Ruth and the lost centerline
Ida opened her 1976 Boulder advanced class with a story about a dancer — Ruth — whose diary entry she had carried in her memory for decades. The dancer had written, on certain nights, that she could not dance well because she could not find her line. For Ida, this was a fragment of evidence from outside her own discipline that the question of a centerline was real, not invented by her, and that even gifted performers without a structural vocabulary could sense its presence or absence. The story functions in the classroom as a permission slip: the reader, she implies, has the same proprioceptive equipment as Ruth, and can verify the claim by experiment in the room. Ida then moved her advanced students toward exactly that experiment — asking them to stand and feel where the line would have to run for the body to function as a unit.
"Where will be the center for a center line in the body? Will it be on the outside of the body? I mean the lateral sides of the body? No, it's got to be the middle of the body, don't it? So you have to build up toward the middle and not detract from it by taking it apart. Now I'd like every one of you to stand right in place at this moment for a minute. Get yourself comfortable and feel where you are in that body. You don't accept your head as being you. Seal at centerline if you can that Ruth was looking for. And where does it have to run? Now let your weight go over to your outer arches. What happens? You lose your line."
Boulder, 1976. Ida frames the centerline as a question the body itself must answer.
Notice how Ida posed the centerline as a problem of position rather than concept. Where can a center for a center line in the body actually be? She refused the abstraction and pushed her students into a felt experiment. The classroom in that moment was not receiving doctrine; it was being asked to verify, in standing, whether the line could be located. This is the pedagogical move that distinguishes her late advanced teaching from any anatomical lecture — she trusted the body in the room to answer the question if the question was posed properly.
The inner arch and the unit body
Having established that the centerline must run through the middle of the body, Ida then asked the class to demonstrate to themselves what happens when the line is broken at its lowest point — the foot. She had them shift their weight to the outer arches and report what they felt. The answer came back: the line was lost; the body was no longer a unit. This is one of the rare moments in the transcripts where Ida runs a kinesthetic experiment in real time and lets the students' own perception furnish the evidence. The teaching beat is precise: weight on the outer arch destroys the centerline. The centerline lives along the inside of the leg.
"Now let your weight go over to your outer arches. What happens? You lose your line. It's called you're no longer a unit."
Ida directs the class into the felt experiment.
She then pressed harder. She named, with some irritation, the conventional teaching that weight should fall through the three center toes — a piece of advice she had encountered repeatedly from physical-education traditions and which she found contradicted by experiment. The passage that follows is one of the clearest doctrinal statements in her late teaching about where the centerline actually lives in the body.
"Your center line connects down the inside of the leg. Your center line is destroyed as weight goes on to the outer arch."
Ida names the medial leg as the locus of the centerline.
What Ida is doing here is correcting the inherited textbook in the room. She allows that the three-center-toes formulation may be a sound abstraction — but she insists that the silent level, the felt level, contradicts it for any body that is actually trying to be a unit. The negative way to find the centerline, she said, is simply not to let the weight roll out. The positive way is to turn the toes up and let the line run back up through the middle.
"to put the weight back again into the center line. See what you begin to feel as you begin to feel the establishment of that center line. And where it goes as it goes up into the body and what you are aware of in terms of its lacks and what you are aware of in terms of its ability to help you unify yourself. Realize that when you are standing with your weight flowing down on the outer arch, you are destroying the unity within yourself. Now this is what I jumped on yesterday when I came in and somebody was telling me from some book or other, it might even have been a book of my lectures, That weight has to go through the three center toes."
She works through the recovery move in real time.
Standing with the weight flowing
Once the centerline is found, the question becomes what the practitioner is doing with it. Ida used the verb flowing to describe the relationship between weight and the centerline — not pressing, not loading, but flowing. The distinction matters. A column of stacked blocks merely loads; a body in balance permits weight to flow down through the medial line and meet the ground without breaking the unity. When weight flows out to the lateral arch, the unity is destroyed; when it flows down through the inside of the leg, the body is one piece, and gravity does the supporting work rather than the breaking work.
" Realize that when you are standing with your weight flowing"
The conclusion of the demonstration.
She finished the demonstration by closing the loop — naming what destroys the unity when weight is permitted to roll laterally. The 1976 students were given the high-order abstraction only after the silent level had spoken. This is the order of operations she insisted on: experiment first, then language, then doctrine. The textbook formulation about the three center toes is dismissed not because it is wrong as geometry but because it bypasses the felt verification.
"Now this is what I jumped on yesterday when I came in and somebody was telling me from some book or other, it might even have been a book of my lectures, That weight has to go through the three center toes. It's true. This is the abstraction. But what is the silent level? You're feeling it right now. The silent level is talking to you. The silent level is telling you how you can get to act at one with gravity. One of the ways you can do it is by turning your toes up so as to run that line up through the middle. Certainly the negative way to do it is not to let the weight go down on the outer arch. Now after you got all of this done then it's time to put it into the high order abstraction."
Closing the centerline demonstration.
Building the centerline from the ground up
The recipe Ida built, taught, and refined over twenty-five years can be read as a slow construction of the medial vertical from the ground up. The first hour frees the pelvis from above; the second hour begins to put support under it through the feet, ankles, and lower legs. By the second hour the student is, in her words, heading vertically again — the feet and ankles begin to establish the horizontal hinges through which a vertical line can later be claimed. The advanced students of 1975 Boulder recognized that each horizontal established below is the precondition for verticality above.
"Well yesterday someone, I don't know who said it to me, it's Michael Salison's concept of the fascial tube which starts in the cervicals and goes in the second hour when you start working on the ankles you're heading vertically again. Know that each horizontal that you bring out down below reflects itself upward as we saw in Takashi yesterday where he's working on his leg and you can see his rib cage absorbing the change. 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."
A Boulder student in 1975 names the second hour as the return to verticality.
The argument is mechanical and elegant. If the body is going to balance around a vertical line, then the joints through which that line passes must be available as hinges. Ankles, knees, hips — each must move on a horizontal plane, and each must be free to do so. The legs are the only structure through which the vertical line can reach the ground. Ida's recipe addresses the legs early — the second hour, the third hour, the fourth hour — precisely because no later work on the trunk can take if the support underneath is absent or aberrated.
"point of perspective to see the whole body and to try to establish the horizontals from top to bottom. What's the point of establishing horizontals? Okay. So how are you gonna do it? Well, beginning the metatarsal hinge, you start establishing the horizontals at the feet, the metatarsal hinge, the ankle and working right up the body, using, using the appropriate movements and your hands resisting your body's tendency to try and go away from the horizontal and establish those horizontals, using a two directional movement. In the body itself, I want to turn several joints. The relationship of the fascial envelopes underneath the skin. And this isn't quite what I hear is true. Would you know what I wanted to hear, Hal? Well, me start with an assumption that the most efficient movement of the erect human is by movement of joints that are defined by a horizontal axis. Particularly at the ankle, the knee and the pelvis. And if that's so, if that's what, if that's the equipment that we have in an evolutionary sense, that's what's available to us, that's the optimum functioning of the individual, then it would follow that the balanced organism would be so constructed that when it's in balance these hinges would be horizontal. You know, I sort of go around that and be secular. You know, taking advantage of that circularity, behind which everybody lived and hides from time to time. And so when the, what determines the actual configuration of structure is the combination of weight and tension held both in the fascia and in the musculature."
An advanced-class discussion lays out the horizontal-hinge argument.
The second hour: support under the centerline
In the 1975 Boulder class Ida pressed her students to articulate what the second hour was doing in terms of the whole body, not in terms of moves. The answer she was after was that the second hour puts support underneath the work the first hour had begun. The legs, as she put it elsewhere, are the only structure through which the trunk can transmit its weight to the ground; if the lower leg is not supporting the knee, and the knee is not supporting the thigh, then nothing above can take. The second hour, in her construction, is the hour where the centerline begins to have a foundation.
"And give a pelvic lift, do some work over that and lengthen the back a little bit. Suppose rather than describe the move, like give a pelvic lift, lengthen the hamstrings, that you abstract it to what you are doing to the body in space by virtue of what you're doing with your Well, lengthening the lumbar. I just mean to pull your focus back a little bit more and keep it on the whole body. Now, you just mentioned doing two or three things and it seems like you ought to be able to see that as a whole totality. Well, go ahead. When you lengthen the lumbar by giving a pelvic lift, what you've done is you've affected the cervicals too And you have to get some more space and lengthen the cervicals and work from there. Is that what you mean? Different to do is balance out some of the work that you've done on the spine by lengthening the back a little bit."
Ida pushes a 1975 Santa Monica student to abstract the second hour into its structural function.
She continued the discussion with the same student into the second hour's broader purpose — using the picture in the patient's mind. Ida liked to put before-and-after photographs into the patient's hands and say, in effect, look how your lower leg is not supporting your knee, and your knee is not supporting your thigh. The teaching here is double: it is for the practitioner and for the patient. The legs must visibly come under the pelvis. The picture is the proof.
"When you have your own patient there, you can take and show them their own pictures and say, do you see how your lower leg is not supporting your knees? It's not supporting your upper leg. It's not supporting your thigh. It's not supporting your pelvis. Make them understand this, and make yourself understand that above The thing that's usually obvious in the picture, I usually point out to people, is that the weight is going lateral. On the lower also true. And also that there's a But when you look at rotation. When you look at the side view, you can usually see that the leg is not really under the body. Mhmm. Right. You see, and as you begin to give them reality on these things, then you are released from the necessity of finding words which are going to convey this to me."
Ida instructs the practitioner to show the patient her own legs in the picture.
The same ankle work returns in later sessions, in different vocabulary. In the public-tape lectures Ida returned to the second hour repeatedly to clarify the relationship between the ankle, the foot, and the dorsum joint — the lowest of the horizontal hinges. The second hour, she insisted, is where the practitioner connects the pelvis up to the floor by establishing two functional hinge joints in the foot and ankle. Without both of them mobile, the centerline cannot reach the ground.
"And then in the second hour, realizing that except we connected that pelvis up to the floor through the action of the ankle joint, we were not getting anywhere. And those of you who were real smart realized that not only must you get movement in the ankle joint, but you must get movement in the foot and as I usually express it in this room you must get hinge joints horizontal hinge joints and you get the first and the lowest one across the dorsum of the foot. Sometimes it's pretty hard to get in. It's always easier to get movement in the ankle joint because they have had, if they're going to be mobile at all and walking at all, they've got to have movement in that ankle no matter how core it is or how distorted it is. They've got to move at the ankle. But they don't have to move at the dorsum of the foot. They can walk around that joint. They don't walk very well, but nevertheless, they move. And they're never aware of the fact that they ought to be walking better. Because as far as they're concerned, this is a foot, this is foot, this is a foot, and it's my foot, and therefore, it's a normal foot. This isn't so. Your first joint is across the dorsum of the foot, your second joint is at the ankle and both of them have to be operational before you can start getting operational joints properly operational joints at the knee and at the hip and then start up the spine. You see, it's a it's an absurdly simple concept.
Ida walks through the two hinge joints of the foot in the second hour.
The lateral collapse: weight on the outside
Ida returned obsessively to the failure mode of the centerline: weight flowing laterally rather than medially. In her 1974 Healing Arts lecture she put up slides of the leg bones to show what happens when the gravity line falls in front of the heel rather than through the heavy weight-bearing bones. The same point, in a different vocabulary, appears in every advanced class — the kid taught to stand on the front of the foot, the soldier with shoulders back, the dancer with weight outboard. In each case the centerline runs through soft tissue rather than through bone, and the body is forced into compensatory shortening to keep itself upright.
"Here you have something that conforms to those to that series of blocks, that stacking, that stable stacking of blocks, and you can see how the blocks, the bones are one on top of the other as the blocks were. You can almost imagine that they could stand alone without wrapping. Now, notice where the gravity line goes through, right in front of the heel, and if it goes through and meets the ground in front of the heel, it goes through the middle of the knee, it goes through the bony joint of the hip. This is the way we teach our kids in the school to stand. Stand on your toes. Stand on the front of your foot. This is what happens. The bone the line no longer runs through the bones. It runs through the soft tissue and it comes down here way ahead of the place where it belongs, way ahead. Now this is the guy that comes and says, oh, doc, my feet are killing me. And you say, yeah, but what else? Because you see here, weight always has to go through a hip joint if a man is to stand or even to sit. And after that, it has many options of where it can travel to get to the ground, and this is one of them. Now in the next picture, you'll see where with those options what happens as it goes up the line. I take it that this is the aberrated one, John? You'll see that the gravity line runs down toward way toward the front of the foot, not behind. It runs in front of the knee."
Ida walks the audience through the gravity line in two different leg architectures.
Notice how Ida joins the structural picture to the patient's complaint. The aberrated leg is the body that walks in saying, doc, my feet are killing me. The pain at the foot is the symptom; the broken centerline is the condition. She made it her practitioner's discipline to see beyond the symptom — the foot pain, the knee pain, the lower-back pain — to the geometry that produced it. The pictures she showed her students were not anatomy slides but maps of where the line had drifted.
"The only thing that keeps it from staying that way is the material that is within the body that has not been ordered, that rited."
Ida names what keeps an ordered body from staying ordered.
The fourth hour: the medial midline of the leg
If the second hour puts support under the pelvis from below and outside, the fourth hour returns to the legs to put support under the pelvis from below and inside. This is the hour Ida and her senior practitioners called the medial midline — the hour where the adductors are addressed, where the soft tissue along the inside of the thigh is freed and lengthened, where the centerline begins to inhabit the leg itself rather than being a notional line drawn on a diagram. In the 1976 Boulder teachers' class, Ida pressed her advanced practitioners to name what they always saw in a fourth-hour body.
"You got more to go. Why can't you be proud of your answer, but I don't. Well, you know, I was gonna set Now you people who are in the advanced class, at this point, should realize that everybody that comes in for a fourth hour shows one picture. They show a picture of lack of length in that midline. Most of the time, this lack of length is advertised by the crookedness of the medial line of the legs. And by golly, if somebody comes in for a fourth hour and doesn't show this, some Ralph has been falling down on the job."
Ida names the universal pre-fourth picture.
The senior 1975 Boulder practitioners had worked out the move and the verification in considerable detail. The tissue along the inside of the thigh, they had observed, tends to come up into the belly — the shortness in the medial leg is continuous with shortness up the front of the spine. The fourth hour, then, is not really a leg hour. It is the hour where the centerline reaches from the floor of the pelvis down through the medial leg, and the practitioner's hands work that medial line into a coherent vertical.
"That's where they're showing the stress. Okay, but if you follow the inside of the thigh vertically, where does it go? It's going into the belly. It's going right up the front of the spine and that's where you see the shortness, is through that whole aspect of the body inside. Okay. What then what you wanna do is start creating that midline and start moving things, you know, that way. Right. That's the way the tissue wants to go. And that's where what happens to tissue is it spreads laterally. Did you conceive of moving the tissue toward the midline? At this point? Right, I could conceive of it, but I'm not sure that, I mean, I think I've looked, I see that as an exception. When I worked on Roxanne, part of the work on her lower leg from here down was moving tissue to the midline. Because the body asked for that. And what you're trying to do essentially is let out that shortness that you see from the floor the diaphragm. So you see what you're seeing, if this is the lateral line, you're seeing this sort of thing happening."
An advanced student traces the medial line from the inside of the thigh up into the belly.
Ida herself was insistent that the move in the fourth hour was directional. The tissue along the inside of the leg should be moved toward the midline, not away from it. This sounds like a small technical detail but in the structure of her late teaching it is doctrinal — the centerline is being built, in the literal sense of tissue being repositioned, by the practitioner's hands. The medial line is not just a line one sees; it is a line one constructs.
"This is true, but now let's look at it in the same from the same vantage point that we've been looking before. The next place you're going to try to go is to organize the floor of the pelvis. Now the other thing that determines the floor of the pelvis is what is how the ramus is looked up. What is the distortion on the ramus that is giving you aberrative spanning of the floor of the toes. Okay. But to get into that area Alright. To get into the floor of the ramus, then you've gotta start on the inside of the legs. Peripherally. That's right. But to get in anyway, you've gotta start peripherally. Six months. You know that'll be fun before this class is over. Her the laws. You see She should've taken on that Steve. I'm right. My father was a lawyer. I'll do it. You see, when you look at it this way, the in the adjectives on the legs are simply the peripheral aspect of that range, that pelvic range. And you can look down as far as the knee and see whether it's this is the direct line, and then you see that the knee is determined also by what's below the knee. And in point of actual fact, you are going to find that the attachment of the hamstring at the inside of the knee manages to get itself more balled up than you can imagine. And I've had women who call or refer"
Ida lays out the fourth hour as the hour of the pelvic floor and the medial leg.
In the same 1976 Boulder discussion the senior practitioners pushed further into the fourth hour's purpose — the move toward the adductors, the separation of the adductor sheaths from the pubococcygeus, the way the practitioner's hands work to differentiate structures that have congealed into a single short mass along the inside of the leg. The midline, in the language of that class, is short, and the hour exists to lengthen it from the floor of the pelvis down to the medial knee.
"Okay. Mean, are people pulled down along that midline? I think they're short, but it's hard to say where they're really pulled, you know, sitting down. K. The midline's short. Right. It's I mean, it could go, you know, any direction. Right? Mhmm. But I think you need to think about that. Like, in the third hour, you talked about being pulled down. You know? And this may be the maybe most people are, but there's, you know, more than one direction along that line. And you don't wanna get in your head that it's only one way because I know I'll find a way that, you know, the body's showing a different pattern. Maybe Psychologically, it almost seems that more the pattern is more like that we're sucked up into the midline. You know, we're not quite ready to let our legs come down to earth. People could be pulled down into their ankles too. Yeah. But in any case, that midline usually looks short. I'd like to hear some more about the relationship or goals of the fourth since Tom said the adductors are already the main goal. And that makes sense. I see. Yeah. That's right. And I I know another source will say or it has said one time, the buccupacinia. That's the goal. You know? We're to separate the adductors and the PC so that the floor of pelvis"
The 1976 Boulder class works out the fourth hour as the lengthening of the inside of the leg.
Two girdles, one line
Ida treated the two girdles — pelvic and shoulder — as the body's doing apparatus, and the centerline as what made them work as a unit. The pelvic girdle, she said, is what you walk with. The shoulder girdle is what you do work with. But neither can do its job unless the line between them is intact. In her IPR lecture of August 1974, with the practitioners she most trusted in the room, Ida walked through the progression from the slopping wad of stuff that is an unintegrated body to the form built around a line that runs through ankles, knees, hips, lumbars, shoulders, and ears.
"So he has to be built around a line with breaks in it where he can adjust and get one part of the body balancing the other part of the body. But for balance, you see, you can only have a very slight deviation. You have to have these pieces effectively straight. On the other hand, you have to have the balance so that the straightness permits the fine balance, the fine movement that constitutes balance. Now, you hear what I've said? I've said you have to have junctions. You have to have major points where you can take the whole thorax and make it act as though it were one piece balancing on the whole lumbar and making that act as though it were one piece. Making you have there the definition of junction. It is the union between parts of the body which anatomically are very different. A rib cage has no relation whatsoever anatomically, spatially, yes, but anatomically. With the lumbar vertebra, as I said to you yesterday, as I called to your attention yesterday, the lumbar vertebra are vertebra which are practically horizontal and the spine of the vertebra extends virtually horizontally back from the body of the vertebra. But in a thoracic vertebra you have a vertebra that goes this way. And there has to be a place where that group of vertebrae with that configuration meets the group of vertebrae with this configuration and there is room for adjustment. Now this is true of every one of the major vertebrae, of every one of the major junctions. They are uniting pieces of anatomy. I recommend that expression. You like that? I thought you did. Pieces of anatomy that have different functions. The atlanto cervical or occipital cervical is cervical dorsal. In your mind's eyes see the change in structural configuration. The dorsal lumbar and perhaps the lumbosacral in that the sacral is the representative here of the pelvis. Now, that's the story of your junctions."
In her August 1974 IPR lecture, Ida names the line as the form around which the body is built.
She was at pains to insist, in that same lecture, that the line is not an axis around which the body simply stacks. It is a line with breaks in it — junctions, in her terminology — where one segment of anatomy can rebalance against another. Ankles, knees, lumbosacral, cervicothoracic, occipito-cervical. Each is a place where movement is possible because the segments above and below are anatomically distinct. The centerline is therefore both a structural fact and a dynamic possibility — it is a line of available movement, not a line of rigidity.
"He he closes on on his left side as he moves. Now where The movement hasn't really closed in around his vertical axis. Where do you think you will find the point of greatest weakness which will allow you to put the upper and the lower half together? No one's got a good eye. What do you see? I'm I'd say right there where the torso and the legs fit together. He could he still has no sense of that foundation under him. Well, look at his legs, and you'll see why. But I'm not going to start down with his feet, and I'm not going to start down with his ankles, and I'm not going to start down with his knees. I'm going to start at the crest of the ilium where the torso and the support for the torso come together. Does this make sense to you? John, you had something to say that I think somebody stole from you. Well, as I look at him, I'm sort of flashing back on that triangulation of the energy flow in the body I did a long time ago."
Ida and her senior students discuss where the upper and lower halves of a body fail to connect.
The teeter-totter and the centerline
In the 1976 Boulder advanced class a student named Doug offered Ida an image of the centered body as a teeter-totter. Ida accepted the visualization with a characteristic correction: the body is not as mobile as your image is, but otherwise it is a perfectly good idea. The exchange illustrates her late-career relationship to her own doctrine — she was generous with metaphors that approximated the truth, sharp about which features they preserved and which they did not. The centerline, in the teeter-totter image, is the fulcrum on the hip joint at the acetabulum; the legs are the supports that have to be available for the balance to operate.
"I get a real proof image of a Peter Totter. Well, there isn't too much wrong with that with that visualization, Doug. The only thing that's wrong with it is that your image is being more mobile than any of the facts of life are. It's not worth it. But other than that, it's a perfectly good idea. Right. And you see, when you come right down to your teeter totter, you are preparing for that when you first put your elbow around that hip joint in the first hour. This is one of the things that you are getting ready to do, to have movement around the head of the femur there, around the acetabulum, etcetera, etcetera. Okay. Anybody else got any comment about anything that would make this idea better? You were the one that brought out the idea that the lines of the body don't lend themselves to symmetry. Wasn't this where I started? There's another place where you can't get symmetry, and yet I tell you to look for it. See? There, you've got a horizontal across those ankles. You can't have a horizontal across those ankles because the fibula is bound to be lower than the tibia. It has to be. Yet as those ankles work, when they work properly, they work like a horizontal pinch."
Doug offers a teeter-totter image; Ida corrects it.
The lesson she pulled from that exchange was that physiological balance is not equal to anatomical symmetry. The legs themselves are not perfect mirrors; the ankle joint is structurally asymmetrical because the fibula does not sit at the same height as the tibia. Yet a balanced ankle functions as a horizontal hinge. The centerline lives in the functional plane, not the structural one. Practitioners trained to expect anatomical symmetry, she warned, would be ambushed by the bright raw feet — her phrase for the students who came in with arguments — and would lose the doctrine.
"out and things like that, especially in the service. You were balanced if you had your legs out, you were ready, your arms out. And so I perceive that as being balanced, and now I perceive that as being tight. When I get in a position, I feel the tension in my extrinsic muscles having to hold myself when I was left in the position. Now I a balance The balance is more of a feeling for me. So I don't like to understand it now. And my opinions about it are that the balance is in a higher place than people emphasize. You mean mean it it is in a a higher higher place? Place? Basewise. Basewise. Right. Distance wise from the floor. Well My own opinion is that there is no warning. Now this depends at any given moment on the To me, it's never any one place. It's always a line. I feel that if I think of my center of balance as anywhere in the pelvis or anywhere in the thorax or even the neck or the head, then I'm not down. And only when I I can feel my the entire line do You still have not gone out. So we could talk about what side and what side? We when you're talking about the sides or the front and the back, we're usually talking about short. So one side is short and the other one is the other their function is to help balance"
A 1973 Big Sur student describes the discovery that balance is a line, not a point.
The three planes that make the line
In her 1976 Boulder teaching Ida formalized the centerline as the emergent product of three planes. Verticality is the dimension; but the body finds its way to verticality only through two orthogonal horizontal planes — the plane in which the knees move and the plane in which the elbows move. The centerline is what happens when those planes are appropriately established. The argument relocates the centerline from an abstract axis into a relational outcome of properly hinged joints. The legs, in this picture, are where the lower horizontal — the plane of the knees — is established.
"When you get into advanced work, what you are trying to do is to control, establish, and appropriate dynamics for the project. Now it is a very interesting consideration and one which when you first come into consideration the body would not seem likely to be, that that body aligns itself into three space, into three dimensions. It's not random. It's three-dimensional and it has within it the elements which sense those three dimensions. And the one dimension is the vertical. The second dimension is the horizontal established by the elbows, which is a plane straight out and straight in from the bottom. Straight. We don't bend planes. And the other is a horizontal plane along which the knees move. Straight. And the amazing thing is that when you get these joints of the body understanding their place in life, namely to establish these three planes, then you get body ease and body well-being. And you can't sit back and talk about it, argue about it. It's on silent level. You need to see it. You need to understand And in this advanced work, the first thing that you tackled was the legs, the knees, getting those knees able to conform to that play, to that particular horizontal. And in so doing you began to find that you were establishing a vertical. You didn't have to try to establish the vertical. If you established the plane on which the knees moved appropriately, you have a vertical. And the next thing you try to do is to establish the plane along which the elbows should move and give some consideration to what your ideas of elbow movement were when you came into this class. And I hope when you go out today you will find you have moved a long way along because in order for that elbow to move on that plane that's at right angles."
Ida formalizes the centerline as the emergent product of three planes.
She added, with some impatience, that anatomical knowledge alone does not give the practitioner this picture. The anatomists who wrote the textbooks were experts in anatomy, she allowed, but knowing anatomy does not tell you anything about the dynamics of the body. The advanced practitioner had to work first with the legs — with the knees and ankles, with the plane along which the knees moved — and discover that the vertical line appeared as a consequence rather than as a target. You don't have to try to establish the vertical, she said. Establish the plane on which the knees move appropriately, and you have a vertical.
"I think it was known in the days of the Egyptians. I think that's what the factions say. Now, our balance, our horizontal horizontal comes comes out out of of the interaction of preplane. Knees moving forward, the elbows moving outward and the hips moving upward. Now those three claims have to be related before I accept it as balance. And those three claims, me being people are not theoretical claims that practical claims are the practical movement in the body of certain significant specific forms. And this puts it in to a three-dimensional material world. And all the rest of this stuff that you've been talking about has been in the realm of the anatomy books and not of the physiology physiology books. Yesterday when I was feeling the horizontal and I could feel them in one dimension. You can feel them right. And I was wondering how can you, how can I become aware of that three-dimensional line, the plane? You happy too? Very nice. Glory be to God. Thanks for everything. But you see what I say is true and I'm not vil ifying anyone."
Ida defines her notion of balance against competing definitions.
The recipe as continuation
By 1975 Ida had begun to teach the recipe explicitly as a continuation rather than as a sequence of distinct hours. The first hour is the beginning of the tenth; the second hour is the second half of the first; the third hour continues the second. The reason for breaking the work into ten sessions, as one senior student remembered her saying, was simply that the body could not take all that work at once. The legs are addressed across multiple hours not because they are a separate territory but because the centerline is built incrementally, with each pass adding order that the next pass relies on.
"been just psychological stress, you know, crummy marriage. But what what does matter is that you understand But we're not marriage counselors. What does matter is you understand you have to lift that up off the pelvis to start getting mobility in the pelvis. Uh-huh. The first hour is the beginning of the tenth hour. Okay? Uh-huh. The second hour is a follow-up of the first hour. Uh-huh. It's just the second half of the first hour. Okay? And the third hour is the second half of the second and first hour. It's literally a continuation. 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."
A senior 1975 Boulder student recalls Ida's late framing of the recipe as continuation.
This reframing has consequences for how the practitioner reads the legs across the series. The leg work of the second hour is not finished when the practitioner moves on; it is resumed in the third, the fourth, the fifth. Each hour adds another layer of order to the medial line, the lateral line, the front and back of the leg. The centerline emerges across the full ten — never installed at one stroke, never complete. It is the spectrum Ida named: each hour one more step along the spectrum of realigning the pelvis and the legs underneath it.
The hamstrings and the line of the pelvis
Across the 1976 Boulder transcripts Ida and her senior practitioners returned again and again to the hamstrings — a universal shortening, observed in nearly every body that came in for the work. The hamstrings span from the ischial tuberosities down behind the knees, and they are what tether the pelvis to the legs. If they are short, the pelvis cannot tip horizontal; the centerline cannot find its terminus at the floor of the pelvis. The leg work and the pelvic work are, in this respect, the same work, addressed from below.
"up a rothing room, set it up big enough. You cannot have a cubicle or a routing room and still see the body you're working on. Well, there you are, Peter. I've been here. I wanted to add Where have I been? Just in there. Would like to add that the one thing that one thing I saw that they all share a short hamstring. That's that's a universal. When did you ever see a body come in without a good hamstring? I don't think so either. And I don't know whether this is our cultural pattern or what we do to our kids or what. I don't know. You practitioners, why do you see? Now you people who are in the advanced class, what are you seeing?"
Ida and her senior students name the universal hamstring shortening.
The senior 1971-72 practitioners in the so-called Mystery Tapes had already articulated a version of this argument with reference to the iliopsoas. Ida was cautious about it. Her warning to her advanced students was that you can get to know so damn much about the iliopsoas that you don't know anything about a body. She preferred the relational picture — hamstrings to ischial tuberosities to pelvic floor to lumbar spine — over any single-muscle obsession. The centerline lives in the relations, not in a star structure.
Walking and the centerline
Ida tested the centerline finally in walking. A standing body that satisfies the plumb line is not yet a body that walks well; the centerline must be available in motion. In her 1976 Boulder advanced class she watched a student walking and pointed out, in the absence of the centerline, how the legs failed to come back under the pelvis on each step. The image she favored was that of the leg setting back with relation to the pelvis as the pelvis comes forward — the very motion that her fourth-hour work made available.
"What we're trying to do is we're trying to separate these so that they're able to move independently and then as a group in a sense. I'd like to add to that. To the extent that my vision of the fourth hour, sort of my cue that I've done it, is when I see the whole leg begin to set back with relation to the pelvis. Alright. That's fine. That's, you know, as I'm doing this separating and organizing, when I see the person bring the knee forward and as the knee comes back, I see the whole back. That's leg start moving back with relation to the body Now wait a minute. From above. Have you ever noticed how when I walk at the end of a really good fourth hour, the leg sets back with each step? Mhmm. And the pelvis is and the pelvis really begins to come forward then as it's Now you people that are in the younger class, do have you seen this? I think I've seen some some legs that have gone bad, you know, on on the pelvis. I don't know that I've seen Jen, get up there and walk across this room with fairly quickly. Now watch the do you see what I'm talking about? Now some of you is there"
A senior 1975 Boulder student describes the walking signature of a successful fourth hour.
She returned to the same point in her 1976 Boulder lecture about Madame Mensendieck and the young man jogging in the rain — the well-meaning student whose legs moved but whose torso did not receive the energy of the legs. The point about the work, she told her advanced class, is that the body begins to learn how to move within the gravitational field instead of fighting it. The legs, properly organized around the medial vertical, transmit movement upward into the trunk. When the centerline is broken, that transmission stops at the pelvis.
"I looked at him and I thought to myself, Well, he's got lots of goodwill, he's got lots of rage, but there was no way in which he transmitted the movement from his legs up into his torso. It just stopped right there. Was he doing what he was supposed to do? Namely getting blood and circulation and energy around in his body? No. Because he didn't know how to make the connection. And it is you people who are going to have to go out and say to your demonstrations and your demonstrators the sort of thing that I am saying to you now. The point about Rolfing is that your body begins to learn how to move within the gravitational field instead of fighting gravity. Now some of you here are old enough and some of you are to have been through the routine of these various methods of training bodies. To have been through the routine by which we as Americans train our young men, partly in high school through games, etc, but still more through their period of service in the Army. Shoulders back. Glut in. What happens when you put your shoulders back? Come on, where are the advanced ropals?"
Ida watches the jogger and names the failure of transmission.
Coda: building toward the middle
The centerline, in Ida's late teaching, is something the practitioner constructs from the legs upward — never an axis around which the body is found to already organize itself. The work begins with the inner arch of the foot, runs up the medial leg through the adductors, reaches the floor of the pelvis at the rami and the ischial tuberosities, and continues through the body of the lumbars and the cervicals to the ears. Each hour of the recipe adds another layer of order to this construction; each leg session — second, third, fourth — installs another segment of the medial vertical that the trunk work above will eventually rest on. The line is built, in the literal sense of tissue moved toward the midline. It is also discovered, in the kinesthetic sense Ida demonstrated with her standing students in 1976. Both are true at once.
What the transcripts preserve is not a finished doctrine but a working teacher refining her language across her last decade. Ida did not always use the same vocabulary for the centerline — sometimes it was the vertical line, sometimes the midline, sometimes Ruth's lost line, sometimes the line built from the interaction of three planes. The constant across all these formulations is the legs. They are where the line lands at the ground. They are where the practitioner's hands establish the medial vertical that makes everything above possible. They are, in her formulation in the 1976 Boulder advanced class, what the practitioner must build toward the middle rather than detract from by taking it apart.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, IPR Lecture August 1974 — extended discussion of the body as built around a line and the role of vertebral junctions in permitting the line to bend; included for readers interested in the doctrinal underpinnings of the centerline beyond the leg work. 74_8-05A ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, public tape RolfA1 — practical discussion of leg work in the second hour, including freeing the legs on the pelvis by working around the hip joint and the hamstrings; included as a pointer for practitioners interested in the technical detail of the leg work that constructs the centerline. RolfA1Side1 ▸RolfA1Side2 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, public tape RolfB1 — the pelvic lift demonstration and the discussion of cervical and lumbar curves as twin curves whose balance is required for the centerline; included for readers interested in how the centerline doctrine extends upward through the spine. RolfB1Side1 ▸
See also: See also: the 1976 Boulder Teachers' Class — extended discussions of fibular rotation, eye-level orientation, and the spatial cues that shape how the centerline is felt by patient and practitioner; useful for readers interested in how the centerline is taught at the level of perception and re-patterning rather than tissue work. T2SB ▸