Structure is relationship — the word and the meditation
Ida begins almost every public lecture on the work by asking her listeners to do something small and strange: meditate on a single word. Not posture, not alignment, not the recipe, not even gravity — but the word *structure*. In the 1974 Topanga soundbyte, in the 1973 Big Sur class, in the 1971-72 IPR lecture, she returns to this instruction. The discipline she is asking for is etymological and conceptual at once. She wants her students to notice that the word *structure* never names a thing in isolation. It always names a relation. A beautiful structure is the way the top relates to the middle relates to the floor. A failing structure is a relation that has gone wrong. The first move of her teaching is to get this distinction lodged in the student's mind, because everything that follows — the plasticity of fascia, the verticality, the gravitational reinforcement — only makes sense once the student has stopped treating the body as a single object and started treating it as an aggregate held in relation.
"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?"
From the Topanga soundbyte, an evening lecture for a general audience.
The Topanga formulation is compact, but Ida's most explicit instruction in this register comes from her 1973 Big Sur advanced class, where she pushes the students harder on the etymology. The word *structure*, she says, derives from a root that means the material dimension of relationship. Every use of the word implies a relation between parts. There is no English usage of *structure* that escapes this. She wants the students to test the claim — to try and find a counter-example, to use the word and not be talking about relationship — and to discover that they cannot. The discipline is a small one but its consequences run through the rest of her doctrine. If structure is always and only relationship, then the practitioner's job cannot be to fix a part. It must be to reorganize how parts stand to each other.
"Structure wherever you use the word structure, the next time you use the word structure, look at it. See whether you aren't always talking about relationship. See whether you can ever talk. Use the word structure and be talking about something other than relationship."
From the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, instructing the trainees in how to listen to their own language.
The same meditation appears in an earlier IPR-era lecture, where Ida frames the discipline in a different register — drawing on Korzybski's general semantics, which had been part of her intellectual world since the 1930s. Structure, she tells her students there, is what Korzybski's system calls a fourth-area word. It deals with relationships as causes, not with specific material situations. The materials are real and specific, but only in their capacity as terms of a relation. If you look at what you are seeing with this discipline in mind, she says, you will find relationship in everything. The meditation, in this earlier rendering, is a preparation of perception itself.
"what do we mean by structure, what do we think of when we think of structure. In other words, let's learn a little meditation on structure. Well, in the first place structure always means relationship. Structure, as you recognize, is used in many levels. It's used in theory, it's used in metaphor, it's used in discussing facts and their relationship and so forth, but never is it used except as it involves relationship. Structure is one of those what Koczybski's system calls a fourth area word. It deals with relationships as causes, not specific material situations. They're material and they are specific, but only in a sense of relationship. And of course, if you are going to look at what you're seeing, you'll see a relationship in everything you look at, if this is what you're looking for."
From an IPR-era lecture, framing the meditation in Korzybski's terms.
Bill Williams, working in the same dialogic tradition Ida established, echoes the formulation back to her in one of the RolfB6 conversations — almost as a catechism. The word *integration*, he notes, complements *structure*: structure names the intra-body relationships, integration names the relation of those intra-body relationships to the energy fields outside the body. This double move — relationship inside, relationship outside — is what the name of the work, Structural Integration, is doing. It is not a label for a method but a description of an ontology.
"It's fluid down to the cellular level, which means that we can change it. And it's segmented, which means that we can relate it to each other, the parts to each other. And we the the name of the work is called structural integration, and structure itself, the word structure itself, connotes that there is a relationship. So we're working with relationships. And the word integration connotes that we are working with relationships both intra body and outside of the body, or the energy field inside the body, energy fields inside the body, and the energy field related to larger energy fields. So that's the basis on which we start."
Williams summarizing the conceptual structure of the work for a visiting interlocutor.
Structure as the missing factor in the inherited picture of the body
In the 1974 Structure Lectures — recorded in the Rolf advanced class of that year and intended explicitly as a stand-alone introduction to her thinking — Ida frames structure as a new element in the cultural understanding of the human being. The framing is historical. She tells her students that medicine in the modern period has taken on two large new ideas: the idea of environment and the idea of structure. Both, she says, are relatively recent. Fifteen or twenty years before her lecture, neither had cultural currency. By the mid-1970s, both were beginning to circulate, but neither had been examined carefully. The lecture is her attempt to do that examination — to specify what structure means, where it came from, why it had been excluded from the older picture, and what its inclusion changes about how a body can be understood.
"In the old idea, in the old Aristotelian idea, a body was a body was a body. It was one thing. It was put together. It wasn't a summation of a structured situation."
From the 1974 Structure Lecture, naming the inheritance she is breaking with.
The Aristotelian inheritance, in Ida's reading, was not a small inconvenience. It was the conceptual reason that the manipulative trades had been pushed to the margins of healing while the chemical school took the center. If a body is a single substance, then chemistry — which acts on substance — is the appropriate intervention. If a body is a relation of parts, then manipulation — which acts on relation — becomes intelligible. Ida is not modest about the implication. The structural school, she says repeatedly, was in the field for several thousand years before the chemical school's nineteenth-century triumph. Her own work, she frames as the structural school returning to the conversation with new conceptual equipment — the equipment to say what structure actually is, and how it can be changed.
"because structure as such has been the element which has been added to the old notions which is has been giving and is giving us the greatest greatest impetus toward forward understanding of what constitutes a human being, a human body, and the way it behaves."
From the 1974 Structure Lecture, naming structure as the new element being added to the older picture.
Once the claim is stated, Ida defines the word itself. The dictionary definition she reaches for is something about the order within the parts of a complex situation — order, parts, complex. The body, in her usage, is a complex situation. Its parts are head, thorax, pelvis, legs, and at finer grain the myofascial units that hold those large segments in their relations. Order within those parts is the variable the practitioner is working with. The 1974 lecture makes this definition very nearly axiomatic.
" Structure as you see, as you know, concerns the way parts are put together. The relationship, in other words,"
The dictionary turn — Ida specifying what the word structure refers to.
The body as aggregate of units
If structure is relationship, the question that follows is: relationship of what? Ida's answer is consistent across the transcripts — head, thorax, pelvis, legs. She wants her students to stop seeing the body as a single mass and start seeing it as an aggregate of large segments. The argument is not anatomical so much as perceptual. When the practitioner looks at the next body to walk into the room, she should be seeing four or five large blocks held in particular relation by the myofascial structures that bridge them. The blocks have widths, lengths, tilts, displacements. The practitioner's task is to read those displacements and to understand which intra-bodily relationships are producing the dysfunction the person came in carrying.
"A body is an aggregate of units and in accordance with the way those units head, thorax, pelvis, legs. In accordance with the way those units are put together, they function well or they function less well or they function ill or they function very badly or they lead into death."
From the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, stating the aggregate doctrine in its simplest form.
The blocks image she uses to make the aggregate intelligible to her students has a particular pedagogical history in her teaching. She reaches for it in the Topanga lecture, in the 1976 advanced class, and in the IPR conversations. Children, she says, learn to stack blocks before they are two years old. They learn very quickly that the centers of gravity have to be in vertical alignment or the stack will not stand. A body is rather like that — but with the complication that the blocks are not rigid, the joints between them are not points, and the connective tissue that holds them in relation is itself a substance the practitioner can act on. The image is approximate, but it carries the doctrine: stability is a function of alignment, alignment is a function of how the blocks are stacked, and the stacking is what the practitioner is reorganizing.
"It's not a squat single thing like a tent pole, like a tent plus tent pole. It's more like a series of blocks and those blocks need to be stacked. And you people all realize that you were all of two years old when Uncle Joe gave you some blocks And it didn't take you very long to know that if you were going to get a stable stacking of blocks, you could only stack it in one fashion. And we'll see a little bit more of that in the pictures that I'm going to show presently. The centers of gravity of each block had to be in a vertical line with the center of gravity of the block above and the block below before it was possible for those blocks to form a stable form. And this is part of the story of bodies."
Ida explaining the block image at Topanga, with the tent-pole image bridging into it.
But Ida is also careful not to let the block image collapse into mechanism. In the 1976 Boulder advanced class, when one of her students tries to substitute the word *weight* or *mass* for *blocks* — to make the metaphor more physically rigorous — she resists. Physiology runs through the blocks, she says. The digestive tract is a single system that runs through every block; the circulatory system runs through every block; you cannot organize the digestive tract in terms of the verticality of its containing segments. What the practitioner is working on, she insists, is the weight relationships between aggregate units. The blocks language is approximate but it names the operative variable: how the heavy parts of the body stand to each other in space.
Fascia as the organ of structure
Once structure is defined as relationship and the body as an aggregate, Ida's next move is to name the tissue that holds the relations. This is where her doctrine departs most sharply from the anatomy textbooks. In the standard picture, bones hold the body up and muscles move it. In Ida's picture, fascia — the connective tissue, the collagen system — is the organ that holds the body in three-dimensional shape. Bones do not hold the body up; they hold the soft tissue apart. The image she returns to is the orange with its contents scooped out, the empty rind that nevertheless holds the orange's shape: that, she says, is what would remain if you removed everything from a body except its fascial envelope. The shape would be there. The contour would be there. The body, in its visible form, is a fascial body.
"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, naming fascia as the organ of structure.
The fascial body is the organ Ida considered to have been almost entirely missing from medical anatomy. She tells a story in the 1974 Healing Arts lecture about sending a student to the library to answer the question *what is fascia* — and the student, after two days, returning with nothing. The terra incognita was real. The medical schools had not been teaching the fascial body as an organ; they had been treating it as packing material between the structures that mattered. Her own teaching reversed this. The structures that mattered were the bones, the muscles, the organs — but the substrate that held them in relation, the substrate that determined the body's shape and its capacity to function in the gravitational field, was the fascia. This was not a small revision. It changed what the practitioner's hands were doing when they touched a body.
"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?"
From the 1974 Healing Arts lecture, on fascia as the supporting body.
What makes fascia available as the operative tissue, in Ida's account, is its plasticity. The collagen molecule is a braided protein whose cross-links can shift under pressure. The energy of the practitioner's hands, applied at the right location and the right depth, can change the position of fascial sheaths within the body — and as those sheaths move, the bones they hold apart move with them. This is the mechanism by which structural relationships can be revised. It is not magic; it is, in Ida's careful framing, pure physics, the kind taught in physics laboratories. The practitioner is adding energy to a plastic medium and the medium is changing its configuration in response.
"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. All of you have seen that structure determines function to a very great degree, to a degree which we can utilize."
From the 1973 Big Sur class, on adding energy to the fascial aggregate.
Plasticity — what the practitioner can rely on
Ida's term for the property of the body that makes Structural Integration possible is *plasticity*. She uses the word in the strict dictionary sense: a plastic substance is one that can be distorted by pressure and then brought back to shape by suitable means, provided its elasticity has not been exceeded. The body, in her account, is such a substance. It will deform under load; it will hold the deformation as habit; it will return toward a particular configuration when energy is added correctly. Fifty years ago, she tells her 1974 Healing Arts audience, no one would have believed the claim. Twenty-five years ago it would have been received as eccentric. By the mid-1970s it was beginning to be defensible. She insists that her students hear the claim several times before the lecture ends — the body is a plastic medium — because everything else she says about gravity and verticality depends on 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."
From the 1974 Healing Arts lecture, the plasticity claim stated as the central premise.
What plasticity means, concretely, is that the back-to-shape that the dictionary definition requires can be specified. Ida's specification is striking. *Back to shape*, in the context of the body, means *vertical*. The shape the practitioner is restoring the body to is its vertical relationship to the gravitational field of the earth. This is not an aesthetic preference. It is the configuration in which the body's energy field can be reinforced by the earth's energy field. Any other configuration — any tilt, any displacement, any chronic shortening — places the body in a relation to gravity in which gravity tears it down. The vertical is the configuration in which gravity supports.
"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. The material body of man is a plastic medium, as I just told you. Now by dictionary definition, a plastic substance is one which can be distorted by pressure and then can, by suitable means, be brought back to shape, providing that its elasticity has not been exceeded. Now the question is, what is back to shape in this context really mean? And the answer is simple and really expected. Back to shape in this context means vertical."
From the 1974 Healing Arts lecture, the plasticity definition resolved into verticality.
The mechanism behind plasticity is, for Ida, chemical and structural at once. Collagen — the protein of which fascia is largely made — is a long braided molecule whose strands are connected by inorganic cross-links: hydrogen, sodium, calcium, sometimes other minerals. The cross-links are interchangeable within limits. As a body ages and stiffens, the ratio shifts: more calcium, less sodium, denser bonds. Pressure from the practitioner's hands adds energy to these bonds and shifts the ratio back toward resilience. This is the chemistry that makes manipulation possible. It is also the chemistry that explains why the work, when properly done, does not simply rearrange the surface but reaches into the molecular substrate of the tissue.
Gravity as therapist
Ida's claim about gravity is the one she made most famous, but it is also the claim that requires the most patience to understand. Gravity, she says repeatedly, is the therapist. The practitioner does not heal the body. The practitioner reorganizes the body so that gravity, an always-present environmental force, can act on it supportively rather than destructively. This is the inversion that distinguishes her work from every other system of body mechanics she knew. The other schools — Harvard's body mechanics program, the physical education establishment, the postural correction trades — taught the measuring stick of verticality but no method for achieving it. Ida's claim was that the body is a plastic medium and that the verticality which the other schools measured could actually be brought about by working on the fascial body.
"Rolfing in the sense of this deep changing of the patterns of the fundamental structure of the body to conform with gravity. I have written, as I think probably all of you know, gravity is the therapist, and this is true and I make no claim to be a therapist, but I do make a claim that says that Rothschild changes the basic web of the body so that that therapist's gravity can really get in there."
From the IPR Conference, on gravity as therapist.
The 1973 Big Sur class is where she develops the historical case for the claim most fully. The structural school of healing, she says, had been in the field for thousands of years before chemistry took over the cultural center of medicine. What it lacked, until her own time, was a coherent account of why structural intervention works. Her account is that the body, when organized around a vertical, becomes available to the gravitational field as a positive force. When it is disorganized — when the segments are stacked badly — gravity becomes a destructive force, pulling the body down faster than the body's own energy can compensate. The vertical is the configuration in which the body can transmit the gravitational field rather than fight it.
"This is what often has offered in addition to any other school. What's the difference between this and this? Is the answer. We are the only group who recognize that in order for a living body to be at ease in its spatial environment on the earth, it must deal positively with gravity or rather gravity must deal positively with it. Because what we here in Lawton are here to do, we can't change the gravitational field. This is odd, but we just have nothing that means yet. But what we can do is to change the way the parts of the body that I have already referred to, how they fit together into a whole which can transmit the gravitational field. And in its energy, which is the energy of the earth, in its transmitting of that, it enhances its own energy field. You can change the body by virtue of the fact that its segments are segments of a whole and then the gravity can flow through. Now this is the basic concept of Rolfe."
From the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, on gravity as the distinguishing tool of the practice.
What she means by *gravity flowing through* is something her colleague Valerie Hunt, the UCLA researcher who attended the 1974 Healing Arts class, tried to specify in instrumented terms. Hunt's instrumental work suggested that bodies organized toward the vertical showed measurable changes in neuromuscular firing patterns and in the energy fields surrounding the body. Ida was cautious about the instrumented claims — she was a chemist by training and knew the difference between rigorous measurement and suggestive correlation — but the framing Hunt offered was congenial. As the body's energy fields parallel the earth's, Hunt said, gravity becomes a supportive factor. The man becomes more human. He differentiates more. He feels more.
"So This question. I'd like to quote Doctor. Hunt directly here, so I'm looking for my notes. As those two energy fields parallel one another, it is then that gravity becomes a supportive factor. As the nervous and glandular fields of the man are less bedeviled by gravity, the man apparently changes. His behavior changes. The man, we might say, becomes more human. He differentiates more. He feels more. He feels his own mental processes as being less confused, as being more adequate. He suddenly feels himself as the subject of more and more important insights. This is what Fritz Perls used to say about structural integration. He says, You just can't believe the insights I have had since I have been working with them. As a new technique, we know that we need validation, a fitting into conventional acceptances. One of our attempts at validation is going on in the laboratory of UCLA right now, and is stopping right now. And I think that later Doctor. Hunt may offer some of you the opportunities of being models in there, if you care to see her later on. This validation is going on under Doctor. Hunt's direction, and as I know and as you know, she needs no introduction. It is noteworthy that Doctor."
Valerie Hunt at the 1974 Open Universe class, framing the claim in her own scientific vocabulary.
The body as energy and the gravitational field as nutrient
The deepest implication of Ida's framing — and the one that places her work in a particular intellectual lineage — is that the body is to be understood not as a mass but as an energy field. The Aristotelian inheritance, she says repeatedly, treats the body as a single mass that moves in space. Her own picture treats it as a field that moves in another field. The smaller field of the body, when properly organized, can be reinforced by the larger field of the earth. When it is not properly organized — when the centers of gravity are displaced, when the blocks are tilted — the larger field disorganizes the smaller. The body must continually spend its own energy to compensate, and that energy is no longer available for the work of being a person.
"And the only way that we can really and really and truly change our ideas about a body is by changing this concept of the body as being simply a mass which moves as a mass, an idea which we've had since the days of Aristotle to a brand new idea that what we have now is an energy field and that this energy field works within another energy field. And by the time we are Rapha's, we begin to be aware of the fact that we are always working with a twosome. We are working not merely to change the lines of a body but to change the lines of a body in order that the energy systems that those lines determine within the body fit in to the energy systems of the field that surrounds the earth which which we call which we men call gravity. And that we are not and we are never working with a man as such. Certainly not if we propose to get results either in his thinking or his well-being. We are always working in terms of that relationship between that man and that energy field that he lives in, the field of the earth. The little, the smaller energy field, and the largest surrounding energy field. You know, there's an old Peanuts cartoon which invariably gives me a smile."
From the 1974 Structure Lecture, on the body as energy field within a larger energy field.
Ida is clear that this is physics, not metaphysics. The energy she is talking about is the kind measured in a physics laboratory — the kind quantified as work, transmitted as pressure, registered as the energy required by a body to perform its tasks. She makes the distinction firmly in the 1976 advanced class: she does not mean energetic-in-the-popular-sense, the *oh he's so energetic* sense. She means the physics-laboratory sense. How much work does the body have to do to accomplish what it is paid to do? The disorganized body must spend energy maintaining its own posture against gravity; the organized body does not. The transferable energy released by reorganization is what shows up, to the observer, as the post-work change in the person's vitality.
"Now many of you are aware of the fact that the various parts of the body operate on energy, with energy, by energy, creating their own energy, taking in their own energy. They are individual energy machines. And according to you add these energy machines, appropriately or inappropriately. You get addition or subtraction from the energy machine as a whole. If you've got a liver structure that's functioning very badly, the rest of your body which might be doing reasonably well, you are taking away the energy from it to keep that liver going and the answer is you don't feel so well. Because what you are registering when you say I feel is the sum total of that energy. But remember that sum total is an algebraic sum. Some of those systems are going to be pluses and some of them are going to be minuses unless you are very well stacked. Now you can add to that energy by the stopping. If you set those blocks properly, you can get maximum efficiency in the way that the body works."
From the 1973 Big Sur class, on the body's organs as individual energy machines.
The aura research that Valerie Hunt and Emilie Conrad were doing at UCLA in the mid-1970s gave Ida a way to gesture toward the energy-field claim without herself making metaphysical commitments she was unwilling to make. Random incoming people, Hunt found, tended to have auras half an inch to an inch in width. After Structural Integration, the auras measured four to five inches in width. Ida's framing of this finding was careful: we are dealing with a basic energy phenomenon of life, but whether the energy in question is the same as Newtonian energy, or whether it follows the inverse-square law, or whether it can be detected by other instruments — these were questions she would not commit on. What she would commit on was the structural claim: balance the body about the vertical, and the energy quotient of the system changes.
"What have we found out? 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, on what the work has established.
Function follows structure
The clinical consequence of all of this — the part that mattered to the practitioner about to put hands on a body — was that function follows structure. Ida states the claim plainly in the Topanga lecture and in the 1973 Big Sur class. Posture is what you do with structure. If the structure is in balance, posture takes care of itself. If the structure is out of balance, no amount of work on posture will fix it. The corollary is just as plain: if you change the structural relationships, you change what the body can do. You change the kind of ease and the kind of vitality the person can carry. This is why, in Ida's view, manipulation worked at all. Not because it loosened tight muscles or improved circulation or relieved pain — those were secondary effects — but because it reorganized the relational substrate on which function depended.
"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"
From the Topanga soundbyte, the claim stated to a public audience.
Julian Silverman's contribution to the 1974 Healing Arts class developed the function-follows-structure claim in mathematical terms. The body could be modeled as an ensemble of energy-generating organs whose vector sum was the body's total energy output. Each joint could be represented as a lever powered by an energy source driving a spring and dashpot in parallel. If the connecting networks were overly viscous — if the fascial sheaths were stuck, hardened, locked together — then no joint could move without dissipating energy through the entire system. Reorganizing the fascia toward elasticity changed the model: energy flow between joints became possible, and the system's intrinsic resonance could be approached. Silverman's formalism was a way of saying, in the language of mechanics and thermodynamics, what Ida had been saying in the language of structure: alignment is the condition under which energy moves through a body without being wasted.
"The problem is compounded when one realizes that all of the individual energy sources are interrelated through myofascial investments. If we examine a simple act such as walking in the light of this model, it is apparent that for maximal efficiency these various energy sources must operate in precise, synchronous, often reciprocal patterns. 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? The various energy sources must then be modified so as to bring the system as a whole as near to a resonance condition as possible."
Silverman at the 1974 Healing Arts class, modeling the body as an energy system.
Valerie Hunt's electromyographic work made an adjacent point about what changes after the work. Bodies that had been through the series showed a downward shift in the locus of motor control — from cortical to midbrain — and a shift from co-contraction to sequential contraction of muscles. In plain terms: bodies began to organize their movement at a deeper, more rhythmic level, with antagonist muscles no longer fighting each other. Hunt's framing of this finding was characteristic. The post-work body was not stronger or faster in any simple sense; it was more efficient in its energy expenditure, more coherent in its phrasing of movement, and more available to the kind of action in which intention and execution were not at war.
"It is the kind of thing you experience when you're out playing golf and that one time you hit that ball magnificently and it took off and it was no effort, and you're always looking for it again. We find that when people become more skillful in a particular high level task, they become what we call more finalized. There's a lot of research on this to show that the frequency actually changes. I think that Rolfing brings a downward shift. There is another level of control that we call the midbrain, and this area also can turn on muscles. We can operate on it. It is one of our very basic areas for some of our primitive movement, and it primarily innervates the great large joints of the body and those which are proximal, such as the shoulders and the hips and the trunk one of the areas that Rolfing works a great deal upon. This has a tendency to produce a very rhythmic quality of movement. And then there, of course, is that cortex that louses us up in so many ways. It can do those fine things with the hand and the beautiful nuances in the face, but it is totally inefficient, inefficient. It louses up, its pattern is not well established. Two muscles counteract each other at the same time, And my feeling is that this smoother energy release that comes after rolfing is based upon a downward shift in the control in the primary control. This doesn't mean you can't be cortical but in the primary control of muscle. Another finding is that after structural integration there was more sequential contraction of muscles and not so much co contraction."
Hunt summarizing her EMG findings to the 1974 Healing Arts class.
The vertical line and the energy of the earth
The vertical line, in Ida's teaching, is both an abstraction and a very specific anatomical alignment. As an abstraction, it is the line of gravity — the line along which the earth's energy field operates. As an alignment, it is the line that should connect the ankles, the knees, the hip joints, the bodies of the lumbar vertebrae, the shoulders, and the ears. The Harvard body-mechanics school taught this alignment as a measuring stick. Every accepted school of physical education in the twentieth century taught it. What none of them taught, Ida said, was how to achieve it. The vertical was a target without a method until the practitioner understood that the body was a plastic medium whose fascial substrate could be reorganized to meet the line.
"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. 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."
From the 1974 Healing Arts lecture, the vertical line specified.
Once the static vertical has been approached, something more interesting can begin to happen. Ida calls this the shift from static to dynamic balance. The body whose blocks are first organized vertically is stable in a simple sense. But as the work proceeds — as more layers of the fascial body come into ordered relation — the balance becomes dynamic. The body in motion holds its alignment through the movement, not just in stillness. The pelvic bowl becomes horizontal; the rib cage rides over it; the shoulder girdle floats; the head sits without effort. The vertical is no longer something the body achieves at rest; it is the reference around which all movement is organized.
"And I'm talking here about energy being added by pressure to the fascia, the organ of structure, to change the relation of the fascial sheaths of the body, to balance these around a vertical line which parallels the gravity line. Thus, we are able to balance body masses, to order them, to order them within a space. The contour of the body changes, the objective feeling of the body to searching hands changes. 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. The whole man, the whole person evidences a more apparent, a more potent psychic development. This means that the rate that the ratio man energy to gravity energy energy has changed has increased. The ratio has therefore increased the force available to reverse the entropic deterioration. That is and greater. Our world is no longer running down."
From the 1974 Healing Arts lecture, on the move from static to dynamic balance.
The 1976 Boulder advanced class is where Ida pushes the verticality claim hardest with her students. The random body, she tells them, is one through which gravity cannot work. The field of the earth has to work against it. It is not until the body has been organized around a vertical that the gravitational field begins to act supportively. This is the operational definition of Structural Integration she settled on in her late teaching: 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.
"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?"
From the 1976 Boulder advanced class, the operational definition.
Posture is what you do with structure
One of the cleanest formulations in the late lectures — and one of the ones Ida returns to most often — is the distinction between posture and structure. The boys who devised the word *posture* knew what they were naming, she says. Posture is the past participle of a Latin verb meaning *to place*: it has been placed. When someone has good posture, in the inherited sense, what they are doing is maintaining placement by effort. The shoulders are held back; the gut is held in; the chest is held up. All of these are signals, to Ida, that the body's structure is not in balance. A body in structural balance does not need to be placed. Its posture is automatic.
"Now posture is something else again. And the boys that devised the word posture knew what that something else was because the word posture means it has been placed. It is the past participle of a Latin word, to place, and it means it has been placed. And when you use the word posture, you are saying it has been placed. Somebody has placed something somewhere. Somebody is maintaining the placement of something somewhere. Somebody is working to keep something placed somewhere. And I guarantee that there is no one in this room who doesn't know that in this day and age of the what is it? 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. 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."
From the Topanga lecture, on posture as effortful placement versus structure as relational ease.
The 1976 Boulder advanced class extends this critique into a broader critique of how bodies are trained in American culture. The military training — shoulders back, gut in — produces a posture that looks corrected but is mechanically catastrophic. The shoulders pulled back force the dorsal spine forward. The gut held in tightens the abdominal wall and locks the breath. The body that looks erect is in fact a body whose internal relationships have been forced into a configuration that cannot carry weight through the vertical. The cure, in the inherited picture, has been worse than the disease. Ida's alternative is to leave the surface alone and reorganize the substrate — to let the structure find the vertical from the inside, rather than having the vertical imposed from the outside as effortful placement.
Structure as the new factor — the historical claim
The biographical context for Ida's claim about structure is worth pausing on. She had taken her PhD in organic chemistry at Barnard in 1916 and gone to the Rockefeller Institute as a research scientist at a time when American women were rarely hired into research roles. In the late 1920s the Institute sent her to Europe, where she sat in on Erwin Schrödinger's lectures at the University of Zurich. The intellectual contact mattered. Schrödinger's later book *What is Life?* would frame the living organism as a system that fights entropy by drawing order from its environment — a framing whose conceptual structure is almost exactly the framing Ida would arrive at decades later in her doctrine of gravity as nutrient. The body, in her late teaching, was a system whose internal order could be reinforced by the order of the gravitational field outside it. The Schrödinger lineage is implicit in her formulations even when she does not invoke it by name.
"Rolfing has now become a world renowned system for changing the structure of the body so that it is virtually aligned with the force of gravity. Rolf was born, raised, and educated in New York City. She received her PhD in 1916 from Barnard College as a research chemist. Now at that particular time, few American women sought degrees as research scientists and still fewer were given employment in research institutions. Ida Rolf was immediately hired by the Rockefeller Institute. In the late 1920s, Doctor. Rolfe was sent to Europe by the Institute, and it was during that time that she sat in on some lectures of Erwin Scheddinger at the University in Zurich. She began to suspect that there was a direct relationship between human behavior and both body physics and body chemistry. This was the genesis of the idea of structural integration."
From the introduction to the 1974 Structure Lectures, locating Ida's intellectual formation.
Ida herself, in the Structure Lectures, is reluctant to draw the entropy parallel explicitly when her interviewer presses her. Asked whether disordered structure produces greater entropy, she says — almost dismissively — that this hardly needs physics, it needs only common sense. A body carried in a fashion it was never designed for cannot perform as it was designed to perform. But her reluctance to formalize the claim should not be mistaken for absence of the claim. Her language throughout the late lectures — *energy*, *field*, *coalescing*, *vertical*, *reinforcement* — is the language of a chemist who has spent her career thinking about how order arises in matter. The structural claim is the chemical claim translated into the scale of the whole body.
"And even though you did not mention it in your remarks then, I thought for the moment that we're speaking of your work as a chemist, that you might suggest how the law of entropy fits into your conception that later developed into Rolfing. I'm sorry, this is brand new idea to me and I'm afraid I'm going to have to take some time to think about it. Ask me a couple In more that the disordered structure tends to create greater entropy less Yes, the no question about that. There's no question about that. But that hardly needs physics. That needs just common sense to see that. Yeah. Seems to me. Yes. I don't see how anybody with eyes on their heads can expect that a very disordered body carried in a fashion which it never was designed for can fail to be disorganized and not be able to perform as it was designed to perform. You understand that gravity is, biologically at least, gravity is accepted as a positive force by living bodies. Is that As a positive force in As a positive thing to be used if the body is in structural alignment. Oh, I think there's no question about that, and I think that we show the evidence of this day by day in our work."
From the 1974 Structure Lectures, on disordered structure and the supportive use of gravity.
The reason Ida insists on calling structure *new* — even though manipulative trades had been working on bodies for centuries — is that the conceptual reframing she is proposing changes what manipulation is. Osteopathy and chiropractic, she says in the 1974 lecture, were the first to begin to recover the structural understanding lost when the chemical school took over medicine in the nineteenth century. But neither went as far as her own work. Both still treated the body's parts as a collection of bones to be adjusted. Her own framing — the body as an aggregate held in relation by a plastic fascial substrate, the relations changeable by addition of energy, the optimal configuration determined by the gravitational field — was a different kind of claim. It was structure understood as the variable on which everything else depended.
The work as the practice of structure
All of this — the meditation on the word, the aggregate body, the fascial organ, plasticity, gravity, verticality, energy fields — comes together in the practitioner's hands. Ida's late teaching kept returning to the question her students struggled with: when someone asks you what the work is, what do you say? Her answers were practical. The work is a process by which the practitioner prepares the body to accept the gravitational field as support. The work is a method of arranging the tissues along vertical and horizontal lines so that the body's relationship with gravity becomes efficient rather than wasteful. The work is the only practice she knew that used gravity as its tool — not chemistry, not exercise, not adjustment, but the always-present field of the earth itself.
"Which we the use of structural integration as a process in which we use deep tissue, deep soft tissue manipulation and education to arrange the tissues of the body along vertical and horizontal lines of gravity so as body to experience a harmonious relationship with gravity. What would you say about that? I would say structural integration is a system that looks at the body as a structure in terms of blocks. The head, thorax, pelvis, lower extremities. Right. 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. 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."
From the 1975 Boulder advanced class, the trainees rehearsing the definition.
The 1975 Boulder class also produced one of the most-quoted summaries of how the recipe itself enacts the structural claim. The recipe is not ten separate operations. It is a single integrated process broken into ten sessions because the body cannot tolerate that much work at once. Each hour continues what the previous hour began. The first hour begins the tenth; the second is a follow-up of the first; the third is a continuation of the second. The whole sequence is one operation distributed in time. This is the recipe understood as the temporal expression of the structural claim — relationships have to be reorganized in a particular order because the body's tissues will only accept reorganization in that order.
"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."
Trainees in the 1975 Boulder class working out the integration of the recipe with the structural claim.
Coda: structure as the new factor in the human condition
The question the topic title poses — what does Ida mean when she calls structure *a new factor in understanding the human condition* — has, by this point, a layered answer. She means several things at once, and the layers depend on each other. She means that the inherited Aristotelian picture of the body as a single substance has to be replaced with a picture of the body as an aggregate of segments held in relation. She means that the relations are held by the fascial body, the connective tissue, the collagen system — an organ that classical anatomy treated as packing material but which her own work treated as the organ of structure. She means that this organ is plastic, that its configuration can be changed by the addition of energy, and that the configuration toward which it should be changed is the vertical relationship to the earth's gravitational field. She means that gravity, properly met by a vertical body, becomes a supportive rather than destructive force — the therapist, in her phrase, that the practitioner's work prepares the body to receive.
And she means something larger, which the late lectures only gesture at: that the cultural understanding of what a human being is has been impoverished by the absence of the structural framing. When the body is treated as a substance, healing is chemical. When the body is treated as a machine, healing is mechanical adjustment. When the body is treated as a relation — an aggregate of segments held in relation to itself and to the field it stands in — healing becomes the reorganization of that relation. The man who emerges from a body whose blocks have been restacked vertically is not the same man who walked in. He has more energy because less of his energy is being spent compensating for his own structural failure. He moves with more coherence because his motor control has shifted downward and his antagonist muscles are no longer fighting each other. He feels different because the energy quotient of the field he inhabits has changed. This, in Ida's reading, is what is new: not the manipulation, which is old, but the understanding of what the manipulation is doing and why. Structure, as the new factor, is the conceptual key that makes the practice of the work intelligible — and makes the changed person it produces intelligible too.
See also: See also: Ida's 1974 IPR Lecture (August 5, 1974) on the twelfth dorsal vertebra as the innervation center for the body's autonomic systems — a passage that extends the structural claim into a neurological register the present article only touches on. 74_8-05B ▸
See also: See also: the Big Sur 1973 dialogue (RolfSUR7332) in which Ida reframes the work as the changing of muscular patterns through accumulated functional demand — an evolutionary register that complements the structural framing developed here. SUR7332 ▸
See also: See also: Valerie Hunt's full discussion of structure and ordered relationships at the 1974 Healing Arts class — the passage on graphite versus diamond, sulfa drugs, and the spiral structure of DNA as instances of structure-determining-function at scales beyond the body. CFHA_03 ▸
See also: See also: the 1976 advanced class slide-show passages in which Ida walks the trainees through before-and-after photographs of the children who came to her with physical and developmental difficulties — concrete evidence, in her view, of what verticalization of the body within the gravitational field produces. 76ADV11 ▸