The body as the location of the person
Ida did not begin her career thinking about identity. She began it in 1916, fresh from a Barnard PhD in biochemistry, working at the Rockefeller Institute on the toxicity of an arsenic-based syphilis drug called arsphenamine — what the pharmacopeia of the day called salvarsan. The genesis of her later thinking about the person came obliquely, through a sabbatical in Zurich in the late 1920s where she sat in on Erwin Schrödinger's lectures and began to suspect, as the announcer at her 1974 Healing Arts lecture put it, a direct relationship between human behavior and both body physics and body chemistry. The point is biographical but it is also methodological. Ida arrived at the question of identity from the side of matter — from chemistry, from physics, from the question of what a structure is — rather than from the side of psychology. When she did finally make claims about the person, those claims were grounded in a physicist's intuition that relationships in space organize the behavior of whatever fills them.
"Rolfe was sent to Europe by the Institute, and it was during that time that she sat in on some lectures of Erwin Scheddinger at the University in Zurich. She began to suspect that there was a direct relationship between human behavior and both body physics and body chemistry. This was the genesis of the idea of structural integration."
The biographical frame as it was given to her own students in 1974, by way of introduction:
What that physicist's intuition gave her was a way of locating the person without metaphysics. The person is not in the body the way a soul is in a shell; the person is in the relations of the body to itself and to the field of gravity in which it stands. This is why she spent so much of her late teaching pressing students on what the word structure means. The word, she insisted in her 1971 IPR lectures, always means relationship. When you say a building has structure, you are talking about how its parts stand to each other; when you say a person has structure, you mean the same thing. The relations are the location of the person.
"what do we mean by structure, what do we think of when we think of structure. In other words, let's learn a little meditation on structure. Well, in the first place structure always means relationship. Structure, as you recognize, is used in many levels. It's used in theory, it's used in metaphor, it's used in discussing facts and their relationship and so forth, but never is it used except as it involves relationship. Structure is one of those what Koczybski's system calls a fourth area word. It deals with relationships as causes, not specific material situations. They're material and they are specific, but only in a sense of relationship. And of course, if you are going to look at what you're seeing, you'll see a relationship in everything you look at, if this is what you're looking for. So we have to start looking at this whole business of relationship and what are we relating."
Ida in 1971, pressing her IPR audience to meditate on the word itself:
Body image: the fused gestalt around age five
The most precise account of how a body becomes an identity came not from Ida but from her closest scientific collaborator, Valerie V. Hunt, an electromyographer at UCLA who ran the major laboratory studies of Structural Integration in the early 1970s. Hunt taught alongside Ida in the Open Universe class at UCLA throughout 1974, and her framing of the body image is the framing Ida adopted. The body image, on Hunt's account, is not a picture in the mind. It is a sensory residue — the integrated memory of every experience the body has had through its five senses, fused at about age five into a single gestalt and carried thereafter as the attitudinal framework through which all subsequent experience is filtered. Identity, in this account, is not chosen. It is laid down by accumulated sensory experience and then, once fused, becomes the lens through which more experience is read.
"We have a body image and that image is the product of experiences we've had with our body through our five senses and these become integrated into a whole thing and we carry that body image around with it with us. It may be one of the most destructive things we ever learned is our body image one of the most deprecating and destructive things that we have. But we have to have it because it integrates all of these selves."
Hunt, defining the body image in her 1974 lecture to the joint Open Universe class:
What Hunt called destructive about the body image is what gives the identity-and-structure claim its bite. If the image is the residue of experience with a particular form, then a child who was thrown from a car or who imitated a limping uncle or who flinched habitually from a parent's hand has, by adolescence, built an attitudinal framework around a body that no longer fits its own design. The body image perpetuates the disorganization. The person identifies with the limp, the flinch, the carried shoulder; they say, in Ida's classic recital of the resigned voice, I inherited this lousy body and with this lousy body I really don't have to have any responsibility for it. The whole thrust of Ida's late teaching was to refuse that resignation.
"is the physical body is created by you at any moment and at any time and it is the direct result of your thought and it's the direct result of the inner conception of what you are. Now if we ever took that approach and said, The physical body is created by you at any moment and it is the direct result of your inner conception of what you are. Now, rolfing changes what you are, the conception of what you are. And through it, it changes the nature of the body itself."
Ida, in the same Open Universe sequence, taking the body-image doctrine and pushing it toward its sharpest claim:
The contour and the personality together
If the body is the materialization of the self-image, then changing the body must change the self that has been imagined into it. This is the claim Ida called, half-ironically and half in earnest, the Gospel according to Structural Integration. She made it in a 1974 lecture at UCLA, quoting her colleague Hunt at length about the changes Hunt had recorded after a ten-session series — measurable changes in the neuromuscular firing pattern, in the alpha-wave activity, in what Hunt called the auric field. But the claim Ida wanted her students to hear was the one that had to be said in ordinary language, because it was the claim no other school of body work was prepared to make: contour and personality are continuous, and both can be changed.
"His behavior changes. The man, we might say, becomes more human. He differentiates more. He feels more. He feels his own mental processes as being less confused, as being more adequate. He suddenly feels himself as the subject of more and more important insights."
Ida quoting Hunt directly, on what happens as the body's energy field comes into parallel with the gravitational field:
The passage is striking for its restraint. Hunt does not say the person becomes happier or more enlightened; she says the man differentiates more, feels more, feels his own mental processes as being less confused. The vocabulary is the vocabulary of cognitive clarity, not of mystical transformation. The reason matters: Hunt was a research scientist with a UCLA appointment, and she had every professional reason to overstate nothing. What she was reporting — and what Ida was reporting through her — is that when the structural relationships of the body are reordered, the person who lives through that body reports a sharpened access to their own mental life. The body image, having been built on the old structure, has to be rebuilt; the rebuilding is felt as a kind of waking up.
"enough, both the contour and the personality, contrary to much popular opinion, can be changed. This is the Gospel according to Structural Integration."
Ida's own framing of the same claim, in her plainest formulation:
The shock of plasticity
What makes the claim psychologically destabilizing for the person undergoing the work is the speed at which the body changes. The shape one has carried for thirty or fifty years — and which one has experienced not as a shape one happens to inhabit but as oneself — can be visibly altered in a single session. Ida often said it took thirty minutes; she also sometimes said two minutes. The point of the hyperbole was to underscore that the body which the person had thought of as a fixed inheritance was, in fact, a plastic medium. The implication for identity was unavoidable. If the body that you have built your sense of self around can be altered in two minutes, then the body was not what you thought it was — and therefore neither were you.
"That just the very fact that a body can change shape within thirty minutes, you know, or two minutes really, is a"
Ida, in dialogue with a general-semantics audience at UCLA, addressing whether old habits return after the ten sessions:
The phrase to notice is that just the very fact, repeated twice, the fact of plastic change itself. Ida is not saying that the practitioner installs new convictions in the client. She is saying that the experience of being a body that can change in two minutes is, for most adults, an unprecedented experience — and that this experience is its own teacher. The client comes in believing that the body is the unalterable given around which the life has been arranged; they leave the first session having met direct sensory evidence that this is not so. The body image has been falsified. Some new image has to be built, and the person who builds it is a different person than the one who walked in the door.
"But because the body has an unforeseen, unexpected quality, it can be done. The body is a plastic medium. Now this is incredible, and twenty five years ago, no one would have believed this statement. Fifty years ago, they'd have put me in a nice sunny southern room. You've given me pretty good care, maybe. But the 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."
Ida, registering how recent the recognition of plasticity is, and the cost of having stated it earlier:
Structure as relationship, posture as effort
The Topanga lecture preserved in the soundbyte collection contains one of Ida's clearest distinctions between the two concepts at the center of her thinking about identity. Structure is the way the parts of a body stand to each other; posture is what is done with structure. The word posture, she observes, is the past participle of a Latin verb meaning to place — somebody has placed something somewhere, and someone is maintaining the placement. The maintenance takes effort. When you see a person struggling to hold themselves upright, you are seeing the price of an identity built around a structure that cannot support itself. The self has had to invest continuous muscular work in being the person it takes itself to be.
"It's relationship wherever you use the word structure, you are really talking about a relationship. You talk about this beautiful structure, you are talking about the way the top relates the middle, relates to the floor, the shape of the ground. All of this is implied when I say, I was in a beautiful structure tonight. Structure, wherever you use it, is relationship, and it is particularly relationship of parts in a body. This constitutes structure. Now posture is something else again. And the boys that devised the word posture knew what that something else was because the word posture means it has been placed. It is the past participle of a Latin word, to place, and it means it has been placed. And when you use the word posture, you are saying it has been placed. Somebody has placed something somewhere. Somebody is maintaining the placement of something somewhere. Somebody is working to keep something placed somewhere. And I guarantee that there is no one in this room who doesn't know that in this day and age of the what is it? Nineteen twentieth century, last part of it, last quarter of it, that to keep any of these bodies in posture takes effort, constant continuous effort. And when you have to make effort concerning anything in your body, it's a very bad sign. You don't usually interpret it in view of the next words."
Ida, in the Topanga talk, distinguishing structure from posture and explaining why the distinction matters for the person:
Once structure is in balance, posture takes care of itself. The person no longer has to be maintained; they simply stand. This shift — from being held together by effort to being supported by gravity — has consequences that go beyond the somatic. Energy that was previously committed to maintaining the placement of the self is released for other uses. Ida's clients regularly reported, in passages preserved across her advanced-class lectures, the same astonished phrase: I don't know what you did to me. The phrase points to the same disorientation as the body-image collapse. The self that had been maintained by effort is no longer the self that the body supports.
"fight with gravity. That's one item. And I know that his structure is not in balance. Because if his structure is in balance, his posture automatically is good. Posture is what you do with structure. Structure is the way you relate parts of the body to each other. And if you are really going to understand what I'm talking about tonight, a little meditation on those two words wouldn't do any harm. Because you see, in meditating on posture and meditating on structure, you can ask the same questions. You can ask the question of, now see here, if I alter this structure, what can I hope to get from it? Similarly, you can say, if I alter this posture, what can I hope to get from it? This is a big question. And you ask any of your MD friends, and they'll say, oh, Rod, nothing. Ain't so? You change those relations. You change that structure. And you get the kind of ease and the kind of vitality that you have seen some of your friends get who have gone through this system of structural"
Ida pressing the audience on the practical stakes of the structure-posture distinction:
Energy added to the connective-tissue web
How the body is altered, mechanically, comes back to the connective-tissue web. Ida insisted that fascia is the organ of structure — the medium that determines the contour of the body and therefore, in the chain she was building, the contour of the self. The medium is colloidal in nature: it can be reorganized by the addition of energy, and in the case of Structural Integration the energy is supplied by the practitioner's pressure. Pressure changes the relations of the fascial sheaths; the changed relations alter the contour; the altered contour, having broken the assumptions of the old body image, makes a new self-experience available. The chain runs from finger pressure at one end to a reorganized sense of personhood at the other, and every link in it is physical.
"Relationships in space. There's nothing metaphysical metaphysical about it. It's pure physics as it's taught in physics laboratories. Now the strange part about it is that that organ of structure is a very resilient and very elastic and very plastic medium. It can be changed by adding energy to it. In structural integration, one of the ways we add energy is by pressure so that the practitioner gives deliberately contributes energy to the person on whom he is working, to not energy in the sense that you let a position throw it around, but energy such as they talk about in the physics laboratory. When you press on a given point, you literally are adding energy to that which is under that point. 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."
Ida, in her 1973 Big Sur advanced class, naming the mechanism that links the practitioner's pressure to the change in the person:
What makes the doctrine intellectually unusual, in Ida's account, is that it treats the connective-tissue web as a unit. Earlier schools of manipulation — the chiropractic tradition, the osteopathic — treated the body as an assemblage of bones to be repositioned. Ida's claim is that the fascial body is one thing, and that what one is working on, when one works on it, is the structural organ of the whole person. The passage from Big Sur on fascia as a supportive body underneath the chemical machinery makes the point with one of her favored vivid images: the orange whose pulp has been scooped out, leaving only the rind to hold its shape.
"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. 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."
Ida, in 1974 at the Healing Arts series, on the relation between fascial change and the change in the person:
The body image and the rigid exercise of self
Ida's quarrel with sports and conventional exercise illuminates the identity claim from a different angle. Lifting weights and running track, she argued in her 1974 Open Universe lecture, build strong bodies and rigid body images. The rigidity of the resulting image, not the strength, is the diagnostic problem. An athletic regime is task-oriented — it teaches a defined set of motions toward a defined performance — and the body image that consolidates around such a regime is correspondingly closed. The exerciser becomes a person who can perform the moves they have practiced; they do not become a person whose body is open to new responses. Ida's contention was that the closed body image, however strong, was structurally a dead end.
"In terms of structure they're not very stable. These are task oriented. They are not exploratory. They are not experiencing There are a limited number of potential responses when you do exercises. A very limited number of potential responses. It's a closed system. You learn an exercise, you do it, and that's about what you can do with it. Well, newer approach is the physical body is created by you at any moment and at any time and it is the direct result of your thought and it's the direct result of the inner conception of what you are."
Ida, contrasting exercise's effect on the body image with what Structural Integration aims at:
The contrast is not against exercise as such. Ida's late teaching frequently endorsed Judith Aston's work on structural patterning as the necessary continuation of the ten-session series; the alternative to a closed exercise regime is not stillness, it is movement organized around a different body image. The point of the contrast is to expose what most regimes of self-improvement take for granted: that the self is fixed and the body is to be conformed to it. Ida's claim runs the other way. The body is plastic; the inner conception of what one is is the thing that has become rigid; loosening the body opens the inner conception.
"Then if Roelfing upstates the static thought forms which allows thought as well as body plasticity to take place, as well as structural realignment, there will also be realignment in alteration in not only the conform the the confirmation of the body but in its repair, in its mitosis, in its continual evolution. We know that our bodies change approximately every seven years but have we ever thought that our body changed on every breath? I'm talking about belief systems now. You see, we've held some and we haven't gone any farther. Have we ever thought that atoms and molecules are constantly replacing themselves and being altered? That hormones are in a constant state of emotion and alteration? That electrodynamic and electromagnetic energy changes are occurring constantly which are affecting our body. And yet we try to conceive of the body as static and educated in the same way. And it is not. Our physical senses really tell us very little about our bodies. They tell us that which is on the surface and the outside and that's about all they tell us. And actually we have the capacity we don't have it now, we weren't educated that way."
Hunt extending the argument into the question of how educated a physical body could become:
Personality emerging through the practitioner's hands
The transcripts from the 1975 Boulder advanced class contain Ida's most candid teaching to her senior practitioners about what happens when the structural work begins to alter the body image in real time, in the practitioner's hands. The senior practitioner Peter Melchior, addressing the advanced class on the relation between practitioner and client, names the moment plainly: when you start to modify a person's body pattern, the first thing that emerges is the persona. Whatever the person has organized around the old structure begins to come unstuck along with the structure, and what comes unstuck is not always pretty. The practitioner has to know where to stand in relation to that emergence — not as therapist, not as confidant, but as the person who is doing the structural work.
"I would like to just say a few words about the relationship of practitioner to Ralphie and what's going on in private practice when you're working with people and some of the pitfalls that you're probably going to run into and maybe some other ways and some ways you can avoid the hard experiences. It seems that in the attempt to see a body, one of the things that we do is to project our awareness toward another being. We look, we reach out with our senses and our awareness and try to cognize what's going on with that other person when you're trying to evaluate what you're going to do in terms of structural integration. You're watching someone move around and you start putting your hands on their body and you've seen what you see and you start to act upon what you've evaluated. Invariably, you're going to run into the person's persona when you start trying to modify their body pattern. That's one of the first things that emerges is that the personality starts to manifest more strongly. Very often there's emotional content in what's going on for that person as you work on them. And that you really have to make a clear choice for yourself about where you're going to stand with respect to that person. Sort of how you're going to establish your own territory and maintain it while you're taking that other person through a series of changes. I have kind of seen that a lot of healers and not just rolfers but magnetic healers and psychic healers all those other kinds besides traditional doctors and so on."
Melchior, addressing the 1975 Boulder advanced class on the emergence of the persona during the work:
What Melchior's caution preserves is the line between Structural Integration and psychotherapy. Ida's whole point was that you do not need to go through the person's history to change the person; you reorganize the structure and the person, freed from the necessity of maintaining their old shape against gravity, finds a new available organization. The emotional content that surfaces is incidental — real, but not the target. The target is the structural relationship. The persona that has been built around the old structure may need to grieve, may need to flare, may need to weep; but the practitioner does not redirect the work to address the grief. The work continues in its own register.
"I became aware that perhaps one of the most direct ways, almost a shortcut toward becoming aware of language and our behaviors and our attitudes and our assumptions was through awareness of what is going on in ourselves. No easy matter. And I'm I'm very interested because of what I asked you the question, I think, a few weeks ago. After the ten weeks, and you leave people alone for a while, I was interested in knowing, do the old patterns, the old assumptions begin to build up again the same particular bodily attitude that took a lifetime to develop when you when you have these people. Because without that awareness, I wonder. Say the young man comes to you and there is some particular area that you work with as I watched you. Now that that particular situation in his organism was developed throughout a lifetime. Isn't that what you said? Yes. In ten weeks, there is a loose loosening of various buildup of muscle and tension, whatever. Okay. I can see that. Now that you have so manipulated and moved into a position you feel where there is an openness and an easiness for heightened awareness, for greater ease in living. Without a holistic, which is an awareness of values, assumptions, language, is it likely that there will be a repetition? Well, would say this, that I'm sure that there are convictions that a person can hold through the series of 10 raw things, which still have a hold on them afterwards."
An audience member at UCLA in 1974 pressing Ida on whether bodily change alone is enough without an accompanying change in awareness, language, and assumptions:
The energy ratio and what it changes
Ida's collaborators — Hunt at UCLA, the physicist Julian Silverman at Esalen, the Healing Arts circle around the 1974 lecture series — were trying to give her claim a quantitative foundation. The vocabulary they reached for was thermodynamic. The body is an energy system; the gravitational field is an energy system; when the two are misaligned, the body's energy is spent fighting the field, and when they are aligned, the field becomes a source of support. The ratio of body energy to gravitational energy shifts. What had been entropic — running down — becomes capable of building up. The metaphor is austere but it gave Ida a way of saying that the person becomes more, in some measurable sense, after the work.
"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."
Ida, in 1974, describing what she takes the energy change to be:
Hunt's electromyographic data, presented to the Healing Arts audience that same year, supported the energetic claim with a finer observation: after the ten sessions, the firing patterns of muscle showed a downward shift in control. Where a random body recruits cortex — the highest, least efficient level of motor control — for ordinary movements, a structurally integrated body delegates more of its movement to mid-brain and spinal mechanisms. Cortex is freed for the things only cortex can do: writing, speaking, attending. The person, in other words, has more cortex available to be themselves with. The improved energy efficiency at the muscular level is felt, at the level of identity, as greater presence.
"It is the kind of thing you experience when you're out playing golf and that one time you hit that ball magnificently and it took off and it was no effort, and you're always looking for it again. We find that when people become more skillful in a particular high level task, they become what we call more finalized. There's a lot of research on this to show that the frequency actually changes. I think that Rolfing brings a downward shift. There is another level of control that we call the midbrain, and this area also can turn on muscles. We can operate on it. It is one of our very basic areas for some of our primitive movement, and it primarily innervates the great large joints of the body and those which are proximal, such as the shoulders and the hips and the trunk one of the areas that Rolfing works a great deal upon. This has a tendency to produce a very rhythmic quality of movement. And then there, of course, is that cortex that louses us up in so many ways. It can do those fine things with the hand and the beautiful nuances in the face, but it is totally inefficient, inefficient. It louses up, its pattern is not well established. Two muscles counteract each other at the same time, And my feeling is that this smoother energy release that comes after rolfing is based upon a downward shift in the control in the primary control. This doesn't mean you can't be cortical but in the primary control of muscle. Another finding is that after structural integration there was more sequential contraction of muscles and not so much co contraction. What do I mean by sequential and co? If you're doing very, very fine work, such as writing for long periods of time or work with your eyes, work with your hands, it requires co contraction. You know how fatigued you get. You get tremendously tired from using one muscle against another muscle to keep you from moving any great distance. And so, in fine control, we know that there is co contraction."
Hunt presenting the EMG findings on the downward shift in motor control after Structural Integration:
The recipe as a sequence of progressive identity shifts
Within the ten-session series itself, Ida and her senior practitioners observed that the identity shift did not happen all at once. Each hour reorganized a particular structural domain and surfaced a particular layer of the body image. The first hour opens the breathing and frees the shoulder girdle from the pelvis; the second deepens that work into the legs; the third begins the lateral organization; the seventh, the head and neck work, often produces some of the most dramatic personality changes, since the body image is most intensely organized around the face. The senior practitioners in the 1975 Boulder class spoke of the series as a single continuous process whose stages were divisions of convenience rather than separate operations.
"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."
From the 1975 Boulder advanced class, on the continuity of the series:
What the practitioners in the room were articulating was a doctrine Ida had repeated throughout her late teaching: structural integration is itself a way of life, not a clinical procedure with an endpoint. The reorganization continues beyond the ten sessions. Some of Hunt's longitudinal data, presented to the same Healing Arts audience, suggested that subjects continued to organize spontaneously for months and years after the work was completed. The person, having been freed from the necessity of maintaining the old shape, gradually consolidates a new shape that is no longer subject to the same effort.
"But you see, you also have to look, Bob, at the amazing things about structural integration. The absolutely amazing thing. And that is that within literally minutes of the time you lay your hands on them for the first time, they begin to feel better. And the So if you have both things going on, you have a long term spontaneous improvement, spontaneous organization going on. But you also have that short term improvement where the screening pain is often relieved inside of two seconds. And this is something really that requires prayer and meditation to open up the understanding. I mean this differently and this is something for us all to be thinking about why this works this way and for heaven's sake why since it works this way nobody ever realized it before. This is the unbelievable thing to me. This is the absolutely unbelievable thing."
Ida in 1973 reflecting on the speed of relief and the longer arc of reorganization:
Coda: the responsibility of being a body that can change
The hardest part of Ida's claim, for the people she taught, was not the metaphysics but the ethics. If the body is the materialization of the inner conception of self, then the person is responsible for the body they have lived themselves into. The standard line of resignation — I inherited this lousy body — collapses. The person cannot disown their physical form as something done to them; the form is the cumulative record of how they have lived in themselves. This is a heavy doctrine, and Ida did not soften it. She also did not weaponize it. The point of the claim, in her late teaching, was not to assign blame for past structures but to insist that the future structure was open.
"If we had the concept that electrodynamic, electrochemical changes were ever taking place and were moving in pace with your thoughts, Look what we're saying about developing the human body. That your body is not beautiful or ugly or healthy or deformed or swift or slow simply because it's thrust upon you like this at birth. See this is a fine way to get away from it. Know I inherited this lousy body and with this lousy body I really don't have to have any responsibility for it. If we said that the physical form is the physical materialization of your own thoughts, emotions, and how you interpret them, then we've got a different way to work on the body in its education. I will say that once again."
Ida, completing the thought she began earlier in the same lecture, on what the materialization-of-thought claim implies for responsibility:
What Ida wanted her students to carry away was not a creed but an operational stance: that the structural relationships of a body are alterable, that the inner conception of self that has organized around the old relationships is correspondingly alterable, and that the practitioner's work is the introduction of energy at the point where the alteration becomes possible. The reorganization of the person is the work of the person, supported by gravity once the structure is aligned enough for gravity to support rather than degrade. The practitioner sets the conditions. The person becomes who they become.
"this badly structured individual, no matter how he got there, whether he was thrown from a car as a child or fell down the cellar steps as a kid or fell off the roof when he thought the grass looked so soft that he was jumping. It doesn't matter where that started, but it is possible to just approach that man or that woman as a structural problem and change the relationship within that structure to a place where you get integration. And so the method of therapy, if you want to call it such, I don't like therapy, I like education, to which I devote my time. That method is called structural integration and this is what we mean. We mean that we want to and we do integrate structure. What is integration? It's a putting the parts together so that they relate according to the pattern, which is perfectly obvious if you dissect the body to the point where the joints have to go together. There are certain ways that those joints never were meant to go together. And if the child has been thrown from a car in a fashion in which his knees, the leg and the thigh, do not meet in a straight line, his body will have had to have deposited enough extraneous soft tissue to make some sort of a joint but that joint will not work properly. It will not work easily. It will not work with an economy of energy. And so that child has to expend a great deal more energy getting around than his brother who didn't have that accident. And you can carry this sort of metaphor into all of these problems that you see around you."
Ida, in one of her earliest published statements of the identity-and-structure thesis, summarizing the method:
See also: See also: the closely related discussions in the IPR lectures (RolfA5Side2) on the difficulty of verbalizing what relationship means and the limits of current anatomical literature for capturing the fascial body image. RolfA5Side2 ▸
See also: See also: Ida's earlier biographical reflections (STRUC1) on her Rockefeller chemistry work and the slow emergence of the entropy framework that would later anchor her account of the energy change in the integrated body. STRUC1 ▸
See also: See also: the 1973 Big Sur Advanced Class discussions (SUR7301) where Ida first laid out the basic law that structure determines function and the body as an aggregate of segments whose relations can be deliberately altered. SUR7301 ▸