The bag and what is in it
The first time the shopping bag appears in the 1975 Boulder advanced class, Ida has just walked Chuck and the students through the anatomy of the superficial fascia — two layers, an outer adipose layer that gives the body its contour and an inner membranous layer with a large amount of elastic tissue, the two attached to each other strongly but able to slide as a unit over the deep fascia underneath. Having established the anatomy, she reaches for the homely image. The class is in Boulder, but she sets the metaphor in Manhattan: 42nd Street, 34th, 7th Avenue. The bag is what you are carrying down the avenue. What you are carrying in it is the rest of what the body is made of.
" Okay, now you got the shopping bag. Right? Flexible bag. And in that bag, we're going across 42nd Street. 34th Street. 34th. 35th. And 7th Avenue. Okay. Now in that bag, you got a bunch of stuff. Let's put some brains in there, a heart, some bones. Throw in some glue. Okay? Now here's the key point. This is the bag with all this stuff in it, just like the body. What are you gonna do to organize that stuff? How are you gonna do it? Well, the fascial planes are the organizational material for the body."
Boulder 1975, immediately after laying out the two-layer anatomy of the superficial fascia.
The shopping bag is one of those metaphors Ida uses to break a habit of thought. The habit she is breaking is the catalog-of-parts habit — the idea that a body is the sum of its named structures and that to understand it you list the structures. Her counter-move is to start with a sack. The sack does not care about names. The sack is just a container with stuff in it. The interesting question — the only interesting question, in her teaching — is what relates the stuff. By beginning with a deliberately undifferentiated image, she forces the students to arrive at the fascial planes as the answer to an organizing question rather than as another item on the list.
"Anatomically, the superficial fascia, the flexible sack. Just like a a bag. A shopping bag. Oh, I'm just gonna do that one here. Fable old party. It's a flexible bag containing everything in a very general relationship. Like, here's a bag, and all the body parts are in there. Very general relationship. Flexible bag."
Same Boulder 1975 session, when she pauses Chuck to clean up his use of the word "superficial."
Why the bag is necessary: a body of segments
The shopping bag is necessary, in Ida's teaching, because the body is not a solid object. It is a stack of segments — head, thorax, pelvis, legs — held together by soft tissue and finally bound in an elastic envelope. In the Topanga lectures she develops this idea at length, and she does so with an unusually warm theological aside: the good Lord didn't trust these dumb guys, so he put all their segments in a bag so they wouldn't lose any. The joke is doing real conceptual work. It tells the student that the body's coherence is not given by its bones but by its containment. Without the bag, the segments would not stay related.
"that it is a consolidation of segments. It is not a solid something. It is not a tree trunk. It is not a cylinder of steel. It is a group of segments, one stacked on top of the other, and the whole thing bound in an elastic sack. I sometimes call it a shopping bag. I sometimes say that the good lord didn't trust these dumb guys. He was afraid they might lose some of their segments and he put them all into a shopping bag. And this almost literally is true."
Topanga lectures, presenting the segmental view of the body to a public audience.
Notice what the segmental view buys her teaching. If the body were a solid, structural work would be impossible — you cannot reshape a tree trunk. Because the body is segments in a sack, the relations between segments can be changed. The fascia is what makes the change accessible, because the fascia is what holds the segments in their current relation. Loosen the fascia and the segments can be restacked. The shopping bag image is the entry point into this whole way of thinking; the student who absorbs it stops looking for a single muscle to blame and starts looking at the stacking as a whole.
"I sometimes say that the good lord didn't trust these dumb guys. He was afraid they might lose some of their segments and he put them all into a shopping bag. And this almost literally is true. You see, those segments are really bony segments. And those bony segments are surrounded and are held in place by soft, so called soft tissue, flesh, muscles, eventually skin. The final thing is a skin shopping bag that keeps us where we belong. Now it is on the basis of this idea that you can begin to change the structure of human beings because that soft elastic tissue can be changed By the addition of energy to it, the position of that soft elastic tissue can be changed. And if it is, the position of the bones shifts. Now slightly, I'm not saying that you're going to take your arm and put it in between your leg and your torso. We don't do things like that. But we very often get arms from where they don't belong to where they do belong."
Continuation of the same Topanga lecture, extending the segments-in-a-sack image into a working theory of plasticity.
Inside the bag: fascial planes as organizers
If the shopping bag is the outermost container, the fascial planes inside it are the organizers. Ida's teaching here is evolutionary in tone — she sketches a story of biological organization in which protoplasm gets more and more ordered, the connective tissue resolving a generalized mass of cells into a system. The bag holds the contents; the planes inside the bag give the contents their order. This is the move that elevates fascia from a wrapping around muscles to the organ of structure proper. In the Big Sur 1973 classes she develops this point at length, and she returns to it in the Boulder 1975 sessions when the metaphor is in active use.
"Now, as I told you before, in structural integration, we think in terms of we work in terms of the stacking of the blocks which are part of the myofascial system, the connective tissue system, the collagen system. And it is the collagen system which basically, which the two classes on different levels are going to turn your attention to in the the next six to thirty weeks. You are going to be getting more and more intimate with collagen which before you heard it well could mean you didn't know existed. But you see, it is the connective tissue which is the organ of structure. The fascia envelopes are the organ of structure, the organ that holds the body appropriately in the three-dimensional material world. Now nobody ever taught this in the medical school as far as I know. And anytime you want to get into an argument with your medical through they'll realize that this is so. It is the fascial aggregate which is the organ of structure."
Big Sur 1973 advanced class, distinguishing structure from function and naming the fascial envelopes as the organ of structure.
The bag and the planes work together as a single teaching device. The bag emphasizes containment — that whatever is in there is in a relationship with everything else in there. The planes emphasize organization — that within the bag there is a network of sheets that route the body's mechanical and electrical and fluid traffic. In a 1974 IPR lecture Ida pushes the planes outward to the visceral fasciae: the kidneys, the intestines, all of it wrapped in continuous fascia, all of it part of the same web. The shopping bag, then, is not just an outer sack but a name for the entire facial continuity.
"But I hope that from what I've been stressing about the middle, this core structure, I hope you're beginning to understand that you can get this different idea of a body as a something centered going out instead of something contained in the skin with some cubbyholes in it. Because I do not think that the very essential understanding of the different role of human beings is going to come out until somebody does some heavy thinking about how this thing can be a center of something that is reaching out in every direction through the fascial planes. Okay. If I can just make one more point, one concept of the old fascial thing that we've not really given much thought to is that there is also fascial coverings of all the organs. The kidneys, the intestines and so forth. All of which continuous with this kind of fascia that I'm talking about in the muscles. So that there is no really dependence in any part of the body."
August 5, 1974 IPR lecture, extending the fascial network to the organs and arguing for a centered, outward-radiating view of the body.
In a 1973 Big Sur session, Ida pushes one of her students, Sharon, to find a more evocative metaphor for what the fascia actually does. Sharon has offered that the fascia envelops each muscle; Ida wants her to see that the envelope around one muscle joins the envelope around the next, and the next, all the way down to the bone. She reaches for the image of an orange — the membranes between the pulp sections — and then for a leg of lamb dissected in the kitchen, where you can watch the wrappings of small muscles fuse along a line into the tough tissue that adheres to bone. This is the inside of the shopping bag described from a different angle: not loose contents in a sack but a complicated inter-reading network of sheets.
"It's continuous throughout the body, its chemical properties are such that it may be changing. Wait a minute Sharon, I think you need to put a more evocative metaphor in that. It envelops each muscle, but you see, it isn't apparent from that sentence that not only does it envelop each individual muscle but that these wrappings of individual muscles connect. It's like a section of an orange when you take it and cut it in half. Well it is. Yes. And the the membrane is tissue in between the pulp. Yes. It will give you an idea of what fascia is like in the body. Yes. Except the body fascia is much more comfortable than the orange fascia. And if you sometimes dissect a leg of lamb, left it or otherwise, you will see how the wrapping of the small individual muscles join somewhere along the line to make this tough stuff that then adheres to the bone. And It's not a simple thing that a child can draw, but it becomes a very complicated inter reading and interconnection. And this permits connection to travel through the entire body."
Big Sur 1973 advanced class, working through the orange-section image of the fascial wrappings as they connect across muscles.
Stacking the blocks: what the bag image makes possible
Once the student accepts the body as a stack of segments in an elastic sack, the practical work of Structural Integration follows. In the Big Sur 1973 class Ida brings out a second image alongside the bag: the blocks. The segments inside the bag are blocks that can be stacked well or stacked badly. Stacked well, they let energy flow through; stacked badly, they leak energy in every joint. The shopping bag is what makes the stacking adjustable — because the bag is elastic and the planes inside it are modifiable, the blocks can be shifted into a better arrangement. Without the bag, the blocks would be fixed.
"If you've got a liver structure that's functioning very badly, the rest of your body which might be doing reasonably well, you are taking away the energy from it to keep that liver going and the answer is you don't feel so well. Because what you are registering when you say I feel is the sum total of that energy. But remember that sum total is an algebraic sum. Some of those systems are going to be pluses and some of them are going to be minuses unless you are very well stacked. Now you can add to that energy by the stopping. If you set those blocks properly, you can get maximum efficiency in the way that the body works. But you have to stack your blocks properly. As soon as your blocks get unstacked, then you begin to lessen the efficiency. Now, as I told you before, in structural integration, we think in terms of we work in terms of the stacking of the blocks which are part of the myofascial system, the connective tissue system, the collagen system. And it is the collagen system which basically, which the two classes on different levels are going to turn your attention to in the the next six to thirty weeks."
Big Sur 1973, introducing the stacking-of-blocks image alongside the energetic argument that drives the work.
The second hour is where the stacking image gets its clearest workout. In a passage from the RolfB3 public tape, Ida walks through the logic: in the second hour the practitioner is back at the periphery again, dissolving the glue a little, letting the blocks shift, calling for readjustments in the lumbar spine and the cervicals because the two interplay. She names the elastic envelope as the reason the work must proceed this way. The bag's laws constrain the order of operations. You cannot reach the center until the periphery is no longer in trouble — and the reason, she suspects, is inherent in the qualities of the shopping bag itself.
"Little bit. And so in that second hour, this is what you have to do. And once again, then you're going back and again shifting your blocks by virtue of dissolving the glue a little bit and letting them get back. And you see this calls for a readjustment of the part of the spine that is going to readjust. It calls for a readjustment of actual vertebra on vertebra."
Public tape RolfB3, describing the second hour as a restacking enabled by the dissolution of glue within the elastic envelope.
Notice the move in the second half of that passage. Ida starts with the bag, walks the second-hour logic, and then says the work eventually takes the student out of the metaphor entirely. The shopping bag, in other words, is scaffolding. It gets the practitioner started — it explains why the work has to begin at the periphery, why the glue has to be dissolved before the blocks can shift, why the second hour has the shape it does. But by the time the body has been reorganized through the early hours, the metaphor has done its job. What remains is a body that has stopped being a passive container and has begun to behave as a self-creating something. The bag image expires by the third hour, replaced by a different language.
Past the bag: the third hour and the spontaneous something
Ida is unusually explicit about the expiration date on her own metaphor. In the third hour, she tells her listeners, the practitioner goes to the sides of the shopping bag, finds the elastic material stuck, and unsticks it so it can take on a new position. And then the new position begins to do something the bag cannot describe — it carries the body out of the metaphor altogether and into a different recognition. The practitioner is no longer holding a sack of contents. The practitioner is in the presence of a spontaneous, self-creating, vital something.
"Now that makes you second hour. And the third hour, you go to the sides of that shopping bag, and you take a look at it and you say, oh my goodness. This stuff got stuck, and it has not been unstuck. And you're going to have to unstick the elastic material so that it can take on a new position. And the new position is beginning to get you a deeper organization. It's going to take you out of the metaphor of the shopping bag and put you onto the recognition that you have a something which is a spontaneous, self creating, vital something here. Who's wanted? And it's no longer an accidental being knocked around, being an effect unit."
RolfB3, the third hour described as the move past the shopping bag into a different recognition of what the body is.
This is one of the small moments in Ida's teaching where her conceptual modesty shows. She offers the bag, uses it hard, and then tells the student to leave it behind. The point of the bag was never to fix the body's description as a sack of contents. The point was to displace the catalog-of-parts habit and to install a stacking-of-segments habit in its place. Once that habit is installed, the student is ready to see something the bag image cannot accommodate — that the body, properly reorganized, is not a passive aggregate but an active and self-arranging field of relations. The bag is a developmental rung; the student climbs past it.
"They just seem to be not there. It's not that they're not there, but it it is that their pullings and heaving and falling disguise them. You can't go in and feel them. You can go in and feel tendons sometimes, but you cannot feel fascial flames. And your first ten hours, therefore, are creating the order within these planes which make it possible for you to see and think in terms of fashion planes. Now it doesn't make any difference how far back in my teaching you remember, you still remember that I have always said that in those last hours, you must spread your hands. You remember how I fought my way through that. You must spread your hands."
Boulder 1975, on why the random incoming body does not yet show its fascial planes and how the first ten hours create the order that makes the planes visible.
The bag as fashion of containment: superficial fascia at work
Anatomically the shopping bag is the superficial fascia, and in the Boulder 1975 sessions Ida pushes her students to keep the layers distinct. The superficial fascia has its own two layers — the outer adipose that gives the body its contour and an inner membrane with elastic tissue — and these together form the bag. Beneath the bag is the deep fascia, another investing layer. Below that are the planes that wrap muscles and group them into systems. The student who collapses these distinctions loses the explanatory power of the metaphor.
"Different parts. Just start putting some planes inside that bag. You know, maybe some horizontal different planes and start putting those parts, the random stuff that was in, into different positions in the body. And that's what the fascia plane did. And we put the glue in there to drop the bag, the glue breaks and starts gluing everything together of the random body. So the deep fascia is more specific in ordering the body systems body into various systems and relating those systems together into a whole. Are we done with the superficial fascia? It's superficial fracture is the shopping bag. That's the shopping bag. Now the deep fascia is right below that. It's an outer investing layer. It's okay. Let's go take another look at the superficial fascia for a minute. Just like these surfers wear these wetsuits, that's the superficial fascia. Just below that, there's another wetsuit. So another wetsuit. In other words, wrapping the whole body from head to toe. Within that, there's numerous planes."
Boulder 1975, Chuck and Ida walking through the layered fascia anatomy that the shopping bag image organizes.
What does the superficial fascia actually do in Ida's understanding? It contributes the body's contour. It provides insulation and storage of nutrients. Its outer layer is adipose, its inner layer membranous and elastic. Because the bag's inner membrane can slide over the deep fascia underneath, the bag has play — it is flexible. This flexibility is what allows the practitioner to enter the body at all. If the bag were rigid, the planes and segments underneath would be inaccessible. The shopping bag is the doorway.
"It's thick, very loose, and there's an inner layer that's like a membrane. Those two are connected pretty strongly. Okay, the outer layer's adipose tissue contributes to body contour, provides insulation and storage of nutrients. The inner layers are thin membrane, large amount of elastic tissue. So the superficial fascia can slide over the deep fascia. Okay, now you got the shopping bag.
The anatomical sentences that immediately precede the New York shopping bag image — what the bag is made of and how it sits relative to the layers underneath.
Posture, structure, and the bag's elastic load
The shopping bag also serves Ida's distinction between structure and posture. Structure is relationship — the way the contents of the bag relate to each other. Posture is what the person does with structure. In a Topanga lecture she works this distinction out carefully, observing that the word posture means "it has been placed" and that to keep something placed requires effort. The student watching a person struggle to maintain posture is watching someone losing a fight with gravity. The bag image clarifies the distinction: posture is about how the contents are propped up against gravity from moment to moment; structure is about how the contents are stacked inside the envelope as a standing relationship.
"It's relationship wherever you use the word structure, you are really talking about a relationship. You talk about this beautiful structure, you are talking about the way the top relates the middle, relates to the floor, the shape of the ground. All of this is implied when I say, I was in a beautiful structure tonight. Structure, wherever you use it, is relationship, and it is particularly relationship of parts in a body. This constitutes structure. Now posture is something else again. And the boys that devised the word posture knew what that something else was because the word posture means it has been placed. It is the past participle of a Latin word, to place, and it means it has been placed. And when you use the word posture, you are saying it has been placed. Somebody has placed something somewhere. Somebody is maintaining the placement of something somewhere. Somebody is working to keep something placed somewhere. And I guarantee that there is no one in this room who doesn't know that in this day and age of the what is it? Nineteen twentieth century, last part of it, last quarter of it, that to keep any of these bodies in posture takes effort, constant continuous effort."
Topanga, distinguishing the relational nature of structure from the active maintenance of posture.
Behind this distinction is a claim about plasticity. The bag is elastic — but only within limits. Ida draws on the dictionary definition of a plastic: a material that can be deformed by pressure and then, by suitable means, brought back to shape, provided its elasticity has not been exceeded. The shopping bag of the body has been deformed since birth by the pull of gravity. The work of the practitioner is to reform it within its elastic range. This is why the bag image is so important: it is the visible signature of the body's plasticity. A rigid sack could not be reformed; an elastic sack can.
"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. Now by dictionary definition, a plastic substance is one which can be distorted by pressure and then can, by suitable means, be brought back to shape, providing that its elasticity has not been exceeded. Now the question is, what is back to shape in this context really mean? And the answer is simple and really expected. Back to shape in this context means vertical. Vertical to the surface of the earth, vertical like the burrows of the chestnut, vertical like the force of gravity. Because only when the gravity vertical of the body substantially coincides with the gravity line of the earth can that energy field of the earth reinforce and augment the field of the human body."
Healing Arts 1974, defining Structural Integration in terms of the body's plasticity and the bringing of its vertical into coincidence with gravity's vertical.
Inside the bag: the fluid medium and the cells that live there
The shopping bag is not merely a mechanical container. Inside it, Ida and her colleagues argue, is a fluid medium in which other cells live — cells that respond to systemic disturbances, cells responsible for the body's reaction to disease, cells whose environment is the fascial fluid itself. The bag, in other words, contains not just blocks but a chemical and immunological habitat. In a 1973 Big Sur class one of her colleagues develops this point at length, and Ida joins him in framing the fascial system as a parallel system of communication alongside the nervous and circulatory systems.
"there. And hence it has greater ability, has greater freedom, freedom, it has, in a way to look at it, has greater potential energy. So we have a cell which is capable of generating this fibrous matrix. Now in this matrix lives the cell itself bathes in the fluid and it is also in this matrix and I think it is here that there is tremendous amount of interest now in membrane research in the sense that the fluids of this tissue provide a medium for which other cells live other than the aquaponics tissue cell. And these cells are the body which are primarily, which are very influential in the body's reaction to systemic disturbances, system wide disturbances. It is in this same matrix that those are parasites that responsible for the body's reactions to the disease. Now, are to all of it. There are various cells that live in this connected tissue matrix and it is these cells that are essential for the body's ability to respond to environmental stress and for the body's ability to respond and to heal itself. So when you are dealing with thatch, you are dealing with, from our point of view, a structural system, a structural organ, literally an organ of structure as I have discussed."
Big Sur 1973, a colleague extending the fascial picture into a description of the cells that live in the fascial matrix.
Ida is quick to accept this enlargement of the picture. The fascia, she says, is also a system of communication. Fluids travel along fascial planes. Infections migrate along fascial planes. Electrical charges are transmitted along fascial planes. The shopping bag image, which began as a humble teaching device about containment, opens out into a claim that the fascial system is a third great communication network in the body alongside the nervous system and the circulatory system. The bag is not merely structural; it is informational.
"But you are also dealing with a very delicate and sensitive environment in which other cells that don't have a direct structural significance live and which can be strongly and powerfully influenced by the manipulation of the fracture. For example, it is common knowledge that often times infections will migrate along the fracture planes. Fluids traverse along the planes. And when Ida talks about the body being basically an electrical something, it is also along fascial planes that these ions need and electrical charges are transmitting. So that you begin to get a feeling that it is literally another system of communication in the body. There is a way of organizing the body. For this we have the nervous system. There is a circulatory system which is another way of providing information chemicals pass through the circulatory system and information gets delayed. You can look at the fascial system in a similar way. There is a fluid system in the fascia and you see this, we had a woman yesterday, we had, where you have fluid collected in the legs. And you can literally see that once those fascial planes unstuck from each other, that fluid starts to leave and that the mechanisms that are there for the removal of that fluid can start to work. It is through the fact that that happens. It is that extrinsic fuel to which it is outside the central nervous system."
Same Big Sur 1973 class, the colleague developing the fascial system as a system of communication parallel to the nervous and circulatory systems.
The bag and the change: why fascia can be reformed
The whole pedagogical purpose of the shopping bag, finally, is to make plausible a claim that the body can be reformed. Ida is unsparing about how hard this claim was to advance. Twenty-five years before she taught these classes, she says, no one would have believed the body was a plastic medium; fifty years before, she would have been put away in a sunny southern room for saying so. The shopping bag is the image that makes the claim graspable. A bag with stuff in it can be rearranged. A bag with elastic walls can be reshaped within its limits. The practitioner can put a hand on the bag and shift what is inside.
"And this is indicative merely of the fact that we are going into an unknown territory, a terra incognita, and trying to find out what changes in that body are going to develop into what changes in the personality that calls itself the owner of that body. And I'm talking here about energy being added by pressure to the fascia, the organ of structure, to change the relation of the fascial sheaths of the body, to balance these around a vertical line which parallels the gravity line. Thus, we are able to balance body masses, to order them, to order them within a space. The contour of the body changes, the objective feeling of the body to searching hands changes. Movement behavior changes as the body incorporates more and more order. The first balance of the body is a static stacking, but as the body incorporates more changes, the balance ceases to be a static balance. It becomes a dynamic balance. These are the physical manifestations of the increasing balance, but there is an outgoing psychological change as well toward balance, toward serenity, toward a more whole person. The whole man, the whole person evidences a more apparent, a more potent psychic development."
Healing Arts 1974, describing what energy added to the fascia produces — changes in contour, in objective feel, in movement behavior, and in psychological state.
There is a sentence in one of the 1973 Big Sur sessions that catches what the bag is for, in the end. Ida is talking about energy stored in tense tissue, the molecules aligned in a particular way, and what happens when the alignment is changed. The change, she says, spreads. The shopping bag is the structural condition that allows this kind of spreading change. Because the contents are not fused but stacked, because the envelope is elastic rather than rigid, because the planes inside the bag are continuous with each other, a change made at one site propagates. Reform a section of the bag and the rest of the bag responds.
"I mean this, when the tissue is in tension, that's stored energy that you release into the body. And its energy is not a metaphysical something. These molecules are aligned in a particular way. You change their alignment. The change spreads."
Boulder 1975, on stored energy in fascial tension and the way change propagates through the connected fabric.
Coda: a humble metaphor for an ambitious claim
The shopping bag is one of the most modest images Ida uses, and it carries one of her most ambitious claims. It says that the body's coherence is not given by its bones but by its envelope. It says that the relations between the body's segments are open to revision because the envelope is elastic. It says that there is a layered fascial network inside the envelope that organizes the body's mechanical, fluid, and informational traffic. It says, finally, that all of this can be reached and reformed by a pair of hands. The image is humble because it has to be — the claim it underwrites was not yet acceptable in the medical culture Ida was teaching against, and a New York shopping bag is a way of making the strange claim concrete enough to handle. By the third hour, the student is meant to leave the bag behind and start working with the fascial planes directly. The bag is the rung the student climbs, then stops needing.
See also: See also: the 1973 Big Sur advanced class on fascia as a system of communication (SUR7309), the 1973 Big Sur lectures on the segmental nature of the body (SUR7301), the 1973 Big Sur exchange on fascial wrappings joining across muscles (SUR7308), the late-career Topanga formulations of structure and posture (TOPAN), the Boulder 1975 demonstrations of the fascial anatomy (B3T9SA, B3T9SB), the Healing Arts 1974 sequence on plasticity and energy (CFHA_01, CFHA_02), and the 1974 IPR lecture on the lumbodorsal junction as a center radiating outward through the fascial planes (74_8-05B). SUR7309 ▸SUR7301 ▸SUR7308 ▸TOPAN ▸B3T9SA ▸B3T9SB ▸CFHA_01 ▸CFHA_02 ▸74_8-05B ▸RolfB3Side2 ▸B3T7SB ▸SUR7332 ▸B3T11SA ▸B2T1SA ▸