The categorical claim
Ida did not hedge on scoliosis. In a 1975 Boulder session, working through a model who had a small residual curve and revisiting work done in a previous hour, she pushed her students to see what they had missed. The conversation moved from one student's defense of his third-hour work to Ida's flat rejection of the conventional framing. The room contained an articulated skeleton on a stand, itself faintly scoliotic, and a recent demonstration model — a woman whose curve had come from a pathological process, possibly polio, possibly something else. The exchange that follows is the clearest single statement Ida ever made about scoliosis on tape. Notice that she does not soften the claim with qualifiers. She does not allow exceptions for idiopathic curves, congenital curves, or disease-derived curves. The psoas is named as the structural locus in every case.
"and it is always obvious in a scoliosis that the problem is in the psoas. There has never been a scoliosis on this earth where the problem wasn't in the psoas,"
Pressed on whether the third-hour work had reached what it needed to reach, she returns to the operative structure:
The conversation continues with a student observing the articulated skeleton in the room and noting that its articular surfaces show the wear of a long-held scoliotic pattern. Ida concedes the bone has shaped itself to the position over time, but does not let that observation displace her structural point. The bone follows the soft tissue. The articular surfaces register a history that was driven, originally, by the failure of the psoas to hold the lumbars where they needed to be held. Then she opens the harder case — what about scoliosis that arrived through disease?
"If that scoliosis is the result of something that happened as a disease process, The entrance of the disease has been through the psoas. Now you can't probably, can't sell that to any of your medical friends, but I strongly suggest that you put it in your own notes because wherever, even in that idiopathic scoliosis that Donna had or in that scoliosis that Norm had yesterday or the one that was right here that Lloyd was working on, those things have come in by a breakdown of the supported process of the psoas on the lumbos."
On disease-derived scoliosis — including the polio cases — she will not concede an exception:
Why the psoas — what the muscle actually does
To understand why Ida placed the psoas at the center of every curvature, the practitioner has to first see what the psoas does when it is working. The muscle originates high — at the bodies of the upper lumbar vertebrae and, in many bodies, as far as the twelfth thoracic — and crosses the pelvis on the front to insert on the lesser trochanter of the femur. It is the deepest hip flexor in the body, but in Ida's reading its more important function is structural: it supports the lumbar curve from the front. The lumbars, in her account, do not stand up on their own. They are held forward by a band of soft tissue lying along their anterior surface, and that band is the psoas. When it works, the lumbars sit where they belong. When it fails, the lumbars do whatever the rest of the body's pulls allow them to do — which means they curve.
"Visualize into your fingertips. What happens when a psoas is out of condition and out of commission? And the answer is it gets glued to the front of the lumbar spine and it shortens. As it deteriorates, it shortens. And in shortening, it's going to pull some of those vertebrae folds and it's going to jam all of those vertebrae together."
She names what happens to a psoas that has stopped doing its job:
The numbers Ida cited for the psoas were unusual in the bodywork literature of her time. She drew on an osteopathic work she half-approved of and half-distrusted — Arthur McFarland's book on the iliopsoas, which had circulated among practitioners interested in spinal curvatures — and on what she called the Zebra Symposium, a research report her students could find reprinted in the back of that book. What she took from those sources was the order of magnitude of the forces the psoas transmits in an aberrated body. The number is large enough that the muscle becomes structurally consequential whether or not anyone is paying attention to it.
"when you have the pelvis in a tipped alignment, that the forces acting through the psoas sometimes accumulate to more than a ton. And there's something on the order of 23 to 2,500 pounds of force exerted by the psoas. It's no little muscle. I mean it's a huge, mighty mover if you get"
On the forces transmitted through a tipped pelvis:
The lumbar curve as the place where the body gives
The lumbar spine occupies a particular place in Ida's structural geometry. The dorsal curve, she taught, is the primary curve — fixed by the attachment of the ribs to the thoracic vertebrae and shaped by the spherical geometry of the embryonic body. It cannot give very much. The lumbar curve is secondary, formed in response to the primary curve, and unlike the dorsals it can give. It gives forward, most commonly, in lordosis; sometimes backward, in a posterior curve; and laterally, in scoliosis. The lumbar is the place where the spine adjusts to whatever it has been asked to adjust to. The practitioner who understands this stops looking for the curve at the level of the curve and starts looking for the pulls — anterior, posterior, lateral — that the lumbar segment is registering.
"Now I don't know what this says. It only says, I'm just not kicking this way around. And I recommend it to you. But I also recommend that you look as to why this is the way it is. And this story that I have just told you about the fact that the lumbar lever is going to be the one that can adjust, is going to be the one that has to adjust to the structural demands of any body, It has, something has to give and it can give. The dossiers can't give. If the dossiers could give and gave, you would have everybody so that one vertebra can slide back and forth on the other, it would put so much strain on that whole cardiovascular mechanism. Every time you fell it's really a most important point. It's the most important point as to why it is what we have works. And Mr."
She explains why the lumbar is the segment that gives:
Once the lumbar is identified as the segment that must give, the question becomes: what determines whether it gives forward, backward, or laterally? Ida's answer was that the surrounding soft tissue — the psoas on the front, the erectors on the back, the quadratus on the sides, the diaphragm above and the pelvic floor below — sets the conditions under which the lumbar settles into its curve. Scoliosis is the lateral version of this. Some pull on one side of the lumbar segment is greater than the corresponding pull on the other side, and the segment yields laterally in the direction the pulls allow. The psoas, lying anterior to the spine and crossing the pelvis on both sides, is positioned to be the primary asymmetric pull.
"The Zebra Symposium is the best thing I know. That's in the book. That's the best thing I know and he didn't have to write it because Zebra wrote it. You know, Did we ever do any reprints of that? It is a little startling to find a book that's called The Iliopsoas, the Undiscovered Key to Back Structural anomalies in that, yes. That's the title."
Naming the literature she trusted on psoas-balance and curvature:
Where Ida's account diverges from the orthodox
In a 1971-72 IPR session, a student raised Arthur McFarland's book on the iliopsoas, noting that the author proposed reducing spinal curvatures by balancing the psoas. Ida's response is characteristic — she half-credits the work, half-pulls back from it, and tells her students not to get swallowed by the literature on a single muscle. The position she stakes out is subtle. She agrees that the psoas is the operative structure. She disagrees that one can address it as a single muscle. The psoas, in her teaching, is never alone — it operates against the rectus abdominis on the front of the body, against the quadratus on the side, and against the erectors on the back. Balancing the psoas means balancing all of these at once.
"That's the guy you mentioned yesterday in the morning. He's just written a book on the iliopsoas and which I I have a Listen. Stay away from those books on have them in. Speaking of the iliopsoas muscle, when I was taking my audition class, I think the brains are in the pubococcius muscle and when in doubt say psoas. But Well, I really I really mean what I say. You get to know so damn much about that iliopsoas that you don't know anything about a body. Although he talks about reducing spinal curvatures by balancing the psoas."
On reading too much about the iliopsoas:
The chiropractic and osteopathic accounts Ida had read tended to treat the psoas as a single corrective lever — release it, balance it, the spine straightens. She rejected this on two grounds. First, the psoas does not pull on the lumbars directly in the way an isolated muscle pulls on its attachments; it acts always in relation to its antagonists. Second, the operative reality the practitioner encounters is not anatomical anomaly but functional aberration — something that has moved and can move back, not something fixed. McFarland's title called the iliopsoas the undiscovered key to back structural anomalies. Ida explicitly rejected the word anomaly.
"It is a little startling to find a book that's called The Iliopsoas, the Undiscovered Key to Back Structural anomalies in that, yes. That's the title. He's talking about structural anomalies and we're very much interested at this point in functional not anything that's as solid as an anomaly, as permanent as an anomaly, as immovable as an anomaly. We're talking about this kind of thing. It's alright. And that's some of interesting things, like one of the things for instance he shows, the kind of thing I'm interested in, is that if you, when you have the pelvis in a tipped alignment, that the forces acting through the psoas sometimes accumulate to more than a ton. And there's something on the order of 23 to 2,500 pounds of force exerted by the psoas. It's no little muscle."
On the difference between anomaly and functional aberration:
Reaching the psoas — the third, fifth, and eighth hours
If the psoas is the operative structure in scoliosis, the practical question becomes when in the ten-session sequence the practitioner actually reaches it. Ida's answer, expressed across multiple advanced classes, was that the psoas is touched, prepared, and finally addressed across a long arc — first indirectly through the pelvic lift of the early hours, then more directly through work on the rectus abdominis and the adductors in the fourth and fifth hours, then in the floor of the pelvis and the lumbar grooves in the seventh and eighth. By the eighth hour, in her teaching, the practitioner and the psoas should have been acquainted for several sessions already.
"So then you come on further, and you go into that next level, you have started to free the psoas. To free the psoas, not to place the psoas. That original pelvic lift you see was placing the psoas as best you might at that level. And always pelvic lifts are placing the psoas as best you may at the level that they that you are at the moment. But now you go into the deeper level, is freeing the pelvis itself, the bony structure itself, to shift enough to give you a different relationship now between with respect to the psoas. And your different relationship depends to a large extent on the floor of the pelvis and how well organized it is. And in turn, the floor of the pelvis and the way in which it becomes organized is a function of the adductors."
On the slow approach to the psoas across the sequence:
The fifth hour, in particular, is where the relationship between the psoas and its primary antagonist on the front of the body — the rectus abdominis — comes into focus. Ida's teaching here is structural in a way that few other bodywork traditions are. She does not treat the psoas in isolation. She treats it as the deep half of a reciprocal pair, the surface half of which is the rectus abdominis. The fifth hour, in this reading, is about establishing that reciprocity. The practitioner is not trying to strengthen the psoas, or release it, or lengthen it. The practitioner is trying to make the psoas and the rectus into one functional system, so that as one adjusts the other adjusts in response.
"And you haven't told me why. You tell me part of why. Why are we too? Why are we getting into those areas? I can do a lot of double talk about my pelvis. Because we're working on the psoas and we're getting that in better balance. No, this is the first time you've mentioned any of psoas. Oh, oh. I What we're getting, we're looking for the relationship of the psoas and the That's right."
Pressed by a student on what the fifth hour reaches for, she names the answer:
By the eighth hour, the practitioner is doing something different again — no longer placing the psoas, no longer establishing the reciprocity, but evoking the muscle's actual participation in the breath and in standing. The marker is the belly wall: when the abdomen falls back during inhalation and exhalation rather than mounting up, the psoas has begun to act with the recti. This is the moment when the system is no longer notional but operative. The reciprocity established in the fifth hour now manifests as a behavior.
"All the way along from the first day, somebody should have been owing and ahhing when the belly wall falls back in breathing instead of mounting up. And somebody should have been saying with their owing and ahhing, ah. Now the psoas is participating. As the ballet ball falls back, you have evidence that the psoas is beginning to act with the recti. You're talking about during inhalation of the belly wall. Don't care whether it's inhalation or exhalation. The belly wall should fall back in either in both. And the importance of your work on the recti is in order to so organize the rectus and the psoas to make one mechanism of it, one system of it. Up to this point in the random body, it is not one system."
On the belly wall as the test of psoas participation:
What the practitioner is doing in the tissue
Ida's descriptions of the actual contact with the psoas tissue were precise. The muscle does not lie where the practitioner expects to find it. Its origin is higher than the books say — generally the second lumbar, sometimes as high as the first — and the angle at which it crosses the pubic ramus to reach the lesser trochanter means that the worst adhesions accumulate where it crosses the pubes. In a 1975 Boulder session, Ida and a senior student worked through where the psoas gets stuck and what the practitioner is doing with the fingers when contact is made.
So you have to go in almost under the cusp of origin, it seems like, to really get that. Having done the psoas, you'll get the iliacus. The psoas is done both sides of the lungs with both hands of the lungs. The iliacus?"
On the angle of approach and the sequence from psoas to iliacus:
The other piece of practical anatomy that the practitioner needs is the place where the psoas most reliably gets stuck. Ida's students had identified the pubic crossing as the location, and she agreed — but with a refinement. The stuckness at the pubes is the visible signature of a deeper problem. The muscle is not just adhered there; it has lost its capacity to stretch through the whole length of its anterior course. There is no give in it. The practitioner who finds the stuck point at the pubes is finding a symptom, not the cause.
"That psoas is just stuck as it crosses the cubes. And how can you get into play? There's no stretch to it."
On the loss of stretch in an immobilized psoas:
In the same Boulder session, a student elaborated on the working picture — the psoas is not only attached to the spine, it adheres to the spine, and freeing it means freeing both the muscle and its connection to the vertebrae. The practitioner is reaching for tissue that has lost its differentiation from the structures it lies against. This is also why the psoas-diaphragm relationship matters: the crura of the diaphragm descend along the upper lumbar vertebrae alongside the psoas origin, and when both structures have aberrated they tend to fuse functionally in a way that restricts the breath as well as the spine.
"It seems to me that the psoas anatomically, I don't know, I haven't dissected the psoas diaphragm area of a cadaver but it seems to me that the psoas must get tied up to that diaphragm because the curve of the diaphragm come down to those Yeah. Those are actually in theory at least there's some space between the crura and the psoas. In theory. Yeah. But in practice, as you know, when things get aberrated, they move around and they get random and they get Yeah. Anyway, see the psoas work freeing the diaphragm. I I see that happening as people are are worked. And on the psoas, they're they're breathing freeze. They get more movement in that diaphragm and the costal arch and so forth from work on the psoas. And it's important, I think, working at the psoas to also not only get it in the lower part of the abdomen but also in the upper part near its its origin."
A senior student summarizes the psoas-diaphragm picture, with Ida assenting:
The psoas-rectus system as the body's central axis
Ida did not name many systems in the body as central. She was suspicious of the word, suspicious of the implication of a single locus. But in her teaching on the psoas, she made an exception. The psoas-rectus relationship, she taught, is the single most important biological system in the body for structural well-being. The reasoning is geometric: the rectus runs from the pubis to the front of the rib cage on the surface of the body; the psoas runs from the lumbar spine to the lesser trochanter through the body's interior. The two together describe a structural axis from the inside-back of the lumbars to the outside-front of the chest. No other pair of muscles spans this axis.
"Up to this point in the random body, it is not one system. And more and more, I would like you people, particularly you people who have looked at systems mathematically, to recognize the presence of biological systems operating to do a job. And here you have that system par excellence. There is no other single system in the body that is as important to the well-being of the body as this psoas rectus combination. Why? Noel? It represents a balance between, like, the front of the body and the back of the body, between the Well, when you come right down to a facility, isn't in the back of the body, it's in the middle of the body."
Naming the system explicitly:
The connection between this central axis and scoliosis is direct. In an aberrated body, the rectus abdominis takes over the work of flexion that the psoas should be doing — most visibly in skiers, dancers, and athletes whose thighs hypertrophy out of proportion to their bodies because the rectus femoris and rectus abdominis have substituted for the deeper hip flexor. The psoas, deprived of its functional role, deteriorates: it shortens, adheres to the front of the lumbars, and loses its capacity to support the spine. When the support fails asymmetrically — and it almost always fails asymmetrically, because the body's pulls are never perfectly symmetric — the lumbar segment is left to find whatever lateral position the residual pulls allow. That position is scoliosis.
"And it keeps that belly wall mounted, and it keeps your hand out. Now just as soon as you begin to get relaxation in the rectus abdominis and the belly wall falls back, the psoas takes its place in the abdominal picture of what is going on in movement. And when you give that pelvic lift, you are evoking the activity of the psoas. You are putting it into a new position. You are allowing the lumbars to go back and the psoas to exercise its webbing effect in front of it. That is what you do when you go into the abdomen if you go in there on the first hour but certainly you're going into it as you give that pelvic lift And as you see that belly wall fall back, you are entitled to say, Eureka, I have made it. Because now you are beginning to call on the psoas to take its place in the line."
On the consequence of a rectus that has substituted for the psoas:
Asymmetry, leg length, and the limits of correction
Ida was clear-eyed about what the work could and could not change in a scoliotic body. The doctrine that the psoas is the entry point of every curvature does not imply that every curvature can be made straight. Bone shape changes over a lifetime in response to the loads the body has placed on it. Vertebrae that have grown asymmetrically, occiputs that have developed more bone on one side than the other, articular surfaces worn into a lateral pattern — these will not reverse in ten hours, or twenty, or a hundred. What the work can do is balance the soft tissue around the structures that cannot themselves change, so that the body operates under a different distribution of loads going forward.
"But I would like, if I could, to throw a monkey wrench into the notion that most of you have, if not all of you, that by the use of structural integration, you can take these cockeyed, crooked structures and make them straight. You can't. There are many reasons why you probably can't. One of the reasons is that the bony structures in that body have spent a lifetime growing into certain patterns. I will never forget my disbelief one time many years ago when I went into an anatomical looking the The Was States. Those various United Occiputs that I was looking looking at at, that the bones didn't match. There was more bone on the right side or the left side, literally more bone than there was on the other side. Because down through the whole lifetime of the fellow whose occiput that was, he had been using his head to balance his imbalances, and his structure had changed in accordance with the demand he put put on on. Do you think you're going in there and in two weeks or three weeks change that phone?
On the limits of structural correction in scoliotic bodies:
A related question — and one Ida treated with the same caution — concerns leg-length discrepancy, which often accompanies scoliotic patterns. In a 1974 demonstration, a student observed that what appears as a short leg is often not a bony shortness at all but the result of months or years of asymmetric loading following an injury. The soft tissue holds the asymmetry; the bone is rarely the actual culprit. This was the practitioner's opening — the soft tissue could be reorganized in a way that the bone could not.
"And, what I suspect, a difference in the way the legs relate to the pelvis. That's what we're hoping. That a lot of that difference can be changed by organizing the soft tissue. You see the easy hypothesis is that the leg itself is shorter because of the healing, that there is an overlapping of the bone. And people often take that assumption too easily. When a lot of the change is as a result of walking on one leg for several months, is the way the cast was held, the immobility imposed by the cast, and the lack of proper means to return the body to where it was before. So the rolford is really in a unique position to at least make a crack at restoring that proper length. There's an example of this same sort of thing in a person that I worked on in Chicago."
A senior practitioner explains the working hypothesis on leg-length asymmetry:
Skull asymmetry and the systemic signature
One of the most striking moments in the Boulder transcripts is Ida's recollection of the first time she encountered an asymmetric skull. The discovery — that skulls are not necessarily symmetric, and that the asymmetry tracks scoliotic patterns elsewhere in the body — gave her a way to read the whole-body signature of a curvature. A scoliotic body, in her account, is not curved only at the spine. The curve registers all the way up through the cervicals and into the skull, where the head has spent a lifetime balancing the imbalances below it. The bony asymmetry of the skull is the long-term consequence of that balancing work.
"skulls are not necessarily symmetrical. They're asymmetrical more often perhaps than asymmetrical. I remember my amazement when I first saw this. When I first saw a skull lying in a case, and I looked at it and I said, but look, this is all crooked. And as I treaded this whole thing out, I realized that I must need to be looking at the skull of a curvature or a scoliosis. Now you are never going to really balance this kind of a head, but you sure can get a little north of lot closer to it. And those of you that saw Eric and what happened to Eric last time know, have seen that what I say is true. You can get them acting as though their heads were symmetric. And this acting as though seems to me all that is very important realization and recognition because you see we talk in this teaching program. We talk over simplistically. One has to to convey an idea. But then having gotten that simple minded fundamental schematic recognition, then you have to put into it what you actually see in the actual bodies."
On the asymmetric occiput and the body's long-term accommodation:
Why the work doesn't address the spine directly
A reader new to Ida's account of scoliosis might expect the practitioner to work on the spine itself — to manipulate the vertebrae, to stretch the lateral curve, to address the bone directly. Ida's position was the opposite. Working on the spine, in her teaching, was what the chiropractors and osteopaths did, and she considered the approach mistaken because it treated the spine as a column of independent segments rather than as a unified structure responding to its surrounding soft tissue. The spine, in her account, is a beam upended — and a beam's position is determined by the forces acting on it, not by trying to push the beam into place.
"Well one of the things that impresses me experientially as well as as I try to invest that skeleton with some flesh Is the essential nature of the spinal, not the spine as such, but the spinal structure? It is again as though a body was something built around a spine. Now a lot of people have had this idea, the osteopaths have had it and the chiropractic have had it. But none of them have ever gotten out of their spine a unified something going along there. They always manage to have a series of bony segments and that's what they figure a spine is. Now this is not my concept and this is not the concept around which structural integration works. You have to get that picture of the whole spine, the whole spinal mechanism as a unit, as a unit of united areas. It is a much more sturdy sort of a concept than, for example, the chiropractic concept, where you simply have bones that you push around. And I'd like you to take this idea home with you and try to get more reality on it. As you yourself get more processing, you will understand this."
On the difference between the chiropractic spine and the structural spine:
The practical implication for scoliosis work is significant. The practitioner does not attempt to push the lateral curve back to vertical. The practitioner works on the structures whose pulls placed the curve where it is — the psoas, the quadratus, the lateral erectors, the diaphragm, the floor of the pelvis. As the pulls rebalance, the curve relaxes toward what the bony architecture permits. This is also why the work proceeds in long arcs rather than at the site of the curvature. Ida's third hour, which addresses the side body and the quadratus, is a scoliosis hour. Her fifth, which addresses the psoas-rectus reciprocity, is a scoliosis hour. Her seventh, which addresses the head-on-neck, is a scoliosis hour. The whole sequence, in this reading, is a scoliosis sequence — because the whole body carries the curve.
The rhomboid-psoas balance and the spinal core
Late in her teaching, Ida began to add a further refinement to the psoas doctrine — one that she had clearly been working out across the years but that surfaces most clearly in an August 1974 IPR lecture. The psoas balances the rectus on the front of the body. But it also balances something on the back, and that something is the rhomboids, particularly their lowest fibers. The combination is unusual in the bodywork literature, and Ida acknowledged its strangeness. No other muscle pairing crosses the spine like this — one structure deep on the front of the lumbars, another superficial on the back of the thoracics, both controlling the verticality of the spinal column.
"I'm bringing out and you see the thing that's unique about this is that one of those groups is on one side of the spine, the rhomboids are on the back of the spine and the psoas is in the front of the spine. This is a unique junction, no other junction is like this. Both also relate to girdles. Yeah, it relates to girdles but after all of a sudden you can't have your girdles just flapping around in the grooves. I also feel that when those two points come into proper relationship Hold on a minute, when those two areas, areas come to improper relationship, you also feel, you don't feel that one is on the back and one is on the front, you feel like No, we are on top of each it's all part of the spinal structure."
Naming the unusual structural pairing of psoas and rhomboids:
The clinical relevance of this for scoliosis is that the practitioner has two structural levers, not one. Working the psoas from the front addresses the curve at its anterior driver. Working the rhomboids from the back — particularly the lower rhomboid fibers as they descend toward the lumbar-dorsal junction — addresses the same curve from its posterior counterweight. When both come into balance, the spinal core that Ida sometimes spoke of comes into existence: a unified vertical mechanism whose segments are held in line by the reciprocal action of the deep and superficial structures on either side. The scoliotic body, in this reading, is a body in which this core has not yet been built.
What the practitioner is finally responsible for
Ida's teaching on scoliosis closes, in most of the transcripts, with a statement about responsibility. The practitioner is not being asked to cure scoliosis. The practitioner is being asked to understand what scoliosis is — a failure of the psoas to support the lumbars symmetrically, registered in the secondary curve, manifest in the whole body — and to address that failure across the ten sessions through the structures that actually drive it. Whether the curve straightens, partially or not at all, depends on the body's history, the age of the curve, the bony accommodation, and the body's willingness to reorganize. What does not vary is the structural locus.
"And I have never seen scoliosis that resulted from polio, which wasn't this kind of thing and which didn't require this kind of a shoring up. Then, of course, when that scoliosis breaks down, where is the tissue going to be stored?"
Closing the original Boulder exchange on disease-derived scoliosis:
Coda: the spectrum and the lumbar floor
In the 1975 Boulder class, two senior students — talking around Ida's reorientation of the recipe — observed something about her late teaching that is relevant to any account of her position on scoliosis. They noticed that she had begun to put more and more emphasis on the lumbars and the lumbodorsal hinge, not less. The reason, as they understood it, was that the work could not afford to let students forget where the operative structures lay. The pelvis was the proximate goal; the lumbars and the structures that supported them — the psoas above all — were what made the pelvic work possible in the first place. Scoliosis, in this late framing, is the visible signature of a lumbar floor that has not yet been built.
"Each hour is one more step along that spectrum of realigning the pelvis so that it can do its thing. It's actually more than the pelvis, as we see Ida's putting more and more emphasis on the lumbars and the lumbodorsal hinge and so forth. 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"
Two senior students name Ida's late emphasis on the lumbars:
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, public tape RolfB6Side2b — extended discussion of the progression from pelvic lift to psoas access across the ten-session sequence. RolfB6Side2b ▸
See also: See also: 1971-72 mystery tapes 72MYS111 and 72MYS131 — sustained classroom discussion of psoas mechanics, McFarland's iliopsoas book, and the structural reasoning behind the fifth-hour focus. 72MYS111 ▸72MYS131 ▸
See also: See also: Boulder 1975 tape B2T9SA — technical exchange on the upper origin of the psoas and the practitioner's angle of approach. B2T9SA ▸
See also: See also: 1976 advanced class tape 76ADV21 — Ida and a senior practitioner walking through dissection photographs that document the psoas's relationship to the pelvis and the development of asymmetric pulls in the infant body. 76ADV21 ▸
See also: See also: Big Sur 1973, tape SUR7322 — classroom discussion of sacral rotation, asymmetric tendon pulls at the coccyx, and how an anterior or laterally rotated sacrum participates in the scoliotic signature at the base of the spine. SUR7322 ▸