Where patterning came from
Patterning entered Ida's teaching not as a theoretical addition but as a practical response to a problem her own practitioners were creating for themselves. Judith Aston, a movement specialist who had studied with Ida and with the kinesiology researchers Frank Hatch and Lulu Sweigard (whom Ida calls Harter and Roth in the transcripts), found that the physical demands of delivering the ten-session series were destroying the practitioners' own bodies. The work was rearranging clients beautifully and grinding down the people doing it. Aston's response was to develop a movement re-education method that addressed how the practitioner used herself while working, and how the client used himself afterward. In the 1974 Open Universe Class — a long-form public conversation with students and a curious audience — Ida walked through that origin story, locating patterning as both a remedy for practitioner burnout and a way to extend the educational work of a session into daily life.
"of structural patterning, which was built by Judith Aston, a student of doctor Harter and doctor Roth, that she found herself, her body breaking down with the stress of this work and other authors doing the same thing and developed a technique to help reinforce that or teach and to to evolve the pattern of the Roth body or the Roth line. Bring your leg back. Do you think that there's, in your opinion, enough emphasis put on structural patterning that really is not getting the emphasis by raw footage it should be? Probably. Yeah. I think so. What exactly"
From the 1974 Open Universe Class, narrating the origin of structural patterning.
What the colleague is naming here — and what Ida endorses without correction — is that patterning emerged from inside the practitioner community, not from outside it. Aston had been one of Ida's people. She watched the same bodies Ida watched, learned to read alignment the way Ida read it, and then asked a question Ida herself had not focused on: how does the client carry the change into Tuesday morning at the office, or into a job that involves icing wedding cakes all day? Patterning, in Ida's framing, was the part of the educational sequence that her own technique could not reach with hands alone.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, Structure Lectures 1974 (STRUC1) — Ida's introductory framing of Structural Integration as the genesis of an idea about the relationship between human behavior and body physics and body chemistry, tracing back to Erwin Schrödinger's lectures in Zurich; included as the historical anchor for how the discipline came to encompass movement education as well as manipulation. STRUC1 ▸
What patterning is for
When Ida is asked directly what patterning does, she does not describe it as a remedial discipline or as physical therapy. She describes it as a discipline of awareness — a commitment of time during which the client studies, with a trained guide, how he uses his body and how he might use it differently. The value of patterning, in her account, is not primarily the corrective adjustments the patterner makes; it is the hours the client spends paying attention. This is the first major distinction Ida draws between patterning and the ten-session series. The series acts on the client; patterning trains the client to act on himself.
"Yes, the patterning is valuable in its own way. Its greatest value, in my opinion, is that a person who goes into pattern and commits a certain number of hours of his time to being aware of how he uses his body, how he might better use his body more efficiently, and how he then turns and uses his body more efficiently."
In the 1974 Structure Lectures, answering a direct question about the role of patterning after the ten-session series.
The phrasing is precise. Ida does not say the patterner re-trains the body — she says the client commits hours to being aware. The patterner's role, in her telling, is to make the awareness possible, to direct it, to set the questions. The body change follows from sustained attention to one's own use, not from external correction. This is consistent with Ida's broader pedagogical instinct, which the 1976 Boulder advanced class transcripts return to repeatedly: that the body learns what the mind notices, and that no manipulation, however skillful, replaces the client's own participation.
"You see, he goes to a roper and expects to have something done for him and to him, but he doesn't have any such expectation when he goes to a patina. When he goes to a patina, he goes with the understanding that he is going to do something differently."
Same lecture, the very next breath — Ida draws the categorical distinction between the two disciplines.
This contractual framing is one of Ida's most useful contributions to the discussion. The two disciplines look superficially related — both deal with structure, both involve a trained person working with an untrained one, both aim at greater ease in the gravitational field. But the agreement is different, and the difference is not cosmetic. The ten-session series can succeed with a client who lies passive on the table. Patterning cannot. The patterner is teaching a skill the client must practice; the practitioner of the series is changing tissue the client lives in. A patterner whose client refuses to do the work has accomplished nothing. A practitioner of the series whose client refuses to do anything but show up can still effect remarkable change.
Similar but not equivalent
Having drawn the contract distinction, Ida is then pressed on a more pointed question: does patterning, over time and at a slower pace, eventually achieve what the ten-session series achieves? She does not dismiss the question. She answers it carefully, with a precise verbal hedge — similar but not equivalent — and then explains the population for whom each is appropriate. Patterning, she suggests, can take a client a long way if that client has not gone too far down what she calls the malalignment road. For someone who has gone far down it — someone whose collagen has organized around an old injury or a decades-old postural compensation — patterning will not reach the depth required.
"Very valuable. Is is patterning over the long run a kind of slow very slow, in its effect similar to roughing? Is it at last time? Similar but not equivalent. Not equivalent. It's on the way, let's put it that way. It's on the way. And of course, there are a good many people who haven't gone too far down the malalignment road for whom patterning is very valuable. But the people who have really gone down the malalignment road are usually in need of something that is more potent than patterning."
Still in the same 1974 lecture, refining her position on what patterning can and cannot accomplish.
The careful hedge — similar but not equivalent — is doing a lot of work. Ida is refusing two simplifications at once. She refuses the dismissive line that patterning is merely exercise, a watered-down imitation of the real thing. And she refuses the inflated line that patterning, given enough time, accomplishes the same depth of change. The two practices are on the same road but not at the same point on it. Where exactly they diverge depends on the client's structural condition when he walks in the door.
"Structural patterning, which I talked to Julie Aspen, and Julie Aspen took it and really distributed it among many young teachers and young women and so forth. And they do a very beautiful job. And when you figure that when you get through with Ralph and you don't have the time nor exactly the expertise to get together with yourself and spend an hour finding out how you use your body. But this is what a patterner does. She spends an hour or an hour and a half perhaps working with you and letting you become more conscious of how you use your body, what you're doing, where you're doing it right, where you're really taking away from your own energy. Sometimes the pattern tells the raw fur that he is using himself poorly and that he's giving too much energy to the raw thieves, etcetera, etcetera. These girls, these young women, mostly young women, are spending their time, you see, to make it more possible for the wealthy to understand his own problem and his own body. There is a regular routine which I, in my domestic fervor, have called a recipe. This goes right through the first ten hours."
From a 1971-72 IPR public tape, returning to the same theme with different language.
The detail about patterners working with practitioners of the ten-session series, not just with their clients, is worth noticing. Aston's original concern had been practitioner burnout, and Ida is acknowledging that the discipline she helped seed has returned to serve the practitioners themselves. A patterner watches the practitioner work, identifies where she is wasting her own energy, and trains her toward more efficient use. The bidirectional traffic — patterner serving client, patterner serving practitioner — is one of the structural features of the relationship between the two disciplines as Ida came to describe it in her late teaching.
What patterning does not do
The differences Ida draws between patterning and the ten-session series are not only about depth and contract; they are also about the kind of experience each produces. The ten-session series, in her account, frequently produces emotional release — memories surfacing, old feelings discharging, sometimes vivid changes in mood. Patterning, in her direct testimony, does not. This is not a deficiency she ascribes to patterning; it is a structural difference that follows from what each practice is doing to and with the body. Pressure into deep collagen produces a particular kind of release. Sustained awareness of one's own use does not.
"Is Patterning, for example, does not I have never heard of patterning ever giving you the emotional releases that you very often get with throthing. Yeah, in that respect it's quite different."
Same 1974 lecture, on what patterning does not produce.
Ida does not editorialize about which experience is more valuable. She does not claim that emotional release is the marker of real work, or that patterning's quieter character makes it less serious. She is reporting what she has seen in thousands of sessions across decades. The absence of emotional release in patterning is, in her telling, a structural fact about what kinds of changes the practice produces — a fact a client should know before choosing between the two. Someone who wants the cathartic dimension of the ten-session series will not find it in patterning; someone who wants a slower, more cognitive engagement with how he carries himself will not get that from the series.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, Open Universe Class 1974 (UNI_073) — an extended reflection on how the educational dimension of the body cannot be reached by track and field or other conventional physical training, and on what a more permanent kind of body education would require; included as a pointer for readers interested in Ida's broader critique of the physical-education traditions patterning was developed against. UNI_073 ▸
The session as education
One reason Ida found patterning compatible with her own work, rather than competitive with it, is that she had always understood the ten-session series as an educational process, not a therapeutic one. The session does not heal the client; it teaches the body a new arrangement and asks the body to live in it. Movement re-education was always implicit in the work. Patterning makes that educational dimension explicit, and gives it its own hours and its own teacher. In the 1974 Open Universe Class, Ida and her colleague describe how the educational work begins inside the session itself, before patterning ever enters the picture.
"So how have you found that they have learned to live differently so that the same condition does not be done as time goes on again? There's a lot of learning that goes on in the Rolfing session about body movement and especially the experience of proper movement while, as Valerie said, the field of the rolfer is present and the movement that he elicits and so on. And in addition to that, we do have structural patterning which continues that work of eliciting and applying that in daily life. That one day I was talking with a woman who iced cakes, And you can imagine the movement. She iced these great big cakes all day long. Well, that's a determinant in her life. And if she was going to continue that, she would have to make some kind of application to the balanced system so that she could do that in a balanced way as Roffer's doing doing this work."
From the 1974 Open Universe Class, describing the movement-learning that happens inside a session.
The cake-icer is a small detail but a useful one. It names the problem patterning was built to address: ordinary work makes ordinary demands on the body, and those demands do not pause just because the client has finished his ten sessions. The icing motion, the typewriter posture, the way a piano teacher sits at her instrument — these are the conditions the structural change has to survive. The session establishes a new arrangement; the client's job is to discover how to use that arrangement at the kitchen table, in the office, at the keyboard. Patterning, in Ida's framing, is the discipline that helps the client locate his own work and discover the version of it that does not undo what the session gave him.
"And so, as doctor Rolf said in the first talk, there's really no cause, one to one cause with the pattern. It's an accumulation of person to the pattern that they presently have. The other part is that we learn inefficient methods of movement. Some people still walk like the toddler. That is that their legs are spread apart, their pelvis is anterior, and they have never matured or come to a further position. They're stuck there. And that or they imitated someone in their family and walked that way. And then that pattern gets set. And then it can't be changed unless someone comes and someone like a raw bird. Some other method where you can change those patterns. See, the average person moves primarily with Extrinsic muscles, surface muscles, or groups of muscles that are stuck together. We're gonna lean forward. There's little differentiation in the in the movement."
Same class, on the inefficient movement patterns the work is designed to change.
This is the diagnostic case for why patterning alone, for many clients, is not enough. If the movement pattern is set at the level of differentiated muscle function — surface muscles glued to deep muscles, large muscle groups acting as a single block — then awareness work, however sustained, has limited material to work with. The client cannot recruit a deep muscle independently because the practitioner has not yet separated it from the surface. Once the work has done that differentiation, patterning has new movement options to teach. The two practices, in this technical sense, set each other up.
Sequential rather than simultaneous contraction
The technical companion to patterning's awareness work is what the neuromuscular research found in clients after the ten-session series. Valerie Hunt, the kinesiologist who ran the early electromyography studies on Ida's clients, presented her findings in the 1974 Healing Arts conference of the Rolf advanced class. The studies were designed to capture the differences in movement quality the eye observed but could not quantify. What Hunt found was that after the series, clients moved with a particular kind of neuromuscular efficiency — sequential rather than simultaneous muscle activation, less co-contraction, less wasted energy. This is the kind of efficiency a patterner could then train the client to inhabit consciously.
"Another finding is that after structural integration there was more sequential contraction of muscles and not so much co contraction. What do I mean by sequential and co? If you're doing very, very fine work, such as writing for long periods of time or work with your eyes, work with your hands, it requires co contraction. You know how fatigued you get. You get tremendously tired from using one muscle against another muscle to keep you from moving any great distance. And so, in fine control, we know that there is co contraction. But the type of skills which I asked for in this particular study was not fine skills but gross skills. And these are far better done using the agonist followed by the antagonist, the agonist and not the agonist and antagonist simultaneously. This is tremendously expensive in human energy, is to use one muscle against another. It's like accelerating your car and putting on the brakes simultaneously. It is exhausting. Efficiency then with less tension. Another finding: before structural integration, there was what I called widespread excitation, which was unrelated specifically to the particular task at hand. This means, for example, that people write with their bottom, and their bottom gets very tense when they write. And that is not the specific task at hand."
From Hunt's 1974 presentation to the Healing Arts conference, describing the neuromuscular changes the lab measured.
Hunt's findings answer a question patterning alone cannot answer: why does the same person, given the same instruction in movement awareness, perform it more efficiently after the ten-session series than before? The answer is that the muscles have been differentiated. The signal that recruits a particular muscle now reaches a muscle that can act independently rather than a muscle locked into a larger mass. Patterning, performed on a client who has been through the work, has different material to work with than patterning performed on a client whose extrinsic and intrinsic musculature still act as a single block.
"We find that when people become more skillful in a particular high level task, they become what we call more finalized. There's a lot of research on this to show that the frequency actually changes. I think that Rolfing brings a downward shift. There is another level of control that we call the midbrain, and this area also can turn on muscles. We can operate on it. It is one of our very basic areas for some of our primitive movement, and it primarily innervates the great large joints of the body and those which are proximal, such as the shoulders and the hips and the trunk one of the areas that Rolfing works a great deal upon. This has a tendency to produce a very rhythmic quality of movement. And then there, of course, is that cortex that louses us up in so many ways. It can do those fine things with the hand and the beautiful nuances in the face, but it is totally inefficient, inefficient. It louses up, its pattern is not well established. Two muscles counteract each other at the same time, And my feeling is that this smoother energy release that comes after rolfing is based upon a downward shift in the control in the primary control. This doesn't mean you can't be cortical but in the primary control of muscle."
Same Hunt presentation, on the downward shift in motor control.
Hunt's downward-shift hypothesis remained tentative — she said so explicitly — but it offered a model that linked the two disciplines at a level deeper than either practice's surface description. If the work moves the primary control of large movement to a lower center, and if patterning trains conscious attention to that movement, then the two practices are working on opposite ends of the same axis. The work makes a different movement pattern physically possible; patterning makes the client's awareness adequate to live in it.
The plasticity that makes both possible
Underneath both disciplines is the assumption Ida returned to constantly in her late teaching: the body is a plastic medium. The phrase is hers, used so often in the advanced classes and public lectures that students could quote it back to her. It is also the precondition for everything patterning and the ten-session series both attempt. If the body's structure were fixed by genetics or by adulthood, neither practice could accomplish what it claims. The plasticity of the fascial system — its capacity to be reorganized by added energy, whether the energy comes from pressure or from sustained attention — is what makes both disciplines coherent.
"But because the body has an unforeseen, unexpected quality, it can be done. The body is a plastic medium. Now this is incredible, and twenty five years ago, no one would have believed this statement. Fifty years ago, they'd have put me in a nice sunny southern room. You've given me pretty good care, maybe. But the body is a plastic medium, and you're going to hear that several times before we get out of here today. Now, we are ready to define rolfing structural integration."
From the 1974 Healing Arts lectures, on the central claim that underwrites both disciplines.
The plasticity claim sits underneath the entire conversation about patterning. If the body were not plastic, no amount of awareness would change it. The patterner could direct the client's attention indefinitely and the structure would simply hold its shape. What patterning depends on is that sustained attention, repeated over time, can itself reorganize the fascial network — slowly, less dramatically than pressure, but reliably for clients whose mal-alignment is not too advanced. The work uses pressure as the energy input; patterning uses attention. Both rely on the same property of tissue.
"Now, a fascial tissue So what I'm trying to get you to look at and understand is the circular nature of this whole crib. The way it travels round and round and round and it of the way in which organization at one place organizes or disorganizes at one place. And that's what you were doing yesterday. You were organizing afterwards. In order that Because if a joint is not truly seated with its neighbor, it takes a great deal of your vital energy to get movement organized fashion works. Now remember that what Michael says to you, that all of this fashion tends of chemistry in the extremities, particularly in the teeth. And I ask you, those of you who are in processing, what percentage of the people"
From the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, on the circular nature of fascial change.
Ida's warning that fascial plasticity cuts both ways is worth holding in mind when thinking about patterning. The patterner who teaches a client to favor one side, or who reinforces a compensatory pattern without recognizing it, is using the same plasticity to make things worse rather than better. The work is potent because the tissue is plastic; the responsibility is heavy for the same reason. This is part of why Ida insisted that patterning, like the ten-session series, required real training rather than enthusiasm alone.
"And this is indicative merely of the fact that we are going into an unknown territory, a terra incognita, and trying to find out what changes in that body are going to develop into what changes in the personality that calls itself the owner of that body. And I'm talking here about energy being added by pressure to the fascia, the organ of structure, to change the relation of the fascial sheaths of the body, to balance these around a vertical line which parallels the gravity line. Thus, we are able to balance body masses, to order them, to order them within a space. The contour of the body changes, the objective feeling of the body to searching hands changes. Movement behavior changes as the body incorporates more and more order. The first balance of the body is a static stacking, but as the body incorporates more changes, the balance ceases to be a static balance. It becomes a dynamic balance. These are the physical manifestations of the increasing balance, but there is an outgoing psychological change as well toward balance, toward serenity, toward a more whole person. The whole man, the whole person evidences a more apparent, a more potent psychic development."
From a 1974 Healing Arts lecture on fascia as the organ of structure.
The distinction between static balance and dynamic balance is the distinction that makes patterning necessary. The ten-session series can establish a static balance — the client stands in better alignment when he leaves than when he arrived. But static balance is fragile; the client takes it into a job and a life that pull on it in particular directions. The dynamic balance — the capacity to remain ordered in movement, under load, across the demands of ordinary days — has to be developed by the client himself. The work makes dynamic balance available. Patterning, or the client's own attentive use, makes dynamic balance habitual.
Posture is what you do with structure
Ida's lifelong quarrel with conventional physical education — with the Harvard school of body mechanics, with the army drill sergeant's shoulders-back, with the dance teacher who told a student to stand straight — was that those traditions taught a goal without teaching a method. They told the client where his body should end up but had no way to get him there. Patterning, in her view, was different from those older disciplines because it began with awareness of how the client currently used himself, rather than with imposed correction. The opening move was diagnostic, not prescriptive.
"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."
From a public talk in the Topanga series, distinguishing posture from structure.
The distinction protects patterning from being misread as a version of postural drill. A patterner is not telling the client to hold his shoulders back. A patterner is helping the client discover how his pelvis sits when he is not holding it anywhere, how his weight transfers through his feet when he is not forcing the transfer, how his arms hang when he is not arranging them. The work has already shifted what is possible structurally; patterning gives the client time to find the use that fits the new structure. Forcing posture onto an unchanged structure is the failure mode Ida watched in physical education throughout her life.
"energy to go up to Yale University and to persuade those good old conservative New Englanders that they wanted to put this kind of a system into their physical education program. Now, Madame Mensindeep had a way of getting where she wanted to go. The thing is that she and I didn't see the same place as the same goal. I never knew. And when somebody came in with a curved curvature of the back, for example, Madame Mensenby thought that she could cure that curvature of the back by telling them to stand straight or to do such and such an exercise. The next week they came in and they looked just as bad, and she says, Well, go home and do it twice as many times every day. Now you must understand if you are going to be promophis of Rolfing, you must understand what it is we're promoting."
From the 1976 advanced class, on the older European movement traditions she rejected.
Mensendieck is the cautionary case. She had energy, intelligence, and access to American physical-education institutions, and her method failed in the ways Ida identified: it told the body where to be without giving the body the structural means to get there. Patterning, developed by someone trained in the ten-session series, avoided this failure mode by working in coordination with structural change. The patterner could trust that the structure had been altered and could direct the client's awareness toward inhabiting the alteration. A patterner working with a client who had never been through the series faced the same problem Mensendieck faced — but with the modesty to know it, and with techniques tuned to less dramatic structural shifts.
"Do they distribute their weight differently? This is what I'm telling you that Ralphing is an experiential technique and until you people learn to look to throw your books out of the window and learn to look with your eyes and put together what you see, you will never be Rolfers. Because Rolfers are people who are dealing with the experience of the body, not with what they think the body should be. Okay. Now look at these guys. Now I know you didn't look at them the other day, but you got them today. Some of you move over this way a little bit more so that there's room. Somebody move some of this stuff somewhere else. That's it. Oh, I see what I got. Yeah. Thank you. Say, doctor. I've got a question. What are reflexes? And I realize I've used that term a lot, but I really don't know what they are. Neither do I. Neither does anybody that I know. Is that the not I'm sure."
From a 1976 advanced class session, pushing students to look at the actual body rather than the textbook ideal.
The experiential discipline Ida is demanding here applies equally to patterning. A patterner who cannot see what her client is actually doing — who can only see the ideal she wants to impose — has the same problem Mensendieck had. The patterner's authority comes from the same place the practitioner's authority comes from: long, patient observation of bodies in motion, until the eye can read the difference between a movement the structure supports and a movement the structure is being forced into. Patterning depends on diagnostic seeing as much as it does on teaching skill.
Awareness and the limit of patterning
Even within patterning, Ida identified a particular limit. Patterning can extend the client's awareness substantially — she said it could double, triple, even quadruple awareness of what was happening under the skin. But there is a wall the awareness work hits when the underlying structure requires manipulation the patterner cannot perform. At that wall, patterning stops being a substitute and becomes a complement: it has done what it can, and the next move belongs to the practitioner of the ten-session series. This is one of Ida's most honest statements about the relationship between the two disciplines.
"And patterning is always going to be more valuable than wrapping in a certain sense because you can reach so many more people so much faster."
From the 1975 Boulder advanced class, eighth hour material, on the limit of patterning and the future relationship between the two practices.
The closing claim deserves to be read carefully. Ida is not saying patterning is more powerful than the ten-session series — she has spent the entire conversation insisting it is not. She is saying that patterning will reach more people. The ten-session series is slow, demanding, performed one client at a time, requires trained hands and trained eyes, and asks for ten hours of intensive contact. Patterning is faster to teach, faster to learn, and scales in ways the work does not. A culture that cannot give every client ten hours on the table can give many clients an hour of patterning. That is the cultural calculation Ida is making in 1975, and it is the closest she ever came to predicting where the discipline she helped seed would go.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, Big Sur advanced class 1973 (SUR7309) — extended teaching on the circular nature of fascial change and the importance of understanding what the body's pattern is like when the pattern is doing the right thing; included as background for readers interested in the diagnostic vocabulary patterners must develop. SUR7309 ▸
The sequence behind the work
Both disciplines depend, finally, on the idea that the body has a coherent sequence — that there is a right order to releasing the structure, and a right order to training the client's awareness of his own use. In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, a student named Tom and a colleague named Dick worked through with Ida the logic of why the ten-session series begins where it begins. The conversation is one of the clearest accounts of how Ida thought about the sequence of the work, and it bears directly on how a patterner who understands the sequence can amplify what the work accomplishes.
"Like I asked myself the question, why do we start on the chest? You know, why is I mean, that's how it's been ever since I got into it. First time Ida put her hands on me, she went right there. And so I started thinking about the logic of the sequence and how it evolved, you know, and trying to back myself up to Ida's perspective, you know, and see what she saw. You know, why did the recipe evolve this way? And I think one of the things is that by working and this is a level of abstraction above the physical body, but I think it's relevant that by working on the chest and the pelvis, you deliver the most experience of what we're trying to do. So that when someone gets a first hour, you're establishing in their cells what it is that Rolfing's about. You know, before you put their hands on them, they've only got ideas, abstractions. And in the first hour you're giving them an experiential look at what goes on. And you get the most done for the least amount of doing by freeing the breathing and the pelvis. You know, so there's a lot of impact in that first session. You know, you've taught them at a level that they can understand what Rolfing is, and that says more than all your word."
From the 1975 Boulder class, reconstructing why the first hour starts where it does.
What this senior practitioner is reconstructing is the educational logic of the sequence — that the first hour is not arbitrary, that it teaches the client what the work is by doing it where the client can feel it most directly. The breath changes; the pelvic tilt changes; the client's whole understanding of his own structure changes within the first ninety minutes. Patterning, performed on a client who has had this experiential introduction, has something to point to. The patterner can ask the client to remember what the first hour felt like in his chest, and the client knows what is being asked. Patterning performed on someone who has never been through the work has to do all that introductory work itself, with less leverage.
"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. She just Ida what Ida did is what she's trying to teach how to do, and that is that you have to stay within your your trade. You have to make structural integration in your life."
Same 1975 Boulder class, on the continuity of the ten hours.
The single-continuous-process framing is what makes patterning intelligible as a partner discipline rather than an alternative. If the ten hours are a single educational arc, then patterning is the continuation of the same arc into the client's daily life. The patterner picks up where the tenth hour leaves the client and helps him discover how to use what he has been given. The arc does not end at hour ten; it ends when the client has integrated his new structure into his work, his sleep, his ordinary movement. That integration takes time and attention the practitioner of the ten-session series cannot provide hour by hour. Patterning provides it.
"understand if they've never had any biological experience. When you are dealing with people and this goes for a student student and it goes for an audience. As Mr. Casey says, you start where they are. That's all you can do. When you're dealing with a small child and taking a child out to walk, you can't walk at a pace of four miles an hour and have that kid keep up. He doesn't have the legs for it. So you adapt your legs to the one mile an hour pace that that kid can handle. And you say when somebody says, ma, you're going slowly. You say, yes. But I'm training a child. Now this is a very important pedologic teaching consideration. Very important. If you pick out too high a level and try to introduce your zero man to this level, he can't make it. He can't make it till he goes through here. I have seen over and over again with some of the young men who came in as assistants in the class."
From a 1976 advanced class, on pedagogy as starting where the student is.
Ida's pedagogical principle — start where they are, walk them forward step by step — is the same principle that organizes the recipe and the same principle that should organize a patterning session. A patterner who tries to teach a client a sophisticated movement pattern the client's structure cannot yet support is committing the same error as the assistant teaching trainees in labels they do not yet understand. The discipline of starting at the client's current level requires patience and observational care, and it is one of the strongest continuities between Ida's approach to teaching her own students and the approach the patterners trained under Aston carried forward into the wider culture.
Reaching further than the work itself
There is one more dimension to patterning that Ida foresaw but could not yet measure. The energetic and behavioral changes that Valerie Hunt was documenting in the laboratory in 1974 — the smoother neuromuscular patterns, the reduced anxiety baseline, the more efficient use of energy — were changes the work produced. Whether patterning, by training awareness over many hours, could produce similar changes in clients who never went through the ten-session series was an open question Ida did not pretend to have answered. What she insisted on was that the question was worth investigating, and that the discipline of patterning had reach the work itself could not match.
"And I wondered whether rolfing really affected the anxiety state of an individual. One of the most exciting findings was that you know that Rolfing follows a particular pattern, although it does change certain parts of it change based upon the needs of the people. But on the first hour you're going to get this: on a certain hour your mouth is going to be rolfed. On another hour it's going to be another part of the body. And the data indicated that there was a positive effect on normalizing the frequency of energy, but it was a selective one a selective effect based upon the particular individual difference of that person. And by that I mean that if a person came in and had distributed in his behavior pattern a lot of low frequency activity, he had a tendency to drop that low activity and not have quite as much of it in his next after Rolfing. Or if he came in with a with very little low frequency activity off of the spinal cord, he gained significantly in the use of low frequencies. If he came in with increased high frequencies, after Rolfing he dropped in the high frequencies. If he came in with very little high frequencies, he increased in the frequency."
From the 1974 Healing Arts conference, on the spectrum-widening effect of the work.
Hunt's finding gives patterning its physiological mandate. If the work widens the spectrum of available movement options without specifying which option the client should use, then someone has to help the client discover and inhabit the new range. The practitioner of the ten-session series cannot follow the client home and watch him type, ice cakes, lift his children. The patterner can — in a sense — by training the client's own attention to do that watching. The widened spectrum that Hunt measured in the laboratory has to become a lived repertoire, and the discipline that turns spectrum into repertoire is patterning.
"So my conclusions on this initial study on electrical activity from the neuromuscular system and the patterning of energy of the neuromuscular system were these: that the movement was smoother, it was larger, it was more dynamic, it was more energetic after Rolfing that there was less extraneous movements extraneous meaning extraneous to the act that the postures were improved that the erect carriage was less obviously under strain and particularly during held positions. Well, that was my first study. And my second study, which is not completed at the present time it will go into computers as soon as this conference is over, and I have a moment is titled Neuromuscular Energy Field and Emotional Systems of the Body in reference to structural integration. I the design of this is somewhat different and so is the data. And this is based upon some things that happened to me during the experiences. I remembered and I heard people report that during Rolfing sessions there were frequently memory flashbacks into either prior experience or into something that they described temporary and lasting emotional changes or emotional experiences, and that many reported psychic experiences which sort of resembled raising the level of consciousness. And practically everyone or everyone reported general well-being. Well, at the time I was working on some other studies, or in between time, with schizophrenics, a neuromuscular model of anxiety with healers."
From the same Healing Arts presentation, summarizing what the lab observed.
Smoother, larger, more dynamic, more energetic — Hunt's adjectives describe a movement quality the client now possesses but does not yet own. Patterning is the discipline by which the client comes to own it. The lab can measure the change; the patterner helps the client feel it, name it, and choose it when the demands of work would pull him back toward older inefficient patterns. The two practices — measurement and instruction, the work and patterning — meet at the question of how the client lives in the body he now has.
Coda: the work the client has to do
Across the decade of public teaching from which these transcripts come, Ida returned to one principle that connects everything she said about patterning. The body cannot be reorganized by the practitioner alone — only the client's participation makes the change durable. The ten-session series gives the client a structure he could not have built for himself, but only the client can learn to live in that structure. Patterning is the formal name for the discipline of learning to live in it. Without that discipline, the work fades; with it, the work compounds.
"And the same is true with the leg, etcetera, etcetera. You cannot reorganize a body with your hands. You can only help that body to reorganize itself through movement. Now this is the basic difference in concept between what you are going into here and the other much more orthodox manipulative techniques. Their assumption is that they can replace something that has been displaced. You can, but you can't make it work there. He has to make it work there. And as you go around Essilane, a lot of people are going to pitch to you a nice little negative of, oh, well, I want something that I can do myself. And then you get them in here on the floor, and they lie like a cloud of dirt waiting for you to do something for them. This is a system which demands the participation of the individual who is being worked on for best results. Obviously, if you're working on a deaf and dumb three year old, you're not gonna get very much participation. And you can do a lot of other. But this isn't what you are taking on, I don't think, most of."
From the public RolfB1 tape, on why the client's participation is structural rather than optional.
This is the principle that holds Ida's whole conception of the two disciplines together. The work is not therapy performed on a body; it is education delivered through the body. The session asks the client to participate — to breathe, to move, to attend — and the participation is part of how the structural change is made. Patterning extends that participatory principle into the rest of the client's life. The client who learns nothing from his ten hours will lose them. The client who learns from them, and who continues the learning through patterning or through his own disciplined attention, keeps what he was given and continues the work the practitioner started. In the years after Ida's death, structural integration and movement re-education would continue to evolve along the lines she sketched in these mid-1970s conversations — separate disciplines, related histories, complementary reach, both depending on a body that can be taught and a client willing to learn.