The body is a plastic medium
In her 1974 Healing Arts lecture, recorded at the California Foundation for Healing Arts conference where Valerie Hunt, Julian Silverman, and others were presenting alongside her, Ida laid out the foundation on which the entire concept of 'appropriate direction' rests. Before you can speak of energy being added in a direction, you have to establish that the body is the kind of thing that can be reorganized at all. Most of medicine, in 1974, did not believe this. The medical school anatomy books treated the body as a fixed object whose pathologies were chemical or surgical problems. Ida's claim — that the connective tissue body is plastic, that its shape can be changed by adding energy to it from the outside, that this change is structural and persistent — was, in her own words, the kind of statement that would have gotten her institutionalized fifty years earlier. The lede of every advanced class returned to this point, because without it, nothing else she taught was coherent.
"What do we know? What have we found out? We know that order can be evoked in the myofascial system of the body by substantially balancing the myofascial structures about a vertical line. We know that logically in body mechanics, we can expect that the vertical lines of that force manifesting as the gravitational field can either support and reinforce a body, or it can disorganize it and presumably passing by presumably passing through and being part of it, it can destroy and minimize the energy fields surrounding it. We know that the energy fields of the body must be substantially balanced around the vertical line for gravity to act supportedly, thus changing the energy generated by the body. This vertical line registers the alignment of the ankles, with the knees, with the hip joints, with the bodies of the lumbar vertebrae, with the shoulders, with the ears. This vertical line is reminiscent of the prickles on the chestnut burrow. All those prickles pointing straight toward the center of the earth. If the lines are substantially vertical. This is a static verticality, however. This is the verticality taught by every accepted school of body mechanics operating in this century, and the Harvard group heads the list. All schools of body mechanics teach this measuring stick and verticality, but no other school of body mechanics teaches how to achieve it. But because the body has an unforeseen, unexpected quality, it can be done. The body is a plastic medium. Now this is incredible, and twenty five years ago, no one would have believed this statement. Fifty years ago, they'd have put me in a nice sunny southern room. You've given me pretty good care, maybe. But the body is a plastic medium, and you're going to hear that several times before we get out of here today. Now, we are ready to define rolfing structural integration. It is a system of organizing the body so that it is substantially vertical, substantially balanced around a vertical in order to allow the body to accept support from the gravitational energy."
From the 1974 Healing Arts conference, the foundational statement:
Once plasticity is granted, a new problem appears. If the body can be reshaped, it can be reshaped well or badly. The same hands that can organize a body can disorganize one. The same pressure that can lengthen a back can shorten it. The practitioner becomes, in Ida's framing, the agent who chooses — and the choice is direction. In the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, she returned to this point with sharper language, naming the connective tissue body as 'the organ of structure' and naming what the practitioner is actually doing when hands meet flesh: not releasing, not unwrapping, but adding energy.
"Now the strange part about it is that that organ of structure is a very resilient and very elastic and very plastic medium. It can be changed by adding energy to it. In structural integration, one of the ways we add energy is by pressure so that the practitioner gives deliberately contributes energy to the person on whom he is working, to not energy in the sense that you let a position throw it around, but energy such as they talk about in the physics laboratory. When you press on a given point, you literally are adding energy to that which is under that point. And in structural integration, by way of an unbelievable accident of how you can change fashion structure, you can change human beings. You can change their structure and in changing their structure you are able to change their function. All of you have seen that structure determines function to a very great degree, to a degree which we can utilize."
Big Sur 1973, naming what pressure actually does:
The sentence itself
The mandatory passage for this topic comes from Ida's Open Universe class in 1974, a lecture that Joseph Heller and Julian Silverman attended. Ida had been walking through the colloid chemistry of fascia — sol to gel, gel to sol, the substitution of mineral atoms for hydrogen atoms in the collagen molecule — and she arrived at the operative sentence. She had said earlier in the same talk that food adds energy, that drink adds energy, that some drugs add energy. She named these almost dismissively. The energy that mattered to the practice she had spent her life developing was added differently, and the difference was direction. The pressure of a finger, a knuckle, an elbow — these are just delivery instruments. What governs whether the practitioner is building structure or breaking it is something else. It is whether the direction of the pressure matches what the tissue, the segment, the body in the gravitational field actually needs.
"You can add it chemically in food, or in drink, or in some of these drugs are energy adding additives, not necessarily good ones, but they do add energy. Food is the outstanding good food is the outstanding adder of energy to a body. But there are other ways that you can change it. You can add it mechanically, and this is what the Rolfers do. They add it mechanically by pressure. The pressure may be of a finger, it may be of a knuckle, it may be of an elbow. But all this energy must be added in an appropriate direction. The wrong direction breaks the structure down."
Ida, 1974 Open Universe class — the central sentence:
The phrase 'breaks the structure down' should be heard with its full weight. Ida is not saying that wrong-direction work produces a suboptimal result, or that it wastes time, or that it leaves the practitioner having to redo the session. She is saying that adding energy in the wrong direction does damage. This is why, in the same 1974 lecture, she immediately followed the sentence by warning her audience that in every city where practitioners are working, people will get into this thing without knowing what they are doing. The danger is not nothing happens — the danger is something happens, and what happens is destructive. The plasticity of the body is the practitioner's tool, and it is the body's vulnerability.
Why a plan is required
If direction is the operative variable and wrong direction breaks the structure down, then a serious question follows: how does the practitioner know which direction is appropriate? Ida's answer was that you cannot know without a plan. In one of the mystery tapes from the early 1970s, an unnamed advanced student named Peter or Don — the transcript is ambiguous — articulated the position that Ida wanted her students to hold. The body has central tension points. Karma, in the form of accidents and habits and emotional stress, accumulates. The work of Structural Integration is the introduction of organizing energy from the outside to reverse that accumulation. But to introduce organizing energy, the practitioner needs a plan, a reference, and a direction. Without the plan, the energy goes somewhere — but somewhere is not the same as the right somewhere.
"Now, in order to properly do that, you have to have a plan to think about it. You have to know works, so that you can direct energy towards reorganization, or towards new organization."
From the Big Sur 1973 sessions, articulating the position Ida endorsed:
The plan, for Ida, was the ten-session recipe. The reference was gravity, the vertical line, the horizontal hinges at ankle, knee, and pelvis. The direction was given by the work that needed to happen at each hour — what the previous hours had made available, what the next hours would require. This is why Ida resisted students who tried to abstract Structural Integration into a single technique or a single principle. The recipe is the plan, and the recipe is what tells the practitioner where energy belongs at any given moment. Without the recipe, the practitioner has no way to know what 'appropriate direction' means in this body, in this hour.
"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."
Ida, 1975 Boulder advanced class, on the recipe as a single continuous process:
The colloid argument
Ida's deepest justification for the principle of appropriate direction came from physical chemistry. She had her doctorate in biological chemistry from Columbia, 1920 (not 1916, as the lecturer who introduced her sometimes said), and her formative years at the Rockefeller Institute and in Zurich with Schrödinger had given her a working knowledge of colloid science that few of her practitioner-students could match. In her 1974 Open Universe lecture, she walked the audience through what the collagen molecule actually is: three protein chains held together by hydrogen atoms or mineral atoms, behaving as a colloid that exists in two states — sol and gel. The relevance to the practice is that the state change is governed by energy. Add energy to a gel and you get a sol. Take energy away and the sol gels. The fascia of the body, in her account, is a vast colloid, and its rigidity is a function of how much energy is bound up in it as gel.
"now in the gel state. And in his mind, he's going over the fact that you take energy away from the sol, and you get a gel. You add energy to the gel, and you get a sol. Now, listen to what that is saying to you. It is saying that if somebody can add energy to those colloids which have become much too much of a soul. Oh, how I hate to get up in the morning, my back bothers me, I can't straighten up, I go around so slowly, I must be getting old. Well, the next time you want to try that song, try it to a different tune. Try telling yourself that that colloidal material, which is you, has not had enough energy added to it. See whether it changes your attitude. It might. Now, this kind of energy change permits chemical changes in the molecule, the molecule of that big collagen colloid. It allows chemical changes to occur. Those mineral atoms, or hydrogen atoms, that hold these three chains together can and do change. Minerals can be substituted for hydrogen. Hydrogen can be substituted for minerals."
Ida, 1974 Open Universe, on the chemistry of the fascial colloid:
This is where the doctrine of appropriate direction becomes physically intelligible. If the fascia is a colloid whose state is governed by energy addition, then any pressure changes the state. The question is what state, in what location, with what consequence for the structural relationships around it. Energy added in the right direction shifts a gelled segment toward sol in a way that allows the segment to find its place in the vertical line. Energy added in the wrong direction shifts a gelled segment toward sol in a way that lets it collapse, drift, or stabilize in a configuration further from the vertical than where it started. The fascia does not know which direction is appropriate. The practitioner does.
"And I'm talking here about energy being added by pressure to the fascia, the organ of structure, to change the relation of the fascial sheaths of the body, to balance these around a vertical line which parallels the gravity line. Thus, we are able to balance body masses, to order them, to order them within a space. The contour of the body changes, the objective feeling of the body to searching hands changes. Movement behavior changes as the body incorporates more and more order. The first balance of the body is a static stacking, but as the body incorporates more changes, the balance ceases to be a static balance. It becomes a dynamic balance."
From the 1974 Healing Arts lecture (CFHA_02), on energy added by pressure to the organ of structure:
Energy travels — the change spreads
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, working through the second hour, Ida and her teaching colleagues kept returning to a phenomenon that the practitioners had begun to observe in their own work: that a change made at one location produced effects at distant locations. Free the feet, and the back changes. Work the side body, and the rib cage responds. This is not because the practitioner intended a distant effect. It is because the fascia is a single continuous system, and energy added at one point propagates through it. The teaching beat of this section is that the propagation of energy through fascia is itself a reason why direction matters — because the wrong direction does not just damage the local tissue, it damages the relationships of every other segment downstream.
"Know that each horizontal that you bring out down below reflects itself upward as we saw in Takashi yesterday where he's working on his leg and you can see his rib cage absorbing the change. I mean this, when the tissue is in tension, that's stored energy that you release into the body. And its energy is not a metaphysical something. These molecules are aligned in a particular way. You change their alignment. The change spreads."
From the 1975 Boulder second-hour discussion, on energy as a real physical thing:
The implication is sobering. A practitioner who adds energy in the wrong direction at the feet does not just leave the feet in a worse state. The disorganization travels. The back receives a corrupted instruction from below; the rib cage receives a corrupted instruction from the back; the head and neck find themselves compensating for a pattern that was introduced by the practitioner's own hands. This is why Ida insisted on the recipe's sequence. Each hour establishes the conditions under which the next hour's energy addition will travel along the right paths. Disorder the sequence and you disorder the propagation. The student in the 1974 Open Universe class who observed energy 'expanding' under Ida's hands as vibrations or wavelengths was describing the same phenomenon from the receiving end.
"It's it's almost like well, it is it's vibrations, wavelengths, or expanding. Like energy going? Energy. See, that's what we want to find out is the relationship between this soft tissue change and the change in the energy field. Now lift both your arms up. So you can see now that the rib cage works as one and it's got an undulating movement to it as it breathes. Bring your arms back down."
A student model describing what energy addition feels like from the inside, 1974 Open Universe:
Direction at the joints — the lever and the spring
Julian Silverman, who had presented at the Healing Arts conference alongside Ida and Valerie Hunt, made a contribution to the doctrine of appropriate direction by modeling the body as a network of joints, springs, and viscous dampers. His framing, which appears in the RolfB3 public tape, treats each joint as a lever powered by an energy source driving a spring in parallel with a dashpot. The body's segments are linked through myofascial investments. The implication for direction is mathematical. If the viscous elements outweigh the elastic ones at a given joint, motion is impeded and energy dissipates wastefully. If the practitioner can shift the joint's viscoelastic profile toward more elasticity, energy can flow between joints. But — and this is the crucial qualification — if the modules are still unbalanced with respect to each other, the increased capacity for energy transfer is wasted or even counterproductive.
"If the individual elements are still unbalanced with respect to each other, then the increased capacity for energy transfer may be of little use or may even give the appearance of less synchronicity. This is so because all of the modules have their own intrinsic frequencies of oscillation. And if they are in wrong phase relationships with each other, their energies may tend to collide or interfere with one another."
Silverman, at the Healing Arts conference, on why direction matters at the level of energy transfer:
Silverman's model gives Ida's clinical doctrine a formal justification. The practitioner who works to free a joint without first having organized its neighbors is increasing the joint's energy-transfer capacity into a system that cannot use it well. The freed joint will receive energy from misaligned neighbors and pass corrupted energy to its own neighbors downstream. The result, Silverman notes, may even look like less synchronicity than before the work began. This is exactly what experienced practitioners observe in the disorganized middle hours of the recipe — when one segment has been freed but the next has not yet caught up, the body can look worse before it looks better. Direction includes timing. Add energy in the right place but the wrong hour, and you have added it in the wrong direction.
Direction in the practitioner's hands
The theoretical doctrine becomes a hands-on discipline in the advanced classes, where Ida pressed her senior practitioners on the question of how they actually chose direction in the moment of contact. In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, working through the fourth hour, the conversation turned to what to do with the adductors of the medial leg. The classical instruction had been to move tissue away from the midline. But in some bodies, the appropriate direction was toward the midline. The principle Ida wanted her students to absorb was that direction is not fixed by anatomy book — it is given by what the body in front of you actually requires. The practitioner who moves all tissue in one direction regardless of presentation is adding energy without thinking, and what looks like technique is actually mechanical repetition.
"Well, what you're doing again is establishing midline. Right. What you have to do to get it may be toward, it may be away. Okay. Chances are it will be away but you're going to run into those that don't meet exactly, you know, that idea. You know we're talking about Mhmm. I'm sure I can say something. That like, when you're looking at the fourth hour, like I said, that that it's being sucked down. It's almost like chevrons going down the body this way Yeah. Right.
A teacher in the 1975 Boulder fourth hour, on direction as response to the body:
This is where Ida's pedagogy becomes most demanding. The practitioner cannot rely on a memorized sequence of strokes. The practitioner has to perceive what the body is asking for and respond with energy added in the direction that answer requires. In the 1975 Boulder ninth hour discussion, the same teacher described what it felt like when he finally stopped overriding the body's signal with his own preconception: the tissue was 'unmistakably' easier to move in the direction of order than away from it. The body, when listened to, gives the direction. The practitioner's job is not to choose direction in the abstract but to recognize the direction the body is already indicating.
"Did you have some I just wanted to add to what you were describing your experience of having always moved the tissue away from the midline and then experiencing moving it toward the midline. And I had that experience too and what made it really quick for me was that the tissue felt very different. Mean, it was right, it was unmistakably right. Easier to move it the way of order than it is away from it. Six hundred and first 10. In this business early on I said it looked like I wasn't working very hard and how come I would swear? I'm beginning to see that it's because I wasn't doing it."
Continuing the 1975 Boulder ninth hour conversation:
Ida pushed this perceptual point further by attacking the kinesiology textbook itself. The standard model — muscles pulling on bones as levers, with fulcrum, force, and load — predicted that lifting the arm with the deltoid should jam the humerus up into the socket. But Ida noted that the body does not feel that way under load. Something about the lever description was wrong, and the wrongness mattered because it would lead a practitioner to add energy in directions the lever model called for, when the actual tensional architecture of the body required something else. The doctrine of appropriate direction therefore depends on a working anatomy that the textbook does not supply.
"See, the other thing which I've been trying to figure out which is a sort of chapter two, which I haven't got into writing yet, is that if you look at kinesiology texts, you see that you it's just an automatic assumption that the function of muscles is to pull on bones. So how do they pull on bones? Well they work on it as levers, right? So there's a fulcrum here and there's a point of here and you do this and there's the weight load and all that here which is in a way it seems to be foolishly inefficient way of doing things. Yet at the same if you do this, I mean you're supposed to be doing it with the deltoid. It's really it's very also if the lever conception is correct when you do that, you're putting terrific forces up this way and jamming the humerus up here into this cabinet and it doesn't feel like that. So therefore, I mean just experientially it ain't right but then what is right?"
Ida, in the same 1975 Boulder thread, on why the model of muscles pulling on bones as levers feels wrong in the body:
Adding energy without coverage of the recipe — the danger
Across the public tapes and the advanced classes, Ida returned again and again to a danger she saw spreading through her field: practitioners and would-be practitioners who had learned to put hands into bodies but had not absorbed the discipline of the recipe. In her 1971-72 mystery tape, she said the line that comes back in many forms across the archive: anybody and everybody can put hands into a body and change a body. The change is not the achievement. The achievement is that the change is in the appropriate direction, that it integrates the segment with its neighbors, that it leaves the person more vertical than when they came in. A practitioner who lacks the conceptual framework — who has not done the year of reading, who has not seen the recipe through several times, who has not been processed themselves — is, in Ida's view, a danger.
"It is his responsibility to stop getting an awareness of where is the top of his head and where is his waistline, in other words, his first or second lumbar, to move them back. So that as the man goes into this new relationship, he begins he begins to try at least to make it possible for him to get a changed pattern of movement. Not merely a changed pattern, but a more integrated pattern of movement. Anybody and everybody can put hands into a body and change a body. And have mercy, good lord, on you if you come and say to me, well, I know I did a good job because I changed the body."
Ida, on the difference between manipulating a body and integrating one:
The 1973 Big Sur class made the same point with sharper language. Ida noted that the fascia of the body can be changed for the better or for the worse, and that the very capacity that makes the body responsive to skilled hands also makes it vulnerable to unskilled ones. This is not a rhetorical flourish on her part. It is the direct consequence of the colloid argument: if energy addition changes structure, then any energy addition changes structure, and whether the change is constructive or destructive is given entirely by direction.
"fluid can start to work. It is through the fact that that happens. It is that extrinsic fuel to which it is outside the central nervous system. Well now, my understanding was a very good Now this is a message which I hope gets across except that you understand what the pattern is like when the pattern is doing the right thing. The fact that fascia of the body can be changed is what allows it to become aberrative in the first place. And possibility of changing it allows you to step in and change it for the worse, for the better. But it is also just as possible to change it for the worse if you shall know your business. Function way to teach. That fascial teaching can be modified. That in being modified it is modifying structure and that in modifying structure you modify closure."
Big Sur 1973, on the two-edged capacity of the fascia to be changed:
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, Ida pressed her senior students to articulate the criterion of appropriate direction in language that would withstand a skeptic's challenge. Her answer was operational: direction is appropriate when it brings the body into alignment with the vertical, because the vertical is the configuration in which gravity acts as support rather than as a disorganizing force. The criterion is not internal to the practitioner's intention. It is external — measurable against the gravitational field — and this externality is what keeps the practitioner honest.
"And so that when we move through space and we're not vertical, or we are vertical, then gravity actually helps us move through space if we are in line with this field? Gravity acts supportively Gravity acts if it is able to do so. And our job, as I have told you at least six times in this class, is to get it get our bodies so that they are they can be supported by gravity. And then you can go on to tell the other guy what he has been told by his teachers all down through his academic career. That gravity breaks down a body, but here you diverge from the teacher if the body is random, if the body does not relate to the vertical. Now do you all hear what I have said?"
Ida, working through the same 1975 Boulder discussion of how to articulate the practice to a skeptic:
Direction and gravity — the reference
Direction in Ida's teaching is not chosen relative to the body's own internal axes. It is chosen relative to gravity. Gravity, in her formulation, is both the force the practice is trying to recruit and the reference that defines what 'appropriate' means. Energy added in a direction that brings a segment closer to the vertical line, that horizontalizes a hinge that should be horizontal, that allows gravity to pass through the body as support rather than as a destructive force — that is appropriate direction. Energy added in any other direction may produce a local effect but it does not serve the gravitational organization that is the practice's goal. This is why, across her late teaching, gravity is named so insistently as the therapist. The practitioner does not heal. The practitioner prepares the body to be healed by gravity acting through it in the right direction.
"And all we can say is we haven't done a thing except to prepare your body so that the field of energy of the earth, the gravitational field, is able to support, work through your body and support it, instead of tearing it down. You probably heard in school that the problem with all human beings is that they are standing and operating on two legs and they were designed to operate on four. But the message of Rolfing is that human beings are not static entities. They are evolving entities, and they are evolving toward a two legged vertical entity, an individual who is working best in the vertical field. And the ROFR can actually And see the ROFR the ROFR brings this about, helps this come about."
From a 1971-72 conversation, the gravitational frame:
This is the philosophical move that distinguishes Ida from the manipulative methods she knew of. Chiropractic and osteopathy, in her account, were also adding energy to the body. But they were not adding it in a direction governed by the gravitational reference. They were adding it toward local correction of a joint, a vertebra, a segment, without a unified concept of how that segment fit into a vertical line under gravity. Ida thought their interventions sometimes helped, sometimes harmed, and rarely integrated. The distinguishing feature of Structural Integration was that the reference was external to the body and constant: the gravitational field. Direction is appropriate if and only if it brings the segment into better relationship with that field.
"And if you are really going to understand what I'm talking about tonight, a little meditation on those two words wouldn't do any harm. Because you see, in meditating on posture and meditating on structure, you can ask the same questions. You can ask the question of, now see here, if I alter this structure, what can I hope to get from it? Similarly, you can say, if I alter this posture, what can I hope to get from it? This is a big question. And you ask any of your MD friends, and they'll say, oh, Rod, nothing. Ain't so? You change those relations. You change that structure. And you get the kind of ease and the kind of vitality that you have seen some of your friends get who have gone through this system of structural"
From the Topanga soundbytes, the structural argument:
Ida's audiences sometimes included engineers and physicists who reasoned through her doctrine in their own terms. In a 1974 Open Universe class, one engineer worked his way to a clarifying formulation: gravity pulls the body down, and something has to carry the resulting compression. The bone column carries it, but only if the soft tissue holds the bones in the right configuration. If the tensional architecture is right, no energy is needed to stand up. If it is wrong, the bones are forced into compressive loads they cannot bear efficiently. Direction matters at the engineering level too — the practitioner's energy addition must leave the tensional architecture in a configuration where compression and tension distribute correctly.
"Yeah, I'd always talks about the body being held up by the soft tissue and talks about tent poles and whatnot and there's certainly, know, certain tent ropes help hold the tent up. But in my view as an engineer, my view of how gravity is pulling on my body is that it's trying to pull it down, trying to pull my head down, my head rests on my shoulders, trying to pull that down, and that eventually there has to be a depressive force to keep me standing up. And the compressive force is this kind of a force and a tensile force is this kind. The only, Probably the only part of my body that can take a compressive force enough to hold me from falling down, gravitational field is my bone structure and I feel that that the gravitational pull on me towards the center of the earth comes down through my bones. You know I feel that it doesn't do it properly unless my unless my tension structure is right."
An engineer in the 1974 Open Universe class, on the directionality of gravity and structure:
Direction and the trick of the second hour
In the RolfB3 public tape, Ida worked through the second hour as a worked example of appropriate direction. The student arrives for the second hour having just had the first hour's superficial work. The pelvis has begun to release. The back is still long enough that the trunk does not yet sit over it. The question for the second hour is: in what direction does the practitioner add energy now? Ida's answer was that the direction is given by the structural geometry. The trunk has to come up off the pelvis. The legs have to give the pelvis foundation. The spiny erectors have to be brought together so the back can lengthen. None of these are arbitrary instructions — each one is given by the requirement that the body's segments stack along the vertical, with the moments of rotation reduced toward zero.
"I remember what a time I had with Bill Schutz who insisted on believing that you lengthen a muscle by going along it and lengthen it, but you don't. You must when you lengthen a muscle by going across it, etcetera, etcetera. But those are tricks within this single simple minded notion of what you wanna do with that body in order to get it balanced within the gravitational field. And those of you that remember your physics, remember that it is a question of getting the moment of rotation retired zero or as near zero as you can make it. And you can only do that by getting this ready for alignment. So now we have been talking about another trick."
From RolfB3, walking through the geometry of the second hour:
What makes this passage clarifying is that Ida gives the criterion in terms the practitioner can apply concretely. She does not say 'direction the right way' or 'do what the body needs.' She names a measurable physical quantity — the moment of rotation — and notes that this quantity should approach zero. Energy added in the direction that reduces this quantity is appropriate. Energy added in a direction that increases it, or that reduces it locally while increasing it globally, is not. The same logic applies to every hour. Each hour has a structural target, and the appropriate direction at any moment is whichever direction brings the body closer to that target.
"Figure out that. So we're going to take this body that's gotten this predicament and through the use of gravity and our energy and the client's energy. Through the use of gravity as a tool. And I like I sort of like that concept too. Mhmm. This is actually what you're doing, and it is actually expressed that way. It is expressed in a fashion which I've never seen anybody else put forward. To be able to consider that you are you are really working by means of gravity, and you are. You see, the Alexander people thought that you could use gravity, but they never expressed it. What they thought and what they did was in terms of telling you to get your head up, that you would then be using gravity. But you see, they never threaded it out, as far as I know, into the various paragraphs and sentences and words that were involved there."
From the RolfA3 public tape, on gravity as the tool the practitioner works through:
Direction and the shoulder girdle — the eighth hour
In the RolfB6 public tape, recorded during work on the eighth hour, Ida illustrated the doctrine of appropriate direction with the shoulder girdle. The shoulder presents a different problem than the pelvis. The pelvis transmits weight against gravity, so the appropriate direction of work is constrained by the requirement that the legs and floor of the pelvis support the trunk. The shoulder does not transmit weight in the same way. It carries the arms, which act, lift, reach, but do not bear the body's mass against the ground. The degrees of freedom are different, and so the appropriate direction at the shoulder is given by a different geometric requirement — that the elbow moves straight out and straight in when the arm muscles are balanced.
"So somebody's fingers have to get in there, and it's the same old story, add energy to it. But the problem of the shoulder girth of the eighth hour, that is the shoulder end of the line, is a different problem than the problem at the pelvic end of the line because the shoulder, the arms are doing things but they are not supporting weights. They are not transmitting weights, carrying weights, lifting weights. You see, the the arms in general are not really fighting gravity to any great extent to as great an extent as the legs, which have to transmit that whole 170 pounds of a man or 210 pounds of a man. You see, that's a big job. It's a heavy job. And in that, it is a heavy job."
From RolfB6, on the eighth-hour shoulder problem:
Ida's broader point in this passage is that the practitioner cannot bring a single rule of direction to the whole body. Each region has its own gravitational task, and the direction of appropriate energy addition is given by that task. The legs transmit weight. The arms permit movement. The trunk holds the viscera. The neck balances the head. Each region requires the practitioner to know what its task is in the gravitational field, and to add energy in whatever direction supports that task. This is why the year of reading and the supervised training matter. The practitioner cannot extemporize direction — must know the task of each region before deciding where energy belongs.
Direction and the personal element
Valerie Hunt, in her 1974 Healing Arts presentation, added a dimension to the doctrine of appropriate direction that Ida herself was reluctant to formalize. Hunt had been measuring the energy fields of subjects before and after the ten-session series at her UCLA laboratory. Her findings suggested that the practitioner's own energy field was not incidental to the work — that the relationship between practitioner and client was itself part of what determined whether the energy added flowed in the appropriate direction. Hunt's claim was carefully phrased: she believed that practitioners had become transducers, that something in the dyadic field between practitioner and client facilitated the directional flow of energy in ways that could not be reproduced by mechanical instruments or by exercise alone.
"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."
Valerie Hunt, 1974 Healing Arts conference, on the practitioner as transducer:
Hunt's framing was more speculative than the rest of her physiological measurements, and Ida treated it with some caution. But it adds a dimension to the doctrine of appropriate direction that the colloid argument by itself does not provide. Direction is not only a function of where the practitioner places hands and which way they push. It is also a function of who the practitioner is, what energetic field they carry, what relationship they have established with the person on the table. The same hands can add energy in different directions depending on the practitioner's internal state. This is part of why Ida thought practitioners had to be processed themselves before they could process others — the practitioner's own structure shapes the direction in which energy flows from their hands.
Direction and the test of the tenth hour
If the doctrine of appropriate direction is correct — if energy added in the right direction across the recipe produces integration, and energy added in the wrong direction breaks the structure down — then there should be a way to test, at the end of the work, whether direction has been appropriate throughout. In her 1976 Boulder advanced class, Ida named that test. The tenth hour is not, as many students assumed, the session where the last bits of disorganization are cleaned up. The tenth hour is the session where the balance produced across the previous nine hours is confirmed. The confirmation is operational: the practitioner lifts the head and feels for an uninterrupted wave traveling all the way down the spine to the sacrum. If the wave is continuous, direction has been appropriate. If it is interrupted, some hour, somewhere, added energy in the wrong direction, and the practitioner now sees the consequence.
"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."
From the 1976 Boulder advanced class, the tenth-hour test:
The tenth-hour test is the doctrine's empirical signature. Across her late teaching, Ida grew increasingly insistent that Structural Integration was not a matter of belief or technique or the practitioner's confidence. It was a matter of whether, at the end of the work, the body demonstrated the continuous wave that proves the segments are integrated. The wave is not produced by good intention. It is produced by appropriate direction, sustained across every hour, in every segment. Wrong direction at any point leaves a record, and the record shows up at the end.
"position. And the new position is beginning to get you a deeper organization. It's going to take you out of the metaphor of the shopping bag and put you onto the recognition that you have a something which is a spontaneous, self creating, vital something here. Who's wanted? And it's no longer an accidental being knocked around, being an effect unit. You are now getting it to the place where it can begin to be a cause of its own well-being. This is an interesting philosophical concept. The reason it can be caused is by virtue of the actual energy organ reorganizational organization that's coming through, where you have organization and where you have order, there be there is the opportunity for a creative cause."
From the RolfB3 public tape, on what appropriately directed energy produces over time:
Coda: the wrong direction is always available
The reason Ida returned to the doctrine of appropriate direction so often, across so many years and so many advanced classes, is that the wrong direction is always available. The fascia does not resist incorrect work. The colloid will sol whenever energy is added, regardless of whether the energy is added in the direction that serves the body's gravitational task. The practitioner who has not absorbed the doctrine, who has not seen the recipe play out through processed bodies, who has not learned to read what the body in front of them is asking for — that practitioner will add energy, and the energy will produce change, and the change will look like work being done. The harm is invisible to the practitioner who does not know what to look for. This is the structural reason for the year of reading, the supervised training, the certification: not credentialism, but the prevention of confident wrong-direction work.
"The pressure may be of a finger, it may be of a knuckle, it may be of an elbow. But all this energy must be added in an appropriate direction. The wrong direction breaks the structure down."
Returning, in close, to the sentence:
There is one further consequence of the doctrine that the late teaching emphasized. If direction matters this much, then the practitioner who is uncertain about direction should not add energy. The instruction in the 1973 Big Sur advanced class — that one should think in terms of circular biological causation rather than linear assertion — applies here too. The practitioner who is not sure where the segment belongs, what task it serves, what its relationship to its neighbors should be, is the practitioner who should stop and look longer before adding the next stroke. Energy added in the wrong direction does damage. Energy not added causes nothing — neither help nor harm. The asymmetry favors restraint. The whole archive teaches the practitioner to perceive before pressing.
See also: See also: Ida's 1971-72 conversation on training in the Mystery Tapes (CD2), where she describes the year of reading prerequisite as the discipline that prevents wrong-direction work. PSYTOD1 ▸
See also: See also: the 1974 Open Universe class with Valerie Hunt (UNI_044), where the energetic propagation of structural change is demonstrated from the receiver's perspective. UNI_044 ▸
See also: See also: the 1975 Boulder advanced class on the first-hour discussion of the recipe as a single continuous process (T1SB), in which 'the first hour is the beginning of the tenth hour' becomes the framing principle for understanding direction across the recipe. T1SB ▸
See also: See also: the RolfA1 public tape (RolfA1Side1), which walks through the first-hour direction of work from the chest down through the legs to the hip joint as a sequence of appropriate directional choices. RolfA1Side1 ▸