The sixth hour as the close of a three-hour arc
Ida did not present the sixth hour as a standalone session. In her 1975 Boulder and Santa Monica advanced classes, and in the public RolfB tapes, she returns again and again to the claim that hours four, five, and six are a single structural project taken from three approaches. The fourth hour works the inside line of the legs and the floor of the pelvis from below. The fifth comes down from above through the psoas and the abdominal organs. The sixth comes up from behind through the hamstrings into the rotators that hold the sacrum. The arc has one target — the horizontalizing of the pelvic floor — and three angles of attack. The sixth hour completes the geometry by reaching the one face of the sacrum that the previous five hours could not touch.
"The fourth, the fifth, and the sixth hour are all hours that have to do with the horizontalizing of the elders and specifically of the floor of the pelvis. And it so happens, as you saw yesterday, that it makes a tremendous difference which sequence you take them in."
Speaking to the senior practitioners on the tenth day of the 1975 Santa Monica class, Ida pulls fourth, fifth, and sixth together as a single structural project:
The framing is consequential. It means the practitioner approaching the sixth hour is not opening a new structural region but completing a region already half-built. Whatever the fourth and fifth left undone is now the sixth hour's inheritance — and conversely, whatever the sixth hour finally reaches has been made reachable only because four and five did their work. In her RolfB tape Ida walks the arc explicitly, naming what each hour deposits and what each leaves behind for the next.
"And your sixth hour, you are still working with the pelvis and balancing that basin. You are now going in primarily to balance the sacrum with the rest of the pelvis. Just as through the entire series, we have never gone where we are working. So here, you don't go where you are working, but you go to the areas that influence the sacral position. To balance."
On the RolfB6 public tape, Ida describes the moment of transition from the fifth hour into the sixth:
The principle — go to the determinants, not the target — recurs across her teaching but lands with particular force here, because the sacrum is the most central bone the practitioner ever reaches, and the practitioner reaches it through structures that lie at considerable distance. The hamstrings are not incidental to the sixth hour; they are the gateway. The gluteus maximus is not incidental; it is the door the practitioner must open before the deeper rotators come into view.
Working up the back of the leg to reach the rotators
On the RolfA3 public tape, walking through the sequence with a senior student, Ida names the practical procedure: the sixth hour works peripherally first — Achilles, gastrocnemius, hamstring insertions — then moves up to the sacrum and coccyx, and only then can the practitioner attempt the anterior face of the sacrum from the outside of the body. The student volunteers that the real goal of working the back of the leg is to get under the gluteus. Ida confirms it twice.
"That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. The rotator. The rotator. The real goal of working up the back of the leg is to get under the Ruleus. That's right. That's right. And this then is going to be the first hour where we have some hope of getting at the anterior aspect of the sacrum by working externally with the insertion of the rotator which arises in it. That's right."
On the RolfA3 tape a senior practitioner names what working up the back of the leg is actually for, and Ida confirms it as the structural opening:
The exchange contains the doctrine in compressed form. The sixth hour is the first hour where the practitioner has any hope of reaching the front face of the sacrum — and that reach is made possible only by external work on a chain of structures that runs from the heel up through the hamstring, through the maximus, into the rotators that attach into the sacrum's anterior surface. The whole hour is a single sustained approach. Later on the same tape, Ida is more emphatic: until the back of the leg has resilience, the gluteus maximus will not let the practitioner through.
"And you just, any of you that want to, offer me a suggestion as to what single bone of the body and its position is more important than the sacrum. Now in order to get to those rotators, you have to have a fair degree of resilience up the back of the leg because if you don't, the gluteus maximus maximus will not let you in. And you see again, it is that simple. And that is what the whole idea of yesterday was about. Getting to the place where you can get that sacrum organized with reference to the lumbas, with reference to the ilii, with reference to the coccyx, So the sixth hour is really the hour of the sacrum."
Returning to the same theme later in the tape, Ida names the gatekeeper:
The gluteus, in this account, is doing more than covering the rotators. It is gatekeeping. A maximus held tight by short hamstrings refuses the practitioner. This is why the hour begins peripherally and why so much of its time is spent below the buttock: the work in the leg is what earns the practitioner the right to work in the seat. The procedural sequence — Achilles, gastroc, hamstring, gluteus, rotator, sacrum — is not a list. It is a chain in which each link unlocks the next.
"Now in order to balance the rotators, one of which is the immediate determinant of sacral position, you have to also give a lot of attention to the hamstrings and therefore and thereby to the back of the legs because everything is connected with everything else, and there's no way of escaping this.
On the RolfB6 tape Ida makes explicit why the sixth-hour practitioner cannot avoid the hamstrings:
By the end of the sixth hour, in Ida's framing, the body has been built up from the ground: two feet on the ground, thighs over legs, pelvis over thighs. The sixth hour is the hour where that stack finally settles into the pelvis itself, because the sacrum — the keystone of the stack — has been balanced through the rotators that hold it from below and behind.
The sacrum as the goal
Ida's strongest claim about the sixth hour is also her simplest: it is the hour of the sacrum. The fourth hour worked the floor of the pelvis from below; the fifth from above. The sixth is the hour in which the sacrum itself comes into balance with the rest of the pelvis — and the sacrum, she repeatedly insists, has no rival as a piece of bony architecture. In the RolfA3 advanced-class material, when she presses students for what makes the sacrum special, she lets the question hang: name a single bone whose position matters more.
"coccyx, So the sixth hour is really the hour of the sacrum. Can you balance those that sacrum by virtue of organizing the piriformis basically the obturator in the second place which does the inside of the pelvis not really to the inside of the sacrum."
Naming the hour by its target, Ida states the doctrine flatly:
Two muscles are named: piriformis first, obturator second. The piriformis is the muscle that crosses from the anterior face of the sacrum out to the greater trochanter; the obturator group does the inside lining of the pelvis itself. Between them, they hold the sacrum's relationship to the femoral heads on one side and to the pelvic interior on the other. The sixth hour's work on the rotators is therefore not generic — it has a structural sequence within it, and the piriformis is the lead.
"And you're looking the key to unlock the block on on this pelvis at this hour is the piriformis. And the reason that's so important is because it goes to the or comes from the anterior part of the sacrum, which is the part we haven't been able to get to and usually the part that the the base is anterior and the apex is posterior too much. And so you work in that area, and the key and the hallmark that the way you've known you've done a pretty good job is that the breathing starts."
Walking through the sixth-hour procedure aloud on the RolfB6 tape, a senior practitioner identifies the piriformis as the key that unlocks the pelvis at this hour:
The piriformis matters not because it is large but because of where it attaches. Most muscles of the body are reachable from one side of the bone they cross. The piriformis is unusual: by working it from the outside, the practitioner is in effect reaching through the pelvis to the anterior surface of the sacrum — a surface that lies inside the bowl. This is what Ida means when she calls the sacrum's anterior face uniquely available in the sixth hour. The rotators are the only structural bridge in the body that crosses from inside to outside the pelvic basin.
The piriformis and the asymmetry of the pelvis
In the 1973 Big Sur tape twelve, Ida lets Carolyn — one of her senior students — develop the piriformis story aloud. Carolyn traces the muscle from the anterior surface of the sacrum, through the sciatic notch, out to the trochanter, and notes the structural consequence of asymmetric tone in the two piriformis muscles: a rotation through the entire pelvis. The discussion is also where Ida, unusually, names the lineup of sixth-hour clients she had worked the previous afternoon as evidence that integration at this hour is a different order of magnitude from what came before.
"They didn't Those of you who were in my class yesterday afternoon saw one after the other of those six hour people come out integrated, One after the other you looked at and you admired and you saw how drastically different it was a different order of magnitude that those people showed as they walked out from when they came in the pre six hour and the post six hour."
In Big Sur 1973 Ida points to the row of clients who had received their sixth hour the previous afternoon as evidence of what the hour does:
The claim about "a different order of magnitude" is doing two things at once. It is a teaching claim — the sixth hour visibly changes the body in ways earlier hours do not. It is also a polemical claim about what integration means. Earlier in the same tape, Ida tells the class that there is very little new in structural integration except integration itself, and that this is what separates the work from every other school of manipulation she knows. The sixth hour, in her telling, is one of the hours where that difference becomes most legible from the outside.
"It comes right through here, but it actually lays all in here and comes out over to here. So that if one piriformis is tighter than the other, you're going to have a rotation in the entire pelvis And that's the thing that Doctor. Rolfe was talking about when you start looking at people. When a person comes in the first hour, you start thinking about those later hours because when you get there, it's too late if you haven't been analyzing that body all along because you haven't freed it up enough to get down to the deeper structures to get the chains that you want."
Carolyn, taking up Ida's invitation to continue, develops the structural consequence of asymmetric piriformis tone:
Carolyn's contribution is also structurally important for the rest of the article: she names that the sixth hour cannot be improvised at the sixth hour. The practitioner has been reading the pelvis for piriformis asymmetry since the first hour. The work that lands in the sixth has been prepared by what was noticed — and freed — earlier in the series. The advanced classes return often to this point: each hour is read forward into all the hours that follow.
The gluteus medius and the muscle pattern of the sixth hour
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, working through the sixth hour aloud with the senior practitioners, Ida presses them to name what is invariably aberrated when a client arrives for this session. Steve Weatherwax volunteers the piriformis. Ida accepts it as right in general but says she is after something more specific — a particular muscle pattern that turns up almost every time, and that has to be addressed before the piriformis itself can be reached productively.
"But there is a specific muscle pattern in there that you find almost invariably in the sixth hour."
Pressing the senior practitioners for what they invariably find at the sixth hour, Ida sets up the puzzle:
The answer she is waiting for is the gluteus medius. Until the medius lengthens, the rotator work the practitioner intends to do — work on piriformis and obturator — will not deliver. The medius is the surface layer that holds the position of the trochanter relative to the crest; if it is too short, the rotators underneath cannot achieve the length the sacrum requires. The minimus, she notes, will take care of itself once the medius is freed. The lesson is also a polemic about the relation of anatomical naming to structural seeing.
"And until you let that gluteus medius lengthen run, you're not going to get what you're looking at. It's your question. You include the minimus in that too? Not so much. It's the medius. It's the medius. It's the straight line right in here. If you go in there and find the minimus is involved, nobody's telling you to get out of there. So you go and get that medius fixed up. Minimus will take care of itself. Piriformis is really important in this one because it it ties it goes from the inside of the sacrum to the outside. If your medius is too short, you won't get the appropriate freeing with the piriformis as it goes through the is it tattooed from the inside to the outside?"
Naming what she has been waiting for, Ida specifies the muscle and adds an aesthetic test:
The teaching beat is layered. The gluteus medius is the specific muscle whose shortening signals the sixth hour. But Ida is also using the moment to argue for an integration of anatomical knowledge with aesthetic perception. The student must see the medius as a too-narrow band between two landmarks, must feel the aesthetic offense before reaching for the Latin name. The same point appears later in the same class when she describes the visual hallmark of the sixth-hour body before it has been worked.
"The buns look sucked in and pulled up, also heavy around the pelvis. Yeah. It's that with those dimples alongside the gluteus are almost invariably too deep, which is talking about the structure of your body. Yeah, but I think the characteristic earmark hallmark of the sixth hour is the shortness of the body first."
Asked what the pre-sixth-hour body looks like at a glance, Ida names the visual hallmark:
Read alongside the medius doctrine, this gives the practitioner a complete pre-hour exam. The eye looks for sucked-in buttocks, deep dimples beside the gluteus, a too-narrow band over the trochanter, and a back of the leg with no fluidity. The body announces itself as a sixth-hour body before the practitioner's hands have touched it.
Reading the body before the sixth hour begins
The 1975 Boulder discussion of the pre-sixth-hour exam is one of the longest sustained pieces of pre-session looking in the recipe transcripts. Ida walks the practitioners through what to see: the shortness of the back of the leg, the lack of fluidity, the sacrum not just tight but pulled up. The sign-language of the body is also the practitioner's road map — the visible defects name the order in which the hour will proceed.
"You know? There's one way. And you look, you know, you watch him in his breathing and there should be some movement in the sacrum when he breathes also. That's too subtle. Something else to see, which is almost to a person. What I see like in that lineup yesterday, outstanding one of the outstanding characteristics of the poor practitioners in particular, not Takashi so much, was that they all had a it was as though they were falling over backwards."
Setting up the visual exam that opens the sixth hour, Ida names what the breath shows and what is too subtle to rely on:
The vivid image — a row of dominoes about to topple backwards — is what makes the exam memorable. The pre-sixth-hour body has its center of mass falling behind the hips, and the postural compensation is a backward pull centered at the pelvis. After the hour, this pull is no longer there. Ida's complaint, in the same passage, is that this gross sign was visible in nearly every member of the practitioners' lineup the previous day — meaning that in the advanced-class population, the sixth hour was the structurally most-needed work.
"The lower half, not the front half or the back half. Mhmm. It is just as the upper half is the target, really, in the fifth power. Mhmm. So the lower half is the target in the sixth I wish you fellas would get along with it because I got something to say before the six. Go on. Get on with it. Okay. So well, you have to well, depending on what you've done, you know, what you've got to do is There's something else again."
Setting the procedural sequence aloud, Ida confirms that the sixth hour invariably begins in the lower half:
The pairing of fifth and sixth — fifth working downward from above, sixth working upward from below — is one of the clearest pieces of recipe geometry Ida ever lays out. The pelvic floor is the meeting point, and the practitioner approaches it from two sides on consecutive sessions. The body that walks in for a sixth hour is a body that the fifth has prepared for an approach from below.
Why the back of the leg has to be short before it can be long
The 1975 Boulder discussion also brings out a peculiarity of the sixth-hour body: the hamstrings are predictably tight, even after they were addressed in the fourth hour, because the fifth hour's work in the front of the body pulls the hamstrings shorter. Chuck, one of the senior practitioners, names the trap that some practitioners fall into — finishing the fourth hour without really getting the hamstrings, so the sixth-hour practitioner inherits a back of the leg that has not been adequately addressed.
"What I see in a lot of people's work is that because the fourth hour, they take too long in the fourth hour, they fool around too long in the ankle and too long in the knee. And they don't get up from the pelvis quick enough. And then they start working the pelvis and their energy goes down. The hour becomes more and more painful, the person getting rolled. And frequently they cut out the hamstrings. They do the hamstrings but not with a real intention of getting the hamstrings. It's like their intention is finishing the hour, getting it over with, letting this poor person get out of here."
Chuck describes the common failure mode of the fourth hour that the sixth-hour practitioner inherits:
The diagnostic point — sixth-hour hamstrings reveal the quality of the fourth-hour work — is part of the larger advanced-class teaching that the hours read each other. A sloppy fourth hour shows up six weeks later as a sixth hour that cannot reach the rotators. This is also why the procedure of the sixth hour begins in the back of the leg even though the target is several layers deeper: the practitioner is, in part, completing the previous hour's unfinished business before opening the new one.
"a fluid, a movement of the tuberosities as they're pulling their legs up. You want to get that. And you see what is happening in the hamstrings. You can see if they're grabbing as they're pulling up. And you just go in and you get those places where they're short. Think the elbow is usually the most appropriate tool to use unless you're IDA. You can get in on them with your fist turning. Often it seems to be effective to work with a fist on the hamstrings while getting in with the knuckle or fingers around the ischial tuberosity."
Describing the practical work in the hamstrings before the rotators can be reached, a senior practitioner names what to look for:
The procedural detail — looking for the tuberosities to slide, the hamstrings to spread, the gluteals to broaden — is the kind of hands-on competence the advanced-class transcripts repeatedly try to transmit. The student who can only describe the move in words has not yet learned it. The student who can see the hamstring spread under his hand has.
The sacrotuberous and the back-work of the hour
After the rotators, the 1975 Boulder discussion turns to the sacrotuberous and sacrospinous ligaments and to the back work that follows. The hour does not end at the rotators. Ida directs the practitioners to work the ligaments that span the sacrum to the ischial tuberosity, and then to do the back work that integrates the new pelvic position upward into the spine. This is partly comfort, partly the recipe's standard practice of distributing local change.
"And that is that I really didn't understand that. I've never seen it before. I don't remember seeing it before. That back work on the sixth hour. Back work is always given on the sixth hour. Now go on and get up to the back work and then I'll take over. Okay. Well, after you've after you've breathed the rotators, you work on the sacrotuberous and sacrospinius ligament and do whatever How do you do this?"
Asked about the back work that always closes the sixth hour, a student questions whether it is standard; Ida confirms:
On the same RolfA3 tape, Ida confirms that the back of the sacrum itself is worked in some cases — freeing the insertion of gluteus maximus into the sacral fascia and the sacrotuberous tissue — and then closing the hour with a pelvic lift and neck work for balance. The sequence is consistent with her general rule: a region of deep change is followed by integration above and below, so that the new pelvic position is not held in isolation.
"We also worked on the outside of the sacrum or the posterior aspect of the sacrum. In some cases, freeing up the insertion of hoodies maximus in the fascia and the sacrotoxigeoloidal material true. Material Mhmm. Where where necessary. Necessary. It is true. Then this hour again, we did a pelvic lift in the back of the neck for balance comfort. And And you observed? What was the milepost door on the way? You know, that was so spaced out here. On your Thursday, I don't if there's any milepost or not."
Describing the closing of the sixth hour on the RolfA3 tape, Ida walks through the integration of the rotator work upward into the spine:
The closing of the hour is also a statement about the rest of the recipe. The sign that the sixth hour has landed — breath reaching the sacrum — is achievable only if the lumbars are in place, the psoas is functional, and the whole lumbar region has been spanned by adequate soft-tissue work. The sixth hour is the test of the first five.
The hallmark: breath into the sacrum
Throughout the transcripts, Ida and the senior practitioners return to one specific sign as the test of whether the sixth hour has landed: the sacrum visibly moves with the breath. The body lying prone after the hour shows a pumping action — the sacrum nutates with each inhalation. The sign is gross enough to be seen and specific enough not to be mistaken for general fluidity. It is also, by Ida's own account, almost impossible to fake.
"was getting those three hours back together again. The breathing went down into the sacrum. Sacrum mode. The movement of the sacrum and the breathing. And you see this cannot occur until you've got reasonably good relatedness all down the spine. It cannot occur. It cannot occur until you've got reasonable reasonable function in the psoas. It cannot occur until you've got the whole lumbar area spanning in terms of its soft tissue, in terms of its bone."
Naming the milepost again on the RolfA3 tape, Ida ties breath-into-the-sacrum to the prerequisites in the previous hours:
The marker is doubled: it is a sign that the sixth hour has done its work, and it is a sign that the first five hours did theirs. A sacrum that does not move with the breath after a sixth hour is testimony either that the rotator work did not land or that the lumbar region was not previously organized to allow it. The advanced classes use this fact diagnostically — when a sixth hour does not produce the breath sign, the question is whether the failure belongs to the hour just given or to an hour given weeks before.
"There's one way. And you look, you know, you watch him in his breathing and there should be some movement in the sacrum when he breathes also. That's too subtle. Something else to see, which is almost to a person. What I see like in that lineup yesterday, outstanding one of the outstanding characteristics of the poor practitioners in particular, not Takashi so much, was that they all had a it was as though they were falling over backwards."
On the 1975 Boulder tape, the breath-into-the-sacrum sign comes up again, with the acknowledgment that the sign itself can be subtle:
The honesty of this admission is characteristic of how Ida teaches the recipe. The signs are real but not uniformly easy to see. Some are gross — the dominoes-about-to-fall posture, the sucked-in buns. Some are subtle — the pumping of the sacrum with breath. The competent practitioner builds a hierarchy of cues and uses the gross ones to confirm what the subtle ones suggest.
Each hour is the beginning of every later hour
The advanced-class transcripts repeatedly insist that the recipe's hours are not discrete sessions but a single continuous process broken into ten parts only because the body cannot absorb the whole at once. The sixth hour is therefore not only the close of a three-hour arc; it is also where work begun in the first hour finally arrives. In the 1975 Boulder discussion the senior practitioners and Ida together state this principle as a recipe-wide rule.
"I clearly I clearly saw, you know, last summer that continuation process and how and, you know, Dick talked about how, you know, the only reason it was broken into 10, you know, sessions like that was it because the body just couldn't take all that work. Couldn't take it right. But I just sitting on just trying to figure out how the hell she ever figured out that process, and then began to see it."
Talking through the recipe's logic in the 1975 Boulder class, the practitioners and Ida together state the rule that each hour is the continuation of those before it:
The principle changes how the sixth hour is taught. The practitioner who treats the hour as a fresh approach to the sacrum is at a disadvantage: every move now made was made possible by an earlier move, and what cannot now be done has its origins in what was not done earlier. The piriformis that resists in the sixth hour is the same piriformis that should have been read in the first. Carolyn's earlier point — start reading the deeper structures from the moment the client first comes in — is part of the same teaching.
"Know that each horizontal that you bring out down below reflects itself upward as we saw in Takashi yesterday where he's working on his leg and you can see his rib cage absorbing the change. I mean this, when the tissue is in tension, that's stored energy that you release into the body. And its energy is not a metaphysical something. These molecules are aligned in a particular way. You change their alignment. The change spreads."
On the same Boulder tape, a senior practitioner restates the principle in terms of energy and tension:
The energy framing — fascial tension as stored energy, release as redistribution — is the same one Ida invokes in her public talks. Within the recipe's logic, the sixth hour is the session in which the body's stored backward pull at the pelvis is finally released, because the rotators that held it have finally been reached. The redistribution shows up as breath moving into the sacrum and as a body that no longer falls backward at the hips.
What the gluteus is doing in this hour
Across the transcripts the gluteus appears in two distinct roles. As the maximus, it is the gatekeeper — the surface layer that must be soft enough to admit the practitioner's hand to the rotators beneath. As the medius, it is the recurring pattern — the specific aberration that turns up in nearly every sixth-hour client and that must lengthen before the piriformis can be worked productively. The minimus, in Ida's framing, is secondary. The hour's gluteal work is principally maximus-as-gateway and medius-as-pattern.
"So well, you have to well, depending on what you've done, you know, what you've got to do is There's something else again. Is free the gluteus and I'm just going to go into the major part of the gym besides well, you've got to get the hamstrings. You've got to get the hamstrings free and you've got to put some more order in the hamstrings. And then you have to free that whole area around the buns and you're sort of working from the superficial level on into the deeper level and freeing the top layers and working really working that layer by layer so that you can get into the rotators and start strumming those and getting some length into them. What do you find invariably aberrated still when you get to that sixth hour?"
Walking the procedure aloud in the 1975 Boulder class, Ida and a senior practitioner describe the hands-on work that opens the gluteals before the rotators come into view:
The image of strumming the rotators is one of Ida's more memorable. The rotators are cords; once the surface layers have given way, the practitioner's hand reaches them and works them like strings, lengthening each in turn. The piriformis, the obturator, the gemelli, the quadratus femoris — the strumming distinguishes them and gives each its own length. The metaphor is not strictly anatomical but it teaches the hand what the work feels like when it is going right.
"Is true. Is true. But there are certain earmarks, certain hallmarks, that say to you you've done a good job on the sixth hour. One, when the sacrum orbates moves with each breath and there's no mistaking it. Two, when you a little further beyond that is when you begin to feel movement at the dorsal hinge check. This is the right. But there's one other point which is very easy to check and which tells you a great deal and you haven't mentioned it."
From an earlier advanced-class discussion preserved on the mystery-tape CD, Ida names a second hallmark of a completed sixth hour:
The dorsal-hinge sign is the integration sign — what the hour has done at the sacrum has propagated to the lumbodorsal junction. The same passage adds a third sign that Ida considers diagnostic: any movement initiated in the lowest part of the body should spread the gluteals rather than draw them in. A pelvis whose gluteals still grip on movement is a pelvis whose sixth hour has not landed.
The coccyx and what must be there by the sixth hour
On the RolfB6 public tape, Ida turns the discussion to the coccyx — the structure that must be hammocked between the two ischial spines for the pelvis to find its balance. The sixth hour is the third and last opportunity in the recipe to address the coccyx. If the coccyx has not been organized by then, the work simply cannot deliver the response the practitioner is looking for, no matter how well the rotators are worked.
"You haven't really stressed the fact that there there's well, at three times up to date, when you have been able to take a look at the and perhaps do something about it. The first hour, the fourth hour Mhmm. And the sixth hour. And if you haven't got it done by that time, in the first place, you are throwing rocks in your own way. But in the second place, there is no other logical place coming up where you can do this. But more than this, you are throwing rocks in your own path. Because if that pelvis if that toxic is not able to swing itself, to hammock itself between those two STI, you can't get the kind of balance in the pelvis that you're looking for. And you saw on some of these people here where fairly good fourth hours had been done. So I'm done, for instance."
On the RolfB6 tape Ida names the three points in the recipe at which the coccyx can be addressed, and the consequence of failing to use one of them:
The coccyx framing also explains a peculiarity in the same tape: Ida is observing that some of the demonstration clients had received "fairly good" fourth hours but were not responding at the sixth, and the reason was specifically the coccyx — which had not been organized when it could have been. The sixth hour is in this sense a court of last resort. The structures it can reach are not reachable anywhere else, and the practitioner who misses the opportunity at this hour does not get a second chance later in the recipe.
"Because if that pelvis if that toxic is not able to swing itself, to hammock itself between those two STI, you can't get the kind of balance in the pelvis that you're looking for. And you saw on some of these people here where fairly good fourth hours had been done. So I'm done, for instance. Fairly good four hours had been done, but you weren't getting the response."
Continuing the same point, Ida names the structural consequence of an unorganized coccyx:
Bringing the coccyx into the sixth-hour picture completes the floor-of-the-pelvis story. The fourth hour worked the floor from below. The fifth came in through the psoas from above. The sixth reaches the floor through the rotators that attach into the anterior surface of the sacrum, and confirms the structure by ensuring the coccyx is properly slung between the ischial spines. The three hours together make the floor of the pelvis horizontal — and the body, finally, capable of resting its weight squarely on its own base.
Coda: the hour that confirms what came before
Across these transcripts, what emerges is that the sixth hour is less an opening than a confirmation. The practitioner is not adding a new structural region; he is reaching the one face of the pelvis that no earlier hour could approach, and in doing so confirming whether the previous five hours did their job. A successful sixth hour is testimony to a successful fourth and fifth. A failed sixth hour is testimony — usually — to a coccyx not organized in the fourth, a piriformis not read in the first, hamstrings not finished, a lumbar region not yet spanned.
"And the pelvic floor. Yeah. It isn't an and the pelvic floor. If you really establish the medial line of the body, you will have established the pelvic floor. Quite true, the pelvic floor is your goal, but it's not a separate goal. It's just the end point of a road. And if you go along that road, you can't help getting to that end point if you go far enough."
On the RolfA2 public tape, summarizing the relation of one hour to the next, Ida states the principle that governs the whole sixth-hour project:
The image of the road is what the article comes to rest on. The sixth hour is not a destination but the place where the road through the pelvic floor finally arrives at the sacrum. The practitioner who has prepared the road well finds the destination available. The practitioner who has not finds that the rotators resist, the gluteus maximus refuses entry, the sacrum stays jerked up, and the breath does not reach the bone. The hour is, in this sense, the most honest hour of the recipe. It rewards everything that was done before and exposes everything that was not.
See also: See also: 1975 Boulder advanced class (T1SB) for the recipe-wide doctrine that each hour is the beginning of all subsequent hours, with extended discussion of why Ida structured the work to begin in the chest and pelvis to deliver the most immediate experience of what the practice is. T1SB ▸
See also: See also: 1975 Boulder advanced class (T9SB) on the fourth-hour transition into the fifth and sixth — the practitioner's task of putting organized support under the pelvis from below so that the pelvis can be free for sixth-hour rotator work. T9SB ▸
See also: See also: 1973 Big Sur Tape 10 (SUR7318) — Ida on the fourth, fifth, and sixth as the three key hours of pelvic organization, and on the necessity of reading the body's lateralization in earlier hours so that the sixth can land. SUR7318 ▸
See also: See also: 1971-72 Mystery Tapes (72MYS131, 72MYS141) for early formulations of the sixth-hour doctrine, including Ida's framing of the hour as the first 'movement' hour and the relation of fourth-hour adductor work to the freedom required at the sixth. 72MYS131 ▸72MYS141 ▸