The recipe as credo
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, Ida faced a recurring problem: her senior students, having seen the recipe for years, were beginning to wander. They saw deeper, they thought they saw better, and they began to drift from the protocol. Her response was unusually firm. The recipe, she told them, is not a scaffolding to be discarded once internalized — it is a credo, an article of faith that must be held even when the practitioner believes she has outgrown it. The advanced work does not abandon the recipe. It does, however, demand a different relationship to it. The practitioner must hold the recipe as inviolable while simultaneously developing the discernment to recognize what each body in front of her actually needs. This is the tension that animates Ida's teaching about advanced work: continuity of structure, plasticity of response.
"forth, you must stay with this I believe thing if you're going to really go along these lines. If you're not, that's another story. Jen, you seem to have something on your mind, and I thought maybe you would like to talk about what you've experienced and maybe not. I have seen the recipe now sort of like stroboscopically over maybe a period of six or seven years. Y"
Ida, addressing the 1975 Boulder advanced class, on the discipline required of senior practitioners:
What Ken says next, in the same Boulder session, is what makes the exchange historically important. He has watched the recipe evolve over six or seven years of contact with Ida — different techniques applied at the same hour in different years — and he has come to see that the changes are not contradictions but applications. The recipe leads the practitioner to a specific place in the body, and what happens there must answer to what the body asks. Ida does not interrupt this account. She accepts it. The credo, in other words, is not the specific technique applied in the fourth hour to the inside of the thigh; the credo is that the fourth hour goes to the leg and that the body's need governs what happens once you arrive.
"You know, each time that I encounter you and go through a class situation, it's different. You know, the recipe is constantly changing. But from that, I have abstracted Well a sense of of ability. Yeah. It hasn't really changed. You know? Well, what I mean Yeah. Go ahead. Well, I don't want these guys to get off on this tangent. Well, I'm I'm I'm not going on tangent. And that what I see is a continuity within that change, which is sort of reassuring. Know, like there's one year the fascia asks you to go this way or like originally we used to separate on the midline of the thigh this way, and then a year later we were digging in and pulling it up, and the next year we were pushing it toward the midline. But what what I've begun to see from all that is that indeed the fourth hour takes you to the leg, and indeed you have to get a certain amount of work done, but that the body demands what it is that you do. It's as though these different techniques begin to form a body of possibilities that you can apply to the inside of the thigh on the fourth hour. That that part is consistent, that the recipe constantly leads you to the place in the body which this road is following."
Jan, in dialogue with Ida in the same 1975 Boulder session, describing how the recipe holds steady beneath changing techniques:
From cook to chef
Ida's clearest formulation of what advanced work is — and why it cannot be skipped, hurried, or reduced to additional technique — appears in her 1976 institutional address. She frames the transition in culinary terms: the elementary practitioner cooks from a recipe; the advanced practitioner becomes a chef. The chef does not abandon the recipe. The chef has internalized the interplay of materials at a level that allows new creations. The recipe still works at the beginning of every relationship with a body, she insists; it will be good 'down to the end of the line for beginning work.' But the demands of practice extend beyond beginning work, and the institute's job, as she sees it in 1976, is to give practitioners the deeper understanding that lets them respond to those demands. This is the institutional rationale for the four-week advanced class for advanced practitioners she announces for 1977 — a class with no six-week introduction, open only to those who have already taken the standard advanced class.
"We, your teachers, must know how and through what means this revolutionary technique of rolfing works. We must. A recipe is fine, it works, as each and every one of you have reason to know, but when you get to be a chef instead of a cook you create your results not by a recipe but by your recognition of the interplay of food and nutritional materials. This is the level where we are now. We have got to understand those nutritional materials and be able to understandingly put them together, not to supersede the recipe in the early stage of the game, that recipe is going to be good down to the end of the line for beginning work. But after all is said and done, we have many demands that are further along than beginning work. To me personally, we have a consistent and continuous need for input, that is among the teachers and the people who are developing this, a need for input in order to feed the springs that give the outflow, we must know if we have to progress further. We must know more about the structure with which we as welfare are dealing. What is it we're doing to and with these structures? For it is the change in structure which manifests or doesn't manifest or is it only an index for behavior?"
Ida, in a 1971-72 institutional address (IPR conference tapes), announcing the advanced-for-advanced class and the cook-to-chef transition:
The cook-to-chef metaphor is more than rhetorical. It marks a structural distinction in Ida's pedagogy. The cook applies the recipe to produce a predictable result. The chef knows what the ingredients do, why they combine as they do, and what variations are possible without destroying the dish. In Structural Integration terms, the cook applies the ten hours as a sequence; the chef understands what each hour accomplishes structurally and can therefore work intelligently in the advanced hours when the sequence is no longer linear. The advanced hours, Ida is saying, are inaccessible to anyone who has only learned to cook.
"He doesn't understand them. And the same is true as you begin to get into an understanding of what constitutes a body. You've got to start there. But in order to get a more sophisticated, advanced, shall I say control of the body body is what I really mean. You have to then work your way out of it, beginning to see the actual realities as they emerge. Now those old anatomy boys that worked in the fourteenth century and the fifteenth century and so forth were mighty smart babies and I can't understand how just cannot imagine how they got the kind of understanding that they put into this old anatomy books. They did and it worked and it works up to a certain point and then it doesn't work anymore. Then you've got to go on from there. And that is what that advanced class hopes to do. It hopes to take you people who have been brought up on classical anatomy and give you an understanding of the kind of anatomy which a rolfa needs to know in order to create what he's looking for. Now, I would like at this point to throw a question into you. What is Rolfing? Does anyone Anybody want to answer that question? Oh, come now. I'm gonna fire all you advanced students. Be no class tomorrow. What is wrong?
Ida, in the 1976 advanced class, distinguishing elementary instruction from the deeper anatomical understanding the advanced practitioner must develop:
Synthesis of systems
If the elementary work is analysis — taking the body apart layer by layer, hour by hour — the advanced work is synthesis. This is one of Ida's most insistent claims across the 1971-72 and 1974 tapes. The complaint she repeats to her practitioners is that they can take a body apart but cannot put it together. Analysis is necessary; synthesis is the goal. And the synthesis the advanced hours demand is not a synthesis of muscle groups or fascial sheets considered individually but of whole systems — the great fascial planes that organize the body and the energy systems that animate them. The eighth, ninth, and tenth hours, in this account, are not 'more advanced' versions of the earlier hours; they are categorically different work, work that cannot be done at all until the first seven hours have prepared the body to be seen as systems rather than parts.
"Now there are a lot of you here that know about systems analysis, you know more than I do, and there are a lot of you here to whom systems analysis is a strange term, But systems analysis has made so many people aware of synthesis, of integration in life, a synthesis of systems and not of the addition of parts. Now this in Rolfeing, an appreciation of the body. In in Rolfeing, you have to see this as an appreciation of the body as a set of interrelated systems, of interrelated systems rather than an aggregate, a summation of individual pieces, call it myofascial units if you will, is what is necessary to get a body together. This synthesis of systems, not individual pieces. This is the job and the understanding that's necessary for hours eight, nine, and 10 and the more advanced hours. This synthesis of systems and those systems are laid down in the body in terms of great fascial planes and Lewis will be talking about them I imagine in one of the smaller sessions."
Ida, at the 1971-72 conference, distinguishing the analytic work of the early hours from the synthetic work of the later ones:
The methodological tool Ida names for this synthesis is systems analysis. She knows the term sounds borrowed from engineering or biology, but she uses it deliberately. The advance she wants her practitioners to make is from thinking about the body as a pile of pieces to thinking about it as an ensemble of interrelated systems whose behavior cannot be predicted from any one of its parts. This is what makes the advanced hours genuinely different. The practitioner in the third hour can work on the quadratus, see the twelfth rib lift, and trace the consequence to the lumbar spine. But the practitioner in the ninth or tenth hour must work with the whole tensional pattern at once, and the recipe alone cannot tell her where to put her hands.
"You can't go in and feel them. You can go in and feel tendons sometimes, but you cannot feel fascial flames. And your first ten hours, therefore, are creating the order within these planes which make it possible for you to see and think in terms of fashion planes. Now it doesn't make any difference how far back in my teaching you remember, you still remember that I have always said that in those last hours, you must spread your hands. You remember how I fought my way through that. You must spread your hands. You must remember that you are working with fashion. I've always said that. It's only as I work harder and harder and harder to try to present a logical formulation to these people that I begin to get some more order into my own thinking, I suppose you might say."
Ida, in the 1975 Boulder advanced class, on why fascial planes only become accessible after the elementary work is done:
What the first hour is for, in retrospect
The advanced practitioner, Ida insists, must understand the first hour better than the beginning practitioner does. This is one of the more counterintuitive features of her late teaching: the early hours are not basic in the sense of simple. They are basic in the sense of foundational, and their full meaning only becomes legible from the vantage of the tenth hour and beyond. In the 1975 Boulder class, she asks Dan to define Structural Integration as the opening move of a session on the first hour. The exchange that follows is partly diagnostic — Ida wants to see how clearly her advanced students can articulate the work to a stranger — and partly pedagogical, since the act of defining structural integration in the presence of the first hour is itself the discipline she is asking them to master.
" The first hour begins the process. Mhmm. Start out by let me give this a little form for you so it'll be easier for you. Okay. Yeah. Start out by sort of defining structural integration and what it is basically and then go into the first hour. Structural integration is a process. Which we th"
Ida, opening the first-hour review session in the 1975 Boulder advanced class, asks Dan to begin by defining the work:
What follows the definition, in the same Boulder session, is a doctrinal statement Ida had been refining for years and which becomes one of her most-cited late formulations: that the first hour is already the beginning of the tenth. The recipe is not ten discrete pieces of work but a single continuous process broken into ten sessions because the body cannot absorb it all at once. This is the doctrine that justifies the advanced work conceptually. If the recipe is already a single trajectory, then the work after the tenth hour is not a new procedure layered on top — it is the same trajectory continuing into territory the elementary hours opened but did not complete.
"What does matter is you understand you have to lift that up off the pelvis to start getting mobility in the pelvis. Uh-huh. The first hour is the beginning of the tenth hour. Okay? Uh-huh. The second hour is a follow-up of the first hour. Uh-huh. It's just the second half of the first hour. Okay? And the third hour is the second half of the second and first hour. It's literally a continuation. I clearly I clearly saw, you know, last summer that continuation process and how and, you know, Dick talked about how, you know, the only reason it was broken into 10, you know, sessions like that was it because the body just couldn't take all that work. Couldn't take it right. But I just sitting on just trying to figure out how the hell she ever figured out that process, and then began to see it. What she did is what most of of us need to do more."
From the 1975 Boulder advanced class, Ida's senior practitioners articulating her doctrine that the recipe is a single continuous process:
The eleventh hour and the static-to-dynamic shift
Ida's most technical account of what advanced work accomplishes appears in her August 1974 IPR lecture, where she walks her senior practitioners through the conceptual difference between the verticality of the tenth hour and what she calls the dynamic that comes after. The static verticality that ends the ten-session series is genuine — the body stacks, the segments align, the practitioner has done the work the recipe asks for. But verticality, in Ida's mature teaching, is only the bridge to a dynamic that the static body cannot yet manifest. The advanced hours, beginning with what she calls the eleventh hour, are about converting the tenth-hour illumination into something the person can use. The 1974 IPR lecture is where she articulates this most directly.
"The first hour, the eleventh hour so to speak, doesn't add very much dynamic. If you notice what you see is the static improvement of the whole body below the waistline. But that is the road, that is the sort of bridge by which you bridge into the dynamic. Once again, it's the legs you see. But you somehow or another have to get this intuitive feeling for the change from static to dynamic."
Ida, in her August 1974 IPR lecture, on what the eleventh hour does — and does not — accomplish:
What makes this passage important is the distinction it draws between illumination and use. The tenth hour, Ida says, gives the person a real experience of balance — but the person is not yet 'sufficiently experienced' to take hold of the intrinsic musculature and demand work from it. The eleventh hour is where the practitioner begins to teach that musculature how to function under the load of ordinary life. The dynamic is not added to the body the way a tenth coat of paint is added; it emerges from the body once the static stacking has been confirmed and the intrinsics have been activated. This is why, in Ida's late teaching, the post-tenth work is the work where Structural Integration begins to mean what it eventually means.
"And so in your eleventh hour you are taking this person who's had an illumination and he has in that tenth hour to be properly human, you're taking that illumination and you're trying to convert it into something that they can use and the first place, as we've been stressing right from the beginning, is the relation between the feet, the legs, and the intrinsic balance. Now in your temporal you very rarely have established that and if you keep going with that first cycle stuff, you never get to establish it. You have to somehow change relations in fascial planes before you can get that established to the place where you can use it. And it's practically clear what you do then. I have never yet given an eleventh hour to a person without their having a drastic sense of improvement. The chronic that they've had for years suddenly changes. The way they walk changes. They begin to stride across here as you've seen with several of your confras here. They begin to use their legs so differently. And then of course, what you're going to have to do next is to balance the cuff on the bottom. And all of a sudden you find that that arm structure is responsible for a great Beal Mor aberration than you had any idea of."
Ida, continuing the same 1974 IPR lecture, on the dramatic change the eleventh hour produces:
The advanced practitioner sees what the elementary practitioner cannot
A recurring feature of Ida's advanced classes is her insistence that the advanced student must learn to see what the body itself shows, not what the recipe predicts. In the 1976 advanced class, she pushes a student who has begun to describe what needs to happen next in a body by reference to the recipe rather than to what she is looking at. The exchange is delicate because Ida does not want to undermine the recipe she has just spent the previous section defending. What she wants is for the advanced practitioner to recognize that, by this point in her training, the recipe and the body should be telling her the same thing — and if they are not, she has stopped seeing the body.
"You say that's a question of knowing the recipe. Or it shows in their bodies too? Well, it says in their bodies. This is what I'm saying. Are you seeing it basically because you know the recipe? Or are you seeing it because you are looking at bodies? Say, if you like, that it's the recipe."
From the 1976 advanced class, Ida pressing a student on whether her observations are coming from the body or the recipe:
The same teaching beat appears in the 1975 Boulder transcripts, where Ida's senior students reflect on what has changed in their work since beginning the advanced class. Pat, Chuck, Joe and others describe a shift not in technique but in clarity — both their own clarity about what they are doing and the clarity of the bodies under their hands. The advanced work, in their accounts, has produced a different relationship to fascial planes. They are no longer working on muscles individually; they are working with planes as planes. This is the practical face of the synthesis Ida named institutionally in 1971-72: the practitioner reaches a point where the systems become the unit of perception.
"But I'm finding or the thing that I wanna learn in my that I'm trying to learn now is how to really move those fascial planes, and I really recognize that my fingers just simply do not have enough knowledge. And that's Is it knowledge or is it strength? Well, but they don't have enough strength at times. At other times, it's just simply not enough information. I'm not clear yet about what they're telling And so that's that's what I'm trying to deal with. So, Chuck, what's coming up in your life? Well, I've noticed in the last six weeks, I've been able to go a lot deeper with less effort. Don't have to so much Is it that your less effort is less fear? No, think it's less effort. Good. I also the word when you used clarity fits too. Like, I feel more clarity in my own body, And when I'm working, there's more clarity under my hand. And I'm really interested to learn more about fascia planes in my hands. Joe? Yeah. I'll go home with with trust. Have noticed in my work that my clients now talk to me about relationships. All of a sudden. All of a sudden, right. Of course, there's no projection on your part or lack of projection at all. And I find that as I see my work more in terms of relationships, that's what comes out. They talk about it. Ain't that wonderful? Yeah, it is wonderful. Then my expectation for the next four weeks is to really learn more about the fascial planes, both in my head and in my hands. And find that my thinking is abandoning the model"
From the 1975 Boulder advanced class, senior practitioners describing what has changed in their work since beginning the advanced training:
The tenth hour as test of balance
The tenth hour occupies a particular place in Ida's account of advanced work because it is the hinge — the end of the elementary series and the precondition for everything that follows. In the 1976 advanced class she asks her students to articulate the test for a good tenth hour, and the answer she accepts has a specific structure: the practitioner sits behind the person, takes the head, and feels the continuous wave that should travel through the spine from cranium to sacrum without interruption. The test is not of any single segment but of balance throughout — nothing catching, nothing out of line, each part balancing its opposite. This is what the static verticality of the tenth hour is supposed to deliver, and it is what the eleventh hour and the advanced work then take up and convert into dynamic function.
"got a much greater degree of balance than you had before. Wherever you are going in that material universe, are recognizing the fact that the material stuff in the three-dimensional universe works at its optimal when it is under a law of balance. And this is what your tenth hour is about. Did you hear from any of these people about what is the test for the tenth hour? Supposing some of you take on that one. What is the test for the tenth hour? When do you know you have done a good tenth hour? When you can. The person sitting straight and hung up with the tuberosity. Holding the head, pulling up on the side of the head, jiggling it, back from the side to side. You can feel the spine as a continuous wave all the way down to the sacrum, so you have more weight on the end of the line with no interference along the spine. That's right. And do you recognize how what he's describing describing there there is is a test of balance. Something isn't out of line. Something isn't catcher. Something is balancing its opposite number. And so you get this uninterrupted wave through the body. Now, actually, that wave occurs in the mesodermic body."
Ida, in the 1976 advanced class, naming the test for a successful tenth hour:
What Ida adds in this 1976 passage is the further claim that the wave occurs in the mesodermic body — the body derived from the middle germ layer, the body of bones and muscles and connective tissue — but that the behavior pattern it instills lives in the ectodermic body, the nervous system. The tenth hour, in other words, changes the connective tissue body in such a way that the nervous system inherits a new pattern. Whether and how it propagates to the endodermic body — the gut, the glands — she does not claim to know. This is one of those passages where Ida's classroom honesty becomes part of the doctrine: she names what she has observed, names what she has not resolved, and refuses to invent the connection.
"Something isn't catching. Something is balancing its opposite number. And so you get this uninterrupted wave through the body. Now actually that wave occurs in the mesodermic body. But the behavior pattern out of its hills is in the ectodermic body. In the body that has derived from the ectoderm, the nervous system. And it may or may not, it probably will but not predictably, carry through into that endomorphic endomorphic, endomorphic body, the gut body, the gland body. Doctor, how does it carry too many of you? I don't know. Several things in life I don't know. Don't you hear how that question violates what we are preaching in. Don't you hear how you are asking What you see as you look at this, you begin to see how balance is necessary between bodies as well as within bodies. Certainly you've got to balance muscles in that connective tissue body. And this is where you can start because myofascial units or something you can lay your hands on. With your hands you can affect it. With your hands you can put it somewhere and ask it to work."
Continuing the same 1976 teaching, Ida on what balance reaches and what it does not:
The energy body and what fascia is for
Ida's most ambitious framing of advanced work — and one that recurs across the 1974 Healing Arts conference and the 1971-72 IPR tapes — is that the practitioner of the advanced hours is no longer working on structure for the sake of structure. The structure is the access route to the energy body. This claim is more speculative than the structural claims, and Ida treats it as such. She does not claim to know what the energy body is. She claims to have evidence that something the practitioner does with her hands to the fascial body produces effects that the structural account alone cannot explain — auras that expand from half an inch to four or five inches, electroencephalographic changes, reports of altered consciousness. The advanced practitioner, in her late teaching, must be aware of this frontier even if she cannot work it directly.
"And if you think I have been too freely imbibing of that nectar that they have up on Cloud 9, it would be an idea to talk to some of the more recent advanced students and see how they feel about what their ability is to see and to work at this point. So as I say, we are bragging. We are bragging about how much better we can do at this point than we could have a year ago. But now let's leave that one for the time being. All of you, however, know that my personal goal in the study of Rolfing is the study of the energy body and how it works. What constitutes the energy body? And how are these structures affected by Rolfing or by other techniques? How are they affected? This is the question. It's quite true that we as rolfers are basically concerned with the application and the improvement of the technique called rolfing, but unless we have a basic understanding of what it is we are trying to affect and how these energy units can express themselves in what we call, we are pleased to call the real world, we are in a dark confusion. You see, ordinarily we don't think down to that depth."
Ida, at the 1971-72 IPR conference, framing the energy body as her own personal research goal:
Valerie Hunt's work at the 1974 Healing Arts conference gave Ida laboratory evidence for what she had long claimed intuitively: that the practitioner is doing something more than mechanical reorganization. Hunt's electromyographic studies showed that after the ten-session series, the patterning of neuromuscular energy changed — frequencies shifted, baselines reorganized, the body controlled movement from a different level of the nervous system. This data did not settle the question of what the energy body is, but it gave Ida a vocabulary for what the advanced practitioner is trying to extend. The advanced hours are where the practitioner consolidates these neuromuscular changes into stable patterns rather than transient effects.
"It is the kind of thing you experience when you're out playing golf and that one time you hit that ball magnificently and it took off and it was no effort, and you're always looking for it again. We find that when people become more skillful in a particular high level task, they become what we call more finalized. There's a lot of research on this to show that the frequency actually changes. I think that Rolfing brings a downward shift. There is another level of control that we call the midbrain, and this area also can turn on muscles. We can operate on it. It is one of our very basic areas for some of our primitive movement, and it primarily innervates the great large joints of the body and those which are proximal, such as the shoulders and the hips and the trunk one of the areas that Rolfing works a great deal upon. This has a tendency to produce a very rhythmic quality of movement. And then there, of course, is that cortex that louses us up in so many ways. It can do those fine things with the hand and the beautiful nuances in the face, but it is totally inefficient, inefficient. It louses up, its pattern is not well established. Two muscles counteract each other at the same time, And my feeling is that this smoother energy release that comes after rolfing is based upon a downward shift in the control in the primary control. This doesn't mean you can't be cortical but in the primary control of muscle. Another finding is that after structural integration there was more sequential contraction of muscles and not so much co contraction. What do I mean by sequential and co? If you're doing very, very fine work, such as writing for long periods of time or work with your eyes, work with your hands, it requires co contraction. You know how fatigued you get."
Valerie Hunt, presenting her electromyographic findings at the 1974 Healing Arts conference Ida convened:
Why the recipe is taught from the periphery toward the center
One of the structural principles Ida names in her 1974 Big Sur and 1975 Boulder teaching is that the recipe works from the periphery toward the center — and the advanced work continues this trajectory at a deeper level. The first hour reaches superficial fascia. The second hour reaches the extensors of the back. By the third hour the practitioner is working with the quadratus, and the depth has increased. The pattern continues through the recipe: each hour both reaches a deeper layer and confirms the layer above. The advanced hours, in this account, are the hours where the practitioner finally reaches the structures the elementary work has been protecting: the intrinsic musculature of the spine, the deep fascial sheaths around the viscera, the planes that organize the body's three-dimensional architecture.
"And you can only do that by getting this ready for alignment. So now we have been talking about another trick. And the third trick is that when we work, we work from the periphery toward the center. Now when you come right down to it, we've been doing that in the second hour. When you go and you get to those extensor muscles in the back, you are certainly at a deeper level than you were when you were working with that superficial fascia. In the early stages of the game, nobody believes that you're really working with that superficial fascia in the first hour. But actually, as you go further along and get more familiar with it, you begin to realize that you are working with that superficial fascia and that you are stretching that superficial fashion. And it is by virtue of the change that you put into the superficial fashion that you begin to get change in underlying structures."
Ida, in the public-tape lecture material from the Boulder period, on the periphery-to-center trajectory:
The third hour is the canonical example of how this trajectory works in practice. In the public-tape teaching on the third hour, Ida walks her students through the chain: the quadratus organizes, the twelfth rib lifts and is supported rather than hung from, the trunk lengthens, the lumbar vertebrae find their place, and the autonomic chain that runs in front of those vertebrae — long the unstated concern of the work — finds room to function. This is the chain the advanced practitioner must understand because the same logic, scaled and deepened, governs the advanced hours. Each move enables the next; nothing is independent; the practitioner who cannot trace the chain cannot work intelligently at the deeper levels.
"the crest of the ileum and the twelfth rib, you get it stand out by your very effortful work there. What else happens? The the thing that I'm thinking about is it begins to do its function of supporting the twelfth grip instead of hanging on to it. Something else very important comes in there. Fritz, you wanna help me on? I think I'm still caught in this twelfth rib too or freeze the twelfth rib so that which is so important in the abdominal function and in the allowing the trunk to lengthen. How does the trunk lengthen? How does the trunk lengthen? What is the mechanism? Organizing the quadratus, the twelfth rib becomes more elevated. Elevated. And then? Well, let's do this together. The trunk lengthens by straightening the spine. Yes. So the You see, stretch the soft tissue and then the the hard tissue, the tent pole can go into place. Oh, okay. And if it's gone Now if the tent pole is in place, place, then you begin to get an entirely different functioning in your autonomic nervous system which is dependent on the tent pole, as well as your central nervous system."
From the public-tape teaching on the third hour, Ida walking her students through the cause-and-effect chain that governs advanced work:
Fascial planes as the advanced practitioner's working unit
Ida's most concrete account of how advanced work differs from elementary work centers on fascial planes. In the elementary hours, the practitioner works on muscles, on tendons, on the superficial fascia that wraps them. The advanced practitioner, by contrast, works on fascial planes — the great sheets of connective tissue that organize the body's tensional architecture across regions. This is what Lewis Schultz was beginning to document with Ron Thompson's dissection photographs, and it is what Ida wanted her advanced students to learn to see. The 1975 Boulder transcripts return repeatedly to this point: the practitioner whose perception is still organized around individual muscles cannot do advanced work, because the units of advanced work are not muscles.
"With the kind of culture that you we have here, you would suppose there would be somebody who could put together an elastic model or something that would make give this thing a greater reality, but I wouldn't know where to find it. I do think that sooner or later, someone of us has to be smart enough to really trace out facial patterns of the shoulder girdle and facial patterns of the hip girdle. Because you see this is what we've been dealing with. And then there is the problem of the connection between say the tenth rib and the crest of the ileum which is another fascial problem. But how do these hip girdle fascia fit together with the fascia that enwraps the obliques for instance? Now if the fascial patterns were as clear to us as the muscular patterns are, I think there would be a great deal less problem in teaching this if there were a book to which we could refer about how those fascial planes run as we refer back to our anatomies here as to how the muscular patterns run. It might be that it would be easier to turn our practitioners who understood they were dealing with facial bodies. You see, when you people get to the place where you go out and you give demonstrations, you can bank on the fact that you're going to have one or two people in the audience who are going to say to you, and how does this happen or what happens? And you say something about it happens by means of fascism. And there will be a great many people in the audience that you see haven't heard your word fascia because that this is an unfamiliar word to them."
Ida, in a public-tape teaching session, on the unfinished work of mapping fascial planes:
The reason fascial planes are central to advanced work, in Ida's account, is that fascia is the organ of structure. Muscles, considered individually, are energy machines — they generate force, they shorten and lengthen, they move bones. But the spatial relationships between body segments, the relationships the word 'structure' actually refers to, are held by fascia. The advanced practitioner is therefore working on the organ that establishes structure as such. This is why the synthesis Ida demands in the advanced work is a synthesis of fascial systems: because those systems are what structure is, and the work of integration is by definition the work of bringing those systems into proper relation.
"Now, as I told you before, in structural integration, we think in terms of we work in terms of the stacking of the blocks which are part of the myofascial system, the connective tissue system, the collagen system. And it is the collagen system which basically, which the two classes on different levels are going to turn your attention to in the the next six to thirty weeks. You are going to be getting more and more intimate with collagen which before you heard it well could mean you didn't know existed. But you see, it is the connective tissue which is the organ of structure. The fascia envelopes are the organ of structure, the organ that holds the body appropriately in the three-dimensional material world. Now nobody ever taught this in the medical school as far as I know. And anytime you want to get into an argument with your medical through they'll realize that this is so. It is the fascial aggregate which is the organ of structure. And the structure basically the word, where we use the word structure, we are referring to relationships in free space. Relationships in space. There's nothing metaphysical metaphysical about it. It's pure physics as it's taught in physics laboratories."
Ida, in the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, on fascia as the organ of structure:
The advanced practitioner's discernment
Toward the end of the 1975 Boulder class, in a moment of relative quiet, Ida asked her senior students to articulate what they were beginning to see in their bodies that they had not seen before — and specifically, what the difference was between the pattern at the end of the tenth hour and the pattern at the end of advanced work. The answers her students gave are themselves part of the doctrine. They speak of greater involvement of intrinsic musculature, of a lift from the core, of relationships between joints and the freedom of those joints, of a body operating at a different level. None of these are claims about technique. They are claims about what the practitioner is now able to perceive.
"is a greater lift from that core, greater liveliness from that internal core after the advanced therapy. And what and to the at the end of the tenth, what I'm seeing is more in relation I'm seeing more in relationship to joints and freedom of those joints."
Ken, in the 1975 Boulder advanced class, describing what advanced work adds beyond the tenth hour:
What Ida is asking her students for in these closing exchanges is not technical mastery but discernment — the capacity to see what advanced work has done and to articulate it in terms a peer or a stranger can understand. This is the same demand she made of Dan at the beginning of the 1975 class when she insisted he define Structural Integration before discussing the first hour. The advanced practitioner must be able to say what the work is, what each hour accomplishes, what advanced work adds, and how she knows. Without this articulacy, Ida thought, the practice would not survive its transmission. The advanced work is therefore as much a discipline of perception and language as it is a discipline of hands.
"Or should we recognize that in terms of gravitational pulls, he's better off if he can get a step out of one. Now what you people are doing is learning a recipe. And that recipe is good. But unless you learn that that recipe is a response to what goes on in the body. It is not doing what you do. Recipe is like all cookbooks. It's an ever present help in time of trouble. But if you get good enough, you don't have times of trouble. How's your dog house this morning? Feels great."
Ida, in the 1976 advanced class, on the recipe as ever-present help in time of trouble — and what supersedes it:
Coda: the work continues
By 1976, Ida was eighty, and the institutional questions about advanced work had become inseparable from questions about the work's transmission after her. Her institutional addresses from 1971-72 onward returned repeatedly to the necessity of training teachers as well as practitioners — of producing not only competent practitioners but people capable of teaching them. The advanced class for advanced practitioners, announced for 1977, was part of that project. So was her insistence on synthesis of systems, her demand for clarity of definition, her refusal to let the recipe be reduced to procedure. What she was building was a profession that could outlast her and continue to develop the work she had begun. The advanced work, in this final sense, is not a fixed body of technique but an ongoing inquiry into what the practice can become.
"To me personally, we have a consistent and continuous need for input, that is among the teachers and the people who are developing this, a need for input in order to feed the springs that give the outflow, we must know if we have to progress further. We must know more about the structure with which we as welfare are dealing. What is it we're doing to and with these structures?"
Ida, at the 1971-72 IPR conference, naming the necessity of continued input:
See also: See also: Open Universe Class (UNI_044) — Ida and a senior practitioner answering audience questions on training, on the recipe's evolution, and on what the elementary practitioner is taught to perceive before beginning to work. UNI_044 ▸
See also: See also: 1975 Boulder advanced class (T1SB) — extended discussion of how each hour feeds into the next, with Bob Hines articulating the doctrine that the work on the back in the first hour opens the doorway to the quadratus in the third. T1SB ▸
See also: See also: Open Universe Class (UNI_083) — Ida on the seventh hour as a balancing hour that affects the pelvis as well as the head, and on how the recipe's progression brings the body to changes in the pelvis that the earlier pelvic hours alone could not produce. UNI_083 ▸
See also: See also: 1975 Boulder advanced class, second-hour session (B2T8SA) — John defining Structural Integration in his own words, working out the tensegrity-mast versus stack-of-blocks distinction that Ida wanted her advanced students to be able to articulate. B2T8SA ▸
See also: See also: RolfB6 public tape (RolfB6Side1a) — extended teaching on what the first hour does in light of the whole series, including the doctrine that the first hour balances what the body brings while the remaining hours add new organization. RolfB6Side1a ▸
See also: See also: RolfA3 public tape (RolfA3Side1) — detailed walk-through of the third hour and its consequences for the lumbar spine and the autonomic chain, recorded as Ida is teaching practitioners to trace the cause-and-effect chains advanced work requires. RolfA3Side1 ▸
See also: See also: 1976 advanced class (76ADV62) — Ida on the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic musculature and her argument with Lewis Schultz over redefining the terms, which bears on what the advanced practitioner must perceive in the deeper structures. 76ADV62 ▸
See also: See also: SIIPR2 (1971-72 conference) — Ida's account of the difference between the standard work and a softer variant practitioners sometimes claim to offer, along with her remarks on structural patterning as the necessary complement to the hands-on work. SIIPR2 ▸