The basin and the horizontal
Ida's vocabulary for pelvic tilt was geometric before it was anatomical. She wanted students to see the pelvis as a basin whose floor either lay parallel to the ground or did not, and she defined horizontality with a specific line — from the pubes in front to the second segment of the coccyx behind. Tilt, in this scheme, was the angle between that line and the floor. In the 1975 Boulder class, working with a skeleton in front of her, she walked the students through what they were actually looking at when they laid a body down.
"I think everybody can see, no matter where you're sitting, that the flat surface of this interspace between the last lumbar and the first sacral is on a plane, which is roughly like this. Interesting. It's about like that. And what we want to do is bring in as much as we can to this kind of a thing. Now as Doctor. Rolf mentioned, the ground is fixed. We can't do anything about that. So with the weight transmitted through the bony structures, first place we can do any rotation is right there at the head of the femur. So the whole task is to free this structure off the pelvis, free these ligaments and attachments as much as possible to the rotation, and then with the pelvic lift, to begin to rock these back and let the pelvis turn off. Put your hand there in the same position that you would do with the pelvic lift."
From the RolfB1 public tape, 1975 Boulder advanced class, talking the students through the geometry of the lumbosacral junction:
The passage names a doctrine that recurs across every advanced class: tilt is not corrected by acting on the pelvis directly. It is corrected by freeing the structures around the hip joint so that the basin can rotate around the femoral heads as a unit, with the lumbars dropping back into the space that becomes available. The horizontal is a result, not a starting position. This is why every hour of the recipe addresses the pelvis even when the practitioner's hands are nowhere near it.
"What we have done, the goal of the first hour, the goal of the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, the eighth, the ninth, and the tenth hours is to make that pelvis, is to organize that pelvis so that it knows where the horizontal is."
Later in the same demonstration, Ida names the through-line of the entire series:
The lumbars going back
If the geometry of tilt is the pubes-to-coccyx line, the mechanism of correcting tilt is the lumbar spine. In Ida's teaching across the 1975 and 1976 Boulder classes, the senior practitioners repeatedly press her on what exactly horizontalizes the pelvis, and she repeatedly returns the conversation to the lumbars. Anterior tilt is, in her account, the visible consequence of lumbars carried forward of the line of weight. The lumbosacral joint cannot do its work of weight bearing when the fifth lumbar sits anterior to where it belongs.
"Alignment by alignment, I mean, not only giving it as much horizontality as we can at this point, also alignment by dropping the lumbar spine back as much as possible in this first hour so that the lumbar begins to take up its job of weight bearing, which in many people has lost because of its anterior displacement."
Asked to expand on what she means by the pelvis taking its first taste of alignment in the first hour:
She is unusually emphatic in this passage — repeating the doctrine twice in three sentences as if to settle the matter for the room. The lumbars going back is not one option among several. It is the only available mechanism. Anterior lumbars produce a lumbosacral joint that cannot do its work, and a pelvis whose floor cannot find horizontal.
"So the lumbers have to go back. The lumbers have to go back. There is no other way to do it. And just assume just as long as the lumbers are way forward, you get the joint of the fifth lumbar and the sacrum not incompetent, relatively incompetent to do the job that they're lined up for."
She lands the doctrine:
Why the lumbars going back lets the sacrum turn
The mechanical reason that lumbar position governs pelvic tilt is that the sacrum is part of the pelvis but the lumbars are not. The sacrum can only move with the pelvis as a unit, and the pelvis can only rotate around the femoral heads when the lumbars give it permission to do so by moving posterior. In a 1975 Boulder session, Ida walks the practitioners through this chain explicitly, in response to a question about how the pelvic lift is supposed to be doing what they have been told it does.
"So the lumbars going back enables the pelvis to turn in such a fashion that the sacrum, which is part of it, the base of the sacrum goes back, the apex of the sacrum comes, turns under, comes forward. And this is dealing with the average problem."
Working through the mechanical chain with the senior practitioners:
Ida is careful here to make a distinction that students routinely miss. The sacrum does not move independently of the pelvis — it moves with the pelvis because it is part of the pelvis. What changes when the pelvis rotates is not the position of the sacrum within the pelvis but the orientation of the whole basin in space. The base of the sacrum coming back and the apex coming under are descriptions of the basin's rotation, not of any independent motion of the sacrum. This distinction matters because students who try to correct tilt by working on the sacrum directly are usually working on the wrong end of the lever.
"We've talked about the fact that we're interested interested in in horizontalizing horizontalizing the the pelvis. Pelvis. Did I hear you wanting to talk now? I think like with the pelvic lift in the end of the hour that you're beginning to like if they have anterior lumbar, you're beginning to What does the pelvic lift do? It encourages those lumbar to come back into the space that you made available? That's right. It lengthens it. It gives it more space, and then you can turn the sacrum in the greater space that you have. Right. But it's not just the lumbar, but it's also the lumbar. The whole pelvis goes with the sacrum as it moves, but the sacrum can't move till you get the lumbars back."
Earlier in the same exchange, she presses a student to think about the pelvic lift as something more than a mechanical act:
The floor of the pelvis as the unit of tilt
In her late teaching, Ida increasingly described pelvic tilt as a question about the floor of the pelvis rather than about the bony rim. The basin's geometry is determined by the plane of its floor, and the floor's plane is governed not by the pelvic-floor muscles in any simple sense but by the joints above and below — the sacroiliac articulation, the fifth-lumbar-to-sacrum joint, the fourth-to-fifth lumbar joint. This is the doctrine she lays out most fully in the RolfB4 public tape, and it reframes everything students think they know about what 'pelvic floor' means.
"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."
From the RolfB4 public tape, late in a discussion of the energy fields surrounding the body:
The reframing has direct practical consequences. If the floor of the pelvis is a joint relationship and not a muscular layer, then the floor can be moved by working anywhere along the chain that produces the joint relationship — the hamstrings that pull the ischial tuberosities down, the adductors that govern how the basin sits on the legs, the lumbar fascia that controls how high the lumbars carry. Each is a way of acting on the floor.
"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 pelvic floor. Just as soon as you take on the type of athletic training which shortens and tightens the hamstrings to the exclusion of the antagonists of the hamstrings, you're going to interfere with that pelvic floor. Just assume as you do any of these habitual postures that spread the knees wide, thereby shortening the brassless and altering the hamstring relationship in there, you're going in feel that pelvic floor. So if there is a vast terror incognito in there for each and every individual about how he developed these various physical attitudes and therefore mental attitudes. And what we are doing here, of course, is to take the outermost layer of those attitudes and sort of organize them and relate them to a place where the attitudes themselves are less constricting, are less compelling than they otherwise have been. And where as a result of the lesser compulsion that is in the muscle, you can get a lesser compulsion in the mind in terms of certain attitudes."
She continues, naming the habitual postures that interfere with the floor's geometry:
Side-to-side: the sacrum is not just anterior
Most of the discussion of pelvic tilt in the recipe literature is about anterior-posterior orientation, but in the Big Sur class of 1973 a senior practitioner named Jim raises a point that Ida confirms and develops: a sacrum that sits anterior is rarely only anterior. It is almost always tipped to one side or the other, and often rotated as well. This produces a side-to-side asymmetry in tilt that has to be addressed at the level of the soft tissue running down either side of the sacrum.
"that often times when the sacrum is in there in anterior position, it's not only anterior, it's tipped to one side or the other. So that at this point, you're affecting literally the rope on either side of the sacrum that position it in the center of the pelvis is going to have profound significance all the way up the line. And frequently it's just tipped or anterior, it's rotated."
From the Big Sur 1973 tape, after Jim's explanation of how the sacrum sits:
The coccyx, sitting at the bottom of this geometry, is subject to the same kind of asymmetric pull. The practitioners in the Big Sur class go on to discuss it directly, and Ida confirms that the coccyx is held in its sideways tilt by tendons that are unequal in length on either side. This is the level of detail at which side-to-side tilt has to be addressed — not as a global rotation of the pelvis, but as a local asymmetry of the structures holding the sacrum and coccyx in the basin.
"The coccyx is the end here and they can also be pulled over to one side or the other and it's all, if it goes one way or the other it's rotated also. It's tied up with tendons but frequently one tendon will be shorter than the other."
Continuing the same discussion, on the coccyx itself:
The first hour begins the work
In the 1975 Boulder class, the senior practitioner Bob makes a remark that becomes a touchstone for how the recipe is structured around the problem of pelvic tilt: the first hour, he says, is the beginning of the tenth hour. The second is the second half of the first. The third is the second half of the second. The recipe is not ten separate jobs but one continuous job, broken into ten because the body could not absorb all the work at once. Every hour is another approach to the same question of how to bring the basin toward horizontal.
"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."
Bob, describing what he came to understand about the structure of the recipe:
The first-hour approach to tilt is what Ida calls 'freeing the pelvis from above and from below' — lifting the thorax off the basin from above so that the basin has room to rotate, and freeing the legs from underneath so that the basin can rotate around the femoral heads. The work is on the superficial fascia and on the long structures that tie the pelvis into its neighbors. The first-hour pelvic lift is the maneuver that consolidates this freeing into an actual rotation.
"Okay. How about starting with the first hour now and seeing what you could do with each one of those hours to help the pelvis along? Well, the first hour, freeze the pelvis from both above and below. You lift the thorax off the pelvis by working up around the rib cage and under the costal margin and down along the spine of the ileum. Then you free the pelvis from underneath by working along again, along the spine and around the trochanter and down the hamstrings. And that essentially creates length along the front, which you can find by looking at the pictures of after one. Then they come in for two, and you haven't done any work below the knees, so you do some work below the knees to finish up what you did above the knees and unpinning those safety pins that are on the surface fascia."
Walking through the first hour in the 1976 advanced class:
The pelvic lift as the unit of correction
The pelvic lift recurs in every hour of the recipe, and Ida treats it as the moment when the work that has been done with the hands becomes the body's own reorganization. In the RolfB2 public tape, she gives the most complete description of what the lift is mechanically doing — it is not a stretch and not a manipulation but a coordinated turning down of the sacrum and lengthening of the lumbar vertebrae. The lift is the operation that converts freed tissue into changed geometry.
"And then you build in the freeing which you have done with your hands through a pelvic lift. And that pelvic lift is a turning down of the sacrum, a separation of the lumbar vertebrae so that they can begin to straighten out."
From the RolfB2 public tape, on what the pelvic lift is actually doing:
She continues with a description of what the practitioner is actually doing during the lift — organizing every lumbar articulation, but especially the fourth-to-fifth and the fifth-to-sacral joints, and using the fingers to stretch and reorganize the soft tissue overlying the sacrum. The lift is both a global rotation of the basin and a local reorganization of the joints that govern that rotation. It is also, in her later teaching, the moment when the practitioner asks the client to participate — to turn the tail under voluntarily — and this participation matters because permanent change requires the client to know what the new geometry feels like.
"lift. You are organizing every one of those lumbar articulations but particularly fourth to fifth and fifth to sacral. And with your fingers you are very often stretching and reorganizing the muscle in its containing fashion that overlies the sacrum. You'll find many many sacrum that feel as though they were say, is anybody down at the gate keeping it getting it open for Frank? He's As you go into that sacrum you will very often find overlays of stringy muscles and the bone feels about like the rock Of Gibraltar. And the first thing you have to is to get those stringy muscles with enough elasticity to allow the change in mobility. And then in that the cervical spine is a function, a reciprocal function of the lumbar spine."
Continuing the description, with a passage on what happens at the sacrum itself:
The fifth hour: turning the pelvis up in front
If the first hour begins the rotation of the basin, the fifth hour completes the front of it. In the 1975 Santa Monica class, Ida presses Steve Weatherwax on what the fifth hour actually does, and Steve gives the answer she is waiting for: by the fifth hour, the chest has been lifted, the back lengthened, the sides opened, and now the front of the body needs to lengthen so that the pelvis can come up more anteriorly. The fifth hour, in Ida's framing, is when the front of the basin finally rotates into its place.
"Since the first hour we've been trying to horizontalize the pelvis. Yeah. And we've gotten to the place now, we've uplifted the chest, lengthened the back sides, opened up the sides, and we started to establish a midline. And now we see that the front is beginning to need to be lengthened also. How come? From the pull of the thorax and the position of the pelvis. And the pelvis has to come up more anteriorly And by lengthening the rectus, we begin to get that and we begin to get a more total integration between the upper half and lower half. It's a very good job. A very good job. Compliment to you."
Steve answers Ida's question about what the fifth hour is, with her commentary:
Ida's amendment to Steve's answer is critical: the fifth hour is not about the bony pelvis but about the floor of the pelvis. The bony rim is what you can see; the floor is what determines whether the basin can hold its new orientation. The fourth hour has given the floor enough support from below by working up the legs; the fifth hour completes the rotation by lengthening the front so that the pubes can lift and the floor can sit horizontal.
"And you see your fourth hour has taken on the positioning of the floor of the pelvis. And the fifth hour begins to turn it up in the front so that it has support under the abdominal organs. And your sixth hour, you are still working with the pelvis and balancing that basin. You are now going in primarily to balance the sacrum with the rest of the pelvis. Just as through the entire series, we have never gone where we are working. So here, you don't go where you are working, but you go to the areas that influence the sacral position."
From the RolfB6 public tape, on the relation between the fourth, fifth, and sixth hours:
The sixth hour: the back of the sacrum
The sixth hour is where the recipe finally addresses the back of the basin — the rotators that attach to the anterior face of the sacrum, and through them the position of the sacrum itself. In the RolfA3 public tape, a senior practitioner walks through the sixth hour with Ida correcting and amplifying as he goes. The doctrine that emerges is that the sixth hour is the hour of the sacrum, and that the rotators — particularly the piriformis — are the structures that, when balanced, allow the sacrum to find its position in the basin.
"I was with them. The fact that the rotates are attaching on the anterior side of the sacrum. That's right. That's the point of the rotators. Say it again. The other end of the rotators me is the rotates on the anterior surface of the sacrum. You remember that we went into this at great length yesterday, that this is a unique situation where you can get the prevertebral organization of the sacrum from the outside of the body. And you just, any of you that want to, offer me a suggestion as to what single bone of the body and its position is more important than the sacrum."
From the RolfA3 public tape, on what the rotators are doing for sacral position:
The piriformis matters for tilt because, as Ida and the senior practitioners work through in the 1975 Santa Monica class, a shortening on one side of the piriformis pulls the sacrum to that side, producing the side-to-side asymmetry that was first named in the Big Sur 1973 discussion. Balancing the rotators is therefore the mechanical answer to the side-to-side tilt that anterior pelvises so consistently carry.
"Well, generally, the rotators, of course, affect the rear back part of the sacrum. Sacrum. Anybody wanna Danny? It seems that a shortening of or a constriction in rotators, especially in my mind, see the piriformis sucking that sacrum over to one side or the other. If it's and well, imbalancing the sacrum because of its direct pull right on the sacrum. Why do you why do you pick out the piriformis? Because it has such a a met so much of its origin or its origin is right there on the sacrum itself."
From the B2T10SA tape, on why the piriformis is singled out among the rotators:
The coccyx as the tail of the tilt
If the sacrum is the bone whose position defines the back of the basin's tilt, the coccyx is the structure that sits at the end of the chain and, in Ida's teaching, frequently determines whether the work of the rotators will hold. In the RolfB6 public tape she names three points in the recipe — the first hour, the fourth hour, and the sixth hour — where the coccyx can be addressed, and argues that if it has not been organized by the end of the sixth, there is no further appropriate moment in the series. An unorganized coccyx is what prevents the sacrum from hammocking properly between the two iliac bones.
"You haven't really stressed the fact that there there's well, at three times up to date, when you have been able to take a look at the and perhaps do something about it. The first hour, the fourth hour Mhmm. And the sixth hour. And if you haven't got it done by that time, in the first place, you are throwing rocks in your own way. But in the second place, there is no other logical place coming up where you can do this. But more than this, you are throwing rocks in your own path. Because if that pelvis if that toxic is not able to swing itself, to hammock itself between those two STI, you can't get the kind of balance in the pelvis that you're looking for. And you saw on some of these people here where fairly good fourth hours had been done. So I'm done, for instance. Fairly good four hours had been done, but you weren't getting the response."
From the RolfB6 public tape, on the necessity of organizing the coccyx by the sixth hour:
In a 1975 Boulder session, the senior practitioners work through the diagnosis of coccyx position in detail. The practitioner does not have to go in and feel the coccyx directly to know whether it is tipped — the side that is shortest, the side that is tightest, and the side that feels most aberrated are all visible signs. The position of the coccyx, once read, predicts the extent to which the practitioner can horizontalize the pelvis. It is the final variable in the geometry of tilt.
"If you want to touch it, but you don't have to, you can see it. And all this tells you about the position of the coccyx. And the position of that coccyx is going to do a very great deal in determining the extent to which you're going to be successful in, quote, horizontalizing your pelvis. It will be very important so that you deal with that coccyx at this point having dealt with the rotators and having found that you're not happy with the rotators and you don't just climb on the rotators and stay, you get off the rotators and go and look at the coccyx and see what effect this has on you. And having done as well as you can in organizing that coccyx, then you go and look at the sacrum."
From the 1975 Boulder T10SA tape, on reading the coccyx:
Cervical and lumbar as reciprocal curves
The doctrine that the cervical curve and the lumbar curve are reciprocal — that the two ends of the stick must balance or neither will hold — is repeated across every public tape in the corpus. For the question of pelvic tilt specifically, this means that the lumbars cannot be brought back permanently unless the cervicals are brought back to match. Every first hour ends with neck work, and this is not a cosmetic addition. It is the mechanical condition of the lumbar change holding.
"curve, that your lumbar curve talks about your cervical curve. Therefore, if you aim to change the one or the other permanently, you have to change the twin, the two ends of the stick. The anatomy books, the physiology books talk about these curves being secondary curves, but I have yet to see any anatomy book or physiology book really discussing the necessity of balance between the cervical and the lumbar. But this is so and this is obvious to you as you start working with bodies. So here in order to complete the work of a generalized reorganization of that body you now have to go up to the cervical spine. Remembering that you are doing once over lightly in that first hour, you are dealing primarily with superficial fashion. You are not dealing with individual muscles. You cannot get to individual muscles in the first hour. Remembering this, you realize that you cannot deal with anything in the neck in that first hour really except the spine of the the unwrapping of the sternocleidomastoid or the unwrapping of the trapezius."
From the RolfB1 public tape, on the reciprocity of cervical and lumbar curves:
Ida is unusually frank in this passage about what distinguishes Structural Integration from other manipulative methods: the practitioner does not let a person off the table without doing the best they can to integrate the change. The pelvic lift, the neck work, and the standing assessment are not optional. They are how the change becomes the body's own — and they are how anterior tilt, once reduced, stays reduced.
"Consequently, it would be completely out of order to do your first hour without doing a pelvic lift to try to organize a pelvis, without doing something to balance the change in the lower part with the upper part, without making the man or attempting to make the man conscious of fact that he is going into a new alignment. This business of simply taking your hands and manipulating this is not what it is about. What it is about is making the individual conscious of the fact that there are relations within his body which make him feel best. And it is his responsibility to move himself along toward those places. It is his responsibility to stop getting an awareness of where is the top of his head and where is his waistline, in other words, his first or second lumbar, to move them back."
Continuing the same passage:
The pelvic lift as a request, not an act
Across the public-tape lectures, Ida returns to a point about the pelvic lift that distinguishes her teaching from the manipulative methods that surrounded her in the 1960s and 1970s. The lift is not the practitioner doing something to the pelvis. It is the practitioner asking the client to turn their tail under in a particular way, and holding the soft tissue organized while they do so. In the RolfA1 public tape, she corrects a senior practitioner who has described the lift too mechanically, and the correction names a distinction she returned to throughout her late teaching.
"There is I didn't really like this whole pelvic lift that that as you described it because you did not make it clear that as you just turned the tail under, what happens with that first command is that the coccyx and the lowest part of the sacrum are just slightly started up. Tuck your tail under, you take the whole sacrum you see and force it forward. Just turn your tail under, gets to the coccyx and to the apex of the sacrum and it turns under allowing the to to"
From the RolfA1 public tape, correcting a practitioner's description of the pelvic lift:
In a later passage from the RolfB2 lecture, Ida acknowledges that this command took her almost twenty years of teaching before she got a class that could execute it correctly. Students would translate 'turn your tail under' into 'boost your hind end up into the air,' because that was the only way they knew how to use the back of the basin. Teaching tilt correction, in her account, is a teaching problem before it is a manipulative problem. The client has to learn what the new geometry feels like from the inside.
"Both of the classes this summer have listened and learned and said, now just let your pale turn under. It has taken me almost twenty years of teaching before I got a class that would do that. Because they will all say, now turn your tail under. That's right. Now lift. And the first thing that happens is that that guy takes his hind end, and he boosts it up into the air because this is the only way he knows how to use his hind end. He doesn't know how to use his hind end by letting the apex turn under. And you have to teach him. And any teaching function takes time, and it takes a step by step understanding. And when you tell a guy, that's fine now. Boost your tail up. Turn your tail under. Oh, I can't tell you how many ways they can get of avoiding that little sentence. Just let your tail turn under. Because if you do let it alone, it goes back there. And I congratulate all of you. One for being so intelligent, two for having such an intelligent teacher. Anyway but I really mean this."
From the RolfB2 public tape, on the long teaching arc of the pelvic lift command:
Tilt as the geometry of energy
In her late lectures — the Healing Arts lecture of 1974, the Structure lectures of the same year, the public-tape series of the mid-1970s — Ida increasingly framed pelvic tilt not as a postural problem but as the geometric condition for the body to accept support from the gravitational field. A body whose basin is tilted is a body that cannot let gravity reinforce it; instead, gravity disorganizes the structure by passing through it at angles the structure cannot accommodate. Horizontalizing the pelvis is, in this framing, the operation that converts gravity from an enemy into an ally.
"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."
From the Healing Arts lecture of 1974, on the relation between vertical alignment and the body's energy:
Pelvic tilt, in this final framing, is what disorganizes the body's relation to its energetic environment. The basin's plane is the registration point for the entire vertical line. When the pelvis is anterior, the lumbar vertebrae cannot align with the hip joints; when the lumbars cannot align, the shoulders cannot balance over the basin; when the shoulders cannot balance, the head and the ears cannot find the vertical line. Tilt is the geometric problem that propagates through every other level of the structure, which is why the entire recipe is, in the end, a recipe for the pelvis.
"So what you say is true, but if you Now together and we're freeing the pelvis, and by freeing the pelvis, we're allowing the sacrum to start coming under so that they can start supporting those lumbars. So how do you do that? In the first hour? So we're working on the superficial fascia all around the pelvis, and we're starting to get good legs under. Said to bring the positioning of that pelvis in relation to the lumbar curve. It happens through yielding one, tilting the pelvis under and raising so that the process of laying on a hand then of coming under and and helping that person to get length through the lumbar spine. In fact, could length through the whole spine. By lowering then onto the floor, the lumbar spine in relation in a different relation at this point."
From the Big Sur 1973 advanced class, on the first-hour preparation for the cervical-lumbar relationship:
Coda: tilt as the recipe's organizing question
Across more than two thousand pages of transcript from advanced classes between 1971 and 1976, pelvic tilt is the structural question Ida returns to most often. Not because it is the most exotic teaching, but because it is the geometric center of everything else she taught. The basin's orientation determines whether the lumbars can drop back, whether the rib cage can lift, whether the legs can carry weight efficiently, whether the cervical curve can find its reciprocal. Every hour of the ten-session recipe is, in this sense, another approach to the same question. The first hour begins the work by freeing the pelvis from above and below. The third addresses the side body that constrains lateral tilt. The fourth supports the floor from underneath. The fifth turns the front up so the basin completes its rotation. The sixth addresses the back of the sacrum through the rotators. The seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth confirm and integrate what the earlier hours made possible.
What gives Ida's teaching on tilt its distinctive shape is the layering of mechanism. She does not say 'the pelvis is tilted because the lumbars are forward' and stop there. She says the lumbars are forward, and the sacrum cannot turn until the lumbars come back, and the lumbars cannot come back until the soft tissue around the basin is freed, and the soft tissue cannot be freed until the thorax has been lifted off and the legs have been freed from underneath, and even all of that does not hold unless the cervical curve is brought into reciprocal relation with the new lumbar position. The chain is long, and each link is necessary. This is why she resisted students who tried to reduce the work to a single key — the psoas, the piriformis, the pelvic floor muscles. None of them is the answer alone; all of them are part of the same geometric question.
"Rolfe an article written by Roy Elkins from Mayo Clinic, He stated in there the necessity of developing a posture with the pelvis horizontal and what have you, to the degree of what happens when a person attempts to hold it by contracting the gluteal muscles and the abdominal muscles. But as soon as you relax, it falls back in the other position. She wrote back to him and says they say it, but nobody has said how to do it. And doctor Rolf is the one who said how to how to do it. Do any of you know anybody who gets in there in a classroom and says how you do it? I do."
From the Mystery Tapes (1971-72), citing Ida's response to an article by Roy Elkins of the Mayo Clinic:
Ida's claim, repeated across the public-tape lectures and the advanced classes, was not that she had discovered the importance of a horizontal pelvis. The accepted schools of body mechanics already taught that. Her claim was that she had discovered how to bring the pelvis to horizontal — by treating the body as a plastic medium, by working on the soft tissue rather than on the bones, by organizing the basin's relations to its neighbors rather than commanding it into position. The teaching on pelvic tilt is, in this sense, the teaching that the rest of the work elaborates.
See also: See also: 1974 Open Universe Class (UNI_044) — Ida discusses how habitual immature gait patterns produce the anterior-pelvis carriage and how those patterns become structurally fixed in the fascia; included as a pointer for readers interested in the developmental side of tilt. UNI_044 ▸
See also: See also: 1974 Structure Lectures (STRUC1) — the biographical and theoretical lecture in which Ida traces her own development of the doctrine of vertical alignment, useful for readers wanting the longer arc of how the geometry of tilt entered her thinking. STRUC1 ▸
See also: See also: 1973 Big Sur Tape 12 (SUR7322) — extended discussion of the obturator fascia, the iliococcygeus, and how the rotator work in the sixth hour propagates into the floor of the pelvis; included as a pointer for readers interested in the deeper mechanism of the sixth-hour approach to tilt. SUR7322 ▸
See also: See also: 1975 Boulder advanced class T9SB and T10SB — extended dialogue on the relation between the pelvic lift and the neck work, and on how the head-pelvis connection is consolidated by the integrative work that closes each hour. T9SB ▸T10SB ▸