A research chemist from Barnard, an institute in Boulder
The introductions Ida received in the mid-1970s tell the story she allowed to be told about her own lineage. Speakers reached, with surprising consistency, for the same handful of facts: Barnard PhD in 1916, Rockefeller Institute, Zurich and Schrödinger, the late 1920s European trip that planted the seed. The framing mattered because it positioned the work as the disciplined output of a research scientist, not an Esalen-era invention. By 1974, when this particular introduction was given to open the Structure Lectures of the advanced class, Ida was eighty years old, still teaching, and had just published her book the year before. The institute existed; the practice had spread; she was still firmly in charge of certification. Her biography functioned as the lineage's first paragraph — the credential that let her claim, against the medical establishment, that what she was doing was research.
"Rolfing has now become a world renowned system for changing the structure of the body so that it is virtually aligned with the force of gravity. Rolf was born, raised, and educated in New York City. She received her PhD in 1916 from Barnard College as a research chemist. New York City."
The standard biographical preamble, delivered before Ida took the stage at the 1974 advanced class:
The institute itself, by Ida's own account, was a long time in arriving. For most of the work's history there had been no central training station — elementary classes ran on the East Coast and West Coast in parallel, advanced classes likewise, and practitioners traveled to wherever a class was being given. By the early seventies that arrangement was buckling under the volume of trainees. In a 1971-72 interview she registered the shift with characteristic understatement: a building of their own, finally, in Boulder. The Rolf Institute was becoming what she had always insisted it would have to become — a place, not just a curriculum.
"Well that person does it as long as the rolfa. Is there just one place now that is training rolfers or are there No. Have never, up to this point, we've never trained in one place, so I think the training in one place is getting nearer. We now have our own building in Boulder, thanks be to God and some friends, and I think we'll probably be setting up a proper training station in Boulder presently."
Asked by an interviewer whether there is a single place training practitioners, Ida explains the geography:
She was also explicit about who ran the place and how decisions were made. The 'we' that certified practitioners was, in her telling, mostly her — a single research chemist and a board, with a small set of younger teachers who taught in accordance with the pattern she had established. That centralization was the institute's strength and its vulnerability. It guaranteed coherence; it also meant the work's survival was bound up with her own.
Fritz Perls and the debt to Esalen
Of the names Ida insisted her students remember, Fritz Perls came first. Their entanglement at Esalen in the mid-1960s gave the work its first sympathetic public — the gestalt therapists, the encounter-group movement, the early Big Sur generation who passed her name from person to person. Perls had been worked on himself, and from what survives in the transcripts he had been generous in promoting the practice to his own large audience. Ida's reflections on him in the early seventies carry a tenderness she rarely allowed herself for living colleagues, and an urgency about preserving the memory because newer trainees no longer knew who he was.
"because it will be many and many a long day before Ralfas really are out of their debt, their indebtedness to Fritz and what he did for them in those early days."
Speaking to a roomful of practitioners in 1971-72, Ida flags the institutional memory she fears is slipping:
What Esalen gave the work, in Ida's framing, was not just a venue but a developmental phase. She described the practice in that period as an art form — perceived as a whole, demanding total expression, caught up in the imagination of a particular set of people. This was the work's first life. The institute's job, two decades later, was to carry it through its second life, into something analyzable and teachable. She was clear that the second life was not the first life with footnotes.
"A revolutionary idea develops first as an intuitive perception in the mind of the pioneer or the innovator. At this point in in its life it is practically an art form. It is an art form perceived as a whole embodying a total idea demanding a total expression, and this is where Rolfing was in the days of Esselen, the days which I have been describing. This was an art form that caught the imagination of a lot of people. 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."
Continuing the same 1971-72 talk, Ida narrates the developmental arc of a revolutionary idea:
Standing on someone's shoulders
Ida's most pointed comment on lineage came as a rebuke. Teaching the 1976 Boulder advanced class, she was pressing students to integrate what they were learning rather than treating each idea as a separate item. The conversation turned to the holistic notion of the body as one — an idea she insisted had a specific intellectual origin and a specific named author. The students didn't know. Her response was a teaching beat about scholarly responsibility itself.
"I mean, this is the job of an educated person, to know where ideas come from. Who's shoulders are you standing on?"
Pressing the 1976 Boulder advanced class to know the genealogy of its own ideas:
The names she named, across the transcripts, formed a recognizable cluster. Jan Smuts for holism. Norbert Wiener for the human-use-of-human-beings formulation that she returned to repeatedly. Erwin Schrödinger for the seed idea that human behavior connected to body physics and body chemistry. Buckminster Fuller for tensegrity, which by 1976 a research subgroup within the institute was applying to the body. Claude Bernard, the nineteenth-century physiologist, for the discipline of looking carefully at the abdominal contents previous generations had merely dumped on the slide. These were not name-drops. She wanted students to read these figures, to know what they had said, to be able to defend the work's ideas with the intellectual apparatus of the broader scientific culture.
"And it wasn't until the of Claude Bernhardt. Claude Bernhardt got the bright idea that maybe in that heap of stuff that they just dumped on the sled, there was something that was significant studying it. It is important that you know about Claude Bernard. It is important that you understand that the same sort of historical process is repeated over and over and over again. Claude Bernard, as I said, devoted his much life to finding out what was in that heap of stuff and what did it do and why did it do it. Finally he was awarded the Meechin Alona Alona for his work. And when he got up to give him speak the customary speech, he opened it by saying, Gentlemen, a man is a something built around a gut. Now you can see how similar is this program to what we are going to do."
Teaching the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, Ida traces Claude Bernard's discovery as a model for her own:
Change is not optional
By 1971 Ida was already managing a problem that would intensify for the rest of the decade: older practitioners who resented the changes she was making to the teaching. People who had trained in the early sixties were being told that the work had developed, that earlier techniques were no longer sufficient, that they needed to come back for further training. Some of them complained. Her response was structural and unsentimental. The work could not stand still; the world was moving too fast for any practice that did. The institute's job was to be the vehicle of that change, not its archive.
"see if we weren't changing in this very rapidly changing world we also would be in the garbage pail, I fear. It is this capacity for change and the fact that from somewhere out of the blue we are given a vision of how we can change that keeps us as a valuable contributor to the culture of today."
Addressing the older generation of practitioners' complaint that the teaching keeps changing:
The phrase she used elsewhere for what older practitioners needed was 'updating.' By 1976 the institute was planning a four-week advanced class specifically for senior practitioners who had taken the original ten-week version years before — a class that would skip the standard six-week introduction and concentrate only on later techniques. It was an unusual move for any institution: to acknowledge publicly that what it had taught five years earlier was now inadequate. Ida was untroubled by the optics. The recipe still worked, she said. It just didn't work deeply enough.
"And so I ask you that you look at this the next time you are inclined to complain because it is being suggested that you take further training in Rolfing and actually recognize the fact that that which worked five years ago, six years ago, ten years ago, It still works, but it doesn't work well enough, it doesn't work deeply enough, it doesn't get where we should be going in order to show what Rolfing really can do. Rolfing in the sense of this deep changing of the patterns of the fundamental structure of the body to conform with gravity."
Naming the specific inadequacy in the earlier teaching:
The institute's primary job
At the 1976 institute conference, Ida laid out what she considered the board's settled view of the institute's purpose. The previous year had been one of consolidation — sorting loose ends, improving communication between the board and the membership. Out of that consolidation she could name the institute's core mission with unusual precision. It was, in her formulation, primarily a teaching body, and what it taught were practitioners. Not a research institute, not a clinical service, not a movement: a place that made skillful teachers of human structure and function.
"We feel in the Ralph Institute, or the board feels, and I feel, that our primary job is teaching practitioners, making more skillful and wiser, more knowledgeable teachers of human structure and function."
At the 1976 institute conference, naming the board's settled view of the institute's purpose:
But teaching, she immediately added, was not enough. The teachers themselves had to understand the mechanism — the why and how of what the work did. The image she reached for here, the chef and the cook, became one of her favorite metaphors for the difference between recipe-following and structural understanding. A cook executes a recipe. A chef creates results by understanding how nutritional materials interact. Beginning practitioners needed the recipe. Advanced practitioners — and certainly teachers — needed the underlying chemistry.
"But teaching in my opinion is not enough. We, your teachers, must know how and through what means this revolutionary technique of rolfing works. A recipe is fine, it works, as each and every one of you have reason to know, but when you get to be a chef instead of a cook you create your results not by a recipe but by your recognition of the interplay of food and nutritional materials."
Continuing the 1976 institute address, distinguishing the cook from the chef:
The chef metaphor cut both ways. On one side it gave senior practitioners license — and obligation — to depart from the recipe when they understood why. On the other side it protected beginning practitioners from being thrown into improvisation before they had the basis for it. Ida was firm that the recipe was good down to the end of the line for beginning work. The institute's task was to train people through the cook stage carefully before letting them call themselves chefs.
Research as obligation
By 1976 the institute was sponsoring research in a way it had not before. Valerie Hunt's UCLA laboratory was running electromyography studies on subjects who had been through the ten-session series. Lewis Schultz and Ron Thompson had spent a year doing dissection work and developing theoretical frameworks about the fascial system. A subgroup of practitioners — Lou, Ron, and others — was applying Buckminster Fuller's tensegrity model to the human body. Ida spoke about these efforts in her 1976 conference address with evident pride, but also with a specific intellectual demand: the institute's senior figures had to be willing to invest in understanding, not just practice.
"This is the level where we are now. We have got to understand those nutritional materials and be able to understandingly put them together, not to supersede the recipe in the early stage of the game, that recipe is going to be good down to the end of the line for beginning work. But after all is said and done, we have many demands that are further along than beginning work. To me personally, we have a consistent and continuous need for input, that is among the teachers and the people who are developing this, a need for input in order to feed the springs that give the outflow, we must know if we have to progress further. We must know more about the structure with which we as welfare are dealing."
In her 1976 conference address, framing the institute's research mandate:
The research she sponsored was not, by the standards of any single discipline, conventional. It crossed electromyography, energy-field measurement, fascial dissection, aura reading, tensegrity modeling, and what Valerie Hunt called bioelectric baseline studies. Ida was unapologetic about the breadth. The work itself crossed those domains; the research would have to as well. What she was uncompromising about was that the institute's faculty had to remain engaged with the question of mechanism.
"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."
Speaking to the 1976 institute conference about the work of Lewis Schultz and Ron Thompson:
The naming was important. Across her transcripts, when Ida talked about the institute's future, she named people. Lou Schultz. Ron Thompson. Valerie Hunt. Dick Stenstevald. Bob Hines. Bill Schutz. Judith Aston. Emmett Hutchins. The institute was not, in her presentation, an abstraction. It was a roster of specific practitioners and researchers, each of whom carried a piece of the work forward. The lineage she wanted preserved was not a doctrine but a set of relationships.
Synthetic integration and the limits of analysis
One of the recurring themes in Ida's institutional talks was a particular complaint about her own practitioners. They could take a body apart but they could not put it back together. Analysis was widespread; synthesis was rare. The institute's curriculum was designed to address that gap, but the gap kept reappearing in each new cohort. Her framing of the problem was philosophical as much as pedagogical: she saw the broader scientific culture as having spent two centuries learning to analyze and only the last twenty-five years learning to synthesize. The institute's pedagogical task was to give practitioners that newer skill.
"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."
Addressing the 1971-72 conference on the institute's central pedagogical problem:
The systems-thinking lineage was, for Ida, the institute's intellectual home. She read Smuts, Wiener, Schrödinger. She kept up with what was being written about cybernetics and general systems theory. She wanted her practitioners to think in terms of fascial planes — interconnected, system-level objects — rather than in terms of individual muscles. The first generation of teaching, she acknowledged, had been forced to use the language of individual myofascial units because that was the only language available. The second generation, working with Schultz's dissection findings, could finally start to teach the body as a system of planes.
"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."
Continuing the 1971-72 address, framing what advanced teaching requires:
Valerie Hunt and the energy-body research
Of all the researchers in the institute's orbit, Valerie Hunt occupied a special place. A professor at UCLA, trained in neuromuscular kinesiology and electromyography, Hunt had come to the work as a skeptic doing pilot studies and stayed as one of the institute's most active researchers. By 1974 she was running studies that combined conventional bioelectric measurements with aura readings, Kirlian photography, and energy-field measurements outside the body. Ida treated Hunt's research not as a curiosity but as a central piece of the institute's intellectual future.
"Institute. My tentative conclusions are that Rolfing has a profound effect upon human energy systems in the direction of negative entropy, The counteracting of entropy: there are at least two aspects of the energy systems brought into greater coherency, and the physicists describe coherency to us and state that coherent energy or energy, for example, that goes through a laser beam places energy in unified directions, in a single direction, and that very small quantities of coherent energy are equal to atomic bomb energy and very large quantities of incoherent energy or dissipated energy is like random trade winds. They may be pleasant if you don't do much with them. I think that one of our goals should be human coherent energy in our quest and not just more energy. We might even solve our food problems. If we had coherent energy, we wouldn't have to feed the fuel as often."
In her 1974 Healing Arts presentation to the advanced class, Hunt reports her tentative conclusions:
Hunt's framing of the work as an energy-coherence problem aligned closely with what Ida herself was saying in her institute talks. By the mid-seventies Ida was increasingly explicit that the work's deep mechanism was an energy mechanism — that pressure on fascial tissue added energy to the system in the precise physical sense of the term, and that what the practice did was reorganize the body's energy fields so that the gravitational field could support rather than destroy them. The institute, she said, had to remain engaged with that question because it was the only research program adequate to the work's real claims.
"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. These are the physical manifestations of the increasing balance, but there is an outgoing psychological change as well toward balance, toward serenity, toward a more whole person. The whole man, the whole person evidences a more apparent, a more potent psychic development. This means that the rate that the ratio man energy to gravity energy energy has changed has increased. The ratio has therefore increased the force available to reverse the entropic deterioration. That is and greater. Our world is no longer running down."
In her 1974 Healing Arts lecture, Ida sketches the mechanism connecting fascial change to psychological and entropic change:
Hunt's biography in the practice — recounted in her own voice during the 1974 Healing Arts presentation — is one of the institute's clearest case studies in how skeptical academics became researchers. She arrived at the work as a UCLA professor teaching neuromuscular kinesiology, watched a dance concert in which she could see something had changed in dancers she knew, ran her own pilot electromyography study on subjects who had been through the ten-session series, and found data so spectacular that, in her phrase, her resistance was gone. The institute did not have to recruit Hunt. The work itself did.
"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. It's quite true that we as rolfers are basically concerned with the application and the improvement of the technique called rolfing, but unless we have a basic understanding of what it is we are trying to affect and how these energy units can express themselves in what we call, we are pleased to call the real world, we are in a dark confusion."
Naming her own research priority for the institute's future:
The training pipeline
Ida talked about the institute's training pipeline in remarkably concrete terms when interviewers asked. The model had evolved out of necessity. Students with no biology background started with nearly a year of reading. Students with medical or pre-medical training went directly into more specialized material. Then came written reports designed to test whether the student could think independently or only paraphrase textbooks. Then auditing — learning to see, not learning to manipulate. Then, finally, the manipulating itself, under supervision.
"-What is the training that a rolfer receives? -Well, the first thing we if we take in people who have no background in physiology or anatomy or the medical biological sciences, the first thing we do is give them almost a year of reading. -In physiology and -In biology all and kinds of things that indicate that have to do with the biological sciences. If, on the other hand, they have had pre medical training or medical training and so forth and so forth, they've had a lot of this and they go on into something more highly specialized. And then at the end of that time they are supposed to write us a report answering certain questions which we give them, the point of these questions being to find out whether that individual in answering that question goes to the textbook and copies the textbook, or whether he takes the material and constructs an idea independently. Now when you say we, whom are you speaking of? Mostly Ida Pirov. So you are still the individual who certifies and directs the training."
In a 1971-72 interview, Ida describes the practitioner training in concrete detail:
The auditing stage was Ida's particular invention and remained one of the things she defended most vigorously. Students sat in classes of six manipulators surrounded by ten or fifteen auditors who watched. The auditor's job was not to hear but to see — to learn what change looked like before the auditor was ever asked to produce it. If six bodies were given a second hour, the auditor learned to see that all six showed the same patterns. Vision came before action. The pedagogical logic was that you could not produce a change you could not yet recognize.
"Biological disciplines, then I assume he must go into or she must go into some kind of next thing they do is to go into what we call an auditing class. Now the auditing class consists of not individual coming to a proper manipulating, laughing class. There'll be perhaps six people learning Ralphing manipulation in this class, and then maybe 10 or 15 of them sitting around as what we call auditors, looking at the changes, learning to see. Auditing is not learning to hear, but learning to see. So the auditor has not yet started doing the manipulations him or herself. That's right. He's learned to see what needs to be manipulated and how when it's manipulated in this fashion, it changes. And he learns to see that if you do six people in a second hour and do their feet, lo and behold, they all show the same thing. He learns to see that if somebody walks in and says, well, I've had several treatments from somebody on the East Coast, and I don't quite know I don't quite know how many. He learns to see that he shouldn't be able to tell. Exactly how many treatments that person has had by the body configuration. That's fascinating. That's fascinating."
Continuing the same 1971-72 interview, Ida explains the auditing stage:
Structural integration as a way of life
Toward the end of the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, Ida turned the institute's mission inside out. The students had been using the phrase 'structural integration is a way of life' loosely, almost as a slogan, and she heard it being said by people whose own personal lives — their homes, their books, their relationships — were obviously disorganized. The discrepancy irritated her. If structural integration was a way of life, then practitioners had a responsibility to embody integration in everything they touched, not just in the bodies under their hands.
"My way of questioning that was how do you consider structural integration a way of life? How do you consider structural integration? I have just told you leaving a mess in your lives and a mess in the physical environment you is not making structural integration a part of your life. Integration is integration no matter where you catch it. Disintegration is disintegration no matter where you catch it. It can be in your personal relation with your mother or your father. It can be in the way you run your home. It can be in the way you run your books. It can be in the way you never know how much money you have in the bank. There are a few other things like that. This is structural integration in action. This is what I'm talking about when I say structural integration is the way of life. And I don't doubt that a lot of you have picked up that slogan and are using it around you without really realizing what you are committing yourself to. Now this is not going to teach you how to get that little man one shoulder higher than the other or lower than the other or something. This talk that I'm giving you right now."
At the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, Ida pushes back against students using the phrase casually:
The standard she was applying to the institute itself was the same one she applied to practitioners' kitchens. The institute had to be coherent in the way it asked clients to be coherent. Its administration, its training, its research, its handling of money — all of it had to demonstrate the integration the work claimed to produce. This was demanding in a way most professional organizations are not asked to be demanding, and it remained a source of friction throughout the institute's early decades.
"Fascia as the large A is a whole system in itself from birth onward developing into other systems. The myofascial is what we are dealing with and that is the The myofascial is what you are dealing with, in that you are dealing with an energy unit, the muscle, contained within a it's up to you people to go out and get a few more revelations. Structural integration is not a closed end revelation. There never was a closed end revelation, not in the history of the world or the history of the world. Everything that can be regarded as a revelation is open ended. In terms of sense. 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?"
Teaching the 1973 Big Sur class on the open-endedness of the work:
The Boulder class and the second-generation teachers
By 1975, with the Boulder advanced class running and a roster of second-generation teachers emerging, Ida's position in the institute was changing. She still taught, still certified, still set the doctrine. But increasingly the practitioners in the advanced classes were learning the work as a continuous integration — the first hour as the beginning of the tenth, each hour as a continuation of the one before it — rather than as a sequence of discrete moves. The integration of the recipe itself was the institute's intellectual achievement, and it had named carriers. Dick Stenstevald was one. Emmett Hutchins was another. The conversation in the 1975 Boulder transcripts shows these teachers integrating Ida's lifetime of observation into the formal teaching.
"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. We're not only taking people along the spectrum of life, we're taking them on a very special spectrum. You can't be wishy washy about this."
Practitioners in the 1975 Boulder advanced class reflect on how Ida arrived at the recipe:
The conversation continues with a practitioner explaining why the recipe was broken into ten sessions in the first place. The answer — that the body could not absorb that much work all at once — frames the recipe not as a metaphysical sequence but as a practical concession to physiological limits. This is the kind of detail the institute had to preserve and transmit, and it was the kind of detail that easily got lost if practitioners learned the recipe as a fixed scripture rather than as a continuous integration.
"the important things about the advanced class, that you see yourself not merely as a follower of a recipe, but as a someone who is bringing a little more and a little more and a little more clarity to the confused situation, which is life. So what do you wanna say? I like what you just said. It I feel that I have had more clarity since since the the class. Class. Do you feel that you can convey more clarity? And I've been hearing back from my clients. That's been very gratifying to me that with a lot less effort and more focus and more confidence, I've been able to get much better results. And I'm I'm getting that feedback from the clients. Not just I feel better, but gee, now this goes here and that goes there. And people that that really haven't been into movement or anything are are connecting with those things from the silent level to their own verbal level before I say anything."
Boulder 1975 advanced class debrief — participants report what the advanced class has given them:
The second generation also took on the work of defining what they were doing in their own words. In one of the Boulder 1975 sessions, a senior student named John was asked to redefine Structural Integration on the spot, and the resulting attempt — halting, careful, still working out the precise relationship between the blocks of the body and the vertical axis — shows the institute's pedagogy at the moment of generational transfer. These were the people Ida was preparing to carry the work after her.
"Well, in the first place, I still have a lot to learn about the first hour, but I feel as though I would profit more from having our discussion lead into some of the other hours than hearing about the first hour for most of this course. And I realize that there's still a lot there that I don't know and it's an extremely important hour, but I'm feeling some insecurity about the second hour and so forth. So I'd like to get into those as quickly as possible. Go right ahead. Why don't you just briefly redefine structural integration and then step off from that? Jim asked us to do an assignment the other day where we wrote out a definition of structural integration. And I set myself the task of writing a definition which would include the block concept without saying the body is like a stack of blocks because I don't think that's accurate. I don't think the body is like a stack of blocks. We've discussed in here that the body is like a tensegrity mast. But there is a relevant analogy to a stack of blocks in that if the various major blocks of the body are stacked improperly, then there are going to be unnecessary stresses and strains. And I can't remember just how I put it unfortunately. I think I said structural integration is I'll have to instructional integration is a process in which the rover uses his hands to work on a person, another person's body, the Royal Pee's body, in order to bring the various parts of that person's body into a better relation with one another. And it seeks to balance the body about a vertical axis. When the various parts of the body are brought into a state of balance about a vertical axis, then the body is able to better withstand and even utilize the force of gravity and activity."
Asked in the 1975 Boulder class to define the work in his own words, a senior student named John attempts an integrated definition:
Terminology, science, and the work's two languages
Across the transcripts, Ida used several names for the practice interchangeably — without much apparent concern for which was the official term. She had named the practice 'Structural Integration' herself, in the late 1920s, after the Schrödinger encounter; the shorter informal term came later and from her colleagues. By the institute's founding both terms were in circulation, and Ida used whichever fit the audience. In her 1974 Open Universe lecture at UCLA — a more academic setting — she leaned toward the formal name. In the practitioner classes she used the informal shorthand freely.
"'tology' because 'tology' is the material dimension of that word structure. Structure wherever you use the word structure, the next time you use the word structure, look at it. See whether you aren't always talking about relationship. See whether you can ever talk. Use the word structure and be talking about something other than relationship. And every time you use the word structural integration, You are talking about the relationship between various gross, unitary parts that fit together to make the aggregate that we call the man. Now many of you are aware of the fact that the various parts of the body operate on energy, with energy, by energy, creating their own energy, taking in their own energy. They are individual energy machines. And according to you add these energy machines, appropriately or inappropriately. You get addition or subtraction from the energy machine as a whole."
Teaching the 1973 Big Sur advanced class on the meaning of 'structural integration':
The structural-integration framing was, for Ida, the more accurate one. It named what the work actually did — established structural relationships — rather than the procedure by which it did so. In her academic settings she was careful to use the descriptive term. The institute's formal name held both terms in tension, and her settled view was that practitioners should be able to translate between them depending on the audience.
"And as she moved along, she got more and more interested in all kinds of fascinating bipads, and she's become the mascot of our movement because she's been doing the most significant research around structural integration across. I'm not gonna put many more words in your mouth except to say that it's very exciting to me that she agreed to be the coordinator of this theory. And in a minute, she'll have a chance to introduce our speaker. And I hope you won't put the kind of words in his case. You see, the reason he did this is because subject of study over a long period of time is more difficult. I wanted to demonstrate to her that there were people who cared enough about the concepts around which this was built, who would come back, who would invest some time and some debt in going with her and some of her ideas. And that's much more important to me than lots of people coming in on single admission next time we may do it on the other day. So at any rate, you're in the verge of the nation. For those of you who are taking the course of credit and you'll be interested to learn that there are many taking the course of university credit, I will do the sheet next time. If the plaintiff claims it even earlier, At at least we've made our agreements about what needs to be done, and I will duplicate that and get it to them. Let me see if there's anything else."
At UCLA in 1974, the speaker organizing Ida's Open Universe lecture series introduces Valerie Hunt as the institute's research coordinator:
Coda: the future of the institute
In her 1976 institute conference address, Ida looked forward as well as backward. She had described the year of consolidation, the six-day intensives, the planned 1977 advanced class for senior practitioners, the research subgroups, the work of Schultz and Thompson and Hunt. She had named the people she expected to carry the work forward. What she still wanted, and what she framed as the institute's continuing obligation, was a deeper engagement with the energy-body research she considered her own most important unfinished work. She told the membership she would return on the conference's final evening to sketch what she wanted done in the year ahead. The institutional future, in her framing, was a research future as much as a clinical or training one.
"a consistent and continuous need for input, that is among the teachers and the people who are developing this, a need for input in order to feed the springs that give the outflow, we must know if we have to progress further. We must know more about the structure with which we as welfare are dealing. What is it we're doing to and with these structures? For it is the change in structure which manifests or doesn't manifest or is it only an index for behavior? I think you would all agree that the change in behavior is the prime importance of what we do. But remember that if you take on somebody who has had a great deal of physical problem you are also saying that he has a behavior problem because his behavior problem concerns the behavior of the particular organ or system which in trouble. And it manifests its trouble through behavior. It isn't working right. It isn't doing its digestion or it isn't doing its walking or it isn't doing something of the sort which is the outward and visible sign, in the words of the good old catechism, of the inward and spiritual disgrace."
Closing her 1976 institute conference address, Ida names what the institute still owes itself:
The institute Ida left behind was not the institute she had wanted, in the sense that no institution ever quite is. The research agenda she had endorsed splintered after her death; the tensegrity work continued through Schultz and others but did not become the institute's central paradigm; the trademark questions she had been casual about became central; the second generation of teachers fragmented into competing schools. But the framework she had given the institute — that its primary job was teaching practitioners, that those teachers had to understand mechanism, that the work had named intellectual debts to Smuts and Wiener and Schrödinger and Bernard and Fuller, that practitioners owed it to themselves to know whose shoulders they stood on, and that the work would be in the garbage pail if it stopped changing — survives in the transcripts with unusual clarity. The institute itself, more than fifty years on, still negotiates the demands she set for it.
See also: See also: the 1974 Healing Arts presentation of Doctor Heider's account of fascia as the supportive body that gives the human its shape (CFHA_02) — an extended companion to Ida's own fascia teaching, delivered at the same advanced class. CFHA_02 ▸
See also: See also: the 1974 Open Universe lecture in which a guest speaker explores how the work alters perception and consciousness, framed in dialogue with Ida's energy-body teaching (UNI_021); and the practitioner discussion of fascial change and movement reorganization from the same series (UNI_044). UNI_021 ▸UNI_044 ▸
See also: See also: the 1973 Big Sur class material on the open-ended nature of the work and the practitioner's task of integrating ideas across levels (SUR7332); and the 1975 Boulder advanced class session in which senior students attempt their own definitions of the work for the institute's records (B2T8SA). SUR7332 ▸B2T8SA ▸
See also: See also: Bob Hines and Dick Stenstevald conducting practitioner training in 1975-76 (RolfA5Side1, RolfB6Side1a, RolfB2Side1, RolfB3Side2) — these tapes document the second-generation teachers' handling of the institute's pedagogy in classes Ida did not personally teach. RolfA5Side1 ▸RolfB6Side1a ▸RolfB2Side1 ▸RolfB3Side2 ▸
See also: See also: Valerie Hunt's full 1974 Healing Arts presentation on the energy-field research (CFHA_03) — Hunt's own scientific autobiography, from skeptic to institute researcher, fills out the institutional research story. CFHA_03 ▸