What the anatomy books do not show
Ida Rolf began many of her advanced classes by asking what kind of anatomy a practitioner actually needs. The standard texts — Cunningham, Gray, the old colored plates — were not wrong so much as derived from a way of seeing that cut the body into discrete parts before the question of structure could even be asked. The early anatomists, working in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, had to begin somewhere; they cut, they named, they drew. Their work was a necessary starting point, and the elementary class taught from it as a matter of course. But in the advanced class she demanded something else: a second pass at the body, after the elementary training, in which the practitioner re-sees what the textbook cannot show. The opening move was to declare the textbook inadequate and ask the student to look at the dissection photographs Ron Thompson had taken under Lewis Schultz's direction — photographs that documented what actually emerged on the slab.
"In order to get a working concept of the body, you have to begin to see it not as the pictures in the anatomy book. The pictures in the anatomy books, God knows where they came from, I don't necessarily. Some of them are extremely misleading and they seem to fail to get the sense that my vision, such as it is, has projected that Lewis Schultz and Ronnie Thompson and, to a certain extent, Jim Asher have been trying to demonstrate in dissection laboratories."
Opening the 1976 Boulder advanced class, she names what the practitioner has to see past:
The image of the cylindrical spider web is doing real work here. A spider's web is a structure in which a disturbance at any one point registers at the farthest periphery; this is the property she wanted the practitioner to internalize before laying hands on anyone in the advanced sequence. The elementary student could be excused for thinking that the iliotibial band ended at the knee or that the trapezius ended at the spine of the scapula. The advanced student had to learn that nothing ended where the textbook line ended. The connection traveled.
"to the pictures in the anatomy book. Feel that But if you look at these pictures, these Ron Thompson has taken with absolute inspiration of the dissection which they did, you w"
Pointing to the difference between the page and the slab:
Fascia as the organ the medical schools missed
Practical anatomy, for Ida, was organized around a single structural fact the standard curriculum had largely declined to teach: that the connective tissue — fascia, the myofascial body, the collagen system — is the organ of structure. The textbooks named individual muscles, gave them origins and insertions, and treated the wrapping around them as a passive sheath. Ida insisted the wrapping was the structure. The muscle was the contractile element inside; the fascia was what held the body's shape, what determined contour, what positioned the bones, what relayed mechanical change from one region to another. She often dated the eclipse of structural thinking to the late nineteenth century, when the rise of synthetic chemistry pulled medical attention away from mechanics toward biochemistry. The structural school, she said, had gone underground for nearly a century and was only now resurfacing.
"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."
Speaking to the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, she names what the medical curriculum had failed to teach:
Because the textbooks had not made fascia central, the working vocabulary the practitioner needed did not yet exist in a usable form. Ida liked to tell the story of a student she had sent to the library to come back with a definition of fascia. The student spent two days among the standard references and could not find what she was looking for. The omission was not accidental, in Ida's reading; it followed from a century-long preference for chemistry over mechanics. To do the work, the practitioner had to build the missing chapter herself.
"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. I remember sending somebody who came to me as a student and I set them the question of I set them to answer the question, what is fascia? She decided that was lots of fun. She'd go to the library. She'd have the answer in no time. She went to the library. She spent two days in the library, and she couldn't find the answer. 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."
Teaching the 1974 Healing Arts class, she frames fascia as supportive architecture and reports on her student's library search:
The deficit was not only verbal. The dissection itself, when done with the standard technique of cutting through fascial planes rather than along them, destroyed the very information the practitioner needed. Modern surgeons, Ida noted with approval, were beginning to learn the opposite — to slide between fascial planes rather than across them — but the standard anatomical preparation had been built on cutting, and what the textbooks displayed was therefore the residue of a method that erased its own subject.
The myofascial unit, not the muscle
If fascia is the organ of structure, then the muscle named in the textbook is not really the working unit. The working unit is the myofascia — the contractile element together with its envelope, considered as one indivisible structural element. In the 1975 Boulder class, a student named David pressed Ida on this point: was the fascia around the organs the same kind of thing as the fascia around the muscles? Her answer drew a careful distinction. The fascia around the liver or the kidney holds the organ in place but does not penetrate it; the fascia around a muscle is so completely interwoven with the contractile fibers that you cannot dissect one fiber's wrapping away from the muscle it belongs to. The myofascia is therefore not a wrapped muscle but a single structure.
"of the fashion. This is also true. Is true. And this is a very penetrating insight that you've had there. It's like the fascia around organs is sort of has It's just holding the organ Yeah. But the fascia around muscles is actually almost indistinguishable within the muscle from the fascia. It's all so tightly interwoven together. Although the sheets around the muscle, the fascial sheets are distinguishable, you can't go in and dissect the fascia of one muscle fiber away from it. Did you ever dissect? Yeah. Then you know what you're talking about, whereas really most of the people here are imagining what you're talking about. It is true, it is true, and you see there is a reason why it is called the myo fascial body. Because there is only god knows what was the instinct that made those old anatomists try to understand by the kind of analysis that they made. See, they felt they had to analyze. Like if you're dissecting a brain, you can get yourself more balled up than any other fashion by trying, as you dissect the brain, to see the line of demarcation between these various parts of it. And the same thing is true down in the myofascial body, to try to see just where these, and yet, and yet, a great many modern surgeons are learning to not cut through the fascia, but to slide between the fascia to get where they want to go."
Answering David in the 1975 Boulder advanced class:
The point is not merely terminological. To name something a myofascial unit is to assert that you cannot work on a muscle without working on its fascia, and that the contractile activity you observe at one place is conditioned by the fascial tension distributed across many places. The textbook image of a muscle as a discrete actor with a defined origin, insertion, and action becomes, in this reframing, a useful simplification that the practitioner must then learn to see past.
"Now it takes an awful lot of thinking before this is really part of your mental process, and the best way that I know of to suggest your thinking is to turn you loose on some of this stuff, and get you to do the kind of tracing that gives you a greater reality of what David's talking about. What makes a muscle not an organ, but a myofascial unit? You see, these fascial planes have many reasons for being. Some of them are just holding things apart, seeing to it that your liver doesn't get balled up with your lungs, or your stomach, or your diaphragm, diaphragm, or something. But others are a different situation. Others say that the myofascia is the unit that relates parts appropriately, that it is where your fascial body literally is which determines that structural relationship which we have been preaching as if the relationship is right, the health is good, the well-being is there."
Continuing the same exchange, she names what makes a muscle a myofascial unit rather than an organ:
Trace it with paper over the page
Ida did not ask students to abandon the anatomy books. She asked them to use the books differently. In the 1975 Santa Monica class, working through the fifth hour with students who could not name the muscles of the pelvic floor, she gave a concrete pedagogical instruction: lay a transparent sheet over the anatomy plate and trace it. Only by that kind of hand work, she said, would the practitioner come to know what she had been looking at. The exercise looks elementary, but its purpose is structural — to slow the reading eye down to the speed of the hand, so that the relationships between adjacent structures register as the practitioner draws them.
"see, I would strongly suggest that you get into your anatomy books with a transparent sheet over it and trace it. Only by that kind of work are you going to know."
Pressing students who could not name the muscles of the pelvic floor in the 1975 fifth-hour class:
The tracing exercise was meant to address a specific deficiency. Students arrived in the advanced class able to recite the names of structures but unable to position them in three dimensions relative to one another. Ida thought this was because the eye had been trained for speed — to read a page, to recognize a label, to move on — and that the speed of recognition prevented the deeper relational pattern from registering. The hand, drawing slowly, did what the eye refused to.
"You just look at him here and tell me where they are. So now you've got to get the organization, the relation of muscles in the leg appropriate to the job of maintaining the weight of the body and to the job of moving the weight of the body. This is function for the legs. And so you get on with it and you go down and you take a look at what is holding it immobile. And you start making that move with your toes up, foot up, foot up, toes up, toes down, foot down. The demand in every direction for movement while you seek to it that the muscle is where the muscle belongs. And this demands that you know where the muscle belongs, and this demands that you read the book."
Discussing the second-hour work on the legs, she ties anatomy study directly to the practitioner's task at the table:
Fascial planes — the anatomy that does not yet exist
The deepest layer of Ida's complaint against the textbooks was that they had not yet produced an anatomy of the fascial planes. Individual muscles were named; the named fascial bands — the lumbodorsal, the iliotibial, the thoracolumbar — appeared as discrete items; but the continuous interconnected sheet system that practitioners actually worked on had not been systematically documented. She hoped Lewis Schultz would eventually produce the book that would do this work, and she put repeated pressure on him during the 1970s to that end. In the meantime, students had to imagine the planes by extrapolation from what they could already feel under their hands.
"This interrelated, this interlocked set of webbing which we call fascial planes. Now, we need to know something about the anatomy of the fascial planes."
Naming the anatomical gap directly in the 1976 Boulder opening:
In the public RolfA5 tape she develops the same point. The patterns of muscular anatomy had been mapped; the patterns of fascial anatomy had not. If a practitioner wanted to explain to a curious observer how the work actually changes the body, she had to use the word fascia, and the word fascia was not yet in the audience's vocabulary. The educational task was therefore double — to teach the practitioner the anatomy of fascial planes and to give them language with which to teach others.
"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."
On the public RolfA5 tape, she names the unfinished anatomy directly:
Reading contour, not structures
Practical anatomy is anatomy you can see from across the room. In the 1975 Boulder class a student described a moment of reorientation: he had been looking at the back of a body and seeing scapulae sticking out — that is, named structures pushing into his visual field — and then realized that what he was looking at was actually superficial fascia reflecting the position of everything beneath. The scapula was a contour, not an object. The teaching point Ida was driving at: the practitioner does not see structures; the practitioner sees the surface fascia reading out what the deeper layers are doing.
"fascia of the hide. Always before when I looked, I saw there's a scapula sticking out at me. Instead of thinking that the superficial fascia is a reflection of what's happening deep, in other words, there's a bump there. Something's pushing out at me. So that was kind of a revelation for me, that whatever deep is reflecting into the superficial fascia. I was always looking scapula instead of just looking out at the mountains and seeing the contours instead of the names of the peaks. So as long as I'm now thinking in terms of the reflection of the superficial fascia, Then I think broader. My mind all of a sudden goes broader. Well, here's a bump here and here's a valley here. It's not so much the scapula is poking out at me and the thorax is turned or pushed in. It's now here's the heel in the valley. So that was interesting for me. Any of the rest of you have similar enlightenments?"
In the 1975 Boulder class, a senior student describes the perceptual shift:
Ida confirmed the perception and pressed it further. The eye trained on textbook plates looks for known shapes and finds them; the eye trained on fascial contour looks for relationships and finds those. The shift between the two ways of looking is what distinguishes the elementary practitioner from the advanced one. She acknowledged that this could not be taught quickly: the standard anatomical vocabulary was too entrenched, the textbook image too readily available.
"It's continuous throughout the body, its chemical properties are such that it may be changing. Wait a minute Sharon, I think you need to put a more evocative metaphor in that. It envelops each muscle, but you see, it isn't apparent from that sentence that not only does it envelop each individual muscle but that these wrappings of individual muscles connect. It's like a section of an orange when you take it and cut it in half. Well it is. Yes. And the the membrane is tissue in between the pulp. Yes. It will give you an idea of what fascia is like in the body. Yes. Except the body fascia is much more comfortable than the orange fascia. And if you sometimes dissect a leg of lamb, left it or otherwise, you will see how the wrapping of the small individual muscles join somewhere along the line to make this tough stuff that then adheres to the bone."
Teaching the same lesson in the 1973 Big Sur class with a culinary analogy:
Colleagues in the room
Ida's revision of practical anatomy was not solitary work. Lewis Schultz, Ron Thompson, Jim Asher, and Michael Salveson appear repeatedly in the transcripts as colleagues building the alternative anatomy alongside her. Schultz was developing theoretical accounts of human development as continuous connective-tissue elaboration; Thompson was documenting the dissection findings photographically; Asher was contributing to the advanced classes' theoretical content. Salveson contributed the concept of the fascial tube — a vertical fascial column extending from the cervicals downward — which gave practitioners a way to track how horizontal work on the ankle propagated upward into the rib cage.
"Well yesterday someone, I don't know who said it to me, it's Michael Salison's concept of the fascial tube which starts in the cervicals and goes in the second hour when you start working on the ankles you're heading vertically again. Know that each horizontal that you bring out down below reflects itself upward as we saw in Takashi yesterday where he's working on his leg and you can see his rib cage absorbing the change. I mean this, when the tissue is in tension, that's stored energy that you release into the body. And its energy is not a metaphysical something. These molecules are aligned in a particular way. You change their alignment. The change spreads."
Referencing Michael Salveson's contribution in the 1975 Boulder class:
Lewis Schultz's contribution went further than nomenclature. He was developing a theoretical account of the connective-tissue cell as the least differentiated, most labile cell in the embryo — the cell that retained the most potential because it had not yet committed to becoming bone, muscle, or anything else. From this developmental fact he was building an argument about what the connective-tissue body actually is, structurally and energetically. Ida wanted his work in print and said so repeatedly.
"aspect? Heaven forbid, by no means. We are, or at least we should, be adding to our tools to enable us to create a more effective whole. Lewis and Ron will later show you the evidence of their zeal and labor a result of which Lewis has developed some very challenging and intriguing revolutionary theories concerning the development of the life manifestation which we call a human being. I do so hope he will get these ideas into print soon, see Lewis Ida, so that we may all share them because when this happens we will be able to take great pride in this contribution. Great pride that such a contribution, such a revolutionary contribution, has come out of the insights which have been fostered, created by Rolfing. And so let me do it once again, I hope he will publish it soon. I'm sure that all the people in the advanced class of the '76 in New Jersey will bear me out in applauding the contribution which has been made toward a greater effectiveness of the advanced methods at the hands of Ralfas resulting from that greater understanding, that greater understanding of these systems and of how these systems are put together."
Praising Schultz at the 1971-72 IPR conference, she asks him to publish:
The myofascial body and what it actually does
Practical anatomy is not only a different way of seeing the body; it carries different claims about what the named structures actually do. The textbook tells the student that muscles produce movement and bones bear weight. Ida's framing inverted both. The bones in a vertebral column, she observed, do not show the kind of stress lines you would expect if they were bearing continuous compressive load. The connective tissue distributes the load through tensile patterns, and the bones, in the body that has been organized, behave more like spacers in a tensegrity arrangement than like stacked masonry.
"things about those sections of femur and so on is that they are all average bodies. Right. And using their bones, they carry the weight around. But so are so are these vertebrae. Yeah. And even in even in average bodies, the vertebrae don't look like compression structures at all. Inadequate compression structure. When they do get when they do start to get compressed, they start to get wedged. But but in the average random body, they, you know, they don't develop distress lines that belie a, you know, continuous compression function throughout lifetime. Where do you see those stress lines again? You see them there's some really good pictures in some of the books in Cunningham in Graves. You see them all up and down the leg bones. You see them in the head of the femur. You see them in the calcaneus, those two places really well. Interestingly enough, you see them in the sacrum. Probably you'd only see him in the sacrum and ran the bodies. Probably that's Definitely good thing to have photographs of us so we can we can clarify this idea, you know Yeah. Among us. Then we could that'd be simple to have good photographs of the show, the existence of and the nonexistence of them. Right. Food for thought. That's an excellent argument for the for the vertebra being non weight bearing. Yeah. It's the most convincing I've heard so far. So that then being added with their shock absorbers makes Yeah. Well, it's are capable of taking those Mhmm."
In the 1975 Boulder class, a senior practitioner makes the structural argument explicitly:
What the fascia does, in this framing, is hold the body's contour. The muscles inside the fascial envelopes contribute force, but the position the body occupies in space — its shape, the distance between the shoulder girdle and the iliac crest, whether the rib cage rides high or has collapsed onto the pelvis — is set by the fascial sheets. This is why, in Ida's recipe, the first hour begins on the superficial fascia of the thorax: not because the thorax is the most important region but because the superficial fascia is what the practitioner can reach and what controls the bony segments through their fascial attachments.
"But at any rate, this is a beautiful example I think of how the contour of the body is determined really by the connective tissue, not by the muscle. And you can see the pull here of the strap which is pulling that buttocks, really think I got some pictures of Why at this point to talk about useful or effective tissue versus mild fascial tissue, etcetera, etcetera? My preference now and I don't always do it because I've got to change my head on this is I prefer to call it connective tissue. I think we're in a lot less trouble if we do it. The problem is that first of all every organ has its fascia so we would have to say myofascial. We tend it from an eye tendon. When I talked about fascia is to think of the wrapping around muscle. Then I realized fascia is fascia around all the glands, there's fascia around all the organs and so forth. The myofascial I think is like a part of the fascia and as long as we consider it as only part that we're affecting more than that, that we are affecting as you've started to say, we are affecting the glandular system and it may be, it's easy to say that a beginning effect can be by affecting its fascia and affecting its circulation because indeed we have all the blood vessels in the fascia or in the connective tissue. So at this point I'm preferring to say connective tissue and then talk about the fascia, the myofascia as one part of it and I don't always get there. I mean as I get talking I don't know."
Discussing the 1976 advanced class, Ida and a colleague develop the proposition that fascia, not muscle, determines contour:
Collagen and the chemistry that makes the work possible
Practical anatomy, in Ida's teaching, also had to include a working understanding of the chemistry of the connective tissue. The reason fascia can be reorganized under the practitioner's hands is that the collagen molecule — the protein that makes up most of the connective-tissue matrix — is a colloid, and colloids change state when energy is added to them. The student of practical anatomy therefore needs to understand the difference between a sol and a gel, why heat liquefies gelatin and cold sets it, and how pressure applied through the practitioner's elbow or fingers performs the same physical work on the body's collagen that heat performs on the gelatin in the kitchen.
"Collagen is a colloid and as are all large molecules of protein molecules of protein. Colloids have certain qualities in common. An outstanding one is that by the addition of energy, they become more fluid, more resilient. You remember that half set pan of gelatin in water? And water, it's gelled. You set it back on the stove, you turn up the light, and lo and behold, it liquefies. You take it off the stove, you set it in the fridge, and lo and behold, it solidifies. These this is a generalized quality of colloids and it is a generalized quality of the connected connective tissue of the body. Add energy to it and it becomes more fluid, more sol. Subtract energy and it becomes more dense, more solid, a gel. And as I said before, what do we mean by energy? In the case of the jello, we're talking about heat. In the case of the body, we may be talking about heat. Remember how different your flesh feels to your fingers in the very hot weather? There are people where you put your hand on their flesh in very hot ninety, hundred degree weather and it feels as though you're going right through them. But in terms of roughing here, we are talking about pressure. Pressure at the right points, in the right directions at the hands of the roper."
In the 1974 Healing Arts series, she walks through the chemistry that makes the work possible:
This is what made the chemistry chapter of practical anatomy non-optional. Without the colloid framework, the practitioner had no theoretical account of what was actually happening under the hands. With it, the warming sensation that students reported during the work, the melting feeling at the point of stuck tissue, became intelligible as a state change in a known protein. The textbooks of standard anatomy did not include this material because they were not asked to; the practical-anatomy syllabus required it.
The body as a center reaching outward
One of Ida's more striking reframings of practical anatomy proposed that the body should not be conceived as something contained within the skin but as something centered at the lumbodorsal junction and reaching outward through the fascial planes. In her August 1974 IPR lecture, she developed this idea by reference to the twelfth dorsal vertebra — the innervational center, in her account, for digestion, elimination, reproduction, the kidneys, the adrenals, the spleen. The fascial planes radiating from this region were therefore not a wrapping holding things in but a distribution system extending the body outward through space.
"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. Because I do not think that the very essential understanding of the different role of human beings is going to come out until somebody does some heavy thinking about how this thing can be a center of something that is reaching out in every direction through the fascial planes. Okay. If I can just make one more point, one concept of the old fascial thing that we've not really given much thought to is that there is also fascial coverings of all the organs. The kidneys, the intestines and so forth. All of which continuous with this kind of fascia that I'm talking about in the muscles. So that there is no really dependence in any part of the body."
In her August 1974 IPR lecture, she offers a reorientation of how to imagine the body's center:
The image of the body as a center reaching outward did several things at once. It displaced the skin as the body's boundary; it gave the practitioner a new way to think about why working on a region of fascia might register at a distant point; and it tied the structural argument to a physiological one — the twelfth-rib region as a neurological hub whose disorganization would propagate through the autonomically innervated systems. The textbook image of the body as a labeled container could not accommodate any of this.
Reading the dissection laboratory
Practical anatomy in Ida's teaching depended on dissection done in a particular way. The standard medical-school preparation — lifting the abdominal contents out as a unit and laying them on a slide, cutting through fascial planes to expose underlying muscles — destroyed the very integration the practitioner needed to see. Ron Thompson's photographs documented a different practice: dissection that respected the continuity of fascial sheets, that preserved the relationships between adjacent structures, that showed the body as the interweaving of planes Ida had been claiming it was. The photographs functioned in the advanced class as evidence — proof, presented visually, that what the textbooks showed was a partial record.
"In the late eighteen ninety's, it was customary in medical schools to do dissections and as they opened the individual, they took and just lifted the whole abdominal contents contents up up and and they they put put it it on on the the slide. Slide 15. Nobody paid any attention to it or that was suggestive stuff. And it wasn't until the of Claude Bernhardt. Claude Bernhardt got the bright idea that maybe in that heap of stuff that they just dumped on the sled, there was something that was significant studying it. It is important that you know about Claude Bernard. It is important that you understand that the same sort of historical process is repeated over and over and over again. Claude Bernard, as I said, devoted his much life to finding out what was in that heap of stuff and what did it do and why did it do it. Finally he was awarded the Meechin Alona Alona for his work. And when he got up to give him speak the customary speech, he opened it by saying, Gentlemen, a man is a something built around a gut. Now you can see how similar is this program to what we are going to do. And we are going to someday get cited, and we're going to get up and we're going to say, Gentlemen, a man is this something built around that I think that before we're through, we're going to talk about it being built around an electronic system. Because we've gotten to the point where we are past putting it around the fascial system. But look, we had to go through that before we understood about it and what we understand today."
In the 1973 Big Sur class, she traces the history of medicine's relationship to the abdominal cavity:
Schultz and Thompson's program was therefore not only documentary but rhetorical. The photographs supplied the missing illustrations the textbook had failed to produce; they also served as evidence, in the IPR conferences and the advanced classes, that the connective-tissue body Ida had been describing for decades was visible to anyone who knew how to dissect it without destroying it.
What the practitioner has to do at home
If practical anatomy is not yet finished and the textbooks do not contain the synthesis the practitioner needs, then the burden falls on the practitioner to construct the missing chapter herself. In the 1975 Boulder class, working through what eighth, ninth, and tenth hours required, Ida pressed her students to take their books home and study the fascial planes at the joints. The instruction was specific and demanding: get many books, compare them, trace what they show, and then build a working picture of how the planes converge at the structural transitions of the body. No single book would do it; no class would do it for the student.
" You are going to have to take your books, for example, and go to as many of them as you can to study the way fascial planes come together at junctions, at the joints. You see, that tenth hour you said was a joint hour, And at the time you"
Teaching the tenth-hour material in the 1975 Boulder class, she names the homework:
The injunction to consult multiple sources reflected Ida's view that no single book was reliable. The standard texts disagreed; some omitted relevant structures; some named fascial bands without showing their connections. The practitioner had to triangulate. Reading several books against one another, then reading the body against the books, was the only path to a usable working knowledge.
"You see, that tenth hour you said was a joint hour, And at the time you did it, maybe you were thinking in terms of tendons, muscle tendons. But now you're going to have to put a different hat on this situation, and you're going to have to look at it in terms of fashion, fashion meeting in the joint, fashion crossing the joint. What will be the effect on the fascial plane if you put more material? In other words, protein, carbohydrate, etcetera, etcetera, under that fascial plane and force it out. What's going to happen to it? What's going to happen to it in terms of physics? What's going to happen to it in terms of chemistry? Now I cannot say to you, you go to such and such a book and all the answers are there. There is not one book that has more than one and a half answers in it. And your job in the next four weeks is to forget all the nice things you could be doing down here in this town and sitting with this and meditating on it, if you want to call it meditation, but you'd better meditate with six books in front of you and a pencil in your hand, and thinking what happens. You have every last one of you experienced what happens under your fingers. Every last one of you here, some time or another, has had me screaming at them to get that stuff off the bone. It's glued to the bone. And all of a sudden, the next time you look at it, lo and behold, it isn't glued to the bone. It's a pad instead of a thin skin, fluid to foam. So that what you are having to do is an exploring job. And I can't tell you. The books can't tell you. Nobody can tell you about it. You are going to have to do it yourself, and there will be some of you who will get the kind of insight that will then contribute to the consolidation of what we know about these things and need to, at one time or another, publish."
Continuing the same teaching moment, she names what the practitioner has to do that no book can do:
Seeing fascial sheets in living bodies
Practical anatomy is tested in the moment of looking at a body. In the 1976 advanced class, working with a student whose pelvis had tipped and whose rib cage had collapsed onto it, Ida pressed her advanced students to identify what they were seeing as a disparity between two fascial planes — the deep fascia of the recti abdominis was too tight relative to the anterior fascia of the trunk. The student who answered her by naming the sheath of the psoas was told plainly that he did not yet belong in the advanced class because he had not yet been taught to see. The lesson she was demanding was the substitution of fascial-plane perception for named-structure recognition.
"The first mark, to me, his pelvis looks quite horizontal, but his rib cage collapsed. Pelvis doesn't look horizontal to me. It looks tipped the wrong way. It's tipped the opposite way from most of these buildings. But there is a something here which the advanced students should see. And that is that the deep fascia the deep fascia of the recti abdominis is too tight, and it's too tight for the anterior fascia. Now look. Look at them and see whether you see it. When you say anterior fascia, you mean the sheath enclosing the psoas? Go on. You do not belong in the advanced class. You haven't been taught to see. I'm not putting you down, but I'm simply saying you can't tell a six year old what you tell a 16 year old."
Pressing an advanced student in the 1976 class to see fascial sheets rather than named structures:
The exchange illustrates what Ida meant by practical anatomy as a perceptual discipline rather than a verbal one. The student could name the structure perfectly well; what he could not yet do was see the body as a system of sheets in disparate tension. That kind of seeing was the actual content of the advanced training, and it could not be acquired by additional reading. It had to be built through repeated exposure to bodies under the instruction of someone who already saw that way.
The recipe as embodied anatomy
One of the more striking implications of Ida's view of practical anatomy is that the ten-session series itself was a kind of anatomy lesson — not a lesson delivered in lectures but one delivered through the practitioner's hands and through the body's progressive reorganization. The first hour taught the practitioner about superficial fascia; the second hour about how the legs anchor the pelvis; the third hour about the quadratus and the twelfth rib; and so on. The recipe was a curriculum, and what it taught was practical anatomy.
"The first hour is the beginning of the tenth hour. Okay? Uh-huh. The second hour is a follow-up of the first hour. Uh-huh. It's just the second half of the first hour. Okay? And the third hour is the second half of the second and first hour. It's literally a continuation. I clearly I clearly saw, you know, last summer that continuation process and how and, you know, Dick talked about how, you know, the only reason it was broken into 10, you know, sessions like that was it because the body just couldn't take all that work. Couldn't take it right. But I just sitting on just trying to figure out how the hell she ever figured out that process, and then began to see it. What she did is what most of of us need to do more. She just sat and watched bodies. And she just kept on doing it. And put unfortunately, she's a little bit more brilliant than the rest of us. 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. She integrated her life towards understanding structural integration."
Discussing the recipe's pedagogical logic with a senior practitioner in the 1975 Boulder class:
What this implied for the student of practical anatomy was that the textbook ordering of muscles by region — leg, trunk, arm — was structurally arbitrary. The order that mattered was the order in which the body could give up its restrictions, which was the order the recipe followed. Anatomical knowledge organized in this way looked very different from the anatomy of the standard plates; it was organized functionally, around what came next.
"The reason she's doing that is because in her integration of the educational process, she has seen that by just talking about the pelvis and not possibly reemphasizing the importance of those large lumbars, that people tend to forget that. They miss that part of it. I was giving this whole thing some thought last night. 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."
Continuing the 1975 Boulder discussion of the recipe's structural logic:
The body as system, not parts
By the eighth, ninth, and tenth hours, the practitioner's working anatomy had to make a further shift — from the body conceived as a sum of myofascial parts to the body conceived as a fascial complex in which the parts are subordinate to the whole. Ida pressed her students hard on this transition. The advanced practitioner could no longer afford to listen to the individual screams of individual regions; the practitioner had to read the body's overall fascial topology and decide what region's release would most benefit the whole. The shift was difficult precisely because it ran counter to the textbook habit of treating each named structure as an independent actor.
"And another thing that I think is important in EHR is you've done a great deal of work already. So some of the things which the body needs to have done of screen out at you more, what this I want done now, this body. This is true. And I think also that because you've opened up three to four, you can get in a lot deeper. But on the other hand, what you have to get away from in the eighth and ninth hour if you're going to get true integration, you have to get away from listening to the individual screams of individual parts because you are beginning to get into an understanding of the body as a fascial complex. And this is something that you are going to need to understand if you're going to go on into advanced work. Because in the advanced hours, you are looking at the body no longer as this plus this plus this plus this. You're looking at the body as a large sized piece of the whole facial complex. Another thing I think is important too, of where you think it is at eight, that you may think, here's where the body needs the most help. And this is one of the traps you get into when you're looking at small pieces. Because you may think, well, it's going to be up here or it's going to be at the thorax or it's going be at the ankle."
Working through the eighth and ninth hours in the 1976 advanced class, she names the shift in perception practical anatomy requires:
Ida had been saying for years, in various forms, that her students knew how to take a body apart but not how to put one back together. The diagnosis was as much about anatomy training as about technique. The standard curriculum taught analysis — dividing a system into named parts — but never asked the student to perform the inverse operation of synthesis. Practical anatomy as Ida defined it required both, and the second was harder.
"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. Obviously, if you're working on those little that brain injury child's picture I showed you yesterday, you have to do it, most of it. But this isn't this isn't the trip we're on right here right now. So who hasn't got an idea who hasn't got a clear idea of what's going on in the first hour? My I going to say about the legs. Oh, did I finish what I was gonna say about the legs?"
On the public RolfB1 tape, she names the first hour's anatomical logic explicitly:
Static and dynamic anatomy
Practical anatomy as Ida taught it was not only spatial but temporal. The body had to be understood not as a frozen arrangement but as a moving system. In her August 1974 IPR lecture she pressed advanced students to recognize that the verticality they had learned to see in the elementary class was a static measurement, useful as a starting point but inadequate for the advanced work. The real subject of the advanced hours was dynamic balance — the way the body's parts continually adjusted to one another in motion.
"Even the first day that we started the advanced class. Look at the first day of the elementary class, look at the first day of the advanced class and look at what you are talking about this morning. You see those other two first days. You saw radicality as being so much more important. And as of today, you are beginning to recognize that it isn't verticality. It's no longer the static, it's the dynamic. Now the problems that, the questions that you bring in and that fall into these two groups, you think that the dynamic is further along the static. It's something has to be added to the static before you get the dynamic. And you've been adding to it in these four hours. The first hour, the eleventh hour so to speak, doesn't add very much dynamic. If you notice what you see is the static improvement of the whole body below the waistline. But that is the road, that is the sort of bridge by which you bridge into the dynamic. Once again, it's the legs you see. But you somehow or another have to get this intuitive feeling for the change from static to dynamic. Now you get the beginning of that when you get that tenth hour balance, you know, where you take the head and you feel the relation that there is between the intrinsics of the spine and the extrinsics of the sleeve. But the person is not sufficiently experienced, shall I say, at that time to be able to get ahold of intrinsic musculature and hang onto it, use it, demand from it."
In her August 1974 IPR lecture, she names the shift from static to dynamic anatomy:
The textbook image of the body presented it as a static arrangement of parts with named relationships. Practical anatomy demanded that the same parts be re-imagined as a system in continuous motion, with the fascial planes serving as the medium through which the parts coordinated. The shift from static to dynamic anatomy was therefore part of the same revision that the rest of Ida's practical-anatomy syllabus required: from the body as a labeled container to the body as a system in process.
Coda: the practitioner as cartographer
Practical anatomy in Ida Rolf's teaching is a project rather than a possession. The student arrives in the elementary class with the textbook plates as a working map and is sent into the advanced class to discover that the map omits most of what matters. From there the work of revision begins. Lewis Schultz contributes the developmental theory of the connective-tissue cell; Ron Thompson contributes the dissection photographs; Michael Salveson contributes the fascial-tube concept; Jim Asher contributes to the classroom presentation; Ida supplies the pressure that keeps the project moving and the framework that holds it together. The practitioner, in her account, is responsible for the synthesis that no single contributor can deliver. The books are starting points; the body under the hand is the test; the practical anatomy that emerges is built jointly, over years, by working practitioners assembling what the textbooks did not yet contain.
"Why don't you just briefly redefine structural integration and then step off from that? Jim asked us to do an assignment the other day where we wrote out a definition of structural integration. And I set myself the task of writing a definition which would include the block concept without saying the body is like a stack of blocks because I don't think that's accurate. I don't think the body is like a stack of blocks. We've discussed in here that the body is like a tensegrity mast. But there is a relevant analogy to a stack of blocks in that if the various major blocks of the body are stacked improperly, then there are going to be unnecessary stresses and strains. And I can't remember just how I put it unfortunately. I think I said structural integration is I'll have to instructional integration is a process in which the rover uses his hands to work on a person, another person's body, the Royal Pee's body, in order to bring the various parts of that person's body into a better relation with one another. And it seeks to balance the body about a vertical axis. When the various parts of the body are brought into a state of balance about a vertical axis, then the body is able to better withstand and even utilize the force of gravity and activity."
Closing on a student's working definition in the 1975 Boulder class:
See also: See also: RolfA5Side2 (public tape, undated) — extended reflection on the unfinished anatomy of fascial planes and the educational task of giving practitioners both knowledge and language; included as a pointer for readers tracking how Ida framed the cultural and pedagogical gap. RolfA5Side2 ▸
See also: See also: B3T9SA (Boulder 1975) and 76ADV22 (1976 advanced class) — extended exchanges with Lewis Schultz and senior practitioners on the developmental embryology of the connective-tissue cell and how the contour of the body is determined by fascial rather than muscular structure. B3T9SA ▸76ADV22 ▸
See also: See also: 76ADV62 (1976 advanced class) — the third-hour discussion in which Ida names the body as an onion to be unwrapped from outside in, and the periphery-to-center principle as practical anatomy's governing direction of work. 76ADV62 ▸