The three germ layers and the primacy of mesoderm
Ida opened her embryological teaching with the same move every time: she returned the listener to the fertilized ovum and the three layers — ectoderm, mesoderm, endoderm — that emerge from it within the first days of development. The lecture pattern is repeated across the 1973 Big Sur classes and the 1976 New Jersey advanced class with very little variation, because for Ida the move was foundational. The practitioner of Structural Integration works almost exclusively on tissues derived from one of those three layers — the mesoderm, the middle layer, which produces fascia, bone, muscle, ligament, blood, and most of what holds the body in three-dimensional space. To understand what the work does, the student first had to understand what the mesoderm is and what makes its derivatives so unusual.
"They are all related. Now as these fundamental germ cells develop, they begin to differentiate according to the sorts of environmental demands they are made on. Certain mesoderm cells are subjected to stretching. They develop the tractile properties. Other mesodermal cells are put under pressure for developing bone cells. So that you can begin to see that from one way of looking at it, the entire skeletal model of the comes from one basic cell. They are all related and they differentiate depending upon the source of energy that flow through them, the kind of environmental influences they coming through."
From the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, Ida walks the students through differentiation:
The implication is structural, not metaphorical. Bone became bone because cells in that region were subjected to compression during embryonic life; tendons became tendons because they were subjected to stretch. The germ layer did not predetermine the outcome — the environment did. Ida pressed this point because it broke a deeply held assumption among her students that the body's tissues were essentially fixed by genetic instruction. They were not. They were shaped by force, and they remained shapeable by force. This is the doctrinal seam where embryology stops being a story about the past and starts being a description of what the practitioner's hands are still doing.
"Now as these cells become more and more specialized and as the embryo develops, there is one cell which stops at a certain level of differentiation and just becomes faster. Fracture is the connective And this is significant that fascia, the connective tissue cells are the least differentiated and I am not speaking here about the extruded collagen fibers, I am speaking about these basic cells that generate the fibers. Because you have to remember that fascia is a matrix of connective tissue fibers called collagenous fibers along protein strands in which live the cells of the connective tissue. And it is these cells that generate fascia. So the And fascia is formed from the least differentiated cell. In that sense it is the most primitive and also the most labile because it hasn't gone as far down the road for specialization."
Continuing the same Big Sur lecture, Ida arrives at the cell that does not finish differentiating:
Notice the move: the most primitive cell is the most useful one. Fascia did not advance as far down the road of specialization as the cells that became bone or skeletal muscle. It stopped earlier. That arrested differentiation is exactly what gives connective tissue its lability and its responsiveness to pressure. The body is not most plastic in the structures that took longest to differentiate; it is most plastic in the one structure that elected never to finish. This is the structural fact that makes Structural Integration mechanically possible — and it is also the structural fact that defines Ida's claim about lifelong embryonic development. The tissue that the practitioner works has, in a real biological sense, never stopped being embryonic.
Aging starts before birth
In the 1976 New Jersey advanced class, Louis Schultz — the anatomist who collaborated with Ida on dissections and on the embryological framing of the recipe — opens a morning session with a claim that startled even seasoned practitioners in the room. The distortions the practitioner spends ten hours addressing did not begin with childhood injury, postural habit, or trauma. They began before the patient was born. The pressure of the uterine wall on the developing fetus is itself a structural force that imposes rotations, twists, and asymmetries on the embryo. By the time the child emerges, the body is already patterned. Schultz had been making this point gently for several years in his anatomy teaching, and Ida had endorsed it; here he says it bluntly.
"but the aging starts before birth. In other words, we are not born perfect as we all now say and I get surprised when people think that's an amazing statement. It's hard for me to remember back to the days when I thought that we were born perfect and that everything happened bad from then on and that there have been a lot of influences. For instance, just thinking of the pure pressure of the uterine wall restriction on the baby and there for there's going to have to be some kind of rotation of head rotating around legs with arms going into some kind of rotation with the external pressure of the restriction of space that's already starting to cause distortions or modifications or rotations or whatever you want to call them by the time of birth."
Louis Schultz, opening the 1976 advanced class morning lecture:
This was, in 1976, still a heterodox claim in conventional anatomy. The textbook framing of fetal development emphasized the genetic program; environmental constraint on the fetus was acknowledged in extreme cases but not treated as a routine source of structural pattern. Schultz and Ida were arguing something else: that intrauterine pressure was routinely sculpting the embryo, and that the rotations practitioners saw in adult bodies — the head turned to one side, the pelvis carried with a habitual twist — could often be traced back through infancy into the womb. This was not the same as saying every distortion is congenital. It was saying that the developmental sculpting process that began in utero continued without break into infancy, childhood, and adult life.
"will go, the tendons only develop as modification of fascia just as bones do, just as ligaments do and that's by tensions or pressures that are brought about in particular area in a very simplistic way. And so that as we're held in a certain position or we hold ourselves in a certain position, this then is how I feel that we get the so called Roth ropes, slip gunk, all these nice anatomical terms that we have to get into the literature someday."
Schultz then names the mechanism — tendons and bones as modifications of fascia under tension and pressure:
Read carefully, Schultz is saying something with very large implications. Every tendon in the body, every ligament, every bony prominence is the historical record of a particular pattern of mechanical force during development. The shape is the integral of the forces. And because fascia retains the lability of the unfinished mesodermal cell, the integration can be partly rewritten. The aberrant tendons Schultz refers to — the bands between the shoulder blades where no tendon should be, the connective-tissue thickenings in the foot where the anatomy book shows nothing — are not anomalies. They are the body's continued response to ongoing mechanical demand, laid down by the same developmental mechanism that produced the original tendons. The body, in this framing, is still differentiating.
Continuing embryological development in the adult
If aging begins before birth and the mechanism of differentiation is continuous, then what the practitioner does on the table is not repair. It is participation in a developmental process. Schultz, who had absorbed this from years of working alongside Ida, framed it in his own scientific language during the same 1976 class. His phrasing is careful — he speaks of getting closer to a perfection that will never be reached — because the developmental view of the work resists any clean endpoint. There is no fully developed body. There is only further differentiation, further organization, further specification of the fascial planes.
"that in the process of carrying along or helping, you might say embryological development in the individual, we are likewise then I feel continuing or getting closer to perfection that will never reach early evolutionary development."
Schultz, in the 1976 New Jersey class, names the practitioner's work as continued embryological development:
The phrasing — perfection that will never be reached — was Schultz being scrupulous. Ida sometimes spoke more decisively, but the doctrine was the same. The body is never finished. Even the upright position, Schultz argues elsewhere in the same lecture, is a still-evolving state; the four-legged ancestor's mechanical solution to gravity is not the human one, and the human one is incomplete. What the practitioner adds with pressure is energy in the strict thermodynamic sense — energy that the fascial planes use to differentiate further, to specify their relationships in space, to refine the segments' stacking. The work is, in this framing, not a corrective overlay but a forward continuation.
"The other definition of a plastic is that it can be reformed without breaking. And people come to grief, come to their griefs, by virtue of the fact that these bodies of theirs have been being deformed under the pull of gravity since they were born, but nobody has gotten around to reforming them because nobody has really taken a good look at the fact that it is a plastic body and therefore can be reformed. Now, let's look a little deeper and realize that this body of ours can be reformed by virtue of the fact that it is a consolidation of segments. It is not a solid something. It is not a tree trunk. It is not a cylinder of steel. It is a group of segments, one stacked on top of the other, and the whole thing bound in an elastic sack. I sometimes call it a shopping bag. I sometimes say that the good lord didn't trust these dumb guys. He was afraid they might lose some of their segments and he put them all into a shopping bag. And this almost literally is true. You see, those segments are really bony segments."
Ida, in a public lecture, gives the structural reason the body can be reformed:
The grace of God language is Ida's, and so is the casual tone — she is talking to a public-lecture audience at Topanga or thereabouts, and she is making the structural point land in plain terms. But the underlying claim is rigorous. Plastic, in the engineering sense, means a material whose deformation is not purely elastic — it does not snap back to its original configuration when force is removed. That property, which is what makes fascia frustrating when you try to stretch it briefly and then let go, is exactly what makes fascia useful when you apply sustained pressure with intention: the new configuration persists. Lifelong developmental change is possible because the medium of structure is the kind of material in which change persists.
The fascial cell that never finishes specializing
Ida returned repeatedly to the strange status of the connective-tissue cell — the fibroblast, though she rarely used that term. Compared to the other mesodermal derivatives, it is undercommitted. It does not become bone or muscle; it stays the cell it began as and produces collagen fibers around itself. The fluid between those fibers becomes the matrix in which other cells live and through which fluids and electrical charges move. This is the structural reason, in Ida's account, that the practitioner can change a body at all. If fascia had finished its developmental commitment, it would be no more responsive to manipulation than bone is. Because it has not, the practitioner's hands can still ask it to organize differently.
"there. And hence it has greater ability, has greater freedom, freedom, it has, in a way to look at it, has greater potential energy. So we have a cell which is capable of generating this fibrous matrix. Now in this matrix lives the cell itself bathes in the fluid and it is also in this matrix and I think it is here that there is tremendous amount of interest now in membrane research in the sense that the fluids of this tissue provide a medium for which other cells live other than the aquaponics tissue cell. And these cells are the body which are primarily, which are very influential in the body's reaction to systemic disturbances, system wide disturbances. It is in this same matrix that those are parasites that responsible for the body's reactions to the disease. Now, are to all of it. There are various cells that live in this connected tissue matrix and it is these cells that are essential for the body's ability to respond to environmental stress and for the body's ability to respond and to heal itself."
Schultz, continuing the 1973 Big Sur embryology talk, elaborates what living in the fascial matrix actually means:
Schultz is making a point that goes beyond mechanical reshaping. The cells that live in the fascial matrix are the cells that respond to whatever the body encounters — pathogens, toxins, the chemical signals of stress. The fascial matrix is therefore not only a structural medium but a developmental medium for the body's ongoing relationship with its environment. The continuity from embryo to adult is not just that the cells retain plasticity. It is that the whole tissue retains its function as the body's responsive interface — the place where environmental information becomes structural change. This is why, in Ida's framing, the manipulation of fascia could not be reduced to mechanical realignment. It was always also a developmental intervention.
"Well now, my understanding was a very good Now this is a message which I hope gets across except that you understand what the pattern is like when the pattern is doing the right thing. The fact that fascia of the body can be changed is what allows it to become aberrative in the first place. And possibility of changing it allows you to step in and change it for the worse, for the better. But it is also just as possible to change it for the worse if you shall know your business. Function way to teach. That fascial teaching can be modified. That in being modified it is modifying structure and that in modifying structure you modify closure. 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."
Ida closes the same Big Sur sequence by naming the circular nature of fascial change:
The cut runs both ways. The same property that lets the practitioner help is the property that let gravity and habit and injury hurt in the first place. Ida is not romanticizing the developmental view. She is saying that plasticity is morally neutral — a feature of the medium, not a guarantee of any particular outcome. Lifelong embryonic development means lifelong vulnerability as much as it means lifelong opportunity. The practitioner's job is to add energy in the direction of order rather than disorder, and to do so with enough understanding of fascial anatomy to know which direction is which. The work is developmental, but it is not automatic.
Intrauterine rotation and the patterns we inherit
Schultz had begun, in the years before 1976, to study fetal-development photographs systematically. Working with Judith Aston during one of her trainings, he noticed that the late-stage in-utero positions consistently showed a rotation — the head turned to one side, both legs crossed to the same side, the arms angled across the torso. The question was not whether this happened in individual cases. The question was whether it was the standard. Schultz suspected it was. And if a particular rotation was the developmental default — imposed by the mechanics of the uterine wall on a body of a certain size at a certain stage — then practitioners were dealing with a primary rotation that began at the first weeks of pregnancy and persisted through life.
"And that the upright position, in the true upright position, is truly an evolved state because if you think that the four legged state was more efficient and see what happens to animals' heads, just simply, That is not in reference to gravity a very involved state. Lewis, I wish you would take up perhaps this twisting that occurs Well, one of the things that I've started to do, this came out of one of the trainings that I had with Judith Astin where we started just looking at embryology books and realizing as you saw pictures of the later stages of fetuses in utero that there was always a rotation of the head usually to one side of the leg. That the two legs, both legs were off to one side. Now whether that's true or not I don't know. I want to spend time now looking at pictures going back and looking from this point of view that this is therefore imposing a rotation and Doctor. Rolfe is talking about a primary rotation that as I understand you say we never change but we only make people more comfortable with. I don't know if that's a proper Yeah, quote or you've rightly changed it. And that that may go back to the fertilized egg. I feel easily it can go back to the first week of development, the first week of pregnancy, easily. When you start talking about the development of the mesoderm and start getting an actual disc of embryo, there's already a twisting which again I've seen for years in books and all of a sudden there it is, it's at six zero one which you'll be hearing a lot about. For ten weeks you'll be hearing about six zero one if you're lucky. She's that complimentary to you. Okay, why don't we go ahead then with the pictures. I'll be talking along on these concepts as we look at the pictures."
Schultz, in the 1976 New Jersey class, traces the rotation back to the first weeks of pregnancy:
What Schultz is describing changes how the practitioner thinks about chronicity. A rotation that is observable in a six-day embryonic disc is not a problem that postural habit created and that better posture could solve. It is a structural inheritance from the earliest moments of differentiation, carried forward through every subsequent stage of development by the same mechanism — tension and pressure shaping the still-labile fascia. The practitioner cannot undo it. What the practitioner can do is help the body become more comfortable with it, and more functionally organized around it. Schultz is careful about this distinction; Ida, in her own way, was careful about it too. The developmental view does not promise erasure of the past. It promises continued participation in shaping what comes next.
"In contrast, the next slide shows that by putting the arm in a different way, you've got a different set of pulls but here again you the scapula move right along with the arm. This this is showing the pelvis, the back part of the pelvis and you see here how the fascia tends to go right with the normal position in a sense being leg out to the side. And that's again the way the leg always fell which makes sense when you figure that all of the muscle development is back here and very little here to really bring it around. Now what was interesting is when we rotated the leg and I think it's on the next slide, we rotated the legs inward right, we immediately got an anterior pulse. They tilted forward. You can see the strains that have started here. You see the beginning of the strain here where ultimately this actually develops into a strap that holds the bottom of the gluteal fold. The bottom of the gluteal fold is not the gluteus maximus, it's rather the strap and the gluteal fold really doesn't go with the gluteus maximus. This came back and this went forward. I don't know why this is what happened and I do have some ideas of course because of psoas and so forth and we don't know how developed the psoas was because we never got that far into section. But you can see then how the strains changed from the going, the tissue going the direction of the buttocks down the leg as it was in the previous slide to now imposing these new sets of pulls around beginning to form straps, belts, whatever you want to call them in our new anatomy. And this is just showing the back of the baby lying on its side and again you see the legs are forward so the iliac crest is coming out, it's more pronounced."
Schultz, presenting the 1976 dissection slides, shows how rotating the leg generates new fascial straps:
Schultz's two-day-old specimen is a remarkable piece of evidence for the developmental view. The infant has been alive outside the womb for forty-eight hours. The fascial patterns visible on the dissection table are essentially the patterns established in utero — there has been no time for postural habit, no time for gait, no time for psychological history. And yet the patterns are already specific. Rotating the leg inward immediately creates new strains that, if maintained over months and years, would become permanent straps. This is the developmental process visible at its starting moment. The same process, in the same tissue, with the same mechanism, continues throughout the patient's life. The dissection is a frame from a film that does not end.
The three germ layers and the human as mesodermal being
Ida did not treat the three germ layers as equal contributors to the practitioner's work. In the 1976 New Jersey advanced class, she pushed her students to abandon the language that equated the head with intelligence and instead see the head as a structural part of the same mesodermal system that produced the pelvis and the rib cage. The body, in her framing, is dominated developmentally by whichever germ layer took the lead during embryonic specification. The mesomorph is led by the mesoderm and operates through the structural system; the endomorph is led by the endoderm and apprehends the world through feeling and gut; the ectomorph is led by the ectoderm and lives through the nervous system. The classification was not novel — it came from Sheldon — but Ida's application of it was developmental, not typological.
"I know that Well with the But don't feel completely certain to what I feel reasonably certain about is the following statement: that very early in the development of the embryo the egg having of been fertilized by the sperm very early there a differentiation occurs and it becomes apparent that there are three systems in that fertilized ovum. There is what we call an ectoderm, a mesoderm, and an endoderm. Now what this refers to is that one of the systems which is going to be the leader in the development of that human being for the rest of his life. The mesomorph develops primarily a myofascial system. This is the leader in his human beingness. He thinks he works. He lives through that system which we call the mesoderm from which develop all connective tissue, great deal of blood work, But primarily, it is a structural system. It determines structure, it maintains structure, it builds structure, it repairs structure. And this is the man whose muscular system takes the lead in his development of his humanness. Now, the more primitive system is not that mesoderm but is the endoderm, the development of the gut this is the kind of system that you find in most peasant types. Their feeling is very important to them. They apprehend the world in terms of feeling. They have certain characteristics. They like children, for instance. They are able to relate to children. They are able to be just large sized children."
Ida, in the 1976 New Jersey class, lays out the three germ-layer types as developmental dominances:
What matters for the developmental view is Ida's claim that the germ-layer dominance is not a snapshot of adult typology but the persistent lead established during embryonic life. The mesomorph is not someone who happens to have muscle; the mesomorph is someone whose embryonic mesoderm took the lead and has continued to lead. The endomorph is led by a gut whose primacy was settled in the embryo and has carried forward. This is a strong developmental claim, and it commits Ida to a view in which the work — which addresses mesodermal tissue — has a more direct purchase on the mesomorph than on the ectomorph, but reaches all three because the mesodermal system underlies the others. The practitioner is working on the layer that was developmentally tasked with supporting whatever else the body is doing.
Maturation as the developmental task of the work
If embryonic development continues after birth, then so does maturation — and so does immaturity. Schultz argued that many of the patterns practitioners encountered in adults were not pathological in the usual sense but were simply incomplete developmental stages. The toddler walks with legs spread wide and pelvis tilted forward because the toddler is still organizing the structural demands of bipedal gait. Some adults, Schultz observed, never moved past that stage. Their pelvis remained anterior, their feet remained spread, their structural development arrested at a stage that should have been transitional. The work, in this framing, was developmental in a quite literal sense: it was helping the body finish a process it had not finished on its own.
"had not been embalmed, the scapula would move right with it. There was no separation of function at the shoulder joint and one of the things that I feel we're doing on the shoulder joint as well as the hip joint, I feel this is an immature pattern that where people move and the goes every place the arm goes, that somewhere maturity relates, a mature shoulder relates to using the glenoid fossa and mature pelvis relates to using the acetabulum because so many people are just moving with the whole pelvis instead of letting the leg swing which you saw yesterday in the first hour. We start to affect that and indeed we're affecting this part in the first hour so we're really getting to what I feel is the two points of what I consider changes in an immature body. At any rate, with the arms straight out to the side in this fashion then, you can start to see some of the pulls of the fascia going all the way down to the pelvis and below. This is what we call the third arm position."
Schultz, on the same 1976 dissection slides, distinguishes immature from mature shoulder and pelvic articulation:
The implication is significant for how the practitioner sees the body on the table. A pelvis that moves as a unit with the leg is not malfunctioning; it is functioning at an earlier developmental stage than the practitioner is asking it to operate at. The first hour, by beginning to separate the limb's motion from the girdle's, is doing developmental work — completing a differentiation that the body's history did not impose enough mechanical demand to complete on its own. Ida had hinted at this for years, but Schultz's anatomical framing gave the practitioners a way to articulate what they were doing. The work was not regression to some idealized prior state. It was advancement to a maturation stage the body had not yet reached.
"What's happened to to my seeing in this class, or at least one of the things that's happened, and it started with Dick Schultz's anatomy class and his embryological, the developmental idea, and that is that I'm starting to see sort of like an underlying structure, which is the torso and cervical and cranial. And then I'm seeing the shoulder girdle sort of pulled on over that like a garment almost, which is knit on by They took you to this class to see that. I'm I'm seeing it in a different way. Alright. I mean, I've I've been seeing it, and I'm seeing it much more that the girdle has the potential to really ride on the rib cage, finely articulated. And then I'm seeing how the in other words, you could take that girdle and by carefully trimming away certain attachments, you could just lift that girdle right off. Exactly. And on the tenth hour, you've seen me over and over again lift the core up through the girdle and the girdle attach itself."
Ida, in the 1975 Boulder advanced class, picks up the developmental seeing the students have started to acquire:
Note what Ida is endorsing. The student is describing a way of seeing in which the shoulder girdle is not a fixed part of the rib cage but a structure that, in a mature body, articulates freely on top of it. The developmental view says that this is the body's design — the girdle is supposed to ride on the core, the limb is supposed to swing from the girdle. When practitioners encounter girdles fused to rib cages, they are encountering bodies that did not complete that differentiation. The tenth hour, in Ida's hands, was where the lift became visible. The work across the ten hours had supplied enough mechanical reorganization for the girdle to take its proper relationship to the core — to finish maturing — and in the tenth hour the practitioner could simply confirm the new articulation.
Infantile patterns in adult bodies
If maturation is the developmental task of the work, infantile patterns are what the practitioner is asked to mature. In the 1976 New Jersey class, the conversation turned to babies, and Ida and her senior students worked out a small clinical observation that crystallized the developmental view. Ida had a habit, when handed an infant, of feeling for the erector spinae muscles in the back. They were almost always spring-steel hard, even at nine months. Whatever produced that hardness — and Ida confessed she did not know — it was already a structural pattern in a body too young to have postural habits. Working on the back even gently seemed to clear up other complaints. The developmental process was already underway, and it could be assisted.
"You take a little tiny baby on your lap, and you expect it to be cuddly, soft, and pliable. You reach around and you grab the erectors, and you're like spring steel at nine months old. You know what mean? I don't know what that's all about, but I do know that when you begin to organize the bath a little bit, a lot of that other stuff that you're complaining about starts to clear up. And the other thing that's always seems always to be happening is that the legs need to be helped along. With a baby, you see, the only thing you're talking about when you talk about working with a child, you're clearly not involving the baby because you're not organizing it around a critical way. What you're doing is assisting that developmental process. It's very clear so that people like Carol who work a lot with children probably get a clearer reality on that developmental stuff than most of us do. Although what's very interesting is as we start to change our definitions, I noticed that in our class we're seeing a lot of that pattern of more mature in the back than in the front. You know, the whole the whole front just looks almost formless. And it seems to me probably that the minute we turn our attention to something, we start seeing it everywhere. You know? It's like, I wonder why I never saw that before. It's really clear in all those people. And we have a lot of our models before coming in looking like a hundred and fifty pound infants. You know? Just a very definite infantile patterns underneath the the individual And the embryonic part of our life lasts at least until the late teenage period. In that sense, we differ from every other mammalian category. We are the one exception of single bird mammals where the embryo is born ahead of time, and that's because of the size of the female pelvis. We have to be born when we are."
Ida, in the 1976 New Jersey class, describes feeling infant erectors and seeing infantile patterns in adults:
The phrase that lands is the one at the end: hundred-and-fifty-pound infants. Adults whose pelvises still tilt forward as if balancing on toddler legs, whose feet still splay outward, whose backs are still spring-steel tense in the erectors — they are not aging adults with adult problems. They are people whose embryonic and infantile development was incomplete, and whose adult lives have been built on top of the incompleteness. The developmental work the practitioner does at the table is therefore not anti-aging in the cosmetic sense. It is something stranger and more accurate: it is the completion of maturation that the body's history did not supply enough mechanical demand to provoke. The embryonic period, in this view, does not last nine months. It lasts as long as the differentiation continues — which is to say, the whole life.
The fascial bag and the organization of protoplasm
Jim Asher, teaching at Boulder in 1975, offered a vivid synthesis of the developmental view in the form of an extended metaphor. The body is a shopping bag — Ida's own image, recycled — full of stuff: brains, heart, bones, glue. The question is not what is inside the bag. The question is what organizes the inside of the bag. The answer, Asher argued, is the fascial planes. They are the organizational material for the body. They are what differentiated the early embryonic protoplasm into a structured organism in the first place, and they are what continues to organize the body throughout life. Without them, the contents of the bag would simply be a heap.
"And in that bag, we're going across 42nd Street. 34th Street. 34th. 35th. And 7th Avenue. Okay. Now in that bag, you got a bunch of stuff. Let's put some brains in there, a heart, some bones. Throw in some glue. Okay? Now here's the key point. This is the bag with all this stuff in it, just like the body. What are you gonna do to organize that stuff? How are you gonna do it? Well, the fascial planes are the organizational material for the body. It's what I think. K. And if you look at it from an evolution standpoint, there's some massive protoplasm there. As that protoplasm gets more organized, in other words, higher structures come to be like a nervous system, the nervous system gets more organized. In other words, instead of a bunch of cells just floating around into this large massive protoplasm, the connective tissue organizes that into a system. Okay?"
Jim Asher, in the 1975 Boulder advanced class, gives the shopping-bag synthesis:
Asher's evolutionary framing is important. In the embryo, fascia organizes still-undifferentiated protoplasm into recognizable body. In the adult, fascia organizes still-changing tissue into the body the person currently inhabits. The two functions are not analogous; they are continuous. The same tissue is doing the same job across the entire developmental arc, with the same mechanism — laying down collagen fibers in response to mechanical demand, arranging cells in space, creating the organized something out of the disorganized stuff. When the practitioner adds energy through pressure, the practitioner is participating in this organizing function. The work is not introducing a new principle into the body. It is supplying a stimulus the body's own developmental machinery already knows how to use.
"Would you get any help in relating this, say, to the development of the human from in in reality Because to age natural body changes. If you want to talk about the whole, say you have just assume we have a a function that will define each one of these fascial planes. Okay. And you wanna talk about the whole man in terms of the fascial planes. Well, then you're gonna have to have, say, some big function. Let's call it capital f, that talks about all the fascial planes. Okay. One of the properties this big f has to have is that if we look at this individual fascial plane, say that we've talked about with little f, that when big f operates on this little one, it's got to agree with this one. And so embryonically, it all comes from the same thing, which to me means that there is a big f that connects it all. You know, if if say this fascia down here came out of the back door and this one over here came in the front door and there was no connection, you know, worse yet well, if there was no connection, then we could define it in a nonconnected way."
A student in the 1975 Boulder advanced class works out the embryological connectivity of the fascial planes:
The student is working out something Ida had been saying for years: the fascia is one continuous system, embryologically and structurally. You cannot treat the leg without the back. You cannot release the pelvis without affecting the rib cage. The reason is developmental — all the fascia derives from the same mesodermal origin, and the relationships among the planes were established during embryonic life. The practitioner who tries to work on one region in isolation is fighting the developmental architecture. The practitioner who works with the system as a unified developmental whole is going with the grain of how the tissue was actually laid down. This is why the recipe was a recipe — a sequence that respected the embryological order of the fascial relationships.
The body changes on every breath
Valerie Hunt, the UCLA physiologist whose laboratory studies of the work in the mid-1970s became important corroborating evidence for Ida, made a related point in a different idiom. Conventional thinking treated the body as essentially static between scheduled changes — periodic renewal of cells, slow aging across decades. Hunt argued that this was nowhere near the right time scale. The body is changing constantly: atoms and molecules are replacing themselves, hormones are in continuous flux, electromagnetic states are shifting. The static model of the body had taught us to overlook a continuous process of self-revision. If embryonic development is the right framework, then revision is happening on the time scale of breath.
"Then if Roelfing upstates the static thought forms which allows thought as well as body plasticity to take place, as well as structural realignment, there will also be realignment in alteration in not only the conform the the confirmation of the body but in its repair, in its mitosis, in its continual evolution. We know that our bodies change approximately every seven years but have we ever thought that our body changed on every breath? I'm talking about belief systems now. You see, we've held some and we haven't gone any farther. Have we ever thought that atoms and molecules are constantly replacing themselves and being altered? That hormones are in a constant state of emotion and alteration? That electrodynamic and electromagnetic energy changes are occurring constantly which are affecting our body. And yet we try to conceive of the body as static and educated in the same way. And it is not. Our physical senses really tell us very little about our bodies. They tell us that which is on the surface and the outside and that's about all they tell us. And actually we have the capacity we don't have it now, we weren't educated that way. We have the capacity and we have other levels of consciousness to know and experience molecular action inside the body and to know all about it. If we talk about an educated physical body what are we talking about?"
Valerie Hunt, in a 1974 Open Universe Class lecture, names the time scale of bodily change:
Hunt's framing meshes with the embryological view in a way that may not be immediately obvious. The embryo develops continuously, not in discrete stages — the stages are descriptive conveniences, but the underlying differentiation is happening on the cellular and molecular time scale, moment to moment, in response to the local environment of each cell. If adult development is continuous with embryonic development, then it operates on the same time scale. Every breath is a moment when the body's organization is being slightly revised. The practitioner's hour on the table is not an isolated intervention in an otherwise static structure. It is a particularly concentrated participation in a process that has never stopped since the first weeks of pregnancy.
What the practitioner is actually doing
If the work is the continuation of embryonic development, what does that mean for the practitioner's hands on the table? Ida's answer was that the practitioner is adding energy. The word energy in her usage was technical — she meant it in the sense the physics laboratory would mean it, force applied through distance, work done on the system. Pressure through the fingers and elbows literally adds energy to the tissue underneath. That energy alters the chemistry of the bonds in the collagen molecule, changes the relationships of the fascial planes, and allows the body to reorganize. The mechanism is the same as the mechanism that differentiated bone from tendon in the embryo: applied force changing the configuration of the still-labile mesodermal tissue.
"It's pure physics as it's taught in physics laboratories. Now the strange part about it is that that organ of structure is a very resilient and very elastic and very plastic medium. It can be changed by adding energy to it. In structural integration, one of the ways we add energy is by pressure so that the practitioner gives deliberately contributes energy to the person on whom he is working, to not energy in the sense that you let a position throw it around, but energy such as they talk about in the physics laboratory. When you press on a given point, you literally are adding energy to that which is under that point. And in structural integration, by way of an unbelievable accident of how you can change fashion structure, you can change human beings. You can change their structure and in changing their structure you are able to change their function. All of you have seen that structure determines function to a very great degree, to a degree which we can utilize. Now the basic law of law of law law is that you add structure to the body and in so doing, that you add structure you add energy to the body, and in so doing you demand all of you are going to hear a great deal more about this as time goes on. But this is the basic reason why structural integration works."
Ida, in the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, names energy addition as the developmental mechanism:
Notice the modesty in Ida's framing — by an unbelievable accident of how fascial structure can be changed. She does not claim to have discovered some hidden principle of the body. She claims to have noticed that the developmentally unfinished tissue retains its responsiveness to applied force, and that intelligent application of that force can produce orderly change. The accident is that fascia stopped differentiating early enough to remain workable. The discovery is what to do about it. Energy applied through pressure works because it is the same kind of input — mechanical force — that drove the original differentiation. The practitioner is not introducing a foreign signal; the practitioner is supplying the signal the tissue already knows how to interpret.
"Two factors contribute to this: the first that the body, seemingly a unit, is in fact not a unit but a consolidation of large segments: the head, the thorax, the pelvis, the legs. The relation of these segments can be changed because the connecting myofascial structure is a structure of connective tissue of collagen. This is what that myofascial body is about. And collagen is a unique protein. The collagen molecule is a very large protein and it is a braiding of three strands a special braiding. These three strands are connected by various inorganic hydrogen sometimes, sodium sometimes, calcium sometimes, and undoubtedly other minerals. These minerals are interchangeable within limits. Thus, as the body grows older and stiffer, undoubtedly a larger percentage of calcium and a smaller percentage of sodium are present in these bonds. But by the addition of energy and what is energy? In this come in this context, it can it is the pressure of the fingers or the elbow of the ralpha. This ratio may be varied by the addition of this energy, and the joint or the connective tissue becomes more resilient, more flexible."
Ida, in a 1974 Healing Arts lecture, describes the molecular mechanism of fascial change:
Ida's collagen-chemistry framing is doing two things at once. It is grounding the developmental claim in molecular reality — there is an actual physical mechanism by which pressure changes tissue — and it is naming aging as a specific chemical drift, more calcium and less sodium in the bonds, rather than as some inevitable biological clock. If the bond ratios are changeable by added energy, then aging is partially reversible at the molecular level, not just at the gross structural level. The body is not running down toward an entropy floor it cannot escape. It is in continuous negotiation with its environment, and the practitioner's energy contribution is one input among many that can shift the negotiation toward more orderly structure. This is what Ida meant by lifelong development. The negotiation never closes.
The plasticity claim and the broader culture
Ida's claim that the body remains developmentally workable across the lifespan was, when she first began making it publicly, heterodox in two directions at once. The medical orthodoxy held that structural problems were largely fixed in childhood; the psychological orthodoxy held that the I was a set thing that did not change. Both assumptions had begun to soften by the mid-1970s, but Ida had been arguing against them for decades. In a Public lecture in the early 1970s — preserved in the Topanga recordings — she framed the developmental view in cultural terms, against the Aristotelian model of adulthood as peak-and-decline.
"And as you know, all growth centers around this country, as far as I know, are dedicated to one proposition, namely the enhancement of human potential. They assume that you can grow. Now I don't know how many of you have stopped to think about this situation. I remember, and it's not that long ago, when the idea that an adult human being could grow was an absolute absolutely ridiculous notion. According to a standard practice, according to the classics, according to mister Aristotle and all the people who descended from him, a man grew in terms of years. And during those years he grew to a peak. He grew to an intellectual and to a physical peak in his early twenties and thirties, and from there his progression was downward. From there, aging, so called, set in. And this was his growth. This was normal growth when I was a young woman. You see, you are here tonight examining a premise which is the exact opposite of this. And this premise deals not merely with the physical body and its potentialities, but it deals also with the psychological body and its potentialities. Those of you who are here who are in the psychological profession, psychotherapeutic profession, recognize that it's very few years since the same assumption governed the field, namely that a child came into the world with a certain IQ and nothing after that changed it. You remember the assumption that people had, and many of them still have, but I hope they're not in this room, that I, quote, unquote, was a set and relatively unchanging thing. I did it this way. I felt that way. When I was angry, I."
Ida, in the Topanga public lecture, frames the developmental view against the Aristotelian model:
Ida is making a historical point as well as a doctrinal one. The developmental view of the work depended on a cultural willingness to entertain the idea that adults could change at all. When she began teaching, that willingness was scarce. By the mid-1970s, the growth-center movement and the encounter-group culture had created an audience prepared to hear the claim. But Ida's argument was older and stranger than the cultural moment. It was that the body itself had been developmental all along — that the assumption of fixity had been a cultural overlay on a tissue that was, biologically, still embryonic. The growth-center movement was catching up to a fact that the fascia had never stopped demonstrating.
Awareness, assumption, and the persistence of pattern
If embryonic development is continuous and the body remains plastic, why do old patterns return? This question came up directly in a 1974 Open Universe Class lecture, when a member of the audience pressed Ida on the durability of the ten-hour result. The questioner, who had not been worked on but had brought general-semantics frameworks to bear on body awareness for years, wanted to know whether the body would simply rebuild its old assumptions once the practitioner stopped. Ida's answer was structural and developmental at once.
"After the ten weeks, and you leave people alone for a while, I was interested in knowing, do the old patterns, the old assumptions begin to build up again the same particular bodily attitude that took a lifetime to develop when you when you have these people. Because without that awareness, I wonder. Say the young man comes to you and there is some particular area that you work with as I watched you. Now that that particular situation in his organism was developed throughout a lifetime. Isn't that what you said? Yes. In ten weeks, there is a loose loosening of various buildup of muscle and tension, whatever. Okay. I can see that. Now that you have so manipulated and moved into a position you feel where there is an openness and an easiness for heightened awareness, for greater ease in living. Without a holistic, which is an awareness of values, assumptions, language, is it likely that there will be a repetition? Well, would say this, that I'm sure that there are convictions that a person can hold through the series of 10 raw things, which still have a hold on them afterwards. However, what seemed implicit in there, which I don't think happens, is that they're separate, that they don't have a lot of necessary changes in their assumptions, convictions, opinions, and decisions about life as a result of their body changing."
Ida, responding to an audience question in a 1974 Open Universe Class:
Ida's answer reframes the question. Yes, old convictions can pull the body back toward old patterns. But the body change is not separable from the conviction change. When a body changes shape in thirty minutes — and Ida had seen this happen thousands of times — the person who lives in that body cannot continue believing the same things about themselves. The convictions are themselves developmental, built up over years from the body the person had. Change the body, and the developmental ground of the convictions shifts. The continuity Ida is pointing toward is one in which embryonic development, postural development, and the development of self-understanding are all aspects of the same continuous process. None of it finishes. All of it remains in negotiation.
The twelfth dorsal and the developmental center
In her August 1974 IPR lecture, Ida named a specific anatomical locus as the developmental center of the body's organization — the twelfth dorsal vertebra and the lumbodorsal junction. This was not a digression from the embryological framing; it was its clinical consequence. The twelfth dorsal is where the autonomic innervation concentrates for the digestive, eliminative, reproductive, and adrenal systems. It is where the diaphragm anchors. It is the structural fulcrum where the rib cage and the pelvis negotiate their relationship through the quadratus lumborum and the psoas. In the developmental view, this location is not coincidentally central; it is the body's organizational hub, established embryologically and continuously reorganizing across life.
"Well, my point right now is trying to think of everything that happens right about this point. Well, the point is everything does happen right and about this you all realize that that twelfth rib, the twelfth dorsal vertebra, is the center for the innovation for everything around except your head. You see, it's the innovation for digestive activity, for eliminative activity, for reproductive activity, for the kidneys, for the adrenals, for the spleen, etc, etc. There is nothing within that body that doesn't have some sort of connection directly, most of them directly, some few of them indirectly, that lumbodorsal junction. And this is what is telling you of its importance, aside from the fact that you can feel it. But for all of these things to work, and particularly for the adrenal gland and the kidneys to get appropriate innervation. That lumbar dorsal junction, that twelfth dorsal vertebra, has to be working. When it breaks down everything breaks down including the energy source that's of the adrenals. So now you have a new way of looking at a body. You have a way of looking at it as an extension of that twelfth dorsal area of that luminal dorsal ridge."
Ida, in her August 1974 IPR lecture, names the twelfth dorsal as the body's innervation center:
The clinical point is that the practitioner's developmental work is not evenly distributed across the body. There are loci where the fascial planes converge and where the embryologically established organizational architecture most matters. The twelfth dorsal is one of them. Working there is not arbitrary; it is working at the place where the developmental signal is most likely to propagate through the fascial system. The body, in this framing, is not a container; it is a center radiating outward through planes laid down in the embryo. The practitioner who understands this is doing developmental work at the developmental hub. The work continues to organize the body the way the embryo originally organized it — from the center out, along the same planes.
The first hour is the beginning of the tenth
The developmental view also reframes how Ida understood the recipe itself. In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, in a conversation captured on the T1SB tape, a student works out the temporal logic of the ten-hour sequence in terms that turn out to be developmental. The first hour is not separate from the tenth; the third is not separate from the second. The whole recipe is one continuous unfolding, with each hour preparing the developmental ground for the next. The reason the work is broken into ten sessions is not that the hours are conceptually distinct but that the body cannot absorb everything at once.
"What does matter is you understand you have to lift that up off the pelvis to start getting mobility in the pelvis. Uh-huh. The first hour is the beginning of the tenth hour. Okay? Uh-huh. The second hour is a follow-up of the first hour. Uh-huh. It's just the second half of the first hour. Okay? And the third hour is the second half of the second and first hour. It's literally a continuation. I clearly I clearly saw, you know, last summer that continuation process and how and, you know, Dick talked about how, you know, the only reason it was broken into 10, you know, sessions like that was it because the body just couldn't take all that work. Couldn't take it right. But I just sitting on just trying to figure out how the hell she ever figured out that process, and then began to see it. What she did is what most of of us need to do more. She just sat and watched bodies. And she just kept on doing it. And put unfortunately, she's a little bit more brilliant than the rest of us. 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."
A student in the 1975 Boulder advanced class works out the developmental continuity of the recipe:
The continuity the student is describing is developmental in the strict sense. Each hour creates the conditions under which the next hour's work becomes possible. The body's response to the first hour is what makes the second hour viable; the cumulative effect of the first nine hours is what makes the tenth hour's integration possible. The recipe is, in this view, a compressed developmental sequence — a way of supplying the mechanical demand that the body's history did not impose strongly enough to provoke a more complete maturation. The ten hours do not undo damage. They supply ten well-timed pulses of developmental input to a tissue that has been waiting for it. The first hour is the beginning of the tenth because the whole recipe is one continuation of the developmental process that began in the womb.
Coda: a perfection that will never be reached
Schultz's careful phrasing — getting closer to a perfection that will never be reached — is the right note to end on. The developmental view of the work does not promise that the body can be made perfect. It promises that the body can continue to develop. The two are not the same thing. Perfection implies an endpoint; development implies a direction. Ida and Schultz both, in their different idioms, were arguing that the body's situation is one of ongoing differentiation across the whole arc of a life, and that the practitioner's role is to assist that differentiation rather than to deliver some final result. The work is not a cure. The work is participation.
"Now it wouldn't hurt us to talk about that last sentence right here in the middle because it is true. We got off on this table one day last week. Function can, will, and does What goes on to change it? Is it just God sitting up in his heaven and saying let that be? I certainly don't believe it. There is a man child down on this earth who wants to throw balls, who wants to fight with his fellows, who wants to climb a tree, who wants to do all kinds of things, and whose desire keeps edging out toward us. And he cannot attain this desire until the day comes when he creates new muscular patterns or more muscular patterns and the greater muscular stress evokes an answer from the body And then by that he's got the mechanism that he needs to give him the greatest strength. And the whole history of growth is a history any living human being by putting it into bed and keeping it. Now I realized I am talking about like to have, there is a level of abstraction which is essentially identical when you talk about protein molecules. Out here, from the hip, from the hip, except here."
Ida, in the 1973 Big Sur tape, frames structural change as part of the history of growth:
Ida's image of the child wanting to climb the tree is more than rhetorical. It is the developmental mechanism in plain language. The child does not develop the musculature first and then climb. The child climbs, and the climbing evokes the developmental answer from the body — new fascial bands, new muscular coordination, new bony adaptation. Desire calls forth structure. The same principle, Ida argues, operates throughout life. Whatever the adult demands of the body — whether through their own habitual movement or through the practitioner's pressure on the table — calls forth a developmental response. The body is not finished. It is in continuous conversation with what is being asked of it. The practitioner's job, in the developmental view, is to ask well.
See also: See also: Ida's discussion with the audience at a 1971-72 lecture about the plasticity of the body and the manipulation of myofascial tissue — including her account of the human instinct for order and why we lose it. PSYTOD2 ▸
See also: See also: the 1973 Big Sur tape on the history of medicine, Claude Bernard, and fascia as a system of support — the historical context for treating connective tissue as the organ of structure. SUR7308 ▸
See also: See also: Valerie Hunt's energy-field discussion of how Structural Integration affects negative entropy and coherent energy patterns across the developmental arc. CFHA_04 ▸
See also: See also: Ida's account in the 1975 Boulder advanced class of why the first hour is the beginning of the tenth — the developmental logic running through the entire recipe sequence. T1SB ▸
See also: See also: the 1974 IPR August lecture on the twelfth dorsal vertebra as the innervation center for digestive, eliminative, reproductive, and adrenal function — the structural locus where developmental organization most concentrates. 74_8-05B ▸
See also: See also: Ida's Topanga public lecture on the growth-center premise — the idea, novel when she began teaching, that an adult human being can still grow. TOPAN ▸