The question itself
Ida did not arrive at the question *how human is the human* through philosophy. She arrived at it through bodies — through what she could see change in a room when a pelvis came horizontal and a head settled onto a spine. The doctrine she eventually issued was that verticality is not a posture but an evolutionary stage, and that the work could move a person toward a more fully human use of the body she had been given. In the 1976 Boulder advanced class she put this directly to her students: the standing human is not the problem, despite the medical schools teaching otherwise; the standing human is the goal not yet reached. The students in front of her were being asked to consider that their hands were doing more than relieving pain. They were participating, body by body, in the species' unfinished business.
"And you see what we are driving for is something below the level of consciousness where we say that if as we approach the vertical we are getting more human, then two tablespoonfuls of the same will give us more than one tablespoonful, which may not be true at all."
In the 1976 Boulder advanced class, pressing her students past the cultural assumption that bipedalism is humanity's structural mistake:
The framing is unusual and worth pausing on. Ida is not saying that humans should be vertical because verticality is dignified or aesthetic. She is saying that verticality is the physical signature of an evolutionary process still underway, and that the structural integrationist's hands are one of the instruments by which that process can be accelerated in an individual life. This shifts the entire register of the work. It is no longer therapy. It is, in her own phrase from the Big Sur tapes, a contribution toward the construction of a more nearly whole man — a creature the culture has not yet produced in any reliable numbers.
Norbert Wiener's phrase
Ida borrowed her motto from the cybernetician Norbert Wiener, whose 1950 book *The Human Use of Human Beings* she cited often in the IPR lectures. The phrase did work for her that her own vocabulary couldn't quite manage. It carried the implication that there were uses of human beings that were *not* fully human — uses that treated people as machines, as labor, as symptoms — and that the practice she had built was oriented toward the alternative. In the 1971 IPR address she announced this goal explicitly, naming the lineage and the ambition together. The students hearing this in the Esalen and IPR rooms of the early 1970s would have understood the phrase as a flag planted: the work was not about pain relief, not about better posture, not about flexibility. It was about producing a different kind of person.
"But bear in mind, our work is synthetic integration, a contribution toward knowledge and a creation of a wholeness and the understanding of how a man who is more nearly whole behaves. Now it is not merely the knowledge of anatomy or anatomical facts, not even facial anatomy and its facts. It is the voluntary creation of a man nearer to the goal signified by Norbert Weiner, and most of you have heard me say this before, a more human use of human beings. This is our goal, to create that kind of a man. And this goal I feel is mirrored, decidedly nearer than it was even a year ago."
In a 1971 IPR address, naming the goal in Wiener's terms and claiming visible progress toward it:
Wiener's framing also gave Ida cover for a claim that would otherwise have sounded grandiose: that a manual practice operating on connective tissue could affect the development of consciousness. Wiener had argued that information, control, and structure were the same problem viewed from different sides. If a human being was a self-organizing information system whose structure determined the patterns it could run, then changing structure was changing information, and changing information was changing what kind of being the person could be. The 1976 advanced students were asked to consider that this was what they were doing every time they put their elbow into a quadratus.
"Our goal is the building of a superior person. And in as much as practically no people in the culture today are anything except random people,"
Later in the Big Sur 1973 advanced class, refusing to soften the ambition:
Below the level of consciousness
One of Ida's most careful moves was to locate the human-emergence question below the level of conscious experience. The student on her table was not being asked to think more clearly or to want anything different. The change Ida claimed to produce operated underneath cognition, in what she called the structural relationship of the body's blocks to one another and to the gravitational field. This was important to her because it kept the work out of the territory of belief and exhortation. She had no interest in telling people to be better. She was interested in changing the substrate on which their behavior was running. The 1976 Boulder passage above — *something below the level of consciousness* — is the doctrine in its most compressed form. The vertical was a fact about how the body sat in space, and that fact, she argued, propagated upward into everything the person did, including what they thought.
"And the question becomes then as progress into our study of material, we are really looking for behavior patterns of material and what changes them. Now the behavior patterns that change a human are relatively easy to spot. They are inability of the various parts of that human to relate appropriately, to integrate, as we say. This is something which it takes us a while to see because we have been taught that a body is a body is a body is a body, this kind of notion has been going on down since the days of Aristotle. But we, the modern thinkers, say a body is not necessarily a body. A body is an aggregate, an aggregate of parts, and those parts, in order to properly function, in order to give you the best possible function, have to be related properly. And so we get to the place where we begin to see that structure, relationship, is something which we need to consider."
In the 1971 IPR address, distinguishing her use of *behavior* from the psychological use:
The move is consequential. By insisting that behavior in her sense was a property of material aggregates, Ida sidestepped the question of whether the students on her table were psychologically ready for the changes she was producing. She did not need their readiness. She needed their tissue. The connective tissue would do the work of carrying the new relationship into their daily life — into their gait, their breathing, their voice, their patience with their children — without their having to consciously adopt anything. This is what she meant by saying the work operated below the level of consciousness. It is also why she resisted the framing of Structural Integration as therapy.
The sensitivity question
If the work produced more human humans, the natural question was: more human in what way? Ida's answer, by the mid-1970s, was that the changes ran toward sensitivity. The integrated body was a more sensitive instrument — it picked up information from its environment that an unintegrated body simply did not register. Students reported they could no longer eat pork, no longer tolerate tobacco, were having what they described as psychic experiences. Ida noted these reports without endorsing or dismissing them. She used them to put a sharp question to her advanced students: was this the kind of human they were trying to produce? Did they want, in the culture they lived in, more sensitive bodies or tougher ones? The question is unusually candid. She is admitting that the choice has costs.
"These are things you've got to make up your mind about. Do you want to increase the sensitivity of the bodies, your or do you want to make tougher bodies, less sensitive, less"
In the 1976 Boulder advanced class, putting the choice to her senior students:
The candor matters. The 1970s alternative-health culture in which the work was embedded tended to assume that increased sensitivity was an unmitigated good. Ida refused that assumption. She had watched students become so sensitized that they could not function in ordinary settings, and she was not certain that the trade was always worth it. The trainees in front of her were being told: you are producing this. Take responsibility for what you are producing. The question — *how human is the human you are making?* — was not rhetorical.
Valerie Hunt and the energy field
Valerie Hunt, the UCLA physiologist who collaborated with Ida from the early 1970s onward, supplied a vocabulary for what Ida was claiming. Hunt's instruments measured what she called the energy field around the body, and she reported that this field expanded measurably after a ten-session series — from auras of half an inch to widths of four or five inches, and in the seventh and eighth sessions to widths of five feet. Hunt was a careful experimentalist; she preferred to measure than to speculate. But when she did speculate, she lined up with Ida on the central claim: that the work was moving the person toward what she called coherent energy, and that coherent energy was the physical correlate of what Ida meant by becoming more human.
"This is what Fritz Perls used to say about structural integration. He says, You just can't believe the insights I have had since I have been working with them. As a new technique, we know that we need validation, a fitting into conventional acceptances. One of our attempts at validation is going on in the laboratory of UCLA right now, and is stopping right now. And I think that later Doctor. Hunt may offer some of you the opportunities of being models in there, if you care to see her later on. This validation is going on under Doctor."
In the 1974 Healing Arts conference, narrating what she saw and measured during sessions:
The word *differentiates* is the key one. Hunt was not claiming that the integrated person became smarter or wiser. She was claiming the person became more articulated — that the parts of the experience could be distinguished from one another in a way they could not before. Confusion is undifferentiation. Sensitivity is differentiation. The more human use of the human being, in Hunt's reading of Ida, was a use in which the person could tell more things apart. This is what Ida meant by sensitivity, translated into a clinical observable.
"My tentative conclusions are that Rolfing has a profound effect upon human energy systems in the direction of negative entropy, The counteracting of entropy: there are at least two aspects of the energy systems brought into greater coherency, and the physicists describe coherency to us and state that coherent energy or energy, for example, that goes through a laser beam places energy in unified directions, in a single direction, and that very small quantities of coherent energy are equal to atomic bomb energy and very large quantities of incoherent energy or dissipated energy is like random trade winds. They may be pleasant if you don't do much with them. I think that one of our goals should be human coherent energy in our quest and not just more energy. We might even solve our food problems. If we had coherent energy, we wouldn't have to feed the fuel as often. It's my opinion that Doctor. Roth has envisioned really a rather tremendous concept about the human being toward man, toward his improvement, toward his evolution, and for me personally, she and the Roth Institute have made it possible for me to move into another area of research which I'm sure will be the area that I will stay in the rest of my professional life."
Concluding the 1974 Healing Arts presentation, summarizing what the energy measurements suggest:
The semantic transactor
At the UCLA Open Universe class in 1974, where Ida lectured alongside the general semanticist Bois and the psychologist Magda Proskauer, the question of what counts as human got its most systematic treatment. Proskauer and her colleagues had inherited the work of Alfred Korzybski, who in the 1930s had defined the human as a *semantic transactor* — an organism whose distinguishing feature was the ability to map symbols onto experience and to reflect on its own mapping. Korzybski's framework gave Ida's intuition a vocabulary. The human was not merely a vertical animal. The human was an animal capable of knowing that it knew. This self-reflexive capacity, Proskauer argued, was what separated humans from earlier stages of life — and it was precisely what the verticality of the body made possible.
"Because one of the great characteristics of being human is self reflexiveness. I know, I know that I know, and I know that I know. With a multi ordinal reflexiveness that can go up to any number, unlimited awareness."
In the Open Universe class of 1974, Proskauer explaining Korzybski's developmental ladder:
Proskauer's framework is the closest the corpus comes to a definition of humanness that is neither purely structural (Ida's verticality) nor purely energetic (Hunt's coherence). For Proskauer, becoming human is becoming recursive — capable of stepping back from one's own experience and noticing that one is having it. This capacity, she taught, is fragile and unevenly distributed. Many adults never develop past the *me cookie* stage; they simply name larger objects of desire. The work Ida was doing, in Proskauer's reading, gave the body the structural conditions under which recursive self-awareness could stabilize. A pelvis spilling forward, a head wedged onto a collapsed thorax, could not sustain the energetic cost of self-reflection. A vertical body could.
"This is not additive thinking. I remember I wrote making the punches. We are not talking about additive thinking. An animal with a brain or an animal who knows, or an animal who remembers and records and can speak. We are speaking of something more than. What do I mean by more than? Water is more than hydrogen and oxygen. It is structurally different. Humans are not animals plus reflexiveness. Humans can be seen as more than attempts to make some kind of up to date order or a model of a semantic transactor, which is what Waugh and Kurzepsie call a human. And these are a few of, because no board would be large enough to write down the theories, some theories, researchers, practices that relate to man, and here he's copious, man in the semantic transactive. This diagram was made by my loving hands about 10 years old. It needs to be rerun by somebody more professional. Here are only a few, and you can see them. They relate to something which I'll talk about in a moment."
Earlier in the same class, Proskauer presenting Korzybski's diagram of the semantic transactor:
The mind as machine
Werner Erhard, who attended Ida's classes in the early 1970s and who would soon found est, supplied the sharpest formulation of what Ida's work was up against. Erhard's framework, which he attributed partly to Ida and partly to his own teaching, was that the ordinary human is operating as a machine — running survival patterns recorded earlier in life, with what feels like thought serving mostly as justification for the patterns. The practitioner's job, in his reading, was not to fix the machine but to release the person from the machine's grip. This was the territory in which Ida's claim about the more human use of the human being landed: the proposition that most of what people call their humanity is mechanical, and that the structural work could create space for something else.
"Most of what you and I call our thoughts are not. They're merely reruns of stuff which allowed us to survive in the past. Remember, it's not too simple for survival. It's merely my identity which once survived. That is my mind and my identity or synonymous."
In the 1974 Open Universe class, Erhard naming the machinery the structural work operates against:
Erhard's reading is a darker companion to Ida's evolutionary framing. Where Ida saw the human as emerging from the animal, Erhard saw the human as imprisoned in machinery the body was running on its behalf without authorization. The two pictures meet in the same place: the ordinary person is not yet what they could be. The difference is in temperament. Ida was a Rockefeller-trained chemist; she trusted that the structural change would propagate upward into the life. Erhard, who would build est around the claim that transformation required confrontation with one's own machinery, thought the body work created the opening but not the result. He went to Ida for the opening.
"If you're a being, if you're something beyond a machine, it would make a hell of a lot more sense to just be there because then when the motion comes to you, you'll be able to deal with that motion. When the threat intrudes, you'll be able to deal with that intrusion. You won't be anticipating. You won't be acting from a former situation."
Later in the same class, naming what the work gave him personally:
Fascia as the medium of change
If the human was becoming, structurally, what it could be, the medium of that becoming was fascia. Ida's specific contribution to the lineage of manual work was the recognition that connective tissue — the myofascial system that organizes the body in three dimensions — was both the organ of structure and a plastic medium that could be reorganized under sustained pressure. This was the leverage point. You did not have to wait generations for the species to drift toward verticality. You could, in a series of sessions, move an individual a substantial distance along the same trajectory. Valerie Hunt would later propose that the fascial web was the interface between the body's energy and the larger fields it lived in. Whether or not that proposition could be measured, Ida's own claim was more modest and more radical: the fascia was the part of the body whose reorganization changed what kind of person was standing there afterward.
"And one of them is that it is the connective tissue which is the interface between the energy fields of man and other parts of the cosmos. Now that is a big hunt to swallow. I do not think that the energy fields are brought to us by the five senses. I think these are grossly limiting. The very nature of the five senses, the structural nature of the five senses, limits that part of an energy field which can be brought to us. And yes, we do receive information from the five senses. But there is this vast array of information which comes to us which has come to me which cannot be described in terms of the five senses. There are limitations which exist within the structure of the central nervous system in the transportation of messages. I don't care how exhaustive it is. And I think there are limitations in the processing in the brain. Well, I think it is through the senses, the brain, the central nervous system that our system is closed. And what I believe is that the dynamic energy fields are received through possibly the acupuncture spots, which exist all over the body. There are many many many thousands hundreds."
In the 1974 Open Universe class, proposing fascia as the interface between the body's energy and the cosmos:
The fascia framework also gave Ida a way to discuss change that did not require the language of personality. A muscle, in her framing, was an energy unit contained within a fascial envelope; a body was an aggregate of such units; and the relations among the envelopes determined the relations among the units. Change the envelope relations and you changed the unit relations. None of this required the practitioner to address the patient's biography, attitudes, or beliefs. The biography would adjust on its own when the structure adjusted, because the structure was where the biography had been stored. This is the radical claim, and it is the one that distinguished her teaching from the psychotherapies that surrounded her at Esalen.
"factory go, but fascia is the stuff that keeps it from falling in on itself, falling in on its face, keeps you from falling on your face. It is your fascial body that supports you, relates you, and you know as with a child, you fool them sometimes by scooping out the material of the orange and leaving the skin and then putting the two heads together and you say to the kid now this is this is an orange and you see how long it takes that young ster to find out that it isn't an orange, that hits a ball of fascia. And so with with a a human being, in theory at least, you could scoop out the stuff that makes the factory go, the chemicals and so forth, and you would have left this supportive body of fascia. And it is this body which has had very little, almost no exploration in the sense that we have been giving to it. 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?"
In a 1974 Healing Arts panel, naming the fascia as the supportive body and the medium through which the practice operates:
The body as plastic medium
Behind the fascia doctrine was a claim about the material body itself that, in Ida's own assessment, would have gotten her institutionalized fifty years earlier: the body is a plastic medium. Not metaphorically — literally. The connective tissue can be reshaped by the addition of energy in the form of pressure, and the reshaping persists. This was the precondition for everything else Ida claimed. If the body had been a fixed object, the question of how human the human could become would have been determined by birth. Because the body was plastic, the question was open. The practitioner's hands were the instrument by which the answer was advanced.
"Because only when the gravity vertical of the body substantially coincides with the gravity line of the earth can that energy field of the earth reinforce and augment the field of the human body. Then the energy of the earth contributes to the energy of the body. The body becomes vitalized. The flesh becomes resilient. Body functions of all sorts improve, for gravity at this point is the nourishing factor. Gravity is the nourishing medium giving to the energy quotient man gravity a higher value, because the man is more energized. This expresses itself in many changes in behavior patterns. Among them, among them is a different state of consciousness. We usually refer to it as a higher state. We have described the body as a plastic medium. Two factors contribute to this: the first that the body, seemingly a unit, is in fact not a unit but a consolidation of large segments: the head, the thorax, the pelvis, the legs. 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."
In a 1974 Healing Arts panel, naming plasticity as the doctrine that opens the question of human emergence:
Ida treats the plasticity claim with the seriousness of a chemist reporting a finding the discipline has not yet accepted. She has the empirical data — she has watched it happen in thousands of bodies — but she knows the claim is structurally heterodox. The standard model, in 1974, assumed that fascia was inert connective tissue whose role was to hold the moving parts in place. Ida was claiming that it was the moving part, in slow motion. The advanced class in front of her was being trained to operate this newly visible substrate.
Gravity as the therapist
The deepest layer of Ida's framework was the claim that gravity itself, properly received, was the agent of human emergence. The practitioner did not produce the change. The practitioner organized the body so that gravity could produce the change. This was an important reframing for her, because it removed the practitioner from the role of healer or therapist — a role she actively resisted — and placed gravity in that role. Her hands were preparing the body to be the recipient of a force that was already, continuously, available to it. The phrase she put on this — *gravity is the therapist* — would later be inscribed on her institute's literature. But the underlying claim was harder than the slogan suggested. It said that a body unable to receive gravity was a body unable to advance toward what its structure was capable of becoming.
"sense of this deep changing of the patterns of the fundamental structure of the body to conform with gravity. I have written, as I think probably all of you know, gravity is the therapist, and this is true and I make no claim to be a therapist, but I do make a claim that says that Rothschild changes the basic web of the body so that that therapist's gravity can really get in there. And I think and trust that all of you are willing to subscribe to that claim and to spread it. I know it sometimes is very hard to find the right words to talk about what you do, but here are a couple that are pretty good."
In the 1971 IPR address, naming gravity's role and her own:
The gravity framework also gave Ida a way to connect the individual session to evolutionary time. The same field that had pulled the species from quadrupedal to bipedal posture across millions of years was pulling the individual body, in the present hour, toward the same vertical. The two timescales were running the same process. The practitioner was, in this sense, accelerating something the gravitational field had been doing slowly. The student in front of her was being moved, in ninety minutes, a distance that natural selection would have taken many thousand generations to produce.
"This is what often has offered in addition to any other school. What's the difference between this and this? Is the answer. We are the only group who recognize that in order for a living body to be at ease in its spatial environment on the earth, it must deal positively with gravity or rather gravity must deal positively with it. Because what we here in Lawton are here to do, we can't change the gravitational field. This is odd, but we just have nothing that means yet. But what we can do is to change the way the parts of the body that I have already referred to, how they fit together into a whole which can transmit the gravitational field. And in its energy, which is the energy of the earth, in its transmitting of that, it enhances its own energy field. You can change the body by virtue of the fact that its segments are segments of a whole and then the gravity can flow through. Now this is the basic concept of Rolfe."
In the Big Sur 1973 advanced class, naming the work's unique contribution among the manual therapies:
The accident that started it
Ida was clear that the discovery was, in part, accidental. The mechanism by which the work produced its effects was not deduced from theory; it was observed in bodies and then theorized. She used the word *accident* deliberately — not to suggest the work was lucky, but to mark that the connection between fascial reorganization and personality change was not predictable from the anatomy textbooks of her era. Nobody had told her this would happen. She had simply watched it happen, repeatedly, and built a teaching around what she saw. The 1973 Big Sur passage below is one of her cleaner statements of this: the work produces its effects because of an unbelievable accident — that you can change fascial structure, and in changing it, you change human beings.
"And in structural integration, by way of an unbelievable accident of how you can change fashion structure, you can change human beings. You can change their structure and in changing their structure you are able to change their function. All of you have seen that structure determines function to a very great degree, to a degree which we can utilize. Now the basic law of law of law law is that you add structure to the body and in so doing, that you add structure you add energy to the body, and in so doing you demand all of you are going to hear a great deal more about this as time goes on. But this is the basic reason why structural integration works. It is the basic reason why there can be a study of bodies based on a structure in the sense that we use it, and why there can be a change of function, in other words, a contribution to health, to well-being, to wholeness, and the functioning of the body through merely being able to change, to alter, to modify. Is a very basic consideration which I just offered you. It is the basic consideration that makes all manipulative techniques something to be considered."
In the Big Sur 1973 advanced class, naming the discovery as an accident and the mechanism as a law:
The candor about accident is part of what gives Ida's claims their weight. She is not claiming to have understood the mechanism in advance. She is claiming to have watched the mechanism produce its effects in body after body and to have built a teachable practice around what she watched. The advanced students in front of her are being told that their own hands, in time, will see things she has not yet seen and add to the doctrine. The work is open at the front.
Random people and integrated people
One of Ida's recurring distinctions, in the Boulder advanced classes especially, was between *random* and *integrated* people. The random person was not chaotic in any moral sense; the word was structural. A random body was one whose parts had no organized relationship to a vertical, whose blocks were stacked according to accident and accumulated injury rather than design. An integrated body was one whose parts had been brought into the relationship that the body's structure was capable of holding. Almost everyone in the culture, Ida said, was random. The work was the slow accumulation of integrated humans into a culture that did not yet know how to produce them on its own.
"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."
In the 1971 IPR address, distinguishing therapy from education and naming what integration means:
The student in this framing is not being repaired. The student is being educated — given access to a relationship among their own parts that no one had taught their body before. This is why Ida resisted the word *therapy* so insistently. Therapy implied returning the patient to a prior state of health. Education implied bringing the student to a state they had never previously occupied. The question of how human the human could become was, in this sense, an educational question, with the body as the curriculum.
The body as one
If becoming more human required integration, integration in turn required a particular way of looking at the body. Ida's complaint about her own students, and about the medical schools her students had come from, was that they had learned to see bodies as collections of parts rather than as units. The result was that they could take a body apart but could not put it together. The skill she was trying to teach in the advanced classes was synthesis — the perception of the whole as a whole — and this skill was the precondition for producing the more human use of the human being. You could not produce an integrated person if you could not see what integration looked like.
"You see, what I keep repeating ad nauseam, literally ad nauseam, is the fact that I want to get this thing integrated into one concept. And we keep going to books because we all think we can always get the answer from books. And the books never integrated it, because they never had the idea that a body was one. This is a random notion. Anybody know where the idea of a whole man came from? Very nice place. No? No? He do that? No. It came from the man Jan Smuts. He was the Governor General of South Africa. So again, it's like the idea of the Tarot practice that I was giving you in the last class. You people should know to whom you are indebted to. I mean, this is the job of an educated person, to know where ideas come from. Who's shoulders are you standing on? People Okay, got some more ideas as to what you want to talk about? I like to take what you people feel is unfinished business from the day before if I can find another unfinished business. I was just thinking about it that there have been several topics that we talked about this last We haven't really brought any of them together."
In the 1976 Boulder advanced class, locating the source of the wholeness idea and pressing students to integrate the concepts they have learned in parts:
The Smuts attribution is characteristic of Ida's pedagogy. She was insistent that her students know the intellectual lineage of the concepts they were using. Holism was not common sense; it was a position someone had had to articulate against the dominant analytic frame, and the someone in question was a South African statesman who in 1926 had written a book Ida had clearly read. This kind of historical anchoring is what kept her teaching from becoming a closed system. The work was situated in the longer history of how humans had thought about themselves as wholes, and her students were being asked to take their place in that history.
Looking down at the top of the head
Ida's most vivid image for the human-emergence question came in the 1975 Boulder advanced class. She asked the students to imagine looking down on a body from directly above. In any other animal — a dog, a horse, an ape — you would see a great deal of body. In an evolved human, you would see almost nothing: the top of the skull and perhaps the tip of the nose. The vertical was, in this picture, a fact about what was visible from above. The more human the human, the less of them you could see when you looked straight down. The image is unusual and worth holding. It compresses the entire doctrine — verticality, evolutionary direction, the relationship of the head to the body — into a single perceptual test.
"I was developing last year at the general meeting and actually had been preaching at the meeting of the steering committee and so forth was what was a very exciting idea. Visualize any other animal than man. Visualize that you are looking down on the top of his head, and what do you see? You see a very great deal space. Visualize yourself being directly over Noah at his best there. Looking down directly on the top of his head, and what would you have seen? The top of his head with some projection of his shoulder. Perhaps even the very tip of his nose, but probably possibly not even that. This is the kind of change in structure which has given you the kind of change in function which you refer to as the human use of the human being. Now this includes all kinds of psychological understandings, all kinds kinds of attitudes towards species, all kinds of attitudes on any level that you see as being more exclusively or even predominantly the mark of the high quality human being. This has come in only as you get this different relation of the skull with its contained nervous plexus to the body of the human. This has meant different pressures in the skull. This has meant different inspiratory engagements."
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, presenting the bird's-eye image of the evolved human:
The image is also a teaching device about responsibility. If becoming more human was an evolutionary trajectory and verticality was its index, then the practitioner looking down on a student's body was looking at a measurement. The amount of body visible from above was the distance the work still had to cover. The image gave the trainees a way to see, without abstraction, what their hands were trying to produce — and to keep producing it across the ten sessions and into the body's life afterward.
The sequence as evolutionary stages
If becoming more human happened through structure, the ten-session sequence was the staging device. In the 1975 Boulder class, the senior practitioner Peter Melchior pressed Ida's students to see each hour not as an isolated procedure but as one step in a single continuous unfolding. The first hour was the beginning of the tenth. The third hour was the continuation of the second. The ten-session count was an artifact of human endurance — what a body could absorb in one sitting — not a property of the work itself. Read this way, the sequence is a slow ratcheting of the body's blocks into the relationship that lets gravity start producing the human Ida described in her bird's-eye image.
"What does matter is you understand you have to lift that up off the pelvis to start getting mobility in the pelvis. Uh-huh. The first hour is the beginning of the tenth hour. Okay? Uh-huh. The second hour is a follow-up of the first hour. Uh-huh. It's just the second half of the first hour. Okay? And the third hour is the second half of the second and first hour. It's literally a continuation. I clearly I clearly saw, you know, last summer that continuation process and how and, you know, Dick talked about how, you know, the only reason it was broken into 10, you know, sessions like that was it because the body just couldn't take all that work. Couldn't take it right. But I just sitting on just trying to figure out how the hell she ever figured out that process, and then began to see it. What she did is what most of of us need to do more. She just sat and watched bodies. And she just kept on doing it. And put unfortunately, she's a little bit more brilliant than the rest of us."
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, naming the sequence as a single integrated arc rather than ten discrete procedures:
The framing has consequences for how a trainee thinks about a single hour. If the third session is the continuation of the second, and the second is the continuation of the first, then the practitioner working in the third hour is not solving a new problem. They are pressing forward the same evolutionary movement the first hour opened, on a body that has now absorbed two prior installments of the same change. The hour-by-hour structure is less a sequence of locations than a sequence of depths through which a single trajectory is being worked. In the 1976 Boulder class, Ida's students returned to this question of how to see the whole — and how the perception of integration is itself something practitioners have to learn to do.
"We're not asking for that this morning. Which final words speak to that. Actually, what I experienced what I had been saying the day before, the day part of that, and that is in your first hour, you people have got to get off trying to get a nine doctor shoulder girdle before you've got your pelvis horizontal, or, you know, you gotta work below just as much as you're working above. Well, sure enough, I got a lot of change in the shoulder girdle, just hung out. I mean, I set myself up almost because I said, well, I can't bring the leg in until I work on the lower part of the pelvic girdle on the left side because that'll make it even less horizontal. And I knew that's what was gonna happen. I don't know if I did. You know? And you saw it and felt it? But it didn't I learned a lot."
In the 1976 Boulder advanced class, a dialogue between Ida and her senior students about what *organization* feels like under the hands:
Coda: the unfinished species
Ida's question — how human is the human? — was, in the end, a refusal to treat the species as a finished product. She was unwilling to grant that the random body in front of her represented the human's mature form. She believed, with the seriousness of a research chemist who had spent her career watching molecular structures resolve into more stable configurations, that the human was a structure still resolving. The work she taught was an intervention in that resolution. It accelerated, in individual lives, what the gravitational field would have accomplished slowly in the species. The students she trained were being asked to take their place in this acceleration with their eyes open — knowing what they were producing, accepting its costs, and refusing the more familiar framings of therapy and pain relief. The 1971 IPR address closes the question without resolving it: the practice is one of the instruments by which the species is still becoming, and the rate is dictated, finally, by hands.
"Some few children come by it naturally, not many, Because children aren't born perfect. This is some more of the old crow's universe stuff. People aren't born perfect. They are evolving. Man is evolving. Man is evolving at a faster rate perhaps today."
Closing the 1974 Open Universe class, Hunt naming the species' continuing motion:
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfB6Side1a — a Mystery Tapes recording in which Ida walks a student-interviewer through the first hour as the opening move of the entire ten-session arc, with explicit framing of the work as the integration of intra-body relationships with the larger energy field. The passage extends the human-emergence question into the recipe's pedagogical structure. RolfB6Side1a ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, UNI_064 (1974 Open Universe class) — an extended exchange in which a general-semantics colleague presses Ida on whether the structural change produced in ten sessions persists against the lifetime of conviction and assumption that built the body in the first place. Ida's response — that the very fact a body can change shape in two minutes is itself a cultural assumption being blown — is one of her clearest statements that the work's effect runs across the boundary between structure and belief. UNI_064 ▸
See also: See also: Werner Erhard, UNI_022 (1974 Open Universe class) — the longer monologue from which the *being beyond a machine* passage is drawn, including Erhard's account of the mind as a multi-sensory recording system whose default logic is identification rather than discrimination. The chapter situates Ida's structural work within Erhard's broader theory of what the ordinary human is operating as. UNI_022 ▸
See also: See also: Magda Proskauer, UNI_062 (1974 Open Universe class) — the full presentation of Korzybski's diagram of the semantic transactor, including the four dimensions (electrochemical, motoric, feeling-purposive, language) the work is claimed to affect at once. The chapter gives the most systematic external framework for what Ida meant by the human use of the human being. UNI_062 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, 76ADV141 (1976 Boulder advanced class) — Ida's account of embryological differentiation into ectoderm, mesoderm, and endoderm, and her insistence that the head is not intelligence but another part of the mesodermal system. The chapter extends the article's question by relocating where in the body the *human* of the human is supposed to reside. 76ADV141 ▸