Introduction
My sessions include stretches where I barely touch the body at all. I have written about this territory, generally called energy work, across three parts. This page is a map for taking in those three parts, and the posts related to them, at once. Start wherever you like.
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.
One Way of Seeing
Here is the spine running through all three.
The word energy is vague. So these three parts take energy not as a special power but as information offered to the body as a system. The practitioner does not cure the body. The practitioner arranges the conditions in which the body can change on its own. And within Rolfing, the energetic territory is the fifth of five entrances into the body. That is the way of seeing shared by the posts below.
Start Here
Tracing Energy Work, in three parts.
| Part | What it takes up | Post |
|---|---|---|
| Part 1 | What the word energy points to. What the practitioner is actually doing | What Does Energy Work Actually Address? |
| Part 2 | From Ida Rolf’s 1974 address to the 2007 controversy and the 2017 special issue. How touch changed, and the Blueprint | How Has Energy Been Treated Within Rolfing? |
| Part 3 | Where it sits among Rolfing’s five taxonomies. What makes something Rolfing | Why Does Rolfing Need an Energetic Perspective? |
Start from What You Want to Know
| If you want to know | Read |
|---|---|
| What energy work actually does | Part 1 |
| How intention and intentionality differ | Part 1 ／ The Difference Between Intention and Intentionality |
| How Ida Rolf thought about energy | Part 2 |
| How it relates to craniosacral and biodynamic work | Part 2 |
| What the Blueprint is | Part 2 ／ Learning the Blueprint |
| Why Rolfing needs an energetic perspective | Part 3 |
| What makes something Rolfing | Part 3 |
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 this series has set out 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.
In the same address, 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
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
What I Received in the Advanced Training
- Understanding Energy Work and Bodywork Through the Lens of Information
- The Relationship Between Energy Work and Body Awareness
- Neutrality and Waiting for Change — Yield Work and Changes Between Sessions
- How Healing Comes About — Jeffrey Maitland’s Four Approaches
Further Reading
- Is Rolfing Pseudoscience? — Understanding Rolfing Through the Science of the Body: The Latest Fascia Research and a PhD’s Perspective on the Evidence
- The Path to Becoming a Rolfer — A 12-Year Training Record
- Journey to Becoming an Advanced Rolfer — A Summary of the Road to Certification
Where to Go Next
There are other entry points into how Rolfing sees the body.
- Fascia as a Way of Seeing — What Is Rolfing Actually Touching?──from the side of the tissue the hands touch
- Our Relationship to Gravity: A Guide to Tonic Function──from the side of the body’s relationship to gravity
- Perception as a Way of Seeing — What Is Rolfing Actually Looking At?──from the side of perception
- Where Does Your “Being” Come From? — Phenomenology for Bodyworkers──from the side of the practitioner who is looking. The distinction between intention and intentionality comes from phenomenology
What We Know, and What We Don’t
What is presented here is what energy work addresses, and how it has been placed within Rolfing; it promises no particular outcome. Nor do I have the means to judge which of the two stories of Rolfing’s origin is true. I want to keep the line between what is known and what isn’t drawn honestly.