Why the head is left for last
Ida insisted on a structural logic for the order of the recipe. The seventh hour comes seventh because the first six have built the platform on which the head and neck can finally be addressed. To go after the cervicals before the pelvis is horizontalized, before the legs are organized under the trunk, before the shoulder girdle is freed, would mean working on a structure that has no base to settle into. In a public tape labeled RolfA4, she walks a student through this rationale step by step — and presses the point that without the seventh hour, the gains made below would not hold.
"the through the sixth hour, we have, to a large extent, accomplished what the goal one of the major goals. Of the entire technique that we're into is, and that is to lengthen and place the pelvis into a more horizontal position with the legs under this structure. So to a large extent we've aligned the torso, placed the lower extremities under it and freed the also freed the upper shoulder girdle. So this leaves us at this point with the neck and the head,"
From the RolfA4 public tape, Ida summarizes what the first six hours have accomplished and why the head and neck come next:
She then presses the converse question: what would happen if the head were left alone? The answer is the structural reason the seventh hour exists at all. A head carried forward of the line acts as a weight hung off the upper thoracic spine, and that weight continually pulls the lumbar and dorsal curves back toward the configuration the earlier hours worked to undo. Without the seventh hour, the recipe's pelvic work decompensates from above.
"The reason being that that the the head and neck with its gravity acting on it and its anteriority, generally its anteriority, would tend to decompensate again the lumbar and dorsal curves. You see when the head and neck are carried forward or when the head, let's not consider the neck. When the head is carried forward, you have a weight which, oh, I don't know, runs from about 12 to 16 pounds, I think. Well, being carried forward. And this literally, you are carrying just as surely as if you were carrying it with your two pants in front of you. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know."
In the same exchange, she explains why leaving the head alone would undo what the earlier hours had built:
The dual objective: bring the cervical spine back, put the occiput on the abdomen
When Ida names what the seventh hour is for, she names two things at once. The first is local: bring the cervical spine back from its lordotic forward curve. The second is global: put the occiput on the abdomen — meaning, bring the back of the skull into vertical relation with the abdominal contents far below it, so that the entire span from head to pelvis is organized on one line. In a 1971-72 Mystery Tape, she states the dual objective plainly and lists the structural moves the practitioner makes to accomplish it.
"Well, the objective of the seventh arm are the dual objectives are one, to bring the cervical spine back and two, put the head on, to put the occiput on the abdomen."
On a Mystery Tape from the early 1970s, Ida states the seventh hour's objective in a single sentence:
In the 1974 Open Universe class, working with a student on a live model, she gives the same teaching in different language — naming the look that tells you a seventh hour is needed and the look that tells you it has succeeded. The forward-carried head she describes is the random body's signature: a head that is not on the vertical line the practitioner has been building since the first hour. When the seventh hour lands, the head knows where it belongs.
"The object of this hour is to bring the neck into that vertical line. Most people before the seventh hour have a look of the head very anterior. The head is not on that vertical line we've been talking about all through the class at all. As a result of this hour, that head comes back onto the line."
From the 1974 Open Universe class, demonstrating a seventh hour:
What the practitioner is measuring
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, Ida's senior assistants — Stacey and others — describe the seventh hour to the trainees in technical terms. The cervical lordosis is the immediate measurement, but the teaching that emerges is that the practitioner must learn to see past the local curve to the relationship between the head's mass and the gravity field. Stacey, working at the model's head, walks the class through the shift from anatomical thinking (where is the cervical curve?) to relational thinking (where is the head with respect to the field?).
"What we're trying to do is to get the head, the occiput back with respect to the cervical vertebrae. I guess just in practical terms what I'm measuring there is lordosis of the cervical vertebra."
Working with a model in the 1975 Boulder class, a senior practitioner describes what the seventh hour is trying to accomplish:
Later in the same class, the assistant continues, contrasting two ways of perceiving the head. The first is local — the practitioner looks at the cervical curve as an isolated anatomical fact. The second is relational — the practitioner uses imagined midlines between ear, shoulder, hip, and ankle to locate where the head sits in space. Ida's teaching, the assistant says, was to move trainees from the first mode of seeing to the second. The seventh hour cannot be done by feel alone; the eye has to be trained on the field.
"Well, let's see. What we're trying to do is to get the head, the occiput back with respect to the cervical vertebrae. I guess just in practical terms what I'm measuring there is lordosis of the cervical vertebra. Now you're measuring the lack of relationship to the gravity. So you're looking a cervical curve instead of again the mass in the field. Then you're going to get down like nearsighted. And when a person is laying on their back, Ida sometimes says, you know, just imaginary describe a midline between ear, shoulder, hip and ankle. And those midlines are like, you can sort of whip them up as a point of reference. It's too far forward or it's too far back or the occiput is back or the chin is down. But when you begin to use those theoretical lines instead of lordosis of the cervical vertebrae, you begin to see more in terms of relationship and less in terms of you know, those small areas. I guess I've been doing Seventh Hours more by feel than by what I could see."
Continuing the same class, the assistant describes the perceptual shift Ida required of trainees in the seventh hour:
The fascial complexity of the neck
Before the practitioner can address the cervicals, they must reckon with what the neck actually contains. Ida's teaching emphasizes that the neck is not a simple column but a fascial sleeve carrying many small muscles in stacked layers — the most complicated soft-tissue region in the body. Where the trunk has fewer muscles working at larger amplitude, the neck has many small muscles working at small amplitude, stacked on top of each other, all carried in cylindrical fascial planes that hang from the bony surfaces of the skull.
"And it does it spontaneously. Again, you can ask me questions as I go along and I'll answer them as I feel I can. The fascial network, as you can imagine, in the neck is very complex. There are numbers of smaller muscles than in most other parts of the body, and therefore the layers or the numbers of muscles on top of one another is greater than most places. So the possibility of complication and of trouble is greater than the head to the right."
From the 1974 Open Universe class, describing what the practitioner is reaching into in the seventh hour:
On a Boulder 1975 tape, the assistant elaborates with an image of the cranium as a bowl resting on cylindrical fascial planes that rise up through the neck — planes that both hang from the bony surfaces of the skull and hold it up. This is why disturbances anywhere in the body register in the head and face. The fascial pull is continuous from the trunk through the neck to the cranial surfaces; nothing is isolated.
"Well, there's another way of looking at it in terms of soft tissue is that if you were to take a section through the neck, for example, you'd see all these fascial planes in the form of cylinders. And it's like the cranium is kind of like a bowl that sits on all these fascial planes and they're sort of hanging from or holding up, both things are true, from all the bony surfaces of the skull. So that any kind of changes from anywhere in the body are gonna be reflected up in those places because everything hangs from those bony surfaces all the way around. Well, it's more than any kind of changes, any kind of illness, any kind of local tension. If you have a stomach ache and it's relatively confined to your stomach, it's going to be shown up there. If the liver isn't working right, it's going to be shown up there. This is going to be the point of major disturbance, greater disturbance many times than the local point of problem. The kind of shine that gets into people in their head, in their face frequently comes long before the seventh hour. You know, third or fourth along in the air. You begin to see that coming out from you. What do you suppose that's a reflection of? Just what we're talking about."
From the 1975 Boulder class, describing the cranium as resting on the fascial cylinders of the neck:
Two levels: the collar and the depth
In the 1976 advanced class, Ida frames the seventh hour as two distinct levels of work that the practitioner must hold separately in mind. The first is what she calls the collar — the superficial fascia at the neck and shoulder yoke, the sternocleidomastoid, the trapezius, the splenius, the structures that touch the body's surface. The collar is what every preceding hour has already begun to address, however lightly. The second level is the depth — the small intrinsic muscles between the cervical vertebrae and the prevertebral fascia in front of the spine. The mistake she watches trainees make is trying to reach the depth before the collar is sufficiently resilient to permit entry.
"Do you remember how, no, you don't, because I haven't done any more class. But how many times I get after people and it is somewhere along the third, the fourth, fifth hour and say to them, Now this is the third hour. Don't try to really change what is deep there. Just organize it so that there is more resilience, so that these structures can live together a little more happily. And that's all you have been doing up to this point and this is where you start your seventh hour. Just organizing and and lengthening lengthening and making more resilient these superficial structures of that color. And only after you have that ptella sufficiently resilient is it possible to go under that tala and begin to get to the very sturdy but unexpected structures of those very small muscles that run through all of the neck structure, holding vertebrae together, etc. These are small muscles, very small muscles. You remember that big muscles are muscles whose job it is to move structures far and fast. You don't move neck structures, you don't move head structures far and fast. And these are small structures that run between vertically. So forth and so forth. Now, there's a very interesting concept here and that is that all of these muscles which constitute the face, all of these muscles connect back to the cervical spine, either directly or indirectly. So that in order to organize the cervical spine you have to be informed about where the stuff is that you call your face. It's very hard to get the idea that your face is just some more muscles. Because by golly, it's your face."
From the 1976 advanced class, Ida distinguishes the two levels of the seventh hour:
She is explicit that the work is not crude. Watching her with her knuckles in a model's neck, students often imagine she is pressing through bulk tissue, but the work is layer-specific and small-amplitude. In the 1975 Boulder class, the assistant describes what is actually happening when Ida appears to mash the suboccipital region — subtle lengthening of individual fascial fibers, most of which run vertically or diagonally under the skull, requiring transverse strokes across them.
"ought to be aware of in the seventh hour and that's why we brought these in. And that's right here. These should actually have a hinge movement right here. It's really important to get that length down in there because that's where a lot of headaches occur and all kinds of nauseous problems. And so you really, it's not just a matter of mashing a lot of tissue in there, it's a matter of getting in there and subtly lengthening it. And a lot of people see Aida putting their knuckle in there and think that that's what she's doing. She's not. She's really trying to lengthen different layers and she does an amazing job of it. So the head work's really subtle work. You gotta kinda look at it as a whole art creation on its own as part of an art form. In fact if you consider the structure under the base of the skull you you see that most of the fibers run either up and down or on a diagonal under the head. So most of the movement in seventh hour goes across from, the occiput, across those fibers. So what you see is a movement like this is really lengthening individual fibers as you go back and forth in there. That's the place where the fingers are really your best tool. The knuckle sort of opens up the surface but most of the head work is really detail work."
On the same Boulder tape, the assistant describes the suboccipital work as detail work rather than bulk pressure:
Why the practitioner enters the mouth
One of the seventh hour's distinguishing features is that the practitioner works inside the mouth and sometimes the nose. Ida is emphatic about why. The cervical curve cannot be reduced from behind alone, because the structures pulling the cervicals forward are themselves in front of the spine — the prevertebral fascia, the tongue, the soft tissue under the chin and across the floor of the mouth. To organize the cervicals from behind without addressing what is in front is to fight a tug-of-war the practitioner cannot win. In a Mystery Tape from the early 1970s, she walks the students through this logic and names the sixth cervical as the structure that has long defeated chiropractors who do not understand it.
"It never occurred to me that in terms of the physical carriage of the body, the individual who carries his head forward in order to balance the imbalance that is below, as for instance, Jerry over here, is will have managed to get himself the kind of muscular imbalance inside of his head, which has many significances. The whole tongue will have moved forward. And in that the whole the tongue as a whole and the whole tongue has moved forward, you now have all kinds of pressures into the sixth cervical. You also have all kinds of interferences with the well-being of the thyroid and the parathyroid and the thymus, etcetera, etcetera. But one of the reasons why that anterior sixth cervical has always been the major booger boo to osteopaths and to chiropractors has been that they haven't understood that they can't get a sixth cervical back until they let this stuff come back. And this stuff is the stuff that lies under the chin in front. It is a pre it is all the prevertebral soft tissue. And in order to organize the cervical, you have got to organize that soft tissue. And so you go into the mouth. Therefore, you have to go into the mouth. Now the smarter you are with your preparation, the less necessity there is to go into the mouth. But there is a certain amount of necessity, no matter."
From a Mystery Tape (1971-72), Ida explains why the sixth cervical cannot be reached from behind:
In a 1974 IPR lecture, Ida brings the tongue into the picture directly. The tongue, she says, is everlastingly pulling on the oral and cervical fascia, and the practitioner who does not understand this cannot understand why the cervical curve will not yield. She also names something practitioners often miss: every muscle in the head connects, directly or indirectly, to the cervical vertebrae. The face is not an isolated set of expressions but a chain of fascial pulls anchored in the neck.
"get a tongue back where it belongs because that tongue is everlastingly pulling on those oral and cervical fascia. The things that you do not sufficiently recognize is the fact that there is no muscle in the head but connects directly or indirectly to the vertebra of the neck. You see we all think of a face as a face, a head as a head. But that there shouldn't be any relation between the way the vertebrae fall in here and what my facial expression is, is something you never think of until you manage to get into that seventh power. And after that seventh power is organized and you go along and you hit a few days like yesterday was in this room and all of a sudden your face doesn't look the same. It doesn't have that nice shiny radiant brightness that it had. Peter was a beautiful example yesterday."
From an August 1974 IPR lecture, Ida insists on the face-to-cervical connection:
Across hours and venues, Ida returns to the same point in slightly different language. In a public tape she names the principle directly: the cervical cannot be reorganized from outside structures alone. The practitioner must enter the prevertebral space — under the chin, into the mouth, sometimes the nose — because that is where the anterior pull originates.
"It's an intuitive appreciation of normalcy. Now today I am going to do a seventh hour. And in doing that seventh hour I will spend probably a good fifteen minutes, maybe more, preparing that neck. And all of a sudden I get sick and tired of preparing that neck from the outside and I remember that there are prevertical structures as well as postvertical structures."
From a Mystery Tape, Ida describes the moment in a seventh hour when she shifts from outside the neck to inside the mouth:
The cranium is not a stone
Part of what the seventh hour reveals is whether the cranium itself can move. In the 1975 Boulder class, Ida draws on her exposure to the cranial osteopaths — Sutherland chief among them — to make the case that the seven bones of the skull, joined at sutures held by fascial wrapping, are designed to move on each other in normal respiration. Where the skull has become rigid, the practitioner is dealing with a structural emergency, particularly in a child.
"an an osteopath. Osteopath. Now this is important for you to understand because possibly even by this time, you have found that there are heads of your random bodies that you pick up that are like stones. Those are the heads, the craniae that do not move. Realize that the cranium is made up of five different bones of the it. Seven. Seven. Seven. Realize that in the embryological growth of the individual, there were seven centers which as the child developed embryologically developed first into connected tissue, and then into bone, depositing bone marrow. And that when that child is born, as you all know, those bones are not grown together. There are sometimes quite wide apertures, which are held together only by the fascial wrapping. And as the child gets older, the bones extend until they about meet. But you heard me say they about meet. And there is a junction there. And in true health, that junction does move, and there is no question about it. Now the one thing that the cranial osteopaths can teach you is to show you how those bones move. You don't need to know that in order to work with it. If you do, well, that's just that much more in your arm and you're tearing. You feel and you see those bones move. And as the body gets properly balanced, you get this sense of those bones being inside soft tissue that you get with all other problems. And when you find a person whose head is stony, and this is very often the case with young children, that is a child that needs help and needs it quickly. Look you. If this whole spine is a pumping device, you are going to get movement all up and down the spine in normal respiration."
From the 1975 Boulder class, Ida discusses the cranial bones and their movement:
She is careful, on a 1976 tape, not to claim more about the cranial mechanism than her own observation supports. The energy field around the head, which she and her senior practitioners had learned to feel for, becomes one of the seventh hour's diagnostic tests: if after the seventh hour the field is too thin and too narrow, the work has not been done. She places this alongside the structural tests — the head's position on the line, the cervical curve's reduction, the mobility of the cranial sutures — as parts of one assessment.
"He didn't believe what he had seen. Think there was something else I had to say about oh, you asked me the question of had I ever really studied these cyclical changes. No, but it is common practice among all of us to feel what's going on in that head and to feel the intensity or the lack of intensity of the energy field around the head. This ties in with your question whether it's not the specific answer. And if after the seventh hour, which you will be doing next Wednesday, you do not feel that field around the head, and it is too thin and too narrow, you haven't done your $7 before."
From the 1976 advanced class, Ida names the energy field around the head as one of the seventh hour's tests:
Cervical alignment and the structures above the air
On a Mystery Tape that addresses the seventh hour in detail, Ida turns to a teaching moment that has become one of her vivid phrases in the archive — the brain depends on circulation that runs up through the cervical region, and the forward head shuts down that circulation at the vertebral arteries. The seventh hour, in this framing, is not only about structural alignment of the head but about the supply of the brain itself. The extrinsic muscles of the neck — the trapezius and the levator — are the ones that get lost in random bodies, and the end of the seventh hour is the first time the practitioner can really get them back where they belong.
"to Now this is the reason for all of the Get your head up, guy! Because that which makes the guy is above the air and you're shutting off So what are we doing at the end of the seventh hour? The back. You are i"
From a Mystery Tape, Ida names what is at stake structurally in the seventh hour:
On the same tape, she elaborates the physiological reasoning the trainees give her — and accepts it with characteristic correction. The respiratory pattern and the circulatory pattern both improve when the cervicals are properly aligned, because the vertebral arteries loop near the atlas and any restriction in the cervical region constricts the supply to the brain. She does not overclaim the mechanism. She says only that this is one of the primary physiological reasons the seventh hour matters.
"It doesn't why is it that it has the importance that it has? You've all seen with your models around here, seventh hour really shook him in the chest. Well, basically it establishes a relationship from cortical the to more specified and they are on an internal basis of the core. And the respiratory pattern can be established through that whole length of this time as well as the circulatory pattern to the skull is affected. Well the respiratory pattern should be in pretty well. You can wait between the 7,000. But alright, you're doing alright, go on. And by the correct positioning of the cervical vertebra then there is an increased supply of blood to the brain. That's probably one of the, as far as a physiological basis, one of the primary factors. Alright, tell me about that supply to the brain. Well, as the arteries come up they tend to loop near the atlas and axons one artery, the internal carotid. In order to permit this rotational effect, that's fine. And any contraction or restriction The arteries is formal, what's the side of the rotation? Yeah, in order to permit. It's an anatomical Oh, you mean in order to Like, how often you're trying to Yeah, I think you're getting a little bit, I think your anatomy is getting pretty gross. Never mind. I can't wait to see Anyway, and if that area is not properly aligned and there is a restriction of both at that point and it's properly balanced then it will be an optimum level."
From the same Mystery Tape, an assistant works through the physiological reasoning under Ida's questioning:
The face begins to be visible
Across the seventh-hour material, one observation recurs: the face changes. Practitioners working through the recipe see it as early as the third or fourth hour — a shine, a brightness — and by the seventh hour the face has reorganized as architecture rather than expression. Ida's framing is that this is not cosmetic. It is the visible registration of releases far below, transmitted through the prevertebral fascial planes into the face, and of the cerebrospinal fluid beginning to move freely as the sacrum starts to rock with the breath.
"The kind of shine that gets into people in their head, in their face frequently comes long before the seventh hour. You know, third or fourth along in the air. You begin to see that coming out from you. What do you suppose that's a reflection of? Just what we're talking about. Specifically. That you're releasing stuff down below that's transmitting its release up into those head structures. But but stuff wait a minute. I'm stuff is what? Well, specifically, think probably the most important avenue for that is the prevertebral fascial plankton that comes up right up into the face. I think it's the cerebral spinal fluid pumping mechanism beginning to work, especially early on as you begin to free up around here. The sacrum starts being able to move with movement, and then the fluids begin That to makes sense."
From the 1975 Boulder class, an assistant describes the facial change that begins to appear before the seventh hour:
In a 1976 advanced class, Ida frames the same observation through the lens of the random body's body image. The seventh hour is the first hour in which the head's inside becomes visible to the practitioner as a structural region. Before then, the head registers as an outside — the contour of the face, the hair, the expression. After the seventh hour, the inside of the head is laid out where the practitioner can see it, feel it, and change it.
"Lo and behold, now you begin to get a brand new idea. You begin to get the recognition because for the first time you can see it. Of the fact that there is an inside and an outside to his body. So here before you've never seen an inside. But now that inside is laid out right where you can see it, right where you can feel it, right where you can change it, in turns of the muscles that lie on the outside of the skull, on the face, on the chin, so forth. You have a very complicated structure there. And in order to do a good job, you're going to have to go into that complicated structure and simplify And what you do in that complicated structure is exactly what you've been doing right from the minute you started roughing. You are looking at the structure which is too short, which is displaced, which is doing too much work. And you're bringing it around to a place where it doesn't have to work that hard. And many of these structures you have to get to through the mouth. Because with most individuals in our culture, the head is carried too far forward. And you've got to relieve it and allow it to go back. Now I wasn't the first one that got that idea, but apparently I have carried it further than people."
From the 1976 advanced class, Ida names what the seventh hour reveals about the head:
The seventh hour as balance — and its return to the pelvis
Ida treats every hour of the recipe as a balancing hour, including the seventh, and the balance the seventh hour produces does not stay local to the neck. Practitioners observed, again and again, that work in the seventh hour produced further change in the pelvis — sometimes so much change that the body looked disorganized in the days afterward, before the eighth hour came to consolidate it. In the 1974 Open Universe class, the assistant describes this phenomenon explicitly: a plug that had been holding the pelvis or shoulder girdle in imbalance is released by the seventh hour, and the body must reorganize around its absence.
"It becomes clearer and clearer as the time gets closer to the hour. So this hour is a balancing hour as all of them are, but the opposite is very true in this hour that there is an effect in the pelvis. Each hour of the raw thing has one of its goals, horizontalizing the pelvis, bringing that goal which begins filling over both to the side and often to the front, back into a horizontal position. And the results of the work in this hour, both because they go as far as levels are concerned to the same level that you have done in the pelvis and perhaps even deeper. Causes you'll see later on in this hour, we'll do some work in this man's mouth and perhaps some in his nose. This brings the body already in this one hour to even increase change in the pelvis."
From the 1974 Open Universe class, an assistant describes how the seventh hour reaches back down into the pelvis:
Working with a model on the same tape, the assistant notes that the practitioner can sometimes feel the pelvis dropping back during intra-oral work in the seventh hour. The structural relationship between the floor of the mouth and the floor of the pelvis is more than analogical — there is fascial continuity along the front of the spine that runs the entire length of the body, and releasing one end produces a release at the other.
"You come to realize in the seventh hour, especially when you're experiencing it yourself, is the relationship of that of different parts of the body is a constant wonder to the author of a personal sense in various parts of the body. The change is resulting from work in a further part of the body. Very often in the case of the pelvis and in the and I said, I didn't even try anything but feel my pelvis clearly dropping back as he was doing the work in the in the mouth. And it was particularly significant there because the man has cerebral palsy and therefore has a very frozen sort of anterior lumbar region. The seventh hour, his lumbar is by far That point, you'd those especially opposed to probably almost feel the fascial the planes changing their relationship with one another. Those in his neck and those around his jaw, the muscles of the cheek, near the muscles of the cheek that they join the bone."
Working with a man with cerebral palsy in the 1974 class, the assistant describes the pelvic response to seventh-hour mouth work:
After the hour: the head learns where it belongs
Practitioners and students alike report that the seventh hour produces an immediate change in how the head sits, but Ida is careful not to overstate the permanence of any single hour's gains. The head's position is held by the relationships of the structures around it, and those relationships continue to settle through the eighth, ninth, and tenth hours. What the seventh hour establishes, in her framing, is the possibility that the head can know its place — and the practitioner's task in the subsequent hours is to confirm that knowing.
"here saw me do a little work on his neck then. Varies from person to person. Once in a while at the end of the hour you will ease the surface of the neck. But it's not the same as trying to organize it. It's more relating that neck to the work that you've done in that particular hour. Now you can probably see considerable ease on the inside of the neck, but it's sitting back much differently. Well, I yes. But I would say this, that there's a this is a process that we're involved in. And between hours, I talked about how you evolve to the place that's forty seventh hour. It has become more interior with respect to the other things that are being changed, not necessarily more than it was before the first hour, but more with respect to the line as we continue to establish. And there's a variation which takes place between hours. It could happen that before the ninth hour, his head will not look as good, chances are, 100% of the time, won't look as good as how it becomes this hour. So I don't mean by saying that the main change that we've established established tonight will be, you know, held in that body in the same way, exactly the same way. But I do mean to say that it won't return to the place where it was. Yeah? Yeah, there are. A lot of it is there is an element of learning."
From the 1974 Open Universe class, on what happens to the neck and head between the seventh hour and the rest of the series:
In a 1975 Boulder class, the assistants take the senior students through the head work that gets deferred until the advanced training, examining trainees' own necks to assess what has and has not been reached. The lesson, repeated across multiple recordings, is that the cervical region rewards return attention — the practitioner who has done many seventh hours continues to discover small intrinsic relationships that the recipe's first pass cannot reach.
"Do you see how he turns on that top joint and there's still no movement whatsoever between, say, the third and fourth cervical, little on the sixth. Now if you really wanted to get into these specific points, what is it that we have neglected in this advanced work? Dorsal pin. Oh, come. Come now. Copper red. Come. Come now. We haven't done as much head work as I thought we would do. Inside head work. Inside. Seventh hour plus head work. You might feel that one. I don't I don't need more. I just thought I would see more of it maybe. Here is an here is an exercise in imagination. In your mind, pick out some of your friends here. And in your mind get into that seventh hour material and figure where you would want to put it to get greater neck freedom. I don't know how many of you have really experimented to see how, what dropped where while you were doing the seventh hour? What put a finger into the cervicals when you put a finger into their mouth? Was that under the tongue? Was that up at the hinge of the jaws? Was it in the roof of the mouth? Remember at this moment what you have seen in your own seventh hour work. Now Pat there, in thinking about what she had seen, released her own neck. Chuck tightened his. Now you see one of the criteria now one of the situations which must be present before you get that cranium free on that neck is the line at the top of the head, the top of the hair."
From a 1975 advanced class, Ida invites trainees to examine each other's necks and locate what the seventh hour has and has not addressed:
Coda: the seventh hour and the whole
Ida's late-career framing of the seventh hour treats it as one of the most consequential hours in the recipe — not because it accomplishes more than the others but because it completes the chain that the others have built. With the head set onto the abdomen and the cervicals back, the practitioner has finished the span from foot to crown that the gravity field requires. The chain Ida names runs from the cervicals through the autonomic plexi and the vagus to the entire distance below: the neck is a key control point for everything in the body, and the seventh hour is when that key is finally turned.
"to you of the significance of these. And I think that some of the cures that the cervical school of chiropractors credit to chiropractic are really not due to the cervical vertebra, the second and third cervical vertebra, as much as they are due to the replacement, you see, of this chain autonomic. Like so. The fact of the matter remains that as you do a proper job on the neck and the head and the organization of that top segment of the body, you get all kinds of very dramatic episodes coming in in terms of hearing, in terms of sightedness, in terms of hay fever, in terms of 20 year old sinuses and post basal drips and that sort of thing, as well as in terms of an asthma and emphysema and all of these things. You just always put your finger on and turn around when you get into that next structure if you do a good job. So that you have here one of most important hours as far as your affecting well-being is concerned. So today, we're going to have to start on Frank with this seventh hour. And in as much as he's a, quote, fresh guy anyway, we could expect to have a fresher guy around. I would suggest that at this moment while we're waiting for him, This has been briefer than well, it hasn't been briefer than usual because we have an unusual lineup."
From a public tape, Ida describes the systemic effects of organizing the head and the neck:
Late in the same recording, Ida returns to a recurring image: the head is the upward pole of the span the recipe organizes, and the seventh hour is the moment when that pole finally lifts. The work is structural, but it carries a meaning the language of structure cannot quite hold — the practitioner is doing what the religious traditions describe in different words, lifting the body up rather than letting it melt down. Ida is plain that she does not understand the connection, but she is unwilling to pretend it is not there.
"I mean the recognition of how important it is to have hard structures so organized that these soft structures can get to a period of maximum to a place of maximum frequency. So I think we'll call today and do some work on the seventh hour, and you people, when you go upstairs to work upstairs, you are trying to do. Because once again, you are balancing blood source from extensors. Once again, you are contributing to the possibility of getting those extensors working, and they seem to have a validity all their own in terms of quality of human being that they create. Realize that your extensors are not always muscles. Extensors, technically speaking, are muscles, but what I'm talking about is the structures that can lift the body up rather than let a body melt down. This is what you're doing. You're lifting the body up. You're getting the the pole, the uppermost pole of the body lifted up."
From a 1971-72 Mystery Tape, Ida closes a seventh-hour teaching with a reflection on what the work amounts to:
See also: See also: 1976 advanced class (76ADV132) — extended Ida monologue on the two-layer model of seventh-hour work (collar and depth) and the historical predecessors who entered the mouth but did not relate that work to the rest of the body. 76ADV132 ▸
See also: See also: 1976 advanced class (76ADV211) — Ida on the tenth hour's test for balance, an uninterrupted wave through the body from head to sacrum, and on the practitioner's access to the nervous innervation of the thyroid through cervical myofascial tissue — material that bears directly on what the seventh hour has prepared in the neck. 76ADV211 ▸
See also: See also: 1974 IPR Lecture, August 11 (74_8_11A) — Ida on the tongue's pull on cervical fascia, the bite, and the dental-cervical relationship, framed within the third-cervical work she returns to in advanced training. 74_8_11A ▸
See also: See also: 1975 Boulder advanced class (B4T1SA) — extended discussion of head imbalance as field-relational rather than local, with a model named Dorothy whose head sits in a 'hole' she takes out of her own structure. B4T1SA ▸
See also: See also: 1971-72 Mystery Tape (72MYS151) — Ida on the intuitive appreciation of normal head-on-neck structure and the practitioner's preparation of the neck for fifteen minutes before entering the prevertebral space. 72MYS151 ▸
See also: See also: RolfA4 public tape — full structural rationale for placing the seventh hour seventh in the recipe and the head-as-weight load problem. RolfA4Side1 ▸
See also: See also: RolfB6 public tape — Ida's overview of the recipe with the seventh hour positioned in the larger architecture, including the relationship between cranial bones and emotional structure. RolfB6Side1a ▸