The Santa Monica exchange: a student catches the slippage
On the morning of February 19, 1975, Ida convened the advanced rounding class in Santa Monica. The session opened with Dan walking through the definition of Structural Integration — process, deep tissue, vertical and horizontal lines, the segmented body, the gravitational field. Then, almost in passing, a phrase tripped a student up. Dan had said the practitioner works to bring the body 'toward the normal,' and a student in the room realized he wasn't sure what 'normal' meant — or, more pointedly, that he had been hearing it the wrong way. He had been hearing it the way ordinary patients hear it in a doctor's office: my body is pretty normal, meaning I'm in the middle of the bell curve, meaning I'm fine. The exchange that followed is the cleanest articulation in the archive of the distinction Ida wanted her students to internalize before they ever touched another body.
"An average body is one that's not I understand the differences. But I'm just saying that, you know, I I know we use, you know, when we use normal, what I was what I was hearing and placing myself in some of the office positi"
The student locates his confusion — the office word 'normal' has been doing the wrong work in his head:
Dan's response in the room — coached and corrected as Ida and Bob listened — was to suggest that the word the student should reach for instead of 'average' was 'random.' Average is a calculation: take all the head positions in the room, divide by the number of people, and you get the mean position. It says nothing about where the head belongs. Random is the more honest descriptor for what the average head actually is — placed by accident, by injury, by imitation, by stress, in no particular relation to gravity. Normal, by contrast, is the position the head would occupy if the structure underneath it were doing its job. The shift in vocabulary from average to random was not cosmetic; it freed the word 'normal' to do what Ida needed it to do.
"I've got this wonderful Okay. Then you need to think about the word random then. Oh. And we might wanna substitute random for average Okay. And be able to find that in your own mind. And once you can define random and average, then it'd be a simple process for you. One thing that I mean, you can also look at this very simply as an average as you take all of the, say, the positions of our head and you take and just divide it by the number of people here, and that'll give you the average position for our head. Okay. So there's nothing about where that head belongs. I mean, it's just where all the heads had to be on an average. And normal is where applies to Jim's head, your head. It's an individual norm. You know, I what the problem I think I'm having is I'm trying to to to get some fixed point on some normal, you know, where normal should be. Most people think fixed point where ideal is. Right. Right. Right. And And that's not a fixed point. Okay. And people are gonna say, well, I'm average or I'm normal. I wonder where it's optimal. No. Normal is a good good word. Alright. Good morning."
Dan reframes the office word 'average' as 'random,' and Ida intervenes to make 'normal' an individual norm:
The spectrum from extreme toward center
Two years earlier, at Big Sur in the summer of 1973, Ida had given her advanced students a more philosophically explicit version of the same distinction. The cultural inheritance, she argued, is Aristotelian: black and white, sick and well, normal and abnormal, treated as binaries. Reality, she insisted, is a spectrum. The practitioner's job is not to push bodies across a line into some opposite category but to move them along the spectrum from the extremes toward the middle. And the middle — the central line — is not the average. The average is way out at one end of the spectrum, indistinguishable from random. The center is the normal: the knowable line, the line you can reason to from anatomy and from the design of joints. This is the passage that most clearly says what 'normal' is for and what 'average' is not.
"remember when you hear me holding forth that when I say normal, I don't mean average. And when I say average, I don't mean normal. The average is probably way out here. Is way out here, it is random. And it is that random situation which you take and order and order and order and more order and order and you more put more order into it and you put it. And the middle is the normal."
Ida tells the Big Sur 1973 advanced class to remember the distinction whenever they hear her use the word:
The spectrum image carries more weight than it first appears. It frees the practitioner from the Aristotelian trap of having to declare a body either pathological or non-pathological — a trap that produces, in medicine, the absurdity of treating only the bodies whose deviation has crossed an arbitrary line. The spectrum says: every body in the room is somewhere on a continuum. Every body can be moved toward the center. And the center is specifiable — not by counting bodies, but by reasoning from anatomy. How were joints designed to fit? Where would a head sit if the structures underneath it were length-correct? What does the gravitational field require of a vertebral column for that column to transmit weight rather than fight it? These are questions you can answer without ever taking an average. Ida pressed her students to develop the answers by communing, as she put it, with Oscar — the studio skeleton — and with the anatomy book.
"Now if you're looking for another definition of normal, you can get to it through your imagination, through communing with Oscar over there, through communing with the anatomy book and seeing how whoever or whatever it was that designed the body designed it. How did they put joints together? How did they see that we did things together? Because it is at the joint that the deviation can and does come in. Obviously, it's not in the middle of the leg bone which you get the deviation. It's at the joint. And this takes you back again to that premise that we were talking about the other day. A body is an aggregate of segments. You see it is where one segment fits another segment that you get the greatest deviation. So you see in the days that they are rapidly becoming the good old He was quite a character."
Having named the middle as the normal, Ida tells the class how to find it without recourse to a statistical average:
Why the average body is not the appropriate baseline
If average and normal are two different words for two different things, then the medical and educational practices that confuse them are working from a flawed baseline. Ida was emphatic on this point. When a researcher or a clinician compares a body to 'the average body,' they are comparing it to a randomly-assembled body, with all the accumulated distortions of accident, habit, and gravitational fight built in. To say a body is 'within normal limits' on that scale is to say it is not noticeably worse than the broken aggregate around it. This was the substance of her recurring frustration with the systems of physical education and body mechanics that dominated the twentieth century. They taught the verticality as a measuring stick — ear over shoulder over hip over knee over ankle — but they took the average as their baseline and called it normal. In her 1974 Healing Arts lecture in California, she pressed this distinction to its physical-science conclusion.
"We know that order can be evoked in the myofascial system of the body by substantially balancing the myofascial structures about a vertical line. We know that logically in body mechanics, we can expect that the vertical lines of that force manifesting as the gravitational field can either support and reinforce a body, or it can disorganize it and presumably passing by presumably passing through and being part of it, it can destroy and minimize the energy fields surrounding it. We know that the energy fields of the body must be substantially balanced around the vertical line for gravity to act supportedly, thus changing the energy generated by the body. This vertical line registers the alignment of the ankles, with the knees, with the hip joints, with the bodies of the lumbar vertebrae, with the shoulders, with the ears. This vertical line is reminiscent of the prickles on the chestnut burrow. All those prickles pointing straight toward the center of the earth. If the lines are substantially vertical. This is a static verticality, however. This is the verticality taught by every accepted school of body mechanics operating in this century, and the Harvard group heads the list."
In the 1974 Healing Arts colloquium, Ida names what the practitioner actually knows about the vertical and what every school of body mechanics gets wrong:
The claim that the body is a plastic medium is the assertion that makes 'normal' a working target rather than a Platonic ideal. If structure were fixed, then average would be all anyone could ever measure or aim at; you would describe the bell curve and try to keep people from sliding toward its tails. But because the connective-tissue web — fascia — is responsive to energy added by pressure, the body's contour can be altered. The middle of the spectrum is not just a thought-experiment but a destination. Ida's colleague Julian Silverman, working on the energetic model presented on the RolfB3 public tape, framed the same observation in the language of thermodynamics: the random body is one in which the various energy-generating organs operate at cross-purposes, their oscillations colliding rather than reinforcing. Structural Integration brings the system toward resonance — toward, in physical terms, the central line.
"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. Returning briefly to the world of structural integration, the first few sessions, mainly the first, are devoted to reworking the superficial fascia. To the practitioner these early sessions changed the resilience of the body tissue to its touch."
Silverman gives the spectrum-toward-center doctrine its thermodynamic translation:
The random body and the gravitational field
Ida's most operational gloss on the distinction came in the context of explaining what gravity does to bodies of different organizational states. A random body — the average body, in her usage — cannot accept the gravitational field as support. The field passes through it but encounters resistances, asymmetries, and compensations that turn the field into an antagonist. The body must work against gravity to stay upright; gravity is not the therapist, it is the enemy. A body brought toward normal — toward the central line, organized around a vertical — can accept the gravitational field as support and even as enhancement. The same field that breaks down the random body sustains the normal one. This is not a metaphor; it is a claim about how energy is transmitted through a segmented physical structure.
"And rauffing is a process I was happy to hear that word process is a process where you prepare the body to be able to accept the gravitational field of the earth for support, for enhancement. See, the random body is such that gravity cannot work through it. The field that surrounds the earth can not work through it. It has to work against it. And it is not until you get out of this randomness and you organize that body so that it has a model around a vertical that you begin to get a body which can accept the energy of the gravitational field and utilize it. Now, everybody like that definition?
In 1976, Ida defines the practitioner's task by contrasting the random body with the organized one:
The same logic appears, in different vocabulary, on the RolfA1 public tape, where Ida and Al Schultz walk a class through the cycle by which a body drifts from normal toward random. A kid falls off his bicycle, his thigh is bruised, and for several days he carries his torso in a pattern that protects the injury. The protective pattern may itself be uncomfortable, but it relieves the local pain. The body, in other words, abandons normal in favor of a compensation. If the compensation persists — and most do — the body shifts permanently into an aberrant pattern. Multiply this by every minor injury, every imitated gait, every stressed posture of a lifetime, and you have the random body. It is not that the average body is broken in some catastrophic way; it is that it has accumulated a thousand small compensations, each one minor, none of them removed. Average bodies are random because no force ever returns them to the center.
"I would like to make more realistic to you what Al is bringing out. Probably some of you don't mean it, but some of you may. For example, the kid falls off his bicycle and it gets pretty badly lashed in the thigh. And so for several days as he walks, this hurts. And it also hurts if he carries his body in a certain pattern. Yeah. If he can his trunk is balanced above there in a certain pattern. And the pattern that may be hurting may be the normal pattern. So he will shift that normal pattern to something that will quote take the hurt off. Now what I'm wanting you to get is the recognition of the fact that this is your feeling appreciation of the situation which Al has been describing verbally. Mhmm. You see, I want you all to have this Yeah. Very vital realizations, this gut realization of what's going on rather than a head realization of what's going on. Okay? Okay. So once the body has assumed this nonnormal these deviations that or aberrations that we're talking about, the effect of this the effect of this on balance is that there is less motility in the region of the unbalance."
Ida walks Al's analysis into a concrete scene of how the random body actually forms — through a small accident and a habituated compensation:
Posture is what you do with structure
If the random body is held together by effort — by the constant low-grade muscular work of compensating for misaligned segments — then 'posture' in the ordinary sense is the evidence of failure, not of success. This is the move Ida makes in the late-career Topanga soundbite, distinguishing posture from structure with etymological precision. Posture is the past participle of the Latin verb 'to place': it means it has been placed. Somebody has put something somewhere and is working to keep it there. Structure, by contrast, is relationship — the way the parts of the body fit each to each. When structure is in balance, posture takes care of itself. When structure is out of balance, posture becomes an act of will, and the will must be exerted continuously, every waking moment. The average body, the random body, is the one being held in place by effort. The normal body is the one whose structure makes effort unnecessary.
"Somebody is maintaining the placement of something somewhere. Somebody is working to keep something placed somewhere. And I guarantee that there is no one in this room who doesn't know that in this day and age of the what is it? Nineteen twentieth century, last part of it, last quarter of it, that to keep any of these bodies in posture takes effort, constant continuous effort. And when you have to make effort concerning anything in your body, it's a very bad sign. You don't usually interpret it in view of the next words. But as I see a man struggling to maintain posture, I know that he is losing his fight with gravity. That's one item. And I know that his structure is not in balance. Because if his structure is in balance, his posture automatically is good. Posture is what you do with structure. Structure is the way you relate parts of the body to each other. And if you are really going to understand what I'm talking about tonight, a little meditation on those two words wouldn't do any harm. Because you see, in meditating on posture and meditating on structure, you can ask the same questions."
In a late lecture in Topanga, Ida draws the etymological line between posture and structure and what it implies about effort:
The test is consequential because it cuts through the appearance of conformity. A body trained by years of military discipline or athletic drill can look, to the unschooled eye, like a good body — shoulders back, chest out, chin tucked, ear over shoulder. By the measuring stick of the Harvard school of body mechanics, this body is in the middle of the bell curve and might even appear better than average. But under Ida's diagnostic, what it shows is effort. The shoulders are being held back; the chin is being tucked; the chest is being elevated. The structure underneath has not been changed; the muscles have been recruited to override it. This is average masquerading as normal. The body that has been brought toward Ida's normal does not need to perform any of those holdings; it simply sits where it sits, and the sitting is easy.
"fight with gravity. That's one item. And I know that his structure is not in balance. Because if his structure is in balance, his posture automatically is good. Posture is what you do with structure. Structure is the way you relate parts of the body to each other. And if you are really going to understand what I'm talking about tonight, a little meditation on those two words wouldn't do any harm. Because you see, in meditating on posture and meditating on structure, you can ask the same questions. You can ask the question of, now see here, if I alter this structure, what can I hope to get from it? Similarly, you can say, if I alter this posture, what can I hope to get from it? This is a big question. And you ask any of your MD friends, and they'll say, oh, Rod, nothing. Ain't so? You change those relations. You change that structure. And you get the kind of ease and the kind of vitality that you have seen some of your friends get who have gone through this system of structural"
Ida lands the same point in a single tight passage — fighting gravity is the diagnostic sign of imbalanced structure:
An individual norm, not a Platonic ideal
One of the temptations of the average/normal distinction is to slide from the rejection of statistical average into the embrace of a single fixed ideal — a Platonic body that all bodies should be made to approximate. Ida rejected both moves equally. The student in the Santa Monica class who asked for 'a fixed point on some normal' was told that the word he was looking for was 'ideal,' and ideal was not what Structural Integration was after. Normal is individual. It applies to Jim's head, to your head, to this woman's pelvis. The position of the head a given body is moving toward is not the position any other body is moving toward; it is the position that body, given the shape of its skull, the length of its cervical structures, the asymmetries it cannot lose, can sustain in equilibrium with gravity. The practitioner reads the individual norm from the body in front of them, not from a chart on the wall.
"You see in the first hour, we're not trying to get everything. The goal, of course, in all the hours is to horizontalize the pelvis. Pelvis is like a bowl. And in most people, the bowl is spilling over forward. And our goal is to bring that bowl horizontal so that the contents of the torso sit in the bowl properly. So part of the training is to see the result of process. As well as to see what you do next in the process. You see the genius of Doctor. Rolf, part of her genius is in developing a sequence in which the onion can be unpeeled without disordering. In other words, so that you can take layer by layer in a sequential way each hour bringing in a level of organization. She says, well, it's easy to take a body apart, but it's not so easy to put it together. And that's that's the key to it. We're all being said in each hour, you're adding order. Bringing it forward and back. Forward and back."
Asked whether the practitioner is working from some subjective notion of beauty, Ida explains that the criterion is gravitational efficiency, not aesthetic ideal:
The point that each body has its own normal is more than philosophical fastidiousness. It has practical force in the consulting room. A practitioner who has internalized a single ideal will, given a body with one leg shorter than the other or one shoulder developmentally larger than the other, try to make the asymmetric body symmetric — and fail, because the bones will not move. The practitioner who has internalized the doctrine of an individual norm will instead read the asymmetry as a given and work to balance the structure around it, bringing the soft tissue into the relationship that this particular body's geometry permits. In her 1976 advanced class in Boulder, Ida warned her students about exactly this overreach, telling them that they could not change a half-vertebra or a lifetime of bone deposition but could move any structure toward its own individual balance.
"But I would like, if I could, to throw a monkey wrench into the notion that most of you have, if not all of you, that by the use of structural integration, you can take these cockeyed structures and make them straight. You can't. There are many reasons why you probably can't. One of the reasons is that the bony structures in that body have spent a lifetime growing at certain patterns. I will never forget my disbelief one time many years ago when I went into an anatomical, small anatomical museum and was examining skulls and all of a sudden I realized that those various occiputs that I was looking at, that the bones didn't match. There was more bone on the right side or the left side, literally more bone than there was on the other side. Because down through the whole lifetime of the fellow whose octopus that was, he had been using his head to balance his imbalances. And his structure had changed in accordance with the demand he put on. Do you think you're going in there and in two weeks or three weeks change that phone? You're not. And so the rest of the structure will be balanced under that non changeable element. Have I made this clear? There are plenty of people who will come not plenty, but there will be a certain number of people who will come to you who will have a half a vertebra. Are you going to make it a whole vertical? You're not. You will slowly change toward a balance. You can make that fellow seal ever so much better to whatever degree you can bring him toward a balance."
Ida throws what she calls a monkey wrench into the class's expectations about what 'toward the normal' can mean for a body whose bones are already set:
Reading the individual norm: contour, not chart
If the normal is individual, the practitioner needs a way of reading where the individual norm is. Ida's repeated answer was: contour. The trained eye, having seen enough bodies and enough joints in their balanced and unbalanced states, learns to read where this particular structure is going. Valerie Hunt, in the 1974 Healing Arts colloquium, framed the same point in measurement language — that the trained observer was seeing patterns of energetic coherence — but Ida kept the description in the language of looking. A practitioner who has worked with joints long enough will see, on a body that is not moving, whether the joints are in their normal positions or in random ones. The contour gives it away. The skin sits differently. The shoulder hangs differently. The relationship between segments is visible to anyone who has trained the eye, and it is the relationship — not the deviation from a statistical norm — that the practitioner reads.
"And I took Takashi from joint to joint to joint to joint, I have to tell you one characteristic of joints as they balance. Alright. And how you saw what you thought of this flexion, and then there's a something more than you thought of this extension. And then there's a something more, and there's never been a something more before. And that something more gives you a different contour on every one of those joints. And because it gives you a different contour, you don't have to have it even in movement. You can tell whether that joint is normal as you watch it not moving."
Working with Takashi as an example, Ida tells the class that a joint's normalcy can be read from contour alone:
The contour test is also how the practitioner avoids being trapped by the anatomy book's averaged drawings. The drawings represent, in effect, the average body — the random body — turned into a schematic. The ankles in the textbook are drawn at a certain angle because that is the average angle. The legs are not drawn as straight lines because the average leg is not straight. But the textbook drawings are not the target. They are the starting point, the description of the random terrain the practitioner is meeting. Ida pressed this distinction in the second Boulder week of 1975 when reviewing the femur-pelvis-leg complex with the class. As the practitioner does the work — as the femur rotates in the acetabulum, as the pelvis horizontalizes — the picture changes, and the picture in the book is no longer descriptive. It was descriptive of average; the body in the room is leaving average.
"way the average way that goes through the random body, this is a much more ordered way than the average random body is showing."
Ida tells the class that the drawing in the anatomy book represents the average, and the body they are producing leaves the drawing behind:
The chiropractor's normal, the osteopath's normal, and Ida's normal
Ida was acutely aware that other manipulative practices had their own working definitions of normal, and she was uneasy about ceding the word to them. In the 1971-72 mystery tapes recorded at IPR, she pressed her students to notice that chiropractors and osteopaths used 'normal' to mean 'movement at every joint' — the absence of fixation, the restoration of motility at vertebral facets. Movement, as a criterion, was real but insufficient. You could have movement at every spinal joint and still not have the structure organized around a vertical that allows the body to accept gravity. The chiropractor's normal was a normal of mobility; Ida's normal was a normal of relationship. A body could pass the chiropractor's test and still be, in her sense, random.
"Now, our balance, our horizontal horizontal comes comes out out of of the interaction of preplane. Knees moving forward, the elbows moving outward and the hips moving upward. Now those three claims have to be related before I accept it as balance. And those three claims, me being people are not theoretical claims that practical claims are the practical movement in the body of certain significant specific forms. And this puts it in to a three-dimensional material world. And all the rest of this stuff that you've been talking about has been in the realm of the anatomy books and not of the physiology physiology books. Yesterday when I was feeling the horizontal and I could feel them in one dimension. You can feel them right. And I was wondering how can you, how can I become aware of that three-dimensional line, the plane? You happy too? Very nice. Glory be to God. Thanks for everything. But you see what I say is true and I'm not vil ifying anyone."
Ida tells the IPR students that her balance is one of several balances claimed in the manipulative world, and explains what makes it different:
This is where the distinction between average and normal does its hardest work. A chiropractor restoring motility to a fixed lumbar segment is not, by their lights, doing anything different from what Ida is doing — they are also moving the body away from its dysfunctional state and toward some better one. But if the lumbar segment regains motion without the pelvis horizontalizing, the segment will resume its position within hours or days, because the structure that pulled it out of place in the first place has not changed. The chiropractor's normal is a movement of one joint; Ida's normal is the relationship that holds the movement. Without the structural reorganization, restoring movement to the random body just produces a random body with a temporarily mobile segment.
"Every time a chiropractor talks about a spine, a medic hears him say that the trouble is because the vertebrae are too close and not pinching a If they're intelligent, open people, they listen and they don't slam the door in your face. Now I don't know what this says. It only says, I'm just not kicking this way around. And I recommend it to you. But I also recommend that you look as to why this is the way it is. And this story that I have just told you about the fact that the lumbar lever is going to be the one that can adjust, is going to be the one that has to adjust to the structural demands of any body, It has, something has to give and it can give. The dossiers can't give. If the dossiers could give and gave, you would have everybody so that one vertebra can slide back and forth on the other, it would put so much strain on that whole cardiovascular mechanism. Every time you fell it's really a most important point. It's the most important point as to why it is what we have works. And Mr. Indian has said, You start seeing the lumbar change in the first hour if you are trained to see it that way and he is. And this is a very important thing that he has told you this morning."
Ida explains why the lumbar curve is the structural lever and why other approaches that target the vertebrae directly miss it:
What the average body teaches us about the random one
The distinction also reframes what the practitioner is doing when they look at the bodies that walk through the door. The average body — the random body — is not a failure of the normal. It is a record of what has happened to that body. Every shortened ligament, every hardened band of fascia, every rotation of the pelvis is documentation: of an accident, of a sustained emotional pattern, of a habituated posture, of a copied gait. The practitioner reads the random body not as deviation from a chart but as testimony. Ida pressed this point in the 1971-72 mystery tapes when discussing the heaping of tissue at the superior aspect of the sacroiliac junction — a feature she said she saw on essentially everyone. The heaping was not arbitrary. It was what the random body did to stabilize itself when its structure could no longer do the job.
"Femurisine. This now, as the body is consistently moved in an aberrant pattern, some of those ligaments are going to consistently shorten and some of those ligaments are going to get more bristle like. And you see, when the ligament doesn't stretch, it's the same old story that we were talking about before. There's no penetration of fluid, nutrient fluid, into the tissue. The pooping action is gone. And so instead of the resilient action, you get a heaping action. You get a consistent shortening that stays short. I don't feel happy with the answer that I've given you because I don't think it omaves to you the answer yet as far as There's something important about that, I mean, to me at least, just in an observational sense, that particular area because it's the thing that I just see in everybody. Never seen it myself is that there isn't heaping in that particular area and a lot of response to working in this. That's right. But why is there a response? Because you're changing neighboring areas and making it possible for that area to become normal. The only part of that But heeping is an abnormality. Now making orderly, those ligaments, sacral relaxants, forth, is really organizing them in space."
Asked about the heaping at the sacroiliac junction, Ida explains how the random body produces consistent abnormal patterns through repeated stress on ligaments:
The systematic character of the random body's distortions has a consequence Ida pressed often: the practitioner can predict, with reasonable accuracy, what they will find on a body before they begin. Random does not mean unpatterned. It means assembled by an unguided process — accident, habit, gravity unresisted — which nonetheless produces highly recognizable patterns. The forward-spilling pelvis, the heaped sacroiliac, the rotated femur, the elevated shoulder girdle, the head carried forward of the line: these are not arbitrary individual quirks but the standard products of the random assembly process. This is why average bodies look so much alike, and it is also why average could ever have been mistaken for normal in the first place. Average bodies share their distortions because the assembly process that produced them is the same assembly process.
"This last week, there was some talk of randomness tends towards roundness, towards round rounding the otherwise somewhat complex contours of the body. And so by just by looking at a person, you you can see or you can detect non normal structure even though that may in effect, be hidden inside, I mean, the actual problem. You know, pal, it seems like the things you mentioned are more static also, just looking at the person sitting or standing. But also we could think of them in motion too, their ease and freedom in motion is another sign. Yeah. I personally have a lot more difficulty with that. In the first hour, you know, there are some tests that are made. We pump the legs back and forth and then pitch them from side to side."
On the RolfA1 tape, a practitioner names the rounding tendency of the random body — randomness tends toward roundness — and what this lets the diagnostic eye see:
Maturation toward normal, not regression to the mean
Ida sometimes glossed the movement from random toward normal as a maturation. The word is suggestive. To regress to the statistical mean is to slide toward the bulk of the bell curve — toward, in her vocabulary, the random end of the spectrum. Maturation is the opposite movement: toward an individual norm that the body's developmental trajectory was originally heading toward before accidents, habits, and stresses deflected it. A two-month-old infant whose body has been disorganized by the birth process can be brought, by careful manipulation, to look and behave like a five-month-old. A seventy-year-old can be brought to a maturity that they had never previously possessed. The criterion is not age but the relationship of the parts. Maturation is what happens when a body moves from the periphery of the spectrum toward its center.
"And yet I understand children have been rolled. Because practically every child is not normal at birth. They've been through a very heavy experience, and that heavy experience has distorted their bodies. Sometimes it is simply that their body hasn't grown to a normal template during birth and will, if left alone, approximate it, but maybe even hasten it up. Roffing in general can be described as being a technique which matures an individual. And if we take, for instance, a two months old baby and we rock them, all of a sudden we find we have a five months old baby or a six months old child, at least this is the way he's behaving. Now are the effects of rolfing, if it's a maturing phenomenon, are the effects different, Dan, on people of different ages? Well, they all tend to mature. The next question is what is maturation? But you see, if a 70 year old is behaving like a 16 year old, that is not exactly maturing. But it is bringing them toward a position of mature, standing on their own two feet, being assured of their own position and their own capability and their own independence. So it's not only body maturity, It's it's psychological personality maturity, yes, by all means. Now what about men and women? Are there sort of characteristic misalignments that go along with sex?"
Asked whether the work has different effects on people of different ages, Ida explains that the common effect is maturation toward normal:
The maturation framing also resolves a tension that some students of the work felt. If normal is an individual norm, and random bodies are highly recognizable, what is the practitioner aiming the work toward — uniqueness or convergence? Ida's answer was: convergence toward a kind, not convergence toward an identity. All normal bodies share the property of being organized around a vertical, of accepting the gravitational field as support, of distributing energy efficiently across segments. In that sense they converge. But within that kind, each body retains its own asymmetries, its own bone lengths, its own particular history of what cannot be changed. The work moves the body toward the center of the spectrum without ever erasing the body's identity. This is what 'individual norm' means in practice.
Coda: the practitioner's discipline
The discipline the average/normal distinction imposes on the practitioner is severe. It requires the practitioner to refuse the convenient baseline of comparison — the bodies around them, the textbook drawings, the chiropractor's mobility test — and instead read, on this specific body, where its individual norm lies. It requires the practitioner to see the random body not as bad but as documented: assembled by particular accidents and habits, carrying its history in its contour. It requires the practitioner to aim at a target that cannot be specified in advance and that the body in front of them will tell them how to reach. And it requires the practitioner to internalize that normal is not what most bodies are, not what any one body should be, but what this body could be if its structure were given the chance to relate to gravity correctly. Ida's whole pedagogy was the slow installation of this discipline in her students.
"Essentially But the contribution, it doesn't say enough, No, but it says contribution, I should say, but you see, this is a very slidey sort of thing. When we're talking about a home position, we're talking about a position which all of us have felt and which isn't a slidey position. It's a something that you go to and you rest in. Yeah, this guy talks sliding. Saying that there's a current. That's That's This is all right. He's getting something with you. Well Feldman Christ talks about this moment of inertia that George is referring to which is constantly reestablishing. Well, anybody, anyone who has mathematical training will refer to the moment of security."
Closing thought from a 1971-72 IPR session, where Ida draws the line between sliding equilibria and the home position the practitioner is aiming at:
See also: See also: Ida Rolf in the 1975 Boulder advanced class on tensegrity and the vertebral bodies (B3T5SA) — a related discussion of how the average body's compression patterns differ from the normal body's distributed tensional load; included as a pointer for readers interested in the structural mechanics of how a normal body actually carries weight. B3T5SA ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf at Big Sur 1973 on the differentiation of joints as segments become smaller and balance emerges (SUR7334) — an extended reflection on how the integrated joint shows a new strength alongside its looseness, with the smaller 'atoms' of movement appearing as the random body's long undifferentiated masses give way; included as a pointer for readers interested in how the random-to-normal movement looks at the level of a single joint. SUR7334 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf in the 1974 Open Universe class on the seventh hour and energy balance (UNI_083, UNI_044, UNI_073) — extended discussions of how the work moves bodies along the spectrum hour by hour, with attention to where in the recipe the random body's compensations are most visibly addressed; included as a pointer for readers interested in how the average/normal distinction plays out across the ten sessions. UNI_083 ▸UNI_044 ▸UNI_073 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf and Julian Silverman in the 1974 Healing Arts colloquium on entropy and energy fields (CFHA_01, CFHA_03, CFHA_04) — colloquial-language discussions of why the normal body is energetically distinct from the random one; included as a pointer for readers interested in the energetic framing of the doctrine. CFHA_01 ▸CFHA_03 ▸CFHA_04 ▸