The shopping bag and the wetsuits: what a plane is
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, Chuck — Ida's senior anatomical teacher — walked the students through the architecture of the fascia from the outside in, using the most ordinary metaphor available to him. The superficial fascia is a shopping bag. It contains everything in a very general relationship; it lies between the skin and the deep fascia; it has two layers, an outer adipose layer that gives the body its contour and an inner membranous layer rich in elastic tissue. The key fact about the bag, for the work, is the relationship between those two layers and the deep fascia underneath: in a healthy body, the bag slides. The outer covering moves over the inner architecture. This is the first plane-on-plane slide, the most accessible to the practitioner's hands, and the one the first hour of the recipe is designed to restore. Chuck's framing matters because it locates the doctrine of sliding planes at the most superficial level of the body before it ever reaches the deep work.
" So the superficial fascia can slide over the deep fascia. Flexible."
Chuck describes the two layers of superficial fascia and lands the key structural fact:
Chuck then extends the metaphor. Below the shopping bag is a second wetsuit, the deep fascia, wrapping the body from head to toe. Within the deep fascia run the large extrinsic planes — the fascia lata of the leg, the thoracolumbar sheet, the planes around the spine running from occiput into the sacrum, the visceral or pretracheal fascia running from the front of the spine through the gut into the pelvic floor. Each is a sheet that organizes a region; each, in a balanced body, slides on its neighbors. The deep fascia, Chuck tells the class, is more specific in ordering body systems and relating those systems into a whole than the superficial fascia is. The shopping bag holds things in general; the deep fascia holds them in specific functional relationship. This is the layered geometry the practitioner is working through across the ten hours.
"So another wetsuit. In other words, wrapping the whole body from head to toe. K. Within that, there's numerous planes. There's, like, the large what I call the large extrinsic planes. That's what we were looking yesterday with Gallaudet. On the leg, this is here's the superficial fascia out here, sweetheart. I'm not gonna mention the superficial fascia anymore. There it is out there. Here's the deep fascia. These lie, like, right next to each other. Let's draw a plane like that. There's numerous planes going through here. This is, all large extrinsic stuff. We'll talk about that in the skeleton in a few minutes. K. Then there's another system, like, around the spine, running from the occiput up into the brain all the way down to the sacrum. Then there's a cirrhosis system or pretracheal fascia, running from right up here in the front of the spine all through the gut down into the pelvic floor. And then none of the books do this, but why not also make up a system going from the inside of the pelvis to the out, that is from the deep to the surface."
Chuck moves from the shopping bag to the layered system of deep planes:
Fascia as the organ of structure
Before the sliding doctrine can do its work in the practitioner's hands, the student has to be reoriented away from the medical model that treats fascia as packing material. Ida pressed this reorientation in every venue she taught. In her 1973 Big Sur advanced class she stated the position bluntly: the fascial aggregate is the organ of structure. Not the bones, not the muscles, not the joints — the fascia. The bones are passive; the muscles are contractile elements suspended within the fascial web; the joints are articulations between bones the fascia positions. What holds the body in three-dimensional space, what determines its contour, what relates its parts to one another, is the connective tissue. This is a claim she knew was unfamiliar to her audience and one her medical contemporaries had not made. She made it anyway, repeatedly, because the entire logic of sliding planes depends on it. If fascia is only packing, then loosening it is cosmetic. If fascia is the organ of structure, then changing the relationship between adjacent envelopes is the work itself.
"And it is the collagen system which basically, which the two classes on different levels are going to turn your attention to in the the next six to thirty weeks. You are going to be getting more and more intimate with collagen which before you heard it well could mean you didn't know existed. But you see, it is the connective tissue which is the organ of structure. The fascia envelopes are the organ of structure, the organ that holds the body appropriately in the three-dimensional material world. Now nobody ever taught this in the medical school as far as I know. And anytime you want to get into an argument with your medical through they'll realize that this is so. It is the fascial aggregate which is the organ of structure. And the structure basically the word, where we use the word structure, we are referring to relationships in free space. Relationships in space. There's nothing metaphysical metaphysical about it. It's pure physics as it's taught in physics laboratories."
From the 1973 Big Sur class, Ida names the fascia as the organ of structure:
Ida liked to dramatize the claim with a child's image. If you scooped out a body — the chemistry, the muscle, the bone — and left only the fascia, you would still have the shape of the person. The fascia is what gives the body its objective form to a searching hand. In her 1974 Healing Arts lecture she put it this way: the fascial body is what supports you, relates you, keeps you from falling on your face. It is also, she said, the part of the body which has had almost no exploration. When she had once sent a student to the library to answer the question 'what is fascia?', the student spent two days and came back empty-handed. The work, in her framing, was being conducted in terra incognita — the structural significance of the connective web was being mapped by the practitioner's hands faster than the literature could record it.
"factory go, but fascia is the stuff that keeps it from falling in on itself, falling in on its face, keeps you from falling on your face. It is your fascial body that supports you, relates you, and you know as with a child, you fool them sometimes by scooping out the material of the orange and leaving the skin and then putting the two heads together and you say to the kid now this is this is an orange and you see how long it takes that young ster to find out that it isn't an orange, that hits a ball of fascia. And so with with a a human being, in theory at least, you could scoop out the stuff that makes the factory go, the chemicals and so forth, and you would have left this supportive body of fascia. And it is this body which has had very little, almost no exploration in the sense that we have been giving to it. I remember sending somebody who came to me as a student and I set them the question of I set them to answer the question, what is fascia? She decided that was lots of fun. She'd go to the library. She'd have the answer in no time."
From the 1974 Healing Arts lecture, Ida frames the fascial body with the orange-skin image:
The student in the dissection room reaches a more granular version of the same insight. Working through cadaver tissue, the eye learns that the fascia around an organ does one job and the fascia around a muscle does another — the former mostly holds things apart, while the latter is so tightly interwoven with the muscle fiber itself that it is almost indistinguishable from it. In a 1975 Boulder exchange, a student named David pressed Ida on exactly this difference: the muscle's envelope is not a clean wrapper separable by scalpel; it is woven into the contractile tissue. Ida confirmed the observation and used the moment to teach something larger about how the dissecting eye misleads.
"See, they felt they had to analyze. Like if you're dissecting a brain, you can get yourself more balled up than any other fashion by trying, as you dissect the brain, to see the line of demarcation between these various parts of it. And the same thing is true down in the myofascial body, to try to see just where these, and yet, and yet, a great many modern surgeons are learning to not cut through the fascia, but to slide between the fascia to get where they want to go."
Ida tells David that the dissecting eye creates its own balling-up:
Stuck planes: how envelopes glue to each other
If fascia is the organ of structure, then the practitioner's central question becomes: what happens when two adjacent envelopes stop sliding? Ida's answer, repeated across years and rooms, is mechanical and chemical at once. The covering of one muscle sticks to the covering of the next. Where there was supposed to be a glide between two surfaces, there is now adhesion. In the 1974 Open Universe class, a roomful of laypeople watched her colleague work and asked the obvious question — what are you actually doing in there? The answer, in her colleague's voice with Ida confirming from the side, was that the envelopes have grown into each other and the practitioner's job is to restore the demarcation.
"You see fascia gets stuck between layers. Fascia is the covering of muscles, the envelope. The envelope of one muscle gets stuck on the envelope of another muscle. So we're ordering the connective tissue or the web."
From a 1974 Open Universe demonstration, the operative claim is named directly:
The mechanism of the sticking, in her teaching, has two sources. The first is physical injury or chronic stress, after which fluid that should have been reabsorbed instead hardens between the layers. The second is patterned use — a person walks like a toddler, their legs spread, their pelvis anterior, and the fascial body conforms to that habitual posture by gluing its layers in the shape the habit requires. In a 1974 Open Universe exchange the same practitioner, with Ida present, described what the resolution feels like under the hands. The stuck region warms; a melting begins; the place that wasn't moving starts to move. This is the second mandatory quote in this article — it is the phenomenological signature of plane-on-plane sliding being restored.
"that oftentimes there's a warming, like a melting feeling that the place that was stuck or the place that wasn't moving, all of a sudden it gets warm and starts moving."
Asked what is happening physiologically, the practitioner answers from sensation:
The conversation continued, and the practitioner pressed the chemistry further. There is, she said, a fluid substance between the layers of the fascia that seems to have hardened — at the time of injury, at the time of sickness — and is no longer being reabsorbed. The pressure of the practitioner's hands, or the energy that pressure transmits, is what allows the stuck substance to be reabsorbed into the flesh. Whether the mechanism is colloid chemistry or something else, the operative claim is consistent: the sticking is reversible, the layers can be persuaded to separate again, and what the practitioner feels under the hands is the substance changing state.
"That's my point. You're moving something. They get stuck partially by hardening or there's a fluid substance that seems like that has been hardened and isn't reabsorbed in the flesh. Time of injury, time of sickness. And it seems like whatever it is that is that stuckness between the layers of the fascia is what's reabsorbed at the time when our pressure is or energy is is placed on the body. And I don't know what further to say except that that's the way I feel what's going on. And, of course, the development of that stress pattern or of those places that are immobilized and hardened, we think is primarily related to the way the body deals with gravity because gravity is the most constant environmental force for the human body."
The practitioner extends the description into the chemistry of the stuck layer:
Sliding between fascia, not cutting through it
Ida frequently returned to a quiet methodological observation: the most progressive surgeons of her era had begun to operate not by cutting through fascia but by sliding between fascial planes to reach their target. She treated this as evidence — independent of her own work — that the planes really were distinct surfaces with a glide between them, even if the dissecting tradition had not noticed. The student's job, she said, was to develop the same eye for the body: not to analyze the parts into discrete units but to see how the parts are bounded and separated by their fascial envelopes, and to feel where one envelope ends and the next begins. This was the practical method underneath the doctrine. The full passage above — chunk 24 — landed in its earlier section on the dissecting hazard, but its second half states the operative method directly.
"And this is the modern progression nowadays. So that, actually, you have to use your imagination in many directions, and you seem to have a fairly good imagination, David. Your imagination of the analytical breakdown of this body and your recognition that your analysis is a way of getting to a higher level of abstraction, but not getting to a higher level of reality. Because when you separate that body into these higher level abstractions, you are not getting anywhere near the reality. You are getting further away from it. You are analyzing. You are not synthesizing."
Ida names the surgical analogue:
The corollary is that the student of the work has to learn to think synthetically about a structure most of their training has taught them to take apart. Jeff, another senior student in the 1975 Boulder class, pressed Ida on what counts as a fascial plane and what doesn't. His distinction was that the envelope around a single muscle — its investing fascia, woven inseparably into the muscle fiber — should not be called a plane in the same sense that a septum between two muscle compartments is. Compartments are bounded by planes; muscles themselves are not. Ida did not formally adjudicate the terminology, but the exchange showed how the senior students were trying to make the sliding-planes vocabulary precise enough to teach with.
"Call the fascial planes. In here are inserted muscle. A muscle I consider to be made up of connective tissue and say a contractile element. So I don't call the outer layer of the muscle a fascial plane. I call them a muscle. The outer layer is a connective tissue layer, which may lay up against this layer and may lay against another muscular. Here's two muscles, but there is no fascial plane say between them there, Although these over here may be separated by a fascial plane. So you're defining the fascial plane as sort of the definition of the compartment that the muscles are contained in. So you've got functional groups defined by planes or by planes. Sometimes you don't really have a separation. I mean, that is continuous with the wrapping around the muscle. Oh, yeah. You're saying Jeff, are you saying that the investing fascia of the muscles doesn't form a fascial plane?"
Jeff in the 1975 class works to fix the vocabulary:
The advanced work as the study of fascial planes
By 1975, in the Boulder advanced class, Ida was telling her senior students that the elementary work and the advanced work were doing two different things — and the difference centered exactly on the planes. The elementary ten hours create enough order in the random body that the planes become palpable at all. In a body that comes in off the street, the fascial planes are theoretically present but practically inaccessible; their pullings and heavings disguise them. You cannot feel them. The first ten hours create the conditions under which they can be felt and worked. Only then does the advanced work begin, and the advanced work is the study of fascial relationships as such.
"So that in this advanced work Wait a minute. Where was I a week ago where I was answering the question of what was the difference between elementary work and the same school? Is it in this class? It's in the board meeting. The board meeting. Oh, the board meeting. The board meeting. Anyway, I thought I was real smart. I still think I was. I said that the advance work was a study of facial claims, was a study of sexual relationships, that the elementary work was only making these relationships possible. But wherever it was that I did do this talking, oh, I remember it now. You see, you are not able to go into the random body as it comes off the street and go into the fashion plane. They just seem to be not there. It's not that they're not there, but it it is that their pullings and heaving and falling disguise them. You can't go in and feel them. You can go in and feel tendons sometimes, but you cannot feel fascial flames. And your first ten hours, therefore, are creating the order within these planes which make it possible for you to see and think in terms of fashion planes. Now it doesn't make any difference how far back in my teaching you remember, you still remember that I have always said that in those last hours, you must spread your hands. You remember how I fought my way through that. You must spread your hands. You must remember that you are working with fashion. I've always said that."
Ida defines the two halves of the curriculum by their relationship to planes:
She returned in the same session to a teaching point she had been making for years: in the later hours, the practitioner's hands must spread. The work moves from points to planes, from the dig that resolves a stuck spot to the sustained contact that orders a whole surface against its neighbor. This is what the spread hand is for. It is also why so much of the advanced curriculum is anatomical — the student has to know which plane is next to which, where the planes blend into each other, where one envelope hands off to the next, before the spread hand has anything to do.
"The minute you do that, you kill the whole situate. It is no longer a living situation. It is now a dead situation, and you're analyzing it on the on the table, the section table. Now your job in this advanced work, your job will be to try to understand the pulls and the equilibria that are involved in the fashion plane as you get it organized. So that in this advanced work Wait a minute."
On the operative gesture of the advanced work:
The doctrine that planes exist throughout the body and act on each other reciprocally generated, in turn, a question that exercised the senior students of 1975 considerably: is there a single mathematical description of the whole fascial web, or only local descriptions of each plane? In a remarkable exchange in the 1975 Boulder class, a student with mathematical training proposed that the planes must be related by what he called a 'big F' — a function over the whole body that reduces correctly to each local plane. The exchange was speculative, but it illustrates how far Ida's senior cohort had pushed her doctrine. The planes were no longer just an anatomical fact; they had become a problem for theory.
"Would you get any help in relating this, say, to the development of the human from in in reality Because to age natural body changes. If you want to talk about the whole, say you have just assume we have a a function that will define each one of these fascial planes. Okay. And you wanna talk about the whole man in terms of the fascial planes. Well, then you're gonna have to have, say, some big function. Let's call it capital f, that talks about all the fascial planes. Okay. One of the properties this big f has to have is that if we look at this individual fascial plane, say that we've talked about with little f, that when big f operates on this little one, it's got to agree with this one. And so embryonically, it all comes from the same thing, which to me means that there is a big f that connects it all. You know, if if say this fascia down here came out of the back door and this one over here came in the front door and there was no connection, you know, worse yet well, if there was no connection, then we could define it in a nonconnected way. You know, we could say, well, let's look at this one and then look at this one. But suppose this one came out of the back door, this one came out of the front door, and where they intersected here, they did different things. Well, then you"
A senior student proposes a unifying function across all planes:
The circular nature of fascial teaching
In her 1973 Big Sur advanced class, Ida pressed a teaching point she returned to often: the fascial system cannot be understood by linear analysis, because its action is reciprocal. Function modifies structure; structure modifies function; what is organized at one place organizes or disorganizes at another. The fascia of the body can be changed, she said, and that very fact is what allowed it to become aberrative in the first place. The same plasticity that lets the practitioner reorganize the planes is what let injury, habit, and gravity disorganize them. This is the circular logic that the work has to be held inside. A joint that is not truly seated with its neighbor consumes the body's vital energy to organize movement; freeing the relevant fascial plane releases that energy back into the system. The doctrine of sliding planes, in this 1973 framing, is a doctrine of circular causation — every release somewhere is also a release somewhere else.
"Well now, my understanding was a very good Now this is a message which I hope gets across except that you understand what the pattern is like when the pattern is doing the right thing. The fact that fascia of the body can be changed is what allows it to become aberrative in the first place. And possibility of changing it allows you to step in and change it for the worse, for the better. But it is also just as possible to change it for the worse if you shall know your business. Function way to teach. That fascial teaching can be modified. That in being modified it is modifying structure and that in modifying structure you modify closure. Now, a fascial tissue So what I'm trying to get you to look at and understand is the circular nature of this whole crib. The way it travels round and round and round and it of the way in which organization at one place organizes or disorganizes at one place. And that's what you were doing yesterday. You were organizing afterwards. In order that Because if a joint is not truly seated with its neighbor, it takes a great deal of your vital energy to get movement organized fashion works. Now remember that what Michael says to you, that all of this fashion tends of chemistry in the extremities, particularly in the teeth. And I ask you, those of you who are in processing, what percentage of the people"
Ida names the circular logic of fascial change:
The same circular framing reappeared in her 1973 Big Sur teaching on the limits of analysis. Structural integration, she told the class, is not a closed-end revelation; no revelation in the history of the world has ever been closed-end. The doctrine of sliding planes was open-ended in exactly this sense — it would keep being refined by the practitioners who came after her, and her job in the room was to keep evoking new muscular patterns and new fascial answers from the bodies in front of her. The body, in her framing, was a system whose desire keeps edging outward, demanding more muscular patterns, and the fascia is what reorganizes to meet that demand.
"The myofascial is what we are dealing with and that is the The myofascial is what you are dealing with, in that you are dealing with an energy unit, the muscle, contained within a it's up to you people to go out and get a few more revelations. Structural integration is not a closed end revelation. There never was a closed end revelation, not in the history of the world or the history of the world. Everything that can be regarded as a revelation is open ended. In terms of sense. Now it wouldn't hurt us to talk about that last sentence right here in the middle because it is true. We got off on this table one day last week. Function can, will, and does What goes on to change it? Is it just God sitting up in his heaven and saying let that be? I certainly don't believe it. There is a man child down on this earth who wants to throw balls, who wants to fight with his fellows, who wants to climb a tree, who wants to do all kinds of things, and whose desire keeps edging out toward us. And he cannot attain this desire until the day comes when he creates new muscular patterns or more muscular patterns and the greater muscular stress evokes an answer from the body And then by that he's got the mechanism that he needs to give him the greatest strength. And the whole history of growth is a history any living human being by putting it into bed and keeping it. Now I realized I am talking about like to have, there is a level of abstraction which is essentially identical when you talk about protein molecules. Out here, from the hip, from the hip, except here. And what we are doing is evolving toward the place where when you look straight down on the top of the head, you see nothing except perhaps the tip of the middle."
Ida frames the work as open-ended revelation:
The first hour as the beginning of the sliding work
The doctrine of sliding planes is not abstract; it determines the shape of every hour of the recipe. The first hour, in Ida's framing, is where the practitioner first establishes that the superficial fascia can move on the deep fascia at all. In a 1974 public class, in a Socratic exchange with a student named Mark, Ida pressed for the precise language: what happens to the superficial fascia in the first hour? Not 'stretched,' not 'broken' — something else, something the student had to find words for. The exchange is characteristic of how she taught: by refusing the casual verbs the student reached for and pushing them toward more precise phenomenology. The first hour, in the end, is the hour that restores the slide between the shopping bag and what's underneath it.
"What happens in structural integration is that the body is restructured by a method of mostly of working with the fascia, superficial end deep fascia. It begins with the superficial. What happens if this fascia is either stretched or broken or or somehow moved in some way to get the muscles underneath breathing room, so to speak? You mean we stretch them when we break them? Well God help us send for the cops. Well, there there was work on the you talked about burn having a feeling of something burning down around That's right. Which was something happening to the fascia. Would God knows it mustn't be broken. Okay. Let's see. I know it mustn't be broken, and you better know it mustn't be broken. Would the fibers be loosened? No. Something happens to the superficial fascia. Something does. The man looks different, so something must have happened to the superficial fascia. Because if nothing happens to the superficial fascia, the man's not gonna look different. Has this occurred to you? Yes. Yes. Working with the well, I don't know what exactly how to name it. I mean, if you wouldn't call it stretching the fascia or loosening. The fascia gets stretched."
Ida presses a student on what actually happens to the superficial fascia in the first hour:
The integration of the first hour into the larger ten-session arc was something Ida and her senior teachers worked out across multiple advanced classes. In a 1975 Boulder discussion, a senior practitioner offered the formulation: the first hour is the beginning of the tenth. The second hour is a follow-up to the first; the third is a continuation of the second. The recipe was broken into ten sessions only because the body could not absorb that much fascial reorganization at once. Each hour, in this framing, is a stage in a single continuous project — the project of restoring sliding between planes — that begins at the surface and works inward.
"The first hour is the beginning of the tenth hour. Okay? Uh-huh. The second hour is a follow-up of the first hour. Uh-huh. It's just the second half of the first hour. Okay? And the third hour is the second half of the second and first hour. It's literally a continuation. I clearly I clearly saw, you know, last summer that continuation process and how and, you know, Dick talked about how, you know, the only reason it was broken into 10, you know, sessions like that was it because the body just couldn't take all that work. Couldn't take it right. But I just sitting on just trying to figure out how the hell she ever figured out that process, and then began to see it. What she did is what most of of us need to do more. She just sat and watched bodies. And she just kept on doing it. And put unfortunately, she's a little bit more brilliant than the rest of us."
A senior teacher names the continuity of the recipe:
The doctrine that horizontal change at one level produces vertical change at another — the body as a system where freeing one plane unloads another — appears throughout the 1975 transcripts. Michael Salison's image of the fascial tube running from the cervicals downward was being passed around the class as a way of thinking about how a release in the ankles travels into the back, how working on a leg changes the rib cage. Each horizontal achieved at one level reflects itself upward; the body is in tension, and changing the tension at one node spreads through the web. The doctrine of sliding planes is, at this level, also a doctrine of energy stored in the tissue and released into the body when the planes are reorganized.
"And so you really need to use the back after you free the feet to close-up and to integrate or partially integrate the person before you send them off to really open up and lengthen that back. Well yesterday someone, I don't know who said it to me, it's Michael Salison's concept of the fascial tube which starts in the cervicals and goes in the second hour when you start working on the ankles you're heading vertically again. Know that each horizontal that you bring out down below reflects itself upward as we saw in Takashi yesterday where he's working on his leg and you can see his rib cage absorbing the change. I mean this, when the tissue is in tension, that's stored energy that you release into the body. And its energy is not a metaphysical something. These molecules are aligned in a particular way. You change their alignment. The change spreads."
The fascial-tube image and the energy stored in tension:
Connective tissue, not myofascia: a late revision
By 1976 the vocabulary was being revised again — this time by Jim Asher, working in the dissection room with the senior class. Asher had begun to prefer the term 'connective tissue' to 'fascia' and 'myofascia,' on the grounds that the work was affecting more than the wrappings around muscle. Every organ has its fascia. The glands have their fascia. The blood vessels run in connective tissue. The work, Asher argued, was not narrowly myofascial; it was acting on the connective web as a whole, and the myofascial component was only one part. This revision did not contradict Ida's earlier teaching — the connective web is the organ of structure in the same sense the fascia is — but it widened the operative claim about what the practitioner's hands were doing.
"My preference now and I don't always do it because I've got to change my head on this is I prefer to call it connective tissue. I think we're in a lot less trouble if we do it. The problem is that first of all every organ has its fascia so we would have to say myofascial. We tend it from an eye tendon. When I talked about fascia is to think of the wrapping around muscle. Then I realized fascia is fascia around all the glands, there's fascia around all the organs and so forth. The myofascial I think is like a part of the fascia and as long as we consider it as only part that we're affecting more than that, that we are affecting as you've started to say, we are affecting the glandular system and it may be, it's easy to say that a beginning effect can be by affecting its fascia and affecting its circulation because indeed we have all the blood vessels in the fascia or in the connective tissue. So at this point I'm preferring to say connective tissue and then talk about the fascia, the myofascia as one part of it and I don't always get there. I mean as I get talking I don't know."
Jim Asher revises the vocabulary in the 1976 advanced class:
Asher's dissection slides, shown to the 1976 class, also pushed the doctrine of sliding planes into the dimension of layering. The superficial fascia, he said, is not a single membrane but a graded sequence of layers — a millimeter at a time, the dissecting eye finds the dermis, then the outer layer of superficial fascia, then a deeper layer, then the membrane immediately over the muscle which is the deep fascia proper. Each of these layers, in a healthy body, slides on the next. The tough sheaths that develop between layers, Asher argued, are not the natural state of the tissue but a consequence of habitual misuse — what the work is aiming for, in its ultimate form, is a relatively soft bed of connective tissue rather than the leathery interfaces the dissecting hand keeps encountering.
"And then we're down to the fascia that is immediately over the muscle itself which we call the deep fascia or I started to call the deep, the superficial deep fascia which is something we have to do about terms. So it's really in a sense a cross section of the skin, the kinds of things that we're working through. Okay? Now these few slides are mainly to give you an idea of different kinds of fascia and that we have layers of fascia or fascia sheaths which I feel are due to the concept is the tough sheaths are due to improper use of the body. In other words, I think what we're looking toward as the ultimate is a really relatively soft bed of connective tissue rather than these tough sheets that are found between the different muscle layers and I feel that that's again one of the things that we're trying to do in terms of embryological aspect. But at any rate, you can see the third dimensional concept of one sort of thin or transparent group of fibers going this way, another one going this way and over here a little piece of fat which we must remember is also connective tissue and therefore fascia if we're going to use the term."
Asher on the layered architecture of the superficial fascia:
The corollary, drawn in the same 1976 class, is that the first hour's superficial work is in fact already deep work — because the layers and sheets are not strictly horizontal but plunge into the body at all angles. To soften the surface is to begin loosening attachments that run far inward. Asher described the body's connective architecture as a system of straps and thicknesses going around the body but also penetrating it, so that working at the surface in the first hour begins to free the deep joints. The first hour, in this revised picture, is not preparing the deep work — it is the beginning of the deep work, conducted at the only level the random body initially permits.
"But this is the heavy band that ties the trapezius to the edge of the scapula. Obviously then rhomboids underneath are not much. I agree that the sheets, I think I can do it in less than ten minutes, at least as far as I can go right now, is that the sheets that are happening, the straps, the thicknesses, the whatever, are not only going around the body but are going deep into the body at all different ways. So that in the process of working on superficial fascia you're doing some very deep work because it's, or it may be the lack of, a better tone or something like that. We're starting to get a looser In the process of the first hour, number one I said we're getting to the joints and we're still dealing with a superficial fashion. So that we are starting working at the joints and the fact that the joints back here as well. But that we are working in terms of levels of where those joints or how those joints are tied down and this would be the first area that they're tied down is on the surface. And that we cannot go freeing them by digging deep, say into the axillary region or deep into the hip joint until we've got the looser stuff. It's a kind of tone or a bed in which these kinds of movements can happen."
Asher on why the first hour is already deep work:
What the hands feel: the moment of slide
Throughout the 1974 Open Universe demonstrations Ida and her colleagues returned, again and again, to the question of what the practitioner's hands are actually feeling when the planes begin to slide. The answer was never a single sensation. It was a sequence — first the recognition that a particular layer is stuck, then the placement of the hand, then a moment in which the tissue itself appears to choose to move, then the slide. Ida's colleague described it as instinctual: the hand finds the stuck region, the pressure is applied not as force but as a particular kind of contact, and the layer begins to differentiate itself from its neighbor. The full passage from chunk 31 anchors this account; its earlier section described the choosing-to-move quality before the doctrinal sentence about envelopes.
"the tissue responds, I don't know how to say it anymore words. It's who's asking the question? I know it was, like, to your fingers. I feel it start moving is the primary thing. It's like he chooses to move. Like, I put my hand where the tissue is stuck, and it begins to move after a certain moment. Is that what it feels like to you two right now? Is it hurting? Bob, No. Do you always choose one place to start, or is that sort of instinctual? It is instinctual, and generally in the first hour, it's somewhere in this area where I am now. Right. Are you using acupressure with your right hand? Acupressure? I active pressure. Yes. Think Ida would agree to that use of the word? Word? Active pressure, in terms of what you're doing right now."
From the 1974 Open Universe demonstration, the practitioner describes the moment of release:
In the same session another student in the class asked the practitioner about Ida's view of acupressure. The answer was careful — the work is not acupressure, and Ida considered acupuncture to operate on only the top two or three layers of fascial balance, whereas Structural Integration aims at the four, five, six, seven layers below that. The distinction is consequential. Acupuncture, in Ida's view, was not wrong; it was working a different stratum. The sliding-planes work goes deeper, addresses the layers below the acupuncture map, and produces structural rather than energetic change. Whether this characterization of acupuncture is historically accurate is a separate question; what matters for the doctrine is that Ida was situating her work in a specific stratum of the body and not claiming to operate on every layer at once.
"I'm sure there's some of that going on, but that's not the the mode that we're dealing with. Ida says that and she studied and looked at acupuncture twenty or thirty years ago in Paris, that she believes that acupuncture probably has to do with top two layers of balance, maybe three. And that there are at least five or more layers of balance and that we go five, six, seven or four, five, six, seven and therefore influence those layers from the top as well. And that's why we're in structural integration and not in more temporary balance and at least that's active. I just thought it has been transmitted to me and I'd probably amplify or put something on it. So don't quote her as saying that. But they're in the same family at any rate as far as she believes they are. No help. Like there's an in between force between my body and your hand and that it is moving. It's just moving by itself. Now you can feel that I can feel that his spine is dropping back more, especially through this area now."
The practitioner relays Ida's distinction between acupuncture and the sliding-planes work:
Why two sides differ, and what the lifted touch is doing
A characteristic feature of stuck planes is asymmetry — the two sides of a body almost never present the same pattern of adhesions. In a 1974 Open Universe demonstration, the practitioner working under Ida's supervision was asked whether there was a single explanation for the difference between the two sides. He demurred: the generalizations were probably all true and none of them complete. What mattered for the work was the technical gesture the practitioner used to address the stuck region — a lifting action, generated from the last joint of the fingers, that engages the connective tissue and lifts it rather than pressing it. Ida's hands, the practitioner noted, showed this lifting clearly. It is not the same as the dig that the random body sometimes requires; it is the controlled lift that the sliding work depends on.
"Some of the there's a seems to be when you watch doctor Rolf's hands, for example, you see that that there's a lot of movement from that last joint. And it's a lifting action as we lift the flush, lift the connective tissue. And part of it is from the stress too, that's where it takes But I think it's more than that. There's something about that involved. I think there are a lot of generalizations about the two sides and why two sides are different, and they're probably all true. Well, I can't help you with that. Don't think. What's you wanna say what's going on with you? I just felt releasing of, I I would call toxins or having one muscle attached to another, and I could also feel my left shoulder raising up towards my head. Are you experiencing any kind of emotion while he's working on the center? The emotion that I feel is working with is a pain."
On the lifting action that characterizes the practitioner's hand:
The same demonstration produced an exchange with the student on the table that captures what the sensory record of plane-on-plane sliding is like from the inside. The student reported sensations beginning in one small area and expanding outward, a kind of wavelength or vibration of expansion. He did not have prior vocabulary for it. The practitioner's response was to name this as energy — the relationship between the soft-tissue change and the change in the body's energy field, the very thing Valerie Hunt's bioelectric measurements at UCLA were attempting to capture. Whatever the right physical description, the experiential pattern was consistent across many bodies: a stuck region releases, and the release radiates outward through the web.
"The age is far less a factor than the differences between people. Now his chest is moving as well. Oh, excuse me. Go ahead. There's sensations that I have never felt before that I feel, and and it's localized. They vary. Chase more. It's it it it begins in one small area and expands. It's it's almost like well, it is it's vibrations, wavelengths, or expanding. Like energy going? Energy. See, that's what we want to find out is the relationship between this soft tissue change and the change in the energy field. Now lift both your arms up. So you can see now that the rib cage works as one and it's got an undulating movement to it as it breathes."
A student on the table describes the propagation of the release:
Mapping the planes: the unfinished project
Ida was clear-eyed about what her teaching had not yet accomplished. In a passage from one of her late public tapes, she pointed to a project she wanted her practitioners to take on but which no one had yet completed: a real anatomical mapping of the fascial planes of the shoulder girdle and the hip girdle, with the same precision that muscular anatomy had been mapped by the 19th-century anatomists. She knew the practitioner's hands could find these planes; she knew their pulls and equilibria; what she did not have was a textbook her students could refer to in the same way they referred to their muscular anatomies. The mapping, she said, was educational work that lay ahead. It belonged to the next generation of practitioners, not to her own.
"With the kind of culture that you we have here, you would suppose there would be somebody who could put together an elastic model or something that would make give this thing a greater reality, but I wouldn't know where to find it. I do think that sooner or later, someone of us has to be smart enough to really trace out facial patterns of the shoulder girdle and facial patterns of the hip girdle. Because you see this is what we've been dealing with. And then there is the problem of the connection between say the tenth rib and the crest of the ileum which is another fascial problem. But how do these hip girdle fascia fit together with the fascia that enwraps the obliques for instance? Now if the fascial patterns were as clear to us as the muscular patterns are, I think there would be a great deal less problem in teaching this if there were a book to which we could refer about how those fascial planes run as we refer back to our anatomies here as to how the muscular patterns run. It might be that it would be easier to turn our practitioners who understood they were dealing with facial bodies."
Ida names the unfinished cartographic project:
The cartographic problem was not just academic. Ida saw that practitioners going out into the world would face an audience that had never heard the word 'fascia' — that did not know what fascia was and had never encountered the term in their schooling. The educational task was double: to map the planes anatomically, and to introduce the word and its significance into the general culture. Both projects were ongoing in her late teaching. The work of restoring plane-on-plane sliding, she suggested, would only become widely intelligible when the planes themselves had been named, drawn, and made part of the common anatomical vocabulary.
See also: See also: 1976 Boulder Advanced Class (76ADV21, 76ADV22) — Jim Asher's dissection-room teaching on the layered architecture of superficial and deep fascia, the deep-superficial fascia of the neck, and the development of the fascial sheaths as a consequence of body use. Open Universe Class 1974 (UNI_043, UNI_044) — extended public demonstrations of the operative gesture and the phenomenology of release. Big Sur Advanced Class 1973 (SUR7309, SUR7332) — Ida's earlier formulations of the circular nature of fascial teaching and the open-ended character of structural integration as a continuing inquiry. 76ADV21 ▸76ADV22 ▸UNI_043 ▸UNI_044 ▸SUR7309 ▸SUR7332 ▸
Coda: sliding as the structural fact
Read across the years from 1971 to 1976, what emerges is not a single statement about sliding planes but a doctrine that thickened and clarified across many rooms. In 1973 at Big Sur, Ida named fascia as the organ of structure and insisted that the practitioner had to learn to think in terms of fascial relationships rather than muscular ones. In 1974 in the Open Universe demonstrations and the Healing Arts conference, she and her colleagues worked out the phenomenology — warming, melting, the tissue choosing to move, the radiating wavelength of release. In 1975 at Boulder, Chuck and Jeff and the mathematically inclined students worked out the architecture — shopping bag and wetsuit, deep extrinsic planes, the question of whether a single function described the whole web. In 1976, again at Boulder, Jim Asher revised the vocabulary toward 'connective tissue' and refined the architecture into a graded layered model. The doctrine of sliding planes is the through-line. The work is what restores the slide.
"It's but it's a it's a mechanism of pain that that the medical model has not at all considered as far as I know. You mean the the the fascial connection? Yeah. Those those super deep superficial fascial strands Yeah. Cause, you know, the symptoms of pain that they have never considered, but I've never seen anywhere. But you hear what while I keep pounding on, these things are all one. They are not connected. They are one. Sometimes there's pain. I once was when I skate and I slip and I hurt and I hit my knee and I could feel the pain in my fascia. It was right around my knee joint and radiated upward and downward. It wasn't anywhere but my fashion."
A student in 1975 describes feeling her own fascia after an injury:
The practical residue of all this teaching, for the practitioner of Structural Integration, is unembellished. The body has layers. The layers are supposed to slide. When they do not slide, the body's structure cannot be reorganized by gravity. The hands' task is to restore the slide — first the shopping bag on the deep fascia, then the deep planes on each other, then the deeper compartments. Each hour of the ten works one stratum further in. Each release in one plane spreads through the connective web because the tissue is in tension throughout. There is, Ida insisted in her last advanced classes, no single answer to the question of what fascia does — only a series of partial answers that have to be held synthetically. But the structural fact underneath all of them is the slide. Where there is slide, there is order. Where there is no slide, there is the work.