What she meant by 'one'
Ida did not arrive at the body-is-one doctrine all at once. In her earliest decades of practice — the 1940s and 1950s, working out of New York with one client at a time — she worked in segments. An arm. A foot. An ankle. The doctrine of the ten-session series, the sequence everyone now associates with Structural Integration, emerged only when she began to notice that work on one segment did not stay in that segment. In a 1974 interview that became part of the Structure Lectures, she described the moment of recognition: the arm didn't fit into the body, so she went further up. Then further. The body talked back. By the time she was teaching the 1976 Boulder advanced class, she had come to insist that 'the body is one' was not a philosophical position but a structural fact a practitioner had to be able to feel under their hands. The eighth and ninth hours, in particular, were where students hit the wall — because those hours required them to stop working in pieces.
"And when you begin to really recognize the extent to which if you work in the forearm you are changing the rib cage, you then begin to believe the preachers who say to you the body is one. The body is one. The body is one."
Teaching the 1976 advanced class, mid-discussion about why the eighth hour was so difficult for practitioners:
The claim is not modest. It cuts against the whole structure of how the body had been taught for centuries — anatomized into systems, separated muscle from organ, isolated each region for its own specialist. Ida's claim was that this analysis, useful as it had been, was a lie about what the body actually was. The body was not a stack of parts. It was a single continuous fascial web, and any pressure put into it anywhere propagated. The practitioner's job was to learn to feel that propagation and to use it. This is what made Structural Integration different in kind, not just degree, from chiropractic or the older manipulative schools. It was also what made it teachable only by stages — because students could not feel the continuity until earlier hours had organized the body enough that the continuity became palpable.
"And you see, as I say, the part that you cannot believe, you cannot believe, is that what's going on between here and here determines what you're going to see up here. It's incredible."
Earlier in the same 1976 class, framing why the upper-half work in hours eight and nine is so disorienting for students:
Fascia as the organ of structure
The doctrine that the body is one has a specific anatomical basis in Ida's teaching: the fascia. Not muscle, not bone, not the nervous system — fascia. Fascia is what makes the body a single continuous something. Without fascia, all the chemistry of the cellular body would have no shape; there would be nothing to determine where the liver ended and the diaphragm began, nothing to keep the rib cage from collapsing on the pelvis, nothing to give a human being a recognizable contour. Ida considered this point so foundational and yet so under-recognized that she returned to it constantly. The medical schools, she said, did not teach it. The anatomy books separated fascia into named sheets, named ligaments, named retinacula, and lost the fact that all of these were continuous. Her position was that fascia is the organ of structure — singular noun, singular organ — and that until a practitioner held this idea, they would keep working in pieces.
"You are going to be getting more and more intimate with collagen which before you heard it well could mean you didn't know existed. But you see, it is the connective tissue which is the organ of structure. The fascia envelopes are the organ of structure, the organ that holds the body appropriately in the three-dimensional material world. Now nobody ever taught this in the medical school as far as I know. And anytime you want to get into an argument with your medical through they'll realize that this is so. It is the fascial aggregate which is the organ of structure."
In the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, defining the fascia as the organ of structure:
She extended the point in vivid ways. The orange-skin analogy appeared in several public talks: scoop out the chemistry of an orange and put the two empty halves back together, and the child holding the result will be fooled into thinking it is still an orange. The body, similarly, is held in its recognizable shape by its fascial envelope, not by what fills the envelope. She would say, half in jest, that you could in theory scoop out everything that makes the factory go and the fascial body would remain — and would still recognizably be a human being. This was not just rhetoric. It was the anatomical premise that justified manipulating fascia in the first place. If fascia merely wrapped the muscle, working on fascia would change very little. If fascia was the organ of structure, then changing fascia changed structure, and changing structure changed function.
"factory go, but fascia is the stuff that keeps it from falling in on itself, falling in on its face, keeps you from falling on your face. It is your fascial body that supports you, relates you, and you know as with a child, you fool them sometimes by scooping out the material of the orange and leaving the skin and then putting the two heads together and you say to the kid now this is this is an orange and you see how long it takes that young ster to find out that it isn't an orange, that hits a ball of fascia. And so with with a a human being, in theory at least, you could scoop out the stuff that makes the factory go, the chemicals and so forth, and you would have left this supportive body of fascia. And it is this body which has had very little, almost no exploration in the sense that we have been giving to it."
In the 1974 Healing Arts lecture, illustrating fascia as the body's actual organ of shape:
By 1975 in Boulder, Ida was pushing the point further. Fascia was not just continuous with itself — it was continuous in a way that resisted clean separation. A student named David in the class had brought up the difference between the fascia around organs (which seems to hold each organ in place) and the fascia around muscles (which seems to interpenetrate the muscle itself). Ida confirmed his observation but used it to make a larger point. The very fact that fascia could not be cleanly dissected from muscle was why the old anatomists' analytical approach had always failed to find the body. Their dissection method produced more confusion the deeper they went. Modern surgeons, she noted, had begun working with fascial planes rather than cutting through them — sliding between rather than severing. This was what she wanted her practitioners to do with their hands too.
"of the fashion. This is also true. Is true. And this is a very penetrating insight that you've had there. It's like the fascia around organs is sort of has It's just holding the organ Yeah. But the fascia around muscles is actually almost indistinguishable within the muscle from the fascia. It's all so tightly interwoven together. Although the sheets around the muscle, the fascial sheets are distinguishable, you can't go in and dissect the fascia of one muscle fiber away from it. Did you ever dissect? Yeah. Then you know what you're talking about, whereas really most of the people here are imagining what you're talking about. It is true, it is true, and you see there is a reason why it is called the myo fascial body. Because there is only god knows what was the instinct that made those old anatomists try to understand by the kind of analysis that they made. See, they felt they had to analyze. Like if you're dissecting a brain, you can get yourself more balled up than any other fashion by trying, as you dissect the brain, to see the line of demarcation between these various parts of it."
Boulder 1975, responding to a student's observation about how fascia behaves differently around muscles than around organs:
The whole that was missing from the textbooks
Ida was emphatic that the wholeness of the body was not just under-taught — it was not in the literature at all. In her late teaching she made a habit of saying so plainly, and the transcripts capture the exasperation. She had sent a student to the library once to find out what fascia was; the student spent two days and returned empty-handed. Ida used the anecdote to mark out the territory she considered her own contribution. Not the existence of fascia — that had been known for centuries. Not the manipulation of fascia — there were always manual schools. But the recognition that fascia was the relational organ, the organ that made the body a unified whole, and that this fact had structural and clinical consequences. This was the part, she insisted, that no one had brought up before.
"The fact that body is related, the organs are related, the body is made a whole by its fascia. Far as I know, this point has never been brought up."
On a public tape (RolfA4), in a discussion about the eighth, ninth, and tenth hours:
This was not idle self-promotion. Ida was a research chemist by training — Barnard PhD 1916, the Rockefeller Institute through the 1920s, the Schrödinger lectures in Zurich in the late twenties — and she was scrupulous about giving credit. When she said no one had brought this up, she meant she had searched. The point is connected to her broader complaint about the medical model: that it had spent the past hundred and twenty-five years organized around chemistry, around the cellular and molecular, and had let the structural school of healing wither. In her teaching she traced this back to the moment around 1850 when the chemical school decisively eclipsed the manipulative one. What got lost, in her telling, was the recognition that the body's shape — its fascial organization — was a determinant of its function, and that this determination ran in one direction whether or not the chemistry was cooperating.
"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."
Big Sur 1973, on why changing fascia changes the human being:
Continuity as transmission
The body-is-one doctrine had a specific physical meaning in Ida's teaching: stored tension at one place, when released, propagates through the fascial network and arrives at distant places. This was not analogy. The transcripts of the 1975 Boulder class include a discussion of Michael Salveson's notion of the fascial tube, a continuous tube of fascia running from the cervical vertebrae down through the trunk and into the legs. When the practitioner works on the ankles in the second hour, the release travels up that tube and the rib cage absorbs the change. A student in the class named Jan describes watching it happen on Takashi: work delivered at the leg, change visible in the thorax. This is the body-is-one claim as a phenomenon, not as a theory.
"Well yesterday someone, I don't know who said it to me, it's Michael Salison's concept of the fascial tube which starts in the cervicals and goes in the second hour when you start working on the ankles you're heading vertically again. Know that each horizontal that you bring out down below reflects itself upward as we saw in Takashi yesterday where he's working on his leg and you can see his rib cage absorbing the change. I mean this, when the tissue is in tension, that's stored energy that you release into the body. And its energy is not a metaphysical something. These molecules are aligned in a particular way. You change their alignment. The change spreads."
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, a senior practitioner describes the fascial tube and what happens when the practitioner works one end of it:
The mechanism is worth dwelling on because Ida was insistent that it not be mystified. Tension stored in tissue, in her teaching, was literally stored energy — molecules held in particular alignments. When the practitioner's pressure released that alignment, the change propagated because the surrounding tissue was continuous with the released tissue. This was a fact of materials, not of consciousness or intention. She returned to this point whenever a student tried to inflate the explanation into something more mystical than it needed to be. The body's continuity was a continuity of substance. Fascia connected to fascia. Sheet to sheet. Plane to plane. When you changed one, the others rearranged themselves because they had no choice — they were physically attached to what had just moved.
"For example, it is common knowledge that often times infections will migrate along the fracture planes. Fluids traverse along the planes. And when Ida talks about the body being basically an electrical something, it is also along fascial planes that these ions need and electrical charges are transmitting. So that you begin to get a feeling that it is literally another system of communication in the body. There is a way of organizing the body. For this we have the nervous system. There is a circulatory system which is another way of providing information chemicals pass through the circulatory system and information gets delayed. You can look at the fascial system in a similar way. There is a fluid system in the fascia and you see this, we had a woman yesterday, we had, where you have fluid collected in the legs. And you can literally see that once those fascial planes unstuck from each other, that fluid starts to leave and that the mechanisms that are there for the removal of that fluid can start to work. It is through the fact that that happens. It is that extrinsic fuel to which it is outside the central nervous system. Well now, my understanding was a very good Now this is a message which I hope gets across except that you understand what the pattern is like when the pattern is doing the right thing."
In the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, Lewis Schultz describes fascia as a parallel system of communication in the body:
Schultz's framing — fascia as a parallel communication system — is closer to a metaphor than Ida usually allowed herself, but it is consistent with her position. If the body is one fascial complex, then any disturbance in one region is, by definition, registered in the rest of the complex. The question is only how quickly and through what intermediate structures. Schultz's clinical example — the swelling in the legs that resolved once the fascial planes were freed — is the kind of evidence Ida found persuasive because it was concrete. The fluid had been there. The unsticking allowed it to leave. The mechanism could be named. Nothing about the example required mystical machinery.
The advanced hours: from parts to systems
In Ida's teaching, the body-is-one doctrine had a pedagogical shape: the elementary ten-session recipe trained practitioners to take the body apart, and the advanced classes trained them to put it together. She said this constantly, and the transcripts capture her exasperation with practitioners who could do the first but not the second. The elementary hours, she conceded, were necessary — you could not teach a beginner the doctrine of wholeness without first giving them named pieces to work on. But the advanced hours were where the practitioner had to relinquish the named pieces. The body in those later hours was to be seen as one large piece of the whole fascial complex, not as a sum of muscles.
"you are looking at the body no longer as this plus this plus this plus this. You're looking at the body as a large sized piece of the whole facial complex."
In the 1976 advanced class, instructing practitioners on what changes between the elementary and advanced work:
The corollary, which she pressed harder in the 1975 and 1976 classes than in earlier years, was that the location of the problem and the location of the work were often not the same. If the body was one fascial complex, then the place where dysfunction showed up might be far downstream from the place where the relevant fascial restriction lived. A shoulder problem might be resolvable only through the ankles. A breathing restriction might require work in the pelvis. This was infuriating to students who had been trained, in the elementary recipe, to work where the body asked them to work. In the advanced hours, the body asked them to work in one place and the practitioner, if she had learned the doctrine, would work somewhere else.
"Where was I a week ago where I was answering the question of what was the difference between elementary work and the same school? Is it in this class? It's in the board meeting. The board meeting. Oh, the board meeting. The board meeting. Anyway, I thought I was real smart. I still think I was. I said that the advance work was a study of facial claims, was a study of sexual relationships, that the elementary work was only making these relationships possible. But wherever it was that I did do this talking, oh, I remember it now. You see, you are not able to go into the random body as it comes off the street and go into the fashion plane. They just seem to be not there. It's not that they're not there, but it it is that their pullings and heaving and falling disguise them. You can't go in and feel them. You can go in and feel tendons sometimes, but you cannot feel fascial flames. And your first ten hours, therefore, are creating the order within these planes which make it possible for you to see and think in terms of fashion planes. Now it doesn't make any difference how far back in my teaching you remember, you still remember that I have always said that in those last hours, you must spread your hands. You remember how I fought my way through that. You must spread your hands. You must remember that you are working with fashion. I've always said that."
Boulder 1975 advanced class, on why the random body's fascial planes are not yet accessible:
In another 1976 session, Ida and a student named Frank worked through the question of why the trunk lengthens at all in the recipe — why working on the quadratus and the twelfth rib should produce a longer torso. The conversation turned to the autonomic nervous system, which runs along the front of the vertebrae and is affected by where those vertebrae sit. Frank made a remark that captured the doctrine in a personal register. He had been taught, like everyone else, that there was skin, then fascia, then muscle, then bone, then nerves — layers, like envelopes one inside another. Working with Ida, he had started to see that there was no such envelope. Communication ran level to level. The doctrine had landed.
"Mean this class, not just today, but this well, in learning, I learned that there was skin, there was fascia, there was muscles, was bone, there was nervous system, etcetera, and they were like envelopes, one around the other. And now I'm beginning to see that That there ain't no such envelope. That there ain't no such envelope, and there's lots of communication level to level, structure to structure where there's no physical communication perhaps as such. That's right. It's just the physician makes Seems to be related. I have lots of experience with this kind of relatedness, but not so much within now layer to layer, and it fits a whole new thing. I'm buying the plan, but that the man is one. Totally buying. Okay. Let's see. In You're the third hour, and we talked about the quadrias, treating the pelvis, straightening the spine."
In a 1976 advanced class discussion of the seventh hour and the spine, a student named Frank arrives at the doctrine:
Balance, not solidity
If the body is one fascial complex, then what holds the body up cannot be any one part of it. This was a structural argument Ida made repeatedly. The rib cage is not held up by the ribs. The spine is not held up by the vertebrae. The pelvis is not held up by the bones of the pelvis. Each of these structures is held in its position by the balance of soft-tissue tensions around it — by the relationship of fascia to fascia. This is why the body can be plastic, why it can be changed, why pressure on one region produces effect in another. The body's solidity is an illusion produced by balance, and balance is something the practitioner can rearrange.
"And it very often is because, as I've said before in this class, the twelfth rib and the fibula are about the most vulnerable structures that is inside the skin. There's nothing to balance the balance of the ribs going up from the tree. Because the position of that twelfth rib anchored there in that connective tissue is the sturdy base on which the upper ribs sit. And you see as you look at this rib cage, you begin to need to understand that sturdiness is not necessarily solidity. Sturdiness can be and is balanced just as much as it is solidity. Your rib cage isn't being balanced on bones. It's being balanced on the relation of bones which is determined by connective tissue. And the fact that it isn't solid is literally advertised by the number of things that go wrong in the cracks. One with closing in on another, one with getting on top of another, one with going much deeper than it belongs, etc, etc."
In a 1976 advanced class discussion of the third hour and the twelfth rib:
The same argument explained why she described the rest of the body in the same terms. The spine was not, in her teaching, a stack of vertebrae. The spine was a single spinal mechanism whose unity was the fascial and ligamentous structure running its length. She made this point against the chiropractic and osteopathic traditions, which she respected but considered limited by their conception of the spine as a series of discrete bony segments. Her position was that you could not get the body together that way. You had to see the whole spinal structure as a unit of united areas — and you could not see it until you had received enough of the work yourself that your own spine had become a unit rather than a chain.
"Well one of the things that impresses me experientially as well as as I try to invest that skeleton with some flesh Is the essential nature of the spinal, not the spine as such, but the spinal structure? It is again as though a body was something built around a spine. Now a lot of people have had this idea, the osteopaths have had it and the chiropractic have had it. But none of them have ever gotten out of their spine a unified something going along there. They always manage to have a series of bony segments and that's what they figure a spine is. Now this is not my concept and this is not the concept around which structural integration works. You have to get that picture of the whole spine, the whole spinal mechanism as a unit, as a unit of united areas. It is a much more sturdy sort of a concept than, for example, the chiropractic concept, where you simply have bones that you push around. And I'd like you to take this idea home with you and try to get more reality on it. As you yourself get more processing, you will understand this. It is quite impossible, I think, to understand this before you have had the kind of processing that puts these things together. And this is the reason why, at this point, the whole world, relatively speaking, accepts chiropractic, accepts osteopathy, because that is the level where their bodies are living. And you see, you have to build so much on top or around this before you get that sense of sturdy unity that a spine should be giving you."
In the August 1974 IPR lecture, on why the spine must be conceived as a unit rather than a chain of bones:
The body as a summation of energies
Ida's body-is-one doctrine had another register beyond the fascial one. She also described the body as a summation of energies — an algebraic sum of the energies of various organs, regions, and segments. When one part went into deficit, the rest of the body had to contribute energy to keep it functioning, and the whole organism felt the cost. This was not separate from the fascial argument; it was the same argument restated in physical terms. If the body was one continuous structural unit, then its energy economy was also unitary. A liver in trouble drew on the energies of the rest of the body. A spine misaligned with gravity drew constant energy out of every system that had to compensate. The body-is-one doctrine, in this register, meant that no part could be sick or strained without the whole organism paying for it.
"Now many of you are aware of the fact that the various parts of the body operate on energy, with energy, by energy, creating their own energy, taking in their own energy. They are individual energy machines. And according to you add these energy machines, appropriately or inappropriately. You get addition or subtraction from the energy machine as a whole. If you've got a liver structure that's functioning very badly, the rest of your body which might be doing reasonably well, you are taking away the energy from it to keep that liver going and the answer is you don't feel so well. Because what you are registering when you say I feel is the sum total of that energy. But remember that sum total is an algebraic sum. Some of those systems are going to be pluses and some of them are going to be minuses unless you are very well stacked. Now you can add to that energy by the stopping. If you set those blocks properly, you can get maximum efficiency in the way that the body works."
Big Sur 1973, defining the body as a sum of energies that can be added to or subtracted from:
Valerie Hunt, the UCLA physiologist who collaborated with Ida through the 1970s, extended this picture into research. In her Healing Arts presentation she described measuring the bioelectric activity of clients before and after sessions of the work and finding patterns that did not match the standard tension-relaxation framework. Baseline electrical activity went up; activity during action went down. Hunt's interpretation was that the integrated body was more open, more responsive, and operating with a different energy organization than the random body. Whether or not the specific measurements held up over time, what mattered for Ida's teaching was that Hunt was framing the body's energy as a single coordinated phenomenon, not as a sum of independent regional readings. The body, even on the electromyograph, was behaving as one.
"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."
At the 1974 Healing Arts conference, Hunt argues that connective tissue is the interface between the body's energy fields and the larger cosmos:
The twelfth dorsal as the center reaching out
If the body is one continuous structure, then it has to have a center from which the continuity radiates. In her August 1974 IPR lecture, Ida named that center: the twelfth dorsal vertebra and the lumbodorsal junction. She told her students that virtually nothing in the body below the head lacked some structural or innervational connection to that region. Digestion, elimination, reproduction, the kidneys, the adrenals, the spleen — all of them depended in some way on what the twelfth dorsal area was doing. This was not the spine as a chain of segments. This was the spine as a center from which the entire trunk extended outward through fascial planes. She wanted her students to stop seeing the body as something contained within a skin with organs tucked into compartments inside it, and to start seeing it as something centered, reaching out in every direction.
"When it breaks down everything breaks down including the energy source that's of the adrenals. So now you have a new way of looking at a body. You have a way of looking at it as an extension of that twelfth dorsal area of that luminal dorsal ridge. And I think at this point you are, all of you, very aware of how many ways you can look at these things that walk around on two legs, how many facets there are to these energy centers that are contained within a skin and walking around on two legs. But you see, this will never be a practical addition to cultural information until we can tie it up with that old measurement thing that keep popping up. You have to be able to measure these things before it goes into the textbooks. So once again, we're up against it. We need money. Let's not worry about it this morning. But I hope that from what I've been stressing about the middle, this core structure, I hope you're beginning to understand that you can get this different idea of a body as a something centered going out instead of something contained in the skin with some cubbyholes in it."
In her August 1974 IPR lecture, on the twelfth dorsal vertebra as the structural and innervational center of the trunk:
The same lecture closed with the observation that fascial coverings extend not only around the muscles but around all the organs — the kidneys, the intestines, the diaphragm — and that all these fascial coverings are continuous with the fascia of the musculature. This was the final piece of the anatomical argument. If the fascia of the organs and the fascia of the muscles were continuous, then there was no anatomical line between the body's structural unit and its visceral unit. The body was one not because its parts were coordinated but because its parts were physically attached through a single connective-tissue web that reached into every region. The practitioner working at the surface of the trunk was working on the same fascia that wrapped the kidneys.
From taking apart to putting together
Ida was clear-eyed about why her doctrine had been so slow to enter the mainstream. The medical model had organized itself around chemistry. The dominant manipulative schools had organized themselves around individual joints. No tradition had taken fascia seriously as the organ of the body's wholeness. Anatomists had spent centuries learning to dissect, which is to say learning to separate. Their textbooks reflected the separation. The structures she most wanted students to see — the continuous fascial sheets connecting one region to another, the way a single myofascial unit related to its neighbors, the planes along which release would travel — were the structures the textbooks consistently failed to depict. She would send students to the anatomy books and warn them not to expect to find the body there.
"hours in order to present tomorrow a program of pictures which were taken by Ron Thompson in this dissection laboratory. Where you will be able to see what you get on the slab on the table apparently has very little relation to the pictures in the anatomy book. Feel that But if you look at these pictures, these Ron Thompson has taken with absolute inspiration of the dissection which they did, you will get this understanding of this related spider web thing so that you will begin to understand what your job is as you get into the advanced work in field. Nothing wrong with what you're being taught in the elementary work. You have to start somewhere. You can't explain life to a five year old in terms of the same symbols that you use to a 45 year old. He doesn't understand them. And the same is true as you begin to get into an understanding of what constitutes a body. You've got to start there. But in order to get a more sophisticated, advanced, shall I say control of the body body is what I really mean."
In the 1976 advanced class, prefacing a slide presentation of Ron Thompson's dissection photographs:
She returned to the same point in the early-1970s IPR conference recordings while discussing how her teaching had to keep changing. She had spent years complaining, in her phrase, that all her practitioners knew how to take the body apart and very few of them knew how to put it together. The complaint was a description of how analytical training shaped the hands. Analysis was a necessary preliminary — she conceded that — but synthesis was the harder work and the higher work. The body-is-one doctrine was, in her view, a return to synthesis after a century of medicine had drifted into pure analysis. Systems analysis, she noted, had begun in the broader culture to recover the synthetic mode. Her work, she thought, belonged to that recovery.
"Now there are a lot of you here that know about systems analysis, you know more than I do, and there are a lot of you here to whom systems analysis is a strange term, But systems analysis has made so many people aware of synthesis, of integration in life, a synthesis of systems and not of the addition of parts. Now this in Rolfeing, an appreciation of the body. In in Rolfeing, you have to see this as an appreciation of the body as a set of interrelated systems, of interrelated systems rather than an aggregate, a summation of individual pieces, call it myofascial units if you will, is what is necessary to get a body together. This synthesis of systems, not individual pieces. This is the job and the understanding that's necessary for hours eight, nine, and 10 and the more advanced hours. This synthesis of systems and those systems are laid down in the body in terms of great fascial planes and Lewis will be talking about them I imagine in one of the smaller sessions."
On a recording from the early 1970s IPR conference series, on analysis as the necessary preliminary to synthesis:
Coda: what the practitioner finally has to believe
Ida's doctrine, when stripped to its core, is unsentimental. The body is one because its fascia is one continuous organ. Pressure delivered at any point in that organ travels through it. The travel can be felt, watched, and used. This is not a teaching about wholeness in any inspirational sense. It is a structural fact about an anatomical material. What makes it hard to believe is not its complexity but its consequence — it implies that nearly all of medicine and nearly all of bodywork has been organized around the wrong unit. Working in pieces produces piece-shaped results. Working in the one body produces a different kind of result, and the practitioner cannot do the second kind of work until they have stopped seeing pieces.
"And what I am trying to get you to hear this morning, is an appreciation of the complicated as well as the simple world that you live in, and an appreciation of what you can get a hold of in that complicated world so that you now have the end of a string and can pull in on it. And you can do this with the myofascial structure. You can do this with the connective tissue. You can do this No. You can't do it with everything that derives from the mesoterm. No. Because the mesoterm also gives rise to the blood structures. Now you see, this is a point of view that has never been aired. The different usages of these different what it's convenient to call bodies. In a way, I hate to call them bodies because somebody goes off with some cockeyed crazy ideas that the body is something solid."
In the 1976 advanced class, summarizing what makes the myofascial body uniquely available to manipulation:
And so the doctrine returns to where this article began. The practitioner, by the eighth hour, has to believe what they have already seen — that working in the forearm changes the rib cage, that pressure delivered far from the place of dysfunction reaches that place through the continuous web of fascia, that the body is not an assembly but a unit. Ida's late teaching is full of this insistence because she knew how hard the belief was to settle into the hands. Practitioners revert. They go where the body screams. They work in pieces because pieces are what their training and their language have given them. The body-is-one doctrine, in her teaching, is what has to replace the language of pieces — and, if the practitioner is serious, what will eventually replace the way their hands move.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfB1 public tape — an extended discussion of the body as a segmented unit whose joints are where the organization either enhances or prevents balance within the gravitational field; included as a pointer for readers interested in how the body-is-one doctrine connects to the segmental analysis of the recipe. RolfB1Side1 ▸
See also: See also: 1973 Big Sur advanced class, in which Ida and Lewis Schultz discuss the circular nature of biological reality and the impossibility of describing it by linear analysis — relevant to readers interested in the epistemological side of the body-is-one claim. SUR7309 ▸
See also: See also: 1973 Big Sur Tape 17, in which Ida discusses the open-ended nature of Structural Integration as a system of knowledge and the necessity of synthetic rather than analytic thinking about the body. SUR7332 ▸
See also: See also: 1974 Healing Arts conference, Tape 1 — the lecture in which Ida defines the body as a plastic medium and lays out the case for fascia, gravity, and verticality as the unifying terms of the work. Relevant to readers interested in the broader theoretical frame that makes the body-is-one doctrine cohere. CFHA_01 ▸
See also: See also: 1975 Boulder advanced class with Ida and a senior practitioner, on the ovoid shape of the integrated thorax and the principle of efficiency that governs the unified body's structural arrangement. B2T1SA ▸
See also: See also: Topanga lecture, on the difference between structure and posture — structure is the relationship of parts, posture is what you do with structure; included for readers tracing how the body-is-one doctrine reshapes these familiar terms. TOPAN ▸
See also: See also: 1975 Boulder advanced class, T1SB — a senior practitioner's account of why the first hour establishes in the client's cells what the work is about, and how the recipe was designed to deliver the experience of wholeness at the very first session. T1SB ▸