What the client feels: warming, melting, release
The first evidence of change is sensory and immediate. In her 1974 Open Universe demonstration, with a client on the table and an audience watching, Ida is asked the most direct possible question: what is actually happening, physiologically, between the layers of fascia under the practitioner's hands? She declines the theoretical answer and gives the phenomenological one. The practitioner does not know what the molecules are doing; she knows what the tissue feels like, and what the client reports. The classroom in this passage is unusually informal — Ida is narrating a session in progress — and her vocabulary slips into the first person of someone reporting an experience rather than asserting a doctrine. The teaching beat is that the change is observable before it is explainable: something stuck becomes warm; something warm starts moving.
"oftentimes there's a warming, like a melting feeling that the place that was stuck or the place that wasn't moving, all of a sudden it gets warm and starts moving. That's my point. You're moving something. They get stuck partially by hardening or there's a fluid substance that seems like that has been hardened and isn't reabsorbed in the flesh."
Ida narrates what she and the client perceive when the tissue begins to yield:
The mechanism Ida names here — fluid that hardened at the time of injury and was never reabsorbed — is the practitioner's working hypothesis. She is not claiming to have proved it. She is reporting what the tissue tells her hands and what her clients report back. The colleague in the room then builds the connection between this local stuckness and the body's larger struggle with gravity, framing fascia as the system that distributes stress so that no single point is overloaded. This is the move that links the felt phenomenon to Ida's larger structural argument: the warming under the hands is not a curiosity but the beginning of a redistribution of how the body bears its own weight.
"And the fascial system is the way of distributing stress from those points. And so, as doctor Rolf said in the first talk, there's really no cause, one to one cause with the pattern. It's an accumulation of person to the pattern that they presently have."
Speaking immediately after Ida, the colleague reframes the warming and melting as a feature of how fascia distributes stress:
Why fascia can change at all: the least-differentiated cell
If fascia can be reorganized by a practitioner's hands, then something about fascia must be unusual. In the 1973 Big Sur advanced class Ida and her colleagues build the embryological argument for why this is so. All the structural tissues of the body — bone, muscle, fascia — derive from the same germ layer, the mesoderm. As the embryo develops, those cells specialize: some become bone under pressure, some become muscle under stretching. But the fascial cells, in this telling, stop short of full specialization. They remain primitive, and therefore labile. They retain a potential the more committed tissues have given up. This is the embryological basis for Ida's claim that fascia is workable in a way the rest of the body is not.
" Now as these cells become more and more specialized and as the embryo develops, there is one cell which stops at a certain level of differentiation and just becomes faster. Fracture is the connective And this is significant that fascia, the connective tissue cells are the least differentiated"
Walking through the embryology of connective tissue:
The same lecture extends this point: the cell that generates fascia is also the matrix in which many other cells of the body live, including the cells responsible for the body's immune response and its self-healing. Working on fascia, in this view, is not a narrowly structural intervention. It is an intervention on the medium in which a much wider biological life takes place. Fluids traverse fascial planes; infections migrate along them; the system is also, in Ida's framing, a pathway for electrical and ionic communication. The plasticity of fascia, in other words, is not only about whether a posture can change — it is about whether the body's whole inner environment can shift.
"But you are also dealing with a very delicate and sensitive environment in which other cells that don't have a direct structural significance live and which can be strongly and powerfully influenced by the manipulation of the fracture. For example, it is common knowledge that often times infections will migrate along the fracture planes. Fluids traverse along the planes. And when Ida talks about the body being basically an electrical something, it is also along fascial planes that these ions need and electrical charges are transmitting. So that you begin to get a feeling that it is literally another system of communication in the body. There is a way of organizing the body. For this we have the nervous system."
On the implication of fascia's continuity for systemic change:
The colloid and the addition of energy
In the 1974 Healing Arts lecture series Ida gives her most fully worked-out account of how fascia changes chemically. The substance of fascia is collagen, and collagen is a colloid. Colloids — Ida reaches here, as she often does, for the gelatin in the refrigerator — change state with the addition or subtraction of energy. Heat the half-set pan and it liquefies; chill it and it gels. The body is a colloid machine, and the practitioner's pressure is the energy added. This is the moment in Ida's teaching where the mechanism of change is named in its most precise form: structural reorganization is a phase change in a protein. The body that resists getting out of bed in the morning is not, in her telling, old — it is a body whose colloid has had too much energy subtracted from it.
"Collagen is a colloid and as are all large molecules of protein molecules of protein. Colloids have certain qualities in common. An outstanding one is that by the addition of energy, they become more fluid, more resilient. You remember that half set pan of gelatin in water? And water, it's gelled. You set it back on the stove, you turn up the light, and lo and behold, it liquefies. You take it off the stove, you set it in the fridge, and lo and behold, it solidifies. These this is a generalized quality of colloids and it is a generalized quality of the connected connective tissue of the body. Add energy to it and it becomes more fluid, more sol. Subtract energy and it becomes more dense, more solid, a gel. And as I said before, what do we mean by energy? In the case of the jello, we're talking about heat. In the case of the body, we may be talking about heat. Remember how different your flesh feels to your fingers in the very hot weather?"
Ida lays out the colloid argument:
Ida then takes the next step. The colloid model is not just about consistency — fluid versus solid — but about chemical substitution at the molecular level. The collagen molecule is a triple braid, and the bonds that hold the three strands together can host different minerals: hydrogen, sodium, calcium. As a body ages, in Ida's account, more calcium and less hydrogen sit in those bonds, and the tissue gets stiffer. The addition of energy by the practitioner's pressure can shift this ratio back. This is one of Ida's strongest claims about long-term fascial change: that what is called aging is partly a chemistry that can be reversed, locally, by the right kind of mechanical input.
"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."
On the chemistry of the collagen bond and what the practitioner's pressure changes:
The colloid framing also reorganizes what aging is supposed to mean. In a 1974 Open Universe demonstration Ida explicitly rejects the standard story of the morning-stiff back as evidence of inevitable decline. She reframes the experience as a colloid in a state that has had too much energy removed from it — and therefore as a state that the right intervention can change. The teaching beat is not denial of aging but a refusal to accept stiffening as a one-way street. The change-over-time of fascia, in her telling, runs in both directions; the question is which direction the body is being pushed.
"now in the gel state. And in his mind, he's going over the fact that you take energy away from the sol, and you get a gel. You add energy to the gel, and you get a sol. Now, listen to what that is saying to you. It is saying that if somebody can add energy to those colloids which have become much too much of a soul. Oh, how I hate to get up in the morning, my back bothers me, I can't straighten up, I go around so slowly, I must be getting old. Well, the next time you want to try that song, try it to a different tune. Try telling yourself that 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."
Reframing morning stiffness as a sol-gel problem:
Change within a single hour: layers and depth
The colloid argument runs at the molecular level; the practitioner's day-to-day experience runs at the level of tissue under the hands. In her 1976 Boulder advanced class Ida and her colleagues — working from Jim Asher's careful photographs of layered dissections — walk through what change actually looks like in the first hour. The skin gives way to a tough subdermal layer, then to a softer layer, then to the fascia immediately investing the muscle. Each layer has a different texture, and each requires its own touch. The teaching beat is that even a single hour is itself a progression: the practitioner is moving the tissue not all at once but layer by layer, and the change registers differently at each depth.
"But this was a, actually this was Jim Asher's creation of getting the concept of the layers of fascia down starting with the external skin. This was a 43 year old male of the cadaver. This was the external skin I think were taken somewhere in the back, somewhere up in here, in the latissimus dorsi region. So that we have then the skin here then immediately what we did was to peel just the skin back. This is leaving probably partly dermis. This is the same thing here, these two. And so that this is the kind of tissue which you see is, it has some fat in it but it's a very tough tissue in terms of texture. It is not a giving easy tissue to work with. Then we sort of artificially went down another layer so this is what we saw still in just the layer below that. Now these are a matter of probably a millimeter that we're taking. It's a very thin area. Then we took this off so we go down to this region. Now this is all what we call superficial fascia according to the classical definition. And then we're down to the fascia that is immediately over the muscle itself which we call the deep fascia or I started to call the deep, the superficial deep fascia which is something we have to do about terms. So it's really in a sense a cross section of the skin, the kinds of things that we're working through. Now these few slides are mainly to give you an idea of different kinds of fascia and that we have layers of fascia or fascia sheaths which I feel are due to the concept is the tough sheaths are due to improper use of the body."
Asher narrates the layered dissection of fascia:
Asher's framing in the same class adds the developmental dimension. The tough sheets the practitioner encounters between muscle layers are not, in his reading, the natural state of fascia. They are the product of use: a body that has been holding itself wrongly for decades lays down denser, more stuck sheets. The healthy ideal is a relatively soft connective-tissue bed, not the thick parallel sheaths most adult bodies present. This reframes the long-term work of structural integration as restoring fascia toward an earlier, less consolidated state — undoing the accumulated record of misuse.
"But this is the heavy band that ties the trapezius to the edge of the scapula. Obviously then rhomboids underneath are not much. I agree that the sheets, I think I can do it in less than ten minutes, at least as far as I can go right now, is that the sheets that are happening, the straps, the thicknesses, the whatever, are not only going around the body but are going deep into the body at all different ways. So that in the process of working on superficial fascia you're doing some very deep work because it's, or it may be the lack of, a better tone or something like that. We're starting to get a looser In the process of the first hour, number one I said we're getting to the joints and we're still dealing with a superficial fashion. So that we are starting working at the joints and the fact that the joints back here as well. But that we are working in terms of levels of where those joints or how those joints are tied down and this would be the first area that they're tied down is on the surface. And that we cannot go freeing them by digging deep, say into the axillary region or deep into the hip joint until we've got the looser stuff. It's a kind of tone or a bed in which these kinds of movements can happen."
On working through fascial layers in the first hour:
Change across the recipe: the ten-session arc
The colloid argument explains why fascia can change at all; the layered dissection explains what changes in a single hour. The ten-session series is where these compress into a sustained arc. In the 1974 Healing Arts lectures Ida names the arc explicitly. The first balance achieved in a series is static — a stacking of segments around the vertical. But as the work goes on, the body incorporates more order, and the balance ceases to be static. It becomes dynamic. This is, for Ida, the most important single description of what changes across ten hours: the body does not just hold its new shape; it begins to move from a different organizing principle.
"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."
Ida describes the arc from static to dynamic balance:
Within the demonstration of the 1974 Open Universe class, Ida watches this arc unfold visibly. Random people coming in for the work move with their muscles bunched together as a single mass. Differentiation has been lost; the body operates from the surface and from gross groupings. As the series proceeds, the muscles begin to do their own work — to act as individual units rather than as one big glob. Movement begins to come from deep in the body as well as from the surface. The teaching beat is that change across the recipe is not just postural; it is a recovery of differentiation, of muscles becoming themselves again.
"And then as you watch as the rofting goes on, you see that the muscles start doing their own work instead of being grouped all in one big glob. And then you get movement which comes from deep in the body as well as on the surface."
On the differentiation that emerges across the series:
The second hour, on the legs, is where the series enacts its commitment to long-term change at the foundation. In the 1975 Boulder class one of the senior practitioners — invoking Michael Salveson's image of the fascial tube running from cervicals to ankles — works out why one cannot leave the legs unfinished even if the upper body looks transformed. Every horizontal achieved below echoes upward; the rib cage absorbs what the leg releases. The change one is producing is not a sequence of local corrections but the rearrangement of a single continuous tissue. Energy released in tension at the ankle travels into the spine.
"Well yesterday someone, I don't know who said it to me, it's Michael Salison's concept of the fascial tube which starts in the cervicals and goes in the second hour when you start working on the ankles you're heading vertically again. Know that each horizontal that you bring out down below reflects itself upward as we saw in Takashi yesterday where he's working on his leg and you can see his rib cage absorbing the change. I mean this, when the tissue is in tension, that's stored energy that you release into the body. And its energy is not a metaphysical something. These molecules are aligned in a particular way. You change their alignment. The change spreads."
Invoking Michael Salveson's image of the fascial tube:
From plasticity to verticality: why change is possible in this medium
Ida's argument for change-over-time is grounded in a single physical claim about the body as a substance. In the 1974 Healing Arts lectures she names it directly: the body is a plastic medium. By this she does not mean infinitely malleable. She means a substance that can be distorted by pressure and then brought back to shape, provided its elasticity has not been exceeded. The key reframing is what 'back to shape' means in this context. It does not mean the shape the body had a moment ago, or the shape it had at twenty. It means vertical — aligned with the gravitational line of the earth, which is the only relationship in which the body can be nourished by gravity rather than depleted by it.
"body is a plastic medium, and you're going to hear that several times before we get out of here today. Now, we are ready to define rolfing structural integration. It is a system of organizing the body so that it is substantially vertical, substantially balanced around a vertical in order to allow the body to accept support from the gravitational energy. Two characteristic qualities of the body make this unlikely situation possible. The material body of man is a plastic medium, as I just told you. Now by dictionary definition, a plastic substance is one which can be distorted by pressure and then can, by suitable means, be brought back to shape, providing that its elasticity has not been exceeded. Now the question is, what is back to shape in this context really mean? And the answer is simple and really expected. 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."
Ida defines the plastic medium and what it returns toward:
In her 1973 Big Sur teaching Ida adds the qualification that makes the plasticity claim historically honest. The same plasticity that allows the practitioner to change a body for the better also explains how the body could have become disordered in the first place — and how an unskilled practitioner could make it worse. The fact that fascia can be modified, in either direction, is the same fact in both cases. This is one of the moments where Ida is most candid about the responsibility the practitioner takes on. The medium that allows the work to succeed is the same medium that allows it to fail.
"The fact that fascia of the body can be changed is what allows it to become aberrative in the first place. And possibility of changing it allows you to step in and change it for the worse, for the better."
On the two-edged nature of fascial plasticity:
The same Big Sur lecture introduces a phrase that becomes central to Ida's later thinking: that fascia is an extrinsic fuel, outside the central nervous system, through which the body's functioning can be reorganized. The image is of a circuit that travels round and round, in which organization at one place organizes — or disorganizes — at another. This is how change accumulates: not as a sequence of separate corrections, but as the propagation of order around a closed loop. The reason a single piece of work has long-term effects is that the body is not a sum of parts but a circulating whole.
"It is that extrinsic fuel to which it is outside the central nervous system. Well now, my understanding was a very good Now this is a message which I hope gets across except that you understand what the pattern is like when the pattern is doing the right thing."
Naming fascia as the extrinsic fuel and the message of the work:
The plasticity that aging is supposed to prevent
Ida is interested in aging because the language of aging is precisely the language that says fascia cannot change. In a 1974 advanced-class exchange — recorded on the RolfA1 public tape — one of the senior practitioners makes the connection explicit. The most significant changes in aging, in this view, occur in connective tissue. If aging is largely a story of accumulated stress in the mesodermal layer, then a body whose connective tissue has been reorganized is, in a defensible sense, younger than the calendar says. The teaching beat is that change-over-time runs in both directions and that the practitioner's work intervenes on the same tissue that age intervenes on.
"If you start getting in that one structure begins to be another structure, muscle changes into fascia or fascia change in the cartilage, then I think you're giving me an area that's a little bit harder to defend, who you might might be. But you say this makes the breathing better, makes the circulation better. I think you could defend that. 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."
On connective tissue, aging, and the bifurcation points of stress:
In the 1973 Big Sur weeks Ida pushes the symmetry further. The same medium that ages can be reorganized — and the rotators of the pelvis, she insists, are one of the few places where the practitioner's finger can reach all the way to the innermost lining of the sacrum. Long-term change in fascia is partly a matter of which structures the practitioner can actually reach, and over the years she comes to see the rotators as a singular point of access. The passage matters here because it shows Ida thinking about change-over-time anatomically as well as chemically: certain fascial tissues afford the practitioner a depth of access that others do not, and that depth is what allows accumulated misuse to be undone.
"And the rotators are of this degree of importance because they are the only group and there's only one member of that group really that fits in what I'm saying. Two members maybe. They are the only structures in the body where you can put your finger on the outside and the other end of your finger so to speak goes on to the basic basic inside the lining of the sacrum. There is no other muscle that you can get hold of in these hot little hands where you can do this. And so, therefore, the lower the lowest part of that spinal structure, the a basic part of the pelvic structure, you can directly influence through those rotators. And this literally a gift of God. Pure velvet. Had no business to expect it. But you can do it, and in doing it, you see you organize them. And the cox necessarily the coccyx because whatever you do in the sacrum is gonna be reflected in the coccyx."
On the rotators as the rare place where the practitioner can reach the deepest fascial attachments:
Change in the practitioner's hands over time
Fascia changes in the client; it also changes in what the practitioner can perceive. In the 1975 Boulder advanced class Ida turns the question on her senior students themselves. The advanced class is where they stop following the recipe and start working in terms of fascial planes — and the prerequisite for this is that their hands have to have changed. In an end-of-class round, Pat says her fingers do not yet have enough information; Chuck reports being able to go deeper with less effort; Joe reports that his clients have started to talk to him about relationships rather than symptoms. The teaching beat is that the practitioner is part of the change-over-time the work is about, and that competence with fascial planes is itself a long-term acquisition.
"But I'm finding or the thing that I wanna learn in my that I'm trying to learn now is how to really move those fascial planes, and I really recognize that my fingers just simply do not have enough knowledge. And that's Is it knowledge or is it strength? Well, but they don't have enough strength at times. At other times, it's just simply not enough information. I'm not clear yet about what they're telling And so that's that's what I'm trying to deal with. So, Chuck, what's coming up in your life? Well, I've noticed in the last six weeks, I've been able to go a lot deeper with less effort. Don't have to so much Is it that your less effort is less fear? No, think it's less effort. I also the word when you used clarity fits too."
Pat, Chuck and Joe reflect on what has changed in their work:
In the same 1975 class Ida frames the developmental difference between elementary and advanced work in exactly these terms. In the random body that walks in off the street, fascial planes are not available to perception at all. Their pulls and heavings disguise them. The first ten hours are what makes the planes perceptible — only after that work has produced its own order can the practitioner see and think in terms of planes. The advanced class, in this telling, is not more recipe but a different mode of perception, available only because earlier work has changed both the client's tissue and the practitioner's hands.
"I said that the advance work was a study of facial claims, was a study of sexual relationships, that the elementary work was only making these relationships possible. But wherever it was that I did do this talking, oh, I remember it now. You see, you are not able to go into the random body as it comes off the street and go into the fashion plane. They just seem to be not there. It's not that they're not there, but it it is that their pullings and heaving and falling disguise them. You can't go in and feel them. You can go in and feel tendons sometimes, but you cannot feel fascial flames. And your first ten hours, therefore, are creating the order within these planes which make it possible for you to see and think in terms of fashion planes. Now it doesn't make any difference how far back in my teaching you remember, you still remember that I have always said that in those last hours, you must spread your hands. You remember how I fought my way through that. You must spread your hands. You must remember that you are working with fashion. I've always said that."
On why fascial planes only become visible after the first ten hours:
The fascial plane as the unit of long-term change
If the advanced practitioner perceives fascial planes rather than muscles, then the unit of long-term change is the plane and its relationships. In the 1976 Boulder class one of the teachers presses on the terminology: it is misleading to speak only of myofascial tissue, because every organ has its fascia and the connective-tissue continuity extends well beyond muscle. The fascial planes, not the muscle units, determine the contour of the body. The wedge of connective tissue at the iliac crest is what shapes the buttock; the strap of fascia is what holds the position. This shifts the long-term object of the work decisively away from muscle and toward the continuous tissue that organizes everything.
"And you can see the pull here of the strap which is pulling that buttocks, really think I got some pictures of Why at this point to talk about useful or effective tissue versus mild fascial tissue, etcetera, etcetera? My preference now and I don't always do it because I've got to change my head on this is I prefer to call it connective tissue. I think we're in a lot less trouble if we do it. The problem is that first of all every organ has its fascia so we would have to say myofascial. We tend it from an eye tendon. When I talked about fascia is to think of the wrapping around muscle. Then I realized fascia is fascia around all the glands, there's fascia around all the organs and so forth. The myofascial I think is like a part of the fascia and as long as we consider it as only part that we're affecting more than that, that we are affecting as you've started to say, we are affecting the glandular system and it may be, it's easy to say that a beginning effect can be by affecting its fascia and affecting its circulation because indeed we have all the blood vessels in the fascia or in the connective tissue. So at this point I'm preferring to say connective tissue and then talk about the fascia, the myofascia as one part of it and I don't always get there. I mean as I get talking I don't know."
On why the contour of the body is determined by fascia, not muscle:
In the 1975 Boulder class Chuck offers a working image of how this continuity is organized for a beginner to think about. The body is, in effect, a bag — the flexible bag of superficial fascia — and the contents of the bag are organized by the connective-tissue planes within it. As protoplasm becomes more organized through evolution, the connective tissue is what does the organizing. This bag-and-contents image is the entry point for thinking about long-term fascial change: the contents do not reorganize themselves; the planes that hold them do.
"Okay, now you got the shopping bag. Right? Flexible bag. And in that bag, we're going across 42nd Street. 34th Street. 34th. 35th. And 7th Avenue. Okay. Now in that bag, you got a bunch of stuff. Let's put some brains in there, a heart, some bones. Throw in some glue. Okay? Now here's the key point. This is the bag with all this stuff in it, just like the body. What are you gonna do to organize that stuff? How are you gonna do it? Well, the fascial planes are the organizational material for the body. It's what I think. K. And if you look at it from an evolution standpoint, there's some massive protoplasm there. As that protoplasm gets more organized, in other words, higher structures come to be like a nervous system, the nervous system gets more organized. In other words, instead of a bunch of cells just floating around into this large massive protoplasm, the connective tissue organizes that into a system. Okay?"
Chuck offers the bag-and-contents image of fascial organization:
Chuck and his colleague in the same class also work out a microscopic image that links the colloid argument to the macroscopic plane. The collagen fibers in a healthy connective-tissue bed are arranged in interlocking diamonds. Plasticity at the macroscopic level — a fascial plane that changes shape when the leg moves — is the cumulative consequence of these microscopic geometries. When use distorts the diamonds, the fascial sheet stiffens; when energy is added, the diamonds reorganize, and the sheet recovers its shape-changing capacity. This is the mechanism by which a single session's local work can register as a long-term capability of the tissue.
"Now since this tissue has to have some plasticity, it's not solid like cement. It moves like when you move your leg, the fascial planes change shape. So what type of fiber arrangement does there have to be for that to happen? Well, here it is. If these are just you pin them there and you pull here, this diamond takes on a shape like that. So it extends. If you want to pull in this direction, you can extend in two directions now. So this is how the fascial planes change shape by having this diamond structure. Now you can extend this to three dimensions too. You have a thick mat. And in fact, one researcher made a computer program just this way. Put in some constants, you know, with his mathematical stuff. And he checked it out for the stress strain curve of his mathematical model based on these these mathematics to real tissue, and he found out they match. What? You want the to do this, but do have a reference there? We'll bring it in. We I've got You know, we were up to 02:00 last night getting this together."
Chuck describes the diamond-lattice geometry of fascial planes:
The same class extends the analysis to the joints, which Ida and her colleagues are coming to see as nothing other than specialized fascial structures themselves. The synovial membranes and the bursae, in Chuck's account, are continuous parts of the fascia. They come from the same embryological layer; they are part of the same continuity. When the knee opens in the tenth hour and the ligaments soften and admit circulation, what is changing is fascia in another of its forms. This widens the long-term claim once more: the change one tracks across years is not merely change in soft tissue but change in the very structures medicine treats as bone-end hardware.
"Here's that ligament running right from here to here. So that plane just, you know, kinda comes along here and says, There's a bone. Well, I'll talk to this, and I'll go down here too. So probably in the tenth hour when that knee's letting go, those ligaments are going, getting the circulation through them and softening, and that's what we're seeing when that knee starts opening. You're talking about the In this little ligament. Oh, okay. Just this picture of them here. Now those are, you know, directly continuous with the fascia point. There's, like, patellar retinaculum running from here or running from the patella down to here. Directly continues with the fascia planes. Even the books say that. You know, it's not something the ligament came off in the corner. So those ligaments are probably beginning to let go. I have a different viewpoint now which I'd like to bring in this time."
On the joints, synovial membranes, and bursae as continuous parts of fascia:
Change as a circular process
When Ida tries to describe the structure of fascial change to her senior students, she repeatedly returns to a single image: the circle. The change is not linear. Organization at one place organizes another; disorganization at one place disorganizes another; the loop closes back on itself. In the 1973 Big Sur class she presses her students to understand the circular nature of the whole grip — that one cannot work fascia in one direction only, because fascial modification is structural modification is closure modification is fascial modification again. The teaching beat is that change-over-time, in fascia, is not a sequence of corrections but a circulation.
"But it is also just as possible to change it for the worse if you shall know your business. Function way to teach. That fascial teaching can be modified. That in being modified it is modifying structure and that in modifying structure you modify closure. Now, a fascial tissue So what I'm trying to get you to look at and understand is the circular nature of this whole crib. The way it travels round and round and round and it of the way in which organization at one place organizes or disorganizes at one place. And that's what you were doing yesterday. You were organizing afterwards. In order that Because if a joint is not truly seated with its neighbor, it takes a great deal of your vital energy to get movement organized fashion works."
Ida insists on the circular nature of fascial change:
The circular framing also explains why Ida resists single-cause explanations for individual patterns. Patterns are accumulated, not caused; their resolution is similarly cumulative. In another passage from the same Big Sur week Ida widens the loop further. The fascial system houses the cells that respond to environmental stress; it is the medium for fluid drainage; it is a pathway for ionic communication. Long-term change in fascia is therefore long-term change in the conditions under which all those other systems operate. The recipe's work on contour, in this view, is also work on the body's capacity to heal, to drain, to communicate with itself.
"So that you begin to get a feeling that it is literally another system of communication in the body. There is a way of organizing the body. For this we have the nervous system. There is a circulatory system which is another way of providing information chemicals pass through the circulatory system and information gets delayed. You can look at the fascial system in a similar way. There is a fluid system in the fascia and you see this, we had a woman yesterday, we had, where you have fluid collected in the legs. And you can literally see that once those fascial planes unstuck from each other, that fluid starts to leave and that the mechanisms that are there for the removal of that fluid can start to work. It is through the fact that that happens. It is that extrinsic fuel to which it is outside the central nervous system."
On the fluid-drainage and communication functions that recover as fascia changes:
Another moment from the 1973 Big Sur week extends the same circular framing in a more pedagogical direction. Working out the first hour with a confused class, Ida walks through how each adjustment in the back propagates through what one can call the fascial tube — describing fascia as continuous throughout the body, its chemical properties changing under pressure, its wrappings of individual muscles joining along the line into the tough sheets that adhere to bone. The same insistence appears: this is not a sequence of separate corrections but a permitting of connection to travel through the entire body.
"Wait a minute Sharon, I think you need to put a more evocative metaphor in that. It envelops each muscle, but you see, it isn't apparent from that sentence that not only does it envelop each individual muscle but that these wrappings of individual muscles connect. It's like a section of an orange when you take it and cut it in half. Well it is. Yes. And the the membrane is tissue in between the pulp. Yes. It will give you an idea of what fascia is like in the body. Yes. Except the body fascia is much more comfortable than the orange fascia. And if you sometimes dissect a leg of lamb, left it or otherwise, you will see how the wrapping of the small individual muscles join somewhere along the line to make this tough stuff that then adheres to the bone. And It's not a simple thing that a child can draw, but it becomes a very complicated inter reading and interconnection. And this permits connection to travel through the entire body."
On the continuity of fascia through the entire body:
The dynamic balance and what it makes possible
The endpoint of the change Ida describes is not a posture but a relationship — the body's energy field in a different ratio to gravity. In the 1974 Healing Arts lectures Ida names this in her most ambitious register. As the body incorporates more order, the contour changes, the feeling of the body to searching hands changes, movement behavior changes, and the ratio of the body's own energy to the gravity field shifts. The change is not only structural but, in her language, entropic — the body that was running down begins to be capable of building up. This is the most maximalist version of Ida's claim about long-term change, and it is delivered with full awareness of how speculative it sounds.
"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. 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. Is this is this the work of that other energy, the one that does not manifest obedience to the law of inverse squares, the law that I've called psychic energy the stuff I've called psychic energy."
Ida ties fascial change to a reversal of the entropic deterioration of the body:
This is also the moment in Ida's teaching where structural integration is hardest to verify on standard measures. She is aware of this. In the 1974 RolfB3 talks one of the senior researchers attempts a thermodynamic framing — viscous elements in the connective-tissue network converted into elastic ones, joints freed to transfer energy rather than dissipate it, the body brought toward a resonance condition. The argument is offered partly to translate Ida's claim into a vocabulary scientific colleagues might recognize. Whether the translation succeeds is left open. What is clear is that the change Ida describes does not fit comfortably into any single existing measurement framework.
See also: See also: RolfB3 (public tape) — extended discussion of structural integration in the vocabulary of thermodynamics, energy flow, and resonance among joint modules; included as a pointer for readers interested in how Ida's colleagues attempted to translate her change-over-time claim into the language of physics. RolfB3Side1 ▸
Coda: change in both directions
Ida's account of how fascia changes over time is finally an account of a tissue that is always changing, in one direction or the other, and never resting. In the 1974 Healing Arts lecture the larger frame is named: this is terra incognita, and the work is exploring what changes in the fascial body of one person will translate into changes in the personality that calls itself the owner of that body. The territory has not been mapped. The colloid mechanics are sketched, the embryology is invoked, the diamond geometry is drawn on the board, but the integrated account is still being built. What Ida insists on is the basic phenomenon: pressure adds energy, energy changes the colloid, the changed colloid changes the relationship of the planes, and the changed relationship of the planes changes the person. This is the chain. It runs in both directions, and it never closes.
"I remember sending somebody who came to me as a student and I set them the question of I set them to answer the question, what is fascia? She decided that was lots of fun. She'd go to the library. She'd have the answer in no time. She went to the library. She spent two days in the library, and she couldn't find the answer. And this is indicative merely of the fact that we are going into an unknown territory, a terra incognita, and trying to find out what changes in that body are going to develop into what changes in the personality that calls itself the owner of that body. 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."
Ida names the territory of fascial change as still unmapped:
See also: See also: 1973 Big Sur 1973 — Tape 17 (SUR7332) — Ida on the body's options between building up and breaking down, on segmentation, and on the chemical quality of connective tissue as the basis for both directions of change; included as a pointer for readers interested in how Ida frames mankind's structural options. SUR7332 ▸
See also: See also: 1975 Boulder advanced class (B3T9SA, B3T9SB) — extended dissection-room conversations on collagen bundles, ligamentous structure, the deep superficial fascial strands, and what the practitioner is actually changing at the knee in the tenth hour; included as a pointer for readers interested in the microanatomy that underlies the long-term-change claim. B3T9SA ▸B3T9SB ▸
See also: See also: 1973 Big Sur advanced class (SUR7308) — Ida revisiting the unfinished first hour, the second hour's work on the legs, and the necessity of grateful lines for supporting structural change above; included as a pointer for readers interested in the recipe's own logic of accumulation. SUR7308 ▸
See also: See also: 1974 advanced class (RolfA5 public tape) — extended dialogue with Ida and colleagues on the absence of a fascial atlas comparable to the muscle atlas, and on why teaching the work depends on a vocabulary the culture does not yet have; included as a pointer for readers interested in the pedagogical consequences of fascia being undermapped. RolfA5Side2 ▸