Length as the universal diagnostic
Ida did not arrive at her insistence on length through theory. She arrived at it through years of watching bodies and noticing one regularity: every body in trouble was short somewhere. In a 1973 Big Sur class, she tells the room that whatever the presenting complaint — a postural deviation, a chronic pain, a personality contraction — the body in front of them will be short. The first task, the second task, the last task is to make it long. And it must be lengthened everywhere, not only in the obvious place. The story she tells next is a cautionary one: three osteopaths in Texas who attended one of her early trainings remembered only one move — lengthening the back as they went down the body. They worked on each other once a week using that single technique. A year later, all three were in worse shape than before. The cautionary tale grounds the section that follows. Length is the demand the body makes, but it must be balanced length, established through the whole sequence, not through a single move repeated.
"The spine that isn't moving has been shortened one way or another. Another. And everybody I shouldn't tell you this. I should make you see this. Everybody that you have ever seen that is in trouble of any sort, whether it be a mere postural problem or a problem like Frank's or a problem like even like drivers, everybody will be too short. The first thing, the second thing, the third thing, the last thing, the tenth thing, the twentieth thing, the hundredth thing that you gotta do with the body you're working on is make it long. But it's gotta be long all over and not in the back only. I had a very interesting experience one time several years ago. I taught a class in Texas. And in those time those days, I didn't have the system of making people sit through and watch the whole deal."
Ida names length as the universal diagnostic and the universal prescription.
The Texas story that follows in the same lecture is one of her favorite cautionary tales, and it does double work: it warns against isolating any single move, and it dramatizes how durably wrong a body can become when length is added in one direction without the corresponding balance in the others. Three practitioners, all osteopaths, retained one technique from her training — lengthening the back — and applied it to each other repeatedly. The result was not three lengthened backs; it was three bodies that, in her phrase, had landed up by just wiping the axe. The moral of the story, as she delivers it, is that orthodox methodology assumes that if a treatment is good, more of the same treatment is better. Her teaching insists on the opposite. Length added in one place without span established elsewhere shifts strain rather than resolving it.
"And in those time those days, I didn't have the system of making people sit through and watch the whole deal. But I took people like osteopaths and assumed that I could teach them immediately because they had the whole background. And I couldn't do it. They weren't expecting as complicated a teaching as this. It never occurred to them that maybe they should have notes. Nothing occurred to them except they'd spent some money, and they were gonna sit there and listen to it. So they sat there, and they listened to it. And there were three of them that tried to work on each other to a more man wife and a very close friend. And so when I got out of the town, they were all rolled up. And the one thing they remembered was how good it felt to have somebody lengthening their back as they went down like this. And so they'd meet at least once a week and possibly twice a week to talk about structural integration, which they completely forgotten. And what came out of it was that all three of them landed up by just wiping the axe. And about a year after, somebody called me up and said, would you please come down here? We've gotten to be a very funny looking bunny, and now we're getting all kinds of new symptoms. They didn't tell me why. Suddenly, this to remark, I stopped in Texas. And I took one and I knew why. You can't do it that way. But you see all of these orthodox methodologies, they can. If you give treatment, that's good. You give them 10 treatments of the same dose, and that's better. And you give them a 100 treatments or a treatment every day, and that cures them. It does by putting it under the suit, by shifting the strain, and therefore, the suit."
She tells the cautionary tale of three Texas osteopaths who lengthened backs and nothing else.
How muscles are lengthened — across, not along
One of the more durable disagreements in Ida's teaching life was with the encounter-group psychologist Bill Schutz, who had spent enough time around Structural Integration to have opinions about it but who held to a mechanical intuition Ida considered exactly backward. Schutz believed muscles are lengthened by being worked along their length — running pressure up or down the fiber. Ida insisted the opposite. Muscles are lengthened by working across them, by stretching the connective tissue envelope that determines their resting length. The disagreement matters because it goes to the heart of what fascial work actually does. If muscle length were a property of the muscle fiber, Schutz would be right. But in Ida's account muscle length is a property of the fascial sheath, and the sheath is reorganized by transverse pressure, not by longitudinal stroking. The 1976 advanced class makes the mechanism explicit: lengthening of the back is produced by bringing the laterally displaced erectors back toward the midline. The fibers come closer together, the back grows longer.
"The trick trick was how do you how do you get that back lengthened. I remember what a time I had with Bill Schutz who insisted on believing that you lengthen a muscle by going along it and lengthen it, but you don't. You must when you lengthen a muscle by going across it, etcetera, etcetera."
Ida recalls her argument with Bill Schutz about how muscles actually lengthen.
The 1975 Boulder transcripts show Ida walking students through the visible consequence of this principle. In the second hour, the practitioner works the spiny erectors — the three strands of muscle running up the back that everyone in the room can picture from the anatomy books. As the body has shortened over the years, those erectors have spread laterally; as they spread, the back grows shorter. The corrective move is to bring them medially. When the practitioner does this, the lengthening is immediate and visible. In Ida's account, the same logic governs the scapulae: as the body shortens, the scapulae come apart; as they are brought back toward the spine, the body lengthens. The whole back becomes a system of paired structures whose distance from the midline determines the length of the trunk.
"Because as we said yesterday, the thing that you are doing in every hour of brothing that you do is lengthening that body, thinning it for the most part and lengthening it. And in order to lengthen it, you have got to get greater length in those spiny erectors. Now who in this room doesn't have a picture in his mind of those spiny erectors? Who needs to see it in the anatomy books? You all know what I'm talking about. You all know those pictures with those three strands going up. Now in the old, old days, when there weren't as many people who had seen the demonstrations of Rolfing, It used to be quite incredible to people to see that the shortening of the body comes in by virtue of the spreading apart of those spiny erectors and the lengthening of the body can be produced by the tightening together of those spiny erectors. Now everyone in this room, in the course of his second hours, has seen this, but it used to be nothing short of a revelation. You see how when you brought those two strands together, all of a sudden, you had length in the body. And you see this is telling you something else. It is telling you what to do next. Because you find, as you look at these bodies, that as the body has shortened, the scapulae have come apart. The converse is also true. As the scapulae are pulled apart by poor use of the shoulder girdle, the body shortens. Consequently, in order to lengthen the body, you have to get the scapulae in where they belong. The relation of spine and scapulae has to be observed. The normal relation has to be observed."
Ida walks the room through the second-hour mechanism — that lengthening comes from bringing the spiny erectors together.
The recipe as a sequence of lengthenings
The ten-session series, in Ida's teaching, is organized as a sequence of lengthenings in different planes. The first hour lengthens the front; the second the back; the third the sides. By the fourth and fifth hours the lengthening begins to move into the core — the adductors, the rectus abdominis, the psoas. The 1976 advanced class makes this hour-by-hour structure explicit, and Ida insists students perceive it as a continuous process rather than a sequence of discrete moves. Each hour adds length in a new dimension because the body's shortness, as she puts it, sits in every direction at once. A practitioner who lengthens the front without later lengthening the back will produce the Texas-osteopath result — a body more deformed than the one they started with. What makes the recipe coherent is that it cycles through the dimensions of shortness systematically.
"So your overall view shows that short line in spite of all that you've done. You see hour after hour, you have progressed with your overall view. Your first hour is a completely random pattern, and it goes into an overall pattern of now we have a longer front. When your second hour comes in, now we're going to get a longer back. We have to have a longer back. And your third hour says, well, the sides are short. I've gotta get longer sides. Everywhere you are adding length. And always, this is a problem. You must add length to get a person out of his misery because his misery dates from the fact that the gravitational force is pulling him down, and the point of weakness will be the point where he will accommodate to the gravitational force pulling him down and shorten. So everywhere in order to get him out of his problems, you must lengthen him. So then the next question to ask yourself is how can I get a length form in this dimension, so to speak, in this specific direction? Using your analogy of the pole, getting length in the sides has also given us the thorax off the pelvis to give it freedom."
Ida describes the overall view: each hour adds length in a new dimension because the body is short in every direction at once.
The third hour, in her teaching, is the first hour where the lengthening goes deep. In the 1976 advanced class she presses students to name what the third hour actually accomplishes — and rejects the easy answers about the lateral line, the rib cage, horizontality. The answer she is pushing them toward is the quadratus lumborum. The quadratus spans from the iliac crest to the twelfth rib, and its length determines whether the rib cage can lift off the pelvis at all. The third hour, in this framing, is the hour where the practitioner finally reaches the structure that decides whether the shoulder girdle can come up and the pelvic girdle can come down — whether, in other words, the trunk has any room to be long.
"Again, this will be the first hour where we do any deep work when we start to work with the attachment of quadrats and bone to the pelvis and the twelfth rib. Not only to lengthen the sides, but it's then it's now short relatively since we've lengthened the front and back in one and two. But because we, again, wanna do everything we can for the future to free up the pelvis. And the quad quadratus seems to be one of the keys, I haven't got this real clear in my head yet, but it's one of the keys of really getting the pelvis into a position where we can work with it and place it in a functional position. Well, wait a minute. That word relatedness that you liked before, it also comes in here. Only here your relatedness gets to be between one segment of the body, the trunk, the thorax, and the other segment of the body, the pelvis. And this whole quadratus bit has to do with establishing that relatedness through establishing the appropriate span of the tissues. Does this add anything to your idea? Clarify it. And almost almost every hour so far ends with some major structure which connects the two body segments together."
Ida names the quadratus as the operative structure of the third hour and the first deep work of the series.
In a parallel passage from the 1976 class, Ida links the quadratus work back to what was done in the second hour. The lumbar fascia, she explains, was already loosened when the back was lengthened; in the third hour the practitioner penetrates more deeply into the same fascial system, now reaching the quadratus itself. The continuation is exact: second-hour lateral-to-medial work on the erectors lengthens the back; third-hour work on the iliac crest releases the muscle whose attachment determines whether that newly lengthened back can sit appropriately on the pelvis. The whole structure is one continuous excavation — peeling the body like an onion, in her recurring metaphor — going deeper hour by hour into the same fascial system.
"There's also the connection which I had just, as you were talking I was making the connection of the lumbar fascia that had been affected in the second hour and when you go back and you add to that, you have more to it in the third hour of my working done through crest of the ilium and the quadratus beginning to penetrate to a deeper level because now you're down as deep as the quadratus, which you haven't been able to get near at an earlier stage. Now where does the fibratus attach? It spans from the twelfth wave to the rest of the ileum. To the rest of the ileum. So if you're doing something for the quadratus, you're doing something for the ileum. You're doing something to additionally free the pelvis. And you are freeing it more or less on the side now. Not the back, not the right. On the side. Do you see what I'm trying to present to you? I'm trying to make you really understand in your guts how you haven't done one darn thing in all these four hours except get a little more youthful available for your pelvis. Okay, so that's the third hour and in the third hour we begin to go deeper via the quadratus. By the time you begin to get the quadratus where it belongs, you begin to release the twelfth rib if the twelfth rib has been in danger at some point."
Ida shows how the third hour is the second hour continued — going deeper into the same fascial system to reach the quadratus.
Span as the structural complement to length
Length is what the practitioner adds; span is what length makes possible. The word recurs in Ida's late teaching to name the relationship between bones once the fascia between them has been lengthened sufficiently. The twelfth rib spans the gap to the iliac crest by way of the quadratus; the scapulae span the upper back by way of the rhomboids; the rectus spans pubis to fifth rib. Each spanning is a structural fact made possible by a fascial lengthening. The 1971 mystery-tape lecture pulls these together explicitly. Ida is in the middle of describing the third hour and the quadratus when she reaches for the broader principle: the work is about spanning, the establishment of appropriate distance between structures held together by a fascia that has been brought to the right tone.
"Comes the light. And the light comes like in things for me like, I look at a man, and I see that somewhere around his waist there is a sudden indentation."
Ida names the indentation at the waist as the place where the rib cage and pelvis have failed to span each other.
The mechanism by which spanning translates into upright posture is one Ida returns to in the RolfA2 tape. The quadratus, when it has been brought to appropriate length and tone, becomes the key — not just to the side of the body, but to the relationship of the shoulder girdle to the pelvic girdle. If the quadratus is long, the twelfth rib can lift, and with the twelfth rib so can the eleventh and tenth. The whole rib cage rises off the pelvis because its lowest member has been given somewhere to be. Ida insists that the practitioner has only just reached the depth at which this work is possible — the third hour is the first peeling of the onion that gets the practitioner past the surface and into the structures that actually determine trunk length.
"The quadratus lumborum particularly. Because the quadratus is the key to that whole business of whether you can get the shoulder girdle up and the pelvic girdle down. And it is the key through the mechanism of the twelfth rib, plus the eleventh rib, plus the tenth rib, because the eleventh and tenth aren't going to be where they belong if the twelfth You isn't where it see, it establishes the kind of spanning which gives you the length you need. And it is the first time that you've really gone deep into that body. You see, you've taken that body and like an onion, as I've said before, you have peeled it from the outside. But never have you peeled very deeply yet. But in the third hour, you begin to peel more deeply."
Ida names the quadratus as the key to whether the shoulder girdle can come up and the pelvic girdle down.
The rectus and the fifth hour
The fifth hour, in Ida's recipe, is where length becomes a problem of the front of the body. The first hour opened the chest; the second lengthened the back; the third lengthened the sides through the quadratus; the fourth established length on the inside of the legs and freed the pelvic floor from below. By the fifth hour the practitioner is looking at a body whose front has become short relative to all the lengthening done elsewhere. The rectus abdominis — running from the pubis to the fifth rib, sometimes the fourth — is the structure that must now be lengthened. But Ida's framing of the fifth hour is unusual: she insists the rectus work is not really about the rectus. It is about the floor of the pelvis. The rectus lengthens only because the pelvic floor has been horizontalized and the pelvis has been allowed to move into its proper relationship with the trunk above.
"And we've gotten to the place now, we've uplifted the chest, lengthened the back sides, opened up the sides, and we started to establish a midline. And now we see that the front is beginning to need to be lengthened also. How come? From the pull of the thorax and the position of the pelvis. And the pelvis has to come up more anteriorly And by lengthening the rectus, we begin to get that and we begin to get a more total integration between the upper half and lower half. It's a very good job. A very good job. Compliment to you. And this is the answer, only Steve didn't give you quite the full key. The full key is that this has to do with the floor of the pelvis. And you were talking as though you were dealing with the bony. One is equivalent to the other practically, but nevertheless, I'd like to get this into your imagination. That this fifth hour has to do with the horizontalizing of the floor of the pelvis. Now I haven't heard anything in this class nor do I hear much in any classes come to think of it. To indicate that you people recognize the fact that it is the floor of the pelvis, that is the vital structure in this trip. We talk about pelvis."
A student names the fifth-hour work; Ida confirms and adds the key structural reframe.
In her 1976 advanced class Ida walks the students through the anatomy of the rectus itself — where it attaches, what its origins are, what the practitioner can actually reach. She uses the moment as a teaching exercise, pressing the students to name what they would do and where they would put their hands. The answer she arrives at is precise: the rectus has two ends — the pubis below and the fifth rib above, sometimes extending its influence onto the fourth — and these are the two places the practitioner has to address. One of the room's bright boys raises the question of the tendinous inscriptions, the horizontal divisions in the rectus belly. Ida deflects this firmly. The inscriptions are not the practitioner's concern at this point because they are not what is involved in the fascial sheets the practitioner is working with.
So you've got two places where you can begin to look to see what you can do with the rectus. And some of you bright boys are going to say to me, Yeah, how about being scripter? And I say to you that at this point the inscriptor is none of your concern because the inscriptor I say to you advanced students because the inscriptor is not involved in those fascial sheets, particularly primarily. So you've got two places to go to try to lengthen those recti. You've got the fifth rib, and you've got the pubes.
Ida walks the class through the anatomy of the rectus and where lengthening it can actually be applied.
Earlier in the same 1976 class Ida had used the rectus to make a more general point about how students should be developing their eye. She presses a student to say whether his answer about the rectus comes from knowing the recipe or from looking at the body. She accepts the recipe-based answer reluctantly, but the larger argument is that the practitioner must learn to see what the body itself is saying. The bodies tell the practitioner what is short; the practitioner then knows what to lengthen. This is not an intellectual operation. It is the visual recognition of shortening, hour after hour, in body after body.
"It's easy to see on all these bodies that needs to be lengthened and lifted. That's fine. That's probably the start. Now you see that's not an intellectual answer. That's the kind of an answer that I want, that you look at the body and the body says to you, I need this or I need that."
Ida names what she wants — answers that come from the body, not from the recipe.
What lengthening the rectus does to the pelvis
In the same 1976 third-hour discussion, Ida circles back to the question of what fifth-hour work on the rectus actually accomplishes when it succeeds. She has been pressing students on the third hour — what it does to the relationship of rib cage and pelvis — and the conversation extends into the larger question of how front-of-body lengthening reorganizes pelvic position. The discussion is dialogic and partial; Ida is reaching for the answer she wants, and the room is offering partial answers. The exchange shows how she thinks about the pelvis as the structure that responds to lengthening above and below simultaneously.
"Keep going. Keep going. In the third hour. You're allowing the back of the pelvis to drop some. Keep going. Could it be relative to Darcy's comment, a reduction in the base of the anterior aortic artery in the base of the shingle. It's not what I'm looking for. Take your brain and pelvis from the bottom. Basically, essentially, what are you working on in the third hour? Keep going. Keep going."
A dialogic exchange where Ida pushes students toward the answer about what lengthening accomplishes for the pelvis.
What emerges across the 1975 and 1976 transcripts is that for Ida the rectus is never lengthened for its own sake. The rectus is lengthened because it is the front-of-body counterpart to the spiny erectors at the back, and because its tension is one of the structures that holds the pelvis in anterior tilt and prevents the floor of the pelvis from becoming horizontal. When the rectus is lengthened — at the fifth rib above and the pubis below — the pelvis is allowed to come into a new relationship with the trunk; when the pelvic floor is then horizontalized, the rectus stays lengthened. The two events are inseparable. This circularity is characteristic of her late teaching, where she increasingly refuses to describe structural events as having single causes. The rectus and the pelvic floor reorganize each other; the practitioner's work creates the conditions for that reorganization but does not cause it in any linear sense.
The deep core — psoas and shortness in the front
Beyond the rectus, in the fifth hour and after, the lengthening of the front of the body reaches the deepest core structures. In the 1975 Boulder class Ida and her colleagues discuss what becomes visible when a body comes in for fifth-hour work. The shortness, by then, is no longer at the surface; it has moved to the core. The clearest place to see it is the long axis between pubis and sternum — the front midline of the body. The shortness sits in the rectus, but also deep beneath the rectus, in the psoas and the iliacus, the muscles that govern the relationship of the lumbar spine to the femur. The fifth hour is where the practitioner finally reaches this depth.
"That comment really does help me. Okay, the person When the person comes in for the fifth hour, if I'm ready to move on to that, Now the shortness really deep in their body is beginning to show and it's in the core and the place that it shows up the most spectacularly when they come in for the fifth hour is between the pubes and the sternum, I'd say, and the mid chest. There's usually a good deal of shortness in the very front part of the body which of course is deep, is not only shortness in the rectus but also deep down shortness in the psoas and the locus. So the fifth hour works on these areas."
A senior practitioner describes what the body shows when it presents for fifth-hour work.
The psoas, in Ida's teaching, is the structure whose length and balance with the rectus determines whether the lumbar spine can find its proper relationship to the pelvis. In one of her August 1974 IPR lectures she sketches the fascial geography that makes this possible — the psoas wrapped in its own fascial covering, continuous with the iliac fascia, the rectus sheath formed by the aponeuroses of the oblique and transverse abdominal muscles, the lumbar dorsal fascia connecting to the quadratus and the erectors. The whole system is one fascial unit, and the practitioner's work on the rectus at the fifth rib affects the psoas behind it, and vice versa.
"You're getting then certainly the interconnection in terms of potential function between these three layers by a very distinct fascial layer. The psoas then of course has its own fascial covering on its ventral surface which becomes continuous with that of the iliac fascia or that fascia covering the iliacus. Again, I've started going back to the other way to think more of the continuation and the potential functional interactions just using the fascia as one of the keys. Now this, there's an extension from this fascia then going out to form really the aponeurosis of the transversus muscle, the transversus abdominal muscle. This continues underneath this transversus muscle as the transfer salus fascia. Going all the way around and forming then part of the under side of the rectus sheath. This again in addition to the concept which Doctor."
A senior colleague lays out the fascial anatomy connecting psoas, rectus, and the deep abdominal sheaths.
Length in the cervical fascia and the upper trunk
Length is not only a property of the trunk between pelvis and rib cage. In Ida's late teaching it extends through the cervical fascia into the head and through the shoulder girdle out into the arms. The cervical fascia spans the gap between head and trunk; like the quadratus below, it is the structure whose appropriate length determines whether two body segments can occupy their proper distance from each other. A senior colleague in the RolfA4 tape walks through the three layers of the deep cervical fascia and how each affects the carriage of the head and neck. The passage shows how the doctrine of spanning, established in the trunk through the quadratus, generalizes to the upper body through the cervical fascia.
"And this, again, is what distinguishes our way and our thinking from that of other manipulative groups. This is what has made us a unique group that we always are thinking in terms of the expression. And I think that cervical fascia is Right. A That cervical cervical fascia spans that space between the head and the trunk. And then deep to this, we have a middle cervical fascia, which can I guess look at it this way? The middle cervical fashion has spanning between the two ulnar hyoids. You have that picture? The two ulnar hyoids coming up. Covering that area, that space, and going from this and enveloping the great blood vessels on each side. By enveloping the carotid sheath carotid and the jugular and the vagus nerve right there, enveloping that on both sides. And the middle cervical fascia dips way down into the chest, goes retrosternal, as I remember. That's really one of the things that holds that neck down into, you know, at the beginning of the cell tower all the It probably goes down behind the sternum. As I recall, doesn't it have some commiguity with pericardial structures? It probably goes down Around the sternum. It's got it goes down into the mediastinum."
A colleague extends the doctrine of spanning to the cervical fascia between head and trunk.
In her August 1974 IPR lecture Ida herself makes the most generalized version of the spine-as-spanning argument. The spine, she says, is not a stack of segments but a single unitary structure — and the practitioner who treats it as a series of bones to be pushed around (as the chiropractors do, in her usage) misses the point entirely. The spine is a unit of united areas, and its length is a property of the whole. The osteopaths and chiropractors who treat individual segments fail to grasp this; Structural Integration begins from the recognition that the spine is one thing, lengthened through the whole, not at any single joint.
"Well one of the things that impresses me experientially as well as as I try to invest that skeleton with some flesh Is the essential nature of the spinal, not the spine as such, but the spinal structure? It is again as though a body was something built around a spine. Now a lot of people have had this idea, the osteopaths have had it and the chiropractic have had it. But none of them have ever gotten out of their spine a unified something going along there. They always manage to have a series of bony segments and that's what they figure a spine is. Now this is not my concept and this is not the concept around which structural integration works. You have to get that picture of the whole spine, the whole spinal mechanism as a unit, as a unit of united areas. It is a much more sturdy sort of a concept than, for example, the chiropractic concept, where you simply have bones that you push around. And I'd like you to take this idea home with you and try to get more reality on it. As you yourself get more processing, you will understand this. It is quite impossible, I think, to understand this before you have had the kind of processing that puts these things together. And this is the reason why, at this point, the whole world, relatively speaking, accepts chiropractic, accepts osteopathy, because that is the level where their bodies are living. And you see, you have to build so much on top or around this before you get that sense of sturdy unity that a spine should be giving you."
Ida insists the spine is a unitary structure, not a series of bones — and that its length is established through the whole.
The lateral line and the fourth-hour inner leg
Between the third hour's work on the quadratus and the fifth hour's work on the rectus and psoas comes the fourth hour, which Ida names as the inside of the legs. The fourth-hour work establishes length on the medial line — the adductors and the inner thigh fascia — and Ida is explicit that this length is not for the legs themselves. It is preparation for the fifth hour. Without the length established on the inside of the legs, the practitioner cannot reach the floor of the pelvis through the rami; without that reach, the rectus and psoas cannot be lengthened in the way the fifth hour requires.
"Peter? Just the fourth hour it seems to me establishes not only, and I didn't hear this exquisitely, you said that it establishes length all the way up through the body, not just through the inside of What do you think it establishes that length all the way up through the body? When releasing the tie ups at the bottom of the pelvis at the pubic ramus, you seems to allow an extension of the prevertebral. You got any idea what that actually is, Al? Well, can, I mean in terms of structure, Nobody has convinced me yet about that fourth hour as to what its real contribution is? Yeah. Well the fascia that wraps the adductors and the inside of the leg extends right up inside the pelvis and covers the What do you mean by inside the pelvis? It comes up between the rami and then blends with the fascia that covers the obturator internus and becomes part of the floor of the pelvis. So by releasing the legs you change the tone of the floor of the pelvis. You're on the way, I think. You haven't quite made it. You should've made it more now than anyone else. I would think that also that fascia then in turn blends with the iliac fascia and distal."
Ida and a senior student work through what fourth-hour lengthening on the inner leg actually accomplishes.
Why length matters — the gravitational argument
Length in Ida's teaching is not an aesthetic value. It is a structural prerequisite for what she considers the essential phenomenon of the work: the body's reception of support from the gravitational field. A body that has shortened — collapsed, accommodated to gravity by giving up height — cannot accept gravitational support, because the support comes through alignment, and alignment requires that the body's segments be the right distance from each other. In her 1976 advanced class she returns to this argument repeatedly. The body is plastic; the practitioner is changing the fascial relationships; the result is a body capable of being vertical; and verticality is what allows gravity to nourish rather than deform.
"You must add length to get a person out of his misery because his misery dates from the fact that the gravitational force is pulling him down, and the point of weakness will be the point where he will accommodate to the gravitational force pulling him down and shorten. So everywhere in order to get him out of his problems, you must lengthen him. So then the next question to ask yourself is how can I get a length form in this dimension, so to speak, in this specific direction? Using your analogy of the pole, getting length in the sides has also given us the thorax off the pelvis to give it freedom. And then we spend a whole hour or almost a whole hour freeing this the crest and the attachments there, taking the tendon allergy along the next rational move is the corresponding number, which is the opposite of ramus. And we'd have to free that.
Ida names the gravitational logic of lengthening — the body's misery dates from accommodation to gravity by shortening.
The gravitational argument also explains why Ida is so insistent that length be established as relationship rather than as a single measurement. A body can be made taller in a particular direction without becoming any more aligned with gravity. What matters is whether the body's segments are spanning each other in the relationships that allow gravity to pass through. The quadratus that spans rib cage to pelvis, the rectus that spans pubis to fifth rib, the cervical fascia that spans head to trunk — these are the structural facts that make the body verticalizable. Length is the means; span is the structural fact; verticality is the outcome.
"Now, a fascial tissue So what I'm trying to get you to look at and understand is the circular nature of this whole crib. The way it travels round and round and round and it of the way in which organization at one place organizes or disorganizes at one place. And that's what you were doing yesterday. You were organizing afterwards. In order that Because if a joint is not truly seated with its neighbor, it takes a great deal of your vital energy to get movement organized fashion works. Now remember that what Michael says to you, that all of this fashion tends of chemistry in the extremities, particularly in the teeth. And I ask you, those of you who are in processing, what percentage of the people"
Ida names the circular nature of the fascial system — change in one place organizes or disorganizes elsewhere.
Coda: length as the body's youthfulness
Across all these passages a single quiet image recurs. The body that has been lengthened is the body that has recovered something it had earlier — youthfulness, in Ida's word; or, in her more technical framing, the position of structures that the body occupied before it accommodated to gravity by collapsing. The work, in this framing, does not add anything new to the body. It returns the body to a length and span that were already implicit in its structural plan. The 1976 third-hour passage names this explicitly: the practitioner has not done anything in the first four hours except make more youthfulness available to the pelvis. The recipe is, in this sense, a restoration.
"It's particularly shorter near the lateral line you see. And you've got to do something about getting it longer. If you want to go back to the point of youth, if you're willing to settle for, Oh hell, I'm just getting old, then you can leave it where it is. But if you want to restore your mechanical advantage, you have got to literally restore the position of what it is you're using for the effort of the shoulder girdle. And you can do this. Well, you can do this if you happen to know a good wrongful. And what that good wrongful will do will be to take those laterally displaced muscles and bring them in so they're no longer as laterally displaced. Lo and behold, the back is longer and you don't understand lo and behold, bringing those muscles from the lateral to the medial makes possible the lengthening of that back and you don't understand that."
Ida names lengthening as the restoration of youthfulness — the return to the body's earlier position.
The image of restoration explains the most distinctive quality of Ida's teaching on length: her refusal to treat any single move as the source of the result. The practitioner does not lengthen the back, lengthen the side, lengthen the front, and add up the totals. The practitioner works across the body — across the fibers, across the planes, across the segments — and the length that emerges is a property of the whole fascial system newly capable of spanning itself appropriately. What the practitioner adds, finally, is not length. What the practitioner adds is the relationship through which the body can be long. The body, in her late teaching, does the rest.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfB3 public tape — an extended discussion of how the second hour establishes length in the back through lateral-to-medial work on the erectors, with an analysis of how each successive hour deepens the same fascial excavation. RolfB3Side1 ▸
See also: See also: 1975 Boulder advanced class, T1SB — a discussion of how each horizontal change established below propagates upward through the fascial tube, illustrating Michael Salveson's concept that length added at one level releases stored energy through the whole spine. T1SB ▸
See also: See also: 1975 Boulder advanced class, T9SA and T5SB — early-session reviews where Ida and her senior students walk through the lengthening logic of the first three hours and the establishment of the spanning relationships that the later hours require. T9SA ▸T5SB ▸
See also: See also: 1975 Boulder advanced class, B2T5SA — a detailed account of the first-hour work on the rectus, costal arch, and erector spinae, naming the everlasting flexion that produces front-of-body shortness in modern life. B2T5SA ▸