The line as measuring stick borrowed and transformed
In her 1974 Healing Arts lecture, with Valerie Hunt and her UCLA collaborators in the room, Ida laid out the most explicit statement of doctrine she ever committed to a public talk. She named the line not as a metaphor but as a measurable axis — ankles, knees, hip joints, lumbar vertebrae, shoulders, ears. The vivid image she reached for was the prickles on a chestnut burr, every spine pointing straight toward the center of the earth. What is striking in the passage is her acknowledgment that the line itself is not her invention. Every accepted school of body mechanics, the Harvard group at the head, had taught precisely this measuring stick. Her quarrel was not with the criterion but with the means. The other schools taught the line as a goal to be held; she taught it as a structural condition that could be built into the tissue itself.
"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."
Ida defines the line at the 1974 Healing Arts advanced class:
The line as Ida taught it is therefore a borrowed standard given a new mechanism. Where Harvard body mechanics offered exercise and posture drill, Ida offered the claim — startling to her listeners in 1974 — that the body itself is plastic, a connective-tissue medium that can be physically restructured around the vertical it was supposed to merely approximate. The same lecture continues into the definition of the work itself, which she frames not as a healing claim but as a structural reorganization that allows the body to accept gravity as a nourishing field. The line is the criterion by which that reorganization is judged.
"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?"
Continuing that same lecture, she names what the line is for:
Why true symmetry is impossible — the heart, the liver, and the right hand
The paradox at the center of Ida's teaching on the line emerged most clearly in the advanced classes, where a student would inevitably press her on whether the goal was truly symmetry. Her answer was always the same: of course not. The body is asymmetrical by anatomy. The heart sits on one side, the liver on the other; the right hand does most of the work; the fibula is necessarily lower than the tibia. The good Lord, she said in one of her drier moments, never meant for true symmetrical balance. What he meant for was an essential, a virtual balance — what she also called relative symmetry. This is one of the most carefully maintained distinctions in her teaching: the practitioner searches for symmetry not because the body can achieve it but because the search itself produces the closest approximation gravity will accept.
"It is never possible to get true symmetry in a body. How can you? When you've got the difference between a heart on one side and a liver on the other side. How can you? But you can certainly get something that is better balanced in terms of weight."
In a 1976 advanced class, a student asks about the asymmetry of the abdominal contents. Ida's reply:
She extended the same logic to the ankle joint, a place where students often expected horizontal symmetry and found instead an anatomical fact that prevented it. The fibula is structurally lower than the tibia. There cannot be a true horizontal across the ankles. And yet, she insisted, when the ankles work properly they function *as though* they were a horizontal hinge. This formulation — that physiological behavior is not the equal of anatomical structure — became one of her favorite teaching devices for the advanced class, a way of warning practitioners off the literal-mindedness that would otherwise make the work impossible.
"You were the one that brought out the idea that the lines of the body don't lend themselves to symmetry. Wasn't this where I started? There's another place where you can't get symmetry, and yet I tell you to look for it. See? There, you've got a horizontal across those ankles. You can't have a horizontal across those ankles because the fibula is bound to be lower than the tibia. It has to be. Yet as those ankles work, when they work properly, they work like a horizontal pinch. Now you've got to get used to the idea that physiological is not the equal of anatomical. That you've got to be able to juggle these things in words because every once in a while you get a real bright, raw feet coming in and dishing you these same arguments."
Later in the same 1976 class, on the ankle as functional horizontal:
The same essay of doctrine surfaces in her 1975 Boulder material, in a passage where she pressed the same point on a different group of students. Most of the body's true structural asymmetry, she observed, sits above the pelvis — in the rib cage with its heart and liver, in the right-dominant shoulder girdle. Below the pelvis, the legs and pelvic floor are far closer to genuine bilateral symmetry, and this is partly why so much of the work concentrates there. The teeter-totter image a student offered her — pelvis as a balancing fulcrum — she accepted, with the qualification that the image was rather more mobile than the anatomical facts.
Symmetry as a search, not a target
If true symmetry is impossible, what is the practitioner doing? Ida's answer, given most directly in a 1976 advanced class, was that the practitioner is searching — and the search is what produces the relative symmetry the body can accept. The reason for the search is mechanical, not aesthetic. Gravity will only act as a supporting field on a structure that gives it something to support. A body organized in relative symmetry around a vertical is that structure; an asymmetrical body is not. This means the line and symmetry are not separable concepts in her teaching. The line is what symmetry is symmetry *around*; symmetry is the condition that lets the line do its work.
"You are searching for a relative symmetry around a vertical. Because you expect to use gravity to help you out. The only way that you can get gravity to work for you is to give gravity something that is relatively symmetrical around the vertical."
From the 1976 advanced class, after a student reports scoliosis and rotations that did not resolve:
She then went further in the same class, throwing what she called a monkey wrench into the assumption many students still held — that the work could simply straighten crooked structures. It cannot, she said. Bone has spent a lifetime growing into the patterns it now holds. The occiput she had once examined in an anatomical collection had more bone on one side than the other because its owner had spent decades balancing his imbalances by tilting his head. The practice cannot rewrite that history. What it can do is bring the rest of the structure toward balance around whatever is non-negotiable, so that the unchangeable element no longer disorganizes the body around it.
"One of the reasons is that the bony structures in that body have spent a lifetime growing into certain patterns. I will never forget my disbelief one time many years ago when I went into an anatomical looking the The Was States. Those various United Occiputs that I was looking looking at at, that the bones didn't match. There was more bone on the right side or the left side, literally more bone than there was on the other side. Because down through the whole lifetime of the fellow whose occiput that was, he had been using his head to balance his imbalances, and his structure had changed in accordance with the demand he put put on on. Do you think you're going in there and in two weeks or three weeks change that phone?
She continues, warning the class against the childish idea that the practice can make any crooked body straight:
The center line and the inner arch
One of the most vivid passages in the 1976 Boulder transcripts is Ida's account of the dancer's diary. She told the class about a dancer — a woman of an earlier generation — who wrote that she could not dance well on certain nights because she could not find her center line. Ida used the anecdote to make a structural point: the line is not a metaphor the body invents. The line is a felt presence, and dancers who have never heard the word *fascia* nonetheless work in service of it. She then asked the class to do something rare in her teaching — to stand up in place and feel the center line directly, by shifting weight onto the outer arches and watching the line disappear, then turning the toes up and watching it return.
"Will it be on the outside of the body? I mean the lateral sides of the body? No, it's got to be the middle of the body, don't it? So you have to build up toward the middle and not detract from it by taking it apart. Now I'd like every one of you to stand right in place at this moment for a minute. Get yourself comfortable and feel where you are in that body. You don't accept your head as being you. Seal at centerline if you can that Ruth was looking for. And where does it have to run? Now let your weight go over to your outer arches. What happens? You lose your line. It's called you're no longer a unit. You feel it? Anyone want to argue it?"
1976 Boulder advanced class, after recounting the dancer's diary entry:
The experiment that followed was a small piece of teaching genius. The class shifted weight to the outer arches, lost the line, and then turned the toes up and felt the line re-establish itself along the inner arch and up through the body. The point was that the line is not abstract — it is structurally locatable through the inner foot, the medial leg, the body's interior axis. Anyone who teaches weight onto the three center toes, Ida added, has not done the experiment. The center line connects down the inside of the leg, not the outside, and weight on the outer arch destroys it.
"Your center line is destroyed as weight goes on to the outer arch. Now just turn your toes up and see how that begins to put the weight back again into the center line. See what you begin to feel as you begin to feel the establishment of that center line."
The class stands and shifts weight; Ida names what they feel:
A man built around a line
In her August 5, 1974 lecture at IPR — a session for senior practitioners that has been preserved nearly intact — Ida produced one of her most quoted formulations: that if a Legion of Honor citation were ever issued for the work, it would have to read *a man is a something built around a line*. The phrase deliberately echoed Claude Bernard, the great nineteenth-century physiologist whose own Legion of Honor citation had read *a man is a something built around a gut*, because Bernard had spent his career on digestion. Ida's reversal placed structure above metabolism — not in importance, but in the order of explanation. The gut sits inside the line; the line is what determines where the gut sits.
"ladies, a man is a something that is built around a line. But figure what would happen if he were really built around the line and standing on that relative point of the ankles. And it couldn't be, would be a wholly impractical structure. So he has to be built around a line with breaks in it where he can adjust and get one part of the body balancing the other part of the body. But for balance, you see, you can only have a very slight deviation."
At the August 1974 IPR lecture, Ida rewrites Claude Bernard's citation:
What follows in that lecture is one of the clearest statements of how junctions work in her teaching. The body cannot literally be built around the line, because that would leave it balancing on the few square inches of the ankle joints with nothing to absorb any deviation. Instead, the body is built around the line *with breaks in it* — major junctions where the thorax can balance against the lumbar, where the lumbar can balance against the pelvis, where each block adjusts so that the line as a whole remains substantially vertical. The junctions are not failures of the line. They are the mechanism by which the line is sustained in a moving body.
"You have to have these pieces effectively straight. On the other hand, you have to have the balance so that the straightness permits the fine balance, the fine movement that constitutes balance. Now, you hear what I've said? I've said you have to have junctions. You have to have major points where you can take the whole thorax and make it act as though it were one piece balancing on the whole lumbar and making that act as though it were one piece. Making you have there the definition of junction. It is the union between parts of the body which anatomically are very different. A rib cage has no relation whatsoever anatomically, spatially, yes, but anatomically."
She continues, explaining why the line requires junctions:
She then walked the class through the progressive realization that this version of verticality is what the body has been struggling to achieve all along. The reason a 170-pound human being can stand on the few square inches of the soles of the feet is precisely that the body has achieved enough relative balance for the line to come through the ankles, knees, hips, lumbar bodies, shoulders, and ears. The infant cannot do it; the work, laid out in supine sessions on the table, takes gravity out of the picture during the early hours and then progressively returns the structure to its standing engagement with the gravitational field.
"Because there was not within them the mechanical possibility of balancing on a point at that time. So you took gravity out of the picture as much as you could by laying them flat so that you had at most 10 to 12 inches of gravitational pull. But they're big boys and girls now. And in order for them to stand on top of those square inches of the soles of the feet and to balance on top of the number of those square inches that constitute the ankle, you have got a degree of balance in that body now that permits a vertical line to come up through the ankles, through the knees, through the hips, through the bodies of the lumbars, through the shoulders, through the ears. Have you all got this picture of progression? Because this is the message of the morning. This progression that a human being is getting from a wad of stuff that's slopping all over the place to a form, a precise form, which acts as though it were built around the line."
From the same August 1974 IPR lecture, Ida traces the developmental logic:
Symmetry, the line, and the test of the tenth hour
The tenth hour is the place in Ida's teaching where the line and symmetry come together as a single criterion. In the 1976 advanced class she gave one of her clearest formulations of this. Balance is what the tenth hour is testing for, and balance in the material universe is very often associated with symmetry — not always, she was careful to add, but symmetry serves as a useful measuring stick. The practitioner establishing the tenth hour is looking for the moment when symmetry around a line indicates that the body is balancing each opposing weight against its counterweight, so that gravity can flow through it as an uninterrupted wave.
"Now you see, in your material universe, balance is very often, associated with symmetry. Not always, but symmetry is a very useful measuring stick for balance. And in order to establish balance, you will very often use this measuring symmetrical around a line and then look and the chances are pretty strong that you've got a much greater degree of balance than you hoped before. But wherever you are going in that material universe, you are recognizing the fact that the material stuff in the three-dimensional universe works at its optimal when it is under a law of balance. And this is what your tenth power is about. Did What is the test for the tempo? When do you know you have done a good tempo? And That's do you recognize how? What is what he's describing there is a test of balance? Something isn't out of line. Something isn't catching. 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. But the behavior pattern out of its hills is in the ectodermic body. In the body that has derived from the ectoderm, the nervous system."
From a 1976 advanced class on the tenth hour:
Ida tested students on the tenth-hour criterion the way she tested them on the third or the fifth — by asking them to name what they would see if they had done the work well. In one Boulder session a senior practitioner answered her: he would see the body sit straight, the head jiggle freely from side to side, and the spine register as a continuous wave all the way down to the sacrum. Ida accepted the answer because it was a description of balance, not a list of techniques. Something is not out of line; something is not catching; something is balancing its opposite number. The wave is what the line produces when the line has been achieved.
"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."
1976 advanced class, on the test for a completed tenth hour:
Horizontals as the index of the vertical
If the line is the criterion, the horizontals are how the practitioner reads it. This is one of the more counterintuitive turns in Ida's teaching: the verticality of the body is not directly observable, but its horizontals are. The ankle hinge, the knee hinge, the pelvic floor, the shoulder girdle — each is a horizontal joint, and when the body is in balance around the vertical, these horizontals are level. The horizontals are, in her phrase from a 1971-72 class in the Mystery Tapes, *the outward and visible sign* of the inward balance the line represents. This is also why the practitioner looks at the horizontals first when assessing a body.
"When you said that's observable, I thought, what are we looking for? And but I thought of looking at people close, looking at looking for a horizontal line, you think what determines? The horizontal line is the index. It's the outward and visible sign in the words of the good old catechism of the inward and spiritual grace. You're talking to a point but not precisely."
From a 1971-72 class, after a student named Bentley names what he sees in the body:
She extended this to a structural specification: the body has three planes that, in optimal function, must establish themselves as straight horizontals. The ankle plane, the knee plane (the plane along which the knees move forward), and the elbow plane (the plane along which the elbows move outward) together with the upward movement of the hips constitute the three-dimensional architecture the line requires. The 1976 advanced class transcripts show her insisting on this: when the three planes are achieved, the line follows as a consequence. The practitioner does not establish the vertical directly. The vertical is what shows up when the horizontals have been built.
"Now it is a very interesting consideration and one which when you first come into consideration the body would not seem likely to be, that that body aligns itself into three space, into three dimensions. It's not random. It's three-dimensional and it has within it the elements which sense those three dimensions. And the one dimension is the vertical. The second dimension is the horizontal established by the elbows, which is a plane straight out and straight in from the bottom. Straight. We don't bend planes. And the other is a horizontal plane along which the knees move. Straight. And the amazing thing is that when you get these joints of the body understanding their place in life, namely to establish these three planes, then you get body ease and body well-being. And you can't sit back and talk about it, argue about it. It's on silent level. You need to see it. You need to understand And in this advanced work, the first thing that you tackled was the legs, the knees, getting those knees able to conform to that play, to that particular horizontal."
From the 1976 advanced class, on the three planes that yield the vertical:
Three-dimensional balance as the practitioner's map
In 1971-72 Ida pressed the same class on what they were actually looking at when they assessed a body. The exchange preserved in the Mystery Tapes shows her batting back several competing definitions of balance offered by other schools of manipulation. Osteopaths claimed to be doing the same work; chiropractors said the same. Her insistence was that her version of balance was different because it was three-dimensional and dynamic — knees moving forward, elbows moving outward, hips moving upward — and these were not theoretical claims but observations of the body's specific movement. Other schools were treating spinal joints; her work was treating the relationships among them.
"And this is where we get into trouble because there are several ideas of balance around the world and we're defining one and it has not been one that has been brought forth over several centuries now. I think it was known in the days of the Egyptians. I think that's what the factions say. Now, our balance, our horizontal horizontal comes comes out out of of the interaction of preplane. Knees moving forward, the elbows moving outward and the hips moving upward. Now those three claims have to be related before I accept it as balance. And those three claims, me being people are not theoretical claims that practical claims are the practical movement in the body of certain significant specific forms. And this puts it in to a three-dimensional material world. And all the rest of this stuff that you've been talking about has been in the realm of the anatomy books and not of the physiology physiology books. Yesterday when I was feeling the horizontal and I could feel them in one dimension. You can feel them right."
From a 1971-72 class on what distinguishes her doctrine of balance:
The 1975 Boulder transcripts return repeatedly to this image of the line as a map. In one passage Ida calls the line situation *the map which directs your entire activity in this work* — the practitioner is not chasing symptoms or unwinding spirals at random but establishing the changes that make it possible for the body to be built around the three-dimensional set of lines that define the space we live in. The map metaphor matters because it makes the line a *guide* rather than an outcome. The practitioner reads the map continuously; the body's orientation to the line tells the practitioner what to do next.
"Oh, Now that line situation we started to work with the other day, and I think we'll continue to work with that a little bit right now. As you might imagine, in fact, you were working with that a little bit this morning when you were looking at this whole thing. Because you see that line situation really is the map which directs your entire activity in this work. You are making it possible. You are doing the changes or establishing the changes which make possible for the human being to be built around and to operate around this set of lines which determine the three-dimensional space that we live in. And as you get that body oriented into those three-dimensional lines, you have this gold point which we've been for which we've been reaching out. Now you have to remember that you never get a closed end goal."
From a Boulder Public Tape (RolfA6) on the line as map:
Structure as relationship, not posture
In a public talk preserved in the Soundbytes archive, Ida laid out the distinction between structure and posture that gives the line its full meaning. Structure, she insisted, is relationship — the way the parts of the body relate to each other. Posture, by contrast, is what is *done* with structure. The word itself comes from Latin: it means *something has been placed*. A body in good posture is a body being held in place by effort. A body in good structure is a body whose parts relate to each other such that posture happens automatically. The line is therefore not a posture to maintain but a relationship to build.
"our work properly, these bodies are balanced in terms of their muscular components. They are balanced right side against left side and front side against back side. But most important of all, they are balanced outside against inside. The long muscles that make up the surface of the body are neither too flaccid nor too tense to be able to balance against the short muscles that hold the spine where it has to be held to keep these muscular patterns in their own position. So that what I am saying to you tonight is that the key for health, for well-being, for vigor, for women vitality is relationship. It is balance. Now realize that you cannot get balance except you relate that physical material body into a gravitational field. This is what we offer you that none of the more classical systems of manipulation have ever offered."
From a Topanga public talk on structural balance:
She then made the distinction concrete. A practitioner who sees a person struggling to maintain posture is seeing a person losing the fight with gravity. A person in good structure has posture automatically, with no effort, because the parts are in balance with each other. This is also why the line cannot be taught as exercise. You cannot drill someone into structural relationship; you can only drill them into postural effort, which the body will sustain only as long as the will sustains it. The work she developed was an attempt to put the relationship into the tissue itself, so that no effort would be required to hold it.
"fight with gravity. That's one item. And I know that his structure is not in balance. Because if his structure is in balance, his posture automatically is good. Posture is what you do with structure. Structure is the way you relate parts of the body to each other. And if you are really going to understand what I'm talking about tonight, a little meditation on those two words wouldn't do any harm. Because you see, in meditating on posture and meditating on structure, you can ask the same questions. You can ask the question of, now see here, if I alter this structure, what can I hope to get from it? Similarly, you can say, if I alter this posture, what can I hope to get from it?"
Continuing the same Topanga talk:
The block model — segments balanced around the vertical
The practitioner's mental model of the body, in Ida's teaching, is a stack of blocks. The head, the thorax, the pelvis, the legs — each is a segment that the work treats as a unit, and the practitioner's task is to bring these segments into vertical alignment around the line. The connecting tissue between them — the myofascial structure — is what makes the realignment possible, because connective tissue is plastic and responds to pressure. In the 1975 Santa Monica advanced class, Ida pressed a student to give the definition of structural integration in these terms, and Steve Weatherwax produced one of the cleanest formulations of the block model that appears in the transcripts.
"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. 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."
From the 1975 Santa Monica advanced class, a student defines the work and Ida refines his answer:
The block model is, in one sense, an oversimplification — the body is not literally a stack of rigid pieces. But Ida defended it as the right level of abstraction for teaching, because it forces the practitioner to think about segments as units that balance against each other. In another 1973 Big Sur class she made the same point more philosophically: structure means relationship, and you can never use the word *structure* without talking about relationships among parts. The block model is just the simplest expression of that doctrine — four blocks, three junctions, one line.
"'tology' because 'tology' is the material dimension of that word structure. 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. And every time you use the word structural integration, You are talking about the relationship between various gross, unitary parts that fit together to make the aggregate that we call the man. 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."
From the 1973 Big Sur advanced class:
The recipe as progressive approach to the line
The ten-session series can be read as a progressive approach to the line — each hour adding a layer of order, each hour bringing the body closer to the structural condition that lets gravity work. In a 1975 Boulder discussion preserved on tape T1SB, a senior practitioner walks through this logic explicitly: the first hour is the beginning of the tenth; the second hour is the continuation of the first; each session is one more step along a spectrum that aims at the realignment of the pelvis and, beyond that, the alignment of the whole structure with the vertical. The recipe is broken into ten because the body cannot accept all the work at once, not because the work is ten separate things.
"What does matter is you understand you have to lift that up off the pelvis to start getting mobility in the pelvis. Uh-huh. The first hour is the beginning of the tenth hour. Okay? Uh-huh. The second hour is a follow-up of the first hour. Uh-huh. It's just the second half of the first hour. Okay? And the third hour is the second half of the second and first hour. It's literally a continuation. I clearly I clearly saw, you know, last summer that continuation process and how and, you know, Dick talked about how, you know, the only reason it was broken into 10, you know, sessions like that was it because the body just couldn't take all that work. Couldn't take it right. But I just sitting on just trying to figure out how the hell she ever figured out that process, and then began to see it. What she did is what most of of us need to do more. She just sat and watched bodies."
From a 1975 Boulder advanced class, a senior practitioner reflects on the logic of the recipe:
In the same conversation the practitioners noted what Ida herself had said about the development of the recipe — that she had simply sat and watched bodies, repeatedly, over years, and gradually saw which order of work would let the body absorb each layer without disorganizing the next. The recipe is, in this sense, a sequence of permissions: the line cannot be approached directly, so the practitioner approaches it through a sequence that each time prepares the next layer to receive the change. The line is the destination; the recipe is the only known route that lets the body arrive there without breaking apart.
"So part of the training is to see the result of process. As well as to see what you do next in the process. You see the genius of Doctor. Rolf, part of her genius is in developing a sequence in which the onion can be unpeeled without disordering. In other words, so that you can take layer by layer in a sequential way each hour bringing in a level of organization. She says, well, it's easy to take a body apart, but it's not so easy to put it together. And that's that's the key to it. We're all being said in each hour, you're adding order. Bringing it forward and back. Forward and back. Well, we're the goal of the order is the vertical line is the most abstract way of looking at that order. That the body is is aligned with the vertical line."
From a 1974 Open Universe class, on the genius of the sequence:
Reading the line — the practitioner's eye
The line is not something the practitioner draws onto the body with effort; it is something the practitioner learns to see. In the 1975 Boulder classes, Ida pressed a student named John to describe what he saw when he looked at a model, and the answer she was waiting for was something like *the upper half and the lower half are not connected at the lumbodorsal hinge*. She wanted the practitioner to read the body for the place where the line fails — the joint where the relationship breaks down — and then to start work there. This is one of the more characteristic moves in her teaching: the eye is trained to find the failure of the line, not the success.
"He he closes on on his left side as he moves. Now where The movement hasn't really closed in around his vertical axis. Where do you think you will find the point of greatest weakness which will allow you to put the upper and the lower half together? No one's got a good eye. What do you see? I'm I'd say right there where the torso and the legs fit together. He could he still has no sense of that foundation under him. Well, look at his legs, and you'll see why. But I'm not going to start down with his feet, and I'm not going to start down with his ankles, and I'm not going to start down with his knees. I'm going to start at the crest of the ilium where the torso and the support for the torso come together. Does this make sense to you? John, you had something to say that I think somebody stole from you. Well, as I look at him, I'm sort of flashing back on that triangulation of the energy flow in the body I did a long time ago."
1975 Boulder advanced class, students assess a model named Takashi:
In a 1976 Teachers' Class she made the same point with a different image. Looking at a body from the side, she said, you read whether the ribs are too narrow or too shallow — whether the chest has collapsed forward and back, or pinched in side to side. These observations are themselves readings of the line: a too-narrow chest tells you the shoulders have nowhere to rest; a too-shallow chest tells you the upper block has fallen back behind the pelvic block. The practitioner is reading the body not for symptoms but for the geometric relationship of the segments to the vertical axis.
"I had written down last night about the angle of the ribs determining the narrowness from right to left or the shallowness from front to back. So that as you look at a person standing there, you see by the degree of angle of their ribs whether they're too shallow front to back or if they are too narrow. Side to side. Side to side. With some people, you see very wide base down here in a very narrow upper part of their chest. Even though it's supposed to be narrower, some people, it's tremendously narrow. And it looks as though their shoulders then have no place to rest. They are close-up to their ears, and their neck disappears. Yeah. That pear shape. Right. Okay. Other people, you see that this is very shallow from here to here. It's almost as though and some people, extremely so that you get this scooping right in here where mean, this is characteristic of the spinal curvature. Right. Where there is so so much more posterior, where it looks as though this has been wrapped and folded in and that the chest is being held to the back of the pelvis."
From the 1976 Teachers' Class, on reading the body for the relationship of blocks:
Energy, the line, and the science of balance
In her later teaching — especially the 1974 Healing Arts conference, where Valerie Hunt's laboratory data was beginning to validate the work — Ida increasingly framed the line in energetic terms. A body organized in relative symmetry around a vertical was a body whose energy fields, in Hunt's measurements, expanded. Auras of half an inch widened to four or five inches; muscle activity became sequential rather than co-contractile; the control of movement shifted downward from the cortex toward the midbrain. The line, in this telling, was not merely a mechanical criterion. It was a condition that allowed the body to function as a single energetic unit rather than a collection of competing parts.
"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."
From a 1974 Healing Arts lecture, on the energetic consequences of the line:
The 1974 lecture continued into a more speculative register — what Ida called the world no longer running down. If structural integration around the vertical line could shift the energy ratio of a body upward, she was prepared to claim that this represented something other than the entropic deterioration that defines biological aging. Whether this was the work of an energy that did not obey the law of inverse squares, she was careful not to assert. But the line itself, as a physical criterion, she was prepared to assert with full confidence: balanced around the vertical, the body becomes capable of a kind of energetic resonance that the unbalanced body cannot produce.
Coda: the open-ended line
The most important qualification Ida placed on her own doctrine of the line was that the line is never finally achieved. In a 1973 Big Sur lecture she put the point in religious language she rarely used: structural integration is not a closed-end revelation, because there never was a closed-end revelation in the history of the world. Everything that can be regarded as a revelation is open-ended. The same is true of the line. The practitioner aims at it continuously and approaches it asymptotically; the body moves toward it and never quite arrives. Aging itself, she insisted, is the normal procedure by which a living biological system continues to adjust after each apparent achievement of balance.
"There is no such thing in a living biological system as a closed end goal. Soon as you get sunset somewhere, something else starts happening. Some other adjustment starts occurring. Some other change comes. Now that isn't anything else. It's the normal procedure of aging, and I do not mean the abnormal procedure of falling apart. So you see, you always have that open ended goal in front of your eyes, your mind's eyes, and you're always moving toward it. And you never really get to it and really latch onto it forever and ever if life isn't that way. You talk about symmetry in the body. You have to have symmetrical balance in the body if you are going to create these lines and have them permanent. But how do you really get symmetry in a body which is organized with a heart on one side and a liver on the other side? How do you get symmetry in a body where most of your work is done with your right hand?"
From the Boulder Public Tape RolfA6, on the open-ended character of the goal:
This is, finally, what holds the entire teaching together. The line is impossible to achieve perfectly because the body is asymmetrical by anatomy. Symmetry is impossible to achieve perfectly because the heart and liver settle the matter at birth. But the search for relative symmetry around the vertical, conducted with the practitioner's hands on the myofascial body, produces the closest approximation gravity will accept — and that approximation is enough. It is enough to let the energy fields of the body expand. It is enough to let the muscles work sequentially rather than against each other. It is enough to let the body experience itself as a unit moving through space rather than a collection of parts each fighting gravity on its own. The line is the criterion the body cannot quite achieve, and the work is the practice of approaching it anyway.
See also: See also: Open Universe class (UNI_044, 1974) — extended discussion of how the practitioner reads the line in the body and what the model experiences as the work proceeds; included as a pointer for readers interested in the experiential side of the doctrine. UNI_044 ▸
See also: See also: Big Sur Advanced Class 1973 (SUR7332) — Ida's open-ended remarks on revelation and the developmental history of the work; a useful companion to the doctrinal passages above. SUR7332 ▸
See also: See also: 1975 Boulder advanced class (T9SA) — extended teaching on the horizontal at the ankle as the index of balance above it, including Ida's insistence that the foot must come under the leg before any of the upper horizontals can hold. T9SA ▸