The inverted medicine of the era
Ida came of age as a research scientist in the decades when orthopedic medicine had settled into a stable doctrine about flat feet: the inner arch had fallen, and the treatment was to lift it. Children were walked across inclined boards. They were given marbles to pick up with their toes. Custom arch supports pressed up under the medial longitudinal arch to restore what gravity had taken away. By the late 1960s, when Ida was teaching the second hour to her own students in Boulder and at Big Sur, she had developed a position that was the diametrical opposite of this consensus. The outer arch, not the inner, was the structural key. Lifting the inner arch was, in her terms, throwing it away. The teaching was disorienting for practitioners trained in the medical model, and she returned to it again and again — sometimes through the iconography of Mercury, sometimes through anatomical diagrams she found in textbooks whose authors, she said, had the evidence in front of them and could not see it.
"No foot has ever broken down until the outer arch breaks down. While the outer arch is intact, the foot is intact."
From the RolfA1 public tape, working through the second-hour doctrine with a circle of practitioners.
The reasoning behind her position was not contrarian for its own sake. It rested on a developmental observation: children, before they learn to walk, naturally hold their feet on the outside. The pattern persists into walking, and the retinaculae — the fascial bands that hold the muscle tendons in place around the ankle — set into that outside-loaded pattern unless something intervenes. By adulthood the foot has been organized around lateral collapse, and the medical response of pressing the inner arch upward only fights the symptom while leaving the structural cause in place. The second hour, in Ida's framing, was the moment in the ten-session series where the practitioner finally goes back to the shin and reorganizes the apparatus that controls the foot from above.
"And flat feet are not in the feet. Flat feet are in the shins. They are where and how the muscles of the shins relate. And the place to go for your flat feet is not into the feet, but into the shins."
From the RolfB2 public tape, naming where flat feet actually live.
The iconography of Mercury
Ida liked to ground her structural claims in the visual record. In several classes she pointed to the classical image of Mercury — the messenger god, the principle of transportation — and to the detail that the wings were placed not on the inner ankle but on the outside of the foot. The ancients, she argued, had encoded a structural truth in the iconography: if you want to move, if you want to get around, the principle of locomotion lives along the outer line of the foot. She used the image as a teaching device, partly to leaven the technical work and partly because it gave her students a quick visual anchor for a doctrine that ran counter to what they had been taught. The wings on the outer arch became, in her classroom, a kind of mnemonic for what the second hour was trying to establish.
"You recall, you probably, you in this generation don't recall as well as ten year ago generation. The ten year ago generation, every telephone book had a picture of Mercury standing on a globe up on his toes with the outer arch up all That's where the wings were. That's where the wings were. That's as well. Now all these Mercury's that go way way back to early times, not primitive times, they all had the wings on the outer arch there. Meaning, because this was the way the old classicists thought. Mercury is the principle of transportation. If you are going to get around, you must act as though there were wings on that outer arch and you will get around. And so this is what you are trying to establish. Is the mechanics of the weight bearing of carrying the weight along the outside arch first and then transporting it across the No. Weight goes on the outer arch."
Ida on the RolfA1 public tape, pointing to Mercury as a classical witness to her doctrine.
The pairing of the classical image with a working anatomical claim is characteristic of Ida's teaching method. She moved easily between the symbolic register and the technical one, treating them as continuous rather than separate. The Mercury reference appears in the public tapes alongside hard mechanical discussion of retinaculae, tendons, and the weight-bearing geometry of the foot. For Ida this was not ornament; it was an argument that the older traditions of bodily knowledge — Greek sculpture, dance, even the practical wisdom of the body's own design — had already recognized the structural reality that modern orthopedics had inverted.
"Only some of you that were working didn't find it simple. Even the ancients knew this. Why I have the nerve to put in even, I don't know. The ancients knew this. The Greeks, when they wanted to represent the principle of transportation, the principle of getting around, represented a young man with wings on the side, outside of his heels. They were saying, not that they thought that was a god that came around with wings on the side of his feet at all. They were saying that the principle of transportation, of getting around of getting around fast and satisfactorily consisted in walking as though you had wings on the side of your feet. It still is the same, and it's not wings on the inside of it. And those of you who have been through the medical bit of taking flat footed children and making them walk on inclined boards like this. And giving them marbles to pick up on their toes. Well, yeah, it depends on how they pick them up. You see, again, it isn't what you do."
Continuing on the RolfB2 public tape, Ida ties the Mercury image to the practical failure of medical methods.
The yellow and the gray
In her second-hour discussions Ida frequently held up an anatomy textbook to demonstrate a diagram showing the two muscular layers of the foot in different colors — the deeper layer attached to the inner three toes, the superficial layer attached to the two outer toes. She used the color coding as a quick test of practitioner judgment. Lifting at the deeper, inner layer was, in her terms, working against the structure; lifting at the superficial, outer layer was working with it. The mnemonic was characteristically Ida: simple, almost glib, and exact. It compressed an entire doctrine of weight bearing into a two-color test the practitioner could carry into any session.
"If you can lift the gray, you've got it made. If you lift the yellow, you've thrown it away. If lift on the inner arch, you've thrown it away. If you lift on the outer arch, you've got it made. It's that simple."
Ida on the RolfB2 tape, reducing the second-hour decision to a color test.
What gives the mnemonic its force is that it ties a visible anatomical fact — two layers, two colors, two attachment patterns — to a directional choice the practitioner must make in every moment of the second hour. The student who walks into the session committed to lifting the inner arch is going to organize the foot wrong, no matter how skillfully the contact is made. The student who understands that the outer arch is the structural element will reach for the right layer almost by reflex. Ida was looking for that reflex. The color test was a teaching scaffold to install it.
The shin and the retinaculum
Having established that the flat foot is in the shin, Ida had to teach her practitioners how to work the shin. Her instrument of choice was the retinaculum — the fascial band that holds the long tendons of the foot's musculature in place as they cross the ankle. In her vocabulary, retinaculae were just fascia under another name, and they had the characteristic property of all fascia: they could glue down, restrict tendon glide, and lock a dysfunctional pattern into place. The retinaculae around the ankle were, in her terms, where the trouble got worst-glued — where a lifetime of walking on the outside of the feet had cemented the muscular distortion into a fascial pattern that the muscle alone could no longer reverse.
"Well, near an amazing lot of joints in the body, and certainly the joints in the arms and the joints in the legs. You have muscles held into positions by retinaculate. And retinaculae is our good old fascia again under a different name. And you've gotta go in and get those retinaculate sufficiently stretched and organized and elastic that you can get some movement under them. Those retinaculae are there to hold the strings of the muscles in place. It's as simple as that. And if the string is pulled so tightly and can't be moved and can't be loosened, nothing can happen. The muscles can't move. Now as a kid grows up walking on the outside of his feet, and those of you have who have kids, go back and look at those kids sitting in a chair doing anything, sitting like this, always on the outside of their feet, always on the outside of their feet. You see, they have never brought it around. It has never been presented to the child or to the individual that is a goal to bring it around."
From the RolfB2 tape, on the retinaculae as the fascial anchor of the second-hour problem.
The childhood developmental story Ida told repeatedly was that infants, before they walk, hold their feet naturally on the outside; that pattern persists as walking begins because no one teaches the child otherwise; and that the retinaculae set into the pattern over years of repetition. By the time the body comes to the second hour as an adult, the retinaculae have done their fascial work of anchoring the dysfunction. The muscles cannot return to their proper geometry on their own because the fascial anchor is too tight.
"Now as a kid grows up walking on the outside of his feet, and those of you have who have kids, go back and look at those kids sitting in a chair doing anything, sitting like this, always on the outside of their feet, always on the outside of their feet. You see, they have never brought it around. It has never been presented to the child or to the individual that is a goal to bring it around. No one presents this. If it happens, that the kid is a good, or maybe a pain around. But it's just as likely to not happen. And Beverly is going to go home, and she's going to have an awful time because she's got three of them in her house. And every one of them is worth walking on the outside of his feet."
Continuing on RolfB2, Ida traces the developmental pattern by which the retinaculae set.
The practical instruction Ida gave was that the practitioner should be prepared to work both at the retinaculum and along the peroneal group up the leg, moving between them as the fingers — not the head — dictated. Sometimes the retinaculum yielded only when the peroneals had been organized; sometimes the leg muscles released only when the retinaculum had been freed. The practitioner had to read the body, not the protocol.
"And sometimes it becomes more important to start with the peroneal group and the legs, on the legs, than it is to start with the retinaculum because it becomes apparent to your fingers and not to your head that you're not going get anywhere with the retinaculum until you've got the same feeling. So you go up there. But within those limits you follow this pattern of organizing the foot and the leg and the ankle. But going brings more."
Ida on the RolfA1 tape, describing how to alternate between retinaculum and peroneal group.
The function of the foot
Across many of her advanced classes, Ida insisted that her practitioners be able to state the function of the foot in a single sentence. The answer was not biomechanical in the conventional sense — not about propulsion, not about shock absorption, not about ground reaction. It was relational. The foot existed to put the body in contact with the earth and with gravity, and the leg above it existed to carry that contact upward into the rest of the structure. When she pressed practitioners like Alohan in the Boulder classroom to articulate the second-hour goal, this is the sentence she wanted them to arrive at.
"The function of the foot is to relate us to the earth and to gravity, which means having as solid energy flow through our feeding legs to contact us with the earth."
From the RolfA1 tape, Ida pressing Alohan to name the function of the foot.
The same teaching is amplified in the 1976 Boulder advanced class, where Ida and a senior practitioner work through the wording with the students. The practitioner offers "relatedness to the ground," and Ida accepts it but flags the pedagogical risk: civilians and even some practitioners can hear that phrase as vague or mystical. She wants the practitioner to be careful with it, to know what it means concretely. The relatedness she has in mind is mechanical, fascial, and energetic at once — a structural geometry that lets gravity flow through the body rather than fight it.
"The goal of second order is to work from these jobs to begin to establish ability I like the word relatedness to the ground so that the I do too, but you find that you use it with people who haven't been sitting thinking about relatedness to the ground, that it's a word that throws them off. They can't quite understand what you're talking about. You don't have to be careful with it. So we work on the arch of the foot, the extensor and flexor functions of the foot that work both the arch itself, the toes and the ankle belt. We begin to try and free up the leg above the ankle, working back and forth around it. It seems to me that the focus of this argument is to hinge at the ankle. We kind of work back and forth below it and above it, below it and above it, around it to reorganize the whole structure. And finally up to the knee also to as much to organize the ankle as to organize the knee."
From the 1976 Boulder advanced class, working through the goal of the second hour.
The hinge across the dorsum
If the outer arch was the first structural fact of the second hour, the hinge across the dorsum of the foot was the second. Ida taught that the body has two functional hinges below the knee — the ankle, which everyone knows, and a less recognized hinge running transversely across the top of the foot. Without this second hinge, the outer arch cannot lift. Without the lift on the outer arch, the foot cannot bear weight along its proper line. The two facts are mechanically dependent, and the order of operations is fixed: the dorsal hinge must be established before the outer arch can rise.
"foot, there has to be, for normal literally a hinge joint. When that hinge is in then you can get the lift on the outside of the foot. Until that hinge is in you can cannot really get the lift on the outside of the foot."
On the RolfB2 tape, Ida introduces the dorsal hinge as a structural element most practitioners have never considered.
Ida liked to point out that the foot contains, depending on how you count, somewhere in the neighborhood of two dozen bones, each with its own pair of articular surfaces forming small hinges. The functional hinge across the dorsum is the collective behavior of all those small hinges working in concert. When a few of them are stuck — when adjacent bones have lost their relative glide — the macroscopic dorsal hinge stops functioning. The practitioner's job in the second hour is partly to recover that intersegmental glide so the large transverse hinge can be expressed.
"How many bones in a foot? 50 odd pounds. 72. 72. Two for the two of them. I don't know. I keep forgetting about numbers. But at any rate, you see what I'm talking about. Every one of those bones has two hinges, two ends, which form a hinge, an independent little hinge. And those little bones have to fit together so that you get a big hinge, that is big in terms of those little bones, across the dorsum of the foot. And then when you have that, then you will really begin to get an ankle that really walks. Now as you as you we got a visitor. That's Richard. Debbie's processing it. Oh, as you work with ankles, you will find just as as you work with sacra, you will find that there is a great deal of deteriorated tissue around those two joints of gristle."
Continuing on RolfB2, Ida walks through the small-bone geometry that produces the dorsal hinge.
The senior practitioner Tom, in the 1976 Boulder class, reaches for the same teaching when asked to summarize his second-hour work. The hinge, he says, is what the practitioner is trying to establish — a hinge at ninety degrees to the line of walking, so that ankle function can become ideal. The structural conditions for that hinge may not yet be perfect, but the functional approximation is what the work is aimed at.
"Would you go further with it in terms of total body conduct? I think one of the main things we are looking for when you start working on the foot is to establish a proper hinge. Thinking of the hinge being 90 degree to the x, we want to walk. And as Tom said, we work around the ankle in order to free the ankle joint so that the function of the hitch would be ideal."
Tom, presenting his second-hour rundown in the 1976 Boulder advanced class.
The structural plane and the functional plane
One of the more technically demanding distinctions Ida made about the foot and ankle was between the structural plane and the functional plane. The structural plane is defined by the geometry of the malleoli — the inner and outer ankle bones — and is fixed by the relative lengths of the tibia and the fibula. The functional plane is the plane on which the joint actually folds in walking. The two are usually close, but they are not identical, and Ida wanted her practitioners to understand the difference. The structural plane can never be made perfect; the functional plane is what the second-hour work is organized around.
"You better give me a full size Oh, horizontal. I have I'm not sure of that yet. The plane on which it folds will be horizontal. The plane on which it folds is not necessarily the plane marked by the internal and external molybdenum. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. That's about it. There's a functional plane, and there's a structural plane. Fine. And if you look, you'll see the functional. And you can see that whereas within limits, it does. That is if the structural plane is way off, the functional plane cannot be moved on. But by virtue of the difference in length of the tibia and fibula, the structural plane cannot be precise."
From the RolfA1 tape, Ida correcting a student's approximation of the ankle's working geometry.
The distinction has practical consequences. A practitioner who tries to organize the ankle to the structural plane defined by the malleoli will be working to an approximation that can never be exact. A practitioner who reads the functional plane — the plane on which the ankle actually folds in walking — can organize the soft tissue to support that real motion. Ida points out that one of the diagnostic clues is the way the skin folds when the foot flexes. If those folds run horizontally, the joint is functioning as a horizontal hinge; if they run otherwise, something is off.
"of the indications of how that joint is moving is by the folds of the skin when they flex the foot or when they're walking on it. If the folds are horizontal, then the joint itself tends to be acting as a horizontal hinge. And Wow. Bet you get that one. I did. The ridge. Well, it's he was true. I never thought about it, but it's beautiful. It's not mine, it's hers. Often times you have to go underneath the malleus to work on the two ligaments that are underneath, that may be displaced displaced and this sort of thing."
On the RolfA1 tape, Ida hearing a student's diagnostic observation about skin folds.
Bringing the practitioner to the leg
Once the practitioner has accepted that the flat foot lives in the shin, the work of the second hour shifts upward. Ida's instruction was to work the tibialis, the peroneal group, the long extensors and flexors of the foot, and to clear the fascia from the tibia itself — the long shaft of bone running from knee to ankle. The practitioner is freeing the long tendons that govern foot position, separating them from their fascial anchors, and reorganizing the geometry of the leg so that the foot below has a chance to find its proper shape.
"move more freely. You pay attention to the lateral malleolus to the fibula, which is often too far distal, too far down towards the floor, and often too far posteriorly. And again, in freeing the tendons that the paraneus group which come around the back of the ankle into the foot, the fascisms around them, these tendons again can begin to function more freely and and slide over one another. Also, paying attention to where the musculature may be restricted along the leg. The fascia needs to be cleared from the tibia. And as this is stripped off and and freed, again, you see better, smoother motions of the ankle and the leg."
A senior practitioner on the RolfA1 tape, describing the leg work of the second hour.
Ida's emphasis on the leg as the home of foot dysfunction was not just a redirection of attention. It was a structural claim about where the controlling musculature actually lives. The muscles that govern the foot's arch and the foot's lateral or medial loading have their bellies up in the shin and their tendons crossing the ankle to attach below. The leverage that determines foot shape is therefore upstream. The foot itself is the visible distal expression of a proximal mechanical fact.
"In fact, you should have looked at it quite early on and made up your mind what is wrong with this foot as a foot not only what is wrong with this foot as a part of the leg. Now realize, again, gut realization, that when you are working on those peroneals, you are working on toes, on feet, not on legs. Realize that when you have flat feet, you don't have flat feet. You have disorganization of the muscles of the shin, muscles crossing the shin. Has this added to your concept about legs? So that you don't look at a foot and say, oh, this is a flat foot. I've got to get down on this foot and poke around in it. What you have to do is to get the muscles of the leg so organized that they can change the foot to the bones of which they are attached. That makes sense. Tell them where the peroneal is attached and tell them where the balancing muscles attach."
From the RolfA1 tape, Ida summarizing the conceptual shift the practitioner must make.
The shin, the calf, and the deviation from our cousins
In the 1973 Big Sur class, Ida widened the frame to evolutionary anatomy. The human foot, she observed, is the structure in which our species deviates most from its closest primate relatives. Other great apes have feet whose mechanical function remains close to that of hands; the human foot has been remade into a weight-bearing platform for upright walking. The leg above it has been correspondingly restructured. The flat foot, in this evolutionary framing, is what happens when the structural remake is incomplete — when the muscles of the shin have not organized themselves to govern the foot's new function.
"I think it's interesting that if you look at man's structure as he deviates from the rest of his close neighbors in terms of its own evolution. The one structure which is unique to man in earth's feet biogenetically has the greatest deviation in structure from man's feet than in any development, this deviation or development, he's made it act as experiments. It's another thing which as a simple minded human reflexes in the hands? You see, what seems to happen in the foot reflexes where nobody bothers to get after primary is the way you balance. And the primary problem in feet, I suspect, is flat feet. Now, in your working with that foot, as you all found out, you establish an arch. You don't put it there. You free it there. You let it. And what is it which keeps it from happening before you get ill."
From the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, locating the human foot in evolutionary terms.
The Big Sur passage shows Ida's characteristic move of connecting an immediate technical concern to a much larger structural-biological frame. The practitioner working on a flat foot in the second hour is not just correcting an individual dysfunction; the practitioner is, in Ida's account, completing the evolutionary work that the body's developmental program left unfinished. The arch is freed, not put there. The practitioner does not install an arch; the practitioner removes what is preventing the arch from arising.
"Now, in your working with that foot, as you all found out, you establish an arch. You don't put it there. You free it there. You let it. And what is it which keeps it from happening before you get ill. In the case of every flat foot that you will ever find, the problem is not in the flat foot. It is in the shin. Every flat foot you will ever find is in the shin. Anytime you want to get into a great, big, is the muscle up in the shin goes down, hooks around the ankle, and whenever my class does keep nagging about the key is at the malleolus. The key is where the muscle pendants hook around the foot of the malleolus."
Continuing at Big Sur, Ida names the practitioner's role as freeing rather than installing.
The center line and the inner toes
In the 1976 Boulder advanced class, Ida pushed her senior practitioners to think about the foot not just as a local mechanical problem but as the foundation of the body's vertical line. She invoked the dancer who, in her diary, wrote that she would not be able to dance well that night because she could not find her line. The image of the vertical center — the axis around which the dancer organizes her body — became, in Ida's teaching, the framework within which foot work has its meaning. The foot is what either supports or destroys that line.
"No, it's got to be the middle of the body, don't it? So you have to build up toward the middle and not detract from it by taking it apart. Now I'd like every one of you to stand right in place at this moment for a minute. Get yourself comfortable and feel where you are in that body. You don't accept your head as being you. Seal at centerline if you can that Ruth was looking for. And where does it have to run? Now let your weight go over to your outer arches. What happens? You lose your line. It's called you're no longer a unit. You feel it? Anyone want to argue it?"
From the 1976 Boulder advanced class, Ida walking the students through their own center line.
The teaching has a subtle complication. Ida is emphatic that weight should be carried along the outer arch — and equally emphatic that the center line of the body runs down the inside of the leg. These are not contradictions but a description of the same geometry from different vantage points. The outer arch is the structural element that allows the foot to bear weight without collapsing; the center line is the gravitational axis the body organizes around. The two work together when the foot is functioning properly, and the second-hour work is what permits that cooperation.
"Your center line is destroyed as weight goes on to the outer arch."
Continuing in the 1976 Boulder class, Ida pinning down the relationship between weight and line.
In the same class she offered a small kinesthetic intervention. The students were to turn their toes up while standing. The maneuver pulls the weight inward from the outer arch toward the center line and gives the practitioner a felt sense of how the geometry actually works. Ida used the exercise to undo decades of orthopedic indoctrination in a single moment: the abstraction that weight runs through the three center toes is true at one level, but the body's silent intelligence reveals the underlying mechanics when the practitioner stops thinking and starts feeling.
"to put the weight back again into the center line. See what you begin to feel as you begin to feel the establishment of that center line. And where it goes as it goes up into the body and what you are aware of in terms of its lacks and what you are aware of in terms of its ability to help you unify yourself. Realize that when you are standing with your weight flowing down on the outer arch, you are destroying the unity within yourself. Now this is what I jumped on yesterday when I came in and somebody was telling me from some book or other, it might even have been a book of my lectures, That weight has to go through the three center toes. It's true. This is the abstraction. But what is the silent level? You're feeling it right now. The silent level is talking to you. The silent level is telling you how you can get to act at one with gravity. One of the ways you can do it is by turning your toes up so as to run that line up through the middle. Certainly the negative way to do it is not to let the weight go down on the outer arch. Now after you got all of this done then it's time to put it into the high order abstraction."
From the same 1976 Boulder class, Ida resolving the apparent contradiction through felt experience.
The clinical edge — children, surgery, and the limits of the work
Ida was clear that the second-hour work had limits. In the public tapes she described what happens when a practitioner is approached by a family whose child has a serious structural foot pathology — clubfoot, severe knee pathology, congenital malformation — and the family is weighing surgery. Her counsel was neither to dismiss surgery nor to claim the work could replace it. The practitioner's role, she said, was to bring the rest of the body to as good a structural condition as possible before any cutting was done, so that whatever the surgery produced would land in a body with the best available adaptive capacity.
"Some harried and harassed family come to you and they say, well, can you see little Johnny's feet now? Our doctor is proposing to have surgery. I shall do it. Now your cue at this point is not to say, No, don't have surgery, because there's a good chance that surgery will be the ultimate place you'll go to get final help for that kid, but to try to get the rest of the body in as good shape as possible before you let them cut in and make another predicament for that body. And this is about the way you have to explain it to the parent that it will be very worthwhile to let that child have the advantage of as much mobility as possible. You see, that that family doesn't have the foggiest idea that there's anything wrong except some displaced people. Of course, it's easy enough to just take a knife and fix that. And they don't understand that the problem is not at all."
From the RolfA3 public tape, Ida on the limits of the work and the role of surgery.
The clinical realism in this passage is characteristic of Ida's late teaching. She had spent decades arguing that her work could do things conventional medicine could not, but she did not extrapolate that argument into a claim that the work was a universal substitute for medical intervention. Severe congenital pathology was the limit case. The second-hour foot work could prepare the ground; surgery, when indicated, did its own job. The practitioner's responsibility was to know which was which and to advise families honestly.
The bunion and the migrated muscle
Toward the end of her detailed second-hour discussions, Ida often pointed to the bunion as the cleanest visible evidence of how muscle distortion accumulates in the foot. A bunion is not, in her framing, an isolated deformity of the great toe joint. It is the visible end-result of a slow migration of the muscles governing that toe, sometimes by half an inch off their proper position. The deformity at the joint is the consequence, and the migration is the cause. The practitioner who tries to address the bunion at the joint is, again, going to the wrong address.
"And feet show you as not more clearly, I think, than any other thing in the body how muscles go askew. A bunion, for instance. All those muscles that are dealing with that great toe have gone off, have moved off quarter of an inch, sometimes even a half an inch off"
From the RolfB2 tape, Ida using the bunion to illustrate muscle migration.
The bunion example also makes vivid Ida's broader claim that feet show structural disorganization in a way other regions of the body do not. The hand, mechanically similar, rarely accumulates the same gross distortions because it does not bear weight against gravity day after day. The foot does, and over decades the small migrations of muscle position become anatomically legible. For the second-hour practitioner, every bunion, every fallen arch, every laterally collapsed ankle is a readable record of where the muscles have gone.
"Each one doing its own thing. Each one sliding across its neighbor when it needs to. Each one balanced in tone and this means balanced in chemistry and balanced in energy. And then you've got something to stand on. Now the actual practical bit here is to start with the retinaculae because that's where the things get the worst glued up. No. Not the worst. Anyway, it's practical. Sometimes you'll see me starting further up on the leg. Sometimes you will feel that you want to start further up on the leg. The major problem is there. Sometimes it's smart to go into the major problem where the major problem is. Sometimes it isn't that smart at all."
Continuing on RolfB2, Ida describing the practitioner's actual operation on the migrated muscles.
The second hour and the first
In the 1976 Boulder advanced class, Ida placed the second hour in its relationship to the first. The first hour, she said, had begun to mobilize the pelvis within the envelope of the flesh, working from the outside of the body all the way around. But until the practitioner connects the pelvis to the floor through the action of the ankle joint — and behind the ankle, through the dorsal hinge of the foot — the first-hour work cannot fully express itself. The second hour is the moment in the series when the pelvic mobilization established above is brought down through the legs into contact with the ground.
"Now in terms of your third hour work, you have now gotten you see, see in the first hour, you have started on the outside of that body and done a pretty good job all around permitting the pelvis to become more mobilized within the envelope of the flesh. This is the sort of thing that you saw so plainly on Sharon, where you could see that pelvis waving in the breeze inside the envelope. But there was no proper span of the envelope to keep the pelvis from waving in the breeze inside of it. And so, as I say in that first hour, we have gone toward the goal of making the pelvis more horizontal, organizing it on top of the legs in order that it may be horizontal. And then in the second hour, realizing that except we connected that pelvis up to the floor through the action of the ankle joint, we were not getting anywhere. And those of you who were real smart realized that not only must you get movement in the ankle joint, but you must get movement in the foot and as I usually express it in this room you must get hinge joints horizontal hinge joints and you get the first and the lowest one across the dorsum of the foot. Sometimes it's pretty hard to get in. It's always easier to get movement in the ankle joint because they have had, if they're going to be mobile at all and walking at all, they've got to have movement in that ankle no matter how core it is or how distorted it is. They've got to move at the ankle. But they don't have to move at the dorsum of the foot. They can walk around that joint. They don't walk very well, but nevertheless, they move."
From the RolfB2 tape, Ida placing the second hour in sequence with the first.
The senior practitioner working through her own second-hour experience in the 1976 class amplified this. She described the first hour as having lengthened the front of her body, throwing her weight back onto her heels — the classic first-hour outcome — and noted that the second hour now had the task of equalizing the back to match. From the knees down, she said, her body had not yet caught up with what the first hour set in motion. The second hour was where the catch-up happened.
"And having gotten through the first session, somebody needs to take it from there out of the first session into the second session. It seems to me that at least the first part of the second session is really not out of the first session. It's still part of the first session. Looking at the pictures of the pre two people and remembering how I felt as a pre two person at this time, That whole area from knees, myself just above the knees on down has not caught up with what's going on. And I know we've heard a lot about mobilizing the pelvis but my sensation of it, of the first hour was lengthening the front. That's what happened with me, was my front felt longer and my weight felt thrown back on my heels. So that brings up to the second half of the hour, another goal of that to lengthen the back to equal that out. I'm gonna keep going. Below the knees, have the tibia as the main bone and the tibia as the secondary bone and the stensors on the front and the flexors on the back or the other way around, whichever way it works. Which one is this? It's both. Depends on which way you move it smoothly. There was a whole lot of need in the model that came in for balance between those two."
A senior practitioner in the 1976 Boulder class, describing her own experience between first and second hour.
The pattern in the child
Throughout her teaching on the foot, Ida came back to one image: the child sitting in a chair, feet always rolled to the outside, never brought around to a balanced contact with the ground. The pattern, she insisted, is universal in children who have not been guided otherwise. It is the foundation on which the adult foot dysfunction is built. The retinaculae set, the muscles migrate, and by the time the body arrives in the second-hour session, the pattern is anchored at every level — fascial, muscular, mechanical, and energetic. The practitioner is undoing decades of accumulated commitment to a position the body adopted before the conscious mind had any vote.
"The answer to that lies in the development of a child whose undeveloped legs as he's born and as he lives for a whole year, year and a half or so, is always this way. It isn't until that child starts to walk that other things begin to happen. And with too many children, not enough other things happen. And flat feet are not in the feet. Flat feet are in the shins. They are where and how the muscles of the shins relate."
From the RolfB2 tape, Ida tracing the developmental origin of the adult pattern.
The developmental story is also a clinical story. The practitioner working on an adult foot in the second hour is not just addressing a local dysfunction but reaching back into a developmental moment that was never resolved. The work is, in this sense, completing a process that the child's environment failed to complete. This framing gives the second hour a particular weight in Ida's teaching: it is not cosmetic correction; it is the structural completion of an unfinished developmental task.
Coda: the foot as the body's contact with the world
Across the eight or so years of Ida's recorded second-hour teaching, what holds steady is the relational definition. The foot is not, in her work, an object to be corrected for its own sake. It is the connector — the structural element that makes the body's relationship with the earth either possible or impossible. The outer arch is the line along which the body's weight finds the ground; the dorsal hinge is what permits the arch to express itself; the retinaculum is what either frees or imprisons the geometry; the shin is where the muscles that govern all of it actually live. Each piece serves the relational fact. The body, properly organized, lives in contact with gravity through its feet, and gravity, encountered properly, lifts the body rather than crushing it.
What the archive preserves is not a finished doctrine but a teaching method. Ida did not lecture the second hour into existence in a single coherent paper; she taught it over and over, with senior practitioners offering refinements she accepted, with students like Alohan being pressed to articulate the goal in their own words, with images from classical sculpture and from the diaries of dancers folded in alongside the technical specifics of retinaculum work. The result is a body of recorded teaching in which the same structural claim returns from many angles — and in which the practitioner who listens long enough begins to hear the doctrine not as a set of rules but as a single relational fact about how the human body meets the ground.
See also: See also: RolfA3 public tape — extended discussion of clinical limits, congenital foot pathology, and when surgery is the appropriate path; included as a pointer for readers interested in the boundary between the work and conventional medical intervention. RolfA3Side1 ▸
See also: See also: Big Sur advanced class 1973 — extended treatment of the foot in evolutionary and comparative anatomical perspective, including Ida's observations on human deviation from related primates. SUR7312 ▸