The premise the culture got wrong
By 1974 Ida Rolf was working inside a culture — Esalen, the human-potential movement, the West Coast growth centers — whose foundational premise was that any movement away from the static self counted as progress. She had been part of building that culture; her work had spread through it; Fritz Perls had been her advocate at Esalen. But by the mid-1970s she was beginning to push back against the assumption that growth and improvement were synonyms. In her Open Universe lectures at UCLA she found herself increasingly skeptical of the idea that opening a person necessarily made them better, and in her advanced classes she warned practitioners not to confuse the fact of change with the value of change. The distinction is structural. Change is what happens whenever energy is added to a system. Integration is what happens when that energy is added in the right place, in the right direction, with the right effect on the surrounding relationships. The two are not the same.
"with, There always seems to be an assumption in the great Southern California human growth potential movement that all growth is towards becoming better and better."
In a 1974 Open Universe class at UCLA, Ida names the cultural assumption she had come to distrust:
Ida's first move against this assumption was philosophical. The growth movement, in her view, had inherited from American optimism a belief that movement was good and stasis was bad. But the body is not a moral object; it is a mechanical and energetic system, and what counts as improvement is determined by whether the parts come into a workable relationship with gravity. A person can be opened and disorganized in the same session. A pattern can be released and a worse pattern installed. The fact that something is changing tells you nothing about whether what is happening is good. This was not a fashionable position in 1974, and Ida knew it. But she repeated it constantly in her advanced classes through 1975 and 1976 — partly because her own practitioners were absorbing the growth-movement assumptions and partly because she could see, in the bodies coming back to her after botched work, what happened when change was pursued without a structural target.
Change as a vector, not a value
The clearest place Ida formulated this point was inside a discussion of body mechanics — specifically a discussion of the orthopedic tradition that had taught body mechanics at Harvard for decades. The orthopedic tradition could change a joint. Cortisone could change a joint. A chiropractor could change a joint. The question Ida wanted her students to ask was not whether the joint had been changed, but in which direction, against what pattern, with what consequences for the structures above and below it. This is where the article's central doctrine appears most plainly: change applied randomly has just as good a chance of being bad as of being good. The principle of Structural Integration is not that the practitioner changes things; the principle is that the practitioner changes things in a direction governed by the pattern body, the design of the human as it relates to gravity.
"He saw life in terms of joints, and he knew that he could change joints And the problem is that to most people, including many of you, you think that change is necessarily good. It isn't. It's got just as good a chance if you apply change randomly of being bad as it has of being good. It's very important that you understand this. Very important that when you see you have changed a joint, as George described to you that you were able to change a joint by many means, including cortisone chemical means. It's very important for you to realize that unless you have changed that joint in terms of the pattern body, which we are introducing you to, you have not applied the principle of rolfing, of structural integration. That comes up all the time. I know. Sure it does. And it comes up all the time in this campus where we lay out a complete smorgasbord of techniques for change. And nobody to decide which of those techniques applies toward a change for the better."
In a 1971-72 IPR class she lays out the doctrine in its most unambiguous form:
Notice the formal structure of Ida's argument here. She is not saying that change is bad. She is saying that change without a structural target is morally and mechanically neutral — it can go either way. The discipline of Structural Integration consists precisely in knowing which direction counts as integration and which counts as disintegration. This is why she put so much weight on the pattern body, on the vertical line, on the horizontals, on the relationships between segments. These were not aesthetic preferences. They were her way of specifying what the direction of useful change actually was. Without that specification, anyone with hands could push tissue around, and the result would be just as likely to make the person worse as better.
"You change that body, and you can change it very unhappily. You can take it it's just as easy to take a body apart. In fact, it's a lot easier than it is to put it together. But the reason you call yourself a worker in structural integration is because you put it together. And if you don't put it together, you're not you're doing something else. You're not doing what is being taught here. It's very, very important into the direction, the muscles, the units, whatever unit you're dealing with, toward the place that is the place where normally it was designed to work."
She continues the warning in a public RolfB1 lecture, this time directed at her own practitioners:
The phrase she uses here — "have mercy, good lord, on you if you come and say to me, well, I know I did a good job because I changed the body" — is one of her most memorable warnings to her own circle. It indicates how seriously she took the danger. A practitioner could become hypnotized by his own capacity to produce visible alteration. The before-and-after photograph could become a snare. The client's reported sense of difference could become a snare. Ida's point was that change alone proved nothing about whether the work had been done.
The photograph problem
By the mid-1970s, Structural Integration had become photogenic. Before-and-after pictures were the field's principal advertising medium and its principal pedagogical tool. Practitioners showed them to prospective clients; teachers showed them to students. The pictures showed real change — contour change, postural change, the look of someone who had been opened. Ida had used such pictures since the Esalen days and continued to use them in her 1976 advanced classes. But she was also acutely aware that they could lie. A body could show dramatic contour change in the photograph while harboring deeper disorganization that the photograph could not reveal. Worse, the practitioner taking the photograph could be fooled by it — could conclude that because the picture showed change, good work had been done.
"Now in this room this morning, we had a very a magnificent example of the fact that you can take pictures before and after and see a lot of change. I didn't look at Al's picture before one. I didn't look at it before one back in ages and see what a change there was from that picture to this morning's. But you see within that general contour change, which people, including uninformed practitioners, lawmakers, look at and say, see, it's changed. Behind that facade, there is a nonchange going on and sometimes a change for the worse going on. A person who is not sufficiently sophisticated with these methods looks at change, and because it is change, it must be good. Pain itself. Sometimes it's bad. Sometimes it's very bad. And this is the sort of thing that goes on here. Now as I said to you this morning, you've been looking at Al, and you've seen been seeing how much change has been made. And yet when you really go down and you look into the thing deeply and honestly and conscientiously and not kidding yourself, but saying the man is still in trouble, why is he still in trouble? You find it. Now could Alabin help at all by either of these coming up methods? He could not. Now be sure that you understand this. Some of these methods have various values."
Speaking about a session she had just observed, Ida articulates how the photograph can obscure exactly what matters:
The photograph problem is a perceptual version of the larger doctrine. The eye notices what is most visible — the contour, the posture, the apparent ease of breathing. What the eye does not notice is whether the relationships beneath the contour have been brought into a workable configuration. A practitioner might produce dramatic visible change by working only the superficial layers, leaving the deeper structural disorganization untouched and sometimes deepened. The client looks better in the photograph. The client may even feel better for a time. But the structural problem has not been addressed, and Ida's warning is that the practitioner who congratulates himself on the photograph has failed exactly where the work was supposed to begin.
"And yet when you really go down and you look into the thing deeply and honestly and conscientiously and not kidding yourself, but saying the man is still in trouble, why is he still in trouble? You find it. Now could Alabin help at all by either of these coming up methods?
Pressing the point further, she names the consequence:
The orthopedic precedent
Ida's argument did not come out of nowhere. She had spent decades watching the orthopedic profession produce change in bodies — adjustments, manipulations, cortisone injections, surgical interventions — that did not necessarily improve the person who underwent them. The dominant Harvard body-mechanics tradition, which had taught American physical educators since the 1920s, knew how to measure verticality but did not know how to produce it. Chiropractors had been changing joints for nearly a century. Osteopaths had a similar history. All of these traditions could produce change. None of them, in Ida's view, had specified the direction of change with the precision that her work required. The historical observation she kept making to her students was that body mechanics as a discipline had failed not because it lacked tools but because it lacked the criterion that would tell a practitioner which change to seek.
"And they followed in the footsteps of a man whose name was anybody remember that outstanding classic in body mechanics that was written by a Harvard professor? Anybody remember his name? Name? Oh, fine bunch. We are. It's not licked, is it? Licked? Not No. No. Goldway's brother. Goldway. Goldway. He was an orthopedist in Seville. He's what? He was an orthopedist. Alright. But you see, he approached it. That's rare. Rare for this is rare for orthopedists to write a book like he did. Okay. Right. But he approached it like an orthopedist. He saw life in terms of joints, and he knew that he could change joints And the problem is that to most people, including many of you, you think that change is necessarily good."
Walking her advanced class through the history of body mechanics, Ida names the failure of the orthopedic tradition:
The orthopedic precedent gave Ida something to point at. She could tell her students that the failure of the medical tradition was not technical but conceptual. The orthopedist had hands; the chiropractor had hands; the osteopath had hands. What they lacked was a structural target — a specification of what the body was supposed to look like and how the parts were supposed to relate. Ida's contribution, as she presented it to her students, was the specification: the vertical line, the horizontal segments, the integration of head-thorax-pelvis-legs around gravity. Without that target, change was just motion. With that target, change became integration. This is why she repeatedly told her practitioners that they could not borrow techniques from chiropractic or orthopedic manipulation without the structural framework that gave the technique its meaning.
"And if you are really going to understand what I'm talking about tonight, a little meditation on those two words wouldn't do any harm. Because you see, in meditating on posture and meditating on structure, you can ask the same questions. You can ask the question of, now see here, if I alter this structure, what can I hope to get from it? Similarly, you can say, if I alter this posture, what can I hope to get from it? This is a big question. And you ask any of your MD friends, and they'll say, oh, Rod, nothing. Ain't so? You change those relations. You change that structure. And you get the kind of ease and the kind of vitality that you have seen some of your friends get who have gone through this system of structural"
In a public lecture at Topanga, she presses students to think about the difference between posture and structure:
Manipulation alone cannot do it
If change is not necessarily good, what makes change useful? Ida's answer evolved across the 1970s but settled, by the 1976 Boulder advanced class, into a formulation that surprised some of her students. Manipulation alone, she told them, could never produce Structural Integration. Will alone could not do it either. What was required was a coincidence — the practitioner's manipulation reaching the person at the moment when the person had become willing to change. The practitioner's job was to manipulate skillfully; the person's job was to arrive at the willingness; integration happened in the meeting. This formulation came out of years of watching what happened when manipulation was applied to clients who were defending against change. The change could be produced in the tissue. It would not stick.
And I felt like in our 10 models there was a lot of unconsciousness, resistance, body. There was no doubt that there was. And those people that hung on to that changed much."
Reflecting on which clients had changed most across the class's ten models, Ida names what the changed ones had in common:
The implication of this observation is striking. The practitioner who pushes through resistance with stronger and stronger manipulation is not doing better work; he is, in fact, demonstrating that he has misunderstood what makes change useful. The body can be moved by force. The pattern cannot be installed by force. The pattern requires a moment of yielding from the person inside the body, and the practitioner's task is to work skillfully enough that the moment of yielding becomes available. This is part of what Ida meant by saying that the work is teaching rather than therapy: the practitioner is offering an opportunity for change that the person has to accept, not imposing a change that the person has to absorb.
"But you see, what I am preaching to you is that neither by will alone nor by manipulation alone cannot be done. It has to be done by your helping through manipulation. Those people come to a level where it is then possible for them to change, to let go."
She names the formulation directly:
This is the constructive other side of Ida's warning that change is not necessarily good. Useful change is change that the body can take up, the change that becomes part of the person rather than being imposed on the person. Imposed change, no matter how skilled the manipulation that produced it, is the kind of change that disappears within months. Accepted change, change that meets the client at the moment of letting go, is the kind that holds. The practitioner who has not learned to wait for the moment of yielding is producing the wrong kind of change, no matter how much visible alteration shows up in the photograph.
Perfection where they are
One of Ida's most unexpected positions, and one that surprised her growth-movement audiences, was that she did not try to make people better. The growth movement was organized around the project of making people better — psychologically, physically, spiritually. Ida watched this project with skepticism. Trying to make people better, in her observation, invalidated where they were and produced resistance. The practitioner who came at a client with the project of improvement was already at cross-purposes with the work. The position she settled into was that people were perfect the way they were, and improvement happened, when it happened, as a consequence of their being accepted as they were. This was not a sentimental position; it was a structural one. It described what produced change and what blocked it.
"So I don't ever try to make people better. I consider people to be perfect the way they are. And my observation is that as soon as they realize they're all right to where they are, they do get better, automatically without doing anything."
In the same 1974 Open Universe lecture, Ida states the principle directly:
This statement also tells us something about the structural logic of resistance. A body that is being told it is wrong, that needs to be improved, that should be something other than what it is, defends. A body that is met where it is can release. The growth movement, in Ida's view, had this backwards. By treating the client as a project to be improved, the growth movement produced exactly the rigidity it claimed to be dissolving. By treating the client as perfect, the practitioner created the conditions under which structural change could occur. This was not a paradox; it was an observation about how nervous systems respond to invitation versus pressure.
"All patterns are mechanical and therefore anti being."
She follows the statement with its sharpest formulation:
The student who recorded this exchange in the Open Universe class was articulating Ida's mature position. The work was not the substitution of one pattern for another. It was the dissolution of patterning itself, the recovery of what Ida sometimes called spontaneity. A person locked into a posture, a movement habit, an emotional response, a way of holding the shoulders — that person was acting from stored material rather than from the present moment. The practitioner's task was to release the storage, not to install better storage. This is why she resisted the growth-movement formulations: they treated freedom as a destination to be reached, when in her structural understanding, freedom was what remained when the patterns dissolved.
"I'm very clear about my own personal experience of Rawlfin. My own personal experience of roleplaying has made has given the the roleplayer gave me the space to be the way I am. The roleplayer didn't put me back together again. The roleplayer didn't make me the way I never was. The roleplayer gave I know Ida says it a little differently. She says to put you in the field of gravity so that you are she has to use the word appropriate so that what did she say about? So that it supports each other. I call that being appropriate. You know, it's like being the way it is."
A student in the 1974 Open Universe class describes his own experience of the work in exactly these terms:
Pattern, rigidity, and the closed system
Ida's collaborator Valerie Hunt, the UCLA physiologist who worked with her through the 1970s, developed a parallel critique of the growth movement's underlying assumptions. Hunt was a research scientist, formally trained, and her objection was framed in the language of measurement and body image. She had spent years studying what she called body-image rigidity — the inflexibility of the self-concept that the growth movement was inadvertently producing. Her concern paralleled Ida's: the betterment project, by treating the developed person as a fixed achievement, was producing rigidity in exactly the populations that thought they were becoming free.
"About five years ago I woke up and this has been one of my babies I've been working on body image now for many many years and all of a sudden I wanted to get a nice strong secure one and you know I went down to Muscle Beach because there's some nice bodies down there to look at and I went down and I did some testing down at Muscle Beach and I found some nice strong secure the actual and the ideal were pretty close together inflexible body image terribly inflexible and that's what they wanted to do all their life was this. And when I saw that I thought what have I been doing about you know you get it nice and strong and this ties all the selves together and everything's fine and strength is not enough, secure is not enough. And the same thing is true of a strong ego, that's not enough."
Hunt describes a research excursion she made to Muscle Beach in pursuit of a strong, secure body image:
Hunt's finding at Muscle Beach was the empirical version of Ida's structural argument. The men at Muscle Beach had changed their bodies dramatically — anyone could see the change in the photographs — but the change had produced inflexibility rather than freedom. They had become more themselves rather than less, more locked rather than more open. This was precisely the kind of change Ida warned about: change that altered the contour without altering the structural rigidity, change that confirmed the existing pattern rather than dissolving it. The growth movement had treated the developed body as evidence of development. Hunt's data and Ida's doctrine converged on the same point: visible change without structural release was its own kind of failure.
"So I think that one of our major problems in education is the fact that we have educated man with too strong an ego, too inflexible an ego, too inflexible a body image, and we have tried to develop him to his potential in a way that is closed and totally blocked himself as an open universe from reacting and interacting. I have done it. I think you people have done it. I think the fault does lie, for example, in our concept of the human capacity and the concept of the physically, mentally, and spiritually developed man. And this is what determines our education. I think our concept is faulty about what is the educated and developed man. And at the present time it's based upon a linear concept, a very linear concept, a three-dimensional, a closed system concept. And we're talking about educating man to be an open system. We have what we call a body oriented consciousness and what we do with our bodies or what we do with our minds has to immediately be transferred back into some kind of action on the body's part. And I want to say that again. What we do with our bodies or what we do with our minds has to immediately make some sense in terms of something we're going to do with our bodies."
In a later Open Universe lecture, Hunt extends the critique to education and culture:
The Hunt-Rolf collaboration produced one of the period's most coherent critiques of the human-potential movement from inside the human-potential movement. Both women had spent years building the institutional and intellectual infrastructure of growth work; both had become skeptical that the work was producing what it claimed to produce. The skepticism was not nihilistic — they continued to do the work, continued to teach, continued to develop the research that culminated in the UCLA energy-field studies. But they shared a willingness to say what neither of them could comfortably have said in 1965: that change, even dramatic and visible change, is not the same as integration, and that the growth movement was confusing the two.
"Then if Roelfing upstates the static thought forms which allows thought as well as body plasticity to take place, as well as structural realignment, there will also be realignment in alteration in not only the conform the the confirmation of the body but in its repair, in its mitosis, in its continual evolution. We know that our bodies change approximately every seven years but have we ever thought that our body changed on every breath? I'm talking about belief systems now. You see, we've held some and we haven't gone any farther. Have we ever thought that atoms and molecules are constantly replacing themselves and being altered? That hormones are in a constant state of emotion and alteration? That electrodynamic and electromagnetic energy changes are occurring constantly which are affecting our body. And yet we try to conceive of the body as static and educated in the same way. And it is not. Our physical senses really tell us very little about our bodies."
In a 1974 Open Universe class Hunt extends the doctrine to belief systems themselves:
The plastic medium and its dangers
Part of what gave Ida's warning its urgency was her conviction that the body is genuinely plastic — that the fascia can be reorganized, the structure changed, the contour altered. Earlier generations had assumed the adult body was fixed. Ida's whole career had been spent disproving that assumption. By the 1970s the message had gotten through, perhaps too well. Practitioners and clients now believed that the body could be changed. What they had not absorbed was the corollary: a plastic medium can be deformed as easily as it can be integrated. The same capacity that allowed Ida's work to succeed was also the capacity that allowed bad work to do serious damage.
"That in being modified it is modifying structure and that in modifying structure you modify closure. Now, a fascial tissue So what I'm trying to get you to look at and understand is the circular nature of this whole crib. The way it travels round and round and round and it of the way in which organization at one place organizes or disorganizes at one place. And that's what you were doing yesterday."
In a 1973 Big Sur advanced class she names the symmetry directly:
This is the technical version of the doctrine that the article is named after. The body's plasticity is what makes Structural Integration possible; it is also what makes harmful manipulation possible. A practitioner could believe, looking at a body that had been worked on, that change had occurred and that the change must be good because the body had been opened. Ida's point was that an opened body could be opened in directions that left it more disorganized than when it began. The capacity for change is a capacity for change in any direction. The practitioner's discipline is what decides which direction the change goes.
"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. It is a system of organizing the body so that it is substantially vertical, substantially balanced around a vertical in order to allow the body to accept support from the gravitational energy. Two characteristic qualities of the body make this unlikely situation possible."
In a 1974 lecture at the Center for the Healing Arts, Ida defines the practice and names what makes the practice unusual:
The definition Ida gives at the Center for the Healing Arts has a specific structure: the work organizes the body so that gravity can support it. This is the directional criterion in its most compact form. The practitioner is not free to organize the body however he likes; the body must be organized toward verticality, toward balance around the gravity line, because that is the configuration that allows the surrounding gravitational field to function as support rather than as drag. In her later 1974 Open Universe lecture she described the colloidal chemistry that made this possible — fascia as a colloid whose state shifts with added energy, the sol-gel transformations of the kitchen recipe applied to the body. The mechanism is specifiable, and the specifiability is what allows the practitioner to know whether the change being produced is moving in the direction the work calls for.
"All the tissues of the body which are collagen based derive from the embryonic mesoderm. And collagen has a unique characteristic. This is what makes Rolving possible. Like all body proteins, collagen is a colloid. It has a very high molecular weight. It is very complex. And it consists basically of three chains, protein chains, interlinked by mineral and hydrogen atoms. It is characteristic of all colloids that their physical state alters drastically by the addition of energy. You have experience of that right in the kitchen. You heat the colloidal aqueous suspension of jello, and it becomes clear what you think of as a solution, and it takes a chemist to see that it is a naceous sort of a thing that you realize, if you're a chemist, that it's not a true solution. It's a suspension. But at any rate, it flows, and it flows easily, And the chemist would say, it is in a sol state."
In her 1974 Open Universe lecture she names the colloidal chemistry behind the work's plasticity:
The colloidal mechanism is what makes the doctrine technically precise rather than merely metaphorical. Energy added to fascia produces a state change in the tissue. That state change permits reorganization. The practitioner's hands are the source of the energy; the direction of the reorganization is determined by the practitioner's understanding of where the tissue needs to be placed. If the practitioner knows the pattern, the added energy moves the tissue toward integration. If the practitioner does not know the pattern, the same added energy moves the tissue toward arbitrary configurations that may or may not be improvements. The plasticity is the same; the outcome diverges entirely depending on what the practitioner is aiming at.
"And I'm talking here about energy being added by pressure to the fascia, the organ of structure, to change the relation of the fascial sheaths of the body, to balance these around a vertical line which parallels the gravity line. Thus, we are able to balance body masses, to order them, to order them within a space. The contour of the body changes, the objective feeling of the body to searching hands changes. Movement behavior changes as the body incorporates more and more order. The first balance of the body is a static stacking, but as the body incorporates more changes, the balance ceases to be a static balance. It becomes a dynamic balance."
In a 1974 Healing Arts lecture, Ida specifies how the plasticity is actually used:
Recipe before chef
One of Ida's late-career responses to the danger of arbitrary change was to insist on the recipe — the structured ten-session sequence she had developed across decades of practice. The recipe was her safeguard. A practitioner who followed the recipe was, at minimum, applying change in a known sequence that had been refined to produce integration rather than disintegration. The recipe did not require the practitioner to understand why each hour worked; it required only that the practitioner do the hours in order, with attention. As her students advanced, they could begin to depart from the recipe — but only after they had absorbed the structural logic that the recipe encoded. The pattern of the recipe was itself a directional constraint on change.
"We, your teachers, must know how and through what means this revolutionary technique of rolfing works. We must. 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. 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."
In her 1976 conference address, Ida frames the recipe-versus-chef distinction:
The recipe, in this account, is exactly the kind of structural target that makes change useful rather than arbitrary. A practitioner who has memorized the hours, who knows what the second hour establishes that the first hour did not, who knows why the fifth hour cannot be done before the fourth — that practitioner is applying change in a constrained direction. The recipe is the discipline that turns the practitioner's hands from a source of arbitrary change into an instrument of structural integration. This is why Ida defended the recipe so fiercely against students who wanted to skip ahead, or who thought they had understood the work well enough to depart from it. The recipe was the answer to the question of how change becomes directional in the absence of full chef-level understanding.
"However, what seemed implicit in there, which I don't think happens, is that they're separate, that they don't have a lot of necessary changes in their assumptions, convictions, opinions, and decisions about life as a result of their body changing. This is the this was the question that I asked. That just the very fact that a body can change shape within thirty minutes, you know, or two minutes really, is a tremendous cultural assumption."
Asked by a UCLA audience member whether the changes of the work hold, Ida acknowledges what continues to resist:
The danger of suggestion
Another dimension of the doctrine became visible in the 1975 Boulder advanced class, where the practitioners began to discuss what happens to a client psychologically during a session. A client lying on the table, in physical contact with the practitioner, often in some degree of pain or disorganization, is in a heightened state of suggestibility. Anything the practitioner says lands with unusual force. The implications for change are sobering. A practitioner who makes a casual remark — about the client's body, about what the practitioner is feeling, about the meaning of a tissue release — can install a belief or interpretation that the client carries for years. This is change, certainly. It is not necessarily integration. It can, in fact, install exactly the kind of patterned belief that the work was supposed to dissolve.
"Norm had a really good comment about that in Mill Valley. Remember what you said up there, Norm, about your experience when somebody had given you a massage and and, you know, the the fact of letting them in and opening up your body a bit made you very receptive to what they had to say and it made you think that you have to be very careful about what you say to somebody while you're offing them because you are putting them in a place where they're wide open to any suggestion that might come out from you. Particularly when you add the component of pain to the component of physical touch, it's like the subconscious just goes Right. And very often there's no sense of humor there. I mean, that you say something which normally, you know, would be ho, ho, ho, and it goes right in there and sticks. And 10 later, you know, they're still running that program. There's a great book that really should be a good book. It's called Uncommon Therapy. It's about the work of Milton Erickson and Jay Haderuddin."
A senior practitioner in the Boulder 1975 class describes the moment of vulnerability:
This is one of the more sobering observations to come out of the Boulder class. The practitioner has not only the capacity to change tissue — which is well understood as a power requiring discipline — but also the capacity to change belief, simply by speaking during the session. The client's openness, which is what makes structural change possible, is also what makes psychological manipulation possible. A practitioner who has not absorbed this can produce real harm without ever knowing he has done it. The change he has produced will look from the outside like a normal session. Internally, the client may have absorbed an interpretation of himself that he did not need and cannot easily release. Ida's warning that change is not necessarily good extends, in this discussion, beyond tissue to the subtle and largely unmonitored channel of verbal suggestion under touch.
"The thing that I found is that every significant change demands a complete change in my life. Like, all of this stuff in me has has related to being willing to give up conflict. Well, see, that's what connects all of these things. It's the psychology. It's the metaphysics. It's the excuse me. Well, yeah, I admit all that. Yeah. Well, I know the thing of working with my body. For me, what I've seen is that the spiritual trip is for me just more and more down into my body, into my life, present. Judy, you said some remarks the other day that I thought were very important about how patterning can allow the raw themes, the piece people being raw, to participate in their raw things by knowing what the patterners are talking."
Another practitioner in the Boulder class reflects on the cost of significant change:
Resistance and the legitimate refusal
If change is not necessarily good, it follows that resistance to change is not necessarily bad. This was another counter-intuitive position Ida and her circle developed in the mid-1970s. The growth movement tended to treat resistance as something to be overcome — the client's defense against the breakthrough that the work was about to produce. Ida's position was more careful. Some resistance was the body's legitimate refusal to undergo a change it was not ready for, and the practitioner who pushed through such resistance was producing exactly the kind of arbitrary change the doctrine warned against.
"You know, my experience in psychotherapy, when I run into somebody that's sent in or runs into me and they say, well, I really don't wanna get involved because so and so and so and so. I accept that as the as the manifestation that they aren't ready at the moment to do to change or to get involved with change. And my technique at that point usually is to plant some kind of a seed for the future and I'll make some comment about well, you know, maybe this isn't the time. You you gotta check what this is doing for you to not change right now. What's it doing for your life? And usually within sometimes as little as two or three weeks, but certainly no longer than six months, they'll show up again and say, you know, you're right. And I let's get started and here's the money and Mhmm. So I don't push people to put up a real wall of resistance. I think it's Well, that's right. And this a danger to try and run through that."
Discussing a French practitioner who left her London class after two days, Ida acknowledges the legitimacy of certain refusals:
This is a developed and careful position. Ida is distinguishing between two kinds of resistance: the structural unconsciousness that practitioners encounter regularly and that the work is designed to address, and the more fundamental refusal of a person who is not ready to do this work at all. The first kind responds to skilled manipulation and the patient invitation that the recipe provides. The second kind does not, and the practitioner who tries to force it produces only damage. Knowing which kind of resistance is present is part of the practitioner's discipline. Pushing change against a client who is structurally unwilling is one of the clearest forms of change-that-is-not-good — change that the body absorbs as injury rather than integration.
"Newman, who was one of Freud's great scholars and wrote the book on consciousness, I believe it was he that said, for consciousness to change, we need a free universe and a free society. And here again in this, what we're talking about, the opening perspective on or the opening universe. This is why I venture to say tonight that some of our deeply rooted, unconscious or collectivistic unconscious thoughts could be changing. But I was speaking, the answer to your question, directly to the point of the monistic idea. You must read about the Tao, TAO, and the yin yang in order to thoroughly understand this."
In a 1974 Open Universe class, a colleague frames the cultural condition that makes Ida's doctrine legible:
Coda: the direction that matters
What Ida meant by saying that change is not necessarily good comes into focus when the statement is held against the rest of her late-career teaching. She was not anti-change; her whole life's work was the demonstration that the adult body could be changed dramatically and the project of changing it was worth a career. What she was against was the substitution of change for integration in the moral vocabulary of her culture and her own profession. The growth movement had made change a value. Her practitioners had started to absorb this. The before-and-after photograph had become a credential. Clients had started to evaluate practitioners by the visible difference produced in a single session. In every one of these moves, the criterion of change had replaced the criterion of direction. Ida's doctrine was a recovery of the criterion of direction.
"And you have to know how to get these words and put them together and to elicit them forcefully enough that they make an impact on this wall of stuff that has been being built up for the past two thousand years. I do not like to belabor aristocrinism, but I almost have to because you see for two thousand years the trained, the educated part of the community, the priests, and more lately the doctors, have been educated in terms fully of the Aristotelian termites of black and white. Acts in oath. And this is part of our heritage and we are opting for change. A hundred years ago in the days of Victoria, they weren't opting for change. For some reason, somebody is opting for change will. And the only practical way of bringing change into a There is not a black and a white. There is a spectrum. In this spectrum situations can be displaced toward one end or toward the other."
In a 1973 Big Sur advanced class she closes the loop, framing the historical situation:
The historical sweep of this passage clarifies what Ida was responding to. The willingness to change was new. For most of Western history the assumption had been the opposite: that the adult was fixed, that the body was given, that growth meant aging downward from a youthful peak. Ida's career had helped overturn that assumption. But the overturning had produced its own pathology — a culture so committed to change that it had stopped asking which direction the change should go. Her doctrine was an attempt to restore the question. Change is real, change is possible, change can be produced by skilled hands. None of this means change is good. The direction is what matters. The pattern body, the vertical line, the integration of segments around gravity — these were her specifications of the direction that counted, and her practitioners' job was to learn to recognize that direction so reliably that they would never confuse arbitrary change with the work.
"Now remember you have seen the movie several times and you will probably see it again. The title of which is Gravity is the therapist. Don't get the ideas, and for heaven's sake, don't put the ideas out in front that you are God, you are the therapist."
She closes a 1976 advanced class with the warning that summarizes the position:
This is where Ida's doctrine arrives. Change is not necessarily good because the practitioner is not the agent of the change that matters. The practitioner organizes the body; gravity integrates it. The practitioner who imagines himself as the source of the change has already failed the test of the work, because he has substituted his own will for the structural framework that decides which direction counts as integration. The criterion of direction is given by the relationship between the body and the gravitational field, not by the practitioner's intention or by the visible result in the photograph. A practitioner who has absorbed this stops trying to make people better, stops congratulating himself on the change he produced, and starts asking the only question that matters: have the relationships in this body been brought into a configuration that gravity can support? If yes, integration has occurred. If no, what has happened is change — and change, as Ida spent her career insisting, is not necessarily good.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf on the open universe and the closed mind, IPRCON2 (1971-72) — an extended reflection on how energy centers can be located in space rightly or wrongly, with implications for the directional question this article addresses. IPRCON2 ▸
See also: See also: Valerie Hunt and Ida Rolf, RolfB3Side1 — Hunt's mathematical formulation of structural integration as energy ordering, which provides the formal counterpart to the doctrine that change must be directional rather than arbitrary. RolfB3Side1 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf on the limits of psychological breakthrough, 72MYS2B (1971-72) — a discussion of why large cathartic change tends not to integrate, paralleling the article's argument that change without structural target tends not to hold. 72MYS2B ▸