The cartoon as teaching device
In her 1974 Structure Lectures — a series taped during one of the advanced classes and later circulated as introductory material — Ida spent the first morning building the case that Structural Integration could not be understood as a treatment of the body alone. She wanted her listeners to grasp that the word structure already implied a relationship between things, not a thing in itself. After laying that groundwork she reached for the Peanuts cartoon. It was a piece of comic strip lore she carried with her into class after class, because in two sentences of a child's voice it stated the central physical fact of the work: there is a sidewalk, there is a body, and the sidewalk has the longer history.
"You know, there's an old Peanuts cartoon which invariably gives me a smile. It depicts Linus going along down the street with his head hands behind his back and his head down just thinking. And Lucy has just fallen down and Lucy has just come up and she's crying and Linus is meditating and Linus's meditation runs like this. For thousands of years, there have been sidewalks. For thousands of years, there have been little girls and little girls are always falling on sidewalks and the sidewalk always wins."
Ida, in the 1974 Structure Lectures, opening her account of the body as one energy field inside another:
What Ida liked about the cartoon was that it stripped the question down. There is no metaphysics in it, no language of fields and vectors. There is a child and a sidewalk and the historical record of every encounter between them. Lucy lost. She always loses. The cartoon is the empirical case for taking gravity seriously, and it is also, in Ida's hands, the empirical case against the schools of body mechanics that taught a posture without teaching how to get there. Those schools, she said elsewhere, had agreed for a century on what verticality looked like; none of them had said how to produce it.
Two energy fields, not one body
The cartoon's payload is a definition of the human being. In the lecture that frames it, Ida builds toward that definition deliberately. She starts from the word structure, walks through the older medical inheritance which treated the body as a contained mass moving through neutral space, and arrives at the post-Newtonian recognition that a body is not a thing but an energy field inside another energy field. The practitioner's work, she says, is always with the relationship between the two, not with the body alone.
"structure as such has been the element which has been added to the old notions which is has been giving and is giving us the greatest greatest impetus toward forward understanding of what constitutes a human being, a human body, and the way it behaves. So again, let us take a look at the word structure. Structure as you see, as you know, concerns the way parts are put together. The relationship, in other words, of parts. As soon as you use the word structure, you are really talking about a relationship, not about an abstract single idea. You are talking about a relationship and it begins important to think not only of that human body, but of that environment of that human body. And this again is a new idea, an idea which has come into our culture only very recently. The idea that that body actually had a a something which had to do with the world outside itself. But there we have it. All of a sudden we become aware of the fact that we are living in an environment and that that environment is an energy field. And the only way that we can really and really and truly change our ideas about a body is by changing this concept of the body as being simply a mass which moves as a mass, an idea which we've had since the days of Aristotle to a brand new idea that what we have now is an energy field and that this energy field works within another energy field. And by the time we are Rapha's, we begin to be aware of the fact that we are always working with a twosome. We are working not merely to change the lines of a body but to change the lines of a body in order that the energy systems that those lines determine within the body fit in to the energy systems of the field that surrounds the earth which which we call which we men call gravity. And that we are not and we are never working with a man as such. Certainly not if we propose to get results either in his thinking or his well-being. We are always working in terms of that relationship between that man and that energy field that he lives in, the field of the earth. The little, the smaller energy field, and the largest surrounding energy field."
From the same lecture, the buildup that delivers the cartoon — Ida defining structure as relationship and the body as an energy field within an energy field:
The two-field definition is also what makes the work falsifiable, in her view. If a body is just a thing, then any therapy that makes the patient feel better is a success. If a body is an energy field that must be aligned with another energy field, then the alignment is either there or it isn't, and the field will give you the answer. Lucy's sidewalk is not a metaphor. It is the field, doing what fields do, to a body that is not yet aligned with it.
"We know that order can be evoked in the myofascial system of the body by substantially balancing the myofascial structures about a vertical line. We know that logically in body mechanics, we can expect that the vertical lines of that force manifesting as the gravitational field can either support and reinforce a body, or it can disorganize it and presumably passing by presumably passing through and being part of it, it can destroy and minimize the energy fields surrounding it. We know that the energy fields of the body must be substantially balanced around the vertical line for gravity to act supportedly, thus changing the energy generated by the body. This vertical line registers the alignment of the ankles, with the knees, with the hip joints, with the bodies of the lumbar vertebrae, with the shoulders, with the ears. This vertical line is reminiscent of the prickles on the chestnut burrow. All those prickles pointing straight toward the center of the earth. If the lines are substantially vertical. This is a static verticality, however. This is the verticality taught by every accepted school of body mechanics operating in this century, and the Harvard group heads the list."
In her 1974 Healing Arts presentation, Ida names the vertical line that the cartoon's sidewalk implicitly measures against:
Why the sidewalk always wins
If the body is one field inside another, then a random body — a body whose internal lines do not parallel the larger field — has no way to receive support from it. This is the structural meaning of Linus's deadpan observation. The sidewalk wins not because sidewalks are malevolent, but because a body whose pelvis tilts and whose lumbars are forward presents no axis through which the gravitational vector can be transmitted to the ground without breaking something. Ida taught this in the language of physics whenever she could.
"And they are not rushing around at that fantastic speed which you find in subatomic physics where the electron rushes around the central part of the atom, which makes the energy of the atom. So that in considering this, you have to recognize that you're in the common garden variety of experience which Newton described in his book. So you go back and you look at Newton's mechanics with respect to bodies, and you find that those bodies obey Newtonian laws of physics. The Newtonian laws that describe the behavior of masses. And it's that simple. All masses behave, obey to some extent the laws of mechanics. It isn't until you begin to get down to individual particles, very small particles, or on the other hand, very large mass less phenomenons But these mechanics give out on. But you people are just common garden variety of weeds. So you go in and get yourself into a Newtonian consideration. And the Newtonian consideration tells you that gravity is pulling straight up and down, that if your body is random it's not going to pull evenly. It's going to pull randomly and you are going to have all kinds of trouble Because the pulls are not even, they are not balanced. So your job is to try to distribute these masses so that they are evenly distributed around relatively evenly distributed around the body. At a place which is critical is the feet or part of the legs because you've got to have support for the heavier mass of those. It's that simple."
In her 1976 advanced class, drawing the picture explicitly in Newtonian terms:
Newton, in this telling, is the right framework because the body sits in what Ida calls the common-garden-variety part of the energy spectrum. It is not a single particle in subatomic motion; it is a finite but very large aggregate of particles, large enough to behave as a Newtonian mass. The point is not that Newton is the deepest account of nature but that he is the right account for the scale at which Lucy meets the sidewalk. The other energy considerations — what she sometimes called the energy that does not obey the inverse-square law — come later in the work, after the structural alignment has been achieved.
"has found, for example, and will tell you about it, that random incoming people tend to have auras a half an inch to an inch in width, but after the integration of structure and the integration of the myofascial body, which is called rolfing, their auras will have increased usually to four to five inches in width. That's what we said. Wow! Obviously, we are dealing with a basic energy phenomenon of life here. Whether this really relates to or equates with the energy referred to earlier, the energy whose principal distinguishing characteristics is its failure to observe the law of inverse squares, which characterizes Newtonian energy transmission. This we do not know at this point, nor do we see any way to determine it in the very near future. But that which we do know is exciting enough. What do we know? What have we found out? We know that order can be evoked in the myofascial system of the body by substantially balancing the myofascial structures about a vertical line."
From the 1974 Healing Arts presentation, naming the two relationships of body to gravity:
Posture is what you do with structure
One of Ida's most quoted formulations comes from a short recording archived as a soundbite from her Topanga period. She is being asked, in effect, what's the difference between posture and structure — between what every gym teacher in the country was already teaching and what she was offering. Her answer reframes the entire question. Posture is a behavior; structure is a relationship. If you change the relationship, the behavior changes by itself. If you change only the behavior, the relationship reasserts itself the moment the patient stops paying attention, and Lucy falls again.
"fight with gravity. That's one item. And I know that his structure is not in balance. Because if his structure is in balance, his posture automatically is good. Posture is what you do with structure. Structure is the way you relate parts of the body to each other. And if you are really going to understand what I'm talking about tonight, a little meditation on those two words wouldn't do any harm. Because you see, in meditating on posture and meditating on structure, you can ask the same questions. You can ask the question of, now see here, if I alter this structure, what can I hope to get from it? Similarly, you can say, if I alter this posture, what can I hope to get from it? This is a big question. And you ask any of your MD friends, and they'll say, oh, Rod, nothing. Ain't so? You change those relations. You change that structure. And you get the kind of ease and the kind of vitality that you have seen some of your friends get who have gone through this system of structural"
From a short Topanga-era talk, Ida giving one of her cleanest formulations of structure versus posture:
This is also why Ida's reading of the cartoon is not pessimistic. Lucy keeps falling because Lucy's structure keeps her falling. Tell Lucy to stand up straight and she will, for thirty seconds, and then the same lumbar and the same pelvic tilt and the same hip joints will return her to the configuration that meets the sidewalk badly. Change the structure and Lucy's relationship to the sidewalk changes whether or not she is thinking about it. The cartoon is funny because it is a joke about the futility of telling little girls to be careful; the work is serious because it offers a way out that does not depend on willpower.
"And it is you people who are going to have to go out and say to your demonstrations and your demonstrators the sort of thing that I am saying to you now. The point about Rolfing is that your body begins to learn how to move within the gravitational field instead of fighting gravity. Now some of you here are old enough and some of you are to have been through the routine of these various methods of training bodies. To have been through the routine by which we as Americans train our young men, partly in high school through games, etc, but still more through their period of service in the Army. Shoulders back. Glut in. What happens when you put your shoulders back? Come on, where are the advanced ropals? Are they all asleep still? Chest do, sir. Yeah, what else? Dorsal spine goes you can't talk too good. Spine goes forward, you can't talk too good. The spine goes forward. That is the big key there. The spine goes forward."
From her 1976 advanced class, contrasting Structural Integration with the older posture-training traditions:
Madame Mensendieck and the failure of the older schools
Ida often named her predecessors. The Mensendieck system — a European method of physical culture popular in the early twentieth century — had tried to do something like what Structural Integration would later attempt. Bess Mensendieck believed that a curvature could be corrected by instructing the body to hold itself differently and by repeating the instruction until it took. Ida, who had encountered Mensendieck's work, regarded the approach as the textbook case of treating posture without addressing structure. Lucy could be told to stand straighter for the rest of her life; the sidewalk would still win.
"energy to go up to Yale University and to persuade those good old conservative New Englanders that they wanted to put this kind of a system into their physical education program. Now, Madame Mensindeep had a way of getting where she wanted to go. The thing is that she and I didn't see the same place as the same goal. I never knew. And when somebody came in with a curved curvature of the back, for example, Madame Mensenby thought that she could cure that curvature of the back by telling them to stand straight or to do such and such an exercise. The next week they came in and they looked just as bad, and she says, Well, go home and do it twice as many times every day. Now you must understand if you are going to be promophis of Rolfing, you must understand what it is we're promoting. We are promoting energetic efficiency in bodies. I don't mean the kind of thing by energy that some of you are thinking of. I mean, it's not this, this, this, Oh, he's so energetic. Not that at all. It's the kind of energy as is measured in a physics laboratory."
In the 1976 advanced class, Ida tells the Mensendieck story and uses it to define what practitioners are actually promoting:
The contrast also tells you something about what Ida thought she had discovered. She did not think she had invented the vertical line; that line, she repeated, was taught by every accepted school of body mechanics in the twentieth century, with the Harvard group at the head of the list. What she had discovered was that the body is a plastic medium — that the fascial relationships which determine the line can be reorganized by appropriately directed pressure. Without that discovery, the line is a wish. With it, the line becomes a result.
"If the lines are substantially vertical. This is a static verticality, however. This is the verticality taught by every accepted school of body mechanics operating in this century, and the Harvard group heads the list. All schools of body mechanics teach this measuring stick and verticality, but no other school of body mechanics teaches how to achieve it. But because the body has an unforeseen, unexpected quality, it can be done. The body is a plastic medium. Now this is incredible, and twenty five years ago, no one would have believed this statement. Fifty years ago, they'd have put me in a nice sunny southern room. You've given me pretty good care, maybe. But the body is a plastic medium, and you're going to hear that several times before we get out of here today. Now, we are ready to define rolfing structural integration."
Ida, in the 1974 Healing Arts class, naming the discovery that distinguishes her from every previous school of body mechanics:
Fascia as the medium of the relationship
The plastic medium has a name. Fascia — the connective-tissue envelope that surrounds and connects every muscular and visceral structure — is what Ida considered the organ of structure. Her colleagues in the 1974 Healing Arts class, presenting alongside her, helped develop the case that fascia is what gravity acts through. Where the conventional anatomy of her training had treated fascia as packing, Ida treated it as the substrate of the body's three-dimensional relationship with its field. Reorganize the fascia, and the body's orientation to the sidewalk reorganizes with it.
"factory go, but fascia is the stuff that keeps it from falling in on itself, falling in on its face, keeps you from falling on your face. It is your fascial body that supports you, relates you, and you know as with a child, you fool them sometimes by scooping out the material of the orange and leaving the skin and then putting the two heads together and you say to the kid now this is this is an orange and you see how long it takes that young ster to find out that it isn't an orange, that hits a ball of fascia. And so with with a a human being, in theory at least, you could scoop out the stuff that makes the factory go, the chemicals and so forth, and you would have left this supportive body of fascia. And it is this body which has had very little, almost no exploration in the sense that we have been giving to it. I remember sending somebody who came to me as a student and I set them the question of I set them to answer the question, what is fascia? She decided that was lots of fun. She'd go to the library. She'd have the answer in no time. She went to the library. She spent two days in the library, and she couldn't find the answer. And this is indicative merely of the fact that we are going into an unknown territory, a terra incognita, and trying to find out what changes in that body are going to develop into what changes in the personality that calls itself the owner of that body. And I'm talking here about energy being added by pressure to the fascia, the organ of structure, to change the relation of the fascial sheaths of the body, to balance these around a vertical line which parallels the gravity line."
In the 1974 Healing Arts class, Ida explains why fascia is the body of support — the substance that keeps you from falling on your face:
Once you have fascia in mind as the medium, the Linus and Lucy story becomes structurally specific. Lucy's fall is the consequence of a particular configuration of fascial planes — shortened in front, tugged on the side, holding the pelvis and the rib cage and the cervical curve in a relationship that cannot present a vertical axis to the ground. Rebalance those planes and the same girl meets the same sidewalk differently. This was Ida's claim, and it was the claim her practitioners spent ten sessions trying to verify on each new body.
"And, of course, the development of that stress pattern or of those places that are immobilized and hardened, we think is primarily related to the way the body deals with gravity because gravity is the most constant environmental force for the human body. And so it's in response to gravity that the body avoids pain, you might say, or avoids the buildup of stress in an individual point by trying to distribute it. And the fascial system is the way of distributing stress from those points. And so, as doctor Rolf said in the first talk, there's really no cause, one to one cause with the pattern. It's an accumulation of person to the pattern that they presently have. The other part is that we learn inefficient methods of movement. Some people still walk like the toddler. That is that their legs are spread apart, their pelvis is anterior, and they have never matured or come to a further position. They're stuck there. And that or they imitated someone in their family and walked that way. And then that pattern gets set. And then it can't be changed unless someone comes and someone like a raw bird. Some other method where you can change those patterns. See, the average person moves primarily with Extrinsic muscles, surface muscles, or groups of muscles that are stuck together. We're gonna lean forward. There's little differentiation in the in the movement. And then as you watch as the rofting goes on, you see that the muscles start doing their own work instead of being grouped all in one big glob."
From the 1974 Open Universe class, a colleague speaking in Ida's presence about how the fascial system mediates the body's response to gravity:
What the experimentalists saw
Ida insisted that the work could be measured. The 1974 Healing Arts class — a multi-day event in which she shared the platform with researchers studying her work — was her attempt to put the proposition in front of laboratory science. Valerie Hunt presented electromyographic findings on motor unit recruitment after the ten-session series; physicists modeled the body as a network of energy modules with viscous and elastic components. The Linus and Lucy cartoon would not have impressed any of them. The data, in her view, was beginning to.
"This is paraphrasing of a statement made by Doctor. Rall. As a simplifying approximation, let us first consider only organs directly involved in locomotoring behavior, that is the bones, muscles and connective tissue. Specifically, we have a mechanical system of joints, articulations, energy sources springs and viscous damping forces Action at a joint is then represented by a lever powered by an energy source driving a spring and dashpot parallel. These various module organs would be interconnected by networks of parallel combinations of elastic and damping components. Considering first action of a single joint, we see that the viscous elements greatly outweigh the elastic ones, motion will be impeded and energy wastefully dissipated. The problem is compounded when one realizes that all of the individual energy sources are interrelated through myofascial investments. If we examine a simple act such as walking in the light of this model, it is apparent that for maximal efficiency these various energy sources must operate in precise, synchronous, often reciprocal patterns. If the interconnecting networks are overly viscous, then no one joint can be moved without dissipating energy throughout the entire system. If by some process the viscous elements could be changed into more elastic ones, what would the model predict? Clearly, an increased capacity for energy flow between joints is to be expected. Know that this itself will affect an overall change toward more rhythmic efficient energy flow is not true. If the individual elements are still unbalanced with respect to each other, then the increased capacity for energy transfer may be of little use or may even give the appearance of less synchronicity."
A physicist presenting at the 1974 Healing Arts class, modeling the body as an ensemble of energy-generating organs interconnected through myofascial investments:
The model is austere — springs, dashpots, levers, networks — and the language is deliberately neutral. But its conclusion is precisely Ida's: a body whose connective elements are improperly tensioned cannot move efficiently because the energy required to move one joint is wasted by friction throughout the others. The cartoon's sidewalk is the most public form of that inefficiency. In a body whose elements were properly elastic and synchronously phased, the same fall would be a recovery.
"much more regular after Rolfing. Well, that could be described many, many technical ways, and that is it has to do with a sensory nervous system. We have to judge through our sensory system how much energy is required to do a particular piece of work and modulate the amount of activity of the muscle to that particular job. Here the modulation was very smooth. There was what we call recruitment of other motor units so that fatigue was not as great. I have a feeling, although I can't prove it, that there was a downward shift in the control of the movement. This is a tremendously important one. There are three major upstream sources. Like having a switch, a three way switch on a light, a source of energy. It can be turned on at various places. Ordinarily, when we turn on that switch, we get exactly the same light or energy source at the other end. But in the instance of the human body, that is not true. If we turn on the muscle or send the stimulus from the spinal cord, we get what's called a very low frequency. It is the kind of thing you experience when you're out playing golf and that one time you hit that ball magnificently and it took off and it was no effort, and you're always looking for it again. We find that when people become more skillful in a particular high level task, they become what we call more finalized."
Valerie Hunt, presenting at the 1974 Healing Arts class, naming a downward shift in motor control after the ten-session series:
The little boys who could not stand up
Lucy is a cartoon character, but the children Ida treated were not. Throughout her advanced classes she returned to slides of small boys whose structural arrangement had been so disorganized that they could not perform in school. One boy, she said, was being tutored in first-grade work; after the ten-session series, he was being tutored in fifth-grade work. The change was structural. The child whose vertical line could not be assembled was the child who could not pay attention. Lucy's sidewalk, in a quieter form, was every classroom in America.
"Now I have not arranged these in any kind of a sequence, So I'll just quickly explain them as they go by. Okay? I wonder whether somebody will pull down some of those shoes. Cane to school. It was nothing short of a cane. It would have carried the message to his peers that this boy couldn't stand quite as much buffering around Now the body is plastic. Verticalize that body so that it is lying appropriately within the field of gravity of the earth. I don't need to tell you that that was a different boy. This boy was now being tutored in fifth grade work. This boy had been tutored in his first grade work. What happened? What kind of energy was put in? Where? To the structure of the human body. That's all I know. And I know in general how to this slide from."
In the 1976 advanced class, Ida narrating slides of a small boy whose structure was reorganized:
The argument here is the same as the cartoon's, only inverted. If a body misaligned with the field cannot receive support from it, and if the body's energetic deficit registers everywhere — in the muscles, in the breath, in attention — then a body realigned with the field has its energy returned to it. The boy who could not learn is the boy whose structural system was consuming the energy he needed for learning. Make the structure efficient and the energy becomes available. Linus's meditation, in the cartoon, is the negative case; the boy who moves from first-grade to fifth-grade tutoring is the positive.
The ankle, the knee, the hip — the line that meets the sidewalk
Ida's most concrete teaching about gravity always came back to the line. She would call a student to the front of the room, stand them on the floor, and walk her listeners through the points the vertical was supposed to pass through. The ankle came first, because the ankle is the joint through which everything above transmits to the ground. If the ankle is not balanced, no amount of correction further up will hold. This was the technical content of the cartoon. The sidewalk is the ground, and the ankle is the structure that decides whether the ground supports or destroys the body it carries.
"This joint. And after it goes through that joint, it has to the gravity line so called, has to go down to the floor. How does it go to the floor? How does it go to the ground? How does it go to the earth? Goes through a straight line. So what are the points? What are the milestones? What are the significant points in that straight line? The hip joint, the knee joint, You get the weight forward. The weight comes to the ball of the foot. The gravity line no longer goes through the knee. You see here the gravity line goes through the knee and it goes through the place where those two leg bones reinforces them. Doesn't do that to you. Can you get up? Who listened to his teacher because his mama told him, Teacher knew everything. And Teacher says, There, now, you boys and girls, you get up and you take a big breath. Now keep your weight over the fall of your foot. That the only function that the legs here serve is to keep the hip from being parallel to it. The only function is that it is not a weight bearing. That gravity line goes way in front of the lumbar structure. It comes up and it has no relation whatsoever to the shoulder. It has no relation to the neck, no relation to the ear. And the guy has to carry his weight and his problems through his own energy and his energy becomes depleted, etcetera, etcetera."
In her 1973 Big Sur advanced class, Ida walks a student through the gravitational line and the points it must pass through:
Bob Hines, working at her side in the same period, made the structural argument in a different register. He was the practitioner she trusted to demonstrate; his hands, more than her words, often did the proving. In the 1974 Open Universe class with Ida present, he walked a public audience through the rationale for the order of the series — why the chest first, why the legs next, why the pelvic floor as the structural endpoint — and named the goal in language Ida endorsed: to horizontalize the pelvis so that the bowl can hold what sits in it.
"You see in the first hour, we're not trying to get everything. The goal, of course, in all the hours is to horizontalize the pelvis. Pelvis is like a bowl. And in most people, the bowl is spilling over forward. And our goal is to bring that bowl horizontal so that the contents of the torso sit in the bowl properly. So part of the training is to see the result of process. As well as to see what you do next in the process. You see the genius of Doctor. Rolf, part of her genius is in developing a sequence in which the onion can be unpeeled without disordering. In other words, so that you can take layer by layer in a sequential way each hour bringing in a level of organization. She says, well, it's easy to take a body apart, but it's not so easy to put it together. And that's that's the key to it. We're all being said in each hour, you're adding order. Bringing it forward and back. Forward and back. Well, we're the goal of the order is the vertical line is the most abstract way of looking at that order."
From the 1974 Open Universe class — a senior practitioner presenting in Ida's presence, naming the goal of the work as horizontalizing the pelvis:
Standing on a few square inches
In her August 1974 IPR lecture Ida pressed her listeners to notice what they took for granted. A human being weighing one-hundred-seventy pounds is standing on a few square inches of the soles of the feet. There is no static stillness in that situation; what looks like stillness is the live balancing of antagonistic forces against each other. The cartoon's joke depends on this. If the body could simply stand, falling would be the exception. Because the body is always actively balancing, falling is the default — the outcome of any moment in which the balancing fails.
"No, you're talking It has a wider apex There is no such thing in a living human body as stillness except as you get it in balance. Only when you get antagonistic parts balancing do you get stillness? And this isn't really stillness, it's balance, you see. You haven't gone to a place where it's still. You've gone to a place where the tendency to move in one direction balances the tendency to move in the other direction. Now the whole story of the human being emphasizes this. The whole story of the human being emphasizes the necessity, emphasizes that movement is the essence of that human being. Why do you suppose you have 200 or 170 pounds of human being standing on those few square inches of the soles of the foot. You have to be in balance and those souls have to act almost as points. This is the whole story of the upright human being. Now you saw how when we started working on people we laid them flat on their back. Why? Because there was not within them the mechanical possibility of balancing on a point at that time. So you took gravity out of the picture as much as you could by laying them flat so that you had at most 10 to 12 inches of gravitational pull. But they're big boys and girls now. And in order for them to stand on top of those square inches of the soles of the feet and to balance on top of the number of those square inches that constitute the ankle, you have got a degree of balance in that body now that permits a vertical line to come up through the ankles, through the knees, through the hips, through the bodies of the lumbars, through the shoulders, through the ears. Have you all got this picture of progression? Because this is the message of the morning. This progression that a human being is getting from a wad of stuff that's slopping all over the place to a form, a precise form, which acts as though it were built around the line. You remember the story that I told you earlier about has about Claude Bernard, who in getting his citation for the Legion of Honor said, Gentlemen, a man is a something built around a gut, because he was the guy that studied guts."
In her August 5, 1974 IPR lecture, Ida names the human being as a creature whose entire existence is a balancing act:
This is also why the work starts with the patient on the table. A body that cannot balance against gravity standing up cannot be corrected standing up; you take gravity out of the picture by laying the body flat, so that the work can begin with at most ten inches of gravitational pull rather than the full vertical load. Only after the structural reorganization is well underway is the patient asked to meet the field upright. Lucy, in this telling, has been asked to meet the sidewalk too soon and without the structural preparation that would let her win.
Gravity is the therapist
By the early 1970s Ida had a sentence she returned to: gravity is the therapist. The phrasing was hers and she liked it. It said in five words what the Linus and Lucy cartoon said in two panels. The practitioner does not heal the patient. The practitioner reorganizes the body so that the gravitational field, which had been destroying it, can support it. The healer is the field, and the field has been there from the beginning.
"Rolfing in the sense of this deep changing of the patterns of the fundamental structure of the body to conform with gravity. I have written, as I think probably all of you know, gravity is the therapist, and this is true and I make no claim to be a therapist, but I do make a claim that says that Rothschild changes the basic web of the body so that that therapist's gravity can really get in there."
From the 1971-72 IPR conference recordings, Ida stating the phrase that became one of her signatures:
The line was, in its way, a corrective to her own pedagogy. Practitioners trained in the work sometimes spoke as if their hands were the agent of change. Ida's reminder was that the hands only prepared the conditions. The field did the work. Lucy, in the cartoon, has not failed at being a body; she has failed at being a body in a configuration that lets the field carry her. Once the configuration is corrected the field carries her without further intervention.
Auras, energy fields, and what the cartoon does not yet say
Ida did not stop at Newton. The same 1974 Healing Arts presentation that defined the vertical line also reported, with care and a few hedges, the observation by one of her colleagues that the energy fields surrounding the body — what some traditions call auras — expanded after the ten-session series. She did not commit to a single interpretation. She held the observation in suspension alongside the engineering model, and let her listeners hear that there was a second kind of energy involved in the work, one that did not obey the inverse-square law and that she could not yet locate within physics.
"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. It seems capable now of building up. Is this is this the work of that other energy, the one that does not manifest obedience to the law of inverse squares, the law that I've called psychic energy the stuff I've called psychic energy. At this point, we do not know, but it is it could be an open question, you see. It could be an open question."
From the 1974 Healing Arts class, Ida moving from the structural change to its consequences for the body's energy field:
This is where the cartoon stops being adequate. Linus is making a Newtonian observation about a Newtonian event: there is a sidewalk, there is a girl, the sidewalk wins. The work, in Ida's account, eventually moves past this layer of the question — past the mechanical contest between mass and ground, into the energetic and entropic implications of a body that has begun to organize itself within its field rather than against it. The cartoon is true and the cartoon is partial. It says exactly enough to start the conversation.
Coda: what Linus was meditating on
Ida came back to the Linus and Lucy cartoon repeatedly because the joke contained her entire teaching in compressed form. The sidewalk is the field. The little girl is the body. The history is the empirical record of every encounter between fields and the unprepared bodies that meet them. Linus, walking past, hands behind his back, head down, has noticed what every school of body mechanics had refused to notice — that the relationship between the two is the operative fact, and that the body which loses to the sidewalk is the body whose structural relationships have not been brought into alignment with the field. In her own work, the corrective was specific: reorganize the fascia, balance the lumbar against the cervical, bring the pelvic floor toward horizontal, and let the gravitational field act as support. The cartoon does not know any of this. The cartoon only knows that something has been going on for thousands of years, and that the sidewalk always wins. Ida's contribution was to say: it does not have to.
See also: See also: Ida's Big Sur 1973 sessions on the lumbar lordosis and the structural ladder by which the line is built (chunks from SUR7308, SUR7313); her 1974 IPR lecture on the twelfth dorsal as the center of innervation (74_8-05B); and the long methodological discussions of structure as relationship in the 1973 Big Sur class (SUR7301), which extend the cartoon's argument into anatomical specifics. SUR7308 ▸SUR7313 ▸74_8-05B ▸SUR7301 ▸
See also: See also: the 1976 Teachers' Class discussion (T2SB) on whether the human structure is best understood as a suspension bridge, a cantilever, or a tensegrity — an evolutionary reframing of why the sidewalk has been winning for so long. T2SB ▸
See also: See also: the 1975 Boulder advanced class teaching dialogues (T5SA, B2T5SA) in which Ida pressed students to define Structural Integration in their own words and to name gravity as an energy field that acts vertically to the plane of the earth. T5SA ▸B2T5SA ▸
See also: See also: the 1971-72 Mystery Tapes lumbar-lordosis discussion (72MYS101), in which Ida argues that the lumbar is the structural lever every body uses to absorb misalignment, and pathology is simply a provision of physiology once the structural configuration is changed. 72MYS101 ▸
See also: See also: the 1975 Boulder advanced class session on triangulation and the lumbodorsal junction (B2T3SA), where Ida and her students work through how the upper and lower halves of the body fail to connect when the vertical line breaks at the iliac crest. B2T3SA ▸
See also: See also: the 1971-72 IPR Vital Signs discussion (IPRVital1), in which Ida warns against the chiropractic obsession with the iliopsoas and insists that the body, laid flat on the floor, learns subconsciously what horizontality means before the practitioner says a word. IPRVital1 ▸
See also: See also: the RolfB1 public tape (RolfB1Side1), where Ida and a colleague work through the reciprocal relationship between the cervical and lumbar curves — the structural geometry that determines whether a vertical line can hold from foot to ear. RolfB1Side1 ▸
See also: See also: the RolfB2 public tape (RolfB2Side2), Ida's pedagogical reflection on teaching students to let the tail turn under — the practical movement instruction that translates the vertical-line doctrine into something the patient can actually do. RolfB2Side2 ▸
See also: See also: the 1973 Big Sur class recording (SUR7305) on the rib cage, the diaphragm, and the work of preparing the cervical curve as a reciprocal function of the lumbar — the structural sequence by which the body's relationship to the gravitational field is rebuilt from below. SUR7305 ▸