A colleague who argued with her about anatomy
Bill Schutz was one of the Esalen circle who took Ida's classes in the late 1960s and early 1970s and then carried what he had learned back into his own work in group process and body-oriented psychology. Unlike Fritz Perls, who became the public evangelist of the work at Esalen, Schutz was a more technical interlocutor — somebody who asked Ida questions about anatomy and method and was willing to disagree with her about what the hands were actually doing. In her 1975 Boulder advanced class, while walking the students through the logic of the second hour, Ida paused to remember an argument she had had with Schutz about a basic point: in which direction does a practitioner work a muscle in order to lengthen it? The argument is small but characteristic. Schutz wanted the obvious answer; Ida insisted on the counterintuitive one. The exchange survives in the transcript as a glimpse of how Ida thought about her colleagues — as people who had to be argued into seeing what she was seeing.
"I remember what a time I had with Bill Schutz who insisted on believing that you lengthen a muscle by going along it and lengthen it, but you don't. You must when you lengthen a muscle by going across it, etcetera, etcetera. But those are tricks within this single simple minded notion of what you wanna do with that body in order to get it balanced within the gravitational field. And those of you that remember your physics, remember that it is a question of getting the moment of rotation retired zero or as near zero as you can make it. And you can only do that by getting this ready for alignment."
Ida, in the 1975 Boulder class, recalls the argument with Schutz over how to lengthen a muscle:
The argument matters because it captures the texture of Ida's classroom relationships in those years. She was not surrounded by acolytes who absorbed her teaching whole. She was surrounded by people like Schutz and Perls and Valerie Hunt and the orthopedic surgeons she sometimes invited in — people with their own training who tested her claims against what they already knew. Schutz's specific contribution to her thinking, as the transcripts show it, was to keep pressing her about mechanism. If the work was lengthening the back, by what means? If the work was changing the pelvic floor, where exactly was the change, and how could it be measured? These were the questions that, by the mid-1970s, Ida was actively wishing somebody would design the studies to answer.
"And she just kept on doing it. And put unfortunately, she's a little bit more brilliant than the rest of us. She just Ida what Ida did is what she's trying to teach how to do, and that is that you have to stay within your your trade. You have to make structural integration in your life. She integrated her life towards understanding structural integration. And she still does that. And she's still Her body is still her her whole being is integrated towards into structural integration. Being structurally integrated herself, structurally integrating us, the guild, the teaching process, and people per se."
A senior practitioner in the 1975 Boulder class describes how Ida arrived at the recipe by watching, an observation that helps locate Schutz's role:
Kegel, the perineometer, and the muscle that controls the floor
The perineometer was the invention of Arnold Kegel, a Los Angeles gynecologist who in the 1940s had set himself the problem of postpartum incontinence. Kegel's discovery, as Ida tells it in the public-tape series, was that the controlling muscle was not where the standard anatomy textbooks had looked. The pubococcygeus — a thin sling of muscle running from the pubic bone to the coccyx — was so fine that on cadaver dissection it collapsed and was easy to miss. Kegel found it functionally rather than anatomically, by measuring the pressure a woman could generate by squeezing. The perineometer was the bulb-and-gauge instrument he used to make that pressure visible. The exercises he prescribed — what we now call Kegel exercises — were designed to rebuild the tone of that single sling. Ida absorbed Kegel's discovery wholesale and made it central to her teaching about the fourth, fifth, and sixth hours, the three hours she identified as the pelvic-floor sequence.
"When the pubococcygeus is balanced, then you get the kind of balancing of forces, of physiological forces within that body, which enables this to happen, and it doesn't rest. Now the story of how this has been developed in the medical concept is an interesting one. And isn't it doesn't have a very long history. There was a man who still is, though he's pretty elderly at this point. His name is Cagle, and he works in Los Angeles. And he got concerned about the problem of incontinence in women, particularly after childbirth. And he started in trying to find out what it was and why it was. And the thing that threw him was the fact that in trying to do the sections on cadavers, he couldn't find any muscle which would control as he could see it the physiological function of the bladder."
Ida, in a public tape, recounts how Kegel arrived at the pubococcygeus:
Ida's adoption of Kegel was not casual. She read his work carefully, she corresponded with his successors, and she insisted that her advanced students study the diagrams in the marriage-counseling book that Kegel and his collaborator Deutsch had produced. The reason was that Kegel had given her something rare: a piece of medical-anatomical research that confirmed, in measurable terms, what she had been claiming about the pelvic floor on the basis of palpation alone. The pubococcygeus was the muscle whose tone determined whether the contents of the pelvis hung properly or sagged. Its position was, in turn, determined by the bones it attached to — the pubes in front, the coccyx behind — and by the muscles that pulled on those bones. This is why, in Ida's teaching, you could not work the pelvic floor by working the pelvic floor. You had to work the legs and the lower spine, and the floor would reorganize behind your hands.
"Now I urgently request I was almost saying that every member of this class looks into those Deutsch books and studies those two diagrams. They are very important, very important in terms of understanding the function of the floor of the pelvis. Sadly enough, Doctor. Cagle has left us after the fashion of people. There is a man who, a colored physician, a black physician, in Los Angeles, who was his assistant, who was still at work there. But the idea has largely lost its steam. It is still a good idea and it is a very good idea historically for you people to look at to evaluate your own techniques. Because what are you depending on to raise those pelvic contents? Hap stones with spitting steam? You are depending on the relation of the muscles of the leg."
Ida tells her 1976 advanced class about Kegel's Egyptian source and what the perineometer was really measuring:
The Kegel machine in the room
The perineometer itself made physical appearances in Ida's advanced classes. She referred to it variously as "the Kegel machine" or simply by its formal name, and in the 1976 Boulder class she asked openly whether someone had brought one in for the morning's teaching. The exchange is striking partly because it shows how casually Ida moved between abstract structural argument and the question of whether the instrument was physically present in the room. She wanted her advanced students to handle it, to see what it measured, and to understand that the number on the gauge was a function of muscle tone they could affect with their hands. The machine was an expensive piece of equipment — by the mid-1970s it was selling, she said, for around three thousand dollars — and her wish that more of her students would have access to it was bound up with her standing complaint that Structural Integration had no money for the research it deserved.
"I thought that I thought that probably that little thing was now mounted on the big little thing so that it was impressive. Selling for $3,000? Yes. I mean, there's a perineometers. Yes. I know that. Kegel machine. That's just my name. Oh, that's your name for it. That thought that was the the name that they had up at Vallejo. And there are other names for this machine, but I won't tell you. I know. We're not in polite. We're a very polite society Don't mention anything that is polite. Somebody have something to confirm? There's some a paper that he wrote about the exercise exercise and then confidence in the stress."
Ida, in a public tape, asks for the perineometer to be produced in the room:
The perineometer measured one thing: the pressure a person could generate by contracting the pubococcygeus. Ida's interest was in what that number reflected. In her reading, a low number indicated a pelvic floor whose attachments — the rami in front, the coccyx and sacrotuberous ligaments behind — were not in their right positions. You could not raise the number by asking the person to squeeze harder. You could raise it by reorganizing the bony architecture the muscle attached to. That, in her view, was what Structural Integration did, and it was the kind of claim she wanted somebody with research credentials to test.
"I'd like to add something about the, you know, just in case anyone ever experiments on rolting the fluidity hubs. I don't have a lot of data, so don't make the practice of asking people about this, but I have had a couple of people tell me about things that have happened. And one lady who had incontinence, had to pee a lot, to get up at least once an hour, she couldn't hold it, I was hoping that Rolfing would cure that, and I didn't do anything"
Ida, in the 1976 advanced class, opens the door for somebody to study the question:
Schutz as the kind of researcher she was waiting for
The single most direct statement Ida made about Schutz in connection with the perineometer comes at the end of her 1976 advanced-class lecture on Kegel and the pelvic floor. She had been walking her students through the anatomy, through the history, through the diagrams in the Kegel and Deutsch book, and through the specific structures — the rami, the obturator internus fascia, the sacrotuberous ligaments — that her practitioners needed to reach in order to change the floor's tone. The teaching was meticulous and it was also somewhat frustrated. She had laid out the problem clearly enough that, in her view, the research should already have been done. And then she named Schutz as somebody who had at least begun to take it on.
"Now somewhere among all of you people sooner or later, there will be somebody as a matter of fact, somebody did. It was Bill Schutz. There will be somebody coming in who will be very much interested in this problem and will run adequate and adequately documented tests of this whole situation."
Ida, in the 1976 advanced class, names Schutz directly:
The naming is matter-of-fact. She does not describe Schutz's study design, she does not report his results, and she does not say where his work was published. What she does is tell her senior students that he is the kind of person who will eventually do the research properly, and she warns them, in the same breath, against rushing out to do it themselves without his temperament for documentation. The implicit message is that the perineometer is not a parlor instrument. It is a piece of laboratory equipment, and whoever takes up the question has to do it with the discipline of an actual study.
"One of our attempts at validation is going on in the laboratory of UCLA right now, and is stopping right now. And I think that later Doctor. Hunt may offer some of you the opportunities of being models in there, if you care to see her later on. This validation is going on under Doctor. Hunt's direction, and as I know and as you know, she needs no introduction. It is noteworthy that Doctor. Hunt has herself had the personal experience of the Area 5 burgeoning, blossoming. But now, being a good scientist, she goes back to Area 2, the area of measurement for scientific evaluation. Up to this point, her pilot projects have seemed highly significant. We have every reason to believe that this project will lend itself to measurement. 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."
Ida, in the 1974 Open Universe lecture, frames the validation problem in general terms:
What Ida is doing in this passage, structurally, is the same thing she did with Valerie Hunt and with the orthopedic surgeons she sometimes brought into her classes. She was acknowledging that her own role was to teach the work and to articulate the claims; the work of validation had to be done by people with research credentials and institutional access. Schutz, in 1976, was one of the people she trusted to begin to bridge that gap. The transcripts do not record whether his perineometer studies ever produced publishable results. What they record is Ida's hope that they would.
Why the pubococcygeus mattered to the whole recipe
To understand why Ida cared about the perineometer at all, you have to see how the pubococcygeus fit into her larger structural argument. The pelvic floor was not, in her teaching, just one anatomical region among many. It was the structure whose position determined whether the rest of the body could organize itself in gravity. If the floor was tilted, the contents of the pelvis dragged on it; if the contents dragged, the lumbar spine had to compensate; if the lumbars compensated, the thorax could not lift off the pelvis, and the whole ten-session sequence had nothing solid to build on. The fourth, fifth, and sixth hours of the recipe were, in her terms, three different approaches to horizontalizing the floor.
"And, basically, the key of the pelvic floor is the pubococcigeus. Now the pubococcigeus must meet according to its name run from the pubes to the coccyx and it is down there like a sling to serve as the floor of the pelvis. But on its integrity depends what's going on in the pelvic organs and the abdominal organs. And Peter was off on a bad trip when he talks about their resting on the floor of the pelvis. When they rest on the floor of the pelvis, the guy crawls in in here and begs you to do something for him. He's got such, quote, symptoms. That's where they mustn't rest. In fact, nothing must rest anywhere. Everything must be suspended somewhere."
Ida, on a public tape, lays out what the pubococcygeus does:
Ida's view that the organs are suspended rather than resting was idiosyncratic and she knew it. She used the perineometer evidence partly to argue against the conventional medical picture in which gravity simply pulls everything down. The Kegel data showed that contractile tone in the pubococcygeus could be measured, that it varied across individuals, that it correlated with symptom severity, and — most importantly for her — that it could be changed. If it could be changed by Kegel's exercises, she argued, it could also be changed by structural work on the bones the muscle attached to. The perineometer was, in this sense, a witness instrument: it could not measure structural change directly, but it could measure one of the consequences.
"It's not those half dozen muscles which we named the other day as being the pelvic floor. Not at all. It's the sacroiliac articulation. It's the articulation between the fifth lumbar and the sacrum. It's the articulation between the fourth lumbar and the fifth lumbar. See what I'm telling you? Just as soon as you shift any of those lumbars back on any of those lumbars, you're going to get a different relationship in that pelvic floor. Just as soon as you take on the type of athletic training which shortens and tightens the hamstrings to the exclusion of the antagonists of the hamstrings, you're going to interfere with that pelvic floor. Just assume as you do any of these habitual postures that spread the knees wide, thereby shortening the brassless and altering the hamstring relationship in there, you're going in feel that pelvic floor. So if there is a vast terror incognito in there for each and every individual about how he developed these various physical attitudes and therefore mental attitudes. And what we are doing here, of course, is to take the outermost layer of those attitudes and sort of organize them and relate them to a place where the attitudes themselves are less constricting, are less compelling than they otherwise have been. And where as a result of the lesser compulsion that is in the muscle, you can get a lesser compulsion in the mind in terms of certain attitudes. And you can begin to look around and see some other things."
Ida, on a public tape, names the articulations that actually determine pelvic-floor tone:
The fourth hour: reaching the structures Kegel could not
The fourth hour was, in Ida's late teaching, the first hour in which the practitioner's hands actually approached the pelvic floor. The first three hours had worked the periphery — the superficial fascia of the trunk, the legs, the back. The fourth hour, in her phrase, was the hour of the medial line of the body, and the medial line ended in the ramus of the pubis and the ischium, the bony arches the pubococcygeus attached to. This was where Kegel's exercises could not reach. Kegel could ask his patients to squeeze, and the perineometer would register the squeeze, but he could not change the position of the bones the muscle was anchored to. Ida's claim was that the practitioner's hands could.
"your hand on that individual. You begin to go down and take a precise look look at the precise problems involved at the immediate problems is the word I mean. The immediate, the adjacent, the contained problems of the pelvis. How to get it horizontal? And as you're working with it, do not start worrying about whether you turned off the gas in the kitchen stove before you went out this morning. Get your mind on what's going on in the floor of that pelvis. What constitutes the floor of that pelvis? Which aspect of it is pulling? Which aspect of it has to pull? What is this doing in terms of putting strain on the contents of the pelvis and on the contents of the abdomen? What is going on? Because these three hours, the fourth and the fifth and the sixth, are your key situations. This is your opportunity, and if you lose them now, you're not gonna get them back. In your fourth hour, hands are in there around that floor of that pelvis, loosening the stuff which is keeping it askew."
Ida, on a public tape, locates the fourth-hour work in the floor of the pelvis:
Within the fourth hour the specific structures Ida insisted her practitioners reach were the adductor fascia along the inside of the thigh, the obturator internus along the inside wall of the pelvis, and the ligaments that connected the coccyx and sacrum to the ischial tuberosity. Each of these is, in standard anatomy, continuous with the floor of the pelvis. Releasing them changes what the floor can do. The cumulative claim — that a fourth hour properly done would alter a perineometer reading — was the claim Ida wanted Schutz, or somebody like him, to test.
"Just the fourth hour it seems to me establishes not only, and I didn't hear this exquisitely, you said that it establishes length all the way up through the body, not just through the inside of What do you think it establishes that length all the way up through the body? When releasing the tie ups at the bottom of the pelvis at the pubic ramus, you seems to allow an extension of the prevertebral. You got any idea what that actually is, Al? Well, can, I mean in terms of structure, Nobody has convinced me yet about that fourth hour as to what its real contribution is? Yeah. Well the fascia that wraps the adductors and the inside of the leg extends right up inside the pelvis and covers the What do you mean by inside the pelvis? It comes up between the rami and then blends with the fascia that covers the obturator internus and becomes part of the floor of the pelvis. So by releasing the legs you change the tone of the floor of the pelvis. You're on the way, I think. You haven't quite made it. You should've made it more now than anyone else."
Al Drucker, in the Mystery Tapes, walks through the fascial chain that runs from the adductors into the pelvic floor; Ida confirms:
Drucker's reasoning was the kind of anatomical chain Ida had been teaching for years, but hearing it spoken back to her by a practitioner was confirmation that the teaching had landed. The fascia of the adductors and the fascia of the obturator internus and the fascia of the pelvic floor are continuous — what one of them does, the others register. This is the structural rationale that connects a fourth-hour intervention on the inside of the thigh to a downstream change in pubococcygeal tone, which is what the perineometer would, in principle, detect. The sequencing of the work in this hour was as deliberate as the anatomy.
"What you've done, among other things, is you've raised the chest off of the pelvis and you've lengthened the front of the body, raising the whole structure. From here, next we'll go down to the legs. Our core is to organize the pelvis in reference to gravity. So you free the pelvis from above and below. You free it above by raising the thorax off. Now we're down to free the legs on the pelvis by freeing the structures around the hip joints and then around the hamstring muscles to evaluate how where the restrictions are in Brooks, I would like to underscore certain points. You free the pelvis by working around the hip joint. This is right. In order to allow the pelvis to turn around the hip joint. But I want you to be perfectly clear in your mind that the pelvis can't turn around the hip joint if the hamstrings are too tight. This is not a separate situation. This is still a freeing around the hip joint."
Ida, on the RolfA1 public tape, describes how the practitioner frees the pelvis from above and below:
What a measurement program would need
Ida understood the difference between an idea she could demonstrate by touch and a claim that would survive in a research literature. She made this point repeatedly in her late-career teaching, often with some impatience. The horizontality of the pelvis had been demonstrated, in measurable terms, by John Lodge and Peter Melchior using straightforward photogrammetry. But the downstream questions — blood chemistry, hormone function, urinary continence, the things the perineometer could actually quantify — had not been studied because Structural Integration had no research budget. Her standing complaint in those years was that the work she wanted done required money, and the spelling of opportunity, as she put it, was M-O-N-E-Y.
"we had to see how we could measure horizontality in the pelvis. And Peter and John Lodge and a few more of the old hands got busy looking at how you measured the horizontality of pelvis and lo and behold, they found something very significant. They found that the second that the coccyx the second segment of the coccyx in the horizontal pelvis was horizontal with the back posterior aspect Now this put Ralphie. This lifted it out of the guesswork and put it into the measurable work. Unfortunately, we have never had the wherewithal to really follow this along. A study, for example, of the extent to which this horizontality would contribute to the change of blood chemistry or physiological function or psychological function. We have never had the opportunity to do this. We have never had the money to do this. Because, oddly enough, in the year 1970 on, the way they spell opportunity is M O N E Y. And some of you better come out of some of those idealistic little corners where you live and realize that this is what you need to do this kind of investigation, to do any kind of investigation. You need either money yourself or access to the money groups which have been set up by the community like the government groups, etc. I am trying to put across to you at this moment, however, is the fact that the original looking at bodies in terms of getting data on horizontality and so forth has been done."
Ida, in 1976, reports the measurement work that had been done and names what was still missing:
The kind of research Ida wanted done at the perineometer was not complicated. It would have involved measuring contractile tone in a population of subjects before they entered the ten-session series, measuring it again at the end of the series, and ideally tracking it through follow-up. The instrument was reliable, the protocol was well-understood, and the population of interest — women with mild stress incontinence — was readily available. What was missing was somebody with the institutional standing and the patience to do the documentation. Schutz, by virtue of his Esalen base and his academic background in group psychology, had at least some of those resources.
"Rolfe an article written by Roy Elkins from Mayo Clinic, He stated in there the necessity of developing a posture with the pelvis horizontal and what have you, to the degree of what happens when a person attempts to hold it by contracting the gluteal muscles and the abdominal muscles. But as soon as you relax, it falls back in the other position. She wrote back to him and says they say it, but nobody has said how to do it. And doctor Rolf is the one who said how to how to do it. Do any of you know anybody who gets in there in a classroom and says how you do it? I do. Telephone and collect the only what's the name you say if you happen to come across such style. I think there's a fellow up in Martinez that probably comes near knowing that from anybody else. Well, there's this cast His name's. Fell by the name of Manel. Oh, Cheryl. Arthur McFarland. That's the guy you mentioned yesterday in the morning."
Ida, in the Mystery Tapes, comments on Mayo Clinic literature about the horizontal pelvis and what the medical world had failed to specify:
The Mayo correspondence captures Ida's frustration in miniature: the medical literature recognized the problem and said nothing about the solution. She had the solution and no way to document its effects. The perineometer offered a documentary bridge, but the bridge had to be built by somebody. Her own clinical observations, which she occasionally shared with her advanced students, were anecdotal — the kind of cases that pile up in a long career but never accumulate into a publishable dataset without somebody designing the study.
"I don't have a lot of data, so don't make the practice of asking people about this, but I have had a couple of people tell me about things that have happened. And one lady who had incontinence, had to pee a lot, to get up at least once an hour, she couldn't hold it, I was hoping that Rolfing would cure that, and I didn't do anything"
Ida, in 1976, mentions her own anecdotal experience with continence improvements:
What the contemporaneous Hunt studies could and could not measure
While Ida was waiting for the perineometer studies, the research that was actually getting done was Valerie Hunt's electromyographic work at UCLA. Hunt was measuring different things — surface electrical activity, evoked brain potentials, the energetic fields she became increasingly interested in toward the end of her collaboration with Ida. Hunt's work captured aspects of the change Ida wanted documented, but it did not reach the specific physiological questions the perineometer was designed for. The contrast is instructive. Hunt's instruments were sensitive enough to register changes in muscle recruitment patterns and in baseline electrical activity, and she reported these changes in the 1974 Healing Arts conference talks. But pelvic-floor tone was not in her measurement set.
"detailed. But one that led me to the study, another study I will report on today, was that I found what we call baseline of bioelectric activity was increased after Rolfing, particularly when an individual or specifically, when the individual was sitting down in between active events and I could not understand this. I thought, surely we have in the past said that when the baseline of bioelectric activity goes up, the individual is more tense. However, the thing that I perceived was that once the individual started the activity, that baseline dropped to nothing, far below what it had been before. I had no explanation for this. I arrived at some, but it wasn't very good. One I said which I think will hold up is that the person was more open to the experience. And that's good. Nobody can doubt it. Since I couldn't explain it anymore, I just left it there because I was quite convinced that it was not tension. I was perfectly willing to report that it was tension, but it did not have a tension pattern as I could perceive it."
Valerie Hunt, at the 1974 Healing Arts conference, describes what her EMG protocols actually registered:
Hunt's work and the hoped-for Schutz work were complementary rather than redundant. Hunt was measuring nervous-system change. The perineometer would have measured smooth-muscle and skeletal-muscle change in a specific anatomical region. Together they would have given Ida a multi-system picture of what the ten-session series produced. Without the perineometer studies, the pelvic-floor claim remained, in research terms, an assertion supported by anecdote and palpation.
"She's completely found new premises with which to explain or attempt to explain or deal with our situation in the gravitational field or in our environment and it gives me great pleasure to introduce Doctor. Rolf. Well, this is a great joy to be welcomed so warmly by you. Seems to me that we're going to have to do a little changing of this. Before I begin, I'd like to call your attention to a couple of, you know, problems, nuts and bolts problems. We have here, in case there will be those of you who will be curious to get more information about what I have to say, and for those people we have two pieces of literature. One is this, an introduction to structural integration written by one of our Rolfers, and the other is a flyer for a book that we have which is called What in the World is Rolfing? And this book is a compendium of the questions that people usually ask, and you may well find it helpful that abstract will give you an idea of whether you really want it. And because I have a feeling that we're going to be running out of time at the end, I've put this in at the beginning for your pleasure and information, I hope."
Valerie Hunt, at the same 1974 conference, introduces Ida and frames the research question:
The pelvic-floor question in the wider recipe
Ida's repeated return to the pelvic-floor question throughout her advanced classes was not a topical preoccupation but a structural one. The floor was, in her view, the bottom of the trunk; everything above it depended on its position. This is why she taught the fourth, fifth, and sixth hours as a single sequence with a single goal, and why she insisted that the practitioner's hands had to reach the ligaments around the coccyx and sacrum. The perineometer would have given her a number to attach to the claim. Without that number, she had to teach the claim by demonstration and by argument, which she did relentlessly in the surviving transcripts.
"When you study the fascia of the floor of the pelvis, One thing that becomes evident is that the gluteal fascia wraps the coccyx. It's right up to the sacrum. Sacral tuberous ligament, you see that? Yeah. That's the one that I felt I was on yesterday when I went into MARC, going into the coccyx, I was sufficiently anterior to the coccyx that I could feel the The pull of those ligaments. And these vertical strands, I mean, vertical wide This is what I'm trying to make to give you all reality on, that in that fourth hour you have got to get into those ligaments that attach to the toxins and to the sacrum. Every once in a while I'll say to you people, What about its toxics? Well, I was going to get to that. What they're really saying is, I forgot about it, but you're reminding me of it. And what I'm trying to bring up to more nearly the surface of consciousness is that without that kind of an organization that you have no way of horizontalizing the pelvis. Look at it in terms of horizontalizing of the floor there and you see how this is knocked askew. You can't horizontalize the floor because the coccyx is askew."
Ida, in the Mystery Tapes, makes the case for going deep into the coccygeal ligaments:
Ida's teaching on this point was uncompromising. She knew that working into the coccygeal region was emotionally and physically charged for both practitioner and client, and she pressed her students to do it anyway. The reasoning was structural: if the coccyx stayed pulled forward, the floor of the pelvis stayed tilted, and the perineometer reading — and everything it stood for — would not change. This was the operational logic behind her hope that Schutz, or someone like him, would design the study that documented the effect.
"Now I would like would like a lineup. If we've got any models around here that have that are on the first fifth hour, fine. If we haven't, I would still like a what we need to do with the pelvis. We have spent hour one, hour two, hour three, hour four organizing that pelvis from different aspects, from different geometrical aspects, if you like. Have we got it organized? Let's look at the lineup and see. Up to this point, we have done very little except on the surface of the body. And when somebody is directing a question about the pelvic floor, I am sidestepping it. Do you hear me? Because in this work we start at the outside, at the periphery. The periphery of the feet and the periphery of the skin. And we work toward the center, and we work toward the horizontalization of the pelvis. These are all the people that are available for models. Where's the rest of Peter's practitioners?"
Ida, in the 1976 advanced class, refuses to discuss the pelvic floor in isolation from the recipe that approaches it:
Coda: an unfinished collaboration
What the transcripts leave the reader with is an unfinished thread. Bill Schutz appears in Ida's late teaching as a colleague who argued with her about technique, who carried her work into the wider culture through his own Esalen group work, and who — by Ida's report in 1976 — had begun to take up the pelvic-floor research question. The published record of Schutz's perineometer studies, if they were ever completed, has not surfaced in the archive of materials around Ida's classes. What has survived is her naming of him, her framing of the research question, and her teaching about why the question mattered. The pelvic floor was, for her, the structural bottom of the body. Kegel had shown how to measure one aspect of it. Schutz, she hoped, would show that the ten-session series changed what Kegel was measuring.
The larger lesson of this thread is about how Ida thought about validation. She did not believe that the work needed to be defended by its practitioners; she believed it needed to be tested by people with research credentials and instruments. The perineometer was a small, specific, and unusually well-developed instrument with a clear protocol and a population of interest. It was within reach. That she ended her 1976 teaching by naming Schutz as the person who had begun to reach for it, and by warning her own students not to imagine they could do the work without his discipline, tells you something about how she ranked the difficulty of the task.
"You are depending on the relation of the muscles of the leg. You are depending on the relation of the pelvic floor at the ramus. You are depending on the relation of leg musculature attached to the ramus. Now somewhere among all of you people sooner or later, there will be somebody as a matter of fact, somebody did. It was Bill Schutz. There will be somebody coming in who will be very much interested in this problem and will run adequate and adequately documented tests of this whole situation. But don't just get an idea, Oh, it's me. I'm going to do this. Because you've to be qualified for this. You've got to be well qualified."
Ida, in the 1976 advanced class, closes the perineometer discussion with a warning:
Ida's hand-off to Schutz was, in another sense, also a hand-back to the whole arc of the recipe. The pelvic-floor change Schutz was supposed to measure would not be produced by a single hour or a single technique — it would be produced by the cumulative reorganization that began in the first hour, with the first pelvic lift, and continued through every subsequent session. The point was that any honest measurement program would have to take readings across the whole ten-session arc, because the structural foundation for a changed perineometer reading was being laid from the very beginning.
"And this is what makes it a one simple lifeblood. Okay. So what happens next? I'm having free the superficial fascia out in the trunk, both both thorax, upper part and the part that are connected to the pelvis through the legs and the large muscles posteriorly. The goal of the hour has been to reach the pelvis and do a pelvic lift to begin the the leveling of the pelvis. And I'm not sure if there's a why or what the significance is, but it seems to me that we did the neck after the pelvic lift, and I don't know whether that's just for kind of comfort and balance. Yeah. It's for comfort and balance. You can't go around holding your head out this way for an indefinite period. Uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable. I see it. It's inefficient. It isn't beautiful, and it's not good advertising."
Ida, on the RolfA3 public tape, describes the first-hour pelvic lift as the moment the lumbars and sacrum begin to give:
See also: See also: Ida and the public-tape series, especially the RolfB3 and RolfB4 sessions, for extended teaching on the pubococcygeus, the rami, and the sacrotuberous ligaments as the structures determining pelvic-floor tone; these are the anatomical foundations Ida wanted any perineometer study to take seriously. RolfB3Side2 ▸RolfB4Side1 ▸
See also: See also: Ida's 1971-72 Mystery Tapes sessions on the floor of the pelvis and the obturator internus fascia, which spell out the fascial chain from the adductors into the pelvic basin — the chain by which fourth-hour work was supposed to reach structures the perineometer could register. 72MYS141 ▸72MYS131 ▸
See also: See also: Valerie Hunt's 1974 Healing Arts presentations on EMG and bioelectric measurement of the ten-session series, which represent the contemporaneous research program — sympathetic to Ida, well-instrumented, but measuring different variables than the perineometer would have addressed. CFHA_03 ▸CFHA_04 ▸
See also: See also: Ida's 1974 Open Universe lecture in which she frames Valerie Hunt's UCLA validation work as part of the broader project of fitting the practice into conventional scientific acceptances — the same project the hoped-for Schutz perineometer studies belonged to. UNI_102 ▸