The road of natural healing
Ida's most sustained statement on where her work sits among the older drugless traditions comes from the 1976 Teachers' Class, where she read aloud at length from Henry Lindlahr's Philosophy of Natural Therapeutics. Lindlahr was a Chicago businessman turned chiropractor who, around the turn of the twentieth century, traveled to the European spas with his ailing wife, recovered, and went back to apprentice himself to the water-cure priests and farm-clinic naturalists then practicing in Austria and Germany. The book Ida was reading had been written around 1920. She used it not as a doctrinal source but as a way of placing her students on a longer road — one that included homeopathy, hydrotherapy, dietetics, and the early American chiropractic and osteopathic schools. The point of the exercise, she told the teachers, was that Structural Integration was not a brand-new system but a particular contribution to a much older project.
"I think it's important that you people have some sort of a perspective on the road down which you are walking. If you see where it came from and you don't see where it's going, neither do I, but you can look down this road for a very long period and and realize that this is the road on which you are walking. It is not the road of the orthodox allopathic medicine. We will later go into what is the road of the orthodoxy. But at this point, let us stress what we are talking about as the road we are walking is the road which has been rejected by the vision of natural healers down through the ages. Now you are apt to think of yourself as a brand new system. The actual system of wealthing is a brand new system. The idea of natural healing is not a new system at all. It's been going for a long time. Now, this particular book is called The Philosophy of Natural Therapeutics, and it was written by a man by the name of Lindlaw. And Lindlaw was one of the outstanding early chiropractors in this country, though he was not trained as a chiropractor. He was, well, he was trained as an MD, too, come think of it."
In the opening of the 1976 Teachers' Class, Ida frames the lineage she wants her senior students to recognize.
The lineage Ida cared about ran from Austrian farm clinics and Father Kneipp's water-cure baths through American figures like Lindlahr, the early chiropractors, the early osteopaths, and on into homeopathy, naturopathy, and the food-as-medicine tradition. What unified them, in her reading, was the rejection of the combative allopathic principle — that disease is something to be killed — in favor of an idea that the body would heal itself if its conditions were right. She read Lindlahr's distinction between combative and preventive medicine to her teachers as a way of orienting their own work.
"The time has come when order and unity must be evolved out of the chaos of theoretical teachings and practical methods. There are two prints I don't wanna go into this Beychamp method now. I wanna wait until Michael and Michael and Jen are available here. But I will read to you a lot of other indications here. There are two principal methods of treating disease. One is combative, and the other other is the preventive. The trend of modern medical research and practice in our great colleges and endowed research institutes is almost entirely along combative lines. While the individual progressive physician learns to work more and more along preventive lines. The slogan of modern medical science is kill the germ and cure the disease. The usual procedure is to wait until acute or chronic disease have fully developed and then, if possible, to subdue them by the use of drugs, surgical operations, and by means of the morbid products of disease in the form of serums, antitoxins, vaccines, etc. The combative methods fight disease with disease, poison with aversion, and germs with germs and germ products. In the language of the Bible, Beelzebub against the devil. The preventive method does not wait until disease is fully developed. Will you fellows know that much by this time? If you don't, it's time to go back to getting Peter and Jim Peter and Emmett to teach you. The fundamental principles of nature cure philosophy, radically differ from the allopathic theory and practice, and which are destined to revolutionize the chaotic teachings of the old school and to establish human race, an exact science of medicine, are the following: Every acute disease is the result of a purifying healing effort of nature. The inflammatory processes back of all acute and subacute diseases are identical in nature and purpose and in the way they run their courses through the five stages of inflammation."
Reading from Lindlahr, Ida lays out the contrast between combative and preventive medicine that homeopathy, naturopathy, and Structural Integration all share.
Homeopathy in the working classroom
Ida did not, herself, prescribe homeopathic remedies. But homeopathic preparations come up several times in her advanced classes when she or a colleague is talking about what to do with a body that has just been overworked, traumatized, or, in her phrase, 'taken in the toxin' of a difficult session. The most extended discussion comes from a 1973 Big Sur advanced-class side session — one of the Mystery Tapes — where Ida is discussing the practitioner's own depletion after working on an especially difficult body. A senior student turns the conversation toward homeopathy, and Ida pivots gracefully: she has a use in mind for low-potency arnica and hypericum, and she lets the student elaborate on what homeopathic theory has to offer in this kind of situation. The exchange is small but unusually telling, because it shows Ida treating homeopathy as a working part of her colleagues' toolkit without claiming it as her own.
"In other words, it's dealing with a more dense body, because this is affecting the dense body as if you were a dumb way Schmidt. You understand? Yeah, I understand, but let me just say a word about homeopathy homeopathy and how it relates to this. Homeopathy has to do with treating likes with likes, And so, for instance, what would make a certain amount of sense is when you're in this exhausted situation, in that kind of place where you've just finished working on somebody and it's just taken in the toxin, it's at that point that perhaps a drop of your own urine or your own perspiration or breath even potentized in a homeopathic, what they call no cells, you know, turned into a medicine for yourself, you know, could from that point on be useful as an antidote to that process."
From a 1973 advanced-class exchange on practitioner recovery — the student introduces homeopathic principle, Ida holds her ground on dosage.
What is striking about this passage is the layering of bodies. The student is describing a homeopathic mechanism that works on the etheric or energetic body; Ida, characteristically, pulls the conversation back toward the denser physical body. She is willing to use the words and the substances, but she is not willing to leave the physical level. The same impulse appears throughout her teaching: when colleagues bring in subtle-body language — auras, chakras, acupuncture meridians, homeopathic potencies — Ida acknowledges and sometimes welcomes the discussion but tends to bring her own claim back down to the mesoderm, the fascia, the literal lengthening of the spine.
"And it's just an I mean, these things are incredible, literally incredible, if you just haven't been exposed to them before and just take them for the first time. Like taking the Bach rescue remedy is a trip. I mean it's like taking acid. I mean it just has that sudden changing quality to impossible that the buckwholesky remedy may be one of those, or one of the other flower remedies that is more specific to this. But one of the things that I think of in terms of edible remedies is that edible remedies are so called the food values that we're always taking, that this has a certain Mhmm. Suggesting to me that who can who understand these things, and I wanna find them. I read somewhere where you I always consider it when I get into that kind of situation is not to take medicine for because it's not my illness. And if I start taking medicine, cleansing, yes, like soaking my feet in Epsom salt or something like that, to cleanse my body. But if I start taking medicine for other people's illnesses when I come into contact with them, it's endless."
The student elaborates on the homeopathic self-antidote and the Bach flower remedies; Ida is in the room, listening.
Likes treating likes
The homeopathic principle itself — similia similibus curentur, that a substance which produces certain symptoms in a healthy body can, in highly diluted form, treat those same symptoms in a sick one — was never something Ida adopted as her own framework. But she let the principle stand when her senior students brought it forward, and she made room in her classes for the larger picture of which homeopathy was part: the picture of a body that responds to subtle inputs as much as to dense ones, and of a healing tradition that worked with the body's own restorative tendencies rather than against them. The passage where the principle is stated most cleanly comes from the same 1973 exchange.
"Homeopathy has to do with treating likes with likes, And so, for instance, what would make a certain amount of sense is when you're in this exhausted situation, in that kind of place where you've just finished working on somebody and it's just taken in the toxin, it's at that point that perhaps a drop of your own urine or your own perspiration or breath even potentized in a homeopathic, what they call no cells, you know, turned into a medicine for yourself, you know, could from that point on be useful as an antidote to that process."
The student states the homeopathic principle directly — likes treating likes — and applies it to the practitioner's post-session depletion.
There is something quietly characteristic about how Ida handled this. She did not endorse homeopathy. She did not warn against it. She let her colleagues speak and made her own correction only where the conversation drifted away from the physical body she actually worked on. This pattern — receptive, undefensive, but always pulling back toward the mesoderm — runs through every encounter she has in these tapes with a sister healing system.
Different pathways for healing
The broadest statement in the archive of how Structural Integration relates to other healing systems comes from the same 1973 advanced-class side discussion. A senior student — likely the same one who had introduced homeopathic theory earlier — proposes a map. The body has three germinal layers, the mesoderm, the ectoderm, and the endoderm, and different healing modalities work primarily on one or another. Structural Integration works on the mesoderm. Acupuncture works on the endoderm — the organs, the glandular tissue, the viscera. Gestalt therapy and parts of Feldenkrais work on the ectoderm — the nervous system, the motor cortex, the learned patterns of movement and emotion. The student presents this not as a finished doctrine but as a working hypothesis for why these systems do different things and why they can be deployed together rather than in competition.
"Acupuncture, as I see, directly influences the end of the day. I mean, it directly acts on the organs, on the glandular tissue, on the viscera. Gestalt therapy and portions of the work of Feldenkrais directly influence the ectoderm. I mean, the demonstration of that Feldenkrais exercise that I did this weekend, I mean, it's really startling to most people."
The student proposes the germinal-layer map of healing systems — where Structural Integration, acupuncture, and Gestalt each take hold.
The map is loose and the student knows it is loose. But it does the useful work of explaining why these systems do not have to be in competition. A body that has been worked structurally still has organs and glands that may need attention; an acupuncturist's patient still has motor patterns that may need re-learning; a Feldenkrais student still has fascial restrictions that limit what new movement can take hold. The systems address different tissue layers and so address different aspects of a single body. Where they overlap, the student suggests, they follow the same underlying law.
"And so there are different pathways for healing. The important thing is that they're all natural systems, that they work on the total body of mind. And if they do, then they follow what's called the law of cure in the Chinese system."
The student names the underlying law that connects homeopathy, acupuncture, and Structural Integration: the law of cure.
Acupuncture and the Chinese tradition
Acupuncture comes up more often in Ida's classes than homeopathy does, in part because she had several senior students with serious Chinese-medicine training and in part because the diagnostic tools of Chinese medicine — the pulses, the elements, the seasonal organ cycles — gave them a precise vocabulary for the kinds of energetic phenomena Ida herself was less comfortable naming. In one Mystery Tape session a student demonstrates the use of pulse diagnosis on Dick Price at Esalen, and Ida is in the room. Elsewhere a senior practitioner explains how the Chinese system identifies organ function long before any symptoms appear in the body — months before, by his account.
"In the body by three to six months, The pulses, the set of pulses at one time, I'll talk a little bit about that. Colors, the sounds of the voice, smells, the various factors which begin to manifest in a body and indicate perhaps minor unbalances long before there are any symptoms. The man becomes ill, or his spirit becomes ill, long before his body becomes ill, long before the organs, you know, begin to manifest his symptoms. We become very conscious of how the body relates to itself. For instance, in acupuncture, the whole body is mapped out on the nose, and in one form of anesthesia, they have some 60 different points in this region that they will use. For instance, there's a knee point right here, and there's an eye point right here, you know. I mean, the whole body maps continuously on itself. The whole body maps into the iris of the eye, which we've been into iridology. You know, like, you see, you look at Michael, you immediately see his knee problems. See, like, you see that little black spot in his left eye, it just, you know, it just screams at you. You know, palmistry is not such a weird and far out thing. You know, in in fact, there there is information contained in the hand. There's information contained in the in the facial features."
A student trained in Chinese diagnosis describes the layers of bodily information the system recognizes — pulses, colors, voice sounds, smells, facial features.
What Ida tolerated in these passages — and tolerated, in this archive, is the right word, since she neither endorsed nor opposed — was the idea that the body could be read at energetic levels she did not herself work at. Her own claim was always narrower. She worked on fascia, on the literal physical tissue that her hands could touch. She let her colleagues work, talk, and diagnose at other levels. The seventh-hour aggravations, which the student in the previous passage cited as the work's version of the Chinese law of cure, were familiar to every practitioner in the room. The acupuncture and homeopathy framings simply gave those familiar phenomena a wider theoretical home.
"And you look for the cause of the factor and treat it rather than treat symptoms. There are also laws that have to do with how the body energies change during the day and during the seasons. In spring, there's a very different kind of energy from the fall. There's a different part of your body that's active. Okay? Awareness of that. And so that's the traditional system. Then there are symptomological schools of acupuncture where you if you have a headache, you put a needle in here, you know, and turn three times, take it out. And some of those things work. I mean, they work fine. They they could but they also tend towards imbalance unbalancing. For instance, when I put that needle into this common point to create this analgesia, you could see just what was happening to my legs. I mean, there's just a massive imbalance in the system, which has to be attended to afterwards. Just think a moment. Is there anything else? Well, let me direct There your thought for a is, even in this country, a great variety of acupuncturists."
The student describes the traditional Chinese approach as treating the causative factor rather than the symptom — and contrasts it with symptomatic acupuncture.
The Hahnemann lineage and the disappearance of homeopathy from American medicine
In a 1971-72 Mystery Tape, one of Ida's senior medical colleagues — a man with deep knowledge of both osteopathy and Chinese medicine — gives the historical background. Hahnemann Medical School in Philadelphia had originally been Hahnemann Homeopathic Medical School. There had been homeopathic hospitals in Philadelphia and New York. By the 1970s, the homeopathic content of the curriculum had been largely lost to the rising tide of pharmaceutical-allopathic medicine, just as the osteopathic curriculum had been folded into conventional medical training. The same colleague then makes a comparison to Chinese medicine — the law of day and night, the law of the elements, the yin and yang — and observes that the Chinese had developed these systems three thousand five hundred years before the Christian era. Conventional medicine, he says, was only recently rediscovering circadian rhythm and calling it new.
These things in the back pain, and people get better. Have back pain temporarily. And osteopathy is my understanding of osteopathy. I know very little about that. I know less about that than I do about chiropracting. I don't know too much about that. Is that this was large joint manipulation, more so, due to osteopathy. Scientific discoveries came in about quote scientific medicine. The schools of osteopathy really turned into medical schools. Most of the schools of osteopathy had MDs and teachers, Eventually, some of them have been turned over into medical schools, and actually the amount of osteopathy that a person got in a good many of the schools of osteopathy was a really very small amount of the curriculum. It's almost the same as Hahnemann Medical School. Hahnemann Medical School at one time was the Hahneman Homeopathic Medical School. And there's a hospital still named the Homeopathic Hospital in Philadelphia. We are in New York in the third place. But it also turned into the use of homeopathy and not looking at what knowledge that they are learning, empirical knowledge that they had. But their empirical knowledge was kind of lost and went into medical school, and it's much similar to the same situation than if we look at Chinese medicine. In Chinese medicine, three thousand five hundred years before Christ, they knew about circadian rhythm."
A colleague trained in conventional medicine, osteopathy, and Chinese medicine narrates the absorption of homeopathy and osteopathy into mainstream practice.
The same colleague continues with the distinction between symptom-treating practitioners and what the Chinese tradition called 'the real doctors' — those who treated the whole body and paid little attention to the presenting symptom. This was a distinction Ida herself drew repeatedly about her own work, and it is part of why she let her senior students bring Chinese pulse diagnosis and homeopathic theory into the classroom. The frameworks were different but the underlying intention was the same.
"And law One of the law of cures in Chinese medicine is that in any chronic situation or condition, get better from the inside out, and symptoms get worse before they get better. Now, you can apply that to doing some of the things of Rolfing, which is that if a person has pain, they might have little more pain during the time of rolfing. So, we could say symptoms even get worse before they get better. And we look at some of the things, and what has happened to these things is that even though some of the things and the premises that people felt were correct, They were not able to validate these premises. They couldn't go out and have other people use Koch's principle on them. And Koch's principle is that if you can take a bug, and you can give it and put it into a guinea pig, and the guinea pig develops tuberculosis, then you know this was the bug causative organism. And this is one of the important things in bringing up about research. We can do research, but research has not much value unless somebody else in another laboratory can duplicate it. If they can duplicate it, then it becomes valid, and they validate it. Then it becomes useful. We begin to look through the history of these things, and I still don't know how Doctor. Roth got into this principle. I have some ideas or intuitions of how she started using some of these principles. Don't ever trust your intuition."
The colleague articulates the law of cure as the principle uniting traditional medicine, homeopathy, and Structural Integration.
Bach Flower Remedies and the lighter remedies
The Bach flower remedies — Edward Bach's set of thirty-eight flower essences for emotional states, developed in the 1930s in England — come up briefly in the same 1973 exchange where homeopathy was introduced. The Rescue Remedy, in particular, is mentioned by Ida's senior student as having an unusually sudden and changing quality. The remedies are not strictly homeopathic but they share the assumption that highly dilute preparations can affect the body's energetic state. Ida did not pick up this thread herself, but she let it stand. What the passage reveals is the texture of her advanced-class environment: senior practitioners arriving with their own toolkits and their own theories, and Ida creating room for them to be discussed without insisting that they be approved or rejected.
"I mean, it's purification. Cleaning up and reconstructing, really, the temple. Called a sea of energy. It's bringing allowing that to be what moves you. It's also close to the center of gravity of the body. It's also obviously, you can't move there unless the pelvis is free. And so, you know, directly ties into the work we're doing here. And then you do your work. Okay? Which is a whole another thing. And work may be this kind of work, you know. Or work may be something a little bit more diffuse like working on your connections with people or whatever. I mean, like, somehow influencing the evolution. Okay? Okay, so healing is part of this whole thing. Healing has something to do with cleansing and purifying. And you heal the whole man, you don't work on his symptoms. And so there are many systems of natural healing. And some of them are essential systems. I mean, are just obviously vital, and that's how I see routing. Mean, I see this as an essential system. As being essence and also relating to everyone, to all beings, whereas other systems are more directed towards the individual, his needs, which may be very specific to, you know, given personality."
The same student who introduced homeopathic theory frames Structural Integration as one essential system among several natural healing pathways.
The Open Universe class at UCLA — a series of seminars where Ida brought in colleagues from across the natural-healing landscape — was the most extreme version of this hospitality. There, alongside her own teaching, students heard from radionics experts, psychic healers, dowsers, acupuncturists, energy researchers, and Lindlahr-influenced naturopaths. The point of these classes, repeatedly, was not endorsement but exposure. Ida wanted her practitioners to know the landscape they were working inside.
"I'm an amateur so I won't be held responsible for my opinions. We're kicking off on a rather large subject in this conference, We're and things can happen. In the last several years, ESP, psionics, acupuncture, faith healing, psychic healing have become almost respectable. I'm a member of a number of rather, quote, serious, unquote, societies. And even five years ago, I didn't dare tell my colleagues about my hobbies. But today you can pick up practically any trade journal, IEEE, etcetera, and find articles on, psionic investigation. Now these forces have been known for thousands and thousands of years, and semantically, the organizing forces in the universe have been described, by many terms, by many workers. I believe that doctor Reich, Wilhelm Reich, was basically a magician and mistook his work for Oregon Energy. I've had the privilege of studying with mister Hieronymus personally. He's still alive. He's up in his late seventies. And, some of these people are highly controversial but their viewpoints have been tested out experientially. Now, in our own culture, the American Indian medicine man certainly looked at himself and his medicine as an open universe. All of the tents that were used by the shamans, by the medicine men for healing were open at the top. And then there are displays."
A guest speaker in Ida's 1974 Open Universe class names the larger field of energy-based healing systems — including homeopathic-related devices — being investigated at the time.
The radionics neighborhood
Of all the systems adjacent to homeopathy that Ida exposed her students to, the strangest was the radionics tradition — devices supposedly capable of tuning into the resonance of a body anywhere on the planet and changing its energetic state. The same Open Universe lecturer who described the broader energy-healing landscape demonstrated several such devices, including the Hieronymus machine, the Vibaxis system, and the homeopathic shooter from Arizona. Ida did not endorse any of this, and the lecturer himself made clear that he was offering it as a phenomenology rather than as a recommendation. But the inclusion of these passages in the Open Universe curriculum is significant: Ida was willing to let her students see what the outer edge of the natural-healing field looked like, including its hokier corners, rather than restrict their exposure to safer material.
"The photograph of the subject is placed under a bar magnet. Homeopathic pills are placed in a, jar lid on top of it. The thing is aimed in the general direction of the state where the subject lives, and the practitioner collects his money on a monthly basis or whatever the arrangement might be. This is probably the weirdest device in my garage full of medical weirdities. But I threw it in because the doctor who uses it has become so successful that he cannot keep up with his practice, and he has assistance doing this now. And this is so absurd, as a scientist. It totally offends me except the people get better. Now grab that one again. I think the entire summation of what I'm trying to say is that healing works if certain elements are present in spite of the healer's theory. These are more modern day devices which are the interfaces between sympathetic magic and science. This is a Hunter Radionics device. When you take it apart, there is nothing inside except shorted switch plates. There are several of these in operation today behind closed doors in the Los Angeles area. The doctors who have managed to keep these from being destroyed by the agents of the Food and Drug Administration are doing quite well and they are working again with the terminal patients. As I mentioned earlier, the climate in which these things can be investigated has become considerably desensitized since acupuncture, etcetera, etcetera, have become daily words. One of my teachers incidentally when I gave up the idea that I was a scientist was Mr. Hieronymus and we will have a little more to say about him later. Okay, the people either love him or hate him except what he does seems to work."
The lecturer describes a homeopathic shooter and several radionics devices, presenting them with scientific skepticism but reporting that patients do recover.
What this material accomplishes in Ida's curriculum is contextual rather than doctrinal. By placing Structural Integration alongside even the strangest energy-based practices, she made clear that her own claim was modest: she worked on the physical body, on fascia, on the mesoderm, and made no claims about the etheric or astral levels at which homeopathy and radionics were said to operate. But she did not insist that those other levels were unreal. She let the field be wider than her own work, and asked her practitioners to know that wider field.
Lindlahr and the law of inflammation
The most extended reading Ida did in the 1976 Teachers' Class came from Lindlahr's discussion of inflammation. Lindlahr's argument — drawn from late nineteenth-century European naturopathy and from a Los Angeles physician named Powell — was that inflammation was not the body's enemy but its healing process; that bacteria were scavengers of disease matter rather than its primary cause; and that the body's accumulated metabolic wastes, what Powell called pathogen, were what created the soil in which germs could multiply. Ida read this aloud not because she endorsed every detail of the theory but because the underlying principle — that the body is trying to heal itself, and that the practitioner's job is to support that effort rather than to attack disease — was the principle by which Structural Integration worked too.
"Basing our practice on these fundamental wait a minute, the primary cause of germ activity is the morbid soil in which bacteria breed and multiply. Basing our practice on these fundamental propositions, we do not endeavor to kill the germs with poisonous drugs, vaccines, serums, and antitoxins. But instead, we endeavor through natural ways of healing and natural methods of treatment to purify the organism of the systemic waste, morbid encumbrances, and disease paints which furnish the soil for the development and multiplication of disease journeys. When I describe the processes of inflammation solely from the viewpoint of the teachings of Pasteur and Mechnico, may have wondered, meaning the readers, may have wondered why the white blood cells should destroy the diseased germs if the latter one scavenges a morbid matter and disease taint. Also, many inquiries have come to me from readers and from students running somewhat as follows: You say that scabies, itch, lice, crab lice, and many other so called contagious diseases develop in the form of healing crises under circumstances where infection or contagion is improbable or impossible. If this be true, where do the germs or parasites come from? In the case of scabies, lice, crab lice, do you believe in spontaneous generation?"
Ida reads aloud Lindlahr's statement of the natural-healing principles to her 1976 Teachers' Class.
The reading from Lindlahr does important work in Ida's teaching. It tells her senior students that they are not, as practitioners of Structural Integration, alone in the cultural landscape — that they belong to a long lineage of drugless practitioners stretching back through the chiropractic and osteopathic schools, through homeopathy, through hydrotherapy, through the Austrian farm clinics, and ultimately, in her telling, back through Hippocrates and Imhotep. The principle that the body heals itself if its conditions are right is older than any of these particular techniques. Structural Integration is one specific contribution to that ancient project.
"Thus it follows that the physician must learn to judge and to distinguish and to approach his cases in such a way as to bring the whole man into a harmonious and healthy state, etc, etc. Experience would seem to show that, in actual fact, most cases which we meet require both types of approach in different proportions. In reading and maybe you should hear this. In reading and editing Lindvall's books, am aware that the expression nature cure constantly repeating is irritating, and I have to conjure up a picture of loosely dressed people dancing in the view. However, Nature Cure is the name which Doctor. Lindbla has chosen to give to the system of therapeutics which he sends forth and advocates, and I have not felt justified in altering it to naturopathy or natural therapeutics wherever it occurs. The point to be remembered is that, in fact, all genuine cure is and must be natural in the sense that it must work in accordance with natural law. If it does not do so, it is not scientific and not really cure at all. Much that now passes for cure is in fact not pure, but is at best a palliation and at worst an aggravation of a condition of nonhealth. I'm sure all of you would subscribe to that. But what I'm trying to bring to your attention is the fact that you are on a road which a lot of other people have laid down long before you came along, probably before most of you were born, and that you are still traveling down that road expecting hoping and expecting and believing that you are adding to that road, and I think you are. But, nevertheless, it is not a new idea. This, I think, yes, this is Lindvos. He says, The term natural therapeutic has been adopted to designate that system of natural living and healing which I have evolved and demonstrated in many years of institutional work."
Ida continues her reading of Lindlahr, who insists that all genuine cure must work in accordance with natural law.
The microcosm, the cosmos, and Imhotep
Among the most striking guest lectures in Ida's Open Universe series was one given by a religious scholar who had spent years searching for the spiritual basis of healing across the world's traditions. He had visited Zen temples in Japan, lived with Ramakrishna monks, studied yoga in Delhi, investigated chiropractic, acupuncture, and homeopathy, and finally found in Ida's work something he had not found elsewhere. His lecture is one of the few places in the archive where Ida's work is explicitly compared to homeopathic and metaphysical traditions by an outside observer rather than by one of her own practitioners.
"Now, in this matter of my approach to rafting, I have the feeling that against my search, which I'm sure you have somehow caught a little bit now, that in my search, I felt that though I had researched, from a layman's point of view rather thoroughly, though acupuncture, yoga, the esoteric aspects of voodoo, the dream timing of the aborigines in Australia. I lived with a zen in Sojiji Temple in Japan. I lived with Ramakrishna monks. I'd been involved with transcendental med meditation, took the course in Delhi, and all of these things. I have a book on chiropractic called The Chiropractic Story. I was interested in the structural integration book that it quoted rather at length from doctor Still because I have spoken down there through the years at at the college. But I had the feeling, and I say this to you in all sincerity, and I wouldn't be here tonight if I didn't feel that way. I have the feeling that Rothen comes closer to recognizing spirit as the life force and to seeking to make it unitive more than any group that I have investigated or interested myself in. The others still put life into happy categories or unhappy categories. The medical profession, generally, The colleges, generally. The church, generally. Happily, happily into categories. Now Rolfing isn't a religion, but I had this feeling that Rolfing came so close that I wanted to I was thrilled when doctor Ida told me she said, you know, she used this phrase, and I've been using it for years, we've never discussed it. She said, I want to have more to say about the total person, the total person. That really, you know, hit me because that's what I was interested in. I want to tell you something. When I saw the film in that beautiful theater over there when I saw the film and when I heard the phrase, Gravity is the therapist, then I began to see how in my work, my relationship with a basic idea, which I will now state as follows. The microcosm man must be structurally integrate integrated to the macrocosm, the universe, or the cosmos. This is something that I had the feeling was coming through to me in the exercises, which I myself had been developing. I'm not a great yoga adept."
A religious scholar describes his search across world healing traditions and his discovery of Structural Integration as a unitive system.
The same lecturer continued by tracing the spiritual genealogy of healing back through Hippocrates to the Egyptian physician-god Imhotep, who had taught — three thousand years before the Christian era — that human health depended on obedience to natural law and on the management of one's emotions. The argument is striking because it ties Ida's twentieth-century technique back into the same ancient lineage from which homeopathy itself, in its self-understanding, claimed descent. Both traditions saw themselves as recoveries of an older, deeper, pre-allopathic medicine.
"And I would like to just use about ten minutes more of my time to show you why I feel that this is interesting historically and why it is interesting currently, and why it should be of interest to you. You see, psychosomatic medicine psychosomatic may be a new word, a relatively new word. But actually, it is a very old idea. It is as old in my research along the path of health and healing, it is as old as Imhotep. And Imhotep was a short predecessor, you know, of the yellow emperor Wang Di, who lived Imhotep lived about three thousand years before the Christian era. Now Imotep the Egyptian was is usually accredited by the medical profession as being one of the earliest, if he lived at all because he undoubtedly lived because he became a god, one of the earliest who speculated that man's relationship to nature and man's obedience to natural laws would determine the condition of the health of the largely determine the condition of the health of the individual. And he said, in effect, if you will read what has been written about Imhotep, he said, in effect, that people should watch their emotions and should try to discover the cause of some of their tendencies to ill natured living and so on. And he has a beautiful analogy between life and denial, which he drew and which has become more meaningful as time has gone on. After Imhotep, probably one of the other great figures that zeros in, it seems to me, on this concept of spirit being the basis of life is the great is the name of the great Hippocrates, whom, as you know, the medical profession has adopted as the father of medicine. Now Hippocrates, of course, in Greece, I followed his trail. I tried to find what could still be found about Hippocrates, so far as what kind of a man and what his teachings actually were. When I was working on my book, I had access here on the campus of UCLA to some of the Hippocratic writings which are on this here on campus."
The lecturer traces the natural-healing lineage back through Hippocrates to Imhotep, three thousand years before Christ.
What homeopathy could not do
For all of Ida's hospitality to homeopathic and acupuncture-based commentary in her advanced classes, there is no passage in the archive in which she suggests that homeopathy could accomplish what Structural Integration accomplishes. Her own claim was specific. The body is plastic. Its fascial structure can be physically rearranged. Once that rearrangement has been made, gravity can support the body rather than tear it down. Homeopathy might address the energetic body, acupuncture might address the organs, Bach flowers might address emotional states — but none of these worked on the mesodermal organ of structure. The reason Ida placed her work alongside these other systems was not to suggest equivalence. It was to make clear that her own contribution had a particular place in the field.
"this badly structured individual, no matter how he got there, whether he was thrown from a car as a child or fell down the cellar steps as a kid or fell off the roof when he thought the grass looked so soft that he was jumping. It doesn't matter where that started, but it is possible to just approach that man or that woman as a structural problem and change the relationship within that structure to a place where you get integration. And so the method of therapy, if you want to call it such, I don't like therapy, I like education, to which I devote my time. That method is called structural integration and this is what we mean. We mean that we want to and we do integrate structure. What is integration? It's a putting the parts together so that they relate according to the pattern, which is perfectly obvious if you dissect the body to the point where the joints have to go together. There are certain ways that those joints never were meant to go together. And if the child has been thrown from a car in a fashion in which his knees, the leg and the thigh, do not meet in a straight line, his body will have had to have deposited enough extraneous soft tissue to make some sort of a joint but that joint will not work properly. It will not work easily. It will not work with an economy of energy. And so that child has to expend a great deal more energy getting around than his brother who didn't have that accident. And you can carry this sort of metaphor into all of these problems that you see around you."
Ida states her own narrow claim — Structural Integration as the integration of structure, not as therapy.
This is the consistent posture across the archive. Ida did not compete with homeopathy. She did not need to. Her work did something different, and she was clear about what that different thing was. The homeopathic, acupuncture, and energy-based frameworks her senior students and Open Universe guests brought into her classes added context, theoretical companionship, and a wider cultural placement, but they did not threaten the specificity of what her own hands did when they touched a body.
Coda: a road still being walked
The picture that emerges from the archive is of Ida Rolf situated at a particular crossroads in twentieth-century American healing. The European spa movement had crested and faded. American chiropractic and osteopathy had been folded into conventional medical training. Homeopathy had been driven nearly underground; the Hahnemann name survived but the homeopathic curriculum had been absorbed by pharmacology. Acupuncture was just beginning to become respectable in the West. Into this landscape Ida brought a specific technical contribution — the structural integration of the body's myofascial organ to allow gravity to support rather than disorganize the human form — and she taught it inside a wider intellectual environment that included homeopathy, acupuncture, Chinese pulse diagnosis, Bach flowers, radionics, and the entire history of natural-healing thought from Imhotep onward.
She did not endorse homeopathy. She did not study it deeply. But she let it stand in her classroom, let her senior students apply its principles to practitioner self-care, let her Open Universe guests place it in its full historical and cultural context, and read aloud from Lindlahr the larger natural-therapeutics tradition of which homeopathy was a part. The result is an archive in which homeopathy appears not as a competitor to Structural Integration and not as one of Ida's own commitments, but as one of the natural-healing systems with which Structural Integration shares an underlying intention: to support what the body is already trying to do, rather than to fight what is wrong with it.
"I've made the mistake of healing people with cancer and having them go out and commit suicide or kill others on a freeway accident, things like this. It's not a good thing to do. So, yes. You talk a while. I'm sick of hearing myself talk. No, but I want to know how you put the Rolf technique, the Rolf system into the magical system. I don't. I think it's a physical thing that does a tremendous amount of good. I've been Ralph and I love it and I know people before and after that were horrible examples before and good examples after. I kind of think that when you move the blockages around that you realign them on many levels besides just physically. And I think that's that's one of the uninstrumented values of Rolfing as well as the obvious physical changes that take place. Do you subscribe for instance to the idea that as you move the physical blocks around you are really moving fields of force around?"
A practitioner working in psychic and magical healing situates the work alongside the systems he uses — a representative voice from Ida's wider circle.
Ida ended her 1976 Teachers' Class reading by telling her senior teachers that they were still adding to a road that had been laid down long before any of them were born. The road was the road of natural healing. Homeopathy was one of its earlier stretches; Lindlahr's naturopathy another; Chinese medicine had walked it for thousands of years; and Structural Integration was a particular, recent, technically specific contribution to it. The honor she paid to homeopathy in her advanced classes was not the honor of adoption. It was the honor of recognition — the acknowledgment that her own work belonged in a longer story than the one her own century had told.
See also
See also: On the Chinese law of cure and its parallel to seventh-hour aggravations in the work, see also the 1971-72 Mystery Tapes discussion led by a senior medical colleague tracing osteopathic, homeopathic, and Chinese diagnostic traditions. IPRVital2 ▸
See also: On Bach flower remedies and the practitioner's depletion after difficult sessions, see the extended exchange in the 1973 Big Sur advanced-class side tape on practitioner self-care. 73ADVDRU ▸
See also: On the wider radionics and energy-healing landscape into which homeopathy was placed inside Ida's Open Universe curriculum, see the Hieronymus and Vibaxis demonstrations in the 1974 lecture series. UNI_012 ▸UNI_013 ▸UNI_014 ▸
See also: On Lindlahr's full inflammation theory and the pathogen-soil model that Ida read aloud to her teachers, see the continuation of the 1976 Teachers' Class reading. T1SA ▸T1SB ▸
See also: On Structural Integration as one essential pathway among the natural healing systems — and on cleaning up the temple as the first stage of higher-consciousness work — see the 1973 Big Sur advanced-class side discussion of healing as purification. 73ADV1A ▸