The diagram: gray under yellow
Ida's teaching on the arches begins with a colored diagram she carried with her into class after class. The gray arch is attached to the two outer toes — the fourth and fifth. The yellow arch is attached to the three inner toes — the first, second, and third. The diagram's claim is structural, not anatomical in any conventional sense: the gray arch sits underneath the yellow arch, supports it, and determines whether the yellow arch can rise at all. This is the picture she wanted her students to hold in their minds before they ever touched a foot. In a public RolfB2 lecture, she set up the picture by enumerating the wreckage that follows when students miss it — the broken arches, the calves that won't work, the ankles that aren't ankles — and then named the inversion that the conventional orthopedic tradition had gotten exactly backwards.
"If you can lift the gray, you've got it made. If you lift the yellow, you've thrown it away. If lift on the inner arch, you've thrown it away. If you lift on the outer arch, you've got it made."
From the RolfB2 public tape, walking her students through the two-color diagram of the foot.
The corollary follows immediately. If the gray arch is the structural arch, then the conventional therapeutics of the mid-twentieth century — flat-footed children walking on inclined boards, picking up marbles with their toes, the entire apparatus that tried to lift the inner arch directly — had been working from the wrong premise. Ida's objection was not that those interventions failed to do anything, but that they were aimed at the effect rather than the cause. The inner arch is a consequence; the outer arch is the determinant. She traced the misreading back to a deeper habit of mind in the medical tradition, what she called the Aristotelian habit of looking at effects and trying to address them as if they were causes.
"Let always letting the outside of your foot go down. Now you see what was happening was that these boys were brought up with Aristotle. For every cause, there is an effect. And, of course, you can look at the effect. And the effect is that if you wanna get the the inner arch up, you lift the inner arch. You don't. You lift the outer arch. This is one of the things that this second hour is about."
Continuing the same RolfB2 lecture, naming the conceptual error of the conventional flat-foot therapeutics.
Mercury's wings: a structural image from antiquity
Ida liked to point out that her doctrine of the outer arch was not new — it had been encoded in the iconography of the ancient world long before any orthopedic surgeon proposed walking flat-footed children across inclined boards. The figure of Mercury, the Greek principle of transportation, was depicted across two millennia with wings attached to the outside of his heels, not the inside. The ancients, she argued, had observed something true about how a body actually gets around in space, and they had encoded that observation in an image. The wings were not decorative. They were on the outer arch because that is where the lift comes from.
"The Greeks, when they wanted to represent the principle of transportation, the principle of getting around, represented a young man with wings on the side, outside of his heels. They were saying, not that they thought that was a god that came around with wings on the side of his feet at all. They were saying that the principle of transportation, of getting around of getting around fast and satisfactorily consisted in walking as though you had wings on the side of your feet. It still is the same, and it's not wings on the inside of it."
Ida reaches for the Mercury image to anchor the doctrine in something older than modern orthopedics.
She returned to the image in a second RolfA1 passage, sharpening the point. The Mercury figure was not merely a god with decorative wings but a piece of evidence about how a body that moves well distributes its weight. For Ida, the iconographic tradition contained a structural insight that the medical tradition had lost. Her practitioners were to take Mercury seriously — not as a mythological reference but as a diagram of where the lift in the foot has to come from. The wings on the outside were the ancient world's way of teaching the doctrine she now had to reteach in her advanced classes.
"The ten year ago generation, every telephone book had a picture of Mercury standing on a globe up on his toes with the outer arch up all That's where the wings were. That's where the wings were. That's as well. Now all these Mercury's that go way way back to early times, not primitive times, they all had the wings on the outer arch there. Meaning, because this was the way the old classicists thought. Mercury is the principle of transportation. If you are going to get around, you must act as though there were wings on that outer arch and you will get around. And so this is what you are trying to establish. Is the mechanics of the weight bearing of carrying the weight along the outside arch first and then transporting it across the No. Weight goes on the outer arch. And all that you ever learned about taking these kids who have flat feet and walking around boards like that is the diametrical opposite of the therapeutic truth. No foot has ever broken down until the outer arch breaks down. While the outer arch is intact, the foot is intact."
From the same RolfA1 tape, expanding the Mercury image into a teaching about where weight should travel.
The foot has not broken down until the outer arch breaks down
If the outer arch is the structural arch, then the question of when a foot has actually failed — when the integrity of the foot as a unit has been lost — becomes a question about the outer arch alone. Ida stated this in the form of a clinical rule that practitioners could carry into any second-hour assessment. The condition of the inner arch is not the diagnostic question. The condition of the outer arch is. She delivered the rule in the same RolfA1 lecture where she had introduced the Mercury figure, and the rule has been one of the most-cited single sentences of her foot teaching.
"No foot has ever broken down until the outer arch breaks down. While the outer arch is intact, the foot is intact."
Ida's diagnostic rule for the integrity of a foot, delivered in the RolfA1 public lecture.
The rule shifts the practitioner's eye. Rather than looking at the inner arch — which is what the eye is trained by convention to look at — the practitioner is to look at whether the outer side of the foot is tipped up or running down to the floor. A foot whose outer edge is in contact with the ground, even if the inner arch looks superficially intact, is a foot whose structure has already failed. Conversely, a foot with a dropped-looking inner arch but a healthy outer arch is, by Ida's reading, still a foot that has not yet broken down. The rule reorganizes what the practitioner is looking for.
"So that if the foot is going to work with its arch, the outer arch, that is the grave, the part that is attached to the two outer toes, has got to tip up slightly. When these when I don't know. Look at the foot now say, it's all running down on the outside, isn't it? You've heard me say this sort of thing before. Meaning the foot is standing like that, and the part of the foot that's attached to the out of one's toes is down, not up. Then you get a perversion of the whole pattern of movement and the whole pattern of energy flow. Watch this. Don't watch me. I don't I don't quite understand."
From RolfA1, demonstrating what the outer-arch-tipped-up principle actually looks like in a standing foot.
Where weight should travel
If the outer arch is the structural support, where does the weight actually go through a working foot? Ida's answer here is more subtle than the doctrinal headline suggests, and it generated some of the most pointed dialogue in her advanced classes. The weight is supported by the outer arch but transmitted through the inner three toes — the first, second, and third, with the heaviest channel through the great toe and the second. The outer arch holds the structure; the inner toes carry the line of weight forward through the step. The two propositions are not contradictory but sequential, and students who heard one without the other consistently misread her.
"The weight should be transmitted through the inner three toes of the foot. The inner three toes."
From the RolfA1 second-hour lecture, naming the channel through which weight is actually transmitted.
The point became contested in the 1976 Boulder advanced class when a student tried to restate Ida's teaching from memory and got tangled in the two propositions. The exchange that followed is one of the most pedagogically revealing moments in the transcripts — Ida pressing the student to distinguish between the abstraction (weight through the inner three toes) and the silent-level functional truth (do not let the weight fall to the outer edge), and to recognize that the two statements describe different aspects of the same foot. The student's confusion was the usual confusion: hearing 'weight through the inner three toes' as a permission to let the outer arch drop.
"And where it goes as it goes up into the body and what you are aware of in terms of its lacks and what you are aware of in terms of its ability to help you unify yourself. Realize that when you are standing with your weight flowing down on the outer arch, you are destroying the unity within yourself. Now this is what I jumped on yesterday when I came in and somebody was telling me from some book or other, it might even have been a book of my lectures, That weight has to go through the three center toes. It's true. This is the abstraction. But what is the silent level? You're feeling it right now. The silent level is talking to you. The silent level is telling you how you can get to act at one with gravity. One of the ways you can do it is by turning your toes up so as to run that line up through the middle. Certainly the negative way to do it is not to let the weight go down on the outer arch."
From the 1976 Boulder advanced class, untangling the apparent contradiction between the two doctrines.
Flat feet are not in the feet
Among the most-quoted of Ida's foot teachings is the proposition that flat feet are not located where they appear to be located. The collapsed arch the practitioner sees in the foot is the visible distal end of a problem that lives in the shin — in the muscles that originate on the tibia and fibula and travel down across the ankle to control the position of the foot. The arch falls because the muscles that should hold it have lost their organization on the leg. The clinical implication is decisive: the practitioner who tries to fix a flat foot by working on the foot itself is working at the wrong end of the string.
"And flat feet are not in the feet. Flat feet are in the shins. They are where and how the muscles of the shins relate. And the place to go for your flat feet is not into the feet, but into the shins. And there, you organize the muscles that control the feet. Now what are you trying to do there, and what is your goal? And your goal is to establish an angle which acts as though it were horizontal."
From the RolfB2 public tape, locating the actual site of the flat-foot problem.
The teaching reframes the second hour as primarily work on the leg — the second hour is not, in Ida's framing, a foot hour at all, except in the sense that the foot is the place where the results of leg-work become visible. The practitioner spends the bulk of the hour above the ankle, freeing the retinacula, separating the peroneals from one another, clearing fascia from the tibia, addressing the position of the fibula. The foot itself, when the practitioner finally arrives at it, is largely the place where the changes register. In a RolfA1 conversation with a student named Bill, Ida pressed the point: the arches are not normally solved by working on the foot.
"Then you depending upon what's there, you you do it on the bottom of the foot. Realizing that problems in the arches are normally not solved by working on the foot. You're being a little too abstracting."
Closing exchange in the RolfA1 second-hour walkthrough — what to remember about where the work actually lives.
The webbing: how the foot actually holds itself
When Ida did turn her attention to the foot itself, she described it not as a structure of bones supported by muscles but as an interwoven webbing of tendons — three on the dorsum, three on the medial side, two on the lateral — held in their relationships by the plantar fascia underneath and by the retinacula above. The arch, in her telling, is not lifted by a muscle but produced by the cross-pull between tendons. The peroneus longus crossing one way, the extensors crossing the other, generate the lift through what she called a pulley action between them. Change the binding underneath, and you change the foot.
"The peroneus longus coming across the foot this way and the extensor coming this way. As you can see You see that forms the arch. You have a pulley action between the two. Where's the origin of the dorsal tendon? On the front of the foot, on the front of the leg. Right here? Yeah, between the tibia and the tibialis anterior. The extensor of the great toe and the common extensor of other toes. And then you see down on the bottom of all this you have the plantar fascia holding this binding it in. Now if your binding is too short or your binding is too short on the outer arch and so forth, the proper balance and movement of these tendons will be interfered with. This is clear. But the thing I want to get so vivid in your mind is the way in which the foot is a webbing, an interwoven webbing. And that in order to change what you see as a foot, you have to have clarity about this webbing and how it should relate within itself and to the bones that are keeping it stretched. Because see you see here you have a magnificent"
From RolfA1, walking her practitioners through the foot as an interwoven webbing rather than a collection of muscles.
The webbing image has a clinical correlate. Within the webbing, the relationships between adjacent tendons become glued — the two peroneals adhere to one another, the retinacula thicken and bind the tendons too tightly to slide, the fascia of the shin loses its capacity to permit independent muscle action. The practitioner's task is to restore differentiation: to separate each tendon from its neighbors so that each can do its own job. This is what Ida meant when she returned, in passage after passage, to the language of individualization.
"And he turned out the assumption that every foot has to be turned out. Now, actually, what you are going to have to do in order to get those feet back is to get every one of those muscles individualized, eyes. Each one doing its own thing. Each one sliding across its neighbor when it needs to. Each one balanced in tone and this means balanced in chemistry and balanced in energy. And then you've got something to stand on."
From the RolfB2 public tape, on what it means to restore the foot as a webbing.
Retinacula and the anchoring of the pattern
If the webbing has become glued, where does the gluing happen? Ida's answer was specific: the retinacula. These are the fascial bands above the ankle and across the dorsum of the foot that hold the long tendons in their grooves. They are, she observed, simply fascia under another name. Over years of walking on the outsides of the feet, the retinacula thicken to do the job that has been demanded of them — they hold the muscles in the position required for that particular pattern of weight-bearing, and once anchored in that position they make the pattern self-perpetuating.
"You have muscles held into positions by retinaculate. And retinaculae is our good old fascia again under a different name. And you've gotta go in and get those retinaculate sufficiently stretched and organized and elastic that you can get some movement under them. Those retinaculae are there to hold the strings of the muscles in place. It's as simple as that. And if the string is pulled so tightly and can't be moved and can't be loosened, nothing can happen. The muscles can't move."
From RolfB2, on how the retinacula become the structural anchors of the foot pattern.
Once the retinacula have anchored the pattern, the secondary changes follow: chemistry shifts, circulation through the structure fails, the soft tissue of the leg begins to do the work of hard tissue and hardens accordingly. Ida noted this in a 1973 Big Sur class, walking her students through the cascade by which a fibula that has dropped on its lateral side recruits the surrounding soft tissue to do work it was not designed to do, and the soft tissue obliges by becoming wood. The wooden leg is not a metaphor; it is what happens when fascia takes on a structural job.
"Now in order to support, to maintain normal movement with the tibia and the fibula, well not normal movement, in order to maintain movement with the tibia and the fibula displacement. The soft tissue including the interosseous membrane has to become hardened tissue. And if you don't believe it try to get your fingers in that. When soft tissue has to do the work of hard tissue it becomes hardened tissue. So when you begin to get these hard wooden legs, now they can't be wooden legs if they're balanced. They can only be wooden legs if they're not balanced. And the physiological process has hardened salvation. Now we've been talking about the ankle."
From the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, on what happens when soft tissue has to do the work of bone.
Two hinges: the dorsum and the ankle
Once the practitioner has begun to free the webbing and the retinacula, the question becomes how the foot moves. Ida's mechanical picture here introduced an element most students had never considered: the foot has not one hinge but two. The familiar hinge is the ankle. The second, less familiar hinge is across the dorsum of the foot — a transverse line across the metatarsal-tarsal region around which the forefoot lifts and drops. Both must be horizontal, she insisted, for the foot to function. Without the dorsal hinge, the lift on the outside cannot occur, no matter what is done at the ankle.
"And those of you who were real smart realized that not only must you get movement in the ankle joint, but you must get movement in the foot and as I usually express it in this room you must get hinge joints horizontal hinge joints and you get the first and the lowest one across the dorsum of the foot. Sometimes it's pretty hard to get in. It's always easier to get movement in the ankle joint because they have had, if they're going to be mobile at all and walking at all, they've got to have movement in that ankle no matter how core it is or how distorted it is. They've got to move at the ankle. But they don't have to move at the dorsum of the foot. They can walk around that joint. They don't walk very well, but nevertheless, they move. And they're never aware of the fact that they ought to be walking better. Because as far as they're concerned, this is a foot, this is foot, this is a foot, and it's my foot, and therefore, it's a normal foot. This isn't so. Your first joint is across the dorsum of the foot, your second joint is at the ankle and both of them have to be operational before you can start getting operational joints properly operational joints at the knee and at the hip and then start up the spine."
From RolfB2, introducing the doctrine of two hinges in the foot.
The doctrine of two hinges connects directly back to the outer arch. The lift on the outside of the foot — the gray arch tipping up that defines a working foot — cannot occur unless the dorsal hinge is operative. As long as the outside of the foot is running down toward the floor, the dorsal hinge cannot do its work, and the whole tarsal complex remains locked. Ida pressed this point in a RolfB2 second-hour walkthrough, naming the bones and counting them out, insisting that the dozens of small inter-tarsal hinges add up to the one big transverse hinge that the second hour has to restore.
"But across the dorsum of the foot, there has to be, for normal literally a hinge joint. When that hinge is in then you can get the lift on the outside of the foot. Until that hinge is in you can cannot really get the lift on the outside of the foot. And as long as the outside of the foot is down, as you see, it is as we look at the normal accidental business of growing up and walking on the side of your feet the other day, as long as that outside is down, that door that hinge on the foot cannot operate. But that foot is just like any other part of the body. In fact, in certain respects, it's more complicated than any other part of the body. How many bones in a foot? 50 odd pounds. Two for the two of them. I don't know. I keep forgetting about numbers. But at any rate, you see what I'm talking about."
Continuing the RolfB2 second-hour walkthrough, connecting the dorsal hinge to the lift of the outer arch.
Movement as diagnosis: toes down, foot up
How does the practitioner verify that the dorsal hinge and the outer arch are operating? Ida's answer, developed in the 1975 Boulder teachers' class, was a specific movement demand: toes down, foot up. The student lifts the forefoot while the toes remain dropped, and the outer arch tells the practitioner what it is capable of by whether it elevates with the lift or remains stuck. The movement is not a corrective exercise but a diagnostic — a way of asking the foot to do, against gravity, the precise action that the second hour is trying to restore.
"You can take the toes down and bring your foot up, and they'll bring that outside arch up."
From the 1975 Boulder teachers' class, naming the diagnostic movement for the outer arch.
The conversation in that 1975 teachers' class went on at some length, because the movement is not as simple as it sounds and the practitioners were trying to settle whether the more conventional 'toes up, foot up' demand or Ida's 'toes down, foot up' was the better teaching tool. Ida's position was nuanced: each movement does specific work, and a practitioner who treats either as a pat rule will misread the individual foot. A foot with a very high arch should not be sent through toes-up movements that contract the tarsals further. A foot with collapsed arches needs precisely those movements. The diagnostic and the corrective have to be chosen for what the foot in front of you actually is.
"Because it it does continue to attract it contracts the tarsals right in here and they keep contracting. What you want to do is let that sucking up dissipate so this starts to come down. You can use the toes up movement to lengthen the sole of the foot. You can really teach it in such a way that if that whole structure lengthens out tremendously. You can lengthen the sole of the foot with the toes up if they don't have extremely high arches. And if they have extremely high arches, they're just gonna get it's not gonna lengthen the sole foot. It's gonna shorten it. Depends on how good a teacher you are. Like, with arm is you can get those arm's got arches like that. We could make them about where I used to teaching teaching it to her in an appropriate way. That's true."
Continuing the 1975 teachers' class exchange — when toes-up movements help, and when they actively harm.
The talus as wedge
Below the level of movement diagnosis, Ida and her circle had a more technical conversation about why a particular ankle movement opens the foot the way it does. The talus, sitting between the tibia-fibula above and the calcaneus below, is structurally a wedge. When the practitioner calls for an appropriate movement at the ankle, the talus drives itself into the surrounding structures the way a splitting wedge drives into wood. The free flow of fluids and the realignment of the tarsals follow from the wedging action. This is one of the more elegant of Ida's mechanical pictures, and it appears in the 1975 Boulder transcripts as something she was working out with a practitioner trying to understand why the toes-down-foot-up demand produced the openings it did.
"To a great extent, I still don't. Okay. So what that does is it if you look at it, it a wedge. Right. Okay. Just like instead of chopping wood, you can put a wedge in there and hit the wedge and split the wood. That's hard to understand. And if you call for the appropriate movement, the talus acts as a wedge and opens up the structures more. Okay. That I just Which is gonna give you a freer flow of movement and fluids all at once. And as all those structures shift, then you move everything to where you want it. Alright. And it's one of the more natural most natural wedges of the body. And it also acts as a spacer. Mhmm. That's very it's very clear from that exposition and foot pain. Okay. I hadn't realized the part I hadn't realized that in calling for that movement, you're using as a wedge. And another well, maybe I I don't know You wanna look at that because sometimes you might wanna wedge it a different way. Uh-huh. Depending on how the neck the ankle could be too narrow or too fat. So that would change the appropriate movement."
From the 1975 Boulder teachers' class, working out the mechanics of the talus as a structural wedge.
The talus-as-wedge picture connects directly to the question of which movement demand suits which foot. A foot with a very high arch and a tarsal complex already over-wedged should not be asked to drive the wedge further. A foot with collapsed arches has a tarsal complex that has lost its wedging and benefits from being asked to recover it. The same mechanical principle generates different clinical decisions for different feet — which is why Ida resisted, in her teachers' classes, the impulse her students sometimes had to extract a single universal movement instruction from her teaching.
Reading the leg above the ankle
Because flat feet live in the shin, the second hour spends most of its time above the ankle. Ida's instruction to practitioners about how to read the leg above the ankle was concrete: look at where the tissue is heaped, look at where the fibula sits, look at how the tibia and fibula relate, and let those observations decide the direction of the work. Heaping along the outside of the leg signals a fibula problem; bare-boned tissue on the front with all the substance behind signals a different distribution. The reading determines the treatment, and the treatment is finally about restoring the relationship between the bones at the level of the soft tissue that runs between them.
"One of the things you have to look at is where is the where is the heaping of tissue on that leg? Is it all on the outside there along the fibula? If something has gone seriously wrong with the fibulae you will have heaping and a solidifying of tissue on the outer half of the leg, the lateral half. If there is some semblance and balance you will have tissue balanced on two halves of the leg. Legs will come a long way. You see them absolutely bare boned on the front and lots of tissue on the back. And you say I can't get anything here. There's nothing here but bone. Don't you believe it? You just go ahead and do it and don't think. On top of the bone. You've got to take it from where you find it and put it where it belongs. Simple as that. I didn't quite understand what you mean when you said go ahead and do it."
From RolfA1, instructing practitioners on how to read the distribution of tissue on the leg.
The relationship between the tibia and the fibula is, in Ida's reading, central to whether the foot can ever organize. A fibula that has dropped distally and rotated posteriorly produces a foot whose weight inevitably falls to the outside, and no work on the foot itself can correct what is being produced from above. In the 1973 Big Sur class, she connected this directly to the arch question — the fibula has to be where it belongs for the arch to be supportable, and the arch has to lift for the fibula to be supportable. The two are reciprocal.
"Well, this is true, but on the other hand, they've gone to realize that they have to establish the arts and then if you live on those sexual problems, you're quite right, but I'd be aware of the fact that you can't get the arch without the fibula. You can't support the fibula without the arch. Now when the fibula drops, the weight seemingly goes to the outside. Now whatever goes wrong with knees displaces the fibula. I mean every time it gets closer to knees displaces that fibula. And the fibula compensates by either going back to a pregnancy saying that one of us is too far back and one of them will go back and one of will go forward. Or the other thing happens, one of them falls and the other side goes back. Whatever happens, you see, you get a displacement of bony structure and this isn't important, the thing that's important is the displacement of soft tissue which is marked and measured by the bony distortion. It is the displacement of the soft tissue that is the important matter. It is the unbalanced stretch of the spatial envelopes which is the important matter."
From the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, on the reciprocal relationship between arch and fibula.
The hinge of the ankle and the question of horizontal
Ida's discussion of the ankle in the second hour resists tidy summary because she was, throughout the 1970s, working out a distinction her students kept trying to flatten. The ankle has a structural plane — defined by the relative position of the medial and lateral malleoli — and a functional plane, the plane on which the foot actually folds when the body walks. The two are not the same, and they cannot be made the same, because the tibia and fibula are different lengths. The practitioner's task is to bring the functional plane as close to horizontal as the structural plane permits, knowing the structural plane itself cannot be made precisely horizontal.
"But there'll be an almost horizontal plane across the ankle. Better not give me this almost horizontal. You better give me a full size Oh, horizontal. I have I'm not sure of that yet. The plane on which it folds will be horizontal. The plane on which it folds is not necessarily the plane marked by the internal and external molybdenum. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. That's about it. There's a functional plane, and there's a structural plane. Fine. And if you look, you'll see the functional. And you can see that whereas within limits, it does. That is if the structural plane is way off, the functional plane cannot be moved on. But by virtue of the difference in length of the tibia and fibula, the structural plane cannot be precise. So the conjunctiva approach it a lot more closer than yours from many ankles view."
From RolfA1, on the distinction between the structural and functional planes of the ankle.
One practical consequence of the structural-functional distinction is that the practitioner's diagnostic eye watches the folds of the skin. If the folds across the front of the ankle run horizontally when the foot flexes, the joint is acting as a horizontal hinge regardless of where the malleoli sit. If the folds run diagonally, the joint is folding on a plane other than horizontal, and the practitioner knows that something in the soft tissue is recruiting the joint away from its functional alignment. The skin folds report what the joint is actually doing.
"of the indications of how that joint is moving is by the folds of the skin when they flex the foot or when they're walking on it. If the folds are horizontal, then the joint itself tends to be acting as a horizontal hinge. And Wow. Bet you get that one. I did. The ridge. Well, it's he was true. I never thought about it, but it's beautiful. It's not mine, it's hers. Often times you have to go underneath the malleus to work on the two ligaments that are underneath, that may be displaced displaced and this sort of thing."
From RolfA1, on reading the ankle through the folds of the skin.
Walking and the centerline
In a 1976 advanced class, Ida placed her foot teaching inside a larger frame: the centerline of the body. She referenced Ruth St. Denis — the modern dancer who once wrote in her diary that she could not dance well that night because she could not find her centerline — and used St. Denis's instinct to argue that the foot is not its own subject but the foundation of a vertical line that runs the whole length of the body. Where the weight falls in the foot determines whether that centerline can be located at all. When the weight falls to the outer arch, the centerline is lost; when the foot supports the line from the inside of the leg upward, the centerline can be felt.
"And if he was good enough, he probably would. If he did enough, I don't Now know. Where can my common line go? Where can that center line go? Where will be the center for a center line in the body? Will it be on the outside of the body? I mean the lateral sides of the body? No, it's got to be the middle of the body, don't it? So you have to build up toward the middle and not detract from it by taking it apart. Now I'd like every one of you to stand right in place at this moment for a minute. Get yourself comfortable and feel where you are in that body. You don't accept your head as being you. Seal at centerline if you can that Ruth was looking for. And where does it have to run? Now let your weight go over to your outer arches. What happens? You lose your line. It's called you're no longer a unit. You feel it? Anyone want to argue it?"
From the 1976 advanced class, asking her practitioners to feel the centerline change as the weight moves in their own feet.
Walking, for Ida, was the practical test of everything in the second hour. She was withering about the parade of twentieth-century experts who had each issued a different recipe for how to walk — heel first, toe first, toes curling — and her objection was always the same: none of them had said why. None of them had grounded the recipe in a principle. In the 1976 class, working with a student who tried to derive the recipe from the criterion of least energy invested, Ida finally permitted the conversation to proceed. Walking is the energetic test. A foot that distributes weight correctly walks with less energy expenditure than one that does not, and the criterion is empirical.
"point in confusing you. At least a half a dozen different so called experts that have been on the American scene during the last seventy five years. And every one of those so called experts had a different recipe for walking. One says put your heel down first. One says put your toe down first. One says as you're walking, bend your toes to the ground, go down that way. Etcetera, etcetera. And you come and you tell me the way you do it, the way it should be done is so and so. Who says so and why? I'm not just trying to be nasty this morning. I could succeed very easily. Because my silent level is doing a hell of a lot of complaining right now. But I am trying to make you people realize that you are human beings living in the year the last years of the twentieth century and that somehow or another we have come to a critical place in our growth pattern. Men have come, humans have come to a critical place in their growth pattern where they have to begin to understand what happens when they use their bodies in certain ways. Now, just imagine that there were had been no raw fees to tell you, my golly, that feels good. What to do next? I guess the first we have to look at what is. Pardon? We have to look at what is how people walk right now. Yeah, right. And then I'm sure that there is clear way to say that there are people who walk better Wait a minute, what's better? From a point of the amount of energy put into their walk. Now you're talking sense."
From the 1976 advanced class, working through the energy criterion for what counts as walking well.
The children and the boards
Ida returned more than once to the picture of children with flat feet being walked across inclined boards and given marbles to pick up with their toes. Her quarrel with the practice was twofold. First, it aimed at the inner arch, which is the wrong arch. Second, it depended on whether the child happened to perform the action correctly — and absent supervision aimed at the outer arch going down, the child would simply repeat, on the board, the same dysfunctional pattern that produced the flat foot in the first place. The intervention failed not because exercise is wrong but because the unsupervised exercise reinforces the pattern it was meant to correct.
"And giving them marbles to pick up on their toes. Well, yeah, it depends on how they pick them up. You see, again, it isn't what you do. It's how you do it, ma'am. Mhmm. And somebody has to supervise the doing to see if it's done properly. Now as you pick it up right then, you let the outside of your foot go down. And we had to sit straight and bring it up. Yeah. Let always letting the outside of your foot go down."
From RolfB2, on what is actually wrong with the conventional exercise prescription for flat-footed children.
Beyond the technical failure of the exercise, Ida saw a developmental story. Children are not born flat-footed; they become so through habits laid down in the first year of walking. A child who sits in chairs always on the outside of his feet, plays on the outside of his feet, builds the entire kinetic life of the body around weight on the outside of the foot, is a child whose retinacula will eventually anchor that pattern as structure. The intervention has to interrupt the developmental story, not simply correct its endpoint. In a long RolfB2 passage she walked her practitioners through what they would see if they went home and watched the children in their own households.
"Now as a kid grows up walking on the outside of his feet, and those of you have who have kids, go back and look at those kids sitting in a chair doing anything, sitting like this, always on the outside of their feet, always on the outside of their feet. You see, they have never brought it around. It has never been presented to the child or to the individual that is a goal to bring it around. No one presents this. If it happens, that the kid is a good, or maybe a pain around. But it's just as likely to not happen. And Beverly is going to go home, and she's going to have an awful time because she's got three of them in her house. And every one of them is worth walking on the outside of his feet. They'll even play walking on the outside of their feet. You all know it. Is that one of the reasons why Gail is so tripping over her feet all the time? Yeah. But it's not being I mean, the the Anchorage is higher. Mhmm. But certainly, you'll find it there. So that as they walk consistently on the outside of their feet, these retinaculate take on the job that they've got to do of holding those muscles in a good place to walk on the outside of their feet. And then the pattern is anchored. And then within the pattern, you get the change of the individual structure, of the individual chemistry of the structure, of the failure of circulation through the structure, etcetera, etcetera."
From RolfB2, on how children lay down the foot pattern through habits the family never notices.
The clinical limit and the surgical option
Ida did not promise that her teaching could repair every foot. In a RolfA3 conversation about children whose foot pathologies extended to genuine clubfoot or congenital deformity, she was careful to acknowledge the limit. The work could improve such children; it could not make them normal. And surgery — which she did not romanticize and did not condemn — sometimes remained the place such children would finally arrive. The practitioner's role was to bring the rest of the body into as good a shape as possible before any cutting was contemplated, so that whatever the surgeon ultimately did would be done into a body that was at least organized to receive it.
"But I do know that it's a problem of the whole body and no food. Those kids will be tied their back will be tied up until you just cry for them. That doesn't say you can't get them out of it. You don't get them you don't ever get them normal. Neither do surgery, in spite of what any surgeon tells you. But you certainly get them to a place where they do it, it does life better. And over and over again, seeing what we're talking about it, this problem will arise. Some harried and harassed family come to you and they say, well, can you see little Johnny's feet now? Our doctor is proposing to have surgery. I shall do it. Now your cue at this point is not to say, No, don't have surgery, because there's a good chance that surgery will be the ultimate place you'll go to get final help for that kid, but to try to get the rest of the body in as good shape as possible before you let them cut in and make another predicament for that body. And this is about the way you have to explain it to the parent that it will be very worthwhile to let that child have the advantage of as much mobility as possible. You see, that that family doesn't have the foggiest idea that there's anything wrong except some displaced people. Of course, it's easy enough to just take a knife and fix that. And they don't understand that the problem is not at all."
From the RolfA3 public tape, on the limits of structural work in cases of genuine foot pathology.
The passage is one of the more sober moments in Ida's teaching on the foot. The doctrine she had developed — outer arch first, leg before foot, two hinges, the centerline lost when weight falls outside — was, for the great majority of feet, the right doctrine. But the doctrine was not magic, and the practitioner had to know where the work could go and where it could not. The honesty of that recognition is part of what gave the rest of her foot teaching its authority.
Coda: the second hour as a teaching of relatedness
Across the second-hour transcripts, a single phrase recurs: relatedness to the ground. For Ida, the entire technical apparatus of the foot teaching — the gray and yellow arches, the Mercury figure, the dorsal hinge, the wedging talus, the structural and functional planes — was in the service of a simple proposition. The foot is the body's relation to the earth. When the foot is organized, the body is in contact with gravity in a way that lets gravity carry the work. When the foot is disorganized, the body has to expend energy to hold itself up against the ground rather than being held by the ground. The second hour, in this framing, is the hour in which the body first comes into contact with the earth in a way that gravity can support it.
"Now what is the function of this foot? Alohan was complaining that he really doesn't understand the second hour. And between you and me, we're gonna make him understand the second hour this morning. The function of the foot is to relate us to the earth and to gravity, which means having as solid energy flow through our feeding legs to contact us with the earth. This means the angles of weight bearing in the foot and leg, Ideally, we'll have the weight distributed through the relative to the center of the ankle. But there'll be an almost horizontal plane across the ankle. Better not give me this almost horizontal. You better give me a full size Oh, horizontal."
From RolfA1, naming the function of the foot in the larger frame of the work.
A senior practitioner in the 1975 Boulder class extended the picture: each horizontal restored down below registers itself upward as the body absorbs the change. The work on the ankle reaches the rib cage. The lifting of the outer arch reaches the centerline through the whole length of the leg. The foot is not its own subject because the body is not divisible into subjects. The second hour, for Ida, was where the practitioner first encountered, in a concentrated form, the structural reciprocity that organized the whole ten-session series. What happened in the foot was the body's relation to gravity made visible at its most concrete point of contact.
"Well yesterday someone, I don't know who said it to me, it's Michael Salison's concept of the fascial tube which starts in the cervicals and goes in the second hour when you start working on the ankles you're heading vertically again. 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 advanced class, on how the foot work registers upward through the whole body.
See also: See also: RolfA3 public tape — Ida's longer second-hour discussion of relatedness to the ground and the focus on the hinge of the ankle, which extends the centerline argument developed above. RolfA3Side1 ▸
See also: See also: the 1976 advanced class tape 76ADV61 — a senior practitioner (Tom) walks through the structural goals of the second hour, the lengthening of the front established in the first hour, the freeing of the malleoli and the retinacula, and the goal of establishing a proper hinge at the ankle as a 90-degree relationship to the line of walk. Extends the second-hour walkthrough developed above with a colleague's working summary. 76ADV61 ▸