Why the distinction had to be named
Ida did not arrive at the static-versus-dynamic distinction in her first decade of teaching. The early formulation of the work emphasized verticality — a body's segments stacked along a plumb line, the ankles registering under the knees, the knees under the hips, the hips under the lumbar bodies and the shoulders and ears. She was emphatic that this was a real and measurable accomplishment, and equally emphatic that it was what every accepted school of body mechanics in the century already taught, even if those schools had no method for achieving it. The Big Sur 1973 transcripts and the 1974 Healing Arts lectures show her still presenting verticality as the goal. But by 1975 and 1976, with senior students in the room, she had begun pressing against her own earlier framing. Verticality was real, but it was static. Something more had to happen for a body to live in that alignment rather than merely be assembled into it. The name she finally gave to that something was dynamic balance.
"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."
In her 1974 Healing Arts lecture, Ida named the static measuring stick by way of acknowledging where she had to start:
The acknowledgment that the older schools taught the measuring stick but not how to achieve it was Ida's standard refrain. Where her own work departed from theirs was not in the picture of vertical alignment but in the means by which the body was made plastic enough to enter it. And as she watched students attempt to apply the recipe she had built around that alignment, she began to see that even after a clean tenth hour the body could be vertically arranged and still functionally rigid — could be stacked but not free. That observation pushed the doctrine forward. The static stacking had to be the beginning, not the end.
"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."
Continuing in the 1974 Healing Arts lecture, she names the developmental sequence directly:
Structure as relationship, not thing
Before the static-dynamic distinction can be heard properly, Ida's underlying vocabulary has to be heard. She insisted, against the standard usage even among her own students, that structure was not a thing in space but a pattern of relationships. The body's parts could not be understood as objects sitting next to each other; they had to be understood as relations holding each other in place. This was not philosophical hand-waving. It was the engineering claim that made the whole project intelligible: if structure is relationship, then changing structure means changing the relations between parts, which is something the practitioner's hands can actually do.
"I'm very happy to present to you a great teacher of minds and healer of bodies, Doctor. Ida Rolf. Everybody. Good I'm delighted to be able to be here with you and to give you some firsthand hints about Actually, anything that anybody can present to you about Rolfing is necessarily a hint because Rolfing itself is an experience and like all experiences to create it to translate it into verbal sections words doesn't really convey ideas."
From the 1974 structure lectures, defining the term that everything else hangs on:
The further claim that follows from this is that posture and structure are not the same thing. Posture, as she liked to point out, is the past participle of a Latin verb meaning to place — it has been placed. To maintain posture by effort is to confess that the underlying structure is not in balance, because a body whose relationships are right does not have to be held in arrangement. This argument, which she made repeatedly in her public lectures, is the negative form of the dynamic-balance claim: the test of whether structure is right is whether the body's organization is self-sustaining, or whether it has to be held by ongoing effort against itself.
"Nineteen twentieth century, last part of it, last quarter of it, that to keep any of these bodies in posture takes effort, constant continuous effort. And when you have to make effort concerning anything in your body, it's a very bad sign. You don't usually interpret it in view of the next words. But as I see a man struggling to maintain posture, I know that he is losing his 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."
From the Topanga lecture, distinguishing posture from structure:
Organization is not a static factor
The clearest articulation of the doctrine in the recorded teaching comes from the Big Sur 1973 advanced class. Ida is talking about the old osteopathic understanding — Doctor Still and his successors — and about the chronic lesion, the joint that gets adjusted into alignment and then returns within hours or days to its prior position. Her diagnosis is that the old manipulators had identified the right problem, the soft-tissue determinants of joint position, but had reverted to treating the joint as a static object. They forced it into place; the surrounding tissue, unchanged, pulled it back. From this diagnosis she generalizes to the principle her own students were still learning to absorb: organization is something the body does in motion, not something the body holds while still.
"Organization is not a static factor. It is a dynamic factor. It is the way you use muscles to move."
Big Sur 1973, after describing the chronic lesion and why forcing a joint back into line does not hold:
Having named the proposition, she immediately pressed it into pedagogical form. She did not pretend that the students in front of her had yet learned to produce dynamic organization. The acknowledgment was the reverse: that the elementary work, which the entire ten-session recipe instantiates, is the work of organizing things statically. The advanced work — the work she was teaching the senior practitioners present at Big Sur in 1973 and Boulder in 1975 and 1976 — was the work of moving the body from that static organization into a dynamic one. This is what gave the static-dynamic distinction its place in the curriculum. It was the dividing line between two stages of the practitioner's own learning.
"You organize, you break down the old pattern and you have a new pattern but it's static. You have to get a new pattern that is appropriately dynamically to the movement of the weight."
Continuing in the same Big Sur lecture, she names the next move:
The tenth hour as the transition point
By the 1976 Boulder advanced class, Ida had assigned the static-to-dynamic transition explicitly to the tenth hour. The earlier hours had built the static organization — the segments stacked, the fascial planes opened, the major asymmetries softened. The tenth hour's job, in the formulation she arrived at in front of her senior students, was to take the joints of that statically-organized body and bring them into the condition where motion could pass through them. The hour was not meant to take the body very far into dynamic functioning — only to make the transition, to set the trajectory. What would follow over the months after the series was the body's own continuing exploration of the freedom now available to it.
"that the job of the tenth hour is to organize joints to get from static to dynamic. Now you're not going very far dynamic today but you're going to make the transition today, I hope. You're going to understand what it is that makes the transit from static to dynamic and it is literally freedom of the joints."
From the 1976 Boulder advanced class, watching students walk and naming what the tenth hour is for:
The tenth hour test she walked students through in that same Boulder class makes the dynamic criterion concrete. With the subject seated, the practitioner takes the head, holds it from the ischial tuberosity end of the spine, and tests for an uninterrupted wave passing through the spine from the head down to the sacrum. The presence or absence of that wave is the diagnostic. A body with the wave has segments that release into each other under motion. A body without it has segments that catch — that are statically arranged but not yet dynamically related. Ida treated this test as the practical instantiation of the static-dynamic distinction, the place where the otherwise abstract concept could be felt in the hands.
"And this is what your tenth hour is about. Did you hear from any of these people about what is the test for the tenth hour? Supposing some of you take on that one. What is the test for the tenth hour? When do you know you have done a good tenth hour? When you can. The person sitting straight and hung up with the tuberosity. Holding the head, pulling up on the side of the head, jiggling it, back from the side to side. You can feel the spine as a continuous wave all the way down to the sacrum, so you have more weight on the end of the line with no interference along the spine. That's right. And do you recognize how what he's describing describing there there is is a test of balance. Something isn't out of line. Something isn't catcher. Something is balancing its opposite number. And so you get this uninterrupted wave through the body. Now, actually, that wave occurs in the mesodermic body. The body that has derived from the mesoderm."
From the 1976 Boulder advanced class, the tenth-hour test demonstrated:
From the eleventh hour on: dynamic work in the field
Ida's IPR lecture of August 1974 caught her in a moment of revising her own teaching about what comes after the ten-session series. She was telling her students that the questions arriving in their post-series work — the bodies that needed something the recipe had not given them — fell into two groups, and that the groups corresponded to the static-dynamic distinction. The complaints that called for further work in the lower extremities and the intrinsic-extrinsic balance were not requests for a different recipe; they were requests to make the static accomplishment of the tenth hour available to motion. Something, she said, had to be added to the static before the dynamic could emerge.
"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."
From her August 11, 1974 IPR lecture, reflecting on how her own teaching had changed:
The pedagogical implication she drew from this was that the practitioner could not stop at the tenth hour's static balance and consider the work done. Even in cases where the body left the series visibly improved, the static arrangement would tend to be defended by the patient's old movement habits unless something further intervened. The eleventh hour, in her account, was where she repeatedly saw bodies pass into the dynamic register — where the intrinsic-extrinsic balance she had set up in the tenth could finally be put to work, and where the patient began to stride across the room with legs that were doing their own job rather than being dragged.
"Now in your temporal you very rarely have established that and if you keep going with that first cycle stuff, you never get to establish it. You have to somehow change relations in fascial planes before you can get that established to the place where you can use it. And it's practically clear what you do then. I have never yet given an eleventh hour to a person without their having a drastic sense of improvement. The chronic that they've had for years suddenly changes."
Continuing in the same 1974 IPR lecture:
Plasticity as the precondition
The static-dynamic distinction sits on top of a more fundamental claim Ida made constantly: that the human body is a plastic medium. Without that plasticity, neither static rearrangement nor dynamic balance would be available; the body would be locked into whatever configuration it had taken on. Her insistence on this point, audible across nearly every recorded class, was directed against the assumption — held even by many of her medical contemporaries — that adult structure was fixed. Plasticity was what made everything else possible, and she would repeat the phrase several times in any lecture where she was setting up the larger argument.
"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. Now, we are ready to define rolfing structural integration. It is a system of organizing the body so that it is substantially vertical, substantially balanced around a vertical in order to allow the body to accept support from the gravitational energy. Two characteristic qualities of the body make this unlikely situation possible."
From the 1974 Healing Arts lecture, the foundational claim:
The medium through which that plasticity acts is fascia — the connective tissue she called the organ of structure. In her Big Sur lectures and in the public tapes she gave at various venues, Ida repeatedly described how energy added to fascia by the practitioner's pressure changes the fascia's behavior, which in turn changes the relations of the segments, which in turn changes the body's available movement. The mechanism is what makes the static-dynamic transition something the practitioner can actually produce rather than wait for. Pressure changes fascia; changed fascia repositions the segments; repositioned segments make new movement available.
"It's pure physics as it's taught in physics laboratories. Now the strange part about it is that that organ of structure is a very resilient and very elastic and very plastic medium. It can be changed by adding energy to it. In structural integration, one of the ways we add energy is by pressure so that the practitioner gives deliberately contributes energy to the person on whom he is working, to not energy in the sense that you let a position throw it around, but energy such as they talk about in the physics laboratory. When you press on a given point, you literally are adding energy to that which is under that point. And in structural integration, by way of an unbelievable accident of how you can change fashion structure, you can change human beings. You can change their structure and in changing their structure you are able to change their function."
From the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, the mechanism of change:
She also pressed her students to see the circularity of the system. The change to fascia changes structure, which changes function, which in turn places new demands back on the fascia. A body that has begun to move differently because its segments are newly arranged will lay down its fascial planes differently in the months following the series, deepening the organization. The static rearrangement is not the end of the story even at the level of the tissue; it is the entry point to a feedback loop that, if the new movement is taken up, continues to differentiate the body's planes further into the dynamic register.
"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."
From the 1973 Big Sur class on fascial teaching:
What dynamic organization looks like — muscles doing their own work
When she was pressed to describe what the dynamic body actually looked like, Ida's images were consistent. The undifferentiated body moved in gross sweeps; whole regions contracted together because the fascial planes between the muscles were stuck and the nervous system had no way to address one muscle without recruiting its neighbors. After the work, the muscles began to do their own jobs. The differentiation of fascial planes that the recipe accomplished at the structural level showed up at the functional level as movement initiated from deep in the body, with surface muscles no longer obliged to do work that belonged elsewhere. This was the dynamic body — not a body moving more, but a body moving with the right muscles.
"And then as you watch as the rofting goes on, you see that the muscles start doing their own work instead of being grouped all in one big glob. And then you get movement which comes from deep in the body as well as on the surface."
From the 1974 Open Universe class, describing the differentiation that produces dynamic movement:
Her colleague Valerie Hunt, who had been measuring electromyographic patterns in subjects before and after the work, brought back data that gave the same description in laboratory terms. The bodies she measured before the series showed widespread excitation — muscles activating that had no necessary role in the task at hand, co-contractions in which one muscle worked against another to immobilize a joint that should have been moving. After the series the activations became specific, sequential rather than simultaneous, with the agonist firing and then the antagonist firing in succession. The pattern was what efficiency would look like measured in microvolts. It was also, in Ida's vocabulary, what the static-to-dynamic transition would look like to a sensitive enough instrument.
"Another finding is that after structural integration there was more sequential contraction of muscles and not so much co contraction. What do I mean by sequential and co? If you're doing very, very fine work, such as writing for long periods of time or work with your eyes, work with your hands, it requires co contraction. You know how fatigued you get. You get tremendously tired from using one muscle against another muscle to keep you from moving any great distance. And so, in fine control, we know that there is co contraction. But the type of skills which I asked for in this particular study was not fine skills but gross skills. And these are far better done using the agonist followed by the antagonist, the agonist and not the agonist and antagonist simultaneously. This is tremendously expensive in human energy, is to use one muscle against another. It's like accelerating your car and putting on the brakes simultaneously. It is exhausting. Efficiency then with less tension. Another finding: before structural integration, there was what I called widespread excitation, which was unrelated specifically to the particular task at hand. This means, for example, that people write with their bottom, and their bottom gets very tense when they write. And that is not the specific task at hand."
From the 1974 Healing Arts conference, Valerie Hunt reporting her electromyography findings:
Julian Silverman, the other research collaborator who presented at the 1974 conference, framed the same phenomenon in the language of resonance and energy transfer. The body's many segments could be modeled as oscillating modules linked by elastic and viscous elements. If the viscous elements outweighed the elastic ones, no joint could move without energy leaking out through the whole system. If the elastic capacity grew but the modules remained in wrong phase relations to each other, more capacity for transfer would not produce more coherent motion — it might even produce less. The dynamic body, in his model, was the body whose modules had been tuned into resonance, so that motion in one segment carried into the next without dissipation.
"If the interconnecting networks are overly viscous, then no one joint can be moved without dissipating energy throughout the entire system. If by some process the viscous elements could be changed into more elastic ones, what would the model predict? Clearly, an increased capacity for energy flow between joints is to be expected. Know that this itself will affect an overall change toward more rhythmic efficient energy flow is not true. If the individual elements are still unbalanced with respect to each other, then the increased capacity for energy transfer may be of little use or may even give the appearance of less synchronicity. This is so because all of the modules have their own intrinsic frequencies of oscillation. And if they are in wrong phase relationships with each other, their energies may tend to collide or interfere with one another. What then is the resolution of this problem?"
From the public tape series, Julian Silverman modeling the body as coupled oscillators:
Layered hours, layered transitions
Throughout the 1975 Boulder advanced class, Ida's senior students kept returning to the question of how the static-dynamic transition was distributed across the ten hours of the recipe. Their consensus, refined out loud in front of her, was that the hours were not independent. The first hour was the beginning of the tenth — it opened the work the tenth would later complete. The second hour continued and consolidated the first. The third continued the second. The series was a single continuous arc whose late hours could only do their dynamic work because the early hours had laid down the static base. The reason the series was broken into ten distinct sessions, as Dick Demmerle told the class, was that the body could not absorb the work in one sitting.
"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."
From the 1975 Boulder advanced class, articulating the continuity of the recipe:
That continuity argument had a corollary the same Boulder cohort pressed on through their own definitional exercises. When students tried to state what Structural Integration was for a hypothetical outsider, they kept arriving at the same shape: the body is segmented into blocks — head, thorax, pelvis, lower extremities — which through stress and habituation lose their alignment, and the work realigns those blocks within the gravitational field by manipulating the myofascial system. The block language was Ida's own, and the students were learning to deploy it as the language in which the static rearrangement of the body could be named and taught.
"That's a very important point. You want to have every time you define structure integration. Go ahead, Steve. And also, what happens to these blocks is that they, through time, begin to lose their alignment in respect in relationship to one another. Okay. It's not time doesn't do it. That happens through time. Right. Well, that's what I was trying say through time. And what happens when this unalignment occurs is that the body loses its relationship to gravity. And what the structural integrationist attempts to do is to realign the structure and teach the individual how to be aware of the relationship with gravity. Realigns the the basic blocks so they're aligned within the gravitational field. Right. Okay. And we do that we don't we do that by working with the myofascial system by rearranging it in such a way that the body can go towards the normal. And so what are the two factors, Bob, you might say that would help this align just general things?"
From the 1975 Boulder class, students working out the definition of the work in front of Ida:
The other refinement that the same 1975 conversation pressed forward was the recognition that within each individual hour, the practitioner moved through a small version of the same arc. Each session unwrapped certain layers, repositioned certain segments, and then asked the body to take a few steps under its new arrangement before the session ended. The walk at the end of each hour was the moment when the static rearrangement of that session was tested against motion. If the body could carry the new arrangement through a few steps, the session had landed. If it could not, the static gain would not survive contact with daily life. The static-dynamic distinction was, in this sense, not a one-time transition at the tenth hour but a recurring test at every hour.
"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."
From the 1975 Boulder advanced class, on how horizontal changes register vertically:
The static body as habit, the dynamic body as availability
Ida's late teaching pressed against a word her patients used constantly: habit. People came to her saying they had been sitting or walking a certain way for so long that they could not change. She refused this framing in its colloquial form. What people called habit, she insisted, was actually the externally visible sign of a particular internal arrangement of structure. The arrangement, not the habit, was what had to be addressed. Once the internal relations were different, what had appeared as habit would change without anyone having to remember to change it. This is a different version of the same claim. The static body is a body whose internal relations are fixed; the dynamic body is one whose internal relations have become available.
"And whether you wanna talk to them about this or whether you don't wanna talk to them about this, realize that when they say this has been my habit, and I can't change my habit that easily, that what they're really saying is this has been the level of relationship of the internal structure in my structures in my body So that there isn't a thing properly called habit, there is the outward and visible sign of the internal relationship which is most easy for you to get into, most simple. So it is from this level of randomness that you are going to build in the first hour with a pattern. Hey, Fritz. You always sit over in that corner, and I never see you. And you just get away with murder around here. Do you want to sketch in the most vital places to stop the change of that randomness. The change of the randomness. Is partially if you're talking changing of the awareness of the person and from this structural integration position, by beginning with the with the superficial fascia, you begin to change the the body image, the body awareness almost. And by freeing the the body from the sense of the shoulder girdles, the and the pelvic girdle from the central core of the body."
From a public tape, redefining 'habit' as structural relationship:
The corollary she drew was about how the work scaled across the series. Each hour added a new layer of internal differentiation, and each layer reduced the body's reliance on the apparent habit pattern of the previous configuration. The first hour, working in the superficial fascia and beginning to free the shoulder and pelvic girdles from the central core, changed the body image, which was itself the most surface-level layer of the static arrangement. Subsequent hours moved into deeper layers, freeing relations that had been holding the body in arrangements it could no longer choose against. By the tenth hour, the deepest static arrangements had been opened — and the work shifted, for the first time, to making the resulting configuration available to motion.
What the dynamic body lets in: gravity as a positive force
The largest claim Ida made for the dynamic body was that it could finally receive gravity as a positive force rather than spending itself against gravity. The static body, even when its segments are stacked, is still resisting the field; the alignment is being held by the practitioner's intervention rather than by the body's own organization. Only when the joints are available to motion does the gravitational field begin to pass through the body's vertical axis without being deflected, and only then does what Ida called the addition of energy from gravity become possible. The static stack made it geometrically conceivable; the dynamic balance made it functionally real.
"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."
From the 1974 Healing Arts lecture, the largest claim:
Her collaborator Valerie Hunt, taking the same claim into the laboratory at UCLA, found measurable changes in the energy fields surrounding the body of subjects who had completed the series. The aura measurements she conducted were tentative and Ida treated them with appropriate caution — she liked Hunt's data but did not pretend it was settled physics. What mattered to Ida was that the laboratory findings pointed in the same direction as the clinical observation: a body whose segments had become available to motion behaved, energetically, like a different system than the same body before the work. Whether that difference would ultimately be measurable as electromagnetic field strength or as oxygen consumption or as something else, the difference itself was the dynamic body.
"My final reports will be worked on this fall and this winter for the professional group as well as for lay groups through the Rolf Institute. My tentative conclusions are that Rolfing has a profound effect upon human energy systems in the direction of negative entropy, The counteracting of entropy: there are at least two aspects of the energy systems brought into greater coherency, and the physicists describe coherency to us and state that coherent energy or energy, for example, that goes through a laser beam places energy in unified directions, in a single direction, and that very small quantities"
From the 1974 Healing Arts conference, Valerie Hunt summarizing her tentative conclusions:
Coda: what the doctrine settled, and what it did not
The static-versus-dynamic distinction, by the time Ida was teaching the 1976 Boulder advanced class, had become firm enough to anchor a specific assignment — the tenth hour's job is to organize joints from static to dynamic — and loose enough to leave the practical questions open. How far into dynamic functioning a given body would go in the tenth hour itself she described as limited. How much of the rest of the journey belonged to the eleventh hour and to the body's own work afterwards she did not pretend to have settled. What she had settled was the conceptual frame: that organization is a verb, not a noun; that the body's first balance is a stacking but the body's last balance is a participation in motion; and that the work of Structural Integration only fulfills its design when the static accomplishment opens out into dynamic availability.
"I once had a bright English boy who said, Actually, the Ralph process is a twenty hour process and 11 of them are in the tenth hours. You hear what he's saying. He's saying you get stuck there at those joints and this you can't afford to do. You have got to get from the feet to the top of the head in an hour. Give you an extra ten minutes if you like. And that's not twenty minutes and it's not an hour and three quarters and it's not two hours. And it means you keep moving. Pat come out here and you and Peter stand up there where everybody can see you Peter points out what he sees. Oh, I'm sorry. That one. Why do you what do you think is holding at that event? David observed that we're not talking about the fascial body. We're talking about most of the groups."
From the 1976 Boulder advanced class, a coda on what the practitioner must learn:
What remained unresolved in her teaching, and what she did not pretend to have resolved, was how reliably the transition could be produced in any particular body. Some bodies, as she pointed out in the 1976 class watching her students walk, carried the dynamic register with them whether or not they had been through the recipe. Others, even after a full series and a clean tenth hour test, took months or longer to discover what the new arrangement allowed them to do. The static-dynamic distinction was not a guarantee. It was a map of where the work was meant to go, and a vocabulary for naming whether a given body had arrived.
See also: See also: a 1974 Open Universe discussion of how reorganizing the body changes its relation to thought patterns and belief systems, and how 'static thought forms' may parallel static structural forms. UNI_073 ▸
See also: See also: a 1974 Open Universe class in which Ida and her colleagues discuss the fascial body as the interface between human energy fields and the cosmos — a more speculative companion to the doctrine of dynamic organization. UNI_043 ▸
See also: See also: the public RolfA1 tape, in which Ida and a colleague describe how the practitioner reads the body's static and dynamic signs from the outside, noting that motion testing is harder to see than postural assessment but more diagnostic. RolfA1Side1 ▸
See also: See also: a 1976 Boulder advanced class discussion of the segmented body as an aggregate of weight-blocks, and Ida's pushback against describing the work in physiological rather than gravitational terms. 76ADV11 ▸