This article is based on notes from a course in East Asian Medicine I took between April and October 2019, expanded from the standpoint of September 2026. A note at the end sets out what became visible only later.
What I Most Wanted to Know
September 8, 2019, a Sunday. The fifth day of the course. Blood and fluids in the morning, meridians in the afternoon.
I had been waiting for this one.
The whole reason I took the course was that I wanted to know how to understand the meridians.
The previous November, at the class on the viscera in IMAC — the course taught by Hiroki Sato, Hiro, in Osaka — I met Masamichi Abe for the first time. During the time set aside for participants to pair up and practice, Hiro and Abe started running experiments. They measured the range of motion of muscles lying along a meridian, then stimulated acupoints to see how the body would respond. I felt substantial changes in my own body that afternoon.
What had been happening there? On the fifth day, I finally got to the substance of it.
The Meridians Are Arranged by Position on the Body
The meridians are channels for qi and blood. They circle the whole body, and consist of two kinds: the vertical channels, and the collaterals that connect them crosswise.
There are twelve primary channels. They begin at the lung, and the qi rises from the stomach.
The meridians have yin and yang aspects, and divide into three pairs according to degree.
On the front of the body: 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).
Which means it is useful to learn the meridians by their position on the body. Front, back, side.
We tried this in the room. In groups, with one person as a model, we laid tape along all twelve meridians. You could see with your eyes that each one sat at its own position on the body.
This, I thought, is essentially the same as measuring range of motion in IMAC.
The meridians divide further into hand and foot. The hand channels connect to the organs in the chest — lung, heart, pericardium. The foot channels connect to the organs in the abdomen — spleen, liver, kidney. And the yang channels of hand and foot reach the head.
The Five Organs Do Not Reach the Head or the Neck
Here I learned something significant.
The five organs — lung, heart, liver, spleen, kidney — do not connect to the head or the neck.
What does that mean? It means that releasing the five organs, the yin channels, will not release the head or the neck.
The senses are supposed to be governed by the five organs. And yet they do not reach the head. Something else, then, must carry that information.
That something is the five bowels, the yang channels.
This is the reason the two are separated. Is it a problem of passage, or a problem of insufficiency? The division exists so that this distinction can be made.
And with Hiro’s IMAC, Abe said, you can make that distinction just by measuring range of motion. Which makes it useful.
The Eight Extraordinary Vessels, and the Center Line
On top of these fundamentals, we moved to the vessels that fall outside the ordinary scheme.
What surprised me most was the eight extraordinary vessels.
Abe had written this on Facebook:
The eight extraordinary vessels, more or less skipped over in school. The eight extraordinary vessels, of which even acupuncturists cannot name all eight.
A bit rough on them, isn’t it…
And these vessels, it turns out, are extremely useful.
The main two are the governing vessel and the conception vessel.
The governing vessel manages all the yang channels of the body. It runs along the back, following the spine.
The conception vessel manages all the yin channels. It runs along the front, up the midline.
Both put the whole of the yin or yang aspect in order.
Which raises a thought: order these two first, and perhaps the rest will follow. Abe worked from that idea and accumulated clinical experience with it. What he found was that he could then narrow down where among the twelve primary channels the work needed to happen.
And then he said this.
The governing and conception vessels put the center line of the body in order.
That surprised me, because it is very close to how Rolfing thinks.
The ten-session series runs in this order. The sleeve sessions — one through three — organize the surface and prepare for the core and the center line. The core sessions — four through seven — organize the core and the center line. The integration sessions — eight through ten — bring it together.
Source Point Therapy thinks similarly. The diamond points, blockage points, entry points, and the stick figure are all there to organize the center line.
And then there is the microcosmic orbit, one of the meditations I learned at Taozen, which joins the governing and conception vessels. It is closely tied to meditation, and practicing it requires the circuit to run without obstruction. Turning it, I was told, brings changes to the quality of the hands in bodywork, and to how one practices tai chi and qigong.
The microcosmic orbit has five places to hold in awareness: the navel, the sexual center (near the pubic bone), the perineum, the sacrum, and the gate of life, behind the navel.
Directing awareness counterclockwise around these five and circulating it produces a sense of circulation around the lower dantian, and qi gathers there. Turning all the points eventually deepens the meditation.
This felt like putting the midline of the body in order.
In the room, we worked with the point on the conception vessel at the wrist and the point on the yin motility vessel at the ankle, and used stickers to feel out whether the midline came into order.
In the second half, Abe brought out a treatment table and demonstrated. There is a great deal to learn about meridians and acupoints, but he showed us directly how closely range of motion and acupoints are related. Two hours went quickly.
Note, September 2026
I want to set down where the question I came away with eventually went.
The 2019 article ends with the line that there is limitless potential in the connection between Rolfing, IMAC, and East Asian Medicine. Potential, and that was all. What connects to what, I could not say.
Seven years on, there are two things I can now write.
The first is that meridians have always been handled as a shape the body has.
Front, back, side. Hand and foot. What we confirmed with tape that day was that the meridians correspond to positions on the body. They are channels for something invisible, and yet they are laid out along the body’s form.
This is why IMAC can measure meridians with a Western instrument. You do not have to settle what a meridian is made of; if the position is fixed, it can be measured. The measurable form is taken out without the underlying substance being specified.
Daniel Keown’s The Spark in the Machine, which I read in 2018, proposes that fascia is what meridians actually are. I came to this course carrying that question. But what I learned that day was something other than the question of substance: that meridians have been handled as a shape.
How fascia and meridians connect is something I have written about on a separate page, and I will leave it there.
The second is the center line.
The governing and conception vessels put the center line in order. Rolfing’s ten sessions work toward the center line. Source Point Therapy’s points organize the center line. The microcosmic orbit joins the governing and conception vessels.
The 2019 article sets these four side by side and says they are close. Side by side, and no more; why they are close is not written.
Later, on the page about meridians, I set out that these four give four different names to one line. Center line, midline, the governing and conception vessels, sushumna. Four names, one place.
What surprised me then was not a coincidental resemblance. It was that traditions from entirely different places were looking at the same part of the body.
Related Articles on This Course
East Asian Medicine — A Summary of Six Days Across Six Months of Study
- The Five Elements as a Way of Dividing — The Body Moves Toward Balance on Its Own
- Qi, Blood, and Fluids — Dividing the Invisible into Three
- Pattern Differentiation as a Procedure — Why You Don’t Start with the Organs