Fascia as the organ of structure
Ida's central doctrinal move — the one that distinguishes her teaching from osteopathy, chiropractic, and every other manual tradition of her century — was to relocate the source of structural order away from bone and muscle and into the connective tissue web. In her 1973 Big Sur advanced class, working with senior practitioners who already knew how to manipulate muscle, she pressed them to see what they were actually changing. The muscles, she argued, are energy machines — engines that contract and release. But what determines whether those engines are positioned so their pulls compose into upright support, rather than tearing each other apart? Not the muscles themselves. The fascial envelopes around them. This is not a metaphor. It is a structural claim: the connective tissue aggregate is the organ that holds the body in three-dimensional space, and everything else hangs within or upon it.
"It is the fascial aggregate which is the organ of structure."
Big Sur 1973, addressing the advanced class on the foundational claim of the work:
The argument is not merely terminological. If structure resides in fascia, then the practitioner's hands have an object to work on that the medical model has overlooked. Surgeons cut through fascia to reach the muscles or organs they think are the real targets; Ida proposed that the fascia itself was the target, and that everything else followed from putting it in order. Earlier in the same Big Sur lecture, she had walked the students through the energy-machine model — liver, lungs, brain, each contributing or subtracting from the body's total energetic budget — and then named the organizing principle that determines whether those contributions add up or cancel out.
"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. You are going to be getting more and more intimate with collagen which before you heard it well could mean you didn't know existed. But you see, it is the connective tissue which is the organ of structure. The fascia envelopes are the organ of structure, the organ that holds the body appropriately in the three-dimensional material world. Now nobody ever taught this in the medical school as far as I know."
Earlier in the same Big Sur lecture, naming what the connective tissue actually does:
The bag and what is in it
Peter Melchior, teaching the 1975 Boulder advanced class, offered the students a working image that has stuck in practitioner lore ever since. He asked them to picture a shopping bag containing brains, a heart, some bones, some glue — the random stuff of a body. What organizes that stuff into a person? Not the parts themselves. The bag, and more specifically, the planes inside it that compartmentalize and connect the parts. The shopping-bag image is doing the same work as Ida's organ-of-structure formulation, in a more pedagogical register: it gives the trainee something to picture when the word fascia threatens to dissolve into abstraction.
"Well, the fascial planes are the organizational material for the body."
Melchior in the 1975 Boulder advanced class, after walking the students through the shopping-bag image:
The shopping-bag picture is useful but partial — and Ida herself, returning to the same territory in her 1974 Healing Arts lectures, pressed the orange image into more rigorous service. The orange has a peel, then sections, then within each section the pulp held by yet finer membrane. The fascia is all of those wrappings at every scale — the outer envelope, the section dividers, the cell-level membranes. And the supportive function works at every scale too. Scoop out the contents of the orange and the empty peel still has the shape of an orange. The same trick, in principle, would work on a human body.
"factory go, but fascia is the stuff that keeps it from falling in on itself, falling in on its face, keeps you from falling on your face. It is your fascial body that supports you, relates you, and you know as with a child, you fool them sometimes by scooping out the material of the orange and leaving the skin and then putting the two heads together and you say to the kid now this is this is an orange and you see how long it takes that young ster to find out that it isn't an orange, that hits a ball of fascia. And so with with a a human being, in theory at least, you could scoop out the stuff that makes the factory go, the chemicals and so forth, and you would have left this supportive body of fascia. And it is this body which has had very little, almost no exploration in the sense that we have been giving to it."
1974 Healing Arts lecture, extending the orange image into a structural claim about the body:
The phrase that closes this passage — the supportive body has had almost no exploration in the sense we have been giving to it — is Ida marking her territory. The anatomists named fascia centuries ago. The surgeons cut through it. But no one had asked what it does structurally, what its consequences for movement are, or what happens when you change it. That terra incognita is what the work, in her view, was charting.
"And it is this body which has had very little, almost no exploration in the sense that we have been giving to it."
Ida names what makes the inquiry new:
The continuity of the wrappings
The shopping-bag and orange images can mislead in one respect: they suggest the fascia is a finite number of containers nested inside one another. The deeper teaching — and the one that makes the recipe's geographical logic possible at all — is that all the wrappings are continuous. The envelope around one muscle merges with the envelope around its neighbor; the envelope around the calf reaches, through unbroken tissue, the envelope around the neck. In a 1973 Big Sur class, Ida and Sharon worked through this in dialogue, with Ida correcting Sharon's flatter formulation and pressing for a more vivid image of how the wrappings connect.
"It envelops each muscle, but you see, it isn't apparent from that sentence that not only does it envelop each individual muscle but that these wrappings of individual muscles connect. It's like a section of an orange when you take it and cut it in half."
Big Sur 1973, correcting a student's description with a more evocative image:
The orange-section image lets Ida deliver the consequence that matters for the recipe: that a manipulation at one site reaches structures far away, because the tissue connecting them is one tissue. Later in the same Big Sur class, she made the consequence explicit, drawing on the modern surgical practice of sliding between fascial planes rather than cutting through them — a practice that itself testifies to the continuity her teaching insists on.
"And the same thing is true down in the myofascial body, to try to see just where these, and yet, and yet, a great many modern surgeons are learning to not cut through the fascia, but to slide between the fascia to get where they want to go. And this is the modern progression nowadays. So that, actually, you have to use your imagination in many directions, and you seem to have a fairly good imagination, David. Your imagination of the analytical breakdown of this body and your recognition that your analysis is a way of getting to a higher level of abstraction, but not getting to a higher level of reality. Because when you separate that body into these higher level abstractions, you are not getting anywhere near the reality. You are getting further away from it. You are analyzing. You are not synthesizing."
Continuing the Big Sur dialogue, Ida draws out the implication for the practitioner's imagination:
Michael Salveson, working alongside Ida in the same 1973 Big Sur class, took the continuity argument into developmental biology. The reason the wrappings are one tissue is that they came from one cell-line. All the structural tissue of the body — bone, cartilage, fascia, muscle — derives from the mesoderm. They are siblings, differentiated by what kind of environmental stress each lineage was subjected to. Fascia, in Salveson's account, is the lineage that stopped differentiating earliest, retaining the greatest plasticity and the greatest reach.
"Now as these fundamental germ cells develop, they begin to differentiate according to the sorts of environmental demands they are made on. Certain mesoderm cells are subjected to stretching. They develop the tractile properties. Other mesodermal cells are put under pressure for developing bone cells. Cells. So that you can begin to see that from one way of looking at it, the entire skeletal model of the comes from one basic cell. They are all related and they differentiate depending upon the source of energy that flow through them, the kind of environmental influences they coming through. Now as these cells become more and more specialized and as the embryo develops, there is one cell which stops at a certain level of differentiation and just becomes faster. Fracture is the connective And this is significant that fascia, the connective tissue cells are the least differentiated and I am not speaking here about the extruded collagen fibers, I am speaking about these basic cells that generate the fibers. Because you have to remember that fascia is a matrix of connective tissue fibers called collagenous fibers along protein strands in which live the cells of the connective tissue. And it is these cells that generate fascia. So the And fascia is formed from the least differentiated cell. In that sense it is the most primitive and also the most labile because it hasn't gone as far down the road for specialization."
Salveson, teaching with Ida at Big Sur 1973, gives the embryological argument for fascia's continuity and plasticity:
How stuck fascia produces gross movement
If fascia organizes structure, then disorganized fascia produces disorganized movement. The Open Universe demonstration class of 1974, in which Ida and her colleagues talked through their work on a subject in front of a live audience, contains some of the clearest articulations of how stuckness in the fascia translates into the characteristic ungainliness of the random body. The mechanism, in Ida's account, has two parts: first, fluid hardens between fascial layers after injury or chronic stress, gluing the layers together. Second, once layers are glued, the surface muscles can no longer act independently — they fire as a single sticky group, and the body loses its capacity for differentiated movement.
"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. It's an accumulation of person to the pattern that they presently have."
Open Universe class, 1974, explaining how stress accumulates in the fascia rather than at any single point:
The distributed-cause argument matters because it tells the practitioner what they are reading when they look at a body. They are not looking for a single injury that explains the whole pattern; they are looking at the accumulated record of how this person has organized themselves to bear gravity over time. And once the pattern is set in the fascia, it produces a characteristic kind of movement — the kind where the body moves all at once, in undifferentiated globs.
"See, the average person moves primarily with Extrinsic muscles, surface muscles, or groups of muscles that are stuck together. We're gonna lean forward. There's little differentiation in the in the movement. And then as you watch as the rofting goes on, you see that the muscles start doing their own work instead of being grouped all in one big glob. And then you get movement which comes from deep in the body as well as on the surface."
Continuing the same demonstration, naming the movement signature of the random body:
The phrase one big glob is doing significant work here. It names the experiential signature that practitioners learn to recognize: a body where the shoulders, the chest, and the upper back move as a single unit when the person reaches forward, rather than each layer contributing its own articulation. The mature integrated body, by contrast, allows the deep psoas to flex the hip while the surface muscles of the abdomen remain quiet — differentiated movement, originating from inside outward.
"then as you watch as the rofting goes on, you see that the muscles start doing their own work instead of being grouped all in one big glob. And then you get movement which comes from deep in the body as well as on the surface. I I should think as a law for the pain to know, you're at least as clear as a doctor with the muscle structure and tendons and things like that as you want to find."
The same demonstration, completing the picture of differentiated movement:
Fascia as a colloid: the physics of plasticity
The hinge that turns fascia from a structural fact into a clinical opportunity is its plasticity — the property that lets the practitioner change it. In her 1974 Healing Arts lecture, Ida walked the audience through the physical-chemistry argument she had carried with her since her Rockefeller Institute days. Collagen, the protein that makes up fascia, is a colloid. Colloids change state with the addition or subtraction of energy. The gelatin in the refrigerator gels; the gelatin on the stove liquefies. The fascia under pressure becomes more fluid; the fascia at rest, more solid. This is not a metaphor borrowed from chemistry — it is, in her telling, the same physics.
"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?"
1974 Healing Arts lecture, locating fascia's plasticity in basic colloid chemistry:
The colloid argument lets Ida claim a specific physical mechanism for what her hands are doing. She is not, in her telling, breaking fibers, stretching elastic tissue past its limit, or chemically reacting with the body. She is adding energy through pressure, sufficient to shift the colloid from a gel state toward a sol state, during which window the tissue can be reorganized into a new configuration that holds when the energy input ceases. The body is, in her famous phrase from the same lecture series, a plastic medium.
"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."
From the same 1974 Healing Arts lecture, the line she repeated throughout her late teaching:
The student demonstration from the 1974 Open Universe class — where Ida's hands rest on a subject and a warming, melting sensation arises between layers that had been stuck — is the experiential confirmation of the colloid argument. What the practitioner feels under their hands as the tissue softens, and what the subject feels as a warming release, is in Ida's account the colloid shifting state under the energy input of pressure.
"Turn put your feet back down. Turn over onto your left side. Bring your arm back up under your head. This one. Again, we're interested in gravity falling falling through this body in such a way that it's doing a lot of the work. Can you say again what you're doing between the layers and muscles physiologically?"
Open Universe 1974, describing the felt experience of the colloid shifting state:
Why the recipe begins with superficial fascia
If fascia is continuous, plastic, and structural, the practitioner needs a sequence — a way of working through the web that respects its order. The ten-session series is that sequence, and Ida's account of why the first hour goes where it goes turns directly on the fascial argument. The first hour does not target a muscle or a joint; it works the superficial fascia. The student in the 1975 Boulder class who pressed her on this — Joe — drew from her one of her clearest statements of why the surface layer comes first and what its release sets up downstream.
"What happens in structural integration is that the body is restructured by a method of mostly of working with the fascia, superficial end deep fascia. It begins with the superficial. What happens if this fascia is either stretched or broken or or somehow moved in some way to get the muscles underneath breathing room, so to speak? You mean we stretch them when we break them? Well God help us send for the cops."
Boulder 1975, in dialogue with a student trying to articulate the first hour:
The first hour, in this account, is not a warm-up or a relaxation session — it is the structural opening that lets every later hour reach its target. The superficial fascia, when stuck, is the outermost layer of constraint; once it releases, the underlying muscles can find positions they could not previously occupy. In the 1976 advanced class, Ida and her colleagues elaborated this into a layered argument: each hour goes one layer deeper, and the depth is possible only because the layer above has already been organized.
"So that in the process of working on superficial fascia you're doing some very deep work because it's, or it may be the lack of, a better tone or something like that. We're starting to get a looser In the process of the first hour, number one I said we're getting to the joints and we're still dealing with a superficial fashion. So that we are starting working at the joints and the fact that the joints back here as well. But that we are working in terms of levels of where those joints or how those joints are tied down and this would be the first area that they're tied down is on the surface. And that we cannot go freeing them by digging deep, say into the axillary region or deep into the hip joint until we've got the looser stuff. It's a kind of tone or a bed in which these kinds of movements can happen."
1976 advanced class, on the layered logic of the recipe:
The 1976 advanced class also brought into focus a terminological refinement that had been quietly underway in Ida's teaching for several years. The word fascia, used loosely, suggests the wrappings around muscle — but every organ has its fascia, and the practice was clearly affecting more than the myofascia. Her colleagues began pressing toward the more inclusive term connective tissue, recognizing that the work reached the glandular system, the circulation, and the wider web that the muscle-wrappings are only one part of.
"And you can see the pull here of the strap which is pulling that buttocks, really think I got some pictures of Why at this point to talk about useful or effective tissue versus mild fascial tissue, etcetera, etcetera? My preference now and I don't always do it because I've got to change my head on this is I prefer to call it connective tissue. I think we're in a lot less trouble if we do it. The problem is that first of all every organ has its fascia so we would have to say myofascial. We tend it from an eye tendon. When I talked about fascia is to think of the wrapping around muscle. Then I realized fascia is fascia around all the glands, there's fascia around all the organs and so forth. The myofascial I think is like a part of the fascia and as long as we consider it as only part that we're affecting more than that, that we are affecting as you've started to say, we are affecting the glandular system and it may be, it's easy to say that a beginning effect can be by affecting its fascia and affecting its circulation because indeed we have all the blood vessels in the fascia or in the connective tissue. So at this point I'm preferring to say connective tissue and then talk about the fascia, the myofascia as one part of it and I don't always get there. I mean as I get talking I don't know."
1976 advanced class, on the language shift from fascia to connective tissue:
The fascial plane as the operative unit of advanced work
If the early hours of the recipe work toward establishing order in the superficial fascia, the later hours work in a different register entirely. By the seventh, eighth, and ninth hours, the practitioner is no longer dealing with isolated muscles or stuck layers — they are dealing with fascial planes, the broad continuous sheets that span regions of the body and that, when in proper relationship to one another, allow the integrated body to function as a coherent whole. In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, Ida articulated this shift more clearly than she had in earlier teaching, treating it as the conceptual jump that distinguishes the elementary work from the advanced work.
"Others say that the myofascia is the unit that relates parts appropriately, that it is where your fascial body literally is which determines that structural relationship which we have been preaching as if the relationship is right, the health is good, the well-being is there."
Boulder 1975, drawing the line between elementary and advanced understanding:
The crucial pedagogical point is that fascial planes are not directly palpable in the random body. The pulls and heavings of the disorganized tissue disguise them; you cannot reach in on the street and feel the iliotibial band as a discrete plane the way you can feel a tendon. The first ten hours are what make the planes feelable. The advanced practitioner's eye and hand have to be trained to see what the recipe has produced, and they can only be trained by doing the recipe.
"but you cannot feel fascial flames. And your first ten hours, therefore, are creating the order within these planes which make it possible for you to see and think in terms of fashion planes."
From the same Boulder 1975 lecture, naming what the first ten hours accomplish:
Once the practitioner can see in fascial planes, the question shifts from what to release to how the planes balance. The pulls of the iliotibial band against the rotators, the lumbar dorsal fascia against the abdominal sheath, the cervical fascia against the thoracic — all of these become the working units. The advanced practitioner is reading the equilibria of these large sheets, not the contractions of named muscles.
"work, your job will be to try to understand the pulls and the equilibria that are involved in the fashion plane as you get it organized."
Ida names the advanced practitioner's task:
Movement after the work: differentiation and depth
The movement signature of an integrated body, in Ida's teaching, has two related qualities: differentiation between layers, and origination from depth. Valerie Hunt's electromyography studies, presented at the 1974 Healing Arts class, gave the practice its first quantitative confirmation of what practitioners had been seeing for years. After the work, subjects showed not just changed contours but changed neuromuscular patterns — less co-contraction, more sequential activation, lower frequencies of control originating from older neural structures rather than the cortex.
"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. Two muscles counteract each other at the same time, And my feeling is that this smoother energy release that comes after rolfing is based upon a downward shift in the control in the primary control. This doesn't mean you can't be cortical but in the primary control of muscle."
Healing Arts class, 1974, presenting her electromyography findings on changed movement after the work:
The electromyographic findings give experimental weight to what Ida had been claiming since the 1960s — that the body, after the work, moves with less internal friction. The fascial argument explains why. Co-contraction occurs when antagonist muscles fire simultaneously to stabilize a joint that the connective tissue is no longer holding in place; when the fascial bed re-establishes a stable joint position, the antagonist no longer has to fight the agonist, and movement becomes sequential rather than competitive. Less energy is dissipated in the fight, more is available for the act.
"If he came in with a great deal of contraction, he tended to diminish this. What happened was my interpretation anyway is that the spectrum of possibilities for moving efficiently was tremendously increased after the rolfing. There was a lot of information about power density spectra that I'm not going to bore you with because it's highly detailed. But one that led me to the study, another study I will report on today, was that I found what we call baseline of bioelectric activity was increased after Rolfing, particularly when an individual or specifically, when the individual was sitting down in between active events and I could not understand this."
Continuing the electromyography report at the 1974 Healing Arts class:
Pain, the practitioner's hand, and what fascia tells the body
The fascia is not only structural and movement-organizing — it is also, in Ida's later teaching and her colleagues' speculations, a sensory and informational medium. The 1974 Open Universe demonstrations include several moments where subjects report pain, warming, and other sensations that practitioners came to read as evidence that the fascia was carrying more than mechanical load. Ida herself remained cautious about the more expansive claims, but she allowed the conversation.
"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. And the clasp in these are the kind of places that I'm working on right now where doctor sees them from across the room. She'll say, now back there on the back by the fourth rib, go in there and get that. And there it is."
Open Universe 1974, demonstrating and narrating the felt experience of fascial release:
Pain, in this picture, is not the goal of the work and not its measure, but it is the inevitable accompaniment of certain kinds of release. The 1974 Open Universe demonstration includes a frank discussion of how practitioners differ on pain — some believe the work isn't working without it, others believe it will eventually be done painlessly — and Ida herself, who had moved away from her early reputation for hard pressure, took a measured position.
"It's something that we're learning about all the time. You have people who are of the opinion Werner expressed when he was here that it's not rocking unless there's some pain. And there are other people who believe that you will evolve to a place where you can do the whole thing painlessly. Those are probably the two extremes. Course one of it, there are many kinds of pain. That's clear to a rolfer. There is pain from the pressure just because you have in some places in the body in order to reach the level where you want to work, you have to there is pressure exerted and there is some pain involved. Then there is the other element that publicized a lot and very true and that is that there is a memory component in the muscles of pain from another time."
Open Universe 1974, on the role of pain and the memory component in fascial release:
The Boulder 1975 class added another dimension to the practitioner's reading of pain: that pain can arise not from muscle but from fascia itself. One of the senior practitioners, recalling a skating injury, described a radiating ache that was clearly located in the fascia around the knee — not in the joint, not in a muscle, but in the connective tissue itself. The observation matters because it suggests that what the medical model often diagnoses as arthritis or joint pathology may, in some cases, be fascial pain that the diagnostic vocabulary has no name for.
"They are not connected. They are one. Sometimes there's pain. I once was when I skate and I slip and I hurt and I hit my knee and I could feel the pain in my fascia. It was right around my knee joint and radiated upward and downward. It wasn't anywhere but my fashion. I could feel it in there. My experience was this is what arthritis in the knee might be to someone else, you know, that doesn't under that doesn't understand their body well enough to know what the hell they're feeling. They just feel this radiating ache in there. But it was definitely my fascia."
Boulder 1975, a senior practitioner describing fascial pain from his own experience:
What we still do not know
Ida did not present the fascial argument as a closed system. In her 1973 Big Sur class and again in the 1975 Boulder advanced work, she insisted that structural integration was an open-ended revelation — not a finished doctrine, but a working hypothesis still being elaborated. The honest gaps in the account, in her telling, included the precise mechanism by which pressure changes the colloid state, the relationship between fascial change and the changes in awareness practitioners observed in their clients, and — most concretely — the absence of a clear anatomical map of how the major fascial planes actually run through the body.
"With the kind of culture that you we have here, you would suppose there would be somebody who could put together an elastic model or something that would make give this thing a greater reality, but I wouldn't know where to find it. I do think that sooner or later, someone of us has to be smart enough to really trace out facial patterns of the shoulder girdle and facial patterns of the hip girdle. Because you see this is what we've been dealing with. And then there is the problem of the connection between say the tenth rib and the crest of the ileum which is another fascial problem. But how do these hip girdle fascia fit together with the fascia that enwraps the obliques for instance? Now if the fascial patterns were as clear to us as the muscular patterns are, I think there would be a great deal less problem in teaching this if there were a book to which we could refer about how those fascial planes run as we refer back to our anatomies here as to how the muscular patterns run. It might be that it would be easier to turn our practitioners who understood they were dealing with facial bodies."
Public talk on the open work, naming the anatomical mapping that still needed to be done:
The acknowledgment is characteristic of Ida's late teaching. She is willing to claim that the body is plastic, that fascia is the organ of structure, that the recipe works — but she will not claim that the field has finished its work. The fascial atlas she calls for here, fifty years on, has been partially attempted by anatomists working in her tradition, but the gap she names — between what practitioners can do with their hands and what science has mapped in its books — remains substantially open.
See also: See also: Big Sur 1973, Tape 17 (SUR7332) — Ida's reflection that Structural Integration is an open-ended revelation, not a closed-end one, included as a pointer for readers interested in how she framed the field's incompleteness. SUR7332 ▸
See also: See also: Big Sur 1973 (SUR7309) — Michael Salveson's extended teaching on fascia as the body's communication system, where fluids, ions, and electrical charges travel along fascial planes; included as a pointer for readers interested in the communication-channel argument that runs alongside the structural one. SUR7309 ▸
Coda: gravity, the fascial web, and the moving body
The fascial argument resolves, in Ida's late teaching, into a single proposition: that the practice's contribution to a person is not the change in their shape but the change in their relationship to gravity, mediated through the reorganized fascia. The body that comes off the table is not a sculpture; it is a moving organism that has had its connective tissue web brought into a configuration where gravity supports rather than tears down. The practitioner's hands have been the means; the fascia has been the medium; the change in movement is the consequence.
"Rolfing in the sense of this deep changing of the patterns of the fundamental structure of the body to conform with gravity. I have written, as I think probably all of you know, gravity is the therapist, and this is true and I make no claim to be a therapist, but I do make a claim that says that Rothschild changes the basic web of the body so that that therapist's gravity can really get in there."
IPR public lecture, on what the practice ultimately does:
Movement, in this final framing, is what gravity does to a fascially-ordered body. The body that has been brought into vertical balance does not have to brace against the gravitational field; the field supports the verticality, and the energy that was being spent in resistance becomes available for action. The differentiated movement Valerie Hunt measured electromyographically, the deep-originating action Melchior demonstrated in the Open Universe class, the wave through the spine Ida used as the test of the tenth hour — these are all signs that gravity is now working through a body whose fascia lets it pass.
"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."
Boulder 1975, on what fascial release actually stores and transmits: