From Rockefeller chemist to physics of structure
Ida's scientific formation was unusual for a woman of her generation, and she trusted that formation in a way that shaped everything that followed. She took her PhD in organic chemistry from Barnard in 1916; the Rockefeller Institute hired her immediately, in part because the war had created unusual openings for women in research laboratories. She worked under Walter Jacobs and Michael Heidelberger on the synthesis of an American salvarsan — the arsenical drug used to treat syphilis, whose German version had become unavailable. The work was solidly material: organic synthesis, toxicology, the dogged tracking of why one molecule poisoned and another healed. It was during the late 1920s, on a Rockefeller-funded European trip, that she sat in on Schrödinger's lectures in Zurich and began to suspect, as the introducer at her 1974 Healing Arts lecture put it, that there was a direct relationship between human behavior, body physics, and body chemistry. The seed of Structural Integration is in that sentence. Half a century later she was still drawing on it.
"In the last few months. At the age of 80 years, Ida Rolfe remains firmly in charge of the training of all students in Rolfeing. There are now 160 persons officially certified to do structural integration. They have spread throughout North America and into South America and also Europe. 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. Doctor. 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. At 80 years, Ida Rolfe not only continues supervision of her students, but she has recently supplied a great book to the world's understanding of Rolfeing. Only a year ago, a classic discussion of her theories and practice appeared in the book Rolfeing, The Integration of Human Structures. Doctor. Heider Rolf is a benefactor of both the bodies and spirits of humankind. We stand in her debt, and we honor her creativity and genius. I'm very happy to present to you a great teacher of minds and healer of bodies, Doctor. Ida Rolf. Everybody. Good I'm delighted to be able to be here with you and to give you some firsthand hints about Actually, anything that anybody can present to you about Rolfing is necessarily a hint because Rolfing itself is an experience and like all experiences to create it to translate it into verbal sections words doesn't really convey ideas."
The biographical introduction at her 1974 Healing Arts lecture set the frame she herself would extend:
What Ida did with that training was unusual. She did not become a popularizer of physics, nor did she try to dress the work in the language of quantum mechanics to give it prestige. Instead, she used physics in two specific ways. First, as a corrective: when students came in talking loosely about energy and chakras and auras, she would stop them and ask what they actually meant — was this Newtonian mechanical energy? Thermodynamic energy? Electromagnetic? Gravitational? The questions were not rhetorical. Second, she used physics structurally: thermodynamics gave her entropy, and entropy gave her a way to name what the work was doing in language that did not require students to accept mystical premises. The two uses worked together. By the time she got to her 1976 Boulder lectures on the Tao of Physics, she had built a long bridge — and she still insisted that students walk every plank.
What we are talking about when we talk about energy
The energy word was the one Ida policed most aggressively. By the mid-1970s the human-potential movement had absorbed it so completely that it had become a kind of all-purpose verbal currency — energy fields, energy work, energy centers, energy bodies — and Ida had grown impatient. In her Healing Arts lectures and in the 1976 Boulder class she devoted a full hour to dismantling the word and rebuilding it. The dismantling was not contempt; it was the chemist's instinct that you cannot reason about a thing until you have specified which thing you mean. Newton's energy was a property of moving masses. Thermodynamics added a quality called entropy. Maxwell and the late nineteenth century added the electromagnetic. Einstein added mass-energy equivalence and the speed of light. Planck added quantization and frequency. Each was a different concept; each measured something different; each required different mathematics. To say that the work gave someone more energy was to invoke all of them at once, which is to invoke none of them precisely.
"And what we were really talking about was how much gasoline do you have in your tank? Will it get you through the day? What's the relation of that energy to the energy that you people talk about? What's the relation of that energy to so many of these energies that you hear about? Then our clients, our structural our people who have been structurally integrated go around talking about, Oh, they do so appreciate Rolfing. It gave them so much more energy. What are they talking about? And you can see from this, obviously, that we are in the midst of a very great confusion. And some clarification I think you is long overdue. So I have chosen today to try to clarify this, and because it's a rather closely knit structure that I constructed, I ask you to forgive me if I keep rather close to these notes, because one of these days this will have to be published. I fear. Now, William Blake in the late eighteenth century said, Energy is eternal delight. He sort of sounded as though he should have belonged to your center. Well, that's one way of saying it. It underscores I'm sorry, I'm having so much trouble with light here. There is no such thing as a little light that I could have here, a little light that I could have on the desk. Is that? It underscores the human assumption that there is something transcendent about energy. And at the same period in time, Newton developed his ideas about energy. In Newtonian mechanics, energy was seen merely as a property of moving masses. A property of moving masses. Now by the late nineteenth century, men had extended this very limited consideration of the physical quality of energy, and they organized their thinking into two no, three new disciplines. These became absolutely new sciences: thermodynamics, electromagnetism, and quantitative chemistry. All these developed more sophisticated concepts of energy and began to see the world around them as manifestations and concentrations of a universal basic basic divorced divorced from matter itself."
She opened the second part of her Healing Arts talk with what amounted to a tutorial in the history of the concept:
The lecture's pivot is to entropy. Once Ida had reminded the room that each kind of energy had its own mathematical formulation, she introduced the thermodynamic concept she would build the rest of her case on: that every quantity of energy carries with it a quality called disorder, and that the amount of useful energy available from a system is reduced by that disorder. She then made the move that defines her late teaching — she treated the body as a thermodynamic system, and she treated the random body, the disorganized body, as a high-entropy state. The teaching beat is simple: a body with disordered structure has less available energy. Reorder the structure, and you free up energy that was previously bound in disorder.
"So as you see, we need to separate in our own minds what we're talking about in talking about energy. Physicists spend so much time and thought during the thermodynamics period exploring a concept called entropy, and those of you who have been through the physics classes know about entropy. As a result of this exploration, they postulated that each quantity of energy had an associated quality called entropy. This quality is a measure of the disorder in the system, and it varies in different types of energy. You see what this is saying? It is saying that any type of energy has a quality of disorder within it, and that quality of disorder takes away from the available energy."
After running through Einstein and Planck she landed the thermodynamic point:
Thermodynamics applied to the body
The transition from physics seminar to anatomical claim happened on the same afternoon. Ida had a collaborator in those Healing Arts sessions — a physicist whose papers she quoted at length and integrated into her own lectures — and the argument they jointly built was that the body could be treated as an ensemble of energy-generating organs, that structure determined how that energy flowed between them, and that the gross changes a practitioner produces could be described by the first and second laws of thermodynamics: flow of energy, and ordering of energy. This was not metaphor. The claim was that the two laws describe what changes during a ten-session series — that the person becomes more ordered (second law: entropy decreases locally) and that the person's energy becomes more flowing (first law: energy is redistributed but not lost). The intuitive perception that someone is more alive after the work could be grounded in mathematics.
"In physics, long before the molecular statistical mechanical explanation, the gross properties of matter were described by the laws of thermodynamics. It is one of the most striking testimonies to a parsimony in nature that two simple mathematical formulations were able to describe most of the properties of matter and provide a framework with which to understand these phenomenon on a molecular level. These laws, the first and second of thermodynamics, describe change or flow and ordering of energy respectively. Are these not the very same concepts that one intuitively invokes to describe the process of structural integration? Mainly that the person's structure has become more ordered and that he is more alive, that his energy is more flowing and that he somehow has more of it."
The technical paper read into the Healing Arts proceedings made the case directly:
The collaborator's paper went further than analogy. It proposed a mechanical model of the body — joints as levers, muscles as energy sources, connective tissue as a network of elastic and viscous components — and asked what would happen if the viscous components could be made more elastic. The answer was a prediction: energy that had been dissipated as friction within the system would become available for movement. But the model also issued a warning. Simply lowering viscosity would not be enough if the elements remained unbalanced relative to each other — they would still interfere with each other, like oscillators in wrong phase relationships. The system as a whole had to be brought toward resonance. This is a striking passage because it provides, in physics language, a justification for the recipe's logic: it is not enough to soften tissue; the parts must be brought into right phase with one another.
"As a simplifying approximation, let us first consider only organs directly involved in locomotoring behavior, that is the bones, muscles and connective tissue. Specifically, we have a mechanical system of joints, articulations, energy sources springs and viscous damping forces Action at a joint is then represented by a lever powered by an energy source driving a spring and dashpot parallel. These various module organs would be interconnected by networks of parallel combinations of elastic and damping components. Considering first action of a single joint, we see that the viscous elements greatly outweigh the elastic ones, motion will be impeded and energy wastefully dissipated. 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. Returning briefly to the world of structural integration, the first few sessions, mainly the first, are devoted to reworking the superficial fascia. To the practitioner these early sessions changed the resilience of the body tissue to its touch."
The mechanical model came next, with a precise prediction:
Gravity as the one entropy-free energy
Among all the energies Ida had spent decades thinking about, gravity occupied a unique place. It was the one field that, in her telling, did not run down. Throw a ball into the air and it comes back; the prediction is absolute; there is no disorder in the gravitational field's behavior. She used this property to lift gravity out of the catalogue of energies and turn it into a name for the unchanging environmental condition the body lived in. The body could be disordered in many ways, but gravity could not be disordered. This is the move that made gravity — as she put it elsewhere — the therapist. Gravity does not need to be added to or organized; the work is to bring the body into a relationship with it such that it can flow through.
"At that time, I brought to your attention the fact that scientists, especially astro scientists, had come to the conclusion that most of the energy in this world, in this cosmos, not this world, in this cosmos is gravitational. Oh, 80 or 90% is gravitational energy. The energy which surrounds large bodies. The energy which tends to pull other elements in toward the center of large bodies. We have it here on the earth, we also have it on the sun, we have it on every star, we have it on every large body in the universe, the energy of gravity. Now most energies are characterized by so called entropy. Entropy is a disorder in the field of the energy and therefore takes away from the intensity of the energy and its predictability. But there is no such disorder in a gravitational field, and it is one of the very few energy concepts in which no entropy, no disorder is operational. You never threw a ball up in the air and watched it go up indefinitely. You throw it up and it goes just that far and it turns around and it comes down. And you don't have to be a seer, you don't have to be a psychic to say this ball is going to come down. It is going to fall back toward the center of the earth. This is our common everyday knowledge. And so last time that we talked in this fashion a year ago, I talked about this whole concept of the gravitational energy as being the energy of the universe. What I had to say at that time is still important and it still holds. But I am going today to try to bring you all along into what shall I call it into a more limited time field, shall I put it that way."
She returned to the gravity-entropy point in the 1976 Boulder advanced class:
The corollary is the formula she had been refining for years. The structural relationship of the body to the gravitational field determines whether gravity supports the body or destroys it. A random body has its parts arrayed such that gravity passes through it as a disorganizing force; an ordered body has its parts stacked such that gravity flows through and is added to the body's own energy. The verticality her students measured — ankles, knees, hips, lumbars, shoulders, ears — was not a posture goal. It was the alignment that allowed an external field to become supportive rather than destructive. Once the alignment was established, the energy quotient man-over-gravity increased, and the body had more available energy to do its work — including, in her late teaching, the work of reversing entropy.
"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. It seems capable now of building up."
She closed the structural argument with the formula she most wanted on the record:
The body as plastic medium
The hinge that allowed all of this to be practical, rather than merely conceptual, was Ida's claim that the body is a plastic medium. Twenty-five years earlier, she liked to say, no one would have accepted this; fifty years earlier they would have put her in a sunny southern room with good care. But the body could be changed by the addition of energy — and energy, in the practitioner's hands, meant pressure. The plasticity rested on the chemistry of collagen, which she described in terms her Rockefeller training had given her: a triple-stranded protein cross-linked by hydrogen, sodium, and calcium bonds whose ratios shifted with age and could be shifted back. Adding energy to a collagen matrix changed the bonds. The fascia became more resilient; the joints became more flexible; the relationships between body segments could be reorganized.
"Two factors contribute to this: the first that the body, seemingly a unit, is in fact not a unit but a consolidation of large segments: the head, the thorax, the pelvis, the legs. The relation of these segments can be changed because the connecting myofascial structure is a structure of connective tissue of collagen. This is what that myofascial body is about. And collagen is a unique protein. The collagen molecule is a very large protein and it is a braiding of three strands a special braiding. These three strands are connected by various inorganic hydrogen sometimes, sodium sometimes, calcium sometimes, and undoubtedly other minerals. These minerals are interchangeable within limits. Thus, as the body grows older and stiffer, undoubtedly a larger percentage of calcium and a smaller percentage of sodium are present in these bonds. But by the addition of energy and what is energy? In this come in this context, it can it is the pressure of the fingers or the elbow of the ralpha. This ratio may be varied by the addition of this energy, and the joint or the connective tissue becomes more resilient, more flexible."
She gave the chemical mechanism with the patience of someone explaining her own laboratory work:
The plasticity claim is what allows the thermodynamic argument to translate into clinical work. If the body were not a plastic medium, the physics of structure would be a description of fixed facts: this body is disorganized, that body is organized, nothing can be done. Because the body is plastic — because collagen bonds shift under added energy — the practitioner can move a body from one configuration to another, from higher entropy to lower entropy, from a state in which gravity is destructive to one in which gravity is supportive. The clinical work is the bridge between physics description and physical change.
"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. Now the basic law of law of law law is that you add structure to the body and in so doing, that you add structure you add energy to the body, and in so doing you demand all of you are going to hear a great deal more about this as time goes on. But this is the basic reason why structural integration works. It is the basic reason why there can be a study of bodies based on a structure in the sense that we use it, and why there can be a change of function, in other words, a contribution to health, to well-being, to wholeness, and the functioning of the body through merely being able to change, to alter, to modify. Is a very basic consideration which I just offered you. It is the basic consideration that makes all manipulative techniques something to be considered. You see, our dominant school of healing is not manipulation, as you all know. It's medicine. It works through chemistry."
She named the same point in her 1973 Big Sur advanced class, framing it as the basic law of the work:
Valerie Hunt and the measurement project
Ida had been making her physics-level claims since at least the early 1970s, but the case shifted when Valerie Hunt's electromyography project at UCLA produced measurable results. Hunt was a serious experimentalist — Ida introduced her as a woman of extraordinary curiosity, an explorer, a brilliant technician — and she had spent several years applying instrumented measurement to before-and-after states of practitioner-worked bodies. The results, as Ida summarized them, were specific: auras measured at half an inch to an inch in incoming people expanded to four or five inches in worked bodies; chakra-located emissions showed measurable changes in color and frequency; electromyographic patterns showed downshifts in the level of motor control. For Ida, this was the validation she had been waiting for — not proof of mysticism, but the conversion of intuitive observations into instrumented data.
"The increase of energy of the body in order the appropriate relation is added to it. Now, Doctor. Hunt has validated our claim by measuring the increased energy of the body as changes in the material structure have been introduced. She's done this in several ways. She's measured the light energy indirectly through her instruments, and with the help of Doctor. Rosalind Bried, directly through direct reading of the aura. And amazingly, this age old measurement by Doctor. Brierez confirmed Doctor. Hunt's brand new instrument. Doctor. Hunt could have saved the money, but that's all what all metaphysicians have been telling us for centuries anyway. In terms of measuring light, Doctor. Breyer and Doctor. Hunt have observed its intensity in Kurilian auras Kurilian auras its vibratory rate that is, its color as seemingly created in the body. Thus the aura that Kurilian photographs, the brain waves, as well as increased energy over the various centers that the ancients called chakras were all observed. She has found, for example, and will tell you about it, that random incoming people tend to have auras a half an inch to an inch in width, but after the integration of structure and the integration of the myofascial body, which is called rolfing, their auras will have increased usually to four to five inches in width. That's what we said. Wow! Obviously, we are dealing with a basic energy phenomenon of life here. Whether"
She introduced Hunt's findings as the empirical complement to her thermodynamic argument:
Hunt herself, in her own talks at the same conferences, provided the neurological correlate. Her electromyographic recordings of worked bodies showed not just changes in muscle output but a downshift in the level at which movement was being controlled — from cortical to midbrain, in her account, which corresponded to smoother, more efficient, more rhythmic motor patterns. The implication was that the work was changing not only the structural arrangement of tissue but the neural level at which movement was organized. Ida treated Hunt's findings as confirmation that the structural changes she was producing had measurable physiological correlates — and she pointed to them when students complained that her physics talk was too abstract.
"much more regular after Rolfing. Well, that could be described many, many technical ways, and that is it has to do with a sensory nervous system. We have to judge through our sensory system how much energy is required to do a particular piece of work and modulate the amount of activity of the muscle to that particular job. Here the modulation was very smooth. There was what we call recruitment of other motor units so that fatigue was not as great. I have a feeling, although I can't prove it, that there was a downward shift in the control of the movement. This is a tremendously important one. There are three major upstream sources. Like having a switch, a three way switch on a light, a source of energy. It can be turned on at various places. Ordinarily, when we turn on that switch, we get exactly the same light or energy source at the other end. But in the instance of the human body, that is not true. If we turn on the muscle or send the stimulus from the spinal cord, we get what's called a very low frequency. 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."
Hunt described her own findings to the same Healing Arts audience:
Negative entropy and human coherence
By 1974 Ida had a vocabulary, a chemistry, a measurement project, and a physical model. What she wanted next was a name for what the work accomplished at the level of human systems considered as a whole — and she found it in Schrödinger's term, negative entropy. Schrödinger had argued in What Is Life? that living systems are characterized by their ability to import order from their environment and resist the second-law drift toward disorder. Ida used the term carefully. Negative entropy was not magic; it was the local reversal of the entropic drift, made possible because living systems are open rather than closed. She extended the term to the practice: Structural Integration, by reducing disorder in the myofascial system and bringing the body into supportive relationship with gravity, was an intervention in the direction of negative entropy.
" My tentative conclusions are that Rolfing has a profound effect upon human energy systems in the direction of negative entropy, The counteracting of entropy: there are at least two aspects of the energy systems brought into greater coherency, and the physicists describe coherency to us and state that coherent energy or energy, for example, that goes through a laser beam places energy in unified directions, in a single direction, and that very small quantities"
The conclusion of the Healing Arts session named it directly:
The companion concept was coherence, and here Ida and her colleagues borrowed directly from laser physics. The argument was that energy in a system could be either dissipated — pointing in random directions, like trade winds — or coherent — pointing in unified directions, like a laser beam. The same total quantity of energy, if coherent, did work that incoherent energy of vastly greater quantity could not do. The application to the body was direct. A randomly organized body might have plenty of metabolic energy but use it incoherently, dissipating most of it as friction and counter-productive muscular co-contraction (which is exactly what Hunt's instruments measured). A structurally integrated body used the same metabolic energy coherently. The goal of the work, the colleagues argued, was not to add energy but to coherent the energy that was already there.
"Institute. My tentative conclusions are that Rolfing has a profound effect upon human energy systems in the direction of negative entropy, The counteracting of entropy: there are at least two aspects of the energy systems brought into greater coherency, and the physicists describe coherency to us and state that coherent energy or energy, for example, that goes through a laser beam places energy in unified directions, in a single direction, and that very small quantities of coherent energy are equal to atomic bomb energy and very large quantities of incoherent energy or dissipated energy is like random trade winds. They may be pleasant if you don't do much with them. I think that one of our goals should be human coherent energy in our quest and not just more energy. We might even solve our food problems. If we had coherent energy, we wouldn't have to feed the fuel as often. It's my opinion that Doctor. Roth has envisioned really a rather tremendous concept about the human being toward man, toward his improvement, toward his evolution, and for me personally, she and the Roth Institute have made it possible for me to move into another area of research which I'm sure will be the area that I will stay in the rest of my professional life."
Hunt put the coherence argument in its sharpest form:
Open universe, closed universe
Ida's late teaching included a metaphysical layer she defended on physics grounds: the distinction between open and closed universes. A closed universe was the world of Aristotle, of Newton, of nineteenth-century reductionism — life as nothing but a sequence of chemical reactions, the brain as nothing but a computer, a one-dimensional linear continuum of causes and effects. An open universe was the multidimensional, relational continuum of twentieth-century physics — Einstein's relativity, quantum-scale phenomena, the recognition that living systems require continuous energy input to stay far from equilibrium. The transition from closed to open was the philosophical correlate of the entropy reversal she was claiming for the body. A closed universe ran down; an open universe stayed open by continuously importing order. Structural Integration, by reorganizing the body's relationship to its energy environment, was an act of opening.
"Open and closed universes have certain other qualities significant to us. Open systems tend to be a minimum entropy situation, a minimum of disorder, a minimum of disintegration. Because they are complicated structures. And this complicated structure requires that energy be added or put in constantly to maintain its complication. An open universe can be maintained at a distance from the equilibrium point in what physicists call an improbable state by that continuous addition of energy. None of this is true of the closed universe. Man is not a closed order, not even in purely biological terms. The biological man must be looked at as a collection of systems, not of atomistic aggregates. This in itself takes him out of a closed universe. You can't keep collections of systems in a closed universe. The characteristic of such systems is that relationship is the determinant of what you get out of it. Described in these words, life is not a substance, it is a process. And the determinant is relationship. And I hope that your speaker, Mrs. Longstreet, when she goes into this at a later point, will give you the sense of wonder that I always get as I look at the shifting of dimensionality in approaches to life, because this understanding of dimensionality came through the work of Korzybski, was initiated through the work of Korzybski, shall I say. And I hope she's going to go into that in sufficient detail for you to have that wonder. But this process world, this relationship world, is the world, the stuff with which we deal in structural integration. In our case, it is the relationship of body systems. That additional dimension of relationship has become important in the thinking of man since the work of Klasebski. So the problem becomes, in terms of structural integration, what can we do to improve the relationship of man to the to his world of energy, to the world of energy? And the answer is that we need to continue with our relationship to relate within that group of systems that we call man to the point where the man himself, the small energy field, can transmit, can accept the energy field of gravity as a supporting framework. This is what structural integration is about."
Her opening lecture in the Open Universe class series gave the physical and philosophical version of the same claim:
The shift from closed to open also had implications for what counted as science. In Ida's view, the old reductionist model had taken nineteenth-century physics — Newton's mechanics, deterministic prediction, one-cause-one-effect — and assumed it was the only legitimate science. Twentieth-century physics had broken that assumption from within, in its own laboratories, with its own instruments. Quantum mechanics had shown that particles were not solid; relativity had shown that mass and energy were equivalent; thermodynamics had shown that disorder was a quantitative property. The new physics did not contradict the old; it located the old as a special case applicable to a particular range of phenomena. Ida wanted her students to understand that the same shift had to happen in the life sciences — that the old reductionist medicine was a special case applicable to a particular range of structural intervention, and that the work she taught belonged to the wider open-system framework.
"And it hadn't been understood for the very simple reason that we did not have the technological tools to understand. You see, science earlier than this dealt with phenomena, they looked at phenomena, they predicted what was going to happen next, they thought along the lines of Newtonian mechanics. This was what was called physics. Now the word physics, as you know, the word physics is related to the word physical and we think of it in terms of material bodies in a space. If I said to you that something is physical, you're not thinking of something which I would otherwise label psychic. You're thinking of something that is material, something that is predictable, something that you know where it is, something the next time it's going to occur, it's going to occur the same way. All of this has to do with the word physical and the word physics is related to it. And as you go around and listen to the various little conclaves of the human potential movement, they give program after program which they label the physics of consciousness. I look at those programs always hoping I'm going to learn something. And what I learn is that they're talking about consciousness but that nobody talks about physics. Now it was physics that changed as the century changed from the nineteenth to the twentieth. It was the concepts of physics as they applied to the world around you that changed at that point. For two thousand years, following a Greek philosopher Democritus, we had thought of material as consisting of particles. That which was solid consisted particles. And these particles were solid, we thought. Democritus thought, all the rest of us thought. And we could break down anything, in theory at least, to the point where we got very small particles. But those very small particles would have, we thought, the same quality to as far down as we could go that the largest stuff had. If it was solid, the particle would be solid, a little billiard ball, etcetera, etcetera."
She made the historical case in detail in the 1976 Boulder class:
Capra and the Tao of Physics
In 1976, the practitioner Brugh Joy arrived at Ida's birthday party with a copy of Fritjof Capra's Tao of Physics in his bag and gave it to her. The book argued for a parallel between the conceptual world of modern physics and the conceptual world of Eastern mysticism — the idea that the dissolution of substance, the relational nature of reality, and the unpredictability of subatomic events as understood by twentieth-century physicists resembled the descriptions mystics had been giving for centuries of their own experience. The book affected Ida deeply, but not because she became a mystic. What struck her was Capra's argument that the emotional response of physicists confronting the implications of their own theory was indistinguishable from the emotional response of mystics describing their experience — and that, by implication, the mystical experience might be the actual perception of what was going on at the atomic and subatomic levels of the human being.
"Now, this Tao of Physics, this very interesting book, as I said to you before, calls attention to the similarity between the experience, between the emotional response of mystics and the emotional response of people that really get carried away with their understanding of the physics of the atomic and the subatomic areas, and by implication Mancapra is saying that there is a relation between these things. He is saying, as I said, by implication, not by explication, that the mystical experience he thinks is the actual perception of what is going on in the atomic and subatomic levels of the human being."
She framed Capra's argument to her 1976 Boulder class with characteristic precision about what was implied and what was not:
The reason Capra mattered to Ida was that he gave her a way to relate two phenomena she had been thinking about separately: the ineffability of the worked client's experience (the person who cannot describe what happened in words) and the ineffability of the mystical experience as universally reported across cultures. Both, in Capra's reading, pointed to the same underlying physical reality — that at the subatomic and field-relational level, the structures of language built on common-sense Newtonian objects no longer apply. She offered this not as a doctrinal claim but as a research direction: if mystics had been giving accurate phenomenological reports of subatomic reality, and if her clients reported analogous experiences, then the practice might be opening perceptual access to a level of reality the senses normally miss.
"And I'm trying to remember the name of the man that wrote it. Friedrich I've got it somewhere. I've got the book here somewhere. Okay. Yeah. Tell them what the name of that guy is. Fredo Capra. Fredo Capra. Right. It is what shall I say, an astounding book. It called attention to the fashion in which newer physics gave people the same kind of emotional shake up that they used to get from their mystical experience. The things that happened to people as they really thought about physics were soul shaking. And it took them months to settle down again. Just as it took months for people to settle down after mystical experience. As I said to you before, mysticism, the mystical experience has been universal among the cultures of men. No matter what culture of people you go to or you look at in this world, there is always a percentage of those people who have or have had mystical experience and who value that mystical experience as the greatest thing that has ever happened to them. And they manage they cannot cannot tell people what happened to them. They cannot find words that will convey it. Well, you don't have trouble understanding that. Every Ralphie that comes into your room and goes out again says, I wish I could tell my husband, my son, my sister, my aunt, my so forth and so forth. But I can't tell them. And you say, No, you cannot explain experiences in verbalisms. Now this has been the essence of the mystical experience, that it cannot be conveyed in words. Well, the essence that's a pretty strong statement. This has been one of the outstanding characteristics of the mystical experience. But this is also one of the characteristics of the understanding of that newer physics that you cannot convey into words what is going on. It is unpredictable. You can no longer say that that is common sense."
She continued the same lecture with the most extended version of the argument:
Fascia, energy fields, and the chakra question
The Capra question opened directly into a question Ida had been resisting and was now willing to entertain: what was the relationship between the structural changes the work produced and the energy-center descriptions her students kept bringing her from yogic and acupunctural traditions? She was not willing to assert a direct equivalence — she did not know, and she would not pretend to. But she was willing to say that the empirical data from Hunt's project showed measurable changes over the locations the ancients had named chakras, and that the changes correlated with the structural work being done. Whatever the right theoretical account was, the phenomena were too consistent to dismiss.
"It has a great deal to do, not with the price of butter, but with royalty. Because you are talking about working on a solid body and changing the spaces in which that solid body functions. You think you take your hand and you put it onto a Rolfi and you change this solid stuff into a different space. And then the guy, the gal, says, oh, I feel so much more energy. I don't know what she's talking about, and I'm sure you don't. But I'm sure that all these people aren't wrong. I don't know what the relation of a chakra is to what I'm talking about. But there has to be some relation because too many people have had the experience. There has to be a relation between energy centers and what the individual feels. Then you have, in addition, the information that came out of the Hunt project, which I trust you remember, in evidence of this, you have the information that as these various parts of the body which traditionally were called chakras, as they are changed and organized and evolved, that the light that they are emitting changes. The color of the light changes. Now this means that you are getting waves from those centers and that the waves have different amplitudes and different rates and that Rolfing is producing this change. You see, you have now, at this point in Rolfing, you have collected a great deal of information which no author that I know of, or whom I know including myself, is able to interpret. But I still say that whether we can interpret it or not, we need to keep looking at this whole energy pattern This where the answer is."
She addressed the energy-center question with characteristic empirical honesty:
Behind this discussion was a larger hypothesis Ida had begun to entertain, voiced most clearly by a colleague speaking with her present in the 1974 Open Universe class: that the connective tissue itself might be the interface between the body's energy fields and the broader field environment. The hypothesis was speculative; Ida treated it as such. But it followed naturally from the rest of her physics framework. If the fascia is the organ of structure, and if structure determines the body's relationship to gravitational and electromagnetic fields, then the fascia is the tissue through which field-level interaction must occur. The information the body receives is not limited to the five senses; the great web of connective tissue, dense with acupuncture points, may be the way energy fields enter and exit the body.
"But I think in two or three years I'll back them. And one of them is that it is the connective tissue which is the interface between the energy fields of man and other parts of the cosmos. Now that is a big hunt to swallow. I do not think that the energy fields are brought to us by the five senses. I think these are grossly limiting. The very nature of the five senses, the structural nature of the five senses, limits that part of an energy field which can be brought to us. And yes, we do receive information from the five senses. But there is this vast array of information which comes to us which has come to me which cannot be described in terms of the five senses. There are limitations which exist within the structure of the central nervous system in the transportation of messages. I don't care how exhaustive it is. And I think there are limitations in the processing in the brain. Well, I think it is through the senses, the brain, the central nervous system that our system is closed. And what I believe is that the dynamic energy fields are received through possibly the acupuncture spots, which exist all over the body. There are many many many thousands hundreds. The great web of connective tissue which supports us which causes our confirmation which causes the very nature of our functioning which separates tissue from tissue which differentiates us in all senses, which is the most extensive tissue we have in the body, is the weigh in of the energy fields. Rolfing by reorganizing and freeing the body in its primary and most basic receptive and responsive modes. Receptive meaning the energy fields entering and responsive meaning the energy fields being dissipated. I think this makes possible a quality of experience which is open and dynamic. And once it is open, then the mind, the body and the spirit do operate in magnificent symphony. And I think it has to be opened that way. I would even go farther and say that, from my experience and I'm experiencing it right now, I think the opening and this kind of total experiencing someday we will find that it alters the process of mitosis, cell division and rejuvenation. And that'll blow you, blows me. I think it hastens it. I think it makes it more constant. I'll even go beyond that. I said we're in a mind blowing time. Let's blow our minds. It isn't beyond my conception that the triad, when it becomes one in man's experience, that these create such profound changes that the RNA is even influenced."
The hypothesis was developed at length in a colleague's lecture in the 1974 Open Universe series:
The same Open Universe series included a related lecture by a colleague who pushed even further into the consequences of treating the body as an electrodynamic energy field. The argument was that disease itself could be redescribed as the closing-off of the body's open-system relationship with its environment — the loss of the continual energy exchange that an open system needs to stay far from equilibrium. Ida did not endorse every claim her colleagues made, but she invited them onto her podium and let them push the framework outward. What the lectures share is the conviction that body, energy, and thought cannot be educated separately, because they are continuously altering one another.
"Then if Roelfing upstates the static thought forms which allows thought as well as body plasticity to take place, as well as structural realignment, there will also be realignment in alteration in not only the conform the the confirmation of the body but in its repair, in its mitosis, in its continual evolution. We know that our bodies change approximately every seven years but have we ever thought that our body changed on every breath? I'm talking about belief systems now. You see, we've held some and we haven't gone any farther. Have we ever thought that atoms and molecules are constantly replacing themselves and being altered? That hormones are in a constant state of emotion and alteration? That electrodynamic and electromagnetic energy changes are occurring constantly which are affecting our body. And yet we try to conceive of the body as static and educated in the same way. And it is not. Our physical senses really tell us very little about our bodies. They tell us that which is on the surface and the outside and that's about all they tell us. And actually we have the capacity we don't have it now, we weren't educated that way. We have the capacity and we have other levels of consciousness to know and experience molecular action inside the body and to know all about it. If we talk about an educated physical body what are we talking about? Are we talking about knowing what is happening in this body, being aware of it, knowing that thought influences not only how it appears and how it looks but its health. In order to experience this level of consciousness and molecular action we have to limit and minimize body ego and body image. We do not reach that level of consciousness in the level of reality which we're commonly working. We have to open this in order to have that capacity to educate ourselves physically. Giving energy, releasing energy is help, a constant flow of it."
A colleague in the 1974 Open Universe series extended the framework to thought, repair, and cellular mitosis:
Heretic among heretics
Ida was acutely aware that what she was teaching could be confused with the surrounding human-potential discourse of the 1970s, and she worked hard to distinguish her project from it. She was, she said, the chief of heretics — not because she rejected science but because she thought the establishment had taken nineteenth-century science as final, when in fact the twentieth-century revolution had already moved the ground under it. Her heresy was that she insisted on physics. She insisted that students who used the word energy specify which energy they meant. She insisted that her colleagues' measurements be instrumented and replicable. She refused to talk about metaphysics until physics had been done. The position made her difficult to place: too scientific for the mystics, too willing to entertain mystical phenomena for the reductionists, too insistent on structure for the psychologists.
"At this point of time, there are those among us who claim that natural order in the mind, in the spirit, order in general, even ordering your bank account is a projection or at least an accompaniment of order within their physical personality, the body of the individual. As you realize, this is a heretical idea, then I seem to have found my place as a chief of heretics who talks about the value of a structural body integration, who expects through integration of that structure to create an integrity of function, not merely a bodily function, but a purpose in the individual. Many of you have been exposed to the physical technique of structural integration, which is, as you know, a method of creating order in the body. But at this point and in this class, we propose to look not only at the world of physical flesh, which your Ralphing represented, but also at the world of ideas in which we, that is man, have been living, from which we have recognized the need for escape. We will look particularly at the establishment versus the world of fringe ideas, a burgeoning expansion of ideas. We've called these talks structural integration and the open universe. Perhaps we should have called it structural integration and the opening universe. Perhaps now we need to define some of our terms. First of all, the term open universe and its inevitable running running mate closed universe. A scientist not too long ago by the name of Bragg has said, the important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to obtain new ways of thinking about them. This is the crux of our confusion, of our perception of the revolution which is being presented to the layman as the Aquarian age. For we are in the midst of revolution, and we try to measure our new world by our old standards. Seen in the new perspective, the old order was limited and a limiting viewpoint. Its critics have called that scientific order from which we are now emerging reductionism. Think it was Arthur Kessler who called it that in the beginning, and he characterized it by the phrase, it's the nothing but order. Life is nothing but a group of chemical reactions. The brain is nothing but a computer. This point of view obviously describes a closed universe. A universe defined by hard boundaries designed to exclude. Such thinking automatically limits a world. Tribes accept such a cosmology, you are accepting a closed universe. You are defining a man as a nothing but a closed system. One of the characteristics of this kind of universe was its linearity. The world of Aristotle, who was the grandfather of this universe, Newton was its father, you realize, was a world of logic. And characteristically, the world of logic is a world of linearity. It is a linear, a straight world of straight lines, a linear world."
She defined her position with unusual directness in the opening of the Open Universe class series:
The heresy had a positive content: that the practice belonged to the wider scientific movement of the twentieth century, not as a subspecialty of medicine but as an application of open-system thinking to the structural condition of the human body. She wanted her students to feel that they were part of the same intellectual revolution that had produced relativity and quantum mechanics — not as decoration, but as method. She wanted them, when they used the word non-Aristotelian, to know what they meant by it. Her impatience with loose talk was not aesthetic. It was the impatience of someone who had learned organic chemistry before women were welcome in laboratories and who refused to let her work be reduced to vocabulary.
"A revolutionary idea develops first as an intuitive perception in the mind of the pioneer or the innovator. At this point in in its life it is practically an art form. It is an art form perceived as a whole embodying a total idea demanding a total expression, and this is where Rolfing was in the days of Esselen, the days which I have been describing. This was an art form that caught the imagination of a lot of people. At the time of Fritz Perles and those other those other founding friends this fairly expressed its level. But like so many ideas this has progressed to a level where it is now being examined and analyzed and fitted with words suitable for the current idiom. In other words, the idea progresses, I'm talking about ideas in general and Rolfing in particular, The idea progresses from an odd expression into a scientific understanding and thorough analysis, and you can see to what extent this is beginning to describe what you are seeing around you here. Do I think scientific analysis is the answer to all problems? Definitely not, certainly not. I think synthetic integration is a far higher form, and this is what, by the grace of God, we will still be able to call integration. I think for one thing science, but science is not all that bad, you can't just dam it out of hand. For one thing it permits and it encourages replication. And before the method can be taught replication must be possible. You all remember, I'm sure, hearing me the wail, the shortcomings of Rolfers. Don't think any of you have any doubts about that. You've all heard me scream and wail, you all can take a body apart, but the number of people who can get it together are very few. The number of people who can put it together are very few. Here I was saying the same thing you see, analysis is a necessity, a cover form, a preliminary of synthesis, of conscious synthesis, of conscious integration. Our intellectual culture as a whole has come a long way toward appreciating this in the last twenty five years. The number of people on the face of the earth today who have learned to think with a greater emphasis on synthesis as a whole has increased enormously."
She gave the historical-developmental version of the same point in an early 1970s IPR conference:
Gravity, microcosm, macrocosm
The synthesis Ida was reaching for in her late teaching was best captured in a phrase she returned to repeatedly: that the microcosm man must be structurally integrated to the macrocosm. This was not a borrowed mystical formula. It was the open-system claim in compact form. The human being is a small energy field; the gravitational field of the earth is a large energy field; the relationship between them determines whether the small field is sustained or destroyed. The work is the work of bringing the small field into alignment with the large field. When this happens, the small field becomes coherent, entropy reverses locally, and the human being becomes — in Ida's quietly precise phrase — a more human being.
"phrase, Gravity is the therapist, then I began to see how in my work, my relationship with a basic idea, which I will now state as follows. The microcosm man must be structurally integrate integrated to the macrocosm, the universe, or the cosmos."
A colleague speaking in the 1974 Open Universe series gave the phrase its most resonant statement:
The closing question Ida wanted her students to carry forward was not metaphysical. It was empirical and physical: how can we measure the change? How do we know that ordering the body around a vertical line produces the energetic and behavioral changes we observe? Her answer, by 1974, was that the measurements were starting to come in — from Hunt's electromyography, from Kirlian photography, from instrumented aura readings, from observed downshifts in motor control. The work was no longer purely an art form. It had entered, in her historical-development scheme, the analytic phase. The synthetic integration phase, she hoped, would follow.
"Obviously, we are dealing with a basic energy phenomenon of life here. Whether this really relates to or equates with the energy referred to earlier, the energy whose principal distinguishing characteristics is its failure to observe the law of inverse squares, which characterizes Newtonian energy transmission. This we do not know at this point, nor do we see any way to determine it in the very near future. But that which we do know is exciting enough. What do we know? 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. 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. Fifty years ago, they'd have put me in a nice sunny southern room. You've given me pretty good care, maybe. But the body is a plastic medium, and you're going to hear that several times before we get out of here today. Now, we are ready to define rolfing structural integration. It is a system of organizing the body so that it is substantially vertical, substantially balanced around a vertical in order to allow the body to accept support from the gravitational energy. Two characteristic qualities of the body make this unlikely situation possible."
She summarized the structural-physical claim at the heart of the Healing Arts series:
Coda: physics first, then everything else
Ida's engagement with modern physics was a discipline as much as a doctrine. The discipline was that physics had to be done first, with the vocabulary used precisely, before any of the more speculative claims about consciousness or mysticism or energy fields could be entertained. The doctrine was that, once the physics had been done, those speculative claims could be entertained — that the strict-language version of what she taught had room in it for chakras and auras and even for Capra's mysticism-physics parallel, provided they were approached through measurement and structure rather than through belief. She never claimed to have completed the project. She claimed only to have begun it, and to have begun it in language her chemist's training had given her the right to use.
"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. This happens over and over and over and over again. People come back to us and say, I don't know what you did to me last year. I can't last time. I can't imagine what you did to me. I feel so much better. I sleep so much better. I behave so much better, I'm so much more calm, I'm more tolerant. What on earth did you do to me? We haven't done a thing except to make them make it possible for them to live in a friendly instead of an unfriendly environment. So as soon as the structure has been"
Asked in a 1974 interview how the law of entropy fit into the genesis of her conception, she answered with a hesitation worth preserving:
What survives in the transcripts is a body of teaching that holds its physics responsibly and its mysticism cautiously. Ida had begun her life as a research chemist when very few women could; she ended it as the founder of a structural practice that, in her telling, belonged to twentieth-century open-system physics. The Tao of Physics had given her a way to talk about the relationship between mystical experience and subatomic perception without committing herself to claims she could not verify. Valerie Hunt's instruments had given her a way to point to data. Gravity had given her the entropy-free field her structural method aligned the body to. And the body, as she said every chance she got, was a plastic medium — which meant that the alignment was achievable, the entropy was reversible, and the small field of the human being could, with skilled work, come into supportive relationship with the great field of the earth.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, Big Sur advanced class, 1973 (SUR7301) — for the basic structural argument that gravity, not chemistry, is the operative therapeutic agent, and that this is what distinguishes the work from every other manipulative school. SUR7301 ▸
See also: See also: the Open Universe class series (UNI_011, UNI_054, UNI_073) — for extended treatments by Ida and her engineering-trained colleagues of how gravity acts on biological versus mechanical structures, and how the open-universe framing distinguishes living from non-living systems, including the colleague's argument that thought, mitosis, and structural change are continuously interacting on every breath. UNI_011 ▸UNI_054 ▸UNI_073 ▸
See also: See also: the 1976 Boulder advanced class (76ADV11, 76ADV12) — for Ida's most developed lectures on the history of the energy concept, the turn-of-the-century physics revolution, and her reading of Capra's Tao of Physics. 76ADV11 ▸76ADV12 ▸
See also: See also: the IPR conference talks (IPRCON1, IPRCON2) — for Ida's account of how the practice moves through stages from intuitive art form to scientific analysis to synthetic integration, and her impatience with practitioners who resist the science phase. IPRCON1 ▸IPRCON2 ▸