The Hunt laboratory and how the experiment was designed
Valerie Hunt was a physiologist at UCLA who, by the early 1970s, had spent a decade building instrumentation sensitive enough to record electrical activity off the surface of the human body at frequencies far above the range typically studied by electroencephalography or electromyography. Brain waves run zero to thirty cycles per second; muscle activity up to about two-forty; the EKG sits in roughly that same band. Hunt wanted equipment that could go to twenty thousand cycles per second because, as she put it, some guru must have told her the interesting energy lived up there. By 1974 she had assembled a study around forty-eight matched subjects and a smaller intensive sub-study of four people who would receive the ten-session series inside her lab while every available channel ran. The Healing Arts advanced class at Esalen that summer was her first major public report of the findings, and Ida sat in the front of the room as Hunt described what she had built.
"And did all of this have something to do with health and well-being and muscular efficiency and vitality and all of those things that we want that Roffing appears to bring in? And so the design of my study, in line with the twentieth century of looking at patterns and energy, was this: 48 subjects were matched: 24 men, 24 women. They were matched according to age, height, weight, body structure, and they were tested by ordinary daily living activities again. This time we used also EEG brain waves. We did not use it primarily to find out if they were in alpha or a theta or beta. We used it to find out if there were changes that occurred in the use of the two hemispheres following rolfing. We administered the anxiety We did Kerlin We did measurements of DC energy off the surface of the body according to the work of Burr. We did EMG of muscles and we did auric energy fields with an auric reader. This has taken most of a year."
Hunt describes the matched-pair design of the larger study to the Healing Arts class.
The electrode placement was unusual. Where a standard physiology lab would have wired the subjects' major muscle groups, Hunt placed her sensors on the chakra points named in Sanskrit and Tibetan literature — the hypogastric center three inches above the pubic bone, the triple warmer one inch below the navel on the linea alba, the heart location below the xiphoid process, the kundalini across the base of the spine, the throat, the caduceus (which she famously located by guided meditation), and the third eye. The placement was the entire point: she was deliberately staying off muscle in order to record whatever non-muscular energy field might be present at those traditional locations. The choice was both a methodological constraint and a doctrinal claim — that the body had measurable electrical activity organized around points that Western anatomy did not recognize.
"And I was searching for a hidden energy, a hidden energy that I didn't know existed except I'd heard about it, and I wanted a minimal of muscle contraction because these sensors will also pick up muscle contraction. And so I chose to electrode these places, which I'll just run briefly, what I call the hypogastric chakra. The hypogastric chakra three inches up from the pubic bone on the linea alba. I chose the linea alba I wanted to stay off of muscle as much as I could. The triple warmer: an acupuncture spot one inch below the navel. The heart chakra or the heart location I did not stay directly over the heart because of too much muscular area, so I moved into the center of the body an inch below the ziphoid process The Kundalini, where I went at the base of the spine, across the spine itself, the throat chakra, the caduceus. The story of the caduceus is an interesting one. I won't go into great detail, but I didn't know how to find a recording of the caduceus. I tried every place under the sun. And then I took a guided meditation trip and decided Hippocrates ought to tell me, and he told me very well. All information is available if you know how to seek it. And he told me to put it opposite the scapula at the spine of the scapula, one inch from the side of the spine, and it works magnificently. It went to the third eye, which can be found rather easily as a low resistance area or as an area where there's a great deal of biological energy coming out."
Hunt narrates the chakra-by-chakra electrode placement, including the famous Hippocrates meditation that located the caduceus point.
Rosalyn Bruyere and the auric reading
The other half of the apparatus was a person. Rosalyn Bruyere was a Los Angeles psychic who could see auras — colored fields of energy surrounding the body, ranging from the body surface out to several inches or, in unusual states, several feet. Hunt brought her into the laboratory and kept her there. For sixty hours of recording across four subjects' ten-session series, Bruyere stood in the corner of the room, often with her eyes closed, dictating into a microphone what she saw — colors, intensities, locations, plumings, blockages — while Hunt's instruments independently recorded electromagnetic frequencies off the same chakra points. The two streams of data were correlated only after the fact. Hunt was scrupulous about this: Bruyere did not know what the instruments were reading, and Hunt could not see what Bruyere saw.
"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."
Hunt summarizes what the laboratory recorded across the sixty hours of monitoring.
Hunt's verification of Bruyere's reading became a recurring theme in her public talks. She trusted Bruyere not on faith but because the readings consistently anticipated or matched what the instruments were about to show. When Bruyere said a chakra had shifted from purple to green, Hunt would check the frequency record and find a corresponding pattern shift; when Bruyere said the energy had moved from the leg up into the heart chakra, Hunt's electrodes would register an amplitude spike at the heart location seconds later. Hunt was emphatic that she questioned Bruyere only on the bright primary colors — red, blue, yellow, green, purple, white — because the more subtle nuances of magenta or apricot were beyond Hunt's own confidence in matching to frequencies.
"And the patterns emerged that were really profound for me, profound insights. You see, am now an aura reader, and that is I can read your aura providing I have $75,000 worth of equipment, and it takes me approximately thirty minutes to put the equipment on you, I can read your aura."
Hunt names herself, with characteristic humor, as the world's most heavily-instrumented aura reader.
Hunt then extended the same joke into a broader claim about the antiquity of what she was measuring. The chakra patterns, she argued, were not new findings of twentieth-century instrumentation but rediscoveries of patterns long known to the Sanskrit literature, to indigenous traditions, and to the psychics of every culture. What was new was the validation in frequency, waveform, and intensity — the translation of ancient observation into modern measurement. She acknowledged this with characteristic dryness, even suggesting she might sell the chakra-color patterns to interior decorators.
"You see, am now an aura reader, and that is I can read your aura providing I have $75,000 worth of equipment, and it takes me approximately thirty minutes to put the equipment on you, I can read your aura. Waste of energy, isn't it? Tremendous waste of energy. Now this is not new to the old Sanskrit literature, and it isn't new to metaphysics, and it isn't new to the psychics. The psychics say, We've known that all along."
Hunt places the chakra findings in the lineage of ancient metaphysical observation.
The opening of closed chakras across the ten-session series
The single most important finding from Hunt's perspective — and the one Ida cited most often in subsequent advanced classes — was that the four subjects' chakra activity changed progressively across the ten-session series in a specific direction. They came in with what Hunt called closed chakras: pockets of energy at the foot or the knee, then a void through the middle of the body, then a small flicker at the throat. By the tenth hour, the energy ran continuously up the central vertical line of the body, the chakras activated in sequence from base to crown, and the overall auric field expanded from a half-inch around the body to four or five inches.
"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. The specific ones then are: energy in the chakras and areas of the body differed with emotional experiences and with sessions."
Hunt states the general conclusion drawn from the four-subject sub-study.
The opening of the closed chakras did not happen all at once. In the early sessions, Hunt's instruments registered pockets of intense activity at peripheral locations — a foot, a knee, sometimes the throat — separated by gaps where nothing measurable was happening at all. This was the literal definition of disorganization in the energy field, and it matched what Bruyere was seeing visually. The middle of the body, for the untreated subjects, was a void.
"Very early in the sessions, we found that the four people had what you might call closed chakra or energy fields. This meant that sometimes we would pick up a tremendous energy field at the foot or the knee, skip the middle, jump up to the throat. It was almost like there was a void in there."
Hunt describes the pre-session state of the four subjects' chakra fields.
Hunt's instruments could not measure the central vertical flow itself — the column of energy running up the midline that Bruyere reported visually. What Hunt could measure were the individual chakra points, and as those chakras activated in sequence across the sessions, the cumulative effect was registered as expansion of the surrounding aura. The doctrine that emerged: the work opens the body to a vertical flow of energy that runs counter to the entropic pull of gravity, and the chakras are the way the flow becomes locally measurable. Ida used this framing in her own lectures, where she stitched it together with her thermodynamic vocabulary — order, entropy, negative entropy, the body as a system capable of building up rather than running down.
"Rosalind described that once the energy started to flow, it flowed up the central vertical area of the body. We were not able to measure that, that central flow, but we did measure it as chakras became activated. This was first recorded in the chakras and later was described as an increase in the aura, as Doctor. Rolfe reported, from one half inch to four and five inches at the end of the session."
Hunt describes what Bruyere saw — the upward central flow — and how the instruments measured it indirectly through chakra activation.
The right-leg finding
Among the more provocative observations was an asymmetry. The second hour of the ten-session series involves substantial work on the legs, and in all four subjects Hunt found that working the right leg produced more activity in the chakras than working the left. The finding was consistent across all four people, regardless of which leg the subject favored in ordinary life. Hunt and her staff puzzled over the result in their discussions — they speculated about yin and yang, about the ida and pingala channels of yogic physiology, about the male and female aspects of the body, about whether the asymmetry was an artifact of a patriarchal culture imprinting itself on the body's energy economy. Hunt was careful not to claim a conclusion. She offered the finding to the psychotherapists in the audience as a question worth their attention.
"Then a very interesting one that I throw out to those of your psychotherapists, and that 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 presents the right-leg asymmetry as an open question for the practitioners in the room.
Different subjects responded to the right-leg work in different ways, and Hunt traced each pattern to the subject's particular history. A man whose right leg was unusually immobile registered immediate activity at the throat and heart chakras whenever his leg was worked — a kind of distress signal traveling upward through the system. A woman with a long history of gastric trouble registered her right-leg work as activity in the hypogastric chakra, the low-belly center associated in the literature with digestion. A third subject simply went to the crown chakra and spaced out — the chakra activated, the subject's consciousness withdrew upward, and the lower body went quiet.
"Example, there were feelings that were released that were connected to this collagen tissue to the state of affairs it was in, but that this did not always trigger this other energy system in the same way. An example of that was we had a man that when his right leg was worked on, whenever his right leg was touched or other parts of the body that seemed to be particularly immobile, he had an immediate effect upon the throat chakra and the heart chakra. And it was just like saying, Well, here comes so and so now. You know he's in pain. You know something's really happening because he's really flared up in these two chakras. There was another one who every time the right leg was worked on or there was a particular difficult area, it went into the hypogastric of the abdominal area. This is a woman that had had a lot of gastric and intestinal difficulties. There was another one that solved it rather nicely, and that is he went to the crown chakra and spaced out and didn't play with it anymore. Immediately the crown chakra seemed to skip most things in between, jumped up there, took off, and didn't know where it was being worked on. We did notice that the subjects got spacey. You see, we had a lot of microphones going on here. Roz had a microphone and earphones. I had a microphone and earphones. We talked back and forth, and the subject had a microphone no earphones."
Hunt describes the three idiosyncratic right-leg response patterns observed across her four laboratory subjects.
The progression of colors across the ten sessions
Bruyere's color readings followed a sequence that Hunt later mapped to the recipe. The first three sessions produced mixed or displaced colors — a yucky brown where the literature predicted red, purple in the throat instead of in the third eye, yellow at the knee where no color belonged at all. By the fifth and sixth sessions a clear blue dominated, which Hunt associated with creative people doing creative work. By the seventh and eighth, the primary colors thinned into pastels at higher frequencies. By the eighth, ninth, and tenth, every subject was producing a cream-colored aura that persisted into the post-series follow-up months later — a color Bruyere had rarely seen consistently before.
"Now on the eighth time and it's very strange that it happened consistently to all people on the eighth, ninth, and tenth hour, they all had cream colored auras. They stayed in cream colored auras. I have since recorded them post Rolfing, and according to my instruments, they still have cream colored auras. Rolfram described that she had never seen this consistently before. Throughout the entire hour, they came in with it. We recorded them afterwards. They went out with it. As far as I was concerned, these were ho days. I was saying, Ho Rosman, why don't you bring in some color? And she said, If you want color, go to the arts department. No color out here, cream color. But interestingly enough, even despite the color being the same, the intensity of that color differed with individuals. For example, we had a physiological psychologist who works at the university. He's a meditator and his clean color was very, very strong in the throat and the third eye. We had a dancer feet and legs. We had an artist it was in the crown. That's where the great white queens were. We had an axis, heart, hypogastric, and caduceus."
Hunt describes the cream-colored aura that emerged in all four subjects by the eighth session and persisted afterward.
Hunt's interpretation of the cream color drew on her physics. White light is the sum of all visible frequencies; if each chakra is producing its own characteristic frequency — red at the base, yellow at the spleen, green at the heart, blue at the throat, purple at the third eye — and all of them activate together and run continuously up the central column, the result at the body surface would be the blending of all colors into white. The cream tint, slightly warmer than pure white, suggested the red of the base chakra was retaining its strength in the blend rather than being washed out. Hunt connected this back to vitality.
"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. The cream color must carry with it a little more of that bright of that red, than the ordinary white aura. And I think that is a part of the whole factor of vitality. Surely there must be some corollary to these frequencies frequencies and and higher higher levels levels of of consciousness."
Hunt explains the cream color as the spectral sum of all chakra frequencies activating together.
Bruyere also reported a phenomenon at the fifth and sixth sessions that Hunt's equipment could not capture: a secondary aura, expanded out from the body five to ten feet, while the primary aura close to the skin dimmed almost to nothing. On one occasion Bruyere chased the aura halfway around the room before locating it as a pink field encircling the practitioner as well as the subject. The image of an energy field large enough to include both bodies was, for Hunt, the most direct laboratory evidence that the practitioner-subject interaction was not merely mechanical.
"And when they produced this secondary aura, the amplitude of the aura that I was measuring I could not measure that amplitude out there. Someday I hope I can. But I was getting the one which was close to the body, and this dropped. It was out there. 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. During these stages of the aura which or the energy which would as he described it, a secondary one out away from the body, the individual described great peace and quietness."
Hunt and Bruyere chase a vanished aura around the laboratory and discover it has expanded outward to encompass the practitioner.
The practitioner as transducer
Hunt did not instrument the practitioners themselves — her equipment could not span the distance between two bodies — but Bruyere read their auras throughout. The practitioners came in with auras that varied widely, sometimes green or yellow on arrival, but the moment they put hands on a body and began working, their hands and arms turned consistently blue and white. The shift was almost instantaneous and held through the session. When the subject experienced pain, the practitioner's aura would briefly shift to violet edged with pink — a color Bruyere associated with spiritual empathy, with the gesture of making nice. When the subject moved into altered states of consciousness, the practitioner's field would expand into pure white.
"Now, although the Rolfers were not instrumented, Rosalyn did read their aura. I do trust her reading because I learned that when this kind of a pattern came in, that ought to be the color. And she was either just ahead of me or just behind me."
Hunt describes the consistent blue-and-white field around practitioners' hands and arms during work.
The pain-response color shift was, for Hunt, one of the most reproducible findings of the entire study. The same color signature — violet edged with pink — appeared every time a subject moved into discomfort under the practitioner's hands, regardless of which practitioner, which subject, or which session. Bruyere's gloss on the color was that it was the empathetic register, the visible signature of one person reaching across the field to soothe another. The subjects, as the series progressed, became less reactive to pain — either because they were learning to flow with sensation rather than resist it, or because they were absorbing the soothing violet from the practitioner's expanded field.
"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."
Hunt names the violet-with-pink-edge response to subject pain.
From these observations Hunt drew her most consequential interpretive move: the practitioner was functioning as an energy transducer, taking in energy from one source and transmitting it across to the subject through the field interaction. The implication, which Hunt stated plainly and Ida endorsed in her own framing, was that the work was fundamentally interpersonal — that it could not be replicated by exercise alone, nor by machinery, because the practitioner's field was an active participant in the change. The mechanical work on the connective tissue mattered, but it was not the whole story.
"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 names the practitioner as transducer and rules out machinery and exercise as substitutes.
Ida's framing of the energy findings
Ida used Hunt's data to anchor a doctrine she had been moving toward for years — that the work was not just about realigning soft tissue but about increasing the body's energy in a way that ran against the entropy of the surrounding world. Her vocabulary was thermodynamic: the second law of thermodynamics describes how isolated systems run down toward disorder; the unworked body, she argued, was running down in exactly that way, accumulating disorganization and losing energy. The work added energy back. Hunt's measurements gave her the numbers — the expansion of the aura from half an inch to four or five inches across a ten-session series — to make the claim concrete.
"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. Rosalind Bried, directly through direct reading of the aura. And amazingly, this age old measurement by Doctor. Brierez confirmed Doctor. Hunt's brand new instrument. Doctor. Hunt could have saved the money, but that's all what all metaphysicians have been telling us for centuries anyway. In terms of measuring light, Doctor. Breyer and Doctor. Hunt have observed its intensity in Kurilian auras Kurilian auras its vibratory rate that is, its color as seemingly created in the body. Thus the aura that Kurilian photographs, the brain waves, as well as increased energy over the various centers that the ancients called chakras were all observed."
Ida introduces Hunt's findings to the Healing Arts class as direct measurement of the energy increase she had long described in other terms.
Ida's connection between the energy findings and her older work on fascia is worth pausing on. The fascia, for Ida, was the organ of structure — the tissue whose three-dimensional arrangement determined the body's contour and behavior. The energy field, in Ida's late framing, was not separate from the fascial organization; it was its consequence. When the myofascial body became balanced around a vertical line, the energy field generated by that body became symmetrical with the gravitational field passing through it, and the two fields could then reinforce rather than disorganize each other. Hunt's chakra measurements were therefore, in Ida's reading, a downstream effect of the structural work.
"Whether this really relates to or equates with the energy referred to earlier, the energy whose principal distinguishing characteristics is its failure to observe the law of inverse squares, which characterizes Newtonian energy transmission. This we do not know at this point, nor do we see any way to determine it in the very near future. But that which we do know is exciting enough. 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."
Ida sets out her doctrine of the body's energy field and its relation to gravity.
Entropy and negative entropy
Hunt's vocabulary for the central finding shifted, by the end of her presentations, into the language of physical chemistry. The unworked body, with its closed chakras and pocketed energy fields, was a body running down — an instance of the universal tendency toward disorder that physics calls entropy. The progressive opening of the chakras across the ten sessions, the upward flow of energy along the central line, the cream-colored unified field at the end of the series — these described a system not running down but building up, reversing the entropic gradient locally. Hunt called this negative entropy and proposed that the work was, fundamentally, a means of producing it.
"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. I wonder if entropy is a true block in the central flow of energy, of the absorption of energy, in the transmission of energy, and when that flow is reversed and it is going upward, I wonder if this has a rather important effect upon negative entropy. Doctor. Roth discussed integration referring to the psyche as well as the soma and I refer you to the imagery that occurred particularly in the seventh and eighth sessions and as areas of the body or the body's collagen tissue were more plastic and opened up, the psyche seemed to be freed in these times. The aura was, if you remember, in the blues and going into the white. There was an expanded aura up to five feet during these times. Just to conclude and say that Doctor. Wolff reminded us that energy could be primarily could be understood by its frequencies. I might add its frequencies, its pattern and its organization. That human energies are manifest in frequencies."
Hunt names the energy findings as evidence for the reversal of entropy in the local biological system.
The laser analogy, which Hunt invoked repeatedly, was the key metaphor. A laser does not produce more energy than an ordinary light bulb; it produces energy in coherent phase, all the photons traveling in the same direction at the same frequency. The result is that a small quantity of coherent energy can do disproportionate work — cut metal, transmit signals across vast distances, perform surgery. Hunt proposed that the body, after the work, was operating closer to a laser-like coherence: the same energy quantity, but organized into a single direction up the central vertical line, capable of disproportionate effect.
"Particularly in light of Doctor. Roth's paper to bring some of those things together, she talked about entropy, about a flow of energy toward disorganization. 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."
Hunt summarizes the directional change in energy flow and connects it to the reversal of entropy.
The third eye and the altered state
The strangest single recording Hunt produced came not from the four-subject study but from a separate experiment with a shamanic healer working on a woman with channeled energy. The healer never touched her subject; she chanted and moved quartz crystals around the body while Bruyere read the aura and Hunt's instruments ran. At a certain point Hunt lost all signal from her primary electrodes and assumed the equipment had failed. Her technician insisted it was working. What Hunt was registering, when she found the signal again, was a recording in the neighborhood of fourteen to sixteen thousand cycles per second coming off the third eye — orders of magnitude above any ordinary physiological frequency. The reading held for seven minutes.
"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. And when she came back, she hitched it back on in the same technique that she hitched it back off. She came back, lowered the third eye, came back in the body, came back in the hands, and then we debriefed her and me and the whole staff. So these were some of the things that occurred to me and happened to me in order to come up with the experiment that I'm going to spend some time on right now in Rolfing. And I thought to myself, I wonder if these strange recordings which I'm getting can be related to another energy field, an energy field that I don't understand because I work in the electrical energy field."
Hunt narrates the altered-state recording from the shaman session, with frequencies far above the ordinary physiological range.
This recording was the seed of the entire study. Hunt described herself afterward as wondering whether the high-frequency signals she had captured were related to other energy fields she did not understand — the bioplasmic energies of Soviet parapsychology, the acupuncture meridian system, the chakra and prana physiology of the Sanskrit tradition. If those energies were real and measurable, and if the work had any effect on them, then she would expect to see signature changes at the chakra points across the ten sessions. The four-subject study was her attempt to answer that question methodically.
"At the end of the time, the aura reader said there is a clear white light surrounding the two. The aura is 10 inches out, and that's when the technician stopped. And she didn't know what the aura reader was saying. From Eastern philosophies, this white light is an energy field. It is the cosmic. It is the spiritual. It is the oneness of mind, body, and spirit. And what I got on the electromyography was a elevated baseline on every single channel like Rolfing. Totally elevated. It was a profound experience for all of us. The energy in that room was shaking us, and the room was charged, and so were we. I did not sleep that night. I don't think a lot of other people slept that night. And we didn't know exactly what had happened to us or where we had dawned. But we were in an energy field and we had experienced something. I will add two other experiences and then I will summarize and stop. These are both very personal experiences for which I have no laboratory statements. These are laboratory ones I've been giving you. The same person who did the channeling had said to me, you have a bad back."
Hunt describes a parallel shaman-and-crystal session in which energy entered the body in patterns Bruyere named in real time.
Kirlian photography and the post-session corona
Alongside the live chakra recordings, Hunt also took Kirlian photographs of the subjects' fingertips before and after each session — Kirlian being the high-voltage photographic technique that captures a glowing corona around any biological tissue placed against the film. Hunt was skeptical of Kirlian photography in principle because she could not connect it to any other physiological measurement she trusted, but she ran the protocol anyway. What she found was that after each session the corona around the fingertips was larger, brighter, and more organized than before. The pattern held particularly strongly when comparing pre-first-session images to post-tenth-session images: the white field around the finger grew dramatically across the series.
"seems to be a more complete Auric field. Although to say, I don't know what those dark blues, we will know more about it over time. There is a beginning of a white corona occurring there, the beginning of a white corona around the finger. The next slide is again during the experiment. This was pre number 10, session number 10, before the person was roft on the tenth session, and the next slide is post number 10. And you will see the increase in the white bubbles or the white energy field that is occurring here. The last ones are of pre- and post-rolfing. That is a prerolfing. Can you see it? Quite consistently, that before the person had any rolfing at all, this was when they were being tested in the laboratory. They knew they were going to be rolfed. They had made it. They were selected by the flip of a coin by Katie who didn't even know the people, and this was the post rafting. Note this particularly, and that is that this white aura has increased tremendously. Now, that increased more than it did more than you will find in the controls."
Hunt walks the audience through her Kirlian photograph slides showing the post-session expansion of the fingertip corona.
Hunt was also careful to note that the experimental subjects scored significantly higher than controls on state anxiety as they entered the laboratory to be wired up. Her laboratory man, with characteristic dryness, suggested that the people who had agreed to receive the work were the ones who needed it most. By the end of the series, the experimental subjects' anxiety had dropped to baseline. The combination of Kirlian expansion, anxiety reduction, and chakra-field reorganization was, for Hunt, a convergent multi-measure pattern.
"We did find that after Rolfing and I will show you some pictures the corona of the fingertips was more expanded, more brilliant, and with improved organization after Rolfing. However, we also found something else up, and that is we gave them the trait state test. You can say, Is this a valid measure of anxiety? I suppose it's as good a measure as we have, but perhaps it doesn't really measure anxiety. We found that there was no significant difference between the trait anxiety of the experimental and the controls. And that was lovely. It was as though we matched them. But when we tested their state, when they came into the laboratory to be instrumented, We tested them before they were instrumented and after they were instrumented to see if the instrumentation and just working on them changed their anxiety, if they were anxious about being electrodes. We found that the experimental subjects were significantly more anxious than were the controls at the 1% level of significance. Now I don't know whether after they finished rolfing they were not there was no significant difference. So the rolfing subjects changed in anxiety. The experimental did not. Now I don't know at this stage whether the experimental were more anxious because they were going into the unknown, whether they were going into pain, possible flashbacks, possible changes in consciousness, whereas the controls knew they weren't going to go through this experience. Or whether, as my laboratory man says, The rofting people that got experimentally roughed sure needed rofting more than the control. But it's one of the two. Now I'm going to show you some film and we can turn around. I guess I better untwip this."
Hunt presents the Kirlian and anxiety-test results together, with her characteristic scientific caution about each measure.
Connective tissue as the interface with the energy field
Hunt's strongest theoretical claim — and the one Ida was most willing to endorse in print and in lectures afterward — was about the function of the connective tissue itself. The fascia was not merely the wrapping that organized the body's contour. It was, in Hunt's proposal, the actual physical interface between the body's energy field and whatever larger field surrounded it. Acupuncture points existed all over the body; chakras existed in their traditional locations; meridian lines tracked the fascial planes; the entire web of connective tissue was, on this view, the body's antenna system for receiving and transmitting non-mechanical energy.
"I am not a rolford nor did I invent rolfing. And therefore, I can talk about it as I believe it is. 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. And what I believe is that the dynamic energy fields are received through possibly the acupuncture spots, which exist all over the body. There are many many many thousands hundreds."
Hunt proposes the connective tissue as the interface between the body's energy field and the surrounding cosmos.
If the connective tissue was the antenna, then disorganization of the fascia was effectively a degraded reception. The work of unsticking, repositioning, and freeing the fascial layers was, in Hunt's reading, the work of restoring antenna function. The chakra activations Hunt measured across the ten-session series were the signature of that restoration. The cream-colored aura at the end of the series was the signature of an antenna fully tuned, receiving and transmitting across the full frequency range, with all the chakra-level subsystems integrated into one coherent field.
"and how it works. What constitutes the energy body? And how are these structures affected by Rolfing or by other techniques? How are they affected? This is the question. It's quite true that we as rolfers are basically concerned with the application and the improvement of the technique called rolfing, but unless we have a basic understanding of what it is we are trying to affect and how these energy units can express themselves in what we call, we are pleased to call the real world, we are in a dark confusion. You see, ordinarily we don't think down to that depth. We don't think to the level where we recognize that the behavior of a man is the outward and visible sign of a relationship of energy centers. And that if we happen to be able to change those energy centers we will change the behavior of that man. We haven't thought in those terms. We thought in more superficial terms that we have called by words which are more familiar to us. We talk about a man's behavior, we talk about a man's psychology, we talk about he's angry or he's, irascible or he is good natured or he's easygoing and so forth. And we don't think of the fact that what we are really talking about is something inside that man's skin or perhaps it's just outside it, I don't know. But it isn't very far outside of it if it is outside."
Ida charges her practitioners to take the energy-body question seriously as a domain for their own ongoing study.
What Ida did and did not claim
Ida was always careful in her public lectures to distinguish between what Hunt's data demonstrated and what it merely suggested. She would not claim that the energy whose principal characteristic was its failure to observe the law of inverse squares — the Newtonian benchmark that ordinary physical energy obeys — was the same energy Hunt was measuring at the chakras. She did not know that. She would not claim that the aura and the chakra were the only ways to characterize what changed in a body that had been through the series. The fascial reorganization, the changed movement patterns, the photographic evidence of contour change — these all remained primary and self-sufficient evidence for her. The energy findings were a remarkable convergent measure, not a replacement for the older ones.
"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. Two characteristic qualities of the body make this unlikely situation possible. The material body of man is a plastic medium, as I just told you."
Ida names the line between what she will and will not claim about the relationship between the energy data and her older fascial doctrine.
Where Ida did go beyond Hunt's measurements was in her insistence that the practitioner-subject relationship was the engine of the change. Hunt's transducer hypothesis gave Ida the empirical license to say what she had been saying for years — that the work was relational, that a particular practitioner with a particular subject produced a particular result, and that this could not be replaced by exercise, by machinery, or by any solo regimen. The aura data made this concrete: the practitioner's field changed color and expanded into pure white during the subject's altered states; the two fields visibly interacted; the work occurred in the shared field, not in either body alone.
"The great web of connective tissue which supports us which causes our confirmation which causes the very nature of our functioning which separates tissue from tissue which differentiates us in all senses, which is the most extensive tissue we have in the body, is the weigh in of the energy fields. Rolfing by reorganizing and freeing the body in its primary and most basic receptive and responsive modes. Receptive meaning the energy fields entering and responsive meaning the energy fields being dissipated. I think this makes possible a quality of experience which is open and dynamic. And once it is open, then the mind, the body and the spirit do operate in magnificent symphony. And I think it has to be opened that way. I would even go farther and say that, from my experience and I'm experiencing it right now, I think the opening and this kind of total experiencing someday we will find that it alters the process of mitosis, cell division and rejuvenation. And that'll blow you, blows me. I think it hastens it. I think it makes it more constant. I'll even go beyond that. I said we're in a mind blowing time. Let's blow our minds. It isn't beyond my conception that the triad, when it becomes one in man's experience, that these create such profound changes that the RNA is even influenced."
Hunt expands on the relational doctrine: the work opens the body to receive and respond to energy fields the senses cannot detect.
Coda: what the study left unresolved
By the time Hunt presented her data to the Healing Arts class in summer 1974, she was already planning the next study — a larger, better-funded, better-instrumented version of the same protocol, with brain-wave hemisphere measurements added, with Robert Beck's specialized energy-field instrumentation added, with subjects screened more rigorously. The Institute helped recruit participants. The work continued through 1975 and into 1976. Ida cited the new data in her advanced classes. But the larger study did not produce the same kind of dramatic, single-image findings that the four-subject sub-study had. The chakra-color sequence held; the cream-aura endpoint held; the practitioner-as-transducer pattern held. What did not happen was breakthrough into the kind of definitive validation Ida had quietly hoped for.
"And this is based upon some things that happened to me during the experiences. I remembered and I heard people report that during Rolfing sessions there were frequently memory flashbacks into either prior experience or into something that they described temporary and lasting emotional changes or emotional experiences, and that many reported psychic experiences which sort of resembled raising the level of consciousness. And practically everyone or everyone reported general well-being. Well, at the time I was working on some other studies, or in between time, with schizophrenics, a neuromuscular model of anxiety with healers. And so one day I had a rofer come in and sette and work with a psychology professor, a young black woman who was a friend of mine, very affect oriented, a person who was able to report quite adequately, I thought, her experiences. And we did four sessions. She was rough totally, but I recorded four sessions in the laboratory. I didn't know what I was recording, but anyway I was recording. And I found out, at least, she expressed verbally three emotional states, and she expressed them rather strongly. She expressed fear, pain, and anger. In fact, hers was so great it was almost rage."
Hunt describes the laboratory experiences with flashbacks, emotional release, and psychic phenomena that drove her to add the energy-field protocols.
The energy-field work remained, in the end, what Hunt always insisted it was — a set of tentative findings, methodologically novel, evidentially suggestive, theoretically incomplete. Ida did not build her practice on it; she built her practice on fascia, on the vertical line, on the recipe, on what she could teach a practitioner to do with their hands. The Hunt data sat alongside the older doctrine as a parallel layer of evidence, sometimes invoked, sometimes set aside, never quite integrated into the curriculum the way the fascial doctrine had been. But Ida did not abandon it. She continued, into her last years of teaching, to point at the chakra measurements as the most interesting empirical question still open in the field she had built.
See also: See also: Valerie Hunt, Open Universe Class on the design of the follow-up forty-eight-subject study (UNI_074), in which Hunt names Bob Beck's specialized instrumentation and the full multi-measure protocol planned for late 1974 through 1975. The transcript is a useful pointer for readers interested in how the larger study was assembled. UNI_074 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, public tape RolfB3 (RolfB3Side1) — an extended discussion of body energy modeled as a vector sum of organ-level energy sources, with thermodynamic analogies developed in physics-of-locomotion language; included for readers interested in how the energy framework intersected with the mechanical modeling of joint and fascial behavior. RolfB3Side1 ▸