The phrase and what it covered
Ida's reference to "cycles in the affairs of men" — a phrase that echoes Shakespeare's Brutus in Julius Caesar — was never delivered as a set-piece doctrine. It surfaces glancingly in the transcripts, often as an aside while she is teaching something else. But the pattern of those asides is consistent. She is observing that intellectual history moves in cycles: a way of thinking dominates, fades, and returns; an insight is grasped, lost, and grasped again under a new name. Structure, in her telling, was such an idea. The mechanical school of healing — the school that took structure seriously — had been in for thousands of years before the chemical revolution of the nineteenth century displaced it. By the early twentieth century structure had nearly disappeared from medical thinking. By the 1970s, when she was teaching in Boulder and Big Sur and Santa Monica, it was coming back. She placed her own work inside that returning arc.
"hundred and twenty five years ago. I'm not going into this at this moment, but I will discuss it at some later date with you people. The chemical school came in and everybody was so enamored of it that it spread out in all kinds of directions. The mechanical school of healing that I'm talking about, the structural school went out at that time. It had been in for several thousand years, I don't doubt. Because unquestionably, the old original schools of healing and mystery schools and so forth and so forth, the days of Egypt and the had something to do with holiness, with help. But you see, on the day when we suddenly got the grammar of the fact we now knew enough chemistry to synthesize all kinds of things that operated in the body. On that day, we started to forget about structure and it went down to a maybe perhaps in, I don't know, nineteen hundred's, the first decade of this century. And only now, this is coming up again, And And I am saying to you, and I don't get to how many people say this, that we have a more fundamental way, a more basic way of dealing with structure Now the reason we have this way is because we have become sufficiently sophisticated to understand that structure is determined by the relationship of the individual body to the gravitational field."
Teaching the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, she sketches the cycle as historical fact:
The cycle she described was not just intellectual. It was also pedagogical and personal. She watched her own students, in the same advanced class over six weeks, develop a relationship to the recipe that itself moved in cycles — first a faithful imitation of the protocol, then a flight into invention, then a return to the protocol now understood differently. She watched the field of Structural Integration itself cycle: the early Esalen years when it was an art form caught up in the imagination of Fritz Perls and the founding generation; the middle years of analysis and scientific scrutiny; the later years where, she hoped, a synthetic integration would become possible. Each cycle, in her view, was a necessary phase. None could be skipped. But none was the destination.
"Now you see what I am talking about really is just part of the general history of ideas and their development, their application, ideas in general. 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. 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."
In an early-1970s lecture, she places her own work inside the general history of how ideas develop:
Biological cycles in a single body
Before the cultural cycles, there are the bodily ones. Ida was a chemist by training — Rockefeller Institute, 1916 — and she knew the literature on biological rhythms. She referenced them in passing during her clinical teaching, usually when a student was being asked to think about why a particular case was failing to respond. A man who keeps the wrong hours is fighting his diurnal cycle. A patient whose endocrine system is in disarray is out of phase with the seasonal cycle. These were not metaphors for her. They were the substrate of any structural work, because the body she was changing existed inside those rhythms and could only stabilize a change if the rhythms supported it.
"There's the nocturnal diurnal cycle and then there's the seasonal cycle that goes on which works at a much deeper level in terms of some of the basic endocrine systems which are involved."
In a Mystery Tapes session, after walking a student through a case where a man's sleep was inverted, she names the two cycles that matter most:
The seven-year cycle was another that she invoked, drawing on the old biological folk-wisdom that every cell in the body is replaced over roughly that period. She used it to dislodge a particular kind of fatalism in her students and in lay audiences — the conviction that the body, once shaped a certain way, must stay that way. If the body is replacing itself constantly, she argued, then the question is not whether it can change but along what pattern it will replace itself. Structure determines the pattern of replacement. Change the structure and you change what the body becomes when it rebuilds.
"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. They tell us that which is on the surface and the outside and that's about all they tell us. And actually we have the capacity we don't have it now, we weren't educated that way."
Speaking to an Open Universe class in 1974, she presses this point against the static view of the body:
See also: See also: the Big Sur 1973 discussion (SUR7319) where Ida observes that as the energy level of an individual deteriorates, the structure deteriorates with it — old people moving toward what she calls a 'spherical pattern.' Included as a pointer to the long cycle of a single life, from infancy through old age, as another scale on which her cycle-thinking operated. SUR7319 ▸
The cycle of an idea: from art form to analysis to synthesis
Ida's clearest articulation of cycles was about ideas themselves. She had watched her own work move through stages, and she described the stages with the historian's distance of someone who had read enough intellectual history to recognize the pattern. The earliest phase of any genuinely new idea, she said, is essentially artistic — the pioneer perceives it whole, in a flash of intuition, and what is offered to the world at that point cannot really be taught because it has not yet been broken down into parts. In the Esalen years, she felt, that was where the work had been. People responded to it the way people respond to art: with recognition, with enthusiasm, with personal devotion. They could not yet replicate it.
"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. You've all heard me scream and wail, you all can take a body apart, but the number of people who can get it together are very few. The number of people who can put it together are very few. Here I was saying the same thing you see, analysis is a necessity, a cover form, a preliminary of synthesis, of conscious synthesis, of conscious integration. Our intellectual culture as a whole has come a long way toward appreciating this in the last twenty five years."
Continuing the thread, she names what analysis is for and what it cannot replace:
The synthesis she wanted was not a return to the Esalen art form. It was something past analysis, on the far side of it. She believed her field was somewhere mid-cycle, with the artistic flash already behind it and the conscious synthesis still ahead. The cycle was not a circle. It was more like a spiral — returning to the same questions but at a higher level of articulation each time. This is the model she used implicitly when she pushed her advanced students to revisit material they thought they already knew.
"Jen, you seem to have something on your mind, and I thought maybe you would like to talk about what you've experienced and maybe not. I have seen the recipe now sort of like stroboscopically over maybe a period of six or seven years. You know, each time that I encounter you and go through a class situation, it's different. You know, the recipe is constantly changing. But from that, I have abstracted Well a sense of of ability. Yeah. It hasn't really changed. You know? Well, what I mean Yeah. Go ahead. Well, I don't want these guys to get off on this tangent. Well, I'm I'm I'm not going on tangent. And that what I see is a continuity within that change, which is sort of reassuring. Know, like there's one year the fascia asks you to go this way or like originally we used to separate on the midline of the thigh this way, and then a year later we were digging in and pulling it up, and the next year we were pushing it toward the midline. But what what I've begun to see from all that is that indeed the fourth hour takes you to the leg, and indeed you have to get a certain amount of work done, but that the body demands what it is that you do."
In the Boulder 1975 class, a student named Jen tries to articulate what she has seen across six or seven years of returning to Ida's classroom:
Old ideas in new vocabularies
What most struck Ida about cycles was the way the same insights appeared in different centuries under different vocabularies. She had read widely — yoga, acupuncture, the Tao, the dream-time of the Australian aborigines, Sojiji Temple in Japan — and she had also read Schrödinger's Zurich lectures in physics in the late 1920s, and the chemistry of the Rockefeller laboratories in the 1910s. What she found, returning to the same questions across these traditions, was that the questions kept reappearing. The questions about structure, about how parts of a whole hold together, about whether the spirit is something separate from the body or just the body in good order — these had been asked in Egypt, in the mystery schools, in medieval Europe, in modern physics. The vocabularies changed. The questions did not.
"And it is a matter of everlasting everlasting interest to me it to see how at the different periods in the world's history, the history of cultural thinking, you see the same ideas coming up expressed somewhat differently in terms of the cultural pictures of the time. But they never get much beyond it, and they never get much below it. And for three thousand years, people or many or perhaps ten thousand for all I know, people have been talking about the difference between being and doing."
In the late teaching of her Public Tapes, reflecting on the relationship between being and doing systems in the body, she generalizes the observation:
The same point appeared in her late Public Tapes teaching about the doing and being systems — that the medievals expressed the cycle one way through their knightly culture, the twentieth century expresses it another way through the body-beautiful gymnasium, but neither has quite resolved the underlying question of how to balance the two. She used these cultural comparisons not to claim that her own century had finally answered the question, but to show that the question itself was the recurrent one.
"being and doing. And in their religious and philosophical systems, they've been talking about it, and some of them have been trying to develop it. Now for the most part, what they've been trying to develop has been the being system. Mhmm. All this meditation and so forth has been a development of the being system. They have seemingly felt their lack in that being system rather than in the doing system. On the other hand, you've come along to this twentieth century, and, undoubtedly, this was also true in the middle ages where the man who was the greatest knight was not the guy that could think, but the guy that could do, the guy that was more expert in terms of his motor system. And so they were trying at that point to develop a being system through the the glamouring that they put around the being system and the sentiment and so forth and so forth and trying to detract from the motor system. And now we get up to the twentieth century, and we go along and look on the foot stand and find the body beautiful. And there's very little being in it. It's a doing system. And you see they have managed to overstress that doing until they get an absolutely immobilized organization."
Continuing the same late Public Tapes lecture, she traces the doing-and-being cycle from medieval Europe through the twentieth century:
She made a similar observation in a different key when she talked about the cosmologies of other traditions. The old Chinese, she would say, had ideas about heaven and earth and the orderliness that connected them that anticipated, in a different vocabulary, what twentieth-century physics was now saying about energy fields. She did not suggest these were the same idea. She suggested they were attempts at the same idea, each shaped by the language available to its time.
"unites us with the cosmos between ourselves and the Chinese people, who has some such very beautiful ideas about heaven and the orderliness of heaven reflecting itself upon the orderliness of earth, and the disorderliness of earth beginning to cause a fractured state in heaven, so closely aligned and related have they been? So what Hayward said about scientists might also be said of you and me. Now, in this matter of my approach to rafting, I have the feeling that against my search, which I'm sure you have somehow caught a little bit now, that in my search, I felt that though I had researched, from a layman's point of view rather thoroughly, though acupuncture, yoga, the esoteric aspects of voodoo, the dream timing of the aborigines in Australia. I lived with a zen in Sojiji Temple in Japan. I lived with Ramakrishna monks. I'd been involved with transcendental med meditation, took the course in Delhi, and all of these things. I have a book on chiropractic called The Chiropractic Story. I was interested in the structural integration book that it quoted rather at length from doctor Still because I have spoken down there through the years at at the college."
Speaking to an Open Universe audience, with the chiropractor and writer Glenn Clark in the room, she sketches the breadth of traditions she had studied:
See also: See also: the Open Universe class (UNI_022) where the trainer Will Schutz draws explicitly on Ida's notion that her work releases stored body patterns to spontaneity, framing it in terms of survival biology — another instance of an old idea (the body holds its history) being rearticulated in a new vocabulary. UNI_022 ▸
See also: See also: the Open Universe class (UNI_062) where Charlotte Read presents a multi-dimensional Korzybskian model of the human as a thinking-feeling-self-moving-electrochemical organism — another twentieth-century vocabulary attempting to name what older traditions had named through different cultural pictures. Included as a pointer to how a single Open Universe series staged the cycle of vocabularies across multiple speakers. UNI_062 ▸UNI_064 ▸
The chemical school and the structural school
The cycle Ida cared most about was the one that had directly affected her own discipline. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, she said, the chemical school of medicine had risen up and taken over. The mechanical school — the school that took structure seriously — had been pushed aside. By the first decade of the twentieth century, structure had almost disappeared from medical thinking. The body was now understood as a set of chemical processes to be modulated by chemical interventions. Whatever was wrong with you, the answer was a substance you swallowed or were injected with. This was the world she had been trained inside at Rockefeller. She knew its accomplishments at first hand — she had worked on the synthesis of salvarsan, the early arsenic-based syphilis treatment — and she did not dismiss it. She simply observed that it had displaced something that was now coming back.
"inorganic chemistry at that time you were working? No, I was in organic chemistry. As a matter of fact, I was working in chemotherapy. And I was one of the workers in a laboratory of the Rockefeller Institute where they were trying to solve the problem of solvusin and neo solvusin. The American product was proving very toxic. The German product was fine, but the German product was no longer available. And as Americans, they were trying to put an American solvusin on the market, and for some reason or another it persisted in being very toxic. So part of the problems of the Rockville Institute in this wartime service was to try to get a better product. Were there other organic chemical Yeah, I was employed in the organic chemistry department with Walter Jacobs and Michael Heidelberger. At one Some of you out there might recognize those names. In the course of your book, appeared last year, Rolling on Structural Integration, You began the discussion of Roelfing and talking about entropy and the law of entropy. And even though you did not mention it in your remarks then, I thought for the moment that we're speaking of your work as a chemist, that you might suggest how the law of entropy fits into your conception that later developed into Rolfing."
In a 1974 Structure Lectures interview, asked about her early chemistry work, she names the laboratory and the project:
What was coming back, in her account, was not the old structural school exactly. It was structural thinking equipped with something the old structural school had lacked: an understanding of the gravitational field. The Egyptians, the mystery schools, the early osteopaths had all known that structure mattered. None of them, she argued, had had the conceptual tool of gravity as a continuous environmental force on which the body could be aligned. That tool was modern. It made the returning cycle different from the cycle it was returning to — the same idea, but at a higher articulation.
"And only now, this is coming up again, And And I am saying to you, and I don't get to how many people say this, that we have a more fundamental way, a more basic way of dealing with structure Now the reason we have this way is because we have become sufficiently sophisticated to understand that structure is determined by the relationship of the individual body to the gravitational field. This is what often has offered in addition to any other school. What's the difference between this and this? Is the answer. We are the only group who recognize that in order for a living body to be at ease in its spatial environment on the earth, it must deal positively with gravity or rather gravity must deal positively with it. Because what we here in Lawton are here to do, we can't change the gravitational field. This is odd, but we just have nothing that means yet. But what we can do is to change the way the parts of the body that I have already referred to, how they fit together into a whole which can transmit the gravitational field. And in its energy, which is the energy of the earth, in its transmitting of that, it enhances its own energy field. You can change the body by virtue of the fact that its segments are segments of a whole and then the gravity can flow through. Now this is the basic concept of Rolfe. And tomorrow when I get you all together on the griddle, I'm going to ask you for this answer over and over again in many, many different forms."
Continuing the Big Sur 1973 lecture, she names what makes the modern structural school different from the ancient one:
Cycles of pedagogy
Inside the long cycles of cultural thought were the shorter cycles of Ida's own teaching. By the mid-1970s she had been teaching the work for more than fifteen years, and she could see that her own emphasis had shifted as the discipline matured. Early on she had stressed the chest and the pelvis above all — the dramatic places where the first-hour student felt the most change. By 1975 she was stressing the lumbars and the lumbodorsal hinge. She did not regard this as inconsistency. She regarded it as the educational process maturing through its own cycles — what students could not yet hear in the earliest years had to wait until the field was ready.
"the lumbars and the lumbodorsal hinge and so forth. The reason she's doing that is because in her integration of the educational process, she has seen that by just talking about the pelvis and not possibly reemphasizing the importance of those large lumbars, that people tend to forget that. They miss that part of it. I was giving this whole thing some thought last night. Like I asked myself the question, why do we start on the chest? You know, why is I mean, that's how it's been ever since I got into it. First time Ida put her hands on me, she went right there. And so I started thinking about the logic of the sequence and how it evolved, you know, and trying to back myself up to Ida's perspective, you know, and see what she saw. You know, why did the recipe evolve this way? And I think one of the things is that by working and this is a level of abstraction above the physical body, but I think it's relevant that by working on the chest and the pelvis, you deliver the most experience of what we're trying to do. So that when someone gets a first hour, you're establishing in their cells what it is that Rolfing's about. You know, before you put their hands on them, they've only got ideas, abstractions. And in the first hour you're giving them an experiential look at what goes on. And you get the most done for the least amount of doing by freeing the breathing and the pelvis. You know, so there's a lot of impact in that first session. You know, you've taught them at a level that they can understand what Rolfing is, and that says more than all your word. And thinking back of this, I feel like turning the machines. Thinking back about the history also, this is just sort of a side anecdote here. An antidote."
In the Boulder 1975 advanced class, a senior practitioner reflects on why Ida had begun re-emphasizing the lumbars only later in her teaching career:
She was equally aware that her students went through their own cycle inside a single training. They would arrive faithful to the recipe, then somewhere in the middle they would start flying off in invention, declaring they had seen something new, and she had to pull them back. The protocol was not a cage. It was a discipline within which the deeper seeing would come — and she had watched enough cycles of student development to know that the flight into invention was almost always premature.
"evolving in all of us here in the class. It's really nice. But you see, it's an awful hard job at this point to try to keep you people from flying off centrifugely. You're doing very well. That's gonna happen when I'm not sitting in front of you. See, this this is really my concern because if you begin flying off in all directions, and I see it this way, therefore, it is this way, you're not going to get any further along. You're just going to break up not merely your trip, but that of the whole wrong thing. So that this becomes it becomes a very not merely a difficult thing, but a mandatory thing to somehow put into your minds the recognition of the fact that you must keep referring back to the to the, recipe, that this is a credo, I believe, and that in spite of the fact that you may you may see things much more deeply, much more clearly, and so forth, you must stay with this I believe thing if you're going to really go along these lines. If you're not, that's another story. Jen, you seem to have something on your mind, and I thought maybe you would like to talk about what you've experienced and maybe not."
Speaking to her Boulder 1975 advanced class, she warns against the centrifugal phase she has seen students enter:
The cycle of student understanding also expressed itself in how each cohort gradually rediscovered the relationship between the recipe's hours. Students who began by treating the ten sessions as ten discrete events came, after several passes, to see them as one continuous process — the first hour already containing the seed of the tenth, the third already a continuation of the second. This insight was not new in 1975. Ida had been teaching it for years. But each cohort had to discover it for themselves, and the discovery was itself a cycle the teacher learned to wait for.
"And the third hour is the second half of the second and first hour. It's literally a continuation. I clearly I clearly saw, you know, last summer that continuation process and how and, you know, Dick talked about how, you know, the only reason it was broken into 10, you know, sessions like that was it because the body just couldn't take all that work. Couldn't take it right. But I just sitting on just trying to figure out how the hell she ever figured out that process, and then began to see it. What she did is what most of of us need to do more. She just sat and watched bodies. And she just kept on doing it. And put unfortunately, she's a little bit more brilliant than the rest of us. She just Ida what Ida did is what she's trying to teach how to do, and that is that you have to stay within your your trade. You have to make structural integration in your life. She integrated her life towards understanding structural integration. And she still does that. And she's still Her body is still her her whole being is integrated towards into structural integration."
Earlier in the same Boulder 1975 class, a senior practitioner articulates the cyclic structure of the recipe itself:
See also: See also: the Public Tapes lecture (RolfB6Side2b) where Ida walks her students through what unwrapping the recipe hour by hour actually changes at the level of body image and superficial fascia — the cycle of the recipe rearticulated from the student's first encounter with it. RolfB6Side2b ▸
The cycle of a man's life
The largest single-body cycle in Ida's teaching was the cycle of a life. She watched it in her patients and in herself. The infant arrives roughly aligned. The child stresses the structure through a thousand small accidents. The young adult forces compliance through vital energy alone. The middle-aged man begins to feel the cost of those compensations. The old man can no longer afford them and breaks down. Each of these stages, in her telling, was part of a single arc whose pattern was not destiny — because the structure could be intervened in at any point — but whose pattern was real, and recognizable, and predictable. The structural work she taught was, among other things, an attempt to slow the entropic drift of that cycle, or to reverse part of it.
"And it doesn't require a great deal of outness. An eighth of an angel do it. And you no longer have possible the energy pattern, which is the most economical energy pattern. Now you have a new pattern. And while the man is young and vigorous, he can handle it. He can take his vital energy, and he can force himself to do this, that, and the other thing. But as he gets older and he loses some of this vital energy, he can no longer force himself as satisfactorily to him. And the little and the little, that body begins to break down until all of a sudden it comes to a crisis, and then it breaks down a lot. Because you see you do not have the reciprocity of pull, the reciprocity of energy field activity, which makes it possible for it to spontaneously come and restore itself. So that your first law, your first manipulative law, is to take the structure and bring it toward the position which it normally should occupy. And I don't say which it averagely should occupy."
Teaching the first hour on the Public Tapes, she describes the energetic arc of a life in structural terms:
She also kept an eye on the cycle of repair within a body that was being worked. After the ten-session series, she observed, the body continued to improve spontaneously for some period — the work was not done at hour ten; the work continued in the months that followed as the body integrated what had been opened. This was itself a cycle: a period of active intervention followed by a period of integration that the practitioner did not need to be present for. She insisted, often, that students leave enough time between sessions for this integration to happen, and that they not interrupt it by adding more work too soon.
"about ourselves is that one of the goals of structural integration, apparent to the public but to us, is that we are making this a continuous system. And in order to make it a continuous system, you've got to get it out where it belongs. You've got to interfere with the interference. You've got to break down the heaping of the tissue into mounds and so forth. And Now this is what I consider a pretty good discussion here. Add to your concept of what's going on. Yeah, one thing that I'm beginning to see is more reasons why people get better after they've got the ten hours and don't get worse. Brain waves, when they've had two to ten hours now they've Spontaneously they continue to get better for over a long period, yes. But you see, you also have to look, Bob, at the amazing things about structural integration. The absolutely amazing thing. And that is that within literally minutes of the time you lay your hands on them for the first time, they begin to feel better. And the So if you have both things going on, you have a long term spontaneous improvement, spontaneous organization going on. But you also have that short term improvement where the screening pain is often relieved inside of two seconds."
In a Big Sur 1973 conversation, she names the two time-scales of recovery in her work:
Entropy and the running-down of worlds
The deepest cycle Ida talked about was the cosmic one: the running-down of the universe under the second law of thermodynamics. She had absorbed the physics of entropy from Schrödinger's Zurich lectures in the late 1920s, and she used the concept in her later teaching to describe what she thought her work actually did. The universe, in this picture, was constantly losing order. The bodies inside it were constantly losing structure. Left alone, both would dissipate into randomness. But there were local regions — wherever there was life — where order was being maintained or even increased. Life, in her account, was the local reversal of entropy, the place where the universe was building up rather than running down. Structural Integration, she claimed, was one way of feeding that local reversal.
"Applying this metaphor to the random disorder of the physical myofascial body, its entropy, too, can be seen to be increasing, just like the earth running down, so the bodies on the earth just randomly allowed to live are increasing in terms of entropy, increasing disorganization, increasing disorder. We noted that this is not true everywhere in the cosmos, that in local areas where there is life underscored, there is life, there seem to be other forces at work. We need to be thoroughly aware of, familiar with, the concept and its manifestation in the contours of the body in order to reverse the disorganization in our world of our bodies, in order to increase the energy in our world. If this increase of energy is really our quarry, we're in luck. Eureka, we have found it."
Opening a Healing Arts conference talk in 1974, she connects the entropy of bodies to the entropy of the cosmos:
She was careful to specify that the addition of order had to be done in the right direction. Pressure applied wrongly increased disorder. Pressure applied with sophistication — to bring a muscle toward its design position, to ask a joint to move where it was designed to move — decreased disorder. The cycle was not automatic. It depended on the practitioner's knowing what 'toward order' actually meant for a particular body in a particular moment. This was the part she could not put fully into words, and the part that, she felt, the field still had to mature into.
"Rolfers do. They add it mechanically by pressure. The pressure may be of a finger, it may be of a knuckle, it may be of an elbow. But all this energy must be added in an appropriate direction. The wrong direction breaks the structure down. Now, I bid you all hear this, because in whatever city rafters are working, there are always people who will get into this thing and say, well, I just saw her doing that. I saw her putting a knuckle in and just pushing. They have no idea of the sophistication necessary to that movement in order to create good. Maybe they don't want to. A guy one time said to me, I saw you give a demonstration. I went home, and I tried it on my mother-in-law. She has a heart condition and Wright's disease, and it didn't do her any good. Your method's no good. If it hadn't happened to me, I wouldn't have believed it. All of this energy has to be added in an appropriate direction. This is what the rover is taught from the first day he comes into training to the last day when he leaves the training of the advanced classes, to try to know the direction in which he must be working."
Lecturing on the Open Universe series in 1974, she warns about the direction in which energy must be added:
The cycle of measurement and meaning
Toward the end of her teaching life, Ida watched another cycle close — the cycle from intuitive perception, through the long middle of art and devotion, into the beginning of objective measurement. Valerie Hunt's electromyographic work at UCLA, Rosalind Bruyère's aura readings, the brain-wave and energy-field studies done on practitioners and clients — all of these, in the mid-1970s, were beginning to put numbers on what had been a felt observation. Ida welcomed this. She was a research chemist by training and the daughter of a generation that took replication seriously. But she also warned, with the long view of someone who had watched ideas cycle for decades, that the analytical phase was a phase and not the destination.
"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. Before we can get a mature system, by that I mean a system which is sufficiently grown up and stable that it is not changing several times a year, before we can reach that happy goal we need to understand more about the structures which are giving us are giving us our results."
At an IPR conference in the early 1970s, she names the cycle her field still had to complete:
She kept returning, in her late teaching, to the figure of William Lawrence Bragg — the Nobel-laureate crystallographer — and his observation that what science most needs is not new facts but new ways of thinking about them. She used Bragg's line to mark the place in the cycle where her own field was: it had collected enough facts; what it lacked was the framework that would let those facts cohere into a synthesis. That framework, she hoped, was coming. She did not claim it had arrived.
"That is on this level one can change relationships. For the body is a plastic medium. I repeat it. The body is a plastic medium, and therefore, this is the level where structural into where we work with structural integration. And here is where you can begin to look at the phenomenon of life from a different viewpoint. We begin here to apply that theorem of Bragg's that I spoke about, that dictum of brags that what is needed in science is not new facts but new ways of thinking about them. This is basically what we try to offer in structural integration, new ways of thinking about this universe which, to be properly appreciated, must be seen as the open system. Now I'm very nearly ready to hand this podium over to Bob Beck. He is, as I said before, a master in his field of bioelectronics, And he has many ideas which have not yet penetrated into the world that is twenty five years behind the times. Most of us got our education in that kind of a world. And I think you will understand more about man and man's understanding of man if he gives you this partly as a historic overview, partly as including some of the far out notions of man current today. It's quite true. It's only small numbers of people that see this far out view, but they are significant numbers, and it behooves us as we look over our world to understand what is going on."
Closing an Open Universe lecture in 1974, she names what her work is trying to offer at this stage of the cycle:
See also: See also: the IPR conference (SIIPR1) where Ida frames structure as a Korzybskian fourth-area word — meaning relationship rather than substance — and uses the conceptual cycle from substance-thinking to relationship-thinking to mark another stage of intellectual cycling that her work belongs to. Included as a pointer to the philosophical underpinning of her cycle-thinking. SIIPR1 ▸
Cycles inside the practitioner's life
The cycles Ida named in cultural history, in biology, in the recipe, and in entropy were echoed at one further scale: the cycle of a practitioner's own development across the years they worked. Practitioners arrived at their training thinking the work was about technique. They left thinking it was about technique applied to bodies. Then, sometimes years later, they began to see that it was about the relationship between three bodies at once — the physical, the relational, and what she sometimes called the cosmic — and that no change in one could be sustained without a corresponding change in the others. This was the largest cycle of all in her teaching: the one that closed only when a practitioner had been doing the work long enough to see what they had not been able to see at the start.
"that and then they go back into these really vague trips. So you see, it's where I link in my own thinking. I talk about there being three bodies. There's this body, there's the political body, we belong to a body of Christ. Exactly, we do. And if I change this body, I can only change this body to the degree I'm willing to change my relationships, to change the way in which I react in the world, and that's pro that is politics. And then finally, there's a cosmic body. In some way, in some way, the moon and the tides do affect me. I don't know how, but they do. There's some kind of there's some I am linked to that thing. But they're inter these are interlocking circles and that and that anytime you change, you really change a whole different of relationship. Well, this, of course, is the reason why we have so much trouble changing the world. Well, see, one thing I see happening is that people go into these they go rolfing or other rolfing, and they get into they get into this body. Then they want to go from this body to the cosmic body. Without going through the political body, without going through the the body of everyday experience, without really changing their relationship to the world."
In the Boulder 1975 advanced class, a senior practitioner names the three-body cycle that he has come to see his clients struggling with:
The cycle could also be felt in the body of the practitioner herself, as a practitioner under Ida's care came to see her own body open in ways that altered her sense of being in the world. The verticality that the work pursues is not, in this account, a matter of mechanics alone. It is a matter of a person's relationship to the ground beneath them — a primitive metaphysical relationship, as one of her students put it, that older traditions had named in their own vocabularies and that the work delivered through its own.
"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. Oh, you mean the raw facts? Raw fence. Yes. That's where the female oh. Well, but you won't aggravate that so much by keeping your head full right now. Right now, your head The other nice piece of metaphysics I realized in relation to Rolfing was the thing about center of all myth was that notion of the world whole where something happened. And then in the old fashioned villages they made a temple or something at the point where there was and then the whole city And was around then they said, And that's how man is too. His spine is that way. And what I've experienced so much is that really very primitive metaphysic. As that thing comes up, it literally does change your relationship with the earth in such a way that you really do feel."
Later in the same Boulder 1975 conversation, a student describes the metaphysical experience the work delivered to her:
See also: See also: the Boulder 1975 conversation (B3T2SA) where the same practitioner-student dialogue extends to the question of why clients try to skip the political body — the body of everyday relationships — when moving from the physical to the cosmic. Included as a pointer to how Ida's cycle-thinking played out across multiple registers in a single class conversation. B3T2SA ▸
See also: See also: the Boulder 1975 morning conversation (B4T5SB) on the spirals of the legs and trunk, where Ida and her senior practitioners work through whether the cycles of winding in the body should be unwound or balanced — another instance of cycle-language emerging directly from clinical work on a body. B4T5SB ▸
Coda: the same questions, different vocabularies
What Ida meant by 'cycles in the affairs of men' was, in the end, a single observation in many forms. The universe runs down; life locally reverses the running-down. The body changes every breath; structure determines what it changes into. An idea is born as art, matures into analysis, completes itself as synthesis. The chemical school displaces the structural school; a century later the structural school returns, equipped with new tools. A student arrives faithful, flies off in invention, returns to the protocol from inside. The same questions about being and doing, about heaven and earth, about how the parts hold together, recur across three thousand years of cultural thinking, expressed somewhat differently each time, never quite passing beyond their own century. She was not a fatalist about these cycles. She did not think the recurrence meant the questions were unanswerable. She thought the recurrence meant the questions were the right ones, and that each cycle landed a little closer to whatever answer there was.
"I hear a certain amount of complaints going on these days because some of you who are in those older earlier brackets of Rolfing are complaining because we have so many new classes and we keep telling everybody about the difference in the teaching nowadays from the old teaching and so forth. But actually you see if we weren't changing in this very rapidly changing world we also would be in the garbage pail, I fear. It is this capacity for change and the fact that from somewhere out of the blue we are given a vision of how we can change that keeps us as a valuable contributor to the culture of today. And so I ask you that you look at this the next time you are inclined to complain because it is being suggested that you take further training in Rolfing and actually recognize the fact that that which worked five years ago, six years ago, ten years ago, It still works, but it doesn't work well enough, it doesn't work deeply enough, it doesn't get where we should be going in order to show what Rolfing really can do. Rolfing in the sense of this deep changing of the patterns of the fundamental structure of the body to conform with gravity."
Speaking to an IPR gathering in the early 1970s, she defends the necessity of change against the complaints of her older practitioners:
She closed her late lectures, more than once, with some version of the same gesture: the work in front of us is the next turn of a cycle that has been going on far longer than any of us, will continue after us, and asks of us only that we do our part of it well. The Chinese said it one way, she said. The medievals said it another. The physicists are saying it a third. And what we have in our hands now is, for a little while, our version of it.
See also: See also: the Boulder 1975 informal exchange (B3T1SB) where students discuss how every significant structural change demands a corresponding change in the rest of their lives — the cycle of bodily change forcing the cycle of relational change. Included as a final pointer to how Ida's cycle-thinking lived in the daily speech of her advanced classroom. B3T1SB ▸