From unit to field: the reframing
Ida's most consequential late move was to stop talking about the human body as a thing and to start talking about it as a field. In her 1974 Structure Lectures at the advanced training, she walked her students through this shift slowly, as if she knew it was a hat the room would have to try on more than once. She had been a research chemist; she had sat in Schrödinger's Zurich lectures in the late 1920s when wave mechanics was new; she had spent decades watching bodies change under her hands in ways no chemical model could account for. By the 1970s she had a vocabulary for it. The body, she told her students, is not an object the way a chair is an object. It is a consolidation of energy operating in a larger field of energy. The larger field is gravity, and gravity always wins.
"Now we can get a better understanding of these problems of ours if we change our assumptions somewhat. One of them being that our assumptions of what is a man. Is he a unit? No. Let's try the hat on and see how it fits that a man is a field. A man is an energy field. A man is an energy field and he is living in an energy field, a larger energy field, the energy field of the earth naturally and necessarily larger, which we call gravity. And that the energy field of the earth, that large ever present field, which is always there for our use, that that field can give us support and can give us help if our field is in a condition to receive it. And this you see is what is the business of the rauler. The rauler's job is so to organize a body that the field of that body is now able to accept, to transmit, to utilize the energy which comes to it from the field of the earth. And that then that man begins to talk about how wonderful he feels. He feels so good. What did you do to him? He hasn't this pain. He hasn't that pain. He's able to use raise his arms. He hasn't raised his arms in years. He's able to move his legs. He hasn't moved that leg that way in years. What is he talking about?"
Speaking in her 1974 Structure Lectures at the advanced class, Ida introduces the dyad that organizes the rest of her late teaching.
The reframing is philosophical but not vague. Ida means it physically. The body is a material mass; gravity is a measurable force; the question is whether the mass is organized so the force can flow through it supportively or whether it is organized in a way that makes the force corrosive. This is the working physics behind her oft-repeated claim that gravity is the therapist. The therapist is gravity, but only if the body has been put in a position where gravity can do its work. The 1966 Esalen lectures show that she was thinking in these terms a decade before the Healing Arts conference made the language public.
"But people in Switzerland up to this point in general have been playing with these ideas, these studies of men from a psychological point of view. And what I am proposing to do this evening or hoping to do this evening is to persuade you or to convince you that if you are talking about man as a whole in an environment, it is urgently important to you that you look at man as also as a mass, an energy mass that is a material mass in a three-dimensional world and therefore subject to the laws of the three-dimensional world. Now inasmuch as it's so late, I want, if I can, to sort of zip some of this along here and on the other hand not to forget it. So forgive me if I occasionally look at these notes. Now you see, if you are considering hand as a whole, it is not only in order, but it's imperative to take this attitude of looking at this man as a whole in a three-dimensional environment. And the reason for this is that by means of his physical body, he has to, willy nilly, he has to take into his subconscious, if not into his conscious, the various forces with which he is surrounded in this real world and some of which he's conscious and some of which he is not conscious. But these are all energy forces, and this man is living in the midst of them, and they are all acting on him, though whether he knows it or not. They act through the subconscious, if not through the conscious."
In her 1966 Esalen IPR lecture — eight years before the published doctrine takes its mature form — Ida frames the case for considering man as a three-dimensional mass subject to the laws of physics.
Energy within energy: the 1976 Boulder formulation
By 1976, teaching the advanced class in Boulder, Ida had distilled the field-in-field doctrine into a teaching beat she would deliver and re-deliver until the room could repeat it back. She was eighty years old. She was, as Bob Hines's introduction at the Healing Arts conference put it, still firmly in charge of the training. The 1976 transcripts catch her pushing students past their habit of thinking about themselves as discrete individuals — what she calls being stuck on the flypaper — and into the idea that they are situations, fields operating in fields. The vocabulary is deliberately strange. She wants it to be strange. The point is to dislodge a habit of thinking that the older anatomical vocabulary has trained too well.
"And as that man with his field operates in space, we know that he is operating in a bigger field. He is operating in the field of the earth, which as far as he is concerned, is enormous. As far as as as that man is concerned, the field of the earth is tremendous."
From her 1976 Boulder advanced class — the cleanest single statement of the field-in-field relation.
Ida's 1976 elaboration of the same teaching extends the geometry. She wants the students to see that the names we use — gravity, the earth's field — are agreements, not essences. The thing itself is energy within energy. She is willing to be playful about it (we could call it candy by agreement), but the playfulness is in service of forcing the students to feel how arbitrary their inherited language is. Underneath the names, what they are working with is a field receiving energy from a larger field, and being organized or disorganized by how it receives that energy.
"and you trying to jack you into realizing that you people are fields operating in fields. That within you, you have local areas which have apparently been developed to be able to utilize the fields in which you live."
Continuing in the same 1976 Boulder class, Ida names the cognitive shift she is trying to provoke.
The same 1976 lecture closes the geometric loop. The big field is gravity; the small field is the body. The names are conventions. What matters is that one field is receiving — or failing to receive — the other.
"Gravity is the name that we give to the energy field that surrounds the earth. We could call it x y z. We could call it candy. By agreement, we give names. We're talking about energy within energy. If I can just get you fellas so you don't get stuck, get hard and fast stuck on the flypaper so that you can realize that you are a situation rather than an individual. Now you listen to to me and you say yes. And you go away and you think the same dumb old way. This is what I'm trying to jack you out of. I'm trying to jack you into realizing that you people are fields operating in fields. That within you, you have local areas which have apparently been developed to be able to utilize the fields in which you live. As for example, light, there are local areas in you that make it possible for you to utilize light to inform you of what is going on at a distance. And that light feeds apparently the local levels which perceive it. You take a man and put him into a dark place indefinitely, and he becomes flying."
Ida elaborates the field doctrine in her 1976 Boulder class, including the deliberate playfulness about naming.
The man is the energy consolidation
Ida's deepest formulation of the doctrine — and one she repeated almost verbatim across years — is that the man is not a body that has energy but is itself an energy field, an energy consolidation. The 1966 Esalen lecture states this almost in passing, as if she expected the audience already to be there. She is telling psychologists that the physical body has energy requirements that must be met before any other activity is possible, and the way she frames the body in that argument is striking: the body is not a system that needs energy, it is the energy field itself. This is the metaphysical claim that does the most work in her late teaching, because it dissolves the boundary between physiology and psychology. If the man is the energy field, then changing the field is changing the man — not a part of him, not his physical instrument, but him.
"The man is the energy field, the energy consolidation."
From her 1966 Esalen IPR lecture — the doctrine compressed to a single sentence.
The 1966 lecture continues, and the next sentences make explicit what the compression of man is the energy field implies. If a person wants greater happiness or comfort, they cannot bypass the physical mass and its organization. The orthodox medicine of the period, Ida tells her Esalen audience, deals with the chemistry of the body and ignores its physics. Her work is the work of the forgotten element: the actual physics of the body in a gravitational field.
"Now all of these energy fields must be appropriately received by man before he can convert them to his own use. And not only do they have to be appropriately received by man, but they have to have methods and paths of distribution so that there is a free flow for these energies to distribute through the body and to supply the needs of the body."
From the same 1966 Esalen lecture — Ida names the receptivity condition.
The body as plastic medium
The energy-field doctrine has a corresponding doctrine about the body itself: it is a plastic medium. This claim is what makes the rest of Ida's teaching practically actionable rather than merely descriptive. If the body were not plastic, the field could not be reorganized; the field could only be observed deteriorating. The plasticity of the body is the entry point for everything the practitioner does. At the 1974 Healing Arts conference at California State University, Sonoma, Ida hammered this claim into the lecture again and again — she warned the audience they would hear it several times before the day was out. The body's plasticity, she explained, has a chemical basis: collagen, the protein of fascia, is a triple-stranded molecule whose strands are bound by mineral atoms (hydrogen, sodium, calcium) and those bonds are interchangeable by the addition of energy.
"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."
From the 1974 Healing Arts conference lecture at Sonoma — the plasticity claim in its punchiest form.
The 1974 conference lecture then crosses from the chemistry of collagen to the physics of energy addition. Ida explains that pressure applied by the practitioner's hands or elbow is, in literal physics-laboratory terms, the addition of energy. The plasticity of the fascial protein means that this added energy can shift the mineral bonds and change the resilience of the tissue. The body's contour changes, then its dynamic movement changes, and finally its psychological state changes. The lecture is one of the clearest places where Ida explicitly walks the chain from molecular chemistry to behavioral change.
"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. It is a system of organizing the body so that it is substantially vertical, substantially balanced around a vertical in order to allow the body to accept support from the gravitational energy. Two characteristic qualities of the body make this unlikely situation possible. The material body of man is a plastic medium, as I just told you. Now by dictionary definition, a plastic substance is one which can be distorted by pressure and then can, by suitable means, be brought back to shape, providing that its elasticity has not been exceeded. Now the question is, what is back to shape in this context really mean? And the answer is simple and really expected. Back to shape in this context means vertical. Vertical to the surface of the earth, vertical like the burrows of the chestnut, vertical like the force of gravity. Because only when the gravity vertical of the body substantially coincides with the gravity line of the earth can that energy field of the earth reinforce and augment the field of the human body. Then the energy of the earth contributes to the energy of the body. The body becomes vitalized. The flesh becomes resilient. Body functions of all sorts improve, for gravity at this point is the nourishing factor. Gravity is the nourishing medium giving to the energy quotient man gravity a higher value, because the man is more energized. This expresses itself in many changes in behavior patterns. Among them, among them is a different state of consciousness. We usually refer to it as a higher state. We have described the body as a plastic medium. 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."
Continuing the same 1974 Healing Arts lecture, Ida walks the chain from plasticity through gravity to nourishment.
The same Healing Arts lecture continues into the bodily consequences of this energy addition. As order is added to the random myofascial body, its contour changes, its movement changes, and — Ida insists — its psychology changes. The first balance is static; later balances are dynamic. The ratio of man-energy to gravity-energy increases. The body, in her terms, becomes capable of building up rather than running down. This is one of the clearest places where Ida explicitly links the molecular-level energy addition to the macroscopic claim about reversing entropy in the local biological system.
"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."
From the 1974 Healing Arts conference lecture — Ida walks the chain from added energy through fascial reorganization to the ratio of man-energy to gravity.
Bob Hines's contribution to the 1973 Big Sur advanced class extended this argument in a direction Ida endorsed. He told the room that what they were dealing with in fascia was not mystical but pure physics — an organ of structure that was, by virtue of its molecular composition, resilient, elastic, and able to receive energy. Adding energy to it changed it. The mechanism was not metaphorical.
"Relationships in space. There's nothing metaphysical metaphysical about it. 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."
In her 1973 Big Sur advanced class, Ida makes the strict physics case for the practitioner's work.
Valerie Hunt and the measurement of the field
Beginning in the early 1970s, Ida sought scientific collaborators who could put instruments on what her hands had been doing. The most consequential of these was Valerie Hunt, then a professor of kinesiology at UCLA, who designed and ran a series of studies measuring the bioelectric activity, electromyography and what she called the energy field of bodies before, during and after Structural Integration. Hunt was a careful experimentalist, but she was also willing to entertain results her instruments produced that she could not initially explain. At the 1974 Healing Arts conference she presented her findings to a roomful of Ida's students. The picture that emerged corroborated the field doctrine: the auras of clients widened from half an inch to four or five inches over the course of the ten-series; energy patterns became more coherent; the chakras opened in measurable sequence.
"She's measured the light energy indirectly through her instruments, and with the help of Doctor. Rosalind Bried, directly through direct reading of the aura. And amazingly, this age old measurement by Doctor. Brierez confirmed Doctor. Hunt's brand new instrument. Doctor. Hunt could have saved the money, but that's all what all metaphysicians have been telling us for centuries anyway. In terms of measuring light, Doctor. Breyer and Doctor. Hunt have observed its intensity in Kurilian auras Kurilian auras its vibratory rate that is, its color as seemingly created in the body. Thus the aura that Kurilian photographs, the brain waves, as well as increased energy over the various centers that the ancients called chakras were all observed. She 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"
Ida reports Hunt's findings to the 1974 Healing Arts conference audience, in her own voice.
Hunt's own contribution to the same conference described the methodology in detail. She matched 48 subjects by age, height, weight and structure; measured bioelectric activity, EEG, electromyography, and DC surface energy; and recorded the unfolding of energy patterns over the ten sessions. Her conclusions were that the work has a profound effect upon human energy systems in the direction of negative entropy, and that the energy systems are brought into greater coherency. She liked the laser analogy: coherent energy in a unified direction is enormously more powerful than the same quantity of incoherent energy.
"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. It's my opinion that Doctor."
From her 1974 Healing Arts conference presentation — Hunt's summary of the energy findings.
Hunt extended the measurements over the course of a full ten-series on a small subset of subjects. In one striking case, with a former dancer who had revved herself into an altered state during a session, Hunt's electromyographic equipment registered an unprecedented frequency — somewhere in the neighborhood of 14,000 to 16,000 cycles per second — off the subject's third eye region. The reading lasted seven minutes. Hunt at first assumed her equipment was broken; it was not. This event, which Hunt described to the same 1974 conference, was part of why she became convinced she was dealing with a kind of energy that did not fit within her trained vocabulary of electrical activity.
"Well, that's all I'm going to say about the century and about an approach to research, except to say that structure is not a thing in space. It cannot really be defined specifically as a thing in space. Rather, it is a series of ordered relationships, and those ordered relationships constitute the area of my particular study. I am concerned about human behavior and ordered relationships in the areas where I am capable of collecting information and analyzing. So I chose to study Rolfing from this approach. And the ordered relationship I was looking for or I was trying to see was particularly the patterns of neuromuscular energy. We have worked for many, many years in electromyography of muscle. I was not specifically concerned with muscle. I was concerned with how a person orders his neuromuscular energy, recognizing that the unique and the individual difference that we see in human beings as they walk across a room or as they gesture or as they speak constitutes a very unique part of them and their structure has been so called patterned. It is patterned neuromuscules. That was one area I was looking at and the other one was a kind of energy that we really don't know how to call it. It could be called bioplasmic or auric or atomic or electromagnetic. I sort of like electrodynamic because then I have not committed myself to anything except it's happening. And so the first study at Agony State Hospital 14 subjects, all men, no control. Design wise, fairly limited but information wise, not so much."
Hunt, at the 1974 Healing Arts conference, names the methodological problem the field doctrine poses for her laboratory.
Negative entropy and the second law
The deepest argument Ida made for her field doctrine drew on thermodynamics. In her 1974 Healing Arts conference keynote, she set the work against the second law of thermodynamics, which says that closed systems run down — that entropy, disorder, increases. The cosmos at large appears to be running down. But locally, where there is life, the running-down is reversed. Living systems organize themselves; they accumulate order against the tide. Ida's claim was that the practice she had developed was a way of explicitly intervening in that ratio — reducing entropy in the local system of the human body and thereby raising the ratio of man-energy to gravity-energy. The frame was Schrödinger's, drawn from his Dublin lectures on What Is Life — Schrödinger she had heard speak in Zurich half a century earlier.
"Thus, for the word energy to have significance for us here, we must have two members to the system: one, the Newtonian or gravitational energy the other, man consciousness as an energy, for this is the system that you people in this room are interested in and are studying. This is the system whose energy value you hope to enhance, to expand, to increase. Look at it. Energy man, that ratio. Gravitational energy man. This is a system you need to explore if you are looking to increase the energy of the individual man on the earth. This is the energy you need to explore if you are looking to increase the energy, if you are looking to increase negative entropy. In other words, to decrease deterioration. How can you increase the value of this system gravity man? Well, we just oar man gravity, that matter. It's man gravity that basically you are interested in. We've just looked at the energy of the inanimate mass fairly comprehensively. As far as humans are concerned, gravity is a constant, always present, always immense so immense that it's out of our perception, really. We can visualize the energized earth almost as a great big chestnut burr with vertical prickles in all directions, all directed toward the center of the bur, the center of the earth. This is one member of our dyad. The center, this is one member of our dyad. The second member, however, it is which offers us better cheer. It is the second member which can change. It can get greater. It can get lesser. The energy of man, the energy of consciousness as relating to this other energy. For seemingly it is through the second member of the dyad, gravity consciousness, that we may look to alter the ratio, to be able to modify the ratio through the increase of consciousness. In looking at this problem really a statement of the definition of vital rather than inanimate energy the statement is not complete unless we look carefully for all sources of energy, examine all sources of entropic disorganization."
From her 1974 Healing Arts keynote — Ida frames the work as an intervention in the ratio of consciousness-energy to gravity.
The same keynote then crossed into territory Ida treated more cautiously: the phenomena that do not obey the inverse-square law. Newtonian energy falls off with distance; thought transference does not. Ida did not claim to know how to reconcile these two kinds of energy, but she did insist that any serious account of human well-being had to acknowledge both. The aura measurements Valerie Hunt was reporting seemed to point toward the second kind.
"at this problem really a statement of the definition of vital rather than inanimate energy the statement is not complete unless we look carefully for all sources of energy, examine all sources of entropic disorganization. Such a search quickly uncovers a very different kind of phenomenon, which again we label energy. It is the phenomenon of thought transference, of extrasensory perception, of alive manifestations. All energy deriving from gravitational energy conforms to a generalization that the amount of energy available varies inversely with the square of the distance from its source. That's what I was complaining about here a few minutes ago. The distance from the source of the light was so great I didn't have any light. Had it been thought transference, I wouldn't have had to worry. But here's this latest contestant for the word energy, this psychic energy. It shows no effect of diminution of intensity through distance. A man can convey a message, usually involuntarily, from America to Australia with less loss of energy than occurs when he projects his voice a 100 feet or so. So what is this, and should it be labeled energy? If so, what distinguishing mark should we afford it to distinguish it from Newtonian energy? The teleportation or even levitation of material things, does this word energy properly apply to them? There are many persons in this room who could speak to the reality of this kind of energy, where and how it occurs, to what extent it can be tamed and harnessed with much greater authority, much greater expertise than I. I only know that the report which Doctor. Hunt is offering seems to say authoritatively that a kind of energy seen by workers as light, as color, felt by workers as something akin to warmth, not heat, but an emotional as well as a physical outgoing warmth, something that turns on as well as turns off, is associated with the increased energy of the human body. When physical myofascial fleshly order is introduced into the random disorder of the average body, the average human body."
Continuing the 1974 Healing Arts keynote, Ida considers the two kinds of energy at work in the body.
Connective tissue as the interface
If the body is an energy field operating in larger energy fields, what physical structure mediates the relationship between the inside and outside? Hunt's hypothesis, which she stated repeatedly across the 1974 Open Universe lectures, was that the connective tissue itself was the interface — the receptive and responsive organ for the energy fields entering and leaving the body. She acknowledged this was a hunch she could not fully back, but she believed it would be supported within a few years. The five senses, she argued, are too narrow to account for the information the body receives; the acupuncture points and the great web of connective tissue must be the receptive surfaces.
"And I'm going to make some statements which I can't back up. But I think in two or three years I'll back them. And one of them is that it is the connective tissue which is the interface between the energy fields of man and other parts of the cosmos. Now that is a big hunt to swallow. I do not think that the energy fields are brought to us by the five senses. I think these are grossly limiting. The very nature of the five senses, the structural nature of the five senses, limits that part of an energy field which can be brought to us. And yes, we do receive information from the five senses. But there is this vast array of information which comes to us which has come to me which cannot be described in terms of the five senses. There are limitations which exist within the structure of the central nervous system in the transportation of messages. I don't care how exhaustive it is. And I think there are limitations in the processing in the brain. Well, I think it is through the senses, the brain, the central nervous system that our system is closed. And what I believe is that the dynamic energy fields are received through possibly the acupuncture spots, which exist all over the body. There are many many many thousands hundreds. The great web of connective tissue which supports us which causes our confirmation which causes the very nature of our functioning which separates tissue from tissue which differentiates us in all senses, which is the most extensive tissue we have in the body, is the weigh in of the energy fields. Rolfing by reorganizing and freeing the body in its primary and most basic receptive and responsive modes. Receptive meaning the energy fields entering and responsive meaning the energy fields being dissipated. I think this makes possible a quality of experience which is open and dynamic. And once it is open, then the mind, the body and the spirit do operate in magnificent symphony. And I think it has to be opened that way. I would even go farther and say that, from my experience and I'm experiencing it right now, I think the opening and this kind of total experiencing someday we will find that it alters the process of mitosis, cell division and rejuvenation. And that'll blow you, blows me. I think it hastens it."
In her 1974 Open Universe class lecture, Hunt makes the case for connective tissue as the field interface.
Hunt's hypothesis aligned closely with what Ida had been teaching about fascia for a decade. Fascia was the organ of structure; it was what gave the body its contour, its support, its three-dimensional integrity. If it was also the organ of field-reception, then the practitioner's work on fascia was not just biomechanical but bioenergetic — every act of pressure-as-energy-addition was changing not only the body's shape but its capacity to receive its environment. Hunt elaborated this argument in a later Open Universe session, connecting it to thought patterns and the constant flux of the body's molecular composition.
"Rolfing upsets the disequilibrium, there isn't any doubt about it, of connective tissue realigns it. In relationship to the environmental field, that is obvious. We've accepted that as an idea. But it also brings the thought to the surface many of these thoughts I am talking about, the thoughts and emotions and our interpretation of those which is the physical manifestation of the body. And it is through this channel that I think Rolfi makes a tremendous contribution. It is not one that is easily evaluated in our laboratories. This is why I think there is a more permanent change to this kind of education than there is to track and field. I am not against track and field now. I think it has a role but I do not think it has the same kind of role in the development of body that we have thought of in the past. 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."
Hunt elaborates the connective-tissue interface argument in a later 1974 Open Universe session.
What changes when the fields align
The practical claim that organizes Ida's late work is that when the body's small field aligns with the larger field of the earth — when the gravity line of the body coincides with the gravity line of the earth — gravity ceases to be the body's enemy and becomes a nourishing factor. This was, in her phrase, the gospel according to Structural Integration. In the 1974 Open Universe lecture she described what this alignment looks like and what changes when it occurs. The list is concrete: ankles align with knees with hips with the lumbar vertebrae with shoulders with ears; the person reports increased energy, more openness, more frequent insights, more available consciousness.
"Of course, the man is standing upright. The animal is going on four legs. This is true, and this is the clue. The man is vertical. The animal is substantially horizontal. That is the clue. As a potential man approaches the vertical, his nervous system changes, and he projects we call it his behavior and what he projects changes. In other words, the energy field which we refer to as gravity relates differently to his energy field, to the nervous system of that man. As the energy field of the man approximates the vertical, gravity also a vertical field becomes supportive. In medical schools and practically all other schools, for example, you are taught, you have been taught, that gravity is the everlasting, unmitigating enemy of men, of humans. Everything that's wrong with humans comes because they're standing on two legs and they can't adapt to gravity. Well, I don't believe that. So This question. I'd like to quote Doctor. Hunt directly here, so I'm looking for my notes. As those two energy fields parallel one another, it is then that gravity becomes a supportive factor."
From the 1974 Open Universe class — Ida quotes Hunt directly on what the alignment does.
The verticality argument was not aesthetic for Ida. She rejected the postural-instruction approach explicitly. Her 1974 Open Universe class included a small meditation on what it means that humans, alone among the animals, stand vertically — that if you look down on a human head you see at most the tip of the nose, while looking down on an animal you see the whole face. The animal is horizontal to gravity; the human is approximately parallel to it. Verticality, she said, is the condition that lets gravity stop being the everlasting enemy of the body and start being its support.
"What characterizes human from other, and I did not say lesser, animal forms. Have you ever meditated on the relation of a human being to the gravity field versus the relation of other animals to the gravity field? Have you ever considered that if you look directly down on the top of a man's head, of the head of any adult human, you see at most the tip of his nose. He can have very bad posture, but you still see relatively only the tip of his nose. Now as you look down on an animal, you see an entire face. What are we talking about? Oh, you say elementary, my dear Watson, elementary. Of course, the man is standing upright. The animal is going on four legs. This is true, and this is the clue. The man is vertical."
From the same 1974 Open Universe class — Ida on what verticality means in field terms.
Coherence, not quantity
One of the most important refinements Hunt brought to Ida's field doctrine was the distinction between quantity of energy and coherence of energy. The goal of the work, she argued, was not simply more energy but more coherent energy. The laser analogy was her preferred image: a small quantity of coherent light is enormously more capable of work than a vastly larger quantity of scattered, incoherent light. By the same token, a body whose energies are aligned and synchronized — whose various oscillator-organs operate in phase rather than colliding — can do more with less than a body that simply has more energy poorly organized. This is the operative claim that distinguishes Structural Integration's energy doctrine from a generalized vitalism.
"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. This is so because all of the modules have their own intrinsic frequencies of oscillation. And if they are in wrong phase relationships with each other, their energies may tend to collide or interfere with one another. What then is the resolution of this problem? The various energy sources must then be modified so as to bring the system as a whole as near to a resonance condition as possible."
Julian Silverman, presenting at the 1974 Healing Arts conference, makes the resonance argument that completes the coherence picture.
Hunt's own statement of the same claim, delivered in the closing minutes of her 1974 conference report, made the political implication of the coherence argument explicit. The goal of the work, she said, should not be more energy but coherent energy. A society of humans whose energy systems were coherent would need less fuel, less food, less consumption to do the same work. This is one of the few places in the archive where the field doctrine reaches outward into a cultural claim.
"There are many, many aspects of what goes on in structural integration. I believe the very personal element of the roffer is major in facilitating energy flow. In other words, if you get roffed, it's great if you love your roffer. I think it will happen if you don't, but I think certain energy flow will take place faster. My final reports will be worked on this fall and this winter for the professional group as well as for lay groups through the Rolf 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."
Hunt closing her 1974 Healing Arts conference presentation with the broader implication of the coherence finding.
The transducer and the relationship
Hunt observed something else in her 1974 study that did not fit easily inside the field doctrine but that Ida endorsed: the practitioner is part of the field-event. Hunt called the practitioner a transducer — a device that converts one form of energy into another. The work cannot be done by a machine, she said, nor reproduced by exercise. There is a relationship between the practitioner and the client that constitutes part of what makes the change happen. Hunt did not have a clean instrument-level account of this; she simply reported it as what the data suggested. Ida had been saying for years that the practitioner is not interchangeable with the technique.
"It appears to me that there are either two forms of energy human energy that we now know, or there are two aspects of one form of energy: One being primarily electrical, that which is inside the body. The other I don't know whether it's by the process of structural integration they become transducers, whether it's the people of that are chosen to be Ralfords or whether Ida Zapsums. But I'm sure they're transducers and it is a relationship between two people that makes what happens happen. It is in addition to the technique. I think this cannot be duplicated by exercise, by oneself. I'm quite sure it cannot be duplicated by machines or gadgets that exercise us, that make changes in the body. There are many, many aspects of what goes on in structural integration. I believe the very personal element of the roffer is major in facilitating energy flow. In other words, if you get roffed, it's great if you love your roffer. I think it will happen if you don't, but I think certain energy flow will take place faster. My final reports will be worked on this fall and this winter for the professional group as well as for lay groups through the Rolf Institute."
Hunt at the 1974 Healing Arts conference on the practitioner as transducer.
Hunt's findings from the four-subject ten-series study went further. She tracked the energy field across all ten sessions and found that the chakras opened in sequence, that work on different segments of the body produced different effects on different energy centers, and that the right and left legs produced asymmetric field responses. Some of these findings she could not explain. The honesty of the report — its refusal to smooth out anomalies — is part of why Ida valued the collaboration.
"During their offing sessions then of these four people, two men and two women, there was a progressive change or improvement in the flow of this energy upward. That is a general conclusion from the first session to the last session. The specific ones then are: energy in the chakras and areas of the body differed with emotional experiences and with sessions. That is, the energy we recorded, the energy which was described by an aura reader, differed. Very early in the sessions, we found that the four people had what you might call closed chakra or energy fields. This meant that sometimes we would pick up a tremendous energy field at the foot or the knee, skip the middle, jump up to the throat. It was almost like there was a void in there. We had a little energy, but it was so small you could hardly find it. Rosalind described that once the energy started to flow, it flowed up the central vertical area of the body. We were not able to measure that, that central flow, but we did measure it as chakras became activated. This was first recorded in the chakras and later was described as an increase in the aura, as Doctor. Rolfe reported, from one half inch to four and five inches at the end of the session. Then a very interesting one that I throw out to those of your psychotherapists, and that is in the second hour when there is a great deal of work on the legs, there was more activity produced in the chakras as a result of working on the right leg than there was as a result of working on the left leg on all four persons. Their aura became greater as a result of releasing the right leg. The chakra activity became increased. And in our discussion in the laboratory, we wondered about the yin and the yang and the aida and the pingali about the male and the female aspect of the human being. We talked about a patriarchal society. We don't know the answers here, but this right leg work seemed to have an amazing effect upon this energy field that we were recording. Then we found that the areas of the body being rough did not appear to have the same field effect in areas of the body."
Hunt presenting the detailed findings of her four-subject ten-series study at the 1974 Healing Arts conference.
Beyond technique: the larger goal
Ida's late lectures repeatedly insisted that the work was not, finally, a technique. It was an attempt to evolve the human being into a more nearly whole creature — what she sometimes called, borrowing Norbert Wiener's phrase, a more human use of human beings. The technique was the entry point; the goal was the man whose field was sufficiently organized that he could receive gravity, receive the larger field, receive his own consciousness without constant interference. In her 1971–72 IPR conference talks Ida named her own personal research goal as the study of the energy body, what it is and how it works. This was, for her, the open frontier.
"This is our goal, to create that kind of a man. And this goal I feel is mirrored, decidedly nearer than it was even a year ago. And if you think I have been too freely imbibing of that nectar that they have up on Cloud 9, it would be an idea to talk to some of the more recent advanced students and see how they feel about what their ability is to see and to work at this point. So as I say, we are bragging. We are bragging about how much better we can do at this point than we could have a year ago. But now let's leave that one for the time being. All of you, however, know that my personal goal in the study of Rolfing is the study of the energy body and how it works. What constitutes the energy body? And how are these structures affected by Rolfing or by other techniques? How are they affected? This is the question."
From the 1971–72 IPR conference lecture — Ida names the research direction she most wants pursued.
The frontier was open partly because Ida did not pretend to know everything about energy that she would have liked to know. In her 1976 Boulder advanced class she said plainly that she did not know very much about energy, and that the only thing that did not make her feel bad was that all the rest of the men on earth were in the same boat. The honesty of the admission was, by then, characteristic. The doctrine she was teaching was not a finished doctrine but an open one — a frame inside which research could continue.
"Because of this ability to voluntarily, within limits, decide what they want to do and how they want to do it. Are they going to utilize the energy fields around them? I don't know very much about energy. The only thing that doesn't make me feel bad is that I know all the rest of the men on the surface are in the same boat. I don't know very much about anything either. You get busy and we talk and talk and we talk talk and we talk and talk. And and it gives us jobs on university faculties, but it doesn't really tell us about energy. But there seem to be certain things that we do know. We do know that objects, particularly vital objects, all have fields around them which are resultants of what is going on room that we relatively know. And as that man with his field operates in his space, We know that he is operating in a bigger field. He is operating in the field of B. A, which as far as he is concerned is enormous. As far as as that man is concerned, the field of the earth is tremendous. So that he can feel himself within that field. And like energy, any energy to you, it can add to this energy. Or can randomly break it down. It doesn't have to be gravity. Gravity is the name that we give to the energy field that surrounds the earth. We could call it x y z. We could call it candy. By agreement, we give names. We're talking about energy within energy."
In her 1976 Boulder advanced class, Ida acknowledges the limits of her own knowledge of energy.
Plasticity of pattern: the psychological corollary
If the body is an energy field and the field can be reorganized, what follows for the psychological patterns the body carries? Hunt and her colleagues at the 1974 Open Universe class pursued this question further than Ida herself did. Hunt's argument was that the static thought-forms a person carries are themselves part of the field, and that loosening the static physical patterns through the work also loosens the static psychological patterns. Stewart Wilson, presenting in the same series, framed it differently: the body dramatizes patterns that once protected it, and the work releases the person back into spontaneity rather than rebuilding them into a new fixed configuration.
"One of the things that Ida talked to me about is this business about the body dramatizing patterns and that structural integration being an opportunity to release the pattern is spontaneity. You see, I have talked about water. The mind has a kind of order which is totally inhuman. It is therefore a kind of disorder. It's the height of entropy. It wants everything to stop. Don't move. See, it wants safety. It can't stand to free flow. It can't stand to be. It can't stand to meet you see, it's got to know everything about this person so I know how to behave with her. I know exactly how to act with German. An act of third, the way I've always acted with women, I have what I call a man act. And whenever I see a woman, it gets reactivated, and I do it. And the more successful it is, the more likely I am to continue to repeat it. The parts that are a little unsuccessful, I will build justifications around. So you can't expect much from a guy who grew up as an only child for thirteen years. That's why I'm bad with women or whatever. The thing is incredible. It's insidious. It's unbelievable. I mean, it's unbelievable. And when you go to a package, you're attacking it with itself, and it screws you every time.
Stewart Wilson, presenting at a 1974 Open Universe class, on what releasing the dramatized pattern looks like.
The same Open Universe session pursued the same point in a different vocabulary. The body's so-called thoughts, Wilson argued, are often not thoughts at all but reruns of survival patterns held in the muscles, in the shape of the shoulders, in the locking of the knees. When the connective tissue field is reorganized, the patterns it has been carrying can release. The mind, he said, has a kind of order which is totally inhuman — it is the height of entropy because it wants everything to stop. The work disrupts that stop.
"My own personal experience of roleplaying has made has given the the roleplayer gave me the space to be the way I am. The roleplayer didn't put me back together again. The roleplayer didn't make me the way I never was. The roleplayer gave I know Ida says it a little differently. She says to put you in the field of gravity so that you are she has to use the word appropriate so that what did she say about? So that it supports each other. Yes. I call that being appropriate. You know, it's like being the way it is. The Chinese had a word for a long time ago, they called it the Dao but you're not supposed to talk about that in scientific circles. So we have to find other words like gravity and those things. I think there are actually better words for us because we're hip to that perhaps. If you were an old Chinaman, then perhaps Dao would be good for you, but What I've discovered in my own experience is that as the role for releases my body into spontaneity, rest of the circuit, because the circuit has an emotional content, has a mental content, it has a thinking content, an"
Wilson at the 1974 Open Universe class, recounting Ida's own framing of what the work does psychologically.
Coda: the open universe
The doctrine that a man is an energy field living in an energy field was, for Ida, a way of opening her students into what she called a more open universe. The body's plasticity was the entry point; gravity was the constant; the small field and the large field were the dyad whose ratio could be changed. The change was concrete — measurable, in Hunt's instruments — but also pointed toward something Ida did not pretend to have closed. The research direction she named for her senior practitioners in 1971–72 was the study of the energy body. In 1976, eighty years old and teaching in Boulder, she was still telling her students that they were fields, that they were situations, that the names they had inherited for what they were doing might all have to be revised. The work, she said, was not a closed-end revelation. There never was a closed-end revelation.
"Newton's studies, for example, were astute enough to be able to predict planetary movement, to be able to predict eclipses, etc, etc. Newton was a very smart guy. But now, toward the end of that nineteenth century, things began to happen. And Maxwell and Clark started studying energy, light energy. This was the first time in the history of scientific thinking when men thought about energy. Because you see, up through the last two hundred years, as I said in my talk last year, one of the first comments we had about energy was the comment of the poet Blake, who said Energy is eternal delight. Well, that didn't tell us very much except it told us about a certain transcendence which men felt that energy had and that matter didn't have. Men have always felt this way about energy. Now what I want to know is who was the first guy who decided that there was something like energy? What did he think energy was? What did he think when he woke up in the morning and he said, Gee, I feel so much more energy than I felt last night. Oh, I was tired when I went to bed last night. But I'm just full of beams now, full of energy. What did he think he was talking important to you people. Because the one characteristic that seems to be rather universal in Rolfing is the fashion in which people say I have so much more energy."
From her 1976 Boulder advanced class — Ida historicizing her own field doctrine within the development of physics.
What Ida left behind, then, is not a finished science but a frame and a method. The frame is the field doctrine: man as an energy consolidation operating inside the larger field of gravity, with consciousness as the modifiable term in the ratio. The method is the physical practice itself — the addition of mechanical energy through the practitioner's hands to a plastic medium, reorganizing the connective tissue so the small field can receive the large field. The frame and the method together constitute the contribution. Whether her colleagues' early instrument-level findings would be confirmed by later science was, to Ida, less important than that the question had been asked clearly enough that someone could keep asking it. By her own lights, in her last decade of teaching, she was no longer trying to convince the room that the doctrine was correct. She was trying to jack the room out of object-thinking and into field-thinking — long enough that the practitioners who left her classroom might keep watching for what they could not yet name.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfB1 public tape — extended reflection on a body as the algebraic sum of its individual energies, and on segmentation as the structural key that lets the gravitational field flow through. RolfB1Side1 ▸