Posture is what you do with structure
Ida's first move in nearly every public lecture on standing was to separate two words the culture had collapsed into one. Posture, she pointed out, comes from the Latin participle meaning 'it has been placed' — somebody has put something somewhere, and somebody is now working to keep it there. Structure is something else entirely: it is the relationship of the parts. The distinction matters because it tells the practitioner where to direct attention. If a person must work to maintain their posture, the structure underneath is out of balance, and no amount of placement-work will fix it. The fix is structural — the relationships have to change — and once they do, posture takes care of itself. In the Topanga lecture preserved on the short-clip tape, Ida laid this out with the deliberateness of someone who had been refining the formulation for years.
"properly, these bodies are balanced in terms of their muscular components. They are balanced right side against left side and front side against back side. But most important of all, they are balanced outside against inside."
Speaking in the Topanga lecture (undated, distributed as a public soundbyte), Ida names what balance actually means in the body:
Notice the third pairing — outside against inside. Right-left and front-back are the visible balances any observer can name. But the balance of the surface sleeve against the deep core is invisible from outside, and it is the one Ida considered most consequential. A person can look symmetrical from the front and still be structurally collapsed because the long extrinsic muscles have taken over the work that the short intrinsic muscles around the spine were designed to do. The Structural Integration practitioner, in her account, is working all three balances at once but is most concerned with the third. From this framework she moves directly to the distinction between structure and posture, and to the diagnostic she uses on any body that walks into the room.
"Because if his structure is in balance, his posture automatically is good. Posture is what you do with structure. Structure is the way you relate parts of the body to each other."
In the same lecture, Ida draws the diagnostic conclusion from the structure-posture distinction:
The proof of the formulation, she argued, was empirical. Tell someone to alter their posture and ask what they hope to gain — most physicians, she said, would shrug. Tell someone to alter their structure, and the answer is visible in any room of practitioners who had taken people through the ten-session series. The change in ease, in vitality, in the way the body moves through space — these are not posture changes. They are structural changes whose postural expression is automatic.
"fight with gravity. That's one item. And I know that his structure is not in balance. Because if his structure is in balance, his posture automatically is good. Posture is what you do with structure. Structure is the way you relate parts of the body to each other. And if you are really going to understand what I'm talking about tonight, a little meditation on those two words wouldn't do any harm. Because you see, in meditating on posture and meditating on structure, you can ask the same questions. You can ask the question of, now see here, if I alter this structure, what can I hope to get from it? Similarly, you can say, if I alter this posture, what can I hope to get from it? This is a big question. And you ask any of your MD friends, and they'll say, oh, Rod, nothing. Ain't so? You change those relations. You change that structure. And you get the kind of ease and the kind of vitality that you have seen some of your friends get who have gone through this system of structural"
Continuing the Topanga lecture, Ida presses the structure-posture distinction into a thought experiment:
The vertical line as index
Once structure is defined as relationship, the question becomes: relationship to what? Ida's answer was the vertical line — the imaginary plumb that runs from the soles of the feet through the ankles, knees, hip joints, lumbar vertebrae, shoulders, and ears. Every accepted school of body mechanics in the twentieth century, she noted, taught this measuring stick. The Harvard group led the list. What no other school taught was how to achieve it. The vertical was, in their hands, a yardstick of static posture — a way of grading bodies but not a way of changing them. Ida's claim was that the body is a plastic medium, and that the relationships which produce verticality can in fact be altered by the addition of energy to the fascial web. The 1974 Healing Arts lecture, given at the Esalen Institute the year her book appeared, contains her most precise statement of what the vertical line registers.
"This vertical line registers the alignment of the ankles, with the knees, with the hip joints, with the bodies of the lumbar vertebrae, with the shoulders, with the ears."
In the 1974 Healing Arts lecture, Ida specifies what the vertical line actually indexes anatomically:
She liked the image of the chestnut burr — all those prickles pointing straight toward the center of the earth — to describe what alignment looked like geometrically. But she was careful, immediately afterward, to distinguish the kind of verticality she meant from the static verticality every postural school taught. A static stack of segments, even a perfectly stacked one, is not what the body achieves when structure is integrated. What it achieves is something more difficult to describe: a dynamic balance, a verticality maintained through motion rather than against it. The same Healing Arts lecture continues into the definition of the work itself.
"This vertical line is reminiscent of the prickles on the chestnut burrow. All those prickles pointing straight toward the center of the earth. If the lines are substantially vertical. This is a static verticality, however. This is the verticality taught by every accepted school of body mechanics operating in this century, and the Harvard group heads the list. All schools of body mechanics teach this measuring stick and verticality, but no other school of body mechanics teaches how to achieve it. But because the body has an unforeseen, unexpected quality, it can be done. The body is a plastic medium. Now this is incredible, and twenty five years ago, no one would have believed this statement. Fifty years ago, they'd have put me in a nice sunny southern room. You've given me pretty good care, maybe. But the body is a plastic medium, and you're going to hear that several times before we get out of here today."
Ida moves from the static line to the dynamic claim — that the body itself can be reorganized:
The plasticity claim was, for Ida, the hinge of the entire system. If the body's fascial relationships could be changed by the appropriate addition of mechanical energy, then verticality was no longer a yardstick but an outcome. The practitioner's job was to add energy to the connective tissue web in such a way that the segments above it — the legs, the pelvis, the thorax, the head — could stack closer to the line. And the test of whether that stacking was succeeding was not symmetry on a grid but the body's capacity to accept gravity as support rather than as a force to resist.
Why a living body has no stillness
On the morning of August 5, 1974, in an IPR lecture in Boulder, Ida pushed her advanced students past the static image of the vertical line into what she considered the more accurate description. A living body is never still. It is always moving — breathing, adjusting, micro-correcting. What looks like stillness in a standing person is in fact balance, the moment when the tendency to fall forward is precisely matched by the tendency to fall backward. The body has not arrived at a place where it stops moving; it has arrived at a place where its movements cancel. This is a different claim than the orthodox postural one, and Ida used it to anchor her insistence that the human being is designed for motion.
"apex There is no such thing in a living human body as stillness except as you get it in balance. Only when you get antagonistic parts balancing do you get stillness? And this isn't really stillness, it's balance, you see. You haven't gone to a place where it's still. You've gone to a place where the tendency to move in one direction balances the tendency to move in the other direction."
In the August 5, 1974 IPR lecture, Ida states the doctrine in its sharpest form:
Having reframed stillness as balance, she pressed the point further. Why does this matter? Because the whole anatomical design of the upright human being is keyed to motion, not to standing. The feet, the ankles, the spinal junctions — these are mechanisms for movement, and they only function correctly when the body in motion can find balance moment by moment. To stand well, in her account, is to be in motion well; the practitioner who tries to lock a body into static verticality has misunderstood what verticality is for.
"the human being emphasizes the necessity, emphasizes that movement is the essence of that human being. Why do you suppose you have 200 or 170 pounds of human being standing on those few square inches of the soles of the foot."
Ida continues the same passage with the rhetorical question that frames her whole anatomy of standing:
The architectural improbability of upright stance — a tall, narrow, top-heavy column resting on a tiny base — is, in Ida's reading, not a mistake of evolution but its accomplishment. The base had to be small for the soles to function as the pivot points around which dynamic balance could happen. A wider base, a more stable one, would have made stillness possible at the cost of motility. The upright human being is built for instability because instability is the precondition of the kind of moment-by-moment correction that the nervous system uses to find balance.
"You have to be in balance and those souls have to act almost as points. This is the whole story of the upright human being."
Ida lands the architectural claim:
Why the early sessions begin lying down
If the upright human being balances on near-points and is constantly in motion, the practical question for the practitioner becomes: how do you intervene in a system that is always adjusting? Ida's answer, embedded in the design of the ten-session series, was to remove gravity from the picture during the early hours of work. A person lying on a table is no longer balancing on two square inches of foot; the gravitational pull on their tissue is reduced to a fraction, and the work can proceed without the body's compensatory patterns reasserting themselves moment by moment. Only later, when the structure has been reorganized enough to find balance, does the practitioner stand the person up and work with the dynamic system.
"Now you saw how when we started working on people we laid them flat on their back. Why? Because there was not within them the mechanical possibility of balancing on a point at that time. So you took gravity out of the picture as much as you could by laying them flat so that you had at most 10 to 12 inches of gravitational pull. But they're big boys and girls now. And in order for them to stand on top of those square inches of the soles of the feet and to balance on top of the number of those square inches that constitute the ankle, you have got a degree of balance in that body now that permits a vertical line to come up through the ankles, through the knees, through the hips, through the bodies of the lumbars, through the shoulders, through the ears. Have you all got this picture of progression? Because this is the message of the morning."
Still in the August 1974 IPR lecture, Ida explains the strategic reason the early hours of the ten-session series begin with the client supine:
The progression Ida describes — from a 'wad of stuff that's slopping all over the place' to a form that acts as though it were built around a line — is the through-line of the entire recipe. The early hours soften and reorganize the superficial relationships. The middle hours establish the support structures, the legs and the pelvic floor. The later hours integrate. Each step makes the next possible because each step adds enough order that the body can sustain the dynamic balance the next step requires.
"Have you all got this picture of progression? Because this is the message of the morning. This progression that a human being is getting from a wad of stuff that's slopping all over the place to a form, a precise form, which acts as though it were built around the line. You remember the story that I told you earlier about has about Claude Bernard, who in getting his citation for the Legion of Honor said, Gentlemen, a man is a something built around a gut, because he was the guy that studied guts. But if we ever happen to get a bleach in the monor decoration, we're going to have to say something else. We're going to have to say, gentlemen and ladies, a man is a something that is built around a line. But figure what would happen if he were really built around the line and standing on that relative point of the ankles. And it couldn't be, would be a wholly impractical structure. So he has to be built around a line with breaks in it where he can adjust and get one part of the body balancing the other part of the body. But for balance, you see, you can only have a very slight deviation. You have to have these pieces effectively straight."
Continuing the same August 1974 lecture, Ida walks the students through the architectural paradox of the upright human form:
The centerline and the inner arch
In her 1976 Boulder advanced class, Ida had the entire room stand up. She wanted the students to feel, not to think — to locate experientially where the centerline of their own body ran, and to discover what destroyed it. She had been told earlier that day, by someone quoting a book of her own lectures, that weight in standing should be transmitted down through the three center toes. The formulation, she said, was the abstraction. The experimental data — what the body actually feels when weight shifts — was the silent level beneath the abstraction. She instructed the students to let their weight roll to the outer arches and notice what happened.
"Your center line is destroyed as weight goes on to the outer arch. Now just turn your toes up and see how that begins to put the weight back again into the center line. See what you begin to feel as you begin to feel the establishment of that center line."
In the 1976 Boulder advanced class, Ida walks the students through a live experiment in finding their own centerline:
The instruction had a structural reason behind it. The centerline of the leg, in Ida's anatomy, runs up the inside — through the medial malleolus, through the inner edge of the tibia, through the medial line of the femur — and into the body along a line that is medial, not lateral. Weight rolled to the outer arch literally cannot find that line, because the line is not out there. The student who has been told to put weight on the three center toes is being told the right thing, but in abstract form. The lived correction — turn the toes up, find the inner arch — is what allows the abstraction to land.
"to put the weight back again into the center line. See what you begin to feel as you begin to feel the establishment of that center line. And where it goes as it goes up into the body and what you are aware of in terms of its lacks and what you are aware of in terms of its ability to help you unify yourself. Realize that when you are standing with your weight flowing down on the outer arch, you are destroying the unity within yourself. Now this is what I jumped on yesterday when I came in and somebody was telling me from some book or other, it might even have been a book of my lectures, That weight has to go through the three center toes. It's true. This is the abstraction. But what is the silent level? You're feeling it right now. The silent level is talking to you. The silent level is telling you how you can get to act at one with gravity. One of the ways you can do it is by turning your toes up so as to run that line up through the middle. Certainly the negative way to do it is not to let the weight go down on the outer arch. Now after you got all of this done then it's time to put it into the high order abstraction."
Ida continues the 1976 Boulder demonstration, moving from the bodily exercise back to the high-order abstraction:
She continued, in the same session, with the further point. Standing with the weight flowing wrongly is not simply a postural error — it is the active destruction of the body's unity moment by moment. The phrase she used was direct: when you stand with your weight flowing onto the outer arch, you are destroying yourself. Not metaphorically. The structural relationships that constitute the body's coherence depend on the line being where it has to be, and every minute of standing wrongly is a minute of dissolving the integration the practitioner has worked to build.
" Realize that when you are standing with your weight flowing"
Ida lands the consequence of weight flowing wrongly in stance:
Symmetry around the vertical, not perfection of parts
One of the misunderstandings Ida fought most consistently in her 1976 advanced class was the student belief that Structural Integration could make a crooked body straight. It could not. Bones grow into the patterns the body has used over a lifetime; occiputs develop more bone on one side than the other to balance the imbalances above them. Half a vertebra is half a vertebra. The practitioner cannot make it whole. What the practitioner can do is bring the rest of the structure into balance under the unchangeable element. This is what Ida meant by symmetry around the vertical: not bilateral perfection, but a relative symmetry of mass distribution that allows gravity to act through the body rather than against it.
"So we're searching for a particular kind of balance. You are searching for a relative symmetry around a vertical. Why? Because you expect to use gravity to help you out. The only way that you can get gravity to work for you is to give gravity something that is relatively symmetrical around the vertical. Okay, I had a particular model when I did my ten hour on last week. Whether through my own lack of skill or whatever during the ten hours, scoliosis and rotations that he came with did not entirely come up. Of course, they didn't, and they never will if this cheers you up. So I just thought leave myself an open. So in the tenth hour, Peter said, don't Yeah. Look for symmetry. Look for balance. Yeah. That's right. And so I did something like that. And And he was operating alright. Yeah. He was doing fine, but I don't know what I did."
In the 1976 Boulder advanced class, after a student named Peter described a tenth-hour client whose scoliosis had not resolved, Ida intervenes:
The clarification — symmetry around the vertical, not bilateral perfection — is decisive for understanding what Ida meant by 'balance.' The word in her vocabulary was technical. Balance meant that the masses on either side of the line summed to roughly equal moments; it did not mean that the right shoulder was the mirror of the left, or that the curve of the spine had been straightened. The practitioner who tries to make a body symmetrical in the cosmetic sense will fail. The practitioner who organizes mass around the vertical so that gravity has something to work with will succeed within the limits of what the bones permit.
"There was more bone on the right side or the left side, literally more bone than there was on the other side. Because down through the whole lifetime of the fellow whose occiput that was, he had been using his head to balance his imbalances, and his structure had changed in accordance with the demand he put put on on. It. Do you think you're going in there and in two weeks or three weeks change that phone? You're not. And so the rest of the structure will be balanced under that non changeable element. Have I made this clear? There are plenty of people the who will come not plenty, but there will be a certain number of people who will come to you who will have a half a vertebra. Are you going to make it a whole vertical? No. You're not. You will slowly change toward a balance."
Ida elaborates the historical case — bones develop asymmetrically because the body has used them asymmetrically:
The junctions where adjustment happens
If the body is built around a line with breaks in it, the breaks are the junctions — the regions where vertebrae of one anatomical character meet vertebrae of another. The occipito-cervical, the cervico-thoracic, the thoraco-lumbar, the lumbo-sacral. Each is a transition between segments that have grossly different structural and functional properties, and each is therefore a site where adjustment can occur. Ida considered the thoraco-lumbar — the lumbodorsal hinge — the most important of all in establishing the vertical line, and the last to be established when processing a body through the series. Her August 1974 IPR lecture lays out the doctrine of junctions in its most extended form.
"to be a place where that group of vertebrae with that configuration meets the group of vertebrae with this configuration and there is room for adjustment. Now this is true of every one of the major vertebrae, of every one of the major junctions. They are uniting pieces of anatomy. I recommend that expression. You like that? I thought you did. Pieces of anatomy that have different functions. The atlanto cervical or occipital cervical is cervical dorsal. In your mind's eyes see the change in structural configuration. The dorsal lumbar and perhaps the lumbosacral in that the sacral is the representative here of the pelvis. Now, that's the story of your junctions. Now, which is the most important in terms of your straight line? The luminal dorsal is the most important in terms of the straight line. And it is the last one to be established if you are processing. And you know this, you have seen it, you have seen it through the last month, you have seen how you work on a guy to get enough freedom, take Margery for instance, she still has not got that lumbar dorsal established. And one of the reasons she hasn't is because those ribs are so far down that there cannot be movement between the dorsal and the lumbars until the ribs get raised up. And it's coming. But you see, what I'm trying to say to you is that those five different major junctions of the body can be organised into a unified whole differently, with different speeds, different amounts of attention, different understandings, different efforts. Each one is an independent personality of its own. And in terms of establishing a vertical line around which the man can be built, the lumbo dossal is the most important and is of necessity the last to be established. Now the lumbodorsal, in its final ultimate analysis is a balance, is a different type of balance."
Continuing the August 1974 IPR lecture, Ida lays out the anatomy and hierarchy of the junctions:
The student's report — that with the lumbodorsal open, the head and neck come up by a kind of internal leverage — was, for Ida, the right kind of confirmation. It was experiential. The junction was not a concept the student had learned; it was a relationship he had felt his own body discover. This is the standard she set for understanding balance: the doctrine had to translate into the body's own report. The practitioner who could only describe the junctions verbally but had not felt them function had not yet learned to balance.
The first hour begins the tenth
Across the 1975 Boulder advanced class, several practitioners articulated the same insight in different words: the ten-session series is not ten discrete interventions but a single continuous reorganization, with each hour preparing the conditions for the next. Bob Hines's formulation was the cleanest. The first hour is the beginning of the tenth. The pelvis cannot be free without first being supported, and it cannot be supported without first being lifted off — which means even the opening superficial work of the first hour is already aiming at the integration the tenth hour will confirm. Ida agreed with the formulation and used it as a teaching frame for the rest of the class.
"What does matter is you understand you have to lift that up off the pelvis to start getting mobility in the pelvis. Uh-huh. 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. She just Ida what Ida did is what she's trying to teach how to do, and that is that you have to stay within your your trade. You have to make structural integration in your life. She integrated her life towards understanding structural integration."
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, Bob Hines articulates the continuity principle that Ida had been teaching across years:
The continuity is structural, not stylistic. Because balance is a relational property of the whole body, no single hour can complete it. The first hour's work on the superficial fascia changes what the second hour's work on the legs can reach; the work on the legs in turn changes what the pelvic floor work of hours four and five can address. Each hour adds order, and balance becomes possible only because the previous order has accumulated. The student who tries to skip ahead — to do tenth-hour integration work before the third has established the side-body — finds that there is nothing yet to integrate.
"Who wants to start the discussion off by talking briefly about the first hours and working their way from number six? I will. Great. Well, in the first hour, what we wanna do is to free the pelvis from above and below. Mhmm. So we start and and start bringing the ribs and and lifting the thorax. And then we go and You had to say there were three main structures up there that you'd wanna work on. What are they? The shoulders. Well, three muscular myofascial structures. The pectoralis. The One or both? Both. Okay. The lentissimus. Mhmm. Oh, in the in the first hour or about First hour. And then. Then. You were right. You know, we're at the tenths in the first hour. Two pectoralsis and locusis. Balls included on two pectoralsis. Okay. And okay. So then you go on down to the And then you go down to the of the elen and start cleaning that and bring that against the ribbon there. And then you want to lengthen the hamstrings. And give a pelvic lift, do some work over that and lengthen the back a little bit. Suppose rather than describe the move, like give a pelvic lift, lengthen the hamstrings, that you abstract it to what you are doing to the body in space by virtue of what you're doing with your Well, lengthening the lumbar. I just mean to pull your focus back a little bit more and keep it on the whole body. Now, you just mentioned doing two or three things and it seems like you ought to be able to see that as a whole totality. Well, go ahead. When you lengthen the lumbar by giving a pelvic lift, what you've done is you've affected the cervicals too And you have to get some more space and lengthen the cervicals and work from there. Is that what you mean? Sorta. Different to do is balance out some of the work that you've done on the spine by lengthening the back a little bit. Well, the word balance is what we're kind of looking for. We're trying to balance out integrity of the spine there. So that's the first hour. Okay. The second hour, what you wanna do is to establish some support underneath the work that you've done on the top."
Opening the 1975 Boulder advanced class on February 8, Ida has the students walk through the first six hours of the recipe in turn, pressing them at each step to abstract from technique to structural intention:
Static balance becomes dynamic
By the eleventh hour, in Ida's account from her August 1974 IPR lecture, the practitioner is no longer working to build verticality but to convert a static verticality into a dynamic one. The earlier hours have stacked the segments. They have established the relationships. They have made it possible for the body to find balance moment by moment. What they have not yet done is teach the body to live in that balance during motion. The eleventh and twelfth hours, the post-ten work, are about that transition — from a body that can stand vertically to a body that can move vertically. The shift is not additive; it is transformative.
"Even the first day that we started the advanced class. Look at the first day of the elementary class, look at the first day of the advanced class and look at what you are talking about this morning. You see those other two first days. You saw radicality as being so much more important. And as of today, you are beginning to recognize that it isn't verticality. It's no longer the static, it's the dynamic. Now the problems that, the questions that you bring in and that fall into these two groups, you think that the dynamic is further along the static. It's something has to be added to the static before you get the dynamic. And you've been adding to it in these four hours. The first hour, the eleventh hour so to speak, doesn't add very much dynamic. If you notice what you see is the static improvement of the whole body below the waistline. But that is the road, that is the sort of bridge by which you bridge into the dynamic. Once again, it's the legs you see. But you somehow or another have to get this intuitive feeling for the change from static to dynamic. Now you get the beginning of that when you get that tenth hour balance, you know, where you take the head and you feel the relation that there is between the intrinsics of the spine and the extrinsics of the sleeve. But the person is not sufficiently experienced, shall I say, at that time to be able to get ahold of intrinsic musculature and hang onto it, use it, demand from it."
In the August 11, 1974 IPR lecture, Ida draws the distinction between static and dynamic balance:
The doctrine that dynamic balance is more sophisticated than static balance — that the moving body can be more vertical than the still body — is one of the most distinctive moves in Ida's late teaching. It rebuts the orthodox postural project, which treats verticality as a snapshot to be graded. In Ida's account, verticality is something the body does, not something it is. The practitioner aiming at dynamic balance is asking the body to find the line again and again, with every step, and to do so without effort. The static line is the practice ground for that capacity, not the destination.
"Movement behavior changes as the body incorporates more and more order. The first balance of the body is a static stacking, but as the body incorporates more changes, the balance ceases to be a static balance. It becomes a dynamic balance. These are the physical manifestations of the increasing balance, but there is an outgoing psychological change as well toward balance, toward serenity, toward a more whole person."
In the 1974 Healing Arts lecture, Ida states the static-to-dynamic transition in its most compressed form:
Balance as the criterion of the work
Ida was occasionally asked, by students and visitors, what criterion the practitioner uses to judge whether a body has been well processed. The answer, repeated in many forms, was: balance and alignment. Not aesthetic ideals — not a Greek body or a Roman body — but the gravitational efficiency that balance produces. The criterion is not what looks right but what works energetically. A body that has been brought into balance with the vertical uses less metabolic energy to perform the same work, fatigues more slowly, and has more energy available for other tasks. This is what makes the criterion objective rather than a matter of taste. A 1974 Open Universe conversation, recorded the same season as the Healing Arts lectures, captures the exchange.
"That's the the goal. And is the criteria balance and alignment other than aesthetics? Yeah. Right. That which is gravitationally energy wise efficient is one way that we express So a roper doesn't have a perception in his mind of of subjective beauty or anything less? No. No. He doesn't think they begin to think after a while that Roman bodies are beautiful. But as far as a Greek as opposed to a Roman or as opposed to some other form, you know, it's not. You see in the first hour, we're not trying to get everything. The goal, of course, in all the hours is to horizontalize the pelvis. Pelvis is like a bowl. And in most people, the bowl is spilling over forward. And our goal is to bring that bowl horizontal so that the contents of the torso sit in the bowl properly. So part of the training is to see the result of process. As well as to see what you do next in the process. You see the genius of Doctor. Rolf, part of her genius is in developing a sequence in which the onion can be unpeeled without disordering. In other words, so that you can take layer by layer in a sequential way each hour bringing in a level of organization. She says, well, it's easy to take a body apart, but it's not so easy to put it together. And that's that's the key to it. We're all being said in each hour, you're adding order. Bringing it forward and back. Forward and back. Well, we're the goal of the order is the vertical line is the most abstract way of looking at that order. That the body is is aligned with the vertical line."
In a 1974 Open Universe seminar, a practitioner explains how trainees are taught to read balance as the criterion of the work:
The pelvis-as-bowl image is one of Ida's most durable teaching tools. A bowl tipped forward spills its contents; a bowl held horizontal supports them. The pelvis in most bodies tips forward, and the contents of the abdomen and thorax slump into the front of it rather than resting on its floor. Bringing the bowl horizontal — which is the work of hours four through six in particular — establishes the support that allows the trunk to be carried in balance above it. Without that horizontal floor, no amount of upper-body work will hold; the structure above will inherit the slope of the pelvis below.
"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. And so it's in response to gravity that the body avoids pain, you might say, or avoids the buildup of stress in an individual point by trying to distribute it. And the fascial system is the way of distributing stress from those points. And so, as doctor Rolf said in the first talk, there's really no cause, one to one cause with the pattern. It's an accumulation of person to the pattern that they presently have. The other part is that we learn inefficient methods of movement. Some people still walk like the toddler. That is that their legs are spread apart, their pelvis is anterior, and they have never matured or come to a further position. They're stuck there. And that or they imitated someone in their family and walked that way. And then that pattern gets set. And then it can't be changed unless someone comes and someone like a raw bird. Some other method where you can change those patterns. See, the average person moves primarily with Extrinsic muscles, surface muscles, or groups of muscles that are stuck together. We're gonna lean forward."
In the same Open Universe class, a practitioner describes how the body responds to balance work and what the practitioner is reorganizing:
The vertical and the energy field
In her late teaching, Ida became increasingly interested in the energetic implications of structural balance. The Healing Arts lectures of 1974 are her most extended statement of this development. The claim is not mystical — she is careful to distinguish the energy she means from what she dismisses as 'oh, he's so energetic' — but it is structural. A body in balance around the vertical can accept the gravitational field as support. A body out of balance must spend metabolic energy resisting it. The difference, multiplied across every minute of every day of a life, is enormous. The vertical line, in this reading, is not just a geometric index. It is the condition under which the body has more energy available because less is being lost.
"We know that order can be evoked in the myofascial system of the body by substantially balancing the myofascial structures about a vertical line. We know that logically in body mechanics, we can expect that the vertical lines of that force manifesting as the gravitational field can either support and reinforce a body, or it can disorganize it and presumably passing by presumably passing through and being part of it, it can destroy and minimize the energy fields surrounding it. We know that the energy fields of the body must be substantially balanced around the vertical line for gravity to act supportedly, thus changing the energy generated by the body. This vertical line registers the alignment of the ankles, with the knees, with the hip joints, with the bodies of the lumbar vertebrae, with the shoulders, with the ears. This vertical line is reminiscent of the prickles on the chestnut burrow. All those prickles pointing straight toward the center of the earth."
In the 1974 Healing Arts lecture, Ida lays out the energetic argument for balance around the vertical:
The reach of the claim is what made it controversial in its time. Every school of body mechanics could measure verticality. None claimed to be able to change the underlying structural relationships that produced or failed to produce it. Ida's wager was that the fascial web was plastic enough to be reorganized by appropriately directed mechanical energy, and that the reorganization could be read in the energy economy of the whole organism. Whether the auras measured by Valerie Hunt's instruments were really an index of this, she did not claim to know. What she knew was that the body in balance behaved differently than the body out of balance, and the difference was measurable in oxygen consumption, in fatigue patterns, in the smoothness of recruitment of motor units.
See also: See also: the 1974 Healing Arts lecture series at Esalen contained presentations by Valerie Hunt and Julian Silverman on the electromyographic and energetic correlates of Structural Integration — measurements of motor-unit recruitment, oxygen consumption, and field expansion that Ida cited as empirical support for the doctrine that balance around the vertical alters the body's energy economy. CFHA_03 ▸
Carrying the line up through the body
The vertical line in the standing body has to be traced upward from the soles of the feet through every junction. The 1975 Boulder advanced class returned again and again to the question of how each hour of the recipe contributes to the establishment of the line. The second hour's work on the ankles, the practitioner Michael Salveson observed, begins the verticalization of the lower body even while the side-body work begins to horizontalize from below. Each horizontal achieved at one level reflects upward — bringing the next horizontal closer to being achievable, until the segments are stacked enough that the vertical can pass through them as a line rather than a series of accommodations.
"have stopped at some point and waited and come back to the other end. I wasn't adjusting those sides properly. If at first you don't succeed, get the hell out of there. Because I think if you just work in the back and help the feet some, that it wouldn't be as good because we clearly spend a lot of time in the feet and knees. And then a third of time is spent in the back instead of twothree of the time in the back and onethree of the time on the feet and knees. Also, as you change the feet, the direction of release goes into the back. 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."
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, a student lays out how the horizontals achieved at one level reflect upward through the body:
The reciprocity between horizontals and the vertical is essential to Ida's understanding of how the line is established. A pure vertical cannot exist without horizontals at the ankles, the knees, the pelvis, the shoulders. Each horizontal is a level at which the body's mass settles into a plane perpendicular to gravity; each is achieved by balancing the soft tissue around it. When all the horizontals are in place, the vertical becomes the line that passes through their centers. Conversely, when one horizontal is missing — when the pelvis tips forward, say, or one shoulder rides higher than the other — the vertical above it has nowhere to land.
"Knees moving forward, the elbows moving outward and the hips moving upward. Now those three claims have to be related before I accept it as balance. And those three claims, me being people are not theoretical claims that practical claims are the practical movement in the body of certain significant specific forms. And this puts it in to a three-dimensional material world. And all the rest of this stuff that you've been talking about has been in the realm of the anatomy books and not of the physiology physiology books. Yesterday when I was feeling the horizontal and I could feel them in one dimension. You can feel them right. And I was wondering how can you, how can I become aware of that three-dimensional line, the plane? You happy too? Very nice. Glory be to God. Thanks for everything. But you see what I say is true and I'm not vil ifying anyone."
In a 1971-72 mystery-tape session, Ida defines the three planes whose interaction produces what she means by balance:
What the eyes do to the line
In the 1976 teachers' class, the practitioner working with Ida — speaking in the voice of someone who had refined the post-session integration work into its own discipline — pointed out a clinical detail that anyone who had taken a client through the series would recognize. The body, freshly reorganized, has a new height. The eyes register the room at a new level. But the nervous system's memory of where the eye line used to be is so strong that the person will revert to the old height the moment they stop attending. The practitioner has to alert the client to the new orientation, give them permission to use it. The eyes, in other words, are part of the body's standing system, and rebalancing them is part of rebalancing the whole.
"If they walk into the room and this is vertical to them where my eye level is, you may work on them and they have the capacity to be there. But their eyes tell them in the height of the room that, one, they are only this high when they stand upright, and two, they are back here, and you take them here, that's a whole new orientation. So you've got to tell them it's all right to let their eyes play tricks on them just for a moment until they take that space or maybe ask them to close their eyes while you help them find that. Ask them to open their eyes and then, you know, take a sense of where they are. I cannot tell you how often happens. It's the eyes. As soon as a person will start to walk them, even beginning here, you'll see them and they go down because their eyes tell them this is where they walk. So you're saying that there's a component of spatial orientation that has to do with vision that you've got to help someone reprogram if they're gonna take a new posture. Mainly just give them permission to find that new program. Alert them to it. Isn't using mirrors sometimes to help find it? I'm just getting your awareness."
In the 1976 teachers' class, a senior practitioner describes the role of visual orientation in stabilizing the body's new height after a session:
The point is small but consequential. Balance, in Ida's system, is not only a matter of how mass distributes around the vertical line. It is also a matter of how the body knows where the vertical line is. The proprioceptive and visual systems together construct the body's working sense of upright, and a body whose structure has changed must also learn — in its perceptual systems — that the upright it can now achieve is different from the upright it remembers. The practitioner who fails to bridge that perceptual gap may find the client reverting to old patterns within hours, not because the structural work failed but because the perceptual system was never invited to update.
Coda: the message of the morning
On the morning of August 5, 1974, in the Boulder IPR lecture, Ida summed up what she had been teaching the room — what she had been teaching, in different words, for the previous twenty years. The human being is a structure built around a line. The line is not in the body the way an axis is in a wheel; it is the relationship the body bears to the gravitational field of the earth. When the relationship is right, the body lives in balance, in motion, in dynamic equilibrium. When it is wrong, the body spends its life resisting the very field that should support it. The work of Structural Integration, in her account, was the addition of mechanical energy to the fascial web in such a way that the body could find that relationship again. Everything else — the recipe, the junctions, the horizontals, the centerline through the inner arch — was choreography in service of that single aim.
"of the earth for support, for enhancement. See, the random body is such that gravity cannot work through it. The field that surrounds the earth can not work through it. It has to work against it. And it is not until you get out of this randomness and you organize that body so that it has a model around a vertical that you begin to get a body which can accept the energy of the gravitational field and utilize it. Now, everybody like that definition? Who doesn't? Has anybody got a better one? Like the definition of your dad. Of using the Well, who used the word wake blocks? Didn't. Oh, I heard somebody. Who's there somebody that used that wake? I used that. Did you use it open here? Open the hair weight box? Maybe you did."
In the 1976 Boulder advanced class, Ida gives the closing formulation of what the work is:
The doctrine, examined across a decade of advanced classes, is more layered than any single formulation suggests. Standing is balance, not stillness. Balance is symmetry of mass around the vertical, not perfection of parts. The vertical is an index of how gravity can act through the body. The body in balance moves into dynamic balance, and the dynamic balance is what the late hours of the work confirm. The recipe is one continuous reorganization, not ten discrete interventions. The centerline runs up the inside of the leg, and weight rolled to the outer arch destroys the unity it was built to support. None of these claims is independent of the others; they form a single account of what an upright human being is and how the practitioner participates in the body's effort to remain one. The article assembles her statements across years and venues to show the shape of that account as it firmed up in her teaching.
See also: See also: the 1973 Big Sur advanced class (SUR7333) preserves an extended student exchange on what 'balance' means experientially — a practitioner contrasting the military trained sense of balance (legs out, arms out, holding tension extrinsically) with the felt sense of balance as a line rather than a single point, and Ida's response that one side's function is always to help balance the other. SUR7333 ▸
See also: See also: the 1973 Big Sur advanced class also contains an extended discussion of how differentiation of joints — not merely loosening — produces what Ida called the new strength of a balanced segment, where finer movement and greater integrity arise together. SUR7334 ▸
See also: See also: the 1971-72 Mystery Tapes preserve a remarkable conversation in which Ida and her students debate Ralph Pottenger's textbook claims about posture, gravity, and the line — including the proposition that the line of gravity intersects the spine at the cervico-dorsal and dorso-lumbar junctions when balance is achieved. 72MYS181 ▸