Energy as a physics-laboratory term, not a metaphor
Ida's insistence on the word "energy" was a deliberate borrowing from physics, not from the bodywork vernacular of the early 1970s. In her 1973 Big Sur advanced class — teaching to a group that included senior students preparing to teach the work themselves — she pressed the distinction hard. The connective tissue, she said, is the organ of structure; structure refers to relationships in three-dimensional space; and those relationships can be changed because the tissue itself can be deformed by mechanical work. Nothing metaphysical, nothing borrowed from a different tradition's vocabulary. The kind of energy she meant was the kind a physicist measures: force applied through a distance, into a material whose state thereby changes. The teaching beat of this opening section is straightforward but easily missed: when Ida says the practitioner "adds energy," she is making a literal physical claim about what the hands are doing, and a literal chemical claim about what happens in the tissue as a consequence.
"It's pure physics as it's taught in physics laboratories. Now the strange part about it is that that organ of structure is a very resilient and very elastic and very plastic medium. It can be changed by adding energy to it. In structural integration, one of the ways we add energy is by pressure so that the practitioner gives deliberately contributes energy to the person on whom he is working, to not energy in the sense that you let a position throw it around, but energy such as they talk about in the physics laboratory. When you press on a given point, you literally are adding energy to that which is under that point. And in structural integration, by way of an unbelievable accident of how you can change fashion structure, you can change human beings. You can change their structure and in changing their structure you are able to change their function. All of you have seen that structure determines function to a very great degree, to a degree which we can utilize."
Big Sur, 1973, teaching the advanced class on what fascia is and what pressure into it actually does:
She acknowledged that this kind of talk could sound strange. By the early 1970s, the language of "energy" had been borrowed and re-borrowed by many traditions, and Ida was careful to mark out the distance between her usage and theirs. In the 1976 advanced class, recounting her early apprenticeship to Madame Mensendieck, she contrasts the loose sense of energy — the bright, eager, well-meaning student jogging in the rain — with the precise sense: how much work the body actually has to do to produce a given motion. The first is a personality trait; the second is a quantity. Structural Integration concerns itself only with the second.
"The next week they came in and they looked just as bad, and she says, Well, go home and do it twice as many times every day. Now you must understand if you are going to be promophis of Rolfing, you must understand what it is we're promoting. We are promoting energetic efficiency in bodies. I don't mean the kind of thing by energy that some of you are thinking of. I mean, it's not this, this, this, Oh, he's so energetic. Not that at all. It's the kind of energy as is measured in a physics laboratory. How much work does your body have to do in order to affect what it is that you're being paid to do. Something of an oversimplification, but I think you get what I'm doing. As we turned to come down here this morning here out in the rain, it's a well meaning young student jogging. I looked at him and I thought to myself, Well, he's got lots of goodwill, he's got lots of rage, but there was no way in which he transmitted the movement from his legs up into his torso. It just stopped right there. Was he doing what he was supposed to do? Namely getting blood and circulation and energy around in his body? Because he didn't know how to make the connection."
From the 1976 advanced class, distinguishing the everyday word from the laboratory word:
The colloid and the state change
Underneath the physics vocabulary lies a chemistry — the chemistry of colloids, which Ida had studied at Barnard and at the Rockefeller Institute. A colloid is a suspension of large molecules in a fluid medium, and it has the peculiar property of existing in two states: gel (set, dense, less mobile) and sol (fluid, mobile). The state can be shifted by adding or removing energy. Heat will do it; mechanical work will do it. This is high school chemistry by 1970, but Ida's contribution was to identify the body's collagen network as one such colloidal system, and to claim that the gel-to-sol transition could be driven by the practitioner's hands. This is the substantive content underneath the slogan "add energy to the tissue." The teaching beat: the tissue under the practitioner's hand is undergoing a phase shift, and the phase shift is what permits the structural reorganization that follows.
"gel. You add energy to the gel, and you get a sol. Now, listen to what that is saying to you. It is saying that if somebody can add energy to those colloids which have become much too much of a soul. Oh, how I hate to get up in the morning, my back bothers me, I can't straighten up, I go around so slowly, I must be getting old. Well, the next time you want to try that song, try it to a different tune. Try telling yourself that that colloidal material, which is you, has not had enough energy added to it."
From the 1974 Open Universe class, walking the colloid chemistry into ordinary morning experience:
In the same class she walked the chemistry one step deeper, into the molecular architecture of collagen itself. The collagen molecule is a triple braid of protein chains held together by hydrogen and mineral bonds — calcium, sodium, others — and these bonds are not fixed. Minerals can be substituted for hydrogen; hydrogen can be substituted for minerals. As the tissue ages and the colloid becomes more gelled, more calcium accumulates in the bonds, and the tissue stiffens. The addition of energy, in her account, is what permits the substitution to run in the other direction. Whether contemporary biochemistry would describe the mechanism this way is a separate question. What matters historically is that Ida saw the chemistry of the tissue and the mechanics of the hands as two halves of one process.
"In fact, you see, by the addition of energy, change occurs in the structural material of the body. In other words, you can change relationships within that body by adding energy. Now, aside from the word relationships, the key in the last sentence was the word by the addition of energy. How do you add energy? Lots of ways you can add energy to a body. You can add it chemically in food, or in drink, or in some of these drugs are energy adding additives, not necessarily good ones, but they do add energy. Food is the outstanding good food is the outstanding adder of energy to a body. But there are other ways that you can change it. You can add it mechanically, and this is what the Rolfers do. They add it mechanically by pressure."
Ida names the addition of energy as the mechanism by which structural relationships within the body are changed:
Ida often illustrated the colloidal principle with a jar of gelatin: half-set, you turn up the heat, it liquefies; cool it again, it sets. The body, she said, behaves the same way. The pressure of the practitioner's elbow into the iliotibial tract, or the knuckle along a fascial plane, is doing the same thermodynamic work as the kitchen stove — driving the colloid toward its more fluid state, where it can be reorganized, then allowing it to set again in its new configuration.
"Collagen is a colloid and as are all large molecules of protein molecules of protein. Colloids have certain qualities in common. An outstanding one is that by the addition of energy, they become more fluid, more resilient. You remember that half set pan of gelatin in water? And water, it's gelled. You set it back on the stove, you turn up the light, and lo and behold, it liquefies. You take it off the stove, you set it in the fridge, and lo and behold, it solidifies. These this is a generalized quality of colloids and it is a generalized quality of the connected connective tissue of the body. Add energy to it and it becomes more fluid, more sol. Subtract energy and it becomes more dense, more solid, a gel. And as I said before, what do we mean by energy? In the case of the jello, we're talking about heat. In the case of the body, we may be talking about heat. Remember how different your flesh feels to your fingers in the very hot weather? There are people where you put your hand on their flesh in very hot ninety, hundred degree weather and it feels as though you're going right through them. But in terms of roughing here, we are talking about pressure. Pressure at the right points, in the right directions at the hands of the roper. Some of you are saying, oh yes, you mean reflex points. No, I'm not talking about reflex points because in my opinion, reflex points have to do with a nervous phenomenon, phenomenon of the nervous system in some fashion. I'm talking about energy being added by pressure to the fascia of the body. By the way, are there any people in this room that don't know what I'm talking about when I'm talking about fascia? Hands up? One, two okay. I'll give a quick go over."
From a 1974 Healing Arts presentation, the gelatin analogy and its translation into the practitioner's hands:
Pressure as the mechanical route of energy delivery
If energy must be added, the question of how follows immediately. Ida named the routes: chemically, through food; pharmacologically, through certain drugs; and mechanically, through pressure. The mechanical route is the practice's distinguishing contribution. Her colleagues in 1974 — Valerie Hunt with her electromyography, Julian Silverman with his energy-flow formulations — were trying to find ways to measure what was happening when this mechanical energy entered the system. But Ida herself was emphatic that the route was simple and physical, and that the direction of the pressure mattered as much as the quantity. The wrong direction, she said, breaks the structure down. This is the teaching beat of the section: pressure is the mechanism, but pressure must be vectored. The practitioner is not merely adding energy in some general sense; the practitioner is adding energy along a particular line, into a particular plane, to produce a particular structural reorganization.
"And I'm talking here about energy being added by pressure to the fascia, the organ of structure, to change the relation of the fascial sheaths of the body, to balance these around a vertical line which parallels the gravity line. Thus, we are able to balance body masses, to order them, to order them within a space."
From the 1974 Healing Arts conference, the formal statement of what the practitioner is doing:
In a 1974 Open Universe class, with a student on the table receiving a first session, Ida used the moment to walk the senior students through the same logic in question-and-answer form. The fascia gets stuck; the practitioner applies energy through the hands; the tissue becomes unstuck; movement returns. The Socratic exchange — Ida pressing the students to name each step — is one of her recurring pedagogical moves. The point is not the catechism but the precision: the practitioner has to understand that pressure is the route, that energy is what is being delivered, that the chemistry of the colloid is what is being shifted.
"Not all fascia. Some fascia acts simply as the things that hold them together, that hold a man together. But all muscles are enwrapped in fascial envelopes. Okay? Alright. Now going on from there, what do you do with that fascia? Well, you stretch the fascia Yeah. That is stuck. What's the point of stretching it? To get it unstuck? To get it unstuck so that it will move allow free movement of the muscles. Alright. Now how do you do this? Do you wanna take that question, Jim? You too. See if you can play a duet. Well, you you begin by applying energy Yeah. In that certain area. Energy how? Through your hands. That's right. Through pressure of your hands, you are actually applying energy. Yeah. I wanted to know whether you people have that concept."
An exchange from the 1974 Open Universe class, Ida pressing a student to articulate the mechanism in plain words:
On the table itself, the doctrine becomes a felt phenomenon for both practitioner and client. In another 1974 Open Universe class, a practitioner working in front of the students describes the moment when the tissue chooses to move — a localized sensation that begins in one small area and expands, a vibratory wave the client reports as energy traveling outward from the point of contact. The exchange catches Ida's energy doctrine in the act of being verified at the level of subjective experience: the practitioner's hand at a point of pressure, the client's report of expanding warmth, the visible drop of the spine into the table as the rib cage begins to undulate with breath.
"And that's why we're in structural integration and not in more temporary balance and at least that's active. I just thought it has been transmitted to me and I'd probably amplify or put something on it. So don't quote her as saying that. But they're in the same family at any rate as far as she believes they are. No help. Like there's an in between force between my body and your hand and that it is moving. It's just moving by itself. Now you can feel that I can feel that his spine is dropping back more, especially through this area now. As he breathes, there's more movement in his rib cage. You see fascia gets stuck between layers. Fascia is the covering of muscles, the envelope. The envelope of one muscle gets stuck on the envelope of another muscle. So we're ordering the connective tissue or the web. And one of our keys is the movement."
From a 1974 Open Universe class, a practitioner and the client on the table reporting what the energy delivery feels like in real time:
There is a moment in the 1975 Boulder advanced class where Ida's student speaks to this with an unexpected clarity. The students are discussing the way work in the legs propagates upward into the rib cage — a horizontal change down low producing a vertical re-organization above. The practitioner watching describes the tissue's pre-loaded condition: it was already under tension, holding stored energy that the work releases when the planes come apart. The energy is not mystical; it is the molecular alignment that the practitioner's hands have shifted. Once shifted, the change propagates.
"Know that each horizontal that you bring out down below reflects itself upward as we saw in Takashi yesterday where he's working on his leg and you can see his rib cage absorbing the change. I mean this, when the tissue is in tension, that's stored energy that you release into the body. And its energy is not a metaphysical something. These molecules are aligned in a particular way. You change their alignment. The change spreads."
A senior student in the 1975 Boulder advanced class describing what the released energy actually is:
The body as an ensemble of energy generators
Around 1974 Ida's collaborator Julian Silverman, working with the energy-flow formulation that appears throughout the RolfB3 public tape, proposed a more formal model: treat the body as an ensemble of energy-generating organs — bones, muscles, connective tissue — interconnected by networks with elastic and viscous components. Each joint is a lever powered by an energy source driving a spring and dashpot in parallel. The whole machine has to coordinate its many sub-machines, and the coordination depends on how energy can flow between them. The teaching beat for this section is the systems-level claim: it is not enough to have energy; the energy has to be able to move between the segments, and the medium through which it moves is fascia. If the medium is too viscous, the segments cannot couple, and movement at one joint dissipates wastefully through the whole structure.
"If the interconnecting networks are overly viscous, then no one joint can be moved without dissipating energy throughout the entire system. If by some process the viscous elements could be changed into more elastic ones, what would the model predict? Clearly, an increased capacity for energy flow between joints is to be expected."
From the RolfB3 public tape, formalizing the cost of viscous coupling:
Silverman's argument continued into a more careful claim: increased capacity for energy transfer is not sufficient on its own. If the segments are out of phase with each other — each oscillating at its own frequency, with no resonant relationship — increased coupling can produce interference rather than synchrony. The body has to be brought near a resonance condition. This is where Ida's claim about vertical alignment meets the energy frame: the segments must be ordered around the gravity line so that their intrinsic oscillations cooperate rather than collide.
"However, when asked a priori to predict how it should be changed by processing, one is in a bit of a quandary. We might predict a decrease in basal O2 uptake because less is needed due to improved Alternatively, one could argue that an increase in basal oxygen intake reflects the increased needs of a higher energy system, that is a greater requirement of previously starved undemanding tissue. This reason For basal measurements are apt not to mean much without accompanying photothermal profiles. When the first law of thermodynamics states De equals W minus Delta Q where BE is the change of energy in the system, W the work done, and DQ the heat dissipated. Some of these difficulties could be circumvented by also securing estimates of maximum oxygen consumption. Procedurally this is a trivial matter of measuring the increase in heart rate to a given sub maximal workload and extrapolating nomographically to set maximum oxygen consumption. Such a measure gives us a fair estimate of the body's capacity to utilize energy and defines an upper limit on how much work the system can do. A priori there is only one direction in which this number should go as a consequence of processing and that is up. Let us assume for the moment that the maximum O2 capacity does increase. There are two possible reasons for this. One is that due to greater static alignment of the body segments with respect to gravity, energy is freed for other purposes. Alternatively, or rather in addition, the total energy configuration of the fascial system might be reorganized in a dynamic manner so as to facilitate the flow of energy. The definition of flow will be deferred to the following paragraph. That a body becomes more ordered in gravitational field as a consequence of processing is undisputable. The inertial centers of the body segments can be derived from considerations of Newtonian mechanics and the total unbalanced force torque energy, calculated. This energy can then be compared to the increased maximum oxygen consumption. If they are equal, we need look no further."
Silverman walking the thermodynamic frame all the way through, from oxygen consumption to gravitational alignment:
Peter Levine, then a young researcher in Ida's orbit, gave the same picture in the language of a public introduction. The body as a system of energy oscillators, coupled by fascia; the practitioner's first task is to make the coupling medium more elastic so that the oscillators can begin to find each other; without that elasticity, energy is simply absorbed, and the segments cannot function together. This is the systems-level rationale for why the first session of the recipe is devoted to superficial fascia — to make the coupling medium itself workable before any deeper structural work begins.
"Now, the element that connects and couples all of these energy sources probably has a good deal to do with the fascia and probably the superficial fascia in particular. So in the first session, I think the the subjective feeling is that that that before the first session, the subjective facet is very inflexible. It's wooden almost. And if you have a substance like this coupling all of these energy sources, they can't possibly come together. They can't possibly function together because a highly damp substance doesn't transmit energy. It absorbs it."
From the RolfB1 public tape, Peter Levine explaining why the first hour addresses superficial fascia:
Gravity as the nourishing source of energy
If pressure is the energy the practitioner adds, gravity is the energy the body lives in. This is one of Ida's most distinctive theoretical moves: rather than treating gravity as a force the body must endure or resist, she treats it as a potential nourishment that can flow into the body when the body is correctly aligned with it. The whole point of vertical organization, in this account, is to allow the energy field of the earth to reinforce rather than disorganize the energy field of the body. A body misaligned with the gravity line is being depleted by it; a body aligned with it is being fed. The teaching beat: gravity is not the antagonist of the work but its energy source, and the practitioner's job is to position the body so it can receive what gravity has to give.
"Now, we are ready to define rolfing structural integration. It is a system of organizing the body so that it is substantially vertical, substantially balanced around a vertical in order to allow the body to accept support from the gravitational energy. Two characteristic qualities of the body make this unlikely situation possible. The material body of man is a plastic medium, as I just told you. Now by dictionary definition, a plastic substance is one which can be distorted by pressure and then can, by suitable means, be brought back to shape, providing that its elasticity has not been exceeded. Now the question is, what is back to shape in this context really mean? And the answer is simple and really expected. Back to shape in this context means vertical. Vertical to the surface of the earth, vertical like the burrows of the chestnut, vertical like the force of gravity. Because only when the gravity vertical of the body substantially coincides with the gravity line of the earth can that energy field of the earth reinforce and augment the field of the human body. Then the energy of the earth contributes to the energy of the body. The body becomes vitalized. The flesh becomes resilient. Body functions of all sorts improve, for gravity at this point is the nourishing factor. Gravity is the nourishing medium giving to the energy quotient man gravity a higher value, because the man is more energized. This expresses itself in many changes in behavior patterns."
From the 1974 Healing Arts conference, the formal definition of the practice and its dependence on gravitational support:
Earlier in the same talk Ida had already laid out the implications. The body is a plastic medium; the segments — head, thorax, pelvis, legs — can be re-related because the connecting myofascial tissue is itself a plastic, colloidal material whose state can be shifted. The vertical line is not a posture; it is a condition under which the energy of the earth and the energy of the body can be summed rather than opposed. Twenty-five years earlier, she said, no one would have believed this. Fifty years earlier, they would have put her in a sunny southern room with good care. The fact that the body can be re-related by adding energy is, in her telling, the discovery on which the whole practice rests.
"We know that logically in body mechanics, we can expect that the vertical lines of that force manifesting as the gravitational field can either support and reinforce a body, or it can disorganize it and presumably passing by presumably passing through and being part of it, it can destroy and minimize the energy fields surrounding it. We know that the energy fields of the body must be substantially balanced around the vertical line for gravity to act supportedly, thus changing the energy generated by the body. This vertical line registers the alignment of the ankles, with the knees, with the hip joints, with the bodies of the lumbar vertebrae, with the shoulders, with the ears. This vertical line is reminiscent of the prickles on the chestnut burrow. All those prickles pointing straight toward the center of the earth. If the lines are substantially vertical. This is a static verticality, however. This is the verticality taught by every accepted school of body mechanics operating in this century, and the Harvard group heads the list. All schools of body mechanics teach this measuring stick and verticality, but no other school of body mechanics teaches how to achieve it. But because the body has an unforeseen, unexpected quality, it can be done. The body is a plastic medium. Now this is incredible, and twenty five years ago, no one would have believed this statement. Fifty years ago, they'd have put me in a nice sunny southern room. You've given me pretty good care, maybe. But the body is a plastic medium, and you're going to hear that several times before we get out of here today. Now, we are ready to define rolfing structural integration."
From the 1974 Healing Arts conference, the body-as-plastic-medium passage in its full context:
There is a striking sequence in the Healing Arts material where Ida moves directly from this gravitational frame to a claim about entropy. The cosmos is running down; bodies, randomly allowed to live, follow the same direction; the work, by adding energy to the fascial system, runs the local arrow of entropy in the opposite direction. This is not a casual metaphor in her usage. She had studied physical chemistry under conditions where the second law of thermodynamics was a working tool, and her claim is that the practice, by adding energy and ordering the structural material, locally reverses the direction of disorganization that gravity would otherwise drive.
"organized pattern of psychological and, if you like the word, spiritual being. We spoke earlier the fashion in which the energy of this universe seems to be running down. 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. Hunt has been observing it and measuring it, and she will tell you about her sophisticated pioneering exploration in this field, which I know is very dear to your heart. We know that the body has developed embryologically from three systems: the digestive or endomorphic, the nervous or ectomorphic, and the myofascial, mesomorphic or muscular. And of these, it is the myofascial system which is the organ of structure, the myofascial which seemingly offers the opportunity for structural changes, for changes in the three-dimensional world. As loftus, we've been observing for a long time. The increase of energy of the body in order the appropriate relation is added to it. Now, Doctor. Hunt has validated our claim by measuring the increased energy of the body as changes in the material structure have been introduced."
From the 1974 Healing Arts conference, the entropy frame and the role of the myofascial system in reversing it:
Collagen and the molecular substrate
The chemistry of how energy added at the macro scale translates into change at the molecular scale was where Ida's training as a biochemist did its sharpest work. The collagen molecule, in her account, is a triple-stranded protein whose strands are cross-linked by inorganic bonds — hydrogen, sodium, calcium, and other minerals. The bonds are not fixed in identity. As the tissue ages, calcium tends to accumulate in the cross-links and the colloid stiffens. The addition of energy — heat in vitro, pressure in vivo — can shift the equilibrium of these substitutions. The teaching beat for this section: the gel-to-sol transition is not just a bulk property of the tissue, it is a re-equilibration of the cross-links holding the colloid together, and pressure can drive that re-equilibration.
"This is what that myofascial body is about. And collagen is a unique protein. The collagen molecule is a very large protein and it is a braiding of three strands a special braiding. These three strands are connected by various inorganic hydrogen sometimes, sodium sometimes, calcium sometimes, and undoubtedly other minerals. These minerals are interchangeable within limits. Thus, as the body grows older and stiffer, undoubtedly a larger percentage of calcium and a smaller percentage of sodium are present in these bonds. But by the addition of energy and what is energy? In this come in this context, it can it is the pressure of the fingers or the elbow of the ralpha. This ratio may be varied by the addition of this energy, and the joint or the connective tissue becomes more resilient, more flexible."
From the 1974 Healing Arts conference, Ida walking the chemistry of the collagen molecule:
But the collagen matrix is not only structural. As Ida and her senior teaching colleague pointed out in 1973, the same matrix is the medium in which other cells live — cells essential to the body's response to environmental stress, to inflammation, to repair. Fluids traverse along fascial planes; ions and electrical charges are conducted along them; infections migrate along them. Changing the state of the colloid changes the conditions of this cellular environment as well. The energy added by the practitioner is therefore doing more than reshaping structure; it is altering the conditions under which a vast number of non-structural cells live and respond.
"Now, are to all of it. There are various cells that live in this connected tissue matrix and it is these cells that are essential for the body's ability to respond to environmental stress and for the body's ability to respond and to heal itself. So when you are dealing with thatch, you are dealing with, from our point of view, a structural system, a structural organ, literally an organ of structure as I have discussed. But you are also dealing with a very delicate and sensitive environment in which other cells that don't have a direct structural significance live and which can be strongly and powerfully influenced by the manipulation of the fracture."
From the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, broadening the fascial system from structural organ to physiological medium:
The continuation of this passage in the same Big Sur class develops the point further. Fluids collected in tissue — Ida cites a student from the previous day with edema in the legs — visibly leave once the fascial planes are unstuck from each other. The colloidal substrate, once de-gelled by the addition of pressure, allows the mechanisms that ordinarily remove fluid to start working again. This is a clinical observation, but Ida frames it inside the energy-chemistry vocabulary: the fluid did not move because the planes were stuck; the planes were stuck because the colloid had set; the colloid loosened when the practitioner added energy by pressure.
"For example, it is common knowledge that often times infections will migrate along the fracture planes. Fluids traverse along the planes. And when Ida talks about the body being basically an electrical something, it is also along fascial planes that these ions need and electrical charges are transmitting. So that you begin to get a feeling that it is literally another system of communication in the body. There is a way of organizing the body. For this we have the nervous system. There is a circulatory system which is another way of providing information chemicals pass through the circulatory system and information gets delayed. You can look at the fascial system in a similar way. There is a fluid system in the fascia and you see this, we had a woman yesterday, we had, where you have fluid collected in the legs. And you can literally see that once those fascial planes unstuck from each other, that fluid starts to leave and that the mechanisms that are there for the removal of that fluid can start to work. It is through the fact that that happens. It is that extrinsic fuel to which it is outside the central nervous system. Well now, my understanding was a very good Now this is a message which I hope gets across except that you understand what the pattern is like when the pattern is doing the right thing."
Continuing in the same 1973 class, the case of fluid leaving the leg once the fascial planes are unstuck:
Adding energy as the basis of the practice itself
The whole frame of the practice — what makes it different from medicine, from physical therapy, from the various schools of bodywork it contemporaneously sat alongside — rests, in Ida's telling, on this one mechanism. Adding energy to structure changes structure; changing structure changes function. Twentieth-century medicine, she argued, had taken the chemical route to influencing function — pharmacology, hormones, nutrition. The mechanical route had been abandoned around the middle of the nineteenth century. The work she had developed reopened that route, and the warrant for reopening it was the demonstration that pressure was energy in the physics sense, and that the tissue could receive it. The teaching beat: the practice's claim to be a discipline rather than a technique is grounded entirely in the energy-chemistry frame.
"All of you have seen that structure determines function to a very great degree, to a degree which we can utilize. Now the basic law of law of law law is that you add structure to the body and in so doing, that you add structure you add energy to the body, and in so doing you demand all of you are going to hear a great deal more about this as time goes on. But this is the basic reason why structural integration works. It is the basic reason why there can be a study of bodies based on a structure in the sense that we use it, and why there can be a change of function, in other words, a contribution to health, to well-being, to wholeness, and the functioning of the body through merely being able to change, to alter, to modify. Is a very basic consideration which I just offered you. It is the basic consideration that makes all manipulative techniques something to be considered. You see, our dominant school of healing is not manipulation, as you all know. It's medicine. It works through chemistry. And the reason this is so is because the chemical school of healing came to its own about one hundred and twenty five years ago."
From the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, the basic law of the work stated as a syllogism:
Even at the molecular level, Ida's collagen chemistry has implications for how aging and stiffening should be understood. The complaint of morning stiffness, of feeling tired before the day has begun, of being unable to straighten up — these she reframed not as inevitable consequences of years but as states of the colloid that could in principle be shifted. The chemistry, she said in 1974, allows for substitution in either direction; minerals can be substituted for hydrogen, but hydrogen can also be substituted for minerals. The arrow that ordinarily runs toward stiffening can, in the presence of the right energy input, be reversed.
"Now, this kind of energy change permits chemical changes in the molecule, the molecule of that big collagen colloid. It allows chemical changes to occur. Those mineral atoms, or hydrogen atoms, that hold these three chains together can and do change. Minerals can be substituted for hydrogen. Hydrogen can be substituted for minerals. The more minerals are substituted in there, particularly calcium, the more tired you are when you get up in the morning and can't stretch out. This is the process which some people call aging. It isn't truly aging at all. There are other factors entering, in my opinion. The mineral atoms can and do change. They can substitute for the hydrogen, they can be substituted by the hydrogen. The myofascial system changes in terms of resilience, or what in the muscles we call tone. It changes the amount of water that is structurally bound. All of this carries our message, the message of Rolfing. In fact, you see, by the addition of energy, change occurs in the structural material of the body. In other words, you can change relationships within that body by adding energy."
Continuing the 1974 Open Universe colloid lecture into the chemistry of bonds and the question of aging:
A frequent companion to Ida's energy doctrine, in the public tapes from 1973–74, was her insistence that structure means relationship — not anatomy, not posture, but the relationships of the gross unitary parts of the body in space. Energy is added in order to change relationships. The parts themselves do not become different parts; what changes is how they sit with respect to one another. This is what she meant when she said the body operates on energy, with energy, by energy: each part is its own energy machine, and the sum of those machines depends on whether they are well or badly stacked. Adding energy can shift the stacking, but only if the energy is delivered in the right direction.
"And every time you use the word structural integration, You are talking about the relationship between various gross, unitary parts that fit together to make the aggregate that we call the man. Now many of you are aware of the fact that the various parts of the body operate on energy, with energy, by energy, creating their own energy, taking in their own energy. They are individual energy machines. And according to you add these energy machines, appropriately or inappropriately. You get addition or subtraction from the energy machine as a whole. If you've got a liver structure that's functioning very badly, the rest of your body which might be doing reasonably well, you are taking away the energy from it to keep that liver going and the answer is you don't feel so well. Because what you are registering when you say I feel is the sum total of that energy. But remember that sum total is an algebraic sum. Some of those systems are going to be pluses and some of them are going to be minuses unless you are very well stacked. Now you can add to that energy by the stopping. If you set those blocks properly, you can get maximum efficiency in the way that the body works. But you have to stack your blocks properly. As soon as your blocks get unstacked, then you begin to lessen the efficiency. Now, as I told you before, in structural integration, we think in terms of we work in terms of the stacking of the blocks which are part of the myofascial system, the connective tissue system, the collagen system. And it is the collagen system which basically, which the two classes on different levels are going to turn your attention to in the the next six to thirty weeks."
From the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, the algebraic sum and the question of how to stack the blocks:
What Valerie Hunt's instruments were trying to measure
By 1974 Ida had brought Valerie Hunt — a researcher in neuromuscular electromyography from UCLA — into the work, and Hunt's laboratory measurements became the principal scientific evidence Ida was willing to cite. Hunt's findings, presented at the Healing Arts conference, were that after the ten-session series the baseline of bioelectric activity rose in seated subjects between active movements, while during active movement that baseline dropped far below pre-work levels. Hunt also found, with the dermal photographer Rosalind Bruyere, that the body's measured aura widened from roughly an inch in width to four or five inches following the work. The teaching beat: Hunt's instruments were attempting to detect, by external means, exactly the increase in energy capacity that Ida's chemistry had predicted.
"It can be turned on at various places. Ordinarily, when we turn on that switch, we get exactly the same light or energy source at the other end. But in the instance of the human body, that is not true. If we turn on the muscle or send the stimulus from the spinal cord, we get what's called a very low frequency. It is the kind of thing you experience when you're out playing golf and that one time you hit that ball magnificently and it took off and it was no effort, and you're always looking for it again. We find that when people become more skillful in a particular high level task, they become what we call more finalized. There's a lot of research on this to show that the frequency actually changes. I think that Rolfing brings a downward shift. There is another level of control that we call the midbrain, and this area also can turn on muscles. We can operate on it. It is one of our very basic areas for some of our primitive movement, and it primarily innervates the great large joints of the body and those which are proximal, such as the shoulders and the hips and the trunk one of the areas that Rolfing works a great deal upon. This has a tendency to produce a very rhythmic quality of movement. And then there, of course, is that cortex that louses us up in so many ways. It can do those fine things with the hand and the beautiful nuances in the face, but it is totally inefficient, inefficient. It louses up, its pattern is not well established."
From the 1974 Healing Arts conference, Hunt walking through the levels of motor control and what changes after the work:
Hunt's interpretive frame imported the language of coherent versus incoherent energy from physics — coherent energy, like a laser, concentrating force in a single direction, versus incoherent energy like trade winds, pleasant enough but dissipated. She proposed that one of the goals of the practice was the production of coherent human energy, and that this rather than simply more energy was the right measure of integration. This is the place where Hunt's framing extended Ida's. Ida had said: add energy, change the state of the colloid. Hunt added: and the energy of the integrated body is also organized differently — more coherent, more directed, more capable of reversing entropy.
"Institute. My tentative conclusions are that Rolfing has a profound effect upon human energy systems in the direction of negative entropy, The counteracting of entropy: there are at least two aspects of the energy systems brought into greater coherency, and the physicists describe coherency to us and state that coherent energy or energy, for example, that goes through a laser beam places energy in unified directions, in a single direction, and that very small quantities of coherent energy are equal to atomic bomb energy and very large quantities of incoherent energy or dissipated energy is like random trade winds. They may be pleasant if you don't do much with them. I think that one of our goals should be human coherent energy in our quest and not just more energy. We might even solve our food problems. If we had coherent energy, we wouldn't have to feed the fuel as often. It's my opinion that Doctor. Roth has envisioned really a rather tremendous concept about the human being toward man, toward his improvement, toward his evolution, and for me personally, she and the Roth Institute have made it possible for me to move into another area of research which I'm sure will be the area that I will stay in the rest of my professional life."
From the 1974 Healing Arts conference, Hunt's coherent-vs-incoherent energy frame:
Ida used Hunt's findings as confirmation of what her chemistry had predicted, and pointed to Hunt's measurements as evidence that the energy of the body actually increased following the work. The argument was that increased aura width — measured both by Hunt's instruments and by Bruyere's direct reading — corresponded to a real increase in radiated energy, and that this increase came from the gravitational reinforcement made possible by the new structural arrangement of the body. The body, more nearly aligned with the vertical, could draw energy from gravity rather than spend energy resisting it; the surplus was what showed up in the wider aura, in the lower baseline bioelectric activity during movement, in the increased oxygen capacity Silverman had predicted.
"Hunt has validated our claim by measuring the increased energy of the body as changes in the material structure have been introduced. She's done this in several ways. She's measured the light energy indirectly through her instruments, and with the help of Doctor. Rosalind Bried, directly through direct reading of the aura. And amazingly, this age old measurement by Doctor. Brierez confirmed Doctor. Hunt's brand new instrument. Doctor. Hunt could have saved the money, but that's all what all metaphysicians have been telling us for centuries anyway. In terms of measuring light, Doctor. Breyer and Doctor. Hunt have observed its intensity in Kurilian auras Kurilian auras its vibratory rate that is, its color as seemingly created in the body. Thus the aura that Kurilian photographs, the brain waves, as well as increased energy over the various centers that the ancients called chakras were all observed. She has found, for example, and will tell you about it, that random incoming people tend to have auras a half an inch to an inch in width, but after the integration of structure and the integration of the myofascial body, which is called rolfing, their auras will have increased usually to four to five inches in width. That's what we said. Wow! Obviously, we are dealing with a basic energy phenomenon of life here. Whether"
From the 1974 Healing Arts conference, Ida summing up Hunt and Bruyere's measurements:
Energy, plasticity of thought, and the educated body
In the 1974 Open Universe class one of Ida's colleagues — speaking after a demonstration session — pushed the energy doctrine in a different direction. If the work disrupts the static configuration of the connective tissue, it also disrupts the static thought-forms that have been organized around that configuration. The body is not only being mechanically re-related; the constant flow of energy through it, normally held in check by the rigidity of the colloid and the rigidity of ego, is being permitted to move. The teaching beat: the energy-addition doctrine has psychological consequences that the practitioner needs to recognize without overstating. The transcripts show the colleague being careful — energy flow is a help, but the claim is bounded by what can be observed in the room.
"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. We have the capacity and we have other levels of consciousness to know and experience molecular action inside the body and to know all about it. If we talk about an educated physical body what are we talking about?"
From a 1974 Open Universe class, a colleague extending the energy doctrine to the question of body image and thought:
There is a complementary moment earlier in the same class, where another colleague describes the practitioner's hand at the point of contact: a warming sensation, a melting, the place that was stuck becoming mobile. The fluid that had hardened between fascial layers is reabsorbed when the pressure — the energy — is placed on the body. This is a different kind of description than Silverman's thermodynamic argument or Ida's colloid chemistry. It is the description of a practitioner who has been doing the work for years, naming what she actually feels under her hands. But the vocabulary is continuous: stuckness, energy delivered by pressure, the state of the local tissue shifting from hardened to fluid.
"You know, all I know is what I experienced and that is that oftentimes there's a warming, like a melting feeling that the place that was stuck or the place that wasn't moving, all of a sudden it gets warm and starts moving. That's my point. You're moving something. They get stuck partially by hardening or there's a fluid substance that seems like that has been hardened and isn't reabsorbed in the flesh. Time of injury, time of sickness. And it seems like whatever it is that is that stuckness between the layers of the fascia is what's reabsorbed at the time when our pressure is or energy is is placed on the body. And I don't know what further to say except that that's the way I feel what's going on. And, of course, the development of that stress pattern or of those places that are immobilized and hardened, we think is primarily related to the way the body deals with gravity because gravity is the most constant environmental force for the human body. And so it's in response to gravity that the body avoids pain, you might say, or avoids the buildup of stress in an individual point by trying to distribute it. And the fascial system is the way of distributing stress from those points. And so, as doctor Rolf said in the first talk, there's really no cause, one to one cause with the pattern."
From a 1974 Open Universe class, a senior practitioner describing what she feels in her hands when the energy is delivered:
Energy and the recipe — why the early sessions come first
The energy doctrine is not only an explanation; it also determines the structure of the ten-session series. In the 1975 Boulder advanced class Ida emphasized that the recipe is a continuous process, that the first hour is the beginning of the tenth, that the second hour is the second half of the first, and the third hour is a continuation of the second. The reason for the sequencing is that energy must be added to the more superficial layers before the deeper layers can receive it — because the coupling medium has to be made elastic before the deep work has any energetic context in which to land. The teaching beat: the recipe's order is a consequence of the energy doctrine, not an arbitrary protocol.
"The first hour is the beginning of the tenth hour. Okay? Uh-huh. The second hour is a follow-up of the first hour. Uh-huh. It's just the second half of the first hour. Okay? 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."
From the 1975 Boulder advanced class, the explicit claim that the recipe is a continuous spectrum, each hour an extension of the last:
There is a more austere version of the same point in one of the 1973 Big Sur transcripts, where Ida insists that the fascia of the body can be changed and that this is what allows it to become aberrant in the first place — and what allows the practitioner to step in and change it back. The route runs in both directions. The same plasticity that lets injury or chronic strain set the colloid in unhelpful configurations also lets the practitioner, by adding energy, reset it. Fascial teaching can be modified, and in being modified it modifies structure, and in modifying structure it modifies function. The whole edifice rests on this single property.
"But it is also just as possible to change it for the worse if you shall know your business. Function way to teach. That fascial teaching can be modified. That in being modified it is modifying structure and that in modifying structure you modify closure. Now, a fascial tissue So what I'm trying to get you to look at and understand is the circular nature of this whole crib. The way it travels round and round and round and it of the way in which organization at one place organizes or disorganizes at one place. And that's what you were doing yesterday. You were organizing afterwards. In order that Because if a joint is not truly seated with its neighbor, it takes a great deal of your vital energy to get movement organized fashion works. Now remember that what Michael says to you, that all of this fashion tends of chemistry in the extremities, particularly in the teeth. And I ask you, those of you who are in processing, what percentage of the people"
From the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, the circular nature of structural change:
Coda: the energy frame as the work's claim on physics
Across the 1971–1976 transcripts, the energy frame is the single most consistent feature of Ida's late teaching. The vocabulary varied — sometimes she spoke of colloids and gel-sol transitions, sometimes of the gravity line and its nourishing field, sometimes of coherent versus incoherent energy in Hunt's later usage — but the central claim was stable. The practitioner's hands deliver measurable physical work into a tissue whose state changes as a consequence; the change in state permits a reorganization of structural relationships; the reorganized relationships permit the body to draw nourishment from gravity rather than spend resources resisting it; and the surplus is what is felt, and measured, as the increased energy of the integrated body. This is what she meant by adding energy to tissue. It is what she had taught since at least the early Big Sur classes, and what she kept teaching, in continually refined form, through the last advanced class of 1976.
"The contour of the body changes, the objective feeling of the body to searching hands changes. Movement behavior changes as the body incorporates more and more order. The first balance of the body is a static stacking, but as the body incorporates more changes, the balance ceases to be a static balance. It becomes a dynamic balance. These are the physical manifestations of the increasing balance, but there is an outgoing psychological change as well toward balance, toward serenity, toward a more whole person. The whole man, the whole person evidences a more apparent, a more potent psychic development. This means that the rate that the ratio man energy to gravity energy energy has changed has increased. The ratio has therefore increased the force available to reverse the entropic deterioration. That is and greater. Our world is no longer running down. It seems capable now of building up."
From the 1974 Healing Arts conference, Ida walking the consequences of the energy-addition process all the way out to the question of entropy:
The transcripts do not resolve every question the energy frame raises. Hunt's measurements were preliminary; Silverman's thermodynamic argument was a research program more than a finished proof; the relationship between Ida's colloid chemistry and the contemporary biology of fascia remains a live scholarly question. What the transcripts do show is that Ida was unwilling to let the work be described in any other vocabulary. The hands add energy; the colloid changes state; the structure reorganizes; the body draws on gravity; the energy of the integrated body increases. Whether or not every step of that chain ultimately survives in the form she gave it, the chain itself — its insistence on physical mechanism, on measurement, on the laboratory meaning of its central word — is what she handed forward to the practitioners who came after her.
See also: See also: Valerie Hunt's extended discussion of her dancer-subject and the third-eye recording during a Buddha-pose meditation (CFHA_03), an account of the kinds of laboratory anomalies that led her to design the post-session energy-field study. CFHA_03 ▸
See also: See also: the 1971-72 IPR conference tapes, where Ida lays out her late research agenda on energy centers and their location in space as determinants of behavior (IPRCON1, IPRCON2). IPRCON1 ▸IPRCON2 ▸
See also: See also: the 1974 Open Universe class discussion of the released energy that occurs between fascial layers during work, with a senior practitioner describing the warming and melting sensation reported by clients (UNI_044). UNI_044 ▸
See also: See also: the Structure Lectures of 1974 in which the biographical genesis of Ida's energy-chemistry frame is set in the context of Schrödinger's Zurich lectures and her Rockefeller Institute years (STRUC1). STRUC1 ▸