The half-inch body and the five-inch body
Ida had been arguing for two decades that Structural Integration added energy to the body. The trouble was that energy, in this sense, had no instrument behind it. She could point to changed contour, changed gait, changed mood — she could even invoke the thermodynamic vocabulary of entropy and negative entropy — but until 1973 she had no measurement that a physicist would accept as confirming the claim. Valerie Hunt's laboratory at UCLA changed that. Hunt, working with the aura-reader Rosalyn Bruyere and a transient recorder capable of capturing very high frequencies off the skin surface, began recording subjects through full ten-session series. The headline finding was simple enough to state in one sentence, and Ida stated it from the Healing Arts podium on the first night of the 1974 conference.
"that random incoming people tend to have auras a half an inch to an inch in width, but after the integration of structure and the integration of the myofascial body, which is called rolfing, their auras will have increased usually to four to five inches in width. That's what we said. Wow! Obviously, we are dealing with a basic energy phenomenon of life here."
Ida summarizes Hunt's central finding for the Healing Arts audience, August 1974:
Two things are worth noting about how Ida frames the result. First, she gives the credit to Hunt — "she has found, for example, and will tell you about it" — positioning herself as the recipient of a finding rather than its author. Second, she immediately reaches for the largest possible interpretive frame: a basic energy phenomenon of life. The half-inch-to-five-inch widening is not, in Ida's reading, a curiosity. It is the visible signature of whatever the work is actually doing to the body. The rest of the conference, and the rest of this article, is an attempt to specify what that signature means.
The body as energy quotient
Before Hunt walked the audience through her data, Ida set the conceptual scaffolding in place. Her argument was that the body has an energy quotient — a ratio of incoming gravitational support to outgoing structural cost — and that the ten-session series shifts that ratio in the direction of more available energy. This is the framing she had been developing in the late 1960s, partly out of her reading of Schrödinger on negative entropy, partly out of her conversations with the physicists who orbited Esalen. The aura measurement was, for her, the long-awaited instrumented confirmation.
"Hunt has been observing it and measuring it, and she will tell you about her sophisticated pioneering exploration in this field, which I know is very dear to your heart. We know that the body has developed embryologically from three systems: the digestive or endomorphic, the nervous or ectomorphic, and the myofascial, mesomorphic or muscular. And of these, it is the myofascial system which is the organ of structure, the myofascial which seemingly offers the opportunity for structural changes, for changes in the three-dimensional world. As loftus, we've been observing for a long time. The increase of energy of the body in order the appropriate relation is added to it. Now, Doctor. Hunt has validated our claim by measuring the increased energy of the body as changes in the material structure have been introduced. She's done this in several ways. She's measured the light energy indirectly through her instruments, and with the help of Doctor."
Earlier in the same Healing Arts lecture, Ida names the embryological body that carries this energy:
The convergence Ida notes — Hunt's instrument and Bruyere's clairvoyance arriving at the same numbers — is the rhetorical move she relies on throughout the conference. It allows her to address two audiences at once. To the scientists in the room, she can point to the oscilloscope; to the metaphysicians, she can point to Rosalyn. Whether the audience accepted that convergence or merely tolerated it, the four CFHA tapes preserve Ida using it as a load-bearing argument. The body changes contour; the contour change is the visible side of an energy shift; the energy shift can be measured two ways; both ways give the same answer.
"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. These are the physical manifestations of the increasing balance, but there is an outgoing psychological change as well toward balance, toward serenity, toward a more whole person. The whole man, the whole person evidences a more apparent, a more potent psychic development. This means that the rate that the ratio man energy to gravity energy energy has changed has increased."
Continuing the argument the next day, Ida links the energy claim to the language of the gravitational ratio:
Hunt's instruments and the closed chakras
Valerie Hunt took the podium the next day to describe her instrumentation. She had begun, she said, with conventional electromyography — surface electrodes on muscle bellies, recording depolarization during everyday tasks. Her first finding, which she titled an electromyographic study of the neuromuscular energy field, was that after the ten-session series the baseline of bioelectric activity was higher when subjects were at rest between movements. This was the opposite of what tension would predict, and it puzzled her until she stopped reading the trace as muscle tension and started reading it as something else — an openness to experience, a readiness, a field state. The puzzle led her to redesign the study around chakras and acupuncture points rather than muscle bellies.
"The laboratory has never been the same since then, and neither have the staff been the same. Rosalyn Winsky was in there for a long time. She trained this. We saw, we heard, we recorded energy from the body surface, probably electromagnetic. We observed and perceived the relationship between the psyche and the soma, the immediate relationship between changes in moods. We observed and recorded interpersonal relationships on an auric level, and we recorded the waveforms, the frequencies, and the intensities of what happened in another electrical field. Rosalynn Brier read the auras. She stayed in a psychic state for like five hours a day. I thought at times I was going to have to drive her back home. Well, she read the constant auras during rolfing of four subjects in the laboratory. I monitored these people for over sixty hours."
Hunt describes the moment she stopped recording muscles and began recording chakras:
The first finding from the chakra-electrode setup was that the four pilot subjects came in with what Hunt called closed chakras. The body would register a small amount of energy at the foot or the knee, jump to the throat, and leave the middle of the body blank. She and Rosalyn began to describe this as a block in the central vertical flow. As the ten sessions proceeded, the block opened. Energy began to flow upward along the spinal axis. Once it did, the aura — which Rosalyn was reading on the outside of the body in real time — increased from the half-inch baseline to four or five inches. This is the mechanism, in Hunt's account, by which the contour change in the fascia produces the aura widening at the skin surface.
"During their offing sessions then of these four people, two men and two women, there was a progressive change or improvement in the flow of this energy upward. That is a general conclusion from the first session to the last session."
Hunt names the general finding across her four pilot subjects:
The second hour and the right leg
Among the more specific findings Hunt reported was that the chakras responded differently to work on the right and left legs in the second hour. The second hour, in the ten-session recipe of 1974, devoted substantial time to the legs — the adductor compartment, the medial line, the soft tissue from ankle to ramus. Hunt observed that work on the right leg produced more chakra activity than work on the left, across all four subjects. She offered the finding tentatively, with the speculation that it might bear on the yin-yang asymmetry described in the older energy literatures, but she made no strong claim. The data were what they were.
"is in the second hour when there is a great deal of work on the legs, there was more activity produced in the chakras as a result of working on the right leg than there was as a result of working on the left leg on all four persons. Their aura became greater as a result of releasing the right leg."
Hunt reports the second-hour right-leg asymmetry:
Hunt's broader observation, which she developed across several lectures, was that aura-amplitude was not a single global property of the body but a measurement that varied by region, by session, and by what the practitioner was doing in the moment. Different chakras activated differently depending on whose tissue was being worked. A man whose right leg had been chronically held in flexion would, when that leg was finally released, show a flare at the throat and the heart. A woman with gastric history would flare at the hypogastric. The aura was not just widening; it was reorganizing.
"I think that Rolfing brings a downward shift. There is another level of control that we call the midbrain, and this area also can turn on muscles. We can operate on it. It is one of our very basic areas for some of our primitive movement, and it primarily innervates the great large joints of the body and those which are proximal, such as the shoulders and the hips and the trunk one of the areas that Rolfing works a great deal upon. This has a tendency to produce a very rhythmic quality of movement. And then there, of course, is that cortex that louses us up in so many ways. It can do those fine things with the hand and the beautiful nuances in the face, but it is totally inefficient, inefficient. It louses up, its pattern is not well established."
Hunt connects the aura findings to the neuromuscular changes she also recorded:
The color sequence across the ten sessions
The most striking pattern Hunt and Bruyere reported was that the color of the aura changed in a reliable sequence across the ten sessions. Rosalyn, reading auras from across the room while Hunt's instruments recorded frequencies in parallel, saw red and orange in the early sessions, blue emerging in the fifth and sixth, and cream — a kind of saturated white — appearing in the eighth, ninth, and tenth and remaining stable afterward. Hunt's frequency data tracked the color sequence: higher frequencies for the later colors, lower for the earlier. The cream-colored aura at the end of the series was, in her interpretation, the visible blending of all the chakra colors into a single integrated field.
"My feeling was, and confirmed by Rosalind, that this color change had to do with the blending of the energies from the various chakra or energy areas. That when the energy was flowing up the central vertical area, when red and yellow and green and blue and purple all combined, you had the presence of all colors. And you had white."
Hunt offers her interpretation of the cream-colored aura that appeared in the late sessions:
What is worth noting in Hunt's color sequence is that aura-amplitude — the width measurement — and aura-frequency — the color measurement — moved together but not identically. In the fifth and sixth hours, Hunt reported, three of the four subjects produced a secondary aura that extended five to ten feet from the body, while the primary aura at the skin surface temporarily dropped to almost nothing. Rosalyn once spent several minutes trying to find a subject's aura before bumping her head into a pink one that had drifted to the far side of the room. Hunt could not measure the secondary aura with her instruments; it was outside their range. But she trusted Rosalyn's report because in the cases she could measure, Rosalyn's readings and the instrument readings agreed.
"That's where the energy went out around, to the back recesses back there. The pattern of the body changed to a very clear blue, but it was very, very small. Once I had to ask Roslyn to find the aura. Have you ever chased an aura? She chased one halfway around the room. I couldn't find any recording. It was practically nothing, and I said, Roslyn, where's the aura? She looked and she said, It's gone. I said, Is it person alive? She said, He's alive but can't find the aura. And so she went around to the head looking at different directions. She put her hands over the body. She couldn't find the aura, couldn't find the energy. I couldn't find the energy. And finally she ran into it. And she went to the lower part of the body, she bumped her head into a pink aura out there and she said, It came so slowly. It encompassed the raw for it encompassed me and I could not perceive it. So we found our lost aura. I did not record it."
Hunt describes the lost aura of the fifth and sixth sessions:
Ida's interpretation: the energy quotient rising
Ida returned to the podium after Hunt's data presentation to offer her own interpretation of what aura-amplitude meant. For her, the half-inch-to-five-inch widening was not the curious phenomenon at all — it was the expected consequence of doing what she had always claimed the work does. If the body is balanced around its gravitational vertical, the gravitational field can support it rather than disorganize it. The energy that was previously spent fighting gravity is now available for everything else. Aura-amplitude is the leakage signature of that newly available energy at the skin surface.
"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. These are the physical manifestations of the increasing balance, but there is an outgoing psychological change as well toward balance, toward serenity, toward a more whole person. The whole man, the whole person evidences a more apparent, a more potent psychic development. This means that the rate that the ratio man energy to gravity energy energy has changed has increased. The ratio has therefore increased the force available to reverse the entropic deterioration. That is and greater. Our world is no longer running down. It seems capable now of building up."
Ida names the consequence of the rising energy quotient:
It is worth pausing on the strangeness of what Ida is claiming here. She is not saying that the body merely feels more energetic, or that it works more efficiently in the way a well-oiled machine does. She is saying that something is being measurably added — that the integrated body is in some sense a small local site where the second law of thermodynamics, the law that says energy in closed systems runs down, has been temporarily reversed. Whether or not the half-inch-to-five-inch widening of the aura is what the physicist would call energy, Ida treated it as evidence for this thermodynamic claim. The CFHA tapes preserve her making the argument in the company of two physicists — Hunt and a colleague named Rall — and neither of them contradicted it.
"There are many persons in this room who could speak to the reality of this kind of energy, where and how it occurs, to what extent it can be tamed and harnessed with much greater authority, much greater expertise than I. I only know that the report which Doctor. Hunt is offering seems to say authoritatively that a kind of energy seen by workers as light, as color, felt by workers as something akin to warmth, not heat, but an emotional as well as a physical outgoing warmth, something that turns on as well as turns off, is associated with the increased energy of the human body. When physical myofascial fleshly order is introduced into the random disorder of the average body, the average human body. In other words, as we lessen the entropy of the average body, the disorder that exists in its mass As we lessen that entropy, that disorder begins to disappear, and where we seem to be uncovering the same sort of generalized behavior, the same sort of evolving order in the psychic personality guiding and manifesting its energy as we found manifest in the inanimate universe. To repeat, we find that physical myofascial order reflects in a more vital organized pattern of psychological and, if you like the word, spiritual being."
Ida questions whether the word "energy" applies to what is being measured at all:
The practitioner as transducer
One of the more provocative observations to come out of the laboratory was that the practitioner's own aura participated in the session. Rosalyn, who was reading both the subject and the practitioner simultaneously, reported that the practitioner's hands and arms during work were consistently blue or white. When the subject experienced pain, the practitioner's aura developed a violet color with a pink edge. When the subject went into an altered state, the practitioner went into pure white. Hunt could not instrument the practitioner — there were not enough channels — but she trusted Rosalyn's reading because in the cases she could check it had been correct.
"I only questioned her on those really bright colors because I'm not so good on apricot, magenta, and a few other nuances of color. I don't know those yet. The ROF technician's hands and arms, while they were working, were consistently blue or white. Now sometimes they would come in and they would not be blue and white. We had one raulfer that occasionally came in green or yellow, but upon immediately starting his work, his aura changed to blue and to white. There were only minor changes during the session. This was consistent. When subjects experienced pain, the Rolford's aura changed to violet with a pink edge. And again, it consistently. Roslyn said that's like making nice and that's that's a color a spiritual empathetic color, feel color. And after the first few sessions, subjects were less affected by pain. Now they were either less affected by pain because they flowed with the pain they didn't fight it, or because they accepted that soothing violet with pink."
Hunt describes the practitioner's aura as it tracked the subject's state:
Hunt drew an inference from this that she presented carefully. The practitioner, she said, was functioning as a transducer — a device that converts energy from one form to another. She was not sure whether the work trains people to become transducers, or whether the people who become practitioners are already transducers and self-select into the work, or both. But she was confident that the personal element of the practitioner mattered. The work could not be duplicated by a machine, she said, or by exercise alone. Something about the two-person field was constitutive of what happened.
"It appears to me that there are either two forms of energy human energy that we now know, or there are two aspects of one form of energy: One being primarily electrical, that which is inside the body. 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."
Hunt summarizes the transducer hypothesis:
Connective tissue as the interface
If aura-amplitude is the surface signature of an energy shift, what is the physical structure inside the body that mediates between the energy field and the cellular life? Hunt offered an answer to this in the 1974 Open Universe lecture series, where she was less constrained by the laboratory-paper format. Connective tissue, she proposed, is the interface between the energy fields of the human being and the rest of the cosmos. This is the load-bearing claim that connects everything else in her account: the reason the work changes aura-amplitude is that the work changes connective tissue, and connective tissue is what receives and dissipates the energy fields.
"And I'm going to make some statements which I can't back up. But I think in two or three years I'll back them. And one of them is that it is the connective tissue which is the interface between the energy fields of man and other parts of the cosmos. Now that is a big hunt to swallow. I do not think that the energy fields are brought to us by the five senses. I think these are grossly limiting. The very nature of the five senses, the structural nature of the five senses, limits that part of an energy field which can be brought to us. And yes, we do receive information from the five senses. But there is this vast array of information which comes to us which has come to me which cannot be described in terms of the five senses. There are limitations which exist within the structure of the central nervous system in the transportation of messages. I don't care how exhaustive it is. And I think there are limitations in the processing in the brain. Well, I think it is through the senses, the brain, the central nervous system that our system is closed."
Hunt names connective tissue as the interface between the body's energy and the cosmic field:
Hunt's hypothesis is consistent with what Ida had been teaching for years: that fascia is the organ of structure, that it is continuous from head to toe, that it is what makes the human body a unit rather than an aggregate. What Hunt added was the specific claim that this organ of structure is also the organ of energy reception — the antenna, in effect, through which the body picks up whatever field-information it picks up from its environment. Ida did not endorse this claim in print, but she allowed Hunt to make it from the same podium, and the CFHA tapes preserve no audible disagreement.
"Rolfing upsets the disequilibrium, there isn't any doubt about it, of connective tissue realigns it. In relationship to the environmental field, that is obvious. We've accepted that as an idea. But it also brings the thought to the surface many of these thoughts I am talking about, the thoughts and emotions and our interpretation of those which is the physical manifestation of the body. And it is through this channel that I think Rolfi makes a tremendous contribution. It is not one that is easily evaluated in our laboratories. This is why I think there is a more permanent change to this kind of education than there is to track and field. I am not against track and field now. I think it has a role but I do not think it has the same kind of role in the development of body that we have thought of in the past. Then if Roelfing upstates the static thought forms which allows thought as well as body plasticity to take place, as well as structural realignment, there will also be realignment in alteration in not only the conform the the confirmation of the body but in its repair, in its mitosis, in its continual evolution. We know that our bodies change approximately every seven years but have we ever thought that our body changed on every breath? I'm talking about belief systems now."
Hunt extends the claim from physical structure to psychological organization:
The shamanic session
Two of the most extraordinary recordings from Hunt's laboratory came not from Structural Integration sessions but from an experimental session in which Rosalyn Bruyere worked as a shamanic healer on a patient who had had a stroke. The session was set up by a neurologist friend of Hunt's who had been working with the patient and wanted to see what Hunt's instruments would record. Hunt agreed without knowing what she was about to record. She instrumented the patient at the chakras and acupuncture points; Rosalyn worked with quartz crystals; an aura-reader sat in a corner narrating what she saw.
"Energy was transmitted across space. She did not ever touch this person except once, and when she touched them, there was no energy transmission. There was a time there wasn't any. She chanted. Sometimes it was weird and screamy, and sometimes it was mellow, and she chanted. And she moved around this body, And the aura reader stood off in the corner, never having seen this woman before or known her, and repeated on a remote microphone that none of us could hear the colors and the changes of the aura of the body and where the energy entered. And this is some of the things that I found. When the aura reader saw the energy entering a part of the body, that's exactly where it entered. If she said it entered the right leg, it entered the right leg and it didn't enter the left leg. When the aura reader saw the energy enter the crystal and hang in the crystal, I had no energy going into the body at all. And when she said that the shaman healer released the energy from the crystal and it popped into the body here, that's exactly where it popped into the body."
Hunt describes the shamanic session that validated her aura readings against her instruments:
Hunt told this story at the Open Universe class because it was, for her, the methodological foundation that allowed her to trust Rosalyn's readings during the Structural Integration sessions. If the aura-reader's narration could be independently verified against the instrument data, then the same aura-reader's readings of subjects could be trusted as reliable observation rather than impressionistic commentary. The half-inch-to-five-inch widening Ida cited from the podium was, in Hunt's methodological terms, a doubly attested finding: the instrument data showed an aura widening, and an independent observer who had no access to the instrument data described the same widening from across the room.
Frequencies and the third eye
Hunt's most dramatic finding was not the aura widening but what she recorded off the third eye during altered states. A subject in a meditative posture, whom her instruments could not initially register at all, eventually produced a signal at the third eye in the range of fourteen to sixteen thousand cycles per second — a frequency far above anything she had recorded from any other point on the body. The signal persisted for several minutes and then released as the subject came back to the room. Hunt presented this finding as an outlier that she did not yet know how to integrate with her aura-amplitude data, but she included it because she had recorded it.
"She was a dancer. And when she finally got herself revved up, she sat down like a Buddha and she started to take off. And the only reason I knew she took off was I lost all the recordings on her arm. Now as a good scientist I know what happens when you lose recordings on your arm your equipment's not working. So I said to my technician, The equipment's not working. We've to stop everything. He says, Oh yes, it's working. I said, Oh no, it's not working. There's no recording coming in on that woman's arms, and I ought to have at least a baseline. Well the next thing that happened was I didn't get any recording on the body. Was sitting up in a Buddha pose. I ought to have something off the body. I was sure the equipment was broken. It wasn't. No way. Because the next thing that happened was I got a recording which I believe to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 14,000 to 16,000 cycles per second off the third eye, and she took off and so did I. That was when she went into an altered state. And this stayed for seven minutes with the blasting off the third eye."
Hunt describes the moment her instruments registered a frequency she had not seen before:
What this finding implied, in Hunt's interpretation, was that human energy may exist across a spectrum of frequencies far wider than the range her standard EMG equipment was designed to capture. The aura widening she had been measuring at the skin surface was, on this reading, just the lower end of what was happening in the body during the work. Whether the very high frequencies at the third eye corresponded to what older traditions called the crown chakra, or what some physicists were beginning to call bioplasmic energy, she did not know. But she did not want to leave the finding out of her report. The transcripts preserve her presenting it carefully, with the qualification that she could not yet replicate it on demand.
"This is purple violet on the seventh hour taken off of the third eye I'm sorry, taken off of the throat when the person was picturing, and there was also purple taken off of the third eye. Remember when I said they went into pictures? This is purple, And the pattern of energy which we have over sixty hours of monitoring seeing consistently described by the aura reader and seen by me on scope. Flip that one back once, please. Now come now come to the next one. I got purple. This is cream violet. More pastels in the later time. If you'll notice the frequencies, this is almost a solid mass of frequencies in that particular exposure. We stretched it out. We next slide. We stretched it out and look at the frequency. And that is, the pattern does not have the great Here's your sine wave, and you can see it lying within it. It's very, very small. The frequencies are very great. They tend to have almost the same amplitude and not have a great differential like the blue of, again, the heart chakra."
Hunt walks the audience through the frequency signatures of the colors she has been recording:
The recipe and the energy progression
One of the more practically useful findings Hunt presented was that the aura changes she was recording corresponded specifically to which hour of the ten-session recipe was being performed. The first hour produced anxiety in three of the four subjects, with corresponding flares at the heart and throat. The second hour, with its leg work, produced the right-left asymmetry already described. The fifth and sixth hours produced the secondary aura five to ten feet from the body. The seventh and eighth produced blue. The eighth, ninth, and tenth produced cream. The recipe was, in Hunt's account, not arbitrary — its sequence had energetic consequences that her instruments could track.
"One of the most exciting findings was that you know that Rolfing follows a particular pattern, although it does change certain parts of it change based upon the needs of the people. But on the first hour you're going to get this: on a certain hour your mouth is going to be rolfed. On another hour it's going to be another part of the body. And the data indicated that there was a positive effect on normalizing the frequency of energy, but it was a selective one a selective effect based upon the particular individual difference of that person. And by that I mean that if a person came in and had distributed in his behavior pattern a lot of low frequency activity, he had a tendency to drop that low activity and not have quite as much of it in his next after Rolfing. Or if he came in with a with very little low frequency activity off of the spinal cord, he gained significantly in the use of low frequencies. If he came in with increased high frequencies, after Rolfing he dropped in the high frequencies. If he came in with very little high frequencies, he increased in the frequency. If he came in with a very low amplitude, meaning a small quantity of muscular contraction, he tended to vitalize and get more contraction. If he came in with a great deal of contraction, he tended to diminish this. What happened was my interpretation anyway is that the spectrum of possibilities for moving efficiently was tremendously increased after the rolfing. There was a lot of information about power density spectra that I'm not going to bore you with because it's highly detailed."
Hunt describes the recipe-specific effects she found in the neuromuscular data:
This finding mattered to Ida because it spoke to a critique she had been hearing for years — that the ten-session recipe was a rigid formula rather than a responsive method. Hunt's data suggested that the recipe, applied uniformly to four different subjects, produced individually calibrated outcomes. The same sequence of sessions moved each subject toward an integrated state without homogenizing them. The aura widening to four or five inches was a common endpoint; the trajectory each subject took to get there reflected what they had walked in with.
Fascial planes and the midline of the work
Two years later, in the 1976 advanced class in New Jersey, Ida and her senior practitioners returned to the question of how the energy claim connects to the structural method. The advanced class debriefs preserve a different register from the Healing Arts podium — less the framing of findings for a mixed audience, more the working-out among colleagues of what the laboratory results were telling them about where to put their hands. Ida pressed her students to talk in terms of fascial planes and midline, and to connect what they had seen of aura widening to what they were doing to the tissue itself.
"Yeah, it couldn't be drawn up or down. Yeah. And if that begins to let go and if that's a more powerful experience than some of the other work that's been done. Yeah. Okay, still be nice if you could, I mean you got off into this emotional stuff and everything up in here, could you talk for a minute about the center line along the center of the legs here? And that midline goes all the way through but I haven't heard enough of what Ida was talking about in the lineup, tended to start from the ramus and go up. Uh-huh. Well, it would be make a caricature, it would be as if people who were bow legged became straight legged. Okay. The shortness in the medial aspect of the legs. Now, we've kind of talked about this in terms of the static position, what did you see in terms of change of movement? The knee became more of a forward Beautiful. Emaporing and beautiful. Gold star. Well, this is the Let's put it at the bottom of the lineup. Well that kind of blew the first fifteen minutes, anybody else got anything to say again?"
In the 1976 advanced class, Ida presses a student to articulate the fascial path from adductors to thorax:
The 1976 class spent a great deal of time on the question of what fascial planes were, anatomically, and how their reorganization produced the field effects Hunt had measured. The senior practitioners — Lewis Schultz and Ron Thompson among them — had been working in dissection laboratories and had developed a more precise vocabulary for the fascial sheets than had existed two years before. Ida wanted that anatomical precision integrated with the energy framework. She also wanted her students to feel the cost of the older vocabulary, where words like core had become bywords that practitioners used without quite being able to say what they meant.
"And this is a weakness of your entire personal understanding, not only of Rolfie, I don't imagine, imagine, but certainly in life because you don't limit your understanding. Your limitation of wrongfulness. So what I'm saying apropos to that I guess is that suddenly my periphery seems to expand. Alright, but There was another little thing I recall that in one of the classes that Emmett was teaching I think where it said if somebody's hungry do you give them a fish or do you teach them how to fish? Well, anyway, you've all taken a look at this you're and free to challenge what's going on on these two levels. We discuss it, we're free to discuss it with Jason, how you feel about it too, etcetera etcetera. At any rate, I was very much interested in what you said. It's the first time you've ever put it together. I have a question following from that to the people who have put the energy into understanding fascial planes. I really want to know from their experience how it's changed the world. Like has it basically given you the that you just understand what you're doing?"
Late in the 1976 advanced class, Ida asks what difference the study of fascial planes has made in practice:
What the contour shows
Ida's own response to Hunt's data — across the four CFHA tapes — was a return to her older claim that contour is the visible signature of structure, and structure is the visible signature of energy. The aura measurement was important to her because it provided an instrumented confirmation of what she had been able to see with her eyes for decades. To the experienced practitioner, she said, the personality of the body was already legible from contour. Hunt's instruments and Rosalyn's reading were saying the same thing in two new languages.
"Her findings seem to be saying loud and clear that as a man approximates the vertical, that is ears over shoulders, shoulders over hips, hips over knees, knees over ankles, certain very significant changes occur in the kind of neuromuscular behavior, can and these changes can be registered and they can be recorded by electromyographic and electroencephalographic measurements. Ralfas in general are not sufficiently scientifically sophisticated to demand measurements. They're willing to settle with contour, with form, without with recognizing the outward form of contour. In other words, they know that the tension and relaxation at all levels of the body reflect into the superficial level, and that they can look at that superficial level, and they can find out what is going wrong at a deeper level. To the seeing Malthus eye, this is the clue to the personality, both the physical personality and the psychological personality. But interestingly enough, both the contour and the personality, contrary to much popular opinion, can be changed. This is the Gospel according to Structural Integration."
Ida frames Hunt's measurements as confirmation of what the seeing eye already knew:
There is a particular intellectual modesty in this framing that is worth marking. Ida is not claiming that the aura widening proves anything new; she is claiming that it makes legible to outsiders what insiders had always been able to see. The work changes the body. The body that has been changed registers differently — in contour, in movement, in instrumented frequency, in clairvoyant reading, in the practitioner's own field. These are not five separate phenomena. They are five readings of the same underlying shift.
Coda: the open question
Hunt and Ida both insisted, throughout the CFHA tapes, that the aura-amplitude finding was preliminary. Hunt's instruments were prototypes. Her sample size was four. Her validation came largely from the convergence of two independent observers — her oscilloscope and Rosalyn's clairvoyance — which would not be accepted as independent by every reader. The follow-up study Hunt described to the Open Universe class, with forty-eight matched subjects, was still being designed when the lectures were given. Whether the larger study would replicate the pilot findings was, in 1974, an open question.
"I think it's interesting to see that whether this energy that I have just shown you, whether it's electrodynamic, electromagnetic, or whatever you call it, appears to flow in both directions. It appears to flow in two directions: it can flow upward or it can flow downward. And as the body became freer and more plastic, the energy of this energy flowed upward. It flowed upward and it flowed out. The white increased in the aura. It was opposite from the pull of gravity it was almost like a release from the constraints of gravity in an energy field. Some of these findings, I think, show some light on entropy, the reversal of entropy or the slowing down. And I say 'throw some light' because I insist that these are, at this stage, tentative. The slide you saw the white energy decreased in the crown with the pain. The discussion of the randomness of chakras in the beginning, the block in the central flow of energy."
Hunt closes the conference by naming what her data tentatively suggest:
What survives from the four Healing Arts tapes — and from the Open Universe lectures that surrounded them — is not a closed finding but an instrumented hypothesis. The body, after the ten-session series, registers differently at the skin surface than it did before. A trained observer can see it as widened aura; an oscilloscope can record it as increased amplitude across the chakra electrode array. The half-inch becomes five inches. Whether this is the energy that physics knows or some other energy is the question Ida posed and did not answer. She left it open. The aura-amplitude finding stands, in the archive, as the place where her structural claim came closest to laboratory confirmation — and as the place where she most explicitly acknowledged that what she had been measuring all along did not yet have a name.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf and colleagues on the second hour of the recipe and the central vertical flow (B2T5SA, B2T3SA, T1SB) — additional context on the leg work that Hunt's instruments found especially energetically consequential. B2T5SA ▸B2T3SA ▸T1SB ▸
See also: See also: Valerie Hunt on energy transfer and the practitioner's field in the Open Universe class (UNI_042, UNI_043, UNI_044, UNI_073) — extended treatment of the transducer hypothesis that this article only sketches. UNI_042 ▸UNI_043 ▸UNI_044 ▸UNI_073 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf on fascia as the organ of structure (RolfA3Side2, 74_8-05B) — the structural doctrine that underwrites Hunt's hypothesis that connective tissue is the energy interface. RolfA3Side2 ▸74_8-05B ▸