What the first hour does — and does not — do
Ida resisted students who wanted to define the first hour by its techniques. The question she pressed instead was: what is the hour structurally doing to the body in space? In her 1975 Santa Monica class, she walked a student named Jen through her account of the opening session and stopped her at every point where the language drifted toward procedure. The answer she was looking for was directional and architectural — free the pelvis from above, free the pelvis from below, balance what is already there. The methods (pectoralis, latissimus, hamstring, pelvic lift) are the means; the freed pelvis is the end. When the student gave Ida the methods first, Ida corrected her by widening the lens.
"Well, in the first hour, what we wanna do is to free the pelvis from above and below. So we start and and start bringing the ribs and and lifting the thorax."
Santa Monica advanced class, February 1975 — opening review of the first hour:
The corollary statement appeared a year earlier and again the following year: this is a hour about balancing what the body brings, not about adding. Ida insisted on the distinction. The other nine hours of the recipe install something — support, length, depth, rotation, organization. The first hour and the tenth hour are different in kind; they balance what is there. The tenth confirms the dynamic balance the work has produced; the first balances the static randomness the client walks in with. The difference matters because it tells the practitioner what they should and should not be trying to do in this opening session.
"The other eight hours, you're putting in. Nine, you're or ten, you're Yeah. You're coming back to balance. To balance. Right. So during that first hour, you you do several things for the man. You improve his oxygen exchange. You free his thorax so that he can get more fuel or more more fuel for his machine there to start working so that it will have the circulation and the oxygen to establish the to establish the changes that you that you propose or permit, I guess, the the changes that you're you're allowing."
RolfB6, public tape, mid-1970s — Ida describing the first hour in conversation:
Why the superficial fascia, and why first
The first hour works the superficial fascia of the trunk. This is the most commonly misunderstood aspect of the hour, both by students and — in Ida's account — by herself in the early years of the work. The superficial fascia is the outermost sheet of connective tissue, the layer immediately under the skin. It wraps the trunk above and below the pelvis. Working it does not feel, to the practitioner or the client, like deep work; it does not produce the dramatic interior release that later hours produce. And so the natural temptation, especially for new practitioners, is to skip past it and go after the muscles. Ida warned against this in nearly every advanced class she taught.
"fascia. In the early stages of the game, nobody believes that you're really working with that superficial fascia in the first hour. But actually, as you go further along and get more familiar with it, you begin to realize that you are working with that superficial fascia and that you are stretching that superficial fashion. And it is by virtue of the change that you put into the superficial fashion that you begin to get change in underlying structures."
RolfB3, public tape, mid-1970s — on the superficial fascia and what makes the first hour work:
The same point recurs in the 1976 Boulder advanced class with different emphasis. There Ida was less concerned with whether students believed in the superficial fascia and more concerned with whether they understood what it physically is. The superficial fascia is not a single sheet wrapped around the body like cellophane. It is a system of straps and thicknesses that pass not only laterally around the trunk but also obliquely inward, attaching to deeper structures. When you work it well, you are already beginning to reach what later hours will reach more directly.
"I agree that the sheets, I think I can do it in less than ten minutes, at least as far as I can go right now, is that the sheets that are happening, the straps, the thicknesses, the whatever, are not only going around the body but are going deep into the body at all different ways. 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."
1976 Boulder advanced, slide discussion — Ida and the assembled practitioners on what the superficial fascia actually does:
The arm test — before any manipulation
Before the practitioner begins to loosen anything, Ida insisted on an observation step. The client lies supine. The practitioner watches the breathing, watches the thorax, and — first — does what Ida called the arm test. She corrected one of her students mid-sentence in the 1975 Boulder class on exactly this point. The student had begun to describe the first hour by moving directly to the loosening of fascia. Ida stopped him and required him to put the arm test back in its proper place, before any manipulation, as the doorway to the hour.
"The initial process of verticalizing the body begins with manipulation of the superficial fascia above and below the pelvis. And The first area of concern that I would move to in beginning the first hour would be to have the person lying on their back and observing their breathing to see or to have a feeling as to how their thorax is tied down or pinned down."
Boulder advanced class, 1975 — Ida coaching a student on the order of operations:
What is the arm test? The practitioner lifts the client's arm and observes where it binds — in front, in the back, at the spine, or because the teres is holding the scapula too far laterally. The observation gives the practitioner a structural map. But that, Ida said, is only its secondary use. Its primary purpose is for the client. It is the first moment in the work when the client is asked to notice their own body — to realize, often for the first time, that their arm doesn't move the way it could. The arm test is the entry point to the educational dimension of the hour.
"do the arm test and observe the where the arm is tied up before that. Yeah. Is it tied up in front? Is it tied up in the back? Is it tied up at the spine?"
Continuing in the same Boulder session, on what the arm test is looking for:
The reason Ida insisted on the arm test before manipulation begins is pedagogical as much as structural. The client must be brought into the work as a participant, not as a passive surface. By the time the practitioner moves their hands to begin loosening, the client has already observed in themselves that something is wrong with how their arm moves — and, more importantly, has felt the practitioner's hands establishing the existence of that observation. Contact has been made. The work has already begun, and the client is already inside it.
Educating the client into a new awareness
Ida treated the first hour as the moment when the client is introduced — often for the first time in their life — to the proposition that their body is not what they have been taking it to be. This is the meaning of her phrase 'push the unconsciousness back.' The client comes in with a body image formed by habit and assumes that habit is structure. The first hour begins to dissolve that assumption by giving them a perceptible change they cannot deny. The arm test, the breathing, the pelvic lift — each is an opportunity to make the client say 'that's fantastic' and mean it.
"But even more important than your estimate of what is wrong with it is the necessity for introducing your royalty to the notion that there is a something real going on Mhmm. That they can immediately observe the change themselves, that you can get them to say, that's fantastic. People almost always are aware of that sickness where sometimes it's the first time in their life they realize their arms don't move properly. Because the way they move their arms has always been to them the proper way. See, all of these things you are dealing with in that first hour, and this is one of the reasons why we go back and back and back and back to that first hour observing all the little edges where you can push the unconsciousness back."
Continuing in the 1975 Boulder class, on what the practitioner is really after in the first hour:
The 1974 Open Universe session deepened this idea by attaching it to body-image. Loosening the shoulder girdle and the pelvic girdle from the central core of the body, the practitioner is changing not only the structure but the client's perception of their own structure. Ida tied this to the broader trajectory of the ten-session series: each hour pushes the client's awareness of their body a little further toward what the structure can actually do, away from what habit has told them it can do.
"Do you want to sketch in the most vital places to stop the change of that randomness. The change of the randomness. Is partially if you're talking changing of the awareness of the person and from this structural integration position, by beginning with the with the superficial fascia, you begin to change the the body image, the body awareness almost. And by freeing the the body from the sense of the shoulder girdles, the and the pelvic girdle from the central core of the body. Again, this changes the person's awareness of Well, now you're talking about ten hours, aren't you? I I'm thinking overall. You well, I was thinking too. Well Specifically. What you're saying was alright."
RolfB6, public tape — a student describes the first hour's effect on body awareness; Ida pushes back to keep the focus hour-by-hour:
The first hour as the beginning of the tenth
The most architectural of Ida's statements about the first hour came in the 1975 Boulder class in a discussion among students — with Ida intervening to crystallize the point. The first hour is not an isolated session. It is the opening movement of a continuous gesture that culminates in the tenth. The second hour is the second half of the first. The third hour is the second half of the second. Each hour is one step along a single spectrum, and the only reason the work is broken into ten sessions at all is that the body cannot absorb the entire reorganization in one sitting.
"What does matter is you understand you have to lift that up off the pelvis to start getting mobility in the pelvis. Uh-huh. 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."
1975 Boulder advanced class — a practitioner working out how Ida arrived at the recipe sequence:
This claim — first hour as opening of the tenth — does specific work in the practitioner's mind. It tells them what to look for at the end of their first session: they should be looking for a body that has begun to do what the tenth hour will eventually confirm. They are not finishing anything in the first hour. They are starting something whose finish is nine sessions away. This frame is what prevents the practitioner from over-reaching in the opening session, from trying to dig too deep or to make too much happen. The first hour does what only the first hour can do: it opens the door.
"So so see this for what it is, that whole first hour that seems so big and seems so complicated, is really simply one thing, a loosening and all energizing and therefore an organizing of the fascia that invests trunk."
RolfA3, public tape — Ida summarizing the architecture of the first hour after a long technical discussion:
Above and below the pelvis: the two directions of the hour
The architectural symmetry of the first hour is that it works the trunk and the legs in two directions, both aimed at the pelvis. From above, the practitioner releases the thorax — the chest, the shoulder girdle, the latissimus, the pectorals — so that the trunk stops compressing the pelvis from the top. From below, the practitioner works the hamstrings and the back of the legs so that the pelvis stops being pinned from beneath. Neither direction alone would free the pelvis; both must be worked, and the work must be balanced before the hour can be considered complete.
"That first hour, you started up on the trunk to get it free to the pelvis. You went down to the legs to get it free to the pelvis."
RolfB3, public tape — Ida summarizing the architecture of the first hour in the simplest possible terms:
The pelvic lift is what registers whether the two directions have met. It is not, strictly speaking, the goal of the hour — but it is the test of it. If the practitioner has truly freed the thorax from above and the legs from below, then when they hook under the lumbar and lift, the pelvis responds. Something releases: typically one of the lower lumbars or the sacrum repositions itself. If the pelvic lift produces nothing, the practitioner has not actually completed the work above and below. Ida treated the lift as diagnostic as much as therapeutic.
"And I'm not sure if there's a why or what the significance is, but it seems to me that we did the neck after the pelvic lift, and I don't know whether that's just for kind of comfort and balance. Yeah. It's for comfort and balance. You can't go around holding your head out this way for an indefinite period. Uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable. I see it. It's inefficient. It isn't beautiful, and it's not good advertising. Mostly not. Be even more out of balance after the building takes on your party. Right? Probably. So that's that's why. It's just a question you can pay your money and take your choice. Do the pelvic lift last if you like. But you see, the pelvic lift is more than just an organization of what you get, what you've gotten, what you've freed. It it usually involves a repost repositioning of either the third or the fourth or the fifth lumbar and the sacrum. And when you people have done enough first hours, you'll know that that's so. Something down there is going to really give."
RolfA3, public tape — discussion of why the neck and the pelvic lift come at the end of the first hour:
Why the chest first
A question that surfaced repeatedly in the 1975 Boulder class — among students trying to reconstruct the logic of Ida's recipe — was why the very first move of the very first hour is on the chest. The student who raised the question worked through it aloud in a way Ida implicitly endorsed. The chest, in his analysis, is the place where the practitioner can deliver, in the shortest possible time, the most convincing experiential evidence of what the work actually does. By freeing the breathing and beginning to lift the thorax off the pelvis, the practitioner gives the client an unmistakable bodily change within the first session — something the client can feel happening to them in real time.
"First time Ida put her hands on me, she went right there. And so I started thinking about the logic of the sequence and how it evolved, you know, and trying to back myself up to Ida's perspective, you know, and see what she saw. You know, why did the recipe evolve this way? And I think one of the things is that by working and this is a level of abstraction above the physical body, but I think it's relevant that by working on the chest and the pelvis, you deliver the most experience of what we're trying to do. So that when someone gets a first hour, you're establishing in their cells what it is that Rolfing's about. You know, before you put their hands on them, they've only got ideas, abstractions. And in the first hour you're giving them an experiential look at what goes on. And you get the most done for the least amount of doing by freeing the breathing and the pelvis. You know, so there's a lot of impact in that first session."
1975 Boulder advanced class — a practitioner working out the logic of the chest-first opening:
The same practitioner went on to recount a piece of historical anecdote about Ida's early teaching demonstrations among chiropractors, who tended to favor showy, quick releases. Ida's response, in his telling, was to demonstrate something they could not match: a visible change in one entire side of the chest while leaving the other side untouched, producing an asymmetry so dramatic that no one could deny something structural had happened. The story is partly apocryphal in tone, but it captures something accurate about the first hour: it is built to convince, both the body of the client and the mind of the observer.
The fascia underneath the technique
Across her teaching, Ida insisted that fascia is not a wrapping around the body's working parts but the organ that gives the body its shape at all. The first hour is the practitioner's first encounter with this organ. Earlier in this archive — and in many of her public talks — Ida pressed the analogy of the orange-peel: scoop out the contents and the body of fascia would still hold the body's form. The hands of the first-hour practitioner are working not muscle but this form-giving substrate.
"It's continuous throughout the body, its chemical properties are such that it may be changing. Wait a minute Sharon, I think you need to put a more evocative metaphor in that. 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. Well it is. Yes. And the the membrane is tissue in between the pulp. Yes. It will give you an idea of what fascia is like in the body. Yes. Except the body fascia is much more comfortable than the orange fascia. And if you sometimes dissect a leg of lamb, left it or otherwise, you will see how the wrapping of the small individual muscles join somewhere along the line to make this tough stuff that then adheres to the bone."
1973 Big Sur advanced class — a discussion of what fascia is, beginning from the orange analogy:
What does this mean for the first-hour practitioner? It means that the change introduced by the hands in the superficial fascia does not stay where the hands are. The fascial tube reaches from cervicals downward; releases in the chest reflect into the back; releases in the trunk reflect into structures the practitioner has not directly touched. Ida named this propagation explicitly in the 1975 Boulder class, attributing the formulation to Michael Salison. The first hour does more than it appears to do because the tissue it works carries the change.
"And so you really need to use the back after you free the feet to close-up and to integrate or partially integrate the person before you send them off to really open up and lengthen that back. Well yesterday someone, I don't know who said it to me, it's Michael Salison's concept of the fascial tube which starts in the cervicals and goes in the second hour when you start working on the ankles you're heading vertically again. 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."
1975 Boulder advanced class — on the fascial tube and the propagation of change:
What gets stretched, what changes
Ida's clearest articulation of what the practitioner is physically doing to the superficial fascia — and why that doing matters — appears in the RolfB3 public tape. The point is doctrinal: it is the change in the superficial fascia, not the change in the deeper structures, that produces the larger change in the body. The deeper structures change because the superficial fascia has been changed. The first hour matters not because it reaches deep but because it reaches first, and what it reaches releases everything underneath it.
"it, you begin to realize that you are working with that superficial fascia and that you are stretching that superficial fashion. And it is by virtue of the change that you put into the superficial fashion that you begin to get change in underlying structures."
RolfB3, public tape — Ida on the mechanism of change in the first hour:
This is also why Ida resisted attempts to characterize first-hour work as superficial in a dismissive sense. The 1976 Boulder class found her insisting on the distinction between depth-of-touch and depth-of-effect. The first hour reaches no deeper than the superficial path. But the effect of that reach travels through every layer beneath it, and the practitioner cannot do later-hour work properly if the surface bed has not been prepared.
In the first hour you don't get any deeper than the superficial path."
1976 Boulder advanced class — Ida settling the question of depth in the first hour:
The hour is one simple thing
Late in the RolfA3 public tape, after walking through the named structures of the trunk in detail, Ida pulled back to issue the reductive doctrine. Stripped of its sequence and its anatomy, the first hour is one thing. It loosens, energizes, and therefore organizes the fascia that invests the trunk. Every move in the hour is a variation on this single act. The student who can hold this in mind is less likely to get lost in the inventory of named structures and more likely to feel whether the hour is actually doing what it ought to be doing.
"So so see this for what it is, that whole first hour that seems so big and seems so complicated, is really simply one thing, a loosening and all energizing and therefore an organizing of the fascia that invests trunk. This is what it it amounts amounts to. To. And this is what makes it a one simple lifeblood. Okay. So what happens next? I'm having free the superficial fascia out in the trunk, both both thorax, upper part and the part that are connected to the pelvis through the legs and the large muscles posteriorly."
RolfA3, public tape — Ida's reductive summary of the first hour:
Establishing contact, and the second hour as continuation
Ida and her students returned often to the question of why the first hour ends where it ends — at the knees, not the feet. The standard answer was that the body cannot absorb more in one session. But in the 1975 Boulder class, a senior practitioner offered a complementary reason that Ida endorsed: working below the knees in the first hour would mean ending the session out of contact with the client. The first hour, by ending at the trunk and at the upper legs, keeps the practitioner in the relational zone where the client's experience of the work is most vivid.
"And working up close to their head, their face. All of that is true. And when you get down to the feet, it's easy to get out of touch. All of that is true. So so you begin to see what the second hour is really about. Go on, Jen. You're doing such a darn good job. Why should I work?"
1975 Santa Monica advanced class — Jen and Ida on what the second hour does to recover the first:
The second hour is, in Ida's recurring formulation, the second half of the first. It descends to the legs below the knees, completes the unfinished work of the lower body, and begins to put support under the trunk that the first hour has freed. The second hour is not a fresh start but a continuation — which is also why the first hour cannot be conceived as a complete session in its own right. It is the opening half of a structural arc whose closure does not happen until much later.
The first hour as the place students keep returning to
Ida's advanced classes spent disproportionate time on the first hour. Practitioners who had given it dozens or hundreds of times would still find Ida pressing them to revisit it, to refine it, to see something they had previously missed. The reason, she said in the 1975 Boulder class, is that the first hour is full of edges — small points where the practitioner can push the client's unconsciousness back further. There is no point at which a practitioner has finished learning the first hour. Even after a decade of practice, the hour rewards revisiting.
"You see, if we dawdle around this way and we get going at 09:30, we don't get done at night till half an hour later. Amen. Amen. Now let's get back. How many of you here present do not feel secure in that first hour, the understanding of it, the background of it, etcetera. Well, of course, you don't have all you need is the ideas. All you need is the ideas. Can you talk to them? Mhmm. Both of you. Mark, what do you know about the ideas? Well, one of the the basics of the ideas is that a major thing about the Roth technique is it's leads toward the freeing of the pelvis. And the first hour begins this process by freeing the breathing first of all, which is a necessary thing in order to really free the body at all. And there's freeing of the breathing and freeing of structures attached to the pelvis, which would help to bind it."
RolfB1, public tape — a student attempting to describe the first hour; Ida and a colleague redirecting:
The recurring confusion in these advanced-class discussions is structurally informative. Students reach for the techniques because the techniques are nameable; they have trouble naming the structural intent because the structural intent is more abstract. Ida's pedagogical move, hour after hour, year after year, was to refuse the technique-level answer and demand the structural-level one. The first hour matters not because of what the practitioner does with their hands but because of what the work has done to the body's relationship with gravity by the time the hour ends.
See also: See also: 1976 Boulder advanced class (76ADV91), in which Ida demonstrates — using the assembled practitioners as observers — how the disparity between the rectus abdominis fascia and the anterior fascial plane reveals what was not finished in earlier hours, including the first; a reminder that the first hour's superficial-fascia work continues to be diagnosable in the bodies of clients many sessions later. 76ADV91 ▸
Defining the work the hour belongs to
Ida frequently used the first-hour discussion to push students toward a definition of Structural Integration itself. Without that definition, she said, the first hour collapses into a procedure. With it, the hour becomes the opening movement of a coherent project. In the 1975 Boulder class, she had a senior student named John work through the definition publicly, refining it sentence by sentence, with Ida intervening to insist that one feature in particular not be omitted: the plasticity of the body, mediated by the connective-tissue system.
"I think I said structural integration is I'll have to instructional integration is a process in which the rover uses his hands to work on a person, another person's body, the Royal Pee's body, in order to bring the various parts of that person's body into a better relation with one another. And it seeks to balance the body about a vertical axis. When the various parts of the body are brought into a state of balance about a vertical axis, then the body is able to better withstand and even utilize the force of gravity and activity. A simple analogy, the way I put it, a simple analogy is a stack of blocks. When you have blocks stacked so their centers are one above another on a vertical line, You have a more stable and long lasting structure than when you have a stack of blocks whose centers of gravity are placed randomly. Let's see. There's something else in here. I just went on some other idea there that I've forgotten and then just the idea that the fact that structural integration uses the force of gravity makes it a unique and and a uniquely powerful method of personal development. You look you've left one thing out. Did any other auditor nobody's left out? One thing is the connective tissue aspect of it. I think I've left more than one thing out."
1975 Boulder advanced class — John refining his definition of Structural Integration:
The definition matters because the first hour is the moment when the practitioner first applies it. Every move in the hour is, in principle, an instance of bringing the body's parts into better balance about the vertical axis. If the practitioner does not understand the definition, the hour becomes a series of techniques. If the practitioner does understand it, the hour becomes a coherent reorganization. The two look the same from the outside; from the inside — for the client — they feel different.
The first hour as moment of contact between persons
Valerie Hunt's electromyographic studies, presented at the 1974 Healing Arts conference, addressed the first hour from a different angle. Hunt was not investigating what the practitioner did to the body's tissue; she was investigating what changed in the client's energy system as a result of the work. Her findings on the first session were specific. The bioelectric baseline shifted in a way she initially struggled to interpret — not toward tension, but toward openness. Whatever was happening in the first hour was happening at the level of the energy field, not only at the level of the fascia.
"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. I thought, surely we have in the past said that when the baseline of bioelectric activity goes up, the individual is more tense. However, the thing that I perceived was that once the individual started the activity, that baseline dropped to nothing, far below what it had been before. I had no explanation for this. I arrived at some, but it wasn't very good. One I said which I think will hold up is that the person was more open to the experience. And that's good. Nobody can doubt it. Since I couldn't explain it anymore, I just left it there because I was quite convinced that it was not tension. I was perfectly willing to report that it was tension, but it did not have a tension pattern as I could perceive it."
1974 Healing Arts conference — Hunt reporting on her electromyographic findings during the first sessions of Structural Integration:
Hunt's data was important to Ida because it confirmed empirically what Ida had been claiming experientially: that the first hour does something to the person that is not merely structural. The change in fascia, the change in breathing, the change in awareness of the arm — these accumulate, in the first session, into a different state of being. The client leaves the first session not just slightly straighter but slightly different in their relation to their own organism.
See also: See also: 1974 Open Universe class (UNI_044), in which the warming and movement of stuck tissue during first-hour work is described from the client's experiential side — the felt sense of layers releasing and energy redistributing. UNI_044 ▸
Coda: what the first hour leaves the practitioner with
By the end of the first hour, in Ida's account, the practitioner has done one thing thoroughly. They have loosened, energized, and organized the superficial fascia that invests the trunk. They have freed the thorax from the pelvis above and begun to free the legs from the pelvis below. They have established contact with a client who now knows, in their body, that the proposition of the work is real. They have not gone deep. They have not finished. They have, in the strict sense Ida used, begun the tenth hour. Everything that follows in the next nine sessions is continuation.
"Know, like there's one year the fascia asks you to go this way or like originally we used to separate on the midline of the thigh this way, and then a year later we were digging in and pulling it up, and the next year we were pushing it toward the midline. But what what I've begun to see from all that is that indeed the fourth hour takes you to the leg, and indeed you have to get a certain amount of work done, but that the body demands what it is that you do. It's as though these different techniques begin to form a body of possibilities that you can apply to the inside of the thigh on the fourth hour. That that part is consistent, that the recipe constantly leads you to the place in the body which this road is following. What you do there, you have to respond to the body's need. Has it occurred to you, Ken, that possibly the reason for these various changes which you have described relatively aptly has to do with different body levels, as though there was a body inside of a body like the they're like the old skin of the onion thing. It has occurred to me."
1975 Boulder advanced class — Jen describing what stays continuous in the recipe across years of revision:
Ida's last word on the first hour, across the five years of teaching documented in this archive, was that the practitioner must keep referring back to it. Not because the first hour is incomplete, but because the practitioner's understanding of it always is. The recipe is what she called a credo — an 'I believe' that the practitioner must hold even when their experience seems to suggest they could improvise. The first hour, in particular, is where the credo gets tested. If the practitioner can do it well, they have not yet finished anything; they have only begun.
See also: See also: STRUC2 (1974 Structure Lectures), in which Ida narrates her arrival at the recipe sequence by following the body's complaints from session to session — 'the body talks about it,' she says — and explains how each hour's work creates the necessity for the next. STRUC2 ▸