From a pair of hands to an institute
In the early 1970s, when she spoke at IPR conferences and in the public talks now preserved as the RolfB tapes, Ida was already in her late seventies and already conscious that the work needed a structure that would outlast her. The practice had grown from her own two hands to roughly 160 certified practitioners spread across North America, South America, and Europe. The training, however, was still nomadic — elementary classes on each coast, advanced classes on each coast, summers at Big Sur. Students traveled to her. The work had no single home. When she was interviewed about how a prospective student might find the training, she answered in the practical terms of someone who had spent a decade defending a logistically awkward arrangement: classes ran four days a week so students could earn a living the other three. The Boulder building changed that calculus.
"We now have our own building in Boulder, thanks be to God and some friends, and I think we'll probably be setting up a proper training station in Boulder presently."
In a public interview in the early 1970s, asked whether the training was being consolidated:
The building was not merely real estate. It was the precondition for the kind of teaching Ida had been trying to do for years. She had been splitting her advanced classes between Big Sur in the summer and Santa Monica or the East Coast at other times, with the result that no class ever saw the full arc of her current thinking. A permanent station meant a curriculum, a library, a place where senior students could come back for further training without rebuilding the institutional logistics each time. It also meant a board, a director, a mailing address — the bureaucratic infrastructure that lets a teaching survive its founder. The address itself entered the public record:
"Where could I write in order to find out how that's all going The Moss Institute, Boulder, Colorado. Box 1868. Box 1868. Boulder, Colorado."
When the interviewer asks where to write for information:
The Big Sur backdrop
To understand what the Boulder consolidation meant, one has to understand what it replaced. From roughly 1965 through the early 1970s, Ida's primary venue was Esalen at Big Sur. She has described that period in nostalgic detail in IPR conference recordings — the founding friends, the moment when the work displaced sex as the dominant topic of conversation in the Esalen baths, the role of Fritz Perls as an unofficial evangelist. The Esalen years were the years when the practice caught fire culturally but had no organizational ballast. Reading her account of them, one understands why the Boulder building meant so much: it was the answer to a decade of glorious but exhausting improvisation.
"to brag to you about the events of 1976 have made me turn something of a nostalgic eye on the history, the general history of Rolfing, and there are in this room a great many people who I find to my amazement know very little about it, know very little about where we started or how we started or how we got out of the place where we were one pair of hands and one pair of elbows. And so I thought that I would start back there with a nostalgic glance to well perhaps the year 1965 let's say when I came out originally to Big Sur And there are various people that I would like to acknowledge with appreciation and nostalgic pleasure. One of them is Rosemary Fitus. Many of you have known Rosemary, some I fear don't know her, but Rosemary and I were the people who got together and organized Rolfing as you know it now, And Rosemary and I worked, well I sometimes think of that old saw about how we did all we could on six days of the week and the rest we did on the seventh. And that was the way we worked in those days. That was the way we had to work in those days because we had a rough on six days of the week, and we had to plan and write books which are still not published on the seventh."
At an IPR conference in the early 1970s, Ida casts a nostalgic eye back over the founding period:
Fritz Perls is the figure who looms largest in her account of Esalen. Perls was a much-beloved teacher there, and he spoke about the work in ways that put it on the cultural map. By the mid-1970s the senior practitioners around Ida still remembered Fritz; the new students did not, and this troubled her. The dependency on a single charismatic evangelist was exactly the kind of fragility the Boulder institute was meant to overcome.
"talking about Rolfing every step of the way. And this again was what put us on the map because people in spite of of his temperament, people loved Fritz. And there are in this room many people here who will bear witness to the fact that Fritz was a much beloved teacher in Esselen, and I am full of regrets these days when in classes I say, yeah do any of you remember Fritz and every once in a while there's a class where no one remembered, no one knew Fritz, they only know of him. This is a cause of sadness to me because it will be many and many a long day before Ralfas really are out of their debt, their indebtedness to Fritz and what he did for them in those early days. Well that takes us pretty much to the place where you people begin to come on, where most many of you, most of you, begin to come on the scenes and begin to get better acquainted with what goes on, what has goes on still in terms of Rolfing and what we want to do."
In the same conference talk, Ida lingers on Fritz Perls's contribution:
Julian Silverman and the broader Esalen apparatus also contributed. Ida credits the Esalen gossip circuit — what happened in the lunchroom, what happened in the baths — as the actual mechanism by which the practice spread. The marker she gives for when the work had "made it" is when conversation in the baths shifted from sex to her practice as its dominant topic. It is the kind of joke only someone who lived through that period could make, and it captures something true: the Esalen years built reputation, but reputation alone cannot run a training program.
"And those were the kind of people that really put this thing across. And you see, they weren't Rolfers as much as they were founding friends of Rolfers, and I do not like to have their contribution and their friendship forgotten. And then of course there was Esselin itself, Esselin and the friendly moving spirit of Esselin, Esselin and Dick Price, who gave us welcome and who gave us cooperation and who gave us the use of the baths for the rolfing procedures and so forth and so forth. And always there was a welcome on the doormat at Esselin and we were delighted to see it. And Esselin, I think many of you recognize the fact that no other media, no other media, newspapers, periodicals, books, nothing would have could challenge the supremacy of Esselen, the supremacy of the gossip circuit of Esselen in spreading that gospel of Rolfing. And in the lunchroom and in the baths this story got around and as you know people came from all over the world and stayed at Essil in a few weeks and in so doing got inoculated with the knowledge that there was this technique of ralphing, that it worked, it was good, many times they tried it and they carried the knowledge back to their various parts and really and literally the story got around. And when the day came when I heard a rumor, well authenticated rumor to the effect that in the bath the subject of conversation now was was rothing and not sex, then I knew we had it made."
Continuing the same retrospective, Ida names Esalen itself and the role of the gossip circuit:
Why the institute had to teach teachers
Ida was explicit, by 1976, that the institute's primary mission was not to certify more practitioners but to develop more skillful and more knowledgeable teachers. This was a shift in emphasis. In the Esalen years the demand was for hands — anyone who could be trained quickly enough to meet the wave of interest. By the time the Boulder building opened, the demand had shifted: the field had enough practitioners; what it lacked was teachers who could carry the work forward intellectually. Ida's framing of this is one of the clearest statements of institutional purpose she ever gave.
"We feel in the Ralph Institute, or the board feels, and I feel, that our primary job is teaching practitioners, making more skillful and wiser, more knowledgeable teachers of human structure and function."
Addressing an IPR conference about the institute's direction:
But she did not stop at teaching. In the same address she made a further claim — that teaching alone was insufficient, that the senior practitioners themselves had to understand why the work worked, not merely that it did. This was the doctrine that distinguished a chef from a cook. The recipe — the ten-session protocol — was sufficient for beginners and would remain sufficient at that level. But the institute's senior figures had to move beyond the recipe, had to understand the materials they were working with at a level that allowed them to create results rather than reproduce them. This is the most ambitious institutional claim Ida ever made for what Boulder was supposed to be.
"But teaching in my opinion is not enough. We, your teachers, must know how and through what means this revolutionary technique of rolfing works. A recipe is fine, it works, as each and every one of you have reason to know, but when you get to be a chef instead of a cook you create your results not by a recipe but by your recognition of the interplay of food and nutritional materials."
Continuing the same conference address:
The chef-and-cook distinction has a specific institutional implication. It means that the advanced classes — the ones Ida had been running in Big Sur and Santa Monica, and which were to move to Boulder — are not merely longer versions of the elementary training. They are a different kind of education altogether. The elementary class teaches the recipe; the advanced class teaches the practitioner to see what the recipe is doing and why. By 1976 Ida was already planning a further class beyond that, a four-week advanced-advanced class for graduates of the existing advanced training, designed to teach only advanced techniques and to skip the six-week orientation. The institutional architecture was getting layered.
"particularly interested in getting classes into touch with the older group of Rolfers, for Rolfing has gone so far since the earlier classes as I said to you earlier today. We also see as an outstanding accomplishment of 1976 the establishment of our six day intensives. They really offer you, we think, a means of professional progression in your own hometown, and this of course means at a lower cost, less traveling, less board and lodging, etc, etc. In terms of class opportunities, we are also listening hard to the demand of the people who attended the earlier advanced classes in Big Sur, etcetera. These people are feeling the need for the opportunity to update themselves with the ideas and techniques of these later classes. We are therefore considering giving an advanced class for advanced rifles. I know, I feel that way too. In the 1977, it's a whole year away you can get used to the idea, this class will be a class of four weeks long, not ten weeks, and it will demonstrate only advanced techniques. That very significant six week introduction will not be given in that particular class. It will be talking only about advanced techniques and it will be open only to people who have taken the advanced class."
Continuing the same address, Ida lays out the 1976-77 program:
The need for input — research as institutional mandate
If the chef-and-cook distinction is the pedagogical argument for the Boulder institute, the research mandate is its intellectual counterpart. Ida was insistent, from the mid-1970s onward, that the institute could not survive as merely a teaching organization. It had to feed itself with new understanding. The metaphor she used was nutritional: the institute needed input — research, investigation, deeper anatomical study — to feed the springs that produced its outflow. This was not optional, she said. Without it, the teaching would calcify into doctrine and the practice would lose its capacity to develop.
"This is the level where we are now. We have got to understand those nutritional materials and be able to understandingly put them together, not to supersede the recipe in the early stage of the game, that recipe is going to be good down to the end of the line for beginning work. But after all is said and done, we have many demands that are further along than beginning work. To me personally, we have a consistent and continuous need for input, that is among the teachers and the people who are developing this, a need for input in order to feed the springs that give the outflow, we must know if we have to progress further. We must know more about the structure with which we as welfare are dealing. What is it we're doing to and with these structures? For it is the change in structure which manifests or doesn't manifest or is it only an index for behavior?"
Continuing the same address, Ida lays out the research mandate:
The research mandate was not abstract. By the mid-1970s Ida had recruited Valerie Hunt, who was running electromyography studies on practitioners' subjects at UCLA, and physicists and chemists who were beginning to formulate the work's effects in terms of energy, thermodynamics, and connective-tissue colloid chemistry. The CFHA (Healing Arts) lectures from 1974 are essentially a research conference embedded inside an advanced class — Hunt presenting her findings, others presenting on entropy and energy fields, Ida framing each contribution. The Boulder institute was meant to be the permanent home for this kind of work.
"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. So my conclusions on this initial study on electrical activity from the neuromuscular system and the patterning of energy of the neuromuscular system were these: that the movement was smoother, it was larger, it was more dynamic, it was more energetic after Rolfing that there was less extraneous movements extraneous meaning extraneous to the act that the postures were improved that the erect carriage was less obviously under strain and particularly during held positions."
At the 1974 Healing Arts conference, Valerie Hunt presents her first electromyography study on subjects of Structural Integration:
Hunt's second study went further. Working with subjects who reported memory flashbacks, emotional shifts, and altered states of consciousness during sessions, she designed protocols that tracked the neuromuscular signature of those experiences. Her tentative conclusions — that the work produced effects on human energy systems in the direction of what physicists call negative entropy, and that those effects could be measured as coherency rather than as raw energy quantity — were exactly the kind of theoretical framework Ida had been waiting for. They gave the institute a vocabulary it had not previously had.
"Institute. My tentative conclusions are that Rolfing has a profound effect upon human energy systems in the direction of negative entropy, The counteracting of entropy: there are at least two aspects of the energy systems brought into greater coherency, and the physicists describe coherency to us and state that coherent energy or energy, for example, that goes through a laser beam places energy in unified directions, in a single direction, and that very small quantities of coherent energy are equal to atomic bomb energy and very large quantities of incoherent energy or dissipated energy is like random trade winds. They may be pleasant if you don't do much with them. I think that one of our goals should be human coherent energy in our quest and not just more energy. We might even solve our food problems. If we had coherent energy, we wouldn't have to feed the fuel as often. It's my opinion that Doctor. Roth has envisioned really a rather tremendous concept about the human being toward man, toward his improvement, toward his evolution, and for me personally, she and the Roth Institute have made it possible for me to move into another area of research which I'm sure will be the area that I will stay in the rest of my professional life. I hope to get information out to other researchers so that they can not only question what I have done, but they can also use some of the techniques because I feel quite sure that some of this information will have an impact upon all the disciplines that exist that have to do with the human condition or human behavior."
Concluding her presentation at the 1974 Healing Arts conference, Hunt summarizes her tentative conclusions:
Energy, fascia, and the institute's intellectual frontier
The intellectual frontier the Boulder institute was meant to occupy was, in Ida's own framing, the territory of the energy body. She had spent her career working with myofascial structure, and by the mid-1970s she was convinced that the manipulation of fascia was producing effects that could not be fully accounted for by mechanical reorganization alone. There was something else going on — something her colleagues from physics and physiology were beginning to formulate in terms of energy fields, frequencies, and connective-tissue resonance. The institute, she felt, had to be the place where this question was investigated seriously.
"But bear in mind, our work is synthetic integration, a contribution toward knowledge and a creation of a wholeness and the understanding of how a man who is more nearly whole behaves. Now it is not merely the knowledge of anatomy or anatomical facts, not even facial anatomy and its facts. It is the voluntary creation of a man nearer to the goal signified by Norbert Weiner, and most of you have heard me say this before, a more human use of human beings. This is our goal, to create that kind of a man. And this goal I feel is mirrored, decidedly nearer than it was even a year ago. And if you think I have been too freely imbibing of that nectar that they have up on Cloud 9, it would be an idea to talk to some of the more recent advanced students and see how they feel about what their ability is to see and to work at this point. So as I say, we are bragging. We are bragging about how much better we can do at this point than we could have a year ago. But now let's leave that one for the time being. All of you, however, know that my personal goal in the study of Rolfing is the study of the energy body 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."
In the same IPR address, Ida names her personal goal for the institute's research direction:
Valerie Hunt's contribution to this frontier was empirical; Julian Silverman's and Lewis's were more theoretical. The 1976 advanced class in New Jersey, by Ida's own account, was the moment when one of her senior colleagues — Lewis — was developing what she called challenging and intriguing theories about the development of the human being. She framed his contribution as something the institute should take pride in, something that should be published. The institutional architecture being assembled in Boulder was meant to provide a venue for exactly that kind of work.
"aspect? Heaven forbid, by no means. We are, or at least we should, be adding to our tools to enable us to create a more effective whole. Lewis and Ron will later show you the evidence of their zeal and labor a result of which Lewis has developed some very challenging and intriguing revolutionary theories concerning the development of the life manifestation which we call a human being. I do so hope he will get these ideas into print soon, see Lewis Ida, so that we may all share them because when this happens we will be able to take great pride in this contribution. Great pride that such a contribution, such a revolutionary contribution, has come out of the insights which have been fostered, created by Rolfing. And so let me do it once again, I hope he will publish it soon. I'm sure that all the people in the advanced class of the '76 in New Jersey will bear me out in applauding the contribution which has been made toward a greater effectiveness of the advanced methods at the hands of Ralfas resulting from that greater understanding, that greater understanding of these systems and of how these systems are put together. But bear in mind, our work is synthetic integration, a contribution toward knowledge and a creation of a wholeness and the understanding of how a man who is more nearly whole behaves."
Earlier in the same address, Ida acknowledges Lewis and Ron's contribution:
The body as plastic medium — the doctrinal core
Across the Boulder-era talks, Ida returned again and again to one foundational claim: that the body is a plastic medium. This was not a metaphor for her. It was the precondition for the entire enterprise — without plasticity, the manipulation of fascia could not produce lasting change; without lasting change, there would be no work to teach; without a work to teach, no institute. The plastic-medium doctrine is what made everything else possible, and Ida spent considerable time in the 1974 Healing Arts lectures defining it precisely.
"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."
At the 1974 Healing Arts advanced class, Ida defines the body as a plastic medium:
Plasticity, as Ida defined it, was not a vague pliability. It was a specific chemical claim about the collagen protein and the inorganic bonds between its braided strands. The bonds — hydrogen sometimes, sodium sometimes, calcium sometimes — were interchangeable within limits, and the addition of energy could shift the ratio toward more flexible, less stiff configurations. The practitioner's pressure was the energy being added. This was not mysticism. It was, in Ida's view, ordinary thermodynamics applied to connective tissue.
"Two factors contribute to this: the first that the body, seemingly a unit, is in fact not a unit but a consolidation of large segments: the head, the thorax, the pelvis, the legs. The relation of these segments can be changed because the connecting myofascial structure is a structure of connective tissue of collagen. This is what that myofascial body is about. And collagen is a unique protein. The collagen molecule is a very large protein and it is a braiding of three strands a special braiding. These three strands are connected by various inorganic hydrogen sometimes, sodium sometimes, calcium sometimes, and undoubtedly other minerals. These minerals are interchangeable within limits. Thus, as the body grows older and stiffer, undoubtedly a larger percentage of calcium and a smaller percentage of sodium are present in these bonds. But by the addition of energy and what is energy? In this come in this context, it can it is the pressure of the fingers or the elbow of the ralpha. This ratio may be varied by the addition of this energy, and the joint or the connective tissue becomes more resilient, more flexible."
Continuing the same Healing Arts lecture, Ida names the chemical mechanism of plasticity:
Fascia, in this account, becomes the organ of structure — not a wrapping around muscle but the substrate that determines what the body's shape actually is. Ida liked to use the image of an orange whose contents have been scooped out, leaving only the skin: a recognizable orange-shape, made entirely of connective tissue. In theory, she said, the same could be done with a human body. What would remain would be the fascial scaffold, and it would still recognizably be that person. The implication is that working on fascia is not peripheral. It is working on the structural identity of the body itself.
"factory go, but fascia is the stuff that keeps it from falling in on itself, falling in on its face, keeps you from falling on your face. It is your fascial body that supports you, relates you, and you know as with a child, you fool them sometimes by scooping out the material of the orange and leaving the skin and then putting the two heads together and you say to the kid now this is this is an orange and you see how long it takes that young ster to find out that it isn't an orange, that hits a ball of fascia. And so with with a a human being, in theory at least, you could scoop out the stuff that makes the factory go, the chemicals and so forth, and you would have left this supportive body of fascia. And it is this body which has had very little, almost no exploration in the sense that we have been giving to it. I remember sending somebody who came to me as a student and I set them the question of I set them to answer the question, what is fascia? She decided that was lots of fun. She'd go to the library. She'd have the answer in no time. She went to the library. She spent two days in the library, and she couldn't find the answer. 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."
At the 1974 Healing Arts advanced class, Ida defines fascia as the organ of structure:
Posture, structure, and the institutional voice
By the Boulder period Ida had refined a distinction that became almost catechistic in her teaching: the difference between structure and posture. Structure, she said, is relationship — the way the parts of the body are placed in space relative to each other and to the gravitational field. Posture is what you do with structure. The verbal distinction matters because it is the institutional self-definition of the work. Structural Integration is not posture work. It is structure work. The institute, in branding itself, was insisting on this difference.
"None of these older systems have ever taken into consideration that you cannot get so called posture except as you have structure. Structure is 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. And when you have to make effort concerning anything in your body, it's a very bad sign. You don't usually interpret it in view of the next words."
In a public talk preserved on the Topanga tape, Ida distinguishes structure from posture:
The structure-and-posture distinction is also what allowed Ida to claim that the work was something genuinely new rather than a variant of chiropractic, osteopathy, or the various body-mechanics schools that had preceded it. Other schools, she said, taught the measuring stick of verticality but not the method of achieving it. The institute's claim was that the method existed — that the body's plastic medium could be reorganized into verticality through the systematic application of pressure to the fascial planes. This claim required institutional defense, and the Boulder consolidation was, among other things, the venue for that defense.
"And only now, this is coming up again, And And I am saying to you, and I don't get to how many people say this, that we have a more fundamental way, a more basic way of dealing with structure Now the reason we have this way is because we have become sufficiently sophisticated to understand that structure is determined by the relationship of the individual body to the gravitational field. This is what often has offered in addition to any other school. What's the difference between this and this? Is the answer. We are the only group who recognize that in order for a living body to be at ease in its spatial environment on the earth, it must deal positively with gravity or rather gravity must deal positively with it. Because what we here in Lawton are here to do, we can't change the gravitational field. This is odd, but we just have nothing that means yet. But what we can do is to change the way the parts of the body that I have already referred to, how they fit together into a whole which can transmit the gravitational field. And in its energy, which is the energy of the earth, in its transmitting of that, it enhances its own energy field. You can change the body by virtue of the fact that its segments are segments of a whole and then the gravity can flow through. Now this is the basic concept of Rolfe. And tomorrow when I get you all together on the griddle, I'm going to ask you for this answer over and over again in many, many different forms. What does Rolfing contribute to the ideas of the world at the moment that no other schools of? And the answer is that we are using gravity as our tool. So you see, we don't escape to a nice little humble fact sheet. We're just as over proud of ourselves as the medics, but we are using gravity as our field, not chemistry. Now when you come to look at it, this is quite an idea because gravity is always there. You will never escape from it. From the day that single cell is fertilized and develops, gravity is with it. The fetus in the womb of the woman is under the effect of gravity."
At the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, Ida distinguishes the work from other healing schools:
Recipe and revision — what the recipe is for
The recipe — the ten-session protocol — was, for Ida, simultaneously the institute's most valuable teaching artifact and the thing senior practitioners had to learn to work beyond. The Boulder advanced classes in 1975 and 1976 are full of moments where Ida walks her senior students through the logic of the recipe, asking them to articulate what each hour is doing structurally, and pushing back when their answers stay at the level of technique rather than at the level of intention. She wanted them to see the recipe as a deliberate sequence, not a sequence to be reproduced but a sequence to be understood.
"I clearly I clearly saw, you know, last summer that continuation process and how and, you know, Dick talked about how, you know, the only reason it was broken into 10, you know, sessions like that was it because the body just couldn't take all that work. Couldn't take it right. But I just sitting on just trying to figure out how the hell she ever figured out that process, and then began to see it. What she did is what most of of us need to do more. She just sat and watched bodies. 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. And to me, word spectrum really comes to mind here. We're not only taking people along the spectrum of life, we're taking them on a very special spectrum. You can't be wishy washy about this. Every time you get wishy washy and people come in and they just want to have their head straightened out, know, they want some emotional release."
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, a senior practitioner articulates what Ida had been teaching about the recipe's internal logic:
The institutional implication of this view of the recipe is significant. If the ten hours are one continuous process artificially divided for the body's tolerance, then teaching the recipe well requires teaching not just the moves of each hour but the connective logic between them. This was the curriculum the Boulder advanced classes were designed to deliver. It also explains why Ida was so concerned, in the 1976 IPR address, with developing teachers rather than merely producing practitioners — the recipe's connective logic could only be transmitted by someone who had internalized it, not by someone who was merely competent at the moves.
"I think I've left more than one thing out. I tried to what I tried to do was to compress to get only the most essential aspects into as brief a definition as possible because obviously you could go into hundreds of other things. That's what I'm talking about, essential aspects. Okay. I I don't know what that is. Okay, go ahead Steve. Well, everything that John has said is very true and the only thing is that the way we accomplish stacking these blocks and we have to look at it as the connective tissue tissue being like an envelope around these blocks. And because of collagen, the characteristic of collagen, we're able to make these changes by manipulating Okay. How would you describe that characteristic? A plasticity about it. Right. Steve's the only auditor in his papers that had that in it. It's something we've always stressed in the past. That's the plasticity of the body. You don't change a non plastic medium. Good point. And that's what Rolfing is one of the major points of."
In the same Boulder class, another senior practitioner names the plasticity doctrine as the recipe's enabling condition:
Gravity is the therapist
If the structural-integration claim is that the body can be made to accept the gravitational field as a supportive rather than degrading force, then the practitioner's role in that claim is curiously modest. Ida liked to phrase it this way: she made no claim to be a therapist; her claim was that the work changed the body's basic web so that gravity — the actual therapist — could do its work. This formulation, gravity is the therapist, became something close to the institute's slogan. It is also the formulation that gave the work its theoretical humility: the practitioner is not the healer; the practitioner prepares the body for a healing it then accomplishes by itself, in relationship with the gravitational field.
"sense of this deep changing of the patterns of the fundamental structure of the body to conform with gravity. I have written, as I think probably all of you know, gravity is the therapist, and this is true and I make no claim to be a therapist, but I do make a claim that says that Rothschild changes the basic web of the body so that that therapist's gravity can really get in there. And I think and trust that all of you are willing to subscribe to that claim and to spread it. I know it sometimes is very hard to find the right words to talk about what you do, but here are a couple that are pretty good. Now you see what I am talking about really is just part of the general history of ideas and their development, their application, ideas in general. A revolutionary idea develops first as an intuitive perception in the mind of the pioneer or the innovator."
In the same IPR conference address, Ida frames gravity as the therapist:
The gravity-as-therapist formulation also gave Ida a way to describe the institutional development of the work in terms borrowed from the history of ideas. A revolutionary idea, she said, begins as intuitive perception in the mind of an innovator — an art form, in effect. Then it progresses through analytical examination and scientific formulation. Esalen, she said, was where the practice existed as art form. The Boulder institute was where it would exist as analyzed, replicable, transmissible practice. The shift from one to the other was the shift the institute was built to accomplish.
"A revolutionary idea develops first as an intuitive perception in the mind of the pioneer or the innovator. At this point in in its life it is practically an art form. It is an art form perceived as a whole embodying a total idea demanding a total expression, and this is where Rolfing was in the days of Esselen, the days which I have been describing. This was an art form that caught the imagination of a lot of people. At the time of Fritz Perles and those other those other founding friends this fairly expressed its level. But like so many ideas this has progressed to a level where it is now being examined and analyzed and fitted with words suitable for the current idiom. In other words, the idea progresses, I'm talking about ideas in general and Rolfing in particular, The idea progresses from an odd expression into a scientific understanding and thorough analysis, and you can see to what extent this is beginning to describe what you are seeing around you here. Do I think scientific analysis is the answer to all problems? Definitely not, certainly not. I think synthetic integration is a far higher form, and this is what, by the grace of God, we will still be able to call integration. I think for one thing science, but science is not all that bad, you can't just dam it out of hand. For one thing it permits and it encourages replication. And before the method can be taught replication must be possible. You all remember, I'm sure, hearing me the wail, the shortcomings of Rolfers. Don't think any of you have any doubts about that. You've all heard me scream and wail, you all can take a body apart, but the number of people who can get it together are very few. The number of people who can put it together are very few."
Continuing the same address, Ida describes the work's development through stages:
The biographical scaffolding
By the time the Boulder institute opened, Ida was approaching eighty. The Structure Lectures opened with a long biographical introduction — Barnard PhD in 1916, Rockefeller Institute, the European trip in the late 1920s, the lectures of Schrödinger and Debye in Zurich, the slow emergence of what would become Structural Integration. This biographical scaffolding mattered institutionally because it gave the practice a pedigree. The institute could present itself as the continuation of a research lineage that ran through the most rigorous scientific institutions of the early twentieth century. Ida was not a frontier mystic. She was a Rockefeller-trained organic chemist who had worked on Salvarsan.
"Rolf was born, raised, and educated in New York City. She received her PhD in 1916 from Barnard College as a research chemist. Now at that particular time, few American women sought degrees as research scientists and still fewer were given employment in research institutions. Ida Rolf was immediately hired by the Rockefeller Institute. In the late 1920s, Doctor. Rolfe was sent to Europe by the Institute, and it was during that time that she sat in on some lectures of Erwin Scheddinger at the University in Zurich. She began to suspect that there was a direct relationship between human behavior and both body physics and body chemistry. This was the genesis of the idea of structural integration. At 80 years, Ida Rolfe not only continues supervision of her students, but she has recently supplied a great book to the world's understanding of Rolfeing. Only a year ago, a classic discussion of her theories and practice appeared in the book Rolfeing, The Integration of Human Structures. Heider Rolf is a benefactor of both the bodies and spirits of humankind. We stand in her debt, and we honor her creativity and genius."
An introducer at the 1974 Structure Lectures sets out Ida's biographical credentials:
Ida herself would occasionally fill in details. The Rockefeller work, she explained, was in the organic chemistry department under Walter Jacobs and Michael Heidelberger; her specific assignment was chemotherapy, trying to develop a less toxic American Salvarsan to replace the unavailable German product. The European trip was an institutional one — she went to see what European laboratories were doing — and it was on that trip, traveling by train, that she first speculated about whether changing chemistry would change behavior, and whether the first way to change chemistry might be to change physics. These origin stories formed the institutional self-understanding of the work.
"lives at once. I'll get bored of this. If they settle down before I'll begin to get bored. Did you have children at that time when all of those things were falling? No, I think not. My eldest son, who many of you know, was born in '32, it seems to me, and I'm talking now about the twenties. What's the first idea that occurred to you that was like the seed of structural integration? I don't know, but I remember speculating as I was traveling on a train in Europe as to what was going to happen in terms of behavior if you change chemistry. I remember speculating on that. What was going to happen if you change chemistry? How would you change chemistry? The first way to change chemistry would be to change physics. Mhmm. This I recall. I don't know where it came from. It was just an accident. The the work that you did in you had studied in Europe, right? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. And I studied in Europe, but that wasn't my elementary study. My elementary studying was all here in The States. Well, know very little about the man Schrodinger? Schrodinger, yeah. Tell me what did you learn from Schrodinger? Schrodinger was a mathematician. And actually I probably learned less from Schrodinger than I did from Dubai who was a physicist. And what I learned from Schrodinger was how to understand the physicist of Bayes."
In the 1974 Structure Lectures, Ida recalls her own intellectual origins:
What a practitioner has to know
The Boulder institute had to set training standards. Ida's account of what a certified practitioner needed to know shifted over the years, but by the Boulder period the answer had become reasonably stable: substantial knowledge of anatomy and physiology, exposure to massage work so that the trainee discovered whether handling bodies was actually congenial, and then the training in the work itself. The institute's pedagogy involved sending applicants without scientific background a year of reading first — biology, anatomy, the medical sciences — and then evaluating their written responses to assigned questions to see whether they merely copied textbooks or constructed independent ideas.
"Oh, yes. Now, rolfing sounds like technique which is not simple. Nobody can just run out and -It's decide to be a not simple. -What is the training that a rolfer receives? -Well, the first thing we if we take in people who have no background in physiology or anatomy or the medical biological sciences, the first thing we do is give them almost a year of reading. -In physiology and -In biology all and kinds of things that indicate that have to do with the biological sciences. If, on the other hand, they have had pre medical training or medical training and so forth and so forth, they've had a lot of this and they go on into something more highly specialized. And then at the end of that time they are supposed to write us a report answering certain questions which we give them, the point of these questions being to find out whether that individual in answering that question goes to the textbook and copies the textbook, or whether he takes the material and constructs an idea independently. Now when you say we, whom are you speaking of? Mostly Ida Pirov. So you are still the individual who certifies and directs the training. And who directs the training."
In a public interview, Ida describes the institute's training requirements:
Ida was also frank about who could do the work physically. The training was open to women but required a heavyset, sturdy build — too much pressure was needed for it to be sustainable by smaller practitioners. By the early 1970s perhaps a quarter of certified practitioners were women, and the proportion would shift further over time. The geographical distribution was uneven: California had roughly half the practitioners; some states had one or two; some had none. The Boulder consolidation was, in part, an attempt to even out this distribution by giving the institute a central training venue accessible to students from anywhere.
"Now tell me So I'm not exactly sitting in a wheelchair even though that's what people think when they see me around here. Tell me about the Rolfe Institute. Well, what would you like to know? Where is it? Oh, it's in Boulder, Colorado. And it consists of a man who is the director in general and a couple of assistants to himself. And now, thanks be to God and the passage of the progression of time, we are now having a building of our own, which we've never had before, where classes will be taught. Now if an individual might be interested in being rolfed, how would that individual go about finding a rolfer? He usually has heard about rolting through someone. The other way he can do is to write to the Roth Institute in Boulder and ask them for recommendation of somebody that lives the closest relative to himself. Of course, they're not going to say that John is much better than Jim, but they will say that John lives a lot closer to you than Jim lives a 100 miles away, or something of this sort, you see. Now, most of the rolfers that I know of are men, and yet you, a woman, established the discipline. Are there many women rolfers? There are. I don't know what a quarter maybe. It's too hard work for any but a very heavyset, sturdy woman, a peasant type body."
In a public interview, Ida describes the Boulder institute and the distribution of practitioners:
Coda: the institute as Ida's continuation
What the Boulder years finally accomplished, in Ida's own framing, was the conversion of a single teacher's work into a transmissible practice. The institute would outlast her — she was already eighty when much of this was being recorded, and she knew it. The architecture being assembled in Colorado was meant to ensure that the work would have a permanent home, a research program, a curriculum that produced not just practitioners but teachers, and a theoretical vocabulary adequate to its own claims. Whether all of these ambitions were realized in the form she imagined is a question for the institutional history that followed. What the recordings document is the moment of intention — the moment when Ida named what the institute was for.
"And you're trying to see whether you can get something that's better. Of course. And what are your goals for Rolfing now? I'm not quite sure that I know what you intend to ask when you're intending to ask about goals. What do I expect will do? I expect it will do too. We just, you know, not do that, though? I was just trying to remember if you had any plans in the future for expanding or for We just sort of grow like topsy. I mean, we don't get a lot of plans about how we're going to expand because all of a sudden, here is an opportunity, and you grab it, or I grab it. This is the way we've gone from a two handed community of office. I mean, simply two hands to four hands and now to have a nose 400 hands, probably. One last question, and I think it's important."
Asked in a public interview about her goals for the institute, Ida resists the framing of planned expansion:
The institute's continuation depended on more than buildings and curriculum. It depended on the senior practitioners' willingness to keep refining the practice — to accept Ida's repeated insistence that what had worked five or ten years earlier was no longer sufficient, that the technique had to deepen, that the recipe had to be understood as well as performed. Ida's complaints about senior practitioners who resisted further training were a regular feature of her Boulder-era talks. The institute, she felt, had to keep moving or it would die.
"And, of course, thank God, they've not only been changing, they've been developing. Actually, you need to be more conscious. I hear a certain amount of complaints going on these days because some of you who are in those older earlier brackets of Rolfing are complaining because we have so many new classes and we keep telling everybody about the difference in the teaching nowadays from the old teaching and so forth. But actually you see if we weren't changing in this very rapidly changing world we also would be in the garbage pail, I fear. It is this capacity for change and the fact that from somewhere out of the blue we are given a vision of how we can change that keeps us as a valuable contributor to the culture of today. And so I ask you that you look at this the next time you are inclined to complain because it is being suggested that you take further training in Rolfing and actually recognize the fact that that which worked five years ago, six years ago, ten years ago, It still works, but it doesn't work well enough, it doesn't work deeply enough, it doesn't get where we should be going in order to show what Rolfing really can do. Rolfing in the sense of this deep changing of the patterns of the fundamental structure of the body to conform with gravity. I have written, as I think probably all of you know, gravity is the therapist, and this is true and I make no claim to be a therapist, but I do make a claim that says that Rothschild changes the basic web of the body so that that therapist's gravity can really get in there. And I think and trust that all of you are willing to subscribe to that claim and to spread it. I know it sometimes is very hard to find the right words to talk about what you do, but here are a couple that are pretty good."
In the same IPR address, Ida addresses the older generation of practitioners directly:
By the late 1970s the institute had its building, its board, its research program, its training architecture, and its founding doctrine in published form. The Esalen years were memory; the Boulder years were the present. Ida would die in 1979, three years after the most ambitious of the institutional plans documented here were articulated. What the recordings preserve is the voice of the founder while she was still in charge, naming what the institute was for, and asking her colleagues to carry it forward.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, PSYTOD1/PSYTOD2 (Mystery Tapes CD2) — extended public interviews from the 1971-72 period covering training requirements, the institute's practitioner distribution, fee structures, and Ida's own assessment of what the work had meant to her life. These passages are referenced throughout but contain additional institutional detail not quoted in full. PSYTOD1 ▸PSYTOD2 ▸SIIPR2 ▸
See also: See also: Healing Arts conference 1974 (CFHA series) — Valerie Hunt's full presentations on electromyography and bioelectric studies of subjects of the work, including the second study on emotional and consciousness changes. These tapes document the research culture the Boulder institute was meant to sustain. CFHA_03 ▸CFHA_04 ▸CFHA_02 ▸
See also: See also: Open Universe Class 1974 (UNI_043, UNI_044, UNI_073) — sessions where practitioners and subjects describe the experiential dimension of the work, with Ida and colleagues framing it as research material for the institute. UNI_043 ▸UNI_044 ▸UNI_073 ▸
See also: See also: RolfB2, RolfB3, RolfB6 (public tapes) — extended teaching sessions from the Boulder period covering recipe structure, fascial chemistry, and the theoretical model of energy flow through the joints that the institute's research program was beginning to develop. RolfB2Side1 ▸RolfB3Side1 ▸RolfB6Side1a ▸RolfB6Side2b ▸