The flat claim: scoliosis is in the psoas
Most of Ida's structural doctrines were stated with hedges — usually, often, in most bodies — and revised across the years. The psoas claim about scoliosis is unusual because it admits no hedge. In a 1975 Boulder session, a student has just finished working on a scoliotic body and Ida is reviewing what happened in the third hour. The student felt he had gotten something; Ida tells him he didn't get nearly enough. The whole exchange turns on whether the practitioner recognized that the structural problem in any scoliosis lives in the psoas, and whether he reached deeply enough into that muscle to actually move the curve. The teaching that follows is the most absolute thing she says about any pathology in the entire archive.
"There has never been a scoliosis on this earth where the problem wasn't in the psoas, Well, it's out of the psoas, you've got to get your material."
Speaking to a student in the 1975 Boulder advanced class, reviewing a scoliosis case from the third hour:
The grammar of the statement is worth pausing on. She does not say the psoas is usually involved, or that it often shows up, or that it is one factor among several. She says there has never been a scoliosis on this earth where the problem wasn't in the psoas. This is the kind of sweeping claim that practitioners trained in evidence-based language are taught not to make. Ida made it anyway, and she made it in front of a room full of advanced students who had been working on real scoliotic bodies all week. She was inviting them to test it. Her own conviction came from decades of watching curves change — or fail to change — depending on whether the work reached the lumbar terrain where the psoas anchors. The claim functions less as a hypothesis to be falsified than as a piece of practical instruction: if you have not changed the psoas, you have not changed the scoliosis, and so the place to look first when a curve fails to release is always there.
Idiopathic versus post-pathological curves
The advanced class had multiple scoliotic bodies in front of it during the same week. One was a man whose curve Ida described as merely twisting of his backbone — a structural pattern without a named disease behind it. Another was a woman whose curve looked entirely different: deeper, more deformed, the kind of pattern that emerges from a pathological process. Students asked whether it was polio. Ida thought possibly a spinal virus of some kind. The interesting move in her teaching is that she refuses to let the two categories — idiopathic and post-pathological — pull apart at the level of treatment. They look different and they read differently to the eye, but the structural seat of both is the same.
"The other woman's scoliosis, the woman that we had yesterday, this was a different thing. This, I imagine, was the result of polio, was it? It was a very deep it was the kind of scoliosis that came as the result of a pathological process."
Distinguishing the case in front of her from the woman they had worked on the day before:
Having drawn the distinction, Ida immediately collapses it. The next move in her teaching is to claim that even when scoliosis is the result of a disease — polio is the test case — the disease's structural footprint comes in through the same door. The pathogen does not respect anatomy at random; it finds its purchase where the body is mechanically vulnerable, and the body's mechanical vulnerability in the lumbar region is the psoas. This is a strong claim about disease etiology and Ida knows she cannot sell it to physicians. She tells the class to put it in their own notes anyway, because it organizes the treatment.
"If that scoliosis is the result of something that happened as a disease process, The entrance of the disease has been through the psoas. Now you can't probably, can't sell that to any of your medical friends, but I strongly suggest that you put it in your own notes because wherever, even in that idiopathic scoliosis that Donna had or in that scoliosis that Norm had yesterday or the one that was right here that Lloyd was working on, those things have come in by a breakdown of the supported process of the psoas on the lumbos."
Pressing the doctrine further — even disease-caused curves enter through the psoas:
The list of named cases is significant. Donna's idiopathic, Norm's curve, Lloyd's case — these are real bodies the class had encountered, with no shared etiology in the medical sense, and Ida is telling the practitioners they all break down at the same structural junction. The phrase she uses is precise: the supported process of the psoas on the lumbars. The psoas is supposed to perform a particular function for the lumbar vertebrae, and when that function fails — for whatever reason, congenital tendency or viral assault or accumulated postural strain — the lumbar segment loses the support it requires, and the curve develops to compensate.
Polio scoliosis: the shoring up
Ida's clinical generation had seen many post-polio bodies. The polio epidemics of the 1940s and early 1950s left a population of adults whose musculature had been damaged in childhood, and whose structural compensations had been forming for two or three decades by the time they arrived at her table. The scoliotic curves in these bodies were often severe, and they tended to be asymmetrical in distinctive ways — one side of the trunk collapsed where muscle innervation had failed, the other side overworking to maintain verticality. Ida's claim is that despite the unique presentation of each polio case, the work required to address the curve was always the same kind of work.
"And I have never seen scoliosis that resulted from polio, which wasn't this kind of thing and which didn't require this kind of a shoring up."
On the consistency of polio-caused scoliosis across cases:
The phrase shoring up is doing real work in the teaching. Ida is not describing correction in the chiropractic sense — a discrete adjustment to a specific vertebra — nor is she describing strengthening in the physical-therapy sense. She is describing structural reinforcement of a relationship that has failed: the psoas needs to be brought back into its supportive role for the lumbar segment so that the curve has somewhere to rest. The work is restorative of function rather than corrective of position. This matters for what the practitioner expects. A polio scoliosis is not going to become a straight spine. But the body can be made to function again as if it had structural support there, and the curve can settle into a pattern that allows the rest of the body to find its own balance around it.
What the practitioner must reach
The exchange that opens the central passage is a Socratic critique. The student felt he had done good work. He thought he had reached the relevant tissue in the third hour. Ida tells him otherwise — and the basis of her judgment is what the body in front of them was still doing. The articular surfaces of the spine were still recording the long-term position. The lumbar grooves still held the twisting. Without going deeper into the spinal grooves and digging that tissue out, no amount of surface release would resolve the pattern. The student's anatomical knowledge was not wrong; his depth of intervention was insufficient.
"No. The second hour. No. But I say, when you went back to it in the third hour, you didn't get what you were expecting to get. I'm sure you didn't. I felt like I got something. I really You got something that you didn't get I didn't think that you got anything like enough to warrant it. Now this is the difference of a point of view. Yeah. But I lay it out in front of you and say to you, the next time this situation comes up, remember what I've said and look at it. Maybe you agree with me, and maybe you will, and maybe, maybe, maybe. But you see, it was so obvious, and it is always obvious in a scoliosis that the problem is in the psoas."
The opening exchange that frames the scoliosis teaching — Ida critiques what the student got in the third hour:
A second student presses on this. He has been looking at a skeleton — the teaching prop in the room — for two months, and he notes that the articular surfaces themselves seem to reflect the long-term position. The bones have remodeled in response to where they have been held. He grants Ida's point about the psoas being primary in keeping the scoliosis stuck in the body, but he also wants attention paid to those spinal grooves where the longstanding pattern lives. Ida accepts this without retreating from her doctrine. The bones reflect the pattern; the psoas maintains the pattern. Both have to be addressed. But if the practitioner does not get out of the psoas, the material to work with — the lengthened, available tissue — never appears in the back.
Reading the curve in the skull and the pelvis
Scoliosis is not only a spinal phenomenon for Ida. She traced its evidence into the skull and the pelvis, and used those traces as diagnostic instruments. In a 1975 Boulder session she described first encountering an asymmetrical skull in an anatomical collection and realizing she must be looking at the cranium of someone who had been scoliotic in life. The bone itself had remodeled to balance the imbalance. The teaching point is that the practitioner cannot expect to make a scoliotic body symmetrical — the bones tell against that — but can get it operating as though it were symmetrical, which is something different and reachable.
"skulls are not necessarily symmetrical. They're asymmetrical more often perhaps than asymmetrical. I remember my amazement when I first saw this. When I first saw a skull lying in a case, and I looked at it and I said, but look, this is all crooked. And as I treaded this whole thing out, I realized that I must need to be looking at the skull of a curvature or a scoliosis. Now you are never going to really balance this kind of a head, but you sure can get a little north of lot closer to it. And those of you that saw Eric and what happened to Eric last time know, have seen that what I say is true. You can get them acting as though their heads were symmetric. And this acting as though seems to me all that is very important realization and recognition because you see we talk in this teaching program. We talk over simplistically. One has to to convey an idea. But then having gotten that simple minded fundamental schematic recognition, then you have to put into it what you actually see in the actual bodies. We have no bad scoli scoliotic in this group, do we? Sherry's the worst we have. I'm looking for a different type. Well, we've been fairly fortunate in this group anyway in having a very great variety of problems come up and great variety of structures showing up."
Teaching from a skull in the anatomy collection, on what the bones of a scoliotic body record:
The distinction between balancing the head and getting it to act as though it were balanced runs through all of Ida's scoliosis teaching. It is the difference between a goal that cannot be reached and a goal that can. The bones will not be unmade. But the soft tissue around them — the fascial sheaths, the muscle attachments, and especially the psoas and quadratus that span the most consequential junctions — can be reorganized so that the function of the body is no longer dictated by the bone's deformation. The practitioner stops trying to straighten the spine and starts trying to restore the operating relationship between thorax, pelvis, and the lumbar segment that holds them together.
"But I would like, if I could, to throw a monkey wrench into the notion that most of you have, if not all of you, that by the use of structural integration, you can take these cockeyed, crooked structures and make them straight. You can't. There are many reasons why you probably can't. One of the reasons is that the bony structures in that body have spent a lifetime growing into certain patterns. I will never forget my disbelief one time many years ago when I went into an anatomical looking the The Was States. Those various United Occiputs that I was looking looking at at, that the bones didn't match. There was more bone on the right side or the left side, literally more bone than there was on the other side. Because down through the whole lifetime of the fellow whose occiput that was, he had been using his head to balance his imbalances, and his structure had changed in accordance with the demand he put put on on. Do you think you're going in there and in two weeks or three weeks change that phone?
In the 1976 advanced class, on the limits of what structural integration can do to scoliotic bone:
This corrective is offered to students whose ambitions had outrun what the body could deliver. Ida is not lowering the bar; she is locating it accurately. A practitioner who believes she can straighten a scoliotic spine in ten hours will fail and will probably injure the person she is working on. A practitioner who understands that the goal is functional balance around an unalterable structural fact can do extraordinary work — but only if she can also see, in the body in front of her, which elements are amenable to change and which are not. Reading the curve in the skull and the pelvis is part of how the practitioner makes that distinction.
The lumbar lordosis as the operative joint
Behind the psoas claim sits an older claim about the lumbar segment itself. In a 1971-72 mystery-tape session, Ida taught at length that the lumbar lordosis is the place in the spine that can give and therefore must give in response to structural demand. The dorsal spine cannot give meaningfully — it is locked by the ribs into its growth-pattern curve. The cervical curve has limited range. Only the lumbar is structurally available to absorb the body's accommodation to load. This is why so much disorganization registers there, and why a curve in the lumbar appears almost immediately when any other part of the body is changed.
"Well, this wasn't the answer that I wanted to hear And the reason I'm putting stress on this answer is that most of these people here don't recognize it. I mentioned it once since we've been meeting, but some of you might not have heard of them. I mentioned to you the fact that in the course of the building of the spine, the so called primary curve is the dorsal curve. Why is that a primary curve? It's a primary curve because in its growth pattern, the vertebra being connected with the ribs and the firmness process of the ribs being such that they sit so that there can't be too much change. This is inherent in the growth pattern. This now becomes the primary curve and whereas it can be changed, it can't be changed that much. Forward, you have to balance the cervicals where you have a rather, a rather similar situation. But you see, as soon as you begin to affect slightly the curve of the dorsals as you do right the minute you begin to put your hands on there, you are necessarily affecting the curve of the lumbar. Because you cannot change one vertebra. It's impossible. As soon as I saw the end of the first hour and the most recognizable thing to me was the change in the lumbar lordosis. Yeah, because of the last few pastoral I was living for lumbar lordosis. Well the thing that brought to mind was how many times I have seen myself right in discogenic pathology, a person with true pathology, decreased lumbar lordosis, a flattening effect in lumbar spine. In conjunction with pathology. Yeah, you see it in here in conjunction with that structure rather than pathological structure. Then you see how to what extent it changes. Pathology is not pathology. It's a provision of physiology."
In a 1971-72 mystery-tape session, on why the lumbar curve is the operative joint of the spine:
This is the theoretical underpinning of the scoliosis doctrine. If the lumbar segment is the structurally giving part of the spine, then any failure of support reaching that segment will register as a lumbar deformation, and any lumbar deformation will propagate upward through the dorsal curve and downward through the pelvis. The psoas is the muscle whose function is to maintain support across that segment. When it fails to do so — through accumulated postural patterning, through disease, through whatever the precipitating cause may have been — the lumbar gives. The curve that results is what gets called scoliosis. The condition is therefore not, in Ida's reading, a spinal pathology at all. It is a psoas failure registered in the segment of the spine that can register failure.
The quadratus and the third hour
If the psoas is the seat of the scoliosis, the quadratus lumborum is often where the practitioner has to reach first, because the quadratus is what holds the rib cage and the pelvis in their distorted relation to each other across the curve. In the 1976 advanced class, students discussed the third hour on a body with a real scoliosis and found that working the quadratus changed the appearance of the curve but did not finish the work. The completion required getting through to the psoas. The quadratus is necessary; it is not sufficient.
"that seems to be the probably the most closest thing. When I gave a pelvic lift on the third hour, very, very different from a pelvic lift on the first and second hours in terms of playing those lumbar, you get separation of function. You just feel it the experiencing the difference difference in in balance, balance except for the fact that the quadratus can really crush that the back of the thorax and the back of the pelvis together. Is the quadratus one muscle or two muscles? There's one on either side. Mhmm. Well, I wish that had worked. I got somebody with a real nice scoliosis, and I went wailing away on the quadratus, and it didn't work the balance very much at all. Even though I got the quadratus, I got that to come out, but I don't think I'm gonna get it until psoas. Begin to get it until psoas. You're getting there. I mean, there's quadratus on each side of the spine. Keep going, though. Well, you gotta balance those two. I thought that one was about the same. We've been trying to balance both sides of the body in all the hours, man."
In the 1976 advanced class, students discuss the third hour on a scoliotic body and the limits of working only the quadratus:
The structural logic is that the quadratus and the psoas together govern the relationship between the lumbar segment and what lies above and below it. The quadratus connects the twelfth rib and the iliac crest along the lateral border of the lumbar transverse processes. The psoas connects the lumbar bodies themselves to the lesser trochanter of the femur. When one or both of these muscles is asymmetrical in length or tone, the lumbar segment cannot occupy a horizontal pelvis. The scoliosis is one expression of this; lateral pelvic tilt is another; one-sided shortening of the thorax is a third. The third hour is the recipe hour where these relationships first come fully into view, and Ida used scoliotic cases to teach the third hour because the doctrine and the structure illuminate each other.
What the practitioners in the 1976 conversation are working out is that you cannot skip ahead. The quadratus has to release before the psoas becomes available; the psoas will not give to a hand that cannot reach it because the quadratus is still locking the structure above. This sequence is exactly the sequence Ida taught — the body dictates the order — and it has particular force in scoliotic cases because the quadratus on the concave side of the curve is often dramatically shortened and the psoas behind it has been holding the lumbar segment in its rotated position for years.
Pathology as a provision of physiology
One of the most consequential moves in Ida's scoliosis teaching is rhetorical. She refuses to treat scoliosis as a pathology in the conventional medical sense. In the 1971-72 mystery-tape exchange about the lumbar lordosis, she stops the discussion mid-flow to insist that what looks like pathology is in fact a provision of physiology — the body's intelligent accommodation to a structural demand it cannot meet through its preferred mechanism. The implication is that the curve is not the disease. The curve is the body's response to the disease, which is the failure of psoas-on-lumbar support.
"you see how to what extent it changes. Pathology is not pathology. It's a provision of physiology. And you get the structure put where the physiology can function, you can change it very quickly by simply changing structure. At least that's where I stand. And inasmus and in emphacimus, you never get them, without you get a very distorted rib cage. You see, right from the beginning, you have to let's see how we can put it. The lumbar curve is the point which structurally can give and structurally it does give and structurally it has given."
Reframing scoliosis and other apparent pathologies in the 1971-72 lecture:
This reframing matters for what the practitioner allows herself to attempt. If scoliosis is a disease, the practitioner is intervening in a medical condition for which she has no license. If scoliosis is the body's structural accommodation to a failure of support, the practitioner is restoring the support — which is the practice she does have skill in. Ida was careful about the legal frame here. She would tell students never to claim they were treating scoliosis. They were working on the structure. The structure happened to be one whose function had been compromised, and the work restored function. Whether the curve straightened was a question to be settled by the body, not by the practitioner's promises.
The whole body around the curve
Because the lumbar segment communicates upward to the cervicals and downward through the pelvis, a scoliotic curve registers everywhere in the body. The neck balances the lumbar; the pelvis tilts to accommodate the lumbar; the scapulae spread or close in response to the dorsal compensation. Ida taught that the practitioner cannot work the curve directly. She must work the whole structural envelope that the curve sits in. The lumbar lordosis and the cervical lordosis are reciprocal — change one and you must change the other — and so any genuine intervention into scoliosis requires the whole length of the spine to come into the work.
"You've gotten the legs to free themselves down off the pelvis. You have taken the pelvis and made it as horizontal as you can, but you still have a problem in that body in that you have not changed the cervical organization. Now those of you who have worked with manipulative methods before know that you do not get that the cervical curve and the lumbar curve, these secondary curves are related. That your cervical curve talks about your lumbar curve, that your lumbar curve talks about your cervical curve. Therefore, if you aim to change the one or the other permanently, you have to change the twin, the two ends of the stick. The anatomy books, the physiology books talk about these curves being secondary curves, but I have yet to see any anatomy book or physiology book really discussing the necessity of balance between the cervical and the lumbar. But this is so and this is obvious to you as you start working with bodies."
On the reciprocal relationship between the cervical and the lumbar curves:
This is why Ida insisted that scoliosis work cannot be done only at the site of the curve. The curve sits in a system. The shortened side of the trunk has shortened erector spinae; the elongated side has overstretched fascial sheaths; the cervical curve has compensated by deepening or shallowing its own lordosis; the head has tilted to keep the eyes level; the pelvis has rotated to keep the legs roughly under the body. To unwind one of these compensations without addressing the others is to leave the curve in place with new strains added. The third hour is where the practitioner first faces the whole envelope, and where the integration of all these elements has to be attempted in coordinated fashion.
Leg length, pelvis, and the asymmetric load
Scoliotic structure rarely appears without companion asymmetries below the pelvis. In a 1974 Open Universe demonstration, the practitioner working with John walked the audience through the horizontalizing goal in a body whose two sides did not match in height. The lumbar is tipped because the sacrum is tipped, and the sacrum is tipped because one leg has been operating differently from the other — sometimes from injury, sometimes from how a cast was held during long immobilization, sometimes from a congenital tendency. The same logic that holds for scoliotic curves applies here: the soft tissue can be reorganized even when the underlying bone cannot, and the body that walked in lopsided can leave more horizontal than it came.
"see the work proceed. Now, John, if Doctor. Rolfe talks quietly, you repeat what she says so she doesn't lose the energy, but tell everybody what she's talking. You see our goal is the same as we talked about in the other two demonstrations, that is to horizontalize the pelvis. That is to allow the lumbar, or that lower part of the spine, to drop back. And in this case, horizontalizing the pelvis as you can see before the hour primarily means also to allow that left side to be at the same height as the right side. There are of course two ways in which that can happen. One is that the left side gets longer and the right side gets shorter. As you look at the pictures over there, you can see the particular contribution in each hour to the horizontal length of the pelvis. You can see how the effect of the side to side difference of the pelvis, particularly in the front view, changed in several of the hours. You can probably, possibly by now, trace the effect up his spine too. Once you shift the pelvis to one side or the other, what the effect must be in his spine. Just figure that the sacrum is tipped and therefore the spine goes right up. And if you could feel his lumbar in each hour, you would feel the tension and the disorganization that results from that difference in his two legs."
From a 1974 Open Universe demonstration on horizontalizing the pelvis in an asymmetric body:
The demonstration is useful in the scoliosis context because it shows the same structural reasoning applied to a less dramatic case. The lateral tilt of the pelvis is a small scoliotic pattern — or the structural seed of one — and the work to address it is the same work, performed at lower amplitude. The practitioner reads the body from the ground up, finds where the support has failed, and restores the support. Whether the resulting body looks symmetric to the eye matters less than whether gravity can act on it supportively. This is the principle that scales from minor lateral asymmetry all the way to severe post-pathological curves.
The skeleton in the room
The teaching often returned to the skeleton hanging in the corner of the classroom. Ida used it as a constant referent — the bones do not lie, and the patterns they record are not theoretical. The skeleton itself happened to have a small scoliosis, which gave her a teaching opportunity. The remnants of the pattern were visible in the articulations, and students could trace what living tissue must have been doing for decades to produce the bony record they were looking at. The skeleton was not a model of the ideal body. It was a record of a real one, and it was therefore more useful than any diagram.
What the skeleton showed, and what the student looking at it for two months had finally understood, was that long-term pattern leaves a permanent mark. The articular surfaces remodel. The bone itself reshapes. This is not reversible by manual work. But the student also understood — and Ida confirmed — that recognizing the bone's record does not change the priority of the soft-tissue intervention. The psoas still has to be reached. The quadratus still has to release. The lumbar segment still has to be allowed to find a new functional balance around whatever bone has been laid down. The bones are the floor of what is possible. The work happens on everything above that floor.
What polio left behind
Post-polio scoliosis was a category Ida saw repeatedly through the late 1940s, the 1950s, and into the 1970s as polio survivors aged into their adult bodies and began to come to her for structural work. The picture was distinctive. The disease had damaged motor neurons asymmetrically; certain muscles had failed to develop or had atrophied; the body had built compensations on whatever musculature was left. By the time the survivor was in his thirties or forties, the compensations had become the body's whole organizing pattern. The curve was not just the curve. It was the architecture of how that body had learned to be vertical.
Ida's claim that polio scoliosis enters through the psoas is best read as a structural observation about that learning. The lumbar segment is where verticality is negotiated. A body that has lost reliable musculature in one leg or hip will recruit the psoas asymmetrically to maintain upright stance. Over years, the asymmetry becomes the body's default psoas pattern. The lumbar segment loses its bilateral support and curves. The disease was the precipitating cause, but the structure that resulted is psoas structure, and so the work to address it is psoas work. The empirical generalization — every polio scoliosis she ever saw required this kind of shoring up — is the practitioner's confirmation that the doctrine survives contact with the real range of cases.
Spastic patterns and the autonomic puzzle
Scoliotic structure has a cousin in the patterning of spastic bodies, and Ida circled this terrain in a 1975 Boulder session in conversation with a practitioner whose daughter Renée had grown up with a spastic condition. The question that emerged was where the imbalance between intrinsic and extrinsic musculature actually lives. Ida's hypothesis, which she had carried since reading an osteopathic paper from the 1940s, was that the joints might be innervated through the autonomic system while the muscles run through the central — and that spastic patterning reflects a disturbance of that balance. The same disturbance, in a milder form, appears in any body that has lost the use of its intrinsic support and is running everything from the extrinsics.
"That's what I'm saying. Isn't it a question of something that you know with your head, your brain? I know. I know that. I know she didn't know it with her body is what I'm trying to say. That's right. That wasn't available to her. But you see, I think that something that I read many, many years ago back in the oh, yeah. It was during the during the second war, so it was in the forties. Some osteopaths came along with a paper in which they claimed that the joints were innervated by the autonomic system, whereas the muscles were innervated by the central system. And I have a feeling that this is so. And I have a feeling that this whole business of spastic really is an imbalance between the autonomic and the central system by the innovation set. So when you have a child who is dyspastic, what you are having to deal with is the shift of balance back toward the extrinsics. And you see that child, as born, does not have that kind of a balance. Does this clarify your question? Plus a little bit more. Because clarifies a little bit. It does to some extent."
From a 1975 Boulder session, on intrinsics, extrinsics, and the spastic pattern:
The connection to scoliosis is indirect but real. A scoliotic body has lost the deep support that the psoas and quadratus would have provided across the lumbar segment, and has compensated through extrinsic recruitment — the erectors, the lateral abdominals, the long fascial sheaths of the back. The compensation is workable but it is brittle, and it locks the curve in place. The work of releasing the extrinsics and restoring the intrinsics is therefore not just a recipe move; it is a re-routing of how the body holds itself together. In scoliotic cases this re-routing is what eventually lets the psoas resume its support function and the lumbar segment find a new resting balance.
The fascial cap and what the body remembers
In the 1976 advanced class, the dissection slides and the discussion that followed brought attention to the embryological origin of certain fascial patterns. The leg is bent in utero, and the connective tissue around the knee — and by extension around every joint that begins life in flexion — retains a cap of fascia that holds the immature pattern even decades later. The relevance to scoliosis is that the curves the body builds are not capricious. They follow lines that the tissue has been laying down since before birth, and those lines remain available as patterns of accommodation when later demands exceed the body's structural budget.
"Now you can also see here the pull of the fascia between the region of the anterior superior spine and the knee And then remember that in utero, the leg was bent this way so that from the strain of the tension or whatever on the connective tissue, I don't know how long I can stand people doing this, there's literally a cap formed around the knee which in many cases is retained in the adult and we found it in this adult as you can see this cap coming right around the front here which would keep people from getting into true balance with the knees. So again I feel that by loosening knees we are going another step in embryological and therefore evolutionary development. You can do this with angles, you can like bring the calcaneus down, you can, you know, it's a fun play thing and it makes sense in terms of what we're doing."
From the 1976 advanced class, on the in-utero fascial cap retained around the knee:
Scoliotic curves often run along these pre-laid fascial lines. The body finds the path of least structural resistance when it is forced to compensate, and that path is frequently a path the fascia already knew. This is one reason why scoliotic patterns can be eerily symmetrical in their asymmetry — they recapitulate developmental rotations, in-utero flexion patterns, the original lateral folding of the trunk. The practitioner reaching for the psoas in a scoliotic third hour is therefore not only addressing the failure of adult support; she is reaching back through layers of fascial memory to the foundations on which the failure was built.
The ligamentous heap and the sacroiliac
Scoliosis registers at the sacroiliac junction as a pattern of heaping — the ligaments connecting sacrum to ilium, sacrum to fifth lumbar, shorten and densify until the resilient tissue becomes brittle and pooled. In a 1971-72 mystery-tape session, a student described finding this heaping universally just above the sacroiliac joint, and Ida explained why. The pattern is not pathological in origin; it is the structural record of aberrant movement repeated for years, in which ligaments designed to stretch and rebound have stopped doing the second part and have only contracted.
"They don't seem to realize this. Well, you got something to add to it, I don't know, I hope. Well something I, I mean there's a lot of variability in pelvises, but one thing that I sort of universally noted is this heaping on the superior part of the superior aspect of the ileosacral junction. If you go deep, there's always some strings in there. Just on on the top of the of the sacroiliac joint, so to speak. Why are they? Some of the pupil Why are those strings? And you see they wind shorten, and wind shortening may heat. It's only as you stretch a ligament that you begin to get the other picture, the picture of resilience. But you have it's necessary to have ligaments connecting every bone, every other bone, so there's going to be a ligament between this sacrum and the fifth lumbar, and there's going to be a ligament between the sacrum and the Mhmm."
From a 1971-72 mystery-tape session, on the universal heaping at the sacroiliac junction:
The heaping is one of the body's signatures of long-term curve. When the practitioner finds it — and she will find it in nearly every scoliotic body — she is reading a record of how the ligamentous system has been recruited to hold a structure that the muscular system could not maintain. The release of that heaping is part of the work but it is not, by itself, sufficient. The same logic Ida applied to the quadratus applies here: releasing the ligamentous heap above the sacroiliac changes the local picture, but does not finish the curve. The psoas remains the destination, and the heap will reform if the underlying support is not restored.
Symmetry as a practitioner's question
In the 1976 advanced class, a student described his tenth-hour work on a scoliotic body and reported that the scoliosis and rotations the man came in with did not entirely come up. Ida confirmed they never will. The whole class was then taught what the practitioner is actually searching for, which is not symmetry but a relative symmetry around the vertical — a structure that gravity can support, even if every individual element of it is asymmetric. This is a refinement of the symmetry idea that becomes essential in scoliotic work.
"So we're searching for a particular kind of balance. You are searching for a relative symmetry around a vertical. Why? Because you expect to use gravity to help you out. The only way that you can get gravity to work for you is to give gravity something that is relatively symmetrical around the vertical. Okay, I had a particular model when I did my ten hour on last week. Whether through my own lack of skill or whatever during the ten hours, scoliosis and rotations that he came with did not entirely come up. Of course, they didn't, and they never will if this cheers you up. So I just thought leave myself an open. So in the tenth hour, Peter said, don't Yeah. Look for symmetry. Look for balance. Yeah. That's right. And so I did something like that. And And he was operating alright. Yeah. He was doing fine, but I don't know what I did. Okay. You don't have to. But I would like, if I could, to throw a monkey wrench into the notion that most of you have, if not all of you, that by the use of structural integration, you can take these cockeyed, crooked structures and make them straight."
A student reports his tenth-hour outcome on a scoliotic body in the 1976 advanced class:
Relative symmetry around the vertical is a precise concept. It does not require that the right and left sides of the body be mirror images. It requires that the body's mass be distributed so that the line of gravity passes through it in a way that the body can support without continuous muscular bracing. A scoliotic body can achieve this. The curve remains, but the body lives around the curve rather than against it. This is what Ida meant by getting the body to act as though it were symmetric — not the visual illusion of straightness, but the functional accomplishment of effortless verticality despite the underlying asymmetry.
The psoas literature and its limits
Ida was aware that other practitioners — chiropractors particularly — were beginning to write about the psoas as a key to spinal curvature. A book by Arthur McFarland on the iliopsoas had appeared, and a student raised it in the 1971-72 class. Ida's response was characteristic: she discouraged reading those books. Her objection was not that the anatomical content was wrong, but that students who learned the psoas from books tended to know the psoas in isolation, and to lose sight of the body. The psoas is consequential because of how it sits in the whole structure, not because of what it does as a discrete muscle.
"No. Fell by the name of Manel. Oh, Cheryl. Arthur McFarland. That's the guy you mentioned yesterday in the morning. He's just written a book on the iliopsoas and which I I have a Listen. Stay away from those books on have them in. Speaking of the iliopsoas muscle, when I was taking my audition class, I think the brains are in the pubococcius muscle and when in doubt say psoas. But Well, I really I really mean what I say. You get to know so damn much about that iliopsoas that you don't know anything about a body. Yeah. Although he talks about reducing spinal curvatures by balancing the psoas. Well, all right. A great many chiropractors have done the same thing, and there's a whole school of chiropractic, for instance, that sells the idea that you can straighten the spine as well as the spinal cord."
On reading the psoas literature, in a 1971-72 lecture:
That said, Ida did not reject the empirical content of the literature. When a student returned with a specific figure from McFarland — that the psoas in a tipped pelvis can exert pulling forces well over a ton — she absorbed it without dispute. The figure confirmed what experienced hands already knew: this is no small muscle, and surface work that does not reach it cannot move a structure it is actively holding. The book was wrong as a pedagogy but right as a measurement, and the measurement underscored why the practitioner must develop the depth to reach the psoas directly rather than working around it.
"It is a little startling to find a book that's called The Iliopsoas, the Undiscovered Key to Back Structural anomalies in that, yes. That's the title. He's talking about structural anomalies and we're very much interested at this point in functional not anything that's as solid as an anomaly, as permanent as an anomaly, as immovable as an anomaly. We're talking about this kind of thing. It's alright. And that's some of interesting things, like one of the things for instance he shows, the kind of thing I'm interested in, is that if you, when you have the pelvis in a tipped alignment, that the forces acting through the psoas sometimes accumulate to more than a ton. And there's something on the order of 23 to 2,500 pounds of force exerted by the psoas. It's no little muscle. I mean it's a huge, mighty mover if you get it into an aberrated I don't remember that. I don't remember that being in that book. Was it I'm sure it must have been that book."
From a 1971-72 lecture, on the psoas as a structural force generator:
Knowing the figure does not teach the practitioner where to put her hands or how to ask the muscle to release. That has to be learned at the body, in the third hour, under Ida's eye, on real scoliotic structures. The literature can confirm what experienced practitioners already know — that the psoas exerts forces large enough to deform the lumbar segment over years — but the work itself cannot be drawn from the page. It has to be drawn from the body that is in front of the practitioner, and it has to follow the order the body dictates.
The chiropractic temptation
Throughout her scoliosis teaching, Ida pushed against the chiropractic frame that treats the spine as the operative object. Chiropractors, she said in a 1976 lecture, work on the spine by trying to push bones around. The osteopaths do something similar with different theoretical justification. Both schools assume that the deformation lives in the bones and that the intervention happens at the bones. Ida's teaching reverses this. The deformation lives in the soft tissue, in the fascial envelope, in the muscular support structure. The bones record what the soft tissue has been doing. To change the bones' position over time, you change the soft tissue.
"Why are they secondary and why are they curved? Well they have to be curved because of the shape of the vertebra. If they weren't curved you would lose your shock. Why have those vertebra taken that shape? I think it's necessary for the upper right posture. In order to have balance. It would be a compensation for the primary curve. Yeah, that's the answer. It's got to be an appropriate compensation so that the primary curve can sit there supported. It's got to be. So that the secondary curve is secondary because where it is, where it has to be is determined by that primary curve. That's what makes it secondary. Yeah. I seem to remember hearing sometime that that system of curves is ultimately structurally stronger in terms of weight bearing than a perfectly straight spine. I don't doubt that it is. I don't doubt that it is. But this I'm not doing a teleological preaching that you put it in because it's stronger. I'm simply saying here is the structure. Now let's look at it and see how it got that way. How do you suppose you got those great big heavy lumbar vertebra? You've heard me say and I don't doubt you've heard Peter and others say that structure depends on the function that you've demanded."
From the 1976 advanced class, on what the primary and secondary curves of the spine actually are:
This passage is where the doctrine comes full circle. The lumbars are the biggest, strongest vertebrae because they bear the demand of holding the body upright against the primary curve of the dorsal spine. The psoas is the muscle that allows them to do this work. When the psoas fails — and Ida's claim is that in every scoliosis, in some form, the psoas has failed — the lumbar segment cannot do its job, and the curve develops to redistribute the load. The practitioner's task is to restore the muscular support that allows the lumbars to resume their function as the strongest segment of the spine. Everything else in the scoliotic body is downstream of this.
Coda: what stays unfinished
Ida did not promise her students that they could resolve every scoliotic curve they encountered. Her teaching closes on a realistic note: there are limits, and the limits are set by the bone. What the work can do is enormous — restore function, redistribute load, give the body a vertical that gravity can support — but it cannot undo decades of bone remodeling, cannot regenerate motor neurons lost to polio, cannot make a curve disappear. The shoring up is real. The expectations have to be calibrated to what the structure can actually accept.
What survives across the years of her teaching is the doctrine itself: every scoliosis is a psoas problem. The claim is absolute, and Ida states it absolutely. Whether the curve is idiopathic — emerging without identified cause — or post-pathological — the residue of polio or another spinal virus — the structural seat is the same. The lumbar segment has lost its supported relationship with the muscle that is supposed to anchor it. The work is to restore that relationship as best the body will allow, and to organize the whole structure around whatever lumbar function can be recovered. The third hour is where this confrontation first becomes possible. The quadratus is the threshold. The psoas is the destination. And the bones, having recorded the long pattern, set the floor of what the body will agree to become.
See also: See also: 1971-72 mystery-tape discussion of the lumbar lordosis as the structurally giving segment of the spine, with the student's observation that the same lumbar pattern appears in true discogenic pathology — a useful pointer for practitioners interested in how Ida related scoliotic and discogenic presentations. 72MYS101 ▸
See also: See also: 1975 Boulder discussion (B3T4SA) on intrinsics, extrinsics, and the autonomic-versus-central innervation hypothesis — relevant to scoliotic patterning as a case of intrinsic support failure compensated by extrinsic recruitment. B3T4SA ▸
See also: See also: 1976 advanced-class teaching on the primary and secondary spinal curves and on why the lumbars become the strongest vertebrae in the body — the anatomical foundation for the scoliosis doctrine. 76ADV61 ▸
See also: See also: 1975 Boulder discussion of the third hour as a continuation of the first and second hours, with reference to how the recipe accumulates toward the psoas — useful background for practitioners working scoliotic cases through the recipe sequence. T1SB ▸
See also: See also: public-tape discussion (RolfA2) on why the spine functions as an upended beam rather than a column, and why the supine position rather than the prone is the operative orientation for structural work — foundational for understanding why scoliotic patterns are addressed from the front and side rather than from the back. RolfA2Side1 ▸
See also: See also: public-tape discussion (RolfA3) of the second hour and the freeing of feet, ankles, and the lower structures from the ground up — context for how the practitioner builds toward the lumbar work in the third hour where scoliotic patterns first become fully addressable. RolfA3Side1 ▸