The pelvis as the key, the horizontal as the measure
Ida did not treat the horizontal pelvis as one teaching among many. In her 1975 Boulder advanced class, working through the recipe hour by hour with senior practitioners in the room, she repeatedly forced students back to a single formulation: every hour of the work, from one through ten, has the same goal. The thorax is lifted, the legs are freed, the sides are lengthened, the back is organized, the rotators are reached — but always in service of one outcome, the basin becoming a basin again. Where chiropractic and osteopathy stop at mobility, Ida insisted that mobility without horizontality is mobility that gravity will eventually disorganize. The pelvis must be flat enough that the field of gravity acts as support rather than as load. This is the doctrinal claim that distinguishes Structural Integration from every other manipulative tradition she knew, and she pressed it on her students with unusual force.
"the poor old one. It is a compulsion. It is a compulsion now. So your goal in the ordering of the body, your goal is to horizontalize the pelvis. And if you've really got the pelvis horizontalized, everything else will fall into place. This is the key. Now you should know, whether you do or not, I don't know, but you should know that this idea is not was not invented for the sake of Rothes. All manipulative schools recognize the fact that the key to the body is in the pelvis, but all manipulative schools do not recognize the body, that the pelvis has to be horizontalized in order for it to be able to work in the field of gravity. This is where you go a long step ahead of chiropractic, osteopathy, naturopathy, all the rest of them. Those boys and girls feel that if they can get movement in the body, they've got it made. But this is not so. In order to maintain movements, in order to get fine, sophisticated movements, you have to have a pelvis which is horizontal."
Ida lays down the central doctrine in the 1975 Boulder advanced class, positioning the horizontal pelvis against the rest of the manipulative field.
The keyhole metaphor matters because it tells the practitioner what to look at first. When a client lies down on the floor, the floor itself becomes the horizontal reference plane — and Ida understood that this functions at a level deeper than conscious recognition. Lying down lets the body's own sensory history with the horizontal come into play. Every infant learned, before language, that the floor was flat and down. The pelvis's failure to meet that flatness is what the practitioner's hands are looking for from the first moment of the first hour.
"the body could relate. If you will lay them on the floor, they've got a horizontal plane. And this works at a subconscious level as well as a conscious level. Subconsciously, every one of us learned probably before we were a year old that that flow was down there, and that flow was straight. And that flow was what we didn't know enough to call horizontal, but we felt it was horizontal at that time. So the minute you lay a guy down on that floor, he accepts the fact that his problems with that floor are his problems with that horizontal. And those of you who have had the experience of working with people know how many times when you lay them on the floor, they will tend they will say, well, you know, I haven't been able to get the middle of my back down. I don't know when I last got the middle of my back down the floor, etcetera, etcetera. And they give you they let you understand that they understand their limitations themselves. I sent Doctor. Rolfe an article written by Roy Elkins from Mayo Clinic, He stated in there the necessity of developing a posture with the pelvis horizontal and what have you, to the degree of what happens when a person attempts to hold it by contracting the gluteal muscles and the abdominal muscles."
Ida explains why lying the client on the floor immediately calls horizontality into question — and contrasts her position with Mayo Clinic's Roy Elkins.
Every hour has the same goal
The pedagogical surprise of the recipe is that students often imagine each hour has its own discrete target — the first frees the thorax, the second the legs below the knee, the third the side body, and so on. Ida did not deny these local targets, but in her 1975 Boulder class she pushed students past them to the same answer for every hour. When one student stumbled and called the goal of the first hour 'turning the pelvis under,' Ida corrected him sharply: turning under is not horizontalizing, and the words matter. The recipe is not ten goals but one goal, approached from ten directions. The first hour begins it; every subsequent hour continues it.
"What is the actual technique of the first hour when you look at it in terms of its meaning? Drifting the thorax off the pelvis? Yeah. You do more than that. That's the first thing you do. Bring the pelvis from above and below. Freeing the pelvis from above and below. What is the goal of the first hour? Same thing I just said. Oh, it's more than you said. Turning the pelvis under. Mobilizing. Yes. But that's a horrible way to express it. Horizontalizing? Horizontalizing the pelvis. Horizontalizing the pelvis is the goal of the first hour, the second hour, the third hour, of the fourth hour, the fifth, sixth, and seventh hours, the eighth, ninth, and tenth hours. And that isn't turning the pelvis under. Why do you have so much trouble with words? You're not that dumb, but you get yourself balled up in inadequate words. I wish you'd look at this. Have you been to Air Hots?"
In the third-hour session of the 1975 Boulder class, Ida presses a student past local objectives to the single shared goal of every hour.
What makes this teaching difficult is that the practitioner is not always working on the pelvis directly. In the first hour the hands are mostly on the thorax and the legs; in the second they go down the back and below the knees; in the third they reach the side body. The pelvis itself may not be touched for substantial stretches of the recipe. Ida's claim is that this indirectness is the point. The pelvis is freed from above by lifting the thorax off it; freed from below by organizing the legs under it. The sequence of hours is a sequence of strategies for arriving at the basin from different vectors.
"What we have done, the goal of the first hour, the goal of the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, the eighth, the ninth, and the tenth hours is to make that pelvis, is to organize that pelvis so that it knows where the horizontal is."
Ida names the unifying goal of the entire ten-hour sequence in a public lecture.
Ida's senior students in the 1975 class confirmed and elaborated the doctrine in their own voices. The first hour begins what the tenth hour completes; the second hour is the second half of the first; the third is a continuation of both. This is not a sequence of isolated procedures but a continuous unfolding, broken into ten sessions for the simple reason that the body cannot absorb the whole thing at once. The spectrum runs through every session, and at each step the pelvis is moved another fraction closer to plane.
"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. She just Ida what Ida did is what she's trying to teach how to do, and that is that you have to stay within your your trade."
A senior student in the 1975 Boulder class articulates the continuity-of-the-recipe doctrine that Ida had taught him.
Freeing from above, freeing from below
The first hour's logic — and by extension the structural logic of the early recipe — is to free the pelvis from both directions simultaneously. The thorax must come up off the pelvis from above; the legs must come down off the pelvis from below. In the first hour neither move is taken deep; both are done in the superficial fascia. Ida was insistent that this superficial work is not a warm-up but a real intervention. Opening the chest fascia improves respiration, oxygenation, and circulation throughout the body, and through the recti abdomini and obliques it directly mobilizes the pelvis from above. The first-hour pelvic lift then turns the sacrum and separates the lumbars, beginning the rotation of the basin around the heads of the femur.
"There are degrees of perfection attainable in any given series of hours and in any biologic system, perfection isn't possible, but we try and get as close as we can. Now to free up this pelvis, we've got to get a lot of stuff off of it from both directions. And we start by freeing the upper part of the body from the pelvis by loosening the fascia across the chest, chest, especially the fascia which is binding the ribs down. Now this doesn't work exactly directly on freeing the pelvis, but what it does do is increase oxygen flow and cardiac output concurrently to the entire body which makes future work a lot easier and also gives the client a sense of well-being from the first hour. The increased exchange of oxygen just makes his life a little more pleasant. This is true but I can't agree with you that it doesn't work directly on the pelvis. It does work directly on the pelvis when you consider that after all is said and done that thorax is connected through the recti abdomini and through the obliques and all this sort of thing. This is the wrapping which has kept it immobile. And as you're opening that fascia, you do get a mobilization of this whole business. So it does work directly on the pelvis in addition to the respiration. I see that. I was trying to make the distinction that your hands aren't in the pelvis at that moment. They're some place else. This right. So that's I meant with my indirect. All right. But there's so many things."
In a public lecture, Ida and a senior student work out together how the first-hour chest work acts directly on the pelvis.
By the second hour the support has to come from below. The work below the knees that was deferred in the first hour now becomes the foundation: the lower leg must support the upper leg, the upper leg must support the pelvis. Without this support, the horizontalizing work above has nothing to land on. Ida's pedagogical move was to make students show clients their own photographs and trace the weight failing to come straight up the leg — to give the client reality on the structural problem before working on it.
"Well That in order to horizontalize that pelvis, you have to bring the lumbars back. And in order to get the lumbars back, you have to get the cervicals back. That is you have to be able to organize this cervical to lumbar thing."
Ida names the chain that connects the pelvis, the lumbars, and the cervicals in a single sentence.
The chain Ida names here — cervicals to lumbars to pelvis — is the structural reason why every first hour ends with neck work and a pelvic lift. The pelvic lift drops the lumbars back; the neck work organizes the cervicals so the reciprocal curve does not pull the lumbars forward again. Without both ends of the stick balanced, the new lumbar position will not hold. This is the teaching beat that students were expected to internalize by the end of their training — that the basin and the top of the spine are talking to each other through the secondary curves, and the practitioner must address both.
"Now you still have a problem in that body. You have gotten the ribs, the thorax, to climb up off the pelvis. You've gotten the legs to free themselves down off the pelvis. You have taken the pelvis and made it as horizontal as you can, but you still have a problem in that body in that you have not changed the cervical organization. Now those of you who have worked with manipulative methods before know that you do not get that the cervical curve and the lumbar curve, these secondary curves are related. That your cervical curve talks about your lumbar curve, that your lumbar curve talks about your cervical curve. Therefore, if you aim to change the one or the other permanently, you have to change the twin, the two ends of the stick. The anatomy books, the physiology books talk about these curves being secondary curves, but I have yet to see any anatomy book or physiology book really discussing the necessity of balance between the cervical and the lumbar. But this is so and this is obvious to you as you start working with bodies."
Ida explains the cervical-lumbar relationship and why the first hour's neck work is structurally inseparable from the pelvic lift.
From bony horizontality to the floor of the pelvis
The most consequential refinement in Ida's late teaching is the shift from speaking of the pelvis as a bony structure to speaking of the floor of the pelvis as the operative unit. In her 1975 Santa Monica class — the tenth day of teaching, with Steve Weatherwax answering her questions — she pressed students to recognize that what they call 'pelvis' is really the floor of the pelvis. The bony rim and the soft floor are practically equivalent in everyday language, she conceded, but for the practitioner the distinction matters. The floor is what supports the abdominal organs; the floor is what must come to horizontal.
"Since the first hour we've been trying to horizontalize the pelvis. And we've gotten to the place now, we've uplifted the chest, lengthened the back sides, opened up the sides, and we started to establish a midline. And now we see that the front is beginning to need to be lengthened also."
Steve Weatherwax answers Ida's question about the fifth hour by retracing the doctrine of progressive horizontalization.
Ida accepted Weatherwax's account but immediately pushed past it. He had spoken correctly but in bony terms, and she wanted the imagination of the practitioner trained on the floor of the pelvis as a structural unit. The fifth hour does not horizontalize the bony pelvis; the fifth hour horizontalizes the floor. This was, she said, something she had not heard adequately discussed in any class she had taught — and she wanted to correct the omission then and there.
"key. The full key is that this has to do with the floor of the pelvis. And you were talking as though you were dealing with the bony. One is equivalent to the other practically, but nevertheless, I'd like to get this into your imagination. That this fifth hour has to do with the horizontalizing of the floor of the pelvis."
Ida supplies what she calls 'the full key' to Weatherwax's answer.
Once the floor of the pelvis is named as the operative unit, the middle hours of the recipe acquire a new coherence. Hours four, five, and six all address the floor — from the inside of the leg in the fourth, from the front in the fifth, from the rotators behind the sacrum in the sixth. The triangular set of approaches all converge on the same structure. Ida explicitly grouped these hours together as the floor-horizontalizing arc of the recipe.
"The fourth, the fifth, and the sixth hour are all hours that have to do with the horizontalizing of the elders and specifically of the floor of the pelvis."
Ida names the structural unity of hours four, five, and six.
The floor of the pelvis, Ida insisted, is not the half-dozen muscles students had been taught to name as the pelvic floor. It is the articulation structure — sacroiliac, lumbosacral, intervertebral — together with the soft tissue and the rotators that determine the pelvic floor's actual position. Shift any lumbar back, alter the hamstrings, change the habitual posture, and the floor changes with it. This is why athletic and postural habits matter so much, and why Ida treated the floor as the deepest level of the body's history.
"It's not those half dozen muscles which we named the other day as being the pelvic floor. Not at all. It's the sacroiliac articulation. It's the articulation between the fifth lumbar and the sacrum. It's the articulation between the fourth lumbar and the fifth lumbar."
Ida redefines the pelvic floor away from the muscular shorthand of the anatomy textbooks.
The fourth, fifth, and sixth hours as the floor-horizontalizing arc
Within the floor-horizontalizing arc, Ida taught a specific order of approach. The fourth hour comes at the floor from the inside of the leg, lengthening the adductors and establishing structural uplift along the medial line. The third hour, just before, has already established the outside of the leg as a guideline through the side-body work. By the fourth hour the practitioner has both lateral and medial lines below the basin and can begin to lift it from below. Ida's teaching was that the order is not arbitrary — sequence determines what becomes available.
"But what I'm trying to bring out here is that in order for to really get the the floor of the pelvis organized, you have to approach it from a sort of triangular set of premises. One of the first thing you've got to do is to get yourself a decent set of abductors to lengthen the inside of the leg, to lengthen the middle line of the body so that you have a decent set of abductors there to serve as structural uplift. Now see how from the first hour you have been trying to build structure under the pelvis. And you see in that first hour, down as far as the knees, you built from the outside, from the abductors, from the hamstrings, which is the back of the pelvis. In the second hour, you were only influencing the pelvis indirectly from what was below the knees, But you were influencing it. There's no doubt about that. In the third hour, you were very deliberately influencing it from the abductor structure, lengthening the outside of the leg so that when you got to the inside of the leg, you had a guideline established already. That's the fourth hour. Now you see you have the two sides of the leg taken care of, but you don't have anything relating the front and the back of that pelvis except what you did in terms of the back of the legs. Are you following this in your mind's with your mind's eye pencil, are you drawing this in? So you have to now look for what is it that is not that is failing to give you the horizontal pelvis that you're gunning for. How do you define a pelvis as being horizontal? Not you. You too? You might be able to answer this one. You want us to answer? The tubes in the second segment of the coccyx? That's right. And the underpants don't slant down. When the underpants don't slant down."
In the 1975 Boulder seventh-hour session, Ida walks the students through the triangular logic of the floor-horizontalizing hours.
The fifth hour, in Ida's teaching, is the moment where the practitioner reaches the psoas and through it the lumbar plexus. The work begins to affect not just structure but the autonomic organs sitting along the spine. By organizing the psoas, the practitioner is reaching with the hand into the lumbar plexus and altering what the plexus innervates — the abdominal organs, the diaphragm, the solar plexus, and through the diaphragm the position and behavior of the heart. The horizontal pelvis is now also a physiological event.
"And you're doing this through the ir relationship, is other thing own. Muscle, which is is really concerned with the horizontal organization of the pelvis. But primarily you are doing it by virtue of the fact that you are organizing the psoas. And in your organization of the psoas, you are almost reaching with your hand into the lumbar plexus and affecting the characteristics of the lumbar plexus, the inner the the structures which are innervated by the lumbar plexus. So that you see you get into all of that abdominal all those abdominal organs. You're also affecting the diaphragm. And through the diaphragm, the solar plexus. And through the diaphragm, the position of the heart. Mhmm. The behavior of the heart and the stress on the heart. And so in this fifth and fifth hour, you're working your way upward out of the pelvis into the structures whose well-being depends upon the positioning of the pelvis. And you see your fourth hour has taken on the positioning of the floor of the pelvis. And the fifth hour begins to turn it up in the front so that it has support under the abdominal organs. And your sixth hour, you are still working with the pelvis and balancing that basin."
Ida expands on what the fifth and sixth hours accomplish once the floor of the pelvis is being addressed in earnest.
The sixth hour completes the arc by reaching the rotators behind the sacrum — and through them the anterior surface of the sacrum, which Ida considered structurally the most consequential bone in the body. The rotators attach the sacrum to the femur; balancing them balances the sacrum on the basin. But the order matters: you cannot reach the rotators if the hamstrings are not yet resilient, and you cannot reach the sacrum from the inside if the coccyx is still askew. Ida demonstrated this in the 1975 Boulder class by having a student show himself why the sciatic-notch work would not let up until the coccyx was addressed first.
"And I said to myself, he's out of order, but let him alone, but see to it that he shoves this forward. Because what is it that allows the rotation of the pelvis around the head of the femur? The rotator. The rotator. The eminent. So this is our working up. The real goal of working up the back of the leg is to get under the Ruleus. That's right. That's right. And this then is going to be the first hour where we have some hope of getting at the anterior aspect of the sacrum by working externally with the insertion of the rotator which arises in it. That's right. And you see all of this once again is a positioning of the pelvis. Obturator will have the inside of the iliac, the ischial aspect of the iliac. But the whole thing then makes a brand new decision. We also worked on the outside of the sacrum or the posterior aspect of the sacrum. In some cases, freeing up the insertion of hoodies maximus in the fascia and the sacrotoxigeoloidal material true. Material Mhmm. Where where necessary. It is true. Then this hour again, we did a pelvic lift in the back of the neck for balance comfort. And And you observed? What was the milepost door on the way?"
Ida walks a student through the rotator logic of the sixth hour and what makes the anterior sacrum reachable from outside the body.
The coccyx as the determinant of the floor
Within the floor of the pelvis, Ida singled out the coccyx as the determining element. The coccyx is the back end of the floor; if it is pulled forward, the sacrum is on strain; if it is rotated sideways, the floor is askew with it. In the 1971–72 mystery tapes she pressed her students to see how the gluteal fascia wraps right up to the sacrum and the coccyx, and how the ligaments tying coccyx to sacrum to ischial tuberosity determine whether the floor can become horizontal at all. The fourth hour, in this account, is the hour where those ligaments must be reached — and it is, she conceded, a terrifying piece of work for junior practitioners.
"You can't horizontalize the floor because the coccyx is askew. And the coccyx determines the floor of the pelvis."
Ida names the coccyx as the structural determinant of the pelvic floor in the most compact form.
The work that follows from this insight is anatomically demanding. To reach the coccyx-sacrum-sacrotuberous ligament complex, the practitioner must go deep into the pelvic floor through the gluteal fascia. Ida did not minimize how difficult this was for newer practitioners — she acknowledged it as scary work that scared the client and scared the practitioner both. But she did not soften the requirement. Without those ligaments addressed, the basin would not sit on its bottom.
"that to get in there, you have to get to the ligaments that relate the coccyx, the sacrum, and the STI. Now this is a little bit of a terrifying business to you junior people. That's a terrible long way to be into a person. And it's a scary way. And they're scared. And you're scared. And everybody's scared. It's the only way you'll ever get that body organized."
Ida addresses the junior practitioners in the room about the depth of the work the floor of the pelvis requires.
Where the coccyx is rotated as well as displaced — pulled to one side, tipped, tied up unevenly by the ligamentous attachments — the floor of the pelvis is rotated with it. Ida's teaching in the 1973 Big Sur class addressed this directly, working on the ropes on either side of the coccyx that position it in the center of the pelvis. The practitioner who attends only to the bony rim will miss this. The practitioner who has trained the imagination on the floor will not.
"The coccyx is the end here and they can also be pulled over to one side or the other and it's all, if it goes one way or the other it's rotated also. It's tied up with tendons but frequently one tendon will be shorter than the other. You can actually go in there and get that coccyx to sit on there a lot straighter if you go in here and work them soft as you're around it."
In the 1973 Big Sur class, the discussion turns to the coccyx and how its rotation distorts the floor of the pelvis.
How to measure a horizontal pelvis
For most of Ida's career, 'horizontal' was a word she used confidently without a measurement to back it. The eye trained on bodies recognized horizontality; the hands recognized it; but no objective index existed. This changed on a single day in the early 1970s, when Ida and a group of senior practitioners — Peter Melchior and John Lodge among them — set themselves to measure what horizontality actually meant in the pelvis. Ida treated that day as a turning point. Until then the work had rested on perception; afterward it rested on a measurable line.
" How do you define a pelvis as being horizontal? Not you. You too? You might be able to answer this one. You want us to answer? Yes. The tubes in the second segment of the coccyx? That's right. And the underpants"
Ida walks the students through the measurement criterion her senior colleagues had worked out.
The line from the second segment of the coccyx to the back of the pubes became, for Ida and her circle, the working definition of pelvic horizontality. The 1976 advanced class returned to this measurement repeatedly. Ida recounted the day the criterion was discovered as a thrill — the moment when a doctrine that had been carried on perception became a fact that could be looked at. She also acknowledged the limits: the work had never had the funding or the institutional access to follow the measurement into a full study of what horizontality changed in blood chemistry, physiology, or psychology. The criterion existed; the larger investigation had not been done.
"And if you want to add to your livingness, the first thing you've got to do is to add to the ease of the pelvis and the pelvic contents. And you accomplish this by horizontalizing that pelvis. Is Peter in this room? Yeah? Peter was the only one I know of in this room who was present on a most significant day when I got the notion that we had to see how we could measure horizontality in the pelvis. And Peter and John Lodge and a few more of the old hands got busy looking at how you measured the horizontality of pelvis and lo and behold, they found something very significant. They found that the second that the coccyx the second segment of the coccyx in the horizontal pelvis was horizontal with the back posterior aspect Now this put Ralphie.
In the 1976 Boulder class, Ida recounts the day she and Peter Melchior worked out how to measure pelvic horizontality.
What the measurement also did was give Ida a way to talk about the horizontal pelvis as a structural achievement that affected physiology directly. By the time the pelvis is on plane, she taught, the strain on the pelvic contents has begun to ease — and the pelvic contents include not only the reproductive organs but the hormonal system that contributes to lifelong vitality. This is what Ida meant when she said the work was about livingness, not reproduction. The horizontal pelvis is the structural condition under which the body's vitality is unimpeded.
Why horizontalize — the physiology of a flat basin
Ida's claim was never that horizontality was an aesthetic preference. It was a physiological necessity. A pelvis on plane is a pelvis whose contents are unstrained; a pelvis askew is a pelvis whose autonomic plexi, abdominal organs, diaphragm, and hormonal structures are all working against a structural background that drains energy from them. The horizontal pelvis, in her account, was the structural condition of unimpeded function — not a posture but a precondition for everything the pelvic contents are supposed to do.
"So don't go off half cocked on this, but do go off thinking about how these innards drop to where they drop, how you can hope or expect or approach the problem of correctness. You see, by the time you get a horizontal pelvis, you're on your way to removing the strain from the contents of the pelts. This is one of the things that it's about. Now what goes on in that reproductive system? Simply reproduction? Not on your life. The livingness of the being goes on in the pelvic area. How? Through hormonal secretion and control. And the hormones, the sex hormones, which the ordinary person thinks of as having to do with physical reproduction of a human being has that to do with this is a very small, limited in time part of their job. Their job is to contribute vitality to the human being for the rest of his life or her life. Now this is what it's about. This is where it lives. This is where it grows. So don't get any simplification and these simplified notions as to what a pelvis is about. It's not simply the carrying of a child or the creation of a child, etcetera, etcetera. It is your livingness that depends on your pelvis. And if you want to add to your livingness, the first thing you've got to do is to add to the ease of the pelvis and the pelvic contents."
In the 1976 Boulder class, Ida names the physiological stakes of the horizontal pelvis.
The relationship to gravity is the other half of the physiology. A pelvis on plane permits gravity to act as support; a pelvis askew permits gravity to act as load. Ida had absorbed this teaching from her time around physics in Zurich and the Rockefeller Institute — the body as a system in a gravitational field, whose orientation to that field determines whether the field supports or drains it. The horizontal pelvis is the orientation that turns gravity into a structural ally.
"We know that logically in body mechanics, we can expect that the vertical lines of that force manifesting as the gravitational field can either support and reinforce a body, or it can disorganize it and presumably passing by presumably passing through and being part of it, it can destroy and minimize the energy fields surrounding it. 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."
In a 1974 Healing Arts lecture, Ida names the gravitational logic of the horizontal pelvis.
Rotation around the head of the femur
Mechanically, the act of bringing the pelvis to horizontal is the act of rotating it around the heads of the femur. The earth cannot rotate; the leg's connection to the earth at the foot is fixed; the only joint at which the basin can turn is the hip joint. This is why Ida insisted that the fourth, fifth, and sixth hours are not really about the rotators or the adductors or the psoas as such — they are about removing every restriction that prevents the pelvis from turning around the hip joint. The hamstrings, the adductors, the fascia lata, the rotators all converge on this one mechanical fact.
"In order to horizontalize the pelvis, you have to turn it around something. You can't turn the earth. You have to turn the pelvis. So you have to rotate it around something. You have to rotate it around the hip joint. And that hip joint is tied in in terms of the way the guy has been using himself and his pelvis and his legs just as much as the thorax was tied in. So what you have to do is to go to the strings that tie into that hip joint or and or cross them. You have the stuff that goes into the anterior superior spine. They don't tie into the hip joint, but it crosses it. And you have to order that in such a way that the new relation allows the kind of expansion extension which is going to make the rotation of the hip joint, the rotation of the pelvis around the legs possible because you realize that the other end of the leg is the foot, and my foot has to be horizontal. It's only Fred Astaire that can walk up a wall. You have to walk on a horizontal surface."
In the 1975 Boulder third-hour discussion, Ida lays out the mechanical logic of pelvic horizontalization as rotation around the hip joint.
The mechanical clarity here is what makes the recipe coherent. Each hour can be read as a strategy for releasing a specific set of restrictions on rotation. The first hour frees the superficial fascia around the hip joint; the second adds support below the knee so the rotation has a ground to push against; the third lengthens the side body so the lateral fascial pull does not resist the rotation; the fourth releases the medial restrictions; the fifth reaches the psoas, which when contracted holds the basin in anterior rotation; the sixth addresses the rotators themselves. Every hour, read this way, is the same hour from a different angle.
Ten hours, one basin
By the late stages of the recipe — the seventh through tenth hours — the basin has been approached from every direction the body permits. What remains is integration: organizing the relationships that have been opened so that they hold. Ida treated the late hours as integration hours, not as new vectors of attack on the pelvis. The horizontalizing work has been done; what is left is to make sure the new structural relationships are continuous up the spine, through the rib cage, into the cervicals, and out through the head.
"One thing I see almost with every hour is you're through with the hour with the majority of people and there's a real sense of non connection between the head and the pelvis. If you look at them right after the hour, you know, say it's a third hour or fourth hour, the sides are long, they look good, but somehow the pelvis and the head doesn't connect. And the pelvic lift and the network is what the body needs. Is what connects the knee. Right. There's something else too. Like in thinking from say, first hour through, the work on the back not only lets you organize the back and complete the inhaler, bringing integration to the spine, but also what I'm beginning to see is like how you feed into what's coming up. Like how you feed in preparing for the second hour and doing the back work on the first hour and how particularly in the second hour, how by grabbing hold of that latissimus tendon, the edge of it and bringing in that you're beginning to open up the doorway to the quadratus and how when you're doing that, that"
In the late-recipe discussion, senior practitioners describe what the integration hours are for.
Ida's late-career emphasis, her senior students noted in the 1975 Boulder class, had shifted away from the pelvis-as-such and toward the lumbar fascia and the lumbodorsal hinge — not because the pelvis mattered less but because she had seen that students who heard the doctrine only as 'horizontalize the pelvis' missed the role of the lumbars in keeping the basin on plane. The recipe was being refined in real time, the emphasis tilting toward the structures that hold the achieved horizontality in place.
"Each hour is one more step along that spectrum of realigning the pelvis so that it can do its thing. It's actually more than the pelvis, as we see Ida's putting more and more emphasis on the lumbars and the lumbodorsal hinge and so forth. The reason she's doing that is because in her integration of the educational process, she has seen that by just talking about the pelvis and not possibly reemphasizing the importance of those large lumbars, that people tend to forget that."
A senior practitioner notes the late-career shift in Ida's emphasis toward the lumbars and the lumbodorsal hinge.
The first hour as the beginning of the tenth
Perhaps the most quoted single line of late-career doctrine in the 1975 Boulder class was the one a senior practitioner spoke and Ida accepted without correction: the first hour is the beginning of the tenth hour. The recipe is not a sequence of discrete goals but a single continuous gesture broken into ten manageable pieces. Every later hour continues what the first opens; every earlier hour prepares what the next will reach. The horizontal pelvis is the destination, and every step of the journey is the same journey.
"So so see this for what it is, that whole first hour that seems so big and seems so complicated, is really simply one thing, a loosening and all energizing and therefore an organizing of the fascia that invests trunk. This is what it it amounts amounts to. To. And this is what makes it a one simple lifeblood. Okay. So what happens next? I'm having free the superficial fascia out in the trunk, both both thorax, upper part and the part that are connected to the pelvis through the legs and the large muscles posteriorly. The goal of the hour has been to reach the pelvis and do a pelvic lift to begin the the leveling of the pelvis. And I'm not sure if there's a why or what the significance is, but it seems to me that we did the neck after the pelvic lift, and I don't know whether that's just for kind of comfort and balance. Yeah. It's for comfort and balance. You can't go around holding your head out this way for an indefinite period. Uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable. I see it. It's inefficient. It isn't beautiful, and it's not good advertising."
A senior practitioner walks through what the first-hour work amounts to and why the pelvic lift at the end is more than an integration move.
Ida's own framing in the 1975 Boulder class was even more direct. The first hour's work below the head of the femur, the freeing of the legs from the pelvis, the pelvic lift — all of it is the basin's first taste of alignment. Not yet horizontal, not yet complete, but oriented toward the goal. The remainder of the ten hours is the elaboration of what the first hour begins.
"In order that we then can go directly to the pelvis and give it its first taste of alignment, which is the pelvic lift that you saw going on yesterday. I'd like you to expand on the word alignment there. It's first taste of alignment. First taste of alignment. Mean? Alignment by alignment, I mean, not only giving it as much horizontality as we can at this point, also alignment by dropping the lumbar spine back as much as possible in this first hour so that the lumbar begins to take up its job of weight bearing, which in many people has lost because of its anterior displacement. So I see alignment not only on the horizontal, but also letting the lumbers drop back in place so that they can begin to do their work and then free up other misalignments. Well, you see you're once again into the into the relation business, the importance of relationship. You can't get horizontality except as it's related to a verticality. So the lumbers have to go back. The lumbers have to go back."
In the RolfB1 public lecture, Ida and a colleague work out together what 'alignment' means in the context of the first hour.
Coda: the basin as the bowl level on the stove
Ida's favored homely image for the horizontal pelvis was the bowl level on the stove. A bowl that tips will not hold soup; a basin that tips will not hold organs in unstrained relationship to gravity. The image is deliberately simple. It is meant to remain in the practitioner's imagination through every hour of the work, regardless of where the hands happen to be. The bowl must be level. Everything in the recipe — from the first superficial fascial lift of the thorax to the deep ligamentous work around the coccyx — is in service of getting the bowl level so that what sits in it can function.
"stove level. You gotta have the the bowl level on the stove. And when it's level, you can make nice soup in it and everything will come out groovy. That's the hero. You're a son of my own. I was just trying to be a boy. You're just coming along magnificent. Twice as good as the old lady. So in other words, pelvis has to be flat so that it can function as a basin. The pelvis has to be horizontal. Horizontal. As a unit, the pelvis has to be horizontal. Mhmm. I agree with that. So that's what we mean by proper alignment or a more satisfactory alignment. There are degrees of perfection attainable in any given series of hours and in any biologic system, perfection isn't possible, but we try and get as close as we can."
Ida and a colleague settle on the homely image of the bowl level on the stove as the working definition of pelvic horizontality.
See also: See also: the 1971–72 mystery-tape session on the relationship between the pelvic floor, the heads of the femur, and the rotators that cross from outside to inside the pelvis — an extended discussion of the floor's anatomical structure that supplements the doctrine here. IPRVital1 ▸72MYS191 ▸
See also: See also: a 1976 advanced-class discussion of how the discovery of the second-segment-of-coccyx-to-pubes measurement opened the possibility of objective study of structural horizontality and what it changes in blood chemistry, physiology, and psychology — work Ida regretted never having had the resources to pursue. 76ADV102 ▸
See also: See also: the 1975 Boulder third-hour session in which Ida insists that the horizontalizing work in the back is not separate from the work on the hip joint — both are about rotating the pelvis around its mechanical axis. T3SB ▸T3SA ▸
See also: See also: a 1976 Boulder advanced-class session in which senior practitioners walk hour by hour through how the pelvis is freed from above and below across the early recipe — the second-hour back work, the lengthening along the front and back, and the way the shift of weight through the inside of the body prepares the basin for the deeper floor work that follows. 76ADV91 ▸