Pain as too much: Ida's working definition
By the early 1970s Ida had stopped treating pain as a quantity and started treating it as a relationship — between the intensity of a stimulus and the resilience of the system receiving it. In the Mystery Tapes lecture from 1971-72, she reads aloud from a draft of her book manuscript, working out language she would later refine for the 1977 book. The definition she lands on is borrowed in part from Norman O. Brown's work on death and eroticism, but she makes it her own: pain is not a fixed sensation, it is what happens when a rigid system meets more stimulus than it can absorb. The same stimulus delivered to a resilient body registers as pleasure. This reframing matters because it shifts the practitioner's responsibility — the goal is not to avoid stimulus but to increase the system's capacity to receive it.
"Pain is experienced when stimuli, whatever their nature, exceeds certain limits. It is therefore not quantitative. Might it not be simply stated that pain is too much? Pleasure is experienced when the system is resilient and is by modded by the same number of stimuli. Pain is experienced when stimuli, whatever their nature, exceeds certain limits."
Reading from her manuscript draft in the 1971-72 Mystery Tapes pain lecture
The corollary, which Ida draws out in the same lecture, is that the intensity of the stimulus and the rigidity of the structure are not independent variables. A pelvis that is locked, dehydrated, scarred, or fibrotic will report pain at a level of pressure that a resilient body would register as nothing more than firm contact. This is why, in her teaching, the early hours of the recipe matter so much: they are not just preparation for deeper work, they are the work of changing what counts as 'too much' for that particular body. As resilience increases across the series, the same pressure begins to feel different.
"that you can experience either pain or pleasure by the impingement of stimuli, and it will be determined as to what you experience in terms of the sensitivity of the system."
From the same Mystery Tapes lecture, drawing the second half of the definition
Many pains, not one
Once Ida had abandoned pain as a single quantity, she began to insist — repeatedly, across years — that the word covers a family of distinct experiences. In the advanced classes, she pressed students to differentiate. The pain of fascia being stretched is not the pain of a vertebra that has been wrong for a decade. The pain of going over the pectoralis minor against the ribs is not the pain of the major being separated from the minor. Emotional pain released during a session is not physical pain at all, though the recipient may use the same word for both. This taxonomy is one of the most concrete teaching beats in her treatment of the subject — she will not let students collapse the categories.
"There's certainly a difference in the type of pain. Been working my experience with people on the pectoralis major and the minor. As you go in over the thoracic, right against the thoracic, over four, five, and six on the minor, it's pure unadulterated pain, it's sharp, it hurts.
In the Mystery Tapes lecture, drawing on her own clinical observation
The burning sensation Ida names here would become one of her most insisted-on differentiations. In a later passage from her RolfA5 public tape, she returns to the burning and refuses to call it pain at all. It is, she says, the perception of two fascial planes ungluing — the sensation has structural content but no nociceptive content. The medical model has no name for this, and that absence is part of why students struggle to communicate the experience to their clients. The practitioner has to teach the recipient to read their own sensation more finely than their vocabulary allows.
"But that burning is nothing but your perception of the splitting apart. It has not to do with pain and it has not to do with deterioration and it hasn't to do with any of the functions that pain is usually talking about. It has to do with the fact that two fascial planes or several fascial planes have been glued together and you are now putting enough pressure and enough stretching on that they have to respond by the gluing undoing, ungluing."
From the RolfA5 public tape, walking through the burning sensation
And then there is a third category Ida acknowledges but is careful not to fold into the structural account: emotional pain that surfaces as the muscular pattern releases its hold on it. The 1973 Big Sur pain lecturer — a sensory psychophysiologist Ida brought in to give the practitioners a neurological vocabulary — makes the point that this kind of pain may need different handling than physical pain, and that flattening the categories in the name of pain reduction would be a loss. Ida agreed; she did not want her practitioners reducing every report to one kind of intervention.
"It's not a physical pain, it's another pain. And I would hate to see a non discrimination of these kind of categories of pain be lost to reducing pain levels."
In the 1973 Big Sur pain lecture, after Ida raised the question of pain control research
Pressure as energy added to the system
If pain is the system's report on excess stimulation, pressure is the practitioner's deliberate addition of energy to the fascial body. In the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, Ida frames pressure not metaphorically but as the physics-laboratory definition of energy transfer: when you press on a given point, you are literally adding energy to what lies under that point. The fascial system, being colloidal and plastic, changes state in response. This is the mechanism by which the work works at all — and it is the mechanism by which it can cause pain when applied to a system not ready to receive it.
"In structural integration, one of the ways we add energy is by pressure so that the practitioner gives deliberately contributes energy to the person on whom he is working, to not energy in the sense that you let a position throw it around, but energy such as they talk about in the physics laboratory. When you press on a given point, you literally are adding energy to that which is under that point. And in structural integration, by way of an unbelievable accident of how you can change fashion structure, you can change human beings. You can change their structure and in changing their structure you are able to change their function. All of you have seen that structure determines function to a very great degree, to a degree which we can utilize."
From the 1973 Big Sur Advanced Class, defining what pressure actually does
The trick in the application is that the body has a defensive cascade — the so-called pain control system — that will turn on when stimulus crosses a certain threshold. Ida and the Big Sur lecturer worked out together that the way to add the necessary energy without triggering the cascade is to keep the surrounding tissue gentled while going deep. The contrast they drew was with practitioners — Ida names some of them as her own students — who 'wind up' and drive in hard because they don't trust they can reach the layer otherwise. This is the unnecessary pain, the pain that has nothing to do with the recipient's structural holding and everything to do with the practitioner's technique.
"but if you go deep into the body without stimulating surface areas of the body where certain other discrimination fibers, so called, are available that turn on turn off to the pain intensity, then you are going to increase the painful experience. So what you have to do is know that as you are going in deep, surrounding areas ought to be gentle."
Drawing on phantom-limb research to explain why surface contact gentles deep work
The implication for the practitioner is structural, not just tactical. When working deep in the gut, the abdomen, or any area where the recipient's defenses will be engaged, the rest of the hand — what later practitioners would call 'grounding' or surrounding contact — does work that has nothing to do with the depth itself. It does the work of keeping the nervous system out of the pain cascade. Ida absorbed this point and folded it into her teaching, where she returned to it in 1976 in the form of the awareness rule. In the Open Universe demonstration sessions of 1974, the same principle is visible in how she has her students place their hands on the table — broad surface contact around a focal point, the body's defenses gentled even as the deep work is performed.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, Open Universe Class 1974 (UNI_043) — an extended demonstration session in which Ida walks the observers through what is happening under the practitioner's hands as the tissue responds, with explicit attention to the relationship between pressure, surface contact, and the recipient's report of sensation. UNI_043 ▸
Pain as information, not noise
Throughout the lecture series, Ida and her colleagues kept resisting a particular temptation: the temptation to think of the work as a project of pain elimination. If pain is information about where the body is holding, getting rid of the pain by drugs or by avoiding contact with the difficult places would be getting rid of the information the practitioner is there to read. Ida's position was that the practitioner has to add energy in such a way that pain is not unnecessarily triggered — but pain that emerges from the holding itself is exactly what the work needs to engage.
"The pain is information. It tells you about holding, it tells you about a kind of an adjustment on a life style. God knows what you'd lose if you got rid of that painful response."
Closing the discussion of pain control research in 1973
The Mystery Tapes lecture extends this point in a direction that became central to Ida's late teaching. Pain, she argues, is a conservative mechanism — it maintains the present pattern by reporting threshold violations whenever the system is asked to change. This is why patients resist change even when the change is in their interest: the change registers as pain because their structure is rigid enough that any disturbance of the current arrangement exceeds the threshold. The work is asking the body to expand its tolerance for change, which means asking it to redefine what counts as too much.
"A threshold that's set to maintain the boundaries. So what I've said is that you resist change. And that as you begin to understand change in your body, your resistance is expressing itself as pain. That's one of the things I've said. I have defined pain, you see, as a very multi dimensional perception. I've tried to make a look at the expression, at the feeling of pain, realizing the differences in pain which every last one of you in this room understands. You've all experienced it."
From the Mystery Tapes lecture, summarizing the conservative function of pain
The complaint of pain and the person making it
Ida did not let her students treat the verbal report of pain as a transparent window onto neurological events. She had read enough — and she had brought in a sensory psychophysiologist precisely to make this point — to know that the complaint of pain is shaped by the family, the culture, the moment, and the personality of the person making it. Two recipients with identical structural patterns will produce wildly different reports under identical pressure. The practitioner who treats every 'ouch' as a uniform datum will be misled by the more vocal client and will under-attend to the silent one.
"The experience of pain and the complaint of pain are an intrinsic part of each individual's total pattern of personality adaptation. Anything you do, including the way you respond pain to stimulation is representative of you, is representative of the person you are working with."
Opening the general-orientation portion of the 1973 Big Sur pain lecture
The same lecturer drew the distinction more sharply: while pain response itself is innate, the verbal complaint is learned. Cultural attitudes — the assumption that pain warrants a doctor, the parental injunction that little pains are nothing, the bid for attention or emotional support — shape the report in ways the practitioner needs to recognize. Ida's own translation of this into classroom teaching was characteristically blunt: she pressed students not to be fooled by the screamers and not to abandon the stoics. The work is read in the tissue, not in the soundtrack.
"Okay, this is not to say that when someone says Ouch! You don't believe them, or that you do believe them. It's simply to point out that anxiety and motivation and all kinds of learning variables determine the compared to 10. Now just another aside, the kinds of things you guys do seem to be associated to a significant extent with a complaint of pain in one form or another. And so my understanding when we first did this last year, and it turned out to be a worthwhile thing to have done, is that if you begin to gain some appreciation of pain, not only as an experience that you have or the individual has, but as some kind of a process that has neurophysiologic basis, that has learning basis, that has biochemical basis, then you can be a little more sensitive to what is going on in that individual as you are putting your hands on him. And also later on there will be some specific implications emerging from the consideration of the neurophysiologic research."
Continuing the orientation lecture, on the social meanings of the complaint
The fascial pain that has no name in medicine
One of the most striking running threads in the 1975 Boulder advanced class is Ida's insistence that medical pain theory does not have categories for what practitioners feel under their fingers. In the third-hour discussion, a student describes hurting her knee skating and being able to localize the pain entirely to fascia — radiating up and down from the joint, but not in the bone, not along a nerve trunk. Ida agreed: there is a sensation in fascia, the medical model has not described it, and when the practitioner removes the finger it is immediately gone. This last property — transience, dependent on contact — is what most clearly differentiates it from the nociceptive pain of injury.
"That's what I'm Nor is it the kind of pain that you have after you cut your finger. Or do we have a different kind of innovation to the fascist? That's right. That's right. This is what I believe is there and what nobody at this point within the medical world has demonstrated. Now what I'm saying doesn't differ from what you say."
From the 1975 Boulder advanced class, third-hour discussion
In the same class, Ida pushed back on the assumption that fascia and the nervous system are separate channels. The fascia, she pointed out, also wraps the nerves; the muscular contraction of fascia inevitably affects the nerves it envelops. The picture that emerges is not of two independent pain systems but of a fascial pain that may or may not be transmitted along nerves, with the practitioner unable to determine which without instruments not yet developed. This is one of the unresolved threads in her teaching — she names what she does not know.
"But I most certainly am not going to start a great big controversy about pain right here The other thing that's kind of interesting is that in a clinical way one usually differentiates pain in the kind of three areas of psychic, psychic emotional pain and the pain that's perceived at the level of the skin and the special sense organs and then the deep or visceral pain. And it seems to me that when you're talking about the fascial layer, you're really talking again about the more visceral kind of pain that is one that's not out here, not the kind that's perceived by a burning or by the outer trauma that goes on in Well, it's the true."
From the Mystery Tapes lecture, drawing the clinical distinction
The pectoralis demonstration: kinds of pain, located
When Ida wanted to ground the kinds-of-pain doctrine in something tangible, she returned to the pectoralis. The example is concrete enough to teach with: going in over the thoracic against the ribs over the pectoralis minor produces one quality of sensation; getting the hand up between the major and the minor to begin separating them produces another. The first is sharp and unadulterated, what most people would unambiguously call pain. The second is a burning — the same burning Ida elsewhere defines as the perception of fascial planes splitting apart. The two sensations are produced by adjacent moves on the same muscle group and yet report on different processes.
"Been working my experience with people on the pectoralis major and the minor. As you go in over the thoracic, right against the thoracic, over four, five, and six on the minor, it's pure unadulterated pain, it's sharp, it hurts. As you put your hand up and get it between the major and the minor, it's almost always a burning sensation. So that's the partial opening? I mean that's just the partial opening, so there's certainly a different sensation in those two's particular areas and people interpret that and they feel it as different. Well, in this description here about A fibers and C fibers, what the C fibers, the smaller fibers, report is often described as burning pain. And I don't think that has to do with C fibers, I think that has to do with interference with fracture."
From the Mystery Tapes pain lecture, demonstrating the doctrine on the pectorals
What this means pedagogically is that the recipe's anatomical specificity is also a pedagogy of sensation. The third hour, with its work between the pectoralis major and minor, will reliably produce the burning report; the seventh, with its deep neck work, will produce different reports altogether. Over the ten sessions, the recipient develops a vocabulary of sensation tied to the specific structures being addressed. Ida treated this as one of the things the work teaches that nothing else does — the recipient learns to read their own body.
Awareness reduces pain
By the 1976 Boulder advanced class, Ida had crystallized one of her most practical teachings on the management of sensation in the room. A student named W offered the formulation, and Ida accepted it: the more awareness the recipient brings to the spot being worked, the less pain they experience there. The mechanism Ida hinted at but did not fully theorize: an aware structure is a more resilient structure in the moment of being touched, because awareness is itself a kind of organization, a non-collapse, a not-bracing. Pain in this account is partly what happens when the recipient is somewhere else.
If you have the awareness in the spot, the more awareness you have in that spot that you're working, the less pain that that person has in the spot."
From the 1976 Boulder advanced class, on the practitioner's use of recipient awareness
The teaching tactic Ida and Andy Crow developed from this is what some practitioners would later call the awareness-direction move: getting the recipient to feel what is going on under the fingers, the stretching, the burning, the specific quality of what is happening, rather than bracing against an undifferentiated 'pain.' Crow's lecture-demonstration tactic — flatly stating that the work does not hurt and then explaining why — landed because it gave the audience permission to be in the sensation rather than in fear of damage. Ida used the same move in her own teaching when she felt the room was ready for it.
"said, Rolling does not hurt. And then went into the explanations of, you know, the kinds of things that we've been talking about. The the consideration that you're not being damaged, you're getting better, so the fear goes out of it, etcetera."
From the 1976 Boulder advanced class, on reframing the sensation question
Behind the tactic lies a sociological observation Ida made repeatedly in the late classes: most people have never been told that intense sensation can be safe, can be informative, can be pleasurable. The culture they live in has trained them that intensity equals threat. The work, in this account, is doing something more than structural change — it is teaching the recipient to inhabit their own sensory life at a higher amplitude than they have ever permitted themselves.
Sensation that resembles pain but is not damage
By 1975 in Boulder, the language for what the work produces had been worked over enough that a student — Janet — could correct a colleague's casual statement that the work is 'painful.' Ida supported the correction. The work is a system of pressure; whether that pressure produces pain in a given recipient is a fact about that recipient's structure and history, not a fact about the work itself. Practitioners who tell prospective clients 'yes, it's painful' are not being honest, they are being lazy with language. The more accurate statement is that the work produces strong sensation, that some of that sensation resembles pain, and that the recipient learns quickly to distinguish it from the pain of damage.
"The sensation resembles pain but it is not a message about the destruction of tissue. And you learn very quickly to interpret that as such."
From the 1975 Boulder third-hour and fifth-hour discussions
Janet's deeper objection — which Ida absorbed — was that telling clients 'it's painful' focuses their attention on pain rather than on the other experiences the same sensation contains. Once the practitioner has framed the session as pain, the recipient organizes their experience around pain and misses everything else. The framing is part of the work. The pain becomes the pain partly because the language put it there.
The neurophysiology Ida did not have but wanted
Ida read enough physiology to know that the simple specificity theory of pain — the idea that there are dedicated pain fibers running straight from receptor to brain — had been abandoned by the mid-twentieth century. The Melzack-Wall gate-control theory, which she invoked in the Mystery Tapes lecture, gave her a framework she could work with: pain perception is modulated by an input-controlling mechanism that integrates large and small fiber traffic, and this gating is influenced by attention, memory, and emotion. This was exactly the framework she needed to explain why awareness reduces pain, why the surrounding hand matters, and why the same pressure registers differently in different people.
"At present, pain is regarded as a central summation of impulses, and physiologists tend to accept the idea of an input controlling mechanism which prevents too great an intensity. This mechanism, called by its author a gate control system, has to do with the working relationship of large and small fibers. In this way, attention, memory, and emotions are able to monitor sensory input at various levels. But the word pain, according to Wellesack and Wall, is a linguistic label for a rich variety of experiences and responses. In structural integration, we see something of this variety, another confusion with which it is reported to the individual."
Reading from her book draft in the Mystery Tapes lecture
Where Ida wanted to push further than the available physiology allowed was in identifying alternative transmission pathways through the fascial body itself. Michael Salveson had brought her work suggesting that connective tissue proteins exhibit piezoelectric and semiconductor properties — that the fascial web might transmit information through mechanical and electrical channels not described in standard neuroanatomy. The 1971-72 Mystery Tapes lecture entertains the hypothesis and admits the evidence is not yet developed. This is one of the unresolved threads she left to the next generation.
"There have been some other pathways suggested other than neurocaine transmission. Andre Kouharaj written has some of this stuff up, which he sees several different kinds of phenomenon occurring in some specific protein molecules that are in connective tissue. For instance, keratin exhibits or pizoelectric effects, means that it can change mechanical energy or sound energy to electrical, vice versa. And also some semiconductor effects, so they've demonstrated this to the effect of actually making a hearing aid that fits into a vacant area where a tooth has been extracted somewhere from the mouth and it directly conducts to the auditory nerve. Specific to hasn't He hasn't published any. He talked to me a little bit about it. I know."
From the Mystery Tapes lecture, on alternative transmission pathways through fascia
The emotional dimension and its physiological floor
Ida's most theoretically ambitious treatment of pain — in the manuscript draft she reads from in the Mystery Tapes lecture — argues that the emotional and the physical dimensions of pain are not separate phenomena to be balanced, but two facades of one underlying physiological imbalance. Emotional pain, in this account, is the recipient's perception of chemical and physiological imbalance in their own tissue. Depression, grief, anger — these are not psychological events floating above the body; they are awareness of macro or micro chemical lacks and overloads, including at the cellular level. This is a deeply somatic theory of affect, and it organized Ida's claim that structural change produces emotional change.
"Only to the extent and at the speed that restoration of physiological flow occurs can the hang up be erased. All of this, however, is an exploration of change. What change is in terms of human beings. Humans, as we said, tend to resist change. Their resistance verbalizing as pain, emotional or physical. All too often their emotional pain, their depression, their grief, even their anger, is a perception of a physiological imbalance, an awareness of chemical lacks or overloads in blood and tissue. These may be at macro or micro levels, down to and including the cellular. The emotional, affective dimension of this imbalance negative, withdrawing, destructive may be thought of as one facade of pain. In the human condition there is another, a sensory dimension, more precise, apparently more capable of scientific exploration and evaluation."
From the Mystery Tapes book draft, on the emotional facade of pain
Earlier in the same passage, she had pressed this further — psychological hang-ups, she argued, are maintained only to the extent that free physiological response is impaired. The myofascial system is one of the most accessible levels at which physiological response can be restored, which is why structural work has the kind of emotional yield it does. This was not, in Ida's mouth, a claim that the work was psychotherapy; it was a claim that the substrate on which emotional life depends is partly fascial, and that addressing the substrate addresses some of what shows up in the emotional report.
"At the level of everyday problems, psychological organization of emotion can be immeasurably fervoured by any system able to create or restore more vital physiological response. This is the level at which we realize that although psychological hang ups occur, they are maintained only to the extent that free physiological response is impaired. Obviously, this can happen at any of several levels, glandular, neuro, myofascial, etcetera. Restoration of funtooth can be initiated at many levels as well. But establishment of myofascial equipoise is one of the most potent, one of the most obvious, one of the most speedy approaches. Only to the extent and at the speed that restoration of physiological flow occurs can the hang up be erased."
From the same Mystery Tapes book draft
The screamer and the practitioner who winds up
The Big Sur 1973 pain lecturer made an observation about practitioners that Ida absorbed into her teaching with particular force. There are competent practitioners — even talented ones — who, because they doubt their ability to reach a deep layer gently, wind up like a baseball pitcher and drive in. The recipient experiences excruciating pain. But this pain has nothing to do with the recipient's holding pattern; it is generated entirely by the overstimulation of the recipient's nervous system by the sudden intrusion. Ida treated this as a category of practitioner-caused pain that should not exist.
"My understanding of the pain story, by the way we didn't even get to the definition of it yet, is that the kinds of pain you're talking about are very important, but I've also watched draughtii and really good draughtii do things on the basis of certain limitations like weight, in which they'll go, it's like you always see winding up and they know where they've got to go and they have eyes to where they have to go and they go right in there and they're deep and the person is in excruciating pain. Based upon their limitations, because they believe that they can't get in there hard enough, they go shooting in and don't prepare the pain control system that every one of us has for this sudden intrusion. The intrusion itself now becomes a painful experience that is unnecessary, that has nothing to do with the individual's holding. It has to do with the way the total nervous system is overstimulated. We are not stimulating anymore. You mean it is coming from holding the body or under the counter? And people always are amazed how painful he is compared to other people compared to other types of things."
In the 1973 Big Sur Pain Lecture, on practitioner-caused pain
The contrast was practitioners — Ida's example was a specific colleague whose belly work was famous for being painful — who go in slowly, who call their contact at each fascial layer, who give the recipient an intuitive appreciation of what is being asked of the tissue. This kind of practitioner produces less pain not because they go less deep but because they prepare the system at each layer to accept the next. Ida's classroom critique of her students was often calibrated against this distinction.
Pain as the teacher: change and resistance
In the most reflective stretches of the Mystery Tapes lecture, the discussion of pain opens out into a wider claim about change. The Big Sur lecturer offered a formulation Ida liked: pain is the teacher, because pain tells the person where they need to go. Not because pain is to be sought — Ida and the lecturer were both wary of practitioners or recipients who would romanticize pain into a discipline — but because the boundary of present capacity is exactly where pain sits, and expanding capacity means moving into the boundary with enough support not to be overwhelmed by it.
"Pain is the teacher because pain tells you where you have to go but it's pain not enough, I mean we have to immediately differentiate between traumatic pain, this sort of injurious experience and what we're talking about here, the organizing quality the experience that's associated with a, by habit, what we call pain. But pain is the teacher and it always tells you where to go. For instance, in a gestalt, you come into a gestalt group and the reason you're there is because you have emotional, you have an anchor dragging you down somewhere, you're not at full functioning because something is if there's a load of some sort. What do you have to do to unload? Well, you move in a direction of discomfort. You take risks in supportive environment, So you move towards the pain and breathe into it, so to speak. You move into that and perhaps back up. It's that kind of risk taking that gets you through the old habitat."
Reflecting in the 1973 Big Sur lecture on the function of pain in personal change
This is also where Ida's larger framework rejoined the pain discussion. The work is not a therapy; it is a developmental process of adding energy to the system so that the system becomes more capable of receiving and dissipating energy. The recipient's pain across the series is not a side-effect to be minimized but the perceptual edge along which the change is happening. The practitioner's job is to keep the recipient in that edge — neither below it (where nothing changes) nor catastrophically beyond it (where the system braces and the work backfires).
"Mention the subject of pain. So I thought you might like to hear this thing because this is going to be what So are you going to have to refer your people to and so forth and so forth. Humans resist change. Some deep sea and instant decays that somehow they've made it under existing circumstance. What assurance do they know they have continued to make it given a different set of circumstances? Conservatism can be seen throughout the animal kingdom, the tendency to maintain and protect the status quo, to avoid the unknown, to avoid change, is universal. Attempting to label some of these phenomena, we refer to our more superficial conservatisms as habit patterns. Resistance to change is both understandable and predictable, but change so often manifests as pain. Sophisticated people recognize that their use of the word pain covers different phenomena."
From the Mystery Tapes lecture, introducing the manuscript's section on pain
Coda: language at the edge of sensation
What emerges from the archive is not a single doctrine of pain but a careful, repeated refusal to flatten one. Ida treats pain as a relational threshold (what counts as 'too much' depends on resilience), as a taxonomy of distinct sensations (sharp, burning, sick, emotional), as a conservative homeostatic signal, as a culturally-shaped report, as the edge of present capacity, and as a category that the medical model has not yet caught up to. The practitioner is asked to hold all of these at once and to use them to read what is happening in the tissue under their fingers.
"It just doesn't make sense for some I think the one you like the best is the Norton Boost. The label we place on sensations in a rigid system bombarded by an excessive burden of stimulation. Stimulation. Now you see, by implication he says if you can get that system less rigid, you change the pain and the pain reception and the whole trip. Now that's where we live. And the end of that first sentence is, when rigid system is bombarded by an excessive burden of stimulation, because of the nature of its rigidity, cannot cope with. That's another, coping is a musculature adjustment, a musculoskeletal adjustment. Pain is experienced when stimuli, whatever their nature, exceeds certain limits. It is therefore not qualitative. Might it simply not be stated that pain is too much? Pleasure is experienced when a system is resilient although it may be bombarded by the same number of stimulants."
Closing the 1973 Big Sur Pain Lecture with the working definition the practitioners would carry forward
The unresolved questions Ida left on the table are still on the table. Whether fascia has its own innervation distinct from the nerve trunks. Whether information transmits through connective tissue by piezoelectric or semiconductor mechanisms. Whether the pain reports practitioners feel under their fingers belong to one circuit or several. These are research questions her later students inherited, and the transcripts make plain that she would have welcomed answers she did not live to see. What she did pass forward, unambiguously, is the orientation: pressure is the addition of energy, pain is information about resilience, and the practitioner's job is to read both with care.