visible. The direction of the palms. Where the body axis runs. The Yuan-Source point and a magnet. Twelve lines taped onto a body.
Onto that, the question of fascia arrived later.
I did not go looking for the meridians. I tried to deepen a posture, tried to change a pattern in the fascia, tried to know what to change when a session had not worked. Each time, I needed lines connecting the organs to the surface of the body, and the meridians were there.
Further reading
- Fascia as a Way of Seeing — What Is Rolfing Actually Touching?
- Fascia Is Alive — and Because It Is Alive, It Long Resisted Direct Observation
- Yoga × Rolfing Gateway ── Why Is There a “Layer That Cannot Be Reached” Even After Continuing Yoga
- IMAC — A Summary of Twenty-One Days Across Six Years of Training
- East Asian Medicine — A Summary of Six Days Across Six Months of Study
- What Is Rolfing’s Ten-Series? — Three Phases in Which the Body Changes, and the Flow of Each Session
- Is Rolfing Pseudoscience? — Understanding Rolfing Through the Science of the Body: The Latest Fascia Research and a PhD’s Perspective on the Evidence
Hidefumi Otsuka (Ph.D.) | Certified Advanced Rolfer™, Rolf Movement® Practitioner PhD in Medical Science, University of Tokyo Graduate School of Medicine. After eleven years in medical marketing at a foreign pharmaceutical company, he has offered Rolfing® sessions in Shibuya since 2015, working under the theme of integrating science and practice.