Gravity as the most constant environmental force
Ida arrived at her gravity doctrine through a long detour. Trained as an organic chemist at Barnard, with a 1916 PhD and years at the Rockefeller Institute working on the chemotherapy problem of solvarsan, she carried into her later work a chemist's habit of asking what force is acting on what material. In the late 1920s, on a Rockefeller assignment to Europe, she sat in on Erwin Schrödinger's lectures in Zurich and began to suspect that human behavior could be tracked back through body chemistry to body physics. The physics that interested her was not the dramatic one of electromagnetism or atomic structure — it was the boring, ever-present one of gravity. Every other environmental force a body meets is intermittent. Cold passes, heat passes, food comes and goes, injuries arrive and heal. Gravity does not pass. It is acting on the fertilized cell in the womb and on the body in the coffin, and on every moment between. This is the observation from which the entire system was built.
"because gravity is the most constant environmental force for the human body. And so it's in response to gravity that the body avoids pain, you might say, or avoids the buildup of stress in an individual point by trying to distribute it."
Speaking in a 1974 Open Universe demonstration about why stress patterns develop where they do, Ida names gravity as the one force always present:
The constancy of gravity is what makes it useful as a reference. A body cannot be organized around an intermittent force; it can only be organized around something that never stops. This is why, in her advanced classes, she repeatedly pulled students away from physiological framings — what does this do to the digestive system, what does this do to the heart — and back to the spatial framing. The physiological consequences follow, she insisted, from the spatial relationship. Get the body into a workable relationship with the one force that never quits, and the physiology will sort itself out. This was the inversion she was teaching: not posture as the cause of well-being, but a structural relationship to gravity as the cause of posture.
"But what we can do is to change the way the parts of the body that I have already referred to, how they fit together into a whole which can transmit the gravitational field. And in its energy, which is the energy of the earth, in its transmitting of that, it enhances its own energy field."
At Big Sur in 1973, contrasting the practice with the chemical school of medicine, she lays out what the practitioner can and cannot change:
Structure, posture, and the losing fight
Ida drew a sharp distinction between structure and posture, and she taught students to hear it in the etymology. Posture, from the Latin past participle for placing, means it has been placed — somebody is holding something somewhere. Structure means relationship — the way parts of the body relate to one another in space. A body that has structure does not need posture; its posture follows from where the parts are. A body that lacks structure can only have posture through effort, and effort, in her diagnostic eye, was always the sign of a losing argument. She watched men in the Lawton classroom, in the 1976 Boulder advanced class, on Santa Monica beaches, and she could tell at a glance whether the effort they were making to stand up was a winning or a losing one. The losers were aging visibly in front of her.
"that the key for health, for well-being, for vigor, for women vitality is relationship. It is balance. Now realize that you cannot get balance except you relate that physical material body into a gravitational field."
From an undated Topanga-era lecture, the central claim about what produces vitality:
In the same Topanga lecture, she extended the diagnosis into the visible language of aging itself. The man who has to work to maintain his posture, who pulls his shoulders back because he has been told to, who tucks his pelvis because some authority once instructed him — that man is making effort against gravity, and the effort is what wears him out. She trusted her eye on this absolutely. A struggling posture meant a structure out of balance, and a structure out of balance meant a body using its own energy to hold itself up rather than to live. The closer the structure approached the vertical, the less energy the holding required and the more was left over for everything else.
"You don't usually interpret it in view of the next words. But as I see a man struggling to maintain posture, I know that he is losing his fight with gravity. That's one item. And I know that his structure is not in balance. Because if his structure is in balance, his posture automatically is good. Posture is what you do with structure. Structure is the way you relate parts of the body to each other. And if you are really going to understand what I'm talking about tonight, a little meditation on those two words wouldn't do any harm."
Continuing the same passage, she translates the structure-posture distinction into a diagnostic about aging:
The body as a plastic medium
If gravity is the constant, the body must be the variable — and the variable Ida discovered, against the assumptions of the medicine she had been trained inside of, was that the adult human body remains plastic. This was the claim that would have gotten her institutionalized fifty years earlier, she liked to say in her 1974 Healing Arts lectures: the body, even an old body, can be reshaped. By dictionary definition a plastic substance is one that can be distorted by pressure and then brought back to shape, provided its elasticity has not been exceeded. The novelty in her usage was the definition of back to shape. Back to shape, in her framework, did not mean back to the configuration the body happened to have a year ago or a decade ago. It meant back to the vertical — back to the configuration in which the gravitational field can pass through the body without tearing it apart.
"Back to shape in this context means vertical. Vertical to the surface of the earth, vertical like the burrows of the chestnut, vertical like the force of gravity. Because only when the gravity vertical of the body substantially coincides with the gravity line of the earth can that energy field of the earth reinforce and augment the field of the human body. Then the energy of the earth contributes to the energy of the body. The body becomes vitalized. The flesh becomes resilient. Body functions of all sorts improve, for gravity at this point is the nourishing factor. Gravity is the nourishing medium giving to the energy quotient man gravity a higher value, because the man is more energized. This expresses itself in many changes in behavior patterns. Among them, among them is a different state of consciousness. We usually refer to it as a higher state. We have described the body as a plastic medium."
In a 1974 Healing Arts lecture, she defines what plasticity means in a gravitational frame:
The chemistry that makes this plasticity possible is the chemistry of collagen, and here her training as an organic chemist comes into the room. The collagen molecule is a braiding of three protein strands held together by inorganic ions — hydrogen, sodium, calcium, others. Those ions are interchangeable within limits. What she taught practitioners to recognize was that the substitution patterns shift across a lifetime, and that the shifts are reversible. The popular language calls this aging; her language called it a chemistry problem that energy, properly applied, could undo. The pressure of a finger or an elbow, in the right direction, is in her accounting an energy input — and energy added to the collagen molecule could move calcium out and hydrogen back in, restoring the resilience the tissue had lost.
"The relation of these segments can be changed because the connecting myofascial structure is a structure of connective tissue of collagen. This is what that myofascial body is about. And collagen is a unique protein. The collagen molecule is a very large protein and it is a braiding of three strands a special braiding. These three strands are connected by various inorganic hydrogen sometimes, sodium sometimes, calcium sometimes, and undoubtedly other minerals. These minerals are interchangeable within limits. Thus, as the body grows older and stiffer, undoubtedly a larger percentage of calcium and a smaller percentage of sodium are present in these bonds. But by the addition of energy and what is energy? In this come in this context, it can it is the pressure of the fingers or the elbow of the ralpha. This ratio may be varied by the addition of this energy, and the joint or the connective tissue becomes more resilient, more flexible."
Continuing the same lecture, she describes the collagen chemistry of aging:
Aging as the colloidal gel state
Ida had a second technical language for the same phenomenon — the older language of colloid chemistry, in which a fluid colloidal system (a sol) can be converted to a gel by removing energy and converted back to a sol by adding energy. This was the chemistry of her training, and she returned to it whenever she wanted to make the reversibility of aging vivid. The morning stiffness, the slow getting out of bed, the inability to straighten — all of these, she argued in her 1974 Open Universe lecture with Valerie Hunt and Julian Silverman in the room, are signs of a body whose colloids have gelled. The accusation she invited the listener to make was against the standard interpretation. Don't say you are getting old, she pressed. Say the colloid has not had enough energy added to it. The sentence sounds like a slogan, and it was meant to. She was trying to displace a default story.
"that colloidal material, which is you, has not had enough energy added to it. See whether it changes your attitude. It might. Now, this kind of energy change permits chemical changes in the molecule, the molecule of that big collagen colloid. It allows chemical changes to occur. Those mineral atoms, or hydrogen atoms, that hold these three chains together can and do change. Minerals can be substituted for hydrogen. Hydrogen can be substituted for minerals. The more minerals are substituted in there, particularly calcium, the more tired you are when you get up in the morning and can't stretch out. This is the process which some people call aging."
In a 1974 Open Universe lecture, Ida directly contests the language of aging:
The colloid language was not a metaphor for her. It was the chemistry she had learned at Rockefeller in the years when colloid science was the leading edge of organic chemistry. The myofascial system, in her view, is a colloidal system; its resilience is the resilience of bound water; its tone is the proportion of fluid to gel. As that proportion shifts toward gel — through inactivity, through chronic stress, through the slow loss of water with the decades — the body loses range and the contour hardens. The practitioner's pressure adds enough energy to drive the local colloid back toward the sol state, and the tissue rehydrates. The dialogues in her advanced classes returned to this image again and again because it gave practitioners a way to think about what they were doing that did not require any appeal to mystical fluid theories.
"It isn't truly aging at all. There are other factors entering, in my opinion. The mineral atoms can and do change. They can substitute for the hydrogen, they can be substituted by the hydrogen. The myofascial system changes in terms of resilience, or what in the muscles we call tone. It changes the amount of water that is structurally bound. All of this carries our message, the message of Rolfing. In fact, you see, by the addition of energy, change occurs in the structural material of the body. In other words, you can change relationships within that body by adding energy. Now, aside from the word relationships, the key in the last sentence was the word by the addition of energy. How do you add energy? Lots of ways you can add energy to a body."
Ida continues the Open Universe lecture, naming aging directly as a process that is not what it appears to be:
Emotion, the flexor muscles, and the body that has to hold itself up
Ida's account of how gravity wins or loses its argument with the body was not purely mechanical. In her 1973 Big Sur advanced class she traced a second pathway by which the body becomes a gel — the pathway of emotion, particularly negative emotion. Drawing on a remark she attributed to Wilhelm Reich, she pointed out that grief, anger, and fear all manifest physically as a shortening of flexor muscles. The chronic flexor shortening that accompanies a chronic emotional posture produces, over years, exactly the kind of body that has lost its argument with gravity. Such a body cannot balance; it must spend energy continuously to hold itself up; and the energy that goes into holding is the energy that is not available for anything else. This is the second mechanism by which a person ages prematurely in her framework — not collagen chemistry alone, but the long pull of unresolved emotion locked into the flexor sheaths.
"Little Jimmy loves Papa and Papa goes along like this, so Jimmy goes along like this because this allows him to be Papa in this world. By and by he gets a This is where he wants us to be. As you know, the expression of grief is just that. The expression of anger is just that. And seldom Christ called attention to this fact that all negative expressions were accompanied by a shortening of flexor muscles. So you see along about the time that you get overly interested in negative emotions, you begin to get chronic shortening of the flexor muscles. And by the time you get chronic shortening of the flexor muscles, you now have the kind of situation in the gravitational field where the energy that is in that body that is chronically placed has to hold the body. The body cannot balance. And so you see now you have a situation to deal with where you continuously have to add energy to that body to keep it going. I'm going to stop talking about this kind of talking and I'm going to show you some pictures because I think you'll be aware of the fact that people do not hear, do not get reality on."
At Big Sur in 1973, she traces how emotional blocks become structural ones:
The closing image of that passage — the body that continuously has to add energy to itself to keep going — is the Ida Rolf account of exhaustion. She did not believe the exhaustion of middle and later life was a mystery. She believed it was bookkeeping. The accounts run dry because too much of the energy intake is going to the holding budget, and not enough is left for circulation, digestion, immunity, thought. The work, in her account, is the reorganization that gets the holing budget back down to near zero, so that the energy intake can go to the living budget instead. This is what she meant when she said an integrated body has more energy. She did not mean more vital force in any vague sense; she meant the body had freed up the gravitational support function and no longer had to do the work itself.
Gravity acts supportively if it is able to do so
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, with Bob and Chuck and Steve and Dan in the room, Ida pushed students hard to articulate exactly what they would say if a skeptical client asked why anyone should pay three hundred fifty dollars to be aligned with gravity. Their first attempts were too vague — talk of harmonious relationships, of efficient energy use, of being in tune with the environment. She rejected them. The missing link, she insisted, was that gravity itself behaves differently toward a body that is vertical than toward a body that is random. Toward the random body, gravity acts destructively — it breaks the body down. Toward the vertical body, gravity acts supportively. The same field, two opposite effects. This is the inversion that the practice is built on, and Ida wanted her students to be able to land it in one sentence.
"supportively Gravity acts if it is able to do so. And our job, as I have told you at least six times in this class, is to get it get our bodies so that they are they can be supported by gravity."
Correcting a student's pitch in the 1975 Boulder advanced class:
She then made the historical observation that gives the inversion its weight. Every other school of body mechanics, she pointed out, teaches the same vertical measuring stick — ankles under knees under hips under shoulders under ears. The Harvard physical therapy curriculum teaches it. Mensendieck taught it. Every postural exercise system teaches it. But none of them teach how to achieve it, because all of them assume the body is fixed and the only adjustment available is voluntary muscular effort. The practice's contribution, she said in 1975 and again in 1976, was the recognition that the connective-tissue web is plastic and that the vertical can be evoked from the body rather than imposed on it. This is what makes her doctrine of gravity differ from the postural doctrines that look superficially similar.
"teacher if the body is random, if the body does not relate to the vertical. Now do you all hear what I have said? I've given you three all of us have given you three or four or five sentences with which you can carry conviction to any man, or you can begin to carry conviction."
Continuing the same Boulder lecture, she names the point where her doctrine departs from the standard teaching:
The vertical line and the chestnut burr
Ida's image for the vertical was an unusual one — the prickles on the chestnut burr, all pointing straight toward the center of the earth. She used it across her 1974 lectures and again in 1976. The image was useful because it foregrounded that the vertical is not arbitrary. It is not a stylistic choice or a cultural ideal. It is the direction of the gravitational field at the surface of the earth. A body whose long axis coincides with that direction is in a particular structural relationship to its environment that no other orientation produces. The chestnut burr was her way of saying that nature already organizes itself around this direction; the practitioner is helping the body remember an organization that is structurally available to it, not imposing an arbitrary ideal.
"We know that the energy fields of the body must be substantially balanced around the vertical line for gravity to act supportedly, thus changing the energy generated by the body. This vertical line registers the alignment of the ankles, with the knees, with the hip joints, with the bodies of the lumbar vertebrae, with the shoulders, with the ears. This vertical line is reminiscent of the prickles on the chestnut burrow. All those prickles pointing straight toward the center of the earth. If the lines are substantially vertical. This is a static verticality, however. This is the verticality taught by every accepted school of body mechanics operating in this century, and the Harvard group heads the list. All schools of body mechanics teach this measuring stick and verticality, but no other school of body mechanics teaches how to achieve it. But because the body has an unforeseen, unexpected quality, it can be done. The body is a plastic medium. Now this is incredible, and twenty five years ago, no one would have believed this statement. Fifty years ago, they'd have put me in a nice sunny southern room. You've given me pretty good care, maybe."
In her 1974 Healing Arts lecture, she lays out the vertical alignment in its full anatomical specificity and then makes the surprising critique:
What followed from the chestnut-burr image was a teaching about what kind of verticality the work produces. The static verticality of the conventional postural systems was, in Ida's framing, only the first stage. A body initially balances statically — the blocks stack — and that is already a great gain over the random state. But as the work continues, the static balance becomes dynamic. The vertical is no longer a position the body adopts and holds; it is a reference around which movement organizes itself. This is the difference between a body that has been straightened and a body that has been integrated, and it is also the difference between someone who looks erect and someone who is genuinely free of the holding budget.
Fascia as the organ of structure
The mechanism by which the vertical is evoked is the connective-tissue web — the fascial system that envelopes every muscle, surrounds every organ, and ties the segments of the body into a single continuous structure. Ida liked to tell the story of the orange whose flesh has been scooped out and whose skin alone is left, two halves pressed together, presented to a child as an orange. The deception lasts until the child handles it. In her telling, the fascial body is that skin: scoop out the chemical machinery — the cells, the organs — and what would remain is a ball of fascia that retained the shape of the human. The fascia is not a wrapping around something more important. It is the organ that determines what the body's contour is.
"And I'm talking here about energy being added by pressure to the fascia, the organ of structure, to change the relation of the fascial sheaths of the body, to balance these around a vertical line which parallels the gravity line. Thus, we are able to balance body masses, to order them, to order them within a space. The contour of the body changes, the objective feeling of the body to searching hands changes. Movement behavior changes as the body incorporates more and more order. The first balance of the body is a static stacking, but as the body incorporates more changes, the balance ceases to be a static balance. It becomes a dynamic balance. These are the physical manifestations of the increasing balance, but there is an outgoing psychological change as well toward balance, toward serenity, toward a more whole person. The whole man, the whole person evidences a more apparent, a more potent psychic development."
From the 1974 Healing Arts lecture, the passage where she defines fascia as the organ of structure and connects it directly to the gravitational doctrine:
The connection of fascia to aging was, for Ida, direct. In her 1974 conversations with the orthopedic surgeons preserved on the RolfA1 tape, she pressed the point that the most significant tissue change in aging happens in the mesenchymal layer — in connective tissue. The hardening, the loss of resilience, the contour distortions that accumulate with the decades, are all connective-tissue events. If aging is most fundamentally a connective-tissue process, and connective tissue is the substrate on which the practice operates, then the practice has a direct line to the aging process itself. This is the inference she invited her medical interlocutors to follow, and most of them did.
"Well, to the extent that if one considers aging and considers the change in connective tissue, probably the most significant changes, I think, in aging with new occurring connective tissue, mesenchymal or the mesodermal layer in the body. So if we if we would take the extreme of a body that were extremely disordered. It wouldn't be unreasonable to to expect these changes to occur in the shortest span of time. An example, we had a man, Los Angeles Ray Right. In a lockedly full body. This man undoubtedly was an older, physiologic way. And it was So I think for me, anyway, if I keep this concept of the connective tissue as aging and aging due to force, to stress. And I think, you know, I can put these together in space and function."
In a conversation with two orthopedic surgeons preserved on the RolfA1 tape, Ida and her interlocutor link aging to connective-tissue change:
Energy, entropy, and what the body is up against
Behind Ida's gravity doctrine sat a thermodynamic framing she had picked up from her chemistry training and from her Schrödinger lectures — the framing of entropy. The universe, in the second law's formulation, runs down. Order disperses; structure dissipates; energy distributes itself toward equilibrium. The aging body, in this frame, is the local instance of the universal trend. What was startling in her teaching was the claim that the practice reverses the trend locally — not by adding mass or by supplementing chemistry, but by reorganizing the body so that it can draw on the gravitational field as a source of order. The vertical body, in her account, is energetically not running down. It is being supported by an external field whose direction it now matches, and the support permits the body to organize itself against the entropic tendency.
"These are the physical manifestations of the increasing balance, but there is an outgoing psychological change as well toward balance, toward serenity, toward a more whole person. The whole man, the whole person evidences a more apparent, a more potent psychic development. This means that the rate that the ratio man energy to gravity energy energy has changed has increased. The ratio has therefore increased the force available to reverse the entropic deterioration. That is and greater. Our world is no longer running down. It seems capable now of building up."
Closing the same 1974 Healing Arts passage, she states the entropic claim:
The Open Universe collaborations of 1974 brought a parade of physicists, physiologists, and energy researchers into the room with Ida — Valerie Hunt with her electromyography, Julian Silverman with his thermodynamic models, the engineer who argued about whether compression or tension held the body up. What the dialogues made clear was that Ida was not committed to any single physics. She was committed to the observation that the vertical body uses less of its own energy to stand and behaves as though it had access to more energy than its food intake should provide. Whether that surplus was Newtonian gravitational potential or something stranger was, in her view, a question for the next generation of researchers. The practitioner needed only the observation.
"where you continuously have to add energy to that body to keep it going. I'm going to stop talking about this kind of talking and I'm going to show"
Returning to the Big Sur 1973 lecture, Ida names the cost of structural collapse in pure energetic terms:
Movement, recruitment, and the change Valerie Hunt could measure
What the laboratory measurements showed, in the work Valerie Hunt began conducting at UCLA in the early 1970s, was that the post-integration body moved with a different neuromuscular signature than the pre-integration body. The motor-unit recruitment was smoother. The frequency of muscular activation shifted downward. Where the random body had been driven primarily from the cortex — the level of control that, in Hunt's account, is most prone to fatigue and to co-contraction — the integrated body was being driven from lower, more rhythmic, more energy-efficient centers. This was the empirical correlate of Ida's claim that the integrated body had energy available that the random body did not. The cortex, in the random body, was working harder than it needed to. The energy economy improved when the lower centers took over the holding work.
"We find that when people become more skillful in a particular high level task, they become what we call more finalized. There's a lot of research on this to show that the frequency actually changes. I think that Rolfing brings a downward shift. There is another level of control that we call the midbrain, and this area also can turn on muscles. We can operate on it. It is one of our very basic areas for some of our primitive movement, and it primarily innervates the great large joints of the body and those which are proximal, such as the shoulders and the hips and the trunk one of the areas that Rolfing works a great deal upon. This has a tendency to produce a very rhythmic quality of movement. And then there, of course, is that cortex that louses us up in so many ways. It can do those fine things with the hand and the beautiful nuances in the face, but it is totally inefficient, inefficient. It louses up, its pattern is not well established. 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."
Valerie Hunt, presenting her UCLA findings to the 1974 Healing Arts class, describes the downward shift in neuromuscular control:
The dialogue between Ida's classical gravity doctrine and Hunt's neuromuscular measurements was one of the genuinely productive exchanges of the Open Universe period. Ida had taught for years that the integrated body had more energy available. Hunt's measurements offered a mechanism: the recruitment shift, the change in oscillation frequencies, the reduced co-contraction. Both descriptions pointed at the same body, but from different angles. The body that has stopped fighting gravity is also the body whose neuromuscular system has stopped driving itself from the most expensive control level. The two descriptions converge because they are descriptions of the same condition — the condition of a structure that is being supported rather than supporting itself.
Gravity in free fall and the engineer's objection
Not every voice in Ida's Open Universe seminars accepted the doctrine as she stated it. In one 1974 session, an engineer present challenged her tent-pole image — the picture of the body held up by soft-tissue tension, with bones acting as compression struts. His view, as a man trained in classical mechanics, was that the body had to be held up against gravity primarily by compressive force through bone. The exchange is useful because it shows Ida's framework against the standard engineer's intuition, and because it brought into the room the question of what happens to her gravity doctrine when gravity is absent — in free fall, in orbit, in the asteroid colonies that mid-1970s futurists were already imagining.
"Still feel that concepts of Rolfing are very important to the astronauts and I think that in years to come some of our descendants are going to be living in space or living on small asteroids not living in free fall condition. And I think that even in most conditions that the concepts of Rolfing in terms of alignment and balance of the body are going to be as valid as others. I haven't gotten to your thing about gravity holding itself. I kind of like what you said. Just go on and do that that free falling thing. Well, just tell you what my view That's all I ask. Yeah. Don't tell either. I'm sorry. It's gonna be out on tape. Well this fresh out sometime. We'll open her universe. Yeah, I'd always talks about the body being held up by the soft tissue and talks about tent poles and whatnot and there's certainly, know, certain tent ropes help hold the tent up. But in my view as an engineer, my view of how gravity is pulling on my body is that it's trying to pull it down, trying to pull my head down, my head rests on my shoulders, trying to pull that down, and that eventually there has to be a depressive force to keep me standing up."
In a 1974 Open Universe class, an engineer present challenges the tent-pole image and argues for compression through bone:
Ida did not resolve the engineer's objection on its own terms — she generally let the physicists and engineers in her seminars work out their disagreements among themselves. What mattered to her was that the alignment principle was robust across the disagreements. Whether you described the body in tensegrity terms (Buckminster Fuller's vocabulary, which several of her students were borrowing in the early 1970s), in classical compression-through-bone terms, or in her own colloid-and-fascia terms, the same observation held: a body whose segments were aligned around the vertical needed less of its own energy to maintain itself. The gravity doctrine was the version of this observation that she most trusted, because it named the field whose direction the vertical was a vertical to.
The recipe as a long teaching about gravity
Ida did not generally teach the ten-session series as a sequence of gravity lessons, but in the 1975 Boulder advanced class — pushed by Bob and Steve to explain why the recipe begins where it begins — she came close. The first hour lifts the chest off the pelvis so the pelvis can begin to move; the second hour follows the first; the third continues the second. The whole sequence is a long, layered, recursive teaching that gives the body a sequence of opportunities to reorganize around the vertical. Each hour, in her framing, is the beginning of the tenth hour — each hour opens what later hours confirm. The reason the work takes ten sessions is not that the body needs ten different procedures, but that it cannot absorb the full reorganization in fewer sittings. The body, she said, simply cannot take all that work in a single session.
"It's just the second half of the first hour. Okay? And the third hour is the second half of the second and first hour. It's literally a continuation. I clearly I clearly saw, you know, last summer that continuation process and how and, you know, Dick talked about how, you know, the only reason it was broken into 10, you know, sessions like that was it because the body just couldn't take all that work. Couldn't take it right. But I just sitting on just trying to figure out how the hell she ever figured out that process, and then began to see it. What she did is what most of of us need to do more. She just sat and watched bodies. And she just kept on doing it. And put unfortunately, she's a little bit more brilliant than the rest of us."
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, Bob and Ida together work out the logic of why the recipe is divided into ten sessions:
Reading this passage against the gravity doctrine clarifies what the recipe is actually doing. It is not ten different fixes to ten different problems. It is one continuous re-relating of the body to the gravitational vertical, paced into ten sittings because that is what the connective-tissue web can absorb without rebound. Each session adds energy — in her colloid language, drives more of the gel back toward sol — and each session deepens the body's capacity to be supported by the field rather than to hold itself up. The recipe is, from this angle, a sequence of energy inputs whose cumulative effect is to reverse the local entropic accumulation of a lifetime. This is what she meant by saying gravity is the therapist: the recipe prepares the body, and gravity does the work that follows.
"Structural integration is a process. Which we the use of structural integration as a process in which we use deep tissue, deep soft tissue manipulation and education to arrange the tissues of the body along vertical and horizontal lines of gravity so as body to experience a harmonious relationship with gravity. What would you say about that? I would say structural integration is a system that looks at the body as a structure in terms of blocks. The head, thorax, pelvis, lower extremities. That's a very important point. You want to have every time you define structure integration. Go ahead, Steve. And also, what happens to these blocks is that they, through time, begin to lose their alignment in respect in relationship to one another. It's not time doesn't do it. That happens through time.
Opening the same 1975 Boulder class, students walk through the definition Ida has been pressing them to articulate:
Coda: A different argument with time
What Ida was offering, in her gravity-and-aging doctrine, was not a promise that the work made anyone immortal or even, in any simple sense, younger. The chemistry of collagen does shift across a lifetime; the calcium-hydrogen ratio does change; the connective-tissue web does lose some of its bound water. What she challenged was the conclusion that this trajectory is inevitable or one-directional. The trajectory, she insisted, is the product of a particular relationship to gravity, and the relationship is alterable. A body that has been brought into alignment with the field stops accumulating the structural insults that make the slope steep. It stops spending its energy on the holding budget. It stops driving its movement from the most expensive neuromuscular control level. It begins to draw on the gravitational field as a source of order rather than as a force of degradation. Whether this counts as reversing aging or only as slowing it she would not finally claim. But that the practice changed the slope, she had no doubt at all.
"I don't see how anybody with eyes on their heads can expect that a very disordered body carried in a fashion which it never was designed for can fail to be disorganized and not be able to perform as it was designed to perform. You understand that gravity is, biologically at least, gravity is accepted as a positive force by living bodies. Is that As a positive force in As a positive thing to be used if the body is in structural alignment. Oh, I think there's no question about that, and I think that we show the evidence of this day by day in our work. This happens over and over and over and over again. People come back to us and say, I don't know what you did to me last year. I can't last time. I can't imagine what you did to me. I feel so much better. I sleep so much better. I behave so much better, I'm so much more calm, I'm more tolerant. What on earth did you do to me? We haven't done a thing except to make them make it possible for them to live in a friendly instead of an unfriendly environment. So as soon as the structure has been rearranged, then during the days that follow, does gravity tend to further align and smooth out that balance?"
From the 1974 Structure Lectures, closing the argument:
Late in her teaching, in a 1971-72 lecture preserved on the IPRCON tape, Ida named the formulation that has come to stand as her most quoted line on the subject — gravity is the therapist. The phrase compresses the whole doctrine. The practitioner is not the therapist; the technique is not the therapist; the recipe is not the therapist. The practitioner reorganizes the connective-tissue web; the gravitational field does what follows. What gravity does to an aligned body is the actual therapy. What gravity does to a random body is the actual aging. The two are the same force acting on two different structural configurations, and the practice's whole purpose is to move the body from the second configuration into the first.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, 1976 Boulder advanced class (76ADV11, 76ADV41) — extended discussion of the body as plastic medium, the random body's inability to accept gravitational support, and the energetic cost of military-style posture training. Included for readers interested in her late teaching on how cultural training in posture systematically aggravates rather than relieves the gravity problem. 76ADV11 ▸76ADV41 ▸
See also: See also: Julian Silverman, RolfB3 public tape — the thermodynamic-energetic model of integration as a shift from viscous to elastic interconnection in the myofascial network; complements Valerie Hunt's electromyographic findings and provides a physicist's vocabulary for what Ida described as the colloidal gel-to-sol transition. RolfB3Side1 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, 1973 Big Sur advanced class (SUR7308) — extended discussion of Claude Bernard, the historical neglect of fascia, and the recognition of the connective-tissue web as the organ of structure that determines a body's relationship to the gravitational field across a lifetime. SUR7308 ▸