The standing body is not the body we have
Ida begins her August 1974 IPR lecture with a deliberate refusal. She will not, she tells the students, talk about a standing body. The premise itself is wrong — wrong about what bodies do, wrong about what they were designed for, wrong about what verticality even means. To talk about the body as a thing that stands is to treat it as a static stack, a column of bones balancing on a base. But living bodies do not stand; living bodies move, and what we call standing is only a particular kind of arrested motion. The error matters because it propagates: a school of body mechanics that begins by analyzing the standing body will end by prescribing exercises to hold the body still, and the patient will return next week as crooked as before. Ida wants her advanced students to begin somewhere else — with the body in motion, in relation, in dynamic exchange with the gravitational field that surrounds it. The first move of the morning is to evict the standing body from the room.
"Since we're not talking about a standing body, we're talking about a body which moves and has a dynamic relationship to the world around it. Put a little underscoring here, why aren't we talking about a standing body? Because that isn't how life goes."
Pressed by a student on the function of spinal junctions, Ida pivots to her central reframing:
If the body is designed to move, then what we call balance cannot be a static condition. It must be something dynamic — a result that emerges when one tendency offsets another, when the pull in one direction is met by an equal pull in the opposite direction. Ida is careful here about her terms. Stillness, she says, does not exist in a living human body, except as a particular case of balance. The body that appears still is in fact balancing — the appearance of stillness is the surface manifestation of a continuous negotiation between antagonistic structures. This matters for what she means by uprightness. To stand upright is not to arrive at a resting place. It is to enter a condition in which the tendencies to topple in every direction have been brought into mutual offset. The vertical line is not a destination but the trace of an ongoing equilibrium.
"apex There is no such thing in a living human body as stillness except as you get it in balance. Only when you get antagonistic parts balancing do you get stillness? And this isn't really stillness, it's balance, you see. You haven't gone to a place where it's still. You've gone to a place where the tendency to move in one direction balances the tendency to move in the other direction."
She presses the point further, defining balance as the substance of human structure:
From static stacking to dynamic balance
In her Healing Arts lectures of 1974, Ida pushes the distinction further. The first stage of balance, she allows, is a static stacking. When the practitioner has done the early hours — when the superficial fascia has been worked, when the segments of the body begin to align — what emerges first is a sort of column. Ankles over knees, knees over hips, hips over shoulders, shoulders over ears. This is the verticality every accepted school of body mechanics teaches as the measuring stick. It is real, but it is preliminary. The body that achieves it is not yet a finished body. As the work continues, as more change is incorporated, the static stacking ceases to suffice. The balance becomes something else — dynamic rather than static, a balance maintained through motion rather than achieved at rest. The body that has arrived at static stacking is on the way; the body that has moved on to dynamic balance has arrived. Few bodies arrive.
"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."
In her 1974 Healing Arts series, Ida names the two stages plainly:
The teachers' classes of 1975 and 1976 spent a great deal of time on this transition because it is where most practitioners and most clients get stuck. In the August 1974 IPR lecture, Ida lays out the picture of progression — the way the body climbs from a wad of slopping material into something that acts as though it were built around a line. She is precise about what 'built around a line' has to mean. It cannot mean rigid. A truly rigid column built around the line would be wholly impractical; it could not adjust, could not move, could not survive. What the body has instead is a series of straight segments separated by junctions where the segments can adjust against each other. The verticality of the whole is the cumulative effect of all those junctions holding their relationships through motion. Uprightness is what happens when those junctions work.
"We're going to have to say, gentlemen and ladies, a man is a something that is built around a line. But figure what would happen if he were really built around the line and standing on that relative point of the ankles. And it couldn't be, would be a wholly impractical structure. So he has to be built around a line with breaks in it where he can adjust and get one part of the body balancing the other part of the body. But for balance, you see, you can only have a very slight deviation. You have to have these pieces effectively straight. On the other hand, you have to have the balance so that the straightness permits the fine balance, the fine movement that constitutes balance. Now, you hear what I've said? I've said you have to have junctions."
She continues the IPR lecture by spelling out the paradox of a body 'built around a line':
What gravity does to a body that is not yet there
The orthodox teaching, repeated through every twentieth-century medical school Ida had encountered, held that human troubles came from standing up at all. Bipedal posture was the original mistake; the back pain, the foot pain, the postural collapse of the elderly all followed from a primate design pressed into vertical service. Ida rejected this directly. The trouble, she insisted, was not standing up but failing to stand up enough. The body that has only partly verticalized — the body whose pelvis is still tipped, whose chest is still collapsed, whose head still rides forward of the shoulders — is a body in which gravity cannot act supportively. It can only act destructively. Such a body is not erect; it is on its way to erect, and the journey, when arrested halfway, is precisely what produces the chronic compression that medicine misreads as the cost of standing.
"Because it is possible with a human being to so align him that the gravitational field will not break him down but will support him. Now your job as lawfuls is to study the details as to how you get human beings into this verticality so that gravity is not breaking down."
In her 1976 Boulder advanced class, Ida overturns the inherited diagnosis:
Ida liked to contrast two pictures of gravity. In one, gravity is a depressive force, a constant downward drag that the body must spend its energy resisting. This is gravity as the orthodox engineers imagined it — and in one of her Open Universe classes, an engineer in the room argues for exactly this picture, describing how the compressive force has to come down through the bones for him to stand at all. Ida lets the picture stand and then offers the contrary view. In the other picture, gravity is not the enemy but the nourishment. It is an energy field, and when the body is appropriately organized within it, the field flows through the body and supports it. The two pictures sound metaphysically different but in practice they converge: gravity drags a random body down and supports an aligned one. The question is only whether the body in question has done the work to align.
"Yeah, I'd always talks about the body being held up by the soft tissue and talks about tent poles and whatnot and there's certainly, know, certain tent ropes help hold the tent up. But in my view as an engineer, my view of how gravity is pulling on my body is that it's trying to pull it down, trying to pull my head down, my head rests on my shoulders, trying to pull that down, and that eventually there has to be a depressive force to keep me standing up. And the compressive force is this kind of a force and a tensile force is this kind. The only, Probably the only part of my body that can take a compressive force enough to hold me from falling down, gravitational field is my bone structure and I feel that that the gravitational pull on me towards the center of the earth comes down through my bones. You know I feel that it doesn't do it properly unless my unless my tension structure is right. But if my soft tissue, my tension structure that holds my bone structure in the right way, at the very least there's no, I don't need to spend energy to stand up. Biological structures are different from all other structures. I put a bowling ball, set a bowling ball here, it can sit there all night and no work is done in the sense."
An engineer-student at Open Universe presses Ida on how gravity actually transmits through a standing body:
The image of compensation is crucial here. Ida and her colleague Al, in a Rolf A1 public-tape exchange, work through what happens to a body that is not yet upright. Some local part is out of alignment — a head riding forward, an injured thigh that has reorganized the gait around its pain — and because the gravitational field acts on the total body, some other part has to compensate. The lumbar curve deepens, the pelvis tips, the shoulder rises. The pattern is not chosen; it is the body's solution to the local problem of not collapsing. But the solution has costs. The compensating muscles shorten, the tissue hardens, the area receives less circulation, and a cycle begins. Each compensation invites the next. The not-yet-upright body is a body whose every part is compensating for some other part's failure to arrive.
"And that in turn creates, for that to happen with the structure, spinal structure, way it's created, necessarily involves a an accentuation of the lower curvature, a an anteriority of the top of the pelvis, and so on. 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."
Al sketches the mechanics of compensation; Ida pulls him back to the visceral reality:
Posture and structure: what 'placed' means
Ida was a chemist before she was anything else, and her habit of asking what a word actually meant followed her into the lecture room. In one of her late-period public talks she stops to dissect the word posture. The Latin original means it has been placed — the past participle of the verb to place. Posture, in her reading, is something done to the body, something held there by effort. The word itself contains the diagnosis: if you must place something somewhere and keep placing it, the placement is not natural. To her, a person struggling to maintain posture is a person losing the fight with gravity. The structural alternative, which she set against posture, is structure — the relationship of the parts to each other. When the structure is in balance, the posture takes care of itself. When the structure is not, no amount of placement can save it.
"This constitutes structure. Now posture is something else again. And the boys that devised the word posture knew what that something else was because the word posture means it has been placed. It is the past participle of a Latin word, to place, and it means it has been placed. And when you use the word posture, you are saying it has been placed. Somebody has placed something somewhere. 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."
In a Topanga public talk, Ida walks through the etymology of posture as a way of indicting the entire postural tradition:
The same Topanga talk continues the argument by asking what changes if you actually alter the structure rather than the posture. The conventional medical answer, Ida says, is nothing — change the relations of the parts and you will have changed nothing material. She rejects this without softness. Change the structure and you change everything that depends on structure: ease, vitality, the body's capacity to receive its own weight. The not-yet-upright body cannot get this benefit because its structure has not yet rearranged enough to receive it. It can only get the benefit by passing through the work.
"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"
She closes the posture argument by naming what is at stake:
The recipe as a route to the vertical
Ida's ten-session recipe was, in her own account, the route by which she brought a body from one stage of approximation to the next. In her 1975 Santa Monica advanced class, she and her student Peter Melchior talk through the logic of the sequence. The first hour, Peter says, is the beginning of the tenth — every later hour continues what the first opens. The second hour is the second half of the first. The third hour is the second half of the second. The whole recipe is not a series of discrete stages but a continuous lengthening, broken into ten installments only because the body cannot absorb all the work at once. Each hour adds order; each hour brings the body slightly closer to the vertical line that gravity can support. No single hour brings arrival. The recipe is the structure of an asymptotic approach.
"What does matter is you understand you have to lift that up off the pelvis to start getting mobility in the pelvis. Uh-huh. The first hour is the beginning of the tenth hour. Okay? Uh-huh. The second hour is a follow-up of the first hour. Uh-huh. It's just the second half of the first hour. Okay? And the third hour is the second half of the second and first hour. It's literally a continuation. I clearly I clearly saw, you know, last summer that continuation process and how and, you know, Dick talked about how, you know, the only reason it was broken into 10, you know, sessions like that was it because the body just couldn't take all that work. Couldn't take it right. But I just sitting on just trying to figure out how the hell she ever figured out that process, and then began to see it. What she did is what most of of us need to do more. She just sat and watched bodies. And she just kept on doing it. And put unfortunately, she's a little bit more brilliant than the rest of us."
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, Peter Melchior offers his account of how the recipe is constructed; Ida assents:
Ida liked to test her practitioners on this point. What is the test for the tenth hour, she would ask them — meaning, how do you know when a body has arrived as far as the recipe will take it? In her 1976 Boulder class she gets a clean answer from a student. You hold the head, jiggle it back and forth, and the spine moves as a continuous wave all the way down to the sacrum. There is no interruption, no segment that fails to participate. The wave is the surface evidence of structural balance. When that wave passes uninterrupted, something has been achieved — not finality, but a degree of integration adequate to the work. Even then, Ida is clear that this is balance in the mesodermic body, the connective-tissue body, and that the carry-through to the nervous system and the gut is not predictable. The tenth hour is the upper bound of what the practitioner's hands can produce. It is still not the upper bound of what the human being is becoming.
"Did you hear from any of these people about what is the test for the tenth hour? Supposing some of you take on that one. What is the test for the tenth hour? When do you know you have done a good tenth hour? When you can. The person sitting straight and hung up with the tuberosity. Holding the head, pulling up on the side of the head, jiggling it, back from the side to side. You can feel the spine as a continuous wave all the way down to the sacrum, so you have more weight on the end of the line with no interference along the spine. That's right. And do you recognize how what he's describing describing there there is is a test of balance. Something isn't out of line. Something isn't catcher. Something is balancing its opposite number. And so you get this uninterrupted wave through the body. Now, actually, that wave occurs in the mesodermic body. The body that has derived from the mesoderm. But the behavior pattern that it instills is in the ectodermic body In the body that has derived from the ectoderm, the nervous system. And it may or may not, it probably will but not predictably, carry through into that endomorphic endodermic body, the gut body, the gland body. How does it carry through to the epidural? I don't know. Several things in life I don't know is one of them. Don't you hear how that question violates what we're preaching in?"
In her 1976 Boulder advanced class, Ida puts the tenth-hour test to her students:
The third hour and the work of horizontalizing
If verticality is the long arc of the work, the practical instrument by which Ida pursued it was the establishment of horizontals. In the 1971-72 Mystery Tapes she presses her students on what a horizontal is and what determines it. A student answers in osteopathic terms, naming joints that should be freely rotating around horizontal axes. Ida partly accepts this and partly redirects. Horizontality, she says, is the index — the outward visible sign — of an inward balance. The horizontals at the knees, the elbows, the pelvic floor, the metatarsal hinge are the lines that emerge when the soft-tissue tensions and the bony alignments have been brought into right relation. You do not establish horizontality by forcing joints to be horizontal. You establish it by relieving the tensions that prevent it; the horizontals then appear of themselves. The body that has not yet established its horizontals is, in this picture, the not-yet-upright body. The horizontals are how you see whether the verticality is real.
"The relationship of the fascial envelopes underneath the skin. And this isn't quite what I hear is true. Would you know what I wanted to hear, Hal? Well, me start with an assumption that the most efficient movement of the erect human is by movement of joints that are defined by a horizontal axis. Particularly at the ankle, the knee and the pelvis. And if that's so, if that's what, if that's the equipment that we have in an evolutionary sense, that's what's available to us, that's the optimum functioning of the individual, then it would follow that the balanced organism would be so constructed that when it's in balance these hinges would be horizontal. You know, I sort of go around that and be secular. You know, taking advantage of that circularity, behind which everybody lived and hides from time to time. And so when the, what determines the actual configuration of structure is the combination of weight and tension held both in the fascia and in the musculature. And the alignment of the supporting structure of the bone. Mean that's what the I gentleman here that you give him a seven clue as to how to establish it. I don't."
In a 1971-72 advanced class, Ida pushes her students to name what determines horizontality:
The fifth hour of the recipe — the hour Ida considered the gateway between the lower half of the work and the upper half — is in her own account the hour where horizontalizing the pelvis becomes the structural project. In her 1975 Boulder advanced class she presses her senior student Steve Weatherwax for the answer. Steve gives an answer about lengthening the front of the body, and Ida congratulates him before adding the full key. The fifth hour, she says, has to do with the floor of the pelvis. Practitioners talk about the pelvis as if they meant the bony structure, but the structure that matters is the floor — the soft-tissue diaphragm that the bony pelvis carries. The bony pelvis comes horizontal because the floor has come horizontal. Until that hour, every previous hour has been preparing for this — freeing the legs from below, freeing the chest from above, so that the floor of the pelvis can finally come into level. The pelvic floor is the precondition for the rest of the verticalization.
"And you were talking as though you were dealing with the bony. One is equivalent to the other practically, but nevertheless, I'd like to get this into your imagination. That this fifth hour has to do with the horizontalizing of the floor of the pelvis. Now I haven't heard anything in this class nor do I hear much in any classes come to think of it. To indicate that you people recognize the fact that it is the floor of the pelvis, that is the vital structure in this trip. We talk about pelvis. We are really talking about the floor of the pelvis. And you see in this fourth hour, we went up the legs giving that pelvis enough support that it would be able to horizontalize."
In her 1975 Boulder advanced class, Ida supplements her senior student's answer about the fifth hour:
The work of horizontalizing is also the work of differentiation. The body that is not yet upright is, in Ida's account, a body whose muscles still function in glops — large undifferentiated masses moving together, the surface muscles taking on the work that the deeper layers should be doing. As the work proceeds, the muscles begin to separate. They start doing their own jobs. Movement begins to emerge from deep in the body as well as from the surface. The shoulder begins to look like a shoulder through any motion rather than collapsing into the trunk. This differentiation is part of what Ida means by approaching the vertical. The body of glops cannot be vertical because its parts are not yet distinguishable enough to balance against each other. Differentiation is the precondition for the dynamic balance the late stages of the work pursue.
"then as you watch as the rofting goes on, you see that the muscles start doing their own work instead of being grouped all in one big glob. And then you get movement which comes from deep in the body as well as on the surface. I I should think as a law for the pain to know, you're at least as clear as a doctor with the muscle structure and tendons and things like that as you want to find. It's true, especially in the beginning. I mean, the language of rolfing is primarily tactile, but there is, especially in the beginning, some mind learning."
A practitioner at Open Universe describes what differentiation looks like to an outside observer:
What you cannot fix and what you can
Ida was a realist about how far the work could go in any individual body. In her 1976 Boulder advanced class she throws what she calls a monkey wrench into her students' assumptions. They have come into training believing that structural integration can take cockeyed, crooked structures and make them straight. It cannot, she tells them. The reasons are several. Bony structures have spent a lifetime growing into their patterns. A vertebra missing half its bone is missing half its bone forever. An occiput thickened on one side by a lifetime of compensating head-balancing is thickened forever. The work can rebalance the rest of the body around the unchangeable bone, but it cannot un-grow the bone. The body brought toward upright is brought toward upright; it does not become geometrically symmetrical. Verticalization is approximation, not arrival.
"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, crooked 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 into certain patterns. I will never forget my disbelief one time many years ago when I went into an anatomical looking the The Was States. Those various United Occiputs that I was looking looking at 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 occiput that was, he had been using his head to balance his imbalances, and his structure had changed in accordance with the demand he put put on on. Do you think you're going in there and in two weeks or three weeks change that phone?
In her 1976 Boulder advanced class, Ida disabuses her students of the fantasy of straightness:
And yet what can be done is substantial. In her 1973 Big Sur advanced class, Ida frames the wager differently. The body is plastic — that is, by dictionary definition, capable of being distorted by pressure and then, by suitable means, brought back to shape. The question, she says, is what 'back to shape' means in the case of a human body. The answer, simple and expected: back to shape means vertical. Vertical to the surface of the earth, vertical like the burrs on the chestnut, vertical like the line of gravity. The plasticity of the soft tissue is what makes verticalization mechanically possible. The collagen of the fascial body can be reformed by the addition of energy — which, in the practitioner's hands, means pressure. Each session adds energy; each addition shifts the bonds; the contour changes. The body is not finished; the body is continuously being remade. The work proceeds because the medium allows it.
"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."
In her 1974 Healing Arts lecture, Ida defines plasticity and what it makes possible:
There is a further consideration that runs through Ida's 1976 teachers' classes. The human body, in her late-career account, is still evolving. It is in transition from a cantilevered structure — the great ape's spine sloping forward from the pelvis, supported by massive gluteals and short hamstrings — toward something more like a tensegrity, an arrangement in which the spine is no longer simply a load-bearing column but a balanced system of compressions and tensions. Most of the compression problems unique to human beings, she and her colleague Jim suggest, come from the fact that we are trying to come upright in the gravity field for the first time. The species is mid-passage. Each individual body inherits the mid-passage. Each individual body, in being brought toward upright by the work, is participating in an evolution that has not yet completed itself. Not yet upright, in this picture, is not a personal failure but a species condition.
"And the first one was that the that the quadruped up on his toes essentially looked like a suspension bridge to me in terms of how that spine was hung between these two girdles. And the girdle is much more obviously a girdle than a quadruped, the pelvic girdle. And then this ape structure, began to look at it with the idea of looking for a model that I could say, this is like, you know, to evoke an image. And the next thing I thought was this is a cantilevered structure that the spine goes off like at this angle. And that's why you have this massive development of the gluteals and the very short ham strings, which are to support that structure, which is sometimes knuckle walking and sometimes trying to come up. So it's sort of that midway You're right. Structure has to take that whole weight. And Even when he's knuckle walking, I don't think there's an awful lot of weight on those knuckles. And so consequently, you have this very broad flat foot. Now the when you move into a true biped, you start moving toward that tensegrity because that's when the structure is you have an arch forming, which is like a tensegrity, which has tensegrity components at any rate because it's a sprung arch. And then you have the spine, which moves from being from the suspension bridge to the cantilever to the tensegrity in terms of its evolution. That's what's happening with our development. And a lot of the compression problems that we have are unique to human beings because they're trying to come upright in the gravity field for the first time. So that I mean, I'm just sort of And I don't understand what they can do. They're stretched by the ten second piece."
In the 1976 teachers' class, Jim Asher works out an evolutionary picture of human verticalization with Ida:
The vertical that gravity rewards
The vertical Ida pursued was not the vertical of the anatomy textbook. The anatomy textbook gives a line: ankles, knees, hips, lumbars, shoulders, ears. Every accepted school of body mechanics teaches the same measuring stick. What no other school teaches, she insisted, is how to get there. The reason the line itself is not enough is that the line is a description of an end-state — a static condition that real bodies do not occupy. What the practitioner is actually pursuing is the dynamic equilibrium that lets the line appear when the body is at rest and lets it survive when the body moves. The vertical line is not the goal; it is the result of having reached the goal. The goal is the integration that produces the line.
"What do we know? What have we found out? We know that order can be evoked in the myofascial system of the body by substantially balancing the myofascial structures about a vertical line. 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. All schools of body mechanics teach this measuring stick and verticality, but no other school of body mechanics teaches how to achieve it. But because the body has an unforeseen, unexpected quality, it can be done. The body is a plastic medium. Now this is incredible, and twenty five years ago, no one would have believed this statement. Fifty years ago, they'd have put me in a nice sunny southern room. You've given me pretty good care, maybe. But the body is a plastic medium, and you're going to hear that several times before we get out of here today. Now, we are ready to define rolfing structural integration."
Opening her 1974 Healing Arts lecture, Ida lays out what is known about the vertical line and what makes its achievement possible:
The signature of a body that has approached the line — that has approximated arrival closely enough for the field to support it — is a change in how energy moves through it. Doctor Valerie Hunt, who collaborated with Ida in the early 1970s, returned again and again to this point. As the energy fields of the body parallel the field of gravity, gravity becomes a supportive factor; as it becomes supportive, the nervous and glandular systems are less bedeviled by the constant drag of resisting it. The man, she said, becomes more human. He differentiates more, he feels more, he is the subject of more insights. The change is not metaphor. It is the predictable physiological consequence of a body that has stopped paying the energetic cost of being held up against gravity by effort. The not-yet-upright body pays that cost continuously. The approaching-upright body pays it less and less.
"As those two energy fields parallel one another, it is then that gravity becomes a supportive factor. As the nervous and glandular fields of the man are less bedeviled by gravity, the man apparently changes. His behavior changes. The man, we might say, becomes more human. He differentiates more. He feels more. He feels his own mental processes as being less confused, as being more adequate. He suddenly feels himself as the subject of more and more important insights. This is what Fritz Perls used to say about structural integration. He says, You just can't believe the insights I have had since I have been working with them. As a new technique, we know that we need validation, a fitting into conventional acceptances. One of our attempts at validation is going on in the laboratory of UCLA right now, and is stopping right now. And I think that later Doctor. Hunt may offer some of you the opportunities of being models in there, if you care to see her later on."
In her 1974 Open Universe class, Ida quotes her collaborator Valerie Hunt on what happens as the body's energy fields parallel gravity's:
What Ida insists on, finally, is that uprightness is not given to any individual body by nature. The body, she tells her advanced students, is not a static entity but an evolving one. It is evolving toward a two-legged vertical entity. The species is on the way; the individual is on the way; the work of the practitioner is to participate in that ongoing transit, to give a particular body its best available approximation. The vertical is not where we are. The vertical is the direction we are going. And gravity — which the inherited medical orthodoxy treated as the enemy of standing — turns out, when one finally arrives near enough to the line, to be the field that supports the journey.
"You probably heard in school that the problem with all human beings is that they are standing and operating on two legs and they were designed to operate on four. But the message of Rolfing is that human beings are not static entities. They are evolving entities, and they are evolving toward a two legged vertical entity, an individual who is working best in the vertical field. And the ROFR can actually And see the ROFR the ROFR brings this about, helps this come about. And the ROFA corrects the situations which has happened to the individual, which has distorted his ability to get himself vertical. That's good. Now let me see if there's anything else that can you think of that we didn't handle."
In a Psychology Today interview, Ida tells the interviewer what the human is evolving toward:
Coda: on the way
The phrase 'not yet upright' compresses three claims Ida made across her late-career teaching. The first is structural: no actual living body achieves the textbook vertical line at rest. The bodies in the room — including the bodies she had worked on for years — are approximations. The second is processual: even within the recipe, even at the end of a successful tenth hour, the work has not arrived but has reached the upper bound of what the practitioner's hands can install. The carry-through into the nervous system, the glands, the daily life of the person is the person's own business and goes on after the hours are over. The third is evolutionary: humans as a species are mid-transit between the quadruped's cantilever and a fully bipedal tensegrity, and individual bodies inherit the mid-transit. To say a body is not yet upright is to say all three of these things at once.
"And and you have a little stick that measures it here. Okay. So how did we get here? Oh, we got here. I know. How do we get out of here? Always that confounded pelvic floor gets us into all kinds of trouble. So at the relation of the pelvic floor to something which you can't measure like a gravitational field is what is going to determine the entire well-being of that individual. Now realize what determines where the pelvic floor is. It's not those half dozen muscles which we named the other day as being the pelvic floor. Not at all. It's the sacroiliac articulation. It's the articulation between the fifth lumbar and the sacrum. It's the articulation between the fourth lumbar and the fifth lumbar. See what I'm telling you? Just as soon as you shift any of those lumbars back on any of those lumbars, you're going to get a different relationship in that"
On the RolfB4 public tape, Ida names the structural pivot point on which the whole question of arrival turns:
There is one further note. The body's progress toward upright, in Ida's mature account, is not only a release of stored tension but the continuous addition of energy from the practitioner's hands — energy that is then stored in the realigned tissue, available to the body in motion. When the connective tissue is brought into right relation, the energy that was used to hold the previous pattern in place is no longer needed for the holding and becomes available for life. This is what Ida means when she says, in her 1975 Boulder class, that tissue in tension is stored energy that the work releases into the body. The not-yet-upright body is, among other things, an energetically wasteful body. The body brought toward the vertical is being given back the energy it had been spending to hold itself up against a field it had never managed to align with.
"Know that each horizontal that you bring out down below reflects itself upward as we saw in Takashi yesterday where he's working on his leg and you can see his rib cage absorbing the change. I mean this, when the tissue is in tension, that's stored energy that you release into the body. And its energy is not a metaphysical something. These molecules are aligned in a particular way. You change their alignment. The change spreads."
Closing on a 1975 Boulder note, Ida tells her students what is actually being released:
See also: See also: Ida Rolf on the Soundbytes tape (TOPAN), an extended public-talk meditation on bones as separators of soft tissue rather than carriers of weight, included as a pointer for readers interested in the engineering-versus-biological argument that runs alongside the verticality question. TOPAN ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf in the 1971-72 Mystery Tapes (72MYS181) reading aloud from a contemporary text on posture and the line of gravity, including the author's claim that posture is interaction between an organism's physical power and the forces of gravity — a passage Ida partly endorses and partly amends in her own teaching. 72MYS181 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf with a student dialoguing about the elbow horizontal and how movement on horizontal planes serves as the index of verticality (Mystery Tapes 72MYS191), included for readers interested in the practical test of horizontals as evidence of underlying balance. 72MYS191 ▸
See also: See also: a 1975 Boulder advanced-class exchange (B3T11SA) in which a colleague works out, in dialogue with Ida, a mathematical and gyroscopic image of the body in gravity — how a body organized around the vertical comes to feel weightless because the system has been arranged to accept the field rather than resist it; included for readers interested in the engineering and movement-theory side of how a body becomes upright enough to feel unweighted. B3T11SA ▸