Sutherland's lineage and Ida's debt
Ida's references to cranial work were almost never abstract. She named the people — Sutherland, Still, and behind them, she suspected, Swedenborg — and she traced the intellectual line carefully because the line mattered. The cranial osteopaths were, in her account, a small splinter group within osteopathy who had retained something the larger profession had abandoned: an interest in structure rather than pharmacology. In her 1975 Boulder advanced class she made this stark, with a barbed phrase that captures her view of where mainstream osteopathy had gone. The cranial osteopaths still looked to structure; everyone else had become, in effect, junior physicians with sharper needles. The remark is not throwaway — she returns to the cranial school across multiple years as one of the few groups whose perception of the body she could partly endorse.
"But there is within the osteopathic group, is a small school, most of whom are members of the cranial osteopaths who really look to structure still. The rest of them keep the hyperbaric needles sharp. But look at that and understand how you are seeing a similar process going on at the two ends of defined."
Boulder, 1975, in the twelfth-session class, comparing the sacrum and the cranium as bony aggregates that move:
Her debt to Sutherland was specific. From the cranial osteopaths Ida took two propositions: first, that the bones of the skull are jointed at the sutures and do in fact move; second, that respiration is not principally a function of the lungs but a pumping action that involves the cranium, the spine, and the cerebrospinal fluid. She accepted the first proposition without reservation and built the seventh hour of the recipe around it. The second she partly accepted and partly revised, as the later sections of this article will show. But she insisted, every time she returned to Sutherland in lecture, that he was a good observer — that he had watched bodies and seen something real.
"What happened? And he saw that under certain conditions that they became aberrated. The relative position of these boats changed. Sutures changed. Now, doctor Still, as far as I remember, remember I don't think Doctor. Still ever was himself involved in this, except as the teacher of Sutherland. But Sutherland gathered around him a group of what are still called ten finger osteopaths. And they looked, they watched what happened with respiration."
From a 1976 advanced class, describing Sutherland's place in the osteopathic lineage:
What the cranial osteopaths can teach you
Ida did not send her practitioners to study cranial osteopathy. She did, however, repeatedly tell them that the cranial osteopaths had one specific gift to offer: they could show you, with their hands, that the bones of the skull move. This was not a metaphysical claim for her. It was a developmental fact. The seven cranial bones grow embryologically from separate centers, and at birth they are not yet joined — held only by fascial wrapping across what we call the fontanelles. As the child grows, the bones approach each other, but they never fully fuse. The sutures remain. And in a healthy adult, there is still movement at those sutures.
"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, you get this sense of those bones being inside soft tissue that you get with all other problems."
Boulder, 1975, in the tenth-session class, telling students what the cranial osteopaths can offer them:
Notice the calibration. The cranial osteopaths can teach you to feel the bones move — that's a real perceptual skill — but the structural work does not depend on having that skill. A practitioner who develops cranial palpation has more in their hand; a practitioner who does not still gets the cranium to release through the seventh hour. This was characteristic of Ida's relationship to other modalities. She borrowed what she could verify, declined what she could not implement within her own framework, and refused to make her practitioners into cranial osteopaths. The seventh hour does cranial work, but it does it through the soft tissue from the outside, not by sitting at the head and waiting for the bones to tell their story.
"And they did some extremely interesting things by simply holding the head, not too tightly at that, and allowing the movement with this restricted head to change the spine. And as I say, they did some quite impressive things, especially spastic children. And they 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."
From a public-tape lecture, describing what Sutherland's group actually did with their hands:
The primary respiratory mechanism
The second proposition Ida took from Sutherland was the more radical one. Conventional physiology defines respiration as the work of the lungs and ribs. Sutherland — and Ida, following him — proposed something different. The primary respiratory mechanism, in this account, is not pulmonary but spinal and cranial: a rhythmic pumping involving the bones of the skull, the membranes inside the cranium, the ventricles, the cerebrospinal fluid, and the sacrum. The lungs are secondary, an accommodation to the body's need for oxygen, but the deeper rhythm that drives life lives in the spine. Ida did not invent this doctrine. She received it from Sutherland and she suspected Sutherland had received it from Swedenborg, the eighteenth-century Swedish mystic whose anatomical writings she had read.
"Well, Settlement was the guy who devised promulgated cranial osteopathy. I know for some cranial And Sutherland said that the basic respiratory mechanism is not the ribs and the lungs, but is this pumping of the fluid, through the the spinal fluid through the spine by virtue of this coming into that. And as I said to you, I have reason to believe that Sutherland picked this up from Swedenborg. But the fact of the matter is, you see, that he had a vision of an entirely different mechanism which nobody else seems to know how to implement, including the craniovascular patterns."
From a public-tape lecture, attributing the doctrine of primary respiration to Sutherland:
Read alongside the seventh hour, this doctrine has consequences. If respiration is primarily a spinal-cranial phenomenon, then the practitioner who frees the cranium, the cervical fascia, the sacrum, and the spine is operating on the body's deepest rhythm — not on a peripheral system. Ida did not preach this in religious tones. She presented it as a working hypothesis she had inherited from Sutherland and that she found consistent with what she observed when bodies were properly organized. She was also willing to revise it where she thought Sutherland had been incomplete.
"You haven't played with cranial osteopathy? Just barely touched on it. Well, the basic concept behind seminal cranial osteopathy was that the entire spinal column was affected in breathing. That there was movement in the cranium, between the segments of the cranium, that they moved and they did their stuff as a pump. And in so doing, they used the whole spinal column as a pump to tooth spinal fluid. Now you can see well enough that if Mr. Sutherland's idea was right, he had a great, big, beautiful interference toward pumping with that spinal column until he got the solid situation which you people have been pursuing in your sixth hour. You are the spine as you breathe lightly. And every last one of you here in this room has seen the time when Some of them prayed with a rhythm in the hernia. Now you people have had enough hands on enough heads to know that some of them have about as much rhythm in it as a stone has. Now this is what happens when all the lower lying junctions tighten and deteriorate."
Mystery-tapes lecture, framing Sutherland's view of cranial respiration in the context of the sixth hour:
Where Ida revised Sutherland
Ida's amendment to Sutherland was anatomical and structural. Sutherland had perceived the cranial pump but, in her view, had not understood that the pump cannot actually function unless the rest of the spinal mechanism — and especially the sacrum — is also free to move. A cranium that bobs at the top of a rigid column of locked vertebrae and a fused sacrum cannot move cerebrospinal fluid. The cranial osteopaths, sitting at the head and working on the bones, were addressing one end of a mechanism whose other end was paralyzed. Ida thought this explained why cranial osteopathy had produced impressive results in some hands but had never become reproducible at scale. The sacrum had to be available.
"And I don't think Sutherland understood that if you didn't have that movement of the sacrum, that you weren't really getting the pumping action of the spinal fluid. I think Sutherland visualized that there was a pumping action anyway. And this is what makes me suspicious of the fact that I don't think this came from I think that Sutherland found that statement somewhere and didn't know how to implement it."
From the same public-tape lecture, naming her specific disagreement with Sutherland:
This is a characteristic move in Ida's intellectual style. She would adopt another school's central perception, then locate the place where that school had stopped short of its own implications, and add the missing structural step. The cranial osteopaths had the cranium; she added the sacrum. The chiropractors had the spine; she added the myofascial envelope around the spine. The osteopaths had structure; she added the gravitational field. In each case she was not rejecting the prior school. She was completing what she took to be its unfinished work.
"There is another chapter here which is also very great interest. The anonymous member of the first AIA Bureau of Professional Development in his comment regarding the Cranial Bowman manuscript said, The idea of bony movement taking place without muscular action is, to say the least, unique to a degree difficult to follow. I hope he's getting used to it, by this time. Very little is known concerning the normal activity of the brain, yet I know that the normal brain lives, thinks, and moves within its own specific membranous articular mechanism, the skull, and I contend that it does not require intermediate muscular agencies to impel articular movement of its own osseous chamber, as do other osseous articulations outside and distant their phone. According to my present hypothesis, interpreted through various phenomena resulting from the application of tracheal technique, the brain involuntarily and rhythmically moves within the skull. But I think you can, all of you, put a question mark in your mind as to what kind of rhythmic movement you're going to get within that skull if the skull is not in position to allow rhythmic movement. See, this involuntary rhythmical movement involves dilation and contraction of the ventricles during respiratory periods."
Reading aloud from Sutherland's writings in an early-1970s lecture, then commenting on them:
Seven bones, fascial wrappings, and the embryological story
Before the practitioner could work with the cranium, Ida wanted them to understand what was actually under their hands. The skull is not a solid case. It is seven bones — frontal, two parietal, occipital, two temporal, sphenoid (and ethmoid, depending on how you count) — that develop from separate embryological centers, are wrapped together first by connective tissue and then by ossification, and meet at sutures that never fully close. The fontanelles of the infant are simply the most visible expression of this fact. In the adult, the sutures are tighter but still mobile, and the bones move at them. A head that has gone stony is a head in which this movement has been lost — and Ida considered stony heads, particularly in young children, a sign that someone needed help quickly.
"Very careful with this. It's been chipped off about four times now and it keeps losing its value each time. And you can take these screws out here if you want to get a good a good view of the temporal process and actually turn this out. This is a display to show that the bones of the skull do in fact move and are in fact sutured. And there's even a couple little bones back in here with sutures that wiggle around like loose teeth. So if you want to wiggle those around, that's fine. What you have to be careful with are the really thin ones in front. That's true. You're also. I imagine Will Sutherland picking one of these things apart with his pocket And Let me have these two bone in now. I'm gonna see like for just a minute and I'll get it back to you. Does everybody understand why we work in the mouth before we go into the nose or why we work in the neck before we go into the mouth and then the nose? It's basically everything loose and aligned so that that work will actually go home. So it will work number one. And number two, so we don't run into any problems. I do we'll talk about that later on a day."
In an eleventh-session Boulder class, a student is demonstrating an articulated skull and explaining why the cranial work happens late in the recipe:
The point of the demonstration is structural humility. The cranium is delicate, the bones are thin in places, and a practitioner who has not first organized the neck, the cervical fascia, and the soft tissue around the mouth will be trying to change cranial relationships without the structural support those changes require. Cranial work, in Ida's recipe, comes late because everything before it has been preparing the cranium to actually receive change. The seventh hour begins at the periphery of the cranium — the splenius, the sternocleidomastoid, the trapezius — and only then proceeds inward to the bones themselves.
"aware of the fact that a man is not a a blob, but that he is a something in within which there is this everlasting movement. And then you see, having started to establish this down at the bottom, then you go up to do that seventh hour work. And your seventh hour starts, like all seventh hours, at the periphery. It starts at the periphery of the cranium, at the neck, the splenius, the sternocleidomastoid, the trapezius, the what have you. The outside working in. And you free these muscles much more than they have been freed. And you have to remember that those muscles attach down as far as the second rib, that those muscles are interfered with when the clavicle is glued down to the first rib. But this has to be organized in order to permit that cranium to set itself squarely within the shoulder yoke. Because the old anatomists called that shoulder girdle a yoke. And why they were so smart, I don't know. But on the other hand, mister James was in here yesterday, as you know, and you could all see a yoke on that man. And what I'm saying to you people is that these people who were brought up in the relatively simple nutritional patterns that were prevalent in outlying districts in throughout Europe showed up different patternings, patternings that have been destroyed by our different type of nutritional organization. And I was amazed to see that man whom I know because I had my hands on him."
Public-tape lecture, describing the structural logic of the seventh hour's approach to the cranium:
The seventh hour as cranial work
If the cranial osteopaths approached the cranium from inside the cranium itself — feeling sutures, releasing the temporal bone, sensing the sphenoid — Ida's seventh hour approached it from outside, working through the fascial envelope of the neck and the soft tissue of the mouth. The two approaches are not opposed; they are different points of entry into the same mechanism. But the seventh hour's claim is structural in a way the cranial school's was not: the cranium cannot be balanced unless the cervical column underneath it is balanced, and the cervical column cannot be balanced unless the soft tissue that runs from inside the mouth down to the second rib has been organized. The cranium is the top of a structural chain. You don't free the chain by holding only the top link.
"get a tongue back where it belongs because that tongue is everlastingly pulling on those oral and cervical fascia. The things that you do not sufficiently recognize is the fact that there is no muscle in the head but connects directly or indirectly to the vertebra of the neck. You see we all think of a face as a face, a head as a head. But that there shouldn't be any relation between the way the vertebrae fall in here and what my facial expression is, is something you never think of until you manage to get into that seventh power. And after that seventh power is organized and you go along and you hit a few days like yesterday was in this room and all of a sudden your face doesn't look the same. It doesn't have that nice shiny radiant brightness that it had. Peter was a beautiful example yesterday. You see, there is a relationship between thought processes and fashion. Don't ask me what it is, I don't know. Maybe God will tell me someday, maybe he won't. And you'll say just go on and use it, you don't have to know. But feel what happens to you after a thing of this sort."
IPR lecture, August 11, 1974, on the relationship between the tongue, the cervical vertebrae, and facial expression:
The seventh hour's signature move — and the one that distinguishes Ida's approach from cranial osteopathy — is the work inside the mouth. The hard palate, the soft palate, the fascial sheets that connect the cranium to the cervical spine, the muscles that determine where the tongue rides: all of this is approachable from inside the mouth in a way the cranial osteopaths, working entirely from outside, could not match. Ida considered this entry point essential because the deep fascia of the mouth is continuous with the deep fascia of the neck, and pulling the cervical vertebrae back into position requires releasing the fascia in front as well as behind.
"I'm just beginning to be able to relate the aberrations that are going on in the cranium and in the mouth with what's happening in the cervix. I'm beginning to see that, but that's just Well, think in terms of that."
From the same August 1974 IPR lecture — a student trying to articulate the relationship Ida is teaching:
She is hard on the practitioner here, but the standard she is enforcing is the one this article keeps returning to: do not work on the cranium as if the cranium were a self-contained problem. The cervical curve and the lumbar curve speak to each other; the tongue speaks to the third cervical; the sphenoid speaks to emotional grief; the splenius speaks to the second rib. Cranial work that does not trace these connections will produce only local change.
"And one of the things that you have to learn, and it takes a hell of a lot of discipline to learn it, is to learn not to teach people or not to try to teach people who aren't ready to hear, who haven't got the basic fundamental understanding to put what you're saying in its right perspective. You must learn to shut up. It's the toughest thing you ever learned. Now when you get to the hard palate, you are no longer dealing with those cervicals. Then you're dealing with the relation between frontal and temporal and sphenoids, etcetera, etcetera. And all of these bones are related through elastic connective tissue. So there is no earthly reason why they can't be eased, if you're smart enough, into areas that are easier. Now all of you have seen those faces change, and I'm certain that no one in this room would get up and argue that a skull can't change or parts of it can't change in relation to other parts. You've seen it. The sphenoid is particularly vulnerable to emotional as well as physical trauma. A person who has studied a who has suffered a very deep emotional grief will very often just have that sphenoid drop back, and their eyes seem to be so deep in their heads. And lo and behold, after you've given the sun power or even before, those eyes start coming out, they start looking at the world again and being in the world again."
Public-tape lecture, describing how cranial bones respond to emotional as well as physical trauma:
The cranium and the sacrum — the two ends of the line
The structural parallel between cranium and sacrum is one of Ida's recurring themes. Both are aggregates of bones — seven cranial bones at the top, five sacral segments fused into one bone at the bottom — that the medical orthodoxy treated as solid, indivisible units. Both are connected to the spine by joints that conventional anatomy held to be immobile. Both, in Ida's view (following Sutherland), participated in the primary respiratory pump. And both could be aberrated and restored. When she taught the cranium, she taught it as one end of a two-ended structure whose other end was the sacrum.
"You think that on your head, there's an unmoving skull. But there really isn't a tall, and actually as you look at that, the other structure in the body that it reminds you of is the pelvis, isn't it? Because the pelvis also is a structure which is made up by the unification of several bones. It starts out as several bones, and those several bones then unify into something which the orthodoxy has always seen as one thing. I happened to be alive during the time of the controversy. Not only alive but mature in listening and hearing, during the controversy as to whether there could be movement in the sacrum. And nobody believes this. Somebody must have, didn't they? Oh, yeah. The people that were out on the fringe. Mhmm. The the osteopaths. Those days that took well, we had a chiropractic too. Was the osteopaths I think that took the main burden of that controversy. Do you think they're still telling the idea that the sacrum moves, the osteopaths? Have Oh, they it happens, yes. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. No. You can't be an osteopath unless you see an osteopath, and I don't mean a medical strain and manipulation. That's what I'm Well, seeing right agreed. Agreed."
Boulder 1975, in the twelfth-session class, drawing the structural parallel between cranium and sacrum:
This parallel has clinical consequences that the recipe enforces. The sixth hour, which addresses the sacrum and the lower spine, must come before the seventh hour, which addresses the cranium and the cervicals. Working on the cranium without having first freed the sacrum is, in Ida's reading of Sutherland, exactly what Sutherland himself had been trying to do — and exactly what had limited the reach of cranial osteopathy.
"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 in normal respiration. I didn't say average respiration. I said normal respiration and in view of the fact that the spine is held 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. And this is what it does. As you inhale, the apex of the sacrum dives forward in order to let the base of the sacrum come back, 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 to unhook 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 function 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. Now what is it? How do you really reach the sacrum? How do you really reach the front of the sacrum? And that's the one way you can get to it. And how do you get to the piriformis? Well, this is also true."
Boulder 1975, in the tenth-session class, on the sacrum as the bottom of the respiratory pump:
Sutherland, in Ida's account, had the top of the line but not the bottom. The recipe gives the bottom of the line first — through the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth hours — and then arrives at the cranium in the seventh hour with the lower mechanism already prepared. This is the structural rationale for the recipe sequence as it pertains to cranial work, and it is also Ida's most concrete reply to the cranial osteopaths.
Cranial movement as a sign of the work having registered
One of the more striking moments in the Boulder transcripts is when a student named Jan reports that she is seeing changes in the cranium of someone being worked on lower in the body. Ida treats this not as an exception but as a confirmation — that the cranial bones are responsive to changes anywhere in the structural chain. The cranium reflects what is happening below it. A practitioner who knows how to read the head can use it as a diagnostic instrument for the whole body.
"Right in there in the temples. Well, Jan, the kind of thing that you are seeing is what was marked in the theory of the old osteopaths about reflex points. You know? I mean, that's the way they got them. It didn't come out of psychic perception. It just came out of watching bodies. That's right. And some of those old words were pretty good. If you consider that in the joints, have the proprioceptors that have to relate back to the central nervous system. We were doing fifth hours last."
Boulder 1975, while working on a leg — a student notices cranial change as the leg is being addressed:
The cranium changes when the leg changes. The face brightens when the pelvis releases. The eyes recede when grief locks the sphenoid back, and the eyes emerge again when the sphenoid is freed. None of this requires cranial-osteopathic technique. It requires the practitioner to look at the head while working anywhere below it, and to understand that the cranium is not a separate domain but the visible top of a continuous structural and emotional record.
"Looking for for I'm looking for something more. One of the things that's impressed me in my own body and in people I've worked with is how the tissue in in our own head responds to tensions in other parts of the body. And I've experienced that both ways. Other than it's around the jaw and the floor of the pelvis seem to be related and back of the head and this area here and so forth so that I no longer think of the head as an an isolated part. It's definitely reflecting the of if to not the night. Well, I think as the head goes off, then all these other structures such as the eyes lose their horizontality to say a new direction. This is true. And the same with the jaw, the same with the nose, and the same with the ears. Mhmm. That's more evident in the eyes. In other words, if the ears are up like this, I'm not sure that I understand how that's bothering somebody. But if it's tilt put this way, then I can see more sound coming in over here. Well, just watch just watch Dorothy. Her head is always this way. In fact, I can't imitate her head. She just takes a whole chunk out of here and then sets the head down in the hole. She doesn't do as much now as she did as a week ago, thanks to what's been done for her. But just watch and see whether you can determine that. She's the best model of head imbalance that we've got around here."
Boulder 1975, in a fourth-session class, on how the head reflects tensions elsewhere in the body:
Notice how she teaches by example rather than by principle. Dorothy's head — set to one side, the chunk taken out of the neck on one side — becomes the demonstration. The students learn to see cranial imbalance by watching a particular person whose pattern is legible. This is characteristic of Ida's pedagogy. The doctrine is general; the teaching is always specific. She does not lecture the students about cranial-pelvic reflexes. She tells them to watch Dorothy.
The seventh hour as the regulator of higher function
The therapeutic claims Ida made about the seventh hour are striking, and they emerge from her view that the cranium is not merely a structural unit but the bony chamber holding the body's most consequential nervous tissue. Hearing, sight, sinuses, hay fever, breathing — all of these, in her account, can improve dramatically when the head and the top of the cervical column are properly organized. She did not credit this to cranial-osteopathic technique. She credited it to the seventh hour's combined work on the cervicals, the soft tissue of the mouth, and the fascial envelope of the neck.
"to you of the significance of these. And I think that some of the cures that the cervical school of chiropractors credit to chiropractic are really not due to the cervical vertebra, the second and third cervical vertebra, as much as they are due to the replacement, you see, of this chain autonomic. Like so. The fact of the matter remains that as you do a proper job on the neck and the head and the organization of that top segment of the body, you get all kinds of very dramatic episodes coming in in terms of hearing, in terms of sightedness, in terms of hay fever, in terms of 20 year old sinuses and post basal drips and that sort of thing, as well as in terms of an asthma and emphysema and all of these things. You just always put your finger on and turn around when you get into that next structure if you do a good job. So that you have here one of most important hours as far as your affecting well-being is concerned. So today, we're going to have to start on Frank with this seventh hour. And in as much as he's a, quote, fresh guy anyway, we could expect to have a fresher guy around."
Public-tape lecture, on what changes when the seventh hour is done well:
These are large claims, and the transcripts contain plenty of evidence that Ida did see such results in her own practice. They are not, however, claims of cranial-osteopathic technique. They are claims about what happens when the structural chain through the head, neck, and shoulder girdle is finally released by the recipe arriving at its seventh hour. The cranium clears because what was choking it has been organized below.
"At the point of the seventh hour in a series of 10 sessions in walking, the concentration has been chiefly in hours four, five, and six in the pelvic area, and the fourth hour on the inside of the legs, and the fifth hour on the abdomen coming down to the pelvis from the top, and then the sixth hour on the back of the legs and into the rotators and the gluteal muscles in the seat. So a lot of concentration has been at that end of the body. The balanced energy system that the body is, the body is beginning to feel the strain in the neck. Nine people out of ten will come in before their seventh hour very aware that that hour has to have something to do with the neck. It becomes clearer and clearer as the time gets closer to the hour. So this hour is a balancing hour as all of them are, but the opposite is very true in this hour that there is an effect in the pelvis. Each hour of the raw thing has one of its goals, horizontalizing the pelvis, bringing that goal which begins filling over both to the side and often to the front, back into a horizontal position. And the results of the work in this hour, both because they go as far as levels are concerned to the same level that you have done in the pelvis and perhaps even deeper. Causes you'll see later on in this hour, we'll do some work in this man's mouth and perhaps some in his nose. This brings the body already in this one hour to even increase change in the pelvis. Sometimes by the time the eighth hour comes, which is the next one, you see a body which looks very disorganized before the eighth hour, it's as if that one cork or that one plug or one of the plugs that was holding the pelvis or the shoulder girdle in an unbalanced position has now been released by the work that you did in the seventh hour. The object of this hour is to bring the neck into that vertical line. Most people before the seventh hour have a look of the head very anterior."
Open Universe seventh-hour session, 1974, describing what the seventh hour accomplishes in context:
Working inside the mouth
The work inside the mouth is where Ida's seventh hour goes furthest beyond what cranial osteopathy offered. The cranial osteopaths held the outside of the head. Ida sent her practitioners' fingers, gloved with finger cots, into the mouth — releasing the soft tissue of the hard palate, the soft palate, the floor of the cervical fascia from above. This was not a maneuver borrowed from anyone. It was something she developed because the deep fascia of the neck has its anterior aspect inside the mouth, and the cervical vertebrae cannot drop back into position unless that anterior fascia releases.
"Is that clear to even the non rollers here? The reason for doing work inside the mouth is primarily the connection of the fascial tissue with those complex layers within the neck. That there is a continuity, the muscles of the mouth and the muscles of the neck. At the same time there is the same sort of shortening that occurs in those muscles of the mouth as well as in the rest the body. That is, the mouth has its trauma or its history or its experience as well as all the other muscles. And therefore to go into organize those muscles brings up similar effect as in the rest of the body. That is you get a spontaneous movement, a more natural movement. When we work in the mouth, use finger cuts on our fingers. For a lot of people, this is a moment of trepidation. As in other parts of the body, we find a lot of our help for bringing organization is where the muscle tissue meets the bone. Shortening occurs very often by an accumulation of muscle tissue or accumulation of fascia at the place where the muscles connect to the bone. It's pretty much a myth right now. I think it possibly has some future. Who knows where this work can evolve to? But we certainly don't have specialists in orthodontia at this point. You see the primary movement here again is bringing the soft tissue so that cervical vertebrae has more room. First time in this much it's the first time certainly in the inside of his mouth. Do a little work in the first hour. Those that were here saw me do a little work on his neck then. Varies from person to person."
Open Universe class, 1974, on why the work in the mouth is done and how it connects to the rest of the body:
Ida's instruction on the hard palate and the sphenoid bears reading carefully. She did not treat the cranial bones as fragile sacred objects requiring specialized cranial-osteopathic technique. She treated them as soft-tissue-bound structures whose relationships could be changed because the connective tissue holding them is elastic. The sphenoid moves; the frontal moves; the temporals move. If the practitioner is skilled, they can be eased into easier positions. The mystery of cranial osteopathy, in her view, was not the bones themselves but the soft tissue around them.
"So you go in there finding out for yourself perhaps that the positioning of the tongue determines where your second and third circles are going to be and where your sixth circle is going to be. What happens when you tell this to chiropractors in the past? Did you get any What happens when I what? When you explain this to chiropractors. I don't explain it. That's what you're paying money here for to hear what I think about this. I didn't know you. A certain number of chiropractors have been in my class, of course, but they're not, you know, average. Any chiropractor, if he opens his eyes and his mind, can understand, however, that he can give better cervical adjustments if the pelvis is turned under. I mean, this is so utterly obvious on your hands. But this whole head trip and a different sense of head trip is not a a something that You see, except you have the background of understanding of structure, what are you trying to do in the structuring of the body, it doesn't really have meaning to you. And one of the things that you have to learn, and it takes a hell of a lot of discipline to learn it, is to learn not to teach people or not to try to teach people who aren't ready to hear, who haven't got the basic fundamental understanding to put what you're saying in its right perspective. You must learn to shut up. It's the toughest thing you ever learned. Now when you get to the hard palate, you are no longer dealing with those cervicals."
Public-tape lecture on the seventh hour's intraoral work, exchange with chiropractor in the audience:
The cranium as the chamber of the nervous system
The reason cranial work mattered so much to Ida — the reason she gave it the seventh hour rather than treating it as an afterthought — was that the cranium holds the body's central nervous system in a hydrostatic environment. Cerebrospinal fluid surrounds the brain. The ventricles contain it. The membranes hold it under pressure. And the position of the cranium relative to the rest of the body determines the pressures within that fluid system. A head tipped forward produces one set of pressures on the contents of the cranium; a head balanced over the shoulder yoke produces a different set.
"And I was amazed to see that man whom I know because I had my hands on him. I know what amount of trouble that guy was in when he came to us. He was literally made of an iron he was an iron man. And yet here, seven hours after, you see the basic pattern all out there, all screaming to be given that proper job to do. And I must we must get a hold of those basic and publish within our own group. That basic book of western prices with those pitches, we must because it is urgently important that you people see this. Okay. So as I say, you get a hold of that head and you thing that you are doing in that head is enabling you to relate that head to three space, to get those eyes looking out on a horizontal, to see a horizontal line of the mouth, to see a three-dimensional organization of that head. Because just as the pelvis is the key to the vital being of that body, so the positioning of this tremendous nervous plexus that is within the head is the key to the behavior, the different the behavior that's dependent on nervous tissue in the pocket. And you see, the stuff that is within that cranium is a hydrostatic equilibrium is in a hydrostatic equilibrium. This is really a fluid material, as you all know."
Public-tape lecture, on why the position of the cranium changes the pressures inside it:
This is why Ida considered the cranium consequential. Not because the bones are mysterious or because cranial work was a special art, but because the head houses the apparatus on which behavior, perception, and consciousness depend. To leave the cranium misaligned at the top of an otherwise integrated body is to leave the most important chamber in the structure tipped at an angle that misroutes its own contents. The seventh hour exists because the work would be incomplete without it.
"ought to be aware of in the seventh hour and that's why we brought these in. And that's right here. These should actually have a hinge movement right here. It's really important to get that length down in there because that's where a lot of headaches occur and all kinds of nauseous problems. And so you really, it's not just a matter of mashing a lot of tissue in there, it's a matter of getting in there and subtly lengthening it. And a lot of people see Aida putting their knuckle in there and think that that's what she's doing. She's not. She's really trying to lengthen different layers and she does an amazing job of it. So the head work's really subtle work. You gotta kinda look at it as a whole art creation on its own as part of an art form. In fact if you consider the structure under the base of the skull you you see that most of the fibers run either up and down or on a diagonal under the head. So most of the movement in seventh hour goes across from, the occiput, across those fibers. So what you see is a movement like this is really lengthening individual fibers as you go back and forth in there. That's the place where the fingers are really your best tool. The knuckle sort of opens up the surface but most of the head work is really detail work."
Boulder 1975, eleventh-session class, on the subtlety of head work:
Coda: what Ida kept from cranial osteopathy and what she let go
Ida's final position on cranial work can be stated cleanly. From Sutherland's school she kept the perception that cranial bones move, the recognition that respiration is partly a cranial-spinal phenomenon, and a respect for the cranial osteopaths as the small remnant of structural osteopathy. She let go the notion that cranial work could be done in isolation — that one could sit at the head and resolve what was actually a whole-body problem. She added two things Sutherland had not seen: the necessity of sacral freedom for the pump to function, and the intraoral approach that allowed direct release of the cervical fascia from in front.
"It doesn't seem to have occurred to anybody except for the cranial osteopaths opaths and not very much to them. That the literal free space balance of the head depended and depends on muscles that are inside the head as well as outside the head. This never occurred to me. It never occurred to me that in terms of the physical carriage of the body, the individual who carries his head forward in order to balance the imbalance that is below, as for instance, Jerry over here, is will have managed to get himself the kind of muscular imbalance inside of his head, which has many significances. The whole tongue will have moved forward. And in that the whole the tongue as a whole and the whole tongue has moved forward, you now have all kinds of pressures into the sixth cervical. You also have all kinds of interferences with the well-being of the thyroid and the parathyroid and the thymus, etcetera, etcetera. But one of the reasons why that anterior sixth cervical has always been the major booger boo to osteopaths and to chiropractors has been that they haven't understood that they can't get a sixth cervical back until they let this stuff come back. And this stuff is the stuff that lies under the chin in front. It is a pre it is all the prevertebral soft tissue. And in order to organize the cervical, you have got to organize that soft tissue. And so you go into the mouth. Therefore, you have to go into the mouth. Now the smarter you are with your preparation, the less necessity there is to go into the mouth. But there is a certain amount of necessity, no matter. You know how smart you are."
Public-tape lecture, summarizing what cranial osteopathy and most other schools had missed:
The seventh hour, in Ida's mature teaching, was not cranial osteopathy refined. It was cranial work conducted on different premises — premises that began with the gravitational field, traveled through the whole structural chain from feet to skull, and arrived at the cranium only after every link below it had been prepared. The cranial osteopaths were her ancestors and her allies, but they were not her model. Her model was the upright human body, organized around a vertical line, with the cranium balanced at the top because the sacrum was balanced at the bottom and everything in between had been freed.
See also: See also: the early 1970s mystery-tape recordings (CD1) contain extended readings from Sutherland's own writings on the cranial respiratory mechanism, with Ida's interpolated commentary — including her detailed exposition of how the lateral ventricles, third ventricle, and fourth ventricle dilate during inhalation. These passages document Ida's direct engagement with cranial-osteopathic texts. 72MYS142 ▸72MYS122 ▸
See also: See also: the 1976 advanced class extended discussion of Sutherland's school, including the work on cerebral-palsied children in Philadelphia and the lineage from Still through Sutherland — Ida's most historically detailed account of cranial osteopathy as a movement. 76ADV122 ▸
See also: See also: Boulder 1975 second-session work, in which a student feels increased cranial movement as the atlas is released — a working demonstration of how cervical work reaches the cranium even outside the seventh hour. B2T2SB ▸B2T4SB ▸