Tracing Energy Work (Part 1 of 3)
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, as a series tracing energy work, I want to think this through in three parts. This first part takes up what the word energy points to, and what the practitioner is actually doing. Part 2 turns to the history within Rolfing, and Part 3 to where it sits among Rolfing’s five taxonomies.
The map of the whole is “What Energy Work Is — Where the Word Points, and How It Entered Rolfing.”
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.
What the practitioner can do, then, 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.
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 (see “Using Sensation Rather Than Knowledge: Accessing the Blueprint“).
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 Source Point Therapy.
Next time, I trace how energy has been treated within Rolfing.
The whole series is gathered in “What Energy Work Is — Where the Word Points, and How It Entered Rolfing.”
Tracing Energy Work
- Part 1 What Does Energy Work Actually Address? (this article)
- Part 2 How Has Energy Been Treated Within Rolfing?
- Part 3 Why Does Rolfing Need an Energetic Perspective?