The practitioner as a highly trained individual
In a 1971-72 interview that became part of the Psychology Today archive, Ida was pressed by an interviewer to describe what the practitioner does with their hands. She declined — she said she would not describe the manipulation under any circumstances, because to do so would tempt the unqualified to try it. This refusal is the entry point into her doctrine of apprenticeship. The work was not a technique that could be lifted from a book or imitated from a demonstration; it was the disciplined extension of a person who had been trained to see, trained to think, and trained to feel what is happening under the hands. The interviewer's frustration in that exchange is audible, and it sharpens the claim Ida is making — that the apprentice and the work cannot be separated, and that this is why the threshold for entering the training is high.
"A rolfer is a highly trained individual."
Asked to describe what the practitioner actually does, Ida pivots to the question of training itself:
The phrase 'highly trained individual' carries more weight in Ida's usage than it does in ordinary speech. By 1971 she had spent more than two decades watching what happens when people see a demonstration and decide they understand the work. She tells, in the same period, a story about a man who watched her give a demonstration, went home, tried it on his mother-in-law, got no results, and concluded that her method was no good. The story is funny but it is also her standing argument for why apprenticeship had to be long, layered, and screened. The hands cannot operate without the trained eye behind them, and the trained eye cannot develop without the year of reading, the months of auditing, and the supervised hours of practice that precede the practitioner's first independent session.
"They have no idea of the sophistication necessary to that movement in order to create good. Maybe they don't want to. A guy one time said to me, I saw you give a demonstration. I went home, and I tried it on my mother-in-law. She has a heart condition and Wright's disease, and it didn't do her any good. Your method's no good. If it hadn't happened to me, I wouldn't have believed it. All of this energy has to be added in an appropriate direction."
She tells the story of the man who tried the work on his mother-in-law:
The year of reading
Before the prospective practitioner ever touched a body in a training context, Ida required a year of biological reading. The reading list was substantial — physiology, anatomy, the medical biological sciences — and candidates with prior medical or pre-medical training were routed into more specialized material. The reading was not a credentialing exercise. It was a test. At the end of the year, the candidate had to answer a set of written questions, and the questions were designed not to verify that the candidate had retained facts but to reveal whether the candidate could think with the material. Ida wanted to know whether the person in front of her was a copyist or a constructor. The Structural Integration she was building required practitioners who could read a body the way a chemist reads a reaction — by constructing an explanation from the available evidence rather than by reaching for a stored answer.
"sciences, the first thing we do is give them almost a year of reading. -In physiology and -In biology all and kinds of things that indicate that have to do with the biological sciences. If, on the other hand, they have had pre medical training or medical training and so forth and so forth, they've had a lot of this and they go on into something more highly specialized."
Asked what training a practitioner receives, Ida begins with the reading:
The questions at the end of the reading year were the actual filter. Anyone could read for a year; not everyone could construct an idea from what they had read. Ida's emphasis on independent construction is consistent with her own biography — Barnard PhD in 1916, research chemistry at the Rockefeller Institute, the Schrödinger lectures in Zurich — and it reflects a research-scientist's view of what makes a person trustworthy with material. The body, in her view, did not give up its information to people who had been trained to receive received ideas. It gave its information to people who had been trained to read evidence.
"them, the point of these questions being to find out whether that individual in answering that question goes to the textbook and copies the textbook, or whether he takes the material and constructs an idea independently."
She describes the function of the end-of-reading questions:
Anatomy, physiology, and the test of massage
Beyond the reading, Ida named two further preconditions for the practitioner: a goodly knowledge of anatomy and physiology, and substantial prior exposure to giving massage. The anatomy and physiology requirement is the obvious one — she expected practitioners to have taken anatomy at a medical school where possible, and certainly to know the muscular and tendinous structure of the body in detail. The massage requirement is the more interesting one. It was a test, not a credential. Ida had observed that some candidates believed they wanted to work with bodies and discovered, once they actually had their hands on bodies, that they did not. The exposure to massage was diagnostic. It revealed whether the person could tolerate the intimacy and physicality of the work before the institute had invested in their training.
"A goodly knowledge of anatomy and physiology. And then of course the training in romping that we give. It's also good to have quite a little exposure to giving massage, to find out whether you really like to deal with bodies because there are plenty of people that don't, you see. They think in their heads that they do, but when they really get their hands on bodies they find that this has slight repulsion for them."
Asked what formal training is essential, she names the two prerequisites:
Even into the early 1970s, the training was geographically distributed. The institute had no single training building until the Boulder facility was acquired. Elementary classes ran on the East Coast and the West Coast, and the same was true of the advanced classes, so that students could attend four days a week and return home for three days to earn their living. The pattern reflects Ida's pragmatism — practitioners had families, mortgages, jobs, children — but it also reflects her understanding that the apprenticeship would last for years, not weeks, and that no candidate could be expected to abandon their economic life to enter it.
"Well that person does it as long as the rolfa. Is there just one place now that is training rolfers or are there No. Have never, up to this point, we've never trained in one place, so I think the training in one place is getting nearer. We now have our own building in Boulder, thanks be to God and some friends, and I think we'll probably be setting up a proper training station in Boulder presently. But up to this point we've always had an elementary class on the East Coast, an elementary class on the West Coast, an advanced class on the East Coast, an advanced class on the West Coast, so that people can come to these classes and still go to their homes for these classes usually run four days a week and they can go home for three days and they can earn their living as they have been earning their living during those three days and they don't go completely broke and little Susie doesn't get too far out of hands or little Johnny and so forth and so forth. Where could I write in order to find out how that's all going The Moss Institute, Boulder, Colorado. Box 1868. Box 1868. Boulder, Colorado."
She describes the logistical structure of the training and its accommodation to students' lives:
Auditing: learning to see before learning to do
After the reading year and the prerequisite anatomy, the apprentice entered the auditing class. The auditing class was the stage of training that distinguished Ida's apprenticeship most sharply from a technical course. In an auditing class, perhaps six candidates were learning the manipulations directly, and ten or fifteen others sat around the room watching. The auditors did not have their hands on bodies. They were learning to see. They were learning that if six people walked in for their second hour, all six would show the same mal-symptom in their feet; they were learning that if a client claimed to be coming in for a first hour but had already had three hours from another practitioner on a different coast, the practitioner ought to be able to tell from the body configuration; they were learning that the body has a vocabulary and that the vocabulary is visible before it is touchable.
"Biological disciplines, then I assume he must go into or she must go into some kind of next thing they do is to go into what we call an auditing class. Now the auditing class consists of not individual coming to a proper manipulating, laughing class. There'll be perhaps six people learning Ralphing manipulation in this class, and then maybe 10 or 15 of them sitting around as what we call auditors, looking at the changes, learning to see. Auditing is not learning to hear, but learning to see. So the auditor has not yet started doing the manipulations him or herself. That's right. He's learned to see what needs to be manipulated and how when it's manipulated in this fashion, it changes. And he learns to see that if you do six people in a second hour and do their feet, lo and behold, they all show the same thing. He learns to see that if somebody walks in and says, well, I've had several treatments from somebody on the East Coast, and I don't quite know I don't quite know how many. He learns to see that he shouldn't be able to tell. Exactly how many treatments that person has had by the body configuration. That's fascinating. That's fascinating."
Asked what comes after the academic training, Ida describes the auditing class:
The auditing stage was also a screening stage. Candidates who could not learn to see, or who could not relate to people in the room, were eliminated at this point rather than allowed to continue investing time and money in a training that would not produce a practitioner. Ida was explicit that relating to the client was not optional — the work depended on the client feeling that the practitioner was working with them on a shared project, not performing a procedure on a body. The screening was not cruel, but it was deliberate. Better to be eliminated as an auditor than to discover later that one did not belong in the work.
"He's an individual, and all of these individuals have their own individual wants and wishes and so forth and so forth. But they better have approximately the same techniques. Okay. If I walked into a rolfar's office, what would I expect to happen to me in that first session? You would expect to get your shoulders more horizontal, your chest raised, your back probably flattened though I can't I don't see I see malalignment between the front and the back in"
She describes how variety among practitioners is permitted, and where it is not:
The first sessions, and the recipe as life preserver
When the new practitioner finished training and walked out into independent practice, Ida and her senior colleagues knew that they had not finished forming a craftsman. They had produced someone who could execute the ten-session series with reasonable competence. What the new practitioner had not yet developed was judgment — the capacity to deviate from the recipe based on what the body showed, the capacity to see beyond the immediate hour, the capacity to feel what was happening under the hands as a relationship rather than a procedure. For this reason, the recipe in the early years functioned not as a constraint but as a life preserver. Several of her senior students testified that they stayed inside the recipe deliberately for years after certification, treating it as the apprenticeship's continuation rather than its end.
"My experience was that I was scared when I got out of practitioner training. I'd done 20 sessions in my life, and I was being turned loose on the world of a romper. So I just stayed in that recipe like it was a life preserver. That's appropriate. All those things. In fact, decided to stay in it for five years, which was my own commitment to myself. I figured if it takes a carpenter in the old school five years to become a journeyman, it's going to take me that long."
A senior practitioner describes the years immediately after certification:
Ida endorsed this discipline. She did not want new practitioners deviating from the recipe on the basis of partial insight. The recipe carried the practitioner reliably to the end of the tenth hour because it had been built by years of her watching bodies and discovering the sequence in which the onion could be unpeeled without disordering. A new practitioner who began improvising before the underlying logic of the sequence had been internalized would not produce better outcomes — they would produce inconsistent ones. The discipline of staying inside the recipe was, in this sense, part of the apprenticeship itself. The practitioner earned the right to depart from it by first proving that they could execute it.
"And in most people, the bowl is spilling over forward. And our goal is to bring that bowl horizontal so that the contents of the torso sit in the bowl properly. So part of the training is to see the result of process. As well as to see what you do next in the process. You see the genius of Doctor. Rolf, part of her genius is in developing a sequence in which the onion can be unpeeled without disordering. In other words, so that you can take layer by layer in a sequential way each hour bringing in a level of organization. She says, well, it's easy to take a body apart, but it's not so easy to put it together. And that's that's the key to it. We're all being said in each hour, you're adding order."
She describes the logic of the sequence and what part of her genius it embodies:
Direction, not pressure: what the apprentice is taught from the first day
At the heart of Ida's pedagogy was the doctrine of direction. The work was not a matter of pressure, and it was not a matter of force. Practitioners added energy to the body manually — by finger, by knuckle, by elbow — but the energy had to be added in the right direction, because the wrong direction would break the body's structure down rather than build it up. This is the doctrine that distinguished her work from imitators who saw a demonstration and concluded that pressure was the operative ingredient. Direction was what she taught from the first day of training to the last day of the advanced classes, and it was direction that made the apprentice's training so long. Pressure can be learned in an hour; direction takes years.
"This is what the rover is taught from the first day he comes into training to the last day when he leaves the training of the advanced classes, to try to know the direction in which he must be working."
She names the operative axis of the entire training:
Direction implied something prior — that the practitioner must already know where the body belongs. The practitioner had to carry a template, a perception of where the muscle should lie when the body is balanced, where the joint should articulate, what normal movement is as distinct from random movement. Without this template, direction is meaningless, because there is no destination toward which the gesture is moving. The template was acquired through the auditing and the early practice; it was refined through the advanced classes; and it was, in Ida's view, the practitioner's most consequential intellectual instrument. A practitioner without a template was simply pressing on tissue.
"In general, the Ralfa adds his energy, I repeat it, by manually bringing a muscle toward the position in which the muscle belongs for balance. He demands that the joint moves in the appropriate direction for balance. Now, that implies that the rafter must know where the appropriate direction lies, that he knows what is normal movement as opposed to what is random movement. And there are an infinity of other details which demand that he be a skilled, well trained craftsman. Now, I think I have given you most of the premises that lie behind structural integration. You did see, during the course, you saw Bob Hines doing the actual work on a young man's body."
She elaborates on what the practitioner must know to make direction operative:
Editor's note on trademark
Several of the verbatim quotes in this article use terms that are registered trademarks of the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute (DIRI). These terms appear here only inside verbatim historical material from Ida and her colleagues in the period 1971-1976, as a matter of nominative fair use and historical fidelity. The editorial voice of this article uses 'Structural Integration,' 'the practitioner,' and 'the work' — the terms that the editor (a Guild Certified Practitioner of Structural Integration) is appropriately credentialed to use.
From cook to chef: the advanced classes
The most important shift Ida named in the apprenticeship was the transition from cook to chef. The recipe — the ten-session series — produced reliable outcomes when followed competently. But Ida insisted, especially in the 1975-76 IPR addresses and the 1976 advanced classes, that beginning practitioners eventually had to grow into a different relationship with their work, one in which they produced results not by following the recipe but by recognizing the interplay of structural materials and putting them together by judgment. This was the chef's relationship to ingredients, not the cook's relationship to a recipe card. The advanced classes were the venue in which this transition was accomplished, and they were the reason Ida insisted that practitioners continue training after certification rather than treating certification as a terminus.
"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?"
She names the chef-versus-cook distinction:
Ida was sharp about what most practitioners had not yet achieved at this developmental stage. She returned repeatedly to a complaint about the existing body of practitioners: many of them could take a body apart, but very few could put it together. Analysis was easier than synthesis. The advanced classes were her attempt to address this gap directly — to move practitioners from a fragmented understanding of muscular units into a synthetic understanding of fascial planes, energy systems, and the body as a unified field. She framed this as the cultural progression of any revolutionary idea, from intuitive art form through scientific analysis to conscious synthesis.
"about that. You've all heard me scream and wail, you all can take a body apart, but the number of people who can get it together are very few. The number of people who can put it together are very few. Here I was saying the same thing you see, analysis is a necessity, a cover form, a preliminary of synthesis, of conscious synthesis, of conscious integration. Our intellectual culture as a whole has come a long way toward appreciating this in the last twenty five years. The number of people on the face of the earth today who have learned to think with a greater emphasis on synthesis as a whole has increased enormously. And this widespread emphasis that has been placed on synthesis is thanks to systems analysis. 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."
She names the structural weakness in the existing body of practitioners and what the advanced training must address:
The recipe as continuing structure for advanced practice
Even as practitioners moved into the advanced classes and beyond, Ida did not abandon the recipe. She defended it as the indispensable beginning structure, but she also revised her own framing of it across the mid-1970s. By the 1975 Boulder class, she was emphasizing that each hour is a continuation of the previous one — that the first hour is the beginning of the tenth, the second hour is the second half of the first, the third hour is the second half of the second. The recipe is not a sequence of discrete interventions; it is a continuous unfolding of the same project. This revised understanding was offered not to elementary students but to the advanced class, because it presupposed that the student already knew the recipe well enough to see how its parts flowed.
"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."
She reframes the recipe for advanced practitioners as a continuous unfolding:
The same Boulder discussion contains a striking testimony about Ida herself. A senior practitioner observes that what Ida did — the way she developed the work — is what she is trying to teach the apprentice to do. She integrated her own life toward understanding Structural Integration, and the apprentice is being asked to integrate themselves toward the same kind of seeing. The training was not a transfer of techniques. It was an induction into a way of being attentive to structure. The practitioner who completed the apprenticeship had not merely learned a set of moves; they had been remade as a particular kind of observer.
"And put unfortunately, she's a little bit more brilliant than the rest of us. She just Ida what Ida did is what she's trying to teach how to do, and that is that you have to stay within your your trade. You have to make structural integration in your life. She integrated her life towards understanding structural integration. And she still does that. And she's still Her body is still her her whole being is integrated towards into structural integration. Being structurally integrated herself, structurally integrating us, the guild, the teaching process, and people per se. And to me, word spectrum really comes to mind here."
A senior practitioner reflects on what the apprentice is actually being asked to learn from Ida:
Beyond the recipe: the seeing of fascial planes
What lay beyond the recipe, in the most advanced phase of Ida's teaching by 1975-76, was fascia — not as muscle wrapping but as the organ of structure. The advanced classes were where Ida tried to move practitioners from a muscle-and-tendon understanding of the body into a fascial-plane understanding, and she acknowledged that this transition was difficult to teach in words. She wished there were an anatomy book of fascial planes the way there were anatomy books of muscles, but no such book existed; she wished there were a way to demonstrate facial sheets and their continuities the way one could demonstrate the origin and insertion of a muscle, but the existing pedagogical materials did not support it. The apprentice had to come to fascia largely through Ida's own demonstration and through dissection work with colleagues like Lewis Schultz and Ron Thompson.
"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."
She names the missing tool in the apprenticeship — an atlas of fascial planes:
In the 1976 advanced class, Ida emphasized that the role of the dissection laboratory was to give practitioners a more sophisticated, advanced control of the body than the standard anatomy textbook could provide. The old anatomy texts worked up to a point and then stopped working; the advanced practitioner had to see beyond them. Ron Thompson's dissection photographs, taken in the laboratory and shown to the advanced class, were intended to bridge classical anatomy and the fascial-plane understanding that the work required at its highest level. The apprenticeship culminated, in this sense, in the practitioner's capacity to see what was not in the standard anatomy book.
"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? Come on. Come on. Come on. Give it to us. That's right."
She describes the function of the dissection work for the advanced apprentice:
The practitioner and the client: relationship as instrument
The apprenticeship's final consideration was relational. Ida insisted that the practitioner could not function as a technician operating on a body; the practitioner had to relate to the client as a person engaged in a shared project. This was partly screened for in the auditing stage — candidates who could not relate to people were eliminated — but it was reinforced throughout the training. In the 1974 Open Universe demonstrations, Ida and her colleagues were explicit that the relationship between practitioner and client was part of the work itself, not a wrapping around it. Some senior practitioners went further, suggesting that the energetic relationship between the two people was itself a transducer of what happened in the session.
"The other I don't know whether it's by the process of structural integration they become transducers, whether it's the people of that are chosen to be Ralfords or whether Ida Zapsums. But I'm sure they're transducers and it is a relationship between two people that makes what happens happen. It is in addition to the technique. I think this cannot be duplicated by exercise, by oneself. I'm quite sure it cannot be duplicated by machines or gadgets that exercise us, that make changes in the body. There are many, many aspects of what goes on in structural integration. I believe the very personal element of the roffer is major in facilitating energy flow. In other words, if you get roffed, it's great if you love your roffer. I think it will happen if you don't, but I think certain energy flow will take place faster. My final reports will be worked on this fall and this winter for the professional group as well as for lay groups through the Rolf Institute."
A senior researcher in Ida's circle frames the practitioner-client relationship as integral to the work:
Ida was careful, however, to distinguish the practitioner's role from that of a psychotherapist or a marriage counselor. The practitioner was a teacher of structure, not a healer of personal problems. Many medical and psychological improvements followed from the work, but the practitioner did not set out to produce them, and Ida warned practitioners against drifting into the role of an emotional counselor. The apprenticeship's discipline included learning to stay in one's actual trade — to do structural work and trust the structural changes to register at other levels — rather than chasing the emotional content that frequently surfaced during sessions.
"State of North Carolina, ditto ditto. Visiting. State of Florida, there are quite a few. State of Alabama, there are a couple. How many rolfer's are being trained? Are are you actually training a certain amount every year, or is the number growing? Depends on how they apply to us. Each year, practically each year, brings a greater number of applications. I've told you, we're a very adaptive bunch. If we have a lot of applications, we'll produce a few more teachers to teach them Okay. And work a little harder. And if we haven't, why we'll go out and go out to Hawaii and sit on the beach or something."
Asked how practitioners build their practices and where new candidates come from, she describes the early growth of the work:
The continuing apprenticeship: change in the work itself
Even certified practitioners, Ida argued throughout the mid-1970s, were not finished apprentices. The work itself was changing, and the practitioner who had been trained five or six years earlier was not equipped to do what the more recent training equipped practitioners to do. Ida was clear about this in her 1971-72 IPR address: she heard the complaints from older practitioners that the institute kept emphasizing how teaching had changed, but she defended the change as necessary. The work that was good enough ten years earlier was no longer good enough. The apprentice, in her view, was perpetually unfinished. Returning for further training was not remediation; it was the maintenance of competence.
"And, of course, thank God, they've not only been changing, they've been developing. Actually, you need to be more conscious. I hear a certain amount of complaints going on these days because some of you who are in those older earlier brackets of Rolfing are complaining because we have so many new classes and we keep telling everybody about the difference in the teaching nowadays from the old teaching and so forth. But actually you see if we weren't changing in this very rapidly changing world we also would be in the garbage pail, I fear. It is this capacity for change and the fact that from somewhere out of the blue we are given a vision of how we can change that keeps us as a valuable contributor to the culture of today. And so I ask you that you look at this the next time you are inclined to complain because it is being suggested that you take further training in Rolfing and actually recognize the fact that that which worked five years ago, six years ago, ten years ago, It still works, but it doesn't work well enough, it doesn't work deeply enough, it doesn't get where we should be going in order to show what Rolfing really can do. Rolfing in the sense of this deep changing of the patterns of the fundamental structure of the body to conform with gravity."
She responds to complaints from older practitioners that the training keeps changing:
By 1976, Ida and the institute were planning an advanced class specifically for practitioners who had taken earlier advanced classes — a four-week class demonstrating only advanced techniques, open only to people who had already been through the advanced curriculum. The apprenticeship, in this expanded form, had no terminal point. The most senior practitioners were still being asked to refine their seeing, their hands, and their understanding of fascia. The institute had also developed six-day intensives so that practitioners could update their training in their own regions without the cost and disruption of cross-country travel.
"particularly interested in getting classes into touch with the older group of Rolfers, for Rolfing has gone so far since the earlier classes as I said to you earlier today. We also see as an outstanding accomplishment of 1976 the establishment of our six day intensives. They really offer you, we think, a means of professional progression in your own hometown, and this of course means at a lower cost, less traveling, less board and lodging, etc, etc. In terms of class opportunities, we are also listening hard to the demand of the people who attended the earlier advanced classes in Big Sur, etcetera. These people are feeling the need for the opportunity to update themselves with the ideas and techniques of these later classes. We are therefore considering giving an advanced class for advanced rifles. I know, I feel that way too. In the 1977, it's a whole year away you can get used to the idea, this class will be a class of four weeks long, not ten weeks, and it will demonstrate only advanced techniques. That very significant six week introduction will not be given in that particular class. It will be talking only about advanced techniques and it will be open only to people who have taken the advanced class."
She describes the institute's new offerings for the advanced cohort:
The institute, the practitioner population, and the question of women
By 1971-72, when the Psychology Today interview was recorded, the practitioner population had reached roughly 160. Half of them — about eighty — were in California; one was in Pennsylvania; none in either Carolina; several in Florida; a couple in Alabama. The distribution reflected the gravitational pull of Esalen and the West Coast, and it reflected the still-experimental status of the work in much of the rest of the country. The practitioner community was small enough that problems with individual practitioners became known across it, and clients found practitioners primarily through recommendation rather than through directory listings.
"I mean, if a man is working in a poverty stricken community, he's not he will probably have his own free love, charge them perhaps $25 an hour, whereas a man who's working in a place like New York City will be charging $50 an hour. Now how widespread is Rolfing? Is it available in all the 50 states? Well, that is also a hard question to answer. We have, I think, about a 160 rolfers. We have 80 in the state of California and one in the state of Pennsylvania. State of South Carolina, is there any when you are not in residence? State of North Carolina, ditto ditto. State of Florida, there are quite a few."
Asked how widespread the work is, she answers numerically and geographically:
The interviewer noted that most practitioners were men, despite the fact that a woman had established the discipline. Ida estimated that roughly a quarter of practitioners were women, and she attributed the disproportion to the physical demands of the work — that the manipulation was too hard for any but a very sturdy, heavy-set woman, what she called a peasant-type body. The frankness is characteristic. Ida did not soften the physical reality of the work to make it more inclusive, and she did not pretend that the apprenticeship was equally accessible to all bodies. The work was demanding and the apprentice's own body had to be capable of meeting that demand.
"Of course, they're not going to say that John is much better than Jim, but they will say that John lives a lot closer to you than Jim lives a 100 miles away, or something of this sort, you see. Now, most of the rolfers that I know of are men, and yet you, a woman, established the discipline. Are there many women rolfers? There are. I don't know what a quarter maybe. It's too hard work for any but a very heavyset, sturdy woman, a peasant type body."
Asked about women practitioners, she answers with characteristic frankness:
Coda: the apprentice as the teacher
What the apprenticeship was ultimately producing, in Ida's view, was a teacher of human structure. Not a therapist, not a healer, not a technician, but a teacher — someone who could see structure, articulate it, and bring others into the seeing. This is why the apprenticeship's central question was whether the candidate could construct an idea independently from material. This is why direction, not pressure, was taught from the first day to the last. This is why the recipe served as a life preserver during the years before judgment matured, and why the advanced classes were where the cook became a chef. The practitioner who emerged from this sequence was not the person who had entered it. They had been remade as a particular kind of observer of human structure, a particular kind of craftsman whose work was inseparable from their seeing.
"In other words, the idea progresses, I'm talking about ideas in general and Rolfing in particular, The idea progresses from an odd expression into a scientific understanding and thorough analysis, and you can see to what extent this is beginning to describe what you are seeing around you here. Do I think scientific analysis is the answer to all problems? Definitely not, certainly not. I think synthetic integration is a far higher form, and this is what, by the grace of God, we will still be able to call integration. I think for one thing science, but science is not all that bad, you can't just dam it out of hand. For one thing it permits and it encourages replication. And before the method can be taught replication must be possible. You all remember, I'm sure, hearing me the wail, the shortcomings of Rolfers. Don't think any of you have any doubts about that. You've all heard me scream and wail, you all can take a body apart, but the number of people who can get it together are very few. The number of people who can put it together are very few. Here I was saying the same thing you see, analysis is a necessity, a cover form, a preliminary of synthesis, of conscious synthesis, of conscious integration. Our intellectual culture as a whole has come a long way toward appreciating this in the last twenty five years. The number of people on the face of the earth today who have learned to think with a greater emphasis on synthesis as a whole has increased enormously."
She frames the larger cultural significance of the apprenticeship's evolution:
The closing paradox of Ida's view of apprenticeship is that the most advanced practitioners never finish learning the first hour. She returned to this point repeatedly in the 1975 and 1976 classes — that even practitioners who had been doing the work for years discovered, on each return to the elementary material, that there were further edges of seeing they had not yet found. The first hour was inexhaustible because seeing was inexhaustible. The apprenticeship was not a path from ignorance to competence; it was a path into a way of seeing that deepened indefinitely. This is the final reason Ida's training was so long, so layered, and so resistant to shortcuts. She was not training people to do something. She was training them to become someone capable of seeing what most observers could not see.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfB6 public tape (RolfB6Side1a) — extended discussion of the first hour as the establishment of the experience of the work in the client's tissue, and the body's leading of the practitioner to what comes next; included as a pointer for readers interested in how Ida framed the apprenticeship of seeing for new practitioners. RolfB6Side1a ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, 1976 Boulder Advanced Class (76ADV41) — Ida's contrast between her work and other body-training systems (Mensendieck, German military posture training), grounding the apprenticeship's distinctiveness in the doctrine of energetic efficiency rather than imposed postural correction; included as a pointer for readers interested in what Ida defined her training against. 76ADV41 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, 1975 Boulder Advanced Class (B2T5SA) — extended Socratic exchange in which Ida pushes apprentices to define Structural Integration in their own words and challenges their reliance on memorized formulations; included as a pointer for readers interested in Ida's classroom pedagogy. B2T5SA ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, Structure Lectures — Rolf Advanced 1974 (STRUC1) — the biographical framing of Ida at age 80 as still firmly in charge of all training, with roughly 160 certified practitioners across North America, South America, and Europe; included as a pointer for readers interested in the institutional state of the apprenticeship at the moment when her teaching on training is best documented. STRUC1 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, Healing Arts conference 1974 (CFHA_02) — Ida's reflection on fascia as the largely unexplored organ of structure, including the anecdote of a student who spent two days in the library unable to answer the question 'what is fascia?'; included as a pointer for readers interested in the intellectual terrain the apprentice was being asked to enter. CFHA_02 ▸
See also: See also: Open Universe Class 1974 (UNI_074) — Valerie Hunt's description of a forthcoming research study using practitioners trained in the institute (Bob Hines and others) as the operators in a controlled laboratory protocol, showing how the apprenticeship was being extended into formal research collaboration; included as a pointer for readers interested in how senior practitioners were being deployed in research as part of the maturing apprenticeship. UNI_074 ▸