The judo player and the round body
The clearest statement of the ovoid doctrine comes from Ida's recollection of working with Moshe Feldenkrais in England in 1958. Feldenkrais — the second-ranked judo practitioner in the Western world at that time, by Ida's own accounting — arrived for twelve days and demanded the full work in that span. Ida agreed against her better judgment. What she remembered from that encounter, and what she returned to repeatedly in the 1970s classes, was not Feldenkrais's brilliance but the shape of his body. Decades of judo had made him round. And round bodies, in her teaching, are never well bodies. The roundness is not a sign of strength or compactness — it is a structural failure that produces symptoms downstream, in breathing, in digestion, in everything the thorax houses. The story carries the weight of a clinical principle stated through a single memorable case.
"And as a result of his judo, his body was completely round. And I have told you, not all of you come to think of it, that when you get these round bodies they always have symptoms. And that as quickly as you release that roundness of body, the symptom disappears. The symptom may be the way they breathe, and it may be that they have asthma, it may be that they have emphysema, but always they have symptoms because bodies are made to be round. They are made to be ovoid. They are made to have the axis, the lateral axis has got to be greater than the anterior posterior axis for a body to work. And this is true in the abdomen, it's true in the chest, and it's true in the pelvis. And the body is an ovoid thing, not around it."
Ida, recalling the Feldenkrais sessions of 1958 to her advanced students:
The Feldenkrais memory functions in her teaching as a kind of clinical proof-text. He was not weak, not unwell-looking; he was an enormously capable man at the peak of his physical discipline. And yet his body, by becoming round, had become a body that produced symptoms — and the symptoms abated, in her account, as the roundness was released. This was the pattern she had observed across hundreds of cases, and Feldenkrais simply made it visible because the cause was so cleanly attributable to a single training history. The principle Ida extracted from such cases is geometric, not muscular: the cross-section of the thorax, of the abdomen, of the pelvis, must be an oval whose long axis runs side-to-side, not front-to-back. When that geometry collapses toward a circle, structural and physiological consequences follow.
Two cylinders in the thorax: Pat Kloth's contribution
In the Boulder advanced class of 1975, Ida interrupted a long discussion about spiral planes of fascia to remind the students of a way of thinking she credited to Pat Kloth, who had been present at an earlier Boulder class. Kloth had not been working anatomically with planes of fascia in the conventional sense. He had been thinking about the thorax as containing two cylindrical energy structures whose spatial relationship to each other determined whether the thoracic cross-section approached a circle or remained an ovoid. The contribution Ida valued was the conceptual move from anatomical wrappings to dynamic geometry — the recognition that what matters is not where the muscles are but what shape the chamber assumes. And as in the Feldenkrais story, the rule held: the closer the cross-section approached a circle, the more reliably the person carried symptoms.
"Those very good ideas that Pat Kloth had. This was not, he was not in mentally dealing with planes of fascia. He was mentally dealing with energy structures where he considered that within the thorax, for example, there were two cylindrical structures and that those cylindrical structures you see could make an entirely different ovoid that was going nearer to a circle as they approached closer together. And you have all seen how when the thorax is a circle, you are always having severe symptoms. And like you can get those severe symptoms to disappear completely as you get that circle out into an ovoid."
Ida, mid-class at Boulder in 1975, redirecting the students to Kloth's framework:
What Kloth's two-cylinder model gave Ida was a way of describing a doctrine she had been articulating in her own terms for years. The thorax is not a single rounded container; it is the meeting of two longitudinal energy structures whose separation defines the chamber's shape. When the separation is maintained, the cross-section is broad side-to-side and the lungs, the heart, the diaphragm all have the room they require. When the separation collapses — as it did in Feldenkrais's case, as it does in asthmatic patients, as it does in people who have spent their lives hunched over a desk — the cross-section becomes circular and the contents are crowded. Ida noted in the same conversation that there is presumably an optimal point past which the practitioner should not push the spreading; the principle is not 'flatter is better' but 'ovoid, not round.'
The body as a plastic medium
The ovoid doctrine depends on a prior claim that runs through all of Ida's late-career teaching: the human body is a plastic medium. Without that prior claim, the observation that round bodies have symptoms would be a static finding — interesting, perhaps, but not actionable. What makes the ovoid principle clinically useful is the doctrine that the shape can be changed. Ida stated this in nearly every public lecture of the 1970s, often with the phrasing that fifty years earlier such a claim would have put her in a sunny southern room with very good care. In her 1974 Healing Arts lecture she laid out the foundation explicitly, defining the work in terms that explain why shape change is possible at all.
"body is a plastic medium, and you're going to hear that several times before we get out of here today. Now, we are ready to define rolfing structural integration. It is a system of organizing the body so that it is substantially vertical, substantially balanced around a vertical in order to allow the body to accept support from the gravitational energy. Two characteristic qualities of the body make this unlikely situation possible. The material body of man is a plastic medium, as I just told you. Now by dictionary definition, a plastic substance is one which can be distorted by pressure and then can, by suitable means, be brought back to shape, providing that its elasticity has not been exceeded. Now the question is, what is back to shape in this context really mean?"
Ida defining the work in her 1974 Healing Arts lecture:
The plasticity claim does double work in the ovoid argument. It says first that the round thorax can be returned to ovoid because the soft tissue is genuinely deformable under pressure; and it says second that the change persists because the body, once returned to a more optimal shape, finds a new equilibrium with the gravitational field that holds the new geometry in place. The shape change is not a temporary mechanical displacement. It is a re-equilibration. The body that was round had been holding itself round because that was the configuration its tissue equilibrium had settled into; the body that becomes ovoid is now holding itself ovoid for the same reason, and the gravitational field reinforces the new configuration if the verticality is also restored.
"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."
Ida, in the same Healing Arts lecture, on the body's plasticity:
Fascia as the organ of structure
If the body's plasticity makes shape change possible in principle, fascia is the specific organ through which the practitioner accomplishes it. Ida built this argument over decades and stated it most clearly in her 1973 Big Sur class: the connective tissue, the collagen system, the fascial envelopes are the organ of structure. Nothing in conventional medical training had prepared her students to see fascia this way. In the textbooks fascia was packing material, the stuff that wrapped muscles and held organs apart. Ida's claim was that fascia is what determines what the body's contour actually is — what its shape will be in three-dimensional space. The cross-sectional ovoid of the thorax, in this framing, is a fascial outcome. The cylinders Kloth was describing are held in their relationship by the fascial envelopes that bind them. To restore an ovoid, the practitioner works the fascia.
"Now, as I told you before, in structural integration, we think in terms of we work in terms of the stacking of the blocks which are part of the myofascial system, the connective tissue system, the collagen system. And it is the collagen system which basically, which the two classes on different levels are going to turn your attention to in the the next six to thirty weeks. You are going to be getting more and more intimate with collagen which before you heard it well could mean you didn't know existed. But you see, it is the connective tissue which is the organ of structure. The fascia envelopes are the organ of structure, the organ that holds the body appropriately in the three-dimensional material world. Now nobody ever taught this in the medical school as far as I know. And anytime you want to get into an argument with your medical through they'll realize that this is so. It is the fascial aggregate which is the organ of structure."
Ida in 1973 at Big Sur, naming fascia as the organ of structure:
The fascial framing also explains why the round body persists in being round without intervention. The fascia has settled into a configuration that holds the thoracic cylinders close together — perhaps because of decades of judo, perhaps because of asthmatic breathing patterns, perhaps because of habitual posture or emotional withholding. The configuration is self-stabilizing once it is in place. Conventional exercise, conventional postural training, and conventional medical intervention have no way to address the fascial configuration directly. They address muscle, they address bone, they address symptoms — but the organ that is actually maintaining the round shape is left untouched. Ida's claim is that her work reaches that organ.
"factory go, but fascia is the stuff that keeps it from falling in on itself, falling in on its face, keeps you from falling on your face. It is your fascial body that supports you, relates you, and you know as with a child, you fool them sometimes by scooping out the material of the orange and leaving the skin and then putting the two heads together and you say to the kid now this is this is an orange and you see how long it takes that young ster to find out that it isn't an orange, that hits a ball of fascia. And so with with a a human being, in theory at least, you could scoop out the stuff that makes the factory go, the chemicals and so forth, and you would have left this supportive body of fascia. And it is this body which has had very little, almost no exploration in the sense that we have been giving to it."
Ida illustrating the fascial body with her orange-skin analogy:
The lateral axis must exceed the anterior-posterior axis
The geometric specificity of the ovoid claim — that the lateral axis must be greater than the anterior-posterior axis — distinguishes Ida's teaching from any merely aesthetic preference for one body shape over another. The rule is structural and applies in three places: the abdomen, the chest, and the pelvis. In each of those chambers, when the practitioner views a cross-section, the long axis must run side-to-side. When it runs front-to-back, or when the two axes become equal and the cross-section approaches a circle, the chamber is functionally compromised. This is what Ida saw when she looked at Feldenkrais's torso. The man was magnificent in his way, but his thorax had lost its lateral dimension to its anterior-posterior dimension, and the breathing pattern and other symptoms followed.
The rule explains a number of clinical observations that otherwise seem disconnected. Asthma and emphysema, conditions Ida named specifically in the Feldenkrais story, are conditions in which the thoracic chamber has lost its lateral spread — the ribs come forward and down, the chest takes on a barrel shape, and the cross-section approaches a circle. Digestive problems, conditions of the abdomen, follow the same pattern: when the abdominal cavity loses its lateral dimension, the contents are crowded into an arrangement that does not function. And the same is true at the pelvis, where the loss of lateral spread compresses the structures the pelvic basin is supposed to hold. The ovoid rule, in Ida's hands, is a single geometric principle that ties together a wide range of pathologies.
"I mean, you've been asking, I know, for some time now for an explanation for the the the ovoid shape of the thorax. Yeah. I'm not I haven't got any clear answers yet so far. Well, are people that are looking at it. This guy in Houston is looking at that. In fact Pat Clough. Pat Clough is looking at that. Right. They're conferring together. Right. Now there's, I mean, think that it's probably got to do with the principle of efficiency and if it's put together with this concept With that understanding, I agree. Now again, I mean, I've been looking at the body in rather narrow terms. I've been looking at the spine. Now of course the spine is not anything, it's spectacular enough but it is not, it doesn't exist in isolation. It's part of the pelvic structure and the rib structure. Now I think in those I mean, I look at body, I want to take and in these terms, I want to for the purposes of investigation, originally isolate this from here to here without the shoulder girdle and see if I can make that stand up. Well, this spine relates to two sides, though. You're forgetting that. It relates left side to right side. True. I mean, You know, that that's why I want to to be able to see if I can get this whole thing functioning as as a unit, it may turn out that then that ovoid shape is the most efficient way of setting that particular structure up. It's got to be because"
Ida in a 1975 Boulder conversation, on the ovoid thorax and the question of why:
What this Boulder exchange records is something important about how Ida held the ovoid doctrine. It was empirically settled in her mind — she had seen the pattern too many times across too many bodies to doubt it — but theoretically incomplete. She knew round bodies had symptoms; she knew ovoid restoration relieved symptoms; she knew the lateral axis had to exceed the anterior-posterior axis. What she did not yet have, and what she was hoping Pat Kloth and others would eventually supply, was the rigorous mechanical argument for why the ovoid is the most efficient configuration. Her best guess, agreed with her student, was that the spine plus rib structure plus pelvic structure, taken as a whole, achieves its maximum stability and minimum energy expenditure when the thoracic cross-section is ovoid. But she held this as a working hypothesis, not a finished doctrine.
Verticality and the gravitational field
The ovoid restoration takes its place within a larger argument about verticality and the gravitational field. The work is not, at root, about reshaping thoraxes. It is about putting the body into a relationship with the earth's energy field such that the field reinforces rather than destroys the body's own organization. Ovoid restoration is one of the local moves that this larger reorientation requires. A round thorax cannot stack vertically on a horizontal pelvis; the rib cage has the wrong shape to align with the structures above and below. When the ovoid is restored, the thorax becomes a unit that can take its place in the vertical alignment Ida considered the goal of the entire sequence.
"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."
Ida laying out the verticality argument in her 1974 Healing Arts lecture:
The connection between the ovoid and the vertical is structural rather than merely additive. The round thorax is not merely an ugly shape that happens alongside vertical misalignment; it is part of why the vertical cannot be achieved. The forward-and-downward collapse of the ribs pulls the cervical structures forward, drops the shoulders into protraction, and shifts the weight of the head off the line it should occupy above the lumbar vertebrae. Conversely, restoring the lateral spread of the rib cage allows the cervical structures to come back over the shoulders and the head to come back over the lumbars. The ovoid is a precondition of the vertical, in the upper body, and the vertical is what allows the gravitational field to nourish rather than destroy.
"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? Who doesn't? Has anybody got a better one?"
Ida in the 1976 advanced class, on the random body versus the organized body:
The mechanism of change: energy added to collagen
How does the practitioner actually return a round thorax to ovoid? The mechanism Ida described, in her 1974 Healing Arts lecture and elsewhere, was the addition of energy — by the pressure of fingers or elbow — to the collagen molecule. The collagen molecule is a triple braid stabilized by mineral bonds that can include hydrogen, sodium, calcium, and other minerals. These mineral occupants are interchangeable within limits. The aging body tends toward more calcium, the younger body toward more sodium, and the addition of energy by the practitioner's pressure shifts the ratio toward greater resilience. The fascial envelope, which had been holding the thorax in its round configuration, becomes more plastic; the cylinders Kloth described can be moved apart; the cross-section opens toward its proper ovoid.
"Two factors contribute to this: the first that the body, seemingly a unit, is in fact not a unit but a consolidation of large segments: the head, the thorax, the pelvis, the legs. The relation of these segments can be changed because the connecting myofascial structure is a structure of connective tissue of collagen. This is what that myofascial body is about. And collagen is a unique protein. The collagen molecule is a very large protein and it is a braiding of three strands a special braiding. These three strands are connected by various inorganic hydrogen sometimes, sodium sometimes, calcium sometimes, and undoubtedly other minerals. These minerals are interchangeable within limits. Thus, as the body grows older and stiffer, undoubtedly a larger percentage of calcium and a smaller percentage of sodium are present in these bonds. But by the addition of energy and what is energy? In this come in this context, it can it is the pressure of the fingers or the elbow of the ralpha. This ratio may be varied by the addition of this energy, and the joint or the connective tissue becomes more resilient, more flexible."
Ida explaining the collagen mechanism in her 1974 Healing Arts lecture:
The collagen mechanism is what allows Ida to claim that the round thorax does not have to stay round. The mineral composition of the bonds shifts under the addition of energy, the fascial envelope becomes more resilient, and the cylinders of the thorax can take up a new spatial relationship. Without this molecular argument, the ovoid restoration would be a kind of magic — pressure applied somewhere and a shape changing somewhere else for unstated reasons. With the collagen argument, Ida is making a specific physiochemical claim: the practitioner is doing chemistry, at the level of the bonds that stabilize the fascial body. The hands are slow, the pressure is deliberate, and the change is metabolic as well as mechanical.
"Other mesodermal cells are put under pressure for developing bone cells. Cells. So that you can begin to see that from one way of looking at it, the entire skeletal model of the comes from one basic cell. They are all related and they differentiate depending upon the source of energy that flow through them, the kind of environmental influences they coming through. Now as these cells become more and more specialized and as the embryo develops, there is one cell which stops at a certain level of differentiation and just becomes faster. Fracture is the connective And this is significant that fascia, the connective tissue cells are the least differentiated and I am not speaking here about the extruded collagen fibers, I am speaking about these basic cells that generate the fibers. Because you have to remember that fascia is a matrix of connective tissue fibers called collagenous fibers along protein strands in which live the cells of the connective tissue. And it is these cells that generate fascia. So the And fascia is formed from the least differentiated cell. In that sense it is the most primitive and also the most labile because it hasn't gone as far down the road for specialization. It stopped before it has had to make all these decisions about is it going to be bone, is it going to be muscle, is it going to be And it stays right there."
Ida in her 1973 Big Sur class, on the embryological origin of fascia and its labile character:
The body as a segmented unit
The ovoid rule applies because the body is not a single object but a stacking of segments. Ida insisted on this point repeatedly: what looks like one body is in fact a consolidation of large segments — head, thorax, pelvis, legs — connected by myofascial structures of collagen. Each segment has its own internal geometry, and the geometry of each segment matters for how the whole stacks. The thoracic ovoid is the geometry of one segment. The pelvic basin, which Ida described in similar terms, is the geometry of another. When each segment's internal geometry is restored, the segments can stack vertically; when one segment is rounded where it should be ovoid, the stacking fails and the body falls into a configuration where gravity must work against it rather than through it.
"But what you are really dealing with is something vastly more complicated, something which within which there is vitality, within within which which there there is is life, life, within which there is response, within which there is feeling, etcetera, etcetera. So this becomes the problem that we are trying to solve. How do we reorganize that body so that it can stand and work in a gravitational field without the gravitational field breaking it down. And it can be done or at least a very a very definite, a very marked, a very real approach to this goal can be made as you have all seen or you wouldn't be here. Now your keys lie in the fact that a body is a segmented unit. You have another key in the fact that there are many joints within the body that are the outward and visible signs of this segmentation, and that at each joint there is a situation which either enhances the organization of these of the body within the gravitational field or it prevents the organization of the body within the gravitational field. So that each one of these joints becomes a something to look at, becomes a something to understand in terms not of bony surfaces, but in terms of how bony surfaces are dragged by soft tissue. Obviously, if the soft tissue is around that bony joint asymmetrically that joint is not going to work as that joint was designed to work."
Ida on the segmented body in a recorded lecture:
The segmental framing also clarifies why the ovoid rule applies in three places — abdomen, chest, pelvis — rather than being a single rule about the thorax. Each of those three chambers is a segment with its own internal geometry; each must independently satisfy the ovoid rule for the body to stack properly. A body might have an ovoid thorax and a circular pelvis, or vice versa, and either configuration would compromise the stacking. The practitioner therefore looks at each segment separately and asks whether the lateral axis exceeds the anterior-posterior axis in that chamber. Where it does not, work is required. Where it does, the segment can take its place in the vertical.
"And this is what is telling you of its importance, aside from the fact that you can feel it. But for all of these things to work, and particularly for the adrenal gland and the kidneys to get appropriate innervation. That lumbar dorsal junction, that twelfth dorsal vertebra, has to be working. When it breaks down everything breaks down including the energy source that's of the adrenals. So now you have a new way of looking at a body. You have a way of looking at it as an extension of that twelfth dorsal area of that luminal dorsal ridge. And I think at this point you are, all of you, very aware of how many ways you can look at these things that walk around on two legs, how many facets there are to these energy centers that are contained within a skin and walking around on two legs. But you see, this will never be a practical addition to cultural information until we can tie it up with that old measurement thing that keep popping up. You have to be able to measure these things before it goes into the textbooks. So once again, we're up against it. We need money. Let's not worry about it this morning. But I hope that from what I've been stressing about the middle, this core structure, I hope you're beginning to understand that you can get this different idea of a body as a something centered going out instead of something contained in the skin with some cubbyholes in it."
Ida in her August 1974 IPR lecture, on the twelfth dorsal junction as the center where segments meet:
Round bodies always have symptoms
Ida's most arresting clinical claim — that round bodies always have symptoms — is empirical rather than theoretical. She had observed it across hundreds of cases and stated it as a rule. The Feldenkrais story illustrates the principle, but she returned to it across her advanced classes in language that suggested it had become as settled in her mind as any anatomical fact. The phrasing was always strong: not 'often have symptoms,' not 'tend to have symptoms,' but 'always.' The corollary was equally strong: as the roundness is released, the symptoms disappear. She presented this not as a hopeful claim but as an observed regularity that anyone working with bodies would eventually verify.
The symptoms Ida named most often were respiratory — asthma, emphysema, and the general category of disordered breathing. These follow naturally from the geometric argument: the round thorax has less internal volume in the side-to-side dimension where the lungs need to spread, and the diaphragm operates in a chamber whose shape no longer favors its excursion. But the symptoms were not limited to breathing. Digestive problems, cardiac problems, and what she sometimes called the general malaise of the round body — the sense that the person was not well even when no specific diagnosis applied — were all part of the cluster. The ovoid restoration, in her experience, addressed the cluster as a whole because it addressed the underlying geometric failure.
"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? Don't you hear how you're asking for a specific cause for a specific effect? What you see as you look at this, you begin to see how balance is necessary between bodies as well as within bodies. Certainly, you've got to balance muscles in that connective tissue body. And this is where you can start because myofascial units are something you can lay your hands on and with your hands you can affect it with your hands you can put it somewhere and ask it to work. You can't do that with the stuff that derives from the ectodermic body. You can't get ahold of a a nerve trunk and just pull it and yarn and expect to get service out of it."
Ida in the 1976 advanced class, on balance as the criterion for the work:
The balance Ida names in that 1976 exchange is the same balance the ovoid expresses at the level of segment geometry. Side balances side, front balances back, and the cross-section that results — when the work has been done well — is an oval whose long axis runs laterally. The round body is the visible sign that this balance has not been established. And because the round body represents an arrest of the developmental process by which the body finds its proper shape, Ida traced its origin not to bad luck but to the failure of function to evoke structure. In a 1973 Big Sur class she pressed this point: structure is not handed down from on high but emerges from the body's reaching, and where the reaching stops, the shape collapses.
"Everything that can be regarded as a revelation is open ended. In terms of sense. Now it wouldn't hurt us to talk about that last sentence right here in the middle because it is true. We got off on this table one day last week. Function can, will, and does What goes on to change it? Is it just God sitting up in his heaven and saying let that be? I certainly don't believe it. There is a man child down on this earth who wants to throw balls, who wants to fight with his fellows, who wants to climb a tree, who wants to do all kinds of things, and whose desire keeps edging out toward us. And he cannot attain this desire until the day comes when he creates new muscular patterns or more muscular patterns and the greater muscular stress evokes an answer from the body And then by that he's got the mechanism that he needs to give him the greatest strength. And the whole history of growth is a history any living human being by putting it into bed and keeping it. Now I realized I am talking about like to have, there is a level of abstraction which is essentially identical when you talk about protein molecules. Out here, from the hip, from the hip, except here."
Ida in her 1973 Big Sur class, on how function evokes structural change:
Why the ovoid principle remained partly open
Ida did not pretend the ovoid doctrine was finished. In the 1975 Boulder conversation with a senior student she acknowledged that she did not yet have a clear answer to the question of why the thoracic cross-section is ovoid rather than round. People were working on it — she named Pat Kloth, she mentioned others in conference — but the theoretical derivation lagged behind the clinical observation. What she had was a rule that worked: she could see, in any body, whether the thorax presented as ovoid or round; she could predict, with high reliability, that round bodies would have symptoms; and she could intervene, through fascial work, to restore the ovoid. What she did not have, and was waiting for, was the mechanical argument that would explain why this had to be so.
This openness is part of what makes the ovoid doctrine an instructive example of how Ida's teaching actually developed. She did not refuse to teach a principle until she had fully derived it; she taught what she had seen, named it as empirically settled, and invited her students to verify it on the bodies they worked. She trusted that the theoretical explanation would catch up, and she explicitly hoped that her students who had quantitative training — Pat Kloth among them — would eventually supply that explanation. This was the working method of someone who treated her own work as an evolving research program rather than a closed system.
"With the kind of culture that you we have here, you would suppose there would be somebody who could put together an elastic model or something that would make give this thing a greater reality, but I wouldn't know where to find it. I do think that sooner or later, someone of us has to be smart enough to really trace out facial patterns of the shoulder girdle and facial patterns of the hip girdle. Because you see this is what we've been dealing with. And then there is the problem of the connection between say the tenth rib and the crest of the ileum which is another fascial problem. But how do these hip girdle fascia fit together with the fascia that enwraps the obliques for instance? Now if the fascial patterns were as clear to us as the muscular patterns are, I think there would be a great deal less problem in teaching this if there were a book to which we could refer about how those fascial planes run as we refer back to our anatomies here as to how the muscular patterns run. It might be that it would be easier to turn our practitioners who understood they were dealing with facial bodies."
Ida acknowledging the unfinished state of the fascial mapping:
The unfinished quality of the ovoid doctrine is not a weakness in Ida's teaching but a feature of it. She named the principle, she defended it empirically, she connected it to her broader doctrines about plasticity and verticality and the segmented body, and she left the theoretical derivation open for the next generation to complete. What the archive preserves, in passages like the Feldenkrais story and the Kloth cylinder model, is the principle as Ida knew it and the working hypothesis as she held it. The geometry — lateral axis greater than anterior-posterior axis, in abdomen and chest and pelvis — was her firm conclusion. The why remained an invitation.
"Bodies within bodies is water within sand thing. But now this is now showing a different situation. That's what happens when you, like, after the three, then you start to have things emerge that you haven't been able to see before. That's right. That's right. That's absolutely right. Uh-huh. It's like you have rendered more translucent the surface, and then I can see in to the next layers. Like you've done their eyes. But you see, this is the picture. This is the type of picture that you are going to have to interject into your consideration, into the consideration that I taught you in the elementary classes of each of these muscular patterns are encased in fascial planes. So really what they're doing is following those muscular patterns in order to get to the fascial planes. Well, like all this other stuff, it's a partial truth. And at this time, what you have to do is to take that partial truth and try to make a"
Ida in the 1975 Boulder class, on how partial truths must be assembled into a working picture:
Coda: bodies are made to be ovoid
The line Ida delivered in the Feldenkrais story — bodies are made to be ovoid, not round — is the kind of statement she reserved for principles she considered structurally fundamental. It is a claim about how the human form is built, what shape it is supposed to hold, and what the practitioner is looking for when she examines a body. The Feldenkrais case made the principle visible because the cause was so cleanly attributable to one training history; but the principle applies to every body the practitioner ever sees. Some are closer to ovoid, some are closer to round, and the distance from ovoid correlates with the presence of symptoms. The work is partly the slow restoration of the ovoid in chambers where it has been lost.
Read alongside the doctrines of plasticity, fascia, verticality, and the segmented body, the ovoid principle reveals itself as a specific geometric expression of the broader teaching. The body is plastic, so the shape can be changed. Fascia is the organ that holds the shape, so the practitioner has a tissue to work. The vertical is the goal, so the segments must stack — and the thoracic segment cannot stack properly unless its cross-section is ovoid. Each piece supports the others. The ovoid is not a peripheral observation but a structural consequence of the whole system Ida built. That she left its full theoretical derivation to her students and successors is consistent with how she taught everything else: she named what she had seen, demonstrated the work that restored it, and trusted that understanding would catch up.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf on the relation of the tenth rib to the crest of the ilium and the fascial connections that bind the thoracic ovoid to the pelvic basin (RolfA5Side2, an open-ended discussion of the unfinished fascial mapping). RolfA5Side2 ▸
See also: See also: discussion of the spine as a tensegrity structure in the 1975 Boulder advanced class, where a senior student works through how non-deformable triangular vertebral processes might explain the structural stability of the ovoid thorax (B2T1SA). B2T1SA ▸
See also: See also: Ida's 1975 Boulder exchange on why the advanced work must wait until the elementary work has organized the body enough that fascial planes become visible to the practitioner (B3T7SB). B3T7SB ▸
See also: See also: the August 1974 IPR lecture on the spine as a unified mechanism rather than a stack of separated bones, which provides context for how the ovoid thorax sits within the structural picture (74_8-05B). 74_8-05B ▸
See also: See also: the 1975 Boulder discussion of how the recipe hours build on one another sequentially — the first hour being the beginning of the tenth, each hour a continuation — which sets the temporal frame within which ovoid restoration is achieved across the series (T1SB). T1SB ▸
See also: See also: the 1974 Open Universe Class demonstration in which a student reports warming and movement between fascial layers under the practitioner's pressure, illustrating the tissue-level experience of fascial reorganization that underwrites ovoid restoration (UNI_044). UNI_044 ▸
See also: See also: the 1974 Open Universe Class lecture on how sports and exercise build strong bodies and rigid body images but do not address the fascial configuration that holds the round body in place (UNI_072). UNI_072 ▸
See also: See also: the 1973 Big Sur class discussion of the circular nature of fascial pathology — how organization at one place organizes or disorganizes everywhere else — which underwrites Ida's claim that round-body symptoms cluster across multiple systems (SUR7332). SUR7332 ▸