The interview that frames the problem
Sometime in 1971 or 1972, a radio interviewer arrived at Ida Rolf's location with a clear agenda: produce a master tape, sellable as a primer, that would let a curious lay listener decide whether to seek out the work. Bob Rolf — her son — was present. The interviewer wanted the standard format: an interview, spontaneous, conversational. Ida wanted to refer her to a prepared lecture she had given the day before, a document she had revised several times specifically to address the problem of how to introduce the work logically and in order. The opening exchange of that interview is preserved in the chunk pool, and it discloses, almost immediately, the dilemma Rolf faced whenever she stepped into the role of explainer.
"Essentially what we want to do is describe rolfing and, what the underlying philosophy is and how it works and what it does and who's been rolfed and what have been the effects of it and a very basic interview that will so people can listen to this tape and say, That's what rolfing is. I wanna do it or I don't wanna do it or it sounds like it's something for me or it's not."
The interviewer states the goal of the master tape in the opening seconds.
The interviewer's framing is reasonable. It is also the framing Ida spent her career resisting. To compress the work into a portable verbal package is to do violence to what the work is — a felt change in a person's structure and personality, delivered through hands, distributed over ten hours of intimate physical labor. The conversion of that into a radio segment is, in a sense, the entire pedagogical problem of public communication in miniature. Rolf knew this. Within the first few minutes of that same interview, before she had even reached her definition, she had already issued the disclaimer that would govern her thinking about communication for the rest of her life.
"because Rolfing itself is an experience and like all experiences to create it to translate it into verbal sections words doesn't really convey ideas."
Opening a 1974 advanced-class lecture, after a glowing introduction, Ida names what words cannot do.
Why she refused the word "treatment"
The first concrete communication lesson in the transcripts is negative — a word Ida refused to allow. In the same 1971-72 interview, the interviewer opened with what she considered a polite, accurate description: a body treatment Ida had developed many years ago. Ida stopped her on the spot. The objection was not stylistic; it was political and legal. To call the work a treatment was to enter the medical field, to position the practitioner as someone doing something to a passive recipient, and — in the framework of the early 1970s, when chiropractors and others were fighting their own jurisdictional battles — to invite the same regulatory pressure.
"What we're really doing is a personal treatment in the sense that whereas while we're dealing with, while our hands are manipulating bodies, what we're really creating is a change in the personality."
Ida reframes the interviewer's opening characterization within the first minute.
Later in the same interview, the interviewer asks about "treatment methods" and Ida halts her again. The exchange is preserved in chunk 27, and it gives the clearest single statement of her positioning strategy. The work is to be sold — her word — as an educational method, a method of educating a person to a higher potential. Treatment is medical; education is pedagogical. The distinction was not cosmetic. Educational positioning kept the work outside the regulatory net that surrounded medical practice in California and elsewhere; it also matched what Ida believed the work actually was.
"We don't want that. Are interested in selling this as an educational method, a method of a duking, leaving out a person Alright. To a higher potential."
When the interviewer offers "therapy" as an alternative to "treatment," Ida rejects that too.
The replacement language Ida offered in that interview — education, process, working with — was not just defensive. It was a positive claim about what the work was. The implication for any practitioner stepping into a public-speaking moment was clear: every word the practitioner used to describe the work positioned the work somewhere in the cultural landscape, and the wrong word positioned it wrong. The discipline of language was, for Ida, identical to the discipline of accurate self-understanding.
Start where they are
By the mid-1970s, Ida had begun teaching public communication as a topic in its own right inside the advanced classes. In the 1976 Boulder advanced class she devoted a substantial stretch of lecture time to it. Her single most-repeated injunction in that material is the pedagogical principle she attributed to Mr. Casey: start where they are. The phrase was not original to her, but she used it constantly, and it organized her entire approach to the audience problem. A practitioner who walks into a small-town agricultural audience and talks about energy fields and verticality and tensegrity has already lost; a practitioner who walks into a Esalen-style human-potential audience and talks in the same plain folk register that worked in the small town has also lost. The communicator's job, she insisted, is to identify the cognitive starting point of the listener and meet them there.
"When you are dealing with people and this goes for a student student and it goes for an audience. Casey says, you start where they are. That's all you can do."
Ida states the underlying pedagogical principle in plain terms.
The corollary, which Ida pressed in the same lecture, is that practitioners themselves often violate the rule. She watched young assistants, freshly through the class and full of new vocabulary, try to impress audiences with the labels they had just acquired. The instinct was natural — show what you know — but it was, in her view, the precise opposite of teaching. To teach is to walk the listener step by step from where they are to where you are; only at the destination can you afford to stop and admire the view. Anything else was showmanship, and showmanship, as she would tell a story about chiropractic demonstrations to make clear, was the enemy of the work.
"Now you go into one of these human potential audiences, and obviously you can use a great many different words and ideas than you can if you go into a very small town audience where the audience is largely agricultural. It doesn't say the agricultural audience is dumb. It simply says you hook them with a different bait."
Applying the principle directly to the practitioner's choice of audience and register.
This was not cultural relativism in the soft sense. Ida was specific about what the practitioner must not concede in the process of adaptation. The substance of the work — that it changes structure, that it operates within the gravitational field, that it produces a vertical body more capable of accepting support from the earth — could not be diluted into the listener's prior categories. What had to change was the language, the metaphors, the order of presentation. The doctrine stayed; the route to it varied.
Vertical: the word everyone thinks they understand
Within her communication teaching, Ida singled out a particular danger: the audience's false sense of familiarity with the work's central terms. Verticality was the chief offender. To say the work brings a body toward the vertical sounds, to most listeners, like a polite restatement of a familiar idea — stand up straight, good posture, the kind of thing one's mother said. The trouble was that everyone agreed with the slogan and almost no one understood what was being asked. Watch them try to stand up straight, Ida said in the 1976 Boulder class, and you see immediately that the verbal agreement was hollow. A practitioner who proceeds as if the audience already understood the term has communicated nothing.
"For one thing, you have to be sure that whoever you're talking to understands what is the vertical. Plenty of people don't. Everybody thinks they understand what you mean when you say stand up straight, but you watch them try to do it. You realize they don't understand that either."
Ida warns against the most common cause of failed public communication.
The remedy, in her teaching, was to slow down at the moment the audience appeared to be agreeing. Apparent agreement, when the underlying concept had not actually been transmitted, was worse than disagreement. It produced an audience that walked away saying they had understood, but they had only filed the new doctrine into the old slot — good posture, stand up straight, mother was right. The work would then be remembered as a kind of postural massage, a category error Rolf spent her whole career fighting. To prevent this, she demanded the practitioner ground the listener in the actual geometry: ankle over knee, knee over hip, hip over the lumbar bodies, lumbar over shoulder, shoulder over ear — a real line in three-dimensional space, not a moral exhortation.
"It gets us into the medical field, which we are interested in staying on. Okay. You know, I'm just gonna I'm gonna scratch that. I'm gonna scratch that, and I'll ask the question a different way. Okay? Okay. Okay. So we have individuals whose development is somehow not being manifest in such a perfect way as it might. And that by Rolfing you can help the individual to maximize their potential, both their physical potential and their mental and psychological potential."
Ida, in the 1971-72 interview, demonstrates the verticality-by-geometry approach she wanted practitioners to use.
The dichotomy of repetition
If the failure mode of the listener was false familiarity, the failure mode of the speaker — including practitioners — was undiscriminating repetition. In the 1976 Boulder lecture Ida produced one of her most acid complaints about the culture at large, and applied it directly to people who tried to communicate the work. The complaint was that people parrot what they have heard without ever pulling apart what was actually said. Someone tells them the work is a wonderful technique for such-and-such purpose; they go away and tell the next person the work is a wonderful technique, dropping the purpose, dropping the qualifier, dropping the discrimination. The result is endorsement without information, and endorsement without information cannot transmit anything that resembles the actual work.
" this is one of my great complaints in life: that 99 out of every one one hundred people don't discriminate. They repeat something that somebody said. Even rothing is a wonderful technique. They are repeating something that somebody said they're not saying. Rolfing is a magnificent technique for such and such a purpose."
Ida names the failure mode that defeats most attempts to communicate the work outward.
The remedy she pressed on her advanced students was discrimination — the older sense of the word, meaning the ability to make accurate distinctions. A practitioner speaking in public must be able to say not merely that some adjacent practice is good for so-and-so, but to discriminate when it is good, where it is good, and what it offers that the work in question does not. The same applied in reverse: the practitioner had to be able to say exactly what the work did and what it did not do, where its claims were strong and where they were tentative. This was not modesty for its own sake. It was the cognitive prerequisite for being taken seriously by an audience whose default was suspicion of overclaiming.
"And all of this has to become a part of you, a gut part of you, if you are going to fill a unique significant place in your culture and you have to learn how to not merely say, well chiropractic or XYZ technique is very good for so and so, but you have to be able to discriminate in your own mind as to when and where those people are good, when and where they're better than you, when they offer something else. They offer signing certificates that get them money from the insurance company if nothing else. I trust that that particular situation will be remedied shortly."
Ida extends the discrimination argument into the question of how chronic versus acute conditions divide the professional landscape.
The template as a teaching device
Asked, in the 1971-72 interview, how she actually trained a practitioner to do the work, Ida reached for a specific word — template. The choice was Bob's; she had been groping for the right term and he supplied it. The template was a picture, internal to the practitioner, of what a body should look like and how its parts should relate. The practitioner does not impose the template; the practitioner uses it as a reference against which to read the actual body in front of them. The same device, Ida realized in the same conversation, worked as a public communication tool. If you can give an audience a picture of what a properly organized body would look like, you have given them something concrete to measure their own understanding against.
"And that by Rolfing you can help the individual to maximize their potential, both their physical potential and their mental and psychological potential. Yes, this is what we claim and this is what I think we can produce for you. Now, exactly what is Rolfing? How do you produce these changes? Well, what we teach to a prospective Rolfe is a a picture. What is the word that I've been using, Bob? A template. A template. Why don't you start your sentence again? Yes. What we teach to the prospective world for is a picture or, in other words, a template of what a body should look like, how it should look, what are the relations within the body, what sort of arms should a certain set of shoulders have, what sort of shoulders should a certain head have, etcetera."
Ida arrives at the template image as the way to explain to a lay listener what the practitioner is trained to do.
What made the template image work as public communication was that it was concrete without being technical. A listener with no anatomy could grasp it instantly — clothing patterns, dressmaking, the homely image of a size-ten skirt paired with a size-eight blouse. From there Ida could move outward into the actual structural claim: the body has a proper template, the random body deviates from it, the practitioner brings the body closer to it. The route from a kitchen-table metaphor to a doctrinal statement was short because Ida had built the bridge in advance.
Gravity is the therapist
If the template was the image that worked for lay listeners, gravity is the therapist was the slogan Ida offered her practitioners for harder audiences. It appeared in the 1971-72 IPR convention address preserved in chunk 1, and she returned to it in many later lectures. The sentence carried doctrinal weight precisely because it disclaimed the practitioner. The practitioner is not the agent of change. Gravity is. The practitioner's job is to make the body capable of being supported by gravity, not to push the body into a new shape by force. A practitioner who could deliver that sentence cleanly to a skeptical audience had, in a single line, disarmed the most common suspicion — that the work was a forceful manipulation imposing the practitioner's will on the client.
"Rolfing in the sense of this deep changing of the patterns of the fundamental structure of the body to conform with gravity. I have written, as I think probably all of you know, gravity is the therapist, and this is true and I make no claim to be a therapist, but I do make a claim that says that Rothschild changes the basic web of the body so that that therapist's gravity can really get in there."
Ida hands the slogan to the practitioners and explicitly asks them to spread it.
The slogan worked at multiple levels. For a popular audience, it deflected the practitioner's authority onto something universal and unthreatening — gravity, after all, is something everyone already trusts. For a scientific audience, it framed the work in the language of physics rather than therapy, opening a conversation about energy fields, support, and mechanics rather than about diagnosis and cure. For a skeptical chiropractor or physician, it differentiated the work from manipulative practices that claimed to do something to the body. Across audiences, the line let the practitioner say less and mean more — exactly the inversion Ida sought in public communication.
Words for what cannot be said
Beyond the template and the gravity slogan, Ida offered her practitioners a third communicative move: explicit framing of the work as an evolving cultural object. She described its history as a journey from an art form perceived intuitively, in the days of Fritz Perls and Esalen, to a scientifically analyzed phenomenon that could be fitted with current vocabulary. The narrative arc itself was a communication device. It gave the practitioner a way to acknowledge that the work emerged from a counterculture milieu — which was, in many audiences, a liability — while also claiming that it had since matured into a phenomenon that could be examined, replicated, and taught.
"A revolutionary idea develops first as an intuitive perception in the mind of the pioneer or the innovator. At this point in in its life it is practically an art form. It is an art form perceived as a whole embodying a total idea demanding a total expression, and this is where Rolfing was in the days of Esselen, the days which I have been describing. This was an art form that caught the imagination of a lot of people. At the time of Fritz Perles and those other those other founding friends this fairly expressed its level. But like so many ideas this has progressed to a level where it is now being examined and analyzed and fitted with words suitable for the current idiom. In other words, the idea progresses, I'm talking about ideas in general and Rolfing in particular, The idea progresses from an odd expression into a scientific understanding and thorough analysis, and you can see to what extent this is beginning to describe what you are seeing around you here. Do I think scientific analysis is the answer to all problems? Definitely not, certainly not."
Ida narrates the history of the idea itself as part of her public-communication kit.
The move was rhetorical jujitsu. Audiences who arrived suspicious of the Esalen association could be told, accurately, that the Esalen era was indeed where the work first found its audience, but that the work had since been studied with electromyography, brainwave analysis, and other measurements. Audiences who arrived suspicious of laboratory reductionism could be told that the analysis was a stage, not the end, and that the goal remained synthetic integration — Ida's preferred term for the higher form she believed lay beyond analysis. Either suspicion could be answered without compromising the substance.
"In other words, the idea progresses, I'm talking about ideas in general and Rolfing in particular, The idea progresses from an odd expression into a scientific understanding and thorough analysis, and you can see to what extent this is beginning to describe what you are seeing around you here. Do I think scientific analysis is the answer to all problems? Definitely not, certainly not. I think synthetic integration is a far higher form, and this is what, by the grace of God, we will still be able to call integration. I think for one thing science, but science is not all that bad, you can't just dam it out of hand. For one thing it permits and it encourages replication. And before the method can be taught replication must be possible. You all remember, I'm sure, hearing me the wail, the shortcomings of Rolfers. Don't think any of you have any doubts about that."
Ida turns her cultural-history argument into a defense of analysis itself.
The trick demonstrations and what was wrong with them
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, one of Ida's senior practitioners told a story that captured what she did not want public communication of the work to look like. The story concerned Ida's early attempts to teach chiropractors. The chiropractors operated in a culture of showmanship — quick releases, audible cracks, dramatic before-and-after moments. They challenged each other with theatrical demonstrations. Ida, faced with this culture, did her own trick. She would change one side of a person's chest visibly, dramatically, while leaving the other side untouched, producing a body so asymmetric that the change was undeniable. The chiropractors loved it. But the story carried, in its telling, a warning.
"Thinking back about the history also, this is just sort of a side anecdote here. An antidote. Ida herself used to travel around and try to teach us the chiropractors. And their comeback was always they're very showmanship like. They always get together and someone says, watch this. And they like to snap their hands. Someone says, well, that's nothing. Watch this. And so I but it's all quick stuff, you know, quick releases. And I think while all this showy stuff was going on, I decided that she had to really she had to blow them out. How can I really with all these tricks that I have in my back, how am I gonna blow these guys out? She said, well, if I can make this I'll just do my little change one side of the chest and leave the other side so small that it's fairly obvious that the body's going like this, you know, one side. And and that and we'll just see how they like that trick. You know? And and everybody went, well, that's pretty good. Show me that one again. But the problem started off."
A senior practitioner recounts Ida's early showmanship strategy with chiropractors, and what was problematic about it.
The warning, drawn out in the 1975 class discussion, was that the asymmetric-chest demonstration impressed audiences without teaching them. They came away saying the work was powerful; they did not come away understanding what it had done or why. Ida's later teaching, by contrast, insisted on grounded demonstration — the kind where the audience is taught what to look for before the change is made, so that what they see when the change occurs is not magic but a confirmed prediction. The first session of the ten-session series, the senior practitioner argued in that 1975 discussion, was itself a kind of teaching demonstration: it gave the recipient an experience of what the work was about, at a level deeper than slogans, so that further sessions arrived with the body already informed about what was being attempted.
The interviewer as proxy for the public
Across the interviews in this corpus, Ida treated the interviewer as a stand-in for the public she was trying to reach. The interviewer's questions were the public's questions; the interviewer's misunderstandings were the public's misunderstandings; and the interviewer's vocabulary — treatment, therapy, body — was the vocabulary she had to correct in real time before she could say anything substantive. She did this without rancor, but with persistence. She would stop the interviewer mid-sentence, suggest a different word, explain the political and substantive reasons for the substitution, and then ask the question to be asked again. The cumulative effect was a kind of public seminar in how to talk about the work.
"We didn't set out to do it. All right. Maybe we should talk about specifically what is it that Rawl thing sets out to do in a very concise way. The first thing it sets out to do is to make that body conform to the standards for a proper template for a body of that age and that sex. Okay. Wait a minute. I was gonna ask another question. But I wanted to get that in just one line, and I think maybe we'll we'll we can pull that up to to the front where we were talking about that. Oh, I was just gonna ask something. I forgot what it was."
Asked about treatment methods, Ida insists on the educational framing once more.
She also took these moments to model a particular kind of refusal — refusal to describe the manipulation itself. The interviewer asked, reasonably, what the practitioner actually does with the hands. Ida declined. The refusal was not coyness; it was a recognition that a verbal description, broadcast to listeners with no training, would invite imitation. The work, she insisted, was not transmissible by description. The hands had to be trained, the body of the practitioner had to learn what bodies of clients told it, and no radio interview could substitute for the year of reading and the months of supervised practice that the certification required. This, too, was a communication principle: there are some things the public can be told about the work, and some things they cannot be told and must come and experience.
"And now, thanks be to God and the passage of the progression of time, we are now having a building of our own, which we've never had before, where classes will be taught. Now if an individual might be interested in being rolfed, how would that individual go about finding a rolfer? He usually has heard about rolting through someone. The other way he can do is to write to the Roth Institute in Boulder and ask them for recommendation of somebody that lives the closest relative to himself. Of course, they're not going to say that John is much better than Jim, but they will say that John lives a lot closer to you than Jim lives a 100 miles away, or something of this sort, you see. Now, most of the rolfers that I know of are men, and yet you, a woman, established the discipline."
Ida describes how a lay listener can find a practitioner.
Doctor Valerie Hunt: the colleague who speaks the public's language
Among the most striking passages in the corpus are those from Doctor Valerie Hunt, the kinesiologist who studied the work scientifically and who, in the 1974 Healing Arts class, recounted her own conversion. Hunt's testimony is itself an instance of public communication, and Ida valued it enough to invite Hunt to speak in the advanced classes. The reason is structural. Hunt arrived at the work as a skeptic — a credentialed academic teaching neuromuscular kinesiology — and her account of her conversion has the rhetorical shape that lay audiences trust: I was skeptical, I tested it, the data forced me to change my mind, and only then did I undergo the work myself. The narrative is reproducible; it gives practitioners a model for how to introduce the work to scientifically-minded audiences.
"one of the hardest nuts to crack, according to Doctor. Rolfe. She asked me about Rolfing and I wasn't interested. And I want to share with you an experience that I had prior to being Rolf. About five years ago I was teaching at the university, teaching neuromuscular kinesiology to physical therapy students, kinesiologists, and dance people. And students came in and asked me about Rolfine. Well, the only reason I knew it wasn't a pill was because it had ING on the end."
Hunt, lecturing to the 1974 Healing Arts class, opens with her own pre-conversion ignorance.
Hunt went on to describe a pilot electromyography study she conducted on practitioners' clients, the controlled findings that surprised her, and finally her own decision to be worked on. The narrative arc — independent verification, then personal experience — became, in the advanced classes, a template practitioners could borrow when speaking to audiences who needed scientific permission to take the work seriously. Ida did not herself speak in this register; she preferred direct doctrinal statement. But she recognized that some audiences required Hunt's register, and she made sure her practitioners had heard it modeled.
"They were dance people that she was using as her subjects and I got some of those and I did a little electromyography on them with some simple tasks. And then I ran a couple of control subjects not expecting to find anything but saying I'd go through the exercise of making an attempt to find something, and sure enough I found something. And that is that the people after being Roth, their neuromuscular behavior was not the same electronically. And so I started my first study at Agnew State Hospital a number of years ago one I will report on today briefly where there were only 14 subjects or 14 that we finally ended up with with biochemistry tests, with tests of electroencephalography particularly evoked brain responses, and I did electromyography. But as I put this data on computers and did frequency analysis, It was so spectacular that even my resistance was gone. And after the first day I reported that, I said to Doctor. Rolf, my body is yours. May I be Rolf? She did that rolfing, and this very brief statement is not scientific. It is it is specifically my personal testimony, and I'm not being paid for it nor was it solicited."
Hunt walks the audience through the data that forced her to take the work seriously, and the personal decision that followed.
What the practitioner must learn before speaking
Ida's most demanding statement on public communication, delivered in the 1976 Boulder advanced class, ran in the form of an accusation. She told her practitioners that if they could not discriminate accurately when speaking about adjacent practices, if they could not say specifically when a chiropractor was good at what they did and when an osteopath was, and what each offered that the work in question did not, then they were not actually understanding the philosophy that made their own work individual. The demand was severe. It asked the practitioner to do something most people in any field rarely do — to articulate, in defensible terms, not only what they themselves do but what every adjacent practitioner does, well enough to discriminate.
"They offer signing certificates that get them money from the insurance company if nothing else. I trust that that particular situation will be remedied shortly. But those people are taught to see acute problems. You are being taught to see see chronic problems. All chronic problems involve mechanics. All mechanics involve the gravitational behavior of material substances in a three-dimensional field. That's what mechanics is: the study of the behavior of material substances in a gravitational field. How fast does it fall? When does it fall? When is it stable?
Ida pushes the discrimination demand to its full extent.
The cognitive demand cascaded into a research demand. If the practitioners were to speak publicly with discrimination, they needed to know more — about mechanics, about fascia, about how the work actually produced the changes it produced. Ida had already, in her IPR addresses, signaled that the field's understanding of its own mechanism was incomplete. She asked the practitioners to live with that incompleteness honestly when speaking in public, rather than papering over it with confident slogans.
"a consistent and continuous need for input, that is among the teachers and the people who are developing this, a need for input in order to feed the springs that give the outflow, we must know if we have to progress further. We must know more about the structure with which we as welfare are dealing. What is it we're doing to and with these structures? For it is the change in structure which manifests or doesn't manifest or is it only an index for behavior? I think you would all agree that the change in behavior is the prime importance of what we do. But remember that if you take on somebody who has had a great deal of physical problem you are also saying that he has a behavior problem because his behavior problem concerns the behavior of the particular organ or system which in trouble. And it manifests its trouble through behavior. It isn't working right. It isn't doing its digestion or it isn't doing its walking or it isn't doing something of the sort which is the outward and visible sign, in the words of the good old catechism, of the inward and spiritual disgrace."
Ida frames the field's continuing need for understanding as a precondition for public maturity.
Coda: the seed in the culture
In the 1976 Boulder lecture, Ida pressed her practitioners with a charge that was both vocational and cultural. She wanted them, she said, to go out into the culture and act as a seed — a significant seed — for a different way of thinking. The phrase carried her sense that public communication of the work was not a marketing function, and not even primarily a recruitment function. It was a cultural intervention. Every practitioner who learned to speak about the work with accuracy, discrimination, and respect for the listener's actual starting point would alter the cultural soil into which any future practitioner would step. The communication, in that sense, was the work, performed at the level of language.
"They're saying Rolfing is a magnificent technique. Hope I'm making some sort of sense to you people because I would like to see you as a group go out into the culture and be a significant seed in that culture to change their way of thinking. Tom, are you worrying about something? I'm just scratching my oxford here. Rolling isn't much good for it, is it? It is. Somebody else got can someone else take this along?"
Ida names the cultural ambition behind every public communication of the work.
She returned, near the end of the 1971-72 master tape, to the simplest possible statement of what the work was for. The interviewer asked what the goal was, and Ida, in a sentence that practitioners could and did carry away verbatim, said the goal was to bring a human being closer to the vertical so that the gravitational field of the earth could support, rather than tear down, the body. The brevity was earned. Every word in the sentence had been argued for elsewhere; the audience that had been walked from the template to the verticality to the gravitational claim could hear it whole. Communication, in Ida's teaching, was the discipline of preparing the listener so well that the substantive claim could finally be made simply.
"And the purpose what of what is the What is goal of Rolfing? And we'll we can put all of this together. Of course. Wait a minute. Wait a haven't asked you yet. Doctor Rolfe, can you explain briefly what is the goal of Rolfe? Well, in the broader sense, of course, what we're trying to do is to give an individual the better, the best possible use of his body and therefore, incidentally, of his mind. But, of course, the answer to that is as we see it, that we must bring a man or a woman, a human toward the vertical. It is only when he is related to that vertical stance that I described before that he is able to have the best use of his physical body and its appurtenances, a mental body and an emotional body, if one wants to use those metaphors. And this, of course, is what we have in mind to produce. In other words, what we are saying is, what we are claiming is that we can bring any man much nearer to the vertical. And that is where the head is when he to the vertical, he looks at us with amazement and he says, I feel so much better. I feel so much lighter. I move so much better. I do so much more work. What have you done to me? And all we can say is we haven't done a thing except to prepare your body so that the field of energy of the earth, the gravitational field, is able to support, work through your body and support it, instead of tearing it down."
Asked plainly what the goal of the work is, Ida delivers her most-quoted answer.
See also: See also: Doctor Valerie Hunt, Healing Arts 1974 lectures (CFHA_03, CFHA_04) — extended scientific testimony on the work's effects, useful as a model for practitioners addressing scientifically-credentialed audiences. CFHA_03 ▸CFHA_04 ▸
See also: See also: Open Universe class lectures (UNI_043, UNI_044, UNI_073) — extended discussions of how the work is described to lay audiences interested in energy and consciousness, including questions about pain, learning, and the role of structural patterning. UNI_043 ▸UNI_044 ▸UNI_073 ▸
See also: See also: IPR convention addresses (IPRCON1) — Ida's annual reports to her practitioners on the state of the work, where she repeatedly framed the communication task as a cultural one. IPRCON1 ▸
See also: See also: 1976 Boulder advanced class lectures on public speech (76ADV241, 76ADV41, 76ADV51) — Ida's most sustained late-career teaching on how practitioners should address audiences of varying backgrounds. 76ADV241 ▸76ADV41 ▸76ADV51 ▸