The phrase itself, and what occasioned it
The line surfaces in the 1976 Boulder advanced class during a long disquisition Ida is giving on gravity as energy — not as a metaphysical principle but as a measurable phenomenon obeying the laws of physics. She has just walked the class through the idea that the gravitational energy emitted by suns and stars equals the energy contained in the universe, and that humans are, whether they know it or not, energy machines living inside a gravitational field. From there she pivots: religion did this work for an earlier century, science is doing it now, and neither has a monopoly on the project of getting human beings ordered. Someone in the room had laughed the previous day when she offered the cat-and-butter image, and she now retrieves it deliberately. The phrase is doing real work for her — it is the hinge that lets her admit, in front of her own advanced students, that dancers had been working at this problem long before she was.
"it, there are more ways to kill a cat than choking it with butter. Now, there are a great many people and they were mostly people who were interested in movement. In other words, they were dancers who looked at this phenomenon."
Ida to her 1976 Boulder advanced class, mid-lecture on gravity as energy:
The dancer she is reaching for, but can't quite name, is somebody of Isadora Duncan's generation — possibly Ruth St. Denis, possibly Mary Wigman — who wrote in her diary that she could not dance well on a particular night because she could not find her Santa Monica, by which she meant her center of vertical balance. Ida files this anecdote as evidence that the project of organizing a body around verticality was understood by serious dancers fifty years before she gave it the name Structural Integration. The phrase, in other words, is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a position. There are practitioners of dance, of breath, of yoga, of military drill, of physical education in the Mensendieck mode, of chiropractic and osteopathy, who have each been trying to get the human body to deal positively with gravity. Ida claims only that her method is the one that works on gravity through the fascial body as the primary operative tissue.
The dancers, and the German army
When Ida lists the alternative methods, dance comes first — but she follows it quickly with a darker example, Frederick the Great's drill instructor Lund, a Swede brought down to Germany in the eighteenth century to teach posture and movement to peasants conscripted into the Prussian army. The class is being shown an old illustration of soldiers in helmets and boots, and Ida uses the image to make a serious distinction. Lund got his peasants into an army that defeated the French. He did, in some sense, organize their bodies. But the question Ida puts to her students is whether he did it with the least expenditure of energy — and she clearly thinks he did not. The Prussian solution was to drill discomfort into the body until the soldier was angry enough to fight. Verticality achieved through forced posture is not the same as verticality earned by changing the fascial relationships that determine what the body's resting position actually is.
"And by golly, he did a good thing from some points of view. He got that mob of peasants transformed into an army who went over and licked the French, which was just what he wanted to do. But did they do it with the least expenditure of energy? You hear what I'm trying to bring down to you. The point of Rolfing is that you are studying how human beings can operate within the gravitational field with the least expenditure of energy with the greatest effectiveness energetic effectiveness. Don't get yourself mixed up about this because five years from now there's going to be a lot of people asking about Rolfing. And this is the kind of thing they're going to throw at you. Well, have been lots of systems around. What have you got that makes it so damn good?"
In the 1976 Boulder advanced class, after holding up an illustration of German military drill:
She also names Bess Mensendieck, the Dutch educator who came over to Yale and persuaded the New England physical-education establishment to adopt her system. Mensendieck's program was rigorous and influential — it shaped American women's physical education for decades — and Ida acknowledges that the woman had the energy to get where she wanted to go. But Ida says, with the lightest possible touch, that she and Mensendieck did not see the same place as the same goal. Mensendieck was teaching women how to use their bodies well. Ida was reorganizing the fascial relationships beneath the question of use. The difference is again the criterion: Mensendieck got bodies behaving correctly within their existing constraints; Ida was claiming to change the constraints themselves.
"Well, have been lots of systems around. What have you got that makes it so damn good? There was dear old Madame MensenDeek who was oppression by birth and who had been brought up in that system and who came over and had the 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."
Continuing the 1976 lecture, Ida names a second alternative — the Mensendieck system at Yale:
Chiropractic, osteopathy, and the chemical-mechanical divide
Ida's most extended treatment of competing manipulative schools comes in her 1973 Big Sur lectures, where she lays out the historical sweep that puts Structural Integration in context. There was, she says, a mechanical school of healing that ran for thousands of years — through Egypt, through the old mystery schools — and there was a chemical school. About a hundred and twenty-five years ago, the chemical school came in and the mechanical school went out. Medicine became synonymous with pharmacology. The structural approach, which had been the dominant frame for understanding the body since antiquity, was relegated to the chiropractors and osteopaths, whom medicine treated as marginal. Ida is not nostalgic about the older systems. She thinks they were partial. But she is clear that the manipulative tradition has a longer pedigree than the chemical one, and that her own work belongs to that tradition — extending it, in her view, by adding the operative variable that the older manipulators didn't have: gravity.
"It is the basic reason why there can be a study of bodies based on a structure in the sense that we use it, and why there can be a change of function, in other words, a contribution to health, to well-being, to wholeness, and the functioning of the body through merely being able to change, to alter, to modify. Is a very basic consideration which I just offered you. It is the basic consideration that makes all manipulative techniques something to be considered. You see, our dominant school of healing is not manipulation, as you all know. It's medicine. It works through chemistry. And the reason this is so is because the chemical school of healing came to its own about one hundred and twenty five years ago. I'm not going into this at this moment, but I will discuss it at some later date with you people. The chemical school came in and everybody was so enamored of it that it spread out in all kinds of directions. The mechanical school of healing that I'm talking about, the structural school went out at that time. It had been in for several thousand years, I don't doubt. Because unquestionably, the old original schools of healing and mystery schools and so forth and so forth, the days of Egypt and the had something to do with holiness, with help."
In the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, Ida sketches the historical argument:
She is more pointed about chiropractors in a 1975 anecdote her students preserved. Ida had spent years trying to teach the chiropractors what she was doing, and their response was always showmanship — quick releases, snapping hands, watch-this performances. Her solution was to do something they couldn't dismiss: she would change one side of someone's chest dramatically and leave the other side alone, so that the body went visibly lopsided. The chiropractors would look at it and say, show me that one again. The story is told with affection — these were her natural audience, the people she most wanted to reach. But the underlying point is that quick adjustments to bones do not produce the kind of change she was after. The fascial reorganization takes time, and what it produces cannot be reproduced by snapping a vertebra back into place.
"Ida herself used to travel around and try to teach us the chiropractors. And their comeback was always they're very showmanship like. They always get together and someone says, watch this. And they like to snap their hands. Someone says, well, that's nothing. Watch this. And so I but it's all quick stuff, you know, quick releases. And I think while all this showy stuff was going on, I decided that she had to really she had to blow them out. How can I really with all these tricks that I have in my back, how am I gonna blow these guys out? She said, well, if I can make this I'll just do my little change one side of the chest and leave the other side so small that it's fairly obvious that the body's going like this, you know, one side."
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, Peter tells the chiropractor story Ida used to tell:
Reflexology, foot work, and the limits of treating symptoms
Eunice Ingham, the woman who systematized modern reflexology, is the subject of a long passage in Ida's 1973 Big Sur lectures, and Ida's treatment of her is a model of how Ida handled adjacent practitioners she respected. Ingham worked in a doctor's office, took on patients on the doctor's day off, and developed a detailed map of pressure points on the soles of the feet that corresponded to organs and tissues throughout the body. Ida calls her a fine woman who did a good job, and means it. But she also points out the structural limitation of the method. Ingham's reflexes on the foot were held in place by aberrations further up — in the muscles of the leg, in the pelvis, in the spine. Treating the foot reflexes relieved the symptom; it did not reorganize the system that produced the symptom. Once you actually align the legs and the pelvis, the foot reflexes disappear on their own, except in acute illness.
"She wasn't interested in doing a job that was going to stay as much as she was interested in relieving the symptoms. Her approach was purely a medical affixate job. And it was all right, gal did a good job, I'm saying one implying one word against her. I have a very great respect for that little misservice. And gradually she got to a place where you want to go, you can go there. But you will find that by the time you have really looked at this from the point of view of structure, of aligning the body, Now you can get those points of pain and disturbance and distress diagnosis on the body of the body when they come in. But along about the time when you begin to really organize those legs so that the tibia and fibula sits squarely over the ankle and the ankle joint leads squarely onto the foot. Those points of distress disappear and you no longer find them except you come into some acute situation. Some acute disease situation. Then you will reestablish the thought of pain."
In her 1973 Big Sur lectures, Ida on Eunice Ingham and reflexology:
What is striking in this passage is the structural humility Ida grants the symptom-based approaches. She is not saying Ingham was wrong; she is saying Ingham was working at one level of the problem. Reflexology, like many of the older systems, is good for the acute disturbance. Structural Integration, in Ida's framing, is for the chronic pattern — the underlying organization that keeps producing acute disturbances in the first place. Her preferred metaphor in this period was that the older systems and her own work were operating at different levels of the same body, and that her work was the foundation level. She did not mean by this that the foundation made the upper levels unnecessary. She meant that without the foundation, the upper-level interventions would have to be repeated indefinitely.
Acupuncture and the outside disciplines
By the mid-1970s, acupuncture was newly available in the United States, and the Structural Integration community was paying attention. In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, the conversation turns to how outside disciplines can genuinely contribute to the work. Ida and her students discuss the possibility that acupuncture might offer something Structural Integration does not, particularly for individuals tied to their pain experiences. The class also considers Jacobson's deep-relaxation training and other techniques for lowering general muscular tension. This is not a defensive posture. It is a working group treating acupuncture as a peer practice whose insights might inform the work.
"They didn't publish in their science agenda of this year, a discussion of nonmedical therapeutic techniques, included welding and it included acupuncture. There were about two other techniques. Is it a piece of rope? I think I haven't I didn't see it. I was told about it, but I think so. It was intended for young people. And you see what it is what it was doing really was saying to these young people that there are there are other ways of skinning cats. I I think that feeds into what you were saying that we're more while we're not like acupuncturist trying to cure things, we're more at that level. A referral level again. We are at the growth center level where people just come in for a little of this and a little of that or whatever works for them. The growth centers are really merely adult entertainments. They're really expensive. And this is alright. I'm not a kid. Everybody has a place to start on the path. Everybody has a place to start on the path."
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, in the middle of a session-by-session review:
Valerie Hunt, Ida's colleague at UCLA, makes a parallel point from a different angle — she has had Ida's work, she knows what it does in her own body, but she also acknowledges that biofeedback, psychedelic drug work, and certain yogic disciplines all give people access to altered states in which the nervous system processes stimulation differently. Hunt's interest is in whether these methods converge on something. The community in this period is genuinely open about the proposition that several methods are working on the same underlying phenomenon — coherence of the energy field, in Hunt's language — and that the differences may turn out to be matters of access route rather than destination.
"The other thing is that it may be for certain kinds of individuals who are really tied to their own pain experiences that deep relaxation techniques such as Jacobson's or other people's, some kind of training that is not part of your belly work now, which could be brought into your own work. Some way to deal with certain kinds of individuals by lowering the tightness of the muscles in general through relaxation training. Maybe, I don't know. It just doesn't make sense for some I think the one you like the best is the Norton Boost. The label we place on sensations in a rigid system bombarded by an excessive burden of stimulation. Stimulation. Now you see, by implication he says if you can get that system less rigid, you change the pain and the pain reception and the whole trip. Now that's where we live. And the end of that first sentence is, when rigid system is bombarded by an excessive burden of stimulation, because of the nature of its rigidity, cannot cope with. That's another, coping is a musculature adjustment, a musculoskeletal adjustment."
From the 1973 Big Sur pain lecture, on outside disciplines that might inform the work:
Yoga, breath work, and the older traditions
Ida had an unusual familiarity with the older Asian traditions, partly through her own early studies in homeopathy and Tantra in the 1920s, partly through her direct contact with practitioners. In her public RolfB5 tape she describes an old yoga technique that uses rectal dilators to control headaches, digestive spasms, and even heart rate — a technique she takes seriously because she understands, anatomically, why it might work. The dilator presses on the ganglion of Impar at the coccyx; the pressure alters the position of nearby autonomic structures; the symptom resolves. She is not endorsing yogic practice as such. She is saying that the older traditions discovered, by direct experiment over centuries, effects that we are only now in a position to explain anatomically.
"Now if we can do better than that in this class, and we may well. Let's stay in the hearing. Let's stay in the hearing now. Okay. Now I don't know a thing about this. All I know is what I read in the paper. But I do know that there is an old yoke technique which includes the use of rectal dilators to control many symptoms, to control headaches, particularly the kind of headache you get after a day of shopping, etcetera, etcetera, to control spasm of the digestive system, to control heart rate and breath rate by putting a nerve a, rectal dilator into that anus and there is no other explanation for what happens except that you are changing the position and perhaps putting pressure on that ganglion of IMPAR. And that suddenly you don't have a headache anymore."
In her RolfB5 public tape, Ida discusses an old yogic technique:
The Open Universe class of 1974 included extended discussions of healers, chakra workers, and energy practitioners who had no particular relationship to Structural Integration but were working on what they understood as the human energy field. Ida participated in these discussions with a notable lack of defensiveness. She tended to say that she didn't know whether the energy these practitioners worked with was the same as the energy she addressed through gravity and fascial reorganization, but she was willing to entertain the possibility that they were aspects of the same phenomenon. Valerie Hunt's research at UCLA was attempting, in part, to find a measurement framework that could relate the two.
"These are just side games that we play in explorations of consciousness. Would you like to play with the idea of Rolf the Rolf technique now with which you quite familiar as how it plays in. Oh, of course. Oh, of course. I've made the mistake of healing people with cancer and having them go out and commit suicide or kill others on a freeway accident, things like this. It's not a good thing to do. So, yes. You talk a while. I'm sick of hearing myself talk. No, but I want to know how you put the Rolf technique, the Rolf system into the magical system. I don't. I think it's a physical thing that does a tremendous amount of good. I've been Ralph and I love it and I know people before and after that were horrible examples before and good examples after. I kind of think that when you move the blockages around that you realign them on many levels besides just physically. And I think that's that's one of the uninstrumented values of Rolfing as well as the obvious physical changes that take place. Do you subscribe for instance to the idea that as you move the physical blocks around you are really moving fields of force around? You got any evidence?"
From a 1974 Open Universe class on consciousness and healing techniques:
Movement teachers and structural patterners
Inside the Structural Integration community itself, the question of alternative methods took on a more practical form: what about movement work? Judith Aston, a student of Moshe Feldenkrais and of Ida, had been developing a system of structural patterning that picked up where the ten sessions left off, helping clients integrate the structural changes into their daily movement. Ida discusses Aston's work in several of the 1971-72 transcripts, and her position is generous. Aston is doing something Structural Integration cannot do on its own — the systematic re-education of habitual movement. The hands-on work changes the structure; the patterner shows the client how to live inside the changed structure. The two are not competitive, in Ida's view, but complementary, and she actively recommends patterning to her clients after the ten sessions are complete.
"Structural patterning, which I talked to Julie Aspen, and Julie Aspen took it and really distributed it among many young teachers and young women and so forth. And they do a very beautiful job. And when you figure that when you get through with Ralph and you don't have the time nor exactly the expertise to get together with yourself and spend an hour finding out how you use your body. But this is what a patterner does. She spends an hour or an hour and a half perhaps working with you and letting you become more conscious of how you use your body, what you're doing, where you're doing it right, where you're really taking away from your own energy. Sometimes the pattern tells the raw fur that he is using himself poorly and that he's giving too much energy to the raw thieves, etcetera, etcetera. These girls, these young women, mostly young women, are spending their time, you see, to make it more possible for the wealthy to understand his own problem and his own body. There is a regular routine which I, in my domestic fervor, have called a recipe. This goes right through the first ten hours."
From the IPR conference recordings of 1971-72, Ida on Judith Aston and structural patterning:
The same passage contains Ida's recipe metaphor, which is itself a kind of position on alternative methods. The ten-session series, she says, is a recipe in the domestic sense — a reliable sequence that produces a predictable result. Individual variations get worked in as needed, but the recipe itself is what differentiates trained practitioners from improvising ones. The point is not that the recipe is the only possible sequence, but that it has been tested. Other manipulative practitioners are free to develop their own sequences. What Structural Integration offers is a recipe that has been refined across thirty years of practice and that other practitioners cannot reproduce without similar refinement.
Bioenergetics, Gestalt, and the psychotherapy alternatives
Ida's relationship to the body-oriented psychotherapies of her era was complicated. Fritz Perls — Gestalt therapy's founder — was her great early collaborator at Esalen, and she credited him with putting her work on the map. Alexander Lowen and the bioenergetics community were close enough to her practice that they engaged directly with her about pain, vocal release, and somatic emotional discharge. In several transcripts Ida draws a careful distinction between what these practices accomplish and what hers does. Bioenergetics, like Gestalt, deals primarily with the affective and characterological layer of the person — the patterns of holding that have psychological content. Ida claims her work goes underneath that, to the connective-tissue scaffolding that makes the holding possible in the first place. She does not say bioenergetics is wrong, only that it operates on a different layer of the body.
"Know like they gave her a brace work. Well, it might have, but it's almost as though there were many bodies in a man all interpenetrating. And as though some of these Freud and you bodies are just a different body from what we're working on. And we immediately release the problems that are in our body. You see, this is not an impossible situation. We are talking about the fact that we aim to get only into derivatives that of the mesoderm. And I hope all of you have done your homework and you've read your introductory books and you know the mesoderm and you know the endoderm, and you know the exoderm. You know about them. And we claim that our results come from a change in the structures that derive from the mesoderm. And only this."
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, in dialogue with a student about psychotherapy:
The relationship with Fritz Perls is more affectionate, and Ida tells the story of it across multiple recordings. Perls came to Structural Integration as a personal client, became a public advocate, and brought Ida to Esalen — the moment that, in her telling, took the work from a private practice into something the broader culture began to notice. She thought Perls overdid it; he wanted forty sessions when ten would have done. But she preserved her gratitude. The passage where she says forty spoonfuls could kill you is delivered with affection, not with rebuke. Gestalt and Structural Integration, in her view, were doing different jobs on the same person, and a person could legitimately want both.
"Many people to whom it does hurt considerably while the job is being done, immediately when the hands are taken off the pain stops. Immediately. Almost before the hands are off the body. Body. I heard a rumor that it took 40 sessions with Fritz Perls. Is that correct? Fritz Perls a good beginning. There will be people who will never accept that they should stop at the end of the 10. FitzPearls was one of them and I could name you several others. If one spoonful is good, 40 spoonfuls has to be a lot better. But if you'll take one spoonful and then wait until you've gotten all you can get from it, you may find you've got quite a lot, maybe as much as 30 spoonfuls would give you, if not 40. 40 spoonfuls could kill you. Yeah, 40 spoonfuls could kill you. But I've never heard of that killing Ralphie's. May happen"
In the early-1970s IPR conference recordings, Ida on Fritz Perls and the question of dosage:
The criterion that distinguishes the work
Across all of these comparisons — to dance, to drill, to chiropractic, to reflexology, to yoga, to patterning, to bioenergetics — Ida returns repeatedly to one criterion that, in her view, distinguishes Structural Integration from every other method. It is not that the work is more thorough, or more painful, or more comprehensive. It is that the work uses gravity itself as the operative agent. Every other school of body mechanics teaches the goal of verticality. None of them teaches how to evoke it through the gravitational field. This is the claim she lands repeatedly when students press her to defend the practice's distinctness.
"What's the difference between this and this? Is the answer. We are the only group who recognize that in order for a living body to be at ease in its spatial environment on the earth, it must deal positively with gravity or rather gravity must deal positively with it. Because what we here in Lawton are here to do, we can't change the gravitational field. This is odd, but we just have nothing that means yet. But what we can do is to change the way the parts of the body that I have already referred to, how they fit together into a whole which can transmit the gravitational field. And in its energy, which is the energy of the earth, in its transmitting of that, it enhances its own energy field. You can change the body by virtue of the fact that its segments are segments of a whole and then the gravity can flow through. Now this is the basic concept of Rolfe. And tomorrow when I get you all together on the griddle, I'm going to ask you for this answer over and over again in many, many different forms. What does Rolfing contribute to the ideas of the world at the moment that no other schools of? And the answer is that we are using gravity as our tool. So you see, we don't escape to a nice little humble fact sheet. We're just as over proud of ourselves as the medics, but we are using gravity as our field, not chemistry. Now when you come to look at it, this is quite an idea because gravity is always there. You will never escape from it. From the day that single cell is fertilized and develops, gravity is with it."
In the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, after surveying the history of healing schools:
The gravity criterion is what allows Ida to be generous about other methods without conceding that they are doing the same job. The dancers are working toward verticality. The chiropractors are adjusting individual segments. The reflexologists are addressing symptom-bearing points. The bioenergetics practitioners are releasing characterological holding. All of these are real, and Ida says so. But none of them, in her framing, is doing what she claims her work does — which is to use gravity as the energy source that supports the body, rather than as the force the body has to fight. This is the position that makes the cat-and-butter line possible. There are many ways to address the human structural problem. Ida claims only that her route is the one that lets gravity itself become the therapist.
Discriminate, do not repeat
By the 1976 Boulder advanced class, Ida had developed a sharp pedagogical concern about how her own students talked about alternative methods. Her complaint was not that they were too dismissive of other practices — quite the opposite. She thought they were too undifferentiated, too eager to repeat what someone else had said about the work, too lazy to develop their own critical judgment about when and where another practice was good or bad. The discrimination she wanted from her students was not loyalty to Structural Integration; it was the capacity to say precisely what each method does and does not do. The cat-and-butter generosity was supposed to extend in both directions — toward respecting the other methods, and toward refusing to flatten them all into one undifferentiated heap of body work.
"And this is one of my great complaints in life: that 99 out of every one one hundred people don't discriminate. They repeat something that somebody said. Even rothing is a wonderful technique. They are repeating something that somebody said they're not saying. Rolfing is a magnificent technique for such and such a purpose. They're saying Rolfing is a magnificent technique. Hope I'm making some sort of sense to you people because I would like to see you as a group go out into the culture and be a significant seed in that culture to change their way of thinking. Tom, are you worrying about something? I'm just scratching my oxford here. Rolling isn't much good for it, is it? It is. Yes. Somebody else got can someone else take this along? For one thing, you have to be sure that whoever you're talking to understands what is the vertical. Plenty of people don't. Everybody thinks they understand what you mean when you say stand up straight, but you watch them try to do it. You realize they don't understand that either. You excuse for you are not really understanding the philosophy that makes Rolfing individual."
In the 1976 Boulder advanced class, Ida's complaint about how her students talk about the work:
The same passage contains her warning about chiropractors. She has no objection to chiropractic as such — her position throughout is that chiropractic addresses acute problems, while her work addresses chronic mechanical patterns — but she wants her students to be able to articulate the difference rather than waving it away. The acute-chronic distinction is itself a way of thinking about alternative methods. Most practices address acute disturbances. Few address the underlying structural pattern that keeps generating them. Both are legitimate; both have their place; and a practitioner who cannot tell which one a given client needs is a practitioner who has not yet learned to discriminate.
Coda: the older traditions and the newer
There is a passage from Ida's mystery tapes — one of the early IPR conference recordings — where she discusses the development of ideas in general, and the development of her own work in particular, as a movement from intuitive art form to scientific understanding to synthetic integration. The arc she sketches is not unique to her practice. It applies to dance, to chiropractic, to bioenergetics, to acupuncture as it began to enter American medical awareness. Every method starts as an intuition in a pioneer, becomes an art form, gets analyzed, and eventually — if it is fortunate — gets re-synthesized at a higher level. The cat-and-butter generosity, in this longer frame, is the recognition that every legitimate method is somewhere on that arc, and that no method has the right to dismiss another simply because it is at a different stage.
"It is an art form perceived as a whole embodying a total idea demanding a total expression, and this is where Rolfing was in the days of Esselen, the days which I have been describing. This was an art form that caught the imagination of a lot of people. At the time of Fritz Perles and those other those other founding friends this fairly expressed its level. But like so many ideas this has progressed to a level where it is now being examined and analyzed and fitted with words suitable for the current idiom. In other words, the idea progresses, I'm talking about ideas in general and Rolfing in particular, The idea progresses from an odd expression into a scientific understanding and thorough analysis, and you can see to what extent this is beginning to describe what you are seeing around you here. Do I think scientific analysis is the answer to all problems? Definitely not, certainly not. I think synthetic integration is a far higher form, and this is what, by the grace of God, we will still be able to call integration. I think for one thing science, but science is not all that bad, you can't just dam it out of hand. For one thing it permits and it encourages replication. And before the method can be taught replication must be possible. You all remember, I'm sure, hearing me the wail, the shortcomings of Rolfers. Don't think any of you have any doubts about that. You've all heard me scream and wail, you all can take a body apart, but the number of people who can get it together are very few."
From an early-1970s IPR conference recording, Ida on the general arc of revolutionary ideas:
The cat-and-butter line, in the end, is not a piece of folksy humor. It is the verbal form of a position Ida held seriously and consistently across the decade of her recorded teaching. There are many methods for addressing the problem of the human body in the gravitational field. Dance has been working at it for centuries. Yoga has been working at it for longer. Chiropractic, osteopathy, reflexology, bioenergetics, Gestalt, structural patterning, breath work, military drill, physical education in the Mensendieck mode — all of these are real practices that produce real effects, and Ida's position is that none of them should be dismissed. Her own claim was narrower and more specific than her students sometimes made it. She claimed she had developed a method that used gravity itself as the operative agent, and that the fascial body was the tissue through which gravity could be made to do its supporting work. That is a precise claim, not a totalizing one. The cat can be killed many ways. She offered one.
See also: See also: Peter Melchior in the 1975 Boulder advanced class (T1SB) on how Ida arrived at the ten-session sequence by watching bodies — a discussion that bears on her view of why the recipe is reliable in a way that other manipulative sequences are not. T1SB ▸
See also: See also: the 1971-72 mystery tapes (72MYS171) on intrinsic versus extrinsic movement and the options the child picks early in life — context for why structural reorganization, rather than movement re-education alone, is needed to restore the alternatives. 72MYS171 ▸
See also: See also: the 1976 Boulder advanced class (76ADV62) on the quadratus and integration costs — Ida's working illustration of how parts of the body operate as semi-independent units, which informs her view that any single method addressing only one layer will leave the others uncoordinated. 76ADV62 ▸
See also: See also: the 1975 Boulder advanced class (B2T1SB) on bone, soft tissue, and the dimensions in which a joint can be considered — Ida's framing of why different methods see the same anatomy as different numbers of things. B2T1SB ▸
See also: See also: the 1975 Boulder advanced class (B3T5SA) on the yin-yang quality of tissue and the limits of medical vocabulary for describing intrinsic movement — included as a pointer for readers interested in how the community borrowed language from outside disciplines. B3T5SA ▸
See also: See also: Ida's RolfB4 public tape (RolfB4Side1) on the sequence of organizing the external fascial bag and the adjustment of the packages within it — preserves her domestic-metaphor framing of how the ten-session recipe orders the work. RolfB4Side1 ▸
See also: See also: Ida's RolfB6 public tape (RolfB6Side2a) on Benjamin Lee Whorf and the structure of language — included as a pointer for readers interested in Ida's general semantics roots and how the limits of vocabulary shape the comparison of methods. RolfB6Side2a ▸
See also: See also: the 1974 Open Universe class (UNI_022) on the mind, the ego, and the purpose of survival — context for why Ida treated characterological psychotherapy and her own work as addressing different layers of the same person. UNI_022 ▸
See also: See also: the 1974 Open Universe class (UNI_064) on the limits of language and the frustrations of verbal communication — relevant to Ida's complaint that her students fail to discriminate among methods because they repeat phrases instead of describing operations. UNI_064 ▸
See also: See also: Ida's 1973 Big Sur lecture on the unknown territory of fascia (CFHA_02) — an extended meditation on why connective tissue had been so little explored by the medical sciences that preceded her, included as a pointer for readers interested in why she considered her tissue choice itself a methodological discrimination. CFHA_02 ▸
See also: See also: the 1973 Big Sur pain lecture (BSPAIN1) in which Ida and her colleagues discuss how outside disciplines — acupuncture, deep-relaxation training, phantom-limb research — bear on the practitioner's understanding of pain in the work. BSPAIN1 ▸