The anatomist Ida named
By the early 1970s Ida was speaking openly about a problem at the heart of the work she had built. Practitioners could be trained to take a body apart — to read its distortions, to feel its fascial restrictions, to apply pressure where it was needed. What far fewer of them could do was put a body back together. The synthesis that constituted Structural Integration, she said repeatedly, was the harder skill. Lewis Schultz enters her teaching at precisely this point. He was not a practitioner of the work in the way that Bob, Asher, or Schultz's contemporaries on the teaching faculty were. He was an anatomist who had begun to see, in the dissection laboratory, the same fascial reality Ida had been pointing to with her hands. In an IPR conference talk dating from the early 1970s, Ida set out the structural problem and named the figures whose science would address it.
"This synthesis of systems and those systems are laid down in the body in terms of great fascial planes and Lewis will be talking about them I imagine in one of the smaller sessions. To a certain extent this is happening to the insights resulting from the more advanced ralphing technique and given in the more advanced hours, But to a greater degree, it is appearing, as we begin to understand under the leadership of Lewis Schultz and documented by Ron Thompson, of the interrelationships, the interplay of fascial planes in a normal body and also the aberrations to which fascial planes are subject, how this happens, why this happens."
At an IPR conference talk, Ida frames the synthesis problem and names the figures who will address it.
What Ida is doing in this passage is institutional as much as intellectual. She is telling her senior students whose anatomy to trust. The eighth, ninth, and tenth hours of the recipe — the integrative sessions, the work whose logic she had still not fully exposed even to her advanced classes — depended on understanding the body as a synthesis of interrelated systems rather than as a list of myofascial units. The man who would teach that understanding in the lecture room was Lewis Schultz. The man who would document it in the laboratory was Ron Thompson. Ida's role was to bear witness to what her hands had been telling her for forty years and to point toward the two figures who could verify it scientifically.
The cylindrical spider web
The image Ida used in the 1976 advanced class to describe the body she had been teaching her practitioners to feel was a cylindrical spider web — not the body of anatomy textbooks but a continuous, interconnected meshwork in which a disturbance at any one point registered at the farthest periphery. This image is the conceptual core of what she had been asking Schultz and Thompson to demonstrate in the dissection laboratory. The anatomy atlas, with its clean diagrams of muscles named one at a time, did not show this. The body on the dissection table did. Ida named her debt to Schultz and Asher in setting up this picture for the 1976 class.
"I say to you, we say to you, that you have to begin to think of a body as a, shall I say, not a spherical spider web but a cylindrical spider web. Know, one of the characteristics of a spider web is that if you disturb it at any one place, it will be disturbed at the farthest periphery of that spider web. Now, this is actually what happens in a body. This is not what the anatomy books tell you."
Opening the 1976 advanced class, Ida draws the body as a spider web and credits the people who have been showing it to her practitioners.
Notice what Ida does with the anatomy atlas in this passage. She does not throw it out. She tells the class that in the elementary training students have to learn classical anatomy first — they have to start somewhere. But the advanced class, the one in front of her, has to outgrow it. The work Schultz and Thompson have been doing in the dissection laboratory shows what the textbook pictures leave out: the continuity of the fascial envelopes, the way one muscle's wrapping connects to its neighbor's wrapping, the spider-web meshwork that turns a local change into a systemic one. The cylindrical-spider-web image is Ida's working hypothesis. The dissection photographs Schultz and Thompson would show the following day were the evidence.
Postponing his departure
There is a small but telling moment in the 1976 advanced class opening, where Ida thanks Schultz for postponing his departure from Boulder in order to present a slide program of Ron Thompson's dissection photographs. The detail is minor but it tells us where Schultz physically sat in the constellation of figures around Ida in the mid-1970s: he was teaching in Boulder, where the school had moved its center of gravity, and he was willing to rearrange his schedule to put dissection-room evidence in front of both the elementary class and the advanced class on the same morning.
"In order that you people, especially you people of the elementary class, should have a more realistic view of bodies. Lewis Schultz has been good enough to postpone his leaving Boulder for three or four hours in order to present tomorrow a program of pictures which were taken by Ron Thompson in this dissection laboratory."
Ida tells the room why Schultz has delayed his travel.
The slides themselves were apparently striking. Ida describes them as having been taken with what she calls absolute inspiration. The next chunk of her opening lecture extends the praise. She tells the room that the textbook anatomists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were brilliant — that she cannot understand how they got the understanding they put into the old anatomy books — but that their work has a ceiling. To go past that ceiling, the practitioner needs the kind of anatomy Schultz and Thompson have been documenting. The advanced class is meant to do exactly that work.
"hours in order to present tomorrow a program of pictures which were taken by Ron Thompson in this dissection laboratory. Where you will be able to see what you get on the slab on the table apparently has very little relation to the pictures in the anatomy book. Feel that But if you look at these pictures, these Ron Thompson has taken with absolute inspiration of the dissection which they did, you will get this understanding of this related spider web thing so that you will begin to understand what your job is as you get into the advanced work in field. Nothing wrong with what you're being taught in the elementary work. You have to start somewhere. You can't explain life to a five year old in terms of the same symbols that you use to a 45 year old. He doesn't understand them. And the same is true as you begin to get into an understanding of what constitutes a body. You've got to start there. But in order to get a more sophisticated, advanced, shall I say control of the body body is what I really mean. You have to then work your way out of it, beginning to see the actual realities as they emerge. Now those old anatomy boys that worked in the fourteenth century and the fifteenth century and so forth were mighty smart babies and I can't understand how just cannot imagine how they got the kind of understanding that they put into this old anatomy books."
Continuing the same 1976 lecture, Ida sets up the dissection slides Schultz and Thompson will present.
The synthesis the advanced hours require
Schultz's contribution, in Ida's framing, was tied tightly to a specific pedagogical problem: the advanced hours of the work — eight, nine, and ten and beyond — could not be taught using the same anatomical picture that worked for the elementary hours. The elementary hours, broadly, ask the practitioner to address discrete fascial regions one at a time — the superficial fascia, the legs, the back, the pelvic floor. The integrative hours ask the practitioner to operate on the body as a single connected system. For that, the practitioner needs an anatomy in which fascial planes are continuous across muscle groups, across regions, across the cylinder of the body. Ida says this in the IPR conference talk where she introduces Schultz to the room.
"Here I was saying the same thing you see, analysis is a necessity, a cover form, a preliminary of synthesis, of conscious synthesis, of conscious integration. Our intellectual culture as a whole has come a long way toward appreciating this in the last twenty five years. The number of people on the face of the earth today who have learned to think with a greater emphasis on synthesis as a whole has increased enormously. And this widespread emphasis that has been placed on synthesis is thanks to systems analysis. Now there are a lot of you here that know about systems analysis, you know more than I do, and there are a lot of you here to whom systems analysis is a strange term, But systems analysis has made so many people aware of synthesis, of integration in life, a synthesis of systems and not of the addition of parts. Now this in Rolfeing, an appreciation of the body. In in Rolfeing, you have to see this as an appreciation of the body as a set of interrelated systems, of interrelated systems rather than an aggregate, a summation of individual pieces, call it myofascial units if you will, is what is necessary to get a body together. This synthesis of systems, not individual pieces. This is the job and the understanding that's necessary for hours eight, nine, and 10 and the more advanced hours. This synthesis of systems and those systems are laid down in the body in terms of great fascial planes and Lewis will be talking about them I imagine in one of the smaller sessions."
Ida lays out the synthesis problem in the IPR talk, just before naming Schultz.
The intellectual move Ida is making here is worth pausing on. She is naming the difference between an anatomy of parts and an anatomy of relationships. The classical anatomy textbook is a catalog of parts: this is the pectoralis, this is the latissimus, this is the erector spinae. The anatomy Schultz was beginning to document in the dissection laboratory was a catalog of relationships: how the wrapping of pectoralis connects to the wrapping of deltoid, how the lumbodorsal fascia spans the diamond between the trapezius above and the gluteal fascia below, how a pull at the ankle registers at the occiput. Ida did not invent this anatomy. Her contribution was to insist that practitioners had to learn it, and to point at Schultz as the man who was making it teachable.
Schultz's theories of human development
By 1976 Ida was speaking publicly about Schultz's theoretical work as something that went beyond fascial anatomy. She told the IPR conference that Schultz had developed challenging and intriguing revolutionary theories about the development of the life manifestation that we call a human being — that is, about how the body comes to be the shape it is, from embryological origins onward. She pressed him publicly to publish these ideas so that the wider profession could engage with them. The passage is one of Ida's strongest endorsements of a colleague's intellectual work.
"aspect? Heaven forbid, by no means. We are, or at least we should, be adding to our tools to enable us to create a more effective whole. Lewis and Ron will later show you the evidence of their zeal and labor a result of which Lewis has developed some very challenging and intriguing revolutionary theories concerning the development of the life manifestation which we call a human being. I do so hope he will get these ideas into print soon, see Lewis Ida, so that we may all share them because when this happens we will be able to take great pride in this contribution. Great pride that such a contribution, such a revolutionary contribution, has come out of the insights which have been fostered, created by Rolfing. And so let me do it once again, I hope he will publish it soon. I'm sure that all the people in the advanced class of the '76 in New Jersey will bear me out in applauding the contribution which has been made toward a greater effectiveness of the advanced methods at the hands of Ralfas resulting from that greater understanding, that greater understanding of these systems and of how these systems are put together."
At the same IPR conference, Ida presses Schultz to publish.
The fact that Ida used the word revolutionary about Schultz's theories deserves attention. Ida did not deploy that word casually about her colleagues' work. When she described what she herself was contributing, she generally framed it modestly — as a key that happened to open a door no one else had thought to try. When she described Schultz's developmental theories, she reached for stronger language. What she seems to have meant is that Schultz was offering a developmental account of how the fascial body comes to take the shape it does — and therefore an account of how that shape can be returned to its original organization. This would have closed a loop in Ida's own thinking that she had not closed. Her hands could change the structure; she had hypotheses about why this worked; she had Schultz, possibly, offering a developmental explanation she could not have produced herself.
Greater understanding through scientific method
Ida was careful, in the same IPR talk, to frame what Schultz and Thompson were doing as a movement from art toward science — not as a replacement of the original art but as a deepening of it. The early years of the work, when Fritz Perls was alive and Esalen was the center of gravity, had been an art form. The art had caught fire, the practice had spread, and a substantial body of clinical experience had accumulated. Now, Ida said, the work was entering its scientific phase. Schultz and Thompson's anatomical research was a major part of that movement.
"You see we are now getting out of the art level of our task and we are beginning to get a greater understanding through the application of scientific methods. Analysis, replication, does this mean that we are abandoning the creative aspect? Heaven forbid, by no means. We are, or at least we should, be adding to our tools to enable us to create a more effective whole. Lewis and Ron will later show you the evidence of their zeal and labor a result of which Lewis has developed some very challenging and intriguing revolutionary theories concerning the development of the life manifestation which we call a human being."
Ida frames Schultz's research as the maturing of the art into a science.
There is an important nuance in how Ida framed this transition. She did not believe the scientific phase superseded the artistic one. She thought of the relationship as additive. The intuitive perception of the original pioneer — her own perception, in this case — was the source. The scientific replication and analysis that Schultz, Thompson, Valerie Hunt, and others were beginning to develop was a confirmation, an extension, and a teaching tool. The two phases together produced what Ida called synthetic integration — a higher form than scientific analysis alone. Schultz's anatomical work was, in this view, indispensable but not sufficient. It was a tool that allowed the synthesis to be taught.
"At the time of Fritz Perles and those other those other founding friends this fairly expressed its level. But like so many ideas this has progressed to a level where it is now being examined and analyzed and fitted with words suitable for the current idiom. In other words, the idea progresses, I'm talking about ideas in general and Rolfing in particular, The idea progresses from an odd expression into a scientific understanding and thorough analysis, and you can see to what extent this is beginning to describe what you are seeing around you here. Do I think scientific analysis is the answer to all problems? Definitely not, certainly not. I think synthetic integration is a far higher form, and this is what, by the grace of God, we will still be able to call integration. I think for one thing science, but science is not all that bad, you can't just dam it out of hand. For one thing it permits and it encourages replication. And before the method can be taught replication must be possible. You all remember, I'm sure, hearing me the wail, the shortcomings of Rolfers. Don't think any of you have any doubts about that. You've all heard me scream and wail, you all can take a body apart, but the number of people who can get it together are very few. The number of people who can put it together are very few. Here I was saying the same thing you see, analysis is a necessity, a cover form, a preliminary of synthesis, of conscious synthesis, of conscious integration. Our intellectual culture as a whole has come a long way toward appreciating this in the last twenty five years. The number of people on the face of the earth today who have learned to think with a greater emphasis on synthesis as a whole has increased enormously."
Earlier in the same IPR talk, Ida explains why analysis must precede synthesis.
Fascial planes and the practitioner's hand
The practical pay-off of Schultz's work, in Ida's classroom teaching, was that practitioners began to use the language of fascial planes to describe what their hands were doing. By the 1975 Boulder advanced class, this language was operational. Practitioners spoke of fascial tubes that began in the cervicals, of horizontals brought out below that reflected vertically above, of stored energy in the fascia that released when the molecular alignment of the tissue was changed. Ida credited this vocabulary, in part, to colleagues like Schultz who had been pressing on the question of fascial continuity.
"Well yesterday someone, I don't know who said it to me, it's Michael Salison's concept of the fascial tube which starts in the cervicals and goes in the second hour when you start working on the ankles you're heading vertically again. Know that each horizontal that you bring out down below reflects itself upward as we saw in Takashi yesterday where he's working on his leg and you can see his rib cage absorbing the change. I mean this, when the tissue is in tension, that's stored energy that you release into the body. And its energy is not a metaphysical something. These molecules are aligned in a particular way. You change their alignment. The change spreads."
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, a student deploys Schultz-influenced language and Ida builds on it.
What this passage shows is how thoroughly Schultz's framing had entered the practical conversation by 1975. The advanced student does not even need to cite him. The body as a continuous cylindrical web of fascial planes — Ida's image, but documented by Schultz and Thompson — is simply the working assumption. The practitioner discusses where to release a horizontal, knowing that the release will reflect along a vertical above. This is the application, in working hands, of the anatomy that the dissection laboratory had revealed.
"Here's one with a lot of pictures. Sure? Yeah. Well. Would you like to come over this way? Now this is the fashion picture that Chuck is offering as in purple. Figure? How many other what shall I say? Bodies and embodies? No. No. I'm looking for the word that we've been applying to bones. Spaces. Spaces. Figure how many spaces, other spaces. There have to be that you do not see to take this superficial fascia layer as pictured here and make that picture. See here we get something that is less flexible than the bodies within bodies thing. Bodies within bodies is water within sand thing. But now this is now showing a different situation. That's what happens when you, like, after the three, then you start to have things emerge that you haven't been able to see before. That's right. That's right. That's absolutely right. Uh-huh. It's like you have rendered more translucent the surface, and then I can see in to the next layers. Like you've done their eyes. But you see, this is the picture. This is the type of picture that you are going to have to interject into your consideration, into the consideration that I taught you in the elementary classes of each of these muscular patterns are encased in fascial planes. So really what they're doing is following those muscular patterns in order to get to the fascial planes. Well, like all this other stuff, it's a partial truth. And at this time, what you have to do is to take that partial truth and try to make a"
In a 1975 Boulder session, Ida holds up a fascial-planes illustration and asks the class to see beyond it.
Schultz on layers and the limits of acupuncture
Ida occasionally invoked Schultz's authority to mark off where her work differed from other body-based traditions. One vivid example, from a 1974 Open Universe class, concerns acupuncture. Ida had studied acupuncture in Paris in the 1940s or 1950s, and she had a settled view: acupuncture worked on the top two or three layers of fascial balance, but Structural Integration addressed at least five or more layers. The deeper layers were the ones the practitioner reached only by working from the top down across hours of the recipe. This claim about layered fascial balance is the kind of claim Schultz's anatomical work helped to ground.
"Ida says that and she studied and looked at acupuncture twenty or thirty years ago in Paris, that she believes that acupuncture probably has to do with top two layers of balance, maybe three. And that there are at least five or more layers of balance and that we go five, six, seven or four, five, six, seven and therefore influence those layers from the top as well. And that's why we're in structural integration and not in more temporary balance and at least that's active. I just thought it has been transmitted to me and I'd probably amplify or put something on it. So don't quote her as saying that. But they're in the same family at any rate as far as she believes they are. No help. Like there's an in between force between my body and your hand and that it is moving. It's just moving by itself."
In a 1974 Open Universe class, a practitioner relays Ida's framework of layered fascial balance.
The layered-fascia claim, taken on its own, could sound like loose talk. Ida grounded it in two things: in the experience of her hands moving through tissue session after session, and in the anatomical work of colleagues like Schultz who were documenting that fascia genuinely was layered, that the layers had identifiable planes, and that the planes were continuous in ways the textbook anatomy did not show. Without Schultz and Thompson, the claim about five or more layers of balance would have remained intuitive. With their work, it began to acquire the kind of anatomical specificity that could be taught.
Fascia as the organ of structure
The deepest claim Ida wanted her practitioners to hold — and the claim Schultz's anatomical work was, in her view, beginning to vindicate — was that fascia is the body's organ of structure. This formulation was hers and she returned to it constantly. The medical schools, she said, did not teach this. The standard anatomical training treated fascia as a passive wrapping. The work of Schultz, Thompson, and others was beginning to demonstrate the opposite: that fascia is the structural tissue, that it holds the body in its three-dimensional shape, and that it can be changed — and that when it is changed, the shape changes.
"Now, as I told you before, in structural integration, we think in terms of we work in terms of the stacking of the blocks which are part of the myofascial system, the connective tissue system, the collagen system. And it is the collagen system which basically, which the two classes on different levels are going to turn your attention to in the the next six to thirty weeks. You are going to be getting more and more intimate with collagen which before you heard it well could mean you didn't know existed. But you see, it is the connective tissue which is the organ of structure. The fascia envelopes are the organ of structure, the organ that holds the body appropriately in the three-dimensional material world. Now nobody ever taught this in the medical school as far as I know. And anytime you want to get into an argument with your medical through they'll realize that this is so. It is the fascial aggregate which is the organ of structure. And the structure basically the word, where we use the word structure, we are referring to relationships in free space. Relationships in space. There's nothing metaphysical metaphysical about it. It's pure physics as it's taught in physics laboratories."
At the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, Ida states the doctrine that frames everything Schultz was documenting.
What this doctrine required, in order to be taught and defended in the wider medical and scientific culture, was exactly the kind of work Schultz was doing. To say that fascia is the organ of structure is to make a strong anatomical claim that the standard textbooks did not support. To make that claim stick — to make it teachable to elementary students, defensible in arguments with physicians, and rigorous enough to ground a research program — required anatomists who would dissect the body looking for fascial continuity, photograph what they found, and present the evidence in lecture halls. That was Schultz and Thompson's work.
"Wait a minute Sharon, I think you need to put a more evocative metaphor in that. It envelops each muscle, but you see, it isn't apparent from that sentence that not only does it envelop each individual muscle but that these wrappings of individual muscles connect. It's like a section of an orange when you take it and cut it in half. Well it is. Yes. And the the membrane is tissue in between the pulp. Yes. It will give you an idea of what fascia is like in the body. Yes. Except the body fascia is much more comfortable than the orange fascia. And if you sometimes dissect a leg of lamb, left it or otherwise, you will see how the wrapping of the small individual muscles join somewhere along the line to make this tough stuff that then adheres to the bone. And It's not a simple thing that a child can draw, but it becomes a very complicated inter reading and interconnection. And this permits connection to travel through the entire body. Now, this again is a new idea. It's not that fascia wasn't known before. It's been known for a long time. But nobody thought it had any real significance and nobody thought that that was any great point in studying fashion. Now you may think that this is an odd thing, but this is the history of medicine. In the late eighteen"
At the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, Ida builds an evocative image of how fascial wrappings connect.
Energy fields and the receptive web
Among the practitioners and researchers around Ida in the mid-1970s, Valerie Hunt was developing measurements of the body's energy fields before and after Structural Integration. Hunt's instruments showed that the body's aura — measured in inches in random incoming clients — expanded substantially in width after a series of sessions. Hunt's hypothesis about why this happened relied on the same anatomical picture Schultz was developing: that the great connective-tissue web was the interface between the body and its environmental energy fields. Schultz's work on fascial planes gave Hunt's energy-field research its anatomical foundation.
"And one of them is that it is the connective tissue which is the interface between the energy fields of man and other parts of the cosmos. Now that is a big hunt to swallow. I do not think that the energy fields are brought to us by the five senses. I think these are grossly limiting. The very nature of the five senses, the structural nature of the five senses, limits that part of an energy field which can be brought to us. And yes, we do receive information from the five senses. But there is this vast array of information which comes to us which has come to me which cannot be described in terms of the five senses. There are limitations which exist within the structure of the central nervous system in the transportation of messages. I don't care how exhaustive it is. And I think there are limitations in the processing in the brain. Well, I think it is through the senses, the brain, the central nervous system that our system is closed. And what I believe is that the dynamic energy fields are received through possibly the acupuncture spots, which exist all over the body. There are many many many thousands hundreds. The great web of connective tissue which supports us which causes our confirmation which causes the very nature of our functioning which separates tissue from tissue which differentiates us in all senses, which is the most extensive tissue we have in the body, is the weigh in of the energy fields. Rolfing by reorganizing and freeing the body in its primary and most basic receptive and responsive modes. Receptive meaning the energy fields entering and responsive meaning the energy fields being dissipated. I think this makes possible a quality of experience which is open and dynamic. And once it is open, then the mind, the body and the spirit do operate in magnificent symphony. And I think it has to be opened that way. I would even go farther and say that, from my experience and I'm experiencing it right now, I think the opening and this kind of total experiencing someday we will find that it alters the process of mitosis, cell division and rejuvenation. And that'll blow you, blows me."
In a 1974 Open Universe class, Valerie Hunt explains her hypothesis about the fascial web as the interface between body and environment.
Hunt's framing here is more speculative than anything Ida or Schultz themselves would have published, but it shows the intellectual ecosystem Schultz's work fed into. Hunt needed an anatomy in which fascia was extensive, continuous, and structurally central — not a passive wrapping but the body's most extensive tissue. That anatomy was the one Schultz was bringing into the school's teaching. Whether one accepted Hunt's energy-field interpretation or not, the underlying anatomical picture was the same: fascia as the integrative tissue of the body, organized in planes, available to be addressed by the practitioner's hands.
What is fascia
Ida sometimes told a story, in her classroom teaching, about a student she had sent to the library with the question, what is fascia? The student had treated it as a simple research assignment and expected to find the answer quickly. She returned two days later, having found almost nothing. Ida used the anecdote to mark the territory that Schultz, Thompson, and the new generation of anatomically minded practitioners were beginning to map — a terra incognita that the standard medical literature had simply not addressed.
"And so with with a a human being, in theory at least, you could scoop out the stuff that makes the factory go, the chemicals and so forth, and you would have left this supportive body of fascia. And it is this body which has had very little, almost no exploration in the sense that we have been giving to it. I remember sending somebody who came to me as a student and I set them the question of I set them to answer the question, what is fascia? She decided that was lots of fun. She'd go to the library. She'd have the answer in no time. She went to the library. She spent two days in the library, and she couldn't find the answer. And this is indicative merely of the fact that we are going into an unknown territory, a terra incognita, and trying to find out what changes in that body are going to develop into what changes in the personality that calls itself the owner of that body. And I'm talking here about energy being added by pressure to the fascia, the organ of structure, to change the relation of the fascial sheaths of the body, to balance these around a vertical line which parallels the gravity line. Thus, we are able to balance body masses, to order them, to order them within a space. The contour of the body changes, the objective feeling of the body to searching hands changes. Movement behavior changes as the body incorporates more and more order. The first balance of the body is a static stacking, but as the body incorporates more changes, the balance ceases to be a static balance. It becomes a dynamic balance."
In a 1974 Healing Arts lecture, Ida tells the library anecdote and frames what the new anatomy is for.
The library anecdote functions as Ida's institutional justification for the entire research program. If fascia were already well understood — if the medical literature had a clear, settled answer to the question of what it is and how it behaves — there would be no need for Schultz and Thompson's dissection program, no need for Hunt's energy-field measurements, no need for the systematic anatomical work the school was beginning to commission. The fact that a determined student could spend two days in a research library and emerge empty-handed was, for Ida, the institutional license to build the school's own anatomy. Schultz was the man she trusted to lead that work.
The web and the practitioner's eye
Schultz's fascial-planes anatomy did not stay confined to lecture halls. By the 1975 Boulder advanced class, his framing had begun to enter the way senior practitioners read a body in front of them. In one classroom session, Ida and her students worked through a man named John, looking for the point of greatest weakness where his upper and lower halves could be reconnected. A practitioner named John offered an observation that drew explicitly on the language of triangulated fascial flow — the lumbodorsal junction, the diamond shape of the lumbar fascia, the way the trapezius above and the lumbar fascia below participate in a single connective field. Ida's response shows how she received student contributions when they used the new anatomy.
"John, you had something to say that I think somebody stole from you. Well, as I look at him, I'm sort of flashing back on that triangulation of the energy flow in the body I did a long time ago. I remember that. And And I told your metaphysician, get out of here. Right. And I'm still hanging on to it. So I still think it's done. What I see now is that triangulation which is indicated, manifested externally by the lumbar fascia as it makes a diamond shape or triangular shape with the external manifestation that is the trapezius. We have the lumbodorsal junction and right there I feel that that energy flow manifests and will continue up after the connection is made between the lower half and the upper half along that crest. I do feel the need to go into the lumbar dorsiflexion. Your lower triangulation isn't the triangulation. It's a piece of spaghetti. Whatever. Yeah. Okay."
In a 1975 Boulder advanced class session, a student deploys fascial-planes language to read a body.
What is happening here is exactly what Ida had been working toward. A senior practitioner is reading a body in front of him and locating his next intervention in terms of fascial geometry — the diamond of the lumbar fascia, the trapezius above, the connective continuity that linked upper and lower. He is not citing Schultz, but the anatomy he is using is the anatomy Schultz had been bringing into the school. Ida, characteristically, accepted the structural part of the observation and threw out the metaphysical packaging. The result was a practitioner whose hands had a place to go.
Pride in the contribution
Toward the end of the same IPR conference talk where she first introduced Schultz's developmental theories, Ida returned to the question of what the field should be proud of. The advanced students in the 1976 New Jersey class, she said, would bear her out: the effectiveness of the advanced methods had improved as a direct result of the greater understanding of how fascial systems are put together. This understanding was Schultz's contribution. Ida's praise for it was unusually direct.
"I'm sure that all the people in the advanced class of the '76 in New Jersey will bear me out in applauding the contribution which has been made toward a greater effectiveness of the advanced methods at the hands of Ralfas resulting from that greater understanding, that greater understanding of these systems and of how these systems are put together. But bear in mind, our work is synthetic integration, a contribution toward knowledge and a creation of a wholeness and the understanding of how a man who is more nearly whole behaves. Now it is not merely the knowledge of anatomy or anatomical facts, not even facial anatomy and its facts. It is the voluntary creation of a man nearer to the goal signified by Norbert Weiner, and most of you have heard me say this before, a more human use of human beings. This is our goal, to create that kind of a man. And this goal I feel is mirrored, decidedly nearer than it was even a year ago. And if you think I have been too freely imbibing of that nectar that they have up on Cloud 9, it would be an idea to talk to some of the more recent advanced students and see how they feel about what their ability is to see and to work at this point. So as I say, we are bragging. We are bragging about how much better we can do at this point than we could have a year ago. But now let's leave that one for the time being. All of you, however, know that my personal goal in the study of Rolfing is the study of the energy body and how it works. What constitutes the energy body? And how are these structures affected by Rolfing or by other techniques? How are they affected? This is the question."
Continuing the IPR address, Ida praises Schultz's contribution and links it to the improvement of advanced practice.
The claim that advanced practice had improved measurably in a single year is striking. Ida was eighty by this point and had been teaching the work for decades. For her to say that the previous year's research had produced visible improvement in the advanced hours is a strong endorsement of the research arm Schultz was leading. She does not name a specific technique that changed, and the chunks of teaching available to us do not give a clean before-and-after picture. What they show is that Ida believed Schultz's anatomy had begun to make the advanced hours teachable in a way they had not been before.
"Now, you all saw that what you did in that eleventh hour was a more powerful thing than anything that you've done except the first time. Some of you have had luck in integration in the tenth power. Some of you haven't. But you see, lo and behold, you take that eleventh eleventh hour and things really start to integrate to a degree that you haven't seen before. And it's a powerful lift to that body, indicating that this word integration and the reality behind it really carry a punch with it. Now the next thing you're going to have to do is to integrate what? Integrate the observations we've made on the various levels we've made them. We've observed fascial planes, we've observed chakras. All right, keep on observing it. The next thing you're going to have to integrate is the idea is a careful look at the upper half of the body. One integrate? See, it's always been otherwise. People have always been experts in pelvic floor, experts in shoulder work, physicians, specialists in medicine are experts in top work, bottom work, middle work. And you have to see what you have to all fit together before you can fit it."
In the 1976 advanced class, Ida names what students still have to integrate.
Carrying the recipe forward
One other consequence of the fascial-planes anatomy Schultz was developing showed up in how senior practitioners began to talk about the recipe itself. By 1975, students in the Boulder advanced class had begun to see the ten sessions not as ten discrete jobs but as a single continuous integration of the body along its fascial geometry — a vision that depended on the cylindrical-web anatomy Ida and Schultz had been pressing. In one discussion of the first hour, a practitioner laid out the continuity that the new anatomy made visible.
"I clearly I clearly saw, you know, last summer that continuation process and how and, you know, Dick talked about how, you know, the only reason it was broken into 10, you know, sessions like that was it because the body just couldn't take all that work. Couldn't take it right. But I just sitting on just trying to figure out how the hell she ever figured out that process, and then began to see it. What she did is what most of of us need to do more. She just sat and watched bodies. And she just kept on doing it. And put unfortunately, she's a little bit more brilliant than the rest of us. She just Ida what Ida did is what she's trying to teach how to do, and that is that you have to stay within your your trade. You have to make structural integration in your life. She integrated her life towards understanding structural integration. And she still does that. And she's still Her body is still her her whole being is integrated towards into structural integration. Being structurally integrated herself, structurally integrating us, the guild, the teaching process, and people per se. And to me, word spectrum really comes to mind here."
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, practitioners describe the recipe as continuous fascial integration.
The fact that practitioners had begun to think of the recipe as one continuous integration, rather than ten discrete sessions, is a direct consequence of the cylindrical-web anatomy Ida had been pressing. If the body is one fascial system rather than ten regional problems, then the recipe is one intervention administered over ten visits rather than ten separate interventions. Schultz's work — and the dissection-room evidence Thompson supplied — gave that vision its anatomical justification.
Coda: the work that remained for him to do
What the transcripts available to us do not contain is the published anatomy textbook Ida kept urging Schultz to write. She mentioned, in her IPR address, that one day if Schultz lived long enough — or if she lived long enough to keep pressing him — the anatomy of fascial planes would find its way into print. The publishing did not happen in her lifetime in the form she imagined. The fascial-planes anatomy that Ida and Schultz were developing in the 1970s would not reach mainstream anatomy textbooks until decades later, and largely from researchers who did not know they were continuing a project Ida had named at the IPR conference.
"In this advanced class particularly, in the elementary class you've got to stay with your anatomy books, you've got to break in somewhere. But in this advanced class, you have to get this different picture of what constitutes a body. This interrelated, this interlocked set of webbing which we call fascial planes. Now, we need to know something about the anatomy of the fascial planes. Now one day if Lewis Shultz lives long enough no, if I live long enough to keep Lewis Shultz pushed long enough, he's going to run into anatomy that is going to present this. But until that time comes, you people who are in the advanced class have to get this vision of this meshed in spider web through which you can begin to influence all kinds of things going on here. Now somewhere in that spider web we keep that energy. I don't know where it is. If I knew, I wouldn't tell you. But I don't know. So it's safe to know. In order that you people, especially you people of the elementary class, should have a more realistic view of bodies."
In the 1976 advanced class, Ida names the anatomy that was still waiting to be written.
The Lewis Schultz who appears in Ida's transcripts is, finally, a figure of promise. He is the anatomist Ida trusted to verify what her hands had been telling her for forty years. He is the colleague she credited with making the advanced hours teachable. He is the theorist whose ideas about human development she called revolutionary. He is the man she publicly pressed to publish — not from impatience but from the conviction that what he was developing belonged to the wider profession of Structural Integration practitioners. In her last years of active teaching, Ida named Schultz alongside Ron Thompson, Jim Asher, Valerie Hunt, and a small handful of others as the figures who would carry the work past her own lifetime. What he gave her, in return, was the anatomical picture she could finally hand her senior students with the confidence that it would stand up in the dissection room.
See also: See also: the 1974 Structure Lectures (STRUC1), where Ida lays out her biographical genesis and the Rockefeller-Schrödinger arc that led to her interest in structural science; the 1973 Big Sur advanced classes (SUR7308, SUR7309), where Ida elaborates the fascial-continuity doctrine that Schultz's dissection work was meant to verify; the 1975 Boulder advanced class debriefs (B2T3SA, 76ADV281), where senior practitioners apply fascial-plane analysis to live readings; the 1974 Healing Arts and Open Universe classes (CFHA_01, RolfB3Side1, UNI_044), where Ida and her colleagues situate fascia as the medium of structural and energetic change; and the 1971-72 IPR conference talks (IPRCON1, IPRCON2) for the institutional framing of Schultz's anatomical research program. STRUC1 ▸SUR7308 ▸SUR7309 ▸B2T3SA ▸76ADV281 ▸CFHA_01 ▸RolfB3Side1 ▸UNI_044 ▸IPRCON2 ▸