Sutherland, Swedenborg, and a different theory of breathing
Ida's account of sacral respiration always began with attribution. The doctrine, she said, was not hers. It came from William Garner Sutherland, an osteopath of the generation just younger than the founder of osteopathy A.T. Still, who in the first half of the twentieth century developed what became known as cranial osteopathy. Sutherland's central claim — that the lungs were only a secondary pump and that the true respiratory mechanism lay in the movement of cerebrospinal fluid through the spine and cranium — was, in Ida's reading, so foreign to mainstream physiology that he himself must have inherited it from somewhere else. She suspected Emanuel Swedenborg, the eighteenth-century mystic and scientist, whose obscure treatise on the brain she believed Sutherland had encountered. In her 1975 Boulder advanced class she walked her students through this lineage in the opening minutes of a session devoted to the sixth hour.
"Sutherland's theory, as Sutherland taught it, was that the lungs were not the organ of respiration, that the spine was the organ of respiration. And the lungs were only a pair of bellows which affected the spine. And that the true function of respiration was a pumping of spinal fluid."
Ida lays out Sutherland's central inversion of the standard physiological picture, Boulder 1975:
Ida's deference to Sutherland was qualified. She believed his theory was substantially correct but that his attribution was incomplete — that the real source was older. In the same Boulder class she traced the idea back to Swedenborg's privately published treatise on the brain, of which she said only three copies had been printed. Whatever the truth of that bibliographic claim, the point Ida wanted to make was historical: this was not new physiology. It was old physiology that the mainstream medical schools had lost track of. Her students were not learning a Rolf invention; they were learning to feel for something the fourteenth-century anatomists, in her view, had already known.
"And Sutherland said that the basic respiratory is not the ribs and the lungs, but is this pumping fluid, through the the spinal fluid through the spine by virtue of this coming through the"
Speaking in an RolfA3 public tape, Ida summarizes Sutherland's mechanism and adds her own attribution to Swedenborg:
Her clearest extended statement of the lineage came in the 1976 advanced class. Here she gave students the full picture: Sutherland had been a friend and student of the old osteopaths, but his thinking had also drawn from a more obscure source, and the theory he developed was that the spine — not the lungs — was the true respiratory organ, with the lungs functioning as bellows that drove a more fundamental pumping mechanism in the cerebrospinal fluid.
"There's another factor about it. The breath doesn't travel. The breath doesn't travel. And what in heaven's name has breath got to do with the sacred? Sacred should be Now once upon a time, and it's not such a long time ago, I think he died in the forties or fifties. There was an osteopath whose name was Sutherland. He was a friend of the old doctors and a student of the old doctors. But he also seemed to have snuck in a lot of study of Swedenborg. And Swedenborg, one of his more obscure writings, noted the fact which fact which Sutherland developed into a theory. He didn't develop it so much as he elaborated into it. Sutherland's theory, as Sutherland taught it, was that the lungs were not the organ of respiration,"
Ida frames Sutherland as the conduit between an older intuition and modern practice, Boulder 1975:
What the sacrum does in normal respiration
Once the lineage is established, Ida turns to mechanics. The doctrine is not merely that the sacrum moves with breath — it is that the sacrum's movement is what makes the spine's pumping action possible at all. If the spine is to function as a hydraulic device, lengthening on inhalation and shortening on exhalation, the bottom of the column has to give. The sacrum is the giving point. Its base rocks backward, its apex forward, and that small nodding motion is what allows each lumbar vertebra above it to separate slightly from its neighbor, the discs to draw fluid, the cord to be drawn upward, the cerebrospinal fluid to fluctuate. The motion is small but indispensable. Without it, the whole pump stalls.
"That when the sacrum is more organized that with the normal inspiration breathing the lumbar spine is able to straighten and the base of the sacrum can come out and the tip of the sacrum rotate in."
Ida describes the actual movement she expects to see after a properly executed sixth hour:
She returned to the same description in greater anatomical detail in her 1975 Boulder class. Here she walked the sequence vertebra by vertebra: the apex of the sacrum dives forward in order to let the base come back, in order to separate the fifth lumbar from the sacrum, in order to separate the fourth lumbar from the fifth, and so on up the chain. The lengthening is not a single big event but a cascade of tiny vertebral separations, each one made possible by the one below. The sacrum is the foundation move. If it doesn't happen, none of the rest happens, and the spine breathes as a rigid stick rather than as a pump.
If this whole spine is a pumping device, you are going to get movement all up and down the spine respiration. I didn't say average respiration. normal respiration and in view of the fact that the spine is more or less to an effective length. If you're going to get movement up and down that spine, what has to happen? The sacrum has to bow behind that."
Ida walks students through the vertebra-by-vertebra cascade, Boulder 1975:
In her 1976 advanced class, Ida returned to the sacral movement and connected it explicitly to the osteopathic literature she had come up alongside. The cranial osteopaths, she said, had described the same motion — the base of the sacrum going posterior on inhalation, anterior on exhalation — and had identified the sacrum as a basic aspect of the whole respiratory process. The theory was good. The trouble was that the practitioners who held it had no reliable way of producing the motion they were looking for. They could palpate it, name it, work toward it through gentle cranial holds, but they could not deliver it as a consistent outcome of a defined sequence of work.
your respiration is a something which is controlled at the unconscious level from the cranium and involves the entire and particularly it involves the sacrum. And the base of the sacrum goes with inspiration. The base I'm talking about and an inspiration and an expiration if those anterior. And this goes back in inspiration. you get this kind of movement, and the sacrum. The apex of the sacrum obviously does the other. So that that sacrum according to this small group a very devoted and very well informed"
Ida describes how the cranial osteopaths understood sacral respiration, 1976 advanced class:
The cerebrospinal fluid pump and the ventricles
In the early-1970s Mystery Tapes recordings, Ida read aloud at length from osteopathic literature describing the mechanism of cranial respiration in technical detail — the dilation and contraction of the brain's ventricles, the movement of the spinal cord up and down within the canal, the fluctuation of cerebrospinal fluid through the subarachnoid spaces. She did this not because her students needed to memorize the anatomy but because she wanted them to feel the weight of the physiological claim. The brain, she said, is essentially a hydrostatic system — more water than tissue — and the position of the cranium determines what kind of pressures that water is subjected to.
"During this same period, the third ventricle dilates in a V form manner, the fourth ventricle in a lozenge form, while the spinal cord is drawn upward and the cerebrospinal fluid fluctuates and the cerebrospinal The cerebrospinal"
Ida reads the technical description of ventricular and spinal cord movement during inhalation, 1971-72 Mystery Tapes:
Ida continued reading, working her way through a description of the spinal cord behaving like a tadpole's tail — extending and contracting laterally as the canal stayed dimensionally stable — and of the cerebrospinal fluid fluctuating throughout the vertebral column by way of the arachnoid membrane. The membrane, the text noted, has only one attachment below: at the sacrum. This single anatomical fact connects the whole story she has been telling. The sacrum is not merely incidental to spinal respiration. The dural sheath that contains the cord and the fluid is anchored to the sacrum, which means the sacrum's mobility is structurally bound to the fluid's mobility. If the sacrum cannot move, the dura cannot move freely, and the fluid cannot fluctuate as the system requires.
"The spinal cord nearly moves upward and downward, much as with a tadpole's tail will the body of the tadpole to extend and contract The cerebrospinal fluid throughout the vertebral column fluctuates by way of the arachnoid the membrane being hung from above with only one attachment, and that at the sacrum. The dural tissue act as walls to the main venous channels leading into the jugular veins. I don't think I'm going to take you better than that right now because I think you'll have enough to see what the picture is about. And these details in here are very confusing. But this is the story of The Seventh Hour."
Ida continues the reading, naming the single sacral attachment of the dural membrane, 1971-72 Mystery Tapes:
Ida set down the book and made the practical point her students were waiting for. The seventh hour, she said, is the structural work that allows this entire soft-tissue system to come into operation. The hard structures — the bones of the cranium, the position of the cervicals, the relationship of the head to the neck — must be organized so that the soft structures inside them can reach what she called maximum frequency. The reading from the osteopathic literature was not an aside. It was the physiology the seventh hour serves.
"I don't think I'm going to take you better than that right now because I think you'll have enough to see what the picture is about. And these details in here are very confusing. But this is the story of The Seventh Hour. Now the story for the necessity for the seventh hour is in your own imagination. I mean the recognition of how important it is to have hard structures so organized that these soft structures can get to a period of maximum to a place of maximum frequency. I think we'll call today and do some work on the seventh hour, and you people, when you go upstairs to work upstairs, you are trying to do. once again, you are balancing blood source from extensors. Once again, you are contributing"
Ida lays the book down and connects the reading to the seventh hour, 1971-72 Mystery Tapes:
The sixth hour and the appearance of sacral respiration
If the seventh hour completes the work at the cranial end, the sixth hour is where the sacral end of the pump is finally freed. Across multiple advanced classes Ida named the sixth hour as the hour of the sacrum. The work of the previous five hours — opening the chest in the first, supporting the pelvis from below in the second, freeing the side body in the third, addressing the floor of the pelvis in the fourth, organizing the psoas and the front of the lumbars in the fifth — all of it leads to a body in which the sacrum can finally be reached and balanced. The principal anatomical structures are the rotators of the hip — most importantly the piriformis, which originates on the anterior face of the sacrum and so connects the outer body to the inner — and the obturator internus, which lines the inside of the pelvis. By working these structures, the practitioner is reaching, indirectly, into the position of the sacrum itself.
"reference to the lumbas, with reference to the ilii, with reference to the coccyx, So the sixth hour is really the hour of the sacrum. Can you balance those that sacrum by virtue of organizing the piriformis basically the obturator in the second place which does the inside of the pelvis not really to the inside of the sacrum. So for my money, if that fourth, fifth, and sixth hour isn't clear, I don't know. What do like that? Too much cleaner. I like to add on that sixth hour yesterday. I felt this so much when you finished working on me is the floating and sacrum in respiration that's tied in with the respiratory function. Now what is this floating sacrum in respiration business? That when the sacrum is more organized that with the normal inspiration breathing the lumbar spine is able to straighten and the base of the sacrum can come out and the tip of the sacrum rotate in."
Ida names the sixth hour as the hour of the sacrum and introduces the question that organizes the rest of the discussion:
In the same Boulder 1975 session where a student named Jan was pressing toward what made the sixth hour different from the work that came before, Ida cut through the general talk of "everything affecting everything else" and named the specific milestone. The hours leading up to the sixth, she said, were preparing the body to absorb respiratory flow throughout its tissues. The sixth hour itself, when it succeeded, produced a single observable result: the sacrum began to participate in respiratory movement. That participation was the hallmark — the sign that the work had landed.
"been what you have been missing, you've been looking at specifics, and you haven't been looking. You've been talking about how everything affects everything else, but you see you can use generalized words like that, and you still don't have the picture. Now that filling in your picture of how everything affects everything. Why does the motion make sense? The hours leading up to that sixth hour are really preparing the body to assimilate that respiratory flow into its whole body."
Ida cuts through generalities and names the specific milestone of the sixth hour, Boulder 1975:
Ida then gave the doctrine its sharpest expression in the next breath. The sixth hour, she said, is the hallmark of the work because the sacrum's participation in respiration is what tells the practitioner the job has been done. The hour might look modest from the outside — there is no dramatic structural change visible to the eye in the way that the first or seventh hour shows — but it carries the structural key that unlocks the entire respiratory function.
And that work around the rotators and the piriformis is really the hallmark of the sixth hour is the fact that you begin to see the sacrum participating in the respiratory movement. That's what tells you you've got the job
Ida names the sixth hour's small appearance and large significance, Boulder 1975:
She closed the same teaching beat with a forward look at the seventh hour. If the sixth hour produces spinal and sacral respiration, the seventh hour produces what she called its polar homologue — the cranial expression of the same pumping system. The two hours form a pair, working the two ends of the dural anchor: the sacrum below, the cranium above. With both ends freed, the cerebrospinal fluid can fluctuate as the system requires.
"So that that sixth hour which looked as though it might not amount very much is really an extremely Like, when you're opening your door, the door is controlled by three different depths of locks. And this thing is really basic, basic, and you can't get anywhere without it. Now now take that idea and go toward the seventh hour, and where does that where does it take you? Well, actually, it takes you to the excuse the word, the polar homologue of the respiratory function in head and the neck area. I And don't understand. Well And that's for a homologous misleaving. Right. Well, the point we in dealing with, we've discussed spinal respiration, cranial respiration Mhmm. And the sacrum in the head as part of the respiratory function. How do they relate?
Ida connects the sixth hour's sacral work to the seventh hour's cranial work, Boulder 1975:
What happens when the sacrum is hooked higher up
Knowing what the sixth hour should produce does not, by itself, tell the practitioner how to produce it. In her 1975 Boulder class Ida spent considerable time on the structural reasons that a sacrum might refuse to move with the breath — and the most important of those reasons, in her account, was not at the sacrum itself but high up in the dorsal spine. If the breath does not travel down through the spine, the sacrum will not be drawn into respiratory motion. The intuition the practitioner needs to develop is the recognition that a stuck sacrum is often hooked from above.
"And this is what it does. As you inhale, the apex of the sacrum in order to let the base of the sacrum in order to separate from the fifth lumbar, in order to separate from the fourth lumbar, in order to separate from the third lumbar, you just carry it along. And in the sixth hour, if you have done your stuff, you are then able the hook that's up in that dorsal put there by the fact that you were not lengthening your spine in respiration. Now this is the real of the sixth hour. And the milestone that tells you you've gotten where you should be is the fact that that sacrum is moving with every breath. If you haven't, there's something that you haven't done. what is it? do you really reach the sacrum?"
Ida names the dorsal hook that keeps the sacrum from moving, Boulder 1975:
Ida pressed the point further in the same 1975 Boulder class. The intuitive practitioner, she said, will eventually realize that they are not getting where they want with the sacrum because the restriction is much higher up — in the dorsum. The cue is functional, not visual. The sacrum looks wrong, yes, but the more reliable cue is that the breath doesn't travel. If the inhalation stalls before reaching the lower back, the sacrum cannot be brought into motion no matter how skillfully the practitioner works at the pelvis itself.
if you have enough intuition, you will suddenly realize the fact that you are not getting where you want with that sacrum because it is hooked much higher up in the dorsum. Now how do you know this? It doesn't look right. Alright. There's another factor about it. The breath doesn't
Ida names the diagnostic moment when the practitioner realizes the sacrum is hooked from above, Boulder 1975:
In the same Boulder 1975 session a senior practitioner pressed Ida on the anatomical mechanism — why the piriformis in particular was the key. The piriformis, Ida confirmed, originates directly on the anterior face of the sacrum. To release it is to reach the sacrum without going through it. That this single muscle bridges the outside of the pelvis to the inside of the sacrum is, in her account, the structural logic of the sixth hour. The rotators connect the outside with the inside, and the piriformis carries that role more directly than any of the others because of its origin.
"Because it has such a a met so much of its origin or its origin is right there on the sacrum itself. Yeah. It's directly attached to haven't put the put your finger. You know what the answer is. Can I come in on that? Yeah. Well, one thing, the piriformis really spans the ilium, and it just clear into the sacrum, which you Yeah. But you see, you didn't bring bring this out. Yeah. This is the significance of the rotators that they connect the outside with the inside. And this is the significance of the performance even more than the other rotators, which are more or less the original. Not this I'm not sacrum of the pelvis. Ilium. Yeah. So the obturator foramen which seems to be a source of many functions including the shielding, some very important blood vessels and nerves and so forth. The other point that there's another whole"
Ida and a colleague work out why the piriformis is the central structure of the sixth hour, Boulder 1975:
The coccyx, the floor of the pelvis, and the lower anchor
The sacrum does not sit alone at the base of the spine. Its position depends, in Ida's teaching, on the coccyx — the small terminal segment that anchors the gluteal fascia, the sacrotuberous ligaments, and the floor of the pelvis. In her 1971-72 Mystery Tapes class she worked with her students on the practical implications of this dependency. A coccyx pulled forward keeps the sacrum on strain no matter what else is done. Releasing the coccyx releases the sacrum more reliably than the reverse. Students who came to the sixth hour without having addressed the coccyx in the fourth had built their work on a tilted floor.
"You can just see how releasing down here will have to affect the sacrum, will have to affect the coccyx and will also, through the obturator internus fascia, will have to affect the psoas fascia going up. Well you see when that coccyx is still pulled forward, the sacrum will be on the strain no matter what. Releasing the sacrum won't release the coccyx as much as releasing the coccyx will release the sacrum, at least as I see it. Yes, Jen? When you study the fascia of the floor of the pelvis, One thing that becomes evident is that the gluteal fascia wraps the coccyx. It's right up to the sacrum. Sacral tuberous ligament, you see that? Yeah. That's the one that I felt I was on yesterday when I went into MARC, going into the coccyx, I was sufficiently anterior to the coccyx that I could feel the The pull of those ligaments. And these vertical strands, I mean, vertical wide This is what I'm trying to make to give you all reality on, that in that fourth hour you have got to get into those ligaments that attach to the toxins and to the sacrum."
Ida and her colleagues work out how the coccyx anchors the floor of the pelvis, 1971-72 Mystery Tapes:
Ida pressed the point further. The coccyx, she said, was the bottom of the body — and you have to stand a body on its bottom. The horizontality of the pelvic floor is set by the coccyx's position, and the pelvic floor in turn is what supports the abdominal organs and the autonomic nerve plexi that govern metabolism through that region. To work into the ligamentous attachments around the coccyx is to reach into the structural foundation on which the whole respiratory column rests. In her telling, this work was scary for both practitioner and client — it required going deep into intimate territory — but it could not be avoided if the sacrum was to nod with breath.
"And the coccyx determines the floor of the pelvis. Well, it's quite true, it's the second segment of the coccyx, as I remember. In other words, it's way high and the floor of the pelvis doesn't follow as far askew as the coccyx itself goes as your fingers tell you. But all of this is a very important consideration that to get in there, you have to get to the ligaments that relate the coccyx, and the STI. Now this is a little bit of a terrifying business to you junior people. That's a terrible long way to be into a person. And it's a scary way. And they're scared. And you're scared. And everybody's scared. It's the only way you'll ever get that body organized. This is the bottom. You've got to stand it on its bottom.
Ida names the coccyx as the foundation that determines the floor of the pelvis, 1971-72 Mystery Tapes:
Cranial osteopathy and the question of how to deliver the result
Ida's relationship to cranial osteopathy was respectful and competitive. She believed Sutherland's theory was substantially correct. She believed the cranial osteopaths who carried his work forward had done good work, particularly with young children with cerebral palsy and with infants whose head shape required adjustment. But she also believed they had no reliable way of producing the physiological result they were after. The technique was peripheral. It worked through the cranial sutures and produced gentle, slow change that required many sessions. Her own approach worked through the entire structural system and produced sacral respiration as a measurable outcome of a defined sequence.
"But it is my belief that this was advanced in some books of Swedenborg that he called And based and working on this premise, Sutherland started a group with any osteopaths who were known as the cranial osteopaths, and there are still some few of them around. It's not a growing movement. did some extremely interesting things by simply holding the head, not too tightly at that, and allowing the movement with this restricted head change the spine. And as I say, they did some quite impressive things, especially spastic children. started a movement which should have had a great deal more publicity than it has ever had of taking a look at a child's head after birth and simply by it's really a quite gentle technique of allowing the child himself, you see, to change the relationship of the bones."
Ida describes what the cranial osteopaths actually did with infants and children, RolfB6 public tape:
But Ida did not believe the cranial osteopathic technique had ever been generalized into a method that could be taught and reproduced at scale. In her 1976 advanced class she was direct: she did not know many osteopaths who could actually demonstrate the sacral movement Sutherland had described. The theory was good. The technicians who came in to learn the method as a job — eight hours a day, paying the rent — were a different breed of cats from the pioneers who lived inside the theory. The difference between Ida's work and the cranial osteopathic tradition, in her account, was not a difference of physiological claim. It was a difference of method, transmission, and reliability.
"Now that was a fine theory, but personally I don't know very many osteopaths that can demonstrate it. I've known a lot of osteopaths. They didn't know what to do about it. And it's the same old story. You know, the man who is the pioneer and spends twenty four hours a day thinking about his theory gets further along. Then the man who comes in and learns how to be a technician and spends eight hours a day expecting to have enough money in his pocket to pay the rent. Just a different breed of cats. in practice the osteopaths that followed this theory expected to control what was going on in respiration or expected to, what shall I say, direct again, let me use the word direct, to direct the whole process of respiration by putting their hands on the cranium. Now they did extremely"
Ida draws the distinction between pioneer and technician in osteopathic transmission, 1976 advanced class:
Asked directly, in the same 1976 class, whether she had played with cranial osteopathy herself, Ida gave a careful answer. She had not. The reason, she said, was that she believed the structural work she had developed was a much more powerful tool, and that mixing methods diluted both. Cranial osteopathy as it was practiced operated on something peripheral — the cranial sutures and the head. Her own approach went lower, to the structures of the pelvis and the lumbar spine, and worked upward from there. If you organize the body properly, she said, it will breathe; you don't do the breathing for it.
"I don't think I've answered your question, but I don't think I'm willing to answer your question completely. Because as you see, there's a lot of difference in opinion between me and the present exponents of the Reich School, particularly He and I have agreed to disagree. We do this privately, publicly, and not the other way. It's all right. Nobody's mad. Yes. Do you ever play with cranial osteopathy in a sense of feeling the rhythms and so that you talk about? I have never really played with Cranial osteopathy. One of the reasons why I haven't is because I felt that we have a very much more tool in our own hands and I don't believe in mixing these metals. I think you've got to stay with one thing. Now you see, Cranio osteopathy is dealing with something that is as it is practiced. I'm not talking about the theory. It's dealing with something that is very peripheral. Peripheral. Now my idea of what determines cranial osteopathy is right down here."
Ida explains why she chose not to mix cranial osteopathic technique into her own work, 1976 advanced class:
Early signs: cerebrospinal fluid before the sixth hour
Ida did not claim that cerebrospinal fluid movement only began with the sixth hour. In her 1975 Boulder class she acknowledged that signs of fluid pumping could appear earlier — sometimes by the third or fourth hour — particularly as the work around the lower spine and pelvis began to free the sacrum's smaller movements. A senior practitioner observed that practitioners often see a kind of shine appear in clients' faces well before the seventh hour, and Ida and a colleague worked out what that early appearance probably meant: the cerebrospinal fluid pump was beginning to engage, even if it had not yet reached the full participation that the sixth hour produces.
"I think it's the cerebral spinal fluid pumping mechanism beginning to work, especially early on as you begin to free up around here. The sacrum starts being able to move
A colleague names the early appearance of the cerebrospinal fluid pump, Boulder 1975:
The exchange continued, with the practitioners working out how the cervical fascia carries the effect of lower work upward into the head. The head, in Ida's account, sits like a bowl on the fascial cylinders of the neck, hanging from and supported by the bony surfaces of the skull. Any change anywhere in the body is going to be reflected upward through that fascial scaffolding. The shine in the face is a downstream effect of structural change in the pelvis, the breath, the sacrum — all of which begin to engage the fluid pump before the sixth hour formally seals the result.
"This is going to be the point of major disturbance, greater disturbance many times than the local point of problem. The kind of shine that gets into people in their head, in their face frequently comes long before the seventh hour. You know, third or fourth along in the air. You begin to see that coming out from you. What do you suppose that's a reflection of? Just what we're talking about. Specifically. That you're releasing stuff down below that's transmitting its release up into those head structures. But but stuff wait a minute. I'm stuff is what? Well, specifically, think probably the most important avenue for that is the prevertebral fascial plankton that comes up right up into the face. I think it's the cerebral spinal fluid pumping mechanism beginning to work,"
Practitioners work out how lower work transmits upward through the cervical fascia to produce a visible change in the face, Boulder 1975:
The seventh hour and the cranial end of the pump
If the sixth hour freed the sacrum, the seventh hour took on the cranium. Ida treated the seventh hour as the structural complement of the sixth — the hour in which the bones of the head, the joints between them, and the position of the head on the neck were addressed so that the cranial end of the cerebrospinal fluid pump could operate. The mainstream anatomical position was that cranial bones, once fused in adulthood, did not move. Ida and the cranial osteopaths held the opposite view. The bones did move, slightly, at the sutures, and that motion was part of the pumping action.
"And Sutherland said that when you inspired the various junctions where the parts of the cranium joined, the joints of the cranium, properly speaking, that they world. And of Needless to say, all people in the world that had had anything to do with bodies up to that time, even including the osteopaths, were about ready to find a nice, big, southern, sunny room in the the silent force, the mentally affected. Because everybody knows the head is solid. Everybody knows the head doesn't move, everybody knows that just as the sacrum doesn't move, the skull doesn't move. They're ridiculous. But the fact of the matter is that the skull does move. And Sutherland wasn't the guy that discovered it."
Ida names the cranial bones as actually mobile, contrary to received anatomy, Boulder 1975:
Ida sometimes spoke of testing the cranium with one's hands. A skull that felt like stone, with no resilience to the touch, was the sign of a body whose deep junctions had hardened and whose fluid pump was not operating. A skull that felt mobile, with the bones perceptibly sitting inside soft tissue, was the sign of a body in which the structural work had succeeded. The diagnostic is tactile, not visual. The practitioner learns it by feeling many heads.
"And in true health, that junction and there is no question about it. Now the one thing that the cranial osteopaths can teach you is to show you how those bones move. You don't need to know that in order to work with it. If you do, well, that's just that much more in your arm and you're tearing. You feel and you see those bones move. And as the body gets properly balanced, of those bones being inside soft tissue that you get with all other problems. And when you find a person whose head is stony, and this is very often the case with young children, that is a child that needs help and needs it quickly. Look you. If this whole spine is a pumping device, you are going to get movement all up and down the spine
Ida teaches students to feel for cranial mobility versus a stony cranium, Boulder 1975:
In the same Mystery Tapes discussion where she had read the technical osteopathic literature aloud, Ida returned to the brain as a hydrostatic system and asked her students to think through the structural consequences. The contents of the cranium — brain, ventricles, cerebrospinal fluid — function essentially as a water system. The position of the head determines the pressures inside. A head that tips chronically forward, or sits cocked to one side, exposes the third and fourth ventricles to pressure gradients they were not designed to bear. The eyes, the central organizing structures at the base of the brain, the autonomic functions — all are affected. The seventh hour, in this view, exists to bring the head into the position in which the hydraulic system inside it can run as designed.
"What goes on inside this area? And you see you have many, many different types of structures. Here's your shopping bag. Your shopping bag is the two membranes, the arachnoid and the Yeah, right, the dura. And inside that shopping bag you have the brains which are very smooth and that will push around from here to there and back again, the cerebellum, the brain stem, the various systems of the third and the fourth ventricle. Now realize that what you have there is a hydrostatic system. It's practically a water system. And therefore, it's movable. And therefore, as you move it, you get greater pressure in some directions than in other directions. And that may or may not be what that brain was designed for. It may not have been designed for a cockeyed pressure down in that third ventricle, which is adjacent to the eyes, or a cockeyed pressure in that fourth ventricle which is very much in the whole center of the head, has to do with all kinds of central organizations there, tooth terrace and so forth. You see, you're taking this water and tipping it. And that means a different set of pressures. So why is it necessary to get the top of your head up?"
Ida walks students through the head as a hydrostatic system, 1971-72 Mystery Tapes:
Whose theory, whose result
Across her advanced classes Ida returned several times to a careful question of attribution. She had no interest in claiming Sutherland's theory as her own. She believed Sutherland had inherited the central insight from Swedenborg, and she believed the underlying physiological intuition was very old — known, in her speculation, to the fourteenth-century anatomists who worked with cadavers in the first wave of European anatomical study. What she did claim was the method. The theory was Sutherland's, and before him probably Swedenborg's, and before them perhaps the old anatomists'. The technique that reliably produced sacral respiration as a measurable outcome at the end of a ten-session series was hers.
"itself going and keep itself going and remedy itself. Now I believe that settling what he was talking about, and I believe that this was something that was known a long time ago and that was talked about by Sweetyborg. And with all due respect to Mr. Sutherland, I think he got it from Mr. Sweetyborg. And it's just one of those things that was known by the old innovators and the old physiologists, the fifteenth century boy. And you see, this is what I'm talking about when I'm saying to you, you people are not dealing with pathology, are dealing with the establishment of appropriate physiology. And this is part of that appropriate physiology. This is not something that you will hear in any department in any medical school, that in respiration the spine should lengthen."
Ida names the lineage she believes she is in, 1971-72 Mystery Tapes:
She returned, in the same Mystery Tape, to her core methodological point: respiration was a primary function of the spinal column, not of the thorax. The air moving in and out of the lungs was secondary. The pumping of cerebrospinal fluid through the spinal canal was the primary event. And the practitioner, by working with their hands on the structural elements, was making that primary function possible. Sutherland could palpate the result. Ida could deliver it.
"This is not something that you will hear in any department in any medical school, that in respiration the spine should lengthen. Their idea of respiration is that it is a function of the thorax. But if respiration to the spinal column, it makes much more sense. Now Mr. Sutherland's idea was that respiration is a function of the spinal column, is the pumping of the spinal fluid, is the movement of the spinal fluid, and that the air flowing in and out of the thorax was a secondary function of respiration, not a primary function. And I would like to hand this over to you very deeply underscored that you look of what you are feeling from your hands. Now your whole preparation, all this preparation that you've been going through, is really making such a functioning We talk about horizontalizing with health and we talk about this as being very important. That this was not making a vital picture. There has to be integration"
Ida tells her students what physiology they are actually establishing, 1971-72 Mystery Tapes:
Coda: the work and the breath
In her 1976 advanced class, Ida warned her students against trying to control respiration directly. The biofeedback movement, the breathwork practices then spreading in California, the various exercises that promised to make the breath deeper or fuller through conscious manipulation — none of them, in her view, addressed the structural problem. If the spine was disorganized, no amount of attention to the breath could make it travel. If the spine was organized, the breath would travel of its own accord. The body did the breathing; the practitioner did not need to do it for the body.
"This is the question and in most most cases, it is perfectly obvious that it isn't. experience that if you organize a body properly it will breathe. You don't do the breathing. It will breathe. It breathes you and you see this is true for lots of other systems in the body. It has to do with circulation, has to do somewhat with digestion, etc. If you organize it properly, will carry on that function You don't carry on that function with it. Now, this is the basic difference of approach of at least my theory. I was going to say the theory of"
Ida states her core principle: organize the body and it will breathe, 1976 advanced class:
And so the doctrine of cerebrospinal fluid and sacral respiration sat at the center of Ida's teaching of the recipe's middle hours. The sixth hour, working through the rotators and the piriformis to free the sacrum, produced the bottom of the pump. The seventh hour, addressing the head and neck, produced the top. Between them, the dural membrane could draw and release, the cord could move up and down, the fluid could fluctuate, and the spine could lengthen on each inhalation. The hours before built the platform; the hours after refined it. But the heart of the matter — the moment the practitioner saw the sacrum nodding with breath and knew the work had landed — was the signature of the sixth hour, the milestone Ida had inherited from Sutherland, transmitted (she believed) through Swedenborg from the old physiologists, and finally made reliably reproducible through the structural recipe she had spent her career developing.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfB2 public tape — an extended account of the pelvic lift and the lengthening of the lumbar vertebrae that prepares the sacrum to participate in respiration; pointed to as background for the sixth-hour mechanism. RolfB2Side2 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfB6 public tape — Ida walks through the fourth, fifth, and sixth hours as a structural sequence that culminates in balancing the sacrum with the rest of the pelvis; useful background for the middle-hour architecture this article describes. RolfB6Side1b ▸
See also: See also: Boulder Advanced Class 1975, Tape 1B — Michael Salveson and other senior practitioners work out the spectrum of the recipe, with the first hour described as the beginning of the tenth and each hour as a continuation of the prior; relevant to how sacral respiration is built across the whole series rather than in the sixth hour alone. T1SB ▸